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We hold in our mouths the legacy of our evolution. We rarely consider just how amazing our teeth are. They break food without themselves being broken, up to millions of times over the course of a lifetime; and they do it built from the very same raw materials as the foods they are breaking. Nature is truly an inspired engineer.

But our teeth are, at the same time, really messed up. Think about it. Do you have impacted wisdom teeth? Are your lower front teeth crooked or out of line? Do your uppers jut out over your lowers? Nearly all of us have to say ‘yes’ to at least one of these questions, unless we’ve had dental work. It’s as if our teeth are too big to fit properly in our jaws, and there isn’t enough room in the back or front for them all. It just doesn’t make sense that such an otherwise well-designed system would be so ill-fitting.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Theodore Dalrymple lays it out.

Mr. McDonnell, deputy leader of the British Labour Party, which for the time being is in opposition, recently objected to the presence of hereditary peers in the “upper” house of Britain’s Parliament, using the crude and vulgar language typical of populist politicians anxious to demonstrate their identity with the people or the masses. (It is strange, by the way, how rarely leftists who are in favor of confiscatory economic policies are condemned as populist, when they appeal mainly to envy, spite, and resentment, those most delightful of all human emotions.)

Speaking for myself—the only person for whom I am fully entitled to speak—I would rather be ruled (at least in the modern world) by the Duke of Northumberland than by Mr. McDonnell; and this is for perfectly rational reasons and not, as might be supposed, from any feeling of nostalgia for a world we have lost.

I’d pick the Duke of Northumberland — or any Duke, come to think of it — than John McCain.

The average citizen, therefore, has much more to fear (again, I speak of the present time, not of the Middle Ages) from a politician who imagines he has attained power because of his own virtues than from an aristocrat who knows that he owes his position to an accident of birth. Of course, aristocrats can be arrogant, disdainful of the commonalty, and so forth, though in modern circumstances they are not likely to be such; however, human character is unpredictable—anything is possible and perfection not to be looked for.

But successful politicians are arrogant ex officio, almost; arrogance is a precondition of their success, at least in any large-scale polity. The promise to do nothing much, to be but a modest continuator of his country’s life, work, and tradition, is not likely to appeal to an electorate that demand the sun, the moon, and the stars from politicians, and will vote for him who bribes it best. The modern politician’s sense of entitlement and moral authority makes the average modern aristocrat seem humility itself.

Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton exhibit more arrogance than any hereditary lord in the last hundred years.

Read it.

A Marxist student group at the pricey Swarthmore College has disbanded following some introspective efforts that led its members to learn that they were precisely what they were fighting against—both affluent and white. It’s no surprise given that Swarthmore’s students tend to be both those things.

A sudden attack of reality. How often does that happen at a college?

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In 1956, geologist M. King Hubbert famously predicted, in a presentation to the American Petroleum Institute, that oil production in the U.S. would peak no later than 1970. To make his estimates, Hubbert added up all the plausible extrapolations of domestic crude oil reserves. His more conservative calculation assumed the ultimate production of 150 billion barrels, in which case production would peak in 1965. But if ultimate production could rise to 200 billion barrels, the peak would be delayed until 1970.

Must be in the same box with the rising sea levels due to Global Warming.

Read it.

A Canadian writer in a Canadian publication gives us the truth.

Canada’s public service unions gleefully embraced a recent international ranking by Oxford University and the Institute for Government that placed us number one in the world for “civil service effectiveness.” Perhaps understandably intoxicated with this success, those same unions were curiously silent when the prestigious Commonwealth Fund in the U.S. released its most recent update comparing health-care systems in the rich industrialized world. This showed our health-care system, run virtually in its entirety by these effective Canadian public servants, not just below average, but at the bottom of the heap, barely outperforming France and our health-care system’s arch-enemy, the U.S.

On measure after measure the data belie the boasts that medicare apologists tout as proof we have the best system in the world. When measuring the equity of our system against the others, we come a pitiful ninth out of 11, despite the fact that “fairness” is the argument most frequently trotted out to defend the status quo. Turns out Canadian health care isn’t all that fair.

Ditto for health-care outcomes. Despite being a fairly high spender, we are not able to turn that money into better outcomes for Canadians. Again, we rank ninth out of 11.

Read it.

Trump’s announcement that it would not be feasible to open the military to personnel who identify as transgender returns the military to the policy it had always observed, before the Obama administration’s 12th-hour, politically driven imposition of a transgender agenda.

As I explain in my forthcoming book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment,” the best biology, psychology, and philosophy conclude that sex is a biological reality and that gender is the social expression of that reality.

The most helpful therapies for gender dysphoria focus not on achieving the impossible—changing bodies to conform to thoughts and feelings—but on helping people accept and even embrace the truth about their bodies and reality.

