The OFloinn takes a look.

On the visceral level, the casual TV viewer on the evening news — and this is most viewers — is left with only the vague impression of Democratic leadership gathered around a poorly-designed sign reading “Make America Sick Again.” This is a heck of a motto with which to associate one’s party. It is only in the fine print that one sees that they blame the Republicans for doing this; but who reads the fine print in a 15-second sound bite on the evening news? As an ad slogan even a neophyte on Madison Ave. could come up with something ten times better.

On the rational level, the ad’s failure is worse. People do not get sick because they lack health insurance. They get sick because they contract diseases or suffer injuries. The lack of insurance affects the ability to pay for the care, but that is a different problem.  In fact, a major reason why many people had foregone insurance in the past was that, being young and healthy, they saw no need for the expense. That did not account for all of the uninsured, but it was a big chunk of them. Nor is it true that Americans were especially sick before the Obama administration determined to subsidize the insurance industry.

I can’t wait to hear Scott Adams’ take on this.

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Perhaps that’s why they don’t have an immigration problem.

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I do.

I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

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The assumption seems to be that the root of all medical innovation is university research, primarily funded by federal grants. This is mistaken. The private economy, not the government, actually discovers and develops most of the insights and products that advance health. The history of medical progress supports this conclusion.

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Well, if he’s short of eating money, he can always step outside his office to one of the free-food courts at Apple HQ.

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Not discussed: What possible reason you might have for caring about that.

James Miller is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Sara Seager is a brilliant astrophysicist at M.I.T. who is dedicated to discovering more earthlike planets in the universe. Her life’s work has been committed to finding habitable planets light-years away from our own lowly blue home in the Milky Way.

…

The unasked but pertinent question here is: More visible to whom? Seager seems to be operating under the assumption that any contact with aliens is a good thing. Her optimism is untempered with caution. Has she not seen Independence Day, Mars Attacks!, or The Day the Earth Stood Still? If we can’t count on foreigners on our own terrestrial rock to be peaceful, what chance is there that nonhumans will be less hostile?

Why take a chance? That’s all we’re sayin’.

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That’s why Greeks and Italians rule the world! Oh, wait….

That’s why there are so many Greek and Italian Nobel Prize winners! Oh, wait….

That’s why the Greek and Italian economies are on top! Oh, wait….

(What would we do without ‘scientists’?)

And remember that the toilet roll dispenses OVER, not UNDER.

Harvard’s George J. Borjas brings the settled science.

For decades Borjas has been shocking the system in his own way, arguing—carefully, with the support of intricate statistical analysis—that immigration comes with tradeoffs, particularly reduced wages for the native workers who compete with immigrants.

To most academics, that’s heresy. To many others it might sound like common sense—and at last we can experience Borjas’s ideas in a widely accessible form. After focusing for years on academic research, Borjas is bringing his findings directly to the public through a new book called We Wanted Workers, a rejuvenated blog (gborjas.org), and the occasional op-ed in mainstream publications such as Politico.

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Well, that would pretty much put the nail in the coffin for New York City.

Alberto Mingardi riffs on a Kevin Williamson article.

In the 19th century, people of a liberal bent tended to support a wider franchise because they maintained that if everybody had a say in decision-making, the quality of decisions would go up. It was easy for kings and aristocrats to send a country to war: they had limited skin in the game, as they tended to observe the battlefield from distance. Let those who are going to die for the king’s honour and pride decide; they might prove more aware of the costs of their rulers’ decisions.

But a big part of the argument for democracy was in fact an argument for a better informed political discussion. Those who believed in expanding the franchise also believed in popular education and a wider diffusion of political gazette. Democracy and mass literacy should lead us towards saner policies: to become better able to engage the government as intellectually prepared citizens.

Here we are. Does better education really make politics saner?

I would argue: Yes, if it really is education. But what we have today isn’t education, but indoctrination, less obtrusive and therefore more insidious than what occurred in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and other totalitarian states.

