Freeberg ponders.

Think about THAT, now. We’re constantly told the democrats are the party of the little guy, of the underdog. The handicapped, who cannot do, couldn’t have done, anything to improve his present circumstances. Well, putting aside the fact that this is exactly how small children argue — “You’re stupid! I win!” — when the time comes for all of their hopes and dreams to depend on making an entire country angry at one guy, they see this as the most promising strategy. Promulgate the notion that he’s stupid, like they did with Sarah Palin and George W. Bush. Convince us he’s stupid, and our anger is automatic. And right, and good, and just.

Think about that…take all the time you need…

I’m holding out for ‘The floor of the Senate’.

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Probably organizing a union.

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They’re still using the Russian Imperial arms, why not have a Russian Imperial family? I doubt that a new tsar could be any worse than Putin.

Actually, the Russian Imperial dynasty was German from the time of Tsar Paul, so they might want to get some real Russians for a change; there are any number of Rurik-descended noble families that would do, such as the Gagarins, the Obolenskys, and the Dolgorukys.

If they want to go with the Hostein-Gottorp-Romanovs, the heir male was Prince Paul Romanovsky-Ilyinsky, son of Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich, who died in 2004. His son, Dimitri Pavlovich, an American citizen, would be a good pick.

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Imagine if marathon runners were ranked simply by taking their average time over every course. Some courses are clearly harder than others, and runners can choose which races to enter, so a runner could always improve her ranking by refusing to run on difficult courses. Even sillier would be to rank runners by their average finish position across all races: a world-class professional could just run against high-schoolers and finish first without even trying.

Strangely, the current system for evaluating American college students manages to achieve this extraordinary level of silliness. Since students can select their own courses, and grades from all courses count equally, they are rewarded for taking easier courses and punished for taking harder ones. A first-year student taking introductory English literature gets exactly equal credit as her classmate who precociously jumps into graduate-level literary analysis.

College grade-point averages (GPAs) are not merely a matter of pride. Medical schools, law schools and consulting firms, among other popular post-graduation destinations, have strict GPA cut-offs; any student who fails to make the grade will struggle to have their application even seen by a human. From an individual student’s standpoint, it’s completely rational to optimise for GPA, even at the expense of other considerations. From the university’s point of view, though, that expense is vast.

The problem with any system of grading is: Who’s doing the grading, and on what basis?

American military schools solve this problem by separating the teaching and the testing. Tests at the end of every two or three week Unit are standardized and are created and graded by a special testing group who build tests based on individual questions that have been used in past tests and which have values associated with them as to predicted performance, e.g. a question is historically gotten right by 64% or 73% or 45% of test-takers; tests are built from questions whose average predicted success rate equals the desired passing score. New questions are constantly being created and their initial values are derived from performance in tests to which they are added but in which they are not counted ‘for real’.

The closest approach to this in modern academia are the various ‘aptitude tests’ like the SAT and the ACT and the ‘gateway tests’ used by British-format school systems, such as the GCSE, O-Level, and A-Level exams. Attempts are being made to do something like this in the United States but are hitting rocks and shoals because (a) tests of absolute achievement allow teachers themselves to be evaluated for effectiveness, and teachers resist this to their least breath, and (b) such tests are subject to capture by political groups who want the educational system to indoctrinate students with their preferred political agenda and so write tests that reward that indoctrination.

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Science is not always your friend.

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I got a heads up about the comparison at a 2015 dinner, when I heard a congressman complain about the members of the House’s rambunctious and very conservative Freedom Caucus. “Right-wing Marxists,” he called them. Aha, I thought. That’s me.

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Obviously Reality doesn’t read the correct news media.

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Everyone from Sen. Diane Feinstein (D – Cal.) to the leadership of the National Rifle Association was on board with some form of restriction and a flurry of bills were introduced to prohibit them outright.

Today, people seem to have forgotten all about them.

Guess they weren’t that big a deal after all.

In honor of my brother’s birthday.

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How about that Global Warming, eh? Good thing the Science Is Settled.

