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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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’.

Read it.

(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’.

Steve Sailer hits Broadway.

Lin-Manuel Miranda is the token Well-Read, Pro-Social, Pro-Wall Street Minority who turned a giant biography by Ron Chernow into a cool hip-hop musical about how the prototypical financier New Yorker Founding Father was actually, when you squint just right, Diverse. Thus Hamilton is beloved by past and present Secretaries of the Treasury, such as Lew, Geithner, and Paulson.

How hip and trendy. How well this Servant of the Crust has rewarded his masters.

But now Hamilton comes along and makes clear that the dominant mindset in New York today is plutocratic, aristocratic, elitist, and anti-democratic. The only thing worrisome about Hamilton to 21st Century New Yorkers is not his reactionary ideology, but his whiteness.

So, by imagining (the extremely Scottish-looking) Hamilton as nonwhite, he becomes a non-controversial Hero For Our Time, the epitome of the High-Low Squeeze Play on the Middle.

Yes indeed. Who’s next? Goebbels?

Read it.

We can only hope.

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This article is not intended to answer the question about the candidate’s libertarian bona fides one way or another. Rather, it is to point out, amid the distracting hullabaloo of a historically weird presidential campaign, that Bernie Sanders has at least 10 awful policy ideas that would materially damage the country if enacted.

Read it.

Like most technology, Amazon Echo carries with it a number of fascinating halachic questions. What are the prohibitions associated with its use on Shabbos? If one avoids using the name “Alexa” in conversation, may one leave it plugged in on Shabbos? Is there any circumstance in which it may be used? When the word Alexa is used, the Echo awakens and a blue light circles around at the top of the device.

Thomas Frank in the Huffington Post, which shows that even a blind pig can find an acorn now and then.

When you press Democrats on their uninspiring deeds — their lousy free trade deals, for example, or their flaccid response to Wall Street misbehavior — when you press them on any of these things, they automatically reply that this is the best anyone could have done. After all, they had to deal with those awful Republicans, and those awful Republicans wouldn’t let the really good stuff get through. They filibustered in the Senate. They gerrymandered the congressional districts. And besides, change takes a long time. Surely you don’t think the tepid-to-lukewarm things Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have done in Washington really represent the fiery Democratic soul.

So let’s go to a place that does. Let’s choose a locale where Democratic rule is virtually unopposed, a place where Republican obstruction and sabotage can’t taint the experiment.

And it is not a pretty sight — the Crust in all its crustiness.

Ben Casselman is tired of Voices of the Crust.

Here’s how the national media usually depicts the admissions process: High school seniors spend months visiting colleges; writing essays; wrangling letters of recommendation; and practicing, taking and retaking an alphabet soup of ACTs, SATs and AP exams. Then the really hard part: months of nervously waiting to find out if they are among the lucky few (fewer every year, we’re told!) with the right blend of academic achievement, extracurricular involvement and an odds-defying personal story to gain admission to their favored university.

Here’s the reality: Most students never have to write a college entrance essay, pad a résumé or sweet-talk a potential letter-writer. Nor are most, as The Atlantic put it Monday, “obsessively checking their mailboxes” awaiting acceptance decisions. (Never mind that for most schools, those decisions now arrive online.) According to data from the Department of Education,1 more than three-quarters of U.S. undergraduates attend colleges that accept at least half their applicants; just 4 percent attend schools that accept 25 percent or less, and hardly any — well under 1 percent — attend schools like Harvard and Yale that accept less than 10 percent.

Read it.

Al Gore has a problem. He seems to want people to believe that only climate skeptics oppose renewables. The truth is, a small but growing number of prominent greens, openly acknowledge that renewables in their current form are not a scalable replacement for fossil fuels.

Jeanne Safer is married to Rick Brookhiser, a former editor of National Review and a friend of mine at Yale.

Next Election Day, like every Election Day for the last three decades, I will show up faithfully at my polling place, rain or shine, and register my choices for various offices. As long as they’re Democrats, they can count on my support. It’s a matter of moral obligation, not just civic duty: I’ve got to cancel out my husband’s vote.

