Read it.

I agree that getting a ‘masters’ in ‘studio art’ is a mistake. Perhaps she ought to have gotten a Master’s in something that would help her get a job?

ZMan looks on the dark side.

A little over a century ago, September 16, 1920, to be exact, a horse-drawn wagon packed with 500-pounds of dynamite exploded outside the headquarters of the J.P. Morgan & Co. bank on Wall Street. Thirty people were killed instantly and another ten died from their wounds. Over 100 other people were injured. The bombing was never solved, but everyone assumed it was done by anarchists. Anarchist terrorism was becoming common over the prior decade.

One consequence of the bombing was the federal government got serious about the communists and anarchists in the country. They rounded them up and deported them even though they could not pin the crime on them. The elites also gained a new perspective on immigration after this bombing. All of a sudden, letting anyone walk into the country was not so popular with rich people. Not long after, immigration was sharply curtailed, especially from Southern and Eastern Europe.

The incident is a good reminder of the reality of politics. Things that vex the people will be ignored until they begin to threaten the rich people. The bombing of the Los Angeles Times building in 1910 did not register with the ruling class, because the people running the country lived on the East Coast. The terrible impact of immigration on the working classes was considered a feature by the wealthy. When the reality of immigration landed on their doorstep, their attitudes quickly changed.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Of all the cute things dogs do, cocking their head to one side while they look at you may be the most endearing. Yet surprisingly little research has looked into why they do it. Now, a new study of “gifted” canines—those capable of quickly memorizing multiple toy names—shows they often tilt their heads before correctly retrieving a specific toy. That suggests the behavior might be a sign of concentration and recall in our canine pals, the team suggests.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

David Friedman.

The figure shows temperature, CO2 concentration and insolation for the past 350,000 years, a period that covers four interglacials, shown as yellow columns, of which ours is the most recent. When I first saw it, as described in the previous post, I noticed something odd. In the first three interglacials, temperature follows the same pattern, rising steeply at the beginning then falling until the end. CO2 concentration follows a similar pattern except in the third interglacial, where it oscillates about a constant or slightly rising level.

The pattern in the fourth interglacial is quite different. For the first few thousand years it looks similar to the previous three but then the pattern reverses, with temperature and CO2 rising instead of falling through the rest of the interglacial.

What was different this time? The obvious guess was us. The reversal in the pattern happens at about the time that humans adopted agriculture, resulting in both a large increase in human population and a change in how humans affected the world around them.

If it weren’t for Global Warming, we’d be up to our assholes in glaciers

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China’s one-child policy suppressed the birth rate with forced abortions and political terror for a generation. Only allowed one child, many Chinese families chose to abort their baby girls.

The deficit of 40 million female babies is now the specter stalking Communist China.

China’s aggressive military moves against Taiwan and India are a desperate gambit by a corrupt Communist elite facing domestic social instability and millions of men who can never marry.

Read it.

Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates new ones.

Writing forces you to think. It’s nature’s way of telling you how sloppy your thinking is. The ultimate test of how well you understand something is how clearly you can explain it in writing — clear writers are clear thinkers. As a wise” man once said: “everything is vague to a degree you do not realize until you have tried to make it precise.”

“Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.” — Francis Bacon

Steve Sailer.

The Industrial Age assumed that the future would be Centralized and have Economies of Scale. Little did they know that progress meant pushing stuff down to the locality.

Read it.

Austria, one of the most repressive European countries during the coronavirus pandemic, has recently overtaken Sweden in terms of total covid mortality, showing that almost all government interventions have been ineffective and unjustified.

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Why is socialism growing more powerful in the United States? Because it directly benefits the gentry class: those running the country and those supporting them. This includes not just the political elite, but also the upper-middle-class, credentialed workers who work white-collar jobs – management and technology. The folks who can work remotely and get all their wants and needs delivered to their door.

…

Some might say I am nuts. The upper-middle class is the group in the highest tax brackets – the ones on which the burden of paying for government falls upon the most heavily. The working class and poor pay little to no income tax. Except part of that burden is s sleight-of-hand illusion. The top 10% of income earners have many ways of sheltering their income from taxes, which are often entered into the tax code in the interest of “fairness.” (An example is the recent attempt to remove ceilings on SALT tax deductions,) But more than that, those high tax rates are how they maintain their position in society. We do not have wealth taxes. Those who “have theirs” do not get what they do have taxed. They only get taxed on their income. As do their potential competitors.

