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Bryan Caplan is a GMU economist who likes to bet doom-sayers that they’re full of it. He has an impressive track record for winning.,

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It is a truth universally acknowledged among wonky introverts that derive their identity from the contents of their minds over the coalition to which they belong that the left-right political spectrum must be in want of an overhaul.

Check it out.

A ‘Portmanteau and Rhyme Generator’. Give it a try.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that there were a lot of Orthodox Christians among the Maya.

Eastern Orthodox Christianity in particular has been growing rapidly, as a number of schismatic Catholic groups have expressed their desire to become Eastern Orthodox and have been received under the jurisdiction of Eastern Orthodox hierarchs.

I guess they took the Rod Dreher option.

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I guess walls only work if the Force is with you. Or something.

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This micro-generation of Silicon Valley start-ups did two basic things: It put together a labor pool to deliver food or clean toilets or assemble IKEA bookshelves, and it found people who needed those things done. Academics called this a “two-sided market,” but to a user, it meant tapping on a phone and watching the world rearrange itself to satisfy your desires. Convenience drove consumer demand. Economic need and work flexibility drove the labor supply. At least in theory.

And of course, this being The Atlantic, Voice of the Crust, they have to put a Marxian spin on it.

Politically, the world is night and day, though. In that context, these apps take on a strange pall. The haves and the have-nots might be given new names: the demanding and the on-demand. These apps concretize the wild differences that the global economy currently assigns to the value of different kinds of labor. Some people’s time and effort are worth hundreds of times less than other people’s. The widening gap between the new American aristocracy and everyone else is what drives both the supply and demand of Uber-for-X companies.

Workers of the world, arise! You have nothing to lose but your gigs!

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I guess she didn’t have enough Victim Pokemon Points to be a big enough fish in the Senate.

I smell another RINO like Murkowski in the making.

John C. Wright explains it all to you, at length.

Wright is a science fiction author who is unapologetically Christian and doesn’t much like the way things are these days. Being a writer, he tends to write about it.

This is not quite a complete book but a pretty long-form article. Read it if you have time.

Sarah Hoyt casts an eye over the book trade.

If you go back and read Burroughs, say, you’ll find that he was not a particularly good writer on the word level. What he was was a great storyteller, often by violating every known rule, including telling you a vast amount of how things should be, instead of showing how they were. But it worked, and obviously he was to the taste of his contemporaries.

What I see in indie is, weirdly, like a return to the old days of pulp. Novels are shorter.  They start somewhere around 30k and usually top out at 50k.  An 80k word book is rare, and 100k plus very rare.

The reason for this actually makes sense. The change in book length was driven, more than anything, by the need to make a book large enough to sell for $5 — later $8 — dollars for a paperback. They could fudge it some. A friend who did very well never could write more than 65k, but her books were printed with larger type.  But less than that? no.

So, books are returning to the size that most people can consume at one sitting or in an afternoon.

I remember those days. Books would max out at around 300 pages (if you were lucky) and stories would move pretty briskly. You weren’t left after the first 100 pages wondering when a story was going to start.

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What do they know that you don’t?

Perhaps the universe itself is racist.

That would tell us something too.

Sarah Hoyt points ot that bookstores were in the process of hanging themselves when Amazon appeared and gave them a push.

I too had the experience, in the 1990s, of never being able to find something worth reading, much less buying, in an actual physical bookstore. My wife and I would instead go to places like Half Price Books in order to get stuff that was ‘out of print’ but eventually migrated from people’s closets and attics.

It hasn’t gotten any better since. Nowadays I only buy books by people that I know or books that have been recommended by people I trust. That’s not a big world.

Which is fine — I’ve got a public library and I’m not afraid to use it; even a weekly trip through their New Adult NonFiction listing (now conveniently on the Internet) gives me a request list of a dozen or so.

Amazon has been a boon for people like me because it allows oddball people to publish stuff without the gladiatorial contest of going through a major publisher.

Victor Davis Hanson does a guest appearance on the Powerline blog to discuss his new book.

I have never met Trump. I don’t know his close friends and aides. In lieu of any insider information, I wanted to offer a sort of Thucydidean account, neither rah-rah in support or unhinged in hatred, of why the country by 2016 was ready for an unlikely Manhattan billionaire populist candidate without either prior military or political experience.

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When smart phones first appeared it was believed there would soon be an app for improving rifle and pistol accuracy and there were. But at first these apps were only for rifles, especially for long range shots. Over time the technology got better and in 2016 MantisX appeared. This $150 dollar device looked like a small laser sight, of the sort attached to the bottom of a pistol equipped with a rail. MantisX took advantage of better sensor tech (accelerometers and gyroscopes) and combined these with app software downloaded to your smartphone. This combination of hardware and software provided an instant and accurate record of y0ur shooting (with bullets or “dry” without ammo). The MantixX hardware detected the motion of the pistol up to when the trigger was pulled and, using a Bluetooth connection to your to your smartphone to grab the data, analyzed each shot (whether real or simulated) and tells you how well you did and what you did wrong if you were making mistakes with trigger pull or how you were holding the pistol (or rifle). MantisX did this by adapting the software to a wide variety of specific pistol and rifle models. As expected, MantisX underwent constant improvements since it was first introduced and these fixes were automatically distributed via app updates.

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That thing is as big as one of the saltwater crocs for which Australia is famous.

