Read it.

Lot of that going around.

Read it.

I learned some things about how the world works that I couldn’t figure out how to write about without coming across like a paranoid loon, and I couldn’t get them far enough out of my head to write cogently about anything else.  I’m still not sure I can tell this story without sounding like a paranoid loon, but I’ve decided to take that chance.

There are some fairly straightforward technical solution to the problem of credit card fraud.  Some of them are new and innovative, while others are already in widespread use throughout the world, but not in the U.S.  But none of these solutions will be deployed in the U.S. any time soon, not because it’s hard, but because the established players in the financial industry won’t allow it.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, elaborates.

Many people – including a seemingly growing number of economists – intuitively sense that a mandated higher minimum-wage will have little or no negative impact on unskilled-workers’ employment options.  For the person-in-the-street, this intuition, I suspect, springs from the common perception that employers generally have some sort of undue power over both workers and consumers and, as a result of that power, rake in excess profits.  These profits can therefore be tapped into by government diktats such as minimum-wage legislation without causing employers to adjust their operations in response.  For example, a minimum-wate diktat simply effects a redistribution of wealth; employees’ gains are employers’ losses, but losses only of some surplus that serves no economic function.

The intuition of economists who support the legislated minimum-wage is not much different from that of the person-in-the-street, although it is expressed more analytically.

…

My suspicion – and that is all it is, a suspicion – is that some of the more thoughtful proponents of the minimum-wage would pause to realize that, when seen as a a kind of tax upon the employment of unskilled workers, a minimum-wage hike might not be so lacking in negative consequences after all.

Read it.

Indeed, the entire premise of the blue-state anti-gun proposals is based on an absurd fallacy: that honest citizens who own guns are potential criminals, and that real criminals will dutifully conform to the new laws, even though they’ve defied all the earlier ones.

And that’s it, in a nutshell.

Arnold Kling understands the dialectic.

In the legacy education model, teachers combine coaching, feedback, and content delivery. By coaching I mean advice, guidance, and encouragement. Feedback includes formal grading as well as informal praise and criticism. Content delivery includes lectures and reading assignments.

Perhaps the key to radically changing education is to break up those functions.

Absolutely.

Most education reformers want to focus on low-end students. While this is a noble idea, I think it is not a good path for reform. When you fail, you do not know whether it is because the innovations were not good or because the student population is too difficult to reach.

As long as we have a government-run factory school model, where children classed by age are thrown into the same pot (regardless of ability) and are run through the system in batches, the system is going to be run on the basis of the politics of ‘Leave No Child Behind’, which means that the brighter a child is the shorter the end of the stick the child receives.

Read it.

Everywhere you go in a certain segment of bourgeois America you see men and women dressed in childish togs trooping off to yoga class or heading to the gym for aerobics or jogging along—six, seven, eight miles, often at a toddler’s pace—in the heat, dust, and traffic of the late afternoon. Then a shower, a change of clothes, and off to the health-food store before it closes to get the right supplements and a quart of blueberries shipped up specially—it’s off season—from Colombia or Peru.

Why all the fuss? Why all the sweat and bother? To feel good, of course. To stay alive, naturally. What other reason could there be?

But the intensity of pursuit makes one pause and speculate a bit. What is this all about, this amazing attentiveness to health? There is a quasi-heroic dedication to all this conscientiousness about food, a saint’s rigorous commitment to the demands of exercise. And the devotees think about their health all the time. Is man the rational animal? More and more what he thinks about—if he is middle class; if he has been to college; if he has read the right books—is how to go on living. He concocts strategies ostensibly for the prolongation of a healthy life.

But on some level one senses—let speculation take full charge here—that what the man or woman oriented to health most wants to do is to live forever. In one of Tom Wolfe’s novels there is a young man perpetually deep in his computer. He wears titanium-framed glasses and a look of enduring intensity. His name is Wismer Stroock. “The Wiz,” says Wolfe, “was only thirty-two, but he had a bony neck and a bony jaw and sunken cheeks and cadaverous cheekbones from getting up every morning, every morning, before dawn and running six miles through the streets of a Dunwoody subdivision called Quail Ridge.” He drinks bottled water and eats purified foods of all descriptions. He is devoted to the purging of the body. He is very pale. He is a young man, Wolfe suggests, not unrepresentative of many in his generation. On some deep level he has decided that it is his goal to live forever. He is never going to die.

