Read it.

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

Read it.

Illegal aliens who get President Barack Obama’s likely forthcoming executive amnesty will have immediate access to welfare and other public benefits, according to a new report from the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR) exclusively provided to Breitbart News ahead of its public release shows.

Of course. That’s what it’s all about — buying new Democrat voters with YOUR money.

Read it.

Want to know why your cucumbers are producing flowers but no fruit? It could be that your flowers are only male. Can’t for the life of you figure out what those white spots on your squash plants are? A new app called PlantVillage may be able to help.

Read it.

Facts are such tedious things, that’s why ‘progressives’ prefer to ignore them.

Read it.

The Washington Post’s original three-part, in-depth look at the use and abuse of police civil asset forfeiture seems to have transformed into an open-ended, ongoing series. Over the weekend they posted a sixth installment exploring grabby police departments taking their citizens’ cash and belongings.

This time they kept it local, noticing that Washington, D.C.’s, police are actually attempting to plan in its budget for asset forfeiture proceeds in advance. This is considered a no-no for any law enforcement agency participating in the Department of Justice’s Equitable Sharing Program, the program where the feds and local enforcement agencies team up, and the local police get to keep 80 percent of whatever’s seized. This planning came to light to the Post last week because members of D.C.’s Council are attempting to overhaul the city’s asset forfeiture guidelines to increase the threshold of proof and requiring all asset seizures—including the ones that come from the DOJ program—to be placed in D.C.’s general fund, rather than the police’s budget, thus seriously reducing the police’s incentives for snatching whatever they can.

Funny how every story about corrupt city government deals with a city run by Democrats.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Unlike with private enterprise, you can’t take your government business elsewhere.

Read it.

Americans have always prided themselves on being a nation of the self-made, where class and the accident of birth did not determine success. Yet increasingly we are changing into a society where lineage does matter—and likely this process has just started, threatening not only our future prosperity but the very nature of our society.

Poster child: AlGore and anybody descended from Joseph P. Kennedy.

Read it.

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

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

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

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

Read it.

Apparently kicking back at the idiocy of the Social Justice Warriors brings the really special entitled ones crawling out from under whichever rock they were hiding under. That or there’s just something in the air at the moment. Or maybe the water.

…

Honestly. Apparently the moment you scratch a statist you bring out an obsession with genitalia and/or the end product of the digestive system.

Read it.

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

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

…

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

Read it.

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

Read it.

Now, the United Arab Emirates has designated CAIR a terrorist organization. It also so designated the Muslim American Society (MAS).

In addition, the UAE made this designation for a long list of non-U.S. groups. Among them are al-Qaeda, al Nusra, Boko Haram, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Read it.

An excellent essay in The Economist, which does a lot of that.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Through the modern miracle of the Internet it is now possible to buy hippie uniforms from China wholesale at “high quality and low prices”.  The phrase “hippie uniform” may sound like a contradiction in terms, but as the Washington Post’s article on mathematician Jonathan Touboul explains, it’s entirely natural. Most hippies are doomed to don — and to change — uniforms.

Touboul concluded that is because “hipsters” define nonconformity in terms of the ‘perceived mainstream’ and because of delays in rebellion toward it, they entered into oscillating states which effectively doomed them to uniforms.

Read it.

But they won’t get the death penalty because that would be raaaaaaacist.

Read it.

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

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

Read it.

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

Read it.

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

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

Ross Douthat turns over a rock.

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

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

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

Read it.

The New York Times reports that many Americans with health insurance purchased under Obamacare will face substantial price increases next year — in some cases as much as 20 percent — unless they switch plans. The Times report is based on data released by the Obama administration on Friday, just hours before the health insurance marketplace opened to buyers seeking insurance for 2015.

According to the Times, “the new data means that many of the seven million people who have bought insurance through federal and state exchanges will have to change to different health plans if they want to avoid paying more — an inconvenience for consumers just becoming accustomed to their coverage.” Beyond the matter of inconvenience, there is also the fact that the new plan, available at about the price of the old one, typically will be less desirable than the old plan, which now costs more.

Obamacare: The lie that keeps on taking.

Read it.

The amphibious transport ship USS Ponce has been patrolling with a prototype 30-kilowatt-class Laser Weapon System since late August, according to officials. The laser is mounted facing the bow, and can be fired in several modes — from a dazzling warning flash to a destructive beam — and can set a drone or small boat on fire.

Read it.

