Severian teaches us a little history.

Back in my teaching days, I had this whole bit on why we should study history. I’d ask the class “why do we study history?” and the inevitable response came: “To avoid making the mistakes of the past.” But we never really do that, do we? I’d ask them. For instance, think about the last time you tied one on. The next morning you wake up, head pounding, stomach churning, and you vow “I’ll never drink again!” That lasts until the next weekend, tops, doesn’t it?

And so on. Then I’d tell them the real reason we study history is to better understand (for lack of a better term) human systems. The Marxists had a point: Class conflict (again for lack of a better term) really does drive quite a bit of human affairs. That the Marxists quickly went off the rails with it isn’t surprising — you’ll find no one on earth more reality-averse than a Marxist, except a feminist — but they had a point for all that. Breaking any given historical situation down into self conscious groups of people pursuing their class objectives will very often get you at least in the ballpark.

Zman is not happy.

In The Inequality of Man, the great evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane noted that fanaticism was one of the great inventions of the pre-modern world. Obsessive enthusiasm, especially for an unattainable thing like paradise, makes the fanatic a violent force of nature. We see that with the current Afghan debacle. The open borders fanatics have immediately seized on the crisis to justify importing millions of Afghans into your neighborhood. They never miss a beat.

Similarly, the same people responsible for losing yet another war for the empire are now using the Afghan mess to demand money for their China project. The logic here is that the willingness to abandon Afghanistan, as if it was the crown jewel of the empire, means China will think the US will abandon Taiwan. They may make a play for reclaiming the island nation as a result. The remedy is to give the brain trust of the military industrial complex more money for more new stuff.

The “heads we win, tails you lose” psychology of the military industrial complex is one of those signs of rot that does not get enough attention. The truth is, Afghanistan fell victim to the same disease that afflicts everything else. It quickly became a racket for rich people to skim money from Americans. Billions went to NGO’s and civilian contractors, who then used some portion of it to reward their favorite politicians back in Washington for their support of Afghanistan.

Read it.

Maria Andrejczyk, who won the silver medal for javelin throwing at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, auctioned her medal off for $125,000 to pay for an eight-month-old boy’s heart surgery.

Read it.

U.S. Customs and Border Protections recently seized multiple shipments arriving in Chicago from China that contained counterfeit Drug Enforcement Administration and Federal Bureau of Investigation badges, the agency announced in a press release.

Officials seized eight DEA badges and one FBI badge last week, between Aug. 13 and 15, and CBP notes that they’ve seized counterfeit law enforcement badges before, and that these knockoffs were headed towards various locations across the country.

Read  it.

And it doesn’t matter a damn. 44% is about the percentage of the vote that Clinton got when he won the Presidency.

Read it.

What could possibly go wrong?

Read it.

I’ve always thought that the best deterrent to vehicle theft is a radio-controlled bomb. It’s very easy to rig a burner cellphone to act as a trigger.

But that’s me.

Read it.

Members of Virginia’s disability community are slamming Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe after he ditched a candidate forum hosted by a disabilities advocacy group to attend a swanky Las Vegas fundraiser.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Ummmm……. Because life is better here than there? Despite systemic racism, People of Color being lynched left and right, and men in dresses being ‘misgenered’?

Severian regresses a little.

The thing you’ll notice right away if you read them is how utterly tedious life was pre-electricity. Actually, no, tedious is the wrong word, since in our usage it implies “mindless” and that’s exactly the opposite of Victorian and especially Tudor life. A much better word is “laborious,” maybe even just “hard.” Life was hard back then. Even the simplest tasks took hours, because everything had to be done by hand. You had a few simple machines, of course — simple in the mechanical sense, though nearly every page brings its “gosh, I never would’ve thought of that!” surprise — but mostly it’s muscle power. If you’re lucky, a horse’s or a donkey’s muscles do some of the heaviest work, but mostly it’s straight-up human effort.

And dirty. And smelly. And just plain ugly.

“Is there any news that doesn’t involve China being bad?” — Scott Adams

Severian has something to say.

