Read it.

Now, a growing field called “nutrigenomics” aims to provide people with personalized lifestyle guidance, based on their DNA. But is this a breakthrough for nutrition science, or just another fad?

Dead cow and spuds is the basis of all true civilization.

Read it.

The quality of advice depends upon the degree of metanoia it induces in the recipient.

Matt Ridley.

With a laboratory leak in Wuhan looking more and more likely as the source of the pandemic, the Chinese authorities are not the only ones dismayed. Western environmentalists had been hoping to turn the pandemic into a fable about humankind’s brutal rape of Gaia. Even if ‘wet’ wildlife markets and smuggled pangolins were exonerated in this case, they argued, and the outbreak came from some direct contact with bats, the moral lesson was ecological. Deforestation and climate change had left infected bats stressed and with nowhere to go but towns. Or it had driven desperate people into bat-infested caves in search of food or profit.

Read it.

A devastating pandemic with massive unemployment, followed by a shortage of workers during the recovery is forming a boon for the automation industry.

The shortage of workers is exacerbated by the generous government welfare and unemployment benefits.

So, businesses are forced to automate more whether they like it or not, thus eliminating more jobs.

Ultimately, when the workers who are lounging at home now eventually want (or are forced) to go back to work won’t have as many jobs to go back to.

So the political pressure will build to provide more taxpayer-funded welfare benefits.

Eventually we will wind up as Eloi and Morlocks, except that the Morlocks will look like Jeff Bezos and the Eloi like Stacy Abrams.

I’m glad I won’t live to see it (I hope).

Read it.

You can tell that Clive Riordan, the villain in Edward Dmytryk’s Obsession (1949), is a thwarted and disturbed person because he owns an elaborate model railway. Admittedly, there are other indications: primarily the way he kidnaps his wife’s lover and holds the man captive in the basement of a blitzed building, slowly filling the bath of acid in which he plans to dissolve his corpse. It is the scenes of Riordan at play, however, that are truly damning. Running locomotives around the chest-high papier-mâché mountain range that dominates his basement, his megalomania and sadism are thrown into stark relief. This urbane postwar cuckold becomes legible as an ancestor of the basement-dwelling incel of contemporary folklore, impotently venting his frustrations via endless online deathmatches.

I found myself thinking of Obsession in September 2020, when Joe Biden’s campaign team created an island in the Nintendo game Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020). Visitors could enjoy an ice cream with bobbleheaded Joe and Kamala avatars before picking up TEAM JOE signs for display on their very own in-game lawns. They could also pay a visit to ‘Joe’s Train Town’, a basement room featuring an array of model railway sets. This touch was presumably meant to evoke Biden’s old-fashioned decency and pioneer spirit, while expressing a vaguely greenish, vaguely leftish regard for mass-transit infrastructure; I took it as confirmation that anyone who aspires to be Commander in Chief must have a Riordanesque streak.

Read it.

Founded in 1937, the Institute of Shortening and Edible Oils is the national trade association located in Washington, D.C. advocating on behalf of refiners who produce 95% of domestic edible fats and oils.

Typically, trade associations exist to establish barriers to entry in favor of existing members and to lobby for favorable treatment on the part of government.

Really. What were they thinking?

Read it.

In my twenties, I believed that successful people hold secret knowledge leading to their success. I obsessed over “self-help porn”: books, videos, and blogs promising to reveal little secrets that would make me successful one day, too.

But when I started observing and talking to people I consider successful, I noticed they don’t do anything extraordinary. In fact, they do quite the opposite. They follow “boring” advice I already heard a million times in proverbs, religious and old philosophy stories, and even from my grandma.

And it makes sense!. It has already been figured out for thousands of years! There is nothing new a Brian can write in his next New York Times bestseller while sipping a $9 latte that I didn’t hear before. All I ever had to do is to act on that well-known advice.

Actually, there is a secret body of knowledge that guarantees success, but you people aren’t authorized to access it. Sorry.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

Here at iSteve, I’m on the Emmett Till Beat beat 24×7, covering all the stop-the-presses coverage of the latest developments in the ever-evolving Emmett Till story, such as this new New York Times news story about an Emmett Till sign being briefly unaccounted for this week.

Read it.

