Read it.

But you have to bear in mind that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his term of office.

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

Read it.

Sounds reasonable to me.

Now let’s see whether we can get them to refer to the Japanese Tenno by his reign-name rather than his given name.

Read it.

The problem with virtue-signaling is that it makes you an easy target.

Read it.

Or you could become a serial killer. Guaranteed to make people look out for you.

And, once you’re caught, you’ll spend 20 years on Death Row interacting with very … interesting ,.. people.

Read it.

The blade is about the size of a pocket knife.

I suspect the kids are better off with these snowflake-spawn somewhere else.

Read it.

I’ve said for some time that the decline, the decadence, of a civilization can be seen in the breakdown first of the monuments it makes, then the history it writes, and finally the stories it tells. This is why.

ZMan does a deep dive.

Privacy is something that has become a front burner topic for everyone, because every day we are treated to stories about how corporations are spying on us. They harvest information from our daily routines, put it into databases and then use it to push ads on us wherever we turn. They are now inserting surveillance devices in our homes to listen in on us as we go about our daily routines. Of course, no one knows how much is done with government blessing and cooperation, but we know it is there.

Of course, the fact that everyone is worried about this issue means the politicians never speak of it. The old Joe Sobran line was that America is a country where the political parties are significantly to the Left of their voters. Today, when Left and Right are meaningless artifacts from a bygone era, both parties simply make sure to never address the concerns of the people. While Democrats are analyzing spectral evidence for signs of Russian gremlins, the GOP is thanking you for not smoking.

Steve Sailer.

If you are “passionate about social justice issues,” you may well be not quite smart enough to pass the bar exam and therefore wind up stuck with $200k in law school loans but no career.

Fortunately for the Law School Admission Council, luring marginal minds into going to law school is NOT a social justice issue.

One of the reasons our culture is self-destructing is … Social Justice Warriors who have gone to law school. Sure, they may not be able to pass the bar exam, but then they wind up on CNN or MSNBC, at the New York Times or Washington Post, or working for the Deep State — where they can do more damage than in a court room.

Read it.

The most amusing aspect of this is that it’s describing most of the readers of the New York Times, from Blotto O’Rourke and Pete Buttplug right on down to Joe Biden.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, takes on one of ‘Progressivism’s dearest myth.

Few pieces of legislation in the United States are so widely respected as is the Sherman Act. But this respect is undeserved. The referee of Bradley’s book along with Stigler and the many other people who continue to take the Sherman Act at face value ignore the full history of antitrust legislation in the U.S.

Read it.

As a way to keep proglodytes out of your state, anti-abortion legislation just might do the trick … kind of like crosses and vampires, right?

Read it.

Guess he was wrong.

What else has he been wrong about?

Well, almost everything.

Read it.

The pushback continues.

Perhaps the pendulum is starting to swing back.

Perhaps we can stop it somewhere near the middle.

Perhaps.

Freeberg nails it.

It happened long before the beginning of recorded history, so we don’t know if it was sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, or a bunch of cavemen still in the throes of evolution from monkeys. But it was undoubtedly profit-driven, motivated by the realization that a group can achieve in breadth & depth something that a lone individual cannot. And that had to be a meal because it could not have been anything else. It must have been meat, because the farmer labors in solitude when he sows and reaps.

So the most able hunters in a village, or in a locale that was later to become a village, pooled their resources together and brought down a mighty beast. They gathered to cook it over a fire, and divide the portions. They ate better and fed their families better than they had before, as a result of previous attempts in solitude, and so they resolved to do the same again and again.

The process of allocation must have become an issue very soon, likely within mere moments. The first liberal caveman who didn’t know how to hunt, or didn’t care to expend the effort, proposed that his contribution to the feast would be the knowledge of how to apportion the meat among the various other participants. Those stronger cavemen who brought down the beast then tore him limb from limb…and so, having anticipated this, he didn’t actually say anything, opting instead to keep the thoughts to himself. And probably starved, or survived on the scraps.

But the desire remained — the desire to make one’s living by way of dictating where the energies of better people should go, as a substitute for actual contribution. It was left to churn away, like an underground fire, for thousands and thousands of years before technology would permit it to see the light of day

Read it.

Some employees say Google is losing touch with its “Don’t be evil” motto. What happens when an empowered tech workforce rebels?

Read it.

Be careful what you wish for — you just might get it.

Unintended Consequences will be master of them all….

Read it.

Allegedly. This is from Popular Science, which has gone from being a popular science mag to a Voice of the Crust, so I’d want to check it against a couple of reliable sources.

Oh, c’mon! Where are you going to find a virgin these days?

Heather Mac Donald on the new SAT ‘adversity score’.