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It is my goal to explain why the causes of male and female difference are not merely cultural or the product of patriarchal indoctrination. Separate athletic competitions and distinct medical disciplines of gynaecology and urology testify to the most obvious biological differences between men and women. But the scientific method ? a co-operative, critical, and self-correcting process which has midwifed huge technological and medical advances ? can also help us to understand more subtle differences between the sexes in interests and aspirations. And it is understanding what we really are that will make us free.

Science is SCIENCE … except when it goes against the Narrative, at which point DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE!

The Grumpy Economist (love that name) points out some inconvenient truth.

I think every economist in this debate admits, if some reluctantly, that “corporations” pay no taxes. As an accounting matter, every cent corporations pay comes from higher prices, lower wages, or lower payments to shareholders. The only question is which one.  And indirect general equilibrium effects are central.  The question is not just, how do corporations respond immediately, but how do wages, prices, and capital in the whole economy adjust. “Make corporations pay their fair share” is just nonsense.

The only pool of money from which corporations can ‘pay taxes’ is the pool of money they get from their customers. Neither mangers nor shareholders reach into their own pockets to give this extra money to the government.

‘Corporate taxation’ is merely a stealthy way to get more money out of their customers. In that sense, it’s really a form of sales tax — which, as every economist knows (and every proglodyte ignores) is one of the most regressive forms of tax there is. So every proglodyte screaming ‘Tax the rich!’ when corporate tax rates are discussed are actually screaming ‘Tax the poor!’ without knowing it. (Screaming Without Knowing is what proglodytes do best.)

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With the anniversary of the election of Donald Trump to the presidency only a little over two weeks way on November 8, how are you planning to commemorate that momentous event? Well, for thousands of Social Justice Warriors who still can’t accept the notion of a President Trump the answer seems to be to scream helplessly at the sky. I kid you not. In fact they have named their event “Scream Helplessly at the Sky.”

Freeberg gives it a think.

Imagine that we set a whole bunch of famous leaders down and gave them a pop quiz: “What is the purpose of government? What is the State for[?] Then we sort them into buckets.

One common answer would be “the State exists to create Utopia here on earth,” and guys like Lenin, Hitler, Mao, and Obama would be in that bucket. Their Utopias would all look different, and they’d employ different means to get there, but all those guys would agree that their governments are trying to create a perfect world.

Another bucket contains guys like Oliver Cromwell, Suleiman the Magnificent, Charlemagne, and Ferdinand and Isabella. Their answer is something like “government exists to give greater glory to God, and/or punish His enemies.”

A third bucket is full of guys who answered “the purpose of the State is to give me and my entourage the highest possible standard of living” — Genghis Khan, Louis XVI, pick your ancient empire-builder.

A fourth bucket reads “the State exists to keep the natural world in balance.” Egyptian pharaohs and Confucian emperors fit here — they have to do their daily rituals or the world falls out of whack.

A fifth — very small — bucket reads “Government exists to protect its people’s life, liberty, and property.” Here you find George Washington, Jefferson Davis, William Pitt, and (arguably) guys like Pericles and the consuls of the Roman Republic.

I’d argue that the guys in the “state as utopia” bucket are the Left, and the “protect the people’s rights” bucket are the Right. That leaves the vast majority of all governments that have ever existed in the middle three buckets…

Joe Bob Briggs looks behind the curtain.

One of the funniest writers in the sports department where I started my career—a quick-witted guy who should have known better—got promoted to editorial writer. This meant he was responsible for the daily Wisdom Decrees passed down by whoever dwells in those mahogany-lined offices with the big windows that always seem to contain photographs of presidents and home-run hitters.

He lasted three months.

“You can’t pay me enough to have an opinion every day,” he told me when he returned to the safe haven of minor-league baseball and publinks golf tournaments.

I feel the same way, and I don’t even work for an editorial page.

Watch it.

I love these graphical music notation videos.

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Good thing there’s a consensus about global warming. That’s totally proven.

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Flake is certainly living up to his name.

I think this is the first never-Trumper to bite the dust.

