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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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Amazing how only leftist intellectuals can detect these ‘racism codes’.

Remember: If you hear the dog whistle, then you’re the dog.

Watch it.

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Looks like a trend.

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Their Breakfast on a Bun is the best ‘morning cheeseburger’ around. Cheaper than an Egg McMuffin.

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Do you remember how glum Barak Obama looked after last year’s election? It wasn’t because he liked Hillary Clinton. Instead, he was mourning for the last four years of his administration. He was looking at all his unconstitutional executive orders going down the tube.

Obama kept the Affordable Care Act looking healthy via an extra-constitutional grant of $1 trillion to health-insurance companies. That required congressional approval, and Obama’s decision to bypass Congress was held unconstitutional by a federal court. President Trump’s decision Thursday to halt the bailout makes the litigation moot and represents a return to constitutional government.

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Think of it as evolution in action.

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n case you haven’t noticed, though, you’ve changed from hero to villain. You’re too expensive and exclusive for the rest of the world: The garages that gave us Hewlett-Packard and Google now cost millions of dollars. You’ve moved from icon to joke — the show that bears your name is a cringe-worthy, true-to-life satire.

You’re churning out companies that are raising hundreds of millions of dollars, and going bankrupt in literal satires of themselves: a $700 million blood-testing company that never had any actual results; a $120 million juicer with packets that can actually be squeezed by hand.

Now Fast Company is declaring the end of the public’s “love affair” with the Silicon Valley ideal, and everyone from socialist Bernie Sanders to hard-right Steve Bannon is calling for your biggest companies to be heavily regulated, and your reputation is fast approaching that of Wall Street (which used to have a good reputation, too).

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I’ll never tell.

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The question of what it was like to live outside the settled culture of a state is therefore an important one for the over-all assessment of human history. If that life was, as Thomas Hobbes described it, “nasty, brutish, and short,” this is a vital piece of information for drawing up the account of how we got to be who we are. In essence, human history would become a straightforward story of progress: most of us were miserable most of the time, we developed civilization, everything got better. If most of us weren’t miserable most of the time, the arrival of civilization is a more ambiguous event. In one column of the ledger, we would have the development of a complex material culture permitting the glories of modern science and medicine and the accumulated wonders of art. In the other column, we would have the less good stuff, such as plague, war, slavery, social stratification, rule by mercilessly appropriating élites, and Simon Cowell.

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“Of course that’s not how mortgages actually work. It’s much worse than that”, he writes in a wryly funny piece, exploring the wide range in the accessibility of home ownership across the geography of the U.S. Expanding on the (overly optimistic) annual salary/house price comparison, he found that “the typical ratio of median home value to the median income is 1:3”.

My rule-of-thumb is that you can afford a house that costs twice your annual income.

I have no idea where I came up with that — perhaps some vague recollection from my youth — but it works out pretty well.

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America’s seemingly unceasing culture wars are not good for business, particularly for a region like Southern California. As we see Hollywood movie stars, professional athletes and the mainstream media types line up along uniform ideological lines, a substantial portion of the American ticket and TV watching population are turning them off, sometimes taking hundreds of millions of dollars from the bottom line.

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I have said before that no currently popular ideology acknowledges well-established results of behavioral genetics, quantitative genetics, or psychometrics. Or evolutionary psychology.

What if some ideology or political tradition did? what could they do? What problems could they solve, what capabilities would they have?

…

At least some past societies avoided the social patterns leading to the nasty dysgenic trends we aer experiencing today, but for the most part that is due to the anthropic principle: if they’d done something else you wouldn’t be reading this. Also to between-group competition: if you fuck your self up when others don’t, you may be well be replaced. Which is still the case.

Freeberg continues the conversation.

I did not make this problem. The Z-Man didn’t make it either. We did not make it so that “manly-behavior” and “womanly-behavior” have lost all meaning and can no longer be used to reliably communicate thoughts in writing. Feminism did that, and it did it by design. This is part of its own internal contradiction, the thing that makes it inherently dysfunctional even according to its own rules. Men, you see, are entirely disposable because women are strong, and capable of doing everything men can do…and yet, at the same time, any distinctions between the two are culturally driven, arbitrary, unnatural and therefore invalid. The two sexes are the same in every way, it’s just that one of them is so much better and should be running things.

