Read it.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning. The fact that there is no TWA any more makes it feel very alternate-universe, like watching the Pan-Am markings on the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Read it.

Ponder the number of UAW jobs that didn’t get created. When they say ‘pro-choice’, I don’t think that’s the kind of abortion they had in mind.

Read it.

The claim that no Jewish temple ever existed in Jerusalem and that Jews have no rights whatsoever on the Temple Mount is part of the “temple denial” doctrine that has been increasingly internalized in Palestinian academic, religious, and political circles since the 1967 Six-Day War. Others, both Jews and non-Jews, believe that a temple did exist but indicate that the Jews abandoned the area soon after the destruction of the Second Temple nearly two thousand years ago. From that time onward, Jews lost all direct contact with the Temple Mount and relocated their central worship site to other locations, such as the Mount of Olives and later the Western Wall.

How many types of ‘moms’ do we have these days?

We’ve all heard of ‘soccer moms’ and ‘working moms’ and ‘single moms’ and ‘stay-at-home moms’, but the list appears to be expanding day by day.

This morning on the radio I heard a talking head refer to pro-abortion activist Wendy Davis as ‘drawing support from cul-de-sac moms’.

Ponder what sort of creature a ‘cul-de-sac mom’ might be.

Read it.

Actually, it’s a two-pronged criticism. One part, so far as can be discerned from the video, is that Kerry was on his pleasure craft rather than hunkered down in some secure office at Foggy Bottom or the White House basement. The second part of the criticism is that Kerry’s staff initially denied that he was on the boat, but later, after photographs appeared, conceded it.

Democrats lie. Not news.

The famous definition of a diplomat, after all, is someone sent abroad to lie for his country, not someone who lies to his own country about what the Secretary of State is up to.

That was then, this is now.

No matter how powerful and important you are or think you are, it’s still a good idea to get away from the office sometimes.  The change of pace and scenery might prove refreshing and beneficial, inspirational even. The paradox is that all the smartphones, laptop computers, wireless Internet access, and other technology that make it easier to “get away from the office” also make it harder to “get away from the office,” because even if you are physically distant you can still be in touch.

That’s what we’re afraid of. Nothing frightens me more than knowing John Kerry is responsible for our foreign policy.

Freeberg has, as usual, some wise things to say.

There is a Freeberg Addendum to the Aristotle Laws of Thought: When we have to pretend a thing is something other than what it is, to keep someone from getting all pissed off and bent out of shape, it’s time to admit we’re surrounded by nitwits who are just looking for reasons to be offended.

Read it.

Au contraire — I would, and he needn’t bother with the hoodie.

Bieber represents the ideal quisling in the War Against Men, the Titless Girl Masquerading as a Male, and ought to be removed from the gene pool, not because there’s any danger of it reproducing, but just on general aesthetic grounds.

Read it.

Something interesting is taking place in Western religion.  Although the waves are small, one is witnessing the rise of identitarian religion.  What is identitarian religion?  It’s ethno-religion, basically the religious norm for 99% of human history.  In fact, the extreme universalism of Christianity over the past few centuries is the historical aberration. So, when I say “religion 2.0,” this religion is really nothing new, but a return to a traditional concept of religion.

Read it.

Wait a minute… the ‘family farm’ has robots? When did that happen?

Robots are perfect for tedious and boring tasks, and they seem to be well-suited for the repetitive labor of farming. More and more robots are getting into the farming industry, with the potential to displace a lot of human labor. It might take some time before robots are growing a significant portion of our food supply, but farming technology could solve a lot of problems (and create a few more labor problems as well). Here are just a few more farming robots that might take over our farms.

Read it.

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

Activist Mark Dice walked up and down a beach in California that he thought would be thick with Obama voters. He carried a clipboard with a petition to repeal the Bill of Rights and asked passers-by to support Obama by signing the petition. He kept up a patter about how the Bill of Rights is outdated and Obama has been doing all he can to get rid of it. Almost everyone he stopped signed the petition….

Read it.

