Read it.

Via Scott Shackford, at Reason, we learn of “The Scourge of Illegal, Underground Dinner Parties.” In short, people are paying to attend dinner parties featuring fancy food. And such transactions are unregulated.

Naturally, people are concerned. Presumably, some of those concerned parties are restaurants that are subject to heavy taxation and regulation that are nonetheless facing competition from the seedy purveyors of underground dinner parties. I don’t think the people concerned about unregulated dinner parties are going far enough. You know what else is unregulated? The kitchen at my house.

Think about what the means for a second. It means that my children–children, mind you–are being fed food that’s prepared in unregulated, uninsepected, and possibly less-than-sanitary conditions. The burgeoning field of Helen Lovejoy Political Economy demands that something must be done. For the children, of course.

The horror….

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, goes to the (kinda sorta) movies.

I have to admit, he’s got some real contenders here. My favorite:

Afratar. A group of African Americans, weary of groaning under the heel of white privilege and fearful for the lives of their children at the hands of trigger-happy racist cops, have built a starship and fled to a distant solar system. There they have colonized a planet, which they have named Sha’Quaynelle, and established a peaceful and prosperous society.

Just as the Sha’Quaynellians are engrossed in the annual planet-wide chamber music competition, a fleet of ships from a large mining corporation arrives, crewed entirely by white men chewing tobacco and speaking with Southern accents. They want to plunder Sha’Quaynelle for its mineral wealth. The Sha’Quaynellians are forced to flee the clean, beautiful cities they have built and take to guerilla warfare in the forests.

A heroic Sha’Quaynellian physicist discovers a way to nullify the invaders’ technology and cut off their communication with Earth, defeating them at last. In the closing scenes we see the evil white invaders being used by the Sha’Quaynellians as beasts of burden while they rebuild their cities.

“A searing indictment of American racism.” —Christian Science Monitor

You’ve got to admit, that would be a shoo-in.

Read it.

First off, Miss Kansas Theresa Vail is a sergeant in the U.S. Army, only the second contestant ever to be on active duty.

“Nobody expects a soldier to be a beauty queen,” Vail told People magazine. “But I’m all about breaking stereotypes.”

Second, Sgt. Vail has big tattoos. Two of them. One, the insignia for the U.S. Army Dental Corps, is on her left shoulder, while a massive version of the Serenity Prayer runs down her right side. And when she struts her stuff in the bikini contest in the Miss America competition this week in Atlantic City, they’ll both be on display for the world to see.

Words fail me.

Read it.

It’s one thing for a deliberately polarizing legislator like Morse to lose a close race in a swing district. It’s quite another for Giron to lose by 12 points in a district that is 47% Democratic and 23% Republican. One reason is that in blue collar districts like Pueblo, there are plenty of Democrats who cling to their Second Amendment rights. As the Denver Post noted, 20% of the voters who signed the Giron recall petitions were Democrats.

The Colorado Senate is now 18-17 Democratic, and 19-16 pro-Second Amendment. On gun issues, and on many others, the balance of power is now held by moderate Democrats, rather than by the hard left faction formerly led by Morse.

Read it.

Walking out of the new Star Trek, a friend of mine told me he wished the movie made an effort to show off what the future of today could look like, rather than the future of the ‘70s. I stopped for a second and realized that when you take out all the space travel, lens flares, and spandex uniforms, it wasn’t even four-decade-old predictions we were seeing in IMAX 3D, it was the technology we interact with every day. Everyone in the movie walks around carrying an iPad. They have heads-up displays projected on glass. They talk to each other on cell phones. For a series that inspired a generation of engineers to go out and make these incredible things they saw on TV, it’s hugely disappointing to see this big-screen admission that they’ve run out of ideas.

Read it.

It could have been SO much worse….

On the other hand, I still don’t see any excuse for not using the layout used by adding machines.

