Jerry Pournelle looks at the ‘shutdown’.

The stories continue to pour in of government officials – particularly for some reason Parks Department employees including Rangers – taking care to make life miserable for citizens as a matter of policy. Precisely where this policy originated is not known, but considerable money was spent on the operation. The World War II, Viet Nam War, and Korean War monuments on the Mall are not attended and are open for anyone to stroll through, and they are meaningful to the veterans of those wars. The nearest barricades would be in some Park Department storage place a good way from the Mall. Had the government shut down simply removed the park people from the site, it would have cost nothing to ask the American Legion, WFW, and other such outfits to provide monitors; but it was very costly to bring out the barricades and post park police around those monuments to keep the veterans away from them. Yet that was done.

The same with the access off-ramp to the privately owned parking lot at the privately owned and operated Mount Vernon: it costs nothing to operate and no one parks on government property; but at considerable expense barricades were put up to block the off ramp, and federal employees were sent to enforce the shutdown of the turnoff. Same story for the off highway viewpoints for Mount Rushmore; at considerable expense they were closed. And tourists on a tour bus that stopped to look were forbidden to “recreate” by taking photographs of Old Faithful; it took people on duty to do that. This wasn’t saving money, this was intended to be hard on people, presumably so they would blame the Republicans for shutting down the government.

Now you might argue that these acts originated in low level management, but after the first couple of days the President and every senior officer in government had to be aware of them, but nothing was done. Apparently it was decided that this was a reasonable policy. It would seem to be a good subject for investigation with possible firing of government employees under the Hatch Act, but I suppose all the teeth were taken out of that a long time ago. Civil Servants are supposed to be officially politically neutral in exchange for job security when administrations change; clearly that is not working today, and something ought to be done about it. The theory of civil service is that it beats the spoils system by keeping experienced and efficient officials on the job when administrations change. It has a cost: under the “spoils system” it is much easier to hold elected officials responsible for the actions of government. We seem to be working out a system that has all the disadvantages of both.

Bryan Kaplan is delightfully dyspeptic this morning.

First Iron Law: Students learn only a small fraction of what they’re taught.

Second Iron Law: Students remember only a small fraction of what they learn.

Third Iron Law: Most of the lessons students remember lack practical applications.

Read it.

Cities are full of the Hip & Trendy, and they have no time for ‘old people’.

Perhaps no urban legend has played as long and loudly as the notion that “empty nesters” are abandoning their dull lives in the suburbs for the excitement of inner city living. This meme has been most recently celebrated in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

Both stories, citing research by the real estate brokerage Redfin, maintained that over the last decade a net 1 million boomers (born born between 1945 and 1964) have moved into the city core from the surrounding area. “Aging boomers,” the Post gushed, now “opt for the city life.” It’s enough to warm the cockles of a downtown real-estate speculator’s heart, and perhaps nudge some subsidies from city officials anxious to secure their downtown dreams.

But there’s a problem here: a look at Census data shows the story is based on flawed analysis, something that the Journal subsequently acknowledged. Indeed, our number-crunching shows that rather than flocking into cities, there were roughly a million fewer boomers in 2010 within a five-mile radius of the centers of the nation’s 51 largest metro areas compared to a decade earlier.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Read it.

This has been a bad week for the Halfrican Queen of D.C. and Princess Harry. They EXPECTED that the owners of the privately-owned businesses that were arbitrarily shut down, the thousands of people that were suddenly unemployed, the parents of the schoolchildren left stranded at school when the Park Service closed the road that their schoolbuses traveled, elderly crippled homeowners given 24 hours to vacate their homes, tourists held under armed guard in Yellowstone National Park, and the thousands of veterans whose entry to their own memorials were blocked would start demanding the blood of the GOP and the TEA Party. They could hardly wait. They even cut off the funds for the families of the people killed in action in a war that Obama escalated but not many knew about because, hey, the media isn’t interested in covering those killed in action due to a DEMOCRAT president. That meant that the families of the dead had to pay their own way to meet the bodies of their wives, husbands, children that were coming home. They were denied death benefits. THAT would surely show the eeeeeevil of the TEA Party and the GOP!