Surely, if you’ve watched a few Pixar films, you’ve noticed at least one of the many easter eggs that Pixar includes—they always reference other Pixar movies. It’s a staple. Most of the films, for example, include the “Pizza Planet Truck” from Toy Story.

At first glance, you might think it’s just Pixar having fun and giving nods to their other work. Nothing that, you know, means something. But if you look close enough—as Jon Negroni does here—you might start noticing that there are threads that can theoretically tie all the films together somehow in a single timeline.

I hear the ghost of Steve Jobs cackling in the background….

Read it.

The future of work looks bleaker than it needs to for one simple reason: we bring consumption sensibilities to production behavior choices. Even our language reflects this: we “shop around” for careers. We  look for prestigious brands to work for. We look for “fulfillment” at work. Sometimes we even accept pay cuts to be associated with famous names.  This is work as fashion accessory and conversation fodder.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

 It’s funny, though, how blacks keep migrating to states like Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina. You might almost think that blacks find they do better in Republican-run states that are pro-jobs and pro-affordable family formation than in liberal Democratic states like Vermont, where prices are high and the economy shackled. Isn’t it time for Vermont to start a strong affirmative action campaign to rid it self of its shame of being the least diverse state in America?

It’s all that maple syrup, makes them racist. Aunt Jemimah, you know, all that sort of thing.

Read it.

Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi is a loyal Republican, a decent guy, and generally a good senator. He also needs to retire from the Senate because he is not good enough, and I don’t care if that makes him sad.

The New York Times probably thought it was helping him recently when it ran an article about how Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz is planning to challenge him in the 2014 Republican primary. The Times hailed him as “a studious, low-key legislator who worked well with Senator Edward M. Kennedy,” and Enzi probably thinks that’s a compliment.

For that reason alone he needs to go.

He needs to go because we can do better. It’s not about Mike Enzi or any other Republican politician. It’s about winning this war against progressivism, and if you aren’t leading the fight then bow out and make room for someone who will.

Read it.

Consider this:

· About one in every four individuals who are eligible for Medicaid in this country has not bothered to enroll.

· About one in five employees who are offered employer-provided health insurance turns it down; among workers under 30 years of age, the refusal rate is almost one in three.

Think about that for a moment. Millions of people are turning down (Medicaid) health insurance, even though it’s free! Millions of others are turning down their employers’ offers. Since employees pay about 27% of the cost of their health insurance, on the average, millions of workers are passing up the opportunity to buy health insurance for 27 cents on the dollar.

You almost never read statistics like these in the mainstream media. Why? Because they completely undermine health policy orthodoxy: the belief that health insurance (even Medicaid) is economically very valuable, that it improves health and saves lives, and that the main reason why people don’t have it is that they can’t afford it.

Welcome to the huge disconnect in health reform. On the one hand there are the people who are supposed to benefit from health reform. On the other hand there are the people who talk about it and write about it. I think it’s fair to say these two groups almost never meet.

But wait, there’s more.

I have described before the experience of emergency room care in Dallas:

“At Parkland Memorial Hospital both uninsured and Medicaid patients enter the same emergency room door and see the same doctors. The hospital rooms are the same, the beds are the same and the care is the same. As a result, patients have no reason to fill out the lengthy forms and answer the intrusive questions that Medicaid enrollment so often requires. At Children’s Medical Center, next door to Parkland, a similar exercise takes place. Medicaid, CHIP and uninsured children all enter the same emergency room door; they all see the same doctors and receive the same care.

Interestingly, at both institutions, paid staffers make a heroic effort to enroll people in public programs ? working patient by patient, family by family right there in the emergency room. Yet they apparently fail more than half the time! After patients are admitted, staffers go from room to room, continuing with this bureaucratic exercise. But even among those in hospital beds, the failure-to-enroll rate is significant.

And why is that?

Under ObamaCare, similarly situated individuals are going to be expected to pay a monthly premium the way they pay their utility bills. But with this difference. When people don’t pay their electricity bills, the utility cuts off their electricity. When they don’t play their rent, the landlord throws them out in the street. But when they don’t pay their health insurance premium, what happens then? Not much.

