The Critic.

One of the most influential and widely-read opinion columnists in the Western world is never published in mainstream outlets. Despite being read by major commentators and politicians, he is almost never named, let alone discussed. Steve Sailer, a 65-year-old Californian, has haunted mainstream discourse for decades.

You can see his name popping up in New York Times columns by David Brooks and Ross Douthat. He is occasionally published in the American Conservative. Yet the extent to which he is perceived as being politically unmentionable has made him the closest thing that opinion commentary has to an outlaw figure.

The once-edgy comedian, Patton Oswalt, quoted Sailer’s line that “political correctness is a war on noticing” on Twitter in 2014 (and has since deleted the tweet). The now-edgy comedian Tim Dillon referenced Sailer’s characterisation of American policy as being “Invade the World, Invite the World” on a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. Online, there is a running joke about how liberal pieties posted on “X” (formerly Twitter) will attract Sailer’s responses like a crime scene attracts Batman.

Amazon lists NOTICING as ‘currently unavailable’. If you really want it, however, you can buy it here.

Read it.

“First, you allege a problem exists without any scientific basis. Then, you identify a ‘study’ with findings you like that can be used to form a basis for policy advocacy, which you pass onto your former fellow activists who are now in the administration, and let them run with it.”

Power Line.

Some of the most sophisticated work on energy in the country is being done by Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling of Center of the American Experiment. Here, Isaac explains in understandable terms why the supposed costs of wind and solar projects that you see reported in the press, and alleged by “green” advocates, are always wildly off base.

Read it.

A Chinese national illegally in the United States was arrested last week after sneaking onto a Marine Corps base in California and refusing to leave, according to an official from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

In a March 29 post on X, Sector Chief Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino confirmed that agents were called out to the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California after the Chinese national entered the facility without authorization.

Gizmodo.

Saw that comin’.

Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with “Just Walk Out” technology, first reported by The Information Tuesday. The company’s senior vice president of grocery stores says they’re moving away from Just Walk Out, which relied on cameras and sensors to track what people were leaving the store with.

Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.

Wonder how many of them used the Just Don’t Pay program?

Wonder how many of those were Fashionable Victim Minorities?

Inquiring minds want to know….

Read it.

The oldest recognizable map in the world comes from Ukraine and is dated as much later than cave art, around fifteen thousand years ago. An etched mammoth tusk was unearthed along with many mammoth bones at a site called Mezhirich. The scratched lines on the tusk are not random but form a drawing or picture that is likely some kind of map. The design is made with lines, some straight, some zigzagging, presumably to denote a topographical feature. There seems to be a river at the bottom of this first map, and marks of a mountain or hill have been placed at the top. In between are more small lines that look like houses or huts. All the slashes are lines; none of them are curved in any sort of artistic way. There are also no animals and no human figures. This tusk is markedly different from any cave painting in its lack of story and figurative representation. Then, there is its straightforward presentation, which also makes it seem more map-like.

Power Line.

America’s colleges and universities have damaged our country badly, and don’t show any sign of reform. So one obvious path to improvement is for fewer people to attend them. Happily, that is happening: not only that, but young people are finding better alternatives.

Newsbusters.

On Easter Sunday, CBS’s Face the Nationturned to two prominent Washington religious leaders: Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the Catholic archbishop of Washington and Rev. Mariann Budde, Bishop of Washington for the Episcopal Church, which is politically a better fit for Biden.

White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe was the substitute host, and he seemed most interested in underlining how Biden faithfully attends Catholic services, and not so much whether he’s in complete contradiction with Catholic teaching on the hot-button social and sexual issues. He kept pressing the Cardinal on if Biden “resonates” with Catholic voters:

The American Mind.

In 2001, the United States embarked on the War on Terror, rallying the world not just to fight terrorists but to replace autocratic and tribal societies with liberal democratic regimes, despite the lack of local interest. That approach now looks hopelessly wrongheaded.

Though Islamist terror groups still threaten the civilized world, geopolitical power players continue to use terrorist puppet regimes for strategic advantage, despite occasional “blowback.” Russia has been fighting ISIS in Syria since 2015 and, in 2017, prior to the recent ISIS-K raid on the Crocus Music Hall on the outskirts of Moscow, withstood a deadly attack by that group on the St. Petersburg Metro. Yet it’s been friendly with Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists and received a Hamas delegation following the October 7 attack on Israel. Its leadership appears to view NATO, not political Islam, as an existential threat.

