Read it.

He hides it very well.

I know the feeling.

Read it.

Hereditary White Privilege, thy name is Democrat.

Read it.

Boy, that Trump really stepped on it in Davos, didn’t he?

Read it.

I can understand that.

Nick Gillespie of tReason magazine picks up on the fact that much of the drivel inflicted on us these days is by people of demonstrable incompetence in their presumed core activity attempting to play Wise Guru in an entirely different field.

Obama and health care come immediately to mind.

Steve Sailer looks at the news.

The establishment’s conventional wisdom that past immigration morally mandates future immigration is kind of like saying that because your favorite NBA star’s ancestors got here due to the slave trade, Congress should re-legalize the Middle Passage.

…

Likewise, it’s comical that so many have denounced Trump as an “authoritarian” whose election threatens that “democracy dies in the dark,” as Jeff Bezos’ Washington Postclaims.

In reality, of course, Trump’s administration is the most public in memory. Comedians are making jokes about the president for the first time since 2008. Americans are enthusiastically arguing over politics. Trump, love him or hate him, has revitalized democracy.

That’s my idea — what’s your idea?

I actually did that once in a ‘team building exercise’. It did not end well.

Read it.

Socialists keeps their eyes on the prize: All government, all the time.

Any government is better than no government.

Feel the Bern.

Read it.

Considering how annoying most vegans are, she must be really annoying.

Read it.

How you can tell there’s something wrong: People are leaving and parts want to break away.

Read it.

Tell that to my local Goodwill. They’re always packed.

Read it.

The key to handling vegan social situations is quite simple: Don’t be such a dick about it. See? Problem solved.

Can’t help you with the problem of ‘making vegan food exciting’. Sorry.

Lileks.

There is no public consciousness. There are memes and opinions held by some, broadcast loudly to millions, accepted by some, ignored by others. If you do nothing but read or generate articles saturated with llike-minded chatter about your pet issues, yes, you think there’s a public consciousness, but that’s like being on a bus full of slumbering people and concluding the whole world’s asleep.

Steve Sailer casts his mind back.

Pretty soon, most of the edible big beasts were extinct.

This is still often blamed on Climate Change, since, obviously, it must have been easier for mammoths and the like to survive in the Americas during the Ice Age when the future site of Chicago was buried under a mile of ice.

…

In contrast, black bears are a little more at ease with people. It’s pretty common on Los Angeles news stations to show video of a black bear who has come down out of the hills for a swim in a backyard pool. The bear’s view of the traditional middle class Southern California lifestyle of a ranch house, backyard, and swimming pool, seems to be: “Cool! But how can they afford that?”

Time to be really politically incorrect.

When liberals discover that I have unorthodox views on race, they poke around for other unorthodox views. They think that if I am beyond the pale on enough fashionable subjects, it means I am a crackpot, and they can ignore the uncomfortable things I say about race.

…

We are supposed to care about the survival of the snail darter and the spotted owl. If you have endangered salamanders living on your property, the feds may not even let you build a house. I care a whole lot more about the survival of white people than I do about snail darters, and by 2050 we are expected to be no more than 4 or 5 percent of the world population.

Everybody is encouraged to be proud of their ethnic background except white people; they get criminalized for it.

Yeah — how come?

Jacob Lloyd expands on a familiar topic.

I’m not going to get into an argument about what a social justice warrior actually is, because the very concept is a slippery one – and, in any case, it’s better to see them as social justice bullies.  What I will say is that geeks are triggered by social justice bullies.

The core problem with SJWs is not that they are evil.  They have good intentions.  But they see people as groups, rather than individuals.  There is no attempt to draw a line between two different people, not when they’re in the same group.  SJWs see Sheldon Cooper and Warren Mears as being identical, even though they’re very different people.  People who happen to be in the favored groups get better treatment than the unfavored.  Worse, they are unable or unwilling to understand how their words scan to everyone outside their bubble.  A reasonable argument (to them) may not seem quite so reasonable to everyone else.