‘If the Tea Party isn’t pissing someone off, it’s doing it wrong.’ — Jonah Goldberg, The G-File 2013-10-18

Jonah’s whole point is that the notion of defunding Obamacare, while noble and good, was unrealistic given the climate in Washington (which pretty much ignores the climate in the country; Democrats, despite their name, don’t really care what the majority thinks, so long as their base is solidly behind them so that their power is not in danger) — nevertheless, it was a fight worth waging because it shifts the focus in the right direction.

While I think the notion that we wouldn’t be talking about Obamacare were it not for Ted Cruz’s filibuster is simply untrue, the fact that he laid down that marker, and forced everyone in the party to do likewise, will almost certainly work to the Right’s advantage down the road. We can all argue about how unpopular the shutdown really was and how damaged the party brand is, but my guess is that the worst of it has to be behind us. The shutdown will fade from memory while the Obamanation of Obamacare will grow. If you read the Wall Street Journal story today alongside Yuval’s post in the Corner, it’s becoming ever more clear that this is kind of an M. C. Escher drawing of failure. The error pages literally have errors in them. Jonathan Cohn — a passionate Obamacare booster — has a relatively balanced piece about the rollout problems, but he goes back to boosterism when it comes to the issue of premiums. He simply asserts that competition is working and delivering lower premiums. I am at a loss as to how he can know that given that all the reporting I’ve seen suggests that if you’re healthy and middle class, your premiums will likely go up. It even happened to a Daily Kos blogger whose tears are delicious!

Imagine going to Target the day after Thanksgiving for the “Black Friday” sale. You wait for hours or days for the doors to open. You rush in like O. J. Simpson in the old Hertz ads, leaping over pyramids of GI Joes with the Kung Fu Grip, sidestepping the giant Justin Bieber cardboard displays. It’s complete chaos. Some woman who wants the same George Foreman Grill you do punches you in the uvula. You kill a guy with a trident when he tries to get the last Bluetooth beer helmet. Finally, because you kept your head on a swivel, you get your cart to the check-out line and the cashier tells you everything in your cart isn’t on sale, but it’s actually twice as expensive as it would be on a normal day. Why? Because in order to buy the things you want, you have to buy a bunch of stuff you don’t want; a DVD of Bridges of Madison County, a cornucopia of indecipherable feminine products, a top-of-the-line salad spinner, and a twelve-pack of Ensure.

That’s Obamacare for you.

And the fact that the GOP caused a huge fuss that briefly annoyed some people to protest this mess is really not such a bad thing.

Steve Sailer understands the dialectic.

Read it.

The headline read, “We Have Become a Nation of Hamburger Flippers: Dan Alpert Breaks Down the Jobs Report.” Seems that Alpert, the managing partner of New York investment bank Westwood Capital, LLC, was unhappy that most of the jobs created in July were for low-wage workers.

Albert wasn’t alone. Plenty of people have been complaining that most of the recently-created jobs have been for low-wage workers. These people have apparently forgotten who it was that lost jobs in the Great Recession: It was low-wage workers. College educated people were hardly impacted at all, especially those that headed households and had several years of work experience.

The recession hit less educated, and therefore low-wage, workers far more than it hit high-human-capital workers, and the discrepancy persists, even as analysts complain about hamburger-flipping jobs.

And there are a lot more people who can only do burger-flipper jobs than there are highly-educated potential professionals. We don’t need more jobs for the brains in Silicon Valley; we need them for the average Joes on Main Street.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, deals with modern cant.

Modern political discourse consists of little more than the Tinkertoy assembly of cant phrases into speeches: Fix the schools! Out of the shadows! Our brave men and women in uniform! The schools are fine; the “shadow” people are demonstrating in front of TV cameras; and the average American mandarin would faint in horror on hearing that his child had joined the military. Yet still they cant….

