Read it.

Sometimes it’s wrong to begin a phrase with the word “just”. I offer as evidence two such situations. I think there’s a common thread to be drawn.

My wife works at a company that is often buttfucked by consultants and outside vendors, leaving her and her overworked colleagues to clean up the mess. Each such mess is usually introduced with the patent phrase “Oh just do X”, where X is some process that inevitably fails to work as advertised. Handwavium then generally ensues.

ZMan lives in the moment.

The great day is upon us. It used to be that the media would roll out some long serving geezers to give a lecture about the beauty of democracy. They would wax poetic about the wonderfulness of ordinary citizens doing their civic duty. Even though we may not like the results, we had to respect the process. That was when the results never questioned the elite consensus. These days the media rolls out conspiracy theorists telling us half the voters are actually Russian bots.

That will be the story tonight. The bad guys are expected to take it on the chin as normal people manage to outnumber the dead at the ballot box. The official line now is that the only way to preserve democracy is to have a one-party state. The Los Angeles Times makes this point in their fatwah against the Republicans. The Atlantic tells us that the Republicans will immediately implement a police state after the election, followed by the return of everyone’s favorite uncle.

…

As Tucker pointed out, you will know the election is rigged if brain damaged hobo wins tonight.

Read it.

The Idaho stop is the common name for laws that allow cyclists to treat a stop sign as a yield sign, and a red light as a stop sign. It first became law in Idaho in 1982, but was not adopted elsewhere until Delaware adopted a limited stop-as-yield law, the “Delaware Yield”, in 2017. Arkansas was the second state to legalize both stop-as-yield and red light-as-stop in April 2019. Studies in Delaware and Idaho have shown significant decreases in crashes at stop-controlled intersections.

This appears merely to legalize existing behavior on the part of bicyclists. I have yet to see anybody on a bicycle pay attention to either a stop sign or a red light.

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The 2022 midterm election is once again characterized by extreme polarization between the parties. As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, despite moderate positions gaining slightly this year, an annual survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs shows that moderates are in the minority in both parties the United States.

In July, 42 percent of self-described Democrats said they were moderates or conservatives, opposite 58 percent who considered themselves liberals. The gap is even bigger in the Republican Party, where 77 percent identified as conservatives and only 23 percent said of themselves that they were moderates or liberals. According to this survey, this makes Republicans in fact a whole lot more conservative than Democrats are liberal.

Joel Kotkin

Few regions have been more consistently Democratic than the West Coast. Even compared with the Northeast, where Republicans occasionally win governors’ offices, the appropriately named “left coast” has been adamantine in its progressivism. Republicans haven’t won statewide office in California in years; in Oregon, it’s decades. Washington has elected a Republican secretary of state, but she now serves in the Biden administration. And the region’s major cities are overwhelmingly blue.

That could be changing, at least a bit. As cities from Seattle and Portland to San Francisco and Los Angeles fight crime and disorder, something of a political rebellion has broken out. One progressive fashion entrepreneur has called San Francisco “a city of chaos,” where his employees are not safe. The city, by some estimates, has deteriorated further and faster than virtually any urban area in the country. Within the last year, though, San Francisco recalled its progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, as well as left-wing members of the city school board. Meantime, remarkably, Seattle elected a Republican as city attorney, and Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón has faced backlash, and a possible recall. Voters have a chance to continue this rebellion this week.

Read it.

I was recently asked by a former colleague why I had increased my exposure to certain sectors in the equity market. After all, the information that had informed my decisions must already be priced in since the market is efficient, he argued. One could spend plenty of ink on the definitions of market efficiency as is usual in academia, but let’s just not. Instead, I’d like to argue that the market, at least important parts of it, may have become notably less efficient due to changes to the information landscape.

Many may be familiar with the concept tragedy of the commons. Jointly used land (commons) tends to be overused, polluted, and so on. Today’s information landscape actually resembles such a common. Today’s information commons has however become limited (reduced flora and fauna) and less valuable (the soil has been depleted), for several reasons.

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IKEA sent a cease and desist letter to the upcoming survival horror game The Store is Closed over its similarities with the company’s chain of warehouse locations.

