Things have been quiet on my site, and on Porter’s site, and at Social Matter. The years at and around peak earnings (40’s through 50’s) are a busy time. Work, children in college, aging family members, and one’s own efforts to stave off decrepitude all distract from ranting on the Internet. Thankfully the indefatigable Z-Man, Brett Stephens and Steve Sailer soldier on for your reading enjoyment.

Because really, what else is there to rant about? Politics as we know it is over. We have piled up $22 trillion in federal public debt alone, re-financeable at negative interest rates. The monied class has run out of things to buy so they’re buying sovereign debt. It’s better than cash, literally, so why are we still paying taxes?

We are at a strange equilibrium where productivity is keeping pace with monetary inflation. For all practical purposes, we are Post-Scarcity. If you don’t believe me, declare yourself opposite-gendered, get a neck tattoo, alienate your entire biological family, reject your culture’s historic religious faith and taboos, and see if you have to go live under a bridge. You won’t. The rules that kept things together in a world existentially dependent on adequate rainfall don’t apply in a world of air-conditioned skyscrapers in the desert.

The only problem remaining in such a world is the equitable distribution of resources. Does anybody have a good answer for why Haiti is allowed to exist while the US and other governments spend out of their deficits to fund the F-35? Why must these same countries take in immigrants from all the places that are, as usual, failing, when we could swoop in with our F-35’s and save them from their own self-rule?

If you’re a free market economist, you’ll say these massive inequalities are a necessary corollary to uninhibited operation of the supply-demand curve. The human eco-system, so the argument goes, must operate free of externality other than consumer preference in order to incentivize capital formation and efficiencies.  It’s a good argument. Free market economic policy has produced unprecedented, astounding wealth. All attempts to replace the invisible hand of the market with bureaucratic management have failed, and they always will. Socialism can’t calculate. But the awkward issue for the free market-economist is that this hyper-abundance exists hand in glove with the large, omnipresent footprint of governments and their central banks.

The retort from the Austrian School is that the fiat money-generated boom cannot last. The artificially low interest rates and money-printing distort price signals and divert capital from the “real” economy to the “bubble” economy, the latter being parasitic on the former. Eventually, with the real economy starved of capital, the bubble economy collapses to the level which can actually be supported by real savings (current profits retained to fund future production). As Friedrich Hayek conceptualized it, the Keynesians and monetarists simply borrow from the future, and will eventually run out of future.

The Hayekian view is compelling, as it seems confirmed in Nature. Artificial interventions in biological eco-systems lead to disaster. Animals, not having fiat currency and public welfare, must work or starve. Soft times beget soft people beget hard times, as we on the Alt-Right love to remind everyone.

But what if we’re wrong? What if our economic baseline has reached a level of productivity that can support billions of people with far fewer inputs than previous? We spend kings’ ransoms keeping people out of the labor market until well into adulthood, and still have enough to park a number of them there permanently (we call such institutions “universities”). Large numbers of public and private jobs could vanish overnight with no effect on the cone of production. We have them simply because we can afford it,  but we could just pay these people the same salaries to stay home. Here’s Forbes’ list of top YouTube millionaires. Here’s the healthy, enthusiastic staff of the University of Chicago’s Office of Civic Engagement.

Clearly, I have been doing things dreadfully wrong.

The counter to all this remains that we are simply in the Everything Bubble. Like the bald eagles that stopped hunting when the humans arrived and built Dutch Harbor, we will become obese, dissipated, and ultimately incapable of maintaining the technologies upon which we have become dependent.

And so, this strange, quiet Interregnum here in the vanguard of political thought. Are we marching toward a tolerant, borderless future of thermodynamically neutral energy sources overseen by wise technocrats? If so, the Enlightenment ideals and social conservatism of the US Founders do not apply, and I look forward to my YangBucks.

Or is this just the Peak before the accrued capital runs out, and the old gods with terror and slaughter return?

I don’t know. And you can contact Porter, Nick B. Steves or Happy Acres and they’ll tell you they don’t know either. We wait and see–Trump so far has proven to be a placeholder–so getting exercised over which wing of the Globohomo Party should govern the US (and from there, the world) is kind of pointless.