Economist Alex Tabarrok takes a look.

Chuck Norris Versus Communism is a great documentary about art, the power of heroes and the end of communism in Romania. After the communist regime was established in 1948, travel was restricted, the media were censored and the secret police watched everyone. Romania was cut off from the rest of the world. In the mid-1980s, however, smuggled VHS tapes of American movies began to circulate. Underground groups would gather together to watch samizdat movies like Rocky and Lone Wolf McQuade.

…

The action was exciting but perhaps even more revealing were the ordinary scenes of supermarkets stocked with food, at a time when Romania was racked with severe rationing. City lights, beautiful cars, and the ordinary freedoms of worship and belief casually portrayed all impressed on the Romanian viewers the starkness of their own situation.

I am reminded of the scene from Moscow on the Hudson where a Russian defector, played by Robin Williams, goes into a grocery store and asks where is the line for bread? The clerk says, ‘There is no line for bread. Bread is on aisle 4.’ Williams hyperventilates and passes out at the sight of forty feet of shelves with nothing but bread on them — and no line.

Makes you wonder how all the people who prefer socialism to a free market can be so stupid.

Sarah Hoyt vents.

For four generations now, most people were taught Marxist/progressive shibboleths as though they were the revealed truth of the universe. Even teachers who don’t realize that’s what they’re teaching tend to drip through concepts like class struggle and the idea history comes with an arrow pointing at a progressive future, and even the idea of the Government as a benevolent entity that solves all things and fixes all things, from society to science.  Of course most of all the educational-industrial complex sells the idea that it’s wonderful, indispensable, and you should definitely give it way more of your money.

The problem is that when people go out into the world, they keep being forced into situations where this isn’t true, and where their nose is rubbed into the fact that what they were taught is nonsense.  Some (most perhaps) avoid thinking about it or acculturating by becoming bitter and cynical and deciding the world is irredeemable because it doesn’t match their head-picture.  And some fight back with memes.

Memes are perfect for this, because, like proverbs, they have the feeling of revealed truth and therefore stop the discomfort of having to face, you know, real reality which doesn’t match received culture.

The OFloinn shows you the way.

My favorite:

The Talking Heads of the MSM will continue to explain to the public the inexplicable loss of the election by the Space Princess. They will continue to natter on about Russian interference (without specifying what that interference actually consisted of) and about Angry Misogynistic White Men (without discovering any large upwelling either of males or whites among the tallied votes). No one will mention triple digit increases in the price of health insurance under the “Affordable” Care Act or the proposal of a No-Fly Zone over Syria, where the Russians constituted the primary fliers — and hence of the palpable risk of a shooting war with Russia. A few folks in Otto’s Bar and Grille, where the Talking Heads are explaining things, will put down their beers and say, “Ain’t you the folks who were so wrong about who was going to win? So why should we listen to you now?” The Talking Heads have no good answer, and so they talk louder. Everyone stops listening to them.

Runner-up:

The New Witch Hunts will continue as people purge themselves on anti-social media by confessing the sins of other people, often creating these sins de novo from rumors and snippets of quotes. A few will long for the days when confession was under the seal of secrecy. The New Donatists will declare more sins to be lifelong unforgivables and will denounce those who forgive as being haters and ‘phobes.

Steve Sailer looks behind the curtain.

A paradox of the current nationalist rebellion is how worldwide it is. Three years ago, I pointed out in Takimag in a column entitled “Nationalism Is a Blast”:

In 2014, the global winds are blowing in favor of conservative nationalism.

One reason it’s happening over much of the planet is because the various establishment elites have become so homogenous [sic] in their ideology, unconsciously egging each other on into more extremism. For example, after the normally cautious Angela Merkel made her historic refugee blunder in 2015, Hillary Clinton repeatedly endorsed Merkel’s foolhardiness, even as the German leader herself came to regret her imprudence.

Joe Bob Briggs checks the facts.

