Read it.

Today, the bobo class views international travel as an essential activity in order to achieve self-actualization. Thus I pick international travel as an example of the hedonic treadmill, in which something unavailable in the past suddenly becomes essential when it becomes more widely available. But not too widely available because it has to be expensive enough to keep the riff-raff away. There’s no self-actualization to doing something that every blue collar worker can do.

John Hinderaker points out that the Magic Negro still doesn’t have any clothes.

No one, not even a Democrat, would want to live in a country characterized by income equality. Obama, recognizing this, was quick to say that his concern is equal opportunity, not equality of outcomes. Yet his prescriptions were the same warmed-over liberal wish-list that we have heard in every State of the Union speech. Presumably for the last five years Obama has not been trying to stunt the economic development of the middle class or frustrate economic opportunity, yet that has been, empirically, the effect of his policies. Nowhere in Obama’s speech was there any acknowledgement that his policies have failed, or any willingness to re-think what policies will lead to economic growth and greater opportunity.

This is a large subject, and one to which we will return in the months and years to come. Here are a couple of very basic thoughts. First, If the goal is to enhance the wages of lower-skilled American workers, about whom Obama purports to care so much, there is an easy way to make progress toward that goal: stop importing tens of millions of low-skilled immigrants to compete with them and drive wages down. This is blindingly obvious, and yet Obama refuses to admit that the law of supply and demand applies to labor.

Read it.

Not that there’s any such thing as ‘race’, oh no, or that it has anything to do with intelligence, perish the thought.

Read it.

The complexity and incoherence of our government often make it difficult for us to understand just what that government is doing, and among the practices it most frequently hides from view is the growing tendency of public policy to redistribute resources upward to the wealthy and the organized at the expense of the poorer and less organized. As we increasingly notice the consequences of that regressive redistribution, we will inevitably also come to pay greater attention to the daunting and self-defeating complexity of public policy across multiple, seemingly unrelated areas of American life, and so will need to start thinking differently about government.

Read it.

If you’ve followed science news over the past decade then you’ve probably heard about epigenetics, a field that’s caught fire in the minds of scientists and the public, and understandably so. Epigenetic studies have shown that changes in an organism’s external environment — its life experiences and even its choices, if you want to get hyperbolic — can influence the expression of its otherwise inflexible DNA code. Epigenetics, in other words, is enticing because it offers a resolution to the tedious, perennial debates of nurture versus nature.

But some scientists dispute the notion that epigenetic changes have much influence on behavior (see this Nature feature for a great overview of the debate). Even more controversial is the idea that epigenetic changes can be passed down from one generation to the next, effectively giving parents a way to prime their children for a specific environment. The key question isn’t whether this so-called ‘transgenerational epigenetic inheritance’ happens — it does — but rather how it happens (and how frequently, and in what contexts and species).

Read it.

I never learnt how to take notes properly. In retrospect, note-taking should be part of a grade-school curriculum, much like typing. But I didn’t attend any such course so I don’t know how to manage a notebook well.

Read it.

Not least in sampling their own toxic wares….

“If you take into account the risk of being shot by rival gangs, ending up in jail or being beaten up by your own hierarchy, you might wonder why anybody would work for such a low wage and at such dreadful working conditions instead of seeking employment at McDonald’s. Yet, gangs have no real difficulty in recruiting new members. The reason for this is that the prospect of future wealth, rather than current income and working conditions, is the main driver for people to stay in the business: low-level drug sellers forgo current income for (uncertain) future wealth. Rank-and-file members are ready to face this risk to try to make it to the top, where life is good and money is flowing,” wrote Alexandre Afonso, a lecturer in political economy at King’s College London.

He cites the work of the economist Steven Levitt and the sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh in understanding drug gangs. “With a constant supply of new low-level drug sellers entering the market and ready to be exploited, drug lords can become increasingly rich without needing to distribute their wealth towards the bottom,” he writes. “You have an expanding mass of rank-and-file ‘outsiders’ ready to forgo income for future wealth, and a small core of ‘insiders’ securing incomes largely at the expense of the mass. We can call it a winner-take-all market.”

Then he turns to academe and finds very similar conditions.

Steve Sailer takes a look.

