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Below is the checklist of rationality habits we have been using in the minicamps’ opening session.  It was co-written by Eliezer, myself, and a number of others at CFAR.  As mentioned below, the goal is not to assess how “rational” you are, but, rather, to develop a personal shopping list of habits to consider developing.  We generated it by asking ourselves, not what rationality content it’s useful to understand, but what rationality-related actions (or thinking habits) it’s useful to actually do.

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The small hopping insect Issus coleoptratus uses toothed gears on its joints to precisely synchronize the kicks of its hind legs as it jumps forward.

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The policeman’s name is being withheld, unlike Darren Wilson’s –whose address was exposed by outside agitators.

Needless to say, there were no national news crews sent to Salt Lake. Rachel Madcow did not froth at the mouth about what a horrible, racist country America is. Chris Matthews avoided his usual spittle-spewing public meltdown. The Revs Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were nowhere to be found.

Then again, David Duke was unavailable for comment. The Aryan Nations did not show up. The leader of the American Nazi Party did not lead a chant saying “What’s his name?” “Officer X.” “How do we want him?” “Dead!” There was no looting in Salt Lake by aggrieved whites.

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A useful map. Contrary to what you would expect, Texas does not allow open carry.

Sarah Hoyt has some words of wisdom. (Really. They are.)

Look, no humans band up then sit in their clubhouse twirling their moustaches and saying “now we’re going to be evil.” But human organizations often become evil. Partly this is because the people willing to do the donkey work of running a voluntary organization are often – not to say always – the type of mind that seeks power over others. If the charter of the organization allows them to achieve that power by dividing (as it were) the world in two and playing us against them, they will, and they will drive the association down an ever more paranoid path. At the end of which there’s always evil and attack on the “the other.”

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Project aims to help mating moose move from New Brunswick into Nova Scotia

Which, I gather, is what you do if you’re a mating moose. Who knew?

AirEnergy.

The Chairless Chair.

The Cozy Room.

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President Barack Obama may be unpopular, but members of his inner circle of advisers are finding themselves in high demand for big money consulting gigs with crony capitalist companies like Uber and Apple, reports The Hill.

This week, top Obama campaign strategist David Plouffe took a job with the $17 billion taxi app giant Uber.

It’s all part of the DC “Boomtown” cash dash to trade insider access from public service into cold hard cash. What’s more, as Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer chronicled in his New York Times best seller, Extortion, the Obama administration is engaged in a form of legal regulatory extortion wherein it makes complex, onerous, and costly regulations and then whirls through Washington’s revolving door to go to work for corporations who will pay a premium to help navigate big businesses through the very regulatory minefields those former staffers and advisers helped cement in place.

‘And I say to you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when you fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.’
– Luke 16:9.

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As the Mackinac Center for Public Policy points out, Michigan lost roughly half a million jobs during Granholm’s eight-year reign. Even so, UC-Berkeley believes she is qualified to teach Public Policy 290: “Creating Jobs through Better Government Policies for Innovation and Education.”

‘We destroyed thousands of jobs, and so can you!’

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When it comes to killing Palestinians, Hamas has apparently decided that they can’t afford to be outscored by Jews.

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But I can. He’s got two years left as President, and he’s decided to phone it in. In 2016 he’ll retire to a cushy gig as a former President, with plenty of perks, and if he feels like doing a bit of work he can travel the world giving speeches as the Magic Negro at $250,000 a pop. In the mean time, he’s going to enjoy himself.

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It took her more than nine years of working in the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security, but Yasmina Haifi finally uncovered the secret truth about the Islamic State: It isn’t Islamic at all. Actually, it’s a Jewish plot.

Yes, really: that terrorist group formerly known as ISIS, responsible for acts of genocide in Iraq, for the beheading of American journalist James Foley, and for the murder of countless women and children in their war to establish a new Islamic Caliphate, Haifi revealed in a recent post on Twitter, is in fact a “preconceived idea from Zionists deliberately to make Islam look bad.”

