I always thought this was in interesting idea. The risk I would think is that you wind up adding a staunch blue voting block to red states that might turn them purple (or blue, as in Virginia). But maybe a single agency doesn’t have that much heft.

I can hear shouts of “but tourists grow the economy” from the GDP uber alles crowd from here. The parallels between tourist disruption of local habitats and immigration disruption is pretty obvious. Immigration at this point is worse, since they intend to stay permanently rather than spend some money and leave. Also in most of the western world immigrants are no longer particularly skilled on average. It is nice to see people considering what I call the other side of the ledger. GDP is legible, social cohesion and quality of life for natives much less so. Conservatives need to form more coherent arguments about these things for the immigration debate.

Regarding tourism in particular, it seems like short-term rentals are the biggest driver of friction in recent times. This makes sense. For example if staying at hotels were the only way to be a tourist in some location, hotel prices might go up when it becomes more popular (attracting richer and more economically favorable tourists) but given the relatively fixed supply of rooms it’s going to result in less overcrowding. However mass adoption of AirBnB or similar in a locale could x10 the number of rooms available for tourists without any real public debate (which usually happens for new proposed hotels or resorts). This can also drive up housing costs throughout a city since buying property to rent it out becomes more profitable. It also allows the RyanAir crowd to flood your city. Again the parallel to the current immigration debate is clear. Many nice tourism destinations ban short-term rentals for this reason (nb this does piss off some homeowners who would actually like to see appreciation in value of their assets). Either someone goes through the process of building a new hotel and all of the local debate and planning that entails, or capacity stays the same.

Since I’m freestyling, another thought is that SWPL “sustainable tourism” is probably part of the problem. These people want to go be minimalist tourists, staying in a “local” AirBnB or hostel, cooking their meals, and spending their time hiking or otherwise taking in the local nature/attractions. From a local’s perspective this is probably the worst kind of tourist. They spend very little money and still impact the environment. If another person goes to one of these places and stays in a hotel and buys local luxury items and eats in restaurants (sort of typical tourist stuff) they leave more money behind locally and have an equal (or lesser) environmental impact, all else being equal.

He’s a unique member of the “upper class” in that he doesn’t try to hide his membership, nor does he act faux-humble/ashamed of being rich, famous, well connected, etc. the way a lot of them do. I think that’s actually why he connects with middle class Americans on the right so well. It also helps that he’s one degree removed from being a Pariah at this point.

It’s similar to Trump actually, whose public persona for a long time was basically “yes I’m rich and famous, it’s awesome, maybe you can be too.” That’s more honest and tolerable than anything coming out of the “drive a Volvo home to a $5 mil brownstone, take a jet to the climate protest crowd.”

All good points. But the media luminaries are currently using ghost guns (ghosts are scary, obviously) as part of their broader anti-gun crusade. So why would a propagandist let the opportunity go to waste? And hell, maybe it was actually a ghost gun, if the former marine was a DIY type.

The man has a point. Visiting with a friendly parrot does sound like fun. And the best way to get something is to ask for it.

Tricky question – are the companies afraid of the government or is the usual middle manager so on board with diversity that going against that grain is career suicide that precludes ever making it to the C suite? I assume the answer is “both” but I’ve never been able to figure out how to tell.

An interesting aside is how increased regulation and market concentration in general (incumbent advantages) might lead to a more entrenched diversity apparatus, essentially due to reduced competition from upstart firms.

Lehman arguably was, although not in a culture war sense. The few books I’ve read about it (for what that’s worth) have Lehman people suggest the regime did hate them, because the regime/blob was infested with Goldman alums and there was bad blood. Plausible, certainly not proven.

SVB was just idiotic risk management and an unusual asset class mix that put them in a unique situation. They were a zebra with no other zebras amongst which to hide.

Why go public now? Reading the article, the author’s most likely motivation is how NPR covers the Israel-Gaza conflict. It’s the only particular example of bias he brings up from the last 3 years:

“Oppressor versus oppressed. That’s meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.”

The author doesn’t outright say it but based on positioning maybe hints at a connection between the newsroom demographics going from 10% to 40% minority in the post-Floyd era and the tenor of their Israel coverage. It will be interesting to see how this basically internal leftist conflict in opinion making institutions plays out in the coming year or so.

