Thomas at Politics & Prosperity has an excellent fisking of Bryan Caplan on the subect.

“I sometimes think Obama thinks he’s in an episode of The West Wing or some other Aaron Sorkin version of reality where the facts always line up to preconceived liberal narratives. … It’s amazing to me how much Obama’s speeches depend on, and benefit from, the same things. The solipsism of the liberal egghead press is partly to blame. Obama goes out there and literally persuades no one about anything, but since he says exactly what a liberal president is supposed to say, they think it’s all brilliant soaring oratory and bold statesmanship.”

— Jonah Goldberg

Read it.

Four months ago, Demeteriya Nabire was killed by a crocodile when she went to the lake near her home to fetch water. The animal later came back to the area but found Nabire’s husband waiting, ready to take revenge.

Not something you read about every day.

Try it.

(The one for the 16th Amendment, by choice.)

Apparently I was at the Battle of Kursk. They don’t say which side I was on, although they do say that I ‘helped stop Hitler’ … so I’ve got that going for me.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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

The same person who would never trust an optometrist to repair her car’s transmission, or trust an automobile mechanic to prescribe contact lenses to correct her myopia, routinely trusts strangers who specialize in winning popularity contests called “elections” to interfere into her and her neighbors’ lives in many intimate and expansive ways.

And then, when a skeptic of the pretensions of politicians (and of their entourages) suggests that these politicians (and their entourages) address the problems they diagnose, not with government force, but by themselves risking only their own money and effort toward correcting the alleged problems, the response is one of utter dismissal.  ”Ha!  We don’t know anything about actually running actual businesses.  We have no experience at hiring and managing workers.  We haven’t the training or business connections or professional demeanor to, say, profitably employ the low-skilled workers who we nevertheless assure you are currently underpaid.  We have no ability, say, to persuade private investors to risk their funds on alternative-energy projects that we nevertheless assure you will be amazingly profitable.  We have no practical abilities at all!  Yet because we’ve won the most recent election, or because we’ve earned PhDs and read lots of books and academic-journal articles and know what a chi-square test is, we are uniquely qualified to force people to act in ways that we prescribe but which we, on our own, would never dare undertake.  We are paid to rule, not to risk; we are paid to demand of others, not to do of ourselves.”

The fact that such people continue to be called “Progressive,” continue to be considered to be unusually humane and (amazingly) empathetic, and continue to be taken seriously baffles me to no end.

— Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist

Read it.

Last century, William Stanley Jevons, the famous economist who was in part responsible for the marginal revolution, reasoned that because the easy-to-get coal was already gotten, what was left was coal that was harder and harder to reach. Therefore, he argued, we would reach a point where coal would be much scarcer and much more expensive.

As I wrote in my bio of Jevons, here was his error:

Jevons failed to appreciate the fact that as the price of an energy source rises, entrepreneurs have a strong incentive to invent, develop, and produce alternate sources. In particular, he did not anticipate oil or natural gas. Also, he did not take account of the incentive, as the price of coal rose, to use it more efficiently or to develop technology that brought down the cost of discovering and mining (see natural resources).

We have things that are supposed to be illegal that “really” are not, like sneaking across our national border, and we have things that are supposed to be allowed but are “really” against the “law,” like for example forming a Young Conservatives group on a college campus, smoking cigarettes, or wearing a “Proud to be American” tee shirt to a high school on Cinco de Mayo.

It is dangerous, living under two sets of laws like this. It’s not an Obama problem, it’s a baby-boomer problem. The hippies have reached the age where they’re expected to be in charge of things, but they still want to rebel against authority when they are the authority. Their generation has manufactured a contradiction which, I’m afraid, is not finished with doing all its damage yet.

— Morgan Freeberg

The Other McCain has some wisdom for us, if we only have the wit to listen.

We are heirs of a tradition. Each of us is born into circumstances that were created by our parents, by our grandparents, by our ancestors, and by the civilization in which they lived. Human life existed before we born and will continue after our deaths. As children we inherit the past. As parents we create the future. Wisdom requires us to understand ourselves as a single link in an infinite chain of human existence, rather than to imagine ourselves as free-floating atoms unconnected to others.

