Read it.

We should care deeply about what kind of shape they are going [back] in…. Recidivism rates of nearly 50 percent of federal inmates and over 75 percent of state inmates is simply unacceptable. The First Step Act will provide [support for] low-risk offenders who could become productive members of society.

I have an alternative method of Prison Reform that I would like to suggest.

1. Take prisoners into the courtyard.
2. Shoot them in the head.

The advantages of this proposal are manifest. Not only would the government save the amount that it would cost to support the prisoners for the remainder of their sentence, but it would also have — wait for it — zero recidivism rate.

That’s right. Zero recidivism. No more 50 % of federal offenders, no more 75% of state offenders … Zero. Zero recidivism.

You’re welcome.

Read it.

Thank God for those strict gun control laws in Britain or the place would look like Texas.

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.

Bread has long been a foundational part of the human diet, but a revolt against it has been building for years—and seems to be reaching a crescendo. Today, many regard bread as a dietary archvillain—the cause of bigger waistlines and the possible origin of more insidious health concerns. Popular books and health gurus claim that bread and the proteins it harbors can cause or contribute to foggy thinking, fatigue, depression, and diseases ranging from Alzheimer’s to cancer.

But go digging through the published, peer-reviewed evidence on bread and human health, and most of what you’ll find suggests that bread is either benign or, in the case of whole-grain types, quite beneficial.

The things that might be done to-day! The things indeed that are being done! It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the former. When I think of the progress of physical and mechanical science, of medicine and sanitation during the last century, when I measure the increase in general education and average efficiency, the power now available for human service, the merely physical increment, and compare it with anything that has ever been at man’s disposal before, and when I think of what a little straggling, incidental, undisciplined and uncoordinated minority of inventors, experimenters, educators, writers and organisers has achieved this development of human possibilities, achieved it in spite of the disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, and the passionate resistance of the active dull, my imagination grows giddy with dazzling intimations of the human splendours the justly organised state may yet attain. I glimpse for a bewildering instant the heights that may be scaled, the splendid enterprises made possible.

— Wells, H. G. (Herbert George). The New Machiavelli

This feeling is the engine that drives every ideologue’s life, regardless of political orientation. We see it primarily in the activities of the proglodytes who are in charge of our world today, but it motivated Hitler and Mao, Lenin and Stalin, Robespierre and Napoleon.

In the modern industrialized and technologically advanced world, there is all this power sloshing around, that it is impossible for people (who think that the world not only could be a better place but ought to be a better place) to resist attempting to take that power into their hands (and the hands of those who agree with them) to remake that world in the image of the utopia they have in their heads. This is what is meant by the phrase ‘immanentizing the exchaton’, and it never works; but people are eternally trying, vowing ‘This time for sure!’

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Note to self: Don’t be a ‘possible burglar’.

Read it.

I wasn’t aware that Steve Bannon had anything useful to say about sex robots.

I also wasn’t aware that Political Correctness had made any inroads into the sex robot community. But apparently it has.

Huh. Ya learn somethin’ new every day.

Read it.

I’ll bet there’s a movie in there somewhere.

Ace of Spades keeps us abreast of the zeitgeist.

Baizuo [Chinese & IPA characters omitted], literally “white left”]) is a derogatory Chinese neologism used to refer to Western leftist liberal elites. It refers to the left faction in the culture wars in Western politics, implying support of multiculturalism, political correctness and positive discrimination.

Read it.

As Rush Limbaugh pointed out during his show yesterday, the Democrat leaders were expecting Trump to react as a Usual Politician to their gaining control of the House in the recent election, which is to be humbled and to seek to ingratiate himself with his new masters. This was, after all, what Clinton did after Republicans handed him his ass during the mid-terms when they regained control of the House for the first time in decades.

But they had forgotten whom they were dealing with. Trump the Master Showman promptly reminded them that when it comes to framing an issue for public consumption he sets the standard.

Steve Sailer looks at the science.

As I’ve been mentioning for years, we live in an age of growing antiquarianism in terms of thinking about cause and effect of social outcomes. When I was young, there was much interest in how things had changed from the 1960s onward. The Sixties were seen as a big deal.

But now, leading historical savants like Ta-Nehisi Coates act as if they have been living in an underground fallout shelter since 1959. They’ve never heard of the Sixties. What possible influence could the last 50 years have on the present? If you want to understand the Obama Era you need to obsess over New Deal redlining.

