Read it.

As I’ve mentioned before, we’re in the weird situation of having pretty much bet the country on a former McKinsey consultant named David Coleman’s vision of education. First, Coleman sold his Common Core K-12 idea to Bill Gates, who has pretty much bought off most potential prestigious dissidents in the field of education. Then the College Board hired Coleman to rewrite the SAT college admission test.

…

In everything I’ve read about Coleman, I’ve never seen anybody claim he knows much about testing. You don’t have to be a professional psychometrician to have common sense about testing, and Coleman certainly has the raw brainpower to eventually come to grasp the ins and outs. But the education racket has a long history of reformers getting into it on the assumption that everybody who came before them must have been an idiot, then slowly reinventing the wheel before they get depressed and bored.

Putting this much untested power into the hands of one obscure individual with no track record sounds like a bad idea. On the other hand, in an era when honest discussion of the realities of American education is largely forbidden because it’s all about various Gaps, turning control over to a single guy who strikes Bill Gates as smart might be about as good as we can do.

Read it.

“People come here because they say they can hear the electrics,” she replied. “I don’t know if it’s a real condition or not. But the electro- sensitives swear it is, so… to each their own, I say.” She didn’t look convinced. “I don’t really mind not having a cellphone,” she added. “You get used to that. And a lot of us have Wi-Fi in our homes anyway, so that’s OK.”

Hang on, so in The Town Without Wi-Fi, there is in fact quite a lot of Wi-Fi? I worried that this would not make for as catchy a headline as I had hoped. “Not publicly, but at home some of us do. It’s not illegal, but the observatory has a truck that can sense it. They’ll come round and ask you to turn it off.”

Read it.

This is the Oceansphere, a gigantic highly automated fish farm that will grow 1,000 tons of ahi and bluefin tuna from eggs to harvest size at a depth of 1,300 feet a few miles off the coast of Hawaii.

There’s lots to say here about the technology, which includes an automatic feeding system, water quality sensors, and thrusters that keep the sphere stationary, but let’s all just marvel at the fact that the Fish Matrix is real and set to begin installation by the end of the year. Hawaii Oceanic Technology CEO Bill Spencer told West Hawaii Today that this first sphere is mostly about refining the technology, but that after installation and testing the earliest harvest could occur in late 2017.

Considering all of the hand-wringing about low fish stocks and endangered fish species, ‘farming’ fish seems an obvious thing. What is less obvious is why it’s not bigger than it is.

The Oceansphere project has been years in the making — the video above is from 2008 — and HOT has been fighting legal and regulatory battles the entire time to make it reality. According to West Hawaii Today, 1,700 people signed a petition opposing the sphere, and 400 more wrote letters opposing the extension of construction deadlines in 2012. “The bottom line is the benefit does not outweigh the risks, no matter what kind of fish they plan to grow,” Diane Kanealii of theKailapa Community Association in Kawaihae told the paper, while Rob Parsons of Food & Water Watch is quoted calling it a “factory feedlot in our ocean.”

Well, there you go. No good deed goes unpunished. ‘What risks?’, I hear you ask. Unfortunately, I don’t hear an answer.

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

— G. K. Chesterton, The Thing

If we executed everybody who has a tattoo, the world would be much improved thereby.

Discuss.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

Very first test I apply to any presidential candidate is they have to be FOR something.

Bernie Sanders passes the test, Hillary doesn’t, Carly Fiorina does, Jeb Bush doesn’t, Ted Cruz does, Lindsey Graham doesn’t, Sarah Palin would if she was running, Ben Carson probably not, Chris Christie definitely not.

This is just the very first test. It’s asking so little. A candidate’s long-held personal-pet-peeve, would suffice.

It is positively shocking that half the candidates, on both sides, flunk. They’re just outspoken and so wonderful, with name recognition, and it’s their turn! But, they don’t stand for anything.

We just don’t need it.

YES!

Get it.

It’s free, so you have no excuse.

Read it.

When I was an undergrad at Harvard, the English department produced fancy brochures about the opportunities available to its majors: teacher, editor, Rhodes scholar. Personal assistant was not listed. I hadn’t even heard of such positions until senior year, when older friends, artistically inclined friends, started snagging them. It’s the position I think I’ve heard most about now.

…

Welcome to the main artery into creative or elite work—highly pressurized, poorly recompensed, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes menial secretarial assistance. From the confluence of two grand movements in American history—the continued flight of women out of the home and into the workplace, and the growing population of arts and politically oriented college graduates struggling to survive in urban epicenters that are increasingly ceded to bankers and consultants—the personal assistant is born.

This is actually a reversion to the medieval practice, where an important man’s ‘secretary’ was a candidate for important positions later on. We are so used to thinking of secretaries as clerical drudges that we forget the roots of the job. You’ll remember the famous scene in A Man For All Seasons where Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More are speculating on who will wear the Lord Chancellor’s chain after the Cardinal. Wolsey mentions his secretary, Thomas Cromwell, and More doesn’t immediately scoff but rather considers it seriously.

