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.

William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection asks the crucial question.

I do grouchy really well.  In fact, grouchy is why I started this blog (along with frustration, anger and fear of the “other”).

Grouchy gave birth to the blogosphere, and grouchy is what keeps it going after all these centuries.  Without grouchy and high speed cable internet access, we’d be North Korea.

And that about sums it up.

Read it.

So here, just for fun, and woefully incomplete, are a list of “rights” recently discovered. Remember: there can be no rights without responsibilities. If you invoke a right, you imply a responsibility. The real question is then who has the responsibility. The question can never be what had the responsibility, because inanimate objects are powerless.

Thus, “governments” cannot have a responsibility because these are fictions, they are groupings and gatherings of men. The burden is always to identify which men have the responsibility.

Some of these are almost certainly not meant to be “rights” in the philosophic sense, but modern people are so used to speaking in terms of “rights” that they use the term indiscriminately.

Mencius Moldbug is back with us after a long hiatus.

And there was much rejoicing.

Steve Sailer has, as usual, many useful things to say.

By the way, can we try to avoid phrases like “science has recently shed light” — unless you are Thomas Dolby on a nostalgia tour? The research cited was done by living, breathing researchers, whose hard work deserves at least the recognition that they are human beings, not “science.” Moreover, remembering that human beings are making these arguments, not “science,” has the salutary effect of keeping in mind that humans aren’t infallible.

While peripheral to his main point, that’s one of the sharpest things I’ve read in years.

Also, let me put in a word here for an old-fashioned class system. The idea was that there were respectable modes of behavior for whatever class you aspire to, so you don’t have to make up your mind a la carte on every damn thing all day long. You just look at what the people in the class of which you wish to be considered a respectable member do, and imitate it.

Another good point.

The opposite of the Costco shopping experience is car shopping. Dealers work very hard to make to make buying a car a stressful experience that preys upon your class insecurities. Their ultimate goal is to make you want to impress the salesman by overpaying for the car.

That explains a lot….

An Informative Comic

Read it.

The special effects were great, the story was on the weak side. The conflict between Richard the Lionheart and King John from any old Robin Hood story, was mashed together with Transformers II and The Good Son, threw in La Femme Nikita for good measure, then they mounted it on the ledge from Tron: Legacy, laced it with some monsters from the Lord of the Rings trilogy and let it fly.

Too bad it’s in ‘3D’, i.e. you pay extra and have to wear those shitty goggles to watch it.

Ever notice, lately, in these movies that star the puppy-face actors who were born sometime in the 1980’s — the men are all exotic European/Australian types, but the women are super-duper-Yankee-Americanized urban yuppie chicks? That certain voice inflection is really starting to wear on me, I must say. Julia Roberts, Monica Potter, Natalie Portman, Katie Holmes, Jessica Alba, Keira Knightley…they all have it. Just a little too polished and a little too flat. It’s got that “never stepped foot out of an urban metropolis with at least five million people living in it” sound to it.

He’s got that right.

Read it.

In Korematsu v. United States (1944), the U.S Supreme Court, packed to the hilt with 8 justices appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, upheld FDR’s notorious Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced internment of Japanese-Americans as a matter of “military urgency” during World War II. It’s an ugly decision and the full story is even worse. As The Los Angeles Times reports, Neal Katyal, the acting solicitor general for the Obama administration, has admitted that one of his predecessors, FDR’s Solicitor General Charles Fahy, deliberately misled the Supreme Court in the case.

Well, he was a Democrat.

Read it.

In this Article, I invite the reader to indulge in a thought experiment. What would the world look like if, instead of assigning prisoners to particular prisons bureaucratically, we gave them vouchers, good for one incarceration, that they were required to redeem at a participating prison?

Many lawyers have entirely too much time on their hands. Many of these lawyers have as their day job teaching people to become lawyers. Don’t know how you feel about that, but it scares the shit out of me at times.

Check it out.

Obviously the last year in which Congressmen had skills other than wasting taxpayers’ money and lying to the public in order to get re-elected.

Read it.

