ZMan pulls back the curtain.

A famous line from the movie The Usual Suspects is “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Even after all these years, it turns up in comment sections and social media. It is a good line to have in mind when thinking about who is actually ruling over us. In America, our elites have spent a very long time convincing us that there are no elites. The fact is though, every society has an elite and it is usually a stable, semi-permanent one. The people in charge tend to stay in charge.

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Of course the real reason elites tend to get what they want is they are better than the rest of us. They are smarter, better socialized and they have greater access to the stock of knowledge relevant to being in charge. Americans despise the idea of a ruling elite, so the people in charge spend a lot of time pretending they don’t exist. It’s why our form of democracy works so well. The people keep voting for different candidates, but the people in charge never change. That’s what we are seeing with Donald Trump right now.

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The way things looked twenty years ago.

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I’m sure the poachers will appreciate it.

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But I’m sure he doesn’t really mean it.

I’d leave too.

ZMan keeps his eyes on the prize.

One of the stranger bits of the current year is how people all over the ideological map are claiming to be “woke”, “aware” and “red-pilled” despite believing things that directly contradict things other “woke”, “aware” and “red-pilled” people believe. The millennial Jewish girl is woke about the patriarchy, while her last boyfriend is red-pilled on the JQ, mostly from having dated her. The concept, having clarity of “what’s really going on” used to be exclusive to conspiracy theorists, but now it is common in outsider politics.

The truth is, the truly woke understand that the current crisis is not a dispute between tribes or a dispute about facts. It is a moral war where one side controls the moral paradigm and imposes their will on the rest of us, in the teeth of objective reality. The current fight is about control of public morality, not public institutions. Facts and reason only play a supporting role in this fight. Being right on the facts helps win respect, thus giving one moral capital. The point of the game being to define public morality.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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I mean, really.

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One recent winter, I decided to find out. Working with sleep researchers Derk-Jan Dijk and Nayantara Santhi at the University of Surrey, I designed a programme to go cold-turkey on artificial light after dark, and to try to maximise exposure to natural light during the day – all while juggling an office job and busy family life in urban Bristol.

The discoveries I’ve made have revolutionised my attitude to light – and how I live my life during the night and day. I now make simple, daily choices that can transform how I sleep, how I feel and perhaps even my cognitive abilities. Could you be doing the same?

Sorry, but ‘using candles’ isn’t ‘living without artificial light’.

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This month marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most destructive books of the last century, The Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich.

The 1968 doomsday bestseller generated hysteria over the future of the world and the Earth’s waning ability to sustain human life, as Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich offered a series of alarming predictions that turned out to be spectacularly wrong, creating the enduring myth of unsustainable population growth.

Ehrlich prophesied that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s (and that 65 million of them would be Americans), that already-overpopulated India was doomed, and that most probably “England will not exist in the year 2000.”

In conclusion, Ehrlich warned that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” meaning “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

If these musings had been received for what they actually were—the wacky theories of a crackpot academic—all would have been well. But The Population Bomb sold some 3 million copies and influenced an entire generation.

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Marino Menegazzo’s specialty is hammering gold into sheets so fine you can destroy them with a breath of air. His workshop, a nondescript brick building in a corner of old Venice, was once the home and studio of Titian, Italy’s immortal Renaissance painter. Come visit with a man who might be the world’s last true master of handmade gold leaf.

Steve Sailer rushes in where proglodytes fear to tread.

To be precise, enumerating Jews is not allowed in a critical or neutral context, such as Weisman’s 2015 Iran Deal article. It’s fine to celebrate Jewish contributions, but don’t mention the Jewish role in an objective manner.

One reason is that in an era obsessed with rooting out “systemic racism” via white-counting, Jews tend to be numerically overrepresented in most of the better sorts of jobs (as the Weinstein #MeToo scandals have demonstrated).

On the other hand, the percentage of Jews in Congress has been falling in recent years. With Al Franken getting #MeToo’d on rather tenuous charges, the Senate is down to eight Jewish members (only four times their share of the national population). In politics, diversity is beginning to take a toll on Jewish numbers, with, for instance, my old Representative Howard Berman being forced out of office after thirty years by the belated creation of a Mexican district.

