Read it.

I’m convinced.

Read it.

A Rutgers University social science professor set out to research how stereotypes are inaccurate so he could proclaim and promote that to the world with hard scientific data – but eventually made a startling discovery: most stereotypes are accurate.

Scholarly claims of “stereotype inaccuracy” are baseless, Dr. Lee Jussim told The College Fix in an interview.

“When I first began my research, I had assumed all those social scientists declaring stereotypes to be inaccurate were right, so I wanted to know the basis for those claims,” he said. “I would track down the source in an attempt to get the evidence. And slowly, over many years, I made a startling discovery – claims of stereotype inaccuracy were based on nothing.”

In other words, scholars who claim stereotype inaccuracy do not offer citations to a source providing the evidence, or never provide scientific support for their claims.

“As I read more of the literature on stereotypes, I discovered this pattern was pervasive,” Jussim told The Fix. “Every article or book that declared stereotypes to be inaccurate either similarly cited no source, or ended in an identical dead end via a slightly different route.”

Stereotypes, like clichés, are based on experience, and persist because they are confirmed by experience.

Lion of the Blogosphere reveals some Inconvenient Truth.

I believe that the BORINGNESS factor plays a very important role. Girls find computer programming BORING. They also find math really boring, which could explain in part why they don’t do as well on the math SAT. This is not to say that there aren’t biological differences between the sexes, but is it that girls are biologically inclinded to do poorly at math (relative to boys), or are they biologically inclined to find math boring, which in turns demotivates them from studying and learning the material, which causes the lower math SAT scores? I say that it’s probably a little of both. And the BORING factor can run in the other direction, because people are naturally less interested in things they are bad at.

…

We don’t live in a society where young people are normally told that they should persevere with boring material because it would lead to a higher paying, but boring, career. Young people are more often told the opposite. “Follow your passion.” “Do what you love and the money will follow.” You are ten times more likely to hear a high school commencement speaker say something like that rather than “study something BORING that pays well.” But in India, the opposite is true. Everyone in India wants to learn IT, not because they love it or have passion for it, but because they see it as a ticket for moving to America and getting a job here. (And I should add that American corporations seem happy to punch a lot of Indian tickets.)

Read it.

It’s zombie time at campaign Hillary. Behold the dead men walking! It was with strangely slow, narcotized numbness that the candidate and her phalanx of minions and mouthpieces responded to last week’s punishing report by the State Department’s Inspector General about her email security lapses. Do they truly believe, in the rosy alternate universe of Hillaryland, that they can lie their way out of this? Of course, they’re relying as usual on the increasingly restive mainstream media to do their dirty work for them. If it were a Republican in the crosshairs, Hillary’s shocking refusal to meet with the Inspector General (who interviewed all four of the other living Secretaries of State of the past two decades) would have been the lead item flagged in screaming headlines from coast to coast. Let’s face it—the genuinely innocent do not do pretzel twists like this to cover their asses.

Hillary is so dislikeable that even Voice of the Crust Salon.com is noticing.

Read it.

Recently, Rep. Martha McSally suggested that the Air Force conduct a fly-off between the F-35 and the A-10 to see which did better at providing Close Air Support (CAS). But effective CAS is about more than just the capabilities of the aircraft involved. It requires an Air Force community with intimate knowledge of the Army’s maneuver tactics, mindset and intent.

The A-10 community has this knowledge. But that understanding will be lost if and when the Air Force retires the A-10 weapons system—unless its leadership takes a different course of action than the one currently planned.

The Air Force is led by fighter jocks who really don’t care about Close Air Support. This is why the Army needs an Army Air Corps, flying A-10s or equivalent, so that it can be integrated with other land-centric operations, just as the Navy has its own air support branch.

Quite frankly, I don’t see why the Air Force needs to be a separate service at all, but that’s an argument for another day.

Steve Sailer looks at Trump.

The core of the Trump Phenomenon is the question of freedom of expression.

Donald Trump has come to be seen by both his enemies and his supporters as the living embodiment of a potential revival of the American tradition of free speech after the Obama ice age of political correctness. Trump’s backers tend to believe they have more to gain from frank, outspoken debate (whether in pragmatic advantages or simply in entertainment value), while his opponents assume that they, personally, have more to lose from a return to a freer market for ideas.

This is one of those rare cases in politics where both sides may be right.

Read it.

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You’ve seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You’ve heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

Watch it.

Read it.

It’s now official. Burlington College is closed, largely due to Jane Sanders, wife of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

More here: How Bernie Sanders’ Wife Destroyed Burlington College

Read it.

The idea that these elite fighters can adapt solely by addressing emotional trauma, some experts said, is badly misplaced. Their primary difficulty is not necessarily one of healing emotional wounds; they thrived in combat. It is rather a matter of unlearning the very skills that have kept them alive: unceasing vigilance; snap decision making; intolerance for carelessness; the urge to act fast and decisively.

“I don’t even leave my house much,” said Jeff Ewert, who served with the Marines in Iraq and now lives in Utah. “I’m scared not because I’m an über-killer or anything. I just minimize my exposure because I know how easy it is to cross that line, to act without thinking.”

You will note that the Big Money, especailly from the Other Left Coast, is going to Hillary.

But I thought that the Republicans were the Party of the Rich [tm]?

David Brooks writes like a conservative about once a year just to show he knows how.

The argument against this sort of pure moral heroism is that fanaticism in the relief of suffering is still a form of fanaticism. It makes reciprocal relationships difficult, because one is always giving, never receiving. It can lead to a draconian asceticism that almost seems to invite unnecessary suffering.

