Lessons from Mike Plaxco

 Dave Anderson at American Handgunner.

How true. Get antsy and pull the trigger and you miss.

If you want to learn a lot about shooting handguns and have fun doing it, the American Handgunner is a great source - subscribe to it.

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J. Michael Plaxco died recently, too young, a few months short of his 70th birthday. Mike was one of the early superstars of practical shooting competition, winning the IPSC National Championship (pre-USPSA) and the Steel Challenge in the early 1980s. There was little industry sponsorship for even the best shooters in those days. Mike mostly paid his way by building competition pistols, designing the Plaxco compensator (one of the first expansion-chamber comps), teaching classes and writing.

The best money I ever spent learning to shoot was on instruction from top shooters such as Plaxco and Rob Leatham. I’d encourage anyone who really wants to become a good shooter to do the same. I know. Training costs money. But without some kind of guidance, your time and money will produce results slowly at best. At worst, you’ll spend years learning bad habits.

In 1985, it was a humbling lesson to see Plaxco shoot a match at a level far beyond anything I had ever seen. I took a three-day seminar from Mike the same year, and by good fortune, it was a small class, so each student got lots of attention. Mike was a very upbeat, enthusiastic, cheerful person who liked people and liked seeing them improve.

Plaxco was also a highly intelligent and articulate person. He had an analytic mind, he could figure out what worked and why, and he could communicate his ideas. I don’t think he had any formal training as a teacher but he seemed to understand the basics of effective teaching, one of which is repetition. He expanded his teaching notes into an excellent book, Shooting from Within.

Four Basic Requirements

In that seminar long ago, he repeated what he then considered the four basic requirements for learning to shoot. It’s a tribute to his teaching I remember them clearly after nearly 40 years.

1. Accuracy takes precedence over speed. The foundation of good shooting is the ability to hit the target on demand. Speed comes from smoothness and develops naturally over time. If you focus on speed, the accuracy will never come. The old gunfighters expressed the same concept in pithy phrases: “Speed’s fine, but accuracy is final.” And, “Take your time, fast.”

Mike suggested around 200 rounds per training session. Fifty rounds are barely enough to maintain skills. On the other hand, most shooters lose focus if they shoot too much. Break training days into morning and afternoon sessions of 200 rounds each.

He advised beginning and ending every session with 10 or 20 slow-fire, precision shots striving for maximum accuracy. Doing so improves sight focus, trigger control, hold and stance consistency, and mental discipline. He once commented that few shooters have the mental discipline to fire 20 straight A-zone hits — at any range. Mike also taught that whatever skill one is practicing, one should always be scoring 90% of the available points.

2. The sight picture dictates the cadence of fire. In bullseye and precision shooting events, only the perfect sight picture is acceptable. In practical shooting, there are an infinite number of acceptable sight pictures depending on the difficulty of the shot. You should be shooting as fast as possible while maintaining an acceptable picture. The cadence of fire is very different for a full target, five-yard shot than for a partial or moving target at 25 or 50 yards.

3. You must learn to recognize an acceptable sight picture for the shot required. At three yards, a glimpse of the top of the slide may be acceptable; at 10 yards, you might need to see the front sight clearly on target; at 50 yards, the perfect picture of the front sight framed in the rear sight notch. Moreover, what is acceptable can vary with each individual.

When Jerry Barnhart was winning multiple national titles, his speed was simply phenomenal. After he had smoked a tough stage, I recall someone asking Barnhart what sight picture he saw while shooting so fast. Jerry thought for a moment and then replied, “I saw what I needed to see.”

4. Until the sight picture is acceptable, do not break the shot. Again, it relates to discipline — knowing what you are doing. Plaxco was a great believer in calling the shot based on the sight picture as the shot broke. He said, “If you tell me the shot was a D at 9 o’clock, and the bullet hole is a D at 9:00, you are learning. If it’s an A and you don’t know how it got there, you haven’t learned anything.”

Mike left us with one last lesson: “When all else fails, align the sights on target, take up the trigger slack and press the trigger straight back.”

Effectiveness of Risankizumab for Psoriasis

 From www.practieupdate.com.

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Real-World Effectiveness of Risankizumab in Patients With Moderate to Severe Psoriasis

BACKGROUND

Psoriasis, an inflammatory skin disease, is often treated with biologic therapeutics.

OBJECTIVE

To determine the real-world treatment effectiveness of risankizumab, an interleukin-23 inhibitor, in the treatment of moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis.

METHODS

A retrospective, observational study was conducted using the CorEvitas Psoriasis Registry for eligible adults with a diagnosis of moderate-to-severe psoriasis and persistent use of risankizumab at 12 (±3) months after initiation. Skin clearance measures and patient-reported outcomes were analyzed for the entire study population and by prior biologic treatment.

RESULTS

Among 287 patients with persistent risankizumab use at 1 year, most achieved clear or clear/almost clear skin and reported significant reductions in Dermatology Life Quality Index scores, psoriasis symptoms (fatigue, skin pain, and overall itch), and work and activity impairment.

LIMITATIONS

The CorEvitas Psoriasis Registry is not necessarily representative of all adults with psoriasis in the United States and Canada and does not measure patient adherence.

CONCLUSION

Patients treated with risankizumab, regardless of prior treatment, achieved high levels of clear and clear/almost clear skin, Dermatology Life Quality Index scores of 0/1, and significant reductions in psoriasis symptoms (fatigue, skin pain, and overall itch) and work and activity impairment 1 year after initiation.

The Progressive Media’s continued decline

 From Jonathan Turley.

JT is on target.

Our times are marked by mass dysfunction led by many of the Elite, Academia, and the Educational System.

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Yes, Hamas is Legally, Morally, and Factually a Terrorist Organization.

Below is my column in the New York Post on the Associated Press guideline for reporters to avoid calling Hamas a terrorist organization. Voice of America and other media outlets have made the same decision. This is not about supporting the Palestinian cause. It is about correctly describing a group that commits terrorist attacks as a terrorist organization.

Here is the column:

Confucius once said that “the beginning of wisdom is the ability to call things by their right names.”

That does not appear to be the approach of the Associated Press this week after the media organization told its reporters not to call Hamas fighters “terrorists” after they massacred civilians, raped women, and took a couple hundred hostages from Israel on Oct. 7.

The Voice of America issued its own instruction to avoid calling Hamas “terrorists.”

According to the AP, these fighters are to be called “militants” because the term “terrorist” has “become politicized.”

But there is nothing “politicized” in recognizing that Hamas intentionally targeted civilians, including mowing down unarmed participants at a peace concert.

They burned civilians alive in their homes and raped women.

They intentionally and systemically took civilian hostages, including children and the elderly.

The acts defined the actors. These were terrorist acts and those who committed them were by definition terrorists.

The International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism defines terrorism as “any … act intended to cause death or serious bodily injury to a civilian, or to any other person not taking an active part in the hostilities in a situation of armed conflict, when the purpose of such act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or to compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.”

The United Nations Security Council specifically includes with this definition “criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages.”

Nevertheless, the Associated Press reportedly issued an “Israel-Hamas Topical Guide,” which noted that “terrorism and terrorist have become politicized, and often are applied inconsistently.” Thus “the AP is not using the terms for specific actions or groups, other than in direct quotations.”

This isn’t the first time the AP has made strikingly artificial language choices.

For example, AP reporters were told to avoid using the word “surge” to describe the record number of migrants crossing the border.

Likewise, when there was violence and looting in various cities after the George Floyd killing, AP told its reporters to use “milder terms” like “unrest” rather than “riots.”

