Teapot sans Tempest

Oklahoma State leaders estimate that roughly 3,000 illegal immigrant marijuana growers are operating in Oklahoma, with about 80 percent of them under Chinese mafia control; they’re selling $18 billion to $40 billion yearly in pot, a ProPublica investigation estimated. Chinese women get trafficked across the border to serve as prostitutes for the men working the farms. And, of course, there's the weaponry.

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“Inclusive Excellence” is becoming the new term for the tarnished "DEI."  

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Teapot sans Tempest

Price gouging. FEMA misinformation. Health certificates. These are parts of Harris' meandering campaign as the incumbent for change seeks a theme. This iteration is "answers to unasked questions."

This election has had more lies than any other I can remember. Lying has defined the campaign. And no one cares. You can say anything, and suggest anything, without fear of challenge. And you can repeat it even after the lies have been clearly refuted.

Innuendo is the latest. Trump is giving "unhinged" speeches. He is "exhausted." His McDonnald's appearance was "scripted," as if it could be anything else.

Most alarming is the presumed motive. This kind of campaign must be aimed only at people who have no idea what's going on.

Revenant

Apparently, there was a pro-Trump chant that arose at the Steeler game last night but I did not see it broadcast.

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Can you imagine the people behind the Harris campaign--or Trump's--monitoring speech in the public square?

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Universities hoping to reclaim trust must do more than simply make political activism evenhanded. They must reclaim the pursuit of truth that alone justifies university education.


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A US startup company is offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ using controversial technology that raises questions about the ethics of genetic enhancement.

The company, Heliospect Genomics, has worked with more than a dozen couples undergoing IVF, according to undercover video footage. The recordings show the company marketing its services at up to $50,000 (£38,000) for clients seeking to test 100 embryos, and claiming to have helped some parents select future children based on genetic predictions of intelligence. Managers boasted their methods could produce a gain of more than six IQ points.

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Revenant

(This got lost in the wash last week but here it is.)

A rescue. A reprieve. In our daily human slog, a real human achievement.

I'm sure everyone has seen this but it is still just amazing.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1845542074609004971

SpaceX's Starship rocket achieved a world first on Sunday during its fifth test flight, showing for the first time that the launch system may really have what it takes to change spaceflight.

The launch system includes a Starship rocket ship stacked atop a 233-foot-tall Super Heavy booster and stands taller than the Statue of Liberty.

The Super Heavy booster released Starship on its path toward space, then began to fall back to Earth. For the first time ever, as the booster descended toward the company's Texas launchpad, a pair of giant mechanical "chopsticks," or arms, snatched it.

The giant booster had returned to Earth in one piece. It was SpaceX's first attempt at the revolutionary chopstick maneuver.

This engineering feat is unlike anything ever seen in orbital-rocket technology.  

The feat brings SpaceX one step closer to Musk's goals of building the first fully reusable rocket system, slashing the cost of spaceflight, and, ultimately, making humanity a multiplanetary species.

Modern Research

Small liberal arts colleges are being put up for sale all the time in New England for shockingly low sums. Magdalen College in Warner is for sale for $5.5 million, is 129 acres, and all the campus buildings are included.

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The IMF’s Fiscal Monitor on Wednesday will feature a warning that public debt levels are set to reach $100 trillion this year, driven by China and the US.


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On the threatened dock strike. There were 50,000 or so ILA strikers but only 25,000 or so port jobs. That’s right, only about half of the union’s members are obliged to show up to work each day. The rest sit at home collecting “container royalties” negotiated in previous ILA contracts intended to protect against job losses that result from innovation.

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Modern Research 

This is what is being turned out as a research paper now. Paul Novosad Sam Asher Catriona Farquharson Eni Iljazi 2 Oct 2024. (SES is 'Social Economic Status'):

"Unequal opportunity in the sciences reduces scientific contributions from the most talented individuals and limits the rate of human progress. We study unequal opportunity by collecting data on the childhood SES of Nobel laureates in the sciences. The average laureate grew up in an 87–90th percentile household. Access to opportunity doubled from 1901–2023, but remains highly unequal. Barriers are higher for women, but lower for Americans. Access to opportunity across countries is much less equal, and has barely improved at all. Cities with more intergenerational mobility produce more laureates from non-elite families, and more laureates overall."

So The Nobel Prize becomes a proxy for achievement. Socioeconomic status and the winners' parents are major factors in their development and these corelations apparently are proofs of elitism and disparity of opportunity.

One might think that the studies of such superficialities are an effort to avert their eyes from the deeper, severe, and recalcitrant causes of the real problems.

.

Sat Stats

Sat Stats

Taylor:

...government used to dominate funding for basic research, accounting for 70% of the total in the 1960s and 1970s, and for 60% of the total as recently as the early 2000s. But the rise in overall US business R&D spending has “basic” research spending by business as well. Now, it looks as if basic R&D spending by business is about to exceed that from the federal government.




On Hurricanes:

Norberg:

Norberg then noted that in the classical liberal tradition it is a given that “we don’t know everything – nobody does,” and therefore it takes trial and error, a discovery processs, to find out what works and what doesn’t. And this is risky and costly but necessary. Unfortunately, a risk-averse culture dominates “in many businesses and certainly in government,” said Norberg. “Many are so conservative they wouldn’t let anyone do anything for the first time.”