For decades, the College Board defended the SAT, which it writes and administers, against charges that the test gives an unfair advantage to middle-class white students. No longer. Under relentless pressure from the racial-preferences lobby, the Board has now caved to the anti-meritocratic ideology of “diversity.” The Board will calculate for each SAT-taker an “adversity score” that purports to measure a student’s socioeconomic position, according to the Wall Street Journal. Colleges can use this adversity index to boost the admissions ranking of allegedly disadvantaged students who otherwise would score too poorly to be considered for admission.

Advocates of this change claim that it is not about race. That is a fiction.

Read it.

FIRST, CLOSE the blackout blinds in your bedroom. Eat dinner at 4pm, and do not eat or drink anything after 6pm. Put on your blue-light blocking glasses at 8pm. Set your bedroom temperature to 67ºF (19.4ºC) and your electric blanket to 69.8ºF (21ºC). At 8.45pm, meditate for five to ten minutes. Switch on your deep-wave sound machine. Put on your Oura sleep-tracking ring. You are now, finally, ready for slumber. This may all sound a bit over the top. But this is the “sleep hygiene” routine described in a recent blog post by Bryan Johnson, who sold his previous company to eBay for $800m and is now chief executive of Kernel, a startup developing brain-computer interfaces. He admits that his sleep routine has “decimated my social life”, and that his partner sleeps in a different room, but says all this trouble is worth it, because it has boosted his level of “deep sleep” by as much as 157%. He has bought Oura rings for all his employees.

The Duchess of Cambridge and Diana Rigg in her prime.

Think about it.

The New York Post lays it out.

If you’re not laughing, then you don’t know Bill de Blasio like we know Bill de Blasio.

As the hometown paper and preferred foil, let us explain why Democrats across America shouldn’t waste time or money on this guy.

Bill De Blasio makes ‘White Supremacy’ hand-sign.

Read it.

I think so.

Read it.

“We all speed, yet months and months usually pass between us seeing a crash,” lieutenant Megge tells us when we call to discuss speed limits. “That tells me that most of us are adequate, safe, reasonable drivers. Speeding and traffic safety have a small correlation.”

…

As most honest drivers would probably concede, this means that if the speed limit on a highway decreases from 65 mph to 55 mph, most drivers will not drive 10 mph slower. But for the majority of drivers, the opposite is also true. If a survey team increases the speed limit by 10 mph, the speed of traffic will not shoot up 10 mph. It will stay around the same. Years of observing traffic has shown engineers that as long as a cop car is not in sight, most people simply drive at whatever speed they like.

Scott Adams has brought up an interesting situation, although not in the way that he may have meant to.

In the linked Periscope session, during a discussion of the ‘heartbeat bills’ that some states are using to establish constraints on abortion, he expressed the opinion that states that enact such laws will suffer economically, because (for example) large tech companies such as Google, Apple, Amazon, etc., will not choose such states for new facilities because of the existence of such laws.

I think his assessment is correct, as far as it goes.

But think about that. One common complaint among Right-Thinking People is that refugees from high-tax Blue states are moving into low-tax Red states because they want to keep more of their hard-earned money. Unfortunately, such people bring their Social Justice Warrior attitudes with them, and the destination states run the risk of turning into high-tax Politically Correct more-toward-Blue states as a result.

‘Heartbeat’ laws could prove a barrier to such movement. And that, I suggest, is a feature, not a bug. I’d gladly give up the extra economic activity that such population ingress might bring with it in order to avoid the prospect of turning into a junior-grade California. I suspect a lot of Red state people would agree.

So there it is.

Ace of Spades is not pleased.

He’s now voting down conservative judges because they made disparaging comments about Obama.

Looks like the ghost of John McCain is still with us.

Read it.

Women and minorities hardest hit, of course.

Read it.

Most Hollywood liberals not only don’t live in Alabama, they don’t visit the state either. But that hadn’t stopped their fury over the state’s attempt to limit the availability of abortion.

The functional definition of an authoritarian is that, not only do they want to be able to do things their way, they want to force you to do things their way, too.

Read it.

And who could blame them?

Read it.

Shocking.

Read it.

A twofer.

Read it.

In British newspapers, there is a longstanding technique of obscuring a paucity of evidence in support of a preposterous thesis by posing it as a question. It’s been dubbed by the political commentator John Rentoul “Questions to Which the Answer is No” (QTWAIN). Winkler’s article employs the stratagem liberally. “Was Shakespeare’s name useful camouflage, allowing [Bassano] to publish what she otherwise couldn’t?” “Could Bassano have contributed [to literature] even more widely and directly?” In a moment of self-knowledge, Winkler asks: “Was I getting carried away, reinventing Shakespeare in the image of our age?” Yet she immediately supplies not the correct answer but yet another QTWAIN: “Or was I seeing past gendered assumptions to the woman who—like Shakespeare’s heroines—had fashioned herself a clever disguise?”

