Steve Sailer hits Broadway.

Lin-Manuel Miranda is the token Well-Read, Pro-Social, Pro-Wall Street Minority who turned a giant biography by Ron Chernow into a cool hip-hop musical about how the prototypical financier New Yorker Founding Father was actually, when you squint just right, Diverse. Thus Hamilton is beloved by past and present Secretaries of the Treasury, such as Lew, Geithner, and Paulson.

How hip and trendy. How well this Servant of the Crust has rewarded his masters.

But now Hamilton comes along and makes clear that the dominant mindset in New York today is plutocratic, aristocratic, elitist, and anti-democratic. The only thing worrisome about Hamilton to 21st Century New Yorkers is not his reactionary ideology, but his whiteness.

So, by imagining (the extremely Scottish-looking) Hamilton as nonwhite, he becomes a non-controversial Hero For Our Time, the epitome of the High-Low Squeeze Play on the Middle.

Yes indeed. Who’s next? Goebbels?

Read it.

We can only hope.

Read it.

This article is not intended to answer the question about the candidate’s libertarian bona fides one way or another. Rather, it is to point out, amid the distracting hullabaloo of a historically weird presidential campaign, that Bernie Sanders has at least 10 awful policy ideas that would materially damage the country if enacted.

Read it.

Like most technology, Amazon Echo carries with it a number of fascinating halachic questions. What are the prohibitions associated with its use on Shabbos? If one avoids using the name “Alexa” in conversation, may one leave it plugged in on Shabbos? Is there any circumstance in which it may be used? When the word Alexa is used, the Echo awakens and a blue light circles around at the top of the device.

Thomas Frank in the Huffington Post, which shows that even a blind pig can find an acorn now and then.

When you press Democrats on their uninspiring deeds — their lousy free trade deals, for example, or their flaccid response to Wall Street misbehavior — when you press them on any of these things, they automatically reply that this is the best anyone could have done. After all, they had to deal with those awful Republicans, and those awful Republicans wouldn’t let the really good stuff get through. They filibustered in the Senate. They gerrymandered the congressional districts. And besides, change takes a long time. Surely you don’t think the tepid-to-lukewarm things Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have done in Washington really represent the fiery Democratic soul.

So let’s go to a place that does. Let’s choose a locale where Democratic rule is virtually unopposed, a place where Republican obstruction and sabotage can’t taint the experiment.

And it is not a pretty sight — the Crust in all its crustiness.

Ben Casselman is tired of Voices of the Crust.

Here’s how the national media usually depicts the admissions process: High school seniors spend months visiting colleges; writing essays; wrangling letters of recommendation; and practicing, taking and retaking an alphabet soup of ACTs, SATs and AP exams. Then the really hard part: months of nervously waiting to find out if they are among the lucky few (fewer every year, we’re told!) with the right blend of academic achievement, extracurricular involvement and an odds-defying personal story to gain admission to their favored university.

Here’s the reality: Most students never have to write a college entrance essay, pad a résumé or sweet-talk a potential letter-writer. Nor are most, as The Atlantic put it Monday, “obsessively checking their mailboxes” awaiting acceptance decisions. (Never mind that for most schools, those decisions now arrive online.) According to data from the Department of Education,1 more than three-quarters of U.S. undergraduates attend colleges that accept at least half their applicants; just 4 percent attend schools that accept 25 percent or less, and hardly any — well under 1 percent — attend schools like Harvard and Yale that accept less than 10 percent.

Read it.

Al Gore has a problem. He seems to want people to believe that only climate skeptics oppose renewables. The truth is, a small but growing number of prominent greens, openly acknowledge that renewables in their current form are not a scalable replacement for fossil fuels.

Jeanne Safer is married to Rick Brookhiser, a former editor of National Review and a friend of mine at Yale.

Next Election Day, like every Election Day for the last three decades, I will show up faithfully at my polling place, rain or shine, and register my choices for various offices. As long as they’re Democrats, they can count on my support. It’s a matter of moral obligation, not just civic duty: I’ve got to cancel out my husband’s vote.

