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.

Read it.

More useful targets might be those apparently minor players with key connections, according to a complexity analysis approach that could help Colombia – the world’s largest producer of cocaine – investigate and prosecute cartel members.

Complexity analysis depicts drugs cartels as a complex network with each member as a node and their interactions as lines between them. Algorithms compute the strength and importance of the connections. At first glance, taking out a central “hub” seems like a good idea. When Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar was killed in 1993, for example, the Medellin cartel he was in charge of fell apart. But like a hydra, chopping off the head only caused the cartel to splinter into smaller networks. By 1996, 300 “baby cartels” had sprung up in Colombia, says Michael Lawrence of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation in Canada, and they are still powerful today. Mexican officials are currently copying the top-down approach, says Lawrence, but he doubts it will work. “Network theory tells us how tenuous the current policy is,” he says.

Read it.

An excellent analysis of the coming showdown between the Corpocrats and the Crust.

The middle class, we’re frequently told, decides elections. But the 2012 race has in many ways been a contest between two elites, with the plutocratic corporate class lining up behind Mitt Romney to try and reclaim its position on top of the pile from an ascendant new group—made up of the leaders of social and traditional media, the upper bureaucracy and the academy—that’s bet big on Barack Obama.

As recently as 2008, the Wall Street plutocrats were divided, as Obama deftly managed to run as both the candidate of hope and change and the candidate of the banks. But this year, the vast majority of the corporate ultra-rich have backed Romney, who after all is one of their own, his top five sources of donors all financial giants: Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and Wells Fargo. As The Wall Street Journal memorably noted, in 2008, no major U.S. corporation did more to back Obama than Goldman Sachs—and in 2012, none has done more to help defeat him. Those titans, along with the powerful and well-heeled energy sector, have placed most of their bets on the Republican.

Read it.

Better insulation and more-efficient heaters did not reduce energy use because people spent the gains on bigger, warmer houses. Another example: When cars get more mileage per gallon, driving becomes cheaper, so people tend to drive more. An indirect rebound occurs when efficiency improvements raise the productivity of other goods, thereby boosting the demand for energy. The demand for tires, for example, goes up as people wear out tires driving their energy-efficient cars more, so the tire industry uses more energy. Embedded energy is the extra power used to produce, distribute, and maintain energy-efficient goods such as high-efficiency insulation. And economy-wide rebounds, which include indirect and embedded rebounds, result from the ways in which people use their savings on energy to purchase other goods and services that also require energy to produce.

I’ve decided to shave especially closely this November — only barbarians wear hair on their faces.

Heather MacDonald presents some inconvenient truth.

But Sandy is also a reminder of the ongoing necessity of blue collar workers—all those hard hats trying to repair power lines and pump the water out of miles of homes, tunnels, and subway tracks.  A universal population of college graduates, the desideratum of nearly all Democrats and far too many Republicans, composed as it inevitably would be of marketing and ethnic studies majors, would be of little use in rescuing the tri-state area from its catastrophic blow.  Yes, more engineers are also needed–in the long run, to try to design more resistant infrastructure, and in the short run, to diagnose the current ruptures and plan a strategy of attack.  But manual labor is a crucial component of the current recovery.  To be sure, many of these hard hats belong to recalcitrant and budget-breaking public employee unions.  But their power is slight compared to the teachers unions.   And unlike teachers, who enjoy regular paeans of praise from politicians and advocates, utility workers rarely are the object of aspiration and admiration.

Tom Smith has the lowdown.

    That Lucas struck a deal in 2012 may be no accident either, advisers say. Long-term capital gains tax from the sale of assets held more than one year are taxed at a rate of 15% for investors in the 25% income tax bracket or above (Lucas’s level), and zero for investors in the 10% or 15% bracket. Those rates are set to jump to 20% and 10%, respectively in January. “He probably wanted to take advantage of the lower rate on long-term capital gain while it’s certain,” says Bill Smith, managing director at CBIZ MHM, a national accounting and professional services provider.

Thinking of his tax liability he is. That he votes Democratic and wants the rest of us to pay higher taxes I have no doubt.

Read it.

However wrong Michael Levin might be, I dearly love the characterization of publishers as ‘English majors wearing Daddy’s work clothes’.

Read it.

Note that this study only looked at tax return data — so any income that didn’t make it onto the tax returns was effectively invisible.

The research showed that millionaires not only were unmoved, so to speak, by their taxes being raised, “the highest-income Californians were less likely to leave the state after the millionaire tax was passed,” wrote Charles Varner and Cristobal Young in their report.

