Read it.

So he actually is a Democrat after all. Somehow I always suspected as much.

Most of the damage to the Republican party is from RINOs like Bush. (Bloomberg, are you listenin’?)

Of course, the reason they’re wringing their hands of this NOW is because they’re trying to distract from the tyrannous activities of The Magic Negro. Who knows? It might even work.

Read it.

Have you given much thought to the vast amount of material out in space? It turns out there is plenty of amazing stuff in the hundreds of asteroids that pass near Earth every year, and one startup working on getting those materials back down planetside.

Read it.

Sarah Palin can’t raise your taxes. She can’t send your children to war. Yet almost five years after her failed bid to occupy Number One Observatory Circle, Palin’s Pavlovian effect on rabid liberals (and not a few conservatives) is only slightly diminished.

I don’t quite understand this phenomenon….

Lileks.

Behold the list of things I do not wish to do: yea verily, biking to work is prominent among them. Fine if you do; hats off and applause and all that, but I like driving to work.

Preach it, brother.

David Brooks astonishes me by having something quasi-sensible to say … although he still needs some work.

 A half-century ago, 14 percent of college degrees were awarded to people who majored in the humanities. Today, only 7 percent of graduates in the country are humanities majors. Even over the last decade alone, the number of incoming students at Harvard who express interest in becoming humanities majors has dropped by a third.

And, of course, Harvard is representative of the entire country. (Or maybe he means that if the trust-funders at Harvard can’t afford to be humanities majors, nobody can?)

Most people give an economic explanation for this decline. Accounting majors get jobs. Lit majors don’t. And there’s obviously some truth to this. But the humanities are not only being bulldozed by an unforgiving job market. They are committing suicide because many humanists have lost faith in their own enterprise.

A polite way of saying ‘perverted the living shit out of their own field’. But you can’t say that in The New York Times, unless you’re talking about George W Bush.

 Somewhere along the way, many people in the humanities lost faith in this uplifting mission. The humanities turned from an inward to an outward focus. They were less about the old notions of truth, beauty and goodness and more about political and social categories like race, class and gender. Liberal arts professors grew more moralistic when talking about politics but more tentative about private morality because they didn’t want to offend anybody.

A polite way of saying etc. etc.

So now the humanities are in crisis.

Well, no, they’re not, unless you hold to some bizarre ‘disparate impact’ theory of college majors, where the humanities are entitled to a certain percentage of the student body, and if they don’t get it, it’s a vile plot by Somebody Nefarious Probably Republicans.

Read it.

Everyone knows that stereotypes are inaccurate, especially psychologists:

[multiple quotations from unimpeachable sources, reflecting an Incontrovertible Consensus]

Except stereotypes are not inaccurate.  There are many different ways to test for the accuracy of stereotypes, because there are many different types or aspects of accuracy.  However, one type is quite simple — the correspondence of stereotype beliefs with criteria.  If I believe 60% of adult women are over 5′ 4″ tall, and 56% voted for the Democrat in the last Presidential election, and that 35% of all adult women have college degrees, how well do my beliefs correspond to the actual probabilities?  One can do this sort of thing for many different types of groups.

And lots of scientists have.  And you know what they found?  That stereotype accuracy — the correspondence of stereotype beliefs with criteria — is one of the largest relationships in all of social psychology.  The correlations of stereotypes with criteria range from .4 to over .9, and average almost .8 for cultural stereotypes (the correlation of beliefs that are widely shared with criteria) and.5 for personal stereotypes (the correlation of one individual’s stereotypes with criteria, averaged over lots of individuals).  The average effect in social psychology is about .20.  Stereotypes are more valid than most social psychological hypotheses.

Jake Knapp, a guy who works for Google Ventures, channels Edmund Burke.