Typical Democrat. (Just sayin’….)

Read it.

In the conflict that began in Chechnya and has since metastasized into a loosely organized Islamic rebellion throughout the Caucasus region, Russian security services routinely arrest, torture and kill relatives, rights groups say.

The Russian approach, enough to make supporters of waterboarding wince, has by some accounts been grimly effective. Abductions of family members unwound the rebel leadership in Chechnya, for example.

They get results — unlike Obama.

Read it.

Today, spectacular advances in molecular genetics are producing an explosion of new information about how our genome shapes us. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker predicts that these findings will fundamentally reshape our understanding of human nature. They may also reshape our thinking on everything from parenting and education to broader social policy.

…

No wonder many people – especially social scientists, feminists, and progressive politicians – think behavioural genetics is a Pandora’s box that should be slammed shut as soon as possible. They remain heavily invested in cultural determinism – the idea that your environment, not your origins, makes you who you are, and also that the right social policies can significantly change the outcomes.

But genetic denialism has its own risks. One risk is that by not acknowledging the importance of heritability, a lot of social science research is misleading and useless. And many of the policies it has inspired won’t work.

Today the social sciences face a deepening crisis of legitimacy – largely because social scientists, who are overwhelmingly liberal, can’t bring themselves to acknowledge what’s staring them in the face. Yet good social policy depends on it. Dr. Plomin believes this is especially true in education, which should be both more effective and more humane. “It does poor service to social change to subordinate truth to politics,” he says.

Read it.

Currently, the American public school system is a sprawl-generating machine: urban public schools are less appealing to middle-class parents than suburban public schools, causing parents to move to suburbia.

This is the sort of democracy that ‘progressives’ would love to suppress.

This result arises from school assignment laws: because students must attend school in the municipality of their residence, residents of the most diverse municipalities (usually central cities) must attend diverse schools. By definition, diverse schools have lots of children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

I.e. Fashionable Minorities.

Because children from disadvantaged backgrounds often learn less rapidly than middle-class children, these schools quickly get a reputation as “bad” schools, causing middle-class parents to flee to suburban schools that are more socially homogenous.

They also tend to have high percentages of NAMs with behavioral problems that prevent any education from taking place. Cities run by Democrats are the poster children for this sort of thing — even in otherwise rational states like Texas. Nobody in his (or her) right mind will send kids to public schools in Houston, Dallas, Austin, or San Antonio.

The common progressive answer to this problem is to fund urban schools more generously: this strategy has not, when tried, succeeded in bringing middle-class parents back to urban schools.

Because it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of Kids Behaving Badly. That can’t be fixed by throwing money at the problem; it can only be fixed by Good Culture on the part of the parents and neighborhoods from which the problem students come.

Read it.

I would not work for such a company.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

Just in case you haven’t been paying attention.

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

NATO will celebrate its sixty-seventh anniversary in April. Instead of being an occasion for the usual expression of mind-numbing clichés about the alliance’s enduring importance both to U.S. security and world peace, it should become an opportunity for a long overdue assessment of whether the NATO commitment truly serves America’s best interests in the twenty-first century. There is mounting evidence that it does not.

…

The entire security environment is different. Instead of being a collection of demoralized, war-ravaged waifs, the European democracies are now banded together in the European Union, with a population and collective gross domestic product larger than that of the United States. Although they are troubled by the turbulence in the Middle East and the occasional growls of the Russian bear, they are capable of handling both problems. Indeed, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a pale shadow of the threat once posed by the Soviet Union. The European Union has three times the population and an economy nearly ten times the size of Russia.

Sarah Hoyt adds some focus to the discussion.

First let me say right here, that yes, I think we should control our borders. A country that can’t control its borders is not a country. It’s Tragedy of the Commons on a grand scale.

But where I disagree with people who run around saying “the most important thing to do is to stop illegal immigration” is that they make me think of when my husband went to the doctor coughing blood and the the doctor told him “the important thing is not this pneumonia. It’s that you gained 40lbs.”