Popular ideas of “democracy” — the modernistic idolatry that speaks the language of “rights,” “choice” and “equality” — obscure the truth of human existence, trapping us in the present tense, isolating us as rootless individuals removed from the authentic traditions of our inheritance. Children are taught that the past is not merely useless, but actually harmful, because human history is nothing but a catalog of oppression, atrocities and victimhood. Thus, the modern child cannot be allowed to believe that his grandparents were wise or virtuous, that the great achievements of our civilization are worthy of respect.

Read it.

If you want to get anything done, there are two basic ways to get yourself to do it.

The first, more popular and devastatingly wrong option is to try to motivate yourself.

The second, somewhat unpopular and entirely correct choice is to cultivate discipline.

This is one of these situations where adopting a different perspective immediately results in superior outcomes. Few uses of the term “paradigm shift” are actually legitimate, but this one is. It’s a lightbulb moment.

Read it.

So Obama has had to abandon his plan to tax 529 college savings plans to pay for his “free” community college proposal, because lo and behold lots of middle class people are 529 savers.  But Republicans could still enable Obama to pay for this proposal with a tax that actually hits the genuine rich: a surtax on large private college endowments—say on all endowments that are more than something like $1 million per student.  This would hit the ivy league schools that these days are raking in nearly $1 billion a year in contributions according to the latest reports.  (I recall an old line from Conan O’Brien—a Harvard grad—about Harvard’s donor pitch: “We’re Harvard.  We don’t need your money.  We just want it.”)  Or instead of a surtax directly on endowments, reduce the tax deductibility of donations to college endowments above a certain level.

And if Republicans really want to start riots in faculty clubs, they should pass Obama’s community college plan with one proviso: that all community college credits be fully transferrable to any four-year college that accepts any federal funding (which is every institution of higher learning except Hillsdale and one or two others).  Watch the four-year colleges sputter with indignation.  Watch Obama veto the bill.

Heh.

Lion of the Blogosphere has a theory.

In the comments, there is often talk about the fattening of America, yet I hardly see any fat white people in Manhattan. Thus I came up with the theory, this morning, that thin people are moving to Manhattan and other thin cities such as Washington, Boston, and San Francisco/Silicon Valley, leaving the fat people behind in the rest of the country. Those readers who live in the rest of the country are, therefore, getting the false impression that the population as a whole, is fatter than it really is.

There is also dysgenic breeding for fatness, because thin people in cities get married late, if at all, and have few children, while the fat proles in the rest of the country are a lot more fertile.

Can’t say he’s wrong.

Ammo Grrrll connects the dots.

In the endless, tedious discussions about “rape culture,” over and over I read testimony from coeds – adult women! – who willingly get into bed with guys and then are amazed when sex occurs. Is there some parallel universe where that is considered unusual?

…

Help me out here, young ladies, because I’m pretty Old School. How humiliating can it be if you get naked with a guy and yet you expect no response? (“Hey, nuthin’ to see here. Just your average naked woman from the dorm next door hoping to catch a few Zs while you watch ESPN. Carry on.”) Here we have a generation of women who have been putting condoms on cucumbers since kindergarten who apparently do not have even a passing acquaintance with actual male sexuality.

Read it.

Paris. February 26, 1635. The Abbé François de Boisrobert stands before the newly minted Académie française and denounces Homer as a base street poet who eked out a living by declaiming his verses to the mob. Boisrobert’s impassioned speech was perhaps the first skirmish in la querelle des anciens et des modernes, whereby one group of writers sought to differentiate themselves from those who paid undue deference to the Greek and Latin poets. But the ancients couldn’t be dislodged so easily. When the corpus of Western literature consisted largely of two dozen writers who had set the standard for plays, essays, verse, and satires, it was no simple matter to consign them to the past, especially when the past was still present.