Some ideas are stacked up on shelves because, for one reason or another, they’re just bad. Others are set aside because, while they might be good, they’re either really hard to execute or the team isn’t ready to pursue them. Or maybe the timing isn’t right or the person who had the idea doesn’t know how to convince others of its merit. Regardless, once an idea begins to age, it can be difficult to tell whether it has potential. All old ideas are then sullied with the bad-idea funk and people forget how promising those good ideas once were. After a while, it’s hard to tell them apart.

…

Making the decision to double down on something old — especially something that hadn’t worked yet — can be difficult. New ideas are fun, and they’ve got that new idea smell. It’s easy to get excited about them. As CustomMade CEO Mike Salguero said, “Building something new is far more tempting.”

But even famous inventors got famous with old ideas. Take Thomas Edison and the light bulb. Greatest invention of all time, right? And the universal symbol for having an idea. But wait. The light bulb was invented in 1840 — seven years before Thomas Edison was even born. So while he didn’t invent the light bulb, he figured out how to make it commercially viable. How? By creating a vacuum with the recently introduced Sprengel pump, invented by… you guessed it, some dude named Hermann Sprengel. The light bulb wasn’t a brand-new idea for Edison. It was an old idea that was difficult to execute on. It was the Mailbox of the 1800s.

So the next time you’re stumped, the next time you don’t know how to proceed, the next time you’re tempted to invent new ideas, take a good long look at your old ones. There might be a light bulb in there somewhere.

Read it.

Scientists say they found linguistic patterns they believe to be meaningful words within the text.

Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

What he said.

David Friedman asks an important question.

As best I understand the view, at least the version presented in the book I have just been reading, all Muslims eventually make it to heaven—although that has to be qualified by the observation that someone with sufficiently heretical beliefs doesn’t count as a Muslim even if he thinks he does. Punishment is what a Muslim has to go through before he gets there, reward is what he gets when he finally makes it. Hell, for Muslims, is purgatory. It is permanent only for some non-Muslims.

Read it.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said Wednesday she will vote against President Barack Obama’s nominee for U.S. trade representative.

He must REALLY suck, from a left-wing point of view.

I like him already.

Read it.

And it’s not over yet.

Jerry Pournelle.

Of course all this thrashing about is a misguided attempt to pay attention to the 1983 Commission on education headed by Nobel Laureate Glenn T. Seaborg, which famously concluded that “If a foreign country had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war.” This produced a flurry of top down actions dictated across the nation, most of which, by the time the bureaucrats and unions had got through with them, made things worse.

The Golden Age of American education came back when the question of “Federal Aid to Education” was an actual political topic, and there was no massive Federal Aid to education. American schools were run by mostly local school boards, and the school boards were elected by the local taxpayers who paid for the schools. The result was a mixture, of course, with some schools being starved of funds while others had plenty of money but it was not well spent, but overall it worked quite well. In a few places like Los Angeles where the schools were consolidated into enormous districts of hundreds of schools the system was so large that the only controls were bureaucratic, and the school boards were professional politicians, but by and large local communities got the schools they wanted and deserved.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Hastings had a thorough contempt for journalistic customs, including objectivity, which he dismissed as a “fallacy.” As I wrote of him in a profile, Hastings was “a liberal who shared the anti-war, anti-Republican sentiments widespread in his generation of journalists.” Hastings was at least honest about his bias, as opposed to the allegedly objective reporters who cover politics. Most of the young journalists who followed Mitt Romney around on the campaign trail last year may as well have been paid members of Obama’s campaign staff, given their intense commitment to helping defeat the Republican. Journalists have always been predominantly liberal, but recent years have seen an influx of young writers like Hastings who came of age in the anti-war campus cauldrons of the Bush era, and to them the GOP is an enemy more dangerous than any foreign dictator or Islamic terrorist.

