Check it out.

Read it. And watch the video.

The rising ire of a national coalition of black pastors reached a climax Tuesday as the organization announced a campaign to call for the impeachment of Attorney General Eric Holder on the basis that he has violated his oath of office by “attempting to impose same-sex ‘marriage’ throughout the nation…”

Any non-black non-Democrat Attorney General would have been impeached long since, but Holder keeps digging in deeper and deeper. People tend to forget that not all black Americans are denizens of the Obamanation.

Read it.

Why, it’s even in their name. But apparently ‘progressives’ can’t read.

So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism:

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.

The clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.

Steve Sailer writes the obit.

Uh … the reason New York is the ballet capital of America is because of all the money generated by Wall Street. So, a struggle promising street fighting over who has better aesthetic taste — the people who make the money made on Wall Street or the people who spend the money made on Wall Street — wasn’t ever really going to go anywhere. In the battle between the ballerinas and the Masters of the Universe, there will never be a final victor because there’s way too much fraternizing with the enemy.

Jim Goad rushes in where angels fear to tread.

With all due respect to the Founding Fathers, I do not find it “self-evident” that all men are created equal. If anything, it appears bleedingly obvious that they are highly—even comically—unequal.

A good point that has never, as far as I know, been adequately addressed — just assumed.

Your modern smug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug progressive egalitarian dimwit generally believes in evolution—except for the uncomfortable parts. Have you ever noticed that when you disagree with them about the notion of innate human equality, they immediately condemn you as innately inferior to them? In stereotyping the “racist”—which is by far the most pervasive stereotype in modern society—it’s telling how often racists are depicted as stupid, subhuman, genetically inferior, and stuck in the Stone Age. It appears an indelible trait of human group psychology that people need to feel superior to at least someone, and that someone is currently the “racist” rather than the old standby, the Negro.

The truth is that ‘all men are created equal’ is fundamentally a Christian ides, that all men are equal morally before God, and the most amusing aspect of the current fashionable progressivism is that they simply cannot acknowledge that simple historical fact.

Keeping it simple, I’ll use a baseball analogy. Let’s say the best hitter for the Boston Red Sox bats .350. And, oh, let’s say their worst hitter bats .150. And let’s allege that the team’s batting average is .250.

With me?

And let’s say the New York Yankees’ hitters average .350.

So the difference between the Red Sox’s best and worst hitters is a steep 200 points, while there’s only 100 points between the teams’ averages.

Does this, even for a second, mean the Red Sox and Yankees are equal at batting?

Not if you aren’t a moron.

Bryan Caplan, a Real Economist, explains it all to you in pictures so even ‘progressives’ will understand it.

Dean Burnett writes in The Guardian, a British newspaper that is living proof of Jonah Goldberg’s thesis that National Socialism is just another child of Socialism.

(Actually, my choice would be Henry Tudor prior to Bosworth, but that’s just me.)

Read it.

“Will Dropouts Save America?,” asked Michael Ellsberg in a 2011 piece published by The New York Times, a paper that reveres universities and is considered the flagship publication of the American liberal Left.

Ellsberg said most of the high-tech entrepreneurs and the drivers of the Internet economy — from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg — were college dropouts, having realized that they were wasting their time in class.

“American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees,” Ellsberg wrote. “But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but startup entrepreneurs. … No business in America — and therefore no job creation — happens without someone buying something. But most students learn nothing about sales in college; they are more likely to take a course on why sales (and capitalism) are evil.”

Just as a government exists to hire and pay bureaucrats, a university exists to hire and pay professors — and, increasingly, administrators. Educating students is just a Clever Plastic Disguise, the fig leaf that lets the rest of it go on undisturbed. (Not unlike manufacturing in a heavily unionized industry, come to think of it.)

Read it. And watch the video.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of such ‘activists’ is the Brownshirt tactics they routinely employ in their attempts to combat thoughtcrime among their opponents — tactics that they would rightly regard as ‘human rights violations’ and ‘hate crimes’ if employed against themselves.

Increasingly the term ‘activist’ has come to mean ‘asshole in the service of a political agenda’.

Read it.

They ought to have made his birthday, not that of Martin Luther King, a national holiday.

Read it.

