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Probably got there via flying saucers.

Hey, it could happen.

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When summer rolls around, thoughts turn to how to spend the limpid months: Umbrella drinks by the pool? Backpacking through pristine wilderness? A digital detox?

But if you’re a certain kind of person, your dream destination might be Rare Book School in Charlottesville for a week of courses that include “Book Illustration Processes to 1900” or “The Handwriting & Culture of Early Modern English Manuscripts.” Rare book fanatics study not only the words on the page but also the way books were made in order to unlock a deeper cultural understanding of text. And while there are similar programs around the world, Rare Book School offers something they do not: A permanent space and a teaching collection of 80,000 items from books bound in supple goat leather to old Macintosh computers.

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The people most likely to refuse to have their children vaccinated tend to be white, well-educated and affluent, researchers report.

A study published in the January issue of the American Journal of Public Health used California state government data on “personal belief exemptions,” or opting out of vaccinations for nonmedical reasons. From 2007 to 2013, the rate of vaccine refusal for personal belief doubled, to 3.06 percent.

The Crustian SWPL fads often descend into superstition. This appears to be one of them; the Locovore gluten-free organic no-additive food-fetish taken to its extreme, I suspect.

Unlike some people, it doesn’t bother me; if the kids don’t get vaccinated, they get sick and may die, and their parents’ defective genes are subtracted from the gene pool. It’s like biological warfare with self-selecting victims. Think of it as evolution in action.

Scott Johnson of PowerLine has some thoughts.

Donald Trump has proved himself to be a man with substantial insight into the mind of the average Republican voter, a category in which I place myself (in case that’s not obvious from my comments here over the past many years). Having made illegal immigration and American greatness the primary themes of his campaign, he floated to the top of a competitive field and has if anything continued to increase his lead over the rest of the field, at least as measured by the national polls so far. I think Trump’s candidacy represents a reaction to the Age of Obama among Republican voters.

Obama’s promotion of illegal immigration represents a larger component of the Obama syndrome. It stands for Obama’s promotion of lawlessness for political purposes.

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BACK in 1993, the misanthropic art critic Robert Hughes published a grumpy, entertaining book called “Culture of Complaint,” in which he predicted that America was doomed to become increasingly an “infantilized culture” of victimhood. It was a rant against what he saw as a grievance industry appearing all across the political spectrum.

I enjoyed the book, but as a lifelong optimist about America, was unpersuaded by Mr. Hughes’s argument. I dismissed it as just another apocalyptic prediction about our culture.

Unfortunately, the intervening two decades have made Mr. Hughes look prophetic and me look naïve.

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It is difficult to compare 1840 to 2015, so much of what we have today didn’t exist then.  But, they had to move people and goods from place to place as we do now.  They had farms then as we do now. They used wagons pulled by horses, mules or oxen.  We use cars and airplanes. They used muscle power to farm, we use tractors, combines, grain carts, and trucks powered by petroleum fuels. In 1840 crude oil and natural gas production and use were rare. Coal was used in manufacturing, but steam engines were still in their infancy. So the world in 1840 was fossil fuel free for the most part. Biofuels, that is burning wood and dung, were common. Windmills would not appear until 1854. Hydropower was not in common use until after 1849. Solar power had not been invented yet.

The cost of gasoline can be seen on the sign at any gas station, but what is its value?  Using gasoline or diesel saves us time and manual labor. It also saves air, water and waste pollution. Let us not forget that the automobile was lauded as a great environmental improvement after the “Great Horse Manure Crisis” of 1894. Nothing like having horse manure up to your knees to help you appreciate gasoline!

Read it. And by all means watch the video.

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Once again, government employees stake off scott-free from behavior that would put anyone else behind bars.

When a private citizen or company violates rules, misrepresents facts or pollutes a river, government penalties are swift and severe. It’s different when the government lies or screws up.

Two weeks ago, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell testified before Congress on a toxic spill that federal and state agencies unleashed into western state rivers last August. Supervised by officials from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety (DRMS), an Environmental Restoration (ER) company crew excavated tons of rock and debris that had blocked the portal (entrance or adit) to the Gold King Mine above Silverton, Colorado.

