Read it.

The bookshop is the pool-hall for nerds. For those of us who look upon books as near-sacred objects and the places where they are sold as temples of sorts, bookshops are places of pleasure, education, and camaraderie, and as such are indispensable to the good life.

Note please I write “bookshops,” not “bookstores.” A store you enter knowing what it is you want—groceries, hardware, pharmaceuticals—you purchase it, and depart. In a shop you browse, you engage in conversation with the owner or salespeople, you make discoveries you hadn’t previously known existed, you meet people with interests similar to your own, you hang out. In “The Bookshop in America,” an essay of 1963, Edward Shils wrote: “I have gone to bookshops to buy and browse. I have gone to them to buy books I wanted, and because I just wanted to buy a book, and much of the time I wanted to be among books to inhale their presence.”

The problem just now is that they, bookshops, are in danger of going under. In his In Praise of Good Bookstores, Jeff Deutsch notes that in 1994 there were roughly 7,000 bookshops in America, though by 2019 that number had been reduced to roughly 2,500. The reduction is owing, among other things, to the rise of Amazon.com as the principal purveyor of books, the spread of digital culture with its many distractions, and the reduction of reading generally in a country that has never harbored a vast readership.

Read it.

Despite the growing popularity of the practice, it usually fails. The New York Times has published multiple reports over the past several years detailing the grim statistics, including the results of a 2023 study that showed few women successfully gave birth to a child after freezing their eggs. As Evie Magazine noted, “Women under 38 have between a 2% and 12% chance that a healthy frozen egg will result in a baby.” The corporations, of course, are chuffed by this outcome. Childlessness is the point. This has given rise to an even viler industry in which wealthy women pay young women—often university-aged, cash-strapped girls—for their eggs.

Rollo Tomassi, The Rational Male.

Freeberg nails it.

something to do with feminism and The Patriarchy. The guy with the microphone allowed the radicalized social-studies girl, who seemed very nice by the way, no facial piercings or green/purple hair, to sound off with all the familiar bumper sticker slogans and college-words. “Patriarchy” must have been one of those, because he had an interesting question: What would a “matriarchy” look like?

Oh, well I suppose guys could still go to school, but women would graduate more often and they’d get the better and higher-paying jobs. Guys would still work, and doing the lower, menial jobs the females don’t want to do. Something like that.

Follow-up: What’s the difference between that, and what we have?

Um, err, ah, uh…don’t know.

Cat Rotator’s Quarterly.

Clothes make the man. It also allows for quick identification and classification. Metal-heads, preps, punks, country-music sorts, nerds, back-to-nature types (old school and recent), firearms folks, faculty with or without tenure**, they tend to blur. Think of all the professional women in solid-color sheath dresses, or blouses and pencil skirts, jackets, office heels (2-3? heel but not spike usually), tasteful jewelry. Even without a set dress code beyond “professional,” everyone gravitates toward an unspoken but acceptable look. Even in a less formal setting, we all lean toward blending in with the flock. There’s safety and acceptance in numbers, and in not standing out.

The military have a technical term for people who Stand Out. They’re called ‘targets’.

Freeberg nails it.

The more I listen to Trump, the more I realize he is not a master salesman after all. He is an extremely competent salesman. He is better at selling things than I would be. He is much better than most. But among his talents, contrary to popular opinion, selling things is not his peak performance.

He really finds his groove un-selling things. Listing the reasons not to buy the other guy’s stuff. It’s like watching Winter by Antonio Vivaldi performed by a virtuoso. It’s like a vortex-confluence of raw natural born talent, lessons learned over years and years of doing it, and an earnest love and joy of actually doing it. You just want to bottle the performance and put a cork on top. Living greatness.

But after the atmosphere built up by the contagious enthusiasm has come and gone, and the tent has been dismantled and a good night’s sleep has restored sobriety — the core message remains. It’s not a druggy high. It’s durable logic and common sense. It’s truth. Everything he says, once you examine it objectively with patience for the details, is true. It’s only shocking or novel in some way because some people have become hooked on deceptiveness and duplicity. The conflict comes from people who are the problem. Like the villagers who’ve become accustomed to pretending the Emperor is wearing fine clothes, and their churlish attitude against the little boy who points out he’s actually naked.

Read it.

As expected, the left is now in histrionics after Donald Trump suggested that Kamala Devi Harris might not be black, after he was asked a loaded question by an ABC News journalist Rachel Scott in front of the National Association of Black Journalists.

