Steve Sailer is on the case.

Trump’s Luck is the pattern that whenever the national media announces that This Time, Trump Has Gone Too Far, the next day’s headlines will be about some outrage validating Trump’s general point. For example, remember last summer when everybody respectable was worked up over Trump saying the Mexican ruling class dumps their unwanted, low quality people on America as illegal aliens and … a five time deported Mexican illegal alien murdered that poor lady on the waterfront in San Francisco?

Today, the FBI investigation into San Bernardino is turning up all sorts of details that would be hilarious if there weren’t so many dead people.

Freeberg nails it again.

The snooty, snotty, condescending phrase “that’s not who we are” has overstayed its welcome by a good long stretch, much like the house guests reminding of the dictum that “guests, and fish, smell after three days” — and then continuing to squat for another year or two. It’s at the point where we all should start asking ourselves how it came to be that we tolerated it this long; it reflects poorly on the nation. Aren’t we supposed to have guts and conviction in this country? And can you claim to have them, if some gasbag at a podium can persuade you to engage, or even consider, a complete one-eighty-degree course correction by throwing out some paternalistic, hackneyed catchphrase? The solution makes more of the same problem, for that is not who — you know the rest.

To the phrase ‘that’s now who we are’, the only rational response is ‘what do you mean “we”, paleface?’ (Tonto was an undiscovered gem of a political philosopher).

That’s kind of, you know, the whole point. If we aspire to be anything definable, there are going to have to be some restrictions. That’s how any organism or construct declares what it is, by way of rejecting the unlike, not by way of embracing the like. It says “I’m absolutely incompatible with that thing, over there,” and the definition is made. Such things also protect themselves against threats this way, by forming policies, written and unwritten, essentially saying “I’m not going there, and if it comes here, I’m moving.”

Well said. The number of groups in which ‘we’ includes both me and Paul Ryan is shrinking as he speaks.

But he’s [Trump] opened a very worthwhile debate that his opposition, perhaps deliberately, has turned into a very silly one. The citizenry has been led down a primrose path here; a lot of people don’t understand how much precedent such a plan has, or how unprecedented our current “Hoover Vac” immigration policy is.

It is a worthwhile and very necessary debate, one in which the Democrats and quasi-Democrats in the Republican Party are avoiding as if it had cooties.

The American solution is to look at what sort of immigrant is trying to make a life here. What kind of life is to be made? And what nobody is discussing is, the democrat solution: Go ahead and look into it, and make sure that life is one of dependency. To get on the welfare systems, stay on them, and create whole new generations of second- and third-generation immigrants, also made dependent and embracing dependency, from the crib to the crypt. So that democrats can win more elections.

The shootings in San Bernardino underline in blood that even Muslims who were born in this country can go jihadist-mass-murderer, and there’s no way to tell who that will be before it happens. That’s why it’s a problem with Islam, just a problem with certain people who, oh, just by the way, happen to be Muslim. Buddhists don’t do this shit, Hindus don’t do this shit, Jains and Sikhs and Taoists don’t do this shit; only Muslims (and wackos, which we will have always with us) do this shit. So that’s where we need to focus our attention. And the Political Correctness twitch about NOT NOTICING does not do us any favors here.

As far as the theatrical outrage about crossing some uncrossable line of bigotry, or some such. I find it thoroughly revolting that anybody, anywhere, would reach up to take solutions off the table, before it’s been made clear in any way that there are still solutions on the table that might work. Or even, that anything will work. This is not a fight our country has won yet, so who are these people working so hard to eliminate possibilities? It’s become such a regular thing, nobody seems to question it anymore; it’s yet another primrose path down which we have been innocently toddling, for years, decades, generations — we approach a particularly vexing problem that has evaded any promising solution for some indeterminate length of time, and before anybody can shed some rays of hope upon it here comes some jackass trying to make himself sound more important with a lot of “No no, oh heavens no, win or lose we can NEVER do X.”

Read it.

In Washington, the nation’s two most powerful Republicans, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, joined on Tuesday in the GOP establishment’s near-universal condemnation of the presidential candidate’s proposal. But in Iowa and New Hampshire, the key early nominating states, Trump’s backers moved forcefully to counter party insiders’ censure.

“It is un-Republican, it is unconstitutional and it is un-American,”Jennifer Horn, the New Hampshire state party chairman said in a statement.

That prompted New Hampshire state Rep. Al Baldasaro, who backs Mr. Trump, to call for Ms. Horn’s resignation. He said establishment Republicans “don’t like Trump because he tells it like it is. I’m not prejudiced against Muslims, but until we can straighten them out and know who’s who and who is coming into our country, we have to stop the immigration.”