Read it.

Trial by battle was a medieval European form of legal proof in which difficult lawsuits were decided by a single combat between two duellists before a judge.

Nowadays drive-bys serve as a crude substitute.

Read it.

Perhaps the least controversial thing that President Obama ever said was that “in the coming decades, a high school diploma is not going to be enough. Folks need a college degree.” This vision is commonplace, but it implies a bleak future where everyone must work harder just to stay in place, and it’s just not true. Nothing forces us to funnel students into a tournament that bankrupts the losers and turns the winners into conformists. But that’s what will happen until we start questioning whether college is our only option.

…

But what if higher education is really just the final stage of a competitive tournament? From grades and test results through the U.S. News & World Report rankings of the colleges themselves, higher education sorts us all into a hierarchy. Kids at the top enjoy prestige because they’ve defeated everybody else in a competition to reach the schools that proudly exclude the most people. All the hard work at Harvard is done by the admissions officers who anoint an already-proven hypercompetitive elite. If that weren’t true — if superior instruction could explain the value of college — then why not franchise the Ivy League? Why not let more students benefit? It will never happen because the top U.S. colleges draw their mystique from zero-sum competition.

…

Of course, you can’t become successful just by dropping out of college. But you can’t become successful just by going to college, either, or by following any formula. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg aren’t famous because of the similar ways in which they left school. We know their names because of what each of them did differently from everybody else.

Read it.

Prediction: Peruvian men will ignore animal rights activists.

Many called on the owner of the crocodile farm to be charged by police.

Prediction: Peruvian police will ignore many.

The RSPCA, which cannot investigate the incident due to it taking place in South America, told The Independent, “We would like to express our shock and disgust at the events in the video.

Which, to such people, is almost as good as actually doing something about it.

I wonder: If the animal in question had been, say, a similarly-sized rat (and they have them that size in Peru), rather than a cute iddle puddy-tat, would the ‘many’ have been so many? Somehow I doubt it.

Read it.

Some good advice for people who, if they were the sort of people who listened to good advice, wouldn’t need it.

The concept of “white privilege” has become a staple of left-wing think, especially on college campuses. But is it a meaningful way to talk about race? Only, I would argue, in a limited sense that those who bandy the term about probably don’t have in mind.

Like Humpty-Dumpty, they’ve decided that a word means what they want it to mean, and to Hell with everybody else.

Whites as a class aren’t “privileged” economically. Nearly all white children had better obtain knowledge and skills, and then be prepared to work hard at least five days a week (and, of course, eschew criminal and other self-destructive behavior), if they want to make a good living. Nearly all black children who follow this path will also make a good living.

Funny how that works.

Morsy and Rothstein propose that the parenting gap be addressed through “quality preschool.” They probably assume that to propose that parents who aren’t doing so start talking, listening, and reading to their kids would make them look foolish.

Yet these practices, not preschool, are the key to spreading “white privilege” around.

As I said, above.

JOHN adds: How about “Asian privilege”? Asian-Americans earn significantly more money than whites, on the average. Is this because they are privileged in some way? Obviously not. On the contrary, the spectacular success of Asian-Americans is due mostly to the same effective parenting that Paul described with respect to whites–only more so. This has everything to do with solid values and hard work, and nothing to do with “privilege.”

Indeed. If the culture is dysfunctional, as black American culture obviously is, then the people who grow up in that culture will turn out to be dysfunctional to, more often than not.

Read it.

Well. There you go.

This triggers very discomforting thoughts about Austrian beer….

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, gets back to basics.

One of the greatest services that economics offers to humankind is the demonstration that prices set on markets are not arbitrary dictates.  Instead, prices (1) reflect underlying realities and, in doing so, (2) inform producers and consumers about how best to coordinate their actions with each other and (3) give incentives to countless producers and consumers to adjust their actions to each other in coordinating ways.  In short, prices reflect, inform, and incentivize.  (I hate the word “incentivize,” but I now give up trying to buck the trend that has made its use widely acceptable.)

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

I think it’s about reminding the Democrites that their baggage is waiting for them on the platform.

Read it.

This thesis examines several organised examples of live role-play: Southron Gaard, a branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism based in Christchurch, New Zealand; larping, as represented by two documentary films, Darkon and Monster Camp, that document the activities of larping organisations in the USA; and ‘Lord of the Rings Tour’, a tourism trip from Christchurch to ‘Edoras’, a fictional location from Middle-earth, the fantasy world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Novels and Peter Jackson’s filmic adaptations thereof. These organised leisure activities provide platforms for the pursuit of active, physical involvement with the images and ideas of medieval fantasy. In them, participants find ways to bring these fantastic images and ideas onto their bodies in reality and, perhaps as a result, closer to their everyday lives in ways that have more significant social implications than may at first be apparent.

Read it.

Counterfactual history is a risky endeavor. But the events that followed America’s entry into World War I strongly suggest that had President Woodrow Wilson permanently “kept us out of war,” as his 1916 presidential campaign slogan boasted, the conditions that produced World War II would not have been sown.

