John C. Wright exhumes the body of a decayed critic to hang, draw, and quarter it, as was done with Cromwell after the Restoration.

The kind reader may well wonder why any time or effort should be spent on dissecting a review over half a century old, worthy of no attention and no memory. That we must answer only after reading the review itself.

…

So why does Mr Wilson sneer that this is matter fit only for children? As I said, I suspect it is because his passions are corrupted with modern pollution, and in him they do not mediate between the appetites and the reason. He is not capable of having the proper, apt and fitting stock response to high and noble matter, and so he must react like Gollum tasting the mystic waybread of the elves, and spit it out as ashes with a curse.  He is one of C.S. Lewis’ ‘Men Without Chests.’

Read it.

This is extremely significant for two reasons:

1. Asian-Americans now realize that affirmative action is bad for Asians. I don’t think they realized this a decade ago, but they realize it now.

2. Democratic Party is a coalition of minorities and special interest groups controlled by a liberal white elite. I have always predicted that at some time in the future, the minority groups would become more assertive. I admit that I assumed that it would be Hispanic votes who would be the first to assert themselves, but it turns out that Asian-Americans are the first to revolt.

The Identity Politics chickens come home to roost.

Sarah Hoyt notices that her Bullshit Detector has gone off.

First of all there is much to be said against the concept of “cultural tolerance.”  Oh, sure, there is no earthly reason to despise someone for the food they eat or the clothes they wear (unless they eat live children or wear clothes made of ditto.)  There is no reason to consider some language backward (well, there are languages without verb tenses for past and future, which must be pure h*ll to manage modern life in, but that’s something else. Normal human habit in these situations is to borrow like mad.)

In fact, most of the type of thing you learn about other cultures in school aren’t something you should well… have an opinion of any sort about, unless it’s aesthetic.  I hate south American decoration on fabrics.  This doesn’t mean it’s bad.  It’s an aesthetic opinion.  I’m also not particularly fond of the things Scandinavians do with furniture.  Aesthetic opinion.  My kid likes it.  It’s… what you like.  I can say “Bah, no Swedish straight lines, thanks” when shopping for a table.  That doesn’t mean I despise the culture.  Oh, and some African carved masks give me the holly gibbies.  (Though I rather like animal carvings.  Go figure.)

None of this is lack of tolerance.  I like what I like.  You couldn’t pay me to wear a ball cap, for instance, and that’s the culture of my adopted people.

But this is all the level they can teach in school.  First of all because the units for world culture or geography or whatever start in elementary and rarely go beyond middle school.  Do you really want to discuss genital mutilation with your elementary school daughter?  I wouldn’t.  Do you want to explain how the concepts of personhood and individual value vary across the world?  Or course not.

Worse, the teachers are often fluffy internationalists, having been taught what I call “tourist multiculturalism.”  They believe that “culture” is clothes and crafts and food.  Or, as I kept running into when they told me to teach the kids their “culture” and I replied I was, that they were perfect “US Geek.” They got upset, and wanted me to teach them Portuguese culture.  (Why this would trump the culture of their father whose family has been here since the 1600s is a mystery.) They have some vague idea culture is genetic.  And they lack the historical knowledge to realize that is one of the most racist ideas ever.

Read it.

In Bryan’s blog post Predicting the Popularity of Obvious Methods, he suggests that social scientists are more likely to pursue non-obvious methods when the obvious methods don’t provide the answer that they like. In the spirit of his post, the use of non-obvious or overly sophisticated methods can signal that the researcher kept trying until they got the “right” answer. The skeptical might view this as a warning sign about the research.

Most people do not consume research firsthand. Instead, it is filtered through the media. Journalists also have preferences over answers. If a newspaper doesn’t like the answer that research provides, they have wide latitude to ignore it. This means that one can infer the preferences of the media by the research that they do cite. Instead of sophisticated methods being the “tell,” journalists show their preferences by citing weak research.

Let that be a warning to us all.

Read it.

Health, if it’s possible to spend at all (e.g. in pursuit of career success), is extremely illiquid. But as I will argue today, status is so liquid — so easy to transact, and in real time — that it plays a fundamental economic role in our day-to-day lives.

…

The point I’m trying to make here is that social status is not arbitrary. Instead, it’s grounded, very concretely, in the biology of honest signals – and as such, it’s subject to very real constraints. Wild swings of status are possible, but they’re mostly the stuff of stories. Our daily lives are governed by much smaller — and more predictable — gains and losses.

Read it.

To people more worried about kids who are falling through the cracks altogether, doing slightly less than we could for the most gifted might not seem like a pressing problem. But if the study is right that exceptional youthful ability really does correlate directly with exceptional adult achievement, then these talented young kids aren’t just a challenge for schools and parents: they’re also demonstrably important to America’s future. And it means that if, in education, we focus on steering all extra money and attention toward kids who are struggling academically, or even just to the average student, we risk shortchanging the country in a different way.

“We are in a talent war, and we’re living in a global economy now,” Lubinski says. “These are the people who are going to figure out all the riddles. Schizophrenia, cancer—they’re going to fight terrorism, they’re going to create patents and the scientific innovations that drive our economy. But they are not given a lot of opportunities in schools that are designed for typically developing kids.”

The transformation of children into a ‘public good’ is now complete — they aren’t individuals any more, but a natural resource that must be exploited, like shale oil. The same people who can’t leave a seam of coal in the ground without digging it out and burning it, whatever effect that may have on the actual people who live there, are transferring that same attitude to ‘our children’.

Read it.

You know who you are.

Freeberg is always worth reading.

