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It took a while—the first class graduated in 2009—but today the American College of the Building Arts (ACBA) is the only school in the United States to offer a bachelor’s degree in traditional building trades.

Which, of course, completely inverts the basic function of a university degree, as it grew from medieval roots. But nobody cares about history these days, except to plunder it for clever-sounding words that they can ‘repurpose’ to serve their own agenda.

David Warren has some interesting things to say.

My own development as a political thinker was tragically stunted by employment as a political pundit. No class of writers knows less about politics than they. In order to write at all in this genre, one must pretend to take seriously an entire political order that is preposterous, peopled by the mentally and emotionally disturbed, and ruled by power-hungry maniacs, until one’s own last mooring is shot. The madness is compounded by complete ignorance of what is going on, since no one not himself up to his ears in the actual exercise of political power can possibly understand what is in play. And, those up to their ears are drowning.

…

Where to the old Christian view, rights followed from duties in the same man, to our post-Christian view the arbitrary rights of one man translate to duties for unaccounted others. (My right to a free lunch translates to your duty to pay for it, &c.) In this sense, all modern political thinking is in its nature totalitarian.

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One-quarter of people with healthcare coverage are paying so much for deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses that they are considered underinsured, according to a new study.

So, in Crustian, ‘underinsured’ means ‘less insurance than we think they ought to have’. Good to know.

I thought that Obamacare was going to fix that?

Like the ‘poor’, the ‘underinsured’ we have always with us.

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Robots are nothing new. Industrial robots have been employed in manufacturing for about as long as polyester has been belabored in fashion. But unlike synthetic fibers, synthetic laborers have gotten much better over time. Digital employees consistently become cheaper, smarter, and more prevalent with each doubling of the number of transistors crammed into microprocessors. At their most salient, robots look a lot more like Kiva’s dumb and deferent deliverybots shuttling packages along Amazon warehouse floors than Neill Blomkamp’s charming CHAPPiE. But let’s not be crass humanoid supremacists, here. Digital workers are much more than mere metal reflections of ourselves.

My job, no; I have yet to see a robot that can create a star-schema data model from the nebulous blatherings of business users.

Your job — who knows?

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Aside, of course, from the plain fact that God intended you to do so.

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Great. Let the Muslims fight each other for a change.

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The Watch has major in-practice downsides though, the mother of which I’ll call The Douchebag Factor. By virtue of the product’s newness, and its cost, it’s hard to wear the Apple Watch in public without feeling like that girl, the designer-handbag girl, the “I spent $400 to read my texts three seconds sooner” girl. The Watch is still rare enough to earn glances and even questions on the subway, and I found it hard to not be constantly aware of it shouting “I am a shameless consumer!” from my wrist.

The Douchebag Factor is equally prominent in social settings, even if you have the kind of friends who are sympathetic to one’s need to test drive new gadgetry over beers. Because the Apple Watch inherently combines two of the rudest things you can do among friends—check your watch and look at your phone—and suggests that you do them incessantly.

Anything that gets the SWPLs bickering with each other has my support. (The fact that I own Apple stock has absolutely nothing to do with it, of course.)

Read it.

Wisdom. Attend.

People will not obey laws that they think are stupid. Prohibition was the rub-your-nose-in-it proof of that. Multiplying bad laws merely brings law as a concept into disrepute, and undermines the Rule of Law that we all depend on.

Kathy Shaidle is surprised that the Peter Pan Party refuses to grow up.

Meanwhile, south of the border: Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are many things, good and bad, but she isn’t “stupid” and he isn’t “loud.” But to leftists, right-wingers are all stupid and loud, and Coulter and Limbaugh are the only ones whose names they know. Think of the three-year-old who points at every animal and yells “moo!”

…

For almost 25 years, five days a week for three hours a day, Rush Limbaugh has monologued, mostly guest-less, on live radio to a national audience. Think about it: If he doesn’t really “believe that stuff,” then he’s arguably more deserving of that $40 million a year because let’s see you do that.

These scoffers think their reflexive, paranoid “dot connecting” makes them sound worldly, when just the opposite is true. Remember: Conspiracy theories are History for stupid people.

