John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, is uncharacteristically insouciant.

Mass enstupidation worries a lot of the Edge-heads. David Gelernter cruelly reproduces part of a piece Sean Penn wrote for the Huffington Post. That you can be rich, famous, and admired by millions while having the IQ of a nematode is not news, but reminders never hurt. (Penn’s words are the penultimate graf in Gelernter’s piece: The editors forgot to indent it. God bless the editors of Taki’s Mag, who never fail to follow my indentation instructions!)

Steve Sailer unloads some inconvenient truth.

 The destruction of Austin next door threatened to spread to Oak Park, with its spectacular stock of Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie-style homes. But the city fathers responded with a wise (if presumably wholly illegal) racial quota system. The “black-a-block” system restricted real estate agents in Oak Park to selling only one home per block to a black family.

Yet, as James Kabala pointed out once, it’s hard to find any mention on the Internet of Oak Park’s “black-a-block” quota, presumably because it violated federal law, but was winked at because important people felt it worthwhile to save Oak Park’s architectural heritage.

…

Race quotas have been popular with the Establishment in hiring and college admissions, so why, since they worked out well in Oak Park, weren’t they encouraged elsewhere in housing?

“Who? Whom?” of course. Race quotas to increase the numbers of Designated Victim Groups are good, race quotas to limit their numbers are bad, and that’s all you need to know.

Bryan Caplan has the answer.

Of course, popular acceptance wouldn’t extend to mutants who openly embraced or acted upon an ideology of mutant supremacy.  But as long as mutants spoke like loyal citizens of their nations of origin, we’d treat them better, not worse, than normal.  We’d fawn on mutants even if they were arrogant jerks.  See the folks on the covers of our supermarket tabloids.

Read it.

Ms. Radin begins by arguing that boilerplate contracts—which as early as 1919 were widespread enough of a commercial practice as to be a subject of case law—aren’t really contracts at all. Because the terms aren’t bargained over, it follows that they aren’t consented to in any traditional sense; there is no meeting of the minds between the parties.

The absence of real agreement means that boilerplate contracts are inconsistent with the moral basis of contract law, which, after all, uses the power of the state to enforce the transfer of one person’s property to another on the ground that both agreed to the transfer. This degradation of the moral basis of contract law, in turn, undermines the classical liberal justification for the state, which rests on the need for a public entity that enhances freedom by enforcing private agreements.

Read it.

And why not? Technology give the ordinary middle class family amenities that Kings a hundred years ago couldn’t have. (Not didn’t have; couldn’t have, because the technology didn’t exist yet.)

Most of the over-the-top spending you see in the papers and on TV is the result of rich people trying to impress — their guests, their friends, their neighbors, the aforesaid papers and TV, and most importantly themselves. There is an essential distinction between a ‘rich person’ and a ‘person who has a lot of money’.

Taki makes a good case.

Maureen Dowd. The female version of the three stooges mentioned above, she is as politically correct as they come. She keeps reminding us that she was born a pleb. Gee whiz, Mo, did you think any of us ever mistook you for anything but a lowlife? La Dowd was in ecstasy when Romney bit the dust. A lot of people were, but she went on for days writing how the next time we will have more gays, more blacks, more Hispanics, and more women, making sure no white guy is ever president again. Is that what they mean when they call this kind of hysteria penis envy?

Read it.

In 2002, Seth Norton, a business economics professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, published a remarkably interesting study on the inverse relationship between prosperity and fertility. Norton compared fertility rates of over 100 countries with their index rankings for economic freedom and another index for the rule of law. “Fertility rate is highest for those countries that have little economic freedom and little respect for the rule of law,” wrote Norton. “The relationship is a powerful one. Fertility rates are more than twice as high in countries with low levels of economic freedom and the rule of law compared to countries with high levels of those measures.”

And so….

Economic freedom and the rule of law produce prosperity which dramatically lowers child mortality which, in turn, reduces the incentive to bear more children. In addition, along with increased prosperity comes more education for women, opening up more productive opportunities for them in the cash economy. This increases the opportunity costs for staying at home to rear children. Educating children to meet the productive challenges of growing economies also becomes more expensive and time consuming.

Read it.

Volcanos. Lasers. Just sayin’.

Read it.