Harrison Schmitt, a former U.S. Senator from New Mexico and Apollo Astronaut, says although “NASA’s had a good 50-year run,” it’s now time for a change.

Schmitt is proposing to start from scratch, by taking NASA’s deep space exploration efforts and putting them in a new agency. That agency, which Schmitt has dubbed the National Space Exploration Agency, or NSEA, would focus on missions to the moon and beyond.

Or, better yet, we could leave it to private enterprise, which is doing a great job without burdening the taxpayers.

Read it.

I can’t help feeling that, here and elsewhere, Gilbert knew exactly what he was saying. “Where is Mrs Gilbert?” he once asked at the Savoy Theatre. “She’s round behind,” came the reply. “I know,” said Gilbert, “but where is she?” A member of the audience, seeing him standing in the foyer after one performance, mistook the dramatist for a commissionaire and brusquely ordered him to call him a cab. “Certainly,” said Gilbert, “you’re a four-wheeler.” “What!” exclaimed the man. “Well,” said Gilbert, “I certainly wouldn’t call you hansom.”

Ryan Davidson from Law and the Multiverse does what lawyers do best.

We’ve mentioned it in comments, but some idiot was arrested and charged in Michigan last month for hanging off the side of a building in a Batman costume with a variety of concealed weapons. The cops were, to put it mildly, not amused. The stock-in-trade of the costumed hero involves trespassing, violations of weapons laws (for concealed weapons if nothing else), and disturbing the peace, if not also assault or worse. Sure, there’s plenty of crime in our streets, but at this point, it isn’t the kind of crime that we believe could not be solved by police officers if there were enough of them.

Read it.

White people in the United States now feel more discriminated against than black people, according to a new study by professors at Harvard Business School and Tufts university.

Gee, I wonder why?

Watch it.

Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Kevin Williamson, who is deputy managing editor of National Review and author of a new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism, to discuss the meaning of socialism in history and the current moment.

Megan McArdle understands the dialectic.

There were, for example, a lot of complaints about the horseless carriage.  Busy professionals like doctors pointed out that if they bought such a contraption, they would no longer be able to wrap the reins around the buggy whip and take a nap while the horse drove home.  Others pointed to the very low reliability of motor cars, compared to horses, their inferior capabilities on dirt roads, and the difficulty of finding gasoline in the countryside.  People lamented the inability to bond with their cars the way they did with their “team”, and the fact that the motor car would blindly drive you into danger where the horses would have shied away.

All of these things were true. None of them mattered.  Automobiles were faster than horses, and didn’t need to be fed when not in use.  As they became more popular, they made horses a less and less viable means of transportation: drinking troughs disappeared, livery stables and feed stores shut down, hitching posts were not installed.

Printing and distributing books is a large industry with significant economies of scale.  If too few people buy print books, the cost of the remaining books will start to rise.  Eventually, more and more applications will switch to the winning medium, even if individuals miss being able to flip through books. There will be specialty applications, but they will be very expensive.

Megan McArdle is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

It’s a romantic figure: the teacher who spends thirty or forty or sixty years patiently shepherding children through the tricky process of learning to read, or speak French, or do long division.  The whole public school system is set up to reinforce this ideal.  The pay system rewards seniority, the tenure system protects it, and the pension system exacerbates all of this….

Because teachers are the secular equivalent of nuns, and everybody expects nuns to work like dogs all their lives for chicken feed.

Read it.

It is hard for us in America to grasp how consuming this story must be to the French. Imagine that in January 2008 Barack Obama, having won the Iowa caucuses and become the front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, had been arrested for attempting to rape a hotel maid in New York City, photographed in handcuffs, and imprisoned in Rikers Island.

Many of us would have said ‘Mission accomplished.’ and gone back to whatever we were doing.

Steve Sailer has some fun with the culture.

Thus, evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa finds himself widely hated today for posting an item on Psychology Today asking “Why are black women rated less physically attractive than other women, but black men are rated better looking than other men?” It caused such a furor (described here) that the magazine deleted it, so only a screenshot survives. Of course, the reason the whole world got so angry with Dr. Kanazawa is because black women are rated less physically attractive than other women on average.

