Read it.

Young children almost universally produce lactase and can digest the lactose in their mother’s milk. But as they mature, most switch off the lactase gene. Only 35% of the human population can digest lactose beyond the age of about seven or eight (ref. 2). “If you’re lactose intolerant and you drink half a pint of milk, you’re going to be really ill. Explosive diarrhoea — dysentery essentially,” says Oliver Craig, an archaeologist at the University of York, UK. “I’m not saying it’s lethal, but it’s quite unpleasant.”

Hmmm. I hear ‘enhanced interrogation technique’….

Antiplanner pushes back against the latest Crustian jawboning.

“All the studies show” that the millenials “want to live where they can walk, whether that’s the city or an urban suburb,” she tells Washington Post reporter Paul Windle. Gallaher herself lives in New York City’s West Village, while Windle lives in inner Washington, DC, so their own personal anecdotal evidence easily confirms what “all the studies show.”

All the studies are done by academics who live in cities and know little about places where kids ride bicycles on the sidewalk.

Suburbs need to re-invent themselves, says Gallagher, by providing “A place people want to walk around. Organic, village-type environments that are how the suburbs started to begin with. Public transit also. People want out of their cars, especially millennials.” Again, the verdict is still out about whether millennials “want” out of their cars; somehow, I suspect US DOT researcher Don Pickrell is correct (as previously noted here) that high unemployment rates have more to do with the reduced amount of driving they do at the moment.

Let’s say Gallagher is right and young people will prefer to live in mixed-use developments and use transit over driving. Gallagher’s solution is to turn the suburbs into West Villages (or, going back to the real founder of the New Urbanist movement, Jane Jacobs, Greenwich Villages). That’s an invitation for urban planners to do all sorts of expensive and intrusive meddling into people’s lives.

And that’s what they’re really after — people living their lives according to Crustian prescriptions rather than their own preferences.

Read it.

Enter the world of food distribution, however, and you all but travel back in time to the last century. Much as it was done throughout the 1900s, food distributors use a largely paper-based system and onsite visits to take orders and payments. Phone orders and fax are widely used, sure, but ecommerce options –  even basic email – are scarcely found.

As a restaurant owner (and technophile) this frustrating situation is something I constantly agonize over. And notably it runs contrary to other parts of the restaurant industry, where automation and efficiency are driving innovation. Owning a restaurant is highly stressful and the margins are slim, so entrepreneurs like myself need every bit of efficiency we can get, and I believe tech is the answer.

Read it.

While Weinberg and Scott stress that they have studied data only for one university (and urge similar research at other institutions), they also suggest that the logic behind lifting mandatory retirement for higher education was flawed. Most other employers were barred by law in 1986 from using mandatory retirement, but colleges were given an exemption for a while, based on concerns that delays in retirement would make it difficult for colleges to hire people in emerging disciplines, and to diversify their faculties. But Weinberg and Scott note that these arguments became considerably weaker when the National Research Council issued a study in 1991 predicting that those things would not happen.

Read it.

 Kim Ki-hoon earns $4 million a year in South Korea, where he is known as a rock-star teacher—a combination of words not typically heard in the rest of the world. Mr. Kim has been teaching for over 20 years, all of them in the country’s private, after-school tutoring academies, known as hagwons. Unlike most teachers across the globe, he is paid according to the demand for his skills—and he is in high demand.

Read it. And watch the video.

For decades from 1714, experts and enthusiasts submitted their ideas to the Board of Longitude in the hope of winning a £20,000 prize – worth £1.5m in today’s money.

Now, the full story of attempts to solve the longitude problem is available in Cambridge University’s Digital Library – with documents and drawings online. Here, with Cambridge historian Prof Simon Schaffer, look at some of the ideas that failed, and the timepiece credited with providing the solution.

Read it.

 CNN reports that dozens of CIA agents were on the ground there — and that they’re being pressured to keep quiet. Why?

As Nixon learned to his sorrow, and as many have had their noses rubbed in it since, it’s not the original situation but the coverup that will get you.

Read it.

‘Where does he get those wonderful toys?’

Good advice.

You should also click on the link and look at the pictures of the people involved, because it will help you to follow the advice I’ve previously given which is to avoid marrying anyone who looks like she could be on a “Real Housewives” show.

Fisking Steven Pinker.

Predictions about the future of humankind are better left in the hands of writers who see human nature whole, and who are not out to prove that it can be shaped or contained by the kinds of “liberal” institutions that Pinker so obviously favors.

Read it.

None of the Internet giants have unionized employees, which has made Silicon Valley a favorite target for civil libertarians.

