Read it.

The 61 tattoos that are across Iceman Ötzi’s body are the oldest tattoos known to man, according to new research.

And look what it got him – an arrow in the back and a death in the snow, pursued by enemies.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Sarah Hoyt debunks some myths.

The idea that if you gave everyone enough food and time and free schooling they’d all become erudite and thinkers can be disproved by a stroll through your local Welfare hub.  Go on, I dare you, go down and start a little discussion on Kantian philosophy.

But it’s an idea that remains a myth on the left which has lost all other classical liberal ideals (like, you know, individual freedom) but holds fast onto this idea that education will somehow make a progressive out of everyone.  (Patently ridiculous as they’ve been indoctrinating several generations now, and it still won’t take the way they want.  That cold slap of reality counteracts it.  Which is why they advocate more cowbell.)

Read it.

Our company was born out of my own experience as the owner of seven franchised ice cream stores. But years before I owned a chain of quick-service retail establishments, I worked at one. I worked at McDonald’s, where I slung french fries, scrubbed high-chairs, and worked the drive-thru for $6.40/hour (Canadian!)

This investor that sat in front of me was successful. Wealthy. Smart, really smart. He attended an elite private school, and earned two different degrees from separate Ivy League institutions.

But he had never worked at McDonald’s before.

And I bet he had never known anyone that had.

It made me feel a bit like a savant. Here was this brilliant, successful man, who knew 2X or 3X more about many things than I did. But I knew 100X or even 1000X more about a huge part of the world that he had never really experienced.

There are 20 million retail workers in America, with two million of them working at McDonald’s and Walmart alone. Call it whatever you want: “the middle class”, “the working class”, “blue collar workers.” Whatever euphemism you choose, the fact is that a huge portion of North American workers are supporting themselves and their families by working for an hourly wage, often close to the minimum, in retail or hospitality.

Read it.

A look inside Communist Chinese society.

Before the communists marched in, my great-grandfather had already lost everything to gambling debts, except for a few houses left to his sons in his will, including grandpa’s. “Not too bad,” grandpa recalled. “The people in the neighboring village who won our land were later beaten to death during the Land Reforms.”

…

One day, four young men came into the house when only my grandma and two of her young kids were in. They told grandma, “Give us the pans and everything made of iron. Good news, from now on, you don’t have to cook at home, we will work together, eat together, the children will study together and play together. We will take the iron to make steel.” My grandma secretly hid a pan in the haystack, and cried to her husband when he came back. She said, “I heard the children will also be shared in the People’s Commune.”

It turned out the children weren’t confiscated, but soon the People’s Commune collapsed. Half of grandpa’s possessions had already been confiscated and redistributed, and even the bark of the trees in the yard were boiled and eaten by hungry villagers Grandpa had to take down the ink painting on his wall, and put up Chairman Mao’s portrait in its place. But that was fine by him. He loved Chairman Mao.

Mark Steyn on the latest GOP debate.

On Channel 9 in New Hampshire, there’s a Bush ad every ten minutes: That’s an expensive way of keeping a guy at 3 per cent in the polls.

Sean and I also addressed the way Trump has re-framed the debate. For the first time, immigration is being discussed in terms of what it does or doesn’t do for the people who are already here. Without Trump, the immigration portion of a GOP debate would be Jeb! arguing with Marco about whether the “pathway to citizenship” should be two years or six months.

Read it.

Police say no one was injured when the car plowed through the entrance at the golden-domed monument, and the incident is under investigation. A motive is currently unclear, though early reports suggested the man was ‘incoherent’.

Read it.

Searching for possible explanations, we encountered a training manual of the former Russian KGB.8 According to this manual, KGB operatives were instructed to keep their weapon in their right hand close to their chest and to move forward with one side, usually the left, presumably allowing subjects to draw the gun as quickly as possible when confronted with a foe. Indeed, under “Chapter 2–Movement,” the manual gives the following instruction: “When moving, it is absolutely necessary to keep your weapon against the chest or in the right hand. Moving forward should be done with one side, usually the left, turned somewhat in the direction of movement.” We wondered whether this could explain President Putin’s gait, since he had received KGB training earlier in life.9 If this were true, then it would be reasonable to expect a similar gait “abnormality” in other Russian officials who might have received similar instruction during weapons training by the KGB or other military or intelligence agencies. We therefore performed a YouTube search for videos of other Russian officials, with surprising results.

Read it.

Birth tourism — illegally spending just enough time in America so your child can exploit America’s naive birthright citizenship rule — demonstrates the cash scarcity value of American citizenship that America’s leadership seems intent on giving away to random foreign grifters.

