The Other McCain asks the touchstone question.

Who do the enemies of America support, Obama or Romney?

Read it.

Well — if you were Canada, wouldn’t you?

Read it.

But you knew that.

Thomas Sowell blows the whistle.

Sports statistics are kept in a much more rational way than statistics about political issues. Have you ever seen statistics on what percentage of the home runs over the years have been hit by batters hitting in the .320s versus batters hitting in the .280s or the .340s? Not very likely.

Such statistics would make no sense, because different batters are in these brackets from one year to the next. You wouldn’t be comparing people, you would be comparing abstractions and mistaking those abstractions for people.

But, in politics and in commentaries on political issues, people talk incessantly about how “the top one percent” of income earners are getting more money or how the “bottom 20 percent” are falling behind. Yet the turnover in income brackets over a decade is at least as great as the turnover in batting average brackets.

In the course of a decade, the top 400 income earners include a couple of thousand people. The income received by the top 400 (as a statistical bracket) has risen, both absolutely and as a share of all income, even while the average income of the average person who was in that bracket at a given time has fallen by large amounts. How can this be? The short answer is turnover.

Turnover in sports creates no such confusion.

Read it.

Shortly after I started Per Square Mile, I produced an infographic that showed how big a city would have to be to house the world’s 7 billion people. There was a wrinkle, though—the city’s limits changed drastically depending on which real city it was modeled after. If we all lived like New Yorkers, for example, 7 billion people could fit into Texas. If we lived like Houstonians, though, we’d occupy much of the conterminous United States.

Read it.

On August 6, 2011, 30 US service members were killed when a CH-47 Chinook helicopter they were being transported in crashed in Wardak province, Afghanistan. It was the deadliest single loss for U.S. forces in the decade-long war in Afghanistan. 17 members of the elite Navy SEALs were killed in the crash.

Yesterday, Karen and Billy Vaughn, parents of Aaron Carson Vaughn, spoke at the Defending the Defenders forum sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots outside the RNC Convention in Tampa. Karen brought a copy of the form letter they were sent following their son’s death.

It’s a form letter.

It was signed by an electric pen.

 

Because, you know, he’s too busy spending our money and writing checks to groups like Acorn and Planned Parenthood and Solyndra to do more than that. But hey, he killed bin Laden….

Steve Sailer turns over a rock and watch what wiggles out.

Gay marriage has been put to a vote in 32 states. It is currently 0-32.

But nobody cares about that, least of all the ‘Democrat’ party.

I think that exemplifies the main driving force of modern liberalism. It’s not intellectual. In spirit, it’s more like the caste system in India. It’s a system for identifying new Untouchables whose very existence lifts the social status of the liberal. Gay marriage, for instance, is a trivial issue in real world terms, but it has become incredibly important to liberals precisely because it brands huge numbers of their fellow citizens as Dalits for them to hate and feel morally superior to.

Personally, I hate being touched by a liberal — you never know where that hand has been.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, takes a look at The Rich.

In which we learn that the question is not The Rich but Which Rich?

When actual yeoman farmers ceased to be much of a constituency, elements of Jeffersonian flimflam survived in the modern Democratic Party. We hear them today: Evil bankers! Predatory lenders! Wall Street paper-shufflers!

We also hear echoes of that in the modern fetish for The Family Farm, which makes about as much sense as having a similar fetish for The Hand-Made Car — yeah, you can do that, but it will cost you ten times as much, and only The Rich will be able to afford it. (As, indeed, happens today; trying buying Healthy Organic Produce at a place line Whole Foods and see how much of your paycheck is left at the end of the week. My, I’ll go to Kroger and use my Reward card to get $3-a-pound sirloin.)

You can be rich without owning an acre of land, without ever having worked or created anything, just by inheriting your money.

Though it’s hard to argue this is admirable, I can’t see that it’s deplorable. What else should happen to dad’s money? The government should take it? It is highly unlikely they would make any better use of it than the average individual. Surely it is healthy for society to contain a seasoning of persons who need not answer to anyone other than the law for their actions.

