DesertTardigrade

[DesertTardigrade @cavenewt]

@NotoriousAKG When I bought my Vibe in 2004 I had to special order (and wait four months for) a manual transmission. Wanted but unavailable: crank windows.

I'm hoping this car will last me the rest of my life, at least 10 more years.

[DesertTardigrade @cavenewt]

@Hbrd21 @jeffreytucker I'm surprised the option to turn them off even exists.

[Jeffrey A Tucker @jeffreytucker]

Rental car is new, expensive, and utterly undriveable.
Main problem is the aggressive notification to take a break with a coffee emoji and five loud beeps. It is triggered if you drive too close to the line or veer even slightly outside the perfect center, like threading a needle constantly.
So it screams at you for even the slightest venial sin -- providing more moral exhortations than a puritan preacher in 17th century Plymouth. This happened every ten minutes or so on a 2.5 hour drive. Makes one insane. If I drank all the coffee they had suggested, I would have been hospitalized.
Meanwhile anything you want to do -- turn on the radio, change the temp, change the station whatever -- comes with a text warning not to be distracted and a terms of use approval, as if this is not distracting in itself. I'm certain the rental is somehow linked to the Internet so you get the sense that you are not driving at all. Paradoxically, it all feels extremely unsafe and it is impossible to relax. Horrid!
The one time someone snuck into my blindspot going 80 -- now way to see this because this SUV has the outward visibility of a tank -- the magic seeing eyes did not notice. It is more interesting in correcting that helping me. What a miserable experience.
It's odd because the US went all in with cars after WW2 at the expense of passenger trains on grounds that cars offer individual freedom. These new cars do NOT offer individual freedom. They are hectoring, surveilling, prisons on wheels. By constantly registering distrust in you as the driver, they deprecate volition and hence make driving less safe than ever.

[DesertTardigrade @cavenewt]

@jeffreytucker This is why I'm taking good care of my 2004 Pontiac Vibe, hoping it will last me the rest of my life, which will hopefully be at least another 10 years.

[Hayek-Club Weimar @WeimarClub]

Dass in einer Hitzewelle Menschen sterben, ist tragisch – wie es tragisch ist, dass jedes Jahr Millionen weltweit an Kälte sterben, weit mehr als an Hitze.

Das Leben in einer offenen, unvollkommenen Welt birgt Risiken. Die Würde des Menschen verlangt, dass wir diese Realität nüchtern anerkennen, statt sie zur moralischen Keule zu machen.

Was bestürzend ist, ist nicht der Spott einiger, sondern die Instrumentalisierung von Toten für politische Narrative. Statt den Menschen mehr Wohlstand, günstige Energie und technologische Anpassung zu ermöglichen – Klimaanlagen, bessere Isolierung, flexible Arbeitszeiten durch freie Märkte – setzen Sie und Ihresgleichen auf Angst, Subventionen und Verbote. Sie verteuern Energie, behindern Innovation und machen die Ärmsten besonders verwundbar, nur um dann mit feierlicher Miene zu verkünden, wie sehr Sie das alles ‚bestürzt‘.

Der echte Respekt vor dem Leben zeigt sich nicht in Betroffenheitsposen und dem Denunzieren von ‚Schwurblern‘, sondern in Gesellschaften, in denen Reichtum, Freiheit und Verantwortung die natürlichen Feinde von Extremen sind. Freie Menschen erfinden Lösungen.

Lassen Sie die Menschen frei entscheiden, wie sie sich schützen. Und sparen Sie sich die moralische Überlegenheit.

[DesertTardigrade @cavenewt]

@BrainAblaze @SamaHoole Shouldn't be hard to find. I may have first seen a reference to the history of keto diets in Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories.

[DesertTardigrade @cavenewt]

@InnovationArchv In my Driver Ed class in 1970, they taught us all about engines, including the Wankel, which was big at the time.

[Kevin Bass @kevinnbass]

Censorship is far more dangerous than misinformation

[DesertTardigrade @cavenewt]

@eugyppius1 Just now reading about the EU anti-migration legislation. Looking forward to anything you might choose to write about it.

[DNI Tulsi Gabbard @DNIGabbard]

Today, on my final day as Director of National Intelligence, I’m releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Dr. Fauci provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, worked with politicized elements within the Intelligence Community to suppress the truth about his actions and hide the virus’ lab-leak origins, and lied to Congress while under oath in 2024. It’s time you know the truth.

https://t.co/3YJSstB7d4

[DesertTardigrade @cavenewt]

@eugyppius1 When there is a work crew, it must consist of one person laboring, and five people standing around watching.

[DesertTardigrade @cavenewt]

@eugyppius1 Geez. You can easily find the recipe for herbs and spices to mix with mayonnaise and sour cream to make your own ranch dressing (without the nasty additives). Modern people are so helpless.