 As I mentioned in the post below, the Atlantic has a long article about Silicon Valley start-ups attempting to use Big Data for job hiring testing. In the post-WWII era, the article says, American corporations did lots of testing of job applicants, but that fell out of fashion because science. Or something. So for the last generation, firms mostly rely upon resumes and interviews and try to avoid putting much in writing where it can get subpeonaed.

But now in 2013, instead of giant corporations like P&G doing the testing themselves, it’s going to be done for the giant corporations by cool little start-ups with cute names like Knack, Evolv, and Gild. So the New Testing won’t be like the bad Old Testing of the 1950s when the racist, sexist white male power structure was building a giant middle class with secure jobs and pensions. Or something.

Read it.

This strikes me as an excellent summary of my thoughts on the subject, to the extent that I have any.

Read it.

The president said something recently that I believe was interesting and underreported.? At a Democratic campaign fundraiser, the president said he was “not a particularly ideological person.” Assuming he meant it, that was a remarkable thing to say, given that Republicans think of him as a classic liberal ideologue. How did so many get the wrong idea? The president doesn’t see an ideological bent in his actions; he sees himself doing what needs to be done without any ideological motivation. Interesting. ?

During his brief time in the Senate, Obama was rated as the most liberal senator in the entire body in 2007. In the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama famously told Joe the plumber that he was going to raise taxes because “when you spread the wealth, it’s good for everybody.” What could be more ideological than wealth redistribution? What is Obamacare if not an ideological drive for government control and wealth redistribution?  And let’s not forget that the president pursues pointless – some say punitive – environmental policies meant to shape Americans’ lifestyles in furtherance of the ideological embrace of liberal global warming orthodoxy.

Freeberg has some thoughts.

Wonder what it’s like working for this type? Anyone subordinate would have to wonder what his or her place is in the organization, with the guy at the top possessing a complete monopoly on that coveted skill of quality decision-making. I wonder what goes on in your head if you’re about to bring game-changing information to the boss. What if the boss isn’t expecting it? What if He’s wallowing around in the end-zone of His divine decision-making process, just taking His leisurely weeks & months to close in on the answer because it’s, like, really hard and stuff, and this new nugget of information you’re offering might change the result? You’d be obliged to bring it, toot-sweet, of course. But what if it doesn’t change the game after all? Why, then you’d come off looking like an advocate for the “wrong” outcome. Oh well, I’m sure Barack Obama is plenty mature enough to recognize the difference between an advocate for the wrong outcome, and an earnest underling merely doing due diligence, bringing the boss the information needed. Sure He is! Better keep that resume brushed up…

Read it.

Booker, too, funneled a sizable portion of Zuckerberg’s donation to charter schools–on top of supporting limits on teacher tenure.

As mayor, instead of outlawing stop-and-frisk, the racially charged practice of searching suspects on the street without a warrant, his approach was radical transparency. Every stop must now meticulously record the race, location, and reason; that data is then opened to the public for scrutiny.

His novel approach won accolades from Newark’s American Civil Liberties Union for balancing public safety and individual rights. But, a traditional liberal would likely have just outright banned the practice.

Very interesting…. If Booker et al. can divert the Democratic Party into results-based policies rather than the Same Old Socialism, America might be in for an interesting time.

Read it.

Well, duh.

The Other McCain waxes philosophic.

The beginning of economics is the division of labor. If we were all hunter-gatherers, there would little for us to exchange in the marketplace. Hunter-gatherer societies are universally poor. Agriculture and the domestication of livestock were the first steps beyond subsistence and those steps were attended by the development of sex roles. It is only with the affluence and convenience provided by advanced industrial market economies that any idea of “sexual equality” becomes feasible.

Our pioneer ancestors never could have conquered the frontier if the men had stayed home cooking, while sending the womenfolk out to hunt, plow and fight off savage Indians.

A great problem of young people today is that they have been so indoctrinated in the gospel of Equality (capitalized, to signify its status as a quasi-religious belief) that they lack even the vocabulary to discuss ideas like sex roles and complementarity.

…

Egalitarianism itself is creepy. No sane person desires to live in that androgynous asexual utopia where men and women are the same, but this is the future to which feminism proposes to lead us.