…

Practically anything you read or hear about racism, sexism, and homophobia is cant. The most punctilious anti-racists flee like rats from black neighborhoods; the dearth of female mathematicians, in an age when women form an actual majority of college students, is widely understood to be a matter of female preferences, not discrimination; and sensible parents do not leave their kids alone with sexually eccentric adults. Yet the cant goes on.

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship.”

Alexander Fraser Tyler, “The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic”

Read it.

Because we have nothing more important to do today.

Read it.

Oops, too late….

 Remind your parents not to send you to public school. Bill Gates went to Lakeside, Seattle’s most exclusive prep school where tuition in 1967 was $5,000 (Harvard tuition that year was $1760). Typical classmates included the McCaw brothers, who sold the cellular phone licenses they obtained from the U.S. Government to AT&T for $11.5 billion in 1994. When the kids there wanted to use a computer, they got their moms to hold a rummage sale and raise $3,000 to buy time on a DEC PDP-10, the same machine used by computer science researchers at Stanford and MIT.

And that’s advice we can all appreciate.

 Note: Recall that in the 1980s we venerated Donald Trump and studied his “art of the deal”. If Donald Trump had taken the millions he inherited from his father and put it all into mutual funds, you’d never have had to suffer through one of his books. But he’d be just about as rich today.

And that’s all you really need to know about getting rich.

Read it.

Deception #1: universal coverage

Deception #2: no new taxes on the middle class

Deception #3: annual premium savings of $2,500

Deception #4: no increase in the deficit

Deception #5: you can keep your plan if you like it

Read it.

A useul compendium, all in one place, quite convenient.

Many pro- and anti-evolution bloviators get it wrong; here’s the fix.

Read it. And watch the video.

PowerLine looks at what would happen if an Ordinary Citizen ™ were to handle money the way the Federal government does.

Steve Sailer thinks about hard stuff so that you won’t have to.

Last month in Taki’s Magazine, I wrote about Bill Clinton-lookalike Frances Frei, the Dean of Something at the Harvard Business School, and her war on slutty Halloween costumes. I mentioned that Frei is gay-married to a former student at HBS named Anne Morriss. Now, a reader points out that, in one of those iSteve Convergences, Morriss is involved with a new Lesbian Eugenics firm.

Really, you can’t make this shit up.

I could imagine a scenario — feel free to use this in a Lifetime movie — in which a woman is choosing between Donor X and Donor Y, and Genepeeks says Donor Y is clean but Donor X has a 1 out of 1000 chance of horrible Disease Z. But the lady says, But, from their pictures, I like X’s smile more than Y’s, so I’ll go with Donor X. But then the baby is born with Disease Z, for which the mother can’t forgive herself. Until, she discovers that … well, I don’t know what the plot twist would be because I lose interest in making up my own narratives with consistent rapidity.

And there was much rejoicing….

Read it.

Breaking Down the New Feudalism: The Emerging Class Structure

The emerging class structure of neo-feudalism, like its European and Asian antecedents, is far more complex than simply a matter of the gilded “them” and the broad “us.” To work as a system, as we can now see in California, we need to understand the broader, more divergent class structure that is emerging.

The Oligarchs: The swelling number of billionaires in the state, particularly in Silicon Valley, has enhanced power that is emerging into something like the old aristocratic French second estate. Through public advocacy and philanthropy, the oligarchs have tended to embrace California’s “green” agenda, with a very negative impact on traditional industries such as manufacturing, agriculture, energy, and construction. Like the aristocrats who saw all value in land, and dismissed other commerce as unworthy, they believe all value belongs to those who own the increasingly abstracted information revolution that has made them so fabulously rich.

