Read it.

Considering debt, it should be said up front that realistically all government spending is debt. Governments can only spend to the extent that they extract resources from the real economy first, at which point debt amounts to an accounting abstraction. A focus on debt misses the real barrier to economic growth, which is government spending itself. As the late Robert Bartley put it in his classic book on the Reagan economic revival, The Seven Fat Years, “The deficit is not a meaningless figure, only a grossly overrated one.” Government spending is the true tax signaling resource consumption by politicians lacking market discipline. The unseen with the spending is all the experimentation (and yes, voluminous failure) that is never pursued by market-driven entrepreneurs (cancer cures, transportation innovations, technology advances that would render the internet dated) thanks to government existing as a size consumer of always limited resources.

There is no such thing as ‘federal money’, ‘state money’, ‘city money’, or any other kind of government money. It’s all TAXPAYER MONEY, taken from you with the gunman visible in the background.

The rich, for being rich, have money to lose. That’s why much lower tax rates on wealth that is earned or inherited are so crucial to the economic well-being of everyone else. Precisely because the rich are flush with funds, they can take risks on the dynamic companies of tomorrow that are tautologically necessary for the prosperity that Anderson would like. Adam Smith was very clear that investment migrates away from economies that are stationary, and if the tax-cut focus is on the middle class, a more stationary economy will be ours. Such an economy will do little for the typical American whom Anderson would like to aid.

History is once again very clear here. Since the rich have money to lose, they alone can pursue the intrepid investments that make the typical American much better off. Indeed, it was J.P. Morgan who took a flyer on Thomas Edison’s light bulb despite the protests of his father, it was Howard Hughes who brought a pile of inherited money to California in order to fund the aviation boom, families with names like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Phipps were the initial money behind the venture capital explosion out in Silicon Valley, PayPal co-founder Thiel was the money behind Facebook, and then Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was a pioneer investor in both Google and Uber.

Lion of the Blogosphere points out something that I haven’t seen discussed.

Mitt Romney said that Trump is a con-artist, as if that’s a reason not to vote from.

I say that one of the benefits of having a con-artist for president is that he can spot when other people are trying to con him. Do you want a president who is easily conned? I don’t.

Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter showed us why we don’t want that to happen.

Read it.

What Trump has discovered by accident is that many conservatives aren’t as attached to conservative policies as they seemed; that labels don’t mean much to voters; that you can bring new people into the Republican coalition instead of playing by the old rules; and that at least a significant plurality of Republican primary voters don’t care whether you bend your knee to the memory of Ronald Reagan or not.

We may be seeing proof that the era during which the Republican party was explicitly ‘conservative’ (1964-?) is now over, and it may be reverting to what it was at the beginning of the 20th century, when Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican President who proudly carried the Progressive banner into the White House.

Read it.

Health officials will baldly lie to you because they know, know, that they know more about how you ought to live than you do.

But you knew that.

A group of scientists are challenging the now conventional wisdom that a low-sodium diet is better for your long-term health, asking whether people should take official advice on the matter with a pinch of salt.

In a new review of the evidence, a team of experts from Columbia University found there were “two distinct bodies of scholarship” on the matter – those who believe reducing salt intake will improve the overall health of the population, and those who don’t.

Gee, where have we heard that before? Let’s see — could it be ‘climate change’?

Watching your salt intake has become one of the core pieces of dietary advice in the UK in recent years, and in the US it has got to the point where New York is requiring by law that restaurants label salt content in their food.

New York has many stupid laws because New York is full of stupid politicians and stupid people who vote for them.

So it will be a surprise to many to find that just 54 per cent of the 269 academic reports included in the review found in favour of a salt reduction hypothesis.

DENIERS! BURN THEM!

“Decision-makers often must choose a course of action in the face of conflicting, uncertain evidence,” he said.

Only if they’re trying to make a decision in a matter which is NONE OF THEIR FARGIN BUSINESS.

And rightly so, I think, having a more useful skillset than, say, a Gender Studies and Queer Theory major.

Read it.

They also share a different political tradition. It may seem to contradict their shared fascist pedigree, but Trump and Sanders are both, in a meaningful sense, conservatives.

By this, of course, he means ‘people resistant to change’, rather than what, say, National Review means by ‘conservatives’.

