Walter Olson rips the mask off of some Fake News.

It made for great copy – irresistibly clickable and compulsively shareable. “Trump’s Budget Would Kill a Program That Feeds 2.4 Million Senior Citizens,” blared Time Magazine’s headline. “Trump Proposed Budget Eliminates Funds for Meals on Wheels,” claimed The Hill, in a piece that got 26,000 shares.

But it was false. And it wouldn’t have taken long for reporters to find and provide some needed context to the relationship between federal block grant programs, specifically Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), and the popular Meals on Wheels program.

Steve Sailer reviews a book.

Goodhart renames the new tribes the “Anywheres” (roughly 20 to 25 per cent of the population) and the “Somewheres” (about half), with the rest in between. And it broadly works. Those who see the world from anywhere are, he points out, the ones who dominate our culture and society, doing well at school and moving to a residential university, and then into a professional career, often in London or abroad. “Such people have portable ‘achieved’ identities,” he says, “based on educational and career success which makes them . . . comfortable and confident with new places and people.”

Looked for the phrase “based out of” in bios. It used to be that only hitmen identified themselves as “based out of” somewhere.

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One paradox is that Anywheres tend to have extremely strong prejudices against living just about anywhere, instead paying $4000 per month rent to live in San Francisco, say. Just ask an Anywhere why Queens isn’t good enough for him compared to pricier Brooklyn. He’ll tell you why. …

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Beats a hashtag any day.

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Considering the sort of people who inhabit the Province of Ontario, I can’t say that I have a problem with that.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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A note to Dutch innkeepers: If you are going to host a convention of lock pickers, and you promise them free Wi-Fi, it is probably a futile gesture to then require paid access with a password. I learned this one evening a few years ago in the Stay-Okay Hostel in Sneek (pronounced like the serpent), a midsized city in the north of the Netherlands. When I asked a conventioneer if Wi-Fi was complimentary, he said there had been some confusion with the hostel. But not to worry, he said: Someone had clandestinely added an access point. I logged on.

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R.R. Reno’s essay, “A Dissolving Age” (March 2017), raises legitimate concerns about trends in modern American society, but the author is wrong to fix the blame on America’s growing economic ties to the rest of the world.

Reno’s thesis is that globalization?—?which he fairly defines as “the relatively free flow of capital, goods, and labor through most of the world”?—?is one of the principal forces that is dissolving the traditional attachment of Americans to our culture, community, and nation. The author laments “the utilitarian despotism of global capitalism,” which he blames for supplanting the sovereignty of the United States and our patriotic feelings toward our country.

Rather than a point by point response, let me home in on three of the more debatable aspects of Reno’s indictment.

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I have a copy of the first edition. It’s probably worth a lot of money by now.

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Our counter-offer: You can have California. We’ll even pay you to take it.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

ZMan looks behind the curtain.

One of the remarkable things about the Cloud People is they have a non-linear timeline that has more holes than the fossil record. For most of them. the world started in the 1960’s. That’s because the Cloud is dominated by Boomers, but it is also when the Cloud started to form up as a social force. The result is they have two versions of the past. Their past, the 60’s and 70’s, and the long ago past, when Lincoln defeated Hitler.

This ahistorical world view is why they reflexively compare every foreign leader to Hitler and every problem in world affairs to Munich. It’s even more present tense for domestic matters. They have never stopped fighting the Civil Rights Movement. T.N. Coates makes $50K a speech because his kid brushed up against an old white women on an escalator once and that was just like the cops attacking the blacks at Selma.

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So-called foodie culture is interesting in that it is not really a culture. It is the result of lack of culture. The people endlessly searching for a new dish or new cuisine do so because they have nothing of their own or at least nothing they wish to hold up as their own. The endless search for some new exotic cuisine is a distraction from facing the fact that their own culture is dead and its artifacts are now just museum pieces.

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Well, hate makes you ugly, and nobody can hate as well as Leftist politicians.

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A remarkably incisive analysis.

Of course, those who study history recognize that all radical ideologies get taken over the cliff by their fringe. But they never learn.

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Prediction: In any contest between a Real Hamburger and a Fake Hamburger, the Real Hamburger will win every time.

Notice how many people are making fake meat out of plants, and how nobody is making fake plants out of meat. Think about that.

