Read it.

Attention conservation notice. This jeremiad is all about financial policy, which I know is not a topic all of my readers are interested in. This piece is only relevant to you if you own a home in the US (because mortgage rates matter) if you rent in the US (because market rents are set in comparison to the cost of owning), or if you save and/or borrow money anywhere in the world (because of the US mortgage system’s effect on long-term interest rates. Readers who live in monasteries, survivalist compounds, or the Sentinel Islands can safely skip this one.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

The show this week was going to be about the religious underpinnings of what I call the New Religion of the ruling class, but as I was doing it other things came to mind, so it is more of a survey of the antecedents. In retrospect I probably should rework the show around that idea, but that will have to be another show. As a result, this show is more of a thinking aloud about the roots of social justice.

The odd thing to me is the resistance I see to using the word “religion” to label this mode of thought that dominates the ruling class. The behavior of the managerial class ticks the boxes for a theocratic mindset. The only thing missing is a well-defined god, but all the other behavior mimics religious fervor. If you replace God with “arc of history” the puzzle is complete, as far as a religion.

There seems to be two camps that oppose the religion idea. One camp are Christians who think a religion must have all the things in their form of Christianity, which means most of Christianity is a false religion. The other camp is those who cannot move past the idea that people are motivated by something other than money. In both cases the opposition is about their own needs and desires.

ZMan draws an historical parallel.

Today we have mountains of facts and figures to tell us how things are doing in the Global American Empire. There was a time not so long ago when these facts and figures made up the bulk of news coverage. Economists became court wizards, explaining the latest unemployment figures or trade numbers. They were also called upon to bless whatever polices were being debated in Congress. In the Obama years, economic data was the way we measured the glories of the empire.

That has all changed now. One reason is no one in their right mind takes anything the government says at face value. People had grown used to the way the media biased the numbers depending upon who was in office, but the mortgage crisis cratered the public’s confidence in the numbers themselves. If all of the court wizards explaining the numbers could not see the mortgage fiasco coming, then why should anyone believe them about unemployment or inflation?

Then you have the general lying that has become a feature of government. The lying about Covid not only disgraced the medical profession, but it finished off whatever trust people had in the official numbers. If the government lies about how many people are dying from Covid just to move more product for the drug makers, the government will lie about how many people are working or the inflation numbers. No one trusts the numbers because no one trusts the people issuing the numbers.

Steve Sailer.

Our society still deems it important that our bridges don’t fall down, but nobody cares anymore about whether are sociologists are any good, unlike a couple of generations ago when Edward Banfield and Father Andrew Greeley helped make sociology cool.

ZMan does some analysis.

One of the oddities of the Obama administration was that it seemed as if they were working from a list of wrongs they were determined to right. Those wrongs were what the Left counted as their failures over the decades. A part of Obama being viewed as Black Jesus was his ability to heal the past. This was necessary as those old harms were what tied us to the present. It was only by righting those past wrongs that we could break free and enter the glorious future.

The most obvious example was the health care stuff. This proved to be a disaster for the Clinton administration, but that is not how the Left saw it. They viewed it as a betrayal and a defeat that had to be addressed. This is why the eventual policy was nothing like they promised or anything anyone would call reform. That was never the point of the exercise. The point was to have a redo of that old defeat and this time the good guys would win and erase that loss from memory.

This active revisionism turned up in all sorts of places. They had Hillary Clinton pose with Sergey Lavrov holding a red button. This was part of the Russian reset initiative designed to restart relations with Russia. In reality it was about soothing the wounds from the Reagan years when the Left lost the Cold War debate. The same vibe permeated their Iran initiative. Like the Russian reset, the Iran reproachment had no utility in the present. It was all about the past.

How many of these have non-trivial numbers of People of Color is left as an exercise for the readoer.

Washington Free Beacon.

I know some people blame “liberalism” for the triumph of consumerism and the rise of a supposed woke international economic order, but if you are going to blame anything, blame the metric system.