Yes, that he’d gained 40 lbs was a serious problem and one that the doctor couldn’t deal with, because he didn’t realize there was an underlying problem and assumed we were eating butter fried in lard for every meal.

BUT the most immediate problem, and the one that would kill my husband faster, left untreated, was that he had walking pneumonia.

In the same way, we have a massive problem with illegal immigration, sure, but those huge numbers bandied about hide the fact they’re still a tiny percentage and that a lot left when the economy soured, so that now the statists are limited to the children’s crusade to try to have net positive immigration.

Our problem with LEGAL immigration is just as bad, both in what it does — mistake itself for a charity organization that brings in people from the poorest and most backward countries by preference, with no regard to the chasms between the cultures or their potential usefulness — and in what it fails to do — make it almost impossible to bring in educated people who will be a plus value, except via the subterfuge of workers’ visas that put these people forever at the mercy of their employers.

A good point that I don’t recall seeing anyone bring out before.

Steve Sailer speaks truth to stupidity.

The sheer unaffordability of replicating “affordable housing” giveaways on a mass scale is hard for innumerate liberals to grasp. The progressive mindset holds two contradictory assumptions: that the oppressive dominance of the white majority is soon to be swept away by the righteous demographic tidal wave of minorities; and that minorities are a vanishingly tiny percentage of the American population, so of course they can be subsidized indefinitely with special privileges, such as nice houses in nice neighborhoods.

In contrast, Republican candidate Donald Trump knows a few things about real estate, which helps explain the frenzied establishment reaction to his candidacy.

Ammo Grrll connects the dots.

Near the end of the Passover Seder, the celebrants sing a song called “Dayenu” which means “It would have been enough.” It goes on for roughly as long as I was in labor, (17 hours, in case it comes up on a quiz show) but the idea of it is a hymn of praise and thanks to the Almighty saying, “If you had just brought us out of Egypt” Dayenu. It would have been enough. “If you would have only parted the Red Sea,” Dayenu. It would have been enough. “If you had only given us the Torah.” Dayenu. You get the idea.

This song came unbidden to my mind as I thought about all the chances Michael Brown had to save his own life.

If he had only shot some buckets or played a video game instead of getting high and deciding that filching some smokes from a convenience store was a bright idea, he would be alive. At least until the next time he decided to commit a crime. Dayenu.

If The Gentle Giant had not decided as a parting shot to rough up the store clerk who was half his size. Maybe the clerk wouldn’t even have called in the theft. What’s a few cigars? Dayenu.

If, after stealing and assaulting, he had just walked away as unobtrusively as a 300-lb. Man can and not swaggered down the middle of the street, he would be alive today. If, when the officer approached him in his car, he had answered politely, and moved out of the street, he would be alive today. Dayenu.

If, when the officer approached him in his car and noticed that he fit the description of the shoplifter who assaulted the store clerk, he had said, “I’m sorry, officer, I was loaded and acted stupid. Here’s the cigars and I want to apologize to the clerk,” he would be alive today. Almost certainly he would have been able to plead down the assault charge to 5th degree and if he returned the stolen merchandise, they would have let that go, too. “Justice” today is all about plea-bargaining. And several hundred “last chances.”

If, once he made his decision to go after the cop, he had slugged him once and not grabbed at the gun, he would be in seriously deep do-do, but probably still alive. Now, he’s got assaulting an officer to go with shoving the clerk and the petty theft, but Officer Wilson was clearly no hothead. If Brown backs up, hands up, as the narrative pretends to go, and says, “I’m sorry; I’m sorry, that was stupid, I won’t resist any further,” he is probably alive.

If, after he grabs for the gun, it goes off, and he begins to run, he stops, turns, raises his hands and goes down to his knees or prone on the ground, waiting to be arrested, he might get roughed up a bit upon being “helped” into the squad car, but he is alive.

