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Developers are finding interesting ways to respond to latent demand for walkable neighbourhoods. As a result, the future of cities, at least in the south, may look like a Texas Doughnut. At least until cities start mandating more rational parking policies.

I think the Texas Doughnut is a great idea. The major problem with high-density housing in the modern world is that everybody wants a car and needs a place to park, and modern apartment buildings either force people away from having a car, or make large swathes of land into parking lots, which are pretty much useless for any other purpose. The parking area in a Texas Doughnut can be restricted to residents and visitors and hence is more secure than an outside parking lot, is less amenable to being taken over by homeless slums (where that could be a problem), and often have recreational spaces like playgrounds and gardens on their top level where people can send their kids to play without worrying about their safety. If the bottom level of the outside is available for businesses, the result is reminiscent of the ‘vibrant, walkable, full of amenities’ neighborhoods that urban planners cream their jeans over.

Fully qualified for a job at CNN or MSNBC.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The spread of the Wuhan coronavirus in the U.S. has accelerated, apparently due mainly to the delta variant. Last month, reported new cases were averaging around 17,000 per day, according to Worldometer. Now, they are averaging around 40,000 per day.

The good news is that deaths attributed to the virus aren’t increasing. A month ago, the daily death count was said to be around 350-400 per day. Now it’s slightly lower — more like 300 per day. Both totals represent a decrease from May, when the daily death count was coming in at more than 600.

I’d like to see some comparison with the number of deaths annually from ordinary influenza. But of course that wouldn’t stoke the panic, so nobody is going to do that.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

It strikes me as a fair trade.

CCOS

I wonder what would happen if we were to drop an asteroid on the Strait of Hormuz.  (An Arabian peninsula full of trees?)

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Human memory is fallible and malleable. In forensic settings in particular, this poses a challenge because people may falsely remember events with legal implications that never actually happened. Despite an urgent need for remedies, however, research on whether and how rich false autobiographical memories can be reversed under realistic conditions (i.e., using reversal strategies that can be applied in real-world settings) is virtually nonexistent. The present study therefore not only replicates and extends previous demonstrations of false memories but, crucially, documents their reversibility after the fact: Employing two ecologically valid strategies, we show that rich but false autobiographical memories can mostly be undone. Importantly, reversal was specific to false memories (i.e., did not occur for true memories).

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The researchers found that there was a positive correlation between higher penetration of Airbnb properties in an area – for example buildings containing multiple Airbnb lets – and a rise in violence. However, crime types associated with rowdy visitors, like drunkenness and noise complaints, as well as private conflicts, did not increase.

According to one study author, the correlation isn’t due to Airbnb tourists falling prey to pickpockets, but rather the way the short-term rental service can push long-term residents out of neighbourhoods.

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Project Narrative is the world’s leading academic think tank for the study of stories, and in our research labs, with the help of neuroscientists and psychologists from across the globe, we’ve uncovered dozens more literary inventions in Zhou Dynasty lyrics, Italian operas, West African epics, classic children’s books, great American novels, Agatha Christie crime fictions, Mesoamerican myths, and even Hollywood television scripts.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Apparently Asians are ‘honorary White People’ and must be hidden away.

Babylon Bee — barely.

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The only time monopolies really exist is when they are enforced by government (see patent and copyright). The only time government attacks ‘monopolization’ is when some political crony is going to get its ox gored.

Parsing this NPR Narrative Media piece is left as an exercise for the reader. (Hint: you have to get a government license to practice medicine or build a hospital.)

ZMan.

On the other hand, we will now have two new holidays for this new crusade being used to authenticate the regime. Juneteenth will now be the new Independence Day and January 6th will be the Passover. The former is in commemoration of when the good news reached the last of the magic people. The latter is when the tides of history protected the faithful from the raging mobs of systemic racism. Perhaps this will be published as the Gospel of Saint Jaffa, a new holy book.