Read it.

Up to around 1200 members of religious houses—monks and nuns—were the primary consumers of books. They produced the objects themselves and in high numbers, because religious houses could not function without them. The 13th century saw a sharp rise in the production and consumption of books outside the monasteries. Books were now also made for profit in urban shops, both for use by citizens, students and even monks.

Most medieval bookstores were empty because books were too expensive to have in stock. Instead, each customer would have a long talk with the shopkeeper, who would ask how much he wanted to spend, what materials he preferred, what kind of writing style should be used for the text—and so on. The medieval book is therefore always one of a kind. Users often modified the manuscript post-production, bringing it even more in tune with their needs. Bookmarks could be added for quick access to favorite chapters, while nota signs and maniculae placed in the margin marked important passages. Moreover, glosses and slips with notes were inserted where the text needed clarification.

Khan Academy is a magical place.

Read it.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, uncovers a rock.

I’ve never worried about income inequality. It’s not that I’ve not worried much about it; I’ve not worried about it at all .

Income inequality — like the color of my neighbor’s car or the question of the number of pigeons in Central Park — just never dawns on me as an issue worthy of a moment’s attention. More importantly, I’ve never encountered many people who worry about inequality.

Indeed, the only time I had regular, close contact with people who express anxiety about inequality was when I was in law school at the University of Virginia. And there, those who wailed most loudly about inequality were those from families that were, as we say, the “most privileged.”

Bryan Caplan examines human nature.

When you’re a normal member of your society, the appeal of collectivism is easy to understand.  Most people believe what you believe and enjoy what you enjoy.  So wouldn’t it be great if society as a whole continuously celebrated your worldview and lifestyle?  When you fit in, walking on eggshells to spare minority sensibilities is most tiresome.

If you’re weird, in contrast, the appeal of individualism is easy to understand.  Most people neither believe what you believe nor enjoy what you enjoy.  You already feel isolated and alone.  Public celebrations of popular values add insult to injury – especially when these celebrations are infused by the presumption that “These are the values that we as a society hold in common.”

Strangely, though, weird people often hail collectivism and scoff at individualism.  Marxists do it.  Greens do it.  And reactionaries do it.  They’re totally out of sync with their societies, but they nevertheless lament their societies’ lack of community spirit and common purpose.  “A country shouldn’t just be a bunch of people living next to each other” is a typical lament.  But weird collectivists rarely ask themselves, “What would happen if I couldn’t live next to anyone who didn’t share my identity?”  The unwelcome answer, of course, is that Marxists, Greens, and reactionaries would have to recant or relocate.

Read it.

This is an interesting piece in and of itself, but even more interesting for the context. This is not an article that would have been written by somebody who actually lived in Oklahoma; no, this is the sort of article written by someone from Washington, D.C. (or New York or Boston or San Francisco), a bona fide inhabitant of the Crust for whom the middle of America is effectively a foreign country, one inhabited by people who kind of speak the same language but in accents that Our Author only hears in movies or on TV by somebody trying to be funny or trying to express foreign-ness.

This comes out even in the opening paragraph:

The freedom of the open road holds no appeal for my 16-year-old son, Miro. Like many of his generation, he sees cars as agents of global warming and the reason American suburbs can be soulless places with no sense of community, let alone pedestrians. Plus, he gets carsick.

Typical Crustian kid being inculcated with typical Crustian concerns. His only experience with ‘produce’ is what shows up under plastic at Whole Foods. Being concerned about global warming is just What Kids Do, like posting selfies to Facebook. He might actually mow a lawn but more likely it’s done by somebody whose first language wasn’t English. (Full disclosure: as mine is.) The whole point of the family’s trip is to retrace a route, not as an actual family from the Dust Bowl era would have done it, but as characters in a Famous Literary Work were said to have done. (I suspect that the author was an English major in college.) This is like trying to learn medieval history by tracing the adventures of Lancelout from Le Morte d’Arthur.