Mencius Moldbug does what he does best.

 No, obviously no one should ever respond to a journalist.  (Or a Stasi-Mann.)  It’s a mistake to think these people have opinions.  They have careers.  They’re paid by the click and not paid well.  If you or I had Mr. Jones’ job,  we’d write what he writes or lose it – maybe in slightly better English.  It’s a mistake to anthropomorphize Mr. Jones.  He’s a piece in a machine.

The basic nature of constitutional government is the formalization of power, and democracy is the formalization of mob violence.  Why is America’s constitution democratic?  Because the Puritan mob drove Charles I (who, like Louis XVI and Nicholas II, was basically just a nice guy) out of London in 1642.  In a present world where mob violence is a thing of the past, we wouldn’t expect to see genuine demotic opinion actually matter in the political process – much as we wouldn’t expect to see feudal knights matter in a world that’s invented the musket.  For instance, the closest thing America has to a non-astroturf political force is the Tea Party.  Which doesn’t even litter.  Nor does it matter, and this is not a coincidence.

…
(In Rome, I’d be instantly exposed as a ridiculous poser for talking about Ovid when I never even learned Latin. Whereas in Pontus, just the fact that I’ve heard of Ovid makes me sound like a fag.)

John Hinderaker blows the whistle.

It happens every Thanksgiving: leftists crawl out from under their rocks and tell us that the holiday is a shameful celebration of “genocide.” These days, their preferred medium is Twitter.

…

Actually, some Indian tribes were victims of genocide. The Iroquois wiped out the Huron, the Erie and others. The Sioux nearly succeeded in their attempt to kill all the Pawnee. The Sioux themselves likely would have been exterminated by the Ojibwa if they had not fled from the forests to the Great Plains. So it is not unreasonable to link the word “genocide” with American Indian tribes.

Paul Rahe lays out some inconvenient history.

William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony, reports that, at that time, he and his advisers considered “how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.” And “after much debate of things,” he then adds, they chose to abandon communal property, deciding that “they should set corn every man for his own particular” and assign “to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end.”

The results, he tells us, were gratifying in the extreme, “for it made all hands very industrious” and “much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” Even “the women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”

Moreover, he observes, “the experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years . . . amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times . . . that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing.” In practice, America’s first socialist experiment “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.”

I give thanks for the Jews, the Chosen People of God.

What advantage then hath the Jew? or what profit is there of circumcision?

Much in every way: chiefly, because that unto them were committed the oracles of God.

For what if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect?

Romans 3:1-3

Read it.

A meta-study carried out by the American Psychological Association has claimed that playing computer games has many positive effects on children and, in some cases, the more violent the game the more beneficial the effect.

The research, published in the latest issue of American Psychologist, found that modern video games are much more socially orientated, thanks to the growth on massive online gaming environments, and that certain types of game can help kids learn problem-solving skills and creativity.

“Important research has already been conducted for decades on the negative effects of gaming, including addiction, depression and aggression, and we are certainly not suggesting that this should be ignored,” said lead author Isabela Granic PhD, of Radboud University Nijmegen in The Netherlands. “However, to understand the impact of video games on children’s and adolescents’ development, a more balanced perspective is needed.”

Good luck with that ‘balanced perspective’ thing, Doc.

Read it.

It’s tempting to call David Perlmutter’s dietary advice radical. The neurologist and president of the Perlmutter Health Center in Naples, Fla., believes all carbs, including highly touted whole grains, are devastating to our brains. He claims we must make major changes in our eating habits as a society to ward off terrifying increases in Alzheimer’s disease and dementia rates.

Actually, it’s tempting to call it just the latest fad food scare.

And yet Perlmutter argues that his recommendations are not radical at all. In fact, he says, his suggested menu adheres more closely to the way mankind has eaten for most of human history.

And, of course, we’re still living the way we have lived for most of human history. Makes perfect sense, it does.

What’s deviant, he insists, is our modern diet. Dementia, chronic headaches, depression, epilepsy and other contemporary scourges are not in our genes, he claims. “It’s in the food you eat,” Perlmutter writes in his bestselling new book, Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar – Your Brain’s Silent Killers. “The origin of brain disease is in many cases predominantly dietary.”

