Read it.

Scientists have uncovered the first direct evidence that ancient Americans relied primarily on mammoth and other large animals for food. Their research sheds new light on both the rapid expansion of humans throughout the Americas and the extinction of large ice age mammals.

The study, featured on the Dec. 4 cover of the journal Science Advances, used stable isotope analysis to model the diet of the mother of an infant discovered at a 13,000-year-old Clovis burial site in Montana. Before this study, prehistoric diet was inferred by analyzing secondary evidence, such as stone tools or the preserved remains of prey animals.

The findings support the hypothesis that Clovis people specialized in hunting large animals rather than primarily foraging for smaller animals and plants.

The Times (UK).

Three might be a crowd but four appears to be the magic number when it comes to conversation. And, according to an academic who has spent decades studying how we socialise, William Shakespeare instinctively understood that.

Professor Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford, is known for “Dunbar’s number”, which alludes to his theory that most of us are able to sustain about 150 social connections.

But his research has also explored how people act in smaller groups. At Cheltenham Science Festival he explained that when it comes to having an enjoyable chat, the upper limit is a gang of four. When social groups have five or more members, the chances of them laughing together plummets.

Read it.

Millions of Americans dutifully fill their recycling bins each week, motivated by the knowledge that they’re doing something good for the environment. But the sad fact is that much of what is tossed in the recycling bin is eventually heaped into landfills.

John Stossel brought attention to the issue in a video segment shared on X Thursday morning, to which Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk replied, “Recycling is pointless.”

While this bombshell might be jarring – especially if you’re someone who dutifully cleans their recyclables before caringly placing them in bins – Thomas Kinnaman, an environmental economist from Bucknell University, says it’s actually not as bad as you think.

If it were up to me, all of it would be thrown in the trash, and my recycling bins would be empty. But my wife was Raised To Recycle, so that’s not an option.

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ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

One of the interesting things about what is happening in Syria is that it is not just the fall of the government but a collapse of Syrian society. When Assad fled, everyone in his government went into hiding. The people running various parts of the system abandoned their posts, leaving no government at all. The money is worthless, so the economy has ceased to function.

Then you have the gangs of lunatics running around, supported by your tax dollars, making sure nothing is working. Now we are getting word that remnants of the military are forming up into war bands. Soon the various ethnic and religious groups will do the same and the result will be a war zone where lightly armed war bands fight with one another for control of increasingly worthless land.

In other words, Syria collapsed and went from a poorly functioning country to something like a fallen Bronze Age society. This is not just the fall of a government but the collapse of everything, which is not something we often see. The last example is Libya, which was not much a society before we killed Gaddafi. The most recent example is the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago.

That is the show this week. Societal collapse is a rare thing, but Syria is a good reminder that it can still happen. The conditions are pretty similar in all the big examples of collapse. Of course, once you start thinking about those conditions, the West begins to look a bit fragile. Syria is also a reminder that collapse always catches people by surprise, even those causing it.

Steve Graham: “Division gets a bad rap. It’s actually a huge blessing. Associating with degenerate people is harmful.”

ZMan reviews the ch-ch-ch-changes.

One of the things that got the “new right” buzzing in the closing months of the election was the sudden pullback by corporations on the DEI front. A bunch of large companies announced they were terminating these programs. This led to the online wing of the “new right” to confidently say “we are winning!” It was part of a wave of pro-Trump confidence that kicked in during the final six weeks of the election. After the election, the same forces sense they can clear the field of DEI.

That is the subtext to this post by Christopher Rufo, who has made a lucrative career out of opposing the DEI machine. It is a letter to the Trump transition team urging them to reverse the various executive orders creating the DEI bureaucracy within the federal bureaucracy and replacing it with a “colorblind” evaluation system. By acting quickly, Rufo thinks, the new administration can deal a death blow to the DEI movement, while momentum is on their side.

Rufo is smart to point out that public sentiment has shifted strongly against DEI, so Trump would not be battling with a hornet’s nest if he does this. Rufo frames his approach as low hanging fruit that would make Trump’s voters happy without spending too much political capital. On the other hand, the closest thing to eternal life is a government program, regardless of origin. Every president has dreamed of killing at least one government program. None have succeeded.