SJW tactics are very well known to geeks – they faced them back in high school!  Someone steps out of line – someone unpopular, someone with few true friends – and promptly gets blasted by the SJWs.  (The internet makes this worse, as it is now possible to pour scorn on JK Rowling, George RR Martin and others who would be too popular to bully in high school.)  The SJWs use ‘call-outs’ as weapons; instead of addressing matters privately, they humiliate their victims publicly.  And anyone who apologizes only makes it worse for themselves.

This is similar to Cool Kids Syndrome that I discussed earlier in the context of the supposed Democrat boycott of the State of the Union Message.

(George R.R. Martin looks like a huge tick, anyway, so it’s impossible to see him as being ‘popular in high school’.)

Read it.

Well, I can’t see it as a varietal wine.

Why does ‘gadget’ mean a gadget?

And don’t get me started on ‘widget’….

Watch it.

If you aren’t following Scott Adams’ Periscope sessions, you’re missing half the fun.

Read it. And watch the video.

Apparently Trump didn’t get the memo about what an open racist he is. Somebody send the guy a tweet.

Andrew Kalvan tears off the bandage.

Let’s state the obvious. Some countries are shitholes. To claim that this is racist is racist. They are not shitholes because of the color of the populace but because of bad ideas, corrupt governance, false religion, and broken culture. Further, most of the problems in these countries are generated at the top. Plenty of rank-and-file immigrants from such ruined venues ultimately make good Americans—witness those who came from 1840s potato-famine Ireland, a shithole if ever there was one! It takes caution and skill to separate the good from the bad.

For these very reasons, absurd immigration procedures like chain migration, lotteries, and unvetted entries are deeply destructive. They can lead to the sort of poor choices that create a Rotherham. Trump’s suggestions—to vet immigrants for pro-American ideas and skills that will help our country—are smart and reasonable and would clearly make the system better if implemented.

So, when it comes to the Great Shithole Controversy of 2018, my feeling is: I do not care, not even a little. I’m sorry that it takes someone like Trump to break the spell of silence the Left is forever weaving around us. I wish a man like Ronald Reagan would come along and accomplish the same thing with more wit and grace. But that was another culture. History deals the cards it deals; we just play them. Trump is what we’ve got.

Roger Kimball at American Greatness pulls back the curtain.

And here we come to a second curiosity in the preening and ecstatic outrage over the president’s comment. Everyone, near enough, knows that he was telling a home truth. It was outrageous not because he said something crude that was untrue. Quite the contrary: it was outrageous precisely because it was true but intolerable to progressive sensitivities.

In other words, the potency of taboo is still strong in our superficially rational culture. There are some things—quite a few, actually, and the list keeps growing—about which one cannot speak the truth or, in many cases, even raise as a subject for discussion without violating the unspoken pact of liberal sanctimoniousness.

Read it.

So all that money will be coming here rather than Switzerland or Luxembourg or the Caymans? I’m good with that.

John Derbyshire says what everybody knows.

Since the earthquake in 2010, international groups have spent millions of dollars on a plan to build eight open-air sewage treatment plants across Haiti. Seven years on, only one of the eight is operational.

Way to go, international groups. Keep practicing, and someday you might be as inefficient as a government.

A rainstorm on Good Friday last year filled the streets and alleys of one Port-au-Prince neighborhood with 3 feet of raw sewage. Seven people drowned in it. A guy interviewed for the NPR report got an infection that still hasn’t gone away

Sounds like a shithole country to me.

[Michael Wolff] looks as if he were raised among the Mole People. — Jonah Goldberg, The GloP Culture podcast

Read it.

Yeah, that’s totally racist.

In related news, Democrat Party designated National Historic Honey Wagon.

Read it.

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

They may have been founded in 1098, but the Cistercian order in France still managed to anticipate one of the most exciting discoveries of modern science. Known as the “white monks” because of their habits of undyed sheep’s wool, the Cistercians envisaged religious life as a process of cultivation. Pioneers of hydraulic engineering and large-scale agriculture, the white monks described their spiritual transformation in just the same way, creating fertile fields in the garden of their souls, plucking out vices like weeds and watering their flowering virtues with tears of grace.

