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Four of the five reasons are, of course, the result of government activities.

For the truly adventurous, the U.S./Australian dollar rate has greatly improved over the last year, Ward adds.

I’m thinking, I’m thinking….

That’s what Andy Ihnatko calls Christmas … and who can say he’s wrong?

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Those present in the Abbey Road studio to record Lennon’s song A Hard Day’s Night could not have imagined that 50 years later the events would still be analyzed and dissected. Particularly since the focus of the analysis is almost not a piece of music, it’s a short sound, less than 3 seconds long, a crashing, ringing, chiming sound that has caused arguments and discussions between Beatles’ fans and musicologists ever since it was recorded.

…

Here, for the honour of all mathematicians, I would like to put the record straight — or at least straighter. The mathematical tale of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Chord is a tale of 18th century mathematicians, the study of heat, Karaoke tricks and a measure of luck.

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The key problem with this study and the more alarmist stories that followed, is that when it says “e-reader”, it means “Apple iPad”. An iPad at full brightness, no less. When I hear “e-reader”, I tend to think “dedicated e-reader” – an e-ink device without a backlit screen — rather than a multi-purpose tablet. And there’s a big difference.

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If Judah Maccabee were alive today, he’d kill all of the Moslems in Israel and tear down that Mosque and rebuild the Temple. (Not an exaggeration, that’s what he did to the Greeks, and if he didn’t feel guilty about treating Greeks like that, I don’t see why he’d shed tears over Moslems.)

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I’m a sucker for maps, real or imaginary.

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HIV belongs to a class of viruses called retroviruses. They all share three genes in common. One, called gag, gives rise to the inner shell where the virus’s genes are stored. Another, called env, makes knobs on the outer surface of the virus, that allow it to latch onto cells and invade them. And a third, called pol, makes an enzyme that inserts the virus’s genes into its host cell’s DNA.

It turns out that the human genome contains segments of DNA that match pol, env, and gag. Lots of them. Scientists have identified 100,000 pieces of retrovirus DNA in our genes, making up eight percent of the human genome. That’s a huge portion of our DNA when you consider that protein coding genes make up just over one percent of the genome.

“Jeb’s a nice guy, and would certainly be a better President than Obama — but, then, my cat would be a better President than Obama, and I don’t own a cat.”

— Glenn Harlan Reynolds

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Mocking treasured liberal slogans is as easy as shooting (bicycle-riding) fish in a barrel.

The Motley Fool tells you what you need to know.

9. Wealth is relative. As comedian Chris Rock said, “If Bill Gates woke up with Oprah’s money he’d jump out the window.”

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Morris says a 2013 study by Greg Duncan, at the University of California, Irvine’s School of Education, showed that math knowledge at the beginning of elementary school was the single most powerful predictor determining whether a student would graduate from high school and attend college. “We think math might be sort of a lever to improve outcomes for kids longer term,” Morris says.

Oh, ya think?

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I predict that it crashed.

The most interesting part of the picture is the girl with him, who appears to be no more ‘black’ than he is. Perhaps the implicit message is that one needs significant white ancestry in order to code. The brown-bag-and-ruler test appears to be alive and well.

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First, the tone of the report is remarkably hostile to the CIA. It reads like a prosecutor’s brief. I don’t know what the Agency did to get on the wrong side of Dianne Feinstein, but the report is, seemingly, an act of revenge. I suspect that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself would render a more sympathetic account of the CIA’s interrogation program than we got from Senate Democrats.

Second, a great deal of the report is devoted to proving that the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques did no good. I didn’t find this discussion particularly persuasive, mostly because it is so patently partisan and one-sided. Further, while it is appropriate for the intelligence agencies themselves to analyze the success, or lack thereof, of various approaches they have used, this issue strikes me as almost beside the point. In the aftermath of 9/11, it was vitally important to learn all we could about al Qaeda–who was in it, how it was organized, how its members communicated, and above all, what other plots were in the works. It was appropriate to try just about anything to get information from the small number of high-level al Qaeda members to whom we then had access. If some techniques worked and others didn’t, so be it; but they all had to be tried.

Third, the report goes to great lengths to document alleged misrepresentations by the Agency concerning the enhanced interrogation program. Many of these come from Congressional testimony by former CIA Director Michael Hayden. The Agency has acknowledged that Hayden got some facts wrong, especially relating to events that occurred before he became Director. In other instances, I don’t find the Committee’s effort very persuasive. Once again, the vituperative tone of the report undermines its credibility.

