Read it.

On the wall of his living room in Lier, Belgium, Werner van Beethoven keeps a family tree. Thirteen generations unfurl along its branches, including one that shows his best known relative, born in 1770: Ludwig van Beethoven, who forever redefined Western music with compositions such as the Fifth Symphony, Für Elise, and others. Yet that sprig held a hereditary, and potentially scandalous, secret.

That Beethoven, Werner learned to his dismay in 2023, is biologically unrelated to Werner and his contemporary kin. This uncomfortable fact was brought to light by Maarten Larmuseau, a geneticist at KU Leuven who specializes in answering a question relatively few others have explored: How often do women have children with men they’re not partnered with?

In most societies, kinship is at least partly socially constructed, and for example can include adoption and stepfamilies. Yet questions about biological paternity have roiled families and fueled cultural anxieties for eons. Male authors have written about hidden paternity for millennia, including in Greek dramas and The Canterbury Tales; William Shakespeare and Molière wrote plays about it. Knowing a child’s biological father is also important for forensically identifying cadavers, recording accurate medical histories, and charting the manifold ways in which people structure families around the world.

Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist.

I’m a professor of economics at George Mason University and today I’m going to share my screen and we are going to be talking about President Trump’s crypto executive order and what it means for American innovation, crypto taxation, and the global dominance of the dollar. Okay, so let’s get going. I’m going to pull several key sentences from the crypto order, including the first promoting and protecting the sovereignty of the United States dollar, including through actions to promote the development and growth of lawful and legitimate dollar backed stable coins worldwide. So first of all, what’s a stable coin? Well, we all know the price of Bitcoin and Bitcoin fluctuates. It’s 120, it’s 80 today. It goes up and down. It’s actually not a good transactions medium for that reason. So despite what Satoshi Nakamoto wanted, it’s not a good transactions medium. Stable coins, in contrast to Bitcoin are designed to maintain a stable value, typically relative to an already established currency.

Know the feeling.

Read it.

NATO is turning to the ongoing war in Ukraine for lessons as the alliance works to shift its strategy going forward. Tom Goffus, NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Operations, presented five such lessons during a panel this week at the Air and Space Forces (AFA) Air Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado.

“I got to NATO one month before the invasion, so [I had a] front row seat watching the whole thing,” Goffus told the audience. “I think it’s a critical topic.”

Prior to that, Goffus, a former U.S. Air Force F-15 pilot, served as Policy Director on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy, National Security Staff Director for Strategic and Eastern European Affairs, and Senior Military Advisor for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department.

Before unveiling his own takeaways, Goffus talked about the value of Ukraine’s acoustic sensor network for the detection of low-altitude detection of drones and cruise missiles.

“Essentially, Ukraine is covering its entire nation, 1,000 meters and below, with acoustic sensors for less than 50 million euros (nearly $54 million),” Goffus gushed. “It’s crazy what they’re doing with this.”

Many problems fix themselves, if given enough time. Think of it as evolution in action.

Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland:

Five hundred million Europeans begging 300 million Americans to defend them from 140 million Russians. If you can count, count on yourself. Not in isolation, but with full awareness of your potential. Today, in Europe, we do not lack economic strength, people, but the belief that we are a global power.

UnHerd.

The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is one of the most forthright individuals in Silicon Valley. Yet even this billionaire maintains that his fellow elites have been muzzled. Interviewed by Joe Rogan last November, Marc Andreessen said that many of his fellow tech entrepreneurs had been debanked by the Biden administration. The Obama administration, he said, had taken such action against marijuana businesses, escorts and gun shops; Biden’s, he said, pursued tech founders, preventing them from receiving payments, making them, or buying insurance. “This is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump,” he told Rogan.

Debanking is when a bank closes an account in order to censor or punish the customer for political or religious views. The banks, in these cases, are typically responding to ideological pressure or to perceived reputational risk. As you might imagine, anger over debanking rapidly merged with concerns shared by crypto companies, which have also contended with access issues to traditional banking. One CEO shared a letter in which the bank Chase said it was closing his company’s account.

The complaints about debanking were echoed and amplified by Donald Trump. His wife, Melania, claims that she herself was debanked. More broadly, the MAGA movement has ample experience of being booted off social media platforms. The matter of tech debanking, therefore, has been rolled into existing MAGA complaints. By this account, the US government has restricted freedom of expression via several coercive means.

