ZMan touches the third rail.

There seems to be a secret plot to inject the idea of cutting Social Security into the national debate for the looming presidential election. This plot is among the slithering lizard people known as the conservatives. It started with the oleaginous Ben Shapiro demanding that white people work until they die. He then went to Twitter to gin up more talk among the mouth breathers in favor of cutting Social Security. Now the Republican Party is promoting the idea in Congress.

It is an odd coincidence that once Trump secured the nomination, his alleged allies started talking up an idea that has no constituency. No one wants to throw their granny into the street, and no one wants to throw their parents into the streets. More important, the tens of millions of retired white people do not want to be thrown into the streets, especially in the name of sending their last pennies to Israel. It is the third rail of politics for a reason, so why are these reptiles bringing it up now?

The most popular reason is they hope to slime Trump with this issue, thus undermining his general election campaign. They assume, and probably correctly, that the mass media will claim he wants to murder your granny in the promised bloodbath this autumn, no matter what Trump says about the subject. So far, Trump has mostly ignored it, only mentioning the problems of fraud in Medicare. Fraud is a massive problem with Medicare, but fraud is a defining feature of America now.

Power Line.

We have written about the Great Sort many times, but frankly you can’t emphasize it enough. Americans are deserting blue states and cities in favor of red zones. Liberalism has proved to be a failure by the most reliable measure: fewer and fewer people want to live under liberal regimes.

Babylon Bee.

As the debate in the United States continued to rage over the ongoing migrant crisis along the southern border, Mexico announced plans to begin construction on a wall to keep illegal immigrants from coming back.

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Fifty percent of New Yorkers say they plan to leave New York City over the next five years, according to a poll released Tuesday by the Citizens Budget Commission.

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The view that Biology and Culture generally trump Policy is probably going to become a mainstay in my pieces. But I’ll use this one to explicitly argue for why Culture (mostly) beats Policy, using one of the most convincing examples: the decline in birth rates observed across developed nations and subsequent efforts to reverse the trend. This adds empirical depth to some theoretical considerations.

“Policy”, as used by the Cloud People, is merely a euphemism for “government policy”, and government policy has never been effectual in overriding culture. Witness Prohibition in the U.S.

Power Line.

If you’ve wondered how liberals expect you to heat your house after they have outlawed fossil fuels, the short answer is heat pumps. Heat pumps have joined “batteries” as the all-purpose “green” solution. But in reality, they are no solution at all.

The American Mind.

The changing character of the American Right is a favorite topic of liberal commentators and politicians. The arguments made on this score are invariably not just observations but evaluations: the Right is getting worse—a lot worse. The Right has become more radical and authoritarian, and today’s leaders of the Right are a big step down, on the liberal telling, from the allegedly sober and responsible leaders of the American Right in the past—including Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bushes, all of whom were reviled as fascists in their time.

It is true that American politics have changed considerably in the last few decades. But the changes have not been on the Right alone. However one would judge the overall state of American liberalism today, it is undeniable as an empirical matter that many intellectual and moral reflexes that prominently and reliably characterized the Left in the past are no longer evident. And these changes are just as worthy of our attention as any analysis of the American Right.

I suspect that the world would be a better place.

Read it.

The foundation that administers an award in the name of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg announced Monday night that it was canceling this year’s ceremony after criticism from her family about the slate of honorees.

The Spectator.

Let’s play a guessing game: I’m a dangerous force threatening Americans’ health, safety and way of life. We largely rely on government agencies to monitor and manage me. What to do about me is still a matter of debate, as is the severity of the menace I actually create. The media is likely sensationalizing the threat. A new study suggests I’m “not as bad as originally thought,” that reports of the devastation I’m causing were “premature,” and that if you’re outside a specific subset of people I disproportionately affect, you wouldn’t know I exist. Still, there are interactive maps to track my movement, and I’m reported to be related to a new, “hard-to-eradicate, super” strain invading from a foreign country.

What am I?

Yep, you guessed it. I’m a feral pig.

Read it.

Every year, migrants and refugees transfer billions of euros from Germany to family members in their home countries, with the Bundesbank estimating this to be at least €6.8 billion per year.

I suspect this is dwarfed by the amount of money sent to Mexico every year by ‘migrants’, legal and illegal.

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In the last year Greece has spent about $400 million on a unique Israeli combat system. The new Fire Weaver Fire Control system uses Orbiter 3 UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) to seek out targets and automatically have a Spike NLOS missile launched from an aircraft, ground vehicle or ship to hit the target. Israel developed this system over several decades and it is now widely used in the Israeli military.

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The following excerpts are from Tragedy and Hope. They detail the monetary environment from 1914 to the 1930s. When looked at independently the context helps explain the confusion we find across today’s monetary landscape.