George Will pulls back the curtain.

Intellectually undemanding progressives, excited by the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — advocate of the downtrodden and the Export-Import Bank — have at last noticed something obvious: Big government, which has become gargantuan in response to progressives’ promptings, serves the strong. It is responsive to factions sufficiently sophisticated and moneyed to understand and manipulate its complexity.

Hence Democrats, the principal creators of this complexity, receive more than 70 percent of lawyers’ political contributions. Yet progressives, refusing to see this defect — big government captured by big interests — as systemic, want to make government an ever more muscular engine of regulation and redistribution. Were progressives serious about what used to preoccupy America’s left — entrenched elites, crony capitalism and other impediments to upward mobility — they would study “The New Class Conflict,” by Joel Kotkin, a lifelong Democrat.

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In mid-August Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America launched a campaign pressuring Kroger to bar law-abiding citizens from openly carrying guns for self-defense in their stores. Kroger refused to change its policy and in the third quarter–“ending Nov. 8”–Kroger saw a “21 percent increase in profit…compared with the same period last year.”

I guess that’ll show ’em.

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Our mainstream economic system is oriented towards maximal production and growth. This effectively means that participants are forced to maximize their portions of the cake in order to stay in the game. It is therefore necessary to insert useless and even harmful “tumor material” in one’s own economical portion in order to avoid losing one’s position. This produces an ever-growing global parasite fungus that manifests as things like black boxes, planned obsolescence and artificial creation of needs.

I’m not sure where he’s going with this but it’s an interesting read.

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A fascinating review of the many layers that accrete in an ancient city.

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After a closer examination of a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology known as the Antikythera Mechanism, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.

The new findings, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, also suggested that the mechanism’s concept originated in the colonies of Corinth, possibly Syracuse, on Sicily. The scientists said this implied a likely connection with Archimedes.

Some of us remember.

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Law abiding, tax paying, responsible citizens need some gesture or symbol of solidarity that is photogenic. I am thinking perhaps, one hand over our back pocket/wallet with the other hand waist high outstretched palm forward, as in “don’t come toward me, don’t rob me, don’t try to assault me.” I’m sure Ramirez could render a model.

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The discovery adds to the ongoing mystery of Antarctica’s expanding sea ice. According to climate models, the region’s sea ice should be shrinking each year because of global warming. Instead, satellite observations show the ice is expanding, and the continent’s sea ice has set new records for the past three winters. At the same time, Antarctica’s ice sheet (the glacial ice on land) is melting and retreating.

Hey, maybe (just maybe) the climate models are wrong and THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS GLOBAL WARMING. Just maybe.

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An article from The Wasington Post with the truth about the Ferguson Grand Jury decision.

The Washington Post has this extremely helpful graphical presentation of what happened during the shooting, with links to some of the physical evidence in the case.  What follows is my discussion of what appears to be some of the most significant.  To be clear, I do not purport here to completely describe all the forensic evidence and related testimony.  But I will commit to carefully reviewing all of the comments to this post and if anyone points to a significant omission in what I’m describing about the physical evidence — and provides a citation to the volume and page number of the grand jury testimony for that omission — I’ll be glad to consider adding discussion of it.  This post is limited to discussing the physical evidence, as witness testimony cuts in many different directions.

‘What’s this “Hope and Change” crap he’s always on about?’

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In celebration of Black Alternative History Month, the Carlyle Club continues to call the Attorney General’s bluff with a forthright conversation about the most uncomfortable aspects of race we could think of.

Table of Contents

1. Mind the Gap

2. Race Differences in Intelligence, plus:

   1. Return of the Derb

3. The Evolution of an Idea, including:

   1. Tropical Living
   2. Indian Artistry
   3. No Expectations
   4. “Like a Parrot Who Speaks a Few Words Plainly”
   5. “Almost Completely Worthless”
   6. “Political Partisanship and Liberal Hackery”
   7. Savage Africa
   8. Harsh Words

4. Mulatto History Month

5. A Different Sort of Delusion, plus:

   1. ’Tis Sixty Years Since

6. Rushton’s Case, featuring:

   1. Brainpower

7. The Celebration Continues at Radish

8. Recommended Reading

9. Letters to the Editor

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China has been running the world’s largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China’s ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian political correctness to the bitter end.

