Alex Tabarrok.

Christianity in India has roots at least as old as in Italy. Millions of Christians in Kerala today believe that their tradition traces back directly to Thomas, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus, who traveled to India in the first century AD. According to the Acts of Thomas, the apostles divided the world and drew lots to decide their respective regions for spreading the gospel. Thomas, drew India but, ever the doubter, he demurred. “It’s too hot and the food isn’t kosher”, he said, more or less. Jesus appeared to Thomas, however, and bade him “go to India!” Amazingly, he still demurred–what a doubter!–but by a minor miracle just as this was happening an Indian merchant arrived in Jerusalem calling for a master architect and builder to return with him to India. Finally, with this sign, Thomas’s doubts were allayed and his India adventures began.

If I wanted to live outdoors I’d have joined the Army.

Mary Rose Cook.

I used to believe that every book has an objective value. And I used to believe that this value is fixed and universal.

Now, I believe it’s much more useful to say something in this form: this book has this value to this person in this context.

This is one of those metanoia experiences where you encounter something that completely changes how you think about the world. Read The Whole Thing.

Welcome to my world.

Read it.

Indeed, monarchy itself is not so easy to define. Mention the word, and the modern mind—fresh from being ordered to its room in masks by our freely elected masters, whilst the same impose their racial, gender, and hormonal views on a more or less unwilling society—immediately exclaims “tyranny.” Images of Nero, Henry VIII, and a wildly distorted George III are summoned up before said mind, subjected to an obligatory two minutes of hatred, and then once again sent triumphantly back to the mental recesses from whence they came. That task accomplished, one is able to return to the weary world one actually inhabits, feeling that at least one is ‘free.’

And yet, and yet, there are still people who openly call themselves monarchists. If the ‘M’ word is uttered, the malefactor’s hearers often reply: “So, you want to be a lord or something? If we had a monarchy again, you’d be nothing!” My favourite response to this was made by an American lady living in Germany, who answered “What makes you think I’m something now? Do you think the chancellor cares if you or I live or die?” There was no answer to that. At any rate, let us put that argument aside, as well as those who do indeed look for titles or orders of knighthood as social accessories, and concentrate on those who are serious about holding this unpopular view.

Read it.

The New York Fire Department recently reported that so far this year there have been 108 lithium-ion battery fires in New York City, which have injured 66 people and killed 13. According to FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh, “There is not a small amount of fire, it (the vehicle) literally explodes.” The resulting fire is “very difficult to extinguish and so it is particularly dangerous.”

They’re everywhere, the bastards.

Steve Sailer.

I’ve always liked fellow opinion journalist Michael Lind (here’s my positive review of his 2020 book The New Class War) even though he dislikes me. I’ve learned a lot from him, although it doesn’t appear from this article that he’s learned much of anything from me.

…

I’ve never heard the term “eugenicon” before. I guess it means I’m an icon of good genes.

The Eugenicons sound like a 1980s synth pop super group.

 

Quilette.

Historically, the knock on psychotherapy has been that it’s a pseudoscience perpetrated by overeducated life coaches. Their insights are so arbitrary and insubstantial that they can render diametric judgments under oath about the risks posed to society by the same accused serial killer.

Jaundiced perceptions aside, therapy’s role in modern life is no joke. America is a nation increasingly surrendering itself to the therapist’s couch. Forty-one million American adults sought therapy in 2020–21 alone, which was peak-COVID. Nevertheless, that figure reflects a therapy juggernaut not out of line with trends before or since. Nearly a quarter of America has been in therapy in the past 12 months, according to Gallup polling. It is nigh impossible to consume any form of media without being bombarded with PSAs that herd people into overcrowded therapy waiting rooms the way Japan’s oshiya herd people into jam-packed subway cars.

Obviously, then, psychology’s efficacy is a matter of some importance. Yet this is where we encounter an irony—it may be that psychotherapy is most dangerous when it works.

Smash the patriarchy! Oh, wait….

Steve Hayward at Power Line.

A properly Biden-hating but Trump-critical friend remarked to me lately that “I just don’t know any intelligent, educated people who want to vote for Trump next year.” Well maybe so, but I am reminded of the revealing line from Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 presidential campaign, when an enthusiastic supporter ran up to him and breathlessly exclaimed, “Oh, Governor Stevenson! All educated people are for you!” To which Stevenson responded, “Yes, ma’am, but I need a majority.”

That’s a perfect expression of liberal elitism and disdain toward the broad spectrum of Americans who don’t attend elite universities or live in the trendiest neighborhoods or hold the “correct” views.

Which brings me to David Brooks’s mid-week column in the New York Times that people are still talking about days later, which is a much longer half-life for a column than is typical these days. His column is “What If We’re the Bad Guys Here?“, and the “bad guys” here are not the Deplorables that Times readers and other “enlightened” people blame for blocking all desirable progress, but the Times readership itself. Brooks doesn’t put it that directly, but that’s the clear subtext.

