The Other McCain isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions.

My, I’m good with it. I’m still wondering where these $1,000-a-year-for-contraception chicks were when I was in law school.

A recent survey I’ve conducted indicates that 27% of men are attracted to women with the “varsity softball scholarship” look. In fact, seven out of 10 Eritrean immigrant cab drivers in the D.C. metropolitan area say that they would be attracted to Sandra Fluke, especially if her family were willing to provide a dowry that included a small herd of goats, or if they could score a Permanent Residency Visa out of the deal.

Also, if given a choice between Maureen Dowd and Sandra Fluke, the Eritrean cab drivers would unanimously choose Fluke.

And there you have it.

Don Boudreaux, my third favorite economist, weighs in on the latest Rush Limbaugh tsimmis.

A truly civilized person doesn’t demand that other people pick up the bill for her contraception.  A truly civilized person – especially one who can afford to be a full-time student at a prestigious law school – would refuse any invitation to publicly play the role of a victim wronged by being told to pay for her own pills or condoms.  A truly civilized person does not hold in contempt other people for their resistance to being forced to subsidize his or her ‘lifestyle choices’ (whatever those choices might be).

When someone violates standards of civility – as Ms. Fluke has done by self-righteously (and, frankly, also rather incredibly) insisting that she and her fellow students are grievously harmed by the prospect of having to pay for their own contraception – she should not be surprised when other people violate such standards in response.

Charlie Stross, despite being a deluded leftist, is sound on the vegetables question.

Cauliflower (and brassicae in general — broccoli, brussels sprouts, aragula/rocket, cabbages, and so on)

I know some folks appear to like eating this family of vegetables (I’m married to one), but they induce reactions in me ranging from mild dislike (sauerkraut, kimchee) to vomiting. It’s probably the only thing I have in common with George H. W. Bush: a total aversion to an entire family of plants based on a combination of texture and flavour.

Preach it, brother.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Much of what drives political passions in the U.S. are different kinds of white women trying to put each other down.

Paul Rahe at his most incisive.

The bishops, priests, and nuns of the American Catholic Church may be dismayed, but they should not be in any way surprised. The situation that they now find themselves in is one of their own making. Thirty-eight years ago, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision inRoe v. Wade, the country was resolutely hostile to abortion on demand. At that time, many Democratic politicians, not all of them Catholic, announced their opposition to abortion. For a time, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were in their number. Had the Church pressed the question resolutely at the time, the 5-4 court decision would quickly have been reversed. As Mr. Dooley was wont to say, the Supreme Court follows the election returns.

The reason why people make ‘slippery slope’ arguments is because all too often they turn out to be correct. And all the ‘oh, fiddlesticks’ handwaving can’t change that simple historical fact.

The American Roman Catholic Church is full of people, from Mario Cuomo to Ted Kennedy to Kathleen Sibelius to Nancy Pelosi, who would have been instantly excommunicated prior to the 1960s. It is small comfort to recognize that the degeneration of the modern Church merely tracks the same degeneration in the culture at large.

The Blunt-Nelson amendment failed to pass the Senate today for one reason and one reason only. The supporters of abortion-on-demand are serious about the matter. They will do what it takes to punish at the polls any Democrat who crosses them. The bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States have spent almost four decades intimating with a wink and a nod that they are not really serious about this question. In the process, they have made themselves politically irrelevant.

Say what you will about the Left, they never make the mistake of bringing a knife to a gun fight.

Read it.

The US is often talked about as a major supporter of the “free market,” but as we’ve seen over and over again what we have is really crony capitalism, with lots of efforts being made to protect certain industries through regulation. This hasn’t gone unnoticed. The Economist has an article more or less mocking the US for pretending to be all about small government free markets, while really being buried in pointless, confusing and unnecessary regulations:

    But red tape in America is no laughing matter. The problem is not the rules that are self-evidently absurd. It is the ones that sound reasonable on their own but impose a huge burden collectively. America is meant to be the home of laissez-faire. Unlike Europeans, whose lives have long been circumscribed by meddling governments and diktats from Brussels, Americans are supposed to be free to choose, for better or for worse. Yet for some time America has been straying from this ideal.

