Karen Cates, Professor at Nortwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, tells it like it is.

The idea that college is appropriate—essential, even—for all Americans is a myth. We’ve been told there are no decent jobs without a college education. While unemployment among recent college grads is 8.5 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute, if you dig into the numbers you’ll find that 46 percent of them consider themselves “mal-employed.” Translation: They’re working largely in retail and entry-level hospitality, jobs that do not require their college degree.

One folktale that’s been spun from this is that you’ll never earn a living wage unless you have a college degree. This is patently untrue. Our trade professions are clamoring for quality employees to keep up with the demands of a recovering economy. “The homebuilding industry faces a chronic shortage of skilled workers,” laments Jerry Howard, chief executive of the National Association of Home Builders. In many professions, workers can earn as much or more than someone with a degree in marketing or advertising.

Read it.

In downtown Detroit, at the headquarters of the online-mortgage company Quicken Loans, there stands another downtown Detroit in miniature. The diorama, made of laser-cut acrylic and stretching out over 19 feet in length, is a riot of color and light: Every structure belonging to Quicken’s billionaire owner, Dan Gilbert, is topped in orange and illuminated from within, and Gilbert currently owns 60 of them, a lordly nine million square feet of real estate in all. He began picking up skyscrapers just three and a half years ago, one after another, paying as little as $8 a square foot. He bought five buildings surrounding Capitol Park, the seat of government when Michigan became a state in 1837. He snapped up the site of the old Hudson’s department store, where 12,000 employees catered to 100,000 customers daily in the 1950s. Many of Gilbert’s purchases are 20th-century architectural treasures, built when Detroit served as a hub of world industry. He bought a Daniel Burnham, a few Albert Kahns, a Minoru Yamasaki masterwork with a soaring glass atrium. “They’re like old-school sports cars,” said Dan Mullen, one of the executives who took over Quicken’s newly formed real estate arm. “These were buildings with so much character, so much history. They don’t exist anywhere else. And it was like, ‘Buy this parking garage, and we’ll throw in a skyscraper with it.’ ”

…

In the process, the Motor City has become the testing ground for an updated American dream: privateers finding the raw material for new enterprise in the wreckage of the Rust Belt. Whether or not they’re expecting to profit, Gilbert and other capitalists — large and small — are trying to rebuild the city, even stepping in and picking up some duties that were once handled by the public sector. Shop owners around the city are cleaning up the blighted storefronts and public spaces around them. Only 35,000 of Detroit’s 88,000 streetlights actually work, so some owners are buying and installing their own. In Gilbert’s downtown, a Rock Ventures security force patrols the city center 24 hours a day, monitoring 300 surveillance cameras from a control center. Gilbert is proposing to pay $50 million for the land beneath the county courthouse and a partly built jail near his center-city casino, with the intention of moving the municipal buildings to a far-off neighborhood; his goal is to clear the way for an entertainment district that flows south, without interruption, from the sports arenas past his casino and into downtown. Detroit’s new mayor, Mike Duggan, told me he had no problem with the private sector doing so much to shape his city: Other metropolises had their entrepreneurs and deep-pocketed magnates who built and bought and financed things. With a state-appointed emergency manager overseeing various aspects of Detroit’s operations, with many civic services inoperable for years and with a dire need for investment, Duggan said he felt lucky that his town was getting its turn.

In a city where a government based on machine politics and cronyism is collapsing, the inhabitants are learning that you can do for yourself what the government promised and can no longer deliver, if you’re clever enough.

Read it.

The Torah-writing robot was developed by the German artists’ group robotlab and was presented for the first time Thursday at Berlin’s Jewish Museum. While it takes the machine about three months to complete the 80-meter (260-foot) -long scroll, a rabbi or a sofer—a Jewish scribe—needs nearly a year. But unlike the rabbi’s work, the robot’s Torah can’t be used in a synagogue.

I have always found fascinating the strictures around writing a Torah scroll.

Read it.

A very odd thing to appear in the New York Times.

