Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

Cats think you’re just a a slightly big, dumb non-hostile cat. Quite specifically, he says that they treat humans as if they were their Mama Cat.

All that rubbing up against you with their tails up is apparently no more than a hopeful check that you really are just another big, fat, slovenly cat who doesn’t intend to eat them with their Welsh Rarebit.

And I’m good with that.

Read it.

One should point out the hypocrisy of the liberal media which doesn’t care that Bill Clinton most likely raped Juanita Broaddrick (a serious felony that could get a regular person a very long prison sentence in a very unpleasant prison), but closing a few lanes on a bridge is a Huge Scandal of the Greatest Magnitude that it gets a “gate” suffix.

Read it.

Some incisive comments by somebody you never heard of.

The first and perhaps most important mistake people make is to confuse money for wealth. … Having money does not make you wealthy, but having the ability to make money, through net income generating assets such as businesses, investments, or even just your own skills, that makes you wealthy. This is perhaps why those with a solid education are never really poor, but merely broke: they have the potential to make money, even if they don’t have money right now.

Read it.

What we have right now is four labor markets.

We have a teen/early 20-something labor market where the participation collapsed as people focused more on education and/or can’t find work. In the long run, this group will be fine.

We have an age 55+ labor market which fared much better over the past 10 years than the rest of the workforce, but will begin to stagnate and shrink as retirements accelerate.

We have a peak-age labor market which is tightening very quickly, and should be near full employment before the 2016 election.

And we have a segment of the labor market, probably somewhere between 1-3 million people, of workers who are some combination of older, less educated, immobile due to being underwater on their homes, or not properly trained for the modern economy, who need major help from the government. They can’t find work at wage levels they’ll accept. Fiscal policy for this group would be 100% effective, but monetary policy at this point is of dubious help.

Freeberg does it again.

Bearing in mind that experience and experiment come from a common Latin root, catechism-science is anything toiling away under the label of “science” that exists entirely outside of that. Its persuasive strength comes from being repeated over and over, verbatim, by people who call themselves “scientists” but who do not do science.

It’s important to separate this out from the real stuff, for a number of reasons. One of the most important of these reasons is that science relies a great deal on deductive reasoning, and while deductive reasoning is most persuasive when it is carried out properly, people lose track of how easy it is to do it improperly. It doesn’t work at all, in fact, unless 1) the range of possible causes has been exhaustively listed, and 2) each item within that list was eliminated conservatively. If the producer of the conclusion succeeds at #1 and fails at #2, the final conclusion is only as strong as the weakest elimination. If he fails at #1 then the whole thing is just a waste of time.

George Will has some fun with the Usual Suspects.

Americans who exercise consumer sovereignty wherever Barack Obama still tolerates it are constantly disappointing him. For generations they persisted in buying what he calls “substandard” policies from what he calls “bad apple” health insurers. They stopped only when he forced them to stop — when he rescued them from their ignorance by banning their benighted preferences.

Have consumers thanked him for trying to wean them from their desire to drive large, useful, comfortable, safe vehicles that he thinks threaten their habitat, Earth? The 2013 numbers tell the tale of their ingratitude. In 2013, for the 32nd consecutive year, the best-selling vehicle was Ford’s F-Series pickups. This supremacy began, fittingly, in the first year of Ronald Reagan’s deregulatory presidency.

Today’s consumers, who cannot get it through their thick heads that they are supposed to want wee vehicles such as Chevrolet’s Volt, bought 763,402 F-Series trucks. That is 740,308 more than the number of Volts General Motors sold.

…

Today, Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged v. Sebelius may be the second-most serendipitously named court case in U.S. history, second to Loving v. Virginia (wherein Richard Loving, who was white, and his wife Mildred, who was black, in 1967 overturned Virginia’s law against interracial marriages). The Little Sisters are challenging the Obamacare mandate that makes them complicit in providing, through their health insurance, contraception, something that offends their faith.

This mandate illustrates Gesture Liberalism: It is unimportant to the structure of Obamacare. It has nothing to do with real insurance, which protects against unexpected developments — car insurance does not pay for oil changes. The mandate covers a minor expense: Target sells a month of birth control pills for $9 . The mandate is, however, a gesture affirming liberalism’s belief that any institution of civil society can be properly broken to the saddle of the state.

