Some of us remember.

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Law abiding, tax paying, responsible citizens need some gesture or symbol of solidarity that is photogenic. I am thinking perhaps, one hand over our back pocket/wallet with the other hand waist high outstretched palm forward, as in “don’t come toward me, don’t rob me, don’t try to assault me.” I’m sure Ramirez could render a model.

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The discovery adds to the ongoing mystery of Antarctica’s expanding sea ice. According to climate models, the region’s sea ice should be shrinking each year because of global warming. Instead, satellite observations show the ice is expanding, and the continent’s sea ice has set new records for the past three winters. At the same time, Antarctica’s ice sheet (the glacial ice on land) is melting and retreating.

Hey, maybe (just maybe) the climate models are wrong and THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS GLOBAL WARMING. Just maybe.

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An article from The Wasington Post with the truth about the Ferguson Grand Jury decision.

The Washington Post has this extremely helpful graphical presentation of what happened during the shooting, with links to some of the physical evidence in the case.  What follows is my discussion of what appears to be some of the most significant.  To be clear, I do not purport here to completely describe all the forensic evidence and related testimony.  But I will commit to carefully reviewing all of the comments to this post and if anyone points to a significant omission in what I’m describing about the physical evidence — and provides a citation to the volume and page number of the grand jury testimony for that omission — I’ll be glad to consider adding discussion of it.  This post is limited to discussing the physical evidence, as witness testimony cuts in many different directions.

‘What’s this “Hope and Change” crap he’s always on about?’

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In celebration of Black Alternative History Month, the Carlyle Club continues to call the Attorney General’s bluff with a forthright conversation about the most uncomfortable aspects of race we could think of.

Table of Contents

1. Mind the Gap

2. Race Differences in Intelligence, plus:

   1. Return of the Derb

3. The Evolution of an Idea, including:

   1. Tropical Living
   2. Indian Artistry
   3. No Expectations
   4. “Like a Parrot Who Speaks a Few Words Plainly”
   5. “Almost Completely Worthless”
   6. “Political Partisanship and Liberal Hackery”
   7. Savage Africa
   8. Harsh Words

4. Mulatto History Month

5. A Different Sort of Delusion, plus:

   1. ’Tis Sixty Years Since

6. Rushton’s Case, featuring:

   1. Brainpower

7. The Celebration Continues at Radish

8. Recommended Reading

9. Letters to the Editor

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China has been running the world’s largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China’s ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian political correctness to the bitter end.

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THIS season millions of Americans will celebrate with turkey on the table. The turkey is, after all, the native North American animal that Benjamin Franklin considered “a much more respectable bird” than the scavenging bald eagle. But while the eagle landed on the country’s Great Seal and the turkey gets pride of place at our holiday dinners, neither bird can claim to have changed American culture more than their lowly avian cousin, the chicken.

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Consider GiveDirectly this holiday season for your charitable giving. As you may recall, GiveDirectly was started by four economists and it gives money directly to the very poor in Kenya and Uganda. GiveDirectly is a top-rated charity by GiveWell. The founders are committed to providing independent, randomized controlled trials of its process. One RCT has already been conducted with positive results and 3 others are under way. GiveDirectly publicizes the trials of its process before the results are produced. Impressive–the drug companies had to be forced to do this. Check out their website, they even provides real-time performance data. Here’s a bit more on their process.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a similar program for poor people in America? Perhaps we could get the Kenyans and Ugandans to set one up; obviously Americans are too busy.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, lays out some inconvenient truth.

It’s all too drearily familiar, isn’t it? Newark and Detroit; Miami; Crown Heights; Los Angeles; Cincinnati; here we go again.

…

The problem with separatism is that blacks would be nuts to want it. With all the real or imagined indignities of minority status, life is far better for them in a white nation.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

The Medici Palace in Florence was built in the 1440s with heavy stone on the street level and delicate windows on the top floor, both to express the upward-yearning spirit of the Renaissance and to keep the urban mob from dismantling the place when they got uppity, as they were known to do.

