Read it.

It appears based on London but, really, it could apply to every city with a river going through it.

Read it.

When you see a superhero or a supervillain heading deep into their super-high-tech super-secret lair, do you ever wonder how the heck they keep that secret?

Did they build this massive thing on their own? Did they get their architecture, engineering, and interior design degrees while they went through that training/backstory montage? No, of course not. They had henchpeople build it for them, outsourcing the complicated stuff to people who knew more about constructing an island fortress than they do. There’s only one problem with that plan. Letting more people in on a secret virtually ensures that it won’t stay secret for long.

Unless you’re the government, of course, and can put people in jail for talking. And even then you might wind up with a Hillary Clinton.

In order to figure out the average length of time before someone blows a conspiracy’s cover, Grimes looked at three well-documented conspiracies. One, the reprehensible Tuskegee syphilis experiment lasted for a long time, nearly 25 years. The other two, the FBI forensics scandal and the NSA’s PRISM program took less time to come to light. (Each was uncovered in about six years.)

NOTE: THESE ARE ALL GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACIES.

Read it.

If you live in Portland, your lights may now be partly powered by your drinking water. An ingenious new system captures energy as water flows through the city’s pipes, creating hydropower without the negative environmental effects of something like a dam.

Small turbines in the pipes spin in the flowing water, and send that energy into a generator.

This is more accurately an ‘energy recovery system’ than a power generation system, since the move of the the water is the result of it being under pressure from municipal pumps, who I suspect use electricity.

Read it.

Why do people have so much trouble throwing things out? Turns out, the answer lies in people’s heads. Running through Kondo’s best advice and most of her book is the argument about the anxiety-induced limits of human decision-making. Seeing as an entire branch of economics studies exactly that, it’s no wonder that economists have a particular interest in her advice. Financial Times columnist Tim Harford agrees that Kondo’s methods are not only intuitive, but compelling to economists. Harford says that the clutter that piles up in apartments is a product of people’s cognitive blunders.

In my reading and practice of the eponymous “KonMari Method,” I found that Kondo does implictly touch on some important behavioral economics concepts and cognitive biases that prevent us from being tidy. She takes strong stances against these irrational mental habits that govern us. In other words, I think the reason Kondo-mania continues is because she has actually hit upon some good solutions to deal with these pervasive mental fallacies.

Freeberg does us a service.

As Trump haters and Palin haters begin their eighth straight day of lecturing the rest of us on the pointlessness of blind rage, while demonstrating how much of it they have…

Read it.

A case can be made that divisive hot-button issues like inequality and immigration ultimately derive from housing dysfunction. Kevin Erdmann eloquently tells the tale. Matt Rognlie has famously argued that the increase in capital’s share of income, often blamed for inequality, is due largely to housing, once depreciation is taken into account. All of this reinforces the thesis of people like Ryan Avent, Edward Glaeser, and Matt Yglesias who have argued for years that housing supply constraints are to blame for high rents in powerhouse cities, and may constitute an important drag on productivity growth and a cause of macroeconomic stagnation. (See also Paul Krugman, quite recently.) Several of these writers argue that cities should eliminate restrictive zoning and other regulatory barriers to development, then let the free-market create housing supply. In a competitive marketplace, high prices are supposed to be their own cure. Zoning restrictions, urban permitting, and the de facto capacity of existing residents to veto new development are barriers to entry that prevent the magic of competition from taking hold and solving the problem.

My view is that the “market urbanist” diagnosis of the problem is more persuasive than its prescription for addressing it. As a positive matter, they just won’t win the political fights they propose. On normative grounds, I’m not sure that they should. The market urbanists present themselves as capitalist deregulators but I think they can be described with equal accuracy as radical redistributionists. The customary property rights surrounding homeownership in many cities and suburbs include much more than the use of a square of earth and whatever is built on it. Existing homeowners bought into particular neighborhoods in large part because of their “character”, which includes nice-sounding things like walkability or “charm”, as well as not-so-nice-sounding things like access to exclusionary education. Newer residents have bought and paid for those amenities, while older residents may feel they have earned them by helping to create them. Economists describe houses as a form of capital that provides a stream of services, rather than a cash flow, to owner-occupants. We should also describe the arrangement of neighborhoods as a form of capital that provides services people value. Property owners have disproportionate use of, and, informally, enjoy substantial control rights over this “neighborhood capital”, and these benefits have been capitalized into residential real-estate prices. (Location, location, location!) “Zoning reform” is an anodyne way to describe an expropriation of those customary rights. It amounts to diminishing residents’ ability to preserve or control the evolution of their neighborhoods, in order to challenge the exclusivity on which the value of existing neighborhood amenities may be based.