“Transgender” is a mental disorder. Your sex is determined by your hardware. If your software doesn’t agree, then your software needs to be fixed, not the hardware. A man who thinks he ought to be a women is as mentally disordered as a man who thinks he ought to be Spiderman, and ought to receive medical care in the same fashion.

Read it.

I guess the writer thinks of this as some kind of victory — and it is, in the diversity-check-boxing sweepstakes.

Will it lead to more, or less, successful graduates? I guess we’ll see.

Read it.

New York charter schools may soon be able to hire and certify its own teachers instead of having to go through the state, according to state regulations announced Wednesday.

Good. Put control of schools as locally as possible. That’s where it belongs.

The new rules also reflects a battle between Democrat control of New York state schools and a push to expand charter schools from Republicans.

Democrats, party of the totalitarian future.

Teachers’ unions and education experts criticize the proposal, saying that candidates can qualify too easily. “We would be skeptical of people who say we should have more flexible pathways into medicine, or into becoming an airplane pilot, these are activities on which other people’s lives depend,” said Columbia University professor. “I think it’s a terrible disservice to children to act as if their teachers don’t have to be prepared,” he added.

Note the unspoken assumption: People who aren’t prepared Our Way aren’t prepared — as if the current failing schools are good advertisements for the Our Way of preparation. Their problem is that, without a lock on the teacher credentialing process, they have no way of imposing their diversity box-checking and Fashionable Victim way-greasing at the students’ expense.

Read it.

I have a simple system.

1. Open mouth.
2. Shove it in.
3. Repeat.

ZMan looks to the core.

Cultural movements, like identity or race movements, are closed and exclusive. They certainly seek to grow their numbers, but only on their own terms. They place narrow rules on members and never accept divided loyalties. You are either in the thing or outside the thing. There is no in between. This is why the American Left has been so persistent and able to re-spawn after each collapse. It’s not a list of agenda items. It’s a lifestyle with a moral code and a wide array of symbols for the members to accept and display.

Read it.

Feh. I knew it all the time.

Those who claim that money can’t buy happiness are shopping in the wrong places.

Scott Adams explains it all to you on Periscope.

Read it.

Tourists affect me much the same way.

Watch it.

Sounds like a Republican.

Read it.

I see that India is well on its way to becoming a First World country.

We’ll know they’ve made it when they organize a Democratic party that encourages having government running everything.

Lileks.

Last Saturday I stood in a store looking at a thin white plastic square that sings a song when you press a button on your phone. You’re thinking: “Wow, I’ll take two.” But it gets better: You stick the square on something you might lose and want to find. Keys. Dental plates. Dogs. Perspective.

Endless uses! Ever found yourself looking for the TV remote and thought, “It’s probably behind the sofa cushion. If only I could take out my phone, enter my code, call up an app, log in, dismiss the screen that says there’s an update, dismiss the screen that asks for a rating on iTunes and then push a button that makes the remote sing, so I can confirm that the remote’s probably under the cushion.”

Read it.

When many middle-aged people think back to their childhood, they remember roaming the streets with their friends during long, hot summers. Our parents threw us out the door in the morning and instructed us not to come back until dinnertime. Often in charge of younger siblings, we strayed further than we should have, got into trouble and, by the end of the summer, had a collection of triumphs, scars and memories for life.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Parenting hasn’t only changed in terms of what is considered safe for children. Parents now worry more about the impact of their parenting on their children, feeling pressured to provide a stream of stimulating activities in a way that would have once seemed absurd. This has led to the emergence of two types of related parenting styles: the “helicopter” and the “lawnmower”.

My mother’s idea of ‘stream of stimulating activities’ chiefly involved a belt and me bent over the rim of a bathtub. I’ll pass.

Read it.

What nefarious plan does he have cooking, since Everyone Knows that he hates women?

Read it.

This puts the Left in a cleft stick: On the one hand, it makes for a larger dependent Underclass that will vote for more (Democrat) government giveaways; on the other, robots don’t vote Democrat.

I feel their pain.

Joel Kotkin brings some common sense.

When President Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accords, embraced coal, and stacked his administration from people from fossil-fuel producing states, the environmental movement reacted with near-apocalyptic fear and fury. They would have been better off beginning to understand precisely why the country has become so indifferent to their cause, as evidenced by the victory not only of Trump but of unsympathetic Republicans at every level of government.

Yet there’s been little soul-searching among green activists and donors, or in the generally pliant media since November about how decades of exaggerated concerns—about peak oil, the “population bomb,” and even, a few decades back, global cooling—and demands for economic, social, and political sacrifices from the masses have damaged their movement.

My guess: Because they’re unrelenting dicks, and lie through their teeth most of the time. But that’s me.

Freeberg nails it again.

