“This also explains why the demand for Nazis far outstrips the supply. For antifascism to persist as a movement and continue to attract converts, it must show that there are actual fascists that need opposing. It is why the definition of fascist has expanded to mean anyone even slightly suspicious of antifascism. Antifascism is now primarily concerned with the production of fascists.”  — ZMan+

Alex Tabarrok.

Even though I side the statistics, I side with approval. Innovation is a dynamic process. It’s not surprising that the first gene therapy for DMD offers only modest benefits; you don’t hit a home run the first time at bat. But if the therapy isn’t approved, the scientists don’t go back to the drawing board and keep going. If the therapy isn’t approved, it dies and you lose the money, experience and learning by doing that are needed to develop, refine and improve.

Approval is not the end of innovation but a stepping stone on the path of progress. Here’s an example I gave earlier of the same principle. When we banned supersonic aircraft, we lost the money, experience and learning by doing needed to develop quieter supersonic aircraft. A ban makes technological developments in the industry much slower and dependent upon exogeneous progress in other industries.

You must build to build better.

When things are subject to government ‘approval’, innovation is stifled.

Wikipedia.

Reverse graffiti is a method of creating temporary or semi-permanent images on walls or other surfaces by removing dirt from a surface. It can also be done by simply removing dirt with the fingertip from windows or other dirty surfaces, such as writing “wash me” on a dirty vehicle. Others, such as graffiti artist Moose, use a cloth or a high-power washer to remove dirt on a larger scale.

Reverse graffiti has been used as a form of advertising, although this usage has been controversial, as its legality varies depending on jurisdiction.

“The grass is always greener over the septic tank.”

Read it.

Three couples whose frozen embryos were destroyed when a wandering Mobile hospital patient dropped the specimens can sue for wrongful death because the embryos were “children,” the Alabama Supreme Court ruled Friday in reversing a judge’s decision to throw out the case.

The Center for Reproductive Medicine, a fertility clinic used by the couples, and Mobile Infirmary Medical Center, where the embryos were being stored, claimed the couples could not sue for wrongful death because Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act does not cover embryos outside the womb.

But the Alabama Supreme Court disagreed when it reversed Mobile County Circuit Court Judge Jill Parrish Phillips’ ruling to dismiss the case in 2022.

The Wrongful Death of a Minor Act “applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location,” wrote Alabama Supreme Court Justice Jay Mitchell. “[T]he Wrongful Death of a Minor Act is sweeping and unqualified. It applies to all children, born and unborn, without limitation. It is not the role of this Court to craft a new limitation based on our own view of what is or is not wise public policy. That is especially true where, as here, the People of this State have adopted a Constitutional amendment directly aimed at stopping courts from excluding ‘unborn life’ from legal protection.”

Read it.

The 19-year-old son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was found unresponsive in his dorm room at the University of California Berkeley last week.

According to SFGate, freshman Marco Troper was discovered at the Clark Kerr campus in the late afternoon of Tuesday. The Berkeley Fire Department attempted to revive Marco, but he died at the scene.

Considering Wojcicki’s pernicious effect as the chief Woke Witch at YouTube, I have to regard this as Evolution in Action.

His grandmother:

“Marco was the most kind, loving, smart, fun and beautiful human being. He was just getting starting on his second semester of his freshman year at UC Berkeley majoring in math and was truly loving it. He had a strong community of friends from his dorm at Stern Hall and his fraternity Zeta Psi and was thriving academically. At home, he would tell us endless stories of his life and friends at Berkeley.” 

None of which mattered a damn in the face of his fatal foolishness. Natural selection works even when people don’t want it to.

Read it.

If you’ve never had a Coca-Cola from McDonald’s, you’re truly missing out. But if you have had the pleasure of slurping down a Coke under the Golden Arches, then you already know the secret: Coke from McDonald’s tastes better than cola from any other fast food joint, or even soda from the bottle.

That delicious secret isn’t happenstance. It’s for very specific reasons. McDonald’s has a really smart storage tactic and brilliant drink mixing strategy that makes their Coca-Cola stand out. Read on to find out why Coca-Cola from McDonald’s simply can’t be topped.

Or you could just cut to the chase and drink Pepsi. Your choice.

Read it.