Yet when it came to January 6, AP routinely referred to the riot as an “insurrection” (here, here, here).

Notably, in one article titled “Riot? Insurrection? Words Matter in Describing the Capitol Siege,” the AP noted that other mainstream media were using “riot” but also raised the possible terms “sedition” and “coup attempt.”

For the record, I criticized President Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 speech while he was still giving it and wrote that his theory on the election and the certification challenge was unfounded.

I denounced the riot as a desecration of our constitutional process. However, it was not an insurrection, in my view. It was a protest that became a riot.

AP and some other outlets do not want to call it a riot not because it isn’t accurate, but because it is not sufficiently vilifying.

Conversely, the media are often eager to avoid “riot” as too judgmental.

Reporters actually told a chief of police not to use the word “riot” in reference to violence by protesters against police.

Similarly, as billions in property damages were occurring in various cities, Craig Melvin, an MSNBC host and co-anchor of “Today,” tweeted a “guide” that the images “on the ground” were not to be described as rioting but rather “protests.”

He noted, “This will guide our reporting in MN. While the situation on the ground in Minneapolis is fluid, and there has been violence, it is most accurate at this time to describe what is happening there as ‘protests’ — not riots.”

Polls have shown that most of the public view January 6 as a riot.

A CBS poll showed that 76% viewed it for what it was, a “protest gone too far.” The view that it was an actual “insurrection” was far less settled, with almost half rejecting the claim, a division breaking along partisan lines.

Obviously, people can disagree, but this would seem an obvious example where the AP would refrain from using the most loaded term of “insurrection” given the legal and factual contradictions in such usage.

The concern is that AP is showing bias in the use of such terms. Journalism schools now teach young reporters to follow an advocacy model in “leaving neutrality behind.”

Likewise, Stanford journalism professor Ted Glasser insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.”

Recently, former executive editor for the Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News president Andrew Heyward released their survey of leading journalists and outlets and also concluded that objectivity is now considered reactionary and even harmful.

Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle, said it plainly: “Objectivity has got to go.”

Downie explained that news organizations now “believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading ‘bothsidesism’ in covering stories about race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change and many other subjects.

“And, in today’s diversifying newsrooms, they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.”

That view was echoed by Kathleen Carroll, former executive editor at the Associated Press, who declared, “It’s objective by whose standard? … That standard seems to be White, educated, and fairly wealthy.”

The response of the public has been consistent and clear: Trust in the media is at an all-time low.

Roughly 40% of the public has zero trust in the media. Likewise, 50% of Americans believe that the media lie to them to advance their own agendas.

Much of that distrust has occurred over what were viewed as false descriptions.

The best example was the “Let’s Go Brandon” incident.

In that case, NBC reporter Kelli Stavast was doing an interview with race car driver Brandon Brown after he won his first NASCAR Xfinity Series race.

During the interview, Stavast’s questions were drowned out by loud-and-clear chants of “F—k Joe Biden.” Stavast quickly declared, “You can hear the chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s go, Brandon!’ ”

“Let’s Go Brandon” has become a type of Yankee Doodling of the media by the public. It reflected an exasperation with framing and revisionism by the media in describing events.

There is no greater disconnect than describing an attack killing hundreds of unarmed civilians and taking hundreds of hostages as the acts of “militants.”

There is wisdom that comes from calling things by the right name. This was terrorism.

The Awestruck and the Awws

 Don Boudreaux at the American Institute for Economic Research.

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If we exclude misanthropes, most people today can – without excessive simplification – be divided into two distinct camps: the Awestruck and the Awws. The Awestruck are unceasingly amazed at the modern world. They are enormously grateful for the countless amenities and benefits of life in the modern global economy. They are aware that nearly all of our ancestors not only did without the comfort and convenience of the likes of air-conditioning, automobiles, air travel, aspirin, automatic dishwashers, telephony, recorded music, and laptop computers and smartphones connected 24/7/365 by wi-fi to the Web, the Awestruck also realize that most of our ancestors did without access to antibiotics, artificial lighting, indoor plumbing, the ability to bathe daily, and even regular supplies of food.

The Awws, in contrast, are either ignorant of how most of our ancestors lived, or they believe that our ancestors’ experiences are irrelevant for assessing the state of the world today. Unlike the Awestruck, the Awws do not compare the state of the world today to that of the actual past. Instead, the Awws compare the state of the world today to fictions conjured by their imaginations. They compare today’s reality to what they imagine to be a Perfect World. The Awws then notice an undeniable reality: As marvelous as today’s world is, it’s not perfect. It could be marvelouser. Imperfections abound.

Upon noticing these imperfections the Awws, in their dismay, moan “Awww.” No matter how much higher standards of living for nearly everyone in today’s market-oriented economies are, living standards could be even higher. The costs of obtaining, maintaining, and further raising these living standards could be even lower. The ‘distribution’ of the abundance of goods and services could be more equal. And were there fewer disagreeable aesthetics of industrial, commercial society – what with its factories and mines and pipelines and strip malls and light pollution and telemarketers and vulgar websites – persons with finely polished sensibilities would indeed suffer fewer irritations.

It’s curious just how incurious the Awws are about the true nature and source of economic growth. Most Awws seem to think that the massive daily outpouring of goods and services, while it could be further enlarged by wise government intervention, could not be shrunk by such intervention, or at least not shrunk by enough to matter to sensible people. As the Awws see matters, wealth is generated automatically by a machine called “the economy,” which itself was created by – and is maintained by – the state. This machine will slow down or sputter only if the government fails to operate it properly – by erecting protective tariffs on imports of steel, by subsidizing the building of a new baseball stadium, and by fueling the economic machine with regular injections of newly created money, for example.

Unlike the Awestruck who are gobsmacked whenever they contemplate the stupendous amount of on-going individual, detailed efforts that are necessary for the production of even the simplest economic outputs, the Awws are perpetually disappointed that the economic machine never works as well as they can imagine. The Awws, you see, see only surface phenomena. For example, the Awws see a report of Jeff Bezos’s net worth or of Amazon’s market valuation and, looking no further, conclude that the world would be a better place if much of Bezos’s wealth were ‘redistributed’ to poorer Americans and Amazon were forced to charge even lower prices.

The Awws – let’s give them this much – excel at arithmetic. They know that if the retail price of some item sold by Amazon is cut, the new price will be lower than the old price. Brilliant! They also know that Bezos’s net worth, expressed in dollars, is many multiple times higher than the net worth of any ordinary American. The Awws further know that if the government were to subtract $X from Bezos’s wealth and then add that $X to the bank accounts of other Americans, the immediate result would be a decrease in the difference between Bezos’s monetary wealth and other Americans’ monetary wealth.

It’s an A+ performance in arithmetic! Proud of their high academic marks, the Awws then go “aww” if and when the government refuses to recognize the worthiness of the Awws to dictate policies that carry out in practice such arithmetical exercises.

The Awws loudly “boo” when, for example, the Awestruck speak out against income or wealth “redistribution.” The Awestruck do their best to inform the Awws that the monetary wealth of entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos reflects those entrepreneurs’ successes at pleasing consumers. Therefore, the Awestruck argue, it would be unjust to seize this wealth simply to give it to individuals who did nothing to earn it. Let’s be real, observe the Awestruck: More than anyone else, Jeff Bezos did indeed build Amazon, while those individuals who would get from the government any money ‘redistributed’ away from Bezos did indeed not build Amazon.

