Don’t worry about Tucker; Tucker will be fine.

The hills are alive with Narrative media talking heads attempting to dance on his grave; were they in a similar situation (such as Don Lemon), they would be hurting, because there are a limited number of slots for left-wing hatemongers, so they think he’ll have to go and live in a doghouse somehwere. But such celebrations are quite premature.

Scott Adams is fond of saying that he never really appreciated freedom of speech until he got ‘cancelled’. He is doing quite well with his subscription podcast Coffee with Scott Adams on the locals platform, now the sole vehicle for the Dilbert cartoons. (It’s dirt-cheap for what you get, and I highly recommend it.) Tucker is similarly liberated now, and has  a ton of options.

Almost immediately there was a public job offer from Heritage Foundation, and I’m sure he’s gotten calls from American Enterprise Institute, Manhattan Institute, Cato Institute, and other right-wing think-tanks. Sure, he won’t be making the money he was making at Fox, but such fellowship positions (which can pay up to $200,000) entail no actual duties other than to be active in speaking and writing and ‘spreading the word’, which he will be doing anyway.

I presume that his next major move will be a book, a best-selling tell-all exposé of life inside the Fox universe. Being fired gives Tucker carte blanche to grind Rupert Murdoch’s face into the dirt in print, and I (for one) wouldn’t be able to resist that temptation.

Plus he could go the podcast route, which is such a moneymaker for Joe Rogan and others. His audience at Fox is a built-in fanbase for such an endeavor, and he wouldn’t have to share the proceeds with a bunch of Crustian bureaucrats.

Or he could do radio. Dan Bongino has a daily show in Rush Limbaugh’s old time slot; Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Prager, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Mike Gallagher, and Mark Davis make a good living on the airwaves. He could start by guest-hosting in various places, and when one of the big names decides to retire he could just step into their shoes, as Hugh Hewitt did when Bill Bennett gave up his morning show.

And then there’s writing columns for places like the New York Post, Washington Examiner, Washington Free Beacon, NewsBusters, The Foundry, the Daily Wire (which Tucker helped to found), and even major newspapers that feel like stirring up the zoo. (I doubt that The Dispatch and The Bulwark would be interested, but they’re not the only game in town.)

And then there’s giving speeches. Speaking fees for people with Tucker’s public footprint can be very sweet. Bill Buckley used to make up the money that National Review annually lost by such means.

Don’t worry about Tucker; Tucker will be just fine.

UPDATE: All eyes on Tucker

UPDATE: Tucker Leaves the Sinking Ship: How Long Does Cable News Have Left Anyway?

UPDATE: Observations On Tucker  John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

The long-time image of Republicans as the “party of the rich” and country club types is no longer true. Both charts demonstrate that Democrats have become the dominant party of upper-income households.

One of the many, many lies Democrats tell. Elon Musk is about the only one of the ten top billionaires in the U.S. who isn’t a card-carrying Democrat. Buffet, Gates, Bezos–all Dems.

Been there.

Read it.

The game is rigged as far as the ‘Green Transition’ is concerned, with specific technologies and companies receiving support from international institutions and governments to ‘transition’ the surplus value of the working and middle classes to themselves. For now, this has involved highlighting some environmental issues over others (like CO2 emissions over microplastics).

However, the rigging is only partial and, like much of what comes out of Brussels, haphazard. There remains plenty of room for citizen initiatives to siphon off funds and build entities that would add value to the European economy, employ Europeans, and result in genuine community-level resilience in the face of global supply chain vulnerability.

Cinnabon! MMMMMMMMM….

The New Neo.

I’ve read quite a few MSM articles on the SCOTUS ruling about the abortion pill, and the reporting lacked so many of the details I was looking for that I ended up turning to law blogs and the plaintiffs’ brief to get any clarity at all. And even then, many questions remain in my mind.

Read it.

Considering the activities and incompetence of current teacher union members, speed the day.

Read it.

The so-called “national divorce” that was promoted earlier this year by some Republicans appears to be occurring organically, according to a new analysis of U.S. population trends.

Since 2020, some 2.6 million people have moved out of U.S. counties that were won by President Joe Biden and into those that former President Donald Trump prevailed in, the analysis found. It cited recent Census Bureau data.

