The big think piece of the week is this exercise in class navel-gazing in the Atlantic. Its author, Matthew Stewart, is an obviously Very Smart Guy, who went to Princeton and Oxford and who’s written books on the American Revolution’s foundation in Philosophy and on why Management Consulting is typically a scam.

I’ve joined a new aristocracy now, even if we still call ourselves meritocratic winners. If you are a typical reader of The Atlantic, you may well be a member too. (And if you’re not a member, my hope is that you will find the story of this new class even more interesting—if also more alarming.) To be sure, there is a lot to admire about my new group, which I’ll call—for reasons you’ll soon see—the 9.9 percent. We’ve dropped the old dress codes, put our faith in facts, and are (somewhat) more varied in skin tone and ethnicity. People like me, who have waning memories of life in an earlier ruling caste, are the exception, not the rule.

By any sociological or financial measure, it’s good to be us. It’s even better to be our kids. In our health, family life, friendship networks, and level of education, not to mention money, we are crushing the competition below. But we do have a blind spot, and it is located right in the center of the mirror: We seem to be the last to notice just how rapidly we’ve morphed, or what we’ve morphed into.

The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children. We are not innocent bystanders to the growing concentration of wealth in our time. We are the principal accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy. Our delusions of merit now prevent us from recognizing the nature of the problem that our emergence as a class represents. We tend to think that the victims of our success are just the people excluded from the club. But history shows quite clearly that, in the kind of game we’re playing, everybody loses badly in the end. …

The fact of the matter is that we have silently and collectively opted for inequality, and this is what inequality does. It turns marriage into a luxury good, and a stable family life into a privilege that the moneyed elite can pass along to their children. How do we think that’s going to work out?

This divergence of families by class is just one part of a process that is creating two distinct forms of life in our society. Stop in at your local yoga studio or SoulCycle class, and you’ll notice that the same process is now inscribing itself in our own bodies. In 19th-century England, the rich really were different. They didn’t just have more money; they were taller—a lot taller. According to a study colorfully titled “On English Pygmies and Giants,” 16-year-old boys from the upper classes towered a remarkable 8.6 inches, on average, over their undernourished, lower-class countrymen. We are reproducing the same kind of division via a different set of dimensions.

Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, and liver disease are all two to three times more common in individuals who have a family income of less than $35,000 than in those who have a family income greater than $100,000. Among low-educated, middle-aged whites, the death rate in the United States—alone in the developed world—increased in the first decade and a half of the 21st century. Driving the trend is the rapid growth in what the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton call “deaths of despair”—suicides and alcohol- and drug-related deaths.

The sociological data are not remotely ambiguous on any aspect of this growing divide. We 9.9 percenters live in safer neighborhoods, go to better schools, have shorter commutes, receive higher-quality health care, and, when circumstances require, serve time in better prisons. We also have more friends—the kind of friends who will introduce us to new clients or line up great internships for our kids.

These special forms of wealth offer the further advantages that they are both harder to emulate and safer to brag about than high income alone. Our class walks around in the jeans and T‑shirts inherited from our supposedly humble beginnings. We prefer to signal our status by talking about our organically nourished bodies, the awe-inspiring feats of our offspring, and the ecological correctness of our neighborhoods. We have figured out how to launder our money through higher virtues.

Most important of all, we have learned how to pass all of these advantages down to our children. In America today, the single best predictor of whether an individual will get married, stay married, pursue advanced education, live in a good neighborhood, have an extensive social network, and experience good health is the performance of his or her parents on those same metrics.

We’re leaving the 90 percent and their offspring far behind in a cloud of debts and bad life choices that they somehow can’t stop themselves from making. We tend to overlook the fact that parenting is more expensive and motherhood more hazardous in the United States than in any other developed country, that campaigns against family planning and reproductive rights are an assault on the families of the bottom 90 percent, and that law-and-order politics serves to keep even more of them down. We prefer to interpret their relative poverty as vice: Why can’t they get their act together?

RTWT

Stewart’s mea culpa article is intelligent and well-written, but gravely flawed by many of the characteristic intellectual errors of the meritocratic community of fashion elite.