Having crusaded to spare the nation of another Republican presidency, young liberal writers like Michael Hastings seemed genuinely shocked by recent revelations of the Nixonian nature of the regime they did so much to help re-elect. Last year, Hastings praised Obama with the enthusiasm of a 12-year-old girl describing a Justin Bieber concert, but two weeks ago he seemed disillusioned. “Transparency supporters, whistleblowers, and investigative reporters … have been viciously attacked by the Obama administration and its allies in the FBI and DOJ,” Hastings wrote, denouncing “Democratic two-facedness on civil liberties.”

For perhaps the first time in his life, he’s telling the truth.

Read it.

Carl Malamud is suing the IRS over a problem you probably haven’t heard about: the agency’s unwillingness to let the rest of us easily scrutinize nonprofits.

Malamud, a California-based transparency activist, knows a few things about liberating public records. He’s the reason the Securities and Exchange Commission started putting the submissions of public companies online back in the 1990s, why you can see so many hearings on C-SPAN, and why lists of legally enforceable codes and standards may finally become available for free. He’s been badgering the IRS to put nonprofit data online for over a year now, and in the meantime, has uploaded the last decade’s worth of 990s to his Web site Public.Resource.org. It costs him a few thousand dollars a year — a considerable sum for his small organization, but nothing for a massive government agency.

Tom Smith makes it.

The thing that makes the IRS scandal really troubling is that it was (or is) an attempt to manipulate our political process. Again, obviously, it was an attempt by pro-Obama persons to suppress political activity that they disagreed with, and that their superiors disagreed with, and that was contrary to the party in power in the Senate and White House. I hate to say, this strikes at the heart of, but this really does strike at the heart of the democratic compact under which we live. If the party in power can use its influence to subvert the electoral process, then all bets are off. Of course, this is exactly how machine politics in Chicago have worked since the Daley machine and before. One party gets ahold of things, uses its influence to subvert the process, and then you don’t have a democracy any more. To oppose the party in power becomes too dangerous, too expensive or just too futile. I suppose this would not be so bad, except that the Democrats are such a lot of hohos.

Read it.

It remains to be seen how far governments will go. Laws are made to protect people from harm, but they’re also made by taking into account the interests of special interests who spend billions to lobby the halls of Congress. Innovation like the types cited here directly threaten a range of powerful, incumbent, cash-rich industries who view lobbying costs as a minor line-item expense, the cost of doing business in America. The other side of this coin is that, right now, government regulation that overreaches to the point of suppressing an individual’s ability to earn a living wage is the political equivalent of playing with fire. It’s early, but consumer demand is pointing in a direction where the democratization of access to technologies like electric vehicles, 3-D printers, alternative currencies, and peer-to-peer lending puts more power into peoples’ hands than government can realistically control.

Read it.

The very blue state of Massachusetts, whose voters preferred Barack Obama by 61% over their own former governor last November, gets by just fine with a flat tax of 5.25%, well below NC’s top rate. Ballot measures to create a graduated income tax system have been put before voters in this bastion of liberalism five times and five times Massachusetts voters have decided to keep their flat tax in place. The Bay State’s ever-so-progressive voters, who have voted for the Democratic candidate in the last seven presidential elections, seem to like their flat tax just fine and don’t want to get rid of it. If flat tax opponents truly believe their own hyperbolic rhetoric, they must consider places like Boston and Cambridge to be some dystopian wasteland.

Read it.

And perfectly suited to the people who get them, who are the most worthless people on campus.

Read it.

The humorlessness of feminism is an old story, but it is interesting to see a backlash building in mainstream America and not just among conservative critics.  The most interesting recent story you may have missed concerns Rebecca Walker, the daughter of the celebrated feminist author Alice Walker, who, according to her daughter, is an egregiously awful human being because of her feminist views.

The Other McCain is on the case.

“You can’t do that.”
   But it makes me feel good.
“It’s against the law.”
   Then we should change the law.
“Why?”
   Because it makes me feel good.
“Who cares about your feelings?”
   Hater.

Read it.

