Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

One of the most common arguments for mass immigration is ethnic restaurants. Immigrants from Thailand, for example, introduced the now ubiquitous Thai restaurants.

But, one thing that strikes me is that Thai restaurants haven’t improved all that much since the 1980s, while Italian restaurants, despite not much immigration from Italy, have continued to improve.

One reason for this is that most of the Thai immigrants working in Thai restaurants don’t really care about cuisine. They care about moving to America to make more money, and working in a Thai restaurant is just something Thais do for the money when they come to America. In contrast, a fair fraction of the relatively small numbers of Italians who move to America today are Italian cooking fanatics intent on bringing higher standards to Italian restaurants in America.

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It was undoubtedly George W. Bush’s fault.

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Last fall, I proposed my “simplistic theory of left and right”:

1. Leftists are anti-market.  On an emotional level, they’re critical of market outcomes.  No matter how good market outcomes are, they can’t bear to say, “Markets have done a great job, who could ask for more?” 

2. Rightists are anti-leftist.  On an emotional level, they’re critical of leftists.  No matter how much they agree with leftists on an issue, they can’t bear to say, “The left is totally right, it would be churlish to criticize them.”
But even I’m shocked by how well my simplistic theory fits the 2016 election.  On the Republican side, Trump has steamrolled the competition.  How?  Though his concrete policy proposals are few and fluid, he’s expressed minimal interest in free-market ideas.  How then has Trump won over the rank-and-file?  By doing everything in his power to spite the left: teasing, trolling, ribbing, and scaring feminists, Hispanics, Muslims, protestors, and so on.  In a sense, Trump’s main campaign promise is to keep liberals awake at night – and he’s already fulfilling it.

On the Democratic side, matters are slightly more complicated.  Anti-market ideologue Bernie Sanders has pulled anti-market pragmatist Hillary Clinton noticeably to the left, but Hillary’s going to win.  How does this fit with my view that antipathy toward markets is the driving motive of the left?  Because much of Clinton’s support is strategic.  It’s very plausible that 20% of Hillary voters actually prefer Sanders.  They’re voting for her despite their sympathies because they think she’s more likely to win the general election.  In contrast, almost no one who prefers Hillary is voting for Sanders because they think he has better prospects in the general election.  In polls, the Clinton/Sanders/other breakdown is roughly 50%/40%/10%.  So if 20% of Hillary voters and 0% of Sanders voters are strategic, the sincere breakdown is 40%/50%/10%.  Sanders really is the soul of the Democratic Party.

Compare this with Scott Adams’ ‘Master Persuader’ analysis that I’ve been reporting here. These are interesting times.

Read it.

I’ll add a few more:

“Jeez, what died?”

“Is that your real hair color?”

“How can you walk in those things?”

“Doesn’t that thing hurt?”

“Let me just give you this coupon for Harry’s….”

Read it.

Hell might actually be other people  — at least if you’re really smart.

I, for one, am prepared to believe it.

First, they find that people who live in more densely populated areas tend to report less satisfaction with their life overall. “The higher the population density of the immediate environment, the less happy” the survey respondents said they were. Second, they find that the more social interactions with close friends a person has, the greater their self-reported happiness.

But there was one big exception. For more intelligent people, these correlations were diminished or even reversed.

I’ve been saying that for decades. Every bad thing that has ever happened to me has been caused by another person — typically one with whom, given the choice, I would not have associated.

Why would high population density cause a person to be less happy? There’s a whole body of sociological research addressing this question. But for the most visceral demonstration of the effect, simply take a 45-minute ride on a crowded rush-hour Red Line train and tell me how you feel afterward.

Heh. Note that the Crust promote and encourage ‘density’ for everybody else but rarely inflict it on themselves.

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When many people think about the Middle Ages they see it as a time when people were tortured by a wide collection of diabolical instruments. Whether it is the Pear of Anguish or the Iron Maiden, these torture devices are portrayed as medieval. The reality, however, is that many of these devices never existed in the Middle Ages.

Imagine that.

Michael Goodwin speaks truth to power.

The insanity defense is all that’s left now that the smart set has declared that it’s immoral and indecent to even think about voting for Trump. OK, call me immoral and indecent as well as crazy, because I’m thinking about it.

…

I like those Republicans even though I’m a registered Democrat, just not that kind of Democrat. I voted for President Obama in 2008, believing he meant it when he said no red states, no blue states, only the United States. The barrier he broke added to his appeal.