Funny how many of them turn out to be raging socialists — Are you listening, AlGore? — but I suppose it’s just guilt working its way out by making us suffer for their feelings of inadequacy (which feelings, of course, don’t extend to Giving Away The Money, any more than it does with Hollywood celebrities).

Politician Rich. This is where my blood starts to boil. Did you know that Hillary Clinton is worth $31 million? That’s without ever having done anything you or I would recognize as work. (Yeah, yeah, she lawyered; but she was the governor’s wife.)

And don’t let’s get started with the Obamas, both Barack and Michelle getting well-paying jobs basically for being Token Negroes wherever they went.

An Informative Map

Surprisingly enough, there are some.

Note that the most Republican area of Manhattan, the 1%-er Upper East Side, is still overwhelmingly Democrat.

Ron Radosh, a convert from communism, would like to remind us that this particular brand of stupidity is still with us.

He goes on to say that “Much of what is said and done by today’s left—including its ‘anti-Zionism’—is unintelligible without grasping that when ‘anti-imperialist struggle’ displaced ‘class struggle’ as the organizing category of thought and the basis of political identity.” After 1967, that outlook quickly became the necessity of branding the Israelis as “the new Nazis,” and the supposedly oppressed Palestinians as the “new Jews.”

Today, it is that SDS mentality — not that of Johnson and Berman — that makes up the contemporary Left’s ideology. And because the liberals adhered to the doctrine of “no enemies on the Left,” Voegeli adds,  the “respectable liberals couldn’t bring themselves to criticize the tame activists, who couldn’t bring themselves to dissociate from the fierce ones.” Thus, Voegeli writes, “the 60’s liberals in academia, journalism and politics fawned over the New Left radicals who delighted in tormenting them.”  After all, they thought they had a common enemy with the New Left, even though they opposed their tactics. And, worse than the New Left was the boogeyman of the Right. Hence they had a corollary to their doctrine, that of “no allies on the Right.”

The truth is that today’s liberals never came to terms with the legacy of the New Left, just as many Germans for a long time failed to come to terms with the Third Reich. Voegeli is on the mark when he writes: “The radical fringe wanted to live outside the law and also inside the law. Respectable liberals wanted to let them. They lent a hand by praising the radicals with faint damns, then quickly changing the subject to the extenuating circumstances that rendered the fringe’s deeds kinda-sorta understandable, acceptable, and even admirable.”

Read it.

Words of (possible) wisdom from Paul Graham.

Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies weren’t designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically.

A review.

Maraniss is not at all happy about the curious fact that Obama skeptics seem to like to read about Obama more than Obama supporters do.

Hey – he’s the Magic Negro. What more do you need to know?

Obama possesses an impressive understanding of the conventional wisdom. But he seems averse to original thought.

Of course. Original thought is risky and might disturb the Faithful. Better to fit himself into the stereotypes and become the Obamassiah than strike out on his on and impair his career prospects.

Time and again, Maraniss reassures us that Obama was never quite as leftist as all of his Marxist Muslim millionaire buddies from Pakistan. Well, okay …

Yeah, that would take commitment and passion, two characteristics that seem absent from Obama’s character except when it comes to himself and his own advancement.

Read it.

Four years ago at the beginning of Harvard’s school term, I was going over an assignment with a freshman when she confessed that she was feeling guilty—because she was working for the Obama campaign. I assumed she meant that her campaign work was taking too much time from her studies, but she corrected me: She was feeling guilty because she supported John McCain.

So why, I asked, was she working for his opponent? She answered: “Because I wanted so badly to get along with my roommates and with everyone else.”

I know the feeling well. But I strangled it at birth.

At Yale, where the Party of the Right has been a conservative and libertarian redoubt since the 1950s, feisty undergraduates have founded a new group to promote “genuine intellectual diversity” in the face of excessive ideological uniformity. Named for one of Yale’s most famous mavericks, the William F. Buckley Jr. Program takes its motto from the mission statement of Buckley’s magazine, National Review, standing against “the conformity of the intellectual cliques,” and supporting “excellence (rather than ‘newness’)” and “honest intellectual combat.”

We are the champions.