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Weisman begins his book not with his 2015 lambasting by other Jews, but with him tweeting in 2016 a Robert Kagan op-ed about the dangers of Trumpian fascism. (Weisman doesn’t mention the irony that Kagan’s wife, diplomat Victoria Nuland, played a sizable role in the 2014 violent overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government, with far-right ultras leading the putsch.)

He was shocked to receive replies putting his name and Kagan’s name in triple parentheses to point out their Jewishness. While endless clickbait articles are churned out on topics like #OscarsSoWhite theorizing that white overrepresentation in good jobs can only be explained by a vast racist conspiracy among white people, the similar overrepresentation of Jews relative to gentiles is simply not discussed in polite society. White Privilege is currently an American mania, but the analogous concept of Jewish Privilege barely exists.

Jews breed for intelligence, yet the results of this strategy, however obvious it may be to the BadThinkers who are guilty of Noticing, cannot ever be mentioned without drawing the Proglodyte Inquisition down upon you. (The same thing applies, although not as rigidly, to the Chinese culture of achievement.)

Joel Kotkin speaks truth to glower.

In the past, wrote historian Kevin Starr, California “was a final frontier: of geography and of expectation.” Today in the Trump era, California remains a frontier, but increasingly one that appeals largely to progressives. “California,” recently suggested progressive journalists Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira, “today provides a model for America as a whole.”

To them, California remains the “harbinger” of “new America” and “the most active front” in the battle to exterminate Trumpism. Yet this enthusiasm should be curbed somewhat by paying attention to what is actually happening on the ground here.

Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist, shows you a better way.

If inequality is a corollary of innovation, then policy makers must choose their priorities carefully. It is better to focus on innovation, hoping that over time prices will fall and a greater equality of access will follow. If we focus too much on equality, we will think we are failing exactly when progress is rapid, and succeeding when progress is slow.

The push for ‘equality’ is driven by zero-sum thinkers — if there’s only a fixed amount of pie, they want it to be evenly divided because doing so ensures that they get at least as much as anyone else. But life is not zero-sum, because of trade: if I trade you a widget for a loaf of bread, we are both better off (otherwise we wouldn’t have traded). Being better off is the goal, not being no worse off than the next guy.

I don’t care whether Steve Jobs has billions so long as I am better off in a world with Steve Jobs than in a world without him. (And I am, by a bunch.)

John Hinderaker at Powerline is optimistic.

Trump has two big things going for him: he is compiling a very good record, and he gets to run against a Democrat. The Democrats are so tone-deaf, as a party, that they genuinely did not realize that in Hillary Clinton, they were nominating a uniquely terrible presidential candidate. If they were smart, they would nominate someone next time who can compete with Trump’s populist appeal. But they don’t have anyone like that, and if they did, he could never get the nomination.

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The Democrats have another problem, too: cracks are appearing in the wall that has kept African-Americans on their plantation. Led by Candace Owens and Kanye West–who so far, at least, is standing up against extraordinary pressure–a wave of independent thinking is flowing through the black community. This, the Democrats can’t tolerate. Their electoral calculations count on getting a ridiculous percentage of African-American votes–something like 90%. But that is an absurd, unnatural number. A party that wins a demographic group 60/40 is doing very well. To win 80% or 90%, cycle after cycle, defies gravity. It can’t continue.

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Message: ‘Black people aren’t smart enough to work for Apple, but we want to appear as if we’re trying extra hard.’

The Congressional Black Caucus is an explicitly racist (note the name) and effectively partisan (no Republicans are allowed, even if black) group composed of those people, mostly mulattos that satisfy the paper-bag-and-ruler test, who have successfully ridden the race-hustle component of Party of Hate machine politics into a cushy taxpayer-funded position of wealth and power.

If you want an afternoon’s entertainment, put ‘corrupt black representative’ into Google and start reading.

Severian looks back in … well, dyspepsia.

