ZMan discusses some inconvenient truth.

Given the current trajectory, it is reasonable to think that in the not too distant future some alien race will be digging through the rubble of humanity trying to figure out what happened to this strange species. Just as modern archeologists dig through ruins of ancient societies, trying to figure out what happened, those aliens will be doing the same with earth. They will dig through whatever is left, things like buildings, tools and cemeteries, piecing together the story of man.

The thing they will not find among the decaying buildings, rusting vehicles and collapsed bridges will be piles of human rights. They will not open a door of some oddly preserved building and find a bunch of skeletons who had found shelter along with their sacred human rights. In fact, they will probably find no trace of human rights or any discussion of the concept. Given that most of our knowledge is now digital, these sorts of things will be impossible to detect.

The main reason for this is human rights do not exist. They are a thing that humans invented late in the history of mankind. People say that human rights are real and point to various authorities to support the claim, but rights are not real things. They exist only as a figment of our imagination, like the concept of lust. No other species has this concept so it is possible the aliens will not understand it either. It will be as alien to them as our entirely made up concept of human rights.

Read it.

Good luck with that.

The West is struggling to set an oil price cap that hurts Russia (CNN)

Ukraine’s four nuclear power plants reconnected to grid – IAEA (Reuters)

These economies are booming as Putin’s war drives migrants and money out of Russia

Putin Branded a Narcissist in Leaked FSB Letters (Newsweek) So obviously he won’t be allowed at the Cool Kids’ Table–they don’t appreciate competition.

Vladimir Putin Wanted To ‘Attack’ Japan, Before He Chose To Invade Ukraine – Claims Alleged FSB Whistleblower (EurAsian Times) And there’s a rumor that he doesn’t wash his hands after he goes to the bathroom, too.

Turkey’s Invasion of Syria Could Lead to Release of Thousands of ISIS Terrorists  Remind me why Turkey is in NATO.

As Negotiations Fracture, EU Postpones Talks On Russian Oil Price Cap To Monday

Western sanctions catch up with Russia’s wartime economy (Washington Post)

Gas Price Cap Could Cause Irreversible Harm To Energy Markets

It Was Never About Ukraine

sThe Ridiculous Reality Of The “Russian Oil Price Cap” Debate In One Picture

Russia Has Issued Over 80K Passports In Annexed Ukrainian Territories

Putin Ally: Russia Will Send Ukraine ‘Back to 18th Century’

AFGHANISTAN: A Work in Progress

Ukraine to Receive 186 Million Euros in Aid from Hungary

Europe accuses US of profiting from war

FCC Bans Equipment Sales, Imports from ZTE, Huawei; National Security Risk

Nah, just kidding. Open Threads are for blogs that are interested in conversation. That ain’t this.

This blog is not intended to spark ‘conversations’ among readers. (If it were, I’d have one of those snazzy plug-ins that actually threaded reader responses, rather than just tipping them into a pile.) It exists to be a dumping ground for stuff with which I would otherwise pester my friends. (Note to self: Do rant on ending sentences with a preposition. Also one on using ‘if’ where you ought to use ‘ought’.)(Maybe one on what preposition to use after ‘different’.)

This blog is intended to publicize things that I find interesting, and in passing document some of the more absurd things that the Evil Party are doing to this country. (If you can’t remember the latest thing that a Stupid Democrat Or Worse did, come here and search. You might find it.) You will note a certain imbalance. That is because Stupid People do more Stupid Things than Interesting People do Interesting Things. (Not My Fault.) Or you could just read the Babylon Bee.

Think of it as a political Ted Talk, without the Wokeness and on-stage preening.

You want to make a snarky comment, feel free. You want to call me names, get banned.

Those are the only rules we have. Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

Read it.

I am a big fan of slow cooking.  That and sous vide….

