Read it.

The dirty little secret of the ‘intellectual property’ racket unmasked: Having a government-enforced artificial monopoly makes a business focus on rent-seeking rather than innovation.

Read it.

Gov. Greg Abbott revealed the website in June, after announcing that the state had set up a $250 million ”down payment” on a border wall. A spokesperson for Abbott told the Tribune that the governor is grateful for the support that that has come in as Texas ”fills the gap created by President [Joe] Biden and steps up to secure our southern border.”

Read it.

“And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.” Luke 16:9.

Don’t think of it as selling out; think of it as buying in.

Steve Sailer.

If you are exposed to the horrific tropical diseases river blindness and lymphatic filariasis, you very much should ingest ivermectin. Ivermectin’s discoverers were awarded the 2015 Medicine Nobel Prize and Merck gives ivermectin away for free in the tropics.

Lileks.

On the way back to the Cities I thought of some writers who are perfectly empowered to discuss the fate and foibles of the Fargos of America, but would probably twitch in their seat if you drove them around, first out of fear that Red Indians would come whooping over the horizon, and then out of dismay that none of this comported with their preconceptions. There’s the classic movie theater, still open, all the marquee bulbs flashing. There’s where the symphony plays. There’s the museum. There’s the central library. There’s the coffee shop with the rainbow flag. There’s the 30s office building with Moderne lines; there’s the dense housing; there’s the bright new big school, lavishly funded. There’s the big newspaper building. There’s the University. Oh, look, there’s the other University. There’s the historic architecture. Here’s the river. Beyond all this, endless grain and toil.

That’s why there’s always a market, in the Big City, for a book by a Big City denizen (who, more often than not, didn’t grow up in the Big City)  chronicling a down-the-Zambezi-with-gun-and-camera expedition to Flyover Country, marveling at all of the Dirt People and what strange shenanigans they get up to.

Read it.

Paul Krugman needs to learn some geography. Last week, he wrote, “there’s no more room for housing” in California unless they build up. After all, he notes, “San Francisco is on a peninsula, Los Angeles is ringed by mountains.”

Yes, San Francisco is on a peninsula. But, immediately to the south of the city is San Mateo County, which — according to census data — is 68 percent rural open space. South of San Mateo is Santa Clara County, home of San Jose, which is 74 percent rural.

I’ve always thought that San Francisco ought to be a walled city, like Valetta.

Read it.

A good deal of the current discussion of vaccination takes it for granted that it is in almost everyone’s interest to get vaccinated, hence that failure to get vaccinated is evidence of false beliefs or irrational behavior. To see why this is not true for everyone, it is worth looking at some numbers.

According to the CDC, the estimated infection fatality rate is 0.05 percent for 18-to-49-year-olds. I start my calculations with someone who is certain to get infected and has a life expectancy of thirty years. Thirty years is 262,800 hours, so the reduction in life expectancy is .0005×262,800=131 hours.

If you believe your chance of getting infected is only .1, not unreasonable if you regard the current wave as the last of the epidemic, that reduces it to 13 hours. If you are 25, which according to one source gives an IFR of .01, that takes it down to less than three hours. Saving that may not be worth the time and trouble of two injections, a likely few days of not very serious side effects and some small risk of more substantial side effects. The same is more true for younger ages or people in particularly good health.

Read it.

A lot of us no doubt have been wondering what act, by whom, will catalyze an uprising against the increasingly oppressive regime? I remember years ago an ABC program that demonstrated that good people will remain frozen in the face of wrongness until someone moves, someone acts, and then all of a sudden everyone moves to confront evil. So it is that many of us are watching and calculating and simply need to see the flow start and then we, too, will add out weight to the change that must come.

As many of you may recall I attended my first protests in 2020 in Sacramento against Covid restrictions that were trashing the livelihoods of small businesses, running over the rights to religious practice and assembly, and generally oppressing the people. The protests had little, if any, effect. Covid fear was high then, and as it waned in the latter part of the summer California calculatedly eased restrictions just enough to stave off dangerous discontent. When California started ramping oppression up again toward the end of the year is when I moved to East Tennessee.

And now our national oppression is in full force. Well, not actually full force if you have read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. But certainly at unprecedented levels in this country that for so long embraced individual rights and freedoms. As we have been watching this regime take control and promote destructive policies, we have wondered how long will the people stand for it? What will cause the people, whom the regime sees as an existential threat, to see the regime as an existential threat to them? When will they make demands for change that cannot be ignored?