It’s a bit regrettable that they believe in some kind of fight between good and evil inland, and then it seems once we’re talking about overseas situations with the prospect of war emerging, evil suddenly vanishes and anyone who makes an issue out of it must be some kind of “warmonger.” That dog won’t hunt. Evil exists, and it’s always been exceptionally talented at convincing the casual observer it doesn’t.

But she’s figured out how Obama’s snookered her generation. Vote for the magic-man, shed your tears of exuberance and happiness on 11/5/08, help end war and stick it to these evil corporations. She’s figured out the downside of voting friends into power and enemies out of power; that government works according to the interests of politicians, by its nature, and you can’t have it working for you unless you’re a politician. She’s beginning to understand that people who aren’t politicians need to keep government small. It’s on us. The politicians aren’t going to say “Okay that’s it, we’re interfering in their lives enough.”

The way these youngsters see it, though, is not like that. They say “not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties.” And then, while I can’t pretend to speak for this shirt-burner lady, I’ve noticed many among them are all-on-board when the time comes to consider the next tax increase. They want to stick it to those evil corporations.

Read it.

That’s the most positive thing I’ve heard about these changes to date. After all, if the ‘experts’ who have been screwing up our education system for the past fifty years don’t like them, they must be headed in the right direction, right?

Steve Sailer draws an important distinction.

While American geopolitical thought tends to divide the world up morally into the Democratic (whoever is on our side) and the Evil (vice-versa), Russians tend to strategize geographically in terms of Land (Mother Russia) v. Sea (those deplorable Atlanticists).

This dichotomy leads to endless paradoxes. For example, Russian grand strategy has traditionally been obsessed with making the country less of a land power by obtaining non-Arctic ports such as St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, Port Arthur, and Sochi, which is why Sevastopol in Crimea is such an emotional subject for them.

And yet the land-bound Russians never achieved their ultimate goal of taking Constantinople and thus securing a sea route to the Mediterranean. In contrast, the nautical British have held the strategically comparable Rock of Gibraltar at the opposite entrance to the Mediterranean for 310 years, and they appear to be in no hurry to give it back to Spain.

In the American mind, land powers are seen as militarist, brooding, and no fun: Sparta, Prussia, the Soviet Union, and now Putin’s Russia. In contrast, sea powers are the good guys, the cool kids: Athens, Holland, England, and America.

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Paul Mirengoff lays it out.

Justice has always been understood in our tradition as justice for the individual, qua individual. When a person goes to court, either in a criminal or a civil case, our system strives to provide him with a result that is fair given what he has done or failed to do. This is what we understand justice to be. Thus, when we say that justice should be blind, we mean that it should be rendered without regard to a person’s social status and without regard to the demands of this or that social agenda.

If justice is an individual-centric concept, then there is no room for the concept of social justice. The pursuit of social justice may lead to action that is consistent with justice, for example a non-discrimination statute. But the concept of “social justice” isn’t required to justify such a law; nor is it invoked to do so, since arguments for simple justice are always more persuasive (for example, the sponsors of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 took pains to assure the nation, probably disingenuously in some cases, that the law would preclude racial preferences).

The pursuit of social justice may also lead to action that is inconsistent with justice, such as granting racial preferences or expropriating someone’s property for “the greater good.” Such action is not justice, but rather justice’s antithesis. Thus, we should object when it is marketed “social justice.”

Charles Stross points out some inconvenient truth.

Our representative systems almost all run on a party system; even pure PR systems like that of Israel rely on a party list. (I could take out Israeli citizenship and run for the Knesset, but I’d be running as “the Charlie Stross Party”, not as myself: if I was a runaway success I’d need to find some extra representatives to tag along on my coat-tails.) Parties are bureaucratic institutions with the usual power dynamic of self-preservation, as per Michels’s iron law of oligarchy: the purpose of the organization is to (a) continue to exist, and (b) to gain and hold power. We can see this in Scotland with the SNP (Scottish National Party) — originally founded with the goal of obtaining independence for Scotland and then disbanding, the disbanding bit is now nowhere to be seen in their constitution.

Per Michels, political parties have an unspoken survival drive. And they act as filters on the pool of available candidates. You can’t easily run for election — especially at national level — unless you get a party’s support, with the activists and election agents and assistance and funding that goes with it. (Or you can, but you then have to build your own machinery.) Existing incumbent representatives have an incentive to weed out potential candidates who are loose cannons and might jeopardize their ability to win re-election and maintain a career. Parties therefore tend to be self-stabilizing.

A secondary issue is that professionals will cream amateurs in any competition held on a level playing field. And this is true of politics as much as any other field of human competition. The US House of Representatives is overwhelmingly dominated by folks with law degrees (and this is not wholly inappropriate, given they’re in the job of making laws). The UK’s Parliament is slightly less narrowly circumscribed, but nevertheless there’s a career path right to the top in British politics, and it’s visible in all the main parties: you go to a private school then Oxford or Cambridge, participate in student politics (if you’re on the left) or debating societies (if you’re on the right), take a post as researcher or assistant for an MP or (less commonly) run for a local council office, then run for parliament. There are plenty of people in every democratic constitutional system who have never held a job outside of politics — and why should they? Such a diversion would be a waste of time and energy if your goal is to make a difference on the national stage.

Read it.

 Late in the 1860s novel “Little Women,” heroine Jo March, dreading her friend Laurie’s budding romantic feelings for her, tells her mother she feels “restless and anxious to be seeing, doing and learning more than I am.” Her solution is to move to the city, to live and work in a boardinghouse. There, she has a room to herself, time to write, and the welcome distraction of friendships with her fellow boarders.