Nowadays, the pressure for conformism comes more from the faculty, which tips Democratic like the Titanic in its final throes. Programs that once upheld the value if not the practice of intellectual diversity tend to function more like unions, trying to keep their membership in line. Some professors make a habit of insulting Republican candidates and conservative ideas with the smirking assurance of talk-show hosts, unaware that their laugh lines reap from some students the contempt that they sow.

The increased political conformism at universities may be traced in part to the redefinition of diversity that accompanied the introduction of group preferences, aka “affirmative action.” Schools instituting this policy never acknowledged that it conflicted with competing commitments to equal consideration “irrespective of race, religion, or gender,” or that at least half the country questioned its wisdom.

And if a Harvard Professor says it, are we not obliged to believe it?

Read it.

Charlie Stross is Doing Stuff (getting more books out, I hope, since he is one of my Recommended Writers over there on the right – buy and read his books; you’ll be glad you did) and so is having some guests in on his blog. This is one of them:

Let me say it again, louder. THERE IS NO EVIDENCE FOR THIS. The bulk of our extant sources – law codes and chronicles, saints’ lives and charters, prose tales and poems – paint a picture that is almost the exact opposite. Women in early mediaeval Wales and Ireland were far from equal. They remained, lifelong, legal minors, subject to the control of their father, husband or son. Their lives were worth less than those of men. They could not own land, nor could they own much property, and, with a few minor exception (all small personal items, clothing mainly) they could not dispose of their property without the permission and sanction of the man who controlled them. They could not bear witness in court, even to acts of violence against them, because, legally, they were not fully people, their words weren’t valid in law. They could not inherit land (save in very, very unusual circumstances) nor could they inherit offices. They could not choose their own husbands, and, while they could divorce their husbands in some circumstances, their children would remain with the father (whose property they were) and a divorced woman would probably have to return to her birth kin. Once there, she was likely to end up as a servant, unless her father was very powerful and could find a man willing to marry a non-virgin. Women whose kin cast them off had nowhere to go, no options beyond service or prostitution. And, if they left the lands of their husband, father, son or overlord, they could be enslaved without sanction. (This latter could befall men, too: outside your homeland, your legal status became much lower.) Women did not rule, did not become warriors, did not make laws or participate in public society. They were, by and large, property. Irish law codes make this explicit: the two units of currency recognised under them are cattle and slave girls. Women were commodities, not full legal people.

Very refreshing. Even more refreshing would be one of these fine folks casting the cold light of reality on the New Age socialist claptrap that Charlie pushes whenever he gets off of the Writing Reservation. But I suppose that would be too much to expect. Pity.

Read it.

But do we really need Barack Obama Sr. to account for his son’s hostility toward America and its traditional beliefs and values? I don’t think so. Obama came of age, over a period of decades, in an environment that can charitably be described as hard-left. His father and mother were both socialists or worse. His maternal grandfather selected a mentor for young Barry who was a long-time member of the Communist Party USA. The socialist New Party listed him as a member. His friend, colleague and fundraiser Bill Ayers is a terrorist who says he wishes he had set off more bombs. His college professor Edward Said was the leading intellectual voice of those who want Israel destroyed. His law school mentor Roberto Unger was too far left for Brazil’s socialist party, and was sent back to Harvard, where he declined all interviews lest he endanger Obama’s electoral prospects. The minister who converted him to Christianity was Jeremiah “Gad damn America” Wright. You can go on and on.

Obama would be a communist if he wanted to put in the work.

Steve Sailer lays it out.

In general, India seems to win hands down in a contest of stereotypical images in the heads of SWPLs.

The upper middle class spends much time and money stage-managing their children’s lives to get them into the right institutions with the right sort of people for them to find the right sort of spouse, but then the ungrateful little scions fail to pull the trigger. So, why not take the next step and instead of just hiring tutors and consultants to get them into nice colleges and nice law schools, go all the way and hire matchmaking consultants to get them a nice husband or wife?

Sort of expresses an eternal truth.

Alexia Tsotsis says what we’re all thinking.

