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Adolescents used to identify with a party but polarization was muted by a general warmth towards authority figures. Today, however, the warmth is gone and adolescents are as polarized as adults which has implications for future polarization and generalized distrust.

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Apple is reportedly researching ways to use the cameras inside of the iPhone to detect childhood autism, aiming to use data from the camera to observe a child’s behavior that could be used for early diagnosis, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.

UPDATE: iPhone & Apple Watch study launches to detect depression, dementia

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The real story is the slow—but gaining-in-speed—exodus from California to states with lower or no state taxes. This mass exit likely reduced the number of people who might have voted to oust Newsom. Then there’s the rising cost of just about everything, including gasoline. At nearly $6 a gallon at some stations in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Los Angeles, California has the highest average price for gas in the nation.

There are also other forces at work.

Apparently I’m not the only one who noticed the resemblance.

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Here are some ideas of what Republicans could do if they actually wanted to motivate voters to show up for them at the polls ever again after Lucy-with-the-footballing us for decades.

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“I am wary of a lot of other things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny. I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.” The Deep Blue Good-By

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Long before the earliest animals swam through the water-covered surface of Earth’s ancient past, one of the most important encounters in the history of life took place. A primitive bacterium was engulfed by our oldest ancestor — a solo, free-floating cell. The two fused to form a mutually beneficial relationship that has lasted more than a billion years, with the latter providing a safe, comfortable home and the former becoming a powerhouse, fueling the processes necessary to maintain life.

That’s the best hypothesis to date for how the cellular components, or organelles, known as mitochondria came to be. Today, trillions of these bacterial descendants live within our bodies, churning out ATP, the molecular energy source that sustains our cells. Despite being inextricably integrated into the machinery of the human body, mitochondria also carry remnants of their bacterial past, such as their own set of DNA.

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I’ve always wondered about that.

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The differences between Chris and Susan are striking. Susan was born to an extremely wealthy family, and married an extremely wealthy man. Now she’s in her 50’s, and divorced, and finds herself very wealthy with no obvious skills to contribute to, well, anybody. It must be a weird feeling. She has gradually slipped down the social strata throughout her life. From a fabulously wealthy upbringing, to not getting into a prestigious college, to partying away four years at a state school, to marrying a wealthy man and traveling the world on his dime. Now she’s single, divorced, and not all that important to anyone. She’s still wealthy, but nothing else is going right.

Chris was born of very modest means, grew up working on his grandfather’s farm, went from state schools and the military to Harvard, to consulting, to finance, and now is at the top of the heap. He has had a difficult rise, but has succeeded every step of the way, and now, in his 50’s, he is very important to a lot of people, and is setting himself up for an early and very comfortable retirement.

Susan looks down her nose at people like Chris. For a lot of reasons. Susan is an enlightened atheist. Chris is a devout Catholic. Chris doesn’t know anything about the best ski slopes in Austria, or French wine, or Italian shoes. To Susan, he’s just a rat in the rat race, unlike her position as a worldly philosopher, above such petty concerns.

Chris knows exactly who Susan is, too. Or at least, people like her. When I suggested that he could use the expertise of people like her, he initially thought I was kidding. And then, he concluded that I just had no idea what I was talking about, but he was too nice to point out how absurd I sounded. Even though we both knew that he was right.

Severian does some pharmacology.

I’m not sure if “comorbidity” is the right word — remember, not that kind of doctor — but I’d wager long money that there is no addict on this earth who is addicted to one drug exclusively. Sure, his drug of choice is heroin, but if he can’t find that he’ll go down the list until he gets altered on something, because in a lot of ways, “___ addict” is something like a category error. You’re an addict first; what you’re technically addicted to is epiphenomenal.

‘Addict’ is a personality disorder, and (like stupid) it can’t really be fixed.

Scott Adams often tells the story of his step-son, who died of a fentanyl overdose — they tried on multiple occasions to rehabilitate him, but all attempts failed on the rock of the fact that he just preferred being high to being straight, and that’s not something that you can fix from the outside.

Read it.

Sterile, free of toxic metals, isotonic and good for the heart, beer is undeserving of decades of bad press, say David Williams and Jeremy Philpott.

