David Friedman explains it all to you.

Suppose you are a professional academic who wants to publish a journal article in order to improve your chance of getting an offer, getting tenure, getting a raise. One way to do so is to produce and write up research that provides support for a novel theory. One problem is that, if the theory is true, it is quite likely that someone else in your field, over the past century or so, has already discovered it and published it, making your result not novel, hence likely to be rejected by the journal you submit it to.

If, on the other hand, your theory is false, the odds are much better that nobody else will have come up with it, found evidence to support it, and published. So if you can produce what looks like good evidence for a false theory, the odds that it will be novel, hence publishable, hence will contribute to your career, is much higher than for a true theory.

Read it.

Good luck with that.

On my way out of Edinburgh University, where I’d just delivered a speech on how feminists should resist male violence, I was attacked last week by a shrieking “transgender person” (to cite the term used in a Scotsman headline). Had it not been for the three burly security guards surrounding me, I would have been punched.

I usually use female pronouns to refer to trans women, as a courtesy. But this is a courtesy I won’t extend to someone seeking to hurt me physically. This was a man—specifically, a misogynist who’d become notorious under the (since deleted) Twitter handle TownTattle. He was deeply offended that I’d been allowed to speak. That’s why he wanted to hurt me: for being a woman who opened her mouth.

From what I’ve seen, they don’t need an actual reason.

Before we took the stage, speakers were given an hour-long briefing by the university’s security team. We were told what would happen if the stage were stormed by protesters, or if it became necessary to vacate the venue. This is what it now means to advocate publicly for women’s rights.

Or anything, really.

Read it.

We wrote here about the lawsuit against Oberlin by a local store, Gibson’s, that alleged it was defamed by the college and its Dean of Students. Among other facts in the case, student protesters, accompanied by the Dean, handed out leaflets accusing Gibson’s of being “racist” because the store’s employees caught an African-American Oberlin student shoplifting a bottle of wine. Does that make sense to you? It didn’t make sense to the jury, either.

UPDATE: Will Oberlin Learn Its Lesson?

Another Pane of Glass

The Climate Renegade

The Most Delicious Foods Will Fall Victim to Climate Change

Scarcities are recyclable excuses for expanding government

UN Chief Poses For TIME Cover Off ‘Sinking’ Pacific Island Nation That’s Actually Growing In Size

West Coast Heat Wave: Experts Say It’s Weather, Not Global Warming

Grassroots Fury at DNC Refusal to Allow a Climate Debate

Read it.

They don’t make it easy for you.

The Cold War Project That Pulled Climate Science From the Ice

Another Major News Outlet Ditches ‘Climate Change’ For More Alarming Language

‘Climate Emergency’ Activism Now Official Party Line At Telemundo

Study: Cattle Methane is a moooot point in global climate

We Have Four Years to Save Ourselves from Climate Change, Harvard Scientist Says

Read it.

According to the pro-life group Live Action, Pinterest “permanently suspended” its account on June 11. This was after Pinterest was exposed by Project Veritas for limiting conservative groups on the platform. A Project Veritas secret investigation quoted a Pinterest insider who revealed how the site censors such content.

Read it.

The science is settled — until they take it back.

Moral: Just because ‘scientists’ say something doesn’t oblige you to believe it.

Read it.

The author, of course, is not a white person. He confesses that he has servants, so why he’s picking on ‘white people’ is not clear.

There may be an agenda here.

Steve Sailer.

Over the past few weeks, two academics working separately, Zach Goldberg and David Rozado, have documented how extremist The New York Times, once known as The Gray Lady for its decorum, became during Obama’s second term.

Quantifying the Times over time offers the single best way to measure increasing media wokeness because of the newspaper’s breadth and its influence on other journalists, who traditionally look to it for guidance on what they are supposed to be worked up over.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Read it.

A jury has ruled that Oberlin College, one of the nation’s most left-wing institutions of higher learning, must pay the proprietors of Gibson’s Bakery in Oberlin, Ohio, $11.2 million in damages for libel, slander, and other disruptions that the college caused in the business by encouraging false charges of racism.

Ace of Spades is on the case.

A doctor named Dominic D’Agostino is the main guy studying the effects of ketosis on divers, working with the Navy SEALs.

Scientists make case for stabilizing forest carbon to help mitigate climate change

What Universities Won’t Teach College Students About The Economics Of Climate Change

PG&E wins court case allowing it to renegotiate $34 billion in renewable energy contracts

Wacky NYTimes: ‘If To See the World Is Also To Help Destroy It, Should We Just Stay Home?’  Well, certain people ought to.

The Guardian on Climate Activist Billionaires: “None of them should have as much money as they do.”  Why not? They never say.

Read it.

Amazon launched a new credit card offering today for individuals with bad/no credit. If disruptive innovation always starts with addressing the low end of a market (and it does…) then this move merits attention. If anyone has the technological horsepower to crack the low end of the financial services marketplace, it’s Amazon.

The problem with that is that the low end is the low end for a reason.

Read it.

