Read it.

We have the technology.

I wish somebody had slapped an AirTag on democracy before the proglodytes stole it, stripped it, and left it burning in a landfill.

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“Critical race theory” has become the latest “Republicans pounce” story. Liberal media outlets are upset that this is being debated before school boards. On July 7, CNN reporter Elle Reeve complained “relentless propaganda from some conservatives created a panic that white people and especially white children are under attack.”

Perish the thought.

There is zero doubt that after all the overwrought journalistic elevation of George Floyd’s death into a “landmark” historical event that exposed “systemic racism,” the schools would follow. The so-called “hard conversations” – one-sided “anti-racism” diatribes about how America remains hopelessly, structurally racist – are happening in classrooms all across America. But it’s the parents who are “pouncing.”

Read it.

Apparently the chief thing Diana will be remembered for is her yuppie Sloan Ranger job before she was plucked from obscurity by Prince Charles.

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Most people don’t think much about the food scraps they throw away; however, researchers in Tokyo have developed a new method to reduce food waste by recycling discarded fruit and vegetable scraps into robust construction materials.

‘Mommy, I’m hungry!”

“Go lick the wall, sweetie.”

ZMan lays it out.

One of the weirder aspects of the Covid panic was how every corporation decided they needed to do their duty with regards to panic. In many respects, they were the primary fear mongers, as people interface with corporations multiple times a day, while it is possible to tune out the government. For most people, the yammering meat sticks in the media are just the background noise of life. The corporation, on the other hand, is the safety rails of their life, guiding them as hey go about their business.

Shortly after the politicians declared mass panic, every retail chain was busy putting up signs, setting up social distancing protocols and training an army of harpies to lecture people about the need to be safe. The banal overhead music was replaced with endless chants about how much they cared and wanted you to be safe. Those declarations were followed by the robot voice telling you to obey the latest edicts from the CDC about social distancing and dousing yourself in alcohol gel.

The weird part about it was not that it was right out of dystopian science fiction movies where people live in high tech penal colonies. What was weird is no one noticed that we were suddenly thrust into high tech day care centers. The fact that corporations would take the lead was just expected. Something similar happened with the antiwhite pogroms launched after George Floyd. It was corporate America leading the war on white people through ads, TV shows, sporting events and movies.

Read it.

As far as railroads go, the First World consists of the United States and Canada, the only two major countries that haven’t nationalized their rail systems. Just about every other developed country is in the Second World. The Third World consists mainly of countries that don’t have railroads at all or have very few.

Where private owners attempt to earn profits, political leaders want to get re-elected. As a result, government ownership, especially in democracies, leads politicians to direct resources to the most visible activities. Passenger trains are more visible than freight, so Second-World countries dedicate their rail systems to passengers. Private rail systems in the United States and Canada are used mainly for freight because freight rail, unlike passenger trains, is profitable. Not coincidentally, these are also the most productive rail systems in the world.

Read it.

Eventually farming will be done by computer-directed robots, and farm jobs will be engineering and software jobs. The ‘family farm’ will be no more.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that DaVinci’s DNA was a ‘mystery’.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees….

Read it.

The résumé, a document that largely gained prominence in the past half-century, was once a key part of getting a job. Soon, it might just disappear entirely.

ZMan turns drama critic.

Politics in a liberal democracy is a drama run by the ruling class. Think of it as a big stage on which politics is acted out for the masses. In America, this means the Left opens the show by demanding action against some threat to “our democracy” or demanding action to defend a victim group. Their fluffers go into the crowd to get the audience excited for the next drama. The actors perform the familiar story, sometimes combining the two into a single story.

At this point, the so-called conservatives waddle onto the stage in their comfort-fit chinos and golf shirts. They dismiss the claims of the Left, either claiming they are exaggerating or that the issue is just not important. The crowd is encouraged to boo and hiss at them, which causes their knees to shake. Before long, some of them break ranks and join the Left in jeering at their old colleagues. The crowd keeps booing and the conservative are eventually run off the stage.

