Lot 20, De Beers, a Brass and Diamond Hourglass Timer, containing 2000 diamonds weighing roughly 36 Carats, Christie’s “Elements of Style Auction,” Shanghai, “24 October 2015

Fortune reports that Communist China now has more billionaires than the United States does.

Even with concerns over its economy, China can now claim to have surpassed the U.S. in one wealth indicator: the number of billionaires within its borders.

A survey conducted by The Hurun Report says China now has 596 billionaires, surpassing the U.S. tally for the first time (the U.S. has 537 billionaires, according to the report). If 119 billionaires from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macao are added, Greater China owns 715 billionaires in the “Hurun Global Rich List.”

Christie’s, as you see (above) now holds auctions of preposterously expensive timepieces in Shanghai.

In the New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz looks at Henry David Thoreau through the lenses of contemporary leftist community of fashion ideology, and does not like what she sees. Thoreau may have been keen on Abolition, but he is not a leftist radical at all. He is a shameless individualist, and if you look closely enough, eeek! he is liable to remind you of Ayn Rand.

The real Thoreau was, in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world. From that inward fixation flowed a social and political vision that is deeply unsettling. It is true that Thoreau was an excellent naturalist and an eloquent and prescient voice for the preservation of wild places. But “Walden” is less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people. …

Thoreau went to Walden, he tells us, “to learn what are the gross necessaries of life”: whatever is so essential to survival “that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it.” Put differently, he wanted to try what we would today call subsistence living, a condition attractive chiefly to those not obliged to endure it. It attracted Thoreau because he “wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.” Tucked into that sentence is a strange distinction; apparently, some of the things we experience while alive count as life while others do not. In “Walden,” Thoreau made it his business to distinguish between them.

As it turns out, very little counted as life for Thoreau. Food, drink, friends, family, community, tradition, most work, most education, most conversation: all this he dismissed as outside the real business of living. Although Thoreau also found no place in life for organized religion, the criteria by which he drew such distinctions were, at base, religious. A dualist all the way down, he divided himself into soul and body, and never could accept the latter. “I love any other piece of nature, almost, better,” he confided to his journal. The physical realities of being human appalled him. “The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this slimy, beastly life, eating and drinking,” he wrote in “Walden.” Only by denying such appetites could he feel that he was tending adequately to his soul.

“Walden,” in consequence, is not a paean to living simply; it is a paean to living purely, with all the moral judgment that the word implies. In its first chapter, “Economy,” Thoreau lays out a program of abstinence so thoroughgoing as to make the Dalai Lama look like a Kardashian. (That chapter must be one of the highest barriers to entry in the Western canon: dry, sententious, condescending, more than eighty pages long.) Thoreau, who never wed, regarded “sensuality” as a dangerous contaminant, by which we “stain and pollute one another.” He did not smoke and avoided eating meat. He shunned alcohol, although with scarcely more horror than he shunned every beverage except water: “Think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them!” Such temptations, along with the dangerous intoxicant that is music, had, he felt, caused the fall of Greece and Rome.

I cannot idolize anyone who opposes coffee. …

Unsurprisingly, this thoroughgoing misanthrope did not care to help other people. “I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic enterprises,” Thoreau wrote in “Walden.” He had “tried it fairly” and was “satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.” Nor did spontaneous generosity: “I require of a visitor that he be not actually starving, though he may have the very best appetite in the world, however he got it. Objects of charity are not guests.” In what is by now a grand American tradition, Thoreau justified his own parsimony by impugning the needy. “Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it.” Thinking of that state of affairs, Thoreau writes, “I began to pity myself, and I saw that it would be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole slop-shop on him.”

The poor, the rich, his neighbors, his admirers, strangers: Thoreau’s antipathy toward humanity even encompassed the very idea of civilization. In his journals, he laments the archeological wealth of Great Britain and gives thanks that in New England “we have not to lay the foundation of our houses in the ashes of a former civilization.” That is patently untrue, but it is also telling: for Thoreau, civilization was a contaminant. “Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries,” he wrote in “Walden.” “The soil is blanched and accursed there.” Seen by these lights, Thoreau’s retreat at Walden was a desperate compromise. What he really wanted was to be Adam, before Eve—to be the first human, unsullied, utterly alone in his Eden. …

Thoreau never understood that life itself is not consistent—that what worked for a well-off Harvard-educated man without dependents or obligations might not make an ideal universal code.) Those failings are ethical and intellectual, but they are also political. To reject all certainties but one’s own is the behavior of a zealot; to issue contradictory decrees based on private whim is that of a despot.

