Theodore Dalrymple.

Last week I reviewed a book published by an American academic press—it hardly matters the title or author, for in the respect to which I wish to draw your attention they are almost all the same these days. With few exceptions, they capitalize the word black when it refers to a person, while keeping white (or brown) in the lower case.

This is no doubt a fashion, but it does not seem a purely spontaneous one. If there is no central enforcement, there might as well be one. The presses have been invaded by the termites of wokeness so thoroughly that there is no need of central direction.

It is unlikely in any case that the authors put up much of a fight, if any, against the imposition; most of them probably don’t even see it as an imposition. I suspect, however, that any author who did want to resist the fashion would soon be faced by a stiff fight, which he would probably lose. His desire to be published would overcome his scruples on a matter of principle.

The American Mind.

Former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump pledged to end birthright citizenship in a recent campaign announcement, promising to sign an executive order on his first day in office to prevent “the future children of illegal aliens” from receiving automatic citizenship. The proposal promises to clarify at least a century of constitutional ambiguity on the subject of American citizenship and its automatic bestowal upon anyone born on the soil of the nation. Immigration has emerged as the most important domestic issue in the 2024 election cycle, with estimates of upwards of ten million illegal aliens flooding the country under the Biden regime. The magnitude of the ongoing crisis far surpasses the number of illegal border crossings in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election, when then-candidate Trump first proposed the idea in response to a crisis whose scale was itself unprecedented for the time. Nearly a decade later, the problem has only worsened. The need for dramatic action—even more than in Trump’s first term—is palpable.

The idea that the Fourteenth Amendment does not license birthright citizenship based on its proper, constitutional interpretation has found support from both legal scholars and political historians. The text of the amendment itself reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Of controversy is whether the phrase “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” should be read in conjunction with—“and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” As scholars John Eastman and Michael Anton, as well as others, have persuasively argued, the plain meaning of the text itself requires that both elements of that constructive phrase be satisfied in order to qualify for the fruits of citizenship. In other words, a person must not only be born “in the United States”—i.e., the geographical region over which the laws of the United States apply—but also be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” To fully qualify for citizenship, a person born within the United States must owe no allegiance to any other sovereign—he or she must, in other words, exclusively qualify under the laws of the United States alone.

Read it.

Unless there’s a war going on, developing new or improved military equipment or weapons is delayed by bureaucrats more concerned about avoiding mistakes than getting the job done. This leads to lots of delays. The Ukraine War has changed that for NATO nations and Russia. While the Ukrainians develop a lot of their own weapons, and always have, they need more and that is what their NATO allies are supplying. With a war going on in Ukraine, it’s easier for the NATO defense procurement officials to say yes. With their nation under attack, Ukrainian developers are coming up with new weapons and equipment as well as upgrades for items they have received from NATO nations. Ukraine can put new or improved systems to the test quickly. Sometimes the Ukrainians don’t tell their NATO allies about new items used or produced in Ukraine because the NATO countries are more likely to publicize that. The Ukrainians are more discreet, realizing that what the Russians don’t know about will hurt them more. At the start of the war the Russians underestimated Ukrainian weapons and military equipment and the Ukrainians’ ability to use it effectively. This continues to supply the Russians with unexpected and unpleasant surprises.

The Spectator.

America! The land of the free. A place for second chances. But if you’re a foreigner who wants to keep basking in the aforementioned freedom, the one thing you probably shouldn’t do is write about your excessive drug use in a memoir when you’re on a visa.

That’s the mistake made by Prince Harry, who now faces legal action that could end with his deportation back to Britain.

You’d think a royal armed with the best schooling (and lawyers) money can buy would know that. But as is clear from Prince Harry’s latest debacle, hundreds of thousands of the finest British pounds in tuition will only get you so far. In his memoir Spare he wrote that he had consumed cocaine on several occasions. “Of course. I had been doing cocaine around this time. At someone’s country house, during a shooting weekend, I’d been offered a line, and I’d done a few more since,” Harry revealed. Perhaps you could forgive him the mistakes of a wealthy seventeen-year-old. But then came the chapter in which Harry bragged about having magic mushrooms and the trip that followed while he was at Friends star Courtney Cox’s house in Los Angeles.