The enthusiasm for epigenetics — i.e., a Lamarckian/Lysenkoist theory that the past, especially politically exploitable traumas such as the Holocaust or slavery, can damage genes for multiple generations — is related to this antiquarian turn,

You will have noticed this ‘antiquarian turn’ in public statements by those on the Left. When Newt Gingrich mentions orphanages, Hillary Clinton talks like there haven’t been any changes since Dickens. When the Left talks about slavery, you’d think that the Emancipation Proclamation was just last week.

Read it.

Someone came up with the label “virtue signaling” to describe the psychological impulse behind these signs. The idea is that people who put them up want to tell you how noble they are. But that doesn’t sound right. Virtue-signalers aren’t in any way in doubt about their own virtue. What they really want to do is signal how depraved others are.

It’s about vice signaling, not virtue signaling.

This is the same impulse behind the prevalence of the Aggregation Fallacy in moralizing journalism. Whenever a proglodyte writer wrings ix hands over a situation and uses the words ‘we’ or ‘us’, ix is not really including ix in that collective, because obviously ix is sufficiently woke to See The Dystopian Reality; what is actually meant is ‘you’.

A couple of years back there used to be Fourth of July street picnics there. But the shindigs haven’t happened the last couple of years, and I don’t think I’ll see them again soon. Vice signaling breaks up communities, and there’s a lot of it today.

Yup. The SJW witch-hunt for Heretics and Sinners doesn’t allow for rubbing elbows with the enemy.

Vice signaling is a defense mechanism, meant to displace liberal guilt. There was a moment, shortly after the 2016 election, when liberals realized that ordinary Americans had turned against them, and that they had reason to do so.

Denial is more than just a river in Egypt.

Read it.

We got your diversity, right here.

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As one might expect from an article published in a Voice of the Crust like the New Yorker, the main premise is that these wonderful kids were okay in their day but now they’ve ‘grown up’ to realize that Government Is Good and Individualism Is Defective.

Certain elements of the “Whole Earth Catalog” haven’t aged particularly well: the pioneer rhetoric, the celebration of individualism, the disdain for government and social institutions, the elision of power structures, the hubris of youth.

…

Brand now describes himself as “post-libertarian,” a shift he attributes to a brief stint working with Jerry Brown, during his first term as California’s governor, in the nineteen-seventies, and to books like Michael Lewis’s “The Fifth Risk,” which describes the Trump Administration’s damage to vital federal agencies.

…

“We didn’t know what government did. The whole government apparatus is quite wonderful, and quite crucial. [It] makes me frantic, that it’s being taken away.”

This points up, I think, the danger that exists for so-called ‘libertarians’ who are at heart ideologues and temperamentally more at home with other ideologues, even those of a contrary viewpoint, than with anti-ideologues who want to see ideology constrained to maximize freedom. Like electrons, once they lose their excitement and come to a rest state, the rest state they come to is with the ideology that rules the Establishment.

Read it.

But you have to remember that Notorious Racist Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his term in office.

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

Read it.

Probably not. But we could do a lot worse.

Theodore Dalrymple misses the Good Old Days.

If you try to be fair, you have to institute methods of being so; moreover, you have not only to be fair, but to be seen to be fair, for fairness, at least in the selection of people for employment, is a quality that cannot be a light that is hidden under a bushel.

Now, in order to be fair, the method must be formalized and not open to the influence of personal prejudice or connection. In practice, this means forms and questions whose answers have an agreed weight ascribed to them in advance. And this in turn means that the person selected will be the person who knows best how to fill forms and answer questions according to the most desired answers. This is not the way to find people of great ability. It is the way to find people of petty personal ambition.

But you have to remember that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his time in office.

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

Read it.

For the past 50 years, scientists have been studying climate change and the possibility of related sea level changes resulting from melting ice and warming oceans. Despite the common belief that increasing levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in our atmosphere could result in catastrophic sea level rise, there is no evidence to support this fear. Tax monies spent trying to solve this non-existent problem are a complete waste.

There is another widely held misconception: that all the oceans of the world are at the same level.  In reality, sea level measurements around the world vary considerably, typically by several inches. Prevailing winds and continental instability are among the variables that make measurements difficult, but the varying results of rising sea levels are extremely accurate.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the United States updated its coastal sea level tide gauge data in 2016 at the request of the previous administration. These measurements continue to show no evidence of accelerating sea level rise.

They keep rising, but they never get here.

I’ll believe in rising sea levels when rich people start selling their beachfront property.

Read it.

This is mostly confirmation bias — some people are unwilling to admit that negative events are the result of fumbling rather than intelligent design. Anyone who has seen Mark Zuckerberg in a social situation could rationally peg him as semi-autistic, based mainly on his body language and facial expressions.