Read it.

As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, ten years ago today, Al Gore said we had only a decade left to save the planet from global warming. But Earth and humanity has been doing just fine since then.

People that know money over at Investor’s Business Daily, said that “We Know Al Gore’s Been Running A Global Warming Racket” and listed five ways they ascertain this, I’m going to list those, embellish them, and add a few of my own.

Read it.

Denmark has defended a plan to remove asylum seekers’ cash and jewellery from them, saying it puts refugees on an “equal” footing with other Danes.

Amid media scrutiny and UN condemnation of a number of migration-related reforms, the Danish government is on the brink of passing a law to seize cash and items worth more than about £1,000 from refugees, according to The Local.

Yet ruling right-wing party Venstre and anti-immigration coalition partners the Danish People’s Party (DPP) have said claims the measure is a violation of international commitments and human rights shows the law has been “grossly misunderstood.”

Anders Vistisen, an MEP from the DDP, said Danish citizens who suddenly become unemployed are also expected to sell their most valuable possessions to receive state support.

“The new law is about creating equality between migrants and Danes, so that everyone under the welfare system has the same possibility to receive public benefits,” he told The Local.

Welcome to socialism, guys. Yes, you get benefits, but the downside is that the government is entitled to all you have.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist and prominent libertarian academic, takes a stand.

I would much prefer a Pres. Sanders or a Pres. O’Malley than Trump. (I’m less certain about a Pres. H. Clinton, but I think that I’d even prefer a Pres. H. Clinton to a Pres. Trump.) My reasons are two:

(1) As one sensible commenter (I forget who) said, with any of the three Democrats we pretty much know what we’ll get; with Trump, there is no such knowledge. And while what we’ll get with any of the three Democrats will indeed be bad, I can imagine even worse coming from someone such as Trump.

(2) More importantly, whatever policies are implemented by a Pres. Sanders, a Pres. O’Malley, or a Pres. H. Clinton will be (correctly) understood by most people today, and by history, to be anti-free-market policies, yet whatever policies are implemented by a Pres. Trump will be (incorrectly) understood today, and by history, to be “free-market” policies.

He’s got a point. Trump has been all over the map on a number of significant issues, so far as I have been paying attention, which admittedly isn’t much.

Read it.

Political pundits and historians always like to analogize the current election cycle to a past election cycle, though I think a case can be made that each cycle is unique and non-repeatable. On the surface, it might look like we might be heading for a repeat of 1912, when a Republican split led to the independent candidacy of Teddy Roosevelt and handed the White House to Woodrow Wilson. That, I am sure most sensible people will agree, was a blunder.

Was it ever. That was the start of the conversion of the historical Democrat Party into Amerca’s own brand of fascism, which flowered with Franklin D. Roosevelt and whose fruit have been marching through our institutions and corrupting them ever since.

But I wonder whether we might have four major candidates in the event of a Trump-Sanders or Trump-Clinton matchup—Bloomberg plus an “independent” Republican candidate (I’d guess it might be Romney)? Then the election we’d most resemble was 1824, when there were four major candidates running. That election was settled in the House of Representatives in favor of John Quincy Adams, even though Andrew Jackson won the most popular votes. One could imagine this happening again, with Trump, Clinton, or Bloomberg getting the most votes, but a Republican dominated House picking the “independent” Republican candidate. (Let’s hope to God it isn’t Jeb Bush.) One can imagine today’s Jacksonian candidate (Mr. T) being just as outraged as Jackson was at such an outcome. If you think things were bitter after the messy outcome of the 2000 election between Bush and Gore, just wait.

