Sarah Hoyt reflects.

I came to understand, particularly through changing cultures, that manners are more than a senseless form.  They are things people do to let each other know that they belong – that they are part of the group.

Humans are a social animal.  Little meaningless rituals are built in to us, as a way of saying “I belong in the nest, don’t throw me out.”  Also, while manners are slightly different in each country (for instance, I think Americans would think I was out of my raving mind if I asked “Do I have permission to enter this room” – except in SFF, where they’d probably stake me through the heart.  While Portuguese would find it bizarre for a shop attendant to thank them for buying something.) they are also not entirely meaningless.  They are things that get automated, at a trained-in level, so you don’t have to think about it and don’t unwittingly offend someone.  I could be dead tired, for instance, or in the hospital, but if someone does some minor favor for me, I’m going to say “Thank you” out of automated reflex.  And that thank you lets the other person – no matter how tired or dead on their feet THEY are – know their action was seen and appreciated.

As Heinlein put it, it makes things run smoother.  In the same way, I might not be aware of the shopper coming out of the store behind me, both arms loaded with parcels.  But I am aware someone is behind me, and at this point it is a reflex to hold the door open so they pass.  When I’m the one on the receiving end of this kindness, that manners-reflex is much appreciated.

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Once upon a time, food was about where you came from. Now, for many of us, it is about where we want to go—about who we want to be, how we choose to live. Food has always been expressive of identity, but today those identities are more flexible and fluid; they change over time, and respond to different pressures. Some aspects of this are ridiculous: the pickle craze, the báhn-mì boom, the ramps revolution, compulsory kale. Is northern Thai still hot? Has offal gone away yet? Is Copenhagen over? The intersection of food and fashion is silly, just as the intersection of fashion and anything else is silly. Underlying it, however, is that sense of food as an expression of an identity that’s defined, in some crucial sense, by conscious choice. For most people throughout history, that wasn’t true. The apparent silliness and superficiality of food fashions and trends touches on something deep: our ability to choose who we want to be.

…

Not so long ago, food was food. (I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had with people in the industry, debating some point backward and forward, that end with someone shrugging and saying, “It’s just food.”) That’s not true anymore. Food is now politics and ethics as much as it is sustenance. People feel pressure to shop and eat responsibly, healthfully, sustainably. At least, that’s the impression you get from what’s written and said about food culture—that it’s a form of surrogate politics. To some, it’s not even surrogate politics; it’s the real deal, politics at its most urgent and consequential. Alice Waters presents the case beautifully: “Eating is a political act, but in the way the ancient Greeks used the word ‘political’—not just to mean having to do with voting in an election, but to mean ‘of, or pertaining to, all our interactions with other people’—from the family to the school, to the neighborhood, the nation, and the world. Every single choice we make about food matters, at every level. The right choice saves the world.”

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For those of you who don’t have a librarian or professional activist in your life, Banned Book Week (a combination of words which allows for no tasteful acronym) is an annual program sponsored by the American Library Association that “celebrates the freedom to read” by discussing attempts to “censor or ban books.”  To be fair, this organization and many of the bloggers and journalists who write about the occasion do from time to time discuss historical examples of actual censorship. However, their main focus is on more recent events, primarily examples of people challenging a book’s presence on a library’s shelf or on their child’s school reading list. You see, this too is censorship and a threat to our freedom, according to the ALA.

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Remembrance Day has been observed in the United Kingdom, and throughout the Commonwealth, since 1919. It was originally intended to honor those killed in the Great War, and has since been expanded to recognize British and other Commonwealth soldiers who have died in subsequent conflicts. Armistice Day is November 11, but in England, the main observance takes place on Remembrance Sunday, the Sunday closest to November 11.

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In recent years, the company has gotten noticeably good at something that wasn’t always its focus — developing technology products to get pizzas to people more easily.

Yeah, well, it’s still Domino’s pizza….

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, explains it all to you.

The typical voter devotes more time to learning how to program his TV’s remote control than how to assess how each candidate’s likely actions while in office will affect society. Voters’ inattentiveness to the substance of public-policy questions is rational: If public policies will be whatever they will be regardless of how, or even if, you vote, why spend your valuable time learning the details of public-policy issues? Better that you spend that time learning about matters that you can individually control.

Most voters are therefore rationally uninterested in the substantive details of public policies. So, voters instead pay attention only to the most superficial aspects of political questions. And politicians — whose expertise is in campaigning and winning elections — cater to this disinterest by serving up only brainless campaign ads.

Can’t say he’s wrong.