Less of a pest than a medieval friar, who spent his time wandering around getting in people’s faces.

Read it.

“An awful lot of immigrants come from this country from other places that aren’t very nice,” Carlson continued. “Those places are dangerous, they’re dirty, they’re corrupt and they’re poor, and that’s the main reason those immigrants are trying to come here and you would too if you lived there.”

But hey, truth is foreign to both our political class and our chattering class.

Read it.

Here’s the test: If you were forced to live in another country, would you choose Norway or Haiti? Any sensible person — and perhaps even a leftist — would choose Norway.

That’s it, in a nutshell. Even Dick Durbin would pick Norway, and he knows it as well as you do.

The historical fact that Democrats are trying to hide under the rug is that all of the immigrants that made American great were from Asia and Europe, not Africa, not South America, certainly not from Mexico. Democrats depend on the fact that nobody is learning Real History in their government schools in order to do this short of shuck-and-jive.

Freeberg gets down to the nitty-gritty.

The interesting question is: Why have movie stars and other celebrities become an aristocracy of secular demigods? It seems to me an objective fact that virtually any other group of professionals plucked at random from the Statistical Abstract of the United States — nuclear engineers, plumbers, grocers, etc. — are more likely to model decent moral behavior in their everyday lives. Indeed, it is a bizarre inconsistency in the cartoonishly liberal ideology of Hollywood that the only super-rich people in America reflexively assumed to be morally superior are people who pretend to be other people for a living.      — Jonah Goldberg

Exactly. We’d be better off throwing a pair of dice to figure out what’s right vs. what’s wrong, than we are turning to the acting profession for moral guidance. This is a profession — never forget this — that relies on pretending false things are true.

…

The problem is, as Goldberg points out above, we’ve overshot the mark. We’ve passed the point where we see entertainers as a lodestar for where our society is going, for where it ought to go. And it’s not lost on me that we’ve pivoted, in many cases, from figuring out what’s right & true, to figuring out what’s inevitable…as in, right or wrong, this is where it’s going, better get on board or get left behind…

Read it.

I’m always suspicious of such things, since I think they do more to reveal the prejudices of the creator of the test than actual reality.

I would of course be a Herald, standing off to one side with the other side’s Heralds totting up points, waiting until things were over so I could help identify bodies and decide what to call it. Oh, and making snarky remarks during the fighting, that’s also key.

Severian continues our National Conversation.

Sometime in the Sixties, we noticed that many successful people have college degrees.  Because “correlation isn’t causation” is a truth we seem hardwired to ignore, we went on to infer that because successful people tend to have college degrees, a college degree causes success.  And since college degrees can be bought, we decided to buy them for our kids.  After all, what parent doesn’t want his kids to succeed?

The consequences were predictable to anyone who has ever seen a consumer fad.  Furbies, Cabbage Patch Kids, Tamagotchis, pet rocks, mood rings, coonskin caps, whatever (I dare you not to spend the next two hours on that site).  First everyone wants one, then the prices jack into the stratosphere, then everyone has one, then nobody cares anymore, because when it comes right down to it you’re carrying a fucking rock around in a box.

That’s what college is these days.

And now we have everybody and his sister pushed into going to college, even if they haven’t got the smarts or the discipline to get a degree, and the taxpayers are picking up the bill, either at the time in the form of financial aid or on down the line when they default on their humongous student loans.

Universities were never intended to be jobs training programs.  Nor were they intended to be research centers.  Both of those are parasitic on the bad “college causes success” inference from the Sixties.  With all those kids flooding onto campuses — and paying a pretty penny to do it! — military contractors like Dow Chemical realized they had a huge supply of trained labor sitting around, in the form of all those new-minted science PhDs churned out to meet the consequent demand for professors.  Why give some egghead a GS rating, a lifetime pension, and a security clearance, when Football U. will foot the bill for you?

