Steve Sailer does an extended Fisking of an article in the New York Times by a typical SWPL academic.

Granted that New York Times articles are low-hanging fruit, it’s still a great example of the art. Recommended.

Read it. Futher discussion of the way that the Peter Pan Party, journalist strain, mistake their fantasies for the real world.

Urban theorists, such as Peter Katz, insist that millennials (the generation born after 1983) have little interest in “returning to the cul-de-sacs of their teenage years.” Manhattanite Leigh Gallagher, author of “The Death of Suburbs,” asserts with certitude that “millennials hate the suburbs” and prefer more eco-friendly, singleton-dominated urban environments.

Such assessments thrill the likes of real estate speculators, such as Sam Zell, who welcomes “reurbanization” as an opportunity to cash in by housing a generation of Peter Pans in high-cost, tiny spaces unfit for couples and unthinkable for families. Others of a less-capitalistic mindset see in millennials a post-material generation, not buying homes and cars and, perhaps, not establishing families. Millennials, for example, are portrayed by the green magazine Gris as “a hero generation” – one that will march, willingly, even enthusiastically, to a downscaled and, theoretically, greener future.

In reality, these views reflect more fantasy than reality, as a host of surveys of millennials demonstrate. When asked – in a 2010 survey by Frank Magid and Associates – where would be their “ideal place to live,” more millennials identified suburbs than previous generations, including boomers. Another survey, published last year by the National Association of Homebuilders, found that 75 percent of millennials favor settling in a single-family house, 90 percent preferring the suburbs or even a more rural area but only 10 percent the urban core.

This, not surprisingly, is not what you read about regularly in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Young reporters, virtually all of whom live in dense, expensive places like New York or Washington, instinctually believe the world they know first-hand, the one in which they and their friends reside, epitomizes their generation. Most Americans, however, are not young, highly educated or likely to ever be Manhattan or Brooklyn residents. Indeed, only 20 percent of millennials live in urban core districts; nearly 90 percent of millennial growth in major metropolitan areas from 2000-10 occurred in the suburbs and exurbs.

Read it. The picture is of Yale, of course, with Harkness Tower in the distance.

Frank Bruni’s new book, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, argues that the college you attend doesn’t really matter so much. The coveted Ivy League—and the wider range of elite schools—have more applications than ever before, but Bruni recommends that anxious students and their status-obsessed parents caught up in the admissions madness should calm down and relax—the school you go to cannot define you.

And, of course, that’s not an argument anybody’s making. The school you go to opens — or closes — doors, and that can be of inestimable value.

Which is, of course, both trite and true. In life, you are what you make of each opportunity. Yet Bruni himself, an influential New York Times columnist and prominent member of the US elite, makes an argument that somewhat contradicts his own educational history. After all, he graduated from a top public institution—The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill—and an Ivy League graduate school—Columbia University.

Would he be where he is today if he had just chosen a college or graduate school at random?

Doubtful.

To Bruni’s credit, he does conduct some research to support his point. For example, he examined the American-born chief executives of the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 and noted that roughly 30 went to an Ivy League school or equally selective institution.

However, why stop at 100? Why not examine the entire Fortune 500? That is, in fact, what I did in my research (pdf), published two years ago. And in an extended analysis from 1996 to 2014, I uncovered that roughly 38% of Fortune 500 CEOs attended elite schools (see the paper for the full list) for the last two decades.

Of course, that depends on how many schools are on your list of ‘elite schools’. Still, I doubt if it’s more than 25, in which case that 38% looks pretty impressive.

Based on census and college data, I estimate that only about 2% to 5% of all US undergraduates went to one of these elite schools. That makes all these US elite groups well above what you would expect in the general population. And this doesn’t even include the percentage who went to a “non-elite” graduate school.

And that’s puts things in perspective. When 5% of your candidates wind up with 38% of the top slots, there’s something going on.

