Sabremetrics for Generals - Seriously Cool

Includes an interactive map of generalship and individual profiles. I'm serious. Very cool. Here.

Cracked is dead.

It flipped to "Social Justice" and stopped being funny. It's the classic "turn hard left and die maneuver". 

https://www.dangerous.com/37818/cracked-lays-off-staff/

Oklahoma City: Pyongyang on the Prarie?

Michelle Malkin says so. And if half of what she writes is true, it's prosecutorial and judicial abuse on an epic scale.

Deep in their blue bunkers, totally out of their minds.

This is a good precis by the "Never Trump" Right of the Trump/Mueller/Russian Collusion Imbroglio

Summary: the goal is and has always been impeachment. But you should read it yourself.

And I confess to be amazed. Because:

1. If it succeeds it will once again gravely damage the Federal government's reputation among half of the population.

2. It will likely provoke levels of violence unseen at least since the nineteen sixties and perhaps not since the eighteen sixties.

3. And the great majority of the people expert at violence are on the right.

The result of this unwillingness to accept an election result by the permanent Federal Elite must inevitably be a significant degradation in the power, reputation and influence of the Federal government and other elite institutions which are already suffering massively from all sorts of trust based scandals.

Personally I and most of the right welcome a significant reduction in Federal and general Elite power, status and reach.

But I presume the left and the DC elite don't . 

Yet they sit in their deep blue bunkers spinning their power fantasies, totally out of their minds.

Moments

Moments come and then they go.
We think they're true and full of hope.
Then we find they aren't meant to be.
And never were.

Faces come with hopeful gaze.
We place our hopes and dream of days.
But we don't really know them.
And never will.

We tell ourselves that it's fine.
There's always more wine.
But we know the bottle's near empty.
And there are no more.

So we search and hope and pray.
With voices that fade more each day.
And we learn our fate face by face.
Until there are no more.

Free Too

I hear what you're saying
I see what you mean
I know what you're doing
But I want to be free

I stood there when she said it
She came straight up to me
So filled with His spirit
So gentle and free

I hear what you're saying
I see what you mean
I know what you're doing
But I need to be free

I was there when she said it
She came straight up to me
So filled with His love
So beautiful and free

I hear what you're saying
I see what you mean
I know what you're doing
But I must be free

Teaching Millennials how to think...

....requires they unlearn what they've been taught. I'm not sure this guy could get a job at an "elite" university.

http://newbostonpost.com/2017/11/09/undoing-the-dis-education-of-millennials/

Marxism, Communism and Christianity

Proposition: Christianity has communist attributes but is not marxist. Secular liberalism is Marxist but not communist. Christianity is authoritative but not Leninist. Secular liberalism is not authoritative but is Leninist.

Now some Definitions (my own):

Communism: the sharing of basic elements for living, the notion of from each what they can contribute and to each what they need. The ideal of Grace.

Marxism: The idea that there are different groups/classes of people and that there is one group that oppresses the other(s) and that the goal of politics is to overthrow the hegemonic group and usher in equality. The ideal of Equality.

Leninism: The idea that a relatively small cadre of determined people define what the society is to be and that their choices are independent of any authoritative source. They are their own Gods creating their own new civilization. The ideal of Revolution.

Authoritative (also could be called 'ethical' but that term is more value laden): institution with a fixed set of rules or precepts that pre-exist the institution and that the institution cannot radically change without undermining its legitimacy. The ideal of Constitutionalism.

And the key event that led to this dichotomy was the success of the Liberal project in appropriating 'social gospel' Christianity and unmooring it from it's authoritative religious roots. That allowed the left to innovate in countless ways that we see today.

Identity Marxism is just as deadly as the Leninist Version was

From a review of new books on Lenin and Stalin on Tablet:

It is a terrible reality, noted by Applebaum, that most of the people who condemned Ukrainian peasants to starvation were themselves Ukrainian peasants. They “requisitioned” grain and livestock from their neighbors for many reasons, not just survival but the desire for power and also out of Marxist idealism. The striking truth is that under the Soviet system taking food from a family dying of hunger could be made to seem an act with, to use Duranty’s phrase, a “noble purpose.” This was an innovation in political science. Before the Soviet era, it was human beings who killed each other. Now, under Lenin and Stalin, history itself exterminated class enemies.

Bolshevism was a vastly simplified religion masquerading as science. Lenin said he had solved the formula of history, and so had changed the world. The crimes committed by your rulers are the work of the dialectic, and therefore no crimes at all: For a time Soviet citizens may have believed this gospel or pretended to believe it. But long before Stalin’s death, the Soviet Union had become a realm of cynicism, apathy, and fear. Now it too has been consigned to the dustbin of history, but its lessons remain. We can hear echoes of Leninism not only in Putin’s new totalitarianism, as Masha Gessen has called it, but here at home with a leader who depends on agitprop, scapegoating, and artificial facts. The Bolshevist specter refuses to die off.

Marxist revolutions are defined by their fealty to an "Historical Process" - their 'God', really. That "process" is defined differently based upon the time. In Lenin and Stalin's time it was a class based God whereby the 'proletariat' liberated the nation from the bourgeoisie, the nobility and the peasants.  Today's Marxism is an identity based God whereby the 'woke' liberate non-white racial groups and non heteronormative sexual groups from 'white' and 'religious' devils.

Both forms are equally deadly to society, generating huge demographic deficits either through straight up murder or through the suppression of births. Leading to the death of culture and family. Modern birth suppression Identity Marxism is no doubt much less bloody and cruel than traditional Marxist slaughter but it's every bit as effective in enervating civilization. And radical Environmentalism provides a religious pretext for the Birth Holodomor:  Like the Kulaks, the fecund are evil, seeking to destroy the world. So they must be stopped.

