Quilette.

Like the rest of my generation, I have been anxious and apprehensive for as long as I can recall. The crippling anxieties of Gen-Z and younger millennials are everywhere apparent; we have a mental-health epidemic with a higher generational suicide risk, which have variously been attributed to awareness of worldly chaos, the COVID-19 pandemic, and chronic onlineness. We have grown up comfortable indoors, isolated with the computer, console, or TV, and reliant upon Instagram and disembodied voices in place of social interaction. We accept one or two posts as “news” and information we see online as “facts,” usually without further research. South Park has remodeled Cartman after the image of the doomscrolling, internally distraught Gen-Zer, and I can’t help but see myself and my peers in him. This generational affliction has hindered our ability to communicate and problem-solve, and the technology upon which we are so hopelessly dependent has only enabled an inflation of animosity and alienation, further aggravating a crisis of hyperpolarization and mental-health issues.

 

Read it.

Stretched limos are gone for now, but luxury chauffeur services are still thriving. It’s just the mode of transport has changed. And in a country where progressive policies have sparked a nationwide crime wave in major metro areas, no one in their right mind would dare drive around in a moving target.

One of the virtues (if one can call it that) of high urban crime rates is that it persuades rich people to be less conspicuously consumptive.

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That the West is synonymous with the idea of liberal democracy is common thinking nowadays. That sentiment is amplified and strengthened with the pretty unanimous backing of Ukraine against Russian aggression by the countries considered to be part of the West.

Such thinking is well conveyed in the last interview of the famous American historian Stephen Kotkin, conducted by Peter Robinson. For Kotkin, the West is characterized by strong independent institutions, a free judiciary, the rule of law, etc. Or more broadly speaking, by liberal democracy. Thus, it is quite logical that he included “North America, Europe, the first island chain in Asia, and many other partners, Israel, in the Middle East” in the West. He added that the West “needs to be expanded and needs to be cultivated like a garden.” This is different from the “civilizational” definition of the West in Samuel Huntington’s famous book The Clash of Civilizations, according to which the Catholic and Protestant countries in Europe, along with the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, constitute Western civilization.

Does Kotkin’s trans-geographical and transcultural understanding of the West imply that the U.S., Great Britain, or France cease to be part of the West if they become autocratic? Given that Kotkin defined “Western” countries as liberal democratic ones, it is interesting that India is not included in the West, although it has never ceased to be a democracy since its independence from the British Empire in late 1940s. The exclusion of India makes sense when we consider the rest of Kotkin’s narrative in which the democratic West is fighting autocratic Russia.

The American Mind.

Typically, Americans can agree on what happened in our mass shootings. Our disagreements have centered on how to stop them. Owing to our biased media’s failure to imagine any other cause or solution, the debate usually boils down to a myopic focus on gun laws. But Nashville was different. The revelation that Hale was a biological woman who requested that people refer to her with he/him pronouns (and the later confirmation that she identified as a trans man) offered a twist. Years prior Hale had been a student at the Covenant School where she launched her attack, a detail that suggested her violence might have been a form of revenge.

These details ensured that the meaning of the massacre was contested. In the conflict over “trans rights,” we are witnessing the beginning of a war. I’m not talking about a metaphorical war or another cold war. It is now plain that wherever you stand in the debate over gender identity, literal acts of violence are unfolding across the nation. Sometimes the bullet is the instrument of destruction. Sometimes it’s the blade. Sometimes the bloodshed is self-inflicted. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s even elective. But the bloodshed isn’t allegorical. Both sides insist that lives are at stake, and they aren’t wrong.

The battle over trans identity is the first theater in what will be a much larger conflict over technology, the body, and the human essence. Whoever can secure the high ground in these early skirmishes will possess an enormous advantage in the fight for the future. Exploring the mutually exclusive accounts of the Nashville massacre offers a panorama of this bloody war. Although they agree on some basic facts, each account showcases a well-developed worldview and a network of deeply-held values.

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Energy expert Anas Alhajji shared a video on Twitter that appears to show, according to his description, “An oil tanker, known for transporting Iranian oil, catching fire off the coast of Malaysia.”

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

A few years ago, when gender mania was still confined mostly to academia, a college student had a moment of fame when he told his school that he identified as a king, and his pronouns were “Your Royal Highness.” Such mockery is to be encouraged. The idea that a person can “identify” as something other than what he or she is, and demand that others accede to that “identity,” is complete bullshit and deserves nothing but ridicule.

