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Can’t say that  I mind.

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Some of the anti-glutenists argue that we haven’t eaten wheat for long enough to adapt to it as a species. Agriculture began just 12,000 years ago, not enough time for our bodies, which evolved over millions of years, primarily in Africa, to adjust. According to this theory, we’re intrinsically hunter-gatherers, not bread-eaters. If exposed to gluten, some of us will develop celiac disease or gluten intolerance, or we’ll simply feel lousy.

Most of these assertions, however, are contradicted by significant evidence, and distract us from our actual problem: an immune system that has become overly sensitive.

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Yet another attempt to use technology to perform an end run around evolution.

Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

A general assumption of the moderate conventional wisdom over the last half century is that average black performance is dragged down by specific impediments, such as poverty, crime, culture of poverty, parental taciturnity, lead paint, or whatever. One would therefore expect blacks without those impediments to score equal with whites.

But a close inspection of the social science data suggests that the world doesn’t really look like that. For example, above is the 2013 federal National Assessment of Educational Progress scores for 12th graders in Reading. Blacks who are the children of college graduates average 274, which is the same as whites who are the children of high school dropouts.

‘Progressives’ are all about science, except when it disagrees with their preconceived notions, in which case RACIST!

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Well, think about it.

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On this day in 1928 damned near every country in the world signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, promising to eat Raisin Bran for breakfast ‘outlawing war as an instrument of national policy.

And, of course, since that time we haven’t had any wars. Way to go, world.

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After the trial, the couple, who own the post office in Llangernyw, near Abergele, both said they would do the same thing again. Mr Baines, 44 said: “I wouldn’t let them get away next time.”

His wife, 43, added: “I hit one of them with the bat then my husband took it from me. I just wish I’d hit him harder.”

Even Brits can act like Americans when the chips are down.

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People silently struggle from all kinds of terrible things. They suffer from depression, ambition, substance abuse, and pretension. They suffer from family tragedy, Ivy-League educations, and self-loathing. They suffer from failing marriages, physical pain, and publishing. The good thing about politeness is that you can treat these people exactly the same. And then wait to see what happens. You don’t have to have an opinion. You don’t need to make a judgment. I know that doesn’t sound like liberation, because we live and work in an opinion-based economy. But it is. Not having an opinion means not having an obligation. And not being obligated is one of the sweetest of life’s riches.

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Even the most conservative estimates predict that 15–40% of living species will be effectively extinct by 2050 as a result of climate change, habitat loss and other consequences of human activities. In the face of such drastic losses, scientists are debating the pros and cons of various, and often controversial, interventions. These include moving populations to help track hospitable habitats, and reinstating keystone species — those that have a large effect on ecosystem structure and function, such as top-level predators — into areas where they have long been absent. Even the revival of species that have recently gone extinct is being explored.

So far, an increasingly viable (and potentially less risky) option, which we call facilitated adaptation, has been little discussed. It would involve rescuing a target population or species by endowing it with adaptive alleles, or gene variants, using genetic engineering.

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Gee, I wonder why?

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Is there a more Crustian name than Brent Scowcroft? Maybe Strobe Talbot. Or Stansfield Turner.

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Food has replaced music at the heart of the cultural conversation for so many, and I wonder if it’s because food and dining still offer true scarcity whereas music is so freely available everywhere that it’s become a poor signaling mechanism for status and taste. If you’ve eaten at Noma, you’ve had an experience a very tiny fraction of the world will be lucky enough to experience, whereas if you name any musical artist, I can likely find their music and be listening to it within a few mouse clicks. Legally, too, which removes even more of the caché that came with illicit downloading, the thrill of being a digital bootlegger.

Once, it felt like watching music videos on MTV was a form of rebellion in plain sight. Nowadays, the channel doesn’t play any music videos. Instead, we have dozens of food and cooking shows, even entire channels like The Food Network dedicated to the topic. Chefs have become elevated to the status of master craftsmen, with names that have risen above the status of their restaurants, and diners revere someone like Jiro of Jiro Dreams of Sushi fame the way a previous generation worshipped the guitar sound of a rock god like Jimi Hendrix.

