Read it.

We now know that people in academia overwhelmingly supported Obama.

With that in mind, it’s difficult to feel sympathy over their shrinking pool of job prospects.

Indeed. Being taught by somebody who voted for Obama is like getting driving lessons from Cheech & Chong.

Steve Sailer contemplates the Axis of Drivel.

 In December of each year, the New York Times film critics, like film critics everywhere, write Deep Think pieces about what patterns in the movies released in the current year tell us about Trends in the Big Issues. The annual answer ought to be: Virtually nothing, because what gets released in a single year is a close to a random sample of projects that had been in the works for years and happened to come to fruition now. But that never stops the critics from pontificating on 2012: The Meaning of It All.

Not surprisingly, they are still using Obama Campaign talking points.

Read it.

There are social and cultural influences and practical considerations; but the basic problem is that because of their genetic makeup, some people’s bodies are more efficient at storing calories. In a famine situation, they would be the survivors; in a world where abundant food is available, they are the obese.

Hey, you, fat guy — you’re a survivor. Take a bow. Or try, anyway.

Tom Smith understands the dialectic.

The obvious explanation I think is to consider what tax deductions actually are.  They are the very catalog of political influence in this country. The real estate industry, the non-profits, the long list of other deductions you can take: The tax code is the fine print of the social contract on which the fat belly of Leviathan comfortably rests. Those of us squished by its slimy blubber may breathe only with difficulty, but for the beast itself, it’s more like a soft mattress to which it has comfortably conformed, and vice versa. Any sort of tax reform, including deduction caps, which are incremental reform, partially wipes out part of these accumulated deals among State and special interest factions. So if you want to raise revenues for the State, and leave the tissue of these deals intact, it has to be by raising rates, not imposing caps, and the more funds you want to raise, the more important this is.

Rates declare how much of your earnings will be confiscated by the state; deductions are what the state, for political reasons (and favoring politically fashionable groups), will graciously allow you to keep.

Each deduction is a privilege, in the precise meaning of that term, written into the law to favor a particular special interest, and bearing the fingerprints of a political agenda or a corrupt political deal. They are the poster children of The Tax Code As Social Engineering, rather than serving (as the Founders intended) as a just system of allocating the cost of government.

Lileks.

According to a spokesman for the Department of Whoa, Didn’t See That Coming, the state is $1.1 billion in the hole, and there’s not enough gambling money to pay for the stadium. The problem, according to one of the state reps I heard on the news:

“The tax system is broken.”

That’s bad news. I guess. Perhaps he means “broken” in the “out of order” sense, where you put your money in the slot and get absolutely no state services in return, and then you get angry and find your state rep and jiggle him back and forth and maybe pound on his forehead to get the state services to fall down into the basket– you can just see that highway construction project stuck there in the screw-thing that pushes it out! Someone else is going to come along and put in some taxes and get two freeway interchanges for the price of one.

Bryan Caplan looks at reproduction.

To be brutally honest, we’re reluctant to have more children because we think that the pain outweighs the gain. When people compare the grief that another child would give them to the joy that the child would bring, they conclude that it’s just not worth it. As Bill Cosby put it, “The reason we have five children is because we do not want six.”

More and more people on the right side of the bell curve and the upper levels of the economy are making that decision. We are no longer a labor-intensive society, so having additional hands to put to work aren’t really an advantage any more. And with the prevalence of ‘social safety nets’, you don’t need kids to look after you in your dotage, either. (In fact, they more and more regard past-sell-by-date parents as an inconvenience.) In short, people are making the entirely rational calculation that kids are more trouble than they’re worth. Some overclass people will continue to have kids, just as some people enjoy knitting socks by hand, but it will be, effectively, a hobby. (The underclass, of course, will continue to have kids because sex is one of the few recreations available to them, and they’re too stupid to think ahead.)

Read it.

That politicians regularly talk about “job creation” is a strong signal that most have never created any. It’s lost on the political class, but jobs are most plentiful in business sectors where they’re most readily being destroyed.

True dat. Especially ones who have never had a real job in their lives, like AlGore or Jesse Jackson or most of those named Kennedy or Rockefeller.

Put simply, the mass destruction of farming jobs allowed for the redirection of precious human capital toward more productive, higher value work.

