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Put a 20mm Bushmaster turret on top with a head-up display and I’m in.

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In 1890 the British Library acquired a set of papyri dating from the first century that had been found by archaeologists digging in a rubbish heap near the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus. Amid the trove of tax assessments and official records was a papyrus with a text, known from ancient references and fragments but long believed lost, of what has come to be called the Constitution of Athens, generally attributed to Aristotle. Though the papyrus is hardly complete and has many contested passages, it offers an extensive history of Athenian political development and details Athens’ political structure during the fourth century bc. Suddenly, the institutional configuration of the first democracy became available.

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One of the things I noticed throughout the past year has been that a lot of my friends who had grown up in authoritarian or poor countries had a much easier time adjusting to our new pandemic reality. My childhood was intermittently full of shortages of various things. We developed a corresponding reflex for stocking up on things when they were available, anticipating what might be gone soon. That was quite useful for the pandemic. So was trying to read between the lines of official statements—what was said and what was not, who was sitting with whom on the TV, and evaluating what the rumor networks brought in. It turns out those are really useful skills when authorities are lying at all levels.

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School is, well, mostly bad. It teaches things slowly, it mostly trains obedience, and it’s a social horror show. When we say social dynamics are like high school, we never mean anything good, and there are dozens of movies about how awfully students treat each other.

And most of what is taught in school and university is quickly forgotten. I used to amuse myself by asking recent university grads what they had learned, most of them could barely remember anything. Since I was widely read, often I knew enough to ask basic questions about their discipline, and they wouldn’t know the answers.

This is primarily a result of the defective German/American university system, in which students go through courses the way a gamer goes through levels – once you level up, you can forget where you’ve been (unless you’re heading to grad school, in which case you might need to remember some of it).

The British system, in which you spend three years studying a subject under the guidance of an individual tutor and your degree depends on a single comprehensive examination at the end, is much superior–if knowledge is what you’re after, rather than just a credential that will get you a good job.

Parents want their children to go back to school because it’s a babysitting service, and since we’re not paying parents to stay home, they need someone to take care of their kids. And yes, some may be falling behind or finding distance learning hard, but a decent system could make that up well enough.

But the idea that the kids themselves miss school, except in the sense that they can’t see their friends (which is pandemic related, and if it’s not safe to see them outside of school it isn’t safe to see them in school) is laughable.

Amen to that. Public schools are explicitly babysitting services that have long since given up the pretense of actually educating their pupils. (Look up ‘social promotion’.)

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Milloy published a letter to EPA Administrator Michael Regan headlined “Milloy to EPA Administrator: Pick a new [Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC)] or see you in court.” CASAC is supposed to provide “independent advice to the EPA Administrator on the technical bases for EPA’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards.”

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Amazon is pushing back against the Biden Administration’s effort to impose new anti-trust strictures on Big Tech by filing a complaint with the FTC asking that Lina Khan, recently confirmed as head of the commission, recuse herself from all dealings involving Amazon.

In its request, filed with the agency on Wednesday, the company argued that Khan should be barred from handling enforcement decisions involving Amazon because Khan “on numerous occasions argued that Amazon is guilty of antitrust violations and should be broken up.” Amazon added that “these statements convey to any reasonable observer the clear impression that she has already made up her mind about many material facts relevant to Amazon’s antitrust culpability as well as about the ultimate issue of culpability itself.”

Bias? What bias?

The Other McCain does some sociology.

The liberal considers himself to be inherently superior to others, and thus endowed with greater knowledge and moral virtue about everything, including race relations. The fact that you disagree with the liberal is, to him, proof of your inferiority.

The subject of your disagreement is irrelevant, and it doesn’t matter why you’re disagreeing with the liberal, or what facts or logic you might be able to muster in defense of your position. what you have done, by your disagreement, is to deny the liberal’s superiority. His entire identity — his sense of his own worthiness — is invested in the belief that his political opinion proves him to be a better person than you.

Liberal superiority is tautological in this way, a circular argument in which the conclusion is a restatement of the first premise.