The food scene today offers a seemingly never-ending supply of scarce experiences, ingredients, and dishes. Cronuts you have to wait in line for a few hours to get your hands on. Pop-up restaurants that serve only on a few nights a week for a few weeks, then disappear forever. Restaurants that you have to sacrifice a goat to just to get a reservation, and then they’ll actually take that goat you killed and prepare your entire dinner from it, nose to tail. A white truffle add-on that tacks $80 on to a single piece of cured hamachi, and oh, the truffle is only available for four weeks a year and came over on a gondola from Alba, Italy, and the hamachi is one of the last of three members of its species so you know, you should probably try it before…oops, sorry, the chef says someone just ordered the last of it. Yep, it’s that couple at the corner table, and that’s the last plate that she’s Instagramming right now.

Foodies are the new Cool Kids, or want to be.

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Not to mention everyone else … but we’ve learned not to expect miracles from Democrites.

Hey, GOP primary losers, you better get out there fast with a real immigration plan, because right now you are losing to Donald Trump and that makes you the epitome of loserdom. But unlike Trump, you should be serious about ending the illegal immigration nightmare. His supporters are. Hell, his opponents are, too. Yet some of you haven’t just flirted with amnesty – Rubio tried yet couldn’t score, but donor class puffball Jeb Bush has gotten to third base with amnesty and is trying to round home.

Which pretty much reflects my thoughts on the subject.

HOWEVER, there are other viewpoints — one such is that of David Henderson, who (as with the other George Mason University economists that I follow) is usually pretty sound on most issues. I would recommend that you read it in order to have a good grasp of both sides of the question.

Read it.

Maybe they know something we don’t.

We have a similar system in this country — the women are from HR, and promise that they’ll clean out your cubicle for you once they’ve escorted you from the building.

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“Income inequality” is one of the populist issues du jour, even if there is a certain logical incoherence in believing that the growing income of rich people is somehow necessarily bad for poor people.

A new economic study suggests that, actually, we can calculate when a billionaire’s riches harm the poor and when they’re helpful. The “bad” billionaires aren’t the ones who flood the marketplace with cheap goods and jobs that some folks want to blame for all our ills. Those billionaires help the poor (by providing cheap goods and jobs, obviously). It’s the billionaires who get and keep their riches because of their connections to the government and through crony capitalism who create the most harmful consequences of income inequality.

It is diverting to speculate why such care is devoted to the breeding of dogs and horses while the human race prefers to reproduce itself in a largely indiscriminate and haphazard fashion.

— Randolph Spencer-Churchill

Well, Margaret Sanger did what she could….

Glenn Harlan Reynolds (The Instapundit) points out what markets are good — and not good — for.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently tweeted: “The free-market system lets you notice the flaws and hides its benefits. All other systems hide the flaws and show the benefits.”

This drew a response: “The most valuable property of the price mechanism is as a reliable mechanism for delivering bad news.” These two statements explain a lot about why socialist systems fail pretty much everywhere but get pretty good press, while capitalism has delivered truly astounding results but is constantly besieged by detractors.

That’s it, in nutshell.

At the same time, markets deliver the bad news whether you want to hear it or not, but delivering the bad news is not a sign of failure, it is a characteristic of systems that work. When you stub your toe, the neurons in between your foot and your head don’t try to figure out ways not to send the news to your brain. If they did, you’d trip a lot more often. Likewise, in a market, bad decisions show up pretty rapidly: Build a car that nobody wants, and you’re stuck with a bunch of expensive unsold cars; invest in new technologies that don’t work, and you lose a lot of money and have nothing to show for it. These painful consequences mean that people are pretty careful in their investments, at least so long as they’re investing their own money.

Bureaucrats in government do  the opposite, trying to keep their bosses from discovering their mistakes.

Which is why it’s pretty much always a mistake to put government employees in charge of anything.

