UnHerd.

If you want to know the secret of J.D. Vance’s meteoric rise, at the age of 39, to Donald Trump’s choice for vice president should he win, just glance at some of the more overheated liberal analyses of Vance’s success. This one, published in the New York Times, is a classic: it is like the X-ray of a liberal psyche outraged by the success of people who are on the “other side”.

Titled “How Yale Propelled J.D. Vance’s Career”, it reveals that “many students and professors remember Mr. Vance as warm, personable and even charismatic. But several also said they were perplexed by what they saw as Mr. Vance’s profound ideological shift.” That’s a real head-scratcher: since when does being warm and personable have anything to do with one’s ideology? Mussolini could be warm and personable. As for charisma, well.

The article recounts, with an air of true perplexity, the conundrum of Vance and his wife, who is of Indian descent and the daughter of immigrants, “deliver[ing]- home-baked treats” to a transgender student who had just undergone, as the Times put it in smug jargon, “top surgery” as if it were an everyday procedure, like a tonsillectomy. It then quotes the student, who said they abruptly ended the friendship after Vance, as senator from Ohio, supported legislation in Arkansas that prohibited transgender care for children.

Of course, they had every right to take offence. But there is no contradiction between treating trans people with kindness, protectiveness and respect and opposing transgender treatment for children. Except in the mind of the New York Times, whose grim, sanctimonious and lucrative prosecution of MeToo, the 1619 Project, the trans revolution, and its stigmatising of everything from a Confederate statue in the middle of nowhere to gas stoves and gas-powered cars had as much to do with Trump’s resurrection as anything else.

The American Mind.

Your driving habits might be secretly influencing more than just your road safety—they could be impacting your wallet, too. While everyone knows about credit scores, fewer are aware of the existence and potential consequences of a driver score. This score reflects various aspects of your driving behavior, including how often you brake suddenly, exceed speed limits, use your phone while driving, or operate your vehicle late at night. Auto insurance companies have increasingly been leveraging this data to adjust insurance rates, aiming for a more accurate reflection of the risk posed by individual drivers.

In the past, for rather obvious reasons, auto insurers struggled to encourage consumers to participate in usage-based insurance plans, which monitor driving behaviors to adjust rates accordingly. Consequently, the industry has adopted alternative methods to gather driving data, such as collaborating with automakers or utilizing existing smartphone apps already in use by drivers. Despite the widespread collection of such data, many individuals remain unaware of the extent to which their driving behaviors are being monitored by insurance companies.

The implications of such data collection extend far beyond insurance rates, touching upon broader concerns surrounding personal freedom and privacy. Recent legislative efforts, such as the mandate for new cars to be equipped with a “kill switch” feature by 2026, raise significant questions about government control over vehicles and the potential misuse of such technology.

To be fair.

Read it.

Rocket company SpaceX will move its headquarters to Starbase, Texas from California, CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday in a post on X.

Welcome to my world….

The Spectator.

“Did I just write the song of the summer?” twenty-seven-year-old Megan Boni, an aspiring New York-based singer-actress known on social media as “Girl on Couch,” asked her public a few weeks ago. Days before, she suggested that her TikTok followers set to music a thirteen-word satirical musing she had improvised about her undersexed Gen Z peeresses’ lofty romantic expectations. Known simply as “Man in Finance,” the song’s lyrics easily divide into four short verses that unfold like shallow ads in the “Personals” section of an old newspaper: “I’m looking for a man in finance/Trust fund/Six-five/Blue eyes.”

Adaptations have gone viral on social media, gathering more than 80 million hits and earning Boni more than $300,000 in revenue. She has reportedly landed brand promotion deals, received a contract offer from Universal Music and quit her 9-5 corporate sales job. Variations of the song are thumping in DJ sets all over the world. Mainstream electronic music superstar David Guetta remixed it to the 2010 anthem “Like a G-6” in a recording with more than16 million plays on Spotify alone. Parody videos have already appeared, using the basic beat to list purported characteristics of traditionally minded wives (“Trad wife/Sourdough/Eats meat/Wants kids”), less appealing New York romantic prospects (“Freelance/Five-six/Tattoos/Bushwick”) and other types who fall outside the desired milieu.

