Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Yet another attempt to make reality conform to How It Ought To Be rather than How It Is.

Work, in the sense used in the article, is easily defined: What you can do that other people are willing to trade you something for, whether it be ‘money’ or something else.

Those who think that they have ‘bullshit’ jobs are under the delusion that the world owes them ‘work’ that not only provides them with money but also happiness. This is a Special Snowflake delusion that is becoming increasingly prevalent in this Participation Trophy world.

If you don’t like your job, do something else. If there’s nothing else that you can do, make the best of it. It’s all about sucking it up and dealing with it.

Read it.

Speed the day.

I don’t care which time they pick; just pick one and keep it the same all year.

Read it.

Nutrition studies are confusing and mostly useless for regular people. I do not say that just because a leading nutrition researcher has been exposed for manipulating data for years and years. I say it because most nutrition studies test the validity of small claims that just don’t matter in the larger scheme of living a life you love, and because the problems that ail us at the population level cannot be fixed with a bandolier of colloidal silver bullets. There is no “supplement” that can cure heart disease, or melt away obesity, or reverse the effects of inhaling a carcinogen all day, every day, for decades.

If you don’t pay attention to nutrition studies, then you won’t look like a fool when two (or five, or ten) years later they come out with another study that says, ‘You remember what we told you about X? Well, Never Mind. Turns out it’s good for you, not bad for you.’

Read it.

When you get dumped back in time, you don’t want to sound like a noob.

At last I’m going to get some use out of my Economics degree.

We hear a lot in the news about the ‘balance of trade deficit’. Supposedly this is a bad thing. In fact, however, it’s irrelevant. Like ‘social justice’, it falls into error by focusing on an incomplete subsection of a complex system.

The phrase ‘balance of trade’ refers to a comparison between how much stuff we send to other countries and how much stuff they send here.

When we send less stuff to them than they send to us, that’s called a ‘balance of trade deficit’.

The reason it doesn’t mean anything is because other countries don’t just send us stuff out of the goodness of their hearts. The expect to get paid. And they do get paid. This ought to come as no surprise.

So what happens when they send us more stuff than we send them? Do they not get paid? (What do you think?) They do indeed get paid. When they send us more stuff than we send them, they wind up with the difference in dollars. Perhaps an example will make this clear. If I give you stuff worth $100, and you give me stuff worth $150, you’re going to want that $50. And you’re not going to make that trade unless you get it. Depend on it.

Now, in the Good Old Days when countries were on the Gold Standard, that difference would mean that I need to send you $50 in gold. Eventually I run out of gold, and that’s a problem. So in the days of the Gold Standard, a balance of trade deficit was actually a problem, because it ran the danger of a country running out of the stuff that backed their currency. If you have X number of dollars in circulation backed by Y amount of gold, and you send $50 worth of gold overseas, then you’ve got X number of dollars in circulation backed by Y-50 amount of gold. This is called ‘deflation’ and it is pretty much always a bad thing.

But we don’t use gold any more. If we send less to a country than they send us, they wind up with a big pile of dollars. What kind of dollars? Paper dollars. That’s right — they wind up with a big pile of paper that they hope we will be good for, on down the line. (Feel free to utter the magic words ‘Thuckerrrrr’ in a Bugs Bunny voice if you wish.)

So: Do they just sit on that big pile of paper and hope that it will be worth something someday? Uh, no. They spend that money in the U.S. as quickly as they can, in the form of ‘investment’. Feel free to look it up. This is why Saudi Princes and Japanese zaibatsu buy American companies, real estate, and other stuff that stays here rather than going overseas to be included in the Balance of Trade computation. Ignorant people, such as journalists and Keynsians, mistake the part that they see for the whole, and so run around in circles and jump up and down (and get handsomely paid; nice work if you can get it), but it’s all hot air.

So when you hear somebody bloviating and handwringing about the ‘balance of trade deficit’, imagine that person with a sign around his or her neck saying ‘I am stupid’. It will make you feel better.

Read it.

Leap Beads allow worshippers to focus on devotions instead of counting mantras by keeping score of mala rotations for them on smartphones.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Jeez, you’d think the place was run by Trump supporters.

Perhaps we can paraphrase an old Russian joke: ‘If you meet a New Yorker on the road, beat him. He will know why.’

Read it.

