Cary Grant in a Hitchcock/George Lucas Mashup.

I’ve never been, and this video definitely makes me want to visit the place.

SINGAPORE HyperZoom from geoff tompkinson on Vimeo.

There’s been a certain amount of complaining about my insulting people by referring to them as “low-information-voters.” The problem is: I’m right. That’s exactly what they are, as Ilya Somin explains at some length.

A specter is haunting this year’s presidential election: political ignorance. Both Democrats and Republicans love to accuse the other party’s supporters of that sin. Sadly, both are often right.

The presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump has raised exploitation of ignorance to new heights. Many of the main themes of his campaign prey on it. Trump’s campaign first took off when he claimed we are being inundated with Mexican immigrants, who increase the crime rate because many are “criminals” and “rapists.” In reality, net migration from Mexico has been close to zero for the last 10 years. Yet few Americans seem to know that. And while studies consistently find that immigrants have lower crime rates than native-born Americans, a 2015 Pew Research Center study found that 50% of Americans (and 71% of Republicans) believe immigration is making crime “worse.”

Trump’s claim that nations such as China, Mexico and Japan are “killing us on trade” because we have trade deficits with them also relies on ignorance. As economists across the political spectrum recognize, free trade benefits the economy, and a bilateral trade deficit between two nations is no more an indicator of economic failure than is my trade deficit with my local supermarket. Unfortunately, studies show that trade is one of the areas where there is the greatest gap between general public opinion and informed opinion.
Trump is far from the only candidate to exploit ignorance this year, merely the most successful. Bernie Sanders, the “democratic socialist” who has mounted an unexpectedly strong challenge for the Democratic nomination, shares some of Trump’s demagoguery on trade.

Like Trump, Sanders has also put forward budget projections that most experts, even in his own party, regard as fantastical. Surveys consistently show that most Americans greatly underestimate the percentage of federal spending devoted to big entitlement programs, such as Medicare and Social Security, which are among the largest areas of federal spending. As a result, many voters accept Trump and Sanders’ claims that we can not only deal with our serious fiscal problems without reforming them, but also pile on enormous spending increases (Sanders) or tax cuts (Trump). A survey of Sanders supporters by Vox found that the vast majority are unwilling to pay more than a fraction of the tax increases that even Sanders’ own projections say would be required to fund the new health care and education programs he proposes. Most likely do not realize the true cost.

The problem of ill-informed voters is certainly not confined to Trump and Sanders, or to the 2016 election; more conventional politicians often manipulate ignorance, as well. It is also not limited to specific issues, instead extending to the basic structure of government.

Read the whole thing.

I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

— Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

Ulysses768 speculates on why his fellow millennial tech workers are so commonly left-wing politically.

I know there appears to be an easy answer for this question, demographics. Of course they are liberal, you may say. Their workers are mostly young and urban. They reside in Northern California, Boston, and New York. How could they be anything but liberal?

That is true, but they also consist of engineers and highly skilled immigrants. They are people who have worked hard and are well compensated. While many of their peers were “studying” sociology and women’s studies they were taking computer science and engineering courses. What they learned was rooted in logic and the physical world, not rehashed Marxism and utopian fantasies.

When I was growing up in Massachusetts, it made sense that my teachers were predominantly leftist. They belonged to a union and their pay was determined by how well they could scare the town into approving ever increasing school budgets and not by how well they did their jobs. I recall a great anticipation of reaching the working world where market forces would determine success and thus people would see the inherent benefits of individual liberty and classical liberal values.

Since graduating college I’ve been a naval officer, nuclear engineer, software engineer at an older tech company, and now one that is based in the Bay Area. Until now most of my fellow employees have appeared right of center, thus confirming my expectations. That’s not to say it isn’t a great place to work, it most certainly is. However, I am at a total loss to explain its culture or the cultures of other companies of its ilk.

I have a few theories, but I am not very confident in any of them. My definition of “new tech companies” are those that have been created or risen to prominence in the last 15 years, such as Twitter or Facebook.

The people are the same but the companies are more authoritarian. Motivated by a very competitive job market and empowered by financial success, these companies seek to engage with their employees at a new level. They encourage their employees to basically live at work, breaking down the professional and personal divide. This fosters an environment not unlike a university. Everyone must be careful not to offend and the needs of all must be accommodated at the expense of the few. The cultures of victimhood and blind acceptance find fertile soil, and people who disagree learn to keep quiet.