Second, the Awestruck explain that ‘redistributing’ monetary income or wealth is not merely a matter of government reshuffling the ownership of sums of money. It’s true that ‘redistributive’ taxation takes from wealthy individuals like Bezos and then gives what was taken to other people. But, the Awestruck note, what’s ultimately ‘redistributed’ is resources. Raising taxes on Bezos would almost certainly not cause him to reduce his consumption. Instead, it would incite him to withdraw an amount of resources equal in value to the amount of the additional taxes he must pay from his company. Amazon would then operate less efficiently. It would have fewer or less-well-maintained delivery vehicles; its workers would receive less training; its warehouses would be outfitted with fewer productivity-enhancing machines; its logistics workers would operate with worse software.

Among the consequences would be lower worker productivity at Amazon, and, hence, lower real wages. This reduced productivity would also manifest itself in consumers getting lower-quality and more expensive products from Amazon. And with the deterioration of Amazon’s service quality and the rise in its prices would come reduced pressure on Walmart and other retailers to compete.

The Awws are unaware of this reality because they see only immediate effects. They’re oblivious to the indescribable complexity and unfathomable interrelatedness of modern economic phenomena. The Awestruck – being, well, struck with awe at this complexity and interrelatedness – know that the simplistic schemes favored by the Awws are destined to have ill consequences that would almost certainly outweigh whatever benefits these schemes might produce.

But despite being warned by the Awestruck, the Awws remain clueless. Stubbornly clinging to the belief that economic reality is really quite simple – that economic reality is certainly not awe-inspiring – the Awws then naturally cling also to the belief that economic reality can easily be engineered to suit their fancies.

The Awestruck, meanwhile, remain awestruck at the Awws’s naivety.

Climate Alarmists wrong again – Arctic sea ice: the canary in the coal mine

 Greg Goodman at judithcurry.com.

The moral of this story and lots of others is that the Climate Alarmists are just that.

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With over a decade and a half since the IPCC AR4, it is  instructive to see how the “run away melting” of Arctic sea ice is progressing.

Mass media outlets have been paying little attention to Arctic sea ice in recent years apart from cries of alarm at carefully selected low points in the record. After much excitement and breathless claims of imminent “ice-free summers” in the Arctic starting around and inspired by the release of IPCC’s AR4 in 2007, we were told that Arctic sea ice was “the canary in the coal mine”, the harbinger of the catastrophic changes happening to the climate system and caused by human actions.

Fortunately for the purveyors of this point of view, 2007 experienced the lowest summer sea ice extent in the relatively short satellite record. Worse, after a few years of mild recovery, we witnessed the OMG minimum of 2012. Media spin went into over-drive with claims it was “worse than we thought”, and claims from activist-scientists that the Arctic was in a “death spiral”.[1]

Now with over a decade and a half since AR4 it would be instructive to see how the “run away melting” is progressing. To check in on our canary and see whether it has fallen from its perch and is lying in the saw-dust with its stiff little legs sadly pointing towards the heavens.

NSIDC maintains a very instructive and useful interactive graph [5], allowing display of any selected years from the satellite record on a day by day basis . They also publish the ice extent data for each day of the 45 year record in text format, as well as the date and magnitude of minimum ice extent each year.

Since the September minimum is the most volatile this became a favourite metric and was a regular media climate highlight each September. In 2007 Al Gore was famously saying (unnamed) scientists had told him there may be no more Arctic ice at all in summer by as early as 2013.

Climatologists frequently explain the idea of the “albedo feedback” whereby less ice leads to more solar energy entering the sea, causing warmer waters, more ice melting, more solar … and a “tipping point” being reached where irreversible, run-away melting would occur. This explanation, while plausible, is of a naive simplicity and does not even examine what other effects more open water may have and what other feedbacks, positive or negative, may come into play.

• More conductive heat loss since the ice was a good insulating barrier.
• More evaporative heat loss due to more open water exposed to persistently strong Arctic winds.
• More radiative heat loss, since water has a high emissivity in the infra-red and will be radiating more 24/7 throughout the summer and continuing into the winter when the Arctic is in permanent darkness and there is zero incident sunlight.

Even in the summer months, the little sunlight there is arrives at very low incident angles and a high proportion is reflected not absorbed at all. This weakens the supposed albedo feedback. It seems this has not been measured or quantified in place. It remains speculative but is somehow expected/assumed to be a dominant factor in the changing polar climate.

So what does the 45 years of daily satellite data tell us?

Figure 1. Arctic sea ice extent ( areas with less than 15% ice coverage ). 

We can see that in 2007 and even up until 2012, the reduction in sea ice extent was indeed reducing significantly and at an accelerating rate. A quadratic function, corresponding to a constantly increasing rate of melting, did provide a reasonably good fit to the date from around 1995. This does not prove that AGW was the cause of that change but it did at least seem a reasonable hypothesis which merited proper investigation. Instead this was taken as a self-evident truth which did not require any proof.

Had that indeed been the case there would have been no summer ice by around 2023/24. However, as the subsequent record now tells us, this simplistic interpretation no longer fits the observed data and therefore is formally rebutted. Not to recognise this would be “science denial” or to display a “flat-earther” mentality. It may even constitute “climate change denial” !

With 16 years more data under our belts, we see a very different outcome. The 2023 sea ice minimum on 18/19 September was indistinguishable from that of 2007 when all the hysterical screaming began. ZERO net change in 17 years. The linear trend since 2007 is indistinguishable from zero ( around -0.17% per year ). Sadly, virtually no one seems to be aware of this GOOD NEWS because there is a stony silence from the media who steadfastly avoid mentioning it and climatologists who prefer to divert the discussion elsewhere : ice maximum, Antarctic sea ice, calving glaciers …. anything but canaries !!

At best we are told the lowest 17y on record are the last 17y, without also being told that period shows no net change.[2] Or we are told sea ice IS shrinking implying it is still happening. The grammatically a falsehood and at best wilful misdirection. eg. NASA Vital signs: “Key Takeaway: Summer Arctic sea ice extent is shrinking by 12.3% per decade due to warmer temperatures.”[3] Climate science seems to have moved from “Hide the decline” to “Hide the lack of decline” !

Regime change
Sumatra et al 2023 [4] Determines that there has been a regime change in the Artic since 2007 witnessed by the thickness and character of ice flow through the Fram Straight.

“Here we show that the Arctic sea ice regime shifted in 2007 from thicker and deformed to thinner and more uniform ice cover. Continuous sea ice monitoring in the Fram Strait over the last three decades revealed the shift.”

Figure 2.

Analysis of year-to-year variation in the date of the summer sea ice minimum also shows a distinct change around 2007 from a trend to later date of minimum ice from 1987-2007 to a trend to earlier minima from 2007-2017. This jumped to later dates close to 2007 timing in recent years. There is a strong biannual (circa 2y) component throughout the record. There may also be indications of the repetition of a 30y cycle here but the dataset is too short for a clear determination of such a pattern.

Figure 3.

Derivation of this result is shown here:
https://climategrog.wordpress.com/arctic-min-dates/
With a more detailed discussion here:
https://climategrog.wordpress.com/category/periodic-analysis/

Conclusion

The detailed daily satellite data of sea ice extent provides the basis for extended study to understand the variation and forces driving change. Sadly much of the discussion seems based on drawing a straight line through the entire dataset and reducing it to single scalar value: the “trend”, which is instantly, and spuriously, attributed to the monotonic rise in atmospheric CO2. This is lazy and convenient but not scientific. The rich granularity of 45y of daily data shows the variation is anything but monotonic and that other factors and feedbacks are at play.

