Read it.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

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The Great Depression brought the failure of thousands of banks in the United States, and none in Canada. Comparing Canada and the United States suggests that there was something deeply wrong with the American banking system. But what was it? The short answer is that American banks were heavily regulated, contrary to Canadian banks.

Few things strike fear in the ‘progressive’ soul than the term ‘unregulated’. Read the news: Whenever something new arises, the first reaction by the Usual Suspects is a call to ‘regulate’ (i.e. impose political controls via government) it. The ‘progressive’ mind reacts to the prospect of human activity outside of politics the way the Pope reacts to the prospect of Mortal Sin.

Mark Derian examines the aliens among us.

Joseph Campbell suggested as a matter of fact that Westerners do not consider the Chinese to be people. It’s why the Chinese have a portrait of Mao hanging from one “Gate of Heavenly Peace,” and we get our pictures taken in front of it like it’s the Parthenon. It’s why Mao’s regime is technically still in power yet we keep giving them the Olympics. It’s why the Pope doesn’t hold the Church in China to the same standard she holds the Church in Europe. It’s even why 87,000 Chinese died in an earthquake not ten years ago though it barely moved the needle on our cultural seismograph.

Campbell gave no explanation as to why this is, though the implication seems to be the Chinese look different than we do. This may be a factor in our “othering”—to borrow a millennial usage—but what distinguishes the Chinese more than their almond eyes is the fact that, on a fundamental level, they don’t think like we do.

Language is a tool of cognition. To understand how people think, first understand their language. The main distinction about the Chinese language is it’s symbolic as opposed to phonetic. It’s as different from English as the Koran is to the Bible. The dissimilarity runs so deep that we cannot compare them to each other, only with each other.

Throughout most of human history, the Chinese have been the most advanced civilization on earth. Why, then, do they not dominate world culture as Europeans do? Some single out the Chinese ideogrammatic writing system as to blame — it cannot serve as a tool for organizing, sorting, and retrieving information the way that phonetic languages can, nor is it convenient for encoding foreign languages with no effective native writing system. This is why no nation that lacks a native writing system is adopting ideograms (the Japanese and Koreans did so because there was no alternative, and it impedes their progress even today); almost all turn to some variant of the Latin or Cyrillic or Arabic alphabet.

Chinese has more than 50,000 pictures, each representing a concept. A picture of a flower means “flower,” a picture of a house means “house,” and a picture of a middle-aged man means “dad.” It’s the kind of language you would come up with if you were an uncreative third grader. It’s limited as a tool of cognition in that it doesn’t challenge the speaker to go beyond the perceptual level of awareness. The allure of symbolic language is that it substitutes memorization for understanding.

Not coincidentally, communism offers the same allure. It’s a concrete idea that solves every societal problem in one fell decree, so there’s no point in learning much else. When the Chinese do adopt free enterprise, they only do so because it makes sense perceptually—that is, it’s practical.

Mao was unable to make Communism work in China because it is essentially alien to the Chinese culture. Deng made it work by keeping the Communist facade and reinstating the traditional Chinese polity in a Clever Plastic Disguise. For some reason, nobody seems to remark on the fact of billionaires in a notionally equalitarian political system. We’re so used to it that nobody notices how anomalous it is.

Megan McArdle has learned some useful things.

You can no longer tell yourself that you might move to Lisbon, learn Portuguese, and take up the guitar. You cannot learn Portuguese at your age. You can’t remember new words anymore; you can’t even remember where you have left your keys.

So it seems a good opportunity to do two things. First, to wish Oprah Winfrey a happy belated birthday. And second, to address this “12 Rules for Life” meme that you young whippersnappers have got up to on the social medias. I am probably more than halfway through my life now; I ought to have some rules.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Most of you know the story of the boy and the starfish. For the few who don’t, it goes something like this:

Thousands of starfish washed up on a beach, and a young boy began throwing them back into the water, one-by-one. A man stopped him and pointed out that his effort made no difference since he couldn’t hope to save more than a few of the creatures. The boy looked at the starfish in his hand and replied, “Well, it matters to this one,” and he threw it into the sea.

The man in the parable is a collectivist who hates inequality. If you can’t help everyone, it’s unfair to help a few. The boy is an individualist who knows that individual life matters; we help those we can.

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How about that Global Warming, eh?

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I rather doubt that large gatherings of white people, especially in Minnesota, are as dangerous for black people as large gatherings of black people are to white people.

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I don’t expect you to have read Bryan Caplan’s new book, The Case Against Education, although it would be helpful if you had at least heard about it (which you will have done did you frequent the rightish side of the Force as I regularly do).

Caplan is one of the more eccentric members of George Mason University’s thoroughly libertarian Economics Department, and loves to take unexpected positions on various issues; his The Myth of the Rational Voter and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids are well worth attention.

This article at West Hunter is an interesting review and response to Caplan’s  book.

He dismisses objections from educational psychologists who claim that studying a subject improves you in subtle ways even after you forget all of it. I too find that hard to believe. On the other hand, it looks to me as if poorly-digested fragments of information picked up in college have some effect on public policy later in life: it is no coincidence that most prominent people in public life (at a given moment) share a lot of the same ideas. People are vaguely remembering the same crap from the same sources, or related sources. It’s correlated crap, which has a much stronger effect than random crap.

