Read it.

Whether they were captives in ancient Crete, orphans in the Florentine Ospedale degli Innocenti, widows in South India or country wives in Georgian England, women through the centuries spent their lives spinning, especially after water wheels freed up time previously devoted to grinding grain. Turning fibre into thread was a time-consuming, highly skilled craft, requiring dexterity and care. Even after the spread of the spinning wheel in the Middle Ages, the finest, most consistent yarn, as well as strong warp threads in general, still came from the most ancient of techniques: drop spinning, using a hooked or notched stick with a weight as a flywheel.

…

More than we realise, we residents of the 21st century simply assume that our clothing will resist wrinkles and stains, that it will stretch as we move, that it will hold its colour and its shape, and feel comfortable against our skin. The incremental innovations that make hoodies breathable or extend the life of upholstery cushions are invisible. They don’t grab public attention the way nylon stockings did. A state-of-the-art raincoat, dress shirt or pair of tights would amaze someone transported from 1939, but nowadays we just expect it to work.

Read it.

The major complaint, of course, is that anybody, ostensibly, can go into a gun show and buy a gun without undergoing a background check.

That isn’t actually the case, though in fairness it could be true, in a certain context and depending on what state the gun show is taking place and if the right conditions are met. That sounds a little convoluted – and it can certainly get that way. More on that in a minute.

David Cole reviews the ethnography of California.

Regarding field labor, you can’t compare the needs of a place like Canada with California regarding agribusiness. My state could buy out that entire country with our agri-dollars. And I’ll tell you, whites won’t work those fields. My whole life I’ve been surrounded by “struggling” actors and actresses. They’re the only women I date, and they’ve always made up the majority of my white friends. Meaning, I’ve known poor whites here in Cali. Very poor whites. Because most actors out here make zero bucks at acting. So believe me when I say this: When young white Angelenos go broke, they DON’T sign up to pick lettuce. That’s not even on their radar. They either find a rich dude to support them (if they’re female or gay), they go back to living with mommy and daddy, or they go on SSI.

Southern California attracts a very specific type of white. We get the artistic “dreamers” from other states. We don’t get the Tom Joads. Here in L.A., pretty young white people with endearingly unrealistic dreams are an industry. It’s a huge business, not so much for them, but for those who make money off them. The steady influx of pretty white wannabe stars is a massive income-generator for the “high-IQ whites” and “high-IQ Jews” (redundant?) who live and work in “the biz.” Our entertainment industry is a billion-dollar concern, and as long as that’s so, the largest plurality of poor whites who move here will not be the type who do field labor.

Read it.

On a summer night, nearly three thousand years ago, three hundred men of Thebes, wet and mud soaked, snuck into the town of Plataea with murder on their minds. Their attempt to launch revolution in Plataea was futile: most would die before the night was over. If their aim was political change, they failed, and failed utterly. But if their aim was undying fame, they succeeded. Perhaps they did not know that their deeds would echo through time, but they have. These were the men who began the Peloponnesian War. What they did is still read and written about thousands of years later.

You like democracy? Democracy is Twitter. Everybody has a voice, and everybody has the same access.

You want a country run by Twitter? Good luck with that.

Liberty – Equality – Fraternity: Pick any two.

Read it.

Yeah….

Read it.

I wonder why we never hear of an athletic team called the Fighting Capybaras.

Perhaps this is why.

Read it.

In “Conspiracy as Governance,” which Assange posted to his blog in December 2006, the leader of then-new WikiLeaks describes what he considered to be the most effective way to attack a conspiracy—including, as he puts it, that particular form of conspiracy known as a political party.

Read it.

A Florida man who drove his daughter to a bank robbery has told authorities he thought he was giving her a lift to a job interview.

The unnamed man told FBI investigators he had assumed his daughter, Chelsea Wilson, had got the job at the bank in Fort Lauderdale and been given a cash advance when she returned to his SUV with a large amount of money.

Who says millenials lack ambition?

Read it.