Ukraine war: How Germany ended reliance on Russian gas (BBC)

Finland and Sweden step up military aid to Ukraine ahead of winter (EuroNews)

Senators alarmed over potential Chinese drone spy threat (Politico)

Russia’s Gazprom threatens to cut last remaining supply of natural gas to Europe (Fortune)

Iran starts enriching uranium to 60% purity at Fordow plant (Reuters)

Power Outages Reported Across Ukraine After New Wave of Strikes (N.Y. Times)

SPACE: Shooting Blanks Over Ukraine

Britain Provides Helicopters To Ukraine For First Time In War

European Parliament Declares Russia State Sponsor of Terrorism

Iranian advisers killed aiding Russians in Crimea, says Kyiv (The Guardian)

Ukraine Battles to Reconnect Millions in Cold, Dark

Read it.

Our elections are an embarrassing third-world mess.

On top of that, there’s no mechanism to test or improve the accuracy of elections. Nobody’s even talking about improving them. And every change that gets implemented makes the system more susceptible to fraud. (Like that wasn’t the whole point.)

Read it.

The Empire State Building and the World Trade Center make for an interesting comparison. In many ways, they’re similar. They’re both iconic Manhattan skyscrapers (they were built just 3 miles apart) that sit right next to each other in the sequence of “world’s tallest building”. Both started out as projects aimed at creating (among other things) a large amount of commercial office space, and were later nudged by their owners into becoming the world’s tallest building. Both were completed in the midst of a severe economic downturn (the Great Depression and the 1973 Oil Shock, respectively), and took many years to be fully occupied. The Empire State Building would be only partially occupied through the 1930s (making money largely from visitors to the observation deck), and the owners were only saved from bankruptcy because the lender (MetLife) didn’t want the building. It wouldn’t start to turn a profit until after WWII. Similarly, the World Trade Center didn’t reach full occupancy in 1980. In both cases the building owners had to coerce government agencies to use much of the available space.

Ann Coulter.

For more than 50 years, our country has been engaged in systemic discrimination against the nation’s most despised racial group, whites. Recently, the Supreme Court heard cases challenging legal race discrimination in a pair of lawsuits brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina for their “affirmative action” policies.

Despite the oft-repeated claim that affirmative action “hurts black people the most,” for the past half-century, it’s whites who’ve been bringing lawsuit after lawsuit for being rejected — solely because of their race — from universities (not to mention jobs, promotions, government contracts, scholarships, executive suites, homecoming queens, etc.).

In response, the Supreme Court announced this fundamental principal of constitutional law: Could you guys try hiding what you’re doing a little better?

The Guardian.

What’s this ‘we’?

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the inconvenient questions.

If there’s a strong statistical pattern in the numbers, you should be able to come up with vivid real-life examples of it. And if you can think of several examples suggesting a pattern, you might well be able to find large-scale data for it.

My main one weird trick for coming up with enough insights to make a living as an unfashionable pundit for 22 years has been to assume that private life facts and public life facts are one and the same. Most pundits assume public controversies, such as BLM, are of a higher realm than daily life, so that what they notice about “safe neighborhoods” and “good schools” when they are making real estate decisions for themselves couldn’t possibly have any relevance to the great issues of the day they discuss in the media.

In truth, you don’t need gnostic dogmas like “systemic racism” to explain why, say, blacks on average are relatively better at playing cornerback in the NFL than center. Biological and cultural differences explain these and countless other patterns.

Read it.

Today we are in a new era of conservative discontent. The national conservatives are at the ramparts against the new status quo of woke progressivism in government, the military, business, education, culture and media. Many of them are also dismissive of the conservatism of Buckley & Co. and Ronald Reagan and their legacy of journals, think tanks and policy doctrines that became a settled Washington establishment by the 2000s and 2010s.

In their view, that establishment was complicit in progressivism’s political ascent. American conservatism became unduly attached to libertarian individualism, unfettered markets and free trade as ends in themselves—which helped set the stage for anything-goes cultural corruption, the decline of community, family and religion, and the rise of global corporations and institutions that decimated the American heartland.

