DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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Everybody’s a critic.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, vents about media treatment of the proposed ‘tax reform’.

In recent days I have – likely like you have – heard and read several media reports on Trump’s tax plan (or what we know of it so far).  Nearly all of these reports are juvenile: changes in tax rates are evaluated by the media according to changes in the legal tax liabilities of various groups of people.  For example, Trump’s proposal to cut the top federal personal income-tax rate from 39.6% to 35% is assessed only by its effect on high-income earners.  Specifically, of course, it’s portrayed as a ‘gift’ to high-income earners.  Eliminating the estate tax, as well as the alternative minimum tax, are likewise portrayed as benefits for the rich.

My purpose here isn’t to praise or to pillory Trump’s tax plan; I’ve yet to examine it in any detail.  My purpose, instead, is to lament this popular approach to evaluating taxation.  This approach, as Deirdre McCloskey might say, is that of a lawyer and not that of an economist.  The lawyer focuses on legal liabilities; the economist focuses on systemic consequences, both immediate and ‘seen’ as well as distant and ‘unseen.’

Actually, most of the j-school grads who are bloviating about it on TV aren’t even lawyers — but they have access to lawyers who (a) are mostly Democrats and (b) apparently slept through a lot of law school.

It’s true that if Smith’s last (say) $10,000 of annual income is currently taxed at a rate higher than a proposed new lower rate, Smith is made better off if this proposed lower marginal tax rate becomes reality.  (As an aside, I refuse to go along with the common-in-many-circles description of such a tax cut as a “gift” or a “giveaway” to Smith and other high-income earners.  Smith is the person who earned the income.  It is his property.  This income belongs to Smith.  The government takes it away from him.  For the government to reduce the amount of money that it takes away from Smith is not properly called a giveaway to Smith.  But let’s here say no more about this particular linguistic battering of reality.)

There’s a lot of that going around these days; the presumption that all your income belongs to the government except for whatever they graciously deign to let you keep infects a lot of people beyond the Usual Suspects who want your earnings confiscated because it’s more than they think you deserve.

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One of the staples of Portland, Oregon—”Portlandia” to TV viewers— is the annual Rose Festival, now in its 82nd year, and it has for several years now featured a kickoff parade, akin to the Rose Parade in Pasadena on January 1 every year. But this year’s parade, scheduled for this weekend, has been cancelled. The reason: It was going to include—gasp—Republicans! And this is too much for the hardened left, which threatens to shutdown the parade by violent means if it includes Republicans. And the city of Portland has caved.

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Each year, Earth Day is accompanied by predictions of doom. Let’s take a look at past predictions to determine just how much confidence we can have in today’s environmentalists’ predictions.

In 1970, when Earth Day was conceived, the late George Wald, a Nobel laureate biology professor at Harvard University, predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist and best-selling author of “The Population Bomb,” declared that the world’s population would soon outstrip food supplies. In an article for The Progressive, he predicted, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” He gave this warning in 1969 to Britain’s Institute of Biology: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” On the first Earth Day, Ehrlich warned, “In 10 years, all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.” Despite such predictions, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ highest award.

Andy McCarthy looks at Judge Orrick’s ‘ruling’.

A showboating federal judge in San Francisco has issued an injunction against President Trump’s executive order cutting off federal funds from so-called sanctuary cities. The ruling distorts the E.O. beyond recognition, accusing the president of usurping legislative authority despite the order’s express adherence to “existing law.” Moreover, undeterred by the inconvenience that the order has not been enforced, the activist court — better to say, the fantasist court — dreams up harms that might befall San Francisco and Santa Clara, the sanctuary jurisdictions behind the suit, if it were enforced. The court thus flouts the standing doctrine, which limits judicial authority to actual controversies involving concrete, non-speculative harms.

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The brownshirts of the Left are on the march. Yet Trump is supposedly the new Hitler.

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We have the technology.

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A new research letter published today in the journal Nature makes a startling claim that, if correct, will rewrite everything we know about how North America was populated.

