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In a bizarre aberration, the New York Times debunks one of its old shibboleths, population explosion.

No one was more influential — or more terrifying, some would say — than Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist. His 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” sold in the millions with a jeremiad that humankind stood on the brink of apocalypse because there were simply too many of us. Dr. Ehrlich’s opening statement was the verbal equivalent of a punch to the gut: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He later went on to forecast that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s, that 65 million of them would be Americans, that crowded India was essentially doomed, that odds were fair “England will not exist in the year 2000.” Dr. Ehrlich was so sure of himself that he warned in 1970 that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.” By “the end,” he meant “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

As you may have noticed, England is still with us. So is India. Hundreds of millions did not die of starvation in the ’70s. Humanity has managed to hang on, even though the planet’s population now exceeds seven billion, double what it was when “The Population Bomb” became a best-seller and its author a frequent guest of Johnny Carson’s on “The Tonight Show.” How the apocalyptic predictions fell as flat as ancient theories about the shape of the Earth is the focus of this installment of Retro Report, a series of video documentaries examining significant news stories of the past and their aftermath.

Jim Goad lays it out.

It is impossible to simultaneously understand the theory of evolution and to believe in blank-slate cognitive equality among human groups of different continental origins.

Both propositions—evolution and equality—cannot simultaneously be true. You have to pick one. Choose wisely, because you can’t have both.

Read it.

Perhaps they’re looking for an environment in which they don’t have to listen to people refer to God as ‘she’.

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For Congress to guarantee a right to health care, or any other good or service, whether a person can afford it or not, it must diminish someone else’s rights, namely their rights to their earnings.  The reason is that Congress has no resources of its very own.  Moreover, there is no Santa Claus, Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy giving them those resources.  The fact that government has no resources of its very own forces one to recognize that in order for government to give one American citizen a dollar, it must first, through intimidation, threats and coercion, confiscate that dollar from some other American.  If one person has a right to something he did not earn, of necessity it requires that another person not have a right to something that he did earn.

— Walter Williams, American Contempt for Liberty, p. 284

Freeberg nails it yet again.

Hurricanes…more laws, raise taxes
Tornado[e]s…more laws, raise taxes
Hot…more laws, raise taxes
Cold…more laws, raise taxes
Flooding…more laws, raise taxes
Drought…more laws, raise taxes
Earthquakes…more laws, raise taxes
Missing Child…more laws, raise taxes
Someone Offended…more laws, raise taxes

John Stossel is agin it.

College has become a scam.

Some students benefit: those with full scholarships and/or rich parents so they don’t go deep into debt, those who love learning for its own sake and land jobs in academia and those who get jobs that require a college credential.

But that’s not most students.

Half today’s recent grads work in jobs that don’t require degrees. Eighty thousand of America’s bartenders have bachelor’s degrees.

The problem is that high schools suck so badly that businesses have to require a college degree in order to get employees who are as educated at what used to be considered a high school level. Don’t blame business, they’re just doing the best with the materials they’re given.

Read it.

Hawaii may figure prominently when the Supreme Court this fall considers a case where plaintiffs are seeking to have legislative districts drawn based on a count of eligible voters rather than the total number of residents.

That’s because for nearly half a century, the Aloha State has had the high court’s permission to ignore transients when drawing its political maps. While the Constitution requires equal population among legislative districts, a 1966 opinion said that Hawaii’s “special population problems” justified using registered voters as the baseline.

The problem, as Hawaii saw it, was the large concentration of military facilities on Oahu. Counting tens of thousands of service members would distort the electoral maps by awarding legislative seats to military bases.

I have no problem with that.

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We found, for all three major minority groups,   that the best places were neither the most liberal in their attitudes nor had the most generous welfare programs. Instead they were located primarily in regions that have experienced broad-based economic growth, have low housing costs, and limited regulation. In other words, no matter how much people like Bill de Blasio talk about the commitment to racial and class justice, the realities on the ground turn out to be quite different than he might imagine.

Read it.

As somebody who lives in the the flatlands over the mountains from Beverly Hills, I’m struck by how many people, such as this Guardian reporter, assume unthinkingly that Beverly Hills residents and immigrants are antonyms.