“More than 61 percent of the counties that voted for Biden in 2020 lost population, while 65 percent of Trump-supporting counties gained population,” the Issues and Insights analysis said. The data showed that some 2,562,937 people moved from Democrat-leaning counties to Republican-leaning counties since Biden was elected in the divisive November 2020 election.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Something I did not discuss in the show, but it will be a topic going forward, is the candidacy of Robert Kennedy Jr. It may be the greatest example of history repeating itself, but with a wry smile, we will ever see. Most people will think of his father’s run in 1968, but it more closely matches his uncle’s run in 1980. Ted Kennedy decided to challenge Carter because Carter was weak.

Many have noted the parallels between this age and the 1970’s. Trump is a good analog for Nixon. Biden is Carter. We have stagflation due to mismanagement of the money supply and reckless spending. The politicians have thrown open the jails and stopped prosecuting criminals, so the cities are falling into chaos. We now even have a standoff with the Russians. It is like old times.

Of course, the irony is that the people in charge today were in the streets causing trouble back in the 1970’s. It is as if their last hurrah is going to be reliving their youth at your expense, one last time. The grand finale will be a Kennedy challenging their Jimmy Carter, thus ushering in the end of the madness. Or will it be a Sirhan Sirhan, this time in drag, assassinating a Kennedy to kick-off the madness?

The typical socialist is not a ferocious working man in greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a useful snob or a prim little man with a white-collar job—usually a secret teetotaler and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of non-conformity behind him and a social position he has no intention of forfeiting.

In addition to these two types is the disquieting presence of cranks. Socialism draws into itself by magnetic force every juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, Nature cure quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

These groups alienate decent people.

And there are the middle-class socialists who talk about a classless society but will never give up their own social prestige.

— George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

Hmmm … what does that sound like? Who does that sound like?

Steve Sailer.

The more inane the photograph illustrating a news story about a crime, the more likely it is that the victim was white and the perp black.

Wall Street Journal.

For one thing, you don’t need a machine to use it.

I know how he feels.

Read it.

When Democrats are in charge, they work hard to pass legislation pushing issues further and further to the left. This is true on both the federal and state levels. We see blue states working to ban gas-powered cars, ban natural gas stoves, and even override parents when it comes to giving kids hormones and sex-change surgeries.

While that is true of Blue states, there are plenty of states that Red states out there as well. But the question is, what is the Red state equivalent to California? Are there Red states that are as conservative as CA, WA, NY, and NJ are liberal? Does a GOP majority move things to the right as much as a Democrat majority moves the state to the left? Probably not?

The thing is that Republicans aren’t committed, as Democrats are, to the politicization of every aspect of life. That’s what ‘progressive totalitarianism’ means.

Daily Signal.

Arkansas lawmakers delivered a clear message to parents of K-12 students this week: You have the right to know how your child is being treated in school.

Lawmakers in New Jersey, California, and hundreds of other school districts across the U.S. operating under policies that do the opposite and allow school officials to hide information about children from their parents should prepare to receive an influx of student-transfer requests.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday signed legislation, the Given Name Act, which says that school officials cannot call a student by a name that does not match the name listed on the student’s birth certificate without a parent’s permission. Likewise, educators cannot address a child by a pronoun that does not match the child’s sex.

The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Wayne Long, a Republican, explains that a teacher contacted him and said her conscience would not let her “affirm” a student confused about his or her sex. “This single mom was willing to lose her job rather than go against her Christian beliefs,” Long said via email.

Very sad, that it should come to this.

Dennis Prager.

A generation of Americans is being raised on half-truths and lies about the history of slavery in America.

They are given the impression that America was uniquely bad and that American slavery was uniquely bad. They learn nothing about slavery elsewhere. Among the many lies they are told are that “black slaves built America” and that America is systemically racist.

Since the only mortal enemy of the Left is truth, here are some truths about slavery.

OffGuardian.

If our children now can know the world is dying an environmental death without a future. If our children can now know how and when and what sex is all about before they know how to even count. If children can decide to mutilate themselves to the gender gods before they know what a pubic hair even is. If children can soon vote in most places at the tender age of 16. If they have nothing to learn now because ChatGTP will do that all for them. If they know what nuclear war is beyond hiding under desks. Then it is time to put them to work. They’re adults now.