Russia’s double standards when it comes to their proxies might be hypocritical, but they are also pragmatic and amoral. We can’t rationally expect that the people in charge can be shamed with accusations of hypocrisy into amending their ways. No one holds Russia to a high standard. If Russia is accused of damaging a church here or a hospital there, it rarely trends on social media or is covered in the news. Russian security forces must step up their game to make anyone pay attention.

‘Stop worrying about what’s happening in the White House and start worrying about what’s happening in your house.’ — Adam Sosnik

‘America is a nation of believers, dreamers, and strivers that is being led by a group of censors, critics, and cynics.’ — Donald Trump, 2016

The Other McCain.

You don’t want to be a “swing voter,” the kind of idiot who tells pollsters he’s undecided who to vote for two weeks before Election Day. Politics is a team sport. and unless you want to be some schmuck who’s a mere spectator at the game, well, you have to join the team you’re on.

Read it.

I have said it many times in the past but I think it bears repeating once again: If you want to understand why world events happen the way they do, you must understand the goals and influence of globalist institutions. You must accept the fact that these people create most of the national and international disasters you and I have to deal with on a regular basis and oftentimes they create these disasters deliberately.

…

The primary purpose of the globalists is to erase national borders and homogenize all countries and cultures under one economic and governmental system. They have openly admitted to this plan on numerous occasions. One of the most revealing quotes on the agenda comes from Clinton Administration Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot, who stated in Time magazine that:

“In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority… National sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all.”

Washington Post.

They realize that, no matter how much they may dislike Trump, he’s still better than Biden.

Power Line.

On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas cannot enforce its border control law, SB 4, because it conflicts with federal law that preempts the field of immigration. The decision is here. Jonathan Turley analyzes the issue here.

Briefly, Turley thinks the panel decision is a correct interpretation of the Constitution and of case law on preemption. The constitutional issue turns on the meaning of “invasion,” which the states are empowered to resist under Article I of the Constitution, and against which the federal government is required to defend the states under Article IV. For the moment, I don’t want to debate that conclusion. Let’s assume it is true that the best interpretation of the Constitution and existing case law is that states cannot act to stop illegal immigration because that is a federal role, even if the federal government has completely abdicated its responsibilities. What then?

Whether or not the influx of millions of illegals across the southern border is an invasion in constitutional terms, it certainly is an invasion in common parlance. And for a border state like Texas, it is a comprehensive disaster. The people of Texas plainly have a right to defend themselves against this evil. If being part of the Union makes it legally impossible to defend themselves, it is only right that they should consider whether they want to remain in the Union. This is doubly true if the problem arises from a malicious determination on the part of the federal government to abandon, indeed subvert, one of the basic responsibilities that Texas and other states have delegated to that government.

Read it.

While Piketty’s claims about the desirability of egalitarianism and wealth taxes are to some extent subjective, his book and his reputation are premised on the claim that he carefully assembled data that showed an increasing return to capital over time.

He claims to have based his work on three centuries of data.

Unfortunately, for fans of Piketty and left-wing economists who prefer a more fact-based economics approach, it looks like Piketty’s data work is quite sloppy.

In 2015, Magness and Murphy pointed to a wide range of flaws or mistakes in the book writing that they found “evidence of pervasive errors of historical fact, opaque methodological choices, and the cherry-picking of sources to construct favorable patterns from ambiguous data. Additional evidence suggests that Piketty used a highly distortive data assumption from the Soviet Union to accentuate one of his main historical claims about global “capitalism” in the twentieth century.” According to Magness and Murphy, Piketty bases his measure of 150 years of the world economy on a sample size of just six individual years and just extrapolates the rest of the data! Yikes!

Quillette.

The left is undergoing an overdue reckoning. Progressive mass movements have achieved little more than mass in recent years. Occupy Wall Street didn’t beget economic redistribution, to say nothing of Marxist revolution. Large-scale marches for gun control and climate action produced neither. Following the police killing of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter blossomed into the largest social movement in U.S. history, drawing millions into the streets to demand racial justice, police reform, and even an “end” to policing. What they got instead were some statues taken down and municipalities quietly rolling back hollow promises to defund the police. Street protests and social media fervour dissipate as quickly as they roil over. Placards hit the garbage bins. Profile pictures boasting support for, as the meme goes, hashtag “the current thing” get changed out. The world moves on. Nothing fundamentally changes.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Steve Sailer.

The late Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024) was an IQ researcher for the Israeli military in an era when it did a world-historical good job at figuring out who its brightest guys were.

