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Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation—especially if things are heated or tense or confusing—they’ll pause, and they’ll say something like:

“I’m sorry, but—look. In my culture…”

…and then they’ll go on to explain something that one might easily mistake for a rule, or a request, or the enforcement of a social norm, but which is actually (as far as I can tell) just a statement about the version of the world they carry around inside their head.

That’s a great trick. I’m going to have to remember that one.

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Hey, sauce for the goose….

We bad.

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Wealth frees a person from immediate survival concerns and therefore increases the importance of symbolic identities. And this, coupled with youth’s natural affinity for rebellion, almost inevitably leads to at least a passing phase of identity-based radicalism. So while others sounded the tocsin, proclaiming this a grave threat to social sanity, I remained skeptical. Of course, I agreed that social justice ideologies were often odious and possibly pernicious, especially inside the elite institutions where they most rapidly proliferated; but, I also thought that alarmism about the problem was equally unhelpful, diverting limited cognitive resources from more constructive activities.

However, I am no longer skeptical. I have come to believe that the hostility to the West embedded in this kind of thinking and activism is a serious and growing problem. It is therefore critical that we understand the motives that drive it and the conditions that enable it, and that we challenge its erroneous assumptions and persuade others of its corrosiveness, preferably without alienating those who find it appealing but are also willing to listen to reasonable objections.

Steve Sailer looks at David Brooks and reparations.

Obviously, in Brooks’ conception, reparations aren’t intended to work in any real world sense. The point of Brooks “concrete gesture of respect” is that a really futile and stupid gesture of inchoate religious symbolism be done on white people’s part by setting fire to a giant pile of money.

But being concrete-minded myself and oriented toward starting from examples rather than abstractions, I’m fascinated by the practical questions of who gets how much.

An excellent question. How much is Maxine Waters owed because she was oppressed? How about Cory Booker?

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This from The Independent, usually a reliable Voice of the Crust.

Somebody escaped from maximum security.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

You’ll never see these in the ‘mainstream media’.

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I love a good detective story.

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Funny how the news media delight in showing that white nationalists and neo-Nazis vote Republican but seem to ignore the fact that most ‘wiccans’ and astrologers vote Democrat. If one can infer that Republicans are the party of hate then one can just as readily infer that Democrats are the party of stupid.

Read it.

Poor Mark Zuckerberg has almost as many fables told about him as Trump.

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Bryan Caplan is a GMU economist who likes to bet doom-sayers that they’re full of it. He has an impressive track record for winning.,

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It is a truth universally acknowledged among wonky introverts that derive their identity from the contents of their minds over the coalition to which they belong that the left-right political spectrum must be in want of an overhaul.

Check it out.

A ‘Portmanteau and Rhyme Generator’. Give it a try.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that there were a lot of Orthodox Christians among the Maya.

Eastern Orthodox Christianity in particular has been growing rapidly, as a number of schismatic Catholic groups have expressed their desire to become Eastern Orthodox and have been received under the jurisdiction of Eastern Orthodox hierarchs.

I guess they took the Rod Dreher option.

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I guess walls only work if the Force is with you. Or something.

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This micro-generation of Silicon Valley start-ups did two basic things: It put together a labor pool to deliver food or clean toilets or assemble IKEA bookshelves, and it found people who needed those things done. Academics called this a “two-sided market,” but to a user, it meant tapping on a phone and watching the world rearrange itself to satisfy your desires. Convenience drove consumer demand. Economic need and work flexibility drove the labor supply. At least in theory.

And of course, this being The Atlantic, Voice of the Crust, they have to put a Marxian spin on it.

Politically, the world is night and day, though. In that context, these apps take on a strange pall. The haves and the have-nots might be given new names: the demanding and the on-demand. These apps concretize the wild differences that the global economy currently assigns to the value of different kinds of labor. Some people’s time and effort are worth hundreds of times less than other people’s. The widening gap between the new American aristocracy and everyone else is what drives both the supply and demand of Uber-for-X companies.