I claim no expertise here but I think those are classic “incels” or involuntarily celibate. Incels basically never had a relationship with women, whereas I got the impression a lot of MGTOWs did have relationships with the opposite sex and it ended poorly, hence a big focus on divorce and family court unfairness, alimony, custody of children, and so forth. At least from what I read on the internet, for precisely what that’s worth.

The PUA crew had two useful pieces of wisdom, neither original. First, you miss every shot you don’t take, so take a lot of shots and don’t worry about the misses. Second, irrational confidence can actually improve your odds with women (fake it til you make it). A lot of threads from the PUA “movement” still exist, and blended into male-centric online spaces around self-improvement, weightlifting, etc. I would also add the takedown of PUA websites and other spaces was one of the early examples of an online purge. They got nuked within a year of each other and removed from major platforms, web hosting apparatuses, etc. Looking back it’s reminiscent of what would happen 5 years later to Parler.

I think the MGTOW thing will lose steam as a specific entity because a lot of unhappy marriages and divorces are probably being prevented as we speak by people failing to form real-world relationships in the first place. So a specific type of unhappiness is being replaced by a society-wide malaise, which probably isn’t an improvement.

Anarcho-tyranny is objectively worse than anarcho-capitalism, to the extent any sorts of anarchy can be delineated from one another. But when comparing the masses of India to middle and lower class Americans, ceteris is not paribus. Yet, at least.

Yea the extensively studied value is execs being able to spend company money via the “marketing budget” to get awesome box suites at sought-after sporting/concert events.

Not sure if you’re joking but the last thing our cheap labor high cost of living economy needs is more vegetable choppers. Just because someone “wants to work” doesn’t make them particularly useful.

Playing devil’s advocate, I was shocked by how many people went along with Covid BS and general media lies. Don’t underestimate the power of the US propaganda machine over the voting populace.

Also, despite it all the US has considerable economic, geographic/military, etc. strengths compared to the rest of the world. There probably won’t be a huge event that shakes people’s faith in the ruling class.

Like most political theorists (including everyone from Ayn Rand to Karl Marx), Yarvin is at his strongest understanding and critiquing the current regime. Building a new one that is stable and effective is a much harder task. The only people who have done so successfully were pragmatic empiricists, rather than theorists.

I don’t know much about pacific hurricanes (maybe no one does?) but in the gulf they can be unpredictably bad. I believe it was Sally for example that was cat2/3 but just sat on the coast for 2 days dumping water. Then there were 10 foot storm surges no one really saw coming. So officials err heavily on the side of caution/cya. If a bunch of people drown “because they didn’t evacuate” it’s an easier sell for the re-election campaign than “because we didn’t tell them to evacuate.”

I’ve liked Hugh Grant’s roles a lot more now that his salacious personal life has freed him up to play the greasy Englishman he was always meant to be, instead of a lovesick pseudo-hero. Doubt that applies to an Oompa in a kid’s movie though.

Good question, one I’ve been thinking about as well. The simplest answer I’ve come up with is that sites like Wikipedia provide some of the most accurate and up-to-date information across a variety of topics. The caveat is that this excludes any topic with a potential political/moral angle the offends our commissars. But if you want a primer on diamagnetism or the battle of Hastings, Wikipedia is still by far the best single repository of such knowledge.

It’s not that intellectually demanding compared to many specialties but you need to be high IQ and diligent to do it. The disconnect is because it pays well, and residency applications are judged by board scores. So the smartest and hardest working med students often aim for dermatology because of the great quality of life and relatively high earnings potential, which is driven by the limited number of residency spots creating low supply relative to demand for dermatologists.

Also I see those numbers are averages. They’re actually lower than a full time specialist in many of these fields would typically make, particularly some of the surgical ones.

Because of their relatively wider hips women’s knees are more vulnerable to injury. There are other differences as well but basic anatomy is a big one.

To Steve’s point about finding a less dangerous sport for women to play (eg netball vs basketball), I think that’s what most Americans think soccer is in the first place. Culturally (and for Title IX reasons), in the US it was a women’s sport at least until recently.

