I WAS JUST TALKING ABOUT THIS WITH SOME FRIENDS NEXT YEAR: Physicist Discovers ‘Paradox-Free’ Time Travel Is Theoretically Possible.

I think this would addresss Niven’s Law of Time Travel, but I’m not sure.

HMM: Dark Genome Discovery: Researchers Reveal “Ancient Genetic Parasite” Implicated in Human Diseases.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Study bolsters evidence that severe obesity increasing in young US kids.

HE’S NOT WRONG: Don Surber: Liberals destroy society: From dams to cities to children, they demolish everything.

PROBABLY WHY THEY WENT EXTINCT: Neanderthals may have been early risers.

ALSO ON TRADITIONAL MEDIA. Health misinformation is rampant on social media.

Related: How the Sugar Industry Shifted the Blame to Fat. And traditional media went along with that for decades.

HMM: I might have to upgrade my Apple Watch just for Siri’s new health features.

We’re getting closer to my idea of a body computer, which I wrote about decades ago.

WHY THEY’RE EXTINCT: Neanderthals may have been early risers: Genetic material left behind from extinct hominins could play a role in modern sleep patterns.

WELL, GOOD: US FDA approves Merck’s drug for kidney cancer.

LIFE IN BIDEN’S AMERICA:

Man Longs For Good Old Days When He Could Go Online Without Seeing Gay Capitol Sex Tape https://t.co/Qmxx8mU5nu pic.twitter.com/ajNoPh5FVM

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) December 16, 2023

THE EMPIRE STRIKES MUSK: “If you go back through the news over the past two years, you will see a steady stream of threats made by US and European government officials–elected and administrative–towards Musk. They made it very clear that he either gets on board with their agenda or the West’s governments would destroy him. Last week, I wrote about one case of the Biden Administration’s weaponization of government against Musk. Today I have the displeasure of reporting that the European Union is trying to shut down Twitter/X due to its nefarious practice of not policing speech harshly enough.”

Related: Why Establishment Knives Are Out For Elon Musk.

IT’S NEVER THIS WAY ON NCIS: Mastermind ‘Fat Leonard’ Gets the Last Laugh in Disastrous Navy Corruption Trial.

A year after Francis’ escape, the convictions of Lausman and the three senior Navy officers crumbled, following disclosures of government missteps.

“It has been said by the defendants in this case, and the court has to agree, that the conduct by the government in this case can only be described as outrageous,” U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino said at a Sept. 6 hearing. Prosecutors agreed to accept misdemeanor pleas and $100 fines from Lausman and the three other officers. Charges against the retired rear admiral were dropped last year.

“The prosecution team on this case was comprised of exceptional public servants with an unwavering commitment to justice,” U.S. Attorney Tara McGrath, now the top federal prosecutor in San Diego, said in a statement.
Four other senior officers in the case, who had pleaded guilty before the trial, are looking for a similar turn in fortune. Federal prosecutors are expected to allow three of them to retract their pleas in exchange for similar misdemeanor deals. The officers have a hearing scheduled for Wednesday. Charges against the fourth officer are expected to be dropped.

“The government had hitched its wagon to Leonard Francis, who gave them a narrative that they ran with,” said Joseph Mancano, one of the defense lawyers.

“Exceptional public servants?” Well, consider this takeaway: ‘China couldn’t have done as much damage to the Navy as the prosecutors did by some of these false allegations.” It’s not impossible that China had something to do with this, I suppose.

Long deep-dive account by the WSJ. Worth your time.

WILL THERE BE A LAW SCHOOL? Elon Musk plans new university, invests $100M.

AIRBRUSHING THE ANTISEMITISM: Harvard’s ‘affinity graduation’ page that excluded Jews has been deleted.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: White House Report Card: Biden sinks lower, to ‘supplicant’ status.

OUR FAILING ESTABLISHMENT: “Liz Cheney couldn’t have picked a worse day to release her new anti-Trump memoir. Just hours after Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning hit bookshelves on Dec. 5, the presidents of three elite universities rife with anti-Semitic activism in recent months humiliated themselves on national television by bungling a simple question about whether it’s acceptable to call for Jewish genocide on campus. One of the presidents, Liz Magill of Penn, resigned in disgrace. The fallout is ongoing.”

Plus: “Like the other (seemingly countless) #Resistance memoirists, Cheney declines to consider that Trump and the support he continues to enjoy from millions of Americans is a symptom of some larger societal affliction, rather than the actual disease. At no point does she contemplate the implications of her deliberately alarmist rhetoric. For example: If America “cannot survive” another Trump presidency, as she and many others have warned, what sorts of actions might be justified to stop it from happening? Obstructing an official proceeding, at the very least, if it means saving the country? If not, then what?”

FLASHBACK: We’re told to ‘follow the science’ — yet some of it is just plain wrong.