Newer tech companies are more software- and web-based than their predecessors. Therefore aesthetically pleasing design is more important to the success of their products. Therefore more creatives are required and creatives trend left of center.

College indoctrination has become so successful that it has bled into the hard sciences and engineering spaces. My fellow employees seem more liberal because they actually are more liberal.

Read the whole thing.

Yale Racial Protest, 2016

Jonathan Haidt demonstrates that that today’s climate of racial discontent on elite university campuses was predicted to occur at the very beginning of the adoption of large-scale Affirmative Action by those universities.

[I]n 1969, at the dawn of racial preferences,… Macklin Fleming, Justice of the California Court of Appeal …[wrote] a personal letter to Louis Pollack, the dean of Yale Law School. Fleming was concerned about the plan Dean Pollack had recently announced under which Yale would essentially implement a racial quota – 10% of each entering class would be composed of black students. To achieve this goal, Yale had just admitted 43 black students, only five of whom had qualified under their normal standards. …

Judge Fleming explained why he believed this new policy was a dangerous experiment that was likely to cause harmful stereotypes, rather than reduce them. …

The immediate damage to the standards of Yale Law School needs no elaboration. But beyond this, it seems to me the admission policy adopted by the Law School faculty will serve to perpetuate the very ideas and prejudices it is designed to combat. If in a given class the great majority of the black students are at the bottom of the class, this factor is bound to instill, unconsciously at least, some sense of intellectual superiority among the white students and some sense of intellectual inferiority among the black students. Such a pairing in the same school of the brightest white students in the country with black students of mediocre academic qualifications is social experiment with loaded dice and a stacked deck. The faculty can talk around the clock about disadvantaged background, and it can excuse inferior performance because of poverty, environment, inadequate cultural tradition, lack of educational opportunity, etc. The fact remains that black and white students will be exposed to each other under circumstances in which demonstrated intellectual superiority rests with the whites.

But Judge Fleming went much further. He made specific predictions about what the new policy would do to black students over the years, and how they would react. Here is his prophecy:

No one can be expected to accept an inferior status willingly. The black students, unable to compete on even terms in the study of law, inevitably will seek other means to achieve recognition and self-expression. This is likely to take two forms. First, agitation to change the environment from one in which they are unable to compete to one in which they can. Demands will be made for elimination of competition, reduction in standards of performance, adoption of courses of study which do not require intensive legal analysis, and recognition for academic credit of sociological activities which have only an indirect relationship to legal training. Second, it seems probable that this group will seek personal satisfaction and public recognition by aggressive conduct, which, although ostensibly directed at external injustices and problems, will in fact be primarily motivated by the psychological needs of the members of the group to overcome feelings of inferiority caused by lack of success in their studies. Since the common denominator of the group of students with lower qualifications is one of race this aggressive expression will undoubtedly take the form of racial demands–the employment of faculty on the basis of race, a marking system based on race, the establishment of a black curriculum and a black law journal, an increase in black financial aid, and a rule against expulsion of black students who fail to satisfy minimum academic standards.

If you read Judge Fleming’s predictions after watching the videos of student protests, and then reading the lists of demands posted at TheDemands.org, the match is uncanny.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Underwater archaeological investigations in a Florida panhandle pond seem to have established firmly a pre-Bering-Straits-Ice-Bridge human presence in Florida much older than the Clovis Point Culture long supposed to be the oldest.

Washington Post:

The project involved years of painstaking excavation in the Aucilla River, a slow-moving, coffee-colored waterway shaded by cypress trees and inhabited by alligators. Underwater archaeologists dug up and dated layer after layer of sediment from the river bottom, sifting through each patch of dirt for evidence that humans had once been there.

They uncovered what co-author Tom Stafford calls a “chronological layer cake.” More than 70 samples of ancient organic material taken from the site and radiocarbon dated at Stafford’s lab showed that each layer was slightly older than the one before it. They prove that nothing had disturbed or mixed up the sediments as they were laid down over time.

By the time archaeologists reached the 14,500-year-old stratum, they began to find objects they say could only have come from humans: five sharpened rocks that were carried in from elsewhere in the region, and a double-sided stone knife, or biface, that would have been among the most advanced technologies of the time. The team then re-examined the mastodon tusk found by Webb and Dunbar (who was also part of this excavation) and determined that it was most likely butchered by humans.

