Read it.

Lewontin argued that there is more genetic variation within human populations than between them, so they can’t really be very different. Of course that’s bullshit: humans have the second-largest morphological variation of any mammal, behind only dogs. How do you get significant phenotypic differences between populations when there isn’t much Fst between them?

One way (at the extreme) is to have a single allele, one that does a lot, vary strongly between populations: at the limit, be fixed in one and nonexistent in the other. There are not a lot of alleles like this in humans, but it happens. EDAR 370A is almost fixed in Northeast Asia, almost nonexistent in Europe and Africa: it results in thicker scalp hair, more numerous sweat glands, smaller breasts, funny teeth, and changes in the shape of the ears and chin. Just one allele: it would not show up noticeably in Fst.

Alex Tubarrok, a Real Economist, turns over a rock.

The food deserts idea was especially implausible for America because Americans spend less of their income on food consumed at home (6%) than any other nation. The Dutch, for example, spend (12%) of their income on food, the Italians and Japanese (14%), the Vietnamese (35%). There is plenty of room in the American food budget for healthy eating. Finally, Allcott, Diamond, and Dubé show that relative to unhealthy food, healthy food is actually a bit cheaper in low-income areas.

More importantly, just open your eyes. Walk into a fast food joint in a food desert and ask yourself, do the customers really want brussel sprouts but are reluctantly settling for Chips Ahoy? The idea is ridiculous and not a bit insulting in denying agency to the people who live in low-income areas. If what people living in food deserts wanted was brussel sprouts, they would get them.

The Whole Foods class think their kale and kombucha are so obviously superior to what the poor eat that the only possible explanation for poor eating is that poor people are denied choice. Yet put an inexpensive but colorful produce stand next to a McDonald’s and you can be sure that the customers will differ by class. Why the poor choose to eat differently than the rich is an interesting and important question but one more amenable to answers focusing on culture, education and history than price and income. The idea applies widely.

Read it.

In fact, the states with the highest state and local tax burdens are California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin. Between them, these 12 states send exactly one Republican senator to Washington and all but one have gone Democrat in every presidential election since 1992. According to the Google machine, all of these states but Maryland and Wisconsin have recently raised taxes, and/or are planning on tax increases in the coming year.

What that tells me is, the people who live in these states want higher taxes. And the top income earners — Hollywood people, Silicon Valley techies, New York hedge fund managers who live in Connecticut — give huge amounts of money to the Democratic Party. They should be celebrating that their taxes are going up. Instead, some of these wealthy Democrats are apparently thinking of leaving. Lousy traitors.

Remember all those Democrat billionaires weeping and wailing about their taxes not being high enough? They ought to be jumping for joy.

Byron York looks at the scorecard.

Assume that tax reform passes and is signed into law. If in, say, 2014, a Republican, of either the conservative or moderate variety, predicted that in 2017 a newly-elected GOP president and Congress would —

1. Cut corporate and individual taxes.
2. Repeal the Obamacare individual mandate.
3. Appoint a highly-respected conservative to the Supreme Court.
4. Appoint a one-year record number of judges to the circuit courts.
5. Get rid of reams of unnecessary regulations.
6. Destroy ISIS.
7. Approve pipeline projects and new oil drilling.

— then a lot of Republicans would probably have cheered. Loudly.

But it’s Trump, so we have to remember that he has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in his first year in office.

Read it.

I soon learned that I was hardly the only Midwesterner left tongue-tied by the Midwest. Articulate neighbors, friends, colleagues, and students, asked to describe their hometowns, replied with truisms that, put together, were also paradoxes: “Oh, it’s in the middle of nowhere.” “It’s just like anywhere, you know.” “We do the same things people do everywhere.” No-places are as old as Thomas More’s Utopia, but a no-place that is also everyplace and anyplace doesn’t really add up. Nor, at least in my experience, does one hear such language from people in other regions—from Southerners, Californians, Arubans, Yorkshiremen. Canadians live in a country that has been jokingly described as America’s Midwest writ larger—Canada and our Midwest share, among other things, manners, weather, topography, and a tendency among their inhabitants to downplay their own racism—yet they are hyperspecific in their language, assuming a knowledge of local landmarks that it never occurs to them non-Canadians may not possess. They assume that whatever their setting is, it is a setting, not, as Midwesterner-turned-expatriate Glenway Wescott once wrote of Wisconsin, “an abstract nowhere.”

Explaining ‘Flyover Country’ to the Coastal Crust. Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion did a lot of this.

