Read it.

On June 24, researchers will meet with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a very specific reason: they want to test a drug that might slow the aging process. If they succeed, they will show for the first time that aging is in fact a condition that can be treated with medicine, which could boost progress—and funding—for anti-aging research. And based on some comments made by officials late last month, the FDA seems inclined to say yes, according to Nature News.

…

Aging researchers don’t claim to seek immortality; rather, they want to keep more people healthier for longer. Drugs that have been developed over the past decade have been ineffective and sold with false promises. But the researchers behind the proposed experiment, called Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME), say they’re in a better position now thanks to animal studies that have hinted at particular physiological pathways that can lead to greater longevity.

Socialism is a disease. Getting old is a misfortune.

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Test-taking is a dreaded experience that the country’s kids and young adults share with their counterparts across the globe. The ritual at its core doesn’t vary much: Students sit at a table or a computer desk (or sometimes, as shown below, on the floor), pencil and/or mouse in hand, the clock ticking away mercilessly. America for its part is home to what The Atlantic has described as an “alphabet soup” of standardized tests, including: the NAEP, SBAC, PARCC, ACT, and, of course, SAT. Testing has become increasingly notorious in the U.S., to the point that tens of thousands of parents across the country have opted their kids out of standardized tests.

I’ve never understood the angst in Certain Circles about testing. My first impulse is to assume that those who worry about tests are those who know they are likely not to pass (or whose kids are likely not to pass), and extend that into a presumption that the test-haters are achievement-haters who want everybody to get a trophy just for showing up, again as a sublimation of their own feelings (or knowings) of inferiority. I’m sure that has a lot to do with it.

In America, perhaps all the testing helps explain why “all-nighters” and Adderall abuse are the norm on many college campuses. But there is an unhealthy obsession with acing the test abroad, too. Fraudulent college applications are reportedly rampant among students in China—the birthplace of the standardized test—aspiring to attend school in the U.S. And hundreds of people in India were recently arrested in connection with a massive cheating scandal. (Many of those arrested were believed to be family members of the 10th-grade test-takers.) Meanwhile, as NPR has reported, “the relentless focus on education and exams is often to blame” for suicide among teens in South Korea, the leading cause of death for that demographic.

Another, perhaps complimentary, explanatory character flaw is an apparent desire to make sure that Da Poor Iddle Kiddies never have to face the bleak prospect of stress in their lives, as exemplified by the current Crybully Crisis on college campuses. (This is what helicopter parenting leads to: A generation of weaklings who take refuge in their fascist impulses.) My attitude toward somebody who would commit suicide because of a test is something on the order of think of it as evolution in action; if you can’t face a test, you’re not going to survive Real Life, so better quit now before you’ve wasted everybody’s time. But that’s me, and I’m a notorious hard-heart. Ask anybody.

I’ve always regarded a test as a puzzle to be solved, rather than a hurdle to get over. Like looking in a mirror, it gives you a better idea of who you are and where you fit. And that’s good to know.

A black Harvard Law Professor gets it right.

Questioners often seem to assume that I should feel deeply alarmed and hurt. I don’t.

The identity and motives of the person or people behind the taping have not been determined. Perhaps the defacer is part of the law school community. But maybe not. Perhaps the defacer is white. But maybe not. Perhaps the taping is meant to convey anti-black contempt or hatred for the African-American professors. But maybe it was meant to protest the perceived marginalization of black professors, or was a hoax meant to look like a racial insult in order to provoke a crisis, or was a rebuke to those who have recently been taping over the law school’s seal, which memorializes a family of slaveholders from colonial times. Some observers, bristling with certainty, insist that the message conveyed by the taping of the photographs is obvious. To me it is puzzling.

At least they have grownups teaching at Harvard Law, regardless of the arrested adolescence of the students.

What I find puzzling is how so sensible a piece got published in the New York Times.

Read it.

That explains the Apple mouse and keyboard. Even the Mac-fanatic tech journalists hate them, from what I’ve seen.

