Read it.

But never forget that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his first year in office.

Don’t let reality distract you from the Narrative.

Read it.

Hey — if we’re going to have a pointless click-bait quiz, let’s have a good one.

Read it.

My guess was ‘Get over it’, but I was wrong.

My second guess was ‘Alright, be that way’, but that was wrong, too.

It’s discouraging how often I get these clickbait-article-title-questions wrong.

Yet: I persist.

Read it.

But you have to keep in mind that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his first year in office. Never lose sight of the Narrative.

Read it.

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times last August, the cofounder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, stated that BLM would not sit at the table with President Trump, because he “is literally the epitome of evil, all the evils of this country – be it racism, capitalism, sexism, homophobia”.

Trump’s views and actions aside, calling capitalism evil and conflating it with racism is noteworthy. The same goes for the increasing tendency among racial justice advocates to embrace the left-wing economic agenda.

Pure Trump Derangement Syndrome.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Natalie Jeffers, who cofounded BLM in the United Kingdom, urged her followers to: “Fight racism with solidarity. Fight capitalism with socialism. We must organize – dedicate ourselves to revolutionary politic power.”

So it’s Just Another Left Wing Victim Group. *yawn*

But you’ll learn. You’ll learn….

Kevin Williamson brings the heat.

The Republican tax plan may be kind of dumb, but if it were three times as dumb as it is, it would only be half as dumb as the Washington Post’s analysis of it.

Don’t hold it in, Kevin, tell us how you really feel.

Paul Mirengoff sums up my position on the Roy Moore kerfuffle very efficiently.

Her allegations may be true. But based on what has been reported so far, I think her most serious allegations — the ones that, if true, would constitute criminal conduct — are more likely false than true.

Read it.

Genuine play exhibits all the classic characteristics of flow. For the child at play, time seems to distort, self-consciousness disappears, and attention is absorbed. In play, there is no fretting, reluctance, or inhibition, so the activity feels effortless, even though the player may be putting forth strenuous effort, say, to beat a video game level. A player might even have a pained look on his face as he pushes up against the limits of his current ability, and yet will later report having had the time of his life.

…

For the school-minded, any activity freely chosen by the child, no matter how growth-inducing, is considered “mere play” in the denigrated sense. An activity is only deemed “work” and “learning” if it is involuntary and assigned by adults.

Wisdom. Attend.

Read it.

I agree.

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The Echo has to be listening at all times in order to respond to the “Alexa” command. So the only question is whether Amazon or some friendly member of the surveillance state is recording then too.

Matches my thinking on the subject.

Cory Doctorow is one of those people who appear to have an opinion on everything.

I was there when “lifehacking” was born. It was the 11th of February, 2004, at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, held in a giant conference hotel in San Diego. I was on the committee for ETech (as we called it) and I had lobbied hard for the inclusion of a talk called “Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks” by Danny O’Brien, a technology columnist and former standup comedian who is also a good friend (I am now godfather to his daughter, Ada). I’d watched Danny compiling his research for the talk and I knew it would be a great one.

Joe Bob Briggs does food.

Two weeks ago I’m in Orlando, and my colleague suggests we Uber over to Winter Park for a restaurant that gets rave reviews on the internet. I love barbecue, so yeah, The Ravenous Pig, cute name, let’s hit it.

I should have thought about it for ten seconds first. Because why is it a ravenous pig instead of a hungry pig? A name like The Hungry Pig or The Hungry Hog would imply fat slabs of pork, whereas The Ravenous Pig is a red flag indicating we’re entering the Neverland of Food Disinformation, like one of those episodes of Iron Chef where the guy with the bow tie says, “I’m impressed that the sriracha doesn’t overpower the wine-shallot reduction, but the pilaf is a bland choice.”

Been there, done that.

I first encountered Ed Gillespie when he worked for Dick Armey, back in the day. He was a Republican Establishment apparatchik then and remains a Republican Establishment apparatchik today.

Virginia has been turning more and more blue as the Washington environs attracts more and more bureaucrats and hangers-on. The surprise here is not Gillespie losing but how close he came to winning — he barely won the primary, so the Republican party was far from unified behind him.

The DemLegHump Media will, of course, be spinning this as a ‘referendum on Trump and the Trump program’, despite the fact that Gillespie’s campaign was run by never-Trumpers from the start. Trump’s name was not on the ballot, and Gillespie’s campaign didn’t make any attempt to grasp Trump’s coat-tails, in any respect.

Nevertheless, even though this guy Northam won, all of the talk will not be about him but about Trump. That demonstrates who is still the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

UPDATE: REPORT: Bannon Offered To Campaign For Ed Gillespie But Was Denied

Read it.

Apparently nobody has clued in these people to the fact that there are more PhDs out there than can find jobs.

