Steven Hayward at Power Line.

Our pal Mark Perry asks a simple question: If America is such a horrible systemically racist country why did the number of Black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean double from 2M to 4M between 2000 and 2019?

Zeihan.

Four big things have helped Texas climb to the top. Thanks to a low cost of living, Texans have been popping out babies left and right, contributing to strong demographic growth. Their proximity to Mexico has bolstered the Texan economy, trade, and manufacturing sector. Texas is a red state with blue cities, so residents can enjoy the perfect regulatory mix. And lastly, Texas has been able to attract businesses from other struggling states.

Read it.

When Wu began his surgical career in the late 1990s, most of his patients were in their sixties or seventies. But in the mid-2000s, he started to notice a troubling change. The people on his operating table kept getting younger. In 2016, Wu performed a scleral buckle surgery—fastening a belt around the eye to fix the retina into place—on a 14-year-old girl, a student at an elite high school in Kaohsiung. Another patient, a prominent programmer who had worked for Yahoo, suffered two severe retinal detachments and was blind in both eyes by age 29. Both of these cases are part of a wider problem that’s been growing across Asia for decades and is rapidly becoming an issue in the West too: an explosion of myopia.

I spent most of my life with myopia–I cannot remember a time when I didn’t wear glasses. When RK became available, I jumped on it (although I now wish I’d waited; Lasik doesn’t leave the same scars in its wake). That gave me about ten years of glorious life without glasses, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

For economies to continuously expand, education had to become central, and as this happened, the rates of myopia started to climb.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that education and myopia have a causal relationship, but it certainly seems suspicious. Of the three of us children to survived to adulthood, the two who were compulsive readers and eventually college graduates were extremely myopic, and the other–first born, in 1944–was never a heavy reader and never went to college.

HERE IS A non-exhaustive list of things that have been blamed for nearsightedness: pregnancy, pipe smoking, brown hair, long heads, bulging eyes, too much fluid in the eyes, not enough fluid in the eyes, muscle spasms, social class. “Any ophthalmologist who experienced a night of insomnia arose in the morning with a new and usually more bizarre theory,” wrote Brian Curtin in an influential 1985 book about myopia.

…

Morgan and his team also surveyed the participants about their daily routines and hobbies and discovered a surprising relationship. The more time kids spent outside, the less likely they were to have myopia.

Read it.

I spend a lot of time in prayer, both alone and in a quorum (a minyan) of men. Prayer is a form of quasi-meditation, once likened by Rabbi Sachs to focusing on micro-adjusting a shortwave radio dial to tune into a very faint and elusive signal. The “still small voice” might be our souls, or it might be the voice of the divine, or it might just be our imagination. I think it might, at times, be none of them, or all three together.

The point of prayer, like that of almost every religious practice, is to focus the mind of the participant on what is important from the aspect of that particular religion.

ZMan peers behind the curtain.

Over the last several years, a group of academics and intellectuals have formed what is now called post-liberalism. The members of this group do not agree on many things, but they agree on one important thing and that is what they call liberalism has run its course and it is time for something new. Patrick Deneen, one of the key members of the post-liberals, has a new book out called Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, in which he sets out to describe what should replace liberalism.

This is the third book from Deneen on the subject. In 2016, Deneen published Conserving America?, which was a collection of essays on the current social and moral troubles of this age. After that he published Why Liberalism Failed, which was a book length analysis of what he calls liberalism. This latest book is supposed to build on that second book and lay out a vision for how to put an end to the liberal order and provide a sketch for what should replace it.

Regime Change has been met with mostly negative reviews. A good example is from Charles Haywood at Worthy House, who was enthusiastically positive about Deneen’s prior book on the subject. It is also fair to say that Haywood is positively disposed to the broad concept of post-liberalism. He makes the point that despite the title, Deneen is not actually suggesting we change the regime. Instead, he offers up the usual list of reforms that have no chance of being considered.

Read it.

There is a tendency in the world of ideas to divide thinkers into saints and witches. Some are singled out for a hagiographic treatment. When others discover issues with their thoughts or lives, the switch is flipped and they become worthy of being burned. They are either valorized or demonized. This has happened to countless intellectuals: Voltaire, Jefferson, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, and thousands more.

It’s all quite infantile. The better approach is one born of maturity. Read everything and everyone and learn what you can and toss out what’s wrong. Of course this requires work and thought. In fact, the saint/witch dichotomy is merely a mask for laziness. It’s a way of finding a fast track to truth that dispenses with the arduous task of actual research.