‘It was long ago observed that the plain people, under democracy, never vote for anything, but always against something. The fact explains, in large measure, the tendency of democratic states to pass over statesmen of genuine imagination and sound ability in favor of colorless mediocrities.’

— H. L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy

Read it.

I’ve decided I’m going to call myself an “Islamoskeptic,” because it neatly combines two left-wing, debate-stifling epithets at one stroke. If you criticize Islam, you’re an “Islamophobe”—the moral equivalent of a racist, so shut up we don’t have to listen to you any more. And if you align at all with climate skepticism and criticize any aspect of climate change orthodoxy, you’re met with the shutdown term of “science denier.” Both terms represent gross abuses of reason.

Read it.

And heed it.

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Courtesy of Bloomberg, the world gets an idea of what the retail from-the-installer price of the battery might look like (rather than the wholesale price the ‘leccy car maker announced last week).

The Elon Musk-led system seller SolarCity, Bloomberg reports, will ship an installed 10 kWh Powerwall for US$7,140 (ouch outright purchase) or $US5,000 plus a nine-year lease.

To match a 16 kW generator that sells in the US for just US$3,699, the reporter works out, would require around US$45,000 worth of Powerwalls on the lease deal.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance doesn’t imagine the Powerwall making a dent in European markets like Germany, where the economics of solar power are well-understood. Its take is that “the economics of an average home with rooftop solar are not significantly enhanced by including the Tesla battery”.

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Yeah, no surprises there.

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Here’s where it gets really weird — if you’re a stickler for logical consistency. Islamists are well-known for their condemnation and punishment of homosexuality. But it is safe to say that persons who are sympathetic to Islam and willing to overlook such “peccadillos” as the stoning to death of queers (and unfaithful female spouses) constitute a large fraction of the Gaystapo.

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Funny how that works.

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This ought to come as no surprise. ‘Diversity’ is a code-word for ‘people not like us’, and most people (‘progressive’ mythology to the contrary notwithstanding) don’t really want to live near people that are greatly different from themselves. Even for SWPLs, a neighborhood full of ‘them’ is a nice place to visit but they wouldn’t (truth be told) want to live there.

Tim Urban chronicles another chapter in the ongoing saga of the Special Snowflakes.

I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group—I call them Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies, or GYPSYs.  A GYPSY is a unique brand of yuppie, one who thinks they are the main character of a very special story.

Read it.

Good.

Ordinarily Wiley Miller is a dependable Voice of the Crust but every now and then it apparently gets too much.

Read it.

Computers are getting smarter and stronger while employees, with their health insurance, pensions, and vacation time are becoming increasingly expensive. The writing is on the wall; plenty of jobs, at least as performed by humans, aren’t long for this world.

Of course, no one knows exactly how automation will shake up the worker economy, but there will almost certainly be winners and losers. IT and creative jobs will proliferate while administrative, factory, and service employment will largely go the way of the dodo.

And for labor unions, that may very well mean that the bell tolls for thee. While unions have generally been in decline for some time, automation may prove to be the proverbial dagger through the heart.

Labor unions are predicated on a situation where workers have no economic leverage because they are in jobs that anybody who is literate and numerate and has an above-room-temperature IQ can do, so the supply always vastly exceeds the demand. Unions attempt to compensate for a lack of economic power by involving political power, be it strikes, picketing, thug violence, or governmental capture. Robots don’t vote and they always do what they’re told; no workers to organize, no union. It’s just that simple.

Of course, unions will attempt to ‘organize’ the workers who are left, but it’s questionable how effective that would be. Despite the attempts by tech firms to import cheap coders from overseas, most ‘knowledge workers’ don’t see themselves and commodity labor — somebody can’t just walk in off the street and after a week’s training do a web site or a smartphone app (although plenty have tried). Thus unions have focused on the remaining commodity labor ares, such as services, government employees, and (sadly, but it’s true) education. It will be interesting to see how long that long retreat can be maintained.