But among people similar to Bruni’s social and family circle, who appear fixated on which college to go to, perhaps their hunch is not wrong. This is likely because many of these people know that where they went to school opened doors for them, regardless of the quality of the education they received—and that is why they want their kids to have those same opportunities. As members of the US elite, they want their kids to at least match if not surpass them, to have an advantage in life, and to reap the enormous benefits that come with that privilege. As my research shows, if you want to become a member of the US elite, an elite school (or grad school) appears to improve your chances.

And that’s what it’s all about. This is especially the case in the academia cohort of the modern clerisy. It is a truth universally acknowledged that your chances of a tenure-track position are far greater at Midwestern State University if you graduated from Princeton than at Princeton if you graduated from Midwestern State University.

Fun exercise for the reader: Compute out what percentage of Supreme Court Justices graduated from just Harvard Law, Yale Law, Columbia Law, or Stanford Law.

Read it.

Put all this together, and we can start to see why many people think a big shift is about to come in the impact of computing and technology on our daily lives. Computers have got dramatically more powerful and become so cheap that they are effectively ubiquitous. So have the sensors they use to monitor the physical world. The software they run has improved dramatically too. We are, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue, on the verge of a new industrial revolution, one which will have as much impact on the world as the first one. Whole categories of work will be transformed by the power of computing, and in particular by the impact of robots.

…

Frey and Osborne’s conclusion is stark. In the next two decades, 47 per cent of employment is ‘in the high-risk category’, meaning it is ‘potentially automatable’. Interestingly, though not especially cheeringly, it is mainly less well-paid workers who are most at risk. Recent decades have seen a polarisation in the job market, with increased employment at the top and bottom of the pay distribution, and a squeeze on middle incomes. ‘Rather than reducing the demand for middle-income occupations, which has been the pattern over the past decades, our model predicts that computerisation will mainly substitute for low-skill and low-wage jobs in the near future. By contrast, high-skill and high-wage occupations are the least susceptible to computer capital.’ So the poor will be hurt, the middle will do slightly better than it has been doing, and the rich – surprise! – will be fine.

Betty Friedan (you remember her, right?) discusses ‘climate change’ — in 1958.

As Ewing and Donn read the evidence, an Ice Age will result from a slow warming and rising of the ocean that is now taking place. They believe that this ocean flood — which may submerge large coastal areas of the eastern United States and western Europe — is going to melt the ice sheet which has covered the Arctic Ocean through all recorded history. Calculations based on the independent observations of other scientists indicate this melting could begin, within roughly one hundred years.

It is this melting of Arctic ice which Ewing and Donn believe will set off another Ice Age on earth. They predict that it will cause great snows to fall in the north — perennial unmelting snows which the world has not seen since the last Ice Age thousands of years ago. These snows will make the Arctic glaciers grow again, until their towering height forces them forward. The advance south will be slow, but if it follows the route of previous ice ages, it will encase in ice large parts of North America and Europe. It would, of course, take many centuries for that wall of ice to reach New York and Chicago, London and Paris. But its coming is an inevitable consequence of the cycle which Ewing and Donn believe is now taking place.

So ‘global warming’ will lead to a new Ice Age. Who knew?

Of course, Betty Friedan has moved on since than and so has the rest of the ‘progressive movement’, but this certainly accounts for all of the AlGore-come-to-town blizzards we’ve been seeing.

Just sayin’.

Read it.

“It would be transformative if everybody voted,” he said. “That would counter money more than anything.”

No, it wouldn’t, not really. Well, first of all, let’s backtrack to the idea. Mandatory voting is a violation of our civil rights, just as denying a citizen a right to vote is a violation. Casting a vote is speech. It is showing support or opposition to a candidate or proposal. Making voting mandatory means voting is no longer a right. It’s an obligation. It’s forced speech. If we were forced to attend a church, but had a choice of several churches, we would still (most of us, anyway) recognize that this is a violation of our freedom to decline to practice religion at all. Not voting isn’t just an expression of apathy. It’s also a form of protest.

