Angelo Codevilla continues to document our descent into Liberal Fascism.

Confirming ordinary experience, the polls leave no doubt that the majority of Americans now regard the U.S. government as more a threat than a protector, acting beyond law or popular control. How government in America became “them” rather than “us,” what government’s loss of legitimacy means for this country, and whether lost confidence and legitimacy may be reclaimed any more than virginity, are questions we must ponder.

…

When some 200 paramilitary agents of the Bureau of Land Management dealt with a Nevada rancher using armored cars, took his herd of some 400 cattle, shot his bull, and tasered his son supposedly to collect a million dollars in unpaid grazing fees, few imagined that those cattle had eaten a million dollars’ worth of grass. Everyone who receives a bill from a government agency knows that the agency quickly multiplies that bill with interest and penalties, and that at best, ordinary citizens can argue before a judge (not a jury) only whether the agency followed its own procedures—not whether its judgments were just. Also, the American people’s near-universal experience is that merely pointing out a mistake to the IRS—or to any other agency—likely leads to its finding pretexts for imposing other, even heavier costs on you.

Moreover, no one was surprised to learn that the family of Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader and senior senator from Nevada, stood to benefit from the rancher’s dispossession. Rory Reed, Harry Reid’s son, is brokering the construction of large scale solar energy farms in the area. Some of the land where they are being built contains wildlife which is to be transferred to the land on which the rancher’s cattle have been grazing. The Bureau of Land Management, which decided to clear this particular land of cattle so that the transfer of said wildlife could proceed, is headed by one Neal Kornze, whose career consists exclusively of service to Senator Reed.

Americans are learning the hard way that the modern administrative state serves the powerful at the expense of ordinary citizens. That is why, the peculiarities of the rancher’s dispute notwithstanding, the American people reacted with something like “That, but for the grace of God, could be me.”

Steve Sailer writes one of the best explanations of ‘race’ I’ve ever read.

Q. What’s race all about?

A. Relatedness.

Race is about who is related to whom.

Q. Do you mean a race is a family?

A. Yes, an extended family. (To be precise, a particular type of extended family, one that’s more coherent over time than the norm, a distinction I’ll explain below.)

Q. Race means family? I’ve never heard of such a thing!

A. It’s remarkable how seldom this concept essential to understanding how the world works is mentioned in the press. Yet, in my Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, the first definition of “race” is:

“1. A group of persons related by common descent or heredity.”

Q. If races exist, then, pray tell, precisely how many there are?

A. How many neighborhoods are there in the place where you live?

Science fiction writer Sarah Hoyt discusses gender roles.

And that’s where we start. You see, it wasn’t that women didn’t believe men were smart or good at stuff. They did. They would actually brag about their husbands. Qualities such as ingeniousness, ability to climb the job ladder (such as it was. In the village most people were self-employed craftsmen and small time farmers) and to make money, ability to hold their own in a discussion, etc. all of these were highly valued. Women also valued men as protectors (they ARE bigger) and as influences in the kids’ lives.

What they didn’t think – and forgive me, I’m just reporting what I see – was that men were competent to run families or groups, or, frankly themselves, at least in some regards. For instance, if a guy appeared in public in utter disarray (or drunk) it was considered a grave fault on his wife’s part. Unless his wife was beaten and abused, in which case it was considered a REALLY grave fault on HIS part and often something the village women decided to do something about. (Meeting a bunch of very upset women in a dark alley at midnight cured some of them – if not all.)

Read it.

Even a blind pig can find an acorn now and then; so it is with The Nation.

At a panel titled “Grassroots Organizing” at the Network for Public Education conference in Austin in March, an audience member asked the all-white panel for its definition of “grassroots.” The conference had been called to “give voice to those opposing privatization, school closings, and high-stakes testing.”

As the questioner pointed out, those disproportionately affected by these developments are poor and minority communities. Chicago, for example, a city that is one-third white, has a public school system in which 90 percent of the students are children of color and 87 percent come from low-income families. When the city schools shut down last year, 88 percent of the children affected were black; when Philadelphia did the same, the figure was 81 percent.

You’d think black people might have something to contribute to a discussion about that process and how it might be resisted. Yet on this exclusively white panel at this predominantly white conference, they had no voice.

…

This ought to be a civil conversation among friends. Those born white and wealthy should not be slammed for developing a social conscience, becoming activists and trying to make the world a better place. But neither should the nature of their involvement be above critique. When their aim is to fight alongside low-income people and people of color as brothers and sisters, real advances are possible. But when they look down on these people as younger stepbrothers and stepsisters to be brought along for the ride, precious few gains are made.