They are both conservatives from the perspective of classical liberalism. More specifically, they are conservatives in the sense that F.A. Hayek used the term in 1960 when he wrote the postscript to The Constitution of Liberty titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative.”

A great essay that everyone ought to read.

They share a fear of uncontrolled and undesigned change, especially in the economy. This is most obvious in Trump’s bluster about how America never “wins” and his desire to raise tariffs on Chinese imports and close the flow of immigrants, especially from Mexico. Economic globalization is a terrific example of uncontrolled change, and using foreign workers and producers as scapegoats for that change — especially when those changes have largely benefited most Americans — is a good example of this fear of the uncontrolled.

Read it.

Hundreds of billions of foreign-aid dollars have gone to fight rural poverty in the developing world since the end of World War II. But ask people in this dry, mountainous outback what has made the most difference in their difficult lives and you get only one answer: remittances.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, the World Bank and the InterAmerican Development Bank have brought remarkable prosperity to Northern Virginia and Maryland. But it’s the fruits of migrant labor sent home that explain how, in places like this, hardscrabble poverty is slowly giving way to development. I emphasize “slowly,” but the change is real. And as one local told me, “When you build something yourself, you value it more.”

One of the reasons that people cross the border illegally is because they can get better jobs in the U.S. The Mexican government doesn’t mind this because their poor and unemployed are shipping themselves out of the country, and the money they send back to their families is boosting the Mexican economy with no effort on their parts.

One might call this “re-imported jobs” — rather than ‘exporting jobs’ overseas so that the work can be done by foreigners in their own country, we’re effectively importing the foreigners so that they can do the same work here; the effect is the same, with the earnings of those foreigners going overseas to benefit their native countries.

And, rather than the U.S. government sending taxpayer dollars overseas in foreign aid, to be stolen by kleptocrats in the recipient countries with a small trickle winding up in the hands of the intended beneficiaries, this form of ‘foreign aid’ uses dollars that are actually earned by the foreigners involved rather than stolen from taxpayers, and almost always find its way to the people who need it.

Whether or not this is a good thing is left as an exercise for the reader.

This is the new Democrat platform.

Read it.

f you have a penis, use the men’s room.

If you look like a man, but don’t have a penis, use the men’s room, but please don’t use the urinal.

If you look like a woman, and don’t have a penis, use the woman’s room.

News you can use, from Lion of the Blogosphere.

As the elephant said when he pooped on the sidewalk, that about covers it.

Freeberg nails it again.

What is the implied plan, with turning your shopping receptacle into a projectile, possibly hurting someone? Someone is supposed to notice you’re upset? Who? For an explanation, all I can think of is a chemical imbalance in the brain, or poor upbringing. It’s not just him. Something is just a bit off today. One of these days, I need to learn to do my shopping here when the professionals do it; seems when they’re there, I have a lot of trouble parking, but when everybody else is there I have problems with everything else. People don’t understand what they’re there to get, which is excusable, but they also don’t seem to understand how to move around other people. Which is not. C’mon, you’re not five anymore. High traffic areas, low traffic areas, these things are not the same. You need to check your bearings, figure out what’s next on your list, have a quick conference with your spouse…where do you do that? In the way, or out of the way? You should have to pass a test like this before being allowed entrance.

…

Here’s the fascinating part. I would bet good money that this is an Obama voter. But there’s no use heading over to Social Media to say so, it would just start needless arguments, butt hurt, and a LOT of rebuttal. That’s the advantage of having taken the time to argue with liberals, you learn things. And the fascinating part is, Obama voters, while being seen in this light by normal people, look at normal people this way too. No really. They think when normal people think about high taxes the way normal people think about high taxes — high, therefore questionable at least, and certainly very taxing — we’re being the asshole who gives a cart a mighty shove, thereby contributing to the congestion problem that he is simultaneously announcing to the world is too much for him to tolerate. They think that guy is us. You hear them say so all the time. Who among us has not heard the endless litanies about how we have to have a tax system so we can pay for police departments, fire departments, park benches, et al. They’re so cute when they work so hard to avoid saying anything good about the military. Also, traffic lights are like this. Part of the price we have to pay to live in a civilized society is that we have to follow rules, much like stopping for a red light and waiting for it to turn green. Yes, that must be the problem. I’m opposed to more public debt because I’m a red-light runner.

Peggy Noonan speaks truth to power.