And even today people aren’t comfortable with that, as all the hand-wringing about ‘family farms’ makes plain. Similarly, the mass destruction of conventional manufacturing jobs will allow for the redirection of precious human capital toward more productive, higher value work — although, again, people aren’t comfortable with that, as all the handwringing about ‘off-shoring’ makes even plainer.

Sure, a lot of low-IQ people are going to starve or spend their lives in drug-induced coma, but — tell the truth — are the rest of us really going to miss them? If everybody who voted for Obama disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow, we’d see exponential growth rates in the economy and science that would catapult us into the next stage of human existence.

Read it.

It seems intuitively obvious that not everyone has a wireless phone, and hence there is still a residual ‘demand’ for pay public telephones. On the other hand, it seems plain that, in light of the theft and vandalism to which they would undoubtedly be subjected in the low-rent areas in which they would be most useful, no commercial company is going to be interesting in throwing money down that particular rat-hole. This would therefore appear to be a perfect opportunity for those so inclined to engage in a government-has-to-meet-this-public-need-because-the-free-market-will-fail program. #OccupyPhoneBooth?

Read it.

A funny thing often happens on the way to soaking the rich: They don’t stick around for the bath. Take Britain, where Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs service reports that the number of taxpayers declaring £1 million a year in income fell by more than 60% in fiscal 2010-2011 from the year before.

That was the year that millionaires became liable for the 50% income-tax rate that Gordon Brown’s government introduced in its final days in 2010, up from the previous 40% rate. Lo, the total number of millionaire tax filers plunged to 6,000 in 2010-2011, from 16,000 in 2009-2010.

Amazing how that works.

The new tax was meant to raise about £2.5 billion more revenue. So much for that. In 2009-2010 British millionaires contributed about £13.4 billion to the public coffers, or just under 9% of the total tax liability of all taxpayers that year. At the 50% rate, the shrunken pool yielded £6.5 billion, or about 4.4%.

All that hope and the change is in the wrong direction.

Read it.

There are two ways of letting political correctness control your mind.

One is to reject viewpoints, not because they’re false, but because they’re politically incorrect.

The other is to embrace viewpoints, not because they’re true, but because they’re politically incorrect.

We libertarians are seldom guilty of the first mistake. But we are often guilty of the second. Those who commit the second mistake are as much slaves of political correctness as those who commit the first.

Read it.

When times are good and the ship of state only needs to sail straight, mentally healthy people function well as political leaders. But in times of crisis and tumult, those who are mentally abnormal, even ill, become the greatest leaders. We might call this the Inverse Law of Sanity.

Ross Douthat points out that the Emperor is not only starkers but also has a really small dick.

WINNING an election doesn’t just offer the chance to govern the country. It offers a chance to feel morally and intellectually superior to the party you’ve just beaten. This is an inescapable aspect of democratic culture: no matter what reason tells us about the vagaries of politics, something in the American subconscious assumes that the voice of the people really is the voice of God, and that being part of a winning coalition must be a sign that you’re His chosen one as well.

Not that they’re into that whole God thing, you understand.

“Those poor, benighted Republicans!” runs the subtext of their postelection commentary. “They can’t read polls! They can’t reach Hispanics! They don’t understand women! They don’t have a team of Silicon Valley sorcerers running their turnout operations!”

Honesty would have forced them to add ‘They’re unwilling to give away free shit!’ and ‘The only good vote is a fraudulent vote!’, but we’re talking Democrats here, so honesty is a foreign concept.

 Liberals look at the Obama majority and see a coalition bound together by enlightened values — reason rather than superstition, tolerance rather than bigotry, equality rather than hierarchy. But it’s just as easy to see a coalition created by social disintegration and unified by economic fear.

If you are useless and ignorant and lazy and therefore dependent on handouts for your very existence, then of course you’re going to support the side the promises you more handouts. That’s just a fact. And the side that catches on to this first is going to encourage people to be useless and ignorant and lazy because that increases their support. That’s just a fact, too. Ta-da! Welcome to the modern Democratic Party.

Foseti labels this grouping ‘The Coalition of Third-Worldism and Civilizational Decay’, although I could think of several less polite (and less Politically Correct) ways to say it.