Ponder the assumption that not having unionized employees makes you a target for ‘civil libertarians’. Ponder what that says about those who pass as ‘civil libertarians’ today.

There’s a very good reason why unions have never had a presence in Silicon Valley: they aren’t fans of technology. Labor unions have aggressively fought Uber and Lyft, which threaten taxi drivers with increased competition. They’ve effectively paralyzed a multi-billion-dollar sharing economy industry from spreading around the country.

Unions — dinosaurs from an earlier age. And it makes perfect sense; unions are about getting benefits for workers, and modern technology is focused on machines doing work that people used to do. Unions and technology are natural enemies.

Not to be outdone, one of the largest labor unions in the country, AFL-CIO, is the leading opponent of more high-skilled immigrants, calling the tech community “greedy” for wanting to make it easier to hire foreign engineers.

While, of course, unions aren’t greedy for wanting to stick the ‘tech community’ with higher costs.

Read it.

Young people increasingly look down on politics as useless and think only losers choose a life of government work, a pessimistic new poll found.

Yeah, well, they’ve got a job and you don’t, ‘nation’s youth’ … who’s the loser now? (Your parents are paying for it in either case, but they don’t have to live in the basement.)

Gavin MacInnes comes clean.

Getting a BA in English lit and taking all the insane lefty electives that surround it is a great way to spend tons of money getting brainwashed. Before I went to college, I had common sense. I believed women are fundamentally different than men and I didn’t think everything is racist. It took them four years to convince me otherwise and about twice that long to recover. (This was in the early 90s before LGBT persecution took over the lexicon.)

Liberal-arts programs don’t point out why angry young men are being irrational. They tell us we’re not angry enough. Professors believe the customer is always right, so they provide kids courses on Sticking it to the Man. We wanted to blow minds with radical ideas, but our professors outdid us every time. I was sorta pro-choice as a teen, but my professor went a step farther by telling us it was OK to have an abortion up until a year after the baby was born. All you needed to do to be outrageous in college was quote your teachers. By the time you get your diploma, you are convinced the Western world is run by rapists from the KKK. We learned to be offended on behalf of others, and how they felt about the matter wasn’t even important. If they didn’t agree with our crusade, they needed more “education.” That’s the same cure for people who resist Scientology: more Scientology.

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

… the KKKrazy Glue that holds together the disparate elements of the Obama Coalition is fear and loathing of white racists, even when they aren’t racist. Or white.

The only reason Zimmerman was put on trial for murder was because, in their lust to find a white racist murderer of an innocent black baby who got away by flashing his White Privilege Card, the media didn’t bother checking a photo of Zimmerman before inflating this exurban police blotter item into the Defining Event of Our Times.

Read it.

In 1977, the federal government put a warning label on saccharine, claiming it caused cancer. It took only 20 years to to admit this was wrong. Then there’s the so-called Healthy Food Pyramid created by the USDA to advise Americans on the composition of a supposedly healthy diet. Although many still follow the recommendations of the food pyramid, it has since been questioned by researchers and nutritionist and even cited as a potential factor in America’s skyrocketing rate of obesity. Now we have another example of bad advice — government recommendations on sodium intake.

Tell the truth: We’ve all wanted to do that.

David Friedman thinks of cool stuff so that you don’t have to.

Malthus started with the observation that humans like sex, and sex produces babies. He concluded that, unless there were large costs to producing babies, population would increase at something close to the biological maximum, leading to an exponential growth rate high enough to overcome any plausible rate of increase in human productivity. Looking around him, he observed that  most people were poor enough so that the cost of supporting an additional child was a substantial burden. He concluded that if that was not the case, if, as Godwin and Condorcet, the authors he was responding to, expected, the future saw a sharp rise in the standard of living of the masses, making additional children only a minor burden, population would increase rapidly and the pressure of population against a fixed supply of land would push standards of living back down.

It’s an elegant argument and provides a plausible explanation for most of human history, but one that stopped working within the lifetime of its author. Why? What went wrong with Malthus’ model?

Jerry Pournelle, whom you really ought to be reading all the time.

Democracies endure until the majority learns that it can vote itself largess from the public treasury. Up to that point awarding yourself money for doing nothing was known as graft. Old Ed Crump, the highly popular and successful city boss of Memphis when I was growing up, used to talk about ‘honest graft’ dishonest graft. Honest graft was the sort of thing like knowing where a road would be built or improved and tipping off your friends to buy out in that direction. Dishonest graft was stealing money from the treasury or intimidating taxpayers. Crump talked openly about it: he didn’t put up with theft and embezzlement and incompetence, but he rewarded efficiency and honesty. Oddly enough, most people believed him, and did so all the time I was in Memphis. I haven’t been back since. I suppose there has been some kind of debunking and posthumous degrading of the old man since I left in 1950.