Sounds like a self-correcting problem.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

After freezing the bank accounts of 26 individuals and entities amid a probe into human trafficking, Mexico has refused to name the account owners – some of which appear to have originated in the US, UK, African nations and Central America, according to Breitbart.

Read it.

Ever since J. Christian Adams, a career Department of Justice attorney, resigned in 2010 (during Obama’s first term) due to his own unwillingness to turn a blind eye to Eric Holder’s highly charged racialist program within the DOJ, I’ve been wondering when the corruption would be called to account. But it never happened. It never happens in the Democrat Deep State…unless, like Sidney Powell, you know where to look.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Read it.

Entrepreneurs, venture capital firms, and early startup employees are using the Qualified Small Business Stock, or QSBS, provision to partially or totally wipe out their tax bills. “It’s an awesome way to mitigate tax,” says Richard Scarpelli, head of financial planning at First Republic Private Wealth Management. Of all the strategies that investors and business owners use to lower capital-gains taxes, he says, “this is by far the best.”

Shares are eligible for QSBS if they’re issued when a company has gross assets of $50 million or less. If you hold on to the stock for at least five years, you can avoid taxes on $10 million of any gains when you sell. But that $10 million is only a minimum—the law says you can instead shield as much as 10 times your initial investment, or basis, in the corporation. So a venture firm that put $10 million in an early startup could reap $100 million in tax-free gains. And QSBS’s benefit can be multiplied several-fold with clever planning.

Read it.

During a sit-down interview, he told The Daily Caller’s Stephanie Hamill that Mexico is incentivizing Guatemalans and others from Central American countries to leave their homes by offering different kinds of benefits to them like work permits and visas while they migrate north toward the United States.

Ace of Spades is on the case.

A beautiful cure to congenital neuroticism and borderline personality disorder. I applaud their decision to self-exile from the human genetic pool. I think falling human average IQ scores just started falling a little less quickly.

Steve Sailer.

Only $20. Be the first on your block.

Read it.

The country club, once a mainstay of American suburbia, faces a cloudy future, with a changing culture eroding its societal influence. Golf and tennis, the traditional club pastimes, have lost popularity. Declining marriage and fertility rates mean fewer families joining. Young professionals, many burdened with limited incomes and high debt, balk at paying dues. And a yearning for broader community makes the clubhouse’s exclusivity unappealing. The country club is increasingly a refuge for retirees—and, upon closure, a site for mixed-use development.

Much like the urban male business and university clubs.

Read it.

A sea change has taken place in American political life. The force driving this change is the digital era style of moral politics known as “wokeness,” a phenomenon that has become pervasive in recent years and yet remains elusive as even experts struggle to give it a clear definition and accurately measure its impact. Where did it come from? What do its adherents believe? Is it just something happening inside the Twitter bubble and on college campuses or is it really spreading across the social and cultural landscape and transforming the country as sometimes appears to be the case? In reality, “wokeness”—a term that originated in black popular culture—is a broad euphemism for a more narrow phenomenon: the rapidly changing political ideology of white liberals that is remaking American politics.

Read it.

High-net-worth individuals and families from high-tax states like New York, New Jersey, California, and Illinois are moving to the Miami area to take advantage of Florida’s status as a no-income-tax state, Dora Puig, a top real-estate broker in the area, previously told Business Insider.

Climate Change: What Can’t It Do?

The Guardian: Rebuilding Shattered Climate Action Reputations in the Pacific will require Lots of Aid Money

Mike Bloomberg Devotes $500 Million To Kill Coal Jobs, Influence 2020 Elections  What a guy.

Read it.

“Alexa, get me the NSA.”

“We’re already here.”

Read it.

Welcome to our world, Bill.  Make yourself at home.

Read it.

In 1956, Philip K. Dick published a short story that follows the tribulations of a police chief in a future marked by predictive computers, humans wired to machines, and screen-based video communications. Dick’s work inspired a generation of scientists and engineers to think deeply about that kind of future. To adapt that same story into a $100 million Hollywood film 50 years later, Steven Spielberg sent his production designer, Alex McDowell, to MIT. There, a pioneering researcher — and lifelong Dick fan — named John Underkoffler was experimenting with ways to let people manipulate data with gloved hands. In 2002, a version of his prototype was featured in the film, where it quickly became one of the most important fictional user interfaces since the heyday of Star Trek. Bas Ording, one of the chief UI designers of the original iPhone, told me his work was inspired directly by the gesture-based system showcased in Minority Report.

Read it.

Imagine an ageing magnate in his private retreat, and you might picture English industrialist William – first Baron – Armstrong in the luxurious wood-panelled library of his Northumberland pile: Cragside.

…

He was connected to leading scientists and engineers, in many cases buying their inventions for installation in the house or grounds. “He was known for going into a trance-like state with his hand on his head and the other in his pocket and was oblivious to what was going on around him,” Sawyer said, with the result that people wondered if he was still breathing. “For me his greatest gift was the ability to gather amazing people around to achieve his dreams.”

Read it.

