Read it.

Bill Maher may be a malicious Leftist, but he’s an entertaining malicious Leftist.

Look at the word order of what he says and tell me I’m wrong.

ZMan does some sociology.

In the 20th centur,y as the country transformed from a republic into a social democracy, the franchise quickly started to expand to include all men, then women, then blacks. Now we are extending the vote to criminals, foreigners, and the imaginary.

One reason for this is the very nature of democracy. In a world of fifty percent plus one there will always be a large minority unhappy with the result. In order to avoid conflict, the natural elites form parties, which allows them to form a consensus around a set of compromises on the important issues. This is something that was the norm in the 20th century, whether it was in multi-party parliamentary systems or the two-party bicameral system in America. Liberal democracy was about consensus.

While that greatly reduces the number of people who feel left out of the result, it creates a new problem. Reformers now need to break the consensus in order to get the changes they think are required. That is difficult, so they instead look to increase the number of those outside the consensus. Put another way, the reformer looks for new voters, rather than trying to challenge old voters. Get enough new voters and the outsiders can challenge the prevailing consensus.

Steve Sailer.

There’s been a horrible workplace shooting in a San Jose railyard. There appear to be eight dead, including the gunman killing himself. No word on wounded, but assuming it’s less than the dead, I will bet, in accord with Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings that the shooter was nonblack. (Other tells besides more dead than wounded: workplace, daytime, shooter didn’t get away, and witnesses are talking to the cops.)

Read it.

The human body is not a machine to be toyed with, and biological sex is not an accidental feature, like hair length or nail color, to be stripped away or altered at will. Our physical identity as male or female affects every aspect of our health and biological development. Therefore tampering with biological sex, as trans extremists regularly do, has devastatingly harmful consequences. These interventions are particularly frightful—and reprehensible—in the case of children.

Severian indulges in a little sociology.

The white pill in all of this, comrades, is that thanks to social media, pretty much all prefab identities are starting to work like that… except one. It’s possible to fake being a member of pretty much every single behavioral subgroup out there, with almost-nonexistent actual risk. It’s more expensive to fake “biker” than “Mob guy,” and “Mob guy” is more expensive to fake than, say, “SJW,” but all of them amount to little more than clothes, tats, and lingo. Indeed, the signal for “SJW” is so far decayed that being #woke is nothing more than a Twitter purity spiral — “Titania McGrath” is a parody, I’m told, in the vein of “Godfrey Elfwick,” but really, who can say? The signal has been completely lost in the noise, and almost all behavioral subgroups are suffering the same fate in the social media age…

…except one. You can change your clothes, comrades. You can certainly change your “gender,” and you can even change your “sex.” But one thing you absolutely cannot change is your skin color. Real blacks, like real bikers or Mob guys, have known this for a long time, which is why guys like Obama and Colin Kaepernick are so obnoxious — they’re not really black, and they know it, because the real blacks themselves let them know, every minute of every day. So, too, soon enough with the other skin color.

ZMan visits the zoo.

The way to think of the media is not so much as a sentient organicism playing a complex game of politics, but as a mindless organism that responds to the stimuli applied by a small group of people. This is the part missing from this otherwise excellent post about CIA manipulation of the media. The CIA can influence the media narrative by simply turning a relatively small number of journalists. They do not control it in an absolute or direct sense. They just control some influencers.

The CIA is not the only part of the managerial state playing this game. The major Wall Street players use access journalism to promote their interests. The FBI sends dozens of retired people into media jobs every year. The corrupt agents involved in the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election landed in the media. The cable channels alone have over one hundred retired FBI people employed. Then you have the revolving door between the media and presidential administrations.

I’ve known people like that. But not for long.

Read it.

