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Hey — I worry about these things….

Jim Goad finds that his Bullshit Detector has gone off.

The 15th annual White Privilege Conference ended on Saturday in Madison, WI. As is usually the case with the locales for such public displays of white ethnomasochism, Madison’s quotient of blacks is roughly half the national average. In contrast, presumably ignorant and “prejudiced” white Southerners—the kind of people most despised by bourgeois-yet-Marxist whites who believe in fairy tales such as “white privilege”—have for centuries lived in the blackest part of the nation. It is typically whites with the least amount of experience living alongside blacks that tend to idolize colored folks beyond all reason.

…

According to conference founder Eddie Moore, Jr., “white supremacy, white privilege, racism and other forms of oppression are designed for your destruction—designed to kill you.” If that’s the case, privileged whites are doing a piss-poor job, seeing as how the 400,000 or so Africans who were transported to the New World in slave ships have—through the noxious evils of white privilege, white technology, and living amid a predominantly white culture—blossomed into around 40 million modern American blacks. That’s an increase of 100-1 and truly the most inept genocide in world history.

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So where does all this Rube Goldberg action come from? It’s tempting to blame evolution, and the accumulation of cruft in the genome, but evolution can be quite good at simplifying when simplicity is actually optimal. We have only one backbone in our body, not five sort-of-parallel ones all trying to combine to support us. So there must be something optimal here about complexity, and when considered it’s obvious: if we could understand the immune system easily, so could microbes, and so they could subvert it easily. Indeed, it seems like whenever I read about the workings of any well-studied human pathogen, those workings include at least one way of eluding, deceiving, or sabotaging the immune system, and often two or three of them. Germs don’t seem to qualify as human pathogens, in the eyes of doctors, unless they have such a way; otherwise they are just one of the “harmless” background microbes which the immune system usually deals with so efficiently that we don’t even know that they are trying to eat us (though they can still be harmful in high doses). Yet even when a germ has three different ways of eluding the immune system, that doesn’t make it 100% deadly; most of the time the immune system can still eventually get it under control, using a fourth (and maybe a fifth and a sixth) mechanism in its arsenal.

Freeberg speaks wisdom.

I’ve been noticing that with what we lately call “left” and “right” in politics, it is a rather consistent configuration that this “side that refuses to define things” is on what we call the “left.” Issue after issue. I have also noticed that where these halves overlay occupations, the “left” sympathizes with those who don’t have any. Or, are occupied with something disassociated with any sort of material demand. Community organizing. Wheelchair-ramp-reconstruction or health insurance including birth control; other things people buy not because they actually want them, but to meet some sort of regulatory requirement. Well, this stands to reason. If you’re going to sell something to people who actually want to buy it, you’re going to need to define things in order to do your market research. And, to build the widget to make sure it does what people want it to do. And then the people lining up to spend their hard-earned dollars buying it, oh boy howdy, they’re going to want things defined too. What’s the total cost of ownership? What’s it like to use it? What are the consequences of moving on to this new thing, and stopping using the old thing?

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When every argument you make relies on presenting things as the opposites of themselves, that’s deceit; and, deceitful people don’t want things defined, that makes it harder to do the deceiving.

Freeberg hears his Bullshit Detector go off.

It isn’t just the lefties anymore. We see it everywhere now, don’t we? A&E “fired” Phil Robertson, patriarch of Duck Dynasty — now, what was the point of that? I never did hear of anyone taking the extra time or trouble to teach or counsel Mr. Robertson into having the correct opinions about gay people, so it wasn’t about Robertson’s opinions. As always seems to be the case with actions like this, it was about influence. The rule seems to be that you can think whatever you want, but you’re not allowed to have influence unless you think the right things. If you don’t think the right things then you are to be driven out of whatever position you have. Once that’s done, you can go on thinking it, but the important goal is that we have to get our society properly arranged, with these good thoughts entirely saturating the tallest spires, and the bad thoughts entirely relegated down there in the dark alleyways, among the plebes. That is, from all I have seen and all I can figure out about it, the ultimate objective. The shrieking I hear is all about these exceptions: Someone in a position has a bad thought, let’s get him defrocked of the position so he can keep his bad thought — but, down there, not up where he is. Those people up there are all supposed to think the same, good, things.

Read it. And by all means watch the video.

While I continue frankly have no particular taste for commercial advertisements, particularly for foolish products like electric cars (they run on electricity generated at powerplants by burning diesel fuel, hence serve no purpose), I admit it is refreshing to see one which pretends, if only for a moment of make-believe, that ours is the America we once had in the 1950s and which has since been abandoned.

