Read it.

A Voice of the Crust wakes up … sort of.

Then 2016 arrived, and with it, Donald Trump’s winning run for the White House. Suddenly the words “complexity” and “ambiguity” — not to mention “nuanced” — disappeared from the vocabularies of the so-called sophisticates, washed away in the swirling high tide of the return of that simplistic word: “evil.”

…

Strange, isn’t it, that when the tables are turned, the liberal pushers of moral ambiguity are as absolutist as any fundamentalist preacher associated with George W. Bush? There’s a lesson or two to be learned here. With all due respect to Brzezinski, the right doesn’t have a lock on paranoia. And dualism — our side good, your side evil — is actually baked into human nature and doesn’t really have much to do with how smart you are or how many shades of moral gray you think you can discern. Whenever you let loose your moral indignation at high decibel, someone somewhere will be laughing.

So who are the Manichaeans now?

Read it.

I don’t so much mind not getting the promised flying car, but I’m really disappointed about not getting the promised celebrity exodus.

And they whine about Trump being a liar….

Glenn Reynolds understands the dialectic.

Why are the relations between Donald Trump and the press so bad? There are two reasons. One is that Trump is a Republican, and the press consists overwhelmingly of Democrats. But the other reason is that Trump likes it this way, because when the press is constantly attacking him over trivialities, it strengthens his position and weakens the press. Trump’s “outrageous” statements and tweets aren’t the product of impulsiveness, but part of a carefully maintained strategy that the press is too impulsive to resist.

As I have been saying. The press is more bull than you think.

In fact, Trump’s basically gaslighting them. Knowing how much they hate him, he’s constantly provoking them to go over the top. Sean Spicer’s crowd-size remarks on Saturday were all about making them seem petty and negative. (And, possibly, teeing up crowd size comparisons at this Friday’s March For Life, which the press normally ignores but which Trump will probably force them to cover).

Trump knows that the press isn’t trusted very much, and that the less it’s trusted, the less it can hurt him. So he’s prodding reporters to do things that will make them less trusted, and they’re constantly taking the bait.

Read it.

I guess the Great White North doesn’t want them either.

Can’t say that I blame them.

Check it out.

ZMan is not afraid to ask the rude questions.

Like most people, I just assume this is so, because actors tend to say stupid things when not following a script. The actress Meryl Streep took to the stage at some awards show to say Donald Trump gave her the sads. I’ve watched it a few times trying to figure out what it is she was trying to communicate. Streep is a great actress so it was well choreographed, but it contained nothing more than some hyperventilating about imagined bogeymen. My take away from watching it is that Mx. Streep is not spending her free time working math puzzles.

…

The first thing that springs to mind is that you need a near total absence of self-respect to be a performer. It is, at best, a degrading way to make a living. Anyone who has stood in front of a crowd to give a speech knows it is not as easy as it looks. Imagine standing in front of cameras, pretending to be someone else, while a crowd of people watch you play make believe. Often times, the job requires the performer to make a fool of themselves or do degrading things for the amusement of the crowd. Most people will not do it.

…

Most Americans have never been to Africa so they only know about the place from books and television. As a result, Americans talking about Africa sound like morons to people who have lived in Africa. This is the problem for performers. They talk about America as if it is a foreign country to them. That’s because it often is a foreign country. How much does Meryl Streep know about America at this stage of her life? She has been cooped up in a museum for decades. Death row inmates have a better feel for America than actors.

Read it.

Sayonara. Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.

Read it.

Higher minimum wage = fewer jobs.

Basic economics, too basic for intellectuals to worry about.

Read it.

Speed the day.

Nobody needs a master bedroom you could play football in. You have the rest of the house to do non-bed stuff. A bed and a couple of dressers is all you need in there. Think about it.

You don’t need a home theater unless you’re charging your friends admission to watch movies.

I’ve owned three houses and not one had a garage with enough room in it to park a car. Just call it ‘storage shed with big door’ and be done with it.

Read it.

To end membership of the United States in the United Nations.

Read it.

If the eco-Nazis allow it.

Read it.

His name: Trump Jamil Hassan – AKA “Little Trump.”