Tyler Cowen looks at what the Crust obsesses about these days.

Since the 1960s and ’70s, food has replaced music’s centrality to American culture. These are invariably somewhat subjective impressions, but I’d like to lay out my sense of how the social impact of music has fallen and the social role of food has risen.

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Most of the top music from the 1990s, such as say Alanis Morissette, would sound current if released today, a sign of cultural stasis in what was once a highly socially charged and rapidly changing sector. In 1967, music from 20 or even 10 years earlier sounded quite different and indeed archaic.

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Restaurants are increasingly an organizing and revitalizing force in our cities, and eating out has continued to rise as a means of socializing. America’s educated professional class may be out of touch with sports and tired of discussing the weather, and so trading information about new or favorite restaurants, or recipes and ingredients, has become one of the new all-purpose topics of conversation. Food is a relatively gender-neutral topic, and furthermore immigrant newcomers can be immediately proud of what they know and have eaten.

Megan McArdle visits America for Bloomberg News.

There’s no getting around it: For a girl raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Salt Lake City is a very weird place.

I went to Utah precisely because it’s weird. More specifically, because economic data suggest that modest Salt Lake City, population 192,672, does something that the rest of us seem to be struggling with: It helps people move upward from poverty. I went to Utah in search of the American Dream.

Columnists don’t talk as much as they used to about the American Dream. They’re more likely to talk about things like income mobility, income inequality, the Gini coefficient?—?sanitary, clinical terms. These are easier to quantify than a dream, but also less satisfying. We want money, yes, but we hunger even more deeply for something else: for possibility. It matters to Americans that someone born poor can retire rich. That possibility increasingly seems slimmer and slimmer in most of the nation, but in Utah, it’s still achievable.

You will have noticed, if you have been paying attention, that the loudest clamoring about being ‘sanctuary cities’ comes from yuppie hipster enclaves like San Francisco or Malibu or West Palm Beach or Manhattan. The reason for this is that the Upper Crust can’t afford to lose their Underclass dependents, upon whom they rely for domestic servants, nannies and housekeepers and yardboys and such.

Scrape off the icing of virtue-posturing and that’s all it is. Those who scream loudest about ‘living wage’ are the same ones who are ready to die in the last ditch to continue paying their illegal servitors a less-than-market wage for their Upper Crust lifestyle.

So, as with any other area of life, tune out the bleatings and follow the money.

Eric Raymond provides some advice to those who are not.

This blog post is brought to you by a recent bad experience I had watching a 5-minute clip from Big Bang Theory on the recommendation of a friend who thought I might find it amusing.

Bleagh. This is supposed to be a show about geniuses? It’s not. It’s a show about a dimwit’s idea of what bright people are like. The slowest person in my peer group could out-think and out-create any of these sad-sack imitations of “smart” on any day of the week.

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This will tell you what to avoid to escape these twits.

I figure that tattoos and a man-bun figure prominently, but I don’t care that much to actually find out.

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Funny, it doesn’t look Jewish.

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In July 2015, William Merideth, 47, was at home in Hillview, Kentucky, America, when his daughter came in from sunbathing in the garden to say there was a drone buzzing overhead. As a firm believer in his Second Amendment rights, Merideth loaded up his shotgun with bird shot, waited until the camera-fitted quadcopter came over his home, and then took it down with a single shot – which bought the drone’s operators running.

“They asked me, ‘Are you the S-O-B that shot my drone?’ and I said, ‘Yes I am’,” he told journalists. “I had my Glock on me and they started toward me and I told them, ‘If you cross my sidewalk, there’s gonna be another shooting’.”

Heh.

The police were called and they arrested Merideth – not for shooting down the drone per se, but for discharging a firearm within city limits. In October, a judge agreed with Merideth (now known as the Drone Slayer) that he was within his rights to take down the trespassing drone. The dad was cleared of all charges.

And rightly so.

David Boggs, the drone’s owner, was not a happy chap. He sued Merideth for the $1,500 it had cost to replace his toy, insisting that only the US Federal Aviation Administration has the right to control airspace, so his aircraft couldn’t have been trespassing.

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Gee, I wonder why?

