Read it.

To identify the cities most likely to boom over the next 10 years, we took the 53 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the country (those with populations exceeding 1 million) and ranked them based on eight metrics indicative of past, present and future vitality. We factored in, equally, the percentage of children in the population, the birth rate, net domestic migration, the percentage of the population aged 25-44 with a bachelor’s degree, income growth, the unemployment rate, and population growth.

…

The most vital parts of urban America can be encapsulated largely in one five-letter word: Texas. All four of Texas’ major metro areas made our top 10. Austin, Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth and San Antonio are very different places, but they all have enjoyed double-digit job growth from 2010 through 2014, well above the national average of 8.1%. They also all have posted income growth well above the national average.

But the biggest divergence from the pack may be demographics. The Texas cities have become major people magnets, with huge growth in their populations of young, educated millennials and households with children. The clear star of the show is No. 1-ranked Austin, which has become the nation’s superlative economy over the past decade.

Read it.

The woman, in her 60s, was attacked by the animal at Three Mile Creek in Wyndham, 2,000 miles north of Perth, on Wednesday afternoon, Western Australia’s County Health service told AFP news agency.

…

Eyewitness Paul Cavanagh, said his nephew and son-in-law, who were near the creek at the time, took the woman to hospital after noticing she was missing her arm just above the elbow.

Yeah, it was kinda hard to miss.

Michael Snowball, a cafe owner who witnessed the incident told AFP the woman was beside the creek when the crocodile “came out of the water and grabbed her and did a death roll and took her arm off near the elbow.”

Let that be a lesson to us all.

A lawyer looks at the Powerball.

As Wired magazine lays out here, the maximum number is what you’d get if you took the payout over 30 years. You’re not dumb enough to do that, so you’d take it in cash, giving you just $868 million. Wait, who’s that at the door? Most likely an IRS agent, dressed just like the one also waiting at the back door, so don’t bother trying that. That big bag slung under a helicopter is to take away about 40% of your winnings. The less-well-dressed agents behind them, with a smaller bag under a smaller helicopter, are there to take your state’s cut, unless you had the good sense to move to a state with no income tax before you won the lottery. But you didn’t. Now you’re down to $394 million, barely enough to get you a decent condo in the Bay Area, and according to Wired this brings your expected return on a $2 ticket down below $2. But the more people who play, the more likely it is that the jackpot will be split anyway, and then it just gets worse.

John C. Wright reacts to VoxDay’s Musings on Immigration (see previous post).

We Americans have never lived in, and can hardly imagine, living in a nation that is not dedicated to an ideal.

We have no idea what it is like to live in a land that stands for nothing, means nothing, and has no future. Small wonder Science Fiction is dominated by the Americans and, to a lesser extent, by the Japanese. In Britain, science fiction has long grown pale on the tall shadow of Michael Moorcock and his New Wave, that is, socially relevant, bitter, and unappealing futurism. The Michael Palin movie BRAZIL is of this same spirit, if not of the same camp.

The grim and boring Philip Pullman trilogy His Dark Materials has the same social message, even though it is fantasy, not science fiction: since there is no God, hope is for chumps, therefore stay in school and be kind to people in small things.

In Europe, there are no great things to do or to defend.

That strikes me as right on target.

Scott Johnson points out the holes.

President Obama gave his last State of the Union Address last night. The White House has posted the text here and video here. I’ve also embedded the video below.

Obama’s Iranian friends provided their own commentary in advance of the speech, seizing two Navy riverine ships and detaining 10 sailors (nine men and one woman). The mullahs were expressing their complete and utter contempt for Obama. Obama did things his way, omitting to mention the sailors (or the other Americans held by Iran) in his speech. He looked the other way.

Obama’s SOTU was just another example from the last seven years of preferring to living in a fantasy world of his own devising rather than addressing real problems in a practical way.

Steve Sailer looks at Barry’s last SOTU.

Despite the origin of the phrase among conspiracy-loving Byzantines, Lofgren warns enthusiasts that the American deep state is more mundane:

Those who seek a grand conspiracy theory…will be disappointed. My analysis of the Deep State is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal. I use the term to mean a hybrid association of key elements of government and part of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with only limited reference to the consent of the governed as normally expressed through elections.