Typical Democrat. (Just sayin’….)

Read it.

In the conflict that began in Chechnya and has since metastasized into a loosely organized Islamic rebellion throughout the Caucasus region, Russian security services routinely arrest, torture and kill relatives, rights groups say.

The Russian approach, enough to make supporters of waterboarding wince, has by some accounts been grimly effective. Abductions of family members unwound the rebel leadership in Chechnya, for example.

They get results — unlike Obama.

Read it.

Today, spectacular advances in molecular genetics are producing an explosion of new information about how our genome shapes us. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker predicts that these findings will fundamentally reshape our understanding of human nature. They may also reshape our thinking on everything from parenting and education to broader social policy.

…

No wonder many people – especially social scientists, feminists, and progressive politicians – think behavioural genetics is a Pandora’s box that should be slammed shut as soon as possible. They remain heavily invested in cultural determinism – the idea that your environment, not your origins, makes you who you are, and also that the right social policies can significantly change the outcomes.

But genetic denialism has its own risks. One risk is that by not acknowledging the importance of heritability, a lot of social science research is misleading and useless. And many of the policies it has inspired won’t work.

Today the social sciences face a deepening crisis of legitimacy – largely because social scientists, who are overwhelmingly liberal, can’t bring themselves to acknowledge what’s staring them in the face. Yet good social policy depends on it. Dr. Plomin believes this is especially true in education, which should be both more effective and more humane. “It does poor service to social change to subordinate truth to politics,” he says.

Read it.

Currently, the American public school system is a sprawl-generating machine: urban public schools are less appealing to middle-class parents than suburban public schools, causing parents to move to suburbia.

This is the sort of democracy that ‘progressives’ would love to suppress.

This result arises from school assignment laws: because students must attend school in the municipality of their residence, residents of the most diverse municipalities (usually central cities) must attend diverse schools. By definition, diverse schools have lots of children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

I.e. Fashionable Minorities.

Because children from disadvantaged backgrounds often learn less rapidly than middle-class children, these schools quickly get a reputation as “bad” schools, causing middle-class parents to flee to suburban schools that are more socially homogenous.

They also tend to have high percentages of NAMs with behavioral problems that prevent any education from taking place. Cities run by Democrats are the poster children for this sort of thing — even in otherwise rational states like Texas. Nobody in his (or her) right mind will send kids to public schools in Houston, Dallas, Austin, or San Antonio.

The common progressive answer to this problem is to fund urban schools more generously: this strategy has not, when tried, succeeded in bringing middle-class parents back to urban schools.

Because it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of Kids Behaving Badly. That can’t be fixed by throwing money at the problem; it can only be fixed by Good Culture on the part of the parents and neighborhoods from which the problem students come.

Read it.

I would not work for such a company.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Just in case you haven’t been paying attention.

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

NATO will celebrate its sixty-seventh anniversary in April. Instead of being an occasion for the usual expression of mind-numbing clichés about the alliance’s enduring importance both to U.S. security and world peace, it should become an opportunity for a long overdue assessment of whether the NATO commitment truly serves America’s best interests in the twenty-first century. There is mounting evidence that it does not.

…

The entire security environment is different. Instead of being a collection of demoralized, war-ravaged waifs, the European democracies are now banded together in the European Union, with a population and collective gross domestic product larger than that of the United States. Although they are troubled by the turbulence in the Middle East and the occasional growls of the Russian bear, they are capable of handling both problems. Indeed, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a pale shadow of the threat once posed by the Soviet Union. The European Union has three times the population and an economy nearly ten times the size of Russia.

Sarah Hoyt adds some focus to the discussion.

First let me say right here, that yes, I think we should control our borders. A country that can’t control its borders is not a country. It’s Tragedy of the Commons on a grand scale.