It’s true that life in America has changed. Economic, regional, and cultural changes enormously increased social and physical mobility over much of the last century, killed local industries, and drained, year after year, ever larger percentages of people with brains and talent and initiative out American small towns and rural counties, sending them off to the big cities and their posh suburbs.

The automobile and the shopping mall killed Main Street, and the big multiplex theaters killed the hometown movie palace. Now Amazon is killing off the malls, and digital streaming off the Internet is killing off the multiplexes.

It is characteristic of members of the intelligentsia like Matthew Stewart to place limitless confidence in the calculative powers of human reason and the wisdom of credentialed experts and to imagine that the iron laws of economics and the choices of the gods of History can simply be set aside by the application of a bit of collectivist statism. That perspective is obviously dead wrong.

Unless you are prepared to go to the same lengths as Pol Pot and march people at gunpoint out of the city and into the countryside again, you are not going to change all this. A hundred years ago, many people were sad that the gods of Economics had decreed that the small family farm had to die and everyone had to move into town and take work at the factory or the mill, but it happened, and that is how economies progress and standards of living rise. But change always comes with some pain as its cost.

The establishmentarian feels guilty and suffers from an obsession with Equality. People like Matthew Stewart naturally believe that they are the cat’s pajamas, the winners in Life’s Olympic Race, and they assume that everybody is crying himself to sleep every night for not being one of them.

They are profoundly wrong in a couple of ways. First of all, it is possible to be a good man and a person of accomplishment and skill in all sorts of ways not measured by the SATs and entirely unconnected to graduation from elite schools or the publication of important books. There are circumstances in life in which you’d be better off having the assistance of a skilled automobile mechanic or a grizzled old hunting guide than that of an Oxford graduate or best-selling historian.

Then, it is also an important fact of life that it is simply impossible for everybody in the world to graduate from a top Ivy League school and grow up to be a doctor, lawyer, investment banker, or management consultant. The world really does have to have more Indians than chiefs. And not everybody thinks the same way. I have some things in common with Mr. Stewart: I went to Yale and I sometimes read The Atlantic. But they’d have to pay me by the hour to live in Brookline or any similar place. And I’m surrounded out here in rural Pennsylvania by people who feel the same way.

My Trump-voting neighbors here in the Central Pennsylvania boondocks are, it’s true, ill-educated, and unfashionable. They are also a lot less affluent than people like Mr. Stewart. They do have some problems, but most of them, at least most of the older ones, are not unhappy. I think younger people out here in the sticks are more decidedly the left-behinds, and are more demoralized by the decay of Religion and the local economy, and the weakening of all the institutions. And it is there, not in the areas Mr. Stewart talks about, that we meritocrats are to blame.

If you go to Princeton or Yale, you can reject bourgeois society, organized Religion, and Kipling’s gods of the copybook headings and (mostly) get away with it. You’re a clever person and probably a strong-willed person, so you can do drugs and get up and go to work anyway. You believe in free love, but somehow in the end, you wind up married anyway. But where we catch a cold, the ordinary people back home get the Plague. Without the old-time Religion and conventional bourgeois morality keeping them on the straight and narrow, for them, everything goes to shit. You get single mothers, jailbird fathers dead at 35 from booze or meth or crashed cars, neglected, badly-raised kids, and ruined lives all over the place.

Our guilt does not lie in erecting barriers to entry at Ivy League schools. Our class’s guilt lies in our snobbery, our boundless self-entitlement, and our abandonment of hometowns, home regions, and obligations of leadership and fellowship, in our home communities, and in the deplorable example we set with our wholesale rejection of tradition and conventional wisdom.

In the LA Review of Books, Theodore Gioia reports on classical music being used as bum repellent.

At the corner of 8th and Market in San Francisco, by a shuttered subway escalator outside a Burger King, an unusual soundtrack plays. A beige speaker, mounted atop a tall window, blasts Baroque harpsichord at deafening volumes. The music never stops. Night and day, Bach, Mozart, and Vivaldi rain down from Burger King rooftops onto empty streets.

