DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

We have seen the future, and it sucks.

Archive for the 'Think about it.' Category

Israel Picks Identity Over Democracy. More Nations May Follow.

23rd July 2018

Read it.

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”

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Car Ramming Incident Sparks 20-Man Street Brawl in Scotland

22nd July 2018

Read it.

The Scots are not to be messed with.

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Thought for the Day

22nd July 2018

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McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture?

21st July 2018

Read it.

Everything you need to know in one article.

If you ever win the lottery, don’t go there. Just … don’t.

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Psychedelics Promote Structural and Functional Neural Plasticity

21st July 2018

Read it.

So if you want a brain that can be molded like Play-doh, get tripping. The Democrats will thank you for it.

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Thought for the Day

21st July 2018

I love exercise. I can watch it all day.

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Russia! Russia! Russia!

21st July 2018

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The Robot Becky Menace

20th July 2018

Steve Sailer sounds the alarm.

As white people ever more often get hammered in the national media — with potential lifelong effects on their employability — for a single Type I (false alarm) error involving calling the cops on black people who turn out to be law-abiding, it’s only natural to look to Artificial Intelligence to get you out from under the vast amount of hatred hunting for Evil White People. “Hey, it wasn’t me who called the cops, it was the AI system!”

It turns out that Artificial Intelligence programs are designed to (shock) learn from experience.

And sometimes that ‘learning from experience’ causes them to profile black people as potential criminals.

This is the Blue Whale in the bathtub. For say, teenage males, the difference in criminal propensity between African-Americans and Asian-Americans is between one and two orders of magnitude. If you reduce AI’s dependence on “ethnicity, gender, income,” you are pretty much dead in the water when it comes to public safety, especially if “age” gets added to the list as another “sensitive attribute.” Everything else, such as measuring the body language of the individuals or their vocabularies, will have massive Disparate Impact problems.

Well, we can’t have that. Forget Science, we want Diversity! Even if we all get mugged and murdered because of it.

The problem is that when it comes to crime, reality is biased.

Reality is what sticks around even after you pretend it isn’t there.

UPDATE: Another Becky gets fired  Apparently natural intelligence is just as corrupt and wacist.

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Why I Don’t Buy Organic, and Why You Might Not Want to Either

20th July 2018

Read  it.

I don’t buy organic foods. In fact I specifically avoid doing so. It’s not my place to tell anyone else what to do, but I’d like to lay out three, seriously considered factors that have shaped my personal stance on organic:

  1. Informed confidence that we are safe buying “conventional” foods
  2. Recognizing that some of the best farming practices from an environmental perspectiveare not always allowed or practical under the organic rules
  3. An ethical problem with the tactics that some organic advocates and marketers employ which seriously misrepresents their “conventional” competition

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Tariffs China Imposes on Every Country

20th July 2018

Weighted Average Chinese Import Tariffs on Select Countries

Just in case you were wondering what all of the excitement was about.

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Australia Could Ask Potential Immigrants About Their Values

20th July 2018

Read it.

Ability to pick Foster’s out of a lineup will no doubt figure prominently.

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The Morning Rant

20th July 2018

Ace of Spades nails it.

“Ever since the election, I see these women on the news marching up and down and wearing their pink pussy hats and hollering obscenities and I think, what are they going to tell their daughters? They’ll have stories about the evil Trump and how awful everything was, and how he was Voldemort and Sauron and Satan all rolled into one, and their daughters will ask, well then, what did you do to fight this great evil, did you join the army or take up arms like they did in the American Revolution, or what? And the mothers will say, no, I jumped up and down and shouted that Trump was a Nazi while dressed as a giant twat.”

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Analyze This

20th July 2018

Scott Johnson at Powerline finds some hidden gems.

I’m not a big fan of Twitter but there are some people who can play it like a guitar.

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Thought for the Day

20th July 2018

Pearls Before Swine for Jul 12, 2018 Comic Strip

That’s certainly my idea of Paradise.

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MSNBC Worried Americans Might Think Capitalism ‘Is Working for Them’

19th July 2018

Read it.

Low unemployment and booming economy just might have that effect.

They are right to worry.

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Report: Democratic Alaska Candidate Has Never Visited the State

19th July 2018

Read it.

This is very curious.

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MS-13 Threatens the Legitimacy of Salvadoran Government

19th July 2018

Read it.

The ‘problem’ with MS-13 is the same as the ‘problem’ of the Yakuza in Japan: Both groups would effectively disappear if you just rounded up everyone with their distinctive tattoos and executed them. The reason the problem is a problem is that the people in charge aren’t willing to take the obvious action that would solve the problem.