To recap, Scott asked Trump if he thinks Harris is ‘only on the ticket because she is a black woman?’ to which Trump replied, accurately, that Harris has identified as an Indian-American – which she openly campaigned on.

Read it.

Trump made the announcement on his Truth Social platform. He wrote: “SENIORS SHOULD NOT PAY TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY!”

Social Security can be claimed starting at age 62, although benefits increase the longer one waits to claim them, with benefits capping out at a retirement age of 70.

The taxation of Social Security began in 1984 with legislation signed by President Ronald Reagan. Seniors receiving Social Security income pay taxes on 50% of their income from the program, and in some cases, as high as 85% if their combined income from other sources pushes them above a certain threshold.

Read it.

Unanticipated incidents, be they acts of God or assassination attempts, define themselves. Others, from proposed legislation to controversial court cases, are subject to the manipulation of their acolytes.

Claiming to be on “the right side of history” is a common tactic such people employ. The phrase, usually emanating from the Left, is used as a debate-stopper, an argument-ender, a moral cudgel, as if the one who invokes it has special insight into the ultimate judgment of things (which, ironically, implies an ultimate judge, an implication most of them are unwilling to accept).

But the judgments of man are notoriously fickle. As the eminent 20th-century journalist John Chamberlain said: “There is no compulsion on the decent human being to be ‘with history’ when history is driving headlong toward an abyss.”

UnHerd.

The pioneer dream is deeply engraved in American culture and history. It’s simple but powerful: setting forth into the unknown, with just a few belongings and your immediate family, and creating a self-reliant, flourishing home in an unforgiving environment. As depicted in the (now resoundingly cancelled) Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, it’s a dream that required practical skills, physical strength and mental fortitude.

It was also, always, an easier sell to men than to women, which is why frontiersmen often had to obtain a wife by mail order. What for a man might be a pioneering adventure might be, for his wife, an arduous daily grind of growing and preparing food, making and mending clothing, laundry, animal husbandry and so on, all with no family help and multiple children underfoot.

Over time, though, a slew of innovations — from cars to ready-made foods to labour-saving home devices — have made it ever easier to live life in a seemingly self-contained way. Perhaps most of all, this has liberated women to pursue individualist dreams just like men. As the American antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly once observed, women were liberated more by the washing machine than feminism.

The New Neo.

Of course he does.

As Erdogan said: “Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.”

ZMan does a deep dive.

A question that does not get asked very much, especially in public, is if Christianity is compatible with democracy. Organized Christians in this age make a point of supporting “democracy” because the people in charge cannot stop talking about it, but that speaks to the sorts of people running organized Christianity. They want to be in good standing with the rulers, an irony that never gets mentioned. The thing they claim to profess evolved in opposition to secular rule.

Putting that aside, the issue of whether democracy, as in the consent of the governed through direct participation in governance by the governed, is compatible with Christianity is an important one. It is clear that as the West has become more democratic, it has become less Christian. Open hostility to Christianity is a feature of the class of people who talk about democracy the most. It certainly seems like the fans of democracy are not fans of Christianity.

Most people today who call themselves Christian or one of the sects of what we think of as Christianity are well aware of the hostility, but they blame secularism or various names for radicalism, rather than democracy. Christians embrace democracy as much as the opponents of Christianity, even if their particular brand of Christianity has no democratic elements. Catholicism, for example, is anti-democratic in structure, but American Catholics love democracy.

Read it.

Surveillance capitalism is a novel economic system that has emerged in the digital era. It is characterized by the unilateral claim of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. In this version of capitalism, predicting and influencing behavior (political and economic) rather than producing goods and services is the primary product. This economic logic prioritizes extracting, processing, and trading personal data to predict and influence human behavior by exploiting those predictions for various economic (marketing) and political objectives.

More accurately ‘surveillance socialism’.

Tyler Cowen.

The minimum wage will tend to increase unemployment among low-skill workers, often minorities. To many people that’s an argument against the minimum wage. But to progressives at the opening of the 20th century that was an argument for the minimum wage–progressive’s demanded minimum wages to get women and racial minorities out of the work force.

Something similar may be happening with rent control. Rent control reduces new development. Bug or feature? California Republican Tony Strickland argues that reduced development is a feature. New state laws in California prevent cities from restricting development but if rent control was legal cities could be used it to do the same thing just by making it unprofitable to build.