Read it.

A 100-year history in college sports is ending. Barring some sort of miracle, or a negotiated deal there will only be four schools left in the Pac-12.

USC and UCLA were the first to leave to join the Big-10. The University of Oregon and the University of Washington have announced their decisions to join the Big-10. Utah, Arizona State, and Arizona are headed to the Big-12. There will be four members left in the Pac-12. Stanford, Oregon State, Washington State, and Cal.

Football programs are the biggest money makers in college sports and the most expensive sport to maintain. Televison money and viewing ratings are the key to survival. There are rumors that some current conferences will cut teams that are not generating TV ratings and will be shown the door as new teams join super conferences.

Read it.

In your book you talk about progressivism as a religion. How does this religion sell transhumanism?

It is sold as a material improvement, as an idea of progress in which the human being is improved, replaces God, and becomes God thanks to technology. The problem with this approach is that it is a false and empty promise. The sine qua non condition of this process is that the human being ceases to be human. You will progress, but the cost of that progress is that you cease to be what you are. So, homo sapiens can transition into a homo deus or any kind of form, what I call a neo-entity. Basically, technology is going to allow you to be whatever you want to be and that is one of the promises of progress.

This technological progress is accompanied by a postmodern moral progress, in which all the value categories that Judeo-Christianity established in the previous 2000 years become irrelevant. This progressive morality is completely anti-Christian. We are going to be better intellectually, cognitively, physically, and morally, but this morality is an amorality because it has no landmarks and no flag. It is a relativistic morality.

Check it out.

An infographic that will tell you more than you really want to know about the demographic makeup of the Ivy League colleges. (Click to expand)

The New Neo.

Brooks’ column is entitled, “What If We’re the Bad Guys Here?” To refresh your memory, Brooks is the resident guy on the right at the Times, but as tradition dictates he’s really a very strange kind of mushy-middle straddler. He also was famous as the guy who fell in love with the perfect crease in Obama’s pants and, as far as I know, has never fallen out of that love.

You may say “why read Brooks?”, and it’s a good question. My answer is that people like Brooks fascinate me. Intelligent but not wise, he often half gets it and half doesn’t, and seems to be attracted to the surface of things rather than their depth. In that, I think he’s not so very unusual, and as such it’s of interest to look at what he’s saying and the way he thinks.

His column contains a rather good description of how today’s “elites” – among whom he places himself, so there’s some insight there – have isolated themselves from many other Americans and incurred their wrath. But he seems to think that the worst thing about that is that it’s led to the rise of Donald Trump.

Zman blows the whistle.

A paradox of the modern age is that the average person in the West knows more about the natural world than the most learned man of prior eras, but people remain as superstitious and irrational as ever. This is true even in the human sciences, where doctors continue to tell patients that they should make sure to eat plenty of vegetables and avoid fatty foods. Much of what people experience as medicine is the same old oogily-boogily that has been with us since forever.

The carnivore diet is the latest bit of nonsense to make the rounds. Search the topic on YouTube and your recommendations will suddenly be packed with videos of men wearing lab coats or standing in front of dry erase boards, explaining how this diet is based on the science of cavemen. They claim that humans are made to eat meat, not bread or vegetables, so we should only eat meat. This will cure the things that ail you in the modern age, like obesity and unhappiness.

This is pure nonsense. Modern humans are the product of a long process that continues to this day. That process is called evolution. The ancestors of modern humans survived on what they could find. We know that species that can survive on a varied diet are more adaptive than species hooked on a narrow diet. If you can eat anything, you can live anywhere. If you can only eat bamboo shoots, then the only place you can live is in a Chinese zoo.

Some of us can’t wait that long.

Read it.

In Democracy on Trial, Jean Elshtain stresses the need for what she calls “democratic dispositions,” which include a willingness, or perhaps even eagerness, to act with others toward shared purposes, to compromise, to converse, and to understand one’s unique life as embedded in a skein of relationships that help constitute one’s distinctive personhood. The maintenance of these dispositions is a necessary condition, it seems, for preserving the civic virtues of “sobriety, rectitude, hard work, and familial and community obligations.”

What Elshtain calls democratic dispositions are, by my way of thinking, habits that temper and moderate democracy rather than express its inherent nature. The “savage instincts of democracy,” to use Tocqueville’s phrase, tend toward despotism rather than freedom, toward barbarism rather than toward civility. Unchecked democratic instincts encourage people to withdraw into an intensely private sphere and to see the world from the narrow perspective of their own self-interest, crudely understood. Disconnected from public obligations, having come to think of individualism as a virtue, the democrat sees only his own small world of family and close associates, and then the abstractions of nation or humanity. The rich world of political and civil associations in between these two extremes are invisible to him.