Gordon Haff was at Dartmouth about the same time that I was at Yale, and this list brings back a lot of dear memories of my youth. I endorse his choices up to Olivia Butler, who unfortunately marked the beginning of Wokeness in SF, which has pretty much destroyed the value of the traditional Hugo and Nebula awards and divided the field effectively into two different parts.

Excuse me while I go read Weapon Shops of Isher again….

Read it.

This is The New Yorker (“Fifty-one, with light-green eyes and a dark beard that lend him a mischievous air….), so I’d want to confirm this with another source.

Read it.

The dirty little secret of the ‘intellectual property’ racket unmasked: Having a government-enforced artificial monopoly makes a business focus on rent-seeking rather than innovation.

Read it.

Gov. Greg Abbott revealed the website in June, after announcing that the state had set up a $250 million ”down payment” on a border wall. A spokesperson for Abbott told the Tribune that the governor is grateful for the support that that has come in as Texas ”fills the gap created by President [Joe] Biden and steps up to secure our southern border.”

ZMan nails it.

False consciousness is term probably coined by Friedrich Engels to describe a scenario where a subordinate class embraces the ideology of the ruling class, even though the ideology guarantees their subordination. In the communist view of things, workers embraced the bourgeois values of capitalist society, even though it meant they remained at the bottom of the social hierarchy. It was an interesting bit of projection that has been a feature of radicalism since the beginning.

To be a radical in the conventional sense of Western politics starts with a heavy dose of self-deception. Radicals are rarely from the subordinate class. Almost always they are from the ruling elite. They are intellectuals raised in leisure, but convinced they are the authentic voice of the masses. The rare few from the masses have been elevated because they confirm the bourgeois radical’s need for affirmation. As a reward, the striver gets to live in the farmhouse with the pigs.

…

Just as conservatism is a bone the system throws to middle-class white people to keep them busy; socialism is a bone tossed to upper-middle class white people to make them feel special. One of the remarkable features of the Bernie Bro phenomenon is that it is whiter than a Klan rally. Scroll through the clips of the Jimmy Dore show or the Young Turks and it is nothing but palefaces. In no way does this brand of radicalism look anything like the people they claim to represent.

ZMan takes the long view.

When you are living through an age, it is very difficult to see the currents with which the age will be identified. Few people living in the Jazz Age would have guessed they were living in the Jazz Age. In this age, society is whipsawed by one trend after another, so it seems impossible to know which one will be remembered. Maybe this is the geriatric age where aging Baby Boomers ruled the day. Perhaps the democratic age, where mob rule plunged the West into darkness and chaos.

One option may be the age of meaning. This is the time when people are always searching about for meaning and purpose in their lives. They turn the trivial into all-important moments, so they can pretend to be in a struggle. They invent victims of imaginary oppression so they can play the white knight. Every crisis, it turned into a crusade that quickly takes on the trappings of religion. Ours is an age where everyone is on a vision quest and they force the rest of us to play along.

I propose The Age of Identity in the Face of Reality. “That’s My Truth and I’m Sticking to It.”

Bourgeoise restlessness is not a new thing. This desire to do something important seems to be the result of leisure. Young men from good homes have gone off to seek adventure since there have been young men from good homes. We live in an age in which large swaths of the population are idle. Poverty is no longer a threat, as even the poor have more than they need. In one respect, the quest for meaning in a post-scarcity phenomenon driven by an excess of middle-class people.

Once inflation gets going, that will die quickly.

Read it.

“And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.” Luke 16:9.

Don’t think of it as selling out; think of it as buying in.

Steve Sailer.

If you are exposed to the horrific tropical diseases river blindness and lymphatic filariasis, you very much should ingest ivermectin. Ivermectin’s discoverers were awarded the 2015 Medicine Nobel Prize and Merck gives ivermectin away for free in the tropics.

Lileks.

On the way back to the Cities I thought of some writers who are perfectly empowered to discuss the fate and foibles of the Fargos of America, but would probably twitch in their seat if you drove them around, first out of fear that Red Indians would come whooping over the horizon, and then out of dismay that none of this comported with their preconceptions. There’s the classic movie theater, still open, all the marquee bulbs flashing. There’s where the symphony plays. There’s the museum. There’s the central library. There’s the coffee shop with the rainbow flag. There’s the 30s office building with Moderne lines; there’s the dense housing; there’s the bright new big school, lavishly funded. There’s the big newspaper building. There’s the University. Oh, look, there’s the other University. There’s the historic architecture. Here’s the river. Beyond all this, endless grain and toil.

