Radical Middle

[Radical Middle @RadicalMiddle4]

@jmasseypoet The second stream of dissident poetry?

[Radical Middle @RadicalMiddle4]

@Steve_Sailer @mmxgt500 Agreed. But America has a much bigger population, and has pipelines that feed athletes into our major leagues, except for soccer.

[Radical Middle @RadicalMiddle4]

@mmxgt500 @Steve_Sailer Not to demean 4 Women’s World Cup victories, but my point is that it’s odd that the U.S. has not developed home teams consisting of US born players equivalent to top tier European teams.

[Lemma the Optimist @DoctorLemma]

In most countries, half the buttons you press in a day might be placebos. The walk button at the crossing, the close-door button in the elevator, the thermostat on the office wall. They click, they light up, and many of them are not actually wired to anything.

Take New York, in the United States. Of the roughly 3,250 buttons at its pedestrian crossings, fewer than 120 actually do anything. The rest click when you press them, they look like working buttons, but they have not been connected to the traffic lights for more than thirty years. The city quietly deactivated them in the late 1980s when the signals moved to a computer system. Nobody told the public, because the public kept pressing them anyway.

The close-door button in most American elevators is in the same condition. It has been doing nothing since 1990. That was the year the Americans with Disabilities Act passed, which required elevator doors to stay open long enough for someone in a wheelchair or on crutches to get in. The button stayed on the panel, but the wiring was cut. Karen Penafiel, who ran the National Elevator Industry trade group, confirmed this plainly to the New York Times a few years ago.

In Hong Kong, the walk button at many pedestrian crossings is real during quiet hours and a placebo during rush hour. A central traffic computer decides which one it is, depending on how busy the road is. The same button, pressed by the same person at the same crossing, might or might not be doing anything, depending on the time of day. Parts of the UK and Australia use the same system.

Office thermostats have their own version of this. A 2003 piece in the Wall Street Journal revealed that landlords in the US had been installing dummy thermostats in commercial buildings for years. A tenant would complain about the temperature, an engineer would walk over, turn a dial that controlled nothing, and the complaints would stop. One HVAC specialist estimated that as many as ninety percent of office thermostats in the country were fake. Other engineers said it was closer to two percent. Either way, it was widespread enough to be a known trick of the trade.

These are only the places where someone has bothered to investigate and report it. Nobody has done a proper audit of the buttons in Lagos, or Nairobi, or Jakarta, or Mexico City, or Karachi. The crossings, elevators, and thermostats in those cities were installed by the same manufacturers, run by the same kinds of building managers, governed by the same kinds of traffic computers. There is no particular reason to assume the buttons there are any more honest than the ones in New York.

A Harvard psychologist named Ellen Langer has a name for what is going on. She calls it the illusion of control. When you press the button, even if nothing happens, your brain registers that you took an action, and the waiting becomes easier. The door closes eventually, the light changes, the office cools down. And every time, your brain credits the button.

[Radical Middle @RadicalMiddle4]

@lynnexxa @DoctorLemma Really, do you think Trump is no different than Biden?

[Escuela Austriaca de Economía 🇦🇷 @DiegoMac227]

¿Por qué los intelectuales odian el capitalismo? - Jesús Huerta de Soto

Bertrand de Jouvenel, en su análisis sobre la relación entre los intelectuales y el capitalismo, sostiene que muchos de ellos tienden a rechazar el sistema capitalista debido a su naturaleza impersonal y a la percepción de que promueve desigualdades.

De Jouvenel argumenta que este rechazo se origina en el deseo de los intelectuales de tener un papel central en la sociedad, algo que el capitalismo no necesariamente les garantiza. Jesús Huerta de Soto amplía esta crítica al señalar que el odio de los intelectuales hacia el capitalismo se fundamenta en cuatro factores: ignorancia, soberbia, resentimiento y envidia. La ignorancia se manifiesta en una falta de comprensión de cómo el capitalismo fomenta el bienestar general; la soberbia, en una actitud de superioridad moral frente al mercado; el resentimiento, por no ser reconocidos como actores clave en el sistema; y la envidia, hacia quienes prosperan bajo un modelo que privilegia el mérito y la innovación.

Estas críticas reflejan un profundo desacuerdo con los principios de la economía de mercado, que valora la descentralización y la competencia, en contraposición al control centralizado que muchos intelectuales prefieren.

[Radical Middle @RadicalMiddle4]

@bennymichielsen The human body contains 150-170 ounces of blood total.

[Radical Middle @RadicalMiddle4]

@DanBurmawy How many of the 56 were liberal democracies prior to their transformation?

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

Bonchie’s being diplomatic. Russia is a crappy country. It has some great literature. And like all nations, it has some lovely people and traditions. But as a nation-state and empire, its history is of cruelty, backwardness, oppression, and violence. https://t.co/i9nhAaODPf

[Electroverse @Electroversenet]

Since the 1980s, the Sahara has shrunk by roughly 8%. Satellite data show widespread greening, a pattern that is playing out across the planet.

Around 50% of Earth's vegetated land has become significantly greener, an area roughly three times the size of the United States.

The dominant driver is not rainfall or land use change, it is rising atmospheric CO2.

Higher CO2 lets plants photosynthesize more efficiently, they lose less water, they tolerate heat and dryness better.

The effect is strongest along desert margins, across the Sahel, the Middle East, Australia's interior and the southern edge of the Sahara.

Rising CO2 is making the deserts, and the planet as a whole, greener.

[Radical Middle @RadicalMiddle4]

@The_Kyle_Mann It wasn’t cold blood. Greedo was shaking Han down, and probably intended to kill Solo after taking his money.