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It all started when outdoor dining resumed after initial waves of mandated closures last spring. Wary of wayward coronaviruses lingering on physical menus, restaurants taped QR codes to their tables and outsourced the act of menu delivery to the diner and her smartphone. This might have made sense when it still seemed possible that the coronavirus was largely spreading through surface transmission. But we now know that the risk of infection via a contaminated surface is low. In tons of communities across the U.S., vaccination rates are high and COVID-19 case rates are low. People are attending indoor concerts, grinding at dance clubs, and heading back to the office. And yet, even as we eat and slobber and sneeze in restaurants seated at full capacity, in many of those establishments, we’re still obliged to use our own smartphones to figure out what we want to eat. Why? Why should we be scared to go back to touching a communal piece of paper when we’re already breathing one another’s theoretically more dangerous air?

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As college students, John and I both subscribed to the philosophical doctrine of determinism. We differed, though, on what implications, if any, the doctrine had for the issue of income distribution.

I believed that because the traits that result in wealth are determined by causes beyond our control — the genetics lottery, for example — wealth is undeserved. Therefore, inequality is unjust and should be abolished

John understood that my conclusion didn’t follow from our premise. Even if high incomes are undeserved in some philosophical sense, there might be, and indeed are, utilitarian-type reasons to eschew radical income redistribution policies and accept income inequality. Rewarding excellence with income produces benefits for society at large, while government-imposed income leveling is a recipe for mediocrity and possibly repression.

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Put plainly, an increasing cohort of successful women are chasing a shrinking number of high-value, commitment-averse men.

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One of the most elementary lessons of economics is that incentives matter. You’d hardly think this needs demonstrating, but apparently even the Wall Street Journal‘s news pages struggle with basic economics. Today the Journal reports that—lo and behold!—job growth is rising faster in states that have ended lavish unemployment bonus payments. I love the “gee whiz” language of this story.

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Of course. It’s like living in California without having to pay California taxes or put up with California bullshit.

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The New York Times reports that crime is starting to worry “progressives” — not the phenomenon, but the politics of it. I don’t know whether progressives in general are worried, but the ones at the Times sure are.

This Times article focuses on the success of Eric Adams in the Democratic mayoral primary. The Times frets that the winner of the race (at least in terms of the popular vote) “focused much of his message on exposing progressive slogans and policies that he said threatened the lives of ‘Black and brown babies’ and were pushed by ‘many young, white and rich’ people.” That’s hitting awfully close home for the New York Times.

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The Trump administration effectively pushed China enough that the question in Congress is no longer whether to push, but just how hard, according to a pair of think tank experts.

“Under Donald Trump, the beltway’s view of China shifted from one of relative complacency to one verging on alarmism,” Quincy Institute’s East Asia program director Michael Swaine and Advocacy Director Marcus Stanley co-wrote for Business Insider on Sunday, promoting a gentler approach to China as proposed in the House versus the Senate.

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A talk by Glenn Loury, econ prof at Brown.

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Forbes magazine now being fully Woke, it’s unfortunate that millions of jobs are threatened but it’s the ‘income inequality’ that really burns their butts.

By definition, half of the population is below average in intelligence. If you think about some of the 100 (average) IQ people you know, you’ll realize that this means that a lot of our population are mentally slow (compared to the rest). Most employers don’t like having slow thinkers on payroll because they take extra effort to train and manage, and longer to do most tasks; so, if one can purchase a machine that will do the same work with less managerial effort, that’s a win. Plus they don’t require (government-mandated) benefits or take off sick or have family emergencies or join unions. Really, there’s very little downside to replacing unskilled or semi-skilled labor with robots — except politically.

The Crust doesn’t mind replacing workers with robots because (a) they’re part of the class profiting thereby (Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg) and (b) it increases the size of the Underclass dependent on government for their livelihoods and so reliable votes for the Party of Free Stuff (Democrats). Dimwits are by their nature Low-Information Voters, Joe Biden’s base.

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It is an acknowledged legacy of any president’s career that, once they leave office, they will seek to make a lot of money from a book deal. In the case of most incumbents of the White House, the subsequent memoir will be well-written (often with the aid of a handsomely remunerated ghostwriter), insightful (insofar as classified details can be revealed in the lifetimes of participants) and front-loaded in terms of sales. It is hard to imagine that many people today will be rushing to purchase Jimmy Carter’s Keeping Faith, or even George W Bush’s Decision Points.

Yet, in the case of the Oval Office’s most notorious recent occupant, there is already controversy on a hitherto unimagined scale. Donald Trump has announced, in his usual quiet, low-key way, that he is working on a memoir of his time as President. In a statement last week, he claimed that “I’m writing like crazy, and when the time comes, you’ll see the book of all books.” He also stated that he had already turned down two lucrative deals “from the most unlikely of publishers”, but did not name who they were, only stating that “I do not want to do such a deal right now”.

