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Former President Barack Obama was caught on video dancing maskless at his 60th birthday party Saturday night in Martha’s Vineyard — inside a giant tent filled with celebrities.

In a video posted to Instagram by singer-songwriter, Erykah Badu, Obama could be seen holding a microphone and dancing in the middle of the raised dance floor — to the cheers of gathered guests, the Daily Mail reported.

Badu had been performing with members of her band and managed to convince Obama to get on stage.

While the president’s back was turned, she took a selfie video capturing Obama fully in the frame, which she then posted directly to Instagram — despite photos being banned at the event. Crowds of people could be seen in the background, also in contrast to Obama’s insistence the event would be scaled back because of the spread of the delta variant of COVID-19, the Daily Mail reported.

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The myth of ‘intellectual property’ is showing its age.

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There were maybe 15 or 20 specialty labs that were doing really cool work in those days, and all of them were in California. Today, they’re all in Texas. The best lab in the world that studies cardiovascular genetics now is in Waco, Texas. There are several other examples of this phenomenon. This seems odd, to me. But whatever, right? So I was in San Francisco, around the year 2000 or so, working with one of the leaders in this field, who is a personal friend, so I will keep his identity discreet at this point. He was trying to figure out how to earn a living financially, while pursuing cutting-edge technology in this growing field. And he finally realized that he would have to leave California.

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Technicolor film was not color film, and it did not produce anything like lifelike colors. But how did it produce color movies? And why did those colors glow? And why did all of it lead to Dorothy getting ruby slippers?

As anyone who has seen an old Technicolor film knows, it looks weird. Blue eyes look like they glow. Pink faces look like they’ve been painted peach. Red looks scary. It all looks dyed, not recorded — and that’s because it was. There wasn’t any color film at the time that Technicolor was making its big splash. No one had figured out how to create a film stock that would record color. They had, however, found a way to make film stock that would filter out all the color that shouldn’t get through. And they had dyes. By putting them together, they made Technicolor glorious.

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‘Activists’ find out who’s actually in charge by getting their noses rubbed in it.

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What people really want, deep down, is drama within limits. Ideally, you have the sense that something better is possible — and that something worse is possible — but, most importantly, the sense that if you follow the rules, and make sure everyone else follows the rules, neither of them will happen.

If you reach what appears to be an end state — that is, there’s no realistic possibility of anyone going higher or lower — you see nasty Karen-ish behavior. From everyone, everywhere, always. The Z Man did a piece the other day on Sayre’s Law, which anyone who has ever dealt with eggheads instinctively understands: “The fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so small.” If you read the bios of the real lunatics — the insane-by-egghead-standards, I’m talking — you almost always see that they’re tenured at some second rate academy. They’re topped out, and they know it. Hang around the faculty lounge long enough, and you learn to spot it in their eyes — that precise moment when they realize that Harvard won’t be calling, so they’re stuck here at Flyover State. They can’t move up, and thanks to tenure there’s no realistic (in their minds) possibility of falling down. The only drama left, then, is interpersonal drama, which is why they’re such vicious, obnoxious bitches to everyone, everywhere, always.

I love this guy….

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

The title of the show this week is taken from the title of a book by the guy most consider to be the founder of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol. He was one of the first far-left intellectuals to break with the Left and migrate to the new Right. He embraced the term neocon, in an “own the insult” way, which is probably why the term has remained with us, despite it originally being an insult. The Left used it as a way to criticize their former colleagues for their break with them over various issues.

Today, of course, our side uses the term as an insult. Even within what is left of mainstream conservatism, the term and the people associated with it is falling out of favor, especially as the neocons get nastier in their critiques of populism. David French now sounds like a less masculine version of Robin DiAngelo. That is not an exaggeration, as he sounds like Mickey Mouse, and she sounds like she has had one too many Pall Mall’s with her boiler makers.

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Truth matters. Words matter. What is objectively the case matters. And insofar as our words and concepts can be about the objective world at all, then the shared set of words and meanings that we collectively use and are permitted to use to describe, navigate, and refer to that objective world matters. Such is the case for any society worth defending. The growing rash of instances of threats, intimidation, social cancelling, and violence in the name of creeping gender ideology within academia and beyond drastically threatens this shared set of goods and values and marks the beginning of what will be a steep and rapid descent into institutionalized tyranny if left unopposed.