As reported by Kotaku, the famed Swedish furniture giant sent the request to The Store is Closed‘s sole indie developer Jacob Shaw, who also goes by the studio name Ziggy. The letter demands that Shaw make significant design changes to the game, which is set in a large warehouse store that strongly resembles an IKEA. Lawyers for the furniture company claimed The Store is Closed commits copyright infringement due to comparisons made by some news outlets between the game and IKEA’s stores.

Spoilsports.

ZMan does a deep dive.

fundamental question for any human society. You cannot have a society without first answering the question, who are we? History and biology do the heavy lifting for large human societies, while smaller societies, like social clubs, will have some sort of founding document to define the society. Of course, constitutions are not just for small scale societies. Big countries have them too.

Indeed it is.

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Price inflation and the resulting business cycles are monetary phenomena, and without increases in the money supply—i.e., monetary inflation—there is no price inflation. If the world were a very simple place, we would see this relationship clearly displayed: when the money supply increased, we would also see a general increase in prices soon thereafter. The world, however, is not a very simple place and an economy can include countless factors that can mask, delay, and otherwise obscure the connection between monetary inflation and price inflation.

Read it.

I doubt that vegetarians will be willing to ‘follow the science’

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

This is the last final push to the election. That means the democracy supporters have just a couple more days to get those ballots printed and into the mail, depending upon the state they are ballot stuffing. Elections have turned into Christmas for the elves who are tasked with making sure their bosses get what they want when they wake up the morning after the election.

All joking aside, the very weird noises coming from the Biden people suggest they are plotting a caper next Tuesday. Biden’s chief of staff issued what he called a final warning about the election. Of course, Biden’s speech made clear that the only way to defend democracy is to support the regime at all costs. It was another form of “by any means necessary” that we heard in the Trump years.

Much like the over-the-top response to Kanye West and now the basketball player, a repeat of 2020 next Tuesday would serve our interests. The regime would avoid an embarrassing result on Tuesday, but it would come at the price of their legitimacy, which would be an enormous price to pay. Too many people would notice what was happening and draw the obvious conclusion.

“Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.” — Kurt Vonnegut

ZMan does a little history.

The main difference between the 19th century peasant and the modern suburban peasant is communications. The French peasant could go weeks or months without speaking to neighbors. The suburban peasant cannot go five minutes without information bombarding his senses. The same information storm intended to keep the suburban peasant suspended within a solution of information, often insulates him from his conditioning, resulting in radicalization.

Marx was right about the French peasants. They were never much use for the revolution, something the Bolsheviks would eventually learn as well. For the modern dissident, there may be some portion of the suburban peasantry that has radical potential, even if he is immune to direct radicalization. The phenomenon of normie going from zero to eleven on the radicalization scale after an incidental encounter with forbidden material is well known.

Feel free to substitute the popular music artist of your choice.

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Much remains to be learned about the nature and origins of various sex differences, but more is known than most people realize. Much of the current confusion is generated by activists who suppress, attack, and distort information on sex differences in order to reinforce their preferred ideological narratives. These ideology-driven distortions are helpfully illustrated by a recent New York Times essay by Chelsea Conaboy, which announces that the maternal instinct is a “myth”—a social construct generated and upheld by the patriarchy to impel women to raise children and keep them out of the workforce.

Biology Deniers!

Hungary closing public facilities due to soaring cost of energy (EuroNews)

Russia Would Agree to Talks to End Ukraine War on These Conditions: Kremlin (Newsweek)

Will Putin Drop a Nuclear Bomb on Ukraine? Here’s What Americans Think (Newsweek)

US, NATO, EU Condemn Russia on Grain Deal

Finland Says Ukraine Arms Ending Up In Hands Of Criminal Gangs

US Plans to Deploy B-52 Bombers to Australia’s North: Source

“Let’s Get Out Of NATO”: Discontent Soars Across Europe As Russian Sanctions Backfire

Ukraine: Barrage of Russian Strikes on Key Infrastructure

Wheat Prices Jump After Russia Exits Grain Deal; UN Races To Save Agreement

Much Of Ukrainian Capital Without Power & Water After New Russian Airstrikes

Read it.

