Read it.

Not that anybody reads Augustine these days. But it’s interesting.

I am at present reading a Kindle e-book on the PC Kindle app. Every now and then I’ll run across an odd thing: a light grey dotted line under a passage, with the notation, e.g., ‘3 highlighters’. My wife, who owns a Kindle as I do not, informs me that this indicates that X other people who have purchased that title from Amazon have highlighted that passage. That kinda creeps me out.

And yet … Consider a textbook with that sort of indicator. One underline is probably bullshit. Twenty may indicate something significant; getting into the whole ‘wisdom of crowds’ notion. As an unwanted markup in my book, it’s a minor annoyance at worst; but, for those who whom such things are important, it represents a species of real-time involvement in a community, the group of all people who have read this particular title and found something in it worth highlighting. I’m going to have to think about that one.

And the question immediately arises: Who came up with the idea to add that particular ‘feature’ to the Kindle app, and why? And how did it survive the corporate bureaucracy that clots organizations the size of Amazon like kudzu? I’m going to have to think about that one, too.

Read it.

In the 1980s and ’90s, enclosed malls were the supermodels of American commerce: youthful, gorgeous, and incredibly seductive, the people’s choice for Best Place to Spend Disposable Income on Candlesticks. In 2011 they’re America’s retail cougars, doing everything they can to stay sexy while competing with younger, fresher shopping paradigms.

I remember when every mall had a Waldenbooks and a B. Dalton. Ah, those were the days.

Even Victor Gruen, the architect who invented the enclosed mall, ended up hating his creation. In 1954 he designed the Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota. Featuring not just department stores and smaller retailers but a public auditorium, a kiddie zoo, a post office, a garden court, an aviary, and the first works of art commissioned specifically for a shopping center, it was an ambitious, utopian attempt to bring urban density and the kind of pedestrian-friendly European café culture that Gruen was familiar with from his Viennese childhood to the sprawl and isolation of the suburbs. It would eliminate trips to traffic-clogged, crime-ridden downtowns. It would give harried suburban automatons a place to walk safely and bond with their neighbors. It would foster community.

I guess not.

Read it.

An interesting journey, for those who enjoy that sort of thing.

Read it.

Not just Turks, but Japanese as well live in Germany in parallel societies, and they teach their children Japanese first. Nonetheless that makes no one nervous.

So I wonder why we have a problem with the Turks and no problem with the Japanese, not even in Düsseldorf. Nobody inquires after their birth rate. No authorities are putting interpreters at their disposal. There has not been a summit on Japan — or Asia — with the ministry of the interior. There has been no Christian-Japanese working group on Protestant Church Day. We don’t even know what religion they belong to. They make no secret of it, but they don’t make a big fuss about it either.

There must be other reasons. Could it have something to do with the fact that no Japanese has gone to court to sue for a prayer room in a school? Or that no Japanese has refused to stack drinks in a supermarket, which his religion has forbidden him to drink? Or that the Japanese are under-represented in the ranks of multiple offenders and over-represented among those who have graduated from secondary school? The Japanese, too, live in parallel societies, marry among themselves and teach their children Japanese first and then German.

Read it.

It is true that the unrest in the Middle East and North Africa has had some impact on gas prices. Though Libya produces only 1.5m barrels of oil a day (more context on this number to come), the demand for oil, as a key input of production, energy, transportation, and the entire global economy is relatively inelastic. That means that even very small shocks to the supply of oil can ripple quite quickly and drastically through the world.

But are there other explanations for this recent spike in gas prices other than brown people looking for freedom?

I’m so glad you asked.

Because the real reason for the recent spike in gas prices has, at best, an attenuated, ancillary, and secondary relationship to the current unrest in the Arab world.

The primary party is Wall Street.

As Rahm Emmanuel so famously said, ‘Never let a crisis go to waste.’

Read it.

Hopefully we’ll have a Republican President by then, so we’ll have some chance of winning said war.

The Other McCain reacts to feminist criticism.

We are at that stage of the argument you have with your wife when whatever started the argument has ceased to be relevant, and the point of the argument has become: She is right, you are wrong, and your refusal to acknowledge her unquestioned rightness is regarded as an intolerable insult.

