Read it.

Bryan Caplan is a GMU economist who likes to bet doom-sayers that they’re full of it. He has an impressive track record for winning.,

Read it.

It is a truth universally acknowledged among wonky introverts that derive their identity from the contents of their minds over the coalition to which they belong that the left-right political spectrum must be in want of an overhaul.

Read it.

Returning to designs abandoned in the 1970s, start-ups are developing a new kind of reactor that promises to be much safer and cleaner than current ones.

Our future depends on nuclear power. These guys are trying to help.

Check it out.

A ‘Portmanteau and Rhyme Generator’. Give it a try.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that there were a lot of Orthodox Christians among the Maya.

Eastern Orthodox Christianity in particular has been growing rapidly, as a number of schismatic Catholic groups have expressed their desire to become Eastern Orthodox and have been received under the jurisdiction of Eastern Orthodox hierarchs.

I guess they took the Rod Dreher option.

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I guess walls only work if the Force is with you. Or something.

Read it.

Think how much more material would be reused if plastic recycling didn’t entail washing, sorting and individual processing. Now, IBM researchers have developed a new chemical process called VolatileCatalyst that eliminates these steps. VolCat recycling grinds up plastics, adds a chemical catalyst and cooks them at temperatures above 200 degrees Celsius. The chemicals eat through polymer strands, producing a fine white powder ready to be made into new containers.

House Democrats Have A Timetable For Demanding Trump’s Tax Returns  I’m sure he has a timetable for refusing.

Maxine Waters Delivers Wild Rant, Asks Trump If He’s ‘Still In Love’ With Kim Jong Un  Let’s ask Congresswoman BitterBeerFace whether she’s still in love with Louis Farrakhan.

Kimmel: CPAC Is ‘Largest Gathering’ of Anti-Vaxxers Led by a ‘Dementia’-Stricken Trump  There is, of course, no connection between ‘anti-vaxxers’ and either CPAC or Trump — except in the delusions of people like Kimmel.

CNN Rips President Trump for Hugging, ‘Groping’ American Flag at CPAC

Stephen Colbert targets Trump in Game of Thrones parody: ‘Subpoenas are coming’  Scraaaaaaape that barrel.

Laurene Powell Jobs says media should be careful, Trump attacks ‘out of a dictator’s playbook’  I can see where marrying Steve Jobs could make you an expert on ‘dictator’s playbooks’.

CNN Mocks Trump For Hugging American Flag At CPAC

CNN Aghast: Trump Signed Checks on Days He Fulfilled Official Duties

Revolving Door: House Intel Committee Hires Rabidly Anti-Trump MSNBC Analyst

Rep. Rashida Tlaib To Introduce Impeachment Resolution Against Trump  I guess she wanted to be the first on her block. It’ll be interesting to see whether she bothers to some up with some plausible excuse or whether it just boils down to ‘BECAUSE TRUMP’.

No-deal Brexit would take back control and hand it to Trump, experts say  And GOD KNOWS we can’t have THAT, right?

Anderson Cooper Plugs Liberal Poll: 64 Percent Say Trump ‘Committed Crimes’ Before Election

Read it.

Forbes.com contributor Elizabeth MacBride recently produced an essay that says far more about herself than the subject she has been supposedly getting to know over the course of “more than a year.” In “The Second Amendment Is A Marketing Slogan, And Other Lessons from The Gun Business Beat,” we are witness to what happens when a writer uses his or her own pre-existing beliefs to interpret what they see. In the world of intelligence gathering it’s called “mirror imaging.”

That approach might be an acceptable approach for a novelist, but such clear bias coming from a “business writer” who claims to be reporting on what she found in that role is a real disservice to Forbes readers. Serving as a self-appointed tour guide for those on the other side of our nation’s cultural divide when it comes to gun ownership, she is now only reinforcing the biases of those who would never deign to set foot on a range or venture near a gun counter

Read it.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have held up California’s new, error-plagued automatic voter registration program as a model for the nation, and are now pushing for a nationalized version of the program in a bill called the “For the People Act.”

The bill would require all states to implement automatic voter registration systems, which advocates claim would improve the accuracy of voter registration rolls, prevent ineligible people from registering, help election officials do less work to keep voter registration records accurate, and make it easier for eligible voters to register or update their registration records.