Markets make people better off, but they don’t provide sufficient opportunities for politicians to extract bribes and intellectuals to feel better about themselves. This explains why they’re unpopular with politicians and intellectuals. The real question is why anyone else listens to the self-interested claims of politicians and intellectuals. Maybe because the subject of what works and what doesn’t in economics is mostly written by journalists?

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Read it.

Come to think of it, most bachelors’ degrees these days are a form of microcredential.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, draws a distinction.

A Typical Entrepreneur: Someone who, spotting exploitable profit opportunities – that is, spotting currently existing but exploitable failures of the market to operate as productively as possible – puts his or her own money where his or her mouth is to take productive and voluntary actions that make the market operate better than before….

An All-Too-Typical Academic: Someone who, unduly impressed by his or her own academic studies and methods, concludes that the market does not work in reality as well as his or her academic studies and ruminations suggest that it should work.  This academic, however, is both too incompetent and too cowardly to act in the real world by staking something of his or her own.  He or she instead wishes to convince people with guns – government officials – to force other people to take his or her findings seriously….

‘My wife and I listen to a lot of Public Radio, because we’re middle-aged white people living in California.’

— Merlin Mann

Think about that for a bit.

Taki does the Trump.

What I particularly like about Trump is the way he’s hated by the media. He doesn’t take any of their crap, and when misquoted, which he is a lot, he calls them names not fit to print to their face. This is the way it should be. When Vicky Ward, a Vanity Fair writer who has an acid pen and uses her blond looks as an added attraction, did a hatchet job on him, Trump replied in kind. He called her a bitch, a liar, and ugly to boot. The great and the good were horrified. I thought he hit the nail right on the head. The other thing that has the hacks really peed off is the fact that The Donald tells it like it is when it comes to immigration and crime. Phony writers for the Times and other such tendentious organizations ignore blue-collar workers who have not graduated from Ivy League schools. The latter love Trump, and the less educated they are, the more sense they make in liking him. We can’t all live in ritzy suburbs and slick Park Avenue apartment buildings like Times people, whose only contact with immigrants is during the 6 o’clock news. At the same time, Trump’s outrageous shtick and his camera-hogging antics endear him to those uninvited to chic parties in New York and Washington. The Donald blew it with McCain—what’s a pilot supposed to do when shot down, act Japanese and go down in flames?—but otherwise he’s done a great job annoying the rest of the crowded Republican presidential field.

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An Illinois man cuffed for suspected theft of a sex toy, and who told cops he had “no idea” how a pink Euphoria G-Spot Delight vibrator came to be in his boxer shorts, later recalled quite clearly that he didn’t much like the US prez when he “stripped completely naked” in his cell, making “derogatory comments about President Obama”, and signing his Miranda Rights consent form with the phrase “Obama is a criminal”.

Yeah, we’ve all been there.

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And all of it will be subsidized and micromanaged by the government.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Don’t like government dietary guidelines? Wait a year or five and they’ll change.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Australians have been warned to get their dietary act together, after a survey revealed a growing and alarming trend for junk food excess.

According to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), 40,000+ respondents to its Healthy Diet Score Survey – “a scientifically validated survey which assesses people’s diet quality against the Australian Dietary Guidelines” – scored an average 61 out of 100.

“Discretionary food, or junk food, intake was found to be three-times higher than the recommended daily limit,” CSIRO notes.

Gotta love Australians.

Mark Bauerlein is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

IN the coming weeks, two million Americans will earn a bachelor’s degree and either join the work force or head to graduate school. They will be joyous that day, and they will remember fondly the schools they attended. But as this unique chapter of life closes and they reflect on campus events, one primary part of higher education will fall low on the ladder of meaningful contacts: the professors.

That’s what students say. Oh, they’re quite content with their teachers; after all, most students receive sure approval. In 1960, only 15 percent of grades were in the “A” range, but now the rate is 43 percent, making “A” the most common grade by far.

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And have been as far back as I can remember. Really, this is news?

