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We know that: windfarms ruined the ocean view of late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Cape Cod home; are shredding birds to smithereens like carrots in a Cuisinart; and are too intermittent and unreliable as a stand-along energy source and usually needs back up by awful fossil fuel sources. But do they also cause global warming?

The irony that a cure for global warming is actually causing global warming might be too good to be true. But what is true is that had wind energy not been powered by crony capitalism, it would have been long ago blown away by the gales of destruction unleashed by its more viable competitors.

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Actually, it turns out that Obama always said that his New York squeeze was a fake.

A white fake, you will note.

What stands out from the composite story isn’t that Obama amalgamated characters, it’s that the press hadn’t noticed until now. As with the dog story, this confirms the suspicion that the mainstream media gave Obama a free pass in 2008 and declined to check too deeply into his background. Even The Atlantic’s Graham admits that he’s never read Dreams From My Father, and neither, it would seem, has anyone else in the press corps. They have the excuse that the book is incredibly narcissistic and boring, but otherwise isn’t this exactly the sort of character assessment/assassination that should have happened four years ago?

Ya think?

Freeberg is on a roll.

I grew up in a college town myself; I’ve had occasion to meet the middle-aged-hippy-woman who’s on the faculty at the campus, who doesn’t believe in eating meat and burns incense at home and droning on about patriarchy and nobody-made-it-on-their-own and what-not. A little bit of them goes a long way. I don’t know why anyone thought the voters would flock to her. And that’s before she got caught lying to advance her career.

Ran into a number of those myself. Tiresome is the most polite thing I can say.

Read it.

“But I went to college — I can’t be racist!” Turns out, you can.

Steve Sailer thinks that this isn’t intended to be a parody.

For years, I’ve been talking about those who get the joke and those who don’t, and that’s what we see being played out, with the clueless going on the offensive. This is like Georgia attacking Russia in 2008.

… but I’m less sure. Hey, we report, you decide.

Read it.

Now Obama, of course, doesn’t care one bit about deference to legislation passed by a democratically elected legislative body. He is concerned with outcomes, namely that the Supreme Court rubber-stamp his agenda. (Strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, uphold Obamacare, etc.) As do many on the left, he is convinced that whatever legislation he likes is constitutional and whatever he strongly objects to must offend some constitutional provision. This mind-set perfectly reflects the degree to which judicial review has become a matter of subjective preferences for the left.

Read it.

EVE Online’s largest economic hub is currently under attack by a massive alliance of the game’s most ruthless players, infamously known as “Goonswarm,” and they may succeed in damaging it. For those who haven’t heard of it, EVE is a gargantuan space-based MMO from developer CCP Games that’s been home to several rich tales of high-stakes drama since it launched in 2003. The open-ended game is like a Lockean dreamworld in its no-security (“null-sec”) areas, that are open to scamming, murder, corporate espionage, economic manipulation, ruthless warmongering, and mind-boggling heists. But many of EVE’s law abiding players stay within safe high-security (“hi-sec”) areas that have mostly protected them from null-sec raiders, much to the chagrin of Goonswarm and its allies. According to some players, many of those in null-sec, including Goonswarm and its leader, resent hi-sec’s existence and aim to force their vision of the game on hi-sec players (who they insultingly refer to as “empire dwellers”). To accomplish that, they’re waging economic warfare and aiming to strike fear into all those who play in hi-sec space.

Following a 30-day ban that resulted from his efforts to mock a suicidal player, Goonswarm leader Alexander “The Mittani” Gianturco is leading “Burn Jita:” an attack on hi-sec space that’s intended to crash the game’s market for an important resource and cut off trillions of player-made assets through blockades. Eurogamer reports that The Mittani and his team of over 1,500 players have spent months planning the Jita attack, and have built an army of 15,000 small, single-purpose suicide ships that render the protection of Hi-sec’s AI police useless. So far, they’ve destroyed thousands of ships, and continue to attack vessels in hi-sec space — but it’s not clear if the attack has succeeded in crashing the market, as conflicting reports about its stability have surfaced on the web.

One of the most glaring defects of the ‘progressive’ worldview, to which ‘progressives’ are functionally blind but which appears to Real World People™ as a great gaping hole, is the inability to accept that there are evil people in the world, and that these evil people not only act to work evil on everybody else but also combine in groups whose major reason for existing is to make those evil works more effective. This is a fairly blatant example of such a dynamic, which has the virtue of all simulations in that it leaves behind the clutter of daily details and thus makes more stark the operation of underlying principles.

