There is nothing new under the sun.

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As I’ve written before, there is no way to know – and no way to prove, which is far more important – that there was enough fraud to have determined the outcome of this election. That doesn’t mean there can’t be very strong suspicions.

But I’ve noticed in the comments here and elsewhere a number of people saying something like, “Oh, so you think this election was pure as the driven snow?”, as though that would be the only alternative way to look at it: fraudulent election or squeaky-clean election.

So I decided to write a post about the range of possibilities I see.

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The smuggling of cars into China has been a widespread problem since at least the 1980s, and slowly evolved into an arms race between the authorities and the smugglers. The ultimate smuggling boat is known as the Armored Stealth Boat (ASB). You read that correctly; this may sound too James Bond to be real, but it is.

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

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How appropriate.

Congress seeks to arm Taiwan quickly as China threat grows (Washington Post)

In Solidarity With NATO, Giorgia Meloni Affirms Italian Support for Ukraine

Russian Tech Drain Increases Amid Draft, Economic Woes

Russians on Moscow Streets Calling for Nuke Strike on DC

The U.S. Navy to Send 40 More Boats to Ukraine

Iran and China Use Private Detectives to Spy on Dissidents in America (N.Y. Times)

Zelenskyy: Russian Troops Committed 400 War Crimes in Kherson

The Russian Empire Must Die (Atlantic)

WEAPONS: Another First Hits The Russian Fleet

US Army iOS app among thousands that unknowingly used Russian code

Putin’s Private Army Goes Full ISIS With Sledgehammer Execution Video  Putin is the New … Mohammed?

UN General Assembly Calls for Russian Reparations to Ukraine  Good luck with that.

Tom Veal.

The midterms defied expectations and, contrary to my prediction, are sure to strangle the Democratic “push Joe out” campaign in its cradle, especially if, as is not at all improbable, the Georgia runoff leads to another 50-50 Senate split. If that happens, the Democrats will need a Vice President to break ties, and Kackling Kamala is the only Veep they’ve got or will be able to get.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Ukraine Situation Report: Russia’s Demolition Of Roadway Over Dam Seen In Incredible Video

Jersey Police Apologize For Raid On Roman Abramovich, Agree To Pay Damages

A Cold Winter For Europe: Blame Strategic Blindness

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The Mexican government is using video of homeless people and open-air drug users in Philadelphia’s troubled Kensington neighborhood in a national ad campaign to try to scare young people away from drugs.

Jesús Ramírez, the spokesman for Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, proudly presented the ad series Tuesday, saying the campaign ‘seeks to inform young people of the damage caused to health by the consumption of chemical drugs.’

Ramírez did not respond to repeated requests for comment as to where the government got the Philadelphia videos or why they used them in ads aimed at a Mexican audience.

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Ask any young lady today what her idea of the “traditional” American woman is, and she will bring up, twisting her face in disdain, the midcentury suburban housewife.

It’s hard to say whether the woman in our heads was ever even real, let alone representative of some majority. Influentially documented (or perhaps, drawn up) by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, the American housewife has become a stock character for Hollywood mythmakers: isolated, vain, bored; drowning her resentment of her 2.5 kids and their cheating Don Draper of a father in wine and pills. Whatever the reality, this meme overpowered it.

Every meme doubles as a consumer identity and triples as an easily digestible political motif. The “repressed housewife” became a Girardian scapegoat around which the new liberal feminist order coalesced. By the ’70s, more than half of American women were working alongside men outside of the home. The “housewife” was as passée as the dresses she would have worn, the threat she posed now far more imaginary than real. But still, she was routinely resurrected on television and in movies, the ambivalent icon of women’s history in America for decades to follow—the superficial image of what not to be, of a regressive past always threatening to re-impose itself. She was to be relentlessly guarded against, her image in our world and in our own hearts stamped out, replaced instead by the sexually and economically “liberated” girlboss feminist.

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I want to start with a page out of history — the handwriting of Thomas Jefferson, taken from one of his notebooks on religion. The words on this page belongs to a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe and America, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book.

This blog has a page where I keep my commonplace book.

Ben Domenech lays out the Conservatism Inc. view.