I couldn’t believe how relevant the 75-year-old book—with its depiction of industrial agriculture squeezing out small farmers, climate-driven environmental woes, and migrant workers at the mercy of big landowners—felt today.

Note the desideratum: Relevance. Not accuracy, not authenticity, not getting into the head of people from back then; relevance. (Can ‘consciousness raising’ be far behind?) The author could be a Peace Corps volunteer tromping down Route 66 to See What The Natives Can Teach Us About Our Lives.

As they saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.

Read it.

We know about seating plans, table arrangements, etiquette and procedure at many formal meals. Cookery books survive to reveal the kind of dishes that were informally served, and poems and stories attest to what poorer folk ate for supper and dinner.

Breakfasts, by comparison, do not have their literature. Chroniclers did not observe monarchs eating breakfast. The first meal of the day is thus one of those features of life that has slipped through the historian’s net.

Read it.

The fact that this fiery anti-union tirade passed the lips of a blue state Democrat tells you everything you need to know about just how thoroughly teaches union have alienated many of their natural political allies. And this isn’t merely some quirk of New York politics, as the same thing has happened on a local scale in numerous cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. Democratic politicians everywhere are more willing to take on teachers unions than ever before.

Right back atcha, Andy — don’t say you represent the people.

Read it.

One of the great advantages of being a historian is that you don’t get your knickers in as much of a twist over how bad things are today. If you think this year is bad, try 1347, when the Black Death covered most of Europe, one-third of the world had died, and (to add insult to injury) there was also (in Europe) the little matter of the Hundred Years’ War and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (where the pope had moved to Avignon, France, and basically the Church was being transformed into a subsidiary of the French regime). Things are looking up already, aren’t they?

Another thing is economics. Everyone complains about taxes, prices, and how expensive it is to live any more. I’m not going to go into taxes – that way lies madness. But I can tell you that living has never been cheaper. We live in a country awash in stuff – food, clothing, appliances, machines, cheap crap from China – but it’s never enough. $4 t-shirts? Please. We want five for $10, and even then, can we get them on sale? And yet, compared to a world where everything is made by hand – we’re talking barely 200 years ago – everything is cheap and plentiful, and we are appallingly ungrateful.

…

Anyway, with clothing that expensive and hard to make, every item was something you wore until it literally disintegrated. Even in 1800, a farm woman would be lucky to own three dresses – one for best and the other two for daily living. Heck, my mother, in 1930, went to college with that exact number of dresses to her name… This is why old clothing is rare: even the wealthy passed their old clothes on to the next generation or the poorer classes. The poor wore theirs until it could be worn no more, and then it was cut down for their children, and then used for rags of all kinds, and then, finally, sold to the rag and bone man who would transport it off to be made into (among other things) paper.

Read it.

On May 20th, 2009 Jordan’s King Abdullah officially opened the King Abdullah Special Operations Training Center (KASOTC), a facility set against a dramatic pocketed plateau on the northern outskirts of Amman. It is called the most advanced special operations training complex in the world and it looks like a life-sized GI Joe dream set.

Now, ask yourself why Jordan, of all places, has need for such a training facility.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, takes a delightful look at an alternate reality.

… news reports would regularly include stories of “grocery experts” offering new and “pioneering” proposals to improve grocery distribution, and the citizens of “grocery districts” meeting with their local “grocery boards” to discuss and debate these different proposals.  Each affiliate of a major national network (like each of the national networks), as well as each newspaper and other significant news outlet, would have its own “grocery reporter” (or “grocery correspondent”) to keep tabs on the latest efforts to improve the way government delivers groceries to citizens.

When new big-city mayors are sworn into office they would typically replace the incumbent “Grocery Superintendents” (or “Grocery Chancellors”) with their own preferred “Grocery Superintendents” (or “Chancellors”).  The local policy punditry would discuss in great detail the differences in the grocery-supply philosophies of the new Grocery Superintendents compared to those of the outgoing Superintendents.  ”Grocery-beat reporters” would often solicit from people on the street these people’s opinions of the different methods proposed to improve grocery distribution.  Question such as “Do you think new Grocery Chancellor Smith’s proposal to allow a handful of people to buy their groceries from charter grocery stores is a good idea?  Or do you side with former Chancellor Jones in staunchly opposing charter grocery stores?” would be asked and seriously answered.