But they won't. Just the Christian ones. And the Muslims will inherit large parts of what used to be called Christendom and will slaughter the remaining remnant of identity Marxists with relish as the fools gape and beg 'but, but we're woke, we're on your side' to the flash of the scimitars.

The Silence of the Woke

Why we shouldn't tear down monuments.

The best 2 arguments against monument destruction I've seen. It seems to me that the universities and media are in the throes of "The Great Identitarian Cultural Revolution". At the link.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7660

Is Science just becoming another form of religious dogma?

Another field where "scientistic" claims are made as religious dogma, blighting countless lives. By Puritans left and Right. 

"In McKune v. Lile, a 2002 decision that upheld a mandatory prison therapy program for sex offenders, Kennedy said "the rate of recidivism of untreated offenders has been estimated to be as high as 80%," a number he called "frightening and high." He repeated that claim the following year in Smith v. Doe, which upheld retroactive application of Alaska's registration requirements for sex offenders. As of 2015, according to a reviewpublished in Constitutional Commentary, Kennedy's phrase had been echoed in 91 judicial opinions and the briefs filed in 101 cases.

Yet there was never any evidence to support Kennedy's assertion, and research conducted during the same period when it was proliferating indicates that it is not even remotely true. As Feige notes in a commentary that accompanies his video, "Nearly every study—including those by states as diverse as Alaska, Nebraska, Maine, New York and California as well as an extremely broad one by the federal government that followed every offender released in the United States for three years—has put the three-year recidivism rate for convicted sex offenders in the low single digits, with the bulk of the results clustering around 3.5 percent." Studies covering longer periods find higher recidivism rates, but still nothing like 80 percent, even for high-risk offenders."

Science is just the religion that people who think they have no faith have faith in. But vanishingly few of them actually are willing to make the effort to treat science as science. It's just the New Jesus.

And since far more people on the left think they have abandoned 'superstition' for science, the superstition of 'scientism' is much more virulent there. And unlike Christianity, Scientism neither acknowledges it's religious basis nor has had thousands of years to build up protections against its vicious oppression of unbelievers.  Like other modern cults (socialism, national socialism, maoism) it is raw and brutal in its intent.

Story Here.

California: Mexico del Norte

San Diego has a hepatitis epidemic because so many people are homeless and defecating on the streets. San Fancisco publishes "poo maps" highlighting pockets​ of ordure.

It's all so very progressive.

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-hepatitis-los-angeles-20170914-htmlstory.html

How the government almost killed the cocktail.

The bastards. Here:

http://reason.com/archives/2017/09/12/government-almost-killed-the-c

HL Mencken was born 137 years ago

AEI has a list of his best sayings here.

Hitting Things...Hard

So Hurricane Harvey landed on Houston with a terrible squelch, temporarily returning neighborhood after neighborhood to the swamp from whence they came. While this was going on I was home spending what seemed like an eternity with my paranoid schizophrenic 'refugee' barricaded in his room convinced that I was conspiring with persons unknown to...well, do unknown things to him. By the time he finally escaped my evil clutches (also known as 'when I drove him back to his homeless shelter when it became safe to do so') I was ready to hit something. Hard. Over and over again.

And Harvey obliged, wrecking something like 100,000 homes to one degree or another. Technically I only hit three of them, taking a crowbar to soggy walls and wrecked floors. It was quite cathartic. I did my hitting with friends from church. Like most everyone in Houston who wasn't a victim, we were doing what we could to help or if we couldn't really help, at least demonstrate that we gave a damn. The therapy I got from all the hitting was just an extra, probably not shared by very many others.

It was at my third house-hitting that I had a bit of an epiphany. There were two women there that I was friends with from church (or if not friends at least they never visibly blanched when I came their way). I could tell that this wasn't their usual line of work from their soft shoes that screamed 'nail wounds' and from the fact that during that entire day they didn't smash a single thing (they did the essential but IMHO less fun work of clearing up our smashing). But there they were, covered in dust and sweat, dodging flying boards and falling cabinets, the detritus of disaster. And inexplicably, there was joy - in doing hard work for people we would likely never see again for nothing but a thank you.

I noticed that their attitude was radically different than my schizophrenic friend's. Paranoid schizophrenia is a bit like cancer: it spreads in a person's mind until it consumes everything: every person is suspect, every event a portent, the whole world a threat. I realized that this is what terminal narcissism looks like....the total focus on self, so extreme that its victims can't even function. There is no joy there - nothing but terror and chaos. And I recognize that in my life: the times when I was most focused on myself were often miserable while when I chose (or was forced) to focus on things greater than myself and on others I was happier.

At this point you're probably thinking "that's what Jesus told us 2000 years ago, knucklehead", "Love your God with all your heart and soul and mind (aka: 'the Greater') and Love your neighbor as yourself' (aka 'the others')" and you would be right.

I think this overfocus on ourselves, this 'cultural narcissism' is what has been happening to all of us. We've become more and more focused on our private entertainments, on our own petty concerns and on our status as victims. And it is making us miserable.  Perhaps Harvey was sent to remind us of this central truth:

"Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will keep it."

Great 2018 political ad #2

Video of black masked and clad Antifa smashing windows, hurling urine and feces, stomping little old ladies, holding signs saying Fuck the Police and America is Racist.

Voiceover: And these Democrats say that we're the fascists......

What? You say I'm exaggerating? That this is a small fringe? That it doesn't have the support of the Democrat party? Well maybe you should have been saying that over the last year when these thugs were stomping your political rivals. To your (approving?) silence.