Because the truth is, unless you’re driving all the time, you don’t actually use Apple’s Siri for very much. Because of the endless “D’oh” moments, the only interactions you have with it is on accident; Ask Siri to call you an ambulance, and it literally calls you ‘An Ambulance.’

What bugs people the most about these ill-thought-out products is that they’re like that annoying person at work who’s always all, “Can I do anything to help?” when they can’t actually do anything, don’t know shit, and are actually neglecting their real job while they take the time to ask you that question. And everyone knows what eventually happens to that person product.

Hear, hear.

Read it.

Which is why four more years of Obama will not bring economic recovery. Duh.

Read it.

The notion of a colleague betraying you is at least as old as the tale of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, who famously uttered the phrase “et tu” as Brutus plunged a knife into his back.

And if you’ve ever encountered a co-worker who will do anything to get ahead — even if that means ruining your good name in the process — you know how calculating and callous such people can be.

But did you realize that such a person could also have psychopathic tendencies?

Oh, ya think?

We often think of a psychopath as being a serial killer. Yet according to former criminal profiler Gregg McCrary, psychopathy runs on a continuum — with white collar criminals falling in the middle.

Perhaps that’s why such people appear to be attracted to ‘public service’. Few professions offer such opportunities for stealing and backstabbing as government employment.

George Will nails it.

Because the possibility of effectively supervising government varies inversely with government’s size, so does government’s lawfulness.

Read it.

What does it say when a University feels the need to have a “free speech zone.”  Well, the obvious point is that speech is not free outside the zone.

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

Read it.

There is a widespread phenomenon in the Western democracies that I refer to as “hassling the law-abiding”. I’m familiar with the American version, but the Canadian, Australian, and Western European versions are surely similar.

The general idea is this: complex modern welfare states mobilize bureaucrats and law-enforcement agents to coerce conformity from ordinary people — normal well-behaved citizens who are (mostly) peaceful and productive members of society.

The prototype — some might say the Platonic ideal — of hassling the law-abiding occurs every day at the airport. When I travel by air I have to stand in line for half an hour, have my baggage X-rayed, remove my shoes and belt, and endure TSA employees staring at my junk on a screen. These procedures are supposed to ensure my “security”, but all they really do is display the absolute power of the State and allow sadistic low-level employees to get their jollies humiliating and inconveniencing thousands of innocent travelers a day.

Your tax dollars at work … sort of.

I could list more examples, but you get the idea. Law-abiding people experience routine hassles because they are, well, law-abiding. The authorities do this stuff to us because they can. Ordinary citizens are generally compliant, and put up with these things because they’re brought up to be lawful, orderly, and respectful towards authority.

Bruce Schneier accurately terms this ‘security theater’ — government employees who don’t really want to do anything, but are fully vested in wanting to appear to be doing something.

 Those who might really be dangerous — the guys in the beanies and nightgowns with their women dressed in shapeless black bags — are the ones who get the religious exemptions. Nobody wants to offend their religious sensibilities or, God forbid, profile them, so they can count on having the rules suspended for them whenever they yell loud enough. They’re not all that law-abiding, but they can cause mass trouble when riled. It’s much easier to just hassle Mr. Jones and let the others slide on by.

[insert sound of Maynard G. Krebs reacting to a mention of ‘work’ here]

And, practically speaking, it’s easier that way. So, no matter how much money it costs, no matter how many man-hours it wastes, we have to go through all this pointless folderol.

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

When those officers on the street in Toronto or Dearborn or Chelmsford confront a potentially explosive situation, they know that they must contain it in the cheapest way possible, or face wrath from above. And, let’s face it, cracking down on Christians and Jews is much cheaper than trying to keep a Muslim mob from murder and mayhem. Just think of the amount of police overtime and fuel use that would be required if the dogs or the crosses or the bacon or the Israeli flags were to get too close to the culturally enriched!

Cracking down on the guy walking his dog and the guy riding his bike is far easier — and cheaper — than actually enforcing the law. Police know that natives are far more likely to be peaceful and compliant than the enrichers. So they twist the arms of the law-abiding, and make sure they comply.

