HISTORY YOU CAN DRINK: Origins of Cappuccino: A Saintly Friar and a Battle Against the Turks.

WELL, YES: When you gaze into the AI, the AI also gazes into you.

HANDS-ON VEEP: Former senator told Biden he’d ‘kick the sh-t out of’ the then-VP for getting handsy with his wife.

Former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown threatened President Joe Biden with bodily harm when the then-veep allegedly got fresh with Brown’s wife more than a decade ago, he recalled this week.

“I told him I’d kick the sh-t out of – beat the – I told him to stop,” Brown told host Tom Shattuck on the “Burn Barrel” podcast Wednesday.

“He didn’t act the way I thought he should,” Brown added.

“And, you know, we called him on it, and that’s it.”

The incident occurred in 2010, when Biden, in his role as president of the Senate, posed for photos with Brown and his wife, Gail Huff Brown, at the Republican’s swearing-in ceremony in the US Capitol.

Photographers captured Huff Brown’s frozen grin as Biden’s right hand remained awkwardly behind her back – apparently near her posterior – as the portrait session ended.

Biden has always been a bully and a creep — and what a shame some husband or father didn’t publicly deck him long ago.

FASTER, PLEASE: General Fusion Funded to Build Scientific Breakeven Fusion Machine by 2026.

I’D RATHER NOT TASTE THE RAINBOW: Skittles Pulls a Bud Light.

BRAD THOMPSON: Of Joy and Grief.

I WONDER IF THERE’S REALLY A TRADEOFF BETWEEN SMARTNESS AND MOTIVATION: Dopamine control: Turning off one ion channel made mice smarter. Turning off another made them more motivated.

DOUBTFUL, BUT THE SPECULATION IS CERTAINLY DETAILED AND ENTERTAINING: TR-3B: Does America have a reverse-engineered UFO?

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Biden’s Response When Asked About Maui Death Toll Is Truly Cold.

Now let’s be real. If former President Donald Trump had that kind of a response to such a disaster, refusing to even comment when asked about the death toll of such a disaster, the media would have ripped him to shreds. We would have been told that his enjoying himself biking and on the beach was evidence that he didn’t care. But with Biden, don’t expect the same response, because he has the magical “D” after his name.

Without that “magical ‘D’” after Biden’s name, this would be a George W. Bush and Hurricane Katrina moment for the DNC-MSM. As Mickey Kaus wrote at the height of the media pummeling Bush over Katrina, “Katrina gives them a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq. No wonder Gwen Ifill smiles the ‘inner smile.’” It was a stepping stone for the left to win back the House and Senate in 2006.

FIGHT OF THE CENTURY: Elon’s Got the Receipt Proving Zuck Chickened Out of Charity MMA Fight.

SPACE LAW: Debate and hopes for consensus at UN space resource meetings.

JAMES LILEKS: In Living Color: What do our eras’ color schemes tell us about America—and about ourselves?

OUT TOMORROW FROM SOHRAB AHMARI: Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty–and What to Do About It.

VIDEO: China Is Screwed: Pipe People. “‘Those who are single simply adapt to homelessness, creating their own personal space amongst the concrete pipes.’ Or, you could have, you know, lived modestly, saved money, and shared housing with other people. The fact they haven’t gone this route and are instead living in pipes suggests something in the Chinese economy is even more broken than we think.”

If you don’t have the time or inclination to watch a video, Lawrence Person has done his usual fine job of breaking out the bullet points.

CRISIS BY DESIGN: Erie, N.Y., Halts Migrants Entering the County After Two Sexual Assaults in Two Weeks.

READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods (2nd Generation) Wireless Earbuds with Lightning Charging Case. #CommissionEarned

MALINVESTMENT: IRA Subsidies Are Driving Investment Decisions In A Dangerous Direction.

One result of having perhaps the worst possible class of people – politicians – making all these multi-billion-dollar decisions for the rest of us comes clear in the perverse incentives and unintended consequences the policies are now creating.

One of the best illustrations of this is the IRA/EPA policy effort to force 2/3rds of the U.S. transportation fleet to convert to EVs by 2032. The IRA contained the carrot of heavy incentives and subsidies for EV makers and consumers, and the EPA is implementing the stick of new tailpipe emissions and mileage standards designed to crowd most current internal combustion models out of the market.