These passages help us better understand money and the lack of order that takes hold when international players desire a change to the system. The greatest challenge then and now was the battle between real wealth and claims on wealth.

The Spectator.

Lent which, under Orthodox tradition means no eggs, meat or dairy (or even fish for designated periods), can be weirdly enjoyable, if only for the break in routine and the longings it unleashes. Besides, set it beside Ramadan, when during the hours of daylight even water can’t be drunk, and you realize things could be a whole lot worse.

Today is Forgiveness Sunday (Sunday of Cheesefare). Full Great Lent starts officially tomorrow.

Read it.

As a scholar of Arthurian literature, particularly that of England in the 15th century, I have a professional appreciation for the existence of physical media. If, instead of diligently writing out his Le Morte Darthur, Sir Thomas Malory had only told his story aloud to friends, relatives, and his gaoler, we almost certainly would not have had the benefit of it over the intervening centuries that have passed since his death. Like so many other fascinating but ephemeral pieces of the past, it would have entirely disappeared, leaving future generations deprived of that which they did not even have the chance to know.

Physical connexions to the past are not only of interest to scholars of literature and history; both well-known texts and more recent discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library are obvious examples of how ancient written works quite clearly continue to influence the modern world, shaping the religious beliefs and practises of countless people. Such physical records are vital for providing insight into contemporary differences and debates, but they also serve as an objective authority that can speak for the past in a way that no credible scholar can simply dismiss without cause. It is for this reason that George Orwell’s 1984, with its nightmare vision of a totalitarian future, portrays a world in which The Party endlessly destroys and rewrites every record of the past. Once history is destroyed, truth ceases to be a matter of conformity to objective facts and becomes instead a matter of compliance with the powerful.

Read it.

Skip stand-ups and all-hands. Evade Easter brunches, birthdays, and graduations.

Decline invitations by default. When you’re essential to an event, its host will notify you.

If you must attend an unfun event, make it memorable! Play pranks and plan ruses!

Don’t ghost. Never leave others hanging. Decline invitations with ample notice.

You’re going to die. Spend your time unapologetically. Be polite but direct. Never succumb to obligation.

Good advice.

“Feminists are all about equality until a bill comes or a fight starts.” — Taylor the Fiend (on YouTube)

Read it.

A little over a century ago, in his 1920 encyclical Principi Apostolorum Petro, Pope Benedict XV declared the 4th century poet, theologian, and writer, Saint Ephrem the Syrian, the Deacon of Edessa, to be a Doctor of the Church, a high and rare honor of the universal church. The 24th person so recognized since the Middle Ages, Saint Ephrem, was the first who did not come from the Western (Latin) Church or Eastern (Greek) Church. He was a speaker of Syriac and wrote exclusively in that language. In his encyclical, the pope mentioned the many clerics and bishops who encouraged him to take this step, especially the patriarchs of the Maronite, Chaldean, and Syriac Catholic churches, all spiritual descendants of Saint Ephrem.

…

The ‘Syriac World’ (some prefer the term Assyrian or Aramean) is the ethnic and religious community that grew out of the Syriac language and Christianity in Late Antiquity—Syriac being a branch of Aramaic, the lingua franca of most of the Middle East in the centuries before the coming of Christ. This status was retained for centuries, until Syriac was displaced by Arabic with the triumph of Islam. The roots of Syriac especially look to Edessa (the modern city of Urfa in Turkey), the city of Saint Ephrem. From there, as much as from nearby Antioch and more distant Jerusalem, and from the peregrinations of Saint Paul, “Christianity, an Asiatic religion,” spread both east and west. The Syriac world became a largely Christian one, best understood in a group of often contending, fissiparous religious bodies, which were often in conflict with their counterparts in Constantinople and Rome: the (Assyrian) Church of the East (disparagingly called the Nestorian Church); the Syrian Orthodox Church (sometimes called the Jacobite Church); various Indian branches of these churches; and related church bodies using Syriac and in communion with the pope in Rome, such as the Maronite Catholic, Chaldean Catholic, Syriac Catholic, Syro-Malabar, and Syro-Malankaran churches. Today, all of these churches have diaspora communities in the West, which are sometimes larger and richer than the original communities from where they sprang in the East.

Read it.

Tyler Cowen.

At first people thought that drones favored defense, since Ukraine, in its war against Russia, was defending successfully with drones. But now Ukraine is using drones to attack Russia, and Russian oil refinery assets and warships. It is less obvious that drones are defensive assets on net. Furthermore, Russia is now using more electronic jamming, and more weapons that are drone-avoiding or drone-resistant, thereby limiting the defensive value of drones.

The American Mind.