This actually may be a healthy thing for the Republican Party. There has long been a divide between the ‘establishment’ or ‘country club’ faction in the party, which pretty much controls the formal party structure and encompasses most Republican-affiliated legislators, and the ‘movement conservative’ wing, which makes up a strong party of the Tea Party movement and which has criticized the other faction as me-tooist semi-Democrats. Trump’s candidacy has hit this fault line with a meat cleaver, and whatever effect it has on this season’s Presidential race, it may spark an internal ideological revolution and re-alignment in the GOP. Interesting times.

Read it.

The evening after, FDR was to have had dinner with Edward R. Murrow. Instead, they had sandwiches and a midnight snack in the White House and FDR spilled all the beans — which battleships had been sunk and all the rest. FDR said nothing about being “off the record.” Murrow, the first celebrity journalist, decided to… keep the information private until after the president addressed the United States in Congress Assembled. He felt that the People should get the news from the president, not from a radio reporter. Who among the Late Modern fourth estate would show such judgement?

But another theme ran silently throughout the background. In one scene, the dead from the attack are buried unceremoniously in a mass grave and the news film shows only about two dozen of the survivors in attendance. Everyone else was off getting the ships repaired and prepping for war with Japan.

In contrast, sneak attacks by a determined enemy today elicit not the grim determination of 1941, but a fusillade of mutual hugs, tears, teddy bears and lighted candles. That will make the enemy quail! They might have guns, but by gum! we have flowers. The enemy will also flee from our barrage of self-doubt and our plaintive questions about how we brought this on ourselves. Not to mention the focus not on the enemy who wrought or encouraged the attacks, but on our keepers who didn’t warn us about it ahead of time.

Read it.

1. Avoid wog food.
2. Most especially, avoid hipster fake wog food.
3. Dead cow and spuds constitute the basis of all true civilization.

George Will lays out some inconvenient truth.

Progressives are increasingly preoccupied with income inequality, and their current hero, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), favors increasing the tax system’s progressivity. So, in this 103rd year of the income tax, it is timely to note that there still is no intellectually sturdy case for progressive taxation.

Arguments for it are invariably arguments for increased equality of social outcomes. Because individuals have different vocational desires and different aptitudes for adding value to the economy, inequality is inevitable. Because individuals have different social sensibilities, opinions will differ about what degrees of inequality are intolerably unlovely (more about this aesthetic metric in a moment). But inequality, even when unlovely to some, is unjust only when it arises from unjust social arrangements. So, the degree to which inequality is morally troubling depends on the degree to which the process that allocates wealth does so according to political influence and rent-seeking rather than merit and self-reliance.

…

Proportionate taxation always is what progressive taxation never is: simple. What justifies progressive taxation, and characterizes progressivism, is confidence that at any moment in society’s endless evolution, what is equitable can be known and society can be fine-tuned to achieve it. Which is how we got our baroque tax code.

Freeberg adds some additional insight:

There are people who hate money. No seriously. They bring it home, and figure the odds are stacked against them because after they’ve paid the essentials and made the minimum payments on the credit cards, which are maxed, there’s nothing. If this is ever discussed anywhere, it leads to some dirge about how the situation came to be, the high debt is the aftermath of some health crisis or what-not…but, nobody ever plotted a decent course forward by looking back at where he’d been. The real issue is that if the debt wasn’t high, they wouldn’t know what to do. If the debt was somehow gone tomorrow, and they had ten grand in the checking account, they wouldn’t see it as the end of a calamity but rather as the beginning of one. The money would represent an unfinished task, an unsolved problem.

Hand them $50, they start looking for things that cost $60. These are people who will never have money left at the end of the month. Ever. Because the simple fact of the matter is that isn’t what they want to have happen.

Read it.

Trump has no set in stone an ideology other than winning. If he has to modify some of the promises he made during the Republican primary in order to win the general election, who doubts he will? And just try and call him out on it. When has Trump ever been harmed by being caught in a flip-flop or a lie? He just denies he has flip-flopped or lied, even when there is overwhelming evidence, and moves along. Such a strategy doesn’t work for most candidates, but for some reason it works for Donald Trump.

Just as it worked for Bill Clinton, who I will remind you got two terms despite being a serial liar and rapist.

What’s more, once he is the nominee, Trump-The-Master-Brander will immediately attempt to destroy Hillary Clinton in the same manner he destroyed “low-energy” Jeb Bush and some of his other primary contenders.

The biter bit. I would find that entertaining.

Bryan Caplan lays it out.

At this point, the iniquity of practicing politicians should be clear. How much time and mental energy does the average politician pour into moral due diligence? A few hours of year seems like a high estimate. They don’t just fall a tad short of their moral obligations. They’re too busy passing laws and giving orders to face the possibility that they’re wielding power illegitimately.

