“SYSTEM DECAY” IS MOST OF OUR CIVILIZATION RIGHT NOW: Robin Hanson: Beware System Decay.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY (MOSCOW EDITION):

1/ With an estimated 200,000 men killed so far in the Ukraine war, Russia's cemeteries are booming. A 'cemetary mafia' is profiting by violently taking over cemeteries, funeral businesses and even hospitals, attacking funerals, and setting fire to rivals. pic.twitter.com/rpYIVN5ra8

— ChrisO_wiki (@ChrisO_wiki) September 19, 2024

A country in severe demographic decline is in a mafia war over corpses.

FLASHBACK: Lifetime Pennsylvania Democrats are becoming Republicans.

Shirley Hall has always lived in this charming Blair County borough, located a few miles from the big city of Altoona and once the home of booming coal and paper mill industries. She has also been a Catholic all of her life and for most of it a registered Democrat, two attributes she says are, or at least were, a profound part of her identity.

She is still a Catholic, faithfully so, but last week when watching former President Donald Trump walk into the convention hall in Milwaukee just two days after being shot, she changed her voter registration on the spot.

In short, she is not just a Democrat voting for Trump come November, but she is now a Republican and will be voting so up and down the ballot. How solidly Democrat was Hall? The retired administrator for a local Catholic church voted for Barack Obama twice and Hillary Clinton in 2016 and did not vote for Donald Trump in 2020.

“I didn’t vote for Biden either. I just didn’t vote for either man that year,” Hall said.

Hall said a number of things led to her pivotal decision last week. “The last three years had really disheartened me in how my party had handled inflation, never recognizing that it is really impacting people’s lives, but also the border and how that has made accessing drugs even easier for people,” she said.

That’s a Salena Zito story from July.

Today:

Even a reversal of these numbers in Pennsylvania would be very, very bad for Harris. https://t.co/2QEqxmHLDR

— Avi Woolf, Wilderness Conservative🐺 (@AviWoolf) September 19, 2024

I don’t like how needlessly close this race is — and I let it get me crabby yesterday — but there are unprecedented undercurrents in this race that I’m not sure pollsters have figured out how to account for.

“IT’S TIME FOR A LIBERTY-LOVING SOCIOLOGY.” I’d settle for a sociology that was interested in researching what’s true rather than pushing an agenda.

SHE PRETTY MUCH SUCKS AT EVERYTHING: FCC Commissioner Just Scorched Harris for Her $42 Billion Fail.

LIMITED TIME DEAL: Champion Power Equipment 4250-Watt Dual Fuel RV Ready Portable Open Frame Inverter Generator. #CommissionEarned

BECAUSE IT HELPED ESTABLISH A DESIRED NARRATIVE. NEXT QUESTION? Why did it take four years to debunk the black baby study?

A study published this week in a prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, makes a claim that’s almost unheard of on the pages of leading medical journals: systemic racism and implicit bias are not the self-evident explanations for a pervasive racial disparity. To be precise: black newborns aren’t dying at higher rates when they’re treated by white doctors.

The study, conducted by a Harvard economist and a Manhattan Institute researcher, purports to debunk a widely circulated 2020 study, also published in PNAS, which concluded that black newborns attended by a white physician suffer a “mortality penalty” and are twice as likely to die. That study garnered incriminating headlines in USA Today, CNN, Science News, NPR, and The Washington Post. It was also so influential that it was cited by Supreme Court Justice Brown Jackson in the high court’s 2023 affirmative action case, in which the American Medical Association and 44 other parties declared in their amicus brief: “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug.”

How could two teams of researchers look at the same data — 1.8 million childbirths in Florida between 1992 and 2015 — and reach diametrically opposite conclusions?

This time around, the researchers added one key variable that the 2020 researchers had overlooked — low birth weights — and the whole thing collapsed. The research design contained a fatal flaw, overlooking the fact that severely underweight babies, who have very high mortality rates to start with, tend to be treated by white doctors. Physicians who handle the most serious medical cases tend to see higher death rates.

No matter; the narrative is firmly established.

SATIRE, REALLY?

Biden Promises Next Trump Assassin Will Be A Woman Of Color https://t.co/4r1F4CXAEm pic.twitter.com/4jeuKDgFot

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) September 19, 2024

TRUE:

For many liberal Christians loving their neighbor means spitting on their current neighbor and replacing them with one that the New York Times would find more fashionable

— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) September 13, 2024

JEFFREY GOLDSTEIN: Am I Racist? part 2: The linguistic origins of a question not worth asking.

THAT’S NICE. WHEN DO WE GET AN APOLOGY FOR WALTER DURANTY? New York Times apologises to furious Scottish readers after calling Baby Reindeer star Richard Gadd’s Emmys sporran a ‘black fanny pack.’

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Chicago Public Schools teachers say they were told by administrators to give migrant students passing grades.”The teachers we spoke with work in CPS elementary schools and say they spoke no Spanish, while their migrant students spoke no English, making communication virtually impossible. They also added that because their schools were located in predominantly Black neighborhoods, they offered no English as a Second Language (ESL) support. Despite this, they say they were instructed by school administrators to give their migrant students a 70 percent in every subject and pass them on to the next grade.”

