Mental health break

In a lighter vein, this made me laugh.

Government imposed Renewable Energy targets = clear cutting protected forests

Who didn't see this coming?

Protected forests are being indiscriminately felled across Europe to meet the EU’s renewable energy targets, according to an investigation by the conservation group Birdlife.

Up to 65% of Europe’s renewable output currently comes from bioenergy, involving fuels such as wood pellets and chips, rather than wind and solar power.

Bioenergy fuel is supposed to be harvested from residue such as forest waste but, under current legislation, European bioenergy plants do not have to produce evidence that their wood products have been sustainably sourced.

But if you don't support the Green policy flavor du jour, you just hate the earth.

California to regulate cow farts

I would mock this, but it comes pre-mocked from the California Legislature:

GALT, Calif. (AP) — California is taking its fight against global warming to the farm.

The nation's leading agricultural state is now targeting greenhouse gases produced by dairy cows and other livestock.

Despite strong opposition from farmers, Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation in September that for the first time regulates heat-trapping gases from livestock operations and landfills.

Not sure what you could add to that.

Watching Media Bias in action

Unfolding before our eyes:

If "alt-right" could have been tied tightly to Spencer and overt racists, then it would seem as though Bannon is an admitted racist and Breitbart.com is toxic. That plan seems to have failed because the intermediate step — equating "alt-right" with racist — outraged readers. Making racists seem okay and kind of cool was an unintended consequence.

So now we're seeing the media back off.

Shilling for the Left.  It's what they do.

Detente with Russia?

Boy, there sure are a lot of people who don't like the idea of Trump de-escalating tensions with Russia.  Quite frankly, it sure looks like some folks (*cough* EU *cough*) sure have pushed Russia to the edge:

So from a Russian perspective, they are entirely surrounded by historically or currently hostile actors with a history of invasion by them and a recent history of “Color Revolutions” instigated by Soros and his fellow travelers in the EU having taken down a series of Slavic Countries to the west. (Czech Republic, Slovakia, the various parts of the old Yugoslavia, Ukraine, etc. etc.) with Russia as “on the menu”. Thus Putin tossing Soros out and banning his “Non-governmental” Organizations… 

Now, one more little item to remember: When Eastern Germany was allowed to merge with West Germany, Gorbachev was given an iron clad guarantee that NATO would not extend “one thumbs width” further East. Now Nato borders Russia in several areas.

From the Russian POV, NATO has violated all agreements, expanded into Slavic lands, often via politically manipulative “color revolutions” and then insists on imposing “European Values” by which is usually meant the Soros Selected set of anti-Nation and anti-tradition and anti-Church and anti-European Culture destructive ideologies. Then we go and put anti-missile missiles in Poland (that shares a border with the part of Russia named Kaliningrad) where NATO was promised not to be.

When you figure that NATO (*cough* US Military *cough*) is their muscle, it seems entirely reasonable for President Trump to ask what the USA is getting from all this.

One of these things is not like the other

I was driving back to Castle Borepatch, listening to the rush hour traffic/news/talk.  The news, as you would imagine, was about the attack at Ohio State.  While the story did not include the words "radical" "islam", "jihad", or "terror", it did tell us that some Somali immigrant drove a truck into a crowd of students and then stabbed a bunch of them before finding himself on the naughty end of a police officer's gun.

The story was very careful to say that we don't know the attacker's motivation, and so speculation is presumably double plus ungood.

Then the story launched into a discussion of the Virginia Tech shootings.

Wait, what?

The story did not talk about the attack in Nice, France a few months back.  You know, the one where some dude drove a truck into a crowd and then stabbed some of them before getting shot.  That seemingly is not at all similar to the OSU attack.  But the Virgina Tech incident seemingly is similar, at least similar enough to be included as a "hey, doesn't this remind you" comparison.

Never mind that the Virginia Tech incident did not have an immigrant as the perpetrator, did not include a truck running people down, or a finale of shabby-stabby.

If you were as nasty and cynical about the Press as I am, you might think this was used to distract people from "dangerous jihadi immigrants are killing people" to "guns are bad, mkay?"

But since you're obviously not as nasty and cynical about the Press as I, this sort of Thought Crime clearly would never cross your mind.

What will not be seen at Castle Borepatch

Dang.