The current scene keeps bringing back to mind the old saying attributed (incorrectly) to Mark Twain: history doesn’t repeat itself—but it rhymes. Right now the country seems to be repeating the cycle of the 1960s, when liberals in power gave us reckless spending that stoked inflation, social engineering like “model cities” and busing, degraded law enforcement with soft-on-crime policies contributing to a massive crime wave, and race riots that elicited ritual confessions of liberal guilt (i.e., the Kerner Commission report of 1968). By the time the cycle was done in the early 1970s, Richard Nixon piled up a 49-state landslide—a repudiation of liberalism that carried through Reagan’s landslides in the 1980s.

Today is the day
That the masks go away
In Texas.

The gas station on the corner by my house has taken down its plexiglas shields and no longer pleads with you to wear a mask and maintain ‘social distancing’. (Their staff quit wearing masks a while ago.)

My local public library no longer has its WEAR A MASK YOU FARGIN SCIENCE DENIER signs, although the library staff (being Servants of the State) still wear theres.

I think that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Jean-Louis Gassée.

Ordinarily I find Gassée’s comments illuminating, and he does some of that here, but I was disappointed to learn that he has sipped the KoolAid of wokeness, in his apparent belief that uttering a negative opinion about some women somewhere means that one hates all women everywhere. I found Garcia Martinez’s comments about women in Silicon Vally harsh but by no means ‘misogynistic’; he just painted what he saw, and (from what I’ve seen with respect to Silicon Valley) I have no trouble believing that he saw what was actually there. In any event, his opinion is based on experience, not prejudice, and calling it ‘misogynist’ is a stretch too far. But go read his book.

Listen to it.

When I was working, I would listen to Mike Gallagher every morning on the way to work.

I’ll read anything written by Victor Davis Hanson that I can.

Highly recommended.

Check it out.

This is an excellent analysis by people learned in the law and well worth listening to, repeatedly if necessary. It admirably demonstrates what lawyers being lawyers can do when at the top of their game.

Read it.

Not ought they.

Freeberg has a bone to pick.

I’m not in favor of replacing the word “liberals” with “leftists.” It is true that much of the criticism we have for the liberals should more fairly be redirected toward dedicated leftists, and in a lot of cases it is true that the real problem is there, with leftism. But not all the criticism, and not all the cases.

That’s why I rarely use the term ‘liberal’. Gladstone was a liberal; Ted Kennedy was a progressive, and rather tediously so. And AOC is a proglodyte, quite obviously.

Read it.

For decades, studies have shown that boys and girls generally prefer playing with toys typically associated with their biological sex: toy trucks for boys and dolls for girls, to give a rough example.

Gee, one might almost suspect that the reason toys became gender-typical because people observed gender-typical behavior on the part of children.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Summer is here in Lagos. We went from cold mornings and moderate afternoons a week ago to cool mornings and hot afternoons. Next week is the unofficial start of summer in the U.S. and the start of high killing season here in Lagos. There be lots of pent up homiciding, so we are expecting a banner year. In preparation I am taking next week off from the show and the Sunday show. Next week is one of the slowest traffic weeks for the site, so it is a good time for a break.

…

Getting back to the coming of summer, it is looking like an interesting culture war here in Lagos over the dropping of the masks. Last week, the Tubby Tyrant in charge of this dump dropped the mask edict. In theory, you are no longer required to wear a mask when going into stores or offices. We never wore masks at the office, but if you wanted to go in a store, you had to wear one. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”

Bethany Mandel.

The pandemic is quickly coming to a close thanks to herd immunity brought on by vaccines and infections. It’s a tough pill to swallow for those who want to live in “forever pandemic” land, wearing masks and social distancing into the rest of the decade, but for those of us who actually enjoy living, it’s a welcome development. But here’s the problem with our return to normalcy: There are people who are trying to hold us back in “forever pandemic” land, due to either their own paranoias or opportunism.

Read it.

In his 1944 lecture “The Inner Ring,” C. S. Lewis made a profound observation about social exclusivity, one applicable to today’s institutions of higher learning. Exclusion, Lewis explained, is not an evil in and of itself; it can be “accidental” to groups dedicated to substantive activity. But a problem arises when an exclusive dynamic exists for its own sake, when elitism develops in the absence of substance. “Your genuine inner ring,” Lewis stated, “exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion [for the inner ring] is no accident: it is the essence.”

