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They used to be called Masters.

I recommend the title that some heads of colleges at Oxford and Cambridge have, and which probably comes under the rubric of ‘more true than you know’: Warden.

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It had to happen.

It won’t go anywhere, of course — being contrary to the Official Narrative that only women can be oppressed and only men can be oppressors — but it’s the sort of situation that Identity Politics has shat upon us.

On this date in 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified.

Without the magic money machine of the income tax, and the everybody-is-guilt-of-something tax code, the modern administrative state would not be possible.

Steve Sailer goes to the theater.

A simple model that helps make much about the modern world easier to comprehend is that of a high-low tag team against the middle. As part of a time-tested strategy of divide and rule, the rich tend to push for policies and attitudes that increase identity-politics divisiveness—more immigration, more Black Lives Matter rioting, more transgender agitation, and so forth—which makes it harder for the nonrich to team up politically to promote their mutual economic interests.

You could call it: “Diverse and Conquer.”

As I have been saying for years.

A striking example of how identity politics turn in practice into the Zillionaire Liberation Front has emerged in the war over which Dead White Male to kick off the currency to make room for a woman: the $10 bill’s Alexander Hamilton or the $20’s Andrew Jackson. Bizarrely, the reactionary genius Hamilton, apostle of rule by the rich, is rapidly morphing in the conventional wisdom’s imagination into an Honorary Nonwhite.

…

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop musical Hamilton had already been a sensation when it debuted Off Broadway months before Lew’s announcement about the ten-spot. And it’s not hard to grasp how the show fits exactly what wealthy white New York liberals want to see: minorities defending Wall Street. It’s the Obama of musicals. (The president, by the way, made time in his schedule to see Hamilton twice last year.)

The Other McCain is on the case.

Well, a few actually did say a word about it — Laurie Penny, for example, denounced as “racists” anyone calling attention to sexual violence committed by Muslim men — but no feminist will acknowledge the reality of what the Islamic invasion of Europe means for women there.

Steve Sailer finds such things so you don’t have to.

Bucks TV analyst Marques Johnson says he was called into a conversation player DeMarcus Cousins was having with the Kings operations team over the controversial shirt.

‘I walk into the building and DeMarcus Cousins calls me over to an animated discussion he’s having with Kings operations people. He [asks] me, “Olskool, what you think about this T-shirt? Told him a little insensitive on first day of Black History Month.” They pulled the shirts,’ said Johnson on his Facebook page.

Jerry Pournelle runs down the list.

A lot of Americans hate their government. Perhaps that’s too strong a word, but their experiences with government tend to expose them to arrogant incompetence for which their Civil Masters, oops Servants give themselves bonuses when their performance warrants discipline—look at the VA as a fine example—and they are afraid to stand out in a crowd lest they draw the attention of government. Streets aren’t paved, laws aren’t enforced equally, water pipes burst, drinking water has lead in it in Flint, and generally things don’t work so good; while all around us is the Internet of Things, marvels and miracles, yet somehow government gets bigger, pays itself more, and presents us with arrogant incompetence.

Trump has fewer – not many fewer but fewer – government credentials than Obama had when he started toward the Presidency. He was briefly in the Illinois legislature, hardly long enough to learn that job, before he became a Senator, and he hadn’t been there long before he was the candidate of hope and change, and he didn’t need to tell people how he was going to do it. Trump has less government experience; but he has built buildings and golf courses, and he has done things; he hasn’t been a community organizer or an unpublished law professor whose students don’t remember him; but he had made a lot of money, not from government; and he is not beholden to contributors or anyone else. His appeal is that he say he will do things, and although he is not a great public speaker, he has done things he is proud of. He knows how to choose people to get them done; or so far he has.

And that’s as fine a precis of Trump’s attraction as I’ve seen anywhere.

Read it.

Wax seals have largely fallen out of favor today, but in Medieval times, they were everywhere, used as an official signature on all kinds of important documents.

But in addition to an impression of the seal itself, the warm wax also recorded something else–the fingerprints of people applying the seal to the document. Now, researchers at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom are taking a closer look at these old fingerprints using modern forensics.

James E. Miller doesn’t much like Bernie Sanders.