What is all this talk of fascism really about

Everyone who is anyone is panicked about resurgent fascism. To hear the chattering classes tell it, there's a Brownshirt under every bed and Trump is if not Hitler, then at least Mussolini. But Brendan O'Neill argues that what's really going on is the return of normal politics. And all this fascist talk? The screeches of elites who believed that all the "New World Order" bilge was actually true and guaranteed them power in some noveau version of a very ancien regime. As O'Neill puts it:

This, precisely, is what they mean when they say ‘fascism’. They mean you, me, ordinary people; people who have dared to say that they want to influence politics again following years of being frozen out. When they say fascism, they mean democracy.

Yes dear friends, you're the fascist bogeyman. So next time you run into a scribbler or apparatchik: say "boo". They might just soil their knickers.

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/what-fascism-is-and-isnt/19467#.WaVRINBOnqA

White Supremacism's Modern Roots

As Brendan O’Neil of Spiked recently  wrote on his Facebook page:

“You are a white man. Check your privilege. Stay in your lane. You will never understand black people’s lives or experiences. You’re all about whiteness, that’s how you’re conditioned.” — SJWs 

“I am a white man. What a privilege. I’m going to stay in my lane. I will never understand black people. I’m all about whiteness, it’s how I’m conditioned.” — White Nationalists

My Visitor Log tells the tale of China's Totalitarian Control

Most populous country in the world with hundreds of millions of internet users and not one of them has ever been allowed to browse my site.  The Chinese Gerontocrats are terrified of me. Losers.

Predictions for the new 'Socially Just' Identitarian Regime

So what happens as America becomes more racially and gender identity divided?

Public schools wane and private, parochial, charter, home and voucher schooling will grow.

Welfare benefits for the poor fall. Welfare benefits are highest in places with very homogenous populations and cultures - we care most for the welfare of people like us. They are noticeably smaller in most traditionally diverse locations. Newly diverse locations with high benefits like CA are busy bribing all the different racial groups demanding rewards and no doubt will radically truncate benefits as soon as they go bankrupt.

Affirmative action will get so complex and cause so much rage that it will die of its own irrationality. When there was one set of 'victims' and one set of 'oppressors' the process was easy to organize, manage and ultimately limit. But the more identities there are, the more finely graded levels of 'victim' and 'oppressor' that must be accounted for, the more chaos and conflict, the less support there will be for the whole idea. Which politicians and elites have always liked far more than the public anyway.

Finally, as different states evolve to different 'identity' cultures there will be more and more pressure to loosen the Union. How can people lacking our identity possibly govern us justly? It will also lead to balkanization within states and even metro areas.

Maybe we'll end up like Classical Greece: 1500 city states fearing, hating and warring against each other with 'Empires' like Athens or Sparta rising and falling with the tide of human affairs.

It's all so very Progressive.

The perfect political ad for 2018 and beyond

The destruction and desecration of historical icons from Joan d'Arc to Columbus to Lincoln to Robert E. Lee is creating a fabulous opening for Republicans.

Opening Shot:  A shot of the 215 year old monument to Columbus shattered by vandals.
Shot: Lincoln bust burnt. Joan d'Arc vandalized.

Voice Over: Voters want their leaders to be builders, to get things done. Yet Democrats only know how to destroy.

Shot: Masked black clad Antifa shattering windows, attacking unarmed people, setting things on fire.
Shot: Statues being torn down by black clad mobs.

VO: Americans don't want to pay the bill for Democrat destruction.

Closing Shot: What's next? Graphic of the Statue of Liberty being pulled down.

Liberalism is exhausted

And there is nothing to replace it but racial and gender identity. Oh and sex and drugs - lots of that.

In a world without  purpose it's a wonder more people aren't overdosing. Rod Dreher's piece is important to read. Hattip instapundit.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-storm-before-the-storm-weimar-america-liberalism/

"This is a massive, massive scandal"

Democrat IT staffers may have sold secrets to Pakistani and Russian intelligence. No wonder they've been harping on statues.

http://nypost.com/2017/08/19/it-staffers-may-have-compromised-sensitive-data-to-foreign-intelligence/

Seattle bans criminal background checks for rentals, Male, Black, Latino and Young Homelessness to soar

A classic example of shallow, thoughtless good intentions gone awry. There is copious evidence that denying landlords and employers information on candidates increases their reliance on the information that they have available: namely the race, age and gender of the candidate. The result is that races and genders with higher criminal propensities suffer MORE discrimination, not less because there is no way for the decision maker to differentiate between 'safe' and 'unsafe' so the more 'unsafe' group gets punished indiscriminately.

Progressivism is a science free cult.

From Reason, here.

Isn't it Ironic?

That the Democratic party feels compelled to destroy thousands of statues and monuments honoring Democrats that were erected by Democrats in what were then Democrat controlled jurisdictions?

A party that feels compelled to do that isn't a powerful party, it's a desperate party.

Last Trump for the Democrats?

I think Richard Fernandez hits the causal nail on the head.

When The State has to resort to masked storm troopers that pretend that they're anarchists to shut down unpopular fringe speech you know that they're losing. Because a Party of the State that doesn't have the confidence to ignore criticism from a group hated by 95% of the nation is in serious trouble.

And a Party of the State that does not control The State....is nothing. The smell of death surrounds it. Hence all the hysterical flailing.

For the longest time I couldn't figure out why Democrats were so upset by a crude loudmouth like Trump. Now, after dozens of riots and hundreds of fabricated news stories I think I know:

For Democrats he may truly represent The Last Trump.