The New York Times recommends that we all move to Wichita, Kansas. Just kidding. Although Wichita has more income quality than New York, no one from the NY Times would want to live in a state where Sam Brownback is the governor.

Read it.

Questions to ask:

What differentiates ‘neoracism’ from good old-fashioned ‘racism’? Or is it another weasel-term like ‘social justice’?

What are these ‘experts’ expert in?

Are they just worried that science is undermining the blithe Crustian assumption that ‘race’ has no real meaning? If so, why is that a bad thing?

New forms of discrimination, known as “neoracism”, are taking hold in scientific research, spreading the belief that races exist and are different in terms of biology, behaviour and culture, according to anthropologists who spoke at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago.

How are these ‘new forms of discrimination’ different from previous forms of discrimination?

If science has actual evidence that ‘races exist’ and ‘are different in terms of biology, behaviour, and culture’, why are they trying to oppose it? Science is science.

Read it.

Artist Alfred Twu, the Bay Area graphic designer behind this popular imagining of a cross-country high-speed rail map, has created a series of renderings showing what Silicon Valley tech campuses might look like if their parking lots could house the thousands of their controversial employees. Not only has he envisioned new campuses for Google, Apple, Facebook, and Electronic Arts, but he’s also created with a “generic café/startup/coworking space” to serve as a model for smaller startups, too.

It would certainly eliminate the prospect of on-the-street confrontations with the UnderCrust of San Francisco.

Read it.

I rarely revise my text messages, sending out typos and odd autocorrections left and right, and the semicolon is often the first punctuation mark I thumb for when I’m moving onto another thought (for instance: “yea, dinner at 8 sounds good; did you walk the dog?”).

Read it.

Consider income inequality. Not only is there inequality — which should be unsurprising, given inequality of ability, ambition, etc. — but there is supposedly a growing gap between America’s “haves” and “have-nots.” A do-gooder would leave it at that. Not being one of them, I’ll ask the questions that they’re unwilling/afraid/too-jejune to ask:

1. What is a have? Is it someone/a household whose income exceeds the median for all persons/households? Is in the top 20 percent of all such incomes? The top 5 percent? The top 1 percent? The top 0.1 percent? (Pick your favorite point along the continuous curves in the graphs here.)
2. Or is a have defined by his/her/its wealth? And, if so, how? (See preceding bullet.)
3. Do haves “rig the game” so that they are, in effect, stealing from have-nots?
4. If haves are clever and determined enough to do that, isn’t it likely that they’d still be haves without “rigging the game”?
5. Is one’s economic status a permanent thing, or do people in fact move up and down the economic ladder during their lifetimes?
6. Are the have-nots of today — who, mostly, aren’t the have-nots of yesteryear — really worse off than their predecessors, or are they really better off?
7. Are they worse off relatively?
8. Will tomorrow’s have-nots be better off if the haves are deprived of income/wealth through redistributive actions taken by government?
9. Or will redistributive actions simply make haves worse off and less likely to do the things that make have-nots better off (e.g., give huge sums to charity, invest in growth-producing investments)?

Questions 1 and 2 are unanswerable; the distinction between a have and a have-not is purely arbitrary. (It has been said, with some accuracy, that a rich person is someone who has more more money than you.) The answers to the other questions are: (3) only to the extent that some of them are aided by government through perverse regulations favored by do-gooders; (4) yes; (5) not permanent, plenty of movement; (6) better-off absolutely than earlier have-nots; (7) probably about the same, relatively, but they’re mostly different people; (8) worse off; (9) yes, redistributive actions make have-nots worse off by hindering economic growth. (For more, see the list of readings, below.)

Read it.

 You love math and want to learn more. But you’re in ninth grade and you’ve already taken nearly all the math classes your school offers. They were all pretty easy for you and you’re ready for a greater challenge. What now? You’ll probably go to the local community college or university and take the next class in the core college curriculum. Chances are, you’ve just stepped in the calculus trap.

The best argument for learning calculus I ever heard was from a Dungeon Master. ‘You’re in a 10-foot-wide passageway that does an L into a five-foot-wide passageway. How long a spear can you get around that corner?’ That focused the minds of the players like nobody’s business.

Fred Reed lays down some inconvenient truth.

