Read it.

People who are troubled by markets tend to treat prices as the problem in a market. Whether the price of labor or agricultural commodities is too low, or the price of housing or healthcare or payday loans is too high, prices are the problem in need of a solution. Prices, however, are not the problem. If there is a problem, prices are literally a symbol of it.

If low wages indicate that a person has a bad life, low wages do not indicate it because the dollar number per hour is low. What indicates that a life is bad is that low wages are not good enough to have a good life. The trouble with low wages is not that they are too low to have a good life. It is that a life of low wages is bad. “Not good enough to have a good life” is not equivalent to “too low to have a good life.” “Too low” treats the wage as a sign that directly points to something known. “Good enough” treats the wage as a symbol that makes multiple indirect connections to the unknown. Prices are more like symbolic words than simple indicating traffic lights.

Read it.

I grinned watching the military operation executed against Greenpeace. I enjoyed the astonishment on the activists’ faces when, not so much disarmed as not even carrying arms, Greenpeace’s “Arctic 30” seemed to lose moral authority as fast as they lost their ship. Pictures of a pathetic English activist, elbows slouching on jail-cell bars, reveal they don’t have much backbone in the end. I mean, if you’re an eco-warrior, stand like a warrior. Don’t hug the bars like you’re waiting for mummy, whining moral platitudes at Russian guards who don’t speak English. Why should they? You (Greenpeace) are too lazy to learn Russian. If you want to effect change, why not learn the dialect first? Come on…man up, Greenpeace! Suck on the rough justice if you want to push your cause. Where’s the attitude now?

Greenpeace has been brash and impolite, if not culturally offensive, in its campaigns over the years. We in the West permit Greenpeace their transgressions because we’re furtive voyeurs of these merry pranksters who made a full-time job out of growing beards and goofing around in dirigibles. Read on, Greenpeace, and maybe take some notes from a real warrior such as Putin.

The Google Doodle today honors veterans.

Since when did Google start giving a shit about veterans? There must be a mole….

Read it.

Rather, the reason why Last Action Hero didn’t become a massive blockbuster rests in the film itself. It’s a mutant that can’t be categorized, both a straightforward action movie and a Joe Dante-style gag-a-minute fantasy. It doesn’t make much sense. It’s the only truly funny comedy of Schwarzenegger’s career, and it’s overtly about Schwarzenegger, and yet none of its best jokes are related to Schwarzenegger’s screen persona. At times, it’s brilliant and demented.

The point about Last Action Hero is that Schwarzenegger is not the star. It makes no more sense to call Last Action Hero a Schwarzenegger movie than it does to call any of the Star Wars flicks Harrison Ford movies.

Read it.

Words fail me.

Read it.

1. There will be more canceled health insurance plans.  Every day, more and more Americans are receiving cancellation notices for plans they liked and wanted to keep.  And every day, they continue to hear administration officials and their Democratic allies insist that the president didn’t lie about people being able to keep their health insurance plans.  Dissatisfaction with Obamacare grows exponentially as people witness family members and colleagues being victimized by the “big lie.”
2. If you like your doctor, you can’t keep your doctor.  Soon the story will break through that a lot of Americans will be losing access to their doctors and will be forced to pick one approved by Obamacare.  Health-care plans are instituting very restrictive provider networks to try to keep down costs in the face of astronomically rising premiums.  In New Hampshire, for instance, only 16 of the state’s 26 hospitals will be in the network of exchange plans approved by Obamacare.  The reaction of voters losing, in some cases, the person who has been their doctor for years could be worse for Democrats than what we are currently seeing in the involuntary loss of insurance plans.
3. Sticker shock.  Prices for health-care plans are not coming down for many voters.  Once the Web site starts working and Americans can “shop around” for their new health insurance plans as the president instructed they should do, they are going to experience sticker shock.  Premiums and deductibles will be going up for millions of hardworking Americans who can’t afford these increases – especially for coverage they don’t need or want.
4. Obamacare ads.  Throughout the 2014 campaign, Republicans will use footage of Democrats repeating the “big lie” in ads targeting Democrats.  The search is on for news clips, town-hall meeting videos, and other instances where Democrats have committed on the record and on video that “if you like your health plan, you can keep it.”
5. Navigators.  If you liked ACORN, you’ll love the Obamacare Navigators.  I’m sure there will be good, sincere people who really want to help people navigate the Obamacare maze.  But there will be enough bad apples employed as navigators to supply plenty of scary anecdotes and weird encounters that will result in a steady ridicule of the overall program.  And there will no doubt be activists with hidden cameras ready to capture a few creepy and outrageous encounters that will grab everybody’s attention and make voters even more skeptical of Obamacare.
6. Security breaches.  Security breaches will increase.  There have already been so many Web site problems and so many unanswered questions about Web site security that it’s surprising administration officials are still claiming they are “confident” in the system.  A big security breach is inevitable.  It’s just a matter of time.  Even just the few horror stories we have heard so far prove what we all know: The Web site will not protect everybody’s sensitive, personal health care and financial data.  Period.  You know it and I know it.

