Read it.

I’ll bet she does, I’ll bet she does, nudge nudge wink wink say no more….

Read it.

In a different era, obtaining a diploma from an Ivy League school required hard work and real educational attainment for almost any major. The kinds of students admitted through money or connections would often struggle to make it through—hence the so-called “gentleman’s C.” But the vast majority of those who completed a degree could take pride in their accomplishments and rest easy knowing they were well-prepared to succeed in life.

Not so anymore. Since the late 1960s, universities have increasingly suffered from grade inflation and an emphasis on ensuring that all admitted students graduate. At the same time, schools have become more liberal about accepting applicants based on unorthodox qualifications, from athletic ability to nonacademic accomplishments, disadvantageous backgrounds, and demonstrated social “awareness.”

Read it.

At last, we are on the verge of getting to the bottom of the weaponization of the nation’s top law enforcement and spy agencies to spy on political opponents, and it is far bigger than obtaining bogus FISA Court warrants to spy on Carter Page.  Barack Obama’s minions have been spying on his political opponents since before his 2012 re-election, and the entire Russiagate hoax was an effort to cover up that ongoing spying.

Read it.

Anthony Peacock’s effort to vindicate the commercial republic, as it is explained in The Federalist, is both refreshing and disturbing. By calling our attention to Publius’s case for a well-constructed Union, the spirit of enterprise, and the enormous extent to which The Federalist is about war and strategy, Peacock rediscovers an almost lost continent neglected by scholars who take the survival of the Union for granted, disdain commercial society, and are more concerned with controlling power than generating it. In that way, such scholars have not been true to the spirit of the work, for as James Madison explained in Federalist 51, in framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the first task is to enable the government to control the governed; the next task is to oblige it to control itself.

Pretty pricey at $105, but maybe you could get it through InterLibrary Loan.

Read it.

And there was much rejoicing.

ZMan looks back in horror.

Politics is always a repeat of the past, to some degree, but what makes this age a weird echo is debates themselves. The biggest issues facing the West are never discussed, outside of dissident circles. Trump ran on immigration and trade, but no one talks about those anymore. The Democrats could be running on the student debt issue or the crisis facing the young people of the middle-class. Instead they are talking about socialism, as if it is this brand new idea that has never been tried.

…

Our political class is mostly cucks and kooks, unable and unwilling to muster anything resembling courage.

Read it.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

‘White Supremacy’: Is there anything it can’t do?

Read it.

The Washington Post reports that Joe Biden is running a presidential campaign of “limited exposure.” This Memorial Day weekend, when his rivals were scurrying from venue to venue pressing the flesh, Biden’s agenda stated “no public events scheduled.”

That’s typical of his campaign so far. According to the Post, since entering the race four weeks ago, Biden has held 11 public events. Beto O’Rourke held nearly four times that number in the same period. Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker have held 27; Bernie Sanders 17. Kirsten Gillibrand planned 11 stops in Iowa just over the holiday weekend.

Post reporters Annie Linskey and Chelsea Janes point out that, with the exception of O’Rourke, all of these candidates have full-time jobs in the Senate. Biden is unemployed.

Read it.

I guess all white people look alike to him.

Climate change: ‘We’ve created a civilisation hell bent on destroying itself – I’m terrified’, writes Earth scientist

Monday Mirthiness – The mind of a climate alarmist

Making Life Worse: The Flaws of Green Mandates

We Can’t Destroy Planet Earth

Gregory Wrightstone: exposing the mass extinction lie

Read it.

The success of Asian-Americans is a severe embarrassment to the race industry. Race hustlers focus on “gaps” between whites and blacks with regard to income and educational attainment, which they attribute to “systemic” racism. But what about the gaps between Asian-Americans and whites? Asians, on average, earn considerably more than whites and as a group they do better in school. Is their superior performance due to “systemic” racism directed against whites?

Apparently Asians are Honorary White People. That will come as news to a lot of actual white people.

On the other hand, I’d certainly rather live next door to Asians, East or South, than Politically Certified Brown people.

But that’s me.

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

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

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

— John McRae

Read it. And listen to the song.

Ask yourself why a Finnish team, upon victory, is singing an old American pop song.

I dare say not many of them come from West Virginia.

Read it.