Workers of the world, arise! You have nothing to lose but your gigs!

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I guess she didn’t have enough Victim Pokemon Points to be a big enough fish in the Senate.

I smell another RINO like Murkowski in the making.

John C. Wright explains it all to you, at length.

Wright is a science fiction author who is unapologetically Christian and doesn’t much like the way things are these days. Being a writer, he tends to write about it.

This is not quite a complete book but a pretty long-form article. Read it if you have time.

Sarah Hoyt casts an eye over the book trade.

If you go back and read Burroughs, say, you’ll find that he was not a particularly good writer on the word level. What he was was a great storyteller, often by violating every known rule, including telling you a vast amount of how things should be, instead of showing how they were. But it worked, and obviously he was to the taste of his contemporaries.

What I see in indie is, weirdly, like a return to the old days of pulp. Novels are shorter.  They start somewhere around 30k and usually top out at 50k.  An 80k word book is rare, and 100k plus very rare.

The reason for this actually makes sense. The change in book length was driven, more than anything, by the need to make a book large enough to sell for $5 — later $8 — dollars for a paperback. They could fudge it some. A friend who did very well never could write more than 65k, but her books were printed with larger type.  But less than that? no.

So, books are returning to the size that most people can consume at one sitting or in an afternoon.

I remember those days. Books would max out at around 300 pages (if you were lucky) and stories would move pretty briskly. You weren’t left after the first 100 pages wondering when a story was going to start.

Read it.

What do they know that you don’t?

Perhaps the universe itself is racist.

That would tell us something too.

Sarah Hoyt points ot that bookstores were in the process of hanging themselves when Amazon appeared and gave them a push.

I too had the experience, in the 1990s, of never being able to find something worth reading, much less buying, in an actual physical bookstore. My wife and I would instead go to places like Half Price Books in order to get stuff that was ‘out of print’ but eventually migrated from people’s closets and attics.

It hasn’t gotten any better since. Nowadays I only buy books by people that I know or books that have been recommended by people I trust. That’s not a big world.

Which is fine — I’ve got a public library and I’m not afraid to use it; even a weekly trip through their New Adult NonFiction listing (now conveniently on the Internet) gives me a request list of a dozen or so.

Amazon has been a boon for people like me because it allows oddball people to publish stuff without the gladiatorial contest of going through a major publisher.

Victor Davis Hanson does a guest appearance on the Powerline blog to discuss his new book.

I have never met Trump. I don’t know his close friends and aides. In lieu of any insider information, I wanted to offer a sort of Thucydidean account, neither rah-rah in support or unhinged in hatred, of why the country by 2016 was ready for an unlikely Manhattan billionaire populist candidate without either prior military or political experience.

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When smart phones first appeared it was believed there would soon be an app for improving rifle and pistol accuracy and there were. But at first these apps were only for rifles, especially for long range shots. Over time the technology got better and in 2016 MantisX appeared. This $150 dollar device looked like a small laser sight, of the sort attached to the bottom of a pistol equipped with a rail. MantisX took advantage of better sensor tech (accelerometers and gyroscopes) and combined these with app software downloaded to your smartphone. This combination of hardware and software provided an instant and accurate record of y0ur shooting (with bullets or “dry” without ammo). The MantixX hardware detected the motion of the pistol up to when the trigger was pulled and, using a Bluetooth connection to your to your smartphone to grab the data, analyzed each shot (whether real or simulated) and tells you how well you did and what you did wrong if you were making mistakes with trigger pull or how you were holding the pistol (or rifle). MantisX did this by adapting the software to a wide variety of specific pistol and rifle models. As expected, MantisX underwent constant improvements since it was first introduced and these fixes were automatically distributed via app updates.

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That thing is as big as one of the saltwater crocs for which Australia is famous.

Beer is vegan.

