Read it.

This study examines exposure to the police drama television genre and its impact on perceptions of crime and racial criminality. Content analyses of three seasons of Law & Order were examined to evaluate the show’s portrayal of race and crime compared to actual crime statistics for New York City during the same periods. A survey was also conducted to examine perceptions of personal safety and the influence of television’s depiction of race and crime. Results suggest whites are disproportionately portrayed as criminals five to eight times more often on police dramas compared to actual crime statistics for the city of New York, exposure to police dramas increases beliefs of threats to personal safety, and exposure to police dramas leads to elevated perceptions of white criminality among non-whites. Results provide additional support for cultivation theory and “Mean World Syndrome,” and implications for delimitation and racial distrust.

Eric S. Raymond does music.

I’ve been diving into the history of rock music recently because,
quite by chance a few weeks ago, I glimpsed an answer to a couple of
odd little questions that had been occasionally been bothering me for
decades.

The most obtrusive of these questions is: Why does nothing in today’s
rock music sound like the Beatles?

It’s a pertinent question because the Beatles were so acclaimed as
musical innovators in their time and still so hugely popular. And yet,
nobody sounds like them. Since not long after the chords of the “Let
It Be” died away in 1969, every attempt to revive the Beatlesy sound
of bright vocal-centered ensemble pop has lacked any staying power
among rock fans. It gets tried every once in a while by a succession
of bands running from Badfinger to the Smithereens, and goes nowhere.
Why is this?

Another, related question is: Why does so very little in today’s rock
music sound like Chuck Berry?

I just listened to James Gang’s YER ALBUM on YouTube and he’s absolutely right.

I also wasted a day pining for 1969. Sigh.

Holman Jenkins understands the dialectic.

For this viewer, the meaning of the Trump show began to change with last week’s tax bill. Donald Trump normalizes nothing new and outré in our politics after all. He is but an effective parody of the politicians we have, and have long had.

We are also learning something about the relationship, in our age, between the political show and movement, however fitful, on the nation’s business.

Told you so. It’s coming.

Read it.

Pity the poor liberal Democrats. Once upon a time leading Democrats understood the need for tax reform. It’s not necessary to go back to John F. Kennedy or even the bipartisan tax reform of 1986 to see this. If you paid close attention to Hillary Clinton ten years ago when she was still in the Senate, she noted publicly that our corporate income tax system needed reform, and even Obama declared that he thought the corporate income tax rate should be lowered to around 25 percent. But he never pursued the idea, even though it would have been an easy bipartisan achievement for him. What explains this resistance?

The mystery deepens when you realize that if even eight or 10 Democratic senators had decided to support tax reform and bargain with Republicans, they might well have been able to keep the state and local tax deduction beloved of insolvent blue states everywhere, and probably the Obamacare individual mandate. One thing a handful of Democrats would easily have preserved is the prohibition on oil exploration in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), which has been the holy grail for environmentalists for nearly 40 years. By their intransigent opposition, Democrats were completely routed. What explains this shortsightedness, if not political incompetence?

Read it.

Pages from a remarkable book entitled Mira calligraphiae monumenta (The Model Book of Calligraphy), the result of a collaboration across many decades between a master scribe, the Croatian-born Georg Bocskay, and Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel. In the early 1560s, while secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, Bocksay produced his Model Book of Calligraphy, showing off the wonderful range of writing style in his repertoire. Some 30 years later (and 15 years after the death of Bocskay), Ferdinand’s grandson, who had inherited the book, commissioned Hoefnagel to add his delightful illustrations of flowers, fruits, and insects.

Read it.

Fountain pens have always served as the quintessential combination of beauty, tradition, and dexterity. But did you know they’re also tools of environmental consciousness? Join our tour of the fountain pen’s history, infinite varieties, and remarkable powers. With tips for shopping and maintenance.

Read it.

Coming to a San Franciso near you.

Money has value because people want it: gold, silver, cows, etc.

Fiat money has value because a government can force people to take it.

Bitcoin and other ‘cryptocurrencies’ have value because the people who brought you the Dot-Com Tech Bust say so.

Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

Morgan Stanley says the true price of Bitcoin might be zero  I rather suspect that Morgan Stanley knows more about this than you or me.

Read it.

Are the Democrat spinmeisters or the mainstream media (pardon the redundancy) correct in believing that Roy Moore’s loss in Alabama means that 2018 will see a “Blue Wave”, in which Democrats retake one or both houses of Congress? Wasn’t Moore’s loss a continuation of the Dems’ “stunning” sweep of statewide offices in Virginia? Doesn’t all of that portend a repudiation of Trump in 2020?

The answers are “no”, “no”, and “no”. Moore’s loss was a one-off event that had everything to do with Roy Moore and nothing to do with the political leanings of Alabamans. It is ludicrous to believe that Alabama has suddenly become a Purple State when Trump’s 64-percent share of the two-party vote surpassed the share received by any GOP candidate since Richard Nixon in 1972.

