The Spectator.

Never before has a generation of males been solely responsible for the gathering and preparation of their own food. Historically, women played a crucial role in deciding what families would eat. And since many women now (especially those on the leading edge of nutrition influencing) gravitate more toward “plant-based” diets, it makes sense that men would look for alternatives to meal plans primarily comprised of soy and beans. With no sensible women to help them, it is unsurprising that men on a mission to eat meat might go a little crazy and avoid eating any plants at all.

The American Mind.

As a conservative AP English teacher and AP Exam reader, I have something of a love-hate relationship with College Board.

On one hand, I love the rigor and standards of Advanced Placement classes. For students willing to work hard and make the most of their time in high school, AP classes are a great option that will challenge them and offer them a chance at earning college credit. Moreover, they find their community in AP, something especially critical in otherwise rundown public schools where the world outside the AP bubble is mired in crime and mediocrity—for all its cheesiness today, the eighties film “Stand and Deliver” actually captures this reality pretty well. Both as a student and teacher, I’ll always be grateful that AP was there for the kids who needed it.

On the other hand, the leftist bias in the curricula, along with progressive pedagogy that emphasizes skills over content, has tarnished the luster of College Board. In history courses, which seem to receive a makeover every few years, these problems are especially pronounced. In English, there’s been a noticeable shift toward diverse ethnic or racial voices, and there’s certainly a relativistic approach to texts featured in these courses (for example, students were asked to analyze a portion of Sonia Sotomayor’s memoir to demonstrate their knowledge of rhetoric). I do encounter teachers, usually from very progressive states, who take a progressive approach in their classes and score exam essays with this prejudice, but indoctrination isn’t implicit in the course curriculum itself.

Washington Free Beacon.

Most feminists—heck, most people in general—like to see themselves as being on the side of progress. Not Mary Harrington, a self-described “reactionary feminist” and the author of Feminism Against Progress.

What does it mean to be “against progress” in the name of feminism? That turns out to be mostly a semantic matter: Harrington does not want to lose the right to vote, and while she takes some swipes at the “Progress Theology” of folks like Steven Pinker, she doesn’t deny, much less bemoan, that humans have become richer and live longer lives in recent centuries.

What Harrington dislikes are some major changes we have seen in the relations between the sexes in the past 60 years or so: The essence of her view is that not every change that free markets enable—or that societies enthusiastically embrace—is necessarily an improvement on what came before. Just as ubiquitous sugar is a poor fit for a species that evolved in an environment where calories were scarce, perhaps dating apps, “gender affirming” medical interventions, and even the Pill are a poor fit for humanity too, offering instant gratification but longer-term harm.

Read it.

OK, here’s my little result. I took a quick look at demographic variation in the frequency of the filled pauses conventionally written as “uh” and “um”. For technical reasons that I won’t go into here, I used the frequency of the definite article “the” as the basis for comparison. Thus I selected a group of speakers (e.g. men aged 60-69), counted how often they were transcribed as saying “uh”, and to normalize that count (since the number of people in each category was different) I divided by the number of times the same speakers were transcribed as saying “the”.

 

Victor Davis Hanson.

Almost everyone who originally had opposed the absolute monarchy, and, like the Americans, wished for a constitutional replacement, was eventually executed by revolutionaries who were then executed by more radical revolutionaries. The longer and more radical the revolution ran, the meaner, dumber, and more deadly the revolutionaries who emerged from the woodwork.

Finally, what could not go on, did not go on, as French society unraveled. Then the so-called Thermidors put an end to the madness of the Robespierre brothers and their sidekick, the 26-year-old Saint-Just, and did to them what they had done to thousands.

The final revolutionary correction saw a Directory, then a Consulate, and finally the dictator Napoleon—the self-described emperor who claimed he was the final absolutist manifestation of the “Revolution.”

The American Mind.

Norms. Remember those? If you do, you’re one of the few.

I used to be a normie. I come from a long line of normies stretching back through time to my first normie ancestors, who set foot on these shores, looked around, and thought, where should we put the TV, honey?

