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Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos will save an estimated $610 million in taxes after he sells 50 million shares of Amazon, thanks to his move from Seattle to Miami last year, CNBC reported Monday.

The state of Washington imposed a 7% capital gains tax on sales of stock and bonds more than $250,000 in 2022. Meaning, that by the time Bezos unloads 50 million shares before Jan. 31, 2025, his address at “Billionaire Bunker” at Indian Creek, Florida, will save him hundreds of millions.

Bezos last week sold nearly 12 million common shares of Amazon stock worth more than $2 billion last week, according to a filing with federal regulators. Bezos avoided paying state taxes on that sale, too, meaning he saved $140 million that he would have paid if still living in Seattle.

You don’t stay the world’s richest man by being stupid with your money.

Read it.

Shell Hydrogen will permanently close all seven of its California pumping stations immediately, the company confirmed this week. It will no longer operate light-duty hydrogen stations in the U.S., and represents another blow to the struggling hydrogen car market in the only state where the fuel is widely available at all.

The outlet Hydrogen Insight first reported the news on Thursday. Shell had, until recently, operated seven of the 55 total retail hydrogen stations in California, per the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Partnership (H2FCP). That makes this a blow, but not apocalyptic news for the (small) hydrogen community.

Just wait. It’s coming.

ZMan looks at show business.

This is the great innovation of America. Entertainment has become a church at which the morality of the day is preached to the audience. It is easy to see at the Super Bowl, where moral messaging is everywhere. In the end zones there was a message about ending racism, a hobgoblin of the modern elites. There were ads about other hobgoblins like antisemitism, bullying and Gaia. They have your attention, so they make sure to let you know what you ought and ought not be doing.

Then you have the appeals to unity, by which they mean conformity. At the start of the game, you get patriotic songs. They even have something called the “The Black National Anthem” which is supposed to shame whites and remind them they can never be forgiven for the sin of whiteness. In a prior age, parishioners were told they were at the mercy of an angry God. Today they are told they are at the mercy of angry minorities, which is far more terrifying than an angry god.

When these songs are played at the start of the game, the players, who should only care about winning, make themselves cry and look moved by the program. This is where you see the supremacy of carny life. The star players know this game is really an audition for them to join the media circus or possibly get a brand going so they can be a celebrity past their playing career. Everyone wants to run away to the circus, even people already in the circus.

Rula Lenska, call your agent.

All of this is the product of democracy. In theory, democracy is about convincing fifty percent plus one. In order to do that, you need to get the attention of the public, which is why celebrity becomes the coin of the democratic realm. The only way you can have a chance to influence anyone is by getting on the stage and you do that by getting everyone’s attention. Carnies live to get attention, so it does not take long before they take center stage in the democratic process.

LAME (Look At Me Everybody) is the New Black.

Think About it … Carefully

Read it.

A new law takes effect in New York this weekend requiring businesses to inform customers about credit card surcharges that will cost them more money at the register.

Starting Sunday, businesses must post the total cost of goods or services with a credit card, including surcharges, before customers checkout. Proprietors can either display the total price inclusive of the credit card surcharge, or list a separate prices for paying with a credit card versus cash.

The new law also requires the surcharge passed on to customers using credit cards to the exact amount charged by credit card companies.

…

The new rule does not apply to debit cards.

Which also have a fee attached. One wonders why they were exempted–perhaps because government benefit programs are paid via ‘debit’ cards such as the famous EBT.

Watch it.

Chris Williamson does a podcast called Modern Wisdom in which he interviews the most interesting people he can find about modern social relations, focusing on how men and women deal with each other. I’ve liked every one of them I’ve seen.

This particular episode includes Mary Harrington, about whom I knew nothing and whose work I intend to investigate.

Highly recommended.

If one thinks of a society as occupying a three-dimensional bell curve (which looks like an actual bell, not the two-dimensional slice to which the term ‘bell curve’ is ordinarily applied), one can divide it into two parts: That which exists within One Standard Deviation from the center axis (approximately 68% of its volume) and everything else, the other (approximately) 32%. I call these apportionments Core and Fringe, and apply  them to the people who occupy those parts of society that are either central to its existence or peripheral to that existence.

The distinction between Core and Fringe may be discerned by asking a simple question: If all of the people that share a certain characteristic were to disappear overnight, would society grind to a halt? or would it keep chugging on, perhaps after a bobble or two or at a reduced level? If that removal means society would halt, then such people are Core; if not, then they are Fringe.