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Trees that were domesticated by pre-Columbian peoples still dominate the forests of the Amazon Basin. The findings put a dent in the notion that the vast rainforests were untouched by human hands before the arrival of the Spanish explorers in South America. In an article published in Science, an international team including Florian Wittmann from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, the scientists report their findings.

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And we’re coming for you. There ARE no ‘safe spaces’.

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Well. There it is.

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Chelsea Clinton is set to receive a lifetime achievement award from Variety magazine next month, though it is unclear why.

Well, she survived to adulthood with Bill Clinton as her father and Hillary Clinton as her mother. I find that impressive.

Clinton’s other achievements include being born to one of the most skilled politicians in American history, growing up in the White House, landing a $600,000 contract with MSNBC, marrying a hedge fund millionaire, and tweeting constantly about President Trump.

That’s more than I’ve ever achieved. I’m convinced.

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

Lion of the Blogosphere has a theory, with which I disagree.

Rich people talk a lot about getting taxes raised, but if you listen closely they’re talking about tax rates on Ordinary Income, wages and such-like, and that’s not where they make their money.

And even if taxes were raised on the forms of income that they get, they still have a comparative advantage over people who make orders of magnitude less than they do. A tax rate of 50% or even 90% is not going to hurt very much when you’re pulling down a hundred mil a year, but if you’re only making a hundred thou, that drops you to poverty level pretty quickly.

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In his 2005 book Blink, he confirms that Pepsi has more of a citrus flavour, while coke is characterised by a raisiny-vanilla tang.

He also states that the sweeter and more citrusy taste behind Pepsi is why it usually wins in taste tests. This gives is a stronger blast of flavour while Coke is a lot smoother.

No, the reason is that Pepsi tastes like something a human being would want to drink, while Coke tastes like something you would want to clean rust off of furniture with. It’s really just that simple.

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Will the planet actually be saved? Stay tuned for the next thousand years.

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Well, yeah. Especially if the Social Justice Warriors keep throwing poor people out of work by jacking up the minimum wage.

This past July, the BratWurst Bot, developed by the Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI) Research Center for Information Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany, flawlessly took orders, cooked, and served over 200 meals for a salivating garden party crowd. “We had a few people at the party surprised that robotics can do something like this,” Arne Roennau, the department manager of robotics at FZI, said. “People are not aware that technology has come this far.”

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As fast-food employees continue their Fight for $15, restaurant corporations have begun to look for, and invest in, technological replacements.

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The world is divided into people who sit on the floor and those who sit on chairs.

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With the first billionaire in the White House, Wall Street booming and, for the first time in almost a decade, very solid and broad based job growth, one would think America’s business elite would be beaming. But that’s not so because the country’s moguls are more divided than at any time in recent history.

This conflict stems largely from divergent interests among rival factions of the putative ruling class. Trump’s backers tend to have links with the “real” economy, that is, those people who make things, such as energy producers, domestic manufacturers, agribusiness, suburban home-builders, and aerospace firms. These interests are increasingly concentrated in parts of America Trump painted “red”—the South, the Midwest, the Great Plains, and Appalachia.

On the other side lies the “ascendant” ephemeral economy, based in such industries as media, entertainment, software, and social media, as well as their financial backers. These industries are less affected by environmental regulations than those in more tangible lines of business. They are also concentrated in the deep blue slivers along the coasts and in college towns, the very places where the progressive social and environmental agenda is most deeply entrenched.

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For a climate activist, having babies is apparently a troubling ethical dilemma, a distressing personal contribution to the global anthropogenic carbon footprint. But somehow they keep popping them out.

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One of my cousins recently attended an event at a suburban church and I tagged along. I’m amoral and omnivorous. I’ll go to any house of worship on the odd chance I might actually learn something useful – and I often do. And I meet a lot of really nice people along the way. But mostly I like to explore the landscapes other people inhabit. Church provides an intimate glimpse into what people are thinking and feeling in a particular location.

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I was immediately impressed with how much this church looked and functioned like a shopping mall. The size, shape, and general construction of the buildings and surrounding parking lots were indistinguishable from a large retail center. I spent more time than I probably should have trying to figure out which denomination it was. Catholic? Definitely not. Lutheran? Not exactly. Baptist? Meh. Mormon? Nope. It was a generic all inclusive Christian arrangement that celebrated the lack of any specific affiliation. Come and worship. We take all kinds. And enjoy the ample free parking and food court while you’re here. There was a well populated Christian school, a substantial auditorium, and all manner of programs and facilities. It was a highly successful suburban version of Big Box Jesus.