But the Census Bureau reports that 37.4% of the residents of Beverly Hills are foreign born.

I guess we’re all supposed to have been programmed to believe that immigrants are necessarily “huddled masses,” which doesn’t fit well in our heads with living large in Beverly Hills.

But if you grew up anywhere within 20 miles of Beverly Hills, you’d have started noticing the place filling up with immigrants right after OPEC raised oil prices in 1973. Persians and Arabs who had gotten rich back home — let’s not ask how — were appearing in large numbers by 40 years ago. Rodeo Drive leapt up into the stratosphere of luxury with some of the impetus coming from crazy shopkeepers like new immigrant Bijan of Beverly Hills.

It’s really hard to be aware of patterns that your ideology doesn’t encourage you to regard.

Read it.

Obviously, we don’t give one vote to one person — or at least not yet we don’t let anybody who sneaks into the country vote. But we typically count them for drawing up state legislator and House districts, which seems like an oversight from the Warren Court’s era of low immigration.

…

The court has never resolved whether voting districts should have the same number of people, or the same number of eligible voters. Counting all people amplifies the voting power of places with large numbers of residents who cannot vote legally, including immigrants who are here legally but are not citizens, illegal immigrants, children and prisoners. Those places tend to be urban and to vote Democratic.

…

Also, there are several potential intermediate levels between counting everybody, whether here legally or illegally, and counting only eligible voters. For example, as Judge Posner suggests, you could count all voting age American citizens (including felons who have lost their voting rights since they are still our fellow American citizens). Or you could count legal immigrants as well.

The bottom line is that the current system of counting illegal immigrants is absurd, while other alternatives are least arguable.

Read it.

There is nothing new between the covers.

The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

Read it.

This is fascinating.

Read it.

In some countries, including the United States and Japan, people who have trained at great length and expense to be researchers confront a dwindling number of academic jobs, and an industrial sector unable to take up the slack. Supply has outstripped demand and, although few PhD holders end up unemployed, it is not clear that spending years securing this high-level qualification is worth it for a job as, for example, a high-school teacher. In other countries, such as China and India, the economies are developing fast enough to use all the PhDs they can crank out, and more — but the quality of the graduates is not consistent. Only a few nations, including Germany, are successfully tackling the problem by redefining the PhD as training for high-level positions in careers outside academia.

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So why would more Americans not drive diesels? From the European perspective, it would suit the driving style of the States perfectly, with lots of relaxed muscle available at low rpms to cruise vast interstate networks that are the envy of the world. Better mileage means fewer fill-ups, and the on-paper improvements in fuel economy would, overnight, take the US fleet one massive step toward President Obama’s targeted 54.5 mpg national average by 2025. Simply stated, diesel should “work” in the US.

1. Diesel fuel is sufficiently more expensive than gasoline that the added mileage doesn’t save you anything.

But with more diesel purchasers, the laws of the marketplace would kick in, bringing prices into greater alignment.

Fine. You first. I knew an early adopter once. He died.

2. Gasoline is everywhere, diesel not so much.

Ask me a hard one.

Read it.

You’re looking at a world of gameplay, of simulated war, fought by an army of paintball enthusiasts who spend their weekends shooting one another with gelatin shells of colored dye. Paintball is an industry of equipment suppliers who rely on amateurs to design and build the playing fields. Typically, a few friends with a Bobcat construct a combat stage by incorporating whatever materials remain on the land from its previous use, and whatever can be salvaged nearby. Old agricultural machines, remnants of fallen buildings, shipping containers, cable spools, loading pallets, railroad ties, junked cars, concrete fittings, PVC pipes, obsolete communication towers: The detritus of an industrial century is pushed to the urban margins to create apocalyptic playgrounds. Collectively, these sites represent a range of military conflicts at home and abroad, past, present and future.

It takes some imagination to read these free-form interpretations of castles, spaceships, and Islamic villages. But for the 9 million players that use them, all that’s needed is the symbolic form, a suggestion of meaning. Over the years, the sites take on new complexities, as buildings are layered with patchwork repairs and surfaces acquire an abstract expressionist patina of exploded pigment. They hold the memories of battles won and lost, testifying to the power of personal narrative. We were here then. That’s where I caught them. Authentic hauntings.

