Read it.

Children of the Crust will never want for a place. Too bad her name isn’t Clinton.

Read it.

This will clear up a lot of the confusion.

They lie when the truth would suffice, and they hold on to that lie, even doubling down on it, regardless of what evidence to the contrary comes to light.

When President Obama’s “If you like your plan you can keep your plan” lie was finally and irrefutably exposed, he didn’t apologize or explain why he’d lied. He just said he was sorry people got the wrong impression from his words, which, of course, could not have been clearer.

…

But the Bergdahl lie was hardly an orphan this week in the pantheon of progressive lies. Hillary Clinton, our next president as far the casual observer of mainstream media knows, told a doozy this week.

Read it. (PDF)

Burt Rutan lays it out in black & white.

Jim Goad follows the President no matter how far down he goes.

President Barack Obama—who would never lie…at least not intentionally…or at least he wouldn’t admit it…recently spoke at a Massachusetts school where he claimed that “30 to 40 percent” of the pupils are “DREAM kids,” which basically means that they are dreaming if they think they are here legally. He added that “our future rests on their success.”

Is this encouraging?

Most of the DREAMers are from Mexico, a nation of 120 million whose residents love their country so much, they keep fleeing it to live in the United States.

Apart from a mean IQ of 87, what will these diminutive and swarthy newcomers bring to the table in terms of success? In his book Travels in Mexico and Life Among The Mexicans, Frederick Albion Ober speaks of the nation’s “inventive genius.”

OK, then, what have Mexicans invented?

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Steve Sailer enlightens you.

Native populations within Mexico are pretty much the people who stayed home and didn’t out-marry. The working definition of an Indian in Mexico has been somebody who wears the distinctive clothes of his or her Indian people. If somebody leaves home and makes a new life in a different area, they typically wear the European-style clothes of the mestizo majority. If you put on European clothes, you are assumed to have chosen to belong to mestizo, because even if you are still 100% Indian, your descendants will likely be mestizo.

Jan-Werner Müller reviews Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void.

The evidence Mair marshals to demonstrate the decline of parties is overwhelming. Although turnout isn’t progressively lower in every successive election, record troughs occur more often and in more and more places. Surveys confirm that the number of people who identify with a particular party is falling, while party membership is dwindling dramatically. Indifference, Mair argues, goes together with inconsistency. Voting has become more volatile, and although we can’t be sure what voters are thinking, it’s plausible to assume that taking politics less seriously translates into experimenting more freely with one’s ballot. That said, rising volatility could also indicate the opposite: that citizens think more carefully about their choices; that they don’t blindly follow a party allegiance they may well have inherited from their parents. For Mair, though, this is a problematic development. Parties used to be based on distinct social identities. In other words, they truly represented distinct sections of the population. Partisanship didn’t detract from, but increased, the legitimacy of the political system. Parties were not one mechanism among others that made ‘mass democracy’ acceptable: they were the principal means of transmitting popular will and opinion from civil society to the state. Crucially, they remained anchored in the former. Hence the importance of what Mair calls ‘representational integrity’: politicians could not simply go in search of support from the people as whole or adopt what Mair terms ‘the politics of “what works”’. The question was not ‘what works?’ but ‘what works for us?’ And that self-interest on the part of multiple constituencies was precisely what made democracy work as a whole.

Read it.

In most war games, players are out for blood. But a soon-to-be-released game from 11 Bit Studios turns that shoot ’em up convention on its head.

In This War of Mine, survival is the only goal. By day, your group of civilians hides from snipers. By night, you sneak out for building supplies and medicine, or contrive ways to capture rainwater for drinking.

…

“While designing a new game,” lead designer Michal Drozdowski explained in a blog post, he and his team read a viral online account called “One Year in Hell,” written by a Bosnian about his life in the early 1990s. “We learned about his hardships and the horror of that experience. We decided to work around this idea and make something real, something that moves people and makes them think for a second. It’s about time that games, just like any other art form, start talking about important things.”

