Sarah Hoyt lays out some inconvenient truth.

When I woke up this morning we were snowed in, and we still are.  Which makes me feel like I should crawl back between the covers.

This is too bad, because I need to speak to several things that are alien to native-born Americans.  These include how the rest of the world works, how a religious mono-culture works, that yes, most Muslims are not actually insane terrorists BUT that doesn’t mean they don’t support the insane terrorists even as they recoil from the things they do and in the cool light of day think they are farkin insane.

It is important to explain this, because the US is so large and has been in peace and prosperity so long that the arguments that broke up all over facebook were like watching two people discuss whether the greatest danger to the Titanic was bad soup or a measles epidemic, even while the iceberg tore the ship apart.

Sarah Hoyt offers some perspective.

Sarah is Portuguese and grew up under a socialist government, but came to the U.S. because it was better.

As I said, I already had some idea that in the US communist authors and singers weren’t shunned. I’d listened to enough singers who sounded like the Portuguese communists and who were multimillionaires in the US. But that was the first time I met an on-the-street American (he was a new employee there) and realized that it not only wasn’t true that communism and socialism were looked down upon on the US, but that the “cultured” groups in the US were pretty much indistinguishable from cultured groups in Europe, where leftism was a positional good and saying things like “Stalin was a little harsh” was not a reason to recoil in horror but a reason to nod and know the speaker was on the vanguard of culture.

By the time I moved to the US in the mid eighties, leftism and posing as a leftist were very much a mark of the “educated” and the “smart.” While the popular idea was that the Republicans were “the party of the rich” in fact to move in the wealthy and “classy” sets you had to parrot opinions that were indistinguishable from the opinions of the left and even the extreme left in Europe.

It’s only got worse since then. In the last thirty years, the long march through the institutions was completed, and art, news and academia are all firmly in the hands of the left. Which means that parroting the right (left) opinions is not only the way to advance, it’s the ONLY way to advance. In fact you have to at least nod to them in order not to be sent to Coventry.

Read it.

The ‘car pool’ urban planners to the contrary notwithstanding.

Given the proliferation of microtransit services trying to match drivers and passengers, you might think they had ride-sharing and carpooling all figured out. But the recent demise of Leap Transit in San Francisco—to say nothing of the other transportation start-ups that have failed without a media whimper—reminds us that even in a big city it’s not easy to fill empty vehicle seats. And in the suburbs, it’s downright mathematically impossible.

Or just about, anyway, according to a provocative new thought-experiment by Steve Raney, principal at a smart mobility consultancy called Cities21. In a working paper, the former Silicon Valley tech product manager crunched the numbers on ride-sharing in the Palo Alto area and found the odds of matching drivers with passengers long, to say the least. Raney calls it the “Suburban Ridematch Needle in the Haystack Problem.”

“I wanted to gently inject some reality into this,” he tells CityLab.

What a concept.

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Don’t ever say we don’t have useful information here.

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Got that right.

In a recent study, researchers at the University of Barcelona, Spain, compared “morning people,” those early birds who like to get up at dawn, and “evening people,” night owls who prefer to stay up late and sleep in. Among the differences they found is that morning people tend to be more persistent. Morning types are also more resistant to fatigue, frustration and difficulties, which often translates into lower levels of anxiety and lower rates of depression, higher life satisfaction and less likelihood of substance abuse.

On the other hand, evening people tend to be more extravagant, temperamental, impulsive and novelty- seeking, “with a higher tendency to explore the unknown.” They are more likely to suffer from insomnia and ADHD. They also appear to be more likely to develop addictive behaviors, mental disorders and antisocial tendencies, and even to attempt suicide.

Read it. And watch the video.

When “Islamophobes” quote the Koran to buttress their arguments about the inherently violent (or hateful, or intolerant, or misogynistic…) nature of Islam, they are frequently accused by Muslims or their useful-idiot kafir apologists of “taking the verse out of context”.