Well, this is fun. We just recently wrote about how Chicago’s speed cameras, ostensibly all to do with safety, failed to bring in as much money as Mayor Rahm Emanuel had suggested in his budget plan. Yes, tickets based on speed cameras were worked into the budget numbers, which is a strange thing to do if they’re supposed to be about safety and not money. Safe driving, in other words, should not trigger a budget crisis. But it turns out the ticketing revenue might still be inflated, even at the crisis number, as a bunch of speeding tickets were generated by cameras within school zones flagging drivers for driving over the school zone limit in the summertime.

Funny how all corrupt city governments are run by Democrats. Only a coincidence, I’m sure.

Read it.

In a brief, nationally televised announcement on August 7th regarding the Islamic State, which invaded the multicultural, northern Nineveh Province of Iraq this summer, President Obama observed “these terrorists have been especially barbaric towards religious minorities, including Christian and Yazidis.”

It’s so bad that even Obama noticed.

Read it.

I’m a young, feminist atheist who can’t bake a cupcake. Why am I addicted to the shiny, happy lives of these women?

Another victim of Identity Politics and Voice of the Crust stares through the bars of her ideology at the Happy Hunting Ground in which she will never get to live.

Magnetic Shoe Closures.

Uzi Tactical Pen.

Hexagonal Shelving.

Cutting board with built-in knife sharpener.

Kinglock self-tightening nut.

Light-Casting Gloves.

Solar-Powered System Extracts Drinking Water From The Air.

Sara Hoyt reminds us of certain Eternal Truths.

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

…

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

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

Read it.

No one knows why Taylor chose to wear that shirt on television during a massive scientific mission. From what we can tell, a woman who goes by the name of Elly Prizeman on Twitter made the shirt for him, and is just as bewildered as he must be that anyone might be upset about her creation. But none of that actually matters. What matters is the fact that no one at ESA saw fit to stop him from representing the Space community with clothing that demeans 50 percent of the world’s population. No one asked him to take it off, because presumably they didn’t think about it. It wasn’t worth worrying about.

Of course, if he’d been black, nobody would have dared open his (or, more accurately, her) mouth about it.

Of course, if he’d been black, he wouldn’t be involved in landing a spacecraft on a comet.

But this merely illustrates that for some people (even in the supposedly ‘technical’ press) their political agenda intrudes on every aspect of their lives — they still haven’t gotten over the fact that the only people who have been to the moon were white and male.

UPDATE: John C. Wright addes the choicest comment: ‘If I wrote this in a parody SFF story, no editor would buy it. It is too far beyond belief.’

Gavin McInnes responds to the New York Times.

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

Nicholas Kristof, eat your heart out.

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

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

Read it.

Or you could watch “Grimm” on ABC.

Read it.

Last month, the Seattle Parks Department ordered the destruction of a play area designed for special needs kids, claiming its four-foot rope ladder, tire swing, and “nest” made of rope and bike tires were “extreme dangers” and “hazardous conditions.” That’s an odd verdict: In 10 years of existence, no children were ever significantly injured on the play area equipment, according to Liz Bullard, who helped design the space.

That’s they way they do things on the Left Coast. Reality must conform to their preconceived notions, no matter who suffers.

Read it.

California has a new law that requires all eggs sold in the state to come from chickens that are housed in roomier cages. Specifically, the hens “must be able to lie down, stand up and fully spread their wings.”

So how many Californians have been arrested for eating the wrong kind of egg? Zero. Not even one? Not one. Actually, the law doesn’t take effect until January, but even then egg eaters will have nothing to fear. The reason: the law doesn’t apply to people who eat eggs. It only applies to people who sell eggs.

When you stop to think about it, that’s not unusual. Almost all government restrictions on our freedom are indirect. They are imposed on us by way of some business. In fact, laws that directly restrict the freedom of the individual are rare and almost always controversial.

Read it.

As well it should.

Read it.

Man dies of incurable disease, so naturally the family sues the hospital that failed to cure him.

Modern American law being what it is (“whoever has the deepest pockets has to pay”), the hospital caved.

There’s our civilization falling in front of your very eyes.

Read it.

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

Oh, and minorities, too.

Read it.

Does a good sun tan count? Or is this just more institutionalized Democrat racism?

Read it.

Thanks to the actions of the Islamic State, more and more Westerners have become aware of the scriptural justification for murder, rape, slavery, and all the other wonderful sharia-based practices now spreading across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Libya. It’s becoming harder and harder to support the assertion that the “extremists” have misinterpreted the Islamic religion.

Read it.

