Read it.

Until now, the working consensus of the E.U. has been that member states yield part of their sovereignty, pool it in Brussels and through the manifold power of the states, gain back all the more sovereignty. It is now precisely this – committing to delegated power – that appears to the new Polish government to be an infringement of their national pride and Brussels as a world of backrooms in which a few unelected, instead of many elected, make the decisions. So far it has only been angry citizens who have talked like that when they saw themselves being robbed of their self-determination by being forced to adopt energy-saving lamps or through free trade agreements. Now governments are talking that way.

…

What is right-wing and what is left-wing criticism of the E.U.? Hard to say when ultimately both are concerned about the same thing: raising the will of the people above an international architecture that has become irritating and inconvenient. The hatred of an E.U. cartel that imposes either economic or cultural rules is uniting the nationalists and socialists in Europe, occasionally even allowing them join together, as in Greece, where the left-radical Syriza formed a coalition with the national-chauvinistic ANEL party.

The transnational Crust hits a speedbump.

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What we found startled us. For STEM-related majors, average earnings don’t vary much among the college categories. For example, we find no statistically significant differences in average earnings for science majors between selective schools and either midtier or less-selective schools. Likewise, there’s no significant earnings difference between engineering graduates from selective and less-selective colleges, and only a marginally significant difference between selective and midtier colleges.

What’s going on? For potential employers, the skills students learn in these fields appear to trump prestige—possibly because curriculums are relatively standardized and there’s a commonly accepted body of knowledge students must absorb. So, a student may not need to attend the best possible school to ensure a good salary after graduation. (It’s important to note that we controlled for numerous other factors that might influence postgraduation earnings, such as family income, race/ethnicity, gender, marital status, SAT score, postgraduate degree and age at graduation and more.)

In other words, in fields where questions have right and wrong answers, and can be tested that way, pretty much any college can train you properly, and you can’t bullshit your way to a good grade.

Unstated is the obvious corollary: In fields where ‘right’ is a matter of opinion, it’s important how high the rank is of the Mandarin whose opinion you are successfully parroting.

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The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change UN IPCC features and endorses decadal global climate forecasting products. Those in turn feed into numerous downscaled regional climate forecasts. In published representations of forecast skills to date, all within this collective appear to include the poorly disclosed practice of annual boundary condition re-initializations. At one time, such initializations were isolated to obscure attempts to improve forecasts of seasonal climates (lead time 4 months). Now the initializations have become institutionalized, and they direct multi decadal predictions throughout the field of global and regional climate forecasting. The results would be more transparent to peers and the public if the true decadal history matching skills of the models (without initializations) were highlighted.

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No, not the car.

How long will this video stay up before British Leyland files a DMCA takedown for trademark infringement?

Start your timers….

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A Voice of the Crust actually comes out and says what they all believe.

Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education.

A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education’s narrow band of values.

With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its disposal, education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are relegated to the bottom streams at the age of seven or before.

The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself.

Read it.

President Obama seems to believe in nothing more than he does the defense of Islam. He specializes in pronouncements on what is truly Islamic and what is not. Such pronouncements are always intended to preserve the good name of Islam. Al Qaeda, of course, not Islamic. The Islamic State, not Islamic.

San Bernardino murderers Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, not Islamic.

Who are you going to believe, Obama or your lyin’ eyes?

Really … if Obama actually were a secret Muslim, what would he be doing differently? I can’t think of anything.

Read it.

They used to be called Masters.

I recommend the title that some heads of colleges at Oxford and Cambridge have, and which probably comes under the rubric of ‘more true than you know’: Warden.

Jerry Pournelle runs down the list.

A lot of Americans hate their government. Perhaps that’s too strong a word, but their experiences with government tend to expose them to arrogant incompetence for which their Civil Masters, oops Servants give themselves bonuses when their performance warrants discipline—look at the VA as a fine example—and they are afraid to stand out in a crowd lest they draw the attention of government. Streets aren’t paved, laws aren’t enforced equally, water pipes burst, drinking water has lead in it in Flint, and generally things don’t work so good; while all around us is the Internet of Things, marvels and miracles, yet somehow government gets bigger, pays itself more, and presents us with arrogant incompetence.

