David Henderson, a Real Economist, points out the obvious.

Read it.

As someone who has worked in the criminal justice system for 26 years and a considerable amount of that time in the prison system, I can tell you emphatically that Merah’s radicalization was much more than self-induced. One does not become “self-radicalized” in prison. The constant interaction that occurs within a prison negates that. There is always a facilitator, an influence, or a catalyst. Be that literature, another cellmate, or a clergy. What was the integer in this case?

Read it.

Some Democratic officials are demanding that Apple — in exchange for millions of dollars in tax breaks from Travis County — hire residents who are “economically disadvantaged.”

If Apple wanted to hire the ‘economically advantaged’, they’d do it in China, where they’re REALLY ‘economically disadvantaged’. (Oh, wait — they already do. Well, then.)

Getting Apple to Austin, however, could hinge on the demand from some Travis County Democrats that Apple’s tax breaks be contingent on it hiring a certain percentage of economically disadvantaged residents. Local TV station YNN explained that Apple would have to “give preference to qualified applicants who are at or below the poverty line rather than those who may come across as the most attractive job candidates.”

To do what? Clean the offices? Look after the grounds? Serve meals in the cafeteria?

Democrat Sarah Eckhardt, a Travis County commissioner, complained to YNN that Apple will thus have to change its hiring practices. “They will-hire the low-hanging fruit, and the low-hanging fruit in our community don’t need the hiring preference.”

See #2, below.

Some Apple executives must be thinking about now that some of Austin’s Democrats are a little over the top — clueless about how a business operates.

Yeah, that’s Democrats, alright.

To sum up … Lessons that Apple probably won’t learn:

1. If you take the government’s money, you also get the government’s collar.

2. Politicians don’t see you as a source of products and services, but as a provider of jobs, concerning which see #1.

3. Democrats don’t want you to hire the most qualified person, but rather someone who will vote for them. See #2.

Freeberg has a list — it’s really rather impressive.

First President to apply for college aid as a foreign student, then
deny he was a foreigner.

First President to have a social security number from a state he has
never lived in.

First President to preside over a cut to the credit-rating of the United States

…

Read it.

The Green movement needs to rethink its philosophy from the ground-up. That’s according to Peter Kareiva, a leading conservation expert and chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, the world’s biggest environmental group.

It must abandon the idea that nature is “feminine” and in particular that it’s “fragile”, he said, because not only is this artificial, it’s wrong, and so many bad ideas follow.

Steve Sailer isn’t afraid to ask about the elephant in the room.

The win-win solution against stereotyping is for blacks to stop living down to their profiles.

So what can grownups do to discourage black youths from acting like knuckleheads?

All else being equal, does naming your child after an English poet give him a better chance in life than making up some Ghetto Fabulous name to advertise your commitment to keeping it real?

Couldn’t hurt. There’s a reason why Asians either give their kids an additional ‘Western’ name or the kids adopt a ‘Western’ nickname on their own, and I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that Asians are on average smarter than you and me (and people named Trayvon).

Yet Fryer and Levitt can’t find much evidence on an individual level that naming your child D’Qisykha will make her worse off than all the other problems she will inherit merely from being the daughter of somebody who might name her daughter D’Qisykha.

True that.

Higher-class blacks tend to give their children less self-defeating names. “Danielle” is a clever compromise that shows up three times out of the 142 names of Florida’s black 2012 National Achievement Scholars. The “D” sound is Afro-loyal, but white employers won’t automatically perceive a Danielle’s job application as a discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen.

There’s a reason that Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and Clarence Thomas are more successful than your local Tawanda, Latrina, Antwon, or Trayvon.

What’s the Swahili for ‘unemployed’?

Freeberg looks at Michelle Obama and says ‘Huh?’

The left seems to have a fascination with this that goes back aways — children being wise sages uniquely qualified to dispense the kind of wisdom that is attained only through experience.

Near as I can figure, it’s part of a much greater and broader perspective in which it’s important to see everything as the opposite of what it really is. We have to spend lots of money to keep from going broke, we show the greatest respect toward women when we systematically eliminate every reason for their existence, we’re “shoring up” capitalism by stealing money from the people who’ve been productive and giving it to people who’ve chosen to live destructive and self-destructive lifestyles…et al.

