DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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As the former head of an explicitly racist organization, I suppose he ought to know.

Read it. And watch the video.

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

Progressive nonprofit Great Education Colorado claims to be the most effective education advocacy group in the state, but less than 30 percent of Great Education’s funding actually finds its way to education campaigns and issues. The small amount spent on education has supported initiatives that would drastically raise taxes on Coloradans.

A prime Job of the Crust is as a well-paid employee of a ‘non-profit’ that rakes in lots of cash from the politically-correct but dimwitted public and then never does anything useful, even by their own warped standards.

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With families small, few young adults have significantly younger siblings or older siblings having children of their own already. Small family size also affects extended families: gone are the days of hordes of cousins of all ages gathering together. And even if such a situation exists, our nomadic ways means that it’s unlikely they’re all able to be together in one place more than a couple of times a year. Meanwhile, the creeping upward average age of marriage (and the fact that those who are more affluent tend to wait until after marriage to have children) means that the span of years where young adults neither have kids themselves nor friends who do is also increasing.

I know a couple who are both only children, who have one child, and probably won’t have another. Eight people, with only one grandchild among them.

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A city in New Hampshire is suing a group that signs letters “Robin Hood and his Merry Men” that make a point of searching for expired parking meters and paying them before police can issue a ticket.

Seems harmless enough.

The group, comprised of six “Robin Hooders,” search the town of Keene for delinquent drivers and leave a note behind that says, “Your meter expired; however, we saved you from the king’s tariffs.” The note is signed, “Robin Hood and his Merry Men,” and urges recipients to consider “paying it forward,” The Washington Times reported.

Seems harmless enough.

The city, for its part, said the group “intentionally taunted, interfered with, harassed and intimidated” the city’s three parking enforcement officers, the report said. The suit identifies the “Robin Hood” members and was filed on May 2.

That doesn’t sound so harmless. Can we expect an Occupy Parking Space movement in our future?

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A Seattle man trying to dribble a soccer ball 10,000 miles to Brazil in time for the 2014 World Cup died Tuesday after being hit by a pickup truck on the Oregon Coast.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

‘So how’d your dad die?’

‘He was killed by a truck while dribbling a ball to Brazil for charity.’

‘Oh. Are you going to be that stupid when you grow up?’

‘Gee, I hope not.’

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A new, and potentially dominant, ruling class is rising. Today’s tech moguls don’t employ many Americans, they don’t pay very much in taxes or tend to share much of their wealth, and they live in a separate world that few of us could ever hope to enter. But while spending millions bending the political process to pad their bottom lines, they’ve remained far more popular than past plutocrats, with 72 percent of Americans expressing positive feelings for the industry, compared to 30 percent for banking and 20 percent for oil and gas.

…

Perversely, the small number of jobs—mostly clustered in Silicon Valley—created by tech companies has helped its moguls avoid public scrutiny. Google employs 50,000, Facebook 4,600, and Twitter less than 1,000 domestic workers. In contrast, GM employs 200,000, Ford 164,000, and Exxon over 100,000. Put another way, Google, with a market cap of $215 billion, is about five times larger than GM yet has just one fourth as many workers.

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The core trait of a scientific mind is that when its commitments clash with evidence, evidence rules. On that count, what grade do liberals deserve? Fail, given their reaction to the latest evidence on universal health care, global warming, and universal preschool.

Read it. But I’d advise against watching the video.

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?
That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.
Of course, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

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Hey, he just wants some of that down-home Dearborn Muslim cookin’, is all.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education tells us the median salary of public university presidents rose 4.7 percent in 2011-12 to more than $440,000 a year. This increase vastly outpaced the rate of inflation, as well as the earnings of the typical worker in the U.S. economy. Perhaps, most relevant for this community, it also surpassed the compensation growth for university professors.

Some members of the Crust are more equal than others, apparently.

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The ‘Affordable Health Care Act’ must mean affordable to Warren Buffet and George Soros.

David French blows the whistle.

Let me begin with your IRS question of the day — presented to a Tennessee conservative group:

    List each past or present board member, officer, key employee and members of their families who:

    a) Has served on the board of another organization.

    b) Was, is or plans to be a candidate for public office.  Indicate the nature of each candidacy.

    c) Has previously conducted similar activities for another entitty.

    d) Has previously submitted an application for tax exempt status.