Read it.

Five Oregon counties approved measures Tuesday to secede and join Idaho, despite the chances of it actually becoming a reality.

Voters in Lake, Grant, Baker, Sherman and Malheur counties approved measures requiring county officials to take steps to secede and move the Idaho border further west in order to encompass the counties, according to The Hill. Two other counties, Jefferson and Union, voted in favor of the measure back in November.

Severian is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone is one of those books everyone knows, but no one has read (I haven’t). It’s quite a trick, really, to have something so “in the air” like that, such that nobody actually has to read it. If you’ve been to college, or read even a BoomerCon or CivNat site, you know it, in the same way everyone who has been to college knows stuff like Orientalism and Manufacturing Consent. But in case you’ve forgotten, Putnam’s thesis is that social cohesion is real, it’s important, and it is rapidly degrading. His metaphor is bowling leagues — these things used to be everywhere (I was in one in junior high, meaning, the phenomenon was so widespread they could have youth leagues); now they’re not.

…

Mandatory, government-sponsored fun has been on the European Left’s agenda practically since the Estates General. All of that stuff — hiking clubs, guitar clubs, model this-and-that clubs — falls under “building Socialism,” and the idea is either to totally replace a community’s organic ties with State-mandated bonds, or to restore a community’s organic ties via State-mandated bonds, depending on whether the “Socialism” you’re building is of the Soviet or Nazi variety.

Read it.

Glad I got rid of mine.

Read it.

The Associated Press reported in late April that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) will hold a national meeting in June where the bishops will decide whether to tell the president, and other high profile Catholic politicians like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, not to receive Communion at Mass if they continue to publicly advocate for abortion.

Severian peers behind the curtain.

The great thing about industrial work, though, is that you don’t have to be particularly bright to do it. There’s always going to be a fraction of the population that fails the IQ test, no matter how low you set the bar, but in the early Industrial Revolution that bar was pretty low indeed. So much so, in fact, that pretty soon places like America were experiencing drastic labor shortages, and there’s your history of 19th century immigration. The problem, though, isn’t the low IQ guys. It’s the high-IQ guys whose high IQs don’t line up with remunerative skills.

My academic colleagues were a great example, which is why they were all Marxists. I make fun of their stupidity all the time, but the truth is, they’re most of them bright enough, IQ-wise. Not geniuses by any means, but let’s say 120 IQ on average. Alas, as we all know, 120-with-verbal-dexterity is a very different thing from 120-and-good-with-a-slide-rule. Academics are the former, and any society that wants to remain stable HAS to find something for those people to do. Trust me on this: You do not want to be the obviously smartest guy in the room when everyone else in the room is, say, a plumber. This is no knock on plumbers, who by and large are cool guys, but it IS a knock on the high-IQ guy’s ego. Yeah, maybe I can write you a mean sonnet, or a nifty essay on the problems of labor over-supply in 16th century England, but those guys build stuff. And they get paid.

Read it.

I don’t care. I ain’t driving no Hindenburg with wheels.

If we want Hammer tech, we’ve got Tesla.

Read it.

The cyber attack that shutdown the Colonial pipeline causing a gas panic and stoking fears of gasoline shortages, didn’t actually shut down the pipeline. It impacted the billing system at the Colonial Pipeline Co., which shut it down because they were worried about how they’d collect payments.

Yes, the fuel-carrying pipeline was shut down last week in order to prevent a company that is entrusted with what should be a public utility from enduring an accounting headache.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Read it.

Under “progressivism,” anything old is suspect and if there is the slightest hint of incorrect thinking about it, then it certainly must be denounced if not destroyed.

Progressives believe that progress is inevitable; so long as things are allowed to change, time T+1 will inevitably be better than time T.

Hence, for any time T there was a time T-1 that represents Less Progress and is ipso facto Less Good. So the older something is, the less progress it embodies, and this is the very definition of inferiority.