Thus, I applaud Indiana Councilman Ryan Webb. Webb is, to all appearances, a white man. But don’t you dare misgender him! Or rather, her. Because Webb has “come out” as a woman of color….

Read it.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

When government benefits pay more than working, you get fewer workers.

Read it.

Yglesias mourns the loss of the old consensus. He recognizes the shortcomings of public education as it currently exists, but wants to go back to the reasonable reforms that were being tried out during the Obama administration. In contrast, this essay argues that arguments made for supporting moderate reforms over privatization are weak. This isn’t that hard of a case to make to conservatives, who believe in markets and hate public education already. Yet I would go a step further, and argue that working towards privatization makes sense from a moderate and center-left perspective as well, especially for the kinds of people who still pine for Obama-era reforms and think they weren’t tried hard enough. If you believe in private enterprise at all — if you think, for example, things like restaurants and office supply stores are better left to the market — the arguments for keeping education outside of government control are stronger than in most other areas of life.

NewsBusters.

And speaking of Newsmax? The network has not been shy in reporting its 8 p.m. audience nearly doubled Monday, reaching 531,000 viewers, based on Nielsen figures. The following night, the number rose to an average 562,000 viewers, a five-fold increase from the previous week.

By contrast, the Tucker hour’s ratings at Fox plummeted, from 2.59 million on Monday (when his departure was formally announced) to 1.7 million on Tuesday and 1.3 million on Wednesday.

Steve Graham.

A wise man knows a good toilet is an important investment.

The Guardian.

One crisp spring evening, the Wasteland Theatre Company gathered to rehearse Romeo and Juliet. Jonathan “Bram” Thomas was playing Romeo. A self-confessed Shakespeare geek, he’d graduated with a BA in theatre, and this wasn’t his first time playing one half of the star-crossed lovers. But it was the first time a mutant scorpion the size of a Jeep had rampaged on to his stage.

Panicking, the show’s crew rained bullets down on its blackened shell, but not before Juliet fell to its sting. A poison death, certainly – just not one the Bard ever dreamed of writing.

“It’s just one of those things,” Bram shrugs, with the breezy nonchalance of an actor who is now used to these kinds of hiccups. You come to expect them when you’re performing inside a video game.

Just Food.

The company started out in 2013 as Edenworks before transitioning to Seed & Roe and then Upward Farms. Employing aquaponics technology to cultivate microgreens such as kale and mustard, the controlled-environment agriculture business was supplying Whole Foods Market in the New York City area.

Getting off the ground with a farm in Brooklyn, in 2020 Upward Farms revealed a new growing facility in the same borough. At the time, the company said it had just received $15m in fresh funding, including from Wyoming-based venture-capital investor Prime Movers Lab, taking financing to $20m.

“It is with a heavy heart that we are announcing that Upward Farms is closing its Brooklyn headquarters farm and will cease to operate in the vertical-farming sector,” founders Jason Green, Ben Silverman and Matthew La Rosa wrote on the opening page of their website.

“We found that vertical farming is almost infinitely complex – as we tackled challenges, new ones emerged.”

As with most groovy-granola save-the-climate schemes, vertical farming just isn’t sufficiently cost-effective yet. I believe that it will be, eventually, when the technology advances far enough; even steam engines had to wait for the practical end of things to catch up.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

Trump doesn’t seem to have the same clear central focus for his agenda and campaign messaging so far, partly because he can’t seem to decide whether to attack Biden and Democrats more than his GOP rivals, despite his clear front-runner status.

But one of his good ideas that is front and center is civil service reform, aimed at bringing the administrative state back inside the Constitution. Our permanent government rules us without our consent, and undermines popular government. That’s on purpose. Although Reagan made this point well, even he never spoke the plain truth about it: our administrative state and its ever-swelling bureaucracies are the partisan governing instrument of the Democratic Party. Time to say so, and do something about it.

Quillette.

A review of Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hämäläinen, 592 pages, Liveright (September 2022)

The Freudian concept known as “reaction formation” refers to a psychological defense mechanism against guilt. It occurs when an individual responds to a shame-inducing instinct with an overcorrection. Much of modern American history appears to be in the grip of reaction formation. Mortification at the developed West’s historical misdeeds has produced a utopian narrative of indigenous worlds typified by matriarchy, cooperation, pacifism, and gender fluidity. That no such world ever existed is beside the point; much of history is narrated to suit the proclivities of the audience, not to tell the truth about what actually happened.

