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People might get the impression that Democrats are socialists. Perish the thought!

Victor Davis Hanson.

The reinvention of vocabulary can often be more effective than any social protest movement. Malarial swamps can become healthy “wetlands.” Fetid “dumps” are often rebranded as green “landfills.”

Perfectly normal activity can become CrimeThink: ‘black market’, ‘price gouging’, ‘profiteering’, etc.

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Breakaway MPs accused of making off with info.

The Brexit controversy seems to be sparking a re-alignment of British politics, similar to the re-alignment that occurred over Irish Home Rule in the late 1900s. It will be interesting to see what shakes out.

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Unfortunately, money doesn’t buy votes the way it used to, even for Democrats.

Prediction: Too male, too pale, too stale. Jambalaya will get the nomination.

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An interesting piece, with a number of flaws.

I think the accompanying picture particularly unfortunate. Presumably it’s supposed to illustrate that people in ‘flyover country’ are physically unattractive, but if you add a number of tattoos and a piercing or two it could be any denizen of a Left Coast ‘vibrant’ neighborhood. Middle America has no lock on ugly.

One obvious lacuna is no mention of rich people. Rich people don’t live in the country, they live in cities; and not small cities, either, unless those small cities are right next to big cities. The rich people in Dallas don’t live in Parker or Murphy, they live in Highland Park — and so on around the country. Think about that for a bit.

Steve Sailer takes a victory lap.

You can call it Sailer’s Boast: Whenever there is some remarkably dumb development flabbergasting the respectable pundits, I’ve no doubt explained the entire phenomenon years ago in various Taki’s columns.

Steve Sailer counts ’em up.

The theory of Intersectionality — roughly, that the more categories of Victim you can check, the more Victim Privilege you enjoy — has been immensely influential since about 2013.

And those points can be traded for valuable prizes.

Read it.

That sounds about right.

Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist, explains it all to you.

The main reason Amazon as a corporate entity does not pay much in taxes is because the company so vigorously reinvests its profit.  The resulting expensing provisions lower their tax liabilities, in some cases down to zero or near-zero.  That is in fact the kind of incentive our tax system is supposed to create, and does so only imperfectly, noting that many economists have suggested moving to full expensing.

Jeff Bezos has deliberately chosen a business strategy that minimizes nominal profit. That value, rather than being siphoned off by the government, goes toward increasing share value for shareholders. Look at a chart of Amazon’s share price over the last ten years if you don’t believe it. That’s why Jeff is now the Richest Guy In The World;; his wealth is primarily in Amazon stock.

Amazon pays plenty in terms of payroll taxes and also state and local taxes.  Nor should you forget the taxes paid by Amazon’s employees on their wages.  Not only is that direct revenue to various levels of government, but the incidence of those taxes falls somewhat on Amazon, which now must pay higher wages to offset the tax burden faced by their employees.

Remember that the next time that proglodytes lie to you and say that Amazon pays no taxes.

Victor Davis Hanson.

There are not enough racists left to fuel the current insatiable appetite of the anti-racism industry. So both victimizers and victims have to be invented — as we see with the Duke lacrosse lynching, the Virginia fraternity hoax, the Covington-kids invention, and the recent Jussie Smollett fraud.

Victor Davis Hanson does some analysis.

The illegal effort to destroy the 2016 Trump campaign by Hillary Clinton campaign’s use of funds to create, disseminate among court media, and then salt among high Obama administration officials, a fabricated, opposition smear dossier failed.

So has the second special prosecutor phase of the coup to abort the Trump presidency failed. There are many elements to what in time likely will become recognized as the greatest scandal in American political history, marking the first occasion in which U.S. government bureaucrats sought to overturn an election and to remove a sitting U.S. president.

A fact insufficiently appreciated.

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Knowing the Silicon Valley giant held a trove of consumer mobile phone location data, investigators got a Hennepin County judge to sign a “reverse location” search warrant ordering Google to identify the locations of cellphones that had been near the crime scene in Eden Prairie, and near two food markets the victims owned in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

The scope of the warrant was so expansive in time and geography that it had the potential to gather data on tens of thousands of Minnesotans.

The technique has caught the attention of civil liberties lawyers who worry such warrants — deployed increasingly by police in the Twin Cities and around the country — are a digital dragnet ripe for abuse, and that judges may not realize the technical details or broad scope of the searches they’re authorizing.