Today the notion of the boardinghouse—a “big house full of strangers,” as Jo writes in a letter home, where a variety of people would rent rooms and eat at a common table—seems at best quaint, and at worst unsafe and unsavory, as 19th-century critics had it. In the grand narrative of American home life—farm, small town, suburb, apartment—the boardinghouse feels like a long-vanished footnote.

Try that nowadays without getting arrested.

Read it.

Between August 1916 and January 1917 Cobden-Sanderson, a printer and bookbinder, dropped more than a tonne of metal printing type from the west side of the bridge. He made around 170 trips in all from his bindery beside the pub, a distance of about half a mile, and always after dusk. At the start he hurled whole pages of type into the river; later he threw it like bird seed from his pockets. Then he found a small wooden box with a sliding lid, for which he made a handle out of tape—perfect for sprinkling the pieces into the water, and not too suspicious to bystanders.

Those tiny metal slugs belonged to a font of type used exclusively by the Doves Press, a printer of fine books that Cobden-Sanderson had co-founded 16 years earlier. The type was not his to destroy, so he concealed his trips from his friends and family and dropped his packages only when passing traffic would drown out the splash. There were slip-ups, all the same. One evening he nearly struck a boatman, whose vessel shot out unexpectedly from under the bridge. Another night he threw two cases of type short of the water. They landed on the pier below, out of reach but in plain sight. After sleepless nights he determined to retrieve them by boat, but they eventually washed away. After that he was more careful.

Read it.

When President Obama takes the oath of office for the second time, he will also usher in a new era in American power politics. Whereas the old left-wing definition of “who rules” focused on large corporations, banks, energy companies and agribusinesses, the Obama-era power structure represents a major transformation.

This shift stems, in large part, from the movement from a predominately resource and tangible goods-based economy to an information-based one. In the past, political struggles were largely fought over how to divide up the spoils generated by the basic productive economy; labor, investors and management all shared a belief in the ethos of economic growth, manufacturing and resource extraction.

In contrast, today’s new hegemons hail almost entirely from outside the material economy, and many come from outside the realm of the market system entirely. Daniel Bell, in his landmark 1973 The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, may have been the first to identify this ascension to “pre-eminence of the professional and technical class.” This new “priesthood of power,” as he put it, would eventually overturn the traditional hierarchies based on land, corporate and financial assets.

I.e., the Crust. More and more people are Catching On.

Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft are far from “the workers of the world,” but closer to modern-day robber barons. Through their own ingenuity, access to capital and often oligopolistic hold on lucrative markets, they have enjoyed one of the greatest accumulations of wealth in recent economic history, even amidst generally declining earnings, rising poverty and inequality among their fellow Americans.

Last year the tech oligarchs emerged as major political players. Microsoft, Google and their employees were the largest private-sector donors to the president. More important still, tech workers also provided the president and his party with a unique set of digital tools that helped identify potential supporters among traditionally uninformed and disinterested voters, particularly among the young.

An even greater beneficiary of the second term will be the administrative class, who by their nature live largely outside the market system. This group, which I call the new clerisy, is based largely in academia and the federal bureaucracy, whose numbers and distinct privileges have grown throughout the past half century.

Gee, there’s an echo in here.

Most distinctive about the clerisy is their unanimity of views. On campus today, there is broad agreement on a host of issues from gay marriage, affirmative action and what are perceived as “women’s” issues to an almost religious environmentalism that is contemptuous toward traditional industry and anything that smacks of traditional middle class suburban values. These views have shaped many of the perceptions of the current millennial generation, whose conversion to the clerical orthodoxy has caught most traditional conservatives utterly flat-footed.

As befits a technological age, the new clerisy also enjoys the sanction of what Bell defined as the “creative elite of scientists.” Prominent examples include the Secretary of Energy, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist David Chu; science advisor John Holdren; NASA’s James Hansen; and the board of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In the words of New York Times hyper-partisan Charles Blow, Republicans have devolved into the “creationist party.” In contrast Obama reigns gloriously hailed as “the sun king” of official science.

Let’s be clear — this new ascendant class is no threat to either the “one percent,”  or even the much smaller decimal groups. Historically, the already rich and large economic interests often profit in a hyper-regulated state; the clerisy’s actions can often stifle competition by increasing the cost of entry for unwelcome new players. Like Cardinal Richelieu or Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, our modern-day dirigistes favor state-directed capital that has benefited, among others, “green” capitalists, Wall Street “too big to fail” firms and, of course, General Motors.

All this complaining and Occupying Wall Street is merely street theater on the part of the ruling class, as one can easily tell from the number of Filthy Rich People who support the Democratic Party and their bag-man, Barack Obama. It is designed to manipulate the Lower Crust whose votes are the wind beneath the wings of the new corporate state. Since most of them come from the left side of the bell curve, and are kept there by the corruption of public education (the only education any of them can afford), it’s not a lot of heavy lifting.

Read it.

The evidence from twin studies, adoption studies and even from DNA evidence is relentlessly consistent: in children, in Western society, the heritability of IQ scores is about 50 per cent. The other half comes equally from family (shared environment) and from unshared individual experiences: luck, teachers, friends.

This numerical precision easily misleads us into thinking genes and environment struggle against each other. In fact, they are like two pillars supporting an arch: nature makes you seek out nurture, which brings out your nature. But here is where things get interesting. The acceptance of genetic influence on intelligence leads to some surprising, even paradoxical implications, some of which turn the assumptions of both the Right and the Left upside down.

Read it.