Empty streets, however, are the target audience for this concert. The playlist has been selected to repel sidewalk listeners — specifically, the mid-Market homeless who once congregated outside the restaurant doors that served as a neighborhood hub for the indigent. Outside the BART escalator, an encampment of grocery carts, sleeping bags, and plastic tarmacs had evolved into a sidewalk shantytown attracting throngs of squatters and street denizens. “There used to be a mob that would hang out there,” remarked local resident David Allen, “and now there may be just one or two people.” When I passed the corner, the only sign of life I found was a trembling woman crouched on the pavement, head in hand, as classical harpsichord besieged her ears.

RTWT

Gioia has all sorts of problems with this. It makes classical music elitist and turns it into a class signifier. Using music to chase people away is inimical to recruiting the same people into its fan base. And, finally, any non-performative use separates the art from its own native listening experience.

When Karen and I first visited the kennels of the Casanova Hunt at Weston, the former home of that hunt’s founder, Charlotte Nourse, we found the hounds listening happily to Beethoven. Apparently, huntsman Tommy Lee Jones found classical music had charms to sooth the trouble-making breasts of foxhounds.

Mr. Gioia may stroke his chin and frown disapprovingly, but I think it’s more appropriate to admire the ingenuity of people who find other ways of harnessing the power of art.

I bet representatives of today’s establishment intelligentsia would deplore the use of crucifixes to repel vampires, arguing that Religion was intended to be all-inclusive!

GQ interviews the Savile Row Tailors who made Harry’s Blues & Royals uniform and the delightful miniature versions worn by the little page boys at the wedding.

[T]he pageboy uniforms were a bit of a challenge because obviously we were very familiar with the grown-up version that Harry was wearing and to make it for someone who’s considerably smaller, particularly with the detail on the sleeve and on the back and collar of the jacket, we just have to shrink it down to the size that a young child could wear.

On the grown-up version, the lacework on the sleeves goes up above the elbows, so if we used it on the coat for a small chap that would have gone all the way up his sleeve and over his shoulder. So we had to think quite carefully how to represent that design on the sleeve which is an intricate design and we just shrank it.

We were working it out yesterday how long it took and how many stitches were involved and the sleeves alone for Harry’s uniform took one lady one week to make. Between Harry’s and the four pageboy uniforms we used 150 meters [164 yards or 492 feet] of Black Russia, which is a type of double-ribbed lace, and we worked out it was about 65,000 stitches and that’s just the lacework alone.

RTWT

Dege & Skinner have in the past (not this year) put in a annual visit to the Red Fox Inn in Middleburg, Virginia to measure bespoke hunt uniforms for residents of Northern Virginia Horse Country.

I have an Old Dominion Hunt tie made by Dege & Skinner, bearing a Griffin in memory of the Griffin Tavern in Flint Hill where — before WWII, in Mr. Larrabee’s day, when foxes were still scarce in Fauquier County, and they hunted a carted stag, who amusingly could be seen at the end of the day trotting home along the then dirt roads companionably with hounds– the hunt had its Opening Meet.

HT: Karen L. Myers.

Some News Service:

NORTH BEND, Wash. — One man is dead and another has been injured in a cougar attack in Washington, authorities said Saturday.

The two men were on a morning mountain bike ride in the foothills near North Bend when the attack occurred, King County Sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. Ryan Abbott said.

The cougar ran into the woods, he said. The Seattle Times reported state officials tracked, shot and killed the cougar just before 3 p.m.

North Bend is about 30 miles east of Seattle. The injured victim, who is in his 40s, was airlifted to a hospital. He was initially listed in serious condition but has since been upgraded to satisfactory.

A search and rescue team has been dispatched to recover the body of the deceased man.

KIRO-TV reported that the injured man called 911 shortly before 11 a.m. and shouted, “Can you hear me? Help!” and then the call hung up.

Authorities found the cougar standing over the body of the dead biker, the station reported.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the two victims were biking together or separately.

That’s the Left Coast for you.

