Read it.

I have said before, and the schedule does not permit any rummaging through the archives for a link, that many of our modern problems have to do with certain charismatic individuals assuming mantles of real authority when they are not only inexperienced in making sensible decisions, but powerfully motivated toward making non-sensical ones. If the solution to a problem is only too obvious, say for example Orwell’s simple equation of two and two make four; then some of the charisma would have to be sacrificed in providing the correct answer of four. Four is what an ordinary person would say. To those whose position has been defined and perhaps created due to an illusion of their uniqueness, four is therefore out of the question because it would injure the definition. Some flimsy justification must therefore be sought for saying three, five or ten.

In other words: We’re screwed before you even get to the liberal-versus-conservative stuff. Once we elect the “There’s Just Something About Him” types, we’re already over the cliff. We’ve already made our commitment to nonsense.

Arnold Kling is not afraid to expose the man behind the curtain.

One of the other panelists, Maya Wiley, made no pretense of humility. She would gladly spend whatever it takes (of other people’s money, of course) to give everyone broadband Internet access, whether they want it or not. I can imagine a scene where she announces getting government funding for fiber-optic Internet connections to a poor neighborhood, and while she stands beaming in front of a group of poor people, several of them get out their smart phones and ask her, “You’re not going to make me give up my 4G, are you?” (And, yes, poor people are adopting smart phones.)

‘I want to move to a country where the poor people have smart phones.’

Basically, Wiley and LaMarche reinforced my view that non-profits are for people who would rather dictate to customers than serve them.

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

In the non-profit sector, donors are comparable to shareholders and agencies are comparable to management. But the beneficiaries have no say in the matter.

Much like taxpayers in the ‘public sector’, if you call donors ‘contributors’.

What’s worse than a non-profit that by its nature ignores the wishes of beneficiaries and instead gives them what the donors and managers think they should want? A non-profit that by its nature uses the coercive mechanisms of government to ignore the wishes of beneficiaries, etc.

And, baby, do we have a overabundance of those.

Read it.

Because nothing says America like useless decorative shit on a vehicle.

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After experimenting on 24 adults, a research team at the University of California, Berkeley has determined that viewing content on a stereo 3D display hurts your eyes and your brain. The scientific term is “vergence-accomodation,” which means that the eye must constantly adjust to both the distance of the physical screen and that of the 3D content. This can supposedly cause visual discomfort, fatigue, and headaches, which I had thought were just a part of life but apparently there’s a scapegoat: 3D technology.

In his Journal of Vision article, The Zone of Comfort: Predicting Visual Discomfort with Stereo Displays, author Martin S. Banks (also professor of optometry and vision science) writes, “When watching stereo 3D displays, the eyes must focus — that is, accommodate — to the distance of the screen because that’s where the light comes from. At the same time, the eyes must converge to the distance of the stereo content, which may be in front of or behind the screen.”

We hates it, my precious.

George Will puts Obama in context.

Richard Miniter, a Forbes columnist, is right: “Obama is not the new FDR, but the new Gorbachev.” Beneath the tattered, fading banner of reactionary liberalism, Obama struggles to sustain a doomed system. Democrats’ dependency agenda — swelling the ranks of government employees, multiplying government-subsidized industries, enveloping ever-more individuals in the entitlement culture — is buckling under an intractable contradiction: It is incompatible with economic growth sufficient to create enough wealth to feed the multiplying tax eaters.

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For purely peaceful purposes, you understand. So we can go ahead and cut the defense budget in order to pay out more welfare benefits. Not a problem.

Maybe we can make a deal with the Chinese: They ship us manufactured goods and we ship them poor people.

Read it.

This past May Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a member of parliament for Fremskrittspartiet (the Progress Party) in Norway made a speech to a party convention about the Islamization of Oslo and the dire effects that mass immigration has had on the capital city.

He was later brought up on a “racism charge” based on a complaint filed by the Young Social Democrats, as reported in an article from TV2 (in Norwegian).

So it’s now officially illegal in Norway to say that immigrants have quicker tempers than ethnic Norwegians, or that they harass girls with blond hair.