This is not the stuff of a democratic hero. Nor were Thoreau’s actual politics, which were libertarian verging on anarchist. Like today’s preppers, he valued self-sufficiency for reasons that were simultaneously self-aggrandizing and suspicious: he did not believe that he needed anything from other people, and he did not trust other people to provide it. “That government is best which governs least,” Jefferson supposedly said. Thoreau, revising him, wrote, “That government is best which governs not at all.”

Yet for a man who believed in governance solely by conscience, his own was frighteningly narrow. Thoreau had no understanding whatsoever of poverty and consistently romanticized it. (“Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.”) His moral clarity about abolition stemmed less from compassion or a commitment to equality than from the fact that slavery so blatantly violated his belief in self-governance. Indeed, when abolition was pitted against rugged individualism, the latter proved his higher priority. “I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say,” he writes in “Walden,” “as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.” …

Although Thoreau is often regarded as a kind of cross between Emerson, John Muir, and William Lloyd Garrison, the man who emerges in “Walden” is far closer in spirit to Ayn Rand: suspicious of government, fanatical about individualism, egotistical, élitist, convinced that other people lead pathetic lives yet categorically opposed to helping them. It is not despite but because of these qualities that Thoreau makes such a convenient national hero. …

[T]he mature position, and the one at the heart of the American democracy, seeks a balance between the individual and the society. Thoreau lived out that complicated balance; the pity is that he forsook it, together with all fellow-feeling, in “Walden.” And yet we made a classic of the book, and a moral paragon of its author—a man whose deepest desire and signature act was to turn his back on the rest of us.

Read the whole thing.

Duffleblog offers some comfort to the democrat bed-wetting liberal community.

LAS VEGAS, Nevada — Just hours after the Democratic Presidential debate was broadcast on CNN, Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) made a solemn vow to not kill again if elected President, sources confirmed.

Webb, a former Marine officer and Secretary of the Navy, admitted his comments during the debate about the enemy who wounded him with a grenade not being around to tell about it were maybe “a bit too real” for the liberal crowd, close associates of Webb told reporters.

Though Webb cautioned during a post-debate interview from his freshly-dug two-man fighting position that he had taken a man’s life and wasn’t afraid to do it again.

The 69-year-old tried to further explain his comments that drew shock during the debate: “Look, I know what it looks like when a .45 slug takes a man’s brain and paints a Picasso with it,” he said, while miming brain matter exploding out of the back of his head.

He added: “If you elect me President you won’t have to learn what it looks like too,” said the Vietnam war hero, as he began fashioning a necklace of human ears.

According to close associates, once he’s elected as commander-in-chief, Webb plans to delegate future killing to subordinates since he understands that as a good leader, he needs to foster their development and give them a chance to kill for themselves.

Republican turncoat Jim Webb, who despite his Marine Corps and redneck backgrounds, who despite serving as Assistant Secretary of Defense and Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Adminstration, changed sides and ran for the Senate as a democrat opposing the War in Iraq, then in the Senate voted for Obamacare and everything else, all the rest of the way down the line with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, could be observed paying painfully for his treachery last night.

At last night’s “democrat”, read: Socialist Party Presidential Debate, Webb found himself largely ignored by moderator Anderson Cooper. Webb additionally had to pay the price for his infidelity by being obliged to publicly affirm all the sniveling left-wing poppycock that was meat-and-drink to his rivals.

Webb managed to equivocate on Gun Control simultaneously agreeing that we have not done a good job of keeping people “who should be kept from having guns” from obtaining firearms, while also defending the right of ordinary Americans to own guns to defend their families.

But equivocation could only go so far.

I admired Webb’s grit as he ate one very major toad, standing right up and faithfully saluting Affirmative Action and assuring America, right out loud, that African Americans were entitled to a specially-privileged national status on the basis of their history including Slavery and Jim Crow.

Webb is smart enough to know better, but he again carefully followed the Party line on Climate Change, declining to defend coal, citing his Senatorial support for alternative energy and proposing greater reliance on nuclear power.

Inevitably, in certain areas, especially on questions related to foreign policy and defense, Webb sounded like the only adult in the room, and he undoubtedly did himself some good with his answers in those areas.

But Webb finally really paid the price on one particular question.

The British newspaper Independent described the moment from the other side’s perspective.

Jim Webb was responsible for one of the most uncomfortable moments of the Democratic debate on Tuesday evening when his dark sense of humour failed to translate.

Webb served in the Marine infantry as a rifle platoon and company commander during the Vietnam War. He was awarded the Navy Cross, the Silver Star Medal, and other military honours for bravery.

The former Virginia senator was asked to name the enemy he was most proud of making in his political career during the debate.

“I’d have to say the enemy soldier that threw the grenade that wounded me, but he’s not around right now to talk to,” he said slowly after the other four candidates gave their answers, his mouth gradually breaking into a grin.

