Read it.

The amount of censorship on the Internet seems to be increasing. Most of it is not implemented overtly by Western governments — with Germany being a notable exception — but by supposedly private outfits. Facebook and Twitter hold near-monopolies in their specific markets, so that when they decide to censor, their actions are as effective as a government clampdown. And in Germany, of course, the government actually requires them to censor. Geert Wilder’s account was recently blocked in Germany, presumably in obedience to Angela Merkel’s orders.

But Twitter is quite willing to institute censorship on its own initiative, as in the recent case when the account for WorldNet Daily was suspended. If your opinions veer too far from the Narrative, and you become prominent enough that your tweets and posts are often “trending”, then in all likelihood you will eventually be squashed.

Check Scott Adams’ blog where he talks about getting shadowbanned on Twitter.

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I’ll start with a question: What is good writing?

It depends on what country you’re from. We all know what’s considered “good writing” in our own country. We grow up immersed in the cadences and sentence structure of the language we were born into, so we think, “That’s probably what every country considers good writing; they just use different words.” If only! I once asked a student from Cairo, “What kind of language is Arabic?” I was trying to put myself into her mental process of switching from Arabic to English. She said, “It’s all adjectives.”

Well, of course it’s not all adjectives, but I knew what she meant: it’s decorative, it’s ornate, it’s intentionally pleasing. Another Egyptian student, when I asked him about Arabic, said, “It’s all proverbs. We talk in proverbs. People say things like ‘What you are seeking is also seeking you.’” He also told me that Arabic is full of courtesy and deference, some of which is rooted in fear of the government. “You never know who’s listening,” he said, so it doesn’t hurt to be polite. That’s when I realized that when foreign students come to me with a linguistic problem it may also be a cultural or a political problem.

William Zinsser has forgotten more about good writing than you will ever know.

First, a little history. The English language is derived from two main sources. One is Latin, the florid language of ancient Rome. The other is Anglo-Saxon, the plain languages of England and northern Europe. The words derived from Latin are the enemy—they will strangle and suffocate everything you write. The Anglo-Saxon words will set you free.

How do those Latin words do their strangling and suffocating? In general they are long, pompous nouns that end in –ion—like implementation and maximization and communication (five syllables long!)—or that end in –ent—like development and fulfillment. Those nouns express a vague concept or an abstract idea, not a specific action that we can picture—somebody doing something. Here’s a typical sentence: “Prior to the implementation of the financial enhancement.” That means “Before we fixed our money problems.”

Believe it or not, this is the language that people in authority in America routinely use—officials in government and business and education and social work and health care. They think those long Latin words make them sound important. It no longer rains in America; your TV weatherman will tell that you we’re experiencing a precipitation probability situation.

And that’s a lot of the problem with America today. Churchill said it best: ‘Short words are best; and old words, when short, are best of all’. (Of course, he always did.)

Read it.

No one knows exactly how many bodies remain on Mount Everest today, but there are certainly more than 200. Climbers and Sherpas lie tucked into crevasses, buried under avalanche snow and exposed on catchment basin slopes – their limbs sun-bleached and distorted. Most are concealed from view, but some are familiar fixtures on the route to Everest’s summit.

Perhaps most well-known of all are the remains of Tsewang Paljor, a young Indian climber who lost his life in the infamous 1996 blizzard. For nearly 20 years, Paljor’s body – popularly known as Green Boots, for the neon footwear he was wearing when he died – has rested near the summit of Everest’s north side. When snow cover is light, climbers have had to step over Paljor’s extended legs on their way to and from the peak.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Teaching children according to their individual “learning style” does not achieve better results and should be ditched by schools in favour of evidence-based practice, according to leading scientists.

Thirty eminent academics from the worlds of neuroscience, education and psychology have signed a letter to the Guardian voicing their concern about the popularity of the learning style approach among some teachers.

Demonstrating how short a life a ‘scientific consensus’ has as a reflection of reality.

The group opposes the theory that learning is more effective if pupils are taught using an individual approach identified as their personal “learning style”. Some pupils, for example, are identified as having a “listening” style and could therefore be taught with storytelling and discussion rather than written exercises.

The letter describes that approach as “one of a number of common neuromyths that do nothing to enhance education”. It is signed by Steven Pinker, Johnstone family professor of psychology at Harvard University; Dorothy Bishop, professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford; and leading neuroscientist Prof Uta Frith of University College London among others.

Read it.

Enough about Trump, let’s look at something important.