“It’s really exciting,” said Jessi Halligan, an archaeologist at Florida State University and Waters’s fellow principal investigator. “We have these unambiguous cultural artifacts found in an intact geological stratum that dates to more than 1,500 years older than Clovis. That’s why it’s a big deal. That’s why we have to revisit our theory for how the Americas were colonized.”

Read the whole thing.

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Sciences Advances, Pre-Clovis occupation 14,550 years ago at the Page-Ladson site, Florida, and the peopling of the Americas, Abstract:

Stone tools and mastodon bones occur in an undisturbed geological context at the Page-Ladson site, Florida. Seventy-one radiocarbon ages show that ~14,550 calendar years ago (cal yr B.P.), people butchered or scavenged a mastodon next to a pond in a bedrock sinkhole within the Aucilla River. This occupation surface was buried by ~4 m of sediment during the late Pleistocene marine transgression, which also left the site submerged. Sporormiella and other proxy evidence from the sediments indicate that hunter-gatherers along the Gulf Coastal Plain coexisted with and utilized megafauna for ~2000 years before these animals became extinct at ~12,600 cal yr B.P. Page-Ladson expands our understanding of the earliest colonizers of the Americas and human-megafauna interaction before extinction.

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Peggy Noonan is an embarrassment as a pundit. The poor girl must be pretty well half-baked every time she sits down to bat out a column of political pontifications. She has no keel whatsoever. Whatever disaster for the Republic or mass insanity is underway, Peggy falls madly in love with.

In 2008, Peggy was flinging her panties onto the stage at Obama rallies, and gravely advising Republicans and conservatives that “the times they were a-changing” and we had better get with the program and move with the times. The GOP was, Peggy said, a neglected, out-of-fashion and unloved old house. Barack Obama, on the other hand, was the most exciting thing Peggy had ever seen.

It’s a tale of two houses. One is dilapidated, old. Everyone in the neighborhood is used to it, and they turn away when they pass. A series of people lived in it and failed to take care of it. It’s run down, needs paint. The roof sags, squirrels run through the eaves. A haunted house! No, more boring. Just a house someone . . . let go.

But over here, a new house on a new plot. It’s rising from the mud before your eyes. It has interesting lines, a promising façade, and when people walk by they stop and look. So much bustle! Builders running in and out, the contractors fighting with each other—”You wouldn’t even have this job if it weren’t for the minority set-aside!” And everyone hates the architect, who put a port-o-potty on the lawn.

But: You can’t take your eyes off it. “Something being born, and not something dying.” Maybe it will improve the neighborhood. Maybe the owners will be nice.

A year later, Peggy was a loyal member of the Republican opposition again, warning Barack Obama that in his ruthless drive to ram through the nationalization of one-sixth of the US economy he was “terrifying America.”

But, even with Peggy dumping regularly on Obama throughout the 2012 campaign, Jeff Goldstein found it difficult to forgive Peggy Noonan for supporting Obama in 2008.

[O]ne of the women who helped guilt the American people into electing a transformative Marxist with a dubious background and no governing experience, a man who, after his drug-addled youth, hung out with domestic terrorists, academic (and activist) anti-Semites, and got his religious counsel from a man steeped in hatred of Whites and Jews, as head of the free world — while simultaneously sneering down her nose at figures like Sarah Palin, who has proven over the course of time to be every bit as prescient as Ms Noonan was bamboozed, hoodwinked, and gloriously conned — is now writing to tell us the President is not who he promised he’d be. As if we haven’t been alive the last five years, or as if we were the ones whose snobbery and reflected egoism caused us to buy this charlatan’s obvious and vapid bullshit in the first place.

And, here in 2016, we find Peggy at it again, jumping on the chariot of transformative change and sneering at the old fogey skeptics trying to resist the mandate of History.

If you know Trump people in real life as opposed to through social media, if they are your friends and family members, you understand that “rage” doesn’t do them justice. They dislike the Republican Party, which they believe has consistently betrayed them, but Trump people in person are just about the only cheerful people in politics this year. They actually have hope—the system needs a hard electric shock, he’s just the man to do it, and if it doesn’t work they’ll fire him. They’re having a good time. Here I throw in a moment I had in Manhattan Thursday afternoon. I was standing on a corner on York Avenue in the 60s when a cab screeched across two lanes to stop in front of me. “I am voting for Trump!” the driver yelled through an open window. “You want to know why? He is neither right or left!” He then laughed and sped on. Not all Trump supporters are quiet about it.