This is, of course, horseshit. Games are recreations, nothing more, in which people do things that take them away from the tedium that constitutes the bulk of most people’s daily lives. I’d like to see the author cram golf or tennis or bowling into her grimly ideological framework of ‘talking about important things’.

If someone wants to create a simulation of what it’s like to be a civilian in a war zone, then he is certainly free to do so, just as he is free to write a story about the same thing — but it isn’t a game except in the most academic sense.

Read it.

Ferran Adrià and Nathan Myhrvold are an odd couple. Adrià, the Catalan chef, is compact and handsome in an Antonio Banderas-meets-Leonard Cohen sort of way. When he tastes something he likes, he closes his eyes and says, “Fantástico.” Myhrvold, the Microsoft multimillionaire and inventor turned cookbook writer, is a gentler presence. Redheaded, he resembles a cartoon chipmunk, the kind that laughs when you poke its tummy. When he tastes something good, his cheeks glow as if his heart’s pilot light has been ignited.

The pair, both in their early 50s, are at the top of the culinary movement that’s become known as modernist cuisine, one that’s pushed chefs and intrepid home cooks to master a new batterie de cuisine (sous-vide vacuum sealers, ultrasonic homogenizers, centrifuges) and to fill their pantries with staples like xanthan gum and liquid lecithin. Cheerful rule-breakers, they are self-consciously in league with narrative-fracturing modernists in other disciplines — James Joyce in fiction, the Bauhaus school in architecture, Martha Graham in dance. They talk about food the way other people talk about novels or paintings, using terms like “whimsy,” “satire,” “nostalgia” and “trompe l’oeil” as often as “crispy,” “fat,” “salty” or “al dente,” usually without sounding obnoxious.

Sarah Hoyt finds that her bullshit detector has gone off.

So instead I decided to follow right up on what Kate was saying yesterday and jump onto “Diversity is our Strength.”

Has anyone ever proven that? I mean in the terms that PC understands diversity that is.

Well, no. The supposed benefits of ‘diversity’ over any other kind of car is asserted but no attempt is ever made to demonstrated it. Like ‘we’re all immigrants’, it’s one of those platitudes that those who see it as self-evident see as self-evident, and everybody else is evil or stupid or both, probably both.

First, it assumes people are widgets. No, seriously. What would the idea that “diversity is having a black person on the team” mean, unless you think the contents of every black person’s head are exactly alike.

And once you realize this is what is at the basis of it, you’ll have trouble not laughing like crazy. Yep. Thomas Sowell, or the black guy next door? Totally the same thing, even though the guy next door is twenty and studying English. He could totally teach economics at any second. Because he’s black, and that’s all that matters.

Read it.

Why bother stepping on your own dick when government is there to do it for you?

Read it.

But here are two things you need to know about life after an arm amputation: First, your center of gravity changes dramatically when you are suddenly eight pounds lighter on one side of your body. Second, while my arm may be missing physically, it is there, just as it always has been, in my mind’s eye. I can feel every digit. I can even feel the watch that was always strapped to my left wrist. When I tripped, I reached reflexively to break my very real fall with my completely imaginary left hand. My fall was instead broken by my nose, and my nose was broken by my fall.

Read it.

Do not presume that, when a company installs an expensive device in your home, it is necessarily for your benefit.

George Will says what everybody knows and will not admit.

In 1964, 76 percent of Americans trusted government to do the right thing “just about always or most of the time”; today, 19 percent do. The former number is one reason Johnson did so much; the latter is one consequence of his doing so.

Sarah Hoyt has some thoughts.

The world has always been too hard for some percentage of humans. The mind has always been unable to face reality naked. What I mean is, for those of us who believe in something more, it’s easy to say “He won’t give me more than I can handle,” but what about the others? What about those who’ve convinced themselves that there’s nothing but humans, nothing but the naked human mind and the uncaring universe. I don’t mean the ones who have some measure of doubt. All of us, even the most faith-filled have some measure of doubt, and the measure changes through the days and years – I mean the ones who were brought up to believe that anything religious is crazy talk. The ones who try to be “sane” in a peculiar way no human has ever quite managed.