Gavin McInnes understands the dialectic.

All in the Family, Family Ties, and Duck Dynasty were all created by liberal snobs to denigrate American values, and they all backfired. … People loved Archie Bunker and hated Meathead because they knew boomer liberals were full of shit. Even Sammy Davis, Jr. was in the Bunker bunker. He recognized Archie’s vocabulary was that of a hard-working American who grew up in a rough neighborhood. Davis told him as much when he appeared on the show as himself back in 1972.

Read it.

The instruments of popular culture may perhaps be forgiven for continuing to portray the 1960s as a time of infectious idealism, but those of us who were active then have no excuse for abetting this banality. If in some ways it was the best of times, it was also the worst of times, an era of bloodthirsty fantasies as well as spiritual ones. We ourselves experienced both aspects, starting as civil¬rights and antiwar activists and ending as co¬editors of the New Left magazine Ramparts. The magazine post allowed us to write about the rough beast slouching through America and also to urge it on through non¬editorial activities we thought of as clandestine until we later read about them in the FBI and CIA files we both accumulated.

Read it. And watch the video.

Specifically, according to Christensen, here is the recurring dynamic: the new entrants siphon off work from the bottom-end — work that the high-end says it does not want anyway.  The cycle repeats itself a few times until, much to the incumbents’ surprise, the bottom-end becomes more economically relevant and powerful.  Why does top-end let this happen?  Because the incumbents have come to view success as elite status and high margins, which is an unrealistically high long-term bar unless you are continuously innovating.  Eventually, the so-called high-margin niche becomes insufficient to sustain the enterprise, and giants fall — see the automotive industry, steel, computer hardware, televisions, consumer electronics, etc.

Freeberg does some heavy lifting.

To a child, once you head down that road it is all too easy to look at all problems in life like that. The problem isn’t there, it’s the person who’s the problem, therefore bitching about the person is the same as solving the problem. That’s how we get Barack Obama and people like Him: Every day, more bitching about those awful Republicans, while the problems go unsolved. Obviously, we don’t need more of that going on…so I guess I’m stepping out on a treacherous precipice here. But there is danger in the opposite as well, and I guess I’m guilty of practicing that, looking at only the problem and ignoring the people causing the problem. I guess we tend to embrace that in childhood, confident that it will lead to all-good-habits, no-bad-ones in adulthood. That’s not what happens. Some problems have makers, and solving the problems while ignoring the problem-makers is like chopping away at the leafy part of a weed rather than uprooting it. So I’d file this “good” piece of advice for kids, alongside “always clean your plate.” Waist-size-wise, some of my worst habits come from the clean-your-plate rule I was taught in childhood. Maybe my whole generation should have been taught “here’s how you throw that good food away, and forget all about those poor kids in China.” Lately, I’m thinking I’ve been solving problems the same way I’ve been eating what’s on my plate when I’m not really hungry, and with what’s been going on with my waist size during this time, I have no business eating when I’m not hungry.

Read it.

The stories we tell affect the lives we lead. I do not mean to be abstract here. I mean, literally, the stories that are told make up a kind of meta-reality that soaks in us to form a “truth”. This “truth” affects policy, which affects investment, which affects bricks and mortar, pocketbooks, and power. Eventually, the “truth” trickles down into a more real reality that defines the lives of the powerless.

The story du jour in urban policy is one of density. The arc of the story is that cities are places where “ideas come to have sex”. The lovechild is innovation. The mood lighting is creative placemaking.

The Kama Sutra of density reads this way: creative people cluster in cities that are good at lifestyle manufacturing. The more people that are sardined the higher likelihood there will be “serendipitous” encounters. The more serendipity in a city the better chance the next “big thing” will occur. The next “big thing” will lead to a good start-up, which will lead to an agglomeration of start-ups, termed an “Innovation District”. Detroit becomes Detroit 2.0 then.

Fred blows the whistle.

Pondering the smoking ruins of American racial policy, I wonder whether it isn’t time to say publicly what many, if not most, of both races know: It isn’t working. It isn’t going to work. If it were, it would have. If it were working, we would not need the unending laws to force the races together when they don’t want to be together. If people wanted diversity, it would happen without compulsion.

The hope that black and white would mingle amicably if only segregation were dismantled relied on a peculiarly American inattention to life and history and on a belief that people will behave as we want them to instead of how they observably behave. Human nature remains human nature, no matter how hard one holds one’s breath and turns blue.