…

We in fact have unimpeachable evidence of Shakespeare’s activities as a writer, far more than we do for, say, his fellow-dramatists John Webster or Cyril Tourneur, but by a series of rhetorical sleights-of-hand Price rules it all inadmissible. To give a single but weighty example: Shakespeare’s fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell assembled the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works, published in 1623, with Shakespeare’s name on the title page and his engraved image in the frontispiece, and with a laudatory poem by Ben Jonson referring to the author as “Sweet Swan of Avon.” Price dismisses this as evidence of authorship because it’s posthumous, coming seven years after Shakespeare’s death, even though the planning and publishing of the book must have taken years, and Heminge, Condell and Jonson all knew Shakespeare personally. This isn’t scholarship but sophistry.

There is a famous story told about the French diplomat Talleyrand from his pre-Revolutionary career as an Archbishop. The way I heard it: There was a provincial synod in the Archdiocese of Tolouse, of which Talleyrand was the Archbishop, at which the Bishop of Auch failed to appear. When Talleyrand asked his chancellor why the Bishop didn’t show, the chancellor replied, “Your Excellency, the Bishop of Auch died two weeks ago.” To which Talleyrand responded, “That undoubtedly explains it. Still, I wonder what his real reason was?”

Read it.

Who hasn’t seen the ads for Shen Yun?

Well, me, for one.

Read it.

One of the most astonishing manifestations of disconnected-from-reality hubris is public authorities’ sublime confidence that employers and entrepreneurs will continue starting and operating enterprises no matter how difficult and costly it becomes to keep the doors open, much less net a profit.

The average employee / state dependent reckons that the small business owner / entrepreneur is killing it financially, banking a small fortune in pure profit every month, and that they’re doing what they love so they’ll continue doing it no matter what. In other words, they’re all wealthy Tax Donkeys who can easily afford higher taxes and fees and will tolerate paying more to keep doing what they love.

Wrong on both counts–dead wrong. A far more typical response is the one a house painter emailed me last year: every day, he reported, he wanted to dump his spray rig and power washer in a dumpster and leave the U.S.

Read it.

In times of stress, in times of uncertainty, people often return to their roots.

Read it.

Whatever happens, we have got
Apple’s buy-back program, and they have not.

Read it.

John’s post yesterday about how Denmark’s left-leaning social democrats are turning against immigration—not just any immigration but specifically from you-know-where—has prompted me to writing about a broader dilemma that, sooner or later, America’s liberals will need to confront.

Milton Friedman and other libertarians long argued that you can have high rates of unskilled immigration, or a generous welfare state, but not both. The basic thought is that high rates of unskilled immigrants will eventually bankrupt the welfare state, and while this may yet prove true, the deeper reason is not fiscal, but cultural and social. This is what the Danes have figured out.

Read it.

Notable about all this is that workers plainly agree that Amazon’s working conditions are pretty logical. Indeed, according to the New York Times Amazon reached 300,000 employees faster than any public company in history. It wouldn’t have if conditions were of the “sweatshop” variety, and if the work culture were defined by “human suffering.” Unemployment is presently low, there are countless employers out there that aren’t Amazon, yet people flock to Amazon.

Read it.

Sharing was supposed to transform our world for the better. Instead, the only thing we’re sharing is the mess it left behind.

Markets are self-organizing, based on the incentives inherent in any given situation and the amazingly sophisticated operations of human ingenuity. Ignorance of this basic fact is one of the chief causes of the disasters that can often plague the best-laid plans of mice and men, not to mention governments and tech start-ups.

Jim Goad takes a look behinds the myths.

Why the hell are these mass shooters always straight white males?

Well, for starters, because they’re not. According to a study of mass shootings in the USA between 1982 and February 2019, 62 out of 110 shooters were white, which comprises 56% of the total. Since non-Hispanic whites accounted for nearly 80% of the public in 1982 and currently hover at about 63%, whites have consistently been underrepresented as mass shooters over the past 37 years.

I’ve previously written about a similar myth—that there are no black serial killers. In reality, blacks are overrepresented among the ranks of serial killers by anywhere from 200% to 400%, and that’s assuming that no one counts gang members as serial killers.

Why the myths, then? It’s almost as if some people harbor intense racial hatred for whites.

Read it.

We have been writing for years about the fact that any European who expresses skepticism about the wisdom of mass immigration is immediately branded “far right,” no matter what his other views may be. This has had the unhealthy effect of driving voters toward parties that, in some cases, have indeed been unsavory. But it was probably only a matter of time before “mainstream” parties would see the writing on the wall.

Read it.

I doubt that anybody living really appreciates the shit that black people had to go through before the changes in the mid-60s. The fact that race-pimps and professional victims have metastasized that achievement into the cancer that race relations have become doesn’t detract from the significance of the achievement itself.

Read it.

I think this is well argued. We are long past he day when almost every girl was taught to cook in Home Ec in high school. Most men would rather eat junk food than prepare a nutritious meal, and women who have a full-time job don’t feel like spending an hour over a stove when they get home.