We’re in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact of the Republican primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you’re teasing him. Trump, they say.

I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Jimmy asked me, conversationally, what was going to happen. I deflected and asked who he thinks is going to win. “Troomp!” He’s a very nice man, an elderly, old-school Italian-American, but I saw impatience flick across his face: Aren’t you supposed to know these things?

In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious.

‘Normal’ people, of course, have no access to the corridors of power; no Congressmen in their Contacts list, no children at Sidwell Friends School, no pundit gigs on MSNBC, no pixel-inches in Slate or the Huffington Post, no gangs of kids hanging out on their street-corners whose first language comes from another continent.

There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.

The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.

I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.

The ‘protected’, of course, include fashionable minorities — and those who ‘identify’ with the new Ruling Victims.

They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.

Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.

Read it.

The reign of margarine is almost over. Sales of margarine—a plant-based spread that was once immensely popular because of its purported health benefits—have been rapidly declining and is now a cause of huge concern for Unilever, the world’s largest margarine producer and the parent company of brands that include Promise, Imperial, and Country Crock. The butter-substitute has a long history at Unilever—the company was founded through a merger between a soap maker and a Dutch company that began making margarine in 1872.

But, the truth is that butter has made a comeback: new reports argue that it’s not as unhealthy and artery-clogging as once thought, which has pushed margarine into quick decline. In response, Unilever last year created a separate business unit for its margarine operations, a move that its chief executive compared to “putting a sick child in a separate room from siblings, and showering extra care on them.” But the results have remained the same.

Read it.

Now THAT’s a scary thought.

Yeah, it’s been that kind of a day.

Freeberg has some thoughts.

Second thing is what has happened to the liberals. They still want to get even for the “Florida debacle” of 2000. Before that, they were about ending prejudices, and feeding and clothing the hungry. True, a lot of their measures achieved the opposite of these things and the liberals didn’t very much care. But afterward, getting even with conservatives is an objective that has stolen the limelight. The shift is subtle, but it is there. There’s a difference between — “I want to get these people health insurance, and I must defeat conservatives because they’re getting in my way of doing that” — and — “I want to make these conservatives look bad in the public view, and to do that I can get the word out that they, for some reason, don’t want these people to get health insurance.” Those are actually two different things. One is overly simplistic but determined, like a dog chasing a car that wouldn’t know what to do if it caught the car. The other is just plain vengeful.

And the third thing is what’s happened to conservatives. They still don’t have time for all this fighting-about-politics stuff. They have work to do. In fact, very often The Futility sets in, and they say to themselves…well, fuck this, this dime-store idiot liberal guy has all the time in the world to throw his cherry-picked statistics at me, his Mother Jones articles, maybe troll conservative blogs all day, but I have customers counting on me and I have to get back to work. And then after awhile the other thought enters the conservative cranium, yet again…I’m doing this to set up my retirement, get my kids headed to a brighter future, not be a burden to my family when I’m older. If only the liberal dipshits have influence on our politics, they get to shape our politics, and that will render these local efforts of mine entirely futile. The Counter-Futility. Back and forth the conservative goes, like a ping pong ball..it’s futile to do this, it is futile not to do this…

Read it.

Not the sort of thing you expect to see in the New York Times.

Colonel Qaddafi overthrew King Idris, the country’s founding leader, in a 1969 coup, but that was not all. He also abolished the monarchy; scrapped the royal flag; banished or jailed the king’s relatives; and turned the gold-domed palace into office space, a library, and after 2009, a lavish private museum for classical antiquities.

Yet the popular memory of King Idris, who died in Cairo in 1983, has quietly endured in Libya. And now, after Colonel Qaddafi’s own fall and the years of violent turmoil that have followed, the country’s closet royalists have emerged with a radical suggestion: Restore a form of monarchy, at least temporarily, to let Libyans rally behind a respected father figure and begin to rebuild their splintered nation.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, is delightfully dyspeptic today.

The successful politician no less than the successful whore adorns himself or herself with whatever costume, no matter how tawdry or embarrassing, is thought to be most alluring to the greatest number of customers.  But unlike the successful whore, who gives something of genuine value in return to each and every person who pays for her services, the successful politician gives value only to a small handful of his or her customers, and this politician finances these transactions with funds and freedoms forcibly confiscated from others.  In short, when ranking different professions according to the principles held and adhered to by their members, whores rank much, much higher than politicians.

