Read it.

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

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Alexis de Tocqueville was a more prophetic observer of American democracy than even his most ardent admirers appreciate. True, readers have seen clearly what makes his account of American exceptionalism so luminously accurate, and they have grasped the profundity of his critique of American democracy’s shortcomings. What they have missed is his startling clairvoyance about how democracy in America could evolve into what he called “democratic despotism.” That transformation has been in process for decades now, and reversing it is the principal political challenge of our own moment in history. It is implicitly, and should be explicitly, at the center of our upcoming presidential election.

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International team reports CO2 fertilization prompted plants and trees to sprout extra green leaves equivalent in area to two times the continental USA, or nearly 4.4 billion General Shermans (largest giant Sequoia tree).

Well. How about that.

Kyrie

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A steady push toward mechanization in Maine’s blueberry industry is reducing the number of migrant farmers who travel to the state to rake the crop, which is vitally important to the state’s economy, state officials and industry leaders said. Maine’s blueberry harvest attracted more than 5,000 migrant farmers 10 years ago and it’s down to about 1,500 today, said David Yarborough, a University of Maine professor of horticulture.

I doubt that the machines are making $15 an hour.

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Who’s Trump gonna call?

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“Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” says an ancient legal nostrum.

The reason for it is simple enough: If ignorance could excuse any crime, then ignorance might excuse every crime. Rather than impose on the legal system the obligation to prove a defendant’s knowledge of the law — with the defendant’s incentive running in the opposite direction, toward ignorance of the law — the legal system assigns to itself no obligation in this regard. Upon which defendants find that they have an enormous incentive to know what the law is and to comport themselves accordingly.

Sounds great, but no — this is a rationalization made up after the fact. The real reason the ‘ancient legal nostrum’ came about is that it originated in a time where ‘the law’ was simply what every rational person would or wouldn’t do; the whole concept of ‘the common law’ is of a ‘law’ to which everyone is subject because it just made ‘common’ sense. Don’t kill or maim people, don’t rape, don’t burn down people’s houses, don’t steal their stuff — all of these were things that every sensible person would understand were ‘no-no’s. It was only later, when ‘law’ became a thing of legislatures rather than ordinary life that this self-serving statist ‘nostrum’ became popular. Indeed, that interpretation became so popular (especially with those charged with enforcing such ‘laws’) that people (including lawyers) are scarcely aware that there is any alternative.

Bluebird of Bitterness tells the tale.

On Monday, a florist went to a barbershop for a haircut. But when he tried to pay the barber, the barber said, “I can’t accept money from you. I’m doing community service this week.”

When the barber went to open his shop on Tuesday, he found a thank-you card and a dozen roses waiting for him at the door.

Later that day, a baker came in for a haircut, and when he tried to pay the barber, the barber again said, “I can’t accept money from you. I’m doing community service this week.”

On Wednesday morning when the barber went to open his shop, he found a thank-you card and a dozen cupcakes waiting for him at the door.

Later that day, an English professor came in for a haircut, and when he tried to pay the barber, the barber again said, “I can’t accept money from you. I’m doing community service this week.”

On Thursday morning when the barber went to open his shop, he found a thank-you card and a dozen books waiting for him.

Later that day, a congressman came in for a haircut, and when he tried to pay the barber, the barber again said, “I can’t accept money from you. I’m doing community service this week.”

On Friday morning when the barber went to open his shop, there were a dozen congressmen lined up waiting for a free haircut.

Read it.

Ira Einhorn was on stage hosting the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970. Seven years later, police raided his closet and found the “composted” body of his ex-girlfriend inside a trunk.

Hey, man, it’s like organic.

(Is it just me, or does he look like a Bernie Sanders supporter?)

Andrew Grimson has an interesting take on the subject.

The monarchy is one of the greatest, though least observed, checks on arbitrary power. It occupies the space a dictator would need to occupy.

Because it is unthinkable in Britain to push the monarch aside, tyranny itself becomes unthinkable. In countries where for understandable reasons the monarchy was overthrown – France in 1789, Russia in 1917, Germany in 1918 – tyranny was not unthinkable.

…

The US is a disguised monarchy. The president promises to defend the people against the scoundrels in Washington, and having failed to do so, is replaced by someone else who promises to do the same thing.

…

In modern times, our monarchs have served the public by going above politics, and becoming instead a kind of hereditary umpire.

The Queen plays this role with exceptional and unwearying conscientiousness. She does not have to declare any Prime Minister out: the public elect MPs who do that for her.