The  Clerisy: The Oligarchs may have the money, but by themselves they cannot control a huge state like California, much less America. Gentry domination requires allies with a broader social base and their own political power. In the Middle Ages, this role was played largely by the church; in today’s hyper-secular America, the job of shaping the masses has fallen to the government apparat, the professoriat, and the media, which together constitute our new Clerisy. The Clerisy generally defines societal priorities, defends “right-thinking” oligarchs, and chastises those, like traditional energy companies, that deviate from their theology.

The New Serfs: If current trends continue, the fastest growing class will be the permanently property-less. This group includes welfare recipients and other government dependents but also the far more numerous working poor. In the past, the working poor had reasonable aspirations for a better life, epitomized by property ownership or better prospects for their children. Now, with increasingly little prospect of advancement, California’s serfs depend on the Clerisy to produce benefits making their permanent impoverishment less gruesome. This sad result remains inevitable as long as the state’s economy bifurcates between a small high-wage, tech-oriented sector, and an expanding number of lower wage jobs in hospitality, health services, and personal service jobs. As a result, the working class, stunted in their drive to achieve the California dream, now represents the largest portion of domestic migrants out of the state.

The Yeomanry: In neo-feudalist California, the biggest losers tend to be the old private sector middle class. This includes largely small business owners, professionals, and skilled workers in traditional industries most targeted by regulatory shifts and higher taxes. Once catered to by both parties, the yeomanry have become increasingly irrelevant as California has evolved into a one-party state where the ruling Democrats have achieved a potentially permanent, sizable majority consisting largely of the clerisy and the serf class, and funded by the oligarchs. Unable to influence government and largely disdained by the clerisy, these middle income Californians are becoming a permanent outsider group, much like the old Third Estate in early medieval times, forced to pay ever higher taxes as well as soaring utility bills and required to follow regulations imposed by people who often have little use for their “middle class” suburban values.

Read it.

But there is, in my view, an even more fundamental objection to government control over health care: anything run by the government inherently becomes political. The result is that the interests of politicians take precedence over everything else. For a case in point, see the United Kingdom. Over the last year or more, we have covered the unfolding scandal of Britain’s National Health Service, where appallingly bad care–not just inept, but callous–has led to many fatalities and has shaken Britons’ faith in the NHS.

Read it.

Yeah, this makes me feel old. I remember all of them except the milk pass-through — back in the day when there were milk deliveries, we had an insulated box that would sit on the porch into which the milk guy would put the stuff. (This was in the early 60s, so it wasn’t all that long ago.) (Or maybe it was….)

Read it.

Eventually I’m allowed to leave the premises with my shopping, having managed to get through the automated Fast Checkout service with the assistance of two shop employees, a public-spirited member of the public and 26 primary school children.

Freeberg is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Anyway, I was thinking this morning around five o’clock, heading southbound on I-680…gee, I can’t imagine why…how assholes are made. Isn’t that what really bothers us about assholes? It isn’t that the assholes are there, or that we encounter them. We should expect this. We’re all sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, who got kicked out of the Garden of Eden because they were a couple of assholes. And I think deep down everyone realizes that. So we’re bothered when we meet assholes, but the existence of the asshole is not what bothers us.

…

You lay down just one single incentive that goes in the right direction, makes life easier for non-assholes or provides a much-needed challenge or rebuke to the assholes — the assholes are fine with it, but the asshole-makers start squawking. They do more than that, they’ll gouge your eyes out if you’re not careful. Starving wild animals being kept away from the beef steak. Asshole-makers will not quit the asshole-making lifestyle. And the older I get, the more certain I am that they, more than the assholes, are the real problem. Think of Count Dracula going around biting people turning them into vampires. The “freshman vampires” are not the real problem, Dracula is the real problem. These are Asshole Dracula people.

Read it.

That few reporters knew which end of that sort of big long gun-thingy the bullet came out of made them easy marks for Reformers. I knew something about tanks, having gone through armor school in the Marine Corps and served in an AMTRAC battalion in Vietnam. I could talk shop with guys in armor. But how do you explain to a J-school grad why thermal imagers are superior to micro-channel photomultipliers?