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

Among the most economically naive calculations that people (including government officials) make is to estimate the growth in tax revenues based on the assumption that nothing changes beyond a hike in the tax.  So, for example, if 10,000 pounds of apples are sold each week in Hometown, USA, and the government of Hometown imposes a 50-cent per pound excise tax on apple sales, it’s tempting for the economically uninformed to conclude that this tax will raise the weekly revenues of Hometown’s government by $5,000.  A staple of any decent principles-of-microeconomics class is to show that such a static calculation is mistaken.  Any such static calculation is arithmetic masquerading as economics.

Read it.

In an effort to deter the US from attacking Syria, the “International Human Shields” movement is eying to locate civilians to Damascus from across the globe, including Britain and the US, reports the Daily Telegraph.

Even as residents are evacuating Syria, hundreds of activists are volunteering to be placed in harm’s way against possible air strikes, despite the dangerous nature of the protest.

So we can spank Syria and at the same time help clean up the human gene pool? I’m in.

(Actually, no; this is a very stupid idea. But they’re making it very tempting….)

Bryan Caplan points out some inconvenient truth.

 Kevin Drum and Chris Mooney have already posted excellent summaries of this neat study of motivated numeracy.  You should read them.  But if you prefer the digest version: Even unusually numerate people take off their thinking caps when the numbers are ideologically inconvenient.

Read it.

Assuming, of course, that that is what you want to do.

An amazing map.

Biggest losers: Blue states. But you knew that.

Biggest winners: Red states. But you knew that too.

When people vote with their feet, they vote for freedom. (That’s why a lot of people want to come to the U.S., and not many want to go to Zimbabwe or Haiti.)

Read it.

Stealth wear, clothing and accessories created to protect their wearers from surveillance, has largely been an abstract concept. Most designs are created as prototypes, not items that can be purchased in a department or drug store.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro….

Read it.

A man who squared up to cops after a domestic disturbance stabbed himself in the chest three times before biting the officers’ dog, according to reports from the US.

This is news?

The incident began at about 7.45pm when a deputy sheriff responded to a report of a domestic dispute in the Californian city of San Jose.

Oh, well, California — say no more….

Read it.

Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing is spreading the wealth around again this year, giving away some $3.25 million from his personal bonus to the company’s employees around the world, reports Bloomberg. That’s an extra $250,000 over the $3 million he gave away in an identical gesture last year, and will roughly amount to an extra month’s pay for most of the 10,000 recipients. To put it in context, Yang made about $14.6 million last year, including just over $4 million in bonuses.

Something neither Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs ever did. Nor any of the ‘my taxes aren’t high enough!’ moguls who support Obama-socialism.

Don Boudreaux gives us a little elementary economics.

One way – there are many ways, of course – to highlight the marvelousness of our age is to note that, unlike for the multitudes of all of our pre-industrial ancestors, nearly everything that an ordinary denizen of our age consumes is something that

(1) that person did not personally make;

and, most spectacularly,

(2) no single person knows how to make – that it, it is something the construction and supply of which require the knowledge, skills, and efforts of literally millions of individuals.

What to watch out for in the coming weeks — and years.

Dependency, debt, and cronyism imperil our nation just as much as terrorists operating in Drone-free zones. That troika of hazards risks rendering the fabric of our democratic republic. It leads, ultimately, to a decline in economic strength and, ultimately, to a rise in totalitarianism.

With government consuming an ever-larger percent of GDP, economic growth becomes more difficult. Every day we witness signs of executive usurpation in Washington. While care for the poor, the disadvantaged and the elderly is noble (and necessary in many cases), we must be wary that government does not become overly paternalistic; for dependency weakens the moral fiber of society.

Debt is insidious; it creeps up on little cat feet, especially in an environment of artificially low interest rates. And cronyism is the consequence of bigness – in government, banks, corporations, media/entertainment and unions. Theirs’ is a symbiotic world, each feeding off the other.

Dependency is dangerous no matter the form it takes; it is antithetical to nature. The protective instinct of new parents gives way to the equally natural instinctive knowledge that long-term survivability depends, in some measure, on self-sufficiency. In the wild, animals understand that survivorship of their species means their off-spring must become self-reliant. Birds nudge fledglings from nests high above the ground. While man is societal, he recognizes his responsibility to himself and those who depend on him.

