Read it.

Bernie Sanders is God’s gift to the Republican party. Long may he wave.

Read it.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been on the Supreme Court since 1993. She is experiencing a period of pop culture notoriety few justices–even Supreme Court justices–ever enjoy, no matter how impactful their work might be. As a feminist icon at home in the politics of the Left, she now graces t-shirts, coffee mugs, and dorm rooms under her catchy moniker: the Notorious RBG. She’s also the subject of a glossy documentary, which I decided to see with a way-more-progressive friend in the week of its release to the big screen.

Movies involving Supreme Court Justices, according to the Narrative, must be about Minorities, specifically Minorities Who Agree With Us.

• Thurgood Marshall (right-thinking black)? Check. (Separate But Equal)
• Clarence Thomas (wrong-thinking black)? Of course not.
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg (right-thinking woman)? Check. (RBG)
• Sandra Day O’Connor, the First Woman On The Court (wrong-thinking woman)? Of course not.

I despise Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the same reason I despise John McCain: They accomplished great things, and if they had stopped there, they would be worthy of praise; unfortunately, they continued on and leveraged their rightful glory into activities that were damaging to our society and our culture, and that puts them squarely on the side of Evil. Both of them get to wear a Saruman mask for the rest of eternity.

A common meme on Social Media, I’m told, is ‘You can’t spell Truth without Ruth’. Yeah, well, you can’t spell Ruthless without Ruth, either, nor can you spell Bader without Bad. (The problem with memes is that more than one can play that game.)

ZMan reviews the culture.

Way back before the 2016 election really got started, I recall watching National Review’s David French learn on twitter what the word “cuckservative” meant. It was an amusing thing to watch as he went back and forth with some alt-right types. I could tell he was feeling like a cool kid picking up slang from the in-crowd on the playground. Then he realized that the “cuck” they were referring to was him. He then set off blocking half the internet. It was an amusing example of just how isolated these people are from us.

The chattering classes are supposed to be the interface between the Cloud People and the Dirt People. Before the explosion of mass media, the chattering skulls would go on the three Sunday chat shows to tell us what to think, while pretending to tell us what our rulers were thinking. Usually, these people had a column in one of the big city broadsheets or they were a “reporter” in Washington. This worked as the Dirt People had nothing against which to compare it and we never got to see these people outside of their roles.

These are the people I talk about when I talk about the Crust.

They tell me this is fun but I just don’t see it.

The New York Times notices.

Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”

I was meeting with Sam Harris, a neuroscientist; Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital; the commentator and comedian Dave Rubin; and their spouses in a Los Angeles restaurant to talk about how they were turned into heretics. A decade ago, they argued, when Donald Trump was still hosting “The Apprentice,” none of these observations would have been considered taboo.

Today, people like them who dare venture into this “There Be Dragons” territory on the intellectual map have met with outrage and derision — even, or perhaps especially, from people who pride themselves on openness.

Read it.

I don’t even know where to start to comment on this.

I’ve shared a place of employment with a few of those.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I wasn’t.

Read it.

I doubt that he regrets it for a second.

Read it.

Apparently the middle and working class are moving out, and the rich and illegal are moving in.

The top recipient state for the low and middle-income people leaving California is Texas. Liberals who claim to be on the side of the poor and middle class fall suddenly mute when it is pointed out that when poor and middle-class working people vote with their feet, they vote for a deep red state that liberals deplore.

The point is clear: California is now just a playground for rich and affluent professionals, and a lower class that cuts their lawns and cleans their kitchens.

ZMan has some shrewd things to say about what’s going on.

The on-going investigation into FBI shenanigans trundles on and it is easy to be a bit cynical about the whole thing. It’s clear that the DOJ and FBI are stalling, hoping the Democrats take the House thus relieving them of their duties to Congress. The modern habit of the Washington elite giving themselves a pass for their bad behavior, should lead sensible people to assume nothing comes of this. After all, it involves some of the biggest players in the semi-permanent Washington ruling class and they are above the law.

On the other hand, the list of people who tangled with Trump and then came to a bad end is long enough now to think it is not a coincidence. The mass media and the NeverTrump loons like to paint the guy as a buffoon, but he is a very savvy political athlete. What makes it work for Trump is that when guys like Eric Schneiderman go up in flames, it looks like Trump was not involved, but curiously prescient. The fact is, Trump plays rough and the people in the FBI scandal have every reason to fear retribution from him.