Few have been victimized by this habit as much as the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. People might encounter her work in high school and decide to adopt it as a personal credo, only to find out later in life that the world is more complicated than she describes and they turn against her.

Mostly she got right that the majority of people are selfish shits regardless of what they say.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

This video made me laugh. Riley Gaines munches on breakfast cereal with a deadpan expression while watching a lib’s self-absorbed TikTok video. The funny thing, as Riley notes, is that TikTok banned the video even though Riley does not utter a single word. Her only commentary is “poor cat,” which you will understand if you watch the lib woman’s litany….

Read it.

French authorities have deployed a new floating barrier in the Prefecture of Pas-de-Calais in the north of the country in an effort to hinder illegal migrant boats trying to cross the English Channel and catch people smugglers.

The barrier, which has been labelled a “floating dam,” was deployed on the Canche River last week in Étaples and is designed to stop so-called ‘taxi boats’ from picking up migrants before heading across the English Channel, the newspaper Le Parisien reports.

The barrier itself is made from yellow buoys connected tightly together with a chain and is anchored on each side of the Canche River making any crossing of the river impossible.

Sound familiar? It does, to a Texan.

Alex Tabarrok.

Christianity in India has roots at least as old as in Italy. Millions of Christians in Kerala today believe that their tradition traces back directly to Thomas, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus, who traveled to India in the first century AD. According to the Acts of Thomas, the apostles divided the world and drew lots to decide their respective regions for spreading the gospel. Thomas, drew India but, ever the doubter, he demurred. “It’s too hot and the food isn’t kosher”, he said, more or less. Jesus appeared to Thomas, however, and bade him “go to India!” Amazingly, he still demurred–what a doubter!–but by a minor miracle just as this was happening an Indian merchant arrived in Jerusalem calling for a master architect and builder to return with him to India. Finally, with this sign, Thomas’s doubts were allayed and his India adventures began.

If I wanted to live outdoors I’d have joined the Army.

Mary Rose Cook.

I used to believe that every book has an objective value. And I used to believe that this value is fixed and universal.

Now, I believe it’s much more useful to say something in this form: this book has this value to this person in this context.

This is one of those metanoia experiences where you encounter something that completely changes how you think about the world. Read The Whole Thing.

Welcome to my world.

Read it.

Indeed, monarchy itself is not so easy to define. Mention the word, and the modern mind—fresh from being ordered to its room in masks by our freely elected masters, whilst the same impose their racial, gender, and hormonal views on a more or less unwilling society—immediately exclaims “tyranny.” Images of Nero, Henry VIII, and a wildly distorted George III are summoned up before said mind, subjected to an obligatory two minutes of hatred, and then once again sent triumphantly back to the mental recesses from whence they came. That task accomplished, one is able to return to the weary world one actually inhabits, feeling that at least one is ‘free.’

And yet, and yet, there are still people who openly call themselves monarchists. If the ‘M’ word is uttered, the malefactor’s hearers often reply: “So, you want to be a lord or something? If we had a monarchy again, you’d be nothing!” My favourite response to this was made by an American lady living in Germany, who answered “What makes you think I’m something now? Do you think the chancellor cares if you or I live or die?” There was no answer to that. At any rate, let us put that argument aside, as well as those who do indeed look for titles or orders of knighthood as social accessories, and concentrate on those who are serious about holding this unpopular view.

Read it.

The New York Fire Department recently reported that so far this year there have been 108 lithium-ion battery fires in New York City, which have injured 66 people and killed 13. According to FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh, “There is not a small amount of fire, it (the vehicle) literally explodes.” The resulting fire is “very difficult to extinguish and so it is particularly dangerous.”

They’re everywhere, the bastards.

Steve Sailer.

I’ve always liked fellow opinion journalist Michael Lind (here’s my positive review of his 2020 book The New Class War) even though he dislikes me. I’ve learned a lot from him, although it doesn’t appear from this article that he’s learned much of anything from me.

…

I’ve never heard the term “eugenicon” before. I guess it means I’m an icon of good genes.

The Eugenicons sound like a 1980s synth pop super group.

 

Quilette.

Historically, the knock on psychotherapy has been that it’s a pseudoscience perpetrated by overeducated life coaches. Their insights are so arbitrary and insubstantial that they can render diametric judgments under oath about the risks posed to society by the same accused serial killer.