So, you aren’t supposed to say that. If he had said “Why are Slavic supermodels rated less physically attractive than other women?” nobody would have much cared.

Read it.

Roiling debates in state capitals across the land demonstrate a backlash against the unions. But a new book by Terry Moe argues that it’s technology, not politics, that will be their undoing. Moe is a political science professor at Stanford and has long been a leading advocate for charter schools and vouchers. Special Interest is in part a solid history of the rise of the unions not so long ago — in the 1960s and ’70s. But the book’s analysis of sweeping trends is what’s most compelling. Moe says legislative reforms like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top “are small things by comparison, and they can be blocked.” By contrast, “education technology is a tsunami that is only now beginning to swell.” Unions “can’t stop it, although they will try.”

Read it.

Mark Twain is credited with the remark that history doesn’t repeat itself–but it rhymes.* Over the last 48 hours I think we’ve seen an ironic rhyme of an old career-killing incident: Newt Gingrich has had his Romney Moment. No–not the Romney moment you’re thinking; not Newt’s tentative embrace of an individual mandate for health care, which is the 8,000-pound millstone sinking Mitt Romney’s prospects. I think Newt’s problem is his alignment with another Romney–Mitt’s dad, George Romney.

Newt would make a good Vice-President, though.

The Other McCain is perplexed.

It is nowadays said by many that Barack Obama is the worst president in American history. If this is so, President Obama will have eclipsed a mark that most observers believed would stand unchallenged until the final trumpet: The abysmal record of James Earl “Jimmy” Carter.

It’s a tough choice.

Arnold Kling calls out the Crust.

1. The main reason we have them is because parents love it when their kids are placed in them. It is a huge status thing for parents. G&T programs could have negative effectiveness and still be enormously popular.

2. Either you believe your bright kids should experience going to class with students who are not so bright, or you don’t. If you don’t, then pay for private school. G&T allows you to send your kids to private school while claiming they are still in public school.

Read it.

The draining away of working-class support isn’t a problem confined to the Labour Party. Left-wing parties all over Europe are facing similar difficulties. Labour was punished by the British electorate last year, polling its lowest share of the vote since 1983, but not as severely as the Social Democrats were by the Swedes, polling their lowest share of the vote since universal suffrage was introduced in 1921. This was the first time in the Social Democrats’ history that it lost two elections in a row. Only 22 per cent of those Swedes in work voted Social Democrat in 2010, a number that fell to 13 per cent in the Stockholm region.

On the face of it, mass immigration has been the undoing of leftwing political parties across Europe since it erodes the shared values that are an essential prerequisite of a well-funded welfare state. Why should indigenous, working populations support the high levels of taxation necessary to sustain generous welfare payments if the beneficiaries are people unlike themselves? If they can’t look at a benefit recipient and think, “There, but for the grace of God, go I”, why should they continue to pay such high taxes? This problem was spelt out by David Willetts a few years ago:

The Other McCain points out that it’s the Democrats, not the Republicans, who are the ‘party of the rich’.

Katherine Mangu-Ward looks at endangered species.

Wolves are notoriously slow to hire lobbyists. Lichen doubly so. It’s no surprise, then, that the Endangered Species Act is a law written by humans and used for human ends. Ever since the act’s 1973 debut, supporters and opponents have accused each other of playing politics with the fates of nearly extinct plants and animals. To be fair, both sides are usually right. In Listed, conservation biologist Joe Roman recounts the uses and abuses of a well-intentioned but all-too-human law.

The difficulty of getting off the list of endangered species ranks right up there with unsubscribing from the Pottery Barn catalog.

Read it.

Strange but interesting.

Read it.

Why the appallingly (wink wink) low numbers of blacks in our special elite units? This is a topic about which I truly know more than the average person. I spent four years at Fort Bragg, home of the airborne. Many of my neighbors were Green Berets and Rangers. I also spent two years at the Norfolk Naval Base and was in close proximity to the Navy SEALs. And, prior to my military career I was a swim instructor at McBurney YMCA on 7th Avenue and 23rd Street. I had over 50 students, about ten of whom were black.

