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I’ve been close to despair of late as it appears, to me at least, that the divide on the right has widened considerably, nearly reaching the point of irreconcilable differences where both parties no longer talk to each other but instead face each other while talking mainly to themselves. For those who respect certain minds on both sides of the divide, the feeling is one of dismay at what is fast becoming the political equivalent of being caught between divorced parents who each insist that we take one side over the other notwithstanding the fact that they both screwed up.

The problem with people who describe themselves as ‘conservatives’ is that they can never define what being ‘a conservative’ is that would satisfy somebody else who ‘self-identifies’ as ‘a conservative’. I am confident that it’s because there is no such thing as ‘conservatism’ and hence no such thing as ‘a conservative’. In order to be a Real Ism, an ideology has to have some sort of target state toward which it strives, and soi-disant conservatives do not have a single target state on which they can all agree. The best you can say is that there are a number of aspects of current (or proposed) culture that they are together in being against, and I suppose that such is the best for which one can hope.

I prefer to describe myself as an anti-progressive, the way some people back in the Good Old Days described themselves as anti-Communists, because proglodytes do have an ideology and a target state towards which they are working, and I’m here to get in the way of that process as best I can.

The next time you’re trapped in a social situation with someone who ‘identifies’ as ‘a conservative’, just ask: ‘Okay, what do you want to conserve?’ and watch the reaction. It can be entertaining, but also rather sad.

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Agricultural policy for the last fifty years might be characterized as ‘trying to turn the farm into a factory and not succeeding very well’. Review the performance of any of ConAgra’s or ADM’s factory-farms and this is pretty obvious.

The whole ‘urban indoor farm’ is just another such attempt to change the field into a factory floor. The problem is that organic processes (such as those that create food) aren’t really susceptible to the simplistic order of the assembly line. Any attempt to do so can only work by simplifying inherently complex natural biological systems so that they can be ‘managed’ for artifacture, which works about as well as a ‘managed’ economy — the latter gives you Soviet ‘goods’; the former gives you the equivalent of Soviet food. Nutrition gurus like Michael Pollan complain about the result, with good reason, and often about the artifactural production, but never get to the root of the problem.

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Trump is not nice. Republicans tried “nice” with Mitt Romney in 2012. They tried “experienced and professional” with John McCain in 2008. Both lost. One of the reasons? No matter who is the Republican candidate, the Democrat politicians, and the heavily-Democrat media are not going to be nice nor professional. They’re going to say and do whatever it takes.

I’ve been saying that for decades.

The author correctly points out that Trump doesn’t take a shot at you unless and until you take a shot at him.

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The Trump-hating mainstream media claims that President Trump has an enemies list. It’s possible that he has one, but the list of people whose security clearance is under review isn’t it. An enemies list would be longer and would include, for example, Jim Acosta. The list in question is simply a group of people who may not deserve the privilege of having a security clearance now that they are not in government.

Calling the list an “enemies lists” has its uses, though. It enable aging liberals to gloat about being on Nixon’s enemies list — the real thing. And it enables the Trump-hating mainstream media to push the Trump-as-Nixon theme.

I have an Enemies List. I’ll bet it’s longer than Trump’s.

Here is the reality about presidents and their enemies: (1) every president has them, whether on a list on not; (2) only a stupid president doesn’t know who they are; (3) people who get themselves elected president aren’t that kind of stupid.

The media are experts at spinning stuff that makes perfect sense into something that they can white and bitch about.

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When a company hires predominantly from a demographic that has been indoctrinated with the idea that ‘whistleblowers’ are Heroes of the Revolution and whose heroes are Aaron Schwarz, Julian Assange, BradleyWhatever Manning, and Edward Snowdon, this is to be expected.

John Derbyshire does a little mind-picking.

So there was Cuomo doing the soft-shoe shuffle. Our Governor is a sort of grandee of the Democratic Party: son of a former three-term Governor, ex-husband of a Kennedy gal.

But I should say that the phrase “Democratic Party” in my last sentence refers to the oldDemocratic Party, the party of FDR, JFK, Bill Clinton, and John Kerry. Andrew Cuomo, like those other names, is a white guy of European ancestry. Like other white guys in his party, Cuomo has the uncomfortable feeling that the ground is moving under his feet—that the Democratic Party is turning into something different from what it has been though his, and my, lifetime.

…

The Progressive vision is narrow, provincial, and present-centric. The past, according to them, was bad; the present is just tolerable; the future will be radiant.

And that’s about the best summary of the proglodyte vision I’ve ever seen.

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And there it is.

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Tip #1: Stay away from bears.

If you’re camping or hiking in the woodlands of North America – particularly Canada, Alaska, Washington, Idaho, the Dakotas or Montana – or in parts of northern Europe and Asia, it’s perfectly possibly you could encounter a large bear.

So, obviously, don’t do that.

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Or their parents, too, obviously.