And at the center of the web: A Clintonite

One question I had about the events at Charlottesville: Where were the police? In every other crazy hater march I've ever read about - right or left - the cops and Guard were in the middle doing their job" keeping the peace by keeping the various crazies from tearing each other up. But according to the ACLU, they were ordered to not do their job. And guess who was in charge: Former Clinton consigliere and uber loyalist Gov. Terry McAulliffe. Why am I not surprised?

The self refuting nature of Identity Politics

Good piece by Rod Dreher exploring the fundamental contradiction at the center of Social Justice Warrior ideology. Put simply:

First they (the 'woke' that is) hold that the different sexes, races and nationalities naturally have the same distribution of skills and preferences. And logically following from this assumption is the conclusion that deviation from proportional outcomes can therefore only be due to "hate" or structural bias.

At the same time the "Big Bad Woke" argue that the perspectives and experiences of different sexes and races are so unique and unavailable to other races and genders, that failure to include all of the various identities in an institution leads inevitably to Error and debilitating group think. So much so that a white author cannot possibly write about a black character.


But here's the rub: They both can't possibly be true.

And since they can't, the SJW are doomed to inevitable failure, discrediting and defeat. But as the Soviet Union (and Venezuela) showed: a fanatical ideology can do a lot of damage before reality burns through their will to believe. The 'woke' don't believe they are fighting for 'better' against 'worse'. They believe they are fighting for the True Good against Evil.

And True Believers who believe that are the most dangerous creatures on the face of the earth.

The Myth of Cosmopolitanism

This is a super piece by Ross Douthat in the NYT from last year. It articulates the experience that anyone from a truly diverse background experiences upon contact with the "Diverse, Sophisticated, Global Elite". Who are about as diverse as.....Sweden used to be before it's fearless and oh so diverse leaders started tearing the country apart with real diversity.  Beware: when an elitist speaks to you of diversity, they are really talking about conformity. As my Grandad might say: "They are so full of s**t that their ass drags the ground".

NOW that populist rebellions are taking Britain out of the European Union and the Republican Party out of contention for the presidency, perhaps we should speak no more of left and right, liberals and conservatives. From now on the great political battles will be fought between nationalists and internationalists, nativists and globalists. From now on the loyalties that matter will be narrowly tribal — Make America Great Again, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England — or multicultural and cosmopolitan.

Well, maybe. But describing the division this way has one great flaw. It gives the elite side of the debate (the side that does most of the describing) too much credit for being truly cosmopolitan.

Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one’s own. It takes its cue from a Roman playwright’s line that “nothing human is alien to me,” and goes outward ready to be transformed by what it finds.

The people who consider themselves “cosmopolitan” in today’s West, by contrast, are part of a meritocratic order that transforms difference into similarity, by plucking the best and brightest from everywhere and homogenizing them into the peculiar species that we call “global citizens.”


This species is racially diverse (within limits) and eager to assimilate the fun-seeming bits of foreign cultures — food, a touch of exotic spirituality. But no less than Brexit-voting Cornish villagers, our global citizens think and act as members of a tribe.


They have their own distinctive worldview (basically liberal Christianity without Christ), their own common educational experience, their own shared values and assumptions (social psychologists call these WEIRD — for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic), and of course their own outgroups(evangelicals, Little Englanders) to fear, pity and despise. And like any tribal cohort they seek comfort and familiarity: From London to Paris to New York, each Western “global city” (like each “global university”) is increasingly interchangeable, so that wherever the citizen of the world travels he already feels at home.

Indeed elite tribalism is actively encouraged by the technologies of globalization, the ease of travel and communication. Distance and separation force encounter and immersion, which is why the age of empire made cosmopolitans as well as chauvinists — sometimes out of the same people. (There is more genuine cosmopolitanism in Rudyard Kipling and T. E. Lawrence and Richard Francis Burton than in a hundred Davos sessions.)

It is still possible to disappear into someone else’s culture, to leave the global-citizen bubble behind. But in my experience the people who do are exceptional or eccentric or natural outsiders to begin with — like a young writer I knew who had traveled Africa and Asia more or less on foot for years, not for a book but just because, or the daughter of evangelical missionaries who grew up in South Asia and lived in Washington, D.C., as a way station before moving her own family to the Middle East. They are not the people who ascend to power, who become the insiders against whom populists revolt.

In my own case — to speak as an insider for a moment — my cosmopolitanism probably peaked when I was about 11 years old, when I was simultaneously attending tongues-speaking Pentecostalist worship services, playing Little League in a working-class neighborhood, eating alongside aging hippies in macrobiotic restaurants on weekends, all the while attending a liberal Episcopalian parochial school. (It’s a long story.)

Whereas once I began attending a global university, living in global cities, working and traveling and socializing with my fellow global citizens, my experience of genuine cultural difference became far more superficial.

Management 101: You can get a lot done when you know how to manage

Trump's delegation of authority to the decision makers in the field has led to much better results against ISIS and illegal immigration. Imagine that.

Lifetime legislators don't learn management skills, they learn manipulation skills.

Hattip Instapundit.com

A striking bloom

I spied a flower, a striking bloom
It shocked my soul and pierced my gloom.

But I can't keep it, nor make it mine.
Only love its grace, its beauty, its life.

Real Median Income Questions aka Texas: WTF?