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

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

While the clickbait headline on the WaPo’s frontpage refers to “pronouns,” the article refers to “nouns.” These days you must say “343 firefighters died in the World Trade Center on 9/11? because saying “343 firemen died in the World Trade Center on 9/11? is an insult to the memory of all the firewomen who died on 9/11.

…

In the 21st Century, for instance, you can tell if somebody is a Bad Person or a Good Person by whether they use the old “B.C. and A.D. ” (Bad Person) or the new “B.C.E. and C.E.” (Good Person).

Doesn’t “B.C.E.” stand for “Before Christian Era” you might ask, so what’s the point?

Oh, no, it stands for “Before Common Era.”

Now, you may wonder what was so “Common” about the era that began in 1 C.E., but you’re missing the point. The point is that you are one of those Bad People.

Read it.

I can see that.

Read it.

Democrat John Barnes, a member of the Ohio state legislature, has pulled back the curtain on the racial politics that pervade his party. Barnes, who is African-American, alleges in a lawsuit against the Ohio Democratic Party and its outgoing chairman Chris Redfern that he faced discrimination, retaliation, and defamation at the hands of his own party for refusing to join the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus and for raising the issue of racism by Democrats.

Read it.

“Transit for Others” characterizes three decades of transit in Los Angeles County. Despite its massive $10 billion plus rail program, MTA bus and rail services carried fewer riders in 2012 (latest Federal Transit Administration data) than were carried by the buses in 1985 (MTA was formed in the early 1990s from a merger between the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission and the Southern California Rapid Transit District).

Sarah Hoyt reflects.

I came to understand, particularly through changing cultures, that manners are more than a senseless form.  They are things people do to let each other know that they belong – that they are part of the group.

Humans are a social animal.  Little meaningless rituals are built in to us, as a way of saying “I belong in the nest, don’t throw me out.”  Also, while manners are slightly different in each country (for instance, I think Americans would think I was out of my raving mind if I asked “Do I have permission to enter this room” – except in SFF, where they’d probably stake me through the heart.  While Portuguese would find it bizarre for a shop attendant to thank them for buying something.) they are also not entirely meaningless.  They are things that get automated, at a trained-in level, so you don’t have to think about it and don’t unwittingly offend someone.  I could be dead tired, for instance, or in the hospital, but if someone does some minor favor for me, I’m going to say “Thank you” out of automated reflex.  And that thank you lets the other person – no matter how tired or dead on their feet THEY are – know their action was seen and appreciated.

As Heinlein put it, it makes things run smoother.  In the same way, I might not be aware of the shopper coming out of the store behind me, both arms loaded with parcels.  But I am aware someone is behind me, and at this point it is a reflex to hold the door open so they pass.  When I’m the one on the receiving end of this kindness, that manners-reflex is much appreciated.

Read it.

The Cathedral is panicking.  Modern science overwhelmingly shows that not only is race biologically real but it is also correlates with a number of important traits.    Such findings have made the guardians of Politically Correct Thought even more brash and, unfortunately, monotonous in their assertion of  “race is not biologically real.”

Case in point.  Professor of anthropology Robert Wald Sussman (who recently defamed Jared Taylor) published a hit piece in this week in Newsweek (“There Is No Such Thing as Race“), which is an excerpt from Sussman’s new book on why race is not real.  The target of the piece is race, which is not hard to miss, since it’s quite repetitive.  In fact, it’s not really an argument at all but just a broken record.   Sussman early on says his book has not “dwelt upon all of the scientific information that has been gathered” by scientists et al. about race, and then goes on to discuss Hitler, Medieval injustices against Jews, more Hitler, etc.   It’s funny that he cites Franz Boas as a savior of sorts, even though Boas has been thoroughly repudiated as a fraud.   He also engages in numerous logical fallacies, such as the one that since race is clinal it cannot exist (many things are clinal and exist).

Read it.

The Washington Post reports that the Washington National Cathedral will host a Muslim prayer service this Friday. The cathedral, part of the Episcopal Church, has long been the site of important services, including memorial services for presidents, some of whom are buried there. But the Cathedral has never before been used for Muslim services.

…

This is not the first time that the Episcopal Church has sent a message via its policy on usage of the Cathedral. As Munro reminds us, in 2011 evangelicals were excluded from services commemorating the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

Read it.

Being run by Democrats will do that for you.

Read it.

Of course he can.

He said Mr. Shepherd, who is currently living in Bavaria, could face up to 18 months in prison in the U.S. for desertion.

I guess the days when they shot people like that are long gone. Pity.

I’d mention that he was black but that would be raaaaaaacist. (Truth is like that.)