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In modern industrial societies, Marx’s claim that the major division would be among capitalists who control the means of production and proletarians without productive assets other than their own labor has proven to be influential and useful. In these pages (Summer 2017), I have argued that the Marxist conception was usefully modified by James Burnham and others, for whom a bureaucratic, managerial group in both the private and public sectors displaced an older, owner-operator-investor bourgeoisie. In this view, modern advanced industrial societies are divided chiefly among two classes. One is a substantial managerial-professional minority, as large as 30 percent or so if all recipients of college degrees are included in it, but arguably no more than the top 10 or 15 percent. The other is the working class, increasingly working in the nontraded domestic service sector as manufacturing jobs are eliminated by a combination of offshoring and automation.

But a vocation, or a constellation of related vocations, is not in itself a class, any more than an income category is. In ordinary discourse, one is born into a class. What turns a mere vocation or income or wealth category into a class is a high degree of persistence of its membership across generations. The source of hereditary class advantage need not be formal legal privileges, or even inherited wealth; it can also take the form of attitudes, skills, and connections bequeathed by parents to their children.

Thus the best definition of a class, I would suggest, is this: a class is a group of families within a society whose members are disproportionately likely to work in certain vocations and also disproportionately likely to marry and have children with one another. This definition unites the functional and nepotistic aspects of class.

Steve Sailer takes a look at the Party of Hate.

One reason the Democrats keep ancient warhorses like Nancy Pelosi around is to forestall the Diverse Party’s upcoming internal war of all against all over who gets the spoils. Now, elderly black Congressional leader Jim Clyburn is putting himself forward as a potential Speaker of the House, cleverly positioning himself as reassuring to non-blacks as being too old to launch the Democratic Party’s upcoming internal race war, but also as galvanizing to blacks by promising to help position younger blacks to win the Race War for Control of the Democratic Party after his time.

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Since the old requirements of ebenbürtigkeit have fallen by the wayside, the princes of the world now have their pick of ‘trophy wives’ without the bother of having built up a fortune first.

Unsurprisingly, this candidate pool runs heavily to actresses (e.g. Duchess of Sussex) and models (e.g. Duchess of Värmland). Such people can be presumed to have adjusted to the 24/7 publicity machine that is one of the chief defects of the royal life. The primary constraints are finding candidates that aren’t tainted by the psychological problems for which actresses and models are famou, but princes usually have the best vetting systems available to them, so this ought not to be a problem.

I predict that Diana Spencer will be the last ‘blue blood’ to marry into the British royal family; such people no longer have the background for it.

Read it.

I’d be in favor of using VX, myself. It’s hard to obtain but a little goes a long way.

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Betcha he has tattoos.

Check it out.

A titanic struggle.

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I guess WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE Women and Minorities Hardest Hit etc. didn’t actually happen.

I don’t suppose we’ll get an apology.

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The medieval Catholic Church was against Catholics marrying even moderately distant cousins and other kin, which HBD Chick has long argued is a key reason why Westerners are the way they are (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic: WEIRD)

…

This is one of the great forgotten achievements of history: the Dark Age Catholic Church’s detribalizing the militant tribes that overturned the Roman Empire. In England, nobody worries about Angles and Saxons being at each other’s throats, whereas in much of the rest of the world, the tribes of 600 AD are more or less the tribes of 2018 AD.

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Conservatives have been saying for a long time that our porous southern border poses a security risk. Over the years there have been multiple news stories about Middle Easterners with terrorist connections being apprehended at the border, or after crossing the border. But because these crossings haven’t resulted in successful terrorist attacks, they have gotten essentially no notice.

Meanwhile, Democrats are committed to the view that there is no reason to want a secure border other than racism. This is pretty much insane–countries have wanted secure borders for centuries, and until now no one thought there was anything untoward about it–but it is the media narrative, and anything that contradicts the Democrats’ narrative will not be publicized.

I’d say they both are.

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Gee, how could that happen? Don’t they read the newspapers?

Watch it.

Victor Davis Hanson is always worth hearing.

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Everyone loves having everything delivered to their door. I do. But there’s nothing quite like going to the mall for a pair of jeans, finding the huge wall of pants all neatly stacked, with all the different options — slim, boot cut, high rise, relaxed, tense, lying waistband size for the days you feel bloated, and so on. They still don’t have your size, but if they did, you could try them on.

Read it.

All it takes is one country willing to stand up against the conspiracy to import a new African population for Europe.

It can be done.

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Well, we seem to have an opportunity, here.

1. Fracking causes earthquakes — just ask the nearest proglodyte.
2. Earthquakes can cause islands to rise.

The solution to global warming, therefore, is obvious. Just frack the living Hell out of places threatened by the rapidly rising sea levels that all good climatistas are warning us about, and everything will be shiny.

Charles C. W. Cooke lays it out.

Once that “serious consideration” was undertaken, the house of cards fell, and Americans got back their right to keep and bear arms. Perhaps the neatest illustration of the change can be found in the work of Harvard’s Laurence Tribe. In the 1978 edition of his American Constitu­tional Lawtextbook, the Second Amendment is mentioned only in a footnote, and cast solely as a means by which “to prevent such federal interferences with the state militia as would permit the establishment of a standing national army and the consequent destruction of local autonomy.” The 1988 revision contains the same characterization. The 2000 edition, by contrast, confirms that the provision represents an individual right. “The amendment achieves its central purpose,” Tribe maintained, “by assuring that the federal government may not disarm individual citizens without some unusually strong justification. . . . That assurance in turn is provided through recognizing a right . . . on the part of individuals to possess and use firearms in defense of themselves and their homes.”