Six months later, I was off the bus. It was already clear Obama had no intention of building a consensus on anything, although few realized he would be such a radical and partisan polarizer. He may love America, but doesn’t seem to like actual Americans. Other than himself, of course.

…

Following Obama, Clinton’s election would be a calamity. She would be beholden to him, and unable to shift much from his disastrous policies. And who knows what she really believes?

Besides, if the Clintons are rewarded with the White House again, it would be impossible to demand honesty from any public official in America. She’s thoroughly corrupt and, in the memorable words of the late William Safire, a “congenital liar.” Voting for her is a give up on the future.

Scott Sumner, a Real Economist, takes a look.

Suppose you wanted to switch to socialism—what would be the ideal place to do so?
You’d want a country with extremely high quality civil servants.

That would be France.

You’d want a country where socialism is not a dirty word, and capitalism is.

That would be France.

You’d want a country with the Socialist party in power, a party that was committed to enact the ideas of Thomas Piketty.

That would be France.

So how did things work out in France, when they tried to adopt a Bernie Sanders/Thomas Piketty approach to taxes?

Eric S Raymond has some new theories.

A theory is a prediction-generating machine. It takes as input some set of observables and generates as output predictions about the not yet observed. One of the classic examples is Newton’s Three Laws of Physics. Using these, expressed in the formalism of calculus, we can put in observations of force and mass and motion and get out predictions of future force and motion.

(If you are studying something that people call a “theory”, and you can’t identify what inputs it takes and what predictions it generates, the “theory” is almost certainly bogus. I say “almost” because it’s possible you don’t yet understand the theory well enough to do that identification. On the other hand, there are a lot of bogus pseudo-theories floating around out there; caveat thinker.)

But are there no inconveniences to be thrown into the scale against the advantage expected from a multiplication of numbers by the importation of foreigners? It is for the happiness of those united in society to harmonize as much as possible in matters which they must of necessity transact together. Civil government being the sole object of forming societies, its administration must be conducted by common consent. Every species of government has its specific principles. Ours perhaps are more peculiar than those of any other in the universe. It is a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution, with others derived from natural right and natural reason. To these nothing can be more opposed than the maxims of absolute monarchies. Yet, from such, we are to expect the greatest number of emigrants. They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass. I may appeal to experience, during the present contest, for a verification of these conjectures. But, if they be not certain in event, are they not possible, are they not probable? Is it not safer to wait with patience 27 years and three months longer, for the attainment of any degree of population desired, or expected? May not our government be more homogeneous, more peaceable, more durable? Suppose 20 millions of republican Americans thrown all of a sudden into France, what would be the condition of that kingdom? If it would be more turbulent, less happy, less strong, we may believe that the addition of half a million of foreigners to our present numbers would produce a similar effect here. If they come of themselves, they are entitled to all the rights of citizenship: but I doubt the expediency of inviting them by extraordinary encouragements. I mean not that these doubts should be extended to the importation of useful artificers. The policy of that measure depends on very different considerations. Spare no expence in obtaining them. They will after a while go to the plough and the hoe; but, in the mean time, they will teach us something we do not know. It is not so in agriculture. The indifferent state of that among us does not proceed from a want of knowledge merely; it is from our having such quantities of land to waste as we please. In Europe the object is to make the most of their land, labour being abundant: here it is to make the most of our labour, land being abundan

Notes on the State of Virginia, Query VIII

Read it.

Read it.

Science remains humanity’s best hope for solving its most vexing problems, from feeding the malnourished, to finding alternative energy sources, and protecting us from pandemics and meteorites. But the way we train scientists now is not optimal for tackling these big challenges. Rather than thinking big, the current system encourages students to think small. It provides potent incentives for behaviors that are sometimes detrimental to not only scientists but also science and, by extension, to society as a whole. A winner-take-all hyper-competitiveness discourages cooperation, encourages poor scientific practices and deters new talent from entering the field. Graduate programs since World War II have produced excellent postdoctoral fellows. However, attempts to create well-rounded scientists have been thwarted by an increasingly demanding, grant-focused environment. As a result, we channel students into already narrow and highly specialized areas, teaching them more and more about less and less. One sad consequence is the inability of many scientists to talk about their work and ideas in a way that’s comprehensible by voters, politicians and even scientists in other fields.

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That explains a lot.

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As I understand it, the theory underlying the concept of Very Serious People is as follows.