The American deep state is less Oliver Stone’s JFK than The Office. Lofgren remarks upon “the sheer weight of its boring ordinariness once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the ten thousandth time.” It’s an emergent phenomenon of a quasi-empire run out of a wealthy and not exceptionally at-risk republic.

Eric S Raymond has an interesting take.

I’m bringing this up now because I want to put a stake in the ground. I have a personal theory about why Europo-American dueling largely (though not entirely) died out between 1850 and 1900 that I think is at least as well justified as the conventional account, and I want to put it on record.

Sarah Hoyt opines.

If you want people to believe the most outrageous things, you have to tell them something that is true and that they know is true.  This is why the crazier philosophies that sell themselves to humans sell themselves by telling them something that the people know is true.

Communists used to be really good at this. They told people what everyone knew to be true.  The Noblemen had it better.  And they’d (by and large) had done nothing to deserve it.  Or they told them what people wanted to be true: your failure is not your fault, the rich are holding you down.  Or a million other such things.  And then on top of that they slid the nutcakes: because you can’t trust any other human you can trust the government (which is, of course, composed of angels.)  Or if you make the state big enough, it will eventually disappear.  (Wait, what?) Or even if you just take other people’s things, you’ll be happy (because no one can take them from you, right?)  And of course, a lot of other crazy cakes stuff, including but not limited to that value is created by labor and that things are worth the labor put into them.

No one would believe any of those things undiluted.  But they believe them when they’re packaged among homey truths that everyone knows to be true.

Read it.

Watching New York drown is almost a religious experience.

Unfortunately, you can’t enter negative numbers to model how the next Ice Age will work. Pity.

Eric S. Raymond lays it out for you.

I have been studying these questions for years as part of my self-training. I learned some of the basics of counter-terrorism theory from a former SpecOps officer, and more from my Kung Fu instructor whose day job is as a criminal forensics and counter-terrorism specialist consulting to law enforcement. I’ve also read up on the subject, and thought carefully about what I’ve read.

The following is a primer on how people whose job it is to prevent and mitigate terrorist activity and spree killings think about it.

Read it.

In allying with Obama, tech is moving in the opposite direction to much of the business community, particularly small business, which Gallup finds a hotbed of anti-Obama sentiment. Other traditional industries like oil and gas have also turned overwhelmingly to the right, as Obama has targeted them for their role in climate change. In 1990, energy firms gave out almost as much to Democrats as Republicans; in 2014 they gave over three times as much to the GOP.

In contrast, the oligarchs, as they have become ever richer, are clearly moving leftwards. In 2000, the communications and electronics sector was basically even in its donations; by 2012, it was better than two to one Democratic. Microsoft, Apple and Google – not to mention entertainment companies – all overwhelmingly lean to the Democrats with their donations.

…

One critical PR advantage the tech firms enjoy is that most, with a notable exception of Amazon, don’t mistreat blue-collar workers, or unions, since they have few of either. This gets them a free pass from social-justice warriors unavailable to traditional firms. Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford mostly exploited workers in Pittsburgh or Detroit, and paid a price; the exploitation of the oligarchs takes place far away in Chengdu, Guangzhou or India.

…

What are ‘tech liberals’? Ferenstein provides a picture of an unconscious elitism that runs through their worldview. Although their industry is overwhelmingly based in the San Francisco Peninsula’s suburban sprawl, the internet oligarchs, he claims, want ‘everyone’ to move to the urban centre, something not remotely practical for most middle- and working-class families. They also advocate for strict environmental laws and ever higher energy prices, which don’t threaten their lifestyles, but are often devastating to those below them.

…

The new political configuration works in classic medieval fashion, with the rich providing the necessities for the poor, without providing them opportunity for upward mobility or the chance, God forbid, to buy a house in the outer suburbs. With the fading of California’s once powerful industrial economy – Los Angeles has lost much of its manufacturing base over the past decade – its working classes now must be mollified by symbolic measures, such as energy rebates, subsidised housing and the ever illusive chimera of ‘green jobs’.