But in the the words of its own author, Steven Holen, the evidence he and his colleagues discovered “went against everything I’ve ever taught in my career about early humans in North America.”

So clearly it’s reasonable to be skeptical. That’s why we’re breaking down the evidence in this special edition of CSI: Mastodon.

UPDATE: More here.

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The University of California’s administration kept millions of dollars in a secret fund even as it sought permission from the Board of Regents, and approval from the public, to raise tuition. It also overpaid employees who were already handsomely compensated, and provided them expensive perks.

Public institutions exist to provide the Crust and their offspring with affluence at taxpayers’ expense.

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In a report released yesterday, the CBO concludes that federal employees receive total wages and benefits that average 17 percent above what comparably skilled workers earn in large private-sector firms. The federal premium comes from slightly higher salaries — about 3 percent higher than the private sector, on average — coupled with massively higher benefits, which average 47 percent above private-sector levels. The new report is an update of the CBO’s 2012 analysis, which found close to the same thing.

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

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A parent who had built a good insurance business in 1950 had a valuable asset that he could hand over to his sons. As long as they put a full day in at the office, they too would be able to take home a good living. That calculation applies across a broad range of manufacturing, retail and service businesses that used to form the economic bulwark of the prosperous middle class.

An MBA, however, is not heritable. Neither is a law degree, a medical degree, or any of the other educational credentials that form the barriers to entry into today’s upper middle class. Those have to be earned by the child, from strangers — and with inequality rising, the competition for those credentials just keeps getting fiercer.

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Will the Islamophobia never cease?

Funny, the bear didn’t look Jewish….

Steve Sailer watches the meltdown.

Lately, American higher education is notoriously prone to tantrums. Two more academic meltdowns last week raise connected questions:

First, are scholars allowed to suggest any explanation for racial disparities other than that White People Are Bad?

Second, if they can’t say anything heretical or interesting, do we really need white scholars anymore, or can they be replaced by Professors of Color?

All of the above, I’d say.

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Hillary Clinton’s Department of State aides threatened a South Asian prime minister’s son with an IRS audit in an attempt to stop a Bangladesh government investigation of a close friend and donor of Clinton’s, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group learned.

A Bangladesh government commission was investigating multiple charges of financial mismanagement at Grameen Bank, beginning in May 2012. Muhammad Yunus, a major Clinton Foundation donor, served as managing director of the bank.

Democrats, the Party of Corruption since before the Civil War.

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United doesn’t just break guitars.

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And here I thought it was more pictures of the ‘Science March’. Hard to tell without a scorecard sometimes.

I suppose it’s about all they’ve got left (no pun intended).

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“Being ‘pro-science’ has become a bizarre cultural phenomenon in which liberals (and other members of the cultural elite) engage in public displays of self-reckoned intelligence as a kind of performance art, while demonstrating zero evidence to justify it,” Dr. Jeremy Faust, a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, wrote in Slate.

“There was an uncomfortable dronelike fealty to the concept — an oxymoronic faith that information presented and packaged to us as Science need not be further scrutinized before being smugly celebrated en masse,” Faust wrote. “That is not intellectually rigorous thought — instead, it’s another kind of religion, and it is perhaps as terrifying as the thing it is trying to fight.”

Perhaps because ‘progressivism’ is, fundamentally, a cult.

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Two professors from West Chester University decided to do an in-depth analysis into various people’s ancestries and backgrounds. First they asked participants to guess the results. One of their participants, Bernard, came away very displeased when the test revealed he was mainly European and not at all black.

Bernard walked into the test identifying himself as “black.” He informed the professors ahead of time that despite having a white mother, his mother raised him to identify as a black man.

“My mother said, ‘I know you are me, but no cop is going to take the time to find out your mother is white,’” Bernard explained before the test. “She was very specific about raising me as a black man.”

Perhaps because those Victim Points can be traded for valuable prizes.

Perhaps if I ‘identify’ as rich somebody will give me money.

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Still won’t make up for the millions who died because of Rachel Carson.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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If you like that sort of thing, you know who you are.