That’s the thing with Trump. He is a genuine politician, who does not have his head in the clouds or frets about getting a little dirty in a street fight. This is something we have not seen on the Right in national politics since forever. Reagan, on occasion, would throw some sharp elbows, but all of his worshipers since then have either confined themselves to the world of forms or found a reason why their principles prevented them from getting into the fight. The result has been a once sided drubbing of the Right by the Left.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

It’s not as if there were other demands on your time.

Read it.

But you have to bear in mind that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in his first year in office.

Just bear that in mind.

Absolutely nothing.

“On the Internet, nobody knows your website is a dog.” — Mark Seidenberg, Language at the Speed of Sight

Read it.

Well, you know, these things happen, You have to admit that they kinda look alike.

Owners grew suspicious when animal showed talent for walking on two legs.

I’ll bet they did.

Read it.

But you have to bear in mind that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his first year in office.

Just bear that in mind.

Absolutely nothing.

Read it.

Today, spin classes, artisanal food, and the college application process have replaced Sunday promenades, evening lectures, and weekly salons. But make no mistake, they serve the same purpose: transforming class privilege into individual virtue, thereby shoring up social dominance.

Progressives as the new Puritans, Hipsters as the new Victorians — everything old is new again.

Current exercise trends, like hot yoga, spin, and CrossFit, all demonstrate a commitment to self-denial and self-discipline, values much praised by the Victorians. Marathon running has become the ultimate signifier: competitors can post photos on social media to prove to everyone that they have tortured their bodies in a highly virtuous — and not at all kinky — fashion.

This seeps over into everyday activities as well. Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods are filled with people dressed in workout gear with no sweat in sight. This clothing marks its wearers as the type of people who care for their bodies, even when they aren’t exercising. Yoga pants and running shoes display virtue just as clearly as the nineteenth-century wives’ corseted dresses did.

Being fit now indexes class, saturating both fitness and food culture. As calories have become cheaper, obesity has changed from being a sign of wealth to a sign of moral failure. Today, being unhealthy functions as a hallmark of the poor’s cupidity the same way working-class sexual mores were viewed in the nineteenth century.

There is no such thing as ‘capitalism’.

Let me repeat that.

There is no such thing as ‘capitalism’.

‘Capitalism’ is a term created by Marxists in order conveniently to tag and condemn people that they disagree with. This is a well-worn tool in the Marxist belt; everything is ideological, so everything must be an ‘-ism’ because everything has an implicit ideological agenda. Hence Marxist writings are full of such terms as Revisionism and Deviationism and Trotskyism — even Stalinism fits this template, when it came time to turn their backs on him. (This Alinskyish tagging has a long history. Terms like ‘black market’, ‘price gouging’, ‘profiteering’, ‘windfall profits’ etc. are the spoor of people trying to get a rhetorical armlock on their political opponents.)

But in order to be an ‘-ism’, something must have an ideological component (think ‘environmentalism’), and there is simply no ideological component to ‘capital’ (even though most people use the term ‘capitalism’ as if there were).

Marx himself didn’t use ‘capitalism’ but he did use ‘capital’, and he used it in a very specific and restricted sense: To refer to the machines that were used to produce mass-produced goods during the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, the distinguishing characteristic of which was that such machines were owned by someone other than the people who operated them. Prior to industrialization (a more accurate term for which would be ‘automation’), workers typically owned their own tools — think blacksmith, weaver, carpenter, mason — so there was no separation between ‘labor’ and ‘the means of production’. That separation came about during industrialization, and one might with good reason say that the use of such automation is the defining characteristic of ‘industrialization’.

Here we get into a vocabulary problem. ‘Manufacture’ strictly means ‘making by hand’, but everybody has carried the term forward to refer to things that are made by automated processes as well, which confuses things. A better term for the latter would be artifacture, and I hereby invent that word to make the distinction clearer.