Technology capable of collecting solar power in space and beaming it to Earth to provide a global supply of clean and affordable energy was once considered science fiction. Now it is moving closer to reality. Through the Space-based Solar Power Project (SSPP), a team of California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researchers is working to deploy a constellation of modular spacecraft that collect sunlight, transform it into electricity, then wirelessly transmit that electricity wherever it is needed. They could even send it to places that currently have no access to reliable power.

“This is an extraordinary and unprecedented project,” says Harry Atwater, an SSPP researcher and Otis Booth Leadership Chair of Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science. “It exemplifies the boldness and ambition needed to address one of the most significant challenges of our time, providing clean and affordable energy to the world.”

Atwater, who is also the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science, leads the project jointly with two other researchers: Ali Hajimiri, Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and co-director of SSPP; and Sergio Pellegrino, Joyce and Kent Kresa Professor of Aerospace and Civil Engineering, co-director of SSPP, and a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Jerry Pournelle pushed this idea for decades.

Freeberg has some insight.

On this “fake it ’til you make it” thing…

It occurs to me that we could think of this as how humans are built. We settle ourselves into communities, and at the community level a decision is made somehow about whether we’ll put up with fakery. This is why certain people don’t fit into certain communities. If you’ve watched people for a very long time like I have, you’ll notice certain people don’t fit into certain places: Alice invites Bob to live in Aliceville, and when Bob makes the move, things don’t click. Like much of nature, this is a simple thing until you take the time to study it, at which point you discover layers of complexity. “Bob couldn’t make it because Bob is a jerk” makes perfect sense, until Bob relocates to Bobtown, where he gets along just fine. Then: “Alice can live in Aliceville but Bob is relegated to Bobtown because Aliceville has a higher standard…and Bob’s a jerk” makes perfect sense. Until the day Alice visits Bobtown and can barely stand it. Then, you could keep things simple by saying: “Alice is a giver, and the people of Aliceville make it tolerable for her because they’re not a bunch of manic takers like the inhabitants of Bobtown who just take take take, until she has nothing left to give.” Which, again, makes perfect sense. Until you find the citizens of Bobtown are kindly counseling Alice, on her way out of town, not to let the doorknob hit her in the ass.

Deductive reasoning makes it clear, therefore, there’s something deeper and more complicated happening here. Neither side has a monopoly on civil behavior, or mutually rewarding associations. There must be flavors of communities; unwritten codes of conduct.

…

All the people have the “but” in their “I’m a tolerant person, but.”

All the communities have the “but” in their “We’re an accepting and broad-minded community, but.”

Read it.

Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was attacked by a man with a hammer at the couple’s home in San Francisco early Friday morning. CNN has strung a series of reports on the attack here. CNN’s first report of the assault was posted at 11:08 a.m. on October 28. By 2:25 p.m. Gavin Newsom had attributed the attack to “divisive and hateful rhetoric.” By 7:25 p.m. President Biden had observed that assaulter’s query — “Where’s Nancy?” — was the same one used during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

Defamation dies in darkness. The Washington Post therefore assigned three reporters to the case. By 7:00 a.m. on October 29 the Post had nailed it down: “Attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband follows years of GOP demonizing her.” The subhead was equally unsubtle: “A man with right-wing views who broke into the House speaker’s home yelled ‘Where is Nancy?’ before assaulting Paul Pelosi with a hammer, police say.” The Post must have capitalized “Where is Nancy” to indicate it’s part of the right-wing code.

Michael Shellenberger has taken note. Shellenberger is the long time Bay-area resident and author of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities (2021). Shellenberger finds the attacker — David DePape — to be more in the grip of a drug-induced psychosis than ideology-induced fanaticism.

The speculation I’ve seen on the web, granted among people who have even less respect for the Pelosis than I do (zer0), characterize it as a Grindr date gone wrong. This is usually followed by an assertion that the truth won’t come out until after the election because Democrat apparatchiks fear the truth’s effect on their electoral prospects.

I guess we’ll find out….

Read it.