…

Long-range missiles were in their infancy and did not work terribly well. Ignoring the common experience that what works sort of today will work a lot better tomorrow and like gangbusters by next Thursday, Boyd and the Fighter Mafia wanted a philosophical Sopwith Camel. It didn’t bother them that nobody else did. Israel, with the best tactical-fighter force of the age, was and is big on electronics. The Israelis had to win their wars, not talk about them.

The Flight

When the grey geese heard the Fool’s tread
Too near to where they lay,
They lifted neither voice nor head,
But took themselves away.

No water broke, no pinion whirred-
There went no warning call.
The steely, sheltering rushes stirred
A little–that was all.

Only the osiers understood,
And the drowned meadows spied
What else than wreckage of a flood
Stole outward on that tide.

But the far beaches saw their ranks
Gather and greet and grow
By myriads on the naked banks
Watching their sign to go;

Till, with a roar of wings that churned
The shivering shoals to foam,
Flight after flight took air and turned
To find a safer home;

And, far below their steadfast wedge,
They heard (and hastened on)
Men thresh and clamour through the sedge
Aghast that they were gone!

And, when men prayed them come anew
And nest where they were bred,
“Nay, fools foretell what knaves will do,”
Was all the grey geese said.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, points out some inconvenient truth.

First-responders’ pay is as low as it is because there are plenty of people able and willing to work as high-quality first-responders relative to the ‘need’ that we have for first-responders.  With so many highly skilled and dedicated people already working as first-responders, the value of the additional first-response services that we’d enjoy if we hire one more equally skilled and dedicated person to work as a first-responder is very low.  So we’re – rightly – unwilling to pay very much to hire this additional first-responder.  It makes no sense to pay an additional, say, $100,000 annually to get labor services that produce an additional, say, $30,000 worth of output.

So understand our good fortune!  We live in a society blessed with an abundant supply of high-quality live-saving labor services.

Ask: would you prefer to live in a society in which people’s ability and willingness to work as first-responders were as scarce, relative to our ‘need’ for such services, as is the ability to work as a N.F.L. quarterback?  If our society were populated not with tens of thousands, but only with a few dozen, people who can supply top-notch first-response services, would we be better off than we are in reality today or would be worse off?  The answer is obvious: we’d be worse off.

First-responders would be better off.  They would each be paid very handsomely for their services.  But many more of us would, as a result of this wage-raising scarcity of first-responders, die in automobile accidents and home and workplace fires.  High-quality first-response services would be very scarce and, hence, very highly priced.  Fortunately for us, our world has an abundance of high-quality first-responders.  It’s a blessing that we get such essential life-saving and life-enhancing services at relatively low costs.

Markets work even when you don’t want them to. Teachers are another illustration of the basic principle that how well people are paid is not a function of how important is the work that they do but of how many people can provide the same service.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

People, just minding their own business but relying in some way on something-or-another, are having their plans disrupted because strangers are not achieving agreement with other strangers. Thousands of miles away. Strangers who will remain strangers, who will always be strangers. And what the hell does failed-to-reach-agreement mean, anyway? Each side did a diligent and judicious job of minimally choosing its “hill I wanna die on” positions, and some of those were found to be mutually exclusive, so they gave it a few more hasty tries while the clock chimed midnight, and then collapsed in despair? Like that? Or is it more like, someone didn’t even bother to show up. Maybe no one did? Or phoned it in, literally and figuratively?

I can certainly appreciate how it’s so aggravating. I don’t understand how people keep falling for it over & over again. I don’t understand why some people choose to make a lifestyle out of this. It’s quite silly, when you look at it from a distance, or ponder it for awhile. Oh goody, the strangers I’ll never meet happened to agree on something, so I get…access to a park. A paycheck. A seat at the ball game. A boat ride. So glad they agreed…this time.