One of the purposes of not voting is to express the notion that ‘none of the above are correct’. If they would add that choice to every ballot, then my objections to mandatory voting would shrink amazingly. (But still not make them go away. The legitimate functions of government all involve making one not do something. Every time the government attempts to make one actually do something is an usurpation.)

Read it.

Some would quote Ms Hillary, ‘At this point, what difference does it make?’, but not me. I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist.

It’s important to keep in mind the distinction between inequality and poverty.  To confuse the two (as is common today) risks addressing the wrong malady.  Just as we do not blame a cancer victim’s suffering on an unequal distribution of good health – that is, just as we recognize that a cancer victim’s illness is not caused by the good health of others and cannot be cured by making healthy people less healthy – we should recognize that a poor person’s poverty is not caused by the prosperity of others and cannot be cured by making wealthy people less wealthy.  Indeed, recent research suggests that simply transferring more money to relatively poor people in rich societies does not provide much relief; poverty persists for reasons that run far more deeply than the fact that some people earn more income than do others.

The whole ‘inequality’ fetish is the perennial refuge of low-information people  who mistakenly believe that an economy is a zero-sum game, i.e. if X has more then Y necessarily has less.

I blame Rawls and the professors who make him required reading.

Read it.

In 1992, when The Man from Hope established a new standard for campaign trail empathy, there were no smartphones, no wireless activity wristbands, no life-tracking apps, no cloud. Bill Clinton felt our pain, but couldn’t do much about it. In contrast, today’s government caregivers have a vast new arsenal of tools at their disposal. They can feel our pain, aggregate it, analyze it, and implement policies that will reduce it by at least 10 percent. Or at least they can aspire to such grand ambitions.

Read it.

The great psychological advantage of conspiracy theories is that they explain the most disparate phenomena effortlessly and indubitably. They thus satisfy man’s intellectual longing to understand the world, but also, as importantly, man’s desire to be superior in his understanding to his fellows. To have penetrated the mystery of things is an achievement not given to everyone. Those who have developed a conspiracy theory both want to keep it to themselves so that they can retain their superiority over others and spread it as far as possible to recognized for their enormous contribution to human understanding.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Read it.

The average (male) Londoner of the early 1800s, out and about, was quite happy to relieve himself in the nearest alley. Urinals were becoming more common – usually outside pubs – but typically one found a quiet corner and had a pee.

Those who lived in said alleys, or who owned commercial property adjoining, were not entirely forgiving of this practice, as this quote from 1809 suggests:

in London a man may sometimes walk a mile before he can meet with a suitable corner; for so unaccomodating are the owners of doorways, passages and angles, that they seem to have exhausted invention in the ridiculous barricadoes and shelves, grooves, and one fixed above another, to conduct the stream into the shoes of the luckless wight who shall dare to profane the intrenchments. 

Read it.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Read it.

States, though, have struggled to maintain supplies of the most commonly used drugs — or find suitable alternatives — as more suppliers have refused to let their drugs be used in executions. Recent executions that took much longer than planned have brought more scrutiny around the method. In January, months after Oklahoma bungled the execution of Clayton Lockett, the U.S. Supreme Court said it would examine Oklahoma’s lethal-injection protocol.

Fine. Let’s go back to hanging, a perfectly sensible solution that requires common materials.

Read it.

Apple Stores’ ability to generate a high rate of foot traffic in malls is allowing Apple to win “sweetheart deals” from mall operators while increasing mall sales 10%, according to a new Wall Street Journal report.

…

Because Apple Stores bring in so much traffic that leads to increased sales in other parts of the mall, Apple has been able to win rental agreements that see it paying as little as 2% of its sales a square foot. Typically, rents paid to mall operators are based on how much the retailer expects to sell, which is influenced by overall mall traffic.

Read it.

Say goodbye to the family farm, unless the family is named Kennedy or Clinton.

Read it.

Young made the comment during a House Natural Resources Committee hearing during an exchange with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. He was arguing that gray wolves should be taken off the endangered species list, criticizing the National Park Service and his congressional colleagues who seek to protect the animals.

“How many of you have got wolves in your district? None. None. Not one,” Young said, calling the gray wolf “a predator.”

