Read it.

No wonder they want to come here from there.

Scott Adams on Trump.

“One of the distinguishing characteristics of this President is that whenever anyone leaves money on the table, he scoops it up.”

The Ten Commandments are not LAWS (i.e. do this and you’ll be cool) but USE CASES (illustrations of ways to handle certain situations). They really ought to have a Preamble that says DON’T DO STUPID SHIT INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE FOLLOWING:

1. I’m the guy who brought you out of Egypt. If it weren’t for me, you’d still be stacking bricks and eating cardboard. A little gratitude would seem in order.
2. Other gods didn’t do shit for you. You going to go with the losers or go with a winner? That’s a no-brainer.
3. Don’t be using me to bad-mouth other people. I’m more powerful than you and smarter than you. I have a short fuse and a loooooong memory. Pissing me off is a very poor career move.
4. I established the Sabbath for a reason — you need a break every so often. Remember, I’m smarter than you. Take the hint.
5. Maybe your parents are a pain in the ass, but they were here first and without them you wouldn’t be here at all. Again, a little gratitude would seem in order. Give them a break. Peace in the family is worth a little eye-rolling.
6. If people can’t go through their day without worrying about being killed, there won’t be a society. They have to be comfortable that they aren’t going to be whacked without a very good reason. This also is no-brainer.
7. Fooling around with other people’s spouses rarely ends well. ‘Feel good now and worry about tomorrow tomorrow’ is what children do. If others are having problems, it’s not your job to make ’em worse; if they’re not having problems, it’s not your job to start something. That’s what assholes do. Think it through and Just Don’t.
8. People also have to have a certain confidence that they don’t have to watch their stuff all the time. If you want to know why some countries are full of prosperous people and some countries are full of poor people, look at who spends their time stealing stuff. Again, this is a no-brainer. Think it through and Just Don’t.
9. When we are resolving disputes, we need to know what happened. When you lie about that, it screws up the system. If we can’t resolve disputes well, things go to Hell very quickly. Again, this is a no-brainer. Think it through and Just Don’t.
10. If you spend all of your time being grumpy about what other people have, you’ll never be happy, and it will be your Own Damned Fault. If you don’t like what you have, work and get more. It’s not that hard if you FOCUS. If you lust after what other people have all of the time, you wind up in number 7 and number 8 and that rarely ends well. Save us all some trouble and Just Don’t.

TL;DR. If you wouldn’t want other people to do something to you, don’t do it to other people. Doing shit to other people that pisses them off causes hate and discontent and makes everybody unhappy and it’s NOT NECESSARY. Nobody NEEDS to go through life pissing other people off.  Give us all a break and don’t be a jerk. If you forget everything else, remember that.

Victor Davis Hanson points out that Trump really isn’t that much of an outlier as President.

eggy Noonan, apparently like many, believes that Trump’s occasional callousness and crassness are unprecedented. And they have so befouled the political landscape that he has spawned rude and crude leftwing imitators. The result allegedly is the vile language of the “mean girls” such as the anti-Semitism and foul speech of Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib…

…

With all due respect, I don’t think we “all” know that this started with Trump, however crass he can be. Rather, we know all too well the political landscape a decade before Trump.

Scot Adams, in order to have a collective term for Congressman Jerry Nadler and his coterie, has decided to give them the name, like that of a rock band. I kinda like it.

Matt Taibi brings the heat.

Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.

Steve Pressfield reveals all.

Here it is. Here’s the #1 lesson you learn working in advertising (and this has stuck with me, to my advantage, my whole working life):

Nobody wants to read your shit.

Read it.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Watch it.

Read it.

