Modern education in a nutshell.

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Of the world’s “holidays,” Talk Like a Pirate Day (or, to use its full name, International Talk Like a Pirate Day) is probably not high on most people’s list. It was promulgated in 1995 by two guys in Oregon named John Baur and Mark Summers who were playing racquetball. One injured himself and said, “Aaarrr!” Given the associations of this phrase with stereotypical piratical conversation, the two decided that a day (September 19 was chosen) should be established in which all talked like pirates. What they mean, the scholars say, is to talk in the dialect of the West Country, meaning South West England.

Yet, whether it is widely celebrated is less interesting than its premise that we all know—or think we do—what pirates sound like. We also all think we know what pirates look like. Where did our images come from? They came from that genius of American art, illustration, and children’s fiction, Howard Pyle.

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Always and everywhere, political institutions are controlled by elites. It doesn’t matter if the regime type is democratic or monarchical. It doesn’t matter if there is a written constitution or not. All political institutions – and certainly every sovereign state – are run by a group of elites who control the means of coercion.The myth of “rule by the people” is precisely that: a myth.

Yeah, but try getting the average dimwit socialist to realize that….

But this leaves a big question open: who are the elites? Wilfredo Pareto, that pioneer of Italian elite theory, convincingly suggests that elites are simply those people who are most skilled in their respective fields. Being skilled does not suggest any sort of virtue or beauty, of course, and we cannot assume that any member of the elite will be more moral or refined than any, say, middle-class mechanic.

In the case of political elites, to be “elite” simply means to be the most effective at organizing and commanding political action. This can be done toward both virtuous ends or evil ends. The political elites excel at the gaining and wielding of political power. Nothing more. In hereditary monarchies, for example, the monarch is a monarch because his ancestors were more effective at using violence – and at stealing and killing – than were their competitors. Their descendants are able to remain in the elite through effective political scheming to maintain their positions. In democracies, those who gain and maintain power are effective at deceiving the voting public and at currying favor with the ruling coalitions of various interest groups. They’re not “the elite” because they are especially virtuous or well educated. They simply excel at cultivating the knowledge necessary to wield the power of the state against their enemies and against potential rivals.

How many of them are done by women? Hmm?

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First, I should state my credentials to give opinions regarding AI. My teenage self was a big fan of Colossus: The Forbin Project.

It is surreal to hear AI companies say “Please stop us from ending life on earth.” The people running AI corporations are blessed with free will. If they think their activity endangers mankind, they are free to stop. The existence of a law that says thou shall not endanger mankind seems, one, a tad ambiguous, and two, sufficiently self-evident so as to be unnecessary.

Much like all of the Chattering Class emphasis on billionaires calling for an increase in their taxes. If they wanted to pay more in taxes, they could just write a check. No, what they want is to increase everybody’s taxes, for a system in which they would have a comparative advantage.

The Foundry.

Both the Founders and the progressives recognized the political and civilizational stakes of education. They agreed that certain kinds of schooling prepare students to be citizens of a republic, while others incline them to be members of a centralized state ruled by expert administrators; they disagreed on which goal was desirable and, thus, which educational scheme should be preferred.

The local, classical education that characterized early America, that formed most of the American Founders, and that many Founders prescribed for the new nation reinforced the principles of a free federal republic.

Classical colleges taught Americans that human nature was fixed and purposive; that human beings perfect their nature in and owe profound obligations to their familial, political, and religious societies; that the masterworks of classical Greece and Rome, the teachings of the Christian religion, and the heritage of European civilization are part of our birthright and are indispensable aids in cultivating the moral, intellectual, and theological virtues as well as securing the safety and happiness of our nation.

Some times the old ways are best.

Unfortunately for me, my wife knows more about gun shows that I do.

Works in Progress.

In the twentieth century, a radical change took place in global architecture. The modernist movement emerged in the 1920s, favoring unornamented designs, exposed modern materials like steel and concrete, and the abandonment of the complicated visual patterns of traditional planning and facade design. Modernism came to dominate global architecture by the 1950s, and although it has evolved and fragmented since then, styles of broadly modernist character remain dominant today.

Throughout its history, both supporters and detractors of modernist architecture have agreed that it is not widely liked. In 1940, the English architectural historian John Summerson remarked that the public ‘can’t understand it, never will, and hates it like poison’. In 1977, the German-American architectural critic Wolf von Eckardt prematurely announced the death of modernism, claiming that ‘No one mourned. It was never popular.’ The young Summerson was sympathetic to modernism while von Eckardt disliked it, but they made the same observation about its standing with the general public.

