HMM: Scientists can reverse brain aging in fruit flies by preventing buildup of a common protein.

THE E.V. BUBBLE IS DEFLATING: Porsche Now Considering Gasoline Variants of EVs. “Porsche already builds an all-electric version of the Macan and the brand has the Taycan EV — not to mention a slew of hybridized models — with an electrified version of the 718 soon to follow. However, the business has noticed that plug-in vehicles aren’t seeing the same kind of demand as vehicles that continue to rely on gasoline. This came up during the Q3 call for investors, with leadership hinting that one future strategy could be to build combustion variants of electric models.”

SHOOTING: My Guns Don’t Suit Me Anymore: As an older shooter, your accuracy is not what it used to be with your favorite pistol.

ABOUT TIME: Some of Apple’s last holdout accessories have switched from Lightning to USB-C.

I AM THE KEYMASTER: Sperm Can’t Unlock an Egg Without This Ancient Molecular Key. “They’re the original odd couple: One is massive, spherical and unmoving. The other is tiny, has a tail and never stops swimming. Yet the union of egg and sperm is critical for every sexually reproducing animal on Earth. Exactly how that union occurs has long been a mystery to scientists. A study published Thursday in the journal Cell that relied on Nobel Prize-honored artificial intelligence technology shows that an interlocked bundle of three proteins is the key that lets sperm and egg bind together. That crucial bundle is shared by animals as distantly related as fish and mammals, and most likely including humans.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA identifies 9 possible landing regions for Artemis III moon mission.

I BELIEVE THIS: Rapid defibrillator use saves lives from cardiac arrest, study finds.

CDR SALAMANDER: Serious Nations Do Serious Things. Unserious Nations Waste Their Inheritance. Ignoring the Arctic is strategic malpractice.

LOL, DIVERSITY IN HIGHER ED: Faculty Presidential Election Survey: 78% Harris, 9% Trump.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China to send 14th crewed mission to space on Shenzhou-19.

WELL, PROFESSORS. Trump ‘violent rhetoric’ needs ‘close monitoring’: political scientists.

Monitor this, bitchez.

Look at this display that the Democrats put up.

This is clearly a threat and message to President Trump.

They aren’t even hiding it. pic.twitter.com/WD6ohvNayF

— Jack (@jackunheard) October 27, 2024

TELL THE LITTLE TWERPS TO SHUT UP AND STUDY: ‘#StopAsianHate’: UMich dean caves to left, changes book covers amid claims of racism.

CHANGE: Virginia trending for Trump, second poll shows race nearly tied.

MARK JUDGE: Michelle Obama’s limitless resentment.

Lasch also contrasted those who live with limits, who spend their lives working, raising children, going to church, and living their lives “a long way from the centers of metropolitan culture,” with a “new class of elites” that pursues a “heady vision of unlimited possibilities.” These elites “view life as an experiment.”

Lasch believed that the people who accepted the reality of limits paradoxically ended up living more hopeful lives.

Christopher Lasch saw all this coming.

I DON’T THINK THE DEMOCRATS ARE FEELING GOOD ABOUT THIS ELECTION: You Are No Longer Deplorable. You Are a NAZI! “What will Republicans be in 2028? Probably genocidal cannibals from space who want to ‘serve man.'”

It’s a cookbook!

And yet:

How do you recognize whether it's a Trump or Kamala rally?

By the 🇮🇱 flag at Trump rally and 🇵🇸 flag at Kamala rally pic.twitter.com/19bw3ru8qe

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) October 28, 2024

BRYAN CAPLAN: The Obvious-Once-You-Think-About-It Reason Why Education Cuts Fertility.

Education changes students’ values. Never mind rare heavy-handed propaganda about overpopulation. Education dethrones fertility via emphasis. Telling kids that academic and career success should be their top priority implicitly says, “And having kids should be a lower priority.” Not teaching religion and traditional values implicitly says, “Religion and traditional values aren’t very important.” And so on.

Though I’ve long preferred the latter story to the former, only recently did I realize that I’ve been overlooking a far simpler and practically bulletproof mechanism that explains why education reduces fertility. Namely: Almost everyone wants to finish their education before having kids — and there is a strong stigma against those who do otherwise.

If school ends in 12th grade, this norm lets you start having kids at 19 or 20.

If school ends after you get your B.A., this norm lets you start having kids at 23 or 24. (And since most students don’t finish on time, that should usually get bumped up to 26 or 27).

If school ends after your get your second Ph.D., this norm lets you start having kids around the age of 38.

Key point: Staying in school longer does nothing to alter the effect of biological age on fertility. The later you start having kids, therefore, the fewer kids you are ever likely to have. Late fertility almost automatically means low fertility.

One of many reasons why we should not mindlessly extend the years of schooling.

HAHA: “Why is Donald Trump going to win? The people he’s about to defeat have no idea.” “The first reason that people like Donald Trump is because he likes them…. Affection is something you can’t fake…. And the second reason that people love Trump… is because he’s liberated us in the deepest and truest sense. And the liberation he has brought to us is the liberation from the obligation to tell lies…. If you want to enslave people — if you want to degrade them — force them to tell lies, and they have they forced us to lie about everything at gunpoint, effectively they put people in prison, for refusing to lie….”

I FEAR THAT THIS IS RIGHT: Jeffrey Carter: All Roads Lead to Inflation. There Is No Way Out.