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Ponder a world in which a lot of people prefer the Middle Ages to now.

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We explore the links between social capital and labor market networks at the neighborhood level. We harness rich data taken from multiple sources, including matched employer-employee data with which we measure the strength of labor market networks, data on behavior such as voting patterns that have previously been tied to social capital, and new data – not previously used in the study of social capital – on the number and location of non-profits at the neighborhood level. We use a machine learning algorithm to identify potential social capital measures that best predict neighborhood-level variation in labor market networks. We find evidence suggesting that smaller and less centralized schools, and schools with fewer poor students, foster social capital that builds labor market networks, as does a larger Republican vote share. The presence of establishments in a number of non-profit oriented industries are identified as predictive of strong labor market networks, likely because they either provide public goods or facilitate social contacts. These industries include, for example, churches and other religious institutions, schools, country clubs, and amateur or recreational sports teams or clubs.

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Our tax system is unfair, at least if you measure fairness by the fact that a very small number of taxpayers carry almost all the income tax burden.

 The top ten percent of earners, those making more than $138,000 in 2015, made 47 percent of the nation’s income, but they paid 71 percent of the nation’s income tax.  The top 1 percent, the people former President Obama decried the most, made 21 percent of the nation’s income in 2015, but they paid 39 percent of the nation’s income tax.

Not only are these people paying their fair share, they’re picking up other people’s shares as well.

The rich people who prose on about how their taxes are too low are free to write a check to the IRS.

Go ahead. We’ll wait. And wait … and wait … and wait….

Steven Hayward at Powerline reflects.

I’ve always been fond of the old line that “There are two kinds of countries in the world: those that use the metric system, and those that have been to the moon.” Heh. The American disdain for the metric system is one of those little tics that cosmopolite liberals like to point to as just one of many reasons for their contempt for America and its citizens. (They never seem to have the imagination to exploit the cognitive dissonance that might be had from gunowners’ acceptance of 9 mm ammunition.)

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I’ve always wondered about that.

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Imagine falling asleep in the 1990’s and waking up today. You nodded off watching the news explain looming pension crises, a need to raise the retirement age, and some really old guy talk about “cost disease.” You wake up in 2017 and all of that happened, we really are out of money, Baumol is dead, and many “millenials” aren’t sure what the definition of a “pension” is, exactly. Then you read about UBI. Many an article explain proposed positives, but none explain quite how we’ve made the leap from “we can’t pay for people’s retirement anymore” to “let’s give everyone money and see what happens.”

Freeberg sums it up.

Conservatives desire to teach. Yes this is in contravention against the stereotype, with the “new ideas” emerging and conservatives saying “No no no to new ideas, for I am a conservative.” But conservatives conserve civilization, and civilization is conserved by way of teaching. The old teach the young, so the young don’t have to re-learn everything the hard way; that is how it works. This is how you tie a knot, tie a bow, start a fire, use a knife, shoot a gun, go to Church. Yes, conservatives get surly about certain things. But very, very few of them go so far as to say “My kids are not allowed to watch movies because the actors are liberals.” Certainly, they don’t make a political movement out of such a thing. They don’t have the time for it. They’re too busy at their jobs, building things other people can use.

Liberals desire to restrict. Constantly. We don’t even need to wait past the next sundown to see more examples of it anymore, they emerge daily. Cultural appropriation! Sexist! Racist! It’s become such an unremarkable event for them to add more examples, to embiggen the definitions. So they can restrict some more. “Toxic masculinity!” With one single sweeping pronouncement, they declare 48% to 49% of humans to be toxic…”Don’t teach that in science, take it to a mythology class where it belongs!”…dishonest. What they mean is they don’t want kids to be taught religion. Even if the parents wish it. “Prosecute climate denialism!”…criminalize the very act of disagreeing with, or merely questioning, their catechism.

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If you don’t know who Harold McGee is, this will tell you.

If you do know who Harold McGee is, this will tell you more.

If you want to be a good cook, you need to find out who Harold McGee is.

Just saying’.