In another, more accurate way, though, it’s really the American people who are the big winners. Note the lack of quotation marks around the proper noun, because I really do mean Americans — we few, we happy few, who enjoy things like “indoor plumbing” and “knowing how to read” and “living past 35.” For those who were worried that the Regular Army was going to be deployed on American streets in the near future, I think it’s time to take it down a notch. I think the big takeaway from Uncle Sam’s Afghan Adventure is that SEAL Team 6 can’t be everywhere. Eventually they have to turn it over to the Fightin’ Hairdressers of the 4077th Trannie Battalion…

Consider, too, that when it comes to Dolchstossen (or whatever the plural is in German), this one’s a doozy. No doubt The Media have had their “how this is all Trump’s fault” stories queued up and ready to go for a week or two now; the only mystery is how they’ll manage to blame The Unvaccinated and Climate Change, too (though they most assuredly will). But the actual fighting troops know better…

Read it.

The easiest way to identify a dyed-in-the-wool authoritarian is to mention Fox News on social media. It’s like reciting an ancient Gaelic incantation that makes the banshees rise from the swamp and scream their lamentations at the top of their voices. “Baaaaaan themmmmmm!” “The FCC should revoooooooke their license!” “Ruuuuuuuuupert!” And then they all get naked, hold hands around the sacrificial altar and say the magic words: Fairness Doctrine!

Now, these people only know two things about the Doctrine. One, it had the word “Fairness” in the title so it had to be, you know, “fair.” And two, Ronald Reagan was President when it was ditched and he was evil so it had to be good.

In their minds, the FCC was watching every television show and listening to every radio broadcast to make sure that everything was “fair” and that all points of view were being presented on every issue. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Read it.

enny pinching sounds like a good thing to do. Especially for important life decisions like money, education and life partners. Now I’m not here to tell you we should never slow down and assess a situation closely, but rather that it’s easy to do this in situations where it’s not appropriate. The reason it’s often not appropriate is because we almost never have access to the amount and kind of information that would make penny pinching an effective life strategy.

Any time we look into the details of something we are making a big assumption about how information maps to the future. We are assuming information can be tallied up and summed into some final answer that best tells us what to do in a given situation. But this isn’t how information works in complex situations. Under complexity information does not move from input to output as a linear sum of its parts.

Information works in nonlinear and highly opaque ways. The way information gets used under complexity is multiplicative, where bits of information interact with other bits of information in ways we will never know. We know this because this is a fundamental property of complex systems and thus situations. The causal chain that links inputs to outputs cannot be known.

The poor pinch pennies out of necessity, and they tend to raise their children to do the same. It is interesting to watch people who grew up poor and are now comfortably off resist spending money as if they didn’t know where their next meal was coming from. I suspect that most of the Hoarding Old People were of this stripe.

Read it.

Every one of us could write a whole library’s worth on that, so I’ll just pick one that is at least a gateway into all the rest: Stop enabling mental illness.

I love the delightfully appositive nature of the phrase ‘goofy-hippy-shit’. It comes in so handy….

Read it.

Oh, yeah, like that’s going to work.  The very people who loudly proclaim that race is ‘a social construct’ are going to construct you into their favorite oppression-race every time you diverge from the Narrative. Guaranteed.

Babylon Bee.

Back in 1850, the Union voted to make California the 31st state. But now Americans are taking an unusual step: holding a recall election to undo this and kick California out of the United States.

Read it.

After a year of start-and-stop public-health measures, more often guided by intuition than by science, studies are confirming what economists long suspected: the Covid-19 lockdowns were an expensive, unnecessary failure, based on models that overestimated the number of cases and deaths because they failed to account for individual responses to the pandemic.

Epidemiologists viewed lockdowns as the logical response to a new virus to which humans lacked immunity and that could overwhelm hospitals and cause many deaths. Yet health economists, following seminal work by Tomas Philipson, have long understood that people respond to incentives and alter their behaviors to avoid the risks and costs of infectious diseases. Epidemiologists failed to account for these voluntary changes in assessing what would happen without a lockdown.

Read it.

