Read it.

Twice a year, Center of the American Experiment presents its Golden Turkey Award to highlight wasteful government spending in the State of Minnesota. Each contest features four nominees, and thousands of Minnesotans vote to select the winner. This time around, the nominees included a $261,000 grant to the University of Minnesota to teach eagles not to fly into wind turbines; $6.2 million to study development of a half-mile long “land bridge” over the major highway between Minneapolis and St. Paul, the purpose being to remedy “road racism” that occurred 60 years ago when the highway bisected a black neighborhood along with various other neighborhoods; and $2.5 million from the City of Minneapolis to pay “Violence Interrupters” to patrol the streets in brightly colored t-shirts, in lieu of police officers.

Zman does a deep dive.

This view of the world is behind the censorship regime. The unsophisticated make the error in thinking that the motive behind it is fear of their facts and reason. “They are afraid of our message” is a popular slogan in certain quarters. This is true only in that the Left thinks people lack agency and can easily be manipulated into rebellion or violence. That is what lies behind the claim that language is violence. They assume everyone does what they are told.

In the Charlottesville circus trial this was part of the plaintiff’s case. They brought in the equivalent of tarot card readers to explain the secret messages between members of the alt-right organizers. These so-called experts explained the secret meanings of the jokes and memes and then explained how they are calls to violence. At the heart of this is the assumption that humans lack agency and are so suggestible that they will become savage at the sound of certain words.

Magic word theory can probably be placed alongside magic dirt theory and magic shape theory in the domain of left-wing magic. Magic dirt theory is the claim that the soil upon which one stands controls your actions in some mystical way. People born on bad dirt turn out bad, while people born on magic dirt get all the breaks. Magic shape theory claims that metal and plastic shaped into something scary like certain types of guns makes people violent or suicidal.

“Bind not the mouths of he kine that tread out the grain.” Deuteronomy 25:4.

Read it.

Most of us own too much unnecessary stuff and have borrowed waaayyy too much money to buy said stuff. Meanwhile, all that debt is boosting inflation, making things that actually matter harder to afford.

But free people have a way of self-organizing solutions to their problems, and one of the more inspiring examples is the ‘Buy Nothing Project,’ through which members give or lend unneeded things to their neighbors. Think Craigslist without the asking prices.

ZMan really doesn’t like libertarians.

One of the great innovations in American politics introduced by libertarians is the ability to turn the sidelines into the moral high ground. In order to avoid taking on the Left, especially with regards to morality, libertarians became expert at finding a neutral position that worked like a cloaking device. Because the libertarian position offered no threat to the Left, the Left ignored it. This allowed libertarians to pretend to oppose radicalism while never threatening it.

This cloaking strategy took the form of them finding some “principled position” that was often so unrealistic that it did not bear considering. A good example is the homosexual marriage debate. Normal people understood that what the crazies were doing was attacking the very concept of the family. The exclusivity of family offends the core concepts of the open society. Reducing marriage to a handshake agreement open to anyone eliminates its exclusivity.

Instead of confronting the reality of this, libertarians took the position that the state should have no interest in marriage at all. In other words, the libertarian answer to the assault on the institution of marriage was to advocate the elimination of the legal concept of marriage entirely. This allowed them to subtly agree with the Left while claiming to stand on some abstract principle. The libertarian moral high ground was just a way to stand on the sidelines and do nothing.

Read it.

In light of the recent Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, one thing is clear, both the UK and US need a Rittenhouse law.

Since the verdict the Left-wing media have continued to push outright lies about the trial. Politicians, journalists and activists have been quick to peddle more lies and deliberately ignore the facts presented in court.

Make no mistake, this has angered the establishment in America, a white boy defended himself and dared to fight back against rioting hordes who were using the BLM organisation as a cover for their savagery. They were trying to burn a city down to the ground, cause billions of dollars worth of damage and potentially kill people. Kyle Rittenhouse had the sheer audacity to object and rush to help the rioters’ victims – and his own family – who were stuck in the middle of that nightmare.

Standing up to the mob is not allowed, the Left have spent years trying to disarm the Right. Once that happens no one is safe from the mob. Kyle Rittenhouse’s actions are exactly what they fear… Someone being able to fight back against them and their evil actions.

