Steve Sailer.

Back in 1992, East Palo Alto, CA briefly became the murder capital of America with 42 killings. So an enterprising Stanford professor invented a acoustics listening devices for triangulating where gunshots were fired: ShotSpotter.

Ever since, ShotSpotter has been accused of racism since it tends to find that the most gunshots are fired in black neighborhoods, thus leading to black residents being unfairly targeted by excessive policing. Of course, those are precisely the neighborhoods where the most people are murdered by guns each year, but you aren’t supposed to think about Occam’s Razor explanations like that these days.

What are you? A Razorist?

Popular Mechanics.

Every eye color links directly to the volume of melanin in the iris. Green eyes, even more rare than blue, marks a reduced level of melanin, thought not as reduced as blue eyes. It only takes a miniscule change to shift from brown to blue. “From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor,” Eiberg says. “They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA.”

He refers to that that switch as a specific genetic mutation event, and believes that it only produced the first-ever blue-eyed human thanks to the mutation of the regulating HERC2 gene. The combination is the only known way eyes can turn blue (in contrast, red hair can happen for one of nearly a dozen reasons). That mutation remained in place for the next generation, meaning the reduced production of melanin in the iris allowed for the continued dilution of brown to blue.

Read it.

When you live under an empire that’s held together by lies, you’ll be asked to believe a lot of intensely stupid bullshit. Here are the top ten dumbest things the propagandists of the US-centralized empire try to get us to swallow.

Like North Korea, North Carolina is the part run by Communists. And don’t get me started on North Dakota….

How Elite are the New Elite?

“What would the Romans do?” is always a useful way to consider issues of public policy. This is not to say they got everything right – their views on women were a bit iffy while about their attitudes to slavery, the less said the better (even if, on both, the reality was more nuanced than is often assumed). On the other hand, a civilisation which built the largest ramp ever constructed by man just to mop up the remnants of a failed revolt would probably not take 20 years to build a train line.

The Romans invented decimation. ‘Nuff said.

For whereas Roman society started with aristocrats and forced them to become meritocrats, the New Elite is composed of self-described meritocrats who are trying to become aristocrats. Membership of the caste is often hereditary – Goodwin, perhaps flippantly, suggested one test for membership is whether one’s parents have a Wikipedia page –  and a range of signalling mechanisms have been developed to allow members to display their status – declarations of pronouns in one’s biography standing in for a coat of arms, knowledge of the latest progressive fashions replacing a familiarity with courtly etiquette.

Read it.

No need to sit in an exam hall, no fear of plagiarism accusations or concerns with students submitting essays generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. Integrity is 100% assured, in a fair, reliable and authentic manner that can also be easily used to assess multiple individual or group assignments.

As services like ChatGPT continue to grow in terms of both its capabilities and usage – including in education and academia – is it high time for universities to revert to the time-tested oral exam?

NewsBusters.

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley got to the heart of the government shutdown fireworks in her appearance on Fox News Sunday.

“Let’s be clear what the Freedom Caucus is really trying to do; they are trying to cut spending.”

That’s of course correct. One would be hard-pressed to find any Republican, Freedom Caucus member or not, who does not understand the gravity of the state of our federal budget and spending.

The New Neo.

As part of the discussion of Gaetz’s move yesterday, commenter “Sharon W” wrote (I’m pretty sure sarcastically):

Maybe Art Deco can enunciate for us all the gains conservatives experienced when the House, Senate and Presidency were in Republican hands.

Most people on the right – and I include myself – share some of that bitterness and frustration about how little was ever accomplished when “the House, Senate, and presidency were in Republican hands.” The anger is understandable, and it’s a large part of what is behind much of the support for Gaetz’s move.

But I think it’s also instructive to look back at the actual figures about Republican control, something I did in this post I wrote shortly before Trump – and a Republican Congress – took office. Please take a look. You may be surprised at how seldom since the days of Coolidge and Hoover that such a situation – the GOP controlling both houses and the presidency – existed.

“Imagine the people of Portland taking over the whole country and that was Russia after the revolution.” — ZMan

BBC.

Nomad Cruise is the first mobile conference for digital nomads. It combines skill-sharing, networking and celebration while travelling through breathtaking corners of the globe. And German-born Voelkner, 40, says it’s achieving his aim.

“Once we arrive at the new destination, many people end up travelling together, and we organize reunions in beautiful destinations to build and foster this community,” he says. Tickets for the company’s upcoming 12th sailing – a 10-day transatlantic crossing from Spain to Brazil in December – start at around €1,000 ($1,073; £860). To date, upwards of 2,500 remote professionals from more than 80 countries have joined Nomad Cruise for work and wanderlust.

Beyond solving a problem, Voelkner is making money. His revenue comes from negotiating deals with cruise companies and adding travel experiences and onboard programming for new and established remote workers. A record 600 participants are expected on the upcoming transatlantic cruise, and his revenue to date nears €2m ($2.13m; £1.72m).

Read it.