And, of course, he’s got a book to flog, with a title ripped from the headlines in [insert supermarket tabloid name of your choice]. It’s what the fad food scare people do.

Read it.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked….

Praet had to state the obvious because until this year economists, in particular those who make forecasts, put their faith in models that ignored those differences. Those that the ECB and the International Monetary Fund used to predict the future relied on a “representative agent,” a single imaginary person who stands in for everyone.

Your international tax dollars at work. (Think you, the taxpayer, aren’t paying for these international organizations? Well, where do you think they get their money? It ain’t George Soros.)

The problem was that these models failed to predict the consequences of the austerity programs that several European countries adopted in 2010. It turned out that actual people didn’t behave like the imaginary proxy. Economists are learning that the poor and the wealthy respond differently to austerity and stimulus. This could present challenges to politicians. If people behave differently, then policy might have to treat them differently.

Oh, since when have politicians ever listened to reality, rather than their own tendentious fantasies?

Read it.

Perhaps they’ve finally cottoned to the fact that a Communist country isn’t a really healthy environment for rich people. Just possibly.

I ask that you keep in your thoughts and in your prayers my late wife, Ruth Woodring, who was taken from us in body but not in spirit on this date fifteen years ago.

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord,
And may perpetual light shine upon her;
May her soul,
And all the souls of the faithful departed,
Through the mercy of God,
Rest in peace.

Steve Pressfield is optimistic.

When I was a kid my dad’s dream for me was that I would become an engineer and work all my life for Lockheed or G.E.  In other words be an employee. That was how the middle-class dream expressed itself in the days of American pre-eminence post-WWII, before the European countries had rebuilt their shattered economies, before the rise of Asia, India, South America, before outsourcing, before globalization, before the satellite and the microchip and the web.

Now all we hear is that the American Dream is dead. As I write this, I’m looking at an article in the L.A. Times (probably the 500th I’ve read) titled “Poof Goes the Middle Class.”

Well, that sure looks like the trend.

Maybe I’m delusional, but I think a sea-change is taking place right here, right now. I mean a good change. It’s below the radar. The government has nothing to do with it. The government doesn’t even know it’s going on.

What is this change? It’s happening on ten thousand blogs like this one and at a hundred thousand informal academies and webinars and one-on-one teaching exchanges or one-to-a-hundred mentoring events. Individuals on their own, driven by necessity and by their own dissatisfaction with their lives and their futures, are teaching themselves a new way of working in the world.

The change is reflected, even championed, by words like Seth Godin’s, “Don’t wait to be picked, pick yourself.”

People are becoming entrepreneurs. The mind-set of the employee is vanishing like the factory where it was born. It has to. We’ll all die if we wait for some force outside ourselves—business or government—to bring us jobs or teach us who we are or how we ought to live.

Root, hog, or die.

Classic Paul Graham essay from seven years ago.

People who worry about the increasing gap between rich and poor generally look back on the mid twentieth century as a golden age. In those days we had a large number of high-paying union manufacturing jobs that boosted the median income. I wouldn’t quite call the high-paying union job a myth, but I think people who dwell on it are reading too much into it.

The Antiplanner calls bullshit.

The United States is now producing more oil than it imports for the first time since 1995. Not only is the U.S. producing more oil than Saudi Arabia today, it is poised to become the world’s largest oil producer (ahead of Russia, which is currently number one) by 2015.

Despite these dramatic changes, there are some who still want to harp on peak oil. “A new multi-disciplinary study led by the University of Maryland calls for immediate action by government, private and commercial sectors to reduce vulnerability to the imminent threat of global peak oil,” says one news article.

In fact, the study in question doesn’t predict that peak oil will take place soon, only that if it does, it will have serious consequences. But even that conclusion is wrong, as the “multidisciplinary team” would have known if one of the disciplines had been economics.

Read it.

Neoreactionaries believe that while technology and capitalism have advanced humanity over the past couple centuries, democracy has actually done more harm than good. They propose a return to old-fashioned gender roles, social order and monarchy.

Oh, noes! We’re a movement!

