And the swastika armband to prove it.

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Rare is the person who could expertly comment – in a single interview! – on the rise of NFTs and their origins in the virtual worlds of gaming, the logic of the emerging regime of techno-feudalism, and the folly of El Salvador’s Bitcoin-heavy negotiating tactics with the IMF. Luckily, we have found this person in Yanis Varoufakis, the prominent economist, politician, and public intellectual, who is also former Greek finance minister. Yanis was kind enough to grant us an extensive interview, which provides a panoramic (and, at times, rather critical) view of what is going at the intersection of money, macroeconomics, and the digital.

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I think what is happening overall is brinkmanship by a number of parties, which is not uncommon in geopolitics, and it is unlikely anything significant happens.

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Now more than ever, it’s necessary to highlight the importance—and prevalence—of armed citizens who rely on their Second Amendment rights when the government can’t or won’t be there to protect life, liberty, or property from violent criminals.

For this reason, The Daily Signal each month publishes an article highlighting some of the previous month’s many news stories on defensive gun use that you may have missed—or that might not have made it to the national spotlight in the first place. (Read other accounts here from 2019, 2020, and 2021.)

https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2022/02/06

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A group of scientists from the Unversity of Washington has found out that mosquitoes are usually flying towards specific colors such as red, orange, black, and cyan, after detecting a telltale gas from our breaths. And the little creatures often ignore colors like green, purple, blue, and white.

These findings may lead us to learn how they find their hosts, as the human skin emits a strong red-orange signal to their eyes.

Jeffrey Riffell, a UW professor of biology and the senior author of the study said, “Mosquitoes appear to use odors to help them distinguish what is nearby, like a host to bite”. When the mosquitoes smell specific compounds, like CO2 from our breath, “that scent stimulates the eyes to scan for specific colors and other visual patterns, which are associated with a potential host, and head to them” Riffell added.

A world in which even mosquitos are Woke.

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… delicious, handmade yeasted doughs, pulled thin and grilled up with all sorts of savory toppings. Once you start looking, you find them everywhere. In North Africa, a pita-like dough is pulled out into lahmacun or manaeesh and topped with lamb, cheese or zataar, the piquant spice blend common to the region. The French pissaladierefeatures a rich base with a savory topping of caramelized onions, olives and anchovies, while the leaner doughs of Italian focaccias and pizza biancas can feature anything from a drizzle of oil and sprinkle of herbs to a smattering of cheeses, vegetables or even fruit. Of all the variations up and down the Mediterranean, though, my favorite is the Spanish coca.

One need not resort to the Turd World to find tasty wog food.

ZMan lays out some inconvenient truth.

This story out of the NFL is a great example of the sort of irreconcilable contradictions that exist in the new social religion of our rulers. The assumption is that there are not enough black NFL head coaches. No one says what the number should be, but they all agree the current number is below the threshold. This is a habit you see everywhere with the new religion. What is the right amount of diversity? The answer is always more, but no one can say more than what.

 

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I guess Bill had too much influence over the Foundation for her taste.

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I suspect that a committee was involved.

ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.

The old paleo-conservative gag about the demand for Nazis exceeding the available supply has become something of an iron law of the universe. Each generation discovers that the American Left is obsessed with fascists, white supremacists, the Klan and so on, despite these things no longer being real. Other than some cartoonish play-acting by those desperate for attention, these things are no longer real. They certainly play no role in politics or the general culture.

The lack of supply, however, has been no deterrence, especially now that the internet allows people to create these reality from thin air. The intensively on-line far-left invests all of its time finding someone they can label as the bogeyman or one the many members of the bogeyman army. The Antifa subculture, for example, is organized around the hunt for fascists and white supremacists. They spend all day looking for new baddies and obsessing over the prior baddies.

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Caste-oppressed students, who mostly hail from South Asian immigrant and diaspora backgrounds, say that casteism tends to manifest in US colleges and universities through slurs, microaggressions and social exclusion. But because these dynamics play out within these minority communities, most other Americans have little understanding of how they operate — leaving these students, many of whom refer to themselves as Dalits, without recourse.

And, of course, every tender young hurt feeling MUST have a recourse.

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Today’s cars are dumb where they should be smart, and smart where they should be dumb. Enough already. Make a car that’s pretty much all dumb and watch it sell — because what automakers are giving people is so bad, they’ll pay more to have less of it.

Cars now are like budget smartphones with wheels: loaded with bloatware, unintuitive and slow to operate. Carmakers have always struggled with user interfaces, but until recently the biggest problem we had was “too many knobs.” How I long for those days!

The proliferation of touchscreens and LCDs has made every car feel like a karaoke booth. Animations show reclaimed energy from braking, the speedometer changes color as you approach the limit, the fan speed and direction is under three menus. And besides being non-functional, these interfaces are even ugly! The type, the layouts, and animations scream “designed by committee and approved by someone who doesn’t have to use it.”

