Read it.

Mere anarchy is a fair description of the state of the Republican Party, at least amongst those who purport to be its falconers. Mimicking the vulgarity they decry in Trump, they employ every vile epithet to describe him and his followers. National Review’s Rich Lowry enthused that Carly Fiorina had “cut his balls off.” For Lowry’s colleague Kevin Williamson, Trump is a “witless ape … not just an ass, but an ass of exceptionally intense asininity.” As for Trump’s followers, George Will calls them “invertebrates,” while John Hood describes them as “a motley crew of simpletons, bigots, and cynical manipulators.” In their hatred of Trump, they have come to resemble the man they despise.

…

There is, I fancy, one more thing that troubles our falconers. Worse still than Trump is the fact that so many Americans like him, ripping apart the imagined America of the elites, a preppy, mid-Atlantic country south of Iceland and east of The New Yorker. Their America has no monster-truck races, no hip-hop, no reality TV, no Donald Trump; and yet Trump is authentically American. He is Sam Slick the Clockmaker, Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s fast-talking, Yankee peddler, whom Haliburton’s Canadian and British readers saw as the archetypal American. He is, like Johnny Cash and Muhammad Ali, a person who could only be American, and whom Americans will recognize as one of their own. At some level, our elites must recognize this too, and in their anger experience the rage of Caliban seeing his face in the mirror.

Read it.

In a rebuke to the EU, and environmental activists worldwide, the biggest scientific metastudy yet conducted of genetically modified foods concludes they’re good for human health and the environment.

The National Academics of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, an advisory body of scientists, finds no evidence of risks over conventional crops, and huge benefits in the shape of increased yields in poor countries, and healthier crops. Nor did the boffins find any evidence of the catastrophic environmental risks touted by scaremonger green groups.

Read it.

Much here that I did not know.

Steve Sailer looks overseas.

The British will vote in a referendum on whether to leave the European Union on June 23, but the debate has gotten bogged down because of the limits on respectable opinion. The two allowable views are that Britain should leave because other Europeans are hateful, or that Europe should stay united so it can let in more non-Europeans.

The notion that Europeans might favor each other over outsiders (its founding idea) is today unthinkably racist.

Yet the main problems driving support for Britain exiting are immigration and the English fear that the EU is increasingly a mask for German mastery, hand in glove with Germany’s Great War ally Turkey.

But you aren’t supposed to talk about such matters.

Read it.

Maybe they know something we don’t.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Kathy Shaidle at Taki’s Magazine looks into some nooks and crannies.

Leon Neyfakh writes for Slate so, big surprise, his article “They Totally Knew: The People Who Foresaw the Rise of Donald Trump” doesn’t include a single prognostication that dates past last summer. That’s because all genuinely vintage “President Trump” predictions were made in the media equivalent of NASCAR country, where guys like Neyfakh rarely venture.

Read it.

It’s taken six million years for humans to evolve from our ancestors to where we are today.

Unsurprisingly, our physiology has also changed – but not always for the better.

In fact, there are several body parts that were once very useful, but have since lost become all but redundant.

Read it.

No doubt soon to be a protected class under the Civil Rights Acts.

https://bluebirdofbitterness.com/2016/05/16/prey-on-words-part-seven/

Wisdom. Attend.

This is one of the most beneficial articles I’ve ever read, and fits very nicely with the systems-oriented approach to life laid out in Scott Adams’ seminal book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.

Steve Sailer examines the backside of American history.

One of the more eyebrow-raising examples of media power to control the contents of public thought space is the near disappearance of any recollections of the huge leftist Nuclear Freeze movement of the early Reagan years. “Nuclear Freeze” doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia topic.

Read it.

Titled, “free radio on my phone,” the campaign says that most Android smartphones have a built-in FM receiver which doesn’t require data or Wi-Fi to operate.

The U.S. arm of the campaign believes iPhones also have a built-in radio chip but that it can’t be activated. Apple wouldn’t confirm this detail.

The radio chip in many Android phones also lies dormant. But the campaign says it can easily be activated — if telecom providers ask the manufacturers to do it.

Right on.

Russell Moore speaks truth to power.

The Sexual Revolution, chaotically, wants to tell us that gender means nothing and that gender means everything. Neither is true.

Sarah Hoyt talks about being an Odd.

Which brings us to Odds and the way Odds cope with being Odd, and the way only Odds really understand other Odds and, by definition, most people aren’t Odds.

