Zman speaks some inconvenient truth.

In the 1980 campaign, Reagan would regularly say that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job. It was a pithy line that got at something that was always missed by the politicians at the time. That is, the economy is not the same for everyone. You can have a good economy but there will be people who are not doing so good. The reverse is also true. Even in the Great Depression, there were people doing fabulously well.

That is the problem facing the political class this year. According to their court wizards, the economy is growing at a blistering pace. The fourth quarter of last year saw growth at over three percent and inflation falling down to two percent for what the wizards call personal items, while overall inflation was under two percent. The definition of “personal items” is one of those things that makes sense to the people doing the counting, but not to anyone who is doing the actual spending

Does it feel like the economy is growing at a blistering pace? Most people do not think the economy is great. In fact, most people think we are in difficult economic times, despite relatively high employment. This was one of the top reasons people voted for Trump in Iowa and New Hampshire. Under Trump, people perceived the economy as strong while under Biden it seems to be weak. The main reason is inflation. Every trip to the store sees prices higher than the last trip.

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The new CEO for National Public Radio (NPR) has become instant news over social media postings that she deleted before the recent announcement of her selection. Katherine Maher is the former CEO of Wikipedia and sought to remove controversial postings on subjects ranging from looters to Trump.

God forbid anybody should find out what she really thinks.

Shannon Thaler at the New York Post reassembled Maher’s deleted postings including a 2018 declaration that “Donald Trump is a racist” and a variety of race-based commentary. That included a statement that appeared to excuse looting.

Yet another wokerata getting a cushy job paid for by taxpayers.

Read it.

Although I liked the Harry Potter books as a child, I wasn’t a full-blown Potterhead. I didn’t queue for hours at Waterstones for The Half-Blood Prince or dress up as Hermione for Halloween. It’s in adulthood I’ve come to appreciate the thematic layers, world-building and glorious escapism J.K.Rowling’s imagination gave to my generation.

For many children though, what they felt for the books and, by extension, for J.K.Rowling, was pure love. Love, lest we forget, is an emotion next door to hate. They both require a degree of obsession, surrender, investment. And as a very vocal minority of Rowling’s fandom have demonstrated, ever since she first lent her support to Maya Forstater and sex-based rights in law back in 2019, the switch between can be as fast and ugly.

And relentless. The latest insidious project by self-exiled Potter fans is a “foul-mouthed” show about the author organised by an Edinburgh arts company, due to be performed in New York in early February. The title? Terf C**t.

The thing I find most … telling … about the Harry Potter books is the Ministry of Magic. Rowling is a Modern Briton and therefore assumes that every aspect of British life must have a government agency dedicated to controlling and regulating it. If the books had been written fifty or sixty years ago, there would be no ‘Ministry of Magic’, and indeed the plots might revolve around attempts to keep ‘magic’ un-government-regulated.

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Strong ethnic identities are often portrayed as a holdover from an older, irrational, pre-modern era. This is probably why contemporary international conflicts are framed as civilizational or ideological struggles. On this reading, the conflict between, say, Russia and Ukraine cannot be seen for what it really is: a bloody stand-off between Ukrainian nationalism and Russian imperialism. On the contrary, it becomes just one localized instance among many of a global struggle of democracy against authoritarianism, another example being the conflict between Hamas and Israel.

Such moralizing language is not always ill-founded. However, the undeniable ethnic inflections in these conflicts—also evident in the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan—testify to the fact that clashes of zero-sum nationalisms remain the primary cause of interstate wars. Every nation state that has collapsed since the 1990s (Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia) has disintegrated along ethnic lines.

However, the strength of ethnic identities is also indicated by conflicts within states. I will draw on two examples to illustrate how two contemporary civil wars in different parts of the world attest to the continued potency of ethnic identities in the 21st century, despite the fact that the prevailing liberal ethos of our time instructs us to transcend—or, put another way, to ignore—the evident importance of ethnic identity in collective human psychology.