In fact, the richer the Californian, the more likely he or she was to stay, the study found. Nor did the data suggest that lowering taxes lured millionaires to the state.

Which merely goes to prove my theory that a lot of rich people don’t mind a high tax rate (note that I didn’t say ‘paying high taxes’, which is a different thing entirely) because it hits the almost-rich even harder, and tends to increase effective income inequality rather than reduce it. California is like New York City, a very pleasant place for those who don’t have to count their change.

Arnold Kling, a Real Economist, continues pointing out inconvenient truths.

If you own your home, then a lot of your wealth is tied in with the quality of your neighborhood. In theory, this should motivate you to vote more carefully in local elections. On the other hand, if you are a renter, and the neighborhood goes downhill, you will simply leave.

Collectivists prefer to trap households within specific government service areas. Their thinking is that with the “exit” option foreclosed, households will be forced to exercise their “voice” option, to everyone’s benefit. This is an argument against private schools. It goes back at least as far as A.O. Hirschman’s classic book, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.

In my view, the “exit” option works much better than the “voice” option. If a local grocery store does not carry the produce I prefer, the best solution is for me to go to a competing grocer. I feel the same way about schools and local governments. Compared with choosing a competing supplier, it strikes me that writing complaint letters and participating in elections is a feeble way to try to bring about change.

Todd Zywiki takes on Neil Barofsky, naive bureaucrat.

Yet throughout his tome, Barofsky repeatedly remains shocked to find politics at the heart of the TARP process.  Even at the end he seems to believe that such programs can and should be insulated from political pressure—all that is necessary is to put people like him in charge and allow them to do what is right.  But, of course, this dream of eliminating politics from government decision-making and the allure of putting unaccountable do-gooders in charge of the government are the same warmed-over naive platitudes that are so responsible for the soaring growth of government and special-interest rent-seeking since the Progressive Era first foisted the model on America at the beginning of the twentieth-century: appoint more wise and incorruptible people like me and everything will be fine.  If only it were so easy.

Read it.

As Schumpeter pointed out in 1942, a university education makes it psychologically much harder to consider manual trades, even if employment opportunities are greater there.  It’s psychological as well as the material expense involved, particularly these days.  I’d add another, as well, though: it’s not simply the college experience and the expectations it creates – it’s also the way in which the system pushes students to prepare to compete for college while still back in high school, with fewer students of the upper middle class, especially, working the jobs that they used to work, in fast food or retail or other things.  The kind of work in high school that was ordinary and normal even for very smart, college and beyond-bound students, coming from the middle and even upper middle classes, is both less available and  less respected – disrespected, even – by parents, by the college entrance system, by the students themselves.  So much for the intrinsic dignity of labor.

‘To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.’ — Conan the Barbarian

‘To sit in a comfy chair with a good book, a mug of hot cocoa, and a cat purring in your lap.’ — Tim of Angle

Read it.

The rapidly growing use of shale gas in the U.S. has also driven down carbon-dioxide emissions by replacing coal in the generation of electricity. U.S. carbon emissions are falling so fast they are now back to levels last seen in the 1990s. So the two technologies most reliably and stridently opposed by the environmental movement—genetic modification and fracking—have been the two technologies that most reliably cut carbon emissions.

Gene Weingarten is a man after my own heart.

As a person who is both old and grouchy, I have to fight the temptation to be a curmudgeon. So I am always looking for common ground with the young and the hip. (I like Ghostface Killah! Mostly! When his grammar isn’t really bad!)

Keeping the curmudgeon in me at bay isn’t easy, because I am increasingly annoyed by unacceptable modern incursions into what is Right and Proper, dagnabbit. I experienced this the other day when I saw a page of notes taken by my Washington Post colleague Rachel Manteuffel for a story she was writing. It resembled a page from an economics textbook.

“You don’t write in cursive,” I said.

“I was never taught cursive,” she said.

Read it.

You want unrestricted immigration? Fine: China, Korea, Japan — bring ’em on. Our economy would explode.

Steve Sailer explains it all to you.

I know which one I want….

Read it.

In the early days, things were clearer: you were a filthy, exsanguinated revenant, doomed to wander graveyards after dark, feeding on the blood of living humans (often children), sleeping in coffins, biting necks and hiding your face from sunlight, mirrors and God. You were a rat whisperer. One step up from a zombie. You were neither rich nor sexy. You did not sparkle.

