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2025-07-11

Worthy

  • Should the Federal Government Sell Land?

    I wanted to better understand issues of federal land ownership, so I spent the last week mapping land and population data in the western US. For federal land ownership data, I used the PAD-US database maintained by the US Geological Survey. For topography data, I used Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data from OpenTopography.com. For population data, I used the US Census, including census tract shapefiles. By mapping this data, I got a detailed look at the extent and nature of federal land ownership, and to what degree areas of high housing demand could benefit from opening up federal lands for development.

    I found that only a small number of major cities (notably Las Vegas, and to some extent Phoenix, Boise, and Tucson) could take advantage of opening up unprotected federal land for development. Most large cities in western states are adjacent to large tracts of federal land, but most of this land is unsuitable for development, either because it’s mountainous or because it’s a protected area such as a National Forest or Wildlife Refuge. Millions of acres of federal land actually are practical to develop, including some abutting population centers, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to open up some of it — but I also don't expect such development to substantially increase housing availability in western states because most of it is not near large population centers with high housing demand.

    in 1976, the government’s policy towards land disposal officially changed with the passage of the Federal Land Policy Management Act. The act repealed previous homestead acts used to give federal land to homesteaders (along with thousands of other land laws), declared that “it is the policy of the United States that the public lands be retained in Federal ownership,” and tasked the Bureau of Land Management with administering public lands. Since then, outside of a transfer of roughly 100 million acres of federal land to Alaska and Alaska natives in the 1980s, the land area owned by the federal government has remained roughly constant.

    • the "protected areas" are often the bits we need to be selling off

etc

Horseshit

Obit

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

  • Why We're Moving Beyond "Misinformation" and "Disinformation"

    For years, Russian state media has labeled credible reports in Western media that it dislikes as “disinformation,” and recently launched its own so-called fact-checking operations to legitimize that framing. On the left, Democratic-aligned groups like Tara McGowan’s Courier Newsroom have cloaked hyper partisan content in the language of “fighting misinformation.” U.S. President Donald Trump has invoked the phrase “massive disinformation campaign” to dismiss allegations of Russian election interference. Simply put, language that once clarified is now obscuring. At NewsGuard, we’re retiring these words as primary labels. Not because the threats they describe have vanished. To the contrary, the threats have increased. But rather because the words no longer help us explain these threats.

    Language should clarify, not obfuscate. “Misinformation” and “disinformation” have lost their precision. So, we are now employing terms, such as provably false claims, that accurately describe the content in question, rather than signal which side you're on.

Musk

Electric / Self Driving cars

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

  • Black Passengers Feel Targeted By Carnival Cruise Line's New Rules - Travel Noire

    Carnival Cruise Line faces mounting backlash after implementing a series of new onboard policies in June 2025, which many Black passengers claim disproportionately target their community and cultural expressions. The controversial regulations include a zero-tolerance stance on marijuana regardless of home-state legality, a 1:00 a.m. curfew for minors — and perhaps most contentiously — bans on handheld non-battery-operated fans and restrictions on personal Bluetooth speakers. These changes have led to widespread cancellations and heated debate across social media platforms. One TikToker bluntly stated, “We got the message loud and clear, we are not your demographic anymore. Carnival decided they wanted to rebrand.” The cruise line maintains that these changes aim to enhance safety and improve guest experience. Still, many travelers perceive the new rules as an attempt to discourage certain demographics from booking future voyages.

  • Opinion | The Grip Race and Identity Has on My Students - The New York Times

    Race pessimism, even a kind of mass learned helplessness, was < instead the weather that enveloped them. When my friend Coleman Hughes guest-lectured on his case for colorblindness, several of them were visibly unnerved, suggesting that the idea itself was a form of anti-Blackness. Most maintained that one could no more “retire” from race, as Adrian Piper — another of the authors we wrestled with — aspired to do, than one could teleport up from the classroom. To be “antiracist,” the modish catchall term within their peer group that had replaced colorblindness, meant, paradoxically to my mind, to insist on and ultimately help perpetuate the same limiting identities bequeathed by the authors of American racism. About 20 years separated me from my students. President Trump, not Mr. Obama, has overseen their political awakening. As he meticulously effaced his immediate predecessor’s legacy, my students learned to see themselves primarily as members of “ascriptive groups,” categories to which they belong through the accident of birth, not choice.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

TechSuck / Geek Bait

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

Crypto con games

Economicon / Business / Finance

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

Trump

Democrats

  • Did Joe Biden’s Doctor Just Confirm a Cover-Up of His Health? – PJ Media

    In a move that should obliterate whatever remains of the myth of transparency in Washington, Joe Biden’s longtime physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, finally showed up for a closed-door interview with the House Oversight Committee—and proceeded to not answer a single question. But while O’Connor may have refused to talk, his silence said plenty. According to Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), O’Connor was asked two simple but devastating questions: “Were you ever told to lie about the president’s health?” and “Did you ever believe President Biden was unfit to execute his duties?” O’Connor didn’t say “No,” he pleaded the Fifth both times—choosing constitutional protection over basic accountability.

Left Angst

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

  • U.S. introduces bill to combat China's sabotage of Taiwan's underseas cables

  • Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America's Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy

    There are two stories from the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq that I can’t get out of my head. The first is that in the final stages of war planning, the US Air Force was drawing up targeting lists for the sorties they expected to make. They already had detailed plans2 for striking Iraq’s air defense systems, but they worried that they would also be asked to disable Iraqi WMD sites. So the Air Force pulled together a special team of intelligence officers to figure out the right coordinates for all the secret factories and labs that were churning out biological weapons and nuclear materials. Try as they might, they couldn’t find them. So…they just kept on looking. The second story comes from an anonymous source who described to Michael Mazarr, the author of this book, the basic occupation strategy that the National Security Council was settling on. The concept was that once you “cut off the head” of the Iraqi government, you would witness a “rapid and inevitable march toward Jeffersonian democracy.” What I find amazing about this is that nobody even stopped to think about the metaphor — how many things march rapidly and decisively after being decapitated? I am of the exact right age for the Iraq War to be the formative event of my political identity.3 But even if that hadn’t been true, it still feels like the most consequential geopolitical event of my life.

  • Pentagon to become largest shareholder in rare earth miner MP Materials

World

Iran / Houthi

Israel

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

China

Health / Medicine

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

  • Bayou Renaissance Man: It looks like the Covid jabs were - and still are - killing people

  • What Happened to All the Human Bird Flu Cases?

    As cases swelled, an older man in Louisiana fell critically ill. He would eventually become the first person in the U.S. to succumb to the virus since initial human cases were reported to the World Health Organization in 1997. We seemed then, for a moment, to be at a tipping point: bound to unleash something both larger and deadlier than we could foreseeably contain, and destined to dust off the cobwebs of a life grimly lived, again, under a pandemic. And yet, none of that came to pass. Instead, since February, the CDC, which still monitors infections in humans, has not recorded a single new case in the U.S. The count remains the same — stuck firmly at 70.

    Rationalizing the lull in infections has been puzzling. Researchers have tied wild birds, the virus’s largest reservoir, and their spring and fall migrations to periods of greater spread of contagion. Cuts to staff who monitored the virus, at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Center for Veterinary Medicine, might also be playing a role. But these ideas dismiss the deeper and more fundamental problem around our present grasp of bird flu.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

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