It is similarly ludicrous to believe anything about the elections in Virginia other than their consistency with that State’s burgeoning blueness. Bush II, for example, took 54 percent of Virginia’s two-party vote in 2000 and 2004, but McCain, Romney, and Trump won only 47-48 percent in 2008-2016. The Old Dominion is increasingly dominated by the rapidly growing cities and counties of Northern Virginia that are political appendages to Washington DC. (The same is true of Maryland and its rapidly growing appendages to DC.)

The 2018 elections will hinge manly on how voters feel about what the GOP-controlled Congress has done for them. And by election day 2018, most of them will be feeling a lot better because the government is taking a lot less from their paychecks. Continued revival of the economy will also help to buoy voters’ spirits. Unless something very bad happens between now and election day, a pro-incumbent mood will sweep most of the land. There will be exceptions, of course, as this or that Representative or Senator is exposed as a philanderer, swindler, or something unseemly. But those exceptions tend to affect Democrats just as much as Republicans.

Adam Thierer shows you how.

If you want to sell a book about tech policy these days, there’s an easy formula to follow.

First you need a villain. Google and Facebook should suffice, but if you can throw in Apple, Amazon, or Twitter, that’s even better. Paint their CEOs as either James Bond baddies bent on world domination or naive do-gooders obsessed with the quixotic promise of innovation.

Then you repackage some old chestnuts about commercialism or false consciousness. Add a dash of pop psychology and behavioral economics. Be sure to include a litany of woes about cognitive overload and social isolation.

Finally, come up with a juicy Chicken Little title. Maybe something like World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech.

Read it.

Intellectuals have uncommon tastes and with them comes an inclination to put down the ordinary person, who has ordinary tastes. But instead of feeling happy at being different, intellectuals feel unduly isolated, neglected, and unrecognised in their endeavours and their passions. They thus equate a better society with a society in which common people are somehow forced to acquire such “superior” tastes, too. But such a society is difficult to build, if decision making is not centralised. A decentralised system–in which consumers decide what books and movies they want to consume, and producers decide what books and movies they want to publish and broadcast–may allow small niches for the intellectuals’ superior tastes, but would tend to spend many resources to give people action movies and comic books. So, it becomes almost inevitable to blame the system–which is more comforting than blaming the people.

Joe Bob Briggs deals with controversy.

If you’re having a gay wedding, and your cake has been baked by a man who thinks gay marriage is an abomination against God, do not eat the cake.

I’m surprised I have to tell you this.

Good point.

We keep hearing that Trump is an ignoramus, that Trump is a clown, that Trump is a moron, that Trump is an idiot — and yet he keeps winning. Wonder how that happens. When a drunk wanders through a minefield without getting blown up, we mark it down to luck. When he does it a dozen times and still doesn’t get blown up, the whole ‘luck’ thing starts to wear pretty thin. If he offers to bet you $100 he can do it again, which way do you bet?

We now have a ‘Tax Reform’ plan that will soon be law. A prominent left-wing think tank admits that 80% of taxpayers will be paying less. My question is: What do we know about the other 20%?

Democrats keep slagging the plan as ‘tax cuts for the rich’, but we all know that rich people are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans these days. Where do rich people live? Blue states, like California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts — and the D.C. Beltway suburbs of Maryland and Virginia.

Where do rich people live specifically? In very expensive houses … in Blue states like California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts — and the D.C. Beltway suburbs of Maryland and Virginia.

What is one of the most unusual provisions of the new tax plan? A cap on the amount of state and local taxes and the mortgage interest deduction, which will not hurt middle class people but will clip rich people pretty hard … people like those who live in Blue states like California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts — and the D.C. Beltway suburbs of Maryland and Virginia.

Think about that. Most people will be getting a tax cut — except rich people in Blue states, people who hate Trump and would jump off a bridge before voting for him. Trump will be signing into law a tax plan that gives his supporters a tax cut but his enemies a (pretty carefully targeted) tax increase.

That didn’t happen under any previous Republican President — not Nixon, not Ford, not Old Bush, not Young Bush, not even Reagan. None of them thought of such a clever trick. I’m sure Trump is laughing all the way to the bank.

Next time you hear somebody call Trump an idiot, haven him check his wallet; it might be missing.

Read it. And watch the video.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

f you didn’t die after the U.S. pulled out of the Paris climate accord and you didn’t die after the courts suspended President Trump’s travel ban, or you were bummed about losing the opportunity to die when Republicans couldn’t seal the deal on a healthcare bill, you have one more chance. Some critics of the tax bill that just passed Congress and is expected to be signed into law today say this is the policy that might end your life.

Better call the undertaker now. We’re all gonna die! Or not.

The left-leaning Tax Policy Center estimates that 80 percent of taxpayers will see a cut next year. (The numbers change abruptly in 2027, when much of the tax bill expires.) Hardly tales from the crypt. But that hasn’t stopped the apocalyptic rhetoric.

Bet you didn’t know that 80% of the country was rich. But here’s proof, from an Agency of the Crust.

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.