Just sayin’.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

I have noticed fragile narratives start to crack and crumble when made to answer specific questions, and the specific question to ask here is: What exactly are the fringe-kooky right positions? Lower taxes, strong defense, sound immigration policy, law & order. I mean yeah, you can pretend these are “dog whistle” signals for intolerance and bigotry, but that’s not choosing a centrist in-between way forward, that’s uncritically accepting inflammatory leftist talking-points. It all comes down to, Trump doesn’t make a very good Hitler if he’s relocating the embassy to Jerusalem.

I’ve supported Taft ever since Eisenhower screwed him out of the nomination.

No, I won’t let it go.

Read it.

Well, Bush was elected (or maybe I ought to phrase it as ‘AlGore was not elected’), so I guess they were right.

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And it was totally a mistake. The tune is musically too complex for a decent anthem. America the Beautiful would have been much the superior choice. Even God Bless America would have been better, although nowadays there would be a very vocal minority trying to change it.

ZMan lays it out.

The other day, someone asked me what makes for a good writer. We were discussing Jonah Goldberg’s new venture and I pointed out that the big challenge they will face is finding writers that are any good. It’s not so much that their opinions are banal and lacking in authenticity. It’s that the people writing for these sites are dull writers. The whole space is full of people, who should be writing technical manuals. Almost everyone with writing chops has been chased off by the loathsome carbuncles of Conservative Inc..

…

The most common trait of bad writers, it seems, is they write about themselves. Unless you are an international man of mystery, you’re not that interesting. No one is. Bad writers, always seem to think they are the most interesting people they know. This is what made former President Obama such a boring speaker. No matter the subject, his speech was going to be a meditation on his thoughts and feelings about the subject. It became a game of sorts to count how many times he referenced himself in a speech.

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The coalition of the fringes is starting to show a few cracks.

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If you enjoy contemplating the collapse of civilization, envy the the scholars at Cambridge University’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk, who ponder the civilizational End Times all day long and get paid a salary for it.

An interactive map.

With thanks to Debby Witt, a kindred soul.

Read it.

The company is planning dozens of locations in the largest cities in the U.S. The first store will open in Los Angeles potentially by the end of the year. The company is planning to open subsequent stores in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, sources familiar with the plans told WSJ.

When they get to Dallas, I’ll let you know. They’re going to have a hard time beating WalMart on price or Central Market on selection.

Read it.

Officials in the German town of Ahlen have seized a family’s pet pug and sold it on eBay, prompting a storm of criticism.

Edda the pug was taken from her owners after they allegedly failed to pay debts owed to the town, including a dog tax.

Holman Jenkins.

Under Democratic leadership, the House Intelligence Committee is well on its way to becoming a Warren Commission for an alternative universe in which JFK spent a nice day in Dallas. Rep. Adam Schiff has signaled that he intends to rake through Mr. Trump’s business and bank records searching for the motive for collusion crimes that exist only in his imagination.

All this will be cheered on by backward-rationalizing pundits in the New York Times, justifying their own hysteria by portraying the routine, predictable and typically opportunistic partisan opposition faced by Mr. Trump as somehow exceptionally heroic.

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There is nothing new under the sun — every mistake that politicians make has been made before.

Although it would be years before I would work this out, what Mill wrote is based on a proper understanding of Say’s Law. High levels of public spending do not encourage industry. Spending does not of itself create growth and employment. You cannot make an economy prosper through expenditure but only through value adding production. Demand does not drive an economy forward, nor does demand deficiency cause recessions.

It was this most fundamental of all economic propositions that Keynes deliberately and willfully destroyed. Say’s Law has, for all practical purposes, now disappeared from economic discourse and policy. And until it returns, the ability for the economics profession to provide sound and sensible advice during recession will remain sharply constrained. But to understand what Say’s Law means one must first understand the role Say’s Law played in the Keynesian Revolution.

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

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

I’ve had girlfriends like that.

Read it.

As they do.