Unfortunately, most of our politicians grew up reading Rawls, who just assumed that a pie drops magically from the sky and spent all of his time obsessing about how it was going to be divided; his intellectual progeny spend all their time focusing on distribution and not enough of it on production, with results as you see them.

Moore’s law is inexorable. We can do more and more with less and less. The precision gyros and accelerometers in a Minuteman missile cost millions of dollars. Now you can get a full set of gyros and accelerometers with a GPS receiver to boot on a chip for under $50, and that cost is falling. You can build a satellite capable of doing crop forecasts for a few thousand dollars and get it launched as a cube sat. Telemetry is no longer expensive – the batteries cost more than the electronics. In the early days of spy satellites we had to drop physical film packages and catch them off Hawaii before they fell into the sea to get good pictures of the Soviet ICBM installations. Now a cubesat can give you an instant picture at much better resolution.

David Friedman ponders the distinction between laws and social norms.

 You observe a stranger, in public, in possession of what is obviously stolen property of significant value. You might ignore it, but you also might call the police.

Unless it’s a shopping cart. The value of a shopping cart is about a hundred dollars and any that you observe outside the grocery and associated parking lot are almost certainly stolen. Yet, in practice, you do not call the police. My guess is that practically nobody does—or that the police don’t come, or that if they come they make no effort to arrest the thief. The basis for that guess is casual observation—if there were any significant chance that walking off with a shopping cart would get you arrested, tried, and jailed with a sentence suited to the value of the cart, very few people would do it.

Read it.

Earlier today I spent some time with Andrew, his lovely and talented girlfriend Naomi Brockwell, and several other liberty-loving folk (btw, thanks Frayda & Ken!).  Andrew observed that professional politicians are unique among professionals in denying membership in their profession. No electrician who arrives at your home to repair your electrical wiring announces that he’s emphatically not a professional electrician.  No physician whom you visit to set your broken leg or to relieve your hemorrhoids eagerly lies to you that she is most certainly not a professional physician.  Yet the typical professional politician is forever announcing that he or she is not a professional politician.

Gavin MacInnes tells all.

One of the best things about living in the country is how little you care about “city” issues such as the Peruvian Kraut who killed a gangster’s son or a bunch of savages rioting halfway across the world. Here in upstate NY where nature’s tranquility meets summer’s heat, you sweat the small stuff.

Everybody wants to be Hank Williams, but nobody wants to die.

Read it.

British interests have been represented for decades by the same person who embodies the non-political customs and traditions of the U.K. In the U.S., every four years America could be represented by someone who has a different sense of what it means to be an American than whoever previously lived in the White House.

And far too often they get it wrong: Woodrow Wilson. Teddy Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt. Lyndon Johnson. Bill Clinton. Barakc Obama. ‘Nuff said….

Although not granted their position in virtue of their birth, American presidents enjoy some lifestyle perks that are similar, if not superior, to the perks the British royal family enjoys. The White House is a mansion that resembles a palace, yet the British prime minister, the most powerful politician in the U.K. and the American president’s counterpart, gets to live in the comparatively modest 10 Downing Street, an attached office and living area that does not have the absurd amenities that the president enjoys in the White House, such as a bowling alley, swimming pool, tennis court, and cinema. Neither the Queen nor her prime minister get a security detail anywhere near as large as the American Secret Service.

One of the chief benefits of monarchy is perspective — Queen Elizabeth has seen every political fad cone and go for over 60 years, and probably isn’t impressed by any of them. There’s an amusing story that in her final days Queen Victoria was presented by the War Office with proposals that were characterized as ‘entirely new’. After reviewing them, she allegedly responded, ‘No, Mr Bannerman. Lord Palmerston presented me with these exact same proposals in 1852. And Lord Palmerston was wrong.’ That’s the sort of perspective the American government has always lacked at the top.

Read it.

Even a blind pig finds an acorn every now and again.

Read it.

Really, they deserve what they get.

Read it.

Who would know better what a piece of shit this law is?

Read it. And watch the video.

America’s renewable fuels policy is a fiasco that drives up the cost of both fuel and groceries, to no purpose. Well, there is a purpose: lots of people are making money off the renewable scam. But probably not you.

Read it.

Just think what they could do with the government.

Think about getting your driver’s license renewed. Now think about checking it at a car rental counter. Why can’t the former be as efficient as the latter?

