Read it.

But you knew that.

Read it.

‘Swiss cargo ship’? Since when does Switzerland have ships? Where do they dock?

Memo to self: Stay out of Nigerian waters.

Bill Kristol:

Benito Mussolini:

We report, you decide.

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I am always wondering where they get these wonderful sets for British movies and recently stumbled on this resource.

Read it.

This points up a couple of elephants in the room that (so far) the European-model academic world has been ignoring:

1. Other cultures don’t buy into the myth that ‘intellectual property’ is actually a thing rather than a slickly-presented government-granted monopoly.
2. Other cultures also don’t see the point of the 18th-century German ‘research university’ model that requires somebody wanting a doctorate (which, as the world itself suggests, is merely a teaching qualification) to make some sort of ‘original contribution’ to the field — which is why so many doctoral dissertations are, however original, so narrowly focused as to be worthless, when they aren’t sophisticated attempts to game the system.

Anyone who’s been in graduate study with Asian students knows that they think nothing of engaging in what Europeans would consider blatant cheating and plagiarism. Their values are not our values, and probably look pretty silly to them.

Read it.

Let the finger-pointing begin.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

Nobody does proofreading any more. Just read a newspaper and you’ll see.

Read it.

Keep your fingers crossed.

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. And watch the video.

Even 80-year-old Irishmen aren’t to be messed with.

Read it.

Whatever would we do without scientists to tell us these things?

Now that they are convinced that there actually are ‘personality types’, maybe they’ll discover that race is actually a thing.

Read it.

James Burnham was one of the greatest thinkers of modern times — seriously under-appreciated.

The similarities between Hitler and Stalin inspired Burnham’s first book, The Managerial Revolution (1941). Its subtitle, in oracular prose, promised an explanation of “what is happening in the world.” What was happening, Burnham said, was the displacement of both capitalism and socialism by an authoritarian system of technocratic managers.

…

The theme of The Machiavellians is the irrationality of ideologies and the pretense of democracy. Elites rule in every society and in every state, Burnham said, and “the primary object, in practice, of all rulers is to serve their own interest, to maintain their own power and privilege. There are no exceptions.”

…

It was George Orwell who became Burnham’s most famous interlocutor. “Burnham has real intellectual courage,” Orwell wrote in a review of The Struggle for the World, “and writes about real issues.” But Orwell could not embrace Burnham’s thought without qualification: The American, he wrote, was too deterministic, reductive, and catastrophic in his pronouncements. “The tendency of writers like Burnham, whose key concept is ‘realism,’ is to overrate the part played in human affairs by sheer force,” Orwell said. However, despite this objection and others, Burnham’s dark vision fascinated Orwell to such an extent that he incorporated it into Nineteen Eighty-Four.

…

Burnham also sought, over the objections of some of the other editors, to endow National Reviewwith a sense of maturity, ecumenism, and acceptance of American culture that he believed it on occasion lacked. He did not always succeed. However, so devoted was he to this new project that he produced just one major work in the 1950s: Congress and the American Tradition (1959), the result of four years of research into the relationship between Congress and the presidency.

What Burnham identified in this book was a dramatic modification of the way Americans understood democracy. The constitutional system designed by the Founders established Congress as the first branch of government, the mediating institution between the people and the state bureaucracy under the chief executive. Beginning in the 19th century, however, and accelerating under Wilson and FDR, the executive branch acted not with reference to the Constitution but in the name of “the people.” Congress lost its primacy, its powers, and its prestige. Government was no longer constitutionalist. It was Caesarist.

Sound familiar?

UPDATE: James Burnham’s Misplaced Optimism

Read it.

In Britain, the LibDems (Liberal Democrats) are the mutant descendants of the former Liberal Party that shriveled away after the First World War when they were outbid for the Give Us Free Stuff vote by the Labour Party. They are periodically refreshed (and their name periodically changed) by defectors from the Labour Party who can’t persuade themselves that socialism actually works and by defectors from the Conservative Party who can’t bring themselves to risk getting social cooties from what used to be the upper classes.

Steve Sailer is fond of mentioning the odd American phenomenon that black people are always keen to get their kids into schools with a lot of white kids (and, necessarily, keen to keep their kids from schools that have a lot of black kids). He speculates that white kids have some sort of Magic Pixie Dust that, when added to black kids, make them more intelligent, harder working, and less behaviorally disruptive.