For thousands of young conservatives who were born after that era ended, Peter Hitchens has served as a guide who helps us understand why we, too, dislike so much of modernity. He reminds us that it was not always this way, and that saying so matters. We cannot return to the past, he often observes, but we are always in the process of choosing the future—and thus we do not have to make the choices we are making. For that reason, despite his protestations, Hitchens’s writing does make a difference. Because while reading him, many have discovered a heritage largely abandoned before we were born—and have realized what we were missing. Now, many of us know what we like, too.

Read it.

Recently the discussion switched to the Three Six Rule. The idea that, to be date-able, a guy must be a 6 in 3 categories:

• 6 figure income
• 6 feet tall
• 6 inch pecker

These are the important questions of our day.

If you wonder why marriage rates and birth rates are falling, this will tell you more than you really want to know.

Read it.

I once met an untenured lecturer at Yale. His pay was relatively low. He was offered a job at a mid-tier university in the midwest. I asked if he was going to accept. He said, “No way!” This other university offered him a tenure-track professorship, job security, and higher pay. Despite this, he chose to remain at Yale as a part-time lecturer in a financially precarious position. Why? He quietly explained that the name brand was just too valuable to him.

The Spectator.

Who does Vladimir Putin want to win the presidential election this fall? Last night, the Russian president gave an unexpected answer.

In an interview on the Russian state TV channel VGTRK, Putin was asked “Who is better for us, Biden or Trump?” The smirk on journalist Pavel Zarubin’s face suggested he thought the question would be a slam dunk. And yet, to Zarubin’s visible surprise, Putin threw him a curve ball: Putin would, in fact, prefer Joe Biden.

The Spectator.

The tradwife smiles as she feeds her sourdough starter, wearing a long dress and a baby and wrangling the occasional toddler underfoot. She beams at her husband as he comes in from a long day on the ranch, or from the hedge-fund trenches. She makes salt-dough modeling clay for the little ones, whether her stove is from Lowe’s or La Cornue. The Cut describes her Instagram account as both “dangerous” and “stupid.” CNN experts lament that too many girls are turning to her as a “Band-Aid with ideological cover,” and fret about the sourdough-starter-to-White-Supremacy pipeline. Tradwives, both self-identified and smacked with admiring or hostile labels, are the latest cultural phenomenon in media crosshairs.

And no one agrees whom they’re arguing about in the first place. The term is online shorthand for “traditional wife,” which translates to a woman who performs all the tasks your grandmother once did but with access to infinite camera filters and no shag carpet. Most seem to be selling an aesthetic family ideal rather than sex, although some of the bouncing is, let’s say, a little too calculated.

Chilton Williamson.

It is a tragic but incontrovertible fact that the vast majority of people in recent decades, are neither living in what they call “real time” (as if time could be anything else) nor experiencing life and the world itself at first hand, but rather at second or third remove; like sitting behind the wheel of a fifth- or sixth- hand automobile with no tires and a seized-up engine purchased from a used-car salesman straight out of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, pumping the accelerator and shouting “Vroom, vroooooom!” To drive home the aptness of this simile, I cite the fact, ascertained some years ago by the sort of pedagogue who devotes his career to such investigations, that young Americans today, many fewer of whom own cars or have even learned to drive them than in the relatively recent past, choose to remain at home with their noses pressed to their computer screens in preference to buying a jalopy and hitting the open road as previous generations of American youth did (though it is difficult to imagine a travel video made by Jack Kerouac being a satisfying substitute for his book).

… that whenever you see a photo of a ‘celebrity couple’, the guy is looking at the girl but the girl is looking at the camera? It’s as if the guy is just another prop.

Read it.

In June of 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 50-year-old Roe v. Wade and clarified that there was no constitutional right to abortion.

Within minutes of the court’s ruling, hard-line liberals across the nation were howling about restricted access to abortion and devising new and novel ways to ensure its protection.

The latest creative effort to secure abortion access, mounted by a group of satanists in Idaho, was just defeated in federal court.

ZMan ponders modern life.

Anarcho-tyranny is a feature of managerialism, not a bug, because it is what is necessary for managerialism to survive. The people at the top of the system must remain at the top of the system and the only way to ensure that is to make sure everyone is following their orders. The stated goals of the system are a means to an end and the end is to perpetuate the system. The reason you must follow orders may change, but you must always follow orders.

Eventually this advances to the point where the system becomes so conservative and brittle it is unable to adapt. We cannot know how fascism would have ended, but we saw how communism ended. In its final days it was old men desperately trying to hold onto power by enforcing rules that no longer made sense. Once people stopped following orders, the whole thing collapsed. It is something to think about the next time you are pulled over for speeding on a lonely highway.