On February 21, 2019 His Holiness the Ecumenical Patriarch responded to the letter from His Beatitude Patriarch John X sent on December 31, 2018 calling on him to convoke a synaxis of the primates of the autocephalous Orthodox churches in order to examine the Ukrainian issue and find a Pan-Orthodox solution to it. His Holiness states that “after four Orthodox churches, without reason from an ecclesiological and theological point of view, refused to be present during the work of the Great and Holy Council, for which there is no excuse– and your ancient church was one of them– the Ecumenical Patriarchate has good reason to refrain from such a meeting at the Pan-Orthodox level, which would be useless inasmuch as it would only lead to agreement that the participants are in disagreement with each other.” (From Notes on Arab Orthodoxy).

So there.

Readers of my long-neglected blog may recall the Ecumenical Patriarch’s unilateral recognition of a new Orthodox Church for the country of Ukraine, and going back further, the abortive “Great and Holy Council” which the Patriarch attempted to call in 2016. With respect to the former, imagine the American Antiochians doing an end-run around their Patriarch, +John X, and getting +Bartholomew in Istanbul to declare an independent American Orthodox Church. Greatly simplified, that’s what happened with Ukraine motivated, as it now appears, in no small part by the Local Churches’ slight of the Ecumenical Patriarch in 2016. The letter is astonishingly curt and vindictive; Church-speak, like diplomat-speak, is as a rule very rigorously and subtly couched. This letter is the ecclesial equivalent of an Eff You.

Unfortunately, this is a pretty big deal. Moscow is out of communion with Constantinople over Ukraine. Antioch is out of communion with Jerusalem over the latter’s incursion into its territories (over which she appealed, and was ignored, by Constantinople). The canonical Ukrainian Church (the Metropolitanate which answers to Moscow) will soon be outlawed leading to seizure of properties and further escalations on all sides, with the Local Churches inevitably forced into a public stand and, hence, more schisms. The conciliar model is blowing up, thanks to Hellenistic bigots and a Muscovite Patriarch who, with justification, regards the See of Constantinople as functionally vacant but, in his own turn, would very much like to be considered the Third Rome. At the end of the day of course, the Patriarch of Moscow is the one with the sanction of the nuclear-armed Russian state, and the Ecumenical Patriarch lives in a Greek ghetto in Turkey. If you have to remind people of your primacy, as +Bartholomew persists in reminding everyone, you don’t really have it.

I cannot even begin to describe the contrivances our archaic, ethnically tangled ecclesiology has created for itself in the modern world. Yet I am told repeatedly, vehemently, under penalty of excommunication, that even the faintest expression of ethno-nationalism is just the worst sin of all sins that any sinner can ever sin. “In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek,” as St. Paul puts it. Now, the first part is undoubtedly true as I’m aware of exactly one Orthodox of Jewish ancestry in my area, but I have sat in the conference room of a Greek cathedral and heard a prominent congregant remark to Christians of English, Syrian, Palestinian, and Russian descent that “Christianity is Hellenistic.” I also observe that, day in and day out, every single Orthodox bishop and priest of the so-called diaspora Churches in the Americas and Europe is in violation of the 1872 Council.

To my observation, the most salient and consistent feature of the historical Church has been the evolutionary wedding of Her liturgy and hierarchy to the local culture. I have read that the earliest schisms, resulting in the venerable Coptic, Armenian and Assyrian Churches, were motivated in part by antipathy to Byzantine supremacists. The Germanics peeled off with Luther and Calvin from Rome. The only French Pope moved the See to Avignon, and the King of the British Isles quite easily if heretically slipped the leash of a Pope several months’ journey away. (What would Western Christianity look like if the Roman Patriarch had prudentially granted autocephaly to the nations of Europe and Britain rather than try to run everything from the Italian peninsula?)

There is an old English Catholic hymn, “Faith of Our Fathers,” which seems to capture the prevailing sentiment of peoples everywhere quite well. If  our beatitudinous Patriarchs are nationalistic–even, dare I say, imperialistic–then our shopworn “neither Jew nor Greek” dictum has to be an answer to some different question. I wish our bishops would get around to asking it but like I say, the more they have to deal with jurisdictional battles the less time they have to lecture us on immigrants and global warming.

Forgiveness Sunday and the beginning of Great Lent approaches. Let us pray for forgiveness, and the state of Christ’s Church and the World.