…

Our ancestors held on to crazy beliefs because it made it easier to live in a world where most of what they thought they knew was wrong and more often than not bit them in the ass.

Our “liberal” friends are in the same pickle. And no, I don’t know how to fix it, because no, rubbing their nose in reality doesn’t help. If the reality of the mess the USSR really was didn’t fix them, if they can believe Che “I club children to death with my rifle” Guevara was a sort of sensitive idealist, if they can believe this lousy economy is “recovering”, if they can believe, against all history, that bowing and scraping to tyrants like Putin will bring peace…. We can’t reach them. What can we use that will get through?

Freeberg turns over a rock.

What we saw in the 1990?s, in comic books and elsewhere — and it has yet to lose momentum, even this late — is a cultural phobia against true heroism. This could always use more & better inspection, even if the inspection results in unflattering things being noticed about the phobia, which I think for the most part is the case. Let’s see, what are the reasons heroism might be a pain in the ass. There are some: 1) A hero who rights wrongs, might come after you if you’re the guy doing something wrong; 2) Heroes raise the standard, since it isn’t really the physical capability to do what’s right that makes the hero, it’s the resolve. So they pose a threat to the active evil-doer, and the passive bystander alike. May I suggest that our two-decades-old or so beef with yesteryear’s simpler and cleaner brand of heroism, is advocacy for the benefit of the passive and not so much for the active. It is a shadowy crusade for sake of the lazy.

It is, I think, a fulfillment of success by way of defining success downward to meet status quo. Here’s an evil thing being done, and here’s a rationale for not doing anything about it: If true heroism is nothing more than recognizing that we shouldn’t do anything about it, then we can all be heroes by continuing to sit on our asses, playing Angry Birds on our phones. And therein lies a complete inversion that didn’t take too many years to come about; since when Superman got started it wasn’t his superpowers that made him a hero, it was his recognition that something was amiss and something had to be done about it. “This looks like a job for,” remember that?

Scott Johnson comments on John Podhoretz.

In his New York Post column today John Podhoretz puts the revelation of the Bergdahl disgrace over the past week in the context of Obama’s carefully manicured image. “What happens,” he asks, “when the world’s greatest spin doctor commits malpractice — on himself?”

Read it.

What he said.

Read it.

In Piketty’s book, there is surprisingly little economic analysis.  Armen Alchian or Harold Demsetz or Yoram Barzel or Jim Buchanan or David Friedman or Ronald Coase – to choose just some examples – each has more economic analysis on any one randomly chosen page of any of his works than Piketty has throughout his entire book.

Like Marx, Piketty’s agenda is political, and only incidentally economic.

Read it.

As can be seen on the following chart, during the period from January 2011 to March 2014, there have been slightly more single-family housing starts in Houston (95,037) than in California for the entire state (94,993).

Read it.

Despite the benefits of government programs such as affirmative action – something opposed by some other minorities, notably Asian Americans – African Americans have not expanded their share of the middle class in recent decades. Indeed, racial economic disparities are growing, with black unemployment more than double the white jobless rate and reaching 40 percent among youths.

Even more revealing, many of those areas under the most complete progressive control – New York, San Francisco and Chicago – also have among the worst disparities between black and white incomes, notes a recent National Urban League study.

It may well be that hyper-regulatory regimes in the left-leaning cities tend to chase away blue collar jobs and raise the price of housing so high that minorities simply leave. Many of those who stay pay an inordinate share of their income, often upwards of 50 percent, just to keep a roof over their head.

As Thomas Sowell has observed, the black population of San Francisco, the ultimate gentry city, is now half of what it was in 1970, even as the city has experienced an overall demographic resurgence.

Read it.

At last, the truth comes out.