Bryan Caplan puts you to the question.

Read it.

Because we often think about evolution over the great sweep of time, in terms of minuscule changes over millions of years, when we went from fin to scaly paw to opposable-thumbed hand, it is easy to assume that evolution requires eons. That assumption makes us feel that humans, who have gone from savanna to asphalt in a mere few thousand years, must be caught out by the pace of modern life, when we’d be much better suited to something more familiar in our history. We’re fat and unfit, we have high blood pressure, and we suffer from ailments that we suspect our ancestors never worried about, like post-traumatic-stress disorder and AIDS. Julie Holland, a psychiatrist writing in Glamour magazine, counsels that if you “feel less than human,” constantly stressed and run-down, you need to remember that “the way so many of us are living now goes against our nature. Biologically, we modern Homo sapiens are a lot like our cave woman ancestors: We’re animals. Primates, in fact. And we have many primal needs that get ignored. That’s why the prescription for good health may be as simple as asking, What would a cave woman do?”

You can tell by this that the author is female and probably a pain in the ass about it.

Marlene Zuk is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota. This essay is excerpted from her book Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live….

Female? Check. Academic? Check. Blue State? Check. Pushing a new book? Check.

It’s hard to escape the recurring conviction that somewhere, somehow, things have gone wrong. In a time with unprecedented ability to transform the environment, to make deserts bloom and turn intercontinental travel into the work of a few hours, we are suffering from diseases our ancestors of a few thousand years ago, much less our prehuman selves, never knew: diabetes, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis. Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that for the first time in history, the current generation of children will not live as long as their parents, probably because obesity and associated maladies are curtailing the promise of modern medicine.

Occupy Fashionable Leftist Memes About How the Sky Is Falling? Check.

Some of our nostalgia for a simpler past is just the same old amnesia that every generation has about the good old days. The ancient Romans fretted about the young and their callous disregard for the hard-won wisdom of their elders. Several 16th- and 17th-century writers and philosophers famously idealized the Noble Savage, a being who lived in harmony with nature and did not destroy his surroundings. Now we worry about our kids as “digital natives,” who grow up surrounded by electronics and can’t settle their brains sufficiently to concentrate on walking the dog without simultaneously texting and listening to their iPods.

Gratuitous swipe and people who refuse to prefer Wednesday to Tuesday merely because it is Wednesday? Check.

Given this whiplash-inducing rate of recent change, it’s reasonable to conclude that we aren’t suited to our modern lives, and that our health, our family lives, and perhaps our sanity would all be improved if we could live the way early humans did. Our bodies and minds evolved under a particular set of circumstances, the reasoning goes, and in changing those circumstances without allowing our bodies time to evolve in response, we have wreaked the havoc that is modern life.

Ah, but you would be wrong, Neanderthal Breath, and she (who is smarter and more credentialed than you) is going to Explain It All To You.

Newspaper articles, morning TV, dozens of books, and self-help advocates promoting slow-food or no-cook diets, barefoot running, sleeping with our infants, and other measures large and small claim that it would be more natural, and healthier, to live more like our ancestors. A corollary to this notion is that we are good at things we had to do back in the Pleistocene, like keeping an eye out for cheaters in our small groups, and bad at things we didn’t, like negotiating with people we can’t see and have never met.

All of which has a lot of evidence to support it, although that evidence won’t even be mentioned, much less refuted, in an academic sneer piece like this.

The paleofantasy is a fantasy in part because it supposes that we humans, or at least our protohuman forebears, were at some point perfectly adapted to our environments. We apply this erroneous idea of evolution’s producing the ideal mesh between organism and surroundings to other life forms, too, not just to people.

Uh, oh. Sounds like the Sierra Club to me.