Read it.

Some real talk: most writing isn’t worth consuming. That includes cereal boxes and New York Times wedding announcements. More real talk: most people urging you to read widely probably have a hard time ranging outside their comfort zones. There’s no doubt that, in the political realm, we need more connection with those we disagree with. But for the most part, “read widely” belongs to a class of expression that’s good to be heard saying (as in: we need “more dialogue” or we need “to have a national conversation about sheet cake”). In my experience, only a minority of writers like to chase their Leslie Jamison with some Conrad Black, or their Yvor Winters with some Roxane Gay. Many can barely metabolize a Stephen Marche tweet without declaring a stomach ache, and Marche is a reasonable guy who can write a good sentence.

Read it.

Temp-to-oerm Dem Senator in Alabama knows very well which side of his bread is buttered, and is already starting to walk it back.

Read it.

Why women put up with wearing some of the things they’re expected to wear has always puzzled me.

Read it.

Useful in case you get caught in a Black Lives Matter rally.

Somebody asked me what podcasts I listen to, being an affluent man of leisure and all. Here’s the list:

Scott Adams on Periscope. Google ‘Scott Adams Periscope’ and follow the yellow brick road.

The ZBlog Power Hour
Ricochet Podcast
GLoP Culture
Mad Dogs and Englishmen
Commentary Magazine Podcast
The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg
MacBreak Weekly
This Week in Tech
Triangulation

All of these are available on iTunes, which is my go-to place for media.

I am not on Twitter or Facebook — that way madness lies.

BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front): Ain’t no such thing as ‘Trumpism’, and anybody who uses that word as if it were a thing is an idiot.

Our political class is wired to look behind ‘positions’ to ‘principles’, as if every person running for office, or pushing an issue through the political process, were one of Plato’s Philosopher Kings with a coherent deeply-considered philosophy that informs all of their issues, positions, and activity. Any non-superficial exposure to actual politicians, living or dead, exposes this as nonsense. Of the people you’ve heard of, maybe Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were such; no other U.S. President in the 20th (or 21st) century fit this model.

The Republican chattering class, from George Will right down to the people who write for National Review, spend about 90% of their time wringing their hands about the fact that ‘Trump isn’t a conservative!’, as if that actually had anything to do with the U.S. Presidency, American politics, or the Republican Party. The problem is that each and every one of the people parroting that phrase has a different view of what ‘a conservative’ is, and none of them agree. Nor is there any reason to think that being (or not being) ‘a conservative’ has something to do with being a Republican, much less with being an effective U.S. President.

Trump is not ‘a conservative’, in the same sense that William F. Buckley or Ronald Reagan was ‘a conservative’. Trump is like every other American: Conservative in some things, liberal in others, and God-knows-what regarding matters in between.

What Trump is, is what every other American corporate CEO is (or ought to be): A problem-solver. Trump sees that America has certain problems, problems that aren’t being fixed, and he’s decided that he wants to take a crack at fixing them. That’s all there is.

If that means doing ‘conservative’ things, then that’s what he’ll do; if it means doing non-conservative things, then he’s perfectly willing to go there. This pragmatic approach drives the American political chattering class nuts. They keep looking for some sort of consistency, and they’re not going to find it, any more than the kid given a pile of horse manure for his birthday is going to find a pony underneath it all, no matter how convinced he may be that there has to be one.

As a result, the fact that what Trump has been doing so far is ‘a conservative’ wet-dream is being abandoned by the roadside while the people who ought to be out partying about it are instead engaged in a snipe-hunt for some sort of ideological consistency to the Trump program. I am reminded of the (probably spurious) tale of Talleyrand during his tenure as Bishop of Autun — when he asked his chancellor why a certain priest had not attended a local church synod, he was told that the fellow had died. ‘Well, that would explain it,’ he is said to have responded, ‘… but I wonder what his real reason was.’ The right-wing chattering class keep looking for ‘the real reason’ behind what Trump is doing and ignoring the reasons that are in front of their faces.