Peggy even has some advice for Trump opponents:

Those who oppose Mr. Trump should do it seriously and with respect for his supporters. If he is not conservative, make your case and explain what conservatism is. No one at this point needs your snotty potshots or your supposedly withering one-liners. I confess I have lost patience with many of those declaring they cannot in good conscience support him, not because reasons of conscience are not crucial—they are, and if they apply they should be declared. But some making these declarations managed in good conscience, indeed with the highest degree of self-regard, to back the immigration proposals of George W. Bush that contributed so much to the crisis that produced Mr. Trump. They invented Sarah Palin. They managed to support the global attitudes and structures that left the working class jobless. They dreamed up the Iraq war.

Sometimes I think their consciences are really not so delicate.

As for the political consultants who insult Mr. Trump so vigorously, they are the ones who did most to invent him. What do they ever do in good conscience?

I’m supposed to “respect” empty-headed, ill-informed amadans who don’t follow politics, who can’t understand policy, who think pragmatism is better than having principles, and who are, once again, hurrying to make a Pop Culture Celebrity the chief magistrate of the Republic, who want to sit Bozo the Clown in the same chair once occupied by Reagan and by Washington?

I don’t look on the voting decision in 2016 as so much a matter of conscience as of common sense. No one sensible ought to be willing to support a person of bad character, a person of low intelligence, a person manifestly unprincipled, or a person lacking in a sophisticated understanding of government policy. No one of normal intelligence ought to be willing to support an obvious charlatan, a shameless liar, a vulgarian, or a bully. If you think that the remedy for the excesses of bad politics and popular delusions is to find a noiser, coarser, and less-inhibited clown and put the country in his hands, there is something seriously wrong with you.

Peggy Noonan is drunk and should go home, and so should the rest of the people supporting Donald Trump.

What I tend to refer to as “Low-Information-Voter” Trump support is based on a widespread acceptance of a couple of astonishing (and obviously entirely mythical) narratives.

Myth 1: There are no real conservatives. All of them: the Conservative intellectual opposition, the most conservative Republicans in Congress, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, are all sell-outs and traitors, in league with the liberal elite to sell out Middle America to the forces of Progressivism. Republicans and Conservative intellectuals could have defeated Barack Obama and the democrats, but chose deliberately not to.

Myth 2: In the midst of this desolate landscape of opportunism, selfishness, and universal corruption, there is a single bright and shining light, that working-class hero, Donald J. Trump, the heroic, self-made businessman who understands how things really work, who has created his own fortune, a fortune so large that he is completely above pecuniary considerations and will not be beholden to any special interests but can devote his energies selflessly to serving the interests of his people, the little people, the ordinary Americans despised, exploited, and neglected by the system. Donald Trump is volunteering to enter public service in order to make America great again, just for them.

I see in my mind’s eye a nation of Trump supporters, singing the Blues:

After B.B. King:

Nobody loves me, but The Donald
And he could be jivin’ too

But when The Donald screws us over
What then are we gonna do?

1886 Winchester, Serial Number 1, presented to Captain Henry Ware Lawton for capturing Gerinimo.

GunsAmerica:

The world’s most expensive rifle–setting the record at auction for $1.265 million–is a lever-action Winchester, with a blued and case-hardened finish, engraved only with “Albee to Lawton.” It’s an unadorned Model 1886, serial number 1, given to Captain Henry Ware Lawton to celebrate his successful campaign against Geronimo, the fierce leader of the Chiricahua Apache tribe, a key event leading to the end of the brutal Apache Wars.

The rifle was auctioned as part of a lot of Lawton’s belongings including an engraved gold-plated C. Howard & Co. pocket watch and matching engraved gold chain, also in recognition of his work hunting down Geronimo. Lawton received prominent awards and medals during his career, including the Medal of Honor, rising to the rank of Major General before dying in battle during the Philippine–American War.

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Rock Island Auctions, 29 April- 1 May 2016, Lot 1025

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Rock Island Blog, Pt. 1

Rock Island Blog, Pt. 2

Geronimo