Steve Graham:

I know the feeling.

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The U.S.A. is such a hellhole that foreigners can’t wait to buy property here.

Or maybe it’s just our getting rid of Rosie O’Donnell….

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Metrics such as KPIs may be adequate in narrow circumstances such as approximately evaluating an employee’s ability to do a specific type of job, but they have a ceiling of complexity they are able to measure. Highly complex tasks with many dimensions of competency (often including an unknown number of unknown dimensions) cannot be adequately legibilized by quantitative metrics. There is also the matter of who gets to decide what performance indicators are used, how they are measured, and how they are used to inform decisions which are ultimately made by humans. You could design a purely mechanistic system which attempts to cut out human decision-making, but such systems lack flexibility and nuance and are typically abandoned quickly for good reason. In the end, simply having good quantitative metrics isn’t enough on its own. It is the ultimate decision-making process itself that must be improved.

Randomness helps address these problems because it eliminates most marginal advantage from subversive scheming. With random selection, no action or investment can meaningfully improve one’s chances, rendering efforts to manipulate the system worthless. This nullifies political capital and ensures that authority is not seized by those adept merely at influencing outcomes through charm, money, or connections. Instead, it creates a system where competency and merit have a genuine chance to rise naturally, unhindered by strategic manipulation. Moreover, randomness systematically dismantles entrenched crony networks by constantly disrupting established relationships.

How might meritocratic institutions actually harness randomness in practice though? The possibilities are virtually limitless, but here are some ideas.

Ancient Athens used it. Of course, they were more committed to democracy that we are.

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Coming forward to 2024, and we find that the sea conditions and terrain of a much-disputed island would make invasion of it difficult. The island in question is Taiwan and it is China, which sees the island as Chinese, which threatens to invade. Therefore, for the past two decades, China has been developing military means of subduing the island such as increasing the size of its navy and air force and developing long-range missiles. But would a Chinese invasion of Taiwan be feasible when considering Taiwan’s geographical advantages? And if an invasion were feasible, would it not come at too great a cost to China in terms of casualties and the loss of materiel if the well-armed Taiwanese exploit their landscape and weather, and are assisted by their powerful allies?

UPDATE: US demands to know what allies would do in event of war over Taiwan (Financial Times)

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As countries like Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and the United States see an ongoing revolt against mass immigration from India, Germany is opening its doors to the Asian country of 1.5 billion. In particular, the city of Berlin has been a top spot for migration from India, and it is the group that has seen the highest level of immigration to the city in the last ten years.

Official statistics indicate the number of Indians went from 3,579 in 2014 to 41,472 in 2014. That represents a 1,059 percent increase in 10 years, and accounts for the largest immigrant influx to the city during that time in terms of growth. However, in terms of raw numbers, Turks are still the largest group of citizens with foreign citizenship overall, representing 109,585, while Ukrainians are in second with 70,501, according to RBB.

Unlike immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, Indians are not routinely featured in the daily barrage of murders, rape, stabbings, and robberies. However, that does not necessarily mean that a massive influx of Indians is not going to be met with anti-immigration sentiment — at least if it continues at its current pace.

The Spectator.

There is, of course, no such thing as a bad Cornish pasty.

When it comes to traditional British food, there is always regional pride to contend with. Many recipes are intrinsically connected to the area from which they have sprung: Pontefract cakes, Chelsea buns, Lancashire hotpot, Welsh rarebit. They represent heritage and tradition — edible history. You must tread carefully to avoid offending regional heritage or just making silly mistakes. I certainly feel on safer ground making pronouncements from my Salford home on Eccles cakes than I do on Ecclefechan tart.

But when it comes to the Cornish pasty, the people of Cornwall have taken ownership a step further. In 2011, the Cornish pasty was granted Protected Geographical Indication by the European Union, which dictates where — and how — a true classic Cornish pasty can be made. This is the same protection enjoyed by products like champagne, Parma ham and Comté cheese.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Quillette.

Sam Tanenhaus, author of the acclaimed 1997 biography of Whittaker Chambers and editor of the New York Times Book Review from 2004 to 2013, has finally completed his long-awaited biography of William F. Buckley, Jr.—the contract for which he signed more than 25 years ago! Whittaker Chambers had been a great friend of Buckley’s and a major influence on his political thought, so when the Tanenhaus biography of Chambers came out, the publisher asked Buckley to chair an event in the ballroom of a New York City hotel to promote it. As I recall, Buckley began the evening by telling the audience, “After I opened the manuscript and read it, I knew that I had just completed a masterpiece.”

So, it was not a surprise that Buckley agreed to let Tanenhaus write his authorised biography. Although Tanenhaus is not a conservative of any kind, the Chambers volume indicated that its author would strive to produce a fair and accurate, although not uncritical, portrait, and that he would not use the project as an excuse to score points against his political opponents. Buckley duly instructed his friends and family, associates, schoolmates, and political brethren to cooperate fully when Tanenhaus approached them for interviews and pertinent files they may have held.