As in real life, those who work to create dystopias for their own benefit nevertheless realize (whether consciously or unconsciously) that a well-ordered and peaceful society is superior to the world that they strive to make (and far too often succeed), and so are eaten up with envy and hatred that just reinforces their evil tendencies. One of the most attractive features of The Lord of the Rings is that the struggle between these monsters and the rest of creation is perennial and ongoing, and that those who try to ignore it only make the triumph of evil more certain.

The resemblance between this operation against the hi-sec space Jita and the ongoing jihad against Western civilization ought to be sufficiently obvious as to require no comment.

While other MMO developers would likely prevent such a scenario from occurring, CCP welcomes Goonswarm’s efforts. EVE Online senior producer Jon Lander tells Eurogamer that Goonswarm “is going to do exactly what you’re able to do in the game, and people will have to roll with it” — he says the attack on Jita is “absolutely brilliant.” And lead game designer Kistoffer Touborg tells Eurogamer that “we want people to be able to do this. If Goonswarm want to do it, we want them to do it and we want them to have a great time doing it.” Touborg adds that “the worst thing we could do is to stop it happening… it would be against everything we stand for.”

In other words, just as with real life, there is no grown-up who is going to step in at the last minute and make sure of a happy ending.

Read it.

Almost every technological and medical innovation in the world has its roots in a scientific paper. Science drives much of the world’s innovation. The faster science moves, the faster the world moves.

Progress in science right now is being held back by two key inefficiencies:

• The time-lag problem: there is a time-lag of, on average, 12 months between finishing a paper, and it being published.
• The single mode of publication problem: scientists share their ideas only via one format, the scientific paper, and don’t take advantage of the full range of media that the web makes possible.

The stakes are high. If these inefficiencies can be removed, science would accelerate tremendously. A faster science would lead to faster innovation in medicine and technology. Cancer could be cured 2-3 years sooner than it otherwise would be, which would save millions of lives.

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Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of violent video games is that constantly playing them will make you a pussy. Compulsive gamers don’t experience enough real sex and violence to become grown men.

Read it.

‘I could have been Bill Gates, but I didn’t have the working.’

A new study offers evidence  that higher-educated (and therefore higher-earning)  Americans do indeed spend more time working and less time on leisure than poorer income groups. In fact, while income inequality may be growing, “leisure inequality” – time spent on enjoyment – is growing as a mirror image, with the low earners gaining leisure and the high earners losing.

A red herring — it’s irrelevant whether the wealthy work harder; the work they do is more valuable, in the eyes of the only people competent to judge: Those who are paying for it. Even those who pretend to be in favor of free markets have this inner compulsion to substitute their own judgments about what something is worse for that of the market in cases where what is going on seems massively ‘unfair’, but they need to get over it.

The more surprising discovery, however, is a corresponding leisure gap has opened up between the highly-educated and less-educated.  Low-educated men saw their leisure hours grow to 39.1 hours in 2003-2007, from 36.6 hours in 1985. Highly-educated men saw their leisure hours shrink to 33.2 hours from 34.4 hours.  (Mr. Hurst says that education levels are a “proxy” for incomes, since they tend to correspond).

That’s because low-educated men tend to be on welfare, be it unemployment ‘insurance’ or whatever. Let’s tell the truth, here, guys.

(The study defines leisure as time spend watching TV, socializing, playing games, talking on the phone, reading personal email, enjoying entertainment and hobbies and other activities.)

I have no doubt. Better add ‘smoking weed’ in there to be complete.

Read it.

I spoke with a woman at a recent networking event. After she finished telling me about her children, she turned the conversation to me: “Do you have kids?”

To be fair, the question wasn’t unreasonable; she was searching for a common bond, as people often do at these kinds of events. And maybe I was looking a bit haggard that night.

But this was the first time anyone had asked me that question, and my mind reeled with the possible implications: Did she think I looked older than my age? Was I giving off a maternal vibe? I didn’t know whether to scoff at her question or to make a joke of it, so I did both – and then, worried that I had come across as anti-motherhood, explained that I wasn’t married yet and kids were still a long ways off.