Every once in a while, for reasons science has yet to explain, the conservatives do not start to shiver and quake. They hold their ground. This is when the the spotlight illuminates the right side of the stage and we see the Hitler outfit. Over the sound system comes, “Who in the crowd will perform this vital role?” Sure enough, some idiot from a group fond of weird flags runs up on stage, dons the costume and begins to strut around on stage as the crowd throws rotten vegetables.

Read it.

“Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016,” Vance said. “And I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open about the fact that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy. I think he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.

“And as you probably appreciate I’ve taken a lot of flak myself over the last few years for standing up for the president’s voters, but for all standing up for the agenda.

Read it.

It would be an understatement to say that the pendulum of public discussion has swung in favour of the so-called lab leak hypothesis of the origin of Covid-19. In the latest poll, a majority of the United States public said they believed SARS-CoV-2 originated in a laboratory. Alongside this, ‘fact-checks’ that claimed the virus couldn’t have originated from a lab were quickly archived, retracted, or substantially reframed, while several press articles were edited months after publication without warning.

Read it.

It’s been a rough few months for Sci-Hub, the beloved outlaw repository of scientific papers. In January its Twitter account, which had more than 180,000 followers, was permanently suspended. In response to a lawsuit brought by publishers, new papers aren’t being added to its library. The website is blocked in a dozen countries, including Austria, Britain, and France. There are rumors of an FBI investigation.

And yet Alexandra Elbakyan, the 32-year-old graduate student who founded the site in 2011, seems more or less unfazed. I spoke with her recently via Zoom with the assistance of a Russian translator. Elbakyan, who is originally from Kazakhstan, has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and coded Sci-Hub herself. She lives in Moscow now and is studying philosophy at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Back when she started the site, which offers access to north of 85 million papers, she didn’t expect to be fending off lawsuits and dodging investigations a decade on.

There is no such thing as ‘intellectual property’. The definition of ‘property’, both in law and in fact, is something that when one entity is using it other entities are necessarily excluded from using it, within which definition neither ideas nor information will fit. ‘Intellectual property’ is an artificial construct created an enforced by government, originally with the best of intentions, but which has been leveraged by rent-seekers (e.g. ‘patent trolls’, Disney Corp.) to squeeze money out of people without needing to work for it. (This is what enables corporations to buy up the rights to ideas that would hurt their profits and bury them — not my definition of progress, although it certainly fits that of the bureaucracy.)

Read it.

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

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The English Democrats, launched in 2002, are the only campaigning English Nationalist Party. We campaigned for a referendum for independence for England; for St George’s Day to be England’s National holiday; for Jerusalem to be England’s National Anthem; to leave the EU properly and fully; for an end to mass immigration; for the Cross of St George to be flown on all public buildings in England; and we supported a YES vote for Scottish Independence.

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A medical reversal is when an existing treatment is found to actually be useless or harmful. Psychology has in recent years been racking up reversals: in fact only 40-65% of its classic social results were replicated, in the weakest sense of finding ‘significant’ results in the same direction. (Even in those that replicated, the average effect found was half the originally reported effect.) Such errors are far less costly to society than medical errors, but it’s still pollution, so here’s the cleanup.

Psychology is not alone: medicine, cancer biology, and economics all have many irreplicable results. It’d be wrong to write off psychology: we know about most of the problems here because of psychologists, and its subfields differ a lot by replication rate and effect-size shrinkage.

Psychology is no more a science than is astrology or palmistry.

Read it.

The rigorous format in which the speedrunning community asks players to provide video proof of their runs is itself significant. For many games, you need to show not just a recording of your screen, but also a video of your hands on the controller or keyboard, so moderators can ensure that it really was a human—and not a script or a bot—that clinched the all-important record.

Science has been much slower to adapt, even after countless scandals. Researchers provide images for their papers entirely at their own discretion, and with no official oversight; when they aren’t faked, they might still contain cherry-picked snapshots of experiments that don’t represent the full range of their results. The same applies to numerical data, which are often—consciously or unconsciously—chosen or reported to make the best case for a scientist’s hypothesis, rather than to show the full and messy details. Only a few journals require scientists to do the equivalent of posting the screen-and-hands recording: sharing all their data, and the code they used to analyze it, online for anyone to access.