…

One of the best of the retro stadiums was Jacobs Field in Cleveland, which opened a couple of years later and sold out 455 games in a row. A friend told me an interesting rumor. He’d been talking to Mr. Jacobs, owner of the Cleveland Indians, and they got on the topic of why the White Sox new ballpark was so uninviting and closed-off. Mr. Jacobs told him that the owners of the White Sox had some kind of arrangement with the city of Chicago to use the ballpark as a giant holding pen for rioters, much in the traditional manner of a South American soccer stadium.

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When five liberal Democratic senators were elected in 1992, pundits gleefully proclaimed it the year of the woman. Yet their arrival in the Senate, along with that of 24 female freshmen representatives, brought the total number of women in Congress to about 60, or little more than half of what it is today. “A defining moment of change was the general election of 1992 dubbed the ‘Year of the Woman,’ “the official House of Representatives web site proclaims. “The arrival of 28 new women in Congress resulted from the confluence of historic circumstances that have not recurred since.”

How about that War on Women, eh?

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The statistics are staggering: Researchers predict that by 2025, the world will have 37 megacities, defined as urban areas with more than 10 million people. New York City and Newark are expected to have more than 23 million inhabitants; Tokyo, more than 38 million people. All told, well over half of the world’s population will be living in these super settlements.

Uh-huh. Name one instance where predictions by ‘urban planners’ have come to pass.

Indeed, one might extend that challenge to ‘researchers’ generally. Well, let’s see, there’s ‘peak oil’, and ‘climate change’, and the exponentially explosive growth of population that the Zero Population Growth people warned us about…. (Oh, wait….)

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Haven’t seen this sort of action in the neighborhood since they tore down the Delaware Terrace projects. The cops raided a house about a block away from TOF, looking for a fellow who had been dealing heroin on a nearby playground. There is an alley running behind the duplexes shown in the picture, and the playground is across that alley. In TOF’s youth, that playground was actually a cornfield, improbably surrounded by houses and (on one side) by a carpet factory. Every spring the farmer would drive his tractor down from the hill and plow it up and plant corn. Eventually, a new generation of kids arose who regarded the corn as free for the taking, so he gave up and sold out and the city built a park where people could pedal heroin. The carpet factory is also gone. There is a drug store on the site.

Funny how all the behavioral sinks tend to be in areas governed (if you can call it that) by Democrats.

Read it. Ponder the graphs.

Indeed, the “peak car” is antithetical to the reigning urbanist paradigm of highways known as “induced demand.”  Induced demand is Say’s Law for roads: supply of lanes creates its own demand by drivers to fill them. Hence building more roads to reduce congestion is pointless. But if we’ve really reached peak car, maybe we really can build our way out of congestion after all.

Freeberg nails it again.

Had this one germinating in my cranium for awhile. SNews (n.): News that is produced for the benefit of the producer of the news, or some third-party who has entered into some transaction with the producer of the news, rather than for the benefit of the consumer of the news.

If you like, you can think of it as a portmanteau for “sponsored news.” It is meant to be a homonym of snooze. The litmus test is: Thinking of the “news” as an answer to a question, does the question it answers bear any resemblance to a question the audience would have been asking? If it doesn’t — and lately, I notice, it very rarely does — then it isn’t really “news,” is it?

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To paraphrase John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, there is very little wrong with any large American city that a million ethnic Chinese wouldn’t fix.

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As we reflected on the project, we came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

Lewis Page, in British tech pub The Register, expands on that:

Whenever somebody with a decent grasp of maths and physics looks into the idea of a fully renewables-powered civilised future for the human race with a reasonably open mind, they normally come to the conclusion that it simply isn’t feasible. Merely generating the relatively small proportion of our energy that we consume today in the form of electricity is already an insuperably difficult task for renewables: generating huge amounts more on top to carry out the tasks we do today using fossil-fuelled heat isn’t even vaguely plausible.

Read it.

One leading researcher in this field, Henry L. Roediger III of Washington University in St. Louis, argues that tests of varying scale and intensity can deepen learning. “We now know that testing, including self-testing, is an especially powerful form of study,” said Dr. Roediger, co-author of the book “Make It Stick.”

Tests find out what you know. That’s all they do. Yet to read a lot of what passes for discussion these days, especially among ‘educators’, you’d think that making a student take a test is somehow a violation of his or her civil rights.