Love, by its nature, should be strongest when it is personal and intimate. To make love universal, to give no priority to the near over the far, is to denude love of its texture and warmth. It is really a way of avoiding love because you make yourself invulnerable.

And then, of course, he has to walk it back.

Yet I don’t want to let us off the hook. There’s a continuum of moral radicalism. Most of us are too far on the comfortable end and too far from the altruistic one. It could be that you or I will only really feel fulfilled after a daring and concrete leap in the direction of moral radicalism.

Victor Davis Hanson lays it out.

If Donald Trump manages to curb most of his more outrageous outbursts by November, most Republicans who would have preferred that he did not receive the nomination will probably hold their noses and vote for him.

How could that be when a profane Trump has boasted that he would limit Muslim immigration into the United States, talked cavalierly about torturing terrorist suspects and executing their relatives, promised to deport all eleven-million Mexican nationals who are residing illegally in the U.S., and threatened a trade war with China by slapping steep tariffs on their imports?

A number of reasons come to mind.

John C. Wright lays it out.

I am not a Trump fan, but I am a fan of his fans. I trust the common sense of the common man, and the common man is sick of being lied to, and about.

And that pretty much sums up my opinion as well.

We are all, Republican or not, all of us heartily and deeply sick of Leftwing racists calling us racist because we are antiracists, we who want a colorblind society where a man is judged on the content of his character, not the color of his skin.

We are all of us heartily and deeply sick of Leftwing baby-killers protesting, mocking, feminizing and dismantling our military, while calling our soldiers and heroes baby-killers.

We are all of us of us heartily and deeply sick of Leftwing fruit baskets spending our grandchildren into unrecoverable debt, and then lying about how sound the economy is. You morons have brought us to the point where it will take a minor miracle to prevent the Yuan from becoming the default currency of the international banking system, and a major miracle to prevent a second Great Depression.

And that Depression happened to grown ups, who worked their way out of debt by hard work. The coming Depression will happen to lazy and self-absorbed children, degenerates and weaklings who hate the free market and do not understand how ‘work’ works. They will riot if not feed bread and circuses from Caesar’s hand. Every city will be Detroit, and every township Ferguson.

And that about says everything that needs to be said.

Read it.

The importance of HSAs is why Congress should pass H.R. 5324 and S. 2980, the Health Savings Account Expansion Act of 2016, legislation introduced this week by Congressman Dave Brat (R-Va.) and Senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). This legislation contains a number of important reforms that will make HSAs even better.

First, the legislation more than doubles HSA contribution limits. Current HSA contribution limits are $3,350 for a single filer and $6,750 for a joint filer, and this legislation increases that to $9,000 for single filer and $18,000 for joint filers per year.

Second, the HSA expansion act lifts Obamacare restrictions on over the counter purchases and penalties placed on certain withdrawals.

Third, the bill allows HSA funds to be used to pay premiums and direct primary care expenses.

Lastly, superfluous regulatory requirements would be streamlined with the high deductible health plan mandate eliminated.

Read it.

News reports often make it seem like gerrymandering, and redistricting in general, as being a simple matter of politicians being evil to a greater or lesser extent, when it’s actually much more interesting that. Similarly, it’s something that mathematicians and computer scientists often see and think is trivial – and there are actually a lot of interesting problems in gerrymandering to which math and CS can be applied that definitely aren’t trivial, which I’m always excited to share.

Watch it.

… we could all go home early.

John C Wright ponders the Potter milieu.

Asking on a questionnaire whether one is open to diversity is like asking whether one likes raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. And the caricature of conservatives as cretins who applaud deadly force and torture, intolerance and cruelty, is as much of a world make-believe as Voldemort himself.

Finding that no one in real life believes what bigoted leftists pretend conservatives believe does not mean most people lean left: it means leftists are bigots.

Well, yeah.

For better or worse, reality is conservative. Because of this, drama in any form tends to be conservative: readers still enjoy reading love stories and heroic adventures. Hence a book like Harry Potter, which is based on archetypes as old as cave paintings — wise men with long gray beards, evil serpents, trusted comrades, the unloved orphan (who, like Hercules or Moses, is chosen by fate to slay monsters or evil lords and save his people) — is innately conservative.

Read it.

‘Introduces’? One of my fondest memories of Yale was stepping out of the shower spring term of my freshman year in Byers Hall and finding a young lady wrapped in a towel brushing her teeth at one of the sinks. This was 1975.

Read it.

It’s surprising that medieval people got anything done, so politically incorrect were their diets.

Read it.

Looks like the ‘Democrat coalition’ of interest groups is dissolving.

Blue-collar union leaders—already furious over the Obama administration’s scuttling of the Keystone XL pipeline and Hillary Clinton’s vow to shut down the coal industry—took another hit earlier this month, when the Democratic Party announced the formation of For Our Future PAC, a voter-turnout initiative in partnership with billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, who has long waged war against projects that the trade and construction unions hoped would create jobs. The New York Times portrayed the reaction to Steyer’s involvement in the new $50 million super PAC as a “rift between labor and environmentalists” within the Democratic Party, but that’s nothing new: trade unions and environmentalists have long been at odds. The real news was that much of the rest of the labor movement—led by public-sector unions—had agreed to work with Steyer, highlighting the ever-widening divide between blue-collar labor groups and their public-union counterparts. That split has already driven some trade unions into the arms of Republican candidates, and may account for some of the support Donald Trump gets in polls from working-class voters.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

That’s me. I am a Thought Leader. (Minus the coffee, which I can’t stand.)

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.