Anyone having experience with dogs knows that these admirable creatures differ in intelligence. Border Collies are simply smarter than pit bulls. Since there is no political penalty for noticing this, it is widely noticed and not disputed. Yet if subspecies of Bowser differ markedly in intelligence, it would seem to follow that subspecies of humans, who differ in color, hair, biochemistry, facial features, brain size, and so on, might also differ in intelligence. That is, there is no prima facie biological reason for believing that they cannot. There are many political incentives.

In the case of Fido, the differences clearly are not cultural, but genetic. If genetic differences in intelligence can exist between subspecies of dogs, why may they not between subspecies of humans?

People who do not want to believe that such differences exist offer several curious arguments. One is to point out that humans and chimpanzees share 98.2% of their DNA. It then follows that different subspecies of humans share an even higher percentage of their DNA. This is intended to show that humans are therefore essentially identical and that no differences in intellect can exist.

The obvious reason for the similarity of DNA is that the two share their underlying design: digestive tracts, lungs, muscles, cells, and so on. On similar grounds one could note that a Lamborghini and a dump truck share underlying design and therefore are essentially identical. Wanna race?

Sarah Hoyt connects the dots.

I’ve been listening to If This Goes On in audiobook while I clean the house.  I still think that Heinlein was right about the coming theocracy – that is he was right about the theocratic impulse that he saw in the American people.  I see it too.  It’s what I’ve referred to in the past as Americans being, in the community of nations, the Aspergers kid who takes things seriously, things that no one else accepts as written/said.  This has a good side, such as a lot of us taking things like the Constitution very seriously, and a bad side, such as people taking the whole multiculti thing seriously.  (The rest of the world might parrot it, but no, they don’t take it seriously.)

…

I grew up in an area where every invader and every ruler left behind a piece of folk religion and a bit of superstition.  People believed in them all and in the official religion, regardless of the contradictions.

This is more what Progressivism resembles.  It’s made of the myths of many groups, all of which are sure they’re THE group and willing to tolerate fellow travelers.  Thus progressive women have their myths, starting with the Earthly paradise of the matriarchy and ending, eventually with the restoration of the same matriarchy.  Black supremacists… we won’t go into their myths.  We’ll just say they deny other races full humanity.  If you poke around, you’ll find it.  And the myths of the class warriors start in a distant paradise of Rosseau-like nonsense, where men neither spun nor labored and yet had everything they needed, through the current vale of tears of Capitalism, which is weirdly responsible for every human vice (that is for vices that existed before it existed) and which will end in the wonderful classless society of the future, where, to quote Star Trek, “we don’t have money, we just work because we want to.”  (Thus throwing all the credits system away.  Never mind.)

…

One of the mistakes Heinlein’s generation made was thinking the religious impulse went away when organized religion did.  It doesn’t of course.  As religion loses force, the state-as-religion moves in.  Of the two the second is probably the most harmful, as it wants to bring about a reality that simply doesn’t fit into the physical world.  No matter how much we squash capitalism, we’re not going to have an Earthly paradise.  (On the contrary.)  The paradise hereafter is each person’s concern and ultimately neither testable nor enforceable (not to say that some places and times haven’t tried it.)

Read it.

Hey, it’s in The New York Times, so it HAS to be true, right?

John C. Wright lets loose.

Before swan-diving into the sewer of total stupidity that is the DESOLATION movie, my intractable Southern courtesy requires that I say something good about this movie. Well, as it happens, there was not just one thing good about this movie, there were three: Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, and Richard Armitage. They played their parts so well, that I feel I have met the real Gandalf, Bilbo and Thorin.

Read it.

What do they know that you don’t?

Mencius Moldbug lays down some inconvenient truth.

 For there’s nothing new here.  At the height of the lame, doomed “Red Scare,” the Brown Scare was ten times bigger.  You may think it was difficult making a living as a communist screenwriter in 1954. It was a lot easier than being a fascist screenwriter.  Or even an anticommunist screenwriter.  (Same thing, right?)  And as any pathetic last shreds of real opposition shrink and die off, the Scare only grows.  That’s how winners play it.  That’s just how the permanent revolution rolls.

…

Of course, ain’t nothin’ new here.  For quite some time in America it’s been illegal to employ racists, sexists and fascists, and mandatory to employ a precisely calibrated percentage of women, workers and peasants.  Because America is a free country and that’s what freedom means.