Read it.

Hundreds of armed vigilantes stormed a Mexican town and arrested federal police in the latest bloody battle between residents, criminal gangs, and the police locals say are in league with the gang members.

Around 600 members of local ‘autodefensas’, or self-defence groups, stormed Paracuaro in the troubled Michoacan state yesterday in an attempt to seize control of the town back from the feared Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar) drug cartel.

The battle was the latest in a long-running war between the drugs gang in Mexico’s south-west and local residents who say state and federal police are not protecting them.

They’re mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it any more.

It’s in the New York Times, so it must be true, right?

In recent decades, American workers have suffered one body blow after another: the decline in manufacturing, foreign competition, outsourcing, the Great Recession and smart machines that replace people everywhere you look. Amazon and Google are in a horse race to see how many humans they can put out of work with self-guided delivery drones and driverless cars. You wonder who will be left with incomes to buy what these robots deliver.

What can workers do to mitigate their plight? One useful step would be to lobby to eliminate the corporate income tax.

That might sound like a giveaway to the rich. It’s not. The rich, including Boeing’s stockholders, can take their companies and run — and not just from Washington State to, say, North Carolina. To avoid our federal corporate tax, they can, and often do, move their operations and jobs abroad. Apple’s tax return says it all: The company, according to one calculation, paid only 8.2 percent of its worldwide profits in United States corporate income taxes, thanks to piling up most of its profits and locating far too many of its operations overseas.

Instapundit understands the dialectic.

Public schools were designed to be rigid. Back in the 19th century, when Massachusetts Board of Education Secretary Horace Mann toured Europe looking for models of public education to import to America, the one he chose came from Prussia. Inflexibility and uniformity were Prussian specialties, and when Mann brought Prussian-style education to America, those characteristics were seen not as a bug but as a feature.

School was practice for working in the factory. Thus, the traditional public school: like a factory, it runs by the bell. Like machines in a factory, desks and students are lined up in orderly rows. When shifts (classes) change, the bell rings again, and students go on to the next class. And within each class, the subjects are the same, the assignments are the same, and the examinations are the same, regardless of the characteristics of individual students.

As I’ve been saying for years now, Factory Model Schools are outdated. We have the technology to create customized individual educational processes, and need to do so sooner rather than later.

‘”A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure,” Orwell writes, “and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.” Similarly, a teen may take to weed because he feels himself a loser and then become all the more of a loser because he smokes weed.’ — Jonah Goldberg

If you don’t subscribe to the G-File, you really really ought to.

Read it.

But all the odes to middle-class Americans working middle-class jobs, misses one big point: What exactly is “middle class” in America in 2013? That’s not an easy question to answer.

The place you live has a lot to do with how you experience and understand “class” in America. The “middle” is always defined by who is at the top and bottom and that varies greatly from state to state and county to county.

Changes in American communities – particularly growing wealth in urban and suburban places – mean the words “middle class” don’t carry the real weight they once did. The definition of the group has become so broad that crafting something that appeals to it as a whole is a difficult task.

Read it.

The Thirteenth Amendment is an attractive vehicle for advocates of nearly unlimited federal power because a broad interpretation of it would enable Congress to circumvent the limits the Supreme Court placed on Congress’ powers under the Commerce Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment in cases such as United States v. Lopez, United States v. Morrison, and NFIB v. Sebelius. Unlike a law authorized by the Commerce Clause, a law authorized by the Thirteenth Amendment need not have any connection to interstate commerce or “economic activity.” Unlike most parts of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Thirteenth Amendment is also not limited to regulating action undertaken by state governments, since it bans even purely private slavery and involuntary servitude.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

As 2014 dawns, the world continues to keep me furnished with material. For example, the current political shakeup in Turkey turns out to be a mashup of various obsessions and hobbyhorses of mine, such as byzantine conspiracy theories, test prep, the naiveté of American education reform, immigration fraud, the deep state, and even the Chechen Bomb Brothers’ Uncle Ruslan.

I love the smell of conspiracy theory in the morning….

The Other McCain reminds us of a timeless truth.

If something works, it works. To intellectuals, however, theory takes precedence over practice and ideological abstractions like “equality” are more important than actual success and happiness.