2023 is shaping up to be a bellwether year for normies and all their pesky norms. Are you still a normie? Do you ever lay awake at night wondering why it seems like everywhere you look, American society seems to be actively working against you? Like, despite your hard work, things aren’t improving. Things are really starting to suck, in fact. Bags of chips keep getting smaller but cost double. You had to tell your kids they can no longer watch Mr. Beast on YouTube (“Why, Mommy?” “Er, just because, okay?”).

You had to endure yet another humiliating DEI Zoom session at work, followed immediately by a Zoom call where your manager informs your team that ChatGPT will, in fact, put you out of work in three to five years.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

I expected to be traveling this week, so I planned the show in advance, but some unexpected misadventures changed my plans. I liked the show so rather than do something new I kept it. The only thing I regret is I was not able to talk about Trump destroying girl power on CNN this week. It was a masterful performance that was reminiscent of his 2016 campaign.

The crazy thing about it is the people at CNN seemed to think that girl power would be able to handle Trump. What were they thinking? Megyn Kelly was ten times better at being girl power and Trump wrecked her career in one show. Kaitlan Collins is supposed to be CNN’s new star and now everyone is laughing at her. Even the crazies have turned on her and CNN over this event.

The destruction of girl power was not the best part of the show. The audience was laughing right along with Trump. There was one shot of the crowd where older women were holding their hands over their mouths as Trump described his recent court case with the crazy woman. They were laughing so hard they were afraid their dentures would fly out, so they had their hands over their mouths.

The American Mind.

Up until a week ago, the 2024 presidential election campaign was by and large an uninteresting slog. The arrest of President Trump had shown some promise of injecting life into the race, but just a few short weeks later it is all but forgotten. Events that used to carry great significance which would be etched into the public memory for decades—like the investigation, prosecution, or impeachment of a president—have now been reduced to farcical shadow-play, gone in a moment. To generate lasting outrage or even attention, a story needs some element of surprise or departure from normalcy. But the new norm in politics is to destroy all norms. And since mainstream press catastrophizing has been dialed up to 11 since at least 2016, it rings hollower with every passing cycle. To anyone who has been paying attention, not even the most breathless histrionics on the part of professional observers makes a mark.

ZMan cuts through the fog.

One of the strange and unnoticed aspects of the modern age is how much time is spent debating imaginary things. In fact, most of our public debates are about things that may happen or could never possibly happen. The things that are actually happening get very little attention. In some cases, like the ongoing criminal operations of the Biden family, the only people discussing them are “conspiracy theorists”, a term that has been transformed to describe imaginary villains.

In fact, much of what passes for public debate is the shift from things that are real and observable in the present moment to things that do not exist. Crackpot libertarian congressman Thomas Massie spends most of his time warning about a highly unlikely problem with E-Verify, so that his voters do not notice the waves of migrant invaders filling up their cities and towns. He is not alone. Every politician is an illusionist now, making reality disappear behind a curtain of deceit.

What has happened to modern American society is a form of the Peter Pan syndrome, in that society prefers to live in a world of make believe, rather than face up to the tough choices that come with adulthood. Libertarian kooks would rather think about a world governed by the non-aggression principle than think about the problems that the current world is presenting to us. Ten thousand migrants a day cross the border, but libertarian guy is concerned about theoretical abuses of state power.

Lifehacker.

Historically, carrying a gun with which to shoot the shooter seems to work out pretty well.

Real Clear Wire.

Please keep this in mind amid all the hyper-ventilating over potential default. Janet Yellen, the walking, talking-est contrarian indicator on earth claims default would be “catastropic,” while the always and everywhere expert reverent Catherine Rampell tells readers “If you’re not afraid yet [about default], you should be.” Wise minds will be calm. This is such a non-story.

For one, As evidenced by the floating, occasionally very weak dollar over the decades, the U.S. has defaulted numerous times. And that’s not a partisan point. Left-of-center economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff are clear in their book This Time Is Different that when FDR revalued the dollar from 1/20^th of a gold ounce to 1/35^th, the U.S. defaulted.