Apparently this Magic White Kid Pixie Dust belief has migrated across the pond to Britain.

Read it.

Yeah, I’m scratching my head over that one, too. I suppose it makes sense to somebody.

If you had given a cactus to one of the bullies in my high school his first impulse would have been to threaten to shove it up some nerd’s ass, so I’m not clear what’s going on here.

Read it.

Democrats are now replacing veteran Democratic legislators with avowed socialists in primary elections, choosing to nominate socialists precisely because of their socialist radicalism. Writing in the New York Times, Bari Weiss notes that Brooklyn Democratic voters overwhelmingly voted for avowed socialist Julia Salazar, despite her very public history of lying about basic things like her background, origins, and past political positions. As Weiss puts it, Julia Salazar is “the left’s post-truth politician.” This “socialist lied. And lied. And lied. Then she won handily in Brooklyn.”

This is the same transition that occurred in Britain after the First World War, when the Labour Party took over from the Liberal Party as the non-Conservative opposition in government. (The switch in parties rather than the zombification of an existing party was a reflection of the difference between British politics and American politics.) It was supported by intellectual trends in the Universities and co-0pted a lot of people from the existing upper classes whom one would think would naturally be of a Conservative bent, in much the same way as it is doing in the U.S., with the same bizarre features as trust-fund babies from old-money families spouting Marxist rhetoric and espousing policies that have failed every time they’ve been tried. AlGore and (pick any Kennedy) are good examples.

Unlike the Democrats, of course, the Labour Party is an explicitly socialist party and has been since its creation. Tony Blair managed to avoid the consequences of this with his New Labour clever-plastic-disguise, but that came apart rather quickly when it passed out of the hands of the only guy who could make it work. The New Labor scheme of importing a lot of non-British welfare cases from overseas to create a permanent Free Stuff Party majority almost worked, and is still trying to establish itself; the Conservative Party, which is composed of even worse cucks than the Republicans, may still manage to fumble their way into permanent minority status.

The key here is how the Republicans respond. Unlike Britain’s Conservatives, the Republican party’s semi-progressives are still a minority in the Republican political class, and the advent of Trump and his successful record has created an opportunity to beat back the RINOs for a while longer yet.

Read it.

The thing I like about this article is that when the author says ‘people who think X are wrong’ he tells you why in very easily understandable terms that make sense to someone not formally trained in economics. That doesn’t mean he’s right, of course, but it improves the odds.

One thing that I would object to is the headline, which I think is sufficiently imprecise as to be misleading.

What does ‘finance’ mean? When one says ‘I’m going to finance a purchase’, what is that sentence intended to convey?

‘Finance’ means ‘pay for’. And (typically) use of the term ‘finance’ for a transaction means that you are paying for what you’re buying by means of borrowing money from someone else.

The ‘financial system’ is the set of interrelated economic relationships composed of all of the people who are borrowing (and lending) money for the purpose of making purchases. In the case of a business, this can be for buying raw materials, machinery, land, trucks, new employees, bribes to government officials, whatever needs to be bought that you don’t have the cash on hand to buy. In the context of housing, it refers to people borrowing money in order to purchase living space, i.e. mortgages.

The fundamental flaw in the mortgage financial system that underlay the 2008 ‘crisis’ was the constant unrelenting pressure from government to lend mortgage money to people who don’t deserve it, i.e. were not good credit risks. The Politically Correct principle thus expressed is ‘being inclusive’ and ‘helping the underserved’. The assumption is that Fashionable Minorities are not getting the mortgages that they would get if they were Privileged Whites because of racism/sexism/bigotry/homophobia/women-and-minorities-hardest-hit CrimeThink. (That pressure still exists, by the way; when faced with a choice between reality and ideology, politicians will pick ideology pretty much every time if that’s the way to get votes.)

The financial institutions succumbing to this pressure were desperate to find some way of reducing the hideous economic risks that such lending brought to their businesses. They way they did it was basically a shell game, bundling these shit mortgages with good ones and fudging the numbers so that the result would smell like something other than shit, and selling this bow-tied shit to people who didn’t go to the effort of unwrapping it. So, in that sense, the ‘crisis’ arose because of financial shenanigans by people trying to make some money while actually satisfying Big Brother.

The problem with such a system, as with any Ponzi scheme, is that all it takes is one solid hit somewhere for the entire thing to collapse. As it did.