There is ONE MAJOR reason why blacks are so dramatically underrepresented in our elite units. They cannot swim, and when they do, about 98 percent of them do so with extreme difficulty. There is no way of getting around passing the very rigorous swim test to be a Green Beret or SEAL. The results cannot be faked or dumbed down. Either you can do it or you can’t. And blacks, due to their high bone density and lack of body fat (well, at least the type that makes you float), lack the buoyancy to swim well, and particularly to swim under strenuous circumstances. And the very, very few that can pass the test, are more often than not lighter skin blacks with plenty of white-boy-stay-afloat chromosomes in their gene (swimming) pool. I saw it first hand in getting my students to relax in the water. All my black students, including the females, when let loose and allowed to float in the water, sank like Clark Cable’s submarine in “Run Silent, Run Deep.” The very body which makes blacks world class sprinters and superior basketball and football stars, works against them in the water. End of story. Unless the PC Police can accuse the water and ocean of being racist.

George Will sees through the bullshit.

Sven Birkerts in praise of idleness.

It is a confusing concept, though, and to find that pure and valid strain, it would help to say what it is not. Idleness is not inertness, for example. Inertness is immobile, inattentive, somehow lacking potential. Neither is idleness quite laziness, for it does not convey disinclination. It is not torpor, or acedia—the so-called Demon of Noontide—nor is it any form of passive resistance, for these require an engagement of the will, and idleness is manifestly not about that. Gandhi was not promulgating idleness, nor was Bartleby the scrivener exhibiting it when he owned that he would “prefer not to.” Nor are we talking about the purged consciousness that Zen would aspire to, or any spiritually influenced condition: idleness is not prayer, meditation, or contemplation, though it may carry tonal shadings of some of these states.

Idleness is a wait-state,  the phase of being that martial artists call the no-mind: engaged but not acting, situational awareness waiting for a trigger.

Read it.

The revisionist view is that deposit insurance is a case of the government concocting a solution to a problem that was created by government in the first place. That is, the U.S. banking system was unstable due to regulations that promoted small, local banks and inhibited the creation of diversified nationwide banks. Had banks been allowed to branch across state lines or had national bank holding companies been allowed to grow naturally, then (according to this argument) we would have seen few bank failures, even in the 1930’s. Hence, there would be no need for deposit insurance.

Read it.

“Without a college degree, hard-pressed for jobs,” is the headline on an NPR story, right now topping the “most popular list” on the NPR site. Funny how it doesn’t mention Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Enterprise Rent-a-Car’s Jack Taylor, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Dell computer’s Michael Dell, movie and music producer David Geffen, and Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson. None of them are college graduates, and they’re all doing okay.

I suspect that ‘working for somebody else’ is a foundational concept among those of the Crust, of which NPR employees would appear to be archetypes.

Read it.

To be an American today is to constantly experience this kind of cognitive dissonance. The world we read about in magazines and newspapers and see on our televisions and movie screens is a multiracial paradise complete with superintelligent black scientists leading us to a bright future, if only they can avoid the never ending threat of violent white racism. The world we actually live in is a largely segregated one where almost every white person, liberal or conservative, would rather commute hours to work and pay exorbitant gasoline prices rather than have to live among blacks.

It’s a world where largely white sports fans pay thousands of dollars for season tickets to cheer for largely black athletes, but take care not to send their children to an integrated school. It’s a world where standards are lowered so unqualified blacks can attend elite colleges and learn about “white privilege.” It’s a world where “flash mobs” of blacks randomly assault whites in fast food restaurants and mass transit systems, but law enforcement receives training from the Southern Poverty Law Center on how to combat white racism. Most of all, it’s a world where no one, black or white, wants to admit the truth of Black Run America – that we are a nation where nearly every institution is entirely devoted to protecting and promoting the interests of Black people above all others.

Read it.

Remember: Information in your possession takes a warrant under the 4th Amendment. Information in the possession of a third party — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, the phone company, a cloud-storage backup service like Carbonite or Dropbox — doesn’t come under the 4th Amendment and only takes a subpoena.

Read it.

There are some good thoughts here, but unfortunately they’re served on a bed of crap.