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

To legislators, creating legislation is the only hammer in their toolbox, so they see every issue as a nail, even when that’s rarely the case. And that hubris of being able to create perfect legislation to account for every eventuality is the opening for the lobbyists. Politicians who want to think through every possibility ask the lobbyists to help — and the lobbyists then have every opportunity to tilt the playing field to their clients, and against the public interest. And that’s exactly what happens all too often.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

 I think it gets it exactly right, that while both Santorum and Obama say that marriage is between a man and a woman only, everybody knows that only Santorum actually means it, and Obama is just saying so.

We seem to have discovered a moral hazard that is really, really hazardous and arguably not very moral either.  It would be funny if it weren’t so sad that the descendants of the people who brought us prohibition should now have done so much to create a society where the men sit around and play video games and the women work and have babies the fathers of whom are long gone (see above) in ever increasing numbers.  And the solution to this is somehow that we all should subsidize the already dirt cheap Pill (presumably because cigarettes and lottery tickets are so expensive).  And all this somehow follows from hygiene.  Very strange.  It’s all as clean and sterile as a condom still in its foil wrapper and as pastel as diaphram case and yet it ends up with a 4 month old whose daiper hasn’t been changed in two days.  Go figure.  But here I am being naive.  I am forgetting that the solution to failed policy is always more of the same.

Read it.

A new survey from the Pew Internet Center confirms every suspicion I harbor about people my age: Despite unprecedented access to information, technology, wealth, and food, we are basically retarded.

Can’t disagree.

Read it.

Obama’s on it. It’ll be in the next budget, powered by wind and solar.

Read it.

The effect happens when two sounds clash, and results in some people hearing a louder noise and some a softer noise, depending on where they stand in relation to the source.

People taking part in a ritual dance around a pair of pipers would have heard the music unexpectedly grow quieter as they moved past certain spots due to this natural phenomenon, Mr Waller said.

Read it.

Megan McArdle asks how the physical university will survive the coming disintermediation of higher education.  I don’t think the answer is superior learning or even superior credentials.  It’s assortative mating.  Assortative mating works best when the cognitive elites are able to combine signaling behaviors for their superior genes, particularly for doing economics, with the physical proximity that supplies bonding behaviors and oxytocin and also the opportunity to sniff the pheromes.  We need classrooms for one kind of fitness signaling and dorms rooms for another.  There will be math involved.  Not because it’s necessarily needed, but because when economists compete for the opportunity to mate, math supplies the antlers.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, extrapolates, as mathematicians like to do.

I am going to put to you what I think you will find a rather startling, perhaps absurd, proposition: that the elite classes of the U.S.A. may turn racist.

As startling as it may be, this is not an original idea.

Our elites are snobs, but not fools. The dissonance between what all good folk are supposed to believe, and the evidence of our lying eyes, must sooner or later be resolved, when enough little boys have called out that the Emperor has no clothes.

If you want to say that such dramatic turnarounds simply don’t happen, I need only remind you that our elites well within living memory expressed opinions about race that would disqualify them from public office nowadays. About other things, too. Quote: “To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.” That was the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court — a person I think can fairly be taken to belong to the elite. The date was 1986, Bowers v. Hardwick.

Steve Sailer keeps asking the hard questions.

Of course, today we all know that welfare couldn’t have dysgenic and/or dyscultural effects. In fact, Science tells us that welfare state Britain couldn’t possibly wind up after a few generations with lots of anti-intellectual yobs who think that studying is only for toffs and poofters, that toffs are poofters. How unscientific Keynes was! He must have been a poofter toff himself to be so unscientific.

Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

Thomas comes out in favor of simple justice.