In light of recent events, just a short post to remind everyone that ideological debate in this country ended on June 2, 2016.

Whether you know it, or want to admit it, or not.

… versus populism, which is becoming fixed in the argument-ending lexicon, along with the venerable “fascism” and “racism.”

National Review has another enemy of the Republic in its sights, this time Tucker Carlson, for the following heresy:

One of the biggest lies our leaders tell us that you can separate economics from everything else that matters. Economics is a topic for public debate. Family and faith and culture, meanwhile, those are personal matters. Both parties believe this.

Members of our educated upper-middle-classes are now the backbone of the Democratic Party who usually describe themselves as fiscally responsible and socially moderate. In other words, functionally libertarian. They don’t care how you live, as long as the bills are paid and the markets function. Somehow, they don’t see a connection between people’s personal lives and the health of our economy, or for that matter, the country’s ability to pay its bills. As far as they’re concerned, these are two totally separate categories.

Social conservatives, meanwhile, come to the debate from the opposite perspective, and yet reach a strikingly similar conclusion. The real problem, you’ll hear them say, is that the American family is collapsing. Nothing can be fixed before we fix that. Yet, like the libertarians they claim to oppose, many social conservatives also consider markets sacrosanct. The idea that families are being crushed by market forces seems never to occur to them. They refuse to consider it. Questioning markets feels like apostasy.

David French condemned Tucker’s “victimhood populism,” urging conservatives to stay the ideological course. The personal, insists David, is not the political.

The problem with populism — and indeed with much of American politics — is that it focuses on the political at the expense of the personal. As I’ve argued many times, there are wounds that public policy can’t heal. But populism too often pretends otherwise. It tells a fundamentally false story about Americans as victims of a heartless elite and their “worship” of market economics rather than the true story of America as a flawed society that still grants its citizens access to tremendous opportunity.

Now this is correct and reasonable, so far as it goes. The best retirement plan is not Social Security; it’s to have several kids and stay on good terms with them. Avoiding poverty is above all adherence to the three No’s: no dropping out of high school, no children out of wedlock, and no children or marriage before a firm footing in adulthood. But getting people to that point of healthy, stable families should at least include removing active barriers to family formation. Housing and education (both in acquiring credentials and that Holy Grail of parenthood, the “Good School District”) are formidable obstacles, and the government footprint in both is enormous. If anybody requires more examples of actively toxic government policy, there are entire books full of them.

The Z-Man has a good treatment of these issues, riffing off the government’s bass-ackwards regulation of telemarketers. One might think that the default should be businesses cannot just program computers or hire desperate nobodies to cold-call people. But instead, you have to go out of your way to keep these pests off your telephone, which you paid for.

This small little incident I’m describing is a microcosm of what’s wrong in the country. The FTC website should not exist. There’s no need for a do-not-call registry. The government could simply make the telephone companies responsible for the abuse that goes on with telemarketers. The phone companies would then demand the government pass laws that discourage these scams. The phone system operators would then aggressively police their networks and turn the scammers over to the state.

That does not happen, of course. The idea of the government doing things to make daily life easier on the citizens is so alien to us now, that the very suggestion of it is met with howls of protest. That is, after all, what happened when Tucker Carlson suggested the people in charge start worrying about the happiness of the public. The shrieking and gasping at such blasphemy around the Imperial Capital was deafening. No one in the ruling class, or their attendants, thinks the government owes us anything.

To people like David French, this state of affairs is not objectionable because after all, the United States is not a particular people nor even a particular place. America is a Proposition nation where we are free to fail, and the people are expected to make their own way. And certainly they should, if the people could say Fuck You and light out for the open frontier, and the government did not collect trillions of dollars in taxes, issue trillions of dollars in bonds, bail out obscenely wealthy corporations, blow people up, warp the entire culture into feminized co-dependency, and on and on.

America is so obviously not an idea or proposition I’m surprised I still hear it. After all, if America were just a proposition we could write the proposition down on a piece of paper and mail it to everybody. Geopolitics as we know would cease as everyone, swayed by our impeccable logic, just became Americans. (There’s actually a hilariously unironic alt-history story where the US and the British Empire avert World War Two by threatening to destroy France, Germany, and Russia, and everybody agrees to global rule by the Anglo-American commonwealth).

