Read it.

Because talking about IQ implies that some people are better than others at something, and that Disrespects The Narrative.

“IQ is a metric of such dubiousness that almost no serious educational researcher uses it anymore,” the Guardian’s Ana Marie Cox wrote back in May. It was a breathtakingly ignorant statement. Psychologist Jelte Wicherts noted in response that a search for “IQ test” in Google’s academic database yielded more than 10,000 hits — just for the year 2013.

But Cox’s assertion is all too common. There is a large discrepancy between what educated laypeople believe about cognitive science and what experts actually know. Journalists are steeped in the lay wisdom, so they are repeatedly surprised when someone forthrightly discusses the real science of mental ability.

‘What educated people believe’ is, of course, Voice of the Crust-speak for The Narrative, as is ‘the lay wisdom’.

For people who have studied mental ability, what’s truly frustrating is the déjà vu they feel each time a media firestorm like this one erupts. Attempts by experts in the field to defend the embattled messenger inevitably fall on deaf ears. When the firestorm is over, the media’s mindset always resets to a state of comfortable ignorance, ready to be shocked all over again when the next messenger comes along.

That’s why they’re called the LameStream Media. These terms exist for a reason.

At stake here, incidentally, is not just knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but also how science informs public policy. The U.S. education system, for example, is suffused with mental testing, yet few in the political classes understand cognitive ability research. Angry and repeated condemnations of the science will not help.

They’re not interested in ‘helping’, they’re interested in defending the Party Line. That’s their job. Science has nothing to do with it — as is plain by what they call ‘science’, like the Global Warming scam.

In terms of group differences, people of northeast Asian descent have higher average IQ scores than people of European lineage, who in turn have higher average scores than people of sub-Saharan African descent. The average score for Hispanic Americans falls somewhere between the white and black American averages. Psychologists have tested and long rejected the notion that score differences can be explained simply by biased test questions. It is possible that genetic factors could influence IQ differences among ethnic groups, but many scientists are withholding judgment until DNA studies are able to link specific gene combinations with IQ.

But that is Contrary To The Narrative, and therefore constitutes ThoughtCrime. Those who are guilty of ThoughtCrime get subjected to the Two Minute Hate, as happened to this guy.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, explains it all to you:

Nor is it quite the case that “emotion trumps reason.” What mostly trumps reason is the yearning for respectability, leading us to conform to ambient dogmas—in the present-day West, the dogmas of Cultural Marxism, which waft around us like a noxious vapor.

…

“Purported IQ per se” is how you say “IQ” when you are a liberal or a race-whipped conservative with minimal interest in the human sciences and whose intellectual tissues have absorbed the poisonous gas of Cultural Marxism to some degree.

The practical effect of this is, of course, hypocrisy:

A neighbor of ours, a white lady of seamlessly liberal opinions, was dismayed to find that her normal, bright daughter was assigned to one of these inclusion classes. She came around to talk to us about it, quite distraught. I recall sitting on the sofa listening in dropped-jaw amazement to this straight-ticket left-Democrat Hillary voter wailing about her child being marooned among “DeShawns and Lateeshas.” (Those may not be the precise names she used, but they were names like that.)

Diversity For Thee But Not For Me is why, for example, nobody in Congress sends their kids to D.C. public schools. (Neither does Obama — God forbid his mulatto children should have to rub shoulders with, you know, actual Negroes.)

Science insists that there is an external world beyond our emotions and wish-fulfillment fantasies. It claims that we can find out true facts about that world, including facts with no immediate technological application. The human sciences insist even more audaciously that we ourselves are part of that world and can be described as dispassionately as stars, rocks, and microbes. Perhaps one day it will be socially acceptable to believe this.

But that’s not the way to bet.

Read it.

The Buffalo Teachers Federation has filed a grievance against the public school district in Buffalo, New York because the district wants to serve breakfast in the classroom.

The grievance asserts that the breakfast program causes unsanitary conditions and unfairly forces teachers to do work that is beyond the provisions of their collective bargaining agreement, reports Buffalo NBC affiliate WGRZ.

This is laugh-out-loud funny in so many ways….

Read it.

There are two deep-blue regions that are critical to the Obama administration: the Northeast and the coastal region between San Jose and Seattle that truly deserves the moniker of the Left Coast. They dominate the Democratic donor list, and provide the administration with most of its appointees and much of its ideological moorings.

Yet this common ground conceals a shift in the balance of power between these two blue strongholds. The power of the high-tech heavy Left Coast is waxing while the old Boston-to-Washington corridor is waning. Jeff Bezos’ purchase of The Washington Post simply confirms this movement of the political tectonic plates.

