The New York Times, paper of record for the Deep State.

Through recessions, wars, financial crises and political turmoil, the U.S. economy has maintained its reputation as the safest place in the world for investors to put their money and for entrepreneurs to build their businesses.

That has given the United States a nearly incalculable economic advantage, allowing it to borrow more cheaply, grow more quickly and emerge from downturns more successfully than nearly any of its global peers.

President Trump may be chipping away at that advantage.

This proceeds from the statist assumption that a managed economy is stronger than a free economy, and since a managed economy needs metrics by which it can be managed (“You can’t manage what you don’t measure” my Business School teachers ceaselessly droned), Trump’s actions (which, according to the Narrative, impair that measurement) are striking at the foundations of the managed economy. Orange Man Bad.

A good case can be made, however, (and has been by Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, and others) that a managed economy is weaker than a free economy because the metrics that it uses for such management are inaccurate and incomplete compared to the totality of the knowledge available on a distributed basis (what the modern world calls “crowd-sourcing”) to the population as a whole. This is the whole basis of the fight between free-market people and managed-market people (communists/socialists, Keynesians, and Modern Monetary Theory people like Paul Krugman).

Quillette.

Fascism remains the bogeyman of modern Western political culture. As historian Stanley G. Payne observes, “No major modern political phenomenon has been so thoroughly discredited and obliterated as European fascism was in the 1940s. Yet the f-word was never buried, for it had achieved a demonic status like no other, making it very useful in partisan polemics.” To label someone a fascist is to disqualify them from civil discourse entirely.

Despite its comparable—or in some respects greater—destructiveness, communism is rarely invoked with the same moral urgency. Given that fascism and communism represent the most extreme manifestations of Right and Left respectively, and that both left deep scars on the European continent, it is unsurprising that many politicians and intellectuals retain historical or nostalgic affiliations with one or the other. Such sentiments rarely carry serious implications for contemporary politics. Apologists for communism are unlikely to advocate reopening the gulags, nor do fascist nostalgists intend to implement racial laws against Jews.

The party of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Fratelli d’Italia, is often described as “post-fascist.” Similarly, coverage of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement Nationale often highlights the fact that among the party’s founders was former Waffen-SS member Pierre Bousquet. Yet how often have you heard that Meloni’s principal rival, the Democratic Party, traces its lineage back to the Italian Communist Party, which was once faithful to Stalin? How frequently is it mentioned that French President Emmanuel Macron has cooperated with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a man with a Trotskyist past? Mélenchon’s coalition contains a variety of explicitly communist parties, yet this causes no scandal.

Watch it.

Rory Sutherland does what he does best.

The Foundry.

It’s a tale fit for a thriller novel or action movie: planes on the tarmac waiting to take members of a violent gang to a foreign prison, lawyers rushing to the courthouse to stop them, presidential proclamations, and a judge on a mission to impose his own brand of justice. But this drama isn’t made up—it’s very real, and it’s playing out right now in Washington, D.C.

Leading the cast is President Donald Trump, who wants to rid the country of a violent gang. The legal backstory for his actions has three parts.

The first is the Constitution, which the Supreme Court has long held gives the president authority over matters involving international relations that exceeds that permitted in domestic matters.

The second piece is the Alien Enemies Act, enacted in 1798. It authorizes the president to apprehend and remove the natives, citizens, or subjects of a hostile foreign government if that government attempts or threatens an “invasion or predatory incursion” against the U.S.

Third, the Immigration and Nationality Act authorizes the secretary of state to designate as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, or FTOs, groups that engage in terrorist activity and threaten the safety of Americans or the United States.

Watch it.

An extended interview with Rory Sutherland, who is one of Britain’s great national treasures and whose insights into life and commerce are among the most original I’ve ever encountered. One of those people who’ll say something and make you sit up and say, “Wow. I never thought about it that way…” It’s not often that I come out of a YouTube podcast with half a dozen book titles that I need to read, but this is one of them.

In every life there comes a time when you have to deal with the question “Should we put the band back together?”

Read it.

The mother of a Washington, D.C., murder victim cried when President Donald Trump mentioned her son’s killing while announcing a federal takeover of law enforcement in the district.