Freeberg makes up a useful new word.

1. Humankind’s very first liberals, the cavemen who never bothered to learn to hunt or to brew ale; when the cave-conservatives dragged a big carcass back to the fire to carve up and feed everybody, the cave-pussies felt the need to justify their share of the meat, and so contributed some rules about how to divide it all up. Later on, they invented claiming credit for the meat, blaming the conservatives for whatever food poisoning might have happened, and vegetarianism.

2. Any modern day successor of the original cave pussies. Any liberal who implies, directly or indirectly, successfully or otherwise, that he and his friends are the ones who acquired this meat, just because he and his friends are the ones who are making rules about how it’s to be divided.

3. More broadly, anyone who confuses the provisioning of a valued commodity, with its regulation, and erroneously credits the rule-makers with the actual production of the assets.

Read it.

I’d be tempted to take Mr Glock with me.

Bryan Caplan, a Real Economist, explains it all to you.

In practice, isn’t a “demagogue” just a political opponent with a silver tongue? Isn’t “demagoguery” simply rhetoric that hits political nerves you wish would stay eternally numb?

But before you ditch the whole concept, let me propose the following refinement: Demagoguery is the politics of Social Desirability Bias.

The heart of Social Desirability Bias: Some types of claims sound good or bad regardless of the facts. “Helping people” sounds good. “Acquiring luxuries” sounds bad. “Saving American jobs” sounds good. “Cheap nannies for upper-middle class families” sound bad. “Supporting our troops” sounds good. “Sympathizing with the enemy” sounds bad. “Raising the minimum wage” sounds good. “Measuring disemployment effects” sounds bad.

Any competent philosopher can construct cases where what sounds good is bad and what sounds bad is good. For instance: The minimum wage, good as it sounds, would be bad if it sharply increased unemployment of low-skilled workers. But when our competent philosopher runs for office, he has a clear incentive to keep his doubts to himself. If X sounds good, saying “Hooray for X” is a much easier way to win over an audience than “Sure X sounds good, but let’s calm down and consider the possibility that X is in fact bad.”

Read it.

If you want to understand why ‘climate change deniers’ refuse to bow to ‘the scientific consensus’, the history of what science ‘knows’ about nutrition is a good place to start.

For decades, Americans have organized their diet in a way to minimize their intake of saturated fats like butter and red meat. Vegetable oils and carbohydrates became a bigger part of our diet, because, we were repeatedly told, animal fats led to heart disease.

Today, however, we are learning that this advice was bogus. A recent landmark health study has concluded that there has never been a link between saturated fats and heart disease. The “settled science” on nutrition wasn’t quite so settled.

Read it.

Count Sir Bela of Eastmarch shows us how it’s done.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

More here.

The Other McCain is on the case.

To anyone who had been paying attention to cultural trends during the 1970s, the landslide election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was not really surprising. The average American who pulled the lever for Reagan might have had difficulty articulating what it was they were voting for, by they damned sure knew what they were voting against. It wasn’t just the manifest incompetence of Jimmy Carter’s administration and the political/economic “malaise” that they opposed. From the mid-1960s onward, Americans had felt a growing sense of helpless anger toward the youth counterculture that manifested itself in rock music, drug use, radical protests, and orgiastic sexuality. That counterculture had never really represented the mainstream majority of American youth, but by 1980, young people themselves were as fed up with the counterculture as their parents had been for the past 15 years.

It is too early to say we are witnessing a new youth backlash against the dominant progressivism of the Obama years, but why else would Princeton University freshman Tal Fortgang unload a powerful denunciation of the regnant left-wing campus orthodoxy?

Read it.

If you’ve ever met a Texan, you know that Texans love bragging about their state. You’ve probably heard the endless list—the bigness, the freedom, the trucks, the barbeque, the pride, the football—and, like many others, you’ve probably rolled your eyes. So please forgive me, for as a new-ish resident of the Lone Star State, I’d like to add one more item to that long, rambling list: No one in Texas seems to be talking all that much about Thomas Piketty.

If that name rings a bell, it’s because you’ve been reading the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, or basically anything on the Internet for the past few weeks. Piketty, described by the Times as “the latest overnight intellectual sensation,” is a French economist whose new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”—you know, as opposed to the Kapital that Marx wrote about—bemoans income inequality, exposes various flaws in our global economy, and calls for confiscatory global wealth taxes in order to stop Richard Branson from having all that fun.