That’s why there’s always a market, in the Big City, for a book by a Big City denizen (who, more often than not, didn’t grow up in the Big City)  chronicling a down-the-Zambezi-with-gun-and-camera expedition to Flyover Country, marveling at all of the Dirt People and what strange shenanigans they get up to.

ZMan digs deep.

If you were to compile a list of the most influential people in history, you would probably start with the most influential ideas. The people responsible for inventing those ideas or popularizing them would be on the list of influential people. Presumably, without those people, the ideas would not have had the same level of impact. Marx would be on the list because he came up with Marxism. Without Marx, it is hard to imagine that branch of socialism developing as it has over 150 years.

Christian Zionism is an idea that does not get much attention, despite the fact it has cast a long shadow over Western history. It is fair to say that Zionism would not exist if not for the Christian Zionists. As much as people like to talk about the influence of Jews and Judaism on the West, it was Christians and a peculiar strain of Christianity that made Zionism possible. In fact, the modern state of Israel probably owes its existence to the hard work of Christian Zionist.

Read it.

Paul Krugman needs to learn some geography. Last week, he wrote, “there’s no more room for housing” in California unless they build up. After all, he notes, “San Francisco is on a peninsula, Los Angeles is ringed by mountains.”

Yes, San Francisco is on a peninsula. But, immediately to the south of the city is San Mateo County, which — according to census data — is 68 percent rural open space. South of San Mateo is Santa Clara County, home of San Jose, which is 74 percent rural.

I’ve always thought that San Francisco ought to be a walled city, like Valetta.

Read it.

A good deal of the current discussion of vaccination takes it for granted that it is in almost everyone’s interest to get vaccinated, hence that failure to get vaccinated is evidence of false beliefs or irrational behavior. To see why this is not true for everyone, it is worth looking at some numbers.

According to the CDC, the estimated infection fatality rate is 0.05 percent for 18-to-49-year-olds. I start my calculations with someone who is certain to get infected and has a life expectancy of thirty years. Thirty years is 262,800 hours, so the reduction in life expectancy is .0005×262,800=131 hours.

If you believe your chance of getting infected is only .1, not unreasonable if you regard the current wave as the last of the epidemic, that reduces it to 13 hours. If you are 25, which according to one source gives an IFR of .01, that takes it down to less than three hours. Saving that may not be worth the time and trouble of two injections, a likely few days of not very serious side effects and some small risk of more substantial side effects. The same is more true for younger ages or people in particularly good health.

Read it.

A lot of us no doubt have been wondering what act, by whom, will catalyze an uprising against the increasingly oppressive regime? I remember years ago an ABC program that demonstrated that good people will remain frozen in the face of wrongness until someone moves, someone acts, and then all of a sudden everyone moves to confront evil. So it is that many of us are watching and calculating and simply need to see the flow start and then we, too, will add out weight to the change that must come.

As many of you may recall I attended my first protests in 2020 in Sacramento against Covid restrictions that were trashing the livelihoods of small businesses, running over the rights to religious practice and assembly, and generally oppressing the people. The protests had little, if any, effect. Covid fear was high then, and as it waned in the latter part of the summer California calculatedly eased restrictions just enough to stave off dangerous discontent. When California started ramping oppression up again toward the end of the year is when I moved to East Tennessee.

And now our national oppression is in full force. Well, not actually full force if you have read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. But certainly at unprecedented levels in this country that for so long embraced individual rights and freedoms. As we have been watching this regime take control and promote destructive policies, we have wondered how long will the people stand for it? What will cause the people, whom the regime sees as an existential threat, to see the regime as an existential threat to them? When will they make demands for change that cannot be ignored?

Read it.

Nanosatellite startup Spire Global didn’t set out to become a provider of signals intelligence (SIGINT). But with the accidental discovery that its antennas for weather forecasting were also picking up signals being used to jam the Global Positioning System, the pivot just made sense, according to Spire’s new-ish head of US government sales, Conor Brown.