…

It’s actually not hard to explain the Brown Scare.  Like all witch hunts, it’s built on a conspiracy theory.  The Red Scare was based on a conspiracy theory too, but at least it was a real conspiracy with real witches – two of whom were my father’s parents.  (The nicest people on earth, as people.  I like to think of them not as worshipping Stalin, but worshipping what they thought Stalin was.)  Moreover, the Red Scare was a largely demotic or peasant phenomenon to which America’s governing intellectual classes were, for obvious reasons, immune.  Because power works and culture is downstream from politics – real politics, at least – the Red Scare soon faded into a joke.

…

Think about it.  Obviously, if the witches had any power whatsoever, they wouldn’t waste their time gallivanting around on broomsticks, fellating Satan and cursing cows with sour milk.  They’re getting burned right and left, for Christ’s sake!  Priorities!  No, they’d turn the tables and lay some serious voodoo on the witch-hunters.  In a country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found dangling by his heels from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the size of a baseball, we won’t see a lot of witch-hunting and we know there’s a serious witch problem.  In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn.

John C. Wright questions whether we’ve really made any progress under ‘progressive’ government.

The modern poor man is in a much more favorable legal situation, but not a more favorable real-life situation as the serf or slave. Perhaps his situation is worse, because he lacks a personal relationship with his lord or owner: the modern welfare-serf must beg of the anonymous, cold-faced and impersonal institutions what he once sat before the gates of the rich man to beg of him.

Check it out.

I always suspected as much.

Read it.

What do they know that you don’t?

Read it.

Missing?

Arkansas- Mike Beebe (D)

Connecticut- Dan Malloy (D)

Delaware- Jack Markell (D)

Hawaii- Neil Abercrombie (D)

Kentucky- Steve Beshear (D)

Massachusetts- Deval Patrick (D)

Minnesota- Mark Dayton (D)

Missouri- Jay Nixon (D)

Oregon- John Kitzhaber (D)

Rhode Island- Lincoln Chafee (D)

Vermont- Peter Shumlin (D)

Virginia- Terry McAuliffe (D)

Washington- Jay Inslee (D)

Read it.

Much of what you hear about the minimum wage is completely untrue.

First, people should acknowledge that this rather heated policy discussion is over a very small group of people. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there are about 3.6 million workers at or below the minimum wage (you can be below legally under certain conditions). That is 2.5 percent of all workers and 1.5 percent of the population of potential workers. Within that small group, 31 percent are teenagers and 55 percent are 25 years old or younger. That leaves only about 1.1 percent of all workers over 25 and 0.8 percent of all Americans over 25 earning the minimum wage.

Within that tiny group, most of these workers are not poor and are not trying to support a family on only their earnings. In fact, according to a recent study, 63 percent of workers who earn less than $9.50 per hour (well over the minimum wage of $7.25) are the second or third earner in their family and 43 percent of these workers live in households that earn over $50,000 per year. Thus, minimum wage earners are not a uniformly poor and struggling group; many are teenagers from middle class families and many more are sharing the burden of providing for their families, not carrying the load all by themselves.

Steve Sailer exercises his fisking pen on a Voice of the Crust.

I am an American, Calcutta born. I’m writing a book about immigrants in New York, dedicated to my two American sons. I want them to know why we came here and how we found our place in this new land. I want them to know about the teachers at the Catholic school in Queens who called me a “pagan,” and the boy there who welcomed me to the school by declaring, “Lincoln shoulda never let ’em off the plantations,” and the landlord who welcomed us to the country by turning off the electricity.In other words, the most important family memories that these sons of a prominent author are having inculcated in them is that they are Victims of Whites. That’s the most important legacy to instruct your children in in the 21st Century.

Read it.

I’d also like to see one regarding arrows, such as in the TV series Arrow.

Hint: An arrow is not an impact weapon. Maybe if you hit someone in the head or a vital nerve plex — pretty hard to do — it isn’t going to put somebody down; it will merely inconvenience them, and if they’ve got a gun you’re still dead meat. Arrows are hemorrhage weapons — ideally, you shoot somebody and back off until they bleed out (or, if you’re a really really good shot, a lung or the pericardium fills with blood).

Wisdom. Attend.