A simple, logical test to be applied to any declared thing-to-be-done, involving the behavior of the advocates for its implementation: If they get everything they want, will it make them happy?

…

Rather like a hostage situation, in one of those weird old movies where the bad guys have the action hero racing from one pay phone to the next with just seconds to spare. We want each step to be the final one, but we’re so busy executing it that we’re distracted from pondering whether or not there will be more to come. And there always is.

Read it.

The food scene today offers a seemingly never-ending supply of scarce experiences, ingredients, and dishes. Cronuts you have to wait in line for a few hours to get your hands on. Pop-up restaurants that serve only on a few nights a week for a few weeks, then disappear forever. Restaurants that you have to sacrifice a goat to just to get a reservation, and then they’ll actually take that goat you killed and prepare your entire dinner from it, nose to tail. A white truffle add-on that tacks $80 on to a single piece of cured hamachi, and oh, the truffle is only available for four weeks a year and came over on a gondola from Alba, Italy, and the hamachi is one of the last of three members of its species so you know, you should probably try it before…oops, sorry, the chef says someone just ordered the last of it. Yep, it’s that couple at the corner table, and that’s the last plate that she’s Instagramming right now.

Read it.

Walter Williams is a national treasure.

African-American students are getting a raw deal because — in the name of diversity — the system is superficially propping up those students who are doing poorly, according to economist and conservative columnist Walter E. Williams.

“I am glad that I got all of my education — I received all of my education before it become fashionable for white people to like black people,” Williams said in an interview Wednesday on Tallahassee’s Morning Show with Preston Scott. He was recalling a comment about his education that he offered in the documentary “Suffer No Fools.”

Williams, who is 80 years old, explained, “when I got an ‘A’ it was an honest to God ‘A’ and when I got a ‘C’ it was an honest to God ‘C.’ They didn’t give a damn about my self-esteem.”

Read it.

There are a few people in France who would sooner kill these animals than talk to them, however. Persecuted to extinction in the Thirties, the wolf quietly slipped past guards at the border with neighbouring Italy in 1994 and proceeded to storm back into French headlines. Their growing numbers – now an estimated 300, triple the population in 2005 – has angered local farmers to such extremes that, last year, a group of sheep farmers kidnapped the president of a national park to protest loss of precious livestock at the wolves’ jaws. Not long after, the French government deployed a crack team of wolf hunters to the Alps to shoot wolves seen as a threat.

Le levrier est plus rapide que le kangaroo.

Update: French want wolves to be ‘educated’ not to kill sheep

Thanks to Debby Witt, a kindred soul.

Read it.

One, the “Ephemeral Zone” concentrated on the coasts, runs largely on digits and images, the movement of software, media and financial transactions. It produces increasingly little in the way of food, fiber, energy and fewer and fewer manufactured goods. The Ephemeral sectors dominate ultra-blue states such as New York, California, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Connecticut.

The other America constitutes, as economic historian Michael Lind notes in a forthcoming paper for the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, the “New Heartland.” Extending from the Appalachians to the Rockies, this heartland economy relies on tangible goods production. It now encompasses both the traditional Midwest manufacturing regions, and the new industrial areas of Texas, the Southeast and the Intermountain West.

Contrary to the notions of the Ephemerals, the New Heartland is not populated by Neanderthals. This region employs much of the nation’s engineering talent, but does so in conjunction with the creation of real goods rather than clicks. Its industries have achieved  generally more rapid productivity gains than their rivals in the services sector. To some extent,  energy  and food producers may have outdone themselves and, since they operate in a globally competitive market, their prices and profits are suffering.

“There are so many pussies around your Presidential campaign on both sides, that I prefer not to comment about this.” — Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister

Steve Sailer looks at politics.

Late last week, the respectable media was shocked, shocked to discover that Donald Trump is a horndog of almost the same caliber as his golf buddy Bill Clinton.

One advantage of being old is that current events become more amusing the more of the past you’ve endured. For example, the sanctimony of Hillary’s run for the White House seems less humorless if you can remember the last Clinton presidency.

