How about that Climate Change? Is it time for us all to die, women and minorities hardest hit etc. etc. yet?

Read it.

That’s okay. The useful Mexicans are already here.

Lion of the Blogosphere explains some inconvenient truths.

As I’ve written before, that’s an old-fashioned definition of rich. Today, it’s considered low class to not have some kind of job. And the thing about the top out-of-sight rich is that because of their high social capital, in addition to their inherited financial capital, they tend to get paid a lot more money than you think relative to their actual value-creating contributions to the economy. So a top out-of-sight lifestyle can be maintained with less inherited wealth because it’s supplemented with a six-figure salary.

Furthermore, as I’ve also written before, non-transferable capital (what might be called human capital) has become a more important component of being rich. Mere ownership of assets have become a declining source of income. The dividend yield on stocks, the interest rates paid on corporate debt, have never been lower. If you’re just sitting on your assets, then your wealth is declining. I believe that the money which used to go to stockholders is now being transferred to C-level executives, investment bankers and other finance types, and to a lesser extent overpaid corporate helpers like BIGLAW partners and management consultants.

Most of the Chattering Class, and all of the Democrat Underclass base, have no clue about these simple truths.

Read it.

This is an interesting ‘space’, as the tech writers say. For some reason, even though I am notorious among my friends for being boring and unadventurous when it comes to food, I am strongly attracted to meal delivery services like Blue Apron. And my native indolence responds to the appeal of Amazon Fresh and Instacart, although the economics don’t work out for two people who eat out more often than not. Still: Interesting times.

Read it.

The debate over the morality and efficiency of so-called “price gouging” during natural disasters and other emergencies provides a unique opportunity to explore some of the most fundamental ideas in economics. Understanding those ideas is important not just for the economics of emergencies, but for how market economies operate in more normal times and why they are superior to the alternatives.

The biggest advantage of market economies is the way in which they tie together how we decide who will get to purchase and consume goods with the way in which those goods are supplied. Market prices are not only a good way of determining who should get goods. They also work to encourage people to supply more or less of the good depending on how much in demand those goods are.

…

The laws of economics are not suspended in an emergency, no matter what the laws of politicians attempt to do. When goods are more scarce, they will be costly to obtain, whether those costs are in terms of money or something else. The importance of letting market prices do their job and determining who gets what is that this process is also the way in which we make sure that there is stuff to be allocated in the first place. The only way to make sure we have sufficient production is to let market prices determine consumption.

Read it.

The first argument, which nobody in these degenerate modern times ever mentions, is that it is fundamentally immoral, because it steals from one group of people in order to give unearned income to another group of people. The primary motivation for this institutionalized theft, in a quasi-democratic state like America, is to buy the votes of the underclass under the Clever Plastic Disguise of Compassion. ‘He who robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.’

Read it.

Recently Almighty God smote the city of Houston as punishment for its pathetic lack of zoning laws. I am an expert in zoning laws, having spent roughly 4,000 hours playing Sim City in high school instead of losing my virginity.

Going forward, Houston can either embrace zoning and place itself in the steady hands of technocrats who designate where bodegas, trailer parks and whatnot go, or it can stick with the present organic model, letting a bunch of mouth-breathing humans organize the city from the bottom up.

I know what Sim City would do.

Turn-based strategy games typically follow the Centrally Planned Economy of which the Soviets were so fond. That doesn’t really train you for real life, unless your ambition is to become a Faceless Bureaucrat in some future Democrat Oceania. But they are a lot of fun, and (among other things) demonstrate quite plainly that a centrally planned society will crash & burn nine times out of ten, and the tenth time is still pretty grim.

Read it.

Hey, I guess there really is something to this biology stuff, after all.

Reality exists, even when you don’t want it to.

I can’t wait to hear what Scott Adams has to say about this.

I have no respect for anyone who uses ‘gender’ as a verb, and give what they say no credence.

You have been warned.

Read it.

Very ironic when you consider that they were all Democrats.

Even more ironic when you consider that it was the election of a Republican President that triggered secession.

Read it.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

Read it.

Well, maybe.

UPDATE: So much for that Voynich manuscript “solution”

ZMan looks at the New Russian Enemy (not to be confused with the Old Soviet Enemy, which wasn’t cool).

For the last few years, the American ruling class has been obsessed with Russia. The Bear Scare in DC over Trump’s alleged ties to Putin is just one ridiculous element to the obsession.  At some level, even the dullards in the media know it is nonsense, but the Cloud People are convinced that the public shares their hatred of the Russians. China and Israel are much more involved in our elections, but they are not suitable bogeymen, in the minds of our betters. To them, the Russians are the scariest of scary monsters.