Beer is one of the most ancient foods known to humankind. Grain was being fermented to brew beer as long ago as ca 3500 BC – 2000 years before it was used in baking bread. Used as payment, ration, or gift, beer has been drunk and celebrated by people all over the world for thousands of years. Up to 300 years ago it was safer to drink beer than surface water because the water used in brewing had been boiled, and until recently stout was frequently prescribed for post-natal women and the infirm.

It still tastes like beer. Make it taste like Pepsi and then come talk to me. ‘Sure it tastes bad but it’s good for you!’ Well, tastes bad plus good for you makes it ‘medicine’, and I only take medicine when told to by a doctor. When my Primary Care Physician says ‘drink a six-pack of Coors and call me in the morning’, then I’ll think about it.

John C. Wright discusses ‘gender roles’ and why we have them.

Read The Whole Thing. I agree with every word of it.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

An old and mostly true observation about revolutions is that they end up where they started with a new set of rulers doing pretty much the same things as the rulers they deposed in the revolution. Stalin was the Tsar decorated with the ideological trappings of the revolution. Napoleon was a secular version of the Sun King. The people hiding behind razor wire and armed men this weekend in the imperial capital are the authoritarians they claimed to have deposed last election.

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Liberal outlets often try to ignore conservative journalism, refusing to recognize facts and substance that they fear are damaging to the Democrats. The closer the election gets, the more hypersensitive their censoring instincts become. They repeated Democrat claims of “Russian misinformation” and moved on.

This never happens to Bob Woodward, the “legend” of The Washington Post. He is, to liberals, the gold standard of information. He never commits misinformation. Nothing ever needs to be substantiated. No source ever needs to be identified. No “reconstructed conversation” is ever doubted. The Bible is treated less reverently than Woodward’s latest gospel.

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With talk of D.C. statehood, there’s renewed interest in redrawing state boundaries across the U.S. Upstate New York doesn’t have much in common with New York City, or eastern Washington with Seattle. We’ve long been aware of this, but what’s new is the depth of the divide between, say, Washington’s Lincoln County (73% Trump) and King County (75% Biden). And it’s not just how they vote. In their most fundamental beliefs, they’re almost two different countries.

That doesn’t mean we’ll rejigger the map, however. Before that can happen, we’d need three things. First, it couldn’t happen without a perfect political alignment, with the party engineering the split ensconced in power in both the state and in the federal government. Second, the split would have to advantage that party. And third, the change must be seen to be excused by the extraordinary circumstances of the time.

Severian never fails to entertain.

Eurotrash art poseur: We are adrift in a sea of decadent luxury and  meaningless sex.

Moe: Uh-huh …so where might this sea be located?

What goes around, comes around.

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Leaders of New York City’s business community were heartened this week when Democratic mayoral nominee and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams came before them to promise that, under his administration, New York would “welcome business.” In keeping with his primary campaign rhetoric, Adams insisted that he would prevent the city from becoming “dysfunctional,” with a renewed focus on public safety.

These are welcome words. But a closer look at Adams’s campaign platform and long public record reveals a worrisome pattern of reversals, empty promises, and unfulfilled expectations that should at least temper voter optimism that New York City is turning a corner into sunshine.

For instance, while Adams vows to make New York City friendly to commerce, last year he co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed proposing a radical new corporate tax on information. “Years of chronic underinvestment in education, health care, housing and transit,” he wrote, challenge the city “to find new revenue sources.” The obvious place to impose new taxes, according to Adams, “is the data economy.”

As long as New Yorkers keep electing Democrats, they’re going to keep crapping in their own lunch pail.

Read it.

The key, of course, is figuring out how to monetize it.

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Microsoft poured cold water on hopes that its Windows on ARM solution will one day support Apple Silicon, saying that running ARM versions of Windows 11 on M1 Macs is not “a supported scenario.”

The software giant confirmed its plans to The Register last week, noting Windows 11 will not offer official support for M1 Macs through virtualization or on bare hardware.For months, users have relied on Windows Insider builds, specifically those developed for ARM architectures, to run Windows 10 and 11 virtual machines on M1 silicon, but that practice might soon be nearing an end.

A disappointment.

Check it out.

