Saturday Review #4

Monument Valley, Utah

We must snatch the present moment, and employ it well, without too much solicitude for the future, and content ourselves with reflecting that our part is performed. He that waits for an opportunity to do much at once, may breathe out his life in idle wishes, and regret, in the last hour, his useless intentions, and barren zeal. — The Good Doctor Johnson

Since You Asked, Here’s How Google Maps Really Works

The Barbarians Will Solve Your Sterile Existence Rational thinking from the enlightenment era, when taken to its logical end in proving that families, divinity, and traditional standards aren’t necessary, along with the notion that the individual is God, leads to the suicide of society. Rationale, in it’s beautifully cherished civilized form, leads to the end of any race who participates in it, while the stupid barbarians with IQs of 95 or lower, who follow a 1400-year-old book that implores them to conquer and chop off heads, continue to multiply and take over more lands.

An Expert Called Lindy – If you hear advice from a grandmother or elders, odds are that it works at ninety percent. On the other hand, in part because of scientism and academic prostitution, in part because the world is hard, if you read anything by psychologists and behavioral scientists, odds are it works at less than ten percent.

“Trim widow – fit, energetic, health-conscious, Grace-Kelly-like, sylvan, sylphlike, Hepburnesque (Audrey), could probably fit through two fence slats, svelte, as heavy as fifteen Vogues stacked together, could be cast as a tree nymph in a play about Greek mythology, I’m hiking right now actually, could fit into Julian Casablancas’ from the Strokes’ jeans circa 2002 – seeks Harvard grad who has been on an airplane with a staircase and was allowed to climb that staircase, never has to wear the loaner jacket they keep behind the hostess podium at Per Se, has the same last name as someone from the 1600s, wouldn’t look out of place if for some reason the Reagan Administration took over tomorrow due to a rift in the space-time continuum, has had reason to correct someone’s pronunciation of the word “veldt,” has completed at least two lecture tours outside of Continental Europe, can see the ocean right now from his office, has had bottles of wine opened with a sword for him more than three times, could be cast as a background character in an Agatha Christie adaptation without needing to make significant wardrobe alterations.” Harvard Magazine Personal Ads [HT: Never Yet Melted ]

Rule One: stay away from crowds. DC has plainly stated, in public documents, they will requisition food, transportation, equipment, supplies and involuntarily servitude of any kind, in any amount, to whatever extent that pleases them in a “national emergency”. Their control of the cities would rest on food distribution and essential services, then as now, and the rest of America would be stripped to make it happen. This is, plainly said, calculated annihilation, held as not only necessary but just. Woodpile Report

Date Rape Culture on Campus Gets Some Cheerleaders: A Walk in the Woods: A Photo Appreciation of Trees Hannah Brown and fellow activists demonstrate against the planned clear-cutting of trees outlined in the East Bay Deforestation Plan on the University of California, Berkeley campus, in Berkeley, California

Why the Trump dynasty will last sixteen years | Edward Luttwak   Even a developer very fond of fast food at its worst, and who enjoys boasting about his crotch-grabbing, is still a developer, who very naturally thinks in six-year blocks from site scoping to finance to design to construction and disposal, as opposed to the two-year horizon of American politics. That is why Trump registered his “Make America Great Again” slogan in 2010, six years in advance of his planned campaign, and why he is now focused not on the next mid-terms, but on the 2022 mid-terms, after his 2020 re-election, because it is only then that he can launch his daughter’s candidacy, while serving his own last two years in office. In the meantime, he is securing his base by striving hard to keep his promises: withdrawal from the Paris agreement that the US Congress never voted on (Obama approved it with a decree that seemed secure under President Hillary), the Muslim entry restrictions, the “sealing” of the Mexican border that will make universal legalization acceptable, and above all, his sorely needed infrastructure programme that is now being prepared by wholesale deregulation – at present, newly aggravated environmental rules almost exactly double road, bridge and tunnel construction costs as compared to France, in spite of its thirty-five-hour working week, and Japan, in spite of its extreme space restrictions.

Human memories—even the most precious—begin at a very granular scale. Your mother’s face began as a barrage of photons on your retina, which sent a signal to your visual cortex. You hear her voice, and your auditory cortex transforms the sound waves into electrical signals. Hormones layer the experience with with context—this person makes you feel good. These and a virtually infinite number of other inputs cascade across your brain. Kukushkin says your neurons, their attendant molecules, and resultant synapses encode all these related perturbations in terms of the relative time they occurred. More, they package the whole experience within a so-called time window. Your Brain Doesn’t Contain Memories. It Is Memories   Memory exists because your brain’s molecules, cells, and synapses can tell time. Defining memory is about as difficult as defining time. In general terms, memory is a change to a system that alters the way that system works in the future. “A typical memory is really just a reactivation of connections between different parts of your brain that were active at some previous time,” says neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin, coauthor of this paper. And all animals—along with many single-celled organisms—possess some sort of ability to learn from the past.