I have heard many instances of a ‘proverb’ — it was presented to me as Arab, but really it applies to any Turd World country — that goes ‘Me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the world.’ The amusing thing is that many Cloud People who have intensively internalized Identity Politics (‘You aren’t really an individual who ought to be treated as an individual, you’re merely an instance of whatever category I’ve decided to put you in and by God you’d better act like it!’) will turn right around, without blinking, and criticize Dirt People for the only evolution-certified manner of Identity Politics, i.e. ethnic identity.

The Register.

It’s well established that the British are an eccentric people. Among their national obsessions is drinking tea – they consider themselves experts – and one way to trigger the entire United Kingdom is to fuck with the formula.

But that is exactly what American chemistry professor Michelle Francl has done with her new book, Steeped: The Chemistry of Tea, which was published this week through the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Therein, Francl proposes that a tiny bit of salt – not enough to taste – improves tea because “the sodium ions in salt block the bitter receptors in our mouths.”

LAME = Look At Me Everyone.

Useful for dealing with people who have tattoos, piercings, unnaturally colored hair, and Tick Tok or Instagram accounts.

The Spectator.

Well that’s that. It now looks certain that Donald J. Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president this year. At the time of writing, Nikki Haley is still hanging on in the primaries, but the contest is essentially over. Even if Haley stayed around and hovered up the votes of every other Republican candidate who has dropped out, she still wouldn’t arrive at the dominant position Trump has occupied since the start of the race.

This will be a cause for either alarm or rejoicing. What nobody should be is surprised. Ever since the race for the 2024 nomination started, it has all been about the man who wasn’t there. Trump chose not to turn up to any of the primary debates, sitting them out like a lion allowing the minions to pick away at a carcass he had already feasted on. What would it have availed him to mix with the single-digit scavengers?

He needn’t have worried anyway. The only candidate who ever actually pointed themselves straight at Trump was Chris Christie, who is a superb debater but never managed to break through. Except for Vivek Ramaswamy, who paid frequent and loud homage to the Don, the rest tried to duck the question of the absentee leader.

Karen Myers.

If you’ve returned to your childhood home or visited anywhere from your past, you’ve probably learned just how true the adage is, that you can’t go home again.

But my home, and probably yours, is as much or more inside my favorite books. They go back almost as long as I’ve been able to read. Some are warm, some are scary, some are whimsical, and all of them are comforting, in one way or another, suitable companions for a seat by the fire.

Their characters are old friends, and I’m always happy to see them again. I can wallow in their difficulties without anxiety, since I know what will become of them. I can bask in their joys, even if my own life can’t necessarily match them. And they never age — even if they die, they never really leave forever, since I can always open the book again.

Karen is one of the scary-smart people I knew at Yale.

“When the ends of one side are the destruction of the other, the only plausible response for the other side is to seek the same.”  — ZMan

Applies to:

• Progressives
• Muslims
• Communists

Read it.

So why is the United States still struggling to manage something that every other country seems to be able to do and that American engineers used to be able to pull off with slide rules? The Apollo computer used memory made of wire ropes woven by women in the garment industry.

Back then we picked the best and the brightest who had the “right stuff”. Now the right stuff consists of checking DEI boxes.

ZMan is engagingly dyspeptic today.

DeSantis also suffered from the fact that we live in a whirlwind of media bombardment with an increasingly stupid voting base. Part of the latter problem is demographics, but a big part is the internet. People lack the ability to pay attention for more than a few minutes so they make judgements on memes and hot takes. A boring guy who looks like he is passing a stone when tries to tell a joke is never going to go over well with a voting base that thinks Sean Hannity is brilliant.

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Six months after we reported that a “Bipartisan Bill Aims To Block Chinese Purchase Of US Farmland”, more are starting to pay attention yet as even Bloomberg notes that America “is seeing more and more of its most fertile land snapped up by China and other foreign buyers” the big problem remains: it’s difficult to know just how much farmland China has bought due to problem with how the US tracks such data.

Here’s what we do know: according to Department of Agriculture data foreign ownership and investment in US farmland, pastures and forests jumped to about 40 million acres in 2021, up 40% from 2016; but an analysis conducted by the US Government Accountability Office — a non-partisan watchdog that reports to Congress — found mistakes in the data, including the largest land holding linked with China being counted twice. Other challenges include the USDA’s reliance on foreigners self-reporting their activity.