More serious analysis is necessary to determine the extent that long term temperature rise is contributing to change, what feedbacks ( both positive and negative ) are at play and what this tells us about long term change. Trivial “trend” fitting is clearly grossly inadequate to understand the cryosphere and inform energy policy consequences and adaptation measures.

More honest reporting is required from media outlets, climate scientists and government bodies about the true nature of change, good news as well as bad, instead of highly selective reporting or misreporting to build an alarmist narrative.

Association between newer glucose-lowering drugs and risk of Parkinson’s dis-ease

 Here is a link to the paper.

In hypothesis testing, the null hypothesis (typically, no association or no effectiveness) is rejected at a chosen level of statistical significance (often 5%). It works roughly like this:

• Choose a null hypothesis (e.d., no association or no effectiveness).
• Compute the expected outcome of the experiment assuming the null hypothesis is true.
• Compare the outcome of the experiment with the expected value under the null hypothesis.
• Compute the probability of observing an outcome at leasst as extreme in difference under the null hypothesis.
• If the probability is les than the chosen level of statistical significance, reject the null hypothesis. Otherwise accept the null hypothesis.

The computed probability is done in a way that reflects sample size. So, no sample size qualification is necessary (given all the requirements of the statistical theory). This suggests that the qualification at the end of the excerpts reflects a misunderstanding of statistics or a belief that the requirements of applying their statistical methods are not met. Of course, if it is the latter, all bets are off.

Here are some excerpts.

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Meta-analysis of Association between Newer Glucose-Lowering Drugs and Risk of Parkinson's Disease

Background

The association between newer classes of glucose-lowering drugs (GLDs) and the risk of Parkinson's disease (PD) remains unclear.

Objective

The aim was to examine the effect of newer GLDs on the risk of PD through a meta-analysis of randomized outcome trials.

Methods

The methods included randomized placebo-controlled outcome trials that reported PD events associated with three newer classes of GLDs (ie, dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitors, glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, and sodium-glucose co-transporter-2 inhibitors) in participants with or without type 2 diabetes. The pooled odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) were estimated using Peto's method.

Results

The study included 24 trials involving 33 PD cases among 185,305 participants during a median follow-up of 2.2 years. Newer GLDs were significantly associated with a lower PD risk (OR: 0.50; 95% CI: 0.25–0.98) than placebo.

Conclusion

Newer GLDs may possibly be associated with a decreased risk of PD; however, larger datasets are required to confirm or refute this notion.

When civilians have guns – the Kibbutz that won

David Cloud at the Wall Street Journal.

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When Hamas Attacked, This Israeli Kibbutz Fought Back and Won

At 6:56 a.m. on Oct. 7, Moshe Kaplan sent an urgent alert to his volunteer security force in Mefalsim, a kibbutz of 1,000 men, women and children in southern Israel where he served as security chief.

“There’s a shooting in the village from the gate!” he texted after militants fired at his car as he drove past the main entrance. Attackers later blew open a pedestrian gate nearby with explosives and flooded into the kibbutz.


Kaplan rushed home to grab his armored vest, helmet and M16 rifle, then drove off to check another gate on the northwest corner. There he found armed men were already inside the razor-wire security fence that encircled the community.

“Terrorists in the kibbutz! Terrorists in the kibbutz!” he yelled in a second, panicked voice text, begging his men to hurry. Gunshots sounded in the background. He had trained a dozen men for this moment, a surprise attack from nearby Gaza. Yet 19 minutes after his first alert, none had arrived.

Kaplan left his car and shot at assailants from behind a metal garbage container. One lobbed a hand grenade at him. In a stroke of luck for him and Mefalsim, it didn’t explode.

More than two dozen Hamas fighters from Gaza had arrived with orders to subdue the small security force and herd hostages into the community dining hall. They carried a detailed map of the kibbutz and, like other assault teams in southern Israel that morning, an attack plan labeled “top secret.”

Mefalsim was one place that day where nothing for the Hamas attackers went according to plan.

Soon after Kaplan’s call for help, his volunteers rushed from their homes in helmets and protective vests worn over the T-shirts they had slept in, toting M16 rifles. Outnumbered and fighting alone or in pairs, the men mounted a life-or-death stand, communicating via walkie-talkie and WhatsApp texts to track the militants and send each other help.

They believed they had to hold off the insurgents long enough for the Israeli army to arrive. At first, they hoped the soldiers would be there quickly. But as minutes passed, and the fighting grew worse, they realized they would have to fight alone.

“Where are the tanks?” Yarden Reskin, a 38-year-old landscape architect and security volunteer yelled into his walkie-talkie as the bullets flew. “It became very, very apparent that they weren’t coming,” he said later.

Palestinian gunmen who flooded out of Gaza killed 1,400 Israelis and took close to 200 hostages, terrorizing and shooting people at more than 20 Israeli towns and military bases and thousands at an all-night music festival not far from Mefalsim.

In town after town, attackers blasted through security fences that encircled Israeli villages near Gaza, gunning down residents, burning houses with families inside and taking hostages.

Bodies and the burned-up cars of people fleeing the music festival, an early target, were later found outside Mefalsim’s main gate.

Frightened families at the kibbutz, a 200-acre, close-knit community with farm fields and tree-lined streets, took refuge in home shelters, some watching accounts of assaults in nearby towns on phones and TVs. They heard heavy gunfire just outside.

“We didn’t know what all the shooting meant,” said Gil Levi, 17, who was home with her mother, Inbal, younger brother Noam Levi and boyfriend, Ofir Itamari. Her father, Eli Levi, had told them not to come out of the shelter, no matter what.

He was in the living room standing watch through the plate-glass window, facing the southern fence of the kibbutz and the fields that stretched beyond.

When Levi saw militants heading toward the fence, he shot his M16 through the window. All his family could hear inside the shelter was the sound of gunfire.

“Were the terrorists inside the house?” Gil Levi recalled thinking.

Gil’s boyfriend handed her a souvenir Japanese knife he had found in the shelter and a pair of scissors to her mother, in case they had to fight off the intruders themselves.
‘One against four’

The night before the attack on Mefalsim, around 30 families had spent the night camping in an olive grove outside the gate. It was an annual community outing on the last night of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.

In the morning, around 6:30 a.m., sirens warned of incoming rockets from Gaza, a wail so common in local communities that even children treated it as routine.

When Shaked Porat, 43, heard the sirens at the campsite, he roused his two sleeping children—a 10-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son—and quickly drove home, entering through a back gate. At home, the children joined Porat’s wife and their 12-year-old son in the family’s shelter. Porat listened to the urgent voice text from Kaplan about gunmen at the northwest gate. His phone showed the battery at 10%.

Porat, an Israeli army veteran and one of the volunteers in Mefalsim’s security force, ran out his door with an M16 and hustled to a street lined with houses on one side and a kibbutz gate on the other. About 40 yards away, he saw four armed men in vests and black jeans.

Thinking he recognized one of them, he called out, “Sasi!” the Hebrew nickname of another member of the volunteer force. “Ta’al,” one of them responded, meaning “Come here” in Arabic. Porat realized they were militants and started shooting. Two of the armed men ran toward nearby houses for cover. Two others hid behind a parked car.

Porat, who had been in firefights as a soldier, ducked into a small concrete enclosure for trash cans. “It’s a very lonely feeling,” he said later, “especially when you are one against four.”

A resident who watched the exchange of gunfire from an upstairs window yelled a warning to Porat: “They are throwing grenades!” Porat ducked and escaped injury. When one of the militants ran from a yard into the open, Porat shot him.

