Weekly Digest: My Subscriber Knowledge Base

Welcome to my weekly digest for September 16, 2022.

For new subscribers, this contains a roundup of my recent writings and podcasts, as well as links to the best articles from around the web this week. You can control what emails you get from me by visiting your account page.

My next newsletter is out on Monday.

Reminder About the Subscriber Knowledge Base

For those of you who are paid subscribers, I want to be sure you are aware of a unique benefit for you, my Subscriber Knowledge Base. It contains an archive of the last several years of my “best of the web” links, organized by topics. It covers topics like dating and marriage, fertility and child rearing, social dynamics, the economy, men’s and women’s issues, and much more. There’s a lot of good information I’ve curated there.

There are also a number of interesting resources I’ve uploaded, including my notes on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, audio versions of early newsletters that aren’t available publicly, a number of documents about leadership, etc. I’m always looking for this to add to it.

In addition to exclusive content here, as a paid subscriber you get all this for free as an added bonus. Instructions for how to access are available here.

To become a paid subscriber and get access to the knowledge base, exclusive content, podcast transcripts, and occasional special events, click below. Your paid subscription also helps sustain and expand my work.

New Content and Media Mentions

Matt Bennett writes about my three worlds model.

New this week:

• I posted a report from the National Conservatism 3 conference (Paid Subscribers Only).

• My podcast this week is on the corruption of American competence. I highlight our inabilities to deal with crime and decays in our water infrastructure. While not universally the case, in many domains we are seeing increasing decline of our infrastructure and capabilities, and elite dysfunction that makes them impossible to address. Paid subscribers can read the transcript.

• At American Reformer, there’s an interesting article by Gordon Dakota Arnold on the most hard secularist of the American Founders, James Madison.

Related to my podcast this week, we can add, in addition to the areas I covered, our inability to maintain and upgrade our nuclear weapons systems and our similar inability to maintain our submarine fleet.

Best of the Web

The LA Times has an incredible exposé on the state’s pot landscape in the wake of the state’s legalization of it. The article is probably for subscribers only, but they include the highlights on Twitter.

California’s cannabis initiative sold voters on the promise a legal market would cripple the drug’s outlaw trade. Instead, a Times investigation finds the law triggered a surge in illegal cannabis on a scale California has never before witnessed. Rogue cultivation centers like Mount Shasta Vista now engulf rural communities scattered across the state, as far afield as the Mojave Desert, the steep mountains in the North Coast, and the high desert and timberlands of the Sierra Nevada. Residents in these places describe living in fear next to heavily armed camps. Criminal enterprises operate with near impunity, leasing private land and rapidly building out complexes of as many as 100 greenhouses. Police are overwhelmed. Raids rip out plants and snare low-wage laborers while those responsible, some operating with money from overseas, remain untouched by the law, hidden behind straw buyers and fake names on leases. Labor exploitation is common, and conditions are sometimes lethal. The Times documented more than a dozen deaths of growers and workers poisoned by carbon monoxide.

Legalized pot is a disaster. It’s being rammed through because a lot of upscale whites like to smoke it. It’s as simple as that.

Idaho schools have contracted with an agency providing “porn literacy” in the schools.

WaPo: In cowboy country, a single mother tries to raise her boy to be a good man - Undoubtedly many of the men in her life did terrible things and should be condemned. But a healthy society would also have guardrails and system to restrain people like Sarah herself from making toxic choices that are self-destructive and harmful to her son.