I was curious about the foundation too, and you’re correct. The money came from a lumber magnate in the Midwest who made his fortune during the 1800s. His politics were broadly free-market and republican. His only heir was a daughter who inherited the fortune in the early 1900s. She set up the foundation quite modestly, and with relatively anodyne aims like violence reduction in Illinois. On her death in the 1940s, the foundation became very well endowed with the majority of her father’s fortune going to it.

The foundation more or less stuck to her original goals under control of her attorneys/trust until the late 60s, when it hired a Mr. Daly (not that Daly, but probably related, I didn’t check) previously associated with JFK as CEO. He expanded its operations and it became a progressive cause oriented slush fund. Currently it disburses 50m a year on a 750m endowment. It does suggest that it exists in significant part to pay its own administrators if they were willing to offer 1m per year just to the CEO, 20 years ago (BO’s reported offer at the time). That said, the money they do disburse after all of the employees take their cut could still be very detrimental to civilization- it’s cheap to fund chaos.

I wonder how much untaxed money is sitting out there under control of progressive activists. More importantly, how did it come to be under their control? The founder of this particular foundation appears to have had no intention of it turning into what it is, and it retained her vision for almost 30 years after her death. But at some point everyone who knows the founder is dead, and the goals of the foundation become up for grabs. Why don’t conservatives ever take over a fund the way liberals constantly do? Is there a legal or regulatory reason or is it lack of trying?

Certainly the Obama administration made some conscious decisions to gin up identity politics, using federal power (dear colleague letter) and the presidential megaphone (if I had a son he’d look like Trayvon Martin).

However, your comment gets more to the heart of the matter – run-away wokeness was significantly driven by social media. It accelerated the purity spiral and virtue signaling among progressives tremendously. I think this explains why companies seem afraid of their employees’ liberal sensitivities. Since it affected primarily younger people it appeared to come from the bottom up from management’s perspective.

Sport/commerce can be societally valuable if the product involves new technology or engineering – FvF (or prediction of disaster -The Big Short). Movies about creating a novel brand (societally useless) tend to be terrible, as in Air.

If he plays consistently it will probably be at safety because, wait for it, he’s too slow to do man-coverage in the NFL.

When we think about space travel and the Fermi paradox we often assume some sort of faster-than-light travel. If we really are stuck at sub-light speeds, given the amount of energy required to get to anything close to light speed, it makes the Fermi paradox much less of one.

I read it came over on a giant balloon or something

They commit a disproportionate amount of crime, particularly theft. And they have a worse reputation among Europeans (particularly eastern) because that’s where Gypies are more concentrated.

My read is that, since Cali and the Bay Area in particular are one party states, this is an intra-Democratic Party positioning exercise. Who will prove to be the most important constituency? And while black people are numerically smaller than Latinos (and other groups are growing), they remain the moral center of the Democratic Party. That is a powerful position given the amount of virtue signaling done by progressives.

I think you’re missing his point. If a job doesn’t select consistently for talent and ability (because none is required or because the outcomes are too opaque), narcissistic self-promoters tend to displace the merely competent.

I would argue decoupling from Chinese manufacturing capacity to the extent possible is a good national policy initiative. Done correctly, it will help onshore jobs and build domestic technical and supply chain capacity for things like cutting-edge microchips. This should also help raise domestic wages in some industries, especially if for obvious reasons many of these jobs aren’t available to Chinese nationals who companies have been using to undercut those wages.

Regarding war over Taiwan, I tend to think economic decoupling makes it less likely. One reason Russia was comfortable invading Ukraine is that it has the whip-hand over Europe in terms of energy; whether things really work out for Russia regarding the invasion or not is another matter. Similarly, China may be less likely to invade Taiwan if it knows it can’t inflict any economic or technological damage (eg cutting of microchip supplies) on Western nations.

Also the total number of votes was much lower in the off-season election. 110k vs 170k. That could have an effect. It’s possible the marginal voters who can get turned out (or farmed) in a presidential year break heavily to Ilhan.

Twitter and other social media are pretty classic monopolies/oligopolies due to network effects. It’s not trivial to build a successful competing platform. And that’s before you get into the Parler scenario where even if there is some success the new platform itself will be de-listed at app stores which control access to it for the vast majority of people.