“Oh, I don’t test well.” Better learn, then; that’s like saying that you can’t walk well. Real Life is constantly putting one in situations where one either has to come up with a fact or successfully exercise a skill — in other words, IT’S A TEST — and the technical term for those who ‘don’t test well’ is FAILURE. Now, I realize that to be a FAILURE in this degenerate modern age isn’t the Bad Thing that it used to be, but it’s not a Good Thing, either.

Charlie Stross takes a break from being a communist in a Clever Plastic Disguise to talk about something interesting.

Big-ass L5 space colonies as envisaged by Professor Gerard K. O’Neill in his book The High Frontier turn out to be both economically and biologically questionable. To be fair, it’s not entirely his fault: he took NASA’s early-1970s estimates of Space Shuttle flight rates as gospel—one flight per week, costs around $1M/ton delivered into orbit—back when they were selling it as a “space truck”. At which point, hauling 50,000 tons of hardware and 10,000 workers into orbit to build a gigantic factory town churning out gigawatt range solar power stations using materials mined from the lunar regolith and positioned where they could transmit microwave power beams down to Earth 24×7 sounded like it should cost about as much as the 350-odd tons and 6 astronaut crew of the ISS. And as a solution to the 1974 oil shock, it seemed like a good idea. If we ever do get space trucks like that, it might be time to dust off those concept drawings and go for it. But in the meantime …

Read it.

More and more evidence is surfacing, however, that milk consumption may not only be unhelpful, it might also be detrimental. This is in spite of the fact that the United States Department of Agriculture and other organizations advocate that even adults should drink at least three cups a day.

Read it.

Women are finally realizing that being armed is the great equalizer.

Anna Simons, Professor of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, lays it on the line.

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By now it’s sadly clear that the nation’s satirical news programs do a significantly better job at reporting the news than most of the nation’s actual news outlets, despite a fraction of the budget and experience. John Oliver’s recent analysis of Miss America scholarship claims, for example, contained more original reporting in a fifteen minute segment than most Apple regurgitation blogs manage to stumble through in an entire year’s worth of gadget lust. Not only are satirists now doing a better job unearthing the truth, they’re doing a better job explaining complex issues.

Not really much of a surprise.

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Before he became chair of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke agreed with the free market economist Milton Friedman that central bank policy played a key role in making the Great Depression the most severe in U.S. history. But the two parted ways on the reason why. And that disagreement goes a long way toward explaining why the financial crisis of 2007-2009 has brought not just a dramatic increase in the powers and activities of the Federal Reserve but a fundamental transformation of its role within the economy.

Friedman viewed banking panics as monetary shocks, in which the checking accounts and other deposits at failing banks wink out of existence, causing a sudden fall in the total money supply. In contrast, Bernanke treats panics as shocks to the flow of savings, causing the failure of firms whose continued existence is crucial for the allocation of credit. Such disparate diagnoses dictate significantly different cures.

If the danger from bank panics is primarily a collapse of the money supply, then the proper response is a general injection of money by the central bank. The survival of particular financial institutions is of secondary significance. On the other hand, if the danger comes from key financial institutions failing and choking off credit, then the proper response is bailing them out.

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Slow news day.

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But that was yesterday … and yesterday’s gone….

Sarah Hoyt understands the dialectic.

I know that schools purport to teach you the skills to survive in the modern world. They actually teach you the schools to survive in the nineteenth century. But here what they don’t teach you that gets passed on and that I’ve run into trouble with (as have other people) in self directed professions:

• You have more in common with people your age than with anyone else. People born within nine months of you have everything in common with you. This has got us to think in generations, which is stupid. To the extent boomers are as portrayed and to the extent that some of them discriminate against past and future generations, it’s the idea that there’s some magical bond between people within x years or each other. (This is mostly seen among leftists who view people as widgets, anyway.) Do I need to tell you there isn’t? The internet should prove that. And yet it was a shock to me to find that most of my friends are either ten years older or ten to twenty years younger than I. I find myself thinking “What is wrong with me?” Of course, nothing is. I’m just not complying with the educational-industrial complex version of it.

