Read it.

Their vote counts as much as any other dead Democrat, silly.

Curtis Yarvin:

Leftism is always and everywhere an aristocratic force. Perhaps this is most clearly seen in the Labor Party UK, which from its roots in the Ruskinites and Fabians has always been the political vehicle of the university Left. Across the last century, this vehicle has switched its fuel from the disappearing British worker to the burgeoning British immigrant—without any substantive change in the nature of its leadership! This is an absolutely wild way to use the word “democracy.”

Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) is back.

Sometimes Sam Altman, the new young Jupiter of AI, makes it easy to see why—to borrow the title of an essay I wrote ten years ago—he is a blithering idiot.

This is of interest not because Sam Altman is a blithering idiot—in fact, I hear he’s done rather well for himself—but because this miniscule, yet profoundly crippling, logical lesion in so finely-tuned a lipid-based thinking machine is probably not confined to Sam Altman’s brain.

No—whatever the germ (could it be Elon Musk’s “Woke Mind Virus?”) that causes this lesion, it has infected others. In fact, it has infected everyone. It had infected me. (I took my own noötropic tablets, and was cured. Click here to buy.)

Let me explain this simple fallacy using Altman’s own words, posted the other day.

Yarvin makes a point of mentioning evil ideas (according to the Narrative), and doing so in an engaging way.

After all, every time a company refuses to hire someone, it declares them ZMP from the perspective of its own employee pool. A true ZMP adult is unemployable in any firm or by any private individual.

ZMP stands for ‘zero marginal product’, a term apparently coined by economist Tyler Cowen to designate somebody that just plain nobody wants to employ because they just have nothing to offer an employer. In the Good Old Days, such people would (a) starve to death or (b) piss somebody off who would terminate them with extreme prejudice. Nowadays they live off of Government Assistance and use recreational drugs to avoid causing other people problems (although the first two alternatives remain just in case we need them). From an evolutionary standpoint, we are pissing in our own soup. Some people are willing to do that; others think that it’s a Bad Thing.

Not every workplace is Google or OpenAI, but every workplace has a ZMP threshold. Generally that threshold is lower than Google’s. What AI will do—what Sam Altman will do—is to vastly increase the ZMP threshold in almost every workplace.

You will have heard (and read) that we have a population crash problem, that Western woman aren’t having enough babies, that the civilized world aren’t having sufficient youngsters to replace themselves. Yarvin is suggesting that this is a feature, not a bug; anything we can do to avoid having overcrowding by ZMP people (number increasing as automation increases) is probably a Good Thing.

In the end, 20th-century employment as we know it will reduce itself to ten engineers, who write the code that writes the code that writes the code. They will all work for Sam Altman and drive ludicrously amazing flying cars. And what of everyone else?

We (I am anything but an AI engineer—good luck with those matrices, kids) will just have fun, right? Life will just be fun?

No, actually, we will probably all have our throats cut. Here’s why.

Read it.

Though much may separate Thucydides, Xenophon, Ephorus, Plato, and Aristotle from one another, on this fundamental point they and those who subsequently followed their lead were agreed: that to come to understand a polity, one must be willing to entertain two propositions.

First, one must presume that the form of government, the constitution, the rules defining membership in the políteuma or ruling order is the chief determinant of a political community’s character. Second, one must assume that pa?deía, which is to say, education and moral formation in the broadest and most comprehensive sense, is more important than anything else in deciding the character of a particular pol?teía. In one passage of The Politics, Aristotle suggests that it is the provision of a common pa?deía—and nothing else—that turns a multitude into a unit and constitutes it as a pól?s; in another, he indicates that it is the pol?teía which defines the pól?s as such. Though apparently in contradiction, these two statements are in fact equivalent—for, as the peripatetic recognized, man is an imitative animal, the example we set is far more influential than what we say, and it is the “distribution and disposition of offices and honors [táx?s t?ˆn arch?ˆn]” constituting the políteuma of a given polity that is the most effective educator therein.