…

Anyone proposing to get government out of the grocery-supply business would, of course, be ridiculed as being totally unrealistic or being an out-of-touch ideologue, or accused of harboring a secret desire to see the the vast majority of people suffer starvation while only the top one percent of the population continues to enjoy excellent access to superb groceries.  Likewise, proposals to cut (or to not increase) grocery-district funding would be widely condemned as being pro-starvation proposals.  And efforts to measure the performance of grocery-store workers would be mocked as impossible as well as unfair to such workers.  Efforts to restrain the pay of grocery-store workers would be portrayed as efforts to deny ordinary citizens access to the best possible supply of groceries.

Have I mentioned that I don’t fly?

Read it.

Last year, AT&T and the online educational organization Udacity teamed up to offer a “nano-degree” that directly trains students for a job with AT&T. This move is in line with a new government report that suggests that more cooperation between universities and businesses is the key to economic success in the future. However, Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, is skeptical of nano-degrees. The degrees, he claims, are no substitute for a liberal arts degree.

Indeed not. Unlike a liberal arts degree, they will actually help you get a real job.

Read it.

“Sugar daddies”—the official moniker granted to these wealthy men—and the microcosm they occupy aren’t anything new, but they’ve become more mainstream in recent years. That they’ve emerged as a noteworthy group during America’s student-debt crisis is indicative of their growing prevalence—as well as that of “sugar babies,” the ones entrenched in that crisis. And the subculture—”daddies” and “babies” alike—appears to be expanding rapidly. 2014 saw a huge spike in sugar babies nationwide, especially in the southern states, according to new data from SeekingArrangement, a site where “babies” and “daddies” sign up and connect. The trend itself, let alone writing about it, might seem frivolous or demeaning. But the data could clarify what’s going wrong with the system and where those problems lie.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

The Wall Street Journal does its own variant on SOTU Bingo.

I’ll start: ‘White people suck. Raise taxes.’

Read it.

According to the Brandeis student newspaper, The Justice, Professor Donald Hindley will step down from the position he has held for over half of a century because, as he said, there are “far fewer … let me call them, activist, liberal-minded people” at Brandeis University.

Hard to know how to respond … good riddance? the system works? Of course, at Brandeis ‘too many conservatives on campus’ means some guy with a Real Job managed to wander onto the campus before he realized he was in the wrong neighborhood and escaped. But still.

Eric Raymond is Armed & Dangerous.

The problem is, maradydd’s attempt requires the feminists and social-justice warriors she is addressing to be fundamentally be about justice and inclusion, enough so that it is possible to change their behavior by appealing to those values. But that’s not what I see what I look at those people. What I see is thin rationalizations over bullying, dominance games, and an endless scream of monkey rage.

That sums up the Left better than anything else I’ve read.

Read it.

Mosheh ben Maimon, better known in the west as Maimonides, was one of the most famous Jewish philosophers and physicians of the Middle Ages. One of his many works was On Poisons and the Protection against Lethal Drugs, which he wrote up as a quick guide on dealing with animal bites and poisoning. The treatise was written in 1199 at the request of Saladin’s secretary, and proved to be very popular for centuries afterwards. Here is some of the advice that Maimonides gives on poisons.

Read it.

How about even one?

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, invites our attention to the Middle Kingdom.

The thorny tangles of identity, ethnicity, nation, and race, are made thornier under a state ideology based on utopian fantasies and the denial of reality.

Sound familiar? It should; it’s what we write about here at VDARE.com.

And very well, too.