Read it.

Not, I wager, a headline you ever expected to see.

Our mental model of the world shapes our behavior at fundamental levels in ways we often can’t even recognize. I was struck by this when reading two books almost back to back, Scott Adams’ How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big and Peter Thiel’s Zero to One.

Both authors lay out a schema for modeling the future and how to behave relative to it, but come to very different conclusions.

My world, and welcome to it.

Freeberg nails it again.

I’ve noticed the #NeverTrump crowd has gotten desperate since Trump’s YUGE embarrassment this weekend, the “hot mic moment” from 2005 where he talked about grabbing pussies. You can see it in their blog postings, the comments they leave upon the blogs, their social media postings, their “tweets.” This is their moment to be right. Trump has to lose this thing, or they’re going to look like asses and they know it. It’s like the guy who decides not to get involved in a mugging, or to help a woman and her infants stranded on the side of the road with a flat tire. Or, not to fight a house fire. If it all turns out to be a lost cause, looks almost reasonable, but if someone happens along to stop the mugging, save the mom with the flat tire, extinguish the fire…there’s no way to look good if you’re the guy who took a pass. Can’t look cool doin’ that.

Retirement is like being Bilbo Baggins with air conditioning and Internet access and without crusty old fart wizards dragging you off into adventures.

Wouldn’t mind an elf or two, though.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering.

This is what happens when you read California tech blogs.

I’d suggest staying away from California.

Wisdom from the man with the tall forehead.

Google (company motto: “We know what you’re doing, pal”) has announced a new personal assistant. It’s called “Assistant.” It sits on your countertop, answers questions, takes commands. If you have a Google dongle on your TV (and you should, because it’s fun to say “I have a Google dongle, ” just to see who blushes), you can say, “Play Season 43 of ‘Murder, She Wrote’ on Netflix,” and voilà.

‘You have to be a special kind of stupid to write for the Huffington Post.’

— Rush Limbaugh

Steve Sailer looks at trends.

Almost by definition, the powerful in the future will still continue to exercise dominion over the minds of men, but their methods of manipulation will change.

The technology of power is moving from the past’s emphasis on privacy and concealment toward more contemporary techniques of diversion, bias, misconception, and willful stupidity. The crude methods that George Orwell summed up in his image of the incinerator-chute “memory hole” are growing into more sophisticated devices for providing the public with misleading frameworks for mentally organizing (or rationalizations for simply ignoring) the overload of available facts, thus making it harder to remember or understand politically inconvenient knowledge.

…

The memory hole, however, isn’t the only technique for regulating ideas. Among professional journalists, a trend is to take refuge in pedantic obscurantism about the meaning of terms. For example, Donald Trump’s reference to Alicia’s notorious tape of sex with a fellow reality-show participant as a “sex tape” has been widely denounced as totally lacking in verification, even though you can watch it yourself in ten seconds.

Read it.

Holes? Say rather Caverns.

Read it.

A left wing government might not want to pass policies to educate the masses or open markets to small business firms because such policies are likely to be successful and in the process create a class of skilled workers and petty bourgeoisie who will vote against the left-wing party and its policies of income redistribution. By keeping its constituents poor, the left-wing party keeps its constituents beholden because only the left-wing party will support income redistribution.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you less inclined to believe the crap that politicians dish out.

Read it. And by all means listen to the podcast.

Maj. Gen. Bob Scales (USA ret.), author of Scales on War: The Future of America’s Military at Risk, on preparing U.S. ground forces for the coming wars, rather than past conflicts, and repairing a broken Army.

Megan McArdle lays out the options in a field that hasn’t received the attention it deserves.

It’s a short one.

Wherever I go around this country, there’s a question that everybody asks: Why should I vote for you rather than Hillary Clinton?

Well, I can give you one reason. Over the last thirty years I’ve built a lot of businesses and grown a lot of businesses, and had thousands of people working for me. Not one of those people has ever died because of something I did. Hillary Clinton can’t say that. Not one of those people has ever had his dead naked body paraded around the back alleys of a Third World shithole while the enemies of America celebrated.

