HOT. IT LOOKS HOT. This crazy see-through engine shows you what internal combustion actually looks like.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: How American Colleges Became Bastions of Sex, Booze and Entitlement.

IN “THE SCIENCE OF INTELLECTUAL TRIBALISM”, Jonah Goldberg writes:

‘David Gelernter, fiercely anti-intellectual computer scientist, is being eyed for Trump’s science adviser.” — Washington Post, January 18

Um. Well, huh.

For those unfamiliar with David Gelernter, he essentially created parallel computing, which sounds like witchcraft to me, but I’m told it’s a really big deal. He was also one of the first people to see the Internet coming, in his 1991 book Mirror Worlds. Bill Joy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, described Gelernter as “one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time.” Ted Kaczynski — aka “the Unabomber” — agreed, which is why he maimed Gelernter with a letter bomb in a 1993 assassination attempt.

Gelernter, who teaches computer science at Yale and has degrees in classical Hebrew, has written books and articles on history, culture, religion, artificial intelligence, and philosophy. His acclaimed paintings don’t do too much for me, but that’s probably because I’m a bit of Philistine about these things.

Regardless, saying that Gelernter is “fiercely anti-intellectual” is a bit like saying Tiger Woods is fiercely anti-golf.

So what on earth could the Washington Post mean with that headline?

This is how Tom Wolfe defined the term “intellectual” in his 2000 essay, “In the Land of the Rococo Marxists:”

The word “intellectual,” used as a noun referring to the “intellectual laborer” who assumes a political stance, did not exist until Georges Clemenceau used it in 1898 during the Dreyfus case, congratulating those “intellectuals,” such as Marcel Proust and Anatole France, who had joined Dreyfus’s great champion, Emile Zola. Zola was an entirely new form of political eminence, a popular novelist. His famous J’accuse was published on the front page of a daily newspaper, L’Aurore (“The Dawn”), which printed 300,000 copies and hired hundreds of extra newsboys who sold virtually every last one by midafternoon.

Zola and Clemenceau provided a wholly unexpected leg up in life for the ordinary worker ants of “pure intellectual labor” (Clemenceau’s term): your fiction writers, playwrights, poets, history and lit profs, that whole cottage industry of poor souls who scribble, scribble, scribble. Zola was an extraordinary reporter (or “documenter,” as he called himself) who had devoured the details of the Dreyfus case to the point where he knew as much about it as any judge, prosecutor, or law clerk. But that inconvenient detail of Zola’s biography was soon forgotten. The new hero, the intellectual, didn’t need to burden himself with the irksome toil of reporting or research. For that matter, he needed no particular education, no scholarly training, no philosophical grounding, no conceptual frameworks, no knowledge of academic or scientific developments other than the sort of stuff you might pick up in Section 9 of the Sunday newspaper. Indignation about the powers that be and the bourgeois fools who did their bidding-that was all you needed. Bango! You were an intellectual.

From the very outset the eminence of this new creature, the intellectual, who was to play such a tremendous role in the history of the twentieth century, was inseparable from his necessary indignation. It was his indignation that elevated him to a plateau of moral superiority. Once up there, he was in a position to look down at the rest of humanity. And it hadn’t cost him any effort, intellectual or otherwise. As Marshall McLuhan would put it years later: “Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.” Precisely which intellectuals of the twentieth century were or were not idiots is a debatable point, but it is hard to argue with the definition I once heard a French diplomat offer at a dinner party: “An intellectual is a person knowledgable in one field who speaks out only in others.”

If that’s how the Post’s Sarah Kaplan or her headline writer define the term “intellectual,” then defining Gelernter as “anti-intellectual” is very likely quite justified. But as Jonah goes on to write in his essay on Gelernter, it’s not: “What Kaplan really seems to be getting at is that Gelernter is one of the few major intellectuals out there today who is critical of the intellectual establishment, which acts as a class or guild…“It takes a lot of intellectual firepower and self-confidence to declare that the intellectual emperors have no clothes,” he adds, so it’s no surprise that Gelernter “has been accused of being excessively humble.”

Speaking of emperors with no clothes, here’s what Obama’s “science” “czar” was proposing around this time in 2009:

That wasn’t the zaniest idea that Holdren ever floated. As the anonymous Bay Area blogger Zombie noted with quotes from his 1977 book, Holdren believed that forced abortions and mass sterilization were needed to save the planet from overpopulation. Those ideas that were all the rage among the scientific caste back in the ‘70s, who drank gallons of Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” Kool-Aid at the dawn of the Nixon era.

I don’t recall anyone on the left in 2009 speaking out and proclaiming Holdren as daft for wanting to fire rockets filled with pollution into the sky. Someone in the Trump administration should propose that as well, just for kicks and gins when he’s attacked as a lunatic by the media.

MY SECOND AMENDMENT PIECE, Permissible Negligence and Campaigns to Suppress Rights is currently #2 on the SSRN Top Downloads List. Thanks to everyone who downloaded it!

