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?

Read it.

How ’bout that Global Warming, eh?

Back in the ’70s the Usual Suspects were worried about a coming new Ice Age. Maybe they were on to something.

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.

A potato near bedtime will surely increase blood glucose during sleep, supporting the idea that a better supply of blood glucose is what improves sleep.  Presumably it’s important to do this without (a) triggering too much insulin production or (b) increasing brain activity so much you wake up. Whether glycogen, in the liver or elsewhere, has anything to do with this I have no idea. Glycogen is one source of new glucose as the brain burns thru blood glucose but another is not yet digested carbohydrate in what you’ve recently eaten (e.g., potato).

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.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

Cats think you’re just a a slightly big, dumb non-hostile cat. Quite specifically, he says that they treat humans as if they were their Mama Cat.

All that rubbing up against you with their tails up is apparently no more than a hopeful check that you really are just another big, fat, slovenly cat who doesn’t intend to eat them with their Welsh Rarebit.

And I’m good with that.

Read it.

One should point out the hypocrisy of the liberal media which doesn’t care that Bill Clinton most likely raped Juanita Broaddrick (a serious felony that could get a regular person a very long prison sentence in a very unpleasant prison), but closing a few lanes on a bridge is a Huge Scandal of the Greatest Magnitude that it gets a “gate” suffix.

Read it.

Some incisive comments by somebody you never heard of.

The first and perhaps most important mistake people make is to confuse money for wealth. … Having money does not make you wealthy, but having the ability to make money, through net income generating assets such as businesses, investments, or even just your own skills, that makes you wealthy. This is perhaps why those with a solid education are never really poor, but merely broke: they have the potential to make money, even if they don’t have money right now.

Read it.

What we have right now is four labor markets.

We have a teen/early 20-something labor market where the participation collapsed as people focused more on education and/or can’t find work. In the long run, this group will be fine.

We have an age 55+ labor market which fared much better over the past 10 years than the rest of the workforce, but will begin to stagnate and shrink as retirements accelerate.

We have a peak-age labor market which is tightening very quickly, and should be near full employment before the 2016 election.

And we have a segment of the labor market, probably somewhere between 1-3 million people, of workers who are some combination of older, less educated, immobile due to being underwater on their homes, or not properly trained for the modern economy, who need major help from the government. They can’t find work at wage levels they’ll accept. Fiscal policy for this group would be 100% effective, but monetary policy at this point is of dubious help.

Freeberg does it again.

Bearing in mind that experience and experiment come from a common Latin root, catechism-science is anything toiling away under the label of “science” that exists entirely outside of that. Its persuasive strength comes from being repeated over and over, verbatim, by people who call themselves “scientists” but who do not do science.

It’s important to separate this out from the real stuff, for a number of reasons. One of the most important of these reasons is that science relies a great deal on deductive reasoning, and while deductive reasoning is most persuasive when it is carried out properly, people lose track of how easy it is to do it improperly. It doesn’t work at all, in fact, unless 1) the range of possible causes has been exhaustively listed, and 2) each item within that list was eliminated conservatively. If the producer of the conclusion succeeds at #1 and fails at #2, the final conclusion is only as strong as the weakest elimination. If he fails at #1 then the whole thing is just a waste of time.

George Will has some fun with the Usual Suspects.

Americans who exercise consumer sovereignty wherever Barack Obama still tolerates it are constantly disappointing him. For generations they persisted in buying what he calls “substandard” policies from what he calls “bad apple” health insurers. They stopped only when he forced them to stop — when he rescued them from their ignorance by banning their benighted preferences.

Have consumers thanked him for trying to wean them from their desire to drive large, useful, comfortable, safe vehicles that he thinks threaten their habitat, Earth? The 2013 numbers tell the tale of their ingratitude. In 2013, for the 32nd consecutive year, the best-selling vehicle was Ford’s F-Series pickups. This supremacy began, fittingly, in the first year of Ronald Reagan’s deregulatory presidency.

