March 14, 2025

SCIENCE!

Manly’s BlueSky profile says she’s into “Brain Health Equity,” whatever that is.

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green 88

SUMMER RERUN SEASON STARTS EARLY THIS YEAR ON TELEVISION: ‘Mercury Poisoning Is Back:’ Colbert Freaks Out Over EPA Deregulation.

Joe Biden became president in 2021, which was not that long ago, but according to CBS’s Stephen Colbert, repealing Biden-era EPA regulations is a public health crisis of grave consequence. Colbert made the remarks on Thursday’s edition of The Late Show, where he also expressed his lack of interest in the financial cost of regulations.

Reaching for the alcohol, Colbert declared, “Trump also, and I want to be fair, is ruining everything. For instance, his EPA, his Environmental Protection Agency, announced plans to repeal dozens of the nation’s most significant environmental regulations, including more than two dozen protections against air and water pollution. I mean, just even hearing that stresses me out. I need a drink, man. There you go. Oh, my god. That’s water.”

Moving on, Colbert added, “The EPA is also going to overturn limits on soot from smokestacks and restrictions on emissions of mercury. Mercury poisoning is back, baby! Pretty soon your horoscope’s gonna read, ‘This month, Mercury is in retrograde and also in your brain. Blaaaaaaggahhhaa.’”

Colbert’s source for this was a New York Times article that included a note that the soot and mercury regulation was a Biden rule, but Colbert made it seem like Trump was turning the clock back to the 1870s.

Or maybe 2003, when James Lileks wrote: “For all these accusations to work, you have to believe that Republicans want poisoned water. You have to believe they drink different water than everyone else. And, of course, they do:”

Doubt it? Switch parties. Join the GOP, and see what happens: cheerful clean-cut uniformed men show up the next day, and take you off the city water lines. They’ll connect you to the special Republican water system that crosses the nation, supplying pure clean perfect water to GOP households. You can get it without Fluoride, too, as a sop to the Birchers and Goldie holdovers.

And there’s more! They’ll also install special GOP “screens” for your windows — they’ll trap airborne pollutants as small as three molecule across. You’ll also have access to rich, satisfying Republican sunshine, which tans you twice as fast — just look at Bob Dole! — and you’ll enjoy even-tempered Republican weather all year long. This is why Republicans don’t care about pollution, or bad water, or the ozone layer, or global warming: for all practical purposes, they’re not living on the same planet as the rest of the people, so they don’t care at all what happens to you.

True! All true! Invite a Republican over and hand him a glass of water. Watch him avoid drinking it — sometimes they spill it, sometimes they just say “I had water earlier today, thanks anyway” — and sometimes they sneak a little sponge out of their cuff, put it in their mouth and pretend to drink. Oh, they’re clever.

Well, if this isn’t true, then perhaps . . . maybe . . . there’s another side to this arsenic debate. Is it possible? Could it be?

Nahh, that’s just crazy talk.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 65

OLD AND BUSTED: The Democrats are the Working Man’s Party.

The New Hotness? The Democrats’ Brahmin Left Problem.

The Democrats have become and remain today a “Brahmin Left” party. “Brahmin Left” is a term coined by economist Thomas Piketty and colleagues to characterize Western left parties increasingly bereft of working-class voters and increasingly dominated by highly educated voters and elites, including of course our own Democratic Party. The Brahmin Left character of the party has evolved over many decades but spiked in the 21st century. The chart below illustrates this trend.

The chart does not show the most recent elections but election surveys agree that education polarization spiked further upward in both 2020 and 2024. Indeed, in the most reliable 2024 election survey the differential between unmodeled college and non-college Democratic support (compare the blue line in the chart) reached 27 points—literally off the Piketty chart and more than twice its level in the 2016 Piketty data.

It has not escaped the notice of many Democratic-sympathizing analysts that this ever-increasing education polarization—Brahminization—of the Democrats presents existential dangers to the party. Not only might the continued desertion of working-class (non-college) voters fatally undermine the Democrats’ electoral formula over time, the party’s fundamental purpose is being rapidly obliterated. What does it even mean to be the “progressive” party if the most educated and affluent voters are your most enthusiastic supporters? What does it mean to be “progressive” if working-class voters think your party mostly represents the values and priorities of those educated and affluent voters not their values and priorities?

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 95

IS THAT BETTER, WORSE, OR JUST WEIRDER THAN THE POSSIBILITY THAT WE’RE LIVING IN A SIMULATION? Unexpected JWST Observations Hint We Might Be Inside A Black Hole.