The job is to define behavior. That is the job. This means, as some wizened sages have observed, there is a necessity for those new to it to “change the way you think.” That’s true, because the job involves defining something, and until the necessity arises a lot of us don’t have to define much of anything at all. You see this in babies. If they get what they want by just making illegible noises, that’s what they are going to learn how to do. If they’re forced to articulate exactly what it is they want, and until then they don’t get it, they become more skilled in their vocal expression. That is learning to define. This stuff we call “code” is merely the medium through which definition is done. Most debates about programming languages are counterproductive, and most programming languages hurt the industry as a whole, because by adding themselves to the growing collection of languages they do injury against the progress of defining. Just like with the spoken word, changing the language in which an idea is expressed doesn’t do anything to improve the idea. Do you really need to switch? The code you’ve written already is an asset; it is the only product in existence, after your investment of time. “How many lines is your code” is a metric that might offer a clue about this, although not a decisive one. “Is it easy to read?” is a consideration, in the sense that a programmer familiar with it shouldn’t be given a reliable first impression that is the direct opposite of what it really does. As the language evolves, it should maintain backward compatibility as it does so, so that the code written already is treated like an asset. Which is what it is. So, there should be assurances to this effect. Guarantees are better than assurances. I suppose a parchment document signed in blood would be better than a guarantee. Regardless, the best definition of a “wrong language” being used is, oopsie, this compiler or interpreter is now on rev X which doesn’t support programming construct Y anymore, so you need to go demolish/reassemble. Yeah. While you’re doing that, switch languages because that was the wrong one. Then nuke it from orbit.

Victor Davis Hanson points out some anomalies.

Those who would never stoop to paint their own houses gladly expend far more energy sweating at the gym. During the decline in physical-labor jobs over the last 50 years, an entire compensating industry has grown up around physical fitness. As modern work becomes less physical, requiring hours at a desk or some sort of immobile standing, the fitness center has replaced the drudgery of the field, the mine, and the forest as a means to exercise the body each day. A forbidding array of exercise bikes and StairMasters not only works the body; it also reinforces the modern, scientifically backed conviction that physical fitness promotes general wellness, mental acuity, and perhaps longevity. A new slang has entered the Western vocabulary, from “abs,” “glutes,” and “cardio” to “ripped” and “toned” to describe the ideal results of daily exercise: a look of chiseled fitness. The ideal is much different from the appearance of the pipe fitter and welder of the past, whose protruding bellies and girth were not necessarily incongruous with physical strength and stamina incurred from daily physical labor.

Me, I’m ‘sedentary’ and proud of it.

Yet talk long enough to the most accomplished academics, lawyers, and CEOs—who also tend to be the most conscientious about biking, jogging, and weightlifting (obesity is mostly an epidemic of the poor and lower middle classes)—and more often than not, they will brag about a long-ago college summer job waiting tables or an internship repairing hiking trails. They might praise the granite-counter installer who redid their kitchen, or offer an anecdote about the time they helped the tree-trimmer haul limbs from the backyard out to the trailer at the curb. There seems a human instinct to want to do physical work. We moderns want to be able to say that we have some residual firsthand familiarity with drudgery—or at least share our admiration for muscular labor when one sees the positive results of physical craftsmanship, or even the smallest physical alteration of the natural environment.

Read it.

I found this discussion of individualism and tribalism very interesting.

Obviously, this whole individualism thing has both a lot of sources and a lot of ramifications.  But an absolutely central part of it, something without which it cannot survive or cohere, is economic individualism: the idea that an individual person can own property in his own right, with full and complete title to it, including the right to alienate (sell) it as he pleases.  Without that, well, people can’t really act as free individual agents unless they’re prepared to give up all their resources, because all their resources are at least partly controlled by someone else.

…

The main alternative to individualism is the tribe.  Within a tribal system, an individual basically isn’t a meaningful social unit, he is a component of his kinship group.  The tribe owns all the property, and you can’t sell it off, because everyone in the tribe (including all those yet to be born) have a claim on it.  You have duties to the tribe, and those duties define your life, even if maybe you personally would rather do something else.  You are bound to work, and marry, in a way that advances the tribe’s interests.  If you have wealth or power, it is incumbent on you to use it in a way that advances the tribe’s interests.  You get the idea.

This tribe thing is the default social setup for humans.  It dominated most of the great premodern civilizations.  In India, pretty much all of society was built around kinship groups (jatis).  In the Arab world, tribal ties were always paramount – so much so that basically every successful Arab empire had to use slaves to run the government and the military, just on the grounds that foreigners without families wouldn’t funnel all the empire’s resources to their tribes.  The situation in China was a little different, since the kinship groups got kicked in the teeth early by Qin Shi Huangdi’s massive centralized bureaucratic state, but they were always there and always fighting to hang onto what power they could.  Etc.