OffGuardian.

There will come a time when you’re sitting in a smoke-filled place from the out of control wildfires, the chicken balls you had for lunch might be crickets in disguise, the cat and the dog both have bird flu, the mosquito that just bit you probably has Oxitek’s Zika, the water you’re drinking is full of chemicals, nuclear threats from the Ukraine cover the media outlets, artificial intelligence thinks you’re stupid, one egg is worth more than the dollar in your pocket, outside the parades of celebration are really testaments to indignation and random murders compete with random heart attacks for worry of the week, you’ve already used up your allotted 15 minute city day trip and you read about how daffodil extract will save the planet from cow flatulation.

(And the scientists who want to block the sun haven’t checked with the ones who are making solar panels. I don’t think they like each other.)

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

To the Western ear, the phrase “closed society” brings to mind hermit kingdoms like North Korea or totalitarian societies like the old Soviet Union. That is because the ideology of the American empire is the open society. The open society is tolerant and open to minorities while the closed society is intolerant. The former is always good while the latter is always bad, very very bad.

The open society is not the norm for human organization. In fact, the very idea of human organization requires both discrimination and intolerance. All human organizations must have rules to determine who is outside the group, who is inside the group and how this is enforced. An organization where anyone can come or go as they please is just an ad hoc mob, not an organization.

Therein lies the debilitating contradiction in the open society. If the goal is a society where all opinions are tolerated and given a fair hearing, it means tolerating ideas that run counter to the open society ideal. This is where Karl Popper’s famous phrase, “the paradox of tolerance”, comes into the conversation. In order to maintain the tolerant society, you must be intolerant of intolerance.

NBC News.

The U.S. FDA said it did not agree with the cancer research group’s conclusions that linked aspartame to cancer.

James Rikards.

Attention spans are short, and Americans have already moved on to stories about political scandals, the next election, and the usual celebrity glamour gloss. Outside of the U.S. warmonger elites and a few critics (myself included), Americans don’t seem to care.

That’s a mistake. The war is as hard fought as ever and the geopolitical stakes are even higher than at the start of the war as we keep climbing up the escalation ladder.

Today I’ll look at the military situation, the economic sanctions, the bigger picture of global recession, and the impact of the war on energy prices.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

Thirty-five years ago Tom Wolfe wrote “The Great Relearning” for The American Spectator, in which he predicted we’d lapse into some of the same mistakes of the 20th century, and need to re-learn some fundamental truths again from bitter experience. This imperative comes back to mind watching our big cities and criminal justice system, to name just two items, seem determined to repeat all of the liberal mistakes of the 1970s and 198os, which took a long time to recognize and crystalized into policies that work, such as locking up criminals.

Yesterday the Washington DC city council, which only months ago wanted to reduce criminal penalties for carjacking, passed new crime policy by a 12 – 1 vote that is a clear reversal of the leftist nostrums about crime of the last few years. Small wonder why. Last year saw a 33 percent increase in violent crimes, with 17 percent more homicides. This is the third straight year when DC clocked more than 200 homicides. Carjacking is out of control, up 94 percent from 2022, with 140 carjackings in June alone.

The Foundry.

Media outlets on the Left constantly berate pro-lifers and accuse them of forgetting about children after they’re born.

They push false narratives that the pro-life movement wants to deprive women of opportunities and prevent children from obtaining a safe and fair upbringing.

In actuality, pro-lifers have a long history of assisting women and families with options, materials, and a hopeful message that supports their lives.

Concretely, pro-life states across the country have spent the first six months of 2023 enacting a wide array of measures to support mothers and their children, especially in the post-Roe v. Wade era.

The Spectator.