I usually just answer ‘Not that I know of’, but I imagine that, for a woman, that would make an awkward situation even more so. On the other hand, ‘Not any more’ would just shut the conversation down straightaway — if that’s what you’d like to do, which in many cases it might be, I gather.

Actually, the answer is just not to speak to other people, and I’m good with that.

Read it.

Churchill appreciated, as modern ‘progressives’ and their catamites do not, that rich people and their organizations are the ones that drive prosperity for everybody. Whacking them is like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs — a greedy and shortsighted strategy.

This money-gathering, credit-producing animal can not only walk—he can run.  And when frightened he can fly.  If his wings are clipped, he can dive or crawl.  When in the end he is hunted down, what is left but a very ordinary individual apologizing volubly for his mistakes, and particularly for not having been able to get away?

But meanwhile great constructions have crumbled to the ground.  Confidence is shaken and enterprise chilled, and the unemployed queue up at the soup kitchen or march out upon the public works with ever-growing expense to the taxpayer and nothing more appetizing to take home to their families than the leg or the wing of what was once a millionaire.  One quite sees that people who have got interested in this fight will not accept such arguments against their sport.  What they will have to accept is the consequences of ignoring such arguments.  It is indispensible to the wealth of nations and to the wage and life standards of labour, that capital and credit should be honoured and cherished partners in the economic system.

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Among scholars, the simplistic debate over whether Columbus was good or bad has become considerably more nuanced. The full significance of 1492 for global history — and the history of globalization — has come into ever-sharper relief. Historians now focus more on the role that native peoples played in the course of European expansion and conquest, treating them less as passive victims and more as active participants in global integration.

Steve Sailer loves talking about the stuff other people shun.

Here’s a question: Whom would you rather have as a neighbor: George Zimmerman or Trayvon Martin?

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Slow news day.

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1. Most undergraduates and professionals actually want to learn applied software engineering, not “computer science”. Most companies want to hire college graduates who know applied software engineering. But most university CS programs don’t actually teach applied software engineering. This isn’t to say that CS isn’t useful or valuable (even to someone who goes on to become an applied software engineer). But the majority of university CS programs are oriented to training undergraduates to become either systems programmers or academic computer scientists. I’m going to go out on a limb and say this isn’t what most 18-year-olds who enter undergraduate CS programs actually want to do. And I’m certain that the ratio of the demand for software engineers to systems programmers in industry is on the order of 100:1 (maybe even 1000:1).

Read it.

C is for Civility:
Just keep your opinions to yourself and I won’t have to hurt you. Much.

D is for Democrat:
My friends and I are the 99%. Everyone else is the 1%… Math? What math?

E is for EPA:
Stop. ALL. human. activity. right. now. [Evil People Activity?]

R is for Reform:
What to call an unnatural government act that destroys something useful.

U is for Unions:
We know where you live.

Read it.

“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
“They are merely conventional signs!

One must, after all, have priorities. John Henry Newman once wrote about The Idea of a University but obviously he was never in Tuscaloosa on Game Day.

Seemed pretty obvious at the time.

What would happen to Germany if the Nazis were to rule? That was a question that had a surprisingly easy answer. In the March issue of The Atlantic, Nicolas Fairweather wrote “Hitler and Hitlerism: A Man of Destiny.” In it, he analyzed Hitler and his philosophy, as derived from a reading of Mein Kampf, “to foreshadow, from [Hitler’s] own statements, some of the things he would like to accomplish.” Journalists, at times, can be horrible predictors of the future. But in this case, Fairweather’s assessment was a sound alarm.

4. His concern for social betterment (‘true Socialism’) as a necessary prerequisite to the acceptance of his ideals by the masses.

Read it.

Except for the ones who refuse to grow up, of course, which is becoming a greater and greater percentage as the world spins down into lunacy.

An important clue that middle age isn’t just the start of a downward spiral is that it does not bear the hallmarks of general, passive decline. Most body systems deteriorate very little during this stage of life. Those that do, deteriorate in ways that are very distinctive, are rarely seen in other species and are often abrupt.

For example, our ability to focus on nearby objects declines in a predictable way: Farsightedness is rare at 35 but universal at 50. Skin elasticity also decreases reliably and often surprisingly abruptly in early middle age. Patterns of fat deposition change in predictable, stereotyped ways. Other systems, notably cognition, barely change.