It’s common for people to talk about how we were “meant” to be, in areas ranging from diet to exercise to sex and family. Yet these notions are often flawed, making us unnecessarily wary of new foods and, in the long run, new ideas. I would not dream of denying the evolutionary heritage present in our bodies—and our minds. And it is clear that a life of sloth with a diet of junk food isn’t doing us any favors. But to assume that we evolved until we reached a particular point and now are unlikely to change for the rest of history, or to view ourselves as relics hampered by a self-inflicted mismatch between our environment and our genes, is to miss out on some of the most exciting new developments in evolutionary biology.

In other words, I’m a Progressive and Change Is Good! Why am I not surprised.

The Other McCain blows the whistle.

The other day, Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen of Politico published a long story about the dysfunctional relationship between the Obama administration and the White House press corps, saying that the lack of access and deliberate manipulation were making it difficult for reporters to do their jobs.

A basic rule of life: If you volunteer to be somebody’s doormat, you forfeit the right to complain about the footprints on your back.

The White House has merely exploited the unabashed fandom of the journalistic elite, which is so overwhelmingly liberal that they were only too happy for the opportunity to publish daily valentines to their presidential heartthrob. Predictably, this posture of eager sycophancy has not earned reporters the respect of those they flatter, and so White House correspondents — journalists at the very peak of professional prestige — are shocked to find themselves treated like rent-boys by the administration’s P.R. machinery.

Read it.

A classic First World problem. Let it fill your world.

Read it.

In large part, I would say that science fiction authors lean socialist — people like John Scalzi, China Mieville, Charles Stross, Usula Le Guinn, and Steven Brust are just the tip of a very large iceberg. Even those who pretend to be libertarian, like Cory Doctorow, are socialist underneath the Clever Plastic Disguise and talk about actual policies. Needless to say, government-provided health care are very big with writers in general, as are other government benefits that don’t require holding down a day job.

The Other McCain is on the case.

In all honesty, when you hear the word “feminist,” does anyone think of adjectives like pleasant, cheerful, successful and attractive?

No, of course not. You think of adjectives like strident, angry, bitter and ugly. Also, quite often, ridiculous — as illustrated by the deranged mob of strident, angry, bitter, ugly women who showed up for a “One Billion Rising” Valentine’s Day demonstration in San Francisco.

By the same token, anyone who thinks that “honest” and “Democrat” ever belong together in the same sentence is probably suffering from some form of mental illness, and speaking of the mentally ill: Jesse Jackson Jr. will reportedly plead guilty to federal corruption charges.

Read it.

This week’s State of the Union address was full of plans for government action and spending to combat U.S. economic malaise. At the same time, the President claimed that there were drastic cuts to the federal budget on the way (referring to sequestration, under which spending actually continues to grow but at a slower rate). This doublespeak mirrors that of European politicians and hides reality: more government isn’t making the economy any better.

Illustrating this point is the dichotomy in economic performance between Western European countries — whose politicians claim to have made cuts but in reality have increased budgets each year since the Eurocrisis began in 2009 — and their Baltic counterparts — which underwent actual cuts in the size of government.

Read it.

 I hypothesized that the body doesn’t need food itself, merely the chemicals and elements it contains.

I haven’t eaten a bite of food in 30 days, and it’s changed my life.

Guaranteed to make Locovore heads explode.

Gavin McInnes says what all right-thinking people … well, think.

The biggest misconception about so-called “assholes” is that they’re total assholes. I know a lot of them and though they don’t suffer fools gladly, they will defend to the death your right to be foolish. Maybe that’s why they’re so grumpy. They’re always prepared to fight.

Nice people, on the other hand, are dicks. The most dangerous people out there are the ones pretending to be nice. They’re fakes and will happily stab you in the back if it helps their cause.

And that pretty much says everything that needs to be said on the subject. But go ahead and read the whole thing anyway.

Read it.

Actually, I should think that putting the entire Other Left Coast under about 30 feet of water would be a net gain for the nation.

Read it.

Well, not really … they’re billionaires, and they’re giving away pots of money — but billionaires do that, and the pots they are giving away are pretty much the smallest pots in their money bins.