Enough has been written on neoreaction already to fill at least a couple of books, so if you prefer to go straight to the source, just pop a Modafinil and skip to the “Neoreaction Reading List” at the end of this post. For everyone else, I’ll do my best to summarize neoreactionary thought and why it might matter.

Set phasers for ‘strawman’….

“Reactionary” originally meant someone who opposed the French Revolution, and today the term generally refers to those who would like to return to some pre-existing state of affairs.

In other words, most Eco-nazis, public transit aficionados, urban density proponents, paleo-diet mavens, back-to-the-land hippies, ‘family farm’ activists, opponents of ‘sprawl’, AlGore, and illegal immigrants who would like to stay where they are but have it be Mexico again. Lot of Democrats there. But I don’t thing those are who he has in mind….

Neoreactionaries believe “The Cathedral,” is a meta-institution that consists largely of Harvard and other Ivy League schools, The New York Times and various civil servants. Anissimov calls it a “self-organizing consensus.” Sometimes the term is used synonymously with political correctness. The fundamental idea is that the Cathedral regulates our discussions enforces a set of norms as to what sorts of ideas are acceptable and how we view history — it controls the Overton window, in other words.

What I call the Crust, which I think is a more useful term since it more readily captures its relationship to the bulk of the population.

Read it.

VCs and entrepreneurs tend to be well educated. Well educated people think about education as an investment. You put as many of your resources in to an investment as you can. It may take 20 years to pay off, but if the return-on-investment is high (which it is for education) then you invest. This group of people — if you’re reading this, you fall into this group — generally understand that education is an investment, and as a result are price insensitive and will optimize for quality (a higher return on investment). For this group of people, quality is the primary driver of a purchasing decision, not cost.

The average, middle class person thinks about education as an expenditure, not an investment. It’s something they have to do because it’s mandated and the lack of the highest quality education hasn’t negatively impacted their lives in a meaningful way. Step back for a second before you judge. Imagine it’s 2005, and you live in a small town in the middle of Ohio (where I grew up) and you don’t get a college degree. If you get a factory job and make $25k/year and your wife gets a factory job and makes $25k/year, you’re making $50k/year. But houses only cost $90,000 and food is affordable and you can get a loan for a car for $300/month. So you’re not doing terribly and the default state for your children is the same life. You can afford a house, food, have a car, and have weekends off.

So, what has the lack of an education done to the typical American’s life? It’s removed job security, screwed your retirement, and maybe set you up to go bankrupt if you get sick. There are no immediate consequences, there are no immediate consequences for your children, but there is an immediate cost. So the average person thinks of education as an expenditure. If you get sick when you’re 70, you’re screwed. Or if you don’t save in your 401k, you may have to work till you’re dead. Or maybe your children won’t be as competitive in a global workforce 30 years. Don’t believe me? Only 15% of kids taking the SAT pay for an out of school test prep course like Kaplan. Over 50% of Americans don’t have beyond a high school degree.

Read it.

The seemingly inexorable march towards economic socialism and political statism has been accomplished through legislative and judicial ratchets which, once established, were all but impossible to reverse in part because the filibuster helped lock in the agenda and those supporting the agenda.

Because of the ratchet, the nation moved only in one direction: Towards redistribution of wealth, and bigger government.

Because of the ratchet, there was little or no hope of fundamental reversals.

Not anymore.

When Democrats — the embodiment of redistribution and statism — exercised the Nuclear Option yesterday, they blew up the ratchet. The filibuster is dead for all purposes, even if superficially only as to non-Supreme Court nomninees. No one will respect the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees or important legislation — the Senate can’t be half pregnant.

Gavin McInnes reflects.

I told him of a recent revelation where I realized it’s not a choice between “Do they hate us because they’re inbred?” or “Do they hate us because of Israel?”

It’s both. They hate us because they’re inbred and also because of Israel.

He disagreed and said it was neither. “It’s because the book says to kill us and they think God wrote the book.” We then talked about seemingly random attacks on Vancouver and Glasgow and how little our foreign policy in Israel has to do with terrorism in the Philippines right now. The conversation ended with both of us agreeing that nobody kills more Muslims than Muslims do.

Read it.