Yet if the author Nathan Lean is to be believed, Americans today are caught in the grip of an irrational fear of Islam and its adherents. In his short book on the subject, Mr. Lean, a journalist and editor at the website Aslan Media, identifies this condition using the vaguely medical sounding term “Islamophobia.” It is by now a familiar diagnosis, and an ever widening range of symptoms—from daring to criticize theocratic tyrannies in the Middle East to drawing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad—are attributed to it.

In reality, Islamophobia is simply a pejorative neologism designed to warn people away from criticizing any aspect of Islam. Those who deploy it see no difference between Islamism—political Islam and its extremist offshoots—and the religion encompassing some 1.6 billion believers world-wide. Thanks to this feat of conflation, Islamophobia transforms religious doctrines and political ideologies into something akin to race; to be an “Islamophobe” is in some circles today tantamount to being a racist.

Think of some of the other tendentious terms that partisans have enlisted in pursuit of what are essentially political programs: ‘software piracy’ (sorry, if you’re not armed and boarding a ship, it’s not piracy), ‘gay marriage’ (sorry, marriage has never in the history of the planet referred to relationships between people of the same sex), ‘black market’ (black in this case being a pejorative substitution for free, is if free were a bad thing), ‘price gouging’ (as if people were forced to buy something they didn’t want; oddly enough, never applied to prices set by the government, which actually has that power), and so on.

‘Islamophobia’ is another such, an intellectual bait-and-switch that assumes that any hostility to Islam is irrational and therefore ridiculous, as if Islam didn’t have a historical record as black as that of communism or fascism and twenty times as long.

Individual Muslims can be perfectly decent and reasonable people, just as individual Communists and Nazis can be perfectly decent and reasonable people. But the problem is that the ideology (and Islam is an ideology, make no mistake about its Clever Plastic Disguise of being a religion) to which they subscribe is inherently oppressive and totalitarian, and completely contrary to the fundamental principles of Western Civilization. That’s the bottom line.

The problem with the term ‘Islamophobia’ is that fear of Islam is perfectly rational, justified by both history and current affairs, just like fear of fire or flood or high wind. That’s the bottom line.

Read it.

Well, think about it for a bit.

I guess that would make the Indians of NeverLand the British.

Hmmm. There’s irony for you.

Read it.

A gripping tale of love and death, betrayal and deliverance at the Consumer Electronics Show. Or maybe not.

For two years in high school I was a cashier at Whole Foods. We were at a busy intersection right in the middle of three fancy prep schools, so we maintained a pretty steady flow of soccer moms doing wheatgrass shots or going really hard at the salad bar with each other all day long. My supervisor, the Front End Team Leader Eric, was one of those smart middle-aged Whole Foods dudes who seemed like he could be doing much more but had gotten fucked over in life somehow and was now a powerful combination of grateful that he had any job at all and murderously spiteful that he had to wear an apron to work every day. He taught me a lot of lessons, from the practical (where to find the just-expired burritos before they went to the landfill) to the subtly profound. During the lulls in traffic when his team was prone to long bathroom breaks and back-alley bonghits, he’d saunter, clipboard in hand, down the row of cashiers. He’d stop right at the end of your station, lean in, and look you in the eyes. “If you’re not busy,” he’d say in a low rumble, a half-evil grin twisting up into his face, “look busy.” Then he’d slowly moonwalk towards the door, keeping his eyes locked, clicking his pen like a mental patient, until he got outside, where he’d do a spin and casually collect all the misplaced shopping carts in the parking lot. Fuckin’ Eric, man. I wonder if he’s on facebook.

Read it.

Starting in New York, of course … even back then, people were fleeing the Blue States.

Read it.

Read it.

After you pay $29 a ticket, the first thing that happens when you enter the Titanic exhibit (at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute through April) is that you are given a boarding pass. It’s the size of the original boarding passes to the ill-fated ship, and it is a copy of the exact ticket of someone who was a passenger on Titanic. At the end of the exhibit, you’re told, there’s a listing of all the ship’s passengers, and you can find out if your passenger survived the sinking of the ship.

Read it.

In times past, someone like Evgenia wouldn’t bother having a job. Back then, work was something unpleasant that poor people had to do so they wouldn’t starve to death.