Little-noticed in this minor skirmish over the future of the library was a much bigger story about the changing relationship between college students and books. Buried in a slide deck about circulation statistics from Yale’s library was an unsettling fact: There has been a 64 percent decline in the number of books checked out by undergraduates from Bass Library over the past decade.

I guess ‘Bass Library’ is the sold-naming-rights incarnation of what we used to call Cross Campus Library. The major problem with that library was (and maybe still is) that it was impossible to ‘study’ there because of all of the people socializing. The only times I ever entered that library as an undergraduate was when forced to check out reading materials for a course, which had to be done there. The best place actually to study was one of the graduate student carrels in the stacks of Sterling Memorial, because they were all under window embrasures (so they had excellent light), they had a comfortable (but not too comfortable) chair and small table, and it was DEAD QUIET. The effect was that of being in a medieval monastic scriptorium.

Read it.

“Over 80% of primary-school children and over 95% of secondary-school students across the bloc learn English before any other foreign language.”

Read it.

On a scale of 0 to 100, how warm is it? The Fahrenheit scale nearly perfectly captures the distribution of U.S. daily temperatures.

Steve Sailer.

Tina Tchen is also the Designated Woman of Color hired to purge the Southern Poverty Law Center of the nefarious white male influence that, for better or worse, built the place.

Read it.

And since it comes from the American Psychologivcal Association, anyone who disagrees must be a SCIENCE DENIER, right?

Read it.

The accusations of Huawei stealing trade secrets from across the world are hitting a fever pitch, thanks to a new Wall Street Journal expose that blows open accusations of theft and stealing of trade secrets. The article includes insights from lawsuits, Huawei’s competitors and former employees. Allegations run the gamut against the company: from its business practices, to the science behind its 5G, all the way down to copying the text it used in its user manuals.

Treat everybody like royalty.

Don’t speak to them unless you are directly addressed.

Read it.

The Outdoors Right fishes and hunts. The Extreme Outdoors Right shoots big game and/or hunts par force du chien. The Outdoors Right wears safari jackets, canvas hunting coats, camo for duck and turkey hunting, and Scarlet Hunt Uniforms for fox hunting.

The Outdoors Left hikes, bicycles, kayaks, rafts, rock climbs, and skis. The Outdoors Left wears the latest artificial fabric in Life -Saver-flavor colors.

The Outdoors Right remembers shopping at the old (the real) Abercrombie & Fitch and Wm. Mills, and buying from the Herter’s catalogue. We still shop at L.L. Bean, Filson, Woolrich, and Cabela’s. We used to buy from Orvis, but now they do.

The Outdoors Left buys from Patagonia, Northern Mountain, and REI.

We lust after custom shotguns. They yearn for custom bicycles and hiking boots.

The Outdoor Left thinks that every area of the world is Just Like Portland. This often leads them into foolish behavior that gets them eaten, dismembered, raped, or beheaded.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

For more than a half a century, the United States automatically has supported more European integration and opposed efforts to reassert national sovereignty. As recently as 2016, President Obama traveled to the United Kingdom to warn the British that as far as America was concerned, they would be sent to the “back of the queue,” if they dared to approve Brexit. In contrast, then-private citizen John Bolton remarked,“Americans should welcome Britain’s coming Declaration of Independence.”

With the advent of the Trump Administration, automatic support for continued EU centralization and reflexive opposition to national sovereignty has ended. Pompeo, speaking directly to the Europeans in Brussels, forthrightly declared: “Our mission is to reassert sovereignty, reform the liberal international order, and we want our friends to help us assert their sovereignty as well.”

Read it.

The study confirms what we’ve been hearing for years: Cooking from scratch and eating “real food” is better and healthier. The problem is that knowing this doesn’t make it any more doable for the average family.

Read it.

When certain classes of people receive privileges under the law, then others will impersonate them.

This comes as a surprise to a lot of statists.

Young people blame climate change for their small 401(k) balances

Friday Funny – or not so funny – Colorado fracktivist goes off the rails

Alberta Introduces Carbon Tax Repeal Bill

Alexandria Donkey-Chompers: It’s Crazy, We’re Only Now Getting “Casual Tornadoes,” This is a Sign of Global Warming Metereologist: We Have Tornadoes Every Year, Dum-Dum

Read it.

If I actually had an ‘white privilege’, I would use it to send all the white people who wish they were black people to Africa. I doubt that it would take more than about a week to turn them back into white people again.

Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist, writing in Bloomberg.

On the state and local level, they often favor policies that make it harder for new arrivals to the U.S.

Read it.

Encore’s decision to feature a Dominican on its cover is a typical attempt at using the unexpected otherness of a young man wearing a medieval religious habit to attract readers to its pages and ads. Thus, the magazine partakes in one of the known attractions of medievalia in the 21st century, its otherness, in the same way that we casually associate cathedrals, castles, and chivalry with the medieval past. At the same time, Reisenauer’s presence signals that the cover photo is more than a mainstream medievalist meme without any link to a historical reality. In fact, like the existence of the Cistercian and Monastic Studies Center, his picture reminds us of the manifold real cultural continuities between the medieval and our own world.

For the record, I might note that Dominicans are friars, not monks; although readers of Medievalists.net surely know that, outsiders might not.

Read it.

After a decade of training Afghan military pilots in the United States the Americans have decided to train all Afghan pilots in Afghanistan. The problem was that more and more of the trainees deserted while in the United States and many sought to gain legal residence as asylum seekers in Canada or even the United States. This is not a new problem, the first pilot trainee desertions took place in 2015. Eventually over 40 percent of the pilot trainees deserted while in the United States. It is not much better in Afghanistan where the government accepts desertion by soldiers and police as a customary, if annoying, custom. The Afghan Air Force has additional problems.

Read it.

According to Bloomberg, anti-trust authorities are looking into allegations that members of the Realtors Association conspired with brokerage companies like Realogy Holdings Corp and Re/Max Holdings to stop home sellers from negotiating their commissions. Bloomberg learned about the investigation from sources at CoreLogic, a data provider that offers real-estate data to government agencies, lenders and brokers.

Steve Sailer.

Affirmative action was set up 50 years ago in part as reparations for American slavery, but it has tended to evolve into a bizarre system of preferences for those least impacted by American slavery.

Here’s a classic example of the 2004 complaint of Harvard professors Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier that a huge fraction of Harvard’s affirmative action for blacks goes to individuals who aren’t descended from American slaves, are instead descended from foreign elites and/or white parents or grandparents.

Ice sheet contributions to future sea-level rise from structured expert judgment

Tigers don’t want to eat humans, but we’re not giving them much choice  Popular Science continues its pushing of the Narrative.

Scientists Go Back in Time to Find More Troubling News About Earth’s Oceans  Wired Science, despite its name (or perhaps analogous to ‘social justice’) is another Voice of the Crust.

Global Warming: It Can Do Anything!

We Finally Know Where The Scandalous Ozone-Destroying Chemicals Are Really Coming From  Syroruse! It’s China!

Floods & Drought Devastate Crops All Over The Planet; Is A Global Food Crisis Be Coming?

Amazon Shareholders Rejected Employees’ Call to Respond to Climate Change

An Analysis of the Earth’s Energy Budget

Floods & Drought Devastate Crops All Over The Planet; Is A Global Food Crisis Be Coming?  Not so long as the Federal government keeps paying farmers not to grow crops, it won’t.

Read it.

This tradition—whose foundation is the business suit—is one that changes at a geological pace, and at the moment its magma is hissing. “The U.S. men’s suit market has shrunk 8% to $1.98 billion since 2015,” the Wall Street Journal reported, in March, in a piece that quoted an investment-bank analyst who matches his blazer to his Lululemon stretch pants. Later that month, the top three guys on the management committee of the Goldman Sachs Group devoted their absurdly valuable time to approving a five-sentence e-mail with the subject line “Firmwide Dress Code”; the message alluded to “the changing nature of workplaces generally in favor of a more casual environment” and urged employees to “dress in a manner that is consistent with your clients’ expectations.” In April, Patagonia announced that its corporate-sales program would no longer pursue new business in making co-branded fleece tops for big, scary B2B entities like financial firms, say, or super-tall-tower developers. Instead, Patagonia would develop accounts with companies whose environmental and social values reflect its own.

In these degenerate modern times, even how you dress is political.

Read it.

They’ll be sorry,

Joel Kotkin.