1. Everyone has a mix of beliefs, some of which are right, and some wrong.
2. Everyone co-exists in a social system that tends to value, heavily reinforce and widely disseminate some people’s beliefs while disparaging, heavily discounting, and tending to limit the circulation of certain other people’s beliefs. This bias is not random, but instead reflects and reinforces existing power structures and asymmetries.
3. People whose beliefs are reinforced and widely circulated so that they are socially and politically influential, even when they are manifestly wrong, are Very Serious People. The system provides them with no incentives to admit error or perhaps to understand that they have erred, even when their mistakes have devastating consequences.

Or: Shorter Theory of Very Serious People.

1. Being Tom Friedman Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry.

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You think you’ve got problems? Hah! Try being a medieval scribe.

There is a lot you can tell from medieval skin. Like a physician today, the book historian can make a diagnosis by observing it carefully. The best quality, for example, feels just like velvet. It usually has an even, off-white colour, and it makes no sound when you turn the page. Bad skin, by contrast, crackles. It is of uneven thickness, and shows staining and a variety of colours. Unlike what you may have thought, looking at imperfect skin is far more interesting than studying its perfect counterpart. This is because a defect tells a powerful story, shedding light on the book’s production and providing clues about its use and storage post-production. Here’s the skinny on bad medieval parchment.

Freeberg has some thoughts.

It’s interesting. It would be healthy if it relied on a decent and crisp separation between fact and fiction. In a way, it does. But there’s something insincere about it as well. These people we today call “liberals” are the way they are, because we’re going through a cultural conflict. They’re intruding into an established culture, with a new culture they’d like to impose. “Conservatives” are any people who do something to resist this incursion. This new, enlightened culture says men should not address women in any manner or tone except for the most-deferential; to do otherwise is uncool, anywhere, inside or outside of the teevee set. And that goes double for pummeling terrorists to get information, of course. Their message is not one of “that’s only cool in make-believe, real-life people shouldn’t do that”; their message is that this is BadThink. It’s part of the thought-smallpox we’re supposed to make extinct, right?

The two examples — there may be more — dislodge a telling fig leaf. They reveal a meaningful truth, that liberals and conservatives don’t actually disagree about what’s cool. The disagreement is in whether ordinary people are worthy. Kinda gets back to what I was noticing about their newest, Trump-defense campaign slogan: “Americaa is already great.” You don’t know what that actually means, any better than I do. Does that mean, sometime since their guy got sworn in seven years ago, America crossed some threshold and became “great,” rather like the sun crossing the celestial equator and starting Spring officially? Because the liberal catechism sure as hell doesn’t smile on the idea that America was “already great” in 2009. So, when exactly was this crossover-point, this vernal equinox? Where is the enthused, self-identifying liberal who will comment on that?

Robert Higgs offers a little perspective.

No decent person likes the building of a fortified wall to keep peaceful migrants from entering the Land of the Free freely, but at least we are not marching members of the Five Civilized Tribes hundreds of miles at gunpoint in the dead of winter to live and die in a remote wilderness. No decent person likes the way blacks are victimized by the drug war, the crooked cops and prosecutors, and the prison-industrial complex, but at least we no longer have chattel slavery where human beings are bought and sold like livestock at private auction. No decent person likes the demonization of Muslims, but at least we haven’t forced all of them into prison camps, as the West-coast people of Japanese ancestry were forced in 1942-45. And so forth.

The country has always been rotten, full of coercive busybodies eager to use state power to punish their neighbors whose conduct, creed, or ethnicity did not please them. The country has always been teeming with hotheads eager to go to war with practically anyone who seemed to them suitable for killing. The country has always been ruled by crooked politicians and scheming, would-be crony capitalists. Rotten, rotten, rotten to the core from the get-go.

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Looks as if it would feed a family of five. Enough fur for a child’s coat.

Jen Hislop, 43, from North Ayrshire, was chosen out of hundreds of applicants and Atlas left for his new home at the weekend.

She said: “I burst into tears when I got the phone call saying I had been chosen to rehome Atlas and I cried again when I collected him.

“Animals are just pets to some people but my rabbits are family members.

Well, I suppose some are more desperate for family than others.

“I’ve decided to change his name to Atilla the Bun Binky Master Jazz Paws, but I think we’ll call him Atty for short!”

Why am I not surprised….

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That’s the question Glenn Reynolds likes to ask periodically over at Instapundit. Today we’ll add some data points to the file, starting with the news that the New York Times has settled a discrimination lawsuit.

All of these student disturbances are at schools run by ‘progressives’ for ‘progressives’. You never hear about any problems at conservative institutions, like Hillsdale in Michigan.

I incline toward #3, but it’s all good.

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Magic will, of course, be under strict government control, because that’s how they do things in Britain (the ‘Ministry of Magic’), and Rowling can’t conceive of any other arrangement.