Read it.

One reason both for the popularity of economic liberalism in the United States, and for it being considered a ‘conservative’ value, is that it is psychologically connected to its opposite or counterpart. However implicitly tied to the idea that individual calculation of self-interest in monetary terms will produce collective prosperity and virtue, and however much it is de facto applied (such as to endear the tax code to large corporations rather than proliferating startups, family-owned businesses, and enfranchised communities), we cannot help but notice that the aesthetic of American liberalism is often Chestertonian-distributist.

This is the cornerstone of much conservative thought. We may also think of Donoso Cortés and his emphasis on intermediate classes as bulwarks of Spain’s constitution (her literal constitution as society and body politic). And yet Western culture in general is deeply conditioned by habits of mind that militate against the cultivation and safeguarding of those kinds of property arrangements.

Read it.

Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos will save an estimated $610 million in taxes after he sells 50 million shares of Amazon, thanks to his move from Seattle to Miami last year, CNBC reported Monday.

The state of Washington imposed a 7% capital gains tax on sales of stock and bonds more than $250,000 in 2022. Meaning, that by the time Bezos unloads 50 million shares before Jan. 31, 2025, his address at “Billionaire Bunker” at Indian Creek, Florida, will save him hundreds of millions.

Bezos last week sold nearly 12 million common shares of Amazon stock worth more than $2 billion last week, according to a filing with federal regulators. Bezos avoided paying state taxes on that sale, too, meaning he saved $140 million that he would have paid if still living in Seattle.

You don’t stay the world’s richest man by being stupid with your money.

Read it.

Shell Hydrogen will permanently close all seven of its California pumping stations immediately, the company confirmed this week. It will no longer operate light-duty hydrogen stations in the U.S., and represents another blow to the struggling hydrogen car market in the only state where the fuel is widely available at all.

The outlet Hydrogen Insight first reported the news on Thursday. Shell had, until recently, operated seven of the 55 total retail hydrogen stations in California, per the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Partnership (H2FCP). That makes this a blow, but not apocalyptic news for the (small) hydrogen community.

Just wait. It’s coming.

ZMan looks at show business.

This is the great innovation of America. Entertainment has become a church at which the morality of the day is preached to the audience. It is easy to see at the Super Bowl, where moral messaging is everywhere. In the end zones there was a message about ending racism, a hobgoblin of the modern elites. There were ads about other hobgoblins like antisemitism, bullying and Gaia. They have your attention, so they make sure to let you know what you ought and ought not be doing.

Then you have the appeals to unity, by which they mean conformity. At the start of the game, you get patriotic songs. They even have something called the “The Black National Anthem” which is supposed to shame whites and remind them they can never be forgiven for the sin of whiteness. In a prior age, parishioners were told they were at the mercy of an angry God. Today they are told they are at the mercy of angry minorities, which is far more terrifying than an angry god.

When these songs are played at the start of the game, the players, who should only care about winning, make themselves cry and look moved by the program. This is where you see the supremacy of carny life. The star players know this game is really an audition for them to join the media circus or possibly get a brand going so they can be a celebrity past their playing career. Everyone wants to run away to the circus, even people already in the circus.

Rula Lenska, call your agent.

All of this is the product of democracy. In theory, democracy is about convincing fifty percent plus one. In order to do that, you need to get the attention of the public, which is why celebrity becomes the coin of the democratic realm. The only way you can have a chance to influence anyone is by getting on the stage and you do that by getting everyone’s attention. Carnies live to get attention, so it does not take long before they take center stage in the democratic process.

LAME (Look At Me Everybody) is the New Black.

Think About it … Carefully

Read it.

A new law takes effect in New York this weekend requiring businesses to inform customers about credit card surcharges that will cost them more money at the register.

Starting Sunday, businesses must post the total cost of goods or services with a credit card, including surcharges, before customers checkout. Proprietors can either display the total price inclusive of the credit card surcharge, or list a separate prices for paying with a credit card versus cash.

The new law also requires the surcharge passed on to customers using credit cards to the exact amount charged by credit card companies.

…

The new rule does not apply to debit cards.

Which also have a fee attached. One wonders why they were exempted–perhaps because government benefit programs are paid via ‘debit’ cards such as the famous EBT.

Watch it.

Chris Williamson does a podcast called Modern Wisdom in which he interviews the most interesting people he can find about modern social relations, focusing on how men and women deal with each other. I’ve liked every one of them I’ve seen.

