Steve Sailer really doesn’t like John McCain.

Remember when John McCain rattled his saber after Georgia attacked Russian-controlled turf in 2008? Aren’t you sad he didn’t get elected and thus we haven’t even come close to getting into a war with Russia?

Upside of Afghanistan: Fall of the Soviet Empire. Downside of Afghanistan: 9/11.

But what’s the upside of Libya? Fall of the Libyan Empire?

Some of these heroic rebels have hit speeds upwards of 100 mph while fleeing Gaddafi’s crack mercenaries from Burkina Faso. You gotta be brave to drive that fast on those roads.

Read it.

We have people who do real work, and people who don’t. Overall, you’ll find people who do work have a tendency to — as they said when we were growing up — “see what needs doing and get it done.” People who don’t work tend to bitch about what someone should do, wait until someone gets it done, and then contribute a bunch of “ideas” in some big gab-fest about where the product of the work should go. That’s what post-industrial-revolution liberalism is: Non-producers making rules about what should be done with the items of value produced by producers.

The Other McCain really doesn’t like the French.

Kay Hymowitz reveals a dirty little secret.

Not so long ago, highly educated women were a spinster class; men with degrees looked for wives whose talents ran towards cooking the dinner roast and doing the children’s laundry, not writing briefs. No longer. Women with advanced degrees are now as likely to marry as their less-educated sisters (though they are less likely to have children) in large part because educated men are choosing them over secretaries or nurses. Today about 55% of married couples have the same educational level.

Educated men and women are drawn to spouses they think will help them produce the children likely to thrive in the contemporary knowledge-based economy. That means high IQ, ambitious, and organized kids who will do their homework and take a lot of AP courses. The preference for alpha kids is the reason there is a luxury market for Ivy League egg and sperm donors. It also explains why, though we don’t have solid research distinguishing between elite and State U mating choices, Ms. Harvard will probably not accept a proposal from Mr. Florida State. The economist Greg Mankiw has quipped that “Harvard is probably the world’s most elite dating agency.” A glance at the New York Times nuptial pages suggests he’s right.

Read it.

What we are seeing here is not exactly a mystery. Incomes that average $345 million are nearly all capital gains; no one I know of makes anything like that in ordinary income. The capital gains rate was 28 percent in 1992 and 15 percent in 2007. So, with a capital gains rate of 28 percent, the average overall federal tax rate was 26 percent, and with a capital gains rate of 15 percent, the average overall federal tax rate was 17 percent. In both years, the vast majority of the highest earners’ income consisted of capital gains. (In 1992 the top rate on ordinary income was 31 percent, while it was 35 percent in 2007, which presumably accounts for most of the rest of the variation in total federal taxes paid as a percentage of adjusted gross income.)

Some will say that in the present crisis extreme measures are necessary, so let’s emulate Willie Sutton and take the money from the people who have it– the super rich. Indeed, President Obama suggests, more or less obliquely, that this is his alternative to getting federal spending under control.

To test this proposal, let’s do the math. Four hundred “super rich” times an average adjusted gross income of $345 million equals $138 billion. That is around 1/27 of the current year’s federal spending of $3.8 trillion. Which means that if the Democrats stole every penny of income earned by the super rich, it would fuel the out-of-control federal behemoth for a little under two weeks. Thirteen days into the fiscal year, we would be on our own. And we wouldn’t have the super rich to kick around anymore.

Smitty at The Other McCain lets it loose.

Here is a better idea: repeal the 17th Amendment. Let the Senate return to representing the States. The States can treat Senate nominations like the President treats Supreme Court nominations. If the citizens want the Senate to change, let them tell their Governor/Legislature when their terms are up.

I submit that admitting that 1913 was an abso-effing-lutely suck-tacular year for the US Constitution, and unwinding the ill deeds undertaken by Woodrow Fascist Wilson is crucial to letting the Progressive State of America experiment die its dismal death.

On a related note, Hot Air wants to know where the 5 minute tax form is. Going back to 1913, we need to repeal the 16th Amendment. There is no hope with the IRS. None. Nothing but byzantine pettifoggery there. We nix the IRS, and let the States figure out how to raise their allotted portion of the Federal tab.