Don Boudreaux explains the Aggregation Fallacy.

Collectives are not sentient human beings.  It is folly to suppose that just because each member of the collective has some voice in determining the actions of the collective, that the collective thereby is some sort of scaled-up human-like decision-maker.  It is not, and it cannot be.

Read it.

The roots of this culture go back to the Frankfurt School but really got momentum from college professors indoctrinated by manifestos such as Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.

By “them” I never mean educated alpha males prepared to give rational arguments. I mean the churlish left’s frustrated beta males, bored girls, and bullied gays hell-bent on revenge.

Authors such as Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg take the high road and rarely even read such rants. “I’d never give them the pleasure,” Goldberg once told me. Breitbart used to call it “punching down.” However, when you diligently assemble a controversial argument with “some degree of vigor,” ignoring a critique takes some willpower. One thing you’ll notice about these ridiculous rants is that they all look the same.

Not only entertaining, but true.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

One reason for colleges’ quirky essay questions is to discriminate against Asians, who are viewed as often not contributing much to classroom discussion beyond “Will this be on the test?”

A college admission issue I’ve never seen investigated quantitatively is quantity and quality of class participation. How important is class participation and how do you predict it?

Read it.

Unaddressed is the question of why anybody would want to make a city move.

However, given the failure of many static cities, perhaps this type of city makes sense as a solution to some of our social and economic development problems.

Uh, like, how? I don’t see that Detroit would be anything other than a disaster if you could move it somewhere else — unless perhaps you left the current population behind, which is not being suggested. The problems of failing cities are problems caused by the people, not their location.

Read it.

It was an argument he says he made to Thomas Friedman as The New York Times columnist was writing his 2005 book, The World is Flat, a work that came to define the almost end-of-history optimism that accompanied the entry of China and India into the global labour markets, a transition aided by the internet revolution. “Fine, go to those Bangalore Infosys centres, but just for the hell of it go three miles aside and go look at the guy living with no toilet, no running water,” Gates says now. “The world is not flat and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.”

And that tells you everything you need to know about Bill Gates — and Thomas Friedman.

Unfortunately, his viewpoint is still technocratic: “Hey, there’s this problem! We’re smart guys, we fix problems! Let’s go!” Such people spend all their time fixing the symptoms and not addressing the disease, which is the social structures and attitudes that allow such problems to arise and persist in the first place.

Read it.

 You Millenials voted for Obama by a margin of 28 percent, which will make it a lot easier for me to accept the benefits you will be paying for. We warned you that liberalism was a scam designed to take the fruits of your labor and transfer it to us, the older, established generation. Oh, and also to the couch-dwelling, Democrat-voting losers who live off of food stamps and order junk from QVC with their Obamaphones.

You didn’t listen to us. Maybe you’ll listen to pain.

Read it.

How to be a ‘progressive’ in one easy lesson.

SF author Mike Flynn channels Aquinas, delightfully so.

 Question I. Whether Christianity promoted the rise of science

Read it.

Though the famed Egyptian pharaoh King Tutankhamun died more than 3,300 years ago, the mystery surrounding his death and mummification continues to haunt scientists.

Slow news day.

Read it.

So now she’s a Protestant. Hey, it’s a step in the right direction — perhaps someday she’ll make the move and become a Christian.

We can only hope

An economist ‘with a focus on pension issues’ has an idea.

The actual energy savings are minimal, if they exist at all. Frequent and uncoordinated time changes cause confusion, undermining economic efficiency. There’s evidence that regularly changing sleep cycles, associated with daylight saving, lowers productivity and increases heart attacks. Being out of sync with European time changes was projected to cost the airline industry $147 million a year in travel disruptions. But I propose we not only end Daylight Saving, but also take it one step further.