I hate him already. ‘Well, damn the French!’ — John Cleese

Once you look past the patent silliness and First World problems of the almost-rich mentally scapegoating the already-rich, it becomes increasingly clear why income inequality has become the anxiety of choice for the upper-middle-class left. If you’re mad about your neighbor’s private jet, after all, it makes it a heck of a lot easier to ignore the poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks who was just denied access to a quality charter school—thanks, of course, to the charter-blocking policies of the politicians you voted (and perhaps raised funds) for.

Got it in one.

It’s quite timely—and telling—that Donald Sterling, the inarguably horrible man at the helm of the L.A. Clippers, was scheduled to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Los Angeles NAACP this month. Despite being outed as one of the most over-the-top racists in recent American memory, Sterling had donated sizable amounts to the civil rights group. It probably made him feel good.

It certainly made the NAACP feel good — race hustlers don’t come cheap; the problem is that they don’t stay bought.

Somewhere, you see, there might be a rich man kiteboarding right now off the coast of his private island. It is not confirmed, but he may have a supermodel riding on his back. One thing is sure: He does not have to go to the post office. We must stop him. Things like embarrassingly horrible government schools, and the kids trapped in them, can wait.

Freeberg has an opinion.

I hate the metric system.

Not that it doesn’t have its uses. If I’m calculating the accumulation of kinetic energy in an accelerating mass, and the capacity of that kinetic energy when it’s converted into something else, the metric system would be my first choice.

It is the advocacy for the metric system that cheeses me off. The idiotic arguments. “Ten is sensible”; that right there, that’s it. No, ding-dong, ten is not sensible. What is two-thirds of ten? You want to build a house that way?

See, for guys who have hammer-loops in their jeans that they use to actually hold hammers, and carry a tape measure clipped to their belts, twelve is better. It’s better for actually building things. Twelve is a composite that is the product of a low prime times the square of an even lower prime. Ten is just two primes, great for multiplying but lousy for dividing.

I remember the day I realized that ‘progressives’ were really reactionaries with long hair — it was the day I read a diatribe against the metric system by some hippie in the Whole Earth Catalog, reciting all of the arguments that the Duke of Wellington would have used against it (except, perhaps, the expression of contempt for the Lower Classes).

Steve Sailer likes to push on ropes.

As the topic of race continues to pop up in the news now and then, what with the Los Angeles Clippers imbroglio and whatnot, it’s worth reconsidering the conventional wisdom on the subject, which has congealed into: “Race does not biologically exist because, uh … Science!”

Nicholas Wade, the New York Times’ chief genetics reporter, has published 1,052 articles in the newspaper of record since 1983. For most of this century, Wade has been methodically waging war in the Science section of the NYT against the liberal creationist myth that race isn’t real. He has now written a definitive book on the existence of biological differences among races, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, which will be published on May 6.

Read it.

Do they really care, or do they just care about hangin’ with the Cool Kids?

Read it.

Of course, there are many English expressions that have no precise equivalent in French, too, but articles like this one are fun to read.

Read it.

The fact that America is as economically mobile now as it was in the days when the top marginal federal income tax rate was 70 percent doesn’t mean that the country is as economically mobile as it can or should be. Nor does the extremely stable nature of U.S. economic mobility negate the fact that individuals on the high end of the income spectrum are getting richer faster than anyone else.

But Obama’s widely shared misconception also misses the greater cultural context. Economic mobility is not the sole measure of national well-being or progress. It’s not even the sole measure of mobility.

Read it.

As near as I can tell, a racist is one who approves of rigorous education, good English, civilized manners, minimal criminality, and responsible parenthood, among other things. I am, then, a racist. I see no reason to grovel about it.

I decided long ago that if, while I was doing a radio interview, a caller-in told me, “You a racist!” I would hesitate as if puzzled, and say, “… So what?”

…

Herewith another and yet worse confession: I do not see, or care, why it is thought my duty to like, or dislike, groups because of their race, creed, color, sex, sexual aberration, or national origin. Nor do I think it their duty to like me. I especially do not understand why the federal government should decide with whom I ought to associate.

Read it.

But only for parents who don’t want to see their kids shot down like sheep in their ‘gun-free zones’.

Freeberg does language.

