ZMan looks under the hood.

For most people this sounds logical. You start every project with the end in mind and you see that is the Yarvin – Rufo debate. In fact, that is the primary appeal of both Chris Rufo and Curtis Yarvin. They hold up this image of a possible future and if you like what you see, you support their program. This has been how political debate has been framed in the West since the French Revolution. You are presented with two images of the future and asked to pick one of them.

The problem with this, the reason that ideology must always fail, is that it never considers if the end is possible or even plausible. This is not because the ideologue is incapable of doubting the ideology. It is because ideology must always rest on the assumption that all societies are intentional societies. What we see is the product of human labor, therefore the goodness or badness of society reflects the goodness or badness of the people who made it.

Good people not only follow a certain code, but they must constitute the telos of the society of which they are a part. No ideology ever concludes that the ideologue must disengage with society, other than if it helps him engage with fellow ideologues in plotting to overthrow the present order. Ideology assumes you must be engage in the project of moving society toward the desired end. Otherwise, you are assumed to be working against those who are doing so.

This is why both libertarianism and modern-day conservatism must inevitably fail.

“A fine is a tax for doing something wrong. A tax is a fine for doing something right.” — ALUX on YouTube

Read it.

A national study published by JAMA Health Forum found that there was an abrupt surge in permanent sterilization procedures among young adults ages 18 through 30 after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, which reversed the constitutional right to an abortion.

“If options for avoiding pregnancy and/or avoiding carrying pregnancies to term are severely limited, as has happened in 21 states since Dobbs, many patients will choose permanent ways to avoid this risk, rather than relying on less effective or less permanent methods,” Sarah W. Prager, MD, a professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Washington School of Medicine, told Healthline.

Following the Dobbs ruling, researchers observed an abrupt increase of 58 sterilization procedures for women, averaging around 5.31 procedures per month per 100,000 individuals. This marks an almost twofold increase from the prior rate of 2.84 procedures per month for women.

Think of it as evolution in action.

The New Yorker.

A little more than a decade ago, Founders Fund, a venture-capital firm run by the entrepreneur, investor, and political gadfly Peter Thiel, issued a proclamation called “What Happened to the Future?” As an investment thesis, it was underwhelming—it advanced biotechnology, energy, and the Internet as smart bets—but it was received as something of a spiritual treatise. Thiel was best known for his early investment in Facebook, but he believed that the nation had become sluggish. We might have been attempting to terraform nearby planets or surmount death. Instead, we made apps. His statement belonged to the genre of the writer F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909, which proposed that Italy’s moribund museum culture be razed in favor of a machine cult of speed and steel: “We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is the very first sunrise on earth!” Thiel, no poet, was punchier: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

Read it.

California created a boom by offering homeowners a chance to sell energy back to the grid at unsustainable rates.

This year utility companies then slashed what they pay to customers by 75 percent or more.

The payback time for these systems no longer makes any sense. More accurately, if you have to subsidize something, it is not economically feasible in the first place; it just looks like it.

The boom then imploded.

Would that this worked in real life.

The Guardian.

Hungry for niche knowledge to impress your colleagues? Troubled by the size of a hefty new book? Doubt your abilities to understand complex arguments? Well, today an increasingly competitive industry offers to take away these problems with one product: a book summary app.

Since these digital services first promised to boil down a title, usually a nonfiction work, a decade ago, the marketplace has become crowded. So much so that authors and publishers are concerned about the damage to sales, as well as to the habit of concentrated reading.

Some successful writers, including Amy Liptrot, also fear that apps such as Blinkist, Bookey, getAbstract and the latest, Headway, may be undermining the book trade and misrepresenting content.

A cursory review of several books on Amazon that I am interested in seems to suggest that any book worth reading very quickly has a ‘derivative’ work offering the same essential stuff in a quick and allegedly more digestible form. Often it’s difficult to tell which is the original and which the ‘condensed’ version. In the Good Old Days, lines of business such as Reader’s Digest Condensed Books (to which my parents were addicted, to my benefit) paid authors for the rights to ‘condense’ their books for republication; nowadays, of course, Ain’t Nobody Got Time for Dat (much less morals).

“When you’re trying to shoot down $10,000 drones with million dollar missiles, you can see how the math works out.” — ZMan

Definition: Propaganda organs of the ruling establishment masquerading as ‘jourlanists’ and ‘news’ organizations.

Source: Chris Rufo on the plagiarism accusations against black female professors

An apparent variant of ‘media’ based on the French word ‘merde’.

OffGuardian.

We want to know why something is the way it is. It is in our nature. It is why, now presumably understanding the movement of celestial things, we can rest watching an eclipse with the quietened birds and the colours drifting to dark, saturated. Watching as it gradually returns to normal and not be afraid.