Read it.

Bill Gates thinks we need a miracle to solve the world’s energy needs, a safe, reliable, non polluting form of energy which could bring electricity to the rural poor of Africa. The odd thing is, such a “miracle” is within our grasp; but nobody seems to be interested.

…

There is a nuclear fuel source which fits this description – Plutonium 238.

Plutonium 238 is ridiculously safe. Unlike other isotopes of Plutonium, Pu238 is a prolific alpha emitter, but it emits very little dangerous penetrating radiation. This almost eliminates the need for shielding – a sheet of stainless steel would block all the alpha radiation.

Pu238 is so safe, it used to be used as the core of nuclear pacemakers; people had Plutonium nuclear batteries implanted in their bodies. This procedure was only discontinued, when cheaper, long life chemical batteries became available.

Plutonium 238 is also very energy dense – it emits around half a watt per gram. A kilogram of Plutonium 238 generates 500 watts of energy. With a half life of 87 years, a few kilograms of Pu238 could produce more than enough energy to power a few simple household appliances, for several decades, without needing a refuel.

Read it.

An odd piece to see in lefty Voice of the Crust The Guardian.

I have never defended the use or availability of capital punishment on the grounds of retribution and would echo his holiness’s own phraseology in saying that no matter how serious the crime, it is wrong if its purpose is merely an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Using it as a deterrent is, however, a very different matter for it saves innocent lives.

This position ignores the effect on others of ‘retribution’. If we call it by its street name, ‘payback’, it acknowledges that the taking of a life has created a social imbalance that is only rectified by the loss of the murderer’s life. People on the street understand this, even though they often cannot articulate it.

Pope Francis claims that the death penalty is “an offence against the inviolability of life and the dignity of the person” but what about the life and dignity of a victim who would not be a victim if the death penalty were in force?

That’s not what the Pope was talking about, and this author really needs some instruction on what Christianity is all about, not to mention what the Pope’s role is in the Roman Church. (Such ignorance is not surprising in a writer for the Guardian, whose exposure to Christianity is likely restricted to seeing things on TV.)

As a Christian, the Pope is committed to the view that any person, no matter how evil or how criminal, can be saved if brought to repentance. Killing a person, even a murderer, puts that repentance out of reach, and takes from them forever that opportunity for salvation. That is the Pope’s concern, and that is his only concern.

The state’s duty in these circumstances is an extension of the individual’s right to self-defence. If we believe our lives or those of others are at genuine risk then we can use whatever force is necessary to mount a credible defence including, in extremis, killing.

Irrelevant. Under no reading of the law are individuals, pursuing their ‘right to self-defence’, entitled to kill someone merely to avoid the possibility of that other person is, or might be, a murderer.

The government’s duty in these circumstances is part and parcel of its essential function of ensuring that its citizens can associate with each other in mutually beneficial ways without being constantly afraid of arbitrary, even whimsical, violence on the part of those with whom they come in contact. Self-defense doesn’t have anything to do with it (unless we’re talking about invasion by foreigners). This is reflected in the libertarian mantra, ‘Don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff.’ How the government does this is, of course, subject to discussion.

Therefore the crux of the argument is: is it really a deterrent? In the five years immediately following the abolition of the death penalty in Britain the government still collected statistics based on the distinction between capital and non-capital murder precisely in order to assess the effect of abolition and the effect was startling. As Duncan Sandys, a senior Conservative MP, told parliament in December 1969, the capital murder rate had risen almost 125%. It is worth pausing just to absorb that. There was also a substantial rise in the number of times firearms were taken on robberies.

But of course the people who are against capital punishment have all sorts of studies of their own that show that capital punishment is not a deterrent. This ‘battle of the studies’ has been going on ever since sociology reared its ugly head. In any event, that’s not the Pope’s concern, nor is it in any way related to why he made his statement.

In the old days, ‘journalists’ were expected to be able to listen and understand what people are saying, and why, and to ask if they were confused. Today, it is merely sufficient to be confused.

Read it.

Read it.

Only five children go to this 12,000-square-foot school in Florida’s Palm Beach County. Here, on any given day, 12-year-old twins Logan and Garrett might solve math problems on their computers while their sisters, Sienna, 5, Reagan, 7, and Ava Rose, 10, have recess on the playground. Other times they all work together to memorize passages of Shakespeare or the names of the bones in the human body.