That matches my experience.

These widespread new ideas are usually wrong. They come from somewhere – in part, from higher education. Along this line, Caplan thinks that college has only a weak ideological effect on students. I don’t believe he is correct. In part, this is because most people use a shifting standard: what’s liberal or conservative gets redefined over time. At any given time a population is roughly half left and half right – but the content of those labels changes a lot. There’s a shift.

I think it’s deeper than that. I have long maintained the there is no such thing as ‘conservatism’ or ‘liberalism’, because those terms describe aspects of personality, not concrete political views; what constitutes ‘conservatism’ especially changes depending on what point in human history is being dealt with. (The case of ‘liberalism’ is somewhat stronger, because in modern times that equates to ‘progressivism’, which does have a concrete political viewpoint that doesn’t change with time, but if  you wander outside post-1960s North America it reverts to being relative.)

I think the fraction of the population that believed in butt-kicking babes was lower in 1920: probably less than 1%, with most of those believers suffering from tertiary syphilis. What changed? At the root, most of the change must stem from professor-types. There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them. Many of those absurd ideas now have wide currency.

Can’t disagree with that. We all want to believe that Black Widow exists, but deep in our hearts we know that it’s as much of a fantasy as Thor.

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Illegal immigrants in Tel Aviv ‘invited’ to actress Sarah Silverman’s sister’s home as right-wing activists distribute ‘invitations’.

Hmmm. Wonder how Nancy Pelosi would like a couple hundred ‘Dreamers’ on her doorstep looking for a handout.

Joseph Epstein penned this classic in 1989.

Victims have never been in short supply in the world, but the rush to identify oneself as a victim is rather a new feature of modern life. Why this should be so isn’t very complicated: to position oneself as a victim is to position oneself for sympathy, special treatment, even victory. It’s not only individuals who benefit. In international politics, one sees the deliberate strategy of positioning for victimhood played out in the Middle East. Although Israel is a country of fewer than four million Jewish people surrounded by Arab nations numbering some 200 million people, very few of whom mean the Israelis well, the Arabs have somehow been able to make themselves – or at least the Palestinians as their representatives – seem the great victims in the Middle East. Every time a woman or a small child is injured in the organized riots known as the intifada – one might ask why small children are allowed anywhere near such danger – the victimhood of the Palestinians is reinforced and their cause, as victims, made all the stronger.

Gandhi was the great teacher of the art of victimhood, of setting one’s victimization on full public display. Part of the genius of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was to recognize the value of Gandhi’s lessons for the American civil rights movement, and most especially the lesson of nonviolent resistance, which not only highlights victimhood but gives it, in a good cause, a genuinely moral aura. Their moral and physical courage lent civil rights workers in the South an appeal that was irresistible to all but the most hard-hearted of segregationists. Americans, all of whose families began in this country as immigrants, have a built-in tradition of having known victimhood, at least historically, and hence a strong tendency toward sympathy for victims.

Makes more sense than any State of the Union speech I’ve ever heard.

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In 2012 the Chinese naval ships operating off Somalia were seen accompanied by what appeared to be a cruise ship. It was actually the first of two “barracks ships” that the Chinese Navy has built since 2011. Both are 30,000 ton ships that appear to be based on cruise ship designswith lots of topside cabins with windows and large open decks for recreation. These two ships are indeed “barracks ships” but were designed to be quite flexible.

They were first seen in operation off Somalia and described as an example the Chinese Navy learning how important morale at sea was. Until 2008 Chinese warships rarely spent more than a week away from port but since then China has been sending “Naval Escort Task Forces” to participate in the anti-piracy patrol off Somalia. There, for four months (plus a month to get to and from China) the two warships (accompanied by a supply ship) look for pirates and escort merchant ships. On those long voyages Chinese officers soon noted that many months at sea put more strain on sailors than the usual shorter training voyages.

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The nerve of that guy.

Where’s the fun in that?

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The obvious question is: If this is such a ‘powerful political movement’, how is it so easily ‘neutered’?

I’d be more inclined to the thought that this is the perfect example when proglodyte delusion meets reality. Reality wins every time.

Case in point: Grammys 2018: Pink wears t-shirt and jeans for awards performance in solidarity with #TimesUp and #MeToo

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The 5:2 diet, based on intermittent fasting, involves eating pretty much whatever you like for five days a week, then for two nonconsecutive days restricting calories to 500 for women and 600 for men.

Orthodox Christians have been doing this for 2000 years. The fast days are Wednesday and Friday.

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Democrats are great at saying things that sound like English — but are just nonsense.

If you listen to the first video, it does sound like English that you can’t quite catch.

There is, of course, the famous scene in The Court Jester where Danny Kaye does the same thing with French, Italian, and German — and later on for Spanish. So it’s not just a one-way street.

Read it.

He hides it very well.

I know the feeling.

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Hereditary White Privilege, thy name is Democrat.

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

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

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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’.)