As a result, foreign ownership of US cropland is drawing attention from Washington as concern rises about possible threats to food supply chains and other national security risks. And, as we reported last summer, lawmakers have called for a crackdown on sales of farmland to China and other nations.

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In The Identity Trap, Yascha Mounk, who teaches international affairs at Johns Hopkins, joins a number of eminent critics of the identitarian movement that has come to dominate both American academia and, increasingly, our political and social life. He differs from most such critics in two respects. First, while he is a professed “philosophical” liberal, who believes in the existence of universally valid “values” that can provide an objective basis for criticizing and remedying “historical oppression and persistent injustice,” he is also a “political” liberal who advocates social-welfare policies that aim to elevate poor people’s condition and combat racism. This outlook until recently would have put Mounk in the mainstream of the Democratic Party. (Mounk reports having derived his welfare-state liberalism from his grandparents, ex-Central European Communists who after witnessing the death of family members in the Holocaust, then coming “to recognize the cruelty of Soviet communism,” turned to “a reformist creed of social democracy that attempted to humanize capitalism” with “a strong welfare state.”)

Read it.

Gun violence in 6 out of the 8 largest Ohio cities dropped significantly after Ohio legalized permit-free carry of guns across the entire state in 2022.

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No one’s family name was changed, altered, shortened, butchered, or “written down wrong” at Ellis Island or any American port. That idea is an urban legend.

Many names did get changed as immigrants settled into their new American lives, but those changes were made several years after arrival and were done by choice of someone in the family. The belief persists, however, that the changes were done at the entry point and that the immigrants were unwilling participants in the modifications. Sophisticated family history researchers have long rolled their collective eyes at the “Ellis Island name change” idea. In genealogy blogs and online publications, they wearily repeat the correction—names were not changed at Ellis Island; immigrants changed their own names, usually during the citizenship process. But the belief persists, perhaps because people need to explain surname changes in a way that satisfies them (thinking that their immigrant ancestors made the changes themselves apparently does not do so).

The explanation for this is pretty obvious when you think about it. Just as today, people bought tickets and their names were written on the tickets:

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What could go wrong?

I certainly hope so.

Vox.

At least as long as human beings have lived in large, close groups, respiratory viruses have been present — sometimes an annoyance, sometimes a catastrophe. Though we’ve managed to create vaccines and drugs to blunt their effects, the viruses endure.

But there is a group of people who think we do not need to live this way. These scientists, activists, and entrepreneurs believe we’re going to look back on this era, one of commonly endured airborne infections, as a case of antiquarian barbarism, a bunch of needless suffering that we accepted because we didn’t know any better. They believe that we have the technology now, and will have even better technology soon, that could end respiratory infections for good, the way that disinfecting our drinking water with chlorine helped end typhoid as a major cause of death in the US.

The technology is called germicidal ultraviolet light (GUV), and in particular, a relatively novel kind of ultraviolet light often denoted as “far-UV.” “We have so much data suggesting that this is far and away the most impactful technology, when it comes to protecting people from infectious disease, that exists today,” says Kevin Esvelt, a professor and biologist at MIT who has championed the idea.

The Spectator.

A lot of people dream of having what is known as “screw you” money. In my observation, this is not simply in order to be able to live in a castle or own Ferraris or Van Dycks, or whatever is your wont. It is in order to be able to say those fine, demotic words to whomever you like.

It should be noted that most people dream of saying the words to someone who is perceived to be above them: someone to whom they might once have been subservient in some way. A boss, for instance.

Yet one of the strangest things about the mega-rich is that they do not actually say “screw you” when they ought to. A couple of years ago, I was being interviewed in front of an audience made up of the world’s mega-rich and I asked them: “What is the point of having ‘screw you’ money if you never say ‘screw you?’”

I would encourage him to do so. Sauce for the goose….l

Read it.