Even after he charges again and again and is shot multiple times, if he had stopped, gone to the ground with his hands locked behind his head, he is probably alive, headed for a hospital at taxpayer expense and then warehoused for a lot of his life, also at taxpayer expense. Apparently, it was the final head shot that killed him.

On this date the British Act to end the slave trade received the Royal Assent.

Arabs, of course, were key players in the slave trade. Islam has no problem with slavery.

Read it.

The secret to getting rich is as powerful as it is unexciting: live below your means.

That’s it. The bigger the difference between what you earn and what you spend, the sooner you’ll find yourself with enough money to do what you want with your life.

As with many ‘secrets’ to success, it’s simple but requires too much will-power for most people, which is why there are fewer rich people than there are poor people.

Read it.

Sometimes sanity actually wins one.

The controversy surrounding Quenette’s comments arose on November 12, 2015, during a graduate seminar discussion about race. The previous day, KU held a forum on racial and cultural issues affecting the campus in response to student protests over racial issues at the University of Missouri.

According to an open letter written by some of Quenette’s students, during a part of the discussion focusing on how the graduate students can bring up these issues with their students, Quenette said, “As a white woman I just never have seen racism…It’s not like I see ‘Nigger’ spray painted on walls… .” Later, the topic shifted to minority student retention rates in higher education. During that conversation, Quenette responded to one student who argued that the lower retention rate of black students stems from racism and poor institutional support by saying, “Those students are not leaving school because they are physically threatened everyday but because of academic performance.”

But, of course, this was ThoughtCrime and the Ministry of Truth tried to stuff her down the Memory Hole.

Read it.

If nothing else, Trump has the virtue of being willing to raise questions that can profitably be raised but which more ‘grown up’ candidates just wouldn’t think to do.

In Twitter posts on Thursday morning, the Republican presidential front-runner called the 67-year-old security organization “obsolete” and complained that the U.S. pays a “disproportionate share” of its cost.

This is an excellent point that ought to be under ongoing discussion but Just Isn’t. There is no more monolithic aggressively expansionist Communist Soviet empire, which is the precise danger that NATO was crafted to resist. The nature and future of NATO, starting with a de novo review of whether it is even needed, ought to have taken place under Bush the Younger, but didn’t. (Democrats, of course, have no objection to the U.S. meddling in other countries’ business, so long as it’s done in furtherance of the ‘progressive’ agenda — South Africa, si! Zimbabwe, no!)

Absent the Soviet menace, NATO is exactly the type of entangling foreign alliance that George Washington so wisely warned against. It allowed the Europeans to cut their military budgets to the bone and grossly expand their spending on social services, with results as you see them. I think it’s high time that we cut them loose and say, ‘Hey, you worried about Russia? Spend your own money.’

Read it.

If you are a Jane Jacobs fan, as I am, this will interest you.

… though widely celebrated for her insights and unabashed embrace of dense urbanism, Jacobs may ultimately prove more influential than relevant. Her writing was often incisive and inspiring, particularly when she opposed planning and overdevelopment and embraced the role of middle-class families in cities. But the urban revival that has actually taken place is at variance with her own romantic version of cities and how they work.

Read it.

Hint: No.

They obviously do not succeed fully, and in many cases they fall so far short of success that their “virtue laws” are a laughing stock notwithstanding severe penalties provided for convicted violators. Although prostitution has been outlawed far and wide, for example, it has been practiced just as pervasively. Likewise for gambling. Indeed, in many cases, as in states with state-sponsored lotteries, the state has not forbidden gambling as such, but only private gambling that competes with the state’s own gambling enterprises, thereby making a mockery of the idea that it seeks to discourage a vice. An entire sector of the underground economy is involved in supplying the active demands of people who wish to use drugs, patronize prostitutes, gamble, or otherwise engage in “vicious” behavior the state has outlawed. So, at best, the state’s attempt to enforce virtuous behavior is a flop everywhere the state makes such an attempt.

Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

One of the most common arguments for mass immigration is ethnic restaurants. Immigrants from Thailand, for example, introduced the now ubiquitous Thai restaurants.