My former form (eh) was exhilarating to be in because until this blog I’ve never before or since found myself in a group of “my people.”

You know who you are, even if you don’t know why.  You’re the people who given a choice between vanilla and chocolate say “strawberry” and if you can at all set about making it happen.  You’re the people who don’t fit in, and all of you at some point read the story of the pink monkey, torn apart by the brown monkeys.  You’re the people who either learned to go away from normal human intercourse, or else learned to fit in — often not perfectly, but well enough. — In a world of sheep and dogs and wolves, you’re the goats.

Been there, done that.

Read it.

Tribalism works, even when you don’t want it to.

Read it.

Writes Adams: “Identity is always the strongest level of persuasion. The only way to beat it is with dirty tricks or a stronger identity play. … [And] Trump is well on his way to owning the identities of American, Alpha Males, and Women Who Like Alpha Males. Clinton is well on her way to owning the identities of angry women, beta males, immigrants, and disenfranchised minorities.

“If this were poker, which hand looks stronger to you for a national election?”

Scott Adams starts getting the credit he deserves.

Steven Hayward at Powerline actually runs the numbers.

I’ve been wanting to circle back around to the story about the leaded water in Flint, Michigan, for some time now, on the suspicion that a close look at the data would show that the blood lead levels turning up in children are likely much lower than was typical of the majority of American children just 40 years ago, when airborne lead levels from leaded gasoline were very high.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, in the mid-1970s 88 percent of children nationwide had blood lead levels above 10 micrograms per deciliter (ug/dl). In the old days the dangerous level was thought to be around 30 ug/dl, but of course we’ve moved that down to about 5, and you hear a lot of people breathlessly say that there is no safe level.

Read it.

Too bad. I suspect the world would be better off without so many piss-ant island nations in the Pacific whining to First World countries about how poor and underprivileged they are.

Read it.

Thank God for those strict gun control laws in Chicago … otherwise the place would wind up like Texas.

Community members spoke out against the violence on a weekend when mothers are supposed to be spending time with their children, not saying goodbye.

And we see how well that worked. Maybe we need more ‘community organizers’ like Barry Obama.

Robert Higgs writes up something that has irritated me for years.

Rhetoric is often insidious, especially in political and policy-related discourse. The words a writer or speaker uses to express his ideas may easily tilt the reader or listener’s evaluation toward unwarranted acceptance or rejection. Politicians and others who make public pronouncements understand this effect, and they choose their words with an eye toward using the terms that make their arguments and proposals most persuasive.

Think ‘capitalism’, ‘price gouging’, ‘black market’, ‘frankenfood’, ‘Islamophobia’, etc.

Perhaps the most dangerous examples pertain to the ordinary, oft-used words “we,” “us,” and “our.” The danger arises because these words relate to groups of people, perhaps to groups as small as those with only two individuals, but often to groups comprising hundreds of millions of persons. Speaking in terms of collectives predisposes everyone who reads or hears the words toward the assumption that a collective is the appropriate concept for the consideration of what is right or wrong, desirable or undesirable for the government to do.

Whenever a Leftist wants to rope you into whatever Narrative item he (or she) is pushing, he (or she) always uses ‘we’, as if he (or she) and you were part of some group to which certain things ought to apply.

Read it.

First, chase down a rabbit. I will wait while you do this. tick tick tick tick tick tick tick….

“If we were to go back to the very beginning of this process that has gone to an extreme today, I think it would really surprise many people,” said Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological sciences at Harvard University. “We used to spend a disproportionate amount of our days chewing.”

“You can go for an entire day without chewing today, and that’s really bizarre from a historical standpoint,” he added.

Jim Goad seeks to right an historic injustice.

There persists a stubborn myth that all serial killers are white. If pressed to name a black serial killer, some may be able to point to The Atlanta Child Murderer, who to this day insists he was framed by police to cover over the true killers—the KKK, natch. Others may recall the black duo who became known as the Beltway Snipers. Beyond that, most people draw blanks—and that’s unfair in a society that prides itself on equality.

Not only have there been a lot of documented black American serial killers, blacks are actually overrepresented in this grisly yet attention-grabbing crime.