Read it.

“Their billionaires can’t own the Panama Canal ports. Only our billionaires can own the Panama Canal ports.”

Read it.

In the case-control study, individual-level analysis resulted in a hazard of skin cancer (of any type except basal cell carcinoma) that was 1.62 times higher among tattooed individuals (95% CI: 1.08–2.41). Twin-matched analysis of 14 twin pairs discordant for tattoo ink exposure and skin cancer showed HR?=?1.33 (95% CI: 0.46–3.84). For skin cancer and lymphoma, increased hazards were found for tattoos larger than the palm of a hand: HR?=?2.37 (95% CI: 1.11–5.06) and HR?=?2.73 (95% CI: 1.33–5.60), respectively. In the cohort study design, individual-level analysis resulted in a hazard ratio of 3.91 (95% CI: 1.42–10.8) for skin cancer and 2.83 (95% CI: 1.30–6.16) for basal cell carcinoma.

As with most such studies, this documents correlation, not causation, and therefore isn’t worth as much as it pretends to be.

Nevertheless, it’s comforting to know that, like tobacco and alcohol and opiates, this tends to be a self-correcting problem. Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

While we think of today’s metric system (SI) as mostly a modern invention (1960), we have been led to believe for many years now that its most fundamental base unit, the metre, originated in France in 1793, and represented one ten-millionth of the earth’s quadrant (the distance from the earth’s equator to the North Pole, as measured at sea level) . Yet just a few years ago, the late Pat Naughtin discovered that the proposal for a universal standard of length very close to the metre may in fact have originated much earlier, via Bishop John Wilkins, an English cleric and philosopher, and a member of the Royal Society, in the mid-1600s. Recent comments on Metric Views now bring even that assertion into doubt, with the discovery of a measuring device called the wand having been around much longer still.

It is known that the wand, divided into ten segments, was almost exactly, to within a few millimetres, the same length as today’s metre, and that it was used as long as 1000 years ago. But what if all these versions of the metre were simply the rediscovery (or the handing down over time) of a standard measure, equating to the metre, that was invented in Egypt over 4500 years ago?

When we think of units of measure used in Biblical times, the cubit usually springs to mind. In fact, opponents of metric conversion have often referred to the cubit, in jest at least, as having as much validity as the metre. Such people should be careful for what they wish for, for, as we shall see, the cubit and the metre may in fact be directly related – and remarkably both are directly traceable to the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Alex Tabarrok.

Robert Higgs coined the term regime uncertainty to illustrate the challenge faced by business under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, when a flurry of unpredictable legislation such as the expansive and often unclear mandates of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), attempts at court packing, abrupt tax increases, and shifting labor policies, meant businesses couldn’t reliably forecast returns or risks. Uncertainty magnified bad policy causing investment to collapse and remain unprecedently low.

For the eleven-year period of 1930 to 1940, net private investment totaled minus $3.1 billion. Only in 1941 did net private investment ($9.7 billion) exceed the 1929 amount.

The data leave little doubt. During the 1930s, private investment remained at depths never plumbed in any other decade for which data exist.

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The majority of our exports to China are raw products like petroleum and soybeans, the two largest categories being exported, while the majority of China’s exports to the United States are manufactured products like computers and other technical equipment.

We send corn and sorghum to China, they ship us back batteries and toys. We sell them coal and ores, they sell us circuit boards and car parts. We ship them tanned hides and meat, and then receive back optical fibers and medical equipment.

Advanced societies buy raw resources from backward societies and sell them back the manufactured goods. We export scrap metal to China, they send us back steel. We send them scrap copper, they ship us back the equipment of which that copper is a component. We export polymers and import the finished ‘Made in China’ plastic products that fill up our stores.

Read it.

Not tired of winning yet….

Quillette.

