Read it.

Sometimes someone from the Filling sneaks into the Washington Post.

Yesterday, in a somewhat useful exercise, my Democratic friend and sometimes sparring partner Carter Eskew compiled a “Republican Nutcase Check List” for Republican presidential candidates to take. (If you want to see how you’d rank, you can take that survey here.) With his quiz as motivation, and in the same spirit, I wrote a corresponding checklist for Democrats in general, given that their presidential candidate bench is so weak.

In order to slant his test and present Republicans as Democrats want them to be, Carter had to scour some remote corners of the country in search of narrow positions and specific incidents. Here, I’ll stick pretty close to what passes for “mainstream” Democratic positions in our nation’s capital.

This is called the Democratic Whackjob Survey, and I propose that all Democrats take it. There are eight questions and the answers will be tallied to give you a score on the whack-o-meter.

…

If you answered “yes” to 8 out of the above, you’re a whackjob who’s probably permanently in a purple haze, camped out in a public park with a Unibomber-inspired protest sign nearby. And if you are not currently working for the Obama administration, working on a Democratic voter-registration campaign or doing commentary on MSNBC, you should look into those opportunities.

Read it.

I have this image of Jimmy Swaggart shouting at a bunch of hairy elephants in a huge tent. But that’s me.

Read it.

Traffic crashes are a cause of ill health, impaired living or curtailed lifespan. Does city growth, in its sprawl-type outward expansion, increase the incidence of fatal and injurious crashes? This factor is the latest addition to numerous attempts to pin a correlation or causality linking traffic accidents with any number of causes.

I can think of no suburb that is as scary to drive through as Chicago, Boston, or New York.

Read it.

Mr. Grijalva left a clue about how he operates in 2013 when the magazine In These Times asked about his legislative strategy. “I’m a Saul Alinsky guy,” he said, referring to the community organizer and activist who died in 1972, “that’s where I learned this stuff.”

What sort of stuff? Mr. Grijalva sent his letters not to the professors but to university presidents, without (at least in the case of Mr. Hayward) the professors’ knowledge. Mr. Hayward was not even employed by Pepperdine at the time of his congressional testimony in 2011.

But targeting institutions and their leaders is pure Alinsky; so are the scare tactics. Mr. Grijalva’s staff sent letters asking for information about the professors, with a March 16 due date—asking, for instance, if they had accepted funding from oil companies—using official congressional letterhead, and followed up with calls from Mr. Grijalva’s congressional office. This is a page from Alinsky’s book, in both senses of the word: “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have,” reads one tip in his 1971 “Rules for Radicals.”

Yet adopting Alinsky’s tactics may not in this case fit with Alinsky’s philosophy. This is Alinsky with a twist. Despite myriad philosophical inconsistencies, “Rules for Radicals” is meant to empower the weaker against the stronger. Alinsky writes: “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

Reminder: You don’t have to be a Little Guy to be a Radical, just as you don’t have to be poor to be a Democrat.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, debunks a few common economic myths.

Josh Billings famously quipped, “The trouble ain’t what people don’t know; it’s what they know that ain’t so.” He was correct, especially as this keen observation applies to history.

Everyone knows, for example, that minimum-wage legislation is meant to help the working poor. A study of history, however, shows that this just ain’t so.

What is so is that the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 — the legislation that created the national minimum wage in America — was designed to protect the higher wages of Northern textile workers, and the profits of Northern mill owners, from the intensifying competition unleashed by Southern textile mills in the Carolinas and Georgia.

…

Another historical myth is that Southern slavery harmed only the blacks who were enslaved. There’s no doubt that those who suffered most grievously from slavery were the slaves themselves. But slavery also inflicted great economic harm on non-slave-owning whites in the South.

Most obviously, slavery artificially reduced the supply of workers available to work in whatever factories and businesses might have been established by non-slave-owning whites. Therefore, these whites — who outnumbered slave-owning whites, even in the South — suffered reduced opportunities to launch their own businesses. In the South, chattel slavery stymied the single greatest force for widespread and sustained economic growth: market-directed entrepreneurship.