A second attacker raised his head from behind the car, and Porat said he shot him, too. He saw a third gunman running away. The fourth attacker disappeared, said Porat, who stayed put for the next hour, guarding the kibbutz gate to keep out any others.

Photos taken later showed two dead men, one on the sidewalk and one in the street.
Trapped

Video from a security camera at the main gate of Mefalsim captured some of the carnage that took place outside the main gate of the kibbutz as people fled the outdoor music festival and tried desperately to get inside, pursued by militants. A man in a white shirt was shot as he ran toward the entrance. He grabbed his right arm and dropped to the pavement, blood spilling from around his head.

Armed fighters emerged from a wooded area minutes later. Several ran to the fallen man and shot him again. Drivers who abandoned cars to hide in the bushes were attacked with grenades. A person pulled from the bushes was shot and bludgeoned with a rifle butt. The video was posted by South First Responders, a group of emergency personnel working in southern Israel, and verified by The Wall Street Journal.

After militants blew open the entrance at the kibbutz gate and streamed inside, Kaplan kept on the move, worried residents would leave their houses into danger.

“Someone send out a message to stay in the houses and not come out,” Kaplan said in a WhatsApp voice message, breathing heavily. “Emergency task force come to me! Emergency task force come to me! They are splitting up.” Shots cracked in the background.

Over the next hour, there were several gunfights. Security volunteers hunted for the militants who were moving alone and in pairs on residential streets. Two attackers were killed in the garden of a house by four Israeli soldiers who were home on a weekend leave. Two of the soldiers suffered minor wounds from grenade fragments.

Reskin, the landscape architect, came within sight of the main gate and saw a large group of attackers exchanging what looked like congratulations. He fired and they scattered. He next went into a nearby residential neighborhood and joined Idan Mayrovich, the team’s medic. As they walked, they saw Idan Kadosh, a resident, shooting with a handgun from his window, and he joined their patrol.

Two militants walked in front of an elderly woman’s house with their rifles on their shoulders, one holding a stolen children’s bike. Before the attackers saw the three defenders, Reskin fired and they ran.

A militant driving a stolen forklift was headed for the main gate, apparently intending to stack cars there and block an expected counterattack by the Israeli army. Reskin said he shot at the forklift, and the driver abandoned the vehicle.

Another group of militants made their way to a dormitory for foreign workers employed in the kibbutz’s farm operations. A dozen Thai workers hiding there were loaded at gunpoint onto a wagon pulled by a tractor that steered toward the front gate.

They were intercepted by the security volunteers. One of the kibbutz defenders shot at the wagon, and the militants fled, leaving the workers behind.
Last stand

Almost an hour after the battle erupted by the front gate, the fighting shifted to Mefalsim’s southern perimeter.

David “Didi” Rosenberg, a member of the volunteer force, stood on his second-floor balcony where he kept watch on Mefalsim’s southeast fence, armed with his M16. His wife, who was in the home’s shelter with their two children, texted him, “I’m scared.” He suggested games to play with the kids.

Rosenberg, whose balcony overlooks the fence, reported over his walkie-talkie that a truck carrying a dozen armed men and a motorcycle ferrying two gunmen were roaring across an open field toward the fence.

Levi, 48, the head of security and emergency management for Intel in Israel, had also been watching the southern perimeter through his living-room window, and he saw the attackers when they were about 100 yards away.

Levi, a former Israeli soldier, said he froze for a few seconds, thinking of the danger to his family. Then he heard Rosenberg, a few houses away, open fire, prompting Levi to start shooting at the attackers from his living-room window.

Noam Kazaz, 52, who had evacuated with his family to the house of another kibbutz resident shortly after his own was hit by a rocket, called Rosenberg. “We will die on the fence. No one is entering the kibbutz,” he recalled saying before he opened fire.

The three volunteers hadn’t trained to shoot at such a far range. But their heavy gunfire prompted the motorcycle driver to turn around. The men riding on the truck jumped off and flattened on the ground. Levi thought he could see several had been hit.

They kept shooting for the next 90 minutes—until Israeli soldiers arrived at Levi’s house. “I’m from the squad, I’m from the squad,” Levi yelled to the soldiers. “I’m an Israeli. Please don’t shoot me.” Then he went into the shelter and hugged his family. Instead of staying amid the shattered glass in their living room, they went to Rosenberg’s house for the comfort of being with neighbors.

Israeli soldiers spent the following three days going house to house, looking for any attackers who might be still hiding on the kibbutz. The bodies of eight militants were recovered, one resident said. Two more were killed after troops found them hiding in a cow shed. Another was captured, and the rest were driven off.

No Mefalsim residents were killed or taken hostage, protected by a dozen residents, many of them former Israeli soldiers, who had prepared for years to defend the kibbutz.

Mefalsim also got lucky. Although the defenders didn’t know exactly how many attackers infiltrated the kibbutz, they estimated it was probably around 25 to 30, a group smaller than those that attacked other local communities, which suffered far more casualties.

Residents departed after the battle, many of them relocating to a beachfront hotel north of Tel Aviv. Mefalsim has been declared a military zone and is closed. Most of the residents say they will return and rebuild their home.

“There is a feeling of discomfort that we survived, and others did not,” security chief Kaplan said.

But Mefalsim, at least, had survived.

Did gun laws increase the death toll in Israel

 John Lott at the Washington Times.

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Dr. John Lott has a new op-ed piece at the Washington Times. By the way, there was a kibbutz where civilians were armed and they were able to hold of the terrorist attack.

At the Washington Times: Second Amendment matters in a time of crisis: The importance of good guys with guns

Hamas attacked as Israelis were wrapping up the seven-day-long Jewish festival of Sukkot on October 7th. As many as 1,200 Israelis and some Americans were murdered, thousands wounded, and hundreds more taken hostage. Hamas terrorists went into civilian areas and attacked defenseless people who were walking down the street or shopping in stores.

A Sept. 20 Jerusalem Post headline prophetically warned: “Israelis should carry guns on Yom Kippur, police say.” But as of 2022, only 148,000 Israelis carried permitted guns in public for protection – just 3% of the adult, Jewish population. Twenty years earlier, more than 10% of adult Jews had permits.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid called the recent police statement “dangerous.” He echoed sentiments common among Democrats in the United States: “Calling the citizens of Israel to come with weapons to the synagogue on Yom Kippur is not a security policy, it is dangerous populism.”

Concealed carry is now much more widespread in the United States than in Israel. In 2022, 8.5% of American adults had permits. Outside of the restrictive states of California and New York, about 10.2% of adults had permits. And these numbers don’t even account for the fact that there are now 27 Constitutional Carry states where it isn’t necessary to have a permit to carry.

California, with one of the lowest concealed handgun permit rates and the strictest gun control laws in the country, shouldn’t hold itself out as a model for the rest of the country to follow. The periods after 2000, 2010, or 2020 show a consistent pattern: California’s per capita rate of mass public shootings is always much greater than in the rest of the country.

On Sunday, the day after the attack, Israel radically changed its policy on who could carry guns publicly. “Today I directed the Firearms Licensing Division to go on an emergency operation in order to allow as many citizens as possible to arm themselves. The plan will take effect within 24 hours,” Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir posted on X.

In response to terrorist attacks for decades, Israel put more police and military to protect people, but they found that no matter how much money they spent, they couldn’t cover all the possible targets. Before Israel then began letting civilians carry handguns in the 1970s, terrorists committed attacks in Israel almost entirely with machine guns. Afterward, terrorists usually used bombs. The reason was simple: armed citizens can quickly immobilize a gun-wielding attacker, but no one can respond to a bomber once the bomb explodes. Still, armed citizens have occasionally succeeded in preventing bombings.