Like passing gun control laws that oppress the law-abiding and don’t even slow down the ones who are minded to commit a crime with a gun. The Path of Least Resistance is king.

If it takes, say, twenty officers to manage those annoying white guys with dogs and flags, how many would it take to contain the rage of all the Rage Boys if the flames of Islamic righteousness were to be ignited? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand?

Think of all the overtime! And the negative headlines! And the official investigation! And the questions on the floor of Parliament or Congress!

It’s far, far cheaper to hassle the law-abiding kaffir.

The fact that this actually amounts to the enforcement of sharia in the democratic West doesn’t ever have to enter the minds of those who do the enforcing. At most, they’re hoping to avoid being fired or sued for being “racist” and “discriminatory”.

They’re not thinking, “Gee, I want to do my part to bring Islamic law to my country!”

But they’re doing it anyway.

That’s the real cost. And there are no benefits.

Bob Belvedere speaks for all right-thinking folks.

Up until about the 1950?s there never was a time in American Politics where partisanship did not rule in our public affairs, even in War. And it served the cause of preservation of The Republic well because it gave us clear lines of demarcation between the different visions that were competing to direct the course of our progress and survival.

It was only when the Left was well on it’s way in it’s march through all of our institutions that ‘Bi-Partisanship!’ became the Holy Grail of our politics. And this was something touted by the Left.

Once they had taken control of The Narrative, once Leftist Thinking began to dominate our politics, it was in their best interests to convince everyone that cooperation on all things was the most important goal. This was because they now dictated the rules, they ran the game, so any compromise would naturally favor them and their schemes. As it has.

The Mushy Middle is composed of people who are not willing to pull a regular shift of guard duty for our freedoms and liberties. They treat their obligations as citizens of a constitutional republic like they treat any other tiresome, but forced-upon-them obligation — they’ll expend the absolute minimum effort on it and quickly move on to something more ‘enjoyable’ and/or more ‘fulfilling’.

They possess no sense of responsibility as citizens of The United States Of America. They cheerfully boast of their dereliction of duty and joke about their self-imposed cluelessness.

They annoy the living Hell out of me.

And that says pretty much everything that needs to be said on the subject.

Read it.

Twenty years after FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot her mother in the head in front of her, eldest Weaver daughter Sara is more at ease, greatly thanks to her born again Christianity. Getting over that loss, as well as the death of her little brother — shot by a U.S. marshal the day before her mother was killed —took her many years, but she seems to be at peace.

More than I could do. If it were my family, Lon Horiuchi would be a dead man walking.

Read it.

Why not Michigan, I hear you say. And well may you ask.

Read it.

Imagine if you will that some women engaged in similar acts in India or the Islamic world. Obviously they would not dare unless they had a death wish. And that is a difference which unites Russia and the West: religious offense is not a matter of violent retribution. The women of the Pussy Riot collective were lucky that they did what they did in Russia, and not Iran. In a Muslim country they might have been torn limb from limb by enraged believers on the spot.

Read it.

Still more severed human body parts have appeared in central Canada.  This time it’s two hands, and they surfaced not too far from last week’s other Canadian human remains discovery.

I’ve always wondered about Ontario. The name sounds like a breakfast cereal.

Read it.

The issue of taboos is a central aspect of perhaps the most important book to be published in this still young century, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which came out ten years ago next month.

In it Pinker mentions a study that “asked about a hospital administrator who had to decide whether to spend a million dollars on a liver transplant for a child or use it on other hospital needs”, and which found that “not only did respondents want to punish an administrator who chose to spend the money on the hospital, they wanted to punish an administrator who chose to save the child but thought for a long time before making the decision”.

That’s why people don’t touch taboos; yet as Pinker argued in the book, the great taboo of today is that of human nature and the blank slate is a sacred doctrine. Despite the book’s impact, 10 years later the blank-slate model of human nature is still routinely discussed as fact, rather than fantasy, and continues to have serious implications for society (one of which may be that we are rushing towards the sort of projects suggested by Saveluscu).

Read it.

In his inaugural address, Obama promised “not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.” He promised to “build the roads and bridges, the electric grids, and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.” He promised to “restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.” And he promised to “transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.” Unfortunately the president’s scorecard on every single one of those bold pledges is pitiful.