Next step: Pop him one and drag the body outside.

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Three years ago, a small group of academics at a German university launched an unprecedented collaboration with the military – using novels to try to pinpoint the world’s next conflicts. Are they on to something?

If it works, then they are; if it doesn’t, then they aren’t.

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Portland housing advocate Leon Porter estimates that there are 1.5 million bedrooms in Oregon alone that no one is sleeping in, either because the home is vacant or because it’s simply a guest room in an occupied house.

If just 1% of those rooms were rented out, every homeless person in the state could have a roof over their head — and homeowners might get some much-needed financial relief as well.

One of the funniest parts of the movie REAL GENIUS was when Mitch called home and told his parents that he wanted to quit college and come home, and they informed him that they had rented out His Room. The funny part was that nobody does that any more, especially middle class parents like Mitch’s.

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Paper is cheap. Paper is universal. Paper doesn’t run out of battery. Paper doesn’t vanish into the shadow realm when I close the window. Paper can do anything I can do with a pencil. Paper lets me turn back pages in the notebook and scan over for things that have yet to be done. Honestly I wish I had started using paper for this sooner.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Nicole Mansfield Wright’s Defending Privilege asks an extremely timely question: how is it that narratives of victimhood at the hands of arbitrary and excessive power are deployed so frequently in defense of those in power already? To answer this question, Wright turns to the eighteenth-century British novel, a genre long understood to be entwined with liberal modernity, the emergence of human-rights discourse, and the elevation of the “ordinary person” to a level of cultural prominence that anticipated the increasing figuration of “the people” as the legitimate seat of political power.

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As in most academic fields, the top academic finance departments and journals guide the direction of scholarly research. Preferences, tastes, and sensibilities of the faculty at the top finance departments and the editorial boards at top finance journals can have a considerable effect on the acceptable research questions in those journals. It is well known that a person’s political ideology shapes his outlook on scientific issues.1 Yet little is known about the political ideologies of finance professors at these elite institutions and journals. This analysis of the political party affiliations of faculty at the top twenty finance departments and of the editorial boards at the top three finance journals shows that both institutions lean considerably to the left. Results also suggest that finance departments will become even less politically diverse in the future.

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The Register is that uniquely British institution, a tech tabloid.

In addition to being technically savvy, they also do some of the most entertaining writing you’ll find anywhere. If Scott Adams were a tech journalist, he’d write for The Register.

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Notice that nobody is attempting to manufacture fake-plant-food out of meat. That ought to tell you something.

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Wisconsin’s Senate this week passed a piece of legislation that supporters say would make the state a “Second Amendment sanctuary” and exempt the state from federal firearms laws, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

I doubt seriously whether this is anything more than virtue-signaling. That the Federal government has the right (it has always had the power) to stomp on any state law it cares to was settled in 1865. But, like a political lawn sign, it is evidence of popular sentiment … which is something, I guess.

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Biologists at the Universities of Bath and Vienna have discovered 71 new ‘imprinted’ genes in the mouse genome, a finding that takes them a step closer to unraveling some of the mysteries of epigenetics – an area of science that describes how genes are switched on (and off) in different cells at different stages in development and adulthood.

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California’s energy policies are a mess. Ostensibly committed to cutting CO2 emissions, the state shuttered its main nuclear power plant. California has invested massively in wind and solar energy, but since these technologies produce electricity only a minority of the time, California keeps the lights on by importing electricity from other states–electricity that was generated using the reliable sources that California ostensibly eschews.

Then we have electric vehicles. Currently, fewer than two percent of the vehicles on the road in the U.S. are electric. That percentage may be a little higher in California, but it is still miniscule. Nevertheless, California has enacted legislation that seeks to ban gasoline-powered vehicles beginning in 2035. Where the infrastructure will come from to support such a transition in the automobile fleet in the next 14 years is anyone’s guess.

Matt Ridley.

One of the subtexts of the debate over the origin of the pandemic concerns the role of the scientific journals. The magazines that publish scientific papers have become increasingly dependent on the fees that Chinese scientists pay to publish in them, plus advertisements from Chinese firms and subscriptions from Chinese institutions. In recent years observers have noticed that the news coverage of China in these magazines has begun to look a little less objective than it once did.