On the other hand, at least these people have money and are willing to spend it in the U.S. I have no reason to think that they’re doing it just so their kids can come to America some day and shut American workers out of low-paying jobs, while a random subset of them goes on to commit mass murder in a suburban school or mall. So we’ve got that going for us.

Read it.

But you knew that.

Read it.

The point being, of course, that the ergonomics of smartphones as reading devices are not only kind of rad, but historically so.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

The Other McCain is not afraid to ask the hard (well, easy, really) questions.

You can read the whole thing, and you can also read Steve Berman’s commentary at Red State, which begins: “Nobody argues against the fact that there needs to be diversity at the top of large companies, but . . .”
Uh, what?
Is it a “fact” that “diversity at the top” is a “need”? I am skeptical. Why should anyone care whether the executive suite is “diverse”? Are the Japanese executives at Toyota worried? And why does Steve Berman limit this “diversity” requirement to “large companies”?
How large does a company have to be before the “need” for “diversity at the top” becomes a “fact”? If a family of Mexican immigrants opens a taco stand, should they be required to hire a Korean assistant manager for the sake of “diversity”? Does anyone complain there are “too many” Italians working at the pizza restaurant?

This reflects earlier articles I’ve referenced regarding ‘diversity’. Is there a unique ‘African-American’ or ‘Hispanic’ perspective on physics? Latin? Microbiology? Greek? Organic Chemistry? Russian? Meteorology? Babylonian epigraphy?

Businesses exist for exactly one reason, to make profit. Anything that contributes to the goal of making profit is good, and anything that distracts from that goal is bad. Period.

Companies do not exist for the sake for the employees. Nobody has a “right” to a job at any company, because if the company does not make profit, the company will go bankrupt and then everybody will be unemployed. Your employment is therefore a function of your daily contributions to the goal of making profit.

That ought to be carved in stone in a prominent place at every business school in the world.

Where legitimate authority is uncertain or disputed, we find what Hobbes called bellum omnium contra omnes (“the war of all against all”), and the identity-politics mentality of “diversity” is symptomatic of this societal drift toward anarchy. Why should anyone care that the CEO of Sam’s Club is a black woman? And why should she care whether the suppliers are white males? Sam’s Club exists to make profit, as do the companies that manufacture the products that are sold at Sam’s Club, and as long as everybody is making profit, so what? The people who are calling for a boycott of Sam’s Club are reflecting the same mentality as those who want to boycott Donald Trump’s businesses because they don’t like Trump’s opinions on immigration. The idea that everything is political — that everything should always be up for a vote or otherwise subject to political influence — and that we are victims of “social injustice” if things don’t go our way, must ultimately lead to anarchy and civil war.

Preach it, brother.

Sarah Hoyt reflects on the fact that, not only is the future not evenly distributed, the present isn’t either.

I’ve long since realized that I grew up somewhere between medieval England and Victorian England.  Tudor England feels about as familiar to me as the present day which is why I like visiting now and then.

But even in Elizabethan England, there were different time zones, by which I don’t mean the artificial time declarations (though they went by the sun, so it was different too) but more that different parts of Britain at that time were in different “places” historically.

…

The borders of Scotland are “centuries behind” Tudor England on the road from tribalism to a modern state. This in turn means a lot of other things about it are “primitive” as the poor character keeps suffering through.

…

I’m here to tell you that understanding another culture — or even understanding that another culture really exists, and they’re not just sort of playing at it — is REALLY hard.  Humans are very good at absorbing the conditions they’re born into and internalizing them as THE conditions, i.e. the only true ones, and then thinking of everything else as a bizarre variation.

…

For me, who grew up in one culture, entered another when I went to school (think of it as being raised in Apalachia then joining mainstream culture.  I had to learn almost completely different language.)  and then came here for a year, went back for four while dating someone neither Portuguese nor American, then came here to live.  It gives you a very clear vision of both cultures.  And it makes it very obvious it’s not all just “pretending” to be different.

It still stuns me that in that time and in that place, intelligent well read men could believe this clap trap of “one world” and government and religion both withering away leaving behind this human being that if he ever existed would be truly alien.

Read it.

But there seems to be a broader fissure underlying this discussion: why don’t people at the 90th percentile of the income distribution feel particularly rich?

The answer is simple: because any Americans who are richer than this cohort are so much richer.

Read it.

Books, it turns out, were not only among the first commercially produced Christmas gifts; the book business played a central role in turning Christmas into the commercialized holiday that we know today. “Publishers and booksellers were the shock troops in exploiting—and developing—a Christmas trade,” Stephen Nissenbaum writes in The Battle for Christmas, his social history of the holiday. “And books were on the cutting edge of a commercial Christmas, making up more than half of the earliest items advertised as Christmas gifts.”

