Taki does the Trump.

What I particularly like about Trump is the way he’s hated by the media. He doesn’t take any of their crap, and when misquoted, which he is a lot, he calls them names not fit to print to their face. This is the way it should be. When Vicky Ward, a Vanity Fair writer who has an acid pen and uses her blond looks as an added attraction, did a hatchet job on him, Trump replied in kind. He called her a bitch, a liar, and ugly to boot. The great and the good were horrified. I thought he hit the nail right on the head. The other thing that has the hacks really peed off is the fact that The Donald tells it like it is when it comes to immigration and crime. Phony writers for the Times and other such tendentious organizations ignore blue-collar workers who have not graduated from Ivy League schools. The latter love Trump, and the less educated they are, the more sense they make in liking him. We can’t all live in ritzy suburbs and slick Park Avenue apartment buildings like Times people, whose only contact with immigrants is during the 6 o’clock news. At the same time, Trump’s outrageous shtick and his camera-hogging antics endear him to those uninvited to chic parties in New York and Washington. The Donald blew it with McCain—what’s a pilot supposed to do when shot down, act Japanese and go down in flames?—but otherwise he’s done a great job annoying the rest of the crowded Republican presidential field.

Read it.

An Illinois man cuffed for suspected theft of a sex toy, and who told cops he had “no idea” how a pink Euphoria G-Spot Delight vibrator came to be in his boxer shorts, later recalled quite clearly that he didn’t much like the US prez when he “stripped completely naked” in his cell, making “derogatory comments about President Obama”, and signing his Miranda Rights consent form with the phrase “Obama is a criminal”.

Yeah, we’ve all been there.

Read it.

And all of it will be subsidized and micromanaged by the government.

Read it.

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

Don’t like government dietary guidelines? Wait a year or five and they’ll change.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Australians have been warned to get their dietary act together, after a survey revealed a growing and alarming trend for junk food excess.

According to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), 40,000+ respondents to its Healthy Diet Score Survey – “a scientifically validated survey which assesses people’s diet quality against the Australian Dietary Guidelines” – scored an average 61 out of 100.

“Discretionary food, or junk food, intake was found to be three-times higher than the recommended daily limit,” CSIRO notes.

Gotta love Australians.

Mark Bauerlein is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

IN the coming weeks, two million Americans will earn a bachelor’s degree and either join the work force or head to graduate school. They will be joyous that day, and they will remember fondly the schools they attended. But as this unique chapter of life closes and they reflect on campus events, one primary part of higher education will fall low on the ladder of meaningful contacts: the professors.

That’s what students say. Oh, they’re quite content with their teachers; after all, most students receive sure approval. In 1960, only 15 percent of grades were in the “A” range, but now the rate is 43 percent, making “A” the most common grade by far.

Read it.

And have been as far back as I can remember. Really, this is news?

Bernie Sanders has always caucused with Democrats, and they are perfectly comfortable with him. He’s still a long shot for the Democratic nomination, but he is rising in the polls. If there is a distinction between him and President Barack Obama on anything major, what is it? Both pushed “universal health care.” Both oppose the Keystone pipeline. Both believe taxes should be raised on “rich” people. Both believe in the redistribution of income. Obama wants two years of “free” community college. Sanders wants to make college “free” altogether. Both attack “corporate greed” and both belong to the school of economics that says, “you didn’t build that.”

Read it.

The Federal minimum wage has been frozen at $3.35 an hour for six years. In some states, it now compares unfavorably even with welfare benefits available without working. It’s no wonder then that Edward Kennedy, the new chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, is being pressed by organized labor to battle for an increase.

No wonder, but still a mistake. Anyone working in America surely deserves a better living standard than can be managed on $3.35 an hour. But there’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed. Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market. A far better way to help them would be to subsidize their wages or – better yet – help them acquire the skills needed to earn more on their own.

An increase in the minimum wage to, say, $4.35 would restore the purchasing power of bottom-tier wages. It would also permit a minimum-wage breadwinner to earn almost enough to keep a family of three above the official poverty line. There are catches, however. It would increase employers’ incentives to evade the law, expanding the underground economy. More important, it would increase unemployment: Raise the legal minimum price of labor above the productivity of the least skilled workers and fewer will be hired.