The best students, the ones who ought to be going for these degrees, will get scholarships. That’s what scholarships do. Subsidizing the worse students through easy cash lending guarantees does neither them nor the rest of us any good.

(Hint: The children are NOT ‘all above average’.)

Victor Davis Hanson commits the crime of of Noticing.

The English has been clear and exact for nearly a century: illegal alien (cf. Latin alienus) was a descriptive term for any foreigner who crossed the US border without coming through customs to obtain proper legal sanction.

Illegal alien, then, was a politically neutral, exact, and descriptive term: one used by both the Supreme Court and Internal Revenue Service.

But open-borders advocates did not like the adjective and noun because they accurately emphasized both illegality and the foreignness of those arriving into the United States from another country.

What followed was a slow Orwellian devolution. Illegal alien initially was reinvented as “undocumented alien,” as if the violation became one of simply forgetting (rather than never having) one’s supposed legal documents at home. But the noun “alien” still implied arrivals were somehow separate from US citizens by virtue of their illegal resident status. So next the noun changed to immigrant, as if undocumented immigrant gave the impression that forgetful visitors had just strayed innocently across the border.

The Left is very fond of distortion-through-adjective. ‘Justice’ isn’t good enough; it has to be ‘social justice’, ‘racial justice’, ‘distributive justice’, etc. — which is to say, injustice.

Victor Davis Hanson observes the phenomenon.

Read it.

These things happen. Those horns are there for a reason.

Freeberg ponders.

Think about THAT, now. We’re constantly told the democrats are the party of the little guy, of the underdog. The handicapped, who cannot do, couldn’t have done, anything to improve his present circumstances. Well, putting aside the fact that this is exactly how small children argue — “You’re stupid! I win!” — when the time comes for all of their hopes and dreams to depend on making an entire country angry at one guy, they see this as the most promising strategy. Promulgate the notion that he’s stupid, like they did with Sarah Palin and George W. Bush. Convince us he’s stupid, and our anger is automatic. And right, and good, and just.

Think about that…take all the time you need…

I’m holding out for ‘The floor of the Senate’.

Read it.

Probably organizing a union.

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They’re still using the Russian Imperial arms, why not have a Russian Imperial family? I doubt that a new tsar could be any worse than Putin.

Actually, the Russian Imperial dynasty was German from the time of Tsar Paul, so they might want to get some real Russians for a change; there are any number of Rurik-descended noble families that would do, such as the Gagarins, the Obolenskys, and the Dolgorukys.

If they want to go with the Hostein-Gottorp-Romanovs, the heir male was Prince Paul Romanovsky-Ilyinsky, son of Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich, who died in 2004. His son, Dimitri Pavlovich, an American citizen, would be a good pick.

Read it.

Imagine if marathon runners were ranked simply by taking their average time over every course. Some courses are clearly harder than others, and runners can choose which races to enter, so a runner could always improve her ranking by refusing to run on difficult courses. Even sillier would be to rank runners by their average finish position across all races: a world-class professional could just run against high-schoolers and finish first without even trying.

Strangely, the current system for evaluating American college students manages to achieve this extraordinary level of silliness. Since students can select their own courses, and grades from all courses count equally, they are rewarded for taking easier courses and punished for taking harder ones. A first-year student taking introductory English literature gets exactly equal credit as her classmate who precociously jumps into graduate-level literary analysis.

College grade-point averages (GPAs) are not merely a matter of pride. Medical schools, law schools and consulting firms, among other popular post-graduation destinations, have strict GPA cut-offs; any student who fails to make the grade will struggle to have their application even seen by a human. From an individual student’s standpoint, it’s completely rational to optimise for GPA, even at the expense of other considerations. From the university’s point of view, though, that expense is vast.

The problem with any system of grading is: Who’s doing the grading, and on what basis?

American military schools solve this problem by separating the teaching and the testing. Tests at the end of every two or three week Unit are standardized and are created and graded by a special testing group who build tests based on individual questions that have been used in past tests and which have values associated with them as to predicted performance, e.g. a question is historically gotten right by 64% or 73% or 45% of test-takers; tests are built from questions whose average predicted success rate equals the desired passing score. New questions are constantly being created and their initial values are derived from performance in tests to which they are added but in which they are not counted ‘for real’.

The closest approach to this in modern academia are the various ‘aptitude tests’ like the SAT and the ACT and the ‘gateway tests’ used by British-format school systems, such as the GCSE, O-Level, and A-Level exams. Attempts are being made to do something like this in the United States but are hitting rocks and shoals because (a) tests of absolute achievement allow teachers themselves to be evaluated for effectiveness, and teachers resist this to their least breath, and (b) such tests are subject to capture by political groups who want the educational system to indoctrinate students with their preferred political agenda and so write tests that reward that indoctrination.