Those potential competitors are the ones to whom high marginal tax rates are targeted. These are the Horatio Algers of American society. Those that arrive in this country penniless and through hard work, intelligent choices, and a little luck, build a business and amass wealth. But making money takes capital. High tax rates slow the accumulation of capital. Until capital grows to a critical mass, it is difficult to take the risks associated with starting a business unless you are willing to gamble everything on a low-odds effort. High tax rates ensure most of those who could potentially enter the top ten percent age out by the time they get there.

As I have been saying for years.

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More than you ever wanted to know about adhesive tape.

• What is Adhesive Tape?
• A Brief History of Tape
• How Adhesive Tape is Made
• What Makes Tape Stick
• Advantages of Pressure Sensitive Tape
• Why Tape Is Better Than Glue
• Choosing the Right Tape
• What Conditions Make Tape Fail?
• How To Test Tape
• How To Understand An Adhesive Tape Spec Sheet
• What is Adhesion Value, Exactly?
• Tensile Force vs. Shear Force
• Release Liners: What Are They and Why Do You Need Them?
• Why Adhesive Tape is a Universal Tool

David Friedman.

Tesla has been working for years on self-driving cars. A simpler project with a smaller but still significant market would be a self-driving wheelchair. The idea occurred to me talking with a woman whose husband suffered a serious stroke a few years ago, leaving him with a functional mind but imperfect control over his body. A motorized wheelchair would let him move around, but his vision is too unreliable to make that safe. If he could just tell his wheelchair to take him to the home office, or the dining room, or …

Read it.

The Genetic Lottery is not the only book published this summer to tackle controversial topics in biology.

…

Ask the average person whether intelligence is encoded in DNA and they’ll most likely say that yes, to some extent it is. As Harden points out, it is interesting that academics — some of the people most likely to be beneficiaries of an unequal distribution of genetic propensity to learn — are the ones most likely to deny that inequality. People dislike being asked to “check their privilege”. This must be especially true when that “privilege” is something that has attracted praise since earliest childhood, and something one has built one’s identity around.

Steve Sailer.

When white people pretend to belong to a Fashionable Minority, ‘Native American’ is a favorite because it’s easy to do.

Read it.

“I got a lotta problems with you people, and now you’re going to hear about it!”
-Frank Costanza, Seinfeld

On December 23, we’re pulling out the ol’ aluminum pole to celebrate Festivus, a holiday made up by a TV sitcom. In that spirit, we have once again gathered a list of TV grievances to air as well as a feat of strength and a few Festivus miracles. Join us as we recount all the ways Hollywood has disappointed us this past year.

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So, you got a cold. It happens around this time every year, to almost everyone. You got the sniffles, your head is a little foggy, you have an occasional sneeze, there’s some persistent phlegm lingering in the back of your throat. It’s mildly annoying, and you’re reminded this is bound to happen at least once every winter, and life goes on as normal but with a few more tissues in your pocket. Give it three days, a week max. Maybe you take some over-the-counter medicine, have chicken soup for lunch, sleep next to a humidifier. Upon greeting friends or coworkers, you politely decline a handshake or hug. “Sorry, I’ve got a cold,” you tell them — and they appreciate your consideration. “Oh, I just got over that,” one might say, “something’s going around.” No one panics, no one cares, you’re still invited to the party, you can still go to dinner, you still go to the office.

That’s Omicron. To date, one person in the US has died with Omicron, and, note, that’s with Omicron, not from. “With” not “from” is how the germ fetishists in media, government and medicine came up with that apocalyptic number of 800,000 Covid-19 deaths in the US, reached this month. That number means nothing to anyone who’s been following the science, and is critical of the news. We knew back in 2020 that Covid-19 was about as lethal as a particularly nasty strain of flu, albeit this one was made by the Chinese in a lab, and the actual death toll was probably around 100,000, also on par with a very bad flu season.

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The reason I prefer Google Maps to Apple Map is because Apple Maps is more difficult to use and doesn’t provide as much useful information.

Paul Graham.