What would Buckley have made of the upshot, were he alive to see it? On one hand, it is a magisterial work so compelling and fascinating that I wished I could read it in a single sitting (an impossible task given the book’s length). It will surely win the Pulitzer for biography in 2025 when the prizes are announced next year. Tanenhaus need not fear being relegated to the runner-up category, as his Chambers book was. Although blurbs are not a reliable guide to the quality of a newly published work, on this occasion, the lavish praise adorning the book jacket from authors like Beverly Gage, Max Boot, and Jonathan Alter is well deserved.

On the other hand, the portrait of Buckley that emerges is, in many ways, so unflattering that it has enraged a number of critics on the contemporary Right.

Buckley’s problem was that he was a native of the same East Coast Establishment that he so often criticized. He could never break himself of the top-down elitist we’ll-decide-for-you-what-you-ought-to-think attitude that has characterized the New York/Boston/Philadelphia/D.C. corridor since forever. The true heir of Buckley is not Donald Trump but David French.

Let it not be forgotten that former associates of his magazine National Review included not only people who went on to become pillars of ‘conservative’ thought (however defined) but also notorious turncoats like Gary Wills, David Frum, Conor Friediersdorf–and Ron Radosh.

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President Donald Trump says the U.S. will have to send more weapons to Ukraine, just days after ordering pause in critical weapons deliveries to Kyiv.

The comments by Trump on Monday appeared to be an abrupt change in posture after the Pentagon announced last week that it would hold back delivering to Ukraine some air defense missiles, precision-guided artillery and other weapons as part of its announced pause to some arms shipments amid U.S. concerns that its own stockpiles have declined too much.

“We have to,” Trump told reporters about additional weapons deliveries for Ukraine. “They have to be able to defend themselves.”

Trump ought to just cut to the chase by sending Putin a big card that says “51% sweetheart, 49% bitch, don’t push it” and be done.

Hey–it could happen….

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I am an engineer by training with the questionable instinct to run towards problems, especially problems that should not be problems. When I heard that the United States could not produce sufficient 155 mm artillery shells to supply Ukraine, I thought it sounded odd. I knew essentially nothing about artillery save I would not want to be on the other end of one. I was generally aware the industrial base for the defense industry had either atrophied or specialized or both, depending on your perspective. Maybe this was just over-specialization? A dependency on a single part? Maybe it is a reliance on something exotic? Surely, there must be an explanation, something that would help me understand why we are so ill-prepared. Maybe there is some new technology that could be applied? This is a record of what I learned for the benefit of a more-educated citizenry and to save time for anyone else investigating the issue.

Don’t ever say we don’t have useful stuff here.

Washington Free Beacon.

interstates. It isn’t that she’s avoiding speeding maniacs—you can find them on any Pittsburgh street—but she loves to see the local color and variety one can spy on pre-1950s U.S. highways.

This tells us something essential about Zito’s worldview: that she’s acutely conscious of place, as she compellingly demonstrates throughout this powerful and often charming book. On July 13, 2024, Zito was in Butler, Pa., to interview Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump right after an outdoor rally at the county Farm Show Complex. When Trump narrowly avoided death as a gunman’s bullet nipped his right ear, Zito was just feet away. A memorable Associated Press photograph shows her splayed out face-down on the ground, easily identifiable to friends and fans by her signature tricolor cowboy boots.

But the following day was almost equally unforgettable. “Good morning, Salena! It’s Donald Trump. I wanted to see if you and your daughter Shannon and Michael are okay. And I wanted to apologize that we weren’t able to do the interview.” Zito was stunned; her photojournalist daughter and son-in-law had been introduced to Trump just before the rally, too.

Read it.

When you start learning or doing almost anything interesting, you will initially be bad at it, and incur a temporary penalty in the form of looking a little dumb. You will probably sound awful at your first singing lesson. If you publish writing on the internet, your first piece will not be your best work.

My husband calls this the “Moat of Low Status,” and I have gleefully stolen the phrase because it’s so useful. It’s called a moat because it’s an effective bar to getting where you’re trying to go, and operates much like a moat in the business sense — as a barrier to entry that keeps people on the inside (who are already good at something) safe from competition from the horde of people on the outside (who could be).

The Moat is effective because it’s easy to imagine the embarrassment that comes from being in it. It’s so vivid, it looms so large that we forget the novel upsides that come from transcending it. Easy to imagine the embarrassment from your first months of singing lessons, because you’ve faced embarrassment before. Harder to imagine what you’ll sound like as a trained singer, because that’s never happened to you before.

