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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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?

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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.

Read it.

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.

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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.

…

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.

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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?

Read it.

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?

Read it.

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.”

Read it.

Late last week the EPA launched an investigation in to the nation’s federal ethanol mandates. It described the move as “discretionary” and, in its own words, intended to “ensure public health and the environment are protected.” The government agency has been spurred to action by mounting evidence that the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS)—the ethanol program first enacted by President Bush and eventually championed by the Obama Administration—isn’t the unalloyed “green” policy it is often sold as. Now, as Clean Technica reports, a new study from a team of scientists at the University of Tennessee has confirmed that the RFS has been, on balance, bad for the environment….

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

For those of you with too much time on your hands.

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The most interesting thing about Henry Kissinger’s analysis and rescue plan for American foreign policy, A Path Out of the Middle East Collapse, is the how little hope and optimism it excited.  Few appear to regard the article’s recommendations as feasible, and it has been received with the passivity air of a beaten boxer hoping only for a rematch.

This fatalism is especially depressing in the light of Kissinger’s diagnosis that Obama has basically unwound every foreign policy achievement of the last 40 years.   His considered belief that an outside chance of survival of the American position is still possible have struck not a spark.  The atmosphere is as funereal as the locker room of a team down 40 points at halftime after the failed pep talk of a former winning coach that has only served to remind the players of what an invidious contrast there is to their present one.

Read it.

Nevertheless, we’re all going to die when the sea covers the land because all of the Antarctic ice has melted. it’s a consensus! The Science Is In! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

Gates of Vienna provides us with a valuable checklist, since you can’t always tell what’s going on in a news story.

Steve Sailer discusses the unspeakable.

Historically, much effort was put into the obvious challenge of developing IQ tests that are stable across space, from culture to culture. In contrast, nobody until Flynn paid all that much attention to the question of IQ tests being stable across time.

Read it.

Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old fake clock-maker who caused such a stir at his Texas high school, is expected to meet President Obama at the White House this weekend. Obama holds the lad out as a victim of anti-Muslim prejudice even though, as John has argued, his “invention,” which resembled the timing device of a bomb and was placed in a suitcase dummied up to look like a bomb, reasonably triggered concern.

In advance of his meeting with Obama, Mohamed met with another president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan. Bashir is quite a guy. In the 1990s, he harbored Osama bin Laden for five years. He has an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for orchestrating genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Darfur. His country is under a variety of U.S. sanctions, and there is evidence that he may have secretly stolen $9 billion in oil money.

Read it.

I know that law is usually boring to non-lawyers, but every now and then an important case comes along that ought to concern everybody.

Foster involves a criminal trial in Georgia that led to a death sentence for Timothy Foster, an 18-year-old African-American who was accused of robbing and killing an elderly white woman. The prosecution used peremptory challenges, which permit parties in criminal or civil trials to remove potential jurors during jury selection, to eliminate every black prospective juror from Foster’s trial. Although the prosecution stated that it exercised its peremptory challenges for entirely race-neutral reasons, the record contains overwhelming evidence of purposeful—and therefore unconstitutional—racial discrimination. Examination of the prosecution’s own notes reveals that black jurors were singled out in at least five ways.

Increasingly these days we hear outraged claims of racism and racial bias in circumstances where such bleatings are obvious horseshit, but cases of bias do happen and this would appear to be one of them — not on the part of the jury, but on the part of prosecutors. Far too often prosecutors see their job as nailing somebody for a crime without caring too much which somebody gets nailed. This guy may be guilty — if I had to bet, that’s the way I would bet — but that doesn’t justify cutting corners on the way there.

I remember fondly a famous contributory negligence case we studied during my time in purgatory in which a drunk man wandered down the street in a frontier town and fell into a hole where workmen had been repairing the street. Of course, he sued the city. The city argued that he was at least partially to blame because he was drunk. The court ruled that a drunk man had as much right to a safe street as a sober man, and more need of one. We might extend that principle here to say that a guilty man has as much right to a fair trial as an innocent one, however cut and dried things might seem.

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In the long run, it’s probably smart to think strategically about ways we can all optimize our roles in the future economy. But for now, before the robots arrive and outsmart us all, let’s appreciate the fact that we’ve still got them beat when it comes to some tasks requiring fine motor skills, spatial awareness, and manual dexterity.

I’m sure opponents of the motor car thought the same thing about horses. That was then, this is now. And the ‘now’ keeps advancing.

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You have to be willing to revert to a Paleolithic pattern of sleep — and that means turning off your electric lights at dusk and leaving them off until dawn. Do that, and in about three week’s time, beginning around six hours after sunset each evening, you will find yourself experiencing a period of serene wakefulness that was once a nightly meditation retreat for all Homo sapiens on Earth. It’s a guarantee. It’s encoded in your genes.

…

For one month, beginning at dusk and ending at dawn, Wehr’s subjects were removed from every possible form of artificial light. During the first three weeks, they slept as usual, only for about an hour longer. (After all, he reasoned, like most Americans, they were probably sleep deprived.) But at week four a dramatic change occurred. The participants slept the same number of hours as before, but now their sleep was divided in two. They began each night with about four hours of deep sleep, woke for two hours of quiet rest, then slept for another four.