Jaundiced perceptions aside, therapy’s role in modern life is no joke. America is a nation increasingly surrendering itself to the therapist’s couch. Forty-one million American adults sought therapy in 2020–21 alone, which was peak-COVID. Nevertheless, that figure reflects a therapy juggernaut not out of line with trends before or since. Nearly a quarter of America has been in therapy in the past 12 months, according to Gallup polling. It is nigh impossible to consume any form of media without being bombarded with PSAs that herd people into overcrowded therapy waiting rooms the way Japan’s oshiya herd people into jam-packed subway cars.

Obviously, then, psychology’s efficacy is a matter of some importance. Yet this is where we encounter an irony—it may be that psychotherapy is most dangerous when it works.

Smash the patriarchy! Oh, wait….

Steve Hayward at Power Line.

A properly Biden-hating but Trump-critical friend remarked to me lately that “I just don’t know any intelligent, educated people who want to vote for Trump next year.” Well maybe so, but I am reminded of the revealing line from Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 presidential campaign, when an enthusiastic supporter ran up to him and breathlessly exclaimed, “Oh, Governor Stevenson! All educated people are for you!” To which Stevenson responded, “Yes, ma’am, but I need a majority.”

That’s a perfect expression of liberal elitism and disdain toward the broad spectrum of Americans who don’t attend elite universities or live in the trendiest neighborhoods or hold the “correct” views.

Which brings me to David Brooks’s mid-week column in the New York Times that people are still talking about days later, which is a much longer half-life for a column than is typical these days. His column is “What If We’re the Bad Guys Here?“, and the “bad guys” here are not the Deplorables that Times readers and other “enlightened” people blame for blocking all desirable progress, but the Times readership itself. Brooks doesn’t put it that directly, but that’s the clear subtext.

Read it.

A 100-year history in college sports is ending. Barring some sort of miracle, or a negotiated deal there will only be four schools left in the Pac-12.

USC and UCLA were the first to leave to join the Big-10. The University of Oregon and the University of Washington have announced their decisions to join the Big-10. Utah, Arizona State, and Arizona are headed to the Big-12. There will be four members left in the Pac-12. Stanford, Oregon State, Washington State, and Cal.

Football programs are the biggest money makers in college sports and the most expensive sport to maintain. Televison money and viewing ratings are the key to survival. There are rumors that some current conferences will cut teams that are not generating TV ratings and will be shown the door as new teams join super conferences.

Read it.

In your book you talk about progressivism as a religion. How does this religion sell transhumanism?

It is sold as a material improvement, as an idea of progress in which the human being is improved, replaces God, and becomes God thanks to technology. The problem with this approach is that it is a false and empty promise. The sine qua non condition of this process is that the human being ceases to be human. You will progress, but the cost of that progress is that you cease to be what you are. So, homo sapiens can transition into a homo deus or any kind of form, what I call a neo-entity. Basically, technology is going to allow you to be whatever you want to be and that is one of the promises of progress.

This technological progress is accompanied by a postmodern moral progress, in which all the value categories that Judeo-Christianity established in the previous 2000 years become irrelevant. This progressive morality is completely anti-Christian. We are going to be better intellectually, cognitively, physically, and morally, but this morality is an amorality because it has no landmarks and no flag. It is a relativistic morality.

Check it out.

An infographic that will tell you more than you really want to know about the demographic makeup of the Ivy League colleges. (Click to expand)

Zman blows the whistle.

A paradox of the modern age is that the average person in the West knows more about the natural world than the most learned man of prior eras, but people remain as superstitious and irrational as ever. This is true even in the human sciences, where doctors continue to tell patients that they should make sure to eat plenty of vegetables and avoid fatty foods. Much of what people experience as medicine is the same old oogily-boogily that has been with us since forever.

The carnivore diet is the latest bit of nonsense to make the rounds. Search the topic on YouTube and your recommendations will suddenly be packed with videos of men wearing lab coats or standing in front of dry erase boards, explaining how this diet is based on the science of cavemen. They claim that humans are made to eat meat, not bread or vegetables, so we should only eat meat. This will cure the things that ail you in the modern age, like obesity and unhappiness.

This is pure nonsense. Modern humans are the product of a long process that continues to this day. That process is called evolution. The ancestors of modern humans survived on what they could find. We know that species that can survive on a varied diet are more adaptive than species hooked on a narrow diet. If you can eat anything, you can live anywhere. If you can only eat bamboo shoots, then the only place you can live is in a Chinese zoo.

Some of us can’t wait that long.

Read it.

In Democracy on Trial, Jean Elshtain stresses the need for what she calls “democratic dispositions,” which include a willingness, or perhaps even eagerness, to act with others toward shared purposes, to compromise, to converse, and to understand one’s unique life as embedded in a skein of relationships that help constitute one’s distinctive personhood. The maintenance of these dispositions is a necessary condition, it seems, for preserving the civic virtues of “sobriety, rectitude, hard work, and familial and community obligations.”