We’ve had many meetings with NAR execs to explore compromises on the policies that would let us continue our support. Since a Redfin-wide initiative to join NAR in 2017, we’ve paid more than $13 million in dues, in an effort to influence NAR to advocate for an open, technology-driven marketplace that would benefit consumers. We’ll now explore other ways to advance those goals.

…

In the many marketplaces governed by its policies, NAR still blocks sellers from listing homes that don’t pay a commission to the buyer’s agent, and it blocks websites like Redfin.com from showing for-sale-by-owner listings alongside agent-listed homes. Removing these blocks would be easy, and it would make our industry more consumer-friendly and competitive.

‘Professional associations’, no matter what they claim, are all about protecting the financial interest of existing members rather than anything having to do with either the ‘profession’ or their customers.

ScienceAlert.

The animal footprint carvings you can find in the Doro Nawas Mountains of western Namibia are quite something: the artists have captured the tracks so accurately, they can reveal plenty of useful information about the animals they represent.

A team from the Heinrich Barth Institute and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, and the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in Namibia, worked with Indigenous tracking experts from the Kalahari region to look at a total of 513 carvings.

For more than 90 percent of them, Indigenous experts could identify the species, sex, age group, and even which leg the carving was from. It’s like a wildlife compendium, written in rock.

The Spectator.

A week from today, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to make an announcement in Philadelphia that will almost certainly entail running for president as a third-party candidate.

The signs have been there for months that RFK’s politically unique appeal would be crushed by the Democratic Party’s process, which is heavily skewed toward renominating Joe Biden by acclamation. The possibility of Biden debating Kennedy was always out of the question — not because they don’t take his challenge seriously, but because for all their dismissiveness, Democratic leadership takes it very seriously indeed.

The logistics of an RFK independent run would be the challenge — unless, given the unique changes that have taken place in their leadership over the past few years, he is able to run under the standard of the Libertarian Party. According to the New York Times, Kennedy already met with party chair Angela McArdle over the summer. Already on the ballot in all fifty states, the party would offer Kennedy the chance to skip a major challenge for outsider candidates, presuming that he can win the nomination over the objections of delegates who find him insufficiently libertarian.

Why would that bother them? The Democrats frequently run candidates who aren’t at all interested in democracy, and twice in my lifetime the Republicans have nominated Presidential candidates who were famous for being RINOs.

Read it.

It took firms decades to adjust to electricity by redesigning factories, products, and workflows to take full advantage of the new possibilities. Similarly, the benefits of work from home start to come most profoundly when expensive offices can be shrunk, employers can draw from a much larger pool of workers and workers can adjust when and where they work, including the location of their homes. It’s not surprising, therefore, that with little time for either the workers or the firms to adjust and with few options to choose how much to work from home, productivity fell when COVID sent workers home. But, with more time to plan and more options for hybrid but extensive work (e.g. work from home Mondays and Fridays), work from home has large benefits. We are also seeing management redesign to take advantage of work from home in the same way we saw factory redesign to take advantage of electricity. Management, for example, is shifting from input metrics–do you show up?–to output metrics–did the work get done? Designing and validating new metrics takes time, but these changes are helping to increase the benefits of work from home.

Read it.

It has taken me years to answer my father’s question — in the form of my new book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. In it, I argue that our preferences are now shaped not by markets but by machine networks — what I call “cloud capital”. Amazon’s Alexa, for example, is the portal to a totalitarian, fully centralised system of preference creation and satisfaction. First, it trains us to train it to dictate what we want. Second, it sells us what we now “want” directly, bypassing any actual marketplace. Third, it succeeds in making us sustain this enormous behavioural modification machine with our free labour: we post reviews, rate products. Finally, it amasses huge rents from capitalists who rely on this network of cloud capital, usually 40% of sale price. That’s not capitalism. Welcome to Technofeudalism.

Another seemingly bright person led astray by word-salad. One of these days I’m going to write an essay on the various mythologies of ‘capitalism’, both left and right.

*sigh* These kids today….

Read it.

It’s true that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to find mutton—defined as meat from a sheep over two years old—in American grocery stores. “Mutton is not an accessible protein option in the US,” says Megan Wortman, executive director of the American Lamb Board, an industry group aimed at expanding the market for domestic sheep products. If you’re looking to get your hands on some mutton, “you’d have to go through a specialty butcher shop or directly to a special-order processor,” she says.

Mutton has less tender flesh and a stronger flavor than lamb, which comes from sheep that are less than a year old. (Meat from sheep aged one to two years is generally called “yearling” in the US, and “hogget” elsewhere around the world.) That stronger flavor lends itself to curries, stews and “value-added” products such as spiced sausages, says Wortman, “so most of our mutton goes into value-added products or into specialty ethnic markets at this point.”

America sucks so bad that everyone wants to come here.

Read it.

The United Auto Workers (UAW) went on strike on Sept. 15. The strike affected the “big three” in Detroit—General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, maker of the Jeep. The union wants to increase average labor costs from $65 per hour, including benefits, which is already above market rates. Nonunionized Tesla, for example, pays “just” $45 per hour in labor, considering the cost of benefits.