But then the Romantics discovered you, and you went from being an underground word-of-mouth legend to a supernatural star of page, stage, screen and cereal box. The newly industrialized culture was mesmerized by you. No longer a mere monster, you ascended to metaphor.

We report, you decide.

Robert Samuelson spanks the New York Times.

 Who creates most jobs? Hint: It’s not the government. Almost everyone seems to grasp that the private sector is the true jobs machine. But here’s a notable exception to the consensus: the editorial page of The New York Times. The other day, its lead editorial was “The Myth of Job Creation: The government does in fact create jobs, important jobs, millions of them.” In 35 years, I can’t recall ever writing a column refuting an editorial. But this one warrants special treatment because the Times’ argument is so simplistic, the subject is so important and the Times is such an influential institution.

The Voices of the Crust at the Times ignore the fact that the ‘jobs’ the government ‘creates’ are tax-eaters, not tax-payers.

What the Times omits is the money to support all these government jobs. It must come from somewhere — generally, taxes or loans (bonds, bills). But if the people whose money is taken via taxation or borrowing had kept the money, they would have spent most or all of it on something — and that spending would have boosted employment.

Job creation in the private sector is mostly a spontaneous and circular process. People buy things they need and want. Or businesses and private investors take risks by investing in new products, technologies and factories. All this spending, driven by self-interest and the profit motive, supports more jobs. In a smoothly functioning market economy, the process feeds on itself. By contrast, public-sector employment grows only when government claims some private-sector income to pay its workers. Government is not creating jobs. It’s substituting public-sector workers for private-sector workers.

Read it.

While GED holders are as smart as graduates, in terms of future outcomes (annual income, unemployment, divorce, drug use) they look exactly like dropouts.

The study made clear that “non-cognitive skills” like persistence, planning and self-control can be more important than intelligence in the long run.

Read it.

I was going through a litany of favorite left-wing issues, categorizing them according to how they meshed up with what I perceived to be three primary base human impulses. Those three impulses being: Resentment, desire for a centrally controlled and micro-managed nanny-state, and belief in a godless universe. Abortion is godless, not only in the act, but in the beliefs upon which it is based. The baby is “tissue.” To those who then ask, if the baby is nothing more than a clump of cells and the rest of us labor under no moral obligation to preserve it, then how are any of the rest of us more worthy of protection than that “tissue”? And the honest answer is: We’re not! Boys, girls, gays, straights, babies, old people, every year in between we’re all just randomly growing and regenerating carbon-based stuff. Stuck here on a tiny rock in space by unplanned cosmic forces. Nothing glorious about us at all. Certainly no reason for being here, no mission, no purpose. Just sit around and be happy. Play a video game and chow down a Happy Meal. Do whatever pleases you.

Freeberg reinvents Nietzsche.

I reflect on it for a few days and a few nights, and realize I can’t think of any political agenda, in my lifetime, leftward-leaning that doesn’t have something to do with resentment.

Nietzsche, being an academic intellectual, uses the fancy French term ressentiment, but it’s the same tune.

Ressentiment is not to be considered interchangeable with the normal English word “resentment”, or even the French “ressentiment”. While the normal words both speak to a feeling of frustration directed at a perceived source, neither speaks to the special relationship between a sense of inferiority and the creation of morality.

Read it.

In theory, regulation should arise as a response to market failures. In practice, regulation is more accurately characterized as a government tool for redistributing society’s resources toward those groups that have successfully enlisted the support of the government on their behalf.

For example, the 50 biggest-spending lobbying groups spent $176 million on lobbying from July through September this year. If agencies weren’t cranking out 3,800 new rules per year, and if the Code of Federal Regulations wasn’t 169,000 pages long, it is unlikely that so much money would flow into Washington.

Read it.

If you’re not having much luck with traditional dating sites and you’re not a hardcore Star Trek fan, what’s a smart single gal to do? If you’re Noriko Higashi, a programmer at a social gaming company, you post a request for a boyfriend on the social coding platform GitHub. Gotta play to your target audience, right?

We have the technology.

Read it.

Everything you think you know about ‘insurance’ is probably wrong.

An insurance policy is an agreement to turn the possibility of an improbable unaffordable expense into a certain affordable expense. It is not a magic means of making a certain expense affordable.

For example, paying for birth control is highly probable. Needing vaccines or some medical tests is highly probable. Living long enough to retire is highly probable nowadays (although it wasn’t back when old-age pensions were invented). An “insurance” policy that pays for such things is, at best, a matter of taking your money for a wild night out on the town and giving some of it back to you.

