Sarah Hoyt explores the zeitgeist.

But it doesn’t take a very deep thinker, or delving too much into anything at all to realize all the population figures, PARTICULARLY the ones from the UN, are bullshit, and overinflated bullshit at that.

I might have a leg up on you guys on that, since I grew up in a nominally modern, industrialized country which tries really hard to know everything about its people, but is guesstimating when it comes to how many live there because: people lie. They lie for benes. They lie because it’s Tuesday. They lie because it’s fun. Also, even when they’re not lying, they make assumptions. Of course, for instance, I live with my parents. Because for the longest time they assumed that was my real home. Do I count twice? We’re lucky if it’s only twice. A few years ago, I found out that under my pre-citizenship name, I was still voting in North Carolina. Which is a puzzle, as I never voted under that name. But apparently I’ve been living for 30 some years in our starter apartment and am registered to vote. (It’s disconcerting. Oh, fraudulent too. But disconcerting. Like looking into a parallel world.)

Ben Thompson at Stratechery. Highly recommended.

What I did want to do is — word limit be damned — write a post about Facebook’s political problems, as I perceive them, in their entirety. I do think the media gets a lot of things wrong about Facebook, not because there aren’t problems, but because the problems are more profound than the issue of the day. So here’s my best shot.

ZMan peeks behind the curtain.

One of the weird aspects of this age is how important people appropriate the emotions and feeling of others and make them their own. They will make statements about their feelings on a subject, but those feelings are not really their feelings because they cannot actually be experiencing the feelings in questions. Our Cloud People have normalized emotional appropriation as a way of projecting to the Dirt People that they have genuine human emotions.

The easy example here is the public person who has a rare moment of honesty and posts what they really think on Twitter. This sets off the familiar drama on-line in which people rush to their favorite platform to express their outrage. The fact that they have no reason to care, much less be outraged, goes unnoticed. Eventually, the director of this drama tells the star to waddle out on stage and issue an apology. In that apology, the star claims to feel things that cannot be felt.

When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. But when it hands you cow pies, you’re kind of stuck.

Read it.

A Chinese gene company selling prenatal tests around the world developed them in collaboration with the country’s military and is using them to collect genetic data from millions of women for sweeping research on the traits of populations, a Reuters review of scientific papers and company statements found.

U.S. government advisors warned in March that a vast bank of genomic data that the company, BGI Group, is amassing and analyzing with artificial intelligence could give China a path to economic and military advantage. As science pinpoints new links between genes and human traits, access to the biggest, most diverse set of human genomes is a strategic edge. The technology could propel China to dominate global pharmaceuticals, and also potentially lead to genetically enhanced soldiers, or engineered pathogens to target the U.S. population or food supply, the advisors said

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From the revelation that the whole Russia collusion narrative was the result of dirty tricks played by the Hillary Clinton campaign to the validation of the Hunter Biden laptop leaks, to the realization that the Biden administration knows nothing about how corporations make money and pay their taxes, current events are a cornucopia of ironies.

Babylon Bee.

A chilling prospect.

God does not subtract from our allotted lifespan the time spent petting a cat.

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When was the last time you stated a thought like, “At least we haven’t completely lost our republic,” and followed that with a quickly stated, “Knock on wood,” looking for a wooden object or knocking your forehead as an easy substitute? Or made a wish when blowing out candles on your birthday cake? Or carried a rabbit’s foot or other favored item for good luck? Many of us follow these practices and sometimes even realize that we do them playfully, without an expectation for results. Mostly. These wishes and desires are a form of “magical thinking” and are relatively harmless in most situations. But I propose that in this time of COVID-19, magical thinking has infected the worldwide population.

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Every human culture has believed in the existence of other beings, monstrous humanoids, sapient but inhuman. They have gone by different names: boogeymen, bugbear, cyclopes, giant, jotun, ogre, oni, troll, yeti, and more. But they are always feared, lurkers in the shadows, threats to the clan, tribe, or hearth. Dungeons & Dragons didn’t create these monsters, and (despite ongoing controversies) they don’t represent anything modern. Humanity’s legendary heroes have been fighting these monsters since time immemorial.

The real question is why — why does every civilization have similar myths? Why does every culture have legends of monstrous humanoids, and why are they are always depicted as fearsome and dangerous?