Sanders has propelled himself to the near-top of the Democrats’ favorite list based on, among many things, his support for a “living wage.” “The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is a starvation wage,” the irascible senator proclaimed at a Capitol Hill rally last year, “and [it] must be raised to a living wage.” That’s a nice, and unrealistic, sentiment. But the problem is that Sanders doesn’t think his own employees deserve that kind of pay. According to the Media Research Center, the Sanders campaign pays its interns only $12 an hour. That’s a hefty sum for phone bankers and coffee fetchers. But it’s not enough to pay apartment rent and feed a family. Does Bernie not think his college-age employees deserve to live securely?

Sanders’ “do as I say, not as I do” approach also pertains to the app economy. Not one to let an industry operate away from the watchful eye of the government, the senator says he has “serious problems” with companies like Uber because they are “unregulated.” And yet, as a study by National Journal showed, Bernie used the ride-sharing service Uber for 100% of his taxi rides for the first six months of his campaign. For a company that skirts worker protection laws, one might think Mr. Solidarity would refuse to patronize Uber.

Then there is the coup de grâce: Sanders used his congressional campaign war chest to enrich his family members. An investigation by the neocon outlet Washington Free Beacon reveals that Sanders’ wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, collected a cool $90,000 from her husband’s House campaign in return for consulting services from 2002 to 2004. Bernie’s stepdaughter Carina Driscoll also collected $65,000 from the campaign during the same period.

The shady dealings don’t stop there. O’Meara Sanders reportedly abused her privileged position as president of Burlington College from 2004 to 2011. Under Mrs. Sanders’ tenure, the college paid $500,000 to the Vermont Woodworking School, which was run by Driscoll. Additionally, the school gave an all-inclusive Caribbean resort run by family friend Jonathan Leopold $68,000 for a study-abroad program. After O’Meara Sanders stepped down from head of Burlington College (not before inflating donor pledges for a loan application from the local Roman Catholic Diocese that cost the bishopric administration nearly $2 million), payments to the resort and woodworking school ended. Funny, that.

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From segregation to segregation in only 50 years. That’s progress.

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In the past several years politicians have lined up to condemn an epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses. But there is a genuine question of whether the Education Department has exceeded its legal authority in the way it has used Title IX to dictate colleges’ response to the serious problem of sexual assault.

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

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Wakey, wakey….

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The European Commission last week moved one step closer toward implementing a series of tax and regulatory proposals aimed directly at American businesses. This proposal is a thinly veiled tax grab at U.S. businesses and workers that will make it even harder for American businesses to operate across the world and could leave taxpayers on the hook for billions in retroactive payments.

This plan is being developed based on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) project, a broader effort by tax collectors in many countries to surreptitiously extract more revenue from businesses operating across the world.

The European plan includes an information-sharing regime that will allow countries to trade sensitive tax information with each other and will designate many existing tax arrangements as “illegal state aid.” This could completely overhaul how business taxes are applied by unilaterally overriding existing tax agreements held between the U.S. and many of its trading partners and could force U.S. companies to pay taxes retroactively.

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

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all. Stick close to your desks, and never go to sea.

Watch it.

Not something you see every day.

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In late 2015 Singapore arrested 27 Bangladeshi Moslem construction workers and charged them with planning terrorist acts outside of Singapore. Most (26) of them were deported back to their home country while one as charged with trying to leave the country illegally (and engage in terrorist acts). Singapore can afford to just send these wannabe Islamic terrorists home (to face further investigation and possible prosecution) because it is one of the few industrialized nations to have never experienced an incident of Islamic terrorist violence.

Starting in the 1980s Singapore spent an increasing amount of resources on dealing with the terrorist threat. This increased after 2001 and continues as Islamic terrorist groups like al Qaeda and ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) continue to mention Singapore as a target for attacks. There are several interesting reasons why these Islamic terror groups have never been able to touch Singapore.

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The following video is a reprise of the advice that Mayor Henriette Reker of Cologne gave to women who were molested by migrants at the Cologne Hauptbahnhof on New Year’s Eve.

In this case the mayor is a man (no name given), and the town is Bad Schlema. Instead of women, the victims of culture-enriching harassment are little girls, some of them ten years old or younger. But the tagline is essentially the same: “If you don’t get outta line, girl, he won’t have to hit you!”

That is: if the little girls would just take another route to school, there wouldn’t be any problem. Just pay the jizya with willing submission, and show yourselves to be subdued, and everything will be OK.

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About 1-in-4 federal employees would consider leaving their jobs if Donald Trump is elected president, according the results of a recent survey conducted by the Government Business Council.