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 1353: Will The Trump IRS End, Or Embrace, Targeting Of Disfavored Groups? I hope it’ll end it, though I suspect the latter is more likely.

And, once again:

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Jacksonian Revolt:

Many Jacksonians came to believe that the American establishment was no longer reliably patriotic, with “patriotism” defined as an instinctive loyalty to the well-being and values of Jacksonian America. And they were not wholly wrong, by their lights. Many Americans with cosmopolitan sympathies see their main ethical imperative as working for the betterment of humanity in general. Jacksonians locate their moral community closer to home, in fellow citizens who share a common national bond. If the cosmopolitans see Jacksonians as backward and chauvinistic, Jacksonians return the favor by seeing the cosmopolitan elite as near treasonous—people who think it is morally questionable to put their own country, and its citizens, first.

Jacksonian distrust of elite patriotism has been increased by the country’s selective embrace of identity politics in recent decades. The contemporary American scene is filled with civic, political, and academic movements celebrating various ethnic, racial, gender, and religious identities. Elites have gradually welcomed demands for cultural recognition by African Americans, Hispanics, women, the lgbtq community, Native Americans, Muslim Americans. Yet the situation is more complex for most Jacksonians, who don’t see themselves as fitting neatly into any of those categories.

A hundred years ago, Randolph Bourne laid out a theory of identity politics in which minority groups were to develop ethnic pride while the majority Anglo-Saxon population did not. The Bourne identity approach worked, until people started crowing that the majority wasn’t a majority anymore and should hurry up and die out, and, well, then it stopped working.

SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “Next time we have a peaceful transfer of power, can there be less of it to transfer, please?”

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour. Plus, Hourly-Fresh Deals on Best Selling Products.

Also, shop today’s Kindle Daily Deals.

Plus, today’s Digital Deals.

And don’t miss today’s deals in Grocery and Gourmet Food.

A LATE CHRISTMAS: The latest in StrategyPage’s Battle of the Bulge photo series. The photo shows U.S. Army tankers opening Christmas packages on December 30, 1944. The tank crew has erected a tent next to the tank and is using the tank to anchor the tent.

RUSSIA’S GAME IN LIBYA: The article is speculative. However, Russian diplomatic interest and activity in Libya are for real. Power abhors a vacuum.

Russia has not played a dominant role in Libya since the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi. Rather, other powers, including the United States and Europe, and regional actors, including Egypt, Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, have been heavily involved in Libya’s post-Gadhafi transition. Russia has, however, remained focused and engaged in Libya and is now involved there as part of its geopolitical game and expansion of its influence in the Middle East. This is also in part due to Russian companies’ commercial interests.

BRETIGNE SHAFER ON LEFTIES AND TRUMP:

Here’s the thing: I’m a libertarian. I’ve been surrounded by people who don’t agree with me for as long as I can remember and it has never occurred to me to isolate myself from everyone because of our political differences. Certainly not to assault them. Nor am I filled with anxiety by the thought that people who work in my home might have different political views than mine. To me, you’re all a bunch of fascists. But I’ve somehow learned to live with you.

For me, watching people unravel over this election has been instructive. The – yes, I’m going to say it – bigotry of many on the left, in their caricaturing of Trump supporters, has never before been so blatant. Nor has the jaw-dropping, mass-hypnosis level of selective partisan-driven outrage. I understand that a lot of people are worried, upset, even frightened over the prospect of a Trump presidency. Good. They should be. But they should have been worried eight years ago, or at the very least, four years ago.

I was worried four years ago. And I was worried eight years ago. I tried in vain to get my Obama-supporting friends to see what I saw, but with very few exceptions (which I appreciated, thank you) I was met with silence, accused of mean-spiritedness or just told that I should “give him a chance” (did I have a choice?)


I was right in all but one of my predictions for the Obama administration, by the way.

So in case you (like some of my friends) somehow missed out on what’s been happening over the past eight years, let me catch you up:

1. We no longer have a Fourth Amendment, nor the right of habeas corpus (you remember: it was kind of the foundation of our justice system). Yes, the demise of these fundamental protections has been a long time coming, but President Obama delivered the death blow when he gave himself (and all future presidents) the right to imprison indefinitely or even assassinate any human being on the planet with no due process whatsoever.

Number One should be enough. Any normal person should look at the first item on this list and say “OK, I guess that’s a little bit worse than making fun of a disabled reporter.” (And I say this as the mother of an intellectually disabled daughter.) But, because I know it won’t be enough, I’ll continue…

2. Obama has bombed more countries than George W. Bush did, and his drone strikes have killed more than six times as many people as those under Bush, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (killing unintended victims 90% of the time.)

3. He has given himself (and all future presidents) the power to wage war without Congressional approval.

4. He has greatly expanded the mass surveillance of American citizens.

5. He put in place a statist health insurance mandate that has sent insurance premiums skyrocketing.

6. He has continued the same brand of crony capitalism and debt expansion of the previous administration.

7. He has deported more than 2.5 million immigrants – more than any other American president in history.

8. After running on a platform of more government transparency, he has presided over an administration more hostile than any other to whistleblowers and a free press.