Read it.

Plexiglass — or, rather, Plexiglas® — is one of several trade names for acrylic, shorthand for polymethyl methacrylate, a thermoplastic that can be molded at high temperatures but hardens upon cooling. 9 Transparent, lightweight, and shatter-resistant, the material derives from natural gas, and was developed in the late 1920s and ’30s as a safety glass for automobiles, an alternative to silica-based glass. German chemists Otto Röhm and Walter Bauer trademarked a version as Plexiglas® acrylic; British chemists Rowland Hill and John Crawford of Imperial Chemical registered their product under the name Perspex; and E.I. du Pont Nemours & Company, based in the U.S., introduced Pontalite, later renamed Lucite. 10 Acrylic proved useful for many wartime applications, including submarine periscopes, aircraft windshields and canopies, and gun turrets. 11 Moreover, acrylic, like all plastic, affords formal variety, and after the war it was put to myriad commercial uses: bulletproof “glass,” picture “glass,” ice-hockey-rink walls, aquarium walls, salad-bar sneeze guards, surgical instruments, storm doors, paint, jewelry, dentures, and housewares in exciting curved and folded shapes. Acrylic rods became “crystal” chandeliers and towel holders and stands for scale models. Acrylic tubes were bent into point-of-sale displays, decorative furniture, bulk-food dispensers.

Look but don’t touch.

ZMan takes a look under the covers.

In a world where the end always justifies the means, even when the end is not achieved, truth must always be a secondary consideration. In fact, the truth is often the enemy, as it serves the interests of your opponents. By attacking the truth of something, or even the concept of truth itself, you take away the legitimacy of the opposition to you and your schemes. When morality is determined by who wins, rather than by some objective standard, partisanship is the new morality.

This is the modern age. You see it in the language. The public space is full of people juggling neologisms that have a nice ring to them as a replacement for old words or labels. They sound better and the best people always love hearing new ways of saying old things. It makes them feel smart and sophisticated. The intellectual in a liberal democracy is primarily concerned with appearing to be unconventional and heterodox, so the new words and phrases quickly become popular.

Popularly used smears are ready to hand. ‘Price gouging’. ‘Profiteering’. ‘Robber baron’. ‘Windfall profit’. ‘Pay your fair share’. ‘Oligarch’. ‘Racist’. ‘Sexist’. ‘Bigot’. ‘Homophobe’. ‘Islamophobe’. ‘Denier’. ‘Black market’.

The Other McCain spreads the love.

In response to that threat, we organized “Everybody Blog About Rebekah Jones Day.” For a while, it seemed that our efforts to publicize this situation had little impact, but Hoge kept pounding away at the story, and earlier this month, a Maryland judge dismissed the Jones v. Pushaw case.

Then last week, Charles C.W. Cooke did a National Review article about Jones that got widespread attention, including from The Daily Caller (“The Media Elevated A COVID-19 Conspiracy Theorist To Hurt Ron DeSantis”). So now everybody knows the story — demonstrating again how “The Streisand Effect” operates. The truth is great and will prevail.

Shucks, I missed it.

Read it.

The Explanation of ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems (1985) was based on the insight that the world map of communism corresponded extremely closely with a specific family system, that of the exogamous communitarian family. Following Walt Rostow, the Kennedy intellectual, Todd argued that the violent process of modernization exposed societies to communist subversion in a brief window when the traditional institutions, such as the authority of the landlord, have decayed but new institutions and higher standards of living are still not in place. Todd’s corollary to Rostow’s dictum was that, while all societies are traumatized by the process of modernization, some societies were more exposed to communist subversion than others. And what determined this conditional exposure to the risk of communism subversion was a specific sort of traditional family system where marriage was exogamous (cousin marriage was taboo) and there was coresidence of the father and all his married sons.

Don’t ever say we don’t deal with Really Obscure Shit here.

Read it.

The power is not in the device, for it merely channels, dowsers say; the power is out there, and an attuned hand and quieted mind can discern it.