The latest State Median Income numbers are out from the BLS, along with the state Cost of Living and Income Tax adjustments* that allow us to transform it into Real Median Income (RMI) and make an 'apples to apples' comparison between the various states to determine which states do the "best" for their average (aka: median) citizen. And it is critical that we take into account the variation in racial and ethnic mix of each state because different races and ethnicities possess differing average levels of human capital which is the raw material that generates personal income. It's quite obvious from racial/ethnic breakdowns that the more privileged races (European white, Asian) have an earning advantage over their less privileged (African American, Latino) neighbors. So if I tell you the racial/ethnic composition of a state it should help predict its relative prosperity - aka: Real Median Income.

I've plotted the 50 states by their Income Tax Adjusted RMI versus the proportion of their populations that are European White and Asian (aka 'privileged'). I've also made the circle size reflect population and mischievously colored the 'bubbles' according to whether they voted 'Trump' (Orange) or 'Clinton' (Blue). If you put your pointer over the chart it should get big enough to read. Or if you're on a smartphone, open the chart in another window and expand. Incidentally, some of the 'red' states are obscured by all the other states. The raw data I used to plot the chart is at the bottom along with notes on where I got the data and my methodology*.

So what does this tell us?

• First of all Hawaii is really poor, which I guess shouldn't surprise anyone, given its remote geography and politics that are hostile towards commerce.
• There are geographical "clumps" for Trump Southern and Midwestern states but no geographical clumping for blue states - unless  you consider upper New England to be a (particularly poverty stricken) clump.
• 14 of the 19 'blue' states have RMIs below the national average  (about $33, 415 - not exactly because this is a weighted mean of the state medians, not an overall US median. But this number is certainly within 1% of actual) while only 6 of the 31 'red' states do.  I tried a chart that broke out 'purple' swing states but it made the remaining 'blue' states look so much worse (three of the 5 above average "blue" states are in fact 'swing' or 'purple' states while only MI falls out of the top ten 'red' state ranks) and didn't affect the red state outcome much so I gave up on it.
• If you look at the top performing "blue" states  you see a bunch of oddities: they're either purple 'swing' states that recently were red:VA and CO, a bankrupt living on past glory: IL, a state justly recognized for its combination of good government and homogeneity but that gave a majority of its votes to "red" Presidential candidates in 2016: MN and finally, WA: a 'blue' state with a 'red' fiscal policy: its lack of an income tax is the single key differentiator with next door 'poverty champ' Oregon who has no sales tax but far and away the highest income tax on the median earner of any state in the Union.
• Indeed, lest you think this is all all 'blue' vs. 'red', WA and OR illustrate the immense chasm between state median incomes and therefore state economic policy. WA is a not very diverse (in the real sense) place that has the second highest RMI in the land, while OR, with the same geography and demographics is the poorest state in the continental US. Crossing a bridge gets you from richest to poorest. Wonder what the difference is? One might say "well WA has Microsoft and Amazon and Oregon doesn't" but that just begs the question: Oregon is a beautiful state with high earning demographics smack dab between the two greatest centers of wealth generation in the history of the world and it's scraping the bottom of the barrel. What gives?
• There's a major difference in the concentrations of Blue and Red populations. The blue states with almost half of all blue state population have RMI's in the bottom quintile, while virtually no red staters are stuck in such a low income position.  

• There is a correlation between the proportion of 'privileged' ethnicities in a state and RMI...for Clinton States, but not for Trump states. Unless you take away TX. Then the relationship returns - albeit it's a much weaker one (see above for my eyeballed lines). 

• Then there are the "Big Four": First of all FL is a bit of an anomaly because its huge number of retirees distort the data downward somewhat but it still falls in the range of other big Red southern states. But if you compare the other three: CA and NY are among the poorest states in RMI terms in the nation while TX, with the least advantaged ethnic mix save New Mexico is among the very richest. 
• So to put it succinctly:  What the Heck (I'm sorry but my mom might read this), Texas?  How in the hell does a polity founded by slavers, with a constitution written by libertarians and (we are told continually by the 'elite' media) run by yahoos, cretins and (until recently) Rick Perry (but I repeat myself) deliver a so much higher standard of living for regular people?

Texas is an enormous challenge to the racialist and statist narrative. Indeed, this entire chart is. Which is why it took a pro consumer website* economist to raise the issue. Academic economists are heavily on the left at least socially if not economically and analyses that present their valhallas in a bad light particularly when compared to the  "Trump Loving" world are "not done" or at least not published in the hallowed ivy halls of academe. Doesn't comport with the 'narrative'.

And it's not oil: over six years before this data was collected, the price of natural gas fell to (and has largely stayed at) the lowest levels in history and four years after that, oil prices fell from upwards of $120 to a little over $40 a barrel. In other words, the Texas data were gathered in the midst of one of the most catastrophic oil and gas depressions in history. While NY and CA's dominant industries were in the middle of major booms.

So once again:  all together now:  "What the (Heck), Texas?"

 Here's the raw data in a form that can be copied and pasted into a spreadsheet so that you can check my math:

State	Real Median Income	Federal BLS Cost of Living Index 2016	Federal BLS Nominal Median Income (Individual) 2016	Median Income Tax Paid 2016	2017 Estimated Pop. Census  Bureau
WY	$41,250	92.8	$38,280	$0	589,713
WA	$39,802	106	$42,190	$0	7,384,721
VA	$38,351	94.5	$38,180	$1,938	8,492,783
TX	$37,311	92.6	$34,550	$0	28,449,186
ND	$37,296	101.2	$38,170	$427	790,701
IL	$37,223	96.5	$37,320	$1,400	12,815,607
MI	$37,166	91.2	$35,400	$1,505	9,935,116
OH	$37,080	92.5	$35,030	$731	11,646,273
CO	$36,314	101.9	$38,800	$1,796	5,658,546
IN	$36,164	88	$32,910	$1,086	6,663,280
MN	$36,017	101.5	$38,870	$2,312	5,554,532
KS	$35,682	90.9	$33,700	$1,265	2,929,909
TN	$35,238	90.3	$31,820	$0	6,705,339
NE	$35,075	92.3	$33,840	$1,465	1,922,610
DE	$35,060	102.8	$37,750	$1,709	965,866
UT	$34,946	92.4	$33,990	$1,700	3,098,761
AK	$34,772	133.5	$46,420	$0	741,204
IA	$34,739	92	$33,650	$1,690	3,152,735
OK	$34,556	89.7	$32,430	$1,433	3,974,794
MO	$34,538	91.5	$33,380	$1,778	6,123,362
GA	$34,476	91.7	$33,430	$1,816	10,450,316
AZ	$34,179	98.8	$34,680	$911	7,026,629
KY	$34,054	90	$32,340	$1,692	4,450,042
PA	$34,020	103	$36,150	$1,110	12,819,975
WI	$33,853	98.1	$35,110	$1,901	5,795,147
ID	$33,734	88.2	$31,860	$2,107	1,695,178
AL	$33,273	90.2	$31,550	$1,538	4,884,115
MS	$33,174	83.5	$29,000	$1,300	2,990,113
MA	$33,171	130.4	$45,580	$2,325	6,873,018
LA	$33,138	93.4	$31,980	$1,029	4,714,192
MD	$32,968	121.1	$41,860	$1,936	6,068,511
NC	$32,564	95.8	$33,100	$1,903	10,247,632
NJ	$32,269	125.6	$41,320	$790	8,996,351
CT	$31,744	131.8	$43,830	$1,992	3,583,134
FL	$31,652	100.5	$31,810	$0	21,002,678
NV	$31,643	106.5	$33,700	$0	2,995,973
NH	$31,540	118.2	$37,280	$0	1,335,832
NM	$31,016	100	$32,320	$1,304	2,084,193
AR	$30,767	91.4	$29,420	$1,299	3,000,942
RI	$30,483	123.3	$39,050	$1,464	1,059,080
SC	$30,345	97.5	$31,280	$1,693	5,030,118
SD	$30,029	102.5	$30,780	$0	868,799
MT	$29,522	102.7	$31,970	$1,651	1,052,343
NY	$28,948	135.6	$41,600	$2,346	19,889,657
VT	$28,857	123.8	$37,040	$1,315	624,592
CA	$28,651	134.3	$39,830	$1,352	39,849,872
ME	$28,393	114.7	$34,710	$2,143	1,327,472
WV	$28,066	103.7	$30,240	$1,136	1,834,882
OR	$26,238	129.5	$37,080	$3,102	4,144,527
HI	$21,511	168.6	$38,750	$2,483	1,454,295
USA	$33,415				325,744,646

*Bankrate - a website that advises consumers on the best mortgages and other financing made another crucial adjustment that had been skewing these comparisons in the past:  Taxes.  All property and excise taxes are already reflected in the cost of living calculations but the impact of income taxes was being left out. At the extreme it means that that a state like Oregon which has no general sales tax would have its income inaccurately inflated relative to Washington which has no income tax. The population data come from the Census Bureau, the COLA adjustments come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics as do the Nominal Median Income estimates. The Tax Institute provided the Median Income Taxes paid.

We are in the middle of the 6th great explosion of species, not extinction

Author Chris Thomas calls it the 'sixth Genesis'. It turns out that man's effect on nature has been to radically increase local diversity and thereby create the conditions for rapid evolution and speciation.  Matt Ridley summarizes his main point:

At a local scale diversity has increased a lot: “The number of species living in virtually every country or island has already increased during the period of human influence, and numbers continue to increase.” The fauna and flora of Britain are much richer today than 10,000 years ago as a result of farming, towns, gardening, climate change and the deliberate introduction of exotic species. Thomas finds the same to be true in tropical forests in Cameroon, Costa Rica and Brazil: the net effect of some human disturbance can be more biodiversity.

You can resent some of the exotic species (I do) but you should pause to recognise that in terms of the functioning of ecosystems, there has been mostly improvement. In an extreme case, Ascension Island was a barren volcanic rock with a few ferns on its summit. It is now a semi-green island capturing more moisture from the wind, thanks to a deliberate effort, begun by Charles Darwin, to enrich its ecosystem.

Professor Thomas, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist from York University, has produced an immensely significant book. It is fluently written, carefully thought through, ruthlessly argued, neatly illustrated with case studies — and shockingly contrarian. He shows the upside for wildlife in the Anthropocene. He does not deny that human beings also cause problems for wildlife, far from it, but he does think we have almost entirely overlooked the gains for wildlife that our presence is also creating.

I have for some time been thinking that while human beings have caused many species extinctions, they must also be causing many speciations. I have not quite had the courage to say so, for fear of being accused by the green thought police of going too far. While watching sparrows on a recent trip to Hawaii, it occurred to me that, though they were little different from the ones I see in London, they must, through isolation, be on the way to becoming a new species of sparrow. Just as a flock of Asian rosefinches shipwrecked on one of the Hawaiian islands six million years ago have turned into scores of species of honeycreeper, half of which are now sadly extinct.

Evolution is driven by new and novel environmental pressures that species adapt to and that drive new species fitting into new environments. That's Humanity in a nutshell. Every ecosystem in the world is more diverse than before man came. In addition man's production of CO2 has generated far more biomass than existed before we came along. Man has had both good and bad affects on the environment and we should never stop trying to mitigate the bad ones but Humanity is part of the environment and Chris Thomas argues that net-net our impact has been to drive a sixth Great Genesis - an explosion of diversity, new species, new life.