The subtitle is Why Insurance Markets Fail and What To Do About It, and the authors are the highly regarded Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Ray Fisman. The level is a bit above what could make this book a bestseller, but I consider that a good thing. The book in fact is a classic example of how to present economic research in readable, digestible form and should be regarded as such.

People don’t spend a lot of time thinking about insurance–nothing is more boring than an insurance salesman, per the conventional wisdom–but insurance is one of the pillars of modern civilization (in the same way that sewage removal is a necessary requirement of modern cities).

Read it.

Once a term gets widely adopted by the press, and earns itself a space in dictionaries, it becomes challenging to argue that the thing the term stands for does not really exist.

A good example is ‘capitalism’, a term with a precise meaning (by Marx) that most people use as if it were a synonym for ‘industrialism’.

At least this is the case with the “techlash.” A term which is everywhere, even as the thing that it names can be a bit trickier to pin down.

Read it.

Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia announced plans to dedicate an $80 billion fund to develop the Neom megaproject, aimed at establishing a futuristic living space in the northwest of the country. This forms part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, which aims to diversify the national economy and make the country less reliant on its oil revenues. Saudi Arabia plans to develop Neom as a mega clean-energy city on a plot of land the size of Belgium. The space is expected to eventually become self-sufficient and provide a return on investment of between 13 and 14 percent. It will have no cars, roads, or greenhouse gas emissions and will be powered by 100 percent renewable energy, with 95 percent of the land being preserved for nature.

…

The much-talked-about Neom project will see the 10 regions developed in the northwest of Saudi Arabia. The most ambitious project is called ‘The Line’, two parallel skyscrapers aimed at housing 9 million people, a 170-kilometre building that juts into the Red Sea but is just 200 metres wide. What it lacks in width it makes up for in height at a staggering 500 metres tall, complete with a mirrored facade. If successful, this structure will be a major feat of engineering. The development will also include Oxagon, an industrial city with a manufacturing hub centred around tech industries, to be built on the sea and the mountainous region of Trojena. Neom will include a residential area, an industrial city, and a mountain tourism destination.

The project has the further advantage of cutting through major areas that are the traditional home of the Howeitat, long-time enemies of the Saudi royal family.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

With Halloween approaching I thought about doing a special show on the subject, but then I remembered I did that last year. I then remembered that it was not just the greatest Halloween show ever, it was probably the best podcast ever produced in the history of podcasts. In retrospect, I should have retired after that show, but like all champions, I have lingered on too long.

Luckily, the news is providing more than enough content. We have the war, the midterms, the fatwah against Ye. Next week we will get to see a million blue checks on Twitter wail in unison over Elon Musk. It looks like he will start his reign of terror with mass firings, which will be a good time. This is the season of schadenfreude and the gods of that concept are going to be generous.

The one sour note will be seeing so many of our guys rush back to Twitter so they can once again perform for the enemy. Generations of conditioning have trained them to think they need the attention of lefty in order to live. They will abandon the various alternative platforms just so they can carry on like precocious children for their masters on the other side. It is the slave’s mentality.

Read it.

Economic centralization is the ultimate form of organized conspiratorial power, because it allows a small group of people to dictate the terms of trade for a society and therefore dictate the terms of each person’s individual survival.

For example, the Federal Reserve as a banking entity has free rein to assert policy controls that can disrupt the very fabric of the US economy and the buying power of our currency. They can (and do) arbitrarily create trillions of dollars from thin air causing inflation, or arbitrarily raise interest rates and crash stock markets. And according to former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, they answer to no one, including the US government.

Read it.

Just minutes after the world’s richest man has reportedly closed the $44 billion deal, The NYTimes reports that, according to sources that declined to be identified, the Twitter executives who were fired include:

• Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief executive,
• Ned Segal, the chief financial officer,
• Sean Edgett, the general counsel, and
• Vijaya Gadde, the top legal and policy executive, (or censorship czar).

Read it.

My single issue is this: the reinstatement of the draft. Over the next few years, I’ll have two draftable boys, and more after that. The prospect of committing us to yet another 20-year quagmire on some blasted foreign plain with miserable weather and inedible food is an irresistible bauble to our corrupt government; I fear they cannot resist the intoxicating scent of teenage blood.