… the Democratic Party’s coalition is one of NAMs (and Asians) and loose women (I feel a Waylon Jennings song coming on, but maybe that’s just the booze talking). Someone can probably come up with a good name for this coalition, but in the meantime, I’ll lamely propose: The Coalition of Third-Worldism and Civilizational Decay. Or perhaps “Idiocracy in Action” is more catchy.

Read it.

[David] Friedman also seems to think that if a bunch of people from place A move to place B, it’s most likely that they’ll act like citizens from place B. For example, if a bunch of Nigerians move to Norway, Friedman seems to think that the Nigerians will act like Norwegians. What is it about immigration that makes otherwise (in this case) brilliant people say retarded shit?

That has always been one of my reservations about David Friedman’s writing — for someone who teaches both law and economics, he has a distressing tendency to forget both when he gets on one of his hobby horses.

From #62:

It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow.

Aw, who cares what a bunch of dead white men think, anyway….

Ross Douthat turns over a rock.

 WE have two political parties in America, runs a saying that conservatives like to quote. One is stupid, the other is evil. And when they join forces to do something that’s both stupid and evil — well, that’s what we call “bipartisanship.”

Heh.

Read it.

Tim Egan in the Times: “The Progressives of the early 20th had an amazing run — direct elections of senators, regulation of monopolistic trusts, modernization of public schools, cleaning up the food supply — with only one major blooper: Prohibition.” I’m not a big fan of either the Seventeenth Amendment or of antitrust law, but put those aside; what about, among other things, residential segregation laws in the South and border states (fortunately invalidated by the Supreme Court, much to the dismay of Progressive commentators), eugenics legislation, hostility to the Equal Rights Amendment/support for “protective” law for women only, support for American imperialism (at least via one of the Progressives’ great champions, Theodore Roosevelt–and Woodrow Wilson didn’t exactly distinguish himself with American intervention in World War I, which may be the single greatest “blooper” in American history), and support for state legislation monopolizing certain fields on behalf of incumbent businesses (see, e.g., New State Ice v. Liebmann)? Do these count as only minor bloopers, or has Progressive support for these policies slipped down the old memory hole?

As I’ve consistently noted, today’s “Progressives” are not the same as yesteryear’s “Progressives.”  They do share a general affinity for government regulation of the economy, but modern Progressives believe in civil rights and civil liberties (albeit not exactly in the same ways that I believe in them), while those of a hundred years ago were generally hostile or indifferent to such liberties.  But if modern liberals like Egan are going to cite the old Progressives as their forebears, they should at least be cognizant of the full range of policies that were considered “Progressive” one hundred years ago.

Read it.

I’ve always wished I were autistic. Of course, I’ve always wished I were an only child, too, and that didn’t happen, so I guess I’ll just work with what I’ve got.

William Jacobson has figured it out.

Is it possible to pay more than 100% of your last dollar of income in taxes? And if it were, would you bother to earn that last dollar?

Herein lies the key to how Democrats will obtain a permanent, economically-enslaved majority if universal income-based health care subsidies are enacted. And it is much worse and more nefarious than even the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out in Confessions of an ObamaCare Backer.

The scheme is simplicity itself. Welfare phaseouts create a huge ‘hump’ or curb that has to be gotten over before increased income will overcome the negative effect of losing benefits. Most poor people can’t get over that hump, so they’re trapped in low-income dependency on government benefits.

It isn’t until the taxpayer is making over $60,000 a year that he starts getting more net benefit than he was getting at $18,000. And there aren’t many underclass that can jump from $18,000 to over $60,000 — or would be willing to suffer through the hammering they get climbing up the hard way. They’re not that stupid.

In addition to all the other problems with highly subsidized, income-tested health care benefits, will come an even more permanent underclass which, being economically rational, will choose not to earn another dollar rather than lose more than a dollar of benefits.

Result: A locked-in permanent Democrat-voting underclass.

‘The worst things in life are also free.’

Bryan Caplan has some wise words.

Education teaches people to show up on time, sit down, shut up, stay awake, and follow orders.  So it’s tempting to say, “School inculcates the work ethic.”  But that’s not quite right.  School inculcates the school ethic – and while the school ethic and the work ethic overlap, the overlap is far from perfect.