• Performing to set task. I’m actually very bad at it. I think it’s a version of standing up to recite for the teacher. When I’m under contract my mind freezes. Back when there was no indie I could force myself to sort of perform, but it wasn’t my best work. Now… let’s say when these two books are delivered, I hope Toni will let me go on a loose rein. I will still deliver books to Baen, probably twice a year. But if she doesn’t want them, I can bring them out myself, and that allows me to work “loose”

Read it.

Just in case you were w0ndering. I know I was.

I think we can safely say that Antwoin and DeShawn  and Le[whatever]a are Democrat names.

Read it.

Compassion is the liberal’s answer to the question of the best life and the best society. Compassion is the last pillar on which liberals can build a political community, because it doesn’t require any shared notions or beliefs: “They rely on what they take to be our natural empathy to forge a togetherness. This dispensation doesn’t depend on any grand theory, and liberals reject both premodern and totalitarian versions of philosophical unity. They notionally reject certainty itself,” though do so with an alarmingly high degree of certitude.

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They’re not the sharpest knives in the drawer, but they’re not spoons, either.

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Ben Nelson says the primary purpose of a university isn’t to prepare students for a career. It’s to prepare them for life. And he now has $70 million to prove his point.

Nelson is the founder and CEO of a new experiment in higher education called Minerva Project. He says when it comes to learning, job training is the easy part. With the emergence of online courses, it’s easier and cheaper than ever to acquire the hard skills you need to land a job. “Why would you spend a quarter of a million dollars and four years to learn to code in Python?” he says. “If that’s the role of universities, you’d have to be insane to go to universities.”

Uh, Ben? If you’ve got a job opening and the choice is between somebody who can code in Python and somebody with a Yale degree who can code in Python, which one is going to get hired? This conceit of ‘college is there to teach you how to think’ is obvious BS to anybody who has been to college — including Yale.

The places that really do teach you how to think are law schools — where, ironically, they’re supposed to be teaching you the legal equivalent of coding in Python, but typically don’t. Go figure.

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You are a political party, and you want to secure the electoral majority. But what happens, as is occurring to the Democrats, when the damned electorate that just won’t live the way—in dense cities and apartments—that  you have deemed is best for them?

This gap between party ideology and demographic reality has led to a disconnect that not only devastated the Democrats this year, but could hurt them in the decades to come. University of Washington demographer Richard Morrill notes that the vast majority of the 153 million Americans who live in  metropolitan areas with populations of more than 500,000  live in the lower-density suburban places Democrats think they should not. Only 60 million live in core cities.

…

As will become even more obvious in the lame duck years, the political obsessions of the Obama Democrats largely mirror those of the cities: climate change, gay marriage, feminism, amnesty for the undocumented, and racial redress. These may sometimes be worthy causes, but they don’t address basic issues that effect suburbanites, such as stagnant middle class wages, poor roads, high housing prices, or underperforming schools. None of these concerns elicit much passion among the party’s true believers.

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Chapter and verse on why your favorite programming language stinks on ice.

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Farris and his wife — a certified teacher who he says “had to unlearn all the stuff she’d been taught” in order to educate their kids — are two pioneers of the home-schooling movement as we know it today. Farris fought many of the most prominent home-school battles through the 1980s, when it was illegal to home-school children in many states; he founded the Christian Home School Legal Defense Association in 1983, and his family became a model for home schoolers across the U.S.

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We all know the story about algorithms and work the past few years. Service jobs across the country are increasingly being managed with the help of mathematical models of customer demand, revolutionizing everything from taxi driving to food delivery, home cleaning, and laundromats. I have argued that the increased autonomy and flexibility of these jobs means that algorithms are taking over unions as the primary driver of workers’ rights in the 21st century.

But now, startups are starting to move up the corporate ladder, using algorithms to improve and disrupt professions that up until recently have seemed almost completely insulated from the efficiencies of computation.

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More than money, Soylent saves time. It’s not just preparing, cooking and eating food that you can cut out of your life. You don’t have to shop for food or wait to be served in restaurants. Some of those who’ve experimented with the meal-free lifestyle say it saves them at least an hour every day, effectively adding another day to the week. If like many people you feel you’re always harassed and busy, this must seem an enormous benefit. Yet it’s far from clear that free time is what consumers of Soylent truly want.