“We’ve got 79 congressmen sending you a letter, they haven’t got a damn wolf in their whole district,” Young added. “I’d like to introduce them in your district. If I introduced them in your district, you wouldn’t have a homeless problem anymore.”

I like it. It has texture, and scope.

Read it.

I remember having to make six copies of a form using carbon paper. I love photocopiers.

Nowadays, of course, we just scan stuff.

Richard Fernandez points out some inconvenient truth.

The United States was founded by men well acquainted with greatest power of the age: Britain.  The Founders were not ignorant of efficiencies of parliamentary government. The British Army came perilously close to getting them “done”. Rather they both respected and feared it.

The instrument of government they created to replace the Crown was calculated to both exercise power and protect its citizens from that power.  What they did not provide was an adequate mechanism for resolving fundamental differences of principle within the mechanism of government.  As the Lincoln-Douglas debates suggested, that had to be fixed by other means. Once “a house is divided” gridlock ensued; and there is no remedy until the house was united again.  The Constitution seems designed to force the body politic to reach a consensus externally before it would allow the wheels to turn again. The Amendments are peace treaties marking the resolution of various crises.

Permanently resolving the crisis in favor of single body may not be a “better system”. The crises themselves cannot be finessed. They will fester until they are fundamentally resolved. Examples of this abound. Only today the White House and Democratic lawmakers expressed indignation at a letter sent by 47 GOP lawmakers to Iran reminding the Ayatollahs that the government of the United States consisted of more than one man.

Yeah … the nerve!

Read it.

The Main Event: Texas vs. California

Today’s two leading economic models come, not surprisingly, from our two megastates, California and Texas.

…

The difference in domestic migration is particularly revealing. Since 2010, Texas has gained over a half million migrants, while California lost 200,000 residents. The Lone Star State has taken over California’s historic role as the primary destination for middle- and working-class people looking to start a new life; the Golden State’s growth now stems from immigration and inertia – from among all the families formed after decades of rapid population growth.

These differences reflect policy choices. California, one can say, charitably, is looking for “quality” growth that touches the environment very lightly and creates high-end jobs, along with many lower-end service positions. Yet many aspects of state policy – the drive for renewables, stricter land-use regulations and expanding the welfare state – makes the Golden State the national model for progressives, even as middle-class and working-class people head for the exits.

Read it.

Like millions of other Americans who have slogged through an uncomfortably cold winter, I’m looking forward to the change of season. But Daylight Saving Time is an annual tradition whose time has passed. In contemporary society, it’s not only unnecessary: It’s also wasteful, cruel, and dangerous. And it’s long past time to bid it goodbye.

Further: 5 myths about daylight saving time

Read it.

This is a fun read, but the really interesting bit is this one:

In the intervening years it’s become progressively harder to get an H1-b and start the process. From what I hear they are basically snapped up in advance by the big outsourcing firms. The flip-side to that is that once you have one then transferring between employers needn’t be the nightmare it was a decade ago – assuming that your original employer plays ball. If they don’t then it’s indentured servitude. Which is why the outsourcers love them (as do their clients – the “lack of technically skilled people” is largely a myth. What there is a lack of is people willing to work for the pittance that some of the temps will take). [emphasis added]

Yet more evidence is that the push for expanded immigration is driven mainly by employers wanting cheap labor, not by high-minded worship of America’s position as a home for the people that other nations don’t want.

Read it.

Despite appearances, China’s political system is badly broken, and nobody knows it better than the Communist Party itself. China’s strongman leader, Xi Jinping , is hoping that a crackdown on dissent and corruption will shore up the party’s rule. He is determined to avoid becoming the Mikhail Gorbachev of China, presiding over the party’s collapse. But instead of being the antithesis of Mr. Gorbachev, Mr. Xi may well wind up having the same effect. His despotism is severely stressing China’s system and society—and bringing it closer to a breaking point.