But he has to take his wife with him.

Read it.

A dozen years ago, National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood posed the provocative question: Could science leave the university?

Wood framed his question in practical terms. There has always been a bargain of sorts between universities and their science faculties. Universities provide the means for scientists to do science—laboratories, students, bookkeepers, etc. Scientists hustle the grant monies not only to do their work, but also to pay for universities’ costs. Wood argued that the bargain works mostly in favor of the universities, because they ride along on the substantial streams of research revenues their scientists bring in. While scientists were not exactly disadvantaged thereby, Wood suggested that they could prosper as much outside the university as in, raising the question that logically follows: who needs whom?

Since 2011, academic scientists have largely stayed put in the universities. “Who cares what universities charge for their services, as long as we are left alone to ‘do science,’” was the prevailing sentiment. Such a blasé attitude is no longer viable. While scientists busied themselves at their benches, the terms of the bargain have been steadily shifting to scientists’ disadvantage. The unique attractions of academic life are relentlessly, if slowly, falling away. Tenure is on its way out. Freedom of inquiry is increasingly constrained. Pushy administrators presume to dictate hiring, promotion, and curricular decisions that should sit squarely in scientists’ hands. Faculty governance has become mostly performative, with no power to make decisions stick—particularly budgetary and personnel decisions, which have become concentrated in the hands of administrators, governments, and favored political activists. Accreditation boards brazenly impose political agendas on faculties of science and engineering. Challenging the new racial / gender / sexual orthodoxies can snuff out careers in the blink of an eye.

Freeberg nails it.

The older people get, the more they see conservatism is the right way to go. Liberals protest that’s because old people find comfort in old things and are afraid to try anything new. The truth is, when something new works, that’s an exception and it’s rare. As a general rule, if it worked we’d already be doing it. And it’s the older people who can see it because this is a pattern of averages, and it takes time to see it. You have to watch a few plans put into practice, notice across the years what succeeds and what doesn’t.

Now obviously, if we accepted “new things are no good” as policy to be implemented and enforced across the board, in all contexts, without any exceptions asked for or granted, it would be counterproductive. But guess what? We don’t. Nobody advocates for such a thing. A conservative is not an unreasoning, strident extremist lobbying for the patent office to be shut down because everything worth inventing has been invented. Rather, a conservative asks questions. He refuses to grant the new thing the benefit of the doubt.

It is the liberal who is the strident, unreasoning extremist. “A new thing! Let’s get behind it!”

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

The most obvious response to school shootings is to allow teachers and other employees who are licensed to carry firearms to do so. Would-be mass murderers are drawn to schools largely because they are usually “gun-free zones,” which means the shooter’s gun will be the only one on the scene. But some have questioned whether many teachers would actually be willing to arm themselves, so as to make this a practical solution.

The Rand Corporation conducted a nationwide survey of nearly 1,000 teachers, which is reported on by Catrin Wigfall. Most teachers are liberals these days–no surprise, given the far-left orientation of universities’ education programs and the teachers’ unions. So 54% of Rand’s respondents said they thought arming teachers would make schools less safe.

More to the point, however, 19% of those surveyed said that if they were authorized to bear arms at their school they would do so.

History teaches us that the solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, be it a police officer or a public-spirited citizen. All of the handwavium in the Narrative media can’t obscure that simple truth.

The American Mind.

To many on the Left, the group known as “Patriot Front”—known for its surprise marches while wearing a uniform of khaki pants, blue t-shirts, and white balaclavas, displaying American flags and banners reading “Reclaim America” or similar sentiments—is a terrifying example of how rapidly fascism is metastasizing across American conservatism. Miles of column inches have been written about the group, both by professional “hate-watchers” such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and by various fear mongering journalists at Slate, Daily Beast, and the like, nearly all of whom exclusively cite and quote these so-called experts.