Nothing is more important in agriculture than place. What is successful on one kind of soil in one kind of climate won’t necessarily work in another place with a different soil or different weather patterns. Farmers have always gained the knowledge necessary to understand a place through hard-won and rarely transferable experience. What farmer Brown knows about his land might travel down the road a few miles, but it is less applicable on a similar farm in a different part of the country. This idea of place is what drives the local food movement. Wineries brag about the perfection of the marriage between their varietals and soil. On our farm, every acre that I’ve farmed for 35 years and that my father has farmed for 65 years has a story. We know which weeds grow where, when the wet spots will appear, and we all remember that time the combine caught on fire down by the hackberry tree. Farmers’ personal relationship to place, one of the salient facts that distinguish agriculture, is about to change.

Most combines traveling across fields in the Midwest this fall had a GPS receiver located in the front of the cab. Although agriculture has been experimenting with this technology for a decade or so, only now is the industry starting to consider all the uses of this transformative technology. For several years, farmers have had the ability to map yields with global positioning data. Using that information, firms can design “prescriptions” for the farmer, who uses the “scrips” to apply seed and fertilizer in varying amounts across the field. Where the yield maps show soil with a lower yield potential, the prescription calls for fewer seeds and less fertilizer. This use of an individual farmer’s data to design a different program for each square meter in a field spanning hundreds of acres could replace a farmer’s decades of experience with satellites and algorithms. What we have gained in efficiency and by avoiding the overuse of scarce and potentially environmentally damaging inputs, we may be losing in the connections of the farm family to the ancestral place. Precision technology will allow managers to cover more acres more accurately and will likely lead to increasing size and consolidation of farms. While Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, and Alice Waters continue to argue that we need to turn back the clock on technology in agriculture, much of the world is moving in a quite different direction.

More and more, ‘farms’ are turning into food factories that just happen to be outdoors. As capital requirements increase, the size of the operation also needs to increase in order to reach necessary economies of scale.

Jim Goad is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

There are two types of ignorant people: those who don’t know, and those who know but choose to ignore. While nary a day goes by when our pink snouts aren’t rubbed in black slavery and the Holocaust, I can’t remember the last time the media made a peep about white slavery in the American colonies—nor even its more benign term, white indentured servitude. Then again, one can’t forget—nor even remember—what you don’t know about in the first place.

I can count at least one distant ancestor who was transported to the New World as an indentured servant. I’ve dealt with the white-hot topic of white slavery in my book The Redneck Manifesto and in a magazine article that was factually correct yet allegedly cost the magazine in question significant ad revenue from disgruntled White Slavery Deniers. And every time I’ve dared to raise the subject, I am shouted down, scoffed at, spat upon, pooh-poohed, and falsely accused of trying to say “Black slavery wasn’t bad.” My true motive is to say, “Hey, numskulls—you’re missing the big picture and creating poisonous levels of misunderstanding and resentment.” I’m only trying to show the similarities between white and black slavery, while others seem compelled to deny the similarities and focus exclusively on the differences. Interestingly, black people generally seem far more receptive to my humble mission. Then again, the false narrative that white people have never suffered is usually peddled by white people who have never suffered. Funny how that works.

Indeed it is.

Knowing my suggestions will be ignored, I will stubbornly sally forth and suggest two possible Hollywood adaptions of real-life white slavery. The first would involve the Barbary Coast and the estimated million-plus white Christians who were kidnapped by African Muslims and forced to endure hardships and torture that rival and may surpass what black slaves in America experienced.

The second would be based on the book White Cargo. One in a long series of books and essays that have exhaustively documented this otherwise whitewashed phenomenon, White Cargo goes into great detail regarding the brutality of the white slave trade to America and how English and Irish adults and children were kidnapped, beaten, tortured, and worked to death in the New World. For a touch of personal pathos, the screenplay might focus on the tale of a skeleton that was discovered in a Maryland basement in 2003 “in a hole under a pile of household waste.” The remains are presumed to be those of a 16-year-old so-called white indentured servant who’d been worked to death and cast aside as white trash rather than given a proper burial. Let’s see that poor soul’s story up on the silver screen, Mr. Weinstein.

Bryan Caplan points out the elephant in the room, so to speak.

 When I blame people for their problems, Democrats and liberals are prone to object at a fundamental level.  One fundamental objection rests on determinism: Since everyone is determined to act precisely as he does, it is always false to say, “There were reasonable steps he could have taken to avoid his problem.”  Another fundamental objection rests on utilitarianism: We should always do whatever maximizes social utility, even if that means taxing the blameless to subsidize the blameworthy.

Strangely, though, every Democrat and liberal I know routinely blames one category of people for their vicious choices: Republicans.  Watch their Facebook feeds.  You’ll see story after story about how Republicans – leaders and followers – shirk their basic moral duties.  Republicans ignore their duty to help the less fortunate.  Republicans ignore scientific evidence on global warming.  Republicans lie to foment war.  The point of these claims is not merely that Republican policies have bad consequences, but that Republicans are blameworthy people.

The underlying logic is rarely stated, but it snaps neatly into my framework of blame.  Why are Republicans blameworthy?  Because there are reasonable steps they could have taken to avoid being what they are.  Instead of ignoring their duties to help the less fortunate, Republicans could show basic humanity.  Instead of ignoring scientific evidence on global warming, Republicans could calmly defer to the climatological consensus.  Instead of lying to foment war, Republicans could tell the truth.

Are these “reasonable” alternatives?  Sure.  This is clearly true for the Republican rank-and file.  Since one vote has near-zero chance of noticeably changing political outcomes, political virtue is effectively free.  Asking the typical Republicans to reverse course on global warming isn’t like asking him to unilaterally give up his car.  It’s like asking him for a one-penny donation.  Totally reasonable.