[Emphasis added]

Got that? Of course it’s irrelevant that key members of the MSM have spouses in the Obama administration, and the MSM presumes they can remain impartial, but the Internal Revenue Service must know if a tea-party leader’s daughter has filed an application for tax exemption for a local charity, and the IRS must know if his wife might want to run for city council. Unbelievable. And unconstitutional.

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Remind me why we have United Nations….

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Good question.

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But not, you’ll note, Hillary Clinton. ‘Look! Over there!’

I’m shocked–shocked, I tell you–to find the IRS targeting conservatives….

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MailMany modern Europeans have a special ability to piss themselves when the subject of firearms comes up, and the international worry-storm triggered by Defense Distributed’s development and distribution of plans for a fully 3D-printed, single-shot pistol have created just the latest opportunity for merriment and mayhem in Great Britain. In a story full of very nicely staged assassinesque photos of reporters clutching a “Liberator” pistol in public, the Daily Mail reports how it printed out the gun and “smuggled” it onto the Eurostar train, past security, “alongside hundreds of unsuspecting travellers.”

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

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I’ve been married and I’ve been single and married is better.

James Altucher is even more pessimistic than I am. I didn’t think that was possible.

1) The middle class is dead. A few weeks ago I visited a friend of mine who manages a trillion dollars. No joke. A trillion. If I told you the name of the family he worked for you would say, “they have a trillion? Really?” But that’s what happens when $10 million compounds at 2 percent over 200 years.

He said, “look out the windows.” We looked out at all the office buildings around us. “What do you see?” he said. “I don’t know.” “They’re empty! All the cubicles are empty. The middle class is being hollowed out.” And I took a closer look. Entire floors were dark. Or there were floors with one or two cubicles but the rest empty. “It’s all outsourced, or technology has taken over for the paper shufflers,” he said.

“Not all the news is bad,” he said. “More people entered the upper class than ever last year.” But, he said, more people are temp staffers than ever.

And that’s the new paradigm. The middle class has died. The American Dream never really existed. It was a marketing scam.

And it was. The biggest provider of mortgages for the past 50 years, Fannie Mae, had as their slogan, “We make the American Dream come true.” It was just a marketing slogan all along. How many times have I cried because of a marketing slogan. And then they ruined it.

Michael Levin explains.

Prior to the 2008 attention span meltdown, books contained the precise amount of information people needed in order to feel informed about a topic. Today, most people no longer need to feel informed about anything. If they do feel an urge to learn something, even TMZ is usually TMI. Why would you need 400 pages about Harry Truman, or Lady Di, or even Lady Gaga for that matter, when the equivalent of four pages online would suffice?

Books are also boring. You can’t check the weather — or your stocks, or look at porn — in a book. All you can do is read it. The serious point here (I know the porn reference threw you) is that we’ve moved into a world of color, light and sound with which the frumpy old black and white book cannot compete. Reading something online may or may not stick with you the way reading it from a book might, but you can look up all kinds of side references, videos, speeches, and whatnot that a plain old book can’t offer.

Mencius Moldbug explained.

Useful to Moldbug fans. You know who you are.

Progressivism

Progressivism (also called Universalism) is responsible for the vast majority of the world’s problems today. It is a non-theistic religion descended in a direct line from the various Dissenter sects of England. Although the belief in God was dropped during the religion’s evolution in order to improve its ability to spread, the core of progressive beliefs are very similar to the Quaker beliefs of a few centuries ago. In short, progressives are dangerous and creepy religious maniacs who don’t need to believe in God but that makes them no less dangerous, creepy or maniacal.

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I hate going to the dentist. For all the typical reasons–who likes people wielding sharp tools on their gums?–but for another one too: I’m bothered by getting X-rays. Maybe I’m unduly paranoid about such things, but when a technician covers me with a lead sheet, points a giant machine at my head, and runs for cover, I get nervous. But what if X-ray machines didn’t need to be so bulky? What if, indeed, you made such a small machine that it could fit inside the mouth and angle outward, thereby reducing your body’s exposure?

My dentist uses what is, I think, essentially an ultrasound probe to look inside suspicious areas of my teeth.

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 In an era when everything is customizable, why not customize your child’s education?

Hint: Because it threatens the rice bowl of a lot of government employees (unionized government employees, the Ruling Class’s natural prey).

“What about home schooling? You know, it’s not just for scary religious people any more.” That’s a line from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and it should strike fear into the hearts, not of vampires, but of public-school administrators everywhere.