Anyway, if women can use the power of the state to force others to pay for their contraceptives (via higher insurance premiums), men certainly should be able to use the power of the state to acquire goodies that are essential to “men’s health.” I therefore demand that the Obama administration force insurance companies to cover the following items:

• free tickets to sporting events

• beer, whiskey, and wine on demand

• free premium sports packages on cable or satellite TV

• Mondays and Fridays off, with full pay

• provocative clothing (intimate and otherwise) for one’s “partner”

• free subscriptions to various forms of lascivious entertainment

I’m sure there are many other things that are essential to “men’s health,” but that’s a good start.

Hear, hear.

Steve Sailer just loves asking questions that nobody else would dare to touch.

As I pointed out in a couple of articles in 2005, class is the big divide in Britain rather than race. “Class” is a 1500-year-long project to civilize the Conan the Barbarian warlords who inundated the Roman Empire to act like “gentlemen.” By the late 20th Century, all that politeness, all that studying, all that self-discipline, was striking young males of the lower classes as pretty gay. Thus, chavism.

As historian David Starkey pointed out during the English looting last summer, that blacks were in the lead, but whites were right behind in the looting — something you don’t see in the U.S much at all.

Read it.

For complex socio-technical systems (web engineering and operations) there is a myth that deserves to be busted, and that is the assumption that for outages and accidents, there is a single unifying event that triggers a chain of events that led to an outage.

This is actually a fallacy, because for complex systems:

there is no root cause.

Read it.

The Keynesian multiplier is bogus, for reasons spelled out in “A Keynesian Fantasy Land.” By bogus, I do not mean that government spending (G) has no effect on gross domestic product (GDP). What I mean is that the effect of G on GDP is (1) overrated and (2) irrelevant.

Read it.

One by one, the more honest of the scientists who fell for the anthropogenic global warming hoax are confessing their error.

Freeberg lets ‘er rip.

For the record: It’s now been two years, plus a couple months since I said it…on the occasion of the Fort Hood shooting. My long-term memory is showing some signs of age, and is no longer infallible assuming it ever was. But as far as what I had in mind, I think the “calling dangerous things safe” had to do with Islamic weird-beards and Jihad bullshit and Saddam Hussein. You’ll notice our “intellectuals” have been pretty consistent in lecturing us that we have nothing to worry about there…and none of them have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, in terms of substantiating such reassurances to us. Just whistlin’ dixie, as they say.

And the “calling safe things dangerous” would be carbon in the atmosphere. Oh, yes, if you have one of those powerful, capable minds, you’re grousing away like Chicken Little about what’s going to happen to Mother Earth…probably driving a huge truck that gets four miles to a gallon, but who cares what you do, listen to what you say. That makes you an intellektshewel.

What he said….

The feeling you get when you receive a tax refund — until you realize that you’re just getting your own money back after the government has ‘wet its beak’.

Veronique de Rugy takes another lefty scribbler to the woodshed.

Over at New York magazine’s website, Jonathan Chait challenges my claim that the United States’ federal tax system is more progressive than other Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development  (OECD) nations, including countries that Chait probably admires for their welfare states such as France.

I assume this fact bothers him because he likely believes that one factor behind income inequality is a lack of progressivity in the tax code. If I’m correct that the United States has a more progressive tax code than other countries that may have less income inequality than the U.S., it undermines one of the arguments for higher tax rates on the rich.

Read it.

Apparently this very rich man decided to adopt his girlfriend to shield a large amount of assets from a potential civil judgment in the aftermath of DUI charges against him.  Both of his kids are minors, and apparently his trust for his children could still be hit by a future judgment against him, but with the adoption of another daughter who is not a minor, the trust becomes immune to such judgments.  Enter the girlfriend and the strategic adoption.  Rational Economic Man never disappoints in his ability to desacralize institutions and game systems.

Read it.