Today’s consumers, who cannot get it through their thick heads that they are supposed to want wee vehicles such as Chevrolet’s Volt, bought 763,402 F-Series trucks. That is 740,308 more than the number of Volts General Motors sold.

…

Today, Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged v. Sebelius may be the second-most serendipitously named court case in U.S. history, second to Loving v. Virginia (wherein Richard Loving, who was white, and his wife Mildred, who was black, in 1967 overturned Virginia’s law against interracial marriages). The Little Sisters are challenging the Obamacare mandate that makes them complicit in providing, through their health insurance, contraception, something that offends their faith.

This mandate illustrates Gesture Liberalism: It is unimportant to the structure of Obamacare. It has nothing to do with real insurance, which protects against unexpected developments — car insurance does not pay for oil changes. The mandate covers a minor expense: Target sells a month of birth control pills for $9 . The mandate is, however, a gesture affirming liberalism’s belief that any institution of civil society can be properly broken to the saddle of the state.

Gavin McInnes understands the dialectic.

All in the Family, Family Ties, and Duck Dynasty were all created by liberal snobs to denigrate American values, and they all backfired. … People loved Archie Bunker and hated Meathead because they knew boomer liberals were full of shit. Even Sammy Davis, Jr. was in the Bunker bunker. He recognized Archie’s vocabulary was that of a hard-working American who grew up in a rough neighborhood. Davis told him as much when he appeared on the show as himself back in 1972.

Read it.

The instruments of popular culture may perhaps be forgiven for continuing to portray the 1960s as a time of infectious idealism, but those of us who were active then have no excuse for abetting this banality. If in some ways it was the best of times, it was also the worst of times, an era of bloodthirsty fantasies as well as spiritual ones. We ourselves experienced both aspects, starting as civil¬rights and antiwar activists and ending as co¬editors of the New Left magazine Ramparts. The magazine post allowed us to write about the rough beast slouching through America and also to urge it on through non¬editorial activities we thought of as clandestine until we later read about them in the FBI and CIA files we both accumulated.

Read it. And watch the video.

Specifically, according to Christensen, here is the recurring dynamic: the new entrants siphon off work from the bottom-end — work that the high-end says it does not want anyway.  The cycle repeats itself a few times until, much to the incumbents’ surprise, the bottom-end becomes more economically relevant and powerful.  Why does top-end let this happen?  Because the incumbents have come to view success as elite status and high margins, which is an unrealistically high long-term bar unless you are continuously innovating.  Eventually, the so-called high-margin niche becomes insufficient to sustain the enterprise, and giants fall — see the automotive industry, steel, computer hardware, televisions, consumer electronics, etc.

Freeberg does some heavy lifting.

To a child, once you head down that road it is all too easy to look at all problems in life like that. The problem isn’t there, it’s the person who’s the problem, therefore bitching about the person is the same as solving the problem. That’s how we get Barack Obama and people like Him: Every day, more bitching about those awful Republicans, while the problems go unsolved. Obviously, we don’t need more of that going on…so I guess I’m stepping out on a treacherous precipice here. But there is danger in the opposite as well, and I guess I’m guilty of practicing that, looking at only the problem and ignoring the people causing the problem. I guess we tend to embrace that in childhood, confident that it will lead to all-good-habits, no-bad-ones in adulthood. That’s not what happens. Some problems have makers, and solving the problems while ignoring the problem-makers is like chopping away at the leafy part of a weed rather than uprooting it. So I’d file this “good” piece of advice for kids, alongside “always clean your plate.” Waist-size-wise, some of my worst habits come from the clean-your-plate rule I was taught in childhood. Maybe my whole generation should have been taught “here’s how you throw that good food away, and forget all about those poor kids in China.” Lately, I’m thinking I’ve been solving problems the same way I’ve been eating what’s on my plate when I’m not really hungry, and with what’s been going on with my waist size during this time, I have no business eating when I’m not hungry.