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.

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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.

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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?

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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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….

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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.

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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.