Let’s see: Do a lot of work, get health care. Do no work, get pretty much the same health care. Well, the choice seems clear.

Read it.

Of course, while it’s all very well to piously state that correlation doesn’t imply causation, it does leave us with a conundrum: under what conditions, exactly, can we use experimental data to deduce a causal relationship between two or more variables?

Read it.

The researchers found that while math and science majors drew the most interest initially, not many students finished with degrees in those subjects. More students dropped out of math and science majors and fewer students switched into them than any other area of study, including professional programs, social sciences, humanities and business.

Funny thing about that. I started out as an economics major at Yale, until I got a D in calculus. That was the finger of God pointing.

Read it.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

The Other McCain is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Let’s start with the obvious: If Glenn Greenwald is a “serious journalist,” I’m a McChicken sandwich with a side order of fries.He’s an emotionally unbalanced weirdo who knows as much about national security as Andrew Sullivan knows about vaginas.

Steve Sailer deals some inconvenient truth.

 The housing project was on K-Street, kitty-corner from the NPR headquarters. Today, the housing project is a parking lot that charges $8 per hour. Could it be that NPR executives, K Street lobbyists, and others who can pay $8 per hour to park got tired of being polar-bear hunted, and are pretty effective at eventually getting their way?

…

Have you ever noticed that every single thing in America — Washington D.C. housing, Harvard, Augusta National, Goldman Sachs, Teach for America, or whatever — runs on the basis of selectionism? The people with the power pick the new people they want to have around and don’t pick the people they don’t want around. The only exception to this pattern is immigration policy, where, as we all know, it would be unconscionable for citizens to have a say in who gets to become citizens. Didn’t you hear that George W. Bush made a speech this weekend in favor of immigration reform? Who are you to doubt the word of George W. Bush?

Read it.

Why? Because a classic diet coupled with cardiovascular exercise will result in weight loss, but it will come at a cost as 60% of the weight loss will be fat (that’s good!) while the remaining 40% will come from muscle (that’s really, really bad!).

Foseti brings the heat.

The only difference between Detroit and the Third World in terms of corruption is Detroit don’t have no goats in the street.

‘Hey, they speak English….’ No, they don’t. Listen to Eminem for a bit.

Charlie LeDuff grew up as a white kid in Detroit. He leaves Detroit to write at various major news outlets. Eventually he moves his young family back to Detroit to be closer to his extended family. He ends up depressed, violent, and just beaten down by the city. He also discovers he’s black. Along the way, he finds a lot of things that are incredibly interesting and criminally underreported. He’s an interesting guy.

He is indeed.

The catalog of problems is terrible. Alarms don’t work at the fire stations. Fire men have to fix up the station to keep it from crumbling. LeDuff discovers that city officials have been embezzling money slated to maintain the fire stations. He writes a story on it. In perhaps the most revealing episode of the book, no one even pretends to care. City officials are stealing millions, firefighters are (literally) dying, the city is plagued by arson, and no one cares.

Well, that’s Michigan for you. Blue State all the way.

Read it.

What could you do with just a compass and a strightedge?

Read it.

As the confrontation became physical and Dos Santos refused to leave the field, Da Silva allegedly produced a knife and stabbed the player, who died while being taken to hospital.

Reports said that outraged spectators responded by running on to the field and stoning Da Silva, before severing his head and sticking it on a stake in the middle of the field.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Steve Sailer indulges in a little revisionism.

The arrogance of the South Carolinians and their followers in the six Deep South cotton states would not have plunged the nation into a war that killed 750,000 Americans if not for Abraham Lincoln’s Hicksville unpreparedness. Indeed, Lincoln’s worldly Secretary of State William Seward came up with a brilliant plan to avert civil war at the last moment, only to have it shunned by a jealous Lincoln.

A glance at a map showing the dates of secession suggests that it might have been contained at the brushfire stage.

Read it.