Studying the time frame of 1945-2004, criminologist Anthony Walsh found that out of 413 confirmed American serial killers, 90 of them were black—a quotient of 22% and nearly double their percentage of the population. An almost identical quotient is claimed by Eric W. Hickey in his book Serial Murderers and Their Victims. A massive database at Radford University tracking over 4,000 serial killers from 1900 to 2010 found that a whopping 40.6% of the killers were black. In his book Rise of the Black Serial Killer, Justin Cottrell says he’s confirmed 1,837 cases of American serial killers since the year 1860, with 53% of the killers being black. Cottrell also says that only 6% of white serial killers murder “outside their race,” whereas 57% of black serial killers are more racially ecumenical in choosing their victims.

Read it.

As medieval scholars prepare for the journey to Kalamazoo for the International Congress on Medieval Studies, we wanted to tell you the story of a medieval scholar who undertook his own trip for learning – a trip that did not go as planned.

Traveling is always a bad idea.

Read it.

It’s a strong contender for the geekiest video ever made: a close-up of a smartphone with line upon line of numbers and symbols scrolling down the screen. But when visitors stop by Nicola Marzari’s office, which overlooks Lake Geneva, he can hardly wait to show it off. “It’s from 2010,” he says, “and this is my cellphone calculating the electronic structure of silicon in real time!”

Even back then, explains Marzari, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, his now-ancient handset took just 40 seconds to carry out quantum-mechanical calculations that once took many hours on a supercomputer — a feat that not only shows how far such computational methods have come in the past decade or so, but also demonstrates their potential for transforming the way materials science is done in the future.

Read it.

How, then, are cities faring in meeting the aspirations of their black residents, judged especially by the ultimate barometer: whether blacks choose to move to these cities, or stay in them? Among major American cities, three main typologies emerge: the high-flying progressive enclaves of the West, the historically large cities of the Northeast and the Midwest, and the fast-growing boomtowns of the South. Though results vary to some extent, the broad trend is clear: the most progressive-minded cities are either seeing a significant exodus of blacks or, never having had substantial black populations, are failing to attract them. These same cities, home to some of the loudest voices alleging conservative insensitivity to blacks, are failing to provide economic environments where blacks can prosper.

How to have your ‘diversity’ and beat it, too.

The Other McCain, nothin’ but net.

OK, let me interrupt this to make an important announcement. I hadn’t been planning to do this, but I now officially endorse Donald Trump.

If David Brooks hates Donald Trump, then it is my duty as a patriotic American to love Donald Trump. And if David Brooks says the fall election will be a “slaughter” for Republicans, this means Trump will win. And now let’s return to the total wrongness of David Brooks….

…

What is so despicable about David Brooks is his condescending attitude, his insuperable conviction that he is better than the rest of us, more intelligent and sensitive — all that “emotional connection and verbal expression,” you see. And as he departs on his tour of the American hinterlands, ripping himself out of the “bourgeois strata” to leap across “the chasms of segmentation,” I hope David Brooks gets what he deserves, namely to be beaten to a bloody pulp by a tattooed redneck.

I know that feeling.

Read it.

As someone who grew up with most of these ‘obsolete’ technologies, they don’t surprise me. What surprises me is to appreciate how much grown adults today don’t have experience with, say, a dial telephone. (And, as someone who has hand-set lead type, I find ‘uppercase’ and ‘lowercase’ more familiar than most.)

Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

Where are racial gaps in school test scores worst? Ironically, where liberals are most dominant.

The new national database of school-district test scores created by education researchers at Stanford and Harvard reveals that the single widest white-black racial gap in American public school districts is in the city most synonymous with leftism since 1964: Berkeley, California.

How badly do blacks lag whites in Berkeley public schools? Berkeley’s white-black gap is 1.60 standard deviations. In other words, the median black student would score at only the 5th percentile if he were white.

Yet, Berkeley is ferociously antiracist. It was the first to have a Black Studies Department at the high school level. In the 2012 election, Berkeley voted for Obama over Romney 90 to 5. Berkeley Unified school-district administrators obsess over any data showing that black students get punished more than other races.

Still, the racial gap is bigger in Berkeley than anywhere else.

I am not making this up.

You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred.

The AntiPlanner has some thoughts.

As noted in today’s Google doodle, today is Jane Jacob’s 100th birthday. No doubt many people will write positive things about her. However, as the Antiplanner has noted before, her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is overrated.

Jacobs made two points, one of them right, and one of them wrong. Her correct point, which is celebrated by many libertarians, is in recognizing that urban planners don’t understand the cities they claim to be designing. The hubris of planners writing 50 year plans when they don’t even know what’s going to happen five years from now would be amusing if the consequences weren’t so expensive.