Deliberate practice requires careful reflection on what worked and what didn’t work. A budding concert pianist may practice a particularly troublesome passage listening for places where his fingers do not flow smoothly. A chess student may spend hours analyzing one move of a world-championship chess match trying to see what the grandmasters saw. This kind of practice demands time for reflection and intense concentration, so intense that it is difficult to sustain for longer than 3 hours per day.

And applies only to very narrow, very advanced endeavors, not to the sort of comprehensive synoptic study that constitutes the bulk of education outside of a Ph.D. program (or equivalent).

In the grade-school years, deliberate practice is already hard to find. My strongest memory from fifth-grade mathematics is pages and pages of tedious three-digit-by-three-digit multiplication problems. Day after day! It is, alas, the kind of rote practice that I have done for chess: simply playing lots of games.

And, unless you’re a child prodigy, it’s out of place. Three-digit multiplication problems may be tedious, but they certainly impart an ability to do multiplication problems quickly and easily.

In college as in grade school, where is the time for deliberate practice?

Perhaps during the times when lesser lights are doing keggers and mixers. Most college students have sufficient free time to do a deep dive into any particular subject found particularly attractive. They just don’t do it. That’s not the fault of the education system as a system, except insofar as it fails to select for motivation in addition to intelligence.

The Other McCain has a fine rant today.

One of the most pernicious ideas of recent decades – originating in the 1960s “Generation Gap,” but getting worse all the time — is the belief that youth per se has some distinct political value, a belief which in turn involves a willingness to accept pop-culture hipness as actual knowledge.

What accounts for this attitude? I would argue that it is actually rooted in Baby Boom nostalgia. The ’60s generation remembers when the pronouncements of “youth leaders” like Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and Mark Rudd were taken very seriously and so, now ensconced in executive positions, they keep looking for the next generation of “youth leaders.”

You want to slap them and say, “Hey, wake up: The Sixties sucked!”

Read it.

International law is grounded in the practice of states, and the practice of some states matters more than others.  One might think that wicked or unjust or what have you, but if one wants international law to be something more than law professor fantasies, it has to be grounded in how states behave.  International law can get a little bit ahead of where states want to go, but not very far ahead.  It is not just the United States that matters, quite true.  I sorrow to say it, but it is true that China’s views of human rights law and internal interference matter a great deal.

I wish it were otherwise, but China’s views matter a great deal more than Ireland’s or Germany’s or many other countries, in part because countries like Germany long ago stopped pulling their weight in global security, where the rubber meets the road.  “Justice, American Style,” Der Spiegel’s title sneers.  Well, what shall it be: “Free riders, German-style”? The sneers can go both ways, and they can go back and forth forever; Der Spiegel would have been well-advised to skip the sneers and the condescension and the otherworldliness that permeates its alternative-universe theory of law.

The Other McCain finally catches on.

It turns out that “progress” involves a giant leap backward for a lot of progressives, including Paul Krugman.

Gee, I’ve been saying that for years.

Read it.

Of course not — there’s an app for that….

I am constantly amused by the extent to which those who consider themselves — and are certainly considered by their friends — ‘progressive’ reveal a deep desire to abandon industrial civilization and get back to a Rousseauian primitive state in which we all sit around like Eloi and have a good time in a lovely world where everyone is happy and nobody has to see anything she doesn’t like. And they never seem to realize that the Morlocks lurk underneath and do all of the nasty bits and will eventually present the bill.

Dean Ericson speaks for the adults.

You kids don’t get it. You sit here splitting libertarian hairs, counting angels on pinheads, spinning out your abstract theories as if they mattered. Listen; in your open-borders fantasyland libertarianism is dead, dead, DEAD! And you and yours are dead. What the hell do you think happens when 100 million foreigners from around the world come pouring in here? They all sit around sipping espresso while discussing the finer points of libertarianism? — it’s laughable! Listen; they wage a merciless politics of my-group-against-all-others, a savage struggle of competing peoples to see who comes out on top and garner the spoils and who shall be plundered and ruled. For pete’s sake use your imagination, try to see what would actually happen, try getting your thinking out of the lazy rut of your precious ideology and *imagine* the reality.