Just as I’ve read more Marx than most Marxists, I’ve read more about feminism than most feminists.

To every woman who has ever been passed over for a promotion that instead went to a guy, or otherwise felt herself subjected to sexist discrimination, the guy who criticizes feminism is mentally associated with That Awful Creep. This isn’t necessarily my fault, or the women’s fault, it just is what it is.

For women writers, feminism is “this thing of ours,” a subject on which they expect to exercise a monopoly. You will note here a distinction between women who write for a living, or at least as an amateur vocation, and women who have no ambition to be regarded as “writers.” Insofar as any woman aspires to be a writer, one of the subjects about which she can always write — and never have to worry about competing for readership with male writers — is feminism.

No matter how much historical evidence I cite in support of the fact that Second Wave feminism was deeply rooted in the anti-American Left — both Betty Friedan’s pro-Soviet Old Left and the radical New Left roots of the Women’s Liberation Movement — they will not concede the point, because I was born with a penis, and no one born with a penis can be permitted to write with authority as a critic of feminism.

Here.

For the last 18 months or so, the previews for the presidential contest have been really encouraging. Obama has bled support among independents. The Tea Parties have succeeded in framing the debate in ways that make E. J. Dionne want to punch a clown. Nancy Pelosi had her gavel taken away. Some of the states Obama needs to win the Electoral College have been drifting away.

Everything was looking great.

But then, when I look at the field of candidates, I get that “Directed by Michael Bay” feeling. It’s not as bad as I felt in 1996 when it was clear that Bob Dole was going to be the nominee. That was like watching Stephen Hawking heading out to sea on a surfboard. You didn’t know exactly what would happen, but you knew it would end badly.

This time around, you just get the sense that this isn’t the A-Team. In fact, if this were an action movie, these guys would be the team that gets wiped out in the first ten minutes to establish that what’s really needed is the A-Team.

I wrote a column earlier this week about the funk on the right, and it was interesting to read the feedback. Everyone agrees!

That’s not a great sign either.

I’m not saying all is lost or anything of the sort. But I feel a bit like a dog who suddenly realizes the car is heading to the vet, not the park.

And that says everything you need to know about the current political scene.

The Other McCain clears the air.

Few things — not even the threat of a coffee shortage — bother me quite so much as what I call the Existential Theory of Liberalism:

Everything that exists must be subsidized by the federal government; ergo, to argue against government subsidies for something is to advocate the abolition of that thing.

The Existential Theory of Liberalism can be seen in action whenever any conservative proposes reducing federal expenditures for, say, the National Endowment for the Arts, and is therefore accused by liberals of being “anti-art.” By the same token, if you criticize the federal Department of Education, you are “anti-education,” and if you oppose using taxpayer dollars to fund embryonic stem-cell research, you are “anti-science.”

Read it.

The only rational purpose of a tax paid school system is to produce more productive and better citizens. If it doesn’t accomplish that, there is no justification for making everyone pay for it. There is certainly no justification for taxing a person on a $44,000 income to pay salary and benefits including pensions to someone making $50,000 simply because the teacher is entitled to the money. (In California the top state income tax bracket starts at $44,000, and I think no tenured teacher makes less than $50,000. If those numbers don’t apply in your state, supply your own, but you get the idea). The most effective way to get better and more productive citizens is to allocate resources in a way that benefits those who can benefit the most: make sure the best and the brightest regardless of their race or social or economic status get the most education. If you have a little more time to spend with a student, put that time into make the bright ones learn more rather than trying to make the dummies just a little less uninformed.  Of course that is now what we do: the whole system, and particularly No Child Left Behind, is geared in the opposite direction. You can ameliorate that a bit by assigning the best and the brightest teachers to the best and the brightest students, but you can’t if the unions are allowed to negotiate the work rules. You certainly can’t accomplish much when saddled with tenure and seniority rules.

The American school system is a bad parody of an optimum allocation of resources, and nearly everyone knows it, but we always talk as if it were not so. Of course we never discuss the basic premises of public education to begin with.

Freeberg expands upon Thomas Sowell’s recent article.