Freeberg waxes philosophical.

The thing that is not pointed out, is this: Humans who live in civilized societies, have a hunger for, and a fascination with, equality; the idea that anybody can grow up to become anything. Humans who live in civilized societies have a hunger for, and a fascination with, inequality as well. Deep down, we are programmed to admire the caste system. It’s in our wiring. In fact, we have to do some work to get away from it. Here in America, we consider that our patriotic duty. The “don’t care about the baby” types have completed that intellectual struggle, and they perceive, wrongly in some cases, that the “look at that pretty dress Kate’s wearing” people have not done this and therefore have betrayed their birthright.

It has been made a sensitive issue now that we are living in the age of Obama. All Americans with common sense and a decent, working, long-term memory, have seen how this glorification of living idols can mask over — and perhaps encourage — glaring and dangerous defects in judgment on the part of those living idols, or on the part of their peers or subordinates. For those who lack this working long-term memory, there are the stories of Bob Filner and Anthony Weiner. More democrat men tripping over their own dicks. Twice in rapid succession, we get to repeat the Kennedy/Clinton/Hart/Edwards/Spitzer waltz, with the moves now committed to muscle memory: Contrite apologies in front of banks of microphones, with the wife dutifully standing by…which everyone knows are just apologies for having been caught. We also know the wife isn’t standing by out of love, she’s standing by as a business partner, because with democrat politicians that’s what the wife is. And, since the unfaithful husband is a democrat, there will be the expected and obligatory defiant refusals to step down. The democrats can’t fail standards they never had in the first place. Oh yeah, and “blah blah blah performance in public office blah blah blah private life.”

Steve Sailer looks out at the wasteland of American political thought.

With Barack Obama solemnly recounting for us last Friday how being black in America has personally burdened him, race is back in the news.

Actually, race is always in the news. Still, it’s worth using this particular intersection of inanity—during which the president and the Attorney General have made themselves look more foolish than Geraldo Rivera—to think through the most important question about race in the 21st century: How horrible would it really be if it became respectable to discuss racial realities seriously and intelligently?

Oh, as if THAT would ever happen….

The lesson that the prestige press tells us to take away from the Trayvon affair is that “profiling” (i.e., pattern recognition) inevitably leads to murderous frenzies. Some of the virulence of the media’s denunciations of George Zimmerman for putatively profiling stems from an underlying chain of logic in elite thinking that I find scary: If young black males really do tend to be more crime-prone, then…oh, no, the Nazis were right! So if Americans ever become embarrassed by the insipid political correctness we instruct them to spout, they will immediately thaw out Hitler’s cryogenically preserved brain and elect it president. Or something.

Not so much a Slippery Slope as a Cliff.

The day before the president’s speech about the “historical context” behind the Obama Administration’s War on Zimmerman, Detroit announced bankruptcy. Should Detroit’s failure be assessed within the context of four decades of black rule, the first 19 years under the overtly anti-white Coleman Young?

Whether it should or not, it won’t be. The Left spends most of its day with fingers jammed in ears saying LALALALALALALA.

Ron Unz turns over a rock.

My expectations proved entirely correct, and the correlations between Hispanic percentages and local crime rates were usually quite close to the same figures for whites, strongly supporting my hypothesis that the two groups had fairly similar rates of urban criminality despite their huge differences in socio-economic status.  But that same simple calculation yielded a remarkably strong correlation between black numbers and crime, fully confirming the implications of the FBI racial data on perpetrators.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

I am sitting in my air-conditioned house, where it is 75 degrees, and I need light bulbs. Do I go outside where it is 100 degrees and drive the half-mile to Target to get them, or do I click with my mouse to get them cheaper and wait for two days for them to arrive at my doorstep? The question answers itself.

Read it.

No wonder Bloomberg wants to ban it — the Crust don’t want their children to have the competition.

Read it.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna allows us a peek into his life.

Why is Gates of Vienna dangerous?

Two possibilities suggest themselves. The first is the obvious one: speaking out in the manner commonly seen at this site may result in the loss of employment, official harassment, intimidation, and/or arrest (at the hands of the civil authorities). It may also invite death threats, physical attacks, serious bodily injury, and/or death (at the hands of Muslims or the thugs of UAF and its ilk). So danger lurks on all sides for anyone who decides to publicly oppose the Islamization of Britain.

Yet there is another kind of danger in such activities for those who inhabit the privileged heights of British society: ostracism, loss of status, being dismissed from a lucrative sinecure and forced to take a lesser one, the contempt and mockery of one’s peers, etc. It takes a steel backbone to endure to this sort of treatment and remain upright.