The same goes for Republican leaders.  Yes, a successful Republican politician who broke ranks with his party would probably lose his job.  But he could easily find alternative employment that didn’t require him to spurn the poor, scoff at climate science, and make up stories about WMDs.  Stop heinous activity, keep your upper-middle class lifestyle.  Quite reasonable.

Read it.

It is February 2008. President Mubarak reigns over Egypt these days, and the nation’s antiquities service is led by a forceful, charismatic archaeologist called Zahi Hawass.

Gad isn’t the first to attempt to test Tutankhamun’s DNA, but he is the first to get this far. Previous efforts by foreigners were cancelled at the last minute. After decades of outside interference, Egypt’s politicians were reluctant to hand over the keys to the pharaohs’ origins—especially when the results, if dropped into the crucible of the Middle East, might prove explosive.

Now American television, with its lavish budgets, has bought its way to the king. The Discovery Channel has paid millions of dollars to film a pioneering study of Tutankhamun’s genetic heritage, this time carried out by the Egyptians themselves. If successful, the project could fill state coffers, achieve a scientific coup and reclaim dented national pride. Yet the goal is so ambitious that many of the world’s top researchers insist it isn’t even possible.

Read it.

“One of top five industries in the U.S. by expenditure is elementary education, and as opposed to other large industries, the median experience is bad from every angle,” he explains. The dysfunction and relative slow-to-change nature of the educational system is one of his biggest frustrations. The cost of education is increasing, he adds, but that isn’t translating into children excelling more effectively at skills like reading and math.

That’s one of the problems, because education is seen as being an ‘industry’ and it’s really not. As an industry, kids are pushed in one end, as raw materials, and are expected to come out the other end as finished products. This batch process method mirrors the automotive factory and is intended to do so. This whole factory approach to education is a major reason why educational unions are metastasizing and bringing educational progress to a grinding halt.

“If a time traveler came back from the early 1900?s, and looked at schools, they would look relatively the same. And there’s something wrong with that, because children and our world have changed.”

Specifically, we now have the technology to deal with children on individual basis, which we’ve never had before. This means that, instead of treating students as interchangeable parts to push through a designed-for-the-average manufacturing process, we can now tailor individual programs to suit individual talent levels and personalities, as the Khan Academy approach is so famously doing.

He started researching where success was actually taking place at a broader scale in schools, in early education. What ties these schools together is the notion of child centeredness, he says, which is providing individualized education where the student learns at his or her own pace in ways most nurture them and their education.

Exactly.

The more he imagined what his vision would look like in reality, the more it sounded like a home school environment but with a larger group, skilled teachers, and a curriculum that focused on exposing children to experiences, as well as skill-building.

Which is why homeschooled kids typically kick the asses of kids from a ‘factory’ school.

Taki Theodoracopulos is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Now, don’t for a minute think I’m defending slavery. We Greeks didn’t have slaves in modern times, just 2,500 years ago. We stopped after Jesus Christ told us we were all equals in the eyes of God. The fact that Arabs and Africans did not, however, is something Hollywood sharks have chosen to ignore.

Along with the Government, the Media, the Educational Establishment, the Grievance Industry, and all the rest of the usual suspects.

The fact that slavery is still practiced in Africa seems to have escaped the film industry. A lot of American blacks take Arab names and become Muslims, an irony in view of the fact that Arabs in cahoots with African tribal leaders were the ones that enslaved the poor souls that ended up in slave ships. The Brits, too, made a quick buck transporting them to the New World, where the Americans put them to work in chains. Slavery was the most horrendous of institutions, but it has been over since 1865—at least in America. It’s still thriving in Africa, and—I know, I know—blacks in America need a sort of helping hand, but as the great James Burnham wrote, “Human differences are so profound, it is neither possible nor desirable to eliminate all inequalities, hierarchies and distinctions.”

…

The Red Army raped close to three million German women, but you never hear about that in Hollywood movies, much less ones that win Best Picture. Go see The Book Thief.

Read it.

Life is not a race. Speed is good for things you want to get past, not for important things you enjoy. “It was an efficient meal.” “I had a quick life.” If you are doing something meaningful you’d want the experience to last. You would try to savor and consider every single moment to extract the maximum value from it.

Sometimes people brag to me about how many books they read each year. “I read 40 books” or “I read 60 books.”  My first thought is they’re probably reading the wrong books. Or reading them the wrong way. Any book I feel the urge to speed through means it’s either not very good or I’m not very interested.

Or maybe you’re just slow.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Capitalism was much talked about, because it stood in such clear opposition to the state socialism of our Cold War enemy. Again, though, the corrosive effects of capitalism on the nation-state do not seem to have been on anyone’s mind. Schumpeter had already put the phrase “creative destruction” into circulation, but it was discussed mainly as something that happened within a national economy, American makers of buggy whips finding new employment as American auto mechanics.

“Creative destruction” is none the less destruction, and “destroy” is still antonymous with “conserve.” These elementary points of vocabulary were too little noticed by Cold War conservatives.

As the economic manifestation of individual liberty, standing in contrast with socialist tyranny, capitalism was given a pass. The only Cold War conservatives to offer any significant critique of capitalism were Southern agrarians like Richard Weaver, drawing on the old sectionalist Southern prejudices seeing Yankees as cold-blooded, ruthless seekers of profit.

…

Thus the conservative critique of capitalism deserves an airing. We conservatives whose opinions were cooked in the mid-to-late 20th century tend to look kindly on capitalism, in part because we saw close up the horrors and inefficiency of state socialism. But the traditionalist-conservative critique reminds us that capitalism is not necessarily a friend of liberty.

