Lynn Viehl is always worth reading.

Chocolate. Not only can’t I eat it because it’s not part of my heart-healthy twigs-and-bark diet, but I then have to give it to someone else and watch them eat it. Which is when I start sobbing.

Gadget Docking Stations, Accessories, etc. I do not own an iPod, an iPad, an e-reader, a fancy mobile phone or any of that other junk. I have nothing that needs a recharging station, and I don’t want a netbook, a boogie board, a happy light, anything that displays up to ten thousand digital photographs, or that tells me on the hour what the weather is like in Sydney because I can’t figure out how to program it for my time zone.

Grow Your Own! Kits. I’m not especially enamoured of tomatoes that grow upside down, herbs in tiny pots, Chia pets or ugly brown bulbs that are supposed to produce gorgeous flowers but no matter how carefully I follow the directions only remain ugly brown bulbs.

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As they do so many negative aspects of life.

On the other hand, although I can think of many arguments in favor of throwing Congressmen in jail, I can’t think of any for making them go through airport security; I doubt that any of them are going to hijack the plane and fly it into the White House. (More’s the pity; I would vote for such a person.)

Erick Erickson smells blood in the water.

100% NARAL rated Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, the Republican who relied on Democrats to get into his job and then obstructed major conservative reforms in the Texas House of Representatives, is worried he might be voted off the island.

For the Speaker of the Texas House to be calling a blogger from Georgia to, I assume, convince me he is not the 100% NARAL rated and Planned Parenthood praised Democrat in Republican clothing that I know him to be, must mean we are having an impact and he is worried.

Read it.

Isn’t that just the most awesome title for a PhD dissertation ever? Seems a pity to waste it on a blog post.

Assume that you are a student applying to college.  Assume also that your high school has a declared policy limiting the number of schools to which you can apply.  It says it does so in order that you will “take applying seriously.”

You rather suspect that the school does so in order to be able to push particular students it favors for particular colleges, so that too many students do not create too much “noise” and competition for a place that the high school counselor thinks is most competitively filled by a particular student.  The high school’s incentive, in other words, is first to maximize its ability to get students into particular colleges as an institution seeing the students as a school cohort, not to simply support each student in his or her efforts on an individual basis.  One effect of this is to favor students who come from wealthy, powerful, or highly connected legacy families, since those students are most likely in the first place to be able to get into the most competitive schools.  But although you suspect this, it is rather difficult to prove without something like discovery in a lawsuit to find out exactly on whose behalf the counselors call certain colleges and discourage other students from applying at all.

But it’s a very interesting blog post….

Bryan Caplan bares his soul. Sort of.

At yesterday’s lunch, Tyler asked us to name the most important lesson we learned from the crisis of 2008.  My answer: The Fed is much worse than I thought.  I used to think we could trust an economist of Bernanke’s caliber to deliver tolerably good macro performance using inflation targeting – and avoid giving barbarous politicians the excuse to push bailouts and “fiscal stimulus.”  Instead he threw his own principles to the wind, joined the sky-is-falling chorus, and helped end the Great Moderation.

Check it out.

For sufficiently ballsy values of ‘up’.

FuturePundit draws back the curtain.

Consumers who are deeply religious are less likely to display an explicit preference for a particular brand, while more secular populations are more prone to define their self-worth through loyalty to corporate brands instead of religious denominations.

David Friedman continues his discussion.

Generalizing the point, “sustainability” becomes an argument against whatever policies one disapproves of, in favor of whatever policies one approves of, and adds nothing beyond a rhetorical club with which partisans can beat on those who disagree with them.

If a particular policy makes potable water less available to future generations, with the result that many of them get drinking water in bottles rather than from the tap, but also makes future generations enough richer to more than pay the cost of that bottled water, is that policy consistent with sustainability?

If we define sustainability in terms of individual effects, treating as unsustainable anything which makes future generations less able to meet any one of their needs, there may be no policies at all that are sustainable, since each alternative alters the future in different ways and any alteration is likely to be bad in at least one respect. If, more plausibly, we define it in terms of net effects, then the demand for sustainability turns into the demand that we not follow policies that make future generations worse off than the present generation.

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The company’s goals are to build a headquarters that would be “nurturing and regenerative to the environment, provide a vibrant community and work/life balance for all,” Google real estate chief David Radcliffe wrote in a letter to city officials earlier this year.

The new ‘company town’, with fitness and day care facilities.

Jeff Jarvis has some primary source material on what young people are like today.

Jeff is a tenured professor at a Left Coast urban university, and so is Hip And Trendy; hence his evaluation of These Kids Today, above. I’m not so optimistic, but I suppose that’s just me. His attitudes toward the mainstream Voices of the Crust are fairly refreshing, however, and indicate that perhaps the Crust is loosening up a bit. We’ll see.