But she stops the politicians, few if any of whom remain popular for long, from getting above themselves, and obliges even a convinced republican such as Jeremy Corbyn to play by the rules.

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I wouldn’t have noticed the difference if it weren’t for my affection for unusual pens, which brought me to my first good fountain pen. A lifetime writing with the ballpoint and minor variations on the concept (gel pens, rollerballs) left me unprepared for how completely different a fountain pen would feel. Its thin ink immediately leaves a mark on paper with even the slightest, pressure-free touch to the surface. My writing suddenly grew extra lines, appearing between what used to be separate pen strokes. My hand, trained by the ballpoint, expected that lessening the pressure from the pen was enough to stop writing, but I found I had to lift it clear off the paper entirely. Once I started to adjust to this change, however, it felt like a godsend; a less-firm press on the page also meant less strain on my hand.

Modern roller-ball and gel pens work the same way as fountain pens (I was raised with fountain pens and still use them on occasion); don’t know what this person is on about.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all. Think of it as evolution in action.

Steve Sailer peeks behind the curtain.

With San Francisco being one of the epicenters of the environmental movement of the past half century, local homeowners are adept at using progressive verbiage for justifying keeping San Francisco in stasis. As a conservative, I rather admire the cleverness with which liberals have contrived to keep San Francisco physically looking much like it did in the past.

That’s why I always say that soi-disant ‘progressives’ ought to be called regressives instead.

Of course, most of the people denouncing other people for being white and wanting to live in San Francisco are white San Franciscans themselves.

Indeed, that’s the case almost everywhere.

Paradoxically, under its current antidevelopment ideology, San Francisco—like Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn, and unlike almost all the rest of the country—is becoming more white. In 1990, young people in San Francisco were only 22 percent white, but by 2014 they were up to 33 percent white. And the future looks even whiter.

The dirty little secret of these hipster utopias.

In fact, this is a broad pattern. We see exactly the same incentives at work with elite colleges. While Arizona State and Florida International have added capacity for tens of thousands of additional undergraduates, Stanford, Harvard, and Yale have barely added any undergrads, even as demand soars. Stanford, for example, kept its class size virtually unchanged for over three decades despite having a 13-square-mile campus, the majority of it undeveloped open land.

To quote W. S. Gilbert, ‘When everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody.’

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(Who better to track that particular spoor than the New York Times?)

Collectively, these microyuppies are just as strong in their ranks as their progenitors, if not more so. Three decades ago, the yuppie was viewed as a self-interested alien invader in an America that had experienced a solid 20 years of radical activism and meaningful progress in civil rights and women’s liberation. A generation and a half later, we have so deeply internalized the values of the yuppie that we have ceased to notice when one is in our midst — or when we have become one ourselves.

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I suspect pre-natal influence, but you never know.

Steven Hayward scratches his head.

Historians and political theorists have long puzzled over how to resolve the glaring contradiction of Progressive ideology—namely, that Progressive “reform” emphasizes greater “democracy,” and championed innovations like the direct election of Senators, the initiative and referendum, etc. Give the people what they want! Up with democracy! At the same time, Progressives also advanced the theory of government administration deliberately remote from politics and popular accountability—the Administrative State staffed by elite “experts.” We can’t have those grubby people telling the government what to do! Down with democracy!

It is hard to make out, but there is a deeper dialectic at work in the Progressive mind, not unlike that more famous dialectic conjured up by that hairy German fellow. The purpose of the Administrative State—best understood with Saint-Simon’s famous single sentence description about how “the government of men is replaced by the administration of things”—is to create a new people.

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Mountain lions and ants are among the many species great and small figuring out clever ways to live among people.

That’s what gun control laws get you….

Lileks.

There are two kinds of people when it comes to disaster preparedness.

1) I have a generator, food for a month, water purification tablets, candles, solar-powered radios, flint, a full medical kit and classic board games; we will sit in our house playing Clue until order is restored.

2) I have a baseball bat and a map to the first guy’s house.

Read it.

Would that we could do the same.

The correct way to handle this is that when ‘none of the above’ wins an election, the existing candidates are barred from running again and the election is repeated. Of course, no real-world political unit would actually do that. Still, it’s a nice dream.

If 10% Is Good Enough For Jesus

Read it.

