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

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Or just stop having pets. That works, too.

First World problem….

Read it.

But you have to remember that the tax cut bill was a TOTAL GIVEAWAY to The Rich ™ and actually STEALS MONEY from The Poor ™.

John Hinderaker shakes his head.

The Democrats are doing the same thing to Donald Trump that they did to Ronald Reagan–questioning his sanity, claiming he is senile and unstable, denying his fitness for office. There are two differences: the Democratic Party controls the press more monolithically today than it did durning the 1980s, and the Democrats hate Trump even more than they hated Reagan–something I never expected to see.

Take comfort. If you’re taking flak, it means you’re over the target.

Read it.

Tablets are in many ways just like physical books—the screen has well defined boundaries and the optimal number of words per line doesn’t suddenly change on the screen. But in other ways, tablets are nothing like physical books—the text can extend in every direction, the type can change size. So how do we reconcile these similarities and differences? Where is the baseline for designers looking to produce beautiful, readable text on a tablet?

One of the very nice things about the Kindle (and the Kindle app on digital devices) is that they consistently look for ways to make your reading experience better. I see them sitting down in a big room on Monday around a whiteboard with a page-full of text and saying ‘What would a user want to do from this point? Okay, let’s implement that.’ They are constantly making improvements, to the point where they are adding things I didn’t know I needed until I saw them. That’s innovation. I now prefer reading on the Kindle (app) to reading an actual physical book.

I’m a phobic, you’re a phobic, he’s a phobic, she’s a phobic, wouldn’t you like to be a phobic too?

Read it.

The real question is, Affordable for whom?

Hint: Union labor, which almost all government activities require.

Read it.

Hah! Bacon makes everything better.

The Other McCain poses an interesting question.

Occam’s Razor dictates that we ought not seek an obscure or complex explanation when an obvious and simple one is at hand. At some point during the past half-century, Democrats became the anti-white party, not necessarily because of their beliefs, but because of their interests.

You may dispute this interpretation, but what is the alternative theory?

Read it.

As I sit here at my desk I hear a faint susurration of the air-conditioning system and a few random clicks and pops from various disk drives in the computer and the NAS. I don’t mind the air-conditioning noise because I spent my formative youth in the Navy where the sound of moving air meant that we could breath (and that was a good thing) — you didn’t ever want that noise to stop. (Now there’s the lawn mower from my neighbor next door but that’s an occasional thing, very comforting to we who live in suburbia. Plus the occasional plane over head and who knows what the Hell that is all about?)

I don’t mind a little noise; total silence would say to me ‘The world is dead’ and that would be an uncomfortable thing. There is a reason that those noise machines that supposedly help you to sleep have settings like SURF and WIND and RAIN. When I was younger and working I had a little all-in-one unit about six inches in diameter that contained a radio, a single-disk CD player, and a bunch of built in ‘relaxation’ sounds that were a great help in closing out a noisy office and allowing me to concentrate on my work.

Read it.

I am a utilitarian. Many (most?) utilitarians are progressives. So why am I not a progressive?

…

My view is that (at the current margin) more government spending does not solve these sorts of problems, it just ends up being wasted. Rather we should focus on boosting the efficiency of the economy.

Government and efficiency don’t live in the same universe.

I suspect that if Bannon wants to have some credibility he not wander around looking like a derelict. I’d be happy to buy him a suit and set him up with a barber. I’d even send him a gift subscription to the Dollar Shave Club.

Read it.

But of course you have to remember that the so-called tax reform was only to help the rich and oppress the poor. Just listen to Chuck & Nancy, they’ll tell you.

Read it.

Just after Trump tweets about how his nuclear button is bigger. Purely a coincidence, I’m sure.

Read it.

Pakistan’s government called for a meeting with U.S. Ambassador David Hale the day after President Donald Trump blasted its government in a tweet Monday morning.

This is the sort of Normal Political Maneuver that made Obama and his minions very nervous. It indicated that he might have to take a position or make a decision or something, which is not what he was President to do.

Trump said it is time the U.S. stop giving Pakistan money in the tweet and claimed the country has given shelter for terrorists from Afghanistan. He said that the country has only given “lies & deceit” in return for U.S. aid.

All public knowledge.

The president’s tweet sparked instant reaction from Pakistan, as the government summoned Hale to its foreign office Monday to explain Trump’s tweet, according to Reuters.

This is the ‘normal’ diplomatic reaction to such a ‘gaffe’, in which government functionaries from the administrative state are encouraged to rein in elected politicians who are rocking the boat. Hale is supposed to walk back from what the President said and explain that it was ‘taken out of context’ etc. etc. I’m hoping Hale is a Trumpkin who will explain that the President meant what he said, and that the Pakistani government had better get used to the idea that there’s a New Sheriff in Town. We’ll see.

Trump cut off funding to Pakistan, according to a National Security Council official who told Fox News Monday that the White House has decided to hold the $255 million of approved aide to Pakistan.

That certainly sounds promising.

Read it — watch the video if you want, but you’ll be disappointed; Charlie isn’t a very polished public speaker. His talk reads better than it sounds.

Charlie Stross is one of the greatest living science fiction authors (and one of my Recommended Writers — see right). This talk is a very personal look into his view of where we are and where we are going. Although a Fashionable Socialist, as you can tell by the shaved head and chin-beard, Charlie can see around a number of very interesting corners.

Read it.

The Internet is in the proverbial tizzy about Audi’s “feminist” Super Bowl advertisement, in which the automaker comes out in favor of equal pay for women.

Audi is merely doing what every marketing department flacks do: Finding a trend they can ride, which beats actually working. Watch MAD MEN for the details.

Well, if you’ve been reading along, I think you’ve figured out what the real message of this Audi advertisement is, but just in case you’ve been napping I will spell it out for you: Money and breeding always beat poor white trash. Those other kids in the race, from the overweight boys to the hick who actually had an American flag helmet to the stripper-glitter girl? They never had a chance. They’re losers and they always will be, just like their loser parents. Audi is the choice of the winners in today’s economy, the smooth talkers who say all the right things in all the right meetings and are promoted up the chain because they are tall (yes, that makes a difference) and handsome without being overly masculine or threatening-looking.

The ancient struggle between Cloud People and Dirt People. Audi wants to appeal to the Cloud People because the Dirt People don’t have any money and if they did they would spending in on an F150, not an Audi.

Read it.

I don’t know why this is, but hospital corridors, lobbies and the warren of doctors’ offices and clusters of buildings that house them are like a giant maze, so I often got lost and disoriented, but I saw a lot, too. And what I saw that impressed me the most were the hospital placards commemorating the donors who made these enormously expensive facilities possible as well as the hospital’s main contributors whose names are astride the broadside of the buildings, names like Mary Birch, Conrad Prebys (no relation to Reince), Scripps…names that meant little or nothing to me, much less how they accomplished such towering acts of philanthropy.

…

I don’t care how many Ferraris, multi-million-dollar houses on tropical islands — or entire islands — ultra-wealthy people own, I felt a refreshing faith in humanity for their gifts. What would we do without the top one percent and those likeminded generous individuals? You certainly won’t see my name on the signage of a medical pavilion anytime soon — or doubtfully ever at the rate I’m going. But they fill a huge void for which I am grateful.