Because the legends were real. The orcs were real.

That is, at least, the argument offered by Danny Vendramini in his book Them and Us: How Neanderthal Predation Created Modern Humans.

Read it.

The following clip is an excerpt from a panel discussion about the vax on Spanish TV. When the talk turns to the dangers of the experimental mRNA treatment for the Wuhan Coronavirus, half the panelists are unable to bear any further conversation and walk off the set.

The Narrative, the whole Narrative, and nothing but the Narrative.

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The white sailboat outside of Michelin Group’s Swiss office doesn’t have a sail at all. Instead, it has a wing. The puffy, inflatable structure towers over the vessel, resembling an enormous meringue with a spine of stiff peaks. At sea, it cuts through the wind like an airplane wing, sending the sailboat flying across the water. Now Michelin wants to fit the technology onto cargo ships. The goal is to harness wind energy to reduce the use of diesel fuel—and thus curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The question, of course, whether the additional expense is justified by the transportation cost saving.

I’d love to watch the cost accountants wrestle with what monetary value to give to Virtue Signaling.

Read it.

“Meritocracy” was coined as a pejorative, has enjoyed a few decades as an aspiration, and is now returning to its original status, as progressives denounce the notion that attention to “merit” is anything more than camouflage for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and what new isms and phobias have been discovered since three o’clock yesterday. Part I of this series examined the “soft” anti-meritocratic argument, the one advanced by the term’s originator, Baron Michael Young, and carried on today by Charles Murray, ideologically a very different figure.

The Hill tells The Truth for a change.

A recent Internal Revenue Service (IRS) survey found that 95 percent of Americans believe it is everyone’s civic duty to pay their fair share of taxes. They also believe the current system is unfair, largely benefitting big business and rich people. But the truth is American business pays 93 percent of the nation’s taxes, and the top 1 percent pay over one-third of income taxes.

In actuality, corporate taxes are paid by shareholders, workers and consumers, with a substantial share passed on through retail prices or lower wages. As economist Scott Lincicome points out, this can result in lower investment and economic growth, thus reducing wages and living standards, less innovation and lower productivity. An OECD study of major taxes and their impact on economic growth and real wages found that corporate taxes were the most harmful.

But what about tax loopholes and the fact that many big companies do not pay corporate federal taxes? The truth is that the current tax code allows carryforward losses, tax credits for investments in research and development (R&D), investment in equipment and machinery and stock-based employee compensation. These constitute tax avoidance — not tax evasion.

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Apparently nobody tried holding a candle to their butt and ripping off a huge fart.

I hate to think that scientists are less inventive than high school boys.

‘Ideas are elusive, slippery things. Best to keep a pad of paper and a pencil at your bedside, so you can stab them during the night before they get away.’

– Earl Nightingale

Read it.

Just in case.

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Today I want to start from SimCity because it’s the game that forced people to look into the issue of ideology and bias in games for the first time. It wasn’t a serious game but it was a game that begged to be taken seriously.
The other reason is that there are many urban planners here and like it or not, SimCity is the most well known representation of your profession so you can’t quite ignore it. In fact many planners of this generation mention SimCity as their first introduction to the topic.

The map is not the territory, and a simulation isn’t reality.

Read it.

But none of that money goes to you, of course.

Many firms promise that privacy is at the center of their businesses and that they’re careful to never sell information that can be traced back to a person. But researchers studying anonymized location data have shown just how misleading that claim can be.

The truth is, it’s hard to know all the ways in which your movements are being tracked and traded. Companies often reveal little about what apps serve as the sources of data they collect, what exactly that data consists of, and how far it travels. To piece together a picture of the ecosystem, The Markup reviewed the websites and marketing language of each of the 47 companies we identified as operating in the location data industry, as well as any information they revealed about how the data got to them.

The Other McCain does a deep dive.

Of course, it is entirely natural and understandable that, for example, farmers care about how government policy may affect agricultural interests, while auto factory workers are concerned with how legislation might help or harm the automobile industry. Likewise, we can understand that women will take a particular interest in issues relating their lives, that racial minorities are focused on issues that affect them, etc. Anyone who has read Federalist No. 10 knows that our system of government was established with the idea of balancing out the various interests of different factions, and far be it from me to deny to anyone the basic right to judge their own interests and to advocate for policies favorable to their interests. That’s just normal politics.

