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What do these presidents have in common? Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy. When I saw that question posed by University of California Irvine neuroscientist James Fallon, my response was that they were the three most popular presidents of the 20th century.

They all had fascist inclinations and increased the footprint of the Federal government on daily life, precisely because of that popularity.

Now what about Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush? All markedly less popular – each lost his bid for re-election.What I didn’t know is that biographers of each president had been asked to rate their subjects on a standardized assessment of psychopathic traits. Those first three super-popular presidents ranked No. 1, 2, and 3; they were America’s most psychopathic presidents. The three who couldn’t win a second term ranked among the least psychopathic.

…

Practice saying “My candidate is a psychopath. And that’s okay.”

I’d really rather not.

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Not a happy time.

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Well. There it is.

No wonder birthrates in First World nations are dropping like a stone.

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Funny how the people who are so hot to have government in charge of our health care don’t like it when they take charge of recreational drugs.

Geez, make up your minds.

None. Not gonna happen. I don’t indulge in sweat myself, and see no purpose in watching other people do so.

No, not even women’s volleyball. Gave that up long ago.

I can, however, reveal the origins of the sport of curling. It came about because of golf.

God came to visit Scotland one day and watched a bunch of people playing golf.

He said, ‘That has got to be the damnedest silliest game that a human being could devise.’

The Scots, just to prove Him wrong, thereupon invented curling.

True story.

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The Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz highlights this factor in his “time for a change” forecasting model of presidential election outcomes. “When a party has held the White House for two or more terms,” he writes, “voters will be more likely to feel that it is time to give the opposing party an opportunity to govern than when a party has held the White House for only one term.”

 Mr. Abramowitz finds that the party in power performs approximately five percentage points worse in the popular vote after two or more terms in office in a model that controls for the current president’s approval rating and the state of the economy. The sample size of post-World War II elections is very small, but Mr. Abramowitz’s model dominates the field in its forecasting accuracy.

Both Mr. Abramowitz’s model and a similar one from the political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck (an Upshot contributor) would characterize Republicans as the favorite in this election with an estimated probability of winning of approximately 60 percent. As Mr. Sides notes, the G.O.P. edge is due in large part “to the White House’s greater tendency to change hands the longer the incumbent party has been there.”

But of course Trump is the new Hitler so obviously this model won’t work this time and we’re all safe. Phew!

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The way most colleges teach general education to undergraduates is hopelessly broken, according to a group of professors and administrators at Southern Utah University.

…

Wyatt and a team of faculty members last year hatched a plan to reinvent how general education works at the university. Their solution, dubbed Jumpstart GE, began this fall with 43 students. It’s certainly a different approach. And while the experiment is too young to show any real learning outcomes, experts said the concept shows plenty of promise.

The first-year students are taking the full 34 credits for their general education requirements this year — the equivalent of 13 courses. But all that material has been converted into one course that eight professors from different disciplines are teaching jointly.

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I have always been puzzled by the term ‘McMansion’. This clears things up a bit.

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The researchers considered the vegan diet, two vegetarian diets (one that includes dairy, the other dairy and eggs), four omnivorous diets (with varying degrees of vegetarian influence), one low in fats and sugars, and one akin to the modern American dietary pattern.

Based on their models, the vegan diet would feed fewer people than two of the vegetarian and two of the four omnivorous diets studied. The bottom line: Going cold turkey on animal-based products may not actually be the most sustainable long choice for humanity in the long term.

Not to mention the scientific fact that we evolved as omnivores and vegetarianism is just another intellectual fantasy like astrology. (I’ll bet you find an amazing overlap between the two.)

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I certainly associate the two.

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Even Voice of the Crust the Denver Post has had enough.

There is no venue today more politically correct and sanctimoniously liberal than higher education, replete with academic departments “studying” and glorifying every conceivable ethnicity, race and gender.  Nonetheless, the current generation of student activists is overcome by some imaginary insensitivity that surrounds them. With self-righteous indignation inflamed by hyper-narcissism they demand a college campus be “a warm, caring, welcoming, safe place.” An ideological sanctuary from ideas and expressions that might hurt their tender feelings, invulnerable to even the most infinitesimal “microaggression.”

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What did he know that you don’t know?

(Probably not much. Any rational adult could tell that it was rigged.)

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Fortunately, being hipsters who read Mother Jones, this is the most important thing we have to worry about.

Bite is Mother Jones‘ new food politics podcast.

Yup. You heard that right: food politics. With Mother Jones, everything is politics, even food.

Steven Hayward at Powerline peers at the tea leaves.