But it doesn’t, because they provide the votes that make the whole machine run, and the governing bureaucracy is very well aware of it.

“That first year, chatting with other homeschooling parents at soccer games, picnics, and after-church coffee hours, I found that our decision was far from unusual. Homeschooling has long been a philosophical choice for religious traditionalists and off-the-grid homesteaders, but for the parents we met — among them several actors, a jazz composer, a restaurateur, a TV chef, a Columbia University physical-plant supervisor, and a handful of college professors — it was a practical alternative to New York’s notoriously inadequate education system.”

An education totally created by people for whom these hip & trendy urbanites religiously (if I may use so incongruous a term) vote. Savor the irony.

Victor Davis Hanson puts his finger on it.

America has always been a country of self-invention. Yet there used to be some correlation between the life that one lived and the life that one professed. It was hard to be a phony in the grimy reality of the coal mine, the steel mill, the south 40 acres, or atop a girder over Manhattan.

No longer in our post-modern, post-industrial, metrosexual fantasyland. The nexus of big government, big money, and globalization has created a new creed of squaring the circle of being both liberal and yet elitist, egalitarian-talking but rich-acting, talking like a 99 percenter and living like a 1 percenter. And the rub is not that the two poles are contradictory, but that they are, in fact, necessary for each other: talking about the people means it is OK to live unlike the people.

We are degenerating into a society like that of the quondam Soviet Union, where apparatchiks and their privileged scions live very high on the hog while proclaiming their solidarity with the workers and peasants of the proletariat; meanwhile, the real proletariat formed long lines for crude bread and ill-fitting shoes, hoping to find something they could sell on the ‘black market’ to make ends meet.

Hipness is a tool designed to justify enjoying the riches and leisure produced by the American brand of Western market capitalism by poking fun at it, teasing it some, dressing it up a bit to suggest ambivalence over its benefits without ever seriously either understanding their source or, much less, losing them. We feel hip at Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, but not so much in the organic section of Safeway.

It’s all about fitting in with all the other ‘nonconformists’. ‘Edgy’ means falling in line with all of the other self-proclaimed ‘edgy’ people, patting each other on the back about how courageous they are in staying with what’s hip and trendy.

Hip also plays out as professed caring — worrying in the abstract about all sorts of endangered species, starving peoples, or degraded environments. It is being loudly angry at retrograde forces — white males, the rich, gun owners, Christians, family types, and suburbanites, the sorts who ostensibly crafted the toxicity of Western civilization that you are forced to use and enjoy. Yet embrace hip, and all things become possible. A Martian would see the modern university as an elitist enclave, where life-long tenured professors make lots of money overseen by hordes of even better-paid administrators, that together cause tuition for cash-strapped and indebted students to rise faster than the rate of inflation without any promises that their eventual certifications will result in commensurate good jobs. A non-Martian would instead appreciate the hip nexus of diversity, eco-caring, and gender-neutral inclusivity.

It doesn’t matter what you do, much less the effects of your doing — what matters is that you care, and care about the right things. ‘Raising consciousness’ is more valued than actually raising the barn; spending an hour doling out Thanksgiving dinner to the homeless is more valued than doing something that will encourage them to be able to afford their own.

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What happens when a liberal scholar unearths an inconvenient truth?

Hint: It gets ignored.

IT HAS BECOME increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

“The extent of the effect is shocking,” says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.

Not to those of us who live in the real world, as university political scientists increasingly do not.

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But my experience — both on the way up and the way down — is a good window into one of the central questions facing President Obama as he prepares to take the oath of office for a second time on Jan. 21: What role, if any, should the government play in nurturing entrepreneurs and, by extension, jobs, in America? In our case, we really had no expectation that government would play any role whatsoever. Unfortunately, though, we were wrong. Dead wrong. It did play a role and, for the most part, it was not a good one. It doesn’t have to be that way; there are fixes that can be made.

You may not be interested in the fucking government, but the government is interested in fucking you.

The mere debate, however, prompted tremulous bureaucrats at the U.S. Commerce Dept. — congenitally allergic to even the slightest whiff of controversy — to tell the registries (who are regulated by Commerce) to knock it off. We thought the complaints were nonsense. After all, how bad could it be to get rid of errors and replace them with relevant search results? But it didn’t matter. The government had, effectively, dealt us a death blow.

Your tax dollars at work … or not, as the case may be.