Read it.

Nanosatellite startup Spire Global didn’t set out to become a provider of signals intelligence (SIGINT). But with the accidental discovery that its antennas for weather forecasting were also picking up signals being used to jam the Global Positioning System, the pivot just made sense, according to Spire’s new-ish head of US government sales, Conor Brown.

“We actually first, sort of, serendipitously discovered this capability when we were calibrating our first reflectometry satellites,” he told Breaking Defense in advance of last week’s annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.

“It’s been really interesting to repurpose our weather satellites, and apply them to a completely different mission set,” he added. “And so we’re looking at a lot of future architectures — more purpose built solutions, but also maximizing the capability of our satellites on orbit.”

Read it.

“Diversity”—or more properly, ethnopolitics—has long been championed by the Democratic party. So why are California’s 15.6 million Latinos suddenly making liberals nervous? Recent polls suggest that over 54 percent of Latinos support the recall of Governor Gavin Newsom. Highly paid political consultants across the nation are scrambling to come up with an explanation. Why would La Raza suddenly turn on Newsom and the Democratic Party, which has claimed the Latino vote for decades?

When you stop looking at California politics strictly in terms of ethnic allegiances, and consider economics, growth, and opportunity, the answer is obvious: Latinos embody traditional middle-class values of work and success. In short, they still believe in and cherish the California Dream.

With their near-total control of California politics, Democrats have enacted high tax and anti-upward mobility policies. The state’s leadership has attacked middle class virtues such as home ownership, free enterprise, educational advancement, savings, and safety.?California’s historically white middle class is in flight to other states, creating a void which Latinos now fill. As the newest inductees into the American middle class, Latinos remember our roots and remember that we have the most to lose.

Read it.

Pigs are smarter than you might think.

Dennis Prager.

Imagine if some of the biggest cities in America seceded from their states. Imagine Illinois without Chicago, Pennsylvania without Philadelphia, California without Los Angeles or San Francisco, New York state without New York City, or Texas without Houston, Dallas or San Antonio.

Those states would lose a major tax base and some of their best orchestras and other artistic institutions. But the gains in quality of life would completely offset any financial or artistic losses.

That’s the way Britain does it. Major urban areas are separated out from their surrounding rural areas.

Big cities have been and continue to be centers of destructive ideas, and the people living in them are generally coarser and often just plain meaner. Of course, there are decent individuals in big cities and obnoxious people outside of big cities. But having a greater proportion of nice to obnoxious is more likely in smaller cities and other nonurban areas. Everyone reading this knows that one is more likely to be treated warmly when entering a store or dining in a restaurant in Cooperstown, New York, than in Brooklyn, New York; in Laramie, Wyoming, than in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

As regards bad and destructive ideas, big cities almost hold a monopoly.

Tru Dat. Where did the crooked Democrat political machine originate? (Bingo!)

Read it.

This is from New York Magazine, pillar of the Narrative Media, so bear that in mind. But even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then, and this appears to be one of those.

Read it.

Read it.

The pandemic was supposed to prove the value of public health institutions like the CDC; instead, it exposed their inability to deal with a serious pandemic without serious errors. Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, worries that these failures have a deeper cause: as the citizens of countries like the United States come to trust each other less and less, they are increasingly incapable of meeting the big challenges that await them.

Read it.

Elwartowski is dressed, per his trademark style, in a Hawaiian shirt, a look that seems to convert his every setting into cheerful paradise. Affable, clean-shaven, and still boyish at 47, he is one of the most devoted members of a strange global tribe: seasteaders, as they call themselves, believe the answer to some of life’s most pressing problems is to build new cities on the ocean. Global poverty, health crises, environmental challenges: these issues might all be fixed out there, along Earth’s last (mostly) unclaimed frontier. According to seasteading logic, the current crop of land-based governments is not serving the world—and by breaking away and starting afresh, we might build a better society.

Read it.

The FBI released documents sought related to the death of former Democrat National Committee voter expansion data director Seth Rich, and a lawyer says it shows no signs of what has been considered a robbery murder.

Read it.

Convenience sometimes comes with risks that are not always apparent.

Joel Kotkin.

For years progressives, neo-conservatives, libertarians and business “visionaries” embraced the notion of inexorable progress leading humanity to more enlightened times. Optimistic notions about an “arc of history” bending toward greater prosperity and social justice were embraced by both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama. But these days, the arc of progress seems to have done an about face and become something of a circle, bending all the way back to autocracy and intolerance, while the optimism of the Bush or Obama years appears more naïve in retrospect with every passing day.