It has been widely observed that Hillary Clinton is having to repudiate the policy legacy of her husband’s tenure in the White House in the 1990s, which is extremely telling about how far down in the deep end Democrats are today. After all, Bill Clinton’s tenure coincided with robust economic growth, a balanced budget, and expansion of free trade. It also saw two of the greatest social policy achievements of the postwar era—a radical reduction in the welfare rolls, and the beginning of a sharp drop in the crime rate. Ah, yes—liberals don’t like those last two things. And they don’t much like the balanced budget either—and they really hate free trade. Remember that it was near the end of Bill Clinton’s tenure that saw the famous “Battle in Seattle” of leftist protesters against the World Trade Organization, which is ironic, since the Left usually likes any organization that has “World” in the title. Despite this, and Clinton’s shameful personal life, he left office in 2001 with high public approval ratings.

Read it.

No, they’re not talking about politicians, except incidentally.

Beyond the morally reprehensible side of criminals’ work, some business gurus say organised crime syndicates, computer hackers, pirates and others operating outside the law could teach legitimate corporations a thing or two about how to hustle and respond to rapid change.

Well, maybe Obama.

While traditional businesses focus on rules they have to follow, criminals look to circumvent them. “For criminals, the sky is the limit and that creates the opportunity to think much, much bigger.”

That certainly sounds like Obama and the Constitution.

While Devin Liddell, who heads brand strategy for Seattle-based design consultancy, Teague, condemns the violence and other illegal activities he became curious as to how criminal groups endure.

I ask myself the same question about Planned Parenthood.

Some cartels stay in business despite multiple efforts by law enforcement on both sides of the US border and millions of dollars from international agencies to shut them down. Liddell genuinely believes there’s a lesson in longevity here.

Perhaps it’s because they provide something that people want in spite of ruling-class nannying.

One strategy he underlined was how the bad guys respond to change. In order to bypass the border between Mexico and the US, for example, the Sinaloa cartel went to great lengths. It built a vast underground tunnel, hired family members as border agents and even used a catapult to circumvent a high-tech fence.

Like Hamas in Gaza. A perfect example.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Joe Rosenberg takes Bernie to the woodshed.

Bernie Sanders should ask people like me—refugees from collectivist paradises—about income inequality.

Oh, I don’t think that will ever happen. Bernie doesn’t like to ask; he likes to tell.

It takes an immigrant like me to parse the poison that Bernie Sanders is peddling to the naive youth of this country. It takes someone who has experienced socialism’s failures firsthand—as I did, initially as a small child, later as a young adult—to see why Sen. Sanders is succeeding: We elders, immigrants and native-born alike, have failed to teach our children and grandchildren about the economic history and false promises of the myriad forms of socialism that infest our world.

Very true.

As an example of kibbutz ideology: Does it make sense for a person running the washing machines in the laundry to be receiving exactly the same pay and living benefits as someone who might be the community doctor after going to medical school? That may sound like an extreme example, but the same principles apply throughout the economic structure of a collectivist economy. Unlike Chinese or Russian collectivism, Israel’s was voluntary—but insane nonetheless.

You could never get me into an arrangement like that. The whole ‘voluntary collectivism’ was tried by innumerable hippies in my generation, and it all invariably came crashing down.

My experience is far from unique. I have many colleagues who left supposed paradises, socialist countries like China, Russia and Greece, and now strive to succeed on Wall Street. They’re seeking not a handout but a piece of the American Dream, just as I did. When I entered the business Wall Street was a far clubbier place than today. It has increasingly become a meritocracy open to people of every background.

Not to listen to Bernie and Hillary it isn’t.

Ammo Grrrll has some thoughts.

ONE: People do not value things that are free. We have a strong cultural belief that “what you pay is what it’s worth.” I offer as just one case in point, how free entertainers are treated. I offer the example with sadness and vast experience. Trust me when I tell you that all entertainers could fill their calendars every day with nothing but free gigs. People who would never dream of approaching a carpenter or a dermatologist and asking them to work for free think nothing of hounding an entertainer to work free for every charity, disease, battered women’s shelter and political candidate. I mean, these are all worthwhile causes, are you some kind of heartless profiteer, Mr. Musician, Ms. Comic?

…

TWO: Nothing should be free, but for sure not higher education. The students have no skin in the game; the colleges have no skin in the game; and the taxpayers who are skinned alive have no say at all. If free education were valued, then all students would graduate high school and community college would not be necessary as a kind of do-over high school.

Read the whole thing.

Read it.

In a paper published today in Molecular Ecology researchers announced that they found genetic differences between the ancestors and descendants of two separate populations of field mustard both of which evolved during the California drought between 1997 and 2004 to flowers earlier.

But of course ‘climate change’ will mean massive crop failures and WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE. Uh, no. Mother Nature is smarter than most eco-Nazis.

Read it.