Read it.

The Open Source Seed Initiative wants to make carrot seeds more like software. That may seem like an odd project, but consider this: It’s currently possible to patent plants with certain traits, whether they are created through traditional breeding or biotech modification. Worried that the trend of increasingly vague, aggressively enforced patents was discouraging innovation, a group of scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison got together in 2012 with the goal of producing and distributing seeds outside of the conventional intellectual property framework—much in the same way that the open source Linux operating system exists in parallel with Microsoft Windows and iOS, or the anyone-can-edit resource Wikipedia competes with Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The situation is so bad that if a farmer buys seed from, say, Monsanto and raises a crop, that farmer cann0t use that seed to plant another crop because Monsanto can (and will) sue his ass off for patent infringement. Patent and copyright are relics of statism past that need to be excised from our polity if we don’t want progress to come grinding to a halt.

Read it.

Now, there‘s a scary thought.

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Modern biotechnology could put dairy farms out of business. And not just dairy, but lots of other farms as well, including those that produce meat, leather, and even staple starches. In fact, the amount of land devoted to agriculture could shrink by 80 percent in the next few decades.

Modern agribusiness has converted traditional farming into something that resembles a factory without walls or a roof as it is possible to get. It’s only a matter of time and technology  before they close the circle.

Read it.

Judging from current trends, we can expect to hear, sometime in the next five years, than he has blown himself up in Ramadi or Fallujah.

Read it.

Think it’s hard to find a place to charge your smartphone at the airport? Try finding a power outlet in the ocean.

Imagine you’re a robotic Navy mini-sub whose batteries are running low after a long mission monitoring, say, traffic around Chinese artificial islands in the South Pacific. Currently, you’d have to recharge at a land base or a surface ship. The former keeps you close to friendly shores while the latter gives away your presence. But if Navy program manager Mike Wardlaw makes it work, sometime in the early 2020s the Navy will start deploying unmanned, underwater pods where robots can recharge undetected — and securely upload the intelligence they’ve gathered to Navy networks.

Read it.

No doubt soon to be an app on the Apple Watch.

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It took a while—the first class graduated in 2009—but today the American College of the Building Arts (ACBA) is the only school in the United States to offer a bachelor’s degree in traditional building trades.

Which, of course, completely inverts the basic function of a university degree, as it grew from medieval roots. But nobody cares about history these days, except to plunder it for clever-sounding words that they can ‘repurpose’ to serve their own agenda.

David Warren has some interesting things to say.

My own development as a political thinker was tragically stunted by employment as a political pundit. No class of writers knows less about politics than they. In order to write at all in this genre, one must pretend to take seriously an entire political order that is preposterous, peopled by the mentally and emotionally disturbed, and ruled by power-hungry maniacs, until one’s own last mooring is shot. The madness is compounded by complete ignorance of what is going on, since no one not himself up to his ears in the actual exercise of political power can possibly understand what is in play. And, those up to their ears are drowning.

…

Where to the old Christian view, rights followed from duties in the same man, to our post-Christian view the arbitrary rights of one man translate to duties for unaccounted others. (My right to a free lunch translates to your duty to pay for it, &c.) In this sense, all modern political thinking is in its nature totalitarian.

Read it.

One-quarter of people with healthcare coverage are paying so much for deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses that they are considered underinsured, according to a new study.

So, in Crustian, ‘underinsured’ means ‘less insurance than we think they ought to have’. Good to know.

I thought that Obamacare was going to fix that?

Like the ‘poor’, the ‘underinsured’ we have always with us.

Read it.

Robots are nothing new. Industrial robots have been employed in manufacturing for about as long as polyester has been belabored in fashion. But unlike synthetic fibers, synthetic laborers have gotten much better over time. Digital employees consistently become cheaper, smarter, and more prevalent with each doubling of the number of transistors crammed into microprocessors. At their most salient, robots look a lot more like Kiva’s dumb and deferent deliverybots shuttling packages along Amazon warehouse floors than Neill Blomkamp’s charming CHAPPiE. But let’s not be crass humanoid supremacists, here. Digital workers are much more than mere metal reflections of ourselves.