If this were just the hard Left within a few trade unions and a fringe collection of Socialist Workers’ Party headbangers, it would not much matter. But the truth is that a good proportion of the population harbours a vague notion that there exists a whole other way of doing things that is inherently more benign and “fair” – in which nobody is hurt or disadvantaged – available for the choosing, if only politicians had the will or the generosity to embrace it.

Read it. And watch the video.

Read it.

What a piker. I’d like to erase the entire decade 1910-1920, which is the pile of shit from which all our modern trouble grow (and not just in the United States).

Read it.

Spirit Airlines is so annoyed at a costly new Department of Transportation regulation that it has slapped a $2 fee on passengers and called it the DOTUC fee, for “Department of Transportation Unintended Consequences.” A Reuters dispatch and a Spirit airlines press release have details.

Read it.

The 9am to 3.30pm day, with six-week summer holidays, is not only no longer relevant to our lives, but also puts significant and unnecessary strain on teachers, parents and children.

Read it.

It seems odd that someone can be born and raised in the United States, and even graduate from a high school in the United States, and still not understand basic English.

Arizona has become a bellwether for what will likely be America’s grandest cultural divide of the 21st century: the demographic struggle between Anglos and Hispanics, two groups that are split along a seemingly intractable linguistic rift. Arizona is home to an ongoing immigration dispute that has pitted the governor against the president. The state recently outlawed a “Mexican-American Studies” program that was deemed to encourage Hispanic resentment against Anglos.

On the other hand….

This has all fallen on deaf ears in the heat-wilted border town of San Luis, AZ, probably because nine out of ten residents speak Spanish at home. The 2010 US Census pegged the city’s population as slightly over 25,000, with a decisively dominant 99% of its residents being Hispanic. (The quotient was less than 90% in 2000.) So as someone who’s fluent in Spanish but only possesses “survival English” skills, Cabrera would adequately represent her local constituency.

It’s not clear to me why ‘good English’ is necessary for someone to represent a constituency that is 90% Spanish-speaking. It’s not as if there aren’t enough people around who are bilingual and can provide translation services in cases where they are necessary. We don’t insist that American military personnel speak Arabic in order to do ‘nation-building’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a position on a city council, not an executive job where the officeholder is required to serve the public generally. Sure, it would be a good thing if she were to speak better English, and I certainly hope that this incident motivates her to get better at it, but still, I don’t see why it’s so necessary in this case. Is puzzle.

Read it.

Origami architect, Ingrid Siliakus, can spent up to two months painstakingly creating entire cities purely from folding pieces of paper.

Tim Cavanaugh turns over a rock and watches what wriggles out.

How many public transit expert/advocates actually ride on public transportation?

Damned few. I’ll bet you a paycheck on that one.

I have met more than three folks, in and out of the establishment media, who speak with authority about mass transportation yet somehow can never get around to using it in the heat of their daily struggles. Judging by this storied Onion headline, I’m guessing others have met such people as well.

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

I wonder this every time an expert makes the case for more intelligently planned transit networks featuring smarter coordination throughout the hub or loop or grid. There’s one thing you learn by your second day of using transit when you actually don’t have a choice: For every transfer in your itinerary, you need to double the time allotted for the trip.

That’s because it’s not just taking you, it’s taking a bunch of other people, too. When you’re the only guy using the bathroom, it’s pretty quick. When you share it with others, it takes longer. Anybody who grew up with siblings knows the answer to that one. (Hm. I wonder how many ‘experts’ are only children? That would explain a lot….)

But the reality of transit use in the non-hypothetical universe is that you don’t need smarter hubs or better coordination or more efficient transfers. You don’t need experts planning out more brilliant three- and four-transfer itineraries. You need more shit running more frequently to more destinations.

Transit doesn’t suck because it lacks central planning. It sucks because it’s artificially scarce.

The basic problem with ‘mass transit’ is that it carries you from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be, with stops in between to waste your time by picking up and dropping off people other than you. That’s the long and the short of it. If ‘mass transit’ started at your door and went to the door of your destination, it would be great. But it doesn’t. So it’s not.