Coastal cities and suburbs densely inhabited by granola-crunching moonbats on bicycles exist just a short distance from genuine wilderness. The crunchies love the scenery and think nothing of going off into an out-of-doors shared with large predators unarmed, unprepared, and unaware.

In 1900, nobody would have considered going off into mountain lion country unable to defend himself. Today, the overwhelming majority of Left Coast-ers would not dream of carrying a gun, and a sizable percentage will protest the shooting of a man-eating mountain lion.

“The intellectual had become not so much an occupational type as a status type. He was like the medieval cleric, most of whose energies were devoted to separating himself from the mob—which in modern times, in Revel’s phrase, goes under the name of the middle class. … Moral indignation was the main thing; that, and a certain pattern of consumption. In fact, by the 1960s it was no longer necessary to produce literature, scholarship, or art—or even to be involved in such matters, except as a consumer—in order to qualify as an intellectual. It was only necessary to live la vie intellectuelle. A little brown bread in a bread box, a lapsed pledge card to CORE, a stereo and a record rack full of Coltrane and all the Beatles albums from Revolver on, white walls, a huge Dracaena marginata plant, which is there because all the furniture is so clean-lined and spare that without this piece of frondose tropical Victoriana the room looks empty, a stack of unread New York Review of Books rising up in a surly mound of subscription guilt, the conviction that America is materialistic, repressive, bloated, and deadened by its Silent Majority, which resides in the heartland, three grocery boxes full of pop bottles wedged in behind the refrigerator and destined (one of these days) for the Recycling Center, a small, uncomfortable European car—that pretty well got the job done…”

HT: The Barrister.

The teenage William Burroughs.

“As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.”

— William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Selected Essays.

Doesn’t reading this San Diego Union-Tribune story make you happy you don’t live in San Diego County?

Around San Diego County, a hot, salty, buttered controversy has popped up.

Should hardware stores offer free bags of freshly popped popcorn?

While that may look like a warm, welcoming treat, free popcorn is a threat to public health — or so argue county officials. Last month, health inspectors raided La Jolla’s Meanley & Son Hardware, warning that its old-fashioned red popcorn machine is a germy outlaw.

“They explained we didn’t have the proper permits,” said Bob Meanley, whose shop had handed out 30 to 40 bags every day for about 25 years.

To comply with the 1984 California Uniform Retail Food Facility Law, Meanley & Son would need to install a three-basin sink to clean and sterilize the popcorn popper. Also required: regular inspections, just like a restaurant.

Meanley declined and instead rolled the offending machine into storage. Thus ended a tradition he had started 25 years ago.

“I hate to take away something that our customers really like,” said Meanley, whose grandparents founded the hardware store in 1948. …

The county Department of Environmental Health, for its part, has a long tradition of cracking down on these scofflaws. Three years ago, inspectors cited Encinitas’ Crown Ace Hardware and San Carlos True Value Hardware.

“The Health Department came in,” said San Carlos True Value manager Danielle Matheny, “and told us if we wanted to continue giving away free popcorn and coffee we’d have to install a bigger vent system, a bigger and better sink in the break room — a lot of rules and restrictions they put on us.”

In both Encinitas and San Carlos, the stores dropped the practice. Inspectors so far have ignored Payton’s, but El-Hajj figures it’s just a matter of time.

“I feel sad,” she said, “that some of the old traditions we have become so regulated.”

RTWT

Joe Long discusses the latest major outbreak of SJW tyranny in Nerdland.

The classic Marxists of the 20th century wanted to bring the entire world under Communist domination. The new Millennium’s heirs to that movement on the progressive Left are more ambitious: They strive to dominate all the worlds—even the ones that exist only in your imagination. Perhaps especially those.

Using strategies reminiscent of campus crybullies, Leftist activists increasingly are trying to empower literary and hobby Thought Police, and to force every sector of our culture to ostracize non-radicals and wrong-thinkers. This week’s successful fascist psy-op was launched against Larry Correia, a best-selling science-fiction and fantasy author. Correia, an avid wargamer as well as a genre celebrity, was disinvited from a tabletop gaming convention at which he’d been listed as a featured guest.