Hmmm … Left Coast, Other Left Coast, Canadian Left Coast….

The Spectator.

Since the early campaign got underway in earnest, the contest for the Republican nomination has been remarkably stable. Trump has held a commanding lead, Ron DeSantis has lagged behind him in a clear but distant second, failing to breakthrough as many thought he might after declaring his candidacy. Meanwhile, no one else has registered enough of a polling surge to announce themselves as a serious alternative.

Insofar as there has been any movement in the race so far, it has been in Trump’s favor. And his commanding lead is evident in a New York Times/Siena College poll published today. It finds 54 percent of Republican primary voters backing Trump, with DeSantis on 17 percent. No one else can register more than 3 percent.

In his analysis of the poll, Nate Cohn puts Trump’s commanding lead in clear terms: “In the half century of modern presidential primaries, no candidate who led his or her nearest rival by at least twenty points at this stage has ever lost a party nomination. Today, Donald J. Trump’s lead over Ron DeSantis is nearly twice as large.”

ZMan looks at a world turned upside down.

With some obvious exceptions, the people who use the term “white nationalist” use it to mean “people they do not like.” These are people who imbue their language with emotional meaning, rather than descriptive meaning. Just as Eskimos supposedly have a long list of ways to describe snow, the people fond of using the term “white nationalist” have a long list of words for people outside of their cult. The term has no meaning other than “danger! danger!” to the rest of the cult.

Before the term became a cult signal, it used to have meaning. A white nationalist is an American term for a white person who wants to live in communities free of nonwhites, especially black people. Having lost the fight over “civil rights” in the middle of the last century, and not understanding the implications of it, these people organized around the idea of separate lands for people of European descent. They want intentional communities organized around race.

Of course, the people who use the term “white nationalist” as a slur acknowledge that the people calling themselves white nationalists primarily want a white homeland exclusively for white people, but they also claim the reason for this desire is an irrational hatred of nonwhites, especially blacks and Jews. In this way, the term “white nationalists” is shorthand for people who hate nonwhites. It is why you can be a nonwhite white nationalist now.

Read it.

Have you heard about the latest food trend sweeping the nation? It’s called “whimpering over your grocery bill.” In the early days of 2023, Americans are spending 70 percent more on eggs than one year ago. Chicken, dairy and bread prices outpaced inflation as well, increasing by double-digit percentages. What’s an adventurous home cook to do?

The answer is Budget Bytes, a website I first turned to as a broke twenty-two-year-old with a galley kitchen in Queens. I didn’t know, before an acquaintance tweeted a link to a coconut vegetable curry, that you could make a tasty, filling meal, complete with leftovers, using almost entirely canned or frozen goods. Budget Bytes taught me to cook.

Though my income has mercifully increased in the past decade, I’m now paying off a wedding, and my student loans shadow me like the Grim Reaper. And that was before inflation decreased my real wages and the avian flu drove egg and poultry prices into the stratosphere. Now, Budget Bytes comes to my rescue again.

And that will be his highest priority.

Read it.

Like many other Americans, I’ve been following the strange (with a factor of 10) odyssey of Army Private Travis King. In case you’re not familiar with that name, this is the young man who voluntarily left his unit and ran to the benevolent arms of the North Koreans.

…

To me, it seems as if the ball was dropped by several sets of hands. Assuming that he really did graduate from BCT and AIT with no problems, did he believe that everything was going to be roses from there? Did he not understand that at each juncture of his Army career, he would be required to prove his fitness all over again? Where were his Training NCOs, First Shirts, and other assorted personnel who were supposed to be overseeing his development as a Soldier? When Pvt. King again and again proved his unfitness as a Soldier, why wasn’t he cashiered earlier? And, finally, why was this dud trusted to simply fly back to CONUS on his own?

Read it.

The production of steel is a significant contributor to climate change. Direct emissions from steelmaking are around 7 percent of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions.

Iron ore, the raw material used for steelmaking, contains iron oxide, which means the iron atoms are bound to oxygen atoms. To break this bond, the standard steelmaking process in blast furnaces uses coke made from cooking coal. This process creates large amounts of carbon dioxide emissions that cannot be avoided with the existing technology.

An alternative to blast furnaces is using hydrogen in a process called direct reduction. This is often considered the most promising technology for green steel production, and many steel companies have announced investments in it.

Read it.

In a potentially game-changing breakthrough in energy harvesting, researchers have found a way to capture, store and utilize the electrical power generated by falling raindrops, which may lead to the development of rooftop, power-generating rain panels.

Previous attempts to generate power from failing rain have run into specific technical hurdles that often seemed impossible to surpass, but the researchers behind this new method say they have found a solution that may finally make such rain panels as popular, if not more so, than solar panels.

Discourse.

