The American Mind.

If only ideologies worked. It’s easy to see why they tempt us: they promise to absolve us from having to think about complex practical decisions. They hold out the hope of black and white absolutes. We reach for theory when we sense our prudence coming up short.

But it’s best not to be an ideologue if you can help it. Falling for ideology means inviting dogmatists and snake oil salesmen to make your decisions for you. This is never more true than when it comes to education. The sad fact is that public school isn’t always and everywhere a bad option. Even worse—homeschooling isn’t always a good idea. It depends. You have to figure it out for yourself.

As long as ‘traditionalists’ keep denying the realities pointed out to us by evolutionary psychology, they will flounder around like crabs in a bucket and make no progress.

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San Francisco residents on Tuesday voted to let police conduct more vehicle chases and deploy drones and surveillance cameras to fight crime. They also ordered mandatory drug screening for childless adults who receive welfare and housing assistance—benefits that will now be yanked from those who refuse testing.

Both measures passed by wide margins. The police initiative, which voters approved by nearly 20 points, would give law enforcement more leeway in when and why they can chase down suspects fleeing in vehicles. Officers are currently barred from chasing suspected thieves and can only go after those who they believe have committed a violent felony or pose immediate danger to the public. Police would also be able to deploy drones, facial recognition, and other surveillance technology to fight crime.

The welfare measure, which passed by 26 points, would require poor and homeless adults under 65 and without dependent children to be tested for drug use, and if they don’t pass their screening they would have to enter treatment to receive San Francisco’s cash payments and housing assistance. Those who fail a drug test and refuse to receive treatment will not be eligible for benefits.

Steve Sailer.

One of the stranger aspects of the long-running American affirmative action debate is that both supporters and critics of racial quotas seldom admit in public how scarce blacks would be in cognitively elite institutions without the now traditional massive thumb on the scale in their favor.

Liberal racial preference advocates tend to argue as if black representation in prestige positions in percentages close to their share of the population (12 percent or 14 percent, depending on whether or not you count individuals who identify as black and another race) merely requires tie-breakers favoring African-Americans among extremely equal applicants. They present an image of affirmative action as resembling the baseball rule that “a tie goes to the runner”: In the rare instances when the baserunner (black applicant in this analogy) and baseball (nonblack applicant) arrive exactly simultaneously, the umpire is obliged to declare the runner safe.

Who could object to something so trivial?

Racists, that’s who!

Wikipedia.

My favorites:

Richard Epstein.

Now that the efforts to keep Donald Trump off the ballot were soundly rejected in the Supreme Court in Trump v. Anderson, the largest cloud over the former president’s re-election campaign is Jack Smith’s four-count indictment, which makes no reference to insurrection but alleges only “a conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 [2021] congressional proceeding” to certify the election of the next president.

Good advice.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended. (Also available on Apple Podcasts.)

Since I liked yesterday’s post so much, I decided to do a show on the topic, but from a historical perspective. Since the end of the Cold War our ruling class has gone off the rails and it is not a coincidence. We have the combination of two factors that are at the heart of this sudden shift into madness. One is the generational changeover and the other is the end of the Cold War moral order.

The show is about that last bit. It turns out that “winning” the Cold War was the worst thing for the West. The Russians and to a lesser extent the Chinese came out of the experience of losing the great ideological war better than they would otherwise have been if not for the collapse of communism. China is the biggest economy on earth and Russia is a fully modern country of the 21st century.

Meanwhile, the post-Cold War experience for the West, especially America, has been a descent into madness. The inflection point is the 1992 election when the Boomers officially took over and began to shape the post-Cold War world. The trouble is they had no idea what they were doing. They did not understand why the West won the Cold War and lacked the historical understanding to see their own folly.

NBC News.

Yeah, we really need more of these kinds of people in our country. Yup. Sure.

Read it.

Note the unexplored assumptions: Changemaker is a compliment; change (not improvement) is what counts, not the effect of the change; ‘transforming’ is the important thing, not whether the result is positive. This demonstrates how the rot of progressivism has penetrated even so ‘moderate’ a venue as CNBC, nominally devoted to business–all change is good because it inevitably leads to ‘progress’, so y’all need to get out there and start changing things and you too may be celebrated as a ‘changemaker’.

What you will never see from a Narrative media component is a list of ‘The 2024 Improvers’.

BBC.

When Yejin decided to live alone in her mid-20s, she defied social norms – in Korea, single living is largely considered a temporary phase in one’s life.
Then five years ago, she decided not to get married, and not to have children.
“It’s hard to find a dateable man in Korea – one who will share the chores and the childcare equally,” she tells me, “And women who have babies alone are not judged kindly.” [emphasis added]

Think of it as evolution in action. Feminism is a self-correcting problem over the long term.