All of which brings us to the present. In contemplating the present, it’s useful to think about another book written by left-of-center reporters Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III. Baker and Glasser’s book was very fair, and among other things the authors noted about President Reagan was that much as he wanted a smaller, much more limited government, the act of achieving “it proved harder than Reagan’s team had imagined – every program they wanted to cut had a constituency, it seemed, often including fellow Republicans.” Translated, while some politicians want limited government, they all have at least one program that’s near and dear to them. Since they all do, government will always and everywhere grow as votes are traded back and forth so that everyone gets what they want.

Read it.

During a peak of violent crime in New York City, ordinary guy Bernhard Goetz made international headlines when he defended himself from an attempted mugging in a subway car by shooting his four attackers. He became known as the “Subway Vigilante.”

In 1981, Bernhard Goetz was one of many New Yorkers to fall prey to violent crime. He had been beaten and mugged by three assailants, none of whom were successfully prosecuted, and like many New Yorkers, he was tired of living in fear of being attacked. Unlike most, he was prepared when it came—with a five-shot .38 revolver and plenty of practice using it.

While on his afternoon subway commute in December of 1984, four youths assumed threatening positions around him—isolating him near the back of the car—and he quickly mapped out a rapid pattern of fire. One of the young men, Troy Canty, said, “Give me five dollars.” Some details of what happened next are in dispute, but the following is agreed upon.

The Spectator.

Marooned in London for a day between meetings, I walked for miles in an attempt to find something good to say about the city. This was not a wholly unsuccessful expedition — those Nash terraces have an allure, Regent’s Park has been cutely de-manicured to encourage the wildlife and it was possible to buy a plastic replica of Big Ben almost every fifteen yards, which came in handy. It was the Londoners I found problematic. Smirking rat-faced hipsters and man-bunned bike dweebs, buzz-cut, granite-headed lezzas, the performative callisthenics of middle-class thirty-somethings who believe they will never die, Arabs flogging tat every five paces, lithe, snake-hipped homosexuals having a pleasant lunch of kale with yeast extract at one of a million cafés with the word “plant” somewhere in its name, overconfident, braying gap-year yankees, Afghans driving Uber cars as if they were in the Lashkar Gah Grand Prix, desperate, half-dead, joggers, young white businessmen jabbering to themselves like psychos as they stepped over the sprawled bodies of dozing Romanian beggars. London — all of human life is here. Except the good bits.

The American Mind.

Up until a week ago, the 2024 presidential election campaign was by and large an uninteresting slog. The arrest of President Trump had shown some promise of injecting life into the race, but just a few short weeks later it is all but forgotten. Events that used to carry great significance which would be etched into the public memory for decades—like the investigation, prosecution, or impeachment of a president—have now been reduced to farcical shadow-play, gone in a moment. To generate lasting outrage or even attention, a story needs some element of surprise or departure from normalcy. But the new norm in politics is to destroy all norms. And since mainstream press catastrophizing has been dialed up to 11 since at least 2016, it rings hollower with every passing cycle. To anyone who has been paying attention, not even the most breathless histrionics on the part of professional observers makes a mark.

Yet America’s future really is in peril, facing existential threats both internally and externally. Flashpoints are erupting around the world. Our economy is dependent on the special status of our currency in the global market and the unquestioned military supremacy that backs it. Both the U.S. dollar and the U.S. military are hegemonic institutions in decline. Domestically, we are a population divided and unable to find a middle ground in which to establish any collective commitment to one another. Talk of national divorce or civil war was unthinkable a decade ago—now, it’s commonplace. We spend more on healthcare than any other advanced country, take more pharmaceuticals than any other first-world population, and still are sicker than all the rest. These are the elephants in the room of our current political discourse. Politicians prefer to talk about other things.

It is during such times that unconventional presidential candidates have caught wind in their sails. Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ronald Reagan in 1980, Patrick Buchanan, Ross Perot, and Bill Clinton in 1992, Ron Paul and Barack Obama in 2008, and Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in 2016. And now, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Quilette.