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The reason rural America had a lot of small towns is because rural America had a lot of small farms. That is no longer the case.

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Not with the shitty rail network we have today.

For the last 200 years, freight trains haven’t changed much; massive locomotives still move relatively dumb freight cars. Certainly, rail fans could argue that plenty has changed—they’re not wrong!—but from a distance, trains work pretty much the same today as they did in the 1800s.

Guess how heavily the rail networks are regulated.

Whether their bet pays off will hinge on whether freight railroads and their customers will buy into a new way of operating. Parallel Systems isn’t just taking an existing freight train and swapping its diesel-electric locomotive for a battery version. Instead, it’s taking the traction motors and distributing them to every car on the train. It’s how many electric passenger trains operate, but it’s a system that has been slow to migrate to the freight world.

Guess why. (Guess how heavily the rail networks are regulated.)

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

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

While doing homework on the Army – McCarthy hearings, I was reminded of two things that seem to come up regularly. One is that the people causing the mayhem in our society are lacking in self-awareness. The term McCarthyism has dropped out of use of late, I cover this in the show, but most people are old enough to remember when it was popular and what it meant. The new McCarthyites are totally unaware of that rather easy comparison between themselves and McCarthy.

ZMan does a deep dive.

One of the features of every societal crisis is that the elites of the society stop enforcing the rules of society, especially on themselves. Prior to the collapse of the Roman Republic, the elites started making exceptions to the rules. In the short term they seemed practical, but in the long term these exceptions undermined the moral logic of the rules entirely. Before long, a man in Gaul could decide that the rules no longer applied and he was free to do as he pleased.

This is at the core of the current crisis in the American empire. The rules have become arbitrary with regards to the elite. In turn the elites no longer enforce basic principles that are the foundation of the country. One of the principles is property. It used to be understood that you own the produce of your labor. That was the default and infringement on your ownership had to clear a high bar. Today, the powerful can steal your property without consequence.

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Much of the gentrification has been due to an exodus of people from California and Northeast states, attracted by new jobs and the economic prosperity of a thriving city due to Apple, Amazon, IBM, AT&T, Tesla, and Samsung opening new campuses or expanding operations.

The flurry of high-paying tech jobs in the city has unleashed inflationary forces on the metro area, boosting the cost of living from one of the cheapest in the US to the most expensive in under a decade. Rob Gordon, the manager and real estate agent with the realty company, JBGoodwin, said the city expanded by 160,000 people in the last decade.

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Democrats pin a lot of hopes on pre-K as part of their long term push to spend more money on childcare up to but not earlier than 8 months and 29 days before birth.

…

Data through sixth grade from state education records showed that the children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade. A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention.

Steve Sailer

A curious example of the power of social trends on thought is that two years into the Covid pandemic, nobody of any influence has yet bothered to launch a campaign to persuade Americans to do the one obvious non-pharmaceutical intervention that would make Americans healthier whether the virus stays or goes: lose some weight.

Instead, 2022 has seen new gains in the long, grinding campaign to make the fat another of those privileged classes whose self-image cannot be affronted.

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Thank God they didn’t give in to pressures to ‘modernize’ it.

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If you want to change the world to a better place, the best way to do it is a for-profit because for-profits have to take feedback from reality. Ironically, for-profit entities are more sustainable than non-profit entities. They’re self-sustainable. You’re not out there with a begging bowl all the time.

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Solanum jamesii, aka the Four Corners potato, has sustained Indigenous people in the American Southwest for 11,000 years; USDA is now studying its 8-year shelf life, and its resistance to disease, heat, and drought. The future of this remarkable little potato remains unwritten.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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We are rapidly becoming two very different nations with two very different cultures. At one time we truly were the “United” States of America, but now we have been split into two opposing camps that deeply hate one another. As a result, in recent years we have watched millions of Americans relocate for ideological reasons. This has caused “red states” to become even redder and “blue states” to become even bluer. At this point, there are just a handful of “purple states”, and it is in those states where our presidential elections are determined. It is really not healthy for just a few states like Pennsylvania and Michigan to have such power, but that is a topic for another article. In this article, I want to discuss why the mass exodus from blue states to red states is actually going to accelerate in 2022.

Those are the easiest to monetize.

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Some good advice.

ZMan seeks lessons from history.

The news currently tells us that we are on the brink of war with Russia over Ukraine and one of the best minds on the job for the Biden team is Jake Sullivan. There is nothing in his resume that says he should be running a hot dog stand, but he has been told his whole life he is fit to rule, so he believes it. Victoria Nulland is another member of the foreign policy brain trust. Her career is best described as one disaster after another, but she was born for the role in every sense.

Look around at the elected class and you see the same pattern. There are no men who went from the middle class to elected office on their own merit. In fact, it is hard to find anyone in national politics who has ever had a job. No one in the leadership of both parties has a line for “private sector” in his resume. The reason for that is they have never done productive work. Instead, like our old friend Commodus, they were groomed from birth to take up positions in the ruling class.