We have the technology. Whether we will be allowed to use it has yet to be determined.

In the newsreader I use (Feedly) I have a ‘category’ called ‘British News’ that contains feeds from the various British newspapers and online publications that tend to have stuff in which I’m interested.

Ordinarily this would be an overwhelming amount of information to work through every day, but I’ve developed a method of filtering that gets rid of all the uninteresting stuff merely by looking at the accompanying photograph (British news sources are pretty conscientious about including at least one photograph in their stories).

1. Skip anything that has a picture of athletes (typically football/soccer players, but also cricket and American football–not the games, but the Colin-Kaepernick-style controversies).
2. Skip anything that has a picture of a member of the Royal Family. (Usually just ginned-up clickbait gossip; the Daily Mail and Express are especially bad about this.)
3. Skip anything that has a picture of a British politician that I recognize. (Theresa May and Jeremy Corbin are the poster children here, but I recognize a somewhat-frightening number of British political players;Diane Abbot proves that the ugly-fat-black-female-diversity-politician disease is starting to infect the Old Country.)
4. Skip anything that has a picture of crowds carrying protest signs in English. (You’d be astonished at the number of ‘demonstrations’ occurring in places that don’t speak English but carry English protest signs; Arabs and Africans are pretty dependable about that.)

This weeds out about 90% of the junk, and the rest is pretty manageable. (I must admit that I’m a sucker for a Trump Derangement story, and The Independent, despite its name, is a fruitful source for those.)

Read it.

What is it like to go from a tenured professorship to an hourly wage driving buses?

Apparently the psychic benefits are quite formidable.

You hear ex-professors say it all the time and I’ll add to the chorus:  despite nagging precariousness, there’s something profoundly liberating about leaving academe, whereupon you are no longer obliged to give a shit about fashionable thinkers, network at the planet’s most boring parties, or quantify self-worth for scurrilous committees (and whereupon you are free to ignore the latest same-old controversy), for even when you know at the time that the place is toxic, only after you exit (spiritually, not physically) and write an essay or read a novel or complete some other task without considering its relevance to the fascist gods of assessment, or its irrelevance to a gang of cynical senior colleagues, do you realize exactly how insidious and pervasive is the industry’s culture of social control.

John Yoo, who knows more about this stuff than I do.

John is currently a law professor at UC Berkeley, and is famous for pointing out how it’s legal to do stuff that set proglodytes’ hair on fire, such as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ during the Bush administration. He has the usual Harvard/Yale credentials that you would expect.

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An inconvenient scientific fact for the climate alarmist industry is that industrial carbon dioxide turns out to be plant food. The burning of fossil fuels to generate electrical power has not only led to dramatic economic growth, and hence the wealth that buys health and life expectancy. It also has led to a greening of the planet by carbon dioxide, an inert, non-polluting byproduct of combustion.

The fossil-fuel-driven 45 percent increase in CO2 levels since 1900 from a bit less than three percent of one percent of the atmosphere to a bit more than four percent of one percent has increased plant growth by at least 15 percent and perhaps as much as a third.

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Apparently this is a Hollywood archetype. We’re all in a 1930s rom-com.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a stock character first classified by Nathan Rabin in a 2007 review of Elizabethtown, a film he described as “The Bataan Death March of Whimsy.” “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” he wrote, “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”

You could just as easily call her Tinkerbell: When you wish upon a star/Your dreams come true.

John C. Wright, SF author, on Heinlein’s view of the future.

What Heinlein failed to predict was that the Crazy Years would simply continue up through 2010, with no sign of slackening. Ladies and gentlemen, we live in the Crazy Years.

We do indeed.

While Heinlein (as far as I know) supplied no rationale for the advent and the recession of the craziness in the Crazy Years, A. E. van Vogt was freer with is speculations: insanity, either of individuals or of peoples, in van Vogt’s stories (and perhaps in the theories of I. B. Korzybski, who discovered or invented General Semantics) is caused by a fracture or disjunction between symbol and object. When your thoughts, and the thing about which you think, do not match up on a cognitive level, that is a falsehood, a false belief. When the emotions associated with the thought do not match to the thing about which you think, that is a false-to-facts association, which can range from merely a mistake to neurosis to psychosis, depending on the severity of the disjunction. You are crazy. If you hate your sister because she reminds you of your mother who beat you, that association is false-to-facts, neurotic. If you hate your sister because you have hallucinated that you are Cinderella, that association is falser-to-facts, more removed from reality, possibly psychotic.

