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Some of us remember.

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Nowadays cars are much more reliable than they were and seem never to break down. But there is a law of the conservation of irritation caused by machines, like that of energy, and if one type of machine won’t irritate you anymore, another will soon step in to fill the breach.

At the moment it is my computer and the internet messages that irritate me. I keep getting unctuous communications from Airbnb thanking me for being part of their global community. I have never used Airbnb and if I had done so I would certainly not consider myself part of the Airbnb community, any more than I consider myself part of the Fyffes banana community because I once ate a Fyffes banana. If using a service or consuming a product gives us entry into a community, we are all members of thousands of communities.

Jim Goad reflects on leftist hypocrisy.

As the elderly black female homeless Trump supporter was curled in the fetal position on the sidewalk while street swine jeered at her from all sides, a black man leaned over and told her that she’d brought it all on herself:

Didn’t I tell you about five minutes ago that somebody’s gonna walk by here and no, I would not defend you? ‘Cause you spewed hate, and you got hate. You got exactly what you were dishin’ out. I told you. I warned you on that.

Black Lives Matter — unless it goes against the Narrative.

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Which tells you everything you really need to know about Amy Schumer and Seth Rogin.

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Speed the day.

Why aren’t they already there? Canada is much more to their liking than the U.S.

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I don’t even have to say anything, do I?

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If you live in a million-dollar-house, of course you sue Amazon, no matter what happens.

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When the Jewish German psychologist Kurt Lewin fled Nazi rule and moved to the United States in 1933, he, like many immigrants, found his new home a little puzzling. Especially when it came to friendships.

“Compared with Germans, Americans seem to make quicker progress toward friendly relations early in the acquaintance process and with many more persons,” he wrote in his 1936 paper “Some Social-Psychological Differences Between the United States and Germany.” “Yet this development often stops at a certain point and the quickly acquired friends will, after years of relatively close relations, say good bye as easily as after a few weeks of acquaintance.”

Lewin thought that this idea of friends as fast fashion—easily acquired, emotionlessly discarded when worn out—might be spurred by the United States’s high level of residential mobility. American society was mobile in his day and has only gotten more mobile since. People can move from sea to shining sea, dropping things as they go.

For really disposable friendships, see the previous post about dissolving corpses.

There’s an app for that….

David Cole reminds us of some history.

I thought it would be a bigger deal. Last week marked the 70th anniversary, to the day, of the hanging of the Nuremberg trial defendants, and I have to admit, I was expecting to read a lot more about it in the press. After all, with only two weeks to go before an election in which “literally Hitler” is the GOP candidate, I expected the media to use the Nuremberg 70th as an excuse to dredge up fond nostalgic memories of the “noble exercise in justice” (well, I’ll be damned…I typed that line with a straight face) that concluded with ten nasty Nazis dancing at the end of a rope (not counting the one who, in the words of every uninspired narrator to ever give voice to a World War II documentary, “cheated the hangman”).

Sarah Hoyt lays it out.

When you say someone should have “housing and food, a car, entertainment, health care” you’re not saying that angels will come down from heaven and grant this.  Or if you are, you really should tell us how to summon these angels.  What you’re saying is “we should violate someone’s most basic and fundamental liberties so that someone else can be the equivalent of a trustfund baby with never a worry in the world.”

Whose liberties?  Well, builders and farmers, entertainers and doctors.  And while you might think those people can “give” you’re not thinking of scale.  If “everyone” is entitled to this what you’re saying is that these people have to work so that other people can have everything for free even without doing anything.

This guy is American in his heart.

Freeberg demonstrates that politics is like Star Wars, eventually.

The liberal movement consists, in large part, of a sustained monologue taking place FROM the scheming elites TO the ignorant commons, with zero feedback, very much like the power structure among the aristocracy and the peasants in feudal times. A great portion of this monologue, measured either in volume or in priority, is concerned with instructions about how the ignorant-commons should do their living, their communicating, their thinking. The instructions run long on “do this, don’t do that” and run short on hard, helpful information. Passive-voice sentences appear very often in the message stream. And these are things the scheming-elites would never, ever practice themselves. Examples abound.

…

The ignorant-commons consistently fail to distinguish between statements about facts, versus statements about what facts might mean. Put more simply, they can’t think. Examples include emotionally unhinged sentiments of conclusion that purport to be statements of fact, such as “Health care should be a right and that’s a fact,” or “Education must be free and that’s a fact.” This makes it easy for the scheming-elites to program the ignorant-commons to have certain opinions; they say, “get the facts” about this-or-that. The ignorant-commons then obey, get told what to think, and with this emotion-over-reason juxtaposition in place, proceed to “feel” like they know something. From that feeling, they get a sort of a hit, like a hardcore junkie. It’s their soma.

Gavin McInnes isn’t impressed.

Modern feminism insists that women giving birth and sticking around is sexist but putting men’s shitty jobs on a pedestal is somehow feminist. I don’t even know what a strategist is, but I’d rather hear strategies from someone who has literally created a future America than some barren spinster with no stakes in the game. Look at any mainstream media source and you will see women who have put career over family. Sometimes they have one kid. Sometimes they spent $30,000 on in vitro and have two. Even in those rare cases, you are looking at someone who has paid a Third World immigrant to look after their children like some sort of maternal security guard. Why are these people telling us what’s best for the country? They don’t even know what’s best for their own family. When I bring this up with professional women, they tell me a housewife’s life is parochial and boring. What these power moms don’t realize is America is made up of millions of tiny “boring” microcosms who shape the economy.

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.

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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.

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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.

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Yeah….

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

Perhaps this is why.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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