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.

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Holes? Say rather Caverns.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

Thanks to Debby Witt, who is a kindred spirit.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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The team’s press officer, Nick Birkin, agrees. “Reenactors are used to dink, dink,” he says, mimicking the prissy swordplay anyone who’s sat through a retelling of Agincourt will no doubt cringe to recall. Another weekend warrior sums up the distinction more succinctly: “Reenactment’s for pussies.”

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Israelites crossing the Red Sea:

FRAGILE WETLANDS TRAMPLED IN LABOR STRIKE
Law Enforcement Officials Slain While Pursuing Unruly Mob

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Hillary Clinton’s disastrous Labor Day raises the question: If Donald Trump were as bad as she says, shouldn’t Hillary drop out so a better candidate could beat him?

But first… Why is Trump outsmarting Hillary? And what’s this “alt-right” she’s denouncing?

Hillary has been doing almost nothing but politics for over 40 years, while Trump has had a lot of other fun stuff to think about. Shouldn’t she be dominating him on the issues? How is this a close race?

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We might object to the phrase crony capitalism for two reasons:

First, because cronyism is in some ways the antithesis of capitalism. The freedom to compete and the freedom to fail that are central tenets of capitalism are severely compromised by cronyism when in the former case powerful politicians intervene to shield their friends in business and finance from competition, and in the latter intervene again to save them from bankruptcy or occasionally from criminal prosecution. Of course, these friends in turn are no disloyal slouches and they later show themselves to be supremely appreciative by underwriting, financially and otherwise, those same politicians who had all but guaranteed their continued dominance in normal times and their survival against bad odds in times of distress.

Second, because cronyism is just as prevalent, or arguably more prevalent, in a socialist system than in a capitalist one. Socialism is made popular by charismatic figures appealing to the idealism of some voters but wherever it succeeds in establishing itself, its anonymous toiling bureaucrats turn out to be expert cronies of the very first order, if we are to judge by the experience of many countries in the past century.

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It’s a lie, of course. They always say it, but never do it. Such teases.

But wouldn’t it be nice if they did?

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Cash—the familiar, anonymous paper money and metallic coins that most of us grew up using—isn’t just convenient, it’s also a powerful shield for our autonomy and our privacy. That’s the argument of cash advocates of course—but also of those economists and government officials who want to abolish the stuff. Cash’s power to protect people from meddling and tracking motivates both parties, either to shore up our defenses against the state, or to squish them under their thumbs.

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Perhaps this is God telling him to go into another line of work.

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A report last year from the Russian news agency TASS turned up on Reddit Thursday, stating that baseball bat sales in Russia soared in 2014 even though the sport has struggled to gain traction there.

Russians bought 500,000 baseball bats but purchased only one pair of baseball gloves and one ball, according to Moscow traffic police chief Viktor Kovalenko, who reportedly suggested that the bats were often used to resolve traffic disputes.

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How about that Global Warming, eh? We may be doomed, but at least we’ll have full stomachs.

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English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.

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If performing like an asshole in a public forum creates the perverse impression that you are more clever than others who do not, there is a clear incentive to behave this way.

Welcome to the Internet.

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Typing helps you learn the syntax. It helps you learn the keywords. It makes you think, and as you’re writing out the 10th import foo from ‘foo’, the little details become apparent.

“Oh, those separators in the for loop are semicolons, not commas.”

“Oh, import {foo} from ‘foo’ isn’t the same as import foo from ‘foo’.”

Typing makes you curious about the words you are forced to write out. “What do all those things in public static void main(String[] args) mean, anyway?”

It also helps you learn the various error messages. Inevitably, you’ll type something wrong or leave out something you thought wasn’t important or that your eye didn’t notice (damn semicolons).

When you’re typing in a program by hand, you can try to run it at various points along the way, to see what works. Maybe more importantly, you can see where it breaks. “Poking the box.”

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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According to Time, Henry Kissinger and George Schultz are considering making a joint endorsement of Hillary Rodham Clinton for president. This is not surprising – in an era of dopey anti-“Establishment” rhetoric, Kissinger and Schultz may be the last two men in politics happy to call themselves pillars of the establishment. Which, of course, they are, as is Mrs. Clinton.

‘Hillary: The New Nixon’ Yeah, I can see that. Birds of a feather flock together; the Crust takes care of its own.