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THIS season millions of Americans will celebrate with turkey on the table. The turkey is, after all, the native North American animal that Benjamin Franklin considered “a much more respectable bird” than the scavenging bald eagle. But while the eagle landed on the country’s Great Seal and the turkey gets pride of place at our holiday dinners, neither bird can claim to have changed American culture more than their lowly avian cousin, the chicken.

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Consider GiveDirectly this holiday season for your charitable giving. As you may recall, GiveDirectly was started by four economists and it gives money directly to the very poor in Kenya and Uganda. GiveDirectly is a top-rated charity by GiveWell. The founders are committed to providing independent, randomized controlled trials of its process. One RCT has already been conducted with positive results and 3 others are under way. GiveDirectly publicizes the trials of its process before the results are produced. Impressive–the drug companies had to be forced to do this. Check out their website, they even provides real-time performance data. Here’s a bit more on their process.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a similar program for poor people in America? Perhaps we could get the Kenyans and Ugandans to set one up; obviously Americans are too busy.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, lays out some inconvenient truth.

It’s all too drearily familiar, isn’t it? Newark and Detroit; Miami; Crown Heights; Los Angeles; Cincinnati; here we go again.

…

The problem with separatism is that blacks would be nuts to want it. With all the real or imagined indignities of minority status, life is far better for them in a white nation.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

The Medici Palace in Florence was built in the 1440s with heavy stone on the street level and delicate windows on the top floor, both to express the upward-yearning spirit of the Renaissance and to keep the urban mob from dismantling the place when they got uppity, as they were known to do.

…

One of the best of the retro stadiums was Jacobs Field in Cleveland, which opened a couple of years later and sold out 455 games in a row. A friend told me an interesting rumor. He’d been talking to Mr. Jacobs, owner of the Cleveland Indians, and they got on the topic of why the White Sox new ballpark was so uninviting and closed-off. Mr. Jacobs told him that the owners of the White Sox had some kind of arrangement with the city of Chicago to use the ballpark as a giant holding pen for rioters, much in the traditional manner of a South American soccer stadium.

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When five liberal Democratic senators were elected in 1992, pundits gleefully proclaimed it the year of the woman. Yet their arrival in the Senate, along with that of 24 female freshmen representatives, brought the total number of women in Congress to about 60, or little more than half of what it is today. “A defining moment of change was the general election of 1992 dubbed the ‘Year of the Woman,’ “the official House of Representatives web site proclaims. “The arrival of 28 new women in Congress resulted from the confluence of historic circumstances that have not recurred since.”

How about that War on Women, eh?

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The statistics are staggering: Researchers predict that by 2025, the world will have 37 megacities, defined as urban areas with more than 10 million people. New York City and Newark are expected to have more than 23 million inhabitants; Tokyo, more than 38 million people. All told, well over half of the world’s population will be living in these super settlements.

Uh-huh. Name one instance where predictions by ‘urban planners’ have come to pass.

Indeed, one might extend that challenge to ‘researchers’ generally. Well, let’s see, there’s ‘peak oil’, and ‘climate change’, and the exponentially explosive growth of population that the Zero Population Growth people warned us about…. (Oh, wait….)

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Haven’t seen this sort of action in the neighborhood since they tore down the Delaware Terrace projects. The cops raided a house about a block away from TOF, looking for a fellow who had been dealing heroin on a nearby playground. There is an alley running behind the duplexes shown in the picture, and the playground is across that alley. In TOF’s youth, that playground was actually a cornfield, improbably surrounded by houses and (on one side) by a carpet factory. Every spring the farmer would drive his tractor down from the hill and plow it up and plant corn. Eventually, a new generation of kids arose who regarded the corn as free for the taking, so he gave up and sold out and the city built a park where people could pedal heroin. The carpet factory is also gone. There is a drug store on the site.

Funny how all the behavioral sinks tend to be in areas governed (if you can call it that) by Democrats.

Read it. Ponder the graphs.

Indeed, the “peak car” is antithetical to the reigning urbanist paradigm of highways known as “induced demand.”  Induced demand is Say’s Law for roads: supply of lanes creates its own demand by drivers to fill them. Hence building more roads to reduce congestion is pointless. But if we’ve really reached peak car, maybe we really can build our way out of congestion after all.

Freeberg nails it again.

Had this one germinating in my cranium for awhile. SNews (n.): News that is produced for the benefit of the producer of the news, or some third-party who has entered into some transaction with the producer of the news, rather than for the benefit of the consumer of the news.

