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We have the technology.

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These northern California counties–which include Sonoma, Napa, Solano and Marin–have become beacons for middle- and upper-class residents from the Bay Area. These generally liberal people came in part to enjoy the lifestyle of this mild, bucolic region, and many have little interest in changing it.

“The yuppies have insulated themselves here for the long term,” notes Robert Eyler, a director at the Center for Regional Economic Analysis at Sonoma State University. “The boomers have blocked everyone else different in age and skill from rising up and making their place.”

Only in America could such people be characterized as ‘liberal’ rather than ‘conservative’, or even ‘reactionary’.

California’s high-tech greens may talk a liberal streak in terms of diversity and social justice, but their prescriptions offer little for those who would like to build a career and raise a family in 21st century California. Their policies in terms of land use regulation and greenhouse gas emissions will make it even harder for existing factories, warehouses, homebuilders and other traditional employers of the middle- or working class. “In effect,” Eyler notes, “the progressives have become regressives.”

Well, some of us think that the correct term for all modern ‘progressives’ is ‘regressive’ – just look at the environmentalists, who won’t be happy until all white people move back to Europe, and maybe not even then.

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Flowering plants are more interesting than you might realize.

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Well, duh. And I’m quite sure that she didn’t give two seconds’ thought to how her choices would affect anybody else but her. We live in the ME World, of which Twitter and Facebook are the iconic reflections.

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And the place hasn’t changed all that much from then to now.

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We are beginning to see way too many echoes of the 1930s, as national socialist and Marxian socialist thugs try to drive competing political views off the streets. The worst offenders so far have been the Service Employees’ International Union, which has repeatedly sent its members out into the streets to beat up anyone who isn’t toeing the Obama line on issues like socialized medicine.

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With Russia playing President Obama like a fiddle, it’s natural that China would want to get in on the act. Thus, it’s no suprise that the Chinese regime invited Obama to Beijing. Nor is it any suprise that Obama accepted the invitation.

I remember when Khruschev rolled Kennedy in Vienna in 1961, leading directly to the Cuban Missle Crisis. We now have a President who had never run an organization in his life before being elected President of the fargin’ United States, and it shows. Unfortunately, the rest of us will wind up paying for it.

Steve Sailer decides to kibitz the discussion between Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell.

I would suggest that the reason Gladwell is choosing to make a big deal over Pinker calling BS on Gladwell’s assertion that performance as an NFL quarterback “can’t be predicted” is because Malcolm realizes this minor issue is characteristic of his entire career.

Well, yeah.

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Good. Cleansing the Republican party of RINOs is just as important as beating Democrats. You can’t do any heavy lifting when the floor you’re standing on is rotten.

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In pre-industrial times, ‘of full age’ was considered 14 for males and 12 for females; a number of kings came out of regency at that age. Can you imagine the country being run by a 14-year-old? (I know it seems like that at times, but I’m serious.)

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I have not, in the last ten years, had a computer setup at the office that was as good as I had at home. There really is no reason for that — plenty of excuses, sure, but no reason.

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Many people talk about living in the past, but I guess the French have found a way to do it.

I strongly suspect that there are some legal advantages, as well, but I’m a cynical old coot.

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The married British ambassador in Yemen, where adultery is punishable with death by stoning, has moved his pregnant mistress into the official residence after his wife of 23 years returned home.

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Similar legislation no doubt pending in Congress — after all, we have to do it the way the Europeans do it.

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Parents could be unwillingly packing more than 12 teaspoons of sugar into their children’s lunch-boxes, a consumer campaign group claimed.

They say that as if it were a bad thing. Personally, I rarely give much credence to advice from magazines whose names consist merely of an interjection and punctuation mark. “Consumer campaign groups” don’t rank very highly, either. (Ever notice how “consumer groups” seem dedicated to restricting the choices that consumers have? Perhaps “anti-consumer group” would be the more accurate term.)

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Residents of a small Italian town where 8,000 people have the same surname have won a legal fight to use their nicknames, which can descend into the derogatory, on official documents.

How refreshingly medieval. Reputedly the Chinese only have 400 surnames for several billion people; I wonder how they do it?

