Read it.

If you’re curious about effective legal immigration measures, here’s a good example: Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, has extended an offer of 5,000 free passports for highly skilled professionals.

We’re offering 5,000 free passports (equivalent to $5 billion in our passport program) to highly skilled scientists, engineers, doctors, artists, and philosophers from abroad.

This represents less than 0.1% of our population, so granting them full citizen status, including voting rights, poses no issue.

Despite the small number, their contributions will have a huge impact on our society and the future of our country.

Plus, we will facilitate their relocation by ensuring 0% taxes and tariffs on moving families and assets. This includes commercial value items like equipment, software, and intellectual property.

Wikipedia.

The Gakken EX-System is a series of educational electronics kits produced by Gakken in the late 1970s. The kits use denshi blocks (also known as electronic blocks) to allow electronics experiments to be performed easily and safely. Over 25 years after its original release, one of the main kits from the series was reissued in Japan in 2002.

I wish I’d had this when I was a kid. Heck, I wish I’d had it when I was being trained as an Electronics Technician in the Navy.

OffGuardian.

together at a table.  She with a laptop open before her and he with a coffee and a book.  Looking at the screen, she says to him,“I didn’t know that the solar eclipse lasts for 70 to 80 minutes, going from partial to full, and the full eclipse lasts just 3-4 minutes.”

The man replies: “And if you’re lucky, the partial eclipse lasts more than 70 to 80 years, because then the full eclipse is forever.”

She acts as if she doesn’t hear him, as if his sardonic humor has nothing to do with her death anxiety or with the media’s celebration of the darkness visible of the total solar eclipse due to occur on April 8^th across North America that the media is calling “eclipse mania,” while failing to mention they are promoting it as such.

Construction Physics.

Buying a home is by far the largest purchase most of us will make, and paying the rent or mortgage will be our largest monthly expense. In the post-pandemic home-buying boom, the median sale price of a new home peaked at almost $500,000 dollars, just under seven times the median household annual income that year (though it has since fallen). Most new homebuyers will pay around 30% of their income on their mortgage, and the median renter in the bottom quintile of income spends 60% of their income on rent.

Because of the enormous costs of housing, it’s worth understanding where, specifically, those costs come from, and what sort of interventions would be needed to reduce these costs. Discussions of housing policy often focus on issues of zoning, regulation, and other supply restrictions which manifest as increased land prices, but for most American housing, the largest cost comes from building the physical structure itself. However, in dense urban areas — the places where building new housing is arguably most important — this changes, and high land prices driven by regulatory restrictions become the dominant factor.

People concerned about building more housing are right to pay attention to zoning and land use rules: over 100 million Americans live in places where most of the cost of residential property comes from the land itself. But they should not neglect the physical costs of building homes, which are overall more important. Unfortunately, as we’ll see, reducing these physical costs is far from straightforward.

Read it.

The age of overpopulation is over. The age of underpopulation is here. After decades of warnings and fear about an overpopulation crisis, population is now rapidly declining in most of the world. The overpopulation disaster predicted by world elites did not occur.

Total fertility rate is the average number of children born per woman. Demographers tell us that a country’s fertility rate must be at least 2.1 children per woman to sustain the current level of population.

According to data from the United Nations, total world population still continues to rise, but population is declining in all major nations, where fertility rates have fallen below the minimum population replacement rate. Africa is the only continent where the population continues to grow. According to birth rates and without counting immigration flows, population is now falling in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, the United States, and all European nations except Monaco and the Faroe Islands.

The Foundry.

Before voters approved a constitutional amendment to make their state the 28th in the nation to ban private funding of election administration, Wisconsin’s capital city, Madison, already had spent over $1 million in private grants.

Madison, like jurisdictions in three other states that ban private dollars from paying for elections—Arizona, Georgia, and Missouri—is a member of the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence. The organization, founded by the left-leaning Center for Tech and Civic Life, doled out $350 million in election-administration grants in 2020 funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.

Wisconsin’s move to ban private money to pay for elections was significant progress for election integrity but not a silver bullet, said former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative.

The National Interest.

The US military’s reliance on traditional warfare methods, like aircraft carriers, faces challenges in the modern era of anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategies, making them increasingly obsolete. The alternative, submarines, particularly the Virginia-class, are crucial yet insufficient due to budget and industrial limitations. Moreover, the emergence of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), coupled with artificial intelligence and advanced detection technologies, threatens to render submarines obsolete as well. Despite these advancements, submarines remain vital in current great power dynamics, especially against China, highlighting the need for continued adaptation in military strategies to maintain effectiveness in future conflicts.