Whose turn is it to be the New ‘New Right’?

Read it.

In four years, the number of students graduating from high schools across the country will begin a sudden and precipitous decline, due to a rolling demographic aftershock of the Great Recession. Traumatized by uncertainty and unemployment, people decided to stop having kids during that period. But even as we climbed out of the recession, the birth rate kept dropping, and we are now starting to see the consequences on campuses everywhere. Classes will shrink, year after year, for most of the next two decades. People in the higher education industry call it “the enrollment cliff.”

Couldn’t happen soon enough, in my opinion.

Retired colonel ‘very concerned’ about US weapon shortages for Ukraine (CNN)

How Russia is weaponizing the Ukrainian winter (NPR)

Russia’s war in Ukraine (CNN)

Ukraine war: Germany looks to renewables after Russian invasion (BBC)

Heavy Shelling At Ukraine’s Largest Nuclear Plant: “You Are Playing With Fire!”

Energy Crisis: German Minister President Suggests Heating One Room in Winter Is Enough

MURPHY’S LAW: Russian UAV Failures

Carrier Dry Docks – Ours and Theirs

Ukraine’s Kherson Win Shifts Dynamics Across Whole Front With Russia (WSJ)

Ukraine Urges Civilians to Leave Liberated Areas for Winter

Angry families say Russian conscripts thrown to front line unprepared (Washington Post)

Secretary of Defense Austin: US Supporting Ukraine ‘as Long as it Takes’  Or until a Republican President is elected, whichever comes first.

Read it.

We are sorry to inform you that you are in a cult. This must come as a bit of a shock. Your first instinct will no doubt be to recoil in denial. “Me? In a cult? Absolutely not!” We must unfortunately insist. It’s okay though, you had no choice. You were born to parents who started your indoctrination from day one. And, perhaps even more insidious, the cult has been watered-down from its original form, in order to retain members. Thus, the signs and scars created by your cult are subtler than those one might otherwise expect.

There are very few entrepreneurial projects more profitable than starting a cult. Ask L. Ron Hubbard.

Read it.

Downtown Dallas continues to creep away from the original Central Business District on Main Street and towards our residential anchor neighborhoods. This is not because the occupancy has outgrown the Central Business District. In fact, many buildings are empty or are being repurposed.

The real reason for this movement of the Central Business District away from the original heart of downtown Dallas lies in human preferences.

People like the vibrancy of big cities. But they are not particularly attracted to cold, canyonlike streets of tall buildings with few traces of humanity. People love the combination of nature alongside stores, restaurants and lower-density inner-city neighborhoods. There have been many more popular bars and restaurants in uptown residential neighborhoods than downtown Dallas.

Ukraine Situation Report: Possible Drone Boat Attack On Russian Port

Is Russia Now Firing Denuclearized Cruise Missiles At Ukraine?

It’s Costing Peanuts for the US to Defeat Russia (Center for European Policy Analysis)

Celebrating War as Climate Win Makes Red True Color of “Greens”

Sweden Says Nord Stream Pipeline Explosion Confirmed as Sabotage

Fearing Ukrainian Forces, Russians Abandoning Crimea

Russia Secretly Moves 100 Missiles From Belarus

Insider.

I’m afraid we’d get more like Hunter Biden or Chelsea Clinton. But hey–not my circus, not my monkeys.

Read it.

I have my doubts. (It is, after all, NPR.) But the only way to find out is to try it, and if actual companies want to do so, good on them.

I really don’t give a @*#@. Ask anybody.

Joel Kotkin.

In earlier times, even with a soaring population, Americans knew how to accommodate housing demand. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we built cities from scratch along the frontier. The existing major urban centers—Boston, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia—all expanded rapidly, both by density and expansion into land on the periphery.

After the Second World War, mass suburbia and its expansion in homeownership ushered in a period of sustained prosperity that lasted until the 1970s. After 1940, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. homeownership rates grew rapidly, from 44 percent to 63 percent over the next three decades.