Popular mythology to the contrary notwithstanding, the 1% are chiefly Democrats. They know, as most do not, that money follows power, and that if they want to keep their money they’re going to have to follow power as well.

‘Don’t think of it as selling out; think of it as buying in.’

Read it.

Rosie’s mother, Mary (names changed to protect the child’s identity), is single and severely disabled. She and her daughter live on a fixed income disability payment of $628/month. The garden vegetables growing just outside her backdoor lovingly tended by Rosie provide a fresh and healthy addition to their diet that they could not otherwise easily afford.

Rosie started the garden in May 2013, but now the property management company has ordered the garden be removed this week!

The reason?

Gardening apparently goes against the rules set by the USDA’s Rural Development Agency which forbids residents to have structures of any kind within landscaped areas. It seems to me that the practice of growing vegetables by the most needy in our society would take precedence over landscaping, wouldn’t you agree?

Apparently not.

Read it.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe everything will be fine. Maybe the “widening gap between rich and poor” is temporary. Maybe the steady growth in the proportion of jobs that are part-time and/or low-paid will soon reverse.

Or maybe the idea that all the homeless need are old laptops and a few JavaScript textbooks is not unlike the claim that new technologies automatically create new jobs for everyone. Maybe, unless something drastic changes, most people are totally screwed.

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen….

The strange present, we may conclude, is one in which the middle class is slowly being squeezed out of an economy that is gradually dividing into two camps, the few rich and the many poor.

Thereby reverting to the norm throughout human history. My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Henry Blodget says: “Hate To Say It, But If Companies Don’t Start Paying People Better, We May Need Unions.” But unions only matter if labor is valuable, and with every passing year, technology renders labor more irrelevant. When the 5.7 million licensed truck drivers in America are replaced by self-driving vehicles, they can go ahead and strike all they like. Nobody will care. Hardly anybody who matters — which is to say, the rich, the powerful, the technical — will even notice.

The classic definition of ‘proletariat’ is ‘those whose only contribution to society is children’. But what happens to the proletariat when their contribution is no longer needed?

Read it.

 Although I argue for the importance of creativity in human affairs, and therefore of the importance of the creatives who do the primary work of creativity; it should not be forgotten that creativity is a means to an end – and when the end is evil, so is creative activity.

Modern society has become more and more evil – which is to say organized in pursuit of destruction of The Good – the Good being (roughly) truth, beauty and virtue.

Sort of the theme of this blog, when you think about it.

Kathy Shaidle blows the whistle.

During my stint on the left, I met white-ribbon-wearing “male feminists” who were sincere, thoughtful, and decent, but many others ranged from patronizing to abusive.

So sexist “progressive” men such as Anthony Weiner, Bob Filner, and Eliot Spitzer don’t surprise me, but why is anyone else shocked by their hypocrisy? I’m not just thinking of Bill Clinton or Ted Kennedy; second-wave feminism began as a revolt not against mean old fathers and bosses, but against the misogynist college boys running the ’60s peace movement. (Eldridge Cleaver, anyone?)

…

No neocon’s ever called me “honey.”

Read it.

You cannot be faulted for thinking the bureaucracy in this country is comprised chiefly of fools, mad-men, and criminals.

The Wall Street Journal story offers an example of our-government-in-action, which tends to confirm the above assessment.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau performed a genuine public service this week by alerting taxpayers to the tidal wave of student loan defaults coming their way. Too bad the intention was also to alert student borrowers to ways they can avoid repaying those loans.

Read  it.

Italian road trip.

Read it.

Two men were shot in Chicago on August 11 on one of the city’s newly created “Safe Passage” routes intended to keep school children safe.The “Safe Passage” routes along which the men were attacked had recently been heralded by Mayor Rahm Emanuel as a fix for children who had to travel along new routes to schools.

Well, hey, they didn’t shoot any kids, did they? So it’s working, isn’t it? Sheesh, all some people do is complain….

Good thing Chicago has those strict gun control laws or it would be a bloodbath up there … oh, wait….

Read it.

According to “The Bay Area Muslim Study: Establishing Identity and Community,” (BAMS) the San Francisco Bay Area, long known for its tolerance towards minorities and adherence to multiculturalism, is a hotbed of “Islamophobia.”

Oh, if only that were true….

