Thursday Night Links

• One way to look at the Sexual Revolution is as a powerful poison designed to eradicate human beings like bacteria in a petri dish by interrupting their natural reproductive ecology. Like an antibiotic, if the dose is insufficient to uniformly kill the entire population, any surviving members become resistant. Dutton then simply identifies the two populations who have successfully resisted the poison: highly religious, intentionally fertile families who reject the Sexual Revolution explicitly, and those who lack the self-control or conscientiousness to make use of its technologies to prevent unintentional pregnancies. [The Tom File]
• The ability to resist leftist-induced dysphoria is the new crucible of evolution. Where once the crucible of evolution was child mortality it is now Woke morality. Where evolution was formerly selecting for resistance to genetically-based diseases, the emphasis has now switched to ‘memetically’ based diseases; ideological mind viruses that induce infertility in their nonimmune hosts. Those who resist leftist ideology, and its direct and indirect inducements not to procreate, are those who survive. In significant part, this will be those who are, for mainly genetic reasons, religious and conservative. [The Past is a Future Country]
• Nowadays, if I see a book that interests me, I always just buy it. The upside of interesting and useful new information vastly outweighs the downside of being out $20 or $30 dollars. Sometimes I buy books and they turn out to be uninteresting or fail to hold my attention. I place it in a pile. Every couple of months, once the stack reaches around 6-10 books, I’ll then donate them to a local used book seller. He allows me to trade them for 1 or 2 used books from the store. [Rob Henderson]
  
• Dorchester Minerals, L.P. (the “Partnership”) announced today the successful consummation of a notable lease transaction in the Midland Basin. On November 6, 2023, the Partnership leased 243 net acres in two tracts of land in Reagan County, Texas for $30,000 per acre and a 25% royalty. Additionally, the Partnership executed an amendment to an existing lease on two separate tracts of land also totaling 243 net acres in Reagan County, Texas for $18,750 per acre. The resulting payment of approximately $11.8 million will be included in the Partnership’s fourth quarter distribution to unitholders. [Dorchester Minerals, L.P.] 
  
• I was sent to Amarillo by BlimpDAO to find information about the auction of The National Helium Reserve. Who might buy it? For what price? Who will the buyer sell the helium to? Will China make a bid? What impacts will this have on efforts to bring blimps back? BlimpDAO is an Urbit-affiliated DAO. Nobody knows what either of these things are, and I’m not going to explain them now, but suffice to say both are Silicon Valley alt-darlings for similar reasons. Both seek to bring about a calmer, more pleasing, and more comfortable kind of human connection. Both work against the establishment by building networks of counter-elites. Both obsess over packets flying through the air. [Mogmet Tadnem]
• Air Products doesn’t want the system to be owned by a competitor or an unqualified operator, Kornbluth says. “On the other hand, they don’t want to buy it themselves, because it’s a messy, risky asset. The preferred state is the status quo.” The law doesn’t put a specific deadline on the sale of the government’s helium assets, so the system could run as is until the dome is empty, many in the industry argue. Proceeds from continued sale of the government’s helium stock could pay the operation’s bills until then. [Chemical & Engineering News]
• Some Tesla skeptics think that the S&P 500 selection committee can be talked out of adding Tesla to the index. I doubt it. The market cap is now $350 billion and growing. What are they going to do, not have a top ten (by market cap) company in the index? To exclude it on the basis of skepticism or suspicion would be an active choice of security selection. It would imply that the market could be hugely inefficient, that the entire philosophical predicate of indexation was wrong! No, the whole philosophy of the S&P 500 index is one of freeloading: the active participants in the market are supposed to set prices, which passive investors can then take as fair. So if the market says that Tesla is worth $350 billion, that is not something for index investors generally or the S&P committee to second guess. [CBS]
• “My baby has been our $100 billion strategic plan that we will hit over the next three to five years. We’re unveiling that next week,” she said, casting it as an uphill battle to win support for riskier investments. “We will finally be in the $100 billion club when we unveil this, and the only way to pull that off will be to increase private equity. I won my battle with [Chief Investment Officer Marcus Frampton].” Monday’s special meeting of the Board of Trustees was a bucket of cold water. [The Alaska Current]
• The spacious, beautiful and sustainably designed modern winery is carved into the hillside. It is gravity-fed, rather than using mechanised pumps to move the wine around and decorated in indigo, the colours of Florence’s football team Fiorentina. It is surrounded by freshly landscaped gardens designed to attract bees to its local flora. The flat roof, with its views of the nearby countryside, is covered with solidified lava imported from Etna, where the Ferrinis also make wine. (Maybe hauling this from Sicily to Tuscany wasn’t all that sustainable?) [Jancis Robinson]
• Investors appear to be ignoring the facts here and only seeing what they want to see. We believe GFL’s “stock story” has turned into an edition of the National Enquirer or People Magazine. Soon after the Company’s IPO, it was the target of a long short-selling report that effectively accused GFL’s founder and chief executive officer, Patrick Dovigi, of being Italian and in the mob and being a profligate spender because he owned a yacht. To be fair, we understand that Patrick grew up in a small town in Canada playing competitive hockey and bootstrapped this entire business from one single asset. [ADW Capital Management, LLC]