That Obama is losing such a Voice of the Crust as Newsweek does not bode well for his re-election. Unfortunately, you have to work with what you’ve got, and Obama’s record isn’t much to work with.

Gates of Vienna reveals the Truth That Dare Not Speak Its Name.

Read it.

It’s not what you think.

A year earlier, Dubai’s police made the region’s largest narcotics bust when they intercepted a container, carried on a Liberian registered-ship, that had originated from Pakistan and transited through what Ethan Zuckerman has called the “ley lines of globalization,” that constellation of dusty, never-touristed entrepôts like Oman’s Salalah Port or Nigeria’s Tin Can Island Port. Acting on an informant’s tip, police searched the container’s cargo—heavy bags of iron filings—to no avail. Only after removing every bag did police decide to check the pallets on which the bags had rested. Inside each was a hollowed-out section holding 500 to 700 grams of heroin.

Read it.

Not that any of the Global Warming crowd care about the quality of their data — it means cancelling the Industrial Revolution, so they’re all for it. But it’s good to know for the rest of us.

Taki has a birthday.

Hundreds of years of armed neutrality have kept the Swiss out of European wars and—unlike the neocon-inspired American foreign disasters—the Swiss mind their own business and do not engage in faraway adventures trying to introduce democracy and other such alien notions to people who chop off thieving hands and cover up their women.

Read it.

New Yorkers will shell out an average $5,542 more in taxes next year if President Obama and Congress can’t agree on an extension of the current rates, a study by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation found.

Only taxpayers in neighboring Connecticut would suffer a bigger hike than New York. They’d fork over an extra $5,783 if the tax cuts adopted under President George W. Bush expire Jan. 1.

Which is only fair.

New Jersey taxpayers face the third-biggest hit, up $5,030, followed by Massachusetts ($4,277) and California ($4,242). All are wealthier, Democratic-dominated states.

The state facing the smallest tax hike is Mississippi, a solidly Republican and poor state, where the average tax bill would still go up $1,313.

The other states where residents would feel the least impact are New Mexico ($1,465), Alabama ($1,496), Tennessee ($1,522) and West Virginia ($1,530).

“It’s pretty dramatic,” Tax Foundation economist Will McBride told CNBC. “This is the biggest tax increase that would happen since World War II.”

Not that you’d know that from watching TV or reading newspapers.

Read it.

The extension of these areas was calculated by MIT and IBM, analysing anonymised call data. The map delineates zones in which people are more likely to call someone inside those areas rather than outside of them. The result is a revelatory re-mixing of states of America. Some split, others merge with their neighbours.

Read it.

At Commerce, a restaurant in the West Village in Manhattan, the bar menus read, “Credit cards only. No cash please. Thank you.”

The must not understand what ‘Legal tender for all debts, public and private’ means.

Pat Buchanan has a Blind Pig Moment.

The Middle East was sliced up along lines set down in the secret Sykes-Picot agreement. But with the Islamic awakening and Arab Spring toppling regimes, the natural map of the Middle East seems now to be asserting itself.

Good luck with that.

A Kurdish nation carved out of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran would appear to be a casus belli for all four nations. Yet in any natural map of the world, there would be a Kurdistan.

And they deserve it if anybody does. The problem is that authoritarian regimes (and their enablers in the West) won’t give up a spadeful of ground unless you pry it out of their cold dead fingers, and sometimes not even then.

The Other McCain blows the whistle.

When are liberal idealists going to wake up and realize that Democrats treat them like a bunch of chumps, suckers to be played? You’re no better than the Democrats in Montana who elected a governor who slurs them as racist rednecks. It’s as if liberals keep acting out some sort of psycho-drama as a way of dealing with their self-esteem issues: “I don’t deserve to be respected.”

When the Left says ‘Question Authority’, the question they usually ask is ‘What’s in it for me?’

Read it.

I have this vision of shari’a coming to Washington, and all of a sudden we have a town full of one-handed people.

Hmmm.

Read it.