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The situation is so dismal that governments everywhere are now pouring billions of dollars each year into myriad efforts designed to boost the ranks of STEM workers. President Obama has called for government and industry to train 10 000 new U.S. engineers every year as well as 100 000 additional STEM teachers by 2020. And until those new recruits enter the workforce, tech companies like Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are lobbying to boost the number of H-1B visas—temporary immigration permits for skilled workers—from 65 000 per year to as many as 180 000. The European Union is similarly introducing the new Blue Card visa to bring in skilled workers from outside the EU. The government of India has said it needs to add 800 new universities, in part to avoid a shortfall of 1.6 million university-educated engineers by the end of the decade.

And yet, alongside such dire projections, you’ll also find reports suggesting just the opposite—that there are more STEM workers than suitable jobs. One study found, for example, that wages for U.S. workers in computer and math fields have largely stagnated since 2000. Even as the Great Recession slowly recedes, STEM workers at every stage of the career pipeline, from freshly minted grads to mid- and late-career Ph.D.s, still struggle to find employment as many companies, including Boeing, IBM, and Symantec, continue to lay off thousands of STEM workers.

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Missouri GOP Gov. Mike Parson said Tuesday he has granted pardons to Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who drew international attention for brandishing guns at racial justice protesters last year.

In addition to the McCloskeys, who are personal injury lawyers, Parson also pardoned 10 other people Friday, a document from his office showed.

Mark McCloskey, 64, pleaded guilty to one count of misdemeanor fourth-degree assault June 17. His wife pleaded guilty to second-degree harassment, also a misdemeanor, online court records showed.

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When researching construction, you invariably discover that any new or innovative idea has actually been tried over and over again, often stretching back decades. One of these new-but-actually-old ideas is the idea of a mechanical bricklayer, a machine to automate the construction of masonry walls.

It’s easy to see the appeal of this idea – masonry construction seems almost perfectly suited for mechanization [0]. It’s extremely repetitive – constructing a masonry building requires setting tens or hundreds of thousands of bricks or blocks, each one (nearly) identical, each one set in the same way. It doesn’t seem like it would require physically complex movements – each brick gets a layer of mortar applied, and is simply laid in place next to the previous one. And because each brick and mortar joint is the same size, placement is almost deterministic – each brick is the same fixed distance from the previous one.

On top of this, masonry, especially block masonry, is one of the most physically punishing construction tasks, since it requires hours and hours of repetitively moving extremely heavy objects. All together masonry seems like the perfect candidate for a task to hand over to a machine, and it’s something people have been attempting for over 100 years.

Dennis Prager.

In my last column, I published comments written by New York Times subscribers about how proud they were of their children for deciding not to have children of their own. Though they acknowledged how much they ached to be grandparents, they nevertheless reveled in the fact that this would never happen.

Why did these parents take so much pride in their children’s decision not to give them grandchildren?

Because of climate change.

You read that right. Better not to have grandchildren than to have grandchildren who will suffer and quite possibly die because of global warming.

I applaud this decision, and strongly encourage left-wingers not to reproduce.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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“The Iliad”, Western literature’s foundational text, kicks off with a meeting. The Greeks are nine years into the siege of Troy, a plague has ravaged their ranks and they gather to ponder the flagging campaign (good teamwork is conspicuously absent: Achilles, the Greek’s foremost warrior, comes close to killing the commander, King Agamemnon).

In detailing the twists and turns of this conference, and subsequent ones held by the Greeks, Trojans and gods of Mount Olympus, Homer nails meeting behaviour with a precision that management gurus today can only dream of. Where Homer blazes a trail, other literary greats follow: the Western canon is ripe with unharvested wisdom on how to make meetings more productive. Time to put yourself on mute, turn off your camera and get reading.

To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell;
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

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Nuclear energy is considered a crucial part of fighting climate change with experts such as Bill Gates being big supporters of the technology. But nuclear energy comes with issues such as meltdown accidents and toxic waste.

While some might argue those are small fees to pay for clean energy (when compared to fossil fuels’ toll on the environment and humans), others argue there is a better way to do nuclear energy and that is through the use of thorium. For starters, thorium is three times more abundant in nature than currently used uranium.