Edward Mendelson speaks for all right-thinking people.

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Evolution has been caught in the act, according to scientists who are decoding how a species of Australian lizard is abandoning egg-laying in favor of live birth.

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Onboard the Galatea, a ship that is 80m (260ft) long, the GLA have been finding out what happens if the satellite system goes wrong.

Martin Bransby demonstrates a GPS failure by pulling the plug on the ship’s receiver.

Within a few seconds, alarms start to sound on the bridge as one by one the instruments stop working.

“This is the gyrocompass – it steers the ship – you can see it starting to fail,” says Mr Bransby.

“If we walk over here, this is the radar, and that’s not working either. This is the dynamic positioning: it holds the ship’s position, that’s not working.

“The electronic chart display becomes unusable. Even the ship’s clock stops working.”

In a series of tests, the GLA have found that almost every bit of kit on the boat uses GPS – even the onboard satellite entertainment system.

Mr Bransby says: “You can imagine standing watch on this ship, it’s the middle of the night, it’s dark, it’s foggy, you are in the English Channel, and then this happens.

“What do you do? You’re in a right mess, basically.”

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Like the fact that you can unlock your iPhone with your fingerprint? Well, maybe not:

A Circuit Court judge has ruled that a criminal defendant can be compelled to give up his fingerprint, but not his pass code, to allow police to open and search his cellphone.

The question of whether a phone’s pass code is constitutionally protected surfaced in the case of David Baust, an Emergency Medical Services captain charged in February with trying to strangle his girlfriend.

Judge Steven C. Frucci ruled this week that giving police a fingerprint is akin to providing a DNA or handwriting sample or an actual key, which the law permits. A pass code, though, requires the defendant to divulge knowledge, which the law protects against, according to Frucci’s written opinion.

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A feminist in the strict and proper sense may be defined as a woman who envies the male role.

The Other McCain doubles down:

Making equality into a moral principle and a political objective always has the result of  of inflaming irrational resentment. People ask why feminists are always so angry; it is because the egalitarian mind sees injustice everywhere. If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. If the only ideology you have is feminism, every problem looks like patriarchal oppression. Any attempt to placate feminists is as doomed as Neville Chamberlain’s attempts to appease Hitler. Feminists are totalitarians who crave unlimited power and can never be satisfied with partial success or compromise. Grant feminists every demand they make today, and tomorrow they will return with a new list of demands. One day it’s “peace for our time,” the next day the Stukas are dive-bombing Warsaw.

Pro and con.

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Over the weekend, it came out that two giant pharmacy chains, Rite Aid and CVS, had started blocking Apple Pay, the massively hyped new payment system from Apple that has received much praise for its ease of use. The product had worked for about a week before the two companies started blocking such near field communication (NFC) payments (which also takes out other NFC payment options like Google Wallet). While Rite Aid gave a vague and slightly ridiculous explanation — that it is “still in the process of evaluating our mobile payment options” — pretty much everyone knows the truth. A bunch of retailers, led by Walmart, have been creating their own mobile payment system called CurrentC, which cuts out the credit card companies. But, it also builds in all the tracking and spying features of store loyalty cards, expanded across all merchant partners. Apple Pay lets people remain anonymous.

Thar’s gold in them there data.

I’d hate to stop shopping at Walmart, but if they don’t take Apple Pay, it could happen.

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A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, “More Recent Evidence on the Effects of Minimum Wages in the United States,” concludes, “We see the evidence as still pointing to disemployment effects for low-skilled workers from raising the minimum wage.” Further, “we conclude that the best evidence still points to job loss from minimum wages for low-skilled workers — in particular for teens.”

Perhaps somebody ought to send a copy of this paper to Hillary Clinton. She seems to be a common-sense-denier.

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It’s an idea echoed everywhere from “Friends” to “Girls”: Young people want to live in cities. And, we’re told, a lot of them (at least the cool ones) do.

It’s a common assumption. But it’s also wrong.

Between 2010 and 2013, the number of 20- to 29-year-olds in America grew by 4 percent. But the number living in the nation’s core cities grew 3.2 percent. In other words, the share of 20-somethings living in urban areas actually declined slightly.

This trend has occurred in supposedly hot cities like San Fransisco, Boston, New York and D.C., notes demographer Wendell Cox. Chicago and Portland, Ore., both widely hailed as youth boom-towns, saw their numbers of 20-somethings decline, too.

Funny how facts keep putting sand in the gears of the Narrative.