Back in December I brought you the latest social science findings about the ideological meaning of . . . coffee choices. Sure enough, liberals do drink more lattes than conservatives, in part, the authors of the study speculated, because a preference for latte could somehow be connected to a more cosmopolitan, internationalist outlook, whereas the xenophobia of conservatives inclined them against liking Eurotrash beverages. Whatever. But the joke was on the latte liberals, as the authors noted that lattes actually have more domestic content than the average black cup of joe, because the milk came from all-American cows. I’m guessing, by the way, that latte liberals haven’t thought through how their lattes will suffer when the Green Nude Eel eradicates all those farting cows. (Sorry, but almond and soy milk just don’t cut it.)

I think vegetarians count as prey. What do you think?

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Because he’s not Jambalaya Harris, the media candidate for the Democrat nomination.

Plus he’s white.

Plus he’s male.

Plus he’s rich.

Plus he’s a putz.

Read it.

Frankly, it hadn’t even occurred to me to worry about that.

Read it.

Heh.

UPDATE: Adam Schiff Says House Intelligence Committee Is Willing To Subpoena Mueller

Read it.

New research from psychologist and search engine expert Dr. Robert Epstein shows that biased Google searches had a measurable impact on the 2018 midterm elections, pushing tens of thousands of votes towards the Democrat candidates in three key congressional races, and potentially millions more in races across the country.

Read it.

Yes, he does look like a tick with a beard. There’s a reason for that.

Read it.

The 31st U.S. Marine Expeditionary Unit (31st MEU) seized a tiny island and airfield with special operations airmen and soldiers as part of a new island-hopping strategy.

Last week, 31st MEU, backed by the 3rd Marine Division, 3rd Marine Logistics Group and 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, members of the Air Force 353rd Special Operations Group, and Army soldiers with 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group, conducted a series of simulated military exercises attacking and seizing Ie Shima Island located off the northwest coast of Okinawa Island in the East China Sea, reported Task Purpose.

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

Read it.

Do you own your own body? A question you may never have considered as the obvious answer would be: ‘yes, of course I do.’ Well, in law, the position is counter-intuitive. The default rule is that there are no property rights in the human body; this is well established in the law of the UK and further afield. Most people live quite happily without ever having to consider the implications of this. However, for others, the consequences of being unable to own your body, parts of it or its products can lead to very undesirable results.

Christopher DeGroot blows the whistle,

The neoconservative movement has always been more of an alternative left than a school of conservatism proper. Hence the right’s main enemy has long been not the left, but the phony, neoconservative right. For the right cannot realize conservative values—nationalist economics, immigration restriction, anti-interventionist foreign policy, opposition to “progressive” social issues like gay marriage and abortion—if the right itself effectively works with the left to advance the opposite values.

In recent decades, Max Boot, a perpetual warmonger who seems incapable of learning from his own mistakes, has evidenced this problem as much as anyone.

Read it.

The last time I rode in a train it was an overnight journey from New York City to Indiana in 1980.  It wasn’t all that pleasant.

The 28-inch mattress is exactly the same width as seamen had available on old-time wooden warships, although they slept in hammocks. I guess there really is nothing new under the sun.

Read it.

They haven woken up to the fact that you don’t need a college degree to be a banker, you merely need a certain set of skills that can be tested for, and trained, through appropriately designed games.

That’s how we get drone pilots — more Call of Duty than Top Gun.

Read it.

Sounds like a great idea.

H/T Dave Zincavage.

Read it.

This may be a viable financing model for Politically Incorrect professors.

The controversial professor who drew ire of trans activists by refusing to use genderless pronouns is now making more than $50,000 US a month from his adoring fans.

In October of last year, Peterson—at the time an relatively unknown psychology professor—was thrust into the spotlight because of his refusal to use gender neutral pronouns for his students. This became a flashpoint in a debate about political correctness and Peterson rode the controversy to that of a very well paid star. Before courting controversy, Peterson was an accomplished academic—one that taught at Harvard before being granted tenure at the University of Toronto.

…

Now, less than a year since hitting fame, Peterson pulls in (at the time of writing) $51,135 from the crowdsourcing website Patreon which, as the Toronto Star reports, makes him the 32nd highest earner on the site. In April of this year, Peterson was denied research funding for the first time and the professor saw fans, which includes Canada’s answer to Infowars, Rebel Media, launch crowdfunding campaigns on his behalf—raising almost $200,000.