Jim Goad is delightfully dyspeptic today.

As someone who’s offended by nothing but annoyed by everyone, I found no shortage of people this past year to stoke the angry embers of my irascible soul. Try as I may to shield my eyes from the countless blinding petty indignities and massive vexations of everyday existence, each sunrise seemed to drop a new human being on my doorstep to annoy me.

Well do I know the feeling….

John C Wright has an answer.

War is fundamental. A man’s views on war tell you the basic axioms of his view on life. Because of this, a popular war story will tell you in an abbreviated form much about the storyteller’s most fundamental ideals and fears, and that of his audience.

Read it.

America is full of frustrated, broken, baffled people because so many of us think, “If I work this hard, this many hours a week, I should have (a great job, a nice house, a nice car, etc). I don’t have that thing, therefore something has corrupted the system and kept me from getting what I deserve, and that something must be (the government, illegal immigrants, my wife, my boss, my bad luck, etc).”

I really think Effort Shock has been one of the major drivers of world events. Think about the whole economic collapse and the bad credit bubble. You can imagine millions of working types saying, “All right, I have NO free time. I work every day, all day. I come home and take care of the kids. We live in a tiny house, with two shitty cars. And we are still deeper in debt every single month.” So they borrow and buy on credit because they have this unspoken assumption that, dammit, the universe will surely right itself at some point and the amount of money we should have been making all along (according to our level of effort) will come raining down.

Read it.

The pejoratively named “trickle-down economics” was the idea that by giving tax breaks to the wealthy and big business, this would spur economic growth that would benefit those further down the ladder. I guess we all know how that worked out.

But while progressives would clearly mock this policy, modern day urbanism often resembles nothing so much as trickle-down economics, though this time mostly advocated by those who would self-identify as being from the left. The idea is that through investments catering to the fickle and mobile educated elite and the high end businesses that employ and entertain them, cities can be rejuvenated in a way that somehow magically benefits everybody and is socially fair.

Two words: ‘football stadium’.

Read it.

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

After all, only Christians go to church on Christmas.

Read it.

No school has taken flipping as far as Clintondale. It began because Greg Green, the principal, had been recording videos on baseball techniques and posting them on YouTube for his 11-year-old son’s team. Recording the content allowed kids to watch the videos repeatedly to grasp the ideas, and left more time for hands-on work at practices.

It gave him an idea, and in the spring of 2010, he set up an experiment: He had a social studies teacher, Andy Scheel, run two classes with identical material and assignments, but one was flipped. The flipped class had many students who had already failed the class — some multiple times.

After 20 weeks, Green said, Scheel’s flipped students, despite their disadvantages, were outperforming the students in the traditional classroom. No student in the flipped class received a grade lower than a C+. The previous semester 13 percent had failed. This semester, none did. In the traditional classroom, there was no change in achievement.

We have the technology — we just need to figure out the best way to use it.

Gavin McInnes turns over a rock.

Instead of accepting my opinions as sincere, the female professor on the panel insisted I was scared of empowered women. I rarely talk to people this removed from reality, so it was challenging. In their world, the only reason men have a reputation for being tougher than women is because they’ve been conditioned to act that way. In their world, women earn less because of sexism. Women aren’t in math and sciences because they’ve been discouraged from pursuing it, etc. You’ve heard it all before. To them, gender roles are a kind of performance art and we should all be fine with a 130-pound firewoman carrying us from a burning building.

Meanwhile, on Earth, we just want to put food on the table so our kids stay healthy. If a qualified female shows up to work on a project you think, “Good. Maybe we’ll get out of here early.” Nobody doesn’t want her on the job. Nobody is “scared” of her. College professors don’t know this because they don’t work for a living. They’re paid to pontificate, and even then they get to go on sabbatical and pontificate even harder. (I believe the woman I was arguing with was on sabbatical during this debate—I was at work.) Despite how we all feel about women in the workforce, the panel kept implying I felt threatened by qualified women.

Read it.

Popular mythology about ‘the family farm’ to the contrary notwithstanding, most food today is grown in what are essentially outdoor factories. Automation and robotics are starting to dominate these places as they have long dominated indoor factories, and have traveled under the radar of the Lamestream Media because (a) they think farmers are boring and (b) farms aren’t unionized and so don’t reflect an Undercrust pressure group.

