HMM: Russia is ready for ceasefire but not defeat, says ambassador to UK.

Russia is ready for a ceasefire in Ukraine at any time but the prospect is “unrealistic” and unacceptable as long as Kyiv and the West insist on Russia’s military defeat, the Kremlin’s ambassador to London has told The Times.

Moscow’s threatened spring offensive is likely to come in the next few weeks, when the weather improves and the terrain is firmer, Andrey Kelin said.

Kelin acknowledged the crucial political and economic support China was giving Moscow, but said that its proposals for a peace settlement were only a framework and not a detailed plan.

That’s the second — albeit small — indication in the last week that both sides might be ready to talk.

GOOD ADVICE: Why Liberal Students Should Attend College in Red States. “Third, given current economic trends and realities, it’s arguably better in a red state for future job prospects. These states may have more opportunities and a lower cost of living; just ask the American workers who have been moving in large numbers to red states in recent years, many for lifestyle and financial reasons. Graduating college students seek affordability and career opportunities, in that order, in where they’ll start their adult lives. Don’t think that students don’t want to live in red states; Texas boasts the highest retention rate for college grads (more than 60 percent in one study) and other red states, such as Florida and Georgia, are not that far behind.”

Plus: “Many students with whom I speak actively express a desire to go to school with people from all kinds of backgrounds, with points of view different from their own. That’s part of why diversity is so important to them as a generation. But when it comes to higher education, we should not limit ourselves to seeking diversity on just the grounds of race, gender, or socio-economic backgrounds. We need to reach out across the different sides of the political divide as well.”

MONEY. NEXT QUESTION? How Did George Soros’ Son Score So Many WH Meetings?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Most Americans no longer think that college is worth the cost: Crushing student loan debt, the disruption of the pandemic, low graduation rates, and the ‘dogmatic left-wing religion’ on campuses are suggested as reasons behind the dissatisfaction with degrees.

If only there had been some kind of warning.

WELL, EXCEPT FOR CLARENCE THOMAS, BECAUSE LEFTIES HATE HIM: Supreme Court justices are allowed to have friends.

Everything you’re seeing is just an effort to discredit him before the affirmative action decision comes out.

CHANGE? Biden Admin Concedes It’s Unfair To Let Men Compete In Women’s Sports With New Rules Allowing Men In Women’s Sports. “Under the long-anticipated proposal, the Department of Education outlined new guidelines that would invalidate bans on men in women’s sports currently implemented across 20 states. At the same time, schools that receive federal funding and therefore subject to Title IX stipulations may bar male athletes on female teams in competitive leagues.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Blood On Biden’s Hands From Afghanistan Withdrawal Can’t Be Washed Away. “The Biden lackeys in the federal government are beyond disgusting for trying to pull a Pontius Pilate here — they’re just plain evil.”

ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES:  I should have pointed out this a couple of weeks ago:  The Biden Administration has reinstated the 2013 Fair Housing Act rule that had been promulgated during the Obama Administration.  It uses a disparate impact approach to housing law.  Sad.  For the long history of how disparate impact liability got started in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. read my article “Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal.”  For background on how it leaked into housing law, read this.

JONATHAN TURLEY: Democrats Go Nuts in Nashville. “This month, there was an ‘assault on democracy’ in Tennessee. It was not three members halting the legislative process, but rather their expulsion. It appears that nothing says democracy like a bullhorn and obstructing legislative work.”

Plus: “The full-throated support for the actions of the expelled legislators is a bizarre position for the Senate president who enforces the same rules in Washington, DC. Yet she was disgusted by sanctioning members who refused to allow their colleagues to continue legislative business because they lacked the votes for a gun control measure. Harris proclaimed ‘it’s about whose voices they were channeling.’ . . . These legislators were upset because they are in the minority and lack sufficient votes to get what they want. They were protesting the democratic process, not advancing its principles in shutting down the floor.”

It’s always “democracy” if you’re channeling the voices of Democratic activists; it’s alway “insurrection” if you’re taking the other side.

THE SHOOTING OF SIX PEOPLE AT A CHRISTIAN SCHOOL BY A TRANSGENDER ACTIVIST HAS BEEN MEMORY-HOLED: Again… where is the manifesto?