Starting in the 1820s, when Christmas was still largely a day of feasting and religious observance, publishers helped pioneer the concept of giving mass-produced goods as presents, inventing an entire genre of books, called Gift Books, designed to be presented to loved ones at Christmas. These were typically anthologies of poetry, fiction, essays, and drawings, with the contents of each volume tailored to appeal to a specific audience. “Gift Books were available at every price range and for every conceivable market—demographic, religious, political, and cultural,” Nissenbaum writes. “There were Gift Books for children (in fact, for boys and girls separately), young men, mothers, Jacksonian Democrats, proponents of temperance and abolitionism, even members of men’s clubs.”

Scott Johnson at Powerline waxes philosophical.

The rise of Barack Obama is a sign of the indifference of history to the well-being of the United States and, his Nobel Peace Prize to the contrary notwithstanding, the world. If history gave a damn, Barack Obama would still be voting “present” in the Illinois legislature, just to prove his existence to an indifferent universe.

Obama has repeatedly availed himself of the supposed argument from “history” to express his high-minded disapproval of men and events in lieu of doing anything serious about them. In the cases of Putin and Assad, who have suffered the indignity of Obama’s occasional disapproval, history seems to be having the last laugh. What about Obama’s signing the United States on to Team Islamic Republic of Iran under the JCPOA? Obama is jumping on to the wave of the eighth century and taking us closer to the end of history. In this case it won’t have a happy ending. Someone needs to undo what Obama has done.

Read it.

The list of schools where students can get a decent education has been dwindling for some time. And atmospheres of political correctness are nothing new. But with the second coming of ’60s radicalism — met this time with weak-willed administrators caving to long lists of student demands — the issue is whether there are any universities where dissenting students have half a chance.

Few and far between.

By the way, if your child is set on an Ivy League education, you may be particularly worried. The wrong Halloween costume at Yale can create a campus-wide uprising. At Brown University, people who want to engage in free inquiry now have to join a secret society. For the record, Shields says that Harvard has more ideological diversity on its faculty than the rest.

I would not send my child to Yale, although I enjoyed my years there.

Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine lists the problems with ‘diversity’.

Few would deny that some racial diversity in a student body is worthwhile. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say they want to see African-American students nearly vanish from elite college campuses.

But it’s easy to question whether a given level of African-American representation in a student body is necessary to achieve diversity as the concept was always understood (see Notes 1 and 2). Stated differently, it’s probably impossible to show objectively that the levels universities strive for are necessary for this purpose.

Attempts to do so, for example by analyzing black representation on a classroom-by-classroom basis, descend into farce. Why must there be a black student in, say, a physics class? What, Chief Justice Roberts wanted to know, is the unique black perspective on physics?

Why, for that matter, is a black needed in any particular class? It would be terrible to attend college and never hear from a black student. But where’s the need to hear from one on the subject of Charles Dickens, David Hume, or the Catholic Reformation? And what if the black student in that class doesn’t speak up?

Read it.

What if extinctions were only temporary? Yes, we’re talking “Jurassic Park”-level science. It’s called de-extinction, and Dr. Mike Archer, a paleontologist, is trying to make it happen.

Read it.

According to a big crop of recent studies, you’re sexist and you hate the poor. Well, not you personally. Except – quite possibly you personally, actually, even if you believe otherwise. In one study, men liked the idea of dating a hypothetical smart woman, but were less keen on actually meeting a real one. Another found that both sexes judge women, and only women, to be less credible when they’re angry. A third found widespread subconscious bias in favour of rich people, even among those who denied it; a fourth concluded that food tastes better in sexist packaging – “big and filling” for men, “light and healthy” for women. And as we know from research into “implicit bias”, being on the receiving end of such prejudice (being female, poor or black, say) doesn’t mean you don’t also harbour it yourself.

An astonishing admission to read in the pages of the Guardian, Voice of the Cultural Marxist Crust and Tribune of the Politically Correct.

Findings like these typically trigger outrage that such antediluvian attitudes persist. But here’s a troubling thought: what if our getting righteously cross about them makes matters worse? The psychological pitfall here is known as “moral satiation”: the act of calling out others for their prejudice makes you feel you’ve done your job, and need do nothing more, whereas in fact you’ve probably just solidified your own unwarranted assumption that you’d never fall prey to such biases. Something similar happens now that every online hothead is fluent in the previously specialist language of cognitive biases and logical fallacies. There’s no easier way to avoid introspection than to accuse someone else of a bias or fallacy – even though seeing yourself as less vulnerable to them is another cognitive bias. The caller-out glides smugly off into the sunset, confident their morality’s in splendid working order.

A more telling description of the ‘progressive’ Left has never been penned.