Even a leftist rag like Business Insider has nice things to say about rich people when they Follow the Progressive Program — because the whole Progressive Narrative is about redistribution, people who have by some unexamined but probably nefarious means accumulated more than their ‘fair share’ who have decided to get right with Obama by ‘spreading the wealth around’. Nowhere will you find any praise for how they got so rich in the first place: providing goods and services (and, oh, by the way, jobs) for people that they value and for which they are willing to fork over money.

Read it.

As Medicare whacks away at what doctors are paid and health insurers move away from paying fees for service to bundled payments, more physicians who own their own practices will start direct pay or concierge medicine in the next one to three years.

I’m surprised that it’s taking this long.

Under direct primary care, doctors contract directly with patients to provide all of their primary care needs free of insurance interference at a price generally between $50 and $60 a month per patient. It’s what the New York Times last spring called “concierge for the masses” because it was much cheaper than the historically high cost of concierge medicine some Congressional investigators found to be $5,000 to $15,000 a year or more.

I’d jump on it.

Read it.

Since some data is simply not available, BEA has to make assumptions about the direction of the changes that they cannot record.  For example, for the first quarter of 2011, the BEA assumed that nondurable manufacturing inventories increased, exports increased, and imports increased. When you read that exports increased this year, that is because the BEA assumed it increased – they did not actually have any data to measure it when they released the new GDP numbers.

Daniel Pipes has forgotten more about international relations than you or I will ever know.

Freeberg understands the dialectic.

    I think progressivism holds appeal because it does the opposite of what people say about it: It sorts people into different levels and locks them in place there. This guy here at the top is supposed to decide everything, that guy there has the authority to destroy people because his judgment is completely perfect, all these other people at the bottom should just mill about waiting to be told what to do.

Funny thing is, that’s exactly how the enthused progressives are [naturally] configured. Some of them want to boss strangers around, and others want to line up for their three hots every day and just be told what to do. So the allure i[s] that you’ll be locked into the plateau that is most comfortable to you. It seems there isn’t a progressive anywhere who’s entertained the thought, even momentarily, that maybe this perfectly-run United Federation of Planets will find the “right” role for him that is different from what he’s envisioned.

Danielle Morrill points out that we have a lot more control over our lives than we think we do; we just have to exercise it.

These aren’t job titles, but roles I’ve played in the past that I no longer care to play. During YC (Summer 2012) I made a clean break from a lot of these things in order to totally focus on building Referly, and after letting those activities go for a few months I discovered something cool: I don’t want them back in my life at the same level of importance as before.

Read it.

So avoid the whole problem and just read the Bible in Greek.

Mencius Moldbug points and laughs.

 Poor Charles Stross.  Not that he’s the first revolutionary to discover that the revolution bus doesn’t stop where the sign said it was supposed to stop.  And not that he’ll be the last.  But still – can’t we be a little sad?  Just a little?

Charlie Stross is a damned fine writer but a knee-jerk ‘progressive’ who can’t be bothered to think it through on political questions — he’s one of the tiresome crowd who dismissed Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism without bothering to read it because the title was inconveniently incompatible with his preconceived notions — and Mencius here does a little dissection of the sort of contortions that produces. An entertaining read, if you like snark (and I do — ask anybody).

 In postwar Europe, there is a codeword for a political persuasion in which power flows upward.  The codeword is “populist.”  Needless to say, no more vile slur can pass the lips of a good Party man.  A “beige dictatorship?”  Please, man.  Don’t complain about the dish you ordered.

Indeed.

Read it.

Damn those Presbyterians! Oh,wait….

Read it.

If Superman existed to show us how high the human spirit could fly, and Batman to show us the darkness within even our most noble, Aquaman is here to show us the world that triumphs in our absence. The ocean is not ours, and no matter how great our technology, we will never master it as we have mastered land, but Aquaman has. Through this lonely ocean wanderer, we can experience a world that we can never truly command. In many ways, Aquaman was stronger than the Man of Steel and darker than the Dark Knight. He knew loneliness that the orphan and the alien exile never could.