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A useful reference for those of us who often find ourselves throwing books against the wall.

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And about time, too.

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If you haven’t read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you ought to.

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I want you to consider the possibility that your parents did not shape you as a person. Despite how it feels, your mother and father (or whoever raised you) likely imprinted almost nothing on your personality that has persisted into adulthood. Pause for a minute and let that heresy wash across your synapses. It flies in the face of common sense, does it not? In fact, it’s the type of claim that is unwise to make unless you have some compelling evidence to back it up. Even then it will elicit the ire of many. Psychologists especially get touchy about this subject. I do have evidence, though, and by the time we’ve strolled through the menagerie of reasons to doubt parenting effects, I think another point will also become evident: the problems with parenting research are just a symptom of a larger malady plaguing the social and health sciences. A malady that needs to be dealt with.

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Would you give up your citizenship in order to keep your bank account?

That’s a question few Americans would ever want to confront, yet many Americans living abroad are now having to answer.

A little-known tax law, known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, has resulted in some foreign banks no longer serving Americans.

The law, signed in 2010 by President Barack Obama, was intended to make it harder for Americans to keep money overseas and out of the reach of the IRS. The primary target was rich Americans allegedly hiding money from tax collectors.

The Obama legacy — more hardship for Americans. He’s on a roll.

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Poor iddle babies.

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Witnesses claim that approximately 40 to 60 juveniles swarmed the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station and circumvented the payment process by jumping over the fare gates. After arriving to the second-story platform, the thieves manually held open the doors to the train car while other miscreants flooded in, according to SFGATE.

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The latest mass robbery is just one in a string of similar crimes on BART trains in recent weeks, though it appears none of the prior incidents were as organized as this one.

Democrats behaving badly.

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The study found evidence of the comet engraved on a pillar in the world’s oldest temple at G?bekli Tepe in Southern Turkey. The engraving indicates the comet killed thousands, wiping out many large animal species, and triggering a miniature ice age lasting 1,000 years.

Oddly enough, all life on earth was not destroyed. So I wouldn’t sweat the ‘global warming’ scare.

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Another lefty myth debunked.

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While many overdue woman resort to spicy food, sex, pineapple and bouncing on an exercise ball, the Buffalo Wing Pizza at Hawthorne’s New York Pizza and Bar in Charlotte, North Carolina has reportedly sent “multiple women” into labour, reports local news outlet Charlotte Five.

The paper spoke to three women who all gave birth to their children shortly after sampling the pizza which they did from hearing on the local grapevine that it was the place to visit if you were desperate to push your baby out.

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Some people just can’t shake loose from playing with blocks.

Severian looks at education.

Since I’ve spent a lot of time in and around the Ed Biz, people often ask me if professors really believe their own bullshit.  The things they say are so outlandish — and their private behavior is so opposed to their public sentiments — that they must be lying, right?

I don’t think so.  At its higher levels, academia is pretty much a cult, and college is a kind of low rent mind control.  I’m pretty sure the big boys — the college presidents who pull down a million per — know it’s a scam; except for the Diversity clowns, everyone else is a true believer.

The first thing any cult does with a new recruit is to flatten, or at least narrow, their affect.  Your affect — the characteristic way you express emotion — is socially conditioned.  Altering that breaks your social conditioning, and since we all strive to fit in with our society, the recruit will quickly rebuild his affect in the cult-approved manner.  Here’s a good, quick description of how Scientology does it.  TR (training routine)-0 strives for an absolutely flat affect — first, recruits have to stare at each other, unmoving, for up to two hours; next, they have to remain unresponsive to stimuli as their trainers yell at them and degrade them.

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It has become painfully clear in recent years that partisan gerrymandering is one of American democracy’s worst illnesses.