A Capitalist, for Marx, was the guy who provided the machines necessary for artifacture, and hired laborers to operate those machines. These laborers may or may not have been sufficiently skilled to make the product the Old Fashioned Way — somebody who ran a power loom would not necessarily be a skilled weaver (although he might be, coincidentally). To Marx, stuck in his Labor Theory of Value, the existence of a Capitalist, who would take the profit from production and give only part of it to the worker involved, was therefore screwing the worker out of the fruits of his labor. (Don’t get me started on the stupidity of the Labor Theory of Value.) Therefore, in Marxist terms, a Capitalist was a Bad Guy by definition, an ‘exploiter’ (Marxists love to use that word), and deserved any bad thing that happened to him, such as Communists stealing his property.

Unfortunately, since Marxists wield intellectual clout out of all proportion to their actual ideas, the term ‘capitalism’ has become the de facto standard way of referring to our modern industrialized economy. But even a moment’s reflection will reveal that artifacture, far from being an expression of a particular ideology, is merely a necessary stage on the road from small-scale production to industrialized mass production (indeed, artifacture is the very cornerstone of mass production), and has nothing to do with politics at all. Even the old Soviet system, where the ‘people’ (i.e. the government) owned the ‘means of production’ (the machine tools), was ‘capitalist’ in the Marxist sense, the difference being that the government, rather than individuals, were the Capitalists.

But this confusion also leads to ‘capitalism’ getting tied up with notions of private property and freedom of markets and so forth that, strictly speaking, have nothing to do with who owns the ‘means of production’. This confusion has even worked its way down to the Underclass. If you ever watch the movie WOODSTOCK, one of the announcements made from the stage during the event is to the effect that somebody out in the audience had his hamburger stand burn down and ‘if you don’t think that capitalism is all that weird, you might help the guy out and buy some of his hamburgers’ — whereas, in fact, a hamburger stand is the precise opposite of what a Marxist would call ‘capitalism’, because the ‘worker’ owns the tools he is using to produce the food. That’s the sort of confused modern situation we live in, and even respected academics who ought to know better use the term ‘capitalism’ where ‘automation’ or ‘industrialization’ would be more accurate. We live in an intellectually lazy time.

So the next time you hear somebody use the term ‘capitalism’, you can now explain to that ignorant dimwit why capitalism is a myth.

Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist, uncovers a problem.

IN our society, cars receive considerable attention and study — whether the subject is buying and selling them, the traffic congestion they cause or the dangerous things we do in them, like texting and talking on cellphones while driving. But we haven’t devoted nearly enough thought to how cars are usually deployed — namely, by sitting in parking spaces.

Is this a serious economic issue? In fact, it’s a classic tale of how subsidies, use restrictions, and price controls can steer an economy in wrong directions. Car owners may not want to hear this, but we have way too much free parking.

Severian is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Karl Marx’s greatest trick was gussying up his bargain-bin, Hegel-lite, junk philosophy as “science.”  With the stroke of a pen, grave character defects were transformed into high virtues — envy and hatred were now just a dispassionate analysis of the dialectical materialist Forces of History, and ever since, Leftists have claimed that their every opinion is a scientific fact.  They’re not just spouting whatever bullshit will let them get their momentary virtue fix; they’re telling it like it is.

The problem is, of course, science doesn’t work like that… and not even liberals can deny it anymore.  So what comes next?  They’re not going to give up self-congratulation — that smugly superior smirk is the only thing holding their faces together.  They’ll have to find some new way to be comprehensively Better Than Us.

They’ve had this problem before. Prior to WWII, ‘progressives’ were all about eugenics and involuntary sterilization of  ‘deplorables’, all because Science was on their side. (Too bad that Nazis ruined it for them.)

Hey, these things happen..,,

Read it.

Read it.

The recently announced departure of New York City-based Alliance Bernstein for Nashville, taking more than 1,000 jobs with it, suggests a potential loosening of New York’s iron grip on the financial-services industry. Yet the move reflects a longer evolution that has seen financial firms leave not only New York but also other traditional centers—what one historian calls the “Yankee Empire”—that for two centuries dominated banking, insurance, and investment capital.

This process is driven, in large part, by cost considerations. The cost of living in Nashville is just 58 percent that of New York, an important differential for younger workers looking to buy houses and start families, and one likely to widen with the new federal limits on state and local tax deductions. In addition, pension-driven fiscal realities may force states like New York, Illinois, and California to keep raising revenues.

Other forces are at work, too, notably demographic shifts to Sunbelt states and the growing influence of technology companies on finance. Jobs in industries like information technology and business and professional services are fleeing the old centers outside of New York, which is holding its own better than the rest. But the stagnation, and even decline, of financial-services jobs, at a time of high profits, represents a serious threat to regions losing out on job creation in these other sectors as well.