Each of these changes can be explained in evolutionary terms. In general, it makes sense to invest in the repair and maintenance only of body systems that deliver an immediate fitness benefit — that is, those that help to propagate your genes. As people get older, they no longer need spectacular visual acuity or mate-attracting, unblemished skin. Yet they do need their brains, and that is why we still invest heavily in them during middle age.

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While politicians and pundits natter on about whether or not Americans are paying our “fair share” of the national protection money forked over to that extortion racket known as government, it’s worth noting that, whatever you may think of how the tax code allocates the pain, Americans are notable for paying what they’re told to pay. When comparing personal income tax compliance rates gleaned from studies carefully hand-crafted by international craftsman-researchers, taxpayers in the U.S.A. are notable for their unequalled willingness to reach deep into their pockets and hand the taxman what he says they owe.

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English fantasy writer Terry Pratchett is totally awesome. After the best-selling novelist (65 million books sold worldwide) was knighted by the Queen, he made his own sword to go along with his other nightly accoutrement.

Not satisfied with just having a blacksmith make a custom piece, Pratchett actually went out into a field and dug up raw iron ore which he smelt into steel using a homemade kiln powered by sheep poop in his backyard. For an extra shot of magic he threw in a few pieces of meterorite.

Pratchett left the final metal work to a blacksmith, who forged it into a blade fit for a knight.

That’s pretty cool.

Sadly he has to keep his sword in a secret location because strict British knife laws make no distinction for knights’ swords and he fears its confiscation.

There’s room for you in Texas, Sir Terry, and you can even keep your sword.

Read it.

Seth Godin recently mentioned something that Clay Shirky has said about the television industry: Forty years ago, you only had to be better than two other shows. Now you have to better than everybody.

The winner-take-all society …

Big-name schools like MIT and Harvard have made full courses, and even suites of courses, available on-line. One of my more experienced colleagues began to get antsy when this process picked up speed a few years ago. Who wouldn’t prefer MIT’s artificial intelligence course over ours? These courses weren’t yet available for credit, which left us with hope. We offer our course as part of a coherent program of study that leads to a credential that students and employers value. But in time…

… comes to education.

The Khan Academy offerings are significant here.

It’s no longer enough to be the best teaching university in your state or neighborhood. Now you have to better than everybody. If you are a computer science department, that seems an insurmountable task. Maybe you can be better than Illinois-Springfield (and maybe not!), but how can you be better than Stanford, MIT, and Harvard?

What gets learned is going to depend far more on how good the student is than on how good the school is, because students will have easy access to the best schools in the world, and the quality of the school ceases to be a meaningful constraint.

How will that affect ‘credentialing’? If everybody can take a course at MIT, how do you decide who gets an MIT degree? Will the Educational Testing Service branch out into degree examinations leading to something like the GED? (Probably, since the SAT and ACT won’t be needed to take courses online.) Certainly MIT and Wide Spot Community College differ in their teacher quality, but when degrees will be based on examination results, will the one be able to convince us that it can make a better degree examination than the other? Will world-famous universities start ‘franchises’ like KFC, with local offices to administer exams and grant degrees?

Read it.

Having an asinine hairdo is like having asinine political leaders who can’t pass a budget, much less balance one. Sure, through a triumph of the will, you can pretend reality is non-existent. You can fake it, as though no one can see through your wretched toupée, your cooked numbers on unemployment and inflation. You can pretend that the bankruptcy of your failed social welfare state isn’t poking out through the endless smoke and mirrors, or that status as the world’s reserve currency is a license to inflate the currency at will.

Freeberg is always worth reading.

Part of the Architect/Medicator divide is that medicators want to make everyone else a medicator, and a defining behavior of Medicators is that they react emotionally to things. The logical consequence to all that is, people who react emotionally to things want everyone else to react emotionally to things…which, we see, is true. They forget the “O.J. Simpson Trial” rule: Two people from different walks of life, can see exactly the same thing, and come away with wildly different conclusions about what it means, with neither one of them sustaining the slightest question or doubt about what they’ve concluded.

There is, indeed, a lot of that going around. (This afflicts judges and juries, too; one of the reasons I’m not practicing law.)

When people are bludgeoned into this living-of-life-to-avoid-conflict, sooner or later, you always see someone, somewhere, laboring under a commandment that they need to stop living life, or to live less life. So that someone else isn’t offended. Very often, when the “someone else” doesn’t actually exist, and is thought about only as a hypothetical: “Take that American flag down, someone might find it offensive.”

