Read it.

And gotten five more times done. (That’s the part the DemLegHump Media always leave out.)

I’m good with it.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Yes, Virginia, there really were Soviet spies.

Read it.

Why do so many Americans shun the institutions traditionally devoted to saving and loaning money? The answer, many people tell Servon, is that banks don’t seem to want their business and make it too difficult and expensive to get anything done.

“Banks want one customer with a million dollars,” the owner of one check-cashing chain tells her. “Check cashers like us want a million customers with one dollar.”

…

“Customers can find it difficult to predict when banks will charge them a fee (they sometimes change the timing) and what the amount of the fee will be; this lack of clarity can be costly,” Servon writes. “Now imagine the interior of a check casher—or visit one. It resembles a fast food restaurant more than a bank. Posters tell you what products are sold, and large signs above the teller windows list every product, along with its price.”

I’d like to have a doctor’s office like that, please.

Alternative services come with clear costs—and they move fast. Somebody facing bills needs a paycheck cashed now, not after an arbitrary delay while the check clears. Unpaid rent or unpurchased groceries are bigger concerns than a few dollars in fees.

And that’s what competition — when it’s allowed — delivers. Unfortunately, legislators, academics, and other government employees are too fond of telling other people how they ought to live their lives.

Financially sophisticated young Americans are also turning away from traditional banking. Peer-to-peer lending through online services such as Prosper and Lending Club “requires far less paperwork than other loans and is perceived to be more transparent than payday loans,” writes Servon. Loans through these platforms tend to be relatively inexpensive, too. Online-only banks such as Simple and Walmart’s GoBank cater to customers seeking greater transparency and lower costs, and some offer financial advice that millennials in particular find helpful.

Paperwork that is mandated by government regulation, ‘just standard clauses for your protection’, as the Phantom of the Paradise  likes to say.

“The regulators are causing the opposite of the desired effect by making it so dangerous now to serve a lower-income segment,” JoAnn Barefoot tells the author. A former official with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, and a deputy controller of the currency, Barefoot points to a web of red tape—much of it intended to battle discrimination—that makes serving many potential customers a legal minefield.

…

Traditional banks have meanwhile gained a reputation for working hand-in-hand with government. That relationship certainly doesn’t serve the needs of the many customers, from illegal immigrants to established businesses, who want to avoid official scrutiny of their transactions. When Servon asks a successful building contractor why he uses check-cashing services, he answers, “The insurance, the taxes, the workers comp—it’s killing us. Some guys try to hide as much of their income as they can—they got two-million-dollar businesses and they report half a mil. I’m telling you—it’s impossible to stay afloat if you don’t do some of that.”

http://dailysignal.com/2017/02/17/in-1-chart-what-your-favorite-fast-food-items-would-cost-with-15-minimum-wage/

Ammo Grrrll has the answers.

A story appeared a few days after the election about a poor, troubled woman who had just started a new relationship with a real live man, but now was so upset by the election of President Trump whom she feared and hated, that she felt compelled to end her new relationship and hunker down in terror. I say: “Run, guy! You dodged a bullet!”

Amen.

It does make me sad that many women looking for good men do not seem to know where to find them. I’m here to help. Movies are useless, with men and women always meeting “cute.” She drops her purse on the street, stuff falls all over, and a gorgeous man picks up her things. They bump heads going for the lipstick, eyes lock, hands touch. Most cities, you drop your purse on the street, you are never going to see its contents again, let alone the purse. If a guy does pick up stuff, he is likely to be a homeless guy lunging for your embarrassingly large secret stash of Fun Size Snickers.

Now (trigger warning) I’m about to get very cis-normative here, so grab some Play-Doh. Ladies, with rare exceptions, men are not going to be at your yoga class, your line dancing class or your card-making class. They may be at your flower arranging class, but will only notice the flowers, see above. So where do appropriate men hang out? You know, the kind who are never even momentarily ambivalent about which restroom to use.

Clue: Not in ‘class’.

You can look for a husband at the grocery store, another movie favorite, but they are likely to be someone else’s husband. With some impressive exceptions, single men do not shop or cook. Their fridges contain yogurt, mustard and bologna, many of which are expired, and beer. They go out a lot or eat things that can be microwaved and eaten on a paper plate or over the sink. If you do find a straight, single man who cooks, grab him!