[Radical Middle @RadicalMiddle4]

@ErikSherman @MaxAbrahms Wine making in the Beqaa Valley.

[Radical Middle @RadicalMiddle4]

@Mylovanov Mearsheimer is a human pestilence.

[Radical Middle @RadicalMiddle4]

@BohuslavskaKate “Putin has 20 palaces, Zelensky has none.” How Trump sees the War.

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

America's cultural ideal has been the self-made entrepreneur while Europe's was rooted in aristocracy, with status inherited rather than earned. Europe's inheritance laws show this divide.

Many European countries have "forced heirship" laws that require people to leave 50-75% of their estates to their children. Want to leave the majority of your wealth to charity? not allowed. Your kids are estranged from you, struggling with addiction, or irresponsible? still required to give them the money. Want your kids to avoid a life of entitlement? tough.

Incredibly, these laws look back at transfers made during your lifetime. If you have 3 children in France, you're required to bequeath them a minimum of 75% of your estate. Because French law calculates this based on your assets at death plus all lifetime gifts, giving away more than 25% of your wealth while alive means your heirs can legally sue to force charities or foundations to return the funds. This has limited the development of the nonprofit sector on the continent.

The cultural gap between an entrepreneurial society and one shaped by dynastic wealth is enormous. If you make it yourself, you tend to want your kids to do the same. If you inherit it, the primary goal is protecting the estate for the next gen.

Countries like Spain, France, and Italy legally entrench family dynasties, while America has historically sought to limit them through estate taxes. The result is not only a weaker culture of philanthropy and civil society in Europe, but also less economic dynamism.

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

I would put it a little differently. Obama believed he understood his opponents interests better than they did, so if he felt like he’d satisfied their interests, there was no reason to consult them or negotiate with them. He often guessed wrong, but even when he guessed right(ish) the GOP felt it hadn’t been respected or consulted and couldn’t just take the first offer. Politically, they needed buy-in, and Obama refused to offer that. Hence Obama’s ability to “understand” his opponents was in fact a huge political liability for him. But the appearance of that understanding really impressed the media and his staff, because it confirmed their own biases.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Google wants to release 32 million mosquitoes across Florida and California, and not one of them can bite you. They're all male, and male mosquitoes don't drink blood. The plan is to send them out to mate, and let the local bloodsucker population quietly wipe itself out.

The trick is one tiny bacterium. These lab-grown males carry Wolbachia, harmless to people and found naturally in something like half the world's insect species. When one of them mates with a normal wild female, her eggs come out duds. They never hatch. Keep flooding a neighborhood with these males week after week, and the next generation barely shows up. It needs no gene editing at all. The whole thing runs on one common germ and a lot of patience.

This is Google's "Debug" project, run by its life-sciences arm, and right now it's in the hands of U.S. regulators, who are taking public comments until June 5. This batch is aimed at the mosquito that spreads West Nile, the most common mosquito-borne disease in the U.S. The famous earlier work went after a different one, the kind that carries dengue and Zika.

People take this seriously because it has already worked. In a California test, releasing 14.4 million of these males cut the number of biting females by about 95% across the treated neighborhoods. Singapore ran its own version of the same idea and watched dengue cases fall more than 70%, with mosquito numbers down around 90%. Their 2025 dengue count was the lowest since 2018.

That viral "1 billion mosquitoes across four continents" line mashes three different projects into one. The billion comes from a different company that uses genetically engineered mosquitoes, mostly in Florida and Texas. The four-continent footprint belongs to a nonprofit running its own Wolbachia releases in 16 countries. Google's own releases sit in the millions, mostly in California.

Underneath the sci-fi headlines, the plan is almost boring. Raise millions of males that can't bite, and let their dead-end offspring thin the herd over time.

[Divinely Designed @DivinelyDesined]

The most detailed 3D reconstruction of a cell ever created.

Blows my mind every time.

But what exactly are we looking at here?

The average human cell contains:

~ 15-20 total distinct organelle types, totalling between ~1-10 million working together per cell.

All these nano-machines in the cell are made up of proteins.

~ 8,000-10,000 distinct types of unique proteins, adding up to between 40 million - 10 trillion total proteins making up all those cellular systems.

~ 10,000 - 15,000 distinct types of RNA shuttling information around the cell, totalling up to ~10 million RNA molecules moving around the cell simultaneously.

~ Billions of Lipid molecules packed together into the cell membrane, which is also packed tightly with millions more protein-based nano-machines.

And let's not forget billions of lines of DNA information to build and run it all.

That's TRILLIONS of of individual molecular pieces working together to make a single cell function.

That means there is more complexity in a single cell than humanity's largest cities.

And people still believe this wasn't Divinely Designed.

This is God's Glory on Display.

But to make the point.

A cell couldn't have evolved from some nebulous simpler "protocell" because even the simplest cells still require massive complexity.

The "simplest" cell ever created was engineered by scientists knocking out pieces of a functional cell until it stopped functioning.

Here is what they found is the absolute necessary minimal requirements of a cell to function:

- Over ~531,000 lines of coded DNA information

- 473 total genes to create hundreds of unique protein products (they later added 19 genes back in because the cell was so weak)

- Hundreds of thousands of total proteins all working together

- Extensive regulatory networks guiding all these interactions

If the cell doesn't have all these systems in place, from the start...
it doesn't live.

Cell rely on an intricate network of complex systems, which are themselves built from complex interconnected pieces woven together into an incomprehensibly complex web of functionilty.

Only intelligence has ever been observed creation vast interconnected systems like this.

Life was clearly Created.

It couldn't happen any other way.

[Radical Middle @RadicalMiddle4]

@LizaRosen0000 @HillelNeuer Proof that the WHO is dispensing crazy pills.