Predicting the demise of authoritarian regimes is a risky business. Few Western experts forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union before it occurred in 1991; the CIA missed it entirely. The downfall of Eastern Europe’s communist states two years earlier was similarly scorned as the wishful thinking of anticommunists—until it happened. The post-Soviet “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan from 2003 to 2005, as well as the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, all burst forth unanticipated.

Read it.

Ukraine is embroiled in a civil war against Russian-backed separatists, and some volunteers on the pro-Ukrainian side have set up a crowdfunding page for people to fund a tiny robot tank. Dubbed “The People’s Project,” the initiative is currently 73 percent of the way toward raising the $8,000 needed to complete the machine.

Read it.

More ‘consensus science’ down the Memory Hole. (When are they going to connect the dots and do the same with ‘climate change’?)

Read it.

Over the years I’ve argued that economists are horribly confused about the concept of “income.” They use income for tax incidence discussions and also economic inequality, whereas on theoretical grounds consumption is clearly the appropriate variable. And yet until a few minutes ago I never realized just how confused we were (which I guess means I was equally confused).

Heavily theoretical, but worth the effort.

Read it.

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

Ammo Grrrll dishes it out.

I don’t care if you are a sane person who understands that there are two, and only two, “genders,” or more accurately, “sexes” (M & F), or if you are convinced that there are dozens of genders or none at all. It is – more or less – a free country except on college campuses, and you can believe what you want.

But if you are looking for advice on any particular topic, let me give you the benefit of some wisdom gleaned from my many decades upon this wacky planet.

If you want short, practical solutions to a problem at hand, ask a man.

If you want to just vent, or be listened to without even coming close to solving the problem, consult with a woman. In fact, there is substantial research claiming that that is precisely what women want when they ask a man about, say, a vexing issue at work. They just want him to listen; they do not want him to “solve” it. Further, it will even make the woman angry at the man if he tries to solve it. Talk about sandbagging someone!

This matches my experience as well.

Read it.

For the study, Hensher and Mulley gave survey respondents the two images above, plus two others whose only difference was older-looking vehicle styles (one bus and one train), and asked them to rank the four images in terms of “which one you would like to travel in most.” They found that 55 percent chose the modern light rail image, and another 18 percent chose the older light rail. Only about 17 percent chose the modern BRT. Just 10 percent chose the classic old bus.

The responses varied slightly among individual cities—Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Perth—but only slightly. A majority of respondents ranked the modern light rail image first in every city except Sydney, where 49 percent gave it the top rating. The modern BRT got more first-place votes than the old bus across the board, but it never eclipsed 20 percent in any city.

What makes those findings more vexing is that every city involved in the survey is familiar with both modes. In other words, lack of awareness of BRT couldn’t explain the preference gap. Even in Brisbane and Adelaide, where BRT is more prevalent than light rail, the train earned top marks: 53 and 56 percent chose it first, respectively, to about 18 percent in each place for modern BRT.

Read it.

Read it.

I’m in.

Progressives tend to believe that government knows best. The unfolding fiasco over government nutrition misinformation should give them pause.

But, sadly, it won’t.

For years now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been recommending that “everyone age 2 and up should consume less than 2,300 milligrams (mg) of sodium each day. Some groups of people should further limit sodium intake to 1,500 mg per day, including adults age 51 or older, all African Americans, and anyone with high blood pressure, diabetes, or chronic kidney disease.” Recent studies now suggest that this advice is killing more people than it’s saving.

Your tax dollars at work.

Most of the government’s recommendations were derived from “consensus statements” based largely on the results of observational epidemiological studies. The new revisions tend to be based on prospective epidemiological studies and random controlled trials. Observational studies may be good at developing hypotheses, but they are mostly not a good basis for making behavioral recommendations and imposing regulations.

Hey, you can’t go against a consensus. That would make you a denier.

Read it.

The idea that Medieval people drank beer or wine to avoid drinking bad water is so established that even some very serious scholars see no reason to document or defend it; they simply repeat it as a settled truth. In fact, if no one ever documents the idea, it is for a very simple reason: it’s not true.