Read it.

“For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay, here are the Two Things about economics. One: Incentives matter. Two: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Computer Programming:

1. Every problem can be solved by breaking it up into a series of smaller problems.
2. The computer will always do exactly what you tell it to.

Software Engineering:

1. Writing the code is the easy part. Writing it so someone else can understand it later is the important part.
2. Make it work, then make it elegant, then make it fast.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

Making sure we can continue our present activities into the indefinite future makes sense only if we believe that we will be doing those things into the indefinite future. Judged by what we have seen in the past and can guess about the future, that is very unlikely. We do not know what the world of forty or fifty years hence will be like, but it will not be the same as the present world, hence it is very unlikely that we will be doing the same things in the same way and requiring the same resources to do them with.

Read it.

I am finding the spate of recent articles about the huge and growing inequality of wealth in the US pretty tedious.  I suspect they are making some basic mistakes.  They usually take the form of saying the wealthiest X percent of the US population owns Y percent of the wealth, where Y is a much bigger number than X.  What I don’t get is, why should I care about the relationship of X and Y?

Envry and resentment–emotions that ‘progressives’ clutch close to their bosoms to make up for the fact that every time they try to improve conditions they only get worse.

We humans are an envious breed, but we mostly put our own wealth ahead of equality.  And if I could be a few thousand dollars a year better off, at the cost, so to speak, of some guy who lives in some gated paradise I don’t even drive by, becoming millions richer than he already is, well that is a sacrifice I am prepared to make.  As long as he is not around to rub my face in the fact that while he’s buying a new jet, I’m just buying a riding mower, I don’t care.

Ah,  but Democrats do, and they’re the ones passing the silly laws … and, unfortunately, writing the tax code.

Mencius Moldbug is always worth reading.

One of the many divine paradoxes in our political formula is the double valence of democracy. This word, its declensions, its synonyms, carry positive associations well up in the sacred range. Deep in your medulla, warmth glows from everything democratic. Yet at the same time, we have a related family of words, such as politics and its declensions, which seem to mean exactly the same thing – yet reek of heinous brimstone.

Of course, to the hardened UR reader, this is just one more sign that we are dealing with an essentially magical belief system. I will defy any Republican or Democrat to explain this paradox. He can only fall on his knees and worship it. In short, his political loyalty is instantly recognized as a religious affiliation.

The Other McCain is in a bad mood.

No one — not David Frum, not Conor Friedersdorf, not even Charles Johnson — has been the source of more genuine evil in American politics than David Brooks.

Don’t hold it in, Stacy; tell us how you really feel.

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Economics aspires to be a science. But in this it does not succeed. Neither does finance. This despite the fact that there is an annual, optimistically named Nobel Prize in “Economic Sciences.”

Financial crises keep happening—the list is long. Could they be avoided if economics and finance were science? To paraphrase financial observer James Grant: science is progressive, but finance is cyclical.

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Some mutations are so rare that they are known only by their chromosomal address: Samantha and Taygen are two of only six children with the diagnosis “16p11.2.”

It turns out that individuals (and their parents) who share these diagnoses are meeting and exchanging information and forming mini-alliances.

Read it.

This is a bit of a provocative post, and its impressions (I dare not promote them to the level of conclusions) should be taken with the amount of salt found in a McDonald’s Happy Meal. Essentially, I was doing some reading about medieval medicine and was struck by some of the similarities between it and computer engineering, which I attempt to describe below.

This guy has some interesting notions.

Read it.

I’m in.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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Ever wonder what happened to your high school valedictorian? He or she might just have wound up in Washington, D.C. That metro area has the nation’s highest percentage of residents with college degrees.

Call it America’s brainiest place to live.

That must be why the national government is such a lean, mean, efficient machine.

I’ve lived around people with college degrees, and most of them can’t find their butt with both hands, a strip map, and a ground guide. Smartest? Not so much.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

What are the three errors, seen from the standpoint of measuring and taxing the real gains from buying and selling assets?

1. The failure to index capital gains, to measure them in real rather than in nominal terms. At a zero inflation rate this wouldn’t matter, but if inflation is substantial it taxes investors on imaginary profits, heavily discouraging any form of investment activity that will eventually show up on a schedule D.

2. The failure to retain the basis for capital gains when an asset is inherited. Under current law, when my imaginary investor dies in 1998 and his son inherits his $300 asset, the basis for the asset shifts up, so neither the real $100 gain nor the imaginary $100 gain ever pays capital gains tax.

