Steve Sailer looks at David Reich’s new book.

Since then, an endless stream of anthropologists have assured us that race is just a social construct, that ancient peoples made pots not war, that Aryan conquests in India and Europe were Nazi delusions, that the caste system was imposed on the egalitarian Indians by British colonialists, and many other agreeable suppositions.

As Fitzgerald’s friend Hemingway ended The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

But now the brilliant Harvard geneticist David Reich has published a bombshell scientific book, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, whose revelations would have been found congenial by a smarter version of Buchanan (such as Fitzgerald himself).

The Antiplanner points out some inconvenient truth.

The Antiplanner is frequently reminded of H.L. Mencken’s statement that “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem: neat, plausible, and wrong.” Millennials, for example, blame baby boomers for ruining the world. Most of the mistakes that baby boomers made were in adopting simple and plausible but wrong solutions to complex problems. Now the millennials are promoting their own simplistic and wrong solutions to the problems created by the baby boomer’s errors.

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Here’s a question for you: In 1950, would it have been possible for anyone to know all of the goods and services that we would have at our disposal 50 years later?

For example, who would have thought that we’d have cellphones, Bluetooth technology, small powerful computers, LASIK, and airplanes with 525-passenger seating capacity? This list could be extended to include thousands of goods and services that could not have been thought of in 1950.

In the face of this gross human ignorance, who should be in control of precursor goods and services? Seeing as it’s impossible for anyone to predict the future, any kind of governmental regulation should be extremely light-handed, so as not to sabotage technological advancement.

Compounding our ignorance is the fact that much of what we think we know is not true. Scientometrics is the study of measuring and analyzing science, technology, and innovation. It holds that many of the “facts” you know have a half-life of about 50 years. Let’s look at a few examples.

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This hasn’t gotten as much discussion as it deserves.

The left’s favorite bit of language manipulation is the inventing (or repurposing) of words and phrases that function as vague, nefarious placeholders for their grand political ambitions. (Think of them as linguistic Trojan Horses). The idea is to introduce a concept into mainstream thought using a word and phrases that, quite literally, have no fixed meaning. In fact, the more nebulous the term the better. Once this word or phrase becomes embedded in public discourse, it becomes the vehicle for a host of far-left progressive agendas. The lack of a concrete meaning makes the appropriated word or phrase ideal for whatever is currently in vogue with the left.

The most notable example of this technique is the infamous “social justice,” a word phrase that literally means whatever the hell you want it to mean. The social justice movement is in one way bone-jarringly idiotic. How can so many people latch on to a phrase that has no concrete meaning? In another way, the fact that progressives have been able to infect so many universities, public schools, and well-meaning people with the social justice virus is a marvel of political engineering.

My favorite leftist verbal sneak is the term ‘capitalism’. Coined by Marx to spit-tag the system he thought he was fighting against and picked up by people who ought to know better on the free-market side because they didn’t have anything to use in its place, it doesn’t describe anything in the real world and is useful only for the creation of hate-speech against people who think they ought to be able to do what they want rather than what the government wants.

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Let’s see whether any of the Usual Suspects chases the red dot.

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Which was the plan all along.

The proglodytes think they’re fooling people but they’re not.

Indeed not.

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The problem with democracy is that by its very nature the “inventors” tend to be philistines (for example, that grotesque trio: Zuckerberg, Gates, and Bezos), money-grubbers, and cowards, happy to truckle to the diversity rabble and other low types, since there is such a good living and so much social distinction in that. As with the preservation of high culture, it takes a truly elitist social order and an aristocratic tradition to produce statesmen such as those Great Dead White Men, America’s Founding Fathers.

Steve Sailer keeps finding Reality intruding on the media.

Here’s a brand new academic paper that makes the same point I immediately made back in 2013 when the New York Times first trumpeted Raj Chetty’s map of where there is high upward mobility of income: it didn’t look like a map of respectable regional attributes, such as a lack of Sprawl. Instead, it looked like a Map of Where the Blacks Aren’t.

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You knew it had to happen.

Next step: Suing Budweiser for pretending to be beer at all.

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I guess the Jews have gone back to being not-white people again.

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Couldn’t hurt. It would keep out some of the riff-raff, anyway.

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How about that Global Warming, eh?