But that’s not thorium’s only advantage. It turns out that when T-232 is hit by a neutron, it turns into a fissionable version of thorium called T-233. This new reaction makes its own fuel as it goes along making it also self-sustaining.

The thorium-based reactions also produce a lot less toxic waste than uranium-based ones. This is partially due to the fact that the reaction chain from thorium has a lot more steps than the uranium one resulting in fewer final products.

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People often limit their creativity by continually adding new features to a design rather than removing existing ones.

Government activity follows the same paradigm. Politicians typically attempt to solve problems by adding regulations when removing them would be more beneficial.

Joel Kotkin.

In a world that seems to be divided between neoliberal orthodoxy and identitarian dogmas, it is possible to miss the waning presence of traditional social democracy. Born of the radical Left in Marx’s own time, social democrats worked, sometimes with remarkable success, to improve the living standards of working people by accommodating the virtues of capitalism. Today, that kind of social democracy—learned at home from my immigrant grandparents and from the late Michael Harrington, one time head of the American Socialist Party—is all but dead. This tradition was, in retrospect, perhaps too optimistic about the efficacy of government. Nevertheless, it sincerely sought to improve popular conditions and respected the wisdom of ordinary people.

In its place, we now find a kind of progressivism that focuses on gender, sexual preference, race, and climate change. Abandoned by traditional Left parties, some voters have drifted into nativist—and sometimes openly racist—opposition while more have simply become alienated from major institutions and pessimistic about the future.

Ideologues traditionally attempt to skew the traditional definition of terms in order to hijack them politically by sticking a qualifier on the front; ‘social justice’ is the poster child here, with its mutant progeny ‘environmental justice’, ‘racial justice’, and ‘[insert your favorite buzzword here] justice’. One can usually say that if a term has a politically-biased addition on the front, it’s no longer the same term. ‘Social justice’ isn’t justice, any more than ‘gay marriage’ is marriage. Similarly, ‘social democracy’ isn’t democracy.

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Turns out, the Red Delicious apple used to be, well, delicious. Here’s what went wrong.

My wife likes Gala apples but I have yet to find an apple that actually tastes good to me.

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Here in the West, a lifestyle of unnecessary spending has been deliberately cultivated and nurtured in the public by big business. Companies in all kinds of industries have a huge stake in the public’s penchant to be careless with their money. They will seek to encourage the public’s habit of casual or non-essential spending whenever they can.

In the documentary The Corporation, a marketing psychologist discussed one of the methods she used to increase sales. Her staff carried out a study on what effect the nagging of children had on their parents’ likelihood of buying a toy for them. They found out that 20% to 40% of the purchases of their toys would not have occurred if the child didn’t nag its parents. One in four visits to theme parks would not have taken place. They used these studies to market their products directly to children, encouraging them to nag their parents to buy.

…

We buy stuff to cheer ourselves up, to keep up with the Joneses, to fulfill our childhood vision of what our adulthood would be like, to broadcast our status to the world, and for a lot of other psychological reasons that have very little to do with how useful the product really is. How much stuff is in your basement or garage that you haven’t used in the past year?

Tons.

“Well, there goes my appetite.”

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People buy guns & ammo when they feel threatened.

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The Vessel at Hudson Yards in Manhattan has been closed again after a 14-year-old boy jumped off the elaborate honeycomb-like structure that rises 16 stories Thursday afternoon. The teen’s death is the fourth suicide in 18 months since installation. The billionaire property developer behind the public sculpture is contemplating a permanent closure.

The New York City Police Department confirmed a 14-year-old boy jumped off the 150-foot set of spiraling staircases Thursday afternoon, just before 1300 local time, according to NBC News.

If you build it, they will come.

… our thoughts are with the family of the young person who lost their life.

They didn’t ‘lose their life’. They threw it away. You might want to ask Why?

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Furious at Cheney becoming one of ten GOP U.S. Representatives to support the impeachment of former President Donald Trump and her continuing attacks on him, Republicans want her out in 2022.

According to a just-completed McLoughlin poll among likely Republican voters in the Cowboy State, a whopping 72% have an unfavorable opinion of their state’s lone U.S. Representative.

When Cheney is pitted one-on-one against state Rep. Chuck Gray (for whom the poll was conducted), he demolishes her 63% to 24%.

But, with seven other candidates in the primary with Cheney next year, it is now unlikely Gray or anyone else will get to go one-on-one with the three-term congresswoman.