Indeed, “the notion of inexorable progress leading humanity to more enlightened times” is the very foundation of the progressive ideology; to the extent that ‘neo-conservatives’, ‘libertarians’, or ‘business visionaries’ embrace it, they signal that they are neither conservative, libertarian, nor visionary. The progessive icon of ‘the Right Side of History’ has become the new Golden Calf toward which all are expected to bow, and in whose honor all are expected to dance.

Read it.

The NYT is much less enthusiastic about RFK assassination conspiracy theorizing than the Washington Post.

Read it.

2021 Chicago Council Survey data show a majority of Americans support a range of US policies towards Taiwan: recognition as an independent country, inclusion in international organizations, and a US-Taiwan free trade agreement.

Read it.

I frequently listen to Scott Adams’s daily blog — Coffee with Scott Adams. He presents an interesting take on the news of the day and analyzes how persuasive (or not) are certain techniques employed in news outlet propaganda. His audience skews conservative but Adams (provocatively) claims to “be left of Bernie”. In reality, all Adams is doing is promoting critical thinking whether you agree with his particular take on current events. Mrs Rodin, when she listens with me, treats Adam’s coffee klatch as a melodrama. Adams is capable of (frequently) sharing viewpoints with which Mrs Rodin (and others in his audience) do not agree and to which she voices her displeasure.

All this is by way of introduction: Adams’ view on “the Big Lie” (reformulated by Adams a la Trump as “that Biden won”) is that election fraud was not only probable but inevitable. Quoting Adams from memory, “Any system designed to be un-auditable will be used to cheat.” Or words to that effect. Adams does not direct this charge solely to the 2020 general election — it is a general observation true of everything.

I watch Coffee With Scott Adams every day. $7 a month to Locals will allow you to access the recorded videocasts asynchronously. Highly recommended.

“Instapundit” Glenn Harlan Reynolds.

In recent years, there have been a lot of catchphrases around science: “Follow the science!” “We believe in science!” Even “The science is settled!”

Well, sometimes it’s not settled. Sometimes it’s not even really science. But lots of people believe in it or follow it anyway. It’s a global problem.

Most recently, we learned that a widely noticed 2012 study co-authored by Dan Ariely — whom the journal Science refers to as a “superstar honesty researcher” — was based on fake data.

Read it.

When it opened 2 1/2 years ago near the Hudson River, the 150-foot-tall (46-meter-tall) piece of public art known as the Vessel looked like another surefire Manhattan tourist draw. It’s a strange honeycomb of platforms and staircases, partially ringed by skyscrapers, offered striking views of the waterfront and quickly became an Instagram favorite.

But these days it stands closed and empty, its entrances blocked off with chains or metal barricades, after a 14-year-old boy last month became the fourth person to fatally leap from the sculpture.

The death on July 29, a mere two months after the sculpture had reopened following previous suicides, has reinvigorated a call for real estate developer Related Companies to raise the height of the waist-high railings on the sides of the stairs and platforms.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

If I were a Marxist, I might be tempted to say that the obligatory switch to electric cars is a conspiracy of the rich against the poor to enslave them yet further. (By the poor, I mean of course the relatively poor, not the absolutely destitute.)

Many of the relatively poor have old, cheap, and no doubt polluting vehicles. Many of these poor need such vehicles to go wherever they need to go. Tradesmen and craftsmen in a small way of business often have old diesel vans that will soon be prohibited; they will have to replace them with far more expensive electric types. This will have the great advantage of forcing them either to indebt themselves in order to buy them, or to go out of business altogether, thus leaving the field to larger businesses. This would be but a small step in the march to monopoly that the Marxists predict.

Read it.

For one thing, you can subtract the expense of commuting, plus the non-monetary value of the wear and tear on your psyche.

I know the feeling.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

“Just wait ’til” arguments are emotion, not reason.

This may not be evident to the people who need to know; the people who go around using them, with varying degrees of frequency. It is abundantly apparent to those of us who have been continually on the receiving end of them for the last sixteen to nineteen months. “Just wait ’til you catch the ‘vid.” “Just wait ’til you’re on a ventilator.” “Just wait ’til you suffer permanent lung or organ damage.” “Just wait ’til it’s your family members who have it, and they caught it from you.”