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Tyler Cowen has argued that Paul Krugman is the Milton Friedman of the early 21st century, and in many ways that’s true. Among all economists, he is clearly the most influential public intellectual. But an even better comparison might be John Kenneth Galbraith, who was the favorite economist of intellectuals who hated economics.

I’ve noticed that if you explain to intellectuals that a minimum wage will hurt the poor by increasing unemployment, or that rent controls hurt renters by creating shortages, or that unemployment insurance increases unemployment, or that taxes on investment income should be abolished, they’ll give you this look like “I don’t know whether this guy is evil or crazy.” Non-economists strongly resent the implications of much of economic theory, as it punctures holes in all their pet theories. So when a Nobel Prize winner comes along that confirms all their political views, he’s going to be extremely popular among intellectuals. Especially when he’s as brilliant and witty as Paul Krugman.

I don’t want this too sound too negative. Just to be clear, Krugman is 10 times the economist that Galbraith was. I often disagree with him on macroeconomics, but his views are defensible and brilliantly explained. He’s a great writer, and a superb theoretician. Galbraith was a great writer and . . . and that’s about it.

Jim Goad lays out some inconvenient truth.

Without so much as asking a single question, many modern whites have gullibly swallowed a skewed and incomplete historical narrative that depicts them as history’s sole villains and the nonwhite world as innocent, suffering lambs.

Hey, it’s working.

Nearly all modern historians agree that the scenario depicted by Alex Haley in Roots—that of white raiders penetrating the African interior to rout African villages for slaves—is fraudulent. Instead, European slave traders nearly always bought slaves from African vendors at coastal markets. We hear much about the brutal “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic Ocean, but almost never about the estimated 10 million or so indigenous Africans who perished while being marched to the sea in chains and yokes by their African captors.

We don’t hear that according to Boston University’s Linda Heywood and John Thornton, about 90% of Africans transported to the New World had initially been enslaved by other Africans. We don’t hear about Tippu Tip, who was once a world-famous black slave trader in Zanzibar. And we certainly don’t hear much about how Barack Obama—who has no ancestral ties to African slaves in America—is descended from the Luo peoples, who routinely captured other Africans in war and sold them into slavery.

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Considering debt, it should be said up front that realistically all government spending is debt. Governments can only spend to the extent that they extract resources from the real economy first, at which point debt amounts to an accounting abstraction. A focus on debt misses the real barrier to economic growth, which is government spending itself. As the late Robert Bartley put it in his classic book on the Reagan economic revival, The Seven Fat Years, “The deficit is not a meaningless figure, only a grossly overrated one.” Government spending is the true tax signaling resource consumption by politicians lacking market discipline. The unseen with the spending is all the experimentation (and yes, voluminous failure) that is never pursued by market-driven entrepreneurs (cancer cures, transportation innovations, technology advances that would render the internet dated) thanks to government existing as a size consumer of always limited resources.

There is no such thing as ‘federal money’, ‘state money’, ‘city money’, or any other kind of government money. It’s all TAXPAYER MONEY, taken from you with the gunman visible in the background.

The rich, for being rich, have money to lose. That’s why much lower tax rates on wealth that is earned or inherited are so crucial to the economic well-being of everyone else. Precisely because the rich are flush with funds, they can take risks on the dynamic companies of tomorrow that are tautologically necessary for the prosperity that Anderson would like. Adam Smith was very clear that investment migrates away from economies that are stationary, and if the tax-cut focus is on the middle class, a more stationary economy will be ours. Such an economy will do little for the typical American whom Anderson would like to aid.

History is once again very clear here. Since the rich have money to lose, they alone can pursue the intrepid investments that make the typical American much better off. Indeed, it was J.P. Morgan who took a flyer on Thomas Edison’s light bulb despite the protests of his father, it was Howard Hughes who brought a pile of inherited money to California in order to fund the aviation boom, families with names like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Phipps were the initial money behind the venture capital explosion out in Silicon Valley, PayPal co-founder Thiel was the money behind Facebook, and then Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was a pioneer investor in both Google and Uber.

Lion of the Blogosphere points out something that I haven’t seen discussed.

Mitt Romney said that Trump is a con-artist, as if that’s a reason not to vote from.

I say that one of the benefits of having a con-artist for president is that he can spot when other people are trying to con him. Do you want a president who is easily conned? I don’t.

Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter showed us why we don’t want that to happen.