Were Summerson and von Eckardt right? In recent years, researchers have begun to study this more systematically using visual preference surveys. In their simplest form, these are just a comparison of two images alongside a neutral, unbiased question, like ‘Which do you prefer?’ Online panels and better image editing have brought down their cost in recent decades. Since the 1990s, around twenty properly sampled visual preference surveys have been run on popular architectural preferences.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Like and Subscribe….

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I spent six years in low-wage work. Waitressing, a call center, selling laptops at Circuit City, handing out T-shirts for a radio station.

Now I work in policy. When I read coverage of low-wage workers, it flattens something that’s actually quite complex. Low-wage work isn’t a job. It’s a whole world with its own logic and norms. Most coverage misses that. I think that gap is costing the left politically.

Here’s what the media tends to miss.

Low-wage work is a system, not a job.

I’m down for anything that costs the left politically.

Newsweek, a Voice of the Crust.

The number of Americans renouncing their citizenship, along with long-term green card holders ending their United States tax residency, reached its highest level since 2020 over the past 12 months, according to an analysis of Federal Register data.

A total of 5,790 names appeared on the register’s U.S. expatriation list over the past four quarters, representing individuals whose loss of U.S. citizenship or long-term permanent resident status was reported to the Treasury Department. According to Greenback Expat Tax Services, that is the highest four-quarter total in six years.

The increase was particularly sharp between April and June, when 1,781 names were recorded in the register’s list, up 68.5 percent from the same quarter last year. That brought the first-half total to 3,243, up 38.5 percent from the first half of 2025.

Watch it.

Tim Pool has a lot of fun with the latest California ‘you-can’t-make-this-shit-up’ story.

Check it out.

Don’t ever say we don’t have useful stuff here.

Babylon Bee.

Took ’em long enough….

ATQUE: Climate Activists Blame Global Warming For Zero Hurricanes Forming In Atlantic This Year

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It is a gift of Anglosphere culture that we can have obfuscatory rhetoric in any size or shape we want. Perhaps because of the wealth of options, it is not so strange that the first example that comes to my mind is from a 1978 novel titled The Empty Copper Sea. A Florida businessman disappears, presumed drowned in the Gulf of Mexico, but there is some evidence he made it across the water and is now living under a new identity. There is also some evidence that he had been selling assets and emptying bank accounts. I won’t spoil the story by revealing how he is found, or where, or in what physical or financial condition, but I do want to mention his attorney. This man is as genuinely ignorant as everyone else in their seaside town, but he feels that his client, dead or alive, still has interests to be defended. The advocate cannot agree with the idea that money was stolen, or even hidden. On the contrary, he suggests the man was fixing to turn his failing businesses around, as he had often done before, and to that end had simply “enhanced his cash position.”

One of finest of the Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald. Read The Whole Series.

Come to think of it, I’ve read quite a few stories like this – I think they had titles like The Story, or maybe The Novel, or was it The Book – but while John Grisham is a talented author, I think John D. MacDonald was better at this. What I really want to discuss, however, are the two ways we can say something in English: Germanic and Latinate. Harsher words like “stolen” and “hidden” are Germanic; gentler words like “enhanced” and “position” are Latinate. What I really want to pursue is how other cultures manage this – if indeed they do at all. What about cultures that are largely or completely Latinate? Or ones that aren’t at all? In those, what do you do when you want to sound like a pompous jerk?

The reason English is everybody’s second language is exactly this overwhelming flexibility. (Plus Britain and America.)

It may be that riders of mass transit in Guatemala City and Mexico City say with a straight face – there being no other way to do it – that they’re using movilidad integrada. And it may be that the school system in Slovenia still says it’s dealing with Gypsy students using fleksibilna diferenciacija. I can believe education bureaucrats everywhere embrace such lingo. But what do people in, oh, Asia do?

I’m sure you’re going to tell us….

Read it.

How about that Climate Change Emergency, eh?

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Why wasn’t this page found?

We asked some leading economists.