Such negligence is scarcely surprising. After all, what’s in it for the politicians? Political systems reward them for seeming good by conventional standards. If we’re lucky, this spurs leaders to do what most people consider good. More likely, it spurs leaders to spin control – packaging even their worst actions in conventional moral garb. If there’s a political system that affirmatively rewards politicians for conscientiously questioning mainstream moral standards, I’ve never heard of it. Politicians have no excuses for their shameful behavior, but like almost all wrong-doers, they have reasons.

Paul Sperry in the New York Post nails it.

Last month, when a Colorado Christian entered a Planned Parenthood clinic and fatally shot three people, the mainstream media rushed to make the connection to “right-wing domestic terrorism,” even though police hadn’t made any connection and the evidence was thin.

When two California Muslims shot up a government office several days later, massacring 14, national journalists refused to call it Islamic terrorism even though evidence of the shooters’ motive was overwhelming.

When something bad happens, the Drive-By Media will move heaven and earth to shoehorn it into their Narrative; when reality smacks their Narrative in the face, then they fidget and flounder all over the place trying to spin it.

The Beltway punditry is twisting itself into knots trying to avoid admitting the obvious motive — violent Islamic jihad. Now, in a desperate fit to re-spin it all, we’re hearing from CNN that poor Farook was actually acting out over a “turbulent childhood,” and that Malik was suffering from “postpartum syndrome.”

…

When it comes to Muslim terrorism, sorting out motives is oh-so-complicated for the mainstream media. So used to telling us what we should think, they’re suddenly left scratching their heads.

But when it comes to “right-wing domestic terrorism,” the motive is instantly clear to them. And they are miraculously lucid and articulate in ­explaining it to us.

Read it.

Have you heard the one about how you can tell someone is a vegan? Answer: Because they’ll fucking tell you. Sounds about right. Meanwhile: why should you eat meat? Don’t just answer with the obvious and self-evident truth: Because it really tastes great—especially grilled!

Turns out eating meat may be essential for your mental health.

The People’s Cube has the answer to the ‘God Isn’t Fixing This’ meme.

Every time we suffer the consequences of climate change and hateful GOP rhetoric, Republicans always respond by offering “thoughts and prayers.” The Party has decreed that Thoughts and Prayers do not address the problem, and only highlights how little Republicans care about anything.

So what does work more effectively than Thoughts and Prayers? Presented below, for your consideration, are just a few of The Party’s tried and true methods for showing how much more we care than they do.

1. Awareness Ribbons:

Wearing an awareness ribbon shows everyone how much you care. When you see someone wearing an awareness ribbon, you know they care.

Awareness ribbons come in different colors for different issues. Don’t know what issue a certain color signifies? Ask the wearer, and they’ll tell you! Just like that, you’ll be aware of the issue! See how that works? The ribbon really works! And since you don’t want to be seen as uncaring, you’ll want to wear one, too!

You can’t wear Thoughts and Prayers on your lapel or bra strap. – See more at: http://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog/8-things-that-work-better-than-thoughts-and-prayers-t17272.html#sthash.KV7phkLN.dpuf

Read it.

CFACT has participated in the UN climate process going back to the original Rio Earth summit.  We are an officially recognized NGO observer at COP 21.

CFACT’s display is in the NGO pavilion at booth 37c.

We used our space to inject four “inconvenient facts” into the COP.  They are the kind of rock solid, 100% scientifically valid points that leave the warming-indoctrinated spluttering.

In summary:

1. Global temperatures lower than climate models predict.
2. Sea level only rising 1-3 mm per year, for generations.
3. We have more polar bears than 40 years ago.
4. There is nothing abnormal about extreme weather.

Read it.

Mark Zuckerberg did not donate $45 billion to charity. You may have heard that, but that was wrong.

…

He created a limited liability company, one that has already reaped enormous benefits as public relations coup for himself. His P.R. return-on-investment dwarfs that of his Facebook stock. Mr. Zuckerberg was depicted in breathless, glowing terms for having, in essence, moved money from one pocket to the other.

Told you so.

So what are the tax implications? They are quite generous to Mr. Zuckerberg. I asked Victor Fleischer, a law professor and tax specialist at the University of San Diego School of Law, as well as a contributor to DealBook. He explained that if the L.L.C. sold stock, Mr. Zuckerberg would pay a hefty capital gains tax, particularly if Facebook stock kept climbing.

If the L.L.C. donated to a charity, he would get a deduction just like anyone else. That’s a nice little bonus. But the L.L.C. probably won’t do that because it can do better. The savvier move, Professor Fleischer explained, would be to have the L.L.C. donate the appreciated shares to charity, which would generate a deduction at fair market value of the stock without triggering any tax.

