Tyler Cowan is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.

One factor that he overlooks, unusual for an economist, is that tech has political problems for the same reason that everyone has political problems — people are so used to using government power as a stick to beat their enemies that everybody winds up covered in bruises. The way to reduce the scope of ‘political problems’ is to reduce the ability of governments to cause or exacerbate problems, and that means reducing the power of government. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening.

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Today’s @realDonaldTrump approval ratings among black voters: 29%

This time last year: 15% http://bit.ly/preztrack  @POTUS @realDonaldTrump

Damn straight. But, hey, Democrats.

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Our favourite identity thief Peter Gleick, who stole documents from Heartland while serving as chairman of the AGU ethics committee, has written a deliciously confused piece in which he urges people not to give up, despite the inevitability of serious climate change.

The situation is hopeless, but you can still do your part.

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There’s an image that won’t leave you soon.

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Belgium has no reason to exist as a separate country. It’s basically a relic of the wars of religion that were over by 1700. Now that animosity has abated between Catholics and Calvinists, the northern part ought to be part of the Netherlands and the southern part belongs in France.

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Doing well by doing good.

Whenever a government establishes a ‘program’, the first thing that happens is that bottom-feeders congregate with the thought ‘I’m going to get some of that free government money for myself’, and the rest is history. Cronyism is one of the cornerstones of political corruption, and elected officials soon realize that buying votes with Other People’s Money is one of the surest ways to guarantee a long tenure.

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Well, what else can they do? They have no skills with which to get a Real Job. You will seek in vain in the job listings for ‘Wanted: Former Regime Apparatchik. Must be able to look busy, push paper, and collude in government oppression. Equal Opportunity Employer. No white people need apply.’

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Or you could just avoid the whole problem by avoiding The Trail. The choice is yours.

Good advice.

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When you depend on a coalition of fringes sometimes the fringes get in each others’ way.

Ideology is all well and good but Unions are in it for the MONEY.

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

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

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My spirit animal is a badger.

I’d have thought that Hillary’s was a slug but that’s just me.

And those are the best kind.

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Pop quiz: Find the black woman in this picture:

For reference, here is a picture of an actual black woman:

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I am bored, and therefore you must join me in boredom.

Imagine being Alec Baldwin. That’s how bored I am.

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The ongoing uproar after the election of Donald Trump led the sociologist James Davison Hunter to reflect in a fresh way on the engines driving political conflict and social division. Back in the early 1990s, he popularized the phrase “culture war,” the now-indispensable term to describe the struggle for the political and cultural power to define the future of the United States. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, he sees that this struggle has “evolved and metastasized into a class war.” Of course, the culture war has always been a class war. Thirty years ago, when Hunter first began studying it, the culture war was a fight within the broad American middle class, a contest over which of its wings would prevail over the other. Then as now, it pitted a new, economically ascendant class of professionals and “creative industry” managers against a downwardly mobile bloc of “old economy” elites and the middle and working classes tied to them. Our politics are enflamed because this struggle is ongoing, and the stakes are high. It is a battle not just for prestige but for supremacy and rule in every domain of social life—culture, economy, state.

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In learning a language, the chief difficulty consists in making acquaintance with every idea which it expresses, even though it should use words for which there is no exact equivalent in the mother tongue; and this often happens. In learning a new language a man has, as it were, to mark out in his mind the boundaries of quite new spheres of ideas, with the result that spheres of ideas arise where none were before. Thus he not only learns words, he gains ideas too.

This is nowhere so much the case as in learning ancient languages, for the differences they present in their mode of expression as compared with modern languages is greater than can be found amongst modern languages as compared with one another. This is shown by the fact that in translating into Latin, recourse must be had to quite other turns of phrase than are used in the original. The thought that is to be translated has to be melted down and recast; in other words, it must be analyzed and then recomposed. It is just this process which makes the study of the ancient languages contribute so much to the education of the mind.

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In a summer when the news is urgent, relentless, and horrifying, royal-watching is a welcome diversion. And the show hasn’t been this good in years. What is it about Meghan Markle, the new Duchess of Sussex, that has unleashed such a frenzy of decoding? Why do people project so many different meanings onto her, as if she were a living Rorschach test, begging to be interpreted and analyzed?

Well, for one thing, she is one of us. Or more nearly one of us than anyone who’s ever entered the royal family. She’s American, biracial, self-made, a grown-up. She’s had a career. She’s not like Diana Spencer or Kate Middleton, who were unknown before they emerged as princesses-to-be, appearing as public figures at the same moment that they began to disappear into the mystery of royal life. Meghan was already visible, and we’re hoping she’ll stay that way. We know the sound of her voice — she’s been an actress, she’s written a blog, she’s expressed opinions about feminism and race. We want her to keep talking.

I question whether the Boston Globe would be quite so comfortable with her ‘keeping talking’ if her expressed oppinions about ‘feminiism and race’ hadn’t been conventionally ‘progressive’. It is de rigeur these days for anyone who has any possible whiff of Upper Class about themselves to be anodyne in public and not express any sentiment that Elton John or Beyoncé would find objectionable. This is especially true of modern ‘royalty’, and the handcuffs are especially tight for those who marry into royalty, such as Catherine Middleton and Meghan Markle. Every photo must be ‘heartwarming’. Every word must exhibit a bleeding heart. Every virtue must be signaled, although not to excess, of course. The Crust look to them to provide the glossy overcoat that allows their precious moral superiority to shine and gleam and serve as a beacon to those who, not having millions in the bank and instant celebrity, must row their own boat as they make their way in the world.