The problem with IQ science, however, is that it get pretty repetitious pretty quick. So with his IQ researcher pal Abram Tversky, Kahneman progressed into researching shortcomings in human cognition, for which he became extraordinarily famous among the nerdier sort of online thinker in the early 21st Century.

Quillette. 

After the end of the Second World War, the American Old Right underwent a transformation from being a loosely connected band of libertarians, nativists, and isolationists towards a more cohesive ideological conservative movement aimed at confronting the threat of collectivism and atheism posed by the Soviet Union abroad and the left at home. A small band of libertarians and traditionalists debated and discussed first principles, which ultimately resulted in what Frank Meyer termed “fusionism”—a compromise position that incorporated both traditions’ insights. 70 years later, after the Soviet threat was extinguished, that consensus has fractured, and a possible anti-elitist successor has emerged, colloquially known as the New Right. And as it’s begun to take form, it finds itself in an eerily similar place to the early conservatism.

UnHerd.

Ohio Republicans have a new candidate for US Senator: Bernie Moreno, who was endorsed by Donald Trump over establishment-backed Matt Dolan. With Moreno’s victory in last week’s hotly contested primary, the party’s MAGA faction has further entrenched its hold on this pivotal Midwestern state, with its large share of factory towns and labour voters. And should Moreno prevail over the Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown in November, he would go on to join Ohio’s sitting Junior Senator J.D. Vance, probably the most intellectually sophisticated champion of America First nationalism in Congress.

Such a pairing would make for a politically fertile synthesis: while Vance built his electoral brand on his working-class roots, Moreno has advertised himself with a more traditional set of Republican credentials — namely those of a small businessman or, to be more precise, a car dealership owner.

Between these two poles, the outline of a post-realignment GOP may be sketched. Where the Reagan coalition of the Eighties united Wall Street with Main Street business (with some working class defectors), the emergent Trump coalition of the 2020s and beyond will be different. Because of the exodus of the corporate and college-educated segments of America to the Democrats, it will most likely be composed of a more solid pool of working-class voters allied with the petit-bourgeois class of the red-state and hinterland regions, sometimes known as the “American gentry” and stereotypically represented as rock-ribbed conservative car dealers, like Moreno. Yet while much ink has been spilled trying to understand the mindset of the MAGA working class (Vance’s 2016 bestseller Hillbilly Elegy was about precisely the kind of people who would go on to vote for Trump), comparatively little attention has been paid to the Bernie Morenos of America.

Newsbussters.

Communist Chinese government-tied TikTok censored videos of women exposing the health risks of hormonal contraceptives after apparently receiving pressure from a leftist legacy media outlet.

The Washington Post released a now-infamous report attempting to discredit women speaking out about many of the well-known side effects listed on the blanket-sized warning label that comes with oral contraceptives. In its report, The Post highlighted the fact that TikTok had censored some of the people it had reached out to for the piece, including The Daily Wire commentator Brett Cooper who hosts The Comment Section and TikTok influencer Nicole Bendayan. The newspaper took credit for the part it played in the removal of multiple videos.

Brett Cooper’s The Comment Section is one of the best things that ever happened to YouTube. Highly recommended.

The Register.

More than half of Americans are using ad blocking software, and among advertising, programming, and security professionals that fraction is more like two-thirds to three-quarters.

According to a survey of 2,000 Americans conducted by research firm Censuswide, on behalf of Ghostery, a maker of software to block ads and online tracking, 52 percent of Americans now use an ad blocker, up from 34 percent according to 2022 Statista data.

More striking are the figures cited for technically savvy users who have worked at least five years in their respective fields – veteran advertisers, programmers, and cybersecurity experts.

That’s my approach to life in general. SEP does not need me.

ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.

Human societies assume permanence and that means they require a story for how the society came together. The Romans, for example, had the legend of Romulus and Remus who founded the city of Rome. The Rape of the Sabine Women is another important part of the story of the Roman people. The origin myths of a people are specific to a people; thus, their history is specific to them. In other words, a people’s identity is exclusive to them.

This is why a multiracial egalitarian society is impossible. You have different people with different identities rooted in different origin stories. Any effort to write the origin of one people into the story of the other people will be viewed as theft. Vivek Ramaswamy in that tweet was trying to steal a part of European history on order to insert his people into your story. No doubt he saw the resistance to this as a slight against him and people like him. This is now part of his people’s story.

