Read it.

Will the Islamophobia never cease?

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

1. Avoid blimps
2. Avoid golf

Read it.

J.S.G. Boggs, who just died at age 62, was an artist whose career doubled as an extended economic experiment. Starting in the 1980s, he drew money. I don’t mean that he drew scenes with money in them. I mean he drew actual pieces of currency, and then tried, often successfully, to spend them.

Kind of like every Democrat President, except he was honest about it.

Read it.

When Israel waged a defensive military operation against Hamas in Gaza in the summer of 2014, the international community and the Obama administration alike were quick to offer condemnations, with then-State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki calling Israeli attacks on civilian facilities “appalling.” But if you’re still wondering what really went down during Operation Protective Edge, you might want to listen to Ateeq al-Falahi, the secretary general of the United Arab Emirates-based Red Crescent.

Hamas, al-Falahi said in a recent interview, deliberately launched rockets from a UAE-run field hospital in Gaza in the hope of provoking Israel to respond by shelling the facility. This shows (Hamas’s) wicked intentions and how they scarified us,” Al-Falahi said. “They always claim the enemy targets humanitarian envoys, but the betrayal came from them.”

Read it.

Sushi is not food. Sushi is bait.

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For me, one of the surest signs of a state-enforced monopoly is that most schools, whether public or private, look the same and act the same. About 90 percent of K-12 students go to public schools and while charters, home schooling, and other forms of more personalized and individualized education are gaining steam and changing the status quo, the simple fact is that most kids go to schools that are not all that different than the ones I went to as a kid in the 1970s, or that my parents went to when they were growing up in the goddamned 1930s! School starts in late August or early September and lets out in late May or early June, with requisite vacations that don’t take into account parental schedules or the well-observed loss of learning that takes place every summer. And schools start ridiculously early in the mornings and then let out in the mid-afternoon, for reasons that make no sense at all. Don’t buy into the myth that we’re prisoners of a agricultural-economy schedule, by the way. Even if that were true (and it ain’t), those days have long since passed and even farmers these days don’t work by an ag calendar.

I know there are schools out there that have adjusted their schedules to better edumicate teenagers. It really shouldn’t be so rare, though, and I can’t imagine it would be if school choice were more robust than it is. The Libertarian Moment—increasing comfort with choice and personalization that is abetted through technological and cultural innovation—has remade and improved every aspect of our commercial, professional, and personal lives. We can produce and consume all sorts of cultural expression on schedules of our choosing, we can work from home or an office, we can live with whomever we want and eat an ever-increasing array of food. And yet when it comes to legally mandated school, our kids are still getting up in the dark at a time when they are not just battling darkness but biology. That should change, and yesterday.

Read it.

Gotta love that Global Warming climate change. AlGore must have been along.

UPDATE: Arctic Expedition Cancelled Due to Excess “Climate Change”

Steve Sailer looks at the numbers.

The pattern is much the same as it has been in every election since 2000: In states where younger white people can better afford to buy a home, they are more likely to be married, have more children, and vote more Republican. In states where whites are less able to afford a home, they marry later, have fewer children, and vote more Democratic.

Read it.

Cities (urban areas or settlements) have been around for millennia. Over that time, cities have changed in form and function. But the way that people move around the city has materially changed only twice. Walking was predominant until less than 200 years ago, then came mass transit, the automobile and now autonomous cars and some substitution for driving by online technology.

Read it.

Because it lasts for a thousand years or more.

Also because it’s way cool.

Here’s proof:

Read it.

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

Randy Holcombe:

When a government is small, it can provide very limited benefits to special interest groups, so there is a small incentive for special interest groups to lobby the government. The successes of those that do lobby the government will cause the government to grow. This occurs because the great majority of voters and taxpayers are rationally ignorant about most government activity, making it easy to increase everybody’s taxes a small amount to provide a sizable benefit to a few. Most people do not have an incentive to investigate in detail the allocation of their tax dollars, but the special interest groups with the sizable benefit will repay the representatives with political support. Thus, special interest groups cause government growth.