Read it.

Last week, an arbitrator ruled that under state law, members of the Clark County Education Association are required to make increased contributions to the state’s retirement system – just like all other public employees.

The decision saves the Clark County School District $10 million dollars, which equals the cost of 134 teacher positions, reports the ReviewJournal.com.

It is often said that the purpose of a Union is to save worker jobs. This is not, strictly speaking, accurate.

The original reason for forming a Union probably was to look after the interests of workers, but as soon as a Union grows big enough to have paid Union officials, then (in accordance with the Iron Law of Bureaucracy), the purpose of the Union is to look after the interests of Union officials. Actual workers are the cards, not the players. As Nick Nolte so famously said in North Dallas 40: ‘Team?! Hell, they [owners and coaches] are the team! We [players], we’re the equipment!‘ Union bosses have uniformly demonstrated that they will gladly accept layoffs of any amount of workers in order to preserve the pay and perks of those who are left — because the Union bosses are elected (and re-elected) by the ones whose pay and perks they’ve preserved, not the ones who got laid off.

Megan McArdle offers some perspective.

It’s still true: the mania to get more and more people into college is the brain child of people who think that school is fun, and that anyone who doesn’t go is being deprived of something like a trip to Disneyland packaged with a job guarantee.

Lots of people think school is rather miserable, and they wish to leave as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the “school is fun” crowd has made an education a virtual pre-requisite for a stable and well paying job in this century.  If you don’t like school, and aren’t good at it, what do you do?  Spend the rest of your life popping chicken tenders into the deep fry at Popeye’s?  Or deal drugs?

Megan McArdle points out that poor people are poor because they do things that poor people do.

Poor people are people who make decisions.  They are not a combination of circumstances that can be tweaked to make them stop acting like poor people.   They like babies and sleeping in for the same reasons you do.  And they are generally asked to give up those things in return for much less reward than the middle class people who cluck at them for their bad decisions.  (The poor and near poor face some of the highest marginal tax rates in the country due to loss of benefits.  For some reason, the GOP has not put much of its policymaking effort into rectifying this supply-side nightmare.)

Read it.

Perhaps you thought the main reason was labor costs; Apple would have to pay American workers much more than the estimated $17 a day (or less) many Chinese workers at Foxconn make. That’s part of it, but “an enormously small part,” Duhigg told Glass.

Duhigg explained that, in terms of labor costs, producing the iPhone domestically would cost Apple an additional $10 (on the low end) to $65 (on the high end) more per phone. “Since Apple’s profits are often hundreds of dollars per phone, building domestically, in theory, would still give the company a healthy reward,” he wrote in the NYT piece.

Instead, what matters is Apple’s intricate Chinese supply chain.

In other words, even if Apple wanted to move manufacturing back to the U.S., they couldn’t get what they need.

Labor is almost insignificant. What is really important are supply chains and flexibility of factories. You want to be able to be located right next to the plant that makes the screws so that when you need a small change to that screw factory, you can go next door and say, “Give it to me in six hours,” and they can say, “Here you go.” Because if that factory was in another state or on another continent, it would take two weeks. It’s the flexibility within the Chinese manufacturing system, that’s what you can do in Asia that you can’t do in the United States.

You can’t make iPhones with gender-studies and communications majors.

Read it.

The entitlement mentality has been bred. People demand health care from the government. The 57 states, unable to steal the way the Federal Reserve can, are not likely to fund the desired programs. Thus, the system fails upward. Progressives, who really want the Logan’s Run level of control present in Single Payer, are not unhappy about that result. It’s worth throwing a Solicitor General or two under the SCOTUS bus to get to Single Payer. A cost of doing business. It’s all for the cause, man: Holy Progress.

Short of major reform of the Federal Reserve, all the talk of returning to  constitutional government is just so much Tea Party dreaming. It’s ultimately about the frogskins ($).

The Other McCain does the big reveal.

Read it.

Conservatives may not like liberals, but they seem to understand them. In contrast, many liberals find conservative voters not just wrong but also bewildering.

One academic study asked 2,000 Americans to fill out questionnaires about moral questions. In some cases, they were asked to fill them out as they thought a “typical liberal” or a “typical conservative” would respond.