Read it.

The title of this study is based on one of the most interesting characteristics video games can generate. Not only a possible past, that can be altered virtually, but even the divine and omnipotent position from which the player (including all categories of video player) has the opportunity (the power) to do anything in this virtual setting: from managing worlds to planning the life and the death of the characters. In fact, the common denominator is manipulating (in the literal sense of handling) something until now impossible, namely time and events that have already happened, taken as events with a beginning and an end.

Read it.

As this is Thanksgiving week, I thought I’d take a break from Muslim terrorists and social justice warriors and all the other negative stuff to give thanks for something positive that happened in 2015. In two separate but similar criminal cases that were resolved this year, a precedent was established that will possibly, hopefully, influence prosecutors in the years to come: Elderly white guys are not legally mandated to play by the “Chuck Norris rule” if they believe their lives are at risk.

What is the ‘Chuck Norris Rule’? Read the whole thing.

It’s become a media cliché to say that the white population in the U.S. is “rapidly aging,” but clichéd though that claim may be, it’s not inaccurate. Like all elderly people, aging whites will become increasingly susceptible to crime, and matters relating to self-defense will become more and more important. Which is why I consider it a small victory that this year, two separate attempts to penalize old white men for not abiding by the Chuck Norris rule failed miserably. If you didn’t read about these two cases in the news, it’s almost certainly because, since all the participants were white—the good guys and bad guys alike—neither story got Trayvonified into a national cause célèbre involving rioters, burned-out CVS stores, and presidents waxing poetic about hypothetical sons.

Somehow it didn’t surprise me when Obama identified a drug-dealing teen thug as somebody who could have been his son. Although he would have had to learn his aggressiveness from Michelle.

Read it.

Yeah, Turkey so totally borders the North Atlantic.

This morning’s downing of a Russian jet underscores the problems with Turkey’s NATO membership and EU accession. It is perhaps not the worst example of how Turkey is not fit to be in a formal military alliance with the United Kingdom and the United States, but it underscores the point that the country is simply not ready – not even as ready as it was pre-2000. The country has regressed in three key areas as far as Europe and the United States should be concerned: on security matters, on human rights matters, and as a hub for mass migration into Europe.

Actually, the reason to have NATO at all any more escapes me. It was designed to keep Communism out of Europe; it failed to do that, merely managing to keep the Soviets out. There are not more Soviets, so it’s basically an excuse for the Europeans to shuffle off their defense spending onto the U.S. If they’re scared of Russia, let them spend their own damned money.

Read it.

“The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”
— Thomas Sowell, 1998

Steve Sailer digs into the past so you don’t have to.

The first American IQ test, the Stanford-Binet, was created just before World War I by Lewis Terman, who went on to do the first long-term tracking study of high IQ individuals, The Genetic Studies of Genius or Terman’s Termites. (Future Nobel Physicist William Shockley famously just missed scoring high enough to qualify.)

Lewis Terman’s son Fred Terman, Stanford’s longtime Dean of Engineering, is often called the Father of Silicon Valley. Fred Terman, the mentor of Hewlett & Packard, devised both the high tech start-up model for Silicon Valley and brought in huge amounts of Cold War aerospace spending to build the Valley’s tech infrastructure.

The other main candidate for the role of the Father of Silicon Valley, physicist / eugenicist William Shockley, was hired as a Stanford professor by his friend Fred Terman.

It’s almost as if there’s a pattern that Stanford and Silicon Valley believe that intelligence matters and that it’s not wholly malleable through social engineering … But of course that has all been discredited, as demonstrated by Silicon Valley’s lavish hiring of non-Asian minorities for engineering jobs.

*Snort*

Read it.

Well, it may be new to the Wall Street Journal, but it’s not new to those of us who have been paying attention. Talk radio has been a force in politics since the Reagan years.

A decade ago, Republicans touted conservative talk radio as a foolproof medium to communicate directly with their most ardent supporters. Democrats and liberal groups tried to replicate that success by building their own left-leaning television and radio stations, with far less success.