Like the rest of my generation, I have been anxious and apprehensive for as long as I can recall. The crippling anxieties of Gen-Z and younger millennials are everywhere apparent; we have a mental-health epidemic with a higher generational suicide risk, which have variously been attributed to awareness of worldly chaos, the COVID-19 pandemic, and chronic onlineness. We have grown up comfortable indoors, isolated with the computer, console, or TV, and reliant upon Instagram and disembodied voices in place of social interaction. We accept one or two posts as “news” and information we see online as “facts,” usually without further research. South Park has remodeled Cartman after the image of the doomscrolling, internally distraught Gen-Zer, and I can’t help but see myself and my peers in him. This generational affliction has hindered our ability to communicate and problem-solve, and the technology upon which we are so hopelessly dependent has only enabled an inflation of animosity and alienation, further aggravating a crisis of hyperpolarization and mental-health issues.

 

Read it.

Stretched limos are gone for now, but luxury chauffeur services are still thriving. It’s just the mode of transport has changed. And in a country where progressive policies have sparked a nationwide crime wave in major metro areas, no one in their right mind would dare drive around in a moving target.

One of the virtues (if one can call it that) of high urban crime rates is that it persuades rich people to be less conspicuously consumptive.

ZMan peers through the bars.

One of the interesting elements to the Tucker Carlson story is that no one knows why he was fired, but lots of people are sure they know why he was fired. The only thing from Fox so far has been a brief statement in which they announced his departure and thanked him for his service to the company. Carlson made a short video from his home studio telling his fans that everything is going to be fine. Otherwise, there is nothing solid on which to base a theory.

The best reason so far was the first reason. The timing suggested it had something to do with the lawsuit Fox was forced to settle with Dominion over their coverage of the election shenanigans. Facing a rigged trial, Fox agreed to pay Dominion an absurd amount of money for hurting their feelings and the feelings of the crazies who demand we believe Joe Biden is more popular than Jesus. Right after they made the deal, Tucker and Dan Bongino get fired.

Given the nastiness of the people who chant “election denier” it is perfectly reasonable to think they would demand a pound of flesh from Fox. Many of the crazies jumped on this idea because it made them feel like winners. On the other hand, the Murdoch clan may have decided that they were dragged into this mess by people like Carlson, so they were going to purge the ranks of these people. Again, the timing of this is what lends support to the claim Carlson was fired over the lawsuit.

Read it.

That the West is synonymous with the idea of liberal democracy is common thinking nowadays. That sentiment is amplified and strengthened with the pretty unanimous backing of Ukraine against Russian aggression by the countries considered to be part of the West.

Such thinking is well conveyed in the last interview of the famous American historian Stephen Kotkin, conducted by Peter Robinson. For Kotkin, the West is characterized by strong independent institutions, a free judiciary, the rule of law, etc. Or more broadly speaking, by liberal democracy. Thus, it is quite logical that he included “North America, Europe, the first island chain in Asia, and many other partners, Israel, in the Middle East” in the West. He added that the West “needs to be expanded and needs to be cultivated like a garden.” This is different from the “civilizational” definition of the West in Samuel Huntington’s famous book The Clash of Civilizations, according to which the Catholic and Protestant countries in Europe, along with the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, constitute Western civilization.

Does Kotkin’s trans-geographical and transcultural understanding of the West imply that the U.S., Great Britain, or France cease to be part of the West if they become autocratic? Given that Kotkin defined “Western” countries as liberal democratic ones, it is interesting that India is not included in the West, although it has never ceased to be a democracy since its independence from the British Empire in late 1940s. The exclusion of India makes sense when we consider the rest of Kotkin’s narrative in which the democratic West is fighting autocratic Russia.

The American Mind.

Typically, Americans can agree on what happened in our mass shootings. Our disagreements have centered on how to stop them. Owing to our biased media’s failure to imagine any other cause or solution, the debate usually boils down to a myopic focus on gun laws. But Nashville was different. The revelation that Hale was a biological woman who requested that people refer to her with he/him pronouns (and the later confirmation that she identified as a trans man) offered a twist. Years prior Hale had been a student at the Covenant School where she launched her attack, a detail that suggested her violence might have been a form of revenge.