No matter how bad, the results would be better for America than Barack Obama, who has surpassed Jimmuh Carter as the Worst President Ever.

Cast your mind back to Bloomberg for a moment. Why did he run for mayor of New York as a Republican, even though he’s a much better fit in the Democratic Party? Or for that matter, if he wants to be president, why didn’t he run as a Democrat this year? (He dumped his Republican affiliation in New York as fast as he could, remember.) The obvious answer is that he had no opening in the Democratic Party in New York, where the party hierarchy operates much like a closed-shop union. And New York City Republicans have a bare cupboard.

Likewise, why is Donald Trump running as a Republican, after a lifetime of mostly liberal positions, and his occasional declarations that he leans toward Democrats? I still haven’t heard Trump give an account of why, suddenly, he’s changed his mind on so many positions. Like Bloomberg, it seems to be opportunism rather than conviction; he couldn’t win the Democratic nomination these days, but the open and scattered Republican field gives him an opening to win with a mere plurality of primary votes.

On the other hand, few traditions in American politics are of longer standing than opportunism.

Read it.

This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.

Steve Sailer points out some Inconvenient Truth.

A reader writes:

If Bernie Sanders didn’t exist, he’d be the politician Chris Pine works for in a made-up Cameron Crowe movie about idealism and soundtracked by Boomer rock

That movie, if it existed, would get denounced by lefty internet for being too white.

Read it.

A quick Google check of the news finds that the more prominent peak oilers – Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrère, Kenneth Deffeyes, Daniel Goodstein – are maintaining a decorous silence as the price of crude sinks below $28 per barrel. After all, the International Energy Agency just warned that the world is “drowning” in oil. So no Jeremiads about the impending end of an oil-starved industrial civilization are appearing in the media. Nor, sadly, do many journalists seem interested in probing why the peakists’ widely touted dire forecasts have, once again, proven wrong.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, points out an Inconvenient Truth.

My late, great colleague Gordon Tullock famously pointed out the many possibilities to “do well while doing good.”  (See chapter 6 in this collection edited by my colleague Dan Klein.)  However, as I note in my most recent column in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, too many of my fellow economists, while perhaps superficially intent on doing good, are not so intent that they are willing to risk any of their own money on such efforts.  They wish to do good only by spending mostly other people’s money and by stripping away mostly other people’s freedom and options.  This consistent and chronic refusal of policy advocates to put their own money where their mouth’s are is as sure a sign as is humanly possible that these do-gooders are too reckless to take seriously.

Nick Gillespie, of tReason Magazine, is delightfully dyspeptic today.

While most fans merely suffered The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith, those movies represent a piss take on what happened to baby boomers who cut their teeth protesting Vietnam and ended up bombing hell out of the world during the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

Read it.

Interestingly, for a while, there has been a short memo about the alt-right floating about among “Conservatism Inc” warning people of the alt-right.  I’ve read parts of this memo and surprisingly its description of the alt-right is not inaccurate, just too succinct.  Here I’ll give a more detailed explanation of the alt-right.

The alt-right was first coined by Richard Spencer, as an intellectual alternative to the dry “Conservatism Inc” that then passed for right-wing thought. Since then, the term has really taken on a life all its own. As others have noted, the alt-right really isn’t a political movement per se but rather a zeitgeist. The big-tent alt-right includes identitarians and archeofuturists, race realists and HBD bloggers, European New Right (ENR), shitlords, neo-reaction (NRx) and reaction, trad Christians, neo-pagans, white nationalists, PUAs, etc. (Note, these groups are not mutually exclusive. For example, an alt-righter might consider himself an identitarian and race realist.)

I think this might describe me.

While the alt-right is a large tent that disagrees on some issues, one issue that really unites the alt-right is immigration.  The alt-right is fed up with Third World immigration into the West and wish to see most of these immigrants / migrants / refugees / invaders repatriated back to their ancestral lands.

Well, that definitely describes me.

