Read it.

Alphabetization is dying, I suspect. AI searches obviate the need for human skill in alphabets, and designers seem not to want it. Another way of saying I have been unable to sustain it in etymonline; the app technology keeps undercutting it.

AI expects you to seek one thing, and it is eager to hand you that one thing in under .0005 seconds. Yet I need to see the site alphabetically in order to edit it. Or to understand English.

You miss a little when you can’t see the forest. Maybe everything. Now, on your devices, you have a nice stack of dispensable planks; it’s convenient as all. But you lost the forest.

Who hasn’t wanted to have a catnip gazelle available every now and again?

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

In years past, whenever I have put out the call for questions, there would be questions about specific people in politics and questions about a particular question. This time there were no such questions. The former questions have gone away along with the drama, which was a defining feature of outsider politics. The days of various e-celebs warring with one another seem to have passed.

The other question has also changed. You see it with the reaction to the Israel – Gaza cheerleading from conservatives. Ten years ago, the only negative responses to Shapiro or Pollack would have been the old school JQ stuff. These days it is much more nuanced and matter of fact. A large swath of people seem to have internalized many of these arguments into a casual acceptance of ethnic reality.

I did not get a single Ukraine question. A good question is how the general public will respond when the inevitable happens in Ukraine in 2024. The war is not on anyone’s list of concerns at the moment, not even for those on this side of the divide. Will that change when things fall apart next year? Team Biden never recovered from the Afghanistan debacle, even though it had been off the radar for years.

Fox Business.

Jeff Bezos is the latest billionaire name added to the roster of those who call Miami home in the post-pandemic era: Citadel’s Ken Griffin, venture-capitalist Peter Thiel, Goldman Sachs’ Douglas Sacks, Tiger Global Management co-founder Scott Shleifer and Third Point founder and CEO Dan Loeb are also neighbors.

“I actually wasn’t too surprised. I feel like he’s coming back home, right?” fellow billionaire and OneWorld Properties CEO Peggy Olin told FOX News Digital. “He has a place of Miami in his heart. He went to Palmetto High, his parents are in Miami. I think for him, it’s a natural move.”

“I wasn’t shocked. I guess my reaction was, of course, why not?” Ytech CMO Andrew Kraynak also told Digital. “What’s interesting about Amazon, it is a very decentralized business. And we’ve seen what they’ve been going through in terms of creating an East Coast, kind of second headquarters. And right now, it’s a very interesting organization. What that means for Amazon in South Florida, I wouldn’t hazard a guess. I’m sure there’s probably a play there.”

Not having to pay Washington state taxes probably had something to do with it.

Read it.

Cass Sunstein has a lovely New York Times essay that tries to give us back the word “Liberal.” I hope it works.

“Liberal” from “Libertas” means, at bottom, freedom. In the 19th century, “liberals” were devoted to personal, economic, and increasing social freedom from government restraint. “Conservatives” wanted to maintain aristocratic privileges, and government interventions in the traditional way of doing things. The debate was not so obvious. Conservatives defended their view of aristocratic power in a noblesse-oblige concern for little people that the unfettered free market might leave behind, in a way quite reminiscent of today’s elites who think they should run the government in the name of the downtrodden (or “nudge” them, if I can poke a little fun at Sunstein’s earlier work).

But by the 1970s, the labels had flipped. “Liberals” were advocates of big-state interventionism, in a big tent that included communists and marxists. It became a synonym of “left.” “Conservatives” became a strange alliance of free market economics and social conservatism. The word “classical liberal” or “libertarian” started to be used to refer to heirs of the enlightenment “liberal” tradition, broadly emphasizing individual liberty and limited rule of law government in both economic and social spheres.

But broadly, “liberal” came to mean more government intervention and Democrat, while “conservative” came to mean less state intervention and Republican, at least in rhetoric.

Babylon Bee.

Nailed it.

FreeThink.

Not a high bar, I’m thinking.

Freeberg nails it.

I’m seeing this pattern…

There is a tagline for committed “conspiracy theorists” and “nutcases.” In the case of January 6, it would be something along the lines of “We have a ‘Deep State‘ and they arranged this spectacle.” For the 2020 election, it was “democrat activists coordinated within & across state lines to fraudulently bump up Joe Biden’s vote count in the key battleground states.” For COVID, it’s “The virus is a bioweapon that was grown in a Chinese lab.” And in general for all things related to Donald Trump, it’s “Hollywood is opposed to him because they’re full of perverts, pedophiles and pederasts who belong in jail and they don’t want him putting them there.”