In the following video, David Wood of Acts 17 Apologetics demonstrates the way in which Islam-apologists do exactly the same thing that they accuse their opponents of doing when they quote the “peaceful” Koran verse 5:32 not only out of its context, but omitting part of the verse itself. Dr. Wood rectifies matters by including the entirety of 5:32, plus 5:33 and relevant hadith, so that non-Muslims can see just exactly how peaceful this particular verse really is.

Jim Goad utters a cri de coeur.

I’ll believe we have an unbiased media the moment they start using the term “far left” as frequently as they use “far right.” But don’t hold your breath, because you will surely die waiting.

The blood hadn’t even dried from Friday night’s carnage in Paris before the major media’s lackeys and lickspittles were issuing dire warnings about a disturbing political trend in Europe. Despite the fact that Islamic extremists spilled gallons of blood Friday night, the media’s respectable class—those craven lackeys and lickspittles—did not seem in the least bit terrified about Islamic terrorism, but rather about the “far right” gaining traction in Europe.

Read it.

It will also put a lot of people out of a job. Maybe even yours.

Read it.

Today, the Clinton Foundation is unlike anything else in the history of the nation and, perhaps, the world: It is a global philanthropic empire run by a former U.S. president and closely affiliated with a potential future president, with the audacious goal of solving some of the world’s most vexing problems by bringing together the wealthiest, glitziest and most powerful people from every part of the planet.

The evolution of the foundation, which began as a modest nonprofit focused largely on the ex-president’s library in Arkansas, is a nearly perfect reflection of the Clintons themselves. It was not designed as a master plan but rather has grown, one brainstorm at a time, in accordance with the ambitious, loyal, restless and often scattered nature of its primary namesake. Many programs were sparked by chance encounters in Bill Clinton’s life. A meeting with a Harlem shopkeeper. A friend’s plan to fight AIDS. The flight to Davos. Emergency heart surgery.

Where the Crust can come out and play.

Ben Chu at the Independent understands the dialectic.

When Confucius was asked by his students what was the first thing he would do if he were made king, the sage replied: “Rectify the names.”

The answer baffled the students, who had expected their master to say he would promote the virtuous into positions of authority and expel corrupt officials. But Confucius explained his reasoning: “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”

That is why the Forces of Evil spend their initial effort at having a good ‘name’ for name-calling, upon which every other tactic depends. From ‘black market’ to ‘price gouging’ to ‘windfall profits’, the Left knows that controlling the terms of the argument is the first step on the road to winning. And Marx was the original Alinskyite – ‘capitalism’ isn’t really a thing, it’s just a name he created as a stick to beat the people he didn’t like. And everybody has used it as a punching bag ever since, since even people who favor property rights and free markets have taken to using it, since they don’t have any alternative.

But what is this capitalism? What does the word stand for? It’s not a question that is asked enough. The journalist Paul Mason has published a book with the title “Post-capitalism” which, rather irritatingly, lacks any substantive discussion of what capitalism actually is.

The definition is implicit: Capitalism is ‘those ignorant losers who don’t agree with us’. See how it is used and tell me I’m wrong.

But the old concepts are hard to shake. When pressed, people often still describe capitalism as a system under which the owners of financial capital (shareholders) offer up their resources to fund business ventures in exchange for a financial return (dividends paid by a company). Yet few large businesses need to raise money from investors in stock markets any longer. They can fund their expansions from internally generated profits. They are more likely to buy back shares with their free cash flow than issue new ones.

The classic Marxist understanding of capital is economic power as ownership, but ‘ownership’ has become so diffused in the modern world that it has about as much power as owning a lottery ticket. You hope to get lucky, but none of the outcome depends on any action on your part.

Ownership has changed too. Today many company employees are shareholders through their pension schemes. Does that give these workers economic power in the manner of the 19th-century capitalist class? Not really. Economic power usually lies not with shareholders but with the managers of companies, the executives. Sometimes it lies with the financiers who look after people’s investments, the professional asset managers employed by pension funds. But it is virtually never the ordinary shareholder who is in the driving seat.