Trump has fewer – not many fewer but fewer – government credentials than Obama had when he started toward the Presidency. He was briefly in the Illinois legislature, hardly long enough to learn that job, before he became a Senator, and he hadn’t been there long before he was the candidate of hope and change, and he didn’t need to tell people how he was going to do it. Trump has less government experience; but he has built buildings and golf courses, and he has done things; he hasn’t been a community organizer or an unpublished law professor whose students don’t remember him; but he had made a lot of money, not from government; and he is not beholden to contributors or anyone else. His appeal is that he say he will do things, and although he is not a great public speaker, he has done things he is proud of. He knows how to choose people to get them done; or so far he has.

And that’s as fine a precis of Trump’s attraction as I’ve seen anywhere.

Read it.

In late 2015 Singapore arrested 27 Bangladeshi Moslem construction workers and charged them with planning terrorist acts outside of Singapore. Most (26) of them were deported back to their home country while one as charged with trying to leave the country illegally (and engage in terrorist acts). Singapore can afford to just send these wannabe Islamic terrorists home (to face further investigation and possible prosecution) because it is one of the few industrialized nations to have never experienced an incident of Islamic terrorist violence.

Starting in the 1980s Singapore spent an increasing amount of resources on dealing with the terrorist threat. This increased after 2001 and continues as Islamic terrorist groups like al Qaeda and ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) continue to mention Singapore as a target for attacks. There are several interesting reasons why these Islamic terror groups have never been able to touch Singapore.

Read it.

Which, of course, doesn’t mean that it won’t be on the test.

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The country’s law enforcement has teamed up with a raptor training company named Guard From Above to see if birds of prey can be used to safely intercept quadcopters.

In the video demonstration above, an eagle is seen easily plucking what looks like a DJI Phantom out of the air. However, it’s not clear how dangerous this is for the bird. Raptors’ talons are incredibly sharp and their grip is strong enough to crush bone, but that doesn’t meant they’re indestructible and carbon fiber props spinning at full speed can easily cut human flesh. In the video, one of the handlers says that the scales on the eagle’s legs and feet keeps them safe, but also mentions the possibility of creating some sort of extra protection for them.

Still, given the amount of animals who seem to instinctively want to take down drones (the list includes kangaroos, gorillas, geese, and dogs), perhaps the eagles will get some animal backup soon.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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The lecture given by Friedrich von Hayek upon the occasion of his winning the Nobel Prize in Economics.

It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences – an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the “scientistic” attitude – an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, “is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.”1 I want today to begin by explaining how some of the gravest errors of recent economic policy are a direct consequence of this scientistic error.

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All it takes is that little blue pill … isn’t science wonderful?

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Remembering Roger Gower, an elephant hero who died for his cause.

Ponder the concept of ‘elephant hero’.

‘White man come to my continent, keep us from killing animals we have always killed, keep us from feeding our families. White man can kiss my ass.’

Black Lives Matter, but I guess elephants are more important.

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This is actually a pretty good idea. Let’s hope it gets some attention.

They already do that for physicians, I believe.

Read it.

Who says Donald Trump doesn’t like Hispanics?

Carson-based Cali-Fame headwear company, is staffed largely by immigrants from Latin America.

At least he’s giving them jobs, which is more than they are getting from Hillary Clinton or Berni Sanders (or Barack Obama, for that matter).

Brian Kennedy, the company’s president, said that when the order asked his business to make the hats, he addressed his workers.

“I said to them, ‘We’re not political. We’re here to work’,” said Mr Kennedy “And I haven’t gotten any negative comments.”

And THAT is what will Make America Great Again — immigrants who are here to work. I’ve seen no evidence that Trump has anything against those people; nor will you, amidst all the whining about what people heard him say in their imaginations.

Lileks limns the travails of our times.

As problems go, this is small. As small problems go, though, this is big. Step one: You’re watching something on Netflix, and the picture pauses every 37 seconds, displaying a circle that seems to represent the passage of time. Is this an arty French movie that addresses the omnipresent sense of mortality by superimposing a clock over the lives of its characters? No, it’s a “Transformers” movie. The circle means your wireless connection is slow. Well, let’s go to the Internet provider’s HELP page. You learn that certain things can block Wi-Fi, including “walls, pipes, paint, air and the lingering aroma of last night’s fish dinner.” Hey! You had cod. Open a window. Doesn’t help.

Freeberg shares his insight.

These are the guys putting Jeb Bush over Donald Trump, because, manners. Oh they say things about Trump being a showboat and a jerk, and they’re completely right. Where they’re wrong, is in thinking that we vote for a President to give us our manners. Silly.