The crew kept digging until the remaining blockage burst open, spilling 3,000,000 gallons of acidic water laden with iron, lead, cadmium, mercury and other heavy metals. The toxic flood contaminated the Animas and San Juan Rivers, all the way to Lake Powell in Utah. EPA then waited an entire day before notifying downstream mayors, health officials, families, kayakers, fishermen, farmers and ranchers that the water they were drinking, paddling in, or using for crops and livestock was contaminated.

Ms. Jewell told Congress she was unaware of anyone being fired, fined or even demoted. In fact, federal investigations and reports didn’t hold anyone responsible for the disaster. (Maybe they even got bonuses.) Considering the spill’s severity, the gross incompetence of government officials, their advance knowledge of the dangers, and the way they downplayed and whitewashed their actions, this is intolerable.

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A hormone that could control sugar cravings has been identified in the liver, scientists claim.

Research conducted on monkeys and mice has shown the hormone, FGF21, tells the brain to avoid seeking sweet foods.

FG21 is produced in response to high carbohydrate levels and enters the bloodstream to signal to the brain to suppress sugar cravings, says the research published in the journal Cell Metabolism.

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Well, when it comes to education, the schools couldn’t get it done, either. So, I’m doing it myself. The big difference is that I have to keep sending the education “experts” checks because they work for the government and the government gets cranky when you decline to pay for its services, no matter how dubious the quality. But it’s still worth it, because the results are so much better when my wife and I do it ourselves.

In many way, teaching my son is easier than laying a tile floor or installing a stove because the kid actually gives me feedback. If I screwed up installing the stove (I didn’t), I’d have to find out the hard way. My son isn’t shy about saying, “I don’t understand.” He’s just as good at saying, “I get it and I’m bored; can we move on?” If you care enough to listen, that makes it a hell of a lot easier to do it right.

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Would it be “racist” of me to suspect that ever since the War Between the States, every political move designed to protect the “oppressed” was also designed to enhance federal power? Is it paranoid to ponder whether under all the nonsense we hear about civil rights and hate crimes and terrorism are convenient covers for what is essentially a bald-ass, butt-naked power grab?

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We’ve all heard the claim that a rail line can move as many people as an eight- (or sometimes ten-) lane freeway. Not so much. Orlando’s billion-dollar commuter-rail line carries less than 2,000 people to work each weekday morning and home in the evenings. (Amortized over 30 years at 3 percent, it would have cost less to buy every single daily round-trip rider a new Prius every year for the next 30 years.)

Read it. And watch the video, which is fascinating.

Read it.

This is news? Another thumbsucker from the New York Times.

Of course, the point is not necessarily to say something new, but rather to say something: The more a Voice of the Crust pounds a particular idea, like Income Inequality or whatever, the more Low Information voters are likely to panic and allow government action to encroach even more on their personal freedom.

The notion of “making a good match,” a staple of the writings of Jane Austen and Henry James, continues in contemporary romance novels.

As it has since the time that mankind first adopted agriculture. Alexander the Great had his generals marry women from the noble families of conquered people in order to cement his power. Of course, the Times wasn’t around then to notice so it wasn’t all that important.

At the same time, income inequality commands increasing attention from economists.

Mainly because it is one of the buttons the Crust use to keep the Underclass riled up, and economists are as dependent on the Crust for funding as anybody else. Tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Lately we’ve been learning just how much these two topics are tied together.

Mostly from Voices of the Crust like the New York Times. These guys have a tendency to like to breathe their own exhaust.

Whether measured in terms of income or education, there are more so-called power couples today than in the past, one manifestation of a phenomenon known as assortative mating, or more generally the pairing of like with like.

Well, no, the reason we have more ‘power couples’ today is because in the modern world women have more access to power and so turn what would otherwise be a Normal Couple into a Power Couple. Assortative mating has been with us for thousands of years, as the term ebenbürtig testifies. But organs like the Times never stick to the truth when it doesn’t serve their agenda.