Overall, about 2-in-3, or 67 percent said they would not think about leaving the federal government if Trump becomes president, but 14 percent said they would and 11 percent said they would “maybe” leave. Just 8 percent said they did not know. The share of Democrats who said they would leave is higher, with 42 percent indicating that they would exit or could exit.

He’s got my vote.

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This push for social justice requirements is getting a little ridiculous, isn’t it?

More GoodThink from the Ministry of Truth.

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Sarah Lahm, a freelance journalist who has been an education fellow for The Progressive magazine, writes that “what passes for acceptable school choice rhetoric, behind closed doors, is frightening.”

This a nice opening to a hit piece on NSCW, especially to describe a public event that was held at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Not a lot of closed doors at that event, I’m guessing, especially since it was free and open to the public, but details, shmetails, right?

Lahm also clucks that the panel was all-white even as she notes that one of the intended participants was African American but he “was not able to make it.” And there’s this slag: “But that’s not all. The whole room was white, as far as I could see.” That would include Lahm, by the way.

Read it.

Which, of course, doesn’t mean that it won’t be on the test.

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The country’s law enforcement has teamed up with a raptor training company named Guard From Above to see if birds of prey can be used to safely intercept quadcopters.

In the video demonstration above, an eagle is seen easily plucking what looks like a DJI Phantom out of the air. However, it’s not clear how dangerous this is for the bird. Raptors’ talons are incredibly sharp and their grip is strong enough to crush bone, but that doesn’t meant they’re indestructible and carbon fiber props spinning at full speed can easily cut human flesh. In the video, one of the handlers says that the scales on the eagle’s legs and feet keeps them safe, but also mentions the possibility of creating some sort of extra protection for them.

Still, given the amount of animals who seem to instinctively want to take down drones (the list includes kangaroos, gorillas, geese, and dogs), perhaps the eagles will get some animal backup soon.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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The lecture given by Friedrich von Hayek upon the occasion of his winning the Nobel Prize in Economics.

It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences – an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the “scientistic” attitude – an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, “is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.”1 I want today to begin by explaining how some of the gravest errors of recent economic policy are a direct consequence of this scientistic error.

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All it takes is that little blue pill … isn’t science wonderful?

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Remembering Roger Gower, an elephant hero who died for his cause.

Ponder the concept of ‘elephant hero’.

‘White man come to my continent, keep us from killing animals we have always killed, keep us from feeding our families. White man can kiss my ass.’

Black Lives Matter, but I guess elephants are more important.

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What do you get if you preside over 15 straight quarters of shrinking sales, evaporating profit and a sliding share price? A seven figure bonus if you are Ginni Rometty, the chief exec at IBM.

Her base salary for 2015 remained unchanged at $1.6m, but the bonus swelled by $1m to $4.6m. Oh, and the long term incentives package (due to vest in 2019) was $13.3m, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The package is up on the $3.6m of last year, with the exec refusing to take home a bonus in 2013 citing “disappointment at the company’s output.” No such gesture was made for 2015.

Sounds like a great post-President job for Obama. He’s got the right skill-set.

Put this with Carly Fiorina’s tenure at HP and Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, and maybe you can begin to see why there aren’t a lot of female big-corp CEOs. Just maybe.

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This is actually a pretty good idea. Let’s hope it gets some attention.

They already do that for physicians, I believe.

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So should any right-minded individual, even though Google did their best to disguise the fact that he was black. Rather than whine about his hard life, Douglass got out there and busted his ass getting the job done. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, take note.

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Who says Donald Trump doesn’t like Hispanics?

Carson-based Cali-Fame headwear company, is staffed largely by immigrants from Latin America.

At least he’s giving them jobs, which is more than they are getting from Hillary Clinton or Berni Sanders (or Barack Obama, for that matter).

Brian Kennedy, the company’s president, said that when the order asked his business to make the hats, he addressed his workers.

“I said to them, ‘We’re not political. We’re here to work’,” said Mr Kennedy “And I haven’t gotten any negative comments.”

And THAT is what will Make America Great Again — immigrants who are here to work. I’ve seen no evidence that Trump has anything against those people; nor will you, amidst all the whining about what people heard him say in their imaginations.

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First vocalist with Jefferson Airplane. Died the same day as Paul Kantner, which probably means something.

Her best-known song was ‘Chauffeur Blues’, which appeared on the album ‘Jefferson Airplane Takes Off’ in 1966.  However, she left the band in the same year after becoming a mother.

And that speaks well of her.