The president on Monday said he was putting Washington’s police department under federal control and ordering the National Guard to deploy to the nation’s capital to combat what he said is a wave of lawlessness.

Trump cited the death of 21-year-old Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, who was killed in a June 20 drive-by shooting while working a summer internship at the office of Rep. Ron Estes, R-Kan.

You will note that the bottom of the list are all of the Muslim terrorist regimes.

Read it.

Gerrymandering, the political practice of carving up awkward-looking legislative districts to benefit one party’s political power, has slithered into the public conversation once again.

…

Why has the discussion roared into the public consensus this time? It started with the Texas legislature’s efforts to redraw its state’s districts after a request from the Trump Administration to review the fairness of the districts.

Yes, there is gerrymandering in Texas, but not the way that liberal reformers want to portray the problem. Consider some of the urban, Democratic Congressional districts in Texas: the 29th, 32nd, and 33rd, for example, are obscenely drawn. These contortions are examples of race pandering, or “race-mandering,” which result from the tortured misuse of the Voting Rights Act and fears of ongoing legal challenges from left-wing legal activists demanding more majority-minority districts. This kind of lawfare recently forced Alabama and Louisiana to create gerrymandered districts.

Texas is not alone in this fight, either. Ohio has to redraw its Congressional districts. This opportunity could create three more Republican-leaning Congressional seats, while the Texas legislature advances a map creating five more GOP seats. Of course, Governor Abbott and the Republican leadership have floated increasing the GOP advantage to six to eight seats if absent Democrats refuse to come back to work in their vain efforts to break legislative quorums. Democrats have not helped their cause by fleeing to Illinois, whose districts are so gerrymandered that even Stephen Colbert poked fun at them.

For the record, I’m not against gerrymandering–in fact, I favor it over the alternative, which is having up to half of a District’s population not represented by someone whose views they share. The news media, of course, prefer ‘competitive districts’, because the ‘horse race’ makes for more exciting coverage, i.e. coverage that earns them eyeballs, clicks, and money.

Read it.

We were walking to watch the sunset when a dog started barking at us from a porch. From inside, a voice called out: “Don’t worry, he won’t leave the porch. The electric fence hasn’t worked in years, but he still won’t go past it.”

I stopped mid-step.

A dog, imprisoned by a fence that only exists in his memory.

The next question changed how I see everything: What electric fences do we have in our lives?

John C. Wright.

It’s always fun to revisit predictions made by prominent science fiction writers and see how they held up.

Both Heinlein and Asimov made predictions. I’ve not seen an analysis like this one for Asimov’s picks. That would be well worth reading.

My Go-To Guy when I Need To Know.

Read it.

In 1978, a dredging gang working for British Waterways was struggling with a problem. They were trying to clear obstacles on the Chesterfield Canal so they could stabilise a concrete wall — not an easy day’s work. But what really had them stumped was a heavy iron chain on the canal bottom. After various attempts, they hooked the chain to their dredger. That did the trick. A firm pull removed the chain and the block of wood on the end of it. The gang took a well-earned break for tea.

The tea break was rudely interrupted by a policeman in a state of some excitement. He had been passing the normally tranquil waterway when he could not help but notice a large whirlpool. By the time the crew returned to the scene, the canal had gone. “We didn’t know there was a plug,” protested one workman. And, in fairness, the canal was two centuries old, and so was the plug. Whatever records there may have been had been destroyed in the Blitz. The moral of the story: institutional memory is valuable, and if an organisation starts forgetting important matters (such as the existence of the plug) bad things happen. Expertise drains away alarmingly fast if not refreshed by activity.

Sometimes the old ways are best–if someone remembers them.

Los Angeles Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Democratic Congress members visited an ICE processing center that has been criticized for crowding, food scarcity and lack of medical attention for detainees.

Only two people were in the center, leading the Congress members to accuse ICE of sanitizing conditions.

Of course they did. When reality doesn’t match their fantasy, then it’s the result of a Republican conspiracy.

Read it.

Calling a story a “myth” is too often taken to mean it is a lie: I don’t use it that way. Mircea Eliade argued that a mythos is a story that, true or not, functions to form and shape society and social behavior.