But, one thing that strikes me is that Thai restaurants haven’t improved all that much since the 1980s, while Italian restaurants, despite not much immigration from Italy, have continued to improve.

One reason for this is that most of the Thai immigrants working in Thai restaurants don’t really care about cuisine. They care about moving to America to make more money, and working in a Thai restaurant is just something Thais do for the money when they come to America. In contrast, a fair fraction of the relatively small numbers of Italians who move to America today are Italian cooking fanatics intent on bringing higher standards to Italian restaurants in America.

Read it.

It was undoubtedly George W. Bush’s fault.

Read it.

Last fall, I proposed my “simplistic theory of left and right”:

1. Leftists are anti-market.  On an emotional level, they’re critical of market outcomes.  No matter how good market outcomes are, they can’t bear to say, “Markets have done a great job, who could ask for more?” 

2. Rightists are anti-leftist.  On an emotional level, they’re critical of leftists.  No matter how much they agree with leftists on an issue, they can’t bear to say, “The left is totally right, it would be churlish to criticize them.”
But even I’m shocked by how well my simplistic theory fits the 2016 election.  On the Republican side, Trump has steamrolled the competition.  How?  Though his concrete policy proposals are few and fluid, he’s expressed minimal interest in free-market ideas.  How then has Trump won over the rank-and-file?  By doing everything in his power to spite the left: teasing, trolling, ribbing, and scaring feminists, Hispanics, Muslims, protestors, and so on.  In a sense, Trump’s main campaign promise is to keep liberals awake at night – and he’s already fulfilling it.

On the Democratic side, matters are slightly more complicated.  Anti-market ideologue Bernie Sanders has pulled anti-market pragmatist Hillary Clinton noticeably to the left, but Hillary’s going to win.  How does this fit with my view that antipathy toward markets is the driving motive of the left?  Because much of Clinton’s support is strategic.  It’s very plausible that 20% of Hillary voters actually prefer Sanders.  They’re voting for her despite their sympathies because they think she’s more likely to win the general election.  In contrast, almost no one who prefers Hillary is voting for Sanders because they think he has better prospects in the general election.  In polls, the Clinton/Sanders/other breakdown is roughly 50%/40%/10%.  So if 20% of Hillary voters and 0% of Sanders voters are strategic, the sincere breakdown is 40%/50%/10%.  Sanders really is the soul of the Democratic Party.

Compare this with Scott Adams’ ‘Master Persuader’ analysis that I’ve been reporting here. These are interesting times.

Read it.

I’ll add a few more:

“Jeez, what died?”

“Is that your real hair color?”

“How can you walk in those things?”

“Doesn’t that thing hurt?”

“Let me just give you this coupon for Harry’s….”

Read it.

Hell might actually be other people  — at least if you’re really smart.

I, for one, am prepared to believe it.

First, they find that people who live in more densely populated areas tend to report less satisfaction with their life overall. “The higher the population density of the immediate environment, the less happy” the survey respondents said they were. Second, they find that the more social interactions with close friends a person has, the greater their self-reported happiness.

But there was one big exception. For more intelligent people, these correlations were diminished or even reversed.

I’ve been saying that for decades. Every bad thing that has ever happened to me has been caused by another person — typically one with whom, given the choice, I would not have associated.

Why would high population density cause a person to be less happy? There’s a whole body of sociological research addressing this question. But for the most visceral demonstration of the effect, simply take a 45-minute ride on a crowded rush-hour Red Line train and tell me how you feel afterward.

Heh. Note that the Crust promote and encourage ‘density’ for everybody else but rarely inflict it on themselves.

Read it.

When many people think about the Middle Ages they see it as a time when people were tortured by a wide collection of diabolical instruments. Whether it is the Pear of Anguish or the Iron Maiden, these torture devices are portrayed as medieval. The reality, however, is that many of these devices never existed in the Middle Ages.

Imagine that.