The Foundry.

President-elect Donald Trump has once again promised to “end birthright citizenship” for the U.S.-born children of illegal and nonimmigrant aliens.

But can he do this without amending the Constitution?

Yes, he can—at least according to the original meaning of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause, which, as I explained at great length in an earlier law review article and a pair of Heritage Foundation Legal Memos, is far different from the interpretation offered by most modern scholars.

ZMan digs into history.

While most see the collapse of Syria as just another Middle East country thrown into chaos by the American government, it is a good lesson in the dangers that come when a distinct minority rules over the majority. The ISIS rebels get the credit, but the real blame lies with the way in which the Syria state was structured. Until now, Syria was ruled by one of the many minorities in the region. That minority is a mysterious ethnoreligious group called the Alawites.

The place to start is with the people. Syria has some of the oldest communities in the world, dating back to the ancient world. Maaloula, a village in western Syria, is one of the last remaining places where Aramaic is spoken. There are Christian communities that date back to Rome. Of course, Islam has been in the area now called Syria since the time of Mohamed. There is also the ethnoreligious group called the Alawites, which split from Shia Islam at some unknown point in the past.

The origins and identity of the Alawites are a mystery. There are roughly four million of them in the region. Their legends say they are descendants of the followers of the eleventh Imam, Hasan al-Askari. The reason he is called the eleventh Iman is because he was one of the twelve imams who claimed to be the spiritual and biological successors of the Mohamed. These are the founders of Shia Islam. Exactly how they became this distinct subgroup within Islam remains a mystery.

Read it.

These days, politicians routinely invoke the New Deal as a model of inspiration, without delving into the evidence of its effect. They do so even though the New Deal never, not even eight years in, met Roosevelt’s primary goal to “put America back to work.”

In reality, recovery’s absence in the 1930s is not so mysterious. Natural disasters contributed to the plight of the farms. The drought of the 1930s was unusually severe. The summers were unusually hot. While the “mighty wind” of the Dust Bowl resulted from a man-made eco-disaster: the overplowing of tens of thousands of acres.

The absence of a general recovery also can be explained. Recoveries, after all, are like people. They make choices. In each year of the 1930s, the recovery surveyed the economic landscape — and opted to stay away a while longer. Simple facts go a good way towards explaining why each year—and for slightly different reasons — the recovery absented itself. The same facts reveal the dangers of faith — not religious faith, but the political kind.

Read it.

Genes contain instructions for making proteins, and a central dogma of biology is that this information flows from DNA to RNA to proteins. But only two percent of the human genome actually encodes proteins; the function of the remaining 98% remains largely unknown.

One pressing problem in human genetics is to understand what these regions of the genome do—if anything at all. Historically, some have even referred to these regions as “junk.”

Now, a study in Cell finds that some noncoding RNAs are not, in fact, junk—they are functional and play an important role in our cells, including in cancer and human development.

‘Junk’ DNA = DNA we haven’t yet figured out what it does.

Alma T. C. Boykin:

Part of me once wanted to decorate my vehicle. The rest of me bashed that bit over the head until reason returned. One, depending on where you are, having certain tribal markings on the car will draw unwanted attention from passers by, and perhaps law enforcement. I don’t care to come out of a grocery store and discover that my car has been vandalized because of a sticker or logo. Two, getting fossilized decals off of cars is not always easy, especially now that plastic instead of steel and chrome cover everything. Three, having a vehicle that is clearly Alma’s Car might be a problem if I am ever trying to avoid someone or something. Like people who open carry a very unusual handgun, it signals things perhaps best kept quiet. That might be exactly what’s intended, as we see with highly political vehicles. Or it might mark the driver as a target for less-than-friendly attention if things get Interesting.

Marginal Revolution.

Donald Trump wants to create Freedom Cities. It’s a good idea. As I wrote in 2008, the Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. See the map (PDF) for more [N.B. the vast majority of this land is NOT parks]. Thus, there is plenty of land to build new cities that could be adopted to new technologies such as driverless cars and drones.

I would add only one suggestion let’s call this Trump City.

 

ZMan pulls back the curtain.