…what really matters most with regard to political understanding is this: to decide who is to rule or what sorts of human beings are to share in rule and function as a community’s políteuma is to determine which of the various and competing titles to rule is to be authoritative; in turn, this is to decide what qualities are to be admired and honored in the city, what is to be considered advantageous and just, and how happiness and success [euda?monía] are to be understood and pursued; and this decision—more than any other—determines the pa?deía which constitutes “the one way of life of a whole pól?s.”

—Paul Rahe, The Spartan Regime: Its Character, Origins, and Grand Strategy, xii-xiv.

I knew Paul Rahe (now at Hillsdale in Michigan) at Yale, when I was an undergraduate and he was getting his PhD, having done his undergraduate work at Cornell. His magnum opus, the three-volume Republics Ancient and Modern, is first-rate. I heartily recommend anything he writes.

Watch it. (Practical Engineering)

More than you ever wanted to know about the Foundation of Civilization.

Read it.

Business leaders are loath to criticize a sitting mayor who can cause trouble for their enterprises. And they have been loyal backers of this particular mayor both because he is such a contrast to his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, who routinely bashed them, and because his priorities — fighting crime, spurring economic development and tackling the housing crisis — are their priorities.

Maybe most importantly, according to extensive background interviews THE CITY has conducted over the past several weeks, the candidates who have announced for mayor so far are unpalatable to business leaders because of their progressive views.

New York Post.

Carter claimed that so many young people “cheat” their way through college, come out with no skills and then experience a “rude awakening” when they land their first job.

Saying it was unreasonable to “expect a great work-life balance and high-paying job” straight after graduating from university, he also encouraged Gen Zers to dress nicely, speak up, and work on communicating effectively.

Entitled slackers. Perfect Democrats.

Read it.

The ravages of Hurricane Helene had left parts of Asheville, North Carolina underwater, but it wasn’t just the homes and roads that were underwater, but FEMA’s botched response..

Criswell, who had been appointed to head FEMA by the Biden-Harris administration as a reward for coordinating New York City’s horrendously botched response to the pandemic, posed in a starched FEMA blouse and gold necklace on a morning show even as private volunteers were once again having to step in because the Federal Emergency Management Agency had failed.

FEMA was unprepared for the flooding because under Criswell, a DEI hire whose resume included being “the first woman commissioner of New York City Emergency Management”, the agency had shifted from disaster management to DEI disasters.

Read it.

“America doesn’t need this place, doesn’t care about this place… It’s just a place that time forgot.” Tom Altmiller is sitting across from me at a paint-chipped picnic table. It looks like it was bright red once, but the years have faded it to a sort of grayish maroon. He’s in his late 50s, with square glasses, a graying goatee, and a short ponytail, and speaks with a stubborn, matter-of-fact stoicism that’s common among the locals. “My standard joke about this place is that if the world ended tomorrow, we’d get ten more years, because we’re roughly that far behind the curve here,” he says. “In terms of everything.”

…

Beginning around 2021, Charleroi began to be flooded by thousands of immigrants, largely, (though not exclusively) from Haiti. A local CBS report from March reported that “the immigrant population in Charleroi has grown by more than 2,000% in the last two years.” Earlier this month, PolitiFact admitted that the number of non-English speaking students in the Charleroi school district had skyrocketed by an unbelievable 1,800 percent over the past five years.

Two weeks ago, my organization America 2100 spent five days on the ground in Charleroi, documenting and reporting on the crisis. Our coverage went viral, and within 48 hours of our first public interview, President Trump mentioned Charleroi at a rally. Then again, one week and a half later, this time at some length, during a rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania. That kicked off a media feeding frenzy, replete with a flood of authoritative “fact checks” and reports on Trump’s “debunked claims” about the Pennsylvania town, an NBC News segment, a cacophony of garment-rending legacy media write-ups about “hateful rants”, “dangerous conspiracy theories,” “anti-immigrant lies”, and a statement from Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro slamming Trump’s criticism as “complete and utter bullshit.”

Read it.