In truth, we’ve been voting for a President to figure out what excuses should be used to suck money away from the industries that give us the things we really need, and where else that money should be diverted among the professions that make things nobody wanted. Republicans and democrats have both been doing it. And so the professions that give us the things we really need, while allowed to stagger on in the background while the loud people make a lot of noise, have been dwindling.

…

Companies that bake your bread, build the bottles for your water, build the cardboard boxes for your Amazon shipments, clean the poop out of your sewer lines. Oh yeah, and put together your “transportation equipment.” Passenger jets. That’s up at the top of the U.S. exports right now, the stuff the other countries want to buy…*choose* to buy. You know what else is on that list? Software is on there…but way down. Probably doesn’t include anything I’ve written, as of yet…

Nothing liberals build, is on that list. Psychological help isn’t on it. Crazy new rules about guns, written by people who’ve sworn not to ever own any guns — those aren’t on the exports list. Come to think of it, I don’t see anybody clamoring for those things inland, either. They’re such great ideas they have to be forced.

Read it.

How has the Internet upended commerce? Here’s a good structural analysis.

The value chain for any given consumer market is divided into three parts: suppliers, distributors, and consumers/users. The best way to make outsize profits in any of these markets is to either gain a horizontal monopoly in one of the three parts or to integrate two of the parts such that you have a competitive advantage in delivering a vertical solution. In the pre-Internet era the latter depended on controlling distribution.

…

The fundamental disruption of the Internet has been to turn this dynamic on its head. First, the Internet has made distribution (of digital goods) free, neutralizing the advantage that pre-Internet distributors leveraged to integrate with suppliers. Secondly, the Internet has made transaction costs zero, making it viable for a distributor to integrate forward with end users/consumers at scale.

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Most Americans think that teaching is a natural talent, not the product of training, and that smart people are the ones with the talent. So some policy makers have concluded that the way to improve schooling is to lure top-scoring graduates into teaching (as Japan does) instead of scraping the bottom of the academic barrel (as America supposedly does). Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, invoked this idea in a speech last year.

But the problem in American education is not dumb teachers. The problem is dumb teacher training.

…

Teachers are smart enough, but you need more than smarts to teach well. You need to know your subject and you need to know how to help children learn it. That’s where research on American teachers raises concerns.

Rezd it.

I guess ‘leftier than thou’ is harder than it looks. Supporters of the crook always have problems with supporters of the fool; ask Nixon.

Pass the popcorn.

Read it.

Even though there are a few minorities shown, the ad leaves the impression of being very white. And Simon and Garfunkel is very white music.

Matthew Yglesias agrees, he complains that the ad is too white.

Well, really, there aren’t many people more white than Bernie. AlGore, maybe.

Read it.

Perhaps Megyn Kelly ought to run for President. In a country where Obama gets two terms and Trump leads in the polls, how hard could it be?

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It appears based on London but, really, it could apply to every city with a river going through it.

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When you see a superhero or a supervillain heading deep into their super-high-tech super-secret lair, do you ever wonder how the heck they keep that secret?

Did they build this massive thing on their own? Did they get their architecture, engineering, and interior design degrees while they went through that training/backstory montage? No, of course not. They had henchpeople build it for them, outsourcing the complicated stuff to people who knew more about constructing an island fortress than they do. There’s only one problem with that plan. Letting more people in on a secret virtually ensures that it won’t stay secret for long.

Unless you’re the government, of course, and can put people in jail for talking. And even then you might wind up with a Hillary Clinton.

In order to figure out the average length of time before someone blows a conspiracy’s cover, Grimes looked at three well-documented conspiracies. One, the reprehensible Tuskegee syphilis experiment lasted for a long time, nearly 25 years. The other two, the FBI forensics scandal and the NSA’s PRISM program took less time to come to light. (Each was uncovered in about six years.)

NOTE: THESE ARE ALL GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACIES.

Read it.

If you live in Portland, your lights may now be partly powered by your drinking water. An ingenious new system captures energy as water flows through the city’s pipes, creating hydropower without the negative environmental effects of something like a dam.

Small turbines in the pipes spin in the flowing water, and send that energy into a generator.

This is more accurately an ‘energy recovery system’ than a power generation system, since the move of the the water is the result of it being under pressure from municipal pumps, who I suspect use electricity.