For a year or two, everybody is watching, and everybody’s watching everybody else watching. Passing judgment on who’s a nutcase and who isn’t. And you gutterball yourself if you say anything approaching even a watered-down version of the tagline…

“Fact checkers” emerge to “debunk” the tagline. Once and for all! But also, repeatedly, like a lab rat hooked on amphetamine.

And then after a little bit of time, when 90% or so have stopped watching…the tagline that clearly called out the most obvious nutcases…migrates. It becomes not quite so nutty. Then it becomes more probable. Then it becomes a likelihood. And then, one by one, all the alternative explanations are logically ruled out and this one is the only one left standing.

Read it.

Just in case you were thinking of giving it a try, be warned: Nobody will be able to write a competent history of 20th-century American politics without absorbing the themes and revelations in the new book by Luke Nichter, The Year that Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968. A history professor at Chapman University and the biographer of Henry Cabot Lodge, among others, Nichter is widely understood and rightly admired as a tireless researcher—though “tireless” doesn’t quite cover it: In his quest to transcribe most of the hopelessly garbled and obscure audio tapes left behind by Richard Nixon after his presidency, Nichter eventually lost most of his hearing in one ear. It’s not often that we history buffs get our own martyr.

I remember 1968. It was not a good year.

Read it.

Russell is used to getting woken up for a late-night delivery. But this foal was special. It was a clone of a rare Przewalski’s horse, a now-endangered species that once roamed the grasslands of central Asia. Crouched in the corner of the barn stall, Russell waited for its birth with anticipation. “When I saw toes and nose, I thought, ‘Whew, this is going as planned,’” he recalls.

You might be surprised that cloned animals exist—they do, but the procedure is mostly used for domesticated animals. Russell’s company, ViaGen Pets, clones around 100 horses a year, as well as cats and dogs.

Yet the technology has rarely been used for endangered animals. Up until that moment, cloning had only successfully produced a single animal of any such species. The new Przewalski’s horse, born in February and still unnamed, is the second of his kind. He’s a genetic copy of the world’s first cloned Przewalski’s horse, Kurt, who was born in August 2020. Both were made from cells frozen more than 40 years ago at the San Diego Zoo. The scientists behind the effort say this second birth is evidence that cloning could be a viable strategy for saving endangered species.

Astral Codex Ten.

A hyperstition is a belief which becomes true if people believe it’s true. For example, “Dogecoin is a great short-term investment and you need to buy it right now!” is true if everyone believes it is true; lots of people will buy Dogecoin and it will go way up. “The bank is collapsing and you need to get your money out right away” is likewise true; if everyone believes it, there will be a run on the bank.

What else is a hyperstition? “Bernie can’t possibly win” – if everyone believes this, donors won’t bother giving money to Bernie (why bother? it’s futile!), volunteers won’t canvas for him, and party honchos won’t put their careers on the line to support him. But also, “Bernie’s on fire and can’t be stopped!” – donors looking to curry favor with a future winner will support him, his base will be fired up, opponents might even drop out of the race.

Slurs are like this too. Fifty years ago, “Negro” was the respectable, scholarly term for black people, used by everyone from white academics to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King. In 1966, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael said that white people had invented the term “Negro” as a descriptor, so people of African descent needed a new term they could be proud of, and he was choosing “black” because it sounded scary. All the pro-civil-rights white people loved this and used the new word to signal their support for civil rights, soon using “Negro” actively became a sign that you didn’t support civil rights, and now it’s a slur and society demands that politicians resign if they use it. Carmichael said – in a completely made up way that nobody had been thinking of before him – that “Negro” was a slur – and because people believed him it became true.

Vox.

The rise of the no-homework movement during the Covid-19 pandemic tapped into long-running disagreements over homework’s impact on students. The purpose and effectiveness of homework have been disputed for well over a century. In 1901, for instance, California banned homework for students up to age 15, and limited it for older students, over concerns that it endangered children’s mental and physical health. The newest iteration of the anti-homework argument contends that the current practice punishes students who lack support and rewards those with more resources, reinforcing the “myth of meritocracy.”