Those who suffer the handicap, like myself, of having a Ph.D and writing for a living—the kind of people who actually sit in bars discussing, for example, Eric Voegelin’s injunction against “immanentizing the eschaton” (there’s a reason Voegelin devotees don’t get dates, and it’s not hard to figure out)—don’t understand that one reason for Trump’s appeal is that to a great many Americans he talks like they do—in sentence fragments, summary emotive thoughts, and imprecise terms. He’s the first prominent political figure in a long time who doesn’t use the certified official vocabulary and public demeanor of the political class. This, as much as anything, makes him anathema to the denizens of the Acela corridor. (Aside: I rode the Acela from Washington to New York not long ago, and had forgotten how precious—as in ludicrous—and utterly unreal are most of the conversations you overhear.)

That’s one theory anyway. Another is to recall the way Mitt Romney in 2012 “spoke conservatism as a second language,” Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg put it (there’s some dispute as to which of them came up with that observation first, but never mind). One of the Juice Voxers, as I call them, pointed out yesterday that Trump gets into the most trouble when he tries to talk conservative.

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Mel Gibson’s ex-wife Oksana Grigorieva just lost tens of millions of dollars in her divorce settlement. Grigorieva was originally set to receive a whopping $15 million, but that number was cut all the way down to $250,000 due to the domestic abuse claims she brought up during an interview on “The Howard Stern Show” in 2013.

Loose lips lose chips.

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Hillary Clinton has always pushed for a steep Death Tax on the American people. But when it comes to her own finances, it is a different story. Clinton’s newly released tax returns show she still uses tax avoidance strategies to shield their Death Tax liability.

According to a 2014 report by Bloomberg News, the Clintons created trusts in 2010 and shifted ownership of their New York home to it in 2011. In doing so, they will avoid paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in future death taxes.

‘We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.’ — Leona Helmsley

Freeberg nails it again.

So there are two problems here. One, liberals fancy themselves to be too good for any task that involves dirty hands…any task whose completion status is testable. We no longer live in the era in which such neglect bears consequences. If you think yourself too good to cook hamburgers, you can still get hamburgers whenever you want. So, liberals are running around on the Internet, on blogs and on other forms of social media, because Barack & Michelle have asked them to — and, they’re bored.

The other problem is that if the liberals ever did sweep the sidewalks or embalm the bodies or kill the weeds or design the car engines, they’d just do it until they found the entertainment factor to fall short of their expectations, which would be pretty damn soon. If they didn’t get the task done satisfactorily, who’s to say? So either way, they’ve got a lot more time for this than conservatives do, since the conservatives are doing things that are testable, which takes a great deal more time. Anytime you vote in an election, you have to be prepared to lose; anytime you gamble, you must be prepared to lose; and whenever you run tests in good faith, on anything, you must account for that proportion of times that the tests are going to fail.

Conservatives are building the bridges on top of which the cars are going to be driven — we wouldn’t have it any other way. Would you really want to drive a car upon a bridge built by a liberal? Not if you want to see your next birthday. So people are counting on the conservatives, the conservatives have to work away at the task until it’s really done, and the whatever really does work. While, the liberals are bored…so of course the liberals have taken over the arena of rhetoric. Add to that, the fact that conservatives are naturally harder to get engaged in any sort of coordinated political action, because they think too independently. Contrast the recent Trump vs. Cruz contest, versus the Hillary vs. Bernie contest; no need to comment further on that, I think.

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Most of what you think you know about the Crusades ain’t so. The OFlionn explains it all to you.

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Having won more than $600 million for clients in foodborne-illness cases, Marler says that his experiences convinced him that these foods aren’t worth the risks.

He missed a few.

1. Cauliflower
2. Brussels Sprouts
3. Asparagus
4. Broccholi
5. Rhubarb
6. Eggplant

These are the Devil’s Vegetables. Eating them is responsible for all of the evil in the world.

I have my doubts about avocados, too.

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I don’t know … seems pretty normal to me. Walk down a street in Frisco’s tenderloin district with your iPad out and see what happens to you.

The dolphins splashed the tourists standing around the pool for good measure.

Can’t say that I blame them.

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It’s a question that pretty much anyone looking at the arc of his life ends up asking: what happened to Henry VIII? From a hugely-admired prince, to a widely-feared king, the transformation in Henry’s behaviour and outlook would seem like the stuff of fiction, but for the fact that history bears out how real it was. Just how did the champion of the Catholic church come to be the notorious killer of queens? Researchers from the Behavioral Neurology Unit at the Yale School of Medicine think they may have the answer: traumatic head injury.