Truck drivers are Core; homeless people are Fringe. Engineers are Core; artists and other ‘creatives’ are Fringe. Doctors, lawyers, and accountants are Core; bikers, convicts, and yoga instructors are Fringe. Carpenters, electricians, and plumbers are Core; sculptors, musicians, and poets are Fringe. Tech writers are Core; literary novelists are Fringe.

You get the picture.

This is a useful frame for viewing the modern world. About half of government employees are Core; the rest, including politicians, are Fringe. The higher one climbs in the academic prestige rankings, the more an institution trains Fringe and the less it trains Core–in fact, we have academic institutions who focus solely on training Core, like MIT and CalTech.

Try it yourself.

The Atlantic, medium of the Crust.

It can seem, these days, like we are meant to be constantly acquiring things while also constantly getting rid of them. Mass consumption is everywhere—endless online shopping; always a new iPhone or device—as is the reactionary minimalist ethos that demands that we declutter our lives. But the relationships we have with our things tend to be more complicated than either of those extremes allow. Objects are more than just the sum of their parts. I would never give up my copies of my grandmother’s cookbooks. I’m also not going to quit my search for the perfect pair of jeans. I remember a great outfit, and what I did in it, for a long time.

The writer Katy Kelleher is seemingly no different. In her debut book, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, she seeks to understand both her collector’s impulse and her longing “for more, always more, even when I know I already have enough.” A magpie’s nest of research and anecdotes about the objects that attract her, the book examines the tension she feels between wanting the things she wants—clothes, cosmetics, home goods—and acknowledging the murkier story of how some of those items were made and marketed. “I’ve never found an object,” she writes, “that was untouched by the depravity of human greed or unblemished by the chemical undoings of time.”

Cloud People worry about the hidden depths of ordinary daily activities. Dirt People just get on with it.

Read it.

A young woman I know broke it off with a young man after three dates but declared that it was a pretty successful relationship anyway. “He showed me a couple of great Amazon Prime series,” she told me. “And he turned me on to Derry Girls.”

Derry Girls, for the record, is a British comedy set in Northern Ireland in the 1990s and it’s hilarious. But there are more than 600 scripted television series currently on the constellation of streaming services competing for your credit card number, so if you don’t go on a dedicated search for that specific title, you’ll probably miss it. And that’s one reason there’s a new category of first-date small talk: What are you watching? is the new What’s your sign?

Watching TV has never been so baffling. You don’t just walk in the house and flop down in front of the TV and start flipping around anymore. Watching television in 2024 requires what psychologists and self-help gurus call intentionality. You have to know what you’re looking for and exactly where to find it, which means the entire process usually starts with a Google search. We’re all familiar with today’s Television Catechism. It goes: What was that show we wanted to see, again? Followed by: Which one of the thingy’s is it on? And ends in an exasperated: Do we even get that one?

New York Times.

Young people tend to lean more liberal on a range of issues pertaining to relationship norms. But when it comes to dating, the idea that men should pay still prevails in heterosexual courtship.

I didn’t realize that ‘dating’ was even a thing any more.

Read it.

When I visit foreign countries, I often go into bookstores. They provide a window into how cultures think. Thumbing through high-school history books in Japan, I noticed that many were divided into two sections: one dedicated to Japanese history, and the other resembling a Western history textbook, including material on ancient Greece, the medieval feudal system, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and so on. They covered the same core Western Civilization topics that are the focus in classical schools in the US.

It seems strange that citizens of many non-Western countries recognize a value in Western civilization that many in the West themselves cannot or will not see. An OECD survey of over 20 of the most advanced countries in the world found that Japan scored highest of all in “proficiency in literacy and numeracy among adults.” But the current proliferation of classical schools across America indicates that there are many other Westerners who do recognize the value of Western culture and want to ensure that it is passed on to future generations.

It is also odd that the classical education movement is sometimes described as elitist. In point of fact, it is driven by millions of everyday working parents, homeschool mothers, and local community leaders. Critical theory is the opposite: a product of ideologues who shelter in elite universities but claim to represent the oppressed masses. Classical schools have been expanding rapidly due to demand from millions of families; critical theory is pushed on millions of families despite resistance, as illustrated at countless contentious school-board meetings publicized on YouTube. Critical theory requires the uncritical consumption of ideological dogma; classical education asks us to accept the value of a dialogue of ideas that has transpired in the West over millennia, a value recognized in foreign countries like Japan.