But there is still no research consensus on homework’s effectiveness; no one can seem to agree on what the right metrics are. Much of the debate relies on anecdotes, intuition, or speculation.

Bearing in mind that Vox is a hard-left Narrative media site, nevertheless even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.

Read it. (If you dare.)

Much has been said about the phenomenon of the ‘trophy wife’ but I haven’t seen much discussion of the corresponding ‘trophy husband’. Of the two, I suspect that the wife is getting the better deal.

The Foundry.

Patrick Ruffini is a Republican pollster with a reputation for deciphering data and spotting trends. His new book, “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP,” takes a deep dive into one of the biggest political realignments of our lifetime.

Ruffini spoke with The Daily Signal about the demographic changes that are rapidly transforming America’s two biggest political parties—and what it means for the 2024 presidential election and beyond.

“When I first started in politics, Republicans had this reputation as being the country club party,” Ruffini said. “Democrats had this reputation as being the party of the people, the party of the working class.”

He added, “Flash forward almost 20 years, and that trend has completely almost reversed.”

Historically the backbone of the Republican party has been farmers and small businessmen, the first in line to get buttfucked by the Deep State and the coastal Crust. It would be nice to see that world turned upside down.

The Economist.

here is no “i” in team. But there is one in “autopilot”. Despite the growing importance of teamwork in organisations, the processes used to manage employees have carried on much as before. Bosses may wax lyrical about collaboration, but the way they reward, review and recruit has not caught up.

People in organisations have always worked in concert with others. But the emphasis on teams is growing, for a variety of reasons. Technology has made the sharing of ideas and information easier, while hybrid working has made it more vital. (There’s a reason it’s not called Microsoft Silos.) The software industry has spread the gospel of teams—agile, scrums, okrs and all the rest of it—into all kinds of places.

Teams, it turns out, are better at solving complex problems, according to a recent paper by Abdullah Almaatouq of the mit Sloan School of Management. Research also suggests that people have a greater attachment to their work group than to their organisation; you’re less likely to go for lunch with a logo.

The military calls it ‘unit cohesion’ and that’s Old News.

ZMan breaks out the popcorn.

Some movies are on the top-100 list because they are great stories told very well, while others are on the list for their great technological breakthroughs. Some are on the list for their cultural impact. That is the case with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a comedy about race mixing from 1967. The film had two legends, Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, and a big star at the moment in Sydney Poitier.

The film was viewed at the time as groundbreaking because it featured a mixed-race couple in a positive light. Right around the time the movie was released, the Supreme Court had struck down anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia. Of course, the civil rights movement was at its peak, so this was just what white liberals wanted to see, which was white liberals being celebrated for their goodness.

The movie itself is pretty simple. It opens with the couple in question, generic rich white girl and her much older black boyfriend, Sydney Poitier, getting off an airplane and strolling through an airport like lovers on a walk in the park. Keep in mind that this is 1967, but no one in the airport notices, because you see, this is the glorious future where race no longer matters, so get used to it you terrible bigots.

Read it.

According to one estimate I have seen, in 1973 there were only about 13,000 children being homeschooled. Today the number is over 5 million—and may be much higher, as many states do not track the numbers very carefully.

The Washington Post has noticed, and you can tell they are worried about it. (The left has always hated homeschooling, and the teachers unions rightly understand what a threat homeschooling is to their gravy train, as most public schools derive their revenue by how many students are enrolled.)

Me, during football season.

Read it.

Banana equivalent dose (BED) is an informal unit of measurement of ionizing radiation exposure, intended as a general educational example to compare a dose of radioactivity to the dose one is exposed to by eating one average-sized banana. Bananas contain naturally occurring radioactive isotopes, particularly potassium-40 (40K), one of several naturally occurring isotopes of potassium. One BED is often correlated to 10?7 sievert (0.1 ?Sv); however, in practice, this dose is not cumulative, as the potassium in foods is excreted in urine to maintain homeostasis.[1] The BED is only meant as an educational exercise and is not a formally adopted dose measurement.

Happy Birthday to My Brother the Socialist.

Peter Zeihan.

The US is blessed with one of the most prolific water networks in the world, yet it operates at sub-optimal levels. You’ve all heard my thoughts on the Jones Act, so you can probably guess where the blame falls once again.