The Russia-Trump story is just a sideshow, of course. The neocon insistence that we start World War 3 over Ukraine is much more representative of the ruling elite’s hatred for the Russians. Steve Sailer has done yeoman’s work documenting the neocon warmonger’s efforts to stoke the fires of Russophobia. It’s not just the neocons. The Left has gone down a similar path, accusing Putin of being the new Hitler and claiming he has plans to invade Europe. The public face of the ruling elite is sure that Putin is very bad.

Read it.

A few days ago, NRO reported that law professors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander started a firestorm by writing an opinion piece that extolled bourgeois values such as education, employment, hard work, marriage, and charity. Worse, the co-authors pointed out the fact that all cultures are not equally beneficial and constructive. Worst of all, they criticized “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.”

Inevitably, the two professors were accused of racism by some on the left. Apparently, things like valuing hard work, grit, and persistence is something only white folks do. Well. I wonder what minority football, basketball, and baseball players think of that. Would they agree that they got where they are by avoiding hard work? Would they agree that grit and persistence are “white” traits?

Two of the world’s greatest living economists, Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, happen to be black. Did they succeed by avoiding hard work and education? American physician and surgeon, Charles Richard Drew (also black), developed improved techniques for storing blood. Did he do that after dropping out of school?

Isn’t claiming that only white people care about things like learning, honesty, jobs, and kindness sort of, well, racist?

Funny how people who can predict the precise temperature and sea level of the entire earth twenty, thirty, forty years from now can’t predict where a hurricane is going to go in the next six days.

They made a bad boy outa me.

Read it.

1. DACA expressly violated federal statutes which require the initiation of removal proceedings.
2. DACA violated the constitutional obligation of the executive to Take Care That The Laws Are Faithfully Executed.
3. DACA conferred amnesty and federal benefits under the false pretense of “Prosecutorial Discretion.”
4. DACA conferred a benefit without promulgating a rule.

My thesis is that the ‘problem of universals‘ is a better conceptual framework for the modern political world than the ‘left vs. right’ paradigm that we inherited from 18th-century France.

Realists believe that, once we assign a name to a thing, however arbitrary that original assignment might have been, the assignment is locked — while the thing remains the same thing, the name we assign it ought to remain the same.

Nominalists believe that the names we assign to things are and remain completely arbitrary — if we wish to use a name assigned to a thing to include other things as well, we are free to do that.

Sound familiar?

As you might suspect, I consider myself a Realist, and judge most proglodytes to be Nominalists. A quick review of the way proglodytes use the terms ‘marriage’, ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, ‘homophobe’, and ‘free speech’ will, I suggest, adequately support my characterization.

The Nominalist agenda (and they always have an agenda) is summed up by Humpty-Dumpty’s response to Alice in Through the Looking Glass:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’

Nominalists aren’t interested in Truth; they are interested in ‘which is to be master’. That’s all.

My thanks to ZMan, who first turned my mind toward this fruitful perspective.

ZMan takes a step out into the Dark.

The few times a month I bother to scan National Review, I feel the same way as when I watch a B-movie from the 1980’s. Yeah, it reminds me of that time I got to second base with Sally Sugarpants, but the movie is still terrible. Even more so now. Reading one of the bugmen NRO employs to write copy, tub-thump about their principles, I wonder what it must be like to live trapped in amber. Conservative Inc is a Potemkin village, where the people carry on as if nothing has changed since 1984. It’s creepy.

There is a reason, beyond the financial considerations, why these people cling so tenaciously to the past. They have nowhere else to go. They have always lived in a world, whose map is a tiny intellectual zone dominated by the Left. Around it is a blank space labeled “Here Be Monsters.” Even for those who figure out that the old Left-Right paradigm is no longer relevant, their fear of what’s out there has them staggering around on the fringes of the old world, like homeless beggars looking for a place to lie down.

This probably explains some of the Bernie Bros too. They no longer can tolerate Progressive Globalism, but they fear association with the Right, so they have staggered over to 19th century socialism. They don’t really embrace Bernie Sanders or his anachronistic politics, but they have nowhere else to go. It’s a form of populism they can embrace, without changing parties and supporting Trump. The Bernie Movement is just a convenient doorway for them to sleep in while the world sorts itself out.

,,,

You are either in the ideological camp based in biological realism or you are in the camp that embraces the blank slate and egalitarianism. If you reject both, you are a lost boy, staggering around in the darkness.

Read it.

Say you have 10 toy cars, and are told to share them with someone else. You, being reasonable, suggest a five-and-five split. The other person, claiming poverty or special circumstance or simple greed, says they should get nine, and leave you one.