Read it.

Hire Tony Soprano to have them whacked.

Well, that’s what I would do.

Lion of the Blogosphere sorts it out for you.

Gelato is just the Italian word for ice cream, and while there are customary differences between them, I don’t think that there exists an ice cream/gelato police that will put you in prison if you call standard American-style ice cream “gelato” to make it more appealing to SWPLs. You see, SWPLs love stuff that’s European and usually despise eating foods commonly eaten by Amercian proles unless it’s eaten ironically. Although there seems to be an exception for ice cream, a food that spans social classes and can be unironically enjoyed by SWPLs even though they have a preference for the fancier-sounding gelato.

I’ve always preferred sherbet to ice cream. It’s the Turk in me.

Read it.

They’ll have to oil him up first.

Victor Davis Hanson looks at Washington.

Far too many government officials never pay the price for their crimes and misdeeds: Clinton, Rice, Napolitano, Lerner … Comey is the exception.

President Trump’s firing of James Comey revealed strange timing, herky-jerky methods, and bad political optics.

Certainly, in the existential political war that Trump finds himself in, it would have been wiser, first, to have rallied his entire White House team and congressional leaders around the decision and established a shared narrative, to have been magnanimous to the departing James Comey, and to have had obtained private guarantees from a preselected successor that he or she would serve and be appointed within a day or two.

But otherwise the firing was overdue.

The head of the FBI (quite outside his purview as an investigatory official) announced in summer 2016 to the nation that he had decided not to seek an indictment of Hillary Clinton. Then, again in the role of a presumed federal attorney, he seemed to reverse that judgment by reopening his investigation. Then he appeared to re-reverse that decision — all at the height of a heated presidential campaign.

Read it.

Most people who have been exposed to defensive shooting techniques have heard the little slogan, “Two to the body, one to the head, is guaranteed to leave them dead.” Fewer shooters know this refers to a defensive shooting technique called the Mozambique Drill. But a large number of defensive students may be confused regarding the difference between the Mozambique and the Failure Drill. Well, as they say, here is the rest of the story.

I learned it as ‘Two to the body, one to the head, always leaves the target dead.’ But it’s core knowledge however construed.

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The event is taking place at Spøttrup Castle, a well-preserved 16th century fortress, and is part of the line-up for European Capital of Culture Aarhus 2017. The medieval combat will include one-on-one contests to large skirmishes, where teams of 16 people fight with swords, axes, clubs and warhammers.

Whilst the championships take place, the parkland around Spøttrup Castle will be converted into a Medieval market, selling everything from chain mail to mead. At the castle one can experience the entertainment up close while discovering some medieval gourmet as a real warrior, to the sounds of wild battle cries and metal on metal.

Everything old is new again.

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Theunis Botha, 51, from Johannesberg, was leading a hunt in Gwai, Zimbabwe, when they stumbled across a herd of elephants, which included pregnant cows.

Three elephants stampeded towards the hunters and Mr Botha opened fire with his rifle, prompting a fourth elephant to storm in from the side and lift him up with her trunk.

The Afrikaans news site Netwerk24 reported that another member of the group fired the fatal shot at the elephant and, as the animal collapsed dead, she fell on Mr Botha.

Usually karma isn’t that speedy.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

ZMan brings the future.

One of the things that ails us in the modern age is we have yet to adjust our thinking to the modern economy. The great political-economic thinkers lived in a time when money was either gold, backed by gold or a fiat currency. The result is our political and economic debates are based in the logic of a world that no longer exists. The modern global economy is not based on fiat money or hard money. It is based on credit money, which has a unique set of characteristics.

For instance, the US government is no longer able to print up greenbacks and sprinkle them on the economy. Instead, when they expand the money supply, they expand lending, both domestic and global. It’s not just any sort of lending either. The central bank can buy up long term notes in order to drive down long term lending rates, thus expanding lending for capital goods. Alternatively, they can buy up short term debt and increase the amount retail lending. The Federal Reserve holds close to 2 trillion in mortgages, for example.

P. J. O’Rourke tells us how he sees it.

“The politician creates a powerful, huge, heavy, and unstoppable Monster Truck of a government,” P.J. O’Rourke writes in his new book, How the Hell Did This Happen? (Atlantic Monthly Press). “Then supporters of that politician become shocked and weepy when another politician, whom they detest, gets behind the wheel, turns the truck around, and runs them over.”

Read it.