The creation of wealth, or lack thereof, and the ramifications involved — it’s fascinating how so many of our progressive friends remain ignorant of these crucial concepts. Many of them boast impressive educational credentials, and you’d better believe that means something, because if you ever forget they’ll remind you. But if you just listen to them distinguish “private sector” and “public sector” a little while, it becomes apparent they haven’t a clue.

Read it.

While mass transit technology has improved (though not nearly as much as it would have had we not regulated the private companies out of existence and replaced them with sclerotic publicly-managed shitholes), I doubt it will ever get to the point where extra density downtown is not the market equilibrium.

Without access to lucrative jobs in Midtown and Lower Manhattan, would Scarsdale still be able to support all its local jobs? Without the R5 bringing people from Philadelphia’s Main Line into Center City, would all those local jobs still exist? Probably not.

Read it.

Turns out that both male and female readers both preferred male protagonists.  They were more likely to agree with the sentences, “I feel I can understand and appreciate the main character and situation in the story” and “I would like to continue reading to find out what happens next in the story” when the main character was male.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

The Economist, as usual, makes perfect sense.

Without public-sector unions, government workers would lobby their way to padded paychecks, unobtanium-plated pensions, and hermetic job security anyway. Which is just to say, government workers don’t really need unions at all.

The thing is, public-sector unions don’t work like this. They aren’t bargaining against capitalists for a fair cut of the cooperative surplus. They’re bargaining against everybody who pays taxes and/or benefits from government spending. The question of distribution in democratic politics isn’t about splitting up jointly-produced profits. It’s about interest groups fighting to grab a bigger share of government revenue while sticking competing groups with the tax bill. Because of the sheer size and relatively uniform interests of the group, public employees constitute a politically powerful bloc with or without unions. As the percentage of the labour force employed by the government rises, the heft of this group only increases. Public-employee unions simply consolidate an already impressive concentration of political bargaining power. Moreover, as the Democratic Party comes increasingly to rely on patronage from the public-sector unions, the determination of Democratic politicians to bargain against the unions on behalf of taxpayers and the beneficiaries of competing government programmes necessarily weakens. For Democratic office-seekers, generous union contracts are “willingly given”, as the Times put it, in roughly the same sense that unaffiliated private-sector workers “willingly” accept low wages and poor working conditions.

Read it.

In a comments thread, shorelines linked to a fascinating Scientific American article about adolescence by psychologist Robert Epstein. In it, he points to the invention of the very idea of adolescence and its non-universality. In a sample of 186 pre-industrial societies, for example, only 60% had words for the life stage and most had little or no problems with anti-social teen behavior. This data, however, contrasts strongly with new research suggesting that adolescent brains are quite different from adult brains.

Read it.

Is monarchy anachronistic? You bet.

Nonsense. It represents a basic human impulse. No ‘list of remaining monarchies’ would be complete without including autocratic states from Chavez to Qadaffi to Kim Jong Il, which would expand the nominal total by a factor of two, at least.

“It’s easy just to say, ‘tear it all down,’ isn’t it? But what are you going to replace it with?” asks Mary Thomas, a newspaper vendor who sells royal souvenirs near Green Park in London. “I think most people would say that they trust the queen a lot more than [they do] the politicians who run this country.”

That’s a no-brainer.

Spain’s popular king is the official head of state, but never intervenes publicly in politics. (Although at a 2007 Ibero-American summit he famously responded to leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who was interrupting a Spanish official’s speech, by asking “Why don’t you shut up?”)

Would that an American President would have the balls to do the same.

A Useful List.

10) When women see Dads out with kids they assume we’re sensitive people who like to chit chat. We’re guys. We don’t chit or chat. When we see people we know we say “hey” but we don’t stop moving. We never stop moving. We’re like sharks in that way.

Read it.

No, because governments have a vested interest in making sure that their boundaries are all-inclusive, and they have the guns to make it stick. This sort of “let’s move away from the government we don’t like” was outdated two hundred years ago, as the Mormons found out in Utah and the Boers found out in South Africa.

But it’s still an interesting read.

Read it.

Much of the modern world is today the product of Protestant cultures – or cultures in which the view of the Bible has been largely shaped by the Protestant project.