The obvious question that occurs to me is ‘Who cares?’ ‘Income inequality’ is one of the Left’s favorite talking points, but they always assume-without-attempting-to-prove that ‘income inequality’ is ipso facto a Bad Thing, like slavery or  wearing white shoes after Labor Day.

The roots of this attitude are, of course, in Proglodyte Dreams, in which everybody is exactly the same, has exactly the same talents and skills, and therefore ought to receive exactly the same economic compensation for whatever it is tht they do, be it inventing the computer or collecting old bottles to redeem for the deposits.

It is a symptom of how far our civilization has degenerated that they don’t even feel any impulse toward justifying this assumption.

ZMan warns of trouble to come.

That’s why the current climate is so dangerous. Nature supplies more men with nothing to lose than any society can need. A political system that systematically marginalizes large swaths of young men, telling them they have no place in the world, is a society begging for political violence. Rebecca Klein of the Huffington Post may be feeling smug, for having “outed” a bad thinker, but she is not going to be so smug when her Prius blows up when she tries to start it. That’s where this war on our social rights is heading.

In the Civil Rights Movement, there came a point where the people in charge faced a choice. They could let reasonable men on both sides find a reasonable accommodation, or they could let the unreasonable men on both sides fight it out. Today, the people in charge have that same choice. They can put their unreasonable people on a leash and deal honestly with the reasonable people in dissent, or they can continue to wage this social war and invite the war into their streets and their neighborhoods.

This will not end well.

The Social War is, of course, most famously the name given to the conflict between Rome and the other cities of Italy in 91-88 BC. It did not end well.

Read it.

Joy Reid, a leftist writing at the Daily Beast, has a column titled “The Right Can’t Fight the Future.” It is an odd mingling of triumphalism and paranoia, a combination we see often on the left. It is the sort of thing we have seen a thousand times–the inevitable victory of leftism, never mind the USSR, East Germany, North Korea, Venezuela, and so on.

But some found Reid’s column impressive, including Larry Tribe, who was a smart guy when I knew him decades ago. I am not sure what has happened in the interim.

He succumbed to Leftist Brain Rot. It happens every time. This is why Obama didn’t dare nominate him to the Supreme Court, even though he was famous for being the Crust’s candidate for Best Constitutional Law Professor Ever.

Eric S. Raymond blows the whistle.

There’s a lot of buzz about Iain Banks’s Culture universe lately, what with Elon Musk naming his drone ships in Banksian style and a TV series in the works.

I enjoyed the Culture books too, but they were a guilty pleasure for me because in a fundamental way they are bad SF.

They’re bad SF because the Culture’s economics is impossible. That ship hits a rock called “Hayek’s Calculation Problem” and sinks – even superintelligent Minds can’t make central planning work, because without price signals and elicited preferences you can’t know where to allocate resources. What you get is accelerating malinvestment to collapse.

And that’s the problem with Socialism and Communism and all the other statist -isms. There is no central allocation system that can beat the decentralized (‘crowd-sourced’, if you will) market price system for efficiently allocating resources. A naturally self-organizing system (‘kosmos’ in Hayekian terms) will in short order organize itself into the most efficient structure. It does so by its very nature.

John Hinderaker at PowerLine calls time out.

President Trump said last week that he intends to use powers granted him by Congress to impose import duties on steel and aluminum. That was all it took for the press to become free traders. Gloom and doom are everywhere, as reporters gleefully tell us how our trading partners are planning to retaliate and how Trump’s tariffs will damage the economy. I don’t recall a similar reaction when it was Democrats who were the leading protectionists.

…

This is all about President Trump, of course. If Trump came out for a big increase in the minimum wage, the Washington Post would suddenly realize that it would increase unemployment among minority youths.

Read it.

It is said when you are young and foolish, you are young and foolish. While a tautology, it is also true.

This is demonstrated by David Hogg, school shooting “survivor” sucking up media time lecturing everyone on violence, while at the same time displaying ignorance of facts, statute law, and Constitutional Law. (I put survivor in quotes because he was in a different building on campus. He had as much chance of actually getting shot as the Broward County sheriff’s deputies cowering outside the building containing the active shooter. Less, actually. There was a diminishingly small possibility the sheriffs might have shot Cruz leaving the building if only out of self-preservation.)