An interesting bit of subtext to the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO is how the reactions to it reflects the shifting politics in America. Twenty years ago, the general reaction online would have been what you see in television police dramas. The vast majority of the public would have been cheering on the police as they searched for the killer, while his family was paraded in front of the cameras. The dead guy would have been the unquestionable victim of a terrible crime.

On top of that, the people we call conservatives would have been waddling about in their comfort fit chinos, beating their chests about crime and the demonization of capitalism by the people we call the left. As soon as it was clear that the perpetrator was a white male, the people we call the left would have been tub-thumping about the need for gun control and maybe white male violence. Both sides would have done their act in front of predictably adoring audience.

Both sides have tried their normal act, but the world has changed and that means the audience is not as interested in the old shows. The people we call the left got this right away and stuck to giggling about the victim being the head of one of those evil health insurance companies they have been demonizing for decades. They were sure the killer was one of their own, due to his wearing a dark hoodie. In fact, a lot of people in the dissident camp assumed it was an Antifa too.

Slate. a Voice of the Crust.

A gunman dressed in dark clothing and wearing a mask over his lower face ambushed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Wednesday morning in midtown Manhattan, where Thompson’s company was hosting a conference. The New York Police Department said the shooting was a “targeted attack” and that the gunman remains at large, but few other details have been released. Surveillance video captured the moment the shooter calmly approached Thompson, pointed a pistol equipped with a silencer, fired multiple shots, and fled on an electric bike. Police are now combing through video footage to track him down, including at a nearby Starbucks the shooter visited.

Many who noted the details of the shooting had an immediate question: Is this what a professional hit looks like in real life? The NYPD has said nothing of the sort, but that didn’t stop speculation from running rampant online. Dennis Kenney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who has decades of expertise studying professional killers, has a unique perspective on that. He’s spent years dispelling myths about contract killings born of movies and Law & Order episodes. He told me he found aspects of the attack peculiar and agreed to talk to me while emphasizing that it’s too early to draw definitive conclusions about a crime for which very little information has been released. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Read it.

few decades ago, and still kicking about in more American right-wing circles, the discussion of ‘bioethics’ took on national proportions. George W. Bush himself initiated a President’s Council of Bioethics, stacked with then-rockstar intellectuals such as Michael Sandel, Francis Fukuyama, and Leon Kass. The general message was, predictably, “No!”—with more or less embarrassed Biblical footnotes. ‘Transhumanism,’ one of the concerns of these bioethicists, is probably less a concept than a rhetorical device or the name for a vague cultural atmosphere, much like ‘globalism.’ The recent TERF wars have sparked renewed interest in the body and its malleability. J.K. Rowling is certainly an able rhetorician, and Mary Harrington has written what is almost a natural theology of the anatomy, even seeking to recast the post-war consensus on the pill.

There is likely little more exciting to 20th and 21st century political theorists than words like ‘embodied,’ ‘subjectivity,’ or ‘intersubjectivity.’ One really must control oneself. And it is certainly dramatic to write about transhumanism or cyborgs in Blade Runner-sounding jeremiads. What I want to present in the following is not more conceptual weed-killing. Rather, I want to suggest, in very undramatic terms, why technology—in the much more limited, much more Greek sense of craftsmanship—might be not only harmless, and be not merely useful, but be a help to being ourselves.

Read it.

By the early date of 1830, Alexis de Tocqueville had already uncovered the tensions that lie within democracy. He saw that although the gap between rich and poor was smaller than ever, the new closeness bred hatred where there had once been mutual respect. Now, only force could keep the peace. He concluded in despair: “Each feels the ill, but no one has the courage and energy needed to seek something better . . . we have destroyed an aristocratic society, and having stopped complacently amid the debris of the former edifice, we seem to want to settle there forever.” As Teslas glide past tent cities in Los Angeles, the West still stands paralyzed at the end of history.

Daniel Greenfield.

The Left is a religious movement. Its manic enthusiasms are fueled by the conviction that it can and will save the world. But what happens if the world does not want to be saved by the Left?

That is the dilemma of the 2024 election for believers in the ‘right side of history’.

