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.

Read it.

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) threw its support behind House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in her race to retain her leadership post Thursday.

Who says Republicans can’t be bi-partisan?

Watch it.

Ordinarily I skip over these, but every now and one I stumble across one that’s worth a look.

Read it.

Please give generously. They keep track of the ongoing defense against the Muslim threat to the West pretty much full time so that the rest of us don’t have to; they are the ‘community organizers’, if you will, of Flyover America.

Read it.

One of Hillary Clinton’s campaign themes was her alleged competence, based on years of public service, which she tried to contrast with Donald Trump’s amateurism. Yet, Clinton, through her campaign once again demonstrated that she is not competent. That she was outperformed by an “amateur” undermines her “competence” theme all the more.

…

Hillary’s time at the State Department produced the failed “reset” with Russia, chaos in Libya, and a self-inflicted email scandal she couldn’t shake. More evidence, along with her health reform botch during Bill Clinton’s first term, of her incompetence.

Note that there is no mention of Hillary’s time in the Senate. That’s because it might as well not exist; Hillary did absolutely nothing of note during her time in the Senate, other than keep her name in the DemLegHump Media for a possible Presidential run to be named later.

Read it.

Oh, I am SO going to enjoy this Presidency.

Reporters were furious that Trump had “violated protocol.”

Who does he think he is? Doesn’t he know who they are?

“With his Tuesday night actions, the Trump Administration is shaping up to be the least accessible to the public and the press in modern history,” Alexandra Jaffe and Ali Vitali at NBC News said.

Note the equation of ‘the press’ and ‘the public’, as if they had any necessary connection. I have no doubt that Trump will be accessible to the public; the press, not so much.

“Once you are president, once you are president-elect, it is a matter of tradition, it is a matter of security, it is a matter of national interest that you don’t go dark — you’re not really allowed to be a private person anymore,” Maddow said.

I’m sure you think so, sweetheart. (I rather suspect that this is the first time in her life that Rachel Maddow has had anything good to say about tradition.)

“One week after the election, it is unacceptable for the next president of the United States to travel without a regular pool to record his movements and inform the public about his whereabouts,” the WHCA said in a statement.

Yeah, that really improves ‘security’. I’m trying to see how they have any say in what is ‘acceptable’ or ‘not acceptable’. What are they going to do? Refuse to cover him? They can accept it, or they can go pound sand — their choice.

It’s not as if he didn’t warn them.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Jim Goad deconstructs the election.

Much of the media blamed it all on white racism, but that’s the media’s job, isn’t it? Statistically, 58% of whites yanked the lever for Trump. This included 63% of white men and 53% of white women, with the Clinton’s campaign’s attempts at launching an anti-male gender war stumbling as hard as Hillary did outside her van this past September 11. A majority of young whites voted for Trump. And despite the media’s ceaseless attempts to portray all Trump voters as uneducated—I’m still waiting for any mainstream outlet to use the term “non-college-educated black voters”—he was favored by a majority of educated whites.

But it wasn’t strictly a “whitelash,” as chocolate commie cueball Van Jones insisted. Trump performed more poorly among white voters than Mitt Romney did in 2012. And more nonwhites voted for Trump than they did for Romney. Electing Trump didn’t prove America is “racist.” It proved that shouting “RACIST!” no longer works.

Read it.

For months, the only thing that’s surprised me about Donald Trump is my friends’ astonishment at his success. What’s driving it is the class culture gap.

One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.

Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.

Read it.

To other countries, perhaps?

I should think that a good start would be to excise the tolerance that Democrats have traditionally shown for crooks and grifters in their own ranks, especially among candidates and office-holders. 90% of Hillary Clinton’s problems were due to her being a crook and a congenital liar, and yet Democrats were willing to die in the last ditch to support her. Every one of the special snowflake complaints against Donald Trump apply to Hillary Clinton, in spades, and yet she is still the Prom Queen. Non-Democrat voters see this and conclude, naturally enough, that every Democrat is a crook and a liar, because Democrats wholeheartedly support crooks and liars; so why not elect a crook and liar from ‘our side’? At least we may be allowed to wet our beaks a bit.