Moderates and conservatives were adept at guessing how liberals would answer questions. Liberals, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal,” were least able to put themselves in the minds of their adversaries and guess how conservatives would answer.

Freeberg nails it once again.

Good software engineers almost always have side projects. In fact, those side projects are one of the reasons why they are good software engineers. The reason is simple: Good software engineering requires constant learning, and very few companies create a situation where all of that learning can occur on the job.

Technology, and software in particular, move incredibly fast. Today’s frameworks and tools are different than those of a year ago, and those are different still from those of five years ago. The details are ever-changing, requiring software engineers to be continually learning to stay afloat. At the same time, the techniques and practices that are used in software development, the deeper skills underlying the fast-moving surface, are consistent but require long and dedicated work to even begin to master.

IT is probably the first occupational field in the history of mankind in which what you knew five years ago is worthless today.

I will, of course, object to the term ‘software engineer’ — engineering is when you can get a predictable result from specified inputs, and I’ve never seen a software program (beyond the traditional ‘Hello, world!’ exercise) for which the actual outcome is reliably predictable.

Clue: There’s no need to ‘beta test’ bridges or dams or buildings.

Read it.

How many suicides will we blame on Lady Gaga years from now?

Read it.

He saw people stare, but he looked right through them. His mind was on something satisfying. A distant thought made him smile. The bands on his right wrist read “Parachute Regiment” and “Walking With The Wounded.” His T-shirt had a whisky sponsor’s name on it and his left arm wasn’t there. I could see the stump covered in a white sock reflected on the opposite window.

Read it.

Except when extroverts are around — if we could get them to STFU, everything would be fine.

Mike Loukides at O’Reilly makes a good point.

Two words: social engineering.

If a candidate proves that he’ll give out his password in an interview, hasn’t he proven that he’ll give out his password in other situations? Hasn’t he proven that he’s fundamentally unreliable, fundamentally unable to keep secret information secret?

I can see one, and only one, reason for asking for a password in an interview: as an underhanded way to weed out candidates who are unfit for any job requiring any serious responsibility. As soon as a candidate gives you the password, the interview’s over, and “don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

The Other McCain looks at Florida.

The coverage on the local news has been at saturation level. Do any right-thinking people not grasp that the media frenzy has nothing whatsoever to do with justice, and everything to do with power?

When #OccupyResoluteDesk said “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon” he owned this whole thing. Should further violence be piled upon violence, Obama is culpable.

Read it.

An interesting analysis of the Bales situation.

Nicholas Farrell goes Italian.

Italy, tragically, is riddled with Italians. And Tuscany is even worse because lurking behind every oleander bush is an Englishman with a Panama hat on his head and a glass of Chianti in his hand. In every piazza is a sun-dried American woman of a certain age in a hurry to find an answer to her question, “Yes, but is it organic?”

But that’s not the worst of it.

Carla’s mission (God bless her or perhaps God help her) is to get me to become a Catholic because otherwise there is no chance of me going to heaven because only Catholics go to heaven and time is running out because the apocalypse is due any day now, as we can so clearly see from what is going in Syria, and not forgetting Iran, but also those really weird tornados in America. And in those very few moments of life as we know it left to us on Earth she feels “only half a person” being married to a non-Catholic, which also jeopardizes her own place in heaven.

Read it.

Education is an important determinant of income — one of the most important — but it is less important than most people think. If everyone had the same education, the inequality of income would be reduced by less than 10%. When you focus on education you neglect the myriad other factors that determine income. The differences of income among people who have the same education are huge.

Read it.

Calvin: You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants don’t help.

An Informative Map.

Get a sharpie and trace the old border between Germany and Russia pre-1918.

Pretty remarkable when you consider that there aren’t any Germans left in that area.

Read it.

To dig itself out of recession, Britain hiked its income-tax rate to 50% for those making £150,000 or more. Proponents said the tax was needed to bring fairness to an economy, in which the rich were getting richer and not contributing enough to the cause. Critics said the tax would chase out the job creators.

As it turned out, the real impact was in tax avoidance. According to the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s budget announced today, the income-tax hike caused “massive distortions” that cost the government.