Jamil, a 25-year-old father of three and Kurdish peshmerga fighter, said he was proud of his decision. “What I like most and admire about Donald Trump is that he’s a confident man and a successful businessman. He became a leader because he has self-confidence, otherwise he wouldn’t be president.”

Six thousand miles away, dossier-citing Democrats would beg to differ, perhaps, but Trump appears to have no shortage of proud fans in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq. Among a population that respects brash displays of masculine authority, expressions of undying loyalty and the kind of transactional dealmaking that the billionaire businessman touts as his trademark, Trump is enjoying a honeymoon full of cross-cultural appeal.

Read it.

Hungry New Yorkers ordering meals through such online services as Seamless or Eat24 order everything from sushi to burgers to tacos. But when they order from certain restaurants like Leafage and Butcher Block, they might not realize that those restaurants aren’t restaurants at all. They are virtual eateries created by a company called the Green Summit Group that operates several food-delivery services out of central commissaries in midtown Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Chicago. In New York alone, Green Summit’s brands offer all sorts of cuisine “concepts,” including meatballs, salad/sandwich/juice, and burgers/grilled cheese.

Green Summit is just one example of a growing wave of ghost restaurants that skip the storefront and bring food straight to the customer. These places range from the David Chang-backed delivery startup Maple to ready-to-eat meal services like Munchery to new business models like the integrated kitchen/delivery firm Good Uncle.

Read it.

Conventional wisdom holds that Americans drive cars while Europeans ride transit and intercity trains. In fact, while there are some differences in travel habits, differences in rail and bus travel are a lot smaller than most people believe.

Not that you’d know that by reading the DemLegHump Media.

Read it.

I have already thrown some skepticism at the idea that there is going to be a traumatic transition that will throw middle class people out on the streets without warning—rather than a long and gradual transition over decades, to which people can adapt. The future doesn’t come that fast, and we will get a chance to see it coming. The best response is to encourage people to respond to technological progress and to seek out the new jobs that will become available as the old ones fade away.

Yes, automation is going to disrupt the economy, just as technological progress has always disrupted the economy, continually, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. But helping people to adjust by putting them on a permanent welfare subsidy is the worst and cruelest response, precisely because it pays them not to adapt to the new economy.

Joe Bob Briggs breaks it down.

I actually didn’t realize I was an Angry White Man until I finished reading the 397 articles written since the election that start out, “Donald Trump is the product of hatred, misogyny, nativism, bigotry, and resentment emanating from angry white men lamenting the loss of their factory jobs to China.”

The only factory I ever worked at was Phil Hargett’s bus-bench factory in Tullahoma, Tennessee, but I always thought the reason they went out of business was that Phil sold ads on the back of the benches to the Mons Venus All Nude Strip Club in Tampa, causing the Tampa City Council to cancel his contract. Knowing that China stole the municipal-bus-bench business from us makes me even more angry, since it probly makes me ineligible for unemployment checks.

Read it.

The Left has been so good at proselytizing about government run health care for the last 25 years that the public suffers from collective amnesia. We forget that no one complained about insurance very much a generation ago and no one expected miracles from medicine. Health care was just not a big topic.

…

All goods and services are rationed. That’s an iron law of the universe. There are no exceptions. The rationing is either done though control of the supply or through price. In America, a massively convoluted system to control supply has evolved so that the people do not see the cost of health services. This lets a long list of skimmers attach themselves to the system so that prices go up, even though the quality of service often declines.

The question no one ever asks is how to make it cheaper. Follow the talking heads on the subject and they will never address making the price of services cheaper. Instead, they prattle on about access and risk pools and other terms they think sound clever. The reason is not that they view health care as a right. It is because they see it as a privilege to be dispensed by the Cloud People to the Dirt People. Allowing a free market for health services would take all the fun out of being a Cloud Person.

Rick Brookhiser examines how clichés get started.

The initial “hundred days” as a distinct period in a presidency was first used to describe the special session of Congress called by Franklin D. Roosevelt in March 1933. It set the template for the opening act of an activist administration: a president and his allies (really subordinates) in Congress passing a bold program to address a crisis. The president, if not the program, is then enshrined in myth.