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Why do people have so much trouble throwing things out? Turns out, the answer lies in people’s heads. Running through Kondo’s best advice and most of her book is the argument about the anxiety-induced limits of human decision-making. Seeing as an entire branch of economics studies exactly that, it’s no wonder that economists have a particular interest in her advice. Financial Times columnist Tim Harford agrees that Kondo’s methods are not only intuitive, but compelling to economists. Harford says that the clutter that piles up in apartments is a product of people’s cognitive blunders.

In my reading and practice of the eponymous “KonMari Method,” I found that Kondo does implictly touch on some important behavioral economics concepts and cognitive biases that prevent us from being tidy. She takes strong stances against these irrational mental habits that govern us. In other words, I think the reason Kondo-mania continues is because she has actually hit upon some good solutions to deal with these pervasive mental fallacies.

Freeberg does us a service.

As Trump haters and Palin haters begin their eighth straight day of lecturing the rest of us on the pointlessness of blind rage, while demonstrating how much of it they have…

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A case can be made that divisive hot-button issues like inequality and immigration ultimately derive from housing dysfunction. Kevin Erdmann eloquently tells the tale. Matt Rognlie has famously argued that the increase in capital’s share of income, often blamed for inequality, is due largely to housing, once depreciation is taken into account. All of this reinforces the thesis of people like Ryan Avent, Edward Glaeser, and Matt Yglesias who have argued for years that housing supply constraints are to blame for high rents in powerhouse cities, and may constitute an important drag on productivity growth and a cause of macroeconomic stagnation. (See also Paul Krugman, quite recently.) Several of these writers argue that cities should eliminate restrictive zoning and other regulatory barriers to development, then let the free-market create housing supply. In a competitive marketplace, high prices are supposed to be their own cure. Zoning restrictions, urban permitting, and the de facto capacity of existing residents to veto new development are barriers to entry that prevent the magic of competition from taking hold and solving the problem.

My view is that the “market urbanist” diagnosis of the problem is more persuasive than its prescription for addressing it. As a positive matter, they just won’t win the political fights they propose. On normative grounds, I’m not sure that they should. The market urbanists present themselves as capitalist deregulators but I think they can be described with equal accuracy as radical redistributionists. The customary property rights surrounding homeownership in many cities and suburbs include much more than the use of a square of earth and whatever is built on it. Existing homeowners bought into particular neighborhoods in large part because of their “character”, which includes nice-sounding things like walkability or “charm”, as well as not-so-nice-sounding things like access to exclusionary education. Newer residents have bought and paid for those amenities, while older residents may feel they have earned them by helping to create them. Economists describe houses as a form of capital that provides a stream of services, rather than a cash flow, to owner-occupants. We should also describe the arrangement of neighborhoods as a form of capital that provides services people value. Property owners have disproportionate use of, and, informally, enjoy substantial control rights over this “neighborhood capital”, and these benefits have been capitalized into residential real-estate prices. (Location, location, location!) “Zoning reform” is an anodyne way to describe an expropriation of those customary rights. It amounts to diminishing residents’ ability to preserve or control the evolution of their neighborhoods, in order to challenge the exclusivity on which the value of existing neighborhood amenities may be based.

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As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, ten years ago today, Al Gore said we had only a decade left to save the planet from global warming. But Earth and humanity has been doing just fine since then.

People that know money over at Investor’s Business Daily, said that “We Know Al Gore’s Been Running A Global Warming Racket” and listed five ways they ascertain this, I’m going to list those, embellish them, and add a few of my own.

Read it.

Denmark has defended a plan to remove asylum seekers’ cash and jewellery from them, saying it puts refugees on an “equal” footing with other Danes.

Amid media scrutiny and UN condemnation of a number of migration-related reforms, the Danish government is on the brink of passing a law to seize cash and items worth more than about £1,000 from refugees, according to The Local.

Yet ruling right-wing party Venstre and anti-immigration coalition partners the Danish People’s Party (DPP) have said claims the measure is a violation of international commitments and human rights shows the law has been “grossly misunderstood.”

Anders Vistisen, an MEP from the DDP, said Danish citizens who suddenly become unemployed are also expected to sell their most valuable possessions to receive state support.

“The new law is about creating equality between migrants and Danes, so that everyone under the welfare system has the same possibility to receive public benefits,” he told The Local.

