Joel Kotkin uses an incredibly mixed metaphor.

Ultimately all parties are coalitions of disparate groups and interests. Much attention has been on the divisions within the ruling GOP — libertarians, social conservatives and populist/nationalists. But with the Democrats poised to make a comeback this year, and perhaps gain control of all three branches by 2020, perhaps it’s time to analyze divisions that may determine the extent of their ascendancy.

Three different, and often somewhat hostile, tendencies now define the Democratic Party. These include the corporate oligarchs, causists obsessed with particular hot button issues, and (arguably the most critical to long-term ascendency) populists who bear much of the party’s social democratic message and legacy.

NYT: “The President’s Unparalleled War on Law Enforcement”  Since when are a few crooks in the FBI ‘law enforcement’?

CNN’s Stelter: Spying On Trump Justified If There Is ‘Fear’ Of Something ‘Suspicious’  And Trump Derangement Syndrome is all about fear.

Donald Trump will trigger constitutional crisis if he uses declassified memo to end Russia probe, Democrats warn  Well, not really.

ESPN’s Jemele Hill Race Baits Donald Trump To Al Sharpton On MSNBC   Some of the worst racists have the darkest skins, although not as dark as their souls.

Read it.

High concentrations of heavy metals, like copper and gold, are toxic for most living creatures. This is not the case for the bacterium C. metallidurans, which has found a way to extract valuable trace elements from a compound of heavy metals without poisoning itself. One interesting side-effect: the formation of tiny gold nuggets. A team of researchers from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Adelaide in Australia has discovered the molecular processes that take place inside the bacteria. The group presented their findings in the renowned journal Metallomics published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Kind of like Congressmen that way.

Read it.

Most small business problems are caused by government interference.

Read it.

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

Running down the sheep is the hard part. Those suckers are tricky.

Read it.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

Read it.

Really? Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson don’t appear to be having any problems with it.

I suggest that the DemLegHump Media prefer dumb SJWs to smart conservative, which is why their ratings are tanking.

Read it.

The Great Depression brought the failure of thousands of banks in the United States, and none in Canada. Comparing Canada and the United States suggests that there was something deeply wrong with the American banking system. But what was it? The short answer is that American banks were heavily regulated, contrary to Canadian banks.

Few things strike fear in the ‘progressive’ soul than the term ‘unregulated’. Read the news: Whenever something new arises, the first reaction by the Usual Suspects is a call to ‘regulate’ (i.e. impose political controls via government) it. The ‘progressive’ mind reacts to the prospect of human activity outside of politics the way the Pope reacts to the prospect of Mortal Sin.

Mark Derian examines the aliens among us.

Joseph Campbell suggested as a matter of fact that Westerners do not consider the Chinese to be people. It’s why the Chinese have a portrait of Mao hanging from one “Gate of Heavenly Peace,” and we get our pictures taken in front of it like it’s the Parthenon. It’s why Mao’s regime is technically still in power yet we keep giving them the Olympics. It’s why the Pope doesn’t hold the Church in China to the same standard she holds the Church in Europe. It’s even why 87,000 Chinese died in an earthquake not ten years ago though it barely moved the needle on our cultural seismograph.

Campbell gave no explanation as to why this is, though the implication seems to be the Chinese look different than we do. This may be a factor in our “othering”—to borrow a millennial usage—but what distinguishes the Chinese more than their almond eyes is the fact that, on a fundamental level, they don’t think like we do.

Language is a tool of cognition. To understand how people think, first understand their language. The main distinction about the Chinese language is it’s symbolic as opposed to phonetic. It’s as different from English as the Koran is to the Bible. The dissimilarity runs so deep that we cannot compare them to each other, only with each other.

Throughout most of human history, the Chinese have been the most advanced civilization on earth. Why, then, do they not dominate world culture as Europeans do? Some single out the Chinese ideogrammatic writing system as to blame — it cannot serve as a tool for organizing, sorting, and retrieving information the way that phonetic languages can, nor is it convenient for encoding foreign languages with no effective native writing system. This is why no nation that lacks a native writing system is adopting ideograms (the Japanese and Koreans did so because there was no alternative, and it impedes their progress even today); almost all turn to some variant of the Latin or Cyrillic or Arabic alphabet.

Chinese has more than 50,000 pictures, each representing a concept. A picture of a flower means “flower,” a picture of a house means “house,” and a picture of a middle-aged man means “dad.” It’s the kind of language you would come up with if you were an uncreative third grader. It’s limited as a tool of cognition in that it doesn’t challenge the speaker to go beyond the perceptual level of awareness. The allure of symbolic language is that it substitutes memorization for understanding.