Yeah, these things are all ratchet-traps; the dependents are in a situation in which they have no choice. But that’s usually because, before, they passed some point where the choice went away. Because they gave it up. All this debating & discussing about “ObamaCare” was about exactly that, was it not?

…

The question is not whether this is one of those deals where people love to complain about something, but won’t get off their fat asses to solve it. That’s settled. The question is, what forces are at work here; what dynamics; what is happening to them. On this, I’m less than certain. I must form theories. And my favorite theory at this time is — this is a process of urbanization.

John Stossel reveals some inconvenient truth.

I call them “government” instead of “public” schools because not much is “public” about them. Members of the public don’t get to pick their kids’ schools, teachers, curriculum or cost.

By contrast, supermarkets are “private” yet open to everyone. You can stroll in 24 hours a day. Just try that with your kid’s public school. You might be arrested.

…

Defenders of government schools often claim their schools are what create the American “melting pot.” Different races, ethnic groups and income levels mix together in government-funded schools.

Bunk. If it was ever true, it isn’t now.

University of Arkansas education professor Jay Greene examined school classrooms and found that public schools were more likely to be almost entirely white or entirely minority.

He also looked at who sat with whom in school lunchrooms. At private schools, students of different races were more likely to sit together.

Read it.

As we survey the smoking, shattered remains of the federal goverment… Oh, wait, that was a rerun of Independence Day. Awesome scene. Anyway, as we yawn and gaze on the histrionics over the government not-so-shutdown of 2013, there are definitely a few upsides to be seen. I might go so far as to venture that it’s mostly upsides, but let’s stick with a few highlights for now.

Read it.

Adjunct faculty members at Tufts University have voted to unionize with the Service Employees International Union, marking the national union’s first victory in a campaign to organize adjuncts across the Boston area and push institutions to improve their working conditions.

[Recap for the dimwitted: Unions arise when a particular occupation has a skillset that is easily subject to substitution on the part of management because supply vastly exceeds demand, hence collective coercion on the part of workers is the only way to raise (or sustain) their price over what the market-clearing amount would be. Historically, violence and activities that would be unlawful if any group other than a union did them are an integral part of this coercion.]

Steve Sailer looks at striving within the Crust.

 I’m sure it bores most people, but I can never get enough of New York Times articles about the Wechsler I.Q. tests that the 3,000 most important four-year-olds in the world (or at least in Manhattan and the better parts of Brooklyn) take each year so their parents can pay $40,000 per year for them to attend kindergarten with some of the other 2,999 most important small children in the world. Pay no attention to that IQ test behind the curtain!

These are not just helicopter parents — these are Apache-gunship-escorted-Ospreys-loaded-with-Delta-Force parents.

Whatever magically non-competitive test replaces the Wechsler IQ test for NYC kindergarten admissions will instantly become the most gamed status symbol this side of Seoul.

We are rapidly turning into ancient China, where how you do on The Exams determines what you become, not the content of your character or your capacity to achieve or anything silly like that.

But there is hope! Specifically, Los Angeles:

 Los Angeles just isn’t as IQ obsessed as New York is. It’s a who-you-know culture, and if you don’t know anybody, why would they let your child in to their kindergarten for the children of cool parents? Maybe if you are extremely good looking, they’d make an exception. But if you are ugly and unpopular, who cares what your kid’s I.Q. is?

Hmm, well, then again, maybe not….

Read it.

Ted Cruz is looking better and better.

Cornyn has been a tremendous disappointment to Texas conservatives (although not, perhaps, to Texas Republicans); not as bad as Kaye Hutchinson, and certainly not as bad as John McCain, but still a disappointment.

Still, Mirengoff’s criticism is well founded. Cruz ought to say what he thinks, and help the rest of us out in our evaluation of Cornyn … and Cruz.

Read it.

Hint: No.

Read it.

And who could blame them?

A primer.