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

People move their money — and themselves — from high-tax jurisdictions to low-tax jurisdictions if they can. Rich people pretty much always can. As a result, taxes intended to ‘soak the rich’ not only don’t raise the revenue increases that bureaucrats predict under static analysis (‘we can do anything we want and they’ll just sit there and take it’), but don’t even get the revenue that they would have gotten under the old tax structure, because the income stream is entirely gone.

“No Chancellor can justify a tax rate that damages our economy and raises next to nothing,” he said.

But the Obamassiah can.

Raise your hand, anybody who thinks that the U.S. government will let this reality intrude on their liberal fantasies.

No, me neither.

Steve Sailer lets his brain run free, to our benefit and that of all right-thinking people.

Murray says, in a throwaway line in Coming Apart, that the growing problems of the white working class don’t have much to do with race or immigration. Of course, these days, you have to say that to be accepted in polite society. Only poor white trash would think otherwise.

In fact, it’s obvious that class, race, and immigration are indeed intimately intertwined in complicated ways. But we are less and less equipped to understand them—as class taboos harden over what refined folk are supposed to notice about race and immigration.

Even the best of thinkers are constrained by their environment. Thinking outside the box gets you nowhere if the people you’re trying to reach are trained to look only inside the box for their inputs.

Among the intelligentsia, why has not thinking intelligently about immigration become a mark of gentility?

The most obvious explanation: class-based economic self-interest. People higher up the social pyramid compete less with immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, and employ them more.

Duh. Rich people don’t worry about illegal immigration for the same reason that slaveowners didn’t worry about civil rights violations.

Of the 18 NYT editorial board members today, one is black, one is Chinese, and the other16 are white. None have Spanish surnames.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

The Left used to have a ready-made set of class-based explanations for just about everything. For example, they said racial conflict in the Jim Crow South was stirred up by the landowning class to keep black and white sharecroppers from uniting against their oppressors. Similarly, the highly successful leader of the United Automobile Workers union, Walter Reuther (1907-1970), a pillar of the Democratic Party during its mid-Century dominance, preached black-white worker solidarity against management.

That was then, this is now. Nowadays the Left is run by the Upper Crust. So class-based arguments would be, uh, unhelpful.

In recent months, the Left has begun congratulating itself on rediscovering class with its Occupy Wall Street protests. Yet, a glance at the original poster in Adbusters that kicked off the movement should raise doubts. The irony is that this Photoshopped image of a ballerina surmounting sculptor Arthur Di Modica’s iconic symbol of Wall Street, Charging Bull, struck very few protesters as ironic. Ballet is perhaps the most expensive and aristocratic of all performing arts, having attained classical perfection under the patronage of the Czars. Ballet would wither without the rich.

Love the poster. Not every group would announce so publicly that their ‘movement’ is primarily a fancy dance perched on a heap o’ bull.

The Victorians notoriously considered discussion of sex vulgar. Nice people didn’t notice. Likewise, elite Americans now believe that being well informed about race (and, increasingly, immigration) is a sign of ill-breeding.

Suitable only for the rubes in Flyover Country. Listen to any Garrison Keillor monologue for details.

Without massive immigration from Latin America over the last four decades, the U.S. Hispanic population would have become more diffuse. The more talented and ambitious would have married into the general population. Hispanics would have inevitably become even less of a potential political bloc.

But what actually happened was continued mass immigration—and government and opinion leaders actively working to retard Latin assimilation by rewarding Hispanic racialists with Affirmative Action money and prizes.

Who benefits from that? I wonder….

I recently tried to look up how big the Hispanic population was in 1960, the initial point in the half century covered in Murray’s book—only to find that the Census Bureau never asked about Spanish background in the 1950 and 1960 enumerations. During the more idealistic early civil rights era, Hispanics were officially considered just plain white. But that changed as the Quota Era took off from 1969 onward and it began to pay to be officially a minority.

Who benefits from that? I wonder….

But today Chavez’s years of struggle against illegal immigration have almost completely disappeared down the Memory Hole as the MSM has posthumously converted him into the Patron Saint of Undocumented Workers.

To the point of getting a street named after him in downtown Dallas, a city with which he has no connection whatsoever — almost as absurd as naming one after St Patrick.

