There is no patriarchy. It is a feminist meme as fake as the one about journalists being fearful of violence due to their reporting in The Current Year. Blue Tribe lies to keep the machine rolling along. Here is the simple proof it is a lie. If a woman is pregnant and wants to kill her child, the man who impregnated her has no veto power.

If you lived in anything remotely close to a patriarchy, that veto would exist. It does not. You knock up a woman or are the prime candidate, you have one option: pay for that kid if the woman carries it to term. It is the idea that the state and business will replace a husband and father. It is not quite a matriarchy as the central power just becomes the masculine force with a monopoly on violence and the arbiter of justice.

This is old hat for our crowd. Why though would New York push this now and would Virginia try? New York has nothing stopping it. All three pieces of government are in the left’s hands, and the Senate flipped by a wide margin. Nothing to worry about. They will keep doing this with insane progressive wish-list items. Guns will come next.

Even smaller potatoes to you but bigger for every business was New York adding in Paid Family Leave insurance. It is state mandated. Wait, hold on, New York already has a state mandated disability insurance program. True. That benefit though has a $170 weekly benefit cap and never budges because businesses do not want to incur the additional cost.

New York  progressives found a way around that by instituting paid family leave, which is an even broader program with a far higher maximum and will soon have a far higher cost. New York knows this is going to be a death sentence for some employers and for branches of firms that are in NY state, so what they did was set a max price that insurers could charge for the first few years to ease the pain. All firms offering coverage are losing money on this as employers think it is not so bad. This max price cap goes away in the early ’20s and trust me, every single firm that offers this state mandated benefit is going to raise rates to profitability. Good buy to marginal business in New York once it does. It will not go to New Jersey because New Jersey instituted the same idiotic benefit.

This will continue happening in safe blue states. Washington and Massachusetts are going forward with these plans, too. Virginia was a risky attempt because while they have turned it blue, there are still enough swing districts to make abortion at birth moves risky. States will continue to diverge with their political programs. The big economic sort will continue. The political sort will follow.

Eventually stepping between zones will feel like stepping into another country. If you travel the nation for business, you already see this. This will only continue to accelerate as all those years of interstate TFR differentials play out. On to the links…

Franchising White Helmets – It is uncertain what will happen in Venezuela. American warplanes landing in Colombia, who signed a base use deal with America a few years back is an ominous sign. I’ve written on the smart moves the Chavistas did to secure power. Do they have a glass jaw? Would any armed resistance cause them to crumble? We do not know. One thing to keep in mind though is the DC regime using all the tools it used in Syria (except jihadis). This essay is older but an interesting read on the curious case of the White Helmets.

Apple’s China Addiction – Apple won’t be assembling IPhones in America due to some peculiar supply chain advantages in China. Do not sleep on the fact that Americans take breaks and demand food. If you read between the lines, America had far more manufacturing depth and capacity in 2000 versus today.

Coding Monks – This is a wild story about monks coding in the American southwest. Interesting alternative history timeline is what would have happened had they built up a Catholic internet infrastructure.

The Theranos Con – This essay on Theranos’ rise and fall is interesting. It reads more like a movie script of a big con looking for bigger and bigger marks. Holmes faces trial for her fraud, but really, how many elite individuals were conned by snazzy aesthetics and a female LARPing as Steve Jobs?

CIA Circus Stays The Same – Old ground for some of you but this is a nice Unz article on CIA’s methods. Frances Saunders book is a goldmine for exactly how widespread CIA control of the intelligentsia was. This makes sense if you view CIA as initially set up so that the Ivy elite that consolidated power during FDR’s reign needed a police and surveillance force under their control. It allowed for funding of their academics who could not get tenure positions. It also allowed for backdoor funding of whatever they wanted culturally. CIA used the Ford Foundation to keep the WW2 level public funding that Harvard had enjoyed. It does not change and will not as long as we have this regime.