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.

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Turns out, the Red Delicious apple used to be, well, delicious. Here’s what went wrong.

My wife likes Gala apples but I have yet to find an apple that actually tastes good to me.

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Here in the West, a lifestyle of unnecessary spending has been deliberately cultivated and nurtured in the public by big business. Companies in all kinds of industries have a huge stake in the public’s penchant to be careless with their money. They will seek to encourage the public’s habit of casual or non-essential spending whenever they can.

In the documentary The Corporation, a marketing psychologist discussed one of the methods she used to increase sales. Her staff carried out a study on what effect the nagging of children had on their parents’ likelihood of buying a toy for them. They found out that 20% to 40% of the purchases of their toys would not have occurred if the child didn’t nag its parents. One in four visits to theme parks would not have taken place. They used these studies to market their products directly to children, encouraging them to nag their parents to buy.

…

We buy stuff to cheer ourselves up, to keep up with the Joneses, to fulfill our childhood vision of what our adulthood would be like, to broadcast our status to the world, and for a lot of other psychological reasons that have very little to do with how useful the product really is. How much stuff is in your basement or garage that you haven’t used in the past year?

Tons.

“Well, there goes my appetite.”

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People buy guns & ammo when they feel threatened.

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The Vessel at Hudson Yards in Manhattan has been closed again after a 14-year-old boy jumped off the elaborate honeycomb-like structure that rises 16 stories Thursday afternoon. The teen’s death is the fourth suicide in 18 months since installation. The billionaire property developer behind the public sculpture is contemplating a permanent closure.

The New York City Police Department confirmed a 14-year-old boy jumped off the 150-foot set of spiraling staircases Thursday afternoon, just before 1300 local time, according to NBC News.

If you build it, they will come.

… our thoughts are with the family of the young person who lost their life.

They didn’t ‘lose their life’. They threw it away. You might want to ask Why?

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Furious at Cheney becoming one of ten GOP U.S. Representatives to support the impeachment of former President Donald Trump and her continuing attacks on him, Republicans want her out in 2022.

According to a just-completed McLoughlin poll among likely Republican voters in the Cowboy State, a whopping 72% have an unfavorable opinion of their state’s lone U.S. Representative.

When Cheney is pitted one-on-one against state Rep. Chuck Gray (for whom the poll was conducted), he demolishes her 63% to 24%.

But, with seven other candidates in the primary with Cheney next year, it is now unlikely Gray or anyone else will get to go one-on-one with the three-term congresswoman.

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One of the left’s favorite myths is that America is abundant with white supremacists and practitioners of something called the alt-right. I know. I, too, once thought the alt-right was a roadside direction or an indication a detour was ahead, but apparently it has something to do with the politics of a distinctly extremist variety. Advocates of the alt-right apparently tend to congregate at rural gas stations, usually in the dark of night. That is about all I know about it, but the writers at The New York Times claim to be highly agitated over it.

A couple of weeks back, William Regnery II, a man who supposedly “bankrolled” what the Times called “some of the leading organizations and figures behind the rise of the alt-right and championed efforts to win adherents to a modernized notion of white supremacy,” bit the dust. And do you know how the hysterics at the Times handled his passing? They devoted an entire half-page to him, complete with a picture of him standing with some young adjunct who looked understandably uneasy. The young man was wearing an ill-fitting suit, and he might have been more comfortable was he armed, but he was not. The recently deceased Regnery and I might have met years ago at some Republican function, for he was active in the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964. Or possibly, it was at a stamp collectors’ conference. I used to be an avid collector. At any rate, he is dead, and from the Times’s own information gathered for Regnery’s obit, it is clear that he never succeeded in any political endeavor, from his earliest Republican days to his days of aimless wanderings with fanatics.

“He has excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.”

— Declaration of Independence

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You who can use this know who you are.

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Joe Ferullo asks that those who left California for Texas return. He states that Texas laws on voting security, firearms, abortion, minimum wage, and critical race theory violate the mission statements of the tech companies that have vacated the sunshine state. Of course, Hewlett-Packard must defend late-term abortions. How could they make laptops otherwise?

When I finally leave California, it won’t be that my wife and I pay six figures in state income tax. It won’t be that despite (or because of) paying all that money to the government, we still can’t afford to buy a house. It won’t be that, as doctors, we make less in California than we would make elsewhere in the country.

It’ll be due to our smug neighbors tell us we are lucky to pay insane rent for a house with a leaking roof and a rodent infestation (we actually got a good deal considering the alternatives). It’ll be to escape the “tenant advocates” who don’t understand why draconian rent control and tenant protections drive up rents. It’ll be the NIMBY homeowners who refuse to allow new construction, perpetuating discrimination and a housing shortage while proudly displaying a “Black Lives Matter” sign in their all-white neighborhood.