These details ensured that the meaning of the massacre was contested. In the conflict over “trans rights,” we are witnessing the beginning of a war. I’m not talking about a metaphorical war or another cold war. It is now plain that wherever you stand in the debate over gender identity, literal acts of violence are unfolding across the nation. Sometimes the bullet is the instrument of destruction. Sometimes it’s the blade. Sometimes the bloodshed is self-inflicted. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s even elective. But the bloodshed isn’t allegorical. Both sides insist that lives are at stake, and they aren’t wrong.

The battle over trans identity is the first theater in what will be a much larger conflict over technology, the body, and the human essence. Whoever can secure the high ground in these early skirmishes will possess an enormous advantage in the fight for the future. Exploring the mutually exclusive accounts of the Nashville massacre offers a panorama of this bloody war. Although they agree on some basic facts, each account showcases a well-developed worldview and a network of deeply-held values.

Read it.

Energy expert Anas Alhajji shared a video on Twitter that appears to show, according to his description, “An oil tanker, known for transporting Iranian oil, catching fire off the coast of Malaysia.”

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

A few years ago, when gender mania was still confined mostly to academia, a college student had a moment of fame when he told his school that he identified as a king, and his pronouns were “Your Royal Highness.” Such mockery is to be encouraged. The idea that a person can “identify” as something other than what he or she is, and demand that others accede to that “identity,” is complete bullshit and deserves nothing but ridicule.

Thus, I applaud Indiana Councilman Ryan Webb. Webb is, to all appearances, a white man. But don’t you dare misgender him! Or rather, her. Because Webb has “come out” as a woman of color….

Read it.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

When government benefits pay more than working, you get fewer workers.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Read it.

Yglesias mourns the loss of the old consensus. He recognizes the shortcomings of public education as it currently exists, but wants to go back to the reasonable reforms that were being tried out during the Obama administration. In contrast, this essay argues that arguments made for supporting moderate reforms over privatization are weak. This isn’t that hard of a case to make to conservatives, who believe in markets and hate public education already. Yet I would go a step further, and argue that working towards privatization makes sense from a moderate and center-left perspective as well, especially for the kinds of people who still pine for Obama-era reforms and think they weren’t tried hard enough. If you believe in private enterprise at all — if you think, for example, things like restaurants and office supply stores are better left to the market — the arguments for keeping education outside of government control are stronger than in most other areas of life.

NewsBusters.

And speaking of Newsmax? The network has not been shy in reporting its 8 p.m. audience nearly doubled Monday, reaching 531,000 viewers, based on Nielsen figures. The following night, the number rose to an average 562,000 viewers, a five-fold increase from the previous week.

By contrast, the Tucker hour’s ratings at Fox plummeted, from 2.59 million on Monday (when his departure was formally announced) to 1.7 million on Tuesday and 1.3 million on Wednesday.

Steve Graham.

A wise man knows a good toilet is an important investment.

The Guardian.

One crisp spring evening, the Wasteland Theatre Company gathered to rehearse Romeo and Juliet. Jonathan “Bram” Thomas was playing Romeo. A self-confessed Shakespeare geek, he’d graduated with a BA in theatre, and this wasn’t his first time playing one half of the star-crossed lovers. But it was the first time a mutant scorpion the size of a Jeep had rampaged on to his stage.

Panicking, the show’s crew rained bullets down on its blackened shell, but not before Juliet fell to its sting. A poison death, certainly – just not one the Bard ever dreamed of writing.

“It’s just one of those things,” Bram shrugs, with the breezy nonchalance of an actor who is now used to these kinds of hiccups. You come to expect them when you’re performing inside a video game.

Just Food.

The company started out in 2013 as Edenworks before transitioning to Seed & Roe and then Upward Farms. Employing aquaponics technology to cultivate microgreens such as kale and mustard, the controlled-environment agriculture business was supplying Whole Foods Market in the New York City area.

Getting off the ground with a farm in Brooklyn, in 2020 Upward Farms revealed a new growing facility in the same borough. At the time, the company said it had just received $15m in fresh funding, including from Wyoming-based venture-capital investor Prime Movers Lab, taking financing to $20m.

“It is with a heavy heart that we are announcing that Upward Farms is closing its Brooklyn headquarters farm and will cease to operate in the vertical-farming sector,” founders Jason Green, Ben Silverman and Matthew La Rosa wrote on the opening page of their website.