Because they have no such a thing as childhood anymore. That was swept swiftly out the door with all the dust of yesterday’s dreams. Mother Goose was murdered in cold blood for being white. Cinderella kicked the Prince in the b*lls and went to the ball on her own. Black Beauty was murdered in cold blood for being black. Dr. Seuss was burnt at the stake for promoting eggs and ham instead of crickets and Nancy Drew has likely become a transgender vampire.

Steve Sailer.

Walking the dog every day now, I don’t get to the book store very often anymore. But I left the dog behind and went today.

Didn’t find anything new of interest. It looks like the two main topics of new books are “We Wish We Still Had Trump to Kick Around Because Without Him We Don’t Have Anything Interesting to Say” and “I’m a Black Person and Here’s My Story About How Hard It Is Being Black.”

That’s about all that’s available these days.

Washington Free Beacon.

who have seen active service, and, as far as I am aware, just one who has taken part in a successful operation to free a planeload of hostages from a band of terrorists, getting himself shot in the arm in the process.

In case you didn’t know that, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, makes sure you’re apprised in the very first pages of Bibi: My Story, his compellingly told memoir of a lifetime in politics, business, diplomacy, and a lot of shooting wars.

In 1972 he led a group of special forces soldiers in the elite Sayeret Matkal unit of the Israeli military in a raid on a hijacked Sabena plane that had been diverted to an airport outside Tel Aviv, Israel. He recounts with evident pride how he tussled with his older brother Yoni, also in the elite unit, who wanted to pull rank on him and lead the raid himself. Bibi resisted, and prevailed.

Netanyahu’s elder brother, Yoni, was an American citizen and died leading the Entebbe raid–the only Israeli to do so.

When did a Biden ever expose himself to that sort of risk?

The New Neo.

Taibbi points out a huge double standard about intelligence leaks, which is that intelligence agencies/agents themselves leak all over the place, mostly for political reasons, and that is treated as perfectly okay. In contrast, other leakers are heavily punished.

Who, with a greater-then-room-temperature IQ, seriously believes that a National Guard Airman First Class would ever, in any version of reality, have access to this level of classified information?

Seriously?

Seriously?

Unfortunately, not available in the App Store.

Read it.

A small Texas county is weighing whether to shut down its public library system after a federal judge ruled the commissioners violated the constitution by banning a dozen mostly children’s books and ordered that they be put back in circulation.

No bleats about ‘threat to our democracy’ from the Narrative media here, you’ll notice.

The books that Llano County officials removed from the library shelves include Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”; “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group” by Susan Campbell Bartoletti; the graphic novel “Spinning” by Tillie Walden; and three books from Dawn McMillan’s “I Need a New Butt!” series.

Yeah, kids desperately need to have access to ‘I Need a New Butt’.

Also removed from the library were Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen”; Robie H. Harris’ “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health”; and four other children’s picture books with “silly themes and rhymes,” like “Larry the Farting Leprechaun,” “Gary the Goose and His Gas on the Loose”; “Freddie the Farting Snowman” and “Harvey the Heart Has Too Many Farts,” according to the complaint.

The Guardian.

Harvard University will rename its graduate school of arts and sciences after billionaire hedge fund executive and Republican megadonor Kenneth Griffin, the institution announced on Tuesday, after a new $300m contribution brought Griffin’s total support of his alma mater to more than half a billion dollars.

sGriffin, 54, is the founder and chief executive of Citadel, a $59bn hedge fund, and Citadel Securities, which trades securities. He is the 35th richest person in the world, with a net worth of $34.9bn, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index.

Griffin will be just the fourth individual to have a school at Harvard named after him in exchange for a donation, according to the Harvard Crimson student newspaper. His name will carry controversy thanks to Griffin’s stature as a major political donor to rightwing politicians and his company’s investments in firearm and ammunition manufacturers.

Money talks. Even Harvard can be bought.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Lately, Democrats have tried to posture as free speech advocates by denouncing “bans” of various books. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz went on a tirade at a press conference, claiming that Florida–the Left’s bete noire these days–has “banned” various books like, for example, Of Mice and Men and Lord of the Flies. It turned out that Walz just made it up, as usual.