Bernie Sanders has always caucused with Democrats, and they are perfectly comfortable with him. He’s still a long shot for the Democratic nomination, but he is rising in the polls. If there is a distinction between him and President Barack Obama on anything major, what is it? Both pushed “universal health care.” Both oppose the Keystone pipeline. Both believe taxes should be raised on “rich” people. Both believe in the redistribution of income. Obama wants two years of “free” community college. Sanders wants to make college “free” altogether. Both attack “corporate greed” and both belong to the school of economics that says, “you didn’t build that.”

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The Federal minimum wage has been frozen at $3.35 an hour for six years. In some states, it now compares unfavorably even with welfare benefits available without working. It’s no wonder then that Edward Kennedy, the new chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, is being pressed by organized labor to battle for an increase.

No wonder, but still a mistake. Anyone working in America surely deserves a better living standard than can be managed on $3.35 an hour. But there’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed. Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market. A far better way to help them would be to subsidize their wages or – better yet – help them acquire the skills needed to earn more on their own.

An increase in the minimum wage to, say, $4.35 would restore the purchasing power of bottom-tier wages. It would also permit a minimum-wage breadwinner to earn almost enough to keep a family of three above the official poverty line. There are catches, however. It would increase employers’ incentives to evade the law, expanding the underground economy. More important, it would increase unemployment: Raise the legal minimum price of labor above the productivity of the least skilled workers and fewer will be hired.

As recently as 1987, the New York Times was on the right side of the minimum wage question.

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Something I’d never thought to see, an article in favor of Joe Biden.

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In Thursday’s Republican debate, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will be the antiunion candidate. That will be the media snark. He signed (unenthusiastically) a right-to-work bill that applies to his state’s private-sector workers. He promoted (very enthusiastically) a law that all but ended collective bargaining for its public-sector workers.

Critics will ask: What does this have to do with being president? Unfortunately, everything.

Unions may not matter much in American workplaces anymore but unions represent the main political obstacle to just about every kind of reform: School choice. Entitlements. Pensions. Health care.

Even causes that wouldn’t seem union business prompt union opposition. Labor has been the chief obstacle to overhauling California’s notorious Environmental Quality Act—a reform supported by Democrats and environmentalists—because unions like using the law’s excessive paperwork burdens to threaten projects important to employers.

Big labor is behind a New Jersey state senator’s proposal last week for a trillion-dollar federal bailout of state and local government pensions—pensions that most federal taxpayers who would be paying for the bailout can only dream about.

Big labor is behind $15 minimum-wage proposals in major cities—a high-risk experiment for low-skilled workers, who may find themselves without jobs. But it will be a winner for organized labor. Not only will it raise costs for nonunion businesses. In Los Angeles, unions seek their own exemption so they can conspire with employers to substitute untaxed benefits for taxable wages, which strengthens the union’s hold on workers while shifting costs to other taxpayers.

As Miles Kimball, a University of Michigan economist who calls himself a “supply-side liberal,” wrote on his blog a couple of years ago: “Most unions are middle-class organizations that in their political activities are ready and willing to sacrifice the interests of the poor to benefit their members and their leaders.”

An Actual Zimbabwean intrudes a little reality into the Narrative.

Did Cecil live near your place in Zimbabwe?

Cecil who? I wondered. When I turned on the news and discovered that the messages were about a lion killed by an American dentist, the village boy inside me instinctively cheered: One lion fewer to menace families like mine.

My excitement was doused when I realized that the lion killer was being painted as the villain. I faced the starkest cultural contradiction I’d experienced during my five years studying in the United States.

Did all those Americans signing petitions understand that lions actually kill people? That all the talk about Cecil being “beloved” or a “local favorite” was media hype? Did Jimmy Kimmel choke up because Cecil was murdered or because he confused him with Simba from “The Lion King”?

In my village in Zimbabwe, surrounded by wildlife conservation areas, no lion has ever been beloved, or granted an affectionate nickname. They are objects of terror.

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Note that the top of the list is Jeb Bush at $19 million, about what Bill & Hillary make in a year.