I learned about the “Poverty Simulation” by means of a colleague’s letter to campus announcing such an event at the central Pennsylvania liberal arts university where I work. My colleague explained that “many families” in the local communities around the campus are in poverty. The figure she gave was 6 percent, leading me to wonder if “many” is the best term used to describe a phenomenon not being experienced by 94 percent of the people under discussion; also, since the national poverty rate is closer to 12 percent, it would be worth noting that the local poverty rate is extraordinarily low.

In any case, the school looks to involve our students in collaborative work with local communities, and so my colleague argued that they should know something about all this poverty. Such knowledge will require “dispell[ing]…preconceived notions about the experience and roots of poverty,” and an excellent method for dispelling such notions is “through experiencing and sensitizing participants to the realities of poverty.” The Poverty Simulation, I learned from my colleague’s letter, is “not a game [but rather] a role play in which participants get to experience the difficult choices” of those in poverty.

I wonder whether those of us who were actually poor when we were younger can test out of this for credit.

Read it.

Charges will not be filed against a 32-year-old man who shot a gun Thursday in a crowded New York City subway car, with authorities saying he was acting in self-defense when he took a gun from an aggressor and shot him with it.

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The family of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sounding off about this year’s class of honorees for a female leadership award named after the liberal icon.

Not unlike the feelings of the families of people who create and fund foundations (Rockefeller, Ford) and see the trustees of such foundations underwrite all sorts of Woke shit that the creators would have found offensive. Welcome to our world, proglodytes.

“The law of supply and demand is not taught in Gender Studies.” — “Red Pill Guy”

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

One of the weird things about the Cloud people is how they talk about history as if it is a spirit force or a god. In his State of the Union speech, Biden kept saying things like “history is watching us” and “history requires us” as if “history” was the name of the guy controlling the simulation. He is not the only one who does this. In fact, he never talked like this until the rest of the Cloud people started doing it.

One reason for talking about history this way is it gives them a false sense of moral authority for their various schemes. They claim that history moves toward some paradise, so if their schemes advance us toward that paradise, then they must be on the side of history. It is all nonsense, of course, but nonsense has been the fuel of fanatics and lunatics since the dawn of time.

Even with a sober-minded ruling class, however, there would still be this need to shape history so that the present feels inevitable. Much of what has brought us to the present crisis is the shaping of history to fit the causes of the moment. Our progressive ruling class has been rewriting history since Gettysburg, maybe even since the Battle of Naseby, because the future is certain, but the past is unpredictable.

ZMan waxes nostalgic.

Baltimore combines the mindset of the postal clerk with the intellectual dexterity of the population.

YouTube.

Chapelle characterizes Trump as “an honest liar”.

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Many American, British, European and other foreign-born men and women have long served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and often they are dual citizens. As an example, earlier this week Israel announced the death of 19-year old Sgt. Itay Chen, a dual US-Israeli citizen who had been serving in the IDF, at the hands of Hamas.

But South Africa, which brought an International Criminal Court (ICC) case against Israel over allegations of genocide against Palestinians, has issued a new declaration forbidding its citizens from joining or assisting in any way with the Israeli military.

Me, too.

Quilette.

The concept of race, we are often told, is a social construct with no basis in biological reality. Some have argued that it was invented by white Europeans for the express purpose of constructing a racial hierarchy in order to justify slavery. According to cultural critic Kenan Malik, “Racism gave birth to race. The ancestors of today’s African Americans were not enslaved because they were black. They became classified as a distinct, and inferior, race as a means of justifying their enslavement.” This view is even espoused by some scientific institutions.

And yet, by analysing your genome, companies like 23andMe can describe your ancestry, and their reports match people’s own accounts of their racial ancestry to a high degree of accuracy. As humans spread across the globe, they tended to breed within ancestral groups, such that gene flow within groups became greater than gene flow between groups. This led to a pattern of “shared-ancestry clustering” that is still apparent across the world—as a result, we can usually differentiate at a glance between people whose ancestry can be traced back multiple generations in, say, Japan, from those whose ancestors came from Ethiopia or Norway. It is these clusterings that we refer to by the term “race”—a common-language term that predates Enlightenment science.

Despite the fact that there is obviously some biological underpinning to what we call “race,” many people claim that “races” are purely sociological. They argue that races could only be real if they were clearly demarcated, discrete categories and thus countable, or that for races to be real, they must be essentialist categories: i.e., there must be at least one trait shared by all the people of Race A and by no one who is not of Race A.

In support of this, leading geneticist Richard Lewontin pointed out that genes vary just as much within a race as between races. While this is true, it does not negate the reality of races. Our ancestry is manifest in correlated patterns of genetic variation, and these correlated patterns are both real and meaningful and reveal our ancestral groupings. Furthermore, while many dismiss race as only skin deep, AI software can discern a patient’s race just by analysing medical X-rays. The AI cannot just be reflecting human bias when it does so, since it is discerning patterns of which human experts are unaware.