Scott Adams makes this point repeatedly in his Periscope broadcasts, which are well worth watching every day in order to keep one’s mind on an even keel.

Read it.

Scott Adams has been making this point for some time now: The structure of the modern Democrat party makes it almost impossible for their Presidential nominee to be either white or male, even though that might be there best shot at beating Trump in 2020.

Read it.

On December 12, 2018 the New York State Energy and Research Development Authority (NYSERDA) announced the availability of three “playbooks” produced by the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition that includes 16 states and Puerto Rico, to address climate change and implement policies that advance the goals of the Paris Climate Accord. Each of these playbooks deserves detailed review and comment but this post only gives an overview based on my initial skim through the reports.

According to the announcement: “The playbooks will serve as implementation resources for states in deploying solar energy, spurring electric grid modernization, and enhancing resilience in the face of climate impacts and natural hazards. The three solutions are highlighted in the following playbooks: solar deployment, non-wire solutions (NWS), and resiliency.”

Read it.

Britain is turning into America without the white people.

Read it.

It would be an interesting problem to have. Presumably anyone in that situation would have a plan.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Ms Perez is part of an online community of people who carry out “First Amendment audits” which involves filming police officers to see how they react.

As part of the practice, an “auditor” stands filming in a public place and refuses to stop or identify who they are when approached by a police officer.

The people who film the videos consider themselves to be testing their constitutional rights.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Sarah Hoyt points out some inconvenient truths.

The left is very adamant about charity not coming “with a sermon.” It is most of their excuse for wanting government not churches to preach.

But while I understand the convinced Christian’s need to preach and to save everyone from hell, which if you believe it is an eternal sentence and an awful one is mere human decency, I don’t understand the left’s similar need to ensure that everyone lives “a decent life” by its lights.

They refuse to understand that just as people are entitled to disbelieve and deny eternal salvation (and if you’re a Christian you know they are entitled to that. It’s called free will. Just as they’re entitled to sin. Doesn’t make it right. They’re still entitled to it. You can’t force anyone to be holy) they can refuse to live a middle class life. (Or better. The left keeps imagining that middle class is much further up than it is. Possibly because so many of them these days are spoiled rich kids.)

Read it.

But it really doesn’t matter. Once again, Trump has seized the initiative, and Democrats are going to spend the next two years responding to him rather than whatever they had in mind for their agenda.

This is why Trump’s ‘base’ is the same as Patton’s: ‘We’re going to hold them by the nose, and we’re going to kick them in the ass.’

Read it.

Gee, I guess Trump didn’t get the memo that he’s totally in Putin’s pocket. Can’t the guy get anything right?

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I find that comforting.

There is no plane of reality in which it is necessary for a Briton to know how to fold a tortilla.

Read it.

Well, I’ve never had a dog pick my pocket.

I’ve never had a dog call me a racist/sexist/bigot/homophobe.

I’ve never had a dog bitch me out because of my religion.

I’ve never had a dog try to use the men’s room in a store.

Makes you think.

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Until the last ten years it was widely believed that cultural evolution had taken over from genetic evolution in our species. When farming replaced hunting and gathering, something fundamentally changed in the relationship between us and our surroundings. We no longer had to change genetically to fit our environment. Instead, we could change our environment to make it fit us.

That view has been challenged by a research team led by anthropologist John Hawks. They found that genetic evolution actually speeded up 10,000 years ago, when hunting and gathering gave way to farming. In fact, it speeded up over a hundred-fold. Why? Humans were now adapting not only to slow-changing natural environments but also to faster-changing cultural environments, things like urban living, belief systems, and the State monopoly on violence. Far from slowing down, the pace of genetic change actually had to accelerate (Hawks et al. 2007).

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The central misconception is to think that one can claim the honorable title of “liberal” if one approves of one form of liberty, such as mutual consent in sexual partners or the ability to drill for oil where you wish, but excludes the other form.  Liberty is liberty, and is meaningless by parts. You are still a slave if only on odd days of the month.

