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Most of us Coronaskeptics assumed early on in the “pandemic” that the Wuhan Coronavirus did not differ significantly from the seasonal flu. The following article reports on a study from Spain that confirms the widely-held intuition.

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Dating and the process of mate selection have changed. The rise of hook-up culture, proliferation of dating apps, and ever-increasing age of first marriage are evidence of this. This current situation can be summarized along four parameters:

1. Increasing female achievement.
2. Growing variability in male status and competence.
3. An evolutionary desire among females to marry up.
4. The globalization of the sexual marketplace and resultant collapse of local status hierarchies.

Together, these conditions have created pronounced imbalances in the modern sexual marketplace. Put plainly, an increasing cohort of successful women are chasing a shrinking number of high-value, commitment-averse men.

Think about it: Is a rich man more likely to want to marry a woman like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortiz, or one like Melania Trump? The question answers itself, and it’s bad news for the AOCs of the world.

I predict that Greta Thunberg has a long spinsterhood to look forward to.

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For Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter, this phenomenon isn’t merely comparable to other religious traditions — it is religion. According to his new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, wokeism is a “religion in all but name”.

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COBOL is a coding language older than Weird Al Yankovic. The people who know how to use it are often just as old. It underpins the entire financial system. And it can’t be removed. How a computer language controls the financial life of the world.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

One of the unnoticed things about the current crisis is that the people getting what they want are increasingly angry, while the people getting worked over by the system are remaining calm and patient, for the most part. The crazies got what they wanted through the Trump years. They snarled his administration in a made-up plot and convinced his own party to sabotage his efforts. This required little effort, as the GOP is just their dull-witted flunkies.

Then they purged him from the system. The 2020 election should have signaled the end of the madness. The evil orange man had been removed from office. The Republicans could crawn back under their beds and the Democrats could waste everyone’s time with their crackpot ideas. The media would not have hear every day that they are fake news or the enemy of the people. Everything was back to how it was. You would think that they would be celebrating in the streets.

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Proposed guidelines in the state would de-emphasize calculus, reject the idea that some children are naturally gifted and build a connection to social justice. Critics say math shouldn’t be political.

ZMan is delightfully dyspeptic today.

One of the rules of the universe is that you should never take advice from your enemy, unless you are a Republican. This is the one big exception to what should be a fairly obvious rule of life. This also applies to so-called conservatives, who love nothing more than taking advice from the people they claim are their opponents. On the other hand, so-called conservatives and Republicans never listen to their voters. You see this in the aftermath of the Tuesday elections.

Here we have an actor on a far left cable channel explaining how Glenn Youngkin beat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia. The cable channels always have these guys who pretend to know things that they cannot possibly know. They are less reliable than palm readers, but they are a staple of political coverage. In this case, the role of this guy is to explain why the Republican should read the election results as an embrace of the far-left agenda and use it as a road map for future elections.

Joel Kotkin.

The stunning defeat suffered by the Democrats in Virginia, a surprisingly close race in deep blue New Jersey and the defeat of a “police defunding measure” in Minneapolis represent a remarkable turning point in American politics. It is less an affirmation of a resurgent Trumpism than a rejection of what might be called Bidenism, an unnatural merger of traditional Democratic corporate politics with a radical, progressive agenda.

Appealing to what James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager, has dubbed “faculty lounge politics” — with its emphasis on Critical Race Theory, racial quotas, transgenderism and defunding the police — has become an obvious flaw in their political strategy. These positions might prove popular in certain sections of the media, but not so much among the public.

Joel Kotkin.

Like its global predecessors, the COP26 Glasgow conference will usher in a new wave of apocalyptic warnings about climate change. It will also likely prove no more successful, in terms of actually addressing the issue, than its predecessors, particularly as China, India and other developing countries ramp up their emissions.

Nevertheless, none of this will force the climate activists to reconsider how the current strategies against global warming could break the backs of the already beleaguered working and middle class. (For British readers, I use the phrase ‘middle class’ here in the American – less bourgeois – sense.) The climate chorus of celebrities, oligarchs and royals may feel virtuous, but for most people the future could prove to be propertyless proletarianisation. Many of those in Glasgow at the moment pray at the altar of ‘de-growth’. They want to limit the consumption of the working and middle classes, undermine their jobs, raise their energy bills, and inhibit their ability to buy property or travel.

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If you are a good man living in a bad regime, you will necessarily be a bad citizen. That is Aristotle’s teaching. The current controversies surrounding the Claremont Institute, particularly its various fights with both the Left and Right, must be understood in this light.

What Aristotle meant is that if a regime is unjust, it will regard as good citizens only those who are unjust in the way the regime is unjust. Anyone who refuses to acquiesce in the regime’s injustice will be regarded as dangerous. Precisely the just men and women will be seen as disloyal to the ruling authority and as politically illegitimate. In the early 1940s, Germans who sheltered Jews were bad citizens of the Third Reich, and Russians who circulated books critical of Marxism were unfaithful to the ideals of the Soviet Union.

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One thing that made China’s modernized armed forces work was an adequate supply of well-educated and eager Chinese that were capable of mastering the skills required by China’s world-class military being produced. A critical problem is that future generations of well-educated Chinese recruits will be smaller and less eager to choose a military career. The key problem is that too many young Chinese cannot afford to marry and raise more than one child. The government has found this problem very resistant to solutions.

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Charles Darwin was an introvert. Granted, he spent almost five years traveling the world on the Beagle recording observations that produced some of the most important scientific insights ever made. But he was in his twenties then, embarking on a privileged, 19th-century naturalist’s version of backpacking around Europe during a gap year. After returning home in 1836, he never again stepped foot outside the British Isles.

He avoided conferences, parties, and large gatherings. They made him anxious and exacerbated an illness that plagued much of his adult life. Instead, he passed his days at Down House, his quiet home almost twenty miles southeast of London, doing most of his writing in the study. He occasionally entertained a visitor or two but preferred to correspond with the world by letter. He installed a mirror in his study so he could glance up from his work to see the mailman coming up the road—the 19th-century version of hitting the refresh button on email.

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The theory of signalling likens many educational credentials to peacock’s tails: costly encumbrances, useful only as conspicuous proof that their owners are intellectually strong enough to bear them. And in “The Social Limits to Growth”, a book published in 1976, Fred Hirsch, once a writer for this newspaper, pointed out that education is often “positional” in nature. What matters is not only how much you have, but whether you have more than the next person. For many students it is not enough merely to acquire a good education. They must obtain a better education than the people jostling with them in the queue for sought-after jobs.

Positional goods are, by their nature, in strictly limited supply. Everyone can in principle live in a good neighbourhood, attend a good school, and work in a good job. But logic sadly dictates that not everyone can enjoy the nicest neighbourhoods, best schools or most prestigious jobs. As Hirsch pointed out, “what each of us can achieve, all cannot.”

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If we start calling it “gender appropriation,” do you think the Transgender thing will become unpopular on the left?

ZMan does some taxonomy.

If it was possible to hold a convention of people who makes some claim to being right-wing, it would be a quite a crowd. Polling consistently shows that about 40% of white Americans identify as conservative. About 20% identify as liberal. The remaining 40% probably lean proportionally. People who claim to be “moderate” are always left-wing, often far-left. On the other hand, people with no interest tend to live right-wing, so it is hard to know for sure how the undocumented fall.

Regardless, the right side of the scale is a crowded place, but there is not much agreement on what it means to be right-wing in America.

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Naomi Oreskes: – “if human-made warming is as unequivocal as these scientists insist, then why do we need more reports to tell us the same thing?”.

For the same reason choirs still need to be preached to.

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I take a vitamin D3 supplement daily and encourage you to do the same.

URBAN PLANNER: Somebody who lives in a $10 million McMansion in Malibu who thinks you ought to live in an 800 sq ft walkup in Chinatown; who drives a Lexus but wants you to pay $2 a ride for Light Rail; and who doesn’t sent his kids (if indeed he has any kids) to the public schools that are just right for the herd.

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When it comes to marriage, the jobs that each person in a couple has can play a role in whether or not it works out. Maybe it’s similar schedules. Maybe it’s common ground and understanding between two people. Maybe jobs are an indicator for the types of people who match well together.

In the chart below, based on estimates from the American Community Survey, find out which jobs most often pair together among married couples.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

The season of the witch is upon us. For much of the country Halloween is the tipping point where people head inside. It is in the close quarters of indoor life, especially around the holidays, where the witch does her worst work. They have the vaccine spells, supply chain voodoo, CRT incantations and insurrectionist stories ready to go so they can increase your misery. The witch lives to make the normal man miserable and agitated, especially during what should be the cozy season.

This week’s show is about how to deal with the witches we call leftists, feminists, cult-Marxists, and so. Back when I did the shows on the radical nature of our ruling class, I said I would do a show on how to deal with these people in our daily lives. Given this is the season of the witch, it seemed appropriate to post the show this week. When the kids are out trick-or-treating, you can be aware of the mother standing in the shadows, holding a water glass full of chardonnay.

Zman does an overview.

Fighting Mother Nature is always a losing game. This is the lesson of communism in the 20th century. They simply could not kill enough people to cause Mother Nature to yield to the theory. The technological age may be experiencing the same thing, with a lower body count. Instead, people are slowly beginning to adapt to the reality of their environment by reorganizing it. Cord-cutting is a way to slow down your environment, thus making it more habitable.

Social media seems to be suffering a similar trend. They lie about their membership and activity, but it is pretty clear that we are past the peak of these big platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The former is the domain of old people keeping touch with friends and family, while the latter is a holding pen for the mentally ill. A devolution to smaller, more focused on-line communities is under way. People are unplugging from the system to slow down their life.

I’m with Mom on this one.

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More young, activist women are choosing to be sterilized as our nation’s emerging adult generation is buying into climate-change propaganda that ”humans were a mistake,” according to an existential psychologist scholar.

This would seem to be a self-correcting problem, from an evolutionary standpoint.

Personally, I think that women who don’t want to reproduce ought to be encouraged not to do so.

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Andrew Breitbart’s axiom has been repeated so often in right-wing commentary that it has become something of a cliché: politics is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of religion. But an essential feature is missing from this exercise in hydro-political cartography. Near the source of the river, just across from the church, there is a farm.

It may seem outlandish to claim that the way we farm and the way we pray are comparable in their influence on culture and therefore on politics. But it only seems that way from the vantage point of deracinated modernity. Indeed, agriculture has always preceded and underpinned culture. It takes no intellectual leap of faith to trace our obesity and other health crises back to what we grow, and how we grow it. Likewise, if we are what we eat, then our national (and civilizational) identity crisis should come as no surprise: we no longer know who we are because we no longer know what we are eating, or by what means it has arrived on our plates.

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“When your father dies, your accounting degree is not going to help you at all to process that experience. Homer will help you.”

Homer’s poems, the Illiad and the Odyssey, were the Bible of Greek civilization: Everybody knew them, everybody quoted them, everybody internalized them as the foundation of their culture.

ZMan looks at the proposed wealth tax.

Legend has it that the Persian King Xerxes was confident in his ability to crush the Greeks because he saw them as dishonest men. They lied to one another in their marketplace and in their debates over politics and law. From the perspective of the Persians, a people who allegedly viewed lying as the worst crime possible, this defect would undermine their efforts to resist the Persians. Men who cannot trust one another cannot defend one another when under attack.

We know Xerxes was wrong, if he indeed thought these things. Much of our history of the time comes from Herodotus, who was not afraid to gild the lily when rerecording the history of the Greeks and her enemies. It is a useful insight, however, as the market-based society is, when you think about it, a system where the rewards go to those who are best at deceiving their fellow citizens. More accurately, status comes from deceiving people into thinking you are being honest with them.

…

Democratic politics is just taking the marketplace idea and applying it to the governance of the society. The sellers are the people with ideas for how to solve problems in society and the buyers are the majority who vote on it. The game is to convince the mob there is a problem and that you have the solution. Being right about the problem or the solution is unimportant. What gets rewarded is convincing fifty percent plus one to go along with your scheme, which makes you the winner.