Painfully clear, perhaps, to people who write for Slate on ‘law and LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ issues’, but for rational adults, the worst illness is democracy itself — a system of government in which, as the classical definition has it, ‘51% of the population can pee in the soup of the other 49%’. The key characteristic of American democracy is that it is constrained, viz. there are barriers in place to keep The Majority, no matter how overwhelming, from doing the dirty to minorities. This doesn’t always work well — ask Japanese-Americans who their favorite Democrat President is — but in normal times works much better than an unconstrained democracy might.

Although the Supreme Court held decades ago that the purpose of redistricting was to ensure “fair and effective representation for all citizens,” legislators often use the process to lock the minority party out of power.

Democracy itself locks the minority party out of power. (Funny how this complaint never surfaces when Democrats are in charge. Look at any big city and count how many Republicans are on the city council and try to say with a straight face that the minority party has any power.) For the ‘minority party’ to have any power directly undermines the essential nature of democracy.

Both Democrats and Republicans deploy partisan gerrymandering to dilute votes for their opponents, creating one-party rule and, arguably, greater polarization.

I just love that phrase, ‘dilute votes’, as if you can just add water to minority voters and watch them dissolve like dirt in the laundry. Whenever you see the phrase ‘dilute’ it indicates somebody trying to get power for a ‘minority’ that is greater than they would have under a strict democracy. Almost always this is a Democrat (the oxymoron party) complaining that Democrats don’t get to run things even when they lose elections. And if you want polarization, well, listen to a speech by Chuck Schumer or Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warran or any BlackLives Matter demagogue and you’ll see where the polarization is coming from.

I won’t bother fisking the rest of this article (remember, they actually paid somebody to write this stuff), but just move on to discuss ‘gerrymandering’ in light of what one might call ‘democratic theory’. Most arguments against ‘gerrymandering’ take the form of ‘but it makes districts less competitive!’, as if this were some sort of electoral Olympics in which the horse-race aspect of an election has some special virtue. In truth, it does not. ‘Effective representation’ (see Supreme Court reference above) is all about having representatives who believe the same way as the person voting, and the less ‘competitive’ a district is, the more actual ‘effective representation’ that voter has. It is obvious to the most casual observer who doesn’t live in his parents’ basement that if a Representative gets 75% of the vote the voters of that district who are on the winning side (and that’s what democracy cares about, remember) are more effectively represented than in a district where the Representative only gets 51% of the vote.

Think about it. I’ll wait.

The more ‘competitive’ the election, the greater the proportion of voters whose ‘representation’ isn’t effective. That’s the bottom line. From the point of view of DEMOCRACY, the more ‘uncompetitive’ districts one has, the more ‘effective representation’ one gets.

Sure, it’s possible to construct an academic exercise where one way of redistricting an area gives the ‘minority party’ less power than they would have under a different way of redistricting, but if you look closely, these claims (like claims for global warming) always depend for their validity on the truth of some very strong assumptions about voter behavior (typically that all Republicans vote the same way and all Democrats vote the same way), assumptions that have no necessary connection to real-life voter behavior. And no one (that I’ve seen) has yet come up with an actual redistricting scheme that precisely fits that strong-assumption exercise.

The reason why you hear all of the DemLegHump media jaw on about ‘gerrymandering’ is because ‘noncompetitive’ districts are boring. Without a ‘horse race’, they have nothing on which to report. People who went to journalism school because they wanted to Make A Difference get really frustrated when everything they do to Make A Difference doesn’t matter, because the election is only going to go one way. That’s the real reason they don’t like ‘gerrymandering’.

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Well, they could always leave for someplace else. It’s not as if they haven’t done that before.

Joe Bob Briggs investigates ancestry.

I’m loving all these Ancestry.com commercials where dim-witted actors say, “I thought I was a Tahitian Eskimo Mexican until I sent in my DNA test kit, and boy was I flummoxed when the results came back! I’m really Croatian with a mix of sub-Saharan! I guess I’ll be turning in my furry hat!”

Riddle me this: Why do sailors need to wear camouflage on board a ship? In order to better hide from work?

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Given its iconic hold on the American imagination, the idea that more Americans are leaving California than coming breaches our own sense of uniqueness and promise. Yet, even as the economy has recovered, notably in the Bay Area and in pockets along the coast, the latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates show that domestic migrants continue to leave the state more rapidly than they enter it.

