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.

Read it.

Well, you know, it’s that time of year….

Joel Kotkin takes  a peek.

Ultimately the gig economy, even as it uses the latest technology, represents something of a devolution of labor. Although widely associated as “progressive,” the arbiters of the gig economy are, perhaps unconsciously, recreating the conditions that led to the impoverishment of the peasants and mechanics — replaced by slaves — at the end of the Roman Republic, or what befell artisans whose livelihoods were destroyed in the 19th century by machines.

Read it.

Embedded in the cerebral folds of every city planner who’s ever lived, there’s a cluster of neurons that lights up like Las Vegas when confronted with the possibility of a blank slate. It started with Hippodamus, the man Aristotle claimed was the father of urban planning. When the Persians destroyed his hometown of Miletus, Hippodamus discovered a bright side to catastrophe: The attackers had erased all the regrettable improvisations that, over the centuries, had made a mess of the place. Tasked with rebuilding, he seized his chance to impose order upon chaos. And so the concept of the urban grid was born.

A designed city is just right from the viewpoint of the designers but might not be from the viewpoint of those who might have to live there. Rather like a planned economy under communism, and we all know how those turn out.

Steve Sailer bring you the news.

In other words, even leaving aside immigrants, scientists can see that English people who migrate out of coal towns like Rotherham for the bright lights of the metropolis tend to have higher polygenic scores for educational attainment (i.e., years of education) than English people who stay home in dead end coal towns. Of course, a simpler way to do this would be just to ask people what their years of educational attainment are, but it’s kind of cool that you can get to a similar result by looking at their DNA.

Read it.

Countries in Eastern Europe tend to be far more socially conservative in this regard, with as few as three per cent of respondents in Georgia and Armenia in favour of legalising same-sex marriage.

Western Europe tends to be more progressive across the questions asked, with 88 per cent of people in Sweden supportive of legalising same-sex marriage, by way of comparison.

There’s nothing like 70 years of living under Communism to bring home to you why proglodyte degeneracy is a bad thing.

Read it.

No, you have a moral duty to track down Mark Zuckerberg and beat the living snot out of him and everyone in his immediate family, including his communist sister who has caused so much evil in the world.

Read it.

If you have to ‘figure out your heritage’, you don’t have one.

If you need a DNA test to figure out who your ancestors were, it doesn’t matter.

Read it.

At ZeroHedge, Tyler Durden reports that the Clinton Foundation “saw contributions dry up approximately 90 percent over a three-year period between 2014 and 2017, according to financial statements.” If there’s anything surprising about this report, it’s that the Clinton Foundation still receives as much as it does ($23 million in 2017) in contributions.

Why pay if you can’t play?

Read it.

Note that, in these days of Identity Politics, it’s vital to let people know Who You Are before they will give any credibility regarding what you have to say. And in most cases Who You Are is the sole qualification indicating that what you have to say is credible.

This technique is usually of the form ‘As An X …’,  as if just being an X is sufficient; typically there’s nothing about being an X that implies any expertise in what one is saying, which is why it’s so important to play that card right off the bat.

Eric S Raymond looks at computers.

Some years ago I predicted that eventually the core of your desktop PC would morph into a physically tiny compute engine that would merge with your smartphone, talking through standard ports and cables to full-sized peripherals like a keyboard and (a too large to be portable) flatscreen.

More recently I examined the way that compute bricks – small-form-factor fanless PCs running low-power chips – have been encroaching on the territory of traditional tower PCs. Players in this space include Jetway, Logic Supply, Partaker, and Shuttle. Poke a search engine with “fanless PC” to get good hits.

Read it.

I think the scraelings are correct on this one.

Paul Mirengoff of Powerline pushes back.

I like and respect Chief Justice Roberts, but I disagree with him. I believe we have too many federal judges who are doing their level best to assist the left in resisting President Trump. And while I would never refer to a judge as an Obama judge, it’s more than fair to refer to one as an Obama-appointed judge. This may well have been what Trump meant.

The questions of whether it matters who appointed a federal judge and whether such judges view litigants, including President Trump, with equal regard in any meaningful sense are empirical ones. If one can predict with a high degree of accuracy how a judge will rule in a highly controversial case, or in a case challenging a Trump edict the left doesn’t like, just by knowing which president appointed that judge, then Roberts’ defense of the federal judiciary fails.

Read it.

And Trump keeps winning.

Steve Sailer keeps bringing up topics that disturb people.

Diversity is supposed to be “our strength,” but the interracial romance marketplace generates much resentment among those groups, such as black women and East Asian men, who tend to be in less demand than their racial rivals.

Markets work even when you don’t want them to.

