Read it.

Not something that you’d expect to find in the Washington Post.

In my years as a journalist, I have written and spoken a great deal about women’s lives and struggles, and wrote a book about the conflicts facing successful female professionals. But today, 16 years into life as a working mother and 23 years into a marriage, I’ve come to question many of the truths I once held dear. The woman I wanted to be at 22 is not the woman I wanted to be at 38 — not even close — and she is certainly not who I am now at 55.

When life meets ideology, ideology tends to lose.

The debate has become twisted and simplistic, as if we’re merely trying to figure out how women can become more like men.

That has defined the core of ‘feminism’ since the 60s. Kinda late to the party….

During my high school years in the early 1970s, revolution was in the air. Across the bay was Berkeley, the home of free speech. Twenty miles up the road was Haight-Ashbury, the home of free love. And almost everyone I knew was protesting Vietnam and embracing civil rights.

I had similar experiences. But I never liked those people. I suspect that history has proven me right — they weren’t really very likeable.

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

… recent studies show that the use of ethanol and biodiesel does not reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For many years, proponents of decarbonization assumed that the burning of biofuels would be “carbon neutral.” The carbon neutral concept assumes that as plants grow they absorb carbon dioxide equal to the amount released when burned. If true, the substitution of ethanol for gasoline would reduce emissions.

But a 2011 opinion from the Science Committee of the European Environment Agency pointed out what it called a “serious accounting error.” The carbon neutral concept does not consider vegetation that would naturally grow on land used for biofuel production. Since biofuels are less efficient than gasoline or diesel fuel, they actually emit more CO2 per mile driven than hydrocarbon fuels, when proper accounting is used for carbon sequestered in natural vegetation. Further, a 2011 study for the National Academy of Sciences found that, “…production of ethanol as fuel to displace gasoline is likely to increase such air pollutants as particulate matter, ozone, and sulfur oxides.”

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Note the subhead: ‘That would be a miracle–and a nightmare.’ The ‘nightmare’ is that of the eco-nazis, whose campaign to cancel the 20th century can only succeed if it can persuade — or force — the rest of society to give up the energy-dense fossil fuels that have driven progress ever since the internal combustion engine was invented.

Gavin MacInnes reports.

I quit smoking weed because when you have kids, you need to be on call in case someone has a nightmare. You can’t tell your daughter monsters don’t exist when you’re starting to think that maybe they do.

Read it.

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

The why of this flight from the legal protections and relative security of the above-ground economy isn’t a huge mystery. Surowiecki tries to emphasize cultural changes that have companies and workers both preferring contactors and temp work, but many of those shifts seem likely responses to taxes and regulations that make traditional employment more expensive and less attractive than it once was. As Surowiecki concedes, “Feige points to the growing distrust of government as one important factor. The desire to avoid licensing regulations, which force people to jump through elaborate hoops just to get a job, is another.”

Ya think?

John Derbyshire gives us a little political incorrectness.

White people love ethnic diversity, but only as it relates to restaurants.

Zip code 02116 is in congressional district 8, which went for Obama 58-41 last November. That’s Barack Obama, the guy whose political career was launched in the living room of terrorist bombers Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. There’s your irony.

Irony. The prole-hating white Tutsi classes were of course on their knees praying to saints Abraham, Martin, and John that the Boston bombers would turn out to be white clingers.

Read it.

I looked hard at the 60 MBA students and said “President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you.”

More silence.

I could tell they were waiting for me to break the tension, laugh, and admit I was joking.

I did not.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, tells you some inconvenient truth.

 Many errors are made by assuming that things scale linearly when they don’t. For example, if you triple your speed on the highway (from 35 mph to 105 mph), you probably won’t triple the mileage you cover in an hour. You’ll likely spend plenty of time parked on the shoulder, explaining to a police officer why you were driving so fast.

One of the most frequent and unfortunate failures to understand that things don’t always scale linearly involves democracy. Too many people assume that what holds true for their book club or homeowners association holds true for democratic polities of millions of people.

That last may not be a good example — most homeowner’s associations are as rigidly fascist in their outlook as the Congressional Black Caucus. But I take his point.

 The U.S. Capitol building in Washington might be called “the People’s House,” but in reality, I am no more welcome into the inner chambers of that building than I am welcome into the boardroom of IBM or into the office of the CEO of Disney. And what’s true for me is true for 99.99999 percent of other Americans.

Actually, being an economics professor, he’s likely far more welcome there than would be, say, a truck driver or a plumber. The Crust don’t like to rub elbows with proles, after all.

Read it.