That’s because (a) a neoliberal on the radio isn’t entertaining; poster child here is AlGore; (b) the Left can get all the ‘talk radio’ they want from tuning in the Drive-By Media — they don’t need a special format in broadcasting. I guess Patrick O’Connor at the Wall Street Journal just arrived in America from Not Around Here.

Now, the tables have turned. Republican leaders in Washington are under siege from their own activists, in part, because conservative radio hosts are almost as likely to rail against the party brass in Congress as they are to lament Mr. Obama’s failings in the Oval Office.

Is this a great country or what?

Republican presidential contenders would be unwise to write off this bloc; roughly a third of Republican primary voters strongly identify with conservative talk radio, about 10 percentage points higher than the share of GOP primary voters who consider themselves moderate or liberal, according to the survey conducted by the Democrats at Hart Research Associates and the Republicans at Public Opinion Research.

Of course, Republican presidential contenders are unlikely to do so — because they, unlike Patrick O’Connor of the Wall Street Journal, happen to keep up on what is going on in their party.

Sarah Hoyt discovers the terrible sin of Cultural Appropriation.

It might be easier, honest to Bob, if they had children or, for the few of them who DO have children, if they’d paid any attention to their kids’ development instead of to the weird movie going on in their heads which leads them believe things like that a baby recoiling from unfamiliar appearance means the baby is racist.

I’ve always thought babies were racist. Perhaps I ought to reconsider.

But innate tendencies do not a culture make.  Innate tendencies might dictate whether you leap out of bed with a song on your lips and incite murder in the mind of your roommate who drags self out of bed with groan and crawls till noon by the grace of coffee, but it does not dictate what language you speak, what attire you wear, or whether you think women look best when disguised as sofas.  Those are things you learned from your relatives/guardians when you were too young to think.  They might be filed under “must do” at a level where you have never examined them, but that doesn’t mean you can’t examine them. And change them.  It just means it takes time, is painful, and no one is going to do it without major upheaval requiring it.

…

Cultural appropriation?  Flummery.  It’s called being human.

Read it.

Many things in life — like landing a job at some Wal-Mart locations — are harder to achieve than getting into that prestigious university.

Despite much of the bloviation you hear about the origins of the Thanksgiving Day holiday, it’s origin is very simple — it was the traditional English harvest feast of Martinmas, the feast day of St Martin of Tours, held traditionally on November 11 each year. (The Puritans didn’t call it Martinmas, of course, because saints’ days were ‘papist’.)

‘But wait’, I hear you say. ‘Thanksgiving isn’t on the 11th.’ Of course not. In the 1600’s, England was on a Julian calendar; it didn’t start using the ‘papist’ Gregorian calendar until 1752, more than a century after the first ‘Thanksgiving’ feast. The key thing to know about the Julian calendar is that it’s a number of days behind the Gregorian calendar; by 2015 this difference is 13 days. So in order to know what Julian date is for November 11, you have to add 13 days to the Gregorian date. I’ll leave you to do the math.

Read it.

Grains may have a bad rep, but they also do a lot of good. Whole grains are high in fibre and have been linked to preventing ailments from heart disease to bowel cancer. They are also rich in B vitamins, iron and potassium.

But that doesn’t mean that Global Warming isn’t a thing! Not at all!

The vacuity of Keynesianism and the fundamental truth of Saye’s Law (‘supply-side economics’) is contained in the following exchange, overheard in a local Container Store:

“Can I help you find something, sir?”

“Yes. I’m looking for the thing that I don’t know I need until I see it.”

Read it.

Techie triumphalism is all around: “The best thing anyone can do to improve the quality of life around the world is to drive connectivity and technological opportunity,” Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and his co-author, Jared Cohen, wrote in “The New Digital Age.” As Wael Ghonim, who helped usher in the Arab Spring, put it: “If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet.” Today no human domain is safe from the technology world’s “solutionism,” in the phrase of the writer Evgeny Morozov.