Thirty years ago the Wall Street Journal published Edward Jay Epstein’s essay “Who was Lee Harvey Oswald” on the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. Ed has sent along his draft of his essay with the question: “How much has changed?” If anything has changed, it is the ever increasing quantity of ignorance and stupidity abroad in the land on the subject of the Kennedy assassination. Here is Epstein’s 1983 short course on Lee Harvey Oswald.

Taki waxes wroth.

Black rappers in America use the N-word ad nauseam, and rap savages hate, boast sexual degradation of women, and call gay people faggots. Jay-Z, a freak billionaire, boasts about the drugs he used to sell, uses the N-word nonstop, and ends up on the cover of Vanity Fair! The networks in America and Britain show mostly mass slaughter as supplied by assault rifles and are replete with fires, explosions, guns, and mayhem. People regularly walk into schools or malls with high-powered rifles and shoot children and innocent bystanders. Black professional basketball and football players in the states are regularly arrested for violence against women and even murder, but newspapers don’t even bother writing about those arrested under the influence with guns in their cars.

Yet when Alec Baldwin uses the C-word, he gets canned and the tabloids go wild. American colleges are the only ones in the world who pay for student athletes not to attend classes but to graduate literally illiterate. What they’re really doing is pumping out criminals because less than one percent of college athletes make the pros. Once out in the real world with absolutely no credentials or education whatsoever except a useless degree, they more often than not go into crime. But Alec Baldwin is the bad guy.

Read it.

All this artful dodging about the murder of President Kennedy began, of course, nearly 50 years ago with the Warren Commission, the blue-ribbon panel that was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson — not to get at the truth, but to “lay the dust” (in the words of one commissioner) on all the disturbing rumors that were swirling around the bloody events in Dallas. Two new books take us inside the Warren Commission sausage factory, and show in often shocking detail how the august panel got it so terribly wrong.  Soon after the Warren Report was released in September 1964, polls began showing that the American people rejected its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of the president – and nearly a half century later, the report remains a notorious symbol of official coverup. [This does not prevent Abramson from blithely declaring that “the historical consensus seems to have settled on” the lone gunman theory – there is no such consensus, only a deeply fractious ongoing debate.]

Morgan Housel is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Highlights:

“Earnings missed estimates.”

No. Earnings don’t miss estimates; estimates miss earnings. No one ever says “the weather missed estimates.” They blame the weatherman for getting it wrong. Finance is the only industry where people blame their poor forecasting skills on reality.

…

“He predicted the market crash in 2008.”

He also predicted a crash in 2006, 2004, 2003, 2001, 1998, 1997, 1995, 1992, 1989, 1984, 1971…

…

“The [thing not going perfectly] crisis.”

Boy who cried wolf, meet analyst who called crisis.

Journalists just love to trot that one out.

Read it.

One thing I am learning about getting old is that while I can still think clearly, and still write some good sentences, everything not only takes longer, but often with all the good intentions in the world I just don’t have the energy to do what I have set out to do.

True that.

Read it.

It’s a match made in heaven….

Tom Smith has the right of it.

The 50th of JFK’s assassination is coming up, so we have to expect coverage like this.  But it’s still worth remembering that JFK was a bad President and a bad man.  It pains me to say that.  My mother worshipped him and how could she not?  He was an Irish Catholic and a handsome one at that.  When he was elected, St. John’s and St. Joseph’s in Boise, Idaho, and thousands of other parishes and schools around the country became less ghettos and more part of the mainstream.  He didn’t just get Catholics accepted; he showed they could be glamorous.  But that was all on the surface.  Underneath the surface, and not way underneath either, but just a little, there was a cess pool of personal immorality, addiction and abuse.  I mean, honestly, the whole family was corrupt from Joseph, to Jack, to Teddy, to their children.

If we’re going to remember, we need to remember the truth.

Bryan Caplan, a Real Economist, blows the whistle.

 In 11th grade, I took Advanced Placement U.S. History.  I enjoyed it at the time.  Once I started studying economics, however, I was outraged by the economic illiteracy of my history textbooks.  Mainstream historians barely mentioned the unprecedented miracle of sustained economic growth.  Instead, they focused on distribution: How poor workers used labor unions and regulation to pry their fair share from the heartless capitalists who employed them.  These historians never mentioned the negative side effects of unionization and labor market regulation – or even the view that such negative side effects existed.  My historical miseducation eventually inspired my lecture on “Why the Standard History of Labor Is Wrong.”

