Read it.

The liberals are truly going nuts, and it’s beautiful. They recently resurrected Nancy Pelosi for another glorious term winnowing away the House Democrat caucus. Pretty soon it’s just going to be her and some guy representing Berkeley who they recruited while he was shouting “Workers of the world unite!” at bored coeds on Telegraph Avenue. You know, if you want to reach out to the kind of hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, normal Americans who voted for the black guy then allegedly refused to vote for the woman because they are racist, you totally want an ancient, rich, snooty, San Francisco leftist and Botox after-picture like the Nanster.

I forget who said that the Democrat party is a conspiracy of the Upper Class and the Lower Class against the Middle Class, but he ought to get a medal.

Read it.

Trump’s victory was largely minted in the suburbs and smaller cities of the new American Heartland, from Pittsburgh to Omaha to Dallas-Ft. Worth. The heartland regions depend on agriculture, home construction, manufacturing and energy, all of which could benefit from the policies of the new presidential administration and Republican Congress. In contrast, Hillary Clinton favored extending the Obama administration’s policies on fossil fuels and housing that may win support in the dense progressive bastions of the East and West coasts, but were viewed with alarm by many tied to heartland industries, some of which have been under pressure from a global decline in commodity prices.

Read it.

Whether or not Trump can or should attempt to reverse the decline in manufacturing jobs is not the big story here. He can’t. The real story is that he continues to tap into the anger of his voters about being left behind. That will give him much more power than our criticisms will take away.

Politicians, aided by economists, have long ignored the negative impacts of trade-induced structural change. Indeed, they have even cheered it on. After all, the process “releases resources” for use in other, more productive parts of the economy. Those workers are just “low-skilled” workers. The US needs more “high-skilled” workers anyway.

Fact: Workers hate being referred to as “low-skilled.”

How we respond to Trump is important. If we simply fall back on our standard numbers, we lose. If we confidently predict that TPP is a big win because it will add 0.5% to GDP by 2030, we lose. If we just use this as an opportunity to reiterate the importance of a college degree, we lose. We have been doing this for decades, and it helped deliver Trump to office.

…

We don’t have answers for these communities. Rural and semi-rural economic development is hard. Those regions have received only negative shocks for decades; the positive shocks have accrued to the urban regions. Of course, Trump doesn’t have any answers either. But he at least pretends to care.

Just pretending to care is important. At a minimum, the electoral map makes it important.

A Reddit that asked people who had met Trump before he ran for President what he was ‘really’ like.

A typical comment:

A post from Tyler Cowen’s econ blog Marginal Revolution, explaining why celebrities and CEOs make better politicians than politicians typically do.

Read it.

“Farmers, ranchers and growers the world over are transitioning to precision agricultural methods,” Tobe told EE Times in advance of his exclusive report on agricultural robots, “Subdividing their acreage into many unique subplots—and in some cases right down to the individual plant, tree or animal—thereby enabling increased productivity, traceability and lower overall costs. Unmanned aerial vehicles are integral to the process and are being used to map, observe, sense and spray.”

Pretty soon there won’t be any rednecks for Obama to kick around any more.

Read it.

When Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún arrived in New Spain (Mexico) in 1529, he embarked on an extraordinary project: the compilation of an encyclopedic compendium of the world of the Aztecs in the wake of the Spanish conquest a decade earlier.

Finally completed between 1576 and 1577 – essentially Sahagún’s life’s work – the result was the Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (the General History of the Things of New Spain). Sometime between 1578 and 1584 the manuscript was taken to Spain and by 1588 Sahagún’s Historia found its way to Florence, part of the Medici family’s magnificent collections. How exactly the Historia came into Medici hands remains unclear but that is where it still resides today, in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which explains how the Historia became more commonly known as the Florentine Codex.

Read it.

A robochef, like Rosie from the Jetsons, could be just the machine to salvage desire from disappointment. The robochef, Lusk informs us, isn’t just a dream of futures past, but a present-day reality. Designed by Moley Robotics, a prototype robochef — a pedestal topped by a seven-foot cylinder with programmable robotic arms — debuted at a 2015 industrial fair, where it prepared a crab bisque by duplicating the movements of a celebrity chef.

Read it.

How about that Global Warming, eh? Do you feel the rising seas nipping at your toes yet?

Read it.

I’m wondering why everybody is having the vapors about offending the Russians. Looks to me as if they’re still a Third World power. Do any of their nukes still even work?

Read it.

Much can be said about the Left’s lavishly-financed effort to portray global warming as an existential threat, so that a small minority can profit while the rest of us are impoverished. But this is perhaps the most fundamental point: a scientific argument can be made that doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase global temperatures by about one degree C. Most people agree that this would be a good thing; it would undoubtedly contribute to the greening of the Earth, since CO2 is the plant food required for photosynthesis.