The sub in the header photo is not a U.S. sub but rather a Russian Akula.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

An aspect of our increasingly ideological age is the things that used to be a part of the culture that have been removed by force or by neglect. The parts pried loose and discarded are easy to see, as they come with an angry mob of deranged lunatics there to do the damage. The bits that are just forgotten and fall out of the shared reality that is our culture are the things missed only by those who remember them.

ZMan eats some popcorn.

An interesting exchange took place this week on Twitter between Mark Cuban, former owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and Christopher Rufo. The topic of their exchange was diversity, with Cuban claiming that diversity was our greatest strength and Rufo claiming that the diversity movement is un-American. Neither man put it exactly that way, but that is the simple summary. Cuban thinks diversity makes things better, while Rufo thinks the push to impose diversity makes everything worse.

The exchange was amusing for the simple reason that Cuban clearly does not understand the issue, beyond knowing the slogans which he spasmodically repeats when the topic is raised. At one point he seems to be saying that the three branches of government are the President, Congress, and the bureaucracy. Everyone had a good laugh at his expense, as it became clear in the thread that Mark Cuban is not the brightest bulb in the bunch, despite being a billionaire.

To some degree that is the point of these mini dramas. The hoi polloi gets to feel good seeing one of their champions best who they think is the enemy. Mark Cuban puts a lot of effort into insulting normal people, so normal people love it when he has his pants pulled down on Twitter or anywhere else. Rufo clearly understands the mechanics of the Diversity Industrial Complex, so he easily swats down the trite claims made by Cuban throughout the thread.

The Critic.

One of the most influential and widely-read opinion columnists in the Western world is never published in mainstream outlets. Despite being read by major commentators and politicians, he is almost never named, let alone discussed. Steve Sailer, a 65-year-old Californian, has haunted mainstream discourse for decades.

You can see his name popping up in New York Times columns by David Brooks and Ross Douthat. He is occasionally published in the American Conservative. Yet the extent to which he is perceived as being politically unmentionable has made him the closest thing that opinion commentary has to an outlaw figure.

The once-edgy comedian, Patton Oswalt, quoted Sailer’s line that “political correctness is a war on noticing” on Twitter in 2014 (and has since deleted the tweet). The now-edgy comedian Tim Dillon referenced Sailer’s characterisation of American policy as being “Invade the World, Invite the World” on a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. Online, there is a running joke about how liberal pieties posted on “X” (formerly Twitter) will attract Sailer’s responses like a crime scene attracts Batman.

Amazon lists NOTICING as ‘currently unavailable’. If you really want it, however, you can buy it here.

Read it.

“First, you allege a problem exists without any scientific basis. Then, you identify a ‘study’ with findings you like that can be used to form a basis for policy advocacy, which you pass onto your former fellow activists who are now in the administration, and let them run with it.”

Power Line.

Some of the most sophisticated work on energy in the country is being done by Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling of Center of the American Experiment. Here, Isaac explains in understandable terms why the supposed costs of wind and solar projects that you see reported in the press, and alleged by “green” advocates, are always wildly off base.

Read it.

A Chinese national illegally in the United States was arrested last week after sneaking onto a Marine Corps base in California and refusing to leave, according to an official from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

In a March 29 post on X, Sector Chief Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino confirmed that agents were called out to the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California after the Chinese national entered the facility without authorization.

Gizmodo.

Saw that comin’.

Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with “Just Walk Out” technology, first reported by The Information Tuesday. The company’s senior vice president of grocery stores says they’re moving away from Just Walk Out, which relied on cameras and sensors to track what people were leaving the store with.

Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.

Wonder how many of them used the Just Don’t Pay program?

Wonder how many of those were Fashionable Victim Minorities?

Inquiring minds want to know….

Read it.

The oldest recognizable map in the world comes from Ukraine and is dated as much later than cave art, around fifteen thousand years ago. An etched mammoth tusk was unearthed along with many mammoth bones at a site called Mezhirich. The scratched lines on the tusk are not random but form a drawing or picture that is likely some kind of map. The design is made with lines, some straight, some zigzagging, presumably to denote a topographical feature. There seems to be a river at the bottom of this first map, and marks of a mountain or hill have been placed at the top. In between are more small lines that look like houses or huts. All the slashes are lines; none of them are curved in any sort of artistic way. There are also no animals and no human figures. This tusk is markedly different from any cave painting in its lack of story and figurative representation. Then, there is its straightforward presentation, which also makes it seem more map-like.

Power Line.