Read it.

First Law of Dealing With Introverts: LEAVE THEM THE FUCK ALONE. The rest is commentary.

Read it.

Why liberals always wind up indulging it in, however fervent their protestations of devotion to Peace.

Read it.

Words of wisdom from a Voice of the Crust. (Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.)

The obvious flaw with eating outside is that the weather is often unpleasant. That’s why people aren’t suggesting that we eat outside all the time. Only on special “it’s such a nice day!” kind of days do people want to go outside. But what’s a nice day? Well, it’s a day when the temperature outside approximates the results of indoor climate control technology.

And there it is.

Read it.

Conspicuously absent from recent discussion is the role and attractiveness of central cities for families with children. In the past, research and observation both indicated that suburbs provided families with cheaper land and housing, as well as safer neighborhoods and higher quality schools.

If you don’t have — and aren’t going to have — more than one or two kids, there’s no reason to move to the suburbs. If it’s just you and your current squeeze, living in an apartment is not a problem, and you’ve got plenty of free time for clubbing, art galleries, the opera, art films, coffee houses, and trendy parties; nobody needs a sitter, and your biggest problem is finding your way home while tipsy.

Famed scientist and science-fiction author Isaac Asimov attempted to predict, in 1964, what the future would be like 50 years down the road.

I always love reading these sorts of articles. (Did you know that they still have ‘world’s fairs’? I didn’t. I don’t recall hearing anything about them in the news since about 1970. Remember the ‘Motreal Expos’?)

The saddest thing is that Isaac Asimov was a typical Other Left Coast Liberal, as his autobiography makes clear, and a lot of what he predicted would come to pass (Moon colonies! Fission power!) have been made politically impossible by people who believe just like him.

Read it.

These laws include a ban on magazines over 15 rounds (rifle or pistol), background check requirements for every sale in the state, and a new tax–described as a service fee–for those background checks. The background check requirement effectively ends private sales within the state.

Read it.

This week, the movement stands to get a shot in the arm with the release of a new book, Impeachable Offenses: The Case for Removing Barack Obama From Office. Co-author Aaron Klein, a reporter for the website WorldNetDaily, says preorders of the book by retailers and book clubs were “approaching six figures” prior to its release Tuesday, and the publisher plans to deliver copies to the offices of members of Congress shortly after they return to Washington on September 9.

Read it.

In two species — the white-footed mouse and the meadow vole — the brains of animals from cities or suburbs were about 6 percent bigger than the brains of animals collected from farms or other rural areas. Dr. Snell-Rood concludes that when these species moved to cities and towns, their brains became significantly bigger.

As with ‘global warming’, the default assumption seems to be that if anything significant happens in the world, it’s the fault of humans. George Carlin must be spinning in his grave.

Read it.

Guess they’re feeling the hot breath of automation on the backs of their necks….

‘Handloom weavers, meet Ned Ludd. Ned Ludd, meet handloom weavers. Now I’m sure you folks have a lot to talk about….’

Alex Tabarrok (a Real Economist)

More than anyone else, Winthrop Aldrich, representative of the Rockefeller banking interests, was responsible for the separation of commercial and investment banking. With the help of other well-connected anti-Morgan bankers like W. Averell Harriman, Aldrich drove the separation of commercial and investment banking through Congress. Although separation raised the costs of banking to the Rockefeller group, separation hurt the House of Morgan disproportionately and gave the Rockefeller group a decisive advantage in their battle with the Morgans.

This is the same reason behind the Crustian .01% cry “Raise my taxes!” — it will ‘hurt’ them in ways that they won’t really notice, while crippling the ‘almost rich’ with whom they compete for luxury goods.