At least, that’s the plan. Judging by some of the people I’ve gone to school with, it doesn’t always work out that way in real life.

Freeberg looks at where we’re at.

The fact is, liberalism isn’t really an objective. Conservatism might be an objective, but liberalism is merely a direction. Dog chasing the car. It doesn’t really know where it’s going, nor does it care.

So, basically, there’s no bottom to that hole. Lucky us.

Nick Gillespie doesn’t really like politicians much.

Read it.

In an age of rising sticker prices, low graduation rates, increasing enrollment by non-traditional students, dim job prospects, and weak learning outcomes, many students, parents, academic administrators, and politicians are asking whether a degree in History or English is worth the effort and expense. The answer is not clear: to mention one complication, liberal arts graduates have higher initial unemployment rates than graduates in vocational fields, but appear to earn more at mid-career. The question itself, however, is not going to go away.

Like the term ‘liberal’, the term ‘liberal arts’ has become perverted over time.

It used to be that ‘liberal arts’ referred to familiarity with what was best in current civilization, the ability to ponder questions in the widest of contexts, informed by the accumulated wisdom of the ages and the mental tools that had been honed by thousands of years of expert use.

Nowadays, however, ‘liberal arts’ means indoctrination with the currently fashionable Politically Correct worldview, in which critical thinking is encouraged only when it is critical of Those Other People, the ones who decline to Get With The Program.

So the answer, which used to be Yes, is today No.

Peter Hitchens is getting tired of the same old left-wing paintbrush.

I’ve warned before against presuming that I (or anyone else) haven’t said, written or done certain things, unless the person making the statement also has total knowledge. Perhaps it would have been wiser to make some enquiries, or to seek knowledge on this matter first, before making this insinuation. If the accuser can’t be bothered to look back through several years of my writings, perhaps it would have been more prudent to stay quiet. But no, the innuendo must be produced anyway. Out of such slack-minded, and if I may say, bigoted folly is totalitarianism born.

Read it.

It’s unnecessary, ineffective, and expensive. And that’s just for starters.

Read it.

“Targeting journalism has become a trend, and now the people who are harassing and killing journalists include governments as well as the people you would expect,” said Mr. Rusbridger, who, along with others, was honored at the gathering in New York.

Well, then, what you have to ask yourselves is, ‘Why do they hate us?’

 On the same day as the Waldorf event, three employees of news organizations were killed in Gaza by Israeli missiles. Rather than suggesting it was a mistake, or denying responsibility, an Israeli Defense Forces spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, told The Associated Press, “The targets are people who have relevance to terror activity.”

And there you have it. So-called journalists aren’t just objective collectors of facts and reporters of news; they have an agenda and their activities are in support of that agenda. So it’s not a surprise that those on the receiving end of that agenda treat them like any other enemy, especially when they act as the propaganda arm of thugs, mass murderers, and terrorists. There’s nothing about being ’employees of news organizations’ that makes you bullet-proof, or gives you diplomatic (or any other kind of) immunity. News organizations are notorious for picking a side and then employing adherents of that side as Friendly Native Guides; is it any wonder that doing so almost always gets them in trouble with the other side?

 Mahmoud al-Kumi and Hussam Salama worked as cameramen for Al-Aqsa TV, which is run by Hamas and whose reporting frequently reflects that affiliation. They were covering events in central Gaza when a missile struck their car, which, according to Al-Aqsa, was clearly marked with the letters “TV.” (The car just in front of them was carrying a translator and driver for The New York Times, so the execution hit close to our organization.) And Mohamed Abu Aisha, director of the private Al-Quds Educational Radio, was also in a car when it was hit by a missile.

Human Rights Watch spoke up in protest, saying in a statement, “Civilian broadcasting facilities are not rendered legitimate military targets simply because they broadcast pro-Hamas or anti-Israel propaganda.” Reporters Without Borders, another advocacy group, called the killings a “clear violation of international standards.”

Bullshit. If you want to be treated like a neutral observer, act like a neutral observer. Don’t act like a partisan and then act shocked, shocked when you’re treated like any other partisan.

Read it.