I suspect that doctors who don’t agree with how these issues are being handled are the least likely to become trans teen specialists, whatever that’s called. Therefore they’re the least likely to be writing these guidelines in the first place. So there is a degree of ideological self-reinforcement happening in that part of the industry. And you’re obviously right to call out financial self-interest in all of this. Reminds me of the fortunes that were made prescribing “non-addictive” opioids.

This is probably accurate. There are certainly standout HS programs but ranking the top 25 is impossible as a practical matter. Too many schools, too little competition between the highest ranked ones, too much variability year to year, so forth.

This accusation of spying from the NYT that has miraculously “obtained” privileged information following a spurious FBI investigation into a political enemy.

Based on a quick survey of the author’s Twitter feed, the Guardian has a real-life Titania McGrath reviewing a performance by the satirical caricature. It probably struck too close to home.

I wonder to what degree any of these “inside the administration” stories are actually true. Obviously the press have no standards for accuracy regarding Trump, and I’m sure more than a few officials need to pretend they stood up to the Orange Man to justify working with him at all to their DC peers.

Aside from the terribly inaccurate Russia stuff, I remember it seemed like every week some new story would come out that couldn’t be proven or disproven. Diet Coke button on his desk, rudely overfeeding some koi fish, gorilla channel, etc. It makes me question how much we actually know about the trump admin – could be very little.

I wonder what the minimum viable population for a fairly isolated (I’m assuming) colony would be? Did they need ten pairs of men/women to make a go of it, or 200? Maybe there were places they could get to and even live on for a time, but functional distance from home (and thus a larger population of potential mates) using existing technology made colonization infeasible. Just speculating.

The two deaths you mentioned appear to have been unrelated to steroids (cocaine overdose and hemangioma in the brain).

Your question is an interesting one. It has become more common for healthy people to use PEDs including HGH and (relatively) low dose testosterone (TRT) to look better and improve their quality of life. I’m curious to see if there winds up being a noticeable effect on longevity when it is prescribed and managed by a physician.

Also interesting, drugs like DNP that enhance fat burning have been used historically to aid weight loss (nb – the effects of too high a dose are horrendous and the therapeutic index is narrow). Could safer versions be an unequivocal benefit to longevity in that it could combat all of the health ills from our obesity epidemic?

I would guess there is still considerable benefit to be reaped by the average American re: better living through chemistry.

I think Chomsky addressed this same question with an interviewer. “If you didn’t believe what you do, you wouldn’t be sitting here.” They are probably selected to believe it.

Asking the commentariat, has anyone seen this hair touching phenomenon in person? Genuinely curious.

The rest of the complaints seem like normal office stuff (I have to put on a nice face even if I’m stressed!) repackaged through a race-based lens.

Whoops my bad.

Shocking indeed that the completely normal couple Claudia and Sheryl have issues with how the vast majority of biological parents seem perfectly happy to divvy up parenting responsibilities along gender lines.

Would some advanced military project become public knowledge via a UFO report? That strikes me as unlikely, although it also seems unlikely that they could keep much of a secret these days in the first place.

They’re zero famines away. They just haven’t embraced the electoral possibilities yet.

It still amazes me the George Floyd is the guy. Multiple felon, drugged out of his mind. Violent, pointed a gun at a pregnant woman’s belly. But I guess that’s the point. If they can make a saint out of that fuck up what can’t they do?

Man I didn’t read the whole article but are we meant to be shocked that spending on “stuff you use at home” went up during a pandemic that kept everyone home? For about 8 months you couldn’t buy home workout equipment, for example of the demand.

They gloss right over *why* white Americans suddenly were reliant on the interstate highway system to move their magic dirt via automobile out to the suburbs, and just commute in to work.

And yes this bill isn’t meant to build things, it’s meant to hand a trillion dollars to a whole new generation of community-organized malcontents, coming soon to an area near you.

I think the media/protestors/DNC would prefer an absolutely angelic victim of police violence (assuming the skin colors fit the narrative). After all, even propagandists understand the value of the truth, better to have it on your side if you can. But reality is that most people who get shot by the police are repeat felons and/or unstable. Who else fights with the police or aggressively resists arrest.

