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.”

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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%?

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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.

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What an amazing coincidence.

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Every road leads to Rome White Privilege.

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

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Perhaps Reality knows something that politicians don’t.

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

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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.

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Maybe death will shut them up.

We can only hope.

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

Kind of like Marxists with economics.

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Thank you, $15 minimum wage.

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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.

ZMan brings the truth.

This is an iron law of economics. All goods and services are rationed. This is true for health care too. There are no exceptions to this law. Thus, the First Truth of Health Care: No health care plan or system can ever be taken seriously unless it addresses, up front, how it will say “No, you cannot have it” to people who want it. At some point, someone has to tell the patient they cannot have whatever it is they want or need.

In America, rationing is mostly done by price, but increasingly the state is taking over this role. In Britain, most people are denied services by the long lines for those services. The long wait times for basic services is a form of rationing. If you can deliver X per day and the demand is for 2X, you solve this by giving people numbers and having them wait a long time until their number is called. This is socialized medicine in nutshell.

And that says it all, about as simply as it can be said.

Read it.

How about that great government-provided health care! Don’t you wish we had a system like that in America?

Lileks.

Let’s keep sending e-mails, and see what happens.

Watch it.

Scott Adams is the last bastion of common sense in America.

Be sure to hang on to his comments about Kid Rock.

UPDATE: Democrats dismiss Kid Rock’s bid to run for Senate as ‘bizarre publicity stunt’

Yeah, well, they’re the party who ran Al Franken, and we see how that turned out.

Democrats: The Clown Party.

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This is why you never post a picture of one of your keys in public.

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I know this will come as a shock to some people.

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Not really a surprise for those of us who have been paying attention.

The fact that not everybody caught in Hiroshima and Nagasaki died ought to have provided a clue.

The further fact that those are both thriving cities today ought to have been another hint.

The ability of human technology to Destroy All Life On Earth, be it by nuclear war or ‘climate change’, is vastly overrated, chiefly by those who want an excuse to steal your money and spend it their way.

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Actions have consequences.

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The consensus in Iqaluit seems to be that everyone with a credit card has an Amazon Prime membership. That’s because people can often find groceries cheaper online than in local stores, despite government food subsidy programs.

“Amazon Prime has done more toward elevating the standard of living of my family than any territorial or federal program. Full stop. Period,” a local principal, who declined to speak further, said on Facebook.

I love the term ‘food security’. That’s a politician’s term if ever I’ve heard one.

Read it.

We should all encourage people who read the Grauniad or worry about climate change to have fewer children.

Like, none. Zer0. If you have children already, smother them with a pillow. Do the planet a favor.

UPDATE: Having children is one of the most destructive things you can to do the environment, say researchers

I would encourage these researchers to have fewer children as well.

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I knew it had to be something.

But we can still blame it on Global Warming.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

Once again, Trump’s historical role appears to be to act as a catalyst accelerating existing trends, inciting his enemies to declare what’s really been on their minds all along. Thus, even cohesion in Western Europe, which is favored by Trump’s Polish hosts, is now viewed as a racist plot against People of Color, denying them their rightful right to migrate en masse to Europe.

ZMan waxes delightfully dyspeptic today.

Full disclosure: I read (and like) both Tyler Cowan and Raihan Salam (who writes for NR).

That said, I agree with this:

One of the reasons many of us gave up on conventional politics is that in the mainstream, guys with weird, unpronounceable names, from foreign lands keep demanding we change our country to suit their needs. That would be tolerable if the response was “shut up and learn how to be Americans.” Instead, the political class goes out of its way to celebrate these people. Our rulers make it clear that the opinions of newly arrived boat people count for more than the opinions of the natives, who made the country possible.

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Amazing how that just keeps happening.

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The center compiled data on donations made from faculty to presidential, Senate, and House campaigns. Clinton received the most money from each school, with her donations often totaling more than 10 times the amount contributed to the second-most highly funded candidate.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.