Both to satisfy my own curiosity and set out a vision for what a city-oriented United States might look like, I decided to make a map that dispensed with the continental 48 states and instead divvied up the land into 100 city-states.

Read it.

What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.

Read it.

Monopolies aren’t forever.

Don’t Mention the Gigantic New Coal Mine: Al Gore’s Paid Climate Speech Avoids Uncomfortable Local Issues

All The World’s Carbon Emissions In One Chart

Latest Global Temp. Anomaly (May ’19: +0.32°C) A Simple “No Greenhouse Effect” Model of Day/Night Temperatures at Different Latitudes

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The AMA, like every such ‘trade association’, is essentially a cartel or guild, devoted to making sure that it’s members, and only its members, get the benefits that the association can collar through lobbying and publicity. Lawyers have a similar cartel, and accountants keep trying to form one with less success. Whenever you see the term ‘Licensed X’, that’s a cartel. (If you see ‘Certified X’, that’s a cartel wannabe.)

Doctors are smart, so they know that becoming government employees (effectively) means cushy jobs for second-rate people but limits on upside income enhancement for first-rate people … and doctors think of themselves as first-rate people (like lawyers). This is why smart people with medical training in the Turd World all want to come to the U.S. where they can get rich (they think).

L. A. Times article on excess California solar incredibly misleading

‘Skeptical Environmentalist’ Bjorn Lomborg sets fire to the scourge of ‘unbridled climate alarmism’

National Park Quietly Removed Warning That Glaciers ‘Will All Be Gone’ By 2020 After Years Of Heavy Snowfall

Read it.

Every year, I have two encounters with John Locke. The first comes when I go to the American Political Science Association, where I try to understand the arguments of the hardcore political philosophers brought in by Claremont and Institute for Humane Studies, and so on. The second comes about a month later when I teach the Founding to a group of Freshmen at my university. A point I try to drive home to my students, and which, given the recent discussions regarding Sohrab Ahmari around here, is relevant to Ricochet, is that the world of 17th Century England, and especially the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, doesn’t look much like the United States of today, and that properly understanding Locke and Montesquieu requires thinking in terms they would have known.

Locke is a significant figure in modern political philosophy. This new look at his work is well worth reading.

Steve Sailer.

I sometimes mention the obvious distinction between The Atlantic Monthly on paper for grownups and TheAtlantic.com with its proliferation of intern-written hot takes on “Last Night’s Episode of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Reminded Me of My Feelings About My Hair.”

The Atlantic’s editor has noticed it too.

Read it.

A fairly complicated question, and the answer is even more complicated.

Well yes, they hate men, but the police had no problem with them hating men for the last 75 years.

The problem comes when they hate men who LARP as women.

Good luck trying to sort it out.

Anti-Trump AG Sued For Using Bloomberg-Funded Attorneys To Promote A Climate Crusade

Bill Nye the Science Guy Compares the Need to Fight Climate Change to D-Day  He reminds me of Max Headroom.

The Green New Deal’s Epic Transportation and Commerce Fail

The Holocene Sea Level Highstand

Glacier National Park Quietly Removes Its ‘Gone by 2020’ Signs

EIA data shows wind & solar met 3% of U.S. energy after $50 billion in subsidizes

Read it.

According to the FT, the database, known as MS Celeb, was first published in 2016.  At the time, it was described by the company as the largest publicly available facial recognition data set in the world, containing more than 10 million images of nearly 100,000 individuals.

Those whose images were included in the database did not give their permission for the images to be used. Instead, their images were scraped off the web and off search engines.

Two other data sets have also been taken down since the FT exposed how they were being used by the Chinese. They include: the Duke MTMC surveillance data set built by Duke University researchers and a Stanford University data set called Brainwash.

Going by professional citations, Microsoft’s MS Celeb has been used by a handful of corporations, including Sensetime and Megvii, two suppliers of the growing state security apparatus in China’s Northwestern Xinjiang province.

Somebody at Microsoft grew a pair.

Read it.

I suspect some people with Xboxes could use it.

As the late great George Carlin said, ‘If you nail together two things that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck with buy it.’

Read it.

The deadly pig virus that jumped from Africa to Europe is now ravaging China’s $128 billion pork industry and spreading to other Asian countries, an unprecedented disaster that has prompted Beijing to slaughter millions of pigs. But stopping African swine fever isn’t so easy.

Let’s see: It ‘jumped from Africa to Europe’ but the worry is about China’s pork industry? That’s a bigger jump than from Africa to Europe. Pardon me if I don’t seem concerned about China’s pork industry.

If we know anything about disease pandemics, it’s that not every victim will die. (Check the history of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.) If China has 440 million pigs, a significant portion of them will prove resistant. Once all of the vulnerable pigs die off, China will use the resistant pigs to rebuild their port industry. Sucks to be China, of course, but it’s not the end of the world, or even the end of the pigs.

This is the kind of hair-on-fire ‘journalism’ that gives news organs like Bloomberg a bad name.

Read it.

Crooked black politicians and their crooked relatives are an old American tradition.