Its meaning is not limited to “someone who does a lot of talking.” It means a great deal more than that. There has to be a certain meaninglessness to the chatter. And, a certain bossiness too. Flibbertigibbets are radios without off buttons; they care not that the commodity they’re supplying, is in negligible and dwindling demand, or in no demand at all.

If you know a flibbertigibbet or two, it may not have escaped your notice — or maybe it did — that they prattle on with their excess verbiage in an attempt to convince themselves. That is the common content, and that is the common purpose. They repeat most bumptiously and most frequently the things that, according to their own systems of belief, are so emphatically true that they ought to be able to stand on their own. In so doing, they confess to that which is never to be considered: There actually are some doubts. About “The science is settled on global warming!” or “There is no god, now relax and enjoy your life” or “ObamaCare is a spectacular success.”

Hence the term Chattering Classes — all talk, no reality.

Read it.

Hint: Consumption spending.

I’ve been somewhat dismayed to see so many economists debate the economic inequality issue using highly flawed income and wealth data, instead of consumption inequality data. Recently I was listening to an interview with Thomas Piketty when he suddenly said something that caught my attention. He advocated a progressive property tax. That sounds like a great idea, as the consumption value of housing is probably closely correlated with the market value. And then he ruined everything by adding that it should not be levied on the gross value of property, but rather the net value after mortgage debt was subtracted. That defeats the entire purpose of a progressive consumption tax!

Read it.

When it comes to identifying Hillary Clinton’s major accomplishments as Secretary of State, one thinks of Eisenhower on Nixon. The problem, however, is not some underlying antagonism between Clinton and administration spokesmen. Rather, it’s lack of material to work with. As when Tom Friedman posed the question, one can see the difficulty it presents even for Hillary herself.

Don’t forget proto-Obamacare….

Read it.

Much like the growth of socialism early in the 20th century.

Read it.

Almost all of it owned by the government, I’d bet.

Read it.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition took those fair market rents and calculated how much a worker would have to earn per hour to cover such modest housing, if we assume a 40-hour work week and a 52-week year. They call this rate a “housing wage,” and it is, unsurprisingly, much higher than the minimum wage in much of the country.

Of course, that assumes one person per apartment, which is how the Crust prefer to live.

Read it.

I trust I don’t have to say anything about jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.

John Hinderaker does the numbers.

So a majority of Americans will be in the top 10% of income at some time during their working lives. That makes a mockery of the Left’s portrayal of a rigid caste system that–somehow!–must be combated by ever-higher taxes and more government spending.

Read it.

Read it.

Obama says it’s George W. Bush’s fault, and who can prove it isn’t?

Theodore Dalrymple has had enough.

I realized a long time ago that a very large number of people in a modern economy are paid to do things that not only fail to add to the economic product of the country, but on the contrary reduce it, insofar as they obstruct others from producing as much as they otherwise might.

There is, as every petty official knows, a great deal of pleasure to be had from the obstruction of others, especially if they appear to be more fortunate, better placed, richer, or more intelligent than oneself. There is a pleasure in naysaying, all the greater if the naysayer is able to disguise from the victim the fact that he is not only doing his duty but gratifying himself. Indeed, there are many jobs, meaningless in themselves, in which the power to say no is the only non-monetary reward.

More to be feared even than the secret sadist, however, is the person who genuinely believes in the intrinsic value and even indispensability of his absurd task. He is as dangerous as any true believer. In my hospital, I saw many such people, scurrying like the White Rabbit in Alice from one meeting to another—meetings which medical staff were required to attend, thus diverting them from the main purpose of having medical staff in the first place. A friend of mine who had waited all day for a minor but potentially life-preserving operation was told at the last minute that his operation had been postponed because the surgeon had been called to attend a meeting. Only a credible threat by my friend of dire consequences for the hospital if the operation were not performed as planned diverted the surgeon from his pseudo- to his real work.

Read it.

Researchers have an idea for how future nuclear reactors can avoid the trauma that led to the 2011 disaster at Fukushima: by building new plants five to seven miles out into the ocean. “This affords some absolutely crucial advantages,” Jacopo Buongiorno, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, which led the research, explains in a video presenting the idea. In particular, Buongiorno says that this distance into the ocean will remove the risk of tsunamis, which won’t throw big waves in such deep water, and of earthquakes, the seismic waves of which will be damped by the ocean.

XKCD has it right.

The New York Post is on the case.

Gold diggers are such a problem in NYC, one woman has set up an agency that proclaims it will weed them out.