Regarding the enormity of the lie, I forget who said that in some Communist country the point of a lie was to humiliate, break the person forced to tell it. So the bigger the better. Stick a halo on Floyd’s head. Everyone knows he pointed a gun at a pregnant woman’s belly, which makes the feigned deference to his sainthood even more soul crushing, and thus delectable to our elites.

I always thought of coolness as being a studied detachment from things, climbing the social ladder by appearing not to care too much. This is the exact opposite of the current status-conscious Wokeism, where the game is caring earnestly (or faking it) about ever-smaller things that become Very Important. I can’t guess how that interfaces with the teenaged desire to mock anything adults do as phony a la The Catcher in the Rye.

An additional advantage is that the woke can openly and even publicly coordinate to achieve their ends. If you want to hire a diversity coordinator (maybe your buddy) at a private school to start a new initiative, you can talk about it with peers, students, and potential funders. Coordinating against that sort of thing is potential career suicide, and as the article mentions has to be done discreetly and quietly.

Does employment as a private school teacher use at-will contracts? I imagine a strong board objection to this stuff and a new hire at the top could actually succeed in tamping it down. But again, as the article mentions, there’s a considerable amount of real support for it among students, staff, and parents that seems to go beyond self-interest that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Of all of the media absurdities you’ve posted lately, this is the worst. It is indistinguishable from parody, both in bemoaning the inability of “fact checkers” to monitor a media platform and in favorably remarking on the censoriousness of the Chinese Communist Party. This reads like something from Babylon Bee, only less self aware.

I agree, and I can’t figure it out. I do think it’s in part because politics is adjacent to the money printer. What’s 50 mil to oust Trump if it gets your person in charge of the Fed?

It may be just a return to some baseline, ie a period where cases aren’t surging due to, say, the holidays. But there’s also a chance for the initial vaccinations to have an outsized effect on hospitalizations, some variant of to the 80/20 rule. Cases seem less likely to be dramatically affected quickly, but obviously this is speculation.

The fact that is was published in the New York Times and pertains to domestic politics shows you that it’s pure disinformation.

I’m probably too engaged with alternative media to assess this accurately, but are any voters influenced by this old-media neocon tripe anymore? Maybe these articles are aimed at the beltway set as a way of coordinating output of think tanks beholden to cheap-labor-loving donors or something. But I can’t imagine the person who reads the WaPo editorial board column in 2021 and it changes their opinion on immigration. Does the article serve another underlying purpose?

I’m basing my comment on the CDC data for provisional deaths related to covid-19, and these are mortality figures. These may be inflated although that aspect is unclear. But according to this data, the 220 million or so Americans between 15-65 years of age have experienced a 0.02% mortality rate from covid, and I’m not misusing the percentage there. Of those deaths, ~75% are in the 55-65 demographic (experiencing more like a 0.1% population mortality rate) leaving an even smaller number for the under 55 age groups. If serious morbidity occurs an order of magnitude more frequently than mortality (a complete guess), then M&M is maybe 1/500 working age people, heavily concentrated on the 55-65 age group nearing retirement age. This thing isn’t gonna keep food off the shelves or anything like that, since it largely misses the sub-55s, and almost completely misses the sub-45s.

I’m not sure having one team each year (out of a conference of also-rans) barely good enough to get heemed in the playoffs by an SEC or ACC school qualifies Big 10 football as “serious.” I’ll grant you it is probably a revenue generating enterprise as midwestern football might be marginally more entertaining to the folks out there than their other option – literally watching corn grow.

In the event that the vaccines aren’t effective or don’t work against constantly evolving new strains, I’m pretty sure Plan B is herd immunity the old fashioned way. That obviously isn’t ideal, but it’s hardly the apocalypse either. M&M rates among healthy working age people are minuscule, and the vulnerable can continue to self isolate. We certainly can’t lock down everyone forever, although I suspect our kind government overlords would love to try.

That’s an amazing article and worth the read. In particular, the proposed *new* base salary from the company is $45,000 a year with annual 3k increase, this in NYC.

I assume these people love being “influential” more than they love a decent standard of living, which explains a lot of their vindictive witch hunts – it’s all they have.

They think that because they can, and are.

