More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 30 - November 14, 2018
In 1970, less than 5 percent of America’s population were immigrants. By 2018, that number had risen to nearly 14 percent.
The cost of having other people cut your grass is always higher than you think.
Enough money has been spent on recent conflicts to retire all student loan debt in America.
One of the main lessons our elites seemed to derive from 9/11 is that the best way to fight Islamic terror is to welcome huge numbers of immigrants from places known for Islamic extremism.
The path to the American elite has been well marked for decades: Perform well on standardized tests, win admission to an elite school, enter one of a handful of elite professions, settle in a handful of elite zip codes, marry a fellow elite, and reproduce.
Oligarchies posing as democracies will always be overthrown in the end.
Donald Trump won the Republican primaries, and Republican leaders immediately began plotting to take his nomination at the convention. Trump won the general election, and elites schemed to have the results nullified by electors. Trump assumed office, and the permanent class in Washington worked to sabotage his administration.
The NTSB is so good at its job that, since 2009, there hasn’t been a single fatal accident involving a domestic air carrier.
Conservatives accepted the basic unfairness of life. Liberals raged against
around. Someone needs to fret about the excesses of capitalism. When liberals stopped doing that, the country lost a needed counterbalance. In an ecosystem, every species has a role to play, even the pests. If you succeeded in eliminating the mosquitos, birds would starve. When the last liberal stopped sobbing about unfairness, American society became less fair.
Driving is the most common job in the majority of states, the biggest single employer in blue-collar America.
The Democratic Party is now the party of the rich. Eight of America’s ten most affluent counties voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016,
In Manhattan, by contrast, Trump won less than 10 percent of the vote. In the District of Columbia, he got 4 percent, a smaller proportion than third-party candidates and write-ins combined.
Historically, most highly paid executives voted Republican. No more. In the weeks before the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton outraised Donald Trump 20-to-1 among people on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
seven financial firms alone donated $47.6 million to Hillary. Trump received a total of $19,000, about the price of a used pickup.
Employees of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon donated to Hillary over Trump by a margin of 60-to-1.
It now seems normal for businessmen to finance the activist left. A generation or two ago, it would have been inconceivable.
They had little understanding of the defining role luck often plays in life. People who do the right thing often fail anyway. Human power has limits. You’re not always the sum of your choices. That was hard to deny one hundred years ago, when even tycoons routinely watched their children suffocate from diphtheria.
windows. There was very little news coverage of any of it until 2012. That year about 150 Foxconn workers at a plant in Wuhan climbed to the roof of their factory and threatened to commit mass suicide if conditions didn’t improve. The company responded by installing circus nets beneath the railings.
course. That’s because Apple, like virtually every other big employer in American life, has purchased indulgences from the church of cultural liberalism.
Noblesse oblige means “obligations of the nobility.” Every functioning aristocracy has taken that obligation seriously.
Meanwhile, the nameless workers whose heavily discounted labor has helped push Apple’s market cap ever closer to a trillion dollars live in stinking dormitories in towns you can’t pronounce and are killing themselves in desperation. And no one cares.
The marriage of market capitalism to progressive social values may be the most destructive combination in American economic history.
himself. One of the first things he did with his Facebook wealth was buy a secluded 750-acre estate in Hawaii, and then surround it with a six-foot wall.
For many people, Facebook functions like an addiction.
Science agrees. A 2017 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that the use of Facebook correlated with declining psychological and even physical health. The more time people spent liking posts or updating their Facebook status, the less happy they felt.
One study from 2014 found heavy Facebook use was associated with eating disorders.
A 2015 University of Missouri study found that Facebook made people depressed and envious from viewing the carefully curated lives of their friends. In 2016, a study found that ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Following the 2016 election, there were widespread calls for Facebook to further restrict the news Americans are allowed to see on the site. According to the Washington Post, Barack Obama took Zuckerberg aside during a meeting of world leaders in Peru and begged him to impose greater censorship.
Perhaps in order to inoculate himself against elite criticism, Zuckerberg has immersed himself in fashionable political causes.
Former employees told Gizmodo they “routinely” suppressed right-leaning stories on the company’s breaking news platform.
“I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t,” she said. “That wasn’t the metric of success that I wanted in my life.” To signify her commitment to a simpler existence, Chelsea and her husband bought a five-thousand-square-foot, $10 million apartment in New York City’s
Flatiron District. The unit was reported to be the widest apartment in New York. It stretched an entire city block.
recognized on the street. By the time she quit to advise her mother’s presidential campaign, Business Insider calculated that Chelsea had appeared on network television for a total of just fifty-eight minutes, less than four seconds a day. NBC
paid her $26,724 for every minute she spent on the air.
Unlike his wife, Mezvinsky never struggled to make himself care about money. Mezvinsky did, however, struggle to earn money. Eaglevale Partners attracted several hundred million dollars in investments, including sizable sums from various Clinton donors. Mezvinsky used some of that cash to make huge bets on the future of the Greek economy. That turned out to be unwise. By early 2016, Mezvinsky’s “Hellenic Opportunity
Fund” had lost 90 percent of its value.
In the early 1960s, Chavez fought the federal Bracero Program, which gave farmers permission to import hundreds of thousands of seasonal workers from Mexico to pick crops. Growers loved the program because it lowered their labor costs. Chavez hated it for the same reason.
In 1969, Chavez led a march down the agricultural spine of California to protest the hiring of illegal workers by growers.
Samuel Gompers, the famed AFL leader who was himself an immigrant, explained that “immigration is working a great injury to the people of our country.”
For most of the twentieth century, organized labor remained skeptical of immigration.
remained sharply opposed to illegal immigration, which it rightly saw as a vehicle for both suppressing wages and undermining organized labor.
Nobody doubted that an influx of refugees would harm American workers.
One study, conducted after the Mariel boatlift of 1980, found that Americans with lower education levels in Miami saw their wages fall by 37 percent after the Cuban refugees arrived.
Here’s how one prominent Democrat described his position on immigration in 1995: “All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs
they hold might otherwise be held by U.S. citizens or immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.” The speaker? President Bill Clinton, addressing Congress in his State of the Union speech.
“It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws that we’ve seen in recent years,” Clinton said. “We must do more to stop it.” He got a standing ovation.
In 1994, Jordan noted that “it is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest.”
“Immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants,” economist Paul Krugman wrote that year in the paper.
Hillary Clinton voted in support of a fence on the Mexican border. So did Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, and twenty-three other Senate Democrats.