Colleges are conduits for Elite values.  That’s it.  That’s all they’ve ever been.

And the Elite values they inculcate these days aren’t calculated to get somebody a job, but rather to become part of the permanent Underclass that, willy nilly, votes for Democrats because they’re dependent on Free Stuff at taxpayer expense.

Joe Bob Briggs tries to sort things out.

Every day somebody howls for the shutdown of a website, the squelching of a Twitter account, the nuking of a Facebook page, the removal of a video or a screed or a manifesto, all in the name of…uh…well, it depends, but mostly in the name of saving the world.

We’ve become a nation of scolds and censors and digital night-riders, trying to get people removed from the internet.

Many of these modern-day bowdlerizers are the same people crowing about “net neutrality,” whatever that is (and believe me, I’ve tried to figure it out), and demanding that Disney give up the copyright to Mickey Mouse because, after all, everything should be free and available and easy to find.

Well, everything except hate speech. Whatever that is.

Steven Hayward wrings his hands.

Political scientists can point to a lot of evidence from past election cycles that one early sign that a party is facing a rout at the next election is a wave of incumbent retirements. In the last two days two senior Republican House members in California have announced that they will retire this year: Darrell Issa, and Ed Royce. Issa, based near San Diego, has just barely hung on to his seat in the last couple of election cycles, and Royce’s Orange County seat has been looking more marginal for a long time. California Republicans are going to be hard pressed to hold these two seats. (Incidentally, term limit rules adopted back in the Gingrich years may have played a role in these decisions. Both Issa and Royce would lose their committee chairmanships next year even if re-elected.)

A lot of normally intelligent right wing commenters have been getting the vapors about the 2018 mid-term elections, and most of it (as here) makes mountains out of molehills. Two Republican Congressmen having troubles in ever-increasingly Democrat California is not the same as a ‘wave of incumbent retirements’. Looking at trends is fine so long as the trends represent actual facts on the ground, and can be very misleading if you just cut-and-paste from the past to the present without making sure that the shoe fits this time.

People have have also been jittery about the President’s ‘low approval ratings’, ignoring the fact that (a) these are all polls run by people who oversample Democrats (you can look it up), and so will be worse than reality (the same polls showed Hillary getting a landslide a year ago, if you’ll remember), and (b) Trump isn’t seen as some sort of avatar of Republicanism the way that Presidents like Reagan and the Bushes were, so there’s a disconnect that makes such conventional wisdom inapplicable in the Age of Trump.

Trump is Getting Stuff Done and dragging Congress along behind him, and any Republican who is worried about re-election just needs to get with that program. The ones who are in trouble are the anti-Trumpers like Jeff Flake, and I have absolutely no problems with them retiring and letting an actual Republican try for that seat.

Read it.

As they do for all Americans.

Read it.

Giving amnesty to “Dreamers”—young adults brought to the U.S. illegally as children—would create a deficit of about $26 billion over 10 years, according to a report last month from the Congressional Budget Office.

“If we want to save taxpayers’ money, probably the best strategy is to enforce the law and encourage those here illegally to return to their home countries.”—@wwwCISorg’s Steven Camarota

In a video released Monday, the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies details costs presented in the government report.

Read it.

Still waiting for you and Bill to write those checks to the IRS, Warren ‘Raise My Taxes’ Buffet.

Read it.

The plans for the future Obama presidential library have just been released, and they are quite progressive, to say the least.

The library is scheduled to be built in Chicago, Illinois and will be within a stone’s throw of the University of Chicago, Jackson Park and the South Shore Cultural Center. The design includes three buildings: a museum, library and forum.

The library’s design and location has been a source of controversy itself within the Chicago community. The new 3D renderings for the park — released Wednesday — will only throw fuel on that fire.

It looks to me like a set from The Hunger Games.

UPDATE: Furious Chicago Professors Demand Obama Move His ‘Socially Regressive’ Presidential Center Elsewhere