As the federal government’s fiscal year 2013 wheezes to a close without a budget in place for fiscal 2014, here is some basic information everyone should understand.

This is from tReason magazine, so it’s not the usual left-wing drivel.

Read it. And for sure watch the video.

Durbin complained that Cruz wanted to deny health care to the uninsured; did he not, Durbin asked, enjoy the benefits of the generous congressional health-care package himself?

Cruz said he wouldn’t answer Durbin until Durbin first replied to three questions Cruz had posed. Durbin, with an “a-ha” gesture, responded by saying it was clear Cruz was simply refusing to answer his embarrassing question.

He’d walked into Cruz’s trap. For then Cruz said, no, Senator, I’m eligible for the congressional plan — but I’m not enrolled in it.

Read it..

The gist of the message is that, from the outset, the calculations used to sell Obamacare to the American public were slipshod and/or naive and/or mistaken and/or simplistic and/or outright lies (see more here).

And this is news to exactly whom?

Guy Somerset rakes up the past.

On September 20, 2013, President Obama flew the black flag above his White House to honor prisoners of war and soldiers still missing in action.

If you were unaware of this, it is not surprising. The proclamation was quietly released to the media without a televised speech. On the day itself the Commander-in-Chief did make a public appearance…where he spoke about the debt ceiling instead.

It brings to mind December 7, or Pearl Harbor Day, which Americans and their president still widely commemorated until the late twentieth century. Contrast this against only the twelfth anniversary of September 11, which went by largely unnoticed, or at least with far less dignity than it deserved.

Read it.

Apparently a lot of people didn’t really say what other people said they said. Or something.

Read it.

Last year I wrote about some very interesting research being done by Paul J. Heald at the University of Illinois, based on software that crawled Amazon for a random selection of books. At the time, his results were only preliminary, but they were nevertheless startling: There were as many books available from the 1910s as there were from the 2000s. The number of books from the 1850s was double the number available from the 1950s. Why? Copyright protections (which cover titles published in 1923 and after) had squashed the market for books from the middle of the 20th century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public.

Mickey Mouse has a lot to answer for.

Read it.

For years, we’ve been arguing against faith-based policy making when it comes to intellectual property. This is the belief that “if some intellectual property is good, more must be better,” when it’s never been established that the fundamental principle is true in the first place.

Which it isn’t, of course. The reason we have patents and copyrights is because they represented an improvement over the old arbitrary monopolies that monarchs would often grant their friends. Increasingly they act as a barrier to innovation and progress, as is the case with every government-granted privilege.

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

Clintus J. Alford, 37, was sentenced to 40  to 60 years in prison Monday for raping two girls, ages 12 and 14. He had previously been convicted in 2004 of false imprisonment for a case involving an 11-year-old girl, and served two years in prison for that offense.

I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now. (Except white people, of course.)

Read it.

Child psychologists are being given a new directive which is that the age range they work with is increasing from 0-18 to 0-25.

Actually, it’s always been 25 in the Real World — just look at where auto insurance rates break. Actuaries aren’t bound by tradition or politics; it’s all about the numbers.

Read it.

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

The Other McCain is on the case.

For the contemporary Left to stigmatize its opponents as Jew-haters is the exact opposite of truth. The Left — what used to be called “the far Left,” or “the extreme Left,” or simply Commies — has always been willing to exploit anti-Semitism when it suits their purposes. And in recent decades, as the Democrat Party has increasingly fallen under control of the Left, you see more and more Democrats aligned with the enemies of Israel, and using the term “neocon” as a sort of dog-whistle code word for “Jews.”

This what I mean when I refer to the “Sirhan Sirhan wing of the Democrat Party.” The increasing dominance of the Left — ideologues who share the dangerous views of extremists like Bill Ayers and Rev. Jeremiah Wright — shares less in common with Bobby Kennedy than they do with his assassin. But try asking anyone under 30 about who assassinated RFK (correct answer: a Palestinian nationalist) or who assassinated John F. Kennedy (correct answer: a pro-Castro communist named Lee Harvey Oswald) and you immediately discover that young people have been taught no facts about history.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, speaks for us all.