When I got to college, back in the early Clinton years (effectively, 1988-2003), there were three generations of tie-dyed hippie dorks wandering around in search of something to protest.  There I was, thinking hey, it’s 1990, shouldn’t the Tyrell Corporation have a booth at the job fair?, and yet every academic I ran into was still going off about Agent Orange and acid rock.  Left-wingers in 1992, including 18 year old college freshmen, all looked like Left-wingers from 1967.  It was all Vietnam, all the time, to the point where Bill Clinton was some kind of hero for having dodged the draft.

(Remember that?  And wasn’t it a hoot when, just 8 short years later, George W. Bush was some kind of commie scumbag for having dodged the draft?  Or remember the “brutal Afghan winter?”  Good times.  If you’re not old enough to remember this stuff, I’m sure you get the point from the context — the Left spent the entire W. era trying to make the War on Terror into Vietnam II.  John McCain was still humping that chicken on the campaign trail in 2008, when most of his torturers from the Hanoi Hilton had keeled over from old age).

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It’s been widely noted that trust in institutions has been declining across the board in America. Government, religion, media, and business have all seen declining trust. To be quite honest, that decline in trust is deserved. These institutions by and large are not meeting the challenges of our present day and are often dysfunctional.

The root of this at some level is the maturity curve. Our institutions are old and either in maturity or decline. (As I’ve observed many times, one reason sprawly suburbs seem so great in the now is simply that they are new, and so in the youth phases of their lifecycle).

At some level it’s hard to appreciate how old many of our institutions are. Some of them date to the American founding or before. Others are legacies of the 19th century or the New Deal. The high water mark of institutions was in the immediate postwar era – the Marshall Plan, NATO, the UN, the institutional infrastructure between things like the interstate highway system, structures like the GI bill, a then decently functioning corporatist combination of big business and big unions, and many other things.

But World War II ended almost 75 years ago. This is roughly the same distance as from the Civil War to World War I, and from the Revolution to the Civil War. These roughly 70 to 80 year epochs (the span of a human life, interestingly), produced major institutional resets in America, often after a process of upheaval. If history is any guide, we’re due for another one. (I gather that this might be the premise behind the book The Fourth Turning, which I have not read. My observations are my own, but I think rather obvious).

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This is why Trump got elected.

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‘How long before a federal judge in Hawaii rules the Korean War must continue’

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The Antiplanner is frequently reminded of H.L. Mencken’s statement that “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem: neat, plausible, and wrong.” Millennials, for example, blame baby boomers for ruining the world. Most of the mistakes that baby boomers made were in adopting simple and plausible but wrong solutions to complex problems. Now the millennials are promoting their own simplistic and wrong solutions to the problems created by the baby boomer’s errors.

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Here’s the thing. Most of our problems are ones of resource allocation: who gets to consume how much of what. After thousands of years of social evolution, humans have developed three main tools for allocating resources: government, religion, and markets. Government and religion always come up with simplistic solutions that usually don’t match the complexity of the problems they are trying to solve.

Markets, however, have the unusual property of being able to use simple rules to solve complex problems. That’s because markets depend on the simultaneous processing of billions of computers called human beings. Those human beings base their individual decisions on two simple metrics.

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The Starbucks vagrancy/racism episode that occupied so much of the news cycle last week presents us with an opportunity to learn more about how boycotts may have changed – for better or worse – in our digital age. While it’s easy to shrug off the episode as mere “slacktivism” or corporate virtue signaling, remove the cynicism and the issue presents a deeply layered set of principles that all Americans interested in free speech and social activism of all kinds should examine.

I detest coffee, so I don’t have a dog in this fight.

Ross Douthat looks at California.

For all its deranging effects, I am always grateful to Twitter for the interesting ideas it surfaces. But rarely does this surfacing happen quite so overtly as it did earlier this month, when Jack Dorsey, the Twitter C.E.O., tweeted out as a “great read” an article series urging national Democrats to seek the kind of final victory they’ve won in California, in which the G.O.P. is reduced to a rump under one-party Democratic rule.