Springer-Nature, the Anglo-German publisher of the world’s leading scientific journal Nature, announced in 2017 that in some of its publications it was censoring articles that used words like “Taiwan”, “Tibet” and “cultural revolution”, when printing in China. In April 2020 Nature ran an editorial apologising for its “error” in “associating the virus with Wuhan” in its news coverage.

“Follow the money.”

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He’ll lose, of course, but he’ll make a good noise about all the right stuff.

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“Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.”

In a recent graphic of the top 100 organizations for donations to political candidates by employees, the only two that were distinctly more pro-Trump than pro-Democrat were the Marines and the NYPD. And while 97% of Harvard donors donated to Biden, only about 70% of the Marines and NYPD donated to Trump.

Still, I suspect that scared the heck out of Democrats: they’ve got 98% of the institutions more or less on their side, but NOT the two you’d most want to have in your foxhole.

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One of the most curious things about America is how many of our most celebrated billionaires sound like socialists. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett love talking about how more and more of their wealth should be taxed. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, enabling it to wage relentless war on the Republicans.

That’s why it seemed a little funny for the socialists at National Public Radio to report some public hatred of Bezos as news. The headline was “Tens Of Thousands Sign Petition To Stop Jeff Bezos From Returning To Earth.”

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Hint: It’s not for your benefit.

My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory.  For if a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, “You sit here in a good place,” while you say to the poor man, “You stand over there,” or, “Sit down at my feet,” have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?
— James 2: 1-4 (ESV)

Sound at all familiar?

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Outsourcing reaches its limits.

I wonder how many poor schmucks behind the counter are going to be shot because of this?

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A pandemic is as good as a war in shaking up people’s expectations of what is and is not possible.

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At present, disorder is progressives’ most vexing governance challenge. This is illustrated just as plainly by the Jazmine Headley incident Barron describes as the street crisis in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. The Jazmine Headley incident centered around a “victimless crime.” Those are some of the hardest crimes to fight. When public safety authorities concern themselves with “victimless” crimes, that seems to violate John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle”: why should behavior that directly harms no one be a punishable offense?

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Let’s start with a more basic question. What is automation? Machines have replicated and augmented human work processes for centuries, and that is often the colloquial use of “automation” in our current moment. But “automation” was not used to describe this process until 1947, when Delmar Harder, vice president of manufacturing at Ford Motor Company, created its Automation Department. The department’s engineers redesigned automobile production so that materials were automatically conveyed from one process to another, obviating the need for laborers to load and unload machines. Further, the process was itself increasingly machine-controlled, through a system of timers, switches, and relays—what technology historian David Hounsell calls the “electromechanical brain.”

Most of the technologies involved in automation had been developed and implemented in other industries years before their incorporation into Ford’s production process. What made automation new was its centrality to Ford’s manufacturing strategy, coming at a time of historic unrest among autoworkers, and in particular, on the heels of a costly twenty-four-day strike at Ford’s massive River Rouge plant in May of 1949. Not only would the new technologies dramatically reduce an unruly labor force, but they allowed Ford to decentralize its production away from the roiling unrest of Detroit as the company opened new automated factories, with new less militant employees, in Cleveland and Buffalo. Workers immediately perceived the threat, and automation was, from its inception, a deeply politicized issue. The history of automation reveals it as a political tool to subvert worker power, not simply an economic one to increase productivity.

…

Investigating grocery store self-checkout, researchers found that Luddite customers hated and avoided the technology. In response, management cut staff to make lines so unbearable that customers gave up and used the machines instead. Even then, cashiers were still required to assist and monitor transactions; rather than reduce workload, the technologies were “intensifying the work of customer service and creating new challenges.”

…

“There is NO MORAL ISSUE with stealing from a store that forces you to use self checkout, period. THEY ARE CHARGING YOU TO WORK AT THEIR STORE.”

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Last time we took a look at the social place of people involved in war. We found that, far from there being a universal combatant, distinctions between soldiers and warriors are both significant for the present and important for understanding the past. Moreover, beyond that simple dichotomy, the idea of a universal war experience in turn conceals the basic fact that many people who were neither warriors nor soldiers, not properly combatants of any kind, experienced war in unique ways, be they victims of warfare, homefront supporters, or economically invested in the enterprise. Already we have seen that there’s far more than just one sort of person with a war experience.