By the love handles — he’ll have ’em.

Lastly, we come to one of the best places to meet men. A place where the male to female ratio is exceedingly favorable. A place where, for some reason, few women go on a regular basis. I’m talking, of course, about the gun range.

Wisdom. Attend.

You must also negotiate for an adequate ‘portion’, i.e. the number of books that the prospective spouse will bring to the marriage.

Read it.

Whenever I’m reading a science fiction story, I always quit if the aliens aren’t at least as odd as the Japanese.

Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist, looks at automation.

“Why should it be different this time?” That’s the most common response I hear when I raise concerns about automation and the future of jobs, and it’s a pretty simple rejoinder. The Western world managed the shift out of agricultural jobs into industry, and continued to see economic growth. So will not the jobs being displaced now by automation and artificial intelligence lead to new jobs elsewhere in a broadly similar and beneficial manner? Will not the former truck drivers, displaced by self-driving vehicles, find work caring for the elderly or maybe fixing or programming the new modes of transport?

As economics, that may well be correct, but as history it’s missing some central problems. The shift out of agricultural jobs, while eventually a boon for virtually all of humanity, brought significant problems along the way. This time probably won’t be different, and that’s exactly why we should be concerned.

…

Industrialization, and the decline of the older jobs in agriculture and the crafts economy, also had some pernicious effects on social ideas. The early to mid-19th century saw the rise of socialist ideologies, largely as a response to economic disruptions. Whatever mistakes Karl Marx made, he was a keen observer of the Industrial Revolution, and there is a reason he became so influential. He failed to see the long-run ability of capitalism to raise living standards significantly, but he understood and vividly described the transition costs and the economic volatility.

Scott Sumner, a Real Economist, lays it out for you.

Because tax reform is currently in the news, I thought it would be useful to describe what economists know, and don’t know, about taxes. I’ll start with what we know….

Read it.

But there’s a consensus!

Read it.

One sentence is all it takes.

The EPA is one reason why Richard Nixon will burn in Hell for all eternity.

Lion of the Blogosphere connects the dots.

Let’s review what the liberal elites think. The liberal elites believe that having a good career is a reward for doing the right things. The right things include getting good grades in high school and then going to college where you become smart enough to work in a good career.

Liberal elites don’t believe in HBD. If white person, especially a white male, fail to go to college and “make something of themselves,” it’s because they were too lazy and too stupid (stupid in a moral sense and not an IQ sense) to do the right things, despite their white privilege. On the other hand, if a black or Hispanic fails to go to college, that’s because of pervasive racism, and therefore they deserve the help and sympathy of the government as compensation.

Given that the liberal elites who control the Democratic Party believe this, how can they convince the blue-collar whites they are on their side when they give off the vibe that they really despise those people for being lazy and stupid? Sometimes liberal politicians even let slip that they really think the blue-collar whites are a bunch of deplorables clinging bitterly to their religion, their guns, and their racism.

Robin Hanson lays it out.

High school students are easily engaged to elect class presidents, even though they have little idea what if any policies a class president might influence.  Instead such elections are usually described as “popularity contests.”  That is, theses elections are about which school social factions are to have higher social status.  If a jock wins, jocks have higher status.  If your girlfriend’s brother wins, you have higher status, etc.  And the fact that you have a vote says that others should take you into account when forming coalitions – you are somebody.

College is pretty much the same, with more alcohol.

Civics teachers talk as if politics is about policy, that politics is our system for choosing policies to deal with common problems.  But as Tyler Cowen suggests, real politics seems to be more about who will be our leaders, and what coalitions will rise or fall in status as a result.  Election media coverage focuses on characterizing the candidates themselves – their personalities, styles, friends, beliefs, etc.  You might say this is because character is a cheap clue to the policies candidates would adopt, but I don’t buy it.

The obvious interpretation seems more believable – as with high school class presidents, we care about policies mainly as clues to candidate character and affiliations.  And to the extent we consider policies not tied to particular candidates, we mainly care about how policies will effect which kinds of people will be respected how much.

Read it.

Oops.

The OFloinn makes a point.