The Oath Keepers are a coalition of current and former military, police, and other public officials who have pledged not to obey unconstitutional commands. They’re extremely controversial, with critics accusing them (inaccurately) of fomenting terrorism and (more accurately) of attracting people with an affinity for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric. Since they were launched in the first year of the Obama administration, they are also sometimes accused of being unconcerned with the constitutional violations of the Bush years.

The latter charge doesn’t match what I’ve observed in my reporting about the group. Still, I was interested to see how they would react to the unfolding NSA story. In particular, I wondered whether they’d see Edward Snowden’s decision to leak the PRISM documents as the sort of disobedience they champion, and I wondered how much their discussion of the story would extend to Bush-era as well as Obama-era surveillance.

Wonder no more. Stewart Rhodes, the group’s founder, has emailed me a statement about Snowden….

Read it.

Reality intrudes.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, explores some more of the modern world.

My son, who has his own way of getting to the essentials, asked how old the girl was, and the conversation went off on a tangent. I believe I got the main point across, though: Guys have our way of thinking, women have their way. There’s a lot of overlap, of course—I mean, we can both do crossword puzzles and so on—but some key areas of the female brain are wired differently from ours.

This is rank heresy under the reigning dogma of Absolute and Unquestionable Human Equality. Even as you read this I am probably being denounced somewhere by agents of our Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice as an unfit parent and a corrupter of the young.

Whatever: I shall proceed on the understanding that the reigning dogma of A&UHE is a stinking, wormy pile of intellectual dog crap that contradicts all human experience and scientific evidence. Everyone on board with that? Excellent.

Undeniable Truth #1:

I really don’t see how teenage boys can learn anything with girls in the classroom.

Undeniable Truth #2:

If healthy young adult males and females are assembled in units dedicated to a common purpose, in sex proportions much different from 50-50, and walled off from the general population, then strong sex-related emotions—notably sexual jealousy—will inevitably manifest themselves, corroding unit effectiveness.

Undeniable Truth #3:

Women are strongly attracted to higher-status men. If male officers are in command of units containing women, human nature is placed under severe strain.

Undeniable Truth #4:

Men who join the military are responding to widespread, innate male urges—the urge to break things and kill people, for example. Women who join the military are, by contrast, outliers in their sex. They are eccentric and prone to behave eccentrically. As a designated victim group, they are especially susceptible to the associated pathologies, e.g., victim hoaxes for attention, spite, or cash reward.

Four excellent reasons not to have women in the military at all, much less in combat units.

Read it.

Don Mattrick, the head of Xbox at Microsoft, explained to GameTrailers that Microsoft built a system that’s future-proof and if you don’t like it, there’s another option: the eight-year-old Xbox 360.

This is Microsoft’s stance and the company doesn’t care if you complain. That message came through loud and clear during the company’s E3 press conference. Take it or leave it. Microsoft doesn’t care. They know they’ll sell millions of boxes and a group of vociferous web trolls won’t change that – or will they?

Read it.

In a revealing column at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall (pictured) voices doubts about Edward Snowden (and Bradley Manning before him) less for the details of their leaks of government information than for why he thinks he did it. To Marshall, Snowden is “some young guy I’ve never heard of before who espouses a political philosophy I don’t agree with.” That philosophy, he believes, is one that views that state as “essentially malevolent.” That’s enough to put the columnist and the whistleblower in different tribes, and it’s a good start at explaining why so many Americans have lined up behind government officials on the matter of leaks and surveillance, while many others have cheered leakers and denounced the peeping-tom state.

Read it.

Now that he’s exited HP, former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein has opened up a bit about his thoughts on how and why webOS failed. In an interview with Fierce Wireless, Rubinstein said that if he had it to do over again, he wouldn’t have sold to HP, “Talk about a waste. … If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company?”

Ummm … cash out while it was still worth something, rather than ride it into the ground? That’s just a guess, you understand….

Steve Sailer puts things in perspective.

 If you had access to all of DSK’s electronic communications, what kind of data mining algorithm would you craft to ferret out DKS’s greatest vulnerability? How could you best sift through terabytes of data to find DSK’s Achilles heel?