Like their Israeli counterparts, American police recognize their own limitations. “A deputy in uniform has an extremely difficult job in stopping these attacks,” noted Sarasota County, Florida, Sheriff Kurt Hoffman. “These terrorists have huge strategic advantages in determining the time and place of attacks. They can wait for a deputy to leave the area or pick an undefended location. Even when police or deputies are in the right place at the right time, those in uniform who can readily identify as guards may as well be holding up neon signs saying, ‘Shoot me first.’ My deputies know that we cannot be everywhere.”

Police1, the largest private organization for police officers with 749,000 officers, surveyed its members and found that eighty-six percent of them believed that casualties from mass public school shootings could be reduced or “avoided altogether” if citizens had carried permitted concealed handguns in public places. An incredible ninety-four percent of mass public shootings occur in places where civilians are banned from having guns.

Seventy-seven percent of Police1 members supported “arming teachers and/or school administrators who volunteer to carry at their school.” No other policy to protect children and school staff received such widespread support.

When a life-threatening crisis strikes, there might not be time for police to arrive. Amidst such a sudden and massive assault by Hamas, it was simply impossible for Israeli police and military to protect all civilians.

Unfortunately, some lessons are learned the hard way. If only more Israelis had been armed at the time of the attack, more of them would be alive today.

Echoes of Electromagnetism Found in Number Theory

 At www.quantamagazine.org

I needed a little humility, so I read this. Now I need an improved self-image.

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In 2018, as he prepared to be awarded the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor, Akshay Venkatesh carried a piece of paper in his pocket. On it, he had written a table of mathematical expressions that for centuries have played a key role in number theory.

Though the expressions had featured prominently in Venkatesh’s own research over the last decade, he carried them around not as a memento of what he’d accomplished, but as a reminder of something he still didn’t understand.

The columns of the table were filled with cryptic-looking mathematical expressions: On the far left were objects called periods, and on the right, objects called L-functions, which might be the key to answering some of the most important questions in modern mathematics. The table suggested some kind of relationship between the two. In a 2012 book with Yiannis Sakellaridis of Johns Hopkins University, Venkatesh had worked out one direction of it: If they were handed a period, they could determine whether it had an associated L-function.

But they couldn’t yet understand the relationship in reverse. It was impossible to predict whether a given L-function had a matching period. When they looked at L-functions, they largely saw disorder.

That’s why Venkatesh kept the paper in his pocket. He hoped that if he stared at the list long enough, the common traits in this seemingly random collection of L-functions would become clear to him. After a year of toting it around, they hadn’t.

“I couldn’t understand what the principle behind this table was,” he said.

2018 was a big year for Venkatesh in more ways than one. In addition to receiving the Fields Medal, he also moved from Stanford University, where he’d been for the previous decade, to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

He and Sakellaridis also started talking with David Ben-Zvi, a mathematician at the University of Texas, Austin who was spending the semester at the institute. Ben-Zvi had built his career in a parallel area of math, investigating the same kinds of questions about numbers that Sakellaridis and Venkatesh were interested in, but from a geometric point of view. When he heard Venkatesh give a talk about this mystery table he carried with him everywhere, Ben-Zvi almost immediately began to see a new way to make periods and L-functions communicate with each other.

That moment of recognition instigated a multiyear collaboration that came to fruition this past July, when Ben-Zvi, Sakellaridis and Venkatesh posted a 451-page manuscript. The paper creates a two-way translation between periods and L-functions by recasting periods and L-functions in terms of a pair of geometric spaces used to study basic questions in physics.

In doing so, it makes progress on a long-held dream within a sweeping research initiative in mathematics called the Langlands program. Mathematicians working on questions in the program seek to build bridges between disparate areas to show how advanced forms of calculus (where periods originate) can be used to answer fundamental open questions in number theory (the home of L-functions), or how geometry can be brought to bear on basic questions in arithmetic.

They hope that once those bridges are established, techniques can be ported from one area of math to another in order to answer important questions that seem intractable within their own domains.

The new paper is one of the first to link the geometric and arithmetic sides of the program, which for decades have advanced largely in isolation from each other. By creating this link, and effectively enlarging the scope of the Langlands program as it was originally conceived, the new paper provides a single conceptual framework for a slew of mathematical connections.

“It unifies a lot of previous disparate-looking phenomena, and that’s always a happy thing for mathematicians,” said Minhyong Kim, director of the International Center for Mathematical Sciences in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Only Connect

The Langlands program was initiated by Robert Langlands, now a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study. It started in 1967 as a 17-page handwritten letter from Langlands, then a young professor at Princeton University, to Andre Weil, who was one of the best-known mathematicians in the world. Langlands proposed that there should be a way of pairing important objects from calculus called automorphic forms with objects from algebra called Galois groups. Automorphic forms are a generalization of periodic functions like the sine in trigonometry, whose outputs endlessly repeat as inputs grow. Galois groups are mathematical objects that describe how entities called fields (like the real or rational numbers) change when they are extended with new elements.

Pairings like that between automorphic forms and Galois groups are called dualities. They suggest that different classes of objects mirror each other, which allows mathematicians to study either one in terms of the other.

Generations of mathematicians have worked to prove the existence of Langlands’ hypothesized duality. Though they have only managed to establish it for limited cases, even those limited cases have often yielded spectacular results. For example, in 1994, when Andrew Wiles showed that Langlands’ proposed duality holds for a particular class of examples, the result was his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, among the most celebrated results in the history of mathematics.

As mathematicians have pursued the Langlands program, they have also expanded it in many directions.

One such line has been to study dualities between arithmetic objects that are related to, but distinct from, the ones Langlands was interested in. In their 2012 book, Sakellaridis and Venkatesh studied a duality between periods, which are closely related to automorphic forms, and L-functions, which are infinite sums that attach to Galois groups. From a mathematical point of view, periods and L-functions are entirely different species of objects with no obvious common traits.

Periods emerged as objects of mathematical interest in the work of Erich Hecke in the 1930s.

L-functions are infinite sums that have been used since the work of Leonhard Euler in the mid-18th century to investigate basic questions about numbers. The most famous L-function, the Riemann zeta function, is at the heart of the Riemann hypothesis, which can be viewed as a prediction about how prime numbers are distributed. The Riemann hypothesis is arguably the most important unsolved problem in math.

Langlands was aware of possible connections between L-functions and periods, but he viewed them as a secondary matter in his scheme of joining different areas of math.

“In one paper, [Langlands] considered this study of periods and L-functions as something not worth studying,” Sakellaridis said.
Welcome to the Machine

Though Robert Langlands did not emphasize the connection between periods and L-functions, Sakellaridis and Venkatesh viewed them as central to broadening and deepening the connections between seemingly distant areas of mathematics that Langlands had proposed.

In their 2012 book, they developed a machine of sorts, which took a period as an input, performed a long computation, and output an L-function. Not all periods produce corresponding L-functions, though, and the main theoretical advance of their book was to understand which ones do. (This built on earlier work by Atsushi Ichino and Tamotsu Ikeda at Kyoto University.)

But their approach had two limitations. First, it did not explain why a given period yields a given L-function. The machine that turned one into the other was a black box. It was as if they’d constructed a vending machine that often reliably yielded something to eat each time you put in money, only there was no telling what it would be in advance, or if the machine would eat the money without dispensing a snack.