Michael Goodwin speaks truth to power.

The insanity defense is all that’s left now that the smart set has declared that it’s immoral and indecent to even think about voting for Trump. OK, call me immoral and indecent as well as crazy, because I’m thinking about it.

…

I like those Republicans even though I’m a registered Democrat, just not that kind of Democrat. I voted for President Obama in 2008, believing he meant it when he said no red states, no blue states, only the United States. The barrier he broke added to his appeal.

Six months later, I was off the bus. It was already clear Obama had no intention of building a consensus on anything, although few realized he would be such a radical and partisan polarizer. He may love America, but doesn’t seem to like actual Americans. Other than himself, of course.

…

Following Obama, Clinton’s election would be a calamity. She would be beholden to him, and unable to shift much from his disastrous policies. And who knows what she really believes?

Besides, if the Clintons are rewarded with the White House again, it would be impossible to demand honesty from any public official in America. She’s thoroughly corrupt and, in the memorable words of the late William Safire, a “congenital liar.” Voting for her is a give up on the future.

Scott Sumner, a Real Economist, takes a look.

Suppose you wanted to switch to socialism—what would be the ideal place to do so?
You’d want a country with extremely high quality civil servants.

That would be France.

You’d want a country where socialism is not a dirty word, and capitalism is.

That would be France.

You’d want a country with the Socialist party in power, a party that was committed to enact the ideas of Thomas Piketty.

That would be France.

So how did things work out in France, when they tried to adopt a Bernie Sanders/Thomas Piketty approach to taxes?

Eric S Raymond has some new theories.

A theory is a prediction-generating machine. It takes as input some set of observables and generates as output predictions about the not yet observed. One of the classic examples is Newton’s Three Laws of Physics. Using these, expressed in the formalism of calculus, we can put in observations of force and mass and motion and get out predictions of future force and motion.

(If you are studying something that people call a “theory”, and you can’t identify what inputs it takes and what predictions it generates, the “theory” is almost certainly bogus. I say “almost” because it’s possible you don’t yet understand the theory well enough to do that identification. On the other hand, there are a lot of bogus pseudo-theories floating around out there; caveat thinker.)

But are there no inconveniences to be thrown into the scale against the advantage expected from a multiplication of numbers by the importation of foreigners? It is for the happiness of those united in society to harmonize as much as possible in matters which they must of necessity transact together. Civil government being the sole object of forming societies, its administration must be conducted by common consent. Every species of government has its specific principles. Ours perhaps are more peculiar than those of any other in the universe. It is a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution, with others derived from natural right and natural reason. To these nothing can be more opposed than the maxims of absolute monarchies. Yet, from such, we are to expect the greatest number of emigrants. They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass. I may appeal to experience, during the present contest, for a verification of these conjectures. But, if they be not certain in event, are they not possible, are they not probable? Is it not safer to wait with patience 27 years and three months longer, for the attainment of any degree of population desired, or expected? May not our government be more homogeneous, more peaceable, more durable? Suppose 20 millions of republican Americans thrown all of a sudden into France, what would be the condition of that kingdom? If it would be more turbulent, less happy, less strong, we may believe that the addition of half a million of foreigners to our present numbers would produce a similar effect here. If they come of themselves, they are entitled to all the rights of citizenship: but I doubt the expediency of inviting them by extraordinary encouragements. I mean not that these doubts should be extended to the importation of useful artificers. The policy of that measure depends on very different considerations. Spare no expence in obtaining them. They will after a while go to the plough and the hoe; but, in the mean time, they will teach us something we do not know. It is not so in agriculture. The indifferent state of that among us does not proceed from a want of knowledge merely; it is from our having such quantities of land to waste as we please. In Europe the object is to make the most of their land, labour being abundant: here it is to make the most of our labour, land being abundan

Notes on the State of Virginia, Query VIII

Read it.

Read it.