Mr. Toyama used to share that worldview: “I am a recovering technoholic,” he writes. Then he moved to India, to lead the Microsoft lab, and observed a phenomenon that he would come to believe was universal: “Technology’s primary effect is to amplify human forces.” When computers entered rural schools, for instance, guess who held the mouse? Upper-caste boys. Technology wasn’t an intrinsic leveler or a bulldozer to archaic structures: It just gave people new, improved tools to be lovely or horrible to each other in all the old ways.

…

There are various explanations for the technology world’s contempt for existing human structures. It’s a world full of trained engineers — and many college dropouts — who cannot be expected to grasp human dynamics any more than political scientists understand Java code. Many brilliant technology leaders have stories of bullying and isolation in their youths that would leave anyone with abiding skepticism of human groups, institutions, cultures. If family dinners and school lunches were painful for you, “disrupting” eating with a venture-capital-backed protein drink like Soylent can seem like liberation.

The belief that technology can fix all our problems is very ‘progressive’, which is why the tech industry professionals who devote their work lives to Holy Entrepreneurship are so often politically neoliberal. The core belief of ‘progressivism’, that progress is inevitable so therefore the change that enables progress is inevitably good is at the heart of the start-up mavens who roam about the world like roaring lions seeking something to disrupt. Technology is just another tool, and tools are only as good or bad as the people who use them — and, sad to say, there are a lot of bad people in the world.

Read it.

A Democrite not really comfortable with democracy explains that all those Little People are really really stupid to turn down Free Stuff.

‘Of course, it is likely enough, my friends,” he said slowly, “likely enough that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed at home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later. That thought has long been growing in our hearts, and that it why we are marching now. It was not a hasty resolve.’ — Treebeard, The Fellowship of the Ring

Read it.

And you thought your exams were tough….

Both Intrnational Mens’ Day and World Toilet Day.

Make of that what you will.

Read it.

The story of technology is in fact the story of textiles. From the most ancient times to the present, so too is the story of economic development and global trade. The origins of chemistry lie in the colouring and finishing of cloth. The textile business funded the Italian Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; it left us double-entry bookkeeping and letters of credit, Michelangelo’s David and the Taj Mahal. As much as spices or gold, the quest for fabrics and dyestuffs drew sailors across strange seas. In ways both subtle and obvious, textiles made our world.

More blood was shed over sources of alum, fixative for dyes, that you might imagine.

Adam Garfinkle speaks sense to stupidity.

Gems:

Fromkin identified terrorism as a weapon of the weak, a trap of sorts designed to provoke stronger forces into acting on the basis of fear in counterproductive ways. Those counterproductive ways could take several forms: foolishly exaggerating a terrorist enemy’s power and legitimacy; doing things that betray one’s core values or alienate natural or objective allies; spending huge sums of public money to prevent tactics that terrorists have no intention of reusing; and more besides

…

The distorted formation of the Department of Homeland Security and the massive TSA bureaucracy are very expensive, and most of the money we spend year after year is spent by rote and mostly in vain. Somewhere Ayman al-Zawahiri is sucking oxygen, and he probably smiles regularly at the thought of how little al-Qaeda’s operations cost compared to how many billions of dollars we have spent ever since.

…

If basic number one is “don’t foolishly help the bad guys with their strategy of terrorism,” what is basic number two? It is that destroying a relatively weak enemy is easy compared to building a stable peace in its wake. Or, as P.J. O’Rourke once memorably put it, it’s one thing to burn down the shithouse, another to install plumbing.

Read it.

The author of Memoirs of an Addicted Brain and The Biology of Desire, Dr Lewis became addicted to opiates when he was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley.

He faced “serious personal and legal troubles resulting from his addiction,” his website explains.

“I know what scientists are looking at when they say addiction is a disease. I don’t dispute the findings, but I dispute the interpretation of them,” he told The Huffington Post.

He went on to argue that addiction is a “developmental process” and that while the brain changes, addiction is not “chronic” because people “continue to change when they recover.”