Told you so.

Read it.

We’ve written before that “America’s top universities, for all their rhetoric about equality, diversity, and social justice, actually do far more to perpetuate and sustain the upper class than they do to promote those values.” Schools like Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton “rack up billions in tax-exempt donations, connect their disproportionately wealthy students to lucrative job opportunities, and foster exclusive social networks of the rich and powerful.”

A new study out of UC San Diego highlights one of the ways this process works. According to the authors, elite universities facilitate the Ivy League-Wall Street nexus by actively shepherding students into fields of finance and consulting by giving these firms preferential access to their students.

Where was this system when I needed it? Sheesh.

The simple fact is, that the people who go to these schools are, by any measure, the cream of the crop, and the cream always rises. (That others are also successful doesn’t undercut my thesis: These upper-level institutions simply don’t have the room to embrace all of the top-tier.)

This is true despite the increasing adulteration of the student population with affirmative-action admissions and other politically-motivated pandering — such people either don’t get picked for jobs in areas like finance or ‘flunk out’ as soon as their incompetence becomes apparent … although that is also being steadily adulterated by ‘diversity’ mandates in business firms; but such tokens rarely make the Big Bucks unless they wind up in a successful race-hustling operation like the Rainbow Coalition or some other lobbying group.

Lion of the Blogosphere understands the dialectic.

When the Second Amendment was written, it was assumed that the gun owners would be white Christian men.

In a country where there are nearly 3 million Muslims (which is greater than the entire population of the United States in 1776), easy access to guns just makes it easier for them to commit jihad.

That’s an argument you will never hear from liberals. Just putting it out there.

Read it.

“Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” — Richard Pryor

Cue the quibbling over how many Trump saw in an effort to detract from the main issue — as always.

On this date in 1955 Rosa Parks allowed herself to be arrested rather than move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, putting the first crack in the wall of institutional racism and segregation erected by the Democrats after Reconstruction.

One of the great ironies of history is how the legacy of the Democratic Party’s responsibility for Jim Crow in the south has been flushed down the memory hole by the Crust.

It ranks right up there with the irony of black people becoming Muslim, totally ignoring the key role Muslim traffickers played in the Atlantic slave trade.

Ah, well — those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, or so I’m told.

Read it.

He’s right, you know. Think of some gang-banger sitting in stir for the next 20 years. Think he’d vote Republican? The question answers itself.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, has some harsh words about feeders at the government trough.

For the head of Planned Parenthood to self-righteously complain about the “politicization” of women’s health care as her organization receives tens of millions of dollars annually in government subsidies – money forcibly extracted by government from taxpayers and then given to Planned Parenthood – is an astonishing feat of hypocrisy. No one who is ethically mature demands money from Smith and simultaneously complains when Smith expresses opinions about how that money is spent.

People – such as this head of Planned Parenthood – who use politics to seize other people’s money and who then are surprised and angry when such money comes along with attached political strings are inconceivably naive (at best). They are akin to the person who orders a kosher ham sandwich – or, alternatively, they are akin to the would-be pet owner who wants a dog that flies and meows rather than one that walks and barks. Such people, in short, are detached from reality.

Actually, that’s not all there is to it. As long as ‘health care’ involves procedures that a large number of people, in conformance with traditional morality, regard as out-and-out murder, then ‘health care’ is going to be politicized, because what constitutes murder, under the law, is inevitably a political question.

The same problem would arise where there a large population of Muslims in the U.S. who made it a practice to behead apostates from Islam. They don’t regard that as murder, but justice, based on the law they know. The fact that non-Muslims consider it murder is of absolutely no interest to them, except as an annoyance.

John Hinderaker at PowerLine blog points out some inconvenient truth.

Petrophysicist Andy May has prepared a poster-sized chart that shows the current state of knowledge about the Earth’s climate over the last 18,000 years, along with a history of human civilization during that time. You could spend a long time studying the chart, which tells you most of what you need to know to understand why climate alarmism, as currently manifested in the Paris conclave, is–scientifically speaking–a joke. You also should read his long post about the data in the chart. For now, I am simply going to post it. It is in PDF format, you can download it and study it at your leisure.

Read it.

The Antiplanner tried to demolish this myth fourteen years ago in The Vanishing Automobile, but now Daniel Schleith, a geographer from the University of Cincinnati, is bringing it back. Schleith calculated the “minimum commute” that would be required in the nation’s 25 largest urban areas if jobs and housing in those areas were “balanced,” and compared that with the actual average commutes in those areas. The difference between the two is the “excess commute.”

This method makes two related and equally fallacious assumptions: First, that the only purpose of transportation is to get to and from work, and second that the only factor that should be involved in choosing a home location is proximity to work. In fact, commuting makes up only less than 20 percent of our travel, and the other travel we do is only one of the many factors that might lead us to choose a home location that isn’t as close as possible to work.