It's turning out to be a "good gig".

Intersectionality vs. Crossectionality

This just in: mainstream Muslim groups in moderate Muslim Malaysia and Indonesia are calling for a boycott of Starbucks because of its support for LGBTQ issues. I predict this is going to pick up steam as savvy muslim marketers and the politicians they support begin targeting more and more "progressive" Western brands in Muslim countries as well as the west.

And it makes "intersectionality" - which is the meticulous cataloging of victimhood status (does a black male Muslim transgender from Somalia have superior "V" - essence of victimology - than a paraplegic lesbian Asian from Hoboken?) tricky even before you start having 2 billion of the world's "victims" start shouting that half of the world's "victims" need to shut up and get back in their sacks and damn sure before said 2 billion of the "oppressed" start stringing up the 200 million or so LGBTQs. Not to mention all of the disabled that Muslim Shariah enforcement creates.

But 2 billion Muslim "victims" wildly outnumbers 200 hundred million LGBTQ "victims" and unlike LGBTQs boy do they reproduce. So sorry, LGBTQ community, the iron logic of demography combined with the lunacy of SJW "wokeness" eventually says back in the closet.

No, deeper. Way back in the closet. Behind the mothballs. See those bags? You lesbians get in them. Except for your hands and feet. We're serious. Do it. Now. Don't make me come in there with my scimitar....

We are soooo "woked".

The 'Deep and Dem" State is leaking like a sieve

Kimberly Stassel of the WSJ documents the recklessness of dozens of highly placed Federal officials who are now routinely committing felonies, betraying our allies and exposing our secrets to our enemies just to pursue their vindictive agenda.  As Ms. Stassel says about the leak crime wave:

The Trump leaks show the sweeping nature of this enterprise, coming as they have from “U.S. officials,” “former U.S. officials,” “senior U.S. officials,” “intelligence officials,” “national security officials,” “Justice Department officials,” “defense officials” and “law-enforcement officials.” One story cited more than two dozen anonymous sources. Alarmingly, the titles, and the nature of the information disclosed, indicate that many leaks are coming directly from the U.S. intelligence community.

What’s been disclosed? The contents of wiretapped information. The names of individuals the U.S. monitors, and where they are located. The communications channels used to monitor targets. Which agencies are monitoring. Intelligence intercepts. FBI interviews. Grand jury subpoenas. Secret surveillance-court details. Internal discussions. Military operations intelligence. The contents of the president’s calls with foreign leaders.

The analysis lays out the real and the assumed fallout. One clear example is the May stories hyperventilating that Mr. Trump shared classified intelligence with the Russians. Subsequent leaks suggested Israel provided the intelligence, about Islamic State. This revelation caused a diplomatic incident, and reportedly a change in the way Israel shares with the U.S. Even former Obama CIA Director John Brennan called the leak “appalling.”

How many foreign allies are pulling back? How many will work with a U.S. government that has disclosed military plans, weapons systems and cybersecurity tactics? What have our enemies learned? One March story divulged sensitive FBI data on U.S. border vulnerabilities, in hopes of undercutting Mr. Trump’s travel order.

I have long held that the Federal Government is too large, too expensive and too insulated from reality. To those negatives I now add rampant disloyalty and unprofessionalism.

We need to Break it Up, Break it All Up.

Hammock Dream

In a hammock side by side,
Head to toe, toe to head
Watching you watching me.
Speaking of hopes, dreams, you.

Touching foot, ankle, calf.
Your soft, sheathed strength beneath my hand.
You ask a question. I smile: "no".

It doesn't matter where we go.

Is Silicon Valley supporting the $15 Minwage from compassion or self interest?

The most enthusiastic implementers of a 'far above market' (aka $15 minimum wage) have been the centers of high tech and finance, principally in California, Washington State and New York. And they've done so in the face of negative outcomes and near unanimous opposition from the Economics profession.

Why? Could it be that these governments are simply acting in their dominant industry's interests? Because ultra high minimum wages are clearly driving massive adoption of robotics and automation across low wage industries.

Have the Tech Oligarchs and their Wall Street Investors simply decided to target a chunk of lower income America's earnings as a new growth area? And are the $15 laws that they pass at home and promote across the country just strategies designed to accelerate their paydays?

Perhaps the logic is that the profits from automating away a chunk of the working poor will far exceed the excess taxes they will have to pay to provide those people with government support. Particularly when you remember that Tech companies and their Wall Street investors pay virtually no income taxes. And when you remember that Silicon Valley are big supporters of a Federally provided minimum income.

And since they don't necessarily subscribe to the traditional American morality that  recognizes the poor's need for work and purpose, do they just look upon them as 'poorly adapted' members of the species that must be cared for?

I don't know. Because absent a big payday for the power elite in these communities it doesn't seem to be rational to have public policy accelerate the idling of a solid chunk of the industrious poor. Or to accelerate the eradication of the first rungs on the career ladder for many Americans. It also runs in direct contradiction to the Oligarch's promotion of open borders if all they are going to do is automate away the jobs they are luring people here for.

Much of this will happen anyway but why speed up the chaos and the pain that targets the least of us? Why drive the price of their labor so high that businesses are forced to get rid of them in large numbers now?  It seems so self serving and narcissistic of the Oligarchs.  And where are the politicians in these communities who are supposed to be standing up for the 'little' guys and against powerful interests?

Is it (to paraphrase the Who): Meet the New Robber Barons, just like the Old Robber Barons?