In this edition of The Stakes, Michael Anton, lecturer in politics and research fellow at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center, and a Claremont senior fellow, is joined by Matt Peterson, founding editor of The American Mind. The two discuss the massive and widening rift between California and Texas, both as individual states and as standard-bearers for their respective sides of the aisle. In the coming “big sort,” the question will be: which state is better for everyday Americans?

ZMan follows life imitating art.

At some point in the future, the ape historians may look back at this time and call it the Bush – Clinton period of the American empire. The period started with the first Bush presidency in 1989, roughly corresponding with the end of the Cold War and concluding sometime around now. It is hard to know if this period is at an end or if it will stagger on for a while longer. It would surprise no one if Hillary Clinton or one of the Bush clan takes one last stab at the presidency in 2024.

The rivalry between the Bush family and the Clinton family mirrors the rivalry between the Compson and Snopes family in the William Faulkner novels. The Compson family represented the old Southern order that emerged from the wreckage of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The Snopes family represented the new, white trash culture that was slowly overtaking the old order. It was order and dignity at the end of its time versus an emergent disorder and lack of dignity.

Ben Thompson at Stratechery.

An excellent analysis of the recent anti-trust action decision. Thompson isn’t a lawyer, as far as I know, but he would make a good one. Of special note:

This gets at a larger problem in many tech markets: the tendency towards duopoly, which often lets one company cover for the other acting anti-competitively. In the case of Apple and Google:

• Android’s presence in the market means that Apple can act anticompetitively with its App Store policies (which Google is happy to ape).
• Apple’s privacy focus justifies decisions like limiting trackers, restricting cookies, and cutting off in-app analytics; Google happily follows Apple’s lead, which impacts its advertising rivals far more than it does Google, improving their relative competitive position.
• Apple earns billions of dollars giving its customers the best default search experience, even as that ensures that Google will remain the best search engine (and raises questions about the sincerity of Apple’s privacy rhetoric).

This isn’t the only duopoly: Google and Facebook jointly dominate digital advertising, Microsoft and Google jointly dominate productivity applications, Microsoft and Amazon jointly dominate the public cloud, and Amazon and Google jointly dominate shopping searches. And, while all of these companies compete, those competitive forces have set nearly all of these duopolies into fairly stable positions that justify cooperation of the sort documented between Apple and Google, even as any one company alone is able to use its rival as justification for avoiding antitrust scrutiny.

Apple’s requirement that iOS apps pay Apple the full 30% commission for ‘in-app purchases’ is the reason nobody uses the Amazon app on the iPhone, which will not let you make purchases through the app, but merely lets you add products to a ‘shopping list’, presumably from which you can make the actual purchase from Amazon through a browser, where the in-app purchase commission doesn’t apply. This is a serious inconvenience for the user, but Jeff Bezos didn’t get to be the world’s richest man by forking over 30% of the purchase price to Tim Cook.

Read it.

Good. Stay out! Your kind ruined California – we don’t want that here.

Remote workers, on the other hand – who don’t inflict their filthy heathen ways on our politics – are very welcome. The more the merrier.

Read it.

The gods and goddesses of Ancient Egypt were an integral part of the people’s everyday lives. It is not surprising then that there were over 2,000 deities in the Egyptian pantheon. Some of these deities’ names are well known: Isis, Osiris, Horus, Amun, Ra, Hathor, Bastet, Thoth, Anubis, and Ptah while many others less so.

This comprehensive list of the Egyptian pantheon reminds me of nothing so much as a list of current Federal and State government agencies.

The more famous gods became state deities while others were associated with a specific region or, in some cases, a ritual or role.

Pretty keen resemblance.

The goddess Qebhet, for example, is a little known deity who offered cool water to the souls of the dead as they awaited judgment in the afterlife, and Seshat was the goddess of written words and specific measurements overshadowed by Thoth, the better known god of writing and patron of scribes.

That would be the SSA (Social Security Administration), National Bureau of Standards, and the Department of Education.

These gods all had names, individual personalities and characteristics, wore different kinds of clothing, held different objects as sacred, presided over their own domains of influence, and reacted in highly individualistic ways to events. Each deity had their own area of expertise but were often associated with several spheres of human life.

See? Nailed it.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line.

Based on what I’ve read and seen, the prevailing narrative on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is that the war on terror went pear-shaped. 9/11 presented a test, and we failed it.