Tools of Renewal.

This week, someone asked me if I thought Chinese spies were entering the US under our no-borders policy. I didn’t say I thought they were entering. I said they were, in fact, entering.

Imagine you’re a Chinese official. You want to have many spies in the US. That is not a statement a reasonable person can dispute. You have a choice between working hard to get them in legally, with lots of documentation the US government can rely on to track them, taking a great deal of time, or you can tell them to walk in from Mexico.

What would you do?

I’m sure many Chinese moles are coming in legally. There must be advantages to legal entry in many cases. But the Chinese would have to be morons to refrain from sending people in illegally.

Read it.

In response to the virus pandemic and nationwide Black Lives Matter riots in the summer of 2020, some elite colleges and universities shredded testing requirements for admission. Several years later, the test-optional admission has yet to produce the promising results for racial and class-based equity that many woke academic institutions wished.

The failure of test-optional admission policies has forced Dartmouth College to reinstate standardized test scores for admission starting next year. This should never have been eliminated, as merit will always prevail.

Newsbusters.

In 2020, Joe Biden won three states by less than 1 point: Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.

If Donald Trump can flip these three in November — he took them all in 2016 — he’ll be back in the White House this time next year.

Can he do it?

Zman does a deep dive.

Carl Schmitt famously said that “the political is reducible to the existential distinction between friend and enemy.” The shorthand you hear in dissident circles is that politics is about friends and enemies. You can see this in your own life when it comes to some issue with which you have been on the opposite side of a friend. That person may now be a former friend if the issue was important at the time. It is why families often avoid talking about politics during the holidays.

A practical aspect of this reality is that political activism should always seek to harm the opponent and boost your side. An action that makes the other side look bad is good activism and it is even better activism if it also makes you look good. Of course, bad activism is that which boosts the enemy and harms you. The Charlottesville rally in 2018 turned out to be disastrous activism for the alt-right. It rallied their enemies and gutted their support in the broader community.

Life is not always so cut and dried. Generational politics, for example, often feels like good politics to the people doing it. Whether it is young people moaning about old people having had it easy or old people moaning about young people having it easy, the people doing it always feel good about it. A Nick Fuentes feels like a hero when he makes fun of adults for being adults. He thinks it is good politics because it brings in money and gets his young fans excited.

Truth.

Read it.

While New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) has been complaining about “extremely painful” budget cuts, and warned that the flood of migrants thanks to the Biden administration’s open-border policies “will destroy New York City,” somehow – somehow, Adams’ administration has found it in the budget to allocate $53 million towards handing out pre-paid credit cards to migrant families living in Big Apple hotels, the NY Post reports.

…

In response to New York City’s program to take care of illegal migrants before their own homeless population, rapper 50 cent took to Instagram to tell his 31 million followers he might vote for Trump…

Steve Sailer.

Back in 1997, I wrote a long article “Is Love Colorblind?” about how in the 1990 Census, 72% of black-white marriages featured a black husband and a white wife while 72% of white-Asian marriages featured a white husband and an Asian wife. Black-Asian marriages were rare but almost always featured a black husband and Asian wife (e.g., Tiger Woods’ parents).

What has happened since then?

Read  it.

By the time police responded to a call shortly before 10 a.m. regarding a Chinese man and woman conducting surveillance near a security entrance of the historic Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam, the two fled in what police identified as a 2021 silver Nissan Altima, with unidentified plates.

Read it.

I look around and ask myself, “Do I really want these people to reproduce?”

And the answer comes back immediately: “Nah.”

Zman speaks some inconvenient truth.

In the 1980 campaign, Reagan would regularly say that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job. It was a pithy line that got at something that was always missed by the politicians at the time. That is, the economy is not the same for everyone. You can have a good economy but there will be people who are not doing so good. The reverse is also true. Even in the Great Depression, there were people doing fabulously well.

That is the problem facing the political class this year. According to their court wizards, the economy is growing at a blistering pace. The fourth quarter of last year saw growth at over three percent and inflation falling down to two percent for what the wizards call personal items, while overall inflation was under two percent. The definition of “personal items” is one of those things that makes sense to the people doing the counting, but not to anyone who is doing the actual spending

Does it feel like the economy is growing at a blistering pace? Most people do not think the economy is great. In fact, most people think we are in difficult economic times, despite relatively high employment. This was one of the top reasons people voted for Trump in Iowa and New Hampshire. Under Trump, people perceived the economy as strong while under Biden it seems to be weak. The main reason is inflation. Every trip to the store sees prices higher than the last trip.