Read it.

First ask yourself one thing.  Have you ever met a runner that hasn’t complained about their ankles, knees, low back or hips?  I haven’t.  Why is that?  Let me explain.

John Hinderaker lays it out.

The key datum for Ragsdale is “the unavoidable fact that the U.S. homicide rate towers over those of other developed nations.” That, he thinks, confirms the ineluctable connection between gun rights and homicide. But he is wrong: as I wrote here, there is no correlation between legal gun ownership and murder rate. The homicide rate in the U.S. is around average. Russia’s homicide rate is four times ours; rates in Africa average around five times ours; the rate in Brazil is five times ours; Mexico, which has stringent gun control laws, has double our homicide rate; murder rates in the Caribbean approximate those in Africa. It is true that Western European countries in general have lower rates than we do, but that is mostly because African-Americans commit murders at eight times the rate of whites. The murder rate in Norway is very low, but it is indistinguishable from the rate among Norwegian-Americans. It is also noteworthy that the homicide rate in the U.S. today is only one-half what it was in the early 1990s. That decline, which has occurred during a time when gun laws have generally been liberalized, is never addressed by gun control advocates.

“As I wrote in Tyranny of Clichés, what people always forget about Gandhi is that there was a tactical aspect to his philosophy of non-violence. He believed it would work on the British because the British conscience was open to moral suasion and guilt. George Orwell observed that Gandhi’s tactics wouldn’t work in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, because in those places a Gandhi would be carted off in the middle of the night and shot, probably alongside his whole family. In effect, Gandhi used the higher standards of the British against the British. And it worked to the extent that the Brits left India.” — Jonah Goldberg, The Goldberg File

Freeberg nails it yet again.

Liberalism is a bad sales job, and therefore will always have a division in its midst between those who are being duped and those who are doing the duping. Just like an ass will always have a crack. The duped are, for the most part, grown-ups who have buried and forgotten whatever grand dreams they ever had as children about doing or building something great; they’ve now vectored that exuberant energy off into their voting, figuring great-and-grand things are for the political class to do, the role for the rest of us is to sort of mill about being “middle class” and doing middle-classy things. Maybe a quick vacation once a year, maybe visit someone, maybe host a party, the rest of it is all lunch sacks to work, get yelled at by the boss, go home, get yelled at by the wife. And that’s as good as it gets. The bargain they have struck is: I’ve given up on ambition. Ambition might be for my kids. I’ll settle for less pain, that’s my ambition now.

Those are the dupees. The dupers, do I even have to explain them? We have ObamaCare, which is such a debacle that there is widespread and legitimate question now as to whether that was even an accident.

…

We wonder why we’re such a contentious society lately. The answer is because kiosk-people are winning, forcing everyone else to go to centralized kiosks for everything they want or need, regardless of whether that’s how they wish to get it. If more people want the commodity than can be serviced by a single kiosk at one time, then a line forms. Then we show how civilized we are by waiting in line…which is a sad way to show it, since first-graders and Kindergarten students can be expected to do that.

It’s also ineffective. If we both wait at the same kiosk and we have a disagreement about some matter of taste, then the way we resolve it is to vote on it. And then fight about it. That’s what has been happening. We’re brought up to think the voting will settle the matter, but it only “settles” things for one voting cycle, while the battle rages onward from one cycle to the next. That, too, is what has been happening.

 

Read it.

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

Read it.

Aw, what the hell, get rid of the House of Representatives too, while we’re at it; it’s not as if they do anything useful, and we’d save a lot of money.

Read it.

Gotta love that Global Warming. (Maybe AlGore made a secret visit….)

I think this satisfies the ‘cold day in Hell’ criterion….

Read it.

According to Wolin, there are three main ways in which inverted totalitarianism is the inverted form of classical totalitarianism.

• Whereas in Nazi Germany the state dominated economic actors, in inverted totalitarianism, corporations through political contributions and lobbying, dominate the United States, with the government acting as the servant of large corporations. This is considered “normal” rather than corrupt.^[6]
• While the Nazi regime aimed at the constant political mobilization of the population, with its Nuremberg rallies, Hitler Youth, and so on, inverted totalitarianism aims for the mass of the population to be in a persistent state of political apathy. The only type of political activity expected or desired from the citizenry is voting. Low electoral turnouts are favorably received as an indication that the bulk of the population has given up hope that the government will ever help them.^[7]
• While the Nazis openly mocked democracy, the United States maintains the conceit that it is the model of democracy for the whole world.^[8] Wolin writes:

Inverted totalitarianism reverses things. It is all politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash.^[9]

Jim Goad has some fun with the usual suspects.