Dr Lewis said that the label also makes recovery more difficult because it means that patients can be exploited by expensive programmes with low success rates, and ultimately dehumanises addicts.

Cue the attacks by Social Justice Warriors. What this poor guy fails to notice is that (a) classifying it as a disease means you can force insurance to cover ‘treatment’ costs; (b) classifying it as a disease means you can push for government-funded ‘treatment’ programs; (c) classifying it as a disease means It’s Not Your Fault and pushes the Narrative that nobody is responsible for what he does, that Society Is To Blame for everything bad, and that we all ought to surrender to Big Brother, who will kiss it and make it all better.

Well, he did to to Berkeley, so I guess that explains it.

Read it.

Damn, I’m not qualified for any of these jobs.

Sarah Hoyt lays out some inconvenient truth.

When I woke up this morning we were snowed in, and we still are.  Which makes me feel like I should crawl back between the covers.

This is too bad, because I need to speak to several things that are alien to native-born Americans.  These include how the rest of the world works, how a religious mono-culture works, that yes, most Muslims are not actually insane terrorists BUT that doesn’t mean they don’t support the insane terrorists even as they recoil from the things they do and in the cool light of day think they are farkin insane.

It is important to explain this, because the US is so large and has been in peace and prosperity so long that the arguments that broke up all over facebook were like watching two people discuss whether the greatest danger to the Titanic was bad soup or a measles epidemic, even while the iceberg tore the ship apart.

Sarah Hoyt offers some perspective.

Sarah is Portuguese and grew up under a socialist government, but came to the U.S. because it was better.

As I said, I already had some idea that in the US communist authors and singers weren’t shunned. I’d listened to enough singers who sounded like the Portuguese communists and who were multimillionaires in the US. But that was the first time I met an on-the-street American (he was a new employee there) and realized that it not only wasn’t true that communism and socialism were looked down upon on the US, but that the “cultured” groups in the US were pretty much indistinguishable from cultured groups in Europe, where leftism was a positional good and saying things like “Stalin was a little harsh” was not a reason to recoil in horror but a reason to nod and know the speaker was on the vanguard of culture.

By the time I moved to the US in the mid eighties, leftism and posing as a leftist were very much a mark of the “educated” and the “smart.” While the popular idea was that the Republicans were “the party of the rich” in fact to move in the wealthy and “classy” sets you had to parrot opinions that were indistinguishable from the opinions of the left and even the extreme left in Europe.

It’s only got worse since then. In the last thirty years, the long march through the institutions was completed, and art, news and academia are all firmly in the hands of the left. Which means that parroting the right (left) opinions is not only the way to advance, it’s the ONLY way to advance. In fact you have to at least nod to them in order not to be sent to Coventry.

Read it.

The ‘car pool’ urban planners to the contrary notwithstanding.

Given the proliferation of microtransit services trying to match drivers and passengers, you might think they had ride-sharing and carpooling all figured out. But the recent demise of Leap Transit in San Francisco—to say nothing of the other transportation start-ups that have failed without a media whimper—reminds us that even in a big city it’s not easy to fill empty vehicle seats. And in the suburbs, it’s downright mathematically impossible.

Or just about, anyway, according to a provocative new thought-experiment by Steve Raney, principal at a smart mobility consultancy called Cities21. In a working paper, the former Silicon Valley tech product manager crunched the numbers on ride-sharing in the Palo Alto area and found the odds of matching drivers with passengers long, to say the least. Raney calls it the “Suburban Ridematch Needle in the Haystack Problem.”

“I wanted to gently inject some reality into this,” he tells CityLab.

What a concept.

Read it.

Don’t ever say we don’t have useful information here.

Read it.

Got that right.

In a recent study, researchers at the University of Barcelona, Spain, compared “morning people,” those early birds who like to get up at dawn, and “evening people,” night owls who prefer to stay up late and sleep in. Among the differences they found is that morning people tend to be more persistent. Morning types are also more resistant to fatigue, frustration and difficulties, which often translates into lower levels of anxiety and lower rates of depression, higher life satisfaction and less likelihood of substance abuse.