Here’s the big picture. Under certain conditions, free markets channel self-interest towards the social good – that is the meaning of the invisible hand theorem. Unfortunately, there is no invisible hand theorem for politics. There are institutions, such as democracy, checks and balances and an independent judiciary, which help to channel political self-interest if not to the public good then at least away from the public evil. Even given the right macro institutions, however, breaking the iron triangle of politics is difficult. Industry self-interest and the public interest will typically align only accidentally. Universities are not less self-interested than any other actors but support for basic research is (arguably) in the public interest. The usual situation, however, is that industry self-interest pushes well beyond the point of alignment with the public interest. At current spending levels, lobbying by defense firms does not benefit the public even if national defense is a public good.

Read it.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe everything will be fine. Maybe the “widening gap between rich and poor” is temporary. Maybe the steady growth in the proportion of jobs that are part-time and/or low-paid will soon reverse.

Or maybe the idea that all the homeless need are old laptops and a few JavaScript textbooks is not unlike the claim that new technologies automatically create new jobs for everyone. Maybe, unless something drastic changes, most people are totally screwed.

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen….

The strange present, we may conclude, is one in which the middle class is slowly being squeezed out of an economy that is gradually dividing into two camps, the few rich and the many poor.

Thereby reverting to the norm throughout human history. My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Henry Blodget says: “Hate To Say It, But If Companies Don’t Start Paying People Better, We May Need Unions.” But unions only matter if labor is valuable, and with every passing year, technology renders labor more irrelevant. When the 5.7 million licensed truck drivers in America are replaced by self-driving vehicles, they can go ahead and strike all they like. Nobody will care. Hardly anybody who matters — which is to say, the rich, the powerful, the technical — will even notice.

The classic definition of ‘proletariat’ is ‘those whose only contribution to society is children’. But what happens to the proletariat when their contribution is no longer needed?

Read it.

 Although I argue for the importance of creativity in human affairs, and therefore of the importance of the creatives who do the primary work of creativity; it should not be forgotten that creativity is a means to an end – and when the end is evil, so is creative activity.

Modern society has become more and more evil – which is to say organized in pursuit of destruction of The Good – the Good being (roughly) truth, beauty and virtue.

Sort of the theme of this blog, when you think about it.

Read  it.

Italian road trip.

Read it.

But far more expensively.

Read it.

‘So what do you teach?’ she asked as I worked on her presentation.

‘Computing’ I replied.

‘Oh… I guess these days you must find that the kids know more about computers than the teachers….’

If you teach IT or Computing, this is a phrase that you’ll have heard a million times, a billion times, epsilon zero times, aleph one times. Okay I exaggerate, but you’ll have heard it a lot. There are variants of the phrase, all espousing today’s children’s technical ability. My favourite is from parents: ‘Oh, Johnny will be a natural for A-Level Computing. He’s always on his computer at home.’ The parents seem to have some vague concept that spending hours each evening on Facebook and YouTube will impart, by some sort of cybernetic osmosis, a knowledge of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and Haskell.

Normally when someone spouts this rubbish I just nod and smile. This time I simply couldn’t let it pass. ‘Not really, most kids can’t use computers.’ (and neither can you – I didn’t add.)

Steven Hayward is not afraid to ask some pretty obvious questions.

The great but frustrated hope of liberals is that people will vote their supposed class interest, that is, that people of modest incomes will vote for higher taxes (on others) and bigger government.  It is a matter of frustration for liberals when the working class doesn’t vote for Democrats: see Thomas Frank’s famous What’s the Matter With Kansas?  (Actually, don’t see it; it’s stupid; one can just as easily ask, What’s the Matter With the Upper West Side?, where rich liberals vote for candidates who want to raise their income taxes.  Voting against economic self-interest on the Upper West Side is taken as a sign of enlightenment rather than the interest-denying stupidity that is attributed to the GOP-voting working classes of the red states.)

…

I was recalling over the weekend for an audience of mostly liberals the moment that George McGovern realized he was going to lose his Senate seat in the 1980 election: he was in a supermarket checkout line in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where two women in line ahead of him told him that although they were lifelong Democrats, they weren’t going to vote for him this time because he was “too liberal.”  They then proceeded to purchase their groceries with food stamps.

Read it.