Never a rose without a thorn: California has too much pot A leader of California’s marijuana industry warned Wednesday that the state’s cannabis growers produce eight times the pot that is consumed in the state so some will face “painful” pressure to reduce crops under new state regulations that will ban exports after Jan. 1.

Who says there’s no good news?  Twitter Fails to Grow Its Audience, Again – Bloomberg Twitter Inc. failed to attract more monthly users in the second quarter, spooking investors looking for evidence that the company is on a sustainable long-term growth path. The shares tumbled the most in nine months, even as quarterly revenue topped analysts’ projections.

The Closing of the American Mind—30 Years On  It would be as if Socrates, engaging in diaologue, suddenly met a new citizen. Instead of questions and answers, the Greek citizen simply held up a banner—“corrupter of the youth!”—and shouted obscenities until Socrates shut up and left.

American’s Got Talent and Hope –   Diversity was not rammed down our throats. Amazon’s Alexa had a black dad goofing around with his daughter and then asking her what action movies are playing. The odds of that dad sticking around are one in four, but that’s the guy you want to advertise to.

Indopakladesh at seventy :  The Indian Subcontinent contains more nations than Europe, and nations within each nation; unofficial castes within castes, and very official tribes within tribes. It speaks innumerable languages, so that the alphabets present a carnival to the eyes. Its power to resist “globalization” is formidable.

Are the Social Sciences Undergoing a Purity Spiral? – Quillette   People that freely self-identify as far-left in the abstract, in other words irrespective of specific political issues, seem to me to be signalling something: that they are committed to an ideology. The fact that such a large portion of the most influential people in academic social psychology do so suggests that this ideology is entrenched in their field.

That Boy Ain’t Right – BSBFB He calls himself “The Backyard Scientist.” Like many of his generation, he’s convinced that monkeying around in the garage is SCIENCE. Melting pewter is SCIENCE. He thinks putting ketchup on hot dogs with a squirt gun is SCIENCE. Ketchup on hot dogs is an abomination, but it ain’t science. I’ve eaten pizza at temperatures that melt pewter, but somehow he managed to make it sound sciency. Good for him.

Would you give it back or save it for future political disputes?

The RCMP lost a grenade launcher near the Golden Ears Bridge yesterday and would like it back pic.twitter.com/gmDPuEMydI

— Andrea Woo | 鄔瑞楓 (@AndreaWoo) July 24, 2017

Louie Mattar’s Fabulous Car – Within the first four years of owning his 1947 Cadillac, Louie Mattar had installed a shower (with the water piped around the exhaust manifold to heat it), a bar with spigots for whiskey, water, and soda, a washing machine, a stove, a kitchen sink, a hookah, and a driver-seat microphone connected to a speaker under the hood, for offering suggestions to other drivers on the road. But he wasn’t finished.

Sense of Events: Marxists and headlines you can’t make up

KIDDIE WHIPPED

A man who is bound by honor in a war with the left, is bound to lose. Honor being that tender spot in its opposition the left invariably stabs toward. What does honor offer a corpse but flattering eulogies? We won’t even get those. If the West dies, its honor dies with it. Our replacements won’t sing paeans to our noble sacrifice. And we’d still be dead if they did. We have to win. That is the priority. And winning means staying in the fight, even when your enemies howl at the indignity. Despite his singular fidelity in Congress to the actual American people, I think Sessions hasn’t fully comprehended that no one in this existential conflict is going to be left wearing a pristine uniform above ground. Honor and honesty aren’t how things are decided here anymore.Unfollowed | The Kakistocracy

MAGAnomics – U.S. GDP Growth Doubles in Second Quarter 2017…. | The Last Refuge Internally the U.S. is in the building phase for growth in the manufacturing sector. In essence, we have to have the ability to make ‘stuff’, before we can actually make the ‘stuff’. The ‘stuff’ only adds to the GDP after it is made…. THAT’S THE MOMENT when we will see large growth in middle-class U.S. wages.

The Hoarders Who Never Clean Their Nightmare Desktops “One time, when I had probably upwards of 1,500 files on my desktop, I did a trick where I selected half of them, and dragged them on top of the other half of files. Then I did this again, and again, and again, until 1,500 files were stacked completely on top of one another, making them take up about as much space as a postage stamp. ‘There,’ I told my horrified friends. ‘I cleaned my desktop.’” The next day, his computer exploded the pile across his desktop upon exiting sleep mode.