Read it.

BLUF: Both have been proven wrong repeatedly by Actual History. A rational person is therefore justified in thinking such theories to be bullshit.

But read the whole thing.

In the Good Old Days™ we had something called the Spoils System, whereby anybody who got elected to office was entitled to replace all of the existing government employees with his own picks. Needless to say, a lot of these where Friends & Family, but as one went up the Hierarchy of Greeds one soon had to depend on people who were unrelated and, lets face it, not all that friendly. So, as a result, the elected official had to select from among the people who supported him for office; which meant that, whatever he stood for, they more or less stood for the same thing. So every election the entire cast of officeholders would change.

Nowadays, however, we have a ‘reform’ call the Civil Service System, regarding which, as with most government programs, the name is the exact opposite of what it purports to be doing — in this case, it indicates that government employees are obliged neither to be civil nor to give service. But, aside from the name, it’s chief impact has been the fact that once you get hired for a government job, the only way you can lose it is to die (and sometimes not even then). So elections don’t lead to changes the way they used to.

Bottom line: No matter who is elected President, the government will be run by the same malicious morons who run it today. It’s like being electrocuted: No matter what it feels like, you can’t let go.So don’t spend a lot of time fashing yourself about it.

Mike Masnik points out, at greater length than I have the give-a-shit to do, why the concept of ‘intellectual property’ is a loser.

One of the more important points in understanding some of the fights over the ridiculousness of today’s copyright and patent laws is to recognize how knowledge (information) is a natural resource. It is the input that makes other great things. Economist Paul Romer’s famous research really showed how knowledge and information as a resource is what creates economic growth. Once you recognize that fact, you begin to run into problems when you think about locking up that natural resource. Think of other natural resources. Do we think the world is better off if there’s a greater supply of each of those? An abundance? If we have an abundance of wheat, that’s a good thing. If we have an abundance of energy, that’s a good thing. There may be side effects of such abundances, but the overall abundance is something worth cherishing.

Check it out.

I got an 8.

Read it.

Almost certainly, you, too are ordering more and more of your merchandise via an online retailer.  There’s nothing wrong with that, of course.  But it gets a little sketchy when you start visiting big box retailers like Best Buy and Target so that you can have a look at the goods–and then place your order on Amazon.com.

There’s nothing sketchy about it at all. It’s called ‘competition’. We do that in America. As it happens, I have a Target just down the street, and I shop there all the time — especially now that they carry essential groceries and produce. I don’t shop at Best Buy because every time I have I was most impressed by how indifferent their salespeople were to customers.

Since it’s probably a lot cheaper to sell over the internet than to pay for prime real estate and employees to walk you through all the features, it’s hard to see how the brick-and-mortars can compete with see-it-here, buy-it-there.

The Other McCain is the home of the itchy trigger finger.

Setup: For those who don’t follow these things (and who could blame you?), Christine Peliosi is the daughter of Crustian power-broker Nancy Pelosi — a child of the Left Coast Establishment who has a non-career as a Democratic party political operator. She is a poster child for the second-generation Crust-guppies that clog our upper-tier universities while their leather chair waits at the non-prof. They lack for nothing and produce nothing, except occasional pious sentiments and righteous indignation, all in a Good Cause. (She comes by it honestly, though; her siblings are just as bad:

Among Christine’s siblings include environmental activist Paul Pelosi, Jr. and filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi.

— per Wikipedia.) An entire nest of First-World drones. Put them in a homeless shelter with nothing but the clothes on their backs and $10 in their pockets, and they’d starve to death in a week.

But that’s not the entertaining part. The entertaining part is Smitty’s comment on unions:

For those unaware, a union is a corporation without a product. Unions produce not-work, in a fashion similar to that of organized crime. The threat of not-work is used to extort dues from workers and benefits from companies. These monies and favors are then used to buy politicians in a non-virtuous cycle. In the Navy, we called a union a ‘mutiny’.