The reason the black women writing op-eds stick to blaming just the white Beckys rather than also the Asian Amys is, of course, that it is respectable for blacks to blame whites for their problems. For a black woman writer to admit that Asian women also tend to have advantages over her in the hair-length department would be problematic, as they say. But mostly black women are just not into lacerating self-appraisals.

I, for one, don’t find black women at all attractive. I guess that makes me a waysist.

In my 1997 National Review article “Is Love Colorblind?” I pointed out that the 1990 U.S. Census found that white men were married to Asian women 2.5 times as often as Asian men were married to white women.

Conversely, black men were married to white women 2.5 times as often as white men were married to black women.

These racial ratios imply that some Asian men and some black women are going to be out of luck, unless they want to try marrying each other (which, generally speaking, they don’t).

At least black women have an easier time getting into Harvard or Yale or Princeton than Asian men. At least that’s something.

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.

Steve Sailer has a brain-wave.

Testing your personal DNA is hot right now, of course, but the product is increasingly moving against the growing anti-science / pro-feelings current in the culture. Personal DNA testing sounds like something that Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker came up with at an evolutionary psychology conference in 1992, notan idea in sync with the current year. Where are the feelings in the data?

Read it.

Nice work — or not — if you can get it.

Read it.

More myth than man, at this point.

Read it.

Mmmmm … could be.

Read it.

Unfortunately, they have no advice for how to cope with your Angry Uncle punching you out for being a Pussy Communist, with your parents’ approval. They never think it through.

Not one of my uncles, who all fought in The War, would have hesitated.

Read it.

Just because it’s called the Democratic Party doesn’t mean they allow any, you know, democracy. Let’s get real.

Read it.

Trump: Making proglodyte heads explode since 2015.

Read it.

Check it out.

All of our illusions, shattered.

On the other hand: Who expects the reality to look like the ad? I don’t. Nobody I’ve ever talked to does. It’s like lies and politicians — everybody expects politicians to lie, so it’s no surprise when they do; you make allowances and move on.

To be fair: I’ve had food at Chick-Fil-A, and I don’t care what it looks like, it’s all good.

Read it.

Being a Child of the Crust can be quite rewarding.

Steve Sailer fisks Carl Zimmer on genetics.

White people don’t exist, but white guilt is forever.

Read it.

That tells you quite a bit about the modern Democrat party.

They don’t need a Presidential candidate, just somebody who can play eon on TV.

‘Jim Acosta is the rodeo clown of White House correspondents.’

— Scott Adams

Read it.

Good. We have too many stupid people as it is.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

“There are two groups who think Trump is a racist. One is white supremacists, and the other is CNN.”

— Scott Adams

Read it.

Good. He is FAR TOO SHORT.

I’d recommend Liam Neeson.

Read it.

As is now well understood, Trump has few policy interests beyond managing trade and suppressing immigration. Further, he’s an economic populist who has championed plenty of left-wing causes in the past. So he’d have little compunction about abandoning a Republican economic policy and embracing a Democratic one that has blue-collar appeal—and one that would impose hardship on immigrants and minorities to boot.

That’s why I believe Trump will become a loud proponent of increasing the minimum wage—perhaps all the way to the political left’s ideal of $15 an hour.

Read it.

Glock for me.

Read it.

The way this works is that you go to an experienced lawyer/CPA who sets up an LLC which then claims the ticket. This keeps you anonymous in every state.

The LLC can be structured to do almost anything you want to do with it, including passing through large amounts to friends and family so that they will have to pay the income tax and so that no gift tax is incurred.

This doesn’t surprise me a bit. Obviously the winner has two brain cells to rub together. Unusual for lottery winners, certainly, but not impossible.

Read it.

And there’s a reason for that.

‘We will detain and prosecute those who enter US territory illegally,’ American ambassador says.

The UN Refugee Agency has been in the business of promoting ‘refugee-ness’ since its founding. It is the primary reason why ‘Palestinians’ are stuck in crappy refugee tent cities rather than being absorbed by their fellow Arabs in the countries bordering Israel.

Their latest program is to soak up ‘refugees’ from what Trump accurately characterized as ‘shithole countries’ and dump them in unassimilable clumps into First World countries, in order to turn those First World countries into shithole countries as well.

Read it.

What? No calls for ‘crossbow control’?

Why ‘domestic’ violence? Why not just, say, ‘violence’?

Taki hates all of the right people.

What got me thinking about fifth columnists was a new book that I, of course, will neither buy nor read by one Max Boot, a so-called neoconservative who has announced in his opus that he’s leaving the Republican Party for good because he cannot be associated with people who like Trump or those who voted for him. Losing Boot, of course, feels like losing an obese dead man in a tiny overcrowded lifeboat in a storm. The Republican Party is well rid of him, because if ever there were a fifth columnist among conservatives and Republicans, it was the likes of Boot and that poisoned dwarf William Kristol.

What he said.