Read it. Then read it again.

 The unprincipled exception is a non-liberal value or assertion, not explicitly identified as non-liberal, that liberals use to escape the inconvenient, personally harmful, or suicidal consequences of their own liberalism without questioning liberalism itself.

Alternatively, the unprincipled exception is a non-liberal value or assertion, not explicitly identified as non-liberal, that conservatives use to slow the advance of liberalism or to challenge some aspect of liberalism without challenging liberalism itself.

Read it.

Anything that affirms your feelings about your own morality (“I eat organic, therefore I’m a good person.”) your brain may subconsciously use to justify doing something immoral. (“I’m generally a very good person so it’s okay if every now and then I…”)

Related question: Does being a jerk already make it more likely that you prefer organic food? I think there’s a lot of empirical evidence that would support an affirmative response to that.

Read it.

The best education in the world is already free of charge. Just go to the best university in the world and start attending classes. Stay as long as you want, and study everything that interests you. No one will ever “card” you. The only problem is that, no matter how much you learn, there won’t be any record you were ever there.

Universities don’t sell education, they sell credentials. But that’s okay, because employers don’t care about education, they care about credentials. ‘The way she sees and the way he looks, it’s a perfect match.’

Read it.

Can’t say that I blame them.

Read it.

Read it.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Of course, the use of ‘Robin Hood’ here is bogus, as most such uses are. Robin Hood TOOK MONEY FROM CORRUPT GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS AND GAVE IT BACK TO WORKING PEOPLE WHO’D HAD IT STOLEN THROUGH TAXES. Nobody ever seems to remember it correctly.

When Steve Sailer does a takedown, he doesn’t hold back.

 Some celebrated thinkers are so dumb that even when they are more or less right in their politics, they drive the thinking man crazy with their amazing ability to come up with stupid examples for what ought to be easy positions to validate. MIT economist Daron Acemoglu is making himself the Malcolm Gladwell of the 2010s, with a nearly infallible nose for sniffing out the worst possible argument and then putting it forward triumphantly.

Now, I know nothing about Daron Acemoglu (other than that he’s Turkish, as his name makes clear), but this almost tempts me to look him up.

Steven Landsburg is not afraid to say what everyone ought to be thinking.

So Alvin Roth wins the Nobel Prize for, among other things, figuring out the best way to allocate kidneys subject to the constraint that you’re too damned dumb to use the price system.

Next up: A Nobel prize in medicine for figuring out the best way to prolong your life while repeatedly shooting yourself in the head.

And that tells you pretty much everything you need to know on the subject.

Read it.

My favorite example of Mr. Heinegg’s examples, though, has nothing to do with Jewish religious terminology. It occurs at the end of the same “Talmudic argument” after Jesus’s death when he appears to his disciples and asks — seeking to prove that he is flesh and blood and not an apparition — whether they have anything for him to eat. (In the King James, this goes: “Have ye here any meat?”) In Einspruch’s Yiddish, the question is: “Hot ir do epes tsu esn?”

The untranslatable epes is marvelous. Epes is one of the homiest words in the Yiddish language. It means “something” or “anything,” but it can also mean “a bit of,” and it makes Jesus sound as if he were saying, “Hey, you guys, can you spare me a bite to eat?” How could anyone have thought he was an apparition after that?

Read it.

… keep in mind also Hayward’s First Law of Environmental Energy Politics: there is no source of energy, no matter how clean, that environmentalists won’t oppose if it becomes cheap and abundant.  We’ve seen this turnabout on natural gas, but also see widespread environmentalist opposition to wind farms and solar power facilities.  It will happen to algae if it becomes practical.

Read it.

Jaroslav Flegr is no kook.

I don’t know — he certainly looks to me like a kook.

Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia?

Wouldn’t surprise me. Look at some of the things cats do on YouTube.

The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes.

You know how pregnant women are, rooting around in cats’ litter boxes all the time. (Doesn’t ‘T. Gondii’ sound like a rap singer?)

T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage.

I guess homosexuals are cat people. Who knew?

But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents.

Women and minorities hardest hit, no doubt. (See above.)

He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.”

Perhaps it even explains how Obama got elected President. Lord knows we could use a scientific explanation for that one.

T. gondii, reports Sapolsky, can turn a rat’s strong innate aversion to cats into an attraction, luring it into the jaws of its No. 1 predator. Even more amazing is how it does this: the organism rewires circuits in parts of the brain that deal with such primal emotions as fear, anxiety, and sexual arousal

And that would explain the success of Bill Clinton, If You Know What I Mean And I Think You Do. This theory is looking better and better.

