Human capital is the ability to create the material things that constitute wealth… A classic example: In the 1970s, Uganda decided that the Gujarati population, from India, were just too wealthy and controlled too much of the economy. The Ugandans expelled them and wouldn’t let them take their wealth with them. And so the Gujaratis arrived, mostly in England, destitute. Meanwhile, the Ugandan government had taken over all of this material stuff. A few years later, the Gujaratis were prosperous in England, and the Ugandan economy collapsed. Because they didn’t have people who knew how to do what the Gujaratis were doing. It’s also one of the problems of trying to finance things by confiscating the wealth of the wealthy. All you can confiscate is the material wealth. You cannot confiscate human capital.

Thomas Sowell on wealth, poverty and Flat Earth economics:  

Fans of car-crash interviews may enjoy these extracts from the BBC’s Today Programme, in which Ms Malia Bouattia, president of the National Union of Students, shares her deep thinking on the subject of “safe spaces” and campus censorship.

Do stay tuned for her thoughts on the University of Birmingham as “a Zionist outpost.”

Via Julia. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

Well, Soil Is Sort Of Brown. 

Your furniture choices are informed by the “crisis in white identity,” says sociology lecturer. And Gardeners’ Question Time is all about race.

Given the Guardian’s intense gravitational pull on certain kinds of stupid, it was perhaps inevitable that Dr Pitcher would find a welcome there. Now it turns out that squirrels are yet another proxy for “our” unspoken racial sentiment. Our esteemed intellectual, who divines hidden racism by means of his third eye, is hurt by the avalanche of mockery aimed at his earlier pronouncements, claiming his words have been misconstrued, while also claiming that same derision proves him right, and while repeating the very claims that resulted in laughter. He does, however, concede that “the uprooting of… Japanese knotweed is… not necessarily motivated by racist intent.”  

Ladies First. 

You men must learn your place in the progressive pecking order.

“On television interviews, on platforms and political meetings, at any presentations — if there’s no woman speaker, then the event does not take place,” says Professor Haiven. By which she means, such gatherings should not be permitted. She’s quite emphatic on this point. Professor Haiven is also keen on punishing people who say things of which she doesn’t approve, and which she casually conflates with acts of violence. And this great thinker can denounce the evils of an alleged male “monopoly” in an environment where women outnumber men by quite some margin, and while sitting on a panel with no male participants, and with no-one willing to argue a substantively different view. 

Answers On A Postcard, Please.

Squat enthusiast invites readers to “imagine what you and your friends could do with a crowbar, a guitar,” and someone else’s property. 

Says Ms Cosslett, “Communes represented a different way of being – sharing the cooking, the cleaning and the childcare was not only practical but also beneficial to the wellbeing of the members.” Readers who as students shared a house and cleaning duties, in theory at least, will no doubt testify to the practicality of this approach and the lofty hygiene standards that invariably resulted. Now imagine those high standards applied to parenting and childcare.

There’s more, should you want it, in the greatest hits. And tickling the tip jar is what keeps this place afloat.

Noted racist and waitress abuser Mr Ntokozo Quabe™ is in the news again:

It is NOT true that I ‘assaulted’ and ‘whipped with a stick’ a white student during our shutdown of the arrogant [University of Cape Town] Law Faculty yesterday. Although I wish I’d actually… whipped the white apartheid settler colonial entitlement out of the bastard – who continued to video record us without our consent.

Well, in fairness, and as caught on video, Mr Quabe and his associates were fairly unequivocal in their demand for attention. And note the use of the word ‘arrogant’.

While word has it that the instruction to video record us came from the Dean of Law (a whole womxn of colour!), we are klear [sic] that we will not be subjected to such white violence. The violent anthropologising of articulations of black pain without black people’s consent is as old as settler colonial domination itself. We refuse to continue operating under the white gaze!

Yes, physical harassment and jabbing at strangers with a two-metre stick are actions unworthy of complaint. But the use of a smartphone to record said jabbing and harassment constitutes “white violence” and is therefore inexcusable. Potential employers, please take note.

Meanwhile, at the University of Houston, and in no way related to anything above: 

Philosophy department advisor Bobbie Sue Schindler agreed without hesitation to the idea of “emotional first-aid kits,” even offering her assistance to help assemble them. “The stress of school gets to them,” Schindler observed… regarding the emotional distress that students face, “like a bad grade, a missed class, being late, a microaggression, uh whatever…” To help students deal with such burdens, the emotional first-aid kits contain a baby blanket, chocolates, a plush kitten, a bag containing the smell of lavender, ear plugs, a genderless pastel teddy bear, hand written notes, and a pacifier. Only the pacifier gave Schindler any pause, though only out of concern that students might take them the wrong way. Instead, she suggested that the kit just contain a note encouraging students to suck their thumbs.

Says Ms Schindler, “I sucked my thumb for twenty years.”

Kitten lovers, look away now. // Dolly does it double tempo. // When objects melt. // Vintage mugshots. // Inside is a game. From the makers of Limbo. // First world problem. (h/t, Julia) // Bottle opener of note. // Buddhist kung fu nuns bring food, fight trafficking. // Baby otter cam. // When the algorithm doesn’t like your article. // Bewilder your children with this retro coffee table. // Room service. // Discontinued products. // How to punctuate your parentheses. // “The F-16 student pilot started to pull up for a barrel roll, but was forced into a G-induced loss of consciousness half-way through the manoeuvre.” // “Objects around you will change shape, appearing to shrink and expand.” (h/t, Dr W) // I question the practicality. // And finally, pleasingly, the good, the bad and the ugly.