“The solution to a lot of problems is to just keep shooting.” — Lee Andersen

Bloomberg.

I would hardly call Vance a ‘reactionary’ — although he might be one from the perspective of a professor at Harvard Law.

The Other McCain.

One of the things every liberal must believe is Progress, a quasi-religious faith which G.K. Chesterton mocked as “people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.” The apostles of Progress would have us believe that 1959 — the year I was born — was a nightmare dystopia, despite those snazy new Chevy station wagons, and that if Donald Trump gets elected in November, we are all going back to 1959.

I remember 1959. I prefer it to now.

Well, sonny, lemme tell you, it was plenty rough. Back in those days, people had to pay their own bills, so they worked what were called “full-time jobs,” instead of hustling as DoorDash drivers or peddling naked selfies on OnlyFans. Yes, I remember when gas was less than $3 a gallon and interest on the national debt was less than a trillion dollars a year . . .

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

The drive between Butler, Pennsylvania, and the Ohio village of East Palestine is less than 42 miles long. In between are the villages and boroughs of Lyndora, Connoquenessing, and Evans City on the Pennsylvania side before you cross the state line directly into the village of East Palestine.

It is a stretch of geography that includes bucolic rolling pastures, the gentle slopes of the Appalachian Mountains, traces of what once was powerful Steel Valley between New Castle, Pennsylvania, and Youngstown, Ohio, and a mix of decay of what once was and a rebuilding of what may be.

It is what is often referenced to by coastal elites who have never driven through this very Americana scenery as “flyover country” or “the middle of nowhere.”

Read it.

Maharrey began with personal anecdotes to illustrate the unpredictability of life. He shared stories of a day disrupted by a flat tire and an unexpected plumbing issue during a home renovation, underscoring the theme that “you don’t know what you don’t know.” This unpredictability, he argued, is a fundamental flaw in central economic planning.

Read it.

A new study reveals what common sense could have predicted – giving Americans $1,000 per month disincentivizes them from working, causing them to work less – and earn less, over time.

Why is this a surprise? You get more of what you pay for, and if you pay people not to work, they won’t work. A six-year-old can tell you that.

Brett Cooper.

Let’s all move to Forney.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

At the Toto showroom in downtown Manhattan, a young, well-dressed woman enters and announces with a groan that she’s here to buy a bidet toilet seat. The salesperson proudly displays the five different models of Toto’s Washlet, the advanced electronic toilet seat with a built-in, controllable bidet (along with seat heater, deodorizer, MP3 player, and other available features). “I don’t really care which one,” the woman tells the salesperson. “I’m not going to use it. If it were up to me I wouldn’t get this thing, but it’s something my husband wants. Our deal is he gets this, and I get my say with the rest of the house. It’ll be hidden in our master bathroom. … I don’t want my guests to see this.”

I stand a few feet away, shaking my head in disbelief. Here we are in the world’s most sophisticated city, surrounded by the marvels of 21st century technological progress, and this clearly wealthy woman cannot wrap her head around a toilet seat that will wash her husband’s ass. What’s wrong with North American society? Why do people so fear the one perfect device that can guarantee their bum’s cleanliness? Despite its obvious and well-proven benefits, from personal hygiene to environmental, the integrated bidet toilet seat—which sprays a controlled stream of water from underneath the toilet seat at the push of a button—remains stubbornly off-putting to North Americans. Laugh all you want, but this has an impact on all of us.

Toto toilets are Japenese — and very expensive. (Look ’em up on Amazon.)

I don’t know about you, but my ass is as clean as it needs to be. Just sayin’.

Read it.

The concept Universal Basic Income is a pet notion of the Left. They never explain where they’re going to get all of the necessary money. Studies like these focus on what the recipients do with the money; they never focus on where the money comes from.

ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.

The term “conspiracy theory” has been a popular and effective slur against anyone skeptical of official narratives for a long time. The main reason it has been effective is it was always used against people with implausible theories. While the official narrative may not hold up, the alternatives ranged from unlikely to absurd. We have now reached a point where the poles have reversed. The “conspiracy theories” are often far more plausible and sober minded than official narratives.

I do not believe that Jambalaya Harris will be the Democrat Presidential nominee. Harris is a terrible candidate, as she demonstrated in front of God and everybody in the primaries. She’s Joe Biden without even the excuse of Alzheimer’s.