What we call identity politics, however, is something else entirely, involving activism and propaganda intended to incite collective resentment — the victimhood mentality — and to demonize others as perpetrators of oppression. Identity politics is simply organized hatred, and it follows a distinctly destructive pattern of logic.

Read it.

It’s so easy to think that simple solutions exist. But if you look at the history of ideas that actually worked, they tend to only be simple from a distance. The closer you get, the more you notice that the working idea is surrounding by a huge number of almost identical ideas that don’t work.

Take bicycles, for example. They seem simple and obvious, but it took two centuries to figure out all the details and most people today can’t actually locate the working idea amongst its neighbours.

…

It’s ok to think that things have flaws or could be improved. But it’s a trap to believe that it’s ever the case that a simple solution exists and everyone else is just too enfeebled of character to push the miracle button. All the miracle buttons that we know about have already been pressed.

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A 29-year-old man alleged to have been part of a group that blew up at least 15 cash machines in Germany managed to kill himself and injure an associate last year while filming a video tutorial on how to blow up ATMs, according to European authorities.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Austin’s battle over a police staffing ballot measure has a new heavyweight entering the ring: billionaire financier and Democratic Party activist George Soros.

In a bombshell announcement that threatens to shake up the Nov. 2 election, a political action committee opposed to Proposition A — which if passed would require the city to hire hundreds of police officers — says it has accepted a $500,000 donation from Soros.

ZMan’s weeklyl podcast. Highly recommended.

A central question of this age is can you have a peaceful and prosperous society without a well-defined people? If the answer is no, which surely seems to be the case, then the obvious question is can a people exist without a ruler committed to the preservation of the people? In this age, the rulers are committed to abdicating their responsibilities to the people on the grounds that there is no such thing as a people, at least there is no such thing as our people.

Since self-preservation is the primary duty of all life, the first duty of a human group with a common identity is the preservation of the group. Logically, a ruler that violates his duty to that prime directive, putting the very existence of the people into question, is a lethal threat to the people. Just as it is the duty of a life forms to do what they must to preserve their existence, it follows that it is the duty of a people to use any means necessary to preserve itself. It is self-evident.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

Scott has noted that Sen. Joe Manchin has “named his price point” on the spendapalooza bill: $1.5 trillion. Scott is right that this is still very bad, but it requires the progressives to shrink their wish list by more than half—by a full $2 trillion. I’d love to be a fly on the wall in the House Democratic caucus meetings and sub-meetings right now, because if there is no honor among thieves, imagine how painful it is to the progressive raiders of the treasury when they have to start trading off their once-in-a-generation wish lists.

Will the Progs agree to cut back universal Pre-K, or full Medicare vision and dental coverage? How about the $3 billion for “tree equity” (maybe my favorite part of the bill)? For that matter, how about the main features of the “Green New Deal”?

Read it.

A Senate subcommittee last week held a hearing filled with the same old tiresome propaganda that the left has peddled for a decade to attack commonsense election reforms as a racially motivated plot to “suppress” votes.

Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.

Read it.

A Wisconsin Democratic Senate frontrunner held a San Francisco fundraiser with the son of left-wing terrorists and a California state lawmaker who wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Read it. And watch the video.

The following video gives a history of the development of the drug ivermectin, and an account of its suppression after it was shown to be the most effective treatment (both preventive and ameliorative) for COVID-19.

Read it.

In 1981, Washington Post journalist Joel Garreau attempted to understand the many subcultures of America by examining in detail the differences between different states. He came away unsatisfied, and the ultimate result of this dissatisfaction was an influential book, The Nine Nations of North America. In it, he ignored these often-arbitrary state boundaries and divided America into nine regional “nations” that he argued corresponded more with cultural, socio-economic and demographic realities.

One of his nine “nations” of American he named The Empty Quarter.

Centered around the Rocky Mountains it extended out into adjacent and culturally and demographically similar territory. Garreau’s book was a minor sensation and, directly or indirectly, it launched several similar efforts over the ensuing decades — most recently Colin Woodard’s 2020 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. Woodard’s “Far West” nation in his book encompassed the core states of Garreau’s Empty Quarter while tweaking it with some of his own additions.