America’s colleges and universities have damaged our country badly, and don’t show any sign of reform. So one obvious path to improvement is for fewer people to attend them. Happily, that is happening: not only that, but young people are finding better alternatives.

Newsbusters.

On Easter Sunday, CBS’s Face the Nationturned to two prominent Washington religious leaders: Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the Catholic archbishop of Washington and Rev. Mariann Budde, Bishop of Washington for the Episcopal Church, which is politically a better fit for Biden.

White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe was the substitute host, and he seemed most interested in underlining how Biden faithfully attends Catholic services, and not so much whether he’s in complete contradiction with Catholic teaching on the hot-button social and sexual issues. He kept pressing the Cardinal on if Biden “resonates” with Catholic voters:

The American Mind.

In 2001, the United States embarked on the War on Terror, rallying the world not just to fight terrorists but to replace autocratic and tribal societies with liberal democratic regimes, despite the lack of local interest. That approach now looks hopelessly wrongheaded.

Though Islamist terror groups still threaten the civilized world, geopolitical power players continue to use terrorist puppet regimes for strategic advantage, despite occasional “blowback.” Russia has been fighting ISIS in Syria since 2015 and, in 2017, prior to the recent ISIS-K raid on the Crocus Music Hall on the outskirts of Moscow, withstood a deadly attack by that group on the St. Petersburg Metro. Yet it’s been friendly with Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists and received a Hamas delegation following the October 7 attack on Israel. Its leadership appears to view NATO, not political Islam, as an existential threat.

Russia’s double standards when it comes to their proxies might be hypocritical, but they are also pragmatic and amoral. We can’t rationally expect that the people in charge can be shamed with accusations of hypocrisy into amending their ways. No one holds Russia to a high standard. If Russia is accused of damaging a church here or a hospital there, it rarely trends on social media or is covered in the news. Russian security forces must step up their game to make anyone pay attention.

‘Stop worrying about what’s happening in the White House and start worrying about what’s happening in your house.’ — Adam Sosnik

Read it.

A U.S. visa program for skilled foreign workers has long stoked concerns over American workers losing their jobs to lower-paid foreigners. Now a group of experienced American professionals is accusing an Indian outsourcing giant of firing them on short notice and filling many of their roles with workers from India on H1-B visas.

The American workers say that India’s Tata Consultancy Services illegally discriminated against them based on their race and age, firing them and shifting some of their work to lower-paid Indian immigrants on temporary work visas.

Since late December, at least 22 workers have filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against TCS, whose clients have included dozens of the U.S.’s biggest firms.

‘America is a nation of believers, dreamers, and strivers that is being led by a group of censors, critics, and cynics.’ — Donald Trump, 2016

The Other McCain.

You don’t want to be a “swing voter,” the kind of idiot who tells pollsters he’s undecided who to vote for two weeks before Election Day. Politics is a team sport. and unless you want to be some schmuck who’s a mere spectator at the game, well, you have to join the team you’re on.

Read it.

I have said it many times in the past but I think it bears repeating once again: If you want to understand why world events happen the way they do, you must understand the goals and influence of globalist institutions. You must accept the fact that these people create most of the national and international disasters you and I have to deal with on a regular basis and oftentimes they create these disasters deliberately.

…

The primary purpose of the globalists is to erase national borders and homogenize all countries and cultures under one economic and governmental system. They have openly admitted to this plan on numerous occasions. One of the most revealing quotes on the agenda comes from Clinton Administration Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot, who stated in Time magazine that:

“In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority… National sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all.”

Washington Post.

They realize that, no matter how much they may dislike Trump, he’s still better than Biden.

Power Line.

On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas cannot enforce its border control law, SB 4, because it conflicts with federal law that preempts the field of immigration. The decision is here. Jonathan Turley analyzes the issue here.

Briefly, Turley thinks the panel decision is a correct interpretation of the Constitution and of case law on preemption. The constitutional issue turns on the meaning of “invasion,” which the states are empowered to resist under Article I of the Constitution, and against which the federal government is required to defend the states under Article IV. For the moment, I don’t want to debate that conclusion. Let’s assume it is true that the best interpretation of the Constitution and existing case law is that states cannot act to stop illegal immigration because that is a federal role, even if the federal government has completely abdicated its responsibilities. What then?

Whether or not the influx of millions of illegals across the southern border is an invasion in constitutional terms, it certainly is an invasion in common parlance. And for a border state like Texas, it is a comprehensive disaster. The people of Texas plainly have a right to defend themselves against this evil. If being part of the Union makes it legally impossible to defend themselves, it is only right that they should consider whether they want to remain in the Union. This is doubly true if the problem arises from a malicious determination on the part of the federal government to abandon, indeed subvert, one of the basic responsibilities that Texas and other states have delegated to that government.