While many parents hope sports will pave the way for their child to win a scholarship, some sports organizations say parents are steering their children toward less-popular sports with the goal of securing a spot on a Division III team with no money attached—but with the promise of a top-tier education.

At the Manhattan Fencing Club, home to four-time Olympic coach Yuri Gelman, “85 percent of our kids get into fencing to help them get accepted into an Ivy League university—which don’t give athletic scholarships—or Division I school,” says director Julie Gelman. “A lot of kids were able to get into schools that they otherwise wouldn’t have if they weren’t fencing.”

Read it.

Sure enough, now that the data are in, the emerging consensus is that health care costs, rather than “skyrocketing,” have been moderating, even flat-lining. And they were beginning to do so well before Congress passed ObamaCare in March 2010.

There have been a trickling of academic papers and journal articles tracking the trend, but the news hasn’t really yet made it fully into the political discussion.

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

Stanley Fish looks at an important subject.

 The standard rationale for academic freedom is that the business of the academy is to advance knowledge by conducting inquiries the outcomes of which are not known in advance. Since the obligation is to follow the evidence wherever it leads rather than to a “pre-stipulated goal” (a phrase Riley takes from my writings), researchers must be free to go down paths as they suggest themselves and not in obedience to a political program or an ideology. That is why (and again she is quoting me) “the degree of latitude and flexibility” that attends academic freedom is “not granted to the practitioners of other professions.”

But, Riley observes, “a significant portion of [the] additional degrees that colleges have added in the past few decades have been in vocational areas,” and those areas “simply do not engage students in a search for ultimate truths,” but instead have pre-stipulated goals. “Do we need,” she asks, “to guarantee the academic freedom of professors engaged in teaching and studying ‘Transportation and Materials Moving,’ a field in which more than five thousand degrees were awarded in 2006?”

Here we see quite plainly put the two incompatible purposes being served by ‘universities’ these days: As teaching institutions, and as research institutions. The reason undergraduates go to college is to be taught; the reason professors go to college is toresearch, and the tenure process is deliberately designed to reward those who research whether or not they are any good at teaching.

However much it may be the business of a university to ‘advance knowledge’ at the graduate level, the reason we give this job to professors rather than firemen is because the former are trained for the job, and that training is accomplished the same way that grade school and high school prepare people for life, by imparting facts and skills through rigorous training that does not depend on  ‘conducting inquiries the outcomes of which are not known in advance.’

Scott Locklin seems to be having a lot of fun with ‘skeptics’.

Our protagonist in this non-event: a self-declared “Skepchick.” The woman, Rebecca Watson, is also a feminist. She had given a sermon to a group of “skeptics” on their moral failures as sexists who notice she is a girl when she is at skepticism conferences. This sort of behavior apparently “sexualizes” her as a unique individual, makes her uncomfortable, and generally scares away women skeptics everywhere. This is a common sentiment among shy women who participate in nerdy sausage festivals such as the skepticism movement. It’s less common that said women also publish semi-nude photographs of themselves in pin-up calendars dedicated to the same nerdy sausage festival.

Skepchick took video umbrage with the fact that one of her atheistic colleagues awkwardly asked her back to his room for a cup of coffee after her homily on sexism. He made his pathetic offer while in an elevator with her after a 4AM bar closeout, which suggests that he is probably as socially inept as she is. Princess Skepchick expected more chivalry from a bar populated with convention-going atheist nerds. I can empathize with such sentiments, much as I can empathize with people who visit Muslim countries and miss bacon.

I might observe that someone who objects to being ‘sexualized’ might pick a nom de Net other than one ending in ‘-chick’. Just  a thought.

The Skepchick has called for the head of Richard Dawkins. She dropped the big one, informing him that he is the most loathsome of creatures: the privileged old white man. Being something of a skeptic myself, I find it hard not to notice that young Anglosphere women are easily the most privileged people in the known universe. They’re so privileged that even pie-faced, cabbage-brained ones such Rebecca Watson may be able to ruin a world-famous author’s reputation. Dawkins helped found the shabby movement which gives her the adoration of nerdy dudes who respect her intellect but still wouldn’t mind seeing her topless. Because she has a hoo-ha and can use scary words such as “sexism,” some people accord her moral power comparable to that of Pope Urban VII. What was Dawkins’s blasphemy—that the world doesn’t revolve around some creepy attention-whoring nerd girl’s mild social discomforts? Apparently it does.