The interior of a Walmart looks like the street grid of a classic small town.

Downtown Chapel Hill is much bigger than a Walmart. But nonetheless, the relatively small Walmart in the city’s outskirts would fill about a third of the downtown’s busiest commercial block right off campus. In my hometown of Flemington, New Jersey—with a smaller downtown and a larger Walmart—the store would fill more than half of the old commercial core. The largest big-box superstores approach or exceed 200,000 square feet, which is about the size of a very small classic downtown.

The idea of a commercial space aping the design of a city is somewhat familiar when it comes to the suburban shopping mall. Malls were famously designed after urban downtowns or shopping districts by the European-born architect Victor Gruen, who envisioned them not as churches of consumerism but as weather-free, and traffic-free, diminutive cities.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

One of the things to look forward to in the next election will be Gavin Newsome lecturing Tim Scott on the importance of reparations. This assumes Tim Scott will be told to oppose the idea by the party. By next fall reparations could be an ancient conservative principle so we could see a contest between the two parties over who is promising the bigger reparations check.

Either way, it is a safe bet that the subject will be mainstream by next year. The effort to normalize the idea has been going on since the George Floyd riots. California is working on a reparations report. The idea is to release a big official looking study that will be the basis for the following debate. This was popular back in the middle of the last century whenever the progressives were plotting shenanigans.

Part of the plot will be a role for white people to play in the manufactured drama that will play out on cable television and the internet. Sean Hannity will take a week off for a new firmware update and come back with a new set of lapel pins and a new vocabulary to oppose the idea of reparations. It will be the old Washington Generals routine that is the defining feature of the so-called conservative movement.

Zeihan.

Every time we’ve used an asset-backed currency, it’s resulted in collapse. There’s just no asset, especially not gold, that can keep up with economic growth and expansion around the world. And when the currency becomes a brake on economic activity, you end up with a sharp crack in the system; which leads to depression and often state collapse.

Exactly right. I’m as fond of an asset-backed currency as the nest right-wing nut, but the problem is that the amount of the asset can’t keep up with economic growth in the modern world, and so sooner or later acts as a noose strangling the money supply, which cases deflation, which chokes off growth, and we all suffer. (Oh, for the 19th century,  when we didn’t have that problem and could use gold and silver coins to our hearts’ content….)

The American Mind.

Gentrification is the urban policy most closely associated with the neoliberal era. Though reports of neoliberalism’s death are greatly exaggerated, there is no question that policies such as free trade, deregulation, entitlement reform, and foreign intervention are now more on the defensive than 20 years ago. Gentrification may be vulnerable, too. Certainly, fertility decline and remote work pose threats to it. The smaller family sizes that have become normal in 21st-century America mean fewer potential urban professionals in the college-to-city pipeline. Those currents will be yet further stemmed by the increased share of white collar jobs done via Zoom.

Gentrification is, at core, an economic strategy. It aims at increasing the number of middle- and upper-middle-class people living in urban cores. There always were, and always will be, young adults who want to live in cities. Gentrifiers differ from Patti Smith types, because they’re respectable and promise quantifiable gains to the urban economy such as higher real estate valuations. They moved into housing previously occupied by people with lower incomes.

This strategy made sense. The best argument for gentrification is that no other model seemed to work. It’s one thing to nag former industrial cities to lay off their yuppie-hugging and get to work rebuilding the great American working class. It’s quite another to make that happen. The cookie-cutter aspect of gentrification—micro-breweries, Starbucks, people riding bikes to work for reasons other than a DUI or an inability to afford a car—is precisely its virtue. An urban policy “model” is something that can be implemented anywhere and does not require much in the way of charisma or talent in city hall.

Ah, yes, the good old days, when Communists were Communists.

The Spectator.

The Washington Post is collapsing. Once one of America’s great media institutions, the paper lost $100 million last year and has shed 500,000 subscribers. Recent reports reveal that Postowner Jeff Bezos is going to be more hands-on to try and save the paper.

Yet trying to get employees of the Post to do their jobs is like trying to get dogs to play baseball. Dogs just aren’t interested in baseball, and the breed of journalist now at the Post is just not interested in journalism. Always a liberal paper, the Post is now pure propaganda.

The New Neo.

I’ve seen lots of articles lately of this sort:

More than HALF (56.3%) of liberal white women age 18-29 have been diagnosed with a mental health condition. That’s more than DOUBLE the percentage (27.3%) of conservative white women in the same age bracket.

If you look at the charts at the link, the same is true of other age groups (although the differences between liberal and conservatives in other age group are considerably less, they follow the same pattern) and it’s also true for white men. In fact, the differences are even more stark for liberal white men versus conservative white men, and there’s a huge disparity in all age groups for that population.

Most of the speculation on this seems to focus on women; I’m not sure why. And I’d be curious if this effect is only found among white people.