Thomas Molnar (1921-2010) was a Hungarian-born philosopher, a professor at Brooklyn College, a friend of Russell Kirk, and the author of more than forty books, including Politics and the State: The Catholic View, originally published in 1980 by Franciscan Herald Press. In 2018, that work was reissued by Cluny in the edition under review herein: an affordable softcover volume titled The Church and the State, published with ecclesiastical permission and with the subtitle The Catholic Tradition as an Integral Element of Western Political Thought. The work is divided into a brief preface, an expansive introduction, and five chapters.

The preface begins by identifying a philosophical circumstance peculiar to American political thought. Molnar argues that Americans are reliant upon manifest pragmatism to determine the range of their political theory, as a consequence of their scepticism regarding such theories. Consequently, in America, there is a widespread acceptance (or quasi-acceptance) of only four conservative approaches to political theory: one derived from interpretations of The Federalist, one based upon the theories of Leo Strauss, one based upon the theories of Eric Voegelin, and a half-respectable, somewhat un-American one in the form of Marxism. The last of these, Molnar observes, “in spite of the popularity of its advocates in some academic circles, has not entered the mainstream of American political thought”—a statement that still rings true today, albeit less certainly than when it was originally published in 1980, now that congress finds itself beleaguered by a squad of far-left Marxists.

The problem with ‘conservatism’ is that it isn’t really an ‘-ism’, i.e. an ideology that strives for a certain end-state, like progressivism or Marxism. As Russell Kirk famously pointed out, ‘conservatism’ is actually anti-ideology, in that it reflexively opposes ideological movements of any kind.

ZMan intrudes some reality.

The false dilemma is an informal fallacy which is based on the false premise that there are only two options in a particular situation. The fallacy is not in the logic, as with other fallacies, but in the premise. It is a useful rhetorical trick, so it turns up in political debates and propaganda. “We must do X or Y will happen” with Y being something everyone assumes to be bad. The idea is to limit the choices to one that is preferred and one that no one would willingly choose.

It is such a highly effective rhetorical strategy that what we call conservatism rests on a foundation of false choices. No matter what the left proposes, the right opposes by offering an option that is doomed to fail versus what the left proposes. A good example was the homosexual marriage debate. The left proposed redefining marriage to mean sharing rent and a bed. Instead of rejecting this out of hand, the right proposes civil unions, thus leaving us with two degenerate options.

We are seeing this again with the war over the antiwhite pogroms labeled Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It is not an accident that the acronym DEI could easily be DIE, as the people behind this do not hide their intensions. When they say they want to eliminate whiteness, there is only one way this can happen. If one were to call for eliminating Jewishness, you get compared to Hitler. Therefore, logic dictates that when they say they want to eliminate whiteness, they mean white people.

One of the very shopworn tools in the proglodyte toolbox is the rhetorical trick of “So….”, as Scott Adams is constantly pointing out. If you say X, they say “So then you want Y?” which is not even in the same ballpark as X. Every attempt at clarification is met with a reiteration of “So then you want Y?”, as if you weren’t even in the conversation.

Read it.

If it ain’t broke, break it.

That’s Joe Biden’s guiding principle. He took President Donald Trump’s much-tighter southern border and ripped it as wide open as a gutted trout’s belly.

Biden turned Trump’s energy independence into begging Iran and Venezuela to pump more oil. And Biden devolved Trump’s peace in the Middle East into a five-front Arab war on Israel, even as the ayatollahs’ Houthi pals ignited the Red Sea with anti-ship missiles and anti-American drones.

And for his next trick, Biden wants to impersonate a Latin autocrat.

We are living through Atlas Shrugged. I’m sure Ayn Rand would be pleased, if there were a God and an afterlife.

The Register.

And it couldn’t happen to a … nicer group of people.

Read it.

As a result of this history as well as current events, I was asked by a member of my congregation to sit outside during services that Saturday. I, of course, said yes. So that morning, myself and another member showed up before services, got a couple of chairs, and placed ourselves outside the main doors of the Synagogue.

We were, again of course, both armed, though his wife asked us not to bring rifles. We complied, but next time we may have a couple of ARs staged at the door, just in case.

…

During services, a member came outside to check on us and see if we needed anything. Right before he went back inside, he asked if we had whistles or some other type of noisemaker to alert those attending services if there was trouble outside.

