Archive for 2024
January 8, 2024
21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Low Testosterone: What Causes Symptoms in Young Males 20 and Up?
FEEL MORE COMFORTABLE IN THE NEW YEAR: ComfiLife Gel Enhanced Seat Cushion for Desk Chair. #CommissionEarned
WELCOME TO THE CONFORMITY GAUNTLET!: Higher ed has created far too many pressures that promote conformity at the expense of truth.
LIVE LOOK FROM DR. EVIL’S UNDERGROUND LAIR: Dem Rep. Steve Cohen Shares the Dumbest J6 Pic-Tweet of ‘Em All and the (Copypasta) Backfire is Delicious.
So is Cohen going for Dr. Evil-levels of irony here, or the full original Dr. No supervillain from Sean Connery’s first James Bond movie?
ARE YOU UP ON THE LATEST PANICMONGERING? ZOMG You’re Going to Die Three Times from the Tripledemic. “What’s a government gotta do to scare people into submission these days?”
FEEDING THE HUNGRY IS BAD FOR GAIA: Increase in rice farming in sub-Saharan Africa found to be producing rising amounts of methane.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Offices Around America Hit a New Vacancy Record. “A staggering 19.6% of office space in major U.S. cities wasn’t leased as of the fourth quarter, according to Moody’s Analytics, up from 18.8% a year earlier. That is slightly above the previous records of 19.3% set in 1986 and 1991 and the highest number since at least 1979, which is as far back as Moody’s data go.”
Jimmy Carter always was the best-case scenario.
A SUNNY PLACE FOR SHADY PEOPLE: Shore To Please. Review: The Once Upon a Time World: The Dark and Sparkling Story of the French Riviera.
If Hieronymus Bosch ran a holiday resort, it would look like St. Tropez in the summer. It’s the same all the way along the coast from Marseilles to Menton. The rocky hillsides are swathed in concrete. The roads are jammed with preposterous sports cars and Germans in camper vans. The harbors are slick with oil and other fragrant discharges from the yachts in the bay. The harborside restaurants are extortionate and smell of drains. In Nice and Monaco, the surviving Belle Époque mansions are dwarfed by glass towers. This is the Côte d’Azur, the French Riviera: a sweaty panorama of organized crime, municipal corruption, tax-dodging, drug-smuggling, money-laundering, compulsive gambling, and gratuitous thong-wearing. I went last summer and had a great time.
The locals joke that Nice gets its name from “Ni ici, ni là“: “Neither here nor there,” neither French nor Italian, a living city and a stage set for a dream. That is what the visitors want, a break from reality on a cosmopolitan shore between the mountains and the sea. They come to escape life, as once, when the Riviera was an al fresco hospital for tuberculosis patients, they came to escape death. The English invented the French Riviera as a home away from home in the 19th century. The Americans reinvented it in the early 20th as a sophisticated alternative to home. The Germans only knocked it about a bit. The French destroyed it as the Venetians destroyed Venice, by catering to the world’s dreams and desires.
Jonathan Miles’s The Once Upon a Time World is the story of the making and remaking of the Riviera. It would be tidy to speak of its “unmaking,” but that has not yet happened and probably never will. A coast of malarial fishing villages and busy ports became an exclusive resort for the rich, then a glamorous gambler’s paradise with artist colonies on its fringes, then the world’s beach in the Jet Age when being a movie star was worth the trouble, and latterly a money laundry for oligarchs. But the view remains unchanged, and so the Riviera will go on forever, like a Disney cruise that has slipped into the Bermuda Triangle.
And:
The last artwork of any significance to be created on the Riviera was made in 1971, when the Rolling Stones, having come south to dodge British taxation, recorded Exile on Main Street in the basement of Nellcote, Keith Richards’s rented mansion on the headland by Villefranche. Jean Cocteau lived on the same headland and filmed his Orpheus in Villefranche’s backstreets. Somerset Maugham lived there too and knew what he was talking about when he called the Riviera a “sunny place for shady people.” Perhaps the only detail missing in Miles’s encyclopedic account is that when the future Andrew Loog Oldham stopped in Villefranche as a teenage backpacker, he was advised not to go near Maugham’s villa, as young boys were known to have disappeared there.
Read the whole thing.
OLD AND BUSTED: When Worlds Collide!
The New Hotness? When Worlds Experience “A Giant Galactic Hug!” The Thrill Of Word-Policing.
Come, dear reader. Let us visit the publication now laughingly referred to as Scientific American. In particular, an “analysis” piece by Juan P Madrid, in which we’re told,
The language of astronomy is needlessly violent and inaccurate.
Dr Madrid, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, begins his attempt to persuade with a tale of poetic drama:
This summer, a team of students and I were enjoying breathtaking views of the night sky while we collected data using telescopes at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas. One night, when we were outside on a telescope catwalk… one of my students amazed me with her interpretation of the fate of Andromeda, the galaxy closest to our Milky Way. In describing how these two galaxies will merge a few billion years from now, she said they will experience “a giant galactic hug.”
I know. The very stuff of amazement. Brings a tear to the eye.
The kindness, but also the accuracy, of the language my student used was in sharp contrast to the standard description we use in astronomy to explain the final destiny of Andromeda and the Milky Way: “a collision.”
Apparently, the word collision is, for Dr Madrid, much too brutal and masculine when referring to the convergence of two galaxies, and the subsequent merging of the supermassive black holes at their centres – an event that will entail the sling-shotting of countless stars and their orbiting planets, and which may release energy equivalent to around 100 million supernova explosions, and subsequently be detectable halfway across the universe.