This ‘upstairs-downstairs’ California coalition could presage the country’s political future. Perhaps it’s best to think of it as a form of high-tech feudalism, in which the upper classes run the show, but bestow goodies on the struggling masses. This alliance will allow the present tech oligarchs to thrive without facing a populist challenge that could interfere with their profits and expansion into other markets.

Read it.

Are you a visual learner who writes notes in a rainbow of different colors, or do you have to read something aloud before it will sink it? Chances are, you’ve been asked a similar question at some point in your life, and believe the concept of different “learning styles” is perfectly valid. But, as Quartz reported in December, we all learn in fundamentally similar ways. And, as New York magazine reports, the idea that students learn differently depending on their personal preference for visual, auditory or kinesthetic cues is just a myth.

In fact, it’s considered a “neuromyth,” which, as Paul Howard-Jones, professor of neuroscience and education at Bristol University, writes in a 2014 paper on the subject, is characterized by a misunderstanding, misreading, or misquoting of scientifically established facts.

Other examples of neuromyths include that we only use 10% of our brain, and that drinking less than six to eight glasses of water a day will cause the brain to shrink.

Taki is not afraid to poke into some inconvenient truth.

Americans are in general unaware of the catastrophic EU migrant policies. The reason for this is pseudo-reporting by The New York Times and other lefty media who claim dire demographic implosion in Western Europe unless African and Middle Eastern swarms are allowed in. Actually this is the biggest con since those ghastly wind turbines made some people billionaires while turning beautiful regions into horror-movie sets. Afghan, Middle Eastern, and African migrants have already managed to overwhelm Europe’s fragile economies and—in the case of Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany—have done away with national cultures. (Christmas was the first casualty, as celebrating it was seen as insensitive to other creeds.)

And it gets better. Although the assailants in Cologne and Hamburg were young and Arabic-looking and spoke neither German nor English, media reports failed to stress the fact, not wanting to focus attention on the million-plus arrivals. The government was content to play along. The reason for the attacks was a simple one: Muslim men and their culture look down on women and, unless they are covered up like zombies, treat them as sexual objects. After groping the women, insulting them, and calling them whores, these brave males also stole their mobile telephones and wallets. Then they proceeded to throw firecrackers into the crowds celebrating New Year’s Eve. Do you now get, dear readers, why Donald Trump would be a shoo-in?

Read it.

Why is this such a surprise? It’s about the only well-paying job these days that only requires elementary literacy and numeracy.

Mark Steyn looks at Trump in the land of snows.

The media like to play up the anti-Trump demonstrations, but even this works to his benefit, since they come almost exclusively from the leaden clichés of college-debt social justice. For a six-year bachelor’s degree in orientation studies, you’d think these fellows could work up something other than chants that were stale back when Pete Seeger was wondering where all the flowers went. A couple of straggle-bearded hipster dweebs wandered around waving “NO BORDER” signs, which would be a tougher sell in, say, downtown Cologne. A bossy girl of vaguely sapphic mien led us all in a “Black Lives Matter! Black Lives Matter!” chant, which is pretty funny on a street that’s 99.99999999999 per cent white. If black lives matter that much, you’d think they could have bussed one in. As enthusiasm faltered, she segued deftly into “Don’t give in to racist fear! Immigrants are welcome here!” I must say, as an immigrant myself, I’ve never found Vermont that welcoming, but perhaps I’m insufficiently exotic for their tastes.

…

That’s the point. I think it would help if every member of the pundit class had to attend a Trump rally before cranking out the usual shtick about how he’s tapping into what Jeb called “angst and anger”. Yes, Trump supporters are indignant (and right to be) about the bipartisan cartel’s erasure of the southern border and their preference for unskilled Third World labor over their own citizenry, but “anger” is not the defining quality of a Trump night out. The candidate is clearly having the time of his life, and that’s infectious, which is why his supporters are having a good time, too. Had Mitt campaigned like this, he’d be president. But he had no ability to connect with voters. Nor does Jeb (“I’ve been endorsed by another 27 has-beens”) Bush.

Read it.

Douglas Walker, a math whiz who loved to quote Shakespeare, made a fortune by building a trailblazing software firm in Seattle, then retired early and pursued a passion for mountain climbing.