This. With semi-legal ballot harvesting operations the democrats can more or less find the votes they need, as long as no one asks too many questions. And the GOP apparently doesn’t feel compelled to do that.

They aren’t unidirectional but there’s certainly a massive power differential in this case. Random white chick can’t sic the NYT and I guess all of social media on her enemies. Apparently Jimmy can, under limited circumstances.

Literally look like each other’s cousins. Probably are, in fact.

This is of course the same behavior the entire establishment would decry as unpresidential coming from Donald Trump. I do find it interesting that both Biden and Trump focus on “higher IQ” rather than saying “I guarantee I’m smarter than you are” or something similar in meaning.

Also, I note that Joe Biden is the actual “mediocre white man” of leftist fever dreams. They must hate his ass for being necessary to their ambitions.

This question will pivot in part on whether women prefer polygamy in an absence of practical or social pressure to adopt other arrangements. It’s not as clear as one might think what their actual preference might be. Steve mentions that inertia has carried institutions along for the last several decades, to a point where most people in charge can’t explain why we did things one way (eg standardized testing) and so can’t defend against deleterious change. Monogamy would certainly fit in that mold. There are very good, pragmatic reasons a society and culture should enforce monogamy (one example, to keep more men invested in society’s success, which is important for stability and has been decreasing of late), but I’m not sure anyone making decisions in this country could name such a reason if pressed. Our best defense against changing this particular institution in this country may be that some of the most notable practitioners are ultra-white unhip Mormons, which will probably inoculate this issue against Progressive involvement.

In my experience it’s a bit of both. Great programmers tend to be more disconnected than the average person from social systems, so they just don’t understand what all of this is about. And that being the case, they kind of trust the status quo/expert opinion, in the same way that if I’m stuck at an airport and they say my Dallas flight is delayed because of storms on the east coast, I just assume that’s the truth. Sure it could be that an engine fell off my plane and they’re making shit up, but how would I know?

The second part is that they are submissive because they have great jobs at the local programming monopoly run on ad dollars or whatever. Tech monopolies make a big deal about competing to hire the best people for those “100x” programming jobs, but then collude to cut talented programmers’ salaries. This isn’t really a free market, because of the nature of the few monopolies running things. And if they blackball you for basically wrongthink, you’re heading toward reduced opportunities, less interesting projects, and a pay cut.

This is something I harp on a fair bit: the ability of companies to enforce PC dogma on their employees is predicated on the fact that whatever they lose in terms of output they can gain by maintaining their market power, whether by making voters, regulators, or FedGov happy. All of the people who are surprised that college woke culture has been so easily exported to corporations didn’t understand the game.

It’s really a great blog, although as you said a bit dated. It’s central theme, which I think is that ad men are so good at psychology that the messages they try to send can be analyzed to tell you about yourself and your place in society, is unique.

I do however find it a bit at odds with say Steve’s stories about working in marketing where a lot of the value of ad spends is illusory, and most ad value is created by promoting new products as one might expect. Are ad men cunning manipulative psychonauts hacking our collective psyche, or huxters who flatter executives for ad dollars that don’t move the needle much? Or some combination thereof?

True, but Stefi also appears to be on serious steroids, to the point of some vocal masculinization and “roid gut.” Obviously, the male competitors are also juiced to the gills, but gear is probably an equalizer when it’s used in a sport with weight classes. It will allow a woman of a given height to probably pack on muscle at a low body fat in order to fill out one of the lower weight classes.

An interesting question is, given enough anabolic steroids, is there a big difference between male and female “ceilings” for a given height/frame?

I would personally prefer to see “on the gripping hand” used a bit more often, rather than the tedious “on the other other hand.”

A fair amount of new research (which Steve has highlighted) is showing that the current fixation on people’s feelings of being hurt or persecuted being treated as the absolute Truth functions as an anti-CBT, worsening mental illness across the board. This is particularly true of anxiety and/or depression disorders. I think it’s dovetailing with the covid situation as you point out. If you feel anxious about covid it must be very important and serious. That the powers that be are helping make you feel anxious based on their coverage of it usually goes unmentioned, but this is obviously a self serving cycle for them.