The national conservative Patriots for Europe (PfE) group, the third largest party family in Brussels with 84 MEPs, has officially launched a lawsuit against the European Parliament at the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU). PfE aims to overturn the mainstream parties’ cordon sanitaire, which strips the group of all its earmarked leading positions in the Parliament’s governing bodies—even at the expense of violating the institutions’ own internal rules.

The right-wing group is home to parties such as the French National Rally, the Hungarian Fidesz, the Italian Lega, the Austrian FPÖ, the Czech ANO, and the Portuguese Chega. Many of these won the European elections in their respective countries and remain the most popular parties to this day (the FPÖ won the general elections in Austria just two days ago). Yet, the mainstream still believes it’s justified to exclude the PfE from power on account of it being “far-right.”

Read it.

In Washington, which has long been a blue state, an average of 56.2% of voters have supported the Democratic candidate across the last four presidential elections. In fact, Washington has gone to the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1984, when Ronald Reagan, the GOP’s candidate, defeated Democrat Walter Mondale. Barring any major, unforeseen shakeup, Washington state is expected to align with historical voting patterns once again in 2024 and go to Harris. (Here is a look at the 15 least popular presidents, according to Millennials.)

Despite its status as a Democratic stronghold, there are several parts of the state that have consistently broken with the prevailing political ideology in recent elections. According to voting records, there are 23 counties in Washington where an average of at least 50% of voters have supported the Republican candidate in the last four presidential elections. In one of these counties, more than 70% of voters cast ballots for the Republican candidate over the same four general elections.

Read it.

With still no resolution in the months-long diplomatic row between Brussels and Budapest over the latter’s alleged violation of European Union asylum rules, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán doubled down on his government’s previous rhetoric, saying he would begin bussing illegal migrants straight to the EU capital if the Commission insists on collecting hundreds of millions of euros in accumulated fines—despite Budapest’s willingness to implement the reforms being demanded.

And, indeed, it would serve them right.

Read it.

And all of the little eco-Nazis go WAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH….

Read it.

One hopes that Israel will respond in kind.

Such an attack is recognized in international law as a causus belli, an act of war.

Israel is now fully justified in bombing the living shit out of Iran.

I hope they do so.

Read it.

carriers like hard drives, optical discs, and flash storage are readily available, the landscape becomes trickier when dealing with older formats such as floppy disks. It is becoming increasingly difficult to source the hardware, such as 5.25”floppy drives. There are many boards that can read flux streams, including the KryoFlux, and the Award-winning Archivist’s Guide to KryoFlux can help to get started. But KryoFlux is somewhat limited in the disk formats it can interpret and might be too expensive for smaller institutions. We came together as practitioners because we encountered disk formats that required additional efforts to read and extract files. We explored hardware such as Greaseweazle and using FluxEngine software to read less common disk formats. Sharing the knowledge we have gained, this tutorial and workshop present an opportunity for participants to delve into these formats, examining them from both hardware and formatting perspectives.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Read it.

It was all supposed to be so grand. Sweeping libraries of knowledge, fruitful cyber domains and ultimate egalitarian functionality at the touch of a button, or the scuzzy tone of that 9600 baud AOL server hand-shake.

Connect with your friends, they said. Share knowledge, they said. What could go wrong?

But what did we get instead? A seedy panopticon of intrusion and broken bloatware bogging up every last dying pixel of our imported screens. Let’s run down the list of grievances, shall we?

Read it.

The new data on all the criminal noncitizens coming into the U.S. is shocking.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) checks the background of illegal aliens they have in custody. But, the administration’s letter to Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) shows that as of July 21, 2024, ICE let 435,719 convicted criminals and 226,847 people with pending criminal charges in their home countries into the U.S.

Of those cleared by ICE, 13,099 have convictions for homicide, and another 1,845 were facing criminal charges. Some 9,461 have convictions for sex offenses (not including assault or commercialized sex), and 2,659 face pending charges. The convictions include other crimes such as assault (62,231), robbery (10,031), sexual assault (15,811), weapons offenses (13,423), and dangerous drugs (56,533).