The Dallas term is ‘Godatorium’.

But then I looked out at the parking lot. How many people paid cash for their cars? I explored the subdivisions all around the church. How many people bought their suburban homes with cash? How many people are capable of setting aside even a sliver of savings on a regular basis ever. How many people bought their clothes and shoes and had their hair done with a credit card that got rolled over into a big ball of vague but gradually mounting debt? How many people are approaching middle age and still paying off student loan debt?

I understand the dynamics of contemporary accounting. Carrying mortgage debt provides a substantial tax advantage. Using “other people’s money” at a low interest rate to invest in an asset that consistently rises in value is smart and frees up cash to be deployed in other more productive ways. Putting cash into savings is inefficient since it sits in a bank earning near zero interest these days. Stock values keep rising so investing in equities is a no brainer.

You can’t go around wearing thrift store clothes and sporting a bowl haircut and expect to be taken seriously in a professional business setting. You don’t want to drive around in an old clunker and put your family at risk when you could have the latest safety and reliability features of a newer car bought on credit. If you can buy that car with a home equity loan and get the tax deduction, all the better. Everything about respectable modern life is predicated on people spending a certain amount of money in a very specific way that is nearly impossible to achieve on a cash basis. And that set of arrangements is in direct conflict with the traditional virtues of frugality, saving, and self reliance. Big Box Jesus takes Visa, Mastercard, and American Express.

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Over the last 15 years there has been a steady and disconcerting leak of young people away from the labour force in America. Between 2000 and 2015, the employment rate for men in their 20s without a college education dropped ten percentage points, from 82% to 72%. In 2015, remarkably, 22% of men in this group – a cohort of people in the most consequential years of their working lives – reported to surveyors that they had not worked at all in the prior 12 months. That was in 2015: when the unemployment rate nationwide fell to 5%, and the American economy added 2.7m new jobs. Back in 2000, less than 10% of such men were in similar circumstances.

What these individuals are not doing is clear enough, says Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, who has been studying the phenomenon. They are not leaving home; in 2015 more than 50% lived with a parent or close relative. Neither are they getting married. What they are doing, Hurst reckons, is playing video games. As the hours young men spent in work dropped in the 2000s, hours spent in leisure activities rose nearly one-for-one. Of the rise in leisure time, 75% was accounted for by video games. It looks as though some small but meaningful share of the young-adult population is delaying employment or cutting back hours in order to spend more time with their video game of choice.

Think about it:

No fat ugly feminists screeching about The Patriarchy.

No welfare queens complaining that drinking milk is raaaaaaacist.

No nerd little shrimp of indeterminate sex complaining about what pronoun she/it is entitled to.

No minimum wage pricing out of the only jobs you’re qualified for.

No gangbangers whupping your ass because you looked at them on the street.

Just peace – and quiet – and fun.

What’s not to like?

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Any time a Leftist disagrees with a policy, a person, or an idea, if he has already used up the tedious racist/sexist/whatever deal, and hasn’t started rioting yet, he has one more lame argument in his bag of tricks. He has learned from ex-President Obama, to point his nose skyward and assert, “That’s not who we are!” Please. Do us the courtesy of not telling us who we are when you don’t even know us. You know precious few Heartland Americans, as we can tell by the movies you make about us. They ring as true as Hillary’s mortifying black preacher accent when she’s “no ways tahrd.”

Barry’s other go-to threat was that we would end up on “the wrong side of history.” But History just kicked him in the nuts, as History will sometimes do, so it’s back to telling us who we are.

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Influenced by Edison and honed via experimenting on patient, hand-sore librarians, library hand focused on uniformity rather than beauty. “The handwriting of the old-fashioned writing master is quite as illegible as that of the most illiterate boor,” read a New York State Library School handbook. “Take great pains to have all writing uniform in size, blackness of lines, slant, spacing and forms of letters,” wrote Dewey in 1887. And if librarians thought they could get away with just any black ink, they could think again real fast. “Inks called black vary much in color,” scoffed the New York State Library School handwriting guide.