The Rittenhouse Act should make post-court analysis legally accountable. Anybody who takes to media (including Social Media) after a trial and presents “facts” that contradict what appeared in court should face a contempt of court charge. This constant Left-wing disinformation campaign about everyone and everything must be stopped in its tracks. They will attack, bully, smear and torment those who do not toe the line and submit to their dictatorial ways.

The perfect answer. Remember it.

Read it.

The Covid-19 pandemic brought tragedy and disruption to America. But it has also provided another stark warning concern­ing the country’s disastrous overreliance on overseas production. It has demon­strated that without a strong, self-reliant industrial base, this country’s ability to forge a healthy, prosperous future—and even its ability to defend itself against foreign enemies—will be severely compromised.

The fact that the world’s largest, and theoretically most advanced, economy could not provide basic medical equipment like masks or the basic components of pharmaceuticals came as a shock, particularly as the country was forced to lean on its leading geopolitical rival, China, to address a health emergency that originated there. These developments have stirred some businesses and politicians in both parties to seek ways to encourage domestic production.

I know the feeling….

Read it.

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

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Moving from the subtle, at worst, to the gross, at best, we learn from former University of Pennsylvania trustee Peter Levy writing in the Wall Street Journal that after Biden left the vice presidency in 2017, Penn created the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement and appointed Biden to the bespoke position of Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor. Penn paid Professor Biden $371,159 in 2017 and $540,484 in 2018 and early 2019 before Professor Biden retired from teaching and launched his presidential campaign.

In short, Penn paid Biden nearly a cool million over two years for the privilege of associating his name with Benjamin Franklin and the university. Professor Biden served “a vaguely defined role that involved no regular classes and around a dozen public appearances on campus, mostly in big, ticketed events” (here Levy was quoting the Philadelphia Inquirer story reporting the arrangement).

In other words, it was pretty much the same sort of ‘n0-show’ job that Michelle Obama got when her hubby was elected to the state legislature.

Read it.

While he is there, the President will undergo a routine colonoscopy.

The Hunt for Biden’s Brain? Good luck with that.

I want one.

Read it.

Before HTML/XML, database design and informatics were necessary skills to have or understand to work in libraries, there was a crucial requirement to obtain a job: mastery of library hand. Library hand, a specific style of handwriting, was once a highly-sought and praised manner of lettering and spacing and a requirement for many eager to enter the field.

As a young lad I remember encountering library hand on card catalog entries at our local Carnegie library.

Read it.

Ok. So President Biden, the Democrat Party, and major media outlets all agree that the greatest threat of domestic terrorism comes from right-wing militias and white supremacists. That’s what they say. Well, ok.

As the Rittenhouse jury deliberates, the National Guard has moved several hundred troops nearby, to handle possibly violent riots after the verdict is released. Well, ok.

So I presume that the leaders of the National Guard are thinking, “Ok, if Rittenhouse is found innocent, Black Lives Matter and Antifa will be upset, but they’ll use peaceful and legitimate means to air their grievances. No problem. But if he’s found guilty, the right-wing whackos out there are going to start burning down fast food joints and attacking bystanders. We’d better be ready.”

Ok. Maybe. But I really, really, really doubt that.

Me, too.

Read it.

New York City’s outgoing Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled an education plan on Thursday for all-expenses-paid, all-day, year-round education in New York state.

Year-round day-care at taxpayer expense. The Party of Free Stuff is on the roll.

I suspect that there are a lot of people who, at this point, are willing to take De Blasio’s support for an idea to be proof positive that it is stupid. He’s got an impressive track record.

Read it.

I would neither buy nor ride in such a car.

ZMan lays it out.

It seems that some of the empire’s rich people have noticed that the walls are down, so they are coming up with solutions. One is a new university in Texas that will gather up various exiles from the establishment into something of a think tank. Their stated claim is they will challenge the orthodoxy of the academy. The money for this is coming from a guy calling himself Joe Lonsdale. He is part of the Peter Thiel network, so it is safe to assume that Thiel money is involved too.

When you look at the list of people involved, it is basically civic nationalism gathering the remaining troops for one last stand. The “left-wing” people involved are the old liberals who never embraced cultural Marxism. The “right-wing” types are mostly people who never had a chance to work at AEI or Heritage. The one thing all of these people have in common is they are exiles from the establishment foundations. This project is an effort to create their own version of Heritage.

The Other McCain does not mince words.