As if normal existed now.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

On the Sunday show I said I was swearing off any Trump news until the summer, as there is only so much screeching and squealing, I can take. I needed to take a break in order to train for the coming election. I plan to stick to that for the most part but looking at the clips of Trump stopping into a Chick-fil-A and the reaction to it, I thought it may be a good time to talk about the meaning of Trump.

Read it.

Following a path blazed by the once and future Republic of Texas, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds on Wednesday signed into law a measure making it a state crime to enter the Hawkeye State after being deported or denied entry into the country. As an “aggravated misdemeanor,” it would subject illegal immigrants to imprisonment for up to two years.

Reynolds raced to sign the bill just one day after it cleared the state legislature. In a statement issued after the signing, she said President Biden’s neglect of border security made it imperative for Iowa to step up and fill the void.

Read it.

If an investor bets big on Apple, that investor will have a good reason to carefully monitor Apple’s performance, carefully consider how to vote in shareholder elections, and serve as a watchdog on management because of their investments. With index funds, every investor can end up so diversified the performance of each company matters little to investors. It also means that a few investment companies can end up controlling a large or sometimes majority share of every major company. In 2019, the Harvard Business Review pointed out that “either Blackrock, Vanguard, or State Street is the largest shareholder in 88% of S&P 500 companies.”

This common ownership discourages competition.

…

It also means that ideological crusades can be driven by a few investment companies. It’s hard to imagine small firms going all in on DEI or ESG investments. What small family company wants to abandon hiring the best job candidates in the name of diversity or adopt unproven “green” practices in the name of sustainability?

But if a few investment managers become passionate about such trendy left-wing ideas they can rapidly disseminate through the market.

The Guardian.

It was billed as a glass-walled city of the future, an ambitious centrepiece of the economic plan backed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to transition Saudi Arabia away from oil dependency.

Now, however, plans for the mirror-clad desert metropolis called the Line have been scaled down and the project, which was envisaged to stretch 105 miles (170km) is expected to reach just a mile and a half by 2030.

Dreamed up as a linear city that would eventually be home to about 9 million people on a footprint of just 13 sq miles, the Line is part of a wider Neom project. Now at least one contractor has begun dismissing workers.

CNBC.

Wealthy U.S. families are increasingly applying for second citizenships and national residences as a way to hedge their financial risk, according to a leading law firm.

The wealthy are building these “passport portfolios” — collections of second, and even third or fourth, citizenships — in case they need to flee their home country. Henley & Partners, a law firm that specializes in high-net-worth citizenships, said Americans now outnumber every other nationality when it comes to securing alternative residences or added citizenships.

“The U.S. is still a great country, it’s still an amazing passport,” said Dominic Volek, group head of private clients at Henley & Partners. “But if I’m wealthy, I would like to hedge against levels of volatility and uncertainty. The idea of diversification is well understood by wealthy individuals around what they invest. It makes no sense to have one country of citizenship and residence when I have the ability to actually diversify that aspect of my life as well.”

Recent high-profile examples of second citizenships include billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, who added a citizenship in New Zealand, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who applied for citizenship in Cyprus.

ZMan turns the cynicism up to 11.

For fifty years abortion was a part of the national political debate due to the fight to overturn Roe v. Wade. Those who opposed abortion sought to overturn this court decision, thus returning the issue to the people. The pro-life side assumed they could win the argument and get laws passed to end most abortions. The pro-abortion people obviously fought to prevent this, even though they always claimed the vast majority of the people saw abortion as a holy sacrament.

Abortion was always a good money maker for Conservative Inc. because on the one hand, they only had to pay lip service to the moral issue. It was not as if they could pass legislation or change a regulation to meet the demands of their voters. The courts would just strike down those changes. On the other hand, the only path to victory was getting a majority of pro-life people in office, especially the White house, so the courts could be stocked with pro-life judges. That meant voting Republican.

The way the two party grift has worked since the middle of the last century was that the Democrats conjure novel ideas and find creative ways to normalize them with the progressive segment of the population. Once these ideas gain circulation, the Republicans pretend to oppose these new ideas. Both sides squabble over it, thus narrowing the options to their preferred positions. Then they aggressively fundraise off it as the novel ideas are slowly implemented.

The genius of this arrangement is the elites get what they want, while both parties protect themselves from outside threats by sucking all the oxygen out of the room in their endless media debates. With the oxygen comes the money, which keeps both camps in the lifestyle they think they deserve. Just as important, none of that money goes to anyone who has a third opinion. The political rackets rest on every issue being reduce to a binary choice.

Binary is bad.

Read it.