All excellent ideas.

Read it.

For those of you designing games — which I’m sure practically all of you are.

Read it.

The Worrying Class in developed countries laments: “We don’t make anything any more.”

The United States alone produces roughly 20% of all the world’s manufactured goods. We may not make many toys or cell phones any more, but we do make most of the world’s artificial knees and hips, medical scanners and jet aircraft. Those sound like good jobs to me.

Manufacturing fetishists also ignore the fact that many factory jobs were actually not very good jobs at all.

Read it.

The great struggle in Japanese national security policy since World War II has been over the legitimacy of its armed forces. For more than half a century, constitutional restrictions on the deployment of the military have led to the world’s second-largest democratic economy playing a far smaller global role than its peers. Efforts to change that have always faced implacable resistance from a Japanese public scarred by the war and suspicious of any hint of militarism.

Read it.

Okay, let me get this straight: The original tiger species is extinct, so it’s not a case of preserving a native species. And in order for tigers to flourish, they have to reintroduce numerous other species that aren’t there right now.

My question is: Why? And, more important: Who’s paying for all this.

I suspect that the answer to the second question is: Some country’s taxpayers.

Read it.

In the scheme of things, saving the 38 billion bucks that Congress seems poised to agree upon is not a big deal. A big deal is saving a trillion bucks. And we could do that by preventing disease instead of treating it.

For the first time in history, lifestyle diseases like diabetes, heart disease, some cancers and others kill more people than communicable ones. Treating these diseases — and futile attempts to “cure” them — costs a fortune, more than one-seventh of our GDP.

But they’re preventable, and you prevent them the same way you cause them: lifestyle. A sane diet, along with exercise, meditation and intangibles like love prevent and even reverse disease. A sane diet alone would save us hundreds of billions of dollars and maybe more.

Of course, being a writer for the New York Times, he’s too politically correct to mention the worst ‘lifestyle disease’ of all: HIV/AIDS.

The Other McCain questions Google’s priorities. Not that that’s very difficult.

Read it.

I remember a friend of mine getting his kids into calculus by posing the problem ‘Okay, you’ve got a ten-foot-wide corridor that right-angles into a five-foot-wide corridor. How long a spear can you get around that corner?’

It was amazing.

Moreover – and this is risky for me to say, because if this sentiment went viral I’d no longer have a job – it seems pointless to be teaching kids math en masse when we could be teaching them more programming instead.

Well, not necessarily programming, but certainly individualized instruction paced to the mental process of the student — for which programming is an excellent tool, of course; the mental discipline and structured approach to problem-solving required to write correct programs is certainly useful in many areas of life, as well.

Freeberg has some thoughts on the subject.

The defining characteristic of all strains of liberalism is that somewhere, the wrong people might be having a good time. Boy Scouts, stay-at-home Moms, gun owners, whites, males, straights, Jesus-worshipers, oil company executives, health care company executives, bank executives. These people are not feeling enough pain.

I don’t necessarily buy into the notion that the purpose of life is to be happy. I have often said here & there (too lazy, once again, to go digging into the archives) that conservatism in our modern, contemporary age could be best characterized as the possession, ownership and use of a long-term memory. The readiness, willingness and ability to say “We’ve tried that before; so unless there’s some meaningful difference between this time & last time, kindly keep it out of my way.” Liberalism is more like a circular trip on an amusement park silly-go-’round. History always began yesterday morning. So we haven’t tried this before. And if we did, and it failed, it must have been because…of something.

The Other McCain cuts to the chase.

Steve Landsburg fisks the ‘eat local’ crowd.

The locavores, in case you don’t follow this kind of thing, are an environmentalist sect who make a moral issue out of where your food is grown — preferring that which is local to that which comes from afar. For example, as Budiansky puts it, “it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in California because of the energy spent to truck it across the country”.