Despite repeated efforts at reform, almost always stymied by political gridlock in Washington, federal rules make it a snap, and potentially quite lucrative, for people to file civil lawsuits, no matter how ludicrous.

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

Steve Sailer suffers form an embarrassment of riches.

Okay, which of these two white women, the brunet or the blonde, is the American Indian?

…

That raises the metaphysical question: Can a blonde lesbian who claims to be an American Indian be racist against blacks? I look forward to the Washington Post’s black magazine The Root debating this burning topic for several months.

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(Disclaimer: Please disregard all of the following, because the mainstream media and America’s social-sciences community have already established beyond all doubt that anyone who criticizes, or even dares to think bad thoughts about, America’s 44th president is motivated solely by blind feral bigotry, which is a defect of character—and, verily, the soul—that is exclusive to white males.)

Not only was Obama’s administration rocked by the Benghazi hearings and revelations that the IRS during his reign has targeted Tea Party and “patriot” groups for extra scrutiny, it has become increasingly evident even to Obama’s Borg-like defenders that he may care more about appeasing his wealthy benefactors and toasting his celebrity friends than he does about uplifting the vanishing middle class and the squirming proletarian masses.

Mark Steyn is on the case.

After marrying her progeny into the royal houses of Germany, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Greece and Spain, Queen Victoria was known as the grandmother of Europe. The inbreeding among Obama’s court and its press corps is more like one of those “I’m my own grandpaw” deals.

One possible answer.

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Read it.

One of the lessons of history is that peoples with nearly identical economic arrangements can have radically different political institutions, affording them equally varied access to civil liberties and influence on the decisions that shape their lives.  Thus it’s reasonable and, I think, necessary to talk about the factors that will help define the political dimension of America’s post-imperial future—and in particular, the prospects for democracy in the wake of imperial collapse.

There are at least two barriers to that important conversation.  The first is the weird but widespread notion that the word “democracy”—or, if you will, “real democracy”—stands for a political system in which people somehow don’t do the things they do in every other political system, such as using unfair advantages of various kinds to influence the political process.  Let’s start with the obvious example.  How often, dear reader, have you heard a pundit or protester contrasting vote fraud, say, or bribery of public officials with “real democracy”?

Yet real democracy, meaning the sort of democracy that is capable of existing in the real world, is always plagued with corruption. If you give people the right to dispose of their vote however they wish, after all, a fair number of them will wish to sell that vote to the highest bidder in as direct a fashion as the local laws allow.  If you give public officials the responsibility to make decisions, a fair number of them will make those decisions for their own private benefit.  If you give voters the right to choose public officials, in turn, and give candidates for public office the chance to convince the public to choose them, you’ve guaranteed that a good many plausible rascals will be elected to office, because that’s who the people will choose.  That can’t be avoided without abandoning democracy altogether.

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Ms Bentley was an Communist Party USA (CPUSA) member who was an active Soviet spy for most of a decade. Her story is perhaps a micro-version of the entire relationship between American Communism (aka progressivism) and the Soviet variety.

Many Americans joined the CPUSA and many spied for the Soviets. Many (if not all) also eventually broke with the Soviets. Obviously, these people were not all identical. They did not all come from the same background. However, when one reads their memoirs, one notices a lot of similarities. Ms Bentley is, in my opinion, the quintessential American Communist. In a way, her story is the story of them all and it’s laid out – in detail and in a matter of fact way – in this nearly forgotten book. Conservatives want you to remember Whittaker Chambers and progressives want you to remember Joseph McCarthy (if they want to remember anything at all). I would like you to remember Elizabeth Bentley.

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A maverick neuroscientist believes he has deciphered the code by which the brain forms long-term memories.

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I’m pretty sure it would involve kicking somebody’s ass.

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Physicists have finally solved the problem of how pearls form almost-perfect spheres: they rotate as they grow.

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Truly, you can find anything on the Internet.

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I am not inclined to trust in the intellectual capacity of a white guy who wears his hair like he wishes he were a black guy, but you never know.

Jaron Lanier is a computer science pioneer who has grown gradually disenchanted with the online world since his early days popularizing the idea of virtual reality. “Lanier is often described as ‘visionary,’ ” Jennifer Kahn wrote in a 2011 New Yorker profile, “a word that manages to convey both a capacity for mercurial insight and a lack of practical job skills.”

Perhaps that’s why I’ve never heard of him.