On September 12, 2001, America was unified as it hadn’t been for decades. Our allies were fully behind us. But we blew it, or rather the Bush administration did by plunging us into war in Iraq. So I keep reading and hearing.

I disagree. My view is that we won the first 20 years of the long war on terror. Sure, we made many mistakes, as always happens in difficult wars. But there hasn’t been an attack on our homeland of anything remotely like 9/11’s scale in 20 years.

Few predicted this on 9/12, and the fact that the grim predictions of that time didn’t come true isn’t down to luck. It’s due largely to the war on terror.

This alone represents victory to me.

Read it.

After conducting an extensive review of the literature and evidence of long-term human evolution, scientists Tim Waring and Zach Wood concluded that humans are experiencing a “special evolutionary transition” in which the importance of culture, such as learned knowledge, practices and skills, is surpassing the value of genes as the primary driver of human evolution.

Culture is an under-appreciated factor in human evolution, Waring says. Like genes, culture helps people adjust to their environment and meet the challenges of survival and reproduction. Culture, however, does so more effectively than genes because the transfer of knowledge is faster and more flexible than the inheritance of genes, according to Waring and Wood.

Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

An epistemological point I try to make is that there really isn’t all that much Fake News in terms of outright hoaxes in the press. Instead, there is an intractably vast abundance of news, countless facts which people can’t be expected to remember unless it fits into a well-worn narrative, usually about who or what is Good and who or what is bad.

For example, if racial profiling pushed by George W. Bush had contributed to 9/11, you’d never ever hear the end of it. After all, we all know, racial profiling is bad and 9/11 was bad, so of course racial profiling caused 9/11. Who could ever forget that?

In contrary, the high likelihood that George W. Bush’s anti-racial profiling campaign contributed to 9/11 … well, DOES NOT COMPUTE. Being against racial profiling is good but Bush was bad, so how can you fit the fact that Bush was against racial profiling into your narrative. Further, being against racial profiling is good while 9/11 was bad, so how can bad things flow from good things?

Read it.

Redlining a neighborhood is the act of the government and lenders turning off the spigot of loans in a neighborhood by drawing a line around a neighborhood and denying loans to be made in that neighborhood. Munger Place in Dallas is a good example of a neighborhood that was ripe for redlining and suffered the consequences of this policy.

Bluelining a neighborhood is the act of the government and lenders turning on a firehose of free government money and benefits to developers in a designated neighborhood to build low-income apartments. This free government money to developers might include a 99-year property tax exemption for school, City, County and Community College tax. Free government money might also include Community Development Funds, Housing Finance Corporation grants, and the City of Dallas bestowing benefits like added zoning density allowances not desired by the development’s neighbors. Dallas City Council District 3 is a good example of a neighborhood that has suffered the consequences of being blueline.

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And if you believe that one they’ll tell you another one.

Here’s an alternative: companies should offer a four or five-hour workday. It doesn’t have to be for everyone. For those interested, the tradeoff is that they will have to get in on time, work diligently without any internet shopping searches and remain dedicatedly focused. If you are able to produce what is expected or exceed expectations, you’re out by around 2:00 p.m.

Good luck with that.

Read it.

Recently an acquaintance who works for a major U.S. utility sent me brochures describing several schemes, and asked what I thought of them. Two store energy in mechanical ways, and one is a thermal storage system resembling the one profiled on WUWT a few weeks ago. As the time scale to switch to 100% renewables is constantly being advanced on us, even as we only begin to recognize the unsuitability of renewables alone, my acquaintance said, “We are going to waste a lot of money in the next ten years.”

A lot of it provided by taxpayers, whether they like it or not.

Read it.

This year marks a century since the world premiere of Karel ?apek’s drama R.U.R. in the town of Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic. By that very fact, it marks a century of the word “robot” which has spread into all world languages from the very title of ?apek’s drama, since the latter is an initialism standing for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti in the Czech original (meaning Rossum’s Universal Robots). It is the name of the megacorporation responsible for introduction of robots as a cheap and versatile workforce, and – no big spoiler there, considering how famous and even canonical the drama has become – ultimately responsible for the extinction of the human species.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

The news of late has been dominated by a few big items, all of which are driven by the ruling class commitment to their narratives. As a result, the show this week is about how the Cloud People are living in a simulation. Their reality is not only not our reality, but rather an approximation of it. If you imagine the Cloud People playing a live action role plating game of real life, their rantings make more sense.