Varoufakis: If we think of ourselves as empiricists who judge the value of the theory on the basis of how well it predicts, then we should have ditched economic models years ago. Never have our models managed with data to predict the major turning points, ever, in the history of capitalism. So if we were honest, we should simply accept that and rethink our approach.

But actually, I think they’re even worse. We can’t even predict the past very well using our models. Economic models are failing to model the past in a way that can explain the past. So what we end up doing with our economic models is retrofitting the data and our own prejudices about how the economy works.

This is why I’m saying that this profession of mine is not really anywhere near astronomy. It’s much closer to mathematized superstition, organized superstition, which has a priesthood to replicate on the basis of how well we learn the rituals.

Video game communities, social economies, give us something that we never had as economists before. That’s something of an opportunity, a chance to experiment with a macroeconomy. We can experiment in economics with individuals. We can put someone behind a screen and experiment on the subject, and ask him or her to make choices and see how they behave.

That has nothing to do with macroeconomics. Macroeconomics requires a different scenario. You conduct controlled experiments with a large economy. We are not allowed to do this in the real world. But in the video game world, we economists have a smidgen of an opportunity to conduct controlled experiments on a real, functioning macroeconomy. And that may be a scientific window into economic reality that we’ve never had access to before.

Read it.

Life-hacking wouldn’t be popular if it didn’t tap into something deeply corroded about the way work has, without much resistance, managed to invade every corner of our lives. The idea started out as a somewhat earnest response to the problem of fragmented attention and overwork—an attempt to reclaim some leisure time and autonomy from the demands of boundaryless labor. But it has since become just another hectoring paradigm of self-improvement. The proliferation of apps and gurus promising to help manage even the most basic tasks of simple existence—the “quantified self” movement does life hacking one better, turning the simple act of breathing or sleeping into something to be measured and refined—suggests that merely getting through the day has become, for many white-collar professionals, a set of problems to solve and systems to optimize. Being alive is easier, it turns out, if you treat it like a job.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Something I haven’t seen mentioned in all the discussion of Piketty: Near whom would you rather live, the rich or the poor?

And there it is in a nutshell. Say what you will about Donald Trump — and who doesn’t? — I’m pretty confident that, if I bump into him on the street, he’s not going to stab me and steal my wallet and cellphone.

Read it.

Suggestion: R Lee Ermey.

Read it.

Everybody wants to know what the next bubble is, and there’s an easy way to tell: Just watch where Harvard grads are going. Then short the hell out of that.

…

Harvard is a magnet for Organization Kids who excel at coloring between the lines. After graduation, they want to do something prestigious, something remunerative, but mostly, as Kevin Roose points out, something that gives them new lines to color between. That might be Silicon Valley, or it might be Teach for America — or it might be Wall Street, if, that is, the getting looks good.

Read it.

What is remarkable regarding Piketty’s work, is that he backed his work with comprehensive data and thorough analysis. Unfortunately, like too many people, Piketty used speadsheets instead of writing sane software. On the plus side, he published his code… on the negative side, it appears that Piketty’s code contains mistakes, fudging and other problems.

In other words, he skipped a key element of any software design process: code review.

Simply put, spreadsheets are good for quick and dirty work, but they are not designed for serious and reliable work.

• All professional software should contain extensive tests… how do you know that your functions do what you think they do if you do not test them? Yet spreadsheets do not allow testing.
• Spreadsheets make code review difficult. The code is hidden away in dozens if not hundreds of little cells… If you are not reviewing your code carefully… and if you make it difficult for others to review it, how do expect it to be reliable?
• Spreadsheets encourage copy-and-paste programming and ad hoc fudging. It is much harder to review, test and maintain such code.

UPDATE: An opposing viewpoint here.

Steve Sailer illumines a disturbing new trend.

