The Spectator.

Every time I survive a stressed-out trip to “State,” as we call it, I come home annoyed and grateful to live somewhere so unpretentious. I also wonder: do college towns attract liberals or beget them, and why is academia so rife with lefties?

As my father was one of them (an academic, not a lib) for many years, I asked him. His theory is that to make a name for yourself as a professor, you’re expected to discover something new, and unless you’re making breakthroughs in a lab, all the best ideas have already been thought of and expressed. So to get published, earn tenure, and so forth, academics must contradict truth and invent ideas that are “innovative,” even if they’re flat-out wrong. This theory would explain the number of false narratives peddled by so many college profs and the Democratic Party itself. (In 2020, Democratic professors outnumbered Republicans nine to one at top colleges.)

If you put a bunch of late-adolescent people in one place, and allow them to vote, you’re going to get late-adolescent (and arrested-adolescent, in the case of academics) policies foisted on the rest of the population. One of the distinguishing characteristics of adolescents in the modern world is the firm conviction that “wishing will make it so” and “yelling loud enough will get something done”, in which delusion there are a lot of venal apparatchiks ready to shove the cart along.

The Spectator.

You may or may have not noticed, but there is currently a writers’ and actors’ strike happening across Hollywood. Major film productions have been shut down, as have regular television and streaming shows. No new content. Anywhere.

This also applies to all late-night talk shows. There hasn’t been a fresh new episode of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, or The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon or Kimmel. All three network shows have downed tools in solidarity with the strikers. The question is: has anyone noticed, beyond their niche core audience of coastal liberals, for whom such programs have become little more than political group therapy sessions? Those three late-night hosts certainly feel like they’ve been missed, as they have come together, along with Seth Meyers and HBO’s John Oliver, to host a podcast. On it, the absence of writers is omnipresent; every time a host says the name of the podcast, Strike Force Five, there is a headache-inducing explosion sound-effect drop. Every time the name of the podcast is spoken. And they say that name a lot. Colbert, Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers and Oliver have united, they say, to raise charity for their production staff, who were all forced off the job earlier this year when the strike took effect.

If you struggle to tolerate all five of these hosts giving their own shows’ usual opening monologues on the issues of the day, then imagine all five of them, giving the same monologue, while talking over each other. In the first episode they dive into the writers’ strike from 2005, because that’s a historical event that not many people seem to remember or, much like this writers’ strike, care about. This is a podcast about the hosts, talking about the hosts and an entertainment strike, a problem that seems to be at the back of most Americans’ minds, as they face up to with issues like inflation and credit card debt.

Read it.

It’s an old story, manifesting now in new ways. The rich, buoyed by inherited wealth and access to credit, find a locale with the qualities they desire, and buy the choicest properties for their own use, and a surrounding band of nearby properties so they won’t be bothered by the bottom 99%.

This story has a new far more destructive chapter, generated by the boom in STVRs–short-term vacation rentals. The uber-wealthy don’t need more money but they’re trained, like hamsters in a lab, to seek ways to maximize their income and capital gains. STVRs–Airbnb et al.–are highly attractive investments to the wealthy and their money-managers–the hedge funds, private equity managers, family-wealth advisors, et al.

Residential real estate that can be converted to STVRs is well within reach of the top 10% households, who own between 80% and 90% of all income-producing assets such as housing rentals, stocks, bonds and business equity.

Read it.

Aristotle listed four characteristics of sound money: it must be durable, portable, divisible, and have intrinsic value. Gold possesses all of these characteristics, which is why gold has served as money for thousands of years.

It also expands/contracts the ‘money supply’ without reference to the underlying economy, which is why gold (and silver) cause knotty economic problems and why all modern governments don’t use commodity-backed money. Managing a commodity-backed monetary standard takes a lot more work than just shifting a government-mandated interest rate a few basis points here and there, which is why they prefer the latter to the former.