For any given case, you’d put in your money — your period — then “go and do a long computation and see which among a zoo of L-functions you got,” Venkatesh said.

The second thing they didn’t manage to accomplish in their book was to come to an understanding of which L-functions have associated periods. Some do. Others don’t. They couldn’t figure out why.

They kept working after the book came out, trying to figure out why the connection worked and how to run the machine in both directions — not only getting an L-function from a period, but also the other way around.

In other words, they wanted to know that if they put $1.50 into the vending machine, it meant they were going to get a bag of Cheetos. Moreover, they wanted to be able to tell that if they were holding a bag of Cheetos, it meant they’d put $1.50 into the vending machine.

Because they link objects that, on their face, have nothing in common, dualities are powerful. You could stare at a lineup of mathematical objects forever and not perceive how L-functions and periods match up.

“The way they are defined and given, this period and L-function, there’s no obvious relation,” said Wee Teck Gan of the National University of Singapore.

To translate between superficially incommensurate things, you need to find common ground. One way to do that for objects like L-functions and periods, which originate in number theory, is to associate them with geometric objects.

To take a toy example, imagine you have a triangle. Measure the length of each side, and you can produce a set of numbers that tells you how to write down an L-function. Look at another triangle, and rather than the lengths, look at the three interior angles — you can use those angles to define a period. So instead of comparing L-functions and periods directly, you can compare their associated triangles. The triangles can be said to “index” the L-functions and periods — if a period matches with a triangle with certain angles, then the lengths of that triangle match up with a corresponding L-function.

“This period and L-function, there’s no obvious relation in the way they’re given to you. So the point was, however, if you could understand each of them in another way, a different way … you [might] find they are very comparable,” Gan said.

In their 2012 book, Sakellaridis and Venkatesh achieved some of this translation. They found a satisfactory way to index periods using a certain type of geometric object. But they couldn’t find a similar way to think about L-functions.

Ben-Zvi thought he could.
Maxwell’s Dual Hammer

While Sakellaridis and Venkatesh’s work was slightly to the side of Langlands’ vision, Ben-Zvi worked in an area of math that was in a whole different universe — a geometric version of the Langlands program.

The geometric Langlands program began in the early 1980s when Vladimir Drinfeld and Alexander Beilinson suggested a kind of second-order duality. Drinfeld and Beilinson proposed that Langlands’ duality between Galois groups and automorphic forms could be interpreted as an analogous duality between two kinds of geometric objects. But when Ben-Zvi began working in the geometric Langlands program as a graduate student at Harvard University in the 1990s, the link between the geometric and original Langlands programs was somewhat aspirational.

“When geometric Langlands was first introduced, it was a sequence of psychological steps to get from the [original] Langlands program to this [geometric] statement that felt like a different beast,” Ben-Zvi said.

By 2018, when Ben-Zvi had a sabbatical year at the Institute for Advanced Study, the two sides had inched closer together, most notably in work released that same year by Vincent Lafforgue, a researcher at the Fourier Institute in Grenoble. Still, Ben-Zvi planned to use his 2018 sabbatical visit to the IAS for research squarely on the geometric side of the Langlands program. His plan was disrupted when he went to listen to a talk by Venkatesh.

“My son and Akshay’s daughter were playmates, and we were friends socially, and I thought I should go to some of the talks Akshay gave at the beginning of the semester,” Ben-Zvi said.

At one of those early talks, Venkatesh explained the need to find a type of geometric object that could index both periods and L-functions, and he described some of his recent progress in that direction. It involved trying to use geometric spaces from an area of math called symplectic geometry, which Ben-Zvi was familiar with from his work in the geometric Langlands program.

“[Akshay and Yiannis] had been pushing in a direction where they’d started to see things in symplectic geometry, and that rang various bells for me,” Ben-Zvi said.

The next step came from physics.

For decades, physicists and mathematicians have used dualities to come up with new descriptions of how the forces of nature work. The first and most famous example comes from Maxwell’s equations, first written down in the late 19th century, which connect electric and magnetic fields. The equations describe how a changing electric field creates a magnetic field, and how a changing magnetic field in turn creates an electric field. They can jointly be described as a single electromagnetic field. In a vacuum, “these equations have this wonderful symmetry,” Ben-Zvi said. Mathematically, electricity and magnetism can switch places without changing the behavior of the joint electromagnetic field.

Sometimes researchers take inspiration from physics to prove purely mathematical results. For example, in a 2008 paper, the physicists Davide Gaiotto and Edward Witten showed how geometric spaces related to quantum field theories of electromagnetism fit into the geometric Langlands program. These spaces come in pairs, one for each side of the electromagnetic duality: Hamiltonian G-spaces and their dual: Hamiltonian Ğ-spaces (pronounced G-hat spaces).

Ben-Zvi had absorbed the Gaiotto-Witten paper when it came out, and he had used the physics framework they provided to think about questions in geometric Langlands. But that work — let alone the physics paper that helped motivate it — had no connection at all to the original Langlands program.

That is, until Ben-Zvi found himself in the audience at the IAS listening to Venkatesh. He heard Venkatesh explain that following their 2012 book, he and Sakellaridis had come to believe that the correct geometric way to think about periods was in terms of Hamiltonian G-spaces. But Venkatesh allowed that they didn’t know what kind of geometric object to pair with L-functions.

That set off bells for Ben-Zvi. Once Sakellaridis and Venkatesh had connected periods with Hamiltonian G-spaces, it became immediately clear what the dual geometric objects for L-functions should be: those Ğ-spaces that Gaiotto and Witten had said were the dual of G-spaces. For Ben-Zvi, all these dualities, between arithmetic, geometry and physics, seemed to be converging. Even though he didn’t understand all the number theory, he was convinced it was all part of “one big, beautiful picture.”
To G or Not to Ğ

In the spring of 2018, Ben-Zvi, Sakellaridis and Venkatesh met regularly at the restaurant on the campus of the Institute for Advanced Study; over the course of a couple months they worked out how to interpret data extracted from L-functions as a recipe for constructing Hamiltonian Ğ-spaces. In the picture they established, the duality between periods and L-functions translates into a geometric duality that makes sense within the geometric Langlands program and originates in the duality between electricity and magnetism. Physics and arithmetic become echoes of each other, in a way that echoes across the Langlands program.

“You might say that the original Langlands setting is now a special case of this new framework,” Gan said.

By unifying disparate phenomena, the three mathematicians have brought some of the order that’s intrinsic to the relationship between electricity and magnetism to the relationship between periods and L-functions.

“The physics interpretation of the geometric Langlands correspondence makes it much more natural; it fits into this general picture of dualities,” Kim said. “In a way, what [this new work is] doing is a way towards interpreting the arithmetic correspondence using the same kind of language.”

The work has limitations. In particular, the three mathematicians prove the duality between periods and L-functions over number systems that arise in geometry called function fields, rather than over number fields — like the real numbers — which are the true home of the Langlands program.

“The basic picture is meant to go over number fields. I think all this will eventually be developed for number fields,” Venkatesh said.

Even over function fields, the work brings order to the relationship between periods and L-functions. For the months that Venkatesh carried around a printout in his pocket, he and Sakellaridis had no idea why those L-functions should be the ones that are associated with periods. Now the relationship makes sense in both directions. They can translate freely across it using a common language.

“I’ve known all these periods and I’ve suddenly learned I can turn each one around and it turns into another one I also knew. It’s a very shocking realization,” Venkatesh said.

Hamas and amoral clarity

 Victor Davis Hanson is on target.