Using fact-checking as a weapon is like using your own Breathalyzer results to say somebody else is drunk.

Read it. And watch the video.

John Christy is the Alabama State Climatologist and a climate scientist with the University of Alabama. In 1991 he received the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement for his contribution to global temperature monitoring. In 1996 he received a special award from the American Meteorology Society.

You want climate science? We got your climate science, right here.

An oldie but a goodie by Eric S Raymond.

One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this recently that I’ve decided that it needs a name. I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping”, and the above the Model A kafkatrap. In this essay, I will show that the kafkatrap is a form of argument that is so fallacious and manipulative that those subjected to it are entitled to reject it based entirely on the form of the argument, without reference to whatever particular sin or thoughtcrime is being alleged. I will also attempt to show that kafkatrapping is so self-destructive to the causes that employ it that change activists should root it out of their own speech and thoughts.

The revolutionary heart of Communism is not the theatrical appeal: “Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to gain.” It is a simple statement of Karl Marx, further simplified for handy use: “Philosophers have explained the world; it is necessary to change the world.” Communists are bound together by no secret oath. The tie that binds them across the frontiers of nations, across barriers of language and differences of class and education, in defiance of religion, morality, truth, law, honor, the weakness of the body and the irresolutions of the mind, even unto death, is a simple conviction: It is necessary to change the world. Their power, whose nature baffles the rest of the world, because in a large measure the rest of the world has lost that power, is the power to hold convictions and to act on them. It is the same power that moves mountains; it is also an unfailing power to move men. Communists are that part of mankind which has recovered the power to live or die–to bear witness–for its faith. And it is a simple, rational faith that inspires men to live or die for it.

It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.” It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and Man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.

— Whittaker Chambers, Witness

Read it.

Assuming, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Personally, I prefer a Trane.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains it all to you.

The first is the inequality people tolerate, such as one’s understanding compared to that of people deemed heroes, say Einstein, Michelangelo, or the recluse mathematician Grisha Perelman, in comparison to whom one has no difficulty acknowledging a large surplus. This applies to entrepreneurs, artists, soldiers, heroes, the singer Bob Dylan, Socrates, the current local celebrity chef, some Roman Emperor of good repute, say Marcus Aurelius; in short those for whom one can naturally be a “fan”. You may like to imitate them, you may aspire to be like them; but you don’t resent them.

The second is the inequality people find intolerable because the subject appears to be just a person like you, except that he has been playing the system, and getting himself into rent seeking, acquiring privileges that are not warranted –and although he has something you would not mind having (which may include his Russian girlfriend), he is exactly the type of whom you cannot possibly become a fan. The latter category includes bankers, bureaucrats who get rich, former senators shilling for the evil firm Monsanto, clean-shaven chief executives who wear ties, and talking heads on television making outsized bonuses. You don’t just envy them; you take umbrage at their fame, and the sight of their expensive or even semi-expensive car trigger some feeling of bitterness. They make you feel smaller.

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Not that it will end their whining.

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Disclaimer: This reviewer has never played the video game Assassin’s Creed and has minimal knowledge of the game’s major characters or storylines.

Thus putting the reviewer on the same level as the game’s designers, who have an equivalent ignorance of the Middle Ages.

Gavin McInnes runs down the list.

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This was the month everyone told us they were going to move to Canada if Trump won. None of them did.

Joe Bob Briggs explains it all to you.

Probably the worst thing you can say to Donald Trump is “Mr. President, you have to do it that way because we’ve done it that way for the past fifty years.”

That’s like telling an alcoholic, “Don’t touch this MacAllan single malt I’m leaving on your nightstand over the weekend.”