Freedom works every time it’s tried.

In the 1980s, the United States had two major hubs of technology innovation. Everyone knows about Silicon Valley, but the East Coast had a “Silicon Valley” of its own, located along Route 128 in the suburbs of Boston. When Gov. Michael Dukakis touted the “Massachusetts Miracle” in his 1988 presidential campaign, he was largely talking about Boston’s high-tech boom.

Unfortunately, the Massachusetts Miracle didn’t last. During the 1990s, Silicon Valley boomed while Route 128 companies faltered. And researchers have pointed to a surprising culprit: Massachusetts law strictly enforces agreements that prohibit employees from taking jobs at competing companies. In contrast, California law banned these restrictions, making it easier for Silicon Valley startups to form and to recruit talent from larger companies.

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While it’s true that liberalism is destroying America, it is also true that most liberals are not doing it intentionally.

Instead, they do what they do out of fear. Liberals are the casualties of social conditioning which inspires them to fear just about everything. That’s why they fear free speech, warm winters, competition, healthy debate, individualism, the Bible, guns, big sodas, freedom, capitalism, the U.S. Constitution, salt, manly men, a strong military, and so on. These irrational fears drive liberals to attempt to control their environment by creating safe spaces and collective utopias which always fail.

At the heart of liberalism is a quest for control over people’s lives and the insistence that a monstrous, micro-managing government offering minimal personal freedom is the only way to achieve fairness. If Americans understood how enslaved they are, they’d run the other way, but, “ignorance is bliss,” as the saying goes.

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

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Well, you know, Australia. Priorities are priorities.

Speaking truth to stupidity.

The money for an increased minimum wage has got to come from somewhere, and there are only three places from which it can come: investors, in the form of lower profits; customers, in the form of higher prices; or workers, in the form of fewer jobs. Which group pays for the minimum wage hike depends on how competitive the marketplace is.

If competition for investment funds is intense, as is often the case, businesses will resist cutting investors’ profits. If competition for customers is fierce, as is nearly always the case, businesses will do almost anything not to raise prices. This leaves only the workers. There are always exceptions, but historically, firms have financed increases in the minimum wage by laying off minimum wage workers.

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Although the government disagrees, keeping it a ‘controlled substance’. One wonders sometimes who the government things they work for; they certainly don’t give any evidence of thinking that they work for the people who elected them.

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Tell the truth — how many errors can your brain correct with a splitting headache? I mean, really.

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The most famous violin in the world has never been heard. What’s more, it gained its reputation by being invisible. “The Messiah” sits in its glass display case just outside the Print Room of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford. Measuring just less than 23 inches, with a 133/16- inch body, the famous fiddle soon grew gargantuan in stature not because of its sound but because of its story. In fact, the conundrum is that nobody knows how the old fiddle actually sounds. A big part of its mystique lies in the fact that, as the only Stradivari in existence still preserved in pristine condition, it has virtually never been played!

The Messiah is not unlike clockmaker John Harrison’s H-4, the last of the four famous clocks that reside in the Old Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England, in the place where east meets west on the prime meridian—zero degrees longitude. All four Harrison clocks—H-1, H-2, H-3, and H-4—keep accurate time and so made the determination of longitude possible. But H-4 is the only celebrated clock of the four that never runs. As Dava Sobel explains in Longitude: “It could run, if curators would allow it to, but they demur, on the grounds that H-4 enjoys something of the status of a sacred relic or a priceless work of art that must be preserved for posterity. To run it would be to ruin it.”

Read it.

The term “cuckoldry” isn’t strictly confined to duplicitous women duping husbands/boyfriends into believing the kid is theirs when it’s some other guy’s. Consider the marked increase in single motherhood since the Sexual Revolution; the statistic for abortion, the declining marriage rate and the fact that now, in westernized society, and the majority of births (close to 60%) are born to unwed mothers.

Now consider the social imperatives and zeitgeist of the past 70 years that promote women’s Hypergamous choices to the point that every woman’s sexual strategy and breeding choices are legislatively mandated to be supported. Men are mandated to support women’s breeding imperatives both directly and indirectly. Is that not the end purpose of cuckoldry?

Cuckoldry is implicative of far more than this woman’s narrow definition. And it’s narrow because women like Newitz are selling a salve to misdirect men in a larger society from considering that their cuckolding is really by and of their own volition. This is because men have been conditioned over the course of successive generations to think they are some kind of hero for ‘saving’ a woman from her own breeding decisions by directly or indirectly forgiving indiscretions and supporting and raising a child he didn’t father.