…

“In urban planning,” observed Yale political scientist James Scott in his book, Seeing Like a State, “it is a short step from parsimonious assumptions to the practice of shaping the environment so that it satisfies the simplifications required by the formula.” Unfortunately, too many cities have taken that short step and greatly interfered in peoples’ lives to try to shorten commutes.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, examines one of the chief intellectual deficiencies of our time, which I have often discussed here under the title of “Aggregation Fallacy”.

A danger of collectivism of any sort – from formal collectivism such as state-imposed communism to informal and less-obvious forms of collectivism, such as gathering statistics on a nation’s “balance of trade” – is that it clouds thinking.  Collectivism not only masks differences that distinguish individuals who comprise whatever group is constructed, in whatever fashion, into some collective, it also causes people too easily to attribute thought and action to the group rather than to the individuals who make-up the group.

This is illustrated daily in most of what passes for News Media these days, in which some ‘journalist’ will cherry-pick some general statistic such as the number of deaths in a certain period in a certain general group, and then draw some tendentious conclusion, typically supporting a call for government action to infringe the rights and freedoms of people that the journalist just happens to dislike. “The Rich”, “The Poor”, “Working Families”, “Gun Nuts”, and “Fundamentalists” are common whipping-boys for this sort of treatment, although this sort of thing never seems to apply to groups that the Chattering Classes favor, like Muslims or Black People or Government Employees.

Last night at dinner the discussion turned to the hideous Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado.  My close and wise friend Lyle Albaugh observed that many “Progressives” tend to lump together into a fictional collective all people with some anti-government views.  So when a middle-aged white male violently attacks an institution, such as Planned Parenthood, that is an icon of the “Progressive” left, left-wing commenters, along with others with left-wing sympathies, often lump all limited- and anti-government folk together into some fictional group that is feared to be especially prone to commit violence of the sort that occurred last week in Colorado.  (Remember how, just after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in Tucson in 2011 Paul Krugman blamed right-wing ideology for the crime?)

And, indeed, the perpetrators of crimes need not even belong, in any sense that a rational adults would recognize, to whatever group is being trotted out for the Two-Minute Hate, in order to sprinkle with magical victim-blood the objects of their disaffection.

Read it.

On June 24, researchers will meet with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a very specific reason: they want to test a drug that might slow the aging process. If they succeed, they will show for the first time that aging is in fact a condition that can be treated with medicine, which could boost progress—and funding—for anti-aging research. And based on some comments made by officials late last month, the FDA seems inclined to say yes, according to Nature News.

…

Aging researchers don’t claim to seek immortality; rather, they want to keep more people healthier for longer. Drugs that have been developed over the past decade have been ineffective and sold with false promises. But the researchers behind the proposed experiment, called Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME), say they’re in a better position now thanks to animal studies that have hinted at particular physiological pathways that can lead to greater longevity.

Socialism is a disease. Getting old is a misfortune.

Read it.

Test-taking is a dreaded experience that the country’s kids and young adults share with their counterparts across the globe. The ritual at its core doesn’t vary much: Students sit at a table or a computer desk (or sometimes, as shown below, on the floor), pencil and/or mouse in hand, the clock ticking away mercilessly. America for its part is home to what The Atlantic has described as an “alphabet soup” of standardized tests, including: the NAEP, SBAC, PARCC, ACT, and, of course, SAT. Testing has become increasingly notorious in the U.S., to the point that tens of thousands of parents across the country have opted their kids out of standardized tests.

I’ve never understood the angst in Certain Circles about testing. My first impulse is to assume that those who worry about tests are those who know they are likely not to pass (or whose kids are likely not to pass), and extend that into a presumption that the test-haters are achievement-haters who want everybody to get a trophy just for showing up, again as a sublimation of their own feelings (or knowings) of inferiority. I’m sure that has a lot to do with it.

In America, perhaps all the testing helps explain why “all-nighters” and Adderall abuse are the norm on many college campuses. But there is an unhealthy obsession with acing the test abroad, too. Fraudulent college applications are reportedly rampant among students in China—the birthplace of the standardized test—aspiring to attend school in the U.S. And hundreds of people in India were recently arrested in connection with a massive cheating scandal. (Many of those arrested were believed to be family members of the 10th-grade test-takers.) Meanwhile, as NPR has reported, “the relentless focus on education and exams is often to blame” for suicide among teens in South Korea, the leading cause of death for that demographic.