“Learn by doing” is the standard advice for learning something quickly, and it’s what I try to follow. But it’s hard to learn by doing unless you first learn to love the Moat. It’s embarrassing to learn by doing, whether you are trying to learn a language by embedding yourself with native speakers or learning to climb by falling off a wall at the gym over and over again.

LiveScience.

Notice that they spend exactly no time of discussing WHY men are taller, merely on HOW men are taller, i.e. the genetics of the thing.

The reason WHY men are taller is very straightforward: Natural Selection. Women prefer men who are taller than they are, something that anybody who grazes in the fields of Twitter, FaceBook, or TikTok knows perfectly well.

Bring up YouTube and type ‘short men’ into the search box.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Japanese researchers turned to “experimental archaeology” to study how ancient humans navigated powerful ocean currents and migrated offshore.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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This is a post just to share a thought and guard against wishful thinking. The recent NYC primary election of privileged radical Zohran Mamdani has reminded me again of evidence of an often repeated folly of libertarians: the delusion that when once the public has experienced failed Leftist policies, they will all of a sudden be struck with self reflective insight, soon recanting past support of the failed policies, and then, finally, the newly enlightened public will support libertarian principles. An odd result of this line of thinking frequently suggests that it’s good if the others win because their failure will become a future victory. This thinking rests on the big assumption of effective and accurate feedback within a well-functioning process.

Now I’d like to state for full disclosure that I have sympathy with libertarian ideas and principles, and have been influenced by them throughout my life. However, the older I get, the more conservative I have become, and the less tolerance I find myself having with overly idealistic libertarians who are not fully plugged into reality and the way the world actually works. I think to be conservative, you must base your views, as best you can, on concrete truths and observed history and lessons learned from tradition. In this regard, libertarians fail. Soft Republicans also keep the libertarians company on this point more often than I’d like.

Case in point, the election of Zohran Mamdani. The WSJ has a new opinion article that describes the failures of the Democrat Party in NY, leading to the rise of Zohran Mamdani. So an even bigger progressive radical is required to fix the problems that the more mild progressive policies created. Yeah, right. Now, a conservative will look at the situation in NY, especially NYC, and think that it is becoming lost. To mitigate the downward spiral of NYC, a practical conservative would throw weight behind the besieged Mayor Adams (running as an independent) to fend off the truly fanatical Zohran Mamdani. From there, efforts could be made to help recover some conservative influence in governance. Or at least mitigate the awful. On the other hand, you get the libertarian types who want to see Zohran Mamdani because it will be so, so awful that it will inevitably lead to a libertarian utopia. The odds are slim to none, I say.

The essential libertarian mistake is in presuming that all adults are rational and both know and pursue their own interests.

Read it.

A new study from JAMA Pediatrics should stop us in our tracks: early adolescents who report addictive use of screens—not just frequent use—are more than twice as likely to consider suicide within two years.

And I would encourage them to do so. Think of it as evolution in action.

One of the most defective aspects of modern society, especially modern technological society, is its commitment to promoting the continued existence of people whom Natural Selection would otherwise be attempting to subtract from the gene pool.

The whole Cult of Self-Worth toward which everything in modern life seems to be pointed is just making the world worse for all of us.

s

New York Post.

Friday with a blunt takedown of liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s “extreme” dissent in the landmark birthright citizenship case in which the Supreme Court curtailed lower court use of universal injunctions.

“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” wrote Barrett, the court’s second-newest justice, in a jaw-dropping rebuke of her colleague, the newest justice.

“We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”

Ron White: “You cain’t fix stupid.”

Power Line.

A question for discussion: why are so many rich people socialists and communists? Maybe it has long been true; one could cite the example of Friedrich Engels. But I think there are more rich socialists now than ever. It is almost touching to see Bernie Sanders and friends on their “Fighting Oligarchy Tour.” Someone needs to tell poor Bernie that these days, the oligarchs are mostly on his side.

 

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The fact that many children are ditching America’s public schools is undeniable. Most recently, Nat Malkus, Deputy Director of Education Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, reported that while chronic absenteeism spiked during the COVID pandemic, it remains a serious problem.

In 2024, rates were 57% higher than they were before the pandemic. (Students who miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days, are considered chronically absent.)

Malkus goes on to explain that in 2018 and 2019, about 15% of K–12 public school students in the U.S. were chronically absent—a number so high that numerous observers and the U.S. Department of Education are labeling it a “crisis.”

A ‘crisis’ is whenever anything goes against the Narrative and appears to be winning.

In total, nearly one in twelve public schools in the United States has experienced a “substantial” enrollment decline over the last five years.

The problem is especially egregious in our big cities. In Los Angeles, more than 32% of students were chronically absent in the 2023-2024 school year.

In Chicago, dwindling enrollment has left about 150 schools half-empty, while 47 operate at less than one-third capacity.

People are waking up to the fact that they are paying for steak and receiving shit sandwiches.