This new enemy the system has created for itself is more natural and compelling for the regime, so it will be more durable that the crusade against Islam. That drama raised questions about certain subjects that no one is allowed to discuss. It also had religious overtones, which invited in Christians. The only thing that makes the regime more uncomfortable than Christians openly talking about their religion is a collection of white guys noticing they are the only ones without an identity group.

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The animatronic presidency featured Remarks by President Biden on the Economy (the link is to the White House transcript). The remarks appear to be intended to allay concerns about inflation. If you have a modicum of common sense or even if you have only been listening to his Secretary of the Treasury, you would have reasonable concerns about inflation.

Speaking at the White House and staring vacantly into his prompter, our animatronic president argued that his alleged $4.5 trillion “infrastructure” spending blowout (even as downsized) will fund decades of economic growth and keep prices low. “My ‘Build Back Better’ plan will be a force for achieving lower prices for Americans looking ahead,” he said. “If your primary concern right now is inflation, you should be even more enthusiastic about this plan,” said the president. Indeed, it will do everything but prevent male pattern baldness.

And if anybody knows about male pattern baldness, it’s ‘Plugs’ Biden.

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You’d be surprised how many reasons people have to go to Yuma, Arizona. They go for the weather, the four thousand yearly hours of baking sunlight. They go for the casinos, rising up by the highway on the lands of the Quechan and the Cocopah. They go to witness the arsenal of the largest standing army in the world at the Yuma Proving Grounds, where mortars and brimstone missiles pummel the Sonoran Desert. And then there are people who go for the same reason I did: because they’re afflicted with aching and rotting teeth, with broken molars and crooked gums, mouths full of pain that follow them around like debts. Because just across the border from Yuma, so close you can walk it, is Los Algodones—Molar City. The dental tourism capital of the world.

Every year roughly 120,000 Canadians and Americans cross the border into Los Algodones. There they spend millions of dollars on dental care that costs a fraction of what it does back home. The town’s population hovers around five thousand, but it’s home to over five hundred practicing dentists who power the local economy and contribute to the booming global medical tourism industry.

Medical tourism is a deceptively sunny phrase for the lengths a person will go to escape their pain. It’s a type of migration that can only exist under certain asymmetries of care and certain conditions of capitalism. When health is a commodity it feels realer the more dearly you have paid for it. But medical tourism is the inverse: health as a bargain, health as a matter of exchange rates. Health as a gamble.

Scott Johnson at PowerLine brings up some inconvenient truth.

We learned via Twitter last night that two more of the Texas Democrats who fled from Austin to Washington have contracted Covid-19. That brings the number to five out of a group of “nearly 60” (per the Austin American-Statesman here).

Putting the press release below together with Saturday’s previous release, we are advised that the Texas Five were all fully vaccinated — this at a time when the Biden administration is seeking to overcome vaccine “hesitancy” (forgive me) and censor vaccine “misinformation” (according to Ms. Misinformation herself).

I am a cynical guy. I hear the clock striking 13. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave…”

Either the vaccines have proved remarkably ineffective or someone is lying. It appears to me that the news stories are simply regurgitating the press releases.

Yup.

It does indeed.

New York Magazine can’t wait for it.

Last fall, Deutsche Bank warned its clients that millennials were coming for their wealth. In a research note, the bank’s strategist Jim Reid predicted that the generation’s impending attainment of political supremacy will “be a potential turning point for society and start to change election results and thus change policy.” As this younger generation ages into its prime voting years — and boomers steadily age out of the electorate — the intergenerational “balance of power” will shift.

“Assuming life does not become more economically favourable for Millennials as they age (many find house prices increasingly out of reach),” Reid continued, “such a shift in the balance of power could include a harsher inheritance tax regime, less income protection for pensioners, more property taxes, along with greater income and corporates taxes … and all-round more redistributive policies.”

But not all financial analysts are wringing their hands over what millennials will take from the boomers. Some are licking their chops over what they’ll soon receive from their elders.

Check it out.