…

Yes, the so-called New Liberalism was slow socialism, as was an American Progressivism recommending the sterilization of defectives to improve the Aryan race and a minimum wage to drive non-Aryan immigrants out of the labor force, not to speak of carrying a big stick and joining a war to end all wars.  The slow socialism took longer to implement than the fast versions in Bolshevism and Nazism. It was pushed along by the taking of powers by governments in the 20th-century wars, hot and cold.  Calling it “modern liberalism” has always been an abuse of language.  And it was an abuse of people to implement it.

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On August 11, 1777, John Adams, then a delegate to the Second Continental Congress in session in Philadelphia, wrote a letter to his ten-year-old son, John Quincy. In light of the ongoing War of Independence and with a mind to other wars and “Councils and Negotiations” that the future might hold for the boy, Adams urged him “to turn your Thoughts early to such Studies, as will afford you the most solid Instruction and Improvement for the Part which may be allotted you to act on the Stage of Life.” He gave one recommendation in particular: “There is no History, perhaps, better adapted to this usefull Purpose than that of Thucidides.” For Adams, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War contained within it insight of every possible “usefull” sort: “You will find it full of Instruction to the Orator, the Statesman, the General, as well as to the Historian and the Philosopher.”

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For a lot of guys, getting a girlfriend is all about one thing.

A new phone background.

So with Valentine’s coming I wanted to do something to help those without.

Very low maintenance. What’s not to like?

We have the technology.

Read it.

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

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

Read it.

A nonprofit founded by Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams was slapped with three different tax liens over the past year, bringing the organization’s known total to seven.

Third Sector Development, a nonprofit started by Abrams that focuses on registering black voters, was hit with three separate tax liens in the past year for failing to pay state unemployment tax, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Tuesday. The three tax liens, filed by Georgia state regulators, total roughly $3,500.

This isn’t the first time state regulators have targeted Abrams’ organization. The Georgia Department of Labor issued four tax liens worth $13,000 against Third Sector Development between 2014 and 2016, also citing unpaid employment contributions.

Hmmm. I guess only white people have to pay taxes.

Read it.

Because nothing says ‘independence’ like taking advice from lonesome losers.

The distinction between ‘women’ and ‘femmes’ is left as an exercise for the reader.

Steve Sailer takes a look.

This week witnessed two amusing Alliance of the Fringes circular firing squads.

Read it.

High speed rail may be proposed as a climate change panacea here and elsewhere, but the results on the ground are less than promising. California Governor Gavin Newsom announced this week that the California high speed rail project would be scaled back to the route between Bakersfield and Merced, in the San Joaquin Valley (which the state has enough money for). In his “state of the state” speech the Governor said “…let’s be real. The project, as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long. There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency.” Thus the expensive hope of linking the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay Area with high speed rail, already substantively abandoned by the California High Speed Rail Authority, has finally been buried.

Britain’s proposed high-speed rail megaproject (HS2) may be joining California’s on the road to oblivion (Map: Figure 1). A senior government official told Channel 4’s Dispatches public affairs program (aired February 11): “The costs are spiraling so much we’ve been actively considering other scenarios, including scrapping the entire project”

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Is there a more What’s Happening Now headline than this one?

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An elegant solution that will never happen because it won’t guarantee the appropriate ‘diversity’.

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In a 2015 podcast conversation with American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks, Vox’s Ezra Klein declared that “there’s nothing more dangerous than somebody who’s just taken their first economics class.” Often expressing a similar contempt for Econ 101 is University of Connecticut law professor James Kwak.

This expressed skepticism of Econ 101 comes across as wise and sophisticated — even hip — to many people who don’t grasp Econ 101. And it gives the mistaken impression that those who warn of the alleged folly of taking Econ 101 too seriously are expert not only in elementary economics but also in advanced economics.

Yet this contemptuous dismissal of the relevance of Econ 101 is foolish. Those who express it either really don’t know any economics whatsoever or mistakenly presume that the theoretical curiosities explored in Econ 999 are more relevant than is the reality revealed by Econ 101. But the truth is that Econ 101 taught well supplies ample, important, and timeless insights into the way the world works.

Even that doesn’t always work — Congresswoman Occasional-Cortex supposedly was an Econ major at a decent college. But it’s better than nothing.

If I had to design a school system, basic economics and basic statistics would be required subjects in high school.

‘Mom’ is a state of mind.