This is a problem that all authorities, such as governments, have. Authorities have to abide by the rules; rule-breakers don’t feel obliged to do that. So long as the authority self-constrains by abiding by the rules, they are at a disadvantage.

This is why authoritarian and totalitarian regimes are always so apparently more orderly than others. Those in control of the regime only abide by the rules when they judge that it is to their advantage to do so. In the normal course of events, that is the case; most people are happier living under an authority that obeys the rules. If this rule-breaking is only indulged in when the group faces an existential threat by non-regime rule-breakers (‘criminals’), then most people will wring their hands and privately breathe a sigh of relief.

The difficulty arises when those in control of the regime don’t restrict themselves to breaking the rules only in the face of an existential threat, but whenever they feel like it; and that destabilizes the group as badly as, if not more so, than the existential-threat-group. Both the Nazis and the Communists run into this problem damned near every time. This is what gives rise to the term ‘kleptocracy’, which more often than not characterizes such regimes.

This is not a new problem — the Roman Republic died because there was no effective way to deal with an existential internal political threat other than by obviously breaking the rules; and the Roman Empire died  because this system eventually degenerated into one where the rules were defined as ‘whatever the people in charge want them to be’ (under the rationalization salus populi suprema lex, which begs the question of who defines what ‘salus’ means).

Modern societies try to avoid this problem through some combination of democracy and ‘checks & balances’. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Alexander Pope summed it up: ‘For forms of government, let fools contest; That which is best administered is best.’ No matter what the legal structure might be, if the people in charge of enforcing the rules just routinely ignore the rules, then you might just as well not have any rules, because the result is the same. So the key factor is the attitude of the people enforcing the rules. And that’s a cultural matter.

So the key is culture. My chief objection to Social Justice Warriors and their fellow travelers is that they feel perfectly justified in ignoring the rules when doing so helps them to attain their utopian end-state; they are the poster children for ‘the end justifies the means’. This is at odds with traditional American culture. That’s why it is perfectly accurate to characterize Social Justice Warriors as both unAmerican and anti-American (although of course they would deny it and really really feel offended by it, although distinguishing it from the myriad other things by which they are really really offended is often difficult).

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Scientists Say “Only a Few Millimetres Sea Level Rise” If Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapses

19th July 2018

Read it.

Guess it’s not that much of a problem, huh. Wonder why all the Chicken Littles are running around and shouting ‘OMG WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!’.

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U.S. Weekly Jobless Claims Hit More Than 48-and-a-half-year Low

19th July 2018

Read it.

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

Just bear that in mind.

Absolutely Nothing.

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Thought for the Day

19th July 2018

Unshelved comic strip for 7/11/2018

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Think Everyone Died Young in Ancient Societies? Think Again

18th July 2018

Read it.

There’s a thought for you: What would our child mortality rate look like if we were honest and included all of the aborted babies? What would that do to our life expectancy figures?

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Conservatives Believe Their Lives Are More Meaningful Than Liberals, Study Finds

18th July 2018

Read it.

That’s a no-brainer.

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Eating Processed Meats May ‘Increase Risk of Manic Episodes’, Study Finds

18th July 2018

Read it.

Well, that explains a lot.

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The Left Devours Its Children: MP calls Jeremy Corbyn Racist in Furious Commons Row as Labour Redefines Anti-Semitism

18th July 2018

Read it.

The problem with being a radical is that there is always somebody more radical than you.

UPDATE: Jeremy Corbyn called ‘f****** racist and antisemite’ by Labour MP Dame Margaret Hodge

UPDATE: Media Yawn as Top Liberal Leader in Europe Denounced as Jew-Hating Bigot

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Thought for the Day

18th July 2018

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In Our Fast-Paced World I’m Increasingly Drawn to Places That Stay the Same

18th July 2018

Read it.

Hey, me too.

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Thought for the Day

17th July 2018

Trump - honest time cover.jpg

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Chinese Muslims Fear Communist Government Will Wipe Out Islam

16th July 2018

Read it.

Better people than them have tried. I doubt they can do it even in just China.

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Thought for the Day

16th July 2018

trump - head exploding.jpg

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California Democratic Party Abandons Incumbent Feinstein, Endorses Opponent

16th July 2018

Read it.

The problem with being the radical party is that sometimes the radicals take it seriously and think that the apparatchiks really mean it.

Can’t say that I’d be sorry to see the last of Feinstein. Pelosi next, maybe?

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Ice People (Including Bruce Lee) Under the Southern Cross

15th July 2018

John Derbyshire is always worth reading. (See link in upper right corner).

We weren’t designed for these steamy climates. We flourish best in the shady temperate woodlands and windswept grasslands far from the equator. Leave the sun-baked deserts and muggy, buggy rain forests to the Sun People.