It’s either going to be an acquittal or a hung jury, as I see it, because the evidence so clearly shows Rittenhouse fired in self-defense in each of the three cases — killing the deranged criminal JoJo Rosenbaum, killing skateboard punk Anthony Huber, and wounding Gaige Grosskreutz, who was pointing a Glock pistol at Rittenhouse. By the way, they have identified “Jump Kick Man,” the mystery figure who attacked Rittenhouse right before Huber got shot. “Jump Kick Man” is a convicted felon with a lengthy rap sheet. Rittenhouse fired two shots at him but unfortunately missed, and it was this incident that may have encouraged Huber’s subsequent attack on Rittenhouse. “Jump Kick Man” is reportedly behind bars now, because of a probation violation, but his involvement in the case indicates what I’ve said all along — these rioting mobs weren’t composed of “social justice” idealists, but rather criminal scum looking to engage in mayhem. Democrats, in other words.

Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist.

Notice how often the words “opportunity”, “freedom” and “choice” appear. Indeed the testimony from the Urban Institute refers to “the freedom to choose.” Excellent.

I agree with these conclusions. Now here is what is strange. Exactly the same arguments apply to school vouchers and school choice. School vouchers give students the freedom to choose the kinds of schooling and locations that best meet their needs. Yet, while many on the left agree that vouchers are superior to public housing, which tends to freeze the poor into low-quality, poorly maintained housing in poor neighborhoods with a host of cognate problems, they are more reluctant to support education vouchers as superior to public schooling. But all the arguments against public housing also apply to public schooling. Public Housing=Public Schooling. (The right are also strangely reluctant to take credit for housing vouchers even though they have mostly worked in just the way that Milton Friedman would have predicted!)

I suggest that the  key is the fact that realtors don’t have a union that is a key Democrat constituency. Getting reliable votes trumps helping poor people every time.

Read it.

Families, and the lack of them, are emerging as one of the great political dividing lines in America, and much of the high-income world. The familial ideal was once embraced by all political factions, except on the extremes, but that is no longer the case.

This is among the biggest lessons from the Republicans’ big electoral wins earlier this month. Areas close to Washington DC, where singles predominate and birth rates are negligible, remained Democratic, but in the suburbs, from Northern Virginia to Dallas to Long Island, where the families roam, voters shifted to the centre-right. It’s a poor omen for Democrats, who made strong gains in these areas in 2018.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line.

The movement to defeat race-obsessed left-wing school board members is a worthy one. It can be expected to improve public school education. However, there are limits to what even a conservative school board can do to limit woke instruction in the classroom.

At the end of the day, education will always be in the hands of teachers. And public school teachers will always be leftists compared to the population in the area. Even in conservative parts of the country, many public school teachers are leftists, and just comparatively.

That’s why private schools and home schooling have an important role to play in preventing leftist indoctrination at the K-12 levels. Ideology apart, they also have an important role to play in ensuring quality education at these levels.

Read it.

But there is no doubt that Trump is to blame.

John Derbyshire.

For the last few years, our news has been all like that. If you look closely at the big headline issues, the ones generating all the heat and noise in the mainstream media, there is nothing much there—just a gnat.

Read it.

On Monday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott joined Texas House Rep. Ryan Guillen, formerly a Democrat representing District 31, as Guillen announced he’d seek re-election as a Republican.

From Floresville, Texas, Abbott commended Guillen for the move, saying Democratic policies no longer represent the values of the Hispanic community in south Texas. Additionally, Abbott said: “This has been the worst kept secret at the Capitol. Everyone has known that Ryan Guillen is really a Republican who is attached to the wrong label. Ryan: we’re glad you finally came out of the closet.”

Read it.

Apple is driving full speed into a new arena that could create new controversy. The anti-free speech Big Tech company has reportedly teamed up with state governments to turn iPhones into digital identification cards. What could go wrong?

ZMan is not deceived.

A popular topic on this side of the great divide is who is and who is not a grifter, a shill or controlled opposition. The general assumption is that the people with perches in Conservative Inc. are working some sort of con. Maybe their racket is to keep people from looking over the great divide. These are the gatekeepers. Others may co-opt a dissident idea and then neuter it. They say things like Critical Race Theory is actually an attack on nonwhites so white people can oppose it.

