Thursday Night Links

• In fact, about halfway through this book, I realized that it was actually about running a startup. I've long argued that most books about politics and war can be read esoterically as business books, and vice versa. So it’s natural that a book about coups is an esoteric manual about the kind of business that looks, feels, and acts like a coup. What is a startup but a conspiracy that starts stealthy, grows explosively, and aims to take the world by storm before attracting the dangerous attention of large competitors? Like a coup, a startup is always short-staffed, always has too many things to do and has to let some worthy projects slip. And like a coup, if a startup wins it does so because its behemoth competitors cannot match its single-mindedness, decisiveness, or ferocious pace of planning, execution, evaluation, and re-planning. [Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf]
• There are, approximately, an infinite number of books aimed at parents expecting their first child — especially anxious, bookish members of the professional-managerial classwho haven’t been around an actual infant since their sole younger sibling was born — but there are only two you should read. The first and most important is Marc Weissbluth’s Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, a book so vital to parental wellbeing that I once received an expensive Harry & David gift basket merely for a secondhand recommendation. The other is Baby Meets World, a fairly obscure text with a double doctrine: on the surface, an investigation of infant development; beneath, the secret teaching that it doesn’t really matter. [Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf]
• The concept of "allergy" was originally introduced in 1906 by the Viennese pediatrician Clemens von Pirquet, after he noticed that patients who had received injections of horse serum or smallpox vaccine usually had quicker, more severe reactions to second injections. Pirquet called this phenomenon "allergy" from the Ancient Greekwords ἄλλος allos meaning "other" and ἔργονergon meaning "work". [Allergy]
• Far from being some neutral political decision-making process that allows the body of the citizenry to participate in governance, democracy essentially is a sham, a way to apply a veneer of popular legitimacy to predetermined policies desired by Regime oligarchs. And if the occasion arises where the people get too uppity and start moving in directions the oligarchs don’t want, democratic results can always be…adjusted…to give the right answers. All in all, when the Regime talks about “democracy,” what it means is Regime-approved policies and personnel being implemented, and it’s been this way for decades. [The Neo-Ciceronian Times]
• Darwinian selection massively weakened, meaning that, for the first time in history, the selfish, sick and stupid could survive and reproduce, undermining our religious, group-oriented culture. Now the West is scourged by an epidemic of narcissists, competing to signal their individuality and moral superiority. But their ‘fight for equality’ is really a fight for self-promotion. Reflecting this runaway individualism, Westerners increasingly don’t have children, save for those who are genetically resistant to this onslaught ― the staunchly conservative and religious: the eventual inheritors of the earth. But there is a dark storm brewing in the demographic data that the authors have analysed. There is a burgeoning growth in the population of exceptionally unintelligent and antisocial people that social welfare systems cannot sustain for much longer. The developed world will pass away, and the global population that depends on it will crash, in the greatest Malthusian Collapse of all time. Yet all is not lost. The authors show how a resistant class of intelligent, religious conservatives will band together to preserve enclaves of civilization that may survive most of the coming apocalypse, and from its ashes rebuild a new world: A Neo-Byzantium. [Edward Dutton]
• If the elites get their way and a pro-immigration candidate wins, or if an anti-immigration candidate is successfully turned or thwarted, rents will keep spiraling up and labor cost increases will be dampened. High profit margins for the S&P 500 will continue. When you look at it that way, it's hard to believe that the elites won't be able to beg, borrow, or steal the election! [CBS]