Hillary Clinton can’t say that.

Hey, I’ll give you another reason. Over the last thirty years I’ve built a lot of businesses and grown a lot of businesses and created thousands of jobs. Hillary Clinton can’t say that. Since she graduated from Yale Law School, Hillary Clinton has never created one job. Not one.

Oh, she’s spent a lot of money — taxpayer money, your money — she’s great a spending other people’s money. But not creating jobs. Not one.

She’s great at making money for herself and her family and friends. She’s great at making twenty million dollars in two years giving speeches to Wall Street fat cats — you know, the guys she’s always complaining about, the guys she claims aren’t paying enough taxes; and yet they’ve given her twenty million dollars in the last two years for speeches. Maybe they know something you don’t.

But how good is she at making money for you? Are you any better off for having Hillary Clinton in politics for the last thirty years? Beating down bimbo eruptions in the White House? Talking a good fight in the Senate? Selling access to foreigners as Secretary of State? Taking government paychecks — BIG government paychecks — for … what? For what?

Think about what sort of President you want — one who creates jobs, or one who destroys them? One who stands behind his people, or one who doesn’t? One who wants you to make money, or one who wants to make money for herself?

Then vote. I’ll be happy to live with your choice.

Read it.

Half of a herd of cows ate themselves to death after escaping from their pen in Western France.

Not quite sure how a cow eats itself to death.

However, the food they ate was a type of high energy supplement which can be harmful if consumed in large quantities, and the cows proceeded to eat their way through an entire winter’s worth of the food in one sitting.

Ah, that explains it.

Mr Vaillant then had to helplessly watch as his herd began to die, despite enlisting help from a vet. In total, 22 cows died from over-eating. The remaining 24 animals can no longer produce milk.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Joe Bob Briggs does the debate.

Post-bout analysis was all over the lot, with Hillary loyalists claiming utter and complete demolishment of their opponent because she was “more prepared.”

I’ve got news for these Rhodes Scholars. People don’t care about who’s prepared. They care about who’s lying and, in this case, who’s lying more than the other liar. Everything else is just code words. Trump probably can’t lower taxes from 35 to 15 percent. Hillary can’t achieve her goals by taxing only the rich. Neither of them said anything particularly brilliant about police shootings. The jousting on free trade agreements and NATO was all familiar stuff that gets bandied about every day—nobody knows which course produces more prosperity.

As Scott Adams has been pointing out since the election was a cloud on the horizon no bigger than a man’s hand.

But since this was the first and only time Trump has ever been involved in a one-on-one debate, much less a one-on-one debate that goes on for more than 90 minutes, and since he was competing against a veteran fighter who has done it 40 times, I think Trump has to be given the victory according to the Rocky principle: Sylvester Stallone didn’t win the fight, but he was still on his feet at the final bell.

And that’s all he needed to do.

Read it.

As the distance between the present moment and Election Day 2016 shrinks, and as key polls tighten, it’s becoming clear that the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency has liberals and progressives in a panic. But if the Democrats lose their minds, it will only level the playing field; Republicans lost theirs months ago. The first signs of Democratic dementia are evident in the recent outrage at Matt Lauer and Jimmy Fallon for failing to treat Trump as one would treat a radioactive isotope.

Yeah, it’s going to get entertaining.

In one way, it’s not surprising that Democrats are beside themselves at the possibility of a Trump presidency. They’ve spent the last 100 years expanding the scope of executive authority, granting the federal administrative agencies the power of judge, jury, and executioner over their ever-widening dominion. If liberals and progressives didn’t want that awesome, intrusive power to fall into the wrong hands, perhaps they should have heeded the warnings of small-government conservatives, who railed for a century against the bloat, rot, and corruption they saw metastasizing within the District of Columbia. Perhaps they shouldn’t have declared the U.S. Constitution—with its bill of rights and enumerated powers—to be an antiquated relic.

I guess they never thought that Satan would be in charge.