It may seem a hair-splitting distinction to point out that intelligence and its consequences are not identical, but it isn’t. There’s a big gap between them. Anyone who’s spent time around universities and research labs knows how big. There are a lot of genuinely smart people who don’t achieve very much.

I am often reminded that ‘intelligence and wisdom are separate rolls’. The world (and especially the government) are full of very smart yet very foolish people.

Read it.

• Natural wood materials are processed into a HW with a 23-fold increase in hardness
• The HW can be processed into different shapes for various applications
• An HW table knife can be nearly 3 times sharper than most commercial table knives
• An HW nail can be as functional as a steel nail with comparable performance

Read it.

One of the far-too-often repeated statements made by urban, coastal elites is that one’s future cannot be found in the countryside. These city-centered Americans often believe that economic growth, jobs, and the nation’s future can only be found in big cities and that rural America remains a dead-end, brain-drained world with minimal opportunity.

The COVID-19 pandemic dispersed many Americans across the nation. And today, cities are not dominant in the hearts and minds of Americans whatsoever. In reality, not only are most Americans more interested in living in rural areas than in big cities, but many living in rural areas are quite optimistic about the future and still believe in the power of hard work.

Read it.

Two narratives have emerged; first, that Democrats are about to ‘play hardball’ with Manchin – with ‘tough treatment’ from Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) and President Biden. And second, that Democrats in swing states are scrambling to do damage control ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

Manchin appears unfazed by any of it.

Well, at least we know rat is a Blue Oyster Cult fan. And his Latin is probably better than yours.

Read it.

Covid is a serious disease that has killed a lot of people, but it does not kill different people at the same rates. Obviously, one of the greatest risk factors is being unvaccinated. But you’d still rather be a child and unvaccinated than be a 50-year-old and vaccinated if you’re trying to avoid Covid. Nor do different adult populations have the same risk profile. The vast majority of those people who have died of Covid have been elderly, immunocompromised, or ill. Those who have been hospitalized by Covid have also been disproportionately obese, to a startling degree. Covid discriminates, and not just against the unvaccinated. I don’t know why our media has decided that reflecting the plain scientific reality that different people have profoundly different Covid risks should be so taboo, but it’s precisely the sort of thing that causes a loss of trust among the skeptical. In any event, I’m not among the highest risk, or particularly close to it – I’m 40 years old, generally healthy, overweight but not obese, and vaccinated. People like me have died from Covid, but they are a very small minority of the deaths. Most who catch it from my demographic profile experience the disease the way I did in April of 2020: as an unpleasant but entirely manageable fever and mild respiratory illness.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Young progressives have constructed a fantasy world where they are protagonists in the most catastrophic, consequential moment in history, and they’re baffled why the actual world keeps going.

ZMan examines modern magical thinking.

One of the striking features of public discourse in a liberal democracy is the narrowness of language used by people with speaking roles. This narrowness of language reflects the narrowness of acceptable thought. The people allowed on stage signal their conformity to the hive mind by using the approved language. This means using the popular words and phrases of the moment. It is why the mass media resembles fireflies at dusk, blinking at one another as if they are coordinated.

Hence the common term The Hive.

Here we have a story telling us the long dark winter Joe Biden has been promising for two years is finally upon us. The reason is the Build Back Better plan was defeated by the forces of darkness. Goldman Sachs is now saying the economy, like the earth when Persephone returns to the underworld, will now go into a period of mourning over the loss of Build Back Better. How or why this will happen is not discussed, because to do so would possibly offend the gods further.

Progressivism is a religion. Everybody realizes it except the progressives.

Read it.

Cold era, lasting from early 15th to mid-19th centuries, triggered by unusually warm conditions.

New research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst provides a novel answer to one of the persistent questions in historical climatology, environmental history, and the earth sciences: what caused the Little Ice Age? The answer, we now know, is a paradox: warming.

Looking forward to it.

Read it.

A huge lie woven into Woke culture is that its underlying philosophy is progressive. It’s advertised as a falling away from sterile traditions and oppressive ways of thought, and breaking forward into a startling new way of viewing gender, race, and reality. These non-gender conforming, emotion-led activists have dismantled the walls of the blinkered morons who grew up in paternalistic families that brainwashed them into following ancient creeds. We have entered an era of radical critique that historicizes “objective truth” and reveals the sinews of power relations that were served by it.