Often forgotten is that the other side has their fair share of grifters who make a comfortable living working the true believers. Here is an example from the Daily Beast of what can be called woo-woo for the wokies. The writer is telling them that their newly minted hero, Liz Cheney, and an old has-been named Chris Christie, will give Trump a run for his money in the 2024 Republican primary. The Twitter thread on this topic is an amusing window into political mental illness.

https://www.gocomics.com/speedbump/2021/11/14

Jonathan Turley.

In covering the motions hearing last week in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, I noted a surprising comment from Judge Bruce Schroeder that he had “spent hours” with the Wisconsin gun law and could not state with certainty what it means in this case.

The statement could effectively knock out the misdemeanor gun possession count — the one count that could still be in play for the jury after the prosecution’s case on the more serious offense appeared to collapse in court. A close examination of that provision reveals ample reason to question not just its meaning but its application to this case.

Note the picture: Rittenhouse was well trained and conscientious in gun safety.

Read it.

When it comes to salaries, this is what it’s always been like for job applicants. You make your best guess of how much to ask for, based on the few tidbits about pay ranges that you’ve been able to glean from friends and co-workers and job apps, and then you negotiate in the dark. It’s a system of secrecy that benefits employers: By treating everyone’s salaries as “confidential,” companies are able to keep workers guessing about how much they’re willing and able to pay.

That’s all about to change. A growing number of states are enacting measures known as “pay transparency,” which force companies to disclose their compensation levels. New laws set to take effect in Connecticut and Nevada next month, and in Rhode Island in 2023, require employers to provide applicants the salary range they pay for each position at some point in the hiring process. Four other states and two cities have enacted similar mandates, some of which also require employers to disclose their pay scales to existing employees. The most far-reaching law, which Colorado implemented in January, compels businesses to include their salary ranges in every job posting — effectively making their payroll public.

The backbone of a market economy is the price system – we depend on prices being accurate reflections of the value of the use of a resource for that particular ‘product’. The chief hole in directed economies (such as communism) is that, whatever its imperfections, the price system beats central planning six ways from Sunday at allocating resources satisfactorily.

One of the constant temptations in business, a temptation that is rarely resisted, is to promote inefficiency in favor of the business by hiding efficient price information from one side of the transaction. In hiring, this disadvantaged party is the employee. Nothing is so common as a company that won’t tell you what the salary for a position is (or could be), but hides behind the fog-speak ‘competitive pay’. (Competitive with what? With whom?) I’ve never worked at a company where telling somebody else in the company what you are paid won’t get you fired (if they catch you).

And historically it has been very difficult for prospective employees to educate themselves in this area. But times are changing.

Read it.

Olaf Gersemann, a German journalist, 15 years ago set out to correct Europeans who believed that economic life in America was a race to the bottom. He showed that America’s flexible labor markets, dynamic growth, and job creation worked at least as well as Europe’s economies and welfare states. Now American writer David Harsanyi bookends that earlier project with a new text that punctures not European myths about America but the myths that some Americans hold about Europe.

Read it.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) was photographed officiating Ivy Getty’s lavish wedding in San Francisco last week. The photo explains everything you need to know about the Democratic Party. Nearly every important aspect of the party and its voter base is represented.

1) Millionaires and billionaires

…

2) Really old career politicians

…

3) White guys

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4) Celebrities

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5) Anti-Semites

…

6) Selectively enforced rules

Read it.

A Swiss billionaire is bankrolling a leading dark money group lobbying for the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan and green energy jobs initiatives, according to corporation and lobbying records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

Climate Power, one of the main groups pushing for the White House’s climate agenda, has billed itself as a traditional advocacy organization, with an advisory board featuring John Podesta, Stacey Abrams, and former senator Harry Reid. But the group doesn’t actually exist independently—it is owned and operates as a front group under the Fund for a Better Future, a Democratic dark money organization that has received the majority of its funding from Swiss health care mogul Hansjorg Wyss’s foundation since 2016, according to corporation records.

For all that Democrats constantly wring their hands about ‘dangers to our democracy’, they seem to be the ones doing their best to slide their way around it.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Hmm. No place in South America. No place in Asia. No place in Africa.

For a racist hellhole, the U.S. is looking pretty good.

Read it.

I suspect that the cumulative effect of ‘social media’ is the latest addition to the toolbox of Natural Selection.

Think about it.