Stagflation info
The cost of pages rose drastically, while the page production rate slowed down.
General economics
There was no market for it.
Liquidity traps
We injected some extra money into the technology team but there was little or no interest so they simply kept it, thus failing to stimulate the page economy.
Pareto inefficiency
There exists another page that will make everyone better off without making anyone worse off.
Supply and demand info
Demand increased and a shortage occurred.
Classical economics
There is no such page. We are not going to interfere.
Keynesian economics
Aggregate demand for this page did not necessarily equal the productive capacity of the website.
Malthusianism info
Unchecked, exponential page growth outstripped the pixel supply. There was a catastrophe, and now the population is at a lower, more sustainable level.
Neo-Malthusianism info
To avoid unchecked, exponential page growth outstripping the pixel supply and leading to an inevitable catastrophe, we prevented this page from being conceived.
Marxism info
The failure of this page to load is a consequence of the inherent contradictions in the capitalist mode of production.
Laissez Faire Capitalism
We know this page is needed, but we can’t force anyone to make it.
Monetarism info
The government has limited the number of pages in circulation.
Efficient Markets Hypothesis info
If you had paid enough for the page, it would have appeared.
Moral Hazard info
Showing you this page would only encourage you to want more pages.
Tragedy of the Commons info
Everyone wanted to view this page, but no-one was willing to maintain it.
Game theory info
By not viewing this page you help everyone else get better pages.
Mercantilism info
The page is hosted by a foreign web server and is therefore banned to ensure the supremacy of our own software.
Trickle-down
High taxes on content publishers prevented them hiring the person who would have written this page.
Speculative bubble
The page never actually existed and was fundamentally impossible, but everyone bought into it in a frenzy and it’s all now ending in tears.
Socialism
If you were to get the page you wanted you might get a better page than someone else, which would be unfair. This way at least everyone gets the same.
Behavioural economics info
The influence of psychological factors caused you to act in a manner that would not be expected of a purely rational actor.
Theory of the second best info
The best outcome was unachievable, so you have arrived here instead.

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Everyone knows there’s cultural knowledge in elite circles. How to get your kid into a good college. How to pass a consulting or finance or Google interview.

There’s just as much cultural knowledge to being in the bottom two quintiles. I see it written about much less.

My first car was a Datsun PL510, a previous owner of which had glued fake fur to the roof such that you appeared to be riding in an inside-out wolfhound. And the door panels had been reupholstered in red plus that had since sun-faded to a nice peach color. And the shotgun-seat door didn’t open from the outside.

Cost me $1,000 of my own money. Did me all five years of graduate school. Don’t dare return to Indiana because the friends I left it with never changed the registration and eventually it was impounded for traffic and parking tickets. (I know they’re still looking for me….)

Check it out.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

The reason why Japanese people don’t use something like this is that the language contains an obscene amount of homophones, and kanji allow one to nail down the precise meaning without having to depend on vague contextual clues or tedious periphrasis.

(English is just the opposite—it has an excess of what one might call ‘heterophones’, words that mean pretty much the same thing but look and sound entirely different. Of course, if you try to use different heterophones to express different nuances of meaning it brings out the Humpty-Dumpty My Way Or The Highway linguistic hatermongers.)

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Funny how that works.

Among the things a police career taught me is that a small number—usually single digits—of felons commit most felonies. They’ll draw in other criminals, involve them in their crimes, and when convenient, abandon them to arrest. There is no honor among thieves. And the number of the most prolific felons increases and decreases slightly from place to place, and in relation to the specific type of crime.

In some places, crooks specialize in home or business burglaries. In others, specialization might involve burglarizing vehicles or carjacking.

But one thing is certain: take these small bands of crooks out of circulation, and the number of their crimes in those areas immediately, dramatically plummets. The trick is identifying the crooks and rolling them over on each other. Catch some in the act or with the evidence, and the second part is usually easier than the first. When they’re put away, innumerable people we’ll never know don’t end up as victims.

Of course, these kinds of positive results also rely on prosecutors willing to prosecute and judges willing to keep criminals in jail and hand down realistic sentences. That’s a real issue in blue cities and states.

Now it seems Sweden is discovering this reality, particularly where gang-committed, immigrant crime is involved. And it’s about time too. Reports out of Sweden, which has shown suicidal empathy for third-world barbarians, indicate that hand grenade(?!) attacks have become common.

Watch it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Read it.

The distinguishing characteristic of a RINO is its thick skin.

“Gee, George, how long have you worn an ear-ring?”

“Since the day my wife found it in my truck.”

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, credited Charlie Kirk for bringing him and President Donald Trump together and for making the Make America Healthy Again agenda possible.

“Charlie played a critical and indispensable role in bringing me and President Trump together,” he said on Thursday at the 2026 Republican National Committee’s Midterm Convention. “In fact, it was something that he was trying to do for almost a year. … And today, on the first anniversary of his assassination, I can’t stand here without thinking about him.”

Kennedy reflected on the first time he met Trump at an event with Kirk, where they shook hands and promised to make America healthy again.

“Some of my Democratic friends told me that I was a fool for trusting Trump, and so I want to make the record clear right now: President Trump has kept every single promise that he can make without exception,” he said.

And possibly further damage, depending on my mood, the time of day, and the phase of the moon.

Worse on Purpose.

Today, I want to share the sources that I have bookmarked and return to whenever I make a purchase.