Unfortunately, ‘movement libertarians’ (such as those who run–and inhabit–tReason magazine) are intellectually arrested adolescents, whose concerns are adolescent concerns — I want sex! I want drugs! I want rock & roll! — rather than the concerns of adults, and whose perspective is correspondingly narrow. Perhaps equally unfortunately, our civilization has produced a society so rich and secure that they have the room to bloviate in this fashion without being brought up short by reality, as would quickly happen in a more primitive state of society, full of evil men who think that others exist for their own profit and amusement. People like Mohammed, for example.

MORE: Yes, what would you do? Cut a road through the law to get after the Devil?
ROPER: Yes. I’d cut down every law in England to do that.
MORE: And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned on you … where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted with laws from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s, and if you cut them down … do you really think you could stand upright in the wind that would blow then?

Read it.

The Other McCain does his bit.

To be unmarried and childless is the feminist ideal of liberation from male-dominated heterosexist tyranny. “Feminism is the theory; lesbianism is the practice,” as Ti-Grace Atkinson once boldly proclaimed. However, understanding that some women may not be able to attain the sterile nirvana of lesbianism, feminists have encouraged heterosexual women to pursue anti-family practices such as cohabitation, promiscuity, unwed motherhood and divorce.

Unenlightened persons sometimes object that such behaviors do not actually increase happiness for women. But the goal of feminism is not to increase female happiness. The goal is to maximize male misery.

Read it.

Amazon has something that old-school publishers do not: it knows who buys its books. Simon & Schuster doesn’t know that. Stephen King doesn’t know it. I don’t know it. But Amazon does.

Amazon has a database of the names and e-mail addresses of every one of its customers who has bought not only books by the actual author it wishes to promote, but all other similar books by similar authors.

And Amazon has permission from most of these customers to alert them when a new book they might like comes down the pike. That is HUGE. That’s a game-changer.

Megan McArdle has some fun with a New York City politician.

Apparently, that’s what a New York City Councilmember wants . . . at least without permission.  He’s sick of real estate brokers creating imaginary new neighborhoods, and he wants it to stop….

I don’t know which is more characteristic: A politician trying to keep the tide from going out, or a real estate broker trying to recharacterize what’s going on.

Steven Hayward has some fun with Time magazine.

f you want still more indicators that environmentalism is totally passé, look no further than Time magazine’s current issue featuring their latest draft picks of the World’s Most 100 Influential People. If climate change is, as Al Gore (and legions of others) claims, the greatest threat facing mankind evah, why isn’t he on the list somewhere? Or Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the UN’s climate circus? No Amory Lovins? No Bill McKibben, or any other carbon crusader?

The only environmental figure who turns up on the list is EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, and that’s practically a gimme. Ten years from now no one is going to remember Lisa Jackson, come what may from the EPA.

Read it.

If Paul Krugman were a real economist, this is what he would tell you.

No, his Nobel Prize in Economics does not make him an economist.

Nor do his degrees from Yale and MIT.

He has the credentials but he does not think as an economist.

My proof.

From Paul Krugman: “Here’s my question: How did it become normal, or for that matter even acceptable, to refer to medical patients as ‘consumers’? The relationship between patient and doctor used to be considered something special, almost sacred. Now politicians and supposed reformers talk about the act of receiving care as if it were no different from a commercial transaction, like buying a car — and their only complaint is that it isn’t commercial enough.”

An economist would not write that paragraph because an economist would know that a patient is indeed a consumer, a person who makes decisions on this product line called medicine. As a consumer, the patient usually decides whether to buy medical services or products, when, where and how much.

Read it. And pay attention–this is important.

Read it.

After researching what pandas do all day, I was struck by how panda-like we are when we use the Internet.

Roaming a massive world wide web of forests, most of our time is spent searching for delicious bamboo and consuming it. 40 times a day we’ll poop something out — an email, a text message, a status update, maybe even a blog post — and then go back to searching-and-consuming.

Read it.

Here’s my concern: We’ve lost much of this craft culture.

Hephaestus, we can agree, would be pissed about this current state of affairs.