So there is a disagreement, and you go to a mediator/arbitrator to work it out. He, of course, being of Solomonic disposition, splits the difference: you keep three, and the other guy gets seven. The unreasonable party just won.

It astonishes me how obvious this is, and how, time after time, “experts” demonstrate their complete ignorance of this fundamental feature of any arbitrated settlement. And it applies throughout life.

It applies to today’s delicate SJW snowflakes. Since their position is entirely unreasonable, any discussion that tries to find common ground ends up with a laughably stupid result.

The same principle applies to North Korea. Their positions are as extreme as any could be. Any attempt to negotiate means that they win before we even start, since by negotiating, we have conceded that there is something valid and acceptable about the demands of a madman.

Read it.

The belief that humans came out of Africa millions of years ago is widely believed. But it might be about to be entirely re-written, according to the authors of a new study.

They claim to have found a footprint in Crete that could change the narrative of early human evolution, suggesting that our ancestors were in modern Europe far earlier than we ever thought.

Read it.

Years ago I was conversing with a hard-core economist, one of the benighted variety who assumes that everyone behaves like a wealth-maximizing robot. I observed that even if he were right in his presumption that economic decisions are made rationally and in a way that comports with economic efficiency, government stands in the way of efficiency. In my pithy phrasing: Politics trumps economics.

So even if the impetus for efficiency isn’t blunted by governmental acts (laws, regulations, judicial decrees), those acts nevertheless stand in the way of efficiency. A simple case in point is the minimum wage, which doesn’t merely drive up the wages of some workers, but also ensures that other workers are unemployed in the near term, and that more workers will be unemployed in the long-term. Yes, the minimum wage will cause some employers to substitute capital (e.g., robots) for labor, but they will do so only to reduce the bottom-line damage (at least in the near-term). The politics (the urge to regulate) trumps economics (the efficiency-maximizing state of affairs that would otherwise obtain).

Ah, yes — the Martini- Henry. A fine weapon.

Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.

— Hillaire Belloc, The Modern Traveller (1898)

Read it.

WHEN I ASK people to picture a coder, they usually imagine someone like Mark Zuckerberg: a hoodied college dropout who builds an app in a feverish 72-hour programming jag—with the goal of getting insanely rich and, as they say, “changing the world.”

But this Silicon Valley stereotype isn’t even geographically accurate. The Valley employs only 8 percent of the nation’s coders. All the other millions? They’re more like Devon, a programmer I met who helps maintain a ­security-software service in Portland, Oregon. He isn’t going to get fabulously rich, but his job is stable and rewarding: It’s 40 hours a week, well paid, and intellectually challenging. “My dad was a blue-­collar guy,” he tells me—and in many ways, Devon is too.

Read it.

But of course he didn’t do it with any ’empathy’, the swine.

“Price Gouging” Is Urgently Necessary

Bad Economics and Hurricane Harvey

Price hikes in Houston are the result of free market capitalism

Read it.

This proposal is defective. The proposed ‘Left Coast’ state ought to extend North to Sonoma/Napa/Yolo in order to put all the proglodyte crazies in one place.

Read it.

More than Obama ever did. More than Clinton ever did. More than either Bush ever did.

But he lacks ’empathy’ so he’s still the New Hitler.

Watch it.

Scott Adams has a regular feature on Periscope (a service with which I am not, alas, familiar) and always says something interesting.

Although he considers himself a liberal, Adams is so full of common sense that I find him an anomaly. But that’s me.

Read it.

Heh.

Freeberg understands the dialectic.

So we’ve gone from “Russia Russia Russia” to “Nazis Nazis Nazis” to “Statues Statues Statues”…now we’re all going to veer sharply away from our prior silly deliberations about “hate speech” versus free speech, and whether it’s okay to acknowledge more than one side in a dispute is bigoted & hateful and has violent intent, when one of those sides has something to do with Nazis. And with the desperate plight of our fellow country-persons in Texas and the gut-wrenching, life-altering crisis they face, re-focus on what really matters. Melania Trump’s shoes.

Well, if I may; just a parting though or two about the “peaceful” protests. The argument that it’s somehow wrong to call out hatred and bigotry on both sides when it does indeed exist on both sides, has failed. The phrase “peaceful protest” is way past overused; it has failed too. Those protests were not peaceful. They weren’t even protests, they were riots. And the protests themselves have failed. The protesters did not succeed in making their point because they did not have a point to make. “I’m unhappy with the way things are going and I want things to be different” is a gripe, not a point.

Read it.

Thank you, Minimum Wage.

Steve Sailer peeks behind the curtain.

