Potpourri of Random Stuff

• "7 Historical Figures Who Disappeared Without a Trace"--Mental Floss.
• "Crack Your Kids Up With These 51 Hilarious Riddles"--Romper (via Get Pocket). An example:

 What can’t talk but will respond when spoken to?

An echo.

• "Microbes in environment drove methane emissions more than fossil fuels between 2020 and 2022, analysis finds"--Phys.org.
• "Is marriage good for your mental health? Shocking study reveals how having a spouse impacts happiness"--New York Post.  

    Singletons around the globe are in greater danger of experiencing mental health issues than their hitched peers, a new study has found.

    “Our analysis revealed that unmarried individuals had a higher risk of depressive symptoms than their married counterparts across all countries,” wrote the authors of the new study, published Tuesday in the Nature Human Behavior journal.

• "Math Is Still Catching Up to the Mysterious Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan"--Quanta Magazine. 

    Ramanujan brings life to the myth of the self-taught genius. He grew up poor and uneducated and did much of his research while isolated in southern India, barely able to afford food. In 1912, when he was 24, he began to send a series of letters to prominent mathematicians. These were mostly ignored, but one recipient, the English mathematician G.H. Hardy, corresponded with Ramanujan for a year and eventually persuaded him to come to England, smoothing the way with the colonial bureaucracies.

    It became apparent to Hardy and his colleagues that Ramanujan could sense mathematical truths — could access entire worlds — that others simply could not. (Hardy, a mathematical giant in his own right, is said to have quipped that his greatest contribution to mathematics was the discovery of Ramanujan.) Before Ramanujan died in 1920 at the age of 32, he came up with thousands of elegant and surprising results, often without proof. He was fond of saying that his equations had been bestowed on him by the gods.

    More than 100 years later, mathematicians are still trying to catch up to Ramanujan’s divine genius, as his visions appear again and again in disparate corners of the world of mathematics.

•  "Lawless: A look at the ‘shadow network’ that censors dissent and tried to destroy Trump"--Washington Examiner. This October 2024 article begins:

    Near the end of his important new book, The Disappearing of the President: Trump, Truth Social, and the Fight for the Republic, Lee Smith makes an important — and chilling — distinction. What has been happening in the last few years with the attacks on former President Donald Trump has not been a two-tiered system of justice, where some people get punished and others get off, as many conservatives have been arguing. Instead, it is a system of lawlessness. In fact, it’s barely a system at all.

    “In the current system,” Smith writes, “law is an instrument the regime uses to punish political opponents, while everything is legit for the ruling party. That is, the current system is lawless.”

And lawless pretty well describes both the J6 prosecutions and the sudden flurry of judges deciding political issues. 

• "On the Phenomenon of Male Flight"--Vox Day. Comments about the declining number of men in higher education. 

    Every society faces a fundamental choice. Either deny men what they observably and actually prefer or deny women what they think they prefer in theory. Across the West, the last 60 years have been an experiment in the latter. Women have been given the red carpet treatment in the corporations, in the universities, and even in the men’s locker rooms. Divorces and custodies have been granted on demand. Pregnancies have been prevented. Babies have been aborted. Obesity and ugliness have been celebrated. The churches have been de-doctrinated and literally neutered. Refugees have been welcomed. The insane have been liberated from their asylums.

    And yet, not only are women unhappier than they were before being granted their collective societal bucket list, men are increasingly opting out of every form of participation in society. So, unless women are both as willing and as capable as men of performing most of what historically had been male duties, or men are forcibly denied the right to exercise their preferences and conscripted to perform the tasks that women won’t, the choice is between a) societal collapse and b) denying women the right to fully exercise their preferences.

•  "Who Rules the World?"--American Greatness. The 2023 article addresses some of the popular conspiracy theories of aliens or a cabal of powerful families, but continues:

    It’s obligatory to question this paradigm, but rejecting the idea of 13 families running the planetary show doesn’t nullify the possibility that a global hierarchy of institutions exist that are more powerful than national governments. Anyone familiar with the ESG movement recognizes that it is being rolled out and enforced by banks and financial institutions who make access to cash, loans and investments contingent on compliance.

    Similarly, anyone watching the contemporary obsessions with gender ideology and climate alarm has to acknowledge that corporations have incorporated them into their products and marketing. And do corporations control governments? Up until a few years ago when gender ideology and climate alarm coopted and silenced them, that is what the American Left had made a premise of their existence. Now, apparently, accusing the government of being beholden to corporations and banks is a “right wing conspiracy theory.”

    If one does accept the idea that a handful of families own controlling interests in a hierarchy of financial institutions and corporations, that doesn’t necessarily mean the list published (or republished) by TheInfoNG is entirely accurate. Closer to home and more recently, Investopedia published an article “Top 10 Wealthiest Families in the World,” listing the following titanic dynasties: Walton, Mars, Koch, Al Saud, Hermès, Ambani, Wertheimer, Cargill/MacMillan, Thomson, and Hoffmann/Oeri. Is it them? Why aren’t the Rothschilds on this list? Where, for that matter, is Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg?

    Regardless of how you calculate wealth and financial control, and who you determine occupy the top spots, it is probably naive to think that individuals with stupefying wealth would not also be controlling the most powerful institutions in the world.

• "Japanese village replaces young people with mannequins as population falls"--Sky News. "The small population of a village in Japan is now 'outnumbered by puppets'", the article begins, "after using life-like mannequins to replace those who have left the area."
• "The Lost Girl of Vermont’s ‘Bennington Triangle’"--Mental Floss (via Get Pocket). The article begins:

    Louis Knapp saw the girl in the red parka and decided to stop. It was roughly 3 p.m. on Sunday, December 1, 1946, and Knapp was driving along Route 67A in Bennington, Vermont. A building contractor by trade, he was headed for home a few miles away. He asked the girl where she was going.

    To hike the Long Trail, she said. It was a reference to a path that climbed five miles up Glastenbury Mountain, one well-known in the area. She didn’t seem dressed for it, though. It was late afternoon, and the weather, already cool, would be getting colder.

    Knapp figured she was a student at Bennington College, which was right near where he had stopped. He thought her a little clumsy—she had tripped climbing into his truck—but otherwise unremarkable.

    The two said little as Knapp neared his driveway on Route 9 toward Glastenbury. Down the road roughly two miles was the entrance to the Long Trail.

    “Thanks, that’s swell,” the girl said, and headed in that direction.

    A few minutes later, Knapp’s daughter went outside. Route 9 was flat, and you could see a considerable distance of up to a half-mile either way. She would later tell police that there had been no sign of the hitchhiker, even though she still should have been within view. No one could walk a half-mile that quickly.

    The girl’s name was Paula Welden, and for the next several weeks, she was the biggest story to hit Bennington in a long time. Her fate would lend credence to the growing belief that this part of the Long Trail was home to an area that seemed to harbor one story after another of people who simply vanished. So many, in fact, that it came to be called the Bennington Triangle.