Not an actual person, mind you, much less an actual person with a persuasive argument on his side; some hypothetical person who may or may not exist but nevertheless has some mystical power to constrain the behavior of real people. This is stupid.

Freeberg looks at ‘climate change’.

I’m having a problem with my observation of the scientific method being applied to the question of an approaching climate-change cataclysm. I characterized my problem as a “Clark Kent and Superman” problem, by which I mean, I’m seeing these two components but never in the same room at the same time. I see people applying the scientific method to figuring out what’s going on with the climate, and I’m seeing prognostications of doom. But the scientific method and the doomsaying are never in the same room at the same time.

Read it.

Apparently this is the 100th anniversary of his death … if he actually died….

Read it.

It’ll probably end poorly. I don’t think there will be civil war in any countries, just weary acquiescence to illiberal forces on one side and ever-constricting forces on the other. An English school considers banning alcohol on campus because 20% of the students are Muslim, that’s the former; the latter is more surveillance, more internet monitoring, carbon audits, and so on. Where the illiberal demands collide with the values of the overclass – say, a Muslim innkeeper refuses service to a gay couple – there will be an assertion of the overclass values and a simultaneous carve-out of regions where it is tacitly assumed those values will not be enforced.

Is there any next at all? Maybe that’s the problem: you invent democracy, classical music, and perfect representational art, and there’s not a lot left to match your previous achievements. Europe is a highly successful band that hasn’t had a good studio album in three years.

Read it.

President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign is suddenly making an “urgent” push to hire more minorities, particularly blacks, Politico reports. The move comes after conservative outlets such as Breitbart News reported the stunning and hypocritical lack of diversity among Obama 2012 staffers at his campaign headquarters in Chicago–in photos that his own campaign made public.

While the move is obviously a response to the firestorm the photos caused–which resembled the lily-white profile of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement last fall–it took Politico 18 paragraphs and 972 words to mention the photos that most likely spurred Obama campaign officials to send out e-mails to African-American leaders for urgent “help” in finding “qualified, African American candidates for some of these positions” in what is going to be a “fast moving process.”

So Unca Barry is going to purge his campaign staff of some SWPL people from the right side of the bell curve in order to replace them with people from the left side of the bell curve.

I’m good with that.

Read it.

To speak about the federal power and about law, all in the same breath, anyway opens the door to bitter cynicism. Some of the key laws the federal government is entrusted with enforcing are left un-enforced, because the federal executive, for cold political reasons, wants to pander to constituencies who’d prefer them not enforced.

Poster boy here: Onyango Obama, the president’s uncle, an illegal immigrant from Kenya. Last week Radio Derb reported on Mr Obama having had his Massachusetts driver’s license suspended for 45 days after he admitted to driving drunk. Mr Obama is manager of a liquor sotore in Framingham, Massachusetts; so the Scarface rule may be worth re-stating here: “Don’t get high on your own supply.” Anyway, the news last week was that Mr Obama’s driver’s license had been suspended.

This week’s news is, that with one bound he was free! Yes, Mr Obama has been given a hardship driver’s license from the state Registry of Motor Vehicles. A hardship license is what you get if you can show that not having a driver’s license poses an undue hardship on your livelihood — in this case, Mr Obama’s livelihood as a liquor-store manager. In applying for the hardship license, Mr Obama fortified his case with a letter from his employer, Conti Liquors, and also with proof — maybe it was 120 proof, maybe 150 proof, I don’t know — that he’d enrolled in an alcohol-treatment program. Apparently there is no public transportation in Framingham.

So the state law that deprived Mr Obama of his driver’s license is just a joke law. They put up this elaborate, quite expensive show of a judicial proceeding, with a ruling from the bench and a sentencing, but they don’t mean it. It’s just pretend: like a children’s game, like the pretend federal law that says, direct quote from Section 8 U.S. Code 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv)(b)(iii), quote: “It is unlawful to hire an alien, to recruit an alien, or to refer an illegal alien for a fee, knowing the illegal alien is unauthorized to work in the United States. It is equally unlawful to continue to employ an illegal alien knowing that the illegal alien is unauthorized to work.” End quote. That’s a joke law, too; that’s a pretend law, too; or, if it’s not, why is Conti Liquors of Framingham, Massachusetts not explaining themselves to a federal judge?