Michael Brendan Dougherty recently called the alt-right “race obsessed”. A better phrase might be: race realists. Most alt-righters actually take Darwinism seriously. (If you are at a loss of what “taking Darwinism seriously” means, you might want to read this book.) Young alt-righters are comfortable with modern science which shows that human biodiversity is a facet of life. The fact that so many today in Conservatism Inc. want either to ignore or deny human biodiversity, shows how untethered from reality modern conservatism has become. It is living in a politically correct fantasy land.

Yup, me again.

Read it.

When one reads enough Chinese naval literature, diagrams of multi-axial cruise missile saturation attacks against aircraft carrier groups may begin to seem normal. However, one particular graphic from the October 2015 issue (p. 32) of the naval journal Naval & Merchant Ships [????] stands out as both unusual and singularly disturbing. It purports to map the impact of a Chinese intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) strike by twenty nuclear-armed rockets against the United States.

Targets include the biggest cities on the East and West Coasts, as well as in the Midwest, as one would expect. Giant radiation plumes cover much of the country and the estimate in the caption holds that the strike “would yield perhaps 50 million people killed” [????5000 ???]. The map below that graphic on the same page illustrates the optimal aim point for a hit on New York City with a “blast wave” [???] that vaporizes all of Manhattan and well beyond.

That makes the North Korean “threat” look fairly insignificant by comparison, doesn’t it? But what’s really disturbing is that the scenario described above envisions a strike by China’s largely antiquated DF-5 first generation ICBM. In other words, the illustration is perhaps a decade or more out of date. As China has deployed first the road-mobile DF-31, then DF-31A and now JL-2 (a submarine-launched nuclear weapon), China’s nuclear strategy has moved from “assured retaliation” to what one may term “completely assured retaliation.”

Lion of the Blogosphere is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

The Eagles video made me wonder. Today, do any white proles skip college, form a band, and become famous musicians? Or was that just a 70s thing?

I think it all happens except for the ‘become famous musicians’ part — that doesn’t work any more if you’re working-class white.

Read it.

The next time you read of doom-and-gloom about how there are all these poor starving people in the world, remember that people are complaining that we’re growing too much food.

Read it.

If Debbie Wasserman Schultz wanted to “maximize the opportunity for voters to see our candidates” she failed. But she probably didn’t; she probably helped schedule the debates on purpose on nights that TV audiences would be small so as not to give too much exposure to Hillary Clinton’s rivals. And she’s probably lying about it now.

Whoa. When you’ve lost Slate magazine, you are one dead Democrat.

Read it.

Ideological purity always does that to a cynical and corrupt ruling class. The nomenklatura in the Soviet Union had similar worries.

Much like any train wreck, of course, those not involved can appreciate the entertaining moments.

Pass the popcorn.

Read it.

In 2008, Ed Boland, a well-off New Yorker who had spent 20 years as an executive at a nonprofit, had a midlife epiphany: He should leave his white-glove world, the galas at the Waldorf and drinks at the Yale Club, and go work with the city’s neediest children.

“The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School” (Grand Central Publishing) is Boland’s memoir of his brief, harrowing tenure as a public-schoolteacher, and it’s riveting.

Only if you like the horror story that is life in the modern government school.

Government schools didn’t used to be this bad. Identify what has changed, and you’ll know why they’re this bad now. Bite the bullet and vote against the sort of people who are responsible for this degeneration.

Eric S Raymond gives the best explanation of Natural Right that I’ve ever seen.

In modern terms, we can think of “natural rights” as the political and social rules which are required to sustain “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, and derive them not from religion but from game-theoretic analysis of the behavior of competing agents in a political system.

The theorists of English Republicanism in the century and a half before the Declaration of Independence did not have the language of economics or game theory, but they developed a pretty firm grasp on the theory of natural rights by studying the historical failure modes of various political systems.

The English Republican defenses of (for example) the right to free speech were very simple: if these are not the rules of your polity, your polity will come to a bad end in tyranny and chaos and great suffering. In modern terms, they were seeking stable cooperative equilibria under the recognition that most possible sets of political rules do not yield it.

Read it.

