Read it.

Or maybe it’s just the French, I don’t know.

Read it.

In sum, temporally and spatially backward statements cause  readers and listeners to do the work that is properly done by writers and speakers — if they care about the clarity and accuracy of what they write and say. It is all too evident that many writers and speakers do not care about being understood; they prefer to deliver verbiage and let the audience sort it.

A word of sense in these degenerate modern times.

Read it.

Read it.

Sometimes it’s possible to figure out what Mencius Moldbug is saying, and sometimes it’s not. But it’s almost always worth the effort.

All power is rooted in violence – even electoral power (to the extent that any such thing still exists). There is most definitely a continuum between democratic activism and civil war. The struggle for power is one. The whole point of the classic picket sign is that the writing on the cardboard sends one message; the two-by-four it’s stapled to sends another.

And we can tell that left rules right, because we can see that Noam Chomsky has the right to trumpet his ideas to Osama bin Laden, whereas Robert Spencer does not have the right to trumpet his ideas to Anders Behring Breivik. Did he think he had that right? He had not the might, so he had not the right. He’s finding that out right now, as he stares down the barrel of a very angry New York Times.

The trumpeter game, version left, is played ad nauseam in every school system in the world today. All our noble workers and peasants are constantly inculcated with two messages. First, you are the victim of injustice. Second, even though you are the victim of injustice, violence is evil and you must under no circumstances punish the guilty. Human beings are human beings, of course, so the second message doesn’t always take. Aww. Another “random attack.”

Read it.

I have said before, and the schedule does not permit any rummaging through the archives for a link, that many of our modern problems have to do with certain charismatic individuals assuming mantles of real authority when they are not only inexperienced in making sensible decisions, but powerfully motivated toward making non-sensical ones. If the solution to a problem is only too obvious, say for example Orwell’s simple equation of two and two make four; then some of the charisma would have to be sacrificed in providing the correct answer of four. Four is what an ordinary person would say. To those whose position has been defined and perhaps created due to an illusion of their uniqueness, four is therefore out of the question because it would injure the definition. Some flimsy justification must therefore be sought for saying three, five or ten.

In other words: We’re screwed before you even get to the liberal-versus-conservative stuff. Once we elect the “There’s Just Something About Him” types, we’re already over the cliff. We’ve already made our commitment to nonsense.

George Will puts Obama in context.

Richard Miniter, a Forbes columnist, is right: “Obama is not the new FDR, but the new Gorbachev.” Beneath the tattered, fading banner of reactionary liberalism, Obama struggles to sustain a doomed system. Democrats’ dependency agenda — swelling the ranks of government employees, multiplying government-subsidized industries, enveloping ever-more individuals in the entitlement culture — is buckling under an intractable contradiction: It is incompatible with economic growth sufficient to create enough wealth to feed the multiplying tax eaters.

Steve Sailer contributes to the most significant issue of this campaign season — more significant than Barack Obama’s attempts to bankrupt the country, Joe Biden’s hair plugs, Mitt Romney’s waffles (ummm, they’re tasty), and Ron Paul’s need to increase his dosages.

Not that I think the President’s health is all that important anymore. It’s not like the early 1960s and JFK shows up for a summit conference with Khrushchev all doped up for one of his many ailments and so Khrushchev thinks JFK is a weakling and sets the Cuban Missile Crisis in motion. Thank God we don’t live in that world anymore. I think we live in a world more like that of James Garfield. The poor man lingered on his deathbed after being shot on July 2, 1881 until his death on September 19. And we all know the many disastrous consequences that almost ensued from that, such as … Well, I can’t think of any off hand, but there was probably something important involving bimetalism.

The Other McCain sets the record straight.

The Other McCain ponders some eternal truths.

This wisdom seemed important to share, along with my own observation: No woman has ever improved her looks by getting a tattoo.

It does, however, tend to increase her rates.

But let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

A fascinating look at how government regulations on building in cities makes urban living like planning a raid in World of Warcraft.

Indeed, the New York Times writes, “in Scarano’s view, the city’s code was a Talmudic document, open to endless avenues of interpretation. Through a variety of arcane strategies, he could literally pull additional real estate out of the air.”

Joel Kotkin is always worth reading.