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Shrapnel dug into his head, back, arm and legs, and the concussion from the explosion tossed him into the air and down a hill. Mr. Webb kept fighting, throwing a grenade into the bunker and destroying it.

Mr. Webb was evacuated with serious injuries. Later, he was awarded the Navy Cross, which the Department of Defense describes as the second highest military decoration that can be awarded to Marines or members of the Navy, “for extraordinary heroism,” as well as the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts.

The shrapnel is still embedded at the base of Mr. Webb’s skull and in a kidney. He given medical retirement from the Marines, and after the war, Mr. Webb went to law school, served as secretary of the Navy under President Ronald Reagan, wrote books, and served a term in the U.S. Senate.

I think he’d make a fine Republican Presidential candidate. Oh, wait….

Gene Wolfe lays out some insight.

There is one very real sense in which the Dark Ages were the brightest of times, and it is this: that they were times of defined and definite duties and freedoms. The king might rule badly, but everyone agreed as to what good rule was. Not only every earl and baron but every carl and churl knew what an ideal king would say and do. The peasant might behave badly; but the peasant did not expect praise for it, even his own praise. These assertions can be quibbled over endlessly, of course; there are always exceptional persons and exceptional circumstances. Nevertheless they represent a broad truth about Christianized barbarian society as a whole, and arguments that focus on exceptions provide a picture that is fundamentally false, even when the instances on which they are based are real and honestly presented. At a time when few others knew this, and very few others understood its implications, J. R. R. Tolkien both knew and understood, and was able to express that understanding in art, and in time in great art.

Compare these Degenerate Modern Times, where every pervert feels entitled to be considered normal.

It is said with some truth that there is no progress without loss; and it is always said, by those who wish to destroy good things, that progress requires it. No great insight or experience of the world is necessary to see that such people really care nothing for progress. They wish to destroy for their profit, and they, being clever, try to persuade us that progress and change are synonymous.

This captures the essence of the ‘progressive’ — change for the sake of change, for that will inevitably lead to progress. Trust us.

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I asked More Guns Less Crime author John Lott about it and his answers were disappointing. Empiricists are no fun. “I don’t know,” he replied. “We don’t have the data.” He did concede that America has an intense prison culture with “38% of black males having a felony background.” He also backed up Bill Whittle’s claim that the remarkably gun-heavy Plano, Texas has pretty much the lowest crime rate in the world (0.4 homicides per 100,000).

My home town.

Lott is a human Google machine when it comes to guns and crimes and I learned a lot from our conversation. I learned the black family was far more intact in the 1950s and their propensity for crime back then was actually similar to whites. I learned almost nobody gets arrested simply for marijuana possession (0.3% in Arizona) and the vast majority of drug offenses involve trafficking.

And what happened from that time to this? The War on Poverty. If you want to screw something up, give it to the government.

If you had told anybody in 1969, the year we landed on the moon, that by 2015 every teenaged girl in the First World would be carrying around a computer more capable than an IBM S/360, nobody would have believed you.

For those worried about the ‘lack of women in tech’, suggest that they have the means to be ‘in tech’ in their pockets and purses; what they do with it is up to them, and not any supposed oppression by ‘the patriarchy’.

Read it.

If you want a sense of what Democrats are likely to be up to for the foreseeable future, look no further than Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The former Secretary of State has rolled out proposal after proposal detailing, or at least sketching, all the ways she’d change federal policy through executive action or urge Congress to legislate. And in doing so, she’s defined the current state of the liberal agenda—and its likely path in coming years.

That’s in case you were wondering. Some of us are quite familiar with the ‘liberal agenda’.

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I can’t ever tell the difference, myself.

You have to admit, though, it would make an awesome cover group.

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So what do standardized tests actually predict? I know of only one correlation: Your belief in the validity of standardized tests is strongly correlated with how well you did on them. I did very well on the SATs, so I think they’re a great predictor of college performance. Although I’m still annoyed about my math score.

Been there, done that. And I’m still annoyed about my math score.

Read it.

Why are “school shootings” a thing? The Sandy Hook shooter had no strong connection with Sandy Hook Elementary, and the Roseburg murderer had little or nothing to do with Umpqua Community College. Nor did the Aurora, Colorado murder have anything in particular against the movie theater he shot up. It seems blindingly obvious that deranged would-be mass murderers might be crazy, but they aren’t stupid: they go for the gun-free zone nearly every time. As my son once observed while we were leaving a local shooting range, no one ever tries to shoot up a Gander Mountain store.

…

Is it really “hotly disputed” that if someone starts trying to commit mass murder, it would be good to have armed citizens on hand to stop him? What else are policemen? How can anyone deny that “good guys with guns” are the antidote to murderers? That is what stopped the Roseburg murderer, and virtually every other mass shooter, although, sadly, in many instances too late, because no one on the scene was able to fight back. That is the nature of a “gun-free zone.”

I recommend the Glock, because it has no external hammer to catch on clothing and a trigger safety that is quite convenient when time is of the essence.

Read it.

Scratch the 1%, and a lot of Democrites spill out.