Oh, maybe because you don’t live in New York, Boston, or some other coastal city with good legacy public transportation. That’s just a guess, you understand.

Read it.

Remember that they next time you see a lot of hand-wringing over ‘family farms’.

Read it.

A statistical analysis from England suggests that a woman’s IQ is inversely proportional to her desire to breed. This, in turn, suggests that the world will grow dumber with every new day.

Perhaps this is why men are so attracted to airheads–they want their genes to be propagated, not wasted.

Kanazawa is widely known as a “controversial” researcher, which is coded speech meaning that his results cause significant discomfort among those who swallow the reigning cultural dogma. In the past he has faced approbation, ridicule, and even job dismissal for publishing studies that claim black women are less attractive than women of other races due to their higher testosterone levels, sub-Saharan Africa’s poverty is caused by low IQ, intelligent men are less likely to cheat on their partners, and attractive people are more likely to produce female offspring. He also wrote that if Ann Coulter had been president in 2001, she would have dropped nuclear bombs on the Middle East and won the War on Terror “without a single American life lost.”

Yeah, Ann is pretty focused; more so than most men in government.

Western sophisticates claim that the world already has enough people, and many tend to see it as a matter of conscience to not breed. The problem is that hordes of Third Worlders suffer no such ethical qualms. Paradoxically, the pampered First World utopian ideal that the world should be intelligent, sustainable, and filled only with children who are wanted could backfire and create a planet crammed almost exclusively with emotionally, financially, and intellectually deprived Third World bastards.

Cue The Marching Morons.

TakiMag has some fun with some very fun people.

As the story goes, Oprah was ogling a $38,000 handbag at a Zurich boutique a month or so ago when a Swiss clerk allegedly told her it would be “too expensive” for her to purchase. The former queen of daytime talk shows, who’s now doing publicity for her film The Butler and apparently can use some press hype, threw an old-school Congo conniption and blamed the incident on—what else?—racism. Although the store clerk disputes crucial details, the Associated Press deemed the event a “racist encounter” and Switzerland’s national tourism office proffered a slobbering apology.

Looking at her skin color, weight, and gender, it’s obvious that Oprah belongs in Congress.

 In what is perhaps the most disjointed and nonsensical essay ever to appear on the Internet, a female Yahoo! scrivener took talk-show host Chelsea Handler to task for not, er, um, properly handling the fact that her grandfather owned a book with a swastika on it, even though he “probably wasn’t a full-blown Nazi.” Handler is commended for being Jewish and scolded for failing to realize that “this is, you know, HITLER. Slow. It. Down.” Is. It. Wrong. To. Think. That. People. Who. Put. Periods. After. Every. Word. Like. That. Should. Be. Exterminated?

I’m in.

Freeberg points to some inconvenient truth.

Only a true-believing liberal can see his precious theories bump up against and enter into a conflict with reality, and declare reality to be the loser.

…

One may wish to pay attention to how the conclusions are reached. I’ve noticed before that one of the things that make liberal articles — blogs too, not just newspapers — hard to read is that it takes so long to get to the nuts & bolts of the story. It seems you always have to drill through twenty paragraphs about how disgusting something is and what all you’re supposed to think about it, before you get to the facts.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, makes pessimism a high art.

It’s not clear that American democracy, as it has developed to the present, really is so wonderful. One of our big political parties somehow manages to market itself as the party of the Little Guy while owning the allegiance of all the Big Guys in town. (The biggest of them all is second-largest shareholder in the party’s main propaganda organ.) The other party is heavily favored by non-Hispanic white voters yet is in financial thrall to donors and interest groups determined to drown that voter segment in a sea of cheaper immigrants.

Been there, said that. Speaking of China:

    Of the 25 Politburo members before the 18th Party Congress [last November], 19 had run provinces larger than most countries in the world….A person with Barack Obama’s pre-presidential professional experience would not even be the manager of a small county in China’s system.

What do they know that we don’t?