Jerry Pournelle is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

I continue to raise the more fundamental question, to what are people entitled by reason of citizenship, or, lately, sheer residence legal or not? Your father lay with your mother, and you now claim a portion of my goods and earnings to pay for your health care although you and I have no relationship other than you live a few miles away in a part of the city I seldom visit. Why should I pay that?

Plus he includes an interesting colloquy with a Real Doctor about health care in the U.S. generally. Recommended.

Read it.

Now count up the number of Crustian politicians who are old.

Now count up the number of Crustian politicians who are obese.

Now figure out why a Voice of the Crust would run this story.

Jim Goad is marvelously dyspeptic today.

I don’t own a TV—yes, I’m one of those people—so most of what I’ll say about today’s fare will be based on inferences drawn from online synopses. I couldn’t even bring myself to watch sample clips on YouTube—I’m usually willing to bleed for you, dear readers, but there are some things I simply won’t do. Eating live insects is one. Watching modern TV or movies is another. We all have our limits.

…

We have replaced the corny with the trashy and called it progress.

…

At least symbolically, JFK’s assassination marked the beginning of what would commonly come to be understood as “the sixties.” What followed is known in many quarters as “progress,” although to me it seems like an ongoing process of deconstruction and outright destruction. I doubt that today’s culture-busters have any idea what they intend to build, but they’re finely attuned to what they’re trying to destroy. And that’s probably the main reason I don’t have a TV anymore.

James C. Scott (‘He teaches anthropology and political science at Yale’) reviews Jared Diamond’s new book, The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

Like many Voices of the Crust, he is a ‘progressive’ and so has no use for tradition.

It’s a good bet a culture is in trouble when its best-known intellectuals start ransacking the cultural inventory of its ancestors and its contemporary inferiors for tips on how to live.

I’d hardly call Jared Diamond a ‘best known intellectual’, nor would I accept the suggestion that ‘ransackign the cultural inventory of its ancestors’ is quite so widespread as Scott seems to think. (Of course, with ‘progressives’ any trace or remnant of anti-progressive thinking is Cause for Alarm and calls for beating to quarters to repel boarders.)

Read it.

A slew of new studies were released last week, many of them only confirming what was already common wisdom. Has there ever been a study to determine whether such studies benefit anyone except those paid to perform the study?

Online dating website “Are You Interested” sifted through 2.4 million interactions on their site to conclude that men like Asian women the most and black women the least, as if all seven billion people in the world didn’t already know that. “I think it’s very disheartening for African-American women, said Demetria Lucas of The Root. “It’s always the same result and it’s always about how no one’s reaching out for black women.”

Well, that explains a lot about Michelle Obama. And don’t get me started on Oprah….

Read it.

 Understand the single most defining characteristic of a liberal or a leftist is that they are lazy.  They do not want to work.  They do not want to strive.  They want an easy and paid-for life as much as possible.

However, the second most defining characteristic of a liberal or a leftist is their ego.  They have to be applauded.  They have to worshipped.  They have to be doing something that provides them and their ego validation.

Naturally, these two traits are mutually exclusive.  If you aren’t going to work hard for a living, if you’re not going to strive towards something, if you’re incapable of rigor, then you will achieve nothing noteworthy and your ego will go unvalidated.  However, leftists’ egos are so huge and so hungry they inevitably have to “do something,” and so, just like my brother did in 1986, they go for easy, but pointless, targets.

Going green.
Driving a Prius.
Shopping at Whole Foods
etc.

All of these things are nothing more than substitutes for hard work, production, self-supportation, and genuine human value.  They are nothing more than rituals, no different than rituals performed at a church.  They are pointless, they achieve nothing, but they make their religious participants falsely “feel good about themselves.”

However, where the “destruction” in The Destruction Principle comes in is where you have your environmentalists or your most vain and vile leftists.  For example, if some dolt wants to buy a Prius and smugly put their MPG on a vanity plate, they aren’t really hurting anybody.  They are destroying nothing.  But if you have protestors who are going to shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, then you are costing people their lives, jobs, not to mention economic growth for the country.  You are causing destruction.