Aisha is a blogger for slate.com. She shares a first name with the girl who was married to Muhammad at age six and consummated their marriage at the unripened age of nine—while Ol’ Mo was 53—but I didn’t see this fact mentioned in the article that set off a diarrheal blast of news coverage last week.

Of course not. It’s not polite to think about, much less make fun of, the names that black parents give their daughters.

The essay was called “Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore,” and forgive me if I think it’s a wee bit uppity for Aisha to presume she has the authority to make such declarations. Aisha writes of the shame and pain and confusion and heartache she’d experience every holiday season when she walked out into the Scary Big White World and was ruthlessly confronted with “pale” Santas who had “skin as pink as bubble gum.” Aisha failed to note that if she were still living in her ancestral homeland, she likely wouldn’t be concerned with such trifles. Back in those non-wintry climes, she might even know what horseflies taste like.

Oops – there’s that word (‘uppity’). You can apply that to white people, and white people only. For shame.

Still, I find it incumbent upon myself to apologize for some of my brethren who joked that if Santa Claus was black, he’d be breaking into houses with an empty bag and leaving with it full. That so-called “joke” was not funny, nor was it appropriate in these very, very, very sensitive times of change and progress.

As with most jokes, the reason it’s funny is because it has a germ of truth.

Steve Sailer lays down some inconvenient truth.

 The trendy Common Core in K-12 education is intended to teach “critical thinking skills” rather than rote memorization of stale facts. This sounds much like the old fluid v. crystallized distinction in IQ research. But can even effective schools improve fluid IQ?

…

Civilization, when properly functioning, is a device for minimizing the amount of fluid intelligence you need to function. You don’t need to turn military history into a superb epic oral poem like The Iliad anymore: you just write it down. Nowadays, you don’t have to go the library to read it. You can look it up on the Internet.

A huge problem with educational reform efforts is that they are typically designed by people who have high confidence in their own fluid intelligence relative to the average. Combine that with the contradictory dogma that students must all have equally high fluid intelligence — Jefferson wouldn’t have written it into the Declaration of Independence if it weren’t true — and you wind up with remarkably little critical thinking about education fads like critical thinking.

In contrast, the military tends to assume that everybody is an idiot who will find a way to screw up massively and probably get himself and large numbers of people around him killed, so it’s best to break things down into simple steps so soldiers can rely upon crystallized intelligence rather than fluid intelligence.

But the notion that the public schools can learn anything from the military has been out of fashion for just under 50 years. The people who took control of education 45 years ago may talk all the time about critical thinking skills, but they sure don’t like critical thinking about themselves and their ideas.

Read it.

Christopher Hitchens died on this date two years ago. Hitchens was the model of a public intellectual. He was certainly public in his positions and arguments, which allows for anyone interested to assess a person’s arguments. And he was intellectually honest in a way that is uncommon, with many (most?) thinkers curtailing their views if they threaten a broader ideological identity. Though definitely a man of the left, Hitchens was never orthodox and ran into trouble given his positions on issues such as abortion (he was against it), foreign interventionism (he was for it), free speech deemed offensive to certain groups (he was for it), and more. While he rarely missed opportunities to offend right-wing sensibilities (he once joked about Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s clearly having started with the president was still in office), he didn’t hold back against the left, either. He had few kind words about Martin Luther King, Jr. and he dismissed Gandhi as a “poverty pimp.”

Gavin McInnes lays out some inconvenient truth.

Collectivism is a virus that has infected everything we do. I’m presently trying to get my kids into better schools and I’ve noticed the administrators fall into two categories: those who encourage the individual and those who think teamwork trumps personal development.

Steven Pressfield has some insight.

In my experience the evolution of a personal culture takes place in two stages.

First, we have to find it. We’ve got one already, never fear. It was there from the minute we were born. Our personal culture is constituted of our point of view, our style, our sense of humor, our unique gifts and drives. Our personal culture is our voice. It’s our artist’s sensibility. It’s our Authentic Swing.