Franz Krommer - Quintet in G Major op. 101

Image via Der Wik

Mozart, Haydn, Kromer - these were the leading composers in Vienna in the late 18th Century through the first third of the 19th.  It may be that Beethoven was never Court Composer because that post was already filled by Franz Krommer, born František Kramář.  Virtually unknown today, he was famous in his day (famous enough to come to the attention of the Emperor).  Wildly prolific, he wrote 9 symphonies and hundreds of other works, especially those for woodwinds (like today's piece).

Likely his popularity did not outlive the Imperial Court, which was famously conservative in its tastes.  To our ears - schooled by the romantic intensity of Beethoven and the Romantics - his music is a throwback to a classical form that reminds us of Mozart.  However, our music libraries are filled with Mozart, and so there's precious little room left for Krommer.

Still, weep not for Franz Krommer.  He was, after all, Court Composer for the Emperor of Austria for 18 years.  Happy birthday, Franz - born on this day in 1759.

Remember when the Democrats thought we all belonged to the Government?

Hope they're enjoying how things are going now.

Joe Bonamassa - Just Got Paid

Not just a bluesman.

Good advice for the Left

Advice that no doubt will not be taken:

A few years back, in fact, a bunch of Klansmen came to the town where I live to hold a recruitment rally, and the churches in town—white as well as black—held a counter-rally, stood on the other side of the street, and drowned the Klansmen out, singing hymns at the top of their lungs until the guys in the white robes got back in their cars and drove away.  Surprising? Not at all; in a great deal of middle America, that’s par for the course these days.

To understand why a town that ran off the Klan was a forest of Trump signs in the recent election, it’s necessary to get past the stereotypes and ask a simple question: why did people vote for Trump? 

...

When I’ve pointed this out to people on the leftward side of the political spectrum, the usual response has been to insist that, well, yes, maybe Trump did address the issues that matter to people in flyover country, but even so, it was utterly wrong of them to vote for a racist, sexist homophobe! We’ll set aside for the moment the question of how far these labels actually apply to Trump, and how much they’re the product of demonizing rhetoric on the part of his political enemies on both sides of the partisan divide. Even accepting the truth of these accusations, what the line of argument just cited claims is that people in the flyover states should have ignored the issues that affect their own lives, and should have voted instead for the issues that liberals think are important.

In some idyllic Utopian world, maybe. In the real world, that’s not going to happen. People are not going to embrace the current agenda of the American Left if doing so means that they can expect their medical insurance to double in price every couple of years, their wages to continue lurching downward, their communities to sink further in a death spiral of economic collapse, and their kids to come home in body bags from yet another pointless war in the Middle East.

Thus there’s a straightforward answer to both of Ferrett Steinmetz’ baffled questions. Do the people who voted for Trump hate Steinmetz, his readers, or the various groups—women, people of color, sexual minorities—whose concerns are central to the politics of today’s American Left? In many cases, not at all, and in most others, not to any degree that matters politically. They simply don’t care that much about the concerns that the Left considers central—especially when those are weighed against the issues that directly affect their own lives.

This seems spot on to me.  The Archdruid lays out four specific reasons that Middle America abandoned the Democratic Party.  The Democrats, as usual, are stuck in a Groundhog Day loop of What's The Matter With Kansas fail that has landed them firmly in the wilderness, and looks to keep them there for the foreseeable future.

Might America stop being the World's policeman?

We can hope.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Remember that the feast does not just feed the body, but the soul as well.  And since it's Thanksgiving, this is obligatory:

Happy 90th birthday to the original Gerber Baby

Happy birthday to Anne Turner Cooke who turned 90 today.  She was 4 months old when her portrait was made.

Thoughts on the Media freakout

I don't have any idea what Trump will do as President, at least concerning specific policy details.  Build a wall?  Maybe.  Maybe a big wall, may be a little one.  May not build one at all.  I just don't know.

Same for the other policies.  I guess we'll all see soon enough.

But one thing has become crystal clear in the last week: Trump will make two BIG changes that are entirely beneficial to this Republic:

1. He will (continue to) cut the legs out of the professional Political Correctness crowd.

2. He will (continue) to expose the Media as the liars and idiots that they are.

Both of these are a breath of fresh air.