Far too many people operate according to a screwy and uncivilized code of ethics.  Butting in to strangers’ private affairs is applauded as altruistic if done through the agency of the state, while resisting and protesting against such officiousness is portrayed in the media and in the classrooms as evidence of greed or of cruelty or of ignorance (or of some combination of the three).

Making matters much worse are the all-too-typical modern economists.  They thrill to the not-very-challenging challenge of pointing out the many ways that real-world markets ‘deviate’ from textbook models – and in particular of all the many situations in which flesh-and-blood individuals acting in markets are less than fully informed.  These economists then leap, stuffed with confidence but devoid of anything at stake, to the conclusion that they – and the state officials who they imagine are eager to act on their scientific advice – somehow know, or can make known, all that the flesh-and-blood people are presumed not to know about the details of each of these individual’s specific situations.

Lion of the Blogosphere shares.

Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia presents good possibilities for positive press. No doubt it causes cognitive dissonance for Democrats that the Arab countries like Saudi Arabia are very happy that Trump is President, because they hated Obama. They don’t care about Trump’s “Muslim ban,” because they don’t let Jews and Christians immigrate to their countries, why do they care if the United States does the same to their people, as long as they can all get along diplomatically? The Middle East simply does not understand the do-gooder liberal ethic at all. They think they’re a bunch of chumps. They love to take advantage of those chumps, but they have no respect for them.

I try to be cynical but it’s impossible to keep up.

Read it.

Let’s see, who is more likely to be peddling ‘junk science’, a distinguished academic who publishes the research on which his conclusion are based, or writers for a partisan web site who depend on ‘fairly wide consensus among behavioral scientists’?

As with any such issue, the proper response is SHOW YOUR WORK. We can see Murray’s — he put it in a book, which has been out (and subject to checking) for decades. ‘Consensus’ isn’t evidence, it’s just opinion. SHOW YOUR WORK. Give us the data on which you base your opinions. Point out exactly where Murray’s data are wrong. Don’t just wave your hands about how All Right-Thinking People Agree And So That Answers The Question. SHOW YOUR WORK. This is science, after all. (Or is it…?)

For the lazy, Steve Sailer fisks this hatchet-job here.

‘Remember this about America: Everybody is trying to get in, and nobody is trying to get out.’ — Roger Ailes

Read it.

I hope he got paid.

Read it.

A professor wants universities to “stop hiring white cis men,” according to her May blog post uncovered by Campus Reform Wednesday.

“If you are a cis white man (meaning you identify as male and you were assigned male at birth) you almost certainly should resign from your position of power,” wrote Piper Harron, a temporary assistant professor at University of Hawaii at Manoa.

“That’s right, please quit. Too difficult? Well, as a first step, at least get off your hiring committee, your curriculum committee, and make sure you’re replaced by a woman of color or trans person. Don’t have any in your department?  HOW SHOCKING.”

Racism from the Left, strait up. And yet Trump is the New Hitler.

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It’s a region that in many ways is the polar opposite of the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas, which have dominated our ranking for the last few years. (They still place second and eighth this year, respectively, among the largest 70 metropolitan areas, though San Jose is down sharply from second place last year.)

Unlike the tech-driven Bay Area, Dallas’ economy has multiple points of strength, including aerospace and defense, insurance, financial services, life sciences, data processing and transportation. Employment in the metro area has expanded 20.3% over the past five years and 4.2% last year, with robust job creation in professional and business services, as well as in a host of lower-paid sectors like retail, wholesale trade and hospitality.

According to Southern Methodist University’s Klaus Desmet and Collin Clark, Dallas’s success stems in part from the fact that it isn’t looking to appeal to the elite “creative class,” but to middle-class workers and the companies and executives who employ them. Dallas attracts both foreign and domestic migrants, particularly from places like California, where housing is, on an income-adjusted basis, often three times as expensive. This has had much to do with the relocation to the area of such companies as Jacobs Engineering, Toyota, Liberty Mutual and State Farm.

Suck on it, Left Coast.

Joe Bob Briggs lays down the law.

And why is it called a smartphone? It’s not smart, it’s a computer. It’s dumb. It requires a smart person to operate it. It’s probably called a smartphone to disguise the fact that it’s likely to be operated by a dummy, thereby making it more marketable to consumers in need of remedial IQ points.

…

When Steve Jobs arrived at the gates of heaven, Gabriel was not there to greet him, there were no trumpets, and the gates remained closed all day, because the archangels were fiddling with their phones.

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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….

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.