Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.”

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Lileks.

That’s the part that brings you up short: all you can do is go on record, which in the end has the same impact as having your name on the passenger manifest of the Titanic. There is no point arguing with people whose worldview is based on their own dismay at having been dropped, against their will, in the society that’s seven-to-eleven years away from the imminent Utopia; the only problem they seem to have are things that aren’t problems, and even then their braying and snarking is just conspicuous signaling of Virtuous Positions. Every conversation is the equivalent of slamming down those 4+ Uno cards over and over and over.

Read it.

To this day, my biggest movie beef can be distilled to one inelegant, juvenile question:

“Why don’t they just kill That Guy?”

“That Guy.” His names are legion: Kasper Gutman. Darth Vader. The Sheriff of Nottingham. Mr. Potter (although Uncle Billy needed killing even more). Whoever the head guy is in all the Hunger Games flicks I’ve never seen because I’d be yelling, “You have BOWS AND ARROWS, ferchrissakes!” from the back of the theater.

Did you grow up when I did, when in every other movie, That Guy was the Evil Southern Sheriff Who Ran the Whole Town? There was no escape from his suffocating power and influence, his ominous chortle, and his giant belly (which took up a third of the drive-in screen). He decided who voted, who won, who went to jail, and who got off scot-free. And, of course, he was a Klansman or something like it.

If any genre was guaranteed to trigger my party-pooping protestations, it was this one. Think about it: Almost every character in these hicksploitation flicks is already heavily armed and surely knows of some holler where That Guy’s admittedly corpulent corpse could still be stashed undiscovered.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, has the same diskile for the misuse of this term that i do.

The etymology of the word “privilege” is obvious if you think about it: “privi” – private; “lege” – legislation.  Private legislation.  (“Special privileges” is, therefore, a pleonasm.)  A person who is truly privileged, therefore, is a person who benefits from a special use of government force wielded in his or her favor.  This use of force is not generalizable beyond the individual (or small, closed group) for whom the privilege is created.  A genuine privilege is a benefit that government bestows on only an individual or on a small select group with the intention of benefiting that individual or members of that small group even if such benefits come at the greater expense of the general public.

 

Lileks.

When the grizzly at the Minnesota Zoo picked up a rock and smashed the glass that stood between him and having kid-kabob for lunch, maybe he was telling us something.

Reference: Minnesota Zoo bear slams rock into glass pane, shattering it ‘like a windshield’

Read it.

Claire Cain Miller is a representative promoter/consumer of the conventional wisdom (e.g., she pushed Ellen Pao). So, it’s worth noting how she begins her piece by assuming that human frailty and evil must be behind the disparate outcomes of algorithms. Progressives assume they are on the side of Science and Rationality, which have proven that all people are identical, so when robots discover differences, it must be due to Wreckers.

Progressives are at heart conspiracy theorists. They believe in data that agrees with their preconceived notions; when it doesn’t, it’s because of the machinations of Emmanuel Goldstein evil people, especially right-wing evil people (than which no people are, or can be, more evil).

Read it.

The Anti-Discrimination Center, a Manhattan-based non-profit, filed a lawsuit in federal court this week, claiming that New York City’s affordable housing program perpetuates “entrenched segregation.”

The lawsuit takes issue with a common policy in which affordable housing developers set aside 50 percent of the apartments in a new development for prospective tenants already living in the community district. This means access is “effectively prioritized for white residents” who already reside in neighborhoods with the best schools and amenities and “limited for African-American and Latino New Yorkers who do not,” according to the lawsuit.

One of the chief complaints against ‘gentrification’ is that it pushes out existing residents. This has sparked violent confrontations in, for example, San Francisco.

Read it.

As we know from countless historical novels, movies and costume dramas, the steps toward a duel are highly codified, starting with a real or imagined insult to a lady or one’s personal honor. After the insufferable affront comes the challenge, often accompanied by the “soufflet” or slap, the icy presentation of one’s card, and a demand for satisfaction, soon followed by the choice of weapons and the naming of seconds. Come the evening before the actual “rencontre,” at least one of the duelists, either racked with fearful misgivings or maintaining a languid sang-froid, will have settled his affairs so that he can spend what may be his last hours composing a letter to a beloved wife or mistress.