To identify the cities most likely to boom over the next 10 years, we took the 53 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the country (those with populations exceeding 1 million) and ranked them based on eight metrics indicative of past, present and future vitality. We factored in, equally, the percentage of children in the population, the birth rate, net domestic migration, the percentage of the population aged 25-44 with a bachelor’s degree, income growth, the unemployment rate, and population growth.

…

The most vital parts of urban America can be encapsulated largely in one five-letter word: Texas. All four of Texas’ major metro areas made our top 10. Austin, Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth and San Antonio are very different places, but they all have enjoyed double-digit job growth from 2010 through 2014, well above the national average of 8.1%. They also all have posted income growth well above the national average.

But the biggest divergence from the pack may be demographics. The Texas cities have become major people magnets, with huge growth in their populations of young, educated millennials and households with children. The clear star of the show is No. 1-ranked Austin, which has become the nation’s superlative economy over the past decade.

Read it.

The woman, in her 60s, was attacked by the animal at Three Mile Creek in Wyndham, 2,000 miles north of Perth, on Wednesday afternoon, Western Australia’s County Health service told AFP news agency.

…

Eyewitness Paul Cavanagh, said his nephew and son-in-law, who were near the creek at the time, took the woman to hospital after noticing she was missing her arm just above the elbow.

Yeah, it was kinda hard to miss.

Michael Snowball, a cafe owner who witnessed the incident told AFP the woman was beside the creek when the crocodile “came out of the water and grabbed her and did a death roll and took her arm off near the elbow.”

Let that be a lesson to us all.

A lawyer looks at the Powerball.

As Wired magazine lays out here, the maximum number is what you’d get if you took the payout over 30 years. You’re not dumb enough to do that, so you’d take it in cash, giving you just $868 million. Wait, who’s that at the door? Most likely an IRS agent, dressed just like the one also waiting at the back door, so don’t bother trying that. That big bag slung under a helicopter is to take away about 40% of your winnings. The less-well-dressed agents behind them, with a smaller bag under a smaller helicopter, are there to take your state’s cut, unless you had the good sense to move to a state with no income tax before you won the lottery. But you didn’t. Now you’re down to $394 million, barely enough to get you a decent condo in the Bay Area, and according to Wired this brings your expected return on a $2 ticket down below $2. But the more people who play, the more likely it is that the jackpot will be split anyway, and then it just gets worse.

John C. Wright reacts to VoxDay’s Musings on Immigration (see previous post).

We Americans have never lived in, and can hardly imagine, living in a nation that is not dedicated to an ideal.

We have no idea what it is like to live in a land that stands for nothing, means nothing, and has no future. Small wonder Science Fiction is dominated by the Americans and, to a lesser extent, by the Japanese. In Britain, science fiction has long grown pale on the tall shadow of Michael Moorcock and his New Wave, that is, socially relevant, bitter, and unappealing futurism. The Michael Palin movie BRAZIL is of this same spirit, if not of the same camp.

The grim and boring Philip Pullman trilogy His Dark Materials has the same social message, even though it is fantasy, not science fiction: since there is no God, hope is for chumps, therefore stay in school and be kind to people in small things.

In Europe, there are no great things to do or to defend.

That strikes me as right on target.

Scott Johnson points out the holes.

President Obama gave his last State of the Union Address last night. The White House has posted the text here and video here. I’ve also embedded the video below.

Obama’s Iranian friends provided their own commentary in advance of the speech, seizing two Navy riverine ships and detaining 10 sailors (nine men and one woman). The mullahs were expressing their complete and utter contempt for Obama. Obama did things his way, omitting to mention the sailors (or the other Americans held by Iran) in his speech. He looked the other way.

Obama’s SOTU was just another example from the last seven years of preferring to living in a fantasy world of his own devising rather than addressing real problems in a practical way.

Steve Sailer looks at Barry’s last SOTU.

Despite the origin of the phrase among conspiracy-loving Byzantines, Lofgren warns enthusiasts that the American deep state is more mundane:

Those who seek a grand conspiracy theory…will be disappointed. My analysis of the Deep State is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal. I use the term to mean a hybrid association of key elements of government and part of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with only limited reference to the consent of the governed as normally expressed through elections.