Though I live in Texas, my proper environment is New England. I don’t live there for the same reason I don’t live in California: It’s crawling with communists. (I hate communists more than I hate fire ants.)

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Thought for the Day: Bernie Sanders to Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez

15th July 2018

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How Alpacas Became the Latest Wedding Trend

15th July 2018

Read it.

I am not making this up.

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Kickball for Toffs: Why Do Sports Invented by WASPs Rule the World?

15th July 2018

Steve Sailer jumps on board the soccer wagon.

Games such as soccer, rugby, American football, and Australian rules football started out in England as mob football, a pretty much ruleless contest played in a town’s high street with all the lads from one end of town vying against against all the lads from the other end of town, such as the the Up’ards and the Down’ards of Ashbourne, to move the ball to distant goals, sometimes miles apart. These games were kind of a cross between a modern rugby scrum and a mass migration.

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One-Fifth Of North Carolina Students Aren’t Going to Traditional Public Schools

15th July 2018

Read it.

Given the ongoing degeneration of government schools these days, that’s a good sign.

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Trade Deficit Confusion Is Bipartisan

14th July 2018

Read it.

The phrase ‘balance of trade deficit’ don’t mean shit.

Worrying about it is like worrying that your checking account is out of money because you’ve run out of checks.

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Thought for the Day

14th July 2018

Pearls Before Swine for Jul 7, 2018 Comic Strip

I said it first.

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NATO

13th July 2018

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Thought for the Day

13th July 2018

Non Sequitur for Jul 7, 2018 Comic Strip
Think of it as evolution in action.

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‘We’re Actually Screwed for Generations’: Cable Media Shed Bitter Tears Over SCOTUS

12th July 2018

Read it.

I’d certainly like to think so. But I’ve been disappointed before.

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Our Future?

12th July 2018

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Reciprocity Is the Method to Trump’s Madness

12th July 2018

Victor Davis Hanson explains it all to you.

Columbo comments:

So … there is a new sheriff in town. He does not walk ‘softly’. He carries a big stick. He isn’t diplomatic. He speaks candidly, which makes many cringe. He’s the stereotype of the “Ugly American” to half the world and it’s best defender to the other half. We are seeing some titanic shifts in the global world order as a result. The objective is more symmetry, a more even playing field and some new “heartland winners and coastal losers”. To me, this shift feels good. This shift feels right. This shift feels long over due. As VDH points out, if the global world order had not been so asymmetrical over these past decades, we probably wouldn’t have had President Donald J. Trump.

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What’s the Most Liberal Car?

12th July 2018

Read it. And vote for your favorite.

I’m inclined toward the Toyota Smugmobile, since it has that Georgetown mystique.

I understand that they used to come with an Obama sticker standard, but that’s probably just a rumor.

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Thought for the Day

12th July 2018

Heh. You first.

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The Kavanaugh Paper Flow

11th July 2018

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Wisdom From Twitter

11th July 2018

Charlie Kirk:

If you think your life sucks, just imagine being a Democrat – your spokesperson rotates between a 28 year old socialist, a low IQ con artist, a Marxist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union, a criminal who lost the most winnable election of our lifetime, and a fake Native American.

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Honeymooning Couple Collide in Fatal Zip Line Accident

11th July 2018

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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The Strange Career of White Privilege

11th July 2018

Victor Davis Hanson takes a look.

The bizarre academic term “intersectionality” likewise followed, suggesting that gays, feminists, and minorities were united in focusing on supposed white-privilege pathologies. Yet no one quite new how to calibrate all the competing claims of victimhood by race, class, gender, and sexual orientation — as if a white transgendered actor should merit more grievance points than a black impoverished lesbian versus an Egyptian immigrant female CEO or a gay Latino policeman. Such musings are not caricatures, but the logic of the preambles to the usual progressive politicking, when a politico such as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama did not welcome a crowd as a collective of Americans but ticked off all the various identity-politics groups present, all with claims against the majority.

Unfortunately, “diversity” was never exactly defined — and perhaps could not be. The ad hoc buzzword now referred to all white people on one side who enjoyed supposedly innate skin-color-based privilege, set against almost everyone else — at least sort of.

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Variety Reveals Beto O’Rourke Treks to Hollywood for Campaign Cash

10th July 2018

Read it.

Hey, that’s where the money is.

Beto:

Bevo:

The choice is clear.

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Yale Prof: Brett Kavanaugh Is an Originalist Like Justice Clarence Thomas

10th July 2018

Read it.

Akhil was a straight-shooter when I knew him as an undergraduate, and I doubt that he has changed much since then.

I could certainly live with another Clarence Thomas on the Court.

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