Well, you wouldn’t. You’d just call up your press secretary and ask, “What’s the gossip about DSK?”

Underlining the distinction between ‘data’ and ‘information’.

 The more general point is that a lot of the information that the public assumes must be secret is actually common knowledge among the tiny percentage of people who are paying attention. To find out about it, you often just have to ask.

And most people who worry about the government having access to their personal data are the sort of people in whom the government has no possible interest.

Freeberg nails it once again.

If gay marriage were all about providing equal rights, I’d be all for it. But it isn’t about that. Just like “raising the minimum wage” isn’t about raising anybody’s wage, when you really think about it you see it’s all about outlawing jobs that pay below a certain amount — “gay marriage” is a proposal to muck up a definition. That’s what it is, it’s an attack on definitions of things.

Read it.

Of course, I’ve been saying that for years.

Low-Information Voters would be puzzled by this: Why are rich people affiliating with the anti-rich party? But, propaganda aside, the Democrats aren’t anti-rich; they just say they are. Democrats are the biggest group of talk-the-talk-don’t-walk-the-walk hypocrites on the face of the planet. This is how AlGore can sputter and bluster and get Nobel Prizes for being pro-environment and anti-global-warming while his estate in Tennessee uses more electricity than a small town.

Read it.

What is the real issue brought up by this whole PRISM debacle? It’s not that the government is willing to overstep its role using national security as an excuse. That’s been going on for thousands of years. It’s not that companies in a position of power are willing to throw those that rely on them under the bus in order to get ahead. Again, that’s nothing new. And it’s not that the institution of journalism has crumbled into a dismal wreckage of its former glory. Possibly true, but beside the point.

The issue central to all of these is that the fundamental balance of power when it comes to control of information has been allowed to shift unthinkably far away from the individual and towards a set of institutions with motives that are at best mercenary. It’s about time we fixed that, don’t you think?

To address the PRISM scandal itself briefly, I think we will be less surprised at the existence of such a program than, as I think will inevitably transpire, the incompetence and inefficiency that almost certainly define its methods and usage. Allegations of a massive conspiracy that goes so deep that the most powerful tech companies in the world are muzzling themselves and spitting lies out of fear and legal obligation assume, as other theories often do, that this shadow government pulling the strings is both massively effective and operates totally in secret, two things that are highly incongruous with the likely reality of incompetent civil servants, out-of-date methods, and bureaucracy choking everything in sight like the inextinguishable weed it is.

Don’t hold back — tell us how you really feel.

‘Jesus loves you, everyone else things you’re an asshole.’

Freeberg nails it once again.

It occurred to me recently that, when it comes to tax money, progressives never grow out of this rapacious mental stage. Tax monies are there primarily for their personal gratification — to fund untested pet projects, to dole out more pork products than a salumeria to the usual suspects, and presumably these days to wiretap every man, woman and child in America. And if any’s left over, it gets laundered and finds its way into their bank accounts. The idea that these monies are not inherently theirs never seems to cross their minds, nor does the concern that they should first take care of their constitutionally mandated responsibilities. They want Disneyland and they want it now!

And if you dare try to curb their spending, they’ll threaten to shut off the water, power and telephone so they can keep paying for Disneyland. In fact, they do this so consistently that it’s become something of a cliche.

Steve Sailer reveals all.

     For many decades, Chinese testimony was not accepted in California courts, an Alien Land Law discouraged Asian land purchases, the Chinese Exclusion Act (not repealed until 1943) prevented Chinese immigration, and a Gentlemen’s Agreement, signed in 1907, required Japan to cut back sharply on passports issued to Japanese who wished to emigrate to California. When World War II began, the Japanese were sent to relocation camps at great personal cost to them.

Yet today Californians of Asian ancestry are viewed by Caucasians with comfort and even pride. In spite of their distinctive physical features, no one crosses the street to avoid a Chinese or Japanese youth. One obvious reason is that they have remarkably low crime rates.