SMEARING THE HERO, HORATIO NELSON EDITION: “But it turns out that the claim that Nelson was pro-slavery is false. It is based on a letter that he wrote to a Caribbean planter shortly before his death, but we now know that the letter, in the version in which it became known, is a forgery. Anti-abolition planters, desperate to recruit the dead hero to their cause, made 25 changes to the letter Nelson actually wrote, and destroyed the original. We know this now only because Nelson’s copy of the letter, which has long languished among his papers in the British Library, recently came to light. . . . The ‘racist’ smear against Nelson lives on, despite being supported by no evidence, because certain people want to perpetrate it. Such charges are not made out of any genuine concern for the long-gone victims of slavery through the millennia, but rather to discredit the history of selected countries–i.e., the United States and Great Britain, but not China or Brazil. The project is a purely political one.”

The history the left pushes on the West is the kind of history a conqueror imposes on a vanquished nation: One devoid of heroes, and full of shame and division. It isn’t by accident that it is so.

COMIC RELIEF: SF reparations office on hold due to budget cuts.

SOMETHING MUST BE DONE. THIS IS SOMETHING. THEREFORE. . . “We had to do something.” Joe Nocera joins John Tierney to discuss the government’s disastrous response to the Covid pandemic.

Now, the problem with the strategy, if the purpose of this strategy is to relieve the pressure on hospitals over a very short term, three weeks or so, there’s nothing wrong with it. If the strategy is that you’re going to lock everybody up and the pandemic is going to go away, that’s insane, because A, the pandemic doesn’t go away. It just kind of lurks around, waiting for you to leave your house, and B, all these virtuous people who are members of the Zoom class, they got their food from a guy from DoorDash, and they got their goods from some guy in an Amazon warehouse and FedEx and UPS and meatpackers, who got Covid like crazy. There was this whole sense that the working class and the poor had to put their lives at risk so that the Zoom class could feel virtuous.

I had not realized that D.A. Henderson, who was the man who ended smallpox, was against lockdowns and mask mandates.

Related: The COVID lockdown scolds killed people — but they still have no shame.

Also: The rich and powerful thrived as the rest of us suffered in the year of lockdowns.

The pandemic saw a huge amount of power and money transferred to what Michael Lind calls the “overclass” of politicians, corporate managers and bureaucrats. Small businesses shut down while big-box stores deemed “essential” remained open. The laptop class worked from home — to the delight of many of its members — while the working class brought them stuff. Federal money flowed like water to the connected. The national debt went from scandalous to essentially absurd, an amount of money that no one expects to be repaid.

The Chinese Communist Party used the threat of the pandemic and lockdowns to crush a rebellion in Hong Kong. The American powers-that-be did something similar: People who demonstrated for the wrong causes were called granny-killers and shut down; people who demonstrated for overclass-approved causes (like New York’s “Black Trans Lives Matter” rally, featuring thousands and endorsed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, even as he welded the gates of a Jewish park closed) received letters of support from “public-health” people who assured us that racism is a bigger public-health problem than COVID, even as they used COVID as an excuse to remake American society.
see also
Closed doors of the Pasadena Community Job Center in Calif., during the coronavirus outbreak.
Ongoing COVID lockdowns cost countless jobs

From the beginning, of course, the public-health crowd itself failed to perform.

Did they ever. We live in an era of massive institutional failure and corruption, and yet they still take the cake.

SCAM: Facebook diversity chief’s scam captures spirit of the DEI racket. “Guess what? Turns out when you hire people to work as part of a huge scam, like corporate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, they act as though they’re part of a huge scam. Witness the case of Barbara Furlow-Smiles, who led Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts at Facebook from 2017 to 2021. Turns out she was promoting inclusion — of Facebook monies into her own hands and those of her friends and family.”

OPEN THREAD: Comment friend and enter.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China launches large classified optical satellite towards geostationary orbit.

DORMANT DOESN’T MEAN DEAD: Even Sleeping Volcanoes Can Hide an Explosive Surprise Deep Inside.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE: Is Low Fat Dairy Healthier? Puhleez.

Scan the dairy case of any grocery store, and you’ll find rows upon rows of products with varying levels of fat. Nonfat, low-fat, whole: What’s the healthiest option?

If you consult the U.S. dietary guidelines or health authorities like the American Heart Association or the World Health Organization, the answer is clear: Choose a fat-free or low-fat version.

This recommendation stems from the idea that full-fat dairy products are high in saturated fats, so choosing lower-fat versions can reduce your risk of heart disease, said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at Tufts University.

But that guidance goes back to 1980, when the first edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans was published, he said. And since then, most studies on the health effects of dairy fat have failed to find any benefits of prioritizing low-fat versions over whole, Dr. Mozaffarian said.

Nina Planck pointed this out in her excellent book, Real Food, and it remains true.

Related: How the Sugar Industry Shifted the Blame to Fat.