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.

Check it out.

You may have heard of intersectionality – “the theory that the overlap of various social identities, such as race, gender, and sexuality, contributes to the systemic oppression and discrimination experienced by an individual” – but don’t know how to compare your level of oppression with others. Now, you can!

Brought to us by Steve Sailer. No, I don’t know where he finds this stuff.

My score was 4 as compared to a 5 for Steve. Not sure what that means, but I suspect it isn’t good.

Read it.

Ponder the possibility that they both might be right.

Read it.

Climate alarmism is based on cherry-picked data. That isn’t ‘science’.

Read it.

The argument against Lamont Hill seems to be that he deployed a “dog whistle” — that is, that by using the phrase “from the river to the sea,” he signaled to the more clued-in and pernicious members of his audience that what he really covets is the destruction of Israel. Hill vehemently denies this: “My reference to ‘river to the sea’ was not a call to destroy anything or anyone,” he wrote yesterday on Twitter. “It was a call for justice, both in Israel and in the West Bank/Gaza. The speech very clearly and specifically said those things. No amount of debate will change what I actually said or what I meant.”

The Chattering Class are fond of the term ‘dog-whistle’, never pondering the fact that a subtle message audible only to BadThinkers and them pretty much puts them in the BadThinker bucket. Remember: If you hear the dog-whistle, then you’re the dog.

Rollo Tomassi looks at some inconvenient truth.

How many men hold a default Frame in their marriage? Many women are reluctant to even accept their husband’s last name today. There’s a lot of bullshit reasons for this, but the core truth is that women have no confidence in their man in the long term. They don’t trust his ‘course’. There’s holding Frame, and then there’s establishing a long term Frame, a paradigm, a reality of his own, that defines a man’s authority in his marriage and family relationships. Women today still want marriage, but few want to defer to their husband’s ‘course’. They don’t trust him with her life.

And why would they? For the past four or five generations men have been portrayed in popular culture as untrustworthy. Either they are Beta buffoons in need of women’s uniquely female ‘reasoning’ (which is really male reasoning with breasts) to save them from themselves, or they’re malicious Alpha malcontents (or perverts) also in need of female correction to bring them to female approved justice. It’s the retribution fantasy of feminism played out in popular media, but the societal result is generations of women who have no inherent respect of men and even less trust in any beneficial course they might plot out for them as future wives.

Read it.

That’s because there’s no there, there.

Read it.

People need to remember that ‘Just because Hitler liked something doesn’t make it a bad thing.’

Read it.

I guess they really are Dicks after all.

Read it.

Well, waddle, but sure.

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Isn’t that amazing.

Read it.

“To group them all up like, frankly, our president has done, you know I try to speak very respectfully, but he has basically called them all criminals and said they are not coming in here. At least that’s what I’ve seen,” Ammon Bundy said, taking a shot at Trump.

If they enter the country illegally, they are all criminals.

‘You know, everybody in Russia who has money is an oligarch. … Have you noticed that oligarchs exist only in Russia, and only in the Trump Russia collusion story?’ — Rush Limbaugh

Read it.

Wow, that’s news.

Read it.

More wishful thinking from the Zoo on the part of a Voice of the Crust.

Read it.

Two days after the mid-term elections, The Washington Post published an analysis under the headline “These wealthy neighborhoods delivered Democrats the House majority.” That headline is false in several different ways, but it is being repeated among a large group of the punditry because it fits into a class narrative that sees affluent, college-educated white people who live in suburbs as citadels of tolerant decency while white folks without bachelor’s degrees, wherever they live, are wall-to-wall racist and sexist xenophobes.

Listen to it.

A Heritage Foundation podcast addressing the most important issue of our times.

‘Politics is a team sport. If you’re a Crimson Tide fan, you don’t cheer for Auburn, and if you’re a Republican, you don’t want Democrats to win.’ — The Other McCain

That really says everything that needs to be said.

Read it.

Like Uhlmann’s law of legislative analysis:

If an Act of Congress has a long title—lock up the children and run for cover.

Or Uhlmann’s Razor:

When stupidity seems a sufficient explanation, there is no need for recourse to any more elaborate analysis.

Uhlmann’s Razor also has a corollary known as Uhlmann’s First Law of Historical Causation:

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

And my personal favorite:

When evaluating the soundness of any moral proposition, law, rule, or regulation, however popular, to ascertain its true meaning, read it aloud slowly in a German accent.

Read it.

The platform caused an uproar on November 25 when it permanently banned conservative pundit and former Marine Jesse Kelly without explanation. On November 27, the radio host’s account was conveniently restored to Twitter, again without explanation. The Federalist reported that the House Energy and Commerce Committee was looking into Twitter. Only after that story was reported did Twitter reinstate the account.

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.

Rich people are waking up to the fact that, despite paying most of the taxes, they’re not getting their ‘fair share’ of government services. So for mail (UPS/Fedex), law enforcement (private security guards), and now fire-fighting, they’re going direct rather than depending on a government that can’t or won’t provide services.

Read it.

‘In some buildings, there are more Black Lives Matter posters than there are actual black people.’

And there you have the Crust, naked and afraid.

Read it.

In the 1920s and 1930s, a banker named Pat Munroe in the small town of Quincy, Florida noticed that even during the depths of the Great Depression, otherwise impoverished people would spend their last nickel to buy a glass of Coca-Cola.  With good returns on capital, and a once-in-a-century valuation so low that the business was trading for less than the cash in the bank, “Mr. Pat”, as he was called, encouraged everyone he knew to buy an ownership stake in the firm.  He would even underwrite bank loans, backed by Coca-Cola stock, for his responsible depositors to encourage people to acquire equity.

Read it. And by all means watch the video.

Jonah Goldberg never misses an opportunity to Punch Right.

One of these days I’ll read something by him criticizing the Left and I’ll probably die of shock.

Read it.

Damn, what a racist that guy is.

Read it.

Well. There it is.

Read it.

That explains why my brother is a communist, I guess.

Read it.

When I was just a young man, my grandmother said to me, ‘Young man, you will not let a fruit or a vegetable past your lips unless it has been washed off first.’

I said to her ‘Why is that, grandmother?’

She said, ‘You do not know where that fruit or vegetable has been. More importantly, you do not know what has been put on that fruit or vegetable. So you will rinse first, then eat.’

And that advice has stood me in good stead from that day to this.

Sarah Hoyt has some insight.

The goats are needed because the sheep are too social.  I don’t know if it’s true they’ll follow their leader over a cliff, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Sheep ain’t too smart.

…

But when you put this on a national scale, it’s a terrible thing.  We’ve seen exactly how horrible it is over things like the Cultural Revolution, or under Stalin, or for that matter under Hitler, or, in a smaller scale — it was a smaller time — the French revolution.  Because people will do horrible or destructive things rather than buck the group under any circumstances.