Read it.

And no doubt they are racist, white, Republican, bigot, homophone microbes, at that.

Read it.

That sort of sums up the whole of the last six years.

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So some folks who have signaled their anger online that places like Memories Pizza have declared a right to discriminate are also angry that these businesses are now getting rewarded for it. That’s what happens with a culture war, folks. You send up your signals and they send up theirs, and on and on and on. People did not want Memories Pizza or Arlene’s Flowers to be punished for the principles they hold, and so they were willing to use their financial backing to counteract the actions of those who do want to punish them. Ignore this signal at your peril. Regardless of whether people want to see pizza parlors or bakeries or florists turning away gay couples getting married, there are enough of them offended by the idea of driving them out of business to counteract these shaming and boycotting efforts. And it goes both ways. How many gay or gay-friendly folks have made sure to do businesses with companies who supported them and had been targeted by the religious right back in the 1990s or so?

In other words, don’t start a pissing contest unless you’ve got the bigger dick.

Read it.

Amen to that.

Read it.

Getting a college degree is valuable, according to calculations by a group of economists including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. If more people went to college, they’d be much better off. It’s just hard to imagine how helping more high school graduates to earn college degrees could substantially undo the massive increase in inequality of the past several decades, which is largely a result of skyrocketing earnings among the very rich. Indeed, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans now claim nearly as large a share of national income as they did on the eve of the Great Depression.

“I am all for improving education,” Summers told Wonkblog earlier this month. “But to suggest that improving education is the solution to inequality is, I think, an evasion.”

Summers and his collaborators, the Upjohn Institute’s Brad Hershbein and Melissa S. Kearney of the University of Maryland, calculated what would happen if they could wave their magic wands and give a college education to about 6.8 million American men who don’t already have one. Relatively speaking, that’s an enormous increase — about the same proportion as the increase in the overall share of the population with a college degree since 1979.

Steven Hayward at Powerline thinks like a lawyer.

• If a member of the Westboro Baptist Church asks for a bakery to create a cake with their motto “God hates fags,” will the baker be charged with discrimination if she refuses?

• If a baker agrees to bake a cake for a gay wedding, but as matter of practice includes the slogan “God hates fags” in, say, Aramaic script on the side of the cake, wouldn’t this be protected speech and/or “expression” under the First Amendment?

• Just curious: why hasn’t anyone been to a Muslim bakery to press this newfound frontier of anti-discrimination?  Ah—Steven Crowder has.  Will the Human Rights Campaign Fund descend upon Dearborn, Michigan, tomorrow about this outrageous injustice?  I’m not holding my breath.  Video is about 5 minutes long:

The Other McCain muses.

An astonishing phenomenon of the 21st century is the perversely ironic way in which the Information Age has actually increased ignorance. With all the knowledge in the world just a quick Google search away, many people have somehow managed to seal themselves off inside cocoons of confirmation bias, where they only encounter narratives that fit their preconceived personal prejudices. It is not simply a matter of people avoiding opposing opinions, but of filtering out facts in such a way that their worldview becomes wholly unrealistic. Paranoid hostility flourishes inside these online bubbles where kooks cluster, affirming their shared delusions and piling up “evidence” to “prove” their false beliefs to each other.

…

This raises the question of whether “Islamophobia” actually exists. The term “phobia” denotes an irrational fear, yet the history of recent decades offers enough rational basis for concern to make the word “Islamophobia” inherently problematic. One may perhaps distinguish between two phenomena — a vigilant concern about dangerous radicalism, on the one hand, and a simple-minded bigotry on the other — but making that distinction does nothing more than to say, “Ignorant people are ignorant.” To say that fair-minded and educated people should condemn ignorant prejudice isn’t controversial. What is controversial is to assert that “Islamophobia” is a more important problem than the actual dangers posed by radical Islam.

The flat statement that “Islamophobia has criminalized the brown body” is a falsehood, and to then throw in “the suffering of countless victims of . . . baseless hatred” as the emotional freight of an argument requires us to ask, “Are the ‘victims’ truly ‘countless’? Where is the evidence of this ‘suffering’?” In order to sustain such claims, it will not do to cite a list of incidents or anecdotes. No one disputes the fact that ignorant hateful people do ignorant hateful things.