On the other hand, evening people tend to be more extravagant, temperamental, impulsive and novelty- seeking, “with a higher tendency to explore the unknown.” They are more likely to suffer from insomnia and ADHD. They also appear to be more likely to develop addictive behaviors, mental disorders and antisocial tendencies, and even to attempt suicide.

Read it. And watch the video.

When “Islamophobes” quote the Koran to buttress their arguments about the inherently violent (or hateful, or intolerant, or misogynistic…) nature of Islam, they are frequently accused by Muslims or their useful-idiot kafir apologists of “taking the verse out of context”.

In the following video, David Wood of Acts 17 Apologetics demonstrates the way in which Islam-apologists do exactly the same thing that they accuse their opponents of doing when they quote the “peaceful” Koran verse 5:32 not only out of its context, but omitting part of the verse itself. Dr. Wood rectifies matters by including the entirety of 5:32, plus 5:33 and relevant hadith, so that non-Muslims can see just exactly how peaceful this particular verse really is.

Jim Goad utters a cri de coeur.

I’ll believe we have an unbiased media the moment they start using the term “far left” as frequently as they use “far right.” But don’t hold your breath, because you will surely die waiting.

The blood hadn’t even dried from Friday night’s carnage in Paris before the major media’s lackeys and lickspittles were issuing dire warnings about a disturbing political trend in Europe. Despite the fact that Islamic extremists spilled gallons of blood Friday night, the media’s respectable class—those craven lackeys and lickspittles—did not seem in the least bit terrified about Islamic terrorism, but rather about the “far right” gaining traction in Europe.

Read it.

It will also put a lot of people out of a job. Maybe even yours.

Read it.

Today, the Clinton Foundation is unlike anything else in the history of the nation and, perhaps, the world: It is a global philanthropic empire run by a former U.S. president and closely affiliated with a potential future president, with the audacious goal of solving some of the world’s most vexing problems by bringing together the wealthiest, glitziest and most powerful people from every part of the planet.

The evolution of the foundation, which began as a modest nonprofit focused largely on the ex-president’s library in Arkansas, is a nearly perfect reflection of the Clintons themselves. It was not designed as a master plan but rather has grown, one brainstorm at a time, in accordance with the ambitious, loyal, restless and often scattered nature of its primary namesake. Many programs were sparked by chance encounters in Bill Clinton’s life. A meeting with a Harlem shopkeeper. A friend’s plan to fight AIDS. The flight to Davos. Emergency heart surgery.

Where the Crust can come out and play.

Ben Chu at the Independent understands the dialectic.

When Confucius was asked by his students what was the first thing he would do if he were made king, the sage replied: “Rectify the names.”

The answer baffled the students, who had expected their master to say he would promote the virtuous into positions of authority and expel corrupt officials. But Confucius explained his reasoning: “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”

That is why the Forces of Evil spend their initial effort at having a good ‘name’ for name-calling, upon which every other tactic depends. From ‘black market’ to ‘price gouging’ to ‘windfall profits’, the Left knows that controlling the terms of the argument is the first step on the road to winning. And Marx was the original Alinskyite – ‘capitalism’ isn’t really a thing, it’s just a name he created as a stick to beat the people he didn’t like. And everybody has used it as a punching bag ever since, since even people who favor property rights and free markets have taken to using it, since they don’t have any alternative.

But what is this capitalism? What does the word stand for? It’s not a question that is asked enough. The journalist Paul Mason has published a book with the title “Post-capitalism” which, rather irritatingly, lacks any substantive discussion of what capitalism actually is.

The definition is implicit: Capitalism is ‘those ignorant losers who don’t agree with us’. See how it is used and tell me I’m wrong.