If Democrats don’t like the results of the political process, they’ve got nobody to blame but themselves.

Read it.

Where they can get raped and robbed by Muslim immigrants. Good plan.

I’ll chip in.

Read it.

The Re-Elect Trump 2020 campaign is off to a great start in the streets of many American cities and college campuses right now. As someone sagely commented, the left’s reaction to Trump’s election is one of the reasons Trump won the election. Rioters in Portland, Oregon, acted out the overdone metaphor of 2016 by setting an actual dumpster fire. Gotta give ‘em style points for that.

It’s about time we had a professional comedian in the White House.

Read it.

Many will say Trump won because he successfully capitalized on blue collar workers’ anxieties about immigration and globalization. Others will say he won because America rejected a deeply unpopular alternative. Still others will say the country is simply racist to its core.

But there’s another major piece of the puzzle, and it would be a profound mistake to overlook it. Overlooking it was largely the problem, in the first place.

Trump won because of a cultural issue that flies under the radar and remains stubbornly difficult to define, but is nevertheless hugely important to a great number of Americans: political correctness.

More specifically, Trump won because he convinced a great number of Americans that he would destroy political correctness.

Read it.

Funny how British journalism is so much better than American DemLegHumpMedia vaporings.

A Republican trifecta (controlling the White House and both Houses) would be the big news today as it signals a “change election”, and it hasn’t happened since 1928. But Trump is Trump, so that isn’t even mentioned today.

I guess they’re too upset about the sky falling.

One piece of cultural context Europeans invariably forget is that much of America’s politics is done locally, at the town, state, country and state level. Almost all policing is local. The federal government is a distant, often sinister thing, perceived in large parts with some paranoia. Electing Jefferson Smith to go to Washington is regarded as a calculated, prudent measure, not an act of idiocy.

The Crust forget that America isn’t a unitary state like most of Europe — even though they’re trying their best to make it one.

The tech oligarchs had an extraordinary ride of luck. Silicon Valley successfully disguised an attack not just on the heartlands, but the unwritten social contract. If you study Google closely, what emerges is how much the very idea of humans irritates it, what an inconvenience we are. “Post human” isn’t some sci-fi fantasy, it’s a reasonable description of a world in which many jobs have been automated, and the individual’s property rights and identity rights have been pared right away to the bone. People have begun to notice that Silicon Valley doesn’t create jobs or prosperity – except for the oligarchs themselves.

They’re the smartest people in the room, and they’ve got the checkbooks to prove it.

Trump’s victory, like Brexit, divides critics into two camps. It’s either a failure of the existing elites – such as the media and the current parties who have failed to heed people’s concerns, or it’s the fault of the people, who can then be vilified. The latter argument has the merit, for the elites, of absolving them from any fault for alienating voters, or pursuing self-indulgent and irrelevant pursuits – like having a tech policy. Eventually that leads to the elites wishing they had a new electorate, rather than listening and leading. And ultimately, that leads to a Trump.

‘The problem for the left is that, when everyone’s Hitler, nobody’s Hitler.’

— Mark Steyn

Read it.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has brought up the possibility of Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) charges against “Clinton incorporated,” and, according to a senior law enforcement official close to Giuliani, this is no joke.

What a delightful prospect.

He added, “I have a whole bunch of statutes they’ve violated. This is racketeering. This is a RICO statute –Clinton, Inc. I think it was one of the WikiLeaks that said this was ‘Clinton Inc.’ He does the speeches, they put the money in the pocket, she does the favors in the government. It all links up.”

Indeed it does.

Read it.

As John Schindler said on twitter, (words to the effect of) if you tell some people they should just crawl off into the desert and die, they’re likely to remember that when it comes time to vote. Who knew?

“White working class” is just people. They don’t stop being people because they’re white, they don’t live in a big city and didn’t go to college. Trump also won most white college-educated men as well. More people.