Earlier this week I pointed out that an increasing number of the identity politics brouhahas in Silicon Valley don’t seem to involve traditional victims, but instead revolve around attractive young women who hand the press a prefab narrative about the horrors of “alpha-male culture.” Large concentrations of money have traditionally attracted that type of woman formerly known as the adventuress. Some Internet searching suggests that the term “adventuress” is no longer used in polite society, although it remains a popular title for pulp novels for women. It’s considered sexist to say that Bonaparte was an adventurer while Lola Montez was an adventuress. So, the word and, increasingly, the concept are forgotten.

Read it.

BLUF: No.

Many explanations have been offered to make sense of the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of medical wisdom — what we are advised with confidence one year is reversed the next — but the simplest one is that it is the natural rhythm of science. An observation leads to a hypothesis. The hypothesis (last year’s advice) is tested, and it fails this year’s test, which is always the most likely outcome in any scientific endeavor. There are, after all, an infinite number of wrong hypotheses for every right one, and so the odds are always against any particular hypothesis being true, no matter how obvious or vitally important it might seem.

Christopher Hart lays down some inconvenient truth.

But people do have a hierarchy of preferences: always have and always will. They prefer people like them. Most English people would rather live next door to their own. They can converse over the garden fence in English, the wife isn’t hidden under a burqa, and they get the allusions to Monty Python sketches. So those who can afford it live in areas of Britain where this is likely to be the case.

If not English, Dutch or Danish neighbors would probably be OK—or German, despite one or two little misunderstandings over the past century. They behave much as English people would behave. This isn’t prejudice. Prejudice means pre-judging, without evidence. This is informed opinion. If the family is Romanian, they may well be gypsy too—or “Roma,” as we are now obliged to say. And they are factually more likely to steal. Romanians are now the fifth largest group of foreigners in our jails, squeezing in between Jamaicans and Pakistanis. The cost of our Eastern European prison population is now £73 million a year, kindly paid for by the British taxpayer whom they went to jail for robbing in the first place.

If our next-door neighbors are Somalian, Afghan, Nigerian, or Pakistani, they are statistically more likely to remove their wives’ clitorises, to murder their daughters for being seen with a white English boy, to think that 9/11 or our own 7/7 bombings were a fine idea, or to behead a British soldier in a London street (see “Drummer Lee Rigby, death of”). Not all Muslims are terrorists, no; but almost all terrorists these days are Muslims.

Bryan Caplan is always worth reading.

Within economics, the idea that education has a larger effect on income than productivity is vaguely right-wing. Why? Because economists realize that this premise undermines the textbook efficiency case for governments’ massive education subsidies.

Outside economics, however, the idea that education has a larger effect on income than productivity is vaguely left-wing. Why? Because non-economists realize that this premise undermines the legitimacy of the status quo – which they think of as “capitalism.”

Read it.

BLUF: The government is shitty at running things.

Mark Stein, in addition to being a brilliant political commentator, also reviews movies.

Twenty years ago, the Rwandan genocide was, machete-wise, in full swing: They were about halfway through their seven-figure mass murder. There being no hashtags in those days, President Clinton, the Pain-Feeler-in-Chief, had to slough off the victims with a rather brusquer soundbite nixing international intervention: “The UN has to learn how to say no.” And so 20 per cent of the population of Rwanda was slaughtered, a number so huge that the world chose to hold it at a big, woozy, blurry distance. To mark the tenth anniversary, the editors of the Economist asked, ‘How many people can name any of the perpetrators?’ I’d say it’s more basic than that. How many could tell you whether it was the Hutu killing the Tutsi or the Tutsi killing the Hutu? C’mon, take a guess, without looking it up.

Steve Sailer brings us up to date on the latest darling of the Left.

I’m always fascinated by the dynamics of reputation. For example, when Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz demonstrated in late 2005, a half year after the publication of Freakonomics, that Steven D. Levitt’s most famous theory — that legalizing abortion cut crime — was the result of Levitt’s sloppiness in writing Stata code (not Excel, by the way), the impact on Levitt’s career was negligible. His reputation only started to decline a few years later with the publication of SuperFreakonomics in which Levitt didn’t demonstrate complete fidelity to the climate change orthodoxy.