These are not rational arguments. They feel like they are, to the person who is making them. That’s the problem. Feel.

Read it.

The choices by Vyas and other members of the millennial generation of where to live have reshaped the country’s political geography over the past decade. They’ve left New York and California and settled in places less likely to be settings for TV sitcoms about 20-something urbanites, including Denver, Houston and Orlando, Florida. Drawn by jobs and overlooked cultural amenities, they’ve helped add new craft breweries, condominiums and liberal voters to these once more-conservative places.

Note the assumption that young people are liberal voters, as if that were a law of nature.

Read it.

Recent descriptive work suggests the type of college education (field or institution) is an important but neglected pathway through which individuals sort into homogeneous marriages. These descriptive studies raise the question of why college graduates are so likely to marry someone within their own institution or field of study. One possible explanation is that individuals match on traits correlated with the choice of education, such as innate ability, tastes or family environment. Another possible explanation is that the choice of college education causally impacts whether and whom one marries, either because of search frictions or preferences for spousal education. The goal of this paper is to sort out these explanations and, by doing so, examine the role of colleges as marriage markets. Using data from Norway to address key identification and measurement challenges, we find that colleges are local marriage markets, mattering greatly for whom one marries, not because of the pre-determined traits of the admitted students but as a direct result of attending a particular institution at a given time.

Matt Ridley.

Near Fukushima, ten years after the nuclear accident that followed the tsunami, wild boar have colonised the suburbs. Near Chernobyl, bison and wolves wander abandoned streets. There is no doubt that if humans vanished, indigenous wildlife would return in abundance, minus the mammoths and sabre-tooths that our ancestors extinguished.

Rewilding is all the rage, and it is coming soon to a hillside near you. But what form should it take and how should it be done? In practice, rewilding began quite a long time ago. A recent study found that, contrary to what most people believe, the world now has more trees than 35 years ago and much of the regrowth is natural regeneration: Europe alone has gained an area of tree cover greater than France.

If the Apocalypse comes, there will be plenty of pig to eat. Although it won’t be easy….

Severian reveals some inconvenient truth.

Since it’s impossible that blacks could fail tests at a higher rate than Whites for any reason other than Teh Rayciss, companies like Duke Power had to find some other way to weed out grossly unqualified morons from the interview process. Their ad hoc solution was to require college degrees for any meaningful job, because the SAT at that time was basically a jumped-up Wonderlic test — that is to say, functionally an IQ test, lightly disguised as a “scholastic achievement” test.

The inevitable happened. College degrees were suddenly much more valuable, so more people signed up for college. Which led to Bakke v. Regents (1978). And so the corporate gatekeeping had to keep intensifying in order to keep the morons out, such that by the late 1990s you needed a college degree to work as a shoeshine boy, because having the gumption to pay enough fees to the “college” to get the piece of paper at least demonstrates minimal sticktoitiveness….

Read it.

Brad Day and his wife Holly Kulak were first introduced to Pacaso in May, after a romantic sunset dinner in their yard. “And we just saw this drone, coming up and over our backyard,” Brad says. “And we’re like, what is that?”

Pacaso denies directing or paying a drone operator to film the neighborhood. But its website does have drone photos of the house in question, located at 1405 Old Winery Court. It says it bought the photos after the fact.

Nonetheless, after the drone incident, Brad and Holly got suspicious about what was going on in their neighborhood. About a week later, their neighbors told them they were moving and selling their house to a Limited Liability Corporation, or “LLC.” But they were super vague about it.

…

If you buy a share in a house, you’re able to stay in it 44 nights per year, in increments that can’t exceed 14 consecutive days per visit. You can also “gift” these stays to friends or family. Pacaso offers an app to handle the logistics of booking stays. It oversees management, maintenance, and cleaning of the property. In exchange for all this, it charges 12% of the home’s purchase price upfront and monthly fees going forward. If you buy a share in a house, you have to hold on to it for a year. After that, you can sell it and profit from any appreciation in the home’s value (or be on the hook for any depreciation).

Sort of like a time-share.

Read it.