The issue of immigration is one of the weirder class phenomena of our era. Thus on St. Patrick’s Day, the New York Times ran an op-ed by a Maine-based novelist named Peter Behrens, entitled: It’s About Immigrants, Not Irishness. [March 16, 2012]

No!—St. Patrick’s Day really is about Irishness!

But the Irish aren’t a politically fashionable minority, so we have to ‘spread the wealth around’.

Thus, despite all the elite press effort to get Mexicans to feel simmering hatred over immigration, the numbers suggest that immigration is less of a big deal to Mexican-American voters than it is to the journalists sent to cover them.

And their race-industry pets among the ‘activist’ groups like La Raza, of course — but that’s economically-based, too, because being victims is their meal ticket.

Read it.

Given that liberal/left heterosexuals have been campaigning against the institution of marriage for decades, why can’t liberal-left homosexuals? And why support gay marriage and not polygamy if love-feelings are all the rage? Where is the consistency in all of this “equality” talk?

David Friedman is a wellspring of good sense.

Even if one takes seriously the output of that sort of procedure, there is a striking asymmetry in their approach. They do not appear to have asked any experts what the chance is that preventing global warming would cause a catastrophe—or, to put it differently, that global warming will prevent one. Yet, as I keep pointing out, earth’s climate was not designed for us, hence there is no a priori reason to assume that large negative results due to a few degrees of warming are more likely than large positive ones.

In other words, we have no clue whether the total effect of ‘global warming’, assuming that it even exists, will be a bad thing rather than a good thing.

Be sure to read the comments.

Read it.

Look at the crime statistics from areas that are 90% white, and then at the crime statistics from areas that are 90% black (or 90% Latino).

Matt Welch looks at Graydon Carter, Voice of the Crust.

You just know Carter is going to work himself up into a righteous hatred of his own class without once examining his own culpability; the only question is how he’ll get there:

One of the most amusing things about the Lame-Stream Media is the amount of time they spend criticizing the sort of people that they either are or aspire to be. I should have such a job.

Graydon Carter got rich making journalism and parties about other rich people who make movies and music and architecture and journalism. No harm in that! But can we stop, at long last, pretending that these and only these pursuits are the acceptable pathways to the One Percent Club? Or that only “hedge-fund tyros” (and–shudder–businessmen) are motivated by greed?

The whole point of a Crust is that it is rigid, flaky, and just an extraneous layer on the outside of what’s really worthwhile. You can have the filling and no Crust and be pretty well off, but if you’ve got Crust and no filling, all you’re left with is a whole lot of empty.

An Informative Chart.

Want to know why American health care is screwed up? One word: Government.

Read it.

Back when I was a grade schooler, in a few of our classes, we had a ‘propaganda unit’, wherein many of the common techniques of propaganda used historically were detailed and analyzed, perhaps with the intent of inoculating students against them.

Unfortunately, the techniques studies were not the ones actually used most frequently by cultural Marxists—they were really more those of 1950s-1960s Mad Men and WWII propaganda posters.  The really dangerous techniques were never described.

Bryan Caplan points out that there really is nothing new under the sun.

Historians often act like Lenin’s tyranny was a bolt from the blue: Who would have expected a bunch of socialists to be so bloodthirsty?  Admirers of Lenin, in contrast, often paint him as a great innovator – at least as a strategist.  A dictatorship of the proletariat run by a vanguard party of bourgeois intellectuals?  Only Lenin could have conceived it.  When you read 19th-century Russian literature, however, “Leninist” memes clearly predate the birth of Lenin.  Contrary to many historians, Lenin’s atrocities were foreseeable.  And contrary to Lenin’s admirers, his strategy of atrocity was pure cliche.

Read it.

Perhaps that’s because it had more life to start with than the modern world.

Read it.

Sometimes it is good to work Inside the Ring.

Read it.

The death rattle of environmentalism will be deafening.  It has too much political momentum and fanatical devotion to go quietly.  The environmental establishment is a billion-dollar a year business, and there are plenty of stupid guilty rich people, idiot Hollywood celebrities, and direct-mail dupes to keep the agitation machine going for many years to come.  The architecture of environmental law and regulation, and the administrative momentum of the EPA, assures that this zombie movement will continue to do great damage to the economy for a long time to come.  But make no mistake—it is a bunch of brain-dead zombies that we face in the environmental movement today.