Jacobs wrong point, which is celebrated by many urban planners today, was in thinking that she did understand cities. She thought she understood her neighborhood, Greenwich Village, New York, but she didn’t understand it very well. She reduced her understanding to four simple “conditions” that she said all cities needed: mixed uses, short blocks, a mixture of old and new buildings, and density of residents and jobs. Her application of these oversimplified conditions to all “great cities” made her just as guilty of hubris as the planners she criticized.

Read it.

In 2007, television underwent a great expansion — beyond the major broadcast networks, beyond televisions and into all kinds of genres — just at the moment the economy shrank, and a fantasy emerged. As real people became poorer and lost their jobs, the ones on TV got richer, and their jobs seemed more beside the point. All that space to tell new stories ended up dedicated to a limited set of jobs and an increasingly homogeneous notion of what work even means.

These days, there are only a handful of workplace taxonomies in scripted television. We’ve got police precincts, crime-and-forensics teams and legal-medical-Beltway dramas. NBC’s “Chicago Med,” “Chicago Fire” and “Chicago P.D.” are a virtual sexy-calendar night. These shows might know what a blue collar is, but they’re class-unconscious: Their characters don’t usually work for the explicit maintenance of their livelihoods. They work for comedy, for suspense, for sport. For the most part, TV cops, lawyers, bureaucrats and doctors inhabit the same kinds of toothsome residences and wear the same exquisitely tailored clothes, all showing off how fabulously art directors and costume designers earn a paycheck. Sometimes we see more of their work than that done by the people who inhabit it. Now on TV, no matter your actual job, almost everybody belongs to the same generic, vaguely upper-class class.

Watch an episode of a NYPD crime drama and tell me where a NYC cop gets the income to live in that sort of an apartment. (Apart of The Pad, of course….)

TV became — and still is — a medium struggling to understand “average,” “ordinary,” “normal.”

Read it.

Ponder the term ‘black market’ — does it say something about the market, or the person who uses the term?

Gates of Vienna is having a fundraiser. Please give generously.

As is often remarked these days, the nations of the West — Europe, Canada, the United States, and Australia — are drifting inexorably into a Soviet-style totalitarianism. Soft totalitarianism, mind you — no gulag necessary just yet — but still Soviet-like in its insistence ideological conformity.

So what artistic style would we associate with the democratic totalitarianism that dominates the post-modern West? What ideology are we obliged to conform to in our visual representations if we, the artists, want to get ahead?

Why, Multiculturalism, of course. What else could it be?

Walk into a post office, or a bank, or a supermarket, or a pharmacy, and all the images you see will display a uniformity of iconography. Images are chosen carefully to include a certain selection of exquisitely represented races and ethnicities. And they’re gender-balanced, too.

Of course.

We have no choice: the future is multicultural.

Such has been decided for us, for our own good, by people who know better than we do. Left to our own devices, we would be racist throwbacks, little Nazis and bigots wearing Ku Klux Klan robes, goose-stepping around the mean streets of our white supremacist dystopia.

But with the help of our cultural betters, we can recover from our atavisms. Through education and diversity training, we can learn to truly celebrate the wonderful inclusive rainbow quilt of cultures!

Then we can buy the world a Coke and live in perfect harmony.

Uh-huh. Yup.

Read it.

Turns out young people actually like driving.

Imagine that.

Lileks.

We went with my wife’s choice, which is fine. She has excellent taste, too, and by deferring to her choice I accumulated husband points, which I can spend on a new 4K TV.

Read it.

The study, published last year by economists at the United Kingdom and Israel doing novel work on archaeological and anthropological evidence, attempts to explain a strange pattern in agricultural practices. The most advanced civilizations all tended to cultivate grain crops, like wheat and barley and corn. Less advanced societies tended to rely on root crops like potatoes, taro and manioc.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in our vegetables, that we are underlings.

Read it.

So I have always thought.

Read it.

Just to remind everybody that this blog is about what I’m interested in, which may not necessarily be what you’re interested in.

Read it.

Over the years I’ve belonged to a variety of different organizations that had the ostensible goal of accomplishing X or Y. At a certain point I would realize that all anyone was doing was exercising their fears and frustrations. Most of all they were trying to stop other people from doing things they didn’t like.