Signs announcing roadside picnic tables once peppered America’s secondary roads and highways. Or so we call those byways now. Before the limited-access interstate system arrived in the 1960s, these roads were primary. America then was laced with a tangle of serviceable two-lane, hard-surfaced highways. Look at an old oil-company roadmap, if you can find one, to get the idea. Some roads were federal, some state, but all were emphatically open-access: get on anywhere, pull over wherever you like. They led through cities and towns, not around them; they traversed the countryside more than they cut through it. They required two-hands-on-the-wheel alertness in drivers, who got to know and respect the lay of the landscape.

“Roadside Table One Mile” signs invited you to pull over, switch off the ignition, stretch your legs, uncork that thermos of coffee and have lunch. They were as common, and as eagerly watched-for, as the standardized signage that guides us to branded “services” along the interstates today: “Food Next Exit / McDonalds, Burger King, Cracker Barrel.” Oh boy.

The best part of being retired is not having to go to meetings.

The American Mind.

As a sample of his engaging new book, War on the American Republic (WAR), Kevin Slack has laid out an energizing roadmap for the New Right. A recovery of Western Christianity and its concomitant worldview as the foundation for American civilization and the means of “moral aggression”; a reinvigoration of republican virtue; true citizenship as the antidote to corrupt national bureaucracy; and “genuine nationalism” over and against “false patriotism and tribalism.” All this is most welcome. Slack rightly indicts the over-intellectualized conservatism of yesteryear for its inattentiveness to action, its penchant for in-house theory—endless academic programs, conferences, and panels to no end—and effeminate aversion to conflict. WAR deserves three cheers for its masculine, overtly Christian, and unapologetically American mood, not to mention its fiery prose. Slack isn’t squeamish about asserting nationalist economic policy or protectionist immigration restrictions.

Like many New Right commentators, Slack is best at issue spotting. That is, he is a peerless critic of the conservative malaise, and amoral progressive insanity, that is the impetus for the nascent New Right. This is no less true of Slack’s jabs at the conservative legal movement (CLM), always dominated by libertarians, and to which so much intellectual capital has been expended over the past several decades with negligible returns.

Given the illegitimacy of our current “kleptocracy” amidst a “managed national decline,” Slack is right to note the increasingly farcical nature of “legal appeals to the Constitution and precedent.” Originalism and “judicial engagement” as dueling jurisprudential theories have produced not-so-dueling results, viz., simultaneously bloated bureaucracy and a web of regulatory exemptions that empower predatory, unaccountable corporate monopolies. Hence, kleptocracy.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

The drip-drip-drip of the water torture media campaign to force Joe Biden to step aside picked up steam in the last few days. First, Maureen Dowd, the weather wane of respectable centrist feminist opinion at the New York Times, delivers a well-deserved scolding for Joe Biden’s directive to make his son Hunter’s love child with a stripper into a non-person: “The president’s cold shoulder — and heart — is counter to every message he has sent for decades, and it’s out of sync with the America he wants to continue to lead.”

The American Mind.

When a charter board in Oklahoma recently approved an explicitly Roman Catholic charter school, it received opposition from some conservatives and libertarians, in addition to the usual hyperventilation from progressives about the separation of church and state.

Critics on the Right fundamentally misunderstand the nature of church-state relations and the American historical experience more broadly.

David French recently used his Sunday New York Times column to argue that the charter violates the Establishment Clause and is harmful to both church and state. He contended that schools must be neutral and state funding of any institution that had a particular metaphysical commitment violates the Establishment Clause. But French wrongly equivocated any institution funded by the state with the state itself. Schools, for example, can’t raise armies or police forces; they can’t raise taxes; they can’t even be self-governing. The state does those things. Confusing church and state, and state and school, is an interesting mistake for someone intent on maintaining that they’re different and necessarily separate.

David French is a supine tool of the progressive left. Nobody with the IQ of a carrot accepts his pretense that he is either conservative or even-handed.

Rod Dreher.

Rod explains how he’s not David French.  (That’s a good thing.)

Read it.