How, then, could one ever hope to do the right computation? How can we possibly gather enough information to compare the opportunity costs of land, fertlizers, equipment, workers, transportation and energy costs (among many others) and reach a conclusion about which tomato imposes the fewest costs on our neighbors?

Well, it turns out there’s actually a way to do that. You do it by looking at a single number that does an excellent job of reflecting all those costs. That number is known as the price of the tomato. When more New York land is needed for a housing development or a vineyard or a sports complex, the price of New York land goes up and the price of New York tomatos follows. When California workers are needed to build an aquarium or put out a forest fire, the price of California labor goes up, and the price of California tomatos follows.

Markets are not perfect, so the price of a tomato does not, with 100% accuracy, reflect the social cost of acquiring that tomato. But in most circumstances it comes damn close, and in virtually all circumstances it comes a lot closer than Budiansky’s sort of crabbed accounting.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

There’s only one downside to using prices as the primary indicator of social cost — everyone already accounts for them. This robs the locavores of an opportunity to flaunt their moral superiority, and Steven Budiansky of an opportunity to flaunt his math skills. Meanwhile, the rest of us go right on solving the right problem the right way.

Read it.

WOMEN, because of their natural empathy, make better doctors than men. An article in today’s New York Times illustrates why this widely-held belief is false. The entry of large numbers of women into the medical profession has diminished the level of dedication and personal care. Doctors who are mothers are empathetic. But they are empathetic to their children too. They don’t want to work the hours demanded by the traditional medical practice and prefer bureaucratically-administered hospital or clinical jobs that come with regular shifts.

The grandfather of a woman who is a doctor comments on the changes. “My son and I had deeper feelings for our patients than I think Kate will ever have,” Dr. William Dewar II said over lunch at a diner in Honesdale, about 30 miles northeast of Scranton. Munching on a club sandwich, Dr. William Dewar III gestured toward the diner’s owner, who had greeted them deferentially.

“I’ve had three generations of his family under my care,” he said as a waitress brought his usual Diet Coke without being asked. “Kate will never have that.”

David Friedman drags us back to the facts.

Kristof has his historical facts precisely backwards. From 1929 to 1932  federal spending increased by 50% in nominal terms, doubled in real terms, tripled relative to national income. Judged by that measure, Herbert Hoover makes Barack Obama look like a fiscal conservative.

As I pointed out there, we do have an example of a Republican president who responded to a surge in unemployment in the way they think Hoover did. From 1920 to 1921, unemployment rose from 5.2% to 11.7%, almost as sharp an increase as from 1930 to 1931. Harding responded by sharply cutting spending. By 1922, federal expenditure relative to national income had dropped almost fifty percent. And the unemployment rate was back down to 2.4%.

Freeberg points out that the President of the United States isn’t in any position to criticize somebody over poor gas mileage.

Read it.

One of the nice things about a potential government shutdown (or, for that matter, a big Washington D.C. snowstorm) is the clarity it provides about which government workers are “essential” personnel, who come to work even in a shutdown, and which are “nonessential” personnel, who don’t come to work. The question that naturally arises is, if they are nonessential personnel, why are the taxpayers funding their employment to begin with?

I’ll bet we could save a bundle by getting rid of these ‘nonessential’ parasites.

A modest proposal.

Could Social Security’s debt be settled at a discount by voluntary transactions with its creditors, namely American citizens? I propose that it could. Every time this happened, it would reduce Social Security’s net deficit, because its debt would go down by more than its assets, just as with any individual or company in a similar situation. This is basic balance sheet arithmetic: if your debt goes down more than your assets do, your net position improves.

I would. In a heartbeat.

Read it.

And about time that somebody did.

The federal government has been meddling with sugar production since 1934. Today’s convoluted system of supply controls, price supports, and trade restrictions benefits domestic sugar producers at the expense of consumers and utilizing industries. In other words, sugar producers “win” and the rest of the country “loses.”

Of course that doesn’t differ from any other such subsidy program. Those who produce a commodity are small in number, typically know each other and have formed a ‘trade association’ to buy Congressmen lobby Congress concerning their ‘issue’ and win out over the vast mass of consumers who never notice that they’re paying more for something than they would in a free market.