A bona fide First World Problem.

I don’t think much of Dawkins. His ideas on evolution are laughable and mostly popularize those of William Hamilton. He is a decent essayist, and his hatred of religion makes him popular with certain kinds of over-emotional atheists, but otherwise, he’s the type of smug bigot who gives unbelievers a bad name. I find his searing hatred of religious people to be childish and disgusting. The fact that Dawkins is being undermined by fellow hater-atheists is delicately ironic. I suppose the more advanced religions kill their gods after all; atheism’s true believers are no different

There is nothing new under the sun; the labels merely change to protect the delusional.

Steven Mosher explains what modern ‘climate science’ is all about.

The simple point is this: in a PNS situation, the behavior of those doing science changes. To be sure much of their behavior remains the same. They formulate theories; they collect data, and they test their theories against the data. They don’t stop doing what we notional  describe as science. But, as foreshadowed above in the description of how high energy particle physicists behave, one can see how that behavior changes in a PNS situation. There is uncertainty, but the good faith that exists in normal science, the faith that other people are asking questions because they actually want the answer is gone. Asking questions, raising doubts, asking to see proof becomes suspect in and of itself. And those doing science are faced with a question that science cannot answer: Does this person really want the answer or are they a merchant of doubt? Such a question never gets asked in normal science. Normal science doesn’t ask this question because science cannot answer it.

Because values are in conflict the behavior of those doing science changes. In normal science no one would care if Higgs was a Christian or an atheist. No one would care if he voted liberal or conservative; but because two different value systems are in conflict in climate science, the behavior of those doing science changes. They investigate each other. They question motives. They form tribes.  And because the stakes are high the behavior of those doing science changes as well. They protest; they take money from lobby groups on both sides and worse of all they perform horrendous raps on youTube. In short, they become human; while those around them canonize them or demonize them and their findings become iconized or branded as hoaxes.

Read it.

The President is in the White House because of the Civil Rights movement, and I was a leader in that movement.

And I didn’t march one inch, one foot, one yard for a man to marry a man and a woman to marry a woman.

So the president has forgotten the price that was paid, where people died, where they suffered, where they gave their blood to have equal rights in the United States.

Well, obviously he’s just a raaaaacist!  Oh, wait….

Read it.

“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

Read it.

Psychopathy is a psychological condition based on well-established diagnostic criteria, which include lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm, conning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions, among others.

Hey! They’re insulting the President! They must be raaaaacists!

Read it.

For one thing, the government isn’t trying to run everything.

My wife, a pediatrician, doesn’t post price lists. They’re irrelevant, since very few of her patients pay their own bills. Even regular, predictable expenses are handled by insurance companies, or by government programs, or by convoluted combinations of the two. She loves kids and respects parents and discusses care with them. But many of the important decisions are made elsewhere. There’s little point in going in-depth about possible medications with a Medicaid patient when you’re going to end up playing whack-a-mole with the AHCCCS Formulary — the ever-morphing list of medicines that Arizona’s implementation of Medicaid has decided to pay for this time around.

The idea of removing patients as responsible parties was to remove money from the decision-making process — to give us the illusion that care is free, and that treatment will be provided with no need for us to fret over the bills. It’s not free of course. We’ve just bought the illusion, and transferred the cost-benefit analyses to somebody else. We still get some choices, but unless we’re among the few who pay out of pocket, they’ve been winnowed and pre-approved ahead of time.

Read it.

The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that in 2015 the country will have 62,900 fewer doctors than needed. And that number will more than double by 2025, as the expansion of insurance coverage and the aging of baby boomers drive up demand for care. Even without the health care law, the shortfall of doctors in 2025 would still exceed 100,000.

Universal health care is no good without enough practitioners to provide it. Unlike dollars or shoes, you can’t just churn out more as you need them.