Read it.

I’m good with that.

Actually, you’d be hard put to find a cow as big as a Clydesdale or Percheron horse. But nobody expects accuracy from ‘journalists’ any more.

Read it.

Surprising that the New York Times would publish such a direct refutation of a key provision of the proglodyte Narrative.

Christopher DeGroot explains it all to you.

Progressive companies are not only of rich sociological interest; they often provide wonderful unintended comedy. For close scrutiny shows that, on the whole, progressive companies are no better than “the greedy capitalists” whom progressives purport to oppose.

John Derbyshire does some fisking.

As we all know, a peculiar orthodoxy about human nature has come up among the Liberal Arts and Grievance Studies (LAGS) types who staff academic administrations, media, and government bureaucracies, including those that approve money grants to research scientists. A key tenet of this orthodoxy: There Is No Such Thing As Race. According to this tenet, race is a “social construct,” a sort of collective optical illusion.

(As weird as this is, it is not the weirdest thing LAGS folk profess to believe. You can, as I pointed out when addressing AMERICAN RENAISSANCE conference last year, find credentialed academics who will assure you that there is no such thing as sex: that men and women are biologically indistinguishable. We live in an extraordinary time: a good portion of our intelligentsia is clinically insane.)

For some reason, Prof. Reich feels the need to touch his forelock to this race denialism. That is not easy for him to do, as the science he’s been describing in the first three-quarters of his book makes plain what nonsense the LAGS orthodoxy is.

Prof. Reich spends the last three of his twelve chapters trying to square this circle, with results that are painful to read.

Read it.

I keep waiting for it to be stolen by scrap-metal thieves.

Even better would be that they both came alive and the bull pounded her into the pavement.

Read it.

Perhaps draining the swamp is a thing nowadays.

David Cole steals a theory.

Trump’s barely been in office a year and a half, but already his presidency has been analyzed to death, with every new diagnosis contradicting the last. Trump’s a “4D chess master!” No, he’s a charlatan ill-suited for public office. Please, he’s an outsider with a grand vision, hobbled by a deep-state legion of leakers and traitors. C’mon, he’s clinically insane, with incipient dementia. Wrong again, he’s a crouching tiger, his seeming missteps merely a diversion to lull his prey into a false sense of security. Be serious, he’s Åke Axelsson’s chimp, mindlessly flinging paint at the wall as others foolishly debate the merits of his art.

Every theory, from every angle, has been stated and restated. Surely at this point there can be no fresh analysis of this man and his presidency. At least that’s what I thought, until a few weeks ago, when I spent the afternoon with Ann Coulter, having lunch at one of Beverly Hills’ most revered Jewish delis.

Ann Coulter and David Cole walk into a Jewish deli. I’ll let you write your own punchline.

Read it.

A new meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin provides more reason for doubt. The authors averaged the results of 152 studies and found little evidence that bilingualism confers any general cognitive benefit. So what happened to all of the exciting “bilingual advantage” research that we hear so much about? When the authors of the meta-analysis compared effect sizes across the various studies, they found that the most imprecise studies — imprecise in the sense that their small sample sizes introduced a lot of random error — tended to report the most positive results. This is classic evidence of publication bias, whereby shaky studies are more likely to be published if they produce results that go in a favored direction. After correction for publication bias, the effects of bilingualism on cognitive inhibition, monitoring, shifting, and working memory were all effectively zero. Effects on attention and verbal fluency were actually negative, albeit small.

Seemed appropriate for April 15.

Read it.

Most ‘industries’ are cool with government regulation — they see it as a way to stifle competition and prevent that ole debbil ‘disruption’. (Witness the reaction of cab companies to Uber and Lyft, or hotels and motels to AirBnB.)

This is behind Mark Zuckerberg’s call for government regulation of FaceBook; he (rightly) sees it as a method of locking in FaceBooks effective monopoly on the social media space.

Read it.

There are things the left really hates, but it seems to me that they hate Christianity more than anything.

This has been demonstrated repeatedly throughout time. Be it booing God at the DNC, or their irrational hatred of politicians that openly show their faith.

The Witch-Hunt for Heretics and Sinners knows no bounds.