From the beginning, Obama has been first and foremost a gentry candidate. Even in the Democratic primaries, his strongest base lay, outside of the African-American community, within college towns, affluent urban areas and the toniest suburbs. Unlike his predecessors Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter, he never connected well with working class and middle class suburbs.

The gentrification of the Democratic Party, of course, predates Obama. Starting in the 1970s, the party has focused more on the liberal social and green values of concern to the urban upper classes than the bread and butter issues of middle or working class voters.

Here is the ultimate political irony of the Obama era and gentry liberalism: the metropolitan areas most passionately committed to the progressive agenda – which have adopted them on the state and local level – also tend to be those with the highest rates of inequality and the deepest poverty. Indeed, if cost of living is included, most of the urban counties with the highest percentage of poor people are located in the very bluest areas of New York, California or Washington, D.C., which together account for five of the nation’s ten poorest counties.9 As a state, California, once a prototype for democratic capitalism, now suffers the worst income inequality in the country.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. Hint: Probably nothing good.

Read it.

This raises a further observation and prediction.  I think some of the energy behind the demand for gay marriage arises as much from a desire for recognition as much as the usual egalitarianism.  Some of my old lefty-hippie friends from the sixties find the whole gay marriage controversy bemusing, since the countercultural left of the sixties disdained the authoritative state recognition of marriage as “just a piece of paper.”  But now suddenly for people on the left that “piece of paper” is thought crucial to the proper recognition of their social status.  This isn’t just about legalities: the legitimate legal arguments about property, inheritance, insurance benefits, and other legal impediments gay couples face could be solved in many other ways short of changing the positive law of marriage.

The key issue of the ‘gay marriage’ controversy, as I have always said, isn’t marriage, it’s the respectability that the married state has always enjoyed among civilized people. Homosexuals don’t really care about marriage; what they care about is being Respected As Normal, which is why the various ‘domestic partnership’ alternatives Just Aren’t Good Enough. Homosexuals will not be satisfied unless and until they are accepted by heterosexuals as normal, just as ‘civil rights activists’ weren’t satisfied with ‘separate but equal’, but insisted on being considered as equal to white people in every possible respect — even some silly ones, like agitating to be cast as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, just to use an egregious example. (The problem with this, of course, is that the abnormality of homosexuality is a demonstrable physical and historical fact, something that can’t be said about being black.)

The first Republican Party platform of 1856 said that the main object of the new party was to rid the nation of “the twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery.”  The argument at that time was that the “barbarism” of both “peculiar institutions” rested on the same ground—both are an affront to human equality.  In the simplest terms, if one man is to have more than one wife, some other man will have none.  Why should we care about this?  Well, check in with China in a few years, where the widespread practice of sex-selective reproduction favoring males (where are the global feminists on this, by the way?) is leading to a major demographic distortion that will surely have significant social consequences.

Eric Raymond does a deep dive into geekiness.

If this doesn’t completely pass you by…

If the last century and a half of mathematics has taught us anything, though, it’s that Platonism doesn’t work. Kurt Gödel put the final bullet through its head with his Incompleteness Theorem in the 1930s, but it hat been living on borrowed time ever since Bertrand Russell blew up Frege’s axiomatization of number with a simple paradox in 1902. Mathematical Platonism has since almost disappeared as a philosophical position, but not as a psychological one; I’ve noted before that mathematicians then to be formalists in theory but Platonists in practice. In disputes like ?-vs.? the tension between these positions surfaces, because arguments about the notation of mathematics have a natural tendency to slide over into arguments about its ontology.

… then you will find Eric’s article interesting. If not, not.

Extra Credit: Show how this relates to the Realism vs Nominalism debates of the Middle Ages.

Even More Extra Credit: Show how the Thomistic resolution of the Problem of the Universals can help Eric with his issue.

There Is Nothing New Under The Sun Prize: Show how the Realism vs Nominalism debates of the Middle Ages are currently working their way out in modern politics. (Hint: Take a Real Hard Look at identity politics.)

Read it.

The question “what would Jesus do?” is not entirely inane, and if you substitute Montaigne for Jesus, you have a useful tool at your disposal. (Not that he would do much, but he might have a lot to say.)