In 2000 and 2016 leftists resorted to conspiracy theories to explain not only to us but to themselves why they did not really lose, but the 2024 election was a landslide in which not only the electoral college, but the popular vote, not only straight white men, but the entire spectrum of the electorate rejected not just Joe Biden, but his black female girl power ringer

When the Left lost the working class, it blamed the loss on racism. The factory workers and coal miners, the proletariat on whom generations of leftists had pinned their hopes for a national regeneration, were cast out for their whiteness. Henceforth, minorities would be the standard bearers for transforming the national culture and inheriting power at the dawn of the new age.

Now that virtually every minority group except black women has turned on them, what’s left?

Apart from the essays explaining why black women and ‘trans kids’ are the only virtuous minorities still out there (often written by straight white men) there isn’t a backup plan.

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

They feel frustrated by the status quo, and they’re fed up with the system. They don’t trust politicians, and they want revolutionary change.

They are men, many of them younger, who are looking for a champion. Once, they liked Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont as a presidential candidate. This election, they voted for Donald J. Trump.

The number of Sanders supporters who have gone MAGA is most likely a sliver of the electorate. But they illustrate an important pattern in American politics, political scientists say, one that might help explain Mr. Trump’s success with young men in particular. For certain voters, political preferences are defined not by party, but by their attitudes about the ruling class — whether they trust people in power, or think they’ve rigged the system against ordinary people.

Read it.

Concerning the big decisions in the economic realm, we are in a somewhat better situation than national security analysts and policy-makers. Although certainty about possession of the truth remains beyond human reach, although the exact instrumental value of economic freedom and property rights for prosperity and economic growth remains debatable, we do know something. Adam Smith has taught us that the hope to acquire property is an important incentive for eliciting work effort. Ludwig von Mises has added that we need private property rights in land, factories, and enterprises for scarcity prices and a rational allocation of resources to apply. Finally, Friedrich August von Hayek added that the exploitation of human knowledge requires decentralized decision-making. Together these arguments imply that central planning is a road to misery.

Dunh dunh DUNHHHHHHH….

Beneath the icy expanse of Antarctica, an advanced submersible uncovered stunning underwater structures that could rewrite what we know about polar ice. But just as its groundbreaking mission reached new depths, the vessel vanished without a trace. What secrets lie hidden beneath the ice—and what could have caused its mysterious disappearance?

Blame it on Trump.

And about time.

Read it.

How forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases.

You learn something new every day.

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry.

A question to which I dare say you haven’t given a lot of thought.

AND a reminder that there is no notion so trivial or eccentric that some group of people haven’t made an area of deep concern.

Scientific American, a Voice of the Crust.

Archaeological and genetic discoveries topple long-standing ideas about the domestication of equines.

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

Wearable tech – currently dominated by smart watches – is a multi-billion dollar industry with a sharp focus on health tracking.

Many premium products claim to accurately track exercise routines, body temperature, heart rate, menstrual cycle and sleep patterns, among others.

…

But many doctors – and tech experts – remain cautious about using health data captured by wearables.

Read it.

Why is it that, after politicians, bankers and lawyers, architects have such a bad reputation among the general public?

From the Left, architects are held in suspicion or outright hostility as the tools of global finance, willing collaborators with corrupt municipal authorities, apologists for the predations of capital. From the Right, if anything, the contempt is even greater, with architects denounced as the avant-garde of a brutalist, hubristic modernism that has stripped our cities and towns of the layers of history and the particularity of place, both of which they have replaced with a homogeneous landscape of concrete, steel and glass.

And why, perhaps just as importantly, do the vast majority of architects appear to be resigned to this animosity, content to bury their heads in the latest gadgets for digital modelling and 3D-printing while the Tower of Babel they have built is everywhere crumbling into dust?

Read it.

I’d agree that representatives selected from party lists drawn up by capitalists, whether “state” or “corporate”, are hardly the best people to advance democracy.

But can democracy provide a satisfactory and complete political system within itself?

The problem with democracy is that it doesn’t really do what we all want it to do, and yet nobody seems able to come up with a better alternative.

Read it.

Roger Scruton is a marvel.

The Foundry.

Many Democrats dream of ways to ensure they never lose power again. This is why they want to eliminate the Electoral College, pack the Supreme Court, and make the District of Columbia a state.