Capitalists— well, some capitalists— are quite happy to crush your liberties if it’s good for business, which it sometimes is. Indeed, as we see from all the business lobbying for open borders, they’re happy to crush national sovereignty, debase the value of citizenship, and displace American workers, if those things are good for the bottom line.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

But as it turned out in Kiev, a street battle attracts a different demographic than does a gay pride parade. The triumph of brave far-right brawlers in Ukraine horrified the Russians into acting like Russians.

Russia has long been a baleful state, the biggest, toughest flatheads out on the Eurasian plain. You always hear about two times Russia was attacked—by Napoleon in 1812 and by Hitler in 1941—but Russia didn’t get that big through diplomacy.

Bryan Caplan lays down some inconvenient truth.

1. Claims about desert and poverty are meaningful.  Asking, “Does he deserve to be poor?” can be rude, but that doesn’t mean the answer is “No.”

2. A person deserves his problem if there are reasonable steps the he could have taken to avoid the problem.  Poverty is a problem, so a person deserves his poverty if there are reasonable steps he could have taken to avoid his poverty.

3. Common sense can usually resolve whether reasonable steps to avoid poverty were available to a particular person.  A good rule of thumb: If you wouldn’t accept an excuse from a friend, you shouldn’t accept it from anyone.

4. The fact that a person deserves his poverty does not imply that it is morally wrong to help him.

5. However, the fact that a person deserves his poverty is (a) a strong moral reason to give him low priority when weighing how to allocate help, and (b) a strong moral reason not to force a stranger to help him.

6. The fact that a person does not deserve his poverty does not imply that it is morally wrong not to help him.

7. However, the fact that a person does not deserve his poverty is (a) a strong moral reason to give him high priority when weighing how to allocate help, (b) an extra moral reason for individuals morally responsible for his poverty to cease and remedy their wrongful behavior, (c) a moral reason to force these morally responsible individuals to cease and remedy their wrongful behavior, and (d) a plausible though not totally convincing moral reason to force strangers to help the deserving person if the benefits heavily outweigh the costs.

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Our mission while at the orphanage was to build a library. Turns out that we, a group of highly educated private boarding school students were so bad at the most basic construction work that each night the men had to take down the structurally unsound bricks we had laid and rebuild the structure so that, when we woke up in the morning, we would be unaware of our failure. It is likely that this was a daily ritual. Us mixing cement and laying bricks for 6+ hours, them undoing our work after the sun set, re-laying the bricks, and then acting as if nothing had happened so that the cycle could continue.

[snort]

It turns out that I, a little white girl, am good at a lot of things. I am good at raising money, training volunteers, collecting items, coordinating programs, and telling stories. I am flexible, creative, and able to think on my feet. On paper I am, by most people’s standards, highly qualified to do international aid. But I shouldn’t be.

I am not a teacher, a doctor, a carpenter, a scientist, an engineer, or any other professional that could provide concrete support and long-term solutions to communities in developing countries. I am a 5? 4? white girl who can carry bags of moderately heavy stuff, horse around with kids, attempt to teach a class, tell the story of how I found myself (with accompanying powerpoint) to a few thousand people and not much else.

And reality intrudes into the fantasy word of an offspring of the Crust.

Before you sign up for a volunteer trip anywhere in the world this summer, consider whether you possess the skill set necessary for that trip to be successful. If yes, awesome. If not, it might be a good idea to reconsider your trip. Sadly, taking part in international aid where you aren’t particularly helpful is not benign. It’s detrimental. It slows down positive growth and perpetuates the “white savior” complex that, for hundreds of years, has haunted both the countries we are trying to ‘save’ and our (more recently) own psyches. Be smart about traveling and strive to be informed and culturally aware. It’s only through an understanding of the problems communities are facing, and the continued development of skills within that community, that long-term solutions will be created.

We’ll make this kid a conservative yet….

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Stubble-challenged guys are forking over up to $8,500 for the beard-boosting procedure, which has spiked in popularity in recent months, plastic surgeons told The Post.

“Brooklyn is probably the nucleus of the trend, it’s the hipster ‘look’ guys want. If you have a spotty beard, and you let it grow out, it looks sloppy, ” said Dr. Jeffrey Epstein, a Midtown-based plastic surgeon.

“[Clients] want full beards because it’s a masculine look. Beards are an important male identifier,” he added.

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For some time now, it has been customary to label those who write about grammar and usage as either prescriptivists or descriptivists. The former think there are “right” and “wrong” ways to say or write, while the latter claim that we can only record how people actually use language, since any widespread successful usage is, ipso facto, “right.” But as soon as we probe a little further, these two categories start to dissolve. In fact, there are two complementary pleasures to be had from reading contributions to this ever-popular genre. The first is that of watching the most beady-eyed prescriptivist waving through usages that would have put their prescriptivist ancestors in intensive care with advanced apoplexy. The other is the sight of the most laid-back descriptivists casually laying down a range of arbitrary diktats and prohibitions. And this is not accidental or just a matter of personal weakness. In reality, neither of these positions is sustainable in its pure form. Those who think anything goes and those who think that that means it goes to the dogs turn out to be not so far apart after all.

The truth is, not to put too fine a point on it, that every prescriptivist is screwed by history. They can’t avoid knowing that, on so many of the hot topics of grammar and meaning, what used to be right is now wrong and vice versa. But the descriptivists are caught in their own cleft stick without a paddle, too. In theory, their position might be summed up as, “If folks say it like that, then that’s how folks say it.” But just as no one is in practice a thorough-going relativist about knowledge or morals, however committed they may be to relativism as a theoretical position, so no descriptivist can, for example, stand by and watch foreigners mangling the language without invoking the category of “mistake.” In fact, the teaching of English as a foreign language is an interesting testing ground for all the general ideas put forward in these books. In that setting, there certainly are “rules” and there are “right” (and therefore “wrong”) ways. For TEFL teachers, saying “more tastier” can’t just be a matter of taste.