Megan McArdle has an interesting idea.

One suggestion is to give them direct incentives to choose the long-term unemployed over those who are already in work, or out of work for only a short time. How? We could exempt new hires from both the employee and the employer sides of the payroll tax, one month for every month that they were unemployed. The result is a direct wage subsidy of more than 10%. But it is a time-limited subsidy, and one carefully targeted to those who need it the most. By the time the tax relief expires, these workers will have been reintegrated into the labor force. This will cost the government something of course–but not nearly as much as supporting them on welfare, disability, or early retirement–or the prison system.

I find it amusing that the best thing the government can do to reduce unemployment is to … eliminate a burden that government itself places on employment. Gee, what would happen if we reduced the government burden on employment for everybody? Maybe, just maybe, we wouldn’t have so much unemployment to ‘deal with’. Ya think?

Read it.

The European Enlightenment was a response to the unprecedented explosion of scientific knowledge that had transformed Europe during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Rapid advances in the physical sciences, and later biology and medicine, led to the conceit that human society — especially political economy — could also be understood and improved by the enlightened scientific mind.

This has been the gravest and most fundamental error of the last three centuries. The philosophe arrogated unto himself the role of architect of a new society, in which outmoded customs and traditions would be discarded in favor of an improved model of society constructed by scientists armed with their superior knowledge and understanding.

The results of all this utopian tinkering — the French Revolution, Socialism, Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, Multiculturalism, and the modern welfare state — brought untold suffering upon the human race, culminating in the heap of corpses that is commonly known as the 20th century.

Read it.

While it was a magnificent technological achievement, and had many great accomplishments, it was a failure in the primary purpose for which it was built: to dramatically reduce the cost of access to space, and make such trips routine and safe. So as NASA heads into an uncertain future, many are drawing lessons from the shuttle experience to apply to policy going forward.

Unfortunately, many of those lessons are false. If they are believed and applied, they will result in human spaceflight, at least as performed by NASA, that remains expensive, unsafe and rare.

Charlie Stross looks at A.I.

Not only is SF as a field full of assumed impossibilities (time machines, faster than light space travel, extraterrestrial intelligences): it’s also crammed with clichés that are superficially plausible but which don’t hang together when you look at them too closely. Take flying cars, for example: yes, we’d all love to have one — right up until we pause to consider what happens when the neighbour’s 16 year old son goes joy riding to impress his girlfriend. Not only is flying fuel-intensive, it’s difficult, and the failure mode is extremely unforgiving. Which is why we don’t have flying cars. (We have flying buses instead, but that’s another matter.) Food pills out-lived their welcome: I think they were an idea that only made sense in the gastronomic wasteland of post-war austerity English cuisine. I submit that AI is a similar pipe dream.

Jonah Goldberg does an e-mail letter (free) that has, well, Jonah Goldberg writing in it.

And speaking of bad looks, I do wish Mexico would stop pounding its spoon on its high chair about these outrageous assaults on “Mexican sovereignty.” Again, they should be pissed about the guns on the merits. But it is difficult to take the whining about sovereignty too seriously from a country that, as a matter of policy, encourages massive illegal emigration to our country and calls us racist and inhumane when we do anything to stop it. Indeed, Mexico’s official position is that if we adopted the same immigration policiesthey use to police illegal entrants from their southern border, we would be committing an outrage.

…

The logical upshot of liberalism’s hatred of hypocrisy is that it is better for the liar to champion lying, the glutton to advocate gluttony, the adulterer to celebrate adultery, than for someone to preach the right thing if he himself occasionally does the wrong thing. Better to let your failings define you and be happy about it, than to let your ideals define you but then fall short of them, for that opens you up to the charge of hypocrisy (or inauthenticity, or denial, or whatever).

…

But when Quadaffhi starts killing his own people, Obama insists that our ideals and, in effect, our honor demand that we stop him. When Bashar Assad starts doing the same thing, our honor and ideals are apparently on a bus to Atlantic City and realism is left manning the office.

Read it.

Those of us who don’t live on Animal Farm can easily discern ways to grow revenue without raising real taxes.  This involves eliminating special interest “tax extenders” for selected individuals, industries, or social engineering endeavors – and those “credits” granted to people who have no tax debit in the first place.  We should leave those deductions and credits that are 1) broadly available and 2) do not completely eliminate someone’s tax liability.