The American deep state is less Oliver Stone’s JFK than The Office. Lofgren remarks upon “the sheer weight of its boring ordinariness once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the ten thousandth time.” It’s an emergent phenomenon of a quasi-empire run out of a wealthy and not exceptionally at-risk republic.

Eric S Raymond has an interesting take.

I’m bringing this up now because I want to put a stake in the ground. I have a personal theory about why Europo-American dueling largely (though not entirely) died out between 1850 and 1900 that I think is at least as well justified as the conventional account, and I want to put it on record.

Sarah Hoyt opines.

If you want people to believe the most outrageous things, you have to tell them something that is true and that they know is true.  This is why the crazier philosophies that sell themselves to humans sell themselves by telling them something that the people know is true.

Communists used to be really good at this. They told people what everyone knew to be true.  The Noblemen had it better.  And they’d (by and large) had done nothing to deserve it.  Or they told them what people wanted to be true: your failure is not your fault, the rich are holding you down.  Or a million other such things.  And then on top of that they slid the nutcakes: because you can’t trust any other human you can trust the government (which is, of course, composed of angels.)  Or if you make the state big enough, it will eventually disappear.  (Wait, what?) Or even if you just take other people’s things, you’ll be happy (because no one can take them from you, right?)  And of course, a lot of other crazy cakes stuff, including but not limited to that value is created by labor and that things are worth the labor put into them.

No one would believe any of those things undiluted.  But they believe them when they’re packaged among homey truths that everyone knows to be true.

Read it.

Watching New York drown is almost a religious experience.

Unfortunately, you can’t enter negative numbers to model how the next Ice Age will work. Pity.

Eric S. Raymond lays it out for you.

I have been studying these questions for years as part of my self-training. I learned some of the basics of counter-terrorism theory from a former SpecOps officer, and more from my Kung Fu instructor whose day job is as a criminal forensics and counter-terrorism specialist consulting to law enforcement. I’ve also read up on the subject, and thought carefully about what I’ve read.

The following is a primer on how people whose job it is to prevent and mitigate terrorist activity and spree killings think about it.

Read it.

In allying with Obama, tech is moving in the opposite direction to much of the business community, particularly small business, which Gallup finds a hotbed of anti-Obama sentiment. Other traditional industries like oil and gas have also turned overwhelmingly to the right, as Obama has targeted them for their role in climate change. In 1990, energy firms gave out almost as much to Democrats as Republicans; in 2014 they gave over three times as much to the GOP.

In contrast, the oligarchs, as they have become ever richer, are clearly moving leftwards. In 2000, the communications and electronics sector was basically even in its donations; by 2012, it was better than two to one Democratic. Microsoft, Apple and Google – not to mention entertainment companies – all overwhelmingly lean to the Democrats with their donations.

…

One critical PR advantage the tech firms enjoy is that most, with a notable exception of Amazon, don’t mistreat blue-collar workers, or unions, since they have few of either. This gets them a free pass from social-justice warriors unavailable to traditional firms. Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford mostly exploited workers in Pittsburgh or Detroit, and paid a price; the exploitation of the oligarchs takes place far away in Chengdu, Guangzhou or India.

…

What are ‘tech liberals’? Ferenstein provides a picture of an unconscious elitism that runs through their worldview. Although their industry is overwhelmingly based in the San Francisco Peninsula’s suburban sprawl, the internet oligarchs, he claims, want ‘everyone’ to move to the urban centre, something not remotely practical for most middle- and working-class families. They also advocate for strict environmental laws and ever higher energy prices, which don’t threaten their lifestyles, but are often devastating to those below them.

…

The new political configuration works in classic medieval fashion, with the rich providing the necessities for the poor, without providing them opportunity for upward mobility or the chance, God forbid, to buy a house in the outer suburbs. With the fading of California’s once powerful industrial economy – Los Angeles has lost much of its manufacturing base over the past decade – its working classes now must be mollified by symbolic measures, such as energy rebates, subsidised housing and the ever illusive chimera of ‘green jobs’.

