Read it.

The choices by Vyas and other members of the millennial generation of where to live have reshaped the country’s political geography over the past decade. They’ve left New York and California and settled in places less likely to be settings for TV sitcoms about 20-something urbanites, including Denver, Houston and Orlando, Florida. Drawn by jobs and overlooked cultural amenities, they’ve helped add new craft breweries, condominiums and liberal voters to these once more-conservative places.

Note the assumption that young people are liberal voters, as if that were a law of nature.

Read it.

Recent descriptive work suggests the type of college education (field or institution) is an important but neglected pathway through which individuals sort into homogeneous marriages. These descriptive studies raise the question of why college graduates are so likely to marry someone within their own institution or field of study. One possible explanation is that individuals match on traits correlated with the choice of education, such as innate ability, tastes or family environment. Another possible explanation is that the choice of college education causally impacts whether and whom one marries, either because of search frictions or preferences for spousal education. The goal of this paper is to sort out these explanations and, by doing so, examine the role of colleges as marriage markets. Using data from Norway to address key identification and measurement challenges, we find that colleges are local marriage markets, mattering greatly for whom one marries, not because of the pre-determined traits of the admitted students but as a direct result of attending a particular institution at a given time.

Matt Ridley.

Near Fukushima, ten years after the nuclear accident that followed the tsunami, wild boar have colonised the suburbs. Near Chernobyl, bison and wolves wander abandoned streets. There is no doubt that if humans vanished, indigenous wildlife would return in abundance, minus the mammoths and sabre-tooths that our ancestors extinguished.

Rewilding is all the rage, and it is coming soon to a hillside near you. But what form should it take and how should it be done? In practice, rewilding began quite a long time ago. A recent study found that, contrary to what most people believe, the world now has more trees than 35 years ago and much of the regrowth is natural regeneration: Europe alone has gained an area of tree cover greater than France.

If the Apocalypse comes, there will be plenty of pig to eat. Although it won’t be easy….

Severian reveals some inconvenient truth.

Since it’s impossible that blacks could fail tests at a higher rate than Whites for any reason other than Teh Rayciss, companies like Duke Power had to find some other way to weed out grossly unqualified morons from the interview process. Their ad hoc solution was to require college degrees for any meaningful job, because the SAT at that time was basically a jumped-up Wonderlic test — that is to say, functionally an IQ test, lightly disguised as a “scholastic achievement” test.

The inevitable happened. College degrees were suddenly much more valuable, so more people signed up for college. Which led to Bakke v. Regents (1978). And so the corporate gatekeeping had to keep intensifying in order to keep the morons out, such that by the late 1990s you needed a college degree to work as a shoeshine boy, because having the gumption to pay enough fees to the “college” to get the piece of paper at least demonstrates minimal sticktoitiveness….

Read it.

Brad Day and his wife Holly Kulak were first introduced to Pacaso in May, after a romantic sunset dinner in their yard. “And we just saw this drone, coming up and over our backyard,” Brad says. “And we’re like, what is that?”

Pacaso denies directing or paying a drone operator to film the neighborhood. But its website does have drone photos of the house in question, located at 1405 Old Winery Court. It says it bought the photos after the fact.

Nonetheless, after the drone incident, Brad and Holly got suspicious about what was going on in their neighborhood. About a week later, their neighbors told them they were moving and selling their house to a Limited Liability Corporation, or “LLC.” But they were super vague about it.

…

If you buy a share in a house, you’re able to stay in it 44 nights per year, in increments that can’t exceed 14 consecutive days per visit. You can also “gift” these stays to friends or family. Pacaso offers an app to handle the logistics of booking stays. It oversees management, maintenance, and cleaning of the property. In exchange for all this, it charges 12% of the home’s purchase price upfront and monthly fees going forward. If you buy a share in a house, you have to hold on to it for a year. After that, you can sell it and profit from any appreciation in the home’s value (or be on the hook for any depreciation).

Sort of like a time-share.

Read it.