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When we think of oppressive regimes, we immediately think of the Stalinist model portrayed in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the heavy-handed thought control associated with Hitler’s Reich or Mao’s China. But where the old propaganda was loud, crude and often lethal, the contemporary style of thought control takes the form of a gentle nudging towards orthodoxy – a gentle push that gradually closes off one’s critical faculties and leads one to comply with gently given directives. Governments around the world, including in the UK, notes the Guardian, have been embracing this approach with growing enthusiasm.

Nudging grew out of research into behavioural economics, and was popularised in Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s 2008 book, Nudge. It now has widespread public support and has influenced everything from health warnings for cigarettes to calorie counts for fast food. Yet nudging also has an authoritarian edge, employing techniques and technologies that the Gestapo or NKVD could only dream about to promote the ‘right behaviour’.

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And far from being a peculiarity of the Middle Ages, Ekirch began to suspect that the method had been the dominant way of sleeping for millennia – an ancient default that we inherited from our prehistoric ancestors. The first record Ekirch found was from the 8th Century BC, in the 12,109-line Greek epic The Odyssey, while the last hints of its existence dated to the early 20th Century, before it somehow slipped into oblivion.

How did it work? Why did people do it? And how could something that was once so completely normal, have been forgotten so completely?

Now that I’m retired I find myself doing this — I’ll go to sleep at 10:00, what I think of as my Normal Bed Time, and wake up around 1:00 or 2:00 and have a hard time getting back to sleep. At first I put it down to a habit formed from over twenty years of production support — if a data warehouse load is going to break, it will do so around 2:30 a.m. — but maybe there’s something else going on. Hm….

Zman’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

This week’s show is a continuation of last week’s show. The point of the effort is to describe the various aspects of the ruling regime. We don’t have a good name for this form of rule and one reason for it is it just sort of happened. Unlike various forms of socialism, there is no one guy at the center of it. It is the combination of historical and economic events over the last two centuries. The great contribution of Karl Marx was having a last name that made for a pithy label.

In last week’s show, I thought the segment on managerialism was the best, but it is also the most studied aspect of the system. We have 80 years of writing on the growth of the administrative state. This week I think the two segments that are most important are Custodialism and Quadripartism. This growing sense by our rulers that they need to take care of us is rising from and encouraging this blending together of the power centers of the American empire.

Steve lets go.

Scientists are defending their vaccines, pointing to other shots that have low efficacy rates. Flu shots, for example, often miss the mark. Supposedly, this means our covid vaccines are okay. Their defensive arguments are clearly wrong. The smallpox vaccine has a no-infect rate of 95%. The polio vaccine is 99% effective. Indisputably, there are such things as good vaccines. Covid vaccines have a no-infect rate not far from zero, which, by any reasonable scientific standard, is not high. The best you can reasonably hope for after being vaccinated and boosted is that when you get sick, you won’t have severe symptoms, and they can’t even guarantee that. They used to tell us severe cases were impossible for the once-vaccinated, and a couple of months down the road, they sang a totally different tune.

Right now, there are only two intelligent reasons to get vaccinated. 1. To shut people up so you can get on with your life, and 2. to provide a significant but not huge increase in your chances of avoiding severe symptoms such as death. With Omicron’s dramatically decreased severity, reason 2 is getting weaker by the second. Unless you’re a cast member on My 600-Pound Life, Omicron is not likely to do you in.

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From the ancient world to modern times, the class of small property owners have constituted the sine qua non of democratic self-government. But today this class is under attack by what Aristotle described as an oligarchia, an unelected power elite that controls the political economy for its own purposes. In contrast, the rise of small holders were critical to the re-emergence and growth of democracy first in the Netherlands, followed by North America, Australia, and much of Europe.

Today the current class of small holders face a threat from two powerful hegemonies, tech and financial interests, and increasingly intrusive bureaucracies. Both favor policies that would force higher population densities, which wouldlikely raise housing costs and lead to lifetime renting for middle income households who would otherwise own their own homes. These forces—one long associated with the right, and the other the left—share a common agenda, though for different reasons.

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Have you ever sat down and thought “I wonder if a trebuchet could launch a projectile at supersonic speeds?” Neither have we. That’s what separates [David Eade] from the rest of us. He didn’t just ask the question, he answered it! And he documented the entire build in a YouTube video which you can see below the break.

If you haven’t read Pirsig, now would be a good time to do so.

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I’m sure you are somewhat familiar with the self-driving cars levels of automation, perhaps following Tesla’s claims of offering “full self-driving” capabilities, later downgraded to level 2 (out of 5) of autonomy. These automation standards, published in 2014 by automotive standardization body SAE International as “Taxonomy and Definitions for Terms Related to On-Road Motor Vehicle Automated Driving Systems”, are useful to quickly address what we mean by self-driving capabilities. But cars are not the only thing that is getting automated, kitchens are being automated too!