“The Iranian parliament, led by the charismatic Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, was trying to limit the power of the monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Mossadegh nationalized the oil fields, provoking a British blockade, while also clashing with the shah over domestic policy.
Mossadegh trusted the United States as a neutral mediator, but the feeling wasn’t mutual. The Eisenhower administration suspected that Mossadegh was too close to communists, and the CIA supported a coup d’etat by destabilizing the country. In August 1953, after months of protests subsidized by the U.S. and the U.K., monarchist generals in contact with the CIA surrounded Mossadegh’s house with tanks, bringing the shah back to near-absolute power.
Instead of allowing Britain to regain its dominance over Iran, the Eisenhower administration forced Iran to accept an American-led oil consortium. And the CIA helped train the shah’s fearsome new secret police, the SAVAK. When the shah finally fell in 1979, young revolutionaries took revenge by raiding the U.S. embassy, which they called a “den of spies,” and holding everyone inside hostage for more than a year. That began a 46-year conflict that continues to this day.”
“When you effectively give every prospective medical student a limitless pile of money to draw from, colleges are incentivized to hike costs. If we want to make medical school more affordable, the first step should involve actually incentivizing medical schools to stop overcharging students.”
“Mahmoud Khalil, the first target of President Donald Trump’s crusade against international students he describes as “terrorist sympathizers,” was released from custody on Friday after more than three months of detention. But the Trump administration is still trying to deport Khalil, a legal permanent resident, based on his participation in anti-Israel protests at Columbia University.
The official rationale for expelling Khalil is that he poses a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests. That justification is alarmingly broad and vague, raising due process and free speech concerns that interact with each other.”
“So what does Mamdani actually want to institute, if elected in November, and why would it suck so much?
Consider free childcare, which his canvassers seemed to believe would be persuasive to me as I walked past them last night with my 2-year-old. Under Mamdani, the state would provide childcare—via taxpayer-funded daycares, akin to the universal 3K program currently in place (which doesn’t always provide parents with options they actually want)—for all aged six weeks to 5 years old. But if the idea is to lighten parents’ financial load, why aren’t all forms of childcare treated the same? Why don’t stay-at-home mothers get vouchers from the state to recoup loss of income? Why don’t neighborhood babysitting collectives get help? Why is one form of childcare—administered by the state—privileged above all others? Many education savings account programs, such as the one administered by Florida, recognize that assistance from the state, if it is to exist at all, ought to be handed straight to families so that they may use it as they wish. For socialists to offer universal state-run childcare as some great liberator is frankly insulting to many mothers; in the magnificent post-work future the socialists herald, won’t many women choose to spend more time with their children, not less?
City-run grocery stores—another of Mamdani’s proposals—look like a solution in search of a problem. Food deserts—geographic zones where there aren’t any affordable, healthy options available to residents—don’t exist in New York City.
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Then there’s Mamdani’s rent freeze. He hopes to fully eradicate all rent increases for the roughly 2 million New Yorkers who are currently the beneficiaries of the city’s rent-stabilization scheme, claiming this will be a boon to the working class. What he does not realize is that decades of city-sanctioned housing market distortion is what has led to untenably high rents in the first place (plus it being too difficult to build), and that many of the beneficiaries of rent stabilization are not the poorest of the poor, but rather people whose friends or family have treated other people’s real estate as their own inheritances.
And don’t even get me started on the will-he-or-won’t-he of defunding the police. Mamdani, like all progressives swept up in the cultural fervor of George Floyd Summer, once talked big talk about defunding the police (a feminist issue, he says!), but has now motte-and-baileyed his way back to more social workers and investing in mental health services including voluntary rehabilitative programs. Other hints about what Mamdani believes: “Jails are not places where people can recover from a mental health crisis, and they often have punitive responses to mental health needs” and lots of talk about reducing stigmas and improving access to care. As with food deserts, Mamdani seems to genuinely believe that violent people in the midst of mental breakdown just don’t have access to care, and that if it is simply offered to them, they will no longer resort to terrorizing their fellow man. This strikes me as a simplistic understanding of this problem which would erase the improvements in crime rates made so far in 2025.