Read it.

How about — “Socialism: It’s Not Just For Old Rich White Guys Any More”.

Read it.

As you might expect, your money goes farther in Red States.

Richard Fernandez is on a roll today.

It appears that the world is having an outbreak of stupidity. In the imebecile olympics, America may well emerge best off by ironically being the least competent at being incompetent.  For example it is distracted right now by the problem of hauling down a 150 year old flag from a defeated government from several state capitols.  Someone said on Twitter that when he boarded an airplane in Paris everyone was preoccupied with the Greek exit, but when he alighted in Atlanta everyone was talking about Donald Trump. This lack of focus may allow the others to pull ahead in the race to the bottom.

…

Reverting to paper may actually improve security.  Consider why this might be so.

The great benefit of paper clearance forms (and one might add, paper ballots) is that it limits the ability of bureaucrats to play games with data.  The lower tech medium puts the kibosh on all the plans, mandates and improvements they are just dying to implement. All that gender stuff is hard to implement when you’re faced with a stack of paper reaching to the ceiling, besides making the information harder to leak, misuse or steal.  It disempowers the bureaucrats.

The fact that reverting to lower tech may actually improve security suggests that lack of money isn’t the problem, nor are the shortcomings of computer hardware. The biggest shortage plaguing the elites today is a deficit of intelligence. They are a menace to themselves and to the public; and are not even smart enough to know how dumb they are.

Read it.

And will it work on Wall Street?

Steve Sailer thinks deep thoughts so that you don’t have to.

The concept of America being divided into sprawling red Republican regions and dense blue Democrat districts first became a cliché In November–December 2000. Over the past decade and a half I’ve probably thought as much about the underlying reasons as anybody, and in this column I’d like to speculate on an even more fundamental cause behind the red-blue divide.

…

That the partisan divide is related to density is clear. My contribution in 2004–05 was to point out that the red-blue map is related to affordability of family formation, a topic first explicated by Benjamin Franklin in the 1750s but largely ignored in recent decades.

…

But perhaps there are even more fundamental reasons for the density divide. The central red vs. blue identity gap falls between the Core vs. the Fringe of American life: The Obama coalition is a crazy quilt of identity groups who can be held together only by stoking fear and loathing of Core Americans.

In my terminology, the Filling vs the Crust.

Read it.

Just in case you doubted Jonah Goldberg.

Frederick Douglass explains it all to you.

Read it.

The postulate that nature abhors a vacuum seems to apply in politics as elsewhere. There is a vacuum in the Democratic field of candidates for president. Like Gene McCarthy in 1968, Bernie Sanders is in the process of demonstrating the existence of the vacuum. Again, like McCarthy in 1968, there his utility ends. Sanders would not be a viable Democratic candidate for president.

If that is so, then the Republican Presidential race must suck real bad (e.g. Trump).

Hm. Come to think of it….

The vacuum is the space for a plausible alternative to Madam Hillary. Such a candidate would have to be liberal and able to recite the regnant shibboleths with conviction, of course, but he would also have to be likable and honest in his own way in order to distinguish himself from Madam Hillary. This candidate would instantly slow and have a good chance of interrupting the Clinton death march to the Democratic nomination, which seems to be enacting a variant of what Leo Strauss called the joyless quest for joy. In this case it is the joyless quest for power.

Considering how much Democrites lust for power even on their slowest days, the present dearth of candidates would seem to undermine the premise.

Will Joe Biden fill the space created by Hillary’s candidacy?

Probably not. To Quote Joey the Hit Man, speaking of Nixon-McGovern: ‘I had a choice between a fool and a crook. Naturally, I voted for the crook.’

Biden, let it be noted, is 72. Because Barack Obama ended the careers of so many younger Democrat officeholders only the geriatric contingent like Biden are plausible alternatives to Madam Hillary. We know Biden is possessed by the ambition to be president. He would be a fool not to challenge Madam Hillary. He’s not the brightest bulb in the room, but he’s no fool.

Well….

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, offers some advice for the perplexed.

Here’s this week’s precept:

Avoid fucked-up people.