WHERE WE ARE:

Everyone knows that if Trump doesn’t win this election, it means we don’t have actual elections anymore, because there is no way Kamala Harris wins a lawful election. Everyone sees it and everyone knows it.

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) October 24, 2024

ROGER KIMBALL: Trump calls for America’s New Golden Age at Madison Square Garden: What we saw at his Sunday rally was the opposite of divisive.

No one with an open mind — you can even scratch the adjective — no sentient sapiens period can have witnessed Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally without a frisson of awe. Even the most tireless Trump supporter must be a little jaded with Trump’s rallies by now. Just as in 2016, they have been building to a crescendo in both size and frequency. And even avid politicos might be forgiven for thinking they had been there, done that.

But Sunday’s rally at Madison Square Garden was something different. Perhaps other rallies were as large. We’re told that the MSG event boasted a capacity crowd of nearly 20,000 with more than 70,000 lined up to view the festivities on screens set up outside. I gather Trump’s second Butler, Pennsylvania, rally broke 100,000, as perhaps did a few others.

But it wasn’t just the size of Sunday’s rally that made it special. It was also the location, the vibrancy of the speakers and that ineffable, electric feeling that follows closely on impending victory. The Democrats have tried fitfully to claim that Trump is “exhausted” and perhaps not up to the task of being president. Meanwhile, Harris abruptly departed a rally in Detroit after only six minutes while Trump’s daily regime would fell a man half his age.

Madison Square Garden is situated is the belly of the deep-blue beast. How many decades has it been since a Republican won New York in a presidential race? (The answer is four: Reagan won New York in 1984.) Then why was Trump expending precious resources in the state? Why did he hold a rally in the Bronx this summer, on Long Island a month ago? Because the times they are a-changin’. . . .

Will Trump take New York? I am assured that that is unlikely. I note, however, that many of the wise people who say that told me it was impossible only a couple of months ago. Reality does count for something, and the reality is that Trump speaks to a core constituency not only in New York but also across the country. Call it the constituency of normality, the non-trans, pro-capitalist, pro-American demographic that understands that men cannot be women, that you cannot have a country without a secure border and that big government is essentially at odds with individual liberty and general prosperity.

I say that “Trump speaks” to this population, but the red-pilled former Democrat investor Bill Ackman was right when he noted that he now supports Trump not just because of the man himself but also because of his “team” versus Team Harris. In the left corner we have Kamala Harris, “Tampon Tim” Walz, Liz Cheney and assorted other neocons and globalists. In the right corner we have Trump, his running mate J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy and assorted former Democrats like Bill Ackman. Which is more impressive? Which is more likely to save the country? Take your time.

Among my favorite moments in Sunday’s rally was J.D. Vance’s naughty suggestion that Kamala Harris’s new slogan ought to be “Nothing comes to mind,” after her response when a friendly newscaster asked her how her policy positions differed from those of Joe Biden. “Nothing comes to mind,” she said, a phrase that Trump deployed with stiletto-like efficacy in a brief video montage during his speech.

A second favorite moment came in Tucker Carlson’s talk when he noted that: 1) Republicans were going to win and 2) the people would be forearmed against Dem claims that Kamala, a supremely unpopular candidate whom no one voted for had really won by garnering 88 million votes (or whatever). The Dems put that over in 2020 at the height of Covid. That ship has sailed.

People are tired of the bullshit. And the bullying.

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: DIPLOMACY ROLLS ON. Chile and Cyprus sign the Artemis Accords. “The two countries bring to 47 the number of nations that have signed the Artemis Accords since 2020. Four of those countries have signed in October.”

JEFF BEZOS IN THE WASHINGTON POST: The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media.

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.

Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right.

Good for him, though the way to restore credibility is to be credible — which you do by being honest — and not by taking shots at “unresearched podcasts.” The Post’s journalistic record in recent years, and the records of its newspaper brethren, do not justify a high-horse position. You want to be trusted? Stop lying, and stop covering up for Democrats and Democratic administrations.

SOME OF US HAVE KNOWN ABOUT THIS FOR QUITE A WHILE: Meditation And Mindfulness Have a Dark Side We Don’t Talk About. “The first recorded evidence for this, found in India, is over 1,500 years old. The Dharmatrāta Meditation Scripture, written by a community of Buddhists, describes various practices and includes reports of symptoms of depression and anxiety that can occur after meditation. It also details cognitive anomalies associated with episodes of psychosis, dissociation, and depersonalisation (when people feel the world is ‘unreal’). In the past eight years there has been a surge of scientific research in this area. These studies show that adverse effects are not rare. . . . However, many meditation and mindfulness instructors believe that these practices can only do good and don’t know about the potential for adverse effects. The most common account I hear from people who have suffered adverse meditation effects is that the teachers don’t believe them. They’re usually told to just keep meditating and it will go away.”

THE NEW GENERATION OF THE GOP IS TAKING NO BULLSHIT:

“GET OFF YOUR HIGH HORSE!”

Vivek leaves CNN host in SILENCE after exposing her fake outrage over comedian at a Trump rally, indifference to voter fraud.

Another masterful moment by @VivekGRamaswamy flipping the script on humorless, virtue signaling scolds on corporate media: pic.twitter.com/hcky1WAb3c

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) October 28, 2024