Or bored.

Steve Sailer points out what everyone else is missing.

We keep getting told that Trump is a harbinger of Fascism, but, in reality, the Trump Era is Peak Democracy:

– The public is now fascinated by politics
– The midterms saw huge turnout
– Newspapers, improbably, are prospering, because Trump Sells
– Trump’s enemies, such as Jeff Bezos (owner of the Washington Post), are thriving beyond the dreams of Croesus
– Saturday Night Live dares to make fun of the President for the first time since 1/19/2009

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An interesting idea.

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Straight from the horse’s, uh, mouth.

Rush Limbaugh, on his show today, played a collection of sound bites from the Usual Suspects in the DemLeghump Media over these last two weeks. Apparently the government shutdown occurred because Trump received appropriate orders from Rush and Ann Coulter.

I don’t believe it for a minute, but I wish it were true — I’d feel a lot more confident about the future.

Antiplanner looks at the situation.

Fundamentally, however, it isn’t urban and rural that causes the divide. It is middle class (meaning college educated with jobs that are based on thinking) versus working class (meaning jobs that are more based on physical labor). The nation has always had far more working class people than middle class people, and that remains true in rural areas. But in urban areas the middle class has grown while the working class has not. This has led to the appearance of an urban-rural divide, but that really just disguises the middle-class/working-class divide.

…

The real surprise is not that there is a middle-class/working-class divide, but that the working-class are so heavily Republican. At one time, the working class was heavily unionized and union workers tended to vote Democratic. Today, the strongest unions are public employees unions, and they are middle class. Most working-class workers — mechanics, electricians, plumbers, and so forth — are no unionized, and many own or aspire to own their own businesses, which puts them in the Republican camp to the extent that Republicans oppose regulation and taxation of small businesses.

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If you have to wonder whether you’re wealthy, you’re not wealthy.

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In July 2013, the Illinois legislature overrode the veto of then-Governor Patrick Quinn to eliminate the state’s status as the last holdout in refusing to issue concealed-carry permits. In moving from “no-issue” to “shall issue,” law-abiding citizens of the Land of Lincoln were finally able to enjoy the Second Amendment rights affirmed in D.C. v. Heller, McDonald v. Chicago, and Moore v. Madigan. Yet, even while benefitting from armed protection at the expense of taxpayers, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel maintained that “gun control is essential,” and that the new concealed carry law would result in an increase in crime.

Recently, two researchers disproved at least some of Emanuel’s prognostications and added to the growing body of evidence that allowing citizens the right to defend themselves with guns outside their homes can lead to a decrease in crime (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here for examples). Publishing in Applied Economics Letters, Srikant Devaraj and Pankaj Patel (from Ball State University and Villanova University, respectively) used neighborhood-level crime reports from Chicago and Philadelphia during the period January 2006 to December 2015. Their goal was to ascertain the effect of the Illinois concealed carry law on property crimes in Chicago, with the Philadelphia data serving as a “control” comparison over the same term. (Philly was selected because of its similar population density, demographic characteristics, and property crime levels, and because Pennsylvania also is a shall-issue state.)

An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however foolishly confident enough to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance, and complexity, composed of far other wheels, and springs, and balances, and counter-acting and co-operative powers.

— Edmiund Burke

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The Democrats hate Donald Trump, but do they hate his policies? In some cases, sure. But many elements of Trumpism are actually congenial to Democrats who want to run to Trump’s left…or is it his right? A reader unpacks Elizabeth Warren’s speech on “A Foreign Policy that Works for All Americans.”

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The whole concept of ‘pay for your own stuff’ is not very popular these days, since everyone has seen how easy it is to get other people to pay for it.

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We let our daughter go to the college of her choice. She got into many state and private schools, some with scholarships. But no breaks at all from the expensive private college she selected. She loves it, and we can afford it, but it means constant sacrifice. She knows this, but it doesn’t stop her from regaling us with her friends’ pricey bling and fancy travel. I finally lost it when she ignored the care package I sent during exams, telling me about a friend’s new Cartier necklace instead. She texted: “I wasn’t asking for one.” I replied: “Please stop telling me about your rich friends’ luxuries! I don’t want to hear about them.” What do we do?

Quit indulging her. When I graduated from high school, my father told me ‘We put you through high school, the rest is on your own.’ And, thanks to the GI Bill and loans, I paid my own way through Yale and two graduate degrees at Indiana. If I had my way paid for me, I wouldn’t have appreciated it and I wouldn’t have focused on getting my money’s worth.