And about fargin time, too.

Read it.

People often dismiss philosophical disputes as mere quibbles about words.   But shifts in terminology can turn the tide in public debates.

Which is why ‘progressives’ fight so hard to control the terms of debate, ‘gay marriage’ being the poster child for this struggle — their desperate attempts to shoehorn a relationship that isn’t marriage into the term ‘marriage’ is the linchpin of their program; if they can succeed at that, then the rest is just a matter of time. The attempts to paint everything from pointing out that black people commit more crimes than white people to cutting off welfare benefits to goldbricks (who — I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked — tend to be black more than white) as ‘racism’ is the long-term effort that has proven the most rewarding in this respect.

(Of course, this article, being by a Voice of the Crust — as if anyone else would be printed in the New York Times — uses an anti-Republican example, but the point remains valid.)

There are, of course, many cases of athletes who are primarily students, particularly in “minor” (i.e., non-revenue producing) sports.  But what about Division I football and men’s basketball, the big-time programs with revenues in the tens of millions of dollars that are a major source of their schools’ national reputation?  Are the members of these teams typically students first?

Quit snickering.

The N.C.A.A.’s own 2011 survey showed that by a wide variety of measures the answer is no.  For example, football and men’s basketball players (who are my primary focus here) identify themselves more strongly as athletes than as students, gave more weight in choosing their college to athletics than to academics, and, at least in season, spend more time on athletics than on their studies (and a large majority say they spend as much or more time on sports during the off-season).

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

It’s clear, then, that on the whole members of these teams are athletes first and students second, both from their own standpoint and from that of their schools.

Which comes from using colleges as the farm team system for football and basketball. I suppose the only reason it’s not used for baseball as well is the historical fluke that school tends to be out during the baseball season.

At a minimum, there’s the harm of saying that players are primarily students when they are not.  This is a falsehood institutionalized for the benefit of a profit-making system, and educational institutions should have no part in it.

Oh, are we drawing up a list of ‘falsehoods institutionalized for the benefit of a profit-making system’? Let’s start with Congress….

The deeper harm, however, lies in the fact that, in the United States, there is a strong strain of anti-intellectualism that undervalues intellectual culture and overvalues athletics.

… from the point of view of the Crust, of course, of which (memorandum) this writer is a Voice. The Crust is stuffed full with effete faineant intellectuals (think Dick Cavett, or maybe Truman Capote) who are the spiritual heirs of Oscar Wilde and regard sweating (except in the pursuit of sexual gratification) to be distinctly Lower Class.

This, mind you, is in marked contrast to the Classical tradition — you know, Greeks, Romans, those kinds of people — of which the Crust pretend to be the curators, who took seriously the ‘in corpore sano’ half of their educational program. Correctly understood, there is nothing anti-intellectual about participating in, or even enjoying watching, athletics. Indeed, professional sports are among the most intellectual activities available to modern man … at least, if one wants to win on a consistent basis.

As a result, intellectual culture receives far less support than it should, and is generally regarded as at best the idiosyncratic interest of an eccentric minority.

… which, in modern times, it obviously is.

Athletics, by contrast, is more than generously funded and embraced as an essential part of our national life.

… which it certainly ought to be … and, thank God, still hangs in there. When people put their money where their mouths are, more of them are willing to shell out to watch the Steelers play the Pats than are willing to spring for what passes for art, literature, or any of the other quasi-intellectual pursuits that occupy the culture pages of such Establishment bastions as, oh, say, the New York Times.

Anyone who finds this author’s suggestions attractive need only look at the Ivy League schools, who follow it about as strictly as any American colleges could be expected to. How many Ivy League graduates, certifiably students first and athletes second, wind up in the pros? You could certainly count the number without resorting to taking your shoes off. And I’m sure this Professor of Philosophy is perfectly comfortable with that, despite the agita it would undoubtedly cause Plato or Aristotle.

Read it.

A somewhat mixed result from using Khan Acacemy videos in school.

Mike Masnik connects the dots.