Know, incidentally, that Indiana doesn’t produce any sugar to speak of.

Read it.

As more and more systems care about time at the second and sub-second level, finding a lasting solution to the leap seconds problem is becoming increasingly urgent.

We’re talking about the abolishment of leap seconds, a crude hack added 40 years ago, to paper over the fact that planets make lousy clocks compared with quantum mechanical phenomena.

Joe Wickert has some fun.

The impossibility of any system of ‘digital rights management’ merely underlines my contention that ‘intellectual property’ is an oxymoron.

Read it.

I’m not going to say it. I’m just not going to say it.

Steve Sailer wants to help.

I want to introduce a concept to public discussion based on the old Victorian concept of the Deserving Poor: the Deserving Dumb. There are many millions of children in America who, at least when it comes to passing a non-watered down version of Algebra II, are truly the Deserving Dumb. If you force them to take Algebra II, they will come to class, not disrupt the teacher, ask questions, try to do their homework, maybe get some afterschool tutoring. And they will still bomb the final and, thus, fail to graduate. They’ll probably get GEDs later, but they still go through life as high school dropouts. They simply don’t have the powers of abstraction necessary for Algebra II.

Don Boudreaux spanks the Wall Street Journal.

While pandering to economic ignorance often wins votes, it’s distressing to see such pandering – even for a good cause – in your pages.  Trade’s benefits are measured in imports; the more the better.  Exports are the costs of getting these benefits.  In a truly ideal world – one quite the opposite of the ostensible ideal of Messrs. Baucus and Kerry – we’d continually receive cargo ship after cargo ship of automobiles, MP3 players, foodstuffs, and countless other valuable imports in exchange for our export of a single toothpick.  Alas, it’s unfortunate that foreigners in fact are so prehensile that they demand lots more than one toothpick in exchange for the stuff they ship to us.

Read it.

I especially like the preening inherent in the term ‘creative class’. Given its proper name, ‘bullshit class’, it would sound less admirable.

Read it.

James Madison once described the judiciary as “an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive.” Had he lived to see the Supreme Court’s sweeping definition of congressional power under the Commerce Clause, he might have revised that statement.

Does just sitting and doing nothing constitute ‘commerce’? Some think so.

Under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, Congress possesses the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with Indian tribes.” In the 1942 case Wickard v. Filburn, the Court held that the Commerce Clause allowed Congress to forbid farmer Roscoe Filburn from growing twice the amount of wheat permitted by the Agricultural Adjustment Act and then consuming that extra wheat on his own farm. In 2005, the Court reinforced this decision, holding in Gonzales v. Raich that medical marijuana cultivated and consumed entirely within the state of California still counted as commerce “among the several States” and was thus open to the depredations of the Controlled Substances Act. As Justice Clarence Thomas observed in his Raich dissent, “If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything—and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.”

Welcome to the Obamanation.

More or less.

see at the start of this story
basically what Grendel is doing
is every night
when Hrothgar settles down to have himself a sweet party
in his meadhall
Grendel comes charging out of the swamp
humps the door down
and proceeds to play cockhockey with the internal organs
of all the people who are trying to get their booze on
he does this FOR TWELVE YEARS
there are several shocking things about this
one is that these are twelve years of solid murder we are talking about
but more importantly
where do they keep getting dudes
to come to these parties
after say
the first SIX YEARS of unstoppable death
you would think word would get around
like hey
party at Hrothgar’s crib tonight
are you coming
nah man I hear THERE IS A MONSTER THERE WHO MURDERS EVERYONE
but perhaps most bizarre
is the fact that Hrothgar CONTINUES to party throughout these 12 years
this is clearly a man who is committed to partying

Charlie Stross, Hugo Award-winning writer, tries his hand at forecasting the future, with fascinating results.

Read it.

Whenever we have an election, pundits and politicians wax eloquent about the supposed need to increase voter turnout. Much less attention is paid to the question of whether the people going to the polls actually understand the issues they’re voting on.