BAMS is the latest effort by Islamists to use their stature in academe to deceive the Western public about their extremist agenda and the interests of Muslims in general. It is fatally flawed in its methodology, the evidence it musters does not support its conclusions, and it is little more than propaganda to use as a political bludgeon against anyone who objects to radical Islam. No scholarly tool for understanding the Muslims of the Bay area, it will be used to silence critics and stifle debate.

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

Read it.

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

Read it.

Because, you know, government schools are doing such a great job.

And it’s not as if there were a war in Syria or lots of people unemployed or an impending health care disaster or anything to worry about.

I’m waiting for him to recycle those one WIN buttons from the Ford administration, this time meaning ‘Whip Ignorance Now’.

Read it.

Authorities in Kyrgyzstan have shut down a secret pipeline used to smuggle thousands of liters of alcohol into the country from Kazakhstan. The 8-inch wide tube was discovered during what’s described as a “routine” patrol by Kyrgyz border guards, according to the AKIpress news agency. Running over a third of a mile in length, the pipeline was situated along the bottom of the Chu river.

Astonishing, especially considering (SFAIK) that both Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan are nominally Muslim countries.

Read it.

Sorry, Charlie.

And of course ‘nonprofit ocean protection group Oceana’ is completely and totally objective, as well as being rigidly honest, as all such ‘environmental protection’ groups are — not like those putrid, scum-sucking restaurants and grocery stores….

Read it.

Swintec, a New Jersey typewriter company, is one of the last manufacturers standing in a dying industry. What has helped keep it alive? Funeral homes.

Funeral directors in a handful of states must tap out death certificates on a typewriter, relics of the days when the machines represented a modern improvement over an undertaker’s handwriting.

Read it.

Until they ban it — which they will.

I’m thinking that you’d want fin-stabilized ammunition in a ‘real’ version.

Read it.

Interesting, but I’m going to want to have a couple of years’ worth of data before I try it.

Read it.

But far more expensively.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

Next to the Dracula blog, this is my favorite read.

Read it.

Just in case you didn’t know.

I suggest that most talk about the problems of inequality actually invokes this ancient hypocritical ability to covertly discuss where to find lots of nice easy-to-grab stuff. We don’t discuss inequalities across time, because it is hard to grab much more than we do from the past or the future. We don’t much discuss the inequality of rich foreigners, because it is much harder to grab their stuff. We don’t much discuss inequality of those with unusual artistic abilities or sexual attractiveness, because we can’t directly grab their advantages and while we might try to grab their material goods to compensate, they don’t have that much, and the grabbing would be hard. (Also, such folks have more social status to resist with. For foragers, status counted lots more than material goods for influence.)

A few people within our nation who each have lots and lots of material goods, however, seem to make a great target for grabbing. So people discover they have a deep moral concern about that particular inequality, and ponder what oh what could we possibly do to rectify this situation? Anyone have an idea? Anyone?

And you’ll notice that the people who talk trash about inequality aren’t in a hurry to find somebody less well off than they are and split their stuff with them (yeah, I’m looking at you, Hollywood), just as the people who complain about not being taxed enough never seem to understand that, hey, you can just write a check to the IRS that they won’t hesitate to cash.

Make your own furniture with real-life Erector Set joints

Sword and the Stone

Lingua.ly Transforms The Web Into A Language-Learning Opportunity

Stantt Uses Body-Scan Data To Create A Shirt For Every Body Type

The Stack

507 Mechanical Movements

Read it.

Because, you know, rodeo clowns are just SO important.

On Tuesday, the Missouri State National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) issued a statement asking for federal involvement in the case of a rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask and then asked the crowd if they’d like to see Obama run down by a bull. “The activities at the Missouri State Fair targeting and inciting violence against our President are serious and warrant a full review by both the Secret Service and the Justice Department,” said State President Mary Ratliff.

As opposed to the racial strife and favoritism fostered by explicitly racist organizations like .. the NAACP. Nothing to see here, move along, move along….

Read it.

If, that is, that’s what you want to do. Personally, I can’t stand the stuff, but this is America, so knock yourself out.

Read it.

No,hipsters don’t count.

Heh.

In short, it’s probably human-caused climate change that did it: specifically the Australian flooding of 2010 and 2011, which is generally thought by climate scientists to be at least partly attributable to rising atmospheric carbon levels caused by human fossil-fuel burning.

They could certainly use the rain.

Read it.

Obamacare raises the top Medicare payroll tax rate from 2.9% to 3.8%.

Read it.

The German government is engaged in increasingly heated negotiations with energy companies in an effort to stop them closing carbon-emitting power plants which have been rendered unprofitable by the national renewables policies.

Funny how that works. You’d think they’d learn. But no, they never do.

Read it.