Read it.

While Piketty’s claims about the desirability of egalitarianism and wealth taxes are to some extent subjective, his book and his reputation are premised on the claim that he carefully assembled data that showed an increasing return to capital over time.

He claims to have based his work on three centuries of data.

Unfortunately, for fans of Piketty and left-wing economists who prefer a more fact-based economics approach, it looks like Piketty’s data work is quite sloppy.

In 2015, Magness and Murphy pointed to a wide range of flaws or mistakes in the book writing that they found “evidence of pervasive errors of historical fact, opaque methodological choices, and the cherry-picking of sources to construct favorable patterns from ambiguous data. Additional evidence suggests that Piketty used a highly distortive data assumption from the Soviet Union to accentuate one of his main historical claims about global “capitalism” in the twentieth century.” According to Magness and Murphy, Piketty bases his measure of 150 years of the world economy on a sample size of just six individual years and just extrapolates the rest of the data! Yikes!

Quillette.

The left is undergoing an overdue reckoning. Progressive mass movements have achieved little more than mass in recent years. Occupy Wall Street didn’t beget economic redistribution, to say nothing of Marxist revolution. Large-scale marches for gun control and climate action produced neither. Following the police killing of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter blossomed into the largest social movement in U.S. history, drawing millions into the streets to demand racial justice, police reform, and even an “end” to policing. What they got instead were some statues taken down and municipalities quietly rolling back hollow promises to defund the police. Street protests and social media fervour dissipate as quickly as they roil over. Placards hit the garbage bins. Profile pictures boasting support for, as the meme goes, hashtag “the current thing” get changed out. The world moves on. Nothing fundamentally changes.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Steve Sailer.

The late Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024) was an IQ researcher for the Israeli military in an era when it did a world-historical good job at figuring out who its brightest guys were.

The problem with IQ science, however, is that it get pretty repetitious pretty quick. So with his IQ researcher pal Abram Tversky, Kahneman progressed into researching shortcomings in human cognition, for which he became extraordinarily famous among the nerdier sort of online thinker in the early 21st Century.

Quillette. 

After the end of the Second World War, the American Old Right underwent a transformation from being a loosely connected band of libertarians, nativists, and isolationists towards a more cohesive ideological conservative movement aimed at confronting the threat of collectivism and atheism posed by the Soviet Union abroad and the left at home. A small band of libertarians and traditionalists debated and discussed first principles, which ultimately resulted in what Frank Meyer termed “fusionism”—a compromise position that incorporated both traditions’ insights. 70 years later, after the Soviet threat was extinguished, that consensus has fractured, and a possible anti-elitist successor has emerged, colloquially known as the New Right. And as it’s begun to take form, it finds itself in an eerily similar place to the early conservatism.

UnHerd.

Ohio Republicans have a new candidate for US Senator: Bernie Moreno, who was endorsed by Donald Trump over establishment-backed Matt Dolan. With Moreno’s victory in last week’s hotly contested primary, the party’s MAGA faction has further entrenched its hold on this pivotal Midwestern state, with its large share of factory towns and labour voters. And should Moreno prevail over the Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown in November, he would go on to join Ohio’s sitting Junior Senator J.D. Vance, probably the most intellectually sophisticated champion of America First nationalism in Congress.

Such a pairing would make for a politically fertile synthesis: while Vance built his electoral brand on his working-class roots, Moreno has advertised himself with a more traditional set of Republican credentials — namely those of a small businessman or, to be more precise, a car dealership owner.

Between these two poles, the outline of a post-realignment GOP may be sketched. Where the Reagan coalition of the Eighties united Wall Street with Main Street business (with some working class defectors), the emergent Trump coalition of the 2020s and beyond will be different. Because of the exodus of the corporate and college-educated segments of America to the Democrats, it will most likely be composed of a more solid pool of working-class voters allied with the petit-bourgeois class of the red-state and hinterland regions, sometimes known as the “American gentry” and stereotypically represented as rock-ribbed conservative car dealers, like Moreno. Yet while much ink has been spilled trying to understand the mindset of the MAGA working class (Vance’s 2016 bestseller Hillbilly Elegy was about precisely the kind of people who would go on to vote for Trump), comparatively little attention has been paid to the Bernie Morenos of America.

Newsbussters.

Communist Chinese government-tied TikTok censored videos of women exposing the health risks of hormonal contraceptives after apparently receiving pressure from a leftist legacy media outlet.