But times have changed. Poor people no longer have to work because they collect government handouts. Work is now a privilege to be enjoyed by the rich so that they can achieve self-actualization.

Read it.

I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the thought of a chick with blue nail polish and a tattoo on her hand owning an ‘assault weapon’….

Read it.

Thieves who targeted Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus over the holiday break walked away with five iPads but apparently didn’t consider any Microsoft products worth stealing.

Which is why I own a lot of Apple stock and no Microsoft stock, even though I’ve been a developer on the Microsoft platform for over two decades.

Read it.

A question that I’m sure has been as much on your mind as it has been on mine.

An “ostrich-like dinosaur known as an ornithomimid would probably yield the most consumer-friendly cut of meat, while still maintaining a unique dinosaur taste.”

Read it.

And thoats. Don’t forget the thoats.

Read it.

 Kolbe points to a survey by the Tarrance Group and Hart Research that concluded that U.S. adults favor a switch to a dollar coin by a two-to-one margin.

Uh-huh. And yet…

According to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, right now the U.S. Treasury has about $1.4 billion in unused and unwanted $1 coins. That’s so much inventory the federal government recently announced that it wound end its program of producing presidential $1 coins – or at least suspend it.

‘Unwanted’ by whom? The American public, obviously; they’re the ones refusing to use them. Which casts some doubt on the claim that two-thirds favor a switch.

Read it.

Lurking not far beneath the surface in the uproar over the 1% versus the 99% is the notion that once an American makes it to the top he or she is very likely to stay there.

But is that so?

Hint: No.

Of those who were in the top 1% in 1987 (and could be found in 2007 and had some income in 2007), 24% were in the top 1% in 2007 and another 37% were on slightly lower rungs but still in the top 5%.

So 75% had dropped out of the top 1%.

Among people ages 15 years and 18 years in 1987 who showed up as dependents of taxpayers in the top 1%, about 14% were in the top 1% as adults in 2007 and another 20% didn’t make it to the tip top but were still in the top 5%.

So two-thirds of people whose parents were in the top 1% didn’t make it as adults.

Read it.

 When we remember our past selves, they seem quite different. We know how much our personalities and tastes have changed over the years. But when we look ahead, somehow we expect ourselves to stay the same, a team of psychologists said Thursday, describing research they conducted of people’s self-perceptions.

Not the sort of thing you usually see in Slate.

But Lynas has changed his mind—and he’s not being quiet about it. On Thursday at the Oxford Farming Conference, Lynas delivered a blunt address: He got GMOs wrong.

Thanks to ErisGuy for the link.

David Friedman takes a look at the Crustian Narrative.

 A recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that being overweight, as defined by body mass index, may be good for you—that people in the recommended BMI range are more likely to die (“all cause mortality”) than people whose weight classifies them as overweight but not obese. What I found most interesting about the news coverage of the article was the reaction reported—people quoted as criticizing the article without offering any good reason to think it was wrong.

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

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

Advocates of economic redistribution do not generally think of themselves as motivated by selfishness. Egalitarianism typically presents itself as a species of humanitarian philanthropy so that its political advocates are seldom compelled to defend their implicit claims to be acting in the altruistic spirit of charity.

The Democratic Party gets a free pass in this regard. Let any thievish political scoundrel put a “D” beside his name, and he thereby gains for himself the presumption that his every impulse is motivated by a selfless concern for the plight of the downtrodden poor.

As a hustle — a scam, a racket – this is brilliant.

Ann-Marie Slaughter has some thoughts on the subject.

It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.

Read it.

Why would they? Who cares about how many white people die?

Whenever gun control becomes a hot topic, you see white liberals going through a set pattern of contortions, one most fully worked out in Michael Moore’s Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine:

– Racist white rednecks in the sticks want guns because they have racist fears of urban blacks;

– So, we must disarm everybody to stop rednecks from killing so many

Deconstructed, this bizarre theory actually makes a fair amount of sense:

– Liberal whites in the cities want gun control because they have realist fears of urban blacks;

– So, we must disarm everybody to stop blacks from killing so many.

But, white people don’t like talking about black people, they like talking about how much they hate other white people.

Certainly the SWPLs in the media do.