Trump’s critics have the same psycological problem. The essence of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ is the persistent delusion that because Trump does X he is some sort of X-ist, without giving serious consideration to the fact that in this particular situation Trump decided to do X but in a different situation might just as readily decided to do Y or Z. The ruling Washington establishment keeps running all over the map trying to cope with the fact that Trump keeps sneaking out of the little ideological boxes that everybody from the New York Times to CNN keeps trying to cram him into. They just finish crying ‘He’s a racist!’ when he invites a black family to visit the White House. They just finish crying ‘He’s a sexist!’ when he appoints a woman to a significant job like Ambassador to the UN or Press Secretary. They just finish crying ‘He hates Jews!’ while ignoring the fact that his daughter, son-in-law (whom they hate), and grandkids are Jewish. There is no sort of popular Leftists bugaboo ‘-ism’ that has been applied to Trump that doesn’t have multiple counter-examples demonstrating that that particular shoe doesn’t fit. It makes their heads explode and provides a great deal of entertainment for the people in the stands, but there’s no future in it.

So don’t go looking for the mythical Trumpism where it isn’t to be found. Whenever Trump does something, ask yourself ‘What problem is he trying to solve?’ and you’ll be better off.

Read it.

The ‘wildlife refuge’ in question is ANWR, which covers 19 million acres, of which only 1.5 million (about 8%) is being made available for drilling. The pictures I’ve seen of ANWR show the most desolate area of nothing I’ve ever seen; it’s not as if it’s crawling with endangered species.

Scott Adams thinks they’re no longer useful.

The DemLegHump Media take great comfort in any poll anywhere that says Trump has a low approval rating. For an ordinary politician, this would be significant. For Trump, it’s not, because the available evidence indicates that Trump doesn’t give a shit about polls. The whole point of ‘approval polls’ is to put pressure on elected officials between elections, and if the elected official in question is pressure-proof (as Trump has demonstrated himself to be), then it’s really just a waste of money.

Read it.

The president sought to bolster his base with a speech from the White House Wednesday afternoon. In the speech, Trump touted the merits of the tax plan, bringing forward families who would benefit from it.  Trump brought forward pastor Leon and wife Marie Benjamin along with their children as an example of a family who will get a larger tax refund under the plan. The president invited the pastor to speak, and what he said next was amazing.  

“To God be the glory!” Benjamin said loudly into the microphone.

How politically incorrect.

Read it.

What a shock.

Read it.

Plus you can shave them and use the hair to knit socks. Win-win!

And you won’t EVER have to worry about coyotes on campus, unless they’re smuggling illegal immigrants to take advantage of special in-state tuition rates. Such a deal!

Read it.

Off the coast of South Africa, just below the ocean’s surface, an epic battle is underway as killer whales hunt and kill the world’s most iconic predator, the great white shark.

The phenomenon began in early May when scientists at the shark cage diving company Marine Dynamicsspotted a pair of killer whales cruising along the southwestern coast of South Africa. Days later, great white shark carcasses began washing up in their wake.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Not quite a Darwin award, but certainly deserves honorable mention.

Read it.

Every year, more women than men become college-educated. The disparity is already prevalent across North America and Europe, and the trend is beginning to spread across the world more widely. At the University of Texas at Austin where I teach, the sex ratio is 54 percent women to 46 percent men. This imbalance may not seem large at first blush. But when you do the math it translates into a hefty 17 percent more women than men in the local mating pool. Speculations about reasons range widely. They include the gradual removal of gender discrimination barriers and women’s higher levels of conscientiousness (relative to men’s) that translate into better grades and superior college app qualifications. Whatever the causes turn out to be, the disparity is creating a dramatic and unintended mating crisis among educated women.

Stop it, you’re breaking my heart.

Read it.

I don’t actually have an awful lot to say about bonding identity, not beyond what’s already been said by others.  Overall I’m not a fan — insofar as you can meaningfully say that you’re “not a fan” of a core feature of human psychology — in a terminal-values kind of way.  The end-point of pumping up your bonding identity is becoming a eusocial hive insect, caring less about your own fate and more about the fate of the group with which you identify, and while that’s a viable form of eudaimonia I tend to react to it with disgust.  It’s also true that one of the major functions of bonding identity is facilitating group action and shared grievance, and that (like revolutionary fervor) this is a crisis technology that becomes less useful and more dangerous as you move towards utopia and things get better.  Also, of course, people who invest strongly in bonding identity are especially prone to ignore concrete truths about themselves, since it’s so easy to play mental sleight-of-hand games that shuffle “traits I possess” and “traits possessed by the average member of My Group” and “traits possessed by the most heroically extraordinary members of My Group.”

Freeberg waxes dyspeptic.