Welcome to socialism, guys. Yes, you get benefits, but the downside is that the government is entitled to all you have.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist and prominent libertarian academic, takes a stand.

I would much prefer a Pres. Sanders or a Pres. O’Malley than Trump. (I’m less certain about a Pres. H. Clinton, but I think that I’d even prefer a Pres. H. Clinton to a Pres. Trump.) My reasons are two:

(1) As one sensible commenter (I forget who) said, with any of the three Democrats we pretty much know what we’ll get; with Trump, there is no such knowledge. And while what we’ll get with any of the three Democrats will indeed be bad, I can imagine even worse coming from someone such as Trump.

(2) More importantly, whatever policies are implemented by a Pres. Sanders, a Pres. O’Malley, or a Pres. H. Clinton will be (correctly) understood by most people today, and by history, to be anti-free-market policies, yet whatever policies are implemented by a Pres. Trump will be (incorrectly) understood today, and by history, to be “free-market” policies.

He’s got a point. Trump has been all over the map on a number of significant issues, so far as I have been paying attention, which admittedly isn’t much.

Read it.

Political pundits and historians always like to analogize the current election cycle to a past election cycle, though I think a case can be made that each cycle is unique and non-repeatable. On the surface, it might look like we might be heading for a repeat of 1912, when a Republican split led to the independent candidacy of Teddy Roosevelt and handed the White House to Woodrow Wilson. That, I am sure most sensible people will agree, was a blunder.

Was it ever. That was the start of the conversion of the historical Democrat Party into Amerca’s own brand of fascism, which flowered with Franklin D. Roosevelt and whose fruit have been marching through our institutions and corrupting them ever since.

But I wonder whether we might have four major candidates in the event of a Trump-Sanders or Trump-Clinton matchup—Bloomberg plus an “independent” Republican candidate (I’d guess it might be Romney)? Then the election we’d most resemble was 1824, when there were four major candidates running. That election was settled in the House of Representatives in favor of John Quincy Adams, even though Andrew Jackson won the most popular votes. One could imagine this happening again, with Trump, Clinton, or Bloomberg getting the most votes, but a Republican dominated House picking the “independent” Republican candidate. (Let’s hope to God it isn’t Jeb Bush.) One can imagine today’s Jacksonian candidate (Mr. T) being just as outraged as Jackson was at such an outcome. If you think things were bitter after the messy outcome of the 2000 election between Bush and Gore, just wait.

No matter how bad, the results would be better for America than Barack Obama, who has surpassed Jimmuh Carter as the Worst President Ever.

Cast your mind back to Bloomberg for a moment. Why did he run for mayor of New York as a Republican, even though he’s a much better fit in the Democratic Party? Or for that matter, if he wants to be president, why didn’t he run as a Democrat this year? (He dumped his Republican affiliation in New York as fast as he could, remember.) The obvious answer is that he had no opening in the Democratic Party in New York, where the party hierarchy operates much like a closed-shop union. And New York City Republicans have a bare cupboard.

Likewise, why is Donald Trump running as a Republican, after a lifetime of mostly liberal positions, and his occasional declarations that he leans toward Democrats? I still haven’t heard Trump give an account of why, suddenly, he’s changed his mind on so many positions. Like Bloomberg, it seems to be opportunism rather than conviction; he couldn’t win the Democratic nomination these days, but the open and scattered Republican field gives him an opening to win with a mere plurality of primary votes.

On the other hand, few traditions in American politics are of longer standing than opportunism.

Read it.

This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.

Steve Sailer points out some Inconvenient Truth.

A reader writes:

If Bernie Sanders didn’t exist, he’d be the politician Chris Pine works for in a made-up Cameron Crowe movie about idealism and soundtracked by Boomer rock

That movie, if it existed, would get denounced by lefty internet for being too white.

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A quick Google check of the news finds that the more prominent peak oilers – Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrère, Kenneth Deffeyes, Daniel Goodstein – are maintaining a decorous silence as the price of crude sinks below $28 per barrel. After all, the International Energy Agency just warned that the world is “drowning” in oil. So no Jeremiads about the impending end of an oil-starved industrial civilization are appearing in the media. Nor, sadly, do many journalists seem interested in probing why the peakists’ widely touted dire forecasts have, once again, proven wrong.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, points out an Inconvenient Truth.