The most critical part of that intellectual project was the decoupling of Scripture and Church. For Martin Luther or the early Reformers (particularly the successors of Luther, Calvin and Swingli), the Bible became the only authority (sola Scriptura) and it was through the Bible that the Church was to be judged, corrected and reformed. Thus the Scriptures took on a new form – one in which they became an independent book with authority over everything else. Problems of interpretation were often met with theories of “soul competency” in which it was postulated that each individual soul was competent to interpret the Scriptures for themselves. Of course, these were all novel doctrines, unknown to the Fathers of the Church.

One of the results was to create something of a Christian parallel to the Koran. Christianity, at the hands of well-intentioned reformers became a “people of the book.” A single Christian, with a copy of the Scriptures, somehow became a sufficient example of Christianity. Of course this phenomenon was itself a contradiction of the Scriptures. Today we see the embodiment of this sea-change. Crowds of young and old, carrying Bibles under their arms, dutifully make their way into buildings, euphemistically called “Churches,” although in America they are increasingly called something more attractive than “Church.”

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Read it. And watch the video.

I’m just going to come out and say it: the Khan Academy is the best thing that has happened to education since Socrates. The brainchild of Salman Khan, the Khan Academy became famous by teaching simple math lessons for free through over 2000 YouTube videos. Now, after millions in donations and an expansion of the company, the academy is so much more. The website for the Khan Academy already had exercises you could use to test your understanding of the videos you just watched, but in the past few weeks the website has exploded with wonderful new features. You can create a profile for the site simply by logging in through Google or Facebook. You can track your progress with some wonderful metrics. Teachers (or ‘coaches’) can monitor student progress in groups. Students can earn badges to keep them interested. The list goes on and on and it’s all free. Free, I tell you! In true Khan Academy fashion, Sal explains these new features in the video below. As they continue to expand beyond math, and increase the sophistication of their platform, I am left with little doubt that the Khan Academy represents the future of education. And it’s already here.

Read it.

Currently, many eyes are riveted on the battles taking place in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states where public sector unions are desperately fighting to hold on to their privileges. I don’t blame them for that–privileged classes generally find it easy to believe that their privileges are well-deserved–but, while the results of these battles are in doubt, I wonder whether the war is not, in essence, over. The reality is that we, the taxpayers, can’t afford public sector unions. And the unions and their members have nowhere else to go–no one else to sell themselves to, except us. So I think they are doomed.

Bryan Caplan contemplates the Axis of Drivel.

By and large, I think news is a waste of time.  If I want to increase my factual knowledge, I read history – or Wikipedia.  News, I like to say, is the lie that something important happens every day.

Read it.

“The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.”

Note the source. It isn’t from a religious leader, or some religious think-tank. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is an instrument of the Chinese Communist government which spends a not inconsiderable amount of time and money persecuting Christians and is officially atheistic.

Read it.

Brooks’ constant, unsubstantiated and strangely vague attacks on conservatives as a group – in which he claimed membership, until quite recently – put me in mind of something George MacDonald Fraser has his protagonist say in one of the Flashman novels: “I’m not a sabre expert…and if I have to use one I’d rather it wasn’t in single combat, but in a melee, where you can hang about on the outskirts, roaring your heart out and waiting for an opponent with his back turned.”

I don’t like David Brooks much.

Read it.

A little while ago we talked about some international law issues related to S.H.I.E.L.D. This time we’re going to talk about the stories where superpowered characters wind up actually running countries, and some of them quite peculiar countries at that.

Who says lawyers don’t have fun?

Read it.

From 1876 to 1992—116 consecutive years—the Mississippi lieutenant governor was a Democrat. This year, the Democrats haven’t been able to find anyone to run for that office. Nor, for that matter, have they been able to find candidates for state auditor and secretary of state.

Party switching has become rather common in statewide offices in Mississippi: since this past December, three state representatives and two state senators have changed their affiliation from Democratic to Republican.

Read it.

Which is perfectly reasonable, if you think about it.

Most people give that artificial construct of the law, ‘intellectual property’, all the respect it deserves – 0%. Calling it ‘piracy’ merely debases the language — real pirates steal stuff; when somebody steals stuff, the original owner is deprived of its use. If somebody copies a file, the original owner is not deprived of it’s use, therefore IT ISN’T STEALING, no matter how many legislators can be bought by lobbyists to say that it is … and people of common sense (at least 70% of the population, it says here) understand that.