The drift of our own political culture seems to be confirming the Founders’ intuition that representative government can only work in a population possessed of some minimum level of virtue—thrift, restraint, industriousness, stoicism in the face of misfortune, willingness to defer gratification, and concern for the common good.

No wonder the country is headed down the drain.

Jerry Pournelle speaks the truth that politicians dare not think.

\The court martial trial of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan drags on, and no one can understand why. The constitution provides a definition of treason – levying war on the United States – which certainly fits the action of an armed man shooting military men and women while crying “Allah Akbar!” on a military base. What else could that be but treason? Major Hasan should have been ceremonially stripped of his rank in the presence of representative troops, then either hanged or shot, wheel chair and all, and this done last year. The wounded should get their purple hearts. This was no workplace incident, this was an act of war by a Muslim against the armed forces of the United States of America, and it should be treated as such.

Read it.

Hey, I’m all for that.

‘If you think as we do,” says Ben Nelson, “Harvard’s the world’s most valuable brand.” He doesn’t mean only in higher education. “Our goal is to displace Harvard. We’re perfectly happy for Harvard to be the world’s second most valuable brand.”

Uh, no. It’s the second most valuable brand. If you can’t get that right, you’ve got no future.

Mr. Nelson founded and runs the Minerva Project. The school touts itself as the first elite—make that “e-lite”—American university to open in 100 years. Or it will be when the first class enters in 2015. Mr. Nelson, who previously led the online photo-sharing company Snapfish, wants to topple and transcend the American academy’s economic and educational model.

And why not? Higher education’s product-delivery system—a professor droning to a limited number of students in a room—dates back a thousand years. The industry’s physical plant (dorms, classrooms, gyms) often a century or more. Its most expensive employees, tenured faculty, can’t be fired. The price of its product (tuition) and operating costs have outpaced inflation by multiples.

In similar circumstances, Wal-Mart took out America’s small retail chains. Amazon crushed Borders. And Harvard will have to make way for . . . Minerva? “There is no better case to do something that I can think of in the history of the world,” says Mr. Nelson.

Yeah, and everybody brags about how they shop at Walmart. Sales are the only measure when it comes to education.

Read it.

1. One person (or two people) did not have the ancestral state of all of our DNA.
The person whose cells housed the common mtDNA ancestor (or Y ancestor) also had all of the other chromosomes (1-22 and X), but did not house the common ancestor of each of these chromosomes. These non-sex chromosomes are a lot more complicated. This touches on why it is also misleading to refer to the common ancestor of genetic “males” versus “females.” Genetic females are not only their mtDNA – we also have 22 non-sex chromosomes, and two X chromosomes! Genetic males are not only their Y (and mtDNA), they also have 22 non-sex chromosomes and one X chromosome! Because the non-sex chromosomes (autosomes) can swap DNA, and are inherited through both the sperm and the egg, they much more complicated history than the Y and mtDNA.

2. A lower bound, not a point estimate.
Tracing back to the common ancestral mtDNA or the common ancestral Y chromosome does not tell us when anatomically modern humans arose. We can estimate the TMRCA, or the Time to the Most Recent Common Ancestor, but this mtDNA surely existed much further back in time.

Read it.

 I was interviewed by two different science writers to comment on this paper, and in both interviews I stressed how inappropriate the “Adam Y” and mitochondrial or “mtDNA Eve” analogies are. You can see how well they took that into consideration: here and here. I really enjoyed talking with the journalists, so hope they won’t think I’m picking on them either because, to be fair, nearly every popSci article used this analogy (see here, here, here, and here). I’ll take a sentence here to especially note the article by Francie Diep, here, that took a different approach.

While I have several reasons to disliking this analogy, I cannot fault the journalists completely for using it in this instance. Aside from my protests, there is no reason science journalists should think that it is a bad analogy, because it was used in the manuscript (without context or explanation).

Read it.

Of all fallacies, ad hominem endures the harshest abuse, yet we all know in our hearts that it really does matter that Michael Moore is fat

Which is where Bradley Manning comes in.

…

Isn’t the more pressing question really “What the hell kind of army lets a twink like this join in the first place?”

