Can Evolution Be Fast?

Comment: NYT article on very recent evolution of animals living in urban environments.

These kinds of articles always start with “We used to think evolution was very slow.”

Why did we ever believe this? We’ve seen many dog breeds develop in a very short period of time, humans domesticate crops, etc. Going from a fish to an elephant probably would take a very long time, but not a shift in the bell curve of one species on a specific trait.

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Democratic Convention Thread

Comments at Steve Sailer:

Nice to see YouTube favorite, “Frankie,” deliver the opening speech at the convention. He’s come a long way from delivering weather reports:

* Danell Malloy tells us of “a boy who was retarded until well into the 4th grade,” then thru perseverance became governor of the state of Connecticut.

Doesn’t being a liberal democrat mean you already have the retard vote?

So, why would you spend time sharing an anecdote about
a retar… oh.

* He also claimed to be discriminated against in the classroom. For what? Having dyslexia, I guess. But he said it in an ambiguous enough way that it seemed he wanted people to think racial or ethnic discrimination. For being an Irish dude with a tan? Ok.

He got confused a few times during his speech.

Also, someone should keep a tally of how many times someone at the DNC speaks in Spanish. I’ve only caught about 20 minutes and it’s 5 or 6 times already.

* If you’re a recovering alcoholic, and someone suggests “the drinking game” during the DNC, quickly suggest downing a shot every time a thin black woman takes the stage, and thank me later.

* Sort of Brown Congresswoman Sanchez declares of the Hispanic Caucus:

“We are a diverse Caucus!”

Then shows a movie, “What are Latino Congressmen Fighting For?”

I guess they’re fighting for a Mexican-style political model: batshit crazy, solidly reliant on the stupid.

* Or a skit about the Dems trying and failing to build the wall, because “who will pay for it,” “walls don’t work,” “we should build a bridge instead,” etc. Or just general lefty dysfunction: the black guy is too busy spray-painting it with graffiti and getting thrown up against it by white cops, the homo is too busy obsessing over the aesthetic possibilities, the Mexican guy is measuring it for the ladder he’s building, the Palestinian is already digging a tunnel underneath it, the Chinese guy is saying it’ll never hold back the Mongols, etc.

FROM TWITTER:

* Speakers thus far have been : a recovering alcoholic,a mentally retarded man, a mother of a drug addict, and an illegal alien. Your DNC Folks.

* #TimKaine promises bill to legalize illegal immigrants in ‘first 100 days’:

* Brilliant solution. Make all the illegal aliens US citizens. Now there are no more illegal aliens. Or America.

* I’ve watched 10 minutes of #DNCinPHL and so far it’s basically hispanics flaunting their illegal status and screaming at Trump.

* Unbelievable. I’m at the Dem convention and they’re making us watch the lady ghostbusters film. They’ve locked the doors.

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Japan Stabbing Horror

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A revealing look into Donald Trump’s unofficial Internet campaign

From Washington Post July 18, 2016:

At this time last year, Bill Mitchell had 149 Twitter followers and “nothing particularly interesting to say.” He is now, per a recent MIT Media Lab study, the single most influential private person tweeting about the campaigns.

“I feel like I’m part of something historic,” Mitchell said from his home in Charlotte, N.C., where he currently tweets about Trump an average of 73 times per day. “I think historians will look back on this election in 30 or 40 years and see it as the moment when America stepped back from the brink. I’m proud to be a part of that.”

Mitchell, 56, has always been interested in politics: He describes himself as a “lifelong conservative” who has gotten in yelling matches with TV news. But he was never moved to actually participate until Trump entered the Republican race last June.

Mitchell liked the idea of a businessman as commander-in-chief. (He’s personally worked in executive recruitment for the past 30 years.) He also saw a gap in mainstream Trump coverage: No one, Mitchell believed, was doing a particularly knockout job explaining complex concepts to the political newcomers who had embraced Trump. And while the “highly paid punditry” predicted Trump’s downfall on the daily, Mitchell thought they had it wrong.

So he started tweeting: news articles from his favorite sources (Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, Conservative Treehouse, DC Whispers and Truthfeed), pithy commentaries, bite-sized political analyses. During the height of the primary season, Mitchell’s account saw 25,000 retweets per day and reached 60 million people per month.

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THE REVOLT OF THE BANANA REPUBLICANS

Thanks for the gay hysteria, mate.

Jamie Kirchik, who wrote last week in the Los Angeles Times that the military should mount a coup against a President Trump, writes today in Tabletmag:

The porcine duo of Newt Gingrich and Dick Morris, both of whom waddled past me on the convention’s first day, are physical manifestations of what the Republican Party has become under Trump, whose fleshy jowls at times render him indistinguishable from a bullfrog. Unlike the fit and trim House Speaker Paul Ryan, a visibly reluctant Trump supporter who clearly would have rather spent the entirety of last week in a dentist’s chair, Gingrich and Morris are engorged, mercenary, and utterly lacking in self-control, as willing to stick whole plates of food down their gullets or reach for the nearest “beautiful piece of ass” (or prostitute’s toe) as they are ready to adapt their principles to the moment…

Relatives of people murdered by illegal immigrants joined people like Pat Smith, mother of a foreign service officer killed in the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack, in a festival of fear and loathing.

It would have been one thing if this shameless retailing of victimhood (something that conservatives usually blame liberals for doing) was limited to tales of self-pity. What made it truly terrifying were the calls for blood. At the “America First” rally earlier in the day, I had seen dozens of people sporting “Hillary for Prison” T-shirts, what I took at the time to be nothing more than a token of Roger Stone’s virulent mischief. Inside the hall, I was appalled to hear, repeatedly and on every night of the convention, delegates cry “Lock her up!” whenever Clinton’s name was mentioned. It was an exhortation issued directly from the stage. Darryl Glenn, a Senate candidate in Colorado, declared that Clinton should be outfitted in a “bright orange jumpsuit.” Pat Smith, who, in the exploitation of her grief the right has fashioned into its own Cindy Sheehan, insisted that the former Secretary of State “deserves to be in stripes.”

The degeneration of the Republicans into banana Republicans reached its apotheosis on Wednesday evening, when Chris Christie, apparently worried that his reputation as a fat creep hadn’t yet taken hold within the minds of a majority of Americans, led the crowd in a call-and-response show trial-cum-lynch mob…

Supporting Trump is an inherently masochistic act, and not only because one must surrender his conscience to do so. It is a form of intellectual and moral surrender…

Did these latter-day Pontius Pilates, many of whom pridefully advertise themselves as adherents of Judeo-Christian faith, pause a moment to consider what their ancient texts say about the weak and the strong, the rich and the poor, about those who lust for power at the expense of everything else? I hope they did, and that they felt at least a pang of guilt at their participation in this moral obscenity masking itself as an exercise in American democracy.

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