And Germans are behind it … let the conspiracy theories bloom….

Slate magazine assures us that We Need a War on Coal.

It’s wrong for affluent Westerners to inflict the damages of climate change on the world’s poor.

Oh, and just in case you don’t know who Peter Singer is … well, you’re luckier than most. Suffice it to say that he’s most famous for his his defense of infanticide.

Read it.

What ‘West Ties’? The handouts they’re getting from the U.S.?

“Egypt is a key partner of the European Union. We share interests in and responsibility for the maintenance of peace and stability in a strategic region,” European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and European Council President Herman Van Rompuy said in a joint statement ahead of the meeting of senior EU official in Brussels.

And we see how well that’s worked out….

Read it.

Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works division is building a drone that will be able to transport cars, storage containers, and eventually even pods full of soldiers for DARPA. The drone, which will be called the Transformer TX, is currently in a $20.3-million “Phase 3” process, which means Lockheed is finalizing its design before building a working prototype. If DARPA finds that the prototype meets its needs, it can then opt to pay the defense contractor to produce the drones for flight sometime in 2015.

Read it.

Card slots. A bottle opener. Pepper spray. Defense against a .50 caliber bullet. Whatever you might need on the go, people are thinking of ways for you to integrate it right into your iPhone case.

But Y Combinator startup Graft Concepts is trying to cover all your basic needs with one case, using a simple latched frame and interchangeable backplates. Named Leverage, the case’s frame alone is meant to be a bumper for the phone and comes with either a plain backplate for $40 or a card holder (which fits about five cards) for $50. Additional backplates range from $7 to $30 based on design and material.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Coming soon: Breaking Bad, Salon Edition.

Walter Olson blows the whistle, but probably won’t get the adulation that Manning and Snowden get.

A year ago I wrote: “It’s rare for a regulated company to mount open and disrespectful resistance to a federal regulatory agency, but that’s what the maker of BuckyBalls, the popular desktop magnetic toy, is doing in response to the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s effort to ban its product.” The maker in question had devised cheeky, sarcastic ads asking why other products with injurious potential (coconuts, hot dogs) weren’t banned on the CPSC’s logic.

One reason it’s rare to mount open and disrespectful resistance to a federal agency is that agencies have so many ways to make businesspeople’s lives unhappy. This spring, breaking new legal ground, the CPSC reached out and named CEO Craig Zucker personally as a respondent in its recall proceeding.

You make fun of the big boys, they punish you.

Read it.

An Iron Age settlement unearthed in Devon has been described as one of the most important finds of its kind.

Read it.

Used-book stores are disappearing in our day at an even greater rate than regular book stores. Until ten years ago or so, there used to be a good number of them in every city and even in some smaller towns, catering to a clientele of book lovers who paid them a visit in search of some rare or out-of-print book, or merely to pass the time poking around. Even in their heyday, how their owners made a living was always a puzzle to me, since typically their infrequent customers bought nothing, or very little, and when they did, their purchase didn’t amount to more than a few dollars. Years ago, in a store in New York that specialized in Alchemy, Eastern Religions, Theosophy, Mysticism, Magic, and Witchcraft, I remember coming across a book called How to Become Invisible that I realized would make a perfect birthday present for a friend who was on the run from a collection agency trying to repossess his car. It cost fifteen cents, which struck me as a pretty steep price considering the quality of the contents.

What made these stores, stocked with unwanted libraries of dead people, attractive to someone like me is that they were more indiscriminate and chaotic than public libraries and thus made browsing more of an adventure. Among the crowded shelves, one’s interest was aroused by the title or the appearance of a book. Then came the suspense of opening it, checking out the table of contents, and if it proved interesting, thumbing the pages, reading a bit here and there and looking for underlined passages and notes in the margins.

Read it.

When manufacturers build a structure like a plane out of ultralight glued-together carbon fibers known as composites, the common technique is to build it with as few parts as possible. That cuts down on the number of joints where cracks and structural failures can start, but also calls for large specialized manufacturing facilities.

A new structure (subscription required) out of MIT takes a different approach. Researchers found that small X-shaped pieces of carbon fiber composite locked together into K’NEX-like lattice structures are 10 times stiffer than existing ultralight materials. Building something with them requires less material to support the same weight, potentially leading to lighter vehicles and lower fuel costs.

More here.

Read it.

You may ask: Why should a company need a license to ‘transmit money’, in Florida or anywhere else.

You might consider asking your Congressman about that.

Read it.

‘So what do you teach?’ she asked as I worked on her presentation.

‘Computing’ I replied.