Another, perhaps complimentary, explanatory character flaw is an apparent desire to make sure that Da Poor Iddle Kiddies never have to face the bleak prospect of stress in their lives, as exemplified by the current Crybully Crisis on college campuses. (This is what helicopter parenting leads to: A generation of weaklings who take refuge in their fascist impulses.) My attitude toward somebody who would commit suicide because of a test is something on the order of think of it as evolution in action; if you can’t face a test, you’re not going to survive Real Life, so better quit now before you’ve wasted everybody’s time. But that’s me, and I’m a notorious hard-heart. Ask anybody.

I’ve always regarded a test as a puzzle to be solved, rather than a hurdle to get over. Like looking in a mirror, it gives you a better idea of who you are and where you fit. And that’s good to know.

A black Harvard Law Professor gets it right.

Questioners often seem to assume that I should feel deeply alarmed and hurt. I don’t.

The identity and motives of the person or people behind the taping have not been determined. Perhaps the defacer is part of the law school community. But maybe not. Perhaps the defacer is white. But maybe not. Perhaps the taping is meant to convey anti-black contempt or hatred for the African-American professors. But maybe it was meant to protest the perceived marginalization of black professors, or was a hoax meant to look like a racial insult in order to provoke a crisis, or was a rebuke to those who have recently been taping over the law school’s seal, which memorializes a family of slaveholders from colonial times. Some observers, bristling with certainty, insist that the message conveyed by the taping of the photographs is obvious. To me it is puzzling.

At least they have grownups teaching at Harvard Law, regardless of the arrested adolescence of the students.

What I find puzzling is how so sensible a piece got published in the New York Times.

Read it.

That explains the Apple mouse and keyboard. Even the Mac-fanatic tech journalists hate them, from what I’ve seen.

Read it.

The title of this study is based on one of the most interesting characteristics video games can generate. Not only a possible past, that can be altered virtually, but even the divine and omnipotent position from which the player (including all categories of video player) has the opportunity (the power) to do anything in this virtual setting: from managing worlds to planning the life and the death of the characters. In fact, the common denominator is manipulating (in the literal sense of handling) something until now impossible, namely time and events that have already happened, taken as events with a beginning and an end.

Read it.

As this is Thanksgiving week, I thought I’d take a break from Muslim terrorists and social justice warriors and all the other negative stuff to give thanks for something positive that happened in 2015. In two separate but similar criminal cases that were resolved this year, a precedent was established that will possibly, hopefully, influence prosecutors in the years to come: Elderly white guys are not legally mandated to play by the “Chuck Norris rule” if they believe their lives are at risk.

What is the ‘Chuck Norris Rule’? Read the whole thing.

It’s become a media cliché to say that the white population in the U.S. is “rapidly aging,” but clichéd though that claim may be, it’s not inaccurate. Like all elderly people, aging whites will become increasingly susceptible to crime, and matters relating to self-defense will become more and more important. Which is why I consider it a small victory that this year, two separate attempts to penalize old white men for not abiding by the Chuck Norris rule failed miserably. If you didn’t read about these two cases in the news, it’s almost certainly because, since all the participants were white—the good guys and bad guys alike—neither story got Trayvonified into a national cause célèbre involving rioters, burned-out CVS stores, and presidents waxing poetic about hypothetical sons.

Somehow it didn’t surprise me when Obama identified a drug-dealing teen thug as somebody who could have been his son. Although he would have had to learn his aggressiveness from Michelle.

Read it.

Yeah, Turkey so totally borders the North Atlantic.

This morning’s downing of a Russian jet underscores the problems with Turkey’s NATO membership and EU accession. It is perhaps not the worst example of how Turkey is not fit to be in a formal military alliance with the United Kingdom and the United States, but it underscores the point that the country is simply not ready – not even as ready as it was pre-2000. The country has regressed in three key areas as far as Europe and the United States should be concerned: on security matters, on human rights matters, and as a hub for mass migration into Europe.

Actually, the reason to have NATO at all any more escapes me. It was designed to keep Communism out of Europe; it failed to do that, merely managing to keep the Soviets out. There are not more Soviets, so it’s basically an excuse for the Europeans to shuffle off their defense spending onto the U.S. If they’re scared of Russia, let them spend their own damned money.

Read it.

“The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”
— Thomas Sowell, 1998

Steve Sailer digs into the past so you don’t have to.

The first American IQ test, the Stanford-Binet, was created just before World War I by Lewis Terman, who went on to do the first long-term tracking study of high IQ individuals, The Genetic Studies of Genius or Terman’s Termites. (Future Nobel Physicist William Shockley famously just missed scoring high enough to qualify.)

Lewis Terman’s son Fred Terman, Stanford’s longtime Dean of Engineering, is often called the Father of Silicon Valley. Fred Terman, the mentor of Hewlett & Packard, devised both the high tech start-up model for Silicon Valley and brought in huge amounts of Cold War aerospace spending to build the Valley’s tech infrastructure.