This is what the public is missing by having Derb defenestrated from National Review. Rich Lowry is not only a coward, he is also a fool.

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With the towering prohibition against expressing politically incorrect views about race, why would anyone be naïve enough to believe that the demand for total consent will ever stop? The same bullying tactics that have been applied here have been extended to everything else that the left and its obliging conservative-movement collaborators have tried to keep from being mentioned. The left trots out the same victim narratives to shut us up about gender differences, our preference for heterosexual over homosexual family organization, or whatever else they deem unmentionable at a given moment. My friend, distinguished classicist Chris Kopff, says that at the university where he works it’s Christianity—notracism—that gets singled out as the villain. Anyone linked to Christian belief has to answer for the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and many other iniquities that are traced back to Christianity’s inherent intolerance.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, waxes philosophical.

Charles de Gaulle resigned France’s presidency, he and his famously prim wife were entertaining some American guests at their country house. Not all the guests knew French, so conversation was somewhat of a struggle. De Gaulle knew English well, though he rarely spoke it; his wife’s English was rudimentary.

Trying to keep the ball in play, at one point a guest asked Mme. de Gaulle in English what she hoped for most from life now that her husband had no official duties. After a pause for thought, the lady replied: “A penis!”

There was an awkward silence during which the guests all stared hard at their dessert plates. Then de Gaulle leaned forward to his wife and said:

“Non, non, my dear. In English it eez pronounced ‘’appiness.’”

Read it.

The writer Toby Young tells a story about how the modern 100m race is run in primary schools. At the starting pistol, everyone runs like mad. At the 50m point, the fastest children stop and wait for the heavier kids to catch up. Then all the youngsters walk across the finishing line together, holding hands.

Steve Sailer champions the underdogs.

Baseball season reminds us of the identity-politics group that doesn’t bark—left-handers. Why are certain aggregations of once-persecuted people such as blacks or gays so politically potent today, while others such as left-handers can be safely ignored?

Read it.

TakiMag seems to be the mother lode for inconvenient truth these days.

Yahoo! News seems so deep in Obama’s pockets that they’re basically up his ass. Their recent reprint of a Reuters story, “Obama likely paid higher tax rate than Romney in 2011,” bore the sour stench of partisan unfairness. The first red flag is the word “likely”; the second is the fact that although Romney’s tax rate was lower, he’ll pay about TWENTY TIMES the amount of taxes to the federal government that Obama did last year. Did he use twenty times the government services? Not bloody likely, especially considering all of Obama’s international hunting safaris, local rodeo and karaoke-bar appearances in the American heartland, and hip-hop barbecues at the White House. It’s probable that Obama received a laughably larger amount in free government perks than he paid in taxes. If anything, the tax rate seems unfair to Romney, as much as it pains me to defend him in any way.

David Director Friedman is always worth reading.

Our lead authors’ repeated references to “the poor,” in an essay written by and for moderns, badly misrepresents the 18th century world and Smith’s view of it. When Smith was writing, the working class, the people Smith is referring to in that quote, represented not the lower end of the income distribution but the bulk of the population.

Modern day liberals have the same problem. From making the poor work for their benefits to what to do with illegitimate babies, they seem to think this is Britain of 150 years ago; Hillary Clinton, for example, apparently read Dickens at Wellesley and her brain got stuck there.

One can get a clearer idea of Smith’s view of issues of equality from his long discussion of alternative forms of taxation. He begins with a set of maxims, of which the first is:

I. The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.

While he rejected taxes directly on income (except, possibly, the income of government employees), he thought that the overall incidence of taxation ought to be in proportion to income.

I guess Dennis would say that Adam Smith isn’t a ‘reasonable person’, either.

 The version of libertarianism that seems most plausible to me is one where respecting rights is seen as a good thing, a value in itself as well as a means to other values, but not as a value that trumps all others. One reason to respect natural rights is that it is a good thing to do, another is that respecting them can be expected to produce a healthier, wealthier, and happier world than violating them.

That’s what I mean by ‘reasonable person’. And it ain’t Barack Obama.

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Five or six years ago, my mother and I sat in a darkened theater talking about a couple we knew. The wife was an executive with Ivy League degrees. The husband had some nebulous part-time job, but mostly he stayed home with the kids. What, I wondered, does he have that’s attractive to her? There was a pause. Sperm, my mother replied.