The Middle East isn’t the only place that’s producing lots of refugees.

The movement away from expensive core regions reflects the basic preference among people for affordable, less dense housing. The new Census estimates have confirmed this national trend. Migration to both suburbs and smaller cities — and away from dense core counties — is now at the highest rate in a decade.

Population growth in big urban core cities, including New York, is now about half of what it was back in 2010. Last year, all 10 of the top gainers in domestic migration were sprawling, more affordable Sun Belt metropolitan areas in states like Texas, North Carolina, Florida and Tennessee.

These dispersive trends are clear in Southern California, where net migration out of Los Angeles County runs about four times the rate of neighboring, more suburban Orange County, as migration to places like Riverside County mounts. Despite all the national hype surrounding L.A.’s drive for densification, it’s not a model that most people, and particularly families, seem to be embracing.

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Missouri Governor Eric Greitens took part in a SWAT team competition over the weekend.

The Republican governor, a former Navy SEAL, was invited to compete in the Southeast Missouri SWAT Challenge with the St. Louis County SWAT team, his office said.

Funny how you never find former Navy SEALs running as Democrats.

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In 2013, a UK Medical Research Council team stopped brain cells dying in an animal for the first time, creating headline news around the world.

But the compound used was unsuitable for people, as it caused organ damage.

Now two drugs have been found that should have the same protective effect on the brain and are already safely used in people.

“It’s really exciting,” said Prof Giovanna Mallucci, from the MRC Toxicology Unit in Leicester.

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Unclear on the concept.

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Comedian Bill Nye accused CNN of doing a “disservice” to its viewers for inviting a well-respected physicist on Earth Day to argue about the legitimacy of man-made global warming.

Nye, who is well known for hosting a children’s TV show in the 1990s, scolded CNN’s “New Day Saturday” panel Saturday for pitting his environmentalist pedigree against the climate skepticism of physicist William Happer.

He also suggested the 24-news channel should instead drown out people like Happer with 98 scientists who believe in man-made global warming.

For the left, one needn’t be a Real Scientist; merely playing on on TV is sufficient.

Come to think of it, that explains AlGore pretty much.

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I guess picking up after yourself is Right-Wing.

Funny how people getting together to complain about how humanity is trashing the earth inevitably ends up trashing the earth. Well, their ‘science’ isn’t Real Science, either, so I suppose we ought not to be surprised.

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More troubling, any voice—including that of a stranger—can be cloned if decent recordings are available on YouTube or elsewhere. Researchers at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, led by Nitesh Saxena, were able to use Festvox to clone voices based on only five minutes of speech retrieved online. When tested against voice-biometrics software like that used by many banks to block unauthorised access to accounts, more than 80% of the fake voices tricked the computer. Alan Black, one of Festvox’s developers, reckons systems that rely on voice-ID software are now “deeply, fundamentally insecure”.

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They don’t even pretend any more.

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Maybe this would work for ‘progressives’ and reality.

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I am personally amazed by the number of recruiters who have sent us “vetted” professional coders who can’t actually code. This is such a serious problem that if a recruiter sends us three candidates who cannot pass our coding test, we fire the recruiter. We can’t afford to waste the time.

Tech recruiters charge 18 to 25 percent of the first year’s salary, but even the best recruiters we’ve worked with cannot truly vet the types of engineers we need. As far as I can tell, recruiters are not under pressure to learn, because high-end tech talent is so rare, hiring managers will take practically anyone who can fog a mirror. We won’t. And you shouldn’t.

In practice, we could train these workers, but not at market prices with added recruiter vigorish. We just can’t get enough value out of B-team players while they are in training, and by the time we help them become A-team players, their GitHub accounts and contributions will reflect their learning. At that point, they will be firmly on the radar of top-tier tech. And we would have played the role of pre-school for Facebook, Google, or Apple. Great for Zuck, Larry, or Tim, but not so great for us.