DO NOT WANT: Will phones someday be able to transmit smells?

THE ‘BIONIC JEW’ THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE:

But it’s more difficult than you might think to talk sense into such folks because they believe strongly in the Bionic Jew theory of the universe. This goes beyond space lasers or even weather control: It’s a belief in the existence of the super-sabra. In this fantasy, Israel is a place where Jews go to have their software updated, not to learn to use weapons but to become weapons.

After all, if Israel can genetically engineer Egyptian attack sharks and radiation-sniffing Iranian lizards, imagine what can be done with human potential.

There is another, less amusing thought process at work here, however. And that is that the morality of Israel’s operations is inversely correlated with their level of success.

Israel’s critics insist the Jewish state carry out individually targeted attacks. Blowing up a terrorist’s personal pager, maiming him and him alone, is obviously in compliance with this demand. But what if Israel does exactly that to thousands of individual terrorists simultaneously? That’s no good, for reasons that are difficult to explain but which feel obvious to the public intellectuals keeping score.

You can see how this approach has been applied to Gaza for the duration of the ongoing war. If Israeli soldiers encounter an empty house rigged with explosives but which has an entrance to a subterranean tunnel system used only by the terrorist army and the hostages the IDF is trying to rescue, what can it do? The obvious answer is: it can detonate the explosives from a safe distance and then enter the tunnels. After all, the war crime here is Hamas’s, and such an approach allows the IDF to neutralize the threat without harming civilians.

But what if Hamas illegally rigs a house again? And again? “An aerial photo recovered by the Israeli military from a Hamas commander’s post shows three dozen hidden tunnel entrances marked with color-coded dots and arrows in one crowded neighborhood,” reports the New York Times. The underlying facts haven’t changed: Hamas has committed the crime, Israel is pursuing the approach most closely aligned with humanitarian concerns. But because Hamas has replicated its crime many times over, Israel will knock down many houses. Suddenly, the public criticism is of Israel’s conduct, its supposed “domicide,” its appetite for destruction.

In this upside-down world, the more war crimes Hamas carries out, the less Israel is morally permitted to do in self-defense. Hence, the problem in Lebanon is not that there are thousands of Iranian terrorists there but that Israel wants to take out all of them.

Read the whole thing.

Related: More on “Operation Grim Beeper.” “By the way, for an ideology that is rooted in a desire to return to the 8th century, hasn’t Israel helped them take one big step there by causing Hezbollah to abandon electronics?”

SOME THINGS NOT EVEN THE MEDIA CAN DENY: Liberal Media Admits Teamsters’ Snub of Kamala Harris a Major ‘Win for Trump.’

IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Moderate coffee consumption could provide health perks, study says. Perks. ISWYDT.

WAR ON ISRAEL, WAR ON THE WEST: There has never been a lower civilian to combatant casualty ratio in any major anti-terrorism operation in modern history than in Israel’s recent action against Hezbollah. In fact, it’s not even close. Yet all the “international law scholars” and grifters who were previously claiming that Israeli anti-terrorism actions were indiscriminate or put too many civilians at risk are still complaining, inventing new rules so they can that Israel was still acting illegally. The (ever-shifting) legal standards they want to apply would mean that no counter-terrorism operation is lawful, ever. And in fact, that’s what the far leftists who dominate international law discourse want–to leave the West defenseless against terrorism. The plan is to use Israel, which is relatively weak and isolated diplomatically, as precedent, and then use those precedents against the US, NATO, and any other Western actor seeking to counter Islamic State, Al Qaeda, or any other terrorist group.

FLASHBACK: The Conservative School-To-Pundit Pipeline Is Bad for the Right. “If liberals love to talk about the school-to-prison pipeline that affects too many black kids, conservatives would have their own worries about the school-to-punditry pipeline that makes right-wing commentators soft, wonky, unfeeling and self-righteous.”

CHRISTIAN TOTO: CNN’s ‘News’ Mocks Trumps, Joke Implodes on Cast.

Host Wood, passed over for “The Daily Show’s” hosting gig earlier this year, asked the panel, “What was the fake name of the head of the Taliban that Donald Trump cited during the debate.”

The answer? Abdul.

“He picked the most obvious name to make up for the head of the Taliban,” Black cracked as his fellow panelists cackled in glee. The show’s official X account pushed the clip out, secure in its comedy mileage and accuracy.

Except they got it wrong.

So just like CNN’s actual news shows then.

THE CRITICAL DRINKER REVIEWS MATT WALSH’S AM I A RACIST? (Video.)

VOTES: This Is What Trump’s Crypto Play Is Really About.

OVER AT MY SUBSTACK I TALK ABOUT MY PODCAST INTERVIEW ON JURY NULLIFICATION WITH THOMSON/REUTERS’ “THE HEARING” PODCAST:

You can listen to it free at Apple Podcasts or on Spotify Open.

WITH MALICE AFORETHOUGHT: How Facts Get Misrepresented to Push Anti-Gun Narrative.

LIMITED TIME DEAL: Queen Mattress, 14 Inch Hybrid Mattress with Gel Memory Foam. #CommissionEarned

DON’T GET COCKY: This Blue State Shouldn’t Be Competitive… But It Is.