Democracy, it is often acknowledged, produces the occasional bad outcome. In the American system, much depends on the losers validating the transfer of power through gracious concession. If November’s loser won’t concede, well, we’ll have ourselves a situation, won’t we?

Yup, we sure will. Pass the popcorn.

Read it.

Apparently Ahnold holds the record, which doesn’t surprise.

Thanks to Debby Witt, who is a kindred spirit.

Read it.

The tonsils are a pair of glands found at the back of the throat designed to prevent illness by trapping viruses and bacteria. The ridges and craters in these glands therefore become filmed with debris – including food, mucus, and cells – that groups together to form white-ish, calcified blobs called tonsilloliths or tonsil stones.

Read it.

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

Read it.

What you do when you don’t have a highlighter.

Read it.

Read it.

The Dallas Morning News is offering massively discounted subscriptions to its readers in an effort to withstand the fallout caused by its editorial board’s endorsement of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Heh. How to make a Dead Tree Edition a Really Dead Tree Edition.

Freeberg nails it again.

Awhile ago, struggling to understand, I noted that the movement of what we today call “liberalism” seems to be split into two halves, which I called the “scheming elites” and the “ignorant commons”. The thing that separates the two, described from a 38,000 foot level, is that the former is accumulating a useful skill by way of evolving strategies that continue to find measurable success, whereas the latter isn’t accumulating skills at all, useful or otherwise. The former sells things to the latter. It is debatable how useful this skill is, because the skill is in communicating with people who don’t learn anything with either success or failure, because they don’t try to do anything. So one half maintains a tethering to reality, by way of refining the art and technique of aggravating passions in the other half, which has altogether lost its tethering to reality quite aways back and isn’t on any road that leads to regaining it.

As a result, both are nuts in some way. I wouldn’t hire either one of them to do anything practical, even something mundane, like trimming the hedge I forgot to trim this weekend. I would expect all of them to lose my sheers, snip off a finger or two, sue me for everything I’m worth, own my house, and then blame George W. Bush for the mutilation. Maybe they’ll find some excuses for new taxes in the meantime. Manage the country’s response to all of the mass shootings and terrorist attacks this weekend & before? Forget it. But…the competence thing with the scheming elites. They did get Barack Obama reelected. I’m still concerned they could get Hillary in there. I have to be. They do know their own people; they know how to communicate with the insane ones. I guess it’s a question of whether that is the challenge that arises to confront them. And if the challenge is something more demanding than that, like learning how to communicate with sane people who actually do constructive things, can they recognize that and meet the challenge. I suppose that’s the question.

Or maybe just sitting down somewhere and watching a movie….

Steve Sailer looks at the Hillary situation.

It’s worth keeping in mind, however, that if at the 9/11 memorial there hadn’t been a lone bystander with a videophone who alertly recorded Hillary’s alarming breakdown, we would still be getting lectured by the respectable press about how concerns over the Democratic nominee’s health are “conspiracy theories.”

…

My guess is that 2010-era JournoList-style secrecy is hardly necessary anymore. Twitter shows in real time how the hivemind operates, with pundits trying out hot takes for their peers and being shamed if they get off message.

Read it.

Every single Pennsylvania Democrat who attended a recent voter-registration drive in a small western community pledged to vote for Republican nominee Donald Trump.

“They think it is the celebrity of Trump,” Sheik Shannon, 55, told The Atlantic, referring to the political class’s understanding of why people like him are voting Trump. “It’s not. They think we’ve all gone mad. We’ve not. Communities like where I live do not need to shutter and die. We lead solid, honest lives, we work hard, we play hard, we pray hard … we love where we are from, and we feel a duty to make sure that it is here for generations.”

Read it.

Which do better, blue states or red states? There is a veritable cottage industry devoted to obscure means of proving the superiority of the liberal tax-and-spend model, but when citizens vote with their feet, the result is clear: Americans are deserting blue states and moving to red states.

Texas is ready to welcome all immigrants who are already U.S. citizens.