Meanwhile to the Right, given that Patriot Front dresses like cannon fodder for COBRA—the eternal (and always incompetent) enemy in the cartoon TV series G.I. Joe—the group is regarded as an FBI office costume party. Patriot Front, from this perspective, is a thinly-disguised “op” to trap foolish right wingers into supporting a criminal conspiracy in order to meet the Bureau’s statistical need for white supremacist terrorist arrests. According to FBI whistleblowers, special agents can receive substantial cash bonuses for hitting white supremacist arrest targets, so official perfidy seems plausible.

As a wise old Gunnery Sergeant once told me: “If they can’t find you, they can’t hurt you.”

NewsMax.

The King James Bible is being removed from elementary and middle school libraries in Davis County, Utah, after a complaint that it contained passages describing sex and violence.

For once, the Left has no complaint to make. Children with the Bible in their homes, of course, may consult it freely.

Read it.

In the latest ambitious project to use solar energy in space for powering the earth, a public-private Japanese partnership plans to test as soon as in 2025 if solar power generated in space can be beamed to the earth and converted into electricity.

This was one of Jerry Pournelle’s perennial projects.

Read it.

Q: What’s the difference between Hunter Biden, Konstantin Kisin and you?

A: Access to banks

Read it.

“This breakthrough means that custom enzymes for almost any chemical reaction could, in principle, be designed.”

Read it.

Spain will soon have a public reckoning with surrogacy.

The Spanish gossip magazine Lecturas announced that 68-year-old actress Ana Obregón will be returning to Spain from Florida on June 14th with her biological granddaughter.

The actress caused a stir when she announced the baby girl’s birth on March 20th. After being conceived with the semen of Obregón’s son, who died three years ago of cancer at the age of 27, the baby was reportedly born to a Cuban-born woman in Florida under a surrogacy arrangement.

The U.S. is one of the favourite destinations of Europeans for surrogacy as several states have laws that facilitate the practice and allow the contracting persons to appear as if they are the child’s parents by natural birth on the birth certificate, either through recognising surrogacy contracts or through pre-birth adoption arrangements.

But Obregón could face legal problems at home in Spain.

Read it.

In a nation long dominated by the Left, a new conservative political party, Nova Direita (Portuguese for ‘New Right’) is trying to seize the moment. The movement is led by Ossanda Liber, an Angolan-born lawyer who has become a rising star for the weakened and fractured Portuguese Right.

Liber, 46, is a fresh face in politics, although she is not without experience. Her first taste of front-of-the-line politicking was in 2021, when she ran for mayor of Lisbon. During the campaign, she made a name for herself in a much-discussed interview with state-owned broadcaster RTP, in which the journalist bluntly told her that he believed “Portugal to be a systemically racist country.” “Do you think so? I do not,” answered Liber, in what became a major moment for anti-‘woke’ politics in the country. Liber then proceeded in 2022 to run for parliament as part of Aliança, a small right-of-centre party. With the European parliamentary election drawing near, she is now launching her own force.

The Spectator.

Political years are the opposite of dog years: they pass by in a blaze, with entire epochs elapsing in the course of a few news cycles. Ideas, even movements, fade abruptly, recalled only years later when you clean out your garage and stumble on that old tricorn hat from your Tea Party days.

If you want to know how jarring political change can be, consider that at this time in the 2016 election cycle — around the late spring of 2015 — the predicted frontrunner for the GOP nomination was Rand Paul. This was no coincidence. In those days, we were said to be in the middle of something called a libertarian moment. Voters were leery of Barack Obama’s deficit spending, Washington’s endless wars, the NSA surveillance that had been unveiled by Edward Snowden. And only Paul, a self-described “libertarian-ish” senator from Kentucky, had given eloquent voice to this skepticism of the state.