3. The estate tax. Instead of paying capital gains tax on either the real or the imaginary capital gains, the son is taxed on the amount of the estate, some unknown fraction of which consists of actual capital gains. This is double taxation on part of the estate, single taxation on another part, and, given the exemptions in the estate tax law, zero taxation on a third part.

Freeberg is always worth reading.

It must be easier to be an atheist when you’re a vegetarian. Imagine how silly it would be, if we were surrounded by Tribbles who were made of marshmallow and chocolate with a yummy caramel center, to say “they’re just like that because they evolved that way.” To a meat-eater gnawing on chicken wings on a rainy Sunday morning, this is what atheists sound like. Cook the animal’s flesh over flame and it turns into a delicious snack, you’re saying that was not part of a design? It certainly isn’t survival-of-the-fittest to have yummy flesh on your bones that tastes good with a dry rub.

And you can’t say any fairer than that.

Read it.

Traditional school science is being dumbed down as teachers focus on social issues to make lessons more “relevant” to pupils’ lives, according to a leading headmistress.

And this is a problem in the U.S. as well. The problem lies, I suspect, in the fact that the teachers and administrators aren’t really convinced that science has any intrinsic value, and they are projecting those attitudes onto their students: After all, if I the teacher have doubts, then such doubts are natural, and so of course the students will have doubts as well.

Leaving aside the problems inherent in the increasingly common tendency for teachers and administrators to project their attitudes onto their students, I suggest that the problem is one of teachers and administrators losing their grasp on what education is all about. (I know: What a shocking notion.)

Most teachers would really rather be going on intellectual spelunking expeditions with college students than drilling pre-pubescent children, and so sort of reflexively try to intrude pedagogical methods suitable for semi-mature young people into what they’re doing with kiddies. This is always a mistake, and one that I am convinced is behind much of the deterioration of our ‘educational’ systems today.

Fortunately, we are increasingly gaining access to technology that can correct this problem. Prior to about age 12, most kids need facts and skills, not intellectual adventure (look at how schools a hundred years ago did things–and at what they, and their students, accomplished), and the best way to impart facts and skills is repetitive memorization, drilling, and testing–activities for which computers are ideal. When the time comes that automated processes are no longer appropriate, then the teachers can take over and play coach. Until we get such a system in place, our schools will continue to suck.

I am convinced that such a system will eventually arise, if for no other reason than that some desperate group of parents somewhere will try it because they’ve tried everything else, and it will be so successful that everyone else will either adopt it or lose the competition for educational excellence. But getting there will be painful, and a large part of that is the unfortunate fact that teachers as a profession are more ignorant about what they ought to be doing than almost every other field of endeavor.

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Is this a purely English obsession? Looking at much American television, the interest in class and status seems alive and well, despite a widespread belief that Americans don’t “do” class. There are the fascinated homages to opulent wealth and the people struggling to get into that world – 30 years ago, Dallas and Dynasty, these days the awesomely snobbish Gossip Girl and the milder Brothers and Sisters.

I think that the popularity of stories about social class stem from the fact that ‘celebrities’ we will have always with us, and there seems to be a natural homeopathic impulse in people to believe that acting the way rich & famous people act will somehow replicate the effects of being rich & famous, as if being rich & famous were some guarantee of quality. Needless to say, most ‘celebrities’ today fall down on the job (assuming that this is their job to do). As a result, people are attracted to stories set in environments where the equation of wealth and fame with Quality was not only embraced but positively cultivated–and that means looking into the past. (Or into fantasy–it’s no accident that most successful fantasies, like The Lord of the Rings, are set in societies that have nobles and peasants, with the nobles being central to the story.) The constant blathering in the press about sports figures being ‘role models’ merely underscores the accuracy of this analysis.

Exempli gratia: Lance Armstrong. Does he use drugs to win his races? Damn the man for being a negative role model. Does he win his ‘fight’ with cancer? Praise the man for being a positive role model. And all of this is completely divorced from the consideration of whether or not it makes any sense for someone in a normal life to take inspiration from a guy who rides a bicycle for a living. Think about that one for a minute.

Of course, I plan to buy the Downton Abbey series on DVD when it comes out, as it inevitably will. But at least I’ll understand what’s going on.

And, really, is The Sopranos all that different? Most of the trouble into which Mafia guys get is caused by their congenitally poor impulse control … and impulse control is the essence of ‘upper class’.

Which class people belong to, and to which they want to rise; these questions have been the raw stuff of drama for centuries, and are not going to disappear.

It’s as if we only notice the questions, however, when the presence of a butler and a duke alert us to them.

Read it.

Stick-limbed, balloon-bellied, ancient-eyed, the tiny, failing bodies of Biafra