There is no substantive difference between the Queen’s kids and Barack Obama’s kids, between the Duke of York’s kids and AlGore’s kids, between a Montbatten-Windsor and a Kennedy. None can be allowed any degree of intellectuality or to express an original thought (even if an original thought would dare intrude; against that horrible happenstance they have been carefully programmed). None can be allowed to hold a Real Job, one where you make a useful thing and sell it to a willing buyer, meet a payroll and build a business; what they do is modern clerisy work, preferably for some level of government or (ideally) a fashionable foundation.

We want her to show the world, in the summer of 2018, that not all Americans are boorish jerks.

And that, of course, is the chief fear of the Boston Globe, and those who take their cues from its pages.

Our ruling class is becoming overbred, like certain breeds of dogs, and will eventually be fit only to be carried around in a purse and handed off to minions when they become inconvenient.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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These cobbled-together coalitions always break up when the time comes, as it always does, that one special interest group’s interests clash with another’s. We saw this when the FDR Democrat coalition came unglued when Reagan was elected, and wise Republicans have been picking off the outliers every election since then.

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We have the technology — whether you like it or not.

Thank God cash still always works.

Want to cause trouble? Pay in dollar coins.

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She’s got grandkids? That’s a scary thought….

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Just let me add: STFU and Go Away.

Think of what CNN would make of that.

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What happens when a society with a penchant for the cosmetic meets a medium dominated by it?

…

The irony here should be apparent: we were not so much being fed means to become creative or passionate as we were being shown ways to signal that we were either one?—?or better, both. It didn’t appear to matter whether or not we’d ever truly experienced what it was to feel the rush that accompanies creativity, or the bliss that is the complete lack of need for approval when immersed in the throes of passion. All that mattered was that cosmetically, it looked like we had. It was, in many ways, sickening; for years, we existed full of nothing but shortcuts to anything worthwhile; everything with an agenda, and never your own. It was also simply economics; in a society as massive and complex as ours has become, institutions that rely on vetting out the best talent ?—? colleges, companies, banks ?—? use signals of reality, as opposed to reality itself, to determine who makes the cut.

Hence the phenomenon of Virtue Signaling.

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I explained to the others in my little band of activists that I looked at all laws that restricted freedom with a view to the impact it would have in a worst case scenario of our government run amok.  Will this law make it difficult or impossible to protect innocent life from a government intent on their imprisonment or death?  Although I pretty much made everything up on the spot I told them I called this test my “Jews In The Attic Test”.  Furthermore I told them that if it fails this test no further discussion is really needed, the law must be opposed in the most vigorous manner possible.

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Funny thing about that, most of them showed up on TV.

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Don’t often see that happen.

I’ve lived in cities whose city government was that lazy.

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The ruling issued by a three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco, came a year after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to rule either way on the carrying of guns in public.

The 9th Circuit is the most left-leaning appellate court in the U.S. Not coincidentally, it is the most reversed appellate court in the U.S.

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What to choose, what to choose….

Just to help out: The Ocasio-Cortez Highlight Reel

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But just remember that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his term in office.

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

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

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

We report, you decide.

Welcome to my world.

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

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

MORE: North Korea’s ‘dismantling of ballistic missile test site facilities’ draws wary response from experts

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How do you kill the goose that lays the golden eggs — or golden arches, in this case? You increase mandated minimum wage to the point that one of the greatest engines of entry-level job formation in history, McDonald’s Corporation, finds it cost-effect to replace unskilled kids with machines.

The McDonald’s just up the street from my house is in the process of remodeling. Presumably this is the reason.

I’m looking forward to using it.

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If Trump were really Hitler, Hollywood would be on the planes to Gitmo.

I’m kinda torn between Rob Reiner and Alec Baldwin.

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When human passions are released, however, writes Babbitt, “what emerges in the real world is not the mythical will to brotherhood, but the ego and its fundamental will to power.” The will to power often presents itself in palatable ways, replacing traditional notions of virtue with what Babbitt calls “a sort of parody of Christian charity.” The Romantic is drawn not to humanism but to emotional humanitarianism. Believing himself to be blameless, the Romantic locates the source of society’s evils in everybody else. The Romantic humanitarian, Babbitt argues, will always go around pointing out the specks in his neighbors’ eyes while a plank burdens his own. Rousseau, the chief example of this tendency, wrote a 500-page book on how to raise and educate children, after leaving five of his own to a foundling hospital.

Precisely so. This is the disease that we all, to a greater or lesser extent, are fighting.

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That reminds me — I have to go take a nap.

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And the Eurocrats are clutching their pearls.

(As is, of course, the New York Times, although in a quieter way. [cue ominous theremin music].)

Steve Sailer points out the flaws: Two definitions of “democracy:” “rule of majority” vs. “rule by the Democratic Party”