Hey teacher!  Up with your rules!  'Cause everybody knows that smoking ain't allowed in school ...

Malware uses headphones as microphones

Oh, great:

CAUTIOUS COMPUTER USERS put a piece of tape over their webcam. Truly paranoid ones worry about their devices’ microphones—some even crack open their computers and phones to disable or remove those audio components so they can’t be hijacked by hackers. Now one group of Israeli researchers has taken that game of spy-versus-spy paranoia a step further, with malware that converts your headphones into makeshift microphones that can slyly record your conversations.

It seems that the hardware has a "feature" that allows software to turn an output channel into an input channel.  Thanks, programmer-droid.  Hope you die screaming in a crotch fire.

Bottom line, you can get spied on this way even if you plug your headset into an audio-out jack.

The longer I'm in this business, the more I feel like that guy in The Omen who locked himself in a room and wall papered it with bible verses.  Didn't help him, either ...

(Via)

The blindness of the educated class

Via Isegoria (you do read him every day, don't you?  Thought so), there's this must-read by Giovanni Dannato on the blindness of the educated class:

... they never have reason to question what they were taught.  Their whole life is a progression from one sheltered safe zone to the next: grade school(in a “good” district) => college => job echo chamber full of others like them while living in an isolated suburb with people at the same income they make.  They can easily live their whole lives without having to interact with anyone from another caste so that’s what they assume the whole world is like even if it’s actually a very narrow slice.  They can never depart from their group consensus or they get exiled by the only group they’ve ever known. 

This sounds right - for example, it entirely explains the view of the Upper West Side towards "Flyover Country".  But there's an implication to this:

Almost invariably, those who are most in favor of ethnic minority interests are those who interact with them least.  Or at best, if they are activist/charity types they visit the ghettoes as virtue tourists, not as residents just trying to live.  They meet token minorities at work and at school and they model what other races are like based on these outliers.  More importantly, they never interact with other races when they are in the majority.  You don’t know anything about race until you’re the only white guy in the room.  It should be a civic requirement, actually, that everyone have that experience at least once to be in the ethnic minority in a situation like a job, where power matters and you’re not in charge.   The moment whites are in the minority, all the rules instantly change.  The token ethnic coworkers you thought were buddies change their personality like the flick of a switch once they can smell they rule the roost and only ever promote their own kind.  It’s one of the most eye-opening innocence-destroying experiences a sheltered educated person can have.  Once you’re along for the ride in an environment controlled by another people, all the fundamental differences between peoples are revealed.  As it happens, a deep sense of fair play, altruism, and sympathy for outgroups are almost uniquely Western European traits that more insular tribes can easily take advantage of.  4 years of college opened my eyes to the incredible entitlement of women and the evils of feminism but it wasn’t until I was out in the world on my own that I learned what race and ethnicity means in real life.  What any man who has worked jobs in mixed neighborhoods or been to prison knows well, those supposedly the best and brightest of us who make the big decisions are totally clueless about.

The one modification I would make to this is that it isn't really about race - it's about culture:

The quote for this [2008 - Borepatch] election season, if we're smart enough to listen, is about the post-Cold War economies:

Among the heaviest losers in this period of record-breaking economic growth and technological advance were the countries of the Communist Socialist bloc: the Soviet Union at the bottom of the barrel, Romania and North Korea almost as bad, and a range of satellite victims and emulators struggling to rise above the mess. Best off were probably Czechoslovkia and Hungary, with East Germany (the DDR) and Poland trailing behind. The striking feature of these command economies was the contradiction between system and pretensions on the one hand, performance on the other. The logic was impeccable: experts would plan, zealots would compete in zeal, technology would tame nature, labor would make free, the benefits would accrue to all. From each according to their ability; to each according to his deserts; and eventually, to each according to his needs.

The dream appealed to the victims and critics of capitalism, admittedly a most imperfect system - but as it turned out, far better than the alternatives. Hence the Marxist economies long enjoyed a willful credulous favor among radicals, liberals, and progressives in the advanced industrial nations;

The USSR and East Germany were run by whites, and their economy (and society) were terrible. It's not about race.  But history tells us that culture matters:

As a public service, here's something that you should read if you really want to make a liberal's head explode like the fembots in Austin Powers. Or understand why the world's economy is the way it is.  The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, by David Landes. The title is intentionally taken from Adam Smith, but Landes focuses less on describing economics per se, and more on the constraints that a society puts on their economy.