Read it.

First, these countries are not technically socialist. By the YDSA’s definition, socialism entails a centrally planned economy with nationalized means of production. Although these countries have high income taxes and provide generous social programs, they remain prosperous because of their free-market economies.

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Conservative women lined up to challenge New York Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to a debate on Thursday. Their challenges came after she dismissed a similar challenge from conservative commentator Ben Shapiro as sexist (“just like catcalling”), claiming that he had “bad intentions.”

Proglodytes keep forgetting that most of the quality in their Oppressed Minorities are on the other side.

Cant is generally a smokescreen for won’t … or daren’t.

Read it.

Apparently this Voice of the Crust has a problem with that.

I don’t.

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First thing to think about is that Jobs was born in 1955. His biological mother, an unwed graduate student, gave birth and arranged for his adoption. This was 18 years before abortion became legal in America by way of Roe v. Wade.

If Jobs was conceived 18 years later, or if Roe v. Wade had become law of the land 18 years earlier, there is some chance that there never would have been a Steve Jobs. The life that would have become Steve Jobs could have been another in the vast sea of abortion statistics. There would be no Macs, iPods or iPhones.

And I would not be comfortably retired now.

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And yet if a Muslim called for non-Muslims to be gassed and sterilized, do you think he would go to jail for hate speech?

Sura 8, ayat 12: Remember thy Lord inspired the angels (with the message): “I am with you: give firmness to the Believers: I will instil terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them.”

Let’s ask Sarah Jeong.

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Still won’t get into Harvard. Wrong color.

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Well, you know, priorities. Sometimes the old ways are best.

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What does he know that you don’t?

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Isn’t it funny how close elections tend to turn up uncounted Democrat votes? (Yeah, I’m looking at YOU, Al Franken).

Can you remember any such case where the Republican candidate gained more than the Democrat from these Oh, look! votes?

I can’t.

Best description of Malcolm Gladwell I’ve ever seen.

Read it.

With responses ranging from “squirming in discomfort” to “completely discouraged from studying science and engineering,” a nationwide poll group of high school-age girls revealed Tuesday that the nation’s young women are being utterly creeped out by scientists twice their age constantly attempting to lure them into the study of science, technology, engineering, and math. “They’re always hanging around our classrooms and sending us targeted messages online—they sometimes even offer us money if we’re into their sort of thing. It’s so desperate,” said 13-year-old Tessa Levin, recounting the several times she and her friends had been approached by the type of much older chemical engineers or web developers who frequent science fairs with the hopes of involving girls in non-profit mentorship programs or computer programming sleepaway camps. “They always try to treat us like we’re special, but the truth is, they’ll go after pretty much any girl under 18 who can draw a simple parallel circuit diagram. They’re clearly trying to groom girls for their weird lifestyle from a young age. At first it was kind of funny, but the more we learn, the more it just seems gross.” The poll also revealed that some scientists also seem to have a thing for young black and latino boys.

From the Onion, of course. But you can see how easy it is to gin up a crisis by the way it’s reported.

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There goes Trump, kissing Putin’s ass again…. Will the collusion never stop?

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I’ve always wondered about that….

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I have an idea: Let’s put the border wall on the California border, and let them have all the illegal immigrants.

They wind up as Mexifornia and slide slowly into the sea, and the rest of us go on our way. Win-win.

David Cole reminisces.

I recall one black classmate telling me she’d finally “figured out” what this Jew thing is all about: “You guys just wear the cross, but without the little man on it, because you don’t think Jesus is the savior. But we Christians wear the little man because we believe in him.”

Bless her heart, at least she tried.

…

The point I wanted to make is that if you’re a typical American Jew, the gentiles in your life almost certainly know what a Jew is, and they’re properly respectful. Jews don’t like moving in circles where that’s not the case. And frankly, I think that’s a mistake. Whether it’s spending time in the darkest corners of inner-city black America, or in a Mexican slum, every Jew needs the occasional reminder that to a lot of people in the world, we’re not just “nuthin’ special,” we’re worse—we’re white.

Read it.

Lest we wander too far afield, here, let us get back to our roots.

Kevin Williamson scratches his head.

What is it that Paul Manafort is charged with again? So far, the prosecution seems to be trying him for the crime of being a rich a**hole with bad taste.

Or having been. I take it his finances have declined.

Much is being made of Manafort’s shopping addiction: this expensive suit, that expensive ostrich-skin jacket, etc. (Yes, you’d think a guy who spent like that on clothes would have a better wristwatch.) My understanding is that he’s charged with getting his money badly, not spending it badly. But I’m no lawyer, I suppose.

If bad fashion choices were a crime, Hillary would have been behind bars years ago.

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American culture rules.

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However much people have complained about Trump’s handling of foreign affairs, nobody has expelled a U.S. Ambassador and frozen trade with the U.S.

Looks as if the orange-haired guy beats the woke metrosexual when it comes to government.

Just sayin’.