So what’s the problem? The climate alarmists assert that various positive feedbacks, principally an increase in the main greenhouse gas, water vapor, will amplify that scientifically-defensible one degree increase into something like six degrees. EVERY SINGLE THING you have ever read about the supposedly baleful effects of CO2 is based on that unproven assumption. Actually, the net feedbacks–clouds are the great unknown–may be negative rather than positive.

Read it.

How about that Global Warming, eh? Feel the Rising Sea Levels(tm) nipping at your toes yet?

Read it.

It’s hard to single out the most delicious example of the post-Trump liberal freak out, but the din about California secession has to rank high on the list. Among other obvious things, California provided Hillary Clinton with her entire margin of victory in the popular vote—without California, Trump wins the popular vote in the other 49 states handily. (Without California and the five boroughs of New York City, Trump’s popular vote victory starts to approach a landslide.)

Read it.

Gotta retrain those rednecks who voted for Trump somehow.

Harvesting takes me an hour. That’s an hour in which I drive at little more than walking pace from one end of a field to the other and back again 20 or 30 times. It’s not the most fun I’ve had in a video game, but then I do need the money.

Farming Simulator 17, released on 25 October, is the latest game in a series made by Giants Software in Schlieren, Switzerland. Players start out with little land and few machines and must plant, tend and harvest crops – or raise livestock – to earn money to buy more land and more machines.

Prediction: No Democrat will ever play this game.

The Other McCain explores Leftist sociopathy.

Inside their liberal echo chamber, hermetically sealed by epistemic closure, Democrats never have to consider the possibility that they’re wrong. Their friends at the New York Times and CNN all agree with them, as does every professor at Columbia, Yale and other major universities, and every celebrity in Hollywood. Democrats never talk to anyone who disagrees with them, because people who disagree with Democrats are not merely wrong, but also ignorant and evil.

Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.

The Alt-Right Dog-Whistle Theory, as we may call it, serves a valuable psychological function for Democrats. If the people who voted for Trump were racist — “RAAAAACIST!” — then (a) Trump’s election can be dismissed as morally illegitimate, and (b) the Democrats can avoid the question of whether their policies are wrong. Inside their echo chamber, Democrats cling desperately to this kind of rationalization, because the only alternative would be an embarrassing admission of failure.

Remember: If you hear the dog-whistle, you’re the dog.

Democrats hate babies. Democrats hate Catholics. Democrats hate Jesus.

Democrats used to love Catholics, when Catholics helped elect Democrats like John F. Kennedy who, among other things, supported Vietnamese Catholics fighting against Communism. By 1972, however, Democrats hated Catholics and supported Communists in Vietnam. Of course, I’m old enough to remember when Democrats were the party of the working class, whereas now Democrats are the party of Hollywood, George Soros and every whiny liberal arts major at Oberlin College.

So it would seem.

Read it.

How about that Global Warming, eh? Feeling the rising sea levels nipping at your toes yet?

Read it.

I think I saw a movie based on this premise once … The Last Starfighter, I think it was called. I doubt that these are for that sort of job.

Stockfuse, developed by SHFuse Inc., a New York-based startup, is just one of a new breed of apps that invite people to play games that also serve as real-world recruiting tools.

Such apps aim to shed light on how a candidate might perform in a job based on how he or she performs in a game. With Stockfuse, for example, what stocks a player invests in and the returns achieved typically provide plenty of data for consideration. Games from other developers range from solving mazes to managing a simulated sushi restaurant.

The question immediately arises, are they testing the correct qualities in their prospective employees? I have long been doubtful of whether companies, even successful companies, really know what skills are responsible for their success. On the other hand, the military is increasingly using ‘wargames’ to train — and evaluate — their officers, so the attraction seems to be widespread.

I wonder who will be first to use games as an admission factor for schools? One could quite plausibly say that admission tests are actually such ‘games’ — after all, what is a game? You face a situation, you make choices, and on that basis succeed or fail. Sounds like a test to me. Myst was notorious for being an animated IQ test; I’m perfectly comfortable with the notion that anybody who could work through Myst could handle college.

Joe Bob Briggs does diet.

Listen to me, people. Gluten has nothing to do with being fat. Unless you have celiac disease, shut up!

And how many people have celiac disease?

0.7518797 of the Western population. Less than 1 percent.

Read it.

The winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for literature says he has fulfilled a pre-election promise to cut up his green card and leave the United States if Donald Trump was elected president.

“I have already done it, I have disengaged [from the United States]. I have done what I said I would do,” Wole Soyinka, an 82-year-old Nigerian poet and playwright, told Agence France-Presse at an education conference in South Africa on Thursday.