An amount of land equivalent to the Isle of Wight has been added to the shorelines of 13,000 islands around the world in just the last 20 years. This fascinating fact of a 369.67 square kilometre increase has recently been discovered by a group of Chinese scientists analysing both surface and satellite records. Overall, land was lost during the 1990s, but the scientists found that in the study period of three decades to 2020 there was a net increase of 157.21 km2. The study observed considerable natural variation in both erosion and accretion. Of course, the findings blow holes in the poster scare run by alarmists suggesting that rising sea levels caused by humans using hydrocarbons will condemn many islands to disappear shortly beneath rising sea levels. By means of such flimsy scare tactics, as we have seen in many other cases, desperate attempts are made to terrify global populations to accept the insanity of the Net Zero collectivisation.

The American Mind.

When presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told CNN last week that he sees President Joe Biden as a greater threat to democracy than Donald Trump, mainstream media, academics, and elected Democrats exploded in vitriol.

Speaking on CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront, Kennedy said, “I can make the argument that President Biden is the much worse threat to democracy, and the reason for that is President Biden is…the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, so to censor his opponent.” Kennedy added: “The greatest threat to democracy is not somebody who questions election returns but a President of the United States who will use the power of his office to force the social media companies…to open a portal and give access to that portal to the FBI, CIA, the IRS, the NIH, to censor his political critics.”

Biden is not actually the first president to use federal agencies to censor political speech. Presidents John Adams and Woodrow Wilson used the Sedition Acts of 1798 and 1918 to do so, and President Roosevelt censored opponents during World War II. Nonetheless, Biden has undoubtedly overseen the most massive censorship enterprise in U.S. history, and the first to be enjoined by federal courts. That progressives embrace Biden’s affront to a right central to our democracy underscores how far the Left has travelled from its once-avowed principles. While the attack line that Trump is a fascist is so well-worn that most of us ignore it, too little attention is given to authoritarians on the Left. Fascism is a vicious ideology that was responsible for millions of deaths in the twentieth century, but communist and other socialist systems are guilty for at least ten times more murders in the name of class warfare.

Read it.

If you take a look at a map of the world’s Blue Zones — the areas with the highest concentration of centenarians — every one of them is situated along a coastline. Little wonder: settling down by the sea, in a so-called “blue space,” has been linked to a 17% reduction in mortality rate. One study suggested that living within 250 meters of a seaside environment helps reduce stress levels, with the smell and sounds offering a “wonderful tonic.”

…

That’s according to Dr. Wallace J. Nichols, a marine biologist who coined the term “blue mind theory.” (Ted Talk here, book here.) After years spent researching and protecting sea turtles, Nichols started studying the impact that water has on the human body and brain. “When you see water, when you hear water, it triggers a response in your brain that you’re in the right place,” he said in an interview.

ZMan cuts to the chase.

One of the enduring truths about war is that the side that wins is usually the side that starts with a clear objective. That understanding of the goal allows for a strategy to accomplish the goal, which then becomes the framework for the tactics required to implement the strategy and win the war. Starting with the end in mind also allows for changes in strategy and tactics to account for the unknown unknowns that are always a part of a military conflict. No plan survives contact with the enemy.

We may be about to see this in the Ukraine war. From the start the Russians have had a very clear understanding of their interests in Ukraine. This predates the war by about a thousand years. Russia is a land power without natural barriers between itself and its neighbors, so the goal of Russian foreign policy since forever has been to maintain space between Russia and its neighbors. The Ukraine has always been part of that space controlled by the Russians.

This is why the Russians had clear demands at the start of the war. They wanted the Russian speaking areas liberated from Ukrainian control, they wanted Ukraine demilitarized and they wanted NATO out of Ukraine. When the war started, these goals did not have to change as they were the reason for the war. The Russians would simply have to do what was necessary to impose these ends. In other words, once the war started, the question was how not why.

Read it.

Two Bay Area railway workers gave new meaning to “transit oriented development” – when they allegedly built two illegal apartments inside train stations for a combined $50,000.
San Mateo prosecutors allege that two former Caltrain officials built two secret office-to-apartment conversions in two Peninsula stations south of San Francisco, the San Jose Mercury News reported.
Former Caltrain Deputy Director Joseph Navarro and contractor Seth Andrew Worden face felony charges for misusing public funds to build the mini apartments in the historic Burlingame and Millbrae stations. Neither facility is being used by the public.

Read it.

A Nebraska state legislator is transitioning from blue to red after his own party censured him for having a pro-life stance. Nebraska state Sen. Mike McDonnell officially left the Democratic Party last week after 40 years and became a Republican.

In a written statement explaining his decision, McDonnell wrote: “I have asked the Democratic Party to respect my religious based pro-life position. Instead over the last year they have decided to punish me for being pro-life.”

Last month, the Nebraska Democratic Party voted to censure McDonnell, a Catholic, over his pro-life record, contending that his stance “adversely affected the reproductive rights of Nebraskans and the rights of transgender individuals in the state.”

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.