As recently as 1987, the New York Times was on the right side of the minimum wage question.

Read it.

Something I’d never thought to see, an article in favor of Joe Biden.

Read it.

In Thursday’s Republican debate, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will be the antiunion candidate. That will be the media snark. He signed (unenthusiastically) a right-to-work bill that applies to his state’s private-sector workers. He promoted (very enthusiastically) a law that all but ended collective bargaining for its public-sector workers.

Critics will ask: What does this have to do with being president? Unfortunately, everything.

Unions may not matter much in American workplaces anymore but unions represent the main political obstacle to just about every kind of reform: School choice. Entitlements. Pensions. Health care.

Even causes that wouldn’t seem union business prompt union opposition. Labor has been the chief obstacle to overhauling California’s notorious Environmental Quality Act—a reform supported by Democrats and environmentalists—because unions like using the law’s excessive paperwork burdens to threaten projects important to employers.

Big labor is behind a New Jersey state senator’s proposal last week for a trillion-dollar federal bailout of state and local government pensions—pensions that most federal taxpayers who would be paying for the bailout can only dream about.

Big labor is behind $15 minimum-wage proposals in major cities—a high-risk experiment for low-skilled workers, who may find themselves without jobs. But it will be a winner for organized labor. Not only will it raise costs for nonunion businesses. In Los Angeles, unions seek their own exemption so they can conspire with employers to substitute untaxed benefits for taxable wages, which strengthens the union’s hold on workers while shifting costs to other taxpayers.

As Miles Kimball, a University of Michigan economist who calls himself a “supply-side liberal,” wrote on his blog a couple of years ago: “Most unions are middle-class organizations that in their political activities are ready and willing to sacrifice the interests of the poor to benefit their members and their leaders.”

An Actual Zimbabwean intrudes a little reality into the Narrative.

Did Cecil live near your place in Zimbabwe?

Cecil who? I wondered. When I turned on the news and discovered that the messages were about a lion killed by an American dentist, the village boy inside me instinctively cheered: One lion fewer to menace families like mine.

My excitement was doused when I realized that the lion killer was being painted as the villain. I faced the starkest cultural contradiction I’d experienced during my five years studying in the United States.

Did all those Americans signing petitions understand that lions actually kill people? That all the talk about Cecil being “beloved” or a “local favorite” was media hype? Did Jimmy Kimmel choke up because Cecil was murdered or because he confused him with Simba from “The Lion King”?

In my village in Zimbabwe, surrounded by wildlife conservation areas, no lion has ever been beloved, or granted an affectionate nickname. They are objects of terror.

Read it.

Note that the top of the list is Jeb Bush at $19 million, about what Bill & Hillary make in a year.

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When Congress passes laws concerning health care, intentions and results do not always match up. Two cases in point are the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009 (HITECH). Understanding what happened to these two statutes as they passed from Congress to the reg writers and administrators might give us better insight into how we should expect the Affordable Care Act to play out.

Read it.

Ever since some alarmist came up with the economically nonsensical term peak oil, we’ve been inundated with peak this, that, and the other thing. There’s peak helium. How about peak phosphorus?

More recently, the term has been twisted from a supply issue to a demand issue, such as peak smart phone. And now, peak car. Yet, reading about peak car, the Antiplanner can’t help but feeling that this is neither a supply nor a demand issue but more wishful thinking on the part of city officials who are doing their best to create auto-hostile environments.

Millennials don’t drive? It turns out that’s not true, just as it isn’t true that Millennials avoid the suburbs.

…

Never forget that mobility is an economic activity that generates economic benefits, so reducing mobility reduces those benefits. Despite what the urban planners claim, accessibility is no substitute for mobility, as mobility gives people access to more economic opportunities and competitive markets. We will reach peak car only when someone could invent a form of transportation that is faster, cheaper, and more convenient than driving, and the only likely such invention is the self-driving car.

Read it.

The most common tower crane used in construction today has a lifting capacity of some 12 to 20 tonnes. For quite a few construction projects in ancient history, this type of crane would be completely inadequate.

Read it.

BLUF: No.