But now, in many places, it is exceedingly difficult, even impossible, to build the kind of family-friendly housing long sought by most Americans. Instead we are being left with two negative trends: increasingly low housing affordability for many, and the forced march of a whole new generation into the kind of small, crowded spaces they generally eschew, particularly after they enter their thirties.

Read it.

Because he is the sole political figure in living memory who kept each and every campaign promise made previously, and moreso, it may be wise to list the specific campaign promises made in his stump speech, and, if he wins, note if and when and how they are kept. Some are vague and aspirational, others specific.

This also will serve to silence those who mock him for having no plans or no vision, or for dwelling on past deeds and misdeeds.

ZMan.

In the before times, Bill Buckley would claim that he could know everything about a man’s politics based on his opinion of Israel and abortion. These were clarifying issues that did not easily allow for nuance or ambivalence. If you had any politics at all, you had an opinion on these issues. To some degree it is still true, but the clarifying issue of this age is Donald Trump. You cannot engage in politics at any level without having a position on the most famous pitch man in history.

Whenever somebody asks me ‘What do you think of so-and-so?’ I always say ‘He’ll never be the quarterback that Unitas was.’ That usually ends the conversation.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Read it.

How appropriate.

Congress seeks to arm Taiwan quickly as China threat grows (Washington Post)

In Solidarity With NATO, Giorgia Meloni Affirms Italian Support for Ukraine

Russian Tech Drain Increases Amid Draft, Economic Woes

Russians on Moscow Streets Calling for Nuke Strike on DC

The U.S. Navy to Send 40 More Boats to Ukraine

Iran and China Use Private Detectives to Spy on Dissidents in America (N.Y. Times)

Zelenskyy: Russian Troops Committed 400 War Crimes in Kherson

The Russian Empire Must Die (Atlantic)

WEAPONS: Another First Hits The Russian Fleet

US Army iOS app among thousands that unknowingly used Russian code

Putin’s Private Army Goes Full ISIS With Sledgehammer Execution Video  Putin is the New … Mohammed?

UN General Assembly Calls for Russian Reparations to Ukraine  Good luck with that.

Tom Veal.

The midterms defied expectations and, contrary to my prediction, are sure to strangle the Democratic “push Joe out” campaign in its cradle, especially if, as is not at all improbable, the Georgia runoff leads to another 50-50 Senate split. If that happens, the Democrats will need a Vice President to break ties, and Kackling Kamala is the only Veep they’ve got or will be able to get.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Ukraine Situation Report: Russia’s Demolition Of Roadway Over Dam Seen In Incredible Video

Jersey Police Apologize For Raid On Roman Abramovich, Agree To Pay Damages

A Cold Winter For Europe: Blame Strategic Blindness

Read it.

The Mexican government is using video of homeless people and open-air drug users in Philadelphia’s troubled Kensington neighborhood in a national ad campaign to try to scare young people away from drugs.

Jesús Ramírez, the spokesman for Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, proudly presented the ad series Tuesday, saying the campaign ‘seeks to inform young people of the damage caused to health by the consumption of chemical drugs.’

Ramírez did not respond to repeated requests for comment as to where the government got the Philadelphia videos or why they used them in ads aimed at a Mexican audience.

Read it.

Ask any young lady today what her idea of the “traditional” American woman is, and she will bring up, twisting her face in disdain, the midcentury suburban housewife.

It’s hard to say whether the woman in our heads was ever even real, let alone representative of some majority. Influentially documented (or perhaps, drawn up) by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, the American housewife has become a stock character for Hollywood mythmakers: isolated, vain, bored; drowning her resentment of her 2.5 kids and their cheating Don Draper of a father in wine and pills. Whatever the reality, this meme overpowered it.