My fellow sentry and I exchanged a knowing glance and assured him that A) we did, in fact, have noisemakers, and B) they would certainly be loud enough to be heard inside if we needed to use them.

We found out later he was completely unaware of the types of noisemakers we were carrying. After he left, we shared some good natured banter about “noisemakers.”

ZMan examines the tea leaves.

These sorts of rodents scurry around every presidential primary, but we have some unusual vermin this time. Nikki Haley is running as a standard issue regime Democrat in the Republican primary. The base assumptions of her campaign are that Trump will be removed from the ticket and the party is ready to throw in the towel and merge with the Democrats like you see in most Democrat states. In those states, the Republicans run lighter versions of the Democrats in statewide elections.

What she hoped for in Iowa was a clear second place finish. This would have knocked DeSantis out of the race. She would then be the sole anti-Trump option for the next few months, establishing herself as the logical alternative for when the party removes Trump from the ballot. Instead, she came in third place, with her support coming mostly from Democrats crossing over to vote for the most virulent anti-Trump option. She was close enough to DeSantis, however, to stay in the race.

…

Through the media, we can see that the regime has determined that Haley is a good replacement for Biden, even if she is in the wrong party. In a way, they are trying to engineer the primary into a version of Hillary versus Trump in 2016. This may be why Haley is running around praising Hillary Clinton. This is the narrative framing that the regime is conjuring, so Haley is leaning into it. After all, from her perspective, the real nominating process is in Washington.

Heated car seats are a cornerstone of civilization.

Read it.

In this era of hoaxes, euphemisms, obfuscation, and lies, I once again offer the following as a public service.

• *Ableism: the unfounded and bigoted belief that people who are capable of doing a certain job should be hired over those who are not.

I don’t do surveys.

Watch it.

White people are the only people in America who aren’t allowed to prefer living among people who look like them.

Read it.

Since we live in democracies, our view of justice is colored and shaped by a democratic bias. The source of right for us is the proposition that all are created equal, and over time we advance and demand ever-greater political and social equality. To see what true justice is, and also what we are, clearly and free of prejudice, we must discover and confront our political (mis)education: we must turn our heads around, see, and cross-examine those hidden puppeteers of our cave. Liberal education is the opposite of political ‘education,’ or propaganda: it is education that liberates.

It is for this reason that David A. Eisenberg’s ambitious book, Nietzsche and Tocqueville on the Democratization of Humanity, is so welcome and needed. In it, he examines the grand democratizing sweep of Western history and its consequences for human life and thought. In the book’s opening chapter, we confront our greatest puppeteers: the philosophers who most advanced democracy and did so with almost prophetic power, given the great inequalities between men then. From Hobbes, Locke, and Descartes, down through Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, Eisenberg argues they “all . . . reduced man to a common denominator in order to ground their philosophic visions. Uniform drives and appetites were rendered paramount.” Even Hegel, at first glance an exception with his master-slave dialectic, eventually resolves that fundamental conflict “so that the outcome of the historical process was one where uniformity supplanted man’s deep-rooted dichotomy and did so, moreover, in favor of the slave.”

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The legendary historian Will Durant famously wrote that civilizations are born stoic and die epicurean. He meant that through a warrior ethos and a propensity to endure and ignore pain, out of chaos a people might create order—the definition of civilization—which eventually grows, first prosperous, then decadent, and, finally, gives itself over fully to pleasure. It forgets the outside world and ceases to strive for higher purposes, indulging in the sensual and material as the only goal in life. Then a new group of stoics comes and conquers them. The most famous example of this phenomenon is, of course, the fall of the Roman Empire. But Indian history, however unknown in the West, actually illustrates this point clearly with its three and a half thousand years of continual invasions by younger warrior cultures: Aryans, Greeks, Kushans, Ghurid Sultans, Mughals, and Brits, who relieve one another of power once their predecessors have grown decadent in the steamy climate of the subcontinent.

Navy Matters.

Reader ‘Robtze’ just thoroughly embarrassed me in a comment with an incredibly astute observation that I completely missed. He observed/asked whether the Houthis were executing the same mission the Marine Corps envisions with their island/coastal missile shooter concept.