Oh, I think Islam is fully capable of making itself look bad all on its own.

Gavin McInnes is caught up in the same old.

It’s not even the real trannies who are mad. They’re on my side. It’s the fake trannies who want my guts for garter belts. You see, the hot thing with the kids today is pretending you’re transgendered. To mock this is to take away their “me snowflake” status and make them admit they’re just like everybody else. Telling normal people they’re normal is now a hate crime. The government was just kicked off Wikipedia for citing my article. A congressional staffer mentioned it and now they’re considering booting all of congress off of Wikipedia for good. Want to update your constituents on a new bill? Sorry, one person in your building exhibited signs of transphobia.

Anyhoozers, this happens to pretty much everyone. If you’re lucky, you get a good payout. If you’re even luckier, they got the story straight. I don’t know how many of my friends have almost lost their minds after being fired for something that never happened. All it takes is one angry coworker and next thing you know a nonexistent “You” said “nigger” or grabbed someone’s ass.

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Would that other politicians did useful things.

Read it. And watch the trailer.

Europe’s Last Stand is a shocking and graphic documentary by an American film company that examines the Islamic invasion of Western Europe and its threat to European democracy, freedoms, culture and history.

A continent that once gave birth to the greatest advances in world civilization is now on the verge of being extinguished by an unrivaled foe of religious zealots who are on a quest to establish an Islamic Caliphate across the European continent.

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With the median household income stuck at around $53,093 in 2014, an annual salary of nearly twice that still seems like more than enough money to succeed and thrive in any economy, no matter the circumstances. However, a convergence of factors have fundamentally changed what it means to rake in a “six-figure salary” in America, and many families who look rich on paper are merely struggling to get ahead along with everyone else.

Sad but true. I like the fact that they cite inflation as the first reason why six figures no longer means much.

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Hear, hear.

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Why, the control tower for the Landing Ring, of course, silly.

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As higher education faces a crisis of epic proportions, a group of respected campus leaders from across the nation have called on their peers to proactively address the many issues plaguing universities today, saying in a detailed report that “the failure of higher education governance” has helped create the current debacle.

Problems cited in the report include: a lack of a return-on-investment with college degrees; a tenure system that “adds to cost and compromises quality”; political correctness run amok, “undermining the free exchange of ideas”; never-ending collegiate athletic scandals and binge drinking woes; studies that find grads do not leave college prepared for the real world; curriculum requirements that leave students with a “lack a fundamental understanding of their history and heritage”; tuitions that continue to soar far above inflation; and student debt that today tops $1 trillion.

Pardon me while I snicker.

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‘Law? We don’t need no stinkin’ law!’

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Now playing: Jimmy Carter II — Return to the Vomit.

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Of course, it would be more truthful to say that the DoJ stands with the black people of Ferguson, specifically the black Underclass of Ferguson, on which Eric Holder and his Obamanation compatriots depend for the Low Information votes that keep them in power.

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Consulting firm PwC recently published its outlook for work in 2022, based on interviews with 500 human resources experts and 10,000 others in the United States and several other countries. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that big companies could end up so powerful and influential they morph into “ministates” that fill the void when government is unable to provide essential services. Companies will also use sensors and other gizmos to monitor employees around the clock. And workers will mostly acquiesce to this digital leash, in exchange for job security, decent pay and important benefits.

Unspoken is the elephant in the room, that none of this would be possible without the active participation of the government.

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ISIL is of course an acronym for the Islamic State in the Levant. It purports to have created or restored an Islamic caliphate in the territory under its control. How do you edit Islam out of the Islamic State?

Like Hezbollah, Hamas, al Qaeda and all the rest, the Islamic State promotes the imposition of Sharia law in the name of Islam. They all understand themselves to be Muslims acting on behalf of the faith. Yet Obama makes a special point of standing up for the good name of Islam, such as it is.

If Obama actually were a secret Muslim, what would he be doing differently?