Let’s all watch Scandinavia circling the drain.

Read it.

Four elderly Kenyans were give the go-ahead at the High Court today to sue the British government over alleged colonial atrocities committed during the Mau Mau uprising.

Read it.

Quelle domage.

The federal government pays oil companies about $6 billion a year to blend ethanol into your gasoline; it’s been subsidizing ethanol for 33 years now.

No mention the damage done to cars and their owners by the ethanol mix. After all, who cares about them?

The government forces oil companies to use ethanol. And that mandate is growing. Next year, it will call for more ethanol than the industry produced this year.

Of course, reality has never intruded into the world of government mandates.

A tariff on imported ethanol will die with the subsidy. But that’s not likely to stop ethanol production from using about 40 percent of all the corn grown in the United States.

Corn that could be used to, oh, I don’t know, feed people perhaps. But I guess nobody in government cares about them, either.

Read it and be prepared.

Read it.

Never say that we don’t have useful stuff here.

Steve Sailer contributes to the most significant issue of this campaign season — more significant than Barack Obama’s attempts to bankrupt the country, Joe Biden’s hair plugs, Mitt Romney’s waffles (ummm, they’re tasty), and Ron Paul’s need to increase his dosages.

Not that I think the President’s health is all that important anymore. It’s not like the early 1960s and JFK shows up for a summit conference with Khrushchev all doped up for one of his many ailments and so Khrushchev thinks JFK is a weakling and sets the Cuban Missile Crisis in motion. Thank God we don’t live in that world anymore. I think we live in a world more like that of James Garfield. The poor man lingered on his deathbed after being shot on July 2, 1881 until his death on September 19. And we all know the many disastrous consequences that almost ensued from that, such as … Well, I can’t think of any off hand, but there was probably something important involving bimetalism.

Read it.

Assume that Dr Phibes got a government job….

The Other McCain sets the record straight.

Read it.

The issue is whether work done at a new $200 million grain terminal will be done by the ILWU or by non-union labor.

However, there is now another union entering the picture (the Operating Engineers) that may cause this volatile situation to escalate even further.

Ruh-roh.

John Bolton wants to know.

An excellent question, to which numerous answers suggest themselves.

With President Obama’s Libya policy staggering from one embarrassment to another, last week he and Secretary of State Clinton outdid themselves. They publicly welcomed Russia’s effort to insert itself as a mediator, an act of such strategic myopia that it must leave even Moscow’s leadership speechless.

Permanent Security Council members Russia and China abstained on the initial resolution authorizing force to create a Libya no-fly zone and to protect innocent civilians. By not casting a veto, Russia thereby tacitly allowed military action to proceed. As they did, Russia repeatedly second-guessed and harshly criticized NATO’s operations. Now, as a mediator, Russia will, in effect, have the chance to rewrite the Council’s resolution according to its own lights.

Some of us remember this as the day that man landed on the moon, a proud day in the history of mankind and in the history of America.

Google decided to show a doodle honoring Gregor Mendel — a fine person, to be sure, and important in the Great Scheme of Things … but more important than landing on the moon?

I wonder whether they’d have done a moon-landing doodle if it had been somebody other than Americans who had first landed on the moon.

Read it.

Consistently Obama treats the FICA pay-in as merely another tax to be played with as part of a redistributionist policy.  During and immediately after the 2008 campaign it was a plan to issue refundable tax credits which amounted to double-dipping, and in the past year it has been the FICA tax holiday.

The common theme throughout Obama’s proposals has been to divorce benefits and pay-ins, and to treat Social Security benefits as merely another government welfare program.

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I’m sure he’ll be pleased.

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Benyamin Mizrahi, 23, the Israeli man who died in the damaged van, was found to have five passports on his person, the Southland Times newspaper reported.

Three surviving Israelis who were in the van with Mr Mizrahi fled New Zealand within 12 hours, making their way back to Israel.

Read it.