Something will have to change as the US reshores its industry and attempts to build out its manufacturing footprint. Thankfully, reviving water transport in the US is a low-hanging fruit. All it requires is some amendments to the Jones Act and its regulations on waterborne commerce.

If we can manage that, we’ll all enjoy some nice economic growth thanks to reduced product transport costs and a boost to US manufacturing.

Next to the Davis-Bacon Act, the Jones Act is the worst piece of fascist legislation ever dumped on an unsuspecting nation.

L.A. Cathedral.

My local church.

“The 2024 election is already being rigged. They’re doing it right in front of you.” — Scott Adams

The Guardian.

Irving Finkel, assistant keeper of ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures at the British Museum, has speculated that the fact games sharpen our mind-reading skills – forcing us to put ourselves in our opponent’s shoes – is why they have been such an enduring feature of culture. He even goes so far as to suggest that they developed in tandem with human consciousness. Imagining how someone else might move and planning accordingly provided a tool to explore the inner lives of others, an essential skill for a social animal. Finkel is responsible for decoding the rules behind one of the very first board games in recorded history: the 4,500-year-old Royal Game of Ur, which was rediscovered during excavations in the 1920s. Players compete to race pieces around the board using pyramid-shaped dice.

The Economist.

A line of research shows the benefits of an “innovation” that predates computers: handwriting. Studies have found that writing on paper can improve everything from recalling a random series of words to imparting a better conceptual grasp of complicated ideas.

For learning material by rote, from the shapes of letters to the quirks of English spelling, the benefits of using a pen or pencil lie in how the motor and sensory memory of putting words on paper reinforces that material. The arrangement of squiggles on a page feeds into visual memory: people might remember a word they wrote down in French class as being at the bottom-left on a page, par exemple.

One of the best-demonstrated advantages of writing by hand seems to be in superior note-taking. In a study from 2014 by Pam Mueller and Danny Oppenheimer, students typing wrote down almost twice as many words and more passages verbatim from lectures, suggesting they were not understanding so much as rapidly copying the material.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

The four men charged are 25-year-old Rakiem Savage, 31-year-old Ronald Byrd, 30-year-old Haneef Palmer and 32-year-old Malik Palmer, according to 6ABC in Philadelphia. They face charges of conspiracy, robbery and theft of government money, among other charges the report says.

‘Rakiem’? ‘Haneef’? ‘Malik’? I think that there is more here that is being reported.

Read it.

The niceties of hoplite warfare may be abstruse, but as an analogy, it works with depressing frequency in modern politics as both sides adapt their principles to their feelings rather than the other way round. In recent days, the Left (generally quick to equate speech with violence as in Labour’s plans to criminalise misgendering) has been remarkably relaxed about calls to eradicate Israel from the map being heard on the streets of London, while the Right, generally quick to point out that “facts don’t care about your feelings, snowflake” is happy to use the intimidation felt by the Jewish community as a reason for mass arrests and the banning of future protests.

We have the technology.

Washington Free Beacon.

A few years ago, David Brooks wrote a column in which he took a friend without a high school degree to a sandwich shop. “Suddenly,” he recounted, “I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named ‘Padrino’ and ‘Pomodoro’ and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.”

Brooks concluded that “American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, ‘You are not welcome here.'” Well, this is hardly a new phenomenon in America or otherwise, but it’s also only a superficial explanation of what separates the upper-middle class from everyone else. There are also real habits and real pieces of knowledge that enable some kids to get ahead. And they matter a lot more than whether you know different words for Italian meat.

Washington Free Beacon.

Children “require a lot of work and a lot of resources,” writes the economist Melissa S. Kearney. And “having two parents in the household generally means having more resources to devote to the task of raising a family.” This includes working for pay, supervising kids, and much else.

That is the simplest argument for, as the title of Kearney’s book phrases it, a “two-parent privilege”: an advantage to growing up in an intact family. The privilege is denied to a large number of American children, disproportionately those who already face other disadvantages. As of 2019, 84 percent of kids whose moms had four years of college, but only 60 percent of kids whose moms had a high school degree or some college, lived with married parents. The racial gaps are even starker: Even among kids whose moms have a high-school education or less, about two-thirds of white kids, but only about one-third of black kids, have married parents.