Not coincidentally, communism offers the same allure. It’s a concrete idea that solves every societal problem in one fell decree, so there’s no point in learning much else. When the Chinese do adopt free enterprise, they only do so because it makes sense perceptually—that is, it’s practical.

Mao was unable to make Communism work in China because it is essentially alien to the Chinese culture. Deng made it work by keeping the Communist facade and reinstating the traditional Chinese polity in a Clever Plastic Disguise. For some reason, nobody seems to remark on the fact of billionaires in a notionally equalitarian political system. We’re so used to it that nobody notices how anomalous it is.

Read it.

eneath the bland veneer of supermarket automation lurks an ugly truth: There’s a lot of shoplifting going on in the self-scanning checkout lane. But don’t call it shoplifting. The guys in loss prevention prefer “external shrinkage.”

Self-checkout theft has become so widespread that a whole lingo has sprung up to describe its tactics. Ringing up a T-bone ($13.99/lb) with a code for a cheap ($0.49/lb) variety of produce is “the banana trick.” If a can of Illy espresso leaves the conveyor belt without being scanned, that’s called “the pass around.” “The switcheroo” is more labor-intensive: Peel the sticker off something inexpensive and place it over the bar code of something pricey. Just make sure both items are about the same weight, to avoid triggering that pesky “unexpected item” alert in the bagging area.

Read it.

Over the past months a spate of scientific papers published show sea level rise has not accelerated like many climate warming scientists warned earlier. The reality is that the rise is far slower than expected, read here and here.

Read it.

We have the technology — or will soon.

Read it.

“The law that is supposed to restrict copying has instead been misused to crack down on competition, strangling a future’s worth of gadgets in their cradles,” said EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow. “But it’s hard to notice what isn’t there. We’re aiming to fix that with this Catalog of Missing Devices. It’s a collection of tools, services, and products that could have been, and should have been, but never were.”

The damage comes from Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA 1201), which covers digital rights management software (DRM). DRM was designed to block software counterfeiting and other illegal copying, and Section 1201 bans DRM circumvention. However, businesses quickly learned that by employing DRM they could thwart honest competitors from creating inter-operative tools.

Right now, that means you could be breaking the law just by doing something as simple as repairing your car on your own, without the vehicle-maker’s pricey tool. Other examples include rightsholders forcing you to buy additional copies of movies you want to watch on your phone—instead of allowing you to rip the DVD you already own and are entitled to watch—or manufacturers blocking your printer from using anything but their official ink cartridges.

Read it.

Less than a week after Univision smeared the Trump tax cuts, the owner of that broadcasting network, Haim Saban, has announced that he will be giving $1000 bonuses to his employees due to those same tax cuts. In fact, as we shall see, Saban very specifically credited those same tax cuts as the reason for the bonuses.

Read it.

Attorney Michael Haddock told WZZM-TV this week that he received a notice from the Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency in the mail that said “Michael Ryder” will receive $360 a week.

But there is nobody named “Michael Ryder” at Haddock’s address. “Ryder,” however, is the name of Haddock’s German Shepherd and Michael is his first name. So Haddock assumed the notice was for his dog.

“Not sure what he is going to do with the money, but it should be interesting,” Haddock said. “I knew he was clever, but he surprised me this time.”

Environmentalists Go Nuts Over Trump’s Monument Cuts For No Reason

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace: It’s ‘On Trump’ The Next Time A Federal Agent Is Killed  Well, no, it isn’t.

CW Comedy Calls Their Worst Character a ‘Non-Evil Ivanka’  The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners doesn’t exclude family members. Funny how proglodytes feel free to indulge in all of the behaviors that they are so quick to denounce in their enemies.

Hypocritical NYT Claims Trump-Emboldened ‘Autocrats Steamroll Opposition’  Funny, they didn’t complain when Obama was doing it. There’s no pleasing some people.

President Trump Will Accept Your Apologies Now

Megan McArdle has learned some useful things.

You can no longer tell yourself that you might move to Lisbon, learn Portuguese, and take up the guitar. You cannot learn Portuguese at your age. You can’t remember new words anymore; you can’t even remember where you have left your keys.

So it seems a good opportunity to do two things. First, to wish Oprah Winfrey a happy belated birthday. And second, to address this “12 Rules for Life” meme that you young whippersnappers have got up to on the social medias. I am probably more than halfway through my life now; I ought to have some rules.

Read it.

The reason why IQ tests are so ‘controversial’ is that there is a large population of reality-deniers who are firmly convinced (a) that there is no such thing as testable intelligence and (b) that, even if there were, everybody is still equally capable of being an Einstein or a Newton with the proper government-funded ‘education’.