Life in post-feminist America — the Sensitive New Age Guy is the new black (not that he’s actually Black, you understand — not that there’s anything wrong with that — that’s just a metaphor).

Male underemployment, the surge in women’s economic fortunes and the decline in marriage swirled into a meme in 2010, when an article in The Atlantic asked, “What if the modern, post­industrial economy is simply more congenial to women?” The next year, the magazine ran a long essay in which the writer observed that the pool of those considered “traditionally ‘marriageable’ men” — the highly educated, the financially secure — was “radically shrinking.”

After decades of being hammered by the Alan Alda demographic, that’s hardly surprising.

Finding women worrying that men feel emasculated by them more than men actually feel that way, she suggests that these women are more invested in preserving conventional gender roles. That’s one explanation. But it could just as easily mean that the men in question didn’t want to tell a reporter they felt emasculated.

I’m wondering how they’ll fix that pesky problem of the fact that women still, you know, have to have the babies. But I’m sure that some woman in a laboratory somewhere is working on it.

The Other McCain waxes philosophical.

Keeping your britches on is the kind of “choice” that feminists don’t advocate, just as they never advocate (as an alternative to what theocratic reactionaries would call fornication) that men and women form permanent pair-bonds, sanctified by religious vows to forsake all others until death do them part.

Alas, the ceremony of innocence is drowned by the blood-dimmed tide and the falcon turning in its widening gyre cannot hear the falconer.

Without faith or tradition to guide them, young people must seek secular sanction for doing what they do, and the dismal science offers little to improve on the basic supply/demand equation of “free milk and a cow.” In a buyer’s market flooded with free milk, the sale of cows has declined. Young men have no incentive to marry and what woman would want to marry one of these slovenly slacker guys anyway?

Read it.

Liberals say that conservatives are anti-science, and yet they ignore science when it doesn’t fit their fantasy world. Here’s some inconvenient truth for the Left.

Read it.

And they’re refusing to talk to us, the churls.

Read it.

How can women avoid choosing the wrong man? If you start dating a loser in your late twenties and he dumps you at 32, that’s it. You’re done. He just threw your ovaries in the garbage. If you managed to make a baby during that mistake, that’s even worse.

Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

If you met him via infidelity, you are going to lose him to infidelity.

Yeah, I’m lookin’ at YOU, Callista Gingrich.

Read it.

When Trenton Oldfield, weird and wrongheaded, jumped into the River Thames last Saturday to protest the Cambridge-Oxford Boat Race specifically and elitism in sports generally, he did us all a favor. Not only did he cement his blazing idiocy in sports history, but he re-energized the debate over elitism in sports. And while doing so, gave us hard proof that it’s needed and necessary.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, responds to his critics.

Goodness, what a fuss!

I don’t know why people have so much difficulty thinking statistically, as we behave statistically all the time. The sky is overcast; I have to go out to an event where I’ll be in the open; I take an umbrella. If, after all, it does not rain, do I feel like an idiot for having taken the umbrella? Of course not. I yielded to my inner statistician. I went with the percentages. We all do it a dozen times a day. It’s statistical common sense. The trouble-free black neighborhood is the rain-free overcast day: It happens a lot, but take that umbrella.

I say what I think, and I’m very much obliged to Taki’s Mag for letting me do so. If you don’t like the kinds of things I say, there is a very simple remedy available to you: Don’t read me.

Jim Goad doesn’t much like anyone, apparently with good reason.

These days, “racist” is the favorite smear word for the ideologically intolerant. When people ask me if I’m a “racist” I always ask them for their personal definition of that eternally shape-shifting and ever-expanding social construct. I then explain either why I am or am not a racist based solely on their definition. I also explain that I think the term itself is silly and ultimately meaningless, but it’s not a word that scares me like it appears to cause testicles to leap out of nutsacks and hit the floor running nationwide. But my interrogators—or, just as often, my accusers—hardly ever seem to be looking for explanations. They don’t even seem to know the difference between scientific inquiry and the Spanish Inquisition. Rather, they seem hell-bent on using a rusty knife to pry open my cold heart like a stubborn oyster shell to discover the boundlessly irrational primal HATE they are certain throbs inside. True believers that they are, they take it as an article of faith that evil lurks within the hearts of those who don’t think like they do, and goddamnit, they’re going to find it whether it’s there or not.