The UAW’s demands would roughly double labor costs and, according to management, make the companies unviable. Where will the workers go when the automakers go bankrupt, further mechanize their assembly lines, or move yet more production to China?

Many workers in these companies who aren’t on strike are already getting fired. Striking unions attempt to inflict maximum pain on their own companies with as little effort and expenditure as possible. The companies are forced to let go of misguided workers, who they can’t keep busy because other misguided workers on whom they depend are striking. All the strikers and fired UAW workers are getting paid from union funds that came from dues imposed on workers, whether they like it or not. They’re getting paid by the union to halt production.

This ludicrous practice introduces massive inefficiencies into U.S. manufacturing, yet Americans over the decades have gotten used to the deadweight it attaches to the economy.

Read it.

On the left, those with a penchant for turtleneck sweaters, hatred of orange presidents and a lottery of genders can check out Colorado-based TruuBlue, which matches social justice progressives.

On the right, those who love long shoots at the range, not murdering unborn children, and woke-free zones can check out The Right Stuff.

Sounds very convenient. (It doesn’t surprise me that leftists can’t spell.)

Stanford-Medicine.

Tiny circles of DNA harbor cancer-associated oncogenes and immunomodulatory genes promoting cancer development. They arise during transformation from pre-cancer to cancer, say Stanford Medicine-led team.

Read it.

Here’s a story straight out of a “trigger warning” scenario for Vice President Kamala Harris’ new federal office of gun violence prevention: a murdered Ecuadorian cartel boss known as “El Fatal” has been buried with hundreds of guns in his coffin this past week, the NY Post reported.

Surrounded by hundreds of pistols, shotguns and rifles, the 39 year old was the leader of “Los Fatales”. He was getting a car wash last week when he was “suddenly ambushed by gunmen” and killed, along with his 20 year old daughter who was with him.

The murder was blamed on rival gang, the report says.

He’ll be well-armed in the next life.

You want useful? I got yer useful–right here….

Why didn’t I think of that?

Washington Free Beacon.

It pays to be married to the “Squad.”

As Democratic Reps. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), and Cori Bush (Mo.) rage against capitalism from within the halls of Congress, their husbands bring home the bacon, raking in millions through consulting firms, vineyards, and private security operations. The husbands of the “Squad,” who appear to be friends in their own right, have seen their financial fortunes rise in line with their wives’ political stardom.

Read it.

The United Auto Workers went on strike against the Big Three US automakers in Detroit last week. Peter Schiff went on Real America with Dan Ball to talk about the strike and how it might impact the US economy.

Peter put the strike in the context of the current inflationary and high interest rate environment, and talked about how it might impact the broader US economy.

This is the first time the UAW has gone on strike against all three US automakers at the same time. About 12,700 workers are on strike. The UAW is demanding a 40% wage increase through 2027 with a 20% raise immediately. They also want a 32-hour workweek.

ZMan does a deep dive.

For as long as anyone can remember there have been two competing views of how to engage in politics against the people we call the Left. One camp says that opposition must come from a principled group that does not engage in the same tactics as the opponent, in order to provide an alternative to the Left. Their vision of politics is the means justifies the ends, in contrast with the Left, who takes the view that the ends justify the means, or any means necessary to win.

The other camp points out that the Left always wins, so the “principle above politics” business is pointless. The point of politics is to win, which means gaining power, so any strategy that lacks that as its goal is a waste of time. Further, this camp notes that the first principles crowd spends all of their time policing their ranks rather than fighting the Left, which means endless purges. The people being purged are usually the most effective fighters against the Left.

Read it.

Using the smartphone as a point of entry, young people could be inspired to understand that every significant technological breakthrough that has transformed society results from continued human imagination, failure, persistence, courage and, above all else, ambition. Understanding the evolution of the smartphone could, in turn, spark dreams about inventing the future for understanding and changing the world for the better. But praising young people’s apparent technological prowess does the opposite. It encourages complacency and the lowering of ambition.

The result is as depressing as it is inevitable. Instead of a spark for knowledge and a future-oriented aspiration, the smartphone has become a tool of self-reflected indulgence and narcissism. Instead of inspiring young people to raise their eyes from their screens and engage the world around them, we have kindled introspection, a quest for inner identities which fatalistically trap us in the very biology our forefathers overcame with their imaginations.

I have an iPhone SE. Making phone calls is about #45 on the list of the top things I use it for. In fact, I don’t remember the last time I actually made a phone call on it (not to be confused with the last time a spammer tried to call me).

Long Run Health Matters.

Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

And people are less inclined to put up with your shit.

The Antiplanner.

The nation’s fifty largest urban areas housed 82.5 million jobs in 2020, and auto drivers could reach 98 percent of them in an hour of travel. Transit riders, by comparison, could reach only 8 percent in an hour while bicycle riders could reach 7 percent, according to the University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory.