Read it.

Wood at a settlement in Canada’s Newfoundland that was cut with metal tools helped researchers pinpoint when the Norse first reached the continent — well before Columbus.

Read it.

Cruz introduced the Stop the SURGE Act to demand President Joe Biden and Democrats address the crisis at the southern border, which has been flooded by migrants seeking entrance into the U.S.

The legislation would establish new ports of entry in 13 communities across the country and mandate all migrants encountered at Border Patrol Sectors in Texas be transferred to these new ports for processing. That would help alleviate the workload for overwhelmed Border Patrol and local law enforcement.

The new ports would be located in places such as Napa Valley, California; Greenwich, Connecticut; Rehoboth Beach, Delaware; and North Hero, Vermont.

Blue-State legislatures and agencies are very fond of putting (or trying to put) ‘affordable housing’ (i.e. poor black people) in what they consider to be overly-white and overly-affluent areas.  Sauce for the goose….

Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist.

Again, I will repeat the perennial question: do our public health agencies wish to maximize their own status and control and feeling of “having done everything properly as they were trained,” or do they wish to maximize the expected value of actual outcomes for the citizenry? If it is not the latter, and too often it is not, I say they are oppressive frauds.

I’d rather be the hammer than the nail….

Watch it.

A video conversation between economist Tyler Cowan and historian Niall Ferguson.

Two of my favorite people.

Read it.

Standardization makes life easier, but it is often impossible to introduce it to systems that have a messy evolutionary history. Electricity supply is a case in point.

And electricians have to know all this stuff.

Read it.

With President Biden’s massive spending agenda falling apart in Congress (his own party’s infighting was seeing to its failure), former Reagan speechwriter, New York Post columnist and Commentary editor, John Podhoretz dropped some inconvenient truth bombs on Meet the Press’s liberal panel of mostly media types. Meanwhile, the panel spent much of their Sunday discussion on NBC lamenting how Democrats just couldn’t get things together.

Read it.

In The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?, which was published to national and international acclaim last year and issued this year in paperback with a new prologue, the distinguished Harvard professor argues that the antagonism in America between equality, community, the common good, and justice, on the one side, and freedom on the other has reached catastrophic proportions. Amid the bitter divide in the United States between progressive elites and conservative-leaning middle-class and working-class voters, Sandel elaborates the sensational claim that it is meritocracy—the view, central to the modern tradition of freedom, that a “just society” provides all individuals “an equal chance to rise as far as their talent and hard work will take them”—that is tearing the United States apart. It turns out, however, that Sandel is not opposed to the rule of every form of merit. The thrust of his argument indicates that he wishes to replace the allegedly despotic rule of technocrats, economists, and financiers with the ostensibly refined and compassionate rule of experts in moral reasoning capable of leading national conversations about a common good in America that, in his telling, has been and remains elusive.

A reminder that librarians are still government employees.

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A vehicle was stolen on Tuesday in broad daylight in Albuquerque outside a venue where a progressive prosecutor backed by left-wing financier George Soros was speaking about rising crime in the area.

Bernalillo County district attorney Raúl Torrez (D.) is struggling to reverse a prolonged spike in murders and non-fatal shootings in Albuquerque. Torrez is also a candidate for New Mexico attorney general, with a campaign keyed to a left-wing “smart on crime” approach that advocates harsher gun control measures with greater investment in diversionary programs and consumer protection.

Read it.

(I detest people who use ‘should’ in place of ‘ought’. Just sayin’.)

It seemed like double the work—to write 80,000 ish words by hand and then have to type it—am I right? Wrong. In fact, those who swear by it say you end up revising less since you write more carefully with a pen, so although you do have to transfer it to the computer, the work you’ve already done likely puts you a step, or perhaps a draft, ahead.

There’s other benefits too such as an increase of creativity in how using the pen stimulates your brain. (I worry today’s students miss out on this when they take notes on their computer instead of in a notebook.) You also remember what you write down better than you do when you type it. (This is another reason students should drop the computer.) Writing your novel longhand helps you to keep moving down the page too. It’s more aggravating to cross through words than to delete words with the push of a button. And when you cross through a word, it’s still there for you to see. Perhaps when you revise, you’ll like your first instinct better, but when you delete a word on the computer, it’s gone forever. Writing longhand helps you to choose words more carefully and move down the page at a better pace.

Matt Continetti.

Vance is a leader within that faction of the right which says the conservative movement’s emphasis on individual freedom, and its commitment to the classical liberal procedures and “norms” of constitutional government, is responsible for its apparent failure to preserve the nuclear family, and for its exclusion from mainstream institutions. He is a pacesetter for this trend, which drew energy from Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. And because Vance represents one possible future for the American right, I was eager to read the transcript of a speech he gave last weekend to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s “Future of American Political Economy” conference in Alexandria, Va. There is no doubting Vance’s smarts—he graduated from Yale Law School in 2013—or his communication skills. But his text left me with questions.

Joel Kotkin.

Joe Biden may present himself as a ‘working-class hero’, a claim reiterated recently in the leftist American Prospect, but increasingly America’s workers are showing signs not of common cause but disquiet. Hollywood workers just announced a large-scale strike, some of whom blame their hard times on the ‘disruption’ to their industry wrought by tech firms, which are distinctly hostile to unions. There’s also increased tensions at Disneyland, as well as numerous organising efforts targeting Biden’s oligarch allies like Amazon and Starbucks.

One possible cause for the unrest lies with inflationary pressures that have cancelled out any income gains for most people outside the oligarchic elites. The sad economic reality of today – real wages are in decline – contrasts uncomfortably with the far better performance for working people under the pre-pandemic Trump administration.

Tom Veal is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Yesterday I wished readers a Happy Human Sacrifice Abolition Day. Today let me expatiate on the increasingly common practice of treating history as a court room and our ancestors as either the accused in the dock or their innocent, wholly meritorious victims.

Read it.

We’re living in a really remarkable economic time. There appear to be more jobs than workers. Yet the number of homeless-populated tent cities seem to be increasing. Despite the rise in the minimum wage, about 37 million people still exist below the poverty line. What’s really going on? Surely, as Joseph Sunde has written, these strange incongruities predate COVID. Is there a more, I don’t know, human element at play that macroeconomics can’t detect, but a little empathy and less blame-gaming could?

Read it.

I trust billionaires before I trust government. Just sayin’.

Incentives never work as well as motivation.

Read it.

Mollie Hemingway applies her talent—rigorous and thoughtful old-school journalism—to documenting the 2020 assault against America perpetrated by the evil alliance of the progressive movement, the entrenched bureaucracy, modern “journalism”, and big technology firms. Yes, the election was rigged. But the core of Rigged is the story of years of lawfare, private takeovers of election boards by well-funded progressives, ill-considered and/or uncontested consent agreements, the flouting of long-standing election law, and the shielding thereof by a twisted judiciary.

This book does not lay out specific proof that Trump won on November 3, 2020. It does show how the unprecedented surge in mail-in voting, and the suppression of the anti-fraud measures that are supposed to accompany it, made 2020 a perfect storm for untraceable fraud.

The Other McCain rides the wave.

Everybody knows what it means.

ZMan does some analysis.

Like most things in the current age, professional sport has become a degenerate mockery of itself. The presentation is a high-tech vaudeville act that is now mostly advertisements and propaganda. The people in charge of the various sports are the worst this age can muster. The participants are vulgar carnies. Despite the best efforts of this age, however, sport continues to provide an insight into our times. It is a microcosm of the larger society in which it operates.

For example, football was always the second sport in America, up until the explosion of mass media in the 1980’s. In fact, football was probably behind sports like boxing and horse racing, not just baseball. The explosion of television rocketed football to the top of sport entertainment because it was a natural for the medium. It provides a stage that fits the screen, has breaks for ad space and is a weekly happening. The NFL quickly became a lightly scripted television sports drama.

Read it.

Attention has always been a commodity, though not in the same way it is now. Where paying attention was once something that afforded farmers a plentiful harvest, now our attention is increasingly something to be captured and capitalized upon by others. Our attention spans are often described as “scarce.” Some scholars have even started referring to advertising as “attention harvesting.” An almanac is, of course, a product (and it does sell other products in its advertisements), but it more frequently turns readers’ attention to things that cannot be bought or sold, to remarkable phenomena that can only be found in the natural world: bird migration, meteor showers, eclipses.

…

Almanacs force the kind of surrender that comes naturally to a child in the woods. Paging through the almanac, readers must accept things as they come. The reward is a wonderfully freeing randomness: in this year’s almanac, I read about how to plant trees from clippings; learned that Duluth, Minnesota, is famous for “hawk watches”; and prepared for the “full flower moon.” Even the advertisements delight me: at what other one-stop shop could I purchase artisanal sausages, collectors’ nickels from 1935, and a product called “chicken soup for the soil”? I float along the pages, learning things I’ll likely never use — or things that are so obvious as to be useless. This year’s Old Farmer’s Almanac spent an entire section breaking down the pros and cons of owning different species of pets (in case you didn’t know, dogs are friendly but chew shoes sometimes, and cats are cute but independent). That’s part of the charm, too: the almanac doesn’t take itself too seriously. As its five-page article on choosing a pet says: “[D]on’t intellectualize dog love.”

Read it.

Today, breathwork is the new yoga. It can be found everywhere from therapy sessions to gym classes, but, while it’s currently in vogue, it’s far from new. It’s hard to pinpoint the first moment when humans decided to use breathing intentionally, but you can find early indications of conscious breathing in Hindu scriptures dating back hundreds of years, for instance in the Bhagavadgita, composed sometime between the 2nd century BCE and the 2nd century CE.

Scott Alexaner.

I actually disagree with Scott on this one. People who buy the Climate Change flim-flam are prima facie stupid and ought to be encouraged not to reproduce. Think of it as evolution in action.

Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

Tom Veal does a deep dive.

Part I of this series looked at the original, pejorative meaning of the term “meritocracy” and the criticism directed at it by the term’s coiner, the English Baron Young of Dartington. What he meant by “meritocracy” might have been better labeled “sapientocracy”, rule by individuals of high natural intelligence. Part II examined the more recent, broader attack on a somewhat different notion of “meritocracy”. Progressive anti-meritocrats reject merit itself. It is unfair, they contend, to reward people for being “better on the merits” than others, because those merits ultimately derive from external circumstances, most notably the genes, upbringing and education passed on by successful fathers and mothers to their offspring. Worse yet, when preference is given to merit, competition ensues, blighting the lives of the competitors.

Read it.

Five years ago, after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, I set out in search of the origins of the word “xenophobia.” Its birthplace seemed obvious. In ancient Greece, it was said, a wise man combined “xénos” — which connoted both stranger and guest — with “phobos,” their word for fear. Since xenophobia was an eternal and ubiquitous human problem, it made sense that its origins lay near the start of Western civilization, when some Aristotle-like figure opened his eyes and spotted it before him.

All that, I discovered, was nonsense. The ancient Greeks — or the written record we have of them — never employed this term. Instead, in a historical moment with similarities to our own, the word emerged alongside troubles fostered by rapid globalization. And lingering by the starting blocks, off to the side, stood Jean Martin de Saintours.

Read it.

When President Joe Biden announced sweeping new vaccine mandates for 100 million Americans, he stated that these measures were necessary to “protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers.” But isn’t the vaccine itself supposed to be what protects the vaccinated? Not well enough, apparently. So whose interests are served by mandating a leaky vaccine that prevents neither infection nor transmission of a disease that is chiefly dangerous to people over 75 or with serious preexisting medical conditions?

 

Read it.

In other words, we’re all screwed.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

One of the strangest phenomena of our time is the whitewashing of the Chinese Communist Party by American liberals. Fifty years ago, everyone knew that the CCP was vicious, cruel and evil. But over the years, economic self-interest–the desire to take advantage of what is at best low-wage labor, and at worst slave labor–has triumphed over moral judgment. With hindsight, maybe Richard Nixon’s famous opening up of China and Bill Clinton’s admission of China into the World Trade Organization were mistakes. Donald Trump briefly tried to rationalize our relationship with the Evil Empire of the 21st Century, but that was too much for the establishment to take.

“‘o traverse the world men must have maps of the world. Their persistent difficulty is to secure maps on which their own need, or someone else’s need, has not sketched in the coast of Bohemia.’

— Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922)

Read it.

“The question out there for parents and educators is why should our kids spend any time doing handwriting,” says cognitive scientist Brenda Rapp from Johns Hopkins University. “Obviously, you’re going to be a better hand-writer if you practice it. But since people are handwriting less, then maybe who cares?”

“The real question is: Are there other benefits to handwriting that have to do with reading and spelling and understanding? We find there most definitely are.”

Read it.

Steve Sailer.

It turns out GPT-3 disproportionately associates Muslims with violence,

And as we all know, that couldn’t possibly be true because it’s a stereotype.

It seems that Artificial Intelligence software isn’t subject to Wokeness.

Joel Kotkin.

Driven partly by fear of infection, and by the liberating rise of remote work, Americans have been increasingly freed from locational constraints. Work continues apace in suburbs and particularly in sprawling exurbs that surround core cities, while the largest downtowns (central business districts, or CBDs) increasingly resemble ghost towns.

People who aren’t forced to work downtown will avoid doing so if possible. When given the choice of ‘urban density’ or space in the suburbs, the suburbs win every time.

Read it.

A new report out Friday finds that the number of concealed carry gun permits in the country rose 10.5% in the last year, growing to more than 21 million people.

Add to that the entire population of Texas, who now don’t need a permit for open carry. (Colt Peacemaker, here I come….)

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Even now with the economy having problems at the retail end, people are more focused on the less tangible stuff like CRT or Covid policy. The massive Build Back Better bill stuck in Congress gets little attention. Regime media talks about it as a magic elixir so the crazies have something to chant, but otherwise they have left it alone. Twenty years ago, Conservative Inc would have been organizing a campaign against it, but today they cannot generate much interest in the thing.

One reason for this is that people have come to realize that caring about the economy, tax policy or government programs changes nothing. Those who vote Republican have come to terms with the fact that none of the things they want in terms of taxes and spending will ever happen, so they have lost interest. The far-left still dreams of the socialist paradise, but it is mostly a show of piety. Medicare-for-all may as well be unicorns-for-all and they probably know it.

I have so often wanted to do this sort of thing….

Read it.

(Hint: Yes.)

Pressure to get vaccinated against covid is immense. Liberals demand that non-vaccinated people be denied medical care. In New York, you aren’t supposed to be able to enter a bar or restaurant without a certificate of vaccination. Questioning of the efficacy or desirability of vaccination is banned on social media. And Joe Biden says the fight against covid will be won when 97% or 98% of our population has been vaccinated, an impossible figure.

Despite all of the hoopla, it is pretty obvious that the vaccines are not working as well as had been hoped. Originally, it was understood that being vaccinated would prevent you from getting covid. When covid cases and deaths continued to rise after vaccines became available, we were told that it was an “epidemic of the unvaccinated.” But the goalposts have moved; now the claim is that you may still catch the disease, but you probably won’t get as severe a case.

Read it.

Increasingly, companies include unlimited paid time off as part of their job offers, as it’s an enticement popular with millennials and Gen Z workers. But you’ll want to think twice about whether it’s really all that great—studies show that workers often take less time off with unlimited vacation days. Why would that be so? I’ll explain.

Read it.

The adventure of ‘Florida Man’ continue.