The Great War began in August 1914. America did not enter the war until April 1917. By that time both sides were exhausted from years of grinding warfare. There is ample reason to believe that had nothing new been added to the equation, the belligerents would have agreed to a negotiated settlement. No victors, no vindictiveness.

…

Thus, the first likely consequence of U.S. prolongation of the war was the Bolshevik Revolution (and the Cold War). Communism — its threat of worldwide revolution and its wholesale slaughter — was a key factor in the rise of the European despotism that sparked World War II. (Had the Bolsheviks come to power anyway and Germany had won the war, Germany would have thrown the communists out.)

…

The second likely consequence, then, of U.S. prolongation of the war was the rise of Nazi Germany.

Read it.

Before Betsy Chao, a senior here at Rutgers University, could take midterm exams in her online courses this semester, her instructors sent emails directing students to download Proctortrack, a new anti-cheating technology.

“You have to put your face up to it and you put your knuckles up to it,” Ms. Chao said recently, explaining how the program uses webcams to scan students’ features and verify their identities before the test.

Once her exam started, Ms. Chao said, a red warning band appeared on the computer screen indicating that Proctortrack was monitoring her computer and recording video of her. To constantly remind her that she was being watched, the program also showed a live image of her in miniature on her screen.

Even for an undergraduate raised in a culture of selfies and Skype, Ms. Chao found the system intrusive. “I felt it was sort of excessive,” she said.

Read it.

But the overarching theme is that urban planning and zoning are best viewed as a form of economic warfare by the upper and middle classes against the working and lower classes. While that might not have been the original intent, to judge by the smug attitudes of the beneficiaries of such planning and zoning, they are perfectly happy with the results.

…

Long-time Antiplanner readers will know what I have to say next: those surging housing prices only happen in certain regions, specifically those that use planning and zoning to increase urban densities. This includes most of Europe, Australia, much of New Zealand, most coastal states in the United States, and a few Canadian cities including Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, and Montreal.

Housing is also a factor in many developing nations where most land is still owned by the government, or held in trust by the government on behalf of local villages. This includes most of Africa, much of South America, and part of Asia. In such places, the only people who can enjoy the benefits of “surging housing prices” are the few who own their own land, and since land ownership opportunities are limited due to widespread state control, everyone else stays poor. (In the United States, the closest analogues are Nevada, where 90 percent of the land is owned by the government, and Hawai’i, where more than 90 percent of the land is owned by a handful of corporations and trusts that might be willing to sell it for housing, but the state governent won’t let them.)

Read it.

But as Silicon Valley bursts at its suburban seams, one tech company after another has been buying up properties throughout the region and embarking on ambitious development projects. Apple occupies 60 percent of Cupertino’s commercial space. Google dominates Mountain View, and Facebook is spreading its tentacles throughout Menlo Park.

…

Company towns of this era had a barely-hidden paternalistic agenda. Wealthy businessmen saw their workers as family, sort of, and they wanted to provide their wards with safe, modern housing. But many were strict fathers, dictating the minutiae of their grown employees’ lives, from picking the books in the library to restricting the availability of alcohol. It’s hard to imagine Facebook going that far, though the company does try to subtly influence its employees lives by offering such healthy freebies as on-site gyms, bike repair, and walking desks. It’s a strategy that mimics what happened with some later company towns, which employed paternalism to better the company, not just employees’ lives. “Company welfare was seen as an important strategy to promote company loyalty and peaceful relations,” Borges says.

Read it.

Providence regularly lands on the lists of top hipster cities and top hipster colleges for its cool factor, having earned plaudits from Travel and Leisure to Buzzfeed for live music, coffee shops, and hip culture.

…

“There are not enough “hipsters” to plausibly resurrect the urban economies of America,” said Renn. “If you’re in downtown Providence, in the proximity to its center, you can live an eminently hipster lifestyle, and ask yourself, ‘Where would Providence be without it?’ And it would probably not be as great.”

“Is that the solution to the jobs issue on the south side of Providence?  No.  [The hipster economy] has its positives, but it’s something that’s happening more now everywhere,” said Renn.  “I was just in Indianapolis.  There were plenty of beards, plaid shirts, and locally sourced food there.”

Read it.

Generates incredible amounts of academic study (hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know) and tons of consequent opinion journalism.

No apparent effect on young brains, though.

Others forget — Google, which puts up a special ‘doodle’ for every fly-by-night whim of the Left Coast, is plain today – but we remember.

Read it.

The latest liberal hoax exposed is a happy face mirror image of the U. of Virginia rape fraud: a massively publicized paper in Science, the most prominent American peer-reviewed academic journal, about how to market gay marriage to minority voters that turned out to be a complete swindle, another exercise in catfishing made-up people into electronic existence.

And yet the most interesting point about this ignominious affair is that even if the paper had been utterly legitimate, it still wouldn’t have been “science” in the sense that most people understand the word: as a search for relatively permanent truths. Instead, it would have just been marketing research.

Read it.

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’.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.