Fortunately, princes no longer go in for stuff like professional football.

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Last week, the two major domestic performance rights organizations for the American music industry, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, (ASCAP), and Broadcasting Music, Inc., (BMI), threw down the gauntlet on the Department of Justice. They just announced that they will be using a joint strategy of legislation and litigation to get around DOJ’s new interpretation of longstanding antitrust consent decrees, which limit the performance rights organizations’ flexibility to license rights to perform copyrighted music.

Watch it.

Sorry, but that creeps me out.

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Indeed — those who think that not having children is a plus because it ‘benefits the environment’ ought to be encouraged not to have children.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Borders are in the news as never before. After millions of young, Muslim, and mostly male refugees flooded into the European Union last year from the war-torn Middle East, a popular revolt arose against the so-called Schengen Area agreements, which give free rights of movement within Europe. The concurrent suspension of most E.U. external controls on immigration and asylum rendered the open-borders pact suddenly unworkable. The European masses are not racists, but they now apparently wish to accept Middle Eastern immigrants only to the degree that these newcomers arrive legally and promise to become European in values and outlook—protocols that the E.U. essentially discarded decades ago as intolerant. Europeans are relearning that the continent’s external borders mark off very different approaches to culture and society from what prevails in North Africa or the Middle East.

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Borders—and the fights to keep or change them—are as old as agricultural civilization. In ancient Greece, most wars broke out over border scrubland. The contested upland eschatia offered little profit for farming but possessed enormous symbolic value for a city-state to define where its own culture began and ended. The self-acclaimed “citizen of the cosmos” Socrates nonetheless fought his greatest battle as a parochial Athenian hoplite in the ranks of the phalanx at the Battle of Delium—waged over the contested borderlands between Athens and Thebes. Fifth-century Athenians such as Socrates envisioned Attica as a distinct cultural, political, and linguistic entity, within which its tenets of radical democracy and maritime-based imperialism could function quite differently from the neighboring oligarchical agrarianism at Thebes. Attica in the fourth century BC built a system of border forts to protect its northern boundary.

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From the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, black youth unemployment was slightly less than or equal to white youth unemployment. Today, black youth unemployment is at least double that of white youth unemployment. Would anyone try to explain the difference with the argument that there was less racial discrimination during the ’40s and ’50s than today?

Some argue that it is the “legacy of slavery” and societal racism that now explain the social pathology in many black neighborhoods. Today’s black illegitimacy rate is about 73 percent. When I was a youngster, during the 1940s, illegitimacy was around 15 percent.

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What is going on here? Put simply, what’s happened is that the official unemployment number has grown increasingly useless as a reliable economic indicator, for the simple reason that millions of people have simply quit looking for a job. Since the unemployment rate is based only on those who are actively looking for work, the more people who drop out of the labor force, the lower the unemployment rate becomes.

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We all know that there are plenty of U.S. weapons the Chinese military would like to get its hands on. The Arsenal of Democracy churns out some of the best, most technologically advanced and versatile weapons in service anywhere. China is willing to steal American military technology to help advance its own military research and development programs.

The United States on the other hand…well, there is probably not a single Chinese weapon that, in a direct comparison, is better than its American equivalent and that probably won’t change for another twenty years. So if we want to talk about Chinese weapons for the American military, we have to think about holes in current American capabilities. There aren’t many, but here are Chinese weapons that might make the American military a little better.

What do they know that you don’t know?

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History is apparently subject to revision without notice and without basis at the Associated Press.

In an outrageous report primarily dedicated to the notion that Donald Trump’s concerns about the November general elections possibly being rigged thanks to potential voter fraud “challenges (the) U.S. Democratic system” — but a whole host of leftist-inspired rigging efforts apparently don’t — Vivian Salama at the Associated Press informed readers in a later paragraph that Al Gore, according to “several post-mortem reviews,” “would have won” the 2000 presidential election if “undervotes” had all been counted.

Then maybe he’d not have gotten fat and would have stayed poor in the White House (like the Clintons) and not made hundreds of millions of dollars in ‘green energy’ scams.

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Lion of the Blogosphere explains it all to you.

Thorstein Veblen explained that the more prestigious classes manipulate people while the less prestigious classes manipulate things. Thorstein Veblen called the prestigious class the “leisure class” because they didn’t have to do any unprestigious work. They are very similar to what I would call the value transference class, as the leisure class let other people do the boring value creation work, and transferred the wealth created to themselves so they could do more prestigious stuff with their lives.

In modern society, there are now three levels of prestige….