Thirty-odd yards ahead of me, a body lay on the sidewalk in a large puddle of blood. I joined a loose throng of locals, mostly adolescent males, walking towards the mishap. A burly black sergeant with a commanding air stood over the corpse of an Asian shopkeeper while several subordinates established a perimeter. It looked like the shopkeeper had been robbed, chased the felon outside, and was shot dead for his efforts. The big cop slowly scanned the young black males who had gathered to watch the unfolding drama. He seemed to pause here and there as if to memorise faces. Then he shook his head and snarled, “If I get my hands on the nigger who did this…”

He left the sentence unfinished, but the way he glowered at the youths in the crowd left no doubt about his intended meaning. We now live in an era when every instance of police brutality fast becomes a cause célèbre on TikTok. But back then, it was understood that cops would mete out street justice to those who committed heinous crimes like the one I’d stumbled upon. In a scene from the contemporaneous Joe Wambaugh series Police Story, a plainclothes detective at a crime scene gets on the police radio and calls for an ambulance. The uncooperative perp he has been questioning asks what the ambulance is for, to which the cop replies, “Because of the leg you broke getting into the squad car.”

Having no appointment to rush to, I studied the arriving auditors of unnatural death as they went about their business, photographing, measuring, dusting, and collecting evidence. The scene was, in its way, as hypnotic as the flashing lights—but it was not what I found unforgettable about that day (I’d seen dead bodies on sidewalks before, and would see them again). Rather, what stays with me even a half-century later is this: I grew up in the Brooklyn of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing vintage, yet the first time I heard someone call someone else a nigger and really mean it, the word came out of the mouth of a black cop, who spat it at dozens of other young black men.

Alex Tabarrok.

…we started with ChatGPT, but are now seeing a proliferation of industry specific tools. Some people have called these startups “LLM wrappers”; those people are missing the point. The O ring model in economics shows that in a process with interdependent tasks, the overall output or productivity is limited by the least effective component, not just in terms of cost but in the success of the entire system. In a similar vein, we see these new industry specific AI tools as ensuring that individual industries can properly realize the economic impact of LLMs, and that the contextual, data, and workflow integration will prove enduringly valuable.

Examples in this vein include Abridge, Nabla, and DeepScribe, which are rethinking medical and patient care, while Studeo is reshaping how real estate businesses market property. Architects are using SketchPro to instantly render designs with simple text prompts, restaurants are using Slang.ai to take phone reservations, and property managers are unifying customer support with HostAl. Harvey, whose Al legal assistant is used by many Fortune 500 companies, quadrupled revenue in 2024.

Read it.

The title of this post is a reference to a Scandinavian sexploitation film from the early 1970s called The Sinful Dwarf. I never saw the flick — that sort of movie doesn’t appeal to me — but back in the day I saw a lurid ad for it in the back pages of the entertainment section of The Washington Post and the name stuck in my memory.

The sins of the Dwarf of Kiev are of a different sort. Mr. Zelensky got himself into hot water on Friday when he chose to get contentious with President Trump and Vice President Vance in the Oval Office. Maybe he forgot that he had come to the capital of the American empire to beg favors for Ukraine, and decided to bite the hand that fed him.

Or maybe he didn’t really make the decision. Maybe the contretemps was set up, prepared in advance, at least in its general outline. Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance may have been waiting for an opportune moment to steer events in a different direction, one that had been decided well in advance.

Jonathan Turley.

Late Saturday, D.C. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that President Donald Trump violated federal law in firing Hampton Dellinger, head of the Office of Special Counsel. Jackson’s decision is forceful, well-written, and challengeable under existing precedent. Indeed, it may have just set up an appeal that both presidents and professors have long waited for to reinforce presidential powers.

Trump has been doing things that formally Presidents are allowed to do but that most of his predecessors have shied away from because doing so would be inconsistent with ‘how we do things today’. At the very least, it will hammer out (through the courts and otherwise) just what the President can lawfully do.

Read it.

Is the rest of the world entitled to US money and US security? This is the question that’s never asked when the establishment media rages about Donald Trump’s opposition to continue the status quo in Ukraine. Consider for a moment the situation from the perspective of friends (allies).

Imagine a wealthy man is approached by his friends often for loans which these friends rarely pay back. He obliges out of generosity, but begins to suspect his friends are only interested in his wallet. So, he makes an announcement that he’s trying to get his finances in order and will not be lending any money for the next 90 days.

Do his friends respond with understanding? No. They call the man a criminal and cry endlessly about how their families will starve and the world will fall apart if he doesn’t keep filling their bottomless gullets with cash. They even suggest he is deserving of retribution for daring to ask them to support themselves.

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Wall Street Journal.

In America’s most surprising cutting-edge classes, students pursue hands-on work with wood, metals and machinery, getting a jump on lucrative old-school careers.