Only 17 percent of Millennials identify the urban core as where they want to settle permanently. Another survey, by the Demand Institute (funded by the Conference Board and Neilsen), found that 48 percent of 20-somethings hoped to move to the suburbs one day. And contrary to popular myth, they hoped to own a single-family home. Sixty-one percent seek more space.

These findings may actually understate the suburban preference. As people age, particularly entering the child-bearing period between 30 and 50, they long have displayed a distinct tendency to move to suburban areas.

Well, there goes the neighborhood….

Steve Sailer looks behind the curtain.

As I’ve joked before, when I became interested in the quantitative literature on educational achievement in ninth grade in 1972, the racial rankings went:

1. Orientals
2. Caucasians
3. Chicanos
4. Blacks
Today, the order is:

1. Asians
2. Whites
3. Hispanics
4. African-Americans

…

What I hadn’t guessed in 1988 was that the powers that be in Chicago would simply unload their unwanted public housing project residents on the rest of the Midwest via Section 8 vouchers, with the federal government ready to persecute for discrimination any two-bit burgh that tried to resist. That seemed a little too cynical for even me to imagine in 1988.

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Dappled across the grasslands below was an archipelago of forest islands, many of them startlingly round and hundreds of acres across. Each island rose ten or thirty or sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that would otherwise never survive the water. The forests were linked by raised berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long. It is Erickson’s belief that this entire landscape—30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways—was constructed by a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago. Balée, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this view but was not yet ready to commit himself.

…

Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their environment. Europeans tended to manage land by breaking it into fragments for farmers and herders. Indians often worked on such a grand scale that the scope of their ambition can be hard to grasp. They created small plots, as Europeans did (about 1.5 million acres of terraces still exist in the Peruvian Andes), but they also reshaped entire landscapes to suit their purposes. A principal tool was fire, used to keep down underbrush and create the open, grassy conditions favorable for game. Rather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison. The first white settlers in Ohio found forests as open as English parks—they could drive carriages through the woods. Along the Hudson River the annual fall burning lit up the banks for miles on end; so flashy was the show that the Dutch in New Amsterdam boated upriver to goggle at the blaze like children at fireworks. In North America, Indian torches had their biggest impact on the Midwestern prairie, much or most of which was created and maintained by fire. Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country. Is it possible that the Indians changed the Americas more than the invading Europeans did? “The answer is probably yes for most regions for the next 250 years or so” after Columbus, William Denevan wrote, “and for some regions right up to the present time.”

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MANY people think that the key to success is to cultivate and doggedly maintain an optimistic outlook. This belief in the power of positive thinking, expressed with varying degrees of sophistication, informs everything from affirmative pop anthems like Katy Perry’s “Roar” to the Mayo Clinic’s suggestion that you may be able to improve your health by eliminating “negative self-talk.”

But the truth is that positive thinking often hinders us. More than two decades ago, I conducted a study in which I presented women enrolled in a weight-reduction program with several short, open-ended scenarios about future events — and asked them to imagine how they would fare in each one. Some of these scenarios asked the women to imagine that they had successfully completed the program; others asked them to imagine situations in which they were tempted to cheat on their diets. I then asked the women to rate how positive or negative their resulting thoughts and images were.

A year later, I checked in on these women. The results were striking: The more positively women had imagined themselves in these scenarios, the fewer pounds they had lost.

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The problem is that tattoos are indicia of stupidity; this is essentially fraudulent, like hymen reconstruction surgery.

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Hint: Power and money.

Glenn Reynolds once commented on the seeming paradox of liberals who are terrified at the prospect that libertarians might take power and leave them alone. Actually, liberals probably do want to be left alone; they just don’t have any intention of leaving you alone. Liberals hunger for power so that they can enrich themselves, in many cases, but more generally, so they can remake the world according to their own preferences. This doesn’t mean that they will have to change, but it does mean that you will have to change. As long as liberals’ hunger for power is stronger than conservatives’ desire to be left in peace, the Left will continue to dominate our public life.

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I rather suspect that Wall Street could come up with 100 insane things that NBC News believes, with not much effort.

Joel Pollak is disappointed.

You had to feel just the slightest tinge of jealousy watching the members of the Canadian parliament give a lengthy standing ovation to Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers, the 58-year-old who killed a terrorist and defended democracy on Wednesday. Imagine if we in the United States still had the self-confidence to celebrate our heroes. Imagine if we could, even for just a moment, cheer for them–and each other. For who and what we are.

When President Barack Obama announced in May 2011 that Osama bin Laden had been killed, there were no such celebrations–at least among the country’s leaders.