HMM: American IQ Scores Have Rapidly Dropped, Proving the ‘Reverse Flynn Effect.’

The study, published in the journal Intelligence, used an online, survey-style personality test called the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project to analyze nearly 400,000 Americans. The researchers recorded responses from 2006 and 2018, in order to examine if and how cognitive ability scores were changing over time within the country. The data showed drops in logic and vocabulary (known as verbal reasoning), visual problem solving and analogies (known as matrix reasoning), and computational and mathematical abilities (known as letter and number series).

On the flip side, however, scores in spatial reasoning (known as 3D rotation) followed the opposite pattern, trending upward over the 12-year period. “There’s a debate about what’s causing it, but not every domain is going down; one of them is going up,” Elizabeth Dworak, a research assistant professor at Northwestern University and one of the authors on the study, says in a news release. “If all the scores were going in the same direction, you could make a nice little narrative about it, but that’s not the case. We need to do more to dig into it.”

Less stringent reading and writing assignments, more 3D videogames?

REPORT FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Portland Rioter Previously Given Probation For Assaulting Federal Worker Sentenced In Killing Of Infant Son.

MOTOR CITY:  In 1950, Detroit was the 5^th most populous city in the United States with a population of 1,849,568.  These days it has a population of about 632,464, making it the 27^th most populous.  And it is apparently hellbent on shrinking more.

The news out of Detroit is that 63% of its residents support reparations for slavery. Or to put the matter more precisely, a survey shows 63% support reparations to “counter the lasting impacts of slavery and discriminatory policies.”  Interestingly, the higher a respondent’s level of education, the more likely he or she would support reparations.

Not surprisingly, support was higher among African Americans (72%) than it was among whites (38%) or Latinos (27%).  But since Detroit’s population is 77% African American and only 10% white and 8% Latino, a solid majority of residents favor reparations.

The survey comes after a successful effort in 2021 (Proposal R) to call for a reparations task force to make recommendations for a reparations program by the City of Detroit.  The task force is at work now.

I can’t think of a more effective way to shrink the Detroit tax base still further.  Why would anyone who pays taxes to the City of Detroit, other than those who hope to be on the receiving end of the project, want to stick around? No doubt, even now, many are deciding to get out while the getting’s good.

There are, of course, other reasons to oppose the push for slavery reparations.  We’ve got to start talking about those reasons.  You might be surprised at how quickly a wrongheaded policy idea can become a train rolling downgrade.

PRIVACY: AI Firm Scrapes 30 Billion Social Media Photos, Hands Them to Law Enforcement.

YEP:

@banana_n_chips1

😂😂😂 truth!! #fyp #america #letsgobrandon

♬ original sound – banana_n_chips1

One bike is Afghanistan, the other is the economy. More bikes representing China policy, etc., in the sequel . . .

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Politicians are tearing down the guardrails because they’re convinced they’re always right. A civilizational game of Jenga.

SPACE: NASA Reveals What Made an Entire Starlink Satellite Fleet Go Down.

At the other end of the space weather spectrum are solar storms that can knock out satellites. The folks at Starlink found that out the hard way in February 2022. On January 29 that year, the Sun belched out a class M 1.1 flare and related coronal mass ejection. Material from the Sun traveled out on the solar wind and arrived at Earth a few days later. On February 3, Starlink launched a group of 49 satellites to an altitude only 130 miles above Earth’s surface. They didn’t last long, and now solar physicists know why.

A group of researchers from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Catholic University of America took a closer look at the specifics of that storm. Their analysis identified a mass of plasma that impacted our planet’s magnetosphere. The actual event was a halo coronal mass ejection from an active region in the northeast quadrant of the Sun.

The material traveled out at around 690 kilometers per second as a shock-driving magnetic cloud. Think of it as a long ropy mass of material writhing its way through space. As it traveled, it expanded and at solar-facing satellites — including STEREO-A, which took a direct hit from it — made observations. Eventually, the cloud smacked into Earth’s magnetosphere creating a geomagnetic storm.
…
The atmosphere thickened enough that it affected the newly launched Starlink stations. They started to experience atmospheric drag, which caused them to deorbit and burn up on the way down. It was an expensive lesson in space weather and provided people on Earth with a great view of what happens when satellites fall back to Earth. It was also that could have been avoided if they’d delayed their launch to account for the ongoing threat.