The kids live at the school as well—because it’s also their family’s home. Their mother, Karin Katherine Taylor, is also their teacher. She and her husband, a 59-year-old chief executive of an industrial-distribution firm, built the home six years ago with the intent of home schooling their children there.

If I had the money, and children, that’s what I’d do with it.

The family is part of a small subset of affluent homeowners who home-school their kids—but not for typical reasons of wanting to provide religious instruction or because they don’t like the public schools nearby. Instead, they say they can create their own optimal learning environments by buying or building homes in which almost every room is a classroom.

It was customer for the upper classes in Europe to have their children educated by tutors and governesses, the boys until it was time for them to go to ‘public’ school, the girls until they ‘came out’ and hit the marriage market. That may be coming back around on the guitar.

Read it.

An interesting question.

An interesting pattern developed early in the official involvement in global warming. If a person challenged the claim that humans were causing global warming (AGW), it was assumed they were on the political right. If you supported AGW, then you were on the left. This categorization is not related to the science, but to the political nature of the science involved. This occurred in two major parts. The original objective of those using global warming for their political agenda and the marginalizing of those who questioned the science by linking them to industries and their wealthy owners. The author believes the evidence shows that human CO2 is not causing AGW, that the hypothesis is not proved. This article is not written to pick political sides. Rather, it is an attempt to help understand the battles waged and the confusion this created for the public, the politicians, the media, and a majority of scientists.

Read it.

Given the choice between Trump and Apple, I pick Apple.

Perhaps Tim Cook ought to run for President. He’s made more money for Apple than Trump has for Trump, and he doesn’t have a fake hairdo.

My, what a surprise!

The “Strange New Respect” Award is the invention of Tom Bethell, who noted decades ago how liberals would always start praising a conservative or Republican who showed signs of moderation, Bob Dole being a great example. “New respect”—a phrase you’d actually see in the media—was a euphemism for “moved to the left.”

It is a totem of insincere liberalism, a coy way of attacking present-day conservatives. My corollary is that for liberals, the only good conservative is a dead conservative. Back in the 1960s, William F. Buckley was attacked as a fascist or worse, and dismissed as a retrograde force. Today, of course, liberals call him a “national treasure,” and bemoan that today’s conservatism isn’t more like Buckley. (This is Sam Tanenhaus’s favorite hobby horse.)

Ditto for Dwight Eisenhower, whom liberals regarded in his time as an unenlightened dummy, until some liberals decided he was okay after all—actually pretty good in fact—a discovery that coincided with the need to find every way possible way to trash Richard Nixon. Who, come to think about it, many liberals nowadays say as actually pretty good if it wasn’t for that whole Watergate thing.

Apparently Trump makes some of them wish to return to the days of George W. Bush. I am reminded of what Malcolm X said about Martin Luther King: ‘They talk to him because the alternative is to talk to me.’ So I guess Donald Trump is the Malcolm X of the Republican Party.

Which sort of make sense if you think about it….

A Digital, 3D Printed Sundial Whose Precise Holes Cast a Shadow Displaying the Current Time

Masterpan. Unfortunately it’s aluminum and so won’t work with an induction cooktop.

MiniBrew home beer maker. If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Gittler guitar. Simply amazing.

Read it.

An 18-year-old girl reportedly kidnapped by her ex-boyfriend has been safely rescued by police after her mother tracked her location using Find My iPhone. CNBC reports that the victim was found more than 150 miles away from home.

…

Police say that the victim was found bound and gagged in a car in a McDonald’s parking lot. They named the kidnapping suspect as 18-year-old Joseph Boller, whose bail has been set at $150,000.

Moral: Use iPhone. It’s for the children.

(Full disclosure: I own Apple stock. Ka-ching!)

Read it.

When I told friends I was eating nothing but fast food for a week, most immediately thought of the (in)famous Morgan Spurlock documentary “Super Size Me.”

No, I would respond. I’m eating healthy.

As fast-food chains increasingly try to appeal to health-conscious Americans, supposedly nutritious items are popping up on menus more and more.

Once one gets away from the left-wing poseurs and food-snobs who love every century but this one and every country but their own, one finds that the modern world isn’t so bad after all.