Read it.

Perhaps it’s because the median age in a Starbucks is about 19.

That’s mentally, of course.

The Other McCain actually put some thought into this one.

It’s weird how some parts of hippie culture survived and some parts didn’t. Fashionable people are all into food that is organic and natural (being “natural” was a big thing with the hippies), but the same fashionable people do not object to women dosing themselves with synthetic hormones in order to maintain an artificial sterility.

Robert Samuelson draws back the curtain.

Labor’s fall has been stunning. In 2010, unions represented 6.9 percent of private-sector workers. That’s lower than the 12 percent in 1929, before passage of the 1935 Wagner Act – the National Labor Relations Act – which gave workers the right to organize and required employers to recognize unions that won a secret ballot.

Read it.

The problem with blue collar careers that seem fun is that like anythimg, after the novelty wears off, it becomes a job, and any kind of manual labor is just plain hard work, and the pay is not commensurate with the effort.  The reason men like me pick comfortable, cerebral careers instead of manly outdoor jobs like lumberjacking is because to me, what I do is pretty easy, and I can get paid several times more than than I’d get for lumberjacking doing something easy in air-conditioned office.

Read it.

In the Middle Ages, the Middle East was at the forefront of optics, metallurgy, and mathematics. Its largest cities, libraries, and marketplaces dwarfed those in Europe. Subsequently, over the next half millennium, the Middle East slipped behind Europe in many realms, including science and medicine, finance and business, and literacy and living standards. But just as Confucianism and Taoism could not explain China’s failures, Islam, often blamed for the Middle East’s shortcomings, raises more questions than it answers. If Islam’s supposedly retrograde system of beliefs explains the Middle East’s recent failures, what accounts for its earlier successes?

Until the 1700s, the East and the West remained politically independent of each other, regardless of which side was ahead, and neither side enjoyed unchallenged military supremacy. The last reversal, moreover, had another unique trait: self-reinforcing growth. In both regions, the level of development had been constrained for millennia by the limitations of agrarian life. Since 1700, when world trade fell under European control, the West has developed at a dramatically accelerating rate. Today, its development, as measured by Morris, is over 20 times as high as its 1700 level. The East, with some lag, has also developed to unprecedented heights: Morris calculates its level of development to be about 13 times as high as its record level before 1700.

Read it.

I feel that holiday traditions may, and often do, play a role of some determinative, even normative importance in our lives, whether we realize it or not. Thus there is value in being able conceive of and respond to them distinctly. I feel that way because traditions are deeply associated with many other things I take seriously: local engagement, cultural identity, historical memory, familial attachment, and other “communitarian” goods. These don’t constitute a perfectly indivisible bundle, of course, but “traditionalism” is a thread that runs through them and to a degree connects them. Speaking up for tradition in our economically globalized and hyper-mobile world may be essential to making a case for the communitarian perspective as a whole.

Read it.

‘Progressives’ and other hipsters want us all to live in dense urban cores. Well, there are problems with that….

Gas forced air is the standard heating solution for new construction in Chicago and much of the Midwest. This may not apply to the largest buildings, but certainly to single family homes and most of the new construction condos in Chicago. Being able to upgrade building systems is key to energy efficiency, because buildings are the number one source of carbon emissions. In the city of Chicago, about 70% of all carbon emissions come from buildings. And while multi-unit buildings may be inherently more efficient in some regards, they create huge challenges for upgrades because of all the shared infrastructure and lack of access to the roof, exterior walls, and utility feeds. This might not apply in some cases where there is, for example, a shared boiler where one upgrade takes care of all units. But for most new construction condos outside of high rises, I strongly suspect they were built without energy efficient furnaces and in a way that effectively precludes upgrading to current technology.

Bryan Caplan dispels some smoke and smudges some mirrors.

What are you morally forbidden to do to a stranger?  You may not murder him.  You may not attack him.  You may not enslave him.  Neither may you rob him.