To Americans in their 20s and early 30s — the so-called millennials — many of these problems have their roots in George W. Bush’s presidency. But think about people who were born in 1998, the youngest eligible voters in the next presidential election. They are too young to remember much about the Bush years or the excitement surrounding the first Obama presidential campaign. They instead are coming of age with a Democratic president who often seems unable to fix the world’s problems.

“We’re in a period in which the federal government is simply not performing,” says Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center, the author of a recent book on generational politics, “and that can’t be good for the Democrats.”

Good to see more recognition that Democrats are the party of big government.

It has always astonished me that anyone could possibly think that the same government that gave us the Post Office and the Transportation Security Administration could be safely entrusted with running our economy and our health care.

Freeberg lays down some inconvenient truth.

“It’s funny how so many far-left posers get a hard-on for violence and smashing stuff.”

…

But what kind of grown-ups do kids become after watching “don’t kill that bad guy, bring him to justice instead” movies? Non-vengeful, angelic types? Or, are they taught to de-value human life, to see it as not worth avenging, or for that matter, much of anything else. The latter, I think. For that reason, and some others, after watching the recent Star Trek installment I always come away with the same aftertaste as the closing credits roll: I don’t want to see the “don’t kill the bad guy” trope, ever again. Let’s go back to Han shooting first again. It isn’t that I entirely disagree with the point, that the desire for vengeance should be checked. The problem is that it’s bland, boring, reeks of lazy writing and that’s probably what it is. My impression is that the writers never even bothered to contemplate the other problem with vengeance, that those who crusade against it may have as many problems as those who crusade for it. They may pose just as grave a threat against what we think of as “civilization,” which, if it relies on anything at all, must rely on the idea that humans are worth something. Also, that actions have consequences.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, considers George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh.

As both writers foresaw, meritocracy has come upon us. We don’t, thank goodness, have it in the pathological form that Orwell described, although some elements of the current political correctness regime strongly resemble Orwell’s vision. Those of us who write commentary on social topics, especially on matters of race and sex, have to keep checking ourselves to stop overusing phrases out of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Thought Police,” “crimestop,” “Two Minutes Hate,” and so on.

Read it.

It’s generally assumed that it would mean a disaster for the planet if the rainforests of the Amazon were to be replaced with farmland. But it turns out that, actually, much of the area was indeed farmland just a few thousand years ago.

We learn this from new research just published in the august Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A team of mainly British-based scientists carried it out, seeking to explain the presence of various large human-dug ditches and earthworks criss-crossing today’s thick Amazon jungles – and pre-dating them.

Some in the paleo-boffinry community suggest that the ditches mean that the pre-Columbian civilisations of South America had slashed and burned the immemorial rainforests to create large intensively farmed areas home to dense populations. Others contend that actually the jungles remained largely intact, with just a few incursions by small communities of people.

Neither of these scenarios are true, apparently.

“We went to Bolivia hoping to find evidence of the kinds of crops being grown by ancient Amerindian groups, and to try to find how much impact they had on the ancient forest,” explains Dr John Carson of Reading uni. “What we found was that they were having virtually no effect on the forest, in terms of past deforestation, because it didn’t exist there until much later.”

Read it.

Trying to quell a controversy over a $225,000 speaking fee at UNLV, Hillary Clinton told ABC News Friday that all her speaking fees from colleges were “donated” to the family’s Clinton Foundation. It naturally didn’t occur to ABC News to ask whether Hillary deducted this “pass-through” from her taxes, as would likely be legal under the tax code.

“All of the fees have been donated to the Clinton Foundation for it to continue its life-changing and life-saving work. So it goes from a foundation at a university to another foundation,” Clinton told ABC.

The political value of large amounts of money comes not from the power to spend it but rather from the power to determine how it is spent. Control of spending on the part of a well-funded ‘non-profit’ is just as politically valuable as having it in your own bank account. You don’t have to own an airplane if whenever you fly somewhere you can charter one and charge it to someone else. The power of the Presidency doesn’t stem from the magnitude of the office’s salary.

The Clinton Foundation has grown to a non-profit behemoth, with over $225 million in assets. It isn’t entirely clear what the foundation actually does. Reading a summary of its activities filed with its annual 990 reads like a Clinton State of the Union address. With over $50 million in annual donations, Hillary’s speaking fees would be a very small part of its operations.