At first hearing, the song comes across as a toxic artefact of a debased society and a misandrist objectification of men. Boni delivers the lyrics in the slack-jawed vocal fry of a narcissistic female who is obviously only interested in men with lucrative careers, independent resources and two superficial physical characteristics. All other traits are unspecified and presumably unimportant. She sounds like the type of woman wise parents warn their sons to avoid, giving off a Meghan Markle-ish “ick” and willing to trade whatever she imagines love is for otherwise unobtainable financial security provided by a reasonably good-looking man.

“We live in an age where it is unclear who is in charge. The magic of democracy is it tells people that they are in charge, but that is impossible, and people sense it, so without a clear shot caller responsible for what is happening, people naturally look for an explanation that provides that shot caller. Every conspiracy theory assumes that there is someone, or a small group, who has the power to affect the course of history and the foresight to alter those events to their liking.”

— ZMan

Mark Steyn.

Let’s cut to the chase – the US Secret Service: In on it? Or just totally crap?

Well, I’ve thought the Secret Service were rubbish not just since we learned of the Cartagena hookers but for at least another decade before that. And increasingly, when it comes to American officialdom – from Kabul to Uvalde – to modify Henry Ford, you can get it in any colour as long as it’s bloated, lavishly over-funded and entirely dysfunctional.

And yet and yet… it’s hard to believe even these guys (plus their bevy of five-foot-two-eyes-of-blue Keystone chorus girls) could be this crap. Assuming for the purposes of argument that the body on the roof is actually that of the perp, a goofball barely out of high school hatched a plan to have Donald Trump’s head explode in close-up on live TV – and, wittingly or otherwise, the world’s most flush money-no-object security state did their best to help him pull it off.

Read it.

Minnesota Vikings star wide receiver Jordan Addison was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence after being found asleep behind the wheel near Los Angeles International Airport, the Los Angeles Daily News reported Sunday.

Not what I think of when I think Viking.

Read it.

Colleges offer phantom scholarships for the same reason car dealerships offer discounts: to close the sale. But even as this practice has become too obvious not to notice, families still orient to college prices as though they are real. Why is this?

Professional marketers have long known that people are attracted to expensive things?—?and we have a special fascination with things we cannot afford. Teenage boys hang posters of Lamborghinis, not Toyotas, in their bedrooms. Unattainable products also generate free media: Journalists and bloggers write about the new Rolex, not the new Timex.

At the same time, we are highly responsive to the belief that we are getting a deal. In consumer markets, this practice of creating the appearance of a high price paired with a large discount drives purchase behavior so reliably that it works even when everyone knows what’s going on. Retailers, to take one example, routinely pre-print price tags with a struck-through “original” price that buyers never pay and a “marked down” price that was always the real price. Everyone knows what’s happening, but the practice continues because we respond to it anyway.

One of the ways colleges get around prohibitions on having quotas for racial and other Fashionable Minorities is by setting outrageous tuition-room-board fees and then quietly handing compensating ‘scholarships’ to the favored groups.

Read it.

A common way of building a tunnel today is with a tunnel boring machine (TBM), particularly in urban areas where other construction methods such as drill-and-blast or cut-and-cover would be too disruptive. Of the 89 transit projects around the world that required tunneling in a dataset compiled by Britain Remade, 80 of them used TBMs. But tunnel boring machines are a comparatively modern construction technology. The first successful rock tunneling machines weren’t invented until the 1950s, and into the late 1960s most tunneling was done using other construction methods. But as TBMs have improved, they have increasingly been the method of choice for tunneling through a wider variety of ground conditions. And while many construction tasks have resisted automation and mechanization, tunneling machinery has steadily gotten more automated, to the point where a modern TBM is akin to a mobile factory that burrows through the earth and constructs a tunnel behind it.

Check it out.

What makes metric time so cool is that would make all the mental math we have to do when adding and subtracting time so much easier—especially when it comes to different timezones. Working with base-10 numbers is so much easier than trying to think in base-60, base-12, and base-24.

Unfortunately, just being “cool” is not enough to motivate people to change how they live. And, because time is a coordinated cultural practice, everybody has to change at once, and ain’t nobody got time for dat (otherwise Americans would be using metric measures like the rest of the world).

LifeHacker.

I’m not being hyperbolic when I say salt is the most important seasoning of all time. It makes things taste salty, sure, but it also makes things taste like better versions the themselves, and more importantly, salt is a powerful preservative and natural anti-microbial. Long before refrigeration—all the way back to ancient Egypt—salt kept meat from spoiling which, in turn, kept people fed longer. And though salty processed foods don’t have the best reputation, sodium is an essential nutrient, needed to keep your fluids balanced and muscles and nerves working smoothly. Salt is important.