I personally enjoy the delicious irony of using such a no-doubt-funded-by-the-Koch-brothers ad for an electric car.

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For the past three years, Rich and 3,000 other average people have been quietly making probability estimates about everything from Venezuelan gas subsidies to North Korean politics as part of an experiment put together by three well-known psychologists and some people inside the intelligence community.

According to one report, the predictions made by the Good Judgment Project are often better even than intelligence analysts with access to classified information, and many of the people involved in the project have been astonished by its success at making accurate predictions.

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Researchers at Stanford have observed that foraging harvester ants act like TCP/IP packets, so much so that they’re calling the ants’ behavior “the anternet”.

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Four experiments tested the novel hypothesis that ritualistic behavior potentiates and enhances the enjoyment of ensuing consumption—an effect found for chocolates, lemonade, and even carrots. Experiment 1 showed that ritual behaviors compared to a no-ritual condition, made chocolate more flavorful, valuable, and deserving of behavioral savoring. Experiment 2 demonstrated that random gestures do not boost consumption like ritualistic gestures do. It further showed that a delay between a ritual and the opportunity to consume heightens enjoyment, which attests to the idea that ritual behavior stimulates goal-directed action (to consume). Experiment 3 found that performing rituals oneself enhanced consumption more than merely watching someone else perform the same ritual, suggesting that personal involvement is crucial for the benefits of rituals to emerge. Last, Experiment 4 provided direct evidence of the underlying process: Rituals enhance consumption enjoyment due to the greater involvement they prompt in the experience.

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A federal regulation that took effect this week imposes a 15-cent assessment on every Christmas tree cut and sold in the U.S. or imported into the country.

The reason behind the fee: to fund a national marketing program.

These are trying times for Christmas tree growers. An industry task force on tannenbaums reported that the market share for fresh-cut Christmas trees in the U.S. declined by 6% from 1965 to 2008, while the market share for artificial trees increased by 655% in that same period.

A few years ago, the task force pleaded with the federal government for help, and this week the U.S. Department of Agriculture put a present under its tree: a regulation that creates a marketing program to match the heavy advertising the fake-tree industry does so well.

Included in the regulation, which was first published in 2011 but takes effect now, is the 15-cent assessment to pay for the program. The hold on the regulation was lifted as a result of a provision in the 900-plus-page farm bill, which President Barack Obama signed into law in February.

This is the very essence of fascism: Government imposing regulations on citizens in order to benefit a favored corporate interest.

Sarah Hoyt reminds us of some inconvenient truth.

As we’ve talked about before, the entire welfare bureaucracy seems to keep people there, once they fall in. This also I suspect leads even competent parents to the sort of state of despondent despair where they can’t make rational decisions.

But that is precisely the point. To render assistance to the children, we got through the parents. And if the parents weren’t broken to begin with, the system breaks them.

Read it.

Burton’s trial is very worrying for anyone who holds dear freedom of speech and other basic civil liberties. One of the worrisome aspects is the conflating of “religion” with “race”. Islam is clearly not a race and Muslims belong to all races, including whites. Furthermore, the Crown Prosecution Service considers those two charges (racially- and religiously-aggravated crimes) as distinct ones.

But, despite officially paying lip service to this distinction, in Tim Burton’s case the CPS is trying to combine and confuse the two because it does not have sufficient ground to get a conviction on the “religiously aggravated” charge — which requires stronger evidence -, so decides to prosecute using the easier “racially aggravated” one.

As the CPS’s own website says, “So it will be more difficult to prosecute for inciting religious hatred as opposed to racial hatred”.

You might think this a silly question — which it is — but modern politics, and (sadly) modern law, wrestles with such silly questions all the time, with seemingly absurd results more often than most people would find comfortable.

Magnetic measuring spoons.

Weatherproof motion sensor light.

iPhone case with folding knife.

Calslock Portable Door Lock.

Dymphna riffs on Mark Steyn.

In the video, Mr. Steyn points out what one “tiny, miserable grey island in the North Atlantic” managed to accomplish. The great horror is the ways in which that hard-won knowledge is being buried beneath the strew and slander of the deliberate ignorance of those who want only its subjugation under a theocratic supremacy. Those currently in power chant a mantra about the ways “poverty breeds ignorance”, etc., while their own educated ignorance reduces all facts to mere opinion.

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Don’t ever say we don’t have useful stuff here.