I’m impatient. I want to get on with the business of actually doing something tangible. Waiting for someone else to come along and accomplish your goals for you is a really bad plan. Trying to change government policy is endless. Expecting “the market” to magically solve problems isn’t realistic. So where does that leave any of us?

Writing a blog, maybe? It doesn’t get anything done but you feel better about yourself. Those of us with Native Indolence Syndrome tend to prefer the low-effort option.

Enter the Incremental Development Alliance. Let’s say you have a problem in your neighborhood. It needs a grocery store. It needs bike infrastructure. It needs more public gathering spaces. It’s in decline and needs new investment. It’s in the process of being gentrified and people are being squeezed out. Whatever. Why not be the person who brings the desired change? You. Right now. Go do it.

I doubt seriously that anyplace outside of mainland Europe ‘needs bike infrastructure’; that tends to be the compelling fetish of Hipster Whiteopias like Portland and Seattle and San Francisco. Nor do I see any compelling nned for ‘more public gathering spaces’ in a world where staring down at your cellphone is what most people below the age of 60 spend their day doing. And the innate contradiction between ‘in decline and needs new investment’ and ‘being gentrified and people are being squeezed out’ suggests that the author is either incredibly confused or writing for the incredibly confused. I’m not sure I want a confused person and his confused audience to ‘bring the desired change’; such people cause more problems than they solve.

Easier said than done, right? This isn’t easy stuff. There are zoning regulations, building codes, financing obstacles, bureaucratic landmines… The red tape is endless.

Said as if ‘red tape’ falls from the heavens on the just and unjust alike — which it does, of course, but unlike Global Warming it has an easily detectable cause. RED TAPE IS CAUSED BY GOVERNMENT. I’ll repeat that. RED TAPE IS CAUSED BY GOVERNMENT. Those who want to ‘bring the desired change’ need to GET THE GOVERNMENT OFF PEOPLE’S BACKS.

Read it.

And he did it without any government help. Isn’t that amazing.

Cooking something “from scratch” can mean different things to different people. For some it means heading to the farmers market for some fresh ingredients. For others it means skipping the frozen goods section. But for Andy George, host of the show How to Make Everything, it means spending six months and $1,500 growing a garden, turning ocean water into salt, making cheese, and killing a chicken all so he can take a bite of a sandwich truly made from scratch.

Now, for all the work that went into crafting this chicken sandwich, you’d expect it to be the best thing George has ever eaten. You’d expect it to be a sandwich that would inspire future George to spend every Thanksgiving telling his patient family about the time he had a real sandwich. You’d expect it to be so good that he would consider spending six months and $1,500 to make another one. But it isn’t any of those things.

“It’s not bad,” George said. “That’s about it. It’s not bad. Six months of my life for not bad. Yeah.”

Read it.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to. Raise the cost of labor, and the money is going to come from somewhere.

Vanity Fair, a Voice of the Crust, allows some truth to seep out.

Yesterday’s primary handed victories to Trump and Clinton, and, if Michael Lind is right, Trumpism and Clintonism are America’s future. Lind’s point, which he made last Sunday in The New York Times, is that Trumpism—friendly to entitlements, unfriendly to expanded trade and high immigration—will be the platform of the Republican Party in the years going forward. Clintonism—friendly both to business and to social and racial liberalism—will cobble together numerous interest groups and ditch the white working class. Which might be fair enough, but Lind didn’t mention rich people. Where will they go?

The Democratic Party has not been a total slouch, offering policies friendly to health-care executives, entertainment moguls, and tech titans. In fact, financial support for Democrats among the 1 percent of the 1 percent has risen dramatically, more than trebling since 1980. Traditionally, though, the Republican Party has been seen as the better friend to the wealthy, offering lower taxes, fewer business regulations, generous defense contracts, increased global trade, high immigration, and resistance to organized labor. It’s been the buddy of homebuilders, oil barons, defense contractors, and other influential business leaders.

…

In a world of Trumpism and Clintonism, Democrats would become the party of globalist-minded elites, both economic and cultural, while Republicans would become the party of the working class. Democrats would win backing from those who support expanded trade and immigration, while Republicans would win the support of those who prefer less of both. Erstwhile neocons would go over to Democrats (as they are already promising to do), while doves and isolationists would stick with Republicans. Democrats would remain culturally liberal, while Republicans would remain culturally conservative.

Read it.

And government regulation, and pandering politicians, and eco-Nazis, and fearful special snowflakes, and….