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In poetic terms, the typewriter means thudding while word processing means deftness. Word processing on one’s own software or computer or special device—on WordPerfect (1980), the Osborne 1 or IBM PC (1981), the Kaypro II (1982), Microsoft Word (1983)—was for many writers special because it is done with light. Andrei Codrescu wrote that the Kaypro “let you write with light on glass, not ink on paper, which was mind-blowing. It felt both godlike and ephemeral.” The word processor is a powerful and empowering tool, far less about dominating the prone typewriter than about feeling humbled in the presence of infinite possibility.

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Before cereal, in the mid 1800s, the American breakfast was not all that different from other meals. Middle- and upper-class Americans ate eggs, pastries, and pancakes, but also oysters, boiled chickens, and beef steaks. 

The rise of cereal established breakfast as a meal with distinct foods and created the model of processed, ready-to-eat breakfast that still largely reigns. And it all depends on advertising and convincing you that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. 

Sometimes the old ways are best.

The first is that any company that convinces you to eat their cereal, pop tarts, or bagels absolutely owns your breakfast, because most people eat the same breakfast every day. Studies have found that consumers have strong brand loyalty to breakfast foods like cereal. Our breakfast choices are likely more habitual because of the strength of morning routines. Ads by the chicken lobby may convince people to eat a bit more chicken. But an avalanche of Tony the Tiger ads can get tens of thousands of children to eat Frosted Flakes every morning for years. 

Another is that while some Americans cook breakfast, people’s desire for a fast, convenient meal means that many breakfast foods are packaged products that rely on advertising. You can glean this from the structure of the cereal industry: cereal is extremely easy to make—a fact that angered Dr. Kellogg, who patented his creation but failed to prevent others from copying it—yet just a few companies dominate the market. 

Rather disturbing.

Try the Breakfast on a Bun by Whataburger. Basically a breakfast cheeseburger.

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Imagine a world in which the font you use is chosen for you, based entirely on your demographic affiliations. All doctors write in Garamond, while designers are mandated Futura Bold. Middle-aged men get Arial; women, Helvetica. Goofy aunts must use Comic Sans.

Seem strange? A few centuries ago, that was just how things worked. In colonial America, “the very style in which one formed letters was determined by one’s place in society,” writes historian Tamara Thornton in Handwriting in America: A Cultural History. Thanks to the rigorous teachings of professionals called “penmen,” merchants wrote strong, loopy logbooks, women’s words were intricate and shaded, and upper-class men did whatever they felt like. So different were the results, says Thornton, that “a fully literate stranger could evaluate the social significance of a letter… simply by noting what hand it had been written in.”

I’m a Palatino man, myself, with occasional forays into Zapf Chancery.

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Unmentioned, of course, is their utility as an Enhanced Interrogation Device. Trust me, it works.

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In 1980, according to the census taken that year, there were 1,500 bookbinders in New York. A great number of them plied the trade in downtown Manhattan, on the Lower East Side, among the garment workers, delicatessens and dive bars. Of that proud and once ample contingency—the binders of the Lower East Side—now there is only Henry. Henry is not his given legal name. It’s the name of the street where he works and has worked for most of his adult life. At some point, the shop became known as Henry Bookbinding, and he as Henry. It’s that kind of pragmatic thinking and come-what-may attitude, perhaps, that keeps business humming.

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But, nevertheless, White People Are To Blame.

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How did that happen? Doesn’t he know that Tiger Woods is Not A White Person?

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

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Predictions that bears would die due to a lack of sea ice have continuously not come to pass. A new study by Canadian scientists found “no evidence” polar bears are currently threatened by global warming.

“We see reason for concern, but find no reliable evidence to support the contention that polar bears are currently experiencing a climate crisis,” Canadian scientists wrote in their study, published in Ecology and Evolution.

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

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Sometimes you eat the snowman, and sometimes….

Will somebody just give Hillary Clinton a Participation Trophy or something so that she will just shut up and go away?

— Rush Limbaugh

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Notorious Sexist Trump names a woman adviser? How the hell did that happen?

Doesn’t she know that he’s the New whatever-the-sexist-equivalent-of-Hitler-is?

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I think this situation explains socialism.