This study addressed a gap in the research literature by evaluating the validity of general mental ability (g) and personality test scores for prediction of firearms proficiency via shooting range performance, an entirely objective task-based criterion. It was hypothesized that mental ability test scores would be positively related to firearms proficiency based on past research in related areas (e.g., g predicts skill acquisition and training performance) and conceptual similarities between firearms proficiency and cognitive tasks. Using 4 datasets with a combined sample size of 22,525 individuals, this hypothesis was confirmed: g had operational validities ranging from .162 to .188 and logical reasoning had operational validities ranging from .179 to .268 after correcting for range restriction and criterion unreliability. Mental ability test scores predicted an entirely psychomotor criterion task: use of firearms to hit targets at a pre-determined level of accuracy. Most of the validity appears to be attributable to g, but a post hoc analysis indicated that writing ability acted as a suppressor (i.e., the validity of g increased when writing ability was included in a regression model). Conscientiousness was hypothesized to have a positive relationship with firearms performance and emotional stability was hypothesized to have positive linear and quadratic relationships. In contrast, it was observed that conscientiousness had a negative operational validity (?.079) and emotional stability lacked validity relative to the firearms proficiency criterion. The implications for individual differences research and practice are discussed.

Read it.

Unbeknownst to economists, the Keynesian bedrock of modern economics–using financial repression and government spending funded by debt to manage the business cycle of growth and recession–is an artifact of a century of expansive cheap energy and virtuous demographics.

Presented as quasi-scientific “laws of economics,” Keynesian policies of suppressing interest rates and funding stimulus with debt were only possible in an era in which energy per capita (per person) always became more abundant and affordable in terms of the purchasing power of wages, i.e. how many hours of labor does it take to buy the energy to fuel a vehicle, prepare a meal, etc.

We have the technology.

The Spectator.

Last Friday, a day after the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, I noted the gap between the Democratic Party’s leaders and its voters on race-based admissions. Polls find a majority of Democrats opposed to using race as a factor in admissions. The party’s elite, however, is almost universally in favor of affirmative action — as hysterical reactions from the president and others made clear.

But that was last week. Now that the dust has settled, and everyone has had a chance to cool down over July 4, have the Democrats gained some Independence-Day perspective on the end of race-based decisions? Not really. Emotional denunciation remains the dominant tone, and elected officials willing to side with the majority of their party’s supporters are no easier to come by than they were last Friday. For the left more generally, it has been a week of impressive mental contortions to avoid any awkward realities about the discrimination against millions of non-white Americans made possible by affirmative action. NPR gets the gold medal for this news story suggesting Asian Americans are white supremacists. Or something.

Missing from the Democratic reaction to the Supreme Court decision is any suggestion that they see the bigger picture. Were the Democrats a genuine working-class party, they might use this decision to highlight the many ways in which America’s elite schools fall short of their meritocratic potential.

Read it.

Lots of people are arguing about whether college is good, or whether it should be the default, or whether it should look different than it looks now, or whether it’s even a worthwhile institution in the first place. This is no doubt a worthy and important line of inquiry, and yet I am sometimes tempted to bonk such people in the face with the juicy, swollen, succulent, painfully ripe fruit hanging much lower right in front of them: high school.

As a bare minimum, high school is supposed to give kids somewhere to go while their parents are at work and keep them from ending up pregnant, in jail, or dead. Unlike college, which trades off against starting your career immediately, you have to go to high school (or the homeschool equivalent) regardless. And by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there. So you’ve got a four-year chunk during which you’re smart enough to learn anything a novice adult version of you could; don’t have to support yourself with a salary; and have access to a space with lots of peers and shared materials for free. This is absolutely tantalizing, and yet the default model of high school is something we sleepwalked into and thus are utterly wasting.