This seems to be specifically true for our understanding of American Indian history. The violent migration of Europeans to the New World was very much like violent migrations throughout history and across cultures, most likely including successive waves of North American Indians (though the history there is murky). Yet instead of understanding these events in the context of larger historical patterns, the Indian Wars are cast as a morality tale in the manner of Howard Zinn, in which the actions of the European settlers are represented as uniquely reprehensible. This fantasy may be an inversion of past jingoistic and racist caricatures of American Indians as “savages,” but it is not more historically accurate.

I thought about this a lot as I read Pekka Hämäläinen’s fascinating and controversial new history of North American Indians, Indigenous Continent. Told largely from the perspective of the natives, Hämäläinen covers the centuries from the arrival of Europeans in North America through to the final subjugation of the last tribes in the late 19th century. It’s a gripping history, but watching the author attempt to come to terms with the history he is telling also makes for fascinating psychological analysis.

I have read this book, and it is well worth your time.

Read it.

Touchscreens are fine when you’re sitting at a desk pondering the nature of the universe, but when you’re driving and having to keep conscious of six things at once you want a button you can locate by hand and know when it’s been pushed.

Tyler Cowen.

I’m not sure the AGI concept is entirely well-defined, but let’s put aside the more dramatic scenarios and assume that AI can perform at least some of the following functions:

1. Evaluate many policies and regulations better than human analysts can.

2. Sometimes outperform and outguess asset price markets.

3. Formulate the most effective campaign strategies for politicians.

4. Understand and manage geopolitics better than humans can.

5. Write better Supreme Court opinions and, for a given ethical point of view, produce a better ruling.

You could add to that list, but you get the point.  These are a big stretch beyond current models, but not on the super-brain level.

One option, of course, is simply that everyone can use this service, like the current GPT-4, and then few questions arise about differential political access.  But what if the service is expensive, and/or access is restricted for reasons of law, regulation, and national security?  Exactly who or what in government allocates use of the service within government?

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

The long-time image of Republicans as the “party of the rich” and country club types is no longer true. Both charts demonstrate that Democrats have become the dominant party of upper-income households.

One of the many, many lies Democrats tell. Elon Musk is about the only one of the ten top billionaires in the U.S. who isn’t a card-carrying Democrat. Buffet, Gates, Bezos–all Dems.

Been there.

Read it.

The game is rigged as far as the ‘Green Transition’ is concerned, with specific technologies and companies receiving support from international institutions and governments to ‘transition’ the surplus value of the working and middle classes to themselves. For now, this has involved highlighting some environmental issues over others (like CO2 emissions over microplastics).

However, the rigging is only partial and, like much of what comes out of Brussels, haphazard. There remains plenty of room for citizen initiatives to siphon off funds and build entities that would add value to the European economy, employ Europeans, and result in genuine community-level resilience in the face of global supply chain vulnerability.

Cinnabon! MMMMMMMMM….

Read it.

Considering the activities and incompetence of current teacher union members, speed the day.

Read it.

The so-called “national divorce” that was promoted earlier this year by some Republicans appears to be occurring organically, according to a new analysis of U.S. population trends.

Since 2020, some 2.6 million people have moved out of U.S. counties that were won by President Joe Biden and into those that former President Donald Trump prevailed in, the analysis found. It cited recent Census Bureau data.

“More than 61 percent of the counties that voted for Biden in 2020 lost population, while 65 percent of Trump-supporting counties gained population,” the Issues and Insights analysis said. The data showed that some 2,562,937 people moved from Democrat-leaning counties to Republican-leaning counties since Biden was elected in the divisive November 2020 election.

The typical socialist is not a ferocious working man in greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a useful snob or a prim little man with a white-collar job—usually a secret teetotaler and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of non-conformity behind him and a social position he has no intention of forfeiting.

In addition to these two types is the disquieting presence of cranks. Socialism draws into itself by magnetic force every juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, Nature cure quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

These groups alienate decent people.

And there are the middle-class socialists who talk about a classless society but will never give up their own social prestige.