“We actually first, sort of, serendipitously discovered this capability when we were calibrating our first reflectometry satellites,” he told Breaking Defense in advance of last week’s annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.

“It’s been really interesting to repurpose our weather satellites, and apply them to a completely different mission set,” he added. “And so we’re looking at a lot of future architectures — more purpose built solutions, but also maximizing the capability of our satellites on orbit.”

Read it.

“Diversity”—or more properly, ethnopolitics—has long been championed by the Democratic party. So why are California’s 15.6 million Latinos suddenly making liberals nervous? Recent polls suggest that over 54 percent of Latinos support the recall of Governor Gavin Newsom. Highly paid political consultants across the nation are scrambling to come up with an explanation. Why would La Raza suddenly turn on Newsom and the Democratic Party, which has claimed the Latino vote for decades?

When you stop looking at California politics strictly in terms of ethnic allegiances, and consider economics, growth, and opportunity, the answer is obvious: Latinos embody traditional middle-class values of work and success. In short, they still believe in and cherish the California Dream.

With their near-total control of California politics, Democrats have enacted high tax and anti-upward mobility policies. The state’s leadership has attacked middle class virtues such as home ownership, free enterprise, educational advancement, savings, and safety.?California’s historically white middle class is in flight to other states, creating a void which Latinos now fill. As the newest inductees into the American middle class, Latinos remember our roots and remember that we have the most to lose.

Read it.

Pigs are smarter than you might think.

Dennis Prager.

Imagine if some of the biggest cities in America seceded from their states. Imagine Illinois without Chicago, Pennsylvania without Philadelphia, California without Los Angeles or San Francisco, New York state without New York City, or Texas without Houston, Dallas or San Antonio.

Those states would lose a major tax base and some of their best orchestras and other artistic institutions. But the gains in quality of life would completely offset any financial or artistic losses.

That’s the way Britain does it. Major urban areas are separated out from their surrounding rural areas.

Big cities have been and continue to be centers of destructive ideas, and the people living in them are generally coarser and often just plain meaner. Of course, there are decent individuals in big cities and obnoxious people outside of big cities. But having a greater proportion of nice to obnoxious is more likely in smaller cities and other nonurban areas. Everyone reading this knows that one is more likely to be treated warmly when entering a store or dining in a restaurant in Cooperstown, New York, than in Brooklyn, New York; in Laramie, Wyoming, than in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

As regards bad and destructive ideas, big cities almost hold a monopoly.

Tru Dat. Where did the crooked Democrat political machine originate? (Bingo!)

Read it.

This is from New York Magazine, pillar of the Narrative Media, so bear that in mind. But even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then, and this appears to be one of those.

Read it.

Read it.

The pandemic was supposed to prove the value of public health institutions like the CDC; instead, it exposed their inability to deal with a serious pandemic without serious errors. Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, worries that these failures have a deeper cause: as the citizens of countries like the United States come to trust each other less and less, they are increasingly incapable of meeting the big challenges that await them.

Read it.

Elwartowski is dressed, per his trademark style, in a Hawaiian shirt, a look that seems to convert his every setting into cheerful paradise. Affable, clean-shaven, and still boyish at 47, he is one of the most devoted members of a strange global tribe: seasteaders, as they call themselves, believe the answer to some of life’s most pressing problems is to build new cities on the ocean. Global poverty, health crises, environmental challenges: these issues might all be fixed out there, along Earth’s last (mostly) unclaimed frontier. According to seasteading logic, the current crop of land-based governments is not serving the world—and by breaking away and starting afresh, we might build a better society.

Read it.

The FBI released documents sought related to the death of former Democrat National Committee voter expansion data director Seth Rich, and a lawyer says it shows no signs of what has been considered a robbery murder.

Read it.

Convenience sometimes comes with risks that are not always apparent.

Joel Kotkin.

For years progressives, neo-conservatives, libertarians and business “visionaries” embraced the notion of inexorable progress leading humanity to more enlightened times. Optimistic notions about an “arc of history” bending toward greater prosperity and social justice were embraced by both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama. But these days, the arc of progress seems to have done an about face and become something of a circle, bending all the way back to autocracy and intolerance, while the optimism of the Bush or Obama years appears more naïve in retrospect with every passing day.