They especially like coming up with theories about other kinds of white people. For example, the state with the highest homicide rate is usually Louisiana. Just think what savage redneck monsters white people in Louisiana must be. Didn’t you watch Deliverance or read Albion’s Seed?

(Of course, the murder rate in Louisiana is only about half of that in Washington D.C.. Has anybody checked out what Ezra Klein, Chris Matthews, Cokie Roberts are up to?)

No good, I suspect.

Read it.

William Marotta and the recipient of his donation signed an agreement that he would have neither rights nor obligations with respect to any offspring that resulted. But the state of Kansas says that shouldn’t insulate him from paying child support for the three-year-old daughter on whose behalf the state picked up $6,000 in medical bills unpaid by the mother, who had fallen on hard times.

This is the essential problem with accepting government ‘benefits’: It provides government with a reasonable-sounding argument that doing so entitles them to regulate the behavior of the person receiving the benefit, even when the benefit and the behavior are things with which the government has no business dealing. He that pays the piper calls the tune.

If government pays for your health care, it’s entitled to regulate your activities that might affect your health, because hey, it’s picking up the tab. This includes whether and how you reproduce.

If government pays for your housing, it’s entitled to regulate where and how you live, because hey, it’s picking up the tab. This includes whether and how you reproduce.

If government pays for your food, it’s entitled to regulate what you eat, because hey, it’s picking up the tab. This includes whether and how you reproduce.

If the government pays for your travel, e.g. the roads, then it’s entitled to regulate how and when you travel,  because hey, it’s picking up the tab. Hence the oft-repeated trope ‘driving is a privilege, not a right’.

If government pays for your education, it’s entitled to regulate how and when you go to school, and what you learn there, because hey, it’s picking up the tab.

It’s all part of the same scheme. To the extent that the government can do something for you, it’s entitled to do something to you.

Óró se do Bheatha ‘Bhaile

Athbhliain faoi mhaise dhaoibh.

P.J. O’Rourke.

Thank you for not being Jimmy Carter.

Hear, hear.

You sent a message to America in your re-election campaign. Therefore you sent a message to the world. The message is that we live in a zero-sum universe.

There is a fixed amount of good things. Life is a pizza. If some people have too many slices, other people have to eat the pizza box. You had no answer to Mitt Romney’s argument for more pizza parlors baking more pizzas. The solution to our problems, you said, is redistribution of the pizzas we’ve got—with low-cost, government-subsidized pepperoni somehow materializing as the result of higher taxes on pizza-parlor owners.

In this zero-sum universe there is only so much happiness. The idea is that if we wipe the smile off the faces of people with prosperous businesses and successful careers, that will make the rest of us grin.

There is only so much money. The people who have money are hogging it. The way for the rest of us to get money is to turn the hogs into bacon.

Steve Sailer continues spelunking through the Crust.

 Continuing to consider the Sixties … let’s take a look at the Sixties through the lens of class, using the long battle in the 1960s over Mt. San Gorgonio in Southern California, which was a harbinger of the coming class wars between the educated elite, the prosperous upper middle class, and, mostly as bystanders, the masses.

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds reminds us that the world is changing.

‘Nobody ever got shot or knocked up in an online school.” That’s the comment offered by a friend when my daughter — in search of more AP classes than her public school offered, and anxious to graduate early — decided to switch to an online high school.

An excellent point. A reminder that the sort of ‘socialization’ that goes on in schools is mostly turning kids into little socialists.

But the larger question of whether it makes sense to warehouse a bunch of kids together, sorted by age, remains.

Sure. Get all the dysfunctionality concentrated in one place. Nobody ever got bullied or had his lunch money stolen plowing a furrow or tending a loom.

Putting kids together and sorting by age also created that dysfunctional creature, the “teenager.” Once, teen-agers weren’t so much a demographic as adults-in-training. They worked, did farm chores, watched children and generally functioned in the real world. They got status and recognition for doing these things well, and they got shame and disapproval for doing them badly. But once they were segregated by age in public schools, teens looked to their peers for status and recognition instead of to society at large.

With results as you see them.

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds with some inconvenient truth.

 According to the CNN timeline for the Sandy Hook tragedy, “Police and other first responders arrived on scene about 20 minutes after the first calls.” Twenty minutes. Five minutes is forever when violence is underway, but 20 minutes — a third of an hour — means that the “first responders” aren’t likely to do much more than clean up the mess.