On the final day of 2015, the 65-year-old defied high winds to scale Granite Mountain, one of his favorite climbs in the Cascades of Washington state. He died in an avalanche.

David Cole is delightfully dyspeptic today.

To me, the most striking image from 2015 was that of pro-censorship black students at Yale carrying signs and banners proclaiming “We are loved.” It was surreal—black students demanding firings and expulsions for “racist” speech, steamrolling weak and terrified administrators, marching and chanting and bringing campus life to a halt with the message “We are loved.” Those poor cretins, lacking the self-awareness to know that only people who are completely insecure about actually being loved would feel compelled to parade around proclaiming that they are, have now come to think of censorship as a surrogate mother or father, something to help them feel wanted, a way to perhaps compensate for absentee or abusive parents. Just as communism and socialism gave moochers “dignity,” censorship is being used to give positive self-esteem to losers who feel unloved.

Read it.

However hip and cool San Francisco, Manhattan, Boston or coastal California may seem, they are not where families are moving.

Read it.

Whenever you hear Aggregation Fallacy vaporings about ‘The top X% own Y% of the national income/national wealth/available toys’, remember that the ‘X%’ is a constantly changing group, and it typically changes quite rapidly.

‘Progressive’ scaremongering about ‘economic inequality’ depends on specious Aggregation Fallacy scams to fool people who aren’t paying attention that we have a European-style economic class system where a limited number of families are surpassingly rich from generation unto generation, grinding the faces of the poor etc. Do not be fooled.

Steve Sailer looks at analysis.

In recent years, the highbrow spooks at the government’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, an agency set up in 2006 in shame over the Iraq WMD call, have funded four years of Tetlock’s Good Judgment Project to find the best amateur foreign-policy forecasters. In a development reminiscent of the followers of statistical maven Bill James taking over baseball general managers’ offices, it turns out that the best volunteers are consistently better than the government’s experts, even though the professionals have access to confidential information.

Read it.

Raffi Melkonian asks – as relayed by my colleague Tyler Cowen – “When can median income consumers afford the very best?” Tyler offers a list of some of the items in the modern, market-oriented world that are as high-quality as such items get and yet are easily affordable to ordinary people. This list includes iPhones, books, and rutabagas. Indeed, this list includes nearly all foods for use in preparing home snacks and meals. I doubt very much that Bill Gates and Larry Ellison munch at home on the foods such as carrots, blueberries, peanuts, and scrambled eggs that an ordinary American cannot easily afford to enjoy at home.

And even ‘poor’ people these days can have things that not the richest person in the world could have had even within my lifetime.

A slightly different list is one drawn up in response to this question: When can median-income consumers afford products that, while not as high-quality as those versions that are bought by the super-rich, are nevertheless virtually indistinguishable – because they are quite close in quality – to the naked eye from those versions bought by the super-rich? On this list would be most clothing. For example, an ordinary American man can today afford a suit that, while it’s neither tailor-made nor of a fabric as fine as are suits that I suspect are worn by most billionaires, is nevertheless close enough in fit and fabric quality to be indistinguishable by the naked eye from expensive suits worn by billionaires. (I suspect that the same it true for women’s clothing, but I’m less expert on that topic.)

I can wear the same shirts and pants as Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or Carlos Slim without straining my debit card.

Ditto for shoes, underwear, haircuts, corrective eye-wear, collars for dogs and cats, pet food, household bath towels and ‘linens,’ tableware and cutlery, automobile tires, hand tools, most household furniture, and wristwatches. (You’d have to get physically very close to someone wearing a Patek Philippe – and you’d have to know what a Patek Philippe is – in order to determine that that person’s wristwatch is one that you, an ordinary American, can’t afford. And you could stare at that Patek Philippe for months without detecting any superiority that it might have over your quartz-powered Timex at keeping time.) Coffee. Tea. Beer. Wine. (There is available today a large selection of very good wines at affordable prices. These wines almost never rise to the quality of Chateau Petrus, d’yquem, or the best Montrachets, but the differences are often quite small and barely distinguishable save by true connoisseurs.)

Brian Doherty lays out the misleading uses, flagrant abuses, and shoddy statistics of social science about gun violence.