Yet since California started its own automatic voter registration program last April, exactly the opposite has happened.

Read it.

I think that they ought to raise it back to 21. The pathetic excuse used to lower it to 18, that there was a draft and that people who could be called on to die for their county ought to be able to vote, no longer applies.

Read it.

This micro-generation of Silicon Valley start-ups did two basic things: It put together a labor pool to deliver food or clean toilets or assemble IKEA bookshelves, and it found people who needed those things done. Academics called this a “two-sided market,” but to a user, it meant tapping on a phone and watching the world rearrange itself to satisfy your desires. Convenience drove consumer demand. Economic need and work flexibility drove the labor supply. At least in theory.

And of course, this being The Atlantic, Voice of the Crust, they have to put a Marxian spin on it.

Politically, the world is night and day, though. In that context, these apps take on a strange pall. The haves and the have-nots might be given new names: the demanding and the on-demand. These apps concretize the wild differences that the global economy currently assigns to the value of different kinds of labor. Some people’s time and effort are worth hundreds of times less than other people’s. The widening gap between the new American aristocracy and everyone else is what drives both the supply and demand of Uber-for-X companies.

Workers of the world, arise! You have nothing to lose but your gigs!

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

I guess she didn’t have enough Victim Pokemon Points to be a big enough fish in the Senate.

I smell another RINO like Murkowski in the making.

The Register doesn’t have a lot of time for fools.

For those who don’t know what hipsters look like, the hair is short-back-and-sides with the hair on top piled high and combed straight back,  beard like George V. Look at any British football player (Beckhan will do) for an illustration. Or just Google ‘hipster’ and look at Images.

Joe Scarborough is transitioning into the look as he segues into the fashionable Left.

John C. Wright explains it all to you, at length.

Wright is a science fiction author who is unapologetically Christian and doesn’t much like the way things are these days. Being a writer, he tends to write about it.

This is not quite a complete book but a pretty long-form article. Read it if you have time.

Read it.

Muslims being part of the Democrat base and all — surely y’all remember those six million Muslims that Hitler killed? And the swastikas that keep getting painted on mosques everywhere.

Read it.

Kind of like a Democrat Congressman.

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Hey, if a trick works, you use it again.

Read it.

Imagine forcing every kid to walk around holding an ad for Planned Parenthood. Well, in California, you don’t have to imagine it.

California state Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel is doing everything he can to seal the single largest free publicity deal in the history of abortion: a Planned Parenthood phone number on every student ID. Including kids at private and Christian schools.

He calls it the “Pupil and Student Health” bill, but critics of Gabriel’s AB 624 want people to know what it really is: an attack on the First Amendment.

I never had a student ID in high school. Our dress code (guys in coat and tie, girls in uniforms) was ID enough.

Sarah Hoyt casts an eye over the book trade.

If you go back and read Burroughs, say, you’ll find that he was not a particularly good writer on the word level. What he was was a great storyteller, often by violating every known rule, including telling you a vast amount of how things should be, instead of showing how they were. But it worked, and obviously he was to the taste of his contemporaries.

What I see in indie is, weirdly, like a return to the old days of pulp. Novels are shorter.  They start somewhere around 30k and usually top out at 50k.  An 80k word book is rare, and 100k plus very rare.

The reason for this actually makes sense. The change in book length was driven, more than anything, by the need to make a book large enough to sell for $5 — later $8 — dollars for a paperback. They could fudge it some. A friend who did very well never could write more than 65k, but her books were printed with larger type.  But less than that? no.

So, books are returning to the size that most people can consume at one sitting or in an afternoon.

I remember those days. Books would max out at around 300 pages (if you were lucky) and stories would move pretty briskly. You weren’t left after the first 100 pages wondering when a story was going to start.

Read it.

What do they know that you don’t?

Perhaps the universe itself is racist.

That would tell us something too.

Read it.

The coalition of the fringes is starting to unravel.

Maybe he could wear blackface. There seems to be a lot of that going around.

Read it.

Time is up for European Union-mandated daylight savings time. The European Commission and European Parliament have agreed on that. All the relevant committees in Parliament are for the change, according to Germany’s conservative Christian Democrat (CDU) MEP Peter Liese, who has devoted a lot of time to the issue.
Now that the lead committee on transport and tourism has given its blessing, by a large majority, EU lawmakers could vote on the change by the end of March. After that, all 28 member states will need to rubberstamp the ruling.