What Elshtain calls democratic dispositions are, by my way of thinking, habits that temper and moderate democracy rather than express its inherent nature. The “savage instincts of democracy,” to use Tocqueville’s phrase, tend toward despotism rather than freedom, toward barbarism rather than toward civility. Unchecked democratic instincts encourage people to withdraw into an intensely private sphere and to see the world from the narrow perspective of their own self-interest, crudely understood. Disconnected from public obligations, having come to think of individualism as a virtue, the democrat sees only his own small world of family and close associates, and then the abstractions of nation or humanity. The rich world of political and civil associations in between these two extremes are invisible to him.

Hmmm … Left Coast, Other Left Coast, Canadian Left Coast….

ZMan looks at a world turned upside down.

With some obvious exceptions, the people who use the term “white nationalist” use it to mean “people they do not like.” These are people who imbue their language with emotional meaning, rather than descriptive meaning. Just as Eskimos supposedly have a long list of ways to describe snow, the people fond of using the term “white nationalist” have a long list of words for people outside of their cult. The term has no meaning other than “danger! danger!” to the rest of the cult.

Before the term became a cult signal, it used to have meaning. A white nationalist is an American term for a white person who wants to live in communities free of nonwhites, especially black people. Having lost the fight over “civil rights” in the middle of the last century, and not understanding the implications of it, these people organized around the idea of separate lands for people of European descent. They want intentional communities organized around race.

Of course, the people who use the term “white nationalist” as a slur acknowledge that the people calling themselves white nationalists primarily want a white homeland exclusively for white people, but they also claim the reason for this desire is an irrational hatred of nonwhites, especially blacks and Jews. In this way, the term “white nationalists” is shorthand for people who hate nonwhites. It is why you can be a nonwhite white nationalist now.

And that will be his highest priority.

Read it.

The production of steel is a significant contributor to climate change. Direct emissions from steelmaking are around 7 percent of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions.

Iron ore, the raw material used for steelmaking, contains iron oxide, which means the iron atoms are bound to oxygen atoms. To break this bond, the standard steelmaking process in blast furnaces uses coke made from cooking coal. This process creates large amounts of carbon dioxide emissions that cannot be avoided with the existing technology.

An alternative to blast furnaces is using hydrogen in a process called direct reduction. This is often considered the most promising technology for green steel production, and many steel companies have announced investments in it.

Read it.

In a potentially game-changing breakthrough in energy harvesting, researchers have found a way to capture, store and utilize the electrical power generated by falling raindrops, which may lead to the development of rooftop, power-generating rain panels.

Previous attempts to generate power from failing rain have run into specific technical hurdles that often seemed impossible to surpass, but the researchers behind this new method say they have found a solution that may finally make such rain panels as popular, if not more so, than solar panels.

Discourse.

The interior of a Walmart looks like the street grid of a classic small town.

Downtown Chapel Hill is much bigger than a Walmart. But nonetheless, the relatively small Walmart in the city’s outskirts would fill about a third of the downtown’s busiest commercial block right off campus. In my hometown of Flemington, New Jersey—with a smaller downtown and a larger Walmart—the store would fill more than half of the old commercial core. The largest big-box superstores approach or exceed 200,000 square feet, which is about the size of a very small classic downtown.

The idea of a commercial space aping the design of a city is somewhat familiar when it comes to the suburban shopping mall. Malls were famously designed after urban downtowns or shopping districts by the European-born architect Victor Gruen, who envisioned them not as churches of consumerism but as weather-free, and traffic-free, diminutive cities.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

One of the things to look forward to in the next election will be Gavin Newsome lecturing Tim Scott on the importance of reparations. This assumes Tim Scott will be told to oppose the idea by the party. By next fall reparations could be an ancient conservative principle so we could see a contest between the two parties over who is promising the bigger reparations check.

Either way, it is a safe bet that the subject will be mainstream by next year. The effort to normalize the idea has been going on since the George Floyd riots. California is working on a reparations report. The idea is to release a big official looking study that will be the basis for the following debate. This was popular back in the middle of the last century whenever the progressives were plotting shenanigans.

Part of the plot will be a role for white people to play in the manufactured drama that will play out on cable television and the internet. Sean Hannity will take a week off for a new firmware update and come back with a new set of lapel pins and a new vocabulary to oppose the idea of reparations. It will be the old Washington Generals routine that is the defining feature of the so-called conservative movement.