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Yeah, I understand, California has nice weather, but … damn. That certainly never happens in Texas.

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“I support Trump in many ways and thought it was awesome that he was releasing such a rare collection of shoes,” the Pennsylvania resident told The Epoch Times.

But Mr. Hardy almost passed on buying the exclusive sneakers that some say sold out within hours of being launched. At first, the price seemed steep for a pair of shoes he intended to keep only as a collector’s piece, but as the minutes ticked by, he finally pulled the trigger.

Now, after seeing their potential resale value—with some sellers listing them online for as much as $45,000—Mr. Hardy wishes he had purchased three pairs instead of one.

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Russia was unable to recruit, mobilize or conscript enough Russians to fight in Ukraine. Even before the end of 2023, Russia sought ways to deal with this problem. One solution was recruiting 15,000 Nepalese men to fight in Ukraine. The Nepalese Russia recruited were not from the Gurkha region. Gurkha soldiers are much in demand as mercenaries and battalions of them serve in the British and Indian armies. Gurkhas were not interested in fighting for the Russians in Ukraine, so the Russians turned to non- Gurkha Nepalese who needed a job, any job, even if it was a dangerous one. The Nepal recruits were given little training when they entered Russian service in mid-2023. The Nepal troops were soon in Ukraine where they suffered casualties. At least ten were known to have died and there are probably more dead. Four Nepalese soldiers were captured by Ukrainian forces and held as prisoners of war. Families back in Nepal have appealed to Nepalese politicians to find a way they can contact their men in Ukraine. Russia does not provide any way for their Nepal mercenaries to send or receive mail to anyone in Nepal. That led Nepal to ban any more Russian recruiting in Nepal. Earlier Cuba did the same when Russian tried to recruit Cuban men to fight as mercenaries in Ukraine.

Read it.

Indian farmer protests restarted in early 2024 as talks on the producers’ demands to set more legally binding minimum support prices for agricultural products have broken down.

The borders of city state and capital Delhi have been fortified but farmers from surrounding areas seem determined to push past the barricades this week armed with heavy equipment, supplies and masks to fend off tear gas deployed by police. Ahead of the presidential elections in April and May, farmers once again want to make their grievances heard. Similar protests rocked India previously in 2020 and 2021 as farmers vehemently opposed opening up the system of government-controlled wholesale markets – so-called mandis – and limiting minimum support prices. They eventually succeeded in having laws withdrawn.

However, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, while guaranteed minimum prices provide security for farmers to at least sell some of their harvest at a profit, few farmers have actually been able to take advantage of the system in the past. This is tied to the fact that the government’s ability to buy and redistribute agricultural products is limited.

Read it.

“Rocky” star and filmmaker Sylvester Stallone says he and his wife of 26 years, Jennifer Flavin, are relocating to Florida and “permanently” ditching the state of California.

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When someone emerges from a challenging childhood to become a successful adult and writes a memoir about the experience, one of two narratives usually emerges: The first, and most lucrative in today’s market, is what might be called the “wallowing” narrative. Such books settle personal and familial scores; recount excessive drug use, promiscuity, and other poor life choices; and leave readers with a voyeurism hangover.

The second approach tells a tale of plucky courage and upward mobility, with the memoirist expressing gratitude for having been one of the “lucky ones,” who rose from chaos into order and is now eager to impart practical life lessons to others. This is the “inspirational bootstraps” narrative.

In Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, Rob Henderson does neither. Instead, he makes a crucial contribution not only to the modern art of memoir-writing, but to ongoing debates about class, merit, and success in the United States.

Whining and playing the victim is very profitable these days.

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The Great Sort is under way, as normal people move to red states and liberals move to blue states. (That last is hypothetical and hasn’t actually been observed.) When massive numbers began leaving blue states like California and New York for red states like Texas and Florida, many conservatives worried that those blue staters might bring their bad voting habits with them. Happily, that doesn’t seem to have happened.

UnHerd.

For decades now, an axiom of middle-class feminism has decreed that there are no important inbuilt differences between male and female brains. In fact, so the favoured story goes, there are no male and female brains at all, except in the trivial sense that there are a variety of human brains, each lodged within male and female bodies and shaped by external “gendered” circumstances that vary from culture to culture. A second axiom tends to follow swiftly: anyone who says otherwise is probably a sexist pig. This week, however, both of these foundational assumptions were dealt a blow by new research emerging from Stanford University.