We have reached a point of diminishing returns in our public life. Hardly anything actually needs doing. We may in fact be past that point; not only does nothing much need doing, but we’d benefit if much of what has been done were to be undone. What useful work can I do with Windows 8 that I couldn’t do with XP?

Politicians make a living—a very grand living indeed at the higher levels—by saying there are things wrong that need fixing. Are there, though?

Hint: Not as much as they would have you believe.

We are so short of real discontents nowadays, we have to make problems up. There aren’t any hungry children. There aren’t any people dying because they can’t afford an operation. There aren’t any Joad families on the road desperately seeking work and homes. There aren’t any workers being exploited by unscrupulous bosses or tenants being evicted by unscrupulous landlords. Nobody’s being lynched or denied due process or forced by poverty to give up a child for adoption. I wouldn’t say nobody’s poor anymore, but there is no longer what the Victorians called a “deserving poor.” To be in dire straits nowadays, you have to be really, really feckless.

I know a few of those. It is not a pretty sight.

Read it.

South Carolina Republicans go RINO hunting.

On Monday evening, the Fairfield County GOP in South Carolina formally censured Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for his activities in the U.S. Senate. The official GOP body in the state passed its own version of a 29-point resolution shredding Graham’s record in Washington as “in contravention of” principles of the Republican Party as contained in the South Carolina GOP platform.

Maybe the ones in Arizona will take the hint.

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 Many argue inequality is an unavoidable byproduct of growth—a function of investors and entrepreneurs benefiting from successful demand for their products and value creation in financial markets. Inequality rose quickly during economic expansions (1980s and 1990s) and declined during the most recent recession. In other words, the wealthy gain more during good times and lose more during bad times.

…

A 2012 survey from GlobeScan found that 58 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “the rich deserve their wealth.” That’s actually higher than it was in 2008, before the economic crisis, Wall Street bailouts and the Occupy movement.

Damn, there’s that pesky democracy thing getting in the way of the Regressive agenda again.

Read it.

MANY scientists believe that by transforming the earth’s natural landscapes, we are undermining the very life support systems that sustain us. Like bacteria in a petri dish, our exploding numbers are reaching the limits of a finite planet, with dire consequences. Disaster looms as humans exceed the earth’s natural carrying capacity. Clearly, this could not be sustainable.

This is nonsense. Even today, I hear some of my scientific colleagues repeat these and similar claims — often unchallenged. And once, I too believed them. Yet these claims demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of the ecology of human systems. The conditions that sustain humanity are not natural and never have been. Since prehistory, human populations have used technologies and engineered ecosystems to sustain populations well beyond the capabilities of unaltered “natural” ecosystems.

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It was only after years of research into the ecology of agriculture in China that I reached the point where my observations forced me to see beyond my biologists’s blinders. Unable to explain how populations grew for millenniums while increasing the productivity of the same land, I discovered the agricultural economist Ester Boserup, the antidote to the demographer and economist Thomas Malthus and his theory that population growth tends to outrun the food supply. Her theories of population growth as a driver of land productivity explained the data I was gathering in ways that Malthus could never do. While remaining an ecologist, I became a fellow traveler with those who directly study long-term human-environment relationships — archaeologists, geographers, environmental historians and agricultural economists.

Even the Crust can’t keep pretending any more.

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

Social scientists notoriously suffer from “physics envy.” This feeling is quite reasonable: physicists can predict many phenomenon (and they built the atomic bomb, which probably helps even more in garnering respect).

A stranger phenomenon, however, is “IQ envy,” since the study of intelligence is routinely denounced as a pseudoscience. And, yet, if you keep your eyes open, you’ll notice that intelligence is one of the most glamorous attributes in the world of marketing.