We want to pray for those in need, eat our chicken sandwiches, and run our businesses in peace. I wish many on the left felt the same way, but we’re constantly assaulted with evangelist mobs of this or that interest group as they “boo” our God during their political conventions.

“You will be made to care,” says the left.

“Eat mor chicken,” says the Christian.

Read it.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Read it.

Besides having to offer more diverse services, the trade also faces increased competition in its products. Its roots are in carpentry. “You’d buy an expensive casket and the funeral would be included in the price,” remembers Dan Isard, a funeral consultant in Phoenix, Arizona. The unwritten agreement was that the dead would be treated with dignity and that families would not ask if there was an alternative to the $1,000 or $2,000 coffin, or whether embalming was really needed. The business has something in common with prostitution, reflects Dominic Akyel of the University of Cologne. It is legal (as prostitution is in some places) but taboo, “and certainly not to be discussed or haggled over”.

Once I die, I don’t care what happens to what’s left — although I must mention St. Barbara Monastery, which makes nice plain caskets for the Orthodox.

Ron Unz does a thorough review.

One point he makes, which hadn’t occurred to me, is that the reason white and Asian people in California are so complacent in the face of massive illegal immigration is that those immigrants are largely displacing the resident black underclass, with the result that crime rates are dropping precipitously.

Funny, it always works for my wife.

The Other McCain is on the case.

A teacher has slammed her ‘disruptive’ students and their ‘rude’ parents over their lack of respect for her ‘poorly paid’ profession in a Facebook rant that’s gone viral.

Julie Marburger, 45, a mother-of-eight who works at Cedar Creek Intermediate School in Texas, said she had been pushed to quit her role as she feels as though she has ‘no way to do the job I was hired to do… teach kids.’

Steve Sailer looks at stuff that proglodytes would rather he didn’t.

On the one hand, America’s most sacred value has recently become “diversity,” which is conceptualized as a sort of all-purpose supplement, our vitamin D, that makes everything better. Despite, or more likely because of, all the evidence that demographic diversity generally makes life more awkward, we are constantly lectured that diversity is a magic elixir that make all institutions, including America itself, less divisive.

On the other hand, Americans also tend to act as if the only kind of racial diversity that interests them is blackness. In America, diversity isn’t actually a variety of races, it’s being black.

For example, over the last generation, African-Americans have won a proportional share of acting Oscars, while no American-raised Mexican actor has even been nominated since the 1980s. Yet barely anybody, not even Mexican-Americans, cares much about the latter, while the media got all worked up during the #OscarsSoWhite brouhaha over a supposed black lack. To the American press, diversity demands, in effect, that blacks win all the prizes.

Look at any of his pictures and tell me I’m wrong.

UPDATE: Scott Adams apparently agrees with me.

Read it.

If you keep a Commonplace Book, as I do, these will give you some food for thought.

http://broadside.navytimes.com/2018/04/08/workfarce-week-of-april-2-2018/

Read it.

Tell the truth, we’ve all wanted to do that.

Read it.

Tech titan Jack Dorsey of San Francisco-based social media platform Twitter applauded an article in something called Medium in which some other hipster CEO described how liberals intend to crush Normal Americans into serfdom in a bloodless “civil war.”

Here it is.

Ready?

It will just sort of happen. Why? Because. Americans will simply decide to be like California because of reasons and phew, no more troublesome conservatives and Gaia is saved!

So basically, wishing.

I like Dorsey’s Classic Hipster Look: hair piled high on top and swept back, short back and sides, full but neatly trimmed 19th-century beard — all he lacks is a man-bun.

Read it.

America today is riven with racial, social, and political divisions. Why? Is there a way out?

It’s hard to know where to begin. So, rather arbitrarily, I begin with race. David Reich‘s hot new book, Who We Are and How We Got Here, is causing a stir in genetic-research circles. Reich, who takes great pains to assure everyone that he isn’t a racist, and who deplores racism, is nevertheless candid about race….

…

Reich engages in a lot of non-scientific wishful thinking about racial difference and how they should be treated by “society” — none of which is in his purview as a scientist. Reich’s forays into psychobabble have been addressed at length by Steve Sailer (here and here) and Gregory Cochran (here, here, here, here, and here). Suffice it to say that Reich is trying in vain to minimize the scientific fact of racial differences that show up crucially in intelligence and rates of violent crime.