We don’t live in ancient Egypt, and it’s currently quite easy to keep your electrolytes where they need to be for normal brain and bodily functions. So while the modern eater may be a little blasé about salt, flavor is not trivial. Chef-y types have strong opinions about brands and crystal size (and so do I), but the salt you stock your kitchen with should be the salt that fits your culinary needs.

Here’s what you need to know about salt, from the standard iodized table variety to the various Kosher offerings.

The New Yorker.

Every now and then the New Yorker will turn from Wokery and do what it used to do best, some interesting and very well written piece that leaves you better for having read it. This is one such.

In 1966, at a meeting remembered in anthropological lore as the beginning of hunter-gatherer studies, seventy-five experts assembled in Chicago to synthesize our knowledge about foraging peoples. More than ninety-nine per cent of human history was spent without agriculture, the organizers figured, so it was worth documenting that way of life before it disappeared altogether. The symposium—and an associated volume that appeared two years later, both titled “Man the Hunter”—exemplified an obsession with hunting, meat-eating, and maleness. “Man” was meant to cover all humans; “hunter” was shorthand for anyone who subsisted on wild food. The book devoted an entire section to the role of hunting in human evolution. “Hunting is the master behavior pattern of the human species,” a chapter began. “It is the organizing activity which integrated the morphological, physiological, genetic, and intellectual aspects of the individual human organisms and of the population who compose our single species.”

The meeting also revealed problems with the meat-centric story. Dart had asserted that “all prehistoric men and the most primitive of living human beings are hunters, i.e., flesh eaters.” But contributors to “Man the Hunter” showed how one-sided this perspective was. The anthropologist Richard Lee reported that the !Kung, one of the so-called Bushman people of Southern Africa, got two-thirds of their calories from plants. Nor were they an exception. When he compared fifty-eight foraging societies from around the world, Lee found that half got the majority of their calories from plant foods; another eighteen relied mostly on fishing. Only eleven—less than a fifth—relied on hunting as their primary means of subsistence, and all but one were limited to either the highest or the lowest latitudes, far beyond our African homeland.

LifeHacker.

Yes, these smart appliances offer some useful features, but half of the folks who buy smart appliances don’t bother to connect them, either because of privacy concerns (see below) or because they simply don’t see the benefit (do you need your fridge to track your grocery list, or do you just jot it down somewhere like a normal person?). Samsung is apparently plotting to infuse all of its appliances with its digital assistant Bixby (plus an AI boost), despite the fact that Bixby is perhaps the most despised piece of technology this side of speed cameras.

The answer is pretty obvious: No, you probably don’t need smart appliances. In fact, you should probably buy dumb ones—as long as you have the option.

If I could trade my modern Amana and Electrolux refrigerators for a pair of the GE models (circa 1955) my mother used, I would, in a heartbeat.

Tyler Cowen.

Apparently, almost everything.

Read it.

There are 13 divorces among the 10 richest men in the world. Seven of the top ten have been divorced at least once.

Tom Luongo has a very interesting take on the current situation.

It is precisely because Kamala Harris was picked to be Biden’s veep for every other reason than the job description that the Democrats and Davos are in the bind they are in as I write this.

It was never about Harris’ competence, capability, or commitment that landed her in the Naval Observatory. It was the boxes she ticked, the perception of her moral fluidity, and her solidification of the black female vote at a time when black men were drifting into Der Trumpenfuhrer’s orbit that made her the center of their Venn Diagram.

Notice how she was never a person to them… just a series of attributes.

Cedar Sanderson.

A commonplace book isn’t a book, to begin with. It is more akin to a butterfly collection, or perhaps pretty rocks, or fossil bits, or whatever catches your eye and you pick up, sticking it in your pocket to pull out and look at later, arranged in a system that pleases you. In this journal, you would write down parts of books. Quotes, passages, something that sparked a thought and caught your eye, pulled out of a much larger book and jotted down. The very act of capturing it would help you remember it later, and if you did this all through reading a book, then went back at the end of the book to review what you noted during your read-through, you might find that you had captured in a nutshell what the book meant to you.

This site contains my Commonplace Book; look under Pages on the left. I read through it about once a month, and enjoy my time doing so.