This Apple Store looks so real we still can’t quite believe it isn’t. The KIRF-ers have excelled themselves this time: mimicking or at least reinventing everything from the Brave New World posters down to the dog-tags and “We live here” demeanor worn by the staff. There were a few giveaways, however, which led observant blogger BirdAbroad to whip out her camera and start gathering evidence: slight imperfections in the decor, a lack of individual names on staff badges, plus an unlikely location in the Chinese Backwaterville of Kunming.

They have the technology.

Read it.

Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield issue a report on the state of the poor in America.  The short answer is that the poor, by historical standards, are doing well, enjoying what were considered luxuries a few generations ago.  President Obama, as usual, seeks to obscure these issues and to implement a new definition of poverty that assumes economic growth never helps the poor.

We keep forgetting that ‘poor’ is a relative term. The ‘poor’ in modern America eat better, sleep better, are healthier, and live in more comfort than any king prior to the First World War.

I am reminded of Dinesh D’Souza’s anecdote about a friend from India who told him that he was emigrating to America. When Dinesh asked why, his friend said, “I want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”

Read it.

The United Egg Producers and the Humane Society of the United States have partnered to work toward the enactment of federal legislation that would set national standards for hens involved in U.S. egg production. The proposed standards, if enacted, would be the first federal law addressing the treatment of animals on farms.

How this is any business of the Federal government is, of course, not discussed.

If passed by Congress, the legislation would supersede state laws including those that have already been passed in Arizona, California (Proposition 2), Michigan and Ohio. The agreement to pass comprehensive federal legislation for standards of egg production puts a hold on planned ballot measures related to egg-laying hens in both Washington and Oregon. Home growers will face the same regulations – even those with small chicken coops.

And that’s what brought the United Egg Producers in; only major factory farm operations can afford the cost of compliance with this sort of regulatory regime. The Humane Society, of course, is one of the pioneers among organizations that exist solely to stick their noses into other people’s business.

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I am not making this up.

I always suspected that Bill was full of it, but hey….

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Nobody can blame Spanish politicians for struggling to understand the movement. The indignants, who claim to have no leaders, are themselves unclear what they stand for. Their assembly-based, consensus-seeking debates are painfully slow. Manuel Chaves, a minister, likens their meetings to those of the bickering Peoples’ Front of Judea in the Monty Python film “Life of Brian”.

Reminds me of the Al Capp standard, Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything.

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Well, isn’t that convenient.

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What a job to have….

The Other McCain ponders some eternal truths.

This wisdom seemed important to share, along with my own observation: No woman has ever improved her looks by getting a tattoo.

It does, however, tend to increase her rates.

But let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

A Bronx man was viciously assaulted and robbed on a subway train Sunday by four men who he says taunted him for being white.

Police confirmed they are investigating the assault and robbery of Jason Fordell, 29, but have not labeled it a hate crime.

Of course not. Silly to think otherwise. Only white people can be guilty of hate crimes, after all.

Read it.

Alexie Kolpak and Jeffrey Grossman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology propose a new type of solar thermal fuel that would be affordable, rechargeable, thermally stable, and more energy-dense than lithium-ion batteries. Their proposed design combines an organic photoactive molecule, azobenzene, with the ever-popular carbon nanotube.

We have the technology.

Read it.

…just ask yourself this simple question: When did it become the primary function of the federal government to send millions of Americans checks?

When Medicare began in 1966, it cost $3 billion; congressional estimates were that, by 1990, it would cost about $12 billion, allowing for inflation. The actual figure turned out to be $107 billion. Today, Medicare’s future unfunded obligations total at least $36 trillion. Other estimates run even higher.

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This comes as no surprise whatsoever.

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The letter addressed to Clark Moore and postmarked February 1958 arrived at the campus mail room last week. The note ends: “I still miss you as much as ever and love you a thousand times more. Please write me real soon. Vonnie.”

Siddeeq tells the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review he has mixed emotions about it. It turns out he and Vonnie are divorced. She declined to speak to the newspaper.

Read it.

An online campaign has been launched in Russia urging young women to support Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in a presidential vote by taking off their clothes, a lawmaker’s site showed on Sunday.

I am totally certain that there is a Cause out there somewhere that is encouraging people to show their support by picking their noses. It just hasn’t made the Lamestream Media yet. But it will, in time, it will.