Being obliged to use your own money for something concentrates the mind wonderfully.

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The main idea behind RCV is to collect more information about each voter’s preferences by giving them the option to rank the candidates. If no one wins a majority of first place votes, the last place candidate drops out and their votes go to the voters’ second choices (if any) in an on-the-spot runoff election, but without the hassle or cost.

Sometimes known as the ‘Australian ballot’, presumably because it was invented in Australia.

The system used currently in U.S> elections (and in British Parliamentary elections) is called ‘first past the post’ and a lot of people really hate it.

The additional information from each voter means that RCV has a much greater chance of avoiding the nightmare scenario of electing a candidate who would lose in head-to-head matchups against all other candidates—a situation known as Borda’s paradox. Researchers can debate the respective merits of various voting schemes for hours—and have, at a 2010 workshop in Normandy. But one fundamental idea almost all agree on is that a straight plurality vote is the worst way to pick a politician.

John Derbyshire does some ruminating.

“White Supremacist” is of course just totalitarian cuss-talk, like “counter-revolutionary” or “enemy of the people.” You’re not supposed to think about the meaning of the words. You’re just supposed to flip into Two Minutes Hate mode.

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Well. There it is.

For those in need of New Year’s resolutions.

Taki puts the boot in.

The demise of The Weekly Standard was a pleasure, not because I like to see print magazines go down the drain—to the contrary—but because of its parentage, William Kristol and John Podhoretz. These two unpleasant neocons are known as the “Poisoned Dwarf” and “Four Pizzas,” respectively, and rarely have I seen two bigger con men get away with more stuff than this pair. They are smarmy, loquacious, and incompetent except for self-promotion, and were the movers and cheerleaders for the worst foreign-policy decision Uncle Sam has made, with the possible exception of Vietnam. They, of course, have never apologized but insist to this day that going to war to ensure the safety of Likud is good for America.

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This is news?  I suspect Americans feel the same way.

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It would work better if she didn’t look like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Every time I see her I want to throw a bucket of water on her just to see what would happen.

Joe-Bob Briggs evaluates our new Ambassador to the U.N.

The journalists are furious.

(For those of you just tuning in, I don’t defame the reputations of real reporters and newsmen with the froufrou French word. I’m only talking about the posers.)

As I say, the journalistes are furious. They’re furious because Trump has nominated that woman, that unqualified amateur, to be Ambassador to the United Nations.

Why are they furious?

Because she’s a reporter. A newswoman. One of them.

It’s very telling that the working press corps thinks being a member of the working press corps doesn’t equip you with the knowledge to work in government.

I’m willing to take their word for it.

I suggest that our Ambassador to the U.N. ought to be Paulie Walnuts from The Sopranos. ‘Nice country you got there. Be a shame if something were to happen to it.’

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My brain insists that I have no more friends than I can count on my two hands.

That seems a manageable number.

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It should go without saying that a Senator will support policies he agrees with and oppose ones he doesn’t like. It should also go without saying that a Senator will not “comment on every tweet or fault” of a president, and certainly not a president of the same political party. The people of Utah didn’t elect Romney to provide punditry. It shocks me that Romney would even think this role might be on the table.

Romney’s pledge to speak out against “significant statements or actions that are divisive” is pathetic. Any statement or action of a conservative-leaning Republican president is going to be “divisive.”

Apparently, Romney wants Trump to be a punching bag. That didn’t work so well when Romney was the GOP standard-bearer.

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Well, we’re just superior, is all.

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Vegetarians are the Social Justice Warriors of nutrition.

The late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain famously quipped that meat avoiders “are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit”.

The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems. I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems. Our problems will never be solved by the white man.

— Malcolm X

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Elite projection is the belief, among relatively fortunate and influential people, that what those people find convenient or attractive is good for the society as a whole.  Once you learn to recognize this simple mistake, you see it everywhere.  It is perhaps the single most comprehensive barrier to prosperous, just, and liberating cities.

This is not a call to bash elites.  I am making no claim about the proper distribution of wealth and opportunity, or about anyone’s entitlement to influence. But I am pointing out a mistake that elites are constantly at risk of making.  The mistake is to forget that elites are always a minority, and that planning a city or transport network around the preferences of a minority routinely yields an outcome that doesn’t work for the majority.  Even the elite minority won’t like the result in the end.

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Sure, yeah, go ahead, read the articles, watch the hand-wringing and distribute the crying towels. I’ll wait.

Back? Good. I’d like to pose a question of my own: Who the Hell cares what it means to ‘be a conservative’ in the The Age of Trump? Who. The. Hell. Cares?

