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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

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.

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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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

“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

Read it.

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.