Yes, you read that correctly. Ohio’s venerable “Origins Game Fair”—where “grognards” and other varieties of tabletop gaming fan congregate, to roll oddly shaped dice and move miniature tanks or tiny, carefully-painted orcs across the hexagonally-delineated maps of imaginary battlefields—the gaming convention has withdrawn the invitation to its prominent, popular guest of honor, because of a campaign of Social Justice Warrior complaints.

The fair’s executive director, John Ward, condescendingly Leftsplained that counterrevolutionary thought must be suppressed, and that proponents of such thoughts must obviously be exiled from society.

OK, that’s my paraphrase. It’s close enough, though. Unironically employing language reminiscent of compliant totalitarian functionaries across time and, perhaps, dimensions, Ward explained, “…when [Correia] was recommended I was unaware of some personal views that are specifically unaligned with the philosophy of our show and our organization. I want to thank those of you that brought this error to our attention. Origins is an inclusive and family friendly event . . . ” …

Not only did Ward create a standard that “personal views” (or alleged personal views) of presenters must share an alignment (presumably “lawful evil”) with the show and organization, he actually thanked the informants who detected Correia’s badthink before it could infect his event.

What were the “personal views?” They were never specified. We’re left to derive them from Correia’s work, as the helpful informants did. (Correia offered his own gracious rejoinder on his website: “For me personally, meh. I go to enough events. I’ll just do something else fun that weekend.”)

Correia’s most popular series of novels, Monster Hunter International, is a gunslinging, tongue-in-cheek fantasy action-adventure, set in a modern world secretly menaced by legions of B-movie monsters. The heroes are private contractors, in the entrepreneurial mode of the original “Ghostbusters” (the ones who were male, and funny) but with a far better arsenal. This ragtag band combats the monster menace while navigating an obstructive Federal bureaucracy to collect generous bounties. Correia’s cast features members of several races, a few species (some of them imaginary), and every existing sex (both of them real). However, his female, African-American and other assorted protagonists all love guns—and they all respect, whether or not they share, traditional religious beliefs.

Baptists, conservative Jews, the anti-monster detachment of the Pope’s Swiss Guards, and Correia’s Mormon co-religionists all make positive appearances in Correia’s novels. And folks tolerant—or celebratory—of guns and religion, show up, too. These facts about these fictional people apparently forfeit all intersectionality points!

Correia’s Monster Control Bureau, which is featured in that series, deserves special mention. The fictional MCB is a secretive, ruthless government organization which manipulates the media; enforces irrational and counterproductive regulations; has sincere, patriotic agents at street-level but suffers from high-level corruption, and (spoiler alert!) just might have elements colluding with the monsters. (All this long before the Muller probe!)

No perusal of Correia’s works reveals misogyny, racism, or any legitimate reason for resentment by his non-readers, who can easily find works tailored to their “social justice” tastes. However, if nonprogressivism is a crime, Correia’s surely guilty. After all, other works by the author, include fantastical alternate history series in which FDR is an antagonist of the heroes, and his farcical The Adventures of Tom Stranger: Interdimensional Insurance Agent audiobooks are unapologetic right-wing political humor. His strongly-expressed views on politics in the science-fiction publishing world have also frequently sparked reactions and melodramatic overreactions; the disinvitation from Origins is only the most recent Correian War within the world of fandom.

This only intensifies the loyalty of his many fans, however, who have responded to the latest high-handed progressive buffoonery with fury.

RTWT

———————————-

Larry Correia’s response to being disinvited:

For the record, I’m not any of the things they accuse me of. Despite writing a whole bunch of books, and a ton of political articles, and all of my many personal interactions with fans (I’ve done up to 15 cons and events in one year), none of these people can ever find any actual examples of me being sexist, racist, or homophobic (and the Guardian looked hard and still came up with nothing).

That’s because in reality, I’m a libertarian who does not give a shit who you are, or what you do, and it is none of my business, as long as you stay off my lawn.

This time they kept calling me a “rape apologist”. They dug up that classic that John Scalzi created about me several years ago. It’s total nonsense. I spent many years teaching self defense to women, and I’m all in favor of every rape attempt ending with the rapist receiving a couple hollow points to the chest. But that just goes to show the power of lies, rumor, and narrative.