As D.C. celebrates 50 years of “home rule,” here are five reasons that autonomy—let alone statehood—isn’t a good idea.

Sarah Hoyt:

Children weren’t some airy-fairy “the culture tell us it’s good.” For most of human history children were economic goods, an addition to the parents comfort and their ability to survive. For a head-spinning moment, go and read colonial biographies. “I’m so sorry my four year old died. He was doing most of the work looking after the cows and horses, and he was very advanced in his study of Greek.”

The Great Sort continues.

ZMan looks at the elephant in the room.

One of the remarkable things to happen in the last election cycle was the preference cascade that quietly happened regarding immigration. Five years ago, the best you could hope to hear from normie and the people who prey on him in the political system is that “illegal immigration” is bad. They still clung to “legal immigration” as some sort of magical incantation that put them on the side of angels. Then suddenly, normie was holding up signs that read, “Mass Deportation Now!”

There is a practical reason for the change. Trump ran on the immigration issue in 2016 and to the surprise of the beautiful people, it was not disqualifying. They were sure they had properly anathematized the issue but there was Trump talking about Mexican rapists and Muslim bans. They responded with violence against Trump supporters and the usual stuff about Hitler. Meanwhile, the Trump administration was using the administrative state to clamp down on immigration.

That created a contradiction. On the one hand, the Cloud People were attacking the Dirt People for being anti-immigrant bigots, even though the Dirt People continued to hold romantic views on immigration. On the other hand, the negative results of immigration were slowly declining as immigration declined. Then like a windstorm, Biden comes in, opens the border and suddenly everyone is now getting to see the results of open borders policy in their neighborhood.

Been there.

Forbes.

Thomas Kuhn, in his groundbreaking book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, described a paradigm shift in science as a new understanding of nature that:

Is a sufficiently unprecedented theory to attract an enduring group of adherents.

A theory that is open-ended with many problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve.

This is precisely the nature of our new understanding of biology, which has occurred over the past twenty years and is now sufficiently advanced to offer a new paradigm.

ZMan does a deep dive.

A central feature of the democratic society is mendacity. The more democratic the culture, the less honest the participants. The reason for that is simple. The goal in a democratic system, whether it is a marketplace for goods and service or a political system for setting public policy, is to win the crowd. You do not necessarily have to win a majority, but you need enough to lie about having a majority. To do that you must say anything to bring the mob to your side.

This is the reason we know or care about Socrates. Ancient Athens was a democratic society, where rhetoric was the prized skill. The reason for that is status was rewarded to those who could win over their fellow citizens through argument. Inevitably the truth stopped mattering very much, as people tend to believe a good story, especially one that flatters them, over objective reality. Socrates skillfully argued in favor of the truth over rhetoric, so the Athenians voted to kill him.

Lying is a funny thing as everyone lies about something, usually in a moment of weakness or in an effort to be prudent. As a result, normal people think of lying as a thing you do reluctantly. You lie about not having broken something at work, even though in the long run honestly would be your better option. You tell the friend that his new car is great, even though you think it is ridiculous for a middle-aged man to be driving around in a Miata. It hurts to say it, but friendship requires it.

Read it.

You may ask: What need does Qatar have for a warship? What enemies does Qatar have, other then perhaps Iran, in any conflict with which this vessel would have a short life?

I have no answer to that question. HOWEVER, it is nice to see small rich countries experiment in a space usually dominated by large stupid working-on-being-poor countries, like the U.S., U.K., and Russia.

Read it.

Don’t listen to what they say — watch what they do.

Read it.

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to fulfill his pledge to carry out the mass illegal immigrant deportations he promised, all eyes are on the man tasked with implementing that mission: incoming “border czar” Thomas Homan, a more than 30-year law enforcement veteran who led Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the first Trump administration.

Standing in Homan’s way are a handful of Democratic governors and mayors who have vowed to fight deportations of illegal immigrants in their jurisdictions.

The most notable case is Denver mayor Mike Johnston (D.), who said last week in an interview that he is willing to put police officers at the county line to repel ICE agents, comparing Trump’s immigration plans to the massacre at Tiananmen Square.

UPDATE: CBS Evening News HIDES Border Czar Visit to the Border

It’s hip, and trendy.