Steve Sailer waxes dyspeptic.

 As for my influence, I’ve been writing a long time, and I’m stoic about the fact that my influence works through labyrinthine laundering processes, where my ideas eventually show up in more sonorous forms on the op-ed page of the New York Times weeks or months or years after I publish them. Eventually, I expect to be recognized as The Guy Who Figured Out the Answers to the Hard Questions, but I don’t expect that to happen before I’m very old. Such is the way of the world …

On the other hand, the media conventional wisdom considers Bryan’s extremism to be admirable, if perhaps a little too forthright for the peasants at the moment. Unfortunately, it’s not a good idea to blithely assume that elites won’t get what they keep shouting for, no matter how stupid it is. To update for the 21st Century H.L. Mencken’s apothegm on democracy, “Mediacracy is the theory that the elites know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

The problem is that there can be a lot of collateral damage when sanity is considered unmentionable in elite discourse.

That America is better than other places is obvious from the fact that a lot of people want to move from There to Here. It seems obvious to me that those who are Here ought to want to keep Here as good a place as possible, and I don’t see in what way that’s a bad thing; how does letting in a lot of people from There do that? They have equally obviously not been very successful at making There a better place, otherwise they would want to stay There.

So how do we keep Here the place we want it to be, and keep it from becoming Just Another There? The experience of the European countries is, I think, instructive — never have so many from There been allowed into Here, and the results have been invariably negative — for every 10 things good about such ‘diversity’, there are 100 things bad. Ought we not to learn from the mistakes of others? Do we have to keep reinventing the wheel (or, more accurately, the rack)? The whole ‘come one, come all’ attitude makes absolutely no sense to me.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

With Barack Obama having Wall Street’s back over the last five years (i.e., virtually no prosecutions for the events leading up to 2008), it’s only natural that Silicon Valley leaders have been thinking about getting their own tame black President, too: namely, Cory Booker, a former Stanford football player, whose job as mayor of Newark makes it easy for him to hit the national broadcasts out of New York City.

I haven’t paid too much attention to Booker, but he seems like a more energetic and prepossessing personality than Obama, so the notion seems plausible that in a country with a large demand for black Presidents but a small supply of plausible ones, Booker would be worth investing money in.

Read it.

Conservatives and liberals alike may be surprised to find that in reality John C. Calhoun, a South Carolina antebellum statesman and political theorist, and his pro-slavery allies, stand firmly as the intellectual forebears of the political philosophy of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and the modern left. Calhoun and the antebellum thinkers behind the positive defense of slavery in the nineteenth century represent the first major criticism of American founding principles – principles the American conservative movement seeks to preserve – as well as the intellectual seed for the later Progressive movement and what is considered modern-day liberalism.

Read it.

In all of these examples, building infrastructure was never the engine of growth, but rather a lagging indicator of growth that had already occurred in the private sector. And when the infrastructure was built, it was often best done privately, at least until the market grew so large as to demand a wider public role, as with the need for an interstate-highway system in the mid 1950s.

There is a lesson here for President Obama: Government “investment” in infrastructure is often wasteful and tends to support decaying or stagnant technologies. Let the entrepreneurs decide what infrastructure the country needs, and most of the time they will build it themselves.

Read it.

What I have decided is that the Buckley Rule is a stupid rule because it is not a rule, but a saying jackasses use to crap on candidates they don’t like. They did not think Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Pat Toomey and many others in the Senate and House were electable.

While they would point out, similarly, a list of conservatives who did not win, I’d say that’s the point. Views on electability differ and I don’t think you or I should take anyone else’s word for it. We should see for ourselves.

RedState’s rule is simple. We back the conservative in the primary and the Republican in the general. If fortune smiles, we wind up beating the squish in the primary and winning the general. It does not always work out that way, but often it does. There are a lot of Republican incumbents who suck. They are neither kings, nor princes, nor dukes. They do not get to dwell in the seat until they themselves decide to vacate the seat. The people are allowed to boot them out of the seat.

And I’m happy to help do that.