With the traditional definition of money income, the CBO found that real median household income rose by just 15% from 1980 to 2010, similar to the Census Bureau’s estimate. But when they expanded the definition of income to include benefits and subtracted taxes, they found that the median household’s real income rose by 45%. Adjusting for household size boosted this gain to 53%.

And, again, even this more substantial rise probably represents a substantial underestimate of the increase in the real standard of living. The authorities arrive at their estimates by converting dollar incomes into a measure of real income by using a price index that reflects the changes in the prices of existing goods and services. But that price index does not reflect new products or improvements to existing goods and services.

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A new study looks specifically at how formal attire changes people’s thought processes. “Putting on formal clothes makes us feel powerful, and that changes the basic way we see the world,” says Abraham Rutchick, an author of the study and a professor of psychology at California State University, Northridge. Rutchick and his co-authors found that wearing clothing that’s more formal than usual makes people think more broadly and holistically, rather than narrowly and about fine-grained details. In psychological parlance, wearing a suit encourages people to use abstract processing more readily than concrete processing.

Another reason why coders shouldn’t wear suits.

Read it.

A primal connection exists between our brain and our gut. We often talk about a “gut feeling” when we meet someone for the first time. We’re told to “trust our gut instinct” when making a difficult decision or that it’s “gut check time” when faced with a situation that tests our nerve and determination. This mind-gut connection is not just metaphorical. Our brain and gut are connected by an extensive network of neurons and a highway of chemicals and hormones that constantly provide feedback about how hungry we are, whether or not we’re experiencing stress, or if we’ve ingested a disease-causing microbe. This information superhighway is called the brain-gut axis and it provides constant updates on the state of affairs at your two ends. That sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach after looking at your postholiday credit card bill is a vivid example of the brain-gut connection at work. You’re stressed and your gut knows it—immediately.

Read it. (PDF)

Any employer wishing to discriminate against black people need only see the name ‘Ta-Nehisi’ or ‘LaTrina’ on a resume to throw it in the trash can. Why do black people do this to themselves?

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In the hunt for potential RNAi candidate targets, one of the most coveted goals has been the prevention of virus packaging. In the cell, virus particles are made as individual entities and roam around at random until a signal is sent out for the parts to self-assemble into its infectious whole. For 30 years that signal has been known to be contained within the viral RNA. It was first found in herpes and cytomegalovirus, called the alpha sequence. Since then, other genetic elements – known as packaging signals – have been found in other viral families including coronaviruses, hepatitis viruses, and HIV.

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Let that be a lesson to us all. (Don’t mess with Texas armadillos….)

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This is entertaining: Debbie Wasserman Schultz struggles to explain how a Democrat is different from a socialist. It apparently is a question that has never occurred to her before….

Steve Sailer looks at the New James Baldwin.

America’s foremost public intellectual, Ta-Nehisi Coates, has published a new best-selling minibook, Between the World and Me, that’s interesting for what it reveals about a forbidden subject: the psychological damage done by pervasive black violence to soft, sensitive, bookish souls such as Coates. The Atlantic writer’s black radical parents forced the frightened child to grow up in Baltimore’s black community, where he lived in constant terror of the other boys. Any white person who wrote as intensely about how blacks scared him would be career-crucified out of his job, so it’s striking to read Coates recounting at length how horrible it is to live around poor blacks if you are a timid, retiring sort.

Steyn on Obama.

President Obama has wrapped up his tour of Africa. It was notable, insofar as that word can be applied to the trip, for his somewhat condescending and neo-colonial lecture to his hosts on the need to ease up on the old homophobia.

Certainly, Africa is not terribly gay-friendly. But nor are other parts of the planet. In his ardent wooing of Iran, for example, he doesn’t seem to have been perturbed in the least by his new best friends’ executions of homosexuals, anymore than he is by the brutalization of gays elsewhere in the Muslim world. You might deduce in his highly selective criticism a certain cowardice. I’ll bet the mullahs do.

Read it.

An amazing admission by Voice of the Crust The Guardian. Some editor was asleep at the Narrative switch.

One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

Read it.