This ‘upstairs-downstairs’ California coalition could presage the country’s political future. Perhaps it’s best to think of it as a form of high-tech feudalism, in which the upper classes run the show, but bestow goodies on the struggling masses. This alliance will allow the present tech oligarchs to thrive without facing a populist challenge that could interfere with their profits and expansion into other markets.

Read it.

Are you a visual learner who writes notes in a rainbow of different colors, or do you have to read something aloud before it will sink it? Chances are, you’ve been asked a similar question at some point in your life, and believe the concept of different “learning styles” is perfectly valid. But, as Quartz reported in December, we all learn in fundamentally similar ways. And, as New York magazine reports, the idea that students learn differently depending on their personal preference for visual, auditory or kinesthetic cues is just a myth.

In fact, it’s considered a “neuromyth,” which, as Paul Howard-Jones, professor of neuroscience and education at Bristol University, writes in a 2014 paper on the subject, is characterized by a misunderstanding, misreading, or misquoting of scientifically established facts.

Other examples of neuromyths include that we only use 10% of our brain, and that drinking less than six to eight glasses of water a day will cause the brain to shrink.

Taki is not afraid to poke into some inconvenient truth.

Americans are in general unaware of the catastrophic EU migrant policies. The reason for this is pseudo-reporting by The New York Times and other lefty media who claim dire demographic implosion in Western Europe unless African and Middle Eastern swarms are allowed in. Actually this is the biggest con since those ghastly wind turbines made some people billionaires while turning beautiful regions into horror-movie sets. Afghan, Middle Eastern, and African migrants have already managed to overwhelm Europe’s fragile economies and—in the case of Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany—have done away with national cultures. (Christmas was the first casualty, as celebrating it was seen as insensitive to other creeds.)

And it gets better. Although the assailants in Cologne and Hamburg were young and Arabic-looking and spoke neither German nor English, media reports failed to stress the fact, not wanting to focus attention on the million-plus arrivals. The government was content to play along. The reason for the attacks was a simple one: Muslim men and their culture look down on women and, unless they are covered up like zombies, treat them as sexual objects. After groping the women, insulting them, and calling them whores, these brave males also stole their mobile telephones and wallets. Then they proceeded to throw firecrackers into the crowds celebrating New Year’s Eve. Do you now get, dear readers, why Donald Trump would be a shoo-in?

Read it.

Why is this such a surprise? It’s about the only well-paying job these days that only requires elementary literacy and numeracy.

Mark Steyn looks at Trump in the land of snows.

The media like to play up the anti-Trump demonstrations, but even this works to his benefit, since they come almost exclusively from the leaden clichés of college-debt social justice. For a six-year bachelor’s degree in orientation studies, you’d think these fellows could work up something other than chants that were stale back when Pete Seeger was wondering where all the flowers went. A couple of straggle-bearded hipster dweebs wandered around waving “NO BORDER” signs, which would be a tougher sell in, say, downtown Cologne. A bossy girl of vaguely sapphic mien led us all in a “Black Lives Matter! Black Lives Matter!” chant, which is pretty funny on a street that’s 99.99999999999 per cent white. If black lives matter that much, you’d think they could have bussed one in. As enthusiasm faltered, she segued deftly into “Don’t give in to racist fear! Immigrants are welcome here!” I must say, as an immigrant myself, I’ve never found Vermont that welcoming, but perhaps I’m insufficiently exotic for their tastes.

…

That’s the point. I think it would help if every member of the pundit class had to attend a Trump rally before cranking out the usual shtick about how he’s tapping into what Jeb called “angst and anger”. Yes, Trump supporters are indignant (and right to be) about the bipartisan cartel’s erasure of the southern border and their preference for unskilled Third World labor over their own citizenry, but “anger” is not the defining quality of a Trump night out. The candidate is clearly having the time of his life, and that’s infectious, which is why his supporters are having a good time, too. Had Mitt campaigned like this, he’d be president. But he had no ability to connect with voters. Nor does Jeb (“I’ve been endorsed by another 27 has-beens”) Bush.

Read it.

Douglas Walker, a math whiz who loved to quote Shakespeare, made a fortune by building a trailblazing software firm in Seattle, then retired early and pursued a passion for mountain climbing.