In 1862, after President Abraham Lincoln appointed him secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton penned a letter to the president requesting sweeping powers, which would include total control of the telegraph lines. By rerouting those lines through his office, Stanton would keep tabs on vast amounts of communication, journalistic, governmental and personal. On the back of Stanton’s letter Lincoln scribbled his approval: “The Secretary of War has my authority to exercise his discretion in the matter within mentioned.”

The telegraphy system has been called ‘the Victorian Internet‘.

Read it.

One incident summarizes the confusion. A friend I was traveling with became sick. Conveniently, the man we were just about to interview had been a doctor in the war. It turned out he had been a vivisectionist. He organized “medical training” sessions in which the Japanese would take healthy Chinese people, strap them to tables, and practice field surgery on them: bowel resection, limb amputation, and (after shooting them) bullet removal. They did it without anesthesia. Why waste that on Chinese people? This man had abused the most basic premises of what it means to be a doctor. But he was a good doctor to us, helping my friend. We thanked him.

I feel the same way about abortion doctors. What does it take to kill an innocent child, then go home to the wife and kids and maybe watch a little television? There is a reason the that Hippocratic Oath begins with Primum non nocere, ‘First, to do no harm’.

I recently wrote a piece for CNN about a Syrian rebel who carved out a man’s heart and began to eat it. The editor had asked me to explain what could make a man do such a thing. I tried to explain, and many people were outraged by what I wrote. In one way or another, they were all saying: You think when you try to understand why men do evil things, you are going to learn something that might help prevent atrocities in the future. But really you are just excusing the perpetrators, justifying unjustifiable actions. The only thing you need to understand about evil is how to punish it.

And likewise, Islam is an evil religion — a religion that blesses what other religions curse (murder, robbery, deceit when it is profitable, rape, slavery) and more or less says ‘Whatever profits our group is good, whatever disadvantages our group is bad.’ By that standard, there is no moral difference between Islam and National Socialism or Communism.

Read it.

 People who keep llamas as pets will readily offer you any number of reasons: llamas are quiet, they’re gentle and affectionate, they don’t take a lot of work to maintain and, for outdoor animals, they don’t smell bad.

But it’s more than that. Look at a llama and it’ll gaze back sympathetically with those huge, beguiling eyes, ears perked up, looking for all the world like it understands you and really cares about your problems.

You can also use them to carry stuff for you on the trail, and they will flat kick the crap out of coyotes, which is why they are often used by sheep farmers to guard their flocks.

 Her husband said he gets a lot of questions about it. “People come up to me and ask, ‘Why are the llamas humming?’ ” he said. “And I’ll say, ‘Because they don’t know the words.’ ”

Congressmen are a lot like that.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, peeks into the cesspool.

Zimmerman. “It’s hard to find a sympathetic character in the entire saga,” opined our editors about the Zimmerman trial. Oh, I don’t know. I’m quite sympathetic toward Zim. He thought he’d be an active citizen, helping to keep his neighborhood safe. The poor sap thought he was living in the old, free America, where citizens looked out for each other, raised barns together, attended town meetings, and the rest.

That America is long gone, at one with Nineveh and Tyre. Town meetings nowadays are packed with activists from ACORN and GLAAD, and before you can raise a barn you need to spend two years and $100,000 on lawyers to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement. Whom did Zim think Neighborhood Watch has to watch out for? The poor guy’s living in the past, and that’s something toward which I’m definitely sympathetic.

Guy Somerset takes the red pill.

Most of us now realize that both political parties are corrupt to their core and little distinguished by their platforms. A significant portion of us knows that all publishing, broadcast, newsprint, and to a large degree electronic content is owned by a handful of companies whose interests are hostile to ours.

Dude — welcome to the world of the Crust. If you’re not on the outside, you’re the one being digested.

Read it.