The growth of government, in turn, raises the payoff available to special interest groups. With a higher payoff to special interest groups, this encourages the formation of new special interest groups to share in the payoff. A larger government can support a larger number of special interest groups. Thus, as government grows, more special interest groups form. The formation of special interest groups in turn increases the demand for special interest legislation, cause a further growth in government spending.

Read it.

Surely the Trump administration would be willing to add something to that? It would be a cheap price to pay to get rid of fake scientists.

Read it.

If you were to ask those people who marched for science if they believe in evolution, they would have answered with a resounding “yes”. Ask them if they believe that all branches of the human race evolved identically and you will be met with hostility. The problem, for them, is that an admission of the obvious — differential evolution, resulting in broad racial differences — leads to a fact that they don’t want to admit: there are broad racial differences in intelligence, differences that must have evolutionary origins.

In these degenerate modern times, science is only SCIENCE when it agrees with the Narrative.

http://dailysignal.com/2017/06/09/cartoon-media-still-hungry-comey-hearings/

Glenn Harlan Reynolds points the finger.

One reason why so many people don’t take climate change seriously is that the people who are constantly telling us it’s a crisis never actually act like it’s a crisis. They’re all-in for sacrifices by other people, but never seem to make much in the way of sacrifices themselves.

Funny how that works.

I’ll believe that climate change is a problem when real estate prices in Manhattan and Malibu start dropping.

Read it.

Something that few of us pay attention to, other than perhaps Lileks.

Read it.

No one knows what is going to happen 100 years from now — what problems human beings will face and what advances they’ll make. Are you willing to double your electrical bill — to European rates — to reduce global temperatures by two-tenths of 1 degree 100 years from now?

Not even AlGore, for all his psychic powers.

At the present, we do not know how to cost-effectively reduce many carbon-dioxide emissions, but we do know how to adapt to slowly rising sea levels and slightly warmer temperatures. Sea levels have been rising since the end of the last ice age, and there is no evidence that this rate of rise has increased during the past half-century — and mankind has adapted just fine. Despite rising sea levels, the island of Manhattan has grown in size over the last four centuries — because it makes economic sense to create landfills.

It is odd that many in the media and “public intellectuals” call people climate deniers who merely want to have a civil discussion about the rate of climate change and how much is caused by man — while, at the same time, being in deep denial about the real costs, particularly to the poor, of many of their proposed solutions.

Perhaps we’re not all going to die after all.

Rich liberals, like John Kerry and Leonardo DiCaprio, predicted dire consequences (more children with breathing problems) while, of course, conveniently ignoring the hypocrisy of the huge carbon footprint from their private jets and multiple large homes. These folks probably have no idea what they pay for electricity because it does not affect their lifestyles — so they can afford to be moralistic.

Plus being Chicken Little is very very profitable these days. Ask AlGore.

Read it.

So, to overcome any doubts on point one, the scientific and ecological community would have to show a scrupulous concern for the scientific method.

Instead, we have the opposite.

Meanwhile, there is, to date, no credible empirical evidence that the global temperatures on average are increasing. There has been no measured increase in twenty years.

Read it.

Hah.

Read it.

The bus versus streetcar debate became personal in Washington DC when a Megabus rammed a platform for the H Street streetcar. The crash put the streetcar out of service for several hours, and that particular platform for many days.

As if in retaliation, a streetcar rear ended a DC bus, injuring ten transit riders. There were only eight passengers on the bus, so the other two must have been on the streetcar and the Antiplanner wouldn’t be surprised if they were the only passengers on board.

Of course, the entire streetcar system was put out of commission while the messes were cleaned from each of the accidents. If only they had a vehicle that could pass one that was stationary because of an accident or breakdown. Maybe someday someone will invent one.

Read it.

Of course. Mother Nature scoffs at your puling climate alarmism.

And don’t get her started on AlGore….

Read it.

Remember.

Read it.

You want science? You can’t handle the science.

Read it.

Ask any Iraq War veteran about Jersey, Alaska, Texas, and Colorado and you will be surprised to get stories not about states, but about concrete barriers. Many soldiers deployed to Iraq became experts in concrete during their combat tours. Concrete is as symbolic to their deployments as the weapons they carried. No other weapon or technology has done more to contribute to achieving strategic goals of providing security, protecting populations, establishing stability, and eliminating terrorist threats. This was most evident in the complex urban terrain of Baghdad, Iraq. Increasing urbanization and its consequent influence on global patterns of conflict mean that the US military is almost certain to be fighting in cities again in our future wars. Military planners would be derelict in their duty if they allowed the hard-won lessons about concrete learned on Baghdad’s streets to be forgotten.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Lileks.