Upper East Side matchmaker Janis Spindel founded Club J-Love in 1993 — and since then claims to have 1,008 marriages under her belt. Her specialty? Helping men like K.G. avoid heartbreak — and the loss of hard-earned money — by sussing out a woman’s true motives.

“I can smell a gold digger from a mile away,” says Spindel, who says she rejects about 10 percent of all those vying for a place in her 3,000-member stable of beauties. “It’s why [my clients] come to me — to protect them from bimbettes and gold diggers.”

According to Spindel, gold diggers are a growing problem, now that the city is awash in “more money” — from Wall Street to hedge funds to startups. And so she vets each woman in person, grilling each one with a series of pointed questions aimed at determining whether she’s a perfect 10 — or a 49er in disguise.

Read it.

Following an ex vivo prototyping phase, we successfully used the DNA origami robots in living cockroaches (Blaberus discoidalis) to control a molecule that targets their cells.

Read it.

Since they lose pretty much every argument, the global warming fraudsters try to tell us that the science is settled, and we should all just shut up. In fact, however, debates over various aspects of climate science are constantly raging. This one is a great example: “Major Errors Apparent in Climate Model Evaporation Estimates.”

Read it.

The threat of disease is not uniform around the world. In general, higher, colder, and drier regions have fewer infectious diseases than warmer, wetter climates. To survive, people in this latter sort of terrain must withstand a higher degree of “pathogen stress.” Thornhill and his colleagues theorize that, over time, the pathogen stress endemic to a place tends to steer a culture in distinct ways. Research has long shown that people in tropical climates with high pathogen loads, for example, are more likely to develop a taste for spicy food, because certain compounds in these foods have antimicrobial properties. They are also prone to value physical attractiveness—a signal of health and “immunocompetence,” according to evolutionary theorists—more highly in mates than people living in cooler latitudes do. But the implications don’t stop there. According to the “pathogen stress theory of values,” the evolutionary case that Thornhill and his colleagues have put forward, our behavioral immune systems—our group responses to local disease threats—play a decisive role in shaping our various political systems, religions, and shared moral views.

If they are right, Thornhill and his colleagues may be on their way to unlocking some of the most stubborn mysteries of human behavior. Their theory may help explain why authoritarian governments tend to persist in certain latitudes while democracies rise in others; why some cultures are xenophobic and others are relatively open to strangers; why certain peoples value equality and individuality while others prize hierarchical structures and strict adherence to tradition. What’s more, their work may offer a clear insight into how societies change. According to Thornhill’s findings, striking at the root of infectious disease threats is by far the most effective form of social engineering available to any would-be reformer.

Read it.

Colleges are in an unsustainable arms race of spending on non-teaching lures – football stadiums and sushi-laden cafeterias – to attract students who can neither afford the cost of education nor find jobs to repay their debt once they’re out in the real world.

With more than $1.1 trillion of outstanding student debt, up to 40 percent of recent college grads are either unemployed or underemployed. In 2010, the unemployment rate for young workers aged 16-24 hit 19.6 percent, the highest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking unemployment in 1947. The next time you go to an amusement park, think that one in four park workers has a college degree.

As is often the case, change is coming from entrepreneurs looking to reshape education. After all, this stems from a real need on the part of startups to attract and retain great engineers. In most startups, the hardest jobs to fill are positions in core technology, product design and product management.

Taki deals out some inconvenient truth.

Some questions are asked in a spirit of inquiry, to obtain answers, but others are asked to intimidate or badger or coerce agreement with a point of view and establish the irreproachable virtue of the persons who ask them. I received such a question by email the other day from the Lancet, one of the most important medical journals in the world. Addressing me by my first name (already sufficient to irritate me), it asked me, “Do you care about the health of our planet?”

Frankly, the answer is that I don’t. Planets, unlike dogs, are not the kind of thing I can feel affection or concern for. My bank account occupies my mind more than the health of the planet. I am not even sure that planets can be healthy or unhealthy, any more than they can be witty or self-effacing. To call a planet healthy is to make what philosophers used to call a category mistake. This is not to say that I wish the earth any harm; on the contrary. Indeed, in a multiple-choice examination, I might even tick the box for wishing the world well rather than ill, at least if I had any reason for wanting to pass.

Read it.