Let’s see whether the Half-Blood Prince is really serious.

Steve Sailer looks at trial by jury.

The law in Texas didn’t exactly have an exception that said you could shoot somebody if he had it coming, but most jurors in Texas in the 1950s-1970s felt that some people just deserved some shooting.

‘Judge, he needed killin’.’

Read it.

The automobile’s potential is its greatest secret—an open secret and yet, it often seems, a forgotten one. The big SUV in my garage may occasionally make a 10-mile trip to Walmart or 2-mile run to the volunteer fire station when the siren sounds. But it has the potential—the size, the power, the range—to take me, my friends, and our bicycles over the mountain to a distant bike trail, or 1,100 miles with a load of furniture and books to my son’s house in Florida.

And that potential translates into freedom, freedom that most people won’t give up, whatever the nagging by the masters of the Nanny State.

This powerful potential is at the crux of replacing internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles with electric vehicles (EVs). Can EVs ever develop the potential that ICE cars routinely deliver? This is not merely an issue of range, but range plus the sheer reserve power to carry real-life loads, deal with emergencies, and finesse the unexpected detour or delay.

The problem is that we just don’t have the technology (yet) to make an electric car that’s a reasonable substitute for a gas-powered car. And all the subsidies and preferences in the world can’t make up for that basic deficiency.

Megan McArdle asks the big question.

I am getting the same sinking feeling that Brooks is having–that there is a sizeable faction on the right, and worse, in the GOP caucus, that is willing to default rather than make any deal at all. In fact, I think it’s worse than Brooks suggests.  It would be bad enough if these people were simply against higher taxes, because then you might persuade them by pointing out that if we default, we’re probably going to end up with higher taxes, right now, in order to close the current gap between spending and tax revenue.

She’s got a point. Some of the Republicans in Congress are in serious danger of making the best the enemy of the good.

If the GOP doesn’t cut a deal sometime pretty soon, we’re either going to default on our debt (hello, financial crisis, unemployment spike, substantial and immediate drop in GDP, followed by an angry mob of voters descending on their polling places with pitchforks), or we’re going to cut a bunch of programs that beneficiaries are very attached to. (Hello, angry mob of seniors descending on their representatives with machetes.)  There is no deal that they can cut which does not include raising more revenue; the Democrats aren’t going to be the only people offering compromise, and I don’t blame them.

Read it.

Just might be.

Read it.

With the impending demolition of Columbus, Ohio’s failed downtown mall, it is worth taking a moment to reflect on all of the urban planning failures of the past, and all of the things that, while they were successful in a sense, had serious unintended consequences: urban renewal, pedestrian malls, highway mania, single use zoning, federal housing subsidies, etc. It seems to me that almost every urban planning approach du jour ends up, over time, either not accomplishing the things it was touted as delivering, or brought serious negative side effects. Why is this?

Steve Sailer declares the game afoot.

The hunt for the Great Bright Illegal continues. Everybody who is anybody keeps proclaiming that we are lucky to be getting all these highly talented illegal immigrants from Mexico, but, as the decades and generations go by, it’s hard to come up with very many names of high achievers to anecdotally illustrate the bromides.

Read it.

Reading the Declaration of Independence 235 years after it was written, it’s kidney-punchingly obvious that the United States government has become precisely the sort of bloodsucking tyrant against which the Founding Fathers revolted.

Wakey, wakey.

Read it.

If one thinks about it, the world will never run out of oil.  As oil becomes scarce, consumers will necessarily turn to an alternative before the supply runs out.  Whether it is due to a realization that oil is scarce – if only in an economic sense – or due to a concern for global warming, we can see the signs of a shift in consumption.  Most automobile manufacturers have some pure electric or electric hybrid car project in development or in production.  There are even hybrid Formula One racecars.  (What would Enzo think?)  It is only a matter of time that the automobile is electric.  It seems not too far-fetched that oil consumption might drop.

As a commodity, oil is of course limited. But as a resource, it is essentially unlimited, not just because they keep finding more of it, but because people will stop using it and go on to something else when it becomes sufficiently scarce to be expensive. So anybody who goes around whining ‘OMG, we’re going to run out of oil!’ can be legitimately treated as an idiot.