Despite its adherents’ pose of rationality, scientism has a serious problem: it is either self-refuting or trivial. Take the first horn of this dilemma. The claim that scientism is true is not itself a scientific claim, not something that can be established using scientific methods. Indeed, that science is even a rational form of inquiry (let alone the only rational form of inquiry) is not something that can be established scientifically. For scientific inquiry itself rests on a number of philosophical assumptions: that there is an objective world external to the minds of scientists; that this world is governed by causal regularities; that the human intellect can uncover and accurately describe these regularities; and so forth. Since science presupposes these things, it cannot attempt to justify them without arguing in a circle. And if it cannot even establish that it is a reliable form of inquiry, it can hardly establish that it is the only reliable form. Both tasks would require “getting outside” science altogether and discovering from that extra-scientific vantage point that science conveys an accurate picture of reality—and in the case of scientism, that only science does so.

Read it.

One man’s quiet fight to save your face, your bank account, and the environment from an endless case of shaving rash.

I used a Gillette double-edged razor until I couldn’t find blades for it any more.

Read it.

Immigration, housing policy, the staffing of symphony orchestras, minutiae of voting rules, the teaching of math—all these issues can be defined and dominated by reference to the legacy of white supremacy. In those few cases where race seems not to pertain, the contiguous domains of #MeToo, trans rights, or climate change usually cover the dispute and allow the Left to determine the direction of debate. But race blankets everything.

Until Afghanistan. The botched withdrawal of our small but persistent presence from the obstreperous, Central Asian shithole extraordinaire has stunned the Regime. We watch as one spokesperson after another stumbles nonplused into a linguistic void because there are no white supremacists to blame. Neither Ted Cruz nor Tucker Carlson nor “the Koch Brothers” (one of whom is dead, though that hasn’t changed the formulation) ordered the military out of Bagram Air Force Base. The Oath Keepers did not encourage a resurgent Taliban to seize Kandahar, nor did anti-vaxxers convince the Afghan army to sell its weapons. It would be a stretch even for Jen Psaki to connect the collapse of the Ghani Administration to the retreat of glacial ice cover in the Hindu Kush, and from there to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords.

“Everything Woke turns to shit.” — Donald Trump

Read it.

In the past, activism was risky business. By definition, it disrupts lives, threatens chaos, causes disorder and often ends in violence. It should, at the very least, get you in trouble with your boss. But these days, as others have noted, being an activist is simply another part of one’s career, one’s social life, one’s brand. It’s something you perform on Twitter and brag about on LinkedIn. The risk has evaporated and that begs the question: what does real activism actually look like?

The Other McCain puts the boot in.

Said no one, ever.

At least not after the past week, during which President Basket Case has demonstrated once and for all what a hopeless failure he is.

Read it.

The Left desperately needs to convert your children. While the Right is open to children and supportive of large families, the Left is increasingly anti-childbirth (“Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children,” writes the Guardian’s Damian Carrington). So unless our new woke Left finds young converts to fill its ranks, it will die. They are working hard at this conversion project everywhere. Leftism is rampant in public schools, of course, but also in many private schools, religious institutions, youth programs, social media, movies, advertisements, music, billboards, and likely even in the minds of your kids’ friends.

How can parents protect their children against this all-consuming indoctrination? In a hostile society, one of the most viable options is homeschooling—as a lifestyle. Homeschooling makes parents into their children’s primary educators, as they should be. Hence homeschooling grows ever more popular as the Left grows ever more aggressive.

Most government schools these days have degenerated into taxpayer-funded babysitting services in which very little education (but a lot of indoctrination) takes place.

Sarah Hoyt.

In the real world we learn that the stain won’t go on evenly (I will finally have an actually, for real workshop) despite your best efforts, and then you have to fix; that the bookcase you built should take that dictionary, but in fact it just collapsed, that….

You learn that there is a reality, and that it pushes back on you, and it’s not all shaped by your mind. The stain didn’t blotch or the varnish crocodile because of systemic racism. Preaching to the drains about systemic oppression won’t make no never mind. You need to do the work, and do it so it works.

Unfortunately, the profitable path in our society for almost a century has been to be pharaoh’s supervisor, ordering the slaves to make brick without straw.

Which is how we get to the embassy in Kabul being very very concerned with pride month, but not so much with getting their people out safely.

All of which… leads to where we are. There’s a group of people who can’t find the real world with two hands and a seeing eye dog. And they hate, despise and fear those who can, because those people refuse to fall in with the beautiful abstractions of the shit-spinners.

And they keep trying to control everything. Partly because then reality can’t sucker punch them, I think.