And I’ve never heard it put better.

Read it.

The point is, our goal should never be to “create jobs”. Our goal should be to enable people to contribute something valued by other people. The value is the point, not the work. If someone finds a way to provide value to hundreds of millions of people and it requires no more effort from them than batting their eyelashes, that would be a win.

So why are economists like Cowen and Brynjolfsson talking about jobs? The stories they are telling, while far from the same, have a common theme which I interpret as follows: the forward march of technology has made it very difficult for people who have traditionally had low-skill or even middle-skill occupations to contribute value.

More inconvenient truth from a Real Economist. The whole emphasis on ‘creating jobs’ is a species of Cargo Cult — the reason jobs exist is because they contribute to the production process; if they don’t produce, they’re Just Another Welfare Program in a Clever Plastic Face-Saving Disguise.

This is not a matter of semantics. If you think the problem is a lack of jobs, all sorts of dangerous “solutions” may come to mind. Anything from having the government hiring en masse to do make-work, valueless jobs, to setting high tariffs and immigration restrictions so that domestic companies and labor do not have any foreign competition.

Usually an economy, especially a champion economy like ours, has enough surplus to support a limited number of these not-really-jobs welfare slots, but we’re in danger of having the exceptions swallow the rule.

Getting a job is not an end unto itself; the whole point is to trade our labor for other things that we want. Getting a job at the cost of not being able to afford anything is an absurd proposition.

Not that Democrats and other congenital pork-barrel politicians shrink from absurd propositions when it means more power for them.

As for make-work jobs, I would rather the government send the poor a check to do what they want with than to force them to “play real job”. At least then they would have the time to think about how they can contribute something of real value!

Amen.

Commenter Rubberpants on tech site TechDirt does an excellent and thorough fisking of a statement relating to the obnoxious legislative proposals commonly known as SOPA and PIPA.

Read The Whole Thing as an example of how every intelligent citizen ought to analyze any statement by members of the Crust, including (but not limited to) elected officials and corporate crapitalists.

Read it.

The White House apparently doesn’t like the association between Obama and food stamps; Jay Carney said that the claim that President Obama’s policies have added to the food stamp rolls is “crazy.”

But true, nevertheless. Check the graph and its supporting numbers.

Steve Sailer spanks some sloppy thinkers.

The New York Times ran an article over the weekend on how the government’s racial categories don’t fit Hispanics well: For Many Latinos Racial Identity Is More Culture than Color. It’s like a dumbed-down version of one of my articles.

The general tone of the article is the usual: that Latino political power through ethnocentric solidarity is an unquestioned good. To newspaper reporters, what could be more self-evident? All the Latino leaders in their Blackberries tell them that. Granted, in the real world, not that many Spanish-surnamed people seem to care all that much, but that’s just proof that we need to write even more articles telling the Latino masses to Get With The Program that their leaders have laid out for them. (If only we could get Latinos to read the Times instead of the Post.) These people who return my phone calls so promptly are the Martin Luther Kings of the 21st Century. If you don’t believe me, just ask them.

Read it.

Jesse Roe, a ninth-grade math teacher at a charter school here called Summit, has a peephole into the brains of each of his 38 students.

He can see that a girl sitting against the wall is zipping through geometry exercises; that a boy with long curls over his eyes is stuck on a lesson on long equations; and that another boy in the front row is getting a handle on probability.

Each student’s math journey shows up instantly on the laptop Mr. Roe carries as he wanders the room. He stops at each desk, cajoles, offers tips, reassures. For an hour, this crowded, dimly lighted classroom in the hardscrabble shadow of Silicon Valley hums with the sound of fingers clicking on keyboards, pencils scratching on paper and an occasional whoop when a student scores a streak of right answers.

The future is here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.

Now: Imagine trying to get this system into a school infected with a teacher’s union. Feel free to scream and kick the wall if it will make you feel better.