Read it.

There was a NY Times article about this earlier this week. The obvious conclusion, at least to me, is that weight is genetic and there’s not much that the government can do to stop people from becoming fat if it’s in their genes. Although I do think that increasing availability of food stamps has contributed to the problem. People who can’t afford to buy food don’t get fat.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, jumps on the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ bandwagon. Sort of.

The Dark Enlightenment is, so far, a critical movement, with no particular intent to endarken individuals. They just want us to be aware that the Enlightenment had a dark side and that the modes of thought and society that it steered us toward might lead ultimately to a dark place, an antithesis.

And I guess I should drop the third-person pronoun in talking about the movement. A few months ago the blogger Scharlach (German for “scarlet”) drew up a very handy diagram of the movement, with participants grouped according to their major themes. At 11 o’clock on the diagram, grouped with Secular Traditionalists, is me. (Or possibly “…am I.” Please don’t email in to tell me.)

Read it.

Mainstream liberal blogs have recently discovered the neoreactionary movement, also known as the Dark Enlightenment, which is a plucky collection of backward-looking upstarts that started to gel sometime in late 2012. The only unifying themes in coverage are an unfounded sense of hysteria and a complete inability to get the point.

…

Ah, yes. The race thing. If race is a Dark Enlightenment obsession, someone forgot to tell them. While there’s some overlap with human biodiversity (which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like and is thus a horrifying heresy to those of the universalist faith), it’s more a cousin of neoreaction; like the manosphere, it’s hardly a wholly owned subsidiary. On the matter of race, neoreaction’s biggest crime is its refusal to parrot the “White people…ewwwwwww!” meme that dominates much of progressive discourse; instead it offers a critique of the Cultural Marxist “critical race theory” that is an essential leftist article of faith.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

1. If someone gets into trouble by being an idiot, we all need to lose a privilege
2. If someone works hard and produces more, he needs to share
3. Whoever is most fun to watch, is most likely to fix a problem
4. Being offended on behalf of others, who may not even exist, is a noble pursuit
5. Society’s advances were achieved by those who found new ways to be offended
6. Raw emotions do, and should, pull rank over rational thoughts
7. Inequality of wealth must precede some economic calamity
8. If you laugh, or snort derisively, at true things — you can magically make them untrue

The Baron looks at the Dark Enlightenment.

Meaningful dissent against the Cathedral is not permitted, not even among ostensible “conservatives”. Just ask John Derbyshire. Or Jason Richwine.

The greatest punishments are reserved for any deviation from orthodoxy on race and ethnicity. National Review dutifully excommunicates any race-heretics from its cramped crypt in the cellar of the Cathedral. But other topics are also frowned upon, such as skepticism about global warming. Or home-schooling. Or the gold standard — dissidents on fiat money are laughed out of the nave and down the front steps.

If mockery fails as a deterrent, then more stringent persuasions are brought to bear, running from denial of funding through loss of employment to lawsuits and prosecution. The Cathedral will not be gainsaid.

The Adam Smith of Neoreaction is, of course, Mencius Moldbug.

Read it.

Ever since the Nixon era, the Democratic Party has faced its own internal tug of war over fiscal matters, as the party has replaced white working-class voters in the South with upscale voters, especially in the Northeast and Pacific Northwest, who are mainly drawn to the party’s social liberalism. This has placed political constituencies that desire more redistribution of wealth and view corporations and Wall Street with suspicion if not outright animus at odds with those who seek to protect their interests and use the levers of power to gain advantage – typically with the taxpayer paying the price for their cartel-like activity. With the dominance of Bill Clinton’s post-1994 approach to triangulation and the pro-war, pro-surveillance push of the party after 9/11, the progressives have been shoved aside again and again – their positions ignored if not denigrated in matters foreign and domestic. This has continued and even expanded under Barack Obama, whose approach to fiscal and regulatory policy has led to an America where corporations thrive, wages stagnate, the surveillance state expands, Too Big To Fail lives on, and Wall Street grows fat and happy.