They just had Mumbly Joe slur through a speech on Covid that sounded like it was given by an alien in another universe. This great emergency he thinks is happening outside the bubble is not happening at all. For most of the country, life is back to normal, except for the annoying interference of these idiots. Team Dementia, however, is sure the peasants are living through a version of the Black Death.

Read it.

American conservatives can be tiresome gloaters who devote an obscene amount of scribbling toward first principles, constitutional rights, and the like. They hold a self-assured conviction that conservative political philosophy, informed by a realistic and traditional understanding of human nature, is the lodestar by which any political community should be guided.

Instead of devoting so much time to political philosophy though, perhaps conservatives should have studied strategy and tactics. The progressive political left over the past few decades executed a long march through almost every major institution in every field in modern society. Journalism, entertainment, finance and big business, nonprofits, the administrative state, and so on have more or less been captured. Conservatives, by contrast, being inherently cautiously defensive, were outmatched. Taking the position of protecting first principles bred inertia instead of action, and only recently has the political right awakened to the grim reality that it has been outplayed in the public square.

Soon to be a major motion picture.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many things here in America. As every parent knows, one of the major disruptions took place in the realm of education. News has been coming out that among the disruptions in education has been the number of parents choosing to homeschool their kids. Now, we’re not talking about the quasi-homeschooling that all kids experienced when their schools closed and all the kids went to Zoom School, we’re talking about folks who have decided to unenroll their students from public or private school and teach their children themselves.

Some good news for a change.

‘It is a coincidence — totally a coincidence — that The Science always calls for something that is good for Big Pharma.’ — Scott Adams

Read it.

As editor of 99U, my inbox is (thankfully) filled with pitches of all kinds. Mainly, writers who’d like to contribute to this site and speakers who’d like to throw their hat in the ring for our yearly 99U Conference.

And most times, when we dig deeper into a specific person’s pitch, his or her purported authority is more of a facade to make them appear authoritative — and any ideas are actually a mosaic of people also trying to appear authoritative in a disconcerting house of cards.

They are what philosopher Harry Frankfurt would call “bullshitters.” Those that are giving advice for the sake of giving advice, without any regard as to how it is actually implemented, if it can even be implemented at all. “It’s not important to [the bullshitter] what the world really is like,” he says in a short video documentary about the phenomenon (below). “What is important is how he’d like to represent himself.”

Sounds like politics to me.

ZMan improves your vocabulary.

The fraud trial of Elizabeth Holmes begins this week, and it promises to be an enjoyable bit of theater for those interested in the workings of the Cloud People. Holmes founded a company called Theranos when she was just 19-years-old. She had dropped out of Stanford and promised to deliver miracle drug testing equipment. She attracted the support of all the beautiful people, who saw her as the living example of everything the Cloud People believed about the world.

…

In many respects, Holmes is the poster child for the new religion. The reimagined gender role for women is just women doing the things men normally do. You see this in movies where the normal male lead is replaced by a strong diverse female who does all the same things as a male lead, even the personality. There is really nothing new about the new gender roles. The new ideal female is nothing more than a fraud against nature, a fraud that is eventually undone by observable reality.

Steve Sailer.

In the 1970s, the science-denialist Establishment view was represented by actual scientists of achievement in their own specialties who were also cultured authors, such as Harvard biologists Stephen Jay Gould and the recently deceased Richard Lewontin.

But now the left’s intellectual pacesetters are instead minds like Florida A&M African American Studies and Magazine Production double major Ibram X. Kendi, crank amateur historian Nikole Hannah-Jones, ed school prole prof Robin DiAngelo, and Fleet Street hack Angela Saini.

David Friedman.

Ivermectin is a drug extensively used and approved by the FDA for treating problems having nothing to do with Covid, an anti-parasitic drug. There is some evidence that it is useful for treating Covid but apparently not very solid evidence. The FDA says it is not known to help with Covid and that studies are currently being done. It is also used to treat animals for parasites, and some people have taken the animal version, a much larger dose, with bad effects. Unfortunately, the question of whether it works has somehow gotten linked to political polarization, with people on the right thinking it does, people on the left that it doesn’t.