What are you morally required to do for a stranger?  Not much.  Even if he seems hungry and asks you for food, you’re probably within your rights to refuse.  If you’ve ever been in a large city, you’ve refused to help the homeless on more than one occasion.  And even if you think you broke your moral obligation to give, your moral obligation wasn’t strong enough to let the beggar justifiably mug you.

Notice: These common-sense ethics regarding strangers, ethics that almost everyone admits, are unequivocally libertarian.  Yes, you have an obligation to leave strangers alone, but charity is optional.

One last question: What fraction of your “fellow citizens” have you actually met?  Virtually zero.  The vast majority of your countrymen are, in fact, utter strangers to you.    When you tell your kid “Don’t take rides from strangers,” you don’t make an exception for anyone who happens to share your citizenship.  Modern government – and most of political philosophy – is just a massive effort to pretend otherwise.

Thomas doesn’t like Bryan Caplan, Scott Sumner, or Will Wikinson very much.

Can’t say that I blame him.

Why should one reject IQ tests as “culturally biased,” and under what conditions? I have no doubt that there is some degree of cultural bias in IQ tests, but so what? As an employer, I may want employees who are not only capable of carrying out certain kinds of mental tasks but who also are attuned to the culture in which I operate my business. If that rules out, say, inner-city blacks who prefer rap to Bach, who wear outré clothing, and who speak a language other than standard English, so be it.

Sumner also “cringes” at “distrust of democracy.” Does he not understand the history of American politics in the twentieth century? It can be summarized, quite accurately, as follows: promise, elect, spend, tax, regulate, promise, elect, spend, tax, regulate, etc., etc., etc.

I can only shake my head in amazement at the delusions of left-libertarians. I must come up with a new name for them, inasmuch as they are not libertarians.

Read it.

Since 2009, Mr. Heicklen has stood there and at courthouse entrances elsewhere and handed out pamphlets encouraging jurors to ignore the law if they disagree with it, and to render verdicts based on conscience.

That concept, called jury nullification, is highly controversial, and courts are hostile to it. But federal prosecutors have now taken the unusual step of having Mr. Heicklen indicted on a charge that his distributing of such pamphlets at the courthouse entrance violates the law against jury tampering.

Arguing about the theory and history of jury nullification provides some of the most entertaining moments in law school.

Steve Sailer looks at a Russian program to breed foxes as friendly as dogs.

Read it.

A clever idea. Famous person reads e-book, makes marginal notes, sells marginal notes as an add-on to the e-book. This will, of course, require standards so that the notes will dependably attach to the book, but it’s an interesting thought.

This has actually been used in times past. I believe that most editions of the Talmud include the text along with first, second, and perhaps even third-generation glosses. I once saw a printed copy of the Seanchas Mor
in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library that had a similar format: Old Irish Text, Latin glosses on the text, and Middle Irish notations on the Latin glosses.

Gary Taubes does diet. Somewhat old but still interesting.

America has become weirdly polarized on the subject of weight. On the one hand, we’ve been told with almost religious certainty by everyone from the surgeon general on down, and we have come to believe with almost religious certainty, that obesity is caused by the excessive consumption of fat, and that if we eat less fat we will lose weight and live longer. On the other, we have the ever-resilient message of Atkins and decades’ worth of best-selling diet books, including ”The Zone,” ”Sugar Busters” and ”Protein Power” to name a few. All push some variation of what scientists would call the alternative hypothesis: it’s not the fat that makes us fat, but the carbohydrates, and if we eat less carbohydrates we will lose weight and live longer.

What’s forgotten in the current controversy is that the low-fat dogma itself is only about 25 years old. Until the late 70’s, the accepted wisdom was that fat and protein protected against overeating by making you sated, and that carbohydrates made you fat. In ”The Physiology of Taste,” for instance, an 1825 discourse considered among the most famous books ever written about food, the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin says that he could easily identify the causes of obesity after 30 years of listening to one ”stout party” after another proclaiming the joys of bread, rice and (from a ”particularly stout party”) potatoes. Brillat-Savarin described the roots of obesity as a natural predisposition conjuncted with the ”floury and feculent substances which man makes the prime ingredients of his daily nourishment.” He added that the effects of this fecula — i.e., ”potatoes, grain or any kind of flour” — were seen sooner when sugar was added to the diet.