The other main candidate for the role of the Father of Silicon Valley, physicist / eugenicist William Shockley, was hired as a Stanford professor by his friend Fred Terman.

It’s almost as if there’s a pattern that Stanford and Silicon Valley believe that intelligence matters and that it’s not wholly malleable through social engineering … But of course that has all been discredited, as demonstrated by Silicon Valley’s lavish hiring of non-Asian minorities for engineering jobs.

*Snort*

Read it.

Well, it may be new to the Wall Street Journal, but it’s not new to those of us who have been paying attention. Talk radio has been a force in politics since the Reagan years.

A decade ago, Republicans touted conservative talk radio as a foolproof medium to communicate directly with their most ardent supporters. Democrats and liberal groups tried to replicate that success by building their own left-leaning television and radio stations, with far less success.

That’s because (a) a neoliberal on the radio isn’t entertaining; poster child here is AlGore; (b) the Left can get all the ‘talk radio’ they want from tuning in the Drive-By Media — they don’t need a special format in broadcasting. I guess Patrick O’Connor at the Wall Street Journal just arrived in America from Not Around Here.

Now, the tables have turned. Republican leaders in Washington are under siege from their own activists, in part, because conservative radio hosts are almost as likely to rail against the party brass in Congress as they are to lament Mr. Obama’s failings in the Oval Office.

Is this a great country or what?

Republican presidential contenders would be unwise to write off this bloc; roughly a third of Republican primary voters strongly identify with conservative talk radio, about 10 percentage points higher than the share of GOP primary voters who consider themselves moderate or liberal, according to the survey conducted by the Democrats at Hart Research Associates and the Republicans at Public Opinion Research.

Of course, Republican presidential contenders are unlikely to do so — because they, unlike Patrick O’Connor of the Wall Street Journal, happen to keep up on what is going on in their party.

Sarah Hoyt discovers the terrible sin of Cultural Appropriation.

It might be easier, honest to Bob, if they had children or, for the few of them who DO have children, if they’d paid any attention to their kids’ development instead of to the weird movie going on in their heads which leads them believe things like that a baby recoiling from unfamiliar appearance means the baby is racist.

I’ve always thought babies were racist. Perhaps I ought to reconsider.

But innate tendencies do not a culture make.  Innate tendencies might dictate whether you leap out of bed with a song on your lips and incite murder in the mind of your roommate who drags self out of bed with groan and crawls till noon by the grace of coffee, but it does not dictate what language you speak, what attire you wear, or whether you think women look best when disguised as sofas.  Those are things you learned from your relatives/guardians when you were too young to think.  They might be filed under “must do” at a level where you have never examined them, but that doesn’t mean you can’t examine them. And change them.  It just means it takes time, is painful, and no one is going to do it without major upheaval requiring it.

…

Cultural appropriation?  Flummery.  It’s called being human.

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Many things in life — like landing a job at some Wal-Mart locations — are harder to achieve than getting into that prestigious university.

Despite much of the bloviation you hear about the origins of the Thanksgiving Day holiday, it’s origin is very simple — it was the traditional English harvest feast of Martinmas, the feast day of St Martin of Tours, held traditionally on November 11 each year. (The Puritans didn’t call it Martinmas, of course, because saints’ days were ‘papist’.)

‘But wait’, I hear you say. ‘Thanksgiving isn’t on the 11th.’ Of course not. In the 1600’s, England was on a Julian calendar; it didn’t start using the ‘papist’ Gregorian calendar until 1752, more than a century after the first ‘Thanksgiving’ feast. The key thing to know about the Julian calendar is that it’s a number of days behind the Gregorian calendar; by 2015 this difference is 13 days. So in order to know what Julian date is for November 11, you have to add 13 days to the Gregorian date. I’ll leave you to do the math.

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Grains may have a bad rep, but they also do a lot of good. Whole grains are high in fibre and have been linked to preventing ailments from heart disease to bowel cancer. They are also rich in B vitamins, iron and potassium.

But that doesn’t mean that Global Warming isn’t a thing! Not at all!

The vacuity of Keynesianism and the fundamental truth of Saye’s Law (‘supply-side economics’) is contained in the following exchange, overheard in a local Container Store:

“Can I help you find something, sir?”

“Yes. I’m looking for the thing that I don’t know I need until I see it.”

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Techie triumphalism is all around: “The best thing anyone can do to improve the quality of life around the world is to drive connectivity and technological opportunity,” Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and his co-author, Jared Cohen, wrote in “The New Digital Age.” As Wael Ghonim, who helped usher in the Arab Spring, put it: “If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet.” Today no human domain is safe from the technology world’s “solutionism,” in the phrase of the writer Evgeny Morozov.