To be honest, I was actually upbeat when the coffee machine broke. I looked at the brand-new machine, its lights blinking but unable to excrete a single jot of wonderful java, and I thought: If nothing else, I can get a column out of this.

…

So I was intent on cashing in on this opportunity. First step: a call to Customer Support, which is lazy columnist gold. We all hate making those calls, right? Those menus: ridiculous. “To hear these instructions in South Ossian, press 0.” Then you’re on hold for the rest of the afternoon.

In the old days, our parents took a defective coffeemaker right back to Harold’s Appliances on Main Street, walked up to a counter and said, “It broke, Harold.” And he just handed them another one. But his store closed when Wal-Mart came in, and Harold set himself on fire on Main Street, shouting, “Are you happy now? Is this what you wanted?” And people just walked past, ashamed, because they’d bought a Mr. Coffee at the Wal-Mart and felt responsible, somehow. On the other hand, Harold’s old shop is now a bakery and they have fantastic Cronuts.

Read it.

Most people are not actually ideological. That’s not how they think of things. They just look at what goes on in government and think what are these people talking about? What are they wasting their time on? Why doesn’t anything get done? Why is it the same sort of people seem to be in charge whoever we vote for? Why is it always good for them, but my life seems to just get tougher?

Guide for the perplexed:

1. Government doing something I don’t like (Hell, anybody doing something i don’t like) = Fascism
2. Government doing something the benefits me = Populism

Keep these points in mind and you’ll understand the news. Miss them and the news will look as if the world has gone mad.

ZMan is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

The criticism of the Pope on economic grounds says more about the bottomless ignorance of modern conservatism than it does the Pope or the Church. For the Church, any church for that matter, economics are downstream from theology. In fact, economic positions should only matter in so far as how they advance the particular theological points of the faith. Catholicism long attachment to the sovereign authority of the people, naturally leads it to embrace national economics over global economics.

That bit is sure to get some spergy responses from Catholics and Christians, but we’ll deal with that in the comments. The point to take away is that it is perfectly plausible for the Pope to be within Catholic doctrine and oppose the current fads in global economics and not be a communist. The fact that secular defenders of globalism are more hive minded than the clerical critics, suggests globalism has become more of an all-consuming religion than Catholicism. It is international fascism.

…

It’s not just a question about the Pope being Catholic, or at least prioritizing Catholic theology over his personal theology. The question is whether the Catholic Church is still Catholic. It used to be that the Church was at the forefront of social issues like abortion and homosexual marriage. Today, it is rare to hear anything from the Church on social issues. Instead, in the US at least, the Church is more concerned with maintaining their refugee rackets and defending Gaia from your lawnmower.

Read it.

Just in case you had nothing better to do today.

The New York Times has some advice. What do they know that you don’t?

“The most important thing is to build underground,” says Cédric Vuilleumier, an engineer for the Federal Office for Civil Protection in Switzerland, where all citizens are legally guaranteed a spot in a bomb shelter. Packed earth insulates against radiation and blast waves, but don’t go deeper than 10 feet; if your exits (make two) become blocked in the blast, you may need to dig yourself out.

Zman lays it out.

There are two issues at work here. One is the self-awareness, or the lack of self-awareness, we see with Progressives. We’re all used to seeing Progs preach against something they are doing to excess. Google “the opposite rule of liberalism” and see what comes up. The other issue is about agency. These tactics we see them employ to corrupt public institutions suggests a level of plotting and scheming that strains credulity. On the other hand, the pattern suggests agency. They plan their work and work their plan.

The first part is probably the easiest one. People in a cult are not sitting around saying to one another, “This is a great cult. I’m really enjoying my time as a cult member.” Similarly, no one sits down one day and says, “I think I want to join a cult.” People in a cult think the beliefs and rules of their cult are perfectly logical and rational. They provide an explanation and framework for understanding the world. People on the outside, however, see the rules and beliefs of a cult as weirdly irrational and maybe even dangerous.