Read it.

Reading the New York Times is much like reading Pravda back when the old Soviet Union was in power — you know more or less what the Party line is this week (and ‘this week’ is the important part, because it can change, often dramatically and without warning), so the only unknown quantity is how tortured a sophistry is going to be served up in pursuit thereof.

Timothy Egan is billed by the Times as writing ‘on American politics and life, as seen from the West’, the ‘West’ in question apparently stopping at the Hudson River. His trope this week is the common one of ‘well, these right-wing nuts bitch and moan about government spending but they’re getting X amount from a government program’, as if that were some sort of ‘Aha! Caught you in the depths of hypocrisy, we have!’

Uh, no.

First of all, so long as the Crust tout public schools (and lock poor minority kids into those failing schools by killing school voucher programs) while sending their offspring to Sidwell Friends, it continues one of those speck-in-the-other-guy’s-eye-beam-in-your-own moments. I’ll listen to you bitch about my dirty hands once you’re done with your shower, thanks.

Secondly, an obsession with hypocrisy as the most heinous of sins is a distinctively adolescent trait, one that nominal adults ought to have gotten over lang syne. Guys, grow up; there are people out there who are trying to kill us and destroy our civilization, and I suggest that’s a bit more important than domestic witch-hunts.

And thirdly, so long as those opposing government spending continue to do so no matter where their own money comes from, there’s no hypocrisy involved … unless the opposition were merely pro forma and not intended to be effective, which none of these puling whiners can demonstrate.

The law is the law, and it does not say — nor can it say — that only those who support a program are allowed to take advantage of it. For people who work against a program, and who would kill it if they could (which the Crust is very careful not to allow), to leave the advantages of that program while it exists to the jackals of the Crust is a classic case of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. It’s worse than a crime, it’s a blunder. The fundamental argument against any entitlement program is that it is, in the long term, unsustainable; for right-thinking people to shun the program merely delays its inevitable collapse and encourages proponents to say ‘See? It’s not a bad as you said it would be!’

The Other McCain likes the Bezos position. Watch the video.

What it is, really, is an attempt by state governments to impose a tariff on goods sold by out-of-state mail-order vendors, thus usurping the power to regulate interstate commerce, which the Constitution specifically delegates to the federal government.

Whether individual customers order by mail or over the Internet, the transaction is the same, and there is extensive legal precedent that out-of-state mail-order vendors cannot be compelled to collect state sales taxes on such transactions.

Sometimes the doctrine of pre-emption is your friend.

The Amazon links on my blog are merely advertisements, for which I collect a (small) commission based on the sales generated by readers clicking through. California’s argument is like saying that, if a magazine based in New York published an advertisment for a Texas-based mail-order company, this advertisement constitutes a basis for making the Texas company collect New York sales tax.

I’m convinced.

Rebecca Madigan, Executive Director of the Performance Marketing Association, stated, “The devastation is immediate, because the law went into effect upon signing.We tried to communicate to the Governor that this bill would only lead to dramatic income loss of small businesses and job loss, and he signed the bill anyway.”
Similar legislation has been proposed in numerous other states, only to be rejected because those elected officials recognized these proposals do not generate any additional sales tax revenue and, in fact, harm small businesses. When out-of state retailers stopped advertising on in-state websites, the states collect no new sales tax, and in fact lose income tax revenue.

Funny how that works….

Meanwhile, smart people in California are doing the only thing smart people in California can do: Get the hell out of California!

Indeed. Don’t be the last guy out, or you’ll have to turn off the lights … if there are any left.

Steve Sailer has a way with words.

Remember when conspiracy theorists used to get all worked up about the secret meetings of the Bilderbergers? Personally, I thought the idea of senior bigshots like Henry Kissinger and Helmut Schmidt getting together in private to pull strings was reasonably reassuring. Thank God somebody knows what they are doing!

How naive I was …

Charles Murray is a smart guy, and he asks the right questions, but he doesn’t have a lot of answers.