Despite the hype, the relevance, usefulness, and legitimacy of the IQ test is still hotly debated among educators, social scientists, and hard scientists. To understand why, it’s important to understand the history underpinning the birth, development, and expansion of the IQ test – a history that includes the use of IQ tests to further marginalise ethnic minorities and poor communities.

When you see intelligence testing as a to to ‘further marginalize ethnic minorities and poor communities’, then you’re hunting Heretics, not describing science.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

When I was a young boy, that was called The Draft and supposedly we don’t have it any more.

I guess these two ‘legislators’ (perhaps the more accurate term would be ‘commissars’) didn’t get the memo.

Read it.

This is what happens when the government doesn’t do its job: Individuals decide to render ‘justice’ on their own, with no guarantee that they’ll follow the norms that have grown up so painfully for the last 500 years.

Read it.

Most of you know the story of the boy and the starfish. For the few who don’t, it goes something like this:

Thousands of starfish washed up on a beach, and a young boy began throwing them back into the water, one-by-one. A man stopped him and pointed out that his effort made no difference since he couldn’t hope to save more than a few of the creatures. The boy looked at the starfish in his hand and replied, “Well, it matters to this one,” and he threw it into the sea.

The man in the parable is a collectivist who hates inequality. If you can’t help everyone, it’s unfair to help a few. The boy is an individualist who knows that individual life matters; we help those we can.

Read it.

Well, not really. You know journalists.

What happened is that people applied AI to the Voynich Manuscript to try to identify the language that it’s in and there’s a good chance that it’s Hebrew. Work is ongoing.

Read it.

Crispr, the promising new gene editing technology, promises to eradicate the world of human suffering—but for all the hype and hope, it hasn’t actually cured humans of anything, yet. Medical researchers have the cargo, now they just have to figure out the delivery route.

Meltdown! CNN Analyst Sees ‘Mafia Boss Gone Mad’ Trump Ending Democracy With Memo

‘Dangerous, Unprincipled, Divisive’ — Maxine Waters Says Trump Needs Parental Advisory  Maxine needs to get her meds adjusted.

Russia probe lawyers think Mueller could indict Trump  More prog fantasies. No, that isn’t going to happen.

The Associated Press Stokes Racial Division, Smears Trump

Joe Scarborough: ‘How Stupid Will These Republicans Be?’  I don’t know, Joe; how stupid were you when you were a Republican?

Howard Dean UNHINGED — Trump ‘Needs To Be Removed From Office’  The statism inherent in the Democrat ideology comes out.

DNC Chair Calls The Memo A ‘Sham’ — And Says That Republicans Are Trump’s ‘HENCHMEN’ Oh, if only that were true. (‘Henchmen’ were the guys in the middle ages who did the heavy lifting.)

MSNBC Commentator: ‘People Need To Start Taking To The Streets. This Is A Dictator.’  Dude, if this were a dictator, your ass would be in jail. Get over yourself.

Read it.

Last month, Republican Assemblyman Tom Lackey introduced legislation to repeal California’s recently enacted tax on space travel. California’s space tax, the first ever created, requires businesses exploring and attempting space travel to pay taxes based on miles traveled through space and the frequency of flight launches.

I hereby christen California ‘Taxifornia’.

If we could get rid of California and Massachusetts, well, that would really make America great again.

Read it.

Really women and fake women fighting for the same ecological Victim niche.

Read it.

I believe that Sarah Silverman is literally insane.

Read it.

How about that Global Warming, eh?

Scott Johnson blows the whistle on the IRS, strong right arm of the Deep State.

If there was a federal agency that Barack Obama did not corrupt, it must be because it was corrupt when he took over in 2009. The corruption of the IRS is a case in point. Its criminal misconduct perfectly represents what Obama wrought in the agencies that he charged with dictating the way we live. Consider the case of Lori Lowenthal Marcus and Z Street.

Z Street is Lori’s pro-Israel group. It had its application for tax-exempt status held up at the IRS for seven years. When Lori asked why, she was told that IRS auditors had been instructed to give pro-Israel groups special attention and that Z Street’s application had been forwarded to a special IRS unit for additional review. Not to put too fine a point on the legal issues, this wasn’t kosher. It’s illegal.

Read it.

I rather doubt that large gatherings of white people, especially in Minnesota, are as dangerous for black people as large gatherings of black people are to white people.

Freeberg brings us some disturbing news.

Although not common, such incidents are far from rare. I suppose it is just a reflection of the cultMarx ‘march through the institutions’ that began in the 1960s, and we’re used to members of the Chattering Class doing this sort of thing in colleges, but I find it disturbing to find it seeping further down the educational food chain.