The most interesting thing is that video gaming won’t win you a lifetime cushy job at a university through tenure. So the rigor ought to align exactly the opposite of the way it actually does.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

It is ironic how many on the Right now hold the same view of patriotism that the Left used to hold a generation ago. Just a few decades ago it was the Left that said patriotism was a con to keep people from noticing what was happening. In the Bush years, they said dissent was the highest form of patriotism. Today, they put dissenters in prison on trumped up charges. They orchestrate elaborate plots to frame people for schemes that were cooked up by state actors.

I talked about that Revolver story in the show. It reminds me of the old gag about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. “People would stop believing these conspiracy theories about Clinton if they stopped being true.” It is increasingly looking like the so-called insurrection was another hoax. Protestors did clash with cops, and they did barge into the capitol, but it was at the direction of state actors. That does not absolve them of what they did, if any of it was criminal, but it stinks, nonetheless.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that there was such a thing as a ‘fire scientist’.

I’m glad the ‘U.S. West’ is a single entity that can take action. I’m sure there’s a Federal agency for that.

Read it.

EVs are cool. They are not new. The history of EVs is a century of failure tailgating failure. In 1911, the New York Times said that the electric car “has long been recognized as the ideal solution.” In 1990, the California Air Resources Board mandated 10% of car sales be zero-emission vehicles by 2003. Today, 31 years later, only about 6% of the cars in California have an electric plug.

Read it.

Put a 20mm Bushmaster turret on top with a head-up display and I’m in.

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In 1890 the British Library acquired a set of papyri dating from the first century that had been found by archaeologists digging in a rubbish heap near the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus. Amid the trove of tax assessments and official records was a papyrus with a text, known from ancient references and fragments but long believed lost, of what has come to be called the Constitution of Athens, generally attributed to Aristotle. Though the papyrus is hardly complete and has many contested passages, it offers an extensive history of Athenian political development and details Athens’ political structure during the fourth century bc. Suddenly, the institutional configuration of the first democracy became available.

Read it.

One of the things I noticed throughout the past year has been that a lot of my friends who had grown up in authoritarian or poor countries had a much easier time adjusting to our new pandemic reality. My childhood was intermittently full of shortages of various things. We developed a corresponding reflex for stocking up on things when they were available, anticipating what might be gone soon. That was quite useful for the pandemic. So was trying to read between the lines of official statements—what was said and what was not, who was sitting with whom on the TV, and evaluating what the rumor networks brought in. It turns out those are really useful skills when authorities are lying at all levels.

Read it.

School is, well, mostly bad. It teaches things slowly, it mostly trains obedience, and it’s a social horror show. When we say social dynamics are like high school, we never mean anything good, and there are dozens of movies about how awfully students treat each other.

And most of what is taught in school and university is quickly forgotten. I used to amuse myself by asking recent university grads what they had learned, most of them could barely remember anything. Since I was widely read, often I knew enough to ask basic questions about their discipline, and they wouldn’t know the answers.

This is primarily a result of the defective German/American university system, in which students go through courses the way a gamer goes through levels – once you level up, you can forget where you’ve been (unless you’re heading to grad school, in which case you might need to remember some of it).

The British system, in which you spend three years studying a subject under the guidance of an individual tutor and your degree depends on a single comprehensive examination at the end, is much superior–if knowledge is what you’re after, rather than just a credential that will get you a good job.

Parents want their children to go back to school because it’s a babysitting service, and since we’re not paying parents to stay home, they need someone to take care of their kids. And yes, some may be falling behind or finding distance learning hard, but a decent system could make that up well enough.

But the idea that the kids themselves miss school, except in the sense that they can’t see their friends (which is pandemic related, and if it’s not safe to see them outside of school it isn’t safe to see them in school) is laughable.