Sure, students gathered spontaneously in front of the White House, waving American flags and shouting “U-S-A!” Yes, the midshipmen ” target=”_blank”>whooped through the night.

But our politicians–even while taking political credit–would not celebrate America, lest someone take offense.

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Marcin Jakubowski, the owner of a small farm in northwestern Missouri, is an agrarian romantic for high-tech times. A forty-one-year-old Polish-American, he has spent the past five years building industrial machines from scratch, in a demonstration of radical self-sufficiency that he intends as a model for human society everywhere. He believes that freedom and prosperity lie within the reach of anyone willing to return to the land and make the tools necessary to erect civilization on top of it. His project, the Global Village Construction Set, has attracted a following, but among the obstacles he has faced is a dearth of skilled acolytes: the people who show up at his farm typically display more enthusiasm for his ideas than expertise with a lathe or a band saw.

Steve Sailer asks an inconvenient question.

At Rice U., there used to be a jock-only major called Commerce. But, in a bout of post-Sixties idealism, the professors revolted and made Rice get rid of the phony, non-academic Commerce major. During my four years at Rice in the late 1970s, the football team won 7 games and lost 37. Cause and effect?

But what if instead of Commerce, jocks were channelled into, say, African-American Studies? What kind of vicious racist hater would complain about the academic worthiness of African-American Studies?

Steve Sailer looks at urban living.

One reason people moved in large numbers to the suburbs after WWII was because they were quieter for sleeping, especially in summer when you needed to keep your windows open. Lower density means less noise means more hours of sleep per night means happier, more productive days.

Before suburbanization, really rich families simply went some place cool for the entire summer. Affluent families sent the wife and kids away for the summer while the husband stayed home, as in The Seven Year Itch.

For example, in the 1920s, my father lived in Oak Park, Illinois, just west of Chicago. Oak Park is about as famously suburban as any place in America — the house next door was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and native son Ernest Hemingway derided Oak Park for its broad lawns and narrow minds.

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The dastards.

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And why not?

“It’s very apparent that the attitude of the northern part of the state is that they would just love to saw the state in half and just let us float off into the Caribbean,” Stoddard said. “They’ve made that abundantly clear every possible opportunity and I would love to give them the opportunity to do that.”

Sounds like a  plan.

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Fortunately, my son is now homeschooled—or, technically, attends a private online school. He uses online lessons and offline texts and workbooks to learn, coached by his mother and me. The lessons are means to an end; he takes them as needed, and can take as much or little time as necessary, until he demonstrates his mastery of a topic in a unit assessment test. Then he moves on. Find your vocabulary set a breeze? Then skip the review lessons. Stumped by long division? Then spend a few hours working it out.

Funny how that works.

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Last week, California’s Supreme Court reached a controversial 5-2 decision in People v. Diaz (PDF), holding that police officers may lawfully search mobile phones found on arrested individuals’ persons without first obtaining a search warrant. The court reasoned that mobile phones, like cigarette packs and wallets, fall under the search incident to arrest exception to the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

California’s opinion in Diaz is the latest of several recent court rulings upholding warrantless searches of mobile phones incident to arrest. While this precedent is troubling for civil liberties, it’s not a death knell for mobile phone privacy. If you follow a few basic guidelines, you can protect your mobile device from unreasonable search and seizure, even in the event of arrest. In this article, we will discuss the rationale for allowing police to conduct warrantless searches of arrestees, your right to remain silent during police interrogation, and the state of mobile phone security.

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Everything bad is good for you.

Sarah Hoyt breaks the news.

Which is a problem, because while we’re not all going to die of Ebola, Ebola has revealed how far gone we are in lack of civic trust.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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Well, to start with, they don’t pretend that everybody and his dog needs to go to college.

The U.S. has its own tradition of apprenticeship going back many years. But like most kinds of vocational education, it fell out of fashion in recent decades—a victim of our obsession with college and concern to avoid anything that resembles tracking. Today in America, fewer than 5 percent of young people train as apprentices, the overwhelming majority in the construction trades. In Germany, the number is closer to 60 percent—in fields as diverse as advanced manufacturing, IT, banking, and hospitality. And in Europe, what’s often called “dual training” is a highly respected career path.

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When then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid saw fit to ram the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (now affectionately known as ObamaCare) through Congress, the country engaged in a substantive debate over the duty and role of government.

Did I say substantive debate? What I really meant was childish rancor and outrageous demands.