Mr. Khan’s critics say that his model is really a return to rote learning under a high-tech facade, and that it would be far better to help children puzzle through a concept than drill it into their heads.

Better for who? Better for the kids on the right side of the bell curve, perhaps, but that’s only a small subsection of those who need to be taught. This is not Lake Woebegone, and all of the children are not above average.

Read it.

The widespread assumption is that few Americans speak more than one language, compared with citizens of other nations — and that we have little interest in learning to speak another. But is this true?

Probably not. I speak only one language regularly, but then that’s all I really need … living in Texas notwithstanding, I can get along perfectly well not doing Spanish. On the other hand, I can make my way in Latin, French, German, Russian, and Greek (thanks to going to non-government schools) and know enough of Irish, Arabic, Swahili, and Japanese to appreciate their unique qualities. (And how many nerds know enough Elvish or Klingon to astound their high school teachers?) If I lived in Europe or Africa, where one has the equivalent of, say, living in Indiana and having Michigan, Illinois, Kentucky, and Ohio speaking different languages (let’s not have any snide remarks about Kentucky, please), then I’m sure I’d be sufficiently multilingual to suite the most rabid Crustian. But that’s not the case.

Indeed, I’d say that most black people in the U.S. are effectively bilingual, since there’s a distinctive black dialect (remember the ‘ebonics’ flap?) that, depending on how deep into the inner city you get, is often not intelligible to people from the suburbs. (In nine times out of ten, you can tell whether someone is black simply by the way they speak — indeed, one black writer, detailing his experiences growing up and attempting to fit into mainstream American culture, titled his book He Talk Like a White Boy after a remark by one of his classmates.)

Since 1980, the United States Census Bureau has asked: “Does this person speak a language other than English at home? What is this language? How well does this person speak English?” The bureau reports that as of 2009, about 20 percent of Americans speak a language other than English at home. This figure is often taken to indicate the number of bilingual speakers in the United States.

But a moment’s reflection reveals that the bureau’s question about what you speak at home is not equivalent to asking whether you speak more than one language. I have some proficiency in Spanish and was fluent in Mandarin 20 years ago. But when the American Community Survey (an ongoing survey from the Census Bureau) arrived in my mailbox last month, posing that question, I had to answer no, because we speak only English in my home.

So basically the bean-counters are looking for unassimilated immigrants, which is not the same thing at all.

Nonetheless, to better map American language abilities, the census should ask the same question that the European Commission asked in its survey in 2006: Can you have a conversation in a language besides your mother tongue? (The answer, incidentally, dented Europe’s reputation as highly multilingual: only 56 percent of the respondents, who tended to be younger and more educated, said they could.)

Read it.

Don’t know what ‘neurotypical’ means? Well, read the essay.

Romney: “I’m not really a Republican, I just play one on TV.”

Gingrich: “I have more bad ideas in a day than you have ideas at all. Don’t you eyeball me!”

Perry: “Heard you were having an election, so I thought I’d drop by.”

Santorum: “I’m the conservative your mother warned you about.”

Paul: “Arf! Arf arf arf! Arf arf! Arf”

Huntsman: “You can just call me Joe Cool. Did you know that I speak Chinese?”

Steve Sailer does the heavy lifting.

The conventional wisdom on increasing minority homeownership, as promoted by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Henry Cisneros, and Angelo Mozilo, was that mortgage lenders who followed traditional credit standards were stupid racists who were overlooking lots of blacks and Hispanics who were smart enough to make enough money to pay off their mortgages even if they put down a tiny or nonexistent down payment and didn’t quite have all their documents. (Hey, they’re undocumented! Don’t be prejudiced against the undocumented for not having documents proving that that they make six figures picking strawberries.)

What happened instead, of course, was that sharp pencil guys, in the name of fighting racist redlining, pushed people who weren’t good with numbers and weren’t good at coolly assessing the long term implications of financial decisions, people who were disproportionately blacks and Hispanics, into complicated loans that just raped them, and ended up raping the country.