Amen to that. Public schools are explicitly babysitting services that have long since given up the pretense of actually educating their pupils. (Look up ‘social promotion’.)

Read it.

Milloy published a letter to EPA Administrator Michael Regan headlined “Milloy to EPA Administrator: Pick a new [Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC)] or see you in court.” CASAC is supposed to provide “independent advice to the EPA Administrator on the technical bases for EPA’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards.”

Read it.

Amazon is pushing back against the Biden Administration’s effort to impose new anti-trust strictures on Big Tech by filing a complaint with the FTC asking that Lina Khan, recently confirmed as head of the commission, recuse herself from all dealings involving Amazon.

In its request, filed with the agency on Wednesday, the company argued that Khan should be barred from handling enforcement decisions involving Amazon because Khan “on numerous occasions argued that Amazon is guilty of antitrust violations and should be broken up.” Amazon added that “these statements convey to any reasonable observer the clear impression that she has already made up her mind about many material facts relevant to Amazon’s antitrust culpability as well as about the ultimate issue of culpability itself.”

Bias? What bias?

ZMan pulls back the curtain.

The world in which we live today is one where everyone is spying on everyone, except the rulers, all the time. The local business installs cameras outside the warehouse to prevent vandals from defacing the walls with graffiti. Those cameras record everything and store it on the cloud. The owner is told the video stays on the cloud for seven days, but in reality, it is there forever. It just gets moved to a different database, accessible by the security state whenever they think to use it.

All around us, the vast network of recording devises uploads data to various databases that are harvested by the secret police and stored in their systems. Americans don’t think we have secret police, but Americans also think their votes count. The main feature of liberal democracy is it keeps the people living in a fog of self-delusion about who is really in charge of society. That is what we see with the secret police. They have no name and no location, so they do not exist for most people.

The Other McCain does some sociology.

The liberal considers himself to be inherently superior to others, and thus endowed with greater knowledge and moral virtue about everything, including race relations. The fact that you disagree with the liberal is, to him, proof of your inferiority.

The subject of your disagreement is irrelevant, and it doesn’t matter why you’re disagreeing with the liberal, or what facts or logic you might be able to muster in defense of your position. what you have done, by your disagreement, is to deny the liberal’s superiority. His entire identity — his sense of his own worthiness — is invested in the belief that his political opinion proves him to be a better person than you.

Liberal superiority is tautological in this way, a circular argument in which the conclusion is a restatement of the first premise.

ZMan deconstructs the culture.

It is a popular joke among the worst people that the best people need to find a minority to endorse their preferences before they can express them. In this context, the “best people” are the poohbahs of Conservative Inc. No matter how obvious or justified their position, so-called conservatives need to prove they are the best people by searching high and low for a “person of color” who agrees with them. Candace Owens has gotten rich by blessing the positions of conservatives.

It is the slave mentality, of course. The master is always projecting pride and power, as those are the things he values. He is the master, the man in charge, so he places the most value on the things that are useful to him as the master. The slave, on the other hand, is obsequious and submissive. The slave tries to express his will through quiet subversion, always conscious of the master. In American politics, conservatives are the slave, always displaying their submissiveness.

Read it.

It all started when outdoor dining resumed after initial waves of mandated closures last spring. Wary of wayward coronaviruses lingering on physical menus, restaurants taped QR codes to their tables and outsourced the act of menu delivery to the diner and her smartphone. This might have made sense when it still seemed possible that the coronavirus was largely spreading through surface transmission. But we now know that the risk of infection via a contaminated surface is low. In tons of communities across the U.S., vaccination rates are high and COVID-19 case rates are low. People are attending indoor concerts, grinding at dance clubs, and heading back to the office. And yet, even as we eat and slobber and sneeze in restaurants seated at full capacity, in many of those establishments, we’re still obliged to use our own smartphones to figure out what we want to eat. Why? Why should we be scared to go back to touching a communal piece of paper when we’re already breathing one another’s theoretically more dangerous air?

Read it.

As college students, John and I both subscribed to the philosophical doctrine of determinism. We differed, though, on what implications, if any, the doctrine had for the issue of income distribution.