If you want to know how jarring political change can be, consider what happened next. Paul came under fierce fire during the GOP primary debates from a guy called Donald Trump, who took many of Paul’s libertarian issues — antiwar, anti-security state — and rolled them into a more visceral and smash-mouth populism. This populism was simultaneously comfortable with strong government on issues like entitlements and immigration. It was this formula, which we’d now call MAGA, that tapped the mood of the Republican base. Paul dropped out after the Iowa caucuses.

Read it.

Notable:

1. All of them use wind to assist, not as the sole means of power.
2. All of them use vertical wings, not sails.

Washington Post.

Those who came up in the ‘move fast and break things’ era are learning to slow down and make things.

Vox.

People who pretend to be other people for a living will say anything they’re paid to say. That’s their business model. If you’re fool enough to believe them, well….

On the other hand, in world in which I get my heater, air conditioner, water softener, dryer vent, and garage door inspected annually, it’s not to much of a stretch to extend that to my body.

ZMan peers behind the curtain.

This week we have seen two more contenders join the Republican primary field, promising to be happy warriors to save America. Tim Scott from South Carolina and Ron DeSantis of Florida bring the field to eight, as far as the candidates with any chance of getting on the debate stage. With the exception of Trump and Ramaswamy, the field is all doing some version of conservative nostalgia. That is a mix of the crucible, the covenant, and the creed.

That last bit comes from a short little book titled After Nationalism which describes the three main ways the American ruling class has unified the country. The crucible is the melting pot story of America. The covenant is the claim that America has a special purpose in the world. The creed is the old familiar civic nationalist argument that America is just a collection of ideas. Conservatism has relied on all three to market candidates and programs over the years.

The theme of the book is that those three unifying narratives are no longer working as the country devolves into warring tribes. You can see that in the presentation from the Republican candidates as they announce their campaigns. The Tim Scott show was like a 1990’s Conservative Inc. fantasy about the black vote. The DeSantis campaign teased his announcement with this ad on Twitter, which is Bush era patriotism without the promise of a crusade against Islam.

Sarah Hoyt.

Phantom — in comments, recently — mention at the basis of all the leftist policies is the idea of overpopulation: the Malthusian hot mess that believes humans, like some kind of fungus will reproduce till the Earth can’t support them.

I’d never realized that. It is true sort of, though it’s perhaps based on an even crazier premise which in turn is at the very heart of not just socialism/communism but the idea that anyone gets to arrange all of human life from the top down, to spare individuals’ making wrong decisions. Which is, objectively, an idea so crazy that you can’t figure out how any human alive can think it.

And yet, if your theories tell you that humans are too stupid to stop reproducing when they’re starving, then any level of intervention is justified, because, OBVIOUSLY humans are brainless.

Except for the Ruling Class, of course.

The American Mind.

Many policy experts, politicians, and everyday citizens have long been concerned with the breakdown of the family as a result of divorce or separation. But the lack of family formation in the first place is now an even more pressing problem. Birthrates have been falling around the world, a complex phenomenon with many contributing factors. Women are not finding partners in time to become mothers (though the vast majority want children), and young men are disproportionately single.

Sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin has observed that marriage—to the extent it is desired at all—is now viewed as a “capstone” rather than a “cornerstone” of life. That is to say, marriage is no longer considered the foundation of adult life but a kind of feather in the cap of a successful person. We have lost a shared understanding of the human person, of how familial and civic responsibility provide meaning, and what encompasses a life well-lived (as evidenced by this recent Wall Street Journal-NORC poll). These shifts in beliefs have affected marriage rates. But technologies like the smart phone, social media, and online dating have exacerbated the family formation crisis for the youngest generations.

Think of it as evolution in action. The only women who will have children are those who put family ahead of career, and thus the Power Feminists will slowly get weeded out of the gene pool. Natural Selection works even when you don’t want it to.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

The scientific method works as follows: 1) You come up with a hypothesis. 2) You look for the implications of the hypothesis. What will be the case if the hypothesis is true, but will not be the case if the hypothesis is wrong? 3) You carry out observations or run experiments to find out whether the facts implied by the hypothesis do or do not obtain. 4) If you find that a fact implied by the hypothesis is indeed the case, it provides support for the hypothesis. If you find a number of such facts to be true, as implied by the hypothesis, then you may have strong support. 5) But it is not conclusive: if a fact or condition implied by the hypothesis is shown by observation or experiment not to be the case, then the hypothesis is refuted, and you go back to the drawing board.