Despite its adherents’ pose of rationality, scientism has a serious problem: it is either self-refuting or trivial. Take the first horn of this dilemma. The claim that scientism is true is not itself a scientific claim, not something that can be established using scientific methods. Indeed, that science is even a rational form of inquiry (let alone the only rational form of inquiry) is not something that can be established scientifically. For scientific inquiry itself rests on a number of philosophical assumptions: that there is an objective world external to the minds of scientists; that this world is governed by causal regularities; that the human intellect can uncover and accurately describe these regularities; and so forth. Since science presupposes these things, it cannot attempt to justify them without arguing in a circle. And if it cannot even establish that it is a reliable form of inquiry, it can hardly establish that it is the only reliable form. Both tasks would require “getting outside” science altogether and discovering from that extra-scientific vantage point that science conveys an accurate picture of reality—and in the case of scientism, that only science does so.

Read it.

One man’s quiet fight to save your face, your bank account, and the environment from an endless case of shaving rash.

I used a Gillette double-edged razor until I couldn’t find blades for it any more.

Read it.

Immigration, housing policy, the staffing of symphony orchestras, minutiae of voting rules, the teaching of math—all these issues can be defined and dominated by reference to the legacy of white supremacy. In those few cases where race seems not to pertain, the contiguous domains of #MeToo, trans rights, or climate change usually cover the dispute and allow the Left to determine the direction of debate. But race blankets everything.

Until Afghanistan. The botched withdrawal of our small but persistent presence from the obstreperous, Central Asian shithole extraordinaire has stunned the Regime. We watch as one spokesperson after another stumbles nonplused into a linguistic void because there are no white supremacists to blame. Neither Ted Cruz nor Tucker Carlson nor “the Koch Brothers” (one of whom is dead, though that hasn’t changed the formulation) ordered the military out of Bagram Air Force Base. The Oath Keepers did not encourage a resurgent Taliban to seize Kandahar, nor did anti-vaxxers convince the Afghan army to sell its weapons. It would be a stretch even for Jen Psaki to connect the collapse of the Ghani Administration to the retreat of glacial ice cover in the Hindu Kush, and from there to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords.

“Everything Woke turns to shit.” — Donald Trump

Read it.

In the past, activism was risky business. By definition, it disrupts lives, threatens chaos, causes disorder and often ends in violence. It should, at the very least, get you in trouble with your boss. But these days, as others have noted, being an activist is simply another part of one’s career, one’s social life, one’s brand. It’s something you perform on Twitter and brag about on LinkedIn. The risk has evaporated and that begs the question: what does real activism actually look like?

The Other McCain puts the boot in.

Said no one, ever.

At least not after the past week, during which President Basket Case has demonstrated once and for all what a hopeless failure he is.

Read it.

The Left desperately needs to convert your children. While the Right is open to children and supportive of large families, the Left is increasingly anti-childbirth (“Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children,” writes the Guardian’s Damian Carrington). So unless our new woke Left finds young converts to fill its ranks, it will die. They are working hard at this conversion project everywhere. Leftism is rampant in public schools, of course, but also in many private schools, religious institutions, youth programs, social media, movies, advertisements, music, billboards, and likely even in the minds of your kids’ friends.

How can parents protect their children against this all-consuming indoctrination? In a hostile society, one of the most viable options is homeschooling—as a lifestyle. Homeschooling makes parents into their children’s primary educators, as they should be. Hence homeschooling grows ever more popular as the Left grows ever more aggressive.

Most government schools these days have degenerated into taxpayer-funded babysitting services in which very little education (but a lot of indoctrination) takes place.

Sarah Hoyt.

In the real world we learn that the stain won’t go on evenly (I will finally have an actually, for real workshop) despite your best efforts, and then you have to fix; that the bookcase you built should take that dictionary, but in fact it just collapsed, that….

You learn that there is a reality, and that it pushes back on you, and it’s not all shaped by your mind. The stain didn’t blotch or the varnish crocodile because of systemic racism. Preaching to the drains about systemic oppression won’t make no never mind. You need to do the work, and do it so it works.

Unfortunately, the profitable path in our society for almost a century has been to be pharaoh’s supervisor, ordering the slaves to make brick without straw.

Which is how we get to the embassy in Kabul being very very concerned with pride month, but not so much with getting their people out safely.

All of which… leads to where we are. There’s a group of people who can’t find the real world with two hands and a seeing eye dog. And they hate, despise and fear those who can, because those people refuse to fall in with the beautiful abstractions of the shit-spinners.

And they keep trying to control everything. Partly because then reality can’t sucker punch them, I think.

If we let them go on with this, they’ll kill us and destroy civilization.

With thanks to Bluebird Of Bitterness, who consistently has interesting stuff on her blog.