‘When seconds count, police respond in minutes.’ This is the great pothole that rips the oil pan out of all the left-wing rhetoric about only police ought to have guns.

Then there are our homes. If police took twenty minutes to respond at a school, how likely are they to get to your house in time? For those of us without “security teams,” the answer isn’t reassuring.

Indeed. The question that nobody in the ‘lamestream’ media is willing to ask, much less answer.

 A 20-year-old lunatic stole some guns and killed people. Who’s to blame? According to a lot of our supposedly rational and tolerant opinion leaders, it’s . . . the NRA, a civil-rights organization whose only crime was to oppose laws banning guns. (Ironically, it wasn’t even successful in Connecticut, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation.)

It doesn’t really matter who’s really to blame — the hand-wringers will round up the Usual Suspects.

The hatred was intense. One Rhode Island professor issued a call — later deleted — for NRA head Wayne LaPierre’s “head on a stick.” People like author Joyce Carol Oates and actress Marg Helgenberger wished for NRA members to be shot. So did Texas Democratic Party official John Cobarruvias, who also called the NRA a “terrorist organization,” and Texas Republican congressman Louis Gohmert a “terror baby.”

Left-wingers are the biggest and baddest h8ters in the country. ‘End the hate — shoot a liberal.’

Steve Sailer must have a lot of fun.

What really works, I imagine, is for prep schools that have a long and deep relationship with elite colleges to make confidential assessments: “The faculty here at Groton is in near unanimous agreement that this applicant adds more to classroom discussions than any Groton student since Bill Smith four years ago, whom you will have noticed just became a Rhodes Scholar. As you know, we value our relationship with Harvard’s admissions’ committee over all others, so we would not steer you wrong when we call your attention to this applicant’s intangibles.” That kind of thing coming from a top 100 prep school would probably swing some weight, while recommendations from teachers and staff at non-elite high schools probably don’t get taken too seriously because of small sample sizes.

…

But, in the long run, Harvard will get away with lots of stuff that FDNY wouldn’t dream of trying, because it’s Harvard.

Jehu looks at food and its discontents.

It’s been my observation that the least annoying variety of vegetarians are the sort that were raised in a bona fide culture that is vegetarian.  Most of the others, especially the vegans, seem to be almost all SWPLs with degrees that don’t pay much who are desperately trying to distinguish themselves from the hated proles.

Ain’t that the truth.

Read it.

The bad news is that our repopulation rate is going down — not as bad as the Japanese or Europeans, but still not good. The good news is that the boom is in red states and the bust is in blue states, so it bids fair to be a self-correcting problem.

Read it.

The correct answer is “Maybe,” or, more specifically, “Maybe, but probably not.” The specific model of the Bushmaster rifle has not been publicly disclosed, and without knowing that we cannot tell whether it is an assault weapon as defined in the defunct federal law. (The phrase “assault weapon” has no meaning apart from the federal law; it was invented by politicians for political reasons.) We can guess that it probably isn’t, since Connecticut already bans the sale of “assault weapons,” and there is no indication that Nancy Lanza bought or owned her guns illegally.

They can’t call it an ‘assault rifle’ because ‘assault rifles’ are fully-automatic weapons, not semi-automatic such as the ones they want to ban. (The term ‘assault rifle’ was coined by Hitler because he thought it sounded scary — which it does, but adding ‘assault’ to ‘rifle’ has no more objective significance than adding ‘king’ to ‘size’.) It’s just another tendentious propaganda term, like ‘price gouging’ or ‘black market’, used by activists to cause anxiety in the intellectually challenged.

Russ Roberts takes a look at What Everybody Knows.

When I was younger, everyone knew that the New Deal had saved the US economy from the ravages of the Great Depression. Everyone knew that Keynes was right–look what had happened when Roosevelt implemented his ideas–the Great Depression ended! Eventually, everyone knew that story was false. The New Deal wasn’t that big and the Great Depression didn’t really end when the New Deal was implemented.

Now everyone knows that World War II ended the Great Depression. Of course, private consumption fell during WWII and the vaunted Keynesian multiplier seemed to only work for the defense industry. Someday, perhaps, people will understand that when a war takes over most of the industrial sector, you don’t get much stimulus. And it’s not hard to reduce unemployment when you force a huge chunk of the male working-age population into the army.