[DesertTardigrade @cavenewt]

Actually, contrary to what @jeffreytucker expected, Grok pretty much backs him up. https://t.co/xV8YrWKtrb

[Jeffrey A Tucker @jeffreytucker]

What actually happened over the last five years, just looking at the Covid caper alone? It goes something like this:
in 2019 or before, a US-funded biolab in Wuhan, China, one of some 120 in 30 counties, made a virus and inoculation based on an American recipe that leaked and spread, causing worry that US officials would be blamed but they had a fallback: lie about the lab origins and prepare the population for the fix based on a new gene-editing technology that otherwise would never have been approved on grounds that it was too dangerous and not effective. That required buying time while preserving pre-leak immunity profiles via lockdowns for all of 2020 until the injection was available, during which time there had to be mass censorship, deep trauma, manufactured panic, school closures, a removal of other therapeutic options, and millions of business failures, not to mention a shut down of the arts and a printing/spending binge that would hack off a third of the value of the dollar, leaving vast carnage but permitting an indemnified pharmaceutical experiment, meaning that mass injury has no recourse. With low uptake of the supposed inoculation, millions were forced to accept it on pain of losing their jobs. No one has been punished for any of it, and the mainstream media has no interest.
Did I get this mostly correct? @grok will correct this post with all the usual orthodoxies you are supposed to believe.

[DesertTardigrade @cavenewt]

@jeffreytucker Actually, contrary to what @jeffreytucker expected, Grok pretty much backs him up. https://t.co/xV8YrWKtrb

[DesertTardigrade @cavenewt]

@Polly3092 @Rainmaker1973 Yes, you might be the only one.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

POV: You started a towel war with the cleaner at your hotel

[📹evinmaz]

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In 1919 a New York physician got so fed up with watching his patients get worse that he went to a museum to ask the dead for advice.

His name was Blake Donaldson. He had a practice full of people who were overweight, ill, and getting steadily worse no matter what the medicine of the day threw at them, and he had run clean out of ideas. So he walked into the American Museum of Natural History, found the anthropologists, and asked them the question no respectable doctor was supposed to ask. What did healthy humans actually eat before all of this?

They showed him the skulls. Ancient ones. Pre-agricultural ones. And the teeth stopped him in his tracks. No decay. No crowding. No abscesses. Rows of clean, strong, untroubled teeth belonging to people who had never met a dentist, a toothbrush, or a sack of flour. The anthropologists told him about the Plains hunters who lived on buffalo, and about pemmican, the dense brick of dried meat and rendered fat that carried men through a North American winter on next to nothing else.

Donaldson went back to his surgery and did something that would get a modern doctor hauled in front of a committee. He put his patients on meat.

Fat meat, specifically. Roughly six ounces of lean with two ounces of visible fat, three times a day, from beef or lamb. Coffee. Water. That was the prescription. He stripped out what he called the worst offenders, the flour and the sugar and the sweet milk, and he watched what happened.

What happened was they got better. The weight came off without hunger, because he insisted they eat enough and eat often. The blood pressure settled. The gallstones, the migraines, the aching joints, the sour stomachs, the whole catalogue of modern complaints he had been failing to shift for years began, quietly, to resolve. He kept going. By the end he had run something like seventeen thousand patients through this regime over roughly forty years, which is a working lifetime of evidence rather than a passing fad.

He wrote it down in a book called Strong Medicine in 1961.

The establishment's response was swift and familiar. One prominent figure pronounced the book hardly scientific. Another filed Donaldson under food faddism and implied he had simply forgotten whatever he once knew about nutrition. A man with forty years of patient outcomes was waved off by people armed with a theory and a grievance, and the profession moved smoothly on to the low-fat advice that has served us so brilliantly ever since.

He was not a guru and never pretended to be one. He thought he was just copying what those museum skulls had been quietly demonstrating for ten thousand years, which is about the most honest thing a doctor has ever said about diet.

The book is still in print. The skulls are still in the case. And the advice that buried him is still printed on the side of the cereal box.

[Camus @newstart_2024]

The Assault on Truth: Experts Under Fire in the Fight for Justice

Warner Mendenhall, a relentless advocate for truth, recently exposed a chilling reality: courageous experts like Dr. Harvey Risch and Dr. Pierre Kory are under siege. These brave voices, critical to upholding scientific integrity in courtrooms, face unprecedented attacks aimed at silencing their testimony. The stakes? Nothing less than justice itself.

In a gripping account, Mendenhall described walking into a deposition with Dr. Risch, the only epidemiologist willing to stand up in these cases. What he saw was staggering: tables piled high with documents, likely costing opponents hundreds of thousands to compile, all to discredit one man’s expertise. Credentials, financial history, corporate ties—nothing is off-limits in this onslaught.

The weapon? The Daubert test, a legal standard meant to ensure reliable scientific evidence, is being twisted to exclude principled experts. Dr. Risch’s peers, like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Abhin One, now serve in high-level roles, a victory for truth—but their absence leaves a void in litigation. Meanwhile, Dr. Kory faces battles over his board certification, a tactic to strip him of expert witness eligibility. Without certification, he’s sidelined, and justice suffers.

Across the nation, doctors and experts endure relentless challenges to their licenses and certifications, part of a broader campaign to suppress dissent. Mendenhall warns: this isn’t just an attack on individuals—it’s an assault on the ability to present truth in court. The chilling effect is real, discouraging others from stepping forward. Yet, these heroes persist, risking their careers to defend what’s right.