If we let them go on with this, they’ll kill us and destroy civilization.

ZMan’s weekly podcast . Highly recommended.

It reminds me of something Ed Dutton said about the sorts of people drawn to things like anti-fascism. They have disorganized, chaotic minds and need the structure of religion to focus their energy onto something useful. When religion faded, what replaced it was ideology, which focuses their energy on their fellow citizens, who they see as enemies of their new faith. The same impulses that gave us cathedrals now gives us mobs tearing down statues hoping for some grace.

This coincides with the fact that western man started getting dumber around the same time that Christianity started to fade. The intellectual history since that point has been about finding a suitable replacement. The body count suggests we were better off with the old gods. The search for new gods has been a disaster. This current search will no doubt lead to tears. Perhaps the right answer will be that we pick a form of Christianity and make it the basis of a theocracy.

I have a suggestion….

With thanks to Bluebird Of Bitterness, who consistently has interesting stuff on her blog.

Severian teaches us a little history.

Back in my teaching days, I had this whole bit on why we should study history. I’d ask the class “why do we study history?” and the inevitable response came: “To avoid making the mistakes of the past.” But we never really do that, do we? I’d ask them. For instance, think about the last time you tied one on. The next morning you wake up, head pounding, stomach churning, and you vow “I’ll never drink again!” That lasts until the next weekend, tops, doesn’t it?

And so on. Then I’d tell them the real reason we study history is to better understand (for lack of a better term) human systems. The Marxists had a point: Class conflict (again for lack of a better term) really does drive quite a bit of human affairs. That the Marxists quickly went off the rails with it isn’t surprising — you’ll find no one on earth more reality-averse than a Marxist, except a feminist — but they had a point for all that. Breaking any given historical situation down into self conscious groups of people pursuing their class objectives will very often get you at least in the ballpark.

Zman is not happy.

In The Inequality of Man, the great evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane noted that fanaticism was one of the great inventions of the pre-modern world. Obsessive enthusiasm, especially for an unattainable thing like paradise, makes the fanatic a violent force of nature. We see that with the current Afghan debacle. The open borders fanatics have immediately seized on the crisis to justify importing millions of Afghans into your neighborhood. They never miss a beat.

Similarly, the same people responsible for losing yet another war for the empire are now using the Afghan mess to demand money for their China project. The logic here is that the willingness to abandon Afghanistan, as if it was the crown jewel of the empire, means China will think the US will abandon Taiwan. They may make a play for reclaiming the island nation as a result. The remedy is to give the brain trust of the military industrial complex more money for more new stuff.

The “heads we win, tails you lose” psychology of the military industrial complex is one of those signs of rot that does not get enough attention. The truth is, Afghanistan fell victim to the same disease that afflicts everything else. It quickly became a racket for rich people to skim money from Americans. Billions went to NGO’s and civilian contractors, who then used some portion of it to reward their favorite politicians back in Washington for their support of Afghanistan.

Read it.

Maria Andrejczyk, who won the silver medal for javelin throwing at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, auctioned her medal off for $125,000 to pay for an eight-month-old boy’s heart surgery.

Read it.

U.S. Customs and Border Protections recently seized multiple shipments arriving in Chicago from China that contained counterfeit Drug Enforcement Administration and Federal Bureau of Investigation badges, the agency announced in a press release.

Officials seized eight DEA badges and one FBI badge last week, between Aug. 13 and 15, and CBP notes that they’ve seized counterfeit law enforcement badges before, and that these knockoffs were headed towards various locations across the country.

Read  it.

And it doesn’t matter a damn. 44% is about the percentage of the vote that Clinton got when he won the Presidency.

Read it.

What could possibly go wrong?

Read it.

I’ve always thought that the best deterrent to vehicle theft is a radio-controlled bomb. It’s very easy to rig a burner cellphone to act as a trigger.

But that’s me.

Read it.

Members of Virginia’s disability community are slamming Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe after he ditched a candidate forum hosted by a disabilities advocacy group to attend a swanky Las Vegas fundraiser.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Ummmm……. Because life is better here than there? Despite systemic racism, People of Color being lynched left and right, and men in dresses being ‘misgenered’?

Severian regresses a little.