9. Police brutality has not abated, nor has the mass incarceration of Americans (and especially black and Hispanic Americans. Maybe it’s only “racism” if the president is a white Republican?)

10. Did I mention he – and all future presidents – now has the legal right to kill anyone on the planet, including American citizens, with no conviction, no charges, no semblance of due process at all. Did I mention that?

It was fine as long as it was Obama. It’s Hitler now that it’s Trump.

WHY DO THEY HATE AMERICA? Democrats block quick confirmation of Trump’s CIA director. I’m old enough to remember when this sort of “obstructionism” was tantamount to terrorist activity.

WOMEN’S BODIES, WOMEN’S CHOICES, WOMEN’S JUDGMENT ON OTHER WOMEN: It’s Not Okay For You To Pass Judgment On How Many Kids I Have: My children are healthy, happy, and well-behaved. Yet we are still the subject of never-ending judgment, simply because I have four.

A couple of years ago, when one of my colleagues’ wife was pregnant with her fifth kid, I said “Congratulations! That’s great!” And she thanked me, because she said most people either asked why she wanted so many kids, or asked if she knew how this happened.

JONATHAN ADLER: How President Trump will shape the federal courts. The poor federal courts are overworked. We need to add more judges. A lot more judges.

SHE’S RIGHT, BUT SHE’S ALSO THINKING ABOUT RE-ELECTION IN A STATE THAT WENT FOR TRUMP: Dem senator: Violent Trump protesters ‘disgusting:’

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) says she is appalled by protesters responding destructively to President Trump’s inauguration Friday.

“Nothing is more un-American than protesters who are not peaceful – disgusting,” tweeted McCaskill, who backed 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over Trump.

“I understand the angst out there today for all of you throwing stuff at me,” she added. “Sorry, but I believe peaceful protest is always the right way.”

McCaskill also said violent protests run counter to the teachings of civil rights leaders, adding they discredit peaceful demonstrations as well.

“MLK and John Lewis were and are the role models for peaceful protest,” she wrote, referencing Martin Luther King Jr. and the present-day Democratic representative from Georgia, respectively. “But the small group will get all the attention – sigh.”

Trump took the oath of office Friday, making him America’s 45th president after an often bitter White House race last year.

“We are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the people,” he said on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. “From this moment on, it’s going to be America first. I will fight for you with every breath in my body, and I will never, ever let you down.”

Police in Washington, D.C., however, announced that afternoon they had arrested “numerous” people destructively protesting against Trump mere blocks from his address.

Authorities told The Associated Press that those arrested were charged with rioting following incidents involving a group of about 100 people.

The demonstrators damaged vehicles, destroyed property and set small fires while armed with crowbars and hammers, officials added.

She knows that if you want more Trump, this is how you get more Trump. And she doesn’t want more Trump.

Exit question: If you get beaten by these rioters, do you get to play martyr for life like John Lewis?

MICKEY KAUS: It’s Not 1934. “Wanted: A name for the hypertrophied fear of Trump that’s overcome so many — maybe most — of his opponents.”

Plus: “How does 1934ism go away? Is it enough that the brownshirts don’t appear? (Spoiler: Maybe not.)” Well, it’s not so much that they think Trump is a Nazi, as that they want to think of themselves as the bold resistance. The absence of actual brownshirts — well, except for the ones from the Left who were smashing windows, and Trump supporters, in DC last night — only makes it easier and more appealing to strike that pose.

INCLUSION: Trump Referred To Himself Only 3 Times During Speech; We 45 Times; You 24 Times.

WHY DOES THE WAPO HATE IMMIGRANTS? Washington Post snipes at Melania Trump’s bio.

SEAN TRENDE AND DAVID BLYLER: How Trump Won — Conclusions. “The general trend here, though, is that most of the land area is red. Land area doesn’t vote, but rural and small-town America casts tens of millions of votes. Shifts of this magnitude add up. The one big exception is California, which has shifted almost uniformly toward Democrats. But this is inefficient; California was already quite blue by 1996; all of these votes are ‘wasted.’ On the other hand, the dark red areas – West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana – are all places where Democrats performed well in 1996, but no longer do.”

THEY CAN’T HELP IT: Charlie Martin: Stop Making Me Defend Trump!

THIS WAPO HED SEEMS ABOUT RIGHT: Donald Trump completes hostile takeover of Washington, puts both parties on notice.

FAKE NEWS: Valerie Jarrett’s daughter will cover Justice Department for CNN.

AT AMAZON, New Year, New Tech.

Plus, deals galore in Patio, Lawn, and Garden.

OUT: CLINTON FOUNDATION. In: Obama Foundation. Hey, it’s nine-figures wealth for giving some speeches.