The thing we’ve landed on, at least in richer areas, is for high school to be used for getting most of its students into college and a few of them into elite colleges, which means teaching them enough to get high standardized test scores and offering them a wide slate of organized activities that they can join and then list on their applications. But if high school is supposed to prepare you for college, and college is supposed to prepare you for the real world, then it’s suspicious that high school looks so little like the real world. So at least one of three things is true: high school isn’t doing a good job of preparing you to get admitted to college; or college admissions officers aren’t doing a good job of picking students who will succeed in college; or college isn’t doing a good job of setting you up to succeed in real life. Regardless of which it is, the best strategy to set yourself on the path toward a successful, happy life as a teenager is to spend your high school years directly trying to create such a life. If this prepares you for college, great; if it doesn’t, then there’s probably something wrong with college.

New York Times.

We might assume that legacy admissions help privileged students at the expense of underprivileged ones. But I would wager that legacy students, if eliminated, are far more likely to be replaced by other kinds of privileged students than by underprivileged ones. And in ways that are far less obvious, legacy students, with their deep social and cultural connections, are part of the reason less advantaged students get so much out of elite schools.

…

Start by asking yourself what students get out of elite schools. I would like to believe that the most important benefit of these colleges is the exceptional knowledge that professors can deliver in the classroom. But if elite schools delivered special intellectual growth and professional training — what social scientists call human capital — privileged students would benefit greatly from them. And there’s no good evidence that they do.

Instead, other forms of capital play a bigger role: symbolic capital (the value of being associated with prestigious institutions), social capital (the value of your network) and cultural capital (the value of exposure to high-status practices and mores). Graduating from an elite school pays off on all three counts: It affiliates you with an illustrious organization, offers you connections to people with friends in high places and acculturates you in the conventions and etiquettes of high-status settings.

L. A. Times.

Doing the jobs that Americans won’t get a chance to do.

Read it.

If you had to estimate the dimensions of a room without the benefit of a tape measure, you might walk its perimeter heel to toe, counting your steps. To estimate the height of a wall, you might count hand spans from floor to ceiling. In doing so, you’d join a long human tradition. Most human societies around the word—perhaps all—have employed similar body-based measurement strategies, according to a first-of-its-kind study published today in Science. And these informal body-based systems can persist for centuries after a culture has introduced standardized units of measure because, the authors argue, they often lead to more ergonomic designs of tools, clothing, and other personalized items.

 

Read it.

It wasn’t President Macron who brought six days of rioting in France to an end, nor the brave bands of mothers who called for calm in some of the inner-city estates. It wasn’t even the presence of 45,000 police and gendarmes on the streets that persuaded the rioters, arsonists, vandals and looters to stand down. Instead, it seems that it was the drug gangs who decided enough is enough. Having so many boys in blue patrolling the streets was bad for business and so gang leaders exerted their influence and ordered the young hoodlums back to their bedrooms.

That, at least, was the news broken to Macron at the start of this week when he dropped by a police station in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. Pressing the flesh with his worn-out police officers, Macron asked: “But these kids, who do they listen to?” Back came the response: “The dealers, Monsieur le President.”

It was a brutal reality check for the president of the Republic — and an embarrassing one given that it was widely picked up the French press.

ZMan peeks behind the curtain.

On July 4th, a Federal judge in Louisiana issued an injunction against the Federal government barring various departments from contacting social media companies with regards to censoring speech online. This is a practice that started in the Trump years but took off under the Biden administration. On a daily basis government actors contact the censors at these companies and tell them which posts to remove, users to ban and topics that are to be suppressed that day.

In the Trump years, this practice consisted mostly of government officials calling to complain about things that were obviously fake about the White House. Given the lunacy of the people running these companies, the complaints were ignored, but the complaints from fellow partisans were not ignored. A working relationship between the censors and the FBI, DHS and other agencies evolved. Under Biden it is one click away from being enshrined in government regulation.

