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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.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.”

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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.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Find the black woman in this picture:

For reference, here is a picture of a real black woman, Princess Elizabeth of Toro:

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There’s still interest in the Middle Ages out there.

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The reporters covering developments in the ongoing special counsel investigation conducted by Robert Mueller are so excited by the prospect of President Trump’s removal from office impeachment that they can barely keep their tongues from hanging out of their mouths. They demonstrate what it’s all about even if they don’t have a clue what’s going on.

It is a striking fact that the charge to which Michael Flynn pleaded yesterday involves lying about conversations that were not themselves illegal. Flynn was not charged with any substantive criminal offense under the Logan Act or anything else. Rather, he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

Andrew McCarthy has distinguished himself among the observers commenting on the case. An experienced former federal prosecutor himself, he knows what he is talking about. He is familiar with the ground rules that are to govern such matters. He reviews them in his weekly NRO column today as he has before, finding once again that Mueller has undertaken an essentially unlimited criminal investigation in the guise of a counterintelligence probe.

None of the ground rules applicable to a special counsel criminal investigation have been followed. Mueller’s investigation partakes of the wrongs committed by special counsels in past cases — wrongs reflected in the Department of Justice Procedures that are to govern these matters, but that have been thrown out the window.

The chief difference between this situation and all other previous Special Prosecutor situations is that there is no underlying crime. Even if Mueller finds that Trump ‘colluded’ with one or more Russians, that’s not a crime. Flynn, for example, is being prosecuted for lying, which is the same reason as why he was fired. So far, there is nothing to implicate Trump in anything illegal or even unethical. This is all make-believe.

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There would be some serious partying in Flyover Country.

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Judging by the illustration, looked a lot like Bill Clinton.

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Reporter and writer Joshua Green met Thomas Begay, one of the code talkers honored Monday, on his way out of Washington, D.C. Green asked him about the event. Begay said he was “puzzled” about the comment but not offended.

Then Begay dropped a very non safe-space one liner:

“The Marines made us yell ‘Geronimo’ when we jumped out of planes and that didn’t offend me either.”

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Sort of a metaphor for modern life.

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Vivian Yee of the New York Times has written an account of immigration enforcement under the Trump administration in Atlanta, a non-sanctuary city. Yee reports that the regional ICE office in Atlanta made nearly 80 percent more arrests in the first half of this year than it did in the same period last year, the largest increase of any field office in the country.

It has done so with cooperation from local sheriffs and the police, who are working with federal agents to identify and detain immigrants. Yee correctly calls this “the model of cooperation that the Trump administration is rapidly trying to expand throughout the country.”

But we have to remember that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his first year in office.

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It certainly ought to facilitate it. That’s what the whole ‘trophy wife’ thing is about. (Ever wonder why you don’t read about ‘trophy husbands’?)

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All the ways that Texas rocks and California sucks.

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Somehow, I do not see this as a bad thing.

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And they’d none of them be missed;
No, they’d none of them be missed….