The Other McCain doesn’t seem to think so.

Dan Collins called Thursday night and, among other things, we talked about how politically correct revisionist history has convinced young people that the past was a hateful and benighted era, furnished wall-to-wall with racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of oppression.

If you surveyed liberals and asked them, “What was the most evil time and place in human history?” they would almost certainly name Germany under Hitler, but America during the 1950s would be a close second.

I remember that period as being less troublesome than what we have today. Fewer busybodies wandering around poking their noses into other people’s business, certainly.

There are many liberal couples who, when inevitably confronted with what economists would call the “division of labor” dilemma, choose to apportion their marital obligations in a more or less traditional fashion: Husband as father/breadwinner, wife as mother/homemaker.

From time to time, a liberal feminist will write an essay musing in semi-guilty tones about her satisfaction as a stay-at-home mother. These writers often emphasize that they don’t consider themselves as having abandoned The Sisterhood by embracing the “Just A Mom” lifestyle.

Such is the power of their indoctrination — and so pervasive now is the worldview they express — that these women writers feel obligated to declare their continued commitment to the intellectual abstraction of feminism, even while confessing their discovery that there is joy and pleasure to be found by living in contradiction to everything they were ever taught by Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, et al.

Funny how that works out. I am reminded of the arena scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

Read it.

Indians have arrived in droves even as the overall number of illegal immigrants entering the U.S. has dropped dramatically, in large part because of the sluggish American economy. And with fewer Mexicans and Central Americans crossing the border, smugglers are eager for more “high-value cargo” like Indians, some of whom are willing to pay more than $20,000 for the journey.

Ought we to be as worried about illegal immigrants from India as we would be about illegal immigrants from other countries?

The influx has been so pronounced that in May, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a Senate committee that at some point this year, Indians will account for about 1 in 3 non-Mexican illegal immigrants caught in Texas.

I must confess that I find it hard to get worked up about it, perhaps because I am not worried that they will (a) attempt to blow people up, like Muslims, or (b) attempt to subvert the existing American culture, like Hispanics. But is that a reasonable position? I must confess that I’m not all that sure.

Read it.

Saw that coming.

“It’s hard to imagine they’ll be able to stay here now everyone knows they’ve got £161m in the bank. They will be pestered to death,” neighbour David Simpson told the Mail on Sunday.

“No one would have known if they’d kept it quiet. Why let the cat out of the bag?”

Why indeed?

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Slow news day.

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A fascinating look at how government regulations on building in cities makes urban living like planning a raid in World of Warcraft.

Indeed, the New York Times writes, “in Scarano’s view, the city’s code was a Talmudic document, open to endless avenues of interpretation. Through a variety of arcane strategies, he could literally pull additional real estate out of the air.”

Joel Kotkin is always worth reading.

From the beginning, Obama has been first and foremost a gentry candidate. Even in the Democratic primaries, his strongest base lay, outside of the African-American community, within college towns, affluent urban areas and the toniest suburbs. Unlike his predecessors Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter, he never connected well with working class and middle class suburbs.

The gentrification of the Democratic Party, of course, predates Obama. Starting in the 1970s, the party has focused more on the liberal social and green values of concern to the urban upper classes than the bread and butter issues of middle or working class voters.

Here is the ultimate political irony of the Obama era and gentry liberalism: the metropolitan areas most passionately committed to the progressive agenda – which have adopted them on the state and local level – also tend to be those with the highest rates of inequality and the deepest poverty. Indeed, if cost of living is included, most of the urban counties with the highest percentage of poor people are located in the very bluest areas of New York, California or Washington, D.C., which together account for five of the nation’s ten poorest counties.9 As a state, California, once a prototype for democratic capitalism, now suffers the worst income inequality in the country.

Read it.

Read it.

Police in England are to use new laser scanners at the scene of serious motorway crashes so they can clear the roads more quickly.

The technology saves time by making a 3D image of the site, rather than investigators having to painstakingly log everything at the scene.

It is hoped that getting traffic moving again will save the economy hundreds of thousands of pounds each year.