Those ineradicable differences mean that there is something like a permanent — and mostly black — underclass in America. But there is an American “overclass” (to which I will come) which insists that all can be made well by pushing the underclass into contact with people who (wisely) resist the push, and shoveling money and privileges at it. This, alone, would be cause enough for a chasm between the overclass and those who resist its misguided social agenda. But there is more.

As they say, read the whole thing.

The POLITICS & PROSPERITY blog, from which this is taken, will repay your attention, as it does mine.

Paul Mirengoff takes a look at this fake problem.

The Washington Post asked twelve “experts” what to do about our nation’s “staggering economic inequality.” The Post’s Jeff Stein sets up his article by noting that the 400 richest Americans control more wealth than the poorest 80 million households, and “the richest citizens continue to capture the lion’s share of new wealth.” Indeed, “the top 5 percent has captured 74 percent of the wealth created in this country since 1982.”

I’m not sure “captured” is the right word. It’s likely that the top 5 percent played a key role in creating that wealth.

This is what comes from people reading Rawls in college. They get the idea that there are vast herds of ‘wealth’ wandering around out there just waiting for somebody with a cage to ‘capture’ it, without the prospect that somebody had a hand in creating that wealth even crossing their minds. Somehow wealth just happens, and the problem is sharing it around ‘fairly’.

West Hunter turns over a rock.

The Genomics of Race and Identity

Reich starts out strong, telling the story of his work on identifying African-origin alleles that drive increased prostate cancer risk in African-Americans – and the dumbshit responses he got from his colleagues. He mentions an anthropologist that questioned his mention of “African” and ” European” DNA segments: he was flirting with racism. What a fool. By the way, there’s something odd and interesting in that early result: why would most of the risk variants all land in one small segment of the genome? But back to the fools: Reich talks about the anthropologists [ Montagu] , geneticists [Lewontin] , and sociologists that have argued that ‘race’ has no biological reality, that there are not really any significant biological differences between races, that research into such differences should be banned ( why is this necessary if differences don’t exist?), etc. All liars, of course. Although I can think of a few people saying similar things that are not liars: they’re just not very bright.

…

He says that geneticists have tended to ‘obfuscate’ on this topic, mentioning Richard Lewontin. I’d put it a bit differently: they lie.

Read it.

Here’s the answer: If you’re not willing to follow the law, then you should not have a role in making the law for everyone else, which is what you do when you vote — either directly (in the case of a referendum or ballot initiative) or indirectly (by choosing lawmakers and law enforcers).

This is the same reason why we lock criminals up: If you can’t be trusted to move in society without breaking the law, we will remove you from that society so that innocent people, the people that the government exists to protect, are not inconvenience by being robbed, assaulted, or killed.

This ought to be a no-brainer,  but apparently some people are slower than others.

Or they have an ulterior motive — Quick: Is a career criminal more likely to vote Republican or Democrat? The question almost answers itself. If you have doubts, look at the people pushing for ‘convict rights’.

Read it.

The U.S. Air Force has lost its way. Outside observers may seem surprised at this but since 2001 the exit interviews of pilots, especially combat pilots, show more frequent references to aimless leadership, a lack of purpose and not enough emphasis on flying skills as key reasons why experienced pilots want to leave. Pay, promotions and time spent away from family (usually overseas) are less frequently mentioned. Pilots, especially combat pilots, still had a sense of mission but the leadership acted more like a corporate bureaucracy than the leaders of a combat organization. This was nothing new but the shift in attitude accelerated in the 1990s as smart bombs replaced the traditional unguided (”dumb”) ones and the last generation of senior leaders with intense combat experience (the fighter-bomber pilots of the Vietnam War) disappeared into retirement.

Read it.

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

Victor Davis Hanson notices some parallels.

Progressives such as Elizabeth Warren resurrect the race-based thinking of the antebellum South: ‘One drop’ and you’re a bona fide minority.

…

In her past incarnations, she probably used that yarn in hopes of helping her win a law professorship at Harvard, which touted her as the law school’s first indigenous-American professor (and others apparently referenced her as Harvard Law’s “first woman of color”). She has refused to back down (and also refused to take a DNA test), even after Native American genealogists disputed her claim.