Having been saddled by everyone involved with the largest portion of blame for Tuesday’s election disappointment, Donald Trump’s descent into the pit of despair takes exactly the form you could expect: a series of Mean Girls rants about everyone more popular than he is in the Republican Party.

There has been much talk over the years about how there’s a Good Trump and a Bad Trump, but the truth about our 45th president is that, just like the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s version of the Hulk, he’s always angry — he just controls it better when times are good. Now that times are bad — or as bad as they can be when you have millions more Republicans voting than Democrats and you just dislodged Nancy Pelosi from power — he is reverting to his true form. It ain’t pretty.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

One of the lessons of the Tuesday election show is that voting matters when the results are open to competition. In one party states, voting is ceremonial as the results are always the same. America is well on its way to becoming a one party state, so voting is no longer a part of politics. It is another lottery, a thing to let stupid people think that one day something magical will happen.

And, of course, it rarely does.

After several choruses of Someday My Prince Will Come we wind up with … Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and John Fetterman.

It’s time to demand our money back.

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Back in the year 2000, David Brooks made his name with the publication of his first book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Until that time, Brooks had been a journalistic journeyman, having put in stints at the City News Bureau of Chicago, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Washington Times, and the Weekly Standard. But Bobos in Paradise made him a star. In 2003, when the New York Times went looking for someone to replace retiring conservative columnist William Safire, Brooks got the job. Ever since, he has been one of America’s most visible and widely published pundits, with regular appearances on PBS’s The News Hour, NPR’s All Things Considered, a contributing-writer slot at the Atlantic, visiting professorships at prestigious universities, and even a TED talk, which he delivered back in 2019. And all of this came about because of a book filled with observations about America’s future that have turned out to be spectacularly wrong.

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The word GUY so pervades American speech that a detailed account of it would hardly seem necessary, yet the multiple meanings of the word guy are quite complex and are connected to the structure of English. Contemporary English is in a schismatic state between those who make use of or prescribe generic nouns and pronouns, such as man and he ‘human being’, and those who view these constructions as signs of a deeply sexist structure of English. Generic uses of man and he have now long been the targets of “politically correct” language reforms, the chief objection being that a word that primarily signifies the masculine gender cannot also signify the feminine gender or serve as a nongendered or gender-inclusive lexical item. Both man and he primarily signify the masculine gender, but they are also polysemous. English man ‘male human being’ developed from the Old English grammatically masculine noun man(n), whose meaning was originally ‘human being’, and hetook on generic functions after the loss of grammatical gender in the Middle English period. Semantic change is not an uncommon phenomenon, but such changes should not be taken as clean, crisp breaks with the past. The prototypical meaning of a lexical item may change its focus, but the old meanings can still remain connected peripherally. The cognitive model behind the multiple meanings of man and he, despite the current trend to eliminate their generic and inclusive uses, must still be powerfully active in the minds of English speakers, for the development of the word guy closely parallels their meanings and functions.

Babylon Bee.

UPDATE: Nation Unsure Whether To Support Party That Runs Brain-Damaged Candidates Or Party That Loses To Brain-Damaged Candidates

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US Livid As Brittney Griner Transferred To Russian Forced Labor Camp

The White House is livid after WNBA star Brittney Griner has been transferred to a forced labor colony to serve out a nine-and-a-half year sentence after her conviction for possession of a small quantity of cannibas oil.

Note the equation of ‘White House livid’ with ‘U.S. livid’. Sorry, but the White House is not the U.S. I doubt that anyone outside of the clerisy gives a shit about what happens to Brittney Griner, who made the foolish mistake of believing that celebrity earned her a pass for violating an easily avoidable illicit-substance law.

Will she learn anything from this? Doubtful. Will her ‘fans’ learn anything from this? Extremely doubtful.

s

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Sometimes it’s wrong to begin a phrase with the word “just”. I offer as evidence two such situations. I think there’s a common thread to be drawn.

My wife works at a company that is often buttfucked by consultants and outside vendors, leaving her and her overworked colleagues to clean up the mess. Each such mess is usually introduced with the patent phrase “Oh just do X”, where X is some process that inevitably fails to work as advertised. Handwavium then generally ensues.

ZMan lives in the moment.