Read it.

This is the most disturbing aspect of the current kerfuffle: The expanded powers of the Federal government are now biting us all on the butt, and it is an insufficient safeguard of our rights to have in place running the system the people who were the loudest critics of the system when they were out of power. The lesson here is that power corrupts, and we’re never going to have saints in charge of the government, so our only effective protection is to take steps to limit the power that the government does have.

Read it.

Since 2005, when Katherine Flegal of the National Center for Health Statistics began reporting that people whom the government deems “overweight” appear to be healthier than people who stay within the recommended weight range, her work has provoked outrage from other obesity researchers. As Virginia Hughes explains in a recent Nature feature story, the critics’ main complaint is not that Flegal’s findings are wrong but that they are unhelpful.

I guess the sky isn’t falling after all. What a disappointment.

Some of us remember.

Sixty-nine years have passed since they hit the beaches at Normandy. To say that those men “lived in a different time” has become a cliché. They lived and died in another century, one that is becoming less recognizable with each passing year. What is not usually acknowledged is the deliberate attempts to airbrush out our recall in the West of this vast undertaking, or to change it to something different than the way the participants viewed it. They are strangers, those soldiers; not our relatives, our forebears, or the objects of immense bottomless sorrow for those who were killed.

Read it.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to. And people avoid burdens, even when you think that’s rotten behavior.

I know! The immigration debate provides the perfect answer: We just need to think up a new and unthreatening name for the trnasgressors!

Undocumentd Producer. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Read it.

Ugly people have been banned from a new jobs site which only offers positions to applicants who are easy on the eye.

Freeberg waxes philosophical.

We start with the A-through-E “get me a beer” scale. An “A-girl” will get a guy a beer so he doesn’t have to get up. A “B-girl” will get a guy a beer provided he treats her as a dignified and intelligent human being, meaning, says “please” and “thank you” as his Mom taught him. A “C-girl” might get him a beer but she’s going to keep count of who does how many things for who, and after she gets his beer he’s going to “owe” her one. A “D-girl” won’t get him a beer, and an “E-girl” will build an identity for herself out of her refusal to get him a beer.

Hm.

If you make it your business to subscribe to liberal-feminist blogs, and read what they put up, you’ll see a striking pattern set in: Across the hundreds, and even the thousands, they all fall into this funnel of thought that could be summarized as “Oh how I hate this thing I found over here, come gather around loyal readers, and help me hate it.” They don’t have questions and they don’t have answers — all they have is “How Dare You.”

Yeah, that fits my experience.

Liberal women labor under a delusion that their primary motive is to elevate the stature and importance of women in our evolving society. Not only is this untrue, but they labor toward the opposite. Women can do an amazing number of things; some of these things can also be done by men, but there are just two of them that men cannot do. Those two things are 1) being a mother and 2) being a wife. Those are the two things that liberal women don’t want other women, anywhere, to do. Over the last few decades they have become unreasonably invested in the two public issues of 1) abortion, which stops a woman from becoming a mother, and 2) gay marriage, which robs women of their natural role as wives. In a society that is supposed to be sluggish in offering important and significant roles for women to occupy, those are the two roles that have always existed, and they are the very most important ones, supreme to anything a man can do. If liberal women were sincere and consistent in their stated desires, these are the two roles they would most vigilantly protect. As it is, these are the two roles for which they reserve their most incendiary hatred.

Read it.

The rioters in Sweden were Muslim and certainly the ideology of Islam was part of the chaos, but Sweden’s multicultural policy choices literally added fuel to the fire–an open door policy that led to a fractionalized Muslim community that sees itself as separate from the nation in which they reside.

Steve Sailer looks at the intersection of technology and politics.

 I’m not sure that the blanket statement that these days “personal upper-body strength is irrelevant” is true. Guys who lift things for a living largely operate in the “non-tradeable” sector of the economy.