I’ll keep repeating it until it sinks in: There Is No Such Thing As Intellectual Property. Property is stuff that, when you have it, nobody else does. This ain’t that. The term ‘intellectual property’ is like ‘gay marriage’, a category mistake. I tell you three times.

Read it.

But what exactly happens to your once-beloved iPod once you relinquish it to the recycling bin?  We spoke with three e-Stewards certified recyclers from coast to coast to get some insight into the last moments of our abandoned gadgetry and where our old devices go to die.

John Tierney is not afraid to write what everybody knows.

Recycling does sometimes makes sense-for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environrnentally safe landfill. And since there’s no shortage of landfill space (the crisis of 1987 was a false alarm), there’s no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative. Mandatory recycling programs aren’t good for posterity. They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups-politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations-while diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems. Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.

Read it.

And is it responsible for MSNBC? I can’t think of any other explanation.

Read it.

Read it.

Automation lowers costs by eliminating manual labor.

Ponder the positive and negative externalities of that.

Read it.

The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless the latter is identified with the number of patents awarded – which, as evidence shows, has no correlation with measured productivity. This is at the root of the “patent puzzle”: in spite of the enormous increase in the number of patents and in the strength of their legal protection we have neither seen a dramatic acceleration in the rate of technological progress nor a major increase in the levels of R&D expenditure – in addition to the discussion in this paper, see Lerner [2009] and literature therein.

As we shall see, there is strong evidence, instead, that patents have many negative consequences. Both of these observations, the evidence in support of which has grown steadily over time, are consistent with theories of innovation that emphasize competition and first-mover advantage as the main drivers of innovation and directly contradict “Schumpeterian” theories postulating that government granted monopolies are crucial in order to provide incentives for innovation.

The differing predictive and explanatory powers of the two alternative classes of models persist when attention is shifted to the historical evidence on the life-cycle of industries. The initial eruption of small and large innovations leading to the creation of a new industry – from chemicals to cars, from radio and TV to personal computers and investment banking – is seldom, if ever, born out of patent protection and is, instead, the fruits of highly competitive-cooperative environments.

Read it.

Cathy Young calls him out.

This deplorable history of sexism is very real. Yet to insist that any mention of a woman’s attractiveness must therefore be off-limits in any work-related setting is, in effect, to let sexism win. Such a taboo subtly perpetuates, rather than undercut, the notion that a beautiful woman is unlikely to be smart or competent (after all, even to acknowledge her beauty implies it’s the sole basis of her success!). It also promotes a blatant double standard: since men do not face the same cultural burden of being “the fair sex,” a female politician can compliment a man’s good looks with impunity. (Would eyebrows have been raised if Hillary Clinton had referred to San Francisco’s mayor Gavin Newsom as the country’s best-looking mayor?)

Read it.

It is possible to imagine another Times writer discussing higher education’s role as a class sorting machine. But the liberals would end the op-ed with a call for admitting more people to college, and Brooks would trail off into nostalgia for the alleged era when Ivy graduates had more noblesse oblige and the rest of the country reciprocated by respecting their authority. And maybe someone would try to argue for a “national service” program, the better to get the elite out into the world for a bit before they run it. Douthat, who has a healthy decentralist streak, seems to suggest there’s something wrong with the whole setup to begin with. Better still, he’s doing it in the paper that serves as the class in question’s community bulletin board.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Steve Sailer says what others merely think.

     In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class.…I learned to look on the commercial middle class with loathing and contempt. Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher, which was also the revenge of the commercial middle class. The academics lost their power and prestige and the business people took over. The academics never forgave Thatcher….

The only thing I’d add is that in reality, a commercial middle class usually breeds its own critics. And I’m using “breeds” literally. Consider the perhaps most prestigious clan in the history of the British intellectual middle class — the Darwin-Galton-Wedgwood-Benn-Keynes agglomeration.

John Derbyshire remembers Margaret Thatcher.

One of the first things Margaret Thatcher’s government did was to remove exchange controls. It was a small thing but a blessing for ordinary people like me. (For the rich there had always been ways to move money across borders. Governments of any party rarely inconvenience the rich.)

John describes this as ‘semi-Sovietized’, and that’s pretty accurate. These policies were what made the Rolling Stones tax exiles and move George Harrison to write ‘The Taxman’ — not that it prevented either from voting for the same twits who originated that legislation in the first place; creative people seem to have a problem connecting those particular dots.

 Capitalism, like dentistry, is a matter of creative destruction. There is nothing creative in the Thatcher-haters’ cruelty. It’s just purposeless malice.

Yup.

Read it.