Hillary says it does “life-changing and like-saving work,” but it pays twice as much in salaries as it gives out in grants. It stands astride the nexus between government, big business and mega-wealthy individuals. The potential conflict of interest between its work and a Hillary presidential term would ordinarily invite thorough media scrutiny and vetting.

Read it.

The original DRM.

Read it.

Why have the costs of a middle class lifestyle soared while income has stagnated?Though it is tempting to finger one ideologically convenient cause or another, there are four structural causes to this long-term trend:

1. Baumol’s Cost Disease
2. Systemic headwinds to the current version of capitalism
3. Dominance of global corporate capital
4. Financialization

Read it.

Most of us bake, roast, and broil our food using a technology that was invented 5,000 years ago for drying mud bricks: the oven. The original oven was clay, heated by a wood fire. Today, the typical oven is a box covered in shiny steel or sparkling enamel, powered by gas or electricity. But inside the oven, little has changed.

Well, except for me — if it can’t be cooked on a range or in a microwave, I don’t eat it. But it’s a problem for other people.

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And not the British kind, either.

It’s about time for some constitutional impiety on the right, and F.H. Buckley answers the call in his bracing and important new book, The Once and Future King. Buckley, a professor of law at George Mason University and a senior editor at The American Spectator, is unmistakably conservative. But that doesn’t stop him from pointing out that America’s not so all-fired exceptional—or from arguing that our Constitution has made key contributions to our national decline.

Read it.

Democrats — the party of the 1%.

Eric Raymond, more famous as a computer geek than as a literary critic, nevertheless has some firm and well-argued opinions on my favorite form of writing.

It is not fashionable these days to be so normative about any kind of artistic form, let alone SF. The insistence that we should embrace diversity is constant, even if it means giving up having any standards at all. In a genre like SF where the core traditions include neophilia and openness to possibility, the argument for exclusive definitions and hard boundaries seems especially problematic.

I think it is an argument very much worth making nevertheless. This essay is my stake in the ground, one I intend to refer readers back to when (as sometimes happens) I’m accused of being stuck on an outmoded and narrow conception of the genre. I will argue three propositions: that artistic genres are functionally important, that genre constraints are an aid to creativity and communication rather than a hindrance, and that science fiction has a particular mission which both justifies and requires its genre constraints.

Read it.

Speaking as someone who hasn’t bought a physical book in a walk-in bookstore in about ten years, I find this unsurprising.

Jim Goad turns over a rock.

First they came for the male feminists, and no one spoke out—because no one likes them, not even the female feminists.

Steve Sailer has seen it all before.

Education theorists usually have a very hard time remembering that people who thought much like them have been in charge for a long, long time and that most of their ideas have been tried (unsuccessfully) several times before. I don’t know how many times I’ve lived through cycles of fads based on the assumption that the reason for mediocre test scores is because American schools have been run like madrassas until last week, but now we’re finally going to emphasize critical thinking skills and put our chairs in a circle for the first time ever.

Freeberg captures an eternal truth.

Liberals are such a funny lot. They write their tomes about the challenges humanity faces and how it’s time to dig in and really mean business — but once they’re done running things a little while, nobody’s digging in or meaning business because it’s like running through a thicket. Suddenly, everyone is dodging little-laws. Or breaking them. And the place doesn’t look like utopia; it looks like Detroit. You look around and there isn’t anybody acting on the values the liberal was discussing; nobody helping each other, nobody being grown-up or compassionate, beginning with the end in mind, looking down the road, thinking ahead, building a better world. Just litter in the sidewalks, abandoned factories, rotting houses and people awaiting in long lines talking about “foostamps.”

Read it.

An excellent examination of how e-books are affecting people’s reading habits and patterns.

A Real Author explains it all to you.

Look at it this way: you have a widget you’ve invented. It’s shiny; it’s awesome. You’re pretty sure everybody’s going to love it. Problem being, you have no way to tell anybody about. You’ve spent your fortune developing the widget, and you live on an island in the middle of the ocean and phone calls are expensive. You met a guy a while back who expressed interest in your widget, but he wants you to givesell him the rights to produce the widget. And incidentally, he swears he’ll promote the hell out of your shiny widget, and also make it SHINIER! You don’t really need that; you’ve got production facilities going (your island happens to house the last robotic fabrication facility from the lost Mu Empire) but you just don’t have a way to distribute the crates and crates of beautiful widgets to the downtrodden masses whose lives are poorer for lack of your widget.