Read it.

The new CEO for National Public Radio (NPR) has become instant news over social media postings that she deleted before the recent announcement of her selection. Katherine Maher is the former CEO of Wikipedia and sought to remove controversial postings on subjects ranging from looters to Trump.

God forbid anybody should find out what she really thinks.

Shannon Thaler at the New York Post reassembled Maher’s deleted postings including a 2018 declaration that “Donald Trump is a racist” and a variety of race-based commentary. That included a statement that appeared to excuse looting.

Yet another wokerata getting a cushy job paid for by taxpayers.

Read it.

Although I liked the Harry Potter books as a child, I wasn’t a full-blown Potterhead. I didn’t queue for hours at Waterstones for The Half-Blood Prince or dress up as Hermione for Halloween. It’s in adulthood I’ve come to appreciate the thematic layers, world-building and glorious escapism J.K.Rowling’s imagination gave to my generation.

For many children though, what they felt for the books and, by extension, for J.K.Rowling, was pure love. Love, lest we forget, is an emotion next door to hate. They both require a degree of obsession, surrender, investment. And as a very vocal minority of Rowling’s fandom have demonstrated, ever since she first lent her support to Maya Forstater and sex-based rights in law back in 2019, the switch between can be as fast and ugly.

And relentless. The latest insidious project by self-exiled Potter fans is a “foul-mouthed” show about the author organised by an Edinburgh arts company, due to be performed in New York in early February. The title? Terf C**t.

The thing I find most … telling … about the Harry Potter books is the Ministry of Magic. Rowling is a Modern Briton and therefore assumes that every aspect of British life must have a government agency dedicated to controlling and regulating it. If the books had been written fifty or sixty years ago, there would be no ‘Ministry of Magic’, and indeed the plots might revolve around attempts to keep ‘magic’ un-government-regulated.

Read it.

Strong ethnic identities are often portrayed as a holdover from an older, irrational, pre-modern era. This is probably why contemporary international conflicts are framed as civilizational or ideological struggles. On this reading, the conflict between, say, Russia and Ukraine cannot be seen for what it really is: a bloody stand-off between Ukrainian nationalism and Russian imperialism. On the contrary, it becomes just one localized instance among many of a global struggle of democracy against authoritarianism, another example being the conflict between Hamas and Israel.

Such moralizing language is not always ill-founded. However, the undeniable ethnic inflections in these conflicts—also evident in the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan—testify to the fact that clashes of zero-sum nationalisms remain the primary cause of interstate wars. Every nation state that has collapsed since the 1990s (Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia) has disintegrated along ethnic lines.

However, the strength of ethnic identities is also indicated by conflicts within states. I will draw on two examples to illustrate how two contemporary civil wars in different parts of the world attest to the continued potency of ethnic identities in the 21st century, despite the fact that the prevailing liberal ethos of our time instructs us to transcend—or, put another way, to ignore—the evident importance of ethnic identity in collective human psychology.

I have heard many instances of a ‘proverb’ — it was presented to me as Arab, but really it applies to any Turd World country — that goes ‘Me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the world.’ The amusing thing is that many Cloud People who have intensively internalized Identity Politics (‘You aren’t really an individual who ought to be treated as an individual, you’re merely an instance of whatever category I’ve decided to put you in and by God you’d better act like it!’) will turn right around, without blinking, and criticize Dirt People for the only evolution-certified manner of Identity Politics, i.e. ethnic identity.

The Register.

It’s well established that the British are an eccentric people. Among their national obsessions is drinking tea – they consider themselves experts – and one way to trigger the entire United Kingdom is to fuck with the formula.

But that is exactly what American chemistry professor Michelle Francl has done with her new book, Steeped: The Chemistry of Tea, which was published this week through the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Therein, Francl proposes that a tiny bit of salt – not enough to taste – improves tea because “the sodium ions in salt block the bitter receptors in our mouths.”

LAME = Look At Me Everyone.

Useful for dealing with people who have tattoos, piercings, unnaturally colored hair, and Tick Tok or Instagram accounts.

Karen Myers.

If you’ve returned to your childhood home or visited anywhere from your past, you’ve probably learned just how true the adage is, that you can’t go home again.