The Communist Party’s policy towards the “nationalities question” has followed Lenin’s, as described in Book Two of Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism. Their ethnicity is officially recognized (and recorded on personal i.d. cards). It is also to be celebrated, for example with minority dance troops showcased in TV spectaculars on national holidays. Their home regions, if big enough, are declared “autonomous.” They send representatives to regional and national legislatures. They enjoy some minor social privileges, notably exemption from the one-child policy.

The autonomy, however, like the legislatures, is perfectly bogus. Even to advocate self-determination for minorities is both an ideological sin (“splittism”) and a serious crime (Article 103). The Party center makes all significant political decisions, and it is totally Han Chinese.

…

(The January 11th “Unity March” in Paris following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, with a slew of world leaders at the head of the march, has raised much indignation on Chinese blogs. “Where’s our unity march?” they are asking, with reference to the Kunming incident. Short answer: Same place as the rest of your civil freedoms, pal. You live in a communist dictatorship.)

Read it.

The President is fond of invoking “The Folks” in his droning speeches. Now, in rural Minnesota, your “folks” are your parents. But he is referring to those “little” people who make up the once-vast middle class in America. The not-rich and unfamous. The God-fearing, gun-totin’ clingers. In other words, people he has never ever hung out with in his entire pampered life and has total contempt for; he doesn’t have a clue what makes us tick.

And that’s cool. I don’t pretend to know what it’s like to be so rich that I lose track of how many homes I own. Or to be able to spoil someone’s wedding reception in order to golf. Or to whine about being flat broke while giving six-figure speeches. Now, praise God, I’ve never been a homeless junkie either, but I’ll tell you what flat broke was for the working poor, Missy Hillary.

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All this means, as I understand it, that these transgressions should be forgiven or written off, because this behavior is not typical of them. They, or we, can only be called to account if it is something they or we do regularly, and the general public is to accept that this was not the case.

Well, baloney.

Typically it’s used in circumstances where the truth would be ‘Well, that actually is who we are, but that’s not what I’d like you to believe we ought to be.’

Read it.

You, too, can be a cliche. (I don’t see an entry for Grump, but no doubt I would feature prominently.)

Read it.

There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before. The Clock’s chimes have been programmed to not repeat themselves for 10,000 years. Most times the Clock rings when a visitor has wound it, but the Clock hoards energy from a different source and occasionally it will ring itself when no one is around to hear it. It’s anyone’s guess how many beautiful songs will never be heard over the Clock’s 10 millennial lifespan.

At least it’s not a government program at taxpayer expense.

Read it.

On December 2, Attorney General Eric Holder, the top law enforcement official in the country, went to Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church to announce that the Justice Department would soon “institute rigorous new standards-and robust safeguards-to help end racial profiling, once and for all.”

…

But by focusing on the role of race to the exclusion of other contributing factors in these cases, both the powerless in the streets and the powerful in the suites were letting an important culprit off the hook: power itself.

Start with the grand jury process that produced both non-indictments. “The system is under the complete control, under the thumb, of prosecutors,” Cato Institute Criminal Justice Director Tim Lynch told CBS News in December. “If they want an indictment they are going to get an indictment. If they don’t want an indictment it won’t happen.”

…

In practice, the only class reliably protected by grand juries is people that the local prosecutors don’t actually want to prosecute. Namely, cops. The conflicts of interest here are beyond blatant: Prosecutors absolutely depend on the work and testimony of police to send defendants to jail. Grand juries absolutely depend on prosecutors to present information and guidance on whether to indict. There is no impartial judge, no adversarial check on the power of law enforcement.

Jim Goad wants to make sure that all news is treated equally.

Many black people on Twitter—as well as untold legions of their white enablers and allies—appear very pissed that the NAACP story never really got “legs,” as they like to say in the publishing biz. Or as the blacks like to say, there may be a bit of “player hating” going on here by disgruntled African Americans who feel nudged out of the victimization spotlight, however temporarily. They decry the fact that the racist media cares about a dozen dead white Parisians much more than it does about the slightly scuffed side of a building in Colorado.