Actually, it’s all recycled. There’s little more ancient a creed than the worship of the snake. The symbol of the tail-eating snake goes back to ancient Egypt, passing into Greece as the ouroboros and then across Europe as a gnostic and occult talisman. The idea that true knowledge is self-referential and that reality is subjectively based on each person’s sensory experience is a philosophy as old as philosophy itself. Unlike a more Aristotelean line of logic, which would say that people do perceive reality primarily through senses but that the reality we sense is objectively similar for all, modern materialism and immaterialism often shared a relativistic kind of insistence that identity of experience could not be proven. We all live in our own little realities, the self-referentialists concluded, and everything you sense is from your mind. The only thing that is true is the Spirit or spark of consciousness that injects your mind with your reality.

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The fossil footprints around an ancient lake in White Sands have been known for some time, but now we have what look to be perfectly respectable C-14 dates. They’re about 22 thousand years old, close to the Last Glacial maximum (LGM) and, as such clearly predate all existing evidence of human settlement of the New World (south of the glaciers, anyhow).

There were already hints: Amerindian populations in South America, mainly in Amazonia, carry a trace of a different genetic heritage. The existing population closest to that trace are the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, between India and Burma. Other populations such as Australian Aborigines and the inhabitants of New Guinea are also close. There is reason to believe that, until a few thousand years ago, all of Southeast Asia (including the islands) was occupied by related populations, known as Australo-Melanesians.

 

Read it.

Well, that works until the people who want to remove power lines get their way, then you have to do it all over again.

None of these people have a time horizon of over a week.

Read it.

What could possibly go wrong?

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So what do they do that’s worth a billion dollars?

At the moment the company grows 75 different varieties of herbs, salads and leafy greens but the company ultimately wants to grow the entire fruit and vegetable basket and sell premium food at affordable prices to everyone.

Herbs. Salads. ‘Leafy greens’. In other words, the easy stuff. No maize. No wheat. No rice. None of the plants that most of the world depends on for sustinence. Just salad stuff. I see.

Next year, it plans to expand its portfolio with 40 new crops including mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, peas and strawberries.

Still short plants. No substantial grains. No orchard fruits. How … important.

While they have many advantages, critics of vertical farms say they struggle to turn a profit, they use too much energy and they can be expensive to run. They can also produce light pollution and other forms of pollution.

Uh, yeah. When they start growing corn and apples, let me know.

Read it.

And who could blame them?

(In America, of course, those villagers would be armed and those monkeys not long for this world.)

(But that’s here, not there.)

ZMan’s weekly podcast revisits an old favorite. Highly recommended.

When you read the work product of the academy, the thing you see right away is much of it is nonsense busy work. These are people with no useful skills and nothing to do so they fritter away their time in a game of make believe. They imagine themselves as academic and intellectuals. Their specialty is basically a hobby of their own creation, which is an offshoot of their mentor’s hobby. You could eliminate the social science and humanities and no one outside the academy would notice.

The other thing you notice about these nonsense fields is the struggle to apply these boutique theories to anything resembling reality. Queer studies makes perfect sense within the extremely narrow scope of academic queerness. Outside of that narrow scope it makes no sense whatsoever. Much of what is produced in these pseudo-intellectual fields – that is a generous description – is a desperate attempt to apply these crackpot theories to real world situations.

Read it.

I know quite a few retired people who are “comfortable,” maybe even have one or two million dollars to leave their kids after a LIFETIME of work, saving, and investing. I know ONE person who has several tens of millions of dollars. And not a one of those people has any real political power, despite being white and well-off.

Not a one of those people, even the multimillionaire, could afford to give half a BILLION dollars (pocket change for Zuckerberg) to distort the election returns. Even though I bet a forensic audit would turn up well over half of Zuckerberg’s donation was just stolen. Good. Who’s keeping track of five hundred million dollars without dipping in?

Setting aside the butcher paper over the windows at vote-counting time, and the sudden giant leap of late-breaking machine votes ONLY for Biden, and the “toilet malfunction” in Atlanta, just having half a billion dollars to do whatever is claimed they did legitimately to “get out the vote” is a horrendous amount of power wielded by one homely, expressionless dweeb. Not to worry about his half-billion, he has $134 billion MORE. There’s somebody firmly on the INSIDE of those elusive goldarned margins.

