Hey, we didn’t say it would be easy.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

A little change of pace this week as the news is mostly made up nonsense about the war on Russia and, of course, stories about Trump. The obsession with Trump moved past whatever lies beyond absurd years ago. Even if you get the symbolism of Trump to the managerial elite, their obsessing over him is exhausting. It is as if they want to talk about him to the point where his fans are sick of the subject.

Scan the millions of posts about Trump in the regime media each week and it is like watching a man deliberately slip on a banana peel. His attempt to entertain the audience just creates a sense of shame. You are embarrassed for him. That is the same feeling I get when I read a New York Times piece about Trump. How humiliating and degrading it must be to write those posts.

The Finns have a word for this, myötähäpeä, which roughly translates into secondhand shame or shared embarrassment. Fremdschämen is the German version of it, which means the feeling you get when seeing someone do something so embarrassing that you start to feel shame by watching it. English does not have a corresponding word, which is odd given the history of the English language.

Germany raids 24 properties linked to Putin ally Usmanov (Associated Press) Putin cooties! They’re everywhere!

Ex-Putin Adviser Uses BBC Interview to Threaten the U.K. With Nuclear Apocalypse (Daily Beast)

Even Putin knows he is losing

Retired General: US Will Attack Russian Military If Putin Nukes Ukraine Under Biden? I doubt it.

Xi Tells Armed Forces Focus On Preparing For Wars As Geopolitical Flashpoints Intensify 

The Bottomless Corruption of the Ukrainian State

Mother Russia Calls in Vain

Ukraine Threatens 5-Year Prison Sentence For Anyone Voting In “Sham Referendums”

LOGISTICS: Russia Seeks Bounty Hunters

PROCUREMENT: Iran Obtains Su-35s And Unwanted Problems

Ukraine’s Mariupol Defenders, Putin Ally in Prisoner Swap

Ukraine Seizes Dozens of Russian Tanks Left by Fleeing Forces (Bloomberg)

Russian Nukes Can Be Used To Defend Annexed Ukraine Regions, Kremlin Warns

Former Top NATO General: West Must be Prepared For War With Russia

People often ask me why I never smile. I respond that I do smile but just not when they’re around.

Read it.

Sarah Hoyt.

What I am calling for is a cold, hard look at the utility of mass-industrial, state enforced education as we head out of the mass-production, mass-skills era.

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Delaware’s Governor has said they are ‘preparing’ for any migrants that may be sent to Biden’s home state by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis – as the plane which was flown into Martha’s Vineyard heads towards Georgetown airport.

Pass the popcorn.

ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.

The blank slate crowd are sure that everything about a human society is a construction of the mind and can therefore be deconstructed. Western society, which has towered over the rest of mankind for more than five hundred years, can be disassembled and then reassembled to put non-Western people in charge. There is no evidence to support the claim, but a great global experiment is underway, nonetheless. There is mass migration from the Global south into the West.

A dozen years ago, Jason Richwine did his doctoral thesis in the topic and found that migration into the United States from the south was decreasing the quality of human capital by reducing the over all IQ of the population. He relied upon the mountain of IQ studies that show the average intelligence of Hispanics to be ten points below the average for Europeans. The usual suspects flew into a rage and had Jason Richwine condemned for heresy.

No one bothered to challenge the conclusions of his study, as that would suggest moral claims can be subject to objective measures. A key component of any religion is that the moral claims are unassailable. The new religion of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity operates like every other religion. Its principles are beyond question. In this case, it means that all people are equally capable and the differences seen between people are due to the racism of white people.

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The immigrants are being transported from Republican-led border states to northern Democratic enclaves, which have long proclaimed themselves “sanctuaries” for the migrants they are now so appalled to find arriving. Democrats charge that it’s a stunt, and they are partly right. But it is a very shrewd stunt with a far-reaching impact. Although the buses carry a vanishingly small number of the illegals arriving daily in Texas and Arizona, they are making several big points.