One reason why we need to shut down our conscious selves to perform routine maintenance is that our visual system is so greedy. Glucose metabolism is a zero-sum game, and functional MRI studies show a radically different pattern of glucose metabolism during sleep, with distinct regions activated either in active or sleep states but not in both. As soon as we close our eyes for sleep, a large proportion of available energy is freed up. Just as most planes must be grounded to refuel, we must be asleep to restore our brains for the next day. A radical sleep technology would permit the equivalent of aerial refuelling, which extends the range of a single flight (or waking day).

…

Never mind that if we are to speak of maintaining natural sleep patterns, that ship sailed as soon as artificial light turned every indoor environment into a perpetual mid-afternoon in May.

Read it.

I’m not saying that the federal government should eliminate all medical or scientific research funding. But the next time someone makes the argument that any cuts in the budget for federal medical research means that the medical breakthroughs will not happen, the story of Robert Edwards and test-tube babies is a pretty good comeback.

Read it.

I, for one, am not surprised.

 Because the pundit class in America is related to so few people who want to enlist in the military, there’s negligible media awareness of how hard it has become to join up. A major hurdle is scoring high enough on the AFQT cognitive test.

The Pentagon isn’t in any hurry to make its intelligence requirements explicable to the media.  The conventional wisdom is that intelligence testing is a racist hoax or it just applies to academia, not the real world, or whatever. The fact that the military is obsessive about cognitive testing is something that simply isn’t in the reigning worldview, and the military is fine with that. It likes testing and it dislikes outside interference, so the more convoluted its jargon for talking about its intelligence requirements, the better.

Read it.

If the news media hadn’t told you how brilliant Barack Obama was every day for the last six years, you might have your doubts.

Invoking a national outrage in which 41 laws were violated by a lone madman in Newtown, Connecticut, the president of the United States and celebrated orator said on Thursday, “We need everybody to remember how we felt 100 days ago and make sure that what we said at that time wasn’t just a bunch of platitudes, that we meant it.”

Read it.

Dog lovers paid out hundreds of pounds for fashionable ‘toy poodles’ – only to discover they were fluffed-up ferrets on steroids.

One pensioner was duped into buying two of the “pedigree” pets from a market in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires.

Foseti points out that there is nothing new under the sun.

Another example of a problem that our ancestors were better at solving is the problem of how to civilize an uncivilized area. They called this process colonization. We can’t hope to perform this task on the same scale, so we have a mini-version of the same process called gentrification.

Ross Douthat pulls back the curtain.

Every elite seeks its own perpetuation, of course, but that project is uniquely difficult in a society that’s formally democratic and egalitarian and colorblind. And it’s even more difficult for an elite that prides itself on its progressive politics, its social conscience, its enlightened distance from hierarchies of blood and birth and breeding.

Thus the importance, in the modern meritocratic culture, of the unacknowledged mechanisms that preserve privilege, reward the inside game, and ensure that the advantages enjoyed in one generation can be passed safely onward to the next.

Read it.

 A NASA scientist claims to be on the verge of faster-than-light travel: is he for real?

Read it.

India is poised to become one of the four largest military powers in the world by the end of the decade. It needs to think about what that means.

Read it.

Fighting ability, largely determined by upper body strength, continues to rule the minds of modern men, according to a new study by Aaron Sell from Griffith University in Australia and colleagues. Their work explores the concept that human males are designed for fighting, and shows how this fighting ability drives both their behavior and attitudes to a range issues, including political orientation. For example, their research demonstrates that among Hollywood actors, those selected for their physical strength, i.e. action stars, are more likely to support the Republican position on foreign policy.

I’m thinking that the presence of testicles probably has something to do with it.

These features include abilities to dissipate heat, perceive and respond rapidly to threats, estimate the trajectory of thrown objects, resist blunt-force trauma and accurately intercept objects.

We call this ‘football’. There’s a reason why ‘throw like a girl’ is a cliché, and why it applies to Barack Obama.

é

Read it.

Recall that the Bill of Rights originally didn’t apply to the states, and indeed several states (not including North Carolina) had official establishments of religion at the time the Bill of Rights was enacted, with the last being disestablished in the 1830s. It’s the Fourteenth Amendment that has been read as applying the Bill of Rights to the states, through its statement that “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” though many scholars and some judges have argued that the incorporation should have taken place through another clause of the Amendment, “[n]o State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”