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Cretaceous-era dinosaurs sported some terrifying weapons—but it’s still tough to beat the giant armadillo.

Leatherman Crunch.

Pocketo Cable Organizer.

Drop Stop. Don’t you just hate it when things fall between the seat and console in your car?

The Other McCain looks at feminist objections to the ‘transgendered’.

Feminists coined the term “Peak Trans Moment” to describe the point at which they became disgusted with transgender ideology. One woman who related her experiences complained that transgender activists “expect to co-opt feminist time and attention away from their own issues to trans issues, and they expect it as their right.” Why aren’t transgender activists supportive of women?

Gee, that sure sounds familiar….

This is an insightful analysis, but where did transgender activists get their ideas of using “gender” as a weapon to manipulate others? Where did this victimhood mentality originate? Oh, that’s right — feminism.

Read it.

Heavy-duty trucks loaded with oil continue to cross the Turkish-Syrian border as well, Rudskoy said. At the same time, the number of tankers on the northern and western routes used for transporting oil from Syria is declining, the general added.

Read it.

Is war good for anything? In the long run, the Stanford historian Ian Morris argues, it’s good for almost everything. In War! What Is It Good For?, Morris makes the case that war has played an essential role in mankind’s development and in the growth of human well-being. The book endorses not just strong government but imperialism; as applied to recent history, this translates into strong support for the historic role of the British Empire and the current global policies of the United States.

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In a presentation from Fastbrick Robotics, which made Hadrian, they estimate that paying for the labor from skilled human bricklayers adds tens of billions of dollars in cost to home construction costs each year. Hadrian isn’t just a robot that does a cool job, it’s a robot that actively replaces human workers.

In honor of Hadrian’s fast work, here’s a video from a Spec Mix Bricklayer Championship. The fastest human bricklayer in this video set 743 bricks in one hour, or about three quarters the speed of the Hadrian robot.

And yet another skilled trade is doomed by automation.

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On the flat plains of the Po Valley is the small town of Novellara, in the province of Reggio Emilia. It’s not far from the city of Parma – and from Parma and Reggio Emilia comes the name of one of the world’s most famous cheeses, Parmigiano Reggiano… in English, Parmesan. Under EU rules, it has to be made exclusively from milk produced and transformed into cheese in this area of northern Italy.

The large number of Sikhs who have settled here were not attracted by the territory’s famous product but rather by the territory itself, explains Novellara’s mayor, Elena Carletti: “They say, ‘We live here and we feel like we’re still in Punjab because it’s flat, there are no mountains, it’s hot, it’s humid, and the kind of agriculture is more or less the same.'” According to the mayor, Sikhs feel comfortable in their Italian home from home.

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The optics of the camera obscura ha­ve faithfully served photographers for ages. The recipe has been simple: a lens, aperture, dark box and something to record the light.

But the camera as we know it is changing. A revolution in digital imaging research could surpass the camera obscura in almost every technical way: resolution, size and energy efficiency. It’s called computational photography, and it stems from the idea that if you can capture visual data instead of a true image, then the picture can be reconstructed with software.

With cameras capturing light differently, a lens isn’t necessarily needed anymore. Instead, visual data can be gathered by playing tricks with light, like forcing it through a microscopic grating or diffracting it through a glass sphere. Years ago, this technology was just in the lab. But now it has made its way into consumer smartphones.

Veni, Veni, Emmanuel

Read it. And watch the video.

I am not making this up.

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Thirty-five years after they were seized and held in captivity for 444 days by Iranian revolutionaries, the 53 Americans – or their families – are to receive $4.4m in compensation.

Reports said that buried in the details of the huge $1.8 trillion package of spending and tax cuts passed last week, was a provision to make the payments to the former hostages, or their next of kin. Victims of state-sponsored terrorist attacks such as the 1998 American Embassy bombings in East Africa, will also be eligible for benefits under the law.

“I had to pull over to the side of the road, and I basically cried,” Rodney Sickmann, who was a Marine sergeant working as a security guard at the embassy in Tehran, told the New York Times.

Yeah, dude, your government’s got your back — see how this knife fits.

