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On Wednesday, Putin jokingly said of Lavrov, “I will have to reprimand him because he shared these secrets neither with me nor with the Russian secret services which is very inappropriate on his part.”

Waiting for the Russian media to call for his impeachment. Oh, wait….

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Surely Trump is to blame, somehow; or maybe George W. Bush.

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Funny how Democrats are never in favor of this sort of immigration.

If we’re going to be overrun with foreigners, I’d rather they be rich Chinese than poor Mexicans.

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I’ve worked closely with a few powerful CEOs in my life. Most were like Donald, energetic, fun to be around, and quite willing to believe and say just about anything with obvious conviction to make a serious point or promote their venture. I was there to encourage them to paint their pictures within the lines; that is to not get too far ahead or away from reality. More than once, during an analyst meeting or in a meeting with investors, I had to interject, carefully, to pull some of the hotter hyperbole, back to earth.

…

Donald Trump has no appreciation for this kind of retail politics. He’s a business guy, through and through, our first management by objectives CEO, the MBO President. What does he want? Control over our borders. It’s part of his job description and he’s determined to achieve it. And he wants the world to take our leadership seriously. He wants to reverse the diminution of our military. He wants fair trade deals. He wants a simplified tax code with lower rates. He wants elections unblemished by voter fraud. He wants our multinationals to repatriate their profits from overseas. He wants free, open and vibrant health insurance and health care markets. He wants a judiciary that considers constitutional intent, not precedent, first when judging our laws. That’s about it.

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Hey, it could happen.

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The most common reason cited for this conclusion is, of course, financing: though its costs have not been quantified, it is certain that they would be high. Just how income and wealth should be taxed to pay for it remains an open question. Radically transforming the social system to create a basic income would be the greatest financial gamble in recent history.

But the financial aspect is not even the most important argument against a basic income. Basic income is a seductive poison. It would benefit the margins of society at the expense of the middle class. For the poor and long-term unemployed, basic income would remove the pressure to find work and the unpleasant task of actively look for employment. It most likely would not cost the rich any more than before, and would help ease their conscience. Growing inequality would no longer be a social scandal, since everyone would have an income, albeit close to the poverty line. It is precisely for this reason that there are three main arguments against an unconditional basic income.

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I object to the term ‘crony capitalism’ because cronyism has no structural connection to ‘capitalism’ (which is really just a shame-work that Marx invented to have a stick with which to beat free markets); if it did, then there wouldn’t be any cronyism under socialism, when real-world experience show that cronyism is even worse under socialism than under its alternatives.

Still, this is a good exposition of the fact that whenever government sticks its paws into economics it attracts cronyism as rotten food attracts maggots. This is why ‘rich’ people are so comfy with politicians who spend most of their time bashing ‘the rich’ — rich people know (a) they don’t really mean it, and (b) they know that whenever politicians actually do something that is anti-rich they soon get their asses handed to them.

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An interesting point of view.

The problem with automation that might take it out of the general trend over recent centuries is that, unlike semi-skilled agricultural work being replaced by simi-skilled industrial work. semi-skilled industrial and service jobs are being eliminated but the newly-created jobs are highly-skilled service jobs that more often than not incorporate an education credential that the newly-unemployed don’t have and arguably won’t be able to get.

I love free markets as much as any man whomsoever, and I certainly hope that we survive this process as we have survived similar processes in the past, but I don’t see how we get from Point A to Point B.

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News reports indicate that illegal immigration has dropped sharply since President Trump’s inauguration, even though no progress has been made in building the wall. Similarly, it appears that the flow of refugees has declined, even though the president’s travel orders, including his reduced ceiling on refugee admissions, has been tied up in the courts by partisan judges.

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Few inventions have so profoundly shaped consumer habits. With the exception of the automobile, the shopping cart is the most commonly used “vehicle” in the world: some 25 million grace grocery stores across the U.S. alone. It has played a major role in enriching the forces of capitalism, increasing our buying output, and transforming the nature of the supermarket — and for its role, it has been dubbed the “greatest development in the history of merchandising.”

Shopping carts, without which modern civilization would crumble.

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Nope, the Trumps aren’t going with St. Albans or Sidwell Friends.