As the possibilities of biotechnology innovations were revealed, the idea of resurrecting the Woolly mammoth quickly captured the imagination. The pursuit of this project has helped to identify immediate potential benefits to Asian elephant conservation. There is also a compelling climate change resilience rationale for this de-extinction project.

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Gerd Gigerenzer, a sixty-nine year German psychologist who has been studying how humans make decisions for most of his career, doesn’t think so. In the real world, rules of thumb not only work well, they also perform better than complex models, he says. We shouldn’t turn our noses up on heuristics, we should embrace them.

That view is increasingly gaining global attention. Partly because of the failure of complex models in predicting major events, such as the financial crisis in 2008, and the election of Donald Trump last year. Partly because Gigerenzer is backing what he says with some cutting edge research.

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Childlessness is a self-correcting problem Think of it as evolution in action.

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I am putting all these links in one spot for my own convenience. If any reader of mine find this convenient also, please look at these items before YouTube removes them.

I have marked those I discovered had been removed.

It is rather remarkable how quickly Americans grow accustomed to censorship. It is now routine on every news and commentary channel I regularly watch, to hear the pundit simply state there are topics and words he cannot mention without being punished. Several mention their shadow banning and demonetizations.

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Something very similar is at work in the operations of Big Tech, acting as a political arms of the Biden administration. Using the pretext of suppressing “misinformation,” Facebook and other platforms are identifying and silencing the administration’s opponents and, even though this is happening in full view of anyone paying attention, you’re not going to know anything about it if you get your news from CNN, MSNBC or one of the broadcast network troika of NBC/ABC/CBS.

In fact, the liberal media are engaged in “fact-checking” that labels reporting about this censorship as (you guessed it) “misinformation.”

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News reports now recognize the challenges of vaccinating an entire population, but the sophistication of the current collective vaccine-promotion strategies have evolved more slowly and focus on alleviating vaccine anxieties related to efficacy and safety.2 However, for much of the estimated 39% of the US population currently not vaccinated or reportedly not planning to receive the vaccine as soon as possible,3 vaccine apathy rather than true hesitancy may be an important major concern, and addressing apathy necessitates an entirely different communication approach than addressing hesitancy.

I have an idea: Let’s discuss, not hesitancy, not apathy, but aversion. That would be a change.

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One of the great ironies of 20th century history: Marxist revolutionaries could only ever seize power in the wrong countries. Marx imagined a revolution of industrial proletariat; he expected that this proletariat would at first achieve its aims in highly industrialized nations like England and Germany. His theory of socialism presupposed that a successful transition from autocratic “feudalism” to a liberal bourgeois socio-economic system had already occurred. But of course, all of the world’s Marxist regimes were established in very different circumstances. The communist parties that successfully seized authority built their power in rebellion against non-democratic regimes, in countries where industrialization still lay far on the horizon. They justified their power in the name of an ideology whose own precepts predicted they should not exist.

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Consumers’ Research, a consumer advocacy group, launched a series of advertisements Thursday calling out Coca-Cola’s “woke hypocrisy” for its reported defense of China and alleged health concerns associated with its sugary drinks.

Part of the campaign is a video advertisement satirizing a Coca-Cola commercial, which is set to music with lyrics like “Just drink Coke, the road to obesity” and “China is our labor supplier that drives our stock price even higher.” The group also created a website, “alwayswokacola.com,” to continue to expose the company.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

It is fascinating in a way how so much of the current crisis parallels events in Europe a century ago, despite the many differences. This is supposed to be the peak of liberal democracy, but it feels more like the dying embers of the old aristocratic order that evolved out of the 19th century in response to the French Revolution and the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Then as now, the one thing agreed upon is the current order is not satisfactory. The old order has failed.

The past is never a perfect parallel to the present, but the many points of comparison between then and now is what matters. The rise of industry forcing people into cities, altering the power arrangements in European societies set off massive cultural changes that resulted in two great industrial wars and the rise of communism. The technological revolution is having the same impact on the West today. The world after the internet is a very different place from the world before it.