Read it.

Shocking news! Washington state officials have discovered that hiking taxes on cigarettes way above that inflicted on the residents of neighboring states gives people reason to buy smokes in bulk across the border and peddle them to bargain hunters. Who ever would have guessed? Well, aside from anybody with a brain, that is.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Nationally, cigarette smuggling is a big business, largely because taxes have been hiked sky-high in a nanny-state effort to deter smoking. Putting the emphasis on neo-prohibitionism rather than revenue has resulted in 60.9 percent of cigarettes consumed in New York being sourced from the black market. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (that’s a party!) says state governments lost $5 billion in 2010 because Americans preferred to purchase black market cigarettes rather than get mugged by the authorities.

State officials could lower cigarette taxes to take the profit out of smuggling, but they’d rather use the tax code to send a message. That message seems to be that going to the black market is a great way to save a buck — or make a mint.

Dymphna connects the dots.

Perhaps because there is a disappointing lack of widespread “burn-baby-burn-and-bust-me-some-cracker-heads” outbreaks across the country, our President chose to make a surprise speech today. That is, the occasion was a surprise, but the speech was the usual narcissistic insertion of himself into the story in order to generate a crisis. The man loves crises but mostly all he’s managed to create are scandals. And they go on and on. So he needs the race riots he keeps begging for.

So now we have a disgraceful and profoundly disrespectful ‘spontaneous’ speech about how he and Trayvon are soul mates. Trayvon Martin was a throw-away kid. He’d been suspended from school numerous times and was headed to a life as a petty criminal. He lived among various relatives because no one wanted him from Day One. Obama, on the other hand, was – and remains – a child of privilege. Though he and his groomers have done their best to erase the man’s past, we know he went to private schools until he hit Columbia. And his way was paid through private Harvard Law School, though we have little to no access to his records there or to his writings before his ascent to the White House. There is a short recording somewhere of an interview when he was a state senator.

Read it.

And who are still in charge of our foreign policy today.

War makes for strange bedfellows. Among the oddest pairings that World War II produced was the bringing together of William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) — a precursor to the CIA — and a group of German Jewish Marxists he hired to help the United States understand the Nazis.

Read it.

Voter ignorance and elite ignorance are in fact closely related. If the voters were more knowledgeable, they could select candidates who demonstrate a deep understanding of policy issues and, to paraphrase Kaiser, “know and care more about substance than politics.” But in a world where most people don’t even know the name of their representative, they are unlikely to be able to evaluate his or her knowledge of policy issues. Moreover, evaluating that knowledge would require the voters themselves to know more about policy than most of them actually do. In this way, voter ignorance helps produce political leaders who are often ignorant themselves, albeit not quite to the same degree.

‘Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. The maxim is so perfectly self-evident that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it. But in the mercantile system the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer; and it seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce.’ — Adam Smith

So much for ‘intellectual property’.

Read it.

These findings weren’t new. Seven previous studies had already shown that vitamins increased the risk of cancer and heart disease and shortened lives. Still, in 2012, more than half of all Americans took some form of vitamin supplements. What few people realize, however, is that their fascination with vitamins can be traced back to one man. A man who was so spectacularly right that he won two Nobel Prizes and so spectacularly wrong that he was arguably the world’s greatest quack.

Why take a chance? That’s all I’m saying….

Read it.

In some areas, they still do.

It’s tempting to think of sacred tombs and ancient monuments as our best window into other cultures. But archaeologists have long known that if you really want to understand a civilization, to know its people’s passions, weaknesses, and daily rituals, look no further than their garbage.

Read it.

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A society in which all potential abilities are allowed to develop and function will have a survival advantage in the competition of groups. This competition becomes more severe as the destruction of distance intensifies the confrontation of states.

Will & Ariel Durants’ The Story of Civilization was one of my first purchases after I acquired gainful employment, and I’ve never regretted it. They flourished before Political Correctness gained its stranglehold on academia, so their opinions tended to be fact-based rather than steeped in Identity Politics.

Read it.

I would have thought that ‘snoutfair’ meant a gathering of feminists, but I guess not.

Read it.

Libertarians find themselves attracted to doctrines that would wipe out libertarianism if implemented. In other words, they are suicidal.

Read it.

The use of version control by programmers leads to profound changes in the practice of programming. I suspect that the same would be true for writers and publishers, too.

Steve Sailer tells it like it is.

Read it.

It would certainly explain Nancy Pelosi.

Read it.

No, it’s not what you think.