I believed that because the traits that result in wealth are determined by causes beyond our control — the genetics lottery, for example — wealth is undeserved. Therefore, inequality is unjust and should be abolished

John understood that my conclusion didn’t follow from our premise. Even if high incomes are undeserved in some philosophical sense, there might be, and indeed are, utilitarian-type reasons to eschew radical income redistribution policies and accept income inequality. Rewarding excellence with income produces benefits for society at large, while government-imposed income leveling is a recipe for mediocrity and possibly repression.

Read it.

Put plainly, an increasing cohort of successful women are chasing a shrinking number of high-value, commitment-averse men.

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One of the most elementary lessons of economics is that incentives matter. You’d hardly think this needs demonstrating, but apparently even the Wall Street Journal‘s news pages struggle with basic economics. Today the Journal reports that—lo and behold!—job growth is rising faster in states that have ended lavish unemployment bonus payments. I love the “gee whiz” language of this story.

Read it.

Of course. It’s like living in California without having to pay California taxes or put up with California bullshit.

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The New York Times reports that crime is starting to worry “progressives” — not the phenomenon, but the politics of it. I don’t know whether progressives in general are worried, but the ones at the Times sure are.

This Times article focuses on the success of Eric Adams in the Democratic mayoral primary. The Times frets that the winner of the race (at least in terms of the popular vote) “focused much of his message on exposing progressive slogans and policies that he said threatened the lives of ‘Black and brown babies’ and were pushed by ‘many young, white and rich’ people.” That’s hitting awfully close home for the New York Times.

Read it.

The Trump administration effectively pushed China enough that the question in Congress is no longer whether to push, but just how hard, according to a pair of think tank experts.

“Under Donald Trump, the beltway’s view of China shifted from one of relative complacency to one verging on alarmism,” Quincy Institute’s East Asia program director Michael Swaine and Advocacy Director Marcus Stanley co-wrote for Business Insider on Sunday, promoting a gentler approach to China as proposed in the House versus the Senate.

Read it.

A talk by Glenn Loury, econ prof at Brown.

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Forbes magazine now being fully Woke, it’s unfortunate that millions of jobs are threatened but it’s the ‘income inequality’ that really burns their butts.

By definition, half of the population is below average in intelligence. If you think about some of the 100 (average) IQ people you know, you’ll realize that this means that a lot of our population are mentally slow (compared to the rest). Most employers don’t like having slow thinkers on payroll because they take extra effort to train and manage, and longer to do most tasks; so, if one can purchase a machine that will do the same work with less managerial effort, that’s a win. Plus they don’t require (government-mandated) benefits or take off sick or have family emergencies or join unions. Really, there’s very little downside to replacing unskilled or semi-skilled labor with robots — except politically.

The Crust doesn’t mind replacing workers with robots because (a) they’re part of the class profiting thereby (Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg) and (b) it increases the size of the Underclass dependent on government for their livelihoods and so reliable votes for the Party of Free Stuff (Democrats). Dimwits are by their nature Low-Information Voters, Joe Biden’s base.

Read it.

It is an acknowledged legacy of any president’s career that, once they leave office, they will seek to make a lot of money from a book deal. In the case of most incumbents of the White House, the subsequent memoir will be well-written (often with the aid of a handsomely remunerated ghostwriter), insightful (insofar as classified details can be revealed in the lifetimes of participants) and front-loaded in terms of sales. It is hard to imagine that many people today will be rushing to purchase Jimmy Carter’s Keeping Faith, or even George W Bush’s Decision Points.

Yet, in the case of the Oval Office’s most notorious recent occupant, there is already controversy on a hitherto unimagined scale. Donald Trump has announced, in his usual quiet, low-key way, that he is working on a memoir of his time as President. In a statement last week, he claimed that “I’m writing like crazy, and when the time comes, you’ll see the book of all books.” He also stated that he had already turned down two lucrative deals “from the most unlikely of publishers”, but did not name who they were, only stating that “I do not want to do such a deal right now”.