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What Trump has discovered by accident is that many conservatives aren’t as attached to conservative policies as they seemed; that labels don’t mean much to voters; that you can bring new people into the Republican coalition instead of playing by the old rules; and that at least a significant plurality of Republican primary voters don’t care whether you bend your knee to the memory of Ronald Reagan or not.

We may be seeing proof that the era during which the Republican party was explicitly ‘conservative’ (1964-?) is now over, and it may be reverting to what it was at the beginning of the 20th century, when Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican President who proudly carried the Progressive banner into the White House.

Read it.

Health officials will baldly lie to you because they know, know, that they know more about how you ought to live than you do.

But you knew that.

A group of scientists are challenging the now conventional wisdom that a low-sodium diet is better for your long-term health, asking whether people should take official advice on the matter with a pinch of salt.

In a new review of the evidence, a team of experts from Columbia University found there were “two distinct bodies of scholarship” on the matter – those who believe reducing salt intake will improve the overall health of the population, and those who don’t.

Gee, where have we heard that before? Let’s see — could it be ‘climate change’?

Watching your salt intake has become one of the core pieces of dietary advice in the UK in recent years, and in the US it has got to the point where New York is requiring by law that restaurants label salt content in their food.

New York has many stupid laws because New York is full of stupid politicians and stupid people who vote for them.

So it will be a surprise to many to find that just 54 per cent of the 269 academic reports included in the review found in favour of a salt reduction hypothesis.

DENIERS! BURN THEM!

“Decision-makers often must choose a course of action in the face of conflicting, uncertain evidence,” he said.

Only if they’re trying to make a decision in a matter which is NONE OF THEIR FARGIN BUSINESS.

And rightly so, I think, having a more useful skillset than, say, a Gender Studies and Queer Theory major.

Read it.

They also share a different political tradition. It may seem to contradict their shared fascist pedigree, but Trump and Sanders are both, in a meaningful sense, conservatives.

By this, of course, he means ‘people resistant to change’, rather than what, say, National Review means by ‘conservatives’.

They are both conservatives from the perspective of classical liberalism. More specifically, they are conservatives in the sense that F.A. Hayek used the term in 1960 when he wrote the postscript to The Constitution of Liberty titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative.”

A great essay that everyone ought to read.

They share a fear of uncontrolled and undesigned change, especially in the economy. This is most obvious in Trump’s bluster about how America never “wins” and his desire to raise tariffs on Chinese imports and close the flow of immigrants, especially from Mexico. Economic globalization is a terrific example of uncontrolled change, and using foreign workers and producers as scapegoats for that change — especially when those changes have largely benefited most Americans — is a good example of this fear of the uncontrolled.

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Hundreds of billions of foreign-aid dollars have gone to fight rural poverty in the developing world since the end of World War II. But ask people in this dry, mountainous outback what has made the most difference in their difficult lives and you get only one answer: remittances.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, the World Bank and the InterAmerican Development Bank have brought remarkable prosperity to Northern Virginia and Maryland. But it’s the fruits of migrant labor sent home that explain how, in places like this, hardscrabble poverty is slowly giving way to development. I emphasize “slowly,” but the change is real. And as one local told me, “When you build something yourself, you value it more.”

One of the reasons that people cross the border illegally is because they can get better jobs in the U.S. The Mexican government doesn’t mind this because their poor and unemployed are shipping themselves out of the country, and the money they send back to their families is boosting the Mexican economy with no effort on their parts.

One might call this “re-imported jobs” — rather than ‘exporting jobs’ overseas so that the work can be done by foreigners in their own country, we’re effectively importing the foreigners so that they can do the same work here; the effect is the same, with the earnings of those foreigners going overseas to benefit their native countries.

And, rather than the U.S. government sending taxpayer dollars overseas in foreign aid, to be stolen by kleptocrats in the recipient countries with a small trickle winding up in the hands of the intended beneficiaries, this form of ‘foreign aid’ uses dollars that are actually earned by the foreigners involved rather than stolen from taxpayers, and almost always find its way to the people who need it.

Whether or not this is a good thing is left as an exercise for the reader.

This is the new Democrat platform.

Read it.

f you have a penis, use the men’s room.

If you look like a man, but don’t have a penis, use the men’s room, but please don’t use the urinal.

If you look like a woman, and don’t have a penis, use the woman’s room.

News you can use, from Lion of the Blogosphere.

As the elephant said when he pooped on the sidewalk, that about covers it.

Freeberg nails it again.