It traces the history of economic development over the last 1000 years, and asks some very politically incorrect questions:

• Why did China, the world's richest and most powerful country in 1000 AD not only lose her lead, but lose it so badly that it was dismembered by the European (and later resurgent Japanese) powers?
• Why did India, fabulously wealthy and populous, not conquor the west, rather than vice-versa?
• Why did England, an undeveloped backwater as late as 1500 AD, ultimately lead the Industrial Revolution and become the world's most powerful country?
• What explains the vast differences in economic development between the USA and Canada, and other New World countries? After all, in 1700, Mexico's GDP per capita was $450, not far short of the colonies' $490 (1985 dollars). In 1989, Mexico's GDP per capita was $3,500, vs. $18,300 for the USA.

These days, to ask these questions is to be accused by Upper West Side types of being racist.  That's a (likely intentional) mischaracterization: it's about the culture, stupid.

There's a wealth of challenges to the left's ideology in these posts: their comforting assumption that their opponents are uneducated, their comforting assumption that their opponents are racist (and so can be safely ignored), their comforting assumption that since opposition is about race not culture that there can be no principled opposition to unrestricted immigration from other cultures.

And most of all, their comforting assumption that their opponents should be discriminated against, whether by getting them fired from their jobs or by affirmative action giving jobs to someone else.

These are comfortable assumptions because they all allow the Upper West Side types to remain in their cocoon, avoid feeling bad about themselves for the economic distress they cause to much of society, and indeed indulge in an entirely undeserved feeling of smug superiority.  That, I suspect, is their true motivator: it's all Rich People's Leftism:

With this new approach in mind, let me contrast Rich People’s Leftism (RPL) with Poor People’s Leftism (PPL).

RPL thinks that its goal is to help poor people, while PPL thinks that RPL’s primary goal is to ensure that wealthy leftists dominate and get great jobs.

RPL favors equality and so rejects upward mobility. PPL favors upward mobility via capitalism, since it sees that “egalitarian” schemes never work and are really disguised hierarchies with wealthy leftists at the top.

RPL respects wealthy liberals for wanting to help the poor. PPL observes that these wealthy liberals ensure that they are well paid for what they do and prefers to support wealthy conservatives, who at least are honest about where they are coming from.

And this is where I depart from agreement with Mr. Dannato - his conclusion seems a bit utopian:

If the educated classes were no longer removed from reality, we would see a re-emergence of noblesse oblige, a sense of duty to society as a whole.  They would be aware of their superior intellect in a world defined by inequality but also understand how this entails their responsibility to guide the rest rather than throw all the biggest decisions to the ravening crowds.  They would understand themselves as the elites of a people rather than worker cog individuals.  Armed with this core concept, they would no longer form unholy alliances with foreign tribes against their own kin as they do now.  Their false pride and smug virtue posing would evaporate if only they had to test their beliefs against the world.

I don't see this - I see them not wanting to give up their bubble world because they are self-interested.  They want to continue with cheap inflated self-esteem, and they like the thrill of looking down on the "wrong sort" of people.  And so unfortunately I can't really agree that their intellect is superior - after all, the first duty of a proper intellectual is to challenge one's own assumptions.  I don't see any appetite for that, so there's no reason to expect the emergence of an enlightened sense of duty to society.

Still, this is an important read, so get on over and read it.

So it seems that antivirus is good for something

Fattening corporate bottom lines:

Office Depot has suspended PC Health Check – its malware-scanning service – after it was accused of lying about infections to push antivirus software. 

Former Office Depot technician Shane Barnett told Seattle TV station KIRO 7 that the PC Health Check service would lie to customers that their otherwise-clean PCs were infected with malware, and that this was used to flog expensive disinfection tools. He claimed he was let go from his job because he refused to run the allegedly dodgy scanner on people's machines.

Nice.  Note to self: shop somewhere else in the future.  Not because I don't know how to deal with malware, but because I don't like doing business with crooks.

Wow, that really works!

Now on Gab.ai

You can follow me at @Borepatch.  Unlike Twitter, I'll actually try posting stuff.