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Larry2 at Instapundit
There seems to be a pattern:

1. unarmed young black guy is shot,
2. there is a vast media outcry over the young “honor student’s” death,
3. family provides photos of the dead guy taken when he was 11 years old, well before he had opted for the ghetto thug look,
4. it comes out that the “honor student” has been committing felonies,
5. witnesses say the honor student was beating the hell out of the person who shot him,
6. Democrat politicians call for the shooter’s conviction, and
7. prosecutors, fearing rioting, black voters, or what have you, prosecute the shooter anyway.

Have I missed anything?

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The Shahada prayer is the first of the Five Pillars of Islam. The Shahada prayer is also what is written on the black battle flags of Islamic jihad. Along with Allahu Akbar — our God is greatest — the Shahada is the battle cry of advancing Islamic armies. In fact, the very word Islam means submission, and not peace, as it is often intentionally mistranslated by duplicitous Muslims practicing taqiya, or sanctified lying for the cause of advancing the spread of Islam.

It’s purposefully made very easy for a town or a city to submit and convert to Islam. But the entire city must surrender without posing any resistance at all. In the event of any violent or even physical resistance, a new formula applies: the Islamic jihad conquest formula. From the time of Mohammed until today — as we are seeing in the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq — the formula has not changed.

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Found in the southeastern part of the Mexican state of Campeche, in the heart of the Yucatan peninsula, the cities were hidden in thick vegetation and hardly accessible.

“Aerial photographs helped us in locating the sites,” expedition leader Ivan Sprajc, of the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU), said.

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While absenteeism is usually considered a student matter, in San Francisco – and many other districts – the average teacher misses more school than the average child.

If last year’s numbers hold steady, the 4,100 teachers in San Francisco, on average, will each be absent about 11 times this school year, about once every three weeks. That’s four to five days more than a typical student, out of 180 days total.

About seven of those days were for sick or personal leave, and the rest were training days offered or required by the district.

While the teacher absentee rate is about average, or even a smidge below average, for large urban districts across the country, it’s a lot higher than other industries, where the typical worker takes about four sick or personal days over an entire year.

Look for … the Union label….

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New Jersey Police are on the look-out for a man who allegedly committed three separate “knockout game” punches within a 15-minute time frame. The victims sustained bruised jaws and bloody faces. The assailant was described by police as a six-foot or taller black man with an athletic build wearing a Brooklyn Nets hat.

So where are the riots? Where’s Al Sharpton? Where’s Jesse Jackson? Bueller? Bueller?

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Cinthya Garcia-Cisneros, an illegal immigrant who came to the U.S. from Mexico as a child and was shielded from deportation by DACA, was convicted of two counts of felony hit and run after she killed two Forest Grove, Oregon stepsisters — Anna Dieter-Eckerdt and Abigail Robinson ages 6 and 11 respectively — playing in a leaf pile last October.

Last week, as OregonLive.com reported Tuesday, a judge dismissed a deportation case against Garcia-Cisneros and as a result of the ruling, her attorney says she is able to go back under the protections of DACA — meaning she can obtain a work permit and Social Security number.

How about that for Diversity?

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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This is one of the fundamental asymmetries that have persisted for decades in the Middle East: to Israelis, “peace” means what it does here, in the U.S. A time to relax, to raise a family, to focus on one’s job; to take up a hobby or two. A time that one hopes will last forever. But for Islamic terrorists, “peace” means something quite different–more like a time out in a football game, if football were fatal. A time to prepare for war.

They even have a term for it: Hudna. You can look it up.

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The most recent atrocities committed by the Islamic State — notably, the beheading of an American journalist by an ISIS mujahid on video, as a warning to President Obama (see Fox News, CNN, and the Mail Online) — demonstrate that something unprecedented is at work in the Middle East. Not since the defeat of the Ottoman army in 1683 has barbarity of this magnitude gone unchecked in the region.