Then you get a visitor.

She – because strong, female characters are important, I’m told – offers to sell your widgets, under your name, at her enormous network of widget emporia. And not to reverse-engineer them, and cut you out of the market, as she sells widgets, and has no interest in getting into widget production, because taxes. All it’ll cost is roughly a third the retail price of each widget sold.

The other guy offered you a month’s salary or so paid over a year, and maybe about 12% retail of each widget, if anybody’s interested. Oh, and you have to give him the opportunity to buy any more widgets you invent. And you can never sell your widget through anybody else. Oh, and he doesn’t actually have any storefronts. He has relationships with other people, who will also take a cut from the sales of your widget (which is not the same thing as “your widget sales”).

Which deal do you take?

Theodore Dalrymple is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Science does not need women any more than it needs foot fetishists, pole-vaulters, or Somalis. What science needs (if an abstraction such as science can be said to need anything) is scientists. If they happen also to be foot fetishists, pole-vaulters, or Somalis, so be it: but no one in his right mind would go to any lengths to recruit for his laboratory foot fetishists, pole-vaulters, or Somalis for those characteristics alone.

…

It would be no consolation to know while on a collapsing bridge and about to plunge into the deep ravine below that it had been built by a truly representative sample of the population, and was therefore a monument to social justice.

Read it.

French economist Thomas Piketty has succeeded in raising the always important and fascinating topic of inheritances back into the public spotlight, even though his contention of a return to pre-20th Century French norms mostly doesn’t seem to have gone through the formality of coming into existence yet, unless Piketty is right about their being countless vast concentrations of hidden inherited wealth that have wholly escaped the attention of taxmen, fundraisers, salesmen, and divorce attorneys.

And good luck with that. Unless you’re a Kennedy or a Rockefeller or some other flavor of Democrat. Then you’re good.

One reason is that the pre-Baby Boomer “Greatest Generation” didn’t inherit all that much, since their ancestors tended to have been hit hard by the Depression and confiscatory income tax levels at the high end. Moreover, new homes were cheap during the era of suburbanization, so inheriting grandma’s old house wasn’t typically very exciting.

My grandmother lived in a house that had a basement that my grandfather (and friends) dug out from under it. She used one of those open washing machines with an attached mangle to wring the water out. My cousin wound up with it in return for looking after her in her final years; don’t think she got much for it.

These days, the parents of many Baby Boomers are dying off and often leaving significant sums, but the large average family sizes of the Baby Boom mean that the inheritances tend to get split up among three or four kids. Individuals in Post-Baby Boom generations with smaller family sizes may do even better. The oldest post-Baby Boomer (b. 1965) is just shy of 50, although many of them are younger siblings of large Baby Boom families. But in another decade or so, the average number of children an inheritance is split among will probably be down notably.

When my mother died, my share of the estate was about half of my then annual salary. Not something you could retire on.

After WWII, however, the entire topic of inheritance and trust funds virtually disappeared from popular culture. This helps explain the often-noticed “How can they afford that place?” mystery in movies and television shows (e.g., Friends). Characters tend to live in apartments and houses for which they have no visible means of support.

Ever notice how people like TV-show police sergeants in NYC live in places for which in real life they couldn’t even have afforded the utilities?

Read it.

There is indeed an app for that….

Unfortunately, the campaign finance laws don’t have a category for ‘stupid rich kid’.

Read it.

I don’t ordinarily pick up anything from DailyKos, but this attracted my attention.

The problem, at least in the USA, is that those unvaccinated children tend to be clustered in small geographical areas where individuals who share the typical characteristics of many vaccine deniers tend to live.

Love that term: ‘vaccine deniers’.

The complication is that the herd immunity can break down rather quickly when the vaccination uptake drops below 80-90% in these clusters. And all it takes is one person carrying a vaccine preventable disease from an area, where it is endemic, to then start an outbreak or epidemic very quickly in one of these low vaccine uptake clusters.