It can’t work. Ever. Not really. And yet when it fails, it’s all your fault.

…

Nobody wants to live in a place where our public policy is flipped in an instant, like a pancake, because some late night comedian cries. Where science tells people to stop puzzling things out logically and stew in their emotions, if they want to succeed — so that you have to wonder now how the scientists are putting together their science. Where football has become a protest without an actual message, with the game-play as an afterthought.

Nobody really wants these things. Nobody.

Scott Adams is Mr Common Sense.

I’m pro-gun, but mostly for selfish reasons. Some people (such as celebrities) are probably safer with defensive weapons nearby. But I acknowledge the reality that guns make people less safe in other situations. No two situations are alike. That’s partly why the issue can never be fully resolved. Both sides pretend they are arguing on principle, but neither side is. Both sides are arguing from their personal risk profiles, and those are simply different. Our risk profiles will never be the same across the entire population, so we will never agree on gun control.

…

Many pro-gun people in the debate seem to be confused about the purpose of laws in general. Laws are not designed to eliminate crime. Laws are designed to reduce crime. The most motivated criminals will always find a way, and law-abiding citizens will avoid causing trouble in the first place. Laws are only for the people in the middle who might – under certain situations – commit a crime. Any friction you introduce to that crowd has a statistical chance of making a difference.

Humans are lazy and stupid, on average. If you make something 20% harder to do, a lot of humans will pass. It doesn’t matter what topic you are discussing; if you introduce friction, fewer people do it. With that in mind, let’s look at the least-rational gun control arguments I am seeing lately.

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Not a headline that you see every day.

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Meal kits, like Blue Apron, have always stood for the family lives of our fantasies

This brought home to me that I am probably not the target demographic of these services, since neither my parents nor myself were ever divorced. Nor is it important to me that dinner represent a new and exciting culinary discovery; those who know me well know also that ‘new’ and ‘exciting’ aren’t part of my personality.

In its evocation of a family dinner table with no past and no future — having no leftovers is one of the key advertising promises of these services — meal-kit delivery services promise that, with the help of e-commerce, traditional family life can continue undisturbed even as the underlying structures that produced the family as we know it are undergoing extreme disruption. If becoming an adult is learning to parent yourself, meal-kit delivery imagines that parent at sea in the overwhelming churn of an unmoored and unrecognizable life.

That’s more angst than I really need in a meal. I enjoy cooking the things that I know how to cook, and I’d really like to be a great cook but am constitutionally unable to put in the time and effort to become one. And nobody in 1950s Indiana ate food that originated in a foreign country, except maybe Italian on Friday night because you could get spaghetti sauce without meat. (My mother gave us Chop Suey once. From a can. It didn’t end well.)

Lileks has his unique take here.

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Unlike swans, ospreys, coyotes, and termites, the primates known as Homo sapiens do not generally mate for life. While some of us naked apes may find one partner and stay with them forever, never straying, history tells us that it has not been the norm for our species. Nevertheless, marriage, a social technology, has sprung up in most societies and on every inhabited continent.

For the majority of its existence, marriage has been a worldly matter, having to do with the transfer of property, the creation and support of children, the tracking of bloodlines, and the control of women. For these reasons, it was usually a man-woman affair, regardless of a society’s feelings toward homosexuality. But although there have been marriages throughout most of human civilization, this does not mean that there were weddings. There are, for example, no weddings in the Bible. Marriages were made official through the signing of a contract or some other means of formalized agreement, but a marriage was not generally considered to be a spiritual or even romantic occasion. And because there were no weddings, for a long time there could be no true wedding dresses, either.

Well, really, there weren’t any real weddings before Vogue.

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It is a logical and factual error to apply the collective “we” to Americans, except when referring generally to the citizens of the United States. Other instances of “we” (e.g., “we” won World War II, “we” elected Barack Obama) are fatuous and presumptuous. In the first instance, only a small fraction of Americans still living had a hand in the winning of World War II. In the second instance, Barack Obama was elected by amassing the votes of fewer than 25 percent of the number of Americans living in 2008 and 2012. “We the People” — that stirring phrase from the Constitution’s preamble — was never more hollow than it is today.

You will have heard me castigate (can’t say ‘denigrate’ these days) this as the Aggregation Fallacy.