In 2008 James Bessen and Michael Meurer came out with a truly excellent book, Patent Failure. It’s chock full of excellent information and a pretty wide survey of the research showing just how much patents harm innovation. While I don’t necessarily agree with the “solutions” proposed, the key thesis of the book makes a tremendous amount of sense: to have a functioning market, you need property with clear borders. If the borders aren’t clear at all, the end result is that no one knows when they’re trespassing or even what they’re buying, and the benefits of a market collapse, and instead you get mired down in legal disputes. That’s exactly what we’re seeing with patents today. Of course, one of the key reasons for this — as we’ve been explaining for years — is that patents are not property — and thus the attempt to force property-like rules on something that is naturally abundant is going to make it impossible to creates reasonable boundaries.

Read it.

I just started a new job at Microsoft and the hiring process has been on my mind a lot lately. I read articles on the Internet and hear people talking about how hard it is to find good development talent. They say there are plenty of people looking for jobs, but hardly any worth hiring. I don’t think that’s necessarily true.

I just went through the interview process with a bunch of big software companies in the Seattle area and I only received one job offer. I’m generalizing here, but I think that if I’m qualified to work for Microsoft, I’m probably qualified to work just about anywhere. For all but 2 companies, I didn’t make it past the phone screens.

To me, this says that something is wrong with the interview process.

Read it.

THE NEWS that Lord Monckton was to give his “Climate of Freedom” lecture at Union College in Schenectady, New York, had thrown the university’s environmentalists into a turmoil. The campus environmentalists set up a Facebook page announcing a counter-meeting of their own immediately following Monckton’s lecture. There is no debate about global warming, they announced. There is a consensus. The science is settled. Their meeting would be addressed by professors and PhDs, the “true” scientists, no less. Sparks, it seemed, were gonna fly.

Free speech? We don’t need no stinkin’ free speech.

As they filed in, Lord Monckton was chatting contentedly to a quaveringly bossy woman with messy blonde hair who was head of the college environmental faction. Her group had set up a table at the door of the auditorium, covered in slogans scribbled on messy bits of recycled burger boxes held together with duct tape (Re-Use Cardboard Now And Save The Planet). “There’s a CONSENSUS!” she shrieked.

“That, Madame, is intellectual baby-talk,” replied Lord Monckton. Had she not heard of Aristotle’s codification of the commonest logical fallacies in human discourse, including that which the medieval schoolmen would later describe as the argumentum ad populum, the headcount fallacy?  From her reddening face and baffled expression, it was possible to deduce that she had not. Nor had she heard of the argumentum ad verecundiam, the fallacy of appealing to the reputation of those in authority.

Heh.

Then he said that, unlike the IPCC, he was going to speak in plain English. Yet he proposed to begin, in silence, by displaying some slides demonstrating the unhappy consequences of several instances of consensus in the 20th century.

The Versailles consensus of 1918 imposed reparations on the defeated Germany, so that the conference that ended the First World War (15 million dead) sowed the seeds of the Second. The eugenics consensus of the 1920s that led directly to the dismal rail-yards of Oswiecim and Treblinka (6 million dead). The appeasement consensus of the 1930s that provoked Hitler to start World War II (60 million dead). The Lysenko consensus of the 1940s that wrecked 20 successive harvests in the then Soviet Union (20 million dead). The ban-DDT consensus of the 1960s that led to a fatal resurgence of malaria worldwide (40 million children dead and counting, 1.25 million of them last year alone).

Whoda thunkit.

Lord Monckton ended, devastatingly, by showing that a sufferer from trichiasis, a consequence of trachoma that causes the eyelashes to grow inward, causing piercingly acute pain followed eventually by blindness, can be cured at a cost of just $8. He showed a picture of a lady from Africa, smiling with delight now that she could see again. He said that the diversion of resources away from those who most urgently and immediately needed our help, in the name of addressing a non-problem that could not in any event be cost-effectively dealt with by CO2 mitigation, must be reversed at once for the sake of those who needed our help now.

Saving actual people rather than ‘the planet’? What a bizarre notion.

Why, said a professor of environmental sciences in a rambling question apparently designed to prevent anyone else from getting a question in, had Lord Monckton not cited peer-reviewed sources?  He had cited several, but he apologized that the IPCC – which he had cited frequently – was not a peer-reviewed source: indeed, fully one-third of the references its 2007 gospel had cited had not been peer-reviewed.