Out of all the stories that could be told from any epoch, some are chosen for inclusion in a culture’s memory. And—yes—edited too, whether for “clarity” oractual clarity. Myths encode, and it is in this sense that the Bible is filled with myths, inevitably and necessarily.

Whether this or that event “actually happened” or occurred precisely as described in the Bible is, and has to be, unimportant. We are not living in the event or interacting in real time with the forces and persons involved. Until someone builds a time machine–perhaps even then!–our relationship with ourselves as a species is, inescapably, a relationship with stories.

Read it.

As the group of amateur archaeologists sifted through tiles, animal teeth and pottery fragments buried within an ancient Roman pit in eastern England, one of them encountered something unusual last June.

It was a cast bronze object, hollow in the middle, flat along 12 faces, about the size of a clenched fist. Only one of the diggers — all members of Norton Disney village’s archaeology society — recognized the discovery: It was a Roman dodecahedron, likely to have been placed there 1,700 years earlier.

“You’re looking at a very strange and bizarre object,” Richard Parker, secretary of the Norton Disney History and Archaeology Group, said in a telephone interview.

At first glimpse, the dodecahedron looks more like a sci-fi illustration than it does an ancient Roman relic. Each of its pentagon-shaped faces is punctuated by a hole, varying in size, and each of its 20 corners is accented by a semi-spherical knob.

D12. Ask me a hard one. As Gary Gygax once famously said, “No pirate ever role-played as a marketing consultant.”

Larry Correia brings the heat.

Internet Zoology Time: You have all heard my Three Cooters Theory of Internet Discourse, but I need to add a corollary. THE REVERSE COOTER.

The Three Cooters Theory is that most of the time when the media starts going off about how conservatives/republicans/MAGA is outraged about something which only racists/morons/misogynists would be outraged about, and there’s hundreds of articles about this outrage, when you delve into it the actual outrage can be traced back to three guys named Cooter complaining on twitter. Then the left runs with this, acts like 3 Cooters=3million people they don’t like, and turns into a huge story so they can once again go HA HA LOOK AT THE DUMMIES.

Last time I delved into this we came up with dozens of examples of manufactured outrage.

Take it from an Irishman, this is God’s own truth.

Read it.

Yet over the past 40 years, the national debt has grown exponentially, with none of the dire consequences repeatedly predicted. Interest rates have fluctuated, political gridlock has persisted, and deficits have widened, but the U.S. economy continues to function, grow, and attract global capital. The reason is that the U.S. continues to enjoy what economists call the “exorbitant privilege” of being the issuer of the world’s reserve currency. Treasuries remain the deepest, most liquid capital market globally, and the dollar is central to global trade, investment, and reserves. This creates a structural advantage that allows the U.S. to run larger deficits than other nations without facing the same level of market discipline. So long as global trust in U.S. institutions and the rule of law remains intact, there is a deep and steady demand for U.S. debt, providing a long runway before any severe funding stress emerges.

Moreover, deficit spending is no longer a temporary tool used in times of crisis; it has become an embedded feature of the economy. Social Security, Medicare, defense, and other entitlements are politically sacrosanct. At the same time, fiscal transfers (like tax credits and subsidies) are now a regular part of household consumption and corporate support. In many ways, the U.S. economy is now structurally reliant on deficit-financed stimulus. Growth, consumer spending, and even corporate investment increasingly depend on a steady stream of government outlays.

While U.S. debt and deficit levels are elevated, there is no imminent risk of fiscal collapse. However, it is worth examining the impact of rising debt and deficit levels on future economic prosperity.

Read it.

I am not an official Cheesehead. I have never been to Wisconsin, but I am a cheese addict. If life were a choice between chocolate and cheese, I would rather be a cheesehead than a chocoholic.

Cooking with cheese seems simple. I mean, everyone except Chuck Schumer knows that you cook a burger and then put cheese on top.

Manchego. Ummmmm.

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There’s this thing about USB-C that nobody really talks about. Not the part where we all had to buy new dongles (RIP my dongle drawer, 2010-2023). The other part.

See, we all thought USB-C was just going to be about charging things and moving files around like the other USBs. Very serious. Very purposeful. But because of the way it is it can do… other things.

…

The protocol doesn’t judge your life choices.

Read it.