Anyway, I’m writing a column on a Swedish toy catalog that’s going for a Gender Neutral approach, which means the boys have baby dolls and the girls have guns. Seems odd that the news stories call this “gender neutral,” when it’s actually an inversion. Right? There are contradictory strains in modern thought I cannot reconcile: there are no differences between men and women, except that women are more sensible and better. I know I touched on this yesterday, but it’s only because the examples of this idea are so banal, and frequently untethered to observable reality.

I have worked for women all my life – without complaint or resentment, because they’ve all been tremendous bosses. The one guy I had as a boss was the day manager of Ralph and Jerry’s, and he taught me how to shrink-wrap ground beef. A useful skill, and I dare say I could still do it; otherwise, all my editors up the chain have been female. So? So nothing. But when you’ve been edited by women since 1983, the idea that the patriarchal voice brays and blares and drowns out all female voices, well, it doesn’t quite hold. All the women I ever dated were career missiles. My wife is a high-performing medical-statute lawyer.

Every one of those women hated guns and would find an ad with a girl holding a gun to be abhorrent.

But that’s sensible, and who is sensible on this subject in print these days? Damned few.

Read it.

An interactive map from the New York Times showing what could get flooded at various level of sea-rise.

Considering that all of these are deep Blue areas, I kind of like the 25-foot level. It would solve a lot of problems.

And how did that work out for them?

I think Republican consultants are mostly very stupid. I think they have no education. I think they have no sense of history. … If I throw away African Americans, and then I throw away Latinos, and then I throw away suburban women, and then I throw away people under 40, and then I throw away everything north of Philadelphia — there’s a morning where Republicans can’t get to a majority.

— Newt Gingrich, 2007

Read it.

This could actually be quite entertaining.

Read it.

Got super powers? Better keep ’em under wraps.

Is Stark Enterprises liable for damages caused by CEO Tony Stark in his Iron Man guise? Should a villain stay in jail for murder if the victim later comes back to life, as Ben Grimm (“The Thing”) did a few years back? In the movie “Superman III,” the hero crushes coal into a diamond he gives to Lana Lang. “This iconic gift has become closely associated with the Superman character,” the author writes, “but because we are attorneys we have to ask: Does someone have to pay tax on that?”

Read it.

Besides an increase in freedom and justice, that is.

After Prop 209, graduation rates of minorities increased by 4.4%.

No wonder liberals hate it — fewer minorities dependent on government preference programs. Can’t have that. They might vote for a Republican, and the world would end.

Eugene Volokh does what needs to be done.

To begin with, let me stress that I think that modern talk of secession is both foolish and pretty obviously empty posturing, whether it’s some liberals talking that way during the Bush Administration or some conservatives talking that way during the Obama Administration.

Jehu is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

 Is it just me, or are there ANY free trade arguments that could not also be made against income or sales taxes, usually without any rewording at all?  It is almost as if we’ve totally lost sight of the fact that tariffs were originally a revenue measure, and quite an effective one, requiring far less invasion into people’s lives and businesses than sales taxes or especially income taxes.  It is almost as if we have forgotten that belts hold one’s pants up and are a fashion accessory for the sartorially inclined and solely discuss them in the context of domestic discipline.

Let’s see—deadweight losses due to making transactions no longer profitable to both sides and thus not happening?  Check.
Interfering in patterns of specialization and comparative advantage?  Absolutely
Opportunities for rent-seeking and favored groups?  Yes, on steroids

Alex Tabarrok says what I’ve been saying for years.

    Productivity in education has lagged productivity in other sectors of the economy because teaching is so labor intensive. Where exactly in the typical classroom is there room for investment, let alone productivity improvement? More chalk? Prior to online education, the bottleneck though which productivity improvements had to pass was the teacher, and we know that improving teacher productivity is very difficult, which is why teaching methods haven’t changed in millennia. Online education vastly increases the potential for productivity increases because it greatly increases the size of the potential market. Bigger markets increase the incentive to research and develop new products (coincidentally the very topic of my TED talk.) A tool used to improve online education–an interface, an algorithm, a new teaching method–can be applied very widely, potentially world-wide, thus greatly increasing the incentive to invest in the education sector, perhaps the most important sector of the 21st century economy.

Jerry Pournelle has some thoughts.