Raised mostly in Texas and New Mexico by bohemian parents who’d escaped anti-Semitic violence in Europe, he’s been a young disciple of Richard Feynman, an employee at Atari, a scholar at Columbia, a visiting artist at New York University, and a columnist for Discover magazine. He’s also a longtime composer and musician, and a collector of antique and archaic instruments, many of them Asian.

In other words, a Child of the Crust. I dislike him already.

His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world.

And of course nothing says ‘I’m an individualist and war against a hive-mind world’ like a white guy wearing dreadlocks. No shit.

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At least they’re mostly football coaches, so at least we’re paying for performance.

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Why is he wasting so much time on ‘not-news’? Where would Woodward and Bernstein be today if they’d gone running after some ancient shit like that? Oh, wait….

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Some people remember.

Jihad Watch reader Bob writes in:

Otranto certainly demonstrates several things.1. Muslim violence is not a result of poverty, Jews, Israel, or US policy and actions.

2. There is a centuries-long tradition of Muslim beheading. It didn’t start with Daniel Pearl.

3. Muslim attacks on Copts in Egypt are in keeping with centuries-long Muslim traditions

4. Christian martyrs are Christians killed by others. Muslim martyrs are Muslims who kill non-Muslims [and are killed in the process].

The Crimson Reach explains the Crust to you.

If being qualified is simply a matter of getting the right degrees, credentials, and titles on a corporate- or government-ladder, then Smart People know how to navigate that. Their parents set them up nicely to be successful in such a world. But the idea that qualification has something to do with the actual decisions you make once there scares Smart People to death. In the end, this is why the Smart People left is so obstinate and ‘bored’ and denialist on the issue of Benghazi: they can’t afford, psychologically, to truly confront anything about it or discuss it seriously, because it has to do with actual tangible decisions, and weighing right and wrong. Smart People want nothing to do with a world in which those things matter, and so can’t allow criticism of Hillary Clinton on anything like those grounds to take root.

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Uh-oh. When even the tame New England RINOs start chewing on the hand that feeds them, things are getting serious.

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Well, better that than use it to fly in some socialist politician from Washington. At least the Working Girls live in the Real World and have to spend their own money.

And the feminists say: [chirp] … [chirp] … [chirp] ….

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Esther Gokhale teaches techniques for maintaining better posture. She says her advice can relieve nagging back pain.

Yet another First World problem. Eight weeks in boot camp will solve that posture problem for you, guaranteed.

Mark Steyn is on the case.

In Massachusetts, where last year the Governor vetoed efforts to prohibit food stamps being used for pornography, piercings, tattoos, guns, manicures, etc, they’re now trying to discover whether the Tsarnaev brothers used them to pay for the Boston Marathon bombing….

I began my book America Alone with an Arnold Toynbee quote: “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.” Paying Islamic terrorists to blow you up is more like assisted suicide. Cheaper than going to a Swiss clinic, although somewhat bloodier.

Heather MacDonald documents the degeneration.

The public is told that the university needs more state money to stay competitive in the sciences but not that the greatest threat to scientific excellence comes from the university’s obsession with “diversity” hiring. The public knows about tuition increases but not about the unstoppable growth in the university’s bureaucracy. Taxpayers may have heard about larger class sizes but not about the sacrosanct status of faculty teaching loads. Before the public decides how much more money to pour into the system, it needs a far better understanding of how UC spends the $22 billion it already commands.

The modern university is less a center of scholarship than it is a playground for ideological drones.

At Berkeley, as federal research money flooded into the campus, the faculty were losing interest in undergraduate teaching, observed Clark Kerr, UC’s president and a former Berkeley chancellor. (Kerr once famously quipped that a chancellor’s job was to provide “parking for the faculty, sex for the students, and athletics for the alumni.”) Back in the 1930s, responsibility for introductory freshman courses had been the highest honor that a Berkeley professor could receive, Kerr wrote in his memoirs; 30 years later, the faculty shunted off such obligations whenever possible to teaching assistants, who, by 1964, made up nearly half the Berkeley teaching corps.

Alex Tabarrok reports from the field.

In a large, randomized experiment Bowen et al. found that students enrolled in an online/hybrid statistics course learned just as much as those taking a traditional class (noted earlier by Tyler). Perhaps even more importantly, Bowen et al. found that the online model was significantly less costly than the traditional model, some 36% to 57% less costly to produce than a course using a traditional lecture format. In other words, since outcomes were the same, online education increased productivity by 56% to 133%! Online education trumps the cost disease!