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Last week, ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s and Colorado brewer New Belgium announced they would collaborate to create a new Salted Caramel Brownie Brown Ale, billed as “an ice cream infused craft beer.”

A more SWPL product it’s hard to imagine.

Rezd it.

I don’t doubt it a bit.

‘Democracy, alas, is also a form of theology, and shows all the immemorial stigmata. Confounded by uncomfortable facts, it invariably tries to dispose of them by appeals to the higher sentiments of the human heart. An anti-democrat is not merely mistaken; he is also wicked, and the more plausible he is the more wicked he becomes.’

— H. L. Mencken

Megan McArdle shares some history.

My grandfather worked as a grocery boy until he was 26 years old. He married my grandmother on Thanksgiving because that was the only day he could get off. Their honeymoon consisted of a weekend visiting relatives , during which they shared their nuptial bed with their host’s toddler. They came home to a room in his parents’ house—for which they paid monthly rent. Every time I hear that marriage is collapsing because the economy is so bad, I think of their story.

By the standards of today, my grandparents were living in wrenching poverty. Some of this, of course, involves technologies that didn’t exist—as a young couple in the 1930s my grandparents had less access to health care than the most  neglected homeless person in modern America, simply because most of the treatments we now have had not yet been invented. That is not the whole story, however. Many of the things we now have already existed; my grandparents simply couldn’t afford them.  With some exceptions, such as microwave ovens and computers, most of the modern miracles that transformed 20^th century domestic life already existed in some form by 1939. But they were out of the financial reach of most people.

If America today discovered a young couple where the husband had to drop out of high school to help his father clean tons of unsold, rotted produce out of their farm’s silos, and now worked a low-wage, low-skilled job, was living in a single room with no central heating and a single bathroom to share for two families, who had no refrigerator and scrubbed their clothes by hand in a washtub, who had serious conversations in low voices over whether they should replace or mend torn clothes, who had to share a single elderly vehicle or make the eight-mile walk to town  … that family would be the subject of a three-part Pulitzer prizewinning series on Poverty in America.

You can always learn stuff from the comics.

Read it.

Even the smartest people can be fools.

Ain’t that the truth.

Be careful not to step in the diversity.

Read it.

The picture worth a thousand words.

Antiplanner speaks for all right-thinking people.

So what’s so humiliating about Japan’s maglev? As an American, the humiliating thing is that there are other Americans who fall for the argument that because some other country is wasting a hundred billion dollars on a transportation system that goes half as fast as America’s planes, we should waste at least that much money here. That only goes to demonstrate the failure of America’s educational system to help people gain the analytical skills they need to avoid being taken by con artists.

Ponder the fact that a stupid person’s vote counts just the same as yours. Be thankful that things aren’t as bad as they could be.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist:

Examples of labor-saving technology that were created before the Industrial Revolution include the wheel, the lever, the pulley, the bucket, the barrel, the knife, the domesticated ox and horse, the fishing net, and moveable type.  Examples of such technology created after that revolution are even more numerous; they include the harnessing of electricity, the internal-combustion engine, the assembly line, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, refrigeration, and, of course, today’s many IT marvels.  Yet history knows no example of the introduction of labor-saving technology that caused permanent and widespread increases in involuntary human idleness.  And at least since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, all advances in such technology in market economies have been followed by improvements in the living standards of the masses – including (contrary to Ms. Tufekci’s suggestion) those advances introduced during the past few decades.

I certainly hope he’s right.

Read it.

Perhaps they realized it was a really bad idea. That’s just a guess, of course.

Sarah Hoyt ‘splains it all to you.

Since Hillary Clinton announced, the feminists of the United States have undoubtedly been getting set to be outraged at things. We’ll see dozens of new wars on women, but we’ll have to check the news routinely to find out what they are because women are so oppressed in the United States that it takes whole academic departments and quite a lot of grant money to find examples of it. I figure this may be a good time, then, to talk about one of my personal pet-peeve memes, the microaggression.

Read it.