So he won’t have to write an essay apologizing for his White Privilege, as Chelsea Clinton is reported to have done.

They could always homeschool him; I’m sure they could get somebody at the White House for that.

Rush Limbaugh has a new theory, that whereas the DemLegHump Media were until recently the willing accomplices and lackeys of the Democrat party, now the situation is reversed — the DLH Media are calling the shots, and the Democrats are trailing along as spear-carriers.

He bases this on the fact that the Democrats have been losing non-Presidential elections so badly and so widely during Obama’s tenure to the point where they have no actual power outside of their political machines in the major metropolitan behavioral sinks.

Hence any power that the Left has these days is as a result of the control of public information at the hands of — wait for it — the DemLegHump Media. They are the people leading the ‘resistance’ to Trump and his program (if you can call it that), they are the ones constructing the ‘memes’ (which they hope will ‘go viral’), they are the ones composing the ‘talking points’ and determining what spin gets put on the stories that they deem worthy of reporting. In this view, Rachel Madow has more power than Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi.

It’s an attractive premise.

This gives added weight to Rush’s famous montages, where he will put together a series of short bites from TV news reports where the presenters each use nearly the exact same phrase over and over again on a certain day to pound home what they hope will be the public impression of something happening in Washington.

Keep an ear out for it.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, looks at wages.

Why is it that purported market imperfections are almost always the sort that allegedly justify government intervention against the perceived interests of employers or sellers?  If markets are imperfect, those imperfections should not be overwhelmingly biased against employees or consumers.  Sometimes – often, indeed – the imperfections should work in favor of employees and consumers.

Consider, for example, allegations of asymmetric information or other ‘imperfections’ that are said to create monopsony power in labor market.  These ‘imperfections’ are used by some economists to justify minimum-wage legislation, on the grounds that these ‘imperfections’ cause market-determined wages to be too low (that is, below the value of workers’ marginal products).

But if market imperfections exist with such regularity and certainty to justify government intervention, why  are these imperfections presumed always to work against workers?  Why don’t imperfections often lead to wages that are too high (that is, above the value of workers’ marginal products)?  I can think of no reasons why market imperfections are always or even usually biased against workers rather than in workers’ favor – especially today when unemployed workers are entitled to government handouts while most bankrupted employers (say, the restaurants that went belly-up because they paid their waiters and dishwashers too much) get no government relief.  And why presume that employers of low-skilled workers can monitor with sufficient clarity the performance of workers to ensure that workers are not shirking so chronically that employers are not overpaying their workers?  Perhaps – because of ‘asymmetric information’ – many employers can’t monitor workers so clearly.  Or perhaps employers are more poorly informed than are workers about pay and employment conditions elsewhere, thereby giving workers a bargaining advantage over employers.

Paul Rahe passes on what a former student told him.

I did not hear about the firing of James Comey until I read an email this morning — sent by a former student who, having worked for years at the Department of Justice, is now retired. Here is what he told me:

Based on a career spent working with the FBI as a Justice Dep’t lawyer, and on the reasons that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave in this memo, I believe firing James Comey as FBI Director was the right thing to do. A lot of folks would’ve cheered if DAG Sally Yates and President Barack Obama had done this last July or October – as perhaps they should’ve.

Yup.

Comey’s firing is just the latest shift in the balance between DOJ and the FBI. Just as our gov’t rests on civilian control of the military, our law enforcement agencies are subject to the prosecution decisions of local, state, and federal gov’t lawyers. All are in turn subject to the courts. And it is long-standing, written DOJ policy that the FBI does not decide who is (or is not) to be prosecuted. Nor is the Bureau to speak to the press about DOJ’s exercise of its prosecutorial discretion, unless authorized by DOJ. Comey repeatedly broke those rules, and has repeatedly refused to admit his mistakes.

Exactly so.

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Funny how descending into Third World status reveals how much of a First World problem trendy sexual confusion activism is.

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Publishing, not politics. Feel free to skip.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I have a line in the proverbial sand when it comes to how much I will pay for an e-book. It’s a line that I will very rarely cross. I’ll admit I will rarely even get close to the line. That price, for me, is $9.99. It used to be lower but I had to change that when Baen finally got into Amazon. I groused, like a lot of others, because that move meant Baen now charged more. However, there are several Baen authors I will pay that much for instead of waiting for the price to come down. But paying $15 for an e-book when the publisher won’t even admit I own the book? Nope, not gonna happen. I will wait for the price to come down or, if it doesn’t, I will borrow it from the library.