“If the observation shown here indeed reflects the structure of the Universe, it shows that the early universe was more homogeneous in terms of the directions towards which galaxies rotate, and becomes more chaotic over time while exhibiting a cosmological-scale axis that is close to the Galactic pole,” the team explains in their paper.

“Some cosmological models assume a geometry that features a cosmological-scale axis. These include ellipsoidal Universe, dipole big bang, and isotropic inflation. In these cases, the large-scale distribution of the galaxy rotation is aligned in the form of a cosmological-scale axis, and the location of that axis in close proximity to the Galactic pole can be considered a coincidence.”

One possibility suggested by the authors is that the preferred direction is the result of the universe being on the interior of a black hole of a larger universe.

Maybe it’s black holes all the way down.

Posted at 11:44 am by Stephen Green 129

THE TRUTH SINKS IN AT BANK OF AMERICA:

The adjustment will be painful and there will be defeats along the way, but the necessity is undeniable.

Posted at 11:33 am by Stephen Green 122

X IS MORE FUN THAN TWITTER EVER WAS:

Who controls the social media accounts of Congressional Dems is what I want to know.

Who?

Posted at 10:42 am by Stephen Green 112

EXCERPT FROM A PERSONAL EMAIL: I got a ranting screed from a hardcore Dem pal, a great guy but totally unhinged when it comes to All Things Trump. His daughter apparently lost her dream job when the company folded b/c of the tariffs and trade regs w/r/t China. Apparently the company was wholly reliant on China.

At the risk of sounding cold-hearted, I sent him the note below. Real friends will tell you what you think they need to hear, not only what they want to hear:

Dear [XXX]:

Of course it’s not good that your daughter lost her dream job. But to be 100% honest, investing one’s life in a company that relies wholly on business with CCP is not a good choice. Never was. She chose poorly.

I do a lot of editorial work on this subject, and I have to tell you the CCP (which controls every major Chinese enterprise) are a very bad, no good, inhumane bunch. Even the NIH has something to say about it.

Interestingly, a large portion of my NYU students are FOTB Chinese. In my History of Journalism class, when I get to the section on cable news, I show them the video clip of this:

Only about 1/3 of the Chinese students had ever seen or heard of Tiananmen Square, and they only learned about it while in other countries. The subject is completely unfindable in any Chinese platform or outlet, and people who share this in China are subject to immediate arrest and often, made to disappear.

So, at the end of the day, from a moral perspective, in some ways, your daughter is better off. If she got a fabulous job with I.G. Farben in 1939 developing Zyklon B, and then lost her job…what would you say?

I know, people break long-time relationships taking the world too seriously. I could only end with this.

Posted at 10:35 am by Charles Glasser 245

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE:

Posted at 10:12 am by Glenn Reynolds 140

COLORADO: Senate Bill 86: Social media companies as agents of the state.

At its core, Senate Bill 86 seeks to regulate social media platforms by imposing strict requirements on content moderation, user removals, and law enforcement cooperation. Among the bill’s most concerning provisions is the requirement that social media companies determine within 72 hours whether a user has violated the platform’s policies or state and federal law. If a violation is found, the company must remove the user within 24 hours—a mandate that effectively deputizes private companies to police speech at the behest of the state.

This rushed enforcement process leaves little room for due process or thoughtful review. Instead, it incentivizes social media companies to err on the side of censorship rather than risk punishment under Colorado’s broad “deceptive trade practices” statute. The likely outcome? More voices silenced, more accounts banned, and an increasingly sanitized digital space where only state-approved speech is permitted.

Further, the bill’s vague definitions of prohibited activity—such as “subject use” violations that include selling illicit substances or firearms—open the door to arbitrary enforcement and politically motivated deplatforming. The government shouldn’t be in the business of deciding what speech is acceptable, nor should it coerce private platforms into acting as enforcers of an ill-defined and ever-changing set of online restrictions.

The bill looks an awful lot like California’s AB 587 which just had a major provision slapped down by the Ninth.

Update: Second link removed pending a look into a missing PDF and other oddities.

Posted at 9:40 am by Stephen Green 67

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Let Mahmoud Khalil’s Supporters Spend Quality Jail Time With Him. “Back in the 1960s and early ’70s, protesters viewed getting arrested as a badge of honor, unlike the diaper-filling mobs of today. I say we give these kids some help on their protesting journey, and round up even more of them. Better yet, give them each some cell time with Mahmoud Khalil. If his deportation gets delayed any longer, I may start a nonprofit that will fund sending his American supporters back to Syria with him. It’s not deportation, it’s ‘studying abroad.'”

Posted at 9:09 am by Stephen Green 73