What the author is saying is, that the reason this became a ‘crisis’ was the ham-handed government intervention that attempted to keep all of the plates spinning and hope somehow that it would go away. So, in that sense, the headline is correct — if you boldface the word CRISIS. The situation was financial but the crisis was political; but that doesn’t come across through a casual reading of the headline.

Read it.

If you’re the sort of person who worry about ‘income inequality’, then this is the sort of OMG WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE clanger you’ll like.

On the other hand, if you’re the sort of person who worries about communists taking over the world, you’ll find this somewhat reassuring.

You will of course note that all of the places where the ‘super elite’ live are Blue areas. Make of that what you will.

Read it.

Heh.

Read it.

I’d buy one if I could.

Check it out.

I use DuckDuckGo instead of Google, but this looks like an interesting contender.

Read it.

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

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

Read it.

Tennis umpires are reportedly discussing a boycott of Serena Williams’ matches after the female tennis player accused a chair umpire of sexism.

Sounds reasonable.

Read it.

Had California and Germany invested $680 billion into new nuclear power plants instead of renewables like solar and wind farms, the two would already be generating 100% or more of their electricity from clean (low-emissions) energy sources, according to a new analysis by Environmental Progress.

The analysis comes the day before California plays host to a “Global Climate Action Summit,” which makes no mention of nuclear, despite it being the largest source of clean energy in the U.S. and Europe.

Read it.

Last week’s news underscored growing concerns over the politicization of tech companies. With his inimitable style, President Trump claimed on Twitter that Google shows political bias by skewing the news found in online searches. Relatedly, a group of some 100 conservative-leaning Facebook employees formed an online community to escape the strictures of a “political monoculture” and provide themselves a “safe” place for “ideological diversity” among their 25,000 co-workers.

Good luck with that. They’ll get what James Damore got.

It’s a truism that Silicon Valley leans left, but the average tech millionaire is not easy to pigeonhole ideologically. A revealing, if little-noted, 2017 study from Stanford University compared more than 600 “elite technology company leaders and founders,” 80 percent of them millionaires, with more than “1,100 elite partisan donors” of both political persuasions. The distinctions are revelatory for anyone interested in mapping the future of American politics. “Increasingly, technology entrepreneurs are using their personal wealth and firms’ power to exercise political influence,” the survey’s authors observe. “For example, recent federal candidates have referred to Silicon Valley as a ‘political ATM’.” The study found that 80 percent of tech millionaires overwhelmingly donate to Democrats over Republicans; hardly a surprising finding.

Indeed. The Democrat party is the party of the new clerisy, the establishment upper class, and all of their ‘soak the rich’ rhetoric is just virtue-signalling. The reason that they’re getting involved politically is that they’ve learned the Microsoft Lesson, that if you don’t have guys in Washington and Sacramento looking out for your interests you’re going to be pillaged by the Willie Browns of the world. Modern political life consists of the eaters and the eaten.

Read it.

The have to make noise or else little Miss Occasional-Cortex will sneak up and steal their place at the trough.

George Orwell is on the case.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Read it.

Yeah, I’ve been thinking that.

Technology means never having to say you’re tired.

Steven Hayward on the benefits of pwning libs.

These days “owning the libs” seems to be a booming business. I own lots of libs.* I picked them up at a discount during the Obama years. Owning a lib is even cheaper than owning a house with Fannie Mae’s 3% down payment program during the housing bubble years. You can generally own a lib these days with as little as 1% down, because they are so easily acquired on account of their sensitivities and huge outrage promotion market. And they are easy to maintain: just flash a MAGA hat, and they’re as good as owned for another six months.

Read it.

And I can’t say that I blame them. California would be paradise if it weren’t for a lot of the people there. I suppose Hawaii is in the same boat.

Read it.

Perhaps people are finally realizing that government is the problem, not the solution.

Read it.

Been waitin’ for this one.

Read it.

A couple of days ago, The New York Times took what it called the ‘rare step’ of publishing an anonymous op-ed column supposedly by a ‘senior official’ in the Trump administration. The column, which might have been written Bill Kristol and then run through Pete Wehner’s patented Hang-Wringing Moralising Machine, is the perfect epitome of that emetic, holier-than-thou species of Never-Trump rhetoric practiced by newly irrelevant, nominally conservative pundits.

But they’ve got free government health care!