In order to pay for all these proposals—the grocery stores, the daycares, the corps of social workers, the fare-free buses (which 48 percent of New Yorkers fail to pay for in the first place, unfortunately)—Mamdani will simply press the button socialists love: Institute a 2 percent flat tax on those earning over $1 million. What Mamdani does not realize is that you cannot abuse the “tippy top.” It is the HENRYs (“high-earners, not rich yet”) or the “working rich” who are perhaps the best examples of meritocracy in action; they’re not the “idle rich”—those who’ve inherited their wealth or made it long ago, who are now mostly price-insensitive and untouchably well-off—and they’re frequently glued to Manhattan for industries like finance, law, and tech. Meet your tax base, Zohran. You should worry if they flee to the outlying suburbs.”
“numerous studies going back to the year 2000 all indicate there is no particular reason to fear cell phones as a cause of cancer, and a new paper by Li Zhang and Joshua Muscat of the Department of Public Health Sciences at Pennsylvania State University examines the most up-to-date data from the United States to examine this question as if for the first time.
Most studies on this question so far have been case-control studies. This type of study is subject to biases (information bias and selection bias) because it selects subjects who already have the disease of interest (in this case, brain cancer). Although prospective studies avoid the biases inherent in case-control studies, they are expensive and difficult to carry out, especially for rare diseases such as brain cancer.
But now researchers can take advantage of the exponential increase in exposure to cell phones since their introduction in the mid-1980s. In the space of several decades, humans have gone from having no exposure—zero percent of the population exposed—to nearly universal exposure. This means that we can take advantage of what is referred to as a “natural experiment,” the approach that Li and Muscat take in their illuminating new study.
An earlier analysis of this type was carried out by the National Cancer Institute. That study showed no evidence of an association between cell phone use and cancer, but the data only went up to 2012. Possibly cell phones had not been in use long enough for an effect to show up. Li and Muscat extend the period of observation by nine years.
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The authors conclude that “these findings suggest that mobile phone use does not appear to be associated with an increased risk of brain cancer, either malignant or benign.””
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“in the face of this evidence, RFK Jr. insists on propagating this debunked claim, and he is sponsoring a study by a discredited researcher that he hopes will provide the answer he favors. This is an unforgivable waste of money that could be spent on addressing an important health issue. But it is also more than that.
From observing RFK Jr., and those he appeals to, we see that the belief in different bogus claims tends to be correlated. A belief that cell phones are causing cancer or that vaccines cause autism can serve as a sentinel indicator of the susceptibility to other false beliefs, such as those targeting pesticides and genetically engineered crops. It’s noteworthy that the prominent anti-biotech advocacy organization U.S. Right-to-Know is anti-vaccine in addition to being fiercely against glyphosate and other pesticides and genetically modified crops.
These, and many others, are zombie risks that never die. It doesn’t matter what the specific risk is. The credulity, the failure to take any commonsense evidence or distillations of the scientific evidence into account, the refusal to value the judgment of experts who have spent untold hours examining the issue, or the conclusions reached by institutions such as the National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Medicine, or the American Cancer Society, into account are the same.
RFK Jr. appears to have an implacable drive to do away with vaccines by undermining public confidence, disrupting insurance coverage, and making it too costly for pharmaceutical companies to produce them, as happened in the 1980s. Exposing his lies is literally a matter of protecting the lives of children and adults from the all-too-real infectious diseases that RFK Jr. doesn’t believe in.”
Trump Media Group grifting Trump supporters by a large buyback. Instead of investing in the businesses, the company is raising money to put it in Trump’s pocket. Trump owns 60% of the stock, so a buyback makes him richer. Buybacks are normally done by profitable companies to reward their shareholders. Trump Media Group is not profitable. They raised money via an equity sale and then bought back their stock, essentially transferring some of the money raised into Trump’s pockets. (Discussion of this begins at 21:37).