When the war ended, all the Keynesians predicted disaster and a horrible depression because of the cuts in government spending and men coming home from Europe and the Pacific. Well, when that didn’t happen, people should have known that there isn’t a simple relationship between government spending and prosperity. But somehow, people didn’t learn that lesson. And everyone forgot about it. (If you’re interested in how people maintained a belief in a theory that had been entirely discredited by events, you can read my earlier observations, here.)

How does it come to pass that everyone comes to know something that isn’t true? A simple answer is that if enough people treat it as true and those people have some credibility, then most people will assume it is true.

Read it.

 What everyone must understand is that American politics doesn’t work the way you’d think it would. Most people presume that government officials would never willfully withhold penicillin from men with syphilis just to see what would happen if the disease went untreated. It seems unlikely that officers would coerce enlisted men into exposing themselves to debilitating nerve gas. Few expected that President Obama would preside over the persecution of an NSA whistle-blower, or presume the guilt of all military-aged males killed by U.S. drone strikes. But it all happened.

It’s not selling out if you get nothing in return….

“Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.”

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, looks at Sandy Hook.

To fix it! Once and for all! Just like that! Bloomie’s criminal-justice coordinator, a chap named John Feinblatt, chimed in: “I think the American public wants a plan—is demanding a plan—how the president is going to keep them safe.”

Because, you know, if the president can’t keep us safe, who can? We will lift up our eyes unto the hills. Whence cometh our help? Our help cometh from Obama.

For the left it’s all about gun control. The people who’ve been telling us for years that we can’t possibly deport eleven million illegal infiltrators without gross violations of human rights are insisting that we can confiscate three hundred million privately held firearms.

Read it.

If you’re a professional chess player, you’ll spend thousands of hours dissecting the games of better players.

If you’re a promising young violin player, you’ll attend programs like Meadowmount’s brutal 7-week crash course, where you’ll learn how to wring every last drop of value from your practicing.

If you’re a veteran knowledge worker, you’ll spend most of your day answering e-mail.

True dat.

The main problem is that knowledge workers spend a lot of time doing self-management. Unlike chess players and musicians, they don’t have well-designed, comprehensive plans set in front of them, leaving their only task optimal execution. How much time would chess players have for self improvement if they had to run around finding out what pieces were needed, where they were located, and what rules might produce some sort of game that matches the vague description given them by their boss? Who ever asks a chess player ‘how much time do you thing you’ll need for this game?’ before he even knows what rules and pieces he’ll have to work with? ‘You said it would take two hours. Here it is going on three with no end in sight. I have to have a status report on the Chief Games Officer’s desk at 5:00. What’s the holdup?’

Read it.

He makes a good case.

Sigh. Tolkien’s Bilbo doesn’t win by being lost in a warrior’s fury. He’s plucky and creative, tough and strong enough to execute his plans. But crazy-violent? Not hardly.

And even in the magical unreality of Middle-earth where wizards and elves are part of the background, Bilbo successfully taking on the warg seemed unbelievable. Or at least inconsistent. Tolkien’s Bilbo is a hero, never a superhero.

And that’s central to The Hobbit, a story that was initially and principally about and seen through eyes of, well, a hobbit.

But Jackson has that additional six hours of so of movie to fill. He’s already said that Bilbo’s tale is only a fraction of the story he wants to tell. Maybe it will all make eventual sense and his Bilbo will become a mini-barbarian who spears Smaug. And maybe Radagast and Jar Jar Binks will show up in a grand alliance.

But whatever it becomes, it’s already pretty clear that Jackson’s Hobbit will never be Tolkien’s.

Read it.

Neurophysiology student Katy Presland, 29, said: “We’re talking about a green luminescent Christmas tree that glows in the dark and produces a noticeable light during the day.

And perhaps your children will be able to breathe under water.  Ah, I can feel it working already….

Read it.

Note that gun-control laws in 1927 were almost non-existent.

Note further that the only gun used was as a detonator in the perpetrator’s suicide..

Holly Bell points out that California is a ‘progressive’ dreamland.

Read it.