Nobel

Britain’s last nuclear power plant was built between 1987 and 1995. Its next one, Hinkley Point C, is between four and six times more costly per megawatt of capacity than South Korean nuclear power plants, and four times as expensive as those that South Korea’s KEPCO has agreed to build in Czechia. 

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Even the national political press seems to be getting a bit exasperated at this, if only out of a creeping sense that she might blow the election to Trump, combined with a bit of frustration that she’s making their jobs harder in having to not only carry her water but fill the buckets themselves. Maybe Trump’s well-known flaws will rescue her anyway by Election Day, but if not, it’s going to be a long four years with a president whose only real interests are in culture-war hot buttons.--McLaughlan

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Nobel

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to three economists. The recipients are Turkish-born Daron Acemoglu and British-born Simon Johnson, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and British-born James A. Robinson, an economist and political scientist at the University of Chicago. They received the award “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.”

in their 2012 book, “Why Nations Fail,” Messrs. Acemoglu and Robinson divide countries into two types: extractive and inclusive. In extractive countries, a small elite extracts wealth from the masses, whereas in inclusive countries, political power is shared. When governments are extractive, people have little incentive to produce. But the opposite is true when governments are inclusive, as people have property rights and can accumulate wealth.--wsj

And McCloskey''s minority report:

His [Daron Acemoglu’s] theory, which is both, fits smoothly with what people nowadays love to hear, on their road to serfdom—that good policy is super easy and that our masters are super skilled at doing it. The theory makes us feel safe, like children waiting to be fed. We don’t individually need good ethics, professionalism, or high political ideals. Mama and Papa State take care of all that.

Interview

 

For the first time in decades, public health data shows a sudden and hopeful drop in drug overdose deaths across the U.S.

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In 1969, Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, warned that the proliferation of biological weapons would be like making “hydrogen bombs available at the supermarket.” Biological weapons confound the Cold War paradigm of deterrence because those releasing them can evade detection and hence retaliation.--Will

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Interview

Harris' interview on Fox last night was revealing. She was short-tempered, rigid, and hostile. It was easy to see why she has such difficulty holding on to personnel. Some of this may be exaggerated by the emptiness of her political history and the goofy, far-left positions she has adopted in the past; she starts all political discussions on her heels. But this was a fragile, brittle candidate who might be no more attractive personally than Trump himself.

After, Baer discussed the backstory of the interview. Harris was 15 minutes late for the interview. They knew Baer had a deadline where the interview would be aired minutes afterward and they knew the delay would disrupt Baer and his broadcast.

Nothing they do is honest or straightforward.

Anti-Americanism

The average student accepted at Hillsdale College had a 3.95 GPA in high school.

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Russia’s parliament, the State Duma, is working on a law that aims to ban so-called child-free ideology which it sees as harmful to traditional values.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, announced recently that fines for “propaganda of childlessness” will amount to up to 400,000 rubles ($4,300; €3,879) for individuals and up to 5 million rubles for companies.

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Anti-Americanism

In this time of hostility to America and its creation as the country itself struggles with the significance of Columbus Day, here is an event that fits right in.

This is culled from several sources, much Politico, and is an amazing story.

The California Coastal Commission rejected SpaceX’s request to make 50 more rocket launches in Santa Barbara County.

The primary uses of these rockets are to deliver the company’s Starlink satellites, which provide commercial internet and telecommunications, as well as for military missions.

Despite bipartisan support from the state and backing of the U.S. Air Force, six commissioners voted against additional launches, clearly citing Musk’s public statements on politics. That is, a group of administrators--50% unelected-- limited the opportunity of a citizen because of his personal beliefs.

The Coastal Commission, known for its defense of public access to the state’s 840-mile coastline, has been sparring with the Air Force’s Space Force branch since May 2023, when DOD asked to increase SpaceX’s satellite launches from Vandenberg from six to 36 per year.

Things came to a head in August when commissioners unloaded on DOD for resisting their recommendations for reducing the impacts of the launches — which disturb wildlife like threatened snowy plovers as well as people, who often have to evacuate nearby Jalama Beach.

The commission ultimately approved the 36-launch plan at the meeting, on the condition that Space Force undertake seven measures to improve environmental protection and coastal access. But military officials didn’t commit to following them during the hearing, drawing fiery criticism from commissioners.

“Space Force came here and intentionally disrespected us,” Bochco said at the August meeting.

The two sides seemed to reach a detente heading into Thursday’s meeting after the Air Force, which oversees Space Force, agreed in September to meet the commission’s seven conditions, including reducing the sonic booms and increased wildlife monitoring.

A bipartisan group of state and federal lawmakers had also weighed in before the hearing in favor of the application, arguing that California should take advantage of DOD’s embrace of the commercial space industry.

But the goodwill evaporated after commissioners raised concerns about Musk’s political rhetoric, slammed the company’s labor record and questioned DOD’s contention that the launches should benefit from military permitting exemptions even if military payloads aren’t being carried.

“I really appreciate the work of the Space Force,” said Commission Chair Caryl Hart. “But here we’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race and he’s managed a company in a way that was just described by Commissioner Newsom that I find to be very disturbing.”

Proudly rejecting evenhandedness, including a citizen's personal opinions in decisions of public policy, factoring privately held personal beliefs into government decisions--these are more than self-inflicted socio-political wounds, they defy basic elemental principles inherent in the nation's founding.