Could materials mined from the deep sea be the answer? That’s what commercial mining firms and scientists are trying to determine this month during two separate expeditions to a remote part of the Pacific Ocean known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ). A potential treasure chest of metals waiting to be plucked is at stake: This region of water is the size of the continental US, and its floor is littered with potato-sized metallic nodules, each containing high concentrations of cobalt, nickel, copper, and manganese, which are used in EV batteries. (Lithium, another key component, is primarily mined from Australia.) These materials would all be harvested as minerals, then refined into metals that could be used in batteries, usually by adding an oxide. Of course, the trick is getting the nodules off the bottom, which is 12,000 to 18,000 feet deep, without killing the creatures that live there or the fish that swim above.

Read it.

When you overprotect people from any and all risks, you’re not doing them any favours. Trauma-informed approaches and safetyism lead to antifragility, a term coined by Nassim Taleb, which refers to the fact that many systems — including our immune system and psychological system — need to experience stressors to grow strong. Instead of helping young people, we are empowering their anxiety. These overprotective approaches can stunt the natural coping responses that individuals need to develop.

Critical gender studies can also have a detrimental impact on mental health. In 2016, Dr Jordan Peterson expressed his concerns about a bill under consideration by the Canadian federal government. The bill included a list of gender expressions whose use would be prohibited on the grounds of discrimination. Peterson pointed out that the bill let the notion of identity be determined solely by the individual in question — whatever identity that might be. The problem with this is the fact that identity is not solely an individual construct but also a social one. There’s more to it than a person’s choices; identity oscillates between the psychological and the social. Therefore, if someone subjectively decides their identity without taking society into account, this decision will potentially compromise others by unilaterally redefining their roles in society.

Read it.

Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes.

High intelligence merely means that one thinks very very fast; it is no guarantee of the quality of the resulting conclusion. In fact, it often guarantees just the opposite, because the more quickly one comes to a conclusion, the more apt one is to think ‘it’s just obvious’ and put more weight behind its correctness than is deserved. That’s the truth behind the meme ‘an idea so bad that only an intellectual would believe it’.

Read it.

Former President Barack Obama was caught on video dancing maskless at his 60th birthday party Saturday night in Martha’s Vineyard — inside a giant tent filled with celebrities.

In a video posted to Instagram by singer-songwriter, Erykah Badu, Obama could be seen holding a microphone and dancing in the middle of the raised dance floor — to the cheers of gathered guests, the Daily Mail reported.

Badu had been performing with members of her band and managed to convince Obama to get on stage.

While the president’s back was turned, she took a selfie video capturing Obama fully in the frame, which she then posted directly to Instagram — despite photos being banned at the event. Crowds of people could be seen in the background, also in contrast to Obama’s insistence the event would be scaled back because of the spread of the delta variant of COVID-19, the Daily Mail reported.

Read it.

The myth of ‘intellectual property’ is showing its age.

Read it.

There were maybe 15 or 20 specialty labs that were doing really cool work in those days, and all of them were in California. Today, they’re all in Texas. The best lab in the world that studies cardiovascular genetics now is in Waco, Texas. There are several other examples of this phenomenon. This seems odd, to me. But whatever, right? So I was in San Francisco, around the year 2000 or so, working with one of the leaders in this field, who is a personal friend, so I will keep his identity discreet at this point. He was trying to figure out how to earn a living financially, while pursuing cutting-edge technology in this growing field. And he finally realized that he would have to leave California.

Read it.

Technicolor film was not color film, and it did not produce anything like lifelike colors. But how did it produce color movies? And why did those colors glow? And why did all of it lead to Dorothy getting ruby slippers?

As anyone who has seen an old Technicolor film knows, it looks weird. Blue eyes look like they glow. Pink faces look like they’ve been painted peach. Red looks scary. It all looks dyed, not recorded — and that’s because it was. There wasn’t any color film at the time that Technicolor was making its big splash. No one had figured out how to create a film stock that would record color. They had, however, found a way to make film stock that would filter out all the color that shouldn’t get through. And they had dyes. By putting them together, they made Technicolor glorious.

Read it.

‘Activists’ find out who’s actually in charge by getting their noses rubbed in it.

Read it.

What people really want, deep down, is drama within limits. Ideally, you have the sense that something better is possible — and that something worse is possible — but, most importantly, the sense that if you follow the rules, and make sure everyone else follows the rules, neither of them will happen.