This particular episode includes Mary Harrington, about whom I knew nothing and whose work I intend to investigate.

Highly recommended.

If one thinks of a society as occupying a three-dimensional bell curve (which looks like an actual bell, not the two-dimensional slice to which the term ‘bell curve’ is ordinarily applied), one can divide it into two parts: That which exists within One Standard Deviation from the center axis (approximately 68% of its volume) and everything else, the other (approximately) 32%. I call these apportionments Core and Fringe, and apply  them to the people who occupy those parts of society that are either central to its existence or peripheral to that existence.

The distinction between Core and Fringe may be discerned by asking a simple question: If all of the people that share a certain characteristic were to disappear overnight, would society grind to a halt? or would it keep chugging on, perhaps after a bobble or two or at a reduced level? If that removal means society would halt, then such people are Core; if not, then they are Fringe.

Truck drivers are Core; homeless people are Fringe. Engineers are Core; artists and other ‘creatives’ are Fringe. Doctors, lawyers, and accountants are Core; bikers, convicts, and yoga instructors are Fringe. Carpenters, electricians, and plumbers are Core; sculptors, musicians, and poets are Fringe. Tech writers are Core; literary novelists are Fringe.

You get the picture.

This is a useful frame for viewing the modern world. About half of government employees are Core; the rest, including politicians, are Fringe. The higher one climbs in the academic prestige rankings, the more an institution trains Fringe and the less it trains Core–in fact, we have academic institutions who focus solely on training Core, like MIT and CalTech.

Try it yourself.

The Atlantic, medium of the Crust.

It can seem, these days, like we are meant to be constantly acquiring things while also constantly getting rid of them. Mass consumption is everywhere—endless online shopping; always a new iPhone or device—as is the reactionary minimalist ethos that demands that we declutter our lives. But the relationships we have with our things tend to be more complicated than either of those extremes allow. Objects are more than just the sum of their parts. I would never give up my copies of my grandmother’s cookbooks. I’m also not going to quit my search for the perfect pair of jeans. I remember a great outfit, and what I did in it, for a long time.

The writer Katy Kelleher is seemingly no different. In her debut book, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, she seeks to understand both her collector’s impulse and her longing “for more, always more, even when I know I already have enough.” A magpie’s nest of research and anecdotes about the objects that attract her, the book examines the tension she feels between wanting the things she wants—clothes, cosmetics, home goods—and acknowledging the murkier story of how some of those items were made and marketed. “I’ve never found an object,” she writes, “that was untouched by the depravity of human greed or unblemished by the chemical undoings of time.”

Cloud People worry about the hidden depths of ordinary daily activities. Dirt People just get on with it.

Read it.

A young woman I know broke it off with a young man after three dates but declared that it was a pretty successful relationship anyway. “He showed me a couple of great Amazon Prime series,” she told me. “And he turned me on to Derry Girls.”

Derry Girls, for the record, is a British comedy set in Northern Ireland in the 1990s and it’s hilarious. But there are more than 600 scripted television series currently on the constellation of streaming services competing for your credit card number, so if you don’t go on a dedicated search for that specific title, you’ll probably miss it. And that’s one reason there’s a new category of first-date small talk: What are you watching? is the new What’s your sign?

Watching TV has never been so baffling. You don’t just walk in the house and flop down in front of the TV and start flipping around anymore. Watching television in 2024 requires what psychologists and self-help gurus call intentionality. You have to know what you’re looking for and exactly where to find it, which means the entire process usually starts with a Google search. We’re all familiar with today’s Television Catechism. It goes: What was that show we wanted to see, again? Followed by: Which one of the thingy’s is it on? And ends in an exasperated: Do we even get that one?

New York Times.

Young people tend to lean more liberal on a range of issues pertaining to relationship norms. But when it comes to dating, the idea that men should pay still prevails in heterosexual courtship.

I didn’t realize that ‘dating’ was even a thing any more.

Read it.

When I visit foreign countries, I often go into bookstores. They provide a window into how cultures think. Thumbing through high-school history books in Japan, I noticed that many were divided into two sections: one dedicated to Japanese history, and the other resembling a Western history textbook, including material on ancient Greece, the medieval feudal system, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and so on. They covered the same core Western Civilization topics that are the focus in classical schools in the US.