What is in dispute is whether “Islamophobia” — specifically, the concern about Islamic terrorism — has generated such a spree of anti-Muslim violence and harassment as to produce “countless victims.”

To the extent that there are any Muslim victims, they are typically the victims of other Muslims.

Read it.

Read it.

Who knew?

It looks like there are two ways to get countries to reduce their dependence on the American military umbrella. One way is the calculated, tough-love approach: point out that to other governments that they’re capable of fighting their own fights, set a timetable for them to assume responsibilty for defense matters, and stick to it. The other approach is to act so nuts and untrustworthy that allies sense an implosion of crazy and reluctantly take on new responsibilities. This second technique seems to be working miracles in the Middle East as some sort of unified Arab self-help emerges from an anguished watching of whatever the hell it is the United States is up to.

Let’s try NATO next. Imagine how much economic trouble Europe would be in if they had to pay for their own national defense against Putin.

Read it.

This is news? What else is he going to do with it, take it with him? He’s homosexual, so it’s not as if he’ll have any kids to leave it to.

This is the most non-new news I’ve come across in a long time.

My suspicion is that it’s a pre-emptive strike against some Social Justice Warrior group who think he’s not gay enough.

Read it.

A special service from Voice of the Crust the Atlantic to make sure that low-information voters stick to the Narrative and vote for the Peter Pan Party.

Read it.

Now that’s comedy.

Read it.

Well, they already rent their vaginas — it’s not that much of a stretch.

Read it.

When a guy shows up at a Las Vegas emergency room on New Year’s Day with severe facial injuries and broken ribs, and gives as an explanation the functional equivalent of “I walked into a doorknob,” it isn’t hard to guess that he ran afoul of mobsters. Yet the national press has studiously averted its eyes from Reid’s condition, and has refused to investigate the cause of his injuries. To my knowledge, every Washington reporter has at least pretended to believe Reid’s story, and none, as far as I can tell, has inquired further.

The Other McCain adds a dose of reality to the soup.

A California jury on Friday rejected the claim by Silicon Valley executive Ellen Pao that her rights had been violated by her former employer, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer. And this verdict is a teachable moment.

The modern concept of employee “rights” is antithetical to economic liberty. Employment in a free-market system is always a matter of voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit. You need a job. You apply to an employer. Among many applicants for the job, the employer chooses you. This is the basis of a contractual agreement: You do the work, the company pays you. It’s simple.

If you subsequently become dissatisfied with your job, you can quit and go work someplace else. If the company becomes dissatisfied with your work, they can fire you. This is also simple.

Oh, but you’ve got “rights,” you say. So if you don’t get a promotion you want, or you don’t think you’re treated fairly otherwise, you’re going to file a discrimination lawsuit.

Might as well get the word LOSER tattooed on your forehead.

That would certainly make it easier for the rest of us.

Winners don’t file lawsuits. Winners don’t whine about “discrimination.” You know why? Because winners win. Even if, in the course of a lifelong career of winning, the winner suffers an occasional defeat, the winner just grins and moves on with his life. Company X doesn’t treat him right? They don’t appreciate his valuable skills? Fuck Company X.

The winner will find a job at Company Y or, perhaps, he’ll walk out and start his own company. Life’s too short to waste time working for a bunch of losers who don’t appreciate quality work.

If Ellen Pao was such a hotshot in the venture capital field, don’t you think there would have been other companies eager to hire her away from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer? It’s a very lucrative field, and if Ellen Pao was such a goddamned rising star, it stands to reason that some other firm would have jumped at the chance to hire her. So if she felt she was a victim of discrimination, all Ellen Pao would have had to do is to talk to somebody at a rival VC company, “Hey, Kleiner passed me over for promotion. You guys hiring?” Boom — they’d leap at the opportunity to have this young genius Ellen Pao on their payroll.

That’s didn’t happen, did it?

Hell, no, it didn’t happen, because Ellen Pao is a loser.

