At one minute fifty seconds in this you tube video, a man carrying a burning molotov cocktail rushes up to police. They don’t react. He hurls it onto the ground, not at them, but right in front of himself. There is a huge spectacular whoosh as burning petrol sprays everywhere. They react only slightly. He runs away. They don’t chase him. They act as if they knew in advance that …
Left political singularity
The French Red Terror, the Soviet Great Terror, the Cambodian autogenocide, and many others were all examples of what I call left political singularities. Left wing repression tends to make things lefter, which tends to worsen left wing repression, which makes things even lefter, which …  The process only stops when the latest despot starts to realize he is not left enough, he is being outflanked on the left, is …
Fun hate fact about the bell curve
Today’s hate fact is hyperexponential decay. The normal survival function (the number of cases in a normal distribution that are more than x, one minus the cumulative distribution) approaches zero as x increases hyperexponentially, which is to say, very fast. This often makes it possible, under many common circumstances, to draw conclusions about individual cases, to infer a particular person’s character and or ability from his race or sex, and …
Government hires protestors to demand more government
Powerline found an interesting job advertisement in Craigslist: Under the job category “new york craigslist > brooklyn > jobs > government jobsâ€, people looking for a government job are invited to: “ FIGHT TO HOLD WALL STREET ACCOUNTABLE NOW! MAKE A DIFFERENCE! GET PAID!†I knew they were getting paid to protest, but until now there was some deniability – students were being turned out to protest by their professors, employees …
The cause of the decline
Lately there as been a lot of concern about the increasingly visible decline of the west, notably Peter Thiel on “The End of the Futureâ€:
Short summary of “Fast and Furiousâ€
Many blogs have covered all this for a long time, in great depth, among them Human Events. I am not going to do so, but I need to mention such an important event, if only for my own records:
The Great Recession
Pinker on violence
Pinker argues that there has over time, been a great decline in violence, mistaking progressivism for progress. “The better angels of our natureâ€
Herman Cain wrote his own book
Often when a politician campaigns for an important post, he promotes a book about his life. And almost always that book is ghost written. I compared the partial transcripts of his interview with O’Donnell, with an extract from the book discussed by O’Donnell. They are similar in style. Likely the book was edited by a white editor, because most English language books are edited by a white editor, but if …
Progressives are not commies.
Commies propose the government run everything by a central plan. Progressives propose the government run everything with no plan at all. Commies believe that underdevelopment is a sin committed by wealthy capitalists against poor people, and propose to fix this by commanding stuff to be developed. Progressives believe that development is a sin committed by wealthy capitalists against Gaea and the trees, and propose to fix this by prohibiting stuff …