The New York Times’s David Leonhardt has weighed in with a defense of college-for-all. Arnold Kling dissects some of its obvious flaws on econlog. But the larger problem is that Leonhardt misses the point. The choice should not be framed in terms of college or no college. Almost everyone needs more education after high school. The problem is a piece of paper called the bachelor’s degree that has become both the requirement for first class citizenship in this country (being “just a high school graduate” makes you distinctly second class) and at the same time has become meaningless as an indication of what you have learned. End the BA, stop requiring four years worth of courses, stop glorifying the residential campus, and create a post-high-school educational system that takes advantage of all the ways that technology offers to let high school graduates tailor their post-secondary education to what they need to realize their abilities. Forget about the percentage of people going to college and focus instead on how antiquated, inefficient, and punitive the BA system is.

Easy to say; harder to do. The problem is that, when applying for a job, it’s not enough to say ‘I know Kung Fu!’; you have to demonstrate it somehow. And an employer isn’t going to give a prospective engineer a comprehensive set of exams to verify that he is, actually, qualified to be an engineer; that’s why they ask for a bachelor’s degree. (Actually, these days, with the degeneration of the educational system, employers are more than likely asking for a bachelor’s degree to make sure that applicants have what would in the Good Old Days have been considered a decent high-school education.)

We know what the problem is. What’s the solution?

Yuval Levin tries to get things back on track.

All over the developed world, nations are coming to terms with the fact that the social-democratic welfare state is turning out to be untenable. The reason is partly institutional: The administrative state is dismally inefficient and unresponsive, and therefore ill-suited to our age of endless choice and variety. The reason is also partly cultural and moral: The attempt to rescue the citizen from the burdens of responsibility has undermined the family, self-reliance, and self-government. But, in practice, it is above all fiscal: The welfare state has turned out to be unaffordable, dependent as it is upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era. Sustaining existing programs of social insurance, let alone continuing to build new ones on the social-democratic model, has become increasingly difficult in recent years, and projections for the coming decades paint an impossibly grim and baleful picture. There is simply no way that Europe, Japan, or America can actually go where the economists’ long-term charts now point — to debts that utterly overwhelm their productive capacities, governments that do almost nothing but support the elderly, and economies with no room for dynamism, for growth, or for youth. Some change must come, and so it will.

Read it.

‘Social justice’ is one of the great shibboleths of American political mythology.

And who should be in charge of measuring welfare, summing it, and weighing the gains and losses in order to arrive at a socially “just” distribution of income, whatever that is? Well, we know the answer to that question: It has to be the state — or more accurately — elected officials and bureaucrats: people not known for their perspicacity, objectivity, and even-handedness.

In the alternative, a just society could be one where individuals engage in voluntary, cooperative exchanges of goods and services for their mutual betterment, and from the fruits of which they voluntarily aid those whom they know to be in need of aid.

The alternative is inevitably attacked as “unjust.” But it should be noted that such attacks come from individuals (philosophers, politicians, do-gooders, etc.) who would impose their own views of “social justice” on everyone. How any such imposition can be considered more “just” than a regime of voluntary, cooperative, mutually beneficial behavior is beyond me.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

Textbooks are notoriously boring, in part perhaps because they are selected by the professor who assigns them not the students who read them, and some have the reputation of being seriously dumbed down in intellectual level while unusably broad in coverage. What books are there that are used as textbooks but also bought and read in significant numbers by people who are reading them because they want to?

Read it.

Apparently all the Indian MPs under 30 are children of MPs. (Al Gore, are you listenin’?)

Some nations embrace the Crustian lifestyle more than others, and John Derbyshire isn’t the only guy saying “Get a government job!”

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Charlie Stross, Hugo-Award-winning author, wades in on one of the most interesting topics of our time.

Watch it.

Read it.

That ‘India’ is considered one country has always struck me as about as silly has considering ‘Europe’ one country. The only reason India is together is that they were all conquered by the British, which I should think they would consider an inadequate reason. (But, then, I’m not ‘Indian’, so I have no idea.)

Read it.

The looming problem of too many Kindle books.

Read it.

One aspect of the Egyptian uprising (among the others, most ongoing) that was overpowered by the wild acclamation of social media is something that has been quietly but powerfully changing societal norms over the last decade. It is simply the inclusion, on almost every mobile phone sold, of a digital camera. When 90% of the active population can, at any time, record an event they are witness to, and transmit it to the rest of the world instantly, many rules begin to change.