Well, that’s not really the Great Medieval Water Myth, because people of the Middle Ages (and indeed up to the advent of knowledge of bacteria) had no concept of ‘bad water’ above what a child would have in the modern age, focusing on the smell and taste.

The rest of the article is devoted to vivisecting this straw man as if it were a Real Thing, so it’s pretty much pointless. It is, however, a good overview of writing about drinking during that period, so is not totally useless.

Steve Sailer looks at the oddity that it’s okay to dislike foreigners but only if they are rich.

Americans traditionally aspired to live in freestanding houses surrounded by lawns, houses whose size and worth were readily apparent to both the neighbors and the taxman: visual synecdoches for those Jeffersonian ideals.

In the older parts of the world, however, prudent patriarchs built opaque structures that presented only a blank wall and a door directly onto the street, leaving the poverty or luxury behind them a secret known only to those allowed in.

Part of the rise of shell companies as nominal owners of New York City luxury apartments is a not wholly unreasonable response to the fact that on December 8, 1980, practically everybody in America knew that John Lennon lived in The Dakota. But on December 9, 1980, he didn’t.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Uh-oh. Somebody exited the reservation.

Read it.

Kramer is one of 113 people in the world, and the only former chef, to be certified as a Master Bladesmith. To earn this title (which is conferred by the American Bladesmith Society, of Texarkana, Texas), Kramer underwent five years of practice and study, culminating in the manufacture, through hand-forging, of six knives. Five had to be of gallery-quality designs; the fifth was a roughly finished, fifteen-inch Bowie knife, which Kramer had to employ to accomplish four tasks, in this order: Cut through a one-inch thick piece of manila rope in a single swipe; chop through a two-by-four, twice; place the blade on one’s forearm and, with the belly of the blade that has done all this chopping, shave; and finally, lock the knife in a vice and bend it ninety degrees without having it crack. The combination of these challenges tests steel’s central but conflicting capabilities: its flexibility and its hardness. If tested thusly, my boning knife, despite being hand-made, would have snapped like a toothpick. – See more at: http://craftsmanship.net/the-kitchen-bladesmith/#sthash.e1F8V1fV.dpuf

A fascinating look at knives and the people who make them.

Read it.

1) Congress is not out of touch with folks back home
Congress is only a part-time job in Washington, DC. An hour after the last vote, almost everyone is on the airplane home. Congress votes fewer than 100 days a year, spending the rest of the time back home where we pander to their constituents’ short-term interests, not the long-term good of the nation. Anyone who is closer to your district than you are will replace you. Incumbents stick to their districts like Velcro.

Read it.

Well, not really. But it is interesting.

Scientists have discovered a human “biological clock” based on certain changes to genes, called DNA methylation. These are important for the expression and deactivation of genes, and therefore our development. By studying DNA methylation markers, the researchers found a way to predict lifespan. When people had a biological age greater than their actual age (you could be 50, but have the DNA of a typical 75-year-old), they could see they were more likely to die sooner than a person whose biological and real ages were similar.

Read it.

As if this were a brand new idea that originated in Silicon Valley. But the Crust are realizing that the current system of government schools is failing, as all such similar government-run systems are failing, and they have to dress an idea in hipster clothes in order to make it more palatable.

A couple of weeks ago, I wandered into the hills north of the UC Berkeley campus and showed up at the door of a shambling Tudor that was filled with lumber and construction equipment. Samantha Matalone Cook, a work-at-home mom in flowing black pants and a nose ring, showed me around. Cook and her family had moved into the house in April and were in the middle of an ambitious renovation. “Sorry,” Cook said, “I didn’t tell you we were in a construction zone.” A construction zone, it turns out, that doubles as a classroom.

Case in point: Mention of the nose ring — to signal that this isn’t just some Baptist mom doing her barefoot-and-pregnant-in-the-kitchen thing, but rather One Of Us.

Read it.

As human populations disperse, the separation leads to changes both in genes and in language. So if we look at human DNA and languages over time, we should find that they differ along similar geographic lines.