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One of the arguments of my friend’s book is that idolatry of elective democracy as the political and ethical summum bonum inevitably leads to an absence of any sense of limitation in the political class. As he points out, the founding fathers of the American republic were decidedly not democrats, and indeed feared democracy as an inevitable gravedigger of freedom; but We the people (meaning the few of us here assembled) did not find a formula for limiting the power of We the people, because no such formula exists. As the doctor in Macbeth says, “Therein the patient/ Must minister to himself”: in other words, if a man has no inner sense of limitation, no mere constitution is going to restrain him.

Modern politicians, having been given the mandate of heaven (vox populi vox Dei), do not accept limitations of their authority or their moral competence, even if, in practice, only a third or even a quarter of the eligible voters have voted for them. Procedural correctness is all that is necessary for such a man to feel justified in pursuing his own moral enthusiasms at other people’s expense.

Ross Douthat turns over a rock.

First, we now have a clear sense of the legal arguments that will be used to justify the kind of move Obama himself previously described as a betrayal of our political order. They are, as expected, lawyerly in the worst sense, persuasive only if abstracted from any sense of precedent or proportion or political normality.

Second, we now have a clearer sense of just how anti-democratically this president may be willing to proceed.

Ross Douthat got a gig writing at the New York Times, presumably because nobody bought the idea anymore that David Brooks is really a conservative.

Sara Hoyt reminds us of certain Eternal Truths.

Revolutions like the US, which changed governance but didn’t presume to change the way people worked, in their minds and hearts, don’t turn into cannibal feasts. OTOH revolutions like the French, where people descended/aspired to changing the names of the weekdays and the months, in order to construct a completely different humanity, inevitably end up in a pile of blood-soaked corpses.

…

But the SJWs believe it does. They believe someone who is born with more victim cards, even if the person was in fact born very wealthy and never experienced a day’s hardship, immediately can judge them and tell them when they’re exhibiting “privilege” which is a taint that attaches to other seemingly arbitrary characteristics, no matter how poor or downtrodden people born with them are.

“SJW” means “Social Justice Warrior” and you know who they are.

Gavin McInnes responds to the New York Times.

Liberals love blacks but they love them like a fantasy football team, not like human beings. Black poverty is the crux of the leftist argument. The ethos goes: if you’re a Democrat, you want to help the impoverished African-Americans. If you’re a Republican, you want them to be attacked by German shepherds. As far as actual black culture goes, liberals are disappointed that they aren’t all wearing corduroy blazers with elbow patches and listening to NPR.

Nicholas Kristof, eat your heart out.

One of the reasons white, middle-class liberals are so out of touch when it comes to their favorite race is they don’t go near them. They don’t send their kids to remotely urban schools and they make sure their homes are as far away from the loveable Negro as possible. Sure, they have a black friend, but it’s a mulatto girl who grew up white and champions her black power beliefs because her white friends enjoy it. Liberals’ black friends don’t really have black friends themselves because they’re freaks. In black America, watching Doctor Who is like being Doctor Who.

Playing golf with Obama is about as close as they’re willing to stretch.

Read it.

Or you could watch “Grimm” on ABC.

Read it.

Jonathan Touboul is a mathematician and a neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in math from France’s prestigious École Polytechnique, where he won a prize for his thesis on how to simulate neurons in the brain. He publishes papers with titles like “Pulsatile localized dynamics in delayed neural-field equations in arbitrary dimension” and “The propagation of chaos in neural fields.”

Recently, though, Touboul has been thinking about hipsters. Specifically, why hipsters all seem to dress alike. In his line of work, there are neurons that also behave like hipsters. They fire when every neuron around them is quiet; or they fall silent when every neuron around them is chattering.

Because he is a mathematician, Touboul began to look for a way to explore this idea using equations. In other words, he constructed a mathematical model. His key insight is that people (and neurons) do not instantly perceive what is mainstream. There’s a delay. And in situations where the delay is large enough, the contrarians can inadvertently synchronize with each other.

“In wanting to oppose the trends, there actually emerges some sort of hipster loop,” Touboul said.

Read it.

Considering what they’re apparently be taught, shutting the University down sounds like a win for the students, their parents, and the taxpayers of Michigan.

Oh, and minorities, too.

Read it.

After all, he is the Magic Negro, n’est pas?