Much of the mania of the moment stems from a growing crisis of faith among elites over how much longer they can expect the ideological dogmas under which they have prospered so mightily to withstand the onrushing findings of genetic science.

No family illustrates this tension more ironically than the Wojcicki sisters, Susan (the former landlady of Google guys Larry Page and Sergey Brin) and Anne (the former wife of Sergey).

…

Susan’s not going to risk Google’s immense market capitalization by forcing radically different hiring patterns. But she doesn’t want anybody talking about even the possibility that there are genetic reasons behind why Google does what it does when it comes to hiring engineering talent.

In contrast, Susan’s younger sister Anne has been encouraging everybody to talk about genetics and race since she cofounded 23andMe in 2006.

Sarah Hoyt provides some adult supervision.

Science fiction and fantasy icon Ursula K Le Guin  has a rather tiresome essay saying that she was once “a man.”  Because, she says, once upon a time the only role models available for women were male, and therefore she viewed herself as a man.  Yes, I’m rolling eyes as I type this, just as I rolled them while reading the nonsense the first time.

I’ve often expounded my theory that people who need someone who is exactly like them in external characteristics to enjoy a book or a movie, have never left the early toddler stage, where having your name in a book really helps you enjoy it.

I never had that problem, and reading stories with men or boys never made me less of a woman.  Perhaps, of course, because I knew a lot of women in normal, everyday life.

Don’t look around for a role model — strive to be a role model.

A European analysis.

Politicians and car manufacturers praise electric cars as a solution to fight climate change, but the life cycle analysis of the whole vehicle shows that electric cars also cause pollution, sometimes even more than gas and diesel cars.

Manufacturing of batteries is a highly energy-consuming process. However, the main reason why the carbon footprint of electric vehicles can be significant is the way electricity is produced. Electricity emission factor is different according to the type of power plant (coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectricity, wind power…), so greenhouse gases emissions produced by an electric car change a lot from one country to another due to the type of power plants.

I will buy an electric car when I can get 400 miles on a charge and can recharge it in the five minutes it takes to fill up a tank of gas — only then.

The American Revolution gave us George Washington.

The French Revolution gave us Napoleon.

The German Revolution gave us Hitler.

The Russian Revolution gave us Stalin.

The Chinese Revolution gave us Mao.

I rest my case.

Steven Hayward at Powerline has some fun.

I see Trump has said some outlandish things lately. Like this: “I do not consider Hitler to be as bad as he is depicted. He is showing an ability that is amazing, and seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed.” More: “Germans of future generations will honor Herr Hitler as a genius, as a brave man, a matchless organizer and much more.”

Wait—did I say Trump? Sorry—these comments came from Gandhi. The first quote was made in May 1940, as Hitler was readying to roll over France, and the second quote was made on June 22, 1940, the day France capitulated. Time magazine seriously considered Gandhi to be “Person of the Century” back in 1999 before settling on Einstein as a safe and uncontroversial choice.

I guess Trump is the New Gandhi, except that he’s not.

Time had to tap dance to explain why they didn’t re-up with their “Man of the Half Century” from 1950, who was Winston Churchill. Here’s how Time explained it then:

Well, the passage of time can alter our perspective. A lot has happened since 1950. . . In his approach to domestic issues, individual rights and the liberties of colonial subjects, Churchill turned out to be a romantic refugee from a previous era who ended up on the wrong side of history.

In other words, Churchill was politically incorrect.

Whups, there’s that Wrong Side of History again. Like the boogey-man, it’ll get you if you don’t watch out.

Now Timereports that the African nation of Ghana is taking down a statue of Gandhi because of his condescending views of Africans (long known by anyone who studied Gandhi even casually), because why should the U.S. have all the fun:

Ghana has said it will remove a statue of Mahatma Gandhi from a university campus in the nation’s capital where it had sparked protests over the leader’s allegedly racist attitudes.

I love that “allegedly.” I note that Trump’s supposed racism is never considered to be “alleged.” In any case, I think Time has some old editors to erase from their collective memory for their bad judgment about Gandhi.

Maybe Hitler was the New Gandhi, except when he wasn’t. Gandhi can’t be the New Trump, because Hitler came first, or something.

The Other McCain is scouting the trail and finding nada.

According to “social justice” advocates, there is an epidemic of anti-transgender violence for which Donald Trump and Republicans are to blame. The only thing wrong with that claim is the complete lack of evidence to support it. LGBT activists and liberal journalists keep calling attention to the murders of “Transgender Women of Color,” and the facts continue contradicting the social-justice narrative.

Apparently transgender groups are shooting each other and blaming it on Trump. Or something like that.