…

Now the world has evolved further – we are even more integrated and mobile, suggesting we’d benefit from fewer, more stable time zones. Why stick with a system designed for commerce in 1883? In reality, America already functions on fewer than four time zones. I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8am instead of 9am, restaurants were packed at 6pm instead of 7pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. But for the last three years I lived in a state of constant confusion, I rarely knew the time and was perpetually an hour late or early. And for what purpose? If everyone functions an hour earlier anyway, in part to coordinate with other parts of the country, the different time zones lose meaning and are reduced to an arbitrary inconvenience. Research based on time use surveys found Americans’ schedules are determined by television more than daylight. That suggests in effect, Americans already live on two time zones.

Read it.

Now the world has evolved further—we are even more integrated and mobile, suggesting we’d benefit from fewer, more stable time zones. Why stick with a system designed for commerce in 1883? In reality, America already functions on fewer than four time zones. I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8 am instead of 9 am, restaurants were packed at 6 pm instead of 7 pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. – See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/how-many-time-zones-does-america-need-anyway.html#sthash.3P05yxZu.dpuf

Read it.

James Fallon is a happily married father of three, an award-winning neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, the founder of several successful biotech companies, and a scientific advisor to the US Department of Defense. He is also a psychopath.

In 2005, after decades of studying the brain scans of psychopathic killers, Fallon made a startling discovery when examining his own PET scan as part of a separate research project. His brain, Fallon discovered, looked precisely like those of the cold-blooded murderers he’d spent the last 20 years scrutinizing. And after analyzing his DNA, Fallon later uncovered that his genetic profile contained several genes strongly linked to violent, psychopathic behaviors.

Not something you come across every day.

Read it.

All the British survivors have gone now (the men, that is. Just possibly there are bereaved women still alive, but nobody seems to ask about them.) In a hundred years, most things fall silent or shrivel into peculiar objects in display cases. The Crimean War began in 1854; in 1954, it was to me no more than a distant pageant of men with uncommon facial hair, pillbox hats and frogged tunics. By the time British troops went back into Afghanistan after 9/11, nobody in this country felt that the Second Boer War (1899-1902) was ‘relevant’ to what was happening. But the Great War, which ought to be in every sense history, keeps on speaking to us.

Read it.

Time is an illusion – at least in a toy model of the universe made of two particles of light. The experiment shows that what we perceive as the passage of time might emerge from the strange property of quantum entanglementMovie Camera. The finding could assist in solving the long-standing problem of how to unify modern physics.

Physicists have two ways of describing reality, quantum mechanics for the small world of particles and general relativity for the larger world of planets and black holes. But the two theories do not get along: attempts to combine their equations into a unified theory produce seemingly nonsensical answers. One early attempt in the 1960s was the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, which managed to quantise general relativity – by leaving out time altogether.

Read it.

People tend to think of food stamps as being money in the pockets of poor hungry people, but it turns out the money ends up in the pockets of the owners of Walmart, i.e., the Walton family, who are some of America’s richest. It’s somewhat similar to how Pell Grant money, billed as aid to poor college students, winds up in the pockets of relatively well-off professors. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it isn’t often mentioned in the political debates over spending on these programs.

Read it.

With admirable clarity, Marsh goes on to explain the gerund and subjunctive, the difference between comparing to and comparing with, and the correct use of “whom”, avoidance of which has given this book its deliberately teeth-grating title. Cleverly, Marsh here inverts the usual reasons for understanding conventions. You need to know the rule for “whom” not because you should use “whom” whenever appropriate (because it will sometimes sound pompous), but because you need absolutely to avoid using “whom” when it should actually be “who”, since that will sound both pompous and stupid.

This is a book that I plan to buy.

Steve Sailer has doubts.

 Coleman’s philosophy basically appears to be the same as every other educational reformer: Be Like Me. Coleman is a bright, cultured former McKinsey consultant, and thus his Common Core write-up would be a good outline for the home schooling of David Coleman Jr.

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen much evidence that he knows much at all about, say, psychometrics.

…

The point of having standardized college admission tests is to fill in the obvious shortcoming of just using high school GPA. Making the SAT more like high school seems pointless. If we are all supposed to be into “critical thinking,” maybe we should make high school more like the old SAT?

Read it.