It’s David Thompson, so allow your Internet connection to warmly embrace his with a soft, serene cybernetic hug, and gently read the whole thing.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: Read the Dem Script for Why Biden Shouldn’t Debate Trump. “Democrats had the weekend to assess the damage done by Presidentish Joe Biden’s Jan. 6 speech on Friday and, judging by a new report in The Hill today, the consensus is ‘Oh, crap.'”
Founded in August 2022, the startup known as Perplexity aims to challenge Google by offering an AI-based search engine that is “part chatbot and part search engine, offering real-time information and footnotes showing the sources of its answers,” according to its website.
When deciding to invest, Bezos was no doubt looking at the numbers, as he did in the 1990s. Perplexity, while still not profitable, has quickly grown to 10 million monthly active users while almost entirely skipping traditional marketing, according to the company. It further claims that more than a million people have installed its mobile apps on the iOS and Android platforms, and it served over half a billion queries last year.
On Thursday, San Francisco–based Perplexity announced that it has raised $73.6 million from a group of investors led by venture capital firm IVP and including Bezos, the $1.2 trillion AI chip giant Nvidia, and Shopify cofounder Tobias Lütke.
Perplexity is “one of the few consumer AI products to reach this major milestone of 10 million MAUs,” said Jonathan Cohen, VP of Applied Research at Nvidia, in the announcement. AI will “transform how we access information,” he believes.
Not until they solve the problem of LLMs just making stuff up, plus the perhaps more intractable problem of generative AIs generating garbage-out that gets used as garbage-in for generative AIs generating even stinkier garbage.
DEMOCRATIC PARTY BRASS BECOMING INCREASINGLY ANGRY AT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES: Biden campaign brings top journalists to Wilmington.
Two people with knowledge of the situation told Semafor that during meetings with reporters from outlets like The New York Times, the Washington Post, and others, campaign officials have invoked a coverage spreadsheet laying out areas where the team believes their reporting has fallen short.
In particular, campaign officials have chafed at some of the coverage of former President Donald Trump, feeling that outlets are too focused on his legal troubles and haven’t paid enough attention to some of his incendiary recent statements on the campaign trail. A source familiar told Semafor that with the exception of its recent meeting with the Times, the campaign meetings had been “substantive” and “productive,” and that Biden staffers were scheduled to meet in the coming days with political reporting teams from ABC, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, Fox, NPR, Reuters, Bloomberg, and others in Wilmington.
And of course, it’s worth nothing: If Donald Trump Did This, the Establishment Media’s Heads Would’ve Exploded.
This team knows that every aspect of the narrative must be controlled for them to have a shot at re-election. It’s creepy and un-American. If they’re this worried about bad press concerning Joe Biden, maybe Democrats shouldn’t have doubled down on this bad bet. The man is being led off by his wife at events, unable to comprehend his surroundings. If he can’t handle two events in one day without falling, bumbling, drooling, or looking lost, this endeavor isn’t worth entertaining. I don’t see Biden surviving a campaign season that isn’t handicapped by COVID procedures. Those are long over, and voters expect the president to have the stamina to do multiple events in various states for days on end until we all vote in November.
On that issue, no meeting could smooth over Biden falling or suffering a blown mental fuse a la Mitch McConnell on the stump.
This is the inevitable twilight years of a politician who at the peak of his power (and faculties) loved nothing more than insulting journalists and locking them in closets.
Exit quote:
Same energy https://t.co/QLlDO2EX7S pic.twitter.com/SVtFluReJg
— Matthew Foldi (@MatthewFoldi) January 8, 2024
WHEN BLACK FRIDAY MONDAY COMES, I’LL STAND DOWN BY THE DOOR, AND CATCH THE GRAY MEN WHEN THEY DIVE FROM THE FOURTEENTH FLOOR: NFL Black Monday live updates: Ron Rivera, Arthur Smith fired; Bill Belichick next?
Related: Is the Cowboys’ Mike McCarthy also on the hotseat, despite a 12-5 record and winning the NFC East? NBC speculates, “Some believe Patriots coach Bill Belichick is on the radar screen, if the Cowboys decide to try to take a potential championship roster to the next level. It would require both Jones and Belichick to bend a little (or a lot). But it could give Belichick his best chance to chase a Super Bowl championship.”
Kremlinologists are reading much into Jerry Jones’ statement last night after the Cowboys beat the Washington Commanders: “‘I just think his record speaks for itself,’ Jones said Sunday. ‘I think what he’s done, the fact that we’ve put ourselves in this position over these last three years. I think that does speak for itself. We’ve got a lot of football left, no small part thanks to Mike and thanks to his staff, and thanks to some really outstanding football players around here. We’ll see how each game goes.’”
NEVER UNDERESTIMATE JOE’S ABILITY TO F THINGS UP: Worst Presidential Speech Ever: Biden Green-Lights Dirtiest Campaign of our Lifetimes.
WELL, YES. Harvard Is Still Anti-Semitic.
BIDENOMICS: Americans are racking up more ‘phantom debt’ — why that’s a problem.
Some types of debt can haunt you.
“Buy now, pay later” loans, especially, can be hard to track, making it easier for more consumers to get in over their heads, some experts say — even more than credit cards, which are simpler to account for, despite sky-high interest rates.
Over the holidays, the use of installment payments hit an all-time high, up 14% year over year, according to Adobe’s latest online shopping data.
Buy now, pay later is now one of the fastest-growing categories in consumer finance, according to a separate report by Wells Fargo.
“Because no central repository exists for monitoring it, growth of this ‘phantom debt’ could imply total household debt levels are actually higher than traditional measures,” said Tim Quinlan, senior economist at Wells Fargo and co-author of the report.
They keep telling me the economy is booming but all I see is mountains of debt — private and public.