Indeed, “the notion of inexorable progress leading humanity to more enlightened times” is the very foundation of the progressive ideology; to the extent that ‘neo-conservatives’, ‘libertarians’, or ‘business visionaries’ embrace it, they signal that they are neither conservative, libertarian, nor visionary. The progessive icon of ‘the Right Side of History’ has become the new Golden Calf toward which all are expected to bow, and in whose honor all are expected to dance.

Read it.

The NYT is much less enthusiastic about RFK assassination conspiracy theorizing than the Washington Post.

Read it.

2021 Chicago Council Survey data show a majority of Americans support a range of US policies towards Taiwan: recognition as an independent country, inclusion in international organizations, and a US-Taiwan free trade agreement.

Read it.

I frequently listen to Scott Adams’s daily blog — Coffee with Scott Adams. He presents an interesting take on the news of the day and analyzes how persuasive (or not) are certain techniques employed in news outlet propaganda. His audience skews conservative but Adams (provocatively) claims to “be left of Bernie”. In reality, all Adams is doing is promoting critical thinking whether you agree with his particular take on current events. Mrs Rodin, when she listens with me, treats Adam’s coffee klatch as a melodrama. Adams is capable of (frequently) sharing viewpoints with which Mrs Rodin (and others in his audience) do not agree and to which she voices her displeasure.

All this is by way of introduction: Adams’ view on “the Big Lie” (reformulated by Adams a la Trump as “that Biden won”) is that election fraud was not only probable but inevitable. Quoting Adams from memory, “Any system designed to be un-auditable will be used to cheat.” Or words to that effect. Adams does not direct this charge solely to the 2020 general election — it is a general observation true of everything.

I watch Coffee With Scott Adams every day. $7 a month to Locals will allow you to access the recorded videocasts asynchronously. Highly recommended.

“Instapundit” Glenn Harlan Reynolds.

In recent years, there have been a lot of catchphrases around science: “Follow the science!” “We believe in science!” Even “The science is settled!”

Well, sometimes it’s not settled. Sometimes it’s not even really science. But lots of people believe in it or follow it anyway. It’s a global problem.

Most recently, we learned that a widely noticed 2012 study co-authored by Dan Ariely — whom the journal Science refers to as a “superstar honesty researcher” — was based on fake data.

Read it.

When it opened 2 1/2 years ago near the Hudson River, the 150-foot-tall (46-meter-tall) piece of public art known as the Vessel looked like another surefire Manhattan tourist draw. It’s a strange honeycomb of platforms and staircases, partially ringed by skyscrapers, offered striking views of the waterfront and quickly became an Instagram favorite.

But these days it stands closed and empty, its entrances blocked off with chains or metal barricades, after a 14-year-old boy last month became the fourth person to fatally leap from the sculpture.

The death on July 29, a mere two months after the sculpture had reopened following previous suicides, has reinvigorated a call for real estate developer Related Companies to raise the height of the waist-high railings on the sides of the stairs and platforms.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

If I were a Marxist, I might be tempted to say that the obligatory switch to electric cars is a conspiracy of the rich against the poor to enslave them yet further. (By the poor, I mean of course the relatively poor, not the absolutely destitute.)

Many of the relatively poor have old, cheap, and no doubt polluting vehicles. Many of these poor need such vehicles to go wherever they need to go. Tradesmen and craftsmen in a small way of business often have old diesel vans that will soon be prohibited; they will have to replace them with far more expensive electric types. This will have the great advantage of forcing them either to indebt themselves in order to buy them, or to go out of business altogether, thus leaving the field to larger businesses. This would be but a small step in the march to monopoly that the Marxists predict.

Read it.

For one thing, you can subtract the expense of commuting, plus the non-monetary value of the wear and tear on your psyche.

I know the feeling.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

“Just wait ’til” arguments are emotion, not reason.

This may not be evident to the people who need to know; the people who go around using them, with varying degrees of frequency. It is abundantly apparent to those of us who have been continually on the receiving end of them for the last sixteen to nineteen months. “Just wait ’til you catch the ‘vid.” “Just wait ’til you’re on a ventilator.” “Just wait ’til you suffer permanent lung or organ damage.” “Just wait ’til it’s your family members who have it, and they caught it from you.”

These are not rational arguments. They feel like they are, to the person who is making them. That’s the problem. Feel.