Further, the logical and factual error supports the unwarranted view that the growth of government somehow reflects a “national will” or consensus of Americans. Thus, appearances to the contrary (e.g., the adoption and expansion of national “social insurance” schemes, the proliferation of cabinet departments, the growth of the administrative state) a sizable fraction of Americans (perhaps a majority) did not want government to grow to its present size and degree of intrusiveness. And a sizable fraction (perhaps a majority) would still prefer that it shrink in both dimensions. In fact, The growth of government is an artifact of formal and informal arrangements that, in effect, flout the wishes of many (most?) Americans. The growth of government was not and is not the will of “we Americans,” “Americans on the whole,” “Americans in the aggregate,” or any other mythical consensus.

Precisely so.

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The morning after a gunman murdered nearly 60 people in Las Vegas, Hillary Clinton tweeted that “we can and must put politics aside, stand up to the NRA, and work together to try to stop this from happening again.” The former Democratic presidential nominee’s commitment to putting politics aside was gone in an instant, and her implicit claim that she knows how to “stop this from happening again” was equally empty.

Gun controllers like Clinton habitually seize upon mass shootings as evidence in favor of the policies they have always supported. But there is rarely any logical connection between the two, because in this debate showing you are on the right side is more important than persuading anyone.

The Other McCaine clears the air.

Between 2014 and 2016, the nationwide homicide rate has increased more than 20%, and the 3.4% increase in the US violent crime rate from 2015 to 2016 was the largest single-year increase in 25 years, the Justice Department said.

A major factor in this increase was the anti-police rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement, and most of the additional victims were black.

…

Who is killing these black victims? Not whites, and not the police, but other blacks.
In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to the Washington Post. The paper categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as “unarmed.” That classification masks assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest.

Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer.

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Not long ago, emergency calls were handled locally. Outages were small and easily diagnosed and fixed. The rise of cellphones and the promise of new capabilities—what if you could text 911? or send videos to the dispatcher?—drove the development of a more complex system that relied on the internet. For the first time, there could be such a thing as a national 911 outage. There have now been four in as many years.

Uh-oh.

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artin Luther’s Protestant Reformation turns 500 at the end of this month, and I honestly think he would have been surprised to see it last this long, not so much because his initial project of reforming the Church of Rome would have been realized by now but rather because he was under the impression that the world was probably ending soon. Well, here we are, and it’s 2017. A lot has happened in Protestantism’s five centuries.

Most people look at the Reformation from either a Roman Catholic perspective or a Protestant perspective.

There is a reason that there has never been a ‘reformation’ in Orthodoxy. Most of the issues that Protestants raised are areas in which the Roman church departed from Orthodoxy. Sale of indulgences can’t happen in a Church that doesn’t believe in Purgatory, for example.

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Well, not really. They’re looking at skin color, not ‘race’ per se.

Now map this against Muslim terrorist incidents. Notice the correlation?

ZMan casts aspersions.

The reason that Buckley Conservatism completely failed to halt the advance of Progressivism is that the Buckleyites eventually came to accept the moral framework of the Left. Libertarians have gone down the same road, embracing the morality of Progressives, while trying to find a way to carve out a place for individual liberty within that moral framework. It’s why the differences between libertarianism and what passes for conservatism are trivial now. They both operate in the same narrow space.

Wrangling over the permutations and combinations of difference between ‘traditionalists’ (conservatives) and libertarians was the chief occupation of the Party of the Right during my undergraduate years at Yale.

A good way to illustrate this is with this interview Carl Benjamin conducted with Jared Taylor. Benjamin is a British provocateur who goes by the handle Sargon of Akkad on social media. He describes himself as a liberal, but to Americans that should be understood as libertarian. His views are consistent with what you see from the Reason Magazine types. That means he embraces the libertine social polices of the Progressives, but he likes getting cheap stuff from Amazon without paying sales tax.

And a better description of ‘libertarian’ I’ve never seen.

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Stereotypes exist because of reasons; they don’t just fall out of the sky like snowflakes.

Of course a stereotype doesn’t tell you anything factual about particular individuals — it tells you likelihoods and probabilities about groups. But if you meet an individual you don’t know from a group with which you don’t have a lot of contact, you have to play the odds for your own safety’s sake … and the odds are that betting according to the stereotype is the safe play.

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Trump is undoubtedly to blame.

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Sounds to me as if Trump won this one.