Most of the media bloviation I’ve seen today is focused on telling their fellows of the Crust what sort of people carried Donald Trump to victory, with the unspoken subtext that it wasn’t Us, it was Them, so we’re still the same Quality Folk we always were, and it’s the world’s fault for being a horrible place.

It’s really sad. So much of what they ‘know’ about the world is just theater, stories that they tell each other in order to make the narrow little bubble in which they live seem like an actual world. I suspect that it’s because they spend so much of their time in made-up worlds, worlds from novels or from plays or from films, rather than the Rest Of Us who (aside from the occasional TV show) spend most of our time with real people doing real things that are grounded in real life.

God help us when they figure out how to do virtual reality properly.

Read it.

They lied, of course, because that’s what they do, but it will be entertaining watching them squirm.

And, also of course, none of these people would be missed.

‘ “Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms” ought to be the name of a convenience store chain, not a Federal police agency.’ — David Zincavage

Read it.

Every presidential election produces a series of articles probing and prophesizing about the so-called “Jewish vote.” This year has been no different, with most observers agreeing that the majority of Jewish-Americans will vote Democratic.

Why are the ballots cast by Jewish-Americans, just 2 percent of the population, of such importance to politicians (and would-be politicians)? First, relative to their community’s small size, Jews contribute a disproportionate amount of money to political candidates and causes. They give half of the funds received by the Democratic Party and one quarter of the funds received by the Republican Party, according to American history professor Gil Troy. Second, many Jews live in the swing states of Florida (846,700 of 19.9 million), Pennsylvania (324,700 of 12.8 million), Ohio (173,700 of 11.6 million), and Michigan (105,200 of 9.9 million). And third, Jews tout a stellar turnout record—80 percent, on the word of several sources.

…

If there is a dual loyalty among mainstream American Jewry, it doesn’t involve a tension between the U.S. and Israel. Rather, it involves a conscience-splitting conflict between the traditional liberalism of the postwar period and the identity-obsessed progressivism of the twenty-first century.

Read it.

People forget, in the midst of watching the fight in the Republican Party between the Crust and the Filling of the GOP, that the Left has a similar fight going on.

The Filling may be waking up to the fact that the have more in common with each other than with their nominally contentious ‘parties’; the Crust, of course, has always known that, and acted accordingly.

Steve Sailer does some analysis.

You’re not supposed to say this in public, but the GOP traditionally gets most of its votes from people who more or less have their acts together, while the Democrats appeal most strongly to the various resentful fringes of the electorate.

The prototypical Romney voter might be the loser’s wife Ann Romney: married for 43 years so far, with five children and 18 grandchildren.

As for a prototypical Obama voter, it would have been hard to beat the President’s late mother Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro: impregnated at 17 by a passing polygamist, briefly and bigamously married to the African, then married for awhile to an Indonesian. She finally died unmarried and without her peeved son bothering to visit her. (I suspect that, in contrast, most of Ann Romney’s sons will call upon her before she dies.)

Just as importing poor, unskilled foreigners boosts the ranks of Democratic voters in the long run, the social decay of American culture creates more Democrats.

Read it.

Advice for how to run your day from the people who want Hillary to be President.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Read it.

Believing that James would at least soften the anti-Catholic laws that had left many adherents of the Old Faith impoverished, imprisoned, or dead, and that had only become more onerous after the Spanish Armada launched, Catholics were soon disappointed. James had no such intention, especially given a clinical paranoia that made King Herod look like a bodhisattva. (To be fair, James had been the object of earlier, failed Catholic conspiracies, called the Bye and Main plots. One of the plans had been to kidnap the king and hold him in the Tower of London until Catholics were granted full toleration, which becomes increasingly difficult to argue for when you’re holding the monarch captive, as there’s only so much antisocial behavior any king can tolerate before someone loses an eye.)

…

In light of this history, Fawkes is a strange choice to be the face of hacker activists like Anonymous and other anarchist movements. We’ve all seen that stupid mask, the one that looks like Gomez Adams just did it with Morticia.

Read it.

I think that these apply to government employees in certain circumstances.