My job, no; I have yet to see a robot that can create a star-schema data model from the nebulous blatherings of business users.

Your job — who knows?

Read it.

Aside, of course, from the plain fact that God intended you to do so.

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Great. Let the Muslims fight each other for a change.

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The Watch has major in-practice downsides though, the mother of which I’ll call The Douchebag Factor. By virtue of the product’s newness, and its cost, it’s hard to wear the Apple Watch in public without feeling like that girl, the designer-handbag girl, the “I spent $400 to read my texts three seconds sooner” girl. The Watch is still rare enough to earn glances and even questions on the subway, and I found it hard to not be constantly aware of it shouting “I am a shameless consumer!” from my wrist.

The Douchebag Factor is equally prominent in social settings, even if you have the kind of friends who are sympathetic to one’s need to test drive new gadgetry over beers. Because the Apple Watch inherently combines two of the rudest things you can do among friends—check your watch and look at your phone—and suggests that you do them incessantly.

Anything that gets the SWPLs bickering with each other has my support. (The fact that I own Apple stock has absolutely nothing to do with it, of course.)

Read it.

Wisdom. Attend.

People will not obey laws that they think are stupid. Prohibition was the rub-your-nose-in-it proof of that. Multiplying bad laws merely brings law as a concept into disrepute, and undermines the Rule of Law that we all depend on.

Kathy Shaidle is surprised that the Peter Pan Party refuses to grow up.

Meanwhile, south of the border: Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are many things, good and bad, but she isn’t “stupid” and he isn’t “loud.” But to leftists, right-wingers are all stupid and loud, and Coulter and Limbaugh are the only ones whose names they know. Think of the three-year-old who points at every animal and yells “moo!”

…

For almost 25 years, five days a week for three hours a day, Rush Limbaugh has monologued, mostly guest-less, on live radio to a national audience. Think about it: If he doesn’t really “believe that stuff,” then he’s arguably more deserving of that $40 million a year because let’s see you do that.

These scoffers think their reflexive, paranoid “dot connecting” makes them sound worldly, when just the opposite is true. Remember: Conspiracy theories are History for stupid people.

‘It was long ago observed that the plain people, under democracy, never vote for anything, but always against something. The fact explains, in large measure, the tendency of democratic states to pass over statesmen of genuine imagination and sound ability in favor of colorless mediocrities.’

— H. L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy

Read it.

I’ve decided I’m going to call myself an “Islamoskeptic,” because it neatly combines two left-wing, debate-stifling epithets at one stroke. If you criticize Islam, you’re an “Islamophobe”—the moral equivalent of a racist, so shut up we don’t have to listen to you any more. And if you align at all with climate skepticism and criticize any aspect of climate change orthodoxy, you’re met with the shutdown term of “science denier.” Both terms represent gross abuses of reason.

Read it.

And heed it.

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Courtesy of Bloomberg, the world gets an idea of what the retail from-the-installer price of the battery might look like (rather than the wholesale price the ‘leccy car maker announced last week).

The Elon Musk-led system seller SolarCity, Bloomberg reports, will ship an installed 10 kWh Powerwall for US$7,140 (ouch outright purchase) or $US5,000 plus a nine-year lease.

To match a 16 kW generator that sells in the US for just US$3,699, the reporter works out, would require around US$45,000 worth of Powerwalls on the lease deal.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance doesn’t imagine the Powerwall making a dent in European markets like Germany, where the economics of solar power are well-understood. Its take is that “the economics of an average home with rooftop solar are not significantly enhanced by including the Tesla battery”.

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Yeah, no surprises there.

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Here’s where it gets really weird — if you’re a stickler for logical consistency. Islamists are well-known for their condemnation and punishment of homosexuality. But it is safe to say that persons who are sympathetic to Islam and willing to overlook such “peccadillos” as the stoning to death of queers (and unfaithful female spouses) constitute a large fraction of the Gaystapo.

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Funny how that works.