Civilization is made up of very few of these messages: “It is wrong to kill or hurt other people”; “If someone has something you want, you need to acquire consent from them before you take it and that usually means paying for it”; “If you help me get things done I want to get done, I will give you this money.” Liberals and democrats want taxes higher, higher, higher, all the time and they don’t have a set amount in mind, nor do they want to pay for “police, fire departments and park benches”; they just want the taxes to be high, so they can attack that 3rd message that keeps civilization working and functional. Ideally, for them, the tax rate would be 100% and we’d all be fed & sheltered by living on the dole. Then, dependency on the state would also be 100%. Then they’d reach the “fun part” — they tell the rest of us what to do, and we go do it.

…

Higher taxes bring civilization to a stop. They’re supposed to do this. They remove the ability, as well as the incentive, for children to grow into strong, complete, capable adults. They’re supposed to do that, too. Minimal taxes are a lubricant. Higher taxes are a solvent.

Remember this next time you hear someone monologue away about the evils of a tax cut…

Viscount Ridley looks at technology.

Amara’s Law implies that between the early disappointment and the later underestimate there must be a moment when we get it about right; I reckon these days it is 15 years down the line. We expect too much of an innovation in the first ten years and too little in the first 20, but get it about right at 15. Think about the internet. In William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, he foresaw a world of “cyberspace” in which every computer in the world was linked, with profound effects on society. This looked a bit overrated 15 years years later, when the dotcom bubble burst. The Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in 1998 that “by 2005 or so, it will become clear that the internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s”. He went on: “As the rate of technological change in computing slows, the number of jobs for IT specialists will decelerate, then actually turn down; ten years from now, the phrase information economy will sound silly.”

Amara’s Law has a habit of trapping people into such foolhardy remarks after the initial hype subsides, but just before the second wave.

On the other hand, Krugman is famous for being clueless outside of the narrow economics speciality that earned him his Nobel, but that’s probably just a coincidence.

Read it.

“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in.” — George Orwell in the novel, 1984

Georgie said a mouthful there! We see it with the attack on Taylor Swift now for failing to chime in on hate for Trump. I will return to this in a bit.

When I left my little left-wing sect in 1979, I lost most of one set of friends. In fact, unbeknownst to me, the group voted specifically to disinvite me to their convention held every other summer at Oberlin. I had had no intention whatsoever of going, but they felt it was necessary to make sure their members got the message that any deviation on their parts would result in similar shunning. A powerful social control tool, that. Used by all cults, political or religious.

…

I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want any politician to fight for me; I just want him to get out of my way and leave me the hell alone.

Hear hear.

If you’ve been following the coverage, you will note that Franken hasn’t actually resigned. He’s merely said that he will resign sometime in the near future.

Don’t count chickens before they’re hatched.

UPDATE: Franken Accuser Calls Out His Non-Apology [VIDEO]

UPDATE: The Franken Hedge?

UPDATE: Gil Reich: Al Franken’s Non-Resignation

Some of us remember.

‘Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.’ –Isaiah 1:7.

Read it.

Bears Ears was established under the Antiquities Act in Dec. 2016 by former President Barack Obama.

“When we look at the underlying act, it does give the president broad discretion [to designate monuments],” Ute Indian Tribe attorney Jeffrey Rasmussen said on a press call Tuesday. “The legal issue that we are going to be getting to is can the president or can a new president go back and redo that use of discretion.”

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

What’s the German for ‘Hold my beer and watch this’?

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I remember thinking that the new Ice Age would be a good time to move to Texas.

Peter Beinart is one of the few functional adults in the DemLegHump Media.

Now that Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and agreed to dish on his former boss, some Trump-watchers are suggesting that impeachment may be around the corner. “It’s time to start talking about impeachment,” announced a Saturday column on CNN.com. The Flynn deal, declared former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman in Friday’s New York Times, “portends the likelihood of impeachable charges being brought against the president of the United States.”

That may be true. But bringing impeachment charges against Trump, and actually forcing him from office, are two vastly different things. And while the former may be more likely today than it was half a year ago, the latter is actually less likely. Since Robert Mueller became special counsel in May, the chances of the House of Representatives passing articles of impeachment—and the Senate ratifying them—have probably gone down.

Hip, With-it Jesus understands how you feel about cracking up dad’s car. In fact Jesus thinks it’s actually kinda funny, when you think about it.

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From the understated opulence of a Bentley to the stalwart family minivan to the utilitarian pickup, Americans know that the car you drive is an outward statement of personality. You are what you drive, as the saying goes, and researchers at Stanford have just taken that maxim to a new level.

Guess I’m a Korean cheapskate, then.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.