I’m still not going to be happy until NYC is three feet under water.

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I don’t blame him — even thinking about Hillary makes me squirm.

I have a question: Find the black man in this picture:

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

Makes sense to me.

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Can Global Warming be far behind?

Every time you see a bunch of Chicken Littles running around yelling the world is doomed, women and minorities hardest hit, etc., etc., remember that every single one of such disaster predictions has fizzled out. Every. Single. One.

Doug Kimball thinks it may be a Bad Thing.

From the employee’s perspective, this is not a positive trend. Mobility within an outsourced position is limited. You are hired to work in a specific company at a specific job, often reporting up to an employee of the company who has no authority or inclination to help your job trajectory. Outsourced staff are transformed into hyper-specialized clerks and workers and stuck in those positions with little leverage. There is no longer advancement or mobility as you are not an employee. It is not the traditional American “up or out” system. It has been replaced with the “do or done” system.

The old American idea of advancement from the mailroom to a window office is becoming impossible. Ambitious people now must migrate to rise as opportunities within companies have been eroded substantially by outsourcing trends. That’s probably ok as the half-life of corporations these days, where mergers, acquisitions, downsizings, reorganizations, consolidations, divestitures, and old-fashioned bankruptcies are as common as the holiday sale, is measured in dog years.

Since this is St Paddy’s day, I’ll quote a proverb much beloved by my Grandma Brennan: ‘God never closes a door but he opens a window.’ This trend may be bad news for ‘traditional’ employees, but it provides multiple opportunities for entrepreneurs to start up their own outsourcing services. It is quite common in tech fields for employees to think “These guys have their heads up their asses. It’s all corporate politics. I can do it for them and save them money.” And off they go. For a company to be working in an area and not appreciate what’s going on is legendary; think of Xerox PARC. Sure, it doesn’t provide an opportunity for employees who’d rather remain employees than go into business for  themselves (Me! Me!) but they can Go Along With their colleagues who are striking out. This has the potential to bring the Startup Disruption Mindset to more areas than just tech. Let’s see how it works out.

Troparion for St Patrick’s Day:

Holy Bishop Patrick, / Faithful shepherd of Christ’s royal flock, / You filled Ireland with the radiance of the Gospel: / The mighty strength of the Trinity! / Now that you stand before the Savior, / Pray that He may preserve us in faith and love!

Kontakion for St Patrick’s Day:

From slavery you escaped to freedom in Christ’s service: / He sent you to deliver Ireland from the devil’s bondage. / You planted the Word of the Gospel in pagan hearts. / In your journeys and hardships you rivaled the Apostle Paul! / Having received the reward for your labors in heaven, / Never cease to pray for the flock you have gathered on earth, / Holy bishop Patrick!

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Because we haven’t practiced it from childhood. Ask me a hard one.

If you had to squat to poop every day, you could do it, too. I’d rather have a chair and a toilet.

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This was a real eye-opener for me, although I’m sure most women are familiar with it.

If momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

Baron Bodissey asks a good question.

I’ve taken a lot of flak over the past couple of days for referring to the current government of the UK as “totalitarian”. And with good reason — it’s not the right word to describe the repressive regime which is now in place in Britain. The task of suppressing free speech and independent opinion is not the government’s alone, but is also subcontracted to supposedly independent institutions of civil society, the media (especially social media) and the academy. It’s a full-court press across the whole of British culture, but without any obvious co-ordination by a centralized hierarchy headed by a strongman in the style of Stalin, Hitler, or Mao.

No, it’s a different system, and the word “totalitarian” does not do it justice. The word is too old-fashioned: It conjures up images of jackboots and concentration camps and firing squads, which are not necessary (so far) to accomplish the state’s purposes.

Sweden and Germany are much the same, and other Western European countries — France, Belgium, and the Netherlands — are almost as bad. All are using the same types of non-totalitarian methods to enforce an efficient, technologically advanced regimen of thought control. The current government of the UK is far more successful in its brainwashing of the populace than the Soviets or the Nazis could ever have dreamed of.

I think ‘totalitarian’ is accurate. It speaks more to the result than the cause.