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This ought to come as no surprise. ‘Diversity’ is a code-word for ‘people not like us’, and most people (‘progressive’ mythology to the contrary notwithstanding) don’t really want to live near people that are greatly different from themselves. Even for SWPLs, a neighborhood full of ‘them’ is a nice place to visit but they wouldn’t (truth be told) want to live there.

Tim Urban chronicles another chapter in the ongoing saga of the Special Snowflakes.

I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group—I call them Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies, or GYPSYs.  A GYPSY is a unique brand of yuppie, one who thinks they are the main character of a very special story.

Read it.

Good.

Ordinarily Wiley Miller is a dependable Voice of the Crust but every now and then it apparently gets too much.

Read it.

Computers are getting smarter and stronger while employees, with their health insurance, pensions, and vacation time are becoming increasingly expensive. The writing is on the wall; plenty of jobs, at least as performed by humans, aren’t long for this world.

Of course, no one knows exactly how automation will shake up the worker economy, but there will almost certainly be winners and losers. IT and creative jobs will proliferate while administrative, factory, and service employment will largely go the way of the dodo.

And for labor unions, that may very well mean that the bell tolls for thee. While unions have generally been in decline for some time, automation may prove to be the proverbial dagger through the heart.

Labor unions are predicated on a situation where workers have no economic leverage because they are in jobs that anybody who is literate and numerate and has an above-room-temperature IQ can do, so the supply always vastly exceeds the demand. Unions attempt to compensate for a lack of economic power by involving political power, be it strikes, picketing, thug violence, or governmental capture. Robots don’t vote and they always do what they’re told; no workers to organize, no union. It’s just that simple.

Of course, unions will attempt to ‘organize’ the workers who are left, but it’s questionable how effective that would be. Despite the attempts by tech firms to import cheap coders from overseas, most ‘knowledge workers’ don’t see themselves and commodity labor — somebody can’t just walk in off the street and after a week’s training do a web site or a smartphone app (although plenty have tried). Thus unions have focused on the remaining commodity labor ares, such as services, government employees, and (sadly, but it’s true) education. It will be interesting to see how long that long retreat can be maintained.

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Last week, ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s and Colorado brewer New Belgium announced they would collaborate to create a new Salted Caramel Brownie Brown Ale, billed as “an ice cream infused craft beer.”

A more SWPL product it’s hard to imagine.

Rezd it.

I don’t doubt it a bit.

‘Democracy, alas, is also a form of theology, and shows all the immemorial stigmata. Confounded by uncomfortable facts, it invariably tries to dispose of them by appeals to the higher sentiments of the human heart. An anti-democrat is not merely mistaken; he is also wicked, and the more plausible he is the more wicked he becomes.’

— H. L. Mencken

Megan McArdle shares some history.

My grandfather worked as a grocery boy until he was 26 years old. He married my grandmother on Thanksgiving because that was the only day he could get off. Their honeymoon consisted of a weekend visiting relatives , during which they shared their nuptial bed with their host’s toddler. They came home to a room in his parents’ house—for which they paid monthly rent. Every time I hear that marriage is collapsing because the economy is so bad, I think of their story.

By the standards of today, my grandparents were living in wrenching poverty. Some of this, of course, involves technologies that didn’t exist—as a young couple in the 1930s my grandparents had less access to health care than the most  neglected homeless person in modern America, simply because most of the treatments we now have had not yet been invented. That is not the whole story, however. Many of the things we now have already existed; my grandparents simply couldn’t afford them.  With some exceptions, such as microwave ovens and computers, most of the modern miracles that transformed 20^th century domestic life already existed in some form by 1939. But they were out of the financial reach of most people.

If America today discovered a young couple where the husband had to drop out of high school to help his father clean tons of unsold, rotted produce out of their farm’s silos, and now worked a low-wage, low-skilled job, was living in a single room with no central heating and a single bathroom to share for two families, who had no refrigerator and scrubbed their clothes by hand in a washtub, who had serious conversations in low voices over whether they should replace or mend torn clothes, who had to share a single elderly vehicle or make the eight-mile walk to town  … that family would be the subject of a three-part Pulitzer prizewinning series on Poverty in America.