I have always found puzzling the whole ‘get out the vote’ concept. Surely, if people were interested in the outcome of an election, they’d vote? And if they’re not interested in the outcome of the election, why badger them into it? The problem that needs to be addressed is not the number of people voting, but the number of people sufficiently interested in voting to actually do it.

It does not surprise me that the ‘get out the vote’ crowd consists of people whose lives are consumed by politics and political issues. Most people have higher priorities: family, job, recreation, sports.

I have no objection to people who are consumed by politics, just as I have no objection to people who paint up their faces for football games (although I think a good case could be made that people who paint their faces for football games have a more positive impact on our civilization).

But such people are ‘activists’, and the distinguishing characteristic of ‘activists’ is that they are utterly convinced that what they find important is what everybody ought to find important; and (tellingly) therefore there is something wrong with those who don’t. It is but a short step from thinking ‘there’s something wrong with these people who don’t consider important the things I consider important’ to ‘these people ought not to be allowed to participate because they’ll get it wrong’.

Read it.

I’m thinking, recycle it into toilet paper sounds about right.

Freeberg ponders the quality that dare not speak its name.

I’m talking about this so-called “research” people do, in which they find there is some significant difference between life in the U.S. and life abroad…they flesh it out, to such an extent that you’re pressed to come to a conclusion that there must be something different about the people who live here.

And then — they stop. They don’t define the difference. They don’t even offer a possibility. They just sort of drop it out there, like a stink bomb.

Tyler Cowen has some interesting thoughts.

I confess that a lot of my positions are chosen because they are most compatible with my mood of ‘grumpiness’. It certainly works for me.

Read it.

Asians, who faced openly racist exclusion laws for nearly 80 years, huddled in Chinatowns, most of them on the West Coast. One was in Washington State, where the grandson of a house-servant would be named the first Chinese-American ambassador to China — Gary Locke. But his story is already one for the textbooks, the old route to the Asian-American Dream.

The new narrative comes from the ethnoburbs, a term coined in a 2009 book by Arizona State University professor Wei Li to describe entire cities dominated by a nonwhite ethnic group. They are suburban in look, but urban in political, culinary and educational values, attracting immigrants with advanced degrees and ready business skills.

As one would expect for somebody writing in the New York Times, Egan looks at the western U.S. from the viewpoint of a Peace Corps volunteer in the Andes, but even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.

According to Bloomberg Businessweek.

And we all know what experts they are in cars (and ugly).

I’m not sure I agree that the Volkswagen Thing is ugly’ They were targeting a particular demographic (WWII German Staff Car Nostalgia) and I suspect they succeeded – I had a classmate in law school who was a reservist in the 101st, and he loved his.

Have to agree on the Gremlin and the Pacer, though.

But anybody who would call the DeLorean ‘ugly’ is certainly a Communist.

Read it.

Three years after the stock market cratered in 1929, American schools suffered their own crash. School districts had managed to ride out the early years of the Great Depression; in fact, because many districts depended on property taxes, which didn’t crash as fast as income taxes, more than a few managed to increase spending.

But in the 1932–33 school year, many districts ran out of funds. With more than one in five workers unemployed, many households didn’t have the money to pay property taxes, so all of a sudden, the school boards didn’t have enough money to pay their bills. Some 2,200 schools in 11 states closed entirely—in Alabama, schools in 50 out of 67 counties shut down. Many more districts cut services or sharply reduced their hours; thousands of districts in the Midwest and South shrank the school year to fewer than 120 days.

Government activity is essentially parasitical, and you can’t get blood from a corpse. This is why it behooves you to laugh whenever a politician calls for an ‘investment’; it’s not an investment, because investments produce income; it’s just plain spending that s/he is too shy to call spending.

Politicians love to bestow goodies on their constituents, especially retirement benefits for public-sector workers—largesse that some future sucker ultimately has to pay for. Decades of this kind of behavior have left a lot of states with growing structural deficits.

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

Cuomo himself has described the process thusly: “The governor announces the budget; unions come together, put $10 million in a bank account, run television ads against the governor. The governor’s popularity drops; the governor’s knees weaken; the governor falls to one knee, collapses, makes a deal.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, over the past decade, New York’s spending has grown almost twice as fast as personal income.