Sarah Hoyt speaks some inconvenient truth.

The people who do those cute and vapid studies on how your toddler is racist — by which they mean he prefers people who look like mommy and daddy, or their surrogates in his life —  don’t seem to understand that.  They don’t seem to understand that for most of human existence, (prehistory is much longer than history) for a toddler to stray outside his tribe meant at best he was raised as a slave, and at worst he became lunch.

Steve Sailer takes a look.

John Derbyshire once said that there wasn’t anything wrong with New York City that couldn’t be fixed by importing a million ethnic Chinese to the place. We may get a chance to find out.

I’m good with that.

Steve Sailer does the numbers.

The New York Times’ main White House correspondent explains that the poor representation of blacks (1%) at Stuyvesant HS in NYC is due to whites (18%) having White Privilege.

Granted, Asians make up 74% of the Stuyvesant student body, but NYT reporters don’t possess concepts like Asian Supremacy, so who can remember random numbers like that?

For reasons of Victim Pokemon Points, Asians are Honorary White People.

I’m good with that.

UPDATE: Jay Nordlinger gives the National Review cuck perspective.

Yuval Levin takes a step back.

There are, very broadly speaking, two ways to think about why elites tend to aggravate the broader public in democratic societies: We might call them the sin of exclusivity, and the sin of unaccountability. The first is a function of the fact that it is very hard to enter the elite strata of our society (and any society), and the second is a function of the fact that the people who occupy those elite strata think they can do whatever they want without regard to the consequences for others. Our elites tend to obsess about the first a lot more, but it is the second that really drives populist resentment. And in our time, we have been trying to address the first in ways that have only worsened the second.

Read it.

And sometimes not even then, I say.

Read it.

Why O’Rourke won’t be the nominee, no matter how many teeth he has.

Read it.

And not only you, but everybody.

Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called “grit,” depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing.

This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck, the U.S. economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates’s stellar rise as Microsoft’s founder, as well as to Frank’s own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best.

Ecclesiastes 9:11.

Read it.

In the news today is the story of a boy who threw an egg at an Australian senator, who was making remarks about a mass murder in New Zealand. So today, emotionally involved Americans are yelling at each other as if we need, every day, to demonstrate that murder is bad. Who has convinced us that there is a spectrum of positions on murder which are worthy of public debate? Journalists and political activists.

Read it.

I once asked my granny whether she had ever wanted to go back to Ireland. She responded, ‘Why? There’s nothing there but losers and the descendants of losers. Anybody with an ounce of gumption left long ago.”

So there you have it.

Bryan Caplan mounts his favorite hobby-horse.

Read it.

Waffle House does not care how much you are worth, what you look like, where you are from, what your political beliefs are, or where you’ve been so long as you respect the unwritten rules of Waffle House: Be kind, be respectful, and don’t overstay when others are waiting for a table.

A celebration of a key element of American culture.

I have eaten at Waffle House restaurants many times, and never been disappointed.

Troparion — Tone 3

Holy Bishop Patrick,

Faithful shepherd of Christ’s royal flock,

You filled Ireland with the radiance of the Gospel:

The mighty strength of the Trinity!

Now that you stand before the Savior,

Pray that He may preserve us in faith and love!

Kontakion — Tone 4

From slavery you escaped to freedom in Christ’s service:

He sent you to deliver Ireland from the devil’s bondage.

You planted the Word of the Gospel in pagan hearts.

In your journeys and hardships you rivaled the Apostle Paul!

Having received the reward for your labors in heaven,

Never cease to pray for the flock you have gathered on earth,

Holy bishop Patrick!

Read it. And watch the video.

And why not?

Read it.

If the situation were reversed, do you think she would do the same for him?

Not in a million years.