In evolutionary terms, this would seem to be a self-correcting problem — the offspring of those who are inclined to refuse vaccination get the disease; either they form the same immunity that those of us did who went through it before the vaccine was available, or they die, thereby removing their offspring from the gene pool.

Maybe I’m missing something….

Read it.

The incessant attacks on income inequality and inherited wealth arise not only from faulty economic reasoning, as Mankiw points out, but also from envy and resentment.

Envy and resentment are found among non-achievers, of course, but they are rampant in the ranks of the affluent. There we find pseudo-academic poseurs like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, leftist pundits, well-heeled politicos, and cossetted bureaucrats who feast on the spoils of the welfare state. These hypocrites can’t attack “the rich” with a straight face, so they attack “the very rich,” a class that they define (conveniently) to exclude themselves.

That said, I can’t resist the temptation to add to Mankiw’s short list of links to posts and articles that are critical of Piketty’s analysis.

Read it.

The Israeli’s are the poster children for the concept If You’ve Got A Gun Pointed At Your Head 24/7 You Let Nothing Fall Through The Cracks.

Read it.

For 75 years, Finland’s expectant mothers have been given a box by the state. It’s like a starter kit of clothes, sheets and toys that can even be used as a bed. And some say it helped Finland achieve one of the world’s lowest infant mortality rates.

…

The tradition dates back to 1938. To begin with, the scheme was only available to families on low incomes, but that changed in 1949.

“Not only was it offered to all mothers-to-be but new legislation meant in order to get the grant, or maternity box, they had to visit a doctor or municipal pre-natal clinic before their fourth month of pregnancy,” says Heidi Liesivesi, who works at Kela – the Social Insurance Institution of Finland.

So the box provided mothers with what they needed to look after their baby, but it also helped steer pregnant women into the arms of the doctors and nurses of Finland’s nascent welfare state.

And steering people in the the arms of the ‘nascent welfare state’ is what it’s all about.

Read it.

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

The male words tend to center on transportation, weapons, and science, while the female words mostly relate to fashion, art, and flowers.

That sounds about right. Reality is a Republican.

Mark Steyn perfectly encapsulates a pseudo-scientific movement.

Read it.

“Michigan’s cities must retain and attract more people, including young knowledge workers, to its cities by making them attractive, vibrant, and diverse places,” reads a 2003 memo from the National Governor’s Association about Michigan’s “Cool Cities” campaign.

But the campaign struggled. “Government can’t mandate cool,” reflected Karen Gagnon, the former Cool Cities director. “As soon as government says something is cool, it’s not.”

And that, in a nutshell, is the failure of every attempt to have the government solve a problem that the government has no business being involved with.

Read it.

Trust the Washington Post to be attracted to a method of keeping non-‘progressives’ out of their hip-and-trendy gentrified neighborhoods.

Move to Texas. If you’re a communist, go to Austin or one of the other urban behavioral sinks and live on the south end of the downtown. Otherwise, you’re good to go. Problem solved.

Mark Steyn totes up the score.

Let it be said that there is more than enough blame to go round. I see Senator Lindsey Graham has been all over the airwaves saying we need to work with Iran to help save Iraq from ISIS. This is the same Lindsey Graham who’s been calling for the US to assist Syrian rebels in trying to overthrow Assad, Iran’s client. The Syrian resistance is dominated by the same guys currently overrunning Iraq – the Sunni jihadists of the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”. Consider the now largely erased Syrian/Iraqi border: On the eastern side of this vanished line, a disaffected Sunni who takes up arms against an Iranian client in Baghdad is an enemy of the United States whom we must join with Iran in destroying; but, on the western side of this vanished line, a disaffected Sunni who takes up arms against an Iranian client in Damascus is a plucky Arab Spring freedom fighter entitled to the full support of the United States. Granted that this isn’t the easiest part of the world in which to distinguish friend from foe, the way around this abiding problem is not to locate both of them within, literally, the same person.

So Senator Graham is making even less sense than usual.

I wonder how much better a place the world would be if people like Senator Graham were put in Gitmo.

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?

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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?”