The great day is upon us. It used to be that the media would roll out some long serving geezers to give a lecture about the beauty of democracy. They would wax poetic about the wonderfulness of ordinary citizens doing their civic duty. Even though we may not like the results, we had to respect the process. That was when the results never questioned the elite consensus. These days the media rolls out conspiracy theorists telling us half the voters are actually Russian bots.

That will be the story tonight. The bad guys are expected to take it on the chin as normal people manage to outnumber the dead at the ballot box. The official line now is that the only way to preserve democracy is to have a one-party state. The Los Angeles Times makes this point in their fatwah against the Republicans. The Atlantic tells us that the Republicans will immediately implement a police state after the election, followed by the return of everyone’s favorite uncle.

…

As Tucker pointed out, you will know the election is rigged if brain damaged hobo wins tonight.

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The Idaho stop is the common name for laws that allow cyclists to treat a stop sign as a yield sign, and a red light as a stop sign. It first became law in Idaho in 1982, but was not adopted elsewhere until Delaware adopted a limited stop-as-yield law, the “Delaware Yield”, in 2017. Arkansas was the second state to legalize both stop-as-yield and red light-as-stop in April 2019. Studies in Delaware and Idaho have shown significant decreases in crashes at stop-controlled intersections.

This appears merely to legalize existing behavior on the part of bicyclists. I have yet to see anybody on a bicycle pay attention to either a stop sign or a red light.

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The 2022 midterm election is once again characterized by extreme polarization between the parties. As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, despite moderate positions gaining slightly this year, an annual survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs shows that moderates are in the minority in both parties the United States.

In July, 42 percent of self-described Democrats said they were moderates or conservatives, opposite 58 percent who considered themselves liberals. The gap is even bigger in the Republican Party, where 77 percent identified as conservatives and only 23 percent said of themselves that they were moderates or liberals. According to this survey, this makes Republicans in fact a whole lot more conservative than Democrats are liberal.

Joel Kotkin

Few regions have been more consistently Democratic than the West Coast. Even compared with the Northeast, where Republicans occasionally win governors’ offices, the appropriately named “left coast” has been adamantine in its progressivism. Republicans haven’t won statewide office in California in years; in Oregon, it’s decades. Washington has elected a Republican secretary of state, but she now serves in the Biden administration. And the region’s major cities are overwhelmingly blue.

That could be changing, at least a bit. As cities from Seattle and Portland to San Francisco and Los Angeles fight crime and disorder, something of a political rebellion has broken out. One progressive fashion entrepreneur has called San Francisco “a city of chaos,” where his employees are not safe. The city, by some estimates, has deteriorated further and faster than virtually any urban area in the country. Within the last year, though, San Francisco recalled its progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, as well as left-wing members of the city school board. Meantime, remarkably, Seattle elected a Republican as city attorney, and Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón has faced backlash, and a possible recall. Voters have a chance to continue this rebellion this week.

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I was recently asked by a former colleague why I had increased my exposure to certain sectors in the equity market. After all, the information that had informed my decisions must already be priced in since the market is efficient, he argued. One could spend plenty of ink on the definitions of market efficiency as is usual in academia, but let’s just not. Instead, I’d like to argue that the market, at least important parts of it, may have become notably less efficient due to changes to the information landscape.

Many may be familiar with the concept tragedy of the commons. Jointly used land (commons) tends to be overused, polluted, and so on. Today’s information landscape actually resembles such a common. Today’s information commons has however become limited (reduced flora and fauna) and less valuable (the soil has been depleted), for several reasons.

Republican support for Ukraine is fading (Spectator USA)

Serbia ‘In Hurry’ to Cut Russian Energy, Draw Closer to E.U.

US Greenlights Guided Rockets For Finland To ‘Bolster Europe’s Northern Flank’

‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections

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IKEA sent a cease and desist letter to the upcoming survival horror game The Store is Closed over its similarities with the company’s chain of warehouse locations.

As reported by Kotaku, the famed Swedish furniture giant sent the request to The Store is Closed‘s sole indie developer Jacob Shaw, who also goes by the studio name Ziggy. The letter demands that Shaw make significant design changes to the game, which is set in a large warehouse store that strongly resembles an IKEA. Lawyers for the furniture company claimed The Store is Closed commits copyright infringement due to comparisons made by some news outlets between the game and IKEA’s stores.

Spoilsports.