This is a superb idea. We already have the technology. (Google, are you listening?)

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. Hint: Probably nothing good.

Read it. And watch the video.

Pretty cool. You don’t need a transmission — the ball rotates at a constant speed, and your ground speed is controlled by what part of the  ball (relative to the center rotation point) touches the ground … which also governs whether you are going forward, backward, or turning.

I suspect that the tricky part would be wear on the hemisphere, and shock absorbtion. But I’m sure that there are engineers who could handle that.

This would be perfect for a gas turbine engine, which really prefers to operate at the same speed all the time.

Read it.

A Washington Post journalist on the scene confirmed the first lady, who’s made a cause out of child nutrition, ordered a ShackBurger, fries, chocolate shake and a Diet Coke while the street and sidewalk in front of the usually-packed Shake Shack were closed by security during her visit.

Imagine the media firestorm if a Republican had indulged in this sort of hypocrisy.

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Read it.

This raises a further observation and prediction.  I think some of the energy behind the demand for gay marriage arises as much from a desire for recognition as much as the usual egalitarianism.  Some of my old lefty-hippie friends from the sixties find the whole gay marriage controversy bemusing, since the countercultural left of the sixties disdained the authoritative state recognition of marriage as “just a piece of paper.”  But now suddenly for people on the left that “piece of paper” is thought crucial to the proper recognition of their social status.  This isn’t just about legalities: the legitimate legal arguments about property, inheritance, insurance benefits, and other legal impediments gay couples face could be solved in many other ways short of changing the positive law of marriage.

The key issue of the ‘gay marriage’ controversy, as I have always said, isn’t marriage, it’s the respectability that the married state has always enjoyed among civilized people. Homosexuals don’t really care about marriage; what they care about is being Respected As Normal, which is why the various ‘domestic partnership’ alternatives Just Aren’t Good Enough. Homosexuals will not be satisfied unless and until they are accepted by heterosexuals as normal, just as ‘civil rights activists’ weren’t satisfied with ‘separate but equal’, but insisted on being considered as equal to white people in every possible respect — even some silly ones, like agitating to be cast as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, just to use an egregious example. (The problem with this, of course, is that the abnormality of homosexuality is a demonstrable physical and historical fact, something that can’t be said about being black.)

The first Republican Party platform of 1856 said that the main object of the new party was to rid the nation of “the twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery.”  The argument at that time was that the “barbarism” of both “peculiar institutions” rested on the same ground—both are an affront to human equality.  In the simplest terms, if one man is to have more than one wife, some other man will have none.  Why should we care about this?  Well, check in with China in a few years, where the widespread practice of sex-selective reproduction favoring males (where are the global feminists on this, by the way?) is leading to a major demographic distortion that will surely have significant social consequences.

Eric Raymond does a deep dive into geekiness.

If this doesn’t completely pass you by…

If the last century and a half of mathematics has taught us anything, though, it’s that Platonism doesn’t work. Kurt Gödel put the final bullet through its head with his Incompleteness Theorem in the 1930s, but it hat been living on borrowed time ever since Bertrand Russell blew up Frege’s axiomatization of number with a simple paradox in 1902. Mathematical Platonism has since almost disappeared as a philosophical position, but not as a psychological one; I’ve noted before that mathematicians then to be formalists in theory but Platonists in practice. In disputes like ?-vs.? the tension between these positions surfaces, because arguments about the notation of mathematics have a natural tendency to slide over into arguments about its ontology.

… then you will find Eric’s article interesting. If not, not.

Extra Credit: Show how this relates to the Realism vs Nominalism debates of the Middle Ages.

Even More Extra Credit: Show how the Thomistic resolution of the Problem of the Universals can help Eric with his issue.

There Is Nothing New Under The Sun Prize: Show how the Realism vs Nominalism debates of the Middle Ages are currently working their way out in modern politics. (Hint: Take a Real Hard Look at identity politics.)

Read it.

This is like a Tom Clancy story for tech people. Feel free to skip it if you aren’t into that sort of things. (Makes me awful glad I use a Mac, though….)

Watch it.

And about time, too.