Given the state of historical knowledge – abysmal – stretching from the White House and Cabinet through many level of University scholars and down into the public school system, even I am not at all convinced that it is absurd to explain to young American people how terrible cold and hunger can be. We have immigrant children who know these truths in their bones, but the middle class American teen agers who watch the National Geographic Channel are not likely to have experienced such things at first hand. More, concentration on battles and military history cannot be a bad thing. I suspect that “Mankind” will not show the crucial scene in the education of Alexander of Macedon (not yet The Great) who as a teenager was sent with one of Phillip’s marshals with a small force to deal with insurgents and raids on the frontier. On the way they encountered a stream of refugees, young people, women well raped, carrying everything they had as the fled toward the order represented by King Phillip. The old marshal pointed to the stream of misery and said “That is defeat. Avoid it.” Alexander remembered that all his life. It is a lesson every free person should learn.

Read it.

Having the government offer hefty prizes for entrepreneurs to devise ways to make our lives better, rather than wasting taxpayer cash year after year in inefficient attempts to do the same, is an idea that Jerry Pournelle has been championing for decades.

Read it.

Most people believe that businesses abhor regulations and would love to do away with them entirely. This belief is often wrong. Many regulations make it harder for startups to enter the market, and can hobble smaller competitors. That’s why incumbent firms in many industries regularly welcome new regulations with open arms, and will spend millions on lobbying to pass them. It’s a way to keep the competition out.

The same logic applies to taxes. Really rich people love high tax rates, because they’re in a better position to avoid them, and it keeps out the almost-rich people who would otherwise compete for luxury-lifestyle goods, such as fancy houses in Aspen and Malibu and limited seating in fancy restaurants and top-tier schools for the kiddies.

Read it.

In the olden days, scientists knew that money didn’t noticeably matter for incumbents: If incumbents won or lost it wasn’t because of differences in campaign spending.  But in crude regressions, it looked like money mattered for challengers. Now, with fancier regressions, it appears money matters little for challengers as well, especially in well-studied, data-heavy House elections.

The old results were driven by omitted variables: Weak incumbents drew in stronger challengers, and hence more challenger cash.  The challenger cash was a sign of the challenger’s relative strength, not much of a cause of her relative strength.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

Currently it is an alliance of several quite different  factions, united mostly by the desire to elect candidates. It is possible that that situation will continue—but less likely as a result of the recent defeat in the presidential election. If not, there will either be a civil war within the party, with different factions trying to take over, or a new compromise, probably brokered by the professionals at the top and sold to as much of the existing membership as possible.

What are the factions, what policies are important to them, where are there irresolvable conflicts?

Read it.

Two days ago, Karen Hughes, communications director for the Bush White House, announced, “If any Republican man makes a comment about rape other than it’s a heinous act, I’ll personally cut out his tongue.” Her comment was made, of course, in the aftermath of the disastrous 2012 election cycle, in which failed Republican Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock made controversial comments about abortions in the aftermath of rape.

Now that’s the kind of leadership that has been sorely lacking in the GOP since Teddy Roosevelt.

Read it.

Do Democrats engage in soul-searching after they lose an election? Maybe I miss it because I’m not a Democrat, but it doesn’t seem that they do. After John Kerry lost in 2004, did Democrats agonize over whether they should stop opposing the war in Iraq, or become pro-abortion? When Democrats were “shellacked,” as President Obama put it, in 2010, did they debate whether they should come up with a coherent plan to deal with the debt and start adopting budgets? Not that I recall.

The problem is that there aren’t any DINOs to correspond to all the RINOs out there — a fundamental imbalance.

Ann Althouse speculates.

 Maybe you think it won’t happen, but what if it does? Can you picture the relocation that will be needed? Or do you picture storms or waves suddenly devouring whole populations before any full-scale relocation effort takes place? What does the island in your mental picture look like? Does it look like Manhattan?

Only in my dreams, lady, only in my dreams. Actually, my dreams are more comprehensive: They tend to run toward a 30-foot rise in the sea levels around the globe. Goodby, Left Coast. Goodby, Other Left Coast. Goodby, dystopian urban areas on the Great Lakes, where black administrations are corrupt and Democrats are lovin’ it.

Ah, well. Sometimes I wish that Global Warming wasn’t a left-wing fantasy; it would solve SO many problems.

Freeman makes sense, as many do not.