In the Good Old Days, such women were despised as adventuresses, which has gone out of fashion, although the closely-related gold-digger, while deprecated, is still available for use.

The world doesn’t owe you a living. No employer is obligated to hire you or give you a promotion. Ellen Pao’s claim that she was a victim of “gender discrimination” was just a typical loser’s way of rationalizing her own failure. And the lawyers who thought they could get rich off her case are nothing but greedy parasites exploiting “equal opportunity” nonsense. Pao and her lawyers sued for $16 million and they’re walking away without a nickel, and if they’d gotten a nickel that would have been five cents more than what they deserved. Fuck you, losers.

Amen to that.

Read it.

Welcome to YourMorals.org, where you can learn about your own morality, ethics, and/or values, while also contributing to scientific research. We are a group of professors and graduate students in social psychology at the University of Virginia, The University of California (Irvine), and the University of Southern California. (See us here.)

I have my doubts about people who are ostensibly ‘professors and graduate students’ but who apparently fail the grasp the distinction between ‘morals’ (what a community considers good and bad) and ethics (what an individual considers good and bad). No individual, except perhaps a castaway on a desert island, has morals — morals belong to a social group, as the etymology of the word makes clear.

However, I’ve given up expecting precision of either thought or speech out of the modern clerisy, so I suppose this is the best that can be expected.

Read it.

Austin is pretty much the San Francisco of Texas, the low spot toward which all of the SWPL hipsters in the South and West drain if they can’t make it to one of the Left Coasts or don’t want to suffer from those areas’ anti-growth attitudes (an inchoate feeling that they can’t articulate because it would make their heads explode but which motivates them at the subconscious level).

Read it.

Your DNA genome has “on/off” chemical switches that collectively are known as your epigenome. So your epigenome is unique and changes every time a switch is flipped. Because your epigenome’s switches are considered reversible when they are passed from parent to child, many scientists view this to be “soft evolution,” i.e., not guaranteed to be as enduring as when a mutation arises in the core DNA genome.

The epigenome can be passed on, sometimes reversed, sometimes reinforced. Unlike in classic Mendelian genetics, it is hard to predict and quantify, so you can just imagine how this variation in experimental outcomes has driven many careful, traditional scientists who believed the DNA code was the be?all and end-all of heredity completely crazy. They would try to eliminate all the variables, use genetically identical rats, and sometimes get completely different results. So it is no surprise that for decades epigenetics was ignored or pooh-poohed by funders, senior biologists, and science magazines. There was no reliable way to trace the precipitating event and no way to easily predict which individuals would be affected in future generations.

So how do our epigenomes become informed about life around us, particularly the epigenome of a fetus or a yet?to?be?conceived child? Most of the science points to our neural, endocrine, and immune systems. Our brains, glands, and immune cells sense the outside world and secrete hormones, growth factors, neurotransmitters, and other biological signaling molecules to tell every organ in the body that it needs to adapt to a changing world.

Charles Murray points out some inconvenient truth.

Spring is here, which means it’s time for elite colleges to send out acceptance letters. Some will go to athletes, the children of influential alumni and those who round out the school’s diversity profile. But most will go to the offspring of the upper middle class. We all know why, right? Affluent parents get their kids into the best colleges by sending them to private schools or spending lots of money on test preparation courses. Either way, it perpetuates privilege from generation to generation.

The College Board provides ammunition for this accusation every year when it shows average SAT scores by family income. The results are always the same: The richer the parents, the higher the children’s SAT scores. This has led some to view the SAT as merely another weapon in the inequality wars, and to suggest that SAT should actually stand for “Student Affluence Test.”

It’s a bum rap. All high-quality academic tests look as if they’re affluence tests. It’s inevitable. Parental IQ is correlated with children’s IQ everywhere. In all advanced societies, income is correlated with IQ. Scores on academic achievement tests are always correlated with the test-takers’ IQ. Those three correlations guarantee that every standardized academic-achievement test shows higher average test scores as parental income increases.

Read it.

It’s certainly less disturbing than a tattoo.

Almost worth it….

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.

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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!