Neurobiologists there have discovered that a specially designed “deep neural network”— that is, an AI presumably devoid of the misogynist prejudices of ordinary mortals — can reliably sort brains into male and female categories based on the detection of “hotspot” activity patterns. Worse, it seems that the AI can also use these differences to reliably predict different cognitive performances in men and women on certain tasks, suggesting that functional brain variations have behavioural implications. Though it’s a bit early to say, perhaps we can now look forward to a more harmonious future, where a woman can be proudly unapologetic for her inability to reverse park, and a man gets to blame his brain for repeated failures to notice that his wife is crying. Meanwhile, for the many thinkers who have staked their professional identities to the non-existence of two kinds of brain, now might seem like a good time to move some eggs into a different career basket.

Steve Sailer.

Yale became the second Ivy League college, after Dartmouth, after four years of test-optional admissions during the covid/George Floyd eras, to go back to making it mandatory for applicants to submit test scores. Why? Because the anti-test conventional wisdom is stupid.

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In a significant departure for the powerful organized labor group, the Teamsters’ PAC has given $45,000 to the Republican National Committee for the first time in 20 years, The Washington Post reported.

Steve Sailer.

Last week’s Super Bowl parade shooting in Kansas City in which one was killed and 22 wounded was another validation of both Coulter’s and Sailer’s Laws of Mass Shootings.

Ann devised her insight back in 2015 after two Muslim terrorists of Pakistani origin murdered fourteen at a government office in San Bernardino:

The longer we go without being told the race of the shooters, the less likely it is to be white men.

…

Of course, the arrestees are black, according to a photo in the Daily Mail. The Super Bowl parade mass shooting was the usual knuckleheaded dispute that could, at worst, be resolved with fists if African Americans didn’t feel the cultural imperative to start banging away with pistols. But the ruling caste and media work hard to cover up the size of America’s black gun violence problem.

“This also explains why the demand for Nazis far outstrips the supply. For antifascism to persist as a movement and continue to attract converts, it must show that there are actual fascists that need opposing. It is why the definition of fascist has expanded to mean anyone even slightly suspicious of antifascism. Antifascism is now primarily concerned with the production of fascists.”  — ZMan+

Alex Tabarrok.

Even though I side the statistics, I side with approval. Innovation is a dynamic process. It’s not surprising that the first gene therapy for DMD offers only modest benefits; you don’t hit a home run the first time at bat. But if the therapy isn’t approved, the scientists don’t go back to the drawing board and keep going. If the therapy isn’t approved, it dies and you lose the money, experience and learning by doing that are needed to develop, refine and improve.

Approval is not the end of innovation but a stepping stone on the path of progress. Here’s an example I gave earlier of the same principle. When we banned supersonic aircraft, we lost the money, experience and learning by doing needed to develop quieter supersonic aircraft. A ban makes technological developments in the industry much slower and dependent upon exogeneous progress in other industries.

You must build to build better.

When things are subject to government ‘approval’, innovation is stifled.

Wikipedia.

Reverse graffiti is a method of creating temporary or semi-permanent images on walls or other surfaces by removing dirt from a surface. It can also be done by simply removing dirt with the fingertip from windows or other dirty surfaces, such as writing “wash me” on a dirty vehicle. Others, such as graffiti artist Moose, use a cloth or a high-power washer to remove dirt on a larger scale.

Reverse graffiti has been used as a form of advertising, although this usage has been controversial, as its legality varies depending on jurisdiction.

“The grass is always greener over the septic tank.”

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Three couples whose frozen embryos were destroyed when a wandering Mobile hospital patient dropped the specimens can sue for wrongful death because the embryos were “children,” the Alabama Supreme Court ruled Friday in reversing a judge’s decision to throw out the case.

The Center for Reproductive Medicine, a fertility clinic used by the couples, and Mobile Infirmary Medical Center, where the embryos were being stored, claimed the couples could not sue for wrongful death because Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act does not cover embryos outside the womb.

But the Alabama Supreme Court disagreed when it reversed Mobile County Circuit Court Judge Jill Parrish Phillips’ ruling to dismiss the case in 2022.

The Wrongful Death of a Minor Act “applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location,” wrote Alabama Supreme Court Justice Jay Mitchell. “[T]he Wrongful Death of a Minor Act is sweeping and unqualified. It applies to all children, born and unborn, without limitation. It is not the role of this Court to craft a new limitation based on our own view of what is or is not wise public policy. That is especially true where, as here, the People of this State have adopted a Constitutional amendment directly aimed at stopping courts from excluding ‘unborn life’ from legal protection.”