“I wish the coronavirus would hold a press conference and explain how we can protect ourselves from our government.”

— Heard from Scott Adams, who quoted a guy who quoted a guy who didn’t reveal who first said it.

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A fund formed in response to the deadly racial violence four years ago in Charlottesville, Virginia, said Thursday it will award $3 million in grants to more than three dozen groups and sites nationwide to help preserve landmarks linked to Black history.

Lesson: Riot and they will give you money.

Yeah, that’ll work out great.

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Think of it as evolution in action.

ZMan.

“The future is certain; it is only the past that is unpredictable” is an old Soviet era joke about the party’s habit of rewriting history to serve the current moment. Like so many things Soviet, it applies well to the current American regime. Not only do they rewrite the past, but they also magnify events from the past to make them seem like they just happened yesterday. They diminish more recent events so they seem distant. The old communists were amateurs compared to liberal democrats.

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Paul Fussell will have none of it. He believes America has one of the most hypertrophied class systems in the world, that its formal equality has left a niche that an informal class system expanded to fill – and expanded, and expanded, until it surpassed the more-legible systems of Europe and became its own sort of homegrown monstrosity. He says he prefers the term “caste system” to “class system” when describing America, conveying as it does a more rigid and inescapable distinction, and that he uses “class” only out of respect for conventional usage.

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The FCC has granted Amazon permission to use 60GHz radar in some future device to monitor people’s sleeping habits and sense gesture commands.

Amazon requested a waiver [PDF] from the US communications regulator to build a gadget that emits radar waves and “operates at higher powers than currently allowed” in June. Ronald Rapasi, acting chief of the FCC’s office of engineering and technology, officially approved the request this month.

The mysterious gizmo, referred to as a “radar sensor” in the FCC’s response [PDF], would emit radar waves at frequencies between 57 and 64GHz. It was described as a “non-mobile device” that has to be constantly plugged into a power source to work. Amazon said the sensors would be used to help less physically able users interact with the device through gesture commands, and could promote for “sleep hygiene.”

Can mind-control space lasers be far behind? (Did you think Jeff Bezos was going into space just for fun?)

ZMan gets his hands dirty.

Arguably, the first casualty of the antiestablishment uprising that began toward the end of the Obama administration was David French. Unlike most of Conservative Inc., French was too dumb to avoid mixing it up on-line with the smart kids who create clever memes and troll establishment media figures. He became the poster boy for what came to be known as the cuckservatives. As Tucker Carlson noted, French is the sort of person who can only exist in the world of non-profit Conservatism.

What makes a dullard like David French stand out in the bland nothingness that is the conservative intelligentsia is his unbridled narcissism. Most of Conservative Inc. knows they are just overly paid time-servers lucky to have comfortable lives. That is why they make sure to never say a discouraging word. David French, on the other hand, imagines himself to be a world historical figure. He does not believe in much, but he firmly believes in the importance of David French.

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In a certain view, billionaires are not merely wealthy, they are nearly god-like in their influence. As the New York Times op-ed Abolish Billionaires reads:

Billionaires should not exist — at least not in their present numbers, with their current globe-swallowing power.

One practical upshot of this view is that we ought to increase the marginal tax rate, break up tech monopolies, sharpen the pitchforks and so forth.

Yet an equally valid interpretation is this: if you truly see billionaires as all-powerful oligarchs who exert enormous control over world affairs, you should try very hard to become one of them.

Ross Douthat.

But among Catholic writers there has been substantial fracture, experimentation, realignment, and division. The older categories certainly persist. There remain conservative Catholics who believe in the fusionist project of American conservatism, the Catholic reading of the American founding advanced by John Courtney Murray, and the virtues of the pre-Trump Republican party. Meanwhile, the Biden presidency has given a boost to liberal Catholics who believe that the Democratic party is their natural home and meliorist, welfare-state liberalism the obvious way Catholic social teaching cashes out.