Most citizens of a functioning society live in a bourgeois style. They obey the law, keep regular hours, and brush their teeth. They get as much education as they can tolerate, acquire a marketable skill, work, marry, raise kids, and keep their debts under control.

The people I’m advising you to avoid, the fucked-up people—hereinafter FUPs—are the others. You’ve met them, or will: the drunks and moochers, the losers and dropouts, the profligates and unemployables. They will at best waste your time, at worst drag you down (?) into fucked-uppery.

Amen to that.

Read it.

One of the great statistics being bandied about in the great inequality debate is that the Walton family have more wealth between the four siblings than the bottom 40 per cent of Americans do in total. Apparently this is something most shocking – and, of course, something must be done.

I would argue that there’s nothing very unusual in this at all and also that it’s actually a thoroughly good idea. Who knows, by the time I’ve finished explaining why one or two of you might even agree with me.

Read it.

If it doesn’t blow up somewhere along the trip.

No, thank you.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

Coulter’s latest best-seller, the impressively researched ¡Adios, America!, of course features numerous witticisms. We’re constantly told that conservatives aren’t funny by people without the native wit to realize what a large percentage of professional comedy writers are on the Right. (It’s not unknown for TV writers to email jokes to Ann that they don’t dare use on their own shows.)

Slate actually publishes something useful.

Usually, when we say “American slavery” or the “American slave trade,” we mean the American colonies or, later, the United States. But as we discussed in Episode 2 of Slate’s History of American Slavery Academy, relative to the entire slave trade, North America was a bit player. From the trade’s beginning in the 16th century to its conclusion in the 19th, slave merchants brought the vast majority of enslaved Africans to two places: the Caribbean and Brazil. Of the more than 10 million enslaved Africans to eventually reach the Western Hemisphere, just 388,747—less than 4 percent of the total—came to North America. This was dwarfed by the 1.3 million brought to Spanish Central America, the 4 million brought to British, French, Dutch, and Danish holdings in the Caribbean, and the 4.8 million brought to Brazil.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

“Evolution” is still highly prized, as it was generations ago, what’s changed is the emphasis within that. From Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, or even before then, up until the 1960’s sometime it was: Listen to the old people, because they are keepers of the ideas that are kept. They bear the fruits of eons of painful trial & error, good ideas that are formed by way of process-of-elimination, ideas that we know are right but cannot be formed any other way. The stuff that had to be learned. If you value what is good about evolution, look to the old people because they’re the ones who have it.

Now we still value what is good about evolution, but it is the young people who have it. The only role the old people can play is to try to act like the young people; that, and show us how this “survival of the fittest” thing works, and that’s during their final exit. Clean out the gene pool by eradicating themselves from it. The young people have something of a perceived monopoly on knowledge, theirs is the only knowledge that is worth anything at all.

We’ve lost trust. It used to be, the old people would trust the young people, to renew & carry along the value system that civilization should endure and remain strong. The young people would trust the old people, to intermix a bit of valuable personal experience with the equally valuable legacy-wisdom, to do something besides just repeat mindlessly what they’d been told back when they were the same age. So there would have been this sense of intergenerational trust, going in both directions, and it’s no longer there. We’ve also lost respect. This would start with the obvious realization of “Hooray, I’m all grown-up now, but I’m not the first human being who ever reached adulthood — lots of other ideas have been tried, some of actually worked, and other people have had problems before I had any, so let’s see what came of all that.” That, too, is gone. The loud-crowd, today, always seems to think history began at nine o’clock this morning, and the only purpose for any previously-existing idea is to be dismantled. So some hot new “Beverly Hills 90210? generation can show how cool it is, and of course they do that by carrying out this dismantling.

A civilization that values its older people will always have to value life. Even if it somehow doesn’t want to do this, it will have no other choice once it makes the decision to honor and respect old people, because we’re all headed in that direction. Conversely, a civilization that reserves all of its respect for the young, will have to place a premium value on death, because that’s the only way anybody is going to stay that way for very long. And of course if nothing is valuable besides whatever is cool, and nothing is cool besides what is new, that makes for an awful lot of wreckage and destruction that’s going to have to be done. And it’s going to have to be done by everyone who wants to matter, and all of the time.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.