Actually, you’d have to go back farther than 1683, or even 1453, to find comparable events. During its entire suzerainty over Mesopotamia, the Ottoman Empire did not engage in the systematic demolition of Shiite mosques. But that is exactly what ISIS is doing, even as it massacres and enslaves Christians and Yezidis.

This is a moment of enormous historical import. The proclamation of a Caliphate by the Islamic State has electrified Islamic zealots all over the world, which is why the black flag of jihad is appearing now in so many places. ISIS is saying to the Ummah: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” And getting an enthusiastic response, based on all the demonstrators who have taken to the “Muslim street”.

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Of course, the ‘gender issue’ dominates this Voice of the Crust treatment, but achievement is achievement no matter how it comes up.

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Every revolutionary age produces its own kind of nostalgia. Faced with the enormous social and economic upheavals at the nineteenth century’s end, learned Victorians like Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold looked to High Church models and played the bishops of Western culture, with a monkish devotion to preserving and transmitting old texts and traditions and turning back to simpler ways of life. It was in 1909, the nadir of this milieu, before the advent of modernism and world war, that The Harvard Classics took shape. Compiled by Harvard’s president Charles W. Eliot and called at first Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf, the compendium of literature, philosophy, and the sciences, writes Adam Kirsch in Harvard Magazine, served as a “monument from a more humane and confident time” (or so its upper classes believed), and a “time capsule…. In 50 volumes.”

Read it. And watch the video.

We don’t have all the evidence and I’m hesitant to try and litigate this in the press, but there’s also this false narrative being pushed out there by folks like Michael Eric Dyson and [Al] Sharpton and the rest of the hustlers is that black men live in fear of being shot by cops in these neighborhoods. That too is nonsense. I know something about growing up black and male in the inner city and it’s not that hard to avoid getting shot by a cop. They pull you over, you answer their questions, you are on your way. 

The real difficulty is not getting shot by other black people if you are a young black man in these neighborhoods and again that is something we need to talk more about. Cops are not the problem. Cops are not producing these black bodies in the morgues every weekend in Chicago, in New York and Detroit and so forth. That’s not cops. Those other black people shooting black people.

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Ever since the British parliament passed the Town & Country Planning Act in 1947, housing in that nation has gotten less and less affordable. As a result, the average size of new homes today is only 925 square feet, down 44 percent from the average size in 1920. Meanwhile, the average size of new home in the United States in 2013 was 2,598 square feet, up 56 percent from 1,660 square feet forty years before.

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When I am discussing the State with my colleagues at Duke, it’s not long before I realize that, for them, almost without exception, the State is a unicorn. I come from the Public Choice tradition, which tends to emphasize consequentialist arguments more than natural rights, and so the distinction is particularly important for me. My friends generally dislike politicians, find democracy messy and distasteful, and object to the brutality and coercive excesses of foreign wars, the war on drugs, and the spying of the NSA. 

But their solution is, without exception, to expand the power of “the State.” That seems literally insane to me—a non sequitur of such monstrous proportions that I had trouble taking it seriously.

Then I realized that they want a kind of unicorn, a State that has the properties, motivations, knowledge, and abilities that they can imagine for it. When I finally realized that we were talking past each other, I felt kind of dumb. Because essentially this very realization—that people who favor expansion of government imagine a State different from the one possible in the physical world—has been a core part of the argument made by classical liberals for at least three hundred years.

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An intuitive code governs the way English speakers order adjectives. The rules come so naturally to us that we rarely learn about them in school, but over the past few decades language nerds have been monitoring modifiers, grouping them into categories, and straining to find logic in how people instinctively rank those categories.

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Loeb Classical Library, online. Who could ask for anything more?

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Think Eric Holder will be showing up in Chicago any time soon? Only to touch base with old chum Ram Emmanuel.

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Hey — ya work with what ya got.

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What is a city for?

It’s a crucial question, but one rarely asked by the pundits and developers who dominate the debate over the future of the American city.

