When you look at campuses, it's obvious that Pinker was waaaay wrong: Students today are perfectly comfortable with the idea that "certain scientific opinions are immoral or certain questions too hot to handle."

We will forgive Steven for optimism.

MarketWatch asks the unanswerable question, Do tax cuts pay for themselves?

The answer? A definite maybe.

Competition in the pussyweight class.

> A definite maybe.

Totally enough! Onboard here! Ready to ride!




Y'know, it's not that I want tax cuts for the wealthy, it's that I want tax hikes for the poor.

Pretty much serious. Nothing, nothing would do more to trim government shenanigans and compel effective public service than hordes of poor people screaming their lungs out over gratuitous expenditure and regulatory intrusion.

Instead, our polity -- left & right -- believes in progressive taxation with the certitude by which it regards gravitation: 'Well OF COURSE we shouldn't trouble the little people with such responsibilities....'

And so the poor, holding discernment and experience like everyone else on the planet, are ruthlessly excluded from the composition of our local and national project— As if only checkbooks were the measure a man, and no other considerations were applicable. This is universally described as kindness. (The 3rd world cuts away half its brain by segregating women; modernity does it by ostracizing the unfortunate.)

And it instills in everyone the unspoken knowledge that it's possible, and even honorable, to get a free ride in civic fulfillment.

Consider a loathsome passage from the Pinker PDF linked above:

We shouldn't count on ordinary people to engage in the clear thinking -- some would say the hair-splitting -- that would be needed to accept a dangerous idea but not its terrible consequence. Our overriding precept, in intellectual life as in medicine, should be "First, do no harm."

Human nature! Rich or poor, smart or dim, the first chore in composing a worldview is to flatter the self. We shouldn't be surprised that the articulate (often called 'intellectuals') are better (and more ferocious) at it than are others...

...But nor should we be surprised that the sharpest little weasels in our culture want to make physical & emotional distance from the filthy streetfolk using every tool they can devise... They'll do anything, pay any price, to not have to talk to hillbillies.

But sometimes the 'billies get annoyed... Like 2016.

Good one, right? Fuckin' A.

Senior European Correspondent.

Komrades, a video on open borders and on why belief in them gained traction in spoiled countries of the First World.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PABHps6q8Ik

Because Ivanka's dad is a big meanie, that's why.

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/debra-messing-calls-ivanka-trump-glaad-media-awards-article-1.3145255

I hereby withdraw and regret every nasty thing I ever said about Rach'.

Because *day-yum.*

This link is from Cathy Young:

http://quillette.com/2017/03/27/the-changeling-a-review-of-in-full-colour-by-rachel-dolezal/

It's long, but you should read it all.

Innovative cartography.

Crid, I was going to post something last week that I was going to call "In Defense of Rachael Dolezal", but I didn't find time to write it the way I wanted it. Why defend Rachael Dolezal? Because I would like to take the social concept of race (as opposed to the genetic component, which is what it is), and blow it to fucking smithereens. And after that, I want to scrape up the pieces, shoot them, pyrolyze them, and then take what's left and put it on a rocket and send it on a one-way trip to Jupiter. Half of all of the nonsense in Western civilization could be eliminated in one fell swoop. Rachael Dolezal is the Pied Piper of the movement. Once people can claim to be whatever race they want to be, the term will no longer have any meaning, and then we can say good bye and good riddance to a lot of social and legal overhead.