Let's go out dancing tonite

You're a woman that everyone should know in this place.
Know that your beauty goes way deeper than just your face.
Everyone looks at you and asks what you'll do.
But they don't know you the way I do.
No they don't know you the way I do.

Cause you don't know what you'll do and that's alright.
no you don't know what  you'll do and that's alright.
Everyone thinks they know you but they don't have a clue,
so baby let's go out dancing tonight.
Oh baby let's go out dancing tonight.

I'm the kind of man that don't make sense today,
The kind your head tells you stay away.
Everybody looks at me and knows that I'm not for you
But they don't know me the way you do.


Cause I don't know what I'll do and that's OK,
no I don't know what I'll do and that's OK.
Everybody thinks they know me but they don't have a clue,
so baby let's go out dancing tonight.

Everyone says that you can't change how you feel
that you have to play the cards in the deal.
Well they don't know you and they don't know me,
hell, we don't even know what we'll be.

It may be love but it may not be,
yes it may be love but it may not be.
Everyone thinks they know what we'll do but they have no clue,
so baby lets go out dancing tonight.

But if you don't want to play then get up and walk away.
We'll leave the cards face down and go our separate ways
Remembering what this felt like,
what it meant to be this way.

But I'll always miss you and that's OK,
yeah I'll always miss you and that's OK.
'cause no one knows how it felt to be with you this way.
And I'll always remember when we went out dancing that day.

"People Will Die!" Fatuity

Remy, Reason's resident ham has a great mockery of the current Democrat 'people will die' meme regarding, well anything that anyone wants to do that will cost any Democrat party stalwart anything. It's so childish. Really funny.

"We're making Serfs for Life"

John Cochrane, formerly of Chicago, has linked to an essay by Ed Glaeser called The War on Work and How to End it. John points out that all of the subsidies and benefits that are provided to the poor constitute a high barrier to returning to work. As Cochrane put it:

More deeply, our government is quickly creating a legal class system based on income. You are a "low income person," for life, apparently, much as you once were a serf, tied to place, occupation and status. No. In America "income" should be, as it is, a temporary part of your life, low at times of misfortune, high at times of good fortune, and always beckoning. We are not a class society, but we are fast creating one by legislation.

That's the problem with the State:  governments define people by their 'status' and the more fine gradations of 'status' that the government invents, the more castes that are created. It's the State as God, handing out its largesse based upon people's status as victim rather than holiness. But it has the same pernicious, enervating impact as any feudal or caste system.

How the Deep State destroys and corrupts

I recently read this piece by former AG Michael Mukasey on the legal limits of the increasingly kafka-esque Robert Mueller 'Russian Interference' probe. You know, the one that has no crime at the center, which has 15 aggressively leaking Democrat party lawyers and a full time publicist conducting what is in effect a counter-intelligence investigation of Russian espionage activities. Oh and a thinly veiled anti-Trump witch hunt to find someone, anyone who will deal dirt, any dirt, whether true or not on the President.  Which tells me that the Russian 'black op' to screw with the legitimacy of our elections has succeeded.

But I'm not here to talk about the stupidity of the Trumpies (although to get to this pass they are without a doubt sloppy and stupid) or even the self righteous power hunger of DC lawyers (although they make a Gorgon look abstemious). I'm here to talk about a paragraph in Mukasey's column that records a milestone for the Federal State's brutal corruption of an entire industry:

One of Mr. Mueller’s early hires among the dozen-plus lawyers already aboard has a troubling history with the word “corruptly.” Andrew Weissmann led the Enron prosecution team that pressed an aggressive interpretation of “corruptly,” which permitted a conviction even absent the kind of guilty knowledge the law normally associates with criminal charges. As a result, the accounting firm Arthur Andersen was convicted. By the time the conviction was reversed on appeal to the Supreme Court in 2005—in large part due to the erroneous application of “corruptly” in the statute at issue—Arthur Andersen had already ceased operation.

By the time 'justice' was done Arthur Andersen had collapsed into Bankruptcy  based upon conviction of what was in effect a 'crimeless' crime. Thousands of AA partners had their life savings wiped out and upwards of 100,000 men and women lost their jobs overnight. For not committing a crime but for providing services to a company that did.

This example of catastrophic and capricious federal brutality has had quite an effect on the remaining 4 major accounting firms. First, it allowed them to raise their rates and per profitability on their commodity compliance business. By my simple estimates per partner profits doubled in the decade after the AA travesty. Second, it turned nominally conservative institutions that operated somewhat independently of the Federal State into one of its arms -  watching their competitor and its owners be destroyed for not committing a crime put the fear of God into the rest of the firms, causing them to dump whole lines of business at firesale prices.

One interesting personal anecdote illustrates this: I was a PwC partner in St. Louis and after I left the firm I went to the first "Tea Party" Tax Day protest held in Downtown St. Louis on April 15. I parked in the Firm's parking garage and of the 30 or so St. Louis Partners that parked in the Partner lot, there was not a single car. On Tax Day. This was unprecedented. They apparently were so frightened of being associated with the enemies of the Federal State that they made sure none of them were even at work that day.

Which is a problem. We rely on non Federal institutions to be one of the checks on the Federal State but more and more institutions have been deeply corrupted  - either through massive dependence on Federal money (the states, cities, universities, large charities) or through fear that the Feds can destroy them with an absent minded flick of the switch (Banks, Accounting Firms, Federal Contractors, Telecommunications providers, Healthcare companies, broadcast media companies. 

And I believe this domination by a largely faceless but immensely powerful bureaucracy is killing the nation. Which is why I argue that we must:

Break it up, break it all up.