What we’re reading (12/27)
“Wall St Finishes Down After Sell-Off At End Of Strong Holiday-Shortened Week” (Reuters). “Wall Street's holiday cheer ended abruptly on Friday, with all three main benchmarks closing lower in a broad-based sell-off affecting even tech and growth stocks that had driven markets higher through much of the shortened trading week.”
“Behind Closed Doors: The Spy-World Scientists Who Argued Covid Was A Lab Leak” (Wall Street Journal). “The dominant view within the intelligence community was clear when Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, and a couple of her senior analysts, briefed Biden and his top aides on Aug. 24[, 2001]. The National Intelligence Council, a body of senior intelligence officers who reported to Haines and that organized the intelligence review, had concluded with ‘low confidence’ that Covid-19 had emerged when the virus leapt from an animal to a human. So did four intelligence agencies. At the time, the FBI was the only agency that concluded a lab leak was likely, a judgment it had rendered with ‘moderate confidence.’ But neither Bannan nor any other FBI officials were at the briefing to make their case first hand to the president.”
“We Need More Three Mile Islands” (Reason). “Our grids will need an additional capacity of at least 18 gigawatts (GWs) to service AI's data centers by 2030. New York City's grid is about 6 GW annually, so the grid needs about three Big Apples' worth of capacity to satiate AI's energy needs. Intermittent sources, such as wind and solar, cannot meet that need. They are also costly to build for the small amounts of MWh they provide, and the landmass needed to have a capacity comparable to nuclear is extensive. What would take around 15 square miles of solar, nuclear can do in one—and those 15 square miles of solar would produce power only sometimes, while the one square mile of nuclear provides power around the clock.”
“There's Fresh Interest In Informing Potential Jurors About Jury Nullification” (Dealbreaker). “Jury nullification, coupled with voting and that little bit in the Declaration of Independence about the right to abolish tyrannical governments, goes to the very heart of the powers vested in the people to fight tyranny. Given the power that judges and prosecutors wield, how might the people stand up to the application of laws or unruly authority they consider unjust? Well, when the time comes for juries to decide the fate of the defendant, they are told by the judge if they are convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the crimes that they have been accused of, they must return a verdict of guilty. Thing is, that must there is all bark and no bite.”
“Luigi Mangione And The American Abyss” (City Journal). “It’s no surprise that age is inversely correlated with support for left-wing assassination, since the younger the voter, the more recent his exposure to the American education system. The pro-Mangione reaction epitomizes the dominant traits of contemporary academia: narcissism, a juvenile view of economics, the inability to think in terms of principle and precedent, and ignorance about the civilizational triumph that is Western due process…Mangione’s manifesto reflects his Ivy League education (he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania): it is poorly written (‘I do apologize for any strife of traumas’), riddled with cliché (‘clearly power games [are] at play’), and self-important (‘Evidently I am the first to face it with such brute honesty’).”