The Spectator.

It’s a truism that the Anglosphere has developed a “tribalism” that rivals the divisions between the Kikuyu and Luhya in Kenya. One pernicious aspect of mutually hostile groupsterism is prix fixe politics. Your side shares a rigid, prescribed collection of beliefs, and joining the club entails embracing every single one, while despising a compulsory roster of enemies and backing the folks on your team — whatever friend or foe may say, whatever friend or foe may do. As in French restaurants, there are no substitutions.

Read it.

One of my favourite ideas in philosophy is the Duhem-Quine thesis, one of those concepts “discovered” independently by two different people using two different approaches, which tells us that we can never eliminate all but one explanation for a single event. There will always be other potential reasons for what happened. Consider Emma Raducanu. Until the current Wimbledon, she had exited every Grand Slam she had entered after her triumph in New York no later than the Second Round. Is she an elite, Grand Slam-winning level tennis player on a run of bad form, or is she a 30-60 ranked player who once got lucky? Her results support both interpretations and give us no reason to pick one over the other. (I see that she is now out of Wimbledon, losing to a mere qualifier).

The upshot of this is that it is never wise to commit too heavily to any particular interpretation because there is a reasonable chance that it will be wrong.

ZMan does a deep dive.

The regime media’s ongoing meltdown over Joe Biden’s mental decline might be a bit of foreshadowing for what lies ahead in American society. What was on display the night of the debate is called a preference cascade. This is when people suddenly realize that their private doubts or preferences are shared by everyone else. One person realizes he is not alone in his doubts, for example, so he voices them and all of a sudden, this private doubt sweeps the room as public doubt.

Read it.

Compared to the other “visionary” writers working at the time – William Gibson, Neal Stephenson – Banks is underappreciated. This is because Gibson and Stephenson in certain ways anticipated the evolution of technology, and considered what the world would look like as transformed by “cyberspace.” Both were crucial in helping us to understand that the real technological revolution occurring in our society was not mechanical, but involved the collection, transmission and processing of information.
Banks, by contrast, imagined a future transformed by the evolution of culture first and foremost, and by technology only secondarily. His insights were, I would contend, more profound. But they are less well appreciated, because the dynamics of culture surround us so completely, and inform our understanding of the world so entirely, that we struggle to find a perspective from which we can observe the long-term trends.

If you haven’t read any of Banks’ Culture stories, do so. Highly recommended. Start with Consider Phlebas and proceed to Player of Games. If those two don’t get you hooked, you can stop. (And the angels will weep for you….)

MORE: A FEW NOTES ON THE CULTURE by Ian M. Banks

Read it.

Why can’t it be both?

Notice how these days doing something reasonable is called ‘reactionary’ by the Narrative Media.

Read it.

The People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan) have a difficult history. To put it mildly. The seeds of this acrimony were sown long before the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. To Beijing, Taiwan is a part of China that needs to be brought back into the fold, by force if necessary. For Taipei, maintaining the present uneasy status quo is desirable but increasingly untenable long-term. Matters may well come to a head in the next few years. China will have the military capability to take Taiwan by 2027. Yet an amphibious invasion won’t be easy and is by no means a foregone conclusion. This article examines the options available to China from the peaceful to the forceful.

How many parents would do this … if they could?

Read it.

“We were promised the curing of cancer and all we got are so-and-so improvements in five-year cancer survival rates” would be a fair thing to say about progress in biomedical sciences in the last few decades. And cancer is one of the disease areas where we have done pretty well, relatively speaking. If we look at Alzheimer’s, the situation is much worse: up until 2021, we had gone for 20 years with no new drugs – and even the approved ones have marginal effects.

The big question is: Why? A common explanation is that biology might simply be too hard for us to manipulate successfully. Humans have come up with very clever solutions to defeat all these ailments, but despite our ingenuity, we simply cannot match what has been shaped by millions of years of evolution. Another explanation is that this is, to use a very online term, simply a “skill issue.” It’s not that biology itself is too hard, we’re just not being smart enough about understanding and manipulating it.

Smithsonian.

Orderly boxes of cards once filled libraries large and small, and even the most humble of books boasted a catalog card of its own. But when the company that made the cards stopped printing them in 2015, the sun finally set on the card catalog, a book-finding system more than a century old.