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There would be much rejoicing. Just sayin’.

Steve Sailer looks at the Trump phenomenon.

We live in an era when billionaires seem compelled to buy artworks that few would like unless they had been apprised of the theory. Tom Wolfe pointed out in his 1975 history of modern art, The Painted Word, that the great creative talents of the New York art world were less the painters of the era—Pollock, de Kooning, and Warhol—than the critics—Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Steinberg—who had come up with the verbal justifications for why the paintings were worth a lot of money.

…

Today, Trump doesn’t bother to read up on the intricate reasons he ought to buy, say, Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull sculpture For the Love of God for $100 million like an ordinary, decent plutocrat would who respects the values of his age.

Trump instead would rather buy an ocean-cliff golf course because it’s beautiful. He’d tell you that Hirst’s skullpture is ugly.

And he’d be right. Per Cochrane:

You adopt political ideas that are obviously stupid—because only a truly refined person can understand their subtle justifications…. Any lout might think that race exists and partly explains what people are like—only a sophisticate could steadfastly deny his lying eyes.

Joe Bob Briggs takes on the election.

Morning resolve! Before they’ve even microwaved their second Jimmy Dean Sausage Sandwich, they know that this will be the day of reckoning. They will fire up the Kia Sedona and take the long way to work, giving them more time to think about the epic 1,500 words that will make the difference between chaos and civilization.

Yes, they tell their wives, It’s time for my “Donald Trump is a Dickwad” column.

…

\I’m talking about the guy who enrolled at McNeese State in the nineties and fell into deep reverence for Professor Rusty Naugahyde, the legendary teacher whose Newswriting 312 workshop was almost as inspirational as Lou “The News Is Sacred” Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Read it. And watch the video.

For sure, Hamburger U. will give you more usable job skills than a Gender Studies major.

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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Campaign appearances by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump have incited violence, flag burnings, and rage-fueled debates, yet at a Trump pit stop at a Colorado campus on Friday protesters and Trump fans found something they could agree on — a dislike of Hillary Clinton.

As chants of “Lock Her Up” were repeated by a row of Trump supporters outside the event – many anti-Trump protesters joined in.

It’s a Consensus[tm]! The science is settled!

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When I was thinking about these Wet Smelly Dog Days yesterday afternoon, a phrase popped into my head: “Running with the hare and hunting with the hounds”. I believe it’s a British expression, and it refers to someone who wants two opposite things at the same time. An American equivalent is probably “To have your cake and eat it too.”

It came to mind again when I was moderating comments on the post with two videos about three leftist women in Germany who had been raped and/or groped by “refugees”. These women are devotees of the “Welcome Refugees” movement, and loathe “right-wing extremists” who want to curtail immigration. Yet they are feminists, too, and dedicated Social Justice Warriors against Germany’s “rape culture.” The two different zealotries clash when their adherents experience the seamier side of cultural enrichment, driving them into a state of cognitive dissonance.

And yet so many on the Left do this compulsively. Hollywood stars who jet off on their Gulfstreams to conferences on climate change, people who protest for ‘affordable housing’ — somewhere else, there are innumerable examples; Portland, Oregan, ‘the whitest town in America‘, is a prime example.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the easy questions.

Hawaii is a reliably Democratic state in Presidential elections so it is seldom exposed to the kind of media criticism given Republican states, such as in Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas.

But, wow, in the 21st Century, Hawaii sure is an underachiever, especially compared to the high hopes invested in it in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, in the Urban Institute’s study of federal NAEP test scores by state shown below, Hawaii’s students do worst of all 50 states when adjusted for demographics. Hawaii’s racial mix isn’t that different, as first glance, from Silicon Valley’s, but they don’t test like Silicon Valley kids.

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This imbalance of campaign cash—Trump’s shoestring campaign struggling to subsist on less than half of Clinton’s vast fortune—is precisely the sort of “inequality” that Democrats and even the occasional misguided Republican often propose to deal with by means of government redistribution of wealth. A 2013 New York Times editorial about the New York State campaign finance system, for example, said “the most crucial reform of all” is “public financing of elections, which is essential to encouraging competition for legislative offices and reducing the influence of big money on the state’s politics.”

The usual voices supporting taxpayer-funded political campaigns as a way to get special interest money out of the system have fallen strangely silent now that Donald Trump is the one who is getting outspent, and now that Hillary Clinton is the one being aided by “the influence of big money.”

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Trump’s campaign is actually an excellent counter-example to the famous myth ‘whoever has the most money wins the election’, which ought to have been buried when Michael Huffington ran for the Senate in California in 1994.