Read it.

As a matter of economics, why not consider the option of hiring a single professor to teach a first-year curriculum to a small number of students? At the level of the individual student, it may make sense to some families. Rather than spend $50,000 for a year of college at a selective private institution, one could hire a single Ivy League-trained individual with a doctorate and qualifications in multiple fields for, say, two-thirds the price (far more than an adjunct professor would make for teaching five courses at an average of $2,700 per course).

The idea becomes more attractive with multiple students. A half-dozen families (or the students themselves) could pool resources to hire a single professor, who would provide all six students with a tailored first-year liberal-arts education (leaving aside laboratory science) at a cost much lower than six private-college tuitions, and at the level of a real salary for a good sole-proprietor professor.

A low-cost, high-value first-year education would allow students to transfer into a traditional degree-granting institution at a second- or third-year level, saving a year or more of tuition. Home-colleged students would have a year of personal attention to writing skills, research skills, oral-presentation skills, and the relationship of disciplines in the liberal arts.  The attention to oral and written skills may be particularly valuable to non-English-speaking students looking to succeed at an American college or university.

Everything old is new again.

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For a Socialist Rag (or whatever is the Internet equivalent), Business Insider occasionally has some interesting stuff.

The picture is obviously from an SCA event.

Fred Reed is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Things don’t work like they spoza. A cause of this dysfunction is the notion that criminals can “pay their debt to society” and then be all better, as if crimes were purchases made on a credit card. Say that a marginal human wielding a bolo knife crawls through a window, burglarizes the house, and gets caught and sentenced to five years. He gets out some time later having “paid his debt”—actually the citizenry have paid $20K a year to keep him fed and comfortable. He is now thought to have been cleansed and ready to make a fresh start.

Not a chance.

Read it.

In a world run by robots in which few things are scarce, we can probably depend on government to create scarcity where there’s no reason for it. After all, that’s what government does best.

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I suppose the readiness of TV audiences to accept such absurd situations as less depressing than the fact that supposedly sober businessmen paid ad agencies more money than I’ll ever see in my life in the belief that anybody is persuaded by such drivel.

David Friedman lays out some inconvenient truth.

It’s a widespread view, but true in only a narrow sense. People who say they are against teaching the theory of evolution are very likely to be Christian fundamentalists. But people who are against taking seriously the implications of evolution, strongly enough to want to attack those who disagree, including those who teach those implications, are quite likely to be on the left.

Consider the most striking case, the question of whether there are differences between men and women with regard to the distribution of intellectual abilities or behavioral patterns. That no such differences exist, or if that if they exist they are insignificant, is a matter of faith for many on the left. The faith is so strongly held that when the president of Harvard, himself a prominent academic, merely raised the possibility that one reason why there were fewer women than men in certain fields might be such differences, he was ferociously attacked and eventually driven to resign.

Yet the claim that such differences must be insignificant is one that nobody who took the implications of evolution seriously could maintain. We are, after all, the product of selection for reproductive success. Males and females play quite different roles in reproduction. It would be a striking coincidence if the distribution of abilities and behavioral patterns that was optimal for one sex turned out to also be optimal for the other, rather like two entirely different math problems just happening to have the same answer.

Freeberg puts The Arizona Kerfuffle in a nutshell.

Sorry Sulu. Your Facebook updates are a lot of fun, and nothing against your sexual preference but you’re wrong on this one. In fact, Arizona would be a great place for the silliness to finally stop.

There is: Nobody should force me to pour milk on my corn flakes when I happen to prefer orange juice and vodka on my corn flakes. And then there’s: Help me force this restaurant owner to let me walk into his restaurant and eat my corn flakes. Those are two different things. The first thing is freedom, the second thing is force. Two things. Different. In fact, opposites.

Time for the nonsense to end. You’re not championing choice and freedom anymore, when you’ve started to force other people to accept things they don’t want to.

And that’s all you need to know about that. But he elaborates:

So now we’re left with several realizations that lead to a question. There aren’t too many stories to be offered up about gay people being refused service anywhere, so I don’t think we need to pretend this was about anybody’s “rights.” If we do force that understanding, then we would also have to understand, once and for all, that the gay-rights crusade lately has a cause wholly separate from what they’ve been claiming, and those who have been resisting it were completely correct from the very beginning: It’s about special rights and not equal-rights. Laundromats, bowling alleys, Karate studios, fast food restaurants, liquor stores and bars have always been able to display signs that say “We Reserve The Right To Refuse Service To Anyone.” In Arizona, they don’t have that right. And, it seems the loud-crowd is opposed to any business having that right anywhere…where homosexuals are concerned.

The whole ‘gay rights’ thing isn’t about ‘gay rights’ at all, but about ‘gay privileges’. ‘Gay marriage’ is the poster child here: Homosexuals have the same marriage rights as everybody else: To marry someone of the opposite sex. But that’s not what they want; they want to right to marry someone of the same sex, a ‘right’ that no one has except in certain reality-free jurisdictions. All this handwaving about ‘equality’ is meant to pull the wool over the eyes of the Low Information Voter, the same sort of people who believe something is true because they read it in the newspaper.

Check it out.

Read it. And watch the video.