In this understanding of what’s taken place over the past twenty years, the Obama campaign of 2008 takes on a new and more tragic depiction. It reads as the death rattle of a political movement that traces its lineage to Robert La Follette, Samuel Gompers, and Ida Tarbell: a charismatic, appealing candidate who gives verbal endorsement to the frustrations of ill-treated progressives, promising a rejection of traditional political quid pro quo, the end of wars and privacy invasion and Gitmo and lobbyists in government, and a new aspirational and transparent communitarian approach to policies that achieve positive change… and then, once elected, reveals these to be words, just words.

The Crust breaks out of its chrysalis and reveals itself as a pretty nasty bug.

Freeberg nails it again.

The thing about abortion as a political movement, in America, is: It’s fair to connect it with other issues. Far too many people who claim to support choice but not abortion, have been revealed to support abortions, as in, more abortions. They want every abortion that might happen, to happen.

And for every 100 of those, there are 99 atheists, probably more. Which makes sense…but you’ll also find 99 people who believe in the global warming scam. Which also makes a certain amount of sense. You’ll find 99 people who support ObamaCare, which makes much less sense. I mean, think it out: You do not have a right to life if your mom wants to kill you, but if you DO make it out of there, you have a “right” to health care. How is that reconciled?

Abortion exposes liberalism for what it really is. Liberalism makes absolutely no sense at all, as it’s explained by liberals. You do not exist at all unless your mom chooses to carry you to term, but once you do make it you have a right to — health care, an ever-increasing minimum wage, lawsuits against restaurants that don’t built ramps to accommodate your wheelchair, special bathrooms for your transgender situation, lawsuits against wedding cake decorators who won’t accommodate your gay wedding, however much vacation time your union rep thinks you should have, public school education, etc….this doesn’t make any sense at all. You get more and more “rights” but only if you make it? Until you go through the breach you don’t even exist? If there’s nothing sacred about you, why do you deserve rights.

Read it.

Israel, of course.

Read it.

Let’s start with the ship. I’m assuming you want a classic wooden vessel, and from your specifications I gather you want something huge, on the order of Blackbeard’s pride, the Queen Anne’s Revenge. While this isn’t something you can price on Amazon, we can make estimates based on other reconstruction efforts. A 27-meter replica of the Black Pearl, with room for 70 tourists, eight crew, and six functional bronze cannons, was listed for sale online at $2 million a while back but later reduced to $750,000. In 2009 the cost to build a replica of Blackbeard’s sloop Adventure, a much smaller ship than the Queen Anne’s Revenge, was estimated at $3.7 million. Since that was an 80-ton ship, I’ll take a flyer and project the cost to reconstruct the 200-to-300 ton Revenge at $11.6 million.

Next, the crew. Most pirate ships were fairly small, with maybe a dozen guns and crews of around 50, but some carried crews of more than 200, and the Queen Anne’s Revenge carried 300 to 400. You want 300, let’s figure payroll for 300. Pirate crews back in the day typically worked for a share of the plunder, but this is the 2010s, when even cutthroats expect a regular paycheck. In addition to general-purpose crew, you’re going to need a captain, first mate, quartermaster, boatswain, and so on. To estimate your likely outlay, I took current U.S. Navy pay rates and multiplied them by 1.4 to cover everything from Social Security and Medicare to 401(k) contributions (look, be glad I didn’t include stock options), arriving at an annual cost of $11.3 million — spreadsheet on request.

Read it.

“If my books appear oversimplified, then you shouldn’t read them.” Malcolm Gladwell’s invitation to avoid reading his books, made recently in an interview in The Guardian, has a certain charm. He conveys the impression of a writer who, aware of critics who accuse him of cherry-picking the results of complex academic research to support simple-minded stories, defiantly insists on his right to do something different—to write in what he has described, in a riposte to one of his critics, as “the genre of what might be called ‘intellectual adventure stories.’?” If his books do not display the intellectual rigor that is supposed to attach to academic writings, Gladwell seems to be suggesting, it is because they serve a different purpose. Interweaving academic research with real-life stories, Gladwell aims—as he puts it—“to get people to look at the world a little differently.” Using the power of a storyteller, he is bringing “the amazing worlds of psychology and sociology to a broader audience,” an exercise that is capable of producing nothing less than a shift in the worldview of his readers.