Read it.

Science is not always your friend.

Read it.

I got a heads up about the comparison at a 2015 dinner, when I heard a congressman complain about the members of the House’s rambunctious and very conservative Freedom Caucus. “Right-wing Marxists,” he called them. Aha, I thought. That’s me.

Read it.

Obviously Reality doesn’t read the correct news media.

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Everyone from Sen. Diane Feinstein (D – Cal.) to the leadership of the National Rifle Association was on board with some form of restriction and a flurry of bills were introduced to prohibit them outright.

Today, people seem to have forgotten all about them.

Guess they weren’t that big a deal after all.

In honor of my brother’s birthday.

Read it.

How about that Global Warming, eh? Good thing the Science Is Settled.

Read it.

It is my goal to explain why the causes of male and female difference are not merely cultural or the product of patriarchal indoctrination. Separate athletic competitions and distinct medical disciplines of gynaecology and urology testify to the most obvious biological differences between men and women. But the scientific method ? a co-operative, critical, and self-correcting process which has midwifed huge technological and medical advances ? can also help us to understand more subtle differences between the sexes in interests and aspirations. And it is understanding what we really are that will make us free.

Science is SCIENCE … except when it goes against the Narrative, at which point DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE!

The Grumpy Economist (love that name) points out some inconvenient truth.

I think every economist in this debate admits, if some reluctantly, that “corporations” pay no taxes. As an accounting matter, every cent corporations pay comes from higher prices, lower wages, or lower payments to shareholders. The only question is which one.  And indirect general equilibrium effects are central.  The question is not just, how do corporations respond immediately, but how do wages, prices, and capital in the whole economy adjust. “Make corporations pay their fair share” is just nonsense.

The only pool of money from which corporations can ‘pay taxes’ is the pool of money they get from their customers. Neither mangers nor shareholders reach into their own pockets to give this extra money to the government.

‘Corporate taxation’ is merely a stealthy way to get more money out of their customers. In that sense, it’s really a form of sales tax — which, as every economist knows (and every proglodyte ignores) is one of the most regressive forms of tax there is. So every proglodyte screaming ‘Tax the rich!’ when corporate tax rates are discussed are actually screaming ‘Tax the poor!’ without knowing it. (Screaming Without Knowing is what proglodytes do best.)

Read it.

With the anniversary of the election of Donald Trump to the presidency only a little over two weeks way on November 8, how are you planning to commemorate that momentous event? Well, for thousands of Social Justice Warriors who still can’t accept the notion of a President Trump the answer seems to be to scream helplessly at the sky. I kid you not. In fact they have named their event “Scream Helplessly at the Sky.”

Freeberg gives it a think.

Imagine that we set a whole bunch of famous leaders down and gave them a pop quiz: “What is the purpose of government? What is the State for[?] Then we sort them into buckets.

One common answer would be “the State exists to create Utopia here on earth,” and guys like Lenin, Hitler, Mao, and Obama would be in that bucket. Their Utopias would all look different, and they’d employ different means to get there, but all those guys would agree that their governments are trying to create a perfect world.

Another bucket contains guys like Oliver Cromwell, Suleiman the Magnificent, Charlemagne, and Ferdinand and Isabella. Their answer is something like “government exists to give greater glory to God, and/or punish His enemies.”

A third bucket is full of guys who answered “the purpose of the State is to give me and my entourage the highest possible standard of living” — Genghis Khan, Louis XVI, pick your ancient empire-builder.

A fourth bucket reads “the State exists to keep the natural world in balance.” Egyptian pharaohs and Confucian emperors fit here — they have to do their daily rituals or the world falls out of whack.

A fifth — very small — bucket reads “Government exists to protect its people’s life, liberty, and property.” Here you find George Washington, Jefferson Davis, William Pitt, and (arguably) guys like Pericles and the consuls of the Roman Republic.

I’d argue that the guys in the “state as utopia” bucket are the Left, and the “protect the people’s rights” bucket are the Right. That leaves the vast majority of all governments that have ever existed in the middle three buckets…

Joe Bob Briggs looks behind the curtain.

One of the funniest writers in the sports department where I started my career—a quick-witted guy who should have known better—got promoted to editorial writer. This meant he was responsible for the daily Wisdom Decrees passed down by whoever dwells in those mahogany-lined offices with the big windows that always seem to contain photographs of presidents and home-run hitters.

He lasted three months.

“You can’t pay me enough to have an opinion every day,” he told me when he returned to the safe haven of minor-league baseball and publinks golf tournaments.

I feel the same way, and I don’t even work for an editorial page.

Watch it.

I love these graphical music notation videos.