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

Much of the outrage over Trump is from the few thousands of people in the Republican and Democratic establishments who had good cause to hope back in 2015 that their resumes and thus net worths would be permanently burnished by spending a couple of years in a Hillary or Jeb White House, thus upping their market value to private industry.

Don’t think of it as selling out; think of it as buying in.

Read it.

In the movie The Godfather, there’s a scene where Don Corleone is giving Michael some advice about life. He says, “I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men.” It’s a great line and it was true for most of human existence. The role of males in society has always exposed them to the greater risk. That and male competition has often been for keeps. When the stakes are high the room for error is smaller so men have always had to be the less reckless of the sexes.

We live in a soft age where women run most things so that means we live in a careless age as well. All sorts of silly and ridiculous things are indulged because the margin for error seems endless. You can make up a bunch of silly diversity rules, for example, on the college campus, because little serious work is done on the college campus. Most of what is done is busy work. In the areas where serious work is done, like the hard sciences, you see very little of the PC nonsense we associate with the academy.

Ezra Klein has some some shrewd observations.

When a grave-faced announcer on CNBC says “technology stocks are down today,” we all know he means Facebook and Apple, not Boeing and Pfizer. To Thiel, this signals a deeper problem in the American economy, a shrinkage in our belief of what’s possible, a pessimism about what is really likely to get better. Our definition of what technology is has narrowed, and he thinks that narrowing is no accident. It’s a coping mechanism in an age of technological disappointment.

“Technology gets defined as ‘that which is changing fast,'” he says. “If the other things are not defined as ‘technology,’ we filter them out and we don’t even look at them.”

…

“We were promised flying cars; we got 140 characters,” he likes to say.

Paul Graham.

Because biographies of famous scientists tend to edit out their mistakes, we underestimate the degree of risk they were willing to take. And because anything a famous scientist did that wasn’t a mistake has probably now become the conventional wisdom, those choices don’t seem risky either.

Read it.

And so are we.

Major Linux distros, Microsoft, PC hardware manufacturers, big industry turnarounds (Nokia, Blackberry, Motorola) the dawn of the GPU era, the end of Moore’s Law speed clock wars into parallel computing, the dawn of ARM. It took 10 years for all the smoke to finally settle, and it took having Apple standing still for 6 years for everybody to finally catch up.

Read it.

“Go around your house and look for things you’re not utilising, look for things you can re-use and re-purpose to help you get organised,” Costello said.

Everything in Costello’s home is sorted and labelled, but the secret to her ultra-organised house is simply upcycling things she already owns: she uses old medicine bottles to store earbuds, coins and safety pins, and a square divider to keep her teabags in order.

On the other hand, nothing ‘declutters’ like simply Throwing Shit Out.

Read it.

“If you are a very talented person, you have a choice: You either go to New York or you go to Silicon Valley.”

This statement by Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder and venture capitalist, unsurprisingly caused a stir, given that he made it in Chicago. Simon Kuper had made a similar observation in the Financial Times when he described how young Dutch up-and-comers had their sights set on London, not Amsterdam. “Many ambitious Dutch people no longer want to join the Dutch elite,” Kuper wrote. “They want to join the global elite.”

This same attitude is leading to the drain of young people out of the small towns of the heartland into the big cities, often those on the coast. Anyone with an ounce of talent or ambition heads for the city.

Read it.

How about that Global Warming, eh? Rising seas nipping at your toes yet?

Read it.

How about that Global Warming, eh? Rising sea levels drowned Manhattan yet? (Or ANYWHERE?)

Avik Roy does the heavy lifting.

• The proposal contained herein—the “Universal Exchange Plan” (UEP)—seeks to substantially repair both sets of health-policy problems: those caused by the ACA and those that predate it; the UEP’s reforms are also perfectly compatible with the “repeal and replace” approach, but they do not require the full and formal repeal of the ACA in order to be enacted.
• The UEP would, by 2025, increase the number of U.S. residents with health coverage by 12.1 million, relative to the ACA; beyond 2025, the UEP would outperform the ACA by an even wider margin.
• The UEP would also: expand economic opportunity for those struggling with high medical bills, improve the quality of health care delivered to the poor, and put America’s finances on a permanently stable course.

Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist, takes a gander.

Overall, I don’t see why the federal government needs to own about 28% of the country.  Nonetheless, in the meantime the government does allow grazing and mining to take place on those lands, often at below-market rents.  (By the way, for now I am putting on hold a possible #6: “federal land ownership is the most efficient way to regulate mining and fossil fuel extraction.”  It raises issues far beyond the scope of the current discussion, though it is significant.)

Joel Kotkin makes some observations.

In 1949 the historian Carey McWilliams defined California as the “the Great Exception” — a place so different from the rest of America as to seem almost a separate country. In the ensuing half-century, the Golden State became not so much exceptional but predictive of the rest of the nation: California’s approaches to public education, the environment, politics, community-building and lifestyle often became national standards, and even normative.

More’s the pity.

Ironically, the state’s policies, which place strong controls on development, road construction, and energy production and usage, are somewhat symbolic; by dint largely of its mild climate, the state is already far more energy efficient than the rest of the country.  But to achieve its ambitious new goals,  most serious observers suggest, the state would lose at least 100,000 jobs and further boost energy prices — which  disproportionately affect the poorer residents who predominate in the state’s beleaguered, and less temperate, interior.

The impact of these policies would be far-reaching. They have already reduced outside investment in manufacturing to minuscule levels and could cost California households an average of $3,000 annually. Such economic realities no longer influence many California policymakers but they could prove a boon  to other   states, notably Texas, Arizona and Nevada, which make a sport of hunting down California employers.

Eventually Caliornia will find out what failed states such as those in Eastern Europe found out before them: The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

According to the most recent Social Science Research Council report, the state overall suffers the greatest levels of income inequality in the nation; the Public Policy Institute places the gap well over 10 percent higher than the national average.

Isn’t it funny that the most Democrat places in the country — New York, California — are also the poster children for ‘income inequality’? I wonder why that is? Hmm, let me think….

Read it. And watch the video.

As you might have heard, Obama is building a wall around his upscale rental in D.C.’s Kalorama neighborhood.

The video doesn’t appear to work for me — much like Obama, come to think of it.

Greg Ip takes notice.

The new nationalist surge has startled establishment parties in part because they don’t see globalism as an ideology. How could it be, when it is shared across the traditional left-right spectrum by the likes of Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, George W. Bush and David Cameron?

But globalism is an ideology, and its struggle with nationalism will shape the coming era much as the struggle between conservatives and liberals has shaped the last. That, at least, is how the new nationalists see it. After successfully pressuring Carrier Corp. to keep in Indiana about half of the 2,100 jobs that the firm had planned to move to Mexico, Mr. Trump told a rally last month, “There is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. From now on, it’s going to be ‘America First.’ ”

Read it.

I always wondered why, when Harrison Ford went on to become a huge star and even Carrie Fisher managed to find work, Mark Hamil just sat on his butt and did nothing of note.

Now we see that he really was just useless all along.

Read it.

An “exceptional” British student has died after reportedly plunging to his death from a high-rise building in Tokyo on New Year’s Eve following an evening spent drinking with friends.

I can certainly believe that he was exceptionally foolish.

Justin Browning, 21, a third year student at Durham University, was spending a year studying at the Waseda University in Tokyo as part of his history degree when the tragedy occurred.

Oh, I think ‘tragedy’ a bit strong — think of it as evolution in action. Natural selection works even when you might not want it to.

Read it.

While I agree that the Federal Reserve today has a comparative advantage at supplying currency to the global economy, I disagree that this reality is bad for Americans.  In fact, it’s good for Americans – very good.  The reason is that we receive from foreigners a steady flow of valuable goods and services in exchange for inexpensive monochrome portraits of dead American statesmen (or their even-less-costly-to-produce digital equivalents).

I am reminded of a scene in the third Jason Bourne movie, where Bourne is in Moscow and needs to go to the address of the daughter of the couple he killed in his first job. He shows up at a cab rank and asks if anyone can take him to the address that he shows them. Sceptical faces all around. Finally one says, ‘Rubles?’ and Bourne answers ‘Dollars.’ Suddenly all is smiles, and they’re on their way.

American Presidents have power, even after they’re dead.