As a Starlink customer, here’s to hoping that’s a mistake they make only once.

WE CAN’T AFFORD IT, GO AWAY: “Sustainable Development’s” $4 Trillion Price Tag.

If you ask the question – what would it take to put the world on a track of sustainable development? – the best guesses of the experts who have spent most time trying to figure this out tend to congregate around $4 trillion in investment, per annum over the next decade. This was the conclusion of a panel of experts working for the COP27 meeting in November 2022 headed up by Vera Songwe, Nicholas Stern and Amar Bhattacharya.

One could write an interesting story about the calculation of these numbers and the remarkable resurgence of world-level development thinking they imply. To be talking about a “big push” harkens back to the early days of development economics. Is the message from Vera Songwe, Nicholas Stern and Amar Bhattacharya that we need go “back to the future”?

You might say that as in earlier generations of development thinking there is something disembodied, utopian, anti-political about asking this question – what will it take? – and answering with a round number – $ 4 trillion per annum. After all, there is no “we”, no global government that will answer this call. Nation states pursue geopolitics. As ever, national politicians want to retain power. They have short time-horizons. Capitalism is driven by profit, pure and simple. What kind of political process do we envision that would mobilize and direct this immense amount of money? What kind of revolution would it take? . . .

The experts and their networks form a world that is real enough. This circularly self-recruiting epistemic community is closely connected not only to academia and think tanks but institutions like the World Bank and private business. One could write an interesting study of how such expert groups are constituted and constitute themselves.

The record of the “experts” over the past few years does not inspire me to want to give them more power or resources. These people have no skin in the game; if their ideas fail — and, history suggests, they will, and disastrously — they will suffer no consequences.

And note that the $4 trillion figure is per annum. My prediction: $2 trillion will go to various forms of graft, and most of the rest will be spent in ways that do more harm than good.

LIGHTNING DEAL: JMIERR Mens Casual Joggers Pants. #CommissionEarned

GO WOKE…: Bud Light Goes Quiet, Hasn’t Posted on Social Media Since Making Dylan Mulvaney Its Spokestrans.

“DEFENDERS OF SCIENCE:” The biggest defenders of science did the most damage to it.

I know the pandemic is winding down when I see ‘science influencers,’ ‘debunkers’ and the ‘misinformation police’ return to focusing on issues that match their skill set: debunking vitamins, supplements, cupping, homeopathy, electric fields and other clearly unproven and implausible medical interventions. . . .

The science influencers came to our rescue, or so they believed. They knew that the CDC’s recommendations— under a Democratic president— were always correct when they advocated for interventions and restrictions, and only incorrect for not going further. Of course, we should mask toddlers— the only error the CDC made was not doing it sooner and longer. Of course, we should boost 16 year old men— even if they had COVID— and of course, they should get a bivalent booster— even if they had COVID again. Of course, schools should mandate vaccines. In fact, mandates would not be needed if it weren’t for anti-science grifters. If only we would all dutifully get all the doses, Lord Peter Marks advised, and take Paxlovid as Emperor Jha suggested, we would be better off (irrespective of age or prior infection).

Indeed, soft target ‘debunkers’ turned their criticism of alternative medicines into a remix of ‘the establishment is always right, and if anything, doesn’t go far enough’. It was no coincidence that this fell along lines of political preference (left wing), and among insular communities on social media. The debunkers were united in disparate beliefs: masks work and Elon Musk is bad. . . .

Add to this mix: growing political fanaticism. Trump indeed broke brains. Although he is not currently president, he remains the most discussed politician. As Sagar Enjeti recently said, ‘the Trump era began when he descended the escalator and will end only when he dies.’ Soft target debunkers largely oppose Trump, and some of their scientific beliefs are supported merely by the fact Trump said the opposite.

What happens when you pair mediocre scientists with political fanaticism and inject health policy decisions made by partisan administrations? The answer is chaos. The debunkers have no skillset to separate sound decisions from bad ones.

The way you defend science is by explaining, debating, and engaging with people who have different theories and hypotheses. Silencing and bullying isn’t the same.