Read it.

“Effective immediately, I have been removed (banned) from the next 3 NXXT tournaments that I already signed up for and been approved to play,” wrote transgender golfer Hailey Davidson last week.

The message came after he/she was removed from the NXXT Women’s Pro Tour, who has now announced that participants must be “a biological female at birth” to participate in its events, according to Fox News and the NY Post.

Davidson expressed his/her discontent because he/she was already crushing the woman’s field: “They changed their policy mid season, after me signing up already and being 2nd in Player of the Year race.”

ZMan peeks behind the curtain.

One of the things the paleos missed when they began to flesh out managerialism in the last century is how it assumes the qualities of democracy. This is something Robert Dahl picked up in his analysis of American government against the standard of democracy he developed. While the institutions of America were not democratic and could never be democratic, the people in these institutions were motivated by a democratic sense in that they wanted to act according to public will.

This explains, in part, how our institutions have grown increasingly authoritarian over the last three decades, while the people running them have become obsessed with defending what they call “our democracy.” They do not view democracy as a process, but rather as a goal. The truly democratic society is open, and the people freely exchange the right ideas. Defending democracy in this sense means dragging the people to this place, by force if necessary.

This democratic sensibility within democracy is important in understanding the reckless behavior of the people running the institutions. If one were to pick a single word to describe the cause of the current crisis it would be “reckless”. Whether it is reckless foreign policy adventures or poorly conceived domestic fads, the ruling class seems to take pleasure in reckless projects. They operate like gamblers with unlimited credit that they assume will be repaid by others.

It’s often more trouble than it’s worth.

Read it.

The Irish electorate looks like having solidly rejected two constitutional amendments that would have erased the word “woman” from the Irish constitution and altered the legal definition of family in what is shaping up to be a 70-30 shock victory for tradition over the nation’s well-financed NGO lobby.

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Western leaders are experiencing two stunning events: defeat in Ukraine, genocide in Palestine. The first is humiliating, the other shameful. Yet, they feel no humiliation or shame. Their actions show vividly that those sentiments are alien to them – unable to penetrate the entrenched barriers of dogma, arrogance and deep-seated insecurities. The last are personal as well as political. Therein lies a puzzle. For, as a consequence, the West has set itself on a path of collective suicide. Moral suicide in Gaza; diplomatic suicide – the foundations laid in Europe, the Middle East and across Eurasia; economic suicide – the dollar-based global financial system jeopardized, Europe deindustrializing. It is not a pretty picture. Astoundingly, this self-destruction is occurring in the absence of any major trauma – external or internal. Therein lies another, related puzzle.

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Sir Roger Scruton suggested that “conservatism is more of an instinct than an idea.” Apparently, what he meant was that conservatism was not primarily a construct of intellectuals, but something that comes from our natural human dispositions.

Scruton’s insight seems to be corroborated by research on the connection between human personality and political ideology. Psychologists have identified correlations between certain personality traits and ideological and political preferences. These findings suggest that there is a lot in the conservatism-progressivism divide that results from differences in personality traits.

A leading approach to the study of human personality today, called The Big Five, identifies five dimensions of the human personality: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and emotional stability (or, conversely, neuroticism). Researchers interested in assessing the extent to which differences in personality affect ideological inclinations and political choices seek to identify possible associations of these five personality traits with specific political ideologies.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Anyway, that is the show this week. It is about how the decline in intelligence will impact our live and society. The people who think AI will solve it or that robots will pick up the slack have not thought about the problem hard enough. All of those things will make the decline worse for the people with anything on the ball. Imagine Idiocracy by terminators are in charge instead of morons.

Read it.

An earthquake has shaken Republican politics in Texas. Sixteen GOP state representatives who previously voted against school choice were on the ballot for the March 5 primary. Six won, six lost, and four now face runoffs. Given the advantages of incumbency, this outcome is staggering. The results are clear: Texas Republicans want school choice, and they’re happy to vote out politicians who don’t.

Some of the biggest opponents to school choice in the Texas House won’t return to the legislature in 2025. These include Steve Allison, Ernest Bailes, Travis Clardy, Glenn Rogers, Hugh Shine, and Reggie Smith. Also, Reps. DeWayne Burns, Justin Holland, John Kuempel, and Gary VanDeavers face highly competitive runoffs—and it’s entirely possible the incumbents lose each one.

School choice indeed was on the ballot. Corey DeAngelis, an education researcher and well-known “school choice evangelist,” calls the results a clear “mandate for school choice in Texas.” Unseating or forcing a runoff for 77 percent of sitting state representatives is astounding. Republicans who backed the government school monopoly—and they really ought to have known better—now face the likely end of their political careers.

“If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” — various anonymous clever people