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Slate, a once-semi-readable website,published a 2,925-word tome on Tuesday by a guy who is really sad because he managed to rack up $200,000 in student loan debt by getting a useless degree at a fancypants private college and then, by borrowing more cash to be a graduate student.

Lesson: Don’t waste your time in college getting a useless degree unless you have a trust fund that will support you while you whine about your First World problems.

Garner’s tale of woe and world-historical budgetary stupidity begins — as he tells it, in excruciating detail — when he was a high school senior. He was a “consumer” of the “vacuous platitudes” on college brochures, and so he excitedly applied to Connecticut College — a school which currently charges a comprehensive fee of $62,965 per year.

“My siblings and I had the privilege of expecting we would attend private colleges,” Garner explains, even though his family had become “financially stressed” when he was in high school.

As Robert A. Heinlein always used to say, ‘Stupidity is always a capital crime.’ Think of it as evolution in action.

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The American pika is thought by many biologists to be a prime candidate for extirpation as the planet continues to warm, done in by temperatures too severe for this small mammal native to cold climates.

But a new study, published this week in the journal Global Change Biology, paints a different, more complex future for this rock-dwelling little lagomorph – the same order that includes rabbits and hares. Pikas may survive, even thrive, in some areas, the researchers say, while facing extirpation in others.

The research is important because pikas are considered a sentinel species for climate change impacts.

‘Sentinel species’ in eco-speak means ‘bloody shirt to wave to promote hysteria’. Just so you know.

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Better the crook you know than the fool you don’t?

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A passenger plane was forced to make an emergency landing because two stewardesses got into a mid-air fist fight, according to reports.

The brawl, which the company put down to ‘work issues’, happened on the Delta plane around 40 minutes into its journey from Los Angeles to Minneapolis.

A third female flight attendant, who tried to break up the brawl, was reportedly hit in the face.

It is so hard to get good help these days.

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After all, what could go wrong?

Ponder a world where it’s okay to genetically modify embryos but not crops.

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Can’t say that I blame them. We wouldn’t want him to give Lenin a bad name.

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Revital Zilonka, an education instructor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, requires all students in her “Institution of Education” class to state their personal and professional commitment to social justice in an eight-page essay. Her class syllabus also provides a list of feminist and LGBTQ organizations to “like” on Facebook. The class is required to receive a k-12 teaching license in the state.

Rarely does the Marxist indoctrination machine come out of the closet this far.

The L.A. Times illustrates why newspapers are dying.

Less obvious, or at least less discussed, is the parallel conundrum Trump poses for self-styled progressives. How far can they go in decrying Trump’s support among white blue-collar workers without seeming to write off what was once regarded as a core progressive constituency?

The delusion that blue-collar workers were ever a ‘core progressive constituency’ marks this as a prime Voice of the Crust moment. Who do they think voted for Nixon? and Reagan?

It could be argued that the writing-off has already occurred. There has long been a shift in left-liberal politics away from any broad identification with “the workers” — narrowly conceived as white, male and straight — in favor of specific social and environmental issues that pose no threat to existing economic structures. In that regard, Trump’s blue-collar support might be viewed as a vindication: Workers of the world, take a hike. We never liked you much anyway.

Well, that at least is honest enough. But they say it just to try to deny it, which means that they’re still delusional.

Still, there remains the vexing question of how a billionaire demagogue can win the loyalty of the very people whose class interests he opposes.

The assumption here is a cultural Marxist one, that ‘a billionaire demagogue’ has ‘class interests’ opposed to those of the working-class. It also harps on the traditional ‘progressive’ theme that if the workers only knew what their true class interests were, they’d vote for socialists. This is an article of faith, not fazed by facts on the ground.

What possible sense can we make of blue-collar workers of any age, gender or race supporting a man whose very existence rests on their exploitation and, increasingly, on their obsolescence?

Gee, that doesn’t fit the Narrative, so of course it can’t be true. And yet it is. Who can square this circle?

The usual answers — fear of terrorism, resentment of immigrants, disgust with the Washington establishment — are sound enough, but they don’t go very deep.

In other words, the facts don’t match the Narrative, so it can’t be that the Narrative is wrong — something else must be going on there. Now we’re getting into Conspiracy Theory territory.

It’s as if the impossibility of depth were a given.

As it is, in the religion of the Progressive. When facts don’t agree with Belief, the Belief is right, so there must be something wrong about the facts.

Fisking the remainder of the article is left as an exercise for the reader. It won’t be very difficult.