For years, some of the world’s sharpest minds have been quietly turning your life into a series of games. Not merely to amuse you, but because they realized that the easiest way to make you do what they want is to make it fun. To escape their control, you must understand the creeping phenomenon of gamification, and how it makes you act against your own interests.

If you can be fooled into acting against your own interests merely by something disguised as a game, you deserve everything that happens to you. Think of it as evolution in action.

This guy needs to stop whining and  get over the belief that it’s his job to rescue the world.

Watch it.

The major problem is that ‘Chinese’ isn’t a language but a language group, each of which uses the same ideographic symbols but ‘pronounce’s each of those symbols differently. (In fact, one could add Japanese to this category, since kanji are these same ‘Chinese’ characters [more or less] with Japanese ‘pronunciations’.)

So some representation of Chinese sounds in, say, the Latin alphabet would merely apply to one of the Chinese languages (typically Mandarin) and leave the others behind–unless you used it to ‘write’ those others as well, which would ‘say the quiet part out loud’ that these are actually separate (though related) languages. And this would break the culutural unity of which the Chinese are so proud and which is one of the bases of their national identity.

Got no idea how this will work out, but it will be interesting to watch.

We’ll get you a Satanic … Mechanic….

Read it.

Unions are Democrat strongholds. Allowing public employees to unionize locks in Democrat control of the Administrative State. (Imagine how Democrats would scream if public employees were required to be armed at all times.)

Newsbusters.

Before politics overwhelmed the word, the primary meaning of “liberal” was “generous.”

President Donald Trump and the Republican Congress have given political liberals a chance to take that meaning back — by opening their wallets to show just how much they value NPR, PBS and other programs defunded by the GOP.

There’s no shortage of cash on the left:

Laurene Powell Jobs, the mega-rich backer of The Atlantic, has a net worth that was estimated above $11 billion a year ago and is thought to be even higher today.

George Soros, at 94, has a fortune in the vicinity of $7 billion, with billions more in his Open Society Foundations.

Bill Gates has about $115 billion, and his ex-wife, Melinda, around $30 billion.

Any one of these left-leaning billionaires could single-handedly make up the $535 million that NPR, PBS and local stations were getting annually from taxpayers before Congress zeroed out their subsidies.

And if half a billion a year is too much for one zillionaire, a half-dozen of them (or more) could share the burden without feeling a pinch.

But are wealthy liberals willing to put their money where their mouths are?

The Foundry.

Contrary to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ nutty claim that Republicans are trying to “steal the midterm elections” by redistricting in Texas, state legislators there are trying to correct what the Justice Department correctly calls “unconstitutional racially based” gerrymanders.

Their fix will ensure that the over 2 million new residents of Texas get what they are entitled to in Congress: fair representation.

The claim that engaging in mid-decade redistricting is somehow illegal is complete nonsense. No federal or state law, constitutional provision, or court precedent limits states to redistricting just once every 10 years. More frequent redistricting is simply rare because it often results in brutal political fights and years of litigation by those unhappy with the results.

Not only that, but Texas is acting to bring its districts in line with federal law and court decisions.

The Foundry.

Despite a popular Texas phrase, “Don’t California my Texas,” and a song about the phenomenon, Californians are increasingly relocating to Texas.

Roughly 100,000 Californians are moving to Texas a year—the equivalent of the population of Santa Barbara, according to a new study by StorageCafe.

“This makes California the largest source of newly-minted Texans, accounting for about 16% of all state-to-state migration into Texas, followed by Florida and Louisiana,” the report states.

Six of the top 10 California-to-Texas moving routes began in Los Angeles County, the report found.

Read it.

Believe The Science! Until it changes….

(Sometimes the old ways are best.)

Read it.

Many people in the rational sphere have been promoting Lumina/BCS3-L1, a genetically engineered bacterium, as an anti-cavity treatment. However, none have brought up a major negative interaction that may occur with a common genetic mutation.

In short, the treatment works by replacing lactic acid generating bacteria in the mouth with ones that instead convert sugars to ethanol, among other changes. Scott Alexander made a pretty good FAQ about this. Lactic acid results in cavities and teeth demineralization, while ethanol does not. I think this is a really cool idea, and would definitely try it if I didn’t think it would significantly increase my chances of getting oral cancer.