On the final day of 2015, the 65-year-old defied high winds to scale Granite Mountain, one of his favorite climbs in the Cascades of Washington state. He died in an avalanche.

David Cole is delightfully dyspeptic today.

To me, the most striking image from 2015 was that of pro-censorship black students at Yale carrying signs and banners proclaiming “We are loved.” It was surreal—black students demanding firings and expulsions for “racist” speech, steamrolling weak and terrified administrators, marching and chanting and bringing campus life to a halt with the message “We are loved.” Those poor cretins, lacking the self-awareness to know that only people who are completely insecure about actually being loved would feel compelled to parade around proclaiming that they are, have now come to think of censorship as a surrogate mother or father, something to help them feel wanted, a way to perhaps compensate for absentee or abusive parents. Just as communism and socialism gave moochers “dignity,” censorship is being used to give positive self-esteem to losers who feel unloved.

Read it.

However hip and cool San Francisco, Manhattan, Boston or coastal California may seem, they are not where families are moving.

Read it.

Whenever you hear Aggregation Fallacy vaporings about ‘The top X% own Y% of the national income/national wealth/available toys’, remember that the ‘X%’ is a constantly changing group, and it typically changes quite rapidly.

‘Progressive’ scaremongering about ‘economic inequality’ depends on specious Aggregation Fallacy scams to fool people who aren’t paying attention that we have a European-style economic class system where a limited number of families are surpassingly rich from generation unto generation, grinding the faces of the poor etc. Do not be fooled.

Steve Sailer looks at analysis.

In recent years, the highbrow spooks at the government’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, an agency set up in 2006 in shame over the Iraq WMD call, have funded four years of Tetlock’s Good Judgment Project to find the best amateur foreign-policy forecasters. In a development reminiscent of the followers of statistical maven Bill James taking over baseball general managers’ offices, it turns out that the best volunteers are consistently better than the government’s experts, even though the professionals have access to confidential information.

Read it.

Raffi Melkonian asks – as relayed by my colleague Tyler Cowen – “When can median income consumers afford the very best?” Tyler offers a list of some of the items in the modern, market-oriented world that are as high-quality as such items get and yet are easily affordable to ordinary people. This list includes iPhones, books, and rutabagas. Indeed, this list includes nearly all foods for use in preparing home snacks and meals. I doubt very much that Bill Gates and Larry Ellison munch at home on the foods such as carrots, blueberries, peanuts, and scrambled eggs that an ordinary American cannot easily afford to enjoy at home.

And even ‘poor’ people these days can have things that not the richest person in the world could have had even within my lifetime.

A slightly different list is one drawn up in response to this question: When can median-income consumers afford products that, while not as high-quality as those versions that are bought by the super-rich, are nevertheless virtually indistinguishable – because they are quite close in quality – to the naked eye from those versions bought by the super-rich? On this list would be most clothing. For example, an ordinary American man can today afford a suit that, while it’s neither tailor-made nor of a fabric as fine as are suits that I suspect are worn by most billionaires, is nevertheless close enough in fit and fabric quality to be indistinguishable by the naked eye from expensive suits worn by billionaires. (I suspect that the same it true for women’s clothing, but I’m less expert on that topic.)

I can wear the same shirts and pants as Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or Carlos Slim without straining my debit card.

Ditto for shoes, underwear, haircuts, corrective eye-wear, collars for dogs and cats, pet food, household bath towels and ‘linens,’ tableware and cutlery, automobile tires, hand tools, most household furniture, and wristwatches. (You’d have to get physically very close to someone wearing a Patek Philippe – and you’d have to know what a Patek Philippe is – in order to determine that that person’s wristwatch is one that you, an ordinary American, can’t afford. And you could stare at that Patek Philippe for months without detecting any superiority that it might have over your quartz-powered Timex at keeping time.) Coffee. Tea. Beer. Wine. (There is available today a large selection of very good wines at affordable prices. These wines almost never rise to the quality of Chateau Petrus, d’yquem, or the best Montrachets, but the differences are often quite small and barely distinguishable save by true connoisseurs.)