…

In what may have been a deliberate attempt to make things look worse than they were, progressive white MSNBC host Chris Hayes, a verified friend of the black man, covered the bombing story while a photo montage that unfolded behind him included a still photo of massive destruction to a storefront that turned out to be from the recent unrest in Paris rather than outside the NAACP office in Colorado Springs. Hayes apologized for the network’s faux pas by writing “Our bad” on Twitter. Just when you think Chris Hayes couldn’t get any worse, he goes ahead and says “Our bad.”

Read it.

Sigmund Freud said the founder of civilization was the first person who hurled an insult instead of a rock. He was almost right. The true founder was the first person to respond to an insult with an insult of his own.

Some modern-day people have yet to reach the stage achieved by some of our ancient forebears. Muslims who treat offensive depictions of the prophet Muhammad as grounds for execution are the most conspicuous examples of that tragic failure to evolve.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology, masquerading as a religion, with which no co-existence is possible.

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The basic idea is that because your body uses energy to maintain a normal body temperature, exposure to cold expends calories. The vest’s inventor, Wayne B. Hayes, an associate professor at the University of California at Irvine, claims that wearing it for an hour burns up to 250 calories, though his data are very rough. A little more than a year ago, he began selling the vest, which he calls the Cold Shoulder, out of his Pasadena apartment. Name notwithstanding, people won’t ignore you when you wear it.

Read it.

George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, said this month that in 2015 Britain would repay part of the country’s debt from World War I, and that he wanted to pay off other bonds for debt incurred in the 18th and 19th centuries.

That includes borrowing that may have been used to compensate slave owners when slavery was abolished, to relieve the famine in 19th-century Ireland and to bail out the infamous South Sea Company, which caused the bubble in 1720.

Read it.

Much good it did them.

Peter Hitchens is as good a writer as his brother and far more intelligent politically.

Once again we are ruled by a Dictatorship of Grief. Ever since the death of Princess Diana, we have been subject to these periodic spasms when everyone is supposed to think and say the same thing, or else.

We were told on Friday that ‘politicians from all sides’ had lined up to attack Ukip’s Nigel Farage for supposedly ‘exploiting’ the Paris massacre.

Mr Farage had (quite reasonably) pointed out that the presence of Islamist fanatics in our midst might have something to do with, a) uncontrolled mass migration from the Muslim world, and b) decades of multicultural refusal to integrate them into our laws and customs.

Rather than disputing this with facts and logic (admittedly this would be hard), the three ‘mainstream’ parties joined in screeching condemnation.

…

Great mountains of adjectives piled up on every corner, much like those hills of flowers and teddy bears we like to place at the scenes of tragedies.

You can feel the presence of the snarling conformist mob, waiting for some dissenter on whom they can fall, kicking and biting. So-called social media, in fact an intolerant and largely brainless electronic mob, has made this much worse since the sad death of the Princess.

Read it.

In the United States failure appears to be a profit opportunity. Several  American friends have unaccountably offered me exactly  the same piece of sage advice.  ”Richard, never trust anyone who hasn’t failed.”  In their view anyone who hasn’t been flat broke at least once in his life has some kind of character defect. One acquaintance  wistfully recalled the time he lost his fortune and had to live out of his car, and how that motivated him to even greater wealth.  Maybe his last conscious thoughts when the time comes to cross the river will not be of the yacht anchored off the Riviera, or of starlit nights and steel guitars in Rio, but fond memories of a shower and shave at the CITGO rest room.

The downside to this laudable impulse to self-help is that very few American politicians are ever punished for their blunders.  The population apparently finds it easier to adapt.  It is easier to invent a new industry than start a political movement.

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Megan McArdle notes the reason Vermont gave up on Single Payer was it would cost as much as everything the State was now spending. The problem isn’t how to divvy up the bill. The problem is the bill. Nobody can make the unaffordable affordable any more than guys at a clip joint can pay for the bottle service when the dollars in their pocket come up short. Asking the waiter for single or separate bills is irrelevant. The reason health care is so expensive is it already consists of a mass of workarounds.