Many people misunderstand the first rule of kings (including a plenty of kings themselves). You must only give orders that will be obeyed. Break this rule, and you will not stay as king for long.

The Supreme Court showed that they still have the sense to stay as kings.

1/

https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/1938599746622370014

The rule that the craziest of your subordinates gets to act with the full weight and force of the king himself was on a very fast track to getting the entire authority openly defied. Far better to preserve your long term authority by restricting its scope on the short term.

2/

Aesop's Fables are wonderful for children, but you should correct the lessons when they are slightly wrong.

In the Hare and the Tortoise, slow and steady does not generally win the race. Fast and steady does. The real lesson is to not slow down before the race is finished.

1/ In the Town Mouse and the Country mouse, the lesson is not "Better a little in safety, than an abundance surrounded by danger". The lesson is that risk and reward tend to go together.

2/

Milton Friedman's big contribution to the philosophy of science was the "as if" idea. Many models have assumptions that aren't literally true, but still make useful predictions. If not-quite-right assumptions get you correct predictions, it tells you something important.

1/

https://twitter.com/jackmjenkins/status/1921961901749146097

It isn't quite right to say that much of the left hates white people, wants them to suffer and die, wants America replaced by infinity brown people, loves crime and dysfunction and people liable to create this, and wants police to be unable to stop crime and dysfunction.

2/

One of the worst acts of the Biden administration, crying out for punishment, was to openly defy the law by flying millions of illegals into America. They deliberately flouted the rule of law when it served them, knowing it would be hard to deport them all through the courts.
1/ The entropy of immigration means that it is asymmetrically much easier to add known illegal immigrants to a population than to figure out afterwards who is whom. This is precisely the point. So now you have two choices, both bad.

2/

I remember once seeing an Impressionist collection that, unusually, was paired with photos from Paris from the same time. It was amazing how drab and ordinary Paris actually looked next to the paintings. It made me appreciate the art style more, and Paris less.

1/ The Studio Ghibli art is the same, but now everyone gets to see the comparison. But this actually just shows how good it is. It shows the world as you'd like it to be, where the contrast is high, the faces are pretty, the scenes like out of a dream.

2/

I suspect that a lot of the reason for bad parenting guidelines is our unwillingness to give conditional advice for fear of offending people. So instead of saying "don't co-sleep with your baby if you're a morbidly obese drug addict", doctors say "nobody should co-sleep".

1/ But the irony is that the women likely to take this advice seriously and worry about it are the high IQ, high attention, high neuroticism mothers who were at lowest risk in the first place.

2/

Orwell is still undefeated as describing the best model of the psychology of charity:

""A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor—it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it."

1/ It is amazing how many social problems in life are utterly perplexing without this as your default understanding. One normally expects world leaders to hide it better, but the reaction itself is not a surprise at all.

2/

Every day for the past month, I've been reminded that for my entire life up to 2024, I was assured that it was impossible to fire civil servants in any meaningful quantity, that government departments couldn't ever be closed down.

It was all lies. It just hadn't been tried.

1/

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1892709784022864125

And this is not a case of me just believing the New York Times. All my based friends agreed! I agreed. It was one of the most bipartisan beliefs I can think of. It was almost as rock solid outside the Overton Window as inside.

2/

Sooner or later, America is going to have to grapple with the difficult philosophical question of whether "an illegal court order" is a contradiction in terms or not.

1/ You may be surprised to find out that the current regime does not actually have a clean answer to this question. Instead, it studiously avoids needing to have the question brought up. All systems with explicit or implicit judicial supremacy seem to have this trait.

2/

The reactionary economist's steelman case for tariffs. An incomplete thread.

1/ Tariffs produce tax revenue which can be used to offset other taxes. The failure to include this in comparisons greatly slants the argument towards free trade in the eyes of economists, by conflating "lower distortionary taxes" with "lower tariffs specifically".
2/

The essential personality trait that doctors develop is the ability to confidently give an answer on any matter and sound like a self-assured subject matter expert. Even if they've half forgotten, or don't really know. Patients hate an uncertain or unknowing doctor.