School districts around the U.S. are spending tens of millions of dollars to expand and revamp high-school shop classes for the 21st century. They are betting on the future of manual skills overlooked in the digital age, offering vocational-education classes that school officials say give students a broader view of career prospects with or without college.

With higher-education costs soaring and white-collar workers under threat by generative AI, the timing couldn’t be better.

The Washington Poop, a Voice of the Crust, has been invaded by a sane person. Let’s hope he gets out alive.

On the morning of March 10, I intend to take a shower, turn my face up to the spray and burble, “Thank God for the Guardian!” Not because I admire the left-wing politics of the British newspaper, where they seem to long for the days when the Brits’ income tax rate topped 90 percent and Nigel Farage hadn’t been born. No, March 10 will mark precisely one year since the Great Shower Debate ended.

Or at least it ended for me when the Guardian published an article with the immortal headline “High shower pressure can help people save water, study suggests.”

Intrepid researchers at the University of Surrey had placed sensors in 290 showers around campus, recording data for 39 weeks from 86,421 individual shower sessions. “Water consumption,” the study found, sensationally, “was reduced by up to 56% with high water pressure.”

Read it.

Some things in life are so deeply ingrained in our daily existence that we rarely stop to question them.

They are simply there, operating in the background, so fundamental to our existence that they feel as natural as the air we breathe.

We use them, rely on them, and move through the world assuming they are exactly as they should be.

For example, everyone is familiar with the phrase “Money makes the world go ‘round.”

This is rarely questioned and is rather accepted as self-evident.

Every day, you wake up, pay your bills, go to work, and check your bank account,—believing that you understand the system you operate within.

But have you ever stopped to ask yourself: What is money, really?

Not the textbook definition.

Not the economic theory you learned in school.

But the truth.

ZMan:

In time, Volodymyr Zelensky may be on that list of mercurial figures who somehow ended up on the world stage, only to come to a bad end. The former actor and comedian, who was never all that good at either role, has become both the indispensable man and the clog in the drain of history that must be removed for things to take their proper course. The great struggle now is between those two opposing realities, which helps explain last week.

The neocons turned Zelensky into a folk hero so he could be the point around which Western politicians would rally. Then he became the clearing house for cash that flowed into Ukraine, some of which flowed back out into the pockets of European and American politicians. This only worked if there was a war with Russia, so they worked with Zelensky to make negotiations with Russia impossible, short of the unconditional surrender of the Russians.

For Project Ukraine, Zelensky became the indispensable man. Trump comes to power, and he wants to wrap up Ukraine and move onto other things, but to do that he has to broker a deal between Ukraine and Russia. Of course, Zelensky cannot do this as his very existence rests on this war with Russia being a permanent feature of life. It is why his peace plans always revolve around the West joining the Ukrainians in the fight on the ground.

The blowup on Friday now creates a serious problem for the Europeans. Despite the tough talk from the soy boys and girl bosses, they cannot risk a genuine split with Washington. They think Trump is bluffing about cutting off Ukraine, but once they realize that he is not bluffing, they will confront the same issue Trump has observed. The thing clogging the pipes, preventing things from flowing in the proper direction is Zelensky, which means he will have to go.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

One cartel leader says he’s trying to figure out how to protect his family in case the American military strikes inside Mexico. Another says he’s already gone into hiding, rarely leaving his home. Two young men who produce fentanyl for the cartel say they have shut down all their drug labs.

A barrage of arrests, drug seizures and lab busts by the Mexican authorities in recent months has struck the behemoth Sinaloa Cartel, according to Mexican officials and interviews with six cartel operatives, forcing at least some of its leaders to scale back on fentanyl production in Sinaloa state, their stronghold.

The cartels have sown terror across Mexico and caused untold damage in the United States. But here in Culiacán, the state capital, the dynamic seems to be shifting, at least for now. Cartel operatives say they’ve had to move labs to other areas of the country or temporarily shut down production.

“You can’t be calm, you can’t even sleep, because you don’t know when they’ll catch you,” said one high-ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel who, like other cartel operatives, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of capture.’

Sometimes the system works.

Read it.