And a few scholars and judges have indeed argued that this language should not be read as incorporating the Establishment Clause; the most prominent examples have been Justice Thomas and Prof. Akhil Amar. The chief argument for this view is that the Establishment Clause was originally understood as a federalism guarantee, with the ban on federal laws “respecting an establishment of religion” meaning that the federal government could neither establish a national religion nor disestablish (or otherwise modify) state establishments of religion. Another possible argument is that the Establishment Clause differs from most Bill of Rights guarantees in that much action that is seen as violating the Establishment Clause — such as government endorsement of religious messages and symbols — doesn’t deprive anyone of liberty, or abridge any citizen’s privileges or immunities. (Action that does directly implicate people’s liberty, such as coercion of religious practice, might be prohibited by other provisions, such as the Free Exercise Clause and Free Speech Clause, which have been relatively uncontroversially incorporated against the states; likewise, action that denies people tangible benefits based on their denomination or their irreligiosity might be seen as prohibited by the Free Exercise Clause or the Equal Protection Clause.) The North Carolina legislators seem to be siding with this position.

Bryan Caplan lays out some inconvenient truth.

The key problem, though, is that on the market, unpopular true views naturally spread via selection and imitation.  If IQ tests are really better employment screens than education, then the few employers who hire based on IQ gain a big competitive advantage.  They survive and grow, their flexible competitors copy them, and their rigid competitors shrink and die.  That’s one of the reasons why markets are better than democracy.

If this sounds like mere econo-dogma, consider the rise of index funds.  In the 60s, a few academics noticed that dart-throwing chimps could match the performance of fancy investment managers.  Most people thought these academics were crazy.  Since the academics were largely correct, however, the few people who listened to them got rich and revolutionized their industry.  If index funds were illegal, the majority would never have gotten its richly deserved comeuppance.

Kathy Shaidle vents.

We started mocking this personal style as “metrosexual” almost twenty years ago, but that word was always problematic. The “metro” prefix is utterly apt; it’s the “sexual” part that’s off. These nominal heteros are consciously or subconsciously mimicking gay twinks, and those fellows usually want to get laid. Their fragile straight counterparts, in contrast, don’t look like they could manage it, or even want to.

…

In that much maligned “manosphere,” the term “beta male” is the most popular pejorative. Since it’s fresher and more accurate than “metrosexual,” I’ll be using that phrase henceforth, along with that unfairly neglected anachronism “faggotry.” It’s ideal for my purposes because it doesn’t necessarily mean “gay” so much as “gay-ish.” So I’m trying to bring that word back. Call it artisanal invective.

Greg Mankiw, a Real Economist, isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions.

A friend points me to this passage:

    At a White House briefing Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said some of what passes for health insurance today is so skimpy it can’t be compared to the comprehensive coverage available under the law. “Some of these folks have very high catastrophic plans that don’t pay for anything unless you get hit by a bus,” she said. “They’re really mortgage protection, not health insurance.”

I have the same problem with my other insurance policies.  My homeowner insurance doesn’t cover the cost when my gutters need cleaning, and my car insurance doesn’t cover the cost when I need to fill the tank with gas. Instead, the policies cover only catastrophic events, like my house burning down or a major accident. Now that the Obama administration has fixed the health insurance system, I trust they will soon move on to solve these other problems.

Steve Sailer does the necessary.

Union boss Cesar Chavez was one of the leading class warriors of my youth, but today he is remembered only as the patron saint of La Raza.

…

It’s fascinating how today race trumps class so unquestionably that almost nobody can even imagine that a Mexican-American union boss would oppose illegal immigration.

Gavin MacInnes vents.

Los Angeles is to life what New York City is to a woman’s ovaries. It’s an elephant’s graveyard where stupid losers go to die. Here are 10 reasons why.

Read it.

What do you want to bet that ‘ability’ will include racial and ethnic quotas if any politically fashionable minorities wind up ‘underrepresented’.

Read it.

I dunno, I’ve always thought it was pretty random.

Give evolution enough time and space, they say, and new species can just happen. Speciation might not only be an evolutionary consequence of fitness differences and natural selection, but a property intrinsic to evolution, just as all matter has gravity.

Steve Sailer spanks the Washington Post.

 I’ve spent most of my life living in Los Angeles and Chicago between really rich people on one side and poor people on the other. One thing I’ve noticed is that the rich don’t really take up all that much room.

When I go for a hike in the Hollywood Hills, for instance, I often walk by an imposing gated estate that other hikers assert is owned by some major movie star: Will Ferrell is the most popular claim. But it looks like about 4 to 8 acres, most of that steep hillside.

Last year I taking out the trash when I heard a whoop-whoop-whoop from overhead. I looked up and there was the Marine Corps One helicopter carrying the President to his fundraiser at George Clooney’s house, around the corner from the supposed Will Ferrell manor. To be precise, Obama’s helicopter was on its way to an airport to land, from which Obama’s motorcade would wind up into the canyon. Clooney’s house is 7,354 square feet and his estate is 3.16 acres, and apparently doesn’t have a big enough lawn to safely land a large helicopter upon.