About 7.4 million noncitizens are in the “national docket data,” so 662,776 is 9% of the total, and if one extrapolates the numbers to the homicide rate in this country, it strongly indicates that the government is letting migrants into this country who commit murder at a rate 50% higher than the rest of the U.S. population.

The Atlantic.

Nicholas dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1988. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

Read it.

ABC failed miserably when it comes to doing basic journalistic research for this story. The fact that no fact check was even attempted is so egregious, one must wonder if it is purposeful, rather than just an indication of incompetence. A paragraph at the very bottom their story suggests it may be purposeful.

Read it.

Police in India have arrested a man who ordered an iPhone and then killed the courier rather than pay the cash-on-delivery fee.

Who knew that India has Blue States as well?

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

I’ll pass.

Read it.

Tidal action on the underside of the Thwaites Glacier in the Antarctic will “inexorably” accelerate melting this century, according to new research by British and American scientists. The researchers warn the faster melting could destabilize the entire West Antarctic Ice sheet, leading to its eventual collapse.

Which scientists? Who cares! Just, you know, scientists!

The massive glacier—which is roughly the size of Florida—is of particular interest to scientists because of the rapid speed at which it is changing and the impact its loss would have on sea levels (the reason for its “Doomsday” moniker). It also acts as an anchor holding back the West Antarctic ice sheet.

More than 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) thick in places, Thwaites has been likened to a cork in a bottle. Were it to collapse, sea levels would rise by 65 centimeters (26 inches). That’s already a significant amount, given oceans are currently rising 4.6 millimeters a year. But if it led to the eventual loss of the entire ice sheet, sea levels would rise 3.3 meters.

Yah, sure. Call me when real estate prices in Malibu, Martha’s Vineyard, and Miami Beach start going down.

UPDATE: US Government interagency sea level rise website is live  All hail the Narrative!

Read it.

For decades, one of the most fundamental and vexing questions in neuroscience has been: what is the physical basis of consciousness in the brain? Most researchers favor classical models, based on classical physics, while a minority have argued that consciousness must be quantum in nature, and that its brain basis is a collective quantum vibration of “microtubule” proteins inside neurons.

New research by Wellesley College professor Mike Wiest and a group of Wellesley College undergraduate students has yielded important experimental results relevant to this debate, by examining how anesthesia affects the brain. Wiest and his research team found that when they gave rats a drug that binds to microtubules, it took the rats significantly longer to fall unconscious under an anesthetic gas. The research team’s microtubule-binding drug interfered with the anesthetic action, thus supporting the idea that the anesthetic acts on microtubules to cause unconsciousness.

Read it.

My Grann’s edition of The Grady County Extension Homemaker Council’s cookbook Down Home Cookin’ is missing its front and back cover. Once made of thin, flimsy pieces of plastic decorated with an old barn and windmill, the cover has long since fallen off and some of the pages are loose. The book is held together by three red rubber bands. My Grann explains that the plastic binder got brittle and began to fall apart—the rubber bands are her solution. The pages of the cookbook are yellowed from years of use. At least three generations of women in my family, including myself, have flipped through these pages, leaving them stained with the oils from their fingers and the drippings of in-progress recipes. Most importantly to me, they scribbled in the margins. My family’s edition of Down Home Cookin’ has reached a critical mass of notes in the marginalia such that it no longer counts as a simple copy of a cookbook: it is my Grann’s cookbook, our family cookbook. Holding it in my hands in my apartment in California (my Grann kindly agreed to mail it to me) feels off. It feels so delicate here, out of the context of her home, her kitchen, in the little cupboard where she has kept all of her cookbooks since I was a child. Now, it is more like a museum piece, something precious and precarious, meant to be handled with care, preserved, analyzed.

My mother had an old composition book in which she kept all of the recipes she had accumulated throughout her life, starting off with taking Home Ec from the nuns in high school and extending through over six decades of being a homemaker. I wish I had thought to make a copy of it before she passed on and everything got lost. I especially miss the Connie’s Fudge recipe.