When we embark on our hero’s journey, we are seeking our individual culture, whether we realize it or not. The climax of that journey is our discovery of that voice, those gifts, that unique point of view.

Phase two is the construction and reinforcement of that individual culture. Sometimes it just happens without us even thinking about it. Stevie Nicks picked up a tambourine. She found the top hat, the swirling skirts, the whole Welsh Witch thing. It’s been working for her from “Rhiannon” in 1975 to “New Orleans” in 2009.

‘Find out who you are, and then be that person.’ — Robin Williams

George Will gives the Magic Negro a well-deserved spanking.

 The education of Barack Obama is a protracted process as he repeatedly alights upon the obvious with a sense of original discovery. In a recent MSNBC interview, he restocked his pantry of excuses for his disappointing results, announcing that “we have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly”.

…

Obama, of whose vast erudition we have been assured, seems unfamiliar with Mancur Olson ’s seminal “The Rise and Decline of Nations,” which explains how free societies become sclerotic. Their governments become encrusted with interest groups that preserve, like a fly in amber, an increasingly stultifying status quo. This impedes dynamism by protecting arrangements that have worked well for those powerful enough to put the arrangements in place. This blocks upward mobility for those less wired to power.

Obama, startled that components of government behave as interest groups, seems utterly unfamiliar with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis — how incentives influence behavior — to government. It shows how elected officials and bureaucrats pursue personal aggrandizement as much as people do in the private sector. In the public sector’s profit motive, profit is measured by power rather than money.

Read it.

Unless you know about the Crust, in which case you won’t be.

I doubt that there is any conservative organization that can boast a remotely comparable list of corporate supporters. CAP’s disclosure is a timely reminder that large corporations are not, in general, supporters of free enterprise. Many of them love to partner with government to suppress innovation and competition. Koch Industries stands alone, as far as I know, as a relatively large company that actually supports free enterprise as a matter of principle. Which is why corporatist America, through disreputable organizations like the Center for American Progress, has waged unremitting warfare against Koch.

The Other McCain understands the dialectic.

Once you realize that anthropogenic global warming (also known as “climate change”) is a non-falsifiable theory, the pretzel logic is amusing: Any extreme or damaging weather — including extreme cold — can be cited as evidence of “climate change,” and anything that looks like contradictory evidence can be dismissed as irrelevant because . . . well, there’s a scientific consensus, and nobody can argue with a scientific consensus. In other words, the science of global warning is not science. It’s actually the exact opposite of science, because real science requires that a theory conform to the evidence, rather than attempting to conform the evidence to a theory.

In a land that the sand overlays – the ways to her gates are untrod –
A multitude ended their days whose gates were made splendid by God,
Till they grew drunk and were smitten with madness and went to their fall,
And of these is a story written: but Allah Alone knoweth all!

When the wine stirred in their heart their bosoms dilated.
They rose to suppose themselves kings over all things created –
To decree a new earth at a birth without labour or sorrow –
To declare: “We prepare it to-day and inherit to-morrow.”
They chose themselves prophets and priests of minute understanding,
Men swift to see done, and outrun, their extremest commanding –
Of the tribe which describe with a jibe the perversions of Justice –
Panders avowed to the crowd whatsoever its lust is.

Swiftly these pulled down the walls that their fathers had made them –
The impregnable ramparts of old, they razed and relaid them
As playgrounds of pleasure and leisure, with limitless entries,
And havens of rest for the wastrels where once walked the sentries;
And because there was need of more pay for the shouters and marchers,
They disbanded in face of their foemen their yeomen and archers.
They replied to their well-wishers’ fears – to their enemies laughter,
Saying: “Peace! We have fashioned a God Which shall save us hereafter.
We ascribe all dominion to man in his factions conferring,
And have given to numbers the Name of the Wisdom unerring.”

They said: “Who has hate in his soul? Who has envied his neighbour?
Let him arise and control both that man and his labour.”
They said: “Who is eaten by sloth? Whose unthrift has destroyed him?
He shall levy a tribute from all because none have employed him.”
They said: “Who hath toiled, who hath striven, and gathered possession?
Let him be spoiled. He hath given full proof of transgression.”
They said: “Who is irked by the Law? Though we may not remove it.
If he lend us his aid in this raid, we will set him above it!
So the robber did judgment again upon such as displeased him,
The slayer, too, boasted his slain, and the judges released him.