I mean, I almost admire the hustle. You get hired as the diversity consultant in a lily white PC area, and they expect to get racially flogged at least a little bit. That’s what they’re paying you for, sorta like a dominatrix. So you have to come up with something. Two water fountains in some random building in town, one shorter than the other? Segregation! Jim Crow! Is it a symptom of a crumbling nation? Probably. But by God that diversicrat made something out of nothing in impressive fashion.

I think it’s because there aren’t any of those highly effective power-hungry sociopaths like Stalin in their ranks. But, of concern, just because that type isn’t there yet doesn’t mean they won’t ever be. Enough unchecked power attracts a certain type of person.

It’s been astounding to me to talk to some coworkers, otherwise intelligent people, who thought trump was a Russian agent for 3 years and didn’t learn anything about the media from that saga. I would say I underestimated the power of the MSM propaganda machine over the last several years, probably because I view more alt media. But it is certainly pulling hard for Biden this election and will have an effect iSteve readers tend to underestimate.

So, my dubious prediction: trump takes FL/AZ/NC/GA/OH/IA, putting him at about 260 EV. Does he pick off a single Great Lakes state to make it over the top? They run together electorally but there’s still local variation, although the polling and other factors indicate Biden has a stronger hold there than Clinton did, because the DNC are paying attention. But I’ll be an optimist and say trump takes one, I’ll predict ~275 EV for trump, 60% confidence, for what it’s worth.

His logic is absolutely perfect, regardless of if you believe the conventional wisdom. Either the tests are racist or reality is. His idiotic savantness(?) lies in forcing people to take a direct stand on that question.

It should also be noted that small armies of people go back and forth about drug value and pricing stuff. They mostly work for drug companies and payers (eg insurers, hospital systems, Medicare/cade). I suppose a neutral transparent entity looking at the data could be helpful, but the negotiations are opaque so it’s unclear what the impact would be. And even in situations where a well run study compares say two drugs, there are usually methodological considerations that make interpretation difficult.

Right. Imperial Japanese foreign policy was essentially a hard liner soft coup. It explains some of their fairly irrational behavior, like attacking the US who had 10X their industrial output at the time.

Regarding the OP, I think people take jobs for a number of reasons, including financial. But low level political jobs don’t offer much money, so you select for staffers who really really want to work in left wing politics and so don’t care about the low pay and terrible hours. And those kind of people tend to be rabid ideologues. So I doubt it’s a simple matter to replace them with sane 9-5 types even if a pol wanted to. Who else would sign up?

OT Steve, and you may have covered this (it’s about a month old), but I didn’t realize the EIC of Scientific American which endorsed Biden also wrote to implore people not to bid on Watson’s Nobel. Small world full of Amy Harmon aficionados.

https://slate.com/technology/2014/12/james-watson-selling-nobel-prize-dna-structure-discoverers-history-of-racism-and-sexism.html

I think something is lost in (cultural, linguistic) translation or we aren’t getting the full story. It’s easy enough for a company to say “we hired an outside firm to make sure a previous employee wasn’t hiring our employees in violation of his/their non-compete blah blah blah.”

They also may be thinking that controlling crime and other social malfeasance associated with hundreds of millions of immigrants will be easier after they chip everyone and implement a Chinese style social credit system. They see more of a “1984” future with them as a ruling party while to me “mad max” seems more likely.

I know many people prefer liberal hypocrisy to liberal earnestness, since the former implies a degree of sanity. But it’s also what allows them to accrue and maintain they power they use to everyone else’s disadvantage in the first place.

In this case, RBG did immense damage to our country and institutions with both her female and minority centered affirmative action and her general help eviscerating the pre-1965 constitution. She would have been much less effective in that regard if she actually held herself and those around her to the standards she imposed on hundreds of millions of her countrymen.

One of the most interesting politics/media questions is how do they coordinate their narratives en masse. Certainly some of it is the copy/paste of a lazy echo chamber. Some is likely due to people with very similar ideologies and taboos organically alighting on the few permissible and potentially effective rebuttals. And finally, one can’t rule out actual efforts at coordinating messaging. This always struck me as conspiracy talk but mailing lists for that purpose have existed before, and might still. Also the DNC routinely emails their minions in the MSM warnings about what they can and cannot say about political candidates.