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What people in the UK may not realise is that there are teams of contractors who start the American harvest in the south, almost on the Mexican border, and as the year progresses, they move steadily north, combining as they go. After all, the further north, the later the harvest. They finish somewhere in Canada playing chicken with winter.

Now some of these chaps work closely with the major machinery manufacturers. After all they might have several big combines and tractors and they will change them every three years. Not surprisingly, because their machinery works hard. They can be combining, 24 hours a day, for days on end when harvest is ready. So, some of these contractors will effectively have new machinery on standing order. It’s metaphorically got their name on it even as it proceeds along the production line.

One of these chaps was approached by a representative of the company he deals with. The company wanted him to go electric.

His response was simple. “How do I charge these combines when they are many miles from an electrical mains supply, in the middle of a cornfield, in the middle of nowhere?” “How do I run them 24 hours a day for 10 or 12 days straight when the harvest is ready, and the bad weather is coming in?” “How do I get a 50,000+ lb. combine that takes up the width of an entire road back to mains electricity 20 miles away when the battery goes dead?”

Apparently, the answer is ‘we’re working on it’.

Uh, yeah….

Russia’s underperforming military capability may be key to its downfall (The Guardian)

Russia is Running Out of Options to Recruit More Soldiers (Newsweek)

Coal stoves and wood thieves: Europe braces for winter without Russian gas (Washington Post) Boy, those sanctions really work, don’t they.

“Mass Graves” Allegation Becomes Focus Of Calls For Putin To Face War Crimes Tribunal

Senate Bill On Taiwan Will “Make War Much More Likely”

Putin’s Energy War with Europe Seems to Falter  Seems pretty on-track to me….

Europe, More Than Putin, Must Shoulder The Blame For The Energy Crisis

Ban On All Russian Tourists In Baltic States & Poland Takes Effect  Putin cooties are almost as bad as Trump cooties.

Kremlin Rejects Mass Grave “Lie” & “Provocation” As Bodies Exhumed

The Full $16Bn List Of What Biden Has Sent Ukraine

ZMan attempts to follow the bouncing ball.

The so-called reactionaries cannot be working from fear for what change will do to their social power, when they have no political or social power to conserve. This does not stop the radicals from pretending their victims have power, but it is a self-serving game of make believe. The people on the receiving end of radicalism know who has the whip hand.

This is why the old Left-Right framing makes no sense. The people claiming to be on the Right these days are not monarchists. They are not in genuine opposition to the people on the Left. They simply prefer a slower pace of change. The Left is certainly not opposed to institutional power, like all prior left-wing movements. They worship institutional power and act in defense of it. To maintain the old framing, the dissidents are the New Left and the regime is the New Right.

Recent events support this new framing. The election integrity protests during the 2020 cycle looked like every other protest against power. The people in control of the institutions certainly saw it that way. They still carry on like January 6 was a failed Bastille Day or the echoes of 1848. In response, they are acting like institutional power always reacts to threats. They are rounding up opponents, abusing the rights of their citizens and threatening retribution.

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Concerned about privacy? Got ya covered.

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One London evening in 1914, just after Great Britain had declared war on Germany, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey was in his parliamentary office talking to a journalist. This is not always advisable for today’s politicians, but in those days statesmen from Westminster and hacks from Fleet Street took dinner at the same club, or at least within the same social set, and his confidant was John Alfred Spender, editor of the influential Westminster Gazette. “The lamps are going out all over Europe,” said Sir Edward mournfully. “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” A quotable quote, certainly, as long as we bear one thing in mind: Sir Edward was speaking figuratively.

Almost a quarter of a century later, Winston Churchill updated the phrase during a speech broadcast in America just before World War II, saying that “the lights are going out” across Europe, and referring of course to the rise of Hitler. Once again, he spoke figuratively. Eighty years after that, a man who has been called “literally Hitler” made a speech to the United Nations. In that speech, Donald Trump was not being figurative when he informed delegates that following the German energy model of almost complete reliance on power supplied by Vladimir Putin’s Russia would be ruinous. The German delegation openly mocked him. This has turned out to be unwise, particularly when you are from the country that invented the word schadenfreude.