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Pretty impressive.

Severian explains the basics.

Back when we were allowed to acknowledge basic biology, feminists used to howl about the “double standard” in attractiveness: Women get judged almost entirely on their looks, while men get judged almost entirely on their accomplishments. Note that this entails feminism has always been about denial of basic biological reality, right from jump street, but that’s not important right now. In a very limited way, they had a point: That situation is grossly “unfair,” in that there’s very little you can do to improve your looks, but a lot you can do to improve your accomplishments. But see “denial of basic biological reality,” above — such “unfairness” is how homo sap. came to dominate the planet. You really want your critters to take the great leap forward — discover fire or the wheel or whatnot — tell the males of the species there’s some punani in it.

Steve Sailer.

If racism is the only thing that could possibly account for the problems of blacks in 2021, shouldn’t their troubles be declining steadily? After all, the effects of redlining (outlawed in 1968) and the other usual suspects should logically be steadily vanishing into the mists of time. But instead, nothing much seems to change as the decades roll by.

A landmark new study titled “Task-Based Discrimination” looks into exactly why the white-black wage gap among men declined dramatically from 1960 to 1980, but today it is just as wide as it was at the end of the Carter administration (and has been worsening in this century). It turns out it has to do more with fundamental changes in technology than it does white evilness.

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Every so often you realise you’ve missed a trick! I was chatting to another church warden and she commented that she cannot wait for somebody to demand her church be decolonised. She’d point out that the parish isn’t worthy and she could gift the church building to those protesting. Then the church itself could meet in the local community centre where it’s warm, the chairs are comfortable, and she doesn’t have to worry about the maintenance. Let somebody else go slowly bankrupt trying to look after the building and at the same time face the opprobrium of the community who neither attend nor contribute, but are furious that you’ve not maintained it to the high standards their grandfather thinks he remembers.

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The truth is that there is some incredible technology out there, helping farmers do more with less. Most farmers would happily explain this, but they’re too busy working to tweet about crop data tools. That, however, doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t educate ourselves a bit.

 

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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The real monopoly problems in our economy are not the firms that push up some very particular concentration indices, rather they are the small, local monopolies, hospitals, and the public education system.

“Let’s be serious …Olympic athletes are literally chosen to be the best mating prospects on the planet Earth.”

— Scott Adams

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Can entire societies become more or less depressed over time? Here, we look for the historical traces of cognitive distortions, thinking patterns that are strongly associated with internalizing disorders such as depression and anxiety, in millions of books published over the course of the last two centuries in English, Spanish, and German. We find a pronounced “hockey stick” pattern: Over the past two decades the textual analogs of cognitive distortions surged well above historical levels, including those of World War I and II, after declining or stabilizing for most of the 20th century. Our results point to the possibility that recent socioeconomic changes, new technology, and social media are associated with a surge of cognitive distortions.

Severian looks around.

Regarding bicycles, they, like motorcycles, have long since transformed from “a means of locomotion” to “a lifestyle.” Note that I’m only talking about AINO here. Everyone has heard that “more bicycles than people in the Netherlands” factoid, and Euros do seem to love them some bikes, but I haven’t spent enough time over there to say much about it. Here in the Former America, though, anyone who rides a bicycle past age 16 falls into one of two broad groups: 1) they’re nature lovers who want to be out in the countryside but for various reasons can’t take up hiking, or 2) they’re preening, posturing, virtue-signaling, passive-aggressive assholes. The latter outnumber the former about 5,000 to 1.

Preach it, brother.

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The specific reasons vary widely. Some families who spoke with The Associated Press have children with special educational needs; others seek a faith-based curriculum or say their local schools are flawed. The common denominator: They tried homeschooling on what they thought was a temporary basis and found it beneficial to their children.

“That’s one of the silver linings of the pandemic – I don’t think we would have chosen to homeschool otherwise,” said Danielle King of Randolph, Vermont, whose 7-year-old daughter Zoë thrived with the flexible, one-on-one instruction. Her curriculum has included literature, anatomy, even archaeology, enlivened by outdoor excursions to search for fossils.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

This country spent its first 300 years without taxpayer-supported government schools. Maybe we’re going back to the future.

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Nowadays, fortunately, we have more scientific explanations for why the top Japanese woman tennis player is half-black than discredited eugenics ideas like fast-twitch muscles.

Now, we know it’s due to Black Girl Magic!

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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.)

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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.