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Very short post. I read today that Palestine has been granted full member status in the UNFCCC, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

I also recall from a few years ago that when Palestine was admitted to UNESCO, the US had to cut off funds to UNESCO because of US law. As an article at the time said, this was the result of “US laws that force an automatic funding cutoff for any UN agency with Palestine as a member” …

Do I see an opportunity for our lawmakers here? Yep. Will they act on it? Possibly not, but if it is indeed the law, seems like they could be forced to act …

Time for Paul Ryan to step up to the plate and ‘demonstrate his quality’.

Read it.

Whenever I’m reading a science fiction story that involves an alien species, I put it down if the alien species isn’t at least as strange as the Japanese.

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Palestinian leaders are declaring their current campaign of “lone wolf” attacks on Israelis a success even as they explain to the world that is not terrorism. The official Palestinian line is that this was a spontaneous outbreak of violence against Israelis. This is odd since these same Palestinian officials constantly appear on Palestinian media urging Palestinians to keep up and intensify the attacks.

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Academics from the Ancient Artifact Preservation Society (AAPS) say a Roman sword was discovered in a shipwreck off Oak Island on the south shore of Nova Scotia, Canada.

The research reveals that a Roman legionnaire’s whistle, Gold Carthage coins, part of a Roman shield and a Roman head sculpture have also been found on the island.

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My favorite is the F-35 … $400 billion and counting.

Steve Sailer does a little gentle fisking.

Everybody vaguely knows that the problem with the Supreme Court’s invention of disparate impact theory is that if it were applied rigorously enough, we’d be living in a Max Max post-apocalyptic wasteland in about ten years.

So, parts of society goes through various paroxysms for awhile as the Eye of Sauron turns its baleful gaze on X. But it simultaneously ignores Y so that Y can get a lot of work done while X is being roasted. For a long time, for example, fire departments were carefully scrutinized while Silicon Valley was ignored because it was High Tech!

Similarly, nice white liberals in places like Marin Valley have used environmentalism to justify keeping their neighborhoods nice and white. Environmentalism has massive disparate impact, but that’s been okay because it’s environmentalism, which is, as everybody knows, nice, not nasty. But today the Supreme Court turned the Eye of Sauron a little more on disparate impact in housing, so we’ll see what will happen next.

The problem is, of course, that if you Really Look At Hard Data, you’ll get ‘disparate impact’ all over the place, because Reality is Reality and not subject to ‘pregressive’ fantasies about how the world ought to work.

Of course, as they get deeper pockets, the shakedown artists will eventually get their claws into them, but paying off Jesse Jackson, like Intel is doing now, is just a cost of doing business.

So, the point of these Big Data hiring app firms is to outsource responsibility for hiring to Science. Eventually, the leeches will catch up with them, but professional SJWs really aren’t that smart and are easy to fool for quite awhile, so lots of money can be made in the meantime.

The Other McCain is delightfully dyspeptic today.

The habits of America’s “meritocratic” elite are the subject of an American Interest blog post that includes the phrase “educational assortative mating” — i.e., Ivy Leaguers marrying Ivy Leaguers, generation after generation, so that the influential elite form a separate caste, with no familial ties to the rest of the nation, and no direct knowledge of how most Americans live or what most Americans believe.

Not that this is a first in human history.

Even if we stipulate not merely their high IQs, but also their good intentions, it is still quite often the case that smart, well-meaning people turn out to be incompetent fools whose hubristic sense of their own superiority is a chief cause of their folly.

With results as you see them.

The immaturity and selfishness of Ivy League students like Jerelyn “Who the F–k Hired You?” Luther should serve to remind us that the admissions committee at Yale is demonstrably incompetent to choose our nation’s leaders. The Ivy League is decadent and depraved.

I have seen it at first hand, and quite agree.

Read it.