Science remains humanity’s best hope for solving its most vexing problems, from feeding the malnourished, to finding alternative energy sources, and protecting us from pandemics and meteorites. But the way we train scientists now is not optimal for tackling these big challenges. Rather than thinking big, the current system encourages students to think small. It provides potent incentives for behaviors that are sometimes detrimental to not only scientists but also science and, by extension, to society as a whole. A winner-take-all hyper-competitiveness discourages cooperation, encourages poor scientific practices and deters new talent from entering the field. Graduate programs since World War II have produced excellent postdoctoral fellows. However, attempts to create well-rounded scientists have been thwarted by an increasingly demanding, grant-focused environment. As a result, we channel students into already narrow and highly specialized areas, teaching them more and more about less and less. One sad consequence is the inability of many scientists to talk about their work and ideas in a way that’s comprehensible by voters, politicians and even scientists in other fields.

Read it. 

That explains a lot.

Read it.

As I understand it, the theory underlying the concept of Very Serious People is as follows.

1. Everyone has a mix of beliefs, some of which are right, and some wrong.
2. Everyone co-exists in a social system that tends to value, heavily reinforce and widely disseminate some people’s beliefs while disparaging, heavily discounting, and tending to limit the circulation of certain other people’s beliefs. This bias is not random, but instead reflects and reinforces existing power structures and asymmetries.
3. People whose beliefs are reinforced and widely circulated so that they are socially and politically influential, even when they are manifestly wrong, are Very Serious People. The system provides them with no incentives to admit error or perhaps to understand that they have erred, even when their mistakes have devastating consequences.

Or: Shorter Theory of Very Serious People.

1. Being Tom Friedman Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry.

Read it,

You think you’ve got problems? Hah! Try being a medieval scribe.

There is a lot you can tell from medieval skin. Like a physician today, the book historian can make a diagnosis by observing it carefully. The best quality, for example, feels just like velvet. It usually has an even, off-white colour, and it makes no sound when you turn the page. Bad skin, by contrast, crackles. It is of uneven thickness, and shows staining and a variety of colours. Unlike what you may have thought, looking at imperfect skin is far more interesting than studying its perfect counterpart. This is because a defect tells a powerful story, shedding light on the book’s production and providing clues about its use and storage post-production. Here’s the skinny on bad medieval parchment.

Freeberg has some thoughts.

It’s interesting. It would be healthy if it relied on a decent and crisp separation between fact and fiction. In a way, it does. But there’s something insincere about it as well. These people we today call “liberals” are the way they are, because we’re going through a cultural conflict. They’re intruding into an established culture, with a new culture they’d like to impose. “Conservatives” are any people who do something to resist this incursion. This new, enlightened culture says men should not address women in any manner or tone except for the most-deferential; to do otherwise is uncool, anywhere, inside or outside of the teevee set. And that goes double for pummeling terrorists to get information, of course. Their message is not one of “that’s only cool in make-believe, real-life people shouldn’t do that”; their message is that this is BadThink. It’s part of the thought-smallpox we’re supposed to make extinct, right?

The two examples — there may be more — dislodge a telling fig leaf. They reveal a meaningful truth, that liberals and conservatives don’t actually disagree about what’s cool. The disagreement is in whether ordinary people are worthy. Kinda gets back to what I was noticing about their newest, Trump-defense campaign slogan: “Americaa is already great.” You don’t know what that actually means, any better than I do. Does that mean, sometime since their guy got sworn in seven years ago, America crossed some threshold and became “great,” rather like the sun crossing the celestial equator and starting Spring officially? Because the liberal catechism sure as hell doesn’t smile on the idea that America was “already great” in 2009. So, when exactly was this crossover-point, this vernal equinox? Where is the enthused, self-identifying liberal who will comment on that?

Robert Higgs offers a little perspective.

No decent person likes the building of a fortified wall to keep peaceful migrants from entering the Land of the Free freely, but at least we are not marching members of the Five Civilized Tribes hundreds of miles at gunpoint in the dead of winter to live and die in a remote wilderness. No decent person likes the way blacks are victimized by the drug war, the crooked cops and prosecutors, and the prison-industrial complex, but at least we no longer have chattel slavery where human beings are bought and sold like livestock at private auction. No decent person likes the demonization of Muslims, but at least we haven’t forced all of them into prison camps, as the West-coast people of Japanese ancestry were forced in 1942-45. And so forth.