If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of heart disease.

David Ludwig, the Harvard endocrinologist, says that it’s the direct effect of insulin on blood sugar that does the trick. He notes that when diabetics get too much insulin, their blood sugar drops and they get ravenously hungry. They gain weight because they eat more, and the insulin promotes fat deposition. The same happens with lab animals. This, he says, is effectively what happens when we eat carbohydrates — in particular sugar and starches like potatoes and rice, or anything made from flour, like a slice of white bread. These are known in the jargon as high-glycemic-index carbohydrates, which means they are absorbed quickly into the blood. As a result, they cause a spike of blood sugar and a surge of insulin within minutes. The resulting rush of insulin stores the blood sugar away and a few hours later, your blood sugar is lower than it was before you ate. As Ludwig explains, your body effectively thinks it has run out of fuel, but the insulin is still high enough to prevent you from burning your own fat. The result is hunger and a craving for more carbohydrates. It’s another vicious circle, and another situation ripe for obesity.

Read it.

Read it.

Finally, if you have teenagers or preteens, or if you are a teenager, open yourself to a new possibility. People say that the reason teenagers are so hard to get along with is that that stage “is part of growing up.” But, then, why don’t teenagers have the same problems when they work at a summer job or a part-time job during the school year? They are exposed to lots of people, often within a wide age range, but they aren’t treated cruelly, and they don’t treat others cruelly, nearly as frequently. Could their better attitude be the result of three facts: they are free to quit that job; the other people at the job typically want to be there; and there’s not as much time for cruelty when you’re trying to be productive? Teenagers treating other teenagers cruelly is part of growing up?when compulsory schooling is part of growing up.

Considering the ‘socialization’ I observed in elementary school and high school, I think that most children would be better off without it. After all, the term ‘schoolyard bully’ exists for a reason.

Thomas at Politics and Prosperity apparently has similar memories.

They remind me, too much, of the public schools of my own youth. I would have given anything to have been placed in an environment where the emphasis was on learning, not on suffering through hours, days, months, and years of classes with packs of pre-adolescent and adolescent animals.

Freeberg has a checklist.

This would actually be pretty useful. I think I may try this next time I see a movie.

Read it.

Considering that Obama is President, I’d phrase that the other way around, but I’m prepared to believe it.

Watch it.

If you aren’t familiar with ‘TED talks’, you really ought to be. This is an excellent example.

Read it.

The recalcitrant and impatient human mind works best when not in conflict with the host’s biology. This biology is inseparable from the ineffable effects of one’s immediate neighborhood simply because our neighborhood is an inseparable part of our individual human biology. In many ways, we prideful humans are little more than ants with a sense of humor. Funny enough, no neighborhood worth its salt would exist without the flotsam known as “the family”. In the end, when we order our built environment around proven intellectual and biological history, we reach the professional levels of craftsmanship required by that elevation of spirit known as “culture”. When we fail in this effort, we arrive at, among other things that group-grope commonly referred to as “sprawl” and its half-baked antecedent, the so-called “service economy”. After several decades of debt-inspired consumer hullabaloo, the United States of America is in the late night dream fit of a nightmare called sprawl. It aint, to be precise, “familial”. The word “Fiat” seems to define the modus admirably. A widespread and unsustainably confused mess is the most picturesque evidence. The cult of Globalism is its vanguard and the resulting Potemkin Edifice is now leaking while the band plays on.S

Megan McArdle thinks it through.

On one level, this is extraordinarily odd–is it really the president’s job to be taking sides in a dispute between Wisconsin’s elected government and its state employees?  But in another way, it’s logical, even necessary.  State governments are where some of the hardest choices about taxes and spending have to be made.  And thanks to a confluence of factors–ObamaCare rules that keep states from cutting Medicaid spending, poorly thought-out pension obligations that are now coming due, crashing revenue thanks to the recession, and in all but one states, a balanced budget requirement–those choices have to be made now.  Wisconsin is facing a $3.6 billion shortfall over the next two years.  The money is going to have to come from somewhere.

Read it.

Of course, all ‘planned’ cities are insane. Read Jane Jacobs.

Read it.

Raining reality on the comic book parade.