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One of the left’s favorite myths is that America is abundant with white supremacists and practitioners of something called the alt-right. I know. I, too, once thought the alt-right was a roadside direction or an indication a detour was ahead, but apparently it has something to do with the politics of a distinctly extremist variety. Advocates of the alt-right apparently tend to congregate at rural gas stations, usually in the dark of night. That is about all I know about it, but the writers at The New York Times claim to be highly agitated over it.

A couple of weeks back, William Regnery II, a man who supposedly “bankrolled” what the Times called “some of the leading organizations and figures behind the rise of the alt-right and championed efforts to win adherents to a modernized notion of white supremacy,” bit the dust. And do you know how the hysterics at the Times handled his passing? They devoted an entire half-page to him, complete with a picture of him standing with some young adjunct who looked understandably uneasy. The young man was wearing an ill-fitting suit, and he might have been more comfortable was he armed, but he was not. The recently deceased Regnery and I might have met years ago at some Republican function, for he was active in the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964. Or possibly, it was at a stamp collectors’ conference. I used to be an avid collector. At any rate, he is dead, and from the Times’s own information gathered for Regnery’s obit, it is clear that he never succeeded in any political endeavor, from his earliest Republican days to his days of aimless wanderings with fanatics.

“He has excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.”

— Declaration of Independence

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You who can use this know who you are.

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Joe Ferullo asks that those who left California for Texas return. He states that Texas laws on voting security, firearms, abortion, minimum wage, and critical race theory violate the mission statements of the tech companies that have vacated the sunshine state. Of course, Hewlett-Packard must defend late-term abortions. How could they make laptops otherwise?

When I finally leave California, it won’t be that my wife and I pay six figures in state income tax. It won’t be that despite (or because of) paying all that money to the government, we still can’t afford to buy a house. It won’t be that, as doctors, we make less in California than we would make elsewhere in the country.

It’ll be due to our smug neighbors tell us we are lucky to pay insane rent for a house with a leaking roof and a rodent infestation (we actually got a good deal considering the alternatives). It’ll be to escape the “tenant advocates” who don’t understand why draconian rent control and tenant protections drive up rents. It’ll be the NIMBY homeowners who refuse to allow new construction, perpetuating discrimination and a housing shortage while proudly displaying a “Black Lives Matter” sign in their all-white neighborhood.

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Pretty impressive.

Severian explains the basics.

Back when we were allowed to acknowledge basic biology, feminists used to howl about the “double standard” in attractiveness: Women get judged almost entirely on their looks, while men get judged almost entirely on their accomplishments. Note that this entails feminism has always been about denial of basic biological reality, right from jump street, but that’s not important right now. In a very limited way, they had a point: That situation is grossly “unfair,” in that there’s very little you can do to improve your looks, but a lot you can do to improve your accomplishments. But see “denial of basic biological reality,” above — such “unfairness” is how homo sap. came to dominate the planet. You really want your critters to take the great leap forward — discover fire or the wheel or whatnot — tell the males of the species there’s some punani in it.

ZMan lays out some inconvenient truth.

One of the more challenging things for dissidents to grasp about politics within a liberal democracy is emergent behavior. This is behavior of a group that does not depend on properties of individuals, but on the relationships within the group. Right-wing people tend to reject this in favor of reductionism. Individuals act out of material self-interest, so the actions of a group must be out of self-interest. This means the actions of all groups can be reduced down to individual motivations.

The fact that this form of analysis has never been useful in combating radicalism and irrationalism never seems to matter. There is something about the mind of right-wing people that prevents them from questioning this analysis. Perhaps it is simply the product of the rational mind. People who seek to live orderly lives naturally assume order is the default state of mind. To accept the existence of the hive mind is to question a fundamental understanding of existence.

Regardless, emergent behavior is a real thing and accepting it is key to understanding and predicting the behavior of the forces of darkness. The best example is a flock of birds darting among trees at dusk. There is no lead bird calling out commands to the rest of the birds. Instead, every bird is both a leader and follower, responding to the actions of the birds around it. When a bird on the edge of the group moves toward a bit of food, the rest respond in a cascade of corresponding action.

Steve Sailer.