The thing you’ll notice right away if you read them is how utterly tedious life was pre-electricity. Actually, no, tedious is the wrong word, since in our usage it implies “mindless” and that’s exactly the opposite of Victorian and especially Tudor life. A much better word is “laborious,” maybe even just “hard.” Life was hard back then. Even the simplest tasks took hours, because everything had to be done by hand. You had a few simple machines, of course — simple in the mechanical sense, though nearly every page brings its “gosh, I never would’ve thought of that!” surprise — but mostly it’s muscle power. If you’re lucky, a horse’s or a donkey’s muscles do some of the heaviest work, but mostly it’s straight-up human effort.

And dirty. And smelly. And just plain ugly.

ZMan peers through a glass, darkly.

Back during the Cold War, there were people whose job was to figure out what was happening inside the Soviet government. Many were like F.B.I. profilers, in that they were hyped as experts, but just made up stuff to play the role. Others actually tried to read party media to figure out what was happening. These Kremlinologists were well-versed in the “Aesopian language” popular with both dissidents and party officials, so they could connect external clues to internal clues.

One of the many signs that America is authoritarian is that we have to use the same tactics to figure out what is happening with the ruling elite. The uniparty members are mostly just making noises to impress the faction leaders. They are the dancing boys of the American regime. Still, they give a sense of the mood within the factions. The media gives a sense of what is happening with party leadership, especially the semi-permanent elements within the security branches.

“Is there any news that doesn’t involve China being bad?” — Scott Adams

Severian has something to say.

In another, more accurate way, though, it’s really the American people who are the big winners. Note the lack of quotation marks around the proper noun, because I really do mean Americans — we few, we happy few, who enjoy things like “indoor plumbing” and “knowing how to read” and “living past 35.” For those who were worried that the Regular Army was going to be deployed on American streets in the near future, I think it’s time to take it down a notch. I think the big takeaway from Uncle Sam’s Afghan Adventure is that SEAL Team 6 can’t be everywhere. Eventually they have to turn it over to the Fightin’ Hairdressers of the 4077th Trannie Battalion…

Consider, too, that when it comes to Dolchstossen (or whatever the plural is in German), this one’s a doozy. No doubt The Media have had their “how this is all Trump’s fault” stories queued up and ready to go for a week or two now; the only mystery is how they’ll manage to blame The Unvaccinated and Climate Change, too (though they most assuredly will). But the actual fighting troops know better…

Read it.

The easiest way to identify a dyed-in-the-wool authoritarian is to mention Fox News on social media. It’s like reciting an ancient Gaelic incantation that makes the banshees rise from the swamp and scream their lamentations at the top of their voices. “Baaaaaan themmmmmm!” “The FCC should revoooooooke their license!” “Ruuuuuuuuupert!” And then they all get naked, hold hands around the sacrificial altar and say the magic words: Fairness Doctrine!

Now, these people only know two things about the Doctrine. One, it had the word “Fairness” in the title so it had to be, you know, “fair.” And two, Ronald Reagan was President when it was ditched and he was evil so it had to be good.

In their minds, the FCC was watching every television show and listening to every radio broadcast to make sure that everything was “fair” and that all points of view were being presented on every issue. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Read it.

enny pinching sounds like a good thing to do. Especially for important life decisions like money, education and life partners. Now I’m not here to tell you we should never slow down and assess a situation closely, but rather that it’s easy to do this in situations where it’s not appropriate. The reason it’s often not appropriate is because we almost never have access to the amount and kind of information that would make penny pinching an effective life strategy.

Any time we look into the details of something we are making a big assumption about how information maps to the future. We are assuming information can be tallied up and summed into some final answer that best tells us what to do in a given situation. But this isn’t how information works in complex situations. Under complexity information does not move from input to output as a linear sum of its parts.

Information works in nonlinear and highly opaque ways. The way information gets used under complexity is multiplicative, where bits of information interact with other bits of information in ways we will never know. We know this because this is a fundamental property of complex systems and thus situations. The causal chain that links inputs to outputs cannot be known.

The poor pinch pennies out of necessity, and they tend to raise their children to do the same. It is interesting to watch people who grew up poor and are now comfortably off resist spending money as if they didn’t know where their next meal was coming from. I suspect that most of the Hoarding Old People were of this stripe.

Read it.

Every one of us could write a whole library’s worth on that, so I’ll just pick one that is at least a gateway into all the rest: Stop enabling mental illness.