When I told friends I was eating nothing but fast food for a week, most immediately thought of the (in)famous Morgan Spurlock documentary “Super Size Me.”

No, I would respond. I’m eating healthy.

As fast-food chains increasingly try to appeal to health-conscious Americans, supposedly nutritious items are popping up on menus more and more.

Businesses respond to their customers. If people want ‘healthy’ food, they will buy healthy food, and businesses will try to provide it for them.

Read it.

The first set of rules was written by Frank L. Visco and originally published in the June 1986 issue of Writers’ digest.
The second set of rules is derived from William Safire’s Rules for Writers.

Read it.

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

Specifically, I keep seeing reports that Apple has unlocked “70 iPhones” for the government. And those reports argue that Apple is now refusing to do for the FBI what it has done many times before. This meme is completely inaccurate at best, and dangerous at worst.

…

The New York case involves an iPhone running iOS 7. On devices running iOS 7 and previous, Apple actually has the capability to extract data, including (at various stages in its encryption march) contacts, photos, calls and iMessages without unlocking the phones. That last bit is key, because in the previous cases where Apple has complied with legitimate government requests for information, this is the method it has used.

It has not unlocked these iPhones — it has extracted data that was accessible while they were still locked. The process for doing this is laid out in its white paper for law enforcement.

…

The California case, in contrast, involves a device running iOS 9. The data that was previously accessible while a phone was locked ceased to be so as of the release of iOS 8, when Apple started securing it with encryption tied to the passcode, rather than the hardware ID of the device. FaceTime, for instance, has been encrypted since 2010, and iMessages since 2011.

So Apple is unable to extract any data including iMessages from the device because all of that data is encrypted. This is the only reason that the FBI now wants Apple to weaken its security so that it can brute-force the passcode. Because the data cannot be read unless the passcode is entered properly.

Read it.

For one thing, Apple appears dedicated to safeguarding my privacy. The government? Not so much….

For another, if Apple doesn’t safeguard my privacy to the extent I want, I can go elsewhere. The government? Not so much….

Read it.

First, the new post-inversion company will typically chose to bring more of their foreign earned income back to the U.S. than they would as an American based company. This is because they are no longer subject to the international taxation system of the U.S. tax code, and as the study notes, this means money invested in the U.S. economy.

In other words, if an American company owns a foreign company, the American company has to pay taxes on its operations and that of the foreign company, even if the foreign company didn’t do any business in the U.S. (Thanks a lot, Congress.) The other way around, the American company and the foreign company only have to pay taxes in the places where they have operations, which is HOW THE REST OF THE WORLD WORKS.

Second, post-inversion company typically pays more in revenue to the US treasury post- inversion, even as their marginal tax rate decreases.  It is important to note that the hysteria that inverted companies are abandoning the U.S., post-inversion companies continues to pay taxes on their U.S. operations.

Lastly, the authors found concerns over earnings stripping – the transferring of assets to low-tax jurisdictions – is overstated and not used to the extent that critics of inversions contend.

Read it.

This is a fascinating story about how fast medical science is advancing and, most especially, about how individuals who just won’t give up can have an unexpected impact on many lives.

Kathy Shaidle is delightfully dyspeptic today.

I’ve never read To Kill a Mockingbird.

I was going to add, “because I’m Canadian, duh,” but while researching this piece, I learned that Lee’s 1960 novel had long been required reading in British schools—and when it was dumped from the curriculum two years ago, there was a massive freak-out. Hey, England, you have a bunch of your own writers, no? Ah, yes, but Mockingbird’s “otherness” was clearly part of its rather twisted allure across the pond:

The South is an incredibly complex place, but there are British-held stereotypes about its attitude to race and class that this novel could reinforce, and even add to its appeal.

Translation: “American rednecks are evil, stupid, and funny!”

Read it.

Hey, it could happen.

First thing is get the bodies out of the way, I should thing. They never tell you about that part.

PowerLine has it right.

The controversy over the Supreme Court vacancy is entirely predictable and playing out in predictable ways, but as of yet I haven’t seen anyone state the common sense of the subject directly.

I am sure when Democrats tanked Robert Bork in 1987 someone among them—probably even Biden—must have known that what goes around comes around.

Republicans have been waiting 30 years for payback for the shameful rejection of Bork; that day has arrived. Time to pay up, Dems. That’s the only sentence you really need to know. Everything else is mere rhetoric.