Read it.

This is just wrong.

Read it.

I don’t expect you to have read Bryan Caplan’s new book, The Case Against Education, although it would be helpful if you had at least heard about it (which you will have done did you frequent the rightish side of the Force as I regularly do).

Caplan is one of the more eccentric members of George Mason University’s thoroughly libertarian Economics Department, and loves to take unexpected positions on various issues; his The Myth of the Rational Voter and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids are well worth attention.

This article at West Hunter is an interesting review and response to Caplan’s  book.

He dismisses objections from educational psychologists who claim that studying a subject improves you in subtle ways even after you forget all of it. I too find that hard to believe. On the other hand, it looks to me as if poorly-digested fragments of information picked up in college have some effect on public policy later in life: it is no coincidence that most prominent people in public life (at a given moment) share a lot of the same ideas. People are vaguely remembering the same crap from the same sources, or related sources. It’s correlated crap, which has a much stronger effect than random crap.

That matches my experience.

These widespread new ideas are usually wrong. They come from somewhere – in part, from higher education. Along this line, Caplan thinks that college has only a weak ideological effect on students. I don’t believe he is correct. In part, this is because most people use a shifting standard: what’s liberal or conservative gets redefined over time. At any given time a population is roughly half left and half right – but the content of those labels changes a lot. There’s a shift.

I think it’s deeper than that. I have long maintained the there is no such thing as ‘conservatism’ or ‘liberalism’, because those terms describe aspects of personality, not concrete political views; what constitutes ‘conservatism’ especially changes depending on what point in human history is being dealt with. (The case of ‘liberalism’ is somewhat stronger, because in modern times that equates to ‘progressivism’, which does have a concrete political viewpoint that doesn’t change with time, but if  you wander outside post-1960s North America it reverts to being relative.)

I think the fraction of the population that believed in butt-kicking babes was lower in 1920: probably less than 1%, with most of those believers suffering from tertiary syphilis. What changed? At the root, most of the change must stem from professor-types. There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them. Many of those absurd ideas now have wide currency.

Can’t disagree with that. We all want to believe that Black Widow exists, but deep in our hearts we know that it’s as much of a fantasy as Thor.

The Unrepentant Terrorist

Kurdistan Betrayed, Again

Brawl Between Afghan, Eritrean Migrants In France Leaves 4 Wounded

Islamic Leader Says Watching Soccer Is Haram For Women

Palestinian Protesters Attack US Diplomats In Bethlehem Forcing Them To Flee

Hamas Co-Founder Dies After Accidentally Shooting Himself In The Face  Hey, these things happen.

Egypt Gives No Jail Time To Muslims Who Attacked A Church

“ISIS Followers in Hamburg Wanted to Behead Me”

Culture-Enrichers Terrorize the Car Parks of Flanders

Vehicular Jihad in Philadelphia

Lab Tests Tie Assad To Deadliest Chemical Weapons Attack Of The Syrian Civil War

ISIS Militants Assault Afghan Military Academy To Close Bloody Week In Kabul

Iran deploys ‘halal’ internet in latest bid to rein in citizens’ web freedoms  And Social Justice Warriors everywhere take to the streets in protest! Oh, wait….

Kabul terror attack: At least 11 soldiers killed and 16 injured in assault on military base claimed by Isis

Eleven Afghan soldiers killed in latest attack in Kabul

Minnesota man explains mall stabbings

Yemen civil war: Deadly clashes between separatists and government forces deepens split between Gulf allies

Rand Paul Proposes Killing $2 Billion Aid To Pakistan

Taliban attacker driving ambulance packed with explosives kills 40 in Kabul

Syrian War Breaks Out on Germany’s Streets

Culture-Enriching Murder and Mayhem in Amsterdam

Terrorist Driving Ambulance Filled With Bombs Slaughters Dozens In Afghanistan

‘Martyrs’ of Dir’ al-Watan (V Corps)

Kabul bomb: 95 dead and 163 wounded in huge explosion in Afghanistan capital

Afghanistan mourns after ambulance bomb kills dozens

Kabul bomb: People despair in Afghan capital at endless wave of attacks

Kabul ambulance bombing: Death toll rises to 103 with another 235 wounded

Taliban Touts Deadly Bombing In Afghan Capital As A ‘Clear Message For Trump’  I hope they’re ready for his response.

Inside Afrin, the true victims of Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria are revealed – refugees, babies, women and children

Read it.

Illegal immigrants in Tel Aviv ‘invited’ to actress Sarah Silverman’s sister’s home as right-wing activists distribute ‘invitations’.