If you reach what appears to be an end state — that is, there’s no realistic possibility of anyone going higher or lower — you see nasty Karen-ish behavior. From everyone, everywhere, always. The Z Man did a piece the other day on Sayre’s Law, which anyone who has ever dealt with eggheads instinctively understands: “The fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so small.” If you read the bios of the real lunatics — the insane-by-egghead-standards, I’m talking — you almost always see that they’re tenured at some second rate academy. They’re topped out, and they know it. Hang around the faculty lounge long enough, and you learn to spot it in their eyes — that precise moment when they realize that Harvard won’t be calling, so they’re stuck here at Flyover State. They can’t move up, and thanks to tenure there’s no realistic (in their minds) possibility of falling down. The only drama left, then, is interpersonal drama, which is why they’re such vicious, obnoxious bitches to everyone, everywhere, always.

I love this guy….

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

The title of the show this week is taken from the title of a book by the guy most consider to be the founder of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol. He was one of the first far-left intellectuals to break with the Left and migrate to the new Right. He embraced the term neocon, in an “own the insult” way, which is probably why the term has remained with us, despite it originally being an insult. The Left used it as a way to criticize their former colleagues for their break with them over various issues.

Today, of course, our side uses the term as an insult. Even within what is left of mainstream conservatism, the term and the people associated with it is falling out of favor, especially as the neocons get nastier in their critiques of populism. David French now sounds like a less masculine version of Robin DiAngelo. That is not an exaggeration, as he sounds like Mickey Mouse, and she sounds like she has had one too many Pall Mall’s with her boiler makers.

Read it.

Truth matters. Words matter. What is objectively the case matters. And insofar as our words and concepts can be about the objective world at all, then the shared set of words and meanings that we collectively use and are permitted to use to describe, navigate, and refer to that objective world matters. Such is the case for any society worth defending. The growing rash of instances of threats, intimidation, social cancelling, and violence in the name of creeping gender ideology within academia and beyond drastically threatens this shared set of goods and values and marks the beginning of what will be a steep and rapid descent into institutionalized tyranny if left unopposed.

Read it.

The situation is so dismal that governments everywhere are now pouring billions of dollars each year into myriad efforts designed to boost the ranks of STEM workers. President Obama has called for government and industry to train 10 000 new U.S. engineers every year as well as 100 000 additional STEM teachers by 2020. And until those new recruits enter the workforce, tech companies like Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are lobbying to boost the number of H-1B visas—temporary immigration permits for skilled workers—from 65 000 per year to as many as 180 000. The European Union is similarly introducing the new Blue Card visa to bring in skilled workers from outside the EU. The government of India has said it needs to add 800 new universities, in part to avoid a shortfall of 1.6 million university-educated engineers by the end of the decade.

And yet, alongside such dire projections, you’ll also find reports suggesting just the opposite—that there are more STEM workers than suitable jobs. One study found, for example, that wages for U.S. workers in computer and math fields have largely stagnated since 2000. Even as the Great Recession slowly recedes, STEM workers at every stage of the career pipeline, from freshly minted grads to mid- and late-career Ph.D.s, still struggle to find employment as many companies, including Boeing, IBM, and Symantec, continue to lay off thousands of STEM workers.

Read it.

Missouri GOP Gov. Mike Parson said Tuesday he has granted pardons to Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who drew international attention for brandishing guns at racial justice protesters last year.

In addition to the McCloskeys, who are personal injury lawyers, Parson also pardoned 10 other people Friday, a document from his office showed.

Mark McCloskey, 64, pleaded guilty to one count of misdemeanor fourth-degree assault June 17. His wife pleaded guilty to second-degree harassment, also a misdemeanor, online court records showed.

Read it.

When researching construction, you invariably discover that any new or innovative idea has actually been tried over and over again, often stretching back decades. One of these new-but-actually-old ideas is the idea of a mechanical bricklayer, a machine to automate the construction of masonry walls.