People like David Hogg wind up being either elected officials or, more likely, staff members to elected officials.

I do not mean that as a compliment. We all knew such people in high school and college, and always counted our fingers after shaking hands with them.

Read it.

A man who employs six people in California is so fed up of fighting to remain in the US he and his family have “deported” themselves.

Khaled Altarkeet, the owner of a café in San Jose, donated leftover food to Catholic charities before boarding a plane to Kuwait with his wife and four children after he was unable to extend his business visa.

“I’m shutting the business and forgetting the United States,” he told The Mercury News. “I will find another country that is more accepting and willing to take my investments, since this place doesn’t want us.”

Sometimes the system works. If he had been named Sanchez, of course, he’d just stay and thumb his nose at the law.

Mr Alterkeet initially obtained an L-1 visa, which was valid for one year, in order to work on his business. But immigration authorities refused to grant the entrepreneur an extension when he applied in October, on the grounds he failed to prove he was the manager or an executive.

That seems a pretty low bar. Wonder why he couldn’t meet it?

Funny how Trump has been President for one year and it’s now ‘Trump’s America’, while Obama was President for eight and it never was Obama’s America.

Read it.

Americans aren’t happy with companies that severed ties with the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the wake of the tragic Florida high school shooting this month, according to a Wednesday Morning Consult poll.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Norton Antivirus, LifeLock, MetLife, Alamo, National Car Rental and SimpliSafe cut ties with the NRA in response to the Feb. 14 Parkland, Fla., high school shooting that claimed the lives of 17 individuals.

Morning consult surveyed 2,201 adults from Feb. 23-25 regarding their views of each company. The polling agency asked each respondent if they had a “favorable or unfavorable” view of each company before and after they were informed of the company’s choice to cut ties with the NRA.

Net favorability among all adult respondents fell between two and 18 percent for all companies after subjects learned of cutting ties with the NRA.

Before respondents were informed of MetLife’s decision, they had a 45 percent favorable and a 12 percent unfavorable rating. After respondents found out, unfavorable views doubled to 24 percent.

Read it.

Sealioning is the name given to a specific, pervasive form of aggressive cluelessness, that masquerades as a sincere desire to understand.

A Sealion is a person who, when confronted with a fact that they don’t care to acknowledge, say, the persistence of systemic racism in America, will ask endlessly for “proof” and insist that it is the other person’s job to stop everything they are doing and address the issue to their satisfaction.

Note that the Left is congenitally guilty of ‘sealioning’ while having created it as a stick to beat those who don’t bow to the Narrative. ‘Sealioning’, like ‘mansplaining’ and ‘price gouging’ (and ‘profiteering’ and ‘black market’) is one of those smear-words that statists make up so they can have a label they can use to survive episodes of cognitive dissonance.

There is, of course, no ‘systemic racism’ in America, except in the fantasies of those who are so obsessed with the race Narrative that they see it everywhere. It’s just another political religion, the axioms of which are unquestionable.

Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

Notice that Japan has never had a Muslim terrorist incident.

Read it.

Republicans in Congress appear to have mastered this.

Read it.

Proglodytes are going to be chanting ‘Global Warming! Global Warming!’ until the glaciers arrive.

Read it.

My grandmother cooked with lard every day of her life and she lived to be 98.

Wait around long enough, and everything bad is good for you.

So much for your ‘scientific consensus’….

Read it.

Abstract

Black Panther is the hereditary leader of the African nation of Wakanda, a small, natural resource rich country, which lacks access to the sea. Historically the political leadership has tried to hide Wakanda ‘s existence from other countries which has limited its eco-nomic integration with the rest of the world. In spite of its geographic endowments, nota-bly the incredibly rare ore vibranium, Wakanda has attained unprecedented technological development. This chapter explores the political economy of Wakanda and its leader, Black Panther. After explaining the origins of Black Panther, the chapter turns to the economic puzzle of Wakanda by exploring the geographic and economic implications of isolation. This is followed by an investigation into the way Wakanda has avoided the re-source curse that has plagued so many other countries. Next, a comparison is made be-tween Wakanda and the nation of Botswana. While there are some telling similarities, the lack of democracy in Wakanda is a glaring difference. It will discuss how it has de-veloped high-levels of technology that help advance the Black Panther’s dictatorship. Fi-nally, it will address the potential for democracy to emerge in Wakanda. Black Panther offers an opportunity to understand the role of political institutions in affecting the long-run economic, political, and technological development of a country.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Read it.