The simulated city carries none of urbanity’s institutional hardware: no visible governmental facilities, religious institutions, schools or civic centers clutter the street wall. The simulated city eschews manufacturing and offices, instead making itself the chief enterprise: a mecca of retail, dining, and entertainment. It has cherry-picked the good stuff from the old urban form, presenting a cosmetically perfect face without blemish or quirk, redolent in its synthetic beauty.

…

Unlike the shadow-world of Florida’s urban downtowns, riverwalks, boardwalks, and Main Streets, throngs of people crowd these places every day and every night. For all the hoopla about the reinvigorated city, Florida’s urban scene fails to deliver even a fraction of the sidewalk life that these places have. The simulated city is the powerhouse of the future.

Read it.

It made me the man I am today.

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The only person with which I share food is my wife — Texas is a community property state, and she’s entitled to half.

All of this is a little hard on people who, darn it, just want a bit of alone time with the food they actually ordered. For years, reluctant sharers only had to fend off the occasional fry filcher, or the girlfriend who virtuously passes on dessert — and then plants her fork in her companion’s crème brûlée. Now, whole menus are devoted to socialist portions.

Read it.

Well, here we are again, at the beginning of a presidential campaign in which the Republican Party, having lost its hold on the radical middle, is terrified of the electoral consequences. The supporters of Reagan and Perot, of Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, have found another aging billionaire in whom to place their fears and anxieties, their nostalgia and love of country, their disgust with the political and cultural elite, their trepidation at what our nation is becoming.

…

It is immigration—its universally celebrated benefits and its barely acknowledged costs—that is the third rail of U.S. politics, with repercussions from the border to Eric Cantor’s district in 2014 to courtrooms and the Republican debate stage today. Trump didn’t step on the third rail; he embraced it, he won’t let go of it, and in so doing he’s become electric. Republicans, Democrats, journalists, corporations all want to define themselves against him, and their flaunting of their moral superiority only feeds the media monster, only makes Trump more attractive to the dispossessed, alienated, radical middle.

They ought to have a high-school course on not talking back to a man with a gun. It might save more lives than driving lessons.

— Matt Helm, The Shadowers

The main gain of modern man has been the weakening of governments.  Unfortunately, that process is now reversed, not only in Europe, but also in America.  There is a constant accession of government authority and power.  It works inevitably toward the disadvantage of the only sort of man who is really worth hell room, to wit, the man who practices some useful trade in a competent manner, makes a decent living at it, pays his own way, and asks only to be let alone.  He is now a pariah in all so-called civilized countries.

— H. L. Mencken, Minority Report

Read it.

A 14-arm, automated harvester recently wheeled through rows of strawberry plants here, illustrating an emerging solution to one of the produce industry’s most pressing problems: a shortfall of farmhands.

Harnessing high-powered computing, color sensors and small metal baskets attached to the robotic arms, the machine gently plucked ripe strawberries from below deep-green leaves, while mostly ignoring unripe fruit nearby.

Such tasks have long required the trained discernment and backbreaking effort of tens of thousands of relatively low-paid workers. But technological advances are making it possible for robots to handle the job, just as a shrinking supply of available fruit pickers has made the technology more financially attractive.

…

“This is the least desirable job in the entire company,” she said. With machines, “there are no complaints whatsoever. The robots don’t have workers’ compensation, they don’t take breaks.”

Winter is coming.

Steve Sailer has the answer.

With the Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley being shouted down at a progressive convention for not abasing themselves fully enough to a Black Lives Matter rent-a-mob, it’s worth taking a look at what some cities could quite feasibly do to hire better policemen.

Diplomacy, of course.

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And yet he’s ahead in the polls. Perhaps he knows something that Kiran Moodley (‘editorial video manager at The Independent’) doesn’t.

‘You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.’

Read it.

“Finding Zero” is Dr. Aczel’s story of his quest for the origins of the most elusive of numbers: zero. It is zero, Dr. Aczel points out, that makes our place-value number system possible. Without it, there is no way to distinguish among 48, 480 and 4,080. Zero is indispensable for our familiar arithmetical operations, and it is half of the binary language of modern computers.

And yet, even though we can hardly imagine life without it, Europeans had no concept of zero until the 13th century, when they referred to it as and Indian or Arabic numeral. Where then did this epoch-making concept originate?

Alex Tabarrok uses an analogy.