Read it.

Summary: The peak oil hysteria provides rich lessons for us today about learning from activists and the value of listening to our major professional institutions. Easy cynicism led people to believe outlandish forecasts, wasting valuable time and resources. Worse, we have had many such barrages by doomsters — aided by their clickbait-seeking enablers in the media — which have left us almost immune to warnings, no matter how well-founded. We can do better.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, reminds the Low Information Voter of some inconvenient truth.

Knowing how to run a business is not the same thing as knowing economics.  To assume that the two domains of knowledge and expertise are the same is an error equivalent to assuming that a successful NASCAR driver is thereby an expert automotive engineer.  Of course, it’s possible for a successful NASCAR driver to know something about automotive engineering, just as it’s possible for a successful business person to know something about economics.  But success at each of the former tasks (driving a race car and managing a business) is not the same thing as, and requires very little familiarity with, the latter domains of knowledge (automotive engineering and economics).

Unfortunately, a successful business owner will have a good gut-level appreciation of certain economic principles, such as supply and demand, that deludes him into thinking that he knows more about ‘economics’ than he really does.

Read it.

We are being told to eat local and seasonal food, either because other crops have been tranported over long distances, or because they are grown in energy-intensive greenhouses. But it wasn’t always like that. From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, urban farmers grew Mediterranean fruits and vegetables as far north as England and the Netherlands, using only renewable energy.

These crops were grown surrounded by massive “fruit walls”, which stored the heat from the sun and released it at night, creating a microclimate that could increase the temperature by more than 10°C (18°F).

Later, greenhouses built against the fruit walls further improved yields from solar energy alone. It was only at the very end of the nineteenth century that the greenhouse turned into a fully glazed and artificially heated building where heat is lost almost instantaneously — the complete opposite of the technology it evolved from.

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As a Mexican-American, I can tell you that many Mexican-Americans think that Mexican immigrants who come to the United States illegally are taking advantage—of a porous border, of the social-services safety net, of loopholes in immigration law, and of an insatiable appetite among U.S. employers for cheap and dependable labor. And they’re not wrong about that.

It is one of the most pernicious myths of Identity Politics that Hispanics, especially those of Mexican descent, only have one opinion amongst them. Trump realizes that this is not true, and knows that people of Mexican descent who are in this country legally, either as citizens or legal residents who ran the gauntlet of the current broken immigration ‘process’, don’t have a lot of use for those who crawl across the border.

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Beautifully produced by New York Review Books in a new translation, by Damion Searls, with an illuminating introduction, Anti-Education consists of five lectures Nietzsche gave at the Basel city museum in 1872. (A sixth lecture was planned, but never delivered; portions of the series were used in his book Untimely Meditations.) Presenting his critique in the form of a series of dialogues between an old philosopher and a student companion, Nietzsche argues that education (he uses the German word Bildung, a term with multiple senses but that broadly means the formation of culture and individual character) has been degraded by being subordinated to other goals. Both the German gymnasium – the secondary school that prepared students for university – and universities themselves had forfeited their true vocation, which was to “inculcate serious and unrelenting critical habits and opinions”. Instruction in independent thinking had been renounced in favour of “the ubiquitous encouragement of everyone’s so-called ‘individual personality’” – a trend Nietzsche viewed as “a mark of barbarity”. As a result, education was dominated by two tendencies, “apparently opposed but equally ruinous in effect and eventually converging in their end results. The first is the drive for the greatest possible expansion and dissemination of education; the other is the drive for the narrowing and weakening of education.” The first extends education too widely and imposes it on a population that may not want or need it, while the second expects education to surrender any claim to autonomy and submit to the imperatives of the state.

And, indeed, we appear to see that happening right before our very eyes.

Read it. And watch the video.

The world has generally viewed Genghis Khan as a barbaric conqueror whose troops raped and murdered hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people and pillaged and often destroyed villages, towns, and cities throughout Asia and Europe. However, several popular writers have recently portrayed him as an advocate of democracy, international law, and women’s rights. Morris Rossabi, Senior Research Scholar, Queens College, Columbia University, offers this illustrated lecture, which seeks to provide a balanced depiction of Genghis Khan and to explain the reasons for the myths that have developed about the man and the Mongolian people who established the largest contiguous land empire in world history.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, looks at the bottom-feeders in his own field.