The more people become addicted to Facebook and Twitter, the less they engage with real life.

Real life includes having and raising children.

To the extent that people are allowing themselves to become addicted to social media, to that same extent they are slowly excluding themselves from the gene pool.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Zman does some analysis.

The opposite rule of liberalism says that whatever the Left is saying, you should start with the opposite and that is where you will probably find the truth. For example, if they are accusing one of their bogeymen of something, most likely the target is not doing it and is not the bad guy. Odds are, it is the Left engaging in the activity. Whether it is latent guilt or deliberate distraction, the Left tends to accuse others of the things they are doing or plan to do in the future.

It is not always simple like we learned with the Russian collusion hoax. The Left is fond of creating elaborate and plausible concepts that they can use to frame issues so that they are the default moral position. Homosexual marriage is an example where they inverted the morality of the issue. Normal people felt the need to explain why we should maintain normal marriage, as if it was a novel concept. The opposite, of course, was the truth but it was hard for people to see it.

Robin Hanson.

As a book I recently reviewed explains in great detail, elites are selected primarily for their prestige and status, which has many contributions, including money, looks, fame, charm, wit, positions of power, etc. Elites like to pretend they were selected for being experts at something, and they like to pretend their opinions are just reflecting what experts have said (“we believe the science!”). But they often lie; elite opinion often overrules expert opinion, especially on topics with strong moral colors. And elites are selected far more for prestige than expertise.

NPR has you covered.

Of course, the first tip ought to be: Avoid crowds.

But I suppose that’s just me….

Ron DeSantis.

When you’re a governor and you get elected, they elect you to make the decisions. They did not elect me to subcontract out leadership to Fauci. I had to look to see what needed to be done to protect the people of my state.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

I wrote here about the fact that, unfortunately, the anti-covid vaccines do not reliably stop those who get them from either contracting or spreading covid. This negates the argument in favor of vaccine mandates and passports, since the real benefit of a vaccine is in reducing the severity of infection, not in preventing its spread to others.

But data released yesterday by the Minnesota Department of Health cast doubt on the effectiveness of the vaccines, even as to those who receive them. For the week ending November 8, 111 out of 168 newly announced “covid deaths”–66%–were among the fully vaccinated. Likewise, 347 out of 883 hospital admissions for covid (or with covid)–39%–were of the fully vaccinated. (Via Healthy Skeptic.) There is nothing unique about Minnesota, so I assume that these numbers are being replicated, more or less, elsewhere.

I marvel at the fact that people are willing to say, with a straight face, and apparently believe, that those who are unvaccinated represent a threat (a MORTAL threat) to those that are. That’s like saying that people who don’t wear seatbelts endanger those who do WHO ARE IN A DIFFERENT VEHICLE.

Dude, if your ‘vaccine’ will not prevent you from (a) getting the disease or (b) passing it on, THE PROBLEM IS NOT WITH THE UNVACCINATED BUT WITH THE PEOPLE WHO SOLD YOU THE VACCINE. Not to mention your own simplemindedness for believing their horseshit.

A constant reminder that half of the population is, by definition, below average in intelligence. (Yet they still get to vote. And their vote counts as much as yours, sometimes more if they vote Democrat.)

Read it.

These words wouldn’t have had the same effect if they were said by anybody else, but coming from Arnold Schwarzenegger, the bodybuilding Terminator-turned-California-Governor, delivered in his trademark German accent, they were absurdly apposite. It can be difficult to discern the outlines of tyranny when it is couched in the language of Constitutional norms and the structures of democratic federalism, and exercised by slick folks who look and talk like Gavin Newsom or Joe Biden. The Bidens and Newsoms are, after all, just issuing well-intended “mandates” backed, after all, by “the science.” Arnold’s visceral expression—all too reminiscent, to me at least, of his Nazi officer father—should be a wake-up call to all of us frogs contentedly boiling in our pots: Get out now, while we still can.

We need a new term to apply to RINOs, people who are too statist to be really Republicans but not crazy enough to be actual Democrats — you know, the John McCains/Mitt Romneys/Arnold Schwarzeneggers of the world. (You could even include various Bushes; I wouldn’t say you nay.)

Read it.

These deal with the movies, not the books, so it’s mostly “the wit and wisdom of Peter Jackson et al.” rather than Tolkien.

But still interesting.