It’s easy to see the appeal of this idea – masonry construction seems almost perfectly suited for mechanization [0]. It’s extremely repetitive – constructing a masonry building requires setting tens or hundreds of thousands of bricks or blocks, each one (nearly) identical, each one set in the same way. It doesn’t seem like it would require physically complex movements – each brick gets a layer of mortar applied, and is simply laid in place next to the previous one. And because each brick and mortar joint is the same size, placement is almost deterministic – each brick is the same fixed distance from the previous one.

On top of this, masonry, especially block masonry, is one of the most physically punishing construction tasks, since it requires hours and hours of repetitively moving extremely heavy objects. All together masonry seems like the perfect candidate for a task to hand over to a machine, and it’s something people have been attempting for over 100 years.

Dennis Prager.

In my last column, I published comments written by New York Times subscribers about how proud they were of their children for deciding not to have children of their own. Though they acknowledged how much they ached to be grandparents, they nevertheless reveled in the fact that this would never happen.

Why did these parents take so much pride in their children’s decision not to give them grandchildren?

Because of climate change.

You read that right. Better not to have grandchildren than to have grandchildren who will suffer and quite possibly die because of global warming.

I applaud this decision, and strongly encourage left-wingers not to reproduce.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

“The Iliad”, Western literature’s foundational text, kicks off with a meeting. The Greeks are nine years into the siege of Troy, a plague has ravaged their ranks and they gather to ponder the flagging campaign (good teamwork is conspicuously absent: Achilles, the Greek’s foremost warrior, comes close to killing the commander, King Agamemnon).

In detailing the twists and turns of this conference, and subsequent ones held by the Greeks, Trojans and gods of Mount Olympus, Homer nails meeting behaviour with a precision that management gurus today can only dream of. Where Homer blazes a trail, other literary greats follow: the Western canon is ripe with unharvested wisdom on how to make meetings more productive. Time to put yourself on mute, turn off your camera and get reading.

To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell;
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

Read it.

Nuclear energy is considered a crucial part of fighting climate change with experts such as Bill Gates being big supporters of the technology. But nuclear energy comes with issues such as meltdown accidents and toxic waste.

While some might argue those are small fees to pay for clean energy (when compared to fossil fuels’ toll on the environment and humans), others argue there is a better way to do nuclear energy and that is through the use of thorium. For starters, thorium is three times more abundant in nature than currently used uranium.

But that’s not thorium’s only advantage. It turns out that when T-232 is hit by a neutron, it turns into a fissionable version of thorium called T-233. This new reaction makes its own fuel as it goes along making it also self-sustaining.

The thorium-based reactions also produce a lot less toxic waste than uranium-based ones. This is partially due to the fact that the reaction chain from thorium has a lot more steps than the uranium one resulting in fewer final products.

Read  it.

People often limit their creativity by continually adding new features to a design rather than removing existing ones.

Government activity follows the same paradigm. Politicians typically attempt to solve problems by adding regulations when removing them would be more beneficial.

Joel Kotkin.

In a world that seems to be divided between neoliberal orthodoxy and identitarian dogmas, it is possible to miss the waning presence of traditional social democracy. Born of the radical Left in Marx’s own time, social democrats worked, sometimes with remarkable success, to improve the living standards of working people by accommodating the virtues of capitalism. Today, that kind of social democracy—learned at home from my immigrant grandparents and from the late Michael Harrington, one time head of the American Socialist Party—is all but dead. This tradition was, in retrospect, perhaps too optimistic about the efficacy of government. Nevertheless, it sincerely sought to improve popular conditions and respected the wisdom of ordinary people.

In its place, we now find a kind of progressivism that focuses on gender, sexual preference, race, and climate change. Abandoned by traditional Left parties, some voters have drifted into nativist—and sometimes openly racist—opposition while more have simply become alienated from major institutions and pessimistic about the future.

Ideologues traditionally attempt to skew the traditional definition of terms in order to hijack them politically by sticking a qualifier on the front; ‘social justice’ is the poster child here, with its mutant progeny ‘environmental justice’, ‘racial justice’, and ‘[insert your favorite buzzword here] justice’. One can usually say that if a term has a politically-biased addition on the front, it’s no longer the same term. ‘Social justice’ isn’t justice, any more than ‘gay marriage’ is marriage. Similarly, ‘social democracy’ isn’t democracy.