For a supposed Proud Black Woman, Michelle (Mrs. Magic Negro) Obama sure has very straight hair.

No doubt it’s the patriarchy’s fault.

You might find it useful to bear that in mind. Just sayin’.

Eric S. Raymond is guilty of the ThoughtCrime of Noticing.

I had been thinking about posting about immigration recently, because some facts on the ground have caused me to move away from a pure laissez-faire position on it. A few minutes ago I wrote a long comment on G+ that I realized says a lot of what I wanted to. This is a slightly revised and expanded version of that comment.

I am asked, by another member of the educated white elite, why we shouldn’t simply end border enforcement entirely rather than buid a wall or tolerate Joe Arpaio’s squalid detention camps.

Both here and in Europe there’s been a significant spike in communicable diseases that can be traced back to low immunization rates in what Trump may or may not have called “shithole” countries.

Crime is a real issue. Legal immigrants have a slightly higher criminal propensity than the native born (the difference is small enough that its significance is disputed) but illegals’ propensity is much higher, to the point that 22% of all incarcerees are illegals (that’s 92% of all jailed immigrants).

But the elephant in the room is the impact of illegal immigration on social trust.

This is the one that the ‘diversity’ religionistas get wrong.

Check it out.

The book is chock-full of history, and in page after page, points out how climate science has not just been a series of missteps, but an outright colossal failure of the scientific method because it has come to be so highly politicized. As I referenced above, money does that.

The arguments against climate-change alarmism, written so simply that even a Democrat can understand them.

Read it.

They’re afraid that he actually means it. That gives him huge (excuse me, yuge) leverage.

Mexico is delaying a meeting between Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and President Donald Trump for a second time because Trump refuses to take border wall talks off the table.

They don’t want a talk, they want a photo op. Trump has been down this road before and he’s not buying it.

Nieto canceled his first planned White House visit in January 2017 after Trump signed an executive order that authorized border wall construction along the southern U.S.-Mexico divide. After announcing he would not attend the White House meeting, Nieto promised the Mexican people the nation would not pay for any part of the wall — a reference to one of Trump’s key campaign promises regarding its construction.

This is what Scott Adams calls ‘thinking past the sale’. Scott points out that Trump is a master of combining two ideas, one that is based on the other happening first, and then getting the conversation about the second one, thereby fixing in people’s minds that the first one has effectively already happened. ‘We’ve already settled that, now we’re dickering over the price.’

The Mexican president’s assertion illustrates the line in the sand that both administration’s have drawn. Trump has insisted since he kicked off his campaign in 2015 that Mexico will pay, either directly or indirectly, for the wall. Nieto, like former Mexican President Vicente Fox, is unwilling to concede that point, insisting Mexico will not cough up one red cent.

All the U.S. has to do is to impose a significant tax on foreign remittances and earmark that money for the Wall, and it’s done — the Mexican President is completely cut out of the process. This is a significant portion of the Mexican economy, and one of the reason why Mexico assists illegal immigration to the U.S. as much as it can,

Brian X. Chen points out that sometimes the old ways are best.

Some of the most mundane devices are designed to accomplish a simple task extremely well — and in some cases they still execute those duties better than their high-tech brethren.

So let’s take a moment to appreciate some of the best dumb things.

Read it.

Many academics in the modern world seem obsessed with the sex difference in engagement with science, technology, mathematics, and engineering (STEM) fields. Or rather they are obsessed with the fact that there are more men than women in some of these fields. There is particular concern about the lack of women in prestigious STEM fields, such as Ph.D.-level faculty positions, but surprisingly there is no concern about the under-representation of women in lower-level technical jobs, such as car mechanics or plumbing.

The concerned academics have been especially effective in convincing others, or at least intimidating them, into accepting their preferred interpretations regarding the source of these sex differences (as illustrated in the Google memo debate). These interpretations are not surprising and they include sexism, stereotype threat, and more recently implicit bias and microaggression. Each of these ideas has gained traction in the mainstream media and in many academic circles but their scientific foundations are shaky. In this essay, we’ll provide some background on the STEM controversy and consider multiple factors that might contribute to these sex differences.