It seems strange that citizens of many non-Western countries recognize a value in Western civilization that many in the West themselves cannot or will not see. An OECD survey of over 20 of the most advanced countries in the world found that Japan scored highest of all in “proficiency in literacy and numeracy among adults.” But the current proliferation of classical schools across America indicates that there are many other Westerners who do recognize the value of Western culture and want to ensure that it is passed on to future generations.

It is also odd that the classical education movement is sometimes described as elitist. In point of fact, it is driven by millions of everyday working parents, homeschool mothers, and local community leaders. Critical theory is the opposite: a product of ideologues who shelter in elite universities but claim to represent the oppressed masses. Classical schools have been expanding rapidly due to demand from millions of families; critical theory is pushed on millions of families despite resistance, as illustrated at countless contentious school-board meetings publicized on YouTube. Critical theory requires the uncritical consumption of ideological dogma; classical education asks us to accept the value of a dialogue of ideas that has transpired in the West over millennia, a value recognized in foreign countries like Japan.

Tools of Renewal.

This week, someone asked me if I thought Chinese spies were entering the US under our no-borders policy. I didn’t say I thought they were entering. I said they were, in fact, entering.

Imagine you’re a Chinese official. You want to have many spies in the US. That is not a statement a reasonable person can dispute. You have a choice between working hard to get them in legally, with lots of documentation the US government can rely on to track them, taking a great deal of time, or you can tell them to walk in from Mexico.

What would you do?

I’m sure many Chinese moles are coming in legally. There must be advantages to legal entry in many cases. But the Chinese would have to be morons to refrain from sending people in illegally.

Read it.

In response to the virus pandemic and nationwide Black Lives Matter riots in the summer of 2020, some elite colleges and universities shredded testing requirements for admission. Several years later, the test-optional admission has yet to produce the promising results for racial and class-based equity that many woke academic institutions wished.

The failure of test-optional admission policies has forced Dartmouth College to reinstate standardized test scores for admission starting next year. This should never have been eliminated, as merit will always prevail.

Newsbusters.

In 2020, Joe Biden won three states by less than 1 point: Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.

If Donald Trump can flip these three in November — he took them all in 2016 — he’ll be back in the White House this time next year.

Can he do it?

Zman does a deep dive.

Carl Schmitt famously said that “the political is reducible to the existential distinction between friend and enemy.” The shorthand you hear in dissident circles is that politics is about friends and enemies. You can see this in your own life when it comes to some issue with which you have been on the opposite side of a friend. That person may now be a former friend if the issue was important at the time. It is why families often avoid talking about politics during the holidays.

A practical aspect of this reality is that political activism should always seek to harm the opponent and boost your side. An action that makes the other side look bad is good activism and it is even better activism if it also makes you look good. Of course, bad activism is that which boosts the enemy and harms you. The Charlottesville rally in 2018 turned out to be disastrous activism for the alt-right. It rallied their enemies and gutted their support in the broader community.

Life is not always so cut and dried. Generational politics, for example, often feels like good politics to the people doing it. Whether it is young people moaning about old people having had it easy or old people moaning about young people having it easy, the people doing it always feel good about it. A Nick Fuentes feels like a hero when he makes fun of adults for being adults. He thinks it is good politics because it brings in money and gets his young fans excited.

Truth.

Read it.

While New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) has been complaining about “extremely painful” budget cuts, and warned that the flood of migrants thanks to the Biden administration’s open-border policies “will destroy New York City,” somehow – somehow, Adams’ administration has found it in the budget to allocate $53 million towards handing out pre-paid credit cards to migrant families living in Big Apple hotels, the NY Post reports.

…

In response to New York City’s program to take care of illegal migrants before their own homeless population, rapper 50 cent took to Instagram to tell his 31 million followers he might vote for Trump…

Steve Sailer.

Back in 1997, I wrote a long article “Is Love Colorblind?” about how in the 1990 Census, 72% of black-white marriages featured a black husband and a white wife while 72% of white-Asian marriages featured a white husband and an Asian wife. Black-Asian marriages were rare but almost always featured a black husband and Asian wife (e.g., Tiger Woods’ parents).

What has happened since then?

Read  it.

By the time police responded to a call shortly before 10 a.m. regarding a Chinese man and woman conducting surveillance near a security entrance of the historic Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam, the two fled in what police identified as a 2021 silver Nissan Altima, with unidentified plates.

Read it.

I look around and ask myself, “Do I really want these people to reproduce?”

And the answer comes back immediately: “Nah.”