Day: August 3, 2024, 3:01 PM

Chill Quote

We say that an author is original when we cannot trace the hidden transformations that others underwent in his mind; we mean to say that the dependence of what he does on what others have done is excessively complex and irregular. There are works in the likeness of others, and works that are the reverse of others, but there are also works of which the relation with earlier productions is so intricate that we become confused and attribute them to the direct intervention of the gods.

Paul Valéry, “Letter About Mallarmé”

Plainly

Chill Regular-ass Post

COVID-19 origins: plain speaking is overdue – The Lancet Microbe.

Unsigned, of course, because it’s probably written by a GoF researcher worried about losing funding. They came out of the damn woodwork to insist no lab leak had ever happened in the history of the world.

The reality is of course that Covid almost certainly escaped from the WIV. No other explanation or chain of evidence makes any sort of sense when you look at the claims made and what’s backing them. And, of course, how many self-interested parties insisting there’s all this evidence they never examine, link to, or seem to have.

Meanwhile:

Het Hop

Chill Regular-ass Post

Why is it okay for older gay men to date much younger guys, but not in heterosexual relationships?

Because increasingly women are seen — even by other women — as fragile children with no agency and as de facto minors until they are 35-40, while even boys 13-15 are seen by many adults as full-grown men.

Yes, it’s a huge double standard. And yes, it’s terrible. Anyway, compatibility is far more important than any age gap ever will no matter what PMC libs like to believe. People should do what they want as long as everyone is above the age of majority. Also, much of this disparity comes down to the fact that society sees the average man as completely disposable and the average woman as inherently valuable. There are other things around that but that is the fundamental underpinning.

Chill Links

A protein called Reelin keeps popping up in brains that resist aging and Alzheimer’s.

Intel to lay off 15,000 employees.

Complex life forms existed 1.5 billion years earlier than previously believed, study finds.

Violence in fishing, hunting, and gathering societies of the Atacama Desert coast: A long-term perspective (10,000 BP—AD 1450).

More Evidence Links Ultraprocessed Foods to Dementia.

It’s Too Early to Give Up on Homelessness in America. The country’s most powerful deep-blue governor, Gavin Newsom, ordered encampments to be dismantled. But lasting solutions are still needed.

Inflation math is changing America’s dinner plans.

In the hottest big city in the US, where sunbaked concrete sprawls across bone-dry desert, Phoenix is setting records in both high temperatures and body count.

Annexation of Taiwan: A Defeat From Which the US and Its Allies Could Not Retreat.

Elizabeth Warren unveils bill that would spend half a trillion dollars to build housing. Excellent.

America’s long consumer boom begins to falter.

Is the Fed Behind the Curve? As Unemployment Rises, Worries Mount.

China is slowly joining the economic war against Russia.

Agentic

Chill Regular-ass Post

It’s a strange time in gender relations. As a man, you’re supposed to treat women as fragile creatures with no agency at all and no ability (or wish) to make their own decisions and, simultaneously, to believe they are omnificent “girl bosses” who don’t need no help, dammit.

Those two view of women’s agency aren’t really compatible. I’m partnered, but I do understand men who are withdrawing completely and want nothing to do with any of that. It’s dangerous out there — and not just for women.