Overnight News: Want to tell me all about yourself? Don’t bother. Just tell me what you did with your time when you were 13 years old.

As you may have noted, I am fascinated by my own special set of proxy signals. Supermarket floors must sparkle and everyone is to have been DISCed. I am interested in everyone’s first two decades, and I’ll take that in five-year quadrants – with those first years being the most telling of tells. In the bigger picture: Dad was where, when? Career frustrations? Recurring relationship disasters? I ask the questions that make the grown-ups cry.

Here’s a tell for the people you find at the top of any merit-based ziggurat: They all have Thirteen Privilege: They were not wasting their time at age 13.

True or false? Qui non est hodie cras minus aptus erit. At 13, the academically-ambitious Cautious students (aka ‘The Front Row Kids’) could translate that for you – except they were too busy being even more over-prepared for tomorrow’s homework. At 13, the Driven kids were driving their teachers crazy – and bringing home trophies or building the future after school. At 13, the outstanding Incandescents were painstakingly navigating the route to Carnegie Hall – practice, practice, practice.

The attack on merit is a usurpation of invested effort – seizing that Thirteen Privilege away from the hard-working people who earned it, socializing to anyone who didn’t.

Classical music excludes lazy musicians, so it must go. Pro sports teams exclude lazy athletes, so presumably that will have to be corrected, in due course, as well. We depend for our lives on people who were very serious and very busy at age 13, so we must do as much as possible to punish and abuse those people.

We must not only deny them the benefit of their arduous labor, we must also deny ourselves the further fruits of their labors. Their glaring Thirteen Privilege not only denies us jobs we’re not qualified to do, it puts our entire culture of mediocrity into stark relief. Surely it’s easier to rid the world of virtue than to amend the smallest vice…

In other news:

The New York Post: New York City businesses are barely hanging on.

David Blackmon: What Really Happened in Texas Last Week.

Zero Hedge: Michael Burry Warns Weimar Hyperinflation Is Coming.

American Greatness: The Second Set of Books.