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Massie, who has served as the 4th Congressional District of Kentucky’s representative since 2012, is known to occasionally buck the GOP party line with his fiscal conservatism and foreign intervention skepticism. That has served him well representing his district, where he won 75% of the vote in the 2024 Republican primary. But Massie may have finally worn out Trump’s patience by declaring on X that his weekend bombing of Iran was not constitutional.

One often hears the phrase “He’s a man of his word” but one never hears the phrase “She’s a woman of her word”.

Ponder why that is.

ZMan is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

One of the critical questions in any strategy is “Then what?” This question must be asked with every proposed move and counter move. The question is both a reminder and an assumption that the other players will react to your move. Good strategy focuses on the range of possibilities to each move and is prepared for them. Bad strategy just assumes the move will work and good things will flow from it. This is often referred to as the lack of second-order thinking.

For the last five years this has been at the center of American politics. The regime has clearly lost the ability to ask, much less answer the question, “Then what?” The war in Ukraine is in its fourth year because no one in the West could bother to ask the question, much less answer it. President Trump now has himself in a terrible jam because no one on his team thought to ask this question when they were plotting the Pearl Harbor style sneak attack on Iran.

It does not appear that any of them asked the question when planning the operation against the Iranian bunker facilities. By the looks of it, they settled on this attack because they assumed it would satisfy the Israelis, satisfy the crazies in Washington screaming for blood and provide an off-ramp in the conflict. Signaling to Iran that it was a one-time thing was supposed to induce them back to the bargaining table or at least encourage them to seek a cease fire in the war.

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The shift from “search engine” to “answer engine” has been discussed for years. But we’re now watching it happen in real time — and professional services aren’t ready.

Legal services in particular have long been immune to disruption because they’ve hidden behind regulatory insulation, geographic moats and old-school word-of-mouth. But the AI layer doesn’t care about any of that. A good LLM doesn’t need to know your bar number — it just needs to know how people ask legal questions and what a competent, jurisdiction-specific answer should sound like.

That’s why some law firms are already building their own GPTs — custom-trained legal assistants that sit natively on their websites and handle intake. Others are feeding vector databases with cleaned verdicts, client FAQs and state-specific procedures to make their firms “AI-readable” in the next wave of query-routing tools.

The ones thinking a step further are trying to get inside the models — via licensing deals, training partnerships or API-driven apps that plug directly into platforms such as ChatGPT’s GPT Store.

Because let’s be honest: If your law firm doesn’t show up in the AI’s output, you’re invisible to the next generation of clients.

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As President Donald Trump and his administration work on expanding deportation operations, the White House is reporting that blue-collar workers have seen the most significant growth in wages in over half a century.

“In President Donald Trump’s first five months in office, real wages for hourly workers have seen their largest increase under any administration in nearly 60 years—and we’re just getting started with pro-growth, pro-prosperity policies that finally put America First,” the White House reported this week. Blue-collar American workers have seen an increase of 1.7% in real wages over the past five months.

The only other times blue-collar workers have seen any rise in wages during the first five months of a presidency in the last 56 years was under the first Trump administration (1.3%) and Richard Nixon’s administration in 1969 (0.8%).

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Everyone seems to want to break down silos. They are monsters to be destroyed. In consultant-speak, silos stand for isolation, inefficiency, and a myopic refusal to collaborate. The “silo mentality” is a dysfunctional reluctance to share information. In universities, silos are the cause of duplicated efforts, internal competition, and the failure to innovate to serve the customer-student.

Everything about this view is wrong. In the AI era, the responsibility of researchers and specialists to preserve domain-specific knowledge with integrity, to keep going deep while others go broad, will be more important than ever. The universities that protect disciplinary silos are the ones who will thrive.

In fact, the metaphor makes my case. A real, physical silo is a marvel of functional design. Silos store and protect grain. Silos preserve quality and integrity. Without silos, grain rots. A silo is a sanctuary. Its purpose is preservation, not isolation.

Much like the canard Diversity Is Our Strength. Diversity is actually a weakness, promoting division, suspicion, and cliquishness.

Power Line.

In her New York Post Devine Online newsletter, Miranda Devine draws attention to a statement from President Trump that seems worthy of more attention than it has received. Devine quoted Trump speaking at a ceremony at the White House Wednesday where he had a near 100-foot flagpole installed, Asked by a reporter what gave him the idea for the giant flag, he replied: “I’ve had it for a long time. The first time I had it, you guys [the media] were after me and I said, ‘I had to focus.’”

“I was the hunted,” Trump said of his first term, “and now I’m the hunter. It’s a big difference.”

Think of it as evolution in action.

Watch it.

Nick Norwitz was valedictorian at Dartmouth, got a PhD from Oxford and an MD from Harvard.

I think it’s safe to say that he knows more about nutrition than anybody you’ve ever heard of.