A few members of the audience managed an uneasy chuckle, but Moderator Anderson Cooper was keen to move on from his answer and quickly redirected the debate towards closing statements.

How exquisitely painful it must have been to former US Marine Officer James Webb to deliver the kind of line which would have his rivals at a Republican debate laughing appreciatively and the audience leaping to their feet applauding him, yet which, at a democrat party debate, lands on the floor like a dead fish, embarrassing his interlocutors and simply making his intended audience uncomfortable.

Poor Webb! The real price he is obliged to pay for stabbing his own kind in the back, and joining with the enemy, is having to pretend to be one of them and having to endure associating with them.

Jim Geraghty watched last night’s democrat debate, and observes that it proved one important thing: the democrats have become an openly socialist party. The democrat road to office is based entirely on social division and class warfare.

Sure, this batch of candidates sounded like a bunch of loons. They contended socialism is mostly about standing up to the richest one percent and promoting entrepreneurs and small business; climate change is the biggest national security threat facing the nation; college educations should be free for everyone; all lives don’t matter, black lives do; Obama is simultaneously an enormously successful president in managing the economy and the middle class is collapsing and there’s a need for a “New New Deal” which is in fact an Old Old Idea, considering how FDR called for a Second New Deal in 1935. The audience in Nevada applauded higher taxes, believes that Hillary Clinton doesn’t need to answer any more questions, supports the complete shutdown of the NSA domestic surveillance program, and that Obamacare benefits should be extended to illegal immigrants. There are kindergarten classes with more realistic assessments of cost-benefit tradeoffs than the crowd watching this debate at the Wynn Las Vegas.

So yes, the candidates sounded like hard-Left, pie-in-the-sky, free-ice-cream-for-everyone, Socialist pander bears. But they do so because that is what the Democratic Party’s primary voters demand. Don’t blame them; blame the party rank-and-file that craves these promises, rhetoric, and worldview.

Young man identified as Billy the Kid (on left) playing croquet with other regulators, Summer 1878.

Fox News:

A rare coin dealer in California has concluded that a grainy image of legendary gunman Billy the Kid playing croquet is the real thing and could be worth as much as $5 million.

That is not bad for a photo purchased by Randy Guijarro of Freemont, Calif. for $2 as a part of a miscellaneous lot at a Fresno junk shop in 2010… The company is negotiating a private sale of the photo. …

The 4×5-inch tintype – which depicts Billy the Kid and several members of his gang, The Regulators, relaxing in the summer of 1878 – will be the subject of a two-hour documentary airing Sunday on the National Geographic Channel.

Taken just one month after the tumultuous Lincoln County War came to an end, it offers a rare window into the lives of these gunmen. Rather than a threatening outlaw, Billy the Kid seems to be enjoying some downtime following… a wedding.

Kagin’s web-site.

Yale University, founded in 1701 as a collegiate school to prepare young men for the Congregational ministry in Connecticut, I learned today, has been holding lavish Eid (the feast held at the end of a month of fasting by the followers of Mahound) Banquets for the past fourteen years.

This Buzzfeed article, written relying on slang and cultural references post-pubescents are unlikely to understand, particularly singled out female Saracens for praise, alleging that a group of young women of differing races and nationalities who posed for photographs in various traditional ethnic get-ups were “flawless,” “taking charge,” and expressing simultaneously religious convictions and a slang obscenity addressed to people questioning a supposed right to combine a Yale education with affiliation with a sect theologically committed to the forcible conversion or extermination of Congregationalists.

An African young lady named Emi Mahmoud was lauded as “the Number One Poet in the World” having been declared “champion” of the “2015 World Poetry Slam.” I looked it up and discovered that this event, held in Albuquerque, involved 72 of the “best women poets in slam” competing over two nights for a championship. Despite the presence of lots of FAQs, I was completely unable to determine what a slam is.

Bien pensant institutions like Yale absolutely preen over the diversity of it all, having representatives of all sorts of tribes and cultures on campus, studying away for credentials which operate as pass keys into the upper reaches of haute bourgeois Western consumerist society. The presence of all these exotic specimens at Yale simultaneously demonstrates the global reach of Mother Yale, the truly magnificent tolerance and condescension of her administrative authorities, and the inevitable universal triumph of their values and the system they so comfortably preside over.

Personally, I think the ten Congregationalist ministers who met in Saybrook and pooled their books to found that collegiate school in 1701 are spinning in their graves.

Vladimir Putin wears a t shirt with a Russian Regional Sports Festival competitor insignia, while Obama wears a Young Pioneers (Russian boy scouts equivalent) uniform. Putin says: “Be Ready!” While Obama says, admiringly feeling Putin’s bicep: “Strong Uncle Volodya!”

2:03 video