1. There is no Age of Trump. Trump is President and is doing stuff that is shaking the box like there’s no tomorrow; that’s not just an issue for conservatives but for everybody. He is not the leader of a movement, he was not thrown onto the national scene by mobs in the streets or an intellectual wave that swept the nation; he’s just a guy who was fed up with what he saw going on and managed to connect with a bunch of people who felt the same way and have been ignored for a long long time. He’s not Lenin, he’s Jack Cade. There is no Age of Trump.
2. Trump is not a conservative, as he and the staff of every think tank in Washington will gladly tell you, so he has nothing to do with what it ‘means to be a conservative’, in the Age Of Trump or anytime else. Most ‘conservatives’ who are involved in politics are worse than Marxists for trying to define who is In With The In Crowd and who is not; this is just intellectual masturbation and these people have too much time on their hands. Get a life.
3. President is a job. Either you like the job he’s doing or you don’t. Take whatever action you think is appropriate.

Sheesh. These people….

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What would you get if you designed the scientific paper from scratch today? A little while ago I spoke to Bret Victor, a researcher who worked at Apple on early user-interface prototypes for the iPad and now runs his own lab in Oakland, California, that studies the future of computing. Victor has long been convinced that scientists haven’t yet taken full advantage of the computer. “It’s not that different than looking at the printing press, and the evolution of the book,” he said. After Gutenberg, the printing press was mostly used to mimic the calligraphy in bibles. It took nearly 100 years of technical and conceptual improvements to invent the modern book. “There was this entire period where they had the new technology of printing, but they were just using it to emulate the old media.”

The Independent, of course, thinks this is a bad thing.

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“House to test Trump on wall.” So reads the headline (paper edition) of the lead story in today’s Washington Post.

The statement is true. However, it’s also true that Trump will test the new House. I think the test he poses might be the stiffer one.

The Democrats have a constituency — government workers — that will clamor for an end to the shutdown. Trump has no such constituency. Not as long as the partial shutdown is managed well enough to prevent ordinary folks from experiencing pain or significant inconvenience.

But the more salient point is that Trump probably has more flexibility than Nancy Pelosi.

Trump is going to play these toads like a cheap guitar. I’m looking forward to it.

Big Oil’s Monster Decade Reveals Why Energy Experts Are Not Very Good At Making Predictions

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Most color printers have a secret tracking or forensic code added to every page that lets governments and others know when and where the page was printed.

Audacious Epigone welcomes the new year.

What the partial shutdown is making clear is just how superfluous so much of the federal government is. Most people have no idea what exactly is shut down or how it effects them–because it doesn’t effect them. The impending government shutdown is the new Y2K bug.

Apparently Senator Kamala ‘MostlyWhite’ Harris thinks that ‘lynching’ ought to be a ‘federal hate crime’.

Really? Lynching is murder. Murder is a capital crime, in those states that still kill people for killing other people. What, exactly, does making it a ‘federal hate crime’ bring to the party? A lot of virtue-signaling, that’s what.

If we don’t need the federal government, perhaps we don’t need ‘federal hate crime’ laws, either.

Something to think about.

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

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

Economists Alex Tabarrok looks at an interesting wrinkle.

Kevin Williamson fires back at a critic.

Will Wilkinson is a kinda-sorta libertarian associated with the Cato Institute, which (if you follow such things) ought to know pretty much where he’s coming from.

I do not have the hatred for Kevin Williamson that ZMan has, and this article illustrates why.

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Trump is an expert at drawing connections that his enemies find uncomfortable.

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Left as an exercise for the reader: Detecting the ones that were staged.

Extra credit if you can name the political agenda being served by each one.

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I guess you’re not a Real Woman unless you’re non-white.

If that rule were followed everywhere, what a blessedly peaceful place it would be.

The organizers of the annual Women’s March have decided not to hold a rally in Eureka on Jan. 19, as previously planned, because they say participants do not represent the diversity of the area.

They said organizers will continue to meet and discuss how to broaden representation to create an event that represents Humboldt County.

As Steve Sailer points out, Humboldt County was 1.1% black in the 2010 census. Pretty sad if they can’t even scare up 1.1 black woman per 100 marchers.

UPDATE: Upcoming Women’s March Deemed ‘Too White,’ So Organizers Cancelled It

Steve Sailer has some fun with search engines.

Apparently, Google thinks American scientists are uniformly African; Bing admits a few white folks to the party.

The search engine I use, Duck Duck Go, agrees with Google.