But there are also new categories, revived and re­invented movements and tendencies, which matter more to intellectual debate than they did in years past and may eventually matter to Catholic politics as well.

My personal view is that what has happened to the Roman Church since Vatican II is a tragedy – which is why I am no longer Roman Catholic. It could all be summed up in a phrase I heard when I was a student, ‘Catholic is the new Eposcopalian’. But of course both sides of that equation have degenerated since then. The election of Pope Benedict gave me new hope, but his abdication and the election of Francis indicated that things were starting to circle the toilet bowl once more. Sad, but there it is.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst, as we used to say in the Navy.

Victor Davis Hanson.

The grandchildren of the hippies and the children of the Yuppies? They are a different, a hybrid bunch altogether.

They combine all the worst traits of both leftist eras: selfishness, performance art, the I/me/my/mine self-infatuation (“my story,” “my truth,” “my narrative”), crudity, vulgarity and rudeness of the 1960s, along with the fixation on class, snobbery, elitism, money, careerism of the 1980s and beyond. And like both Hippies and Yuppies, their prolonged adolescence and child-like self-centeredness are signature traits.

Yet in this most recent manifestation of Leftist identity-searching, hyper-sensitive, fragile, and whimpering puppydom lacks even the small reservoir of good from both prior cultures: Puppies do not like 1960s unfettered expression, at least if it stands in the way of implementing Maoist-like woke correctness. And they want to scrutinize and audit all Yuppie pleasures, or rather ensure that the grasping middle classes never enjoy these carbon-spewing, planet-heating entitlements.

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Forget this year’s punchy headlines pitching Tim Cook against Mark Zuckerberg—it’s arguably now Google as much as Facebook that’s in Apple’s sights. This has serious implications for 1-billion-plus iPhone users as the fight for your data and your loyalty has suddenly intensified. This is the context behind recent updates from Apple and Google. And this is why it’s time to start deleting apps—including Google Maps.

While Google continues to play privacy catch-up with Apple, as seen in Android 12’s likely enhancements, Android Messages and Workspace client-side encryption, and the PR-friendly “privacy sandbox,” the reality is that Google is the world’s largest data-driven advertising company. Apple is not. Ultimately, who do you trust?

Location data has been central to the privacy debate for years now. First iOS and then Android have given us options to deny, restrict and approximate such data from the dozens of apps that would guzzle our data should we let them. Why exactly do all those trivial games and apps require my precise location, and all that.

But even as we have clicked to deny all these apps access under “Location Services” in our iPhone’s settings, we clearly cannot do the same with mapping apps. But while many iPhone users are tied to Google Maps, the alarming privacy label comparison between it and Apple’s alternative should give serious reason for concern.

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Superior Court Judge Kenneth Medel said Wednesday that victims and families in the Poway, California, synagogue shooting have adequately alleged that Smith & Wesson, the nation’s largest gunmaker, knew its AR-15-style rifle could be easily modified into a machine-gun-like or an assault weapon in violation of state law.

A 2005 federal law shields gunmakers from damages in most cases for crimes committed with their weapons. But it allows lawsuits if the manufacturer was negligent or knowingly violated a state or federal law, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Thursday.

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The coronavirus pandemic has birthed a new historically-specific group: the lockdown refugees.

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It will not do to conceal the identity of police officers who kill people. Nor, as far as I know, has the identity of such officers been withheld for long in cases involving police shootings of Blacks. In fact, most police departments are required to release an officer’s name within days of a fatal shooting regardless of the race of those involved.

Furthermore, it will not do to withhold from the public the stated reasons for police killings or the circumstances that caused the officers in question to resort to lethal violence. Again, this information was not withheld in any case I followed where an officer killed an African-American.

Yet, it’s been half a year since a member of the Capitol Police Force shot and killed Ashli Babbitt on January 6. And still, the name of the officer who shot her has not been disclosed.

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

I figure that’s how we got Evan Wolfson.