The far more common victims of parasitic mind control—at least the ones we know about—are fish, crustaceans, and legions of insects, according to Janice Moore, a behavioral biologist at Colorado State University. “Flies, ants, caterpillars, wasps, you name it—there are truckloads of them behaving weirdly as a result of parasites,” she says.

And that’s not to mention college students. You can’t tell me that there isn’t some sort of parasitic mind control going on there.

Consider Polysphincta gutfreundi, a parasitic wasp that grabs hold of an orb spider and attaches a tiny egg to its belly. A wormlike larva emerges from the egg, and then releases chemicals that prompt the spider to abandon weaving its familiar spiral web and instead spin its silk thread into a special pattern that will hold the cocoon in which the larva matures. The “possessed” spider even crochets a specific geometric design in the net, camouflaging the cocoon from the wasp’s predators.

Any resemblance to the effect of Unions on Congressmen is purely coincidental, of course.

Americans will be happy to hear that the parasite resides in far fewer of them, though a still substantial portion: 10 to 20 percent.

Ah. Undecided voters. It all fits.

Researchers had already observed a few peculiarities about rodents with T. gondii that bolstered Flegr’s theory. The infected rodents were much more active in running wheels than uninfected rodents were, suggesting that they would be more-attractive targets for cats, which are drawn to fast-moving objects

Compare the relationship between small business owners and government. Frightening.

Flegr was especially surprised to learn, though, that the protozoan appeared to cause many sex-specific changes in personality. Compared with uninfected men, males who had the parasite were more introverted, suspicious, oblivious to other people’s opinions of them, and inclined to disregard rules. Infected women, on the other hand, presented in exactly the opposite way: they were more outgoing, trusting, image-conscious, and rule-abiding than uninfected women.

Cat people. I’m tellin’ ya….

The Other McCain is on the case.

If Obama thinks he’s gonna throw Hillary Clinton under his bus, he’s going to find out the hard way his bus ain’t big enough.

Since we knew that the Republicans were going to run the Next Guy In Line in 2008, my wife and I voted in the Democrat primary. I voted for Hillary under the theory that, if we’re going to get a Democrat President, it might as well be a qualified Democrat President — say what you will about the Clintons, they have a talent for finding and sticking to the middle of the road. My wife says she voted for Barack under the theory that, if you’re picking the other side’s candidate, pick the bigger fool and hope that even the Next Guy In Line might win. We all see how that worked out.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

 Let’s try this hypothetical: two blue-eyed identical twins raised together apply to the University of Texas. They have equal GPAs, test scores, extracurricular activities and so forth. They only differ in one thing. Seven of their eight great-grandparents are German. But the other one is the King of Spain. Does this entitle them to check the Hispanic/Latino box on their UT applications?

Hundreds of Habsburgs await the decision with bated breath….

Read it.

How many do you know?

Read it.

It’s amazing how much Darth Vader resembles the government in his approach to ‘deals’.

Read it.

If you believe inflation is under control, then answer this: Where can you get a dozen eggs for a buck?

Nowhere, not even if you own the chicken.

For decades economists have warned about the dangers of deflation. The ongoing double-digit, multimarket decline in real estate prices should horrify us, we are told. Even our language has been edited to reflect this mentality; the phrase real estate recovery is a happy-sounding euphemism for a reinflation of housing prices. Yet everywhere you look, Americans are happy to do the deflation dance.

I wouldn’t mind a little deflation if it meant I could pay 25 cents for a candy bar rather than a buck.

It is well that experts remind us deflation is terrible. Otherwise we might grow too fond of it.

Some of us already are.

Freeberg has some thoughts on the subject.

It’s completely obvious that across time, the definition of the “poor” is changing. You can live in a two-story house with a garage with two nice cars in it, and if the payments and the mortgage cause you some indigestion then that means you need to vote in some politicians who “care” about you and will give you some perks so you can “make ends meet.” I hear a lot of complaining about a “vanishing middle class” and it seems to me the people doing the complaining are the people who are doing the vanishing: If you’re not rich you must be poor, in the sense that you need this government to give you material things it forcibly took away from other people, otherwise you’re boned.