The other thing about people in cults is they join from self-loathing. They hate themselves and seek to swap their hated individual identity with that of the group. It’s why they will savagely defend their group like a mother defending their young. It’s self-defense. The group is them and they are the group. Therefore, any criticism of the group, or the beliefs of the group, is the same as an attack on the member. It is why they consider criticism the same as violence. From their point of view, it is violence, violence against their identity.

Here’s visual proof:

Read it.

Just so you know.

With thanks to Debby Witt, a kindred soul.

Read it.

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

Read it.

If, that is, you limit yourself to national brands.

Fortunately, you don’t have to do that.

On the other hand, these are the places to put your IRA money for a comfortable retirement.

Read it.

That’s because (a) Obama was a stone-cold hypocrite, and (b) a lot of them have Gotten the Word and are staying home.

Either way, it’s a win for us nativists.

(No, we are not a ‘nation of immigrants’. We are a nation of the grandchildren of immigrants. The difference is crucial.)

Read it.

JUST AFTER DAWN in the Salinas Valley south of San Francisco, a raucous robot rolls through a field spitting clouds of vapor. It’s cutting lettuce heads with water knives—super-high-pressure beams—and gobbling up the produce. The heads roll up its mouth and onto a conveyor belt, where workers in hoodies and aprons grab the lettuce and tear off the loose leaves.

Right across the road, workers are harvesting lettuce the agonizing old-fashioned way—bent over with knife in hand. “If you’re a beginner, it kills you because your back really hurts,” says Isabel Garcia, a harvester who works atop the robot. “It takes somebody really strong to be doing that kind of work.”

Message: Automation is in the process of killing unskilled manual labor. Increasing the minimum wage will only speed up this process.

Because if humanity expects to feed its booming population off a static amount of land, it’s going to need help.

Typical modern pseudo-journalism. (a) Population isn’t ‘booming’; the rate of increase is rapidly slowing, and many First World countries are actually declining in population. (b) The amount of land devoted to agriculture isn’t static; right now we use less land than we ever have, and if we need more, we can put idle land back into production. One of the most distasteful features of popular web sites like Wired is that it hires a lot of proglodyte millennials who take their cultural-Marxist myths as gospel and write as if everybody has the same prejudices that they do. Coming across that in an otherwise interesting/useful piece of writing is like biting down on a bit of eggshell at breakfast.

For sure, the robots will definitely support the dwindling farming workforce. Fewer immigrant workers are coming to the fields, and their demographics are shifting.

Thank you, Donald Trump. Just sayin’.

“Just with a changing population here in California, we’ve got an aging workforce,” says Mark Borman, president of Taylor Farms California, which operates the robot. “So people who are coming out to do agricultural, we’re not getting that younger population into the job.”

Apparently there are jobs that Mexicans are no longer willing to do. Progress, I guess.

That means not only using robots to help fill those jobs, but modifying the product they grow to make things easier for the machine. Taylor Farms has selected a kind of romaine that grows more like a light bulb, which leaves a longer base for the water knife to more efficiently slice. So while workers are adapting to work with the robot, the farm is adapting the produce to work with the machine. This is what the future of agriculture looks like: Humans modifying food to fit robots as much as they modify their own behavior to suit the machines.

This is the same process that gave us our current plethora of tasteless but easily produced produce. No one writing about food thinks this is ‘progress’. Don’t get Michael Pollan started.

“We’re not looking to replace a workforce,” Donohue says. “We’re looking to maintain an industry and the food supply for North America.”

Although, if that means replacing a workforce, well, can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. I am reminded of the Dilbert cartoon where the pointy-haired boss chides Alice for not working at 110%. “That’s like stealing from the company.” When Alice points out that she’s not getting paid for her overtime, which is like the company stealing from her, he responds “That’s not stealing, that’s being competitive.”

But Donahue has an existential argument on his side that, say, car factory operators don’t: Humanity is in danger of not being able to feed itself.

No, it’s not. That’s (again) just proglodyte mythology, with no Real Science behind it.

By 2050, the world population could boom to almost 10 billion people.