If, indeed, that matters to you: The Consensus has not been peer-reviewed.

Lord Monckton, sternly but sadly, told those who had raised their hands: “You know, from the plain and clear demonstration that I gave during my lecture, that the IPCC’s statistical abuse was just that – an abuse. Yet, perhaps out of misplaced loyalty to your professor, you raised your hands in denial of the truth. Never do that again, even for the sake of appeasing authority. In science, whatever you may personally believe or wish to be so, it is the truth and only the truth that matters.”

Read it.

When Britain still had an Empire, what mattered most was to get your daughters married and your sons into a good regiment. In Homeland America, all that matters to middle-class and affluent parents is getting their children into the best colleges that money can buy or that the Standardized Aptitude Test will allow.

Not that it will do them much good nowadays. The best way to make it into Harvard is to be black (you don’t have to actually look black, however, as long as you’re at least as black as Barack Obama or Eric Holder or Colin Powell) with an Hispanic surname.

Steve Sailer points out that the Emperor is bare-assed.

The irony, of course, is the that the rapid development of the gene sequencing technology celebrated in 2000’s orgy of Race Does Not Exist pronouncements, immediately began undermining the dogma in its moment of greatest triumph. … A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on, especially when the lie ties into the status system.

Read it.

Millions of viewers were stunned this morning as they tuned into a BBC breakfast news bulletin – and found the presenter apparently asleep on his desk.

I do know how he feels.

Freeberg rips the mask off of the Usual Suspects.

It’s from one lefty to a bunch of other lefties who’ve abandoned President Obama for not being lefty enough. Yeah I know, you were thinking “Oh good, mystery finally solved”…so was I.

The bullet points are interesting. And very well written, as far as implementing the lessons from, uh, “How to cover up your BS and make it look like something that isn’t BS.”

Hey, that’s what lefties do best. After all, if they were honest with people, they’d be strung up from the nearest tree.

‘When times are bad and things are going badly, people do not seek the causes. They seek someone to blame. Whom do they blame? The first target is almost always the group that appears to be favored, that has more than they do, and whose numbers are small. Only if those in that group are powerful do they seek another group to blame, but even so their resentment and anger remain.’

— L. E. Modesitt, Jr., Imager

Gee, that used to be the Jews, but not so much any more. Who could it be? Hm…. ‘the 1%’ … Not the real cause but a convenient whipping boy? Check. Appears to be favored? Check. Has more than they do? Check. Numbers are small? Check. I think we have found the new scapegoat.

Arnold Kling does a review.

“When you start measuring something and then judge people based on that measurement, you encourage people to game the measurement instead of doing whatever it is you wanted in the first place.”

That, in a nutshell, is why principal-agent problems are difficult, why organizations tend to be dysfunctional, and why regulations work less well than intended.

Truest thing you’ll read this year.

Read it.

So why does the media decide to highlight only cases of white violence at schools – turning it into a national story – and refrain from even mentioning the almost daily violence that is found at all-Black, 75 percent Black, all-Hispanic, 75 percent Hispanic, or the dreaded half and half Hispanic/Black school?

Taki lays it out.

Very briefly: The camel drivers posing as Saudi royals got the heebie-jeebies after Uncle Sam invaded Iraq, enabling the Shiites to come to power after the Sunni majority had kicked them around since the 1920s. Iraq’s Shiites and neighboring Iranian Shiites were natural allies. The Saudis began paying al-Qaeda to foment revolution in Syria, the main country standing between Israel and the Shiite regional powers of Iran and Iraq. That is when I believe the camel drivers got a telephone call from Israel: Let’s keep this quiet, but between you and your money, and us with our power over the Americans, we can knock Assad over in no time.

The pathetic media, desperate for a bad guy to demonize, blind to reality but open to PR hucksters, played along. Like lemmings, journalists and newspapers have parroted the script that dictated this was a revolution by Syrian people yearning for freedom. The truth, however, is that the Syrian conflict is a Sunni move against what the Saudis and Israelis view as a Shiite move toward Middle Eastern hegemony.