Via the comments, AnotherFred steers us to an outpouring of note by Melissa Fabello, managing editor of Everyday Feminism. In this potentially classic piece, from September last year, Ms Fabello rails against those who presume to question her feminist gospel and its charmless lamentations:

If you’re a feminist who spends any amount of time on the internet, you know exactly what I’m talking about: You post that article about the wage gap on Facebook, and all of a sudden, all of these cis, white, straight dudes come out of the woodwork to remind you that the statistics are faulty, that women take more time off of work, that women just don’t like STEM fields.

Well, yes, that will happen if you publicly assert as fact things that aren’t true and which have been repeatedly debunked. And labelling the people who correct those zombie misconceptions, the ones that refuse to die, as “cis, white, straight dudes,” even when they’re ladies, as in the links above, is an evasion, not an argument. Curiously, Ms Fabello depicts those who dare to disagree as merely “playing devil’s advocate,” which seems just a tad presumptuous.

Whenever someone responds to my critique of the culture in which we live with what they believe to be a deep conundrum or contradiction, my first thought is, “Wow. You have absolutely no respect for me as an intellectual being.”

You see, those aren’t load-bearing arguments. They’re just for show. If you poke at those buggers the whole roof could fall in. This is followed, almost instantly, by a twitch of political self-correction:

I don’t think we should value intellect… as a trait (hi, that’s ableist)

Whew. Nice save.

but I do think that we should respect one another for whichever way our smarts show up for us.

Ms Fabello’s smarts are manifest via the medium of rhetorical dance:

When you regurgitate the status quo to us

I.e., when you point out a mistake or point of contention, this is,

interrupting our thought processes

How very dare you.

A morality play in three clicks. Or why Mr Godfrey Elfwick is a national treasure.  

Via dicentra, the Z-Man on the ongoing disappearance of mainstream media comment sections: 

The reason news sites are killing off comment sections is two-fold. One, it is usually where you get the bits of the news story our betters edited out in order to maintain the narrative. The “Minnesota man” in the story is identified in the comments as Jorge Gonzalez, an illegal from Guadalajara. It’s where the “suspect wearing a red shirt” is identified as a black guy named T’Q’ull Ferguson with a Facebook page full of pics of him holding a handgun and a bong. The comment sections have become a leak in the system. The other problem, especially for opinion sites like the Spectator, is the comments have become the place that makes the writers cry. Sure, there’s lots of inane chatter, but it is also where some smart people post corrections and point out the many glaring logical errors. [Opinion writers] have fragile psyches, so seeing their mistakes highlighted for everyone to see, right under their posts, is a source of constant distress.

Ed Driscoll has more. See also this. 

Somewhat related, Christopher Snowdon on Oxfam’s dishonesties: 

If you look at the BBC’s inequality report you will find no challenge, no rebuttal and no response from anybody who disagrees with Oxfam’s warped interpretation of the data. Whether it knows it or not, the BBC is complicit in the fabrication.

Thomas Sowell suggests some election year reading: 

If you are concerned about issues involved when some people want to expand the welfare state and others want to contract it, then one of the most relevant and insightful books is Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple. What makes Life at the Bottom especially relevant and valuable is that it is about the actual consequences of the welfare state in England — which are remarkably similar to the consequences in the United States. Many Americans may find it easier to think straight about what happens, when it is in a country where the welfare recipients are overwhelmingly whites, so that their behaviour cannot be explained away by “a legacy of slavery” or “institutional racism,” or other such evasions of facts in the United States. As Dr Dalrymple says: “It will come as a surprise to American readers, perhaps, to learn that the majority of the British underclass is white, and that it demonstrates all the same social pathology as the black underclass in America — for very similar reasons, of course.” That reason is the welfare state, and the attitudes and behaviour it promotes and subsidises.

I didn’t see that coming. (h/t, Ace) // Cats and dogs. // Have you tied and dyed today? // Testing defences. // Why are breasts called boobs? // Fidget cube. // Is Gab the new Twitter? // Six! is a game. // Can you see all 12 simultaneously? // Marvel’s film music is insufficiently humworthy. // A more common usage has been discovered. (h/t, Damian) // “What sort of man reads Playboy?” // Treat the dear wife to a toilet chandelier. // The taming of the fox. // “The footage depicts E. coli evolving to be 1,000 times more resistant to an antibiotic in just 11 days.” // He keeps ants. // Jack’s back. // How to speak auctioneer. // And finally, a catalogue of failed utopian communes, from poison-wielding sex gurus and tea-shunning vegans to nineteenth century radical anarcho-nudists.

In her last couple of weeks, when my mother’s mind seemed to be floating off somewhere else most of the time, she would sometimes lift her arms into the air, plucking at invisible objects with her fingers. Once, I captured her hands in mine and asked what she’d been doing. “Putting things away,” she answered, smiling dreamily. 

This half-dreaming, half-waking state is common in dying people. In fact, researchers led by Christopher Kerr at a hospice centre outside Buffalo, New York, conducted a study of dying people’s dreams. Most of the patients interviewed, 88 percent, had at least one dream or vision. And those dreams usually felt different to them from normal dreams. For one thing, the dreams seemed clearer, more real. The “patients’ pre-death dreams were frequently so intense that the dream carried into wakefulness and the dying often experienced them as waking reality,” the researchers write in the Journal of Palliative Medicine. Seventy-two percent of the patients dreamed about reuniting with people who had already died. Fifty-nine percent said they dreamed about getting ready to travel somewhere.

Jennie Dear on what it feels like to die.