What is the implied plan, with turning your shopping receptacle into a projectile, possibly hurting someone? Someone is supposed to notice you’re upset? Who? For an explanation, all I can think of is a chemical imbalance in the brain, or poor upbringing. It’s not just him. Something is just a bit off today. One of these days, I need to learn to do my shopping here when the professionals do it; seems when they’re there, I have a lot of trouble parking, but when everybody else is there I have problems with everything else. People don’t understand what they’re there to get, which is excusable, but they also don’t seem to understand how to move around other people. Which is not. C’mon, you’re not five anymore. High traffic areas, low traffic areas, these things are not the same. You need to check your bearings, figure out what’s next on your list, have a quick conference with your spouse…where do you do that? In the way, or out of the way? You should have to pass a test like this before being allowed entrance.

…

Here’s the fascinating part. I would bet good money that this is an Obama voter. But there’s no use heading over to Social Media to say so, it would just start needless arguments, butt hurt, and a LOT of rebuttal. That’s the advantage of having taken the time to argue with liberals, you learn things. And the fascinating part is, Obama voters, while being seen in this light by normal people, look at normal people this way too. No really. They think when normal people think about high taxes the way normal people think about high taxes — high, therefore questionable at least, and certainly very taxing — we’re being the asshole who gives a cart a mighty shove, thereby contributing to the congestion problem that he is simultaneously announcing to the world is too much for him to tolerate. They think that guy is us. You hear them say so all the time. Who among us has not heard the endless litanies about how we have to have a tax system so we can pay for police departments, fire departments, park benches, et al. They’re so cute when they work so hard to avoid saying anything good about the military. Also, traffic lights are like this. Part of the price we have to pay to live in a civilized society is that we have to follow rules, much like stopping for a red light and waiting for it to turn green. Yes, that must be the problem. I’m opposed to more public debt because I’m a red-light runner.

Peggy Noonan speaks truth to power.

We’re in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact of the Republican primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you’re teasing him. Trump, they say.

I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Jimmy asked me, conversationally, what was going to happen. I deflected and asked who he thinks is going to win. “Troomp!” He’s a very nice man, an elderly, old-school Italian-American, but I saw impatience flick across his face: Aren’t you supposed to know these things?

In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious.

‘Normal’ people, of course, have no access to the corridors of power; no Congressmen in their Contacts list, no children at Sidwell Friends School, no pundit gigs on MSNBC, no pixel-inches in Slate or the Huffington Post, no gangs of kids hanging out on their street-corners whose first language comes from another continent.

There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.

The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.

I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.

The ‘protected’, of course, include fashionable minorities — and those who ‘identify’ with the new Ruling Victims.

They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.

Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.

Read it.

The reign of margarine is almost over. Sales of margarine—a plant-based spread that was once immensely popular because of its purported health benefits—have been rapidly declining and is now a cause of huge concern for Unilever, the world’s largest margarine producer and the parent company of brands that include Promise, Imperial, and Country Crock. The butter-substitute has a long history at Unilever—the company was founded through a merger between a soap maker and a Dutch company that began making margarine in 1872.

But, the truth is that butter has made a comeback: new reports argue that it’s not as unhealthy and artery-clogging as once thought, which has pushed margarine into quick decline. In response, Unilever last year created a separate business unit for its margarine operations, a move that its chief executive compared to “putting a sick child in a separate room from siblings, and showering extra care on them.” But the results have remained the same.

Read it.

Now THAT’s a scary thought.

Yeah, it’s been that kind of a day.

Freeberg has some thoughts.

Second thing is what has happened to the liberals. They still want to get even for the “Florida debacle” of 2000. Before that, they were about ending prejudices, and feeding and clothing the hungry. True, a lot of their measures achieved the opposite of these things and the liberals didn’t very much care. But afterward, getting even with conservatives is an objective that has stolen the limelight. The shift is subtle, but it is there. There’s a difference between — “I want to get these people health insurance, and I must defeat conservatives because they’re getting in my way of doing that” — and — “I want to make these conservatives look bad in the public view, and to do that I can get the word out that they, for some reason, don’t want these people to get health insurance.” Those are actually two different things. One is overly simplistic but determined, like a dog chasing a car that wouldn’t know what to do if it caught the car. The other is just plain vengeful.

And the third thing is what’s happened to conservatives. They still don’t have time for all this fighting-about-politics stuff. They have work to do. In fact, very often The Futility sets in, and they say to themselves…well, fuck this, this dime-store idiot liberal guy has all the time in the world to throw his cherry-picked statistics at me, his Mother Jones articles, maybe troll conservative blogs all day, but I have customers counting on me and I have to get back to work. And then after awhile the other thought enters the conservative cranium, yet again…I’m doing this to set up my retirement, get my kids headed to a brighter future, not be a burden to my family when I’m older. If only the liberal dipshits have influence on our politics, they get to shape our politics, and that will render these local efforts of mine entirely futile. The Counter-Futility. Back and forth the conservative goes, like a ping pong ball..it’s futile to do this, it is futile not to do this…

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Not the sort of thing you expect to see in the New York Times.