To address his comment, yes, this is almost exactly the mission set. Let’s take advantage of this remarkable similarity and examine how the coastal ‘missile sniping’ concept is working out.

Read it.

The back up for intermittent renewables will come from 40 year old plants, which should have been shut down already.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

If the election comes down to Trump versus Biden again as is likely, it is a certainty that there will be no debates between them—the first presidential race in 50 years without debates. The Biden White House is already floating the trial balloons for refusing to debate Trump while concealing the real reason—they know Biden is not longer up to it. He can no longer do press conferences or one-on-one interview with friendly reporters.

Dementia Hitler, as Scott Adams calls him, is no longer up to a conversation with Trump, much less a debate.

Read it.

The Portland, Oregon, area is currently experiencing an explosion of shigellosis, a highly infectious, often antibiotic-resistant intestinal disease caused by contact with human feces.

Most of the outbreak—at least 218 cases in 2023, 45 of them reported in December—has taken place in Old Town, a once-lively restaurant and shopping destination near downtown Portland that’s now the site of numerous homeless encampments whose residents often use sidewalks as restrooms.

The Portland City Council, alarmed at a surge in the area’s homeless population, now estimated at about 6,000, in June 2023 passed severe restrictions on camping in public places. Tents and campsites are now technically banned during daytime hours and limited to certain designated areas at night. But no one in famously progressive Portland tried to enforce the legislation until the fall, when this latest infestation of shigella bacteria (there had been a similar outbreak among the homeless in 2021) began to generate headlines.

Fox News.

President Biden received a hostile welcome from swing state voters in Pennsylvania during a visit to several small businesses to tout his Bidenomics economic plan.

“Go home, Joe!” one onlooker yelled as the Pennsylvania-raised president walked into a bike shop in Emmaus, Pennsylvania.

“You’re a loser!” another yelled. “Loser!”

Babylon Bee.

At a press conference this week, Sony producers announced the production of a new modern adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopic novel 1984 that will feature the character of Big Brother as the good guy.

And, oddly enough, he looks very much like Joe Biden.

Read it.

For their latest magic trick, physicists have done the quantum equivalent of conjuring energy out of thin air. It’s a feat that seems to fly in the face of physical law and common sense.

“You can’t extract energy directly from the vacuum because there’s nothing there to give,” said William Unruh, a theoretical physicist at the University of British Columbia, describing the standard way of thinking.

But 15 years ago, Masahiro Hotta, a theoretical physicist at Tohoku University in Japan, proposed that perhaps the vacuum could, in fact, be coaxed into giving something up.

Read it.

You will be happier if you spend your money on experiences rather than possessions… or so says the modern truism, supposedly proven by psychological science. Researchers call it the “experience recommendation.”

It sounds good, right? It’s very flattering to a certain class of worldly people who spent their capital on accruing anecdotes. Ah, yes—we who go on retreats in Bali are much happier than the unsophisticated materialistic people who spend money on handbags or whatever.

It also supports the notion, which occasionally floats around, that wealthy people aren’t really made happy by their fancy possessions, which is comforting if you like to believe that wealthy people are idiots.

If you think that money can’t buy happiness you’re shopping in the wrong place.

Read it.

When we speak to visitors or students about our medieval manuscripts, we frequently find ourselves spending a significant amount of time talking about how such books were created. We discuss the ways that scribes worked and artists painted, and quite often we will then be asked just how it is that we can know such details. There are, of course, medieval manuals for craftspeople that still exist, but often we can find clues in the manuscripts themselves. Writing was a skill that was hard-won and greatly valued, and many authors and scribes were memorialised by their artisan brethren.

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It’s tough out there for a hungry grasshopper on the Kansas prairie. Oh, there’s plenty of grass to eat, but this century’s grass isn’t what it used to be. It’s less nutritious, deficient in minerals like iron, potassium and calcium.

Partly due to that nutrient-deficient diet, there’s been a huge decline in grasshopper numbers of late, by about one-third over two decades, according to a 2020 study. The prairie’s not hoppin’ like it used to — and a major culprit is carbon dioxide, says study author Michael Kaspari, an ecologist at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.