ZMan does a deep dive.

fundamental question for any human society. You cannot have a society without first answering the question, who are we? History and biology do the heavy lifting for large human societies, while smaller societies, like social clubs, will have some sort of founding document to define the society. Of course, constitutions are not just for small scale societies. Big countries have them too.

Indeed it is.

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Price inflation and the resulting business cycles are monetary phenomena, and without increases in the money supply—i.e., monetary inflation—there is no price inflation. If the world were a very simple place, we would see this relationship clearly displayed: when the money supply increased, we would also see a general increase in prices soon thereafter. The world, however, is not a very simple place and an economy can include countless factors that can mask, delay, and otherwise obscure the connection between monetary inflation and price inflation.

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I doubt that vegetarians will be willing to ‘follow the science’

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This is the last final push to the election. That means the democracy supporters have just a couple more days to get those ballots printed and into the mail, depending upon the state they are ballot stuffing. Elections have turned into Christmas for the elves who are tasked with making sure their bosses get what they want when they wake up the morning after the election.

All joking aside, the very weird noises coming from the Biden people suggest they are plotting a caper next Tuesday. Biden’s chief of staff issued what he called a final warning about the election. Of course, Biden’s speech made clear that the only way to defend democracy is to support the regime at all costs. It was another form of “by any means necessary” that we heard in the Trump years.

Much like the over-the-top response to Kanye West and now the basketball player, a repeat of 2020 next Tuesday would serve our interests. The regime would avoid an embarrassing result on Tuesday, but it would come at the price of their legitimacy, which would be an enormous price to pay. Too many people would notice what was happening and draw the obvious conclusion.

“Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.” — Kurt Vonnegut

ZMan does a little history.

The main difference between the 19th century peasant and the modern suburban peasant is communications. The French peasant could go weeks or months without speaking to neighbors. The suburban peasant cannot go five minutes without information bombarding his senses. The same information storm intended to keep the suburban peasant suspended within a solution of information, often insulates him from his conditioning, resulting in radicalization.

Marx was right about the French peasants. They were never much use for the revolution, something the Bolsheviks would eventually learn as well. For the modern dissident, there may be some portion of the suburban peasantry that has radical potential, even if he is immune to direct radicalization. The phenomenon of normie going from zero to eleven on the radicalization scale after an incidental encounter with forbidden material is well known.

Feel free to substitute the popular music artist of your choice.

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Much remains to be learned about the nature and origins of various sex differences, but more is known than most people realize. Much of the current confusion is generated by activists who suppress, attack, and distort information on sex differences in order to reinforce their preferred ideological narratives. These ideology-driven distortions are helpfully illustrated by a recent New York Times essay by Chelsea Conaboy, which announces that the maternal instinct is a “myth”—a social construct generated and upheld by the patriarchy to impel women to raise children and keep them out of the workforce.

Biology Deniers!

Hungary closing public facilities due to soaring cost of energy (EuroNews)

Russia Would Agree to Talks to End Ukraine War on These Conditions: Kremlin (Newsweek)

Will Putin Drop a Nuclear Bomb on Ukraine? Here’s What Americans Think (Newsweek)

US, NATO, EU Condemn Russia on Grain Deal

Finland Says Ukraine Arms Ending Up In Hands Of Criminal Gangs

US Plans to Deploy B-52 Bombers to Australia’s North: Source

“Let’s Get Out Of NATO”: Discontent Soars Across Europe As Russian Sanctions Backfire

Ukraine: Barrage of Russian Strikes on Key Infrastructure

Wheat Prices Jump After Russia Exits Grain Deal; UN Races To Save Agreement

Much Of Ukrainian Capital Without Power & Water After New Russian Airstrikes

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Technology capable of collecting solar power in space and beaming it to Earth to provide a global supply of clean and affordable energy was once considered science fiction. Now it is moving closer to reality. Through the Space-based Solar Power Project (SSPP), a team of California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researchers is working to deploy a constellation of modular spacecraft that collect sunlight, transform it into electricity, then wirelessly transmit that electricity wherever it is needed. They could even send it to places that currently have no access to reliable power.

“This is an extraordinary and unprecedented project,” says Harry Atwater, an SSPP researcher and Otis Booth Leadership Chair of Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science. “It exemplifies the boldness and ambition needed to address one of the most significant challenges of our time, providing clean and affordable energy to the world.”

