The chief difference (functionally) between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats never forget what side they are on, whereas a lot of Republicans often lose track — or never knew in the first place.

Read it. And scope out the reading list.

f you pay much attention to the posturings of the left — and how could you not? — you probably have concluded that leftism is a quasi-religious* cult.

Leftism, as we know it today, is quasi-religious because of its strongly moralistic bent, given its readiness to condemn anything that can be associated (by leftists) with white supremacy/white privilege/racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, climate-change denialism, elitism, etc., etc., etc. (Condemnation of elitism, coming from leftist elites, epitomizes irony.)

Leftism of yore was aimed mainly at the realization of a material heaven on Earth through communism, socialism, and various forms of income and wealth redistribution. Today’s leftism, without having abandoned the objective of economic equality (or less inequality), has conjoined that objective to social equality.

Wes McKinney makes a good case for it.

One thing is certain: many companies based in major cities like NYC and SF are extremely effective at extracting high quality labor from the world’s most talented young people. It should be no surprise why wealthy corporations want this to be: it is immensely profitable. In a single quarter in 2017, Facebook made around $450,000 in revenue and $190,000 in profit per employee. As Jeff Hammerbacher infamously put it: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

I’ve increasingly felt that open source development is at odds with the values that are driving a large portion of the corporate world, particularly in the United States. Many companies won’t fund open source work because there is no “return on investment”. This is deeply frustrating, and being surrounded by people whose actions align with profit-motive can be pretty discouraging. It’s not necessarily that people who work in NYC or SF are greedy or amorally concerned with making money. In many cases they are just responding to incentives coming from pretty low on the hierarchy of needs.

Lileks.

It’s the middle of the month of the new year, and you haven’t reduced your screen time, learned French, lost weight, organized the drawers or anything else you resolved to do. January sits on your chest like a fat, dead possum.

But you know what they say about possums: They only play dead. So embrace the good news — you have a live, nasty possum on your chest.

Let me rework that metaphor. You have plenty of chances to start something new, and it’s just a two-step process. Step 1, slowly roll over, so the possum slides off. Two, look at that glossy community education catalog that arrived in the mail. It’s full of interesting classes. It’s like college, without the crippling debt and early-20s sense of existential despair.

I have lingered over these details because they formed a part–a most important and honorable part–of that ancient curriculum of house-keeping which, at least in Anglo-Saxon countries, was so soon to be swept aside by the “monstrous regiment” of the emancipated; young women taught by their elders to despise the kitchen and the linen room, and to substitute the acquiring of University degrees for the more complex art of civilized living. The movement began when I was young, and now that I am old, and have watched it and noted its results, I mourn more than ever the extinction of the household arts. Cold storage, deplorable as it is, has done far less harm to the home than the Higher Education.

— Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

Mrs. Wharton died in 1935; there is no telling what her reaction would have been to Congresswoman Occasional-Cortex, but I doubt that it would have been good.

Read it.

This is a good example of what Scott Adams calls ‘talking past the sale’. If somebody gets in your face and shouts ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT INCOME INEQUALITY?’ the automatic response of most people is to start fumbling around trying to think of what it is you’re doing about income inequality as if it were obvious that income inequality were ipso facto some bad thing that needs to be fixed.

The correct response, of course, is to ask the shouter ‘Why should I be doing something about income inequality?’ since (a) you didn’t create it and (b) no demonstration has been made that it’s a bad thing. But that’s the way the Usual Suspects deal with their agenda: They just proceed on the assumption that their grievances are fully justified and therefore the discussion (using the term loosely) is about how to satisfy them.

There is a lot of income inequality between me and Bill Gates, because I didn’t see an opportunity in the computer field when I was in college, as he did, and I didn’t drop out of Harvard, as he did, to pursue it by working sixty-hour weeks for twenty years, as he did, to build a company to take advantage of that. Is that his fault, or mine? Or maybe nobody’s? In any event, I don’t see that I have any legitimate beef that he’s one of the top ten richest people in the world and I’m not.

Democrats, of course, don’t see it that way. Since there’s no way yet to make me clever and workaholic, their solution is to steal most of his money (thus ensuring that his decades of cleverness and hard work gained him very little) and give it — not to me, of course, because I’m a white man, but to some prole who can barely use a computer much less create an industry to provide them for everybody. As one can plainly see, this guarantees that in the future we will have a lot more ignorant proles and a lot less clever hard-working people like Bill Gates.

But those whose wealth and power depend on harvesting the votes of the ignorant proles (and, hardest to comprehend, the contributions of people like Bill Gates) don’t worry about that, because no matter how bad it is for the rest of us, they’ll be doing very well indeed, as will their children. (Yeah, Chelsea, I’m looking at YOU.)

Read it.

Compromise. It’s a word President Trump used several times yesterday. He is open to compromise. In this case, that means something short of the $5 billion he wants for a border wall. He’s open to taking less, perhaps in exchange for not applying the law to younger illegal immigrants. This is clearly the easiest way out of the current debacle. But it is something the Democrats, led by “No Wall” Nancy Pelosi, have said they will never support.

This is a problem. Democrats have backed themselves up against a, well, a wall. They have created a situation in which if they give even one dollar to Trump to build a wall, or fence, steel barrier, or whatever, they have lost the political fight. Pelosi, the great speaker of the House who gets things done, has left herself no leverage to get anything done. She could ask for almost anything in exchange for wall funding, but instead, she won’t budge.

The Democrats will lose because they have an infinite many ways to lose and only one way to win, one that Trump will never give them.

The Democrats have made this a zero-sum game. If Trump gets any money for the wall, he wins. That’s a really fantastic position for him. He can go on TV, whether in a controversial network roadblock or an appearance on the southern border, and say, “Hey, I’m up for a compromise.” Meanwhile, Chuck and Nancy have to slam the door shut on getting 800,000 federal employees back to work.

I’ve met rocks with more brains than Nancy Pelosi.

Fee Fi Fo Fum! I smell the blood of an English major!

Read it.

Our study used a sample of 175 students from two universities (one in south Wales, the other in Cyprus). We found that people with light or blue eyes scored significantly lower on the seasonal pattern assessment questionnaire than those with dark or brown eyes. These results agree with previous research that found brown or dark-eyed people were significantly more depressed than those with blue eyes.

Hey, we Ice People were made for winter. WETSU.

Read it.

Newly-inaugurated Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has made good on his promise to withdraw from the UN’s “Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration”.

Read it.

I suspect he’s got a large pool from which to choose.

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

Read it.

An interesting idea.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.”

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.’

Read it.

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

That seems a manageable number.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Well, we’re just superior, is all.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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….

Read it.

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.