This is old news among those who have been paying attention. James Burnham wrote it all up in his seminal work, The Managerial Revolution, back before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

Labels are often a substitute for thought, especially in politics where a naïve view holds sway that economic policies and institutions are either inherently “capitalist” or “socialist”. See “privatisation” and “the NHS” for two examples in the British context. Extremists of both the left and the right are attracted to this Manichean world where good and evil collide.

…

“Capitalism” doesn’t really exist. There are various modes of market-based economic, social and legal organisation in rich countries, some of which work well in some respects, and some of which don’t. There is a debate to be had about how to reform those modes to meet the often divergent needs and aspirations of different populations. But there is no magic “capitalist” or indeed “socialist” formula that all should follow. Such 19th-century labels are often an excuse to dodge the difficult job of figuring out what will work.

So, if you’re European, go out there and be odd.

Well, more odd than you are already….

Read it.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is facing a growing backlash from Mormons upset about a new policy that bars children of same-sex parents from baby-naming ceremonies and baptisms, and declares members in gay marriages to be apostates subject to excommunication.

The policies have hit hard in a church that considers family bonds central in this life and eternal in the afterlife. While church members are pouring out their pain and confusion at family dinners and on Mormon blogs, critics are planning a “mass resignation” in a park adjacent to the church’s headquarters in Salt Lake City on Saturday.

Pain there may be, but confusion only afflicts the clueless. The LDS church has a structure of authority based on revelation, just like Real Christianity, and its principles are not subject to the whims of fashion. The children aren’t being permanently excluded from the church, they just have to demonstrate that they conform to the church’s teachings rather than to their ‘parents’. There comes a time when an organization has to step up to the plate or go home, and it would appear that this is the point to which the LDS church has come.

Fortunately they don’t depend for their revelations on the editorial board of the New York Times, or there’s no telling what they’d be expected to believe.

‘Work computers are like an android simulation of a good friend with the memory and personality modules removed.’

Read it.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, draws the line.

In my opinion as an economist and as a human being who believes that no one has a right to use force to extract unbargained-for benefits from anyone else, a sufficient reason to oppose the minimum wage is that it prices some people out of jobs that they would otherwise have voluntarily chosen to take. The number of people priced out of jobs is, for me, irrelevant to this assessment (although, of course, the greater the number of people priced out of jobs by the minimum wage, the worse is the magnitude of its undesirable and unwarrantable effects).

Even if only one person is priced out of a job by the minimum wage (or more precisely, even if only one person is priced out of the job that he or she would have chosen to take in the absence of the minimum wage), I have sufficient reason to oppose it.

Wisdom. Attend.

Mark Steyn is deliciously dyspeptic today.

At this point in the evening, the candidates were arguing not whether it was disgraceful but whether it was do-able. Trump’s response is that not only is it do-able but it’s already been done – by a two-term Republican president. Eisenhower, by the way, was the last non-politician to be drafted as presidential nominee (and “I Like Ike” came from Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam). His sudden reappearance in the GOP pantheon is a fine example of the difference Trump’s made to this primary season: without his presence in the race, no-one would be talking about the practicalities of mass deportation of illegal aliens.

…

It is striking that, even in a conservative debate, mass, remorseless, illegal immigration is discussed almost entirely from the illegals’ point of view: as Kasich advises, think of the families, think of the children. Their families, their children. The families of those they’ve supplanted are of less consequence. The argument made by Bush and Kasich against enforcing the immigration laws is an appeal to moral preening: this is “not who we are”. But using mass immigration to destroy the lives of your own citizens? That’s exactly who we are.

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Note the clever thing that Trump has done here: Rather than bickering over whether it can be done at all, people have started bickering over how it could be done. To which Trump merely has to say, ‘Okay, that’s my idea, if you don’t like it, what’s your idea?’.

Read it.

“Everyone in the media thinks that Soylent is this product for people that are so busy they don’t have time for food; people who work 80 hours per week because they’re crazy,” Coogan says. “That couldn’t be further from the truth. We drink Soylent because it gives us the time to do other things that we love.”

This is actually very clever. Although this discusses mainly legal advice that was actually paid for, and how to get the best bang for your buck in doing so, it has Implications.