The hour, as Saruman said, is later than we think, and even later than Donald Trump and probably Tucker Carlson and certainly David French think. We tell people to vote but California, New York, New Jersey, or any other State can sign up for refugee resettlement, declare sanctuary cities, enact motor-voter laws, and the extant vote will be completely diluted. Los Angeles County is already bigger than 40 of the States–they will not agree to a Red State veto forever. Or, you can vote for whatever policy you want, but if Jeff Bezos is on the other side of it, a single phone call from his lobbyists to your governor or city council will override any mere voting majority. Most poignantly, the average citizen has absolutely nothing to bid against his own displacement and destruction of his socio-economic standing, when political and monied interests stand to gain so much from more commercial churn and more serfs on the tax farm. After all, the Nation is just a Proposition–any people will do.

Against this tsunami, this moving megalith of electoral doom and cultural decimation, the ideological conservative remains steadfast, sanguine in the conviction that while the Left may kill him, ravage his wife and daughters, make his sons into strangers in their own lands and send them off to die for ungrateful foreigners, they can never kill the Constitution!

Source.

Brood parasites are organisms that rely on others to raise their young. The strategy appears among birds, insects and some fish. The brood parasite manipulates a host, either of the same or of another species, to raise its young as if it were its own, using brood mimicry, for example by having eggs that resemble the host’s (egg mimicry).

Brood parasitism relieves the parasitic parents from the investment of rearing young or building nests for the young, enabling them to spend more time on other activities such as foraging and producing further offspring. Bird parasite species mitigate the risk of egg loss by distributing eggs among a number of different hosts. As this behavior damages the host, it often results in an evolutionary arms race between parasite and host as the pair of species co-evolve.

Birds
In many monogamous bird species, there are extra-pair matings resulting in males outside the pair bond siring offspring and used by males to escape from the parental investment in raising their offspring. This form of cuckoldry is taken a step further when females of the goldeneye (Bucephala clangula) often lay their eggs in the nests of other individuals. Intra-specific brood parasitism is seen in a number of duck species, where females often lay their eggs in the nests of others.

Most avian brood parasites have very short egg incubation periods and rapid nestling growth. In many brood parasites, such as cuckoos and honeyguides, this short egg incubation period is due to internal incubation periods up to 24 hours longer in cuckoos than hosts. Some non-parasitic cuckoos also have longer internal incubation periods, suggesting that this longer internal incubation period was not an adaptation following brood parasitism, but predisposed birds to become brood parasites. This is likely facilitated by a heavier yolk in the egg providing more nutrients. Being larger than the hosts at growth is a further adaptation to being a brood parasite.

‘Mafia’ hypothesis
There is a question as to why the majority of the hosts of brood parasites care for the nestlings of their parasites. Not only do these brood parasites usually differ significantly in size and appearance, but it is also highly probable that they reduce the reproductive success of their hosts. The “mafia hypothesis” evolved through studies in an attempt to answer this question. This hypothesis revolves around host manipulations induced by behaviors of the brood parasite. Upon the detection and rejection of a brood parasite’s egg, the host’s nest is depredated upon, its nest destroyed and nestlings injured or killed. This threatening response indirectly enhances selective pressures favoring aggressive parasite behavior that may result in positive feedback between mafia-like parasites and compliant host behaviors.

 

DES MOINES – The mother of Mollie Tibbetts, the University of Iowa student whose disappearance and killing attracted national attention, has taken in the son of Mexican immigrants who worked with her daughter’s accused killer, according to a Washington Post report.

In a story published Friday, The Post reported that Laura Calderwood brought Ulises Felix, 17, into her home. Ulises’ parents worked alongside murder suspect Cristhian Bahena Rivera at a dairy farm in Brooklyn, Iowa.

After Bahena Rivera’s arrest, Ulises’ parents fled town for Illinois and left behind their American son, a high school boy, according to the Post. When Tibbetts’ younger brother, Scott, asked Calderwood whether they could take in Ulises, the 55-year-old woman wondered what her daughter would do, Post reporter Terrence McCoy wrote.

Ulises has been living in a spare bedroom in Calderwood’s house. Mollie’s brother, Scott, also lives there.

Mollie Tibbetts was found dead Aug. 21, her body hidden in a cornfield in rural Poweshiek County, Iowa, after a month of searching for her.