The deeper problem here is that we think of prejudice and bias as anomalies – occasional brain glitches that need stamping out, and from which good people can reasonably aspire to be free. Yet all the evidence suggests they’re basic tools of human reasoning: we must make snap judgments, on the basis of various shortcuts, or we’d be unable to function. Seen this way, hiring a talented teacher over a useless one is still a form of discrimination; the difference is that it’s fair and sensible, while discriminating on the basis of skin colour isn’t.

Except when it is — cf. the preponderance of studies on human bio-diversity and IQ.

Read it.

Well. There it is.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, is worth quoting in full.

While it’s true that Milton and Rose Friedman, along with other libertarians and free-market conservatives who often use “free to choose” as a shorthand descriptor for a free society, believe that such a society results over time in better outcomes than are likely to be generated by less-free economic arrangements, it is emphatically untrue that the Friedmans – or any other respected libertarian writers – ever argued or even implied that free markets lead to something close to an earthly “Garden of Eden.”  The Friedmans understood, and all other respected free-market advocates understand, that our world is one of trade-offs and not “solutions.”  And so, indeed, as the options among which we are free to choose become both more numerous and more attractive, the costs that each of us incurs when exercising our freedom to choose rise.  If for no other reason, such a world cannot possibly ever be an “earthly paradise.”

Moreover, the case for a free society is very much a case for minimizing the prospect of large-scale harm that is always at risk of being unleashed when societies are directed from the top.  It is not a case that promises paradisiacal outcomes.  Free-market advocates recognize that people differ in their tastes, their risk preferences, their judgments, their self-discipline, their talents, and their opportunities.  And, therefore, free-market advocates recognize and accept the reality that many people will make not only choices that others judge to be ‘wrong,’ but also make choices that those who make such choices themselves later judge to be wrong.

Free-market advocates prefer to let even unwise adults remain free to choose than to use the state to oblige adults to choose as elites would have them choose.  There is nothing utopian about such a vision of society.  And by falsely accusing free-market advocates of being utopian, it’s as if Akerlof and Shiller are phishing their readers for phools into buying a faulty case for greater government intervention.

Freedom: It’s not the best thing; it’s the only thing.

Peter Nicholas, in the Wall Street Journal, gives us a synoptic view of a strange duck.

In making himself a viable candidate for the party nomination, though, Mr. Sanders is sounding more like a liberal in the Franklin D. Roosevelt tradition than a classic socialist.

Well, there are some of us who consider Franklin Roosevelt as being sufficiently a classic socialist as to make no difference, but never mind.

Few in the movement expect that Mr. Sanders, should he win the White House, would quickly usher in an economy organized around socialist principles.

By which I assume they mean ‘more than it already is’. The reason they’re so sanguine is that, looking back at how much socialism has crept into American government through people who were socialist at heart if not in name, if they actually get somebody who embraces the name of socialist, the socialization of America can only get faster. I can see their point.

But they see his candidacy as a vehicle to broaden understanding about democratic socialism.

There’s an oxymoron for you, ‘democratic socialism’.

In his speech, Mr. Sanders said he didn’t believe the government should “own the means of production.”

Then he’s not a socialist, and is cripplingly ignorant of what socialism means. I’m more inclined to think that he’s lying, but that’s me.

Gavin McInnes reacts badly to modern mores.

A millennial walked into my office this week looking like a simpleton with a court date. He had a cheap suit on with square-toed shoes and his hair lay flat on his forehead like Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber. His shirt came straight out of the dirty laundry and the collar on it was so crumpled it sat over his blazer like a pile of used condoms. When I began to list the dozens of fashion crimes this young man had just committed he stared at me like a Papua New Guinean being shown how to open a tin. I’m beginning to think young men have been dressing wrong for so long, they no longer know what’s right. I came of age in the ’80s when mods set the template for how to dress, but today all they have is Reservoir Dogs and Men in Black. Those guys don’t even use pocket squares.

Preach it, brother.

Read it.

As the saying goes, “All roads lead to Rome.” Folks at the moovel lab were curious about how true this statement is, so they tested it out. They laid a grid on top of Europe, and then algorithmically found a route from each cell in the grid to Rome, resulting in about half a million routes total. Yep, there seems to be a way from Rome from every point.

Read it.

The Wall Street Journal actually does some journalism, unlike the knee-jerks of the rest of the Drive-By Media.

Executive Summary: People are tired of the Political Correctness straightjacket into which they have been crammed by the existing Ruling Class, and they rejoice to see somebody who’s willing actually to say what they’ve been thinking. The don’t like where the country is today, they hate Barack Obama, they hate the mainstream media, they’re suspicious of Muslims, and they don’t buy the media meme that it’s unreasonable to feel that way.

“Right now the establishment Republicans just died,” Mr. Luntz said.

And good riddance.

Read it.

I’ll bet they’re really great wings.

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.