Anyone coming up with (or allegedly coming up with) a new product in the field of nutrition (loosely defined) can count on a lot of advice/criticism, solicited and un-. Assembling all of that in the form of a data reference, if not a database, is knowledge that would otherwise cost big bucks.

I’m waiting for somebody to do this with the ‘feedback’ that most companies get from their customers. (Yeah, they’re supposed to be doing that already, but a cursory look at the headlines reveals that whatever they’re doing now isn’t working very well.)

Read it.

Apparently this scares some people.

Frankly, I’d be more scared if the opposite were true. But, of course, I don’t write for a living; I actually have a real job.

Read it.

Sarah Hoyt has some points to ponder.

Real virtue is hard because most of it is internal.  It’s refraining from doing the things that the natural creature wants to do. It’s doing things you really don’t want to do.  It’s staying up an hour later to finish that overdue project, it’s getting up in the night because your spouse/kid is throwing up in the bathroom, it’s doing dishes before bed so your spouse doesn’t need to worry about them, it’s making a cup of hot cocoa for your kid when it’s snowy out and you know he/she is going to come trudging through the door, wet and cold.

Real virtue is putting what you ought to do higher in priority than what you want to do, and we see far too little of that these days. But that does not relieve us of the obligation to try.

Kathy Shaidle ponts and laughs.

Marijuana is the abortion of libertarians.

Small-government types, left and right, are unwholesomely obsessed with legalizing weed. Amusingly, both groups tend to stereotype so-con pro-lifers as hideous, crotchety, single-issue knuckle-draggers—“Have you noticed that most of the women who are against abortion are women you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place?” But while antiabortion activists have gotten younger, more genial, and more media-savvy, pro-pot protesters haven’t evolved noticeably in my lifetime: They’re still scruffy, smelly, and likely contagious. More proof that “progressives” really do live in the past.

P.S. Why do pro-pot libertarians positively beam when explaining that legalization will “let the government tax and regulate” their favorite drug, when “taxes” and “regulations” are their greatest enemies when it comes to every other product or service?

A good question. I think it’s because they’re trying to persuade people whose values they don’t share and don’t understand, so they do it in a very ignorant and ham-handed way, like offering black demonstrators some watermelon to quit blocking access to your store.

Weed makes people lazy. You’ll notice I didn’t say “stupid,” although no one can convince me that toking it adds brain cells or IQ points, either.

Many of the dedicated potheads I’ve known have been of average—even above average—intelligence. And they were failures. Or, at the very least (“most”?), mediocrities. They worked just hard enough to get by, and even achieved a degree of success in a constricted sphere of endeavor: hosting a long-running novelty radio show; writing a few books and teaching (part-time) at the same college forever; assistant-managing a small indie record or video store, or maybe a bike shop.

Aye, there’s the rub. Smoking per se is sufficiently stupid that arguing over what’s being smoked strikes me as pretty pointless.

Read it.

And the mask comes off. Dante Chini, writing in The Wall Street Journal, validates his credentials as a native born denizen of The Crust by suggesting that what Jeb Bush needs to do is ‘elect a new people’.

As Jeb Bush struggles in the polls and promises to do better in upcoming debates, here’s a thought to consider: Maybe the former Florida governor’s problems are more about the GOP primary electorate they anything he is doing or can do.

Funny how these people from Flyover Country keep failing to get with the program.

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This just sort of says Modern World to me, somehow.

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Mops just passively soak up the good stuff.4 You may even have to push them around the floor; they have to be led to the drink. At best you can charge them admission or a subscription fee, but they’ll inevitably argue that this is wrong because capitalism is evil, and also because they forgot their wallet.

It makes a disturbing sort of sense.

Via Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, whom I heartily recommend to all.

The day-to-day practice of politics consists largely of pushing the envelope to see how big a lie — and how many of them — one can get away with at the moment.  In what other profession is blurting out the truth considered a gaffe?

An extract from a regular feature on Powerline blog, which I heartily recommend.

It is ever thus in every “social justice” movement. The more obvious it becomes that virtually all impediments to success have been removed, the more furious the professional “victims” become that nothing much has changed in their lives. And the more resentful of others whose life decisions and discipline have catapulted them to success.