The problem is that doesn’t really hurt the publisher but it does hurt the author. I hate that part but there isn’t much more I can do to voice my displeasure — not that the Big 5 listen.

My local public library charges $2.50 for interlibrary loan, so that’s pretty much my limit on e-books.

I have about 3,0o0 PDFs on my 2TB library drive. Yeah, it’s not as convenient as Kindle, but my Kindle library has 1,141 books in it, so I’m good.

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And she’s got a lot of ass to work on. I don’t think marching helps ugly, though.

I know for sure it can’t fix stupid.

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But there’s a Consensus! Are you anti-Science?

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

A wise man once told me ‘Never trust a man who is too lazy to shave’ and I’ve never had any reason to doubt it.

Of course, this makes being an Orthodox Christian somewhat dicey, but hey, life is full of hardship.

Freeberg discusses how the Children of the Sixties are showing their age.

I very often use the term “this stuff we today call ‘liberalism’,” along with “liberalism as we know it today.” These are simply embellishments to phrasing, to make the meaning more precise when it seems like I have the luxury of doing so; the rest of the time I just call it “liberalism,” which is a betrayal against proper definition. After all, the luxury of precision may be gone for awhile, but one’s obligations as a writer remain. Now & then, to avoid flouting the far weightier obligation of not-boring-the-reader, one must use shorthand; one must hope the reader will “get it.” Liberalism is supposed to mean power to the people. It has classically meant free market capitalism, and civil liberties under rule of law. Hopefully, where I’ve failed some writing duties, I’ve succeeded in others, for here in the first paragraph even the casual reader can spot the problem. Liberalism, as we know it today, is most certainly not about these things.

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Using a new technique which takes adult cells back to their embryonic form, US researchers at the Salk Institute in California, showed it was possible to reverse ageing in mice, allowing the animals to not only look younger, but live for 30 per cent longer.

The technique involves stimulating four genes which are particularly active during development in the womb. It was also found to work to turn the clock back on human skin cells in the lab, making them look and behave younger.

Scientists hope to eventually create a drug which can mimic the effect of the found genes which could be taken to slow down, and even reverse the ageing process. They say it will take around 10 years to get to human trials.

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What? Not Barack Obama? That’s raaaaaaacist!

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By the phrasing of the headline you can tell that these are actually Koreans who are U.S. citizens only by an odd quirk of fate. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.

What person of normal intelligence would go to North Korea? These are people from he shallow end of the gene pool, of whom we are well rid.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Democrats are people who believe that all your Stuff belongs to the government, of which on a good day when they are feeling mellow they will allow you to keep a portion.

The corollary of this is that occasionally they come to take some more of your Stuff (and you to jail if you object to it).

This is an introduction to what you might be able to do under those circumstances.

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Really, if you were a monkey in the 17th century, what would you do?

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It’s not just for spec ops any more.

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Ask me whether I give a shit.

‘Popular Science’ has decided to bag the Science and go all-in on the Popular.

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Well, once adults riding bicycles became a thing, I suppose this was inevitable.

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It is if you’re hungry.

Most people have been perpetually reminded since childhood that breakfast is a must. But in recent years, nutritionists and scientists have called this crucial eating time into question. And despite a plethora of research, the scientific community still hasn’t come to a solid conclusion as to when the best time to eat your first meal of the day really is.

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AlGore must have held another fund-raiser.

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According to Hodjat, the system grabs unused computer power from “millions” of computer processors inside data centers, Internet cafes, and computer gaming centers operated by various companies in Asia and elsewhere. Its software engine, meanwhile, is based on evolutionary computation—the same genetics-inspired technique that plays into Aidyia’s system.

In the simplest terms, this means it creates a large and random collection of digital stock traders and tests their performance on historical stock data. After picking the best performers, it then uses their “genes” to create a new set of superior traders. And the process repeats. Eventually, the system homes in on a digital trader that can successfully operate on its own. “Over thousands of generations, trillions and trillions of ‘beings’ compete and thrive or die,” Blondeau says, “and eventually, you get a population of smart traders you can actually deploy.”