Sister of oligarch Alisher Usmanov removed from EU sanctions list (The Guardian) Not enough Putin Cooties, I guess.

As India Joins China in Distancing From Russia, Putin Warns of Escalation (N.Y. Times)

UK Defense: Russia at Risk of Losing Luhansk

EU Calls for War Crime Tribunal Over Mass Graves in Ukraine

China Enjoys Energy Bonanza As NATO Sanctions Against Russia Fail

PEACE TIME: Another Putin Political Punishment Plot

Ukraine’s ambassador describes ‘war crimes of massive proportions’ (Politico)

Russia Widens Strikes on Ukrainian Civilian Targets After Frontline Setbacks

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Industrial heat consumes a huge proportion of global energy. Rondo Energy says its brick-toasting heat storage device is so cheap and efficient that it makes decarbonization an instant no-brainer across a huge range of industries. Bill Gates agrees.

Oh,  well, if Bill Gates agrees, that settles it.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

The Martha’s Vineyard’s meltdown illustrates the efficacy of a few of Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals. Governors Abbott and DeSantis have put several of Alinsky’s rules in play Among them:

• Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

• Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.

• A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

• Keep the pressure on.

• The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

• Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

These rules were formulated for the use of the left. When employed to mount opposition to the left, the axis of American life and politics tilts. The end of the world is nigh.

Read it.

There have been a reported 2,000,000 illegal migrants in the recent surges (total illegals here already is certainly a multiple of that but let’s go with the most recent Biden-induced numbers).

Martha’s Vineyard has a population of 15,000.
The USA population is 332,000,000
The Vineyard’s share of new illegals is therefore 90.34.

People may point out that if the richest community in the US cannot handle a little over half of its share of illegals (50), what can the rest of them be expected to do? Blah, blah. Throw in the 26 homeless that comprise our allotted share of the national homeless population if it comes to that. Are we ready to spend to build a compound for 116 people who–let’s be honest–are not our sort at all?

UPDATE: Martha’s Vineyard and the fraud of the rich white liberal

UPDATE: Biden Admin Mulls Litigation Against GOP Governors Busing Migrants

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

On YouTube there is a genre of video about living off-grid. That is, living in a rural area without electricity, gas, internet and so on. Many, if not most, are fake because most everything is fake these days. Some are legitimate and they make for interesting viewing because it is mostly problem solving. Watching a guy noodle through how to make a tiny hydroelectric system is interesting.

I call it ‘retired’.

Read it.

I love books. If I go to the bookstore to check a price, I walk out with three books I probably didn’t know existed beforehand. I buy second-hand books by the bagful at the Friends of the Library sale, while explaining to my wife that it’s for a good cause. Even the smell of books grips me, that faint aroma of earthy vanilla that wafts up at you when you flip a page.

The problem is that my book-buying habit outpaces my ability to read them. This leads to FOMO and occasional pangs of guilt over the unread volumes spilling across my shelves. Sound familiar?

But it’s possible this guilt is entirely misplaced. According to statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, these unread volumes represent what he calls an “antilibrary,” and he believes our antilibraries aren’t signs of intellectual failings. Quite the opposite.

Better too many books than too few.

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Cheese, curry, beer: We can thank our ancestors who put food scraps to creative use. What we’re leaving our children is garbage

To be fair: We’d love it if a restaurant or grocery store would sell us only as much food as we wanted. But they don’t. You get a choice of what they consider an economic quantity of food for them to sell, and if it’s more than you need (or want), tough shit.

Read it.

The underground excavation industry is exploring mini robots, plasma torches, and superheated gas to replace the massive boring machines now in use.

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A woman whose DNA from a rape kit was used by cops to arrest her for an unrelated burglary filed a federal lawsuit against San Francisco on Monday, alleging the police invaded her privacy.