The Scot Alexander FAQ has Fashionable Web Site Design Disease, a combination of background color and type colors that are probably artistic but make it almost impossible to read, unless you use Safari Reader or actually print it on paper first. You have been warned.

Extract from the FAQ:

To move beyond the demographic of people willing to fly to Prospera and pay $20,000, Lantern will need FDA permission. The FDA has already set unreachable standards for any drug approval study, so Aaron wants to try a different route.

The FDA has lower standards for probiotics than for drugs. And technically, a bacterium which you take in order to change your natural microbiome is a probiotic. The genetic modifications are no disqualification; a few genetically-modified probiotics have already been approved. Some are almost as creative as Lumina: Zbiotics is a genetically engineered Bacillus species which sits in your stomach and (supposedly; I have not investigated this claim) prevents hangovers by metabolizing alcohol byproducts for you.

ALSO: Updates on Lumina Probiotic

ALSO: More thoughts and information from Yishan Wong

I have purchased a dose of this and once my current dental machinations are finished and I have had my next Thorough Cleaning I intend to try it.

The Telegraph (UK).

Migrants attempting to land on a beach in Spain were tackled to the ground by locals and tourists before being taken into custody by police.

Footage showed 13 men diving off a boat and swimming to the shore, where they were immediately met with fierce resistance from beachgoers in a tourist town in Andalusia, in the south of the country.

When those charged with law enforcement fail to act, ordinary people have to step up — and will.

Read it.

Johanna Nichols, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, has used her pioneering work in the field of language history to learn more about language development in North America. She has found that it can be traced back to two language groups that originated in Siberia. Her paper is published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology.

Try doing that without breaking a nail.

Read it.

When was the last time a Democrat was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize? Obama, who received it for doing nothing more than being the Magic Negro.

Read it.

Monasteries are built to last not for decades or even centuries, but for millennia. A monastery is meant to remain there and make that place holy, and that is the reason why monasteries were so successful in the creation of Christendom. But consecrated life, or what the Church calls ‘religious life’—that is, life lived under special vows—underwent big changes. Those changes came about due to the adaptation of religious life in the face of moments of crisis. But in the long run, such changes probably had unhelpful consequences. The consequences to which I refer slowly changed the Christian Faith from the permanent form of a concrete and settled way of life, to a set of intangible ideas or propositions which one either agreed with or one did not.

Settled monastic orders in the Latin Church refer to their abbey as their “stability” for a reason.

The appearance of the friars marked a revolutionary change in which these new ‘monks’—free from the vow of stability—no longer remained in monasteries. They did not stay in one place to transform the area in which they’d settled, consecrating it down the centuries. These friars were on the move, wandering and preaching, turning up in cities and then disappearing again years later. They established lasting priories, but the friars moved between those priories constantly. The friars were to have no lasting attachment to a particular place and its surrounding landscape. What is more, rather than seeing this change in the Church as an unfortunate innovation necessitated by a passing crisis, new celebrity friars—including someone as influential as St. Thomas Aquinas—argued that their way of life marked the perfection of all religious life, combining as it did both contemplative and apostolic life, whereas monks were ‘disadvantaged’ by being contemplatives alone, so Aquinas argued.

By this change in the conception of a ‘consecrated person,’ the Church was set on a trajectory that ultimately unwound its mission centuries later. The friars were not farmers, artisans, and traders; they were full-time missionaries. They would come, render the faithful orthodox with their preaching, and leave. In this way, the definition of the Christian tacitly changed from a ‘liturgical person’ to a ‘person who accepts certain propositions.’ The Faith, without anyone noticing, slowly changed from the existential transfiguration of human nature and the ongoing transformation of human culture to a set of formulae requiring assent. In short, the threads of rationalism, which would later deconstruct the Church and her mission, were sewn into her most holy organ, namely the consecrated life of her religious orders.

Being a Christian changed from “what one did” to “what one believed”. Unfortunately, faith without works is dead.

The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.

Note that the headline is (perhaps deliberately) misleading. It suggests that we have here an examination of a world in which ‘extreme wealth were impossible”, whereas it actually discusses a world in which “we make extreme wealth impossible”, which is a different kettle of fish. (“Journalists”, of course, have grown expert at this sort of prestiverbitation.)