More broadly, the whole “book ban” controversy is stupid. No one is banning books. The issue, when it comes up, is which books, an infinitesimal number out of the millions that are available, should be selected for placement in school libraries, and thus recommended to our young people. And in fact, decisions made by public school librarians are often highly questionable.

As part of his attack on Florida, Governor Walz established a “lending library” in his office where people can drop off and borrow books. It was intended as a stunt, but Bill Walsh, Communications Director at Center of the American Experiment, took the governor’s offer seriously. He placed a number of books that are grossly inappropriate–featuring, for example, graphic depictions of gay sex–in the governor’s library. This short video is entertaining, but is also a sad reminder of the depravity to be found in many public schools.

Read it.

Europeans who are unhappy with the European Union find themselves at a disadvantage. The expression ‘Europe’ has a positive allure which Eurosceptics have not been able to puncture. This is why the EU’s supporters exploit it as a synonym for the organisation. Yet the confusion is decidedly unjust, not only because, as is well known, Europe is bigger and older than the EU but also for a more substantial and concrete reason. The process of European integration has historically not been a European project but rather an American one.

Read it.

The first step has to be a recognition that neither philosophy is “in charge.” Enough people will simply not bow to a different philosophy to let that be so.

The second step is to accept that the philosophies are incompatible, that there is no “middle way” to maintain one society under some form of blended governance.

The third step is to be open to accommodation and trade. And the answer here was given to us with the “sanctuary movement” in Blue cities/states. Sanctuary places simply ignored the law applicable elsewhere. No discussion, no debate, no federal plebiscite. They simply directed their law enforcement personnel to not enforce certain laws, to not cooperate in the enforcement of others of those laws, penalized cooperation, and publicized their position. And the other side did not arrest politicians in those places as lawbreakers and conspirators. And those places continued to trade with the rest of the country and the economy outside of those places was not overly affected by local decisions.

The Other McCain.

One of the things that liberals love to do is to discuss trends without examining the relevant context. Suppose we’re talking about childhood poverty, and the liberal wishes you to be concerned about an increase in this problem. Would it be helpful to know how the data are different between, say, single-parent households and married-parent households? Or how would the data look if we broke it down by race, or by immigration status of the parents? Isn’t it likely that some significant part of the trend in childhood poverty is caused by an enormous influx of impoverished Latin American immigrants, many of them here illegally? Yet even among immigrants, aren’t children less likely to grow up in poverty if they’re living in a two-parent married family household?

On this issue, as on so many other issues, you cannot understand what’s happening and why it’s happening if you do not disaggregate the data, breaking it down by demographic categories.

Steve Sailer.

One of my anti-conspiracy theories is that remarkably little money is spent to influence American electoral politics relative to the stakes of controlling government power.

For example, billionaire George Soros has helped drive murder and traffic fatalities way up in the U.S. in recent years by investing a rather limited (for him) amount of money in electing soft-on-crime district attorneys in big cities.

These aren’t huge sums of money by 2023 standards that Soros gives, but who else makes campaign contributions to District Attorney races? Not all billionaires want to sow chaos in the big city — demographically similar Michael Bloomberg spent 12-years as a successful crime-fighting mayor of New York — but nobody else of comparable wealth seems terribly motivated to counter Soros’s insight that prosecutor races offer a cheap chokepoint.

Read it.

A team of researchers in Greece and Ireland, led by Nikolaos Vakirlis at the Alexander Fleming Biomedical Sciences Research Center in Athens, argues that a key to understanding human evolution lies with short sequences of DNA named “open reading frames” (ORFs). These structures are small sections of the genome that encode tiny protein molecules — microproteins — which can perform a diverse range of crucial biological tasks, from regulating muscle performance to alerting cells to damaging stresses.

Due to their minuscule sizes, ORFs are notoriously difficult to study. Because of this, their full relevance has gone under the radar in mainstream genomics research until recently, and even today, they still aren’t considered to be proper genes in themselves. For Vakirlis’ team, this potential oversight masks the fact that the microproteins encoded by ORFs can develop their own de novo sequences over generations, which may eventually develop into new genes

Cybernaut.

Digital minimalists are using simple talk-and-text devices to spend
less time online, curb distraction, and navigate internet addiction.

Not to mention increased privacy.

Quillette.