While it is fair to say that the jury is still out, there has been a lot of good news for my hopes of a free dinner in the past couple of years. There were two reports (in 2013 and 2014) on tests of Rossi’s device by teams of Swedish and Italian physicists whose scientific credentials are not in doubt, and who had access to one of his devices for extended periods (a month for the second test). Both reports claimed levels of excess heat far beyond anything explicable in chemical terms, in the testers’ view. (The second report also claimed isotopic shifts in the composition of the fuel.) Since then, there have been several reports of duplications by experimenters in Russia and China, guided by details in the 2014 report.

More recently, Rossi was granted a US patent for one of his devices, previously refused on the grounds that insufficient evidence had been provided that the technique worked as claimed. There are credible reports that a 1MW version of his device, producing many times the energy that it consumes, has been on trial in an industrial plant in North Carolina for months, with good results so far. And Rossi’s US backer and licensee, Tom Darden – who has a long track record of investment in pollution-reducing industries – has been increasingly willing to speak out in support of the LENR technology field. (Another investor, the UK-based Woodford Funds, reports that it conducted ‘a rigorous due-diligence process that has taken two and half years’.)

Finally, very recently, there’s a paper by two senior Swedish physicists, Rickard Lundin and Hans Lidgren, proposing a mechanism for Rossi’s results, inspired in part by the second of two test reports mentioned above. Lundin and Lidgren say that the ‘experimental results by Rossi and co-workers and their E-Cat reactor provide the best experimental verification’ of the process they propose.

This could really shake things up.

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Quietly, on December 18, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced a change of the rules for the use of body scanning technology at airport security systems across the country. Now, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) can opt out of letting you opt out of using the body scanners. That is to say, they can decide—for reasons!—that you must go through the body scanners. Julia Angwin, an investigative reporter from ProPublica, made note of the rule change last night on Twitter.

The longer the American people put up with crap like the TSA, the more money will be wasted, and the more travel will be disrupted, and the more we will come to resemble Soviet Russia. You Have Been Warned.

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Guns don’t kill people – video chat kills people.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Dude, take the hint: This is not the girl for you. Think of yourself as having dodged a .50-cal bullet.

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A lunch lady at an Idaho school who gave a hungry 12-year-old a free hot meal after the girl said she had no money has been fired following the incident.

Dalene Bowden, who worked at Irving Middle School in Pocatello, Idaho, said she offered to pay the $1.70 (£1.14) lunch charge for the girl, but her supervisor refused the offer.

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The U.S. (in the form of the director of the FBI) recently revealed that its efforts to prevent American Moslems from travelling overseas to join Islamic terrorist organizations had worked. That was the good news. The bad news was that groups like ISIL (al Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant) had helped make this happen by urging foreigners who want to join to do so where they are and work to carry out attacks where they live. This advice was particularly useful for ISIL and the foreign recruits in Western nations where young Moslem men not only have problems getting to and operating in a Middle Eastern battleground. These woes (include the difficulty raising the cash for travel and avoiding government scrutiny. When they do get to the combat zone they often have language and culture clash problems. Many of the Western Moslems do not speak Arabic and are unfamiliar with Middle Eastern cultures. That means a lot of these volunteers are only really good for suicide bombing missions and even then they need a lot of coaching and guidance in actually carrying out the mission.

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The melting of sea ice will significantly increase Arctic precipitation, creating a climate feedback comparable to doubling global carbon dioxide, a Dartmouth College-led study finds.

“The increases of precipitation and changes in the energy balance may create significant uncertainty in climate predictions,” says lead author Ben Kopec, a PhD candidate in Dartmouth’s Department of Earth Sciences.

The findings appear in the journalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A PDF is available on request.

In other words, ‘climate models’ that predict disaster aren’t as good as the enviro-Nazis claim they are.

Read it.

Read it.

We hear a lot about “rape culture” at American universities, but no one actually believes it. If we did, we wouldn’t send our daughters off to college. It appears there is such a thing, however; American liberals have just been looking in the wrong place. The New York Times headlines: “Norway Offers Migrants a Lesson in How to Treat Women.” We aren’t talking about etiquette lessons here.

Lion of the Blogosphere has the best review I’ve seen of it so far.

Having perused the spoilers in this review, I feel no actual need to see the movie, thus saving immense amount of time and money.