Individual success is anathema to a victim class. It does not inspire; it refutes the linchpin of their victimhood: that the deck is permanently stacked against them all. Those who profit from their professional victim status cling to it like a Titanic survivor to a piece of driftwood. Michelle Obama springs to mind: an obscenely-rich professional vacationer and Food Scold who claims to be dissed at Target and unwelcome at museums in the racist country that elected her unqualified, incompetent husband. Twice.

The Other McCain does the needful.

Did you go through a special anti-homophobia training program in school when you were a kid? No, of course not. You were taught to be polite to everyone and respect others. You are not a bully. You’re a nice person.

So you are a civilized person, and not a violent ruffian, yet you never had any specific lessons about not being a homophobe. Why then do public school teachers seem to think such lessons are necessary?

My theory: Since they are haters, they thing everyone else is a hater, too. (They just hate the wrong things, and so have to be trained to hate the right things.)

Does it now occur to anyone, besides me, that public schools have stopped teaching facts — William Jennings Bryan, and all that — and instead are teaching attitudes? And don’t you see that the attitudes being taught in public schools are liberal attitudes, because all the teachers are liberals who vote for Democrats and they want to train your children to be liberals who vote Democrat, too.

The American public school system is corrupt. Public schools are a political indoctrination program operated by Democrat activists who pay dues to a teachers union that is one of the major funders of the Democrat Party. Why would any Republican parent let their children go anywhere near these kind of wicked and dishonest people?

Read it.

Beneath Beijing’s bluster, Taiwan terrifies China because the small island represents a magnificent vision of what the mainland could be and what the Communist Party is not. This should be a reason to reaffirm that defending democracy in Taiwan is important to America and the region—and as an example for the PRC to follow. But like Ma’s unpopular government, the Obama Administration’s first instinct in this context is to bend to mainland sensitivities on this issue, weakening the defense of the Taiwanese democratic way of life in the process.

Name to the contrary notwithstanding, Democrats really don’t like democracy all that much.

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Read it.

Will he ever get a monument? Just looking at him, I’d guess not, since he didn’t die at the hands of police after committing a crime.

Where are the Black Lives Matter people now? Here’s a kid who deserves to be remembered if anyone does.

Richard Fernandez intrudes some reality into The Narrative.

According to adherents of historical materialism, the story of humanity can flow in only one direction.   That makes progressive politics not only feasible but mandatory.  The one-way nature of history means milestones once passed are in the rearview mirror forever.  Barack Obama could think of no greater put-down than to accuse Mitt Romney of questioning the certainty of progress.

Gee, I’ve been saying that for years.

In this view, progress is like a ratchet, once it advances a tooth it can never go back.

Thus when “progress” actually retreats it causes no end of political embarrassment, not simply because it admits the possibility of fallibility, but it disproves the inevitability of “progress” itself. When China decided to reverse it’s “one child policy” to avoid a demographic catastrophe, as Bret Stephens explains, it did more than repeal a Politburo decision, it admitted that the most advanced idea of the day was a crock of s**t.  It is such a disappointment to progressives.

…

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post writes: “The 2015 election is over. (You may not have known it was even happening.) And it proved one thing: Republicans have an absolute stranglehold on governorships and state legislatures all across the country.” But why?  The Democrats were evicted not because of any superiority in Republican organization but because their program eventually went stale and fell apart.

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There’s a genre of expository writing where the author explains in detail how he got something completely wrong. The name for this form is “nonexistent” because no one ever does it. Similarly, you will never hear a lecture from an economist explaining how he got some prediction totally wrong. For instance, Obama’s economic team swore that the stimulus bill would set off an economic boom through the magic The Multiplier. They were wrong and it was a flop, but no one talks about it because it is simply not done.

This is something you see in all fields, not just public policy. You never read about scientists discussing how they screwed up an experiment or fell for some nutty idea that sounded good at the moment. What we expect and what we get is equivocation, denial and when that does not work, an attempt to flush the incident down the memory hole. It usually works too. Paul Ehrlich was hilariously wrong about human populations, but he has paid no price.