The DNA of the woman, known as Jane Doe, was stored by the SFPD as part of a domestic violence and sexual assault case in 2016. According to her lawyer, Adanté Pointer, the same sample was used to charge her with retail theft five years later.

The lawsuit claims that the victim’s DNA was entered without her knowledge or consent into a database used to identify perpetrators in other crimes.

In pari delicto.

Read it.

Watching BBC and Sky News coverage of the death of Queen Elizabeth II, one is struck by the adjectives used by reporters, commentators, and people interviewed outside Balmoral Castle and Buckingham Palace: sense of duty, virtue, integrity, service.

What astounds is that these and other character traits the late queen exhibited were once considered normal and worthy of being taught to children, but today stand in sharp contrast to what is modeled and accepted.

One commentator said the queen’s death is the symbolic end of the greatest generation. We pay lip service to the virtues that made the greatest generation great, but no longer promote them, whether it is in public schools, social media, or the wider culture.

UPDATE: ‘That Wretched Woman’

Ukraine’s gains expose thinly spread Russian invaders. More could follow (The Guardian)

White House alarm rises over Europe as Putin threatens energy supply (Washington Post)

It’s Time to Prepare for a Ukrainian Victory (The Atlantic)

Could Russia’s Sudden Ukraine Retreat Mean A Tactical Nuclear Weapons Strike Is Coming?

EU Ministers Call For 10% Cut In Energy Consumption

A Desperate Erdogan Cozies Up to Iran and Russia

Germany’s Arms Pipeline To Ukraine Has ‘Crossed Red Line’, Kremlin Says

Last Operating Reactor At Ukraine’s Largest Nuclear Plant Shut Down

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I have never seen, or heard tell of, blue honey.

Not sure I’d want any … unless it came with super powers.

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Pass a Tesla on the street or pick up an Apple Magic Mouse and you encounter the sleek simplified aesthetics that underlie the mindset of the new technocracy. Apple used Picasso’s Bull, a set of drawings that reduce the animal to a stylized cubist abstraction, as the basis for its own minimalist aesthetic reductionism. It’s an aesthetic that meshes with Big Tech’s love of frictionless experiences that make complex processes appear deceptively simple.

Eliminating the extrusions on a car or a computer peripheral doesn’t actually make them any simpler to construct or to operate. It’s a marketing strategy that also shapes how people think of technology. Early computer kits were messy assemblies of wire and circuit boards. The early internet was a sprawling assortment of unregulated content. That was around the time that science fiction author William Gibson, a foremost promoter of Cyberpunk, coined the term “cyberspace”. A generation later, Gibson even more radically envisioned the internet disappearing and being reduced to a few apps on the phone. And that is what happened.

…

Free speech was the first casualty of the simplified internet. Most people give it away for convenience. And they never missed it until suddenly they realized that they wanted to say or hear things that the new platforms no longer allowed. Big Tech wanted people to keep on clicking, but not in a way that disrupted their business model, their politics or culture.

I’m a prepper, you’re a prepper, he’s a prepper, she’s a prepper, wouldn’t you like to be a prepper too?

Read it.

It’s tricker than you might suppose.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

On Meet the Press this morning, Kamala Harris said that if the Democrats pick up two Senate seats in the midterms, they will abolish the filibuster, at least selectively. The two additional seats, plus Harris’s own tie-breaker, will be needed to offset the votes of Senators Manchin and Sinema so as to create a majority in favor of altering Senate rules.

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In September 2018, the linguist Ellen Jovin set up a table near an exit to the 72nd Street and Broadway subway station in New York City and invited passersby to ask her questions about grammar. Her first query, she writes in Rebel with a Clause, was a nasty “spousal apostrophe dispute.” Most people would have folded up their table and headed indoors after that, but Jovin and her husband Brandt took the show on the road. By now, they may have sparked spousal apostrophe disputes in Hawaii, Alaska, and Connecticut, too.