The recent tumult surrounding the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion reminds us that the American body politic is closely and intensively divided on many contentious political, social, religious, cultural, and economic issues. One of those issues is the question of whether affirmative action, particularly in college admissions, passes constitutional muster.

WIRED.

But how far into the depths of coffee connoisseurship have you really dived? There are 124 coffee species out there and just two of them—arabica and robusta—account for around 99 percent of global coffee production. Even the most adventurous coffee fans rarely stray beyond these two headliners. But relying so heavily on just two coffee species is starting to look foolhardy. In our warming world, coffee plantations are coming under increased pressure from diseases, drought, and poor growing conditions. Coffee prices have almost doubled in the past two years, largely due to droughts and frosts in Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer.

Enter liberica. It’s the hipster bean that some coffee aficionados hope will herald a more resilient—and delicious—future of coffee. “It’s surprising a lot of people,” says Aaron Davis, a coffee specialist at Kew Gardens in London and author of a new paper in the journal Nature arguing that liberica’s time has come. Coffee importers and sellers are starting to pay attention to liberica, he says, thanks to its distinctive taste and because it can grow in conditions other species can’t. It could be time for this previously much-maligned bean to come back to the big leagues.

So it’s not so much about the coffee as it is about your image of yourself as being on the cutting edge of fashion. I see. (There’s a lot of money in narcissism these days.)

Read it.

In response to Creationist lists of “scientists who doubt evolution”, the National Center for Science Education put together their own list of scientists who support it. All of the signatories are named Steve, or some variation thereof.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

An indication that Christianity has declined over the last decades is the fact that Easter has slowly faded from the public space. It used to be that stores would have sales for the things that go along with holiday. The grocery stores would have an aisle dedicated to candy and treats popular with Easter. You would see ads for children’s clothes, as Easter was typically a time to get the little ones new gear.

The main reason for the decline in Easter, of course, is the decline in the number of people attending Christian churches. In some parts of the country, like New England, church attendance has collapsed. In those states, about half the people never attend services, while only about a quarter attend regularly. Only a few states have a majority of people attending church regularly.

Of course, the churches have succumbed to the rot. The Episcopal church is mostly about sodomy now. Drive around the east coast and it seems like every rainbow ends at an Episcopal church. The Catholic church is in steep decline due to the homosexual priest scandals. Even the Baptists have decided that it is better to please the lunatics than tend to the faithful. The result is a lot of empty pews.

Steve Sailer.

Three decades ago, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) sobered up enough to make his final contribution to American social science, Moynihan’s Law of Proximity to the Canadian Border: school test scores went up the closer a state was to the Canadian border.

In this map of average age of death, we can see a fascinating addendum: life expectancy goes up close to the Mexican border. This is because Mexicans are remarkably long-lived for their socio-economic status. Wikipedia has a long article review the theories attempting to explain the Hispanic Life Expectancy Paradox.

Vox.

For many Americans, doing your taxes isn’t all that complicated. It’s just data entry.

The actual work of doing your taxes mostly involves rifling through various Internal Revenue Service forms you get in the mail. There are W-2s listing your wages, 1099s showing miscellaneous income like from one-off gigs, 1098s showing mortgage interest or tuition payments, etc.

But here’s the thing about those forms: The IRS has them, too. For many people, the IRS has all the information it needs to calculate their taxes, send taxpayers a filled-out return, and have them sign it and send it right back to the IRS if everything looks in order.

It’s even worse than that. Once you send in your tax return, the IRS plugs it into their machines and recalculates your return, comparing it to the information it has already received, to make sure you are being honest.

But of course tax return preparation is a huge industry, both for the Big Boy tax preparation services like Intuit and H&RBlock and TurboTax, and for individual accounting practices. And those guys have a lot of money to spread around to politicians to make sure that their rice bowl isn’t disturbed. You can tell where this is headed.

I have yet to file a tax return that the IRS didn’t send me a nastygram about how I Done Them Wrong and informing me of what they did to fix it. In fact, my wife and I had taken to filling out the return and signing it, leaving the tax calculation blank, and letting the IRS figure the tax and send us a bill. (They will charge you interest, which is trivial these days, but no penalty if you pay up before the grace period ends.) My life would be substantially easier if I had a rough IRS-generated draft to start with. But NOOOOOOOOOO…