But the old concepts are hard to shake. When pressed, people often still describe capitalism as a system under which the owners of financial capital (shareholders) offer up their resources to fund business ventures in exchange for a financial return (dividends paid by a company). Yet few large businesses need to raise money from investors in stock markets any longer. They can fund their expansions from internally generated profits. They are more likely to buy back shares with their free cash flow than issue new ones.

The classic Marxist understanding of capital is economic power as ownership, but ‘ownership’ has become so diffused in the modern world that it has about as much power as owning a lottery ticket. You hope to get lucky, but none of the outcome depends on any action on your part.

Ownership has changed too. Today many company employees are shareholders through their pension schemes. Does that give these workers economic power in the manner of the 19th-century capitalist class? Not really. Economic power usually lies not with shareholders but with the managers of companies, the executives. Sometimes it lies with the financiers who look after people’s investments, the professional asset managers employed by pension funds. But it is virtually never the ordinary shareholder who is in the driving seat.

This is old news among those who have been paying attention. James Burnham wrote it all up in his seminal work, The Managerial Revolution, back before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

Labels are often a substitute for thought, especially in politics where a naïve view holds sway that economic policies and institutions are either inherently “capitalist” or “socialist”. See “privatisation” and “the NHS” for two examples in the British context. Extremists of both the left and the right are attracted to this Manichean world where good and evil collide.

…

“Capitalism” doesn’t really exist. There are various modes of market-based economic, social and legal organisation in rich countries, some of which work well in some respects, and some of which don’t. There is a debate to be had about how to reform those modes to meet the often divergent needs and aspirations of different populations. But there is no magic “capitalist” or indeed “socialist” formula that all should follow. Such 19th-century labels are often an excuse to dodge the difficult job of figuring out what will work.

So, if you’re European, go out there and be odd.

Well, more odd than you are already….

Read it.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is facing a growing backlash from Mormons upset about a new policy that bars children of same-sex parents from baby-naming ceremonies and baptisms, and declares members in gay marriages to be apostates subject to excommunication.

The policies have hit hard in a church that considers family bonds central in this life and eternal in the afterlife. While church members are pouring out their pain and confusion at family dinners and on Mormon blogs, critics are planning a “mass resignation” in a park adjacent to the church’s headquarters in Salt Lake City on Saturday.

Pain there may be, but confusion only afflicts the clueless. The LDS church has a structure of authority based on revelation, just like Real Christianity, and its principles are not subject to the whims of fashion. The children aren’t being permanently excluded from the church, they just have to demonstrate that they conform to the church’s teachings rather than to their ‘parents’. There comes a time when an organization has to step up to the plate or go home, and it would appear that this is the point to which the LDS church has come.

Fortunately they don’t depend for their revelations on the editorial board of the New York Times, or there’s no telling what they’d be expected to believe.

‘Work computers are like an android simulation of a good friend with the memory and personality modules removed.’

Read it.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, draws the line.

In my opinion as an economist and as a human being who believes that no one has a right to use force to extract unbargained-for benefits from anyone else, a sufficient reason to oppose the minimum wage is that it prices some people out of jobs that they would otherwise have voluntarily chosen to take. The number of people priced out of jobs is, for me, irrelevant to this assessment (although, of course, the greater the number of people priced out of jobs by the minimum wage, the worse is the magnitude of its undesirable and unwarrantable effects).

Even if only one person is priced out of a job by the minimum wage (or more precisely, even if only one person is priced out of the job that he or she would have chosen to take in the absence of the minimum wage), I have sufficient reason to oppose it.

Wisdom. Attend.

Mark Steyn is deliciously dyspeptic today.

At this point in the evening, the candidates were arguing not whether it was disgraceful but whether it was do-able. Trump’s response is that not only is it do-able but it’s already been done – by a two-term Republican president. Eisenhower, by the way, was the last non-politician to be drafted as presidential nominee (and “I Like Ike” came from Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam). His sudden reappearance in the GOP pantheon is a fine example of the difference Trump’s made to this primary season: without his presence in the race, no-one would be talking about the practicalities of mass deportation of illegal aliens.