The system works.

Read it.

The bourgeois Left not only has different cultural tastes than the working classes; it disapproves of blue-collar tastes as well: “It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell.”

We see such disdain for blue-collar taste in our own modern American culture. Indeed, to many on the left, Donald Trump symbolizes bad taste. Snobbishness about food, country music, clothing, NASCAR, or “guns and religion” is as casual as it is accepted in the better ZIP codes of New York and Los Angeles. Orwell, to say the least, had the Left’s number, in ways we still recognize today: “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.”

The Crust remains the Crust even when it is championing the Underclass.

Read it.

And that’s a good thing.

Read it.

“Chairman Price, a renowned physician, has earned a reputation for being a tireless problem solver and the go-to expert on health care policy, making him the ideal choice to serve in this capacity,” Trump said in a statement. “He is exceptionally qualified to shepherd our commitment to repeal and replace Obamacare and bring affordable and accessible health care to every American.”

Well, he’s a doctor, so that’s good. And he apparently hates Obamacare, so that’s even better.

Read it.

Ditching restrictive dieting and calorie-counting is the key to maintaining a healthy weight according to a leading scientist determined to change how we eat.

Instead, the secret to health is nurturing the microbes in our guts, according to Professor Tim Spector, a geneticist at King’s College London.

I’m on it.

Read it.

The future of American cities can be summed up in five letters: Texas. The metropolitan areas of the Lone Star state are developing rapidly. These cities are offering residents a broad array of choices — from high density communities to those where the population is spread out — and a wealth of opportunities.

As compared to places like Michigan, where cities are drying up and blowing away under the combined efforts of Democrat kleptocrats and NAM welfare culture. The only thing growing in Michigan is the number of foreign Muslims making the Detroit suburbs a Little Mesopotamia.

Read it.

Heavy hitters, every one.

Read it.

Can you remember the last time you did calculus? Unless you are a researcher or engineer, chances are good it was in a high-school or college class you’d rather forget. For most Americans, solving a calculus problem is not a skill they need to perform well at work.

This is not to say that America’s workforce doesn’t need advanced mathematics—quite the opposite. An extensive 2011 McKinsey Global Institute study found that by 2018 the U.S will face a 1.5 million worker shortfall in analysts and managers who have the mathematical training necessary to deal with analysis of “large data sets,” the bread and butter of the big-data revolution.

The question is not whether advanced mathematics is needed but rather what kind of advanced mathematics. Calculus is the handmaiden of physics; it was invented by Newton to explain planetary and projectile motion. While its place at the core of math education may have made sense for Cold War adversaries engaged in a missile and space race, Minute-Man and Apollo no longer occupy the same prominent role in national security and continued prosperity that they once did.

Read it.

How do you measure happiness? The Antiplanner isn’t sure, but recent research finds that people living in low-density suburbs are happier than people living in cities. People living in rural areas are happiest of all. The effect isn’t as pronounced for especially intelligent people, the researchers concluded, but it was still there.

Some of it might be that cities are full of Democrats and suburbs of Republicans. Most Democrats don’t have time to be happy, since their lives are full of the desperate search for oppression.

Read it.

There’s a First World Problem for you.

Read it.

One of the more credible sounding proponents of the habit is Scott Napper, a professor of biochemistry who made waves around the world’s media outlets in 2013 when he half-heartedly proposed to a group of his students that eating one’s boogers allows our bodies to safely develop anti-bodies to the weakened pathogens present in our snot and noses. He also suggested that the reason boogers have a sugary taste is to entice children to eat them, thus helping bolster their immune systems… It’s evolution.  You can’t fight it.

To boldly go where no blog has gone before.

(With thanks to Debby Witt, a kindred soul. Blame her instead.)

Lileks buys glasses online.

It’s easy to buy eyeglasses online. No, you don’t have to call up a website and say “better” and “worse” when they show you blurry pictures. Nonetheless, turning my back on the glasses store felt like a divorce. I’m leaving you. I can’t take it anymore. You want something from me I just can’t give you, and that’s $300 for a few ounces of wire.

Preach it, brother.

The Other McCain lays out some inconvenient truth.

Donald Trump got 61% of the vote in this county, winning it by a margin of 40,000 votes. Considering that Trump’s statewide margin in Florida was only 120,000 votes, that means he got a third of his win right here.

We can explain this in four words: Rich, old, white people.

…

While progressives are trying to frighten people with the “Alt-Right” bogeyman, there are no neo-Nazis marching down the palm-tree-lined streets here. Trump won Florida by getting the votes of the same kind of people who always Republican — not angry skinheads, just regular middle-class people and, of course, old white folks with money.