Most people alive today remember when the media proudly refused to cooperate with the government on this stuff. They would make a big deal about not going along with government requests to suppress stories. It was all a lie, of course, but they felt the need to make a big show of it. The secret police had long ago infiltrated the major media companies to shape the news. Operation Shamrock and Operation Mockingbird we both used to control the media.

Read it.

In April of this year, Christine Lagarde gave a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in which she warned that “we are witnessing the fragmentation of the global economy into competing blocs”. Regular readers of this Daily will be familiar with the speech; we made quite a big deal of it at the time, because it is a big deal! We have been warning of this fragmentation for a number of years. Great Power competition is back, and we’re not going back to the halcyon days of US hegemony, ever-liberalising trade, secularly lower inflation and assumptions of the death of history anytime soon.

The Lagarde speech will be rightly viewed as a watershed in years ahead. Much like “whatever it takes”, or comments from Paul Volcker in the late 1970’s when he told students at Warwick University that “it is tempting to look at the market as an impartial arbiter… But balancing the requirements of a stable international system against the desirability of retaining freedom of action for national policy, a number of countries, including the United States, opted for the latter… Controlled disintegration in the world economy is a legitimate objective for the 1980s.”

We’re watching the global economy being re-organized before our eyes and, like Volcker in the 1970’s, policy-makers are prioritizing freedom of action for national policy. Increasingly, we are seeing financial markets and global trade being more clearly subordinated to national policy objectives. There are no atheists in a foxhole, and no free-market liberals in a multipolar world (at least not in the halls of power).

The Critic.

In England, it costs over 40 percent of the average person’s take-home pay to put a one-year-old child in daycare. In London, where nursery schools can cost upwards of £20,000 per year per child, that figure is even higher. These costs are not just steep: for many, they are literally impossible to manage. Even selling a kidney — something the most desperate person can only do once — might not cover a year’s fees for one child.

This has predictable consequences. Many young couples take it as read that they will have to leave London if they want to have children; either that or they just don’t do it at all. Birth rates in the UK, which have been below replacement levels for the last half-century, reach new record lows every year, with fertility in the capital even lower than the rest of the country. Many specifically cite the impossibility of paying for childcare as the reason they are not reproducing.

Allowing costs to remain this high is a form of slow-motion national suicide. But most discussion of this issue seems to focus on subsidising this enormous cost, rather than wondering why it is so high in the first place. In the latest budget, the Conservatives announced a plan to pour more money into the system with a radical new expansion of subsidies to much younger children, an approach which Labour seem likely to mimic in their manifesto for the next general election.

Read it.

When looking at how gun laws across the United States have changed over the past few years, there’s a lot to be hopeful for. Just this year, Nebraska became the 27th state to pass a “constitutional carry” bill into law, following in the footsteps of Florida, which passed similar legislation just a few days prior.

The residents of Florida and Nebraska now join 25 other states where American citizens can freely carry firearms concealed without needing a permit, just as our founding fathers intended when they wrote the Second Amendment into the Constitution.

Those two States won’t be the last to pass permitless carry bills either. There are several different bills at different stages of the legislative process in multiple states nationwide.

But let’s not forget, just a mere 15 years ago — the Second Amendment was not considered an individual right. If we look further back to the 1980s, there was only one constitutional carry state, Vermont. In addition, very few states would even allow carrying with a permit.

The Spectator.

Allowing a psychopath to form a private army of violent criminals may not, on reflection, have been Vladimir Putin’s greatest idea. But Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutinous Wagner Group is by no means the only private army operating in Russia. Over the past couple of months no fewer than five armies have been fighting on Russian soil. Only one of them, the official Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, is directly subordinate to the Kremlin.

BBC.

The Orkney Islands could change their status in the UK or even become a self-governing territory of Norway under new proposals.
A motion will go before the council next week to investigate “alternative forms of governance”.
Council leader James Stockan said Orkney does not get fair funding with its current relationship within the UK.
He wants to look at Crown Dependencies like the Channel Islands and overseas territories like the Falkland Islands.

They were, once.