Glenn Reynolds suspects that this story will confirm some PUA stereotypes settled pattern recognition.

I used hang with a guy who would go to Saskatchewan and sell drugs all the time. He was ballin’. He made tons of money. On our first date, he spent well over a G. He was just throwing it out like it was nothing. He was buying me anything I wanted. We rode around in a limo… It was crazy. We would go out to all these fancy-ass restaurants and all the white people would stare at us like, “Who let these hood rats in?” That was fun. He’s never really in town though, so I only get to see him a few times a year. I think if I ever decide to just settle down and be a housewife, I’ll marry him.

There’s not much in the story for religious traditionalists to latch onto with any sense of consolation. Still, as far as genetic selection for entrepreneurial traits is concerned, it has to be possible to do worse.

ADDED: Another sex psychology story (also via). If you think about the archaic genetics of warfare the answer to the question is obvious. For males losing matters absolutely. For females, not so much.

In the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer notes:

It doesn’t take a genius to see what happens when the entitlement state outgrows the economy upon which it rests. The time of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, the rest of insolvent social-democratic Europe — and now Detroit — is the time for conservatives to raise the banner of Stein’s Law and yell, “Stop.” You can kick the can down the road, but at some point it disappears over a cliff.

Yes, yes, yes … but. Despite its perfect common sense, the monotony of this message is becoming utterly unbearable. The end isn’t arriving tomorrow. This dreary horror show could last for decades. How many roughly-identical, absolutely obvious, sensible Op Ed columns is it possible to endure? (I’m already way into overtime.)

Continue Reading

Sean Thomas at The Telegraph:

From The Sopranos and The West Wing (the first great TV series of the new era) the Americans went on to make The Wire, Breaking Bad, House, Dexter, Grays, Walking Dead, Battlestar, Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, etc etc etc; then the revolution spread to Scandinavia, with the Killing (a stupendously brilliant murder drama), Borgen, The Bridge; now the French are in on the act, with Spiral and The Returned, which you may be watching right now. […] It is, as I say, a cultural revolution: with precedents. In the way that TV drama is taking over from movies, as the most important arena of audiovisual art, it reminds me of the way the novel replaced the poem, as the primary literary form in the mid 19th century.

In broad outline, this thesis strikes me as irresistible. (I’d add Deadwood.)

Walter Russell Mead sinks to musty exhortation:

Time and money are running out before economic conditions for ordinary Egyptians lurch even further downward. Egypt’s new, government absolutely must find some way to restore stability and rebuild confidence, or things will get much, much uglier.

What’s stopping Detroit from becoming a new Hong Kong? asks James Pethokoukis. After all “Out of options, it might just make the China choice.”

From the appallingly realism-afflicted comments thread that follows:

If anyone has found difficulties reaching this blog, it’s possible that inefficient search terms are to blame. From the WordPress Dashboard, I’ve been assured that these search paths all have a record of success:

domestic robotician
racism blog
nick land goes insane
nick land date died when?
h.l. mencken heaving deadf cats in the cathderal
14 vector shot red dawn mood and sex stimulator directions
how all organisms are buckets of anachronisms
one click chicks spanking
free nude picture tubes of saddam hussein

(Some loyal commentators can take their share of credit for our emerging definition within the Planetary Cybermind.)

Some initial thoughts on Greer posted over at Urban Future. As usual, I don’t quite get to first base.

[There’s one technical point where feedback would be especially welcome – either here or there – is the UF2.0 comments system beyond hope, and in need of replacement? Or is it just a matter of catalyzing discussion, through more stimulation?]

‘Smart government‘ doesn’t even need a sarc. tag.

That’s why we’ll see no future Marinettis (in the West, at least).

Ron Unz writing at his own blog:

The more conspiratorially-minded racialists, bitterly hostile to immigration, sometimes speculate that there is a diabolical plot by our ruling power structure to “race-replace” America’s traditional white population.  Perhaps a hidden motive along these lines does indeed help explain some support for heavy immigration, but I suspect that the race being targeted for replacement is not the white one.

(via, of course)

Well-argued, and bolstered by statistics, this article is going to turn some heads around.

Why do some (awkward) libertarians sympathize with the Confederacy? Asks David Bernstein at The Volokh Conspiracy. This is probably as reasonable as mainstream libertarianism is ever going to get on the lost cause, but it still manages to muddy an intrinsically pellucid point.

Even those libertarians who do adopt a Rothbardian/Chomskyite view of foreign policy, or who for any other reason beyond racism wish the Union would have let the Confederacy secede peacefully, are making a mistake in defending the Confederacy–the enemy of one’s enemy isn’t necessarily a friend. But I just wanted to point out that I think a significant amount of libertarian sympathy for the Confederacy in the circles where it exists is really a product of intense distaste for the U.S. government and its post-Civil War record [along with, as a commenter notes, a general sympathy for the right of secession] rather than a considered view of the Confederacy’s own record.

Setting aside the Chomsky distraction, there’s an almost painful struggle to be fair going on here — but then the brackets ruin everything. Secession is the key, irrespective of the course taken by the Union, because the Union itself only exists due to a successful war of secession. If the USA was legitimately born out of war of independence, then it was illegitimately perpetuated by the suppression of the subsequent war of independence which would have divided it. Placing the onus on libertarian confederates to explain themselves — or to have an explanation advanced on their behalf — gets the order of logical obligation completely upside down.

Of course, the Articles of Confederation preceded the American Constitution. Confederation was  not impudently demanded in the mid-19th century, but stripped away by an emergent central power in the late-18th century. In combination, these assaults on decentralized government have rendered American political history almost entirely opaque to itself. Confederation is the primordial expression of American independence.

Yet, from a practical point of view, none of this really matters, because America’s racial nightmare drowns everything out, binding dreams of redemption so intimately to concentrated power that freedom is reduced to ever-more-marginalized crimethink. Under these circumstances, the pretense of reason seems merely absurd.