And not necessarily in ways that can be anticipated. Read the whole thing.

Steve Sailer gets into some strange stuff….

Read it.

Read it.

Google, Apple and Facebook get all the attention. But the forgettable everyday tasks of technology _ saving a file on your laptop, swiping your ATM card to get 40 bucks, scanning a gallon of milk at the checkout line _ that’s all IBM.

Read it.

Hm. Wonder if this has anything to do with Hugh Hefner’s interrupted nuptials.

Coincidence? I think not….

Read it.

The New York Times has a great article today on changing attitudes towards CS, driven in part by movies like “The Social Network.” Apart from the movie’s (glossy and inaccurate) depiction of what it’s like to be a hacker, there’s something else going on here: the fact that CS students can jump in and apply their knowledge to build great things. At Harvard, countless undergrads taking the introductory CS50 class are producing games, websites, and iPhone apps — some of which are good enough to turn into commercial products. I don’t know of any other field where this is possible after taking just a single semester’s worth of courses.

Read it.

Over at EconLong, Arnold Kling has a quick comment on the new version of my federal pay paper with Jason Richwine, arguing that our analysis of salaries, benefits, and job security isn’t really necessary: “All you need to look at are the low quit rates and the high ratio of applicants to openings.” If nobody quits federal jobs and everybody wants to have them, then that’s the market telling you that these are pretty sweet positions to hold.

Read it.

You want serious, try Wikipedia.

Freeberg likes Palin. But we knew that.

Many’s the time I’ve heard a Palin hater say “I don’t have a better candidate in mind, but I’m hoping one will emerge.”

Well, I’m not a ‘Palin hater’, but I do have a better candidate in mind — several, in fact — although none that I can endorse as wholeheartedly as I could Reagan (and, before him, Goldwater). So I could vote for Palin, if she got the nomination; not least because it would cause the sphincter muscles of over a million people to release simultaneously — but that’s more a reflection on me than on her.

I like having former Governors run for President, because the approaches that Governors develop are more directly applicable to the approach needed as President than the approaches that legislators develop, which are in many respects precisely the wrong ones.

Every time we have a former legislator (typically a Senator) get elected President, we wind up with a crappy President. Kennedy, Nixon, the elder Bush, and Obama are the wounds I’ve had to live with, but think it holds true back at least a century. (Yeah, yeah, Lincoln — but I think he would have been a better President if he had been a Governor first; he made a lot of mistakes that people tend to forget because he got some big things right.) This is not to say that having a former Governor as President is any guarantee; the two Roosevelts, Wilson, and (ack, phtooey) Carter testify to that. But at least they know how the standard controls work; Obama could seriously profit from some form of training wheels.

I’m willing to make allowances for somebody with executive experience outside of government, such as Cain — but that isn’t a very large allowance, because an executive outside of government can put programs in place easily, modify them easily, and get rid of them easily if they don’t work out; don’t try that in government (hello, Romneycare).

Most especially, having a track record as a Governor gives a pretty direct indication as to how somebody will do when faced with a decision that needs to be made, and can often save people from making a big mistake, if they’re in the mood to be saved, which isn’t always the case. Unfortunately, it won’t help in situations where the only choices are Dumb and Dumber, which is what we usually get in elections — but it sometimes concentrates the mind during the nomination process.

Sadly, in Rumsfeldian terms, we go to elections with the candidates we have, not the candidates we’d like to have … which is why I don’t put a lot of effort into poking around in the background of potential nominees: Typically sufficient useful knowledge thereof comes out during the campaign to make a reasonable choice. And I’ll spend more time thinking about Palin this time a year from now, because I don’t feel any compelling need to do so before then.

And it’s nice to have True Believers like Freeberg (whose general approach to things is very sound) around to provide drive-by voters such as myself with the materials needed to make a choice.

Oh, my ideal candidate? The movie character typically played by Angelina Jolie (which doesn’t have any connection to the actual Angelina Jolie, of course). Watch SALT or WANTED — or even, God help us, TOMB RAIDER — if you don’t know what I mean.