Hmmm. Wonder how Nancy Pelosi would like a couple hundred ‘Dreamers’ on her doorstep looking for a handout.

NYT columnists remind us: Trump and his voters seem suspiciously German  For almost everybody on the Left, ‘Gernan’ = ‘Nazi’, and so any connection they can make between Trump and German Something (even if they have to make it up) gives them that warm tingle of Confirmation Bias.

Univision Anchors Parrot DNC Talking Points on Trump ‘Stigmatizing’ Immigrants  As they so often do.

ABC Touts Scowling Democrats Booing Trump During SOTU Address  Suckin’ on lemons, every one.

Bernie Sanders: It’s An ‘Outrage’ That Trump Didn’t Talk About Climate Change At SOTU  I suspect that, if Trump had mentioned ‘climate change’, Bernie would still be unhappy.

The State of the (White Nationalist) Union  They actually pay people to write this drivel.

The Worst Media Freak-Outs Over Trump’s State of the Union Address

Joseph Epstein penned this classic in 1989.

Victims have never been in short supply in the world, but the rush to identify oneself as a victim is rather a new feature of modern life. Why this should be so isn’t very complicated: to position oneself as a victim is to position oneself for sympathy, special treatment, even victory. It’s not only individuals who benefit. In international politics, one sees the deliberate strategy of positioning for victimhood played out in the Middle East. Although Israel is a country of fewer than four million Jewish people surrounded by Arab nations numbering some 200 million people, very few of whom mean the Israelis well, the Arabs have somehow been able to make themselves – or at least the Palestinians as their representatives – seem the great victims in the Middle East. Every time a woman or a small child is injured in the organized riots known as the intifada – one might ask why small children are allowed anywhere near such danger – the victimhood of the Palestinians is reinforced and their cause, as victims, made all the stronger.

Gandhi was the great teacher of the art of victimhood, of setting one’s victimization on full public display. Part of the genius of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was to recognize the value of Gandhi’s lessons for the American civil rights movement, and most especially the lesson of nonviolent resistance, which not only highlights victimhood but gives it, in a good cause, a genuinely moral aura. Their moral and physical courage lent civil rights workers in the South an appeal that was irresistible to all but the most hard-hearted of segregationists. Americans, all of whose families began in this country as immigrants, have a built-in tradition of having known victimhood, at least historically, and hence a strong tendency toward sympathy for victims.

Read it.

Many pundits and companies have tried to illustrate how the net neutrality repeal will affect internet users, but YouTuber Rob Bliss has made one of the best demonstrations yet. It’s good because it’s simple, it isn’t trying to sell you hamburgers, and it confused police officers.

The demonstration also took place at a very suitable location—the streets outside of the FCC headquarters in Washington, DC. That’s where Bliss set up traffic cones and rode his bike in the one available lane so that he could “throttle” traffic, unless drivers wanted to pay a $5 fee. This way, as Ajit Pai has put it, “consumers can pick the plan that’s best for them.”

The analogy is inapposite because he neither built nor does he own the road. That’s the problem with analogies: What seems obvious to you may seem absurd to others, and all you do is piss people off and make them think you’re an asshole. This doesn’t help your cause, however much it may ‘raise awareness’. (‘Raising awareness’ typically merely raises awareness that the protestors are assholes. But Virtue Signaling isn’t about effectiveness, it’s about that warm fuzzy feeling that the protesters get at other people’s expense.)

Protests such as this one are effective only to the extent that other people aren’t assholes too. Once somebody gets fed up with assholery and drives over his ass, the demonstration ends, typically with the injured asshole spending his future living as the victim. I had an ethnic German friend who said, when watching the movie Gandhi, that such shenanigans would only have worked with the British; if Gandhi had tried that sort of thing in, say, German East Africa, some leutnant would have shot him in the head and left his body by the side of the road to rot — end of protest.

Read it.

With thanks to Debby Witt, a kindred soul.

Read it.

In extending Temporary Protected Status to some 7,000 Syrians currently in the US, the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged that war-convulsed country remained unsafe for them to return.

“It is clear that the conditions upon which Syria’s designation was based continue to exist, therefore an extension is warranted under the statute,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen said in a statement.

Read it.

Was AlGore in Morocco for some reason?

Read it.

The hunt for ThoughtCrime among the Heretics and Sinners proceeds apace.

Read it.

I am not inclined to stand in the way of anybody in Taxachusetts who wants to commit suicide.

If Massachusetts suddenly turned into the Netherlands, would that be proof of Global Warming? Inquiring minds want to know….