Diversity! It’s not just for breakfast any more.

In the racist South, some minorities sought to pass to claim white status; in racialist 21st-century America, some whites seek to pass to claim minority status. The common denominator in both cases is the contemporary society’s racial fixations — and the absurdity of needing to claim a particular racial status to gain advantages.

Read it.

Overwhelming evidence from archaeology, anthropology, and kindred disciplines is beginning to give us a fairly clear idea of what the last 40,000 years of human history really looked like, and in almost no way does it resemble the conventional narrative. Our species did not, in fact, spend most of its history in tiny bands; agriculture did not mark an irreversible threshold in social evolution; the first cities were often robustly egalitarian. Still, even as researchers have gradually come to a consensus on such questions, they remain strangely reluctant to announce their findings to the public­ – or even scholars in other disciplines – let alone reflect on the larger political implications. As a result, those writers who are reflecting on the ‘big questions’ of human history – Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, Ian Morris, and others – still take Rousseau’s question (‘what is the origin of social inequality?’) as their starting point, and assume the larger story will begin with some kind of fall from primordial innocence.

Simply framing the question this way means making a series of assumptions, that 1. there is a thing called ‘inequality,’ 2. that it is a problem, and 3. that there was a time it did not exist. Since the financial crash of 2008, of course, and the upheavals that followed, the ‘problem of social inequality’ has been at the centre of political debate. There seems to be a consensus, among the intellectual and political classes, that levels of social inequality have spiralled out of control, and that most of the world’s problems result from this, in one way or another. Pointing this out is seen as a challenge to global power structures, but compare this to the way similar issues might have been discussed a generation earlier. Unlike terms such as ‘capital’ or ‘class power’, the word ‘equality’ is practically designed to lead to half-measures and compromise. One can imagine overthrowing capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it’s very difficult to imagine eliminating ‘inequality’. In fact, it’s not obvious what doing so would even mean, since people are not all the same and nobody would particularly want them to be.

The problem appears to be not so much what we know, as what we know that ain’t so.

I’m not sure I understand all I know about this piece but it was delightful to read, rather like a Monty Python skit.

Read it.

Tom Lehrer was the Scott Adams of his day, a liberal who didn’t check his brain at the door on the way in.

Read it.

You also have to live the yoga life, eat vegan, and use only organic GMO-free oil from the Honduran Burberry plant.

I’m a big fan of hard-anodized nonstick, myself. Hot water + paper towel = I can go back to bed.

Can’t say he’s wrong.

Watch it.

Turns out that most of what you see on TV ain’t so.

Read it.

But is there really such a thing as a ‘medieval film’, and if so, what defines it? In her book, Filming the Middle Ages, Bettina Bildhauer argues that medieval films should be considered a genre unto themselves, sharing a portrayal as a time of monks, death, sexual repression and violence; this demonization has its origins in the Reformation and the Enlightenment. But the accuracy (or lack thereof) of events and scenery aside, there are three characteristics which define a medieval film; non-linear time, a visual rather than a literate culture, and an anti-individualism that Bildhauer calls ‘pre-individualism’. This is relatively broad criteria for medieval films, and encompasses everything from The Name of the Rose to Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

Read it.

Therefore changes will have to be made to make sure that it doesn’t happen again — because TRUMP!

Read it.

Bear in mind that the people so sure that Democrats will take over the House are the same people who were just positive that Hillary would win in a landslide.

Read it.

In the past, I have often enjoyed Kevin Williamson’s essays. Even when I found them occasionally incoherent and cruel, I thought it hardly my business to object to a colleague’s writing. But I gather, under changed circumstances, such deference no longer applies, given that in Williamson’s very first column at The Atlantic he attacks both me, and in a backhanded way, his former employer National Review for publishing a recent article I wrote.

I am a great fan both of Victor Davis Hanson and of Kevin Williamson, and so I found this article to be of compelling interest. It is in precisely this sort of contention between persons with whom one would ordinarily expect to agree that one’s own views are more precisely refined and delineated.

Read it.

This explains why there are so many socialists in the world.