Read it.

Of course, since it’s NPR, they couldn’t use a real ordinary goat milk farm; they had to find a prison goat milk farm, because no information is really valid unless it’s received from The Oppressed.

Viscount Ridley explains it all to you.

The problem, of course, is the term ‘capitalism’, which is a dysphemism coined by Marx in order to have a handy stick with which to beat his opponents. It joins similar pro-statist terms like ‘price gouging’ and ‘black market’ and ‘profiteering’ in the arsenal of those who oppose free choice between economic actors.

Read it.

All six members of the teenage Bundi robotics team were reported missing Tuesday, after they were last seen at during a competition at Constitution Hall, reports Fox 5 DC.

Two of them, 16-year-old Don Ingabire and 17-year-old Audrey Mwamikazi, were seen trying to get in to Canada, D.C. police said. The other four, 18-year-old Richard Irakoze, 17-year-old Kevin Sabumukiza, 17-year-old Nice Munezero and 18-year-old Aristide Irambona, have yet to be sighted.

Gee, I wonder why.

The African teens had traveled to America to participate in a robotics competition hosted by FIRST Global. The competition draws young adults around the world and encourages them to pursue math and science fields.

Indeed, and chase them all the way into the Great White North.

Read it.

Warning: don’t read too much about the future of jobs in an era of Artificial Intelligence if you are—psychologically speaking—in a dark place. If you’re a lover of the arts and humanities, for example, you should probably go full hermit in the basement of a university library with plenty of provisions (but no WiFi). If you greet all technological advances with gee-whiz enthusiasm, you’d best avoid long conversations with people who make a living driving trucks or reading X-rays. If you’re an antiglobalization protectionist, get ready to look with longing on a time when the biggest threats to jobs were NAFTA and an ascendant China. And even if you believe in the long-term benefits of what economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction—as I do—prepare to have your convictions tested.

Sky is falling; film at 11. Women and minorities hardest hit, etc. etc.

Read it.

For the first time in roughly a decade, the weekly take for workers in the bottom 10th percentile of the wage scale grew at a quicker rate in the second quarter of 2017, from the same period in 2016, than any other class of laborers, according to the Labor Department. The last time the lowest end of the pay scale outpaced other groups was in 2010.

Damn that Trump! He keeps screwing things up! What happens to the Narrative if low-income wage earners’ incomes grow faster than the 1%?

Read it.

Yup. It changes you from a mature adult into a stupid teenager within five minutes.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Steve Sailer boils it down.

A little-known survey revealed the single most decisive reason Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton: White Democrats have drifted into ideological extremism over not regulating immigration.

By way of background, a general problem in political science with using polls to track ideological trends over the years is that you want to keep asking the same questions to see how voters’ responses evolve. But that means that pollsters seldom ask about new beliefs that would have seemed bizarre even in the recent past.

In turn, pundits, lacking polling data to write about, don’t even mention historic developments, such as the rise of mainstream antiwhite American hate discourse over the past half decade. For most mainstream journalists to notice their own increasingly vicious racist attitudes would be like a fish noticing it is wet.

Read it.

What an amazing coincidence.

Read it.

Every road leads to Rome White Privilege.

Read it.

Good luck avoiding the stranglehold of the eco-Nazis and their minions in government.

Read it.

Perhaps Reality knows something that politicians don’t.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Read it.

Can’t say he’s wrong….

I recently attended a lunch held by one of the country’s foremost organic companies. The event’s host—a yoga teacher who lives in a Connecticut suburb where the streets are jammed with hybrid luxury SUVs and single-source organic almond milk lattes in every cupholder—explained how the brand’s holistic world view aligned with her own.

Puttin’ on the Crust.

I don’t buy organic, think the anti-GMO movement is basically BS, and eat a bowl of Lucky Charms with conventional whole milk every night of the week. And for 30 years I’ve somehow not only survived, but thrived. My docs say my health is stellar—on my diet of what is, apparently, filthy, fake food. Am I a miracle of biology? Not even close.

Probably voted for Trump. The swine.

Deweese says she hates the term clean eating. “It’s a social status thing. It’s more about ‘I’m better because I eat clean,'” she says. Adds Scott-Dixon, “‘Clean eating’ is a preoccupation of people who, in socioeconomic terms, really don’t have any real, legitimate worries. It’s a first-world problem.”

Yup.

Read it.

Maybe death will shut them up.

We can only hope.

Read it.

When the observations don’t match the models, adjust the observations…

Kind of like Marxists with economics.

Read it.

Thank you, $15 minimum wage.

Read it.

Pretty cold.

On the other hand, this gives her a chance to marry somebody who isn’t a bozo, so she comes out ahead.

Few husbands are that amenable to Natural Selection.