But a funny thing is going to happen when the machines start taking the jobs of doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, managers and professors. We’re not quite there yet, but the day is coming very soon when many of what had traditionally been considered untouchable jobs will be done just as effectively or better by machines. Diagnostics and radiology will be handled by machine, with basic examination and nursing work the most common medical professions. Humans won’t be needed for legal services beyond the courtroom and mediation room itself, computer programs will pick investments better than any human, employee evaluation and workforce structuring will be better assessed by analytics than by any middle manager, and mass online education programs will render teachers and professors little more than test proctors and homework readers. None of which assumes the actual intelligent robotic AI of science fiction, which is a whole other story and is also likely coming sooner than we think. Some people see this as utopia, some as dystopia. But either way, it’s coming and coming soon.

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

Specifically, Mr. the Aaron objects to my claim that, because there are no government-enforced prohibitions on the hiring of low-skilled workers, anyone who truly believes that monopsony power in this labor market exists should start a company that uses low-skilled workers.  Mr. the Aaron calls my claim “not practical” and “comical.”  But I stand by my claim.  The researcher who found genuine monopsony power would, by starting his or her own company, earn profits and directly improve the economic lot of low-skilled workers.  The reason, again, is that the exercise of monopsony power by existing employers keeps the prevailing wage lower than the value of what workers produce, at the margin, for their employers.

In short, monopsony power in labor markets keep workers underpaid.  With all those underpaid workers out there – and because there are no government-enforced prohibitions on starting companies that employ low-skilled workers – a true believer that monopsony power is a prevalent reality can profit by exploiting this pool of underpaid workers.  Yet they do not.  They remain in their faculty offices writing papers and issuing commentary.  I continue to insist that this inaction is sufficient evidence against the proposition that monopsony power prevails in the market for low-skilled workers – and, hence, conclusive evidence that the higher the minimum wage, the worse are the job prospects of low-skilled workers.

If an academic tells you that his research finds that the price of Acme Corp. stock – a stock traded, say, on the NYSE –  is too low, what would be the first question you ask this scholar?  The first question I would ask him is “How much of that stock are you buying?”  If the scholar tells me “none,” or looks at me befuddled as he explains that he’s an academic and not an investor, I would dismiss his research on this front.  That person, as I see him here, offers proof as good as it gets that he does not believe what he asserts.

Read it.

I anticipate a Democrat Congressperson will soon introduce legislation to establish a FootCare Initiative to make sure that The Poor Of The World get in on this technological bonanza. At your expense, of course.

Tom Smith cuts to the chase.

Big government has gotten to the point where it cannot do any longer the things it aspires to. First, as we all know, it is running out of money.  To remedy this problem, the Dems propose taking more out of my already stretched to the breaking point budget, and yours too.  I’m enough of an egalitarian not to mind if George Soros gets a few billion skimmed off the top of his cache, but the idea apparently is to go after me and lots of people like me, whatever 100 minus 47 percent is, and raise the money that way.  I’m against that.  But beyond that, it won’t be enough money. But other people are making that argument better than I can.  What strikes me is not only that there isn’t remotely enough money, but not enough time and competence, to construct the massive machines government wants to construct in order to build the dreamlands of tomorrow they want.  Why can’t we have an insurance system where policies get sold as easily as books?  Straightforward, on the web, with government backstopping the sorts of things that are for sale?  It turns out to build such a thing is beyond the capabilities of our government and probably any government.  I think building such a thing is wrong, but forget that.  I might think building the Tower of Babel was wrong as well. The point is the Babylonians lacked as it happened steel and so could not build such a tall tower. We similarly lack the technical wherewithall to build such a big, complicated website, where the only people who want to build it are governed by the hugely complex rules of procurement regulations and motivated by the strands of public choice economics. It’s very like what happened to the old Soviet Union.  It’s not that big missiles and tractors and potatos were beyond technology as such. We had had them for a long time.  It’s the combination — those things, but built by an enormous state-planned political economy, where the planning was done by fallible and corrupt human beings.

Read it.

Bryan Caplan does what economists do best – take absurd policy prescriptions to their logical extreme to show how ridiculous they are.

A few nay-saying libertarians and unschoolers aside, almost everyone favors compulsory K-12 education.  Yet virtually no one favors compulsory college.  It’s quite a mystery.  If mandatory education is a great idea at the primary and secondary levels, why would it be a horrible idea at the tertiary level?  What is the origin of this peculiar policy discontinuity?