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And why should we? Every article ever written on the prospect of languages dying out proceeds from the unspoken assumption that That Is A Bad Thing. I don’t buy it.

A language is a tool. Tools that no longer serve a purpose are abandoned. The sole criterion for whether a tool serves a purpose is whether it is used. Abandoned tools may have some historical interest, but that hardly justifies a massive effort to make sure that the tool is retained in use.

Consider the hitching weight. A hitching weight was a lump of metal or stone carried in a horse-drawn vehicle that, when the vehicle was stopped, was attached to the horse’s reins to keep the horse from moving. How much use is there for a hitching weight nowadays? So close to none as to be negligible. Ought we to have a crash program (complete with taxpayer funding) to ‘preserve the hitching weight’? The question answers itself.

Yes, languages are valuable indicators of how the groups that use them thought about the world.

Yes, languages ought to be fully documented, if possible, before they die out, just as examples of other abandoned tools ought to be stored in museums.

But neither case justifies going to extremes of effort or expense to do that. I personally feel that all this hoo-hah is just a tempest in a teapot ginned up by people who have an obscure hobby to get other people (like you and me) to pay them to pursue it.

We see a lot of that these days.

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President Donald Trump’s tax plan seems to really resonate with millennials, but only when presented as if it were a proposal from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Campus Reform asked a number of students at George Washington University if they supported some of the features of Trump’s tax plan, but sold the provisions as key parts of Sanders’s vision for tax reform.

Isn’t that amazing.

Viscount Ridley lays down some inconvenient truth.

The curse of modern politics is an epidemic of good intentions and bad outcomes. Policy after policy is chosen and voted on according to whether it means well, not whether it works. And the most frustrated politicians are those who keep trying to sell policies based on their efficacy, rather than their motives. It used to be possible to approach politics as a conversation between adults, and argue for unfashionable but effective medicine. In the 140-character world this is tricky (I speak from experience).

Scott Adams gives step-by-step instructions.

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In phenotyping, scientists scan a person’s genes for variations known to influence traits like skin color, eye color, geographical ancestry and freckling. They then plug those markers into a set of algorithms to generate a profile. In recent years, pharmaceutical companies like Parabon NanoLabs of Virginia have begun recreating faces.

Parabon’s tests revealed that Monique was primarily of sub-Saharan African descent, and not white as investigators had believed based on the color of the skin found on her remains.

So Race Doesn’t Exist Genetically except when cops are trying to identify a corpse, in which case, hey, I guess it does.

Steve Sailer sums it up:

I do want to point out that even though we are constantly assured that Science Has Proven Race Does Not Exist Genetically, it’s actually completely uncontroversial in forensic science that DNA can determine the race of pieces of corpses found floating in a New York bay.

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The legendary sword has been pulled from the stone – but the owner wants it back and a crowdfunding campaign has been set up to replace the blade.

Walter Williams, a Real Economist, lays out some inconvenient truth.

Let’s look at who pays what, with an eye toward attempting to answer this question: Are the rich paying their fair share?

According to the latest IRS data, the payment of income taxes is as follows.

The top 1 percent of income earners, those having an adjusted annual gross income of $480,930 or higher, pay about 39 percent of federal income taxes. That means about 892,000 Americans are stuck with paying 39 percent of all federal taxes.

The top 10 percent of income earners, those having an adjusted gross income over $138,031, pay about 70.6 percent of federal income taxes.

About 1.7 million Americans, less than 1 percent of our population, pay 70.6 percent of federal income taxes. Is that fair, or do you think they should pay more?

By the way, earning $500,000 a year doesn’t make one rich. It’s not even yacht money.

But the fairness question goes further. The bottom 50 percent of income earners, those having an adjusted gross income of $39,275 or less, pay 2.83 percent of federal income taxes.

Thirty-seven million tax filers have no tax obligation at all. The Tax Policy Center estimates that 45.5 percent of households will not pay federal income tax this year.

There’s a severe political problem of so many Americans not having any skin in the game. These Americans become natural constituencies for big-spending politicians. After all, if you don’t pay federal taxes, what do you care about big spending?