Arnold Kling reviews Scott Sumner’s book The Midas Paradox.

The Great Depression of the 1930s is one of the most significant events in economic history. It had an impact not only on the people who lived through it but on economic theory and policy all the way to the present. I believe there is a strong case in favor of requiring every economics graduate student to take a course on the Great Depression. Furthermore, the reading list for such a course definitely ought to include Scott Sumner’s new book,The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression.1 Its title pertains to the role that Sumner assigns to gold hoarding in triggering the Depression.

Arnold is a Really Smart Guy and a Real Economist, so what he has to say is well worth hearing. My interest was sparked by his affirmation of the damaging effects of the Aggregation Fallacy, against which I have preached much in this blog.

Have you ever noticed how much Alec Baldwin looks like Lee Harvey Oswald?

And you never see the two of them together.

Read it.

Compare Obama.

The Other McCain lays out some inconvenient truth.

Bad judgment and bad morals are generally not a formula for success in life, and the fact that the men with whom Charlotte Shane hooked up via Tinder were all inadequate, disrespectful and/or immature should not surprise us. As I have explained elsewhere, the dating market is full of bad guys because all of the good guys already have girlfriends and good guys don’t cheat. Past a certain age — maybe as early as 25 — the singles scene is nothing but culls and rejects. The keepers are already taken, and if you’re still in the dating scene when you’re 30, you’re rummaging through piles of damaged goods and leftovers in the discount bin.

The one thing Charlotte Shane cannot do is consider that she could ever be at fault. Exactly how “mature” and “respectful” is she? Not very. Promiscuity is inherently immature, and it’s not respectful, either.

Check it out.

If you’re interested in Skraelings, as I am, this looks fascinating.

If you’re not, feel free to do something else.

Paul Graham speaks sense to stupidity.

I’ve become an expert on how to increase economic inequality, and I’ve spent the past decade working hard to do it. Not just by helping the 2400 founders YC has funded. I’ve also written essays encouraging people to increase economic inequality and giving them detailed instructions showing how.

So when I hear people saying that economic inequality is bad and should be eliminated, I feel rather like a wild animal overhearing a conversation between hunters. But the thing that strikes me most about the conversations I overhear is how confused they are. They don’t even seem clear whether they want to kill me or not.

The most common mistake people make about economic inequality is to treat it as a single phenomenon. The most naive version of which is the one based on the pie fallacy: that the rich get rich by taking money from the poor.

Usually this is an assumption people start from rather than a conclusion they arrive at by examining the evidence.

Evidence? We don’t need no stinkin’ evidence….

Even people sophisticated enough to know about the pie fallacy are led toward it by the custom of describing economic inequality as a ratio of one quantile’s income or wealth to another’s. It’s so easy to slip from talking about income shifting from one quantile to another, as a figure of speech, into believing that is literally what’s happening.

The phrase ‘share of the national income’ is a key giveaway here, making the Aggregation Fallacy of thinking that the ‘nation’ has an ‘income’ of which the only interesting thing is who gets what ‘share’.

Except in the degenerate case, economic inequality can’t be described by a ratio or even a curve. In the general case it consists of multiple ways people become poor, and multiple ways people become rich. Which means to understand economic inequality in a country, you have to go find individual people who are poor or rich and figure out why.

But that would take actual work, and it’s much easier to assume and opine, which pays the same (or sometimes better).

Traditional economists seem strangely averse to studying individual humans. It seems to be a rule with them that everything has to start with statistics. So they give you very precise numbers about variation in wealth and income, then follow it with the most naive speculation about the underlying causes.

Most economists live in Aggregation Fallacy World because that’s the way they were trained and it’s that sort of work that they’re paid for. Thinking outside the box is rarely indulged in when the box is providing your paycheck.

I’m all for shutting down the crooked ways to get rich. But that won’t eliminate economic inequality, because as long as you leave open the option of getting rich by creating wealth, people who want to get rich will do that instead.

Although the Democrats are doing their best to stamp that out. That’s the one thing at which Obama and his henchmen have actually been successful.

UPDATE: An extensive response is here — read it, and its comments.

Read it.