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Compared with peer nations, the United States sends people to the hospital less often, it has a smaller share of specialist physicians, and it gives people about the same number of hospitalizations and doctors’ visits, according to a new study. The quality of health care looks pretty good, it finds, while its spending on social services outside of health care, like housing and education, looked fairly typical.

If you’ve been listening to many of the common narratives that seek to explain the high costs of America’s health system and the nation’s relatively low life expectancy, those results might surprise you. Analysts are fond of describing the system as wasteful, with too many patients getting too many services, driven by too many specialist doctors and too few social supports.

But a large and comprehensive review in The Journal of the American Medical Association punctures a lot of those pat explanations. The paper, conducted by a research team led by Ashish Jha, compiled detailed data from the health care systems of the United States and 10 other rich developed nations, and tried to test those hypotheses. The group included nations with single-payer health care systems, like Britain and Canada, and countries with competitive private insurance markets, like Switzerland and the Netherlands.

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Thank you, minimum wage.

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And then, by God, we will have our revenge!

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Rex Tillerson always looked like a total insider appratchik, the Deep State guy in Homeland Security who gets notified that Jason Bourne has been spotted in Prague.

Most letters can be much improved by judicious editing.

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Of course, he’s a Republican and therefore not a Real Negro.

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Humanity isn’t destroying the natural world. We’re changing it. And in many ways, our changes are creating richer and more vibrant ecosystems.

Maybe so, but I still want to see New York under 3 feet of water.

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I have always hated Krispy Kreme donuts, which look and taste as if they had been extruded from a Play-Doh Fun Factory. I much prefer the flakier hexagonal shaped ones you get from mom-and-pop donut shops.

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I can understand that. I often do the same thing. (I won’t call it a mistake….)

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Recently, I arrived at a moment of introspection about a curious aspect of my own behavior. When I disagree with a conservative friend or colleague on some political issue, I have no fear of speaking my mind. I talk, they listen, they respond, I talk some more, and at the end of it we get along just as we always have. But I’ve discovered that when a progressive friend says something with which I disagree or that I know to be incorrect, I’m hesitant to point it out. This hesitancy is a consequence of the different treatment one tends to receive from those on the Right and Left when expressing a difference of opinion. I am not, as it turns out, the only one who has noticed this.

No shit, Sherlock.

Outbursts of emotional hostility from progressive activists – now described as Social Justice Warriors or SJWs – have come to be known as getting ‘triggered.’ This term originally applied to sufferers of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but activists have adopted it to describe the anxiety and discomfort they experience when they are exposed to views with which they disagree. “Fuck free speech!” one group of social justice advocates recently told Vice Media, as if this justified the growing belief among university students that conservatives should be prevented from speaking on college campuses. It’s no secret that, with the rise of the triggered progressive, university professors are increasingly intimidated by their own students. An illustrative example of this alarming trend was provided by the hoards of screaming students who surrounded the distinguished Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis and demanded his head (which they duly received). Christakis had made the mistake of defending an email his wife had written gently criticizing Yale’s attempts to regulate students’ Halloween costumes. “Who the fuck hired you?!” screamed one irate student in response. “You should step down!”

It certainly does.

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The “assault weapon” controversy first became a national issue in January 1989, when a career criminal murdered five children at school playground in Stockton, California. The failures of law enforcement before and during that crime—and the media and political failures thereafter—were similar to those related to the recent murders in Parkland, Florida. These failures are part of the reason why school shootings, and other mass attacks, persist in the United States today.

This article is the first in a series detailing the “assault weapon” hoax from 1989 to the present.

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Actually, I think it is. Just pick one and stay there.

The problem? Florida doesn’t have the authority to adopt daylight saving time year-round.

The federal government controls the nation’s time zones, as well as the start and end dates of daylight saving time. States can choose to exempt themselves from daylight saving time — Arizona and Hawaii do — but nothing in federal law allows them to exempt themselves from standard time.

That’s okay. Just ignore the federal law. California is doing it with sanctuary cities.

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As for would-be criminals looking for an easy mark, judging by the crime statistics it seems most have bypassed the Georgia town and moved on to easier targets. Even CNN was forced to admit that Kennesaw, populated by 33,000 people, has only had “one murder in the last six years and a violent crime rate of below 2%.”

“But,” writes CNN, “it’s unclear whether that has anything to do with the gun law.”

Unclear to CNN, perhaps.