…

Many of us who remember going to libraries and using the card catalog connect it with a sense of discovery. I have memories of flipping through the cards by subject and finding all the different books or other materials that had the kind of information I was looking for and those were always fun “eureka!” moments.

But it is not just about nostalgia. The card catalog was a revolutionary tool for organizing information. It was really the first search engine, so I think for younger generations it is an eye-opener to think about the written catalog and how far we have come in organizing data and making it findable.

I recall as a student going to the card catalog, looking up a book, and then just flipping through cards ahead and behind the one I had looked up to find others of the same nature. The Library of Congress web site has a ‘browse’ feature where one can look up a book and then ‘browse the self’ for books with the same (or close) classifications, which is an experience close to that of playing Myst.

Read it.

I’m often asked what my favorite weird/obscure fact about New York City was. Ironically, as the founder of Untapped New York, this question frequently proves difficult because there are just so many amazing things about this city. So I went back into my memory archives, thinking what about New York City impelled me to create Untapped New York. The pneumatic tube mail system is top on that list.

I remember pneumatic tube systems in department stores in Indianapolis when I was a child. I’ve never lost my fascination with them. The still seem very … steampunk is about the best way to describe it.

Read it.

Making a graham cracker crust for your no-bake pies and cheesecakes is a bit old hat these days. Usher in this festive season with a crumb crust that’s far from ordinary, but familiar at the same time. This crust provides a unique texture, and it just might be the easiest crumb crust out there. You can make a press-in pie crust out of a single ingredient: Pop-Tarts.

Read it.

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

Engineered mRNA has turned cells into tiny biofactories, producing medications to successfully treat an inflammatory skin condition and two types of cancer, according to a new study. The tech paves the way for therapies in which patients’ bodies make their own drugs.

Read it.

Now, if only we could get Certain People to realize that….

The full implication of the Founding Fathers’ decisions (note the plural) to break from their mother country has never fully sunk in with many Americans. This is especially true when we consider and critique the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. Why? Because, paradoxically, the court often doesn’t do its job of striking down unconstitutional laws because it is too British.

Under the British system, courts don’t judge laws on their constitutionality. But across the pond, America’s system requires them to. When the Supreme Court says it can’t strike down a law because doing so would be “undemocratic” (a frequent justification), it’s actually saying, “No judicial review please, we’re British.” For example, last year, when the court reviewed a California law that threatened to raise the cost of pork throughout the country in violation of the Constitution’s commerce clause, it politely demurred because “[i]n a functioning democracy, policy choices like these usually belong to the people and their elected representatives.” Instead of making an excuse befitting a Jane Austen dinner party, the court would have been better off remembering why it was given the power to overrule a “democratic policy choice” after the American Revolution.

Read it.

Are we on the verge of an apocalyptic global war in which billions of people could die?  Very few people anticipated that World War I would erupt, but it happened anyway.  And very few people anticipated that World War II would erupt, but it happened anyway.  All throughout human history, there have been wars.  Ever since the very beginning, it has just been a matter of time before major powers collide.  Unfortunately, even though very alarming warning signals are flashing all around us, most of the population of the western world seems absolutely clueless about what is really going on out there.  Leaders all over the planet seem to have come down with a really bad case of “war fever”, and preparations for apocalyptic showdowns are being made. 

No pressure, but….

Read it.

This story has been making the rounds on the internet with a claim that you’ve probably been told during visits to castles, but, there’s no evidence for it whatsoever.

“I thought that there were still quite a few people who actually wanted and liked conservatism. But in fact, there are hardly any. The other day I was asked to define the word, on Twitter, and came up with something like “Love of God, love of country, love of family, love of beauty, love of liberty and the rule of law, suspicion of needless change”. Given more room I’d have added all kinds of preferences for poetry and sylvan beauty over noise and concrete, for twilight over noonday, for autumn over summer and wind over calm, for the deep gleam of iron polished in use over the flashy sparkle of precious metal.” — Peter Hitchens

Remember: Corporations do not pay taxes. Corporations merely collect taxes. Taxes are an expense to a corporation, which like any other expense is folded into the price that they charge their customers. Therefore, the people who actually pay the taxes are … the customers.

‘Taxing corporations’ allow governments to take even more money from their citizens in a way such that the stupid element of the population believes that the tax is being paid by someone else.

All cities run by Democrats. What a surprise.

Read it.

When secession serves the needs of political homogeneity and self-determination, it might actually serve the common good.