Among my favorite observations made by Thomas Sowell is his insistence that in economic reality human beings confront, not the possibility of solutions to problems but, instead, only trade-offs.  We can have more of this good, but only at the cost of having less of that good.  T.A.N.S.T.A.A.F.L.  Such is economic reality.

Steve Sailer looks under the radar.

For a dozen years or so, I’ve been pointing out that Southern California appears to be filling up with immigrants from the former Warsaw Pact.

But it’s hard to find out much about them. The media aren’t too interested in them. They’re immigrants (yeah) ,but they’re white (not yeah), so that confuses and discourages the press: What line should we take on them? Are white immigrants bad or good?

Read it.

Big Brother is not your friend. Just sayin’.

Read it.

If the first of January comes on a Friday, the winter will be temperate, and the summer and autumn, dry. Grain will be cheap. There will be eye diseases, and many infants will die, and there will be movement of knights, and there will be much oil in some places.

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

Read it.

Voice of the Crust the New York Times sees a cloud on the horizon no bigger than a man’s hand….

BLUF: If Trump can get the Republican nomination, he can pull enough Democrats to win the Presidency. And the Ruling Class is getting uneasy.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

A. Because there are virtually no Muslims in Japan.

And all strata of Japan, from the prime minister to the working class, intend to keep it that way.

Japan is the poster child for those who not only don’t value diversity but who actively work to exclude it.

The official policy of Japan is not to give citizenship to Muslims who come to Japan, and even permits for permanent residency are given sparingly to Muslims.

…

Japanese companies seeking foreign workers specifically note that they are not interested in Muslim workers. And any Muslim who does manage to enter Japan will find it very difficult to rent an apartment. Anywhere a Muslim lives, the neighbors become uneasy. Japan forbids the establishment of Islamic organizations, so setting up Islamic institutions such as mosques and schools is almost impossible. In Tokyo [population 13.35 million] there is only one imam.

Hard to argue with success.

Read it.

Many years ago, I put my 23andMe genetic screening results online at SNPedia where they are regularly updated so that my friends and enemies can all find out what’s genetically wrong (and right) with me. Consequences? None.

So what is Skloot advocating that has gotten me riled up? The government is proposing revisions to the Protection of Human Subjects rule that could possibly impose new and extensive consent requirements for using all sorts of biological samples derived from people. Skloot begins by asking readers if they want researchers to continue the practice of freely passing around cells derived from their bodies and the genetic information they contain?

Knowledge is not property. Let me repeat that. Knowledge is not property. A fact about you is not something you own

Read it.

Denis Kowitz has a shepherd-retention problem at his Idaho wool-growing operation, and he hopes changes in federal immigration law will help fix it.

“One was named Oscar, the other…well, I can’t remember. But he’s gone!” he says of two hired hands who left in March, just when he needed them for lambing season on his ranch in Rupert, in southern Idaho.

Mr. Kowitz said he paid about $3,000 per shepherd to find them and fly them from Peru. He said he assumed they quit to work in construction or at a dairy or landscaper. In the past 16 months, he said he has lost six shepherds under similar circumstances.

Boy, that sure sounds like a problem. Sure can’t have immigrants moving around as if they were free to choose jobs. People might think that the whole Open Borders thing is about cheap labor, not humanitarian heart-bleed.

Read it.

The first goal of taxation is to raise needed government revenue with minimum economic damage. That means lower marginal rates—the additional tax people pay for each extra dollar earned—and a broader base of income subject to tax. It also means a massively simpler tax code.

Hear, hear. Unconscionable amounts of money are wasted every year just trying to dodge burdensome tax levies.

What would a minimally damaging, simple, fair tax code look like? First, the corporate tax should be eliminated. Every dollar of taxes that a corporation seems to pay comes from higher prices to its customers, lower wages to its workers, or lower dividends to its shareholders. Of these groups, wealthy individual shareholders are the least likely to suffer. If taxes eat into profits, investors pay lower prices for less valuable shares, and so earn the same return as before. To the extent that taxes do reduce returns, they also financially hurt nonprofits and your and my pension funds.