Steve Sailer is troubled.

Is Texas about the best fate that a heavily Hispanicized America can hope for? In a future United States that won’t be able to generate all that much per-capita wealth, is Texas‘s system of cheap labor, cheap land, cheap taxes, and cheap government the only plausible future for the economy?

Well, if you’re lucky….

 Cowen’s third point—most poorly educated Americans these days don’t have high enough IQs to benefit much from more education—is of course, Steve Sailer 101.

Of course, the Crust won’t allow anybody to so diss their Underclass.

Democrats have long tried to attract massive immigration from south of the border so that they can put them on “a path to citizenship” to turn America into a one-party state, Vermont writ large. Yet a central irony for the future of American politics is that these upcoming Democratic voters will be unlikely to generate enough wealth to pay for the expensive Vermont-style policies that liberals crave. Sadly, Vermont policies without an ultra-white Vermont-style population to pay for them tend to lead to Detroit.

And, needless to say, Detroit ain’t Texas.

In the long run, both politically and economically, Texas is in deep trouble.

Hey, in the long run we’re all dead — but Texas will be the last one standing.

The Antiplanner gives us some inconvenient truth.

Rail is less expensive than trucks–if you have high volumes moving from point A to point B. But rail simply cannot compete with trucks for low volumes moving from many origins to many destinations. That’s why most rail shipping today is coal, grain, or containers–all things that can go from one of a few origins to one of a few destinations.

This goes double for cars. The reason why urban light-rail systems (except where they made sense Back In The Day, as in New York and Boston) lose money hand-over-fist even when heavily subsidized by The Taxpayer is that most work environments in the modern world aren’t organized around the model people-live-in-bedroom-communities-but-all-gather-together-in-the-city-core-for-the-workday any more. In days when both transportation and communication were primitive and expensive, that model made a great deal of sense. Nowadays, when transportation is (relatively) cheap and communication damned near free, that model is about as useful as a buggy whip.

A Voice of the Crust looks up from the food dish.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he declared the rich different from you and me. But today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind.

Read it.

A=432 Hz, known as Verdi’s ‘A’ is an alternative tuning that is mathematically consistent with the universe. Music based on 432 Hz transmits beneficial healing energy, because it is a pure tone of math fundamental to nature.

There is a theory that the change from 432 Hz to 440 Hz was dictated by Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. He used it to make people think and feel a certain manner, and to make them a prisoner of a certain consciousness. Then around 1940 the United States introduced 440 Hz worldwide, and finally in 1953 it became the ISO 16-standard.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning….

Charlie Cooke has a great column today making a very similar point to what I had intended to start the G-File with: Obama’s not a dictator; he’s a king. And when I say he’s a king, I don’t mean the dictatorial kind of an absolute monarchy. I mean he’s like the king in a parliamentary democracy where the prime minister has all of the power and the monarch is supposed to mug for postcards and inspire elementary-school children. He’s less Longshanks and more King Ralph. At least whenever he’s expected to take responsibility, he becomes a figurehead who gives voice to the public’s outrage over the problems he himself created. “Nobody is angrier,” Obama routinely insists, about the crap people should be angry at him about. As Charlie puts it, “Obama is less Julius Caesar than he is a tribune of the plebs — an Oprahfied avatar that has been custom-designed both to indulge and guide the public sentiment like so many Bill Clintons feeling your pain.”

— Jonah Goldberg, G-File, 10/25/2013

If you don’t subscribe to the G-File, you really ought.

Read it.

Health activists, nutrition nannies, medical paternalists, and just plain old quacks regularly conjure up menaces that are supposedly damaging the health of Americans. Their scares range from the decades-long campaign against fluoridation to worries that saccharin causes cancer to the ongoing hysteria over crop biotechnology. The campaigners’ usual “solution” is to demand that regulators ban the offending substance or practice. Here are five especially egregious examples of activist misinformation.

Read it.

BLUF: Because they realize that they can do something more fun for more money.

The question I have is why they stay.

Read it.

Just in case you didn’t have anything else planned for the day. I know I didn’t.

Read it.

Virginia’s Renaissance Faire ran from 1996 to 1999, and since then the site has remained untouched, slowly crumbling as it falls into the Dark Ages. Besieged by the elements, these Tudor-style buildings and grand castles are inexorably falling apart.

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.