Read it.

Education schools have long been notorious for two mutually reinforcing characteristics: ideological orthodoxy and low academic standards. As early as 1969, Theodore Sizer and Walter Powell hoped that “ruthless honesty” would do some good when they complained that at far too many ed schools, the prevailing climate was “hardly conducive to open inquiry.” “Study, reflection, debate, careful reading, even, yes, serious thinking, is often conspicuous by its absence,” they continued. “Un-intellectualism—not anti-intellectualism, as this assumes malice—is all too prevalent.” Sizer and Powell ought to have known: At the time they were dean and associate dean, respectively, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

When the worst education you can get is as an education major, things are only going to get worse.

Read it.

The biter bit. I don’t know whether a ‘civil rights audit’ is really a thing — it sounds like something the CNN would pull on somebody else — but I wish them the joy of it.

Ace of Spades blows the whistle.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

America the Cowardly Bully Paul Krugman. It’s all about Trump, of course.

Nets Excited by Dems ‘On the Hunt’ for Trump with New Investigations  Well, it keeps them off the streets.

Gov. Inslee: Trump Is A ‘Fearful Person’  I think what he meant was fearSOME person.

Former Clinton Adviser Claims ‘Every Racist Voted For Trump’  Except the ones who voted for Obama and sat out the election.

Impeachment is on

CNN’s Toobin Rewrites History: Unlike Trump, Obama Had No Scandals!  Seriously? ‘If you like your plan you can keep your plan.’? ‘I’ve got a pen and a phone.’? Van Jones?

Fox’s Juan Williams: Trump Could ‘Refuse To Leave’ Office If He Is Not Reelected  So could Obama. But he didn’t. And there is no actual evidence that Trump wouldn’t — just Leftist fantasies.

Trump’s ‘interference in CNN merger’ an impeachable offence, says husband of White House adviser  Well, actually, no, it’s not.

Jerry Nadler’s frantic quest to ‘Get Trump’

Evening Shows Refuse to Credit Trump for Jobs Boom 98 Percent of the Time  Because, of course, Hitler had absolutely nothing to do with getting the economy moving again….

Trump investigation in House to be led by prosecutor ‘comfortable charging him with felony campaign finance fraud’  And don’t forget the undoubted fact that he used dead baby parts in his Satanic rituals….

Trump flip-flops on Syria, tells Congress he agrees ‘100%’ with keeping US troops in region  Uh, ‘in region’ doesn’t mean ‘in Syria’. Apparently English is not this ‘journalist’s first language.

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Damn that Western colonialism! Oh, wait….

Read it.

Of course they are. That’s what they’re paid to do. I’m sure Russian ‘politicians and generals’ are doing the same thing.

This is just pandering to the hair-on-fire low-information crowd. Disgusting.

Read it.

Sounds like a self-correcting problem.

Apparently, judging by the headline, having a license is proof against that kind of error. Who knew?

Read it.

The coalition of the fringes is beginning to unravel.

Apparently feminists draw the line at political fantasies that mean they wind up losing.

Sarah Hoyt points ot that bookstores were in the process of hanging themselves when Amazon appeared and gave them a push.

I too had the experience, in the 1990s, of never being able to find something worth reading, much less buying, in an actual physical bookstore. My wife and I would instead go to places like Half Price Books in order to get stuff that was ‘out of print’ but eventually migrated from people’s closets and attics.

It hasn’t gotten any better since. Nowadays I only buy books by people that I know or books that have been recommended by people I trust. That’s not a big world.

Which is fine — I’ve got a public library and I’m not afraid to use it; even a weekly trip through their New Adult NonFiction listing (now conveniently on the Internet) gives me a request list of a dozen or so.

Amazon has been a boon for people like me because it allows oddball people to publish stuff without the gladiatorial contest of going through a major publisher.

Read it.

The coalition of the fringes is starting to unravel.

Victor Davis Hanson does a guest appearance on the Powerline blog to discuss his new book.

I have never met Trump. I don’t know his close friends and aides. In lieu of any insider information, I wanted to offer a sort of Thucydidean account, neither rah-rah in support or unhinged in hatred, of why the country by 2016 was ready for an unlikely Manhattan billionaire populist candidate without either prior military or political experience.