Extreme cases are liable to arouse emotional investment and this leads to poor laws. Glanville Williams wrote, “It used to be said that ‘hard cases make bad law’—a proposition that our less pedantic age regards as doubtful.³ What is certain is that cases in which the moral indignation of the judge is aroused frequently make bad law.” (Wikipedia)

We can see this clearly in engineering where sometimes-tragic manufacturing flaws result in absurdly strict design changes because legislatures and courts (and even managers) do not distinguish between doing the right thing and doing the thing right. That is, between quality of design and quality of execution. There are times when a design change can prevent an operational error, but typically if a problem happened because an operator failed to follow a procedure, the solution is seldom a more complex and burdensome procedure. 

Read it.

Doing well is the best revenge.

Read it.

The world is full of mundane, meek, unconscious things embodying fiendishly complex mathematics. What can we learn from them?

Read it.

He built a grassroots machine of two million supporters eager to fight for change. Then he let it die. This is the untold story of Obama’s biggest mistake—and how it paved the way for Trump.

Sometimes even being the Magic Negro isn’t enough.

In the month since Trump was inaugurated, and in the three months since he was elected, two things have become clear.

One is that what he says, and especially what he tweets, is fundamentally just noise. It has no connection with any concrete policy, and only tenuous connection to anything that he will eventually wind up doing.

So why does he do it? We can’t know for sure, but its result is to fully occupy the bandwidth of his enemies (and a number of his putative supporters). One traditional military tactic is to jam the other guy’s radars so he can’t tell what is actually going on, and the equivalent seems to be working on Trump’s opponents’ ‘mindshare’ very effectively. It’s like watching my wife work the cats with a cat dancer — they can’t ignore that flouncing feather or red dot, they have to run after it. She, in the meantime, is laughing uproariously; and I suspect that there is a lot of laughter filling the Oval Office of late.

The other is that the Angry Left is cruisin’ for a bruisin’. Most of the protesters and rioters of late are of two groups: Activist college students and urban minority thugs. They are accustomed to having authority figures, either college administrations or Democrat civil governments, roll over and play dead whenever they raise their voices. That will not work with Trump or with anyone in his administration, and eventually Trump will turn into Nixon and you’ll have dead bodies in Berkeley and Baltimore — and nothing will be done because it will look like a requisite response to nation-wide insurrection. Since these people don’t bother to learn any history they won’t be aware that the response to the Kent State shootings in 1970 was some sad music and Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972. You mess with the bull, you get the horns every time.

So what can we expect in the future? Trump is going to keep doing what he’s doing because it’s working. The Left is going to run itself ragged about things that don’t matter a damn, and in the meantime the government is going to be pursuing its program, which is guaranteed to make ‘progressive’ heads explode.

The whole Democrat party is going under suicide watch, because they’re so used to winning that they don’t have the psychological toughness to cope with losing the way they’re going to be losing for the next four years. These violent protests will either fizzle out, when their instigators realize that that they aren’t doing anything other than alienating the people whose support they need, or they will escalate to the point where the administration will feel safe in stomping on them. I remember the Sixties; they fought the law, and the law won.

It will be ‘interesting times’, for sure.

Read it.

Hitler was a vegetarian. Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

Sarah Hoyt looks at the current scene.

At any rate I don’t remember exactly what I said anymore, but it went something like this: the left fed the right coins into the machine — the fundraising for Hillary was astonishing — and pulled all the right levers, from a press more than fully in the tank (to the point of getting the debate questions ahead of time to the Hillary campaign and also of BURYING her many scandals, including Benghazi, the financial shenanigans of the Clinton foundation, and the crazy server-in-the-bathroom stupidity), to celebrity endorsements, to more or less helping the Republicans select the candidate the democrats thought least likely to win against Hillary. Fraud to the extent it exists (It did in massive galloping amounts in the precinct I watched in 12.

The polls, cooked or not, were no more cooked than in 2012, and they showed a blow out.  EVERYTHING WAS GOING SO WELL.

And then the machine broke.  Instead of the planned, prepared, pushed Hillary presidency it delivered Trump.

Right now, from pussy hats to riots, the left is reacting like teenagers who did everything right and for whom the vending machine failed to deliver what they purchased.  So they’re screaming, and trying to push the machine and slamming it against the wall, trying to get it to dispense the treat they bought.

Watch it.