Note the weasel-word ‘could’. It could all die off in a new Black Death, but it probably won’t, and it probably won’t reach 10 billion, either, given the current trends.

Farmers will have to feed those humans—not to mention their livestock—with the same amount of land. Hell, even less land, as ocean levels continue to rise.

‘Continue to rise’? Are they rising now? Really? Any proof of that? No, just another proglodyte assumption. (More eggshell in the scrambled.)

California may be out of its brutal drought, but there’s no telling how climate change will shape the coming decades.

But, even though ‘there’s no telling’, you Social Justice Warriors will be happy to tell us anyway.

Steve Sailer looks at The Gap.

What if Charles Murray is right? What if some of the various racial gaps in cognitive performance are due to genetics? Would that be the end of the world?

It is considered appropriate to hyperventilate as if you believe so.

On the other hand, what if Murray is wrong and his best critic, James Flynn, is right? Would that validate traditional liberal approaches to bridging The Gap?

Food may be healthy when it is in the ground or on the animal, but, once removed, it is not healthy; it is dead.

Food (when chosen wisely) may be nutritious, but that’s a different thing.

People (when they eat wisely) are healthy, and that’s the goal. Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

Read it.

Its ability to produce high academic results in children who do not start formal schooling until the age of seven, have short school days, long holidays, relatively little homework and no exams, has long fascinated education experts around the world.

Finland is doing some very interesting things these days.

“Traditionally, learning has been defined as a list of subject matters and facts you need to acquire – such as arithmetic and grammar – with some decoration, like citizenship, built in around it,” Ms Lonka says.

“But when it comes to real life, our brain is not sliced into disciplines in that way; we are thinking in a very holistic way. And when you think about the problems in the world – global crises, migration, the economy, the post-truth era – we really haven’t given our children the tools to deal with this inter-cultural world.

Read it.

Albrecht Speer could not be reached for comment.

Jim Goad takes on The Burrito Kerfuffle.

I’m not a fan of Mexican food, for reasons which should be obvious. Although I hold Mexicans in the highest esteem as a proud and noble (if exceedingly short) people, they tend to score poorly on standardized tests and have never invented much of note beyond nachos. I can’t think of a single Mexican comedian, musician, writer, or filmmaker who’s inspired me. To put it bluntly, I’ve never appropriated anything from them because I’ve never wanted to.

I never eat food from a place where more people are moving here from there than are moving there from here. I figure they know something I don’t, and the food is the chief suspect.

Portland, OR is one of the best American cities to enjoy from a distance. After all, it hosted what is easily one of my Top Three Favorite Hate-Crime Hoaxes of all time in the person of one Azalea Cooley, an allegedly cancer-stricken, wheelchair-bound black lesbian who wound up being the person who, when all was said and done, turned out to be the Mystery Klansman who was burning crosses in her own backyard.

Plus the rain. Don’t forget the rain.

Kevin Williamson points out some inconvenient truth.

Tim McVeigh was God’s gift to the Left, and the Left will forever keep his memory alive, tending it like a kind of sacred flame.

Al-Qaeda attacks the United States on September 11, 2001? Yes, but don’t forget about McVeigh. Omar Mateen lets loose an “Allahu akbar!” before massacring 49 people at a gay bar in Orlando? Yes, but remember McVeigh. Salman Abedi and his pack of “lone” wolves get a jump on Ramadan by nail-bombing a bunch of little girls and their grandmothers at a concert in Manchester? Terrible, of course, but let us not forget about the real threat: right-wing terrorism on the McVeigh model.

…

We were, impossible as it sounds to say it, in one sense lucky to have al-Qaeda as our main terrorist threat in the years immediately following September 11, 2001. Al-Qaeda was, as an ideological matter, focused on spectacular attacks when it came to the West, desiring each to be more dramatic than the last. Osama bin Laden et al. found 9/11 difficult to follow up on, especially with U.S. forces hunting them down in their safe havens. The Islamic State has no such ideological limitation, and it is happy to bomb a concert here and behead a hostage there. The mullahs in Iran may dream of a nuclear Armageddon, but the Islamic State would be perfectly satisfied with a permanent intifada being fought in every Western city of any consequence.

Read it.

But of course the ‘consensus’ on Global Warming is incontrovertible.