The irrelevance of upper body strength is true in some jobs. For example, computer programmers don’t have to lift anything heavier than the lids of their laptops. And, perhaps not coincidentally, programmers are notoriously prone to self-defeating universalist ideologies like libertarianism and open borders. The Gang of Eight openly conspires with the billionaires of Silicon Valley to lower the pay of programmers, and what do programmers do about it?

By contrast:

 They are in the “non-tradable” sector so their jobs can’t be easily outsourced to Foxconn in China. Their jobs, however, could be easily insourced and gradually replaced with, say, immigrants, illegal or even skilled foreign set workers via H-1B visas. And yet the entire concept of granting visas to, say, Mexico City’s television set workers to lower Hollywood’s costs has never, as far as I know, been publicly aired.

One reason is that the guys who lift things on sets in Burbank don’t want it to happen. And, unlike computer programmers, they aren’t wracked with guilt over it not happening.

Thereby showing more sense than the ‘you must have a four-year degree before we’ll even talk to you’ crowd.

Read it.

Five of the 10 fastest-growing cities in the country between 2011 and 2012 were in Texas, according to new figures from the US Census Bureau. New York is way out in front in terms of added population, but Houston is second with San Antonio and Austin fourth and fifth.

Actually, you can reduce it to two:

1. It’s not California.

2. It’s not Michigan.

Read it.

There’s a reason why eBay founder Pierre Omidyar just shoveled $15 million in investment to political petition site, Change.org: the business of good citizenship is very profitable. While critics often stereotype tech billionaires as libertarian sociopaths, they do so under the odd premise that making money and promoting democracy are mutually exclusive.

And they ignore the undoubted fact that a depressingly large number of them contribute to, and vote for, people like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Jerry Brown, and Nanny Bloomberg.

Read it.

Self-driving cars will save roughly 32,000 lives lost every year to auto fatalities, reduce pollution and save us countless hours wasted in traffic. It will also obliterate the taxi industry — like it did the steamboat industry.

Bringing to the masses services, which were once considered luxuries (personal assistants, cutting-edge medicine, and world-class education), means automating some jobs out of existence.

Unfortunately, while everybody sees it coming, nobody has any ideas about how to cope with it. My prediction is that it will give us an ever-increasing Lower Crust of unemployable proles who can only survive off of government benefits and therefore will perennially vote for the Party of Free Stuff, the Democrats or whatever even-more-socialist group eventually replaces the Democrats.

Read it.

Here’s a news story about a 72-year-old Fort Worth man who heard his neighbor’s burglar alarm going off, so he got his handgun and went out to investigate. But the local police saw a guy with a handgun wandering around in the dark, so they shot and killed him.

The story of the 72-year-old from Fort Worth is very similar to the story of George Zimmerman. The moral of both stories is that you shouldn’t voluntarily engage in any activity in which you think you might need a gun to protect yourself. The old guy should have let the police investigate the burglar alarm, and Zimmerman should have let the police look for the suspicious-looking teenager.

The higher-level moral of both stories is that you should live in safe gated communities and not in prole neighborhoods.

The even higher-level moral of both stories is that you should graduate from an elite Ivy League university so you can get into a good career track so that you can afford to live in that safe gated community.

John Stossel explains.

Oil must be sucked out of the ground, sometimes from war zones or deep beneath oceans. The drills now bend and dig sideways through as much as 7 miles of earth. What they discover must be pumped through billion-dollar pipelines and often put in monstrously expensive tankers to ship across the ocean.

Then it’s refined into several types of gasoline, transported in trucks that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Finally, your local gas station must spend a fortune on safety devices to make sure we don’t blow ourselves up while filling the tank.

And it still costs less per ounce than the bottled water sold at gas stations. If government sold gas, it would cost $40 per gallon. And there would be shortages!

Read it.

I’d like to be … under the sea … in an octopus’s garden, with you….