But my home, and probably yours, is as much or more inside my favorite books. They go back almost as long as I’ve been able to read. Some are warm, some are scary, some are whimsical, and all of them are comforting, in one way or another, suitable companions for a seat by the fire.

Their characters are old friends, and I’m always happy to see them again. I can wallow in their difficulties without anxiety, since I know what will become of them. I can bask in their joys, even if my own life can’t necessarily match them. And they never age — even if they die, they never really leave forever, since I can always open the book again.

Karen is one of the scary-smart people I knew at Yale.

“When the ends of one side are the destruction of the other, the only plausible response for the other side is to seek the same.”  — ZMan

Applies to:

• Progressives
• Muslims
• Communists

Read it.

So why is the United States still struggling to manage something that every other country seems to be able to do and that American engineers used to be able to pull off with slide rules? The Apollo computer used memory made of wire ropes woven by women in the garment industry.

Back then we picked the best and the brightest who had the “right stuff”. Now the right stuff consists of checking DEI boxes.

ZMan is engagingly dyspeptic today.

DeSantis also suffered from the fact that we live in a whirlwind of media bombardment with an increasingly stupid voting base. Part of the latter problem is demographics, but a big part is the internet. People lack the ability to pay attention for more than a few minutes so they make judgements on memes and hot takes. A boring guy who looks like he is passing a stone when tries to tell a joke is never going to go over well with a voting base that thinks Sean Hannity is brilliant.

Read it.

Six months after we reported that a “Bipartisan Bill Aims To Block Chinese Purchase Of US Farmland”, more are starting to pay attention yet as even Bloomberg notes that America “is seeing more and more of its most fertile land snapped up by China and other foreign buyers” the big problem remains: it’s difficult to know just how much farmland China has bought due to problem with how the US tracks such data.

Here’s what we do know: according to Department of Agriculture data foreign ownership and investment in US farmland, pastures and forests jumped to about 40 million acres in 2021, up 40% from 2016; but an analysis conducted by the US Government Accountability Office — a non-partisan watchdog that reports to Congress — found mistakes in the data, including the largest land holding linked with China being counted twice. Other challenges include the USDA’s reliance on foreigners self-reporting their activity.

As a result, foreign ownership of US cropland is drawing attention from Washington as concern rises about possible threats to food supply chains and other national security risks. And, as we reported last summer, lawmakers have called for a crackdown on sales of farmland to China and other nations.

Read it.

In The Identity Trap, Yascha Mounk, who teaches international affairs at Johns Hopkins, joins a number of eminent critics of the identitarian movement that has come to dominate both American academia and, increasingly, our political and social life. He differs from most such critics in two respects. First, while he is a professed “philosophical” liberal, who believes in the existence of universally valid “values” that can provide an objective basis for criticizing and remedying “historical oppression and persistent injustice,” he is also a “political” liberal who advocates social-welfare policies that aim to elevate poor people’s condition and combat racism. This outlook until recently would have put Mounk in the mainstream of the Democratic Party. (Mounk reports having derived his welfare-state liberalism from his grandparents, ex-Central European Communists who after witnessing the death of family members in the Holocaust, then coming “to recognize the cruelty of Soviet communism,” turned to “a reformist creed of social democracy that attempted to humanize capitalism” with “a strong welfare state.”)

Read it.

Gun violence in 6 out of the 8 largest Ohio cities dropped significantly after Ohio legalized permit-free carry of guns across the entire state in 2022.

Read it.

No one’s family name was changed, altered, shortened, butchered, or “written down wrong” at Ellis Island or any American port. That idea is an urban legend.

Many names did get changed as immigrants settled into their new American lives, but those changes were made several years after arrival and were done by choice of someone in the family. The belief persists, however, that the changes were done at the entry point and that the immigrants were unwilling participants in the modifications. Sophisticated family history researchers have long rolled their collective eyes at the “Ellis Island name change” idea. In genealogy blogs and online publications, they wearily repeat the correction—names were not changed at Ellis Island; immigrants changed their own names, usually during the citizenship process. But the belief persists, perhaps because people need to explain surname changes in a way that satisfies them (thinking that their immigrant ancestors made the changes themselves apparently does not do so).

The explanation for this is pretty obvious when you think about it. Just as today, people bought tickets and their names were written on the tickets:

Read it.

What could go wrong?

I certainly hope so.