The best way to understand Trump is also the simplest: he’s a businessman. From that perspective, little of what he’s doing is as inexplicable or surprising as many make it out to be. The inexplicability arises from general ignorance of business. Most Americans have little knowledge or understanding of how private American businesses work, although they generates the majority of the U.S.’s $29 trillion GDP and employ many of them.

Trump is now CEO of the federal government. That enterprise has over $36 trillion in direct liabilities and unfunded liabilities in the hundreds of trillions. Its cost of credit is rising and debt service is taking an ever-expanding share of its revenues. Self evidently, it cannot continue on its present course.

The common element of successful business turnarounds is that they don’t emerge from slow, incremental changes from within the system. Somebody comes in and administers shock therapy. Turnaround artists are never popular. Lots of people are fired, unprofitable operations discarded, finances tightened, business philosophies rethought, and the company’s direction radically reset. Because the company’s situation is dire, this all has to be done quickly, with shareholders howling and creditors pounding at the door.

Zman explains it all to you.

One of the many failings of conservatism was the insistence that with just the right argument using just the right data points, the people they called the left would throw down their weapons and embrace them as brothers. At the core of what later became known as civic nationalism was the assertion that all political actors are looking for objective truth and therefore would respond to it. The reason for political disputes was the failure to flesh out the facts.

Politic is about morality, not facts. It is also about power, specifically the power to impose your moral vision on the rest. Facts have little to do with politics and are often seen by ideologues as a threat. The diversity cult looks at the FBI crime stats as a direct threat to their project, so they worked to suppress them. The flat earth people insist that intelligence testing is a conspiracy of some sort. They label it “race-science” because adding the words “race” to anything anathematizes it.

Another thing that the conservative view of politics got wrong is that it left people with only two choices when evaluating left-wing rhetoric. Either the people chanting about white power structures were lying or they were deeply confused. In both cases, it was assumed that they had to know the truth and that the truth would either set them straight or force them to stop lying. Untold man hours were wasted trying to explain the truth to crazy relatives because of this.

The basic problem with modern politics is that the Right thinks the Left are wrong but the Left things the Right are evil.

UhHerd.

Few of President Trump’s actions early in his second term have provoked as much furor as the executive order freezing certain federal spending programmes. A federal trial judge in Rhode Island issued a nationwide injunction against the freeze, insisting that he intends to stop the administration from “any federal funding pause”. Five former Treasury secretaries published a protest op-ed in The New York Times, warning that “not since the Nixon administration has this type of executive action been contemplated”.

They’re right about that. Trump’s assertion of the president’s power to pause funding — the right of impoundment — reverses the standard practice of the past two generations. Team Trump aims to restore the traditional exercise of presidential authority to impound congressional spending, a power which was restricted by the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. In doing so, the Trumpians aim to put an end to what political analyst Kevin Phillips called the “Watergate warp” that weakened American presidents, Republican and Democratic, pulling them down from the Caesarist heights summited by pre-Watergate chief executives.

The principle behind impoundments is simple. Congress has the authority to set the ceiling on spending, the thinking runs, but not the floor. If the goal of a programme is achieved without spending the full amount authorised by the legislative branch, the president can decide not to spend the difference. So argued FDR, a frequent user of impoundments. Forcing the president to spend every last dime, he said, “would take from the chief executive every incentive for good management and the practice of commonsense economy”.

If the legal battles over Trump’s executive order freezing some spending lead to a Supreme Court decision clarifying the constitutionality of impoundments — and holding the 1974 act unconstitutional — it would be a huge win for the administration, and they are gearing up for it. But legal battles are downstream of political ones. In Trump’s first term, the president was frequently stymied by coordinated media, legal, and security-apparatus efforts to generate public outcry. After some bluster, Trump usually withdrew to a more conventional position. But he is pulling no punches this time around, and noticeably, he doesn’t need to. The American people appear much less susceptible to supposed threats to “our democracy” than they were in 2017, and Trump’s approval ratings have climbed since he re-entered the Oval Office.

Read it.

It is abundantly clear that the US-NATO umbrella over Europe has achieved the complete infantilization of the Continent. Lacking the need to do anything serious in terms of core national interest (i.e., defense), Europe has entirely lost the plot.

There is no longer any justification for propping up Germany, or any nation that refuses to invest in its own national defense. Beyond that: the US should not be defending illiberal countries that arrest people for “mean tweets.” If the US pulls out, Europe gets the very sharp shock that it needs if it is going to wake up, defend against Russia, reduce the Nanny State, and deport Muslims.