I must confess that the travails of Aquaman never loomed large in my thought.

Jerry Pournelle is always worth reading.

The first and most important problem in public education is to understand what the goal is. It may be that the best way to do that is to ask why someone without children should pay for the education of other people’s children. Education is not a Constitutional right or entitlement, and even the aggressive federal courts don’t assert that.

The usual argument in favor of compulsory education is that an educated electorate is necessary to the health of a republic. A secondary one is that an educated public is a good investment since it promotes economic growth and a wealthier nation.

The available evidence from the the most recent century suggests that the accuracy of this line of reasoning is far from being as intuitively obvious as most of those parroting it seem to think.

When entitlement rights get involved in education, the educational results generally are worse, and often are far worse. Of course some will argue that it is good for the children of normal and above normal intelligence to be exposed to the sub-normal because there is something inherently good about Diversity, but there don’t seem to be any valid studies showing that you learn algebra better if your class includes someone who never will learn it.

Indeed. I never profited from being roped into the same class with stupid and sociopathic people of the same age, other than to heavily reinforce my natural inclinations toward supporting regular and rigorous subtractions from the gene pool. Exposure to ‘diversity’ merely makes most people fear and distrust all the more people who ‘aren’t like them’.

Read it.

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

“You’d be a fool not to leave California,” says Ed Botowsky of Chapwood Investments who manages the finances of several professional athletes and high income Californians.  Botowsky says some of his clients have already made the decision to flee the state to avoid the tax crunch.

Indeed.

Read it.

The headline is taken from an amusing study by two Pennsylvania State University economists who calculate the implied price in terms of presidential campaign contribution of desireable ambassadorships. The subtitle explains it all: “Political Influences on Ambassadorial Postings of the United States of America.” Interestingly, it appears that the current ambassador got the job on the cheap side (see below).

The best government money can buy.

Jared Diamond rounds up the Usual Suspects.

 I now think of New Guineans’ hypervigilant attitude toward repeated low risks as “constructive paranoia”: a seeming paranoia that actually makes good sense. Now that I’ve adopted that attitude, it exasperates many of my American and European friends. But three of them who practice constructive paranoia themselves — a pilot of small planes, a river-raft guide and a London bobby who patrols the streets unarmed — learned the attitude, as I did, by witnessing the deaths of careless people.

Like avoiding groups of black males on the street. Just ask John Derbyshire what that advice is worth.

Read it.

Police officers in Seattle, Washington held their first gun buyback program in 20 years this weekend, underneath interstate 5, and soon found that private gun collectors were working the large crowd as little makeshift gun shows began dotting the parking lot and sidewalks. Some even had “cash for guns” signs prominently displayed.

Police stood in awe as gun enthusiasts and collectors waved wads of cash for the guns being held by those standing in line for the buyback program.

Lessons learned:

1. Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.
2. Once someone enters government employment, the common-sense area of the brain is removed.

Read it.

Who does a better job of serving poor and low-income Americans and students by providing free, high-speed Internet access to those who can’t afford it at home – the government or the market?

Well, there are 15,000 Wi-Fi-enabled public libraries in the country that provide free Internet access. But many public libraries are closed when people and students actually want to access the Internet, like in the evenings, on weekends and on holidays.

The WSJ points out today that McDonald’s has 12,000 Wi-Fi-equipped locations in the U.S., and Starbucks has another 7,000, and they both offer free access, even for those who don’t buy anything. Unlike public libraries, McDonald’s and Starbucks are open in the evenings, on weekends and most holidays.

In terms of addressing the “digital divide” or “Internet gap in education,” you could make a case that the profit-maximizing, private sector is doing a better job than the public sector – McDonald’s and Starbucks have more locations and longer hours than the limited-access public library system.

And you can’t get a Big Mac at the Library, should the urge strike you. In fact, they discourage people eating and drinking there.

Read it.