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And ambitious liberals will have to do so while evangelizing on behalf of a social-political model that right now looks nothing like the ideal egalitarian society liberalism claims that it can build. Under one-party liberal rule, California is presently as unequal as a Central American republic, with one of the highest poverty rates in the country once you control for its exorbitant cost of living. Its educational performance is lousy and its racial gaps are stark — which is why it’s not only lower-middle class whites moving back to red America, and why black complaints about white liberal gentrifiers in SoCal or the Bay Area can resemble the complaints of Trump-leaning ex-Californians. As in other enclaves where Democrats are dominant, its ruling party has proved itself pretty good at rentier-friendly environmentalism and kicking social conservatives while they’re down, O.K. enough at redistribution, and completely terrible at figuring how to build an information-age middle class.

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The venture, announced in January, is aimed at lowering healthcare costs for the companies’ employees, though there haven’t been many details about what that looks like. At the time, news of the partnership sent healthcare stocks plummeting, especially health insurers and members of the pharmaceutical supply chain who might be impacted by the three business giants getting into their lines of work.

But those who have been in the healthcare industry for a while are skeptical of the speed at which the venture could potentially threaten existing healthcare companies. Of the 300 healthcare professionals, large employers, investors, and academics surveyed by venture capital firm Venrock, 73% thought that it’s going to take a lot longer than expected and face many challenges.

In particular, 25% of those surveyed said that the companies “have no idea what they’re getting into.”

Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist, gets in their faces.

Paul Krugman recently made a splash in a New York Times column by suggesting there are no “serious, honest, conservative intellectuals with real influence,” referring to the “unicorns of the intellectual right.” I largely agree with his criticisms, but I would like to offer a very different perspective. This column is my corresponding warning to the left, like when somebody tells you your shirt is not properly tucked in.

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I find that left-wing intellectuals complain more about the right wing than right-wing intellectuals complain about the left. This negative focus isn’t healthy for the viability of left-wing intellectual creativity.

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Pretty harsh.

No, it wasn’t. It got boring VERY quickly.

Lincoln Logs make great fire-starters … when properly chemically treated beforehand.

Just sayin’.

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You’d think that by this time he could take the hint.

“Hmm. The Natural Selection is strong in this one.”

Can’t say he’s wrong.

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Just lucky, I guess.

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California voters may soon be asked to decide whether their state is too big and should broken into three, separate states. Venture capitalist Tim Draper, who pushed for a six-state proposal, now has a three-state proposal called “CAL3,” according to CBS San Francisco.

Draper did not have enough signatures to get his six-state measure on the California ballot in 2016. For this new proposal, he needs 366,000 signatures. On Thursday, he announced that he has more than 600,000 signatures.

“I’m proud to announce we’ve collected more than enough signatures to qualify for the 2018 ballot,” Draper said.

The best way to split California would be a major earthquake that would send the coastal areas out to sea.

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A lot of these are little formulae we’ve come to expect from stories in each genre, like ‘one upon a time’ in fairy tales.  Their dramatic usage trumps their divergence from real life, like whooshing spacecraft.

That said, a lot of these bother me, especially looking at the other guy when you’re supposed to be driving. (I’ve actually known people who do that, and they invariably spark panic in the passenger.)

Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist, explains how the Deep State works.

If you want understand the Facebook hearings it’s useful to think not about privacy or technology but about what politicians want. In the Peltzman model of regulation, politicians use regulation to tradeoff profits (wanted by firms) and lower prices (wanted by constituents) to maximize what politicians want, reelection. The key is that there are diminishing returns to politicians in both profits and lower prices. Consider a competitive industry. A competitive industry doesn’t do much for politicians so they might want to regulate the industry to raise prices and increase firm profits. The now-profitable firms will reward the hand that feeds them with campaign funds and by diverting some of the industry’s profits to subsidize a politician’s most important constituents. Consumers will be upset by the higher price but if the price isn’t raised too much above competitive levels the net gain to the politician will be positive.

John Derbyshire looks at a prophet without honor in his own country.

Powell was right, and his enemies were wrong. And we are suffering the consequences.

Women and minorities hardest hit, of course.

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If you can, you need to get out more.

Just sayin’.