Although I’m sure I’ll by the Extended Edition Director’s Cut We Mean It This Time when it comes out.

Read it.

Maajid Nawaz is a prominent “moderate” or secular Muslim and the founder of the Quilliam Foundation in Britain. His organization was featured briefly in this space two years ago, when Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll left the EDL and teamed up with Quilliam just before Tommy’s trial (see these three posts from October 2013 for more on Tommy Robinson and Quilliam).

The following exposé by Vikram Chatterjee examines the extensive use by Maajid Nawaz of untruths, dissimulation, evasions, and misleading statements in his writings about Islam. In these he reveals himself to be a practitioner of taqiyya, tawriya, and kitman, the time-honored Islamic doctrines of lying and sacred misdirection.

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When, in the near future, a driverless car gets into an accident with another driverless car, it’s going to be difficult to establish who is at fault. Is it the “driver,” the car company, or even the programmer?

But what’s not hard to establish is who will likely benefit: lawyers.

Bloomberg interviewed plaintiff’s lawyers and described them as “salivating” over the potential paydays from driverless cars.

“You’re going to get a whole host of new defendants,” Kevin Dean, an attorney suing General Motors over its faulty ignition switches, told Bloomberg. “Computer programmers, computer companies, designers of algorithms, Google, mapping companies, even states. It’s going to be very fertile ground for lawyers.”

But, of course, nobody in Silicon Valley is thinking about that. Why worry about the future when you have cool toys to play with?

Read it.

If the Rhine freezes over, Publius Quinctilius Varus is in deep doo-doo. (And we’re not looking too healthy, either.)

Read it.

We report, you decide.

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According to the NYPD, the number of graffiti complaints citywide in 2015 is up 15 percent from last year. Meanwhile, arrests for graffiti are down 10 percent compared with last year.

The de Blasio administration is having an effect already.

One often reads of people who aren’t confident that they’ve really learned a foreign language until they ‘start thinking in it’.

Feh. I don’t think in English, or any other language. I think in ‘me’.

If you see me hesitate before speaking, it’s the process of translation. This can sometimes be pretty heavy lifting, since the brilliance of my thought is usually such that mere human language is inadequate to contain it.

So whatever you hear me say — or write — is never as good as the original. Trust me.

Consider that before you make a response.

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In December 2013 a PR woman called Justine Sacco tweeted to her 170 Twitter followers: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white!” The joke was intended to mock her own bubble of privilege, but while she slept on the plane Twitter took control of her life and dismantled it. She became the worldwide number one trending topic that night: “We are about to watch this Justine Sacco bitch get fired, in real time, before she even knows she’s being fired”, and “Everyone go report this cunt @justinesacco”, and so on, for a total of 100,000 tweets. Justine was fired, her reputation mangled. I recounted her story in my book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. The chapter was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine. I’ve been keeping a diary of what happened next.

What he fails to mention is made clear by the above incident: the Online Hate Mob is a ‘progressive‘ Online Hate Mob. The Crust has forged an alliance with the Underclass to enforce it’s ThoughtCrime standards. Perhaps that’s why they seem to fond of Muslim extremists.

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The Slippery Slope Argument is often called the Slippery Slope Fallacy, usually by those favorably disposed toward the bottom of the slope and anxious to get there as quickly as possible with a minimum of tumbling and bruising along the way. But it is really neither a fallacy nor an argument.

History is replete with examples of “give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile.” The pre-war course of Hitler’s micro-aggressions provides a nicely Godwinesque illustration of a slippery slope. Give ’em a Saarland, and they’ll take a Bohemia. Recall also that Griswold v. Conn. legitimized the sale of contraceptives to married couples only, precisely on the grounds of the privacy of the marriage bond, and the thought that this might lead to unmarried couples using contraceptives was dismissed as slippery slopitude. Ho-ho, that will never happen! Likewise the forecast was poo-poohed that such availability would eventually weaken the whole concept of marriage and turn women into sex objects. And yet, here we are. So too the late Daniel Pat Moynihan’s “defining deviancy down.”¹