And that’s The Destruction Principle.

Steve Sailer draws an analogy.

 The New York Times Magazine has a long adventure story by reporter Luke Mogelson about his infiltrating a group of mostly Iranian economic illegal immigrants in Indonesia who are trying to sneak into Australia by boat.

Of course, in the article the Iranians are called “refugees” and “asylum-seekers” as if they were Niels Bohr in his sailboat slipping away from the Nazi occupation of Denmark. If you read the article closely, however, the Iranians mostly seem to be seeking refuge from the general cruddiness of life in a country chock full of Iranians:

The Other McCain has a way with words.

Professional athletes can spawn with multiple baby mamas, and feminists have no word of complaint. Gay men hiring surrogates to breed children for them? Lesbians raising adopted child sex-change experiments? No problem, say the Womyn’s Studies majors. In response to the general plague of divorce and fatherlessness, the poverty-inducing epidemic of illegitimacy that replicates underclass misery, the collective reaction of the Official Women’s Movement is . . . crickets chirping.

However, let a normal couple of married Christians give birth to more than the standard 1.7 children, and they become the targets of seething rage and resentment from the feminist Left. You saw this attitude exemplified in the hysterical reaction to Sarah Palin who, by giving birth to five children, was made the object of fathomless hatred. “For many liberal women, Palin threatens their sexual identity, which is bound up with their politics,” as James Taranto observed.

Read it.

I put quotation marks around “social insurance” because it isn’t insurance, for the reasons discussed in this post. What is it? Just another set of programs designed to redistribute income, mainly from those who’ve earned it to those who haven’t. “Social insurance” is a trickle-down transfer-payment scheme, wherein some of the money reaches its intended targets after passing through the sticky fingers of the overpaid bureaucrats who live in and around Washington, D.C.

Read it. And watch the video.

Well, there’s the smell, for one thing….

Gavin MacInnes weathers the storm.

I recently made the mistake of doing a humorous piece about “Asian privilege,” which was nothing more than an article about white privilege with the word “white” replaced with “Asian.” Virtually no slopes got the joke and my phone almost overheated with angry emails, re-Tweets, Facebook posts, and texts. (How did those tenacious riceballs get my number?) I even won an award for “Hipster Racism.” I didn’t apologize and eventually they went away. That’s the way it works with the Perpetually Offended. They feed off apologies. They’re vindicated by them. The more apologies you give them, the more they demand. And Asians are particularly demanding.

Read it.

After more than two decades of being a dedicated Windows power user, someone who over that time has installed and supported countless systems running versions of Windows spanning from 3.0 to 8.1, I’ve now all but given up on the platform.

It might sound odd, but writing these words actually makes me sad. I devoted my 10,000 hours to mastering the platform, plus thousands more, and got the point where there wasn’t a file, registry entry, or command line trick that I wasn’t familiar with.

I knew how to make Windows work.

But now, other than for test systems and virtual machines, I carry out my day-to-day work on a variety of OS X, iOS and Android systems. I barely giving my Windows PC systems a second glance. My primary work system is a MacBook Pro, and in the ten months I’ve had it it’s flawlessly done everything I’ve asked of it, from run Microsoft Word to render 4K video. I’ve lost count of the number of notebooks I’ve owned over the years, but this MacBook Pro is, by far, the most reliable system I’ve owned, and I put part of that down to the fact that it doesn’t run Windows.

Jerry Pournelle lays out some inconvenient truth.

I used to build models for a living. The notion of systems analysis was to find systems you could model using mathematics that let you solve the model; you then tested the model against the real world.  The various climate models do none of this. They don’t even attempt to model in known factors, and they can’t even predict the real world – that is they can’t take the initial conditions of 1950 and run to 2010 and get anything similar to what actually happened.  And as the years go on it becomes more and more clear that there is no more warming trend now than there was in the days when the great fear was a cooling trend toward an ice age.  The fact remains that we don’t know what generates long term climate trends, and we have absolutely no understanding of solar radiation phenomena.