But where I disagree with people who run around saying “the most important thing to do is to stop illegal immigration” is that they make me think of when my husband went to the doctor coughing blood and the the doctor told him “the important thing is not this pneumonia. It’s that you gained 40lbs.”

Yes, that he’d gained 40 lbs was a serious problem and one that the doctor couldn’t deal with, because he didn’t realize there was an underlying problem and assumed we were eating butter fried in lard for every meal.

BUT the most immediate problem, and the one that would kill my husband faster, left untreated, was that he had walking pneumonia.

In the same way, we have a massive problem with illegal immigration, sure, but those huge numbers bandied about hide the fact they’re still a tiny percentage and that a lot left when the economy soured, so that now the statists are limited to the children’s crusade to try to have net positive immigration.

Our problem with LEGAL immigration is just as bad, both in what it does — mistake itself for a charity organization that brings in people from the poorest and most backward countries by preference, with no regard to the chasms between the cultures or their potential usefulness — and in what it fails to do — make it almost impossible to bring in educated people who will be a plus value, except via the subterfuge of workers’ visas that put these people forever at the mercy of their employers.

A good point that I don’t recall seeing anyone bring out before.

Steve Sailer speaks truth to stupidity.

The sheer unaffordability of replicating “affordable housing” giveaways on a mass scale is hard for innumerate liberals to grasp. The progressive mindset holds two contradictory assumptions: that the oppressive dominance of the white majority is soon to be swept away by the righteous demographic tidal wave of minorities; and that minorities are a vanishingly tiny percentage of the American population, so of course they can be subsidized indefinitely with special privileges, such as nice houses in nice neighborhoods.

In contrast, Republican candidate Donald Trump knows a few things about real estate, which helps explain the frenzied establishment reaction to his candidacy.

Ammo Grrll connects the dots.

Near the end of the Passover Seder, the celebrants sing a song called “Dayenu” which means “It would have been enough.” It goes on for roughly as long as I was in labor, (17 hours, in case it comes up on a quiz show) but the idea of it is a hymn of praise and thanks to the Almighty saying, “If you had just brought us out of Egypt” Dayenu. It would have been enough. “If you would have only parted the Red Sea,” Dayenu. It would have been enough. “If you had only given us the Torah.” Dayenu. You get the idea.

This song came unbidden to my mind as I thought about all the chances Michael Brown had to save his own life.

If he had only shot some buckets or played a video game instead of getting high and deciding that filching some smokes from a convenience store was a bright idea, he would be alive. At least until the next time he decided to commit a crime. Dayenu.

If The Gentle Giant had not decided as a parting shot to rough up the store clerk who was half his size. Maybe the clerk wouldn’t even have called in the theft. What’s a few cigars? Dayenu.

If, after stealing and assaulting, he had just walked away as unobtrusively as a 300-lb. Man can and not swaggered down the middle of the street, he would be alive today. If, when the officer approached him in his car, he had answered politely, and moved out of the street, he would be alive today. Dayenu.

If, when the officer approached him in his car and noticed that he fit the description of the shoplifter who assaulted the store clerk, he had said, “I’m sorry, officer, I was loaded and acted stupid. Here’s the cigars and I want to apologize to the clerk,” he would be alive today. Almost certainly he would have been able to plead down the assault charge to 5th degree and if he returned the stolen merchandise, they would have let that go, too. “Justice” today is all about plea-bargaining. And several hundred “last chances.”

If, once he made his decision to go after the cop, he had slugged him once and not grabbed at the gun, he would be in seriously deep do-do, but probably still alive. Now, he’s got assaulting an officer to go with shoving the clerk and the petty theft, but Officer Wilson was clearly no hothead. If Brown backs up, hands up, as the narrative pretends to go, and says, “I’m sorry; I’m sorry, that was stupid, I won’t resist any further,” he is probably alive.

If, after he grabs for the gun, it goes off, and he begins to run, he stops, turns, raises his hands and goes down to his knees or prone on the ground, waiting to be arrested, he might get roughed up a bit upon being “helped” into the squad car, but he is alive.

Even after he charges again and again and is shot multiple times, if he had stopped, gone to the ground with his hands locked behind his head, he is probably alive, headed for a hospital at taxpayer expense and then warehoused for a lot of his life, also at taxpayer expense. Apparently, it was the final head shot that killed him.

On this date the British Act to end the slave trade received the Royal Assent.

Arabs, of course, were key players in the slave trade. Islam has no problem with slavery.

Read it.

The secret to getting rich is as powerful as it is unexciting: live below your means.

That’s it. The bigger the difference between what you earn and what you spend, the sooner you’ll find yourself with enough money to do what you want with your life.

As with many ‘secrets’ to success, it’s simple but requires too much will-power for most people, which is why there are fewer rich people than there are poor people.

Read it.

Sometimes sanity actually wins one.

The controversy surrounding Quenette’s comments arose on November 12, 2015, during a graduate seminar discussion about race. The previous day, KU held a forum on racial and cultural issues affecting the campus in response to student protests over racial issues at the University of Missouri.

According to an open letter written by some of Quenette’s students, during a part of the discussion focusing on how the graduate students can bring up these issues with their students, Quenette said, “As a white woman I just never have seen racism…It’s not like I see ‘Nigger’ spray painted on walls… .” Later, the topic shifted to minority student retention rates in higher education. During that conversation, Quenette responded to one student who argued that the lower retention rate of black students stems from racism and poor institutional support by saying, “Those students are not leaving school because they are physically threatened everyday but because of academic performance.”

But, of course, this was ThoughtCrime and the Ministry of Truth tried to stuff her down the Memory Hole.

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If nothing else, Trump has the virtue of being willing to raise questions that can profitably be raised but which more ‘grown up’ candidates just wouldn’t think to do.

In Twitter posts on Thursday morning, the Republican presidential front-runner called the 67-year-old security organization “obsolete” and complained that the U.S. pays a “disproportionate share” of its cost.

This is an excellent point that ought to be under ongoing discussion but Just Isn’t. There is no more monolithic aggressively expansionist Communist Soviet empire, which is the precise danger that NATO was crafted to resist. The nature and future of NATO, starting with a de novo review of whether it is even needed, ought to have taken place under Bush the Younger, but didn’t. (Democrats, of course, have no objection to the U.S. meddling in other countries’ business, so long as it’s done in furtherance of the ‘progressive’ agenda — South Africa, si! Zimbabwe, no!)

Absent the Soviet menace, NATO is exactly the type of entangling foreign alliance that George Washington so wisely warned against. It allowed the Europeans to cut their military budgets to the bone and grossly expand their spending on social services, with results as you see them. I think it’s high time that we cut them loose and say, ‘Hey, you worried about Russia? Spend your own money.’

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If you are a Jane Jacobs fan, as I am, this will interest you.

… though widely celebrated for her insights and unabashed embrace of dense urbanism, Jacobs may ultimately prove more influential than relevant. Her writing was often incisive and inspiring, particularly when she opposed planning and overdevelopment and embraced the role of middle-class families in cities. But the urban revival that has actually taken place is at variance with her own romantic version of cities and how they work.

Read it.

Hint: No.

They obviously do not succeed fully, and in many cases they fall so far short of success that their “virtue laws” are a laughing stock notwithstanding severe penalties provided for convicted violators. Although prostitution has been outlawed far and wide, for example, it has been practiced just as pervasively. Likewise for gambling. Indeed, in many cases, as in states with state-sponsored lotteries, the state has not forbidden gambling as such, but only private gambling that competes with the state’s own gambling enterprises, thereby making a mockery of the idea that it seeks to discourage a vice. An entire sector of the underground economy is involved in supplying the active demands of people who wish to use drugs, patronize prostitutes, gamble, or otherwise engage in “vicious” behavior the state has outlawed. So, at best, the state’s attempt to enforce virtuous behavior is a flop everywhere the state makes such an attempt.