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One unexpected blowback from the medieval Hamas's barbaric murdering of hundreds of Israeli civilians is the revelation of current global amorality.

More than 20 Harvard university identity politics groups pledged their support to the Hamas murderers — to the utter silence for days of Harvard President Claudine Gay.

Americans knew higher education practiced racist admission policies. It has long promoted racially segregated dorms and graduations. And de facto it has destroyed the First Amendment.

But the overt support for Hamas killers by the diversity, equity, and inclusion crowd on a lot of campuses exposes to Americans the real moral and intellectual rot in higher education.

Democratic Socialist members of the new woke Democrat Party openly expressed ecstatic support for Hamas's bloodwork.

Their biggest fears were not dead fellow Americans or hostages, or some 1,000 butchered Jewish civilians. Instead they were fearful that righteous Israeli retaliation might destroy the Hamas death machine.

Palestinians for years fooled naïfs in Europe and the Obama and Biden administrations into sending billions of dollars into Gaza.

These monies were channeled to tunnel into Israel, to obtain a huge rocket arsenal, and to craft plans to wipe out Jews.

The Biden administration has blood on its hands.

As soon as President Joe Biden took power, he resumed massive subsidies to radical Palestinians, canceled by the prior Trump administration.

He ignored warnings from his own state Department that such fungible moneys would soon fuel Hamas terrorism.

His administration dropped sanctions against Iran, ensuring that Tehran would enjoy a multi-billion-dollar windfall to be distributed to Israel's existential enemies — another fact well known to the Biden administration.

If the Biden administration had announced overtly that it was rabidly anti-Israel, it would be hard to imagine anything it could have done differently from its present nihilist behavior.

Biden and company quickly restarted the defunct Iran appeasement deal — a leftover from the anti-Israeli Obama administration. No surprise, they appointed radical pro-Iranian activist Robert Malley to head the negotiations.

Malley allegedly has leaked American classified documents to Iranian officials and is under investigation by the FBI. He did his best to place pro-Iranian, anti-American activists into the high echelons of the U.S. government.

Biden was intent on forcing South Korea to release to Iran $6 billion in sanctioned frozen money.

That expectation of cash ensured Iran would be reimbursed for its present terrorist arming spree.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken shamefully tweeted that Israel should settle for an immediate ceasefire. No wonder he soon withdrew his unhinged posting.

That idiocy would be the moral equivalent of an American ally in December 1941 urging the U.S. to seek negotiations with imperial Japan after its surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor — to avoid a "cycle of violence."

The Biden team has drained strategic arms stockpiles in Israel, designed to help the Jewish state in extremis.

It recklessly abandoned a multibillion-dollar arms trove in Kabul, some of which reportedly made its way from Taliban killers to the Hamas murderers.

Once the mass murdering started, the amoral clarity of our "allies" was stunning.

NATO partner Turkey openly sided with the killers. It — along with Blinken — called for a cease fire — at the moment the Hamas death squads had finished, and Israel was ready to hold Hamas to account.

Qatar, where the U.S. Central Command is based, proved little more than a Hamas front.

It offers sanctuary to the architects of Hamas killing. And Qatar ensures a safe financial pipeline to Hamas from Iran and the radical Arab world.

Some of the most vehement current supporters of the Hamas death squads were immigrants to America from the Middle East.

Oddly, they apparently had fled just such illiberal Middle East regimes to reach a tolerant, democratic, and secure United States.

Yet they now endorse the Hamas butchering of Jewish civilians. Its savagery is aimed at executing, raping, and beheading Jews, and then mutilating their bodies.

Hamas apparently hopes to shock the Israeli government into voluntarily committing suicide — in line with the ancient Hamas agenda to destroy the Jewish state.

In a strange way, this reign of death has become a touchstone, an acid test of sorts that has revealed the utter amorality of enemies abroad and quite dangerous people at home.

It is past time that Americans deal with the medieval world that was revealed this week rather than keep dreaming in the fantasy world of our government.

Americans need to stop illegal immigration and restore their southern border, while ceasing all immigration from unhinged, hostile nations.

The military must return to its deterrent role and fire its woke commissariat.

Our leaders must accept that in the last three years of the Biden administration, serial American appeasement abroad, disunity at home, and social chaos have encouraged an entire host of enemies — China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Middle East illiberal regimes, and former friends like Turkey and Qatar.

And our enemies dream of doing to us what we just saw in Israel.

The Impact of Public School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles’ Zone of Choice

 From the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Here is the link.

Here is the abstract.

A simple test of whether or not the Teachers' Union, and teachers' primary interest is helping students is whether they are for or against school choice and charter schools.

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Does a school district that expands school choice provide better outcomes for students than a neighborhood-based assignment system? This paper studies the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program, a school choice initiative of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left attendance zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study market-level impacts of choice on student achievement and college enrollment using a differences-in-differences design. Student outcomes in ZOC markets increased markedly, narrowing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. The effects of ZOC are larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel. Demand estimates suggest families place substantial weight on schools’ academic quality, providing schools with competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. The evidence demonstrates that public school choice programs have the potential to improve school quality and reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity.

Leon Panetta – Appearance is not a reliable indicator of trustworthiness

 Jonathan Turley is on target again.

A soft-spoken, seemingly sincere demeanor does not imply trustworthy.

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“Denial Ain’t Just a River in Egypt”: Panetta Repeats Debunked Russian Disinformation Claims on Laptop

Last night, many of us responded to the statement of Leon Panetta, former CIA Director in the Obama Administration, that he “has no regrets” about signing the now infamous letter of 51 former intelligence officials suggesting that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Even more unsettling was his comments that he believes it could still be Russian disinformation. It turns out that even with American intelligence, the media, and Hunter Biden himself acknowledging authenticity, it can still be Russian disinformation. Panetta has become the personification of the economic theory of path dependence. No matter how much countervailing evidence is presented to Panetta, he still refuses to accept the authenticity of the laptop.

In his interview on “Special Report,” Panetta was asked by Bret Baier if he had any regrets about signing the letter, which was then used by Joe Biden in the debate to avoid answering questions about influence peddling by his family (and a virtual blackout of coverage before the election).

Panetta insisted that he had no regrets and then added that he has seen no intelligence that would make him change his mind.

“You don’t think it was real?” Baier asked him.

Panetta responded “I think disinformation is involved here.”

This was the man in charge of our CIA.

Panetta simply refused to acknowledge (1) American intelligence quickly debunked the claim and said that there was no evidence of Russian disinformation behind the laptop, (2) the emails contained in the laptop were quickly authenticated by the other parties, (3) the FBI authenticated the laptop, (4) Hunter Biden has since sued over the use of his laptop, and (5) the media has independently authenticated the laptop.

It has also been shown that the Biden campaign and associates coordinated the letter.

It was then used by an enabling media as an excuse not to investigate or report on the contents. What is striking is that Panetta can not cite any basis to believe that it was Russian disinformation. The laptop details an influence peddling scheme by a family that has long been known for such corruption. More importantly, there was not a single fact cited in the letter (or now years later) that supported this claim. It was simply embarrassing to the Bidens before a close presidential election.

However, in order to admit to these facts, Panetta would have had to admit that he was a willing or unwitting dupe of the campaign. It is easier to simply continue to claim that this could all be the invention of the Russians. Yet, Panetta is still sought for his advice on other intelligence matters as he continues to repeat disproven claims because the truth is simply too costly on a personal level to acknowledge.

What do we call false claims that are repeated despite being repeatedly debunked and disproven? Oh, yea, disinformation.