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Science is a process. It’s a good process, the best we have for ferreting out objective truths about nature. It’s a good process, but scientists are people, and people, even good people who want to do what’s right, are imperfect. So science, as good as it is, isn’t perfect. Even when the people are careful and the science is good, science is never the only consideration. (That’s why letting one thing — say, health care policy — dictate a nation’s response to a crisis is generally a bad idea.)

But it seems that the loudest accusations of “science denier!” are made when the science is sketchy and, frankly, probably in need of some serious denial. That’s when the technocrats really up their game, censoring competing views, exaggerating their claims of certainty, and encouraging panic and the immediate action that comes with it. We’re seeing that today with the Wuhan coronavirus, where ambiguous and conflicting information and a lack of accountability leave petty authoritarians free to craft arbitrary and capricious public policy.

David Friedman.

Perhaps we owe thanks to our stone age ancestors for the glaciers not yet having started south.

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I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV or in the movies. I am, however, someone who can read, look things up, and understand numbers- and when it comes to the dreaded covid, numbers are all important. And, there’s something you need to understand right up front- your doctor isn’t responsible for your health. Your insurance company isn’t responsible for your health. The government- especially the government- not only isn’t responsible for your health but seems these days to be actively working against it. There is one and only one person responsible for your health- you. Awesome responsibility, isn’t it? Doesn’t apply to children- PARENTS, adults, are responsible for their health Not teachers, not school superintendents or school boards, parents or in some cases legal guardians.

Amen to that.

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Words go in and out of fashion all the time. For example, the phrase “the debate over” is fading out in favor of “the conversation around.”

My guess is that the change in prepositions is merely a fad. After all, prepositions in English are somewhat arbitrary, which is why it’s hard for people learning English to remember which preposition to use.

I don’t know whether it is the product of heredity or of environment, but compulsive nattering appears to be the way women relate to the world, especially to other women. This can be tedious for those of us who make a point of not saying anything when we don’t have anything to say, and wishing that other people would have the good grace to do the same, but there it is. I remember going to an SCA event with my late first wife to Tulsa, a four-hour trip from Dallas, and noticing that she didn’t stop talking for more than ten seconds at a time during that entire four-hour trip. It’s a gift; I couldn’t have done that even if I’d tried.

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In the following video, a man identified only as Wolfgang records a message to his loved ones from his ICU bed about his medical condition. He is now paralyzed from the neck down a month after receiving an injection of the experimental Johnson & Johnson mRNA medical treatment intended to prevent infection with the Wuhan Coronavirus.

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The Utah Supreme Court is the latest stop in EFF’s roving campaign to establish your Fifth Amendment right to refuse to provide your password to law enforcement. Yesterday, along with the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in State v. Valdez, arguing that the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination prevents the police from forcing suspects to reveal the contents of their minds. That includes revealing a memorized passcode or directly entering the passcode to unlock a device.

In Valdez, the defendant was charged with kidnapping his ex-girlfriend after arranging a meeting under false pretenses. During his arrest, police found a cell phone in Valdez’s pocket that they wanted to search for evidence that he set up the meeting, but Valdez refused to tell them the passcode. Unlike many other cases raising these issues, however, the police didn’t bother seeking a court order to compel Valdez to reveal his passcode. Instead, during trial, the prosecution offered testimony and argument about his refusal. The defense argued that this violated the defendant’s Fifth Amendment right to remain silent, which also prevents the state from commenting on his silence. The court of appeals agreed, and now the state has appealed to the Utah Supreme Court.

ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.

Last week, the media was buzzing with claims that the Chinese have mastered hypersonic technology. They had flown a hypersonic glider around the globe and then delivered it to a target. Supposedly the glider was capable of carrying and therefore delivering a nuclear weapon. Additionally, the US military claimed to not know how they managed to pull it off. The implication being that the Chinese have now surpassed the American empire in military technology.

The official outlet for the Washington regime promptly put out an essay warning about the threat China now poses. Th point of the essay is to frame the debate over how best to wage the new cold war. One side will be dovish and seek to negotiate, while the other side will be hawkish and want to keep pace with the Chinese. The compromise will be both sides get what they want. This means jobs and cash for the army of managerial class flunkies and military contractors.