Something surprising has happened with many so-called “sustainable” buildings. When actually measured in post-occupancy assessments, they’ve proven far less sustainable than their proponents have claimed. In some cases they’ve actually performed worse than much older buildings, with no such claims. A 2009 New York Times article, “Some buildings not living up to green label,” documented the extensive problems with many sustainability icons. Among other reasons for this failing, the Times pointed to the widespread use of expansive curtain-wall glass assemblies and large, “deep-plan” designs that put most usable space far from exterior walls, forcing greater reliance on artificial light and ventilation systems.

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

Read it.

Because ? is ‘Thursday’, you twit. everybody knows that.

Read it.

Even so, most workers tick DILLIGAF* box on survey.

And rightly so.

Read it.

… which is a vast improvement over being a Marxist terrorist, which is the actual reason why he was imprisoned in 1962, although the ass-licking coverage in the Voices of the Crust don’t dare mention it … not being part of the Narrative.

Read it.

Not so’s you’d notice from the Obama administration.

The great Allen Guelzo (one of the Power Line 100) wonders something simple: why didn’t President Obama or even Vice President Foot-in-Mouth attend any of the commemorative observances of the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Gettysburg this week?  For that matter, why haven’t the mainstream media covered the story?

Hey, Gettysburg was just so 150 years ago….

Read it.

Engelbart’s vision, from the beginning, was collaborative. His vision was people working together in a shared intellectual space. His entire system was designed around that intent.

From that perspective, separate cursors weren’t a feature so much as a symptom. It was the only design that could have made any sense. It just fell out. The collaborators both have to point at information on the screen, in the same way that they would both point at information on a chalkboard. Obviously they need their own pointers.

Likewise, for every aspect of Engelbart’s system. The entire system was designed around a clear intent.

Our screen sharing, on the other hand, is a bolted-on hack that doesn’t alter the single-user design of our present computers. Our computers are fundamentally designed with a single-user assumption through-and-through, and simply mirroring a display remotely doesn’t magically transform them into collaborative environments.

If you attempt to make sense of Engelbart’s design by drawing correspondences to our present-day systems, you will miss the point, because our present-day systems do not embody Engelbart’s intent. Engelbart hated our present-day systems.

An excellent piece, and a model for its kind.

Read it.

I like it. It has texture, and scope.

Read it.

     One thing that’s remarkable about the testimony of Rachel Jeantel is that it puts on display a black whom one would simply never see under the standard media unspoken rules. Any depiction of a black who came across as so deeply ignorant, frankly stupid, transparently hostile, and flagrantly dishonest would be met with accusations of racism because it is so unflattering. One sees such blacks turning up in youtube videos of course, but I’m not sure I’ve seen any such in the media, even in news reports of crimes, which, I’m sure, are likewise sanitized for public view.

Of course not. It wouldn’t fit The Narrative.

Read it.

This guys is obviously unaware that There Is A Consensus. He’d better get with the program.

‘The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind.’ — Thomas Paine , Common Sense

Read it.

What would The Working Class be without Karl Marx? Not much, apparently.

Karl Marx, writes Jonathan Sperber in this splendid new biography, was “a true and loyal friend, but a vehement and hateful enemy”. To be in his small circle was to feel part of something historic, but also to be exposed to constant critical scrutiny. Once he feared for his political reputation, Marx let no politesse hold him back.

Sounds a lot like Ayn Rand.

It’s certainly true that Marx needs to be understood in his nineteenth century context. It is also true that, as an intellectual, he must be rooted in the canon of political thought his century inherited. As Sperber neatly puts it, Marx’s “communist aspirations” derived from “ideas about abolishing distinctions between individuals and civil society”. These ideas were far from novel.

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.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, deals some inconvenient truth.

 The pretense of science is not science. If government officials truly wish to be scientifically driven, they would allow each of us adults to choose which drugs we wish to take, regardless of the objective likelihood that someone will die or be seriously injured if he or she chooses to be treated with some drug.

Put differently, the scientifically correct level of riskiness of drugs for me is whatever level of riskiness I choose to tolerate. I — not some third party, not even one with an M.D. and who is appointed by government — am the only person on Earth capable of knowing the truth about what is, for me, the appropriate level of riskiness of drugs. Ditto for you.

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.