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 a man was going to come rushing at them and …
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 going to be overthrown by those even lefter than himself, …
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 to infer a particular individual’s race or sex from his …
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 of government unions were being turned out to protest by …
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 so that editor did not do enough editing to change …
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 from being developed. Commies believe in democracy, and indeed believe …