The next part, which will be amusing, will be watching progressive leftovers from the 1960s, who have for decades denounced Kissinger as a war-monger, an enabler of genocide (as Senator Bernie Sanders charges), and a war criminal – who have called for his prosecution — rejoicing in his endorsement of Mrs. Clinton. “Even Henry Kissinger!” they’ll say. Schultz doesn’t stand very much higher in the Left’s estimate, to be sure, though he doesn’t inspire quite the passion that Kissinger does.

It’s all about the Narrative, Larry.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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Waaa waaa waaaa….

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The math myth is the myth that the future of the American economy is dependent upon the masses having higher mathematics skills. This myth goes back to at least Sputnik, when the Russians were going to surpass us because they were better in math and science. It returned in the late 80’s when the Germans and Japanese were going to surpass us because they were better in math and science. It’s occurring again now because the Indians and Chinese are better than us in math and science.

I find it difficult to find anyone who uses more than Excel and eighth grade level mathematics (=arithmetic, and a little bit of algebra, statistics and programming). In the summer of 2007 I taught an advanced geometry course and had two students in the class who had been engineers and one who had been an actuary. They claimed never to have used anything beyond Excel and eighth grade level mathematics; never a trig function or even a log or exponential function! There is in fact a deskilling going on in our economy, where even the ability to make change is about to disappear as an important skill.

I’ve actually used calculus once, in a D&D game where I needed to find out the maximum length of a spear that would fit around the corner of the intersection of a 10-foot-wide corridor and a 5-foot-wide corridor. I’ve used algebra and trig in Navy electronics — again, in school, never out in the Fleet.

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As good a summary of the current situation as I’ve seen.

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Usually, writing about the Early Modern Age isn’t my deal, but it was definitely an interesting time. This was the period in which men went around in puffy pants with rapiers at their hips, ready to duel anyone who ridiculed the puffiness of their pants. And if you’re going to wander around with a rapier, you’d better know how to use it.

‘Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.’

Remember: Han shot first.

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“For the first half of my life, I thought Democrat was the only way to be,” Lephart says. “There’s this belief that you can’t be Republican and union-but I don’t believe that any more.”

Freeberg nails it again.

This question on Quora intrigued me, not quite so much because of the educated-above-their-hat-size, “solve all the world’s problems while we still know everything,” seldom-correct never-in-doubt sophistikateds that talk with smiles on their faces & their eyes closed; that’s a Quora staple right there. Rather, I was taken by the unusual experience. You have to read down quite a way to see it, but the answers under this one constitute a healthy mix. Eventually someone with good old-fashioned horse sense weighs in on the issue…yeah. Someone must’ve forgotten to close a door or something.

…

It all seems just so correct and reasonable. Until you stop to think — just how current are these ideas, which are ushering in this bold new age? And the answer is, not very. Discarding phrasing styles and words that have only recently come into existence or fashion, like “[I]nternet,” this all could’ve been written in…well, just about any year from 1917 onward. The overall sentiments of progressivism have remained unchanged in all that time. We’re battling these “conservatives,” who want to keep things the way they are, but our victory is inevitable, because we’re for sharing and economic equality, and the old bastions of stodgy traditionalism favor inequality, but the world is changing. There isn’t a thought in there that’s less than a century old. And the basics of it are considerably older than that…again, still unchanged.

The future is now.

Where is John Conner when we need him most?

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A cross-channel swimmer has died just a mile short of reaching France, organisers have said.

The man, named in reports as Nick Thomas, 45, from Ellesmere in Shropshire, was pulled unconscious from the water as he neared the end of the 21-mile endurance feat.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

If swimming the Channel is on your ‘bucket list’, leave it there.

Read it. And do watch the video.

Once you hear it, you can’t un-hear it. It will be forever with you. Just a warning.

It’s not a secret that a lot of popular music is unoriginal. In fact, science has proven it: The combinations of notes in pop songs have been losing diversity consistently over the last 50 years. Popular songwriters, producers, and record labels found a formula people like, and the result is many hit songs sound the same.

For example, hundreds of recent pop songs feature the same chord progression, parodied by Australian musical comedy group The Axis of Awesome in their 2009 song “4 Chords” (newer performances of the song include more examples of the progression in the years since). And most mainstream American country music not only sounds similar but is linguistically homogenous (blue jeans, drinking beer, pick-up trucks).

This latest phenomenon, though, is a much more specific musical trope.