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Democrats generally gain support by imagining what would happen if hypothetical conservatives were to win hypothetical control. They don’t talk about real conservatives or real elections. For good reason. “The Handmaid’s Tale” may seem a bit over the top, but there are people who believe that the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination led us inexorably to such a fate. The governing principle of modern American conservatism is individual liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But still, Democrats believe that what Sen. Mitch McConnell really wants is a return to slavery, like Alabama in 1825. Why do Democrats promote such absurd fears?

Because the real ones are less scary: “A Trump presidency is an extinction-level event for democracy. Imagine the agony of being happy, healthy, wealthy, and free. My God. Vote Democrat, and you won’t have to screw up your life — we’ll do it for you!” Absolutely no one (who does not have a Ph.D.) will vote for that. So Democrats are forced to make stuff up, based on hypothetical possibilities that have never happened and make no sense. Which seems silly. But what else can they do?

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Russia continues its military modernization and massive buildup of forces on the border with Ukraine, and China’s military only grows larger, more sophisticated, and increasingly belligerent to its neighbors. Countries like Iran and North Korea have robust missile programs that threaten the United States and regional allies. North Korea continues to manufacture nuclear weapons and Iran hopes to do so soon.

This Christmas season, Heritage’s defense team put together a slightly unorthodox Christmas wish list of things we would like to see in the new year to make America a safer place in the world. Here is part two.

ZMan does some sociology.

Walk around in public and it is increasingly obvious that Americans now live in at least two parallel worlds. For the bare-faced, the masked are a strange and alien people who are starting to fade into the scenery. The weirdness of these people strapping amulets to their faces has faded and it is now just something to be ignored, along with the person wearing the amulet. In fact, the weird collection of beliefs that lie behind the bizarre face-gear are also fading into obscurity.

The mask is no longer about following directions, complying with authority, concerns over public health and so on. It is about membership in a parallel universe that occupies the same physical space as this universe. If you want to know what segregation in the South was really like, go to a grocery store. Jim Crow was mostly two groups of people operating under mostly the same rules but living psychologically apart from one another in the same public spaces.

Read it.

Not quite as much fun as a couple ounces of Semtex, but I suppose it will have to do.

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George Cove, a forgotten solar power pioneer, may have built a highly efficient photovoltaic panel 40 years before Bell Labs engineers invented silicon cells. If proven to work, his design could lead to less complex and more sustainable solar panels.

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Imagine this scenario: In response to rising crime, retail gang theft, and outbreaks of violence at concerts and sporting events; a Government decree went out declaring that entry to shopping centers and public events would be denied to anyone who did not have a Government-issued “Crime Passport” confirming that they had no criminal history. Air travel would also be denied to those who did not have a “Crime Passport,” in the interest of protecting the safety of air travelers.

Explain to me why this would be wrong, but the “Vaccine Passports” being mandated in urban areas like Philadelphia are OK.

I like it. It has texture, and scope.

Read it.

Flying cars are still the stuff of Jetsonian dreams, but self-driving cars are already here. But these semi-autonomous vehicles come with a host of issues. For instance, they must be able to deal with the erratic driving behaviors of humans, as well as unexpected obstacles on the road, such as a wild deer crossing the highway. But a critical though lesser discussed problem associated with self-driving cars involves surveillance. These vehicles look likely to be used as surveillance tools, closely monitoring our every move. Worse still, China, a country that has expanded mass surveillance and integrated it into every part of Chinese life, is leading the self-driving revolution.

“Self-driving cars will represent a new mode for surveillance,” says Luis F. Alvarez León, an assistant professor of geography at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. “Through a self-driving car’s global positioning, system, navigational tools, and other data collection mechanisms, companies will be able to gain access to highly contextual data about passengers’ habits, routines, movements, and preferences.” According to León, whose research interests center around “the geographic, political, and regulatory dimensions of the informational and digital economy,” driverless vehicles provide companies with veritable treasure chests of “personal, locational, and financial data.” In turn, such data can be instantly leveraged and mercilessly monetized.