As for their kinsmen far off, on the skirts of the nation,
They harried all earth to make sure none escaped reprobation.
They awakened unrest for a jest in their newly-won borders,
And jeered at the blood of their brethren betrayed by their orders.
They instructed the ruled to rebel, their rulers to aid them;
And, since such as obeyed them not fell, their Viceroys obeyed them.
When the riotous set them at naught they said: “Praise the upheaval!
For the show and the world and the thought of Dominion is evil!”
They unwound and flung from them with rage, as a rag that defied them,
The imperial gains of the age which their forefathers piled them.
They ran panting in haste to lay waste and embitter for ever
The wellsprings of Wisdom and Strengths which are Faith and Endeavour.
They nosed out and digged up and dragged forth and exposed to derision
All doctrine of purpose and worth and restraint and prevision:

And it ceased, and God granted them all things for which they had striven,
And the heart of a beast in the place of a man’s heart was given. . . .

.          .        .          .          .           .          .          .

When they were fullest of wine and most flagrant in error,
Out of the sea rose a sign – out of Heaven a terror.
Then they saw, then they heard, then they knew – for none troubled to hide it,
A host had prepared their destruction, but still they denied it.
They denied what they dared not abide if it came to the trail;
But the Sword that was forged while they lied did not heed their denial.
It drove home, and no time was allowed to the crowd that was driven.
The preposterous-minded were cowed – they thought time would be given.
There was no need of a steed nor a lance to pursue them;
It was decreed their own deed, and not a chance, should undo them.
The tares they had laughingly sown were ripe to the reaping.
The trust they had leagued to disown was removed from their keeping.
The eaters of other men’s bread, the exempted from hardship,
The excusers of impotence fled, abdicating their wardship,
For the hate they had taught through the State brought the State no defender,
And it passed from the roll of the Nations in headlong surrender!

— The City of Brass, 1909

World socialism as a whole, and all the figures associated with it, are shrouded in legend; its contradictions are forgotten or concealed; it does not respond to arguments but continually ignores them—all this stems from the mist of irrationality that surrounds socialism and from its instinctive aversion to scientific analysis… The doctrines of socialism seethe with contradictions, its theories are at constant odds with its practice, yet due to a powerful instinct these contradictions do not in the least hinder the unending propaganda of socialism. Indeed, no precise, distinct socialism even exists; instead there is only a vague, rosy notion of something noble and good, of equality, communal ownership, and justice: the advent of these things will bring instant euphoria and a social order beyond reproach.

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Read it.

And ponder the fact that the upper income levels pay a greater share of the total tax burden than their share of the national income.

And yet ‘progressives’ say that this is less than their ‘fair share’.

SF author John C. Wright connects the dots.

Both Murder Incorporated and Paul Ehrlich are wrong and for a simple reason: overpopulation is not a number, it is a ratio between the productive capacity of the individual and the drain that individual represents.

If each new baby is a new pair of hands to work, a new brain, and if each new baby over his lifetime produces more than he consumes, then looking at each new baby as a new mouth to feed is folly.

The argument turns on what constitutes a resource. Is copper? You cannot eat it. Yet a man who works in a copper mine produces more than he consumes, and the world would be poorer, not richer, if he were absent. Is oil? Before Standard Oil put the price of oil within the grasp of the common man, oil found on land was a detriment, not a benefit, because it might make crops harder to raise. What about a man who writes science fiction novels, investigates news stories, writes computer manuals, or practices law. I have done all these things. Have I contributed more to the wealth of the world or taken more than I contributed?

If I am taking more than I am contributing, why does any one PAY ME ANYTHING? And yet I am productive enough that I can support five dependents, plus creditors plus the tax man. Through the tax man, I support about as many people as are in my family. In round numbers, there are ten people resting on my work, that is, consumers who are not presently productive. Eliminate me through abortion or contraception, and you eliminate one pair of hands, or, looking at it another way, you increase the unfed mouths by ten.

In the final analysis, there is no such thing as a resource. The amount that we take from nature in the raw is so small as to be below calculation. Oil is worthless without human work, and so is soil, and so are fish in the stream. The question of how to turn a useless material like oil into a substance that serves a human need is a question of human ingenuity.