It is by no means a complete list. It is just an account of the resources I have personally come to value over the years. My hope is that we might build a more complete list together in The Community.

Before the list, I’ll outline the three mechanisms that corrupt almost every review you read online, then the three questions I ask of any reviewer. Together, they’ll tell you in about five minutes whether a source is worth your time.

…

A real test produces numbers, and numbers produce losers. A costume lab produces ranked lists of only winners in spurious categories with buy buttons on every row.

Alma Boykin.

Is it important to be aware that hitching bulls to a wagon might not go well? Should younger people learn about suckling pig and the reason we eat pigs young (if they are old-breed animals)? How vital today is the knowledge of the death march drums, and military justice, or the sequence of plow-sow-harrow-weed-harvest with sickles?

I”m always somewhat surprised by what some of my students don’t know, and don’t realize that they don’t know. But then they’ve never been around horse and ox farming, don’t see really old wagons and hand tools, have no idea about crafts of the pre-industrial or even pre-WWII world. To describe, oh, Deism as “the watchmaker g-d” makes no sense to people who have never seen the interior of a mechanical watch or clock.

When and where I grew up, horse and ox-drawn farming was not that far away, and some people still had Conestoga-type wagons for reenactments. We read things like the Little House books in school, and I read the McGuffey’s readers. My grandparents had wash pot and washboard, and explained how they were used. I saw people making soap (not fun) candles (only the semi-fun part) and was encouraged to learn how weaving and so on worked. We had a big garden that was attacked by rabbits, which had to be thinned via air-rifle. Composted manure? Taught me about how fertilizer and crop rotation happened before nitrogen fertilizer was invented. “History” wasn’t all that far away, or at least, historic technologies like water-powered grist mills, windmills for water, and so on were not far away.

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The other day, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told Qatari state media that the United States was “spending tens of billions of dollars on killing people” when that money “could have been used to make life easier” for the public. “There always seems to be money for war,” he went on, “but not to feed the poor.”

The United States, in reality, spends immense amounts of money feeding and taking care of the poor—far more than it does on war.

Yet, if you listened to the Left, you’d think military spending was driving the debt and squeezing the poor. National defense comprises around 13% of the federal budget, far less than the primary drivers of debt, Social Security and Medicare.

We spend less on the military than we do paying down the interest on our immense $40 trillion national debt.

A debt that exists predominantly because Democorats never met a dollar that they didn’t want to spend (on something that would buy them votes).

My needs are very simple.

Watch it.

Dr, Orion Taraban looks at modern dating and relationships and lays it out logically and bluntly.

Demographic crisis? The answer is provided.

Women can’t find “good” men? The answer is provided.

Incels? The answer is provided.

Babylon Bee.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

G. K.Chesterton:

I HAVE NEVER managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like.

New York Post.

A fool and his money are soon parted.

Remember: Kidney, not carotid—that way you don’t care how sharp the knife is, plus you don’t have to clean up all that mess. Oh, and it reduces the amount of noise the victim makes, as an added bonus.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Like the history of so many wars, the history of the Boer War has been written by the losers, assisted also by those hostile to the British empire in general. There is an alternative version and interpretation as set out here by Alistair Parker.

The Second Anglo-Boer War is amongst the most debated events in British history. The contested aspects include the ‘scorched-earth’ strategy, the British concentration camps, the numbers involved and the motivations behind the war. Yet the most striking feature of many narratives is how they are cast through the prism of our contemporary ethics, economics and politics. Prompted by pre-conceived conclusions on globalisation, imperialism, and racism, and energised by the selective search for evidence that fits, these narratives often fail to ‘add up the numbers’, assess the overall context, or judge human agency by the actual constraints of the time.

Read it.

I used to play this clip and then ask the audience a simple question: Look at everything Sal Khan does to learn something. He reads widely. He scaffolds. He draws. He questions. He calls friends. He argues. He makes connections across fields. He builds intuitive understanding from the ground up. And then he builds something to capture all that he had learned to share with others.

Now… how does Sal Khan want my kid to learn?

Watch a video.

The room always got it immediately.

Because nobody in that room would accept that for themselves. We all know, intuitively, that watching someone else explain something is not the same as understanding it. We would never settle for that as learners. And yet, somehow, we accept it as a solution for other people’s children. This is a version of a phenomenon that I have written about earlier: The reductive seduction of other people’s problems.

Watch it.

AI sometimes comes up with useful stuff.

1. You’re living with too many strangers.
2. Your attention is actually working.
3. You’re forced to live in the wrong time zone.
4. You were made to squat and kneel, not sit.
5. Modern work is anti-social by design.
6. Your eyes are reshaping to fit indoors.
7. You feel too much in a world that wants you to feel less.