Over the years I have noticed something about Bush Derangement Syndrome sufferers: They have shown a persistent tendency to think about things in binary terms. Something can be good, or if it is not, then it is bad. A person can be in, and if he is not, then he must be out. If some course of action has their approval, then they seem to lose track of the reason why; there is no risk involved in engaging it, no side effects to be anticipated, no liabilities involved in choosing it. From all I have been able to observe about them, they are living out their entire lives in the fallacy of the excluded middle. And this strikes me as strange since, thinking back to 2004, hey wasn’t that one of the biggest complaints they had about the man himself? Lack of “nuanced” thinking or some such? Eight years on, I never hear that word “nuance.” I mean, I knew at the time it was a campaign slogan, I just kind of figured there might be more to it than that. Guess I thought wrong, because the Bush haters are showing us lack-of-nuance better than anybody else I’ve seen…

Elected politicians do two types of things: sensible things and stupid things. All politicians are a mixture of the two. Republicans, on average, do fewer stupid things than Democrats; thus right-thinking people tend to support Republicans, all else being equal. This doesn’t mean that supporting any individual Republican means asserting that said Republican doesn’t ever do stupid things; it just means that they are less likely to (not ‘never going to’, but ‘less likely to’) do stupid things than any corresponding Democrat.

Do I wish that George W Bush were still President? Hell, yeah — not that he never did a stupid thing (the record is quite clear that he did plenty), but he tended to do fewer stupid things than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Would I prefer Bill Clinton to Barack Obama? Hell, yeah; Clinton would have liked to do stupid things, but tread more warily than Barack, because he’s a professional and Barack is a clueless amateur. As Joey the Hitman said about the Nixon-McGovern election, “I had a choice between a fool and a crook. Naturally I voted for the crook.” I feel the same way about Clinton-Obama, which is why I supported Hillary during the Democrat primaries in 2008.

One could make a long list of stupid things done by Republican Presidents: Nixon gave us the EPA, OSHA, and affirmative action; Bush the Elder gave us the Americans With Disabilities Act and caved on raising taxes and spending; Bush the Younger spent money like a drunken politician on feel-good nonsense like No Child Left Behind and Medicare prescription drugs, and was a major accomplice in creating the Housing Bubble. And don’t get me started on Eisenhower (hint: 1956).

Nevertheless, the bottom line remains that these guys, bad as they were, were better than their alternatives. What those alternatives would have been like is personified by Barack Obama, who differs from Jimmy Carter only in that his skin color and White Guilt allowed him to get away with shit that Carter never could have.

Republicans will do stupid things (especially Republican Senators); the important point is that however stupid the things that they do, they do less damage than the stupid things that Democrats will do. And, Libertarian fantasy to the contrary notwithstanding, that’s the only choice we get. We have no guarantees that Republicans won’t do stupid things; but we know for a fact that Democrats will do stupid things, as often as they can get away with it, and so that’s what we have to work with.

So don’t come whining to me about what Bush did or didn’t do; on his worst day, he was still better than Gore, Kerry, and Obama.

Joel Kotkin has a fascinating analysis.

Read it.

The visually stunning field of tilt-shift photography became a fairly big thing in the Web a couple of years ago. It uses a special lens that gives a real-world scene the illusion of being a miniature model.

This looks rather strange, but hey, we have the technology….

Read it.

You know, everybody used to say about Bill Clinton that he was the first African-American president, but I think that Barack Obama is the first gay president.

I cannot disagree.

Read it.

Think about it. When you go to visit a doctor each appointment starts with getting weighed, getting your blood pressure taken and checking your heartbeat. All of these sensors are now available (some in the Runkeeper store). I could essentially skip this step by printing out my own data or giving my doctor access to all of the data I’ve been collecting.

And we are long overdue for some such efficiency.

Read it, but it’s all hot air.

DNA is information, and there is no legitimate property right in information, because the essential nature of property is that it is ‘proper’, i.e. if one person has it, another is deprived of it, and that is not the case with information — never has been, never will be.

The entire function and significance of ‘property rights’ is to determine, with regard to a thing that everyone cannot have at the same time, who gets it. Information, by its very nature, is something that anyone can have without depriving someone else of it, and so falls outside of the ambit of property.

Treating information as if it were property is one of the ugliest aspects of this extremely ugly world.