You see this with the old race divide in America. Black people have an origin story that depends on white people being the villain. White people have an origin story that does not include black people. Inserting blacks into the white story requires whites to accept guilt for things they did not do and shame for ancestors who made it possible for any of us to have this discussion. It simply cannot work, so any effort to make it work aggravates the natural racial friction in America.

Read it.

Books can be dangerous because they shape the way we think. Our thoughts shape our actions, and our actions shape our characters, which of course affects how we live our lives—as individuals and as communities. Our age is one quick to laud all things that appear creative, usually with praise for authors who shape our values, whatever that means. The best books, particularly those that have remained important for many centuries, do not create something new or shape anyone’s values. Rather, they are great because, in ways that may be new and exciting, they help us see more fully the structure of reality so that we might better live in accord with the order of creation.

Saint Augustine’s City of God is without doubt on the list of great books that continues to help us see how the natural order is not something bracketed off or separated from spiritual reality. It was written in the 5th century in response to the intellectual class that insisted that Christianity was to blame for the fall of Rome. Christians who insist on being peacemakers on earth while awaiting their rewards in the afterlife made the Romans’ commitment to the city weak and pathetic, it was claimed. Pagan rites bred manliness; Christians, however, preached turning the other cheek. Augustine’s magnificent response provided a strong case that Rome would have fallen regardless of Christian influence, because its foundations were poorly laid.

Of course, for the Greeks and Romans ‘city’ had a broader meaning than it does for us today; the Romans distinguished between the urbs and the broader civitas, just as the Greeks made a distinction between the astu and the broader polis.

UnHerd.

“The transformation of Ireland over the last 60 years has sometimes felt as if a new world had landed from outer space on top of an old one,” wrote Fintan O’Toole, a commentator who is generally approving of this new status quo, in 2021. But the past weeks and months have proven that the “old” country has very different ideas about this extra-terrestrial political order. After Ireland rejected two liberal amendments to the constitution, tabled and sponsored by their government, civic disturbances on a scale not seen for generations continue. They even wear the aesthetic of an older Ireland, with youths on horseback leading a recent protest against a new asylum centre in Dublin.

Read it.

It’s not easy being green.

TechCrunch.

Today, large swaths of the globe haven’t adopted air-source heat pumps because they don’t work as well when the mercury drops. Most of those places still rely on natural gas or heating oil, and convincing people to switch will require a drop-in solution that’s cheaper to run than their existing furnace or boiler and works at extreme temperatures. The basic technology that’s inside your car or your house hasn’t changed in over a century, and it still doesn’t work well at low temperatures.

“Let’s say it’s -30 degrees Fahrenheit in Minnesota, and you have a forced baseboard hot water heater,” Walker said. “No heat pump on the market can do that at any temperature, let alone really cold temperatures.”

Watch it.

“Yew caint always git what you wownt….”  — Mick Jagger

Check it out.

The new, immersive way to learn a language.

Learn vocabulary the natural, immersive way. Build your skills in French, Italian or Spanish whilst you read your favourite books.

This is a very intriguing concept. It attempts to mimic the natural way we expand our vocabulary in our native language, i.e. by inductive reasoning from seeing words in context in actual use. Of course, it makes the ‘reading’ more work, but it would seem to be more enjoyable than stolidly memorizing vocabulary lists. Can’t say that it’s a complete solution but it sure looks like a great first step. (And it appears to be free–always a plus.)

Read it.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, an outspoken climate alarmist, has a new $300 million mega yacht dubbed “Launchpad.” The billionaire’s ‘big boy’ toy collection continues to expand, which already includes a Gulfstream G650 private jet.

Bloomberg data shows the new 287-foot vessel arrived at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last Monday and has been moored ever since. The vessel departed from the Netherlands, where its well-known yacht builder, Feadship, is based, on February 29.

Lürssen is actually doing some interesting work in this area, including a system that uses methane to create hydrogen that is then burned to power the ship; the only products are CO2 and water.

The working poor are starting to wake up to the billionaires who push climate garbage initiatives that force them to buy costly electric vehicles, ban gas stoves, and replace meat with insects and plant-based foods while Zuck and other billionaires sail around the world in mega-yachts and fly around in private jets.

“Rich” means never having to give a shit about the environment.

Read it.

Reform UK, formerly the Brexit Party, is now more popular among male voters than the governing Conservative Party. Nearly one in five—or 19% of—British men back Reform.

The Tories, whose position in the polls has been in freefall amid constant failures to control the nation’s borders and manage the economy, are trailing on a meagre 17%. Twenty-nine per cent of men are either undecided or know they won’t vote, while 41% back Labour.