I’m trying, but I’m having a hard time feeling really oppressed by the fact that George Clooney’s house is about as big as my yard. That doesn’t strike me as unreasonable.

Joel Kotkin takes Silicon Valley’s Sweetheart to the woodshed.

Marissa Mayer’s pronunciamento banning home-based work at Yahoo reflects a great dilemma facing companies and our country over the coming decade. Forget for a minute the amazing hubris of a rich, glamorous CEO, with a nursery specially built next to her office, ordering less well-compensated parents to trudge back to the office, leaving their less important offspring in daycare or in the hands of nannies.

The real issue is how we deal with three concerns: the promotion of families; humane methods to reduce greenhouse gases; and, finally, how to expand the geography of work and opportunity.

Read it.

But he won’t. He is, after all, the Magic Negro, and probably thinks that the Pope would do well to learn from him.

Tuesday’s report that Pope Francis has chosen to live in a modest two-room apartment within the Vatican rather than the more spacious ten-room Papal Apartment on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace offers a stark contrast to the numerous reports of personal extravagance by President Obama, his family, and his administration throughout his tenure in office.

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In each DOMA lawsuit—including Windsor—the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) has a responsibility to defend DOMA against a constitutional challenge. But President Obama declared that he believes DOMA is unconstitutional and ordered DOJ not to defend it.

The justices discussed whether this means no federal court has jurisdiction to decide the lawsuit. Article III of the Constitution only gives federal courts jurisdiction to decide a “case or controversy.” As the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, an essential element of this is that the lawsuit must be adversarial, meaning both parties try to win the case by making a good-faith argument to persuade the court to side with them.

So much for that bit about ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed’ in the Constitution. In a Real Country this would mean Obama’s impeachment. But we don’t live in a Real Country any more.

Megan McArdle lays it out.

This is an excellent precis of all the reasons (and there are a lot of them) to quit taxing corporations. It’ll never happen, of course, between ‘progressive’ simple-mindedness and government love of complexity (not to mention the interest groups that benefit from that complexity, and who have the lobbying clout to tickle special favors out of elected officials).

Read it.

One oft-underestimated threat to epistemic rationality is getting offended. While getting offended by something sometimes feels good and can help you assert moral superiority, in most cases it doesn’t help you figure out what the world looks like. In fact, getting offended usually makes it harder to figure out what the world looks like, since it means you won’t be evaluating evidence very well. In Politics is the Mind-Killer, Eliezer writes that “people who would be level-headed about evenhandedly weighing all sides of an issue in their professional life as scientists, can suddenly turn into slogan-chanting zombies when there’s a Blue or Green position on an issue.” Don’t let yourself become one of those zombies– all of your skills, training, and useful habits can be shut down when your brain kicks into offended mode!

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Freeberg performs a public service.

Elizabeth Warren: ‘If we started in 1960 and we said that as productivity goes up, that is as workers are producing more, then the minimum wage is going to go up the same. And if that were the case then the minimum wage today would be about $22 an hour,” she said, speaking to Dr. Arindrajit Dube, a University of Massachusetts Amherst professor who has studied the economic impacts of minimum wage. “So my question is Mr. Dube, with a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, what happened to the other $14.75? It sure didn’t go to the worker.‘

Not so fast, Cherokee breath: ‘It did go to the worker – in the form of lower prices. Once upon a time, almost all banks charged fees; the increases in technology enabled them to give banking services away for free. Increases in production technology enables people to pay less for better cars. Everyone who is reading this is benefiting from the increases in computer technology that enable them to buy a WiFi enabled tablet for about a tenth of the price of a late 1980s Apple IIE. As Thomas Sowell repeatedly points out, more houses were connected to the internet at the end of the twentieth century than were connected to running water at the beginning. But if we were legally required to pay inflation-adjusted salaries to plumbers to install water pipes into our house, to account for the increased ease of doing so, it’s likely that fewer people would have running water, let alone internet.‘

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I’m tidy but not particularly clean. An important distinction.

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A question that the ‘gay marriage’ pushers never quite seem able to answer.

JUSTICE SCALIA: I’m curious, when -­ when did — when did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted? Sometimes — some time after Baker, where we said it didn’t even raise a substantial Federal question? When — when — when did the law become this?

Check it out.

A picture from the Shorpy web site of a Detroit assembly line during WWII. This is the sort of blue-collar job, requiring only an elementary school education and moderate intelligence, that brought the parents of the Baby Boomers into the middle class.

All of this is now done by robots. And therein lies the problem.