Speaking of consumption, any traveler along Interstate 40 or the old Route 66 knows about the Big Texan Steakhouse in Amarillo, which has the legendary contest where you get a 72-ounce steak for free if you can eat it (and all the sides dishes too) in under an hour.  A shockingly high number of people have accomplished this feat.  But none greater than the 120-lb California woman who last week succeeded in eating three of the Big Texan’s 72-ounce steaks—in 20 minutes.

Freeberg nails it once again. A slice:

The nonsensical complaint: A grievance, from or on behalf of some designated-oppressed-group, and something passive-voice. Women are “seen” in such-and-such a way, gay people are “seen” like this or black people are “seen” like that. Or, men and women are expected to be such-and-such a way by “society.”

Question that cannot be answered: If this complaint were restated in active-voice, what would be the subject? Who’s doing the seeing? Who’s doing this expecting?

Why we don’t get an answer: Because then the mission of reform would become finite rather than infinite. The subject would become an object. The mission of reform would also become testable, because the reform would have to do with changing the state of an object, and it would have to do with actually fixing a problem, like catching the shark in Jaws. And, it would be practical to ask bothersome questions like “Well, have you got it done yet, or don’t you?”

Gates of Vienna is having a fundraiser. They’re good people; go give them some money.

Little Folkies

Little folkies on the hillside, little folkies made of ticky tacky
Little folkies, little folkies, little folkies, all the same
There’s a white one, and a white one, and a white one, and a white one
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all think just the same.

All the people who are folkies all know how to say “diversity”
But they all think in boxes, little boxes, all the same.
And there’s artists, and there’s journalists and there’s teachers of social sciences
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all think just the same.

They believe the TV newscast and the newspaper editorials
But they never believe conservatives so they can’t be taken in.
Now they don’t all wear gray ponytails and they don’t all wear Birkenstocks
But they wear them on the inside in the boxes in their brains

And the houses look like summer camp and they all buy organically
And they don’t have any children, except okay, maybe one.
There’s a Green one and a Pink one, an old Red one and a Rainbow one,
But they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all think just the same.

Steve Sailer has some ideas on the subject.

The population of the African continent in 2013 was 1,111,000,000, so one million migrants would be less than one out of a thousand. In other words, there are lots more where those came from. By the way, the UN forecasts that the population of Africa by the end of the century will be nearly four billion.

A simple reform would be to modernize the refugee application system to the 21st Century and run it solely over the Internet. You can apply from your local Internet cafe in your own country, and if you are Einstein, Solzhenitsyn, or Coetzee, you get in. If you aren’t, too bad, stay home. If you show up without your application being already approved, you get a year in a work camp and a one way ticket home.

This would stop the drownings quick.

The current refugee system is like if you showed up at Harvard in person and demanded they let you be a student, so they say, well, we’ll take a couple of semesters to process your application, so in the meantime here’s the Harvard course catalog!

Funny how Harvard doesn’t work that way.

Read it.

Makes you wonder why the states run by Democrats never thought of it.

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Forget personal freedom, it’s the toilets that are the important thing.

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Got it covered.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Privacy is imperative because political workspaces are radically different from those of writers. The chief requirement of any email server or device for example, is that it must be able to disappear. The primary tool that public figures use is what might be called the moveable stage. The moveable stage is designed to provide a highly controlled viewpoint of the celebrity to convey the intended effect. In place of a laptop computer sending data into the Cloud,  politicians like Hillary have a portable movie set to broadcast messages to the media universe.

Like the peripatetic software developer who today works from Mexico and the day after tomorrow from Southern Italy,  modern politicians now work on location, broadcasting their screeds from the Temple of Hercules or the Brandenberg Gate. They orate before fake styrofoam Greek pillars or from the Chipotle restaurant in the company of “plain folks”.

Plain folks are the only people who actually live in the real world.  And they pay dearly for this misfortune. The degree to which the creators of memes and ideas now influence the world would have shocked Percy Shelley who extravagantly claimed that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.   Never in his wildest dreams could he have foreseen that workers in the realms of “reason and imagination” could gain such power. Ben Rhodes, a speechwriter who majored in creative writing,  is  a deputy national security adviser in the Obama administration.