The rising ire of a national coalition of black pastors reached a climax Tuesday as the organization announced a campaign to call for the impeachment of Attorney General Eric Holder on the basis that he has violated his oath of office by “attempting to impose same-sex ‘marriage’ throughout the nation…”

Any non-black non-Democrat Attorney General would have been impeached long since, but Holder keeps digging in deeper and deeper. People tend to forget that not all black Americans are denizens of the Obamanation.

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Why, it’s even in their name. But apparently ‘progressives’ can’t read.

So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism:

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.

The clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.

Steve Sailer writes the obit.

Uh … the reason New York is the ballet capital of America is because of all the money generated by Wall Street. So, a struggle promising street fighting over who has better aesthetic taste — the people who make the money made on Wall Street or the people who spend the money made on Wall Street — wasn’t ever really going to go anywhere. In the battle between the ballerinas and the Masters of the Universe, there will never be a final victor because there’s way too much fraternizing with the enemy.

Jim Goad rushes in where angels fear to tread.

With all due respect to the Founding Fathers, I do not find it “self-evident” that all men are created equal. If anything, it appears bleedingly obvious that they are highly—even comically—unequal.

A good point that has never, as far as I know, been adequately addressed — just assumed.

Your modern smug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug progressive egalitarian dimwit generally believes in evolution—except for the uncomfortable parts. Have you ever noticed that when you disagree with them about the notion of innate human equality, they immediately condemn you as innately inferior to them? In stereotyping the “racist”—which is by far the most pervasive stereotype in modern society—it’s telling how often racists are depicted as stupid, subhuman, genetically inferior, and stuck in the Stone Age. It appears an indelible trait of human group psychology that people need to feel superior to at least someone, and that someone is currently the “racist” rather than the old standby, the Negro.

The truth is that ‘all men are created equal’ is fundamentally a Christian ides, that all men are equal morally before God, and the most amusing aspect of the current fashionable progressivism is that they simply cannot acknowledge that simple historical fact.

Keeping it simple, I’ll use a baseball analogy. Let’s say the best hitter for the Boston Red Sox bats .350. And, oh, let’s say their worst hitter bats .150. And let’s allege that the team’s batting average is .250.

With me?

And let’s say the New York Yankees’ hitters average .350.

So the difference between the Red Sox’s best and worst hitters is a steep 200 points, while there’s only 100 points between the teams’ averages.

Does this, even for a second, mean the Red Sox and Yankees are equal at batting?

Not if you aren’t a moron.

Bryan Caplan, a Real Economist, explains it all to you in pictures so even ‘progressives’ will understand it.

Dean Burnett writes in The Guardian, a British newspaper that is living proof of Jonah Goldberg’s thesis that National Socialism is just another child of Socialism.

(Actually, my choice would be Henry Tudor prior to Bosworth, but that’s just me.)

Read it.

“Will Dropouts Save America?,” asked Michael Ellsberg in a 2011 piece published by The New York Times, a paper that reveres universities and is considered the flagship publication of the American liberal Left.

Ellsberg said most of the high-tech entrepreneurs and the drivers of the Internet economy — from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg — were college dropouts, having realized that they were wasting their time in class.

“American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees,” Ellsberg wrote. “But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but startup entrepreneurs. … No business in America — and therefore no job creation — happens without someone buying something. But most students learn nothing about sales in college; they are more likely to take a course on why sales (and capitalism) are evil.”

Just as a government exists to hire and pay bureaucrats, a university exists to hire and pay professors — and, increasingly, administrators. Educating students is just a Clever Plastic Disguise, the fig leaf that lets the rest of it go on undisturbed. (Not unlike manufacturing in a heavily unionized industry, come to think of it.)

Read it. And watch the video.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of such ‘activists’ is the Brownshirt tactics they routinely employ in their attempts to combat thoughtcrime among their opponents — tactics that they would rightly regard as ‘human rights violations’ and ‘hate crimes’ if employed against themselves.

Increasingly the term ‘activist’ has come to mean ‘asshole in the service of a political agenda’.

Read it.

They ought to have made his birthday, not that of Martin Luther King, a national holiday.

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The New York Times recommends that we all move to Wichita, Kansas. Just kidding. Although Wichita has more income quality than New York, no one from the NY Times would want to live in a state where Sam Brownback is the governor.

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Questions to ask:

What differentiates ‘neoracism’ from good old-fashioned ‘racism’? Or is it another weasel-term like ‘social justice’?

What are these ‘experts’ expert in?

Are they just worried that science is undermining the blithe Crustian assumption that ‘race’ has no real meaning? If so, why is that a bad thing?

New forms of discrimination, known as “neoracism”, are taking hold in scientific research, spreading the belief that races exist and are different in terms of biology, behaviour and culture, according to anthropologists who spoke at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago.

How are these ‘new forms of discrimination’ different from previous forms of discrimination?

If science has actual evidence that ‘races exist’ and ‘are different in terms of biology, behaviour, and culture’, why are they trying to oppose it? Science is science.

Read it.

Artist Alfred Twu, the Bay Area graphic designer behind this popular imagining of a cross-country high-speed rail map, has created a series of renderings showing what Silicon Valley tech campuses might look like if their parking lots could house the thousands of their controversial employees. Not only has he envisioned new campuses for Google, Apple, Facebook, and Electronic Arts, but he’s also created with a “generic café/startup/coworking space” to serve as a model for smaller startups, too.

It would certainly eliminate the prospect of on-the-street confrontations with the UnderCrust of San Francisco.

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I rarely revise my text messages, sending out typos and odd autocorrections left and right, and the semicolon is often the first punctuation mark I thumb for when I’m moving onto another thought (for instance: “yea, dinner at 8 sounds good; did you walk the dog?”).