Whenever I go dowsing for stupidity, the rod aways dips toward Washington.

Freeberg nails it again.

The Internet is a raucous and noisy place, because people have this need to defend the indefensible, and when that germinates into a need to do some arguing when they don’t know how to argue, they use these templates. The templates exist on what might be thought of as a sort of tree, just like a tree you’d find in a redwood forest, or — forgive me, it’s become part of my vocational discipline to see things this way — a sort of class-inheritance tree you’d find in an application or module written in an object-oriented language. “You see” is at the root. Some well-known and often-seen you-see stuff includes

1. Gender is nothing but a social construct
2. Mankind is a poison on the planet
3. Capitalism is the disease and socialism is the cure
4. “Robber Barons” blah blah blah…

Freeberg nails it.

I’m celebrating Liz Cheney’s defrocking by thinking about her constituents, and I don’t mean Wyoming people. I mean her real constituents. The #NeverTrump types can see with their own eyes that someone’s performing competently at a job, and still wish to replace him because they don’t like his vibe. They’d rather let a building burn to the ground than call a fireman who happens to chew tobacco, or use profanity, or skip Church, or watch Beavis and Butthead, or, or, or…

…

They hate Trump because they don’t value what he did. They’ve never had to count on a job actually getting done right, never lost anything because it didn’t happen. They don’t even understand the concept of “an important job”; to their way of thinking, a job is important when it’s a job done by a person who is important, and what makes a person important is their power over you. Their parents paid their college tuition, and to this day, they’re not too sure of how it got done. Their graduation was a ritual and everything after that has been a ritual. You can explain to them until you’re blue in the face that they’re safe because hard men protect them, and are unafraid of doing terrible things, and they’ll nod and agree like they understand. But they don’t. There’s no reason.

Severian is ready to give up.

When it comes to philosophy, at least, the idea’s the thing, not the prose, a few obvious exceptions like Nietzsche aside. It’s important that you know what e.g. Kant and Hegel said, not how they said it, and since any competent “intro to” book will give you both the “standard” (consensus) view and the most common alternate readings, you really don’t have to plow through The Critique of Pure Reason or, God help us, The Philosophy of History. Intros are fine*, and they’re especially fine for guys like Marx, whose Collected Works with Engels run at least fifty (!) big honking volumes.

…

Just as Cultural Marxism was nothing more than question begging, a smokescreen of ponderous Teutonic prose to keep Marxists from believing their own lying eyes, so #Woke is an increasingly unhinged attempt to convince the True Believers that a society which is actually pretty fucking great for almost everybody is, in fact, a benighted hellhole of oppression. We’ve all seen it, so a single example will suffice: I’ve met three trannies in my life. One of them was in India, where there’s apparently some kind of sub-caste ritual thing they do, which though fascinating in itself isn’t germane.

Read it.

And if you believe that one they’ll tell you another one.

Read it.

way since that Stanford-modified Volkswagen Touareg won the first DARPA Grand Challenge back in 2005, but we’ve still got a long way to go before full Level 5 autonomy. No matter what anyone says. In case you don’t believe me, why not check out this video of a Waymo robotaxi getting very confused by some traffic cones and causing all kinds of trouble, including escaping from Waymo’s own support team.

Read it.

First, beyond a few spats that make headlines, it’s getting harder to detect any serious division among rank-and-file Republicans. In Congress, and at the grassroots, the dominance of Donald Trump over the party is more or less total. The small handful who denounced the former president for his massive lies about the election and his seeding of an insurrectionist riot are now either silent, or have embraced a mealy-mouthed argument for “election integrity.” The same state officials who pushed back against Trump’s attempt to overturn November’s results have embraced a series of restrictive voting measures ostensibly designed to combat non-existent “fraud,” all aimed at hobbling voters inclined to vote for Democrats. Mitch McConnell, who denounced Trump’s behavior in high-minded tones in the aftermath of the riot, also—on the exact same day—voted to exonerate him of wrongdoing.