Perhaps this is dangerous.  Poetry and imagination were meant to give us a glimpse into possibilities but never to provide quotidian reality.  Formerly we delved into books to visit castles in the air, but we walked out the door to go to work. It’s sad to think that crummy walk-up apartment in New York with a laptop on a mattress now should be essentially equivalent to a high windy tower in Italy, or the back of a garbage truck as a workplace.  One hankers for the days when there were actual nymphs and spirits in the woods with whom we could talk and whose cellphones we didn’t confiscate.  But perhaps those days are gone, and even the nymphs speak into their lapels.  The world is the poorer for it.

Read it.

At the top of our list is a group of cities that have long been identified with tech growth. Our No. 1 city, Austin, Texas, boasts the strongest expansion in tech sector employment of any of the nation’s 52 largest metropolitan areas from 2004 to 2014, 73.9%,  as well as 36.4% growth in STEM jobs, the fourth-highest growth rate in the country. Coming in a close second is Raleigh, N.C.,  part of the renowned Research Triangle region, home to outposts of multinationals like Bayer, BASF, GlaxoSmithKline, IBM and Cisco. The Raleigh metro area posted a 39% increase in STEM jobs from 2004-14, the fastest growth in the nation, albeit from a smaller base than many of the other biggest metro areas.

This is what happens when geeks have adult supervision, i.e. a state government that refuses to enact their groovy-granola fetishes into law and restricts them to what they do well.

Read it.

On this 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, the Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn performs a public service today rebutting the relentless liberal/“Progressive” attempts to pry Lincoln from the Republican Party and claim that Lincoln, were he alive today, would surely be a Progressive Democrat:

Read it.

If it isn’t, it ought to be. (Roper: “That’s an ugly word.” More: “It’s an ugly thing.”)

While the “war on women” is a lie, “social justice warrior” describes the average leftie exactly, and it deftly exposes their most egregious conceit, that they are all non-violent activists that just want peace and justice.

I can understand that the average social justice warrior would prefer to be called a “social justice advocate” or maybe just an “activist,” losing the “social justice” part. That’s because “social justice” has an odor to it.

This is nothing new. Once upon a time “communist” was a wonder word. Then it got a bad odor, and lefties started to call themselves “socialist,” and when socialist went bad they became “social democrats.” In the U.S., the bright young things of the 1890s called themselves “Progressives.” But by 1920 the word had a bad odor and so Progressives rebranded themselves as “liberals.” That lasted for about half a century until the day that Republican politicians discovered that an easy way to win elections was to chant “liberal, liberal, liberal” at their Democratic opponents. So the Soros-funded lefties of the 2000s called themselves “progressives.”

This is such a wuss-fest.

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What could go wrong?

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Have you ever marveled at how your abusive wife, girlfriend or ex is able to do and say the most hurtful, underhanded and contemptible things and then portray herself as the innocent victim? Have you ever wondered how she is able to convincingly accuse others, usually her victims, of the abusive behaviors and attitudes of which she is actually guilty? Wonder no more, the answer may be DARVO.

Dr Jennifer J. Freyd, PhD of the University of Oregon identified DARVO in the 1990s at the tail end of the repressed sexual abuse memories hysteria. In spite of its dubious origins, DARVO is a helpful concept with broader applications than Dr Freyd seems to have originally intended. Freyd writes about DARVO in conjunction with her work on betrayal trauma, which I discuss on the original Shrink4Men blog. According to Dr Freyd’s webpage:

“DARVO refers to a reaction that perpetrators of wrong doing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim into an alleged offender. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of “falsely accused” and attacks the accuser’s credibility or even blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation.”

DARVO seems to be a combination of projection, denial, lying, blame shifting and gaslighting. Dr Freyd notes that other observers have identified the same phenomena using different terms. My male clients experience this behavior when they try to hold the abusive women in their lives accountable. It also seems to be common behavior in most predators, bullies, high-conflict individuals and/or abusive personality-disordered individuals. DARVO especially seems to occur in high-conflict divorce and/or custody cases.

A better description of the ‘progressive’ mentality I’ve never seen.