Read it.

Report from the field about how raising the minimum wage encourages automation and discourages employing low-skilled workers.

Women and minorities hardest hit, etc. etc.

Read it.

Jeez. There’s no pleasing some people.

Read it.

Damned reality! Can’t it get with the Narrative?

Read it.

But he does have the power to pull the U.S. out of it. Good luck to the rest of you

UPDATE: Now that Trump has pulled the US out, the Iran nuclear deal will eventually collapse – here’s why

Steve Sailer does a review.

You might assume that if race were an arbitrary social construct, then America would be beset by constant disputes over who qualifies to benefit from racial quotas. If race is all just Foucauldian mind games, then surely blacks must be getting exploited by whites, right?

And yet, Americans don’t actually have much trouble agreeing on who qualifies as black and who does not.

That is not widely understood, though. Like the dog that didn’t bark in the Sherlock Holmes story, it is hard to notice how limited in number are the controversies in the U.S. over whether some racial preference beneficiary is really black or not. (The most notorious one in recent decades was set in isolated Spokane.)

…

It would be interesting to see if anybody ever gets dropped from the ranks of African-American just because their ancestors kept marrying white people, as long as each person in the chain of descent identified as black. I’m not familiar with that ever happening.

Freeberg blows the whistle.

And — ya know what? It isn’t because of some revulsion impulse, as in “Ooh ick, they’re different from me, cooties!” I want to know if liberals were involved in this push-poll, or academic research, or survey, or such-and-such a “fact checking” web site, or “study.” I’m asking the question so I can figure out whether or not to take the findings with a large grain of salt. This is what we all should be doing.

I’m not the only one with the concern, after all. I think if we’re going to be honest about it, we all have doubts in the back of the mind when we hear “a study found.” We’ve just been conditioned over time to nurture some heady fear against asking the obvious question: Did the researchers know what they were going to “find” before they started doing any research?

We’ve also been conditioned not to notice the obvious, that liberals are the people who do exactly that. They “learn” what they want to “know.” You ever try telling them something they don’t? Give that a try, then come back here. I’ll wait.

Read it.

Got it in one, except that Jane never spent any time in the U.S. military.

Scott Adams: ‘The greatest untapped resource that black people have is that white people like to help.’

Read it.

The ‘sanctuary cities’ movement spawns a red-headed stepchild.

ZMan pulls back the curtain.

A famous line from the movie The Usual Suspects is “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Even after all these years, it turns up in comment sections and social media. It is a good line to have in mind when thinking about who is actually ruling over us. In America, our elites have spent a very long time convincing us that there are no elites. The fact is though, every society has an elite and it is usually a stable, semi-permanent one. The people in charge tend to stay in charge.

…

Of course the real reason elites tend to get what they want is they are better than the rest of us. They are smarter, better socialized and they have greater access to the stock of knowledge relevant to being in charge. Americans despise the idea of a ruling elite, so the people in charge spend a lot of time pretending they don’t exist. It’s why our form of democracy works so well. The people keep voting for different candidates, but the people in charge never change. That’s what we are seeing with Donald Trump right now.

Read it.

The way things looked twenty years ago.

Read it.

I’m sure the poachers will appreciate it.

Read it.

But I’m sure he doesn’t really mean it.

I’d leave too.

ZMan keeps his eyes on the prize.

One of the stranger bits of the current year is how people all over the ideological map are claiming to be “woke”, “aware” and “red-pilled” despite believing things that directly contradict things other “woke”, “aware” and “red-pilled” people believe. The millennial Jewish girl is woke about the patriarchy, while her last boyfriend is red-pilled on the JQ, mostly from having dated her. The concept, having clarity of “what’s really going on” used to be exclusive to conspiracy theorists, but now it is common in outsider politics.

The truth is, the truly woke understand that the current crisis is not a dispute between tribes or a dispute about facts. It is a moral war where one side controls the moral paradigm and imposes their will on the rest of us, in the teeth of objective reality. The current fight is about control of public morality, not public institutions. Facts and reason only play a supporting role in this fight. Being right on the facts helps win respect, thus giving one moral capital. The point of the game being to define public morality.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Think of it as evolution in action.