Today's links

• From LRC: how to defend yourself in a home invasion.
• US Army Corps of Engineers building big secret site in Israel. ’Bout time that foreign country stopped wagging the dog. Hmm; no wall of separation between mezuzah and state. Conservative positive: the government’s supposed to be about freedom of, not from, religion; all the Constitution bans is a federal religion. Helping American Jews for example would be part of fostering ‘free exercise’ of faith. (And of course this is the faith of the Old Testament from which Christianity came.) The obvious point though is the state and the left are hypocrites. Mezuzahs are OK but privately funded Nativity scenes at statehouses aren’t. War-on-Xmas stories are naff but there’s a culture war. This blog’s about individual liberty, not fomenting hatred of Muslims to gin up the state’s foreign wars, but the stories from northern Europe are scary (no civic Xmas displays, in Brussels, for example, my employers’ capital, for fear of the Mohammedans) and the Mahmoody and many other stories drive home that you don’t want to live in a Muslim country as dhimmi. Individual Muslims willing to compromise by following our Christian, Anglo-Saxon do-no-harm rule are welcome.
• From Takimag: two bumbling female editors. Our man Taki being a society gossip. His believable premise here: when they were young and attractive, cozying up to rich men made these women. I asked Tina Brown a year ago if she thought print has a future and she diplomatically said yes but much smaller; ‘I’m platform-agnostic’, she said, smiling. Now Newsweek of course is history, gone at the end of this month. In the Internet instant-info age, why pay to read week-old stories? I wasted my newspaper career in weeklies; reality/progress and the depression starting in ’08 essentially ended that. Anyway as I said to someone after talking to Brown, being fairly attractive and having Rupert Murdoch for a buddy, of course she lands on her feet.
• Gavin McInnes: Private schools cost a fortune in New York but the public schools are so terrible, the supply still can’t meet the demand. Once you’re finally afforded the opportunity to pay through the nose just so your kid doesn’t spend all day fighting Puerto Ricans, you’re still stuck with a teacher that says your boy’s progress is “Like, really amazing.” OMG. My father’s generation learned Latin for free. Today it costs tens of thousands of dollars to teach your kid to talk like a babysitter. A high-school teacher told me that use of ‘like’, like much other slang, some still with us (‘cool’ meaning good), started in the golden era with jazzmen/big-band musicians.
• Sailer: race realism and charter schools. Again the left are hypocrites; never mind what they say; watch what they do. Turns out they’re normal in some ways; when it comes to protecting their own kids they’re race realists too (but will never admit it) so they practice (but would never argue for) freedom of association. (Rich whites have the means and smarts to do it and get away with it; poor whites on the front line don’t and are called racist for trying.) A tough one; a political and social trap. The answers: neither the sickle (‘diversity’) nor the swastika (race war). Individual liberty is king; no determinism; race-baiting of course is uncharitable and unfair. (The left’s ‘diversity’ doctrine is Christian morals knocked off base.) So, pure meritocracy (real equal opportunity); disparate impact is not by design but a normal, fair outcome; when it happens, tough. (So your high-IQ magnet school is mostly ethnic Orientals; the few blacks who would probably get in are completely welcome; nobody questions their right to be there.) Critics such as the Anti-Gnostic: of course we don’t want to defeat ourselves by nicing ourselves out of existence. Good point. Let me think about that.
• Tone-deaf Republicans: making another play for Hispanics by pushing immigration, but for scientists and techs. Non-race-baiting reason that’s dumb: as Sailer himself has explained, the Mexicans with those talents and skills, the tiny minority at the far right of the bell curve, of course don’t immigrate! Why would they? They rule the country and live like sultans; immigration, he says, partly means they get to dump their low-achieving riffraff onto us. That’s on top of the facts that Hispanics are largely apolitical (not necessarily bad to libertarians: family > state; very Catholic, something they’ve had in common with the other American Latins, Italians, who seem to have partly anglicized in that respect; Pelosi, et al.) but they’re also functionally statist since of course you’ll support a party giving you handouts, never mind the reason, so the few who vote invariably vote D. So at best the GOP gets nothing and at worst pisses off its white base.