And the definition of “looked after” or whatever, likewise, is changing. In my world, you’re either making it or you’re not. We use this as information, to figure out whether or not we’re on the right track. This mindset of mine seems to have swung out of date by, oh I dunno, maybe as much as a century…and I’m not sure exactly when, how or why. But it isn’t a bowl of soup or a hunk of bread anymore. Obama gonna buy you a cell phone. Obama gonna put gas in your car and pay your mortgage. Obama gonna send you back to school. Subsidies, grants, loan guarantees, deductions, exemptions, ObamaCare waivers, targeted tax cuts, the sky’s the limit. Everyone bitches up a storm about the tax code being too complicated but very few people seem to genuinely care about it.

Steve Sailer is never afraid to ask the discomforting questions.

So what could be more obviously important to America’s future than the quantity and quality of births?

And yet while newspapers run routine articles on the quantity of births, there is negligible coverage of the quality.

On the face of it, this is rather strange because most other aspects of 21st-century American culture are obsessed with quality over quantity. Tiger Mothers, for instance, aren’t impressed that Arizona State has more students than Princeton. Nor does anybody win at fantasy football by having the most players on their roster.

And what does that mean for the rest of us?

One insight is found in the opening scene of the Bush Era’s signature film, Idiocracy. Sitting next to her husband Trevor (138 IQ), Carol (141 IQ) explains, “There’s no way we could have a child now, not with the market the way it is.” Meanwhile, Clevon (84 IQ) has impregnated much of his trailer park.

When home prices increase much faster than income, the prudent abstain from family formation. In contrast, the spurious prosperity of a debt bubble appears to ignite the animal spirits of the less thoughtful.

In other words, the facts of life on the ground encourage low quality people to reproduce and high quality people not. Marxists coined a term for it: ‘proletariat’, those whose only product is offspring.

Joel Kotkin sounds the alarm.

There’s a broader, ugly truth that as the last traces of purple fade from the electoral map, whoever wins will have little reason to take care of much of the country that rejected them.

At least since the dissolving of the “solid South” in the late ’50s and early ’60s, both parties have competed to extend their reach to virtually every region. As recently as 1996, Democrat Bill Clinton could compete in the South, winning several states in the mid-South and even in the heart of Dixie, including Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee. President Obama has about as much chance of winning these states this year as Abraham Lincoln did in 1860—giving him little reason to consider them in a second term.

Read it.

Western industrial civilisation is eating itself stupid. We are living in the Age of Food. Cookery programmes bloat the television schedules, cookbooks strain the bookshop tables, celebrity chefs hawk their own brands of weird mince pies (Heston Blumenthal) or bronze-moulded pasta (Jamie Oliver) in the supermarkets, and cooks in super-expensive restaurants from Chicago to Copenhagen are the subject of hagiographic profiles in serious magazines and newspapers. Food festivals (or, if you will, “Feastivals”) are the new rock festivals, featuring thrilling live stage performances of, er, cooking.

Read it.

Shorter Warren: “I felt Cherokee, and feeling is being.”

Look: they have DNA testing now. Put up or shut up.

He’s got a point.

Read it.

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

A review.

Goldsmith also presents two theses. The first is that pushback against Bush’s anti-terrorism policies produced a consensus about what tools the President can use in fighting terrorism, which explains why President Obama retained so many of Bush’s policies as they stood in 2009. The second is that we should be relatively sanguine about the process that produced the current consensus, and about that consensus itself.

…

“Lawfare” refers to the relatively recent phenomenon of law and lawyers affecting the conduct of war. Lawyers, Goldsmith shows, are now at the heart of the military decision-making process. They not only review operational plans in advance, but also participate in the field, providing counsel to commanders regarding proper targets, for example.

…

Goldsmith finds that “lawfare” constraints have impeded our military operations and increased the number of U.S. casualties. They even enabled Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, to escape after a lawyer dissuaded the military from striking a building because civilians were probably present. As Goldsmith explains, “[S]urrounded by law and under the gaze of many potential retroactive critics, it is entirely rational for soldiers up and down the chain of command to hesitate before acting.” Such hesitation is sometimes incompatible with waging effective warfare.

Read it.

Bees at a cluster of apiaries in northeastern France have been producing honey in mysterious shades of blue and green, alarming their keepers who now believe residue from containers of M&M’s processed at a nearby biogas plant is the cause.

…

As for the M&M’s-infused honey, union head Frieh said it might taste like honey, but there the comparison stopped.

“For me, it’s not honey. It’s not sellable.”

There it is. Faced with something new, the French panic; in America this would be seen as a business opportunity, and this varicolored honey advertised as the Next New Thing.