Every meme doubles as a consumer identity and triples as an easily digestible political motif. The “repressed housewife” became a Girardian scapegoat around which the new liberal feminist order coalesced. By the ’70s, more than half of American women were working alongside men outside of the home. The “housewife” was as passée as the dresses she would have worn, the threat she posed now far more imaginary than real. But still, she was routinely resurrected on television and in movies, the ambivalent icon of women’s history in America for decades to follow—the superficial image of what not to be, of a regressive past always threatening to re-impose itself. She was to be relentlessly guarded against, her image in our world and in our own hearts stamped out, replaced instead by the sexually and economically “liberated” girlboss feminist.

Read it.

I want to start with a page out of history — the handwriting of Thomas Jefferson, taken from one of his notebooks on religion. The words on this page belongs to a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe and America, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book.

This blog has a page where I keep my commonplace book.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

One of the lessons of the Tuesday election show is that voting matters when the results are open to competition. In one party states, voting is ceremonial as the results are always the same. America is well on its way to becoming a one party state, so voting is no longer a part of politics. It is another lottery, a thing to let stupid people think that one day something magical will happen.

And, of course, it rarely does.

After several choruses of Someday My Prince Will Come we wind up with … Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and John Fetterman.

It’s time to demand our money back.

Read it.

Back in the year 2000, David Brooks made his name with the publication of his first book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Until that time, Brooks had been a journalistic journeyman, having put in stints at the City News Bureau of Chicago, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Washington Times, and the Weekly Standard. But Bobos in Paradise made him a star. In 2003, when the New York Times went looking for someone to replace retiring conservative columnist William Safire, Brooks got the job. Ever since, he has been one of America’s most visible and widely published pundits, with regular appearances on PBS’s The News Hour, NPR’s All Things Considered, a contributing-writer slot at the Atlantic, visiting professorships at prestigious universities, and even a TED talk, which he delivered back in 2019. And all of this came about because of a book filled with observations about America’s future that have turned out to be spectacularly wrong.

Read it.

The word GUY so pervades American speech that a detailed account of it would hardly seem necessary, yet the multiple meanings of the word guy are quite complex and are connected to the structure of English. Contemporary English is in a schismatic state between those who make use of or prescribe generic nouns and pronouns, such as man and he ‘human being’, and those who view these constructions as signs of a deeply sexist structure of English. Generic uses of man and he have now long been the targets of “politically correct” language reforms, the chief objection being that a word that primarily signifies the masculine gender cannot also signify the feminine gender or serve as a nongendered or gender-inclusive lexical item. Both man and he primarily signify the masculine gender, but they are also polysemous. English man ‘male human being’ developed from the Old English grammatically masculine noun man(n), whose meaning was originally ‘human being’, and hetook on generic functions after the loss of grammatical gender in the Middle English period. Semantic change is not an uncommon phenomenon, but such changes should not be taken as clean, crisp breaks with the past. The prototypical meaning of a lexical item may change its focus, but the old meanings can still remain connected peripherally. The cognitive model behind the multiple meanings of man and he, despite the current trend to eliminate their generic and inclusive uses, must still be powerfully active in the minds of English speakers, for the development of the word guy closely parallels their meanings and functions.

Babylon Bee.

UPDATE: Nation Unsure Whether To Support Party That Runs Brain-Damaged Candidates Or Party That Loses To Brain-Damaged Candidates

Read it.

US Livid As Brittney Griner Transferred To Russian Forced Labor Camp

The White House is livid after WNBA star Brittney Griner has been transferred to a forced labor colony to serve out a nine-and-a-half year sentence after her conviction for possession of a small quantity of cannibas oil.

Note the equation of ‘White House livid’ with ‘U.S. livid’. Sorry, but the White House is not the U.S. I doubt that anyone outside of the clerisy gives a shit about what happens to Brittney Griner, who made the foolish mistake of believing that celebrity earned her a pass for violating an easily avoidable illicit-substance law.

Will she learn anything from this? Doubtful. Will her ‘fans’ learn anything from this? Extremely doubtful.

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