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That must be why American foreign policy sucks so badly.

To the Palestinians, Clinton argued that, although America wanted Israel to freeze settlement activity, Israel’s refusal to comply should not stop the two sides from talking. But the Palestinians depend on the U.S. to beat up the Israelis until they make concessions; this is their understanding of the “peace process.”

Clinton also told the Palestinians that by refusing to talk with Israel, they risk irking the international community, which might then blame them for the stalled peace process. But the international community is never irked by the Palestinians for long. And it’s not in the international community’s DNA to blame the Palestinians for problems with the “peace process.” If you’re the “victim,” you’re the victim for all purposes.

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Next to rats, monkeys get all the good stuff.

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The United States House of Representatives, now overwhelmingly controlled by the Boomers, signed a $787 billion legislative “stimulus” package comprised of 1,071 pages and a hefty 8 pounds. Not one legislator read the bill before signing it. Months later, the same House members publicly screamed at the corrupt executives of AIG who received bonuses in 2008 – bonuses specifically allowed in the very legislation they passed without reading.

Talkin ’bout my generationnnnn….

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As Mark Steyn said, perhaps it’s time to speak truth to bower.

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For the last eighty years or so radical Muslims have studied, absorbed, and adapted the ideas and techniques of the Socialist Left. As I have pointed out previously, the turgid prose of radical Islamic theorists is all but indistinguishable from that of orthodox Marxists, once certain key words and phrases have been substituted.

So it’s no surprise that Islamists have borrowed the rhetorical techniques of the Left. They are particularly adept at taking a well-known Western political principle, twisting it out of all recognition, and then reversing it to use against the infidel.

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And take whatever action you think appropriate.

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The Sunday Times shows you militant Islam in all its gory.

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From its first publication in 1975, Edward O. Wilson’s book Sociobiology has stirred disputes over his claim that ethics is rooted in human biology. Our deepest intuitions of right and wrong, he asserted on the first page of the book, are guided by the emotional control centers of the brain, which evolved by natural selection to help the human animal exploit opportunities and avoid threats in the natural and social environment. In 1998, Wilson’s book Consilience renewed the controversy as he continued to argue for explaining ethics through the biology of the moral sentiments. Human nature is not a product of genes alone or of culture alone, Wilson insisted. Rather, human nature is constituted by “the epigenetic rules, the hereditary regularities of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction rather than another, and thus connect the genes to culture” (164). The biology of the moral sentiments would be the study of the “epigenetic rules” of moral experience as shaped by the complex interaction of genetic propensities and cultural learning. Wilson has often used Edward Westermarck’s theory of the incest taboo as a good example of this.

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Need more reasons to demand honest services from a banker? Try this list:

1. Congress raised the FDIC insurance to $200,000 to make depositors comfortable leaving money in banks; then the banks passed the insurance premium on to customers – including those that never had $200,000 cash in the bank in their lives and probably never will. Seriously, how much money do you have to have before it makes sense to have $200,000 in cash in a savings account earning 0.25%?
2. Banks can borrow at 0% from the Fed yet they raise the interest rates they charge even their best customers. The bank I use for my company willingly lent me $10,000 last year to open a new office and approved a $7,000 credit card limit. Last month they sent me a letter saying they are raising the interest rate by +1.9 percentage point – though I have never missed a payment deadline.
3. The banks can use our deposits to purchase securities issued by the Federal government, which are yielding better than 3 percent. They pay us about 0.25 percent yet still find it necessary to tack on a multitude of fees – which amount to 53 percent of banks’ income today, up from 35 percent in 1995.

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Faced with the obvious – that Hasan is a jihadist, an America-hating, Islamic murderer, the media still did their level best to paint him as the innocent victim. That wretched tactic having failed them, presumably because America is very quickly getting to the end of its patience with this shit, the media limbers up, pins its ankles behind its egos, and will be piling on so much evidence of Hasan’s guilt that the only natural reaction from apologists and pusillanimous hand jobbers the world over will be to blame, accuse, and denigrate the US Army for either being too stupid to detect it, or choosing not to stop it.

Steve Sailer looks at Mad Men and its times.