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When it comes to political speeches, great ones are few and far between. But ordinary political speeches, those given in U.S. congressional floor debates, for example, are numerous.

They are also remarkably similar. These speeches tend to follow a standard format, repeat similar arguments, and even use the same phrases to indicate a particular political affiliation or opinion. It’s almost as if there is some kind of algorithm that determines their content.

That raises an interesting question. Is it possible for a machine to write these kinds of political speeches automatically?

Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Valentin Kassarnig at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who has created an artificial intelligence machine that has learned how to write political speeches that are remarkably similar to real speeches.

I always suspected that Rachel Madow was a robot.

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They call themselves Righteous Noahides: non-Jews who believe in Orthodox Judaism. According to Jewish theology, there are laws that Jews must obey, the 613 mitzvot, but then there are seven laws for children of Noah—everyone else in the world. They are: Do not deny God; do not blaspheme; do not murder; do not engage in incest, adultery, pederasty, or bestiality; do not steal; do not eat of a live animal; and establish courts.

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Noahidism now encompasses communities around the world, especially in Great Britain, the Philippines, Latin America, Nigeria, Russia, and the United States. According to Rabbi Michael Schulman, who runs Noahide website AskNoah.org, the Philippines may have the most developed community, with well over 1,000 adults and their children living in a collection of agricultural towns. They run Hebrew schools, community meetings, and even a national summit.

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Hint: Fences.

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Back to Michoacan for you, Manuel.

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That Trump — what a failure. He ought to just go home and let Hillary take over the Obama legacy of destroying the economy and making everybody but the Crust poorer and poorer.

Megan McArdle isn’t buying it.

My quarrel is not with the politics of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” nor with its realism. Expecting plausibility from dystopian fiction is like expecting haute cuisine from a highway service area. Of the dystopian fiction I’ve read, only “1984” comes even remotely close to feeling real, and that’s because Orwell was working from two vivid contemporaneous examples, from which he lifted freely.

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America hasn’t had a unified theocratic tradition since the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the descendants of those Puritans are now pouring their fervent moralism into buying Priuses and complaining about Trump. The closest modern equivalent, the statewide hegemony of the Latter-day Saints in Utah, doesn’t look very much like The Handmaid’s Tale, and hasn’t the faintest prayer of co-opting the rest of the nation’s fractured religious traditionalists, many of whom do not even consider the Mormons to be Christian. And even if some movement did, somehow, gather a Mormon-like critical mass, Trump is hardly likely to be its avatar; our most religious red state was also the one where Trump had the greatest trouble.

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There is nothing wrong with enjoying implausibilities on a screen or page. But there is something very wrong with hysterically declaring that those things are reality. That risks confusion so we will not notice the real dystopia rising — or the rest of the world will be too tired of our cries to hear any warnings we shout.

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Algorithms, we are told, “rule our world.” They are ubiquitous. They lurk in the shadows, shaping our lives without our consent. They may revoke your driver’s license, determine whether you get your next job, or cause the stock market to crash. More worrisome still, they can also be the arbiters of lethal violence. No wonder one scholar has dubbed 2015 “the year we get creeped out by algorithms.” While some worry about the power of algorithms, other think we are in danger of overstating their significance or misunderstanding their nature. Some have even complained that we are treating algorithms like gods whose fickle, inscrutable wills control our destinies.

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The company behind a private fusion reactor in Great Britain announced Friday it will become partially operational next year.

The new reactor, dubbed Tokamak ST40, is being built in Oxfordshire by the a private company Tokamak Energy. The company plans to start generating the plasma necessary for fusion power sometime this fall and will reach operating temperatures early next year.

You can believe as much or as little of that as you care to.

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The top response may or may not come as a surprise to you – people not keeping their trolleys with them in supermarkets:

“Leave their cart in the middle of the damn grocery aisle while they look at stuff on the shelves. MOVE, PEOPLE,” one angry person wrote.

Amen to that.

Many agreed, and it wasn’t just in the aisles that neglected trolleys cause annoyance: “Leave their cart in the middle of an empty parking spot because they can’t be bothered to bring it back,” one person added.

Preach it, brother.