…

It is striking that, even in a conservative debate, mass, remorseless, illegal immigration is discussed almost entirely from the illegals’ point of view: as Kasich advises, think of the families, think of the children. Their families, their children. The families of those they’ve supplanted are of less consequence. The argument made by Bush and Kasich against enforcing the immigration laws is an appeal to moral preening: this is “not who we are”. But using mass immigration to destroy the lives of your own citizens? That’s exactly who we are.

Read it.

Note the clever thing that Trump has done here: Rather than bickering over whether it can be done at all, people have started bickering over how it could be done. To which Trump merely has to say, ‘Okay, that’s my idea, if you don’t like it, what’s your idea?’.

Read it.

“Everyone in the media thinks that Soylent is this product for people that are so busy they don’t have time for food; people who work 80 hours per week because they’re crazy,” Coogan says. “That couldn’t be further from the truth. We drink Soylent because it gives us the time to do other things that we love.”

This is actually very clever. Although this discusses mainly legal advice that was actually paid for, and how to get the best bang for your buck in doing so, it has Implications.

Anyone coming up with (or allegedly coming up with) a new product in the field of nutrition (loosely defined) can count on a lot of advice/criticism, solicited and un-. Assembling all of that in the form of a data reference, if not a database, is knowledge that would otherwise cost big bucks.

I’m waiting for somebody to do this with the ‘feedback’ that most companies get from their customers. (Yeah, they’re supposed to be doing that already, but a cursory look at the headlines reveals that whatever they’re doing now isn’t working very well.)

Read it.

Apparently this scares some people.

Frankly, I’d be more scared if the opposite were true. But, of course, I don’t write for a living; I actually have a real job.

Read it.

Sarah Hoyt has some points to ponder.

Real virtue is hard because most of it is internal.  It’s refraining from doing the things that the natural creature wants to do. It’s doing things you really don’t want to do.  It’s staying up an hour later to finish that overdue project, it’s getting up in the night because your spouse/kid is throwing up in the bathroom, it’s doing dishes before bed so your spouse doesn’t need to worry about them, it’s making a cup of hot cocoa for your kid when it’s snowy out and you know he/she is going to come trudging through the door, wet and cold.

Real virtue is putting what you ought to do higher in priority than what you want to do, and we see far too little of that these days. But that does not relieve us of the obligation to try.

Kathy Shaidle ponts and laughs.

Marijuana is the abortion of libertarians.

Small-government types, left and right, are unwholesomely obsessed with legalizing weed. Amusingly, both groups tend to stereotype so-con pro-lifers as hideous, crotchety, single-issue knuckle-draggers—“Have you noticed that most of the women who are against abortion are women you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place?” But while antiabortion activists have gotten younger, more genial, and more media-savvy, pro-pot protesters haven’t evolved noticeably in my lifetime: They’re still scruffy, smelly, and likely contagious. More proof that “progressives” really do live in the past.

P.S. Why do pro-pot libertarians positively beam when explaining that legalization will “let the government tax and regulate” their favorite drug, when “taxes” and “regulations” are their greatest enemies when it comes to every other product or service?

A good question. I think it’s because they’re trying to persuade people whose values they don’t share and don’t understand, so they do it in a very ignorant and ham-handed way, like offering black demonstrators some watermelon to quit blocking access to your store.

Weed makes people lazy. You’ll notice I didn’t say “stupid,” although no one can convince me that toking it adds brain cells or IQ points, either.

Many of the dedicated potheads I’ve known have been of average—even above average—intelligence. And they were failures. Or, at the very least (“most”?), mediocrities. They worked just hard enough to get by, and even achieved a degree of success in a constricted sphere of endeavor: hosting a long-running novelty radio show; writing a few books and teaching (part-time) at the same college forever; assistant-managing a small indie record or video store, or maybe a bike shop.

Aye, there’s the rub. Smoking per se is sufficiently stupid that arguing over what’s being smoked strikes me as pretty pointless.