Just in case you thought Donald Trumpe was the worst thing you had to think about.

Attempting to calculate how much of the taxes you pay goes to support women whose ‘baby daddies’ are in the slammer is left as an exercise (in despair) for the reader.

Read it.

By now, virtually everyone has heard that “97% of scientists agree: Climate change is real, manmade and dangerous.” Even if you weren’t one of his 31 million followers who received this tweet from President Obama, you most assuredly have seen it repeated everywhere as scientific fact.

The correct representation is “yes,” “some,” and “no.” Yes, climate change is real. There has never been a period in Earth’s history when the climate has not changed somewhere, in one way or another.

Song of the Crust.

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They’ve managed to sequence a bit of autosomal DNA from the Atapuerca skeletons, about 430,000 years old, confirming that they are on the Neanderthal branch.

Among other things, this supports the slow mutation rate, one compatible with what we see in modern family trios, but also with the fossil record.

This means that the Pygmies, and probably the Bushmen also, split off from the rest of the human race about 300,000 years ago. Call them Paleoafricans.

…

This means that language is older than some had thought, a good deal older. It also means that people with language are quite capable of going a quarter of a million years without generating much technological advance – without developing the ability to push aside archaic humans, for example. Of course, people with Williams syndrome have language, and you can’t send them into the kitchen and rely on them to bring back a fork. Is the sophistication of Bushman language – this means the concepts they can and do convey, not the complexity of the grammar – comparable with that of other populations? I don’t know. As far as I can see, one of the major goals of modern anthropology is to make sure that nobody knows. Or that they know things that aren’t so.

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Have you ever wondered if you are a progressive? I’ve come up with a two-part test. If you believe in both of the following propositions, then you qualify as a American progressive, circa 2016:

Proposition #1: Free trade with low wage countries like Mexico steals lots of jobs from American workers. There is no way a Mexican-American worker paid $7.25/hour in El Paso can compete with an actual Mexican worker making $3.50/hour in Cuidad Juarez. NAFTA led to a giant sucking sound of jobs flowing south across the Rio Grande.

Proposition #2: Free trade between Texas and California does not cost jobs. A Mexican-American worker making $15 hour in Fresno can easily compete with a Mexican-American worker making $7.25/hour in El Paso, because there are studies “proving” that lower minimum wages in one state do not steal jobs from neighboring states.

In other words, trade steals jobs when it occurs across international boundaries, but not when it occurs across domestic boundaries.

Sarah Hoyt lays it down.

I got obsessed with politics early by being exposed to the fact that while I might want to ignore politics, politics doesn’t ignore me, and if you give people with power their head soon enough they’re intruding into your innocent pleasures: cancelling ballet classes; mandating you spend whole days painting murals; decreeing that your grade be by vote of the class… that type of nonsense.  And worse.

So I follow politics like a guard dog following an intruder.  But most people don’t.  Even my husband has no clue what I’m exercised about at any given time.  (Weirdly younger son inherited mom’s issue and he’ll roam around the house periodically going “Marshall smash” for reasons his father can’t fathom, relating to names he can’t recognize.)

Read it.

It’s right next to ‘affordable housing’.

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(And public sector unions finally find a Republican they like, and Republicans finally find some government employees they want more of). The New York Times has a pretty amusing editorial about the decision by the union representing 16,500 federal border patrol agents to endorse presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Read it.

As is common in much of Africa, the public education system is plagued by graft, poor quality and truancy on the part of both the students and teachers. The democratically-elected government of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a former World Bank official, has decided to try something new—outsourcing primary education to a private, for-profit firm, with student fees paid for by the taxpayer.

The horror.

Still, consider the apoplectic reaction of Kinshore Singh, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on education, who claimed Liberia was flirting with a “gross violation” of its obligation to educate children, and that Liberia’s plan was “devoid of any legal or moral justification.”

Third World statists are not really the go-to-guys for evaluating what ought to be public and what ought to be private. It’s not as if the U.N. has ever succeeded at anything it has tried, other than wasting other people’s money.

Dan Nosowitz is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Not long ago, after I accidentally kicked the radiator next to my bed and brutally stubbed my toe, I looked down. I saw ridiculous mutant-finger-like protuberances coming out of my foot, part of them covered with useless nails that seem to need clipping much more often as I get older. “What is the point of these garbage toes?,” I wondered. They’re lousy at grabbing things, they break easily, and they look, in a pure aesthetic sense, weird.

Watch it.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Read it.

I’d rather risk bowel cancer than have to drink coffee every day. Just sayin’.