But hey! Now they’re victims, and if there’s anything the Crust can’t get enough of, it’s victims. Victims give them the opportunity to spend money, most of which goes into their own pockets. Victims justify setting up government programs, the primary purpose of which is to hire and pay government workers (using the term loosely).

And that explains a lot about the motivations behind the businesses in the immigration lobby: more uneducated, innumerate, insecure Mexicans are more fresh meat for their salesmen. They can’t rip off educated white people who subscribe to Consumer Reporters and use the Zag system reserved for CR subscribers, so they want to bring in millions of new people they can outsmart and cheat.

Read it.

Sorry if this comes as a shock.

Bob nails it.

BATHROOMS

A man has six items in his bathroom: toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving cream, razor, soap, and a towel.

The average number of items in a woman’s bathroom is 173. A man would not be able to identify more than about a dozen of these items.

WARDROBE

A woman will dress up to go shopping, empty the trash, answer the phone, read a book, or get the mail.

A man will dress up (grudgingly) for weddings and funerals.

Read it.

I was delighted to discover that I hadn’t seen any of these.

Mike Masnick hears the crowd of angry peasants coming.

We’ve talked a lot in the past about how the tech industry frequently ignores what’s happening in Washington DC, and takes the attitude that it doesn’t want to be involved in policy debates, because folks are busy focusing on actually building companies. However, as we repeatedly learn, just because we want to ignore DC, it doesn’t mean that DC ignores us. And that’s a problem. It allows others to use the government as a weapon against innovations they don’t like. For years, Hollywood has been able to do this successfully — but, when they push too far, it seems they may awaken a political beast they’d rather not deal with: the geeks. You don’t want to make the geeks angry. Yet, that’s exactly what Hollywood has done with SOPA/PIPA… and this time, most of the public is on the side of the geeks, because we’re all geeks now. We all use these technologies and services. It’s why there’s widespread public outcry against SOPA, but absolutely no grassroots support for the bill.

Read it.

Of course politicians, like bankers, have the capacity to make the situation worse, and they’ve grabbed the opportunity.

Yet they are not the cause of the problem. They are a symptom. The real cause of the crisis and why leaders are forever advocating piecemeal policies lies beneath the speeches and posturing at summits. The tourniquet applied to the Brussels machine is held tight by voters and not politicians.

Whether it is Germans refusing to share with Greeks or rich Greeks with their fellow countrymen, the euro crisis is a case of democracy in action. The problem centres on the demographic development of recent decades that means many voters are over 55 and still retain much of the wealth they gained in the boom. Even those who have lost a large proportion of their pensions continue to vote for politicians who promise to do all in their power to protect what’s left of their other assets.

The economic crises hitting Europe (and America) are the result of the conjunction of two unhealthy trends.

The first is the tendency in the centralizing modern state to put every issue in the hands of the government, which necessarily makes every issue a political issue, decided by political means without regard to the reality of the situation.

The second is the maturation of democracy, where blocs of voters with a common interest have discovered that they can, with their votes, make their wishes come true in political questions, again regardless of the reality of the situation.

Want more money? Vote yourselves some out of the public purse. Public purse empty? Not our problem; we’re still voting for more money, because nobody can stop us.

Under democracy, the voters aren’t accountable to anybody for how they vote; if they vote for something manifestly stupid, selfish, and short-sighted, they still win. Technically, fundamental political principles such as those embedded in the United States Constitution serve as a limit on what democratic majorities can do, but history suggests that no document can forever withstand a majority (or a very focused minority) with the bit in its teeth and access to the political process.

In order to fix this process, that conjunction has to be broken at some point. Unfortunately, it may be that the only way to break it is for the political structure itself to collapse and be reformed, and reformed in such a way that either these questions are no longer political or democracy no longer determines how the issues are handled. I’m in favor of the first, but I’m very much afraid we’re going to wind up with the second.