How are new forms of violence expertise organized and exploited? Most scholars view this as primarily a question of state-building; that is, violence experts use their skills in an attempt to regulate economic transactions or to extract and redistribute resources via protection rents either for themselves or at the behest of political elites. In an alternative view, this article demonstrates that historical gunfighters active in the late 19th-century American Southwest were actually market actors—the possessors of valuable skills cultivated through participation in the Civil War and diffused through gunfighting and reputation building in key market entrepôts. Neither solely state-builders nor state-resisters, as they have traditionally been interpreted, gunfighters composed a professional class that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s and who moved frequently between wage-paying jobs, seizing economic opportunities on both sides of the law and often serving at the behest of powerful economic, rather than political, actors. I establish this claim by examining a dataset of over 250 individuals active in the “gunfighting system” of the post-bellum West, demonstrating that the social connections forged through fighting, and diffused through social networks, helped generate a form of organized violence that helped bring “law and order” to the frontier but as a byproduct of market formation rather than as state-building.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Read it.

Why is President Bush so much more popular than President Obama among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans? That’s an easy one. Bush was the president of let’s roll. Obama is the president of let’s retreat.

Read it.

Economist Mark Gius has a new study in the journal Applied Economics Letters that bears on the gun control debate. Gius finds that permissive concealed carry laws (generally, “shall issue”) result in a lower rate of homicide involving firearms. Conversely, state-level assault weapons bans have no statistically significant effect on the homicide rate involving guns.

Something that everyone realizes intuitively but few are willing to acknowledge publicly.

Read it.

Hey — I worry about these things….

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So where does all this Rube Goldberg action come from? It’s tempting to blame evolution, and the accumulation of cruft in the genome, but evolution can be quite good at simplifying when simplicity is actually optimal. We have only one backbone in our body, not five sort-of-parallel ones all trying to combine to support us. So there must be something optimal here about complexity, and when considered it’s obvious: if we could understand the immune system easily, so could microbes, and so they could subvert it easily. Indeed, it seems like whenever I read about the workings of any well-studied human pathogen, those workings include at least one way of eluding, deceiving, or sabotaging the immune system, and often two or three of them. Germs don’t seem to qualify as human pathogens, in the eyes of doctors, unless they have such a way; otherwise they are just one of the “harmless” background microbes which the immune system usually deals with so efficiently that we don’t even know that they are trying to eat us (though they can still be harmful in high doses). Yet even when a germ has three different ways of eluding the immune system, that doesn’t make it 100% deadly; most of the time the immune system can still eventually get it under control, using a fourth (and maybe a fifth and a sixth) mechanism in its arsenal.

Freeberg speaks wisdom.

I’ve been noticing that with what we lately call “left” and “right” in politics, it is a rather consistent configuration that this “side that refuses to define things” is on what we call the “left.” Issue after issue. I have also noticed that where these halves overlay occupations, the “left” sympathizes with those who don’t have any. Or, are occupied with something disassociated with any sort of material demand. Community organizing. Wheelchair-ramp-reconstruction or health insurance including birth control; other things people buy not because they actually want them, but to meet some sort of regulatory requirement. Well, this stands to reason. If you’re going to sell something to people who actually want to buy it, you’re going to need to define things in order to do your market research. And, to build the widget to make sure it does what people want it to do. And then the people lining up to spend their hard-earned dollars buying it, oh boy howdy, they’re going to want things defined too. What’s the total cost of ownership? What’s it like to use it? What are the consequences of moving on to this new thing, and stopping using the old thing?

…

When every argument you make relies on presenting things as the opposites of themselves, that’s deceit; and, deceitful people don’t want things defined, that makes it harder to do the deceiving.

Dymphna riffs on Mark Steyn.

In the video, Mr. Steyn points out what one “tiny, miserable grey island in the North Atlantic” managed to accomplish. The great horror is the ways in which that hard-won knowledge is being buried beneath the strew and slander of the deliberate ignorance of those who want only its subjugation under a theocratic supremacy. Those currently in power chant a mantra about the ways “poverty breeds ignorance”, etc., while their own educated ignorance reduces all facts to mere opinion.

Read it.

It certainly reduces your risk of dying of starvation.

I’m wondering how big these portions are.

Read it.

Our dataset-of-datasets graph averages the monthly anomalies for the three terrestrial and two satellite temperature records. It shows there has still been no global warming this millennium. Over 13 years 2 months, the trend is zero.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

I blame Garrison Keillor.

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Only two Republican districts make the list of the top 10 richest House districts, according to an Associated Press analysis.

All are in one of the Left Coast states.

Read it.

Here’s a simple test of who is “rich”: If you can afford $40,000 a year for your kid’s college tuition, congratulations, you’re rich.