My money is on Gavin Newsom. He’s the only other viable candidate. And the most likely candidate for his Vice-Presidential nominee would be Gretchen Whitmer.

But we shall see.

Read it.

Major Democratic donors who joined a conference call starring Vice President Kamala Harris say the event’s sloppy organization and scolding tone left them feeling unimpressed and insulted, NBC News has reported.

“It was a total failure. It was damaging. It was poor planning,” said one. Another called it “ludicrous.” It was also described as “mismanaged and rushed.”

The Friday call with about 300 heavy-hitter donors kicked off with reports from field organizers, who used their time to vent anger over the intra-party battle over whether Biden should be replaced atop the ticket, owing to plunging confidence in his mental health.

One participant described how organizers stalled to buy time while everyone waited for Harris to join the call 20 minutes after it started. During that stretch, the donors were “admonished” against agitating to replace Biden, and were instructed to “lock in and get behind” the faltering and frail 81-year-old.

Steve Graham.

I keep saying evil spirits are loose on the earth, corrupting people’s minds. They fill us with delusions. That’s why people keep saying so many nutty things these days. It explains a lot of the Democratic Party’s platform. It explains the flat Earth insanity. It explains the people who think the pandemic, not just the virus, was created deliberately. It explains the folks who insist men are women.

Today it occurred to me that there may be a person we can use as our barometer/coal mine canary. Keith Olbermann.

Olbermann is, without exaggeration, deranged. He has both feet planted firmly in police welfare-check territory, not far at all from the threshold of involuntary commitment. He says things so kooky they would embarrass Whoopi Goldberg.

Read it.

Freeman’s academic interests were framed by her activist experiences. She was deeply involved in the seventies attempts to get feminist planks onto the Democratic and Republican party platforms. Up to that juncture the Republican Party had far stronger feminist credentials than the Democrats did; had the feminist of 1960 been forced to predict which party would champion her cause thirty years later, she would have guessed the GOP.

This is not what happened. That is the mystery that drives much of Freeman’s late ‘80s work: why did the feminist movement succeed so brilliantly with the Democrats, but fail so miserably with the Republicans? Freeman argues that this had less to do with demographics or deep ideological alignment than with the structures and operational culture of each party. Although both parties have changed in the days since Freeman stalked the convention floors, many of the differences she observed between the two parties still hold true today.

The Other McCain.

I must confess that sometimes, when I hear about a road-rage incident escalating into deadly violence, I think to myself, “Maybe this isn’t really a bad thing.” Let’s admit that the victim of a fatal road-rage incident is perhaps not an entirely innocentvictim. You probably have to be a very bad driver to cause a traffic situation so bad that another driver decides he needs to kill you. So, a bad driver gets killed, and another driver with serious anger-management issues gets sent to prison for murder. Isn’t it possible to see that as a win-win? The bottom line is, you’re subtracting two drivers from the morning-commute traffic jam, and that’s a net benefit to society.

Good point.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Lenin famously said there are decades in which nothing happens and then there are weeks in which decades happen. That is the inspiration for the show title and the show itself, which is a rundown of the events of the last few weeks. Any of these events would probably qualify as a big deal in isolation, especially the curious assassination attempt on Trump last week.

The last few weeks culminating in one of the wildest conventions in a long time has been an incredible ride, but we are just getting started. The years long effort to keep Trump off that convention stage is not the end of it. It is just the beginning of what lies ahead as the regime never takes no for an answer. The ball is now back in their court, so the next few weeks will make this last month seem normal.

The next chapter in this wild summer probably kicks off this weekend with a renewed effort to push Biden aside. The fake news stories about his imminent resignation were flying last night. It would take a heart of stone to not laugh at the sight of regime members getting the fake news treatment. Every story about Biden that contains “sources say” must cut like a knife.

Read it.

Pediatric transgender surgeries allegedly have become a fraudulent multibillion-dollar industry. The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating whistleblower reports alleging fraudulent Medicaid billing, including at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston.

The Other McCain.

Let’s be clear: South Korea is an ally, not an enemy. But acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, while pretending to be “an independent foreign policy expert”? That’s a felony, and Max Boot’s wife has been doing it for 10 years — “allegedly,” I hasten to add.

UPDATE: Leading ‘Trump Russia Hoax’ Propagandist’s Wife Indicted As Foreign Spy