Basically, there was no money to be made in showing that the facts didn’t support Levitt’s conclusion. In contrast, there is a lot of money arrayed against Piketty, so we’ll hear more about it.

Sarah Hoyt rather dislikes internationalism.

The point is that the UN without universal values that all the world agrees on is a sheep and ten wolves arguing what is for dinner. It has become a vehicle for countries that would otherwise be totally disregarded – and which by culture should be. I mean, Iran is in charge of women’s status in the UN – to hit out at bigger, more successful countries. Also for countries to cadge Dane Geld from bigger, richer countries (mostly the US.)

One wonders how long the scam can go on, when it’s obvious that this is not a way to create universal peace, which is how it was billed. Instead it’s a rent seeking organization with a side order of “make the US feel guilty” which is necessary, of course, for rent seeking.

But the Crust makes money, and when the Crust makes money, the U.S. taxpayer pays the piper.

I’m going to come back to the idea of the UN, of a world body that can stop wars, and teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

Not only is that impossible, unless we agree on one culture (Be fair to the soviets. Their internationalism was SANE. They wanted a one-world government, and that government soviet.) but is it really desirable?

It amuses me that those who agree on “diversity” in everything are unable to see that diversity of culture and thought might be desirable. At least they are unable to see it when it violates their sacred cows.

Diversity in everything except thought. That sounds familiar.

The glittery hoo ha and the rot in science fiction developed because the structure of publishing became centralized and a mono-culture and that culture Eastern Seaboard Liberal. This didn’t fit even the rest of the country and has been a resounding commercial failure. And meanwhile they, isolated from all criticism, became ever more crazy and started drinking their own ink. Which is why we have a field already dominated by women crowing about “kicking patriarchy in the balls” by giving awards the outer world ignores to people on the basis of their genitals.

THAT is what happens to cultures that are isolated and get their own feedback loop.

Pretty scary. Do we really want One World that is run by the likes of George Soros and Barack Obama? I think not.

Read it.

‘You’re workmen! You should be working! That’s what you get for not having an education!’ — Professor Hathaway, Real Genius

Read it.

A popular study from the 1970s that helps sell millions of dollars’ worth of fish oil supplements worldwide is deeply flawed, according to a new study being published in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology.

Can Global Warming be far behind?

Read it.

What if he went straight to the raw chemical components? He took a break from experimenting with software and studied textbooks on nutritional biochemistry and the Web sites of the F.D.A., the U.S.D.A., and the Institute of Medicine. Eventually, Rhinehart compiled a list of thirty-five nutrients required for survival. Then, instead of heading to the grocery store, he ordered them off the Internet—mostly in powder or pill form—and poured everything into a blender, with some water. The result, a slurry of chemicals, looked like gooey lemonade. Then, he told me, “I started living on it.” Rhinehart called his potion Soylent, which, for most people, evokes the 1973 science-fiction film “Soylent Green,” starring Charlton Heston. The movie is set in a dystopian future where, because of overpopulation and pollution, people live on mysterious wafers called Soylent Green. The film ends with the ghastly revelation that Soylent Green is made from human flesh.

As you would expect from an article in The New Yorker, the Upper West Side ‘canoeing among the natives’ tone comes through perfectly.

Gavin McInnes lays out some inconvenient truth.

Some of my best friends are black and many of them turn purple with rage when I suggest this possibility. The most common response is that I may not even ponder such things because I’m white. One woman told me about the hell she goes through as a person of color because store employees follow her around like she’s a shoplifter. She is the only individual in her family who has an education. Her sister is in jail and both her brothers are dead from gang-related murders. The shopkeepers who are suspicious of her are only off by one sibling. That’s not prejudice. That’s postjudice. What’s more important than leering stares is that she had the same opportunities as everyone else. Because she tried hard in school and refused to waste time partying, she became a successful and happy Woman of Color.