Overall, data suggests that we are not seeing a great “return to the city” but, with few exceptions, a continued movement out to the suburbs and less dense cities, nota­bly in the sunbelt. The spurt of urban core growth that occurred immediately after the housing bust turned out to be remarkably short lived, with the preponderance of metropolitan growth—roughly 80 percent—returning, as has been the case since at least the late 1940s, to the suburbs and exurbs. Indeed, at no point did Census Bureau estimates show net domestic migration from suburbs to core cities, only a reduced rate of migration in the opposite direction.

Even the country’s most influential urbanist, scholar Richard Florida, now suggests that the great urban revival is “over.” Rather than the usual belief that density leads to productivity and innovation, a new Harvard study demonstrates that, between 1970 and 2010, suburban areas have overall steadily increased their economic advantages: the share of suburbs making up the top ranks of all urban and suburban neighborhoods (measured as the top quartile) went from roughly two-thirds in 1970 to almost three-quarters by 2010.

So where’s the shame?

In the past, the traditional urbanist notion, advanced by the late Jane Jacobs, maintained that cities grew best not by “luring” talent but by “creating” a middle class from its existing residents. Yet now, according to two recent Oregon studies, lower-income people in cities experience less upward mobility than people from rural areas. Indeed, according to Pew research, the largest gaps between the bottom and top quintiles can be found in some of the most progressive metropolitan areas, such as (in order from largest to smallest divides) San Francisco, New York, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Boston. In all these “superstar” cities, the middle-class family is rap­idly disappearing, even as poverty remains stubbornly high.

Ah,

Read it.

Pass the popcorn.

International Energy Agency: New Coal Plants are “Filling a Growing Gap” Between Soaring Energy Demand and Renewables

Trump Admin Aims To Make Clean Air Rules ‘More Effective’ By Overhauling How EPA Creates Them

Transformative Technology Needed?

Will New Zealand Accept Thousands of Progressive Aussie Climate Refugees?

Stanford Researchers: Save the climate by turning methane into carbon dioxide!!!

Straight to Hell: Millenarianism and the Green New Deal

Costly wind power menaces man and nature

Greenpeace Co-Founder Tells Congress To Ignore UN’s Latest Extinction Warning

Claim: We Should Act on Climate Change Because of Worst Case Scenarios

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Communal Cauliflowers Turn Minorities Away from Environmental Activism  The best thing you can say about a cauliflower is that it has more intelligence than Congresswoman Occasional-Cortex.

Check it out.

A web site that illustrates over five hundred different mechanical movements.

Absolutely fascinating.

Farhad Manjoo has an epiphany.

Mark it down: An Ivy League trained ‘journalist’ writing in the New York Times and telling the truth.

Read it.

I want to see Clapper and Brennan in jail. Both have admitted to lying under oath to Congress.

Comey is unimportant at this point, although I will cheer anything bad that happens to him.

ZMam has a bone to pick.

One of the irritating things about reading anything that strives to be academic is the thicket of citations throughout the text. It’s not just the end notes and footnotes, but the constant references to the work of others. Often, the text reads like a summary of the work in the field, rather than something original. Just as often, the text has the feel of a paper turned in by a teenager, trying to prove they did their homework. It is not just bad writing, it is a waste of time. It is disrespectful of the reader.

It’s not just a stylistic thing, but a reflection of something that has happened in the intellectual classes of American society. It used to be that an intellectual mastered a subject in order to build on it. The point of his labor was not to prove he had read everyone in the field. The point was to find the gaps in his field and use the source material as a foundation for filling some of those gaps. In other words, the academic added to his field, rather than maintained it like a curator of a museum.

Try an academic journal. They’re even worse.

Steve Sailer.

Jared Diamond, who became a famous public intellectual when his 1997 best-seller Guns, Germs, and Steel was widely proclaimed to have refuted The Bell Curve by arguing that the variation in achievement among races today is a cultural side effect of ancient differences in agricultural potential among the continents, is now under fire for himself being white.

Read it.

Baseball’s timeless appeal is predicated upon an equilibrium between pitching and hitting, and in the past, when that equilibrium has been thrown off, the game has always managed, either organically or through small tweaks, to return to an acceptable balance.

But there is growing evidence that essential equilibrium has been distorted by the increasing number of pitchers able to throw the ball harder and faster. Rising pitch velocity has altered the sport, many believe, and not necessarily in a good way.

Read it.

I could see Elijah Cummings getting a milkshake.

It would have to be chocolate, of course.