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Just about the entire Democratic Party is lining up to dump on Obama at the moment, including former President Jimmy Carter, who is obviously relieved that he’s no longer everyone’s go-to model for the worst president in modern memory.

Scott Adams connects the dots, which as a cartoonist he’s allowed to do.

I’ve described in this blog how my B.S. filter works. I look for two sources to be in agreement. For example, if the news reports match my common sense view, or my observations, or the first-hand accounts from witnesses, I tend to believe the news. But if the news conflicts with my common sense or my observations I raise an eyebrow and try to keep it that way.

The ISIS story doesn’t pass my B.S. filter because it violates common sense that such a competent fighting force could suddenly emerge and bitch-slap professionally trained (or even poorly trained) military forces with such consistency. I have worked in large organizations and I know that the logistics involved – the planning, training, and resupplying are huge challenges even for organized armies. Did ISIS really figure out all of that while their communications are presumably monitored by the enemy?

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I’d be more concerned if Africans didn’t seem so determined to convince us that it is.

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Nigeria is much closer to the West Africa outbreak than the US is, yet even after Ebola entered the country in the most terrifying way possible — via a visibly sick passenger on a commercial flight — officials successfully shut down the disease and prevented widespread transmission.

Usually Business Insider is Just Another Oxymoronically Named Lefty Rag, but they may actually be growing up into real journalists.

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It really is the sort of news that made me want to weep into my skinny cappuccino and then pour it down the sink. After years of being told, and telling others, that saturated fat clogs your arteries and makes you fat, there is now mounting evidence that eating some saturated fats may actually help you lose weight and be good for the heart.

Everything bad is good for you. Michelle, put a sock in it.

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What does it tell you when the leader of the world’s best known rock band has a better grasp of modern tax policy than those responsible for making it?

The front man for the rock band U2 got some people’s Irish up after he defended the low taxes of his homeland. “Tax competitiveness has brought our country the only prosperity we’ve known,” said the singer about the Emerald Isle. He’s absolutely right.

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First, of course, you have to pick the right exam.

Across a variety of experiments, psychologists have found that, in some circumstances, wrong answers on a pretest aren’t merely useless guesses. Rather, the attempts themselves change how we think about and store the information contained in the questions. On some kinds of tests, particularly multiple-choice, we benefit from answering incorrectly by, in effect, priming our brain for what’s coming later.

That is: The (bombed) pretest drives home the information in a way that studying as usual does not. We fail, but we fail forward.

…

Often our study “aids” simply create fluency illusions — including, yes, highlighting — as do chapter outlines provided by a teacher or a textbook. Such fluency misperceptions are automatic; they form subconsciously and render us extremely poor judges of what we need to restudy or practice again. “We know that if you study something twice, in spaced sessions, it’s harder to process the material the second time, and so people think it’s counterproductive,” Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College, said. “But the opposite is true: You learn more, even though it feels harder. Fluency is playing a trick on judgment.”

Steven Pinker turns over a rock.

Together with wearing earth tones, driving Priuses, and having a foreign policy, the most conspicuous trait of the American professoriate may be the prose style called academese.

…

No honest professor can deny that there’s something to the stereotype. When the late Denis Dutton (founder of the Chronicle-owned Arts & Letters Daily) ran an annual Bad Writing Contest to celebrate “the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles,” he had no shortage of nominations, and he awarded the prizes to some of academe’s leading lights.

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Did lead poisoning cause the fall of the Roman Empire?  Probably not.

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I am not making this up.

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Memorandum that Orthodox Christians have been resisting Muslim aggression for 1400 years.

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I was perplexed by this parenting style. After all, most parents seem to take the opposite approach, letting their children bathe in the glow of tablets, smartphones and computers, day and night.

Yet these tech C.E.O.’s seem to know something that the rest of us don’t.

…

I never asked Mr. Jobs what his children did instead of using the gadgets he built, so I reached out to Walter Isaacson, the author of “Steve Jobs,” who spent a lot of time at their home.

“Every evening Steve made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things,” he said. “No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices.”

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Eric Raymond lays out some inconvenient truth.

Males have, on average, about a 150% advantage in upper-body strength over females. It takes an exceptionally strong woman to match the ability of even the average man to move a contact weapon with power and speed and precise control. At equivalent levels of training, with the weight of real weapons rather than boffers, that strength advantage will almost always tell.

…

Firearms changes all this, of course – some of the physiological differences that make them inferior with contact weapons are actual advantages at shooting (again I speak from experience, as I teach women to shoot). So much so that anyone who wants to suppress personal firearams is objectively anti-female and automatically oppressive of women.