So years later, complete strangers come out of the woodwork to talk about how evil I am. Yeah… That does get tiresome. It is wearying.

I’m really sorry for any fans who were planning on seeing me at Origins. Hopefully I’ll get to meet you at some other event.

RTWT

———————————-

John Ringo had some good suggestions for other potentially-targeted SF-authors on FB:

So Larry Correia’s invite as GOH to Origins got rescinded because he’s ‘racist’, ‘homophobe’, ‘has sex with manatees’ etc.

This is a strong suggestion to any decent author, especially all Baen authors.

If invited to a con, especially as a ‘special guest’, require the following in your contract:

Pre-paid travel. (Non-refundable, reserved for your use and one guest.)
Pre-paid room. (Non-refundable, reserved for your use and one guest.)
A cash guarantee of non-cancellation on their part.

Show them links to what happened to myself and Larry.

If they cave to the SJW mobs, make it cost them.

If they refuse, they’re probably setting you up. (This, very much, looked like a set-up to boost visibility. ConCarolinas is slightly different.) Tell them that based upon recent history you have to assume they’re setting you up if they have issues with such basic items and ask them not to contact you again.

Any convention that for any reason plays this game of ‘we have to rescind your invitation’ (Origins, ConCarolinas, ArchCon) refuse to attend and ask other authors to refuse to attend. Not for any reason. Not because it’s ‘local’, not because it’s ‘convenient’. Not because ‘I’ve always gone to X con!’

Start choking them off of the revenue stream created by our attendance.

Just. Say. No.

As authors, we really don’t need conventions anymore. You get more sales through posts online and engaging in social media (for as long as Twitter and Facebook will allows us to do so) than going to all the conventions in the world. The cons are mostly for your fans and if the cons want to play this game, the fans need to make it clear they’re not going.

The exceptions to this are LibertyCon and Dragon Con. They’re both professionally run cons run by professional people who don’t play the SJW game. They’re TRULY apolitical. ( FenCon Convention seems to still be playing it down the middle as well.)

With every other convention, assume you’re being set-up at this point and don’t be played for a sucker.

Oh, yeah, and as fans and lovers of liberty, never, ever attend Origins again if you ever have. Or ConCarolinas. (Sorry, Jada.) Or ArchCon. Or WorldCon.

We need a list. They never will be missed. No they never will be missed.

This has to stop and it won’t until we take a stand. For those of you reading this who are ‘liberals’, please look at the history of how this is going and wonder how long it will take for YOU to end up against the wall. Think they’re going to stop with me and Larry? Think again.

Boycott, divest, sanction.

It’s time to strike back. We don’t need cons. Cons need us. Time for them to figure that out.

John Singer Sargent, Theodore Roosevelt, 1903, White House.

The Art of John Singer Sargent in the White House:

The commission for the painting was arranged in 1902, likely at the behest of architect Charles McKim, who was then under Roosevelt’s direction. Sargent was living in London at the time, but expected to return to the United States to continue work he had undertaken for the Boston Public Library. When Sargent agreed in May 1902 to paint the president’s picture, Roosevelt wrote to him that “it seems to me eminently fitting that an American President should have you paint his picture. I cordially thank you.”

Sargent arrived in the United States in January 1903 and came to live in the White House the following month. At first, the personalities of the two men made progress difficult. Sargent was especially picky about the location where he would ask the president to pose, and Roosevelt was notoriously prickly and impatient with directives. According to one account the president was leading the artist upstairs when the two got into an argument. Roosevelt accused Sargent of not knowing what he wanted, and the artist retorted that the president did not know how to pose. Furious, Roosevelt turned around, grabbed the newel-post with his right hand and yelled “Don’t I!”—at which Sargent told him to hold his pose right there. Sargent completed his portrait on February 19 after several sessions. The president’s refusal to pose for more than half an hour at a time annoyed the painter, but Roosevelt was delighted with the results, professing to “like his picture enormously.”

HT: Bercik.