Atwater, who is also the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science, leads the project jointly with two other researchers: Ali Hajimiri, Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and co-director of SSPP; and Sergio Pellegrino, Joyce and Kent Kresa Professor of Aerospace and Civil Engineering, co-director of SSPP, and a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Jerry Pournelle pushed this idea for decades.

Freeberg has some insight.

On this “fake it ’til you make it” thing…

It occurs to me that we could think of this as how humans are built. We settle ourselves into communities, and at the community level a decision is made somehow about whether we’ll put up with fakery. This is why certain people don’t fit into certain communities. If you’ve watched people for a very long time like I have, you’ll notice certain people don’t fit into certain places: Alice invites Bob to live in Aliceville, and when Bob makes the move, things don’t click. Like much of nature, this is a simple thing until you take the time to study it, at which point you discover layers of complexity. “Bob couldn’t make it because Bob is a jerk” makes perfect sense, until Bob relocates to Bobtown, where he gets along just fine. Then: “Alice can live in Aliceville but Bob is relegated to Bobtown because Aliceville has a higher standard…and Bob’s a jerk” makes perfect sense. Until the day Alice visits Bobtown and can barely stand it. Then, you could keep things simple by saying: “Alice is a giver, and the people of Aliceville make it tolerable for her because they’re not a bunch of manic takers like the inhabitants of Bobtown who just take take take, until she has nothing left to give.” Which, again, makes perfect sense. Until you find the citizens of Bobtown are kindly counseling Alice, on her way out of town, not to let the doorknob hit her in the ass.

Deductive reasoning makes it clear, therefore, there’s something deeper and more complicated happening here. Neither side has a monopoly on civil behavior, or mutually rewarding associations. There must be flavors of communities; unwritten codes of conduct.

…

All the people have the “but” in their “I’m a tolerant person, but.”

All the communities have the “but” in their “We’re an accepting and broad-minded community, but.”

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Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was attacked by a man with a hammer at the couple’s home in San Francisco early Friday morning. CNN has strung a series of reports on the attack here. CNN’s first report of the assault was posted at 11:08 a.m. on October 28. By 2:25 p.m. Gavin Newsom had attributed the attack to “divisive and hateful rhetoric.” By 7:25 p.m. President Biden had observed that assaulter’s query — “Where’s Nancy?” — was the same one used during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

Defamation dies in darkness. The Washington Post therefore assigned three reporters to the case. By 7:00 a.m. on October 29 the Post had nailed it down: “Attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband follows years of GOP demonizing her.” The subhead was equally unsubtle: “A man with right-wing views who broke into the House speaker’s home yelled ‘Where is Nancy?’ before assaulting Paul Pelosi with a hammer, police say.” The Post must have capitalized “Where is Nancy” to indicate it’s part of the right-wing code.

Michael Shellenberger has taken note. Shellenberger is the long time Bay-area resident and author of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities (2021). Shellenberger finds the attacker — David DePape — to be more in the grip of a drug-induced psychosis than ideology-induced fanaticism.

The speculation I’ve seen on the web, granted among people who have even less respect for the Pelosis than I do (zer0), characterize it as a Grindr date gone wrong. This is usually followed by an assertion that the truth won’t come out until after the election because Democrat apparatchiks fear the truth’s effect on their electoral prospects.

I guess we’ll find out….

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The subtitle is Why Insurance Markets Fail and What To Do About It, and the authors are the highly regarded Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Ray Fisman. The level is a bit above what could make this book a bestseller, but I consider that a good thing. The book in fact is a classic example of how to present economic research in readable, digestible form and should be regarded as such.

People don’t spend a lot of time thinking about insurance–nothing is more boring than an insurance salesman, per the conventional wisdom–but insurance is one of the pillars of modern civilization (in the same way that sewage removal is a necessary requirement of modern cities).

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Once a term gets widely adopted by the press, and earns itself a space in dictionaries, it becomes challenging to argue that the thing the term stands for does not really exist.

A good example is ‘capitalism’, a term with a precise meaning (by Marx) that most people use as if it were a synonym for ‘industrialism’.

At least this is the case with the “techlash.” A term which is everywhere, even as the thing that it names can be a bit trickier to pin down.