Beer is vegan.

Just sayin’.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

I have noticed fragile narratives start to crack and crumble when made to answer specific questions, and the specific question to ask here is: What exactly are the fringe-kooky right positions? Lower taxes, strong defense, sound immigration policy, law & order. I mean yeah, you can pretend these are “dog whistle” signals for intolerance and bigotry, but that’s not choosing a centrist in-between way forward, that’s uncritically accepting inflammatory leftist talking-points. It all comes down to, Trump doesn’t make a very good Hitler if he’s relocating the embassy to Jerusalem.

I’ve supported Taft ever since Eisenhower screwed him out of the nomination.

No, I won’t let it go.

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Well, Bush was elected (or maybe I ought to phrase it as ‘AlGore was not elected’), so I guess they were right.

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And it was totally a mistake. The tune is musically too complex for a decent anthem. America the Beautiful would have been much the superior choice. Even God Bless America would have been better, although nowadays there would be a very vocal minority trying to change it.

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The coalition of the fringes is starting to show a few cracks.

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If you enjoy contemplating the collapse of civilization, envy the the scholars at Cambridge University’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk, who ponder the civilizational End Times all day long and get paid a salary for it.

An interactive map.

With thanks to Debby Witt, a kindred soul.

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The company is planning dozens of locations in the largest cities in the U.S. The first store will open in Los Angeles potentially by the end of the year. The company is planning to open subsequent stores in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, sources familiar with the plans told WSJ.

When they get to Dallas, I’ll let you know. They’re going to have a hard time beating WalMart on price or Central Market on selection.

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Officials in the German town of Ahlen have seized a family’s pet pug and sold it on eBay, prompting a storm of criticism.

Edda the pug was taken from her owners after they allegedly failed to pay debts owed to the town, including a dog tax.

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There is nothing new under the sun — every mistake that politicians make has been made before.

Although it would be years before I would work this out, what Mill wrote is based on a proper understanding of Say’s Law. High levels of public spending do not encourage industry. Spending does not of itself create growth and employment. You cannot make an economy prosper through expenditure but only through value adding production. Demand does not drive an economy forward, nor does demand deficiency cause recessions.

It was this most fundamental of all economic propositions that Keynes deliberately and willfully destroyed. Say’s Law has, for all practical purposes, now disappeared from economic discourse and policy. And until it returns, the ability for the economics profession to provide sound and sensible advice during recession will remain sharply constrained. But to understand what Say’s Law means one must first understand the role Say’s Law played in the Keynesian Revolution.

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But you have to bear in mind that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his term in office.

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

I’ve had girlfriends like that.

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As they do.

Joel Kotkin explains it all to you.

The oligarchs have managed to unite both the progressive left and the conservative right against them. The left objects that the tech industry remains almost totally un-unionized and seems to seek to eliminate gainful work for all but a handful. The right sees a threat to their political expression as they strengthen their hold on the means of communications, generally wiping non-progressive views from the screens of their customers.

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It will no doubt not surprise you to find that this comes from Harvard.

Freeberg imports some wisdom.

There’s a lot of talk these days about people being “anti-science.” The problem is, a lot of people making those claims either are a bit unclear on the idea of what science is or know full well what it is but are hoping you don’t. Just because someone calls something science doesn’t mean that it actually is.

First off, science is not a collection of “facts”. It’s not a set of conclusions. And it most certainly is not ultimate Truth, forever and ever, amen.

Science is a method. And the core of that method can be summed up in one simple question:

“How would we know if we were wrong?”

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You mean you haven’t heard of the Men’s and Women’s March? You must have been living in a cave! Or you suddenly realize that no one has ever thought to organize such an exciting and significant event. And that it’s long overdue.

Ain’t gonna happen, of course, but it’s an entertaining thought.

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William Nordhaus was a co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics for his pioneering work on the economics of climate change. On the day of the Nobel announcement, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) released a special report advising the governments of the world on various steps necessary to limit cumulative global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The major media coverage treated the two events as complementary. In fact, they are incompatible. Although Nordhaus favors a carbon tax to slow climate change, his own model shows that the UN’s target would make humanity poorer than doing nothing at all about climate change.

Indeed, we can use Nordhaus’s and other standard models to show that the now-championed 1.5°C target is ludicrously expensive, far more costly than the public has been led to believe. This is presumably why the new IPCC special report does not even attempt to justify its policy goals in a cost/benefit framework. Rather, it takes the 1.5°C target as a politically “given” constraint and then discusses the pros and cons of various mechanisms to achieve it.

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More than 20 years ago, Professor David Labaree wrote in his book How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning that our education system had turned into a costly race for educational credentials where people are pushed to get higher degrees “to stay a step ahead of the pack.”

In short, educational degrees are positional goods. Now that just about everyone gets a bachelor’s degree, you need a master’s degree to outshine the masses

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Not really sure how this is news….

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This video of Bernie Sanders in 1985, celebrating the 7th anniversary of the Communist takeover of Nicaragua, is a classic. I knew people who talked like this, but that was in the 1960s and early 1970s. By 1985, almost everyone knew better. But not Bernie Sanders.

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How about that Global Warming?  (Was AlGore in town?)

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Well, we certainly can’t have THAT….

(Let’s test it on Joe Biden and see whether it works….)

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A Marine at heart, if not in fact.