Truly: the US should leave Europe – for its own good.

Concur.

I’m curious what the ‘Other’ category includes. Black, white, Asian, and ‘Hispanic’ would appear to be exhaustive.

Wall Street Journal, a Voice of the Crust about half the time.

Many Americans are pinching pennies, exhausted by high prices and stubborn inflation. The well-off are spending with abandon.
The top 10% of earners—households making about $250,000 a year or more—are splurging on everything from vacations to designer handbags, buoyed by big gains in stocks, real estate and other assets.

Those consumers now account for 49.7% of all spending, a record in data going back to 1989, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics. Three decades ago, they accounted for about 36%.

All this means that economic growth is unusually reliant on rich Americans continuing to shell out. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, estimated that spending by the top 10% alone accounted for almost one-third of gross domestic product.

Makes you wonder why Democrats and other progressives keep trying to drive rich people out of the country. (Go Where You’re Treated Best)

Read it.

The last two commercial airline disasters had a woman in control of an aircraft, making critical errors. Both were beneficiaries of DEI policies that leapfrogged them ahead of more qualified candidates on the basis of their sex. In the first collision, the Blackhawk pilot did not remain spatially aware of her rotorcraft’s surroundings, and flew right into the path of the descending CRJ. And in the second collision, the rookie pilot, who may have been confused by the blowing snow, failed to flare her aircraft, and she slammed it into the ground. That everyone lived was a miracle, plain and simple.

This did not have to happen. Indeed, it should not have happened. It is a fact that men and women are different. And one of the basic physiological differences is that men have better spatial awareness for moving objects than women, while women have better color awareness than men. More than that (and highly relevant for the DCA Disaster): Men have an advantage over women in night vision due to the physical structure of the eye.

Of course, the Blank Slate crowd (not to mention the ‘assigned gender’ crowd) won’t accept any assertion of physical differences between men and women.

Read it.

Actually, Clinton was one of the better Republican Presidents we’ve ever had.

Read it.

Gee, I wonder why?

ZMan:

Trucks are like guns and dogs. You always have more than you need, but you never have more than you want.

Read it.

The U.S. Marshals Service has deputized members of White House adviser Elon Musk’s private security detail that provides them with some of the same rights and protections as federal law enforcement officials.

CNN reported on Friday that multiple members of the detail have been made special deputies by the Marshals Service, possibly enabling them to carry weapons on federal grounds and making the agency legally liable for mistakes or errors made by the detail, according to a law enforcement source.

Several of the news outlets’ sources said that the level of security around Musk has surprised White House staffers and people close to the president, some of who say that his detail is nearly the size of President Donald Trump’s.

Billionaires are always targets. If they don’t have security in place, they’re fools.

Unherd.

While Cruse is rarely remembered today, his name was often mentioned in the same breath as those of Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X in the Sixties and Seventies. As a writer and professor (who achieved his position without a college degree), he was deeply influential in establishing the field of black studies. The Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. reports that as an undergraduate in the Seventies, he was assigned Cruse’s masterpiece, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, in three separate courses. Indeed, Gates said he “received the call to be an intellectual through Harold Cruse”.

Cruse was unlike the dissenters from the civil-rights consensus we have come to expect. He harboured few fantasies about bootstrapping self-improvement in the manner promoted by black conservatives such as Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele. Nor did he have patience for black radicals’ overheated rhetoric extolling a black separatist utopia. Rather, the problem with the civil-rights consensus for Cruse was that it advanced the interests of the black professional class over and against those of the black masses.

Middle-class professionals, black or white, push their particular material interests in the name of universal ideals. In the case of black professionals, Cruse thought, the earnestness — and thus the self-dealing — are doubly intensified. They serve at the leisure of the white middle class, which, in turn, serves those in the commanding heights of economy and society. As a result, there are very few public voices advancing the genuine interests of poor and working-class black people.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

In every human organization there are things that are true but for one reason or another, everyone agrees to ignore them. It may be that these things are just annoying, like the personal ticks of the boss. In other cases, they are things that would put the organization at risk if people tried to address them. Human systems often must ignore things that contradict the logic of the system.