Our American political system at its … finest?

Barro thinks the state may have finally hit its fiscal capacity, with businesses fleeing and the beginnings of a tax revolt in the New York City suburbs over property taxes and school costs. This has happened before—top personal-income-tax rates went up to 15 percent in the 1970s, and the result was an exodus of businesses, driven as much by middle managers outraged at their tax burdens, as by top executives incensed at the business taxes. But the governors and legislators who brought spending under control the last time around didn’t have the magnitude of pension and health-care burdens now facing the state.

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. The problem with soaking the rich is that they can stay dry someplace else much more easily than most.

Read it.

Many blogs and major articles, including posts on YouTern, have pointed out that a college degree no longer equates to a job offer. As the economy settles into new realities, employers are expecting more of candidates with a fresh education and little experience.

College students are already responding by adding internships as a compulsory component of their college experience. According to NACE, over the past decade or two the college students that have completed an internship have increased from 10% to over 70%. Taking this trend a step further, many students have increased the number of internships they complete, believing that to be competitive the norm has become at least three career-relevant internships during their college career.

I, for one, would like it better if they were called ‘apprentices’ rather than ‘interns’.

Freeberg takes a look at modern advertising.

First question I have is: How do I blog this without picking on the girls? Clearly, men don’t give a flying fig about creamy, and any fool can plainly see a man is not made more receptive to the prospect of buying something by the idea that his wife or girlfriend is going to humiliate him in public yet another time. The tutor who burns up all this time on one thing and on absolutely nothing else is obviously cobbled together to churn up some female appeal. Rare is the man who will stoop to being shown how to do something; and, I daresay, the one who is excited about such a thing has yet to be born. The 4g network does have some appeal for us, we pine for lost youth just like our female counterparts, albeit not in the same way perhaps. Just as many men are snobbish about the environment and want to be “green” so they can say they’re better than the next guy, more worthy of continuing to live here.

My fiance offered up the situation with pickup truck commercials. I had to give her that one. This truck is tough! Grrrr! But then again…after we checked out and mingled with the traffic, there were a lot of Big! Tough! Grrrr! trucks out there, not being used to pull tree stumps or transport cords of wood, just tootling down the road. Sitting way up high. Being safe. Feeling invulnerable…and driving in such a manner as to reflect that, should a collision occur, Number One would come out of it just fine. The other driver would be screwed. But the pilot of the larger vessel would likely not even know anything happened. Like a nine hundred foot long cruise ship running over an otter or something.

My wife is perennially afraid of being on the losing end of such a transaction, which is why she’s a white-knuckle driver.

There is a skill we are talking about here, that is important but doesn’t get a lot of attention because it doesn’t have a name. It is roughly analogous to the skill involved in climbing on to a merry-go-round without anyone stopping it for you. Let the world function in whatever way it will; learn all you can about it anyway.

Certain people can perceive flow and cope with it, and certain people cannot. I suspect that bad dancers are probably bad drivers, and vice versa. People who expect the world to adapt to them, rather than the other way around, and go through life pissed off when it doesn’t happen.

Read it. (The Bible, as well as the article.) (In Greek, if you can handle it. King James would be cool with it.)

All translations are ‘false’ in the sense that it is ordinarily impossible to communicate in language B the exact same meaning and connotation of a particular phrase in language A. This is especially true when going from Greek to English; both are very flexible and astonishingly subtle languages, but they categorize the phenomena of the world in different ways. Greek, for example, has three terms that are translated into English as ‘love’, and only one term for what we divide into ‘art’ and ‘science’.

Joel Kotkin is always worth reading.

The ongoing Census reveals the continuing evolution of America’s cities from small urban cores to dispersed, multi-polar regions that includes the city’s surrounding areas and suburbs. This is not exactly what most urban pundits, and journalists covering cities, would like to see, but the reality is there for anyone who reads the numbers.