The country has always been rotten, full of coercive busybodies eager to use state power to punish their neighbors whose conduct, creed, or ethnicity did not please them. The country has always been teeming with hotheads eager to go to war with practically anyone who seemed to them suitable for killing. The country has always been ruled by crooked politicians and scheming, would-be crony capitalists. Rotten, rotten, rotten to the core from the get-go.

Read it.

Looks as if it would feed a family of five. Enough fur for a child’s coat.

Jen Hislop, 43, from North Ayrshire, was chosen out of hundreds of applicants and Atlas left for his new home at the weekend.

She said: “I burst into tears when I got the phone call saying I had been chosen to rehome Atlas and I cried again when I collected him.

“Animals are just pets to some people but my rabbits are family members.

Well, I suppose some are more desperate for family than others.

“I’ve decided to change his name to Atilla the Bun Binky Master Jazz Paws, but I think we’ll call him Atty for short!”

Why am I not surprised….

Read it.

That’s the question Glenn Reynolds likes to ask periodically over at Instapundit. Today we’ll add some data points to the file, starting with the news that the New York Times has settled a discrimination lawsuit.

All of these student disturbances are at schools run by ‘progressives’ for ‘progressives’. You never hear about any problems at conservative institutions, like Hillsdale in Michigan.

I incline toward #3, but it’s all good.

Read it.

Magic will, of course, be under strict government control, because that’s how they do things in Britain (the ‘Ministry of Magic’), and Rowling can’t conceive of any other arrangement.

Read it.

Tyler Cowen has argued that Paul Krugman is the Milton Friedman of the early 21st century, and in many ways that’s true. Among all economists, he is clearly the most influential public intellectual. But an even better comparison might be John Kenneth Galbraith, who was the favorite economist of intellectuals who hated economics.

I’ve noticed that if you explain to intellectuals that a minimum wage will hurt the poor by increasing unemployment, or that rent controls hurt renters by creating shortages, or that unemployment insurance increases unemployment, or that taxes on investment income should be abolished, they’ll give you this look like “I don’t know whether this guy is evil or crazy.” Non-economists strongly resent the implications of much of economic theory, as it punctures holes in all their pet theories. So when a Nobel Prize winner comes along that confirms all their political views, he’s going to be extremely popular among intellectuals. Especially when he’s as brilliant and witty as Paul Krugman.

I don’t want this too sound too negative. Just to be clear, Krugman is 10 times the economist that Galbraith was. I often disagree with him on macroeconomics, but his views are defensible and brilliantly explained. He’s a great writer, and a superb theoretician. Galbraith was a great writer and . . . and that’s about it.

Jim Goad lays out some inconvenient truth.

Without so much as asking a single question, many modern whites have gullibly swallowed a skewed and incomplete historical narrative that depicts them as history’s sole villains and the nonwhite world as innocent, suffering lambs.

Hey, it’s working.

Nearly all modern historians agree that the scenario depicted by Alex Haley in Roots—that of white raiders penetrating the African interior to rout African villages for slaves—is fraudulent. Instead, European slave traders nearly always bought slaves from African vendors at coastal markets. We hear much about the brutal “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic Ocean, but almost never about the estimated 10 million or so indigenous Africans who perished while being marched to the sea in chains and yokes by their African captors.

We don’t hear that according to Boston University’s Linda Heywood and John Thornton, about 90% of Africans transported to the New World had initially been enslaved by other Africans. We don’t hear about Tippu Tip, who was once a world-famous black slave trader in Zanzibar. And we certainly don’t hear much about how Barack Obama—who has no ancestral ties to African slaves in America—is descended from the Luo peoples, who routinely captured other Africans in war and sold them into slavery.