I love the delightfully appositive nature of the phrase ‘goofy-hippy-shit’. It comes in so handy….

Read it.

Oh, yeah, like that’s going to work.  The very people who loudly proclaim that race is ‘a social construct’ are going to construct you into their favorite oppression-race every time you diverge from the Narrative. Guaranteed.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Revolutions are often driven by events, but they are always, at some level, driven by ideas about how society ought to be organized. Since the beginning, radical revolution is about a small group of intellectuals who flatter themselves by claiming to represent the interests of the people. Their holy mission is to reorganize society for the benefit of the people, even if it means killing many of those people. This week begins an exploration into the ideas that motivate our current radicals.

Babylon Bee.

Back in 1850, the Union voted to make California the 31st state. But now Americans are taking an unusual step: holding a recall election to undo this and kick California out of the United States.

ZMan goes back to first principles.

One of the few things that libertarians get right is that the foundation of Western civilization is private property. They claim this is a universal reality, which is clearly incorrect, but it is true with regards to Western civilization. The assumption that a man owns the produce of his labor is the main difference between Europeans and the other people of the world. It forms the foundation of law and the logic of political organization, in addition to being the bedrock of Western economic systems.

What libertarians get wrong is that you can create a society where government only protects private property and does nothing else. As with so many things, they get the causal relationship backwards. Like everything else about human society, the concept of private property is downstream from biology and culture. Therefore, the primary reason to have a state is to defend the people and their way of life. Private property is one attribute of Western people’s way of life.

Read it.

After a year of start-and-stop public-health measures, more often guided by intuition than by science, studies are confirming what economists long suspected: the Covid-19 lockdowns were an expensive, unnecessary failure, based on models that overestimated the number of cases and deaths because they failed to account for individual responses to the pandemic.

Epidemiologists viewed lockdowns as the logical response to a new virus to which humans lacked immunity and that could overwhelm hospitals and cause many deaths. Yet health economists, following seminal work by Tomas Philipson, have long understood that people respond to incentives and alter their behaviors to avoid the risks and costs of infectious diseases. Epidemiologists failed to account for these voluntary changes in assessing what would happen without a lockdown.

Read it.

Could materials mined from the deep sea be the answer? That’s what commercial mining firms and scientists are trying to determine this month during two separate expeditions to a remote part of the Pacific Ocean known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ). A potential treasure chest of metals waiting to be plucked is at stake: This region of water is the size of the continental US, and its floor is littered with potato-sized metallic nodules, each containing high concentrations of cobalt, nickel, copper, and manganese, which are used in EV batteries. (Lithium, another key component, is primarily mined from Australia.) These materials would all be harvested as minerals, then refined into metals that could be used in batteries, usually by adding an oxide. Of course, the trick is getting the nodules off the bottom, which is 12,000 to 18,000 feet deep, without killing the creatures that live there or the fish that swim above.

Read it.

When you overprotect people from any and all risks, you’re not doing them any favours. Trauma-informed approaches and safetyism lead to antifragility, a term coined by Nassim Taleb, which refers to the fact that many systems — including our immune system and psychological system — need to experience stressors to grow strong. Instead of helping young people, we are empowering their anxiety. These overprotective approaches can stunt the natural coping responses that individuals need to develop.

Critical gender studies can also have a detrimental impact on mental health. In 2016, Dr Jordan Peterson expressed his concerns about a bill under consideration by the Canadian federal government. The bill included a list of gender expressions whose use would be prohibited on the grounds of discrimination. Peterson pointed out that the bill let the notion of identity be determined solely by the individual in question — whatever identity that might be. The problem with this is the fact that identity is not solely an individual construct but also a social one. There’s more to it than a person’s choices; identity oscillates between the psychological and the social. Therefore, if someone subjectively decides their identity without taking society into account, this decision will potentially compromise others by unilaterally redefining their roles in society.

Read it.

Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes.

High intelligence merely means that one thinks very very fast; it is no guarantee of the quality of the resulting conclusion. In fact, it often guarantees just the opposite, because the more quickly one comes to a conclusion, the more apt one is to think ‘it’s just obvious’ and put more weight behind its correctness than is deserved. That’s the truth behind the meme ‘an idea so bad that only an intellectual would believe it’.