Mr. Toyama used to share that worldview: “I am a recovering technoholic,” he writes. Then he moved to India, to lead the Microsoft lab, and observed a phenomenon that he would come to believe was universal: “Technology’s primary effect is to amplify human forces.” When computers entered rural schools, for instance, guess who held the mouse? Upper-caste boys. Technology wasn’t an intrinsic leveler or a bulldozer to archaic structures: It just gave people new, improved tools to be lovely or horrible to each other in all the old ways.

…

There are various explanations for the technology world’s contempt for existing human structures. It’s a world full of trained engineers — and many college dropouts — who cannot be expected to grasp human dynamics any more than political scientists understand Java code. Many brilliant technology leaders have stories of bullying and isolation in their youths that would leave anyone with abiding skepticism of human groups, institutions, cultures. If family dinners and school lunches were painful for you, “disrupting” eating with a venture-capital-backed protein drink like Soylent can seem like liberation.

The belief that technology can fix all our problems is very ‘progressive’, which is why the tech industry professionals who devote their work lives to Holy Entrepreneurship are so often politically neoliberal. The core belief of ‘progressivism’, that progress is inevitable so therefore the change that enables progress is inevitably good is at the heart of the start-up mavens who roam about the world like roaring lions seeking something to disrupt. Technology is just another tool, and tools are only as good or bad as the people who use them — and, sad to say, there are a lot of bad people in the world.

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A Democrite not really comfortable with democracy explains that all those Little People are really really stupid to turn down Free Stuff.

‘Of course, it is likely enough, my friends,” he said slowly, “likely enough that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed at home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later. That thought has long been growing in our hearts, and that it why we are marching now. It was not a hasty resolve.’ — Treebeard, The Fellowship of the Ring

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And you thought your exams were tough….

Both Intrnational Mens’ Day and World Toilet Day.

Make of that what you will.

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The story of technology is in fact the story of textiles. From the most ancient times to the present, so too is the story of economic development and global trade. The origins of chemistry lie in the colouring and finishing of cloth. The textile business funded the Italian Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; it left us double-entry bookkeeping and letters of credit, Michelangelo’s David and the Taj Mahal. As much as spices or gold, the quest for fabrics and dyestuffs drew sailors across strange seas. In ways both subtle and obvious, textiles made our world.

More blood was shed over sources of alum, fixative for dyes, that you might imagine.

Adam Garfinkle speaks sense to stupidity.

Gems:

Fromkin identified terrorism as a weapon of the weak, a trap of sorts designed to provoke stronger forces into acting on the basis of fear in counterproductive ways. Those counterproductive ways could take several forms: foolishly exaggerating a terrorist enemy’s power and legitimacy; doing things that betray one’s core values or alienate natural or objective allies; spending huge sums of public money to prevent tactics that terrorists have no intention of reusing; and more besides

…

The distorted formation of the Department of Homeland Security and the massive TSA bureaucracy are very expensive, and most of the money we spend year after year is spent by rote and mostly in vain. Somewhere Ayman al-Zawahiri is sucking oxygen, and he probably smiles regularly at the thought of how little al-Qaeda’s operations cost compared to how many billions of dollars we have spent ever since.

…

If basic number one is “don’t foolishly help the bad guys with their strategy of terrorism,” what is basic number two? It is that destroying a relatively weak enemy is easy compared to building a stable peace in its wake. Or, as P.J. O’Rourke once memorably put it, it’s one thing to burn down the shithouse, another to install plumbing.

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The author of Memoirs of an Addicted Brain and The Biology of Desire, Dr Lewis became addicted to opiates when he was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley.

He faced “serious personal and legal troubles resulting from his addiction,” his website explains.

“I know what scientists are looking at when they say addiction is a disease. I don’t dispute the findings, but I dispute the interpretation of them,” he told The Huffington Post.

He went on to argue that addiction is a “developmental process” and that while the brain changes, addiction is not “chronic” because people “continue to change when they recover.”

Dr Lewis said that the label also makes recovery more difficult because it means that patients can be exploited by expensive programmes with low success rates, and ultimately dehumanises addicts.

Cue the attacks by Social Justice Warriors. What this poor guy fails to notice is that (a) classifying it as a disease means you can force insurance to cover ‘treatment’ costs; (b) classifying it as a disease means you can push for government-funded ‘treatment’ programs; (c) classifying it as a disease means It’s Not Your Fault and pushes the Narrative that nobody is responsible for what he does, that Society Is To Blame for everything bad, and that we all ought to surrender to Big Brother, who will kiss it and make it all better.

Well, he did to to Berkeley, so I guess that explains it.

Read it.

Damn, I’m not qualified for any of these jobs.