Read it.

Jeff Bezos isn’t going to make the Microsoft Mistake.

Freeberg is at a loss as to why anybody would watch The View in the first place.

I perceive there is a plot to revoke Women’s Suffrage, and to discredit women at large from holding positions of influence. I could be wrong, but if I’m right, The View must be linked to it. Every time I catch a glimpse of it I end up wondering who else is watching, and at the end of it what they think of letting women run things. It almost looks like a propaganda drive. It would be quite natural and fitting for a chyron to appear onscreen, right before the commercial break, asking the viewers if they’d want a panel like this to make decisions about their health care, their kids’ school curricula, the taxes they pay on each gallon of gas…

Yeah, if you’re arguing that women don’t belong in control, The View is good propaganda, just as Chuck Schumer is every Nazi’s wet dream of a crooked manipulative Jew. Make’s you wonder who (on the other side) is actually in charge.

Freeberg makes up new words when the need arises. This is one.

To ostracize a person faction or thing, not out of malicious intent, but as a necessary act of exclusion against a chaotic agent, a prerequisite first step to getting something done.

I can see where this would come in handy. Read the whole thing.

Sarah Hoyt shares some insights.

You see, part of the problem is the mental framework. To the left any money earned anywhere in the country automatically belongs to the government. This confirms my suspicion that at heart, deep inside, they think of the normal form of government as feudalism. This is because I’ve seen very old land deeds and other documents from when Portugal was a monarchy and it read something like “his majesty, graciously allows his subject so and so to exert ownership over this parcel of land” the underlying conceit being that the whole land of the whole country belonged to the king, and it was in his purview to hand it out to whomever he pleased for as long as he pleased, while it still belonged to him. (The documents I saw were for things like house plots, not fiefdoms, incidentally.)

The left seems to be going off the same book when they say things like “How will you pay for the tax cuts?” as if the government is OF COURSE entitled to all your money, and if you’re getting some back, that part must be compensated for.

This goes hand in hand with their idea only the government does anything worthwhile, including demanding the president (at least if Republican) do something about things over which he has no power. “What are you going to do about unemployment?” “What are you going to do about anti-semitism” or “What are you going to do about hurricanes?” (The later and the whole antropogenic global warming climate change obsession, btw, give new meaning to the “everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it” joke.)

Because of these frameworks, they miss what taxes cost.

The rest is well worth reading but I’m attracted by the connection of the Left’s mental model of property rights with that of — well, not feudalism, actually, but the ancient Roman concept of dominium. This concept, which the U.S. inherited from Britain, underlies such legal institutions as eminent domain — if all land belongs to the sovereign (i.e. the government), it has the right to take it for its own use (although the Constitution requires adequate compensation under the 5th Amendment, which the owner sometimes gets and sometimes doesn’t).

This fits in with my long-held believe that the Left isn’t really ‘progressive’ so much as it’s ‘regressive’ — it keeps trying to return to some sort of Good Old Days when people used bikes and trains and didn’t burn coal and oil.

Read it.

Markets that are free to work undergo corrections every now and then as reality catches up to hype. It’s not the end of the world.

Eric S Raymond has a fascinating take on American regional accents.

This is something I had never even suspected. I’m going to be watching a lot of old Western movies to see if I can pick out what he’s talking about.

Read it.

What do you do if you’re a supranational behemoth with a multi-billion dollar budget coupled with a vast number of subsidiary entities that focus on migration?

If you’re the U.N., you publish the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and seek to set up more supranational government entities to duplicate the work you’re already doing, at a gargantuan cost to (mostly Western) taxpayers.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering.

I’m pretty sure Narlathotep isn’t one of them.

Read it.

“So here’s a NY Times food columnist singing the praises of George H.W. Bush who unfortunately passed away the day before the column was published, so he wasn’t around to read how much he was loved by his enemies. Because, as we all know, there are no good Republicans other than dead ones. Also, why can’t today’s Republicans be like the old Republicans, i.e. not fighting back. Not that they fought back much while they were alive, except against other Republicans. Which is why they hate Trump: he hits back. Bush 41 served his country admirably in WWII, so I respect him for that. But I don’t think he was a particularly good president. There, I said it. Remember, in the run-up to the 1980 GOP nomination, he used the phrase ‘voodoo economics’ to describe Reagan’s policy proposals? At heart, Bush was no conservative, he was your archetypical ‘country club Republican’. Yes, he gave us Clarence Thomas, but he also gave us David Souter, and he left the impression they were all the same to him. But aside from that, the spectacle of all the lefties boo-hooing like they lost a long-time pal is disgusting and hypocritical.”