Rebel with a Clause is a useful primer in the parameters of correct usage, but it is also a state-of-the-nation report on the use of American English. Jovin noticed that, despite the divisions of politics, questions of language bring people together in civil and enjoyable exchanges. She also noticed that they have an awful lot of questions. Never mind heavy-duty stuff like direct objects, appositives, and the best way to use a semicolon. Most of her clients struggle with the basic stuff and are often embarrassed by their uncertainty.

Read it.

A split-second glance at two candidates’ faces is often enough to determine which one will win an election, according to a Princeton University study.

Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov has demonstrated that quick facial judgments can accurately predict real-world election returns. Todorov has taken some of his previous research that showed that people unconsciously judge the competence of an unfamiliar face within a tenth of a second, and he has moved it to the political arena. His lab tests show that a rapid appraisal of the relative competence of two candidates’ faces was sufficient to predict the winner in about 70 percent of the races for U.S. senator and state governor in the 2006 elections.

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Shortly after Indiana passed a new law restricting abortion, Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly condemned the law and announced that it would seek to expand outside the state.

It’s widely argued that social conservative policy is bad for business. Is that actually true, as the Lilly statement would seem to suggest? At some level, yes. But the impact is less than some claim. Today, social policy is a relatively marginal factor in business location decisions.

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Apparently God hates California.

I wonder why?

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or the first time in Britain’s history, there are no white men in the three Great Offices of State. Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is the son of Ghanaian immigrants, Suella Braverman follows Priti Patel as another home secretary of South Asian origin, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly was born in Lewisham to a midwife called Evelyn from Sierra Leone.

The rest of the Truss ministry also boasts senior politicians such as the Baghdad-born two-month chancellor Nadhim Zahawi, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants Kemi Badenoch, another minister with South Asian heritage in Ranil Jayawardena, and Alok Sharma, who was born in the Uttar Pradesh state of northern India and has remained in government because the “COP26 President” role still exists, for reasons that escape me and everyone I’ve asked.

I can imagine the email fired out of Labour HQ when the late-night ministerial announcements came trickling onto Twitter: “please, for the love of God, criticise the new appointments all you want, but do NOT mention race.” Additional warnings would have added that anyone using the term “coconut” or “oreo” would be swiftly defenestrated from Parliament and into the Thames.

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Rumor has it that taxation in the U.S. is soft: this is not the case with income tax, the main source of government levies. The top federal marginal rate of 37%, above $523,000 of income, is misleading. In New York, you have to add the state tax (10.9% maximum), the city tax (3.876% marginal rate), and the tax to fund Social Security, the pay-as-you-go pension plan, at 6.2% (up to $147,000 of income).

In total, the marginal tax rate exceeds 53% in New York.

…

In short, leaving New York, where the cost of living is exorbitant, means getting back about two months of the net salary.

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People who follow politics are familiar with the scenario. When a Republican “wave” appears likely, or a Republican presidential candidate develops a significant lead over the Democrat candidate, the media begin reporting “stories” that the wave is receding, and the Democrat is gaining ground.

Television networks prefer close races because it adds to ratings. For once influential newspapers, it used to help sales.

Are these claims true? It doesn’t matter to the media. A majority of journalists identify as liberals/Democrats. Neither does it matter how often polls are wrong. Like people who rely on psychics to tell them what they want to hear (“you will meet a tall, dark stranger”), accurate polls depend on the way the questions are asked, and the understanding people have about candidates and issues. They also depend on the size and political balance of the sample.

The most recent inaccurate polls occurred in the 2020 race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Pollsters had the largest margin of error in 40 years. In 1980, polls showed Jimmy Carter beating Ronald Reagan by six percentage points, according to a study by Vanderbilt University.

Now, the usual pro-Democrat newspapers, cable and broadcast networks are “reporting” on polls (in some cases commissioned by themselves) that show a red wave may not happen and Democrats might even produce a “miracle,” holding on to their slim congressional majority. Such polls also can have the effect of depressing Republican voter turnout. Why vote, goes the thinking, when it appears the result is already determined.