This carrot-and-stick policy approach comes at the same time the U.S. power generation sector faces an already-severe and growing shortage of the transformers that are integral to any power generation or transmission project. It is now taking up to 4 years to source high voltage transformers, most of which are made overseas and moved via supply chains largely controlled by China.

The obvious problem here is that recharging millions of additional EVs will place an enormous new load on the nation’s power grids, a fact that Tesla CEO Elon Musk says will require at least a doubling of generation capacity in the coming years, and that even the Biden administration admits will require the build-out of 47,000 miles of new high-capacity transmission lines.

But get this: Neither the IRA nor the 2021 infrastructure law included subsidies or incentives targeting transmission or transformers.

Oh.

Just a reminder that all this DC-directed spending won’t deliver the promised results, will deliver a lot of misery or at least inconvenience, and come at the cost of productive investments required for healthy economic growth.

YEAH, IT’S NOT LIKE MAINE IS OVERRUN WITH WHITE PEOPLE OR ANYTHING: Former U. Vermont diversity guru rips ‘whiteness’ of Maine hospital system.

ANOTHER ONE: A Very Bad Week for Civilization in California. “Dear Californians: It ain’t rocket science figuring out what’s happening in your beautiful state. This is a direct result of lax enforcement of the law and a reluctance of prosecutors and district attorneys to uphold the basic values of civilization.”

Actually, it was an average week for California — worse than last week, better than next week.

YES, IT DOES: ‘Does it matter if that’s not true anymore?,’ Judge Milan Smith quipped in response to an attorney’s statement that ‘universities are bastions for free speech.’

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Iran close to testing nuclear weapons for first time.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: A National Conversation About Locking Up the J6 Committee Creeps. “It’s outrageous and disheartening that these awful people have played such a significant role in all of the pre-election tampering that we’re seeing right now. Truth has been plagued by false leftist narratives here for far too long. The J6 Committee was created solely to keep a false narrative alive so that it could be weaponized to keep Trump off of the ballot.”

I WASN’T EXPECTING THIS: Jimmy Lai and six other pro-democracy activists see convictions overturned.

Today, Judge Andrew Macrae reported that he and other judges on the Hong Kong Court of Appeal unanimously overruled the convictions against Hong Kong pro-democracy activists Jimmy Lai, Martin Lee, Margaret Ng, Lee Cheuk-yan, Leung Kwok-hung, Cyd Ho and Albert Ho for organising an unauthorised assembly in 2019. Their convictions for participating in an unauthorised assembly were upheld.

The written judgement from the Court of Appeal determined that to be an organiser of an assembly one must be responsible for or proactively plan and arrange an action. The judgement reads, “An inference that because they were at the front of the procession, they must have organised it… is not a realistic or suitable substitute for evidence that they were involved in its organisation.”

Hmm. That sounds more reasonable than some of our January 6 prosecutions, which is embarrassing.

Flashback: Jimmy Lai may yet outlast Hong Kong’s evil regime.

FIGHT THE POWER: ‘Blade Runners’ Fight London’s Car Emission Monitoring Cameras.

THAT’S NOT FUNNY: China has fallen into a psycho-political funk.

Sly, Soviet-style jokes are enjoying a subtle revival on Chinese social media platforms. Their art resides in being too obscure for censors to understand yet clear enough for cynics to chuckle at their mockery.

Some are so esoteric that their satire is confirmed only by the censors’ decision to delete them — echoing the cat-and-mouse dynamic that distinguished dissident humour in the former Soviet Union. One joke this week monitored by the China Digital Times, a US-based site that covers Chinese affairs, belonged to this genre.

It read: “While out and about on vacation, I stubbed my toe on something. Upon closer inspection, I saw it was a bronze lamp. It was smudged, so I picked it up and gave it a good wipe — and out popped a genie! The genie said it could grant me any wish. ‘Is that so?’ I said. ‘Well then, could you make you-know-who you-know-what?’ No sooner had the words escaped my lips than the genie rushed over, clamped my mouth shut, and asked: ‘Are we even allowed to say that?’”

The author’s account appears to have been shut down after the joke was deleted. “Of course, by banning the joke and its author, censors merely proved the punchline,” commented the China Digital Times. “This is not the first time that ‘Soviet-style’ jokes have become Chinese realities.”

But will the Chinese Yakov Smirnoff even want to try his hand at comedy in Woke America?