It’s an intuitive theory, but difficult to prove. That is, until researchers decided to match large collections of geographic, linguistic, and genetic data on hundreds of human populations worldwide.

A new study (PDF), published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, quantifies the complicated relationship between these three factors. Researchers compared the geographic presence of two things in human populations across the world: alleles (trait-defining stretches of DNA) and phonemes (the distinct units of sound that make up spoken language).

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, goes slumming.

A couple of years ago on this site I wondered “Why Isn’t Racism Cool?” Why, I asked, has the state ideology of the West not generated its antithesis, as historical trends are supposed to do? The Kultursmog of white ethnomasochism and xenophilia, of “diversity” and “hate,” of open borders and “no such thing as race,” is at least as stifling—and, in its underlying premises, at least as questionable—as the gray-flannel Organization Man conformism of the 1950s. So where, I asked, are our beatniks and hippies?

Read it.

We talked about how we both felt plagued by this weird new thing, and then it hit me. “We’ve become–had to become–professional multitaskers, and it’s almost as if we’ve retrained our brains,” I said. “Now we can’t focus for any length of time on one thing even when that’s our choice.”

Read it.

People often make pronouncements that have profound economic implications without knowing it. They care about ends and are content to leave the means to others. That’s irresponsible, the intellectual equivalent, as I’ve said before, to drunk driving.

Health insurance, whatever it is, does not grow wild and abundant in nature or fall from the sky like manna. It constitutes a command over goods and services—that is, over the products of human effort in conjunction with scarce resources. When government provides health insurance through subsidies or Medicare or Medicaid, it presides over the disposal of the fruits of other people’s labor. Government personnel decide who gets what, even though they had no hand in producing the resources they “redistribute.”

Read it.

The time has come to rethink wilderness.

This will seem a heretical claim to many environmentalists, since the idea of wilderness has for decades been a fundamental tenet—indeed, a passion—of the environmental movement, especially in the United States. For many Americans wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth. It is an island in the polluted sea of urban-industrial modernity, the one place we can turn for escape from our own too-muchness. Seen in this way, wilderness presents itself as the best antidote to our human selves, a refuge we must somehow recover if we hope to save the planet. As Henry David Thoreau once famously declared, “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” (1)

But is it? The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it’s a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires. For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the nonhuman world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem.

Read it.

(Phys.org)—Human speech is not typically thought to adapt to the environment, and a standard assumption in linguistics is that sound systems are in fact immune to ecological effects. Recently, however, scientists at University of Miami and several Max Planck Institutes in Germany and The Netherlands have, in a single study, predicted that complex tone patterns should not evolve in arid climates by reviewing laryngology data on the negative effects of aridity on vocal cord movement, and – by analyzing climatic and phonological data on over 3,700 languages – found support for their prediction.

Read it.

Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era. Egyptian regular forces did poorly against Yemeni irregulars in the 1960s.¹ Syrians could only impose their will in Lebanon during the mid-1970s by the use of overwhelming weaponry and numbers.² Iraqis showed ineptness against an Iranian military ripped apart by revolutionary turmoil in the 1980s and could not win a three-decades-long war against the Kurds.³ The Arab military performance on both sides of the 1990 Kuwait war was mediocre.⁴ And the Arabs have done poorly in nearly all the military confrontations with Israel. Why this unimpressive record? There are many factors—economic, ideological, technical—but perhaps the most important has to do with culture and certain societal attributes which inhibit Arabs from producing an effective military force.

Read it.

Before understanding how we steal from nature, it’s important to know why we would want to. Under some circumstances, evolution through natural selection can lead to optimal solutions to particular engineering problems faced by organisms. What this means is that, given a well-defined problem under a stable set of constraints, a series of minor adjustments acted upon by selective pressure can, over the course of millions of generations, produce something very close to the best possible solution. There is simply no way, given the materials at hand and the constraints of biology and physics, to produce a significantly better performing apparatus for the task. This is what we term “optimality.”

Read it.

No mess to clean up. No wonder they call it ‘clean’ energy.