Peter Robinson interviews Professor Russell Muirhead of Dartmouth College. This is a fascinating look at the history of political parties in American history.

Read it.

Executive Summary: They suck.

Read it.

Sounds like a win-win to me.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best … and sometimes not.

Thanks to Debby Witt, a kindred soul.

Read it.

Events in Washington and on the left coast display a political analogue. Listening to Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi recycle canards of the 1980’s, well, it’s tiresome. Their creative juices are not flowing. At some time before the onset of the digital era, the record needle got stuck in their groove.

Watching the leftist thugs doing their thing to shut down Milo Yianoppoulos at Berkeley yesterday, we are struck by the repetition.

Read it.

Just who decided we should trust a Pennsylvania rodent with weather prognostication?

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History repeats itself.

May the farce be with them.

Steve Sailer has the pictures.

Maybe we ought to ship them back the Statue. They seem to need it more than we do.

Read it.

Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott cut off state funds to a county that provides sanctuary to illegal immigrants Wednesday, following through on an earlier pledge to punish such sanctuary cities and localities.

Don’t mess with Greg Abbott.

Travis County will no longer have access to $1.8 million in state criminal justice grants, Abbott announced in a letter to county officials, because of a new sanctuary policy implemented by the county sheriff. The policy at issue instructs staff at the sheriff’s department to release illegal immigrants booked in the local jail rather than assist the federal government in deporting them, unless they have been charged with murder, aggravated sexual assault or human smuggling.

Travis County is where Austin, the state capital, is located, and is the biggest blue urban pustule on the red butt of Texas. All of the statist and big-government hipsters gravitate there, and fester.

Steven Hayward looks the situation over.

It is evident that the left, with the active cooperation of the news media, wishes to drive Trump from office. Nothing will sate the left or get them to calm down into a recognizably responsible opposition force.

And why shouldn’t the left think this can succeed? It has worked before. They bagged two presidents in succession back in the 1960s and 1970s—Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. “In a sense,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote of Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run again in 1968, “he was the first American President to be toppled by a mob. No matter that it was a mob of college professors, millionaires, flower children, and Radcliffe girls.” The night Johnson announced his decision, leftists took to the streets to sing “We have overcome.”

Read it.

Rueters reports that the Boy Scouts will begin accepting girls into the Boy Scouts, provided the girls pretend they are boys, or suffer from a mental illness making them unable to comprehend which sex they are, or their parents suffer from a mental illness making them unable to comprehend which sex their child is.

…

Unlike the decision to admit sexual perverts into the company of young boys, this decision to have teen girls bunking in tents and showing with adolescent boys in a movement allegedly design to teach boys morals, virtues, and manhood, was made with no previous debate among the membership.

No one was consulted. It was simply an ambush.

I recall being a Boy Scout. I doubt that any of the guys in my troop would have wanted a girl hanging around.

The SJWs have effectively killed off scouting. Churches and other non-insane, non-evil groups may or may not start youth movement of their own, but it will not have the universal and international character of Boy Scouts.

Well, the Boy Scouts had to get established at some point. Let’s see what can be done.

Rasmussen poll finds the truth.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 57% of Likely U.S. Voters favor a temporary ban on refugees from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen until the federal government approves its ability to screen out potential terrorists from coming here. Thirty-three percent (33%) are opposed, while 10% are undecided.

I guess when Democrats say ‘that’s not who we are’ they’re not talking about Americans.

Read it.

BLUF: Probably.

Andrew Klavan is not afraid to ask.

Mainstream news journalists — by which I mean that collection of Democrats employed by large corporations to push the sort of big government that prevents small corporations from competing with them — have been breathlessly speculating that the recent “Women’s Marches” around the country may be the beginning of a movement. The marches, funded in part by anti-American globalist billionaire George Soros, called forth such headlines as “Cathartic Moment or Enduring Movement” and “Women’s March Activists… Seek To Build a Movement.”

No one knows the future, of course, but I can’t help wondering if the marches, large as they were, were not rather the end of a movement, a fond farewell to an amalgam of obsolete leftist causes that either never had a reason to exist in the first place or have lost whatever reason they might once have had.

If leftism is dead, the speech delivered by actress Ashley Judd in Washington, D.C., may well serve as its eulogy.