…

Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have engaged in a ludicrous fear-mongering crusade intended to convince people that Trump’s election is a foreboding omen of incipient fascism, where roaming squads of Republican storm troopers will soon be rounding up Jews and homosexuals. Yet there is no rational basis for such political paranoia. The voters who elected Trump are not neo-Nazis. Most of them are the same people who would have voted Republican no matter who had won the GOP nomination, and they expect President Trump to implement a conservative policy agenda which, although it might not please Gender Studies majors or #BlackLivesMatter activists, is unlikely to justify the “Dark Nightmare of Neo-Fascism” persecution fantasies of the radical Left.

Somebody needs to tell these young kids the truth, i.e., your Republican grandma is not a Nazi, and Trump is not Hitler. Also, while we’re speaking truth, capitalism works and socialism fails, and maybe if you kids would stop moping and whining about how “oppressed” you are, you could get a real job, save your money, and 40 or 50 years from now, you’ll be living in sunny Florida, rich enough to vote  Republican.

Gavin McInnes looks at the news.

Rapper Kanye West was just carted away to a mental institution for #TrumpingWhileBlack and he will likely spend Thanksgiving in his hospital room. West’s team has canceled his tour and concluded he’s lost his mind because he’s a black man who sees the merits of a Trump presidency.

News from the Whitest City in America.

Portland promised to find affordable homes for displaced blacks, but for some reason those blacks aren’t too thrilled with the 387-square-foot condos the city has offered them. The city is making the condos available to families earning less than $47,000 a year, with priority given to people displaced by gentrification (which is often subsidized by the city’s urban-renewal agency).

Such people will be welcome to buy these condos for a mere $164,000, or nearly $425 a square foot. Such a deal, especially considering many of the displaced people were living in single-family homes several times the size of the condos, and that such homes in places without urban-growth boundaries would cost half of what the city wants for its “affordable” condos.

For some reason, the displaced people aren’t showing much interest in the tiny condos. Donald Trump won the votes of working-class whites who felt oppressed by the elites, but this shows elites can oppress urban blacks just as much as rural whites.

Read it. Then read it again.

Active killer events most often occur at soft targets. A soft target is a location where the victim pool isn’t likely to have the capacity or willingness to fight back. If your policy is to encourage violent resistance to evil, then evil will, in most cases, seek an easier target. That means the politicos have to be willing to give up control and admit they cannot protect everyone all the time and relinquish responsibility for personal safety to the individual.

Any loose object is a projectile. He may still be shooting while he’s dodging bric-a-brac but he damned sure isn’t going to be hitting what he’s shooting at.

Read it.

Diversity for thee but not for me.

Rich Lowry lays out some inconvenient truth.

President Obama won’t explicitly say Donald Trump is on the wrong side of history, but surely it’s what he believes.

I rather suspect he’s been explicit about it, it just hasn’t been reported by the DemLegHump Media.

The president basically thinks anyone who gets in his way is transgressing the larger forces of history with a capital H. During the 2008 campaign, he declared Sen. John McCain “on the wrong side of history right now” (the “right now” was a generous touch — allowing for the possibility McCain might get right with History at some future, undetermined date).

Which McCain has shown a distressing tendency to do.

Obama is given to quoting Martin Luther King for the proposition that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Whoever is deemed to be on “the wrong side of history” by progressives is always loosely associated with the opprobrium directed toward the Southern Fire-Eaters and the defenders of Jim Crow.

That’s because they think that everyone who doesn’t agree 100% with them must therefore disagree 100% with them and is therefore ipso facto a racist/sexist/bigot/homophobe/younameit.

For the left, History isn’t a vast, unpredictable, untameable force, but just like someone who might be standing in line next to you at Whole Foods. History is a board member of Planned Parenthood. It reads the Huffington Post and Vox, and follows Lena Dunham on Twitter.

It really cares whether transgender people are allowed to use the appropriate bathroom. History was probably hanging out at the Javits Center on election night and collapsed into a puddle of tears right around the time Wisconsin was called.

The political dangers of this point of view should be obvious.

Steve Sailer reminds us of some inconvenient truth from 1802.

The next exceptionable feature in the Message [from President Jefferson], is the proposal to abolish all restriction on naturalization, arising from a previous residence. In this the President is not more at variance with the concurrent maxims of all commentators on popular governments, than he is with himself.

Of course, it’s obvious to those who were paying attention that the play Hamilton is a Leftist fantasy pushing the Crustian narrative,  but the Left knows nothing of history, and cares even less.

Read it.

It took an election that gave the Republican Party control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, but at long last the American left is starting to discover the virtues of devolving authority to state and local governments.

The technical term for this is subsidiarity and we would all be better off if our Ruling Class adopted it.