Global warming hysteria is politics or religion, not science. This conclusion follows from the fact that the global warming models have generated many predictions that turned out to be wrong. A single wrong prediction is enough to disprove a model. Numerous, consistently repeated failures mean that the model is a joke.

Sarah Hoyt cuts to the chase.

We live longer healthy lives, and in fact my dad retired at 80, and husband has worked with 80 year olds who got bored in retirement.

What does this mean? Well, we choose our career absurdly early, and expect it to last life-long. That’s half of it. A lot of us come to not like/loathe what we loved as kids. Now, I’m not suggesting the training to be self sufficient should be later. Let the kids grow up. Just …. we probably shouldn’t going for graduate degrees before 32 or so. Because we will change. Or at least a significant subset will.

The problem of course is that our legacy educational system is still geared for people who live till sixty just about, and therefore if you don’t pursue your education early and hard and to the extreme you want to take it, people will look at you funny, which in the case of people who work for college admissions might mean you don’t get in.

Steve Sailer.

A decade ago, I correctly called that the New York Times was promoting transgenderism as the Next Big Thing after gay marriage.

What’s next?

Pedophilia? Bestiality?

Recently, I came around to thinking polygamy (although no doubt under some more euphemistic term) would be next.

Read it.

When we buy cereal or bread, few pay attention to the fact that most grains are protected or even patented. Most farmers don’t own the seeds they sow on their fields. “They are renting them,” Kloppenburg, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-founder of OSSI says with disgust. The problem with that? “A few global companies have the monopolies on global seed trade, and they breed cash crops like corn and soy, purely for money. They don’t care about biodiversity, world hunger or about the small farmer.” What sounds like a business problem impacts everybody, Kloppenburg insists. “These few gene giants on top of the food chain decide what ends up on our plates.”

Read it.

Fast food chain Wendy’s is testing new technology to automate its stores. This is more bad news for human workers as automation and artificial intelligence invade the fast food industry.

Wendy’s announced a new partnership with Pipedream, a hyper logistics company, to pilot-test the first underground autonomous robot system that will allow food from the kitchen to be sent to designated parking spots via an underground network of pipes.

Remind me to avoid Wendy’s.

ZMan dispels the fog.

The overused cliché about the truth being the first casualty of war is an overused cliché because it is so obviously true. Wars are the result of rulers on both sides seeing advantage in the suffering of their people. That means producing a story to explain to the people why they must sacrifice for the ruler. The war in the Ukraine is no exception, but it may be the first war to be turbocharged by the narrative industrial complex through the internet.

For several months, the usual suspects have been promoting a narrative framework with regards to a Ukrainian counter-offensive. Tens of billions of Western arms have been shipped to Ukraine, along with plane loads of cash. This has been done to great political fanfare in every Western capital. Slowly, the story evolved into the great spring offensive in which a newly formed Ukrainian army using Western super-weapons would smash through the Russian lines and send them fleeing.

The explanation for how this would work or why it should be attempted was never provided, but a good story is worth skipping over the details. Russia has about half a million men in Ukraine at the moment. They have air superiority, and they have a growing advantage in firepower. How a seventy-thousand-man attack force could smash through their lines was left to the imagination. That is where people like Edward Luttwak filled the void with serious sounding plans for the attack.

Read it.

Last week witnessed the first tremors of what could be a welcome revolution: the resignation en masse of the forty-strong editorial board of NeuroImage magazine — regarded as the leading publication for brain-imaging research in the world. The board, whose members include very senior figures in the world of brain science, is protesting what it sees as the publisher Elsevier’s greedy and unethical behavior.