“We found that vertical farming is almost infinitely complex – as we tackled challenges, new ones emerged.”

As with most groovy-granola save-the-climate schemes, vertical farming just isn’t sufficiently cost-effective yet. I believe that it will be, eventually, when the technology advances far enough; even steam engines had to wait for the practical end of things to catch up.

The New Neo.

Most violent crime is intra-racial – that is, blacks mostly kill and/or violently attack blacks, whites mostly kill and/or violently attack whites. And the black-on-black violent crime rate is much much higher than the white-on-white violent crime rate. But the MSM and the left aren’t interested in those inconvenient truths.

But what of inter-racial crime, which is a much smaller percentage of the whole? Not only does the left and the MSM pretty much ignore black intra-racial crime, it concentrates instead on inter-racial crime. Regarding the latter, it would have people think that it mostly consists of white-on-black killings, much of it by authorities such as police. And to a large extent the left and MSM have been successful in this propaganda effort.

But Mac Donald tells some inconvenient truths…

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

Trump doesn’t seem to have the same clear central focus for his agenda and campaign messaging so far, partly because he can’t seem to decide whether to attack Biden and Democrats more than his GOP rivals, despite his clear front-runner status.

But one of his good ideas that is front and center is civil service reform, aimed at bringing the administrative state back inside the Constitution. Our permanent government rules us without our consent, and undermines popular government. That’s on purpose. Although Reagan made this point well, even he never spoke the plain truth about it: our administrative state and its ever-swelling bureaucracies are the partisan governing instrument of the Democratic Party. Time to say so, and do something about it.

Quillette.

A review of Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hämäläinen, 592 pages, Liveright (September 2022)

The Freudian concept known as “reaction formation” refers to a psychological defense mechanism against guilt. It occurs when an individual responds to a shame-inducing instinct with an overcorrection. Much of modern American history appears to be in the grip of reaction formation. Mortification at the developed West’s historical misdeeds has produced a utopian narrative of indigenous worlds typified by matriarchy, cooperation, pacifism, and gender fluidity. That no such world ever existed is beside the point; much of history is narrated to suit the proclivities of the audience, not to tell the truth about what actually happened.

This seems to be specifically true for our understanding of American Indian history. The violent migration of Europeans to the New World was very much like violent migrations throughout history and across cultures, most likely including successive waves of North American Indians (though the history there is murky). Yet instead of understanding these events in the context of larger historical patterns, the Indian Wars are cast as a morality tale in the manner of Howard Zinn, in which the actions of the European settlers are represented as uniquely reprehensible. This fantasy may be an inversion of past jingoistic and racist caricatures of American Indians as “savages,” but it is not more historically accurate.

I thought about this a lot as I read Pekka Hämäläinen’s fascinating and controversial new history of North American Indians, Indigenous Continent. Told largely from the perspective of the natives, Hämäläinen covers the centuries from the arrival of Europeans in North America through to the final subjugation of the last tribes in the late 19th century. It’s a gripping history, but watching the author attempt to come to terms with the history he is telling also makes for fascinating psychological analysis.

I have read this book, and it is well worth your time.

Read it.

Touchscreens are fine when you’re sitting at a desk pondering the nature of the universe, but when you’re driving and having to keep conscious of six things at once you want a button you can locate by hand and know when it’s been pushed.

Tyler Cowen.

I’m not sure the AGI concept is entirely well-defined, but let’s put aside the more dramatic scenarios and assume that AI can perform at least some of the following functions:

1. Evaluate many policies and regulations better than human analysts can.

2. Sometimes outperform and outguess asset price markets.

3. Formulate the most effective campaign strategies for politicians.

4. Understand and manage geopolitics better than humans can.

5. Write better Supreme Court opinions and, for a given ethical point of view, produce a better ruling.

You could add to that list, but you get the point.  These are a big stretch beyond current models, but not on the super-brain level.

One option, of course, is simply that everyone can use this service, like the current GPT-4, and then few questions arise about differential political access.  But what if the service is expensive, and/or access is restricted for reasons of law, regulation, and national security?  Exactly who or what in government allocates use of the service within government?