Their current conventional wisdom embraces density, sky-high scrapers, vastly expanded mass transit and ever-smaller apartments. It reflects a desire to create an ideal locale for hipsters and older, sophisticated urban dwellers. It’s city as adult Disneyland or “entertainment machine,” chock-a-block with chic restaurants, shops and festivals.

Overlooked, or even disdained, is what most middle-class residents of the metropolis actually want: home ownership, rapid access to employment throughout the metropolitan area, good schools and “human scale” neighborhoods.

…

In 2013, Houston alone had more housing starts than the entire state of California.

John Hinderaker is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Eight days ago, a Ferguson, Missouri police officer named Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, a young but very large (6? 4?, 300 pounds) African-American, under circumstances that remain murky. Since then, a ritual with which we have become tiresomely familiar has unfolded: demonstrations that turned into riots, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson–still!–descending on the scene, pleas for peace, intervention of federal authorities, calls for reappraisal of American race relations. Followed by more riots and looting.

We have been here before, too many times. But why? What is so special, so symbolic, about the death of Michael Brown? In the month before the Brown case exploded on the nation’s front pages, 40 people were murdered in Chicago, a large majority of them black. This led to no demonstrations or riots, no news coverage outside Chicago, no appearances by Sharpton and Jackson. So what made the death of Michael Brown so newsworthy?

Two factors: first, Brown was killed by a white man; second, the white man was a police officer. But here we come to a fork in the road. Was this particular death noteworthy because it was typical of so many others, or because it was so rare? Evidently the latter. Last time I checked the numbers, there were about 15 times as many instances where blacks murdered whites as where whites murdered blacks. Why do we never have riots over the murder of a white person by a black man? Such events happen, relatively speaking, all the time.

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Annotated with the results of an interview with Wolfe. Radical Chic was one of the first lampoons of Political Correctness, and remains one of the best.

George Will speaks for common sense.

Progressives say corporations using inversions are unpatriotic, which is amusing. When the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision stipulated that Americans do not forfeit their First Amendment right to political advocacy when they act together through corporations (including, and especially, incorporated nonprofit advocacy groups), progressives ridiculed the idea that corporations should be treated as people. Now, progressives charge that corporations resorting to inversion are not behaving like patriotic people.

Hypocrisy is the sine qua non talent for Democrats.

A publicly held corporation’s responsibility is to its shareholders; its fiduciary duty is to maximize the value of their holdings. If businesses supposedly have other responsibilities, who decides what they are? Presumably politicians such as Sen. Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat, who must have learned economics from the nursery story “Rumpelstiltskin.”

A truth that politicians feel free to ignore.

This is the progressive premise in action: Because government provides infrastructure (roads, etc.) affecting everyone, and because government-dispensed money flows everywhere, everything is beholden to the government, and more or less belongs to the government, and should be subordinated to its preferences, which always are for more control of the nation’s wealth. Walgreens retreated, costing its shareholders, employees and customers billions.

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Many companies will train employees on the job. Lucas Mund spent a summer in college working at a local burger chain. “My 19 year-old boss was taking home $35,000/year with benefits,” he said. “Plus they train you on the job for free. She told me that she was on track to be a regional manager by the age of 30 and would make 100k by then.”

Working your way up to store manager has its perks. According to Murray Godfrey a Wal-Mart store manager “of a store in a moderate-sized locale can easily make $200k plus bonuses based on sales.”

Katie Nellis said managers of Walgreen’s drugstores in the US “often retire in their 40s.”

Turns out there’s a lot of moola in doing the jobs Americans don’t want to do.

Theodore Dalrymple expresses my sentiments exactly.

I take a small siesta after lunch—I find it revivifies my brain for about half an hour—but each time I wake up I am a little disappointed to be thrust back into the midst of life. Sleep, especially when dreaming, is so much more enjoyable than being awake, with all the petty tasks that consciousness imposes upon one. The process of keeping myself alive bores me terribly; every morning the same thing, shower, shaving, breakfast, how tedious it all seems!