That is all according to a new YouGov poll reported in The Sunday Times, which also suggests that Reform is ahead of the Conservatives overall in the north of England—particularly in culturally conservative, so-called ‘Red Wall’ seats which leant their backing to the Conservatives in 2019 in the hope of “getting Brexit done.”

The news comes less than a fortnight after former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, who is ‘honorary president’ of Reform, said Britain’s political class didn’t understand the significance of former Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson’s defection to Reform UK.

‘I refuse to say capitalism, because 1) Marx invented it as a stick to bash the free market, and 2) no one can define what capitalism is, aside from “I know it when I see it. Maybe, if I don’t look too closely.”’  — Alma Boykin

UnHerd.

International diplomacy requires countless decisions: the large, small, mundane and monumental. Some turn out to have been wise and some not; some can be corrected, while others bring consequences that must be survived. A few are so pivotal that they reset the course of history.

We can’t be certain how the world would be different had a different course been chosen, but we can identify turning points and their cascading tumbles of consequences. And we can hypothesise an alternative history that, absent some fateful step, might have unfolded instead. Such “Planet Ifs” are more than thought experiments; if we can uncover what these wrong turns have in common, we can try harder to avoid them in the future. To see how, let’s consider four.

How many people are alive today merely because you didn’t want to go to prison?

“Our society, after all, operates on guilt, which often serves only to obscure its real workings and to prevent obvious solutions. An adrenaline high can be just as addictive as any other kind of high.”  — Frank Herbert

Read it.

Until I read Catherine Pakaluk’s fascinating new book, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, I was unaware that I had grown up in what is now considered to be a “large family.” I am the oldest of five children, but my father came from a family of 11 and my mother was one of 7. In the rural Reformed church communities where I live, a family of five children is considered “average” rather than “large.” But communities with large families are now a social aberration. With the exception of a few religious pockets, the birth rate is cratering in every single Western country.

Pakaluk, a social scientist and mother of eight, decided to investigate why, as small families, “DINKs” (dual income, no kids), and overt anti-natalism become the norm, some 5% of American women choose to have five or more children. She traveled across the country and interviewed 55 college-educated mothers with large families to ask them why they chose to have children and why they chose to have more. Pakaluk also explains why, despite concerted efforts at pro-natalist policies by governments, none have successfully boosted the birth rate to replacement level.

John C. Wright passes on the wisdom of Scott from Twitter (to which I do not subscribe, so I had to see it second-hand).

Next week, Trump could make over $4 billion when his media company goes public, removing all doubt about his billionaire status.

And you can stop asking if he would have been better off putting his inheritance in a savings account in the 70s.

I expect Trump to leave a 15% tip for Leticia James and the Democrats because they made his windfall possible by hunting him and censoring him for years. You can call it a bond, not a tip, if you prefer.

When the Supreme Court tosses out the unconstitutional fine, Trump gets most of his “tip” back.

Read it.

That has always puzzled me.

The patient’s teeth appeared to be well cared for, but dentist James Mancini did not like the look of his gums. By chance, Mancini knew the man’s physician, so he raised an alert about a potential problem — and a diagnosis soon emerged.

“Actually, Bob had leukemia,” says Mancini, clinical director of the Meadville Dental Center in Pennsylvania. Though he wasn’t tired or having other symptoms, “his mouth was a disaster,” Mancini says. “Once his physician saw that, they were able to get him treated right away.”

Oral health is tightly connected to whole-body health, so Mancini’s hunch is not surprising. What is unusual is that the dentist and doctor communicated.

How come we have biological males who ‘identify’ as female competing in women’s sports, but no biological females who ‘identify’ as male competing in male sports?

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Intellectual history is generally the study of good ideas or what we currently think are good ideas, but it is the bad ideas that have the most impact. The use of slave labor in the New World, for example, seemed like a good idea at the time but has proven to be a terrible burden on us. If the slavers knew that their descendants would be tormented by the consequences of slavery, would they still have done it?

Of course, the life of a bad idea is the result of the people choosing to embrace the bad idea, often when it is obviously a bad idea. Much of what Marx had to say about economics, even in the context of his age, was obvious nonsense. Further, people knew enough about the human condition to know that communism could never possibly work, but intellectuals chose to embrace it anyway.

Put another way, stupid ideas need a special sort of stupid person. Orwell famously wrote, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Orwell was addressing the educated opinion in England at the time that Germany would win the war. The basic concept is something of a universal, as we see today with our “expert” class.