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The fact that the story goes out of its way to avoid mentioning race suggests that the driver was white and the beaters were black. Note that the driver was characterized as ‘suburban’ and the neighborhood was an ‘east side’ neighborhood.

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I bet you didn’t know that.

“We really need to know what happens with live zebras in the field before we can be sure,” she said.

Good advice in any situation.

Read it.

The communications giant Comcast announced in February that it would buy Time Warner Cable for $45 billion, creating the largest cable provider in America, with more than 33 million customers. That is about one third of the U.S. cable and satellite television market. FCC approval is required for the merger to go into effect. Critics of the deal say it would lessen competition and lead to even shoddier customer service. They are probably right, as all of us will soon find out, because there is little chance the merger will be stopped. Comcast, Time Warner, and their political fixers have spent years preparing for this moment—by buying off the Democratic Party.

Comcast, which employs more than 100 lobbyists, spent almost $19 million last year on lobbying activities. Its president and CEO, Brian L. Roberts, is a golf buddy of President Obama’s, and a Democratic donor who has contributed thousands of dollars not only to the president’s campaigns, but also to the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the DNC Services Corporation, and to Steny Hoyer, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Bob Casey. Roberts’ executive vice president, David Cohen, is a former aide to Democratic bigwig Ed Rendell. Cohen skirts lobbying regulations through loopholes, has raised more than $2 million for Obama since 2007, and in 2011 hosted a DNC fundraiser at which the president called him “friend.” Cohen has visited the White House 14 times since 2010, including two visits to the Oval Office. He attended the recent dinner for President Hollande of France.

He who has the gold makes the rules.

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That’s not Change, that’s Business As Usual.

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But will anything be done about it? Of course not. Too many deep-pocket contributors have an economic interest in the profitable little tricks that their favorite congresscritters have placed in the dark recesses of the current code.

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Read it.

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“Blacks,” said Mayor Barry Mahool, “should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidents of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the White majority.”

Mahool was the mayor of Baltimore who, in 1910, signed into law a racial zoning ordinance. According to Christopher Silver’s The Racial Origins of Zoning in American Cities, he was also “a nationally recognized member of the ‘social justice’ wing of the Progressive movement.”

One of the problems with Low-Information Voters is that anything that happened before about, oh, last week, is off their radar. Democrats depend on this to sweep under the rug that their party has been the Party of Racism since the Civil War.  Judging by the voting statistics, it’s worked, too — wonder why nobody cites that when they talk about racial disparity in IQ.

Read it.

A British sniper in Afghanistan managed to kill six Taliban insurgents with just one bullet by hitting the target switch of a suicide bomber, whose device exploded, the Telegraph reports.

The sniper, a lance corporal in the Coldstream Guards, hit his target from 930 yards away. The incident took place in December. The shot prevented a major attack by the Taliban, Lt. Col. Richard Slack, told the Telegraph.

Nulli secundus!

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It certainly reduces your risk of dying of starvation.

I’m wondering how big these portions are.

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Officials with the Olathe, Kansas, school system have apologized after inviting only black students on a field trip that included visits to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and an exhibit on the Civil Rights movement at a local museum. Well, actually, they say it was all a “misunderstanding” and that the invitation mistakenly “suggested” the trip was open only to blacks. But the actual invitation specified that it was for “our African-American sophomores and juniors.”

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Aside from the fact that the number of people signing up (under government compulsion) was never one of the core objections to Obamacare.

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I wince every time I hear Barack Obama say “The Holy Qur(*gulp*)an”. If he’s a Christian, as he claims to be, the book is not at all holy to him. It’s unseemly and embarrassing to hear a president talk this way.

Really — if Barack Obama actually were a ‘secret Muslim’, how would he act any differently?

The BBC has caught the same disease. I’ve read BBC news articles about alleged desecrators of “The Holy Qur’an” and accounts of newspapers that publish blasphemous cartoons of the “Prophet Mohammed”. The Beeb doesn’t refer to “Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ” in any of its publications, does it? What does this tell you about the official institutional religion at the British Broadcasting Corporation?

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You really don’t want to get on the wrong side of those pregnant football players….

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We just got some pretty damned tough mice here.

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Our dataset-of-datasets graph averages the monthly anomalies for the three terrestrial and two satellite temperature records. It shows there has still been no global warming this millennium. Over 13 years 2 months, the trend is zero.

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

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I blame Garrison Keillor.

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Essentially you are buying a set of files – skulls from dogs, dragons, goats, humans, and Alyssa Milano (not really) – and you can print them out without supports, which is a pretty big deal.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.