1/N This is not just something that comes from the medical profession, but something patients themselves implicitly demand. People don't like doctors that get the wrong answer, but they tend to be even more scornful of doctors who Google things in front of them.

2/N

Evidence Suggesting Voter Fraud in Michigan Senate Race

5 highly suspicious late-night vote updates in Wayne, Genesee, Berrien and Muskegon counties contributed 18.5K net Democrat votes, almost the entire Dem margin of victory. They look implausible on multiple dimensions.

A 🧵 The updates boost Democrat votes at the expense of Republican votes, pushing the limits of what might be considered credible to a casual observer. However, they leave six properties that are consistent with fraud, and are collectively very hard to explain.

2/N

Evidence Suggesting Voter Fraud in Wisconsin Senate Race

In Milwaukee, a huge and improbable Dem vote dump flipped the race

In Dane and Winnebago, updates implausibly all improved Dem vote share relative to prior votes. Updates got more extreme after GOP pulled ahead.

A 🧵 In Milwaukee, a large vote update of 109K votes, 83% favoring the Democrats, arrived at 3:31am on Wed 11/6, flipping the outcome of the race.

This vote batch is improbable on several dimensions:
1. It is late at night
2. It differs from the 67% Dem vote share beforehand

2/N

A 🧵 on alarming changes in Pennsylvania voter rolls between October 14 and 21. Highlights:

-12k duplicate observations, potentially allowing multiple ballots by the same person

-10% of new records (6.5k) suspiciously backdated to list registration dates years in the past

1/N Suspiciously dated records are more likely to:
-Be missing house numbers
-To have registered on Jan 1st
-To have already voted.

They could only be identified by comparing both snapshots. They are not explained by bad updates of old data or inactive voters becoming active.

2/N

A 🧵 on how terrible and massively error-filled Pennsylvania voter roll data is.

This is important for understanding how much voter fraud there is. A system that cannot prevent innocent errors also cannot prevent malicious errors.

First, the highlights:

1/N -423 PA voters are older than the oldest known person. 17 are too young. One is yet to be born.
-Almost 1m (12% of PA voters) lack a house number, making their address impossible to verify.
-252 PA voters only list a Post Office Box as an address

2/N

Brazil right now is a prime example of why a Supreme Court should never ever be given the power to launch their own investigations and make orders based off them, but instead should only have the power to respond to cases that others bring before them.

1/ Moraes is rapidly showing the truth in Moldbug's observation that if the Supreme Court were reduced to a single person, the approrate title for that person would be "King".

I am increasingly convinced that one of the worst societal choices the west made was deciding that housing should be a vehicle for generating investment wealth, rather than something that stays as cheap as possible. The related problem was trying to square the circle of "house prices should go up" and "housing should be 'affordable'" by subsidising loans for housing, which just makes the cost problem worse.

There is a certain kind of opportunistic genius I associate most with the Greeks, in this case an old friend of mine.

When reflecting on Germany/Costa Rica game, once Spain lost to Japan, Germany couldn't go through. But they still had 5 minutes to play. What could they do? They had enough time to turn around and score three own goals, to make sure that Costa Rica won, and then Spain wouldn't go through either.

A friend asked me a few days ago whether I was planning to look into voter fraud this election. I replied that I wasn't. I came to the conclusion last time that it wouldn't matter what we documented, it wouldn't change the result.

https://twitter.com/DanODonnellShow/status/1590364740236156928

Unless State GOP parties did something to stop this kind of stuff in advance, it was hopeless. And sure enough, the states that were useless and dubious last time have chicanery and surprising results again this time. Pennsylvania. Arizona. Wisconsin. Michigan.

New Post: The Martian Perspective
Imagining what a historian in 200 years might make of the present moment.
shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-ma… "As Wallesteimer described the atmosphere in the mid to late 2020s, 'From here on out, both parties' leaders began to suspect that if they lost power, they were liable to lose their freedom, if not their lives. ...

If Trump wants to do one last good economic policy, he should put @JohnHCochrane on the Fed board with the sole mandate of implementing Narrow Banking, come hell or high water. Actually, giving him a broad mandate would be better, but this would be a great place to start.