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.

Read it.

Read it.

In a 1946 essay in the London Tribune entitled “In Front of Your Nose,” George Orwell noted that “we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

The intellectual battlefields today are on college campuses, where students’ deep convictions about race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation and their social justice antipathy toward capitalism, imperialism, racism, white privilege, misogyny and “cissexist heteropatriarchy” have bumped up against the reality of contradictory facts and opposing views, leading to campus chaos and even violence. Students at the University of California, Berkeley, and outside agitators, for example, rioted at the mere mention that conservative firebrands Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter had been invited to speak (in the end, they never did). Demonstrators at Middlebury College physically attacked libertarian author Charles Murray and his liberal host, professor Allison Stanger, pulling her hair, twisting her neck and sending her to the ER.*

Read it.

IN a low-key, musical version of the match between Garry Kasparov and the chess-playing machine called Deep Blue, a musician at the University of Oregon competed last month with a computer to compose music in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. Steve Larson, who teaches music theory at the university, listened anxiously while his wife, the pianist Winifred Kerner, performed three entries in the contest — one by Bach, one by Dr. Larson and one by a computer program called EMI, or Experiments in Musical Intelligence.

Dr. Larson was hurt when the audience concluded that his piece — a simple, engaging form called a two-part invention — was written by the computer. But he felt somewhat mollified when the listeners went on to decide that the invention composed by EMI (pronounced ”Emmy”) was genuine Bach.

Read it.

But saying so is the ThoughtCrime of Noticing.

Jonah Goldberg points out some inconvenient truth.

Fighting Nazis is a good thing, but fighting Nazis doesn’t necessarily make you or your cause good. By my lights this is simply an obvious fact.

The greatest Nazi-killer of the 20th century was Josef Stalin. He also killed millions of his own people and terrorized, oppressed, enslaved or brutalized tens of millions more.

Nazism was evil. Soviet Communism was evil. It’s fine to believe that Nazism was more evil than Communism. That doesn’t make Communism good.

Left-wing talking points to the contrary notwithstanding, Nazis were socialists (National Socialist Party).

Communists have killed at least three times as many people as the Nazis ever did.

The Nazis stopped killing people in 1945; communists have continued to the present day.

There are no Nazi governments any more; communism still oppresses China, Viet Nam, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela.

Media handwringing to the contrary notwithstanding, there are probably more transgender people in the U.S. than actual Nazis. Indeed, there are probably more Hell’s Angels in the U.S. than actual Nazis.

Read it.

Who knew there were so many black people in the KKK?

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

Part of what is going on is an attempt by white liberal urban elites to offload their African-American inner city problem people onto the deplorable whites of suburban and rural America.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Ads critical of Google’s decision to fire an engineer over a diversity memo are appearing all over Venice near the company’s office.

One of the unofficial advertisements shows the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs with the accompanying phrase “Think different.” Right underneath that image is a picture of Google CEO Sundar Pichai saying “not so much.”

Sounds as if the geeks are revolting.

Another one uses the same tagline “Think Different,” but instead of the two tech leaders, there are just the logos of the two respective companies. “Get Hired” is featured next to Apple’s insignia, while “Get Fired” is positioned next to Google’s.

Both forms of conspicuous critique have apparently been spotted at bus stops and on park benches.

Sundar Pichai’s Important Part must be feeling pretty sore right about now….

UPDATE: Pictures: Meanwhile, at a bus stop in Venice, CA …

Sarah Hoyt is not afraid t ask the hard questions.

Asking simple questions like “If men and women are exactly alike, what does a company gain from increasing diversity?” pokes a huge hole in political correctness, and makes it impossible for them to hold these contradictory ideas in their heads in peace.  If they tell you it’s because little Suzie who wants to be a programmer is being discriminated against, ask why we should instead discriminate against little Bobby, who wants to be a programmer, if they’re both exactly alike in any thing but sexual organs.  We’re not hiring them have sex, are we?  If we must have affirmative action, wouldn’t it be better to pick those people who grew up in poor conditions or something, and ignore other characteristics?

Read it.

Free speech — it’s not just a good idea; it’s the law.

California Labor Code § 1102 requires that “no employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity.” Furthermore, the “whistleblower” provisions at §1102.5 prohibit employers from adopting rules preventing disclosure of, or retaliating against an employee for having disclosed, “information … to a person with authority over the employee, or another employee who has authority to investigate, discover or correct the violation … if the employee has reasonable cause to believe that the information discloses a violation of state or federal statute, or a violation of or noncompliance with a local, state, or federal rule or regulation, regardless of whether disclosing the information is part of the employee’s job duties.”

The CTRL-Left steps on its own … well, you know.

Read it.

Spiritual faith has long been shaped by the lettering on a religion’s sacred texts. This is particularly the case with Judaism, so we visited three Hebrew scribes—in Jerusalem, New York City, and the liberal enclave of Berkeley, California—to understand why such laborious traditions continue.

Read it.

August 19th. Be there or be square.

Perhaps I need a new Category: Sauce for the Goose, wherein proglodytes get whapped with their own sticks.

Read it.

Well, the engineer WENT THERE. No, he did not say the chicks are naturally unqualified or under-qualified to do engineering work. You might have heard that. You can see from looking at the document yourself that it’s a deliberate lie. There are many others being told. Anyway, what he did say is what people who’ve looked into it awhile, by which I mean more than a few minutes, know already. The chicks just don’t wanna do it. Figuring this out is not hard, since the alternative would have to be, there’s a huge glut of chicks wanting engineering jobs and their applications are being ritually blocked or turned away at some point in the pipeline. Well, where’s the glut? And where’s the blockage? Can you imagine the job of hiding such a restrictive device, in this climate…or being the device, the manager who says “no chicks on my team”?

ThoughtCrime exists even when you don’t see any. Emmanuel Goldstein is out there somewhere corrupting you even when you don’t know it.

About the most offensive thing the guy actually did say was where he said women are, on average, more emotional. It’s true, but I try to avoid saying things like that because we live in an age wherein men are acting more like women. Nevertheless, even this was given some strong backing by real-life events when it emerged that female employees at Google were skipping work because they were so traumatized by his memo. Those who defend the firing, point to this “trauma” done to the fairer sex within Google’s workforce, as evidence that the company made the right decision. Had they taken no action, so the argument goes, the female employees could have sued due to the hostile work environment.

Which is, of course, offensive only when it’s said by men. When women say it, it’s a feature, not a bug.

From whence arises this expectation that a workplace should be comfortable? And if it isn’t, you can sue? Oh yeah right. Lawyers.

As a lawyer, I can bears witness to this. Lawyers are paid to game the system, which is why I’ve never practiced law — I’d have had to spend too much time washing my hands.

Mr. Damore’s memo is called “Google’s ideological echo chamber”…and, he was fired for writing it. His own sacking proves the truth of what he wrote, because he got fired for saying the wrong things. Nevermind whether I like it or not, or you like it or not…it’s simply unworkable.

And that’s the bottom line.