This is why mass transit, especially commuter rail and HOV lanes, doesn’t work, and will never work; the functional equivalent of setting up hitching posts along the sidewalk to encourage folks to switch from automobiles to horses.

Read it.

In order to distinguish their synthetic DNA from that naturally present in the bacterium, Venter’s team coded several famous quotes into their DNA, including one from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

After announcing their work, Venter explained, his team received a cease and desist letter from Joyce’s estate, saying that he’d used the Irish writer’s work without permission. ”We thought it fell under fair use,” said Venter.

There are circumstances under which the phrase ‘utterly absurd’ is totally inadequate. This is one of them. Our current system of ‘intellectual property’ laws is another.

The synthetic DNA also included a quote from physicist Richard Feynman, “What I cannot build, I cannot understand.”

That prompted a note from Caltech, the school where Feyman taught for decades. They sent Venter a photo of the blackboard on which Feynman composed the quote –and it showed that he actually wrote, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

“We agreed what was on the Internet was wrong,” said Venter. “So we’re going back to change the genetic code to correct it.”

Would that other areas of life were so amenable to improvement.

Bryan Caplan has a nice little puzzler for you.

Read it.

Many people are realizing that random phone calls are just not considered polite any more. They’re somewhat interruptive and can be annoying. What strikes me as really interesting is that this isn’t a case of just the “younger generation” feeling this way — but it’s actually true of many older people as well.

I’ve always hated people just calling me up and wanting to talk, unless it’s some time-dependent thing (e.g. ‘I’ll be in your neighborhood this morning, let’s have lunch’). It always suggests to me the attitude, ‘Whatever you’re doing isn’t as important as talking to me.’ Perhaps we ought to re-establish the concept of the ‘at-home’, e.g. ‘I’ll be at-home on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., if you want to call and just talk, that’s the time to do it.’ But I suppose that would take more social coordination than we can handle in this impulse-dominated culture. It would be very convenient, though, for people who can’t cope with e-mail.

Are wiser than most people’s considered opinions.

They say that records are made to be broken. President George W. Bush set a record by adding $3.2 trillion to the national debt over the course of his eight years in office. But Barack Obama has already beaten that record with $4.4 trillion in just his first three years in office.

What a guy. Go, Barry!

The vocabulary of the political left is fascinating. For example, it is considered to be “materialistic” and “greedy” to want to keep what you have earned. But it is “idealistic” to want to take away what someone else has earned and spend it for your own political benefit or to feel good about yourself.

Yeah, well, some animals are more equal than others.

When the Federal Reserve cites statistics to claim that there is not much evidence of inflation, we need to keep in mind that the statistics they rely on exclude food and energy prices. The cost of living is no sweat if you can do without electricity and food.

Sounds like a plan.

Even if it could be proved that judges who are making rulings that go counter to the written law produce better results in those particular cases than following the letter of the law would have, that does not make society better off. When laws become unreliable and judges unpredictable, lawsuits become a bonanza for charlatans, who can force honest people to settle out of court, for fear of what some judge might do.

This is the business plan of every personal injury lawyer in the United States.

Read it.

Well, it used to . Now? Not so much.

Read it.

Read it.

Of course, it all depends on why you’re in college.

If you want a degree as a milestone on the way to wealth, that’s a very mixed record. It often helps, but it’s not necessary if you’re sufficiently motivated (as the article points out).

Certain fields are based on credentialism — if you want it as a ticket into government or academia, it’s a required base to touch — not just a degree, but high grades and recommendations from your teachers.

If you just want it as an intellectual playground, backed up by an appropriate trust fund, it’s a lot of fun.

Read it.

The problem, however, is that the same 90% of all economists also missed the last crises, and the one before that as well, and before that, and so on. In fact, their record of being able to diagnose and treat economic problems is about zero. And their prescriptions always seem to be counterproductive: the recommendations to limit government always make it grow, their advice on limiting taxation always makes it more, their prescriptions on growing the economy only leads to the illusory growth of bubbles, etc. Put it this way: If your doctor had this same track record of diagnosing and treating disease, you’d be dead by now.