What he said.

Don Boudreaux preaches the libertarian economic gospel.

Genuine sharing through political institutions can, of course, be imagined. And such sharing does exist in some actual settings, as when citizens of a small town literally have a town hall meeting and reach a consensus to combine their efforts and resources to build a community playground. Yet in reality, most of what government promotes is taking rather than sharing.

…

As distorted as is the perception that politics is an arena that encourages and enables sharing, even more distorted is the perception that the market is an arena that discourages and prevents sharing. Long before the arrival of what we today call the “sharing economy,” the market has been, and continues to be, history’s most potent and skilled driver of sharing.

Markets let each person do it his way. Governments force people to do it their way. That’s the bottom line.

Read it.

Works for me.

‘I want to visit America. I want to see a country where the poor people are fat.’

If you watch any of the coverage of the funeral process for George H. W. Bush, you will note that the Big Theme is ‘civility’. Everybody is praising GHWB for his ‘civility’ and wringing their hands about the ‘lack of civility’ in modern American politics — and looking everywhere but at President Trump.

This is been a constant Democrat talking point ever since Trump became a candidate — how civility that used to be present in American politics has been flushed down the toilet by that boob in the White House — but those of us who remember the Clinton years remember the same meme being run around the track about Newt Gingrich and his posse. And of course it was a standard Democrat talking point about Reagan and Nixon.

If you unpack that talking point you realize that it all goes one way. The Democrat definition of ‘civility’ appears limited to Republicans saying nice things about Democrats. No Democrat ever criticizes another Democrat for lack of ‘civility’, although even the most casual glance at any newspaper or any DemLeghump Media outlet will reveal Democrats treating Republicans like used toilet paper on pretty much every occasion.

I don’t recall Maxine Waters, Elijah Cummings, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Elizabeth Warren, ‘Spartacus’ Booker, Looks-Like-A-White-Girl Kamala Harris, Moonbeam Brown, Rahm Emmanuel, or Hillary Clinton ever treating any Republican with ‘civility’. (If it ever happened, it would ipso facto be news.)

So this ‘civility’ schtick is just little Lucy whining ‘Mommmeeee! Johnny hit me back!’

Remember that whenever you hear a Democrat (or a RINO) clutch their pearls about ‘civility’. It’s just another psychological straightjacket that the Left is attempting to persuade the Right to don voluntarily. They know it’s BS, but they’re counting on their targets being stupid enough to buy it.

Kurt Schlichter appears to agree: The Only Good Republican Is A Dead Republican

The death of President George H. W. Bush provided liberals and their Fredocon houseboys yet another opportunity to lament the fact that all Republicans aren’t dead. Their feigned amnesia about what libs were saying while Bush 41 was still in the arena, and their latest hack attempt to tsk tsk tsk tsk about how the Bad Orange Man isn’t like [Insert Name of Dead Republican Here] serves to justify the prophylactic cynicism that we Normals should strive to cultivate.

Scott Adams has the details.

Read it.

Heh.

Read it.

Before its passage, a group opposed to the bill wrote: “AB 1921 would allow anybody to walk into an elections office and hand over truckloads of vote by mail envelopes with ballots inside, no questions asked, no verified records kept. It amounts to an open invitation to large-scale vote buying, voter coercion, “granny farming”, and automated forgery. AB 1921 solves no problem that a simple stamp can’t solve.”

Democrats have always been the technology leaders in stealing elections, from the invention of gerrymandering to the new ‘ballot harvesting’.

Bjorn Lumborg parses it out.

t is an indisputable fact that carbon emissions are rising—and faster than most scientists predicted. But many climate-change alarmists seem to claim that all climate change is worse than expected. This ignores that much of the data are actually encouraging. The latest study from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that in the previous 15 years temperatures had risen 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit. The average of all models expected 0.8 degrees. So we’re seeing about 90% less temperature rise than expected.

Facts like this are important because a one-sided focus on worst-case stories is a poor foundation for sound policies. Yes, Arctic sea ice is melting faster than the models expected. But models also predicted that Antarctic sea ice would decrease, yet it is increasing. Yes, sea levels are rising, but the rise is not accelerating—if anything, two recent papers, one by Chinese scientists published in the January 2014 issue of Global and Planetary Change, and the other by U.S. scientists published in the May 2013 issue of Coastal Engineering, have shown a small decline in the rate of sea-level increase.

All of the screaming and hand-waving about CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS! is designed to distract attention from the fact that when you look at the facts there is no reason for alarm.

You had to be there.