…

Second, the government should tax consumption, not wages, income or wealth. When the government taxes savings, investment income, wealth or inheritance, it reduces the incentive to save, invest and build companies rather than enjoy consumption immediately. Taxes on capital gains discourage people from moving or reallocating capital toward their most productive uses.

Excellent analysis.

Read it.

Cowen rather coyly overlooks another aspect of the assortative mating that takes place at universities: The heritability of intelligence. Men and women now tend to look for partners who are at least as smart as they are and they tend to pass along their smarts to their children. A 2015 study reports that assortative mating correlates more with intelligence than for any other trait.

If they have kids, which a lot of them don’t; or at most one. I know at least one couple who are each only children and have only one child (and probably won’t have another). Sure, that kid will be highly intelligent but might not reproduce at all.

Gavin McInnes reminds us of some inconvenient truth.

It’s impossible to starve in this country. In fact, our biggest problem with the poor is they’re getting too fat. Everyone has a smartphone, even homeless dudes. There are more cars and guns than there are people and it’s virtually impossible to find a home without a fridge and a TV in it. When I put on my magic glasses it is impossible to understand why every so-called oppressed minority doesn’t thank their lucky stars Fortuna’s deadly wheel plopped them down on American soil.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

A service offering monks for hire on Amazon has been criticised by Buddhists who say it “commodifies a religious act as a service”.

Uh, well, it really is a service. Monks gotta eat, too, you know.

The Japanese Buddhist Federation is to formally request that Amazon stops selling the services of Buddhist monks for memorial services and other ceremonies, according to The Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s daily newspaper.

Wet blankets.

A statement from the Federation, released on Christmas Eve, said that the service raises questions about Amazon’s attitude towards religion. Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Freeberg does it so you don’t have to.

I can’t write funny stuff like Mr. Barry, but I must have some talent for noticing things, since I get in trouble so often for noticing things I’m not supposed to notice. Human behavior, for instance. The pattern is pretty clear: People see a problem, they come up with a wrong solution, they chase that for a little while…or a great while. Maybe forever. But if they’re capable of learning something, they eventually figure out the solution they’ve been chasing is the wrong one, and they go to work on their solving skills and start chasing a solution that is, at least, not quite so wrong.

Yes, Barack Obama won re-election in 2012. That doesn’t really prove anything, though, other than for a lot of people it took more than four years to figure out they’d been chasing the wrong solution. For the people like Mr. Barry who see 2015 as a year of pain, the feeling is not imaginary. It is real. This paradigm shift of figuring out you need to re-evaluate the solution, that you’ve been chasing after the wrong one, is never a comfortable one. It is the scraping of the blade of theory getting shaped and sharpened against the stone of practice. And 2015 seems to have taken form as the year of the Great Sharpening.

A year in which a man won the title ‘Woman of the Year’ doesn’t have a lot to recommend it. But we’ll survive this, as we have survived so much else.

Read it.

Probably got there via flying saucers.

Hey, it could happen.

Read it.

When summer rolls around, thoughts turn to how to spend the limpid months: Umbrella drinks by the pool? Backpacking through pristine wilderness? A digital detox?

But if you’re a certain kind of person, your dream destination might be Rare Book School in Charlottesville for a week of courses that include “Book Illustration Processes to 1900” or “The Handwriting & Culture of Early Modern English Manuscripts.” Rare book fanatics study not only the words on the page but also the way books were made in order to unlock a deeper cultural understanding of text. And while there are similar programs around the world, Rare Book School offers something they do not: A permanent space and a teaching collection of 80,000 items from books bound in supple goat leather to old Macintosh computers.

Scott Johnson of PowerLine has some thoughts.

Donald Trump has proved himself to be a man with substantial insight into the mind of the average Republican voter, a category in which I place myself (in case that’s not obvious from my comments here over the past many years). Having made illegal immigration and American greatness the primary themes of his campaign, he floated to the top of a competitive field and has if anything continued to increase his lead over the rest of the field, at least as measured by the national polls so far. I think Trump’s candidacy represents a reaction to the Age of Obama among Republican voters.

Obama’s promotion of illegal immigration represents a larger component of the Obama syndrome. It stands for Obama’s promotion of lawlessness for political purposes.