If racism is the only thing that could possibly account for the problems of blacks in 2021, shouldn’t their troubles be declining steadily? After all, the effects of redlining (outlawed in 1968) and the other usual suspects should logically be steadily vanishing into the mists of time. But instead, nothing much seems to change as the decades roll by.

A landmark new study titled “Task-Based Discrimination” looks into exactly why the white-black wage gap among men declined dramatically from 1960 to 1980, but today it is just as wide as it was at the end of the Carter administration (and has been worsening in this century). It turns out it has to do more with fundamental changes in technology than it does white evilness.

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Every so often you realise you’ve missed a trick! I was chatting to another church warden and she commented that she cannot wait for somebody to demand her church be decolonised. She’d point out that the parish isn’t worthy and she could gift the church building to those protesting. Then the church itself could meet in the local community centre where it’s warm, the chairs are comfortable, and she doesn’t have to worry about the maintenance. Let somebody else go slowly bankrupt trying to look after the building and at the same time face the opprobrium of the community who neither attend nor contribute, but are furious that you’ve not maintained it to the high standards their grandfather thinks he remembers.

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The truth is that there is some incredible technology out there, helping farmers do more with less. Most farmers would happily explain this, but they’re too busy working to tweet about crop data tools. That, however, doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t educate ourselves a bit.

 

ZMan explains it all to you.

The Left-Right dynamic within radical politics is something that gets very little attention, because it does not serve ruling class interests. In 1920’s Russia, the Left side promoted radical reorganization of society, while the Right side wanted to take a gradualist approach. Critics of the conservative movement in America have relied on this comparison to chide them over their diffidence. The paleo criticism of Buckley conservatism was that it was just the slow version of Progressivism.

What this means is that the ruling dynamic of America since the middle of the last century has been a form of party rule. The communist had informal factions within a formal party structure, while the liberal democrats prefer formal factions within an informal party structure. The Democrats are the left-liberals while the Republicans are the right-liberals. They have the same goals, but disagree on the best approach for achieving those goals. They also serve the same interests.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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The real monopoly problems in our economy are not the firms that push up some very particular concentration indices, rather they are the small, local monopolies, hospitals, and the public education system.

“Let’s be serious …Olympic athletes are literally chosen to be the best mating prospects on the planet Earth.”

— Scott Adams

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Can entire societies become more or less depressed over time? Here, we look for the historical traces of cognitive distortions, thinking patterns that are strongly associated with internalizing disorders such as depression and anxiety, in millions of books published over the course of the last two centuries in English, Spanish, and German. We find a pronounced “hockey stick” pattern: Over the past two decades the textual analogs of cognitive distortions surged well above historical levels, including those of World War I and II, after declining or stabilizing for most of the 20th century. Our results point to the possibility that recent socioeconomic changes, new technology, and social media are associated with a surge of cognitive distortions.

Severian looks around.

Regarding bicycles, they, like motorcycles, have long since transformed from “a means of locomotion” to “a lifestyle.” Note that I’m only talking about AINO here. Everyone has heard that “more bicycles than people in the Netherlands” factoid, and Euros do seem to love them some bikes, but I haven’t spent enough time over there to say much about it. Here in the Former America, though, anyone who rides a bicycle past age 16 falls into one of two broad groups: 1) they’re nature lovers who want to be out in the countryside but for various reasons can’t take up hiking, or 2) they’re preening, posturing, virtue-signaling, passive-aggressive assholes. The latter outnumber the former about 5,000 to 1.

Preach it, brother.

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The specific reasons vary widely. Some families who spoke with The Associated Press have children with special educational needs; others seek a faith-based curriculum or say their local schools are flawed. The common denominator: They tried homeschooling on what they thought was a temporary basis and found it beneficial to their children.

“That’s one of the silver linings of the pandemic – I don’t think we would have chosen to homeschool otherwise,” said Danielle King of Randolph, Vermont, whose 7-year-old daughter Zoë thrived with the flexible, one-on-one instruction. Her curriculum has included literature, anatomy, even archaeology, enlivened by outdoor excursions to search for fossils.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

This country spent its first 300 years without taxpayer-supported government schools. Maybe we’re going back to the future.

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Nowadays, fortunately, we have more scientific explanations for why the top Japanese woman tennis player is half-black than discredited eugenics ideas like fast-twitch muscles.

Now, we know it’s due to Black Girl Magic!