The existence of a ‘social safety net’ means that people in the Crust, both the Upper Crust and the Lower Crust (Underclass), no longer really need to work. As automation takes more and more jobs away from ‘working families’, some of them will be fortunate enough to be sorted into the Upper Crust, but most will eventually wind up in the Lower Crust.

Gavin McInnes remembers Amy Winehouse.

Heroin addiction isn’t a disease, as Russell Brand so despondently put it. It’s an indulgence—like obesity, but in reverse.

Drug addicts don’t need kid gloves. They need an iron fist. I know this because I’ve watched a dozen heroin addicts die over the years, and the ones who survived always say the same thing: “I can’t believe you didn’t just punch me in the face.”

But that’s the modern world for you — overindulgence is reinvented as ‘disease’, and abnormality is the new ‘normal’.

Read it.

They can tell you about torment. They can describe long, frustrating hours sitting in dark, stinky basements and caves, pen in hand, trying to get the flow of the words just right.

They can tell you, too, about how it feels to be engulfed in a blaze of inspiration. They’ll describe the delirium of bliss when the right lines come. Like all writers, they are keenly aware of the competition, and envy eats away at them when they detect, in one of their comrades, a candle-flicker of genius.

We speak, naturally, of cheesemongers.

Read it.

Every year, people complain that we’re soon going to reach ‘peak oil’. No more oil. The world comes tumbling down. And what happens? Every so often we find massive new reserves of oil, some of which are new, some of which technology now makes usable. ‘Peak oil’ has been coming now for about fifty years by my count, and somehow it never seems to arrive.

I suspect that ‘peak jobs’ will work the same way. ‘But where will the jobs come from?’ I don’t know — and I don’t care, because people are clever and they’re always inventing new shit that make jobs (if the government doesn’t get in the way).

Charlie Stross, award-wining speculative fiction author and knee-jerk socialist, has some interesting thoughts.

Our ability to exchange extended phenotypic traits without genetic exchange (thank you, language faculty!) makes us, as Dawkins pointed out in the 1990s, exceptional.

Because of this ability, we don’t have to invent everything for ourselves, individually; we can borrow one anothers’ good ideas. So we only need to be smart enough to understand and use the cognitive tools created by our most intelligent outliers.

This is a sharp insight. What follows?

The evolutionary pressure selecting for general intelligence (to the extent that general intelligence exists) breaks once a species develops language.

Hmmmm. There’s food for thought. This would certainly explain the conjunction of Charlie’s superb writing skills with his moronic political opinions. I have a theory that the reason most people who write for a living are Liberal Fascists is that they are so accustomed to being able to control every aspect of their stories (whether what they do reflects Real Life, or is even feasible in Real Life) inclines them into an intellectually lazy acceptance of the notion that some wise central authority should surely be able to take action and obviate whatever aspect of Real Life is currently chapping their butts. What is especially amusing, in an ironic way, is that they are the first to claim membership in the ‘Reality-Based Community’, much the same way that totalitarian Communist regimes are fond of naming their concentration camps ‘Democratic Republic of Supressistan’.

Not a source of optimism. But Real Life seldom is.

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

Basically people were schlepping leaky packages of meat and other foods in their canvas bags, then wadding to the bags somewhere for awhile, leaving bacteria to grow until the next trip, when they tossed celery or other foods likely to be eaten raw in the same bags.

Washing your bags reduces the risk, but let’s be honest: who does that?

Environment theater, to match the security theater we get in the airports. The ‘progressive’ vision, in which posturing substitutes for achievement, and appearance is more important than reality, proceeds apace.

Read it.

Hey, this stuff is important.

Read it.

Read it.

Plano, based in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, is the best-run city in America. Among households in the city, 14% earned over $200,000 in 2011, the fourth-highest proportion of all cities. Meanwhile, a mere 1.9% of households earned under $10,000, which was the second-lowest of all cities. The city’s 1.62 violent crimes per 1,000 people is the second-lowest of all large cities. Plano is home to many corporate headquarters, including J.C. Penney and Dr. Pepper Snapple Group. These companies are among the 10 largest employers in the city. The city appears to be largely unaffected by the housing crisis. The median home price rose by more than 5% between 2007 and 2011, while the national median price fell by more than 10%.