Lileks scratches his head.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the new fad among Kids These Days, which is jumping into cold water. Goes by many names: the Polar Plunge, the Cold Water Challenge, the Frigid Folly, doesn’t matter. It’s simple: Kid goes into the water. Friend shoots a video of the event, because the point of doing anything these days is to do it for the camera, and then it’s posted online, because otherwise it didn’t happen.

It’s for charity, supposedly. Perhaps the American Association for Halting Hypothermia Health Hazards, or AAHHH, which is the sound you make when you jump into cold water.

…

Why is it popular? Because it’s all about the dare. They say it’s not, but that’s the heart of it. If you are dared, you must comply, or you are chicken, and this stays with you the rest of your life:

“Well, Ms. Horgensted, your résumé is most impressive, and your multilingual aptitude is just the sort of thing our international branches are looking for. I’d say you were a natural fit for our French office, but we’re looking for someone who can meet new challenges square in the face, and according to our NSA intercepts of your social media activity from 10 years ago, you declined to walk into cold water when taunted by a peer. I’m sorry, but we’re looking for a leader. Someone who jumps off a bridge, and everyone else follows.”

One thing I’ve always wondered about is the mystical power of the phrase ‘I dare you.’ (Sometimes the ante is upped by ‘I double-dog dare you’, which is really stupid when you think about it, which of course nobody ever does, except in bootless ruminations such as this one.) The classic measure of susceptibility to peer pressure, at any age, is what you will do in response to ‘I dare you’. Of course, the desired outcome is a successful doing, followed by an admiring ‘I can’t believe you actually did that.’ The key here is the admiring tone, which Makes All Worthwhile; the same phrase, uttered in a appalled tone, would rip off the facade of fashionability and reveal the cold hard truth that this was actually an incredibly stupid thing to do. But peer pressure has one of the lowest IQs on the block.

I suspect that my response to such a phrase these days would be ‘Why? Why is it so important to you that I do this (probably) very stupid thing?’ To which, of course, the dare-er has no ready response–other than, perhaps, ‘Well, that’s what we do.’

My theory is that it’s all about control. If I can persuade you to do a stupid thing merely by saying ‘I dare you’, then I exercise a degree of control over your actions. In this regard I think it is important to appreciate the context: We don’t accept dares from people whom we don’t respect, whose regard we do not value. Accepting a dare is a way of validating our membership in a particular social circle, sort of like voluntarily submitting to a humiliating fraternity initiation ritual. ‘I value membership in this group sufficiently to sacrifice my dignity and perhaps risk life and limb; please honor this sacrifice and welcome me into the group.’

Unfortunately, none of us realize this at twelve, when it would be most valuable. As my granny used to say, ‘We is too soon old, and too late smart.’

Larry Summers does Thomas Piketty.

A brief look at the Forbes 400 list also provides only limited support for Piketty’s ideas that fortunes are patiently accumulated through reinvestment. When Forbes compared its list of the wealthiest Americans in 1982 and 2012, it found that less than one tenth of the 1982 list was still on the list in 2012, despite the fact that a significant majority of members of the 1982 list would have qualified for the 2012 list if they had accumulated wealth at a real rate of even 4 percent a year. They did not, given pressures to spend, donate, or misinvest their wealth. In a similar vein, the data also indicate, contra Piketty, that the share of the Forbes 400 who inherited their wealth is in sharp decline.

Read it.

“It really is an amazingly distressing situation,” says Pennsylvania State University glaciologist Sridhar Anandakrishnan, who was not affiliated with either study. “This is a huge part of West Antarctica, and it seems to have been kicked over the edge.”

The researchers say the fate of the glaciers is almost certainly beyond hope.

Remember this when it a couple of years they come back and say ‘Oops! Never mind!’

Read it.

The debate over climate change is often a contentious one, and key players in the discussion only rarely switch sides. But late last month, Lennart Bengtsson, the former director of the Hamburg-based Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, one of the world’s leading climate research centers, announced he would join the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

How can he do that? I thought that ‘the science is settled’? I thought that ‘the debate is over’?