(5) the idea that government-subsidized health care will lower the cost of health care;

(4) the notion that government must have monopoly control over the money supply in order to ensure sound performance of the economy;

(3) the belief that large differences among people in monetary incomes or monetary wealth reflect some market failure that ought to be ‘addressed’ by the state;

(2) the blind faith that government officials in democratic societies can be trusted to exercise power over people who economists do not trust to make choices for themselves;

(1b) the notion that welfare payments (other than EITC) subsidize employers by pushing workers’ wages lower, and

(1a) the notion that the minimum wage is, or can practically be, a boon to all low-skilled workers.

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And it’s really, really important to know that.

A new study on the Amboseli baboons of East Africa shows that there is a “sweet spot,” or optimal group size, that is largely a factor of competition for resources and the need for protection from predators.

And that’s just so totally counter-intuitive.

(Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.)

No indication of who paid for all of this, but I suspect that taxpayers footed a large part of the bill.

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Treason doth never prosper; what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

McAuliffe was referring to a scandal known as Plamegate. The backstory is complicated, but it boils down to this: During the run-up to the Iraq War, a fellow named Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in The New York Times undermining a key administration claim about Iraq’s quest for weapons of mass destruction. This made the administration most unhappy. Not long afterward, someone told columnist Robert Novak and a few other members of the media that Wilson was married to one Valerie Plame, a CIA employee.

…

When he was asked if Karl Rove “is guilty of treason,” Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) said, “Yes, I think so.” Rachel Maddow and others agreed. The word got tossed around so much Plamegate was sometimes referred to as “Treasongate.”

Which brings us to Hillary Clinton.

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The hole is designed to allow the passage of air if someone accidentally swallows it and it blocks their windpipe.

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

A hundred people every year in the United States reportedly choke to death on these pen lids.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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A fighter jet took off with a mock version of the nation’s first precision-guided atom bomb. Adapted from an older weapon, it was designed with problems like North Korea in mind: Its computer brain and four maneuverable fins let it zero in on deeply buried targets like testing tunnels and weapon sites. And its yield, the bomb’s explosive force, can be dialed up or down depending on the target, to minimize collateral damage.

As might be expected from the New York Times, the news comes with a healthy dollop of left-wing hand-wringing.

The build-it-smaller approach has set off a philosophical clash among those in Washington who think about the unthinkable.

…

But critics, including a number of former Obama administration officials, look at the same set of facts and see a very different future. The explosive innards of the revitalized weapons may not be entirely new, they argue, but the smaller yields and better targeting can make the arms more tempting to use — even to use first, rather than in retaliation.

I have no problem with First Use of Nuclear Weapons. Look what it did for Japan, not to mention the U.S.

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Applied to commodities, while essential to economic progress they’re nowhere close to first order goods in economic importance. Oil is a crucial high order input, but per Brookes again “it was the internal combustion engine that gave oil its present value, and not the other way around.” The world would be awful without oil, but it’s first order products like automobiles and planes that gave oil value in the first place.

This is of course why it’s not important that rich countries (think Japan, Switzerland, Singapore, etc.) be resource abundant. Figure commodities are easily importable at the market price, and as plentiful oil exports from economically backward countries like Venezuela, Iran and Equatorial Guinea constantly reveal, commodities in a normal world free of currency distortions would largely be exported by less developed countries to developed ones full of entrepreneurs creating the first order advances that give the prosaic (commodities) life.

Cheap resource inputs mean cheaper resulting products, and that benefits everybody. As the perennial fights over protective tariffs demonstrate, it is very easy to identify those who are harmed by low prices, while those who benefit are more obscure; that’s why lobbyists get rich and politicians convert stupid policies into law.

The beauty of cheap oil is that it will make it more likely that U.S. economic actors import it, and at the same time more and more U.S. investment will migrate toward the Mengerian first order goods that give oil and all manner of other commodities life. Back to Brookes, this is once again what he meant by an economy of the mind. Predicting a broad economic boom amid a “commodity recession” in 1981, Brookes was arguing that falling commodity prices would be brilliant for a country like the U.S. populated by the greatest minds on earth in need of cheap inputs to drive true innovation. From a consumption standpoint, it will surge thanks to cheap oil simply because our production will surge as fewer Americans extract already plentiful oil, and more focus on creating the first order goods that render oil marketable to begin with.