There were some very illogical/stupid comments in that Q&A, but I suppose you’re right that it could indicate malice from a smart person. He danced around the notion of riots as a territorial control tactic, which is accurate. But there was a lot of socialist pablum (“riots show us things can be free without state oppression”).

What I found most interesting was the video. How did that dude swing a week-long jaunt to Barcelona? I’ve yet to figure out how all of these malcontents function the way they do. Rich, permissive parents? Are one of the many conspiracies about funding for antifa actually true? Most of these people don’t strike me as terribly employable, although Osterweiler is a bit of an exception.

I think part of it is fear of having your life picked over with a fine toothed comb. Most people don’t have Trump’s emotional or financial ability to stand up against that. I do agree with you – the general ability of political candidates is way down.

I’m torn. It’s reprehensible to overturn a will on such flimsy pretense. However, maybe this judge is thinking either the deceased parents continue to pay, or the state does. And since the parents paid continuously to foist this person on society for the last 60 years, why should the state have to take over now?

This gestalt attack on “Karens” has gotten to the heart of something important. Upper middle class society has a lot of rules big and small (and granted sometimes obnoxiously enforced) that help keep the riffraff out and keep things “Nice” (and property values high). So a natural target of the riffraff are the de facto enforcers of those rules. An easy rule of thumb to tell a good neighborhood is by how tedious the zoning/HOA restrictions are, for example. But rules, like we’re seeing with laws, don’t matter if they can’t be enforced.

While I agree with you, I’d much rather it be Hannity than someone on CNN or MSNBC.

I know a guy (excellent sourcing, I know) who works on Wall Street. He says a lot of the trading now is “momentum,” basically driven by the fed and bailout promises. Not a lot of concern over fundamentals beyond some obvious stuff, like will this industry be destroyed by Amazon in the next few years. I think Fed money and monopoly/oligopoly explain the market. Lax antitrust is bad for consumers but actually good for individual company stocks. High profits and/or too big to fail. Take this all with a huge grain of salt though. It is just coming from a guy I know after all, and stock trading isn’t my thing.

Regarding Kushner, it’s worth considering the possibility that the majority of what you read in the media is simply untrue. They love these “power behind the throne” stories when Republicans are in office since it delegitimizes them. “Trump isn’t in charge (Kushner/Bannon/etc) is calling the shots.” If Kushner had a heart attack tomorrow by next week there’ll be stories about some other lackey secretly being the brains of the operation.

Regarding the riot response you’re spot on. Trump needs to respond strongly, ASAP.

Certainly they should be arrested and incarcerated for a long time. But, let’s be honest, they’re pretty white girls who were engaged in leftist violence in NY. That probably won’t result in 25 to life. Probably not even close.

At the beginning of this pandemic, “curve management” was meant to prevent the COVID cases from overwhelming hospitals and associated facilities. This would save lives in obvious ways. But the worst hit areas like NYC didn’t seem that close to hitting that point. For example they had empty hospital ships, Javits center, etc. NYC is maybe 20% (?) positive, so 1/3 of the way to herd immunity without unduly stressing their medical systems. Even less concerning if they had protected nursing homes better.

So the “Let ‘Er Rip” crowd had something of a point. If the virus had been burning in a distanced but open NYC they would probably be at herd immunity, and maybe without overwhelming hospital systems.

“After all, you’ve already won a Nobel Prize: How much do you still have to fear from the enemies of science?”

If Dr. Watson is any indication, there is still plenty to fear. And these economists aren’t really near Watson’s caliber as a scientist or in terms of fame.

That 80% of women but only 40% of men (last I checked the genomics journals) have extant descendants strongly implies harem-style mating arrangements. My statement that many or most men didn’t have access to fertile women evolutionarily speaking is not at odds with this, and it appears we agree on this point, so I’m not sure what you think I don’t understand in my statement.

For the vast majority of evolutionary history pregnancy and sex weren’t easily separated. So your position implies that women just wanted sex more than men were willing to give it to them.

Statistically less than half of men who have existed have living descendants, which implies that either they mysteriously weren’t interested in sexual activity, or more likely fertile women weren’t available to them for any number of reasons. The other poster’s analysis of how this reflects risk-taking strategy therefore has merit.