ZMan gets back to basic.

Property is a useful metric in this regard because it is simple and the economic basis of Western society. Even in feudalism property rights were respected, because ownership was what made the system possible. The right to speak out or organize are up for debate to some degree, but the right to own the fruits of your labor is the starting point for social organization in the West. It is what makes communism alien and why it has always been the domain of outsiders and subversives.

ZMan is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Early in the Covid panic it was clear that some people were embracing the panic for reasons that had nothing to do with public health. The harridan assaulting people in the grocery store over the bizarre new rules was doing it because suddenly she had a purpose to her life. This was starkly obvious with the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who made herself harridan-in-chief. All of a sudden, inconsequential people had purpose and meaning to their lives.

Read it

Face it: Human beings are pretty stupid sometimes. We fall for astrology, vote for morons, buy into conspiracy theories, and send our money to obvious scammers. Today, all this seems to be getting worse as “fake news” and “disinformation” take root and the country fragments along partisan lines—not just when it comes to political beliefs but even when it comes to basic facts.

Oddly enough, though, we’re also stunningly brilliant. Not only have the brightest among us produced stunning feats of science and technology, but even normal people, working without modern tools, can use reason to improve their lives. The hunting-and-gathering that humans did long ago required extensive knowledge and careful thought about plants, seasons, animal behavior, and how humans might get what they want from the world around them.

Steven Pinker keeps trying to get people to be more rational. Obviously, it’s not working. But it provides a great market for his books.

Zman’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

It looks like the news next week will be about the legitimacy question as someone leaked a draft copy of the Arizona audit report this morning. This was done so the media could promote the regime lines about the election. When the real report is released, it will not support the coordinated headlines this morning, but by the time the real report is out it will be “old news” and ignored. People will be left with the official narrative and never learn the truth. This is a standard ploy.

What these people do not realize is that this undermines the credibility of the system rather than knocking the critics for a loop. After all, it should be the job of the media to ask who leaked the draft and what was her motives. Someone in the media should ask why the exact same story is in dozens of news sites at the same time. Of course, no one will ask, and the critics will take the silence and the obvious coordination as proof that their claims are correct. The coordinated lies just make things worse.

Babylon Bee.

The natural world is teeming with God’s creative genius, engineering brilliance, and artistic beauty. Our only complaint? WE NEED MORE. Seriously–we’ve had the same animals since God created the universe. Would it hurt to get some new ones? We at the Babylon Bee are geniuses when it comes to thinking of new animal designs. Here are ten ideas.

ZMan does a deep dive.

In the present crisis, the culture of the ruling class is lacking the tools to address the problems, but it also lacks the sort of people who will look outside the system. It has been selecting for highly conservative people, with respect to the culture of the managerial class, for generations now. It is why the system violently vomited up Donald Trump and continues to dry heave over the memory of him. The culture of the ruling class is built around adversity to change.

The Other McCain weighs in.

Nearly all my fellow conservatives are shrieking in anger at MSNBC’s Joy Reid for saying something that is actually true: There is such a thing as “Missing White Woman Syndrome,” and we ought to call it out when — as in the case of Gabby Petito — it dominates the news cycle.

…

A blonde, blue-eyed “social media influencer” is not typical of murder victims, who are disproportionately male and black. During the month of August, when Gabby and her boyfriend were on their excursion across the West, 87 people were killed and 424 were wounded in Chicago. Did any of those Chicago victims make national news? Well, about 83% of the victims in Chicago were black, and none were blonde, blue-eyed 22-year-old “social media influencers.” Not newsworthy, you see?

Read it.

Gender identity ideology began as a way to conceptualise transgender people. According to this belief system, they have a gender identity that doesn’t match the sex they were “assigned at birth”. This ideology currently has the endorsement of governments, educational institutions and NGOs worldwide — a state of affairs that has come about with remarkably little comment. Contradicting this dogma has become suddenly taboo, even via statements nobody would have considered controversial ten years ago, such as arguing that the national census should continue to collect data on people’s biological sex, or that sex itself is a fixed and binary characteristic.

In spite of the pressure, this summer has seen the publication of three new non-fiction books by “gender critical” feminist writers who oppose gender ideology.