‘Oh… I guess these days you must find that the kids know more about computers than the teachers….’

If you teach IT or Computing, this is a phrase that you’ll have heard a million times, a billion times, epsilon zero times, aleph one times. Okay I exaggerate, but you’ll have heard it a lot. There are variants of the phrase, all espousing today’s children’s technical ability. My favourite is from parents: ‘Oh, Johnny will be a natural for A-Level Computing. He’s always on his computer at home.’ The parents seem to have some vague concept that spending hours each evening on Facebook and YouTube will impart, by some sort of cybernetic osmosis, a knowledge of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and Haskell.

Normally when someone spouts this rubbish I just nod and smile. This time I simply couldn’t let it pass. ‘Not really, most kids can’t use computers.’ (and neither can you – I didn’t add.)

Read it.

For a generation, most Americans, whatever their politics, have largely admired Silicon Valley as an exemplar of enlightened free-market capitalism. Yet, increasingly, the one-time folk heroes are beginning to appear more like a digital version of President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.” In terms of threats to freedom and privacy, we now may have more to fear from techies in Palo Alto than the infinitely less-competent retro-Reds in North Korea.

Hey, most of these people voted for Obama. This is just chickens coming home to roost.

Read it.

In theory, Elon Musk’s Hyperloop may be able to get people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes.

In reality, the layover the project will take in Sacramento could delay that trip for decades.

The Hyperloop, the so-called “fifth way” of transportation unveiled by famed entrepreneur Musk on Monday, is an exciting idea, one that is filled with possibilities. Using air-cushioned aluminum tubes, he hopes to create a pod system for just $10 billion. The pods, powered by solar energy, would travel at upwards of 700 mph and make the trip in 30 minutes. On paper, Musk at least says it is workable from a scientific perspective.

But physics may be the least of Musk’s problems. His home state is a bigger issue.

California is widely considered to be a brutal regulatory environment. A survey of business leaders polled by Chief Executive magazine ranked California the worst place to do business. Why? For all the reasons that bode poorly for the Hyperloop. The state received half a star out of five for regulatory environment.

Read it.

‘It’s only a model….’

Steven Hayward is not afraid to ask some pretty obvious questions.

The great but frustrated hope of liberals is that people will vote their supposed class interest, that is, that people of modest incomes will vote for higher taxes (on others) and bigger government.  It is a matter of frustration for liberals when the working class doesn’t vote for Democrats: see Thomas Frank’s famous What’s the Matter With Kansas?  (Actually, don’t see it; it’s stupid; one can just as easily ask, What’s the Matter With the Upper West Side?, where rich liberals vote for candidates who want to raise their income taxes.  Voting against economic self-interest on the Upper West Side is taken as a sign of enlightenment rather than the interest-denying stupidity that is attributed to the GOP-voting working classes of the red states.)

…

I was recalling over the weekend for an audience of mostly liberals the moment that George McGovern realized he was going to lose his Senate seat in the 1980 election: he was in a supermarket checkout line in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where two women in line ahead of him told him that although they were lifelong Democrats, they weren’t going to vote for him this time because he was “too liberal.”  They then proceeded to purchase their groceries with food stamps.

Read it.

Tony Swatton is the most famous blacksmith in Los Angeles. But he’s not forging horseshoes. Rather, Swatton has banged out a place in Tinseltown as the go-to guy when a big-budget movie or hit TV show needs custom metalwork. The swords in Pirates of the Caribbean? Those creepy-cool murder weapons from CSI and Criminal Minds? The Infinity Gauntlet from Thor? All were Swatton creations.

The 49-year-old got started in heavy metal at the tender age of 17. “I saw a guy making armor at a Renaissance fair,” Swatton recalls. “I watched him work for about two hours, went home, replicated some equipment, shaped a section of railroad track into an anvil, and made a helmet. I went back to the same fair two weeks later and showed [it to] him. He thought it was one of his own.”

At least it wasn’t a freon tank….

Read it.

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

Slate magazine takes its Voice of the Crust duties seriously.

Articles you’ll never see in Slate magazine: ‘A Day in the Life of the Muslim Brotherhood, Uncensored’; ‘A Day in the Life of a Planned Parenthood Abortion Mill, Uncensored’; ‘A Day in the Life of a Gay Bathhouse, Uncensored’; ‘A Day in the Life of Jeremiah Wright, Uncensored’; ‘A Day in the Life of Al Sharpton, Uncensored’. (Perhaps that’s because the Ku Klux Klan doesn’t feel that it has anything to hide — unlike these others.)