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The 19-year-old son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was found unresponsive in his dorm room at the University of California Berkeley last week.

According to SFGate, freshman Marco Troper was discovered at the Clark Kerr campus in the late afternoon of Tuesday. The Berkeley Fire Department attempted to revive Marco, but he died at the scene.

Considering Wojcicki’s pernicious effect as the chief Woke Witch at YouTube, I have to regard this as Evolution in Action.

His grandmother:

“Marco was the most kind, loving, smart, fun and beautiful human being. He was just getting starting on his second semester of his freshman year at UC Berkeley majoring in math and was truly loving it. He had a strong community of friends from his dorm at Stern Hall and his fraternity Zeta Psi and was thriving academically. At home, he would tell us endless stories of his life and friends at Berkeley.” 

None of which mattered a damn in the face of his fatal foolishness. Natural selection works even when people don’t want it to.

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If you’ve never had a Coca-Cola from McDonald’s, you’re truly missing out. But if you have had the pleasure of slurping down a Coke under the Golden Arches, then you already know the secret: Coke from McDonald’s tastes better than cola from any other fast food joint, or even soda from the bottle.

That delicious secret isn’t happenstance. It’s for very specific reasons. McDonald’s has a really smart storage tactic and brilliant drink mixing strategy that makes their Coca-Cola stand out. Read on to find out why Coca-Cola from McDonald’s simply can’t be topped.

Or you could just cut to the chase and drink Pepsi. Your choice.

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For thousands of young conservatives who were born after that era ended, Peter Hitchens has served as a guide who helps us understand why we, too, dislike so much of modernity. He reminds us that it was not always this way, and that saying so matters. We cannot return to the past, he often observes, but we are always in the process of choosing the future—and thus we do not have to make the choices we are making. For that reason, despite his protestations, Hitchens’s writing does make a difference. Because while reading him, many have discovered a heritage largely abandoned before we were born—and have realized what we were missing. Now, many of us know what we like, too.

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Recently the discussion switched to the Three Six Rule. The idea that, to be date-able, a guy must be a 6 in 3 categories:

• 6 figure income
• 6 feet tall
• 6 inch pecker

These are the important questions of our day.

If you wonder why marriage rates and birth rates are falling, this will tell you more than you really want to know.

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I once met an untenured lecturer at Yale. His pay was relatively low. He was offered a job at a mid-tier university in the midwest. I asked if he was going to accept. He said, “No way!” This other university offered him a tenure-track professorship, job security, and higher pay. Despite this, he chose to remain at Yale as a part-time lecturer in a financially precarious position. Why? He quietly explained that the name brand was just too valuable to him.

… that whenever you see a photo of a ‘celebrity couple’, the guy is looking at the girl but the girl is looking at the camera? It’s as if the guy is just another prop.

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In June of 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 50-year-old Roe v. Wade and clarified that there was no constitutional right to abortion.

Within minutes of the court’s ruling, hard-line liberals across the nation were howling about restricted access to abortion and devising new and novel ways to ensure its protection.

The latest creative effort to secure abortion access, mounted by a group of satanists in Idaho, was just defeated in federal court.

ZMan ponders modern life.

Anarcho-tyranny is a feature of managerialism, not a bug, because it is what is necessary for managerialism to survive. The people at the top of the system must remain at the top of the system and the only way to ensure that is to make sure everyone is following their orders. The stated goals of the system are a means to an end and the end is to perpetuate the system. The reason you must follow orders may change, but you must always follow orders.

Eventually this advances to the point where the system becomes so conservative and brittle it is unable to adapt. We cannot know how fascism would have ended, but we saw how communism ended. In its final days it was old men desperately trying to hold onto power by enforcing rules that no longer made sense. Once people stopped following orders, the whole thing collapsed. It is something to think about the next time you are pulled over for speeding on a lonely highway.

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One reason both for the popularity of economic liberalism in the United States, and for it being considered a ‘conservative’ value, is that it is psychologically connected to its opposite or counterpart. However implicitly tied to the idea that individual calculation of self-interest in monetary terms will produce collective prosperity and virtue, and however much it is de facto applied (such as to endear the tax code to large corporations rather than proliferating startups, family-owned businesses, and enfranchised communities), we cannot help but notice that the aesthetic of American liberalism is often Chestertonian-distributist.

This is the cornerstone of much conservative thought. We may also think of Donoso Cortés and his emphasis on intermediate classes as bulwarks of Spain’s constitution (her literal constitution as society and body politic). And yet Western culture in general is deeply conditioned by habits of mind that militate against the cultivation and safeguarding of those kinds of property arrangements.