ZMan discusses some inconvenient truth.

If you are over the age of fifty, you remember a time when you would have been corrected, if you said America was a democracy. Conservatives would interrupt you and say that America is a constitutional republic, not a democracy. Liberals would say that America is a fascist police state, not a democracy. That is a small exaggeration, but the liberals were always going on about the lack of democracy. Both sides of the mainstream agreed that America was not a democracy.

Somewhere along the way, this reversed. Both sides of the increasingly narrow political consensus calls America a democracy. In fact, they compete with one another to be the most outraged by threats to our democracy. Proof that the universe has a sense of humor, our rulers would no doubt condemn all of their prior statements about America not being a democracy. This would never happen as no one would dare bring this up to them, but the point remains.

Tom Veal.

The elevation of unrestricted abortion from a progressive policy preference to a primary dogma is one of the most astonishing developments in intellectual history. From Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal and rare”, “rare” has been dropped entirely, and “safe” is hardly a consideration. Abortions performed by non-medical personnel or by the unsupervised ingestion of abortifacient drugs are regarded as quite acceptable. The child’s death has a higher value than the mother’s health.

Even more strikingly, pro-abortion progressives denounce any public criticism of abortion as fiercely as any religious fanatic has ever excoriated blasphemy. Several posts back, I cited a couple of examples. A couple more showed up today.

Read it.

A new Hoover Institution (Stanford University) report indicates that California continues to shed corporate headquarters locations to other states.

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow and UCLA distinguished professor of economics Lee Ohanian and Joseph Vranich of Spectrum Locations Services show that “In 2021, California business headquarters left the state at twice their rate in both 2020 and 2019, and at three times their rate in 2018. In the last three years, California lost eleven Fortune 1000 companies, whose exits negatively affect California’s economy today. But California also is risking its economic future as much smaller but rapidly growing unique businesses are leaving, taking their innovative ideas with them.”

Including companies outside the Fortune 1,000, Ohanian and Vranich indicate that California lost 153 corporate headquarters between in 2021. This is more than double the totals for each of the three years from 2018 to 2020.

Read it.

The NFL has blackmailed Arizona over powder keg issues before, but it won’t happen again, says the Republican candidate for governor. Kari Lake, the former Fox 10 television news anchor, said rich, woke NFL owners will not dictate border policy to her if she’s elected next month.

Sounds good.

MarketWatch.

The company has started covertly tracking wishlists and shopping carts across the web in a gambit to win the big business of social shopping, before other platforms get there first

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Ukraine Situation Report: Intel Chief Says Russia Is Reinforcing Kherson City

Rotax Engine Found In Iranian Mohajer-6 Drone Downed Over Ukraine

Russia’s Growing Dirty Bomb Threat Narrative Is Highly Concerning

Russia’s Medvedev Threatens Defense Industry Arrests During Tank Plant Visit

UN Office: More Than 6,400 Civilians Killed in Ukraine’s War With Russia

Read it.

An Orthodox Jewish school at the forefront of the battle for religious freedom has presented an interesting compromise: Rather than endorse the LGBT student club that is currently suing the school for recognition, it will launch its own club that it says will help LGBT students while obeying the Law of Moses.

Yeshiva University announced Monday that it has established “the Kol Yisrael Areivim club for LGBTQ students striving to live authentic Torah lives.” The announcement came just over a month after the Supreme Court rejected the university’s request to block a non-final New York trial court order forcing it to recognize YU Pride Alliance, an LGBT student group that promotes activities that conflict with Torah values, according to the university.

I don’t think this will satisfy the Freedom Deniers, but it’s a clever move.

Biology Denier: Person who refuses to accept that there is a genetic physical difference between a male and a female.

Spread the word.

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I can count on the fingers of one hand the people that I’d face a bear to save, and “teammate” doesn’t make the cut.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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If you look at the source code for this blog, you might notice that all my blog posts (written in Markdown) have two spaces after every period.

Every so often this Slate article makes the rounds and annoys me. This time I figured I’d write a blog post/rant to get it off my chest once and for all: two-spacing is equal or superior to one-spacing in all non-trivial ways.