No one can doubt Gladwell’s ability to reach large audiences. The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers were all tremendous best-sellers, leading some to conclude that Gladwell has invented a new genre of popular writing. In David and Goliath, Gladwell again applies the formula that has been so successful in the past. Deploying a mixture of affecting narratives of struggle against the odds with carefully chosen academic papers, he contends that the powerless are more powerful than those who appear to wield much of the power in the world. To many, this may appear counterintuitive, he suggests; but by marshaling a variety of historical examples ranging from the American struggle for civil rights to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, leavened with homely tales of the trials and triumphs of basketball teams and fortified with forays into sociology and psychology, Gladwell thinks that he can persuade the reader to accept the difficult truth that the weak are not as weak as the reader imagines. If they play their cards right, they can prevail against the strong.

Read it.

The OED, which this month experiences a rare change in leadership, is different from other English dictionaries. Most obviously, it is much, much bigger. The first edition, published in 10 instalments between 1884 and 1928, defined more than 400,000 words and phrases; by 1989, when two further supplements of 20th-century neologisms were combined with the original to create the second, this had risen to some 600,000, with a full word count of 59m. Once the monumental task of revising and updating that last (and possibly final) printed incarnation is complete, the third edition is expected to have doubled in overall length.

Read it.

There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem with DWYL, however, is that it leads not to salvation but to the devaluation of actual work—and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers.

Superficially, DWYL is an uplifting piece of advice, urging us to ponder what it is we most enjoy doing and then turn that activity into a wage-generating enterprise. But why should our pleasure be for profit? And who is the audience for this dictum?

DWYL is a secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation but is an act of love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, presumably it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.

If you persist in doing what you love, you’ll either starve or get arrested. Just sayin’.

Read it.

Gee, rich people leaving a Communist dictatorship. Whyever would they do that?

Read it.

About 3 years ago, I posted a blog post arguing that the poor don’t work due to economic rationality. This was just me playing around with the data and trying to see what I could come up with.

My conclusion back then: by graphing consumption vs income, it turns out that whether you earn $0 or $20k, your consumption is more or less the same. If utility is a monotonic function of consumption, then this means that people who’s labor income will lie between $0 and $20k will have no incentive to work. The data I had is hardly perfect – it’s just broad aggregates. I don’t know where to get a data set which excludes students, the disabled, etc.

Anyway, I forgot about that blog post. It went semi-viral today, so I decided to revisit the topic. Turns out that about a year after I posted it, the CBO issued a report more or less agreeing with it. They compare disposable income to income (rather than consumption to income), but the idea is similar.

Read it.

I suspect that it’s because watches have gone from something everybody uses to being a fashion statement.

Nobody demonstrates status with Timex.

Read it.

I always knew that the treatment of the critically ill in our best teaching hospitals was excellent. That was certainly confirmed by the life-saving treatment I received in the Massachusetts General emergency room. Physicians there simply refused to let me die (try as hard as I might). But what I hadn’t appreciated was the extent to which, when there is no emergency, new technologies and electronic record-keeping affect how doctors do their work. Attention to the masses of data generated by laboratory and imaging studies has shifted their focus away from the patient. Doctors now spend more time with their computers than at the bedside. That seemed true at both the ICU and Spaulding. Reading the physicians’ notes in the MGH and Spaulding records, I found only a few brief descriptions of how I felt or looked, but there were copious reports of the data from tests and monitoring devices. Conversations with my physicians were infrequent, brief, and hardly ever reported.

Read it.

Heavy, man….

Read it.

But these neologisms seem innocuous when we look at how the word ‘freedom’ has been vandalised. Freedom used to be about taking responsibility for one’s own actions; but not now, we have, for example, freedom of religion — except where Islam is concerned; it is more important not to ‘offend’ Muslims by having a Christmas tree than it is to preserve freedom. We have freedom of speech — except when it is homophobic. We have freedom of information — except where the President’s social security number is concerned.

The word ‘fascist’ has always been difficult to define because it describes the particular aspirations of an Italian neo-communist party to identify with its ancient Roman roots. The fasci, the bundle of sticks wrapped around an axe, were a common link with the past. It is a symbol of absolute power and appears throughout the modern western world. What, however, does ‘fascist’ mean, in modern parlance? It is an epithet used against anybody who does not agree with left liberal/communist doctrines.

Read it. And watch the video.

Somehow, when Democrates whine about the rich and their ‘fair share’, I don’t think they mean a reduction.