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Jinjing Liu, a 15-year-old ninth-grader at Meilong Intermediate in central Shanghai—and part of the best education system in the world’s most populous country—is ticking off her normal class schedule: “Physics, chemistry, math, Chinese, English, Chinese literature, geography…the usual stuff,” she says in impeccable English.

That’s not Jinjing’s school day schedule; that’s her workload each and every Sunday. The Lord may have rested on the seventh day, but Jinjing studies, from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. She relates this over lunch on a Saturday afternoon, “the only day,” she acknowledges, that she has “any free time to relax.” And lest you think she is some whiz-bang academic geek on the fast track to Tsinghua, China’s M.I.T., think again. Ask who else in her high school has that Sunday routine and she says, “Pretty much everyone.”

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It’s such a great, simple idea: Young Brazilians want to learn English. Elderly Americans living in retirement homes just want someone to talk to. Why not connect them?

FCB Brazil did just that with its “Speaking Exchange” project for CNA language schools. As seen in the touching case study below, the young Brazilians and older Americans connect via Web chats, and they not only begin to share a language—they develop relationships that enrich both sides culturally and emotionally.

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You hear the word “poverty” tossed around a lot. There’s been a “war” on it for some 50 years, and I am hardly the first person to notice that either poverty is a tough opponent, or the goalposts keep moving on what constitutes “poverty.” Or both.

…

Follow these 6 simple rules and you may struggle, but you will never be in poverty:

1. Stay in school and actually pay attention. Do your homework, graduate.

2. Do not do drugs at all or drink alcohol to excess.

3. WORK. At anything. Currently, 20 percent of families have nobody working.

4. GET MARRIED. Marriage is the single-best anti-poverty tool there is. If you have a spouse, remember that two crap jobs are equal to one fairly-decent one.

5. Do not have a baby you have no intention of supporting. Do not have a baby without a lawfully wedded spouse, preferably your own.

6. Do NOT be a criminal. It is evil and hurtful to others, but most importantly, the habits and attitudes you will develop are the worst thing you can do to yourself. When you believe that you are entitled to take, by stealth or violence, something someone else has earned, then you are close to a lost cause as a human being.

Not one of these rules calls for a government program. But if every American followed them, poverty would end overnight.

 

Theodore Dalrymple exposes the latest fad in economic ressentiment as the zombie that it is.

Resentment is the one emotion that can last a lifetime and will never let you down. All other emotions are fleeting and unreliable by comparison. I have tried hating someone for years, but found it impossible: hatred fades like the colors of pressed flowers. But resentment! It is the perfect solution to one’s failure in life. And we are all of us failures in some sense or other, thank God, for no one would be as intolerable and the cause of so much resentment as the complete success.

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Just lucky, I guess.

President Barack Obama’s fundraising pilgrimage to California included all the liberal stations: Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and La Jolla.

Two patterns stood out: first, that Obama continues to be heckled even by friendly audiences; and second, that America’s richest political donors not only tolerate attacks on wealth but enjoy them, nodding and murmuring their approval when the president tells them they are the nation’s enemies.

What do they know that you don’t? Hmmm?

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And these are just the good things….

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• Democrat governors have enacted over $58 billion in higher taxes since 2011.

• This stands in stark contrast to Republican governors, who have signed over $36 billion in tax cuts into law since 2011.

And that tells you everything you need to know about Republicans and Democrats.

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It all started with beavers. When Alex Pentland was three years into his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan, in 1973, he worked part-time as a computer programmer for NASA’s Environmental Research Institute. One of his first tasks — part of a larger environmental-monitoring project — was to develop a method for counting Canadian beavers from outer space. There was just one problem: existing satellites were crude, and beavers are small. “What beavers do is they create ponds,” he recalls of his eventual solution, “and you can count the number of beavers by the number of ponds. You’re watching the lifestyle, and you get an indirect measure.”