Funny thing, I don’t notice any Michigan cities in the ‘Best Run’ list. Probably an oversight.

Oh, look, there’s Detroit at #4 on the ‘Worst Run’ list. I knew Michigan would make the scoreboard somewhere.

Read it.

Living in a Communist country is a major factor.

Being black in a city run by Democrats is another.

Neither of which you will find mentioned in an article on the NPR web site, such as this one.

Just sayin’.

Read it.

Until, as with auto radar detectors, they’re made illegal.

Engineers are like ‘progressives’ — they believe that the way things are now will never change.

Steve Sailer asks an obvious question.

That exposure to this heavy metal can be dangerous to humans has been recognized since the days of Hippocrates and Pliny the Elder. But lead was so useful in so many ways that more than a few American municipalities proudly named themselves after their lucrative lead resources. Leadville, Colorado is America’s highest elevated incorporated city. There are several Galenas, one of which is a tourist town in Illinois. There’s a Smelterville, which sounds like a city made up for The Simpsons but is actually a real place in Idaho.

And here I thought he was talking about the music.

Known side effects of lead poisoning include lower IQ and reduced impulse control, which are in turn associated with poor decision-making, such as becoming a criminal or a single mom.

That’s the 60s, alright. Let’s check it out.

The problem is coming up with ways to test the theory. A half-dozen years ago, I blogged (”Lead Poisoning and the Great American Freakout”) about the research that Drum finds so convincing today. One reality check immediately suggested itself: Back in the late 1960s, densely populated Japan was notorious for automobile-induced air pollution. Yet crime didn’t rise in Japan. The country remained an orderly, intelligent, non-impulsive culture.

Oops. Another Jared-Diamondian theory bites the dust.

Read it.

‘I’m sorry, sir, but we’re not Tony Stark.’

Read it.

Be the first on your block….

Read it.

Interesting speculation, but moot — the office of tomorrow is your living room.

Read it.

In all areas of personal health, we see prominent media reports that directly oppose well-established knowledge in the field, or that make it sound as if scientifically unresolved questions have been resolved. The media, for instance, have variously supported and shot down the notion that vitamin D supplements can protect against cancer, and that taking daily and low doses of aspirin extends life by protecting against heart attacks. Some reports have argued that frequent consumption of even modest amounts of alcohol leads to serious health risks, while others have reported that daily moderate alcohol consumption can be a healthy substitute for exercise. Articles sang the praises of new drugs like Avastin and Avandia before other articles deemed them dangerous, ineffective, or both.

Read it.

In the past, political struggles were largely fought over how to divide up the spoils generated by the basic productive economy; labor, investors and management all shared a belief in the ethos of economic growth, manufacturing and resource extraction.

In contrast, today’s new hegemons hail almost entirely from outside the material economy, and many come from outside the realm of the market system entirely. Daniel Bell, in his landmark 1973 The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, may have been the first to identify this ascension to “pre-eminence of the professional and technical class.” This new “priesthood of power,” as he put it, would eventually overturn the traditional hierarchies based on land, corporate and financial assets.

Forty years later the outlines of this transformation are clear. Contrary to the conservative claims of Obama’s “socialist” tendencies, the administration is quite comfortable with such capitalist sectors as entertainment, the news media and the software side of the technology industry, particularly social media. The big difference is these firms derive their fortunes not from the soil and locally crafted manufacturers, but from the manipulation of ideas, concepts and images.

Read it.

I’ve been involved in publishing all my life, and like many others I’ve always accepted as axiomatic the notion that typefaces with serifs (such as Times-Roman) are, in general, are more readable than non-serif typefaces (e.g., Helvetica). It never occurred to me that there was any doubt about the matter. Were the monks who invented serifs and other text ornamentations merely engaging in idle doodling? Weren’t they consciously intending to increase the legibility of the important documents they were transcribing?

It turns out that, as with so many of the things we “know” are right, the idea that serif typefaces are more readable than non-serif typefaces simply isn’t supported by the evidence.