Freeberg:

Well, I can explain it, I think. Opinion-makers and opinion-distributors like Ehrlich pay no price for being wrong, because very few people care; and people don’t care because they, in turn, also pay no price. “Turned out to be right/wrong” has little practical meaning anymore. Our system of forming and governing societies, our style of discussing weighty issues, come from times in centuries past when being right or wrong meant the difference between living or starving. Now, it means the difference between strutting like a peacock on Facebook, or…fuming away on Facebook.

Read it.

It’s time to put an end to the urban legend of the impending death of America’s suburbs. With the aging of the millennial generation, and growing interest from minorities and immigrants, these communities are getting a fresh infusion of residents looking for child-friendly, affordable, lower-density living.

…

How could this be? If you read most major newspapers, or listened to NPR or PBS, you would think that the bulk of American job and housing growth was occurring closer to the inner core. Yet more than 80% of employment growth from 2007 to 2013 was in the newer suburbs and exurbs. Between 2012 and 2015, as the economy improved, occupied suburban office space rose from 75% of the market to 76.7%, according to the real estate consultancy Costar.

Those pesky Americans! No matter how may times the experts tell them that they ought to be crowded together into high-rise apartments, they keep spending money on single-family houses with a yard! It’s infuriating!

Read it.

A few years ago, Jeff Katzenberg, the über-Hollywood mogul, sat onstage with me at a Milken conference and said that the worst career advice anyone can give is this: Follow your passion.

I couldn’t agree with him more, and I wrote about it here. The problem with this advice is that it’s so generic and so untrue that I feel sorry for people who heed it. There are plenty of people who are extremely successful doing things they’re not exactly passionate about. They just happen to be very good at what they do. There are also people who are undyingly passionate about something, but they’ll never make a career of it. They’ll remain poor, but at least they love what they do and are OK with that.

The Other McCain documents our return to  the 1950s, when almost nobody had sex on campus.

The implementation of so-called “affirmative consent” policies means that every heterosexual male student is at risk of expulsion if he attempts to have sex on campus. College orientation is now basically an anti-sex training program where female students are (a) taught that all men are rapists and (b) encouraged to file sexual assault charges if they have any physical interaction with male students. The fate of “John Doe” at Brown University — banned from campus for making out with a girl he met at a party — illustrates the extreme danger male students face in an academic environment where feminists have ginned up a frantic hysteria of hatred. Because the number of actual rapes does not justify their claim that 1-in-5 college women are victims of sexual assault, officials are trying to make up for the “Rape Shortage” by inciting false accusations.

I remember the fifties. They weren’t too bad.

Read it.

An interesting perspective.

Well, I am voting for Donald Trump. Oh, not by choice, and not in the primaries if there’s any option other than the likes of Jeb Bush or John Kasich or Lindsey Graham, the sailor-suited Little Lord Fauntleroy of the GOP. None of them are conservatives, but Trump does not even pretend to be one so he won’t take conservatism’s reputation down with him. Bottom Line: If Donald Trump is the GOP nominee and running against that withered fascist Hillary Clinton, I’m all in for The Donald.

Now, please kill me.

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Yes, we are at the point where a presidential candidate’s position of not being actively opposed to the Bill of Rights is a key selling point.

It might be different if we had a Republican Senate instead of one controlled by fussy submissives. If you were going to write about the shameful festival of capitulation presided over by Mitch McConnell, you should title it Fifty Shades of Reid.

…

What a pathetic state of affairs. The GOP is so full of losers that Donald Trump is a better choice than about half the GOP candidates. And the Democrats are worse – they have come out as actively anti-American adherents of an ideology that murdered 100 million people. I’m sure Hillary’s gulags would be “yuge,” but they would be neither “fabulous” nor “classy.”

Read it.

An international student from China who was dismissed from a doctoral program in psychology after clinical supervisors judged his English-language communication skills as inadequate for engaging in patient care has sued his university.