The Washington Post released a now-infamous report attempting to discredit women speaking out about many of the well-known side effects listed on the blanket-sized warning label that comes with oral contraceptives. In its report, The Post highlighted the fact that TikTok had censored some of the people it had reached out to for the piece, including The Daily Wire commentator Brett Cooper who hosts The Comment Section and TikTok influencer Nicole Bendayan. The newspaper took credit for the part it played in the removal of multiple videos.

Brett Cooper’s The Comment Section is one of the best things that ever happened to YouTube. Highly recommended.

The Register.

More than half of Americans are using ad blocking software, and among advertising, programming, and security professionals that fraction is more like two-thirds to three-quarters.

According to a survey of 2,000 Americans conducted by research firm Censuswide, on behalf of Ghostery, a maker of software to block ads and online tracking, 52 percent of Americans now use an ad blocker, up from 34 percent according to 2022 Statista data.

More striking are the figures cited for technically savvy users who have worked at least five years in their respective fields – veteran advertisers, programmers, and cybersecurity experts.

That’s my approach to life in general. SEP does not need me.

ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.

Human societies assume permanence and that means they require a story for how the society came together. The Romans, for example, had the legend of Romulus and Remus who founded the city of Rome. The Rape of the Sabine Women is another important part of the story of the Roman people. The origin myths of a people are specific to a people; thus, their history is specific to them. In other words, a people’s identity is exclusive to them.

This is why a multiracial egalitarian society is impossible. You have different people with different identities rooted in different origin stories. Any effort to write the origin of one people into the story of the other people will be viewed as theft. Vivek Ramaswamy in that tweet was trying to steal a part of European history on order to insert his people into your story. No doubt he saw the resistance to this as a slight against him and people like him. This is now part of his people’s story.

You see this with the old race divide in America. Black people have an origin story that depends on white people being the villain. White people have an origin story that does not include black people. Inserting blacks into the white story requires whites to accept guilt for things they did not do and shame for ancestors who made it possible for any of us to have this discussion. It simply cannot work, so any effort to make it work aggravates the natural racial friction in America.

Read it.

Books can be dangerous because they shape the way we think. Our thoughts shape our actions, and our actions shape our characters, which of course affects how we live our lives—as individuals and as communities. Our age is one quick to laud all things that appear creative, usually with praise for authors who shape our values, whatever that means. The best books, particularly those that have remained important for many centuries, do not create something new or shape anyone’s values. Rather, they are great because, in ways that may be new and exciting, they help us see more fully the structure of reality so that we might better live in accord with the order of creation.

Saint Augustine’s City of God is without doubt on the list of great books that continues to help us see how the natural order is not something bracketed off or separated from spiritual reality. It was written in the 5th century in response to the intellectual class that insisted that Christianity was to blame for the fall of Rome. Christians who insist on being peacemakers on earth while awaiting their rewards in the afterlife made the Romans’ commitment to the city weak and pathetic, it was claimed. Pagan rites bred manliness; Christians, however, preached turning the other cheek. Augustine’s magnificent response provided a strong case that Rome would have fallen regardless of Christian influence, because its foundations were poorly laid.

Of course, for the Greeks and Romans ‘city’ had a broader meaning than it does for us today; the Romans distinguished between the urbs and the broader civitas, just as the Greeks made a distinction between the astu and the broader polis.

UnHerd.

“The transformation of Ireland over the last 60 years has sometimes felt as if a new world had landed from outer space on top of an old one,” wrote Fintan O’Toole, a commentator who is generally approving of this new status quo, in 2021. But the past weeks and months have proven that the “old” country has very different ideas about this extra-terrestrial political order. After Ireland rejected two liberal amendments to the constitution, tabled and sponsored by their government, civic disturbances on a scale not seen for generations continue. They even wear the aesthetic of an older Ireland, with youths on horseback leading a recent protest against a new asylum centre in Dublin.

Read it.

It’s not easy being green.

TechCrunch.

Today, large swaths of the globe haven’t adopted air-source heat pumps because they don’t work as well when the mercury drops. Most of those places still rely on natural gas or heating oil, and convincing people to switch will require a drop-in solution that’s cheaper to run than their existing furnace or boiler and works at extreme temperatures. The basic technology that’s inside your car or your house hasn’t changed in over a century, and it still doesn’t work well at low temperatures.

“Let’s say it’s -30 degrees Fahrenheit in Minnesota, and you have a forced baseboard hot water heater,” Walker said. “No heat pump on the market can do that at any temperature, let alone really cold temperatures.”