Some restaurants offer burgers without fries and a drink. These restaurants cater to low-income people who enjoy fries and drinks but can’t always afford them. To rectify this sad situation a presidential candidate proposes The Happy Meal Act. Under the Act, burgers must be sold with fries and a drink. “Burgers by themselves are not a complete, nutritious meal,” the politician argues, concluding with the uplifting campaign slogan, “Everyone deserves a Happy Meal!”

But will the Happy Meal Act make people happy? If burgers must come with fries and a drink, restaurants will increase the price of a “burger.” Even though everyone likes fries and a drink they may not like the added benefits by as much as the increase in the price of the meal. Indeed, this must the case since consumers could have bought the meal before the Act but chose not to. Requiring firms to sell benefits that customers value less than their cost makes both firms and customers worse off.

The Happy Meal Fallacy is fairly obvious when it comes to happy meals but now let’s consider the debate over the gig economy and the hiring of employees versus contractors. Employees are entitled to benefits that contractors are not. Thus the standard conclusion is that classifying workers as contractors “is great for employers but potentially terrible for workers.” Wrong. Employees get their wages with fries and a drink while contractors get wages only. Would a law requiring firms to provide all workers with fries and a drink help workers?

The only way that democracy can be made bearable is by developing and cherishing a class of men sufficiently honest and disinterested to challenge the prevailing quacks.  No such class has ever appeared in strength in the United States.  Thus the business of harassing the quacks devolves upon the newspapers.  When they fail in their duty, which is usually, we are at the quacks’ mercy.

— H. L. Mencken, Minority Report

Read it. And watch the video.

“I don’t have an opinion on every single issue out there. To me, that’s, I don’t know,” Walker answered. “I don’t know the answer to that question.”

Whoa – an honest politician. That gets my vote.

Read it.

Ivar Giaever, a scientist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics, challenged Mr. Obama in a July 1 speech at the 65th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Germany.

“I say this to Obama: ‘Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’re wrong.’ He’s dead wrong,” Mr. Giaever said in a video of his 30-minute speech posted on the website Climate Depot, which first reported the story.

But the Science Is Settled! I read it in the New York Times!

Read it.

“Why can’t America have great trains?” asks East Coast writer Simon Van Zuylen-Wood in the National Journal. The simple answer is, “Because we don’t want them.” The slightly longer answer is, “because the fastest trains are slower than flying; the most frequent trains are less convenient than driving; and trains are almost always more expensive than either flying or driving.”

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AH: We’ve had school milk programs and milk in schools since the beginning of the century. During World War II, we needed to boost milk production in order to make processed dairy products to send to soldiers overseas. But farmers weren’t producing enough to meet this demand because they weren’t getting paid enough. So the government decided, “Great, we’ll create demand for milk by giving milk to our kids, and that way we’ll have a demand for the fluid milk and we can make the processed products we need for soldiers.”

So war was part of it. Convenience is also part of it. As people moved to the city and women started working away from home, cow’s milk became seen as a convenient way to give babies nutrition if women weren’t able to be home breastfeeding all the time. And as the dairy industry grows, farmers have an incentive to try to boost demand with government subsidies of dairy.

I can’t say which one of these many different forces did it, but it’s just a combination that has led to this health halo around milk. I think what’s more troubling is how deeply ingrained the idea has become and how inaccurate many of our assumptions about milk are.

Read it.

In other words, he wasn’t Just Another Redneck Racist, but a nutcase from the get-go.

(Actual journalism from the New York Times … I can  hear the pigs flying even as we speak….)

Read it.

The Chaplain–Medic massacre was a war crime that took place in the Korean War on July 16, 1950, on a mountain above the village of Tunam, South Korea. Thirty unarmed, critically wounded United States Army soldiers and an unarmed chaplain were killed by members of the North Korean army during the Battle of Taejon.

These people have nuclear weapons because of ‘deals’ made by Democrat Presidents. Remember that when you read about Obama’s ‘deal’ with Iran.

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Adam Leitman Bailey, a Manhattan attorney who runs a real estate firm, says he looks to hire law school graduates who have grit, ambition and a resolve to succeed in the legal profession.

Considering some of the dreck they teach in the Ivy League these days, that’s probably a good idea.