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When Congress passes laws concerning health care, intentions and results do not always match up. Two cases in point are the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009 (HITECH). Understanding what happened to these two statutes as they passed from Congress to the reg writers and administrators might give us better insight into how we should expect the Affordable Care Act to play out.

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Ever since some alarmist came up with the economically nonsensical term peak oil, we’ve been inundated with peak this, that, and the other thing. There’s peak helium. How about peak phosphorus?

More recently, the term has been twisted from a supply issue to a demand issue, such as peak smart phone. And now, peak car. Yet, reading about peak car, the Antiplanner can’t help but feeling that this is neither a supply nor a demand issue but more wishful thinking on the part of city officials who are doing their best to create auto-hostile environments.

Millennials don’t drive? It turns out that’s not true, just as it isn’t true that Millennials avoid the suburbs.

…

Never forget that mobility is an economic activity that generates economic benefits, so reducing mobility reduces those benefits. Despite what the urban planners claim, accessibility is no substitute for mobility, as mobility gives people access to more economic opportunities and competitive markets. We will reach peak car only when someone could invent a form of transportation that is faster, cheaper, and more convenient than driving, and the only likely such invention is the self-driving car.

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The most common tower crane used in construction today has a lifting capacity of some 12 to 20 tonnes. For quite a few construction projects in ancient history, this type of crane would be completely inadequate.

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BLUF: No.

With the traditional definition of money income, the CBO found that real median household income rose by just 15% from 1980 to 2010, similar to the Census Bureau’s estimate. But when they expanded the definition of income to include benefits and subtracted taxes, they found that the median household’s real income rose by 45%. Adjusting for household size boosted this gain to 53%.

And, again, even this more substantial rise probably represents a substantial underestimate of the increase in the real standard of living. The authorities arrive at their estimates by converting dollar incomes into a measure of real income by using a price index that reflects the changes in the prices of existing goods and services. But that price index does not reflect new products or improvements to existing goods and services.

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A new study looks specifically at how formal attire changes people’s thought processes. “Putting on formal clothes makes us feel powerful, and that changes the basic way we see the world,” says Abraham Rutchick, an author of the study and a professor of psychology at California State University, Northridge. Rutchick and his co-authors found that wearing clothing that’s more formal than usual makes people think more broadly and holistically, rather than narrowly and about fine-grained details. In psychological parlance, wearing a suit encourages people to use abstract processing more readily than concrete processing.

Another reason why coders shouldn’t wear suits.

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A primal connection exists between our brain and our gut. We often talk about a “gut feeling” when we meet someone for the first time. We’re told to “trust our gut instinct” when making a difficult decision or that it’s “gut check time” when faced with a situation that tests our nerve and determination. This mind-gut connection is not just metaphorical. Our brain and gut are connected by an extensive network of neurons and a highway of chemicals and hormones that constantly provide feedback about how hungry we are, whether or not we’re experiencing stress, or if we’ve ingested a disease-causing microbe. This information superhighway is called the brain-gut axis and it provides constant updates on the state of affairs at your two ends. That sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach after looking at your postholiday credit card bill is a vivid example of the brain-gut connection at work. You’re stressed and your gut knows it—immediately.

Read it. (PDF)

Any employer wishing to discriminate against black people need only see the name ‘Ta-Nehisi’ or ‘LaTrina’ on a resume to throw it in the trash can. Why do black people do this to themselves?

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In the hunt for potential RNAi candidate targets, one of the most coveted goals has been the prevention of virus packaging. In the cell, virus particles are made as individual entities and roam around at random until a signal is sent out for the parts to self-assemble into its infectious whole. For 30 years that signal has been known to be contained within the viral RNA. It was first found in herpes and cytomegalovirus, called the alpha sequence. Since then, other genetic elements – known as packaging signals – have been found in other viral families including coronaviruses, hepatitis viruses, and HIV.

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Let that be a lesson to us all. (Don’t mess with Texas armadillos….)