If you like, you can think of it as a portmanteau for “sponsored news.” It is meant to be a homonym of snooze. The litmus test is: Thinking of the “news” as an answer to a question, does the question it answers bear any resemblance to a question the audience would have been asking? If it doesn’t — and lately, I notice, it very rarely does — then it isn’t really “news,” is it?

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To paraphrase John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, there is very little wrong with any large American city that a million ethnic Chinese wouldn’t fix.

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As we reflected on the project, we came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

Lewis Page, in British tech pub The Register, expands on that:

Whenever somebody with a decent grasp of maths and physics looks into the idea of a fully renewables-powered civilised future for the human race with a reasonably open mind, they normally come to the conclusion that it simply isn’t feasible. Merely generating the relatively small proportion of our energy that we consume today in the form of electricity is already an insuperably difficult task for renewables: generating huge amounts more on top to carry out the tasks we do today using fossil-fuelled heat isn’t even vaguely plausible.

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One leading researcher in this field, Henry L. Roediger III of Washington University in St. Louis, argues that tests of varying scale and intensity can deepen learning. “We now know that testing, including self-testing, is an especially powerful form of study,” said Dr. Roediger, co-author of the book “Make It Stick.”

Tests find out what you know. That’s all they do. Yet to read a lot of what passes for discussion these days, especially among ‘educators’, you’d think that making a student take a test is somehow a violation of his or her civil rights.

“Oh, I don’t test well.” Better learn, then; that’s like saying that you can’t walk well. Real Life is constantly putting one in situations where one either has to come up with a fact or successfully exercise a skill — in other words, IT’S A TEST — and the technical term for those who ‘don’t test well’ is FAILURE. Now, I realize that to be a FAILURE in this degenerate modern age isn’t the Bad Thing that it used to be, but it’s not a Good Thing, either.

Charlie Stross takes a break from being a communist in a Clever Plastic Disguise to talk about something interesting.

Big-ass L5 space colonies as envisaged by Professor Gerard K. O’Neill in his book The High Frontier turn out to be both economically and biologically questionable. To be fair, it’s not entirely his fault: he took NASA’s early-1970s estimates of Space Shuttle flight rates as gospel—one flight per week, costs around $1M/ton delivered into orbit—back when they were selling it as a “space truck”. At which point, hauling 50,000 tons of hardware and 10,000 workers into orbit to build a gigantic factory town churning out gigawatt range solar power stations using materials mined from the lunar regolith and positioned where they could transmit microwave power beams down to Earth 24×7 sounded like it should cost about as much as the 350-odd tons and 6 astronaut crew of the ISS. And as a solution to the 1974 oil shock, it seemed like a good idea. If we ever do get space trucks like that, it might be time to dust off those concept drawings and go for it. But in the meantime …

Read it.

More and more evidence is surfacing, however, that milk consumption may not only be unhelpful, it might also be detrimental. This is in spite of the fact that the United States Department of Agriculture and other organizations advocate that even adults should drink at least three cups a day.

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Women are finally realizing that being armed is the great equalizer.

Anna Simons, Professor of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, lays it on the line.

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By now it’s sadly clear that the nation’s satirical news programs do a significantly better job at reporting the news than most of the nation’s actual news outlets, despite a fraction of the budget and experience. John Oliver’s recent analysis of Miss America scholarship claims, for example, contained more original reporting in a fifteen minute segment than most Apple regurgitation blogs manage to stumble through in an entire year’s worth of gadget lust. Not only are satirists now doing a better job unearthing the truth, they’re doing a better job explaining complex issues.

Not really much of a surprise.

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Before he became chair of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke agreed with the free market economist Milton Friedman that central bank policy played a key role in making the Great Depression the most severe in U.S. history. But the two parted ways on the reason why. And that disagreement goes a long way toward explaining why the financial crisis of 2007-2009 has brought not just a dramatic increase in the powers and activities of the Federal Reserve but a fundamental transformation of its role within the economy.

Friedman viewed banking panics as monetary shocks, in which the checking accounts and other deposits at failing banks wink out of existence, causing a sudden fall in the total money supply. In contrast, Bernanke treats panics as shocks to the flow of savings, causing the failure of firms whose continued existence is crucial for the allocation of credit. Such disparate diagnoses dictate significantly different cures.

If the danger from bank panics is primarily a collapse of the money supply, then the proper response is a general injection of money by the central bank. The survival of particular financial institutions is of secondary significance. On the other hand, if the danger comes from key financial institutions failing and choking off credit, then the proper response is bailing them out.

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Slow news day.

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But that was yesterday … and yesterday’s gone….