Steve Sailer has one of those excellent ideas that won’t go anywhere.

Far more people have lost loved ones to crime over the decades, and they deserve a serious memorial on the National Mall to commemorate their tragedies. We also have a Victims of Communism Memorial, a Holocaust Museum, and and increasing number of ethnic victim remembrance sites under the names of museums. It’s time for a tasteful, somber memorial to all the people whose losses disappear down the memory hole because their loved ones were random citizens brutalized by criminals.

Of course, the reason it won’t go anywhere is that it will be a constant reproach to those who are ultimately responsible for those deaths, those whose responsibility it was to protect those innocent victims but who, through venality or incompetence or ambition, decided that they had more important fish to fry.

Yeah, Eric Holder, I’m looking at you.

Economist Robin Hanson explains some unpleasant facts of life.

Food isn’t about Nutrition
Clothes aren’t about Comfort
Bedrooms aren’t about Sleep
Marriage isn’t about Romance
Talk isn’t about Info
Laughter isn’t about Jokes
Charity isn’t about Helping
Church isn’t about God
Art isn’t about Insight
Medicine isn’t about Health
Consulting isn’t about Advice
School isn’t about Learning
Research isn’t about Progress
Politics isn’t about Policy

When I say “X is not about Y,” I mean that while Y is the function commonly said to drive most X behavior, in fact some other function Z drives X behavior more.

There’s more to most things than meets the eye … or the brain, when you get right down to it.

For example, we want nationalized medicine so poor sick folks will feel cared for, military actions so foreigners will treat us with respect, business deregulation as a sign of respect for hardworking businessfolk, official gay marriage as a sign we accept gays, and so on.

This is why I’ve always said that ‘gay marriage’ isn’t about marriage, it’s about the attempt by homosexuals to have their sexual activities accepted as somehow normal by the wider society when it’s as plain as the nose on your face that their sexual activities are not normal, if normal means anything. Which is why ‘progressives’ attempt to destroy the whole concept of ‘normal’ — the closer they can get to having people accept the DoubleSpeak notion that ‘normal is whatever you want’, then the closer they can get to keeping the sheep quiet while they destroy any aspect of the common culture that they find inconvenient.

This perspective explains why voters tend to prefer proportional representation, why many refuse to vote for any candidate when none have earned their respect, and why so few are interested in institutional reforms that would plausibly give more informed policies.

Hence the resistance in the current Republican primary process to ‘settling’ — I won’t vote for Santorum because he’s a bigot, I won’t vote for Gingrich because he’s a flake, I won’t vote for Romney because he’s a rich white guy and I’ve been raised to believe that rich white guys are the Enemy.

The same process works on the Democrat side: I’ll vote for Obama because he’s a black guy (ignoring the non-black parts) and black guys are oppressed, even though it’s plain as the nose on your face that he’s an incompetent amateur who’s never had an oppressed day in his life. This is why an notorious simpleminded moron like Joe Biden can spend a lifetime getting elected to public office (by people who appear to be even stupider than he is), and wind up a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

Smitty at the Other McCain does a little venting.

The Orwellian abuse inflicted upon our culture at the hands of us Postmodern, Progressive–let’s just put it out there–Godless Commies, while actually worse than all of the alcohol, tobacco, and drugs assailing the culture, is a necessary evil to bring about Utopia. From birth (if we deem you fit, in our  Sanger-esque milieu), Progressives must mold formerly free people into our precise little geometric forms, even down to the level of bodily functions.

Read it.

Sir Anthony also recommended that special processes be developed for complex fingerprint marks, saying these should be examined by three experts who should reach their conclusions independently, making notes at each stage.

Steve Sailer gives us some inconvenient truth.

There are patterns that people can notice if they let themselves. And once you let yourself notice the pattern, it’s easier to notice more. For example, an awful lot of the hate crimes that make the news turn out to be hoaxes. That doesn’t mean there are no such things as hate crimes, just that hate crimes like, say, Matthew Yglesias getting stomped for Walking While White is too boring and depressing to be news. The stuff that becomes big news is, typically, a noose is found in the Diversity Nook at some hyper-liberal college.

Read it.

So the question remains, are those who oppose any restriction on sex-selective abortion as an adjunct of women’s rights, willing to live with the consequence that this choice results in fewer women being born? I imagine the answer will be yes for most, but at least people should be honest about the consequences of their choice.