The real sex mismatch happened with the sexual revolution in the later 1960s, when a flood of Baby Boom babes born from 1946 onward came on the mating market and immediately set about stealing prosperous husbands away from their wives.

Men, in the view of social commentators such as James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Groucho Marx, and W.C. Fields, were relentlessly oppressed by women, who refused to sleep with them without a legally binding promise of lifetime support and fidelity.

The contemporary notion that women rose up as one to wrest from men the privilege of bringing home the bacon is one of the more curious myths in folklore.

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As a lawyer who got a D in calculus on four separate occasions, I found this both fascinating and useful.

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Look at what people learn in the classroom.  Look at what people do on the job.  How much of a connection do you see?

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Daniel Henninger has some answers.

The only good news out of the Fort Hood massacre is that U.S. electronic surveillance technology was able to pick up Major Hasan’s phone calls to an al Qaeda-loving imam in Yemen. The bad news is the people and agencies listening to Hasan didn’t know what to do about it. Other than nothing.

The problem is confusion. The combatants at each end of the spectrum in the war over the war on terror know exactly what they think about surveilling suspected terrorists. But if you are an intel officer or FBI agent tasked with providing the protection, what are you supposed to make of all this bitter public argument? What you make of it is that when you get a judgment call, like Maj. Hasan, you hesitate. You blink.

Now everyone thinks the call was obvious. But it wasn’t so obvious before the tragedy. Not if for years you have watched a country and its political class in rancorous confusion about the enemy, the legal standing of the enemy, or the legal status and scope of the methods it wants to use to fight the enemy.

In war, uncertainty gets you killed. It just did.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Queen Himiko is a popular character in Japanese history. She was apparently able to wield great power in the Yamatai Kingdom from around the end of the second century. Legends handed down from the time describe her as “being skilled with magic”.

Japanese revere her as a heroic Boadicea-type figure who unified the kingdom after years of fighting with rival tribes, before her death around 248AD.

Arnold Kling draws attention to the old guy behind the curtain.

The alleged goal of reducing economic inequality is trumpeted by people who want to strengthen inequality of political power. The goal is to entrench Harvard while delegitimizing those who are less educated.

Tyler Cowen has too much time on his hands.

If you type in “is it wrong to” the first suggestion is “is it wrong to sleep with your cousin.”  Number two is (yes, I tested it in Google): “Is it wrong to sleep with your step dad after your mom dies.”  If you type in “is it unethical to,” the first suggestion is “is it ethical to sell customer information.”  Next comes a question about animal experimentation.

Being an academic economist appears to be an untaxing and leisurely career.

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Bear in mind that this is from the New York Times, so any connection to reality is purely speculative.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

No doubt appropriate legislation to ban lollipops (‘It’s for the children!) is being prepared.

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No, this isn’t from The Onion. I double-checked.

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The Irish have been heroes every age.

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We have the technology.

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In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

— Lt.-Col. John McCrae (1872 – 1918)

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Through all its difficulties, the military has kept its stride. That sense of balance comes partly from the fact that soldiers are anchored to the American bedrock. This includes the stereotypical small towns in the South and Midwest that have military service in their DNA. But it also counts plenty of hardworking, upwardly mobile Hispanic and African American families in urban America that produce some of the best soldiers I know.

One doesn’t often find good sense in the Washington Post so we need to treasure it when it happens.

Jerry Pournelle takes a long look.

Are all Muslims enemies of everyone not part of the House of Submission to Islam?

But it all depends on how you define “Muslim” and even more importantly, how the Muslim scholars who define Islam define Muslim; and there the question is not so silly. The Koran is explicit on the subject: all true Muslims must make war on the unbelievers and force them either to convert or to pay tribute. There can be truce in that war, but never peace. This is the nature of Islam. In other words, if you are not at war with the unbelievers you are not a Muslim, and thus the answer to our first question is “yes.” Perhaps it is not a silly question at all.

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Wanting peace with Islam is futile, because they don’t want peace with us, except the temporary truce that allows them to gather their strength for further war. This article illustrates that historical truth and examines one aspect of that constant warfare.

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Some people just have too much time on their hands.