Throughout history human societies (and ideological groups within those societies) have attempted to impose their notion of The Good Life on their fellows, and pretend that it is somehow based in reality. They may even believe it. Reality, however, is what happens while you’re dreaming your dreams, and it doesn’t go away just because you imagine things to be a different than they actually are.

Also noticeable is the fact that it is written by a woman, as exemplified by its “FebBot ‘journalism”: Start with a tear-jerking anecdote designed to tell people How To Feel about the situation, then elide smoothly into a lecture based on the confident assumption that the audience will be ready to accept the not-too-hidden political agenda of the author as demonstrated fact, when in fact it is Just Another Story.

The significance of this is rooted in evolutionary psychology. Human beings evolved, both physically and socially, to be nomadic hunter-gatherers, and each sex evolved to fill distinct roles: men are the breadwinners, and women are the homemakers. We didn’t choose these roles–natural selection chose them for us, and wired our “firmware” to support them. As a result, men organize their social groups hierarchically, and women organize their social groups collectively. The hunt requires clear chains of command and structures of authority, because everybody needs to know precisely who’s in charge and where he fits in ongoing operations. Gathering (and nurturing babies) require cooperative work, pooling of resources, and firm social bonds among participants. Historically, men keep trying to make all of society hierarchical and women keep trying to make all of society collectivist. Both sides think that their way is the right way and the other way is the wrong way.

From the beginning of the species down to about the early 18oos, men typically won this particular conflict, because breadwinning was hard–until the coming of industrialization, built upon the invention of portable non-muscular power sources, made “breadwinning” something so easy that even women could do it. This, coupled with hormonal birth control, made the “homemaker” role on the part of women completely voluntary, with the inevitable impact on marriage rates and population growth.

Since a considerable portion of the “breadwinning community” is now composed of women, hardwired to prefer collectivism over hierarchy, we see “wealth inequality”, the social expression of hierarchy, being denigrated in favor of “egalitarianism”, the social expression of collectivism.

Go back and read the article again through that lens, and things become a lot clearer.

Note that the Starting Anecdote is about a rich woman, whose money came from her breadwinner husband, sharing that money with an institution for the collective benefit of a certain group of people, for which she is praised, mostly by other women. Female collectivism on the hoof.

Note that the supposed ill effects of “wealth inequality” are nowhere demonstrated except by some vague handwaving (by a female professor). The author writes in the sure and certain confidence that her feelings-based politically-correct-instructed audience will tag along dutifully and unquestioningly. The plain historical record that collectivism, on a scale larger than a nuclear family, has failed, always and everywhere, is simply ignored. And ignoring reality is what collectivists do best. And we are all doomed to suffer as a result.

(Sorry about beginning sentences with a conjunction; I’ve been reading far too much Greek lately.)

Power Line.

Administrative Law is sufficiently significant that I was able to take a course by that title in law school in the 80s.

Every day the news brings word of edicts handed down from on high by rulers whose names we have never heard of or voted for. I mean the heads of the various administrative agencies that control every corner of our lives.

Administrative law is not an inherently interesting subject. You may not be interested in administrative law, but administrative law is interested in you. William F. Buckley, Jr. used to say that “a liberal is someone who is determined to reach into your shower and adjust the water temperature for you.” That was in the good old days, when we thought the threat was subject to direct political control. What once was a jape is now the law. Since Buckley spoke federal regulators have extended their hands into every aspect of the home bathroom, including toilets and, yes, shower heads.

Philip Hamburger is the Maurice & Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. In 2014 Hamburger published his monumental treatise Is Administrative Law Unlawful? In this post I am adapting the review I wrote for National Review.

Professor Hamburger observed that, although administrative law is unrecognized by the Constitution, it “has become the government’s primary mode of controlling Americans.” He further noted, however, that “administrative law has avoided much rancor because its burdens have been felt mostly by corporations.” That is changing: “Increasingly, however, administrative law has extended its reach to individuals. The entire society therefore now has opportunities to feel its hard edge.”

Read it.

No. One word: Prohibition. Those who do not learn from history will be butt-fucked by it the next time it comes around, which it invariably does.