Read it.

When smart phones first appeared it was believed there would soon be an app for improving rifle and pistol accuracy and there were. But at first these apps were only for rifles, especially for long range shots. Over time the technology got better and in 2016 MantisX appeared. This $150 dollar device looked like a small laser sight, of the sort attached to the bottom of a pistol equipped with a rail. MantisX took advantage of better sensor tech (accelerometers and gyroscopes) and combined these with app software downloaded to your smartphone. This combination of hardware and software provided an instant and accurate record of y0ur shooting (with bullets or “dry” without ammo). The MantixX hardware detected the motion of the pistol up to when the trigger was pulled and, using a Bluetooth connection to your to your smartphone to grab the data, analyzed each shot (whether real or simulated) and tells you how well you did and what you did wrong if you were making mistakes with trigger pull or how you were holding the pistol (or rifle). MantisX did this by adapting the software to a wide variety of specific pistol and rifle models. As expected, MantisX underwent constant improvements since it was first introduced and these fixes were automatically distributed via app updates.

Audacious Epigone runs the numbers.

One curious aspect of hate crime, which we are told is on the rise in Trump’s America, is how it is predominantly a blue state phenomenon. The inverse correlation between Trump’s share of the vote and the rate of reported hate crime incidents is .60.

Read it.

“I want to personally welcome anyone escaping high tax states to join the hundreds of thousands of their former neighbors who have already moved to Florida,” Governor Rick Scott announced last year.

Read it.

Talkin’ ’bout my g-g-generation….

Read it.

Fine. Don’t have kids. We won’t miss them.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Political Correctness is gradually excluding all the adults from managerial positions in our culture.

This will not end well.

Read it.

And who could blame her?

The elephant in the room is the suspicion that it also gets her away from Congresswoman Occasional-Corrtex.

Read it.

I always like to include good news even when there isn’t a lot of it.

This technique, if economical to use, ought to reduce the use of adhesives and make artifacturing more ‘sustainable’.

Read it.

‘Sustainable’ is one of those words, like ‘vibrant’, that hipsters use when they want to compliment a person or a practice, whether or not it means anything or is even relevant. In this case, it’s even a title — the author is a ‘Sustainability Editor’, which makes no sense whatever. Apparently the qualifications for ‘Sustainability Editor’ include an affection for cauliflower gnocchi (you can hear the Virtue Signaling Pokemon Points rack up) and an ability to be annoyed by plastic. The fact that plastic represents a major advance in the art of preserving fresh and sanitary food is, apparently, So Fifteen Minutes Ago.

The entire article is an illustration of the sad fact that Progs Are Never Satisfied. No matter what one does, no matter how far over backward one bends to meet their unrealistic expectations, there is always something that one has failed to do, for which one can expect criticism. There is no point at which one will hear, ‘Okay, you’ve done what you can, this is good enough.’ Nothing is ever good enough,

Read it.

A sad tale, which just goes to show that, proglodyte fantasies to the contrary notwithstanding, not all change leads to progress.

Trump news – LIVE: President faces new investigation into abuse of power as Senate intelligence chairman says ‘direct evidence’ of collusion with Russia  Except that it’s the House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Adam Schiff, and he’s still being delusionally Democrat.

Children push ahead with historic lawsuit to force Trump administration to tackle climate change

Surprise, Surprise: Media Throw Trump Under the Bus for Defunding Abortion Providers

Morning Joe’s Incessant F-Word of the Day for Trump: ‘Felony’

Democrats Seek To Investigate Everyone Who’s Ever Met Trump  At your expense, of course.

Trump Is The ‘New Form Of Idolatry’: Former RNC Chair Criticized Trump’s CPAC Speech

Scarborough Suddenly Opposes Flippant Comparisons to Tyrants  And somehow this is Trump’s fault.

Trump’s ‘shameless and corrupt’ tweet about Scottish golf course an attempt to pressure UK, experts say  Shows how stupid ‘experts’ can be.

I spent three days listening to a smouldering ash heap of Trumpian shills at CPAC. The GOP’s future looks even worse than we thought

Report reveals extent of Trump-Fox News collusion: ‘Murdoch wants Trump to win’

Ace of Spades reads the tea leaves.

Well, I’m glad we cleared that up.