The American political order as established by the Constitution has holes that the Framers chose to ignore because they had no choice. The final results were a compromise between thirteen states that often had serious conflicts on things, conflicts that could not be reconciled, so they were ignored. The most obvious one is the issue of slavery that was resolved at a later date.

The managerial system that is under assault by Trump was made possible by ignoring things that were essential to its existence. The creation of executive agencies and who controls them is a good example. For fifty years everyone in Washington pretended that these agencies were a fourth branch of government. Trump has stopped pretending and is challenging a core assumption of managerialism.

This is why you don’t want to live in Europe.

You want to Go Where You’re Treated Best.

ZMan tries to keep up.

One of the new features of life since Trump came back to town is that things move quickly and if you are not careful, they will move without you. Ten thousand USAID employees learned this in week one. One day they were organizing the resistance and then the next day they were setting up a LinkedIn account. The first month of the Trump presidency has been a whirlwind of change. This is creating two classes of people, one who keep pace and one who are left behind.

One of those being left behind is Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He now finds himself on the wrong side of the Trump’s friend-enemy distinction. He made the mistake of thinking the new boss was the old boss and his tricks would keep working. When those tricks did not work, he made the very big mistake of saying the new boss was misinformed. Now the new boss is making it clear that Zelensky will not be part of the future. Just like that, Zelensky is being reassigned to the dustbin of history.

The reason that Zelensky has so quickly gone from being the indispensable man to the guest who refuses to leave is that long before he was told about any of this, decisions were made about his future. For months prior to the election Trump would say he had a plan to end the war in Ukraine, but he refused to elaborate on the grounds that it was not prudent to talk about it publicly. The only clue he provided was that the war would never have happened if he had been president.

People dismissed this as hubris, but it was an important clue. If Trump had been president, he would have demanded to talk with the Russians and he would never have elevated Zelensky to the status of indispensable man. Project Ukraine was only possible by first anathematizing Russia and then turning Zelensky into a heroic figure at the point of the spear resisting the evil Russians. Remove that friend-enemy set up and the war never gets started.

 

Quillette.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) originated in higher education, but its political relevance has become more than academic, especially in the United States. Although CRT sprung from legal scholarship, proponents have pushed for its wholescale integration into education, medical training, psychology, and the social sciences as a whole.

CRT has also been the subject of intense political controversy. Many US states have introduced bills to restrict its teaching, sometimes on the grounds that it is not “factual and objective” or that it can “distort historical events.” As a result, both proponents and opponents have a vested interest in defining CRT in whatever way supports their agendas.

Indeed, several media outlets and organisations have published simplified explainers framing CRT either positively or negatively. These conflicting accounts make it hard to tell what critical race theory is—let alone formulate coherent opinions about CRT-related policy.

I’ve always thought that Critical Race Theory was ‘proglodytes criticizing white people as racists no matter what they do’, which seemed to fit all the relevant behaviors. Occam’s Razor and all that….

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The Trump administration is systematically exploiting loopholes to effectively keep much of the president’s blanket spending freezes in place, accounts by officials and court filings show, despite restraining orders from judges who have told agencies to disregard the directives.

The administration’s strategy is to have political appointees embedded in various agencies invoke other legal authorities to pause spending, while posturing as if those officials had undertaken the efforts independent of President Trump’s original directives.

In short, critics say, administration officials are paying lip service to complying with the letter of the court orders while violating their spirit. The tactic shows how aggressively and nimbly the Trump administration is working to keep funds jammed up, and the complexity judges face if they want to compel the administration to unblock the money.

It would appear that Trump has learned a great deal about politics as-it-is-played by the Deep State, and has assembled a team of cunning operators to do unto others as it was done unto them. The apparatchiks, of course, think this is terribly unfair. “MOMMMEEE! Donald hit me back!”

Read it.

The findings revealed a stark contrast between stated preferences and actual choices. While both daughters and parents initially rated intelligence as more important than attractiveness in an ideal partner, their selections told a different story. The majority of daughters (72.6%) and parents (59.6%) chose the more attractive man, regardless of his intelligence level, suggesting that physical appearance exerts a stronger influence in constrained decisions than individuals consciously recognize.

The reference to ‘parents’ in the headline is misleading: “The researchers recruited 201 daughters (ages 18-33) and 187 parents, primarily mothers, from a university community and social media.” [emphasis added]. So the finding relates to women, mothers and daughters, rather than parents equally.