— George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

Hmmm … what does that sound like? Who does that sound like?

Steve Sailer.

The more inane the photograph illustrating a news story about a crime, the more likely it is that the victim was white and the perp black.

Wall Street Journal.

For one thing, you don’t need a machine to use it.

I know how he feels.

Read it.

When Democrats are in charge, they work hard to pass legislation pushing issues further and further to the left. This is true on both the federal and state levels. We see blue states working to ban gas-powered cars, ban natural gas stoves, and even override parents when it comes to giving kids hormones and sex-change surgeries.

While that is true of Blue states, there are plenty of states that Red states out there as well. But the question is, what is the Red state equivalent to California? Are there Red states that are as conservative as CA, WA, NY, and NJ are liberal? Does a GOP majority move things to the right as much as a Democrat majority moves the state to the left? Probably not?

The thing is that Republicans aren’t committed, as Democrats are, to the politicization of every aspect of life. That’s what ‘progressive totalitarianism’ means.

Daily Signal.

Arkansas lawmakers delivered a clear message to parents of K-12 students this week: You have the right to know how your child is being treated in school.

Lawmakers in New Jersey, California, and hundreds of other school districts across the U.S. operating under policies that do the opposite and allow school officials to hide information about children from their parents should prepare to receive an influx of student-transfer requests.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday signed legislation, the Given Name Act, which says that school officials cannot call a student by a name that does not match the name listed on the student’s birth certificate without a parent’s permission. Likewise, educators cannot address a child by a pronoun that does not match the child’s sex.

The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Wayne Long, a Republican, explains that a teacher contacted him and said her conscience would not let her “affirm” a student confused about his or her sex. “This single mom was willing to lose her job rather than go against her Christian beliefs,” Long said via email.

Very sad, that it should come to this.

Dennis Prager.

A generation of Americans is being raised on half-truths and lies about the history of slavery in America.

They are given the impression that America was uniquely bad and that American slavery was uniquely bad. They learn nothing about slavery elsewhere. Among the many lies they are told are that “black slaves built America” and that America is systemically racist.

Since the only mortal enemy of the Left is truth, here are some truths about slavery.

OffGuardian.

If our children now can know the world is dying an environmental death without a future. If our children can now know how and when and what sex is all about before they know how to even count. If children can decide to mutilate themselves to the gender gods before they know what a pubic hair even is. If children can soon vote in most places at the tender age of 16. If they have nothing to learn now because ChatGTP will do that all for them. If they know what nuclear war is beyond hiding under desks. Then it is time to put them to work. They’re adults now.

Because they have no such a thing as childhood anymore. That was swept swiftly out the door with all the dust of yesterday’s dreams. Mother Goose was murdered in cold blood for being white. Cinderella kicked the Prince in the b*lls and went to the ball on her own. Black Beauty was murdered in cold blood for being black. Dr. Seuss was burnt at the stake for promoting eggs and ham instead of crickets and Nancy Drew has likely become a transgender vampire.

Steve Sailer.

Walking the dog every day now, I don’t get to the book store very often anymore. But I left the dog behind and went today.

Didn’t find anything new of interest. It looks like the two main topics of new books are “We Wish We Still Had Trump to Kick Around Because Without Him We Don’t Have Anything Interesting to Say” and “I’m a Black Person and Here’s My Story About How Hard It Is Being Black.”

That’s about all that’s available these days.

Washington Free Beacon.

who have seen active service, and, as far as I am aware, just one who has taken part in a successful operation to free a planeload of hostages from a band of terrorists, getting himself shot in the arm in the process.

In case you didn’t know that, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, makes sure you’re apprised in the very first pages of Bibi: My Story, his compellingly told memoir of a lifetime in politics, business, diplomacy, and a lot of shooting wars.

In 1972 he led a group of special forces soldiers in the elite Sayeret Matkal unit of the Israeli military in a raid on a hijacked Sabena plane that had been diverted to an airport outside Tel Aviv, Israel. He recounts with evident pride how he tussled with his older brother Yoni, also in the elite unit, who wanted to pull rank on him and lead the raid himself. Bibi resisted, and prevailed.

Netanyahu’s elder brother, Yoni, was an American citizen and died leading the Entebbe raid–the only Israeli to do so.

When did a Biden ever expose himself to that sort of risk?

Unfortunately, not available in the App Store.