Freeberg’s reaction:

It’s all a bunch of gelatinous nonsense, held together by the bitter tendrils of resentment. At its core, are the notions that unproductive people should be able to pull rank on the people who actually produce things, and tell them how to do their producing. And, the premiere asset of any sovereign nation is its tax code, which should be based on resentment and hate. If you happen to be rich, you must have stolen it. Unless you happen to be one of the rich people who lean left. And then you’re wonderful.

Watch it.

When the cultural Marxism just gets to you too much.

Read it.

And liberal heads explode. ‘OMG! THE HITLER BROTHERS ARE CRITICIZING THE NEW HITLER! WHAT ARE WE TO THINK!?’

Of course, another of Hitler’s tricks was to emit ‘fake news’, like calling a hiatus in immigration from seven high-risk countries a ‘Muslim ban’.

Joe Bob Briggs brings the history.

Let me make this clear: I’m not a nativist, I’m a redneck. There’s a difference. A nativist would be one of those snooty New Englanders in the Mayflower Society. Blue bloods in ruffled shirts. Think Adlai Stevenson…Noah Webster…William Rehnquist. Congregationalists. Pointy-nosed moralizers. Some of them could be angry—Jonathan Edwards comes to mind—but they were angry in a sort of clench-jawed Connecticut debutante way. Ewwwww, don’t talk to her, she’s such a Kappa.

The nativist idea of a rebellion is to dress up like Indians and dump tea in the ocean—the 18th-century version of frat boys pranking the archrival football team.

The redneck idea of a rebellion is to lie in wait with a shotgun for the guy who’s trying to tax your whiskey.

ZMan turns over a rock.

The only way to properly understand the American Left is to look at it as a civic religion. Because the American Left adopted European anti-Christianity in the 20th century, it is easy to think they are anti-religious. That’s a mistake the Right has made for half a century. The New Religion, what Progressivism is today, evolved out of the Social Gospel Movement, so it carries with it many of the same habits.

The most obvious of those habits is the obsession with public morality. Public Protestantism starts from the assumption that society is judged as a whole. The righteous, like the virtuous in revolutionary France, have a moral duty to raise up the fallen into the righteous life. This is what gives them license to nose around in your business and order you around. It’s not about fitting the economic pieces together as with European socialists. The American Left is consumed with building the City upon a hill.

…

That’s an important lesson to keep in mind when watching the antics of the Left of late. Their lunacy is not directed at the rest of us. They don’t care what you or anyone else thinks about what’s happening. Their public acts are about signalling to the rest of the believers. By holding protests and making fools of themselves in a public way, they are providing support for one another as they work through the disconfirmation. Like herd animals, they are huddling together in the face if danger. It is pure instinct.

Read it.

The problem is not what they know, it’s what they ‘know’ that ain’t so.

Freeberg on Calexit.

As someone else very astutely noted somewhere, liberals have no interest in elections in this day & age — just look at their reaction to the one we just had.

They have to run “everything”…but, they’re incurious dimbulbs, by & large, way too preoccupied with their virtue-signaling to take the time to define “everything.” You know anyone like this in your extended family? Every family seems to have one character like this. Sticking their nose into something that’s none of their concern, starting fights, but as long as they don’t find out about it it’s all good…so everyone else starts to keep secrets from them, because over time it’s been learned by all that that’s the solution. Just put Crazy Auntie Mabel in a snow-globe, of sorts, let her think the world is tinier than it really is. That, too, is an apt description of today’s liberals. If they find out little kids are being taken to church on Sunday mornings somewhere, they’ll start fights and they’ll get into that pit-bull mode of “This argument’s not over until it’s over the way I like it to be over.” But first, they have to find out about it. So we put them in little jars, shrink their little worlds, keep them from finding out about too much, and it’s all good.

Read it.

If someone offers a solution to the Gordian Knot of food sustainability, run it through the following gauntlet:

1. Does it allow you to do most of your food shopping at the grocery store?
2. Does it require just eliminating one or two things from your diet or, alternatively, eliminating all but a few things?
3. Does it excuse you from making substantial shifts in your diet as the seasons progress?

A ‘yes’ to any of those questions is the clarion call of bullshit. A long list of solutions gets beaten to death in this gauntlet, and few so much as vegetarianism.

The scientific term for creatures that eat only plants is ‘prey’.