The top 10 states with the largest percentage of “rich” households under the Obama formula include true blue bastions Washington, D.C., which has the highest concentration of big earners, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, California and Hawaii. The only historic “swing state” in the top six is Virginia, due largely to the presence of the affluent suburbs of the capital. These same states, according to the Tax Foundation, would benefit the most from an extension of the much-lambasted Bush tax cuts.

The pattern of distribution of “the rich” is even more marked when we focus on metropolitan areas. Big metro areas supported Obama, particularly their core cities, by margins as high as four to one. Besides New York, the metro areas with the highest percentage of high-earning households include such lockstep blue cities as San Francisco, Washington, San Jose, Atlanta and Los Angeles.

Read it.

Despite rock-bottom congressional approval ratings, voters reelected their incumbents at near-banana-republic levels in 2012.

The difference being, of course, that elections in a ‘banana republic’ are corrupt and manipulated, and American Congressional elections are relatively fair, despite Democrat attempts to the contrary.

The author obviously thinks that this high-re-election rate is a Bad Thing. On the contrary, I suggest that this means the system is working: A Congressman is supposed to represent his district; if the district’s voters (or those that care enough to vote) think that s/he’s doing that effectively, then re-election happens. There is no value in having a ‘competitive district’ except in the newsroom or studio that is desperate for a ‘horse-race’ to report on.

Yes, there are stupid people in Congress. Witness the Congressional Black Caucus, most of whom would have trouble getting admitted to a selective Charter High School. But they reflect their districts, or they wouldn’t get re-elected, and there are obviously a lot of stupid (and foolish) voters out there. There is nothing in democratic political theory that says they don’t have a right to be represented, too.

The reason Congress is in low esteem is that Congressional votes don’t just affect their own district, but the country as a whole; one might characterize it as ‘think locally, vote globally’. People don’t mind their own Congressman, but rather than butt-head in the district next door who is getting more pork for his district than we think they’re entitled to … rr destroying historical American freedoms or bringing back slavery or whatever bugaboo the local Congressman isn’t guilty of.

Saying ‘voters hate Congress but like their own member’ is about as paradoxical as saying ‘people hate foreigners but like their own neighbor’, which illustrates how silly this whole discussion actually is.

Read it.

Popular liberal mythology to the contrary notwithstanding.

Wearer-of-bad-rugs Bob Costas may have temporarily put gun control back in the headlines, but his advocacy hasn’t made firearms restrictions any less intrusive — or any more enforceable. Like fans of all sorts of restrictions, drugs especially, gun controllers tend to jump from fantasies about a world devoid of the objects of their wrath to demands that new laws be passed to make their fantasies come true. Rarely do they put much thought into whether anybody will actually obey such laws, and the consequences of littering the landscape with impotent legislation. I’ve written before that gun laws tend to be widely flouted, and a peek at our neighbor to the south offers more evidence of such widespread defiance.

Roger Selbert is feeling grumpy.

This is the story of how elites prospered while killing the singular trend that built America, and all that you proles got in return was a dysfunctional housing market. In a reversal of more than 100 years of American history, the unique force that built the United States and the wealth of its inhabitants – geographic convergence – has been stopped. Based on labor mobility and the income convergence it engendered, geographic convergence was our great equalizer, our economy’s ace in the hole: even in the worst of times people could always move from where they were to somewhere else to improve their prospects. Well, they can’t anymore, and the reason is housing.

Who killed geographic and income convergence? Well, we wealthy, older, property-rich elites in desirable zip codes did. Call us the new landed gentry if you like. I would like to say we’re really, really, sorry but I don’t see us doing anything to correct it. It wasn’t on purpose; it was an inadvertent, unintended consequence of well-intentioned laws and regulations concerning land use, zoning, building codes, permits, property taxes and the like. We didn’t undertake those restrictions on building and development specifically to exclude you people (wait – did I really just say “you people?”). Why heck, we’re concerned as all get-out about rising inequality and income disparity, just not in our own neighborhoods, okay? And besides, residential segregation is voluntary, isn’t it? Didn’t you read Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort”? We all naturally prefer to cluster with the like-minded and socioeconomically similar, don’t we?

Wally: A deep appreciation of reality is the same thing as laziness.Asok: That can’t be right.
Wally: Have you ever seen a statue of Buddha running?