My late, great colleague Gordon Tullock famously pointed out the many possibilities to “do well while doing good.”  (See chapter 6 in this collection edited by my colleague Dan Klein.)  However, as I note in my most recent column in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, too many of my fellow economists, while perhaps superficially intent on doing good, are not so intent that they are willing to risk any of their own money on such efforts.  They wish to do good only by spending mostly other people’s money and by stripping away mostly other people’s freedom and options.  This consistent and chronic refusal of policy advocates to put their own money where their mouth’s are is as sure a sign as is humanly possible that these do-gooders are too reckless to take seriously.

Nick Gillespie, of tReason Magazine, is delightfully dyspeptic today.

While most fans merely suffered The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith, those movies represent a piss take on what happened to baby boomers who cut their teeth protesting Vietnam and ended up bombing hell out of the world during the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

Read it.

When one reads enough Chinese naval literature, diagrams of multi-axial cruise missile saturation attacks against aircraft carrier groups may begin to seem normal. However, one particular graphic from the October 2015 issue (p. 32) of the naval journal Naval & Merchant Ships [????] stands out as both unusual and singularly disturbing. It purports to map the impact of a Chinese intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) strike by twenty nuclear-armed rockets against the United States.

Targets include the biggest cities on the East and West Coasts, as well as in the Midwest, as one would expect. Giant radiation plumes cover much of the country and the estimate in the caption holds that the strike “would yield perhaps 50 million people killed” [????5000 ???]. The map below that graphic on the same page illustrates the optimal aim point for a hit on New York City with a “blast wave” [???] that vaporizes all of Manhattan and well beyond.

That makes the North Korean “threat” look fairly insignificant by comparison, doesn’t it? But what’s really disturbing is that the scenario described above envisions a strike by China’s largely antiquated DF-5 first generation ICBM. In other words, the illustration is perhaps a decade or more out of date. As China has deployed first the road-mobile DF-31, then DF-31A and now JL-2 (a submarine-launched nuclear weapon), China’s nuclear strategy has moved from “assured retaliation” to what one may term “completely assured retaliation.”

Lion of the Blogosphere is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

The Eagles video made me wonder. Today, do any white proles skip college, form a band, and become famous musicians? Or was that just a 70s thing?

I think it all happens except for the ‘become famous musicians’ part — that doesn’t work any more if you’re working-class white.

Read it.

The next time you read of doom-and-gloom about how there are all these poor starving people in the world, remember that people are complaining that we’re growing too much food.

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If Debbie Wasserman Schultz wanted to “maximize the opportunity for voters to see our candidates” she failed. But she probably didn’t; she probably helped schedule the debates on purpose on nights that TV audiences would be small so as not to give too much exposure to Hillary Clinton’s rivals. And she’s probably lying about it now.

Whoa. When you’ve lost Slate magazine, you are one dead Democrat.

Read it.

Ideological purity always does that to a cynical and corrupt ruling class. The nomenklatura in the Soviet Union had similar worries.

Much like any train wreck, of course, those not involved can appreciate the entertaining moments.

Pass the popcorn.

Read it.

In 2008, Ed Boland, a well-off New Yorker who had spent 20 years as an executive at a nonprofit, had a midlife epiphany: He should leave his white-glove world, the galas at the Waldorf and drinks at the Yale Club, and go work with the city’s neediest children.

“The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School” (Grand Central Publishing) is Boland’s memoir of his brief, harrowing tenure as a public-schoolteacher, and it’s riveting.

Only if you like the horror story that is life in the modern government school.

Government schools didn’t used to be this bad. Identify what has changed, and you’ll know why they’re this bad now. Bite the bullet and vote against the sort of people who are responsible for this degeneration.

Eric S Raymond gives the best explanation of Natural Right that I’ve ever seen.

In modern terms, we can think of “natural rights” as the political and social rules which are required to sustain “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, and derive them not from religion but from game-theoretic analysis of the behavior of competing agents in a political system.

The theorists of English Republicanism in the century and a half before the Declaration of Independence did not have the language of economics or game theory, but they developed a pretty firm grasp on the theory of natural rights by studying the historical failure modes of various political systems.

The English Republican defenses of (for example) the right to free speech were very simple: if these are not the rules of your polity, your polity will come to a bad end in tyranny and chaos and great suffering. In modern terms, they were seeking stable cooperative equilibria under the recognition that most possible sets of political rules do not yield it.