Jun Yu, who was dismissed from the clinical psychology Ph.D. program at Idaho State University in May 2013, is alleging discrimination based on national origin and denial of due process. In addition to compensatory damages and legal fees, Yu is seeking readmission to the Ph.D. program and the right to complete a remaining practicum requirement in China, where he now resides.

I guess there weren’t any doctoral programs in China. Or Singapore. Or Hong Kong. Or Taiwan. You know how  the Chines don’t value education.

Read it.

It is as though the neighborhood were divided by an invisible wall.

On one side, children attend a public elementary school where test scores are high, the students are mostly white and well off, and the parent-teacher organization can raise $800,000 a year to pay for things like a resident chef.

On the other side, children attend a public elementary school where 87 percent of the students are black or Hispanic and 84 percent receive some form of public assistance. Just over a tenth pass the state reading and math tests. There is no library or art teacher.

Guess what the fight is over. Just guess.

Guess who these people voted for in the last two Presidential elections. Just guess.

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Who knew?

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roduced by the hundreds of millions every day, the modern can—robust enough to support the weight of an average adult—is a tribute to precision design and engineering

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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I am not making this up.

Much like other job aggregation sites such as Indeed and Simply Hired, CareerLabs gathers job listings from around the web. What makes the company different is the ability to filter those job listings based on data that CareerLabs has collected about the employers that posted those jobs. For example, you can filter out companies with low work-life balance scores, or search only for jobs at companies that are growing rapidly. Founder and CEO Anthony Van Horne says the most popular tool during beta testing was employee morale, which is based in part by scraping social networks like Twitter to get a sense of how happy a given company’s workers are. And, yes, thanks to the wonders of public data, CareerLabs will tell you about the political leanings of a company’s management. CareerLabs also is working on a filter for the number of gender or racial discrimination suits filed against companies so job seekers can screen out companies that might be unwelcoming of women or minorities.

Read it.

One in the eye for the gender-is-a-social-construct dimwits.

Steve Sailer asks the obvious question.

For years, Audacious Epigone and myself have been pointing out that Texas public school kids do surprisingly well on the federal NAEP exam within each ethnic group. Now, the NYT finally figures that out, too:

Well, for one thing, they live in Texas rather that California. That argues for a certain degree of smarter.

Read it.

No wonder Trump is doing so well – it’s a Trend.

Hm. Let’s give Louis C.K. a shot at the White House. What’s the worst that could happen?

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During a recent long car ride whose soundtrack was a medley of NPR podcasts, I noticed a verbal mannerism during scripted segments that appeared on just about every show. I’ve heard the same tic in countless speeches, TED talks and Moth StorySLAMS — anywhere that features semi-informal first-person narration.

If I could attempt to transcribe it, it sounds kind of like, y’know … this.

I have always been a fan of radio voices. News broadcasters in the 30s and 40s had a very distinctive style of speaking that is immediately identifiable. So, apparently, do the people on NPR.

The best radio voice now living is James Lileks. You can catch him on the Ricochet podcast.

Lord Ridley reminds us of some inconvenient truth.

Innovation is a mysteriously difficult thing to dictate. Technology seems to change by a sort of inexorable, evolutionary progress, which we probably cannot stop—or speed up much either. And it’s not much the product of science. Most technological breakthroughs come from technologists tinkering, not from researchers chasing hypotheses. Heretical as it may sound, “basic science” isn’t nearly as productive of new inventions as we tend to think.

Suppose Thomas Edison had died of an electric shock before thinking up the light bulb. Would history have been radically different? Of course not. No fewer than 23 people deserve the credit for inventing some version of the incandescent bulb before Edison, according to a history of the invention written by Robert Friedel, Paul Israel and Bernard Finn.

The same is true of other inventions. Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell filed for a patent on the telephone on the very same day. By the time Google came along in 1996, there were already scores of search engines. As Kevin Kelly documents in his book “What Technology Wants,” we know of six different inventors of the thermometer, three of the hypodermic needle, four of vaccination, five of the electric telegraph, four of photography, five of the steamboat, six of the electric railroad. The history of inventions, writes the historian Alfred Kroeber, is “one endless chain of parallel instances.”