Colonel Qaddafi overthrew King Idris, the country’s founding leader, in a 1969 coup, but that was not all. He also abolished the monarchy; scrapped the royal flag; banished or jailed the king’s relatives; and turned the gold-domed palace into office space, a library, and after 2009, a lavish private museum for classical antiquities.

Yet the popular memory of King Idris, who died in Cairo in 1983, has quietly endured in Libya. And now, after Colonel Qaddafi’s own fall and the years of violent turmoil that have followed, the country’s closet royalists have emerged with a radical suggestion: Restore a form of monarchy, at least temporarily, to let Libyans rally behind a respected father figure and begin to rebuild their splintered nation.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, is delightfully dyspeptic today.

The successful politician no less than the successful whore adorns himself or herself with whatever costume, no matter how tawdry or embarrassing, is thought to be most alluring to the greatest number of customers.  But unlike the successful whore, who gives something of genuine value in return to each and every person who pays for her services, the successful politician gives value only to a small handful of his or her customers, and this politician finances these transactions with funds and freedoms forcibly confiscated from others.  In short, when ranking different professions according to the principles held and adhered to by their members, whores rank much, much higher than politicians.

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Bill Gates thinks we need a miracle to solve the world’s energy needs, a safe, reliable, non polluting form of energy which could bring electricity to the rural poor of Africa. The odd thing is, such a “miracle” is within our grasp; but nobody seems to be interested.

…

There is a nuclear fuel source which fits this description – Plutonium 238.

Plutonium 238 is ridiculously safe. Unlike other isotopes of Plutonium, Pu238 is a prolific alpha emitter, but it emits very little dangerous penetrating radiation. This almost eliminates the need for shielding – a sheet of stainless steel would block all the alpha radiation.

Pu238 is so safe, it used to be used as the core of nuclear pacemakers; people had Plutonium nuclear batteries implanted in their bodies. This procedure was only discontinued, when cheaper, long life chemical batteries became available.

Plutonium 238 is also very energy dense – it emits around half a watt per gram. A kilogram of Plutonium 238 generates 500 watts of energy. With a half life of 87 years, a few kilograms of Pu238 could produce more than enough energy to power a few simple household appliances, for several decades, without needing a refuel.

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An odd piece to see in lefty Voice of the Crust The Guardian.

I have never defended the use or availability of capital punishment on the grounds of retribution and would echo his holiness’s own phraseology in saying that no matter how serious the crime, it is wrong if its purpose is merely an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Using it as a deterrent is, however, a very different matter for it saves innocent lives.

This position ignores the effect on others of ‘retribution’. If we call it by its street name, ‘payback’, it acknowledges that the taking of a life has created a social imbalance that is only rectified by the loss of the murderer’s life. People on the street understand this, even though they often cannot articulate it.

Pope Francis claims that the death penalty is “an offence against the inviolability of life and the dignity of the person” but what about the life and dignity of a victim who would not be a victim if the death penalty were in force?

That’s not what the Pope was talking about, and this author really needs some instruction on what Christianity is all about, not to mention what the Pope’s role is in the Roman Church. (Such ignorance is not surprising in a writer for the Guardian, whose exposure to Christianity is likely restricted to seeing things on TV.)

As a Christian, the Pope is committed to the view that any person, no matter how evil or how criminal, can be saved if brought to repentance. Killing a person, even a murderer, puts that repentance out of reach, and takes from them forever that opportunity for salvation. That is the Pope’s concern, and that is his only concern.

The state’s duty in these circumstances is an extension of the individual’s right to self-defence. If we believe our lives or those of others are at genuine risk then we can use whatever force is necessary to mount a credible defence including, in extremis, killing.

Irrelevant. Under no reading of the law are individuals, pursuing their ‘right to self-defence’, entitled to kill someone merely to avoid the possibility of that other person is, or might be, a murderer.

The government’s duty in these circumstances is part and parcel of its essential function of ensuring that its citizens can associate with each other in mutually beneficial ways without being constantly afraid of arbitrary, even whimsical, violence on the part of those with whom they come in contact. Self-defense doesn’t have anything to do with it (unless we’re talking about invasion by foreigners). This is reflected in the libertarian mantra, ‘Don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff.’ How the government does this is, of course, subject to discussion.

Therefore the crux of the argument is: is it really a deterrent? In the five years immediately following the abolition of the death penalty in Britain the government still collected statistics based on the distinction between capital and non-capital murder precisely in order to assess the effect of abolition and the effect was startling. As Duncan Sandys, a senior Conservative MP, told parliament in December 1969, the capital murder rate had risen almost 125%. It is worth pausing just to absorb that. There was also a substantial rise in the number of times firearms were taken on robberies.

But of course the people who are against capital punishment have all sorts of studies of their own that show that capital punishment is not a deterrent. This ‘battle of the studies’ has been going on ever since sociology reared its ugly head. In any event, that’s not the Pope’s concern, nor is it in any way related to why he made his statement.

In the old days, ‘journalists’ were expected to be able to listen and understand what people are saying, and why, and to ask if they were confused. Today, it is merely sufficient to be confused.

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Only five children go to this 12,000-square-foot school in Florida’s Palm Beach County. Here, on any given day, 12-year-old twins Logan and Garrett might solve math problems on their computers while their sisters, Sienna, 5, Reagan, 7, and Ava Rose, 10, have recess on the playground. Other times they all work together to memorize passages of Shakespeare or the names of the bones in the human body.

The kids live at the school as well—because it’s also their family’s home. Their mother, Karin Katherine Taylor, is also their teacher. She and her husband, a 59-year-old chief executive of an industrial-distribution firm, built the home six years ago with the intent of home schooling their children there.

If I had the money, and children, that’s what I’d do with it.

The family is part of a small subset of affluent homeowners who home-school their kids—but not for typical reasons of wanting to provide religious instruction or because they don’t like the public schools nearby. Instead, they say they can create their own optimal learning environments by buying or building homes in which almost every room is a classroom.

It was customer for the upper classes in Europe to have their children educated by tutors and governesses, the boys until it was time for them to go to ‘public’ school, the girls until they ‘came out’ and hit the marriage market. That may be coming back around on the guitar.

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An interesting question.

An interesting pattern developed early in the official involvement in global warming. If a person challenged the claim that humans were causing global warming (AGW), it was assumed they were on the political right. If you supported AGW, then you were on the left. This categorization is not related to the science, but to the political nature of the science involved. This occurred in two major parts. The original objective of those using global warming for their political agenda and the marginalizing of those who questioned the science by linking them to industries and their wealthy owners. The author believes the evidence shows that human CO2 is not causing AGW, that the hypothesis is not proved. This article is not written to pick political sides. Rather, it is an attempt to help understand the battles waged and the confusion this created for the public, the politicians, the media, and a majority of scientists.

Read it.

Given the choice between Trump and Apple, I pick Apple.

Perhaps Tim Cook ought to run for President. He’s made more money for Apple than Trump has for Trump, and he doesn’t have a fake hairdo.

My, what a surprise!

The “Strange New Respect” Award is the invention of Tom Bethell, who noted decades ago how liberals would always start praising a conservative or Republican who showed signs of moderation, Bob Dole being a great example. “New respect”—a phrase you’d actually see in the media—was a euphemism for “moved to the left.”

It is a totem of insincere liberalism, a coy way of attacking present-day conservatives. My corollary is that for liberals, the only good conservative is a dead conservative. Back in the 1960s, William F. Buckley was attacked as a fascist or worse, and dismissed as a retrograde force. Today, of course, liberals call him a “national treasure,” and bemoan that today’s conservatism isn’t more like Buckley. (This is Sam Tanenhaus’s favorite hobby horse.)

Ditto for Dwight Eisenhower, whom liberals regarded in his time as an unenlightened dummy, until some liberals decided he was okay after all—actually pretty good in fact—a discovery that coincided with the need to find every way possible way to trash Richard Nixon. Who, come to think about it, many liberals nowadays say as actually pretty good if it wasn’t for that whole Watergate thing.

Apparently Trump makes some of them wish to return to the days of George W. Bush. I am reminded of what Malcolm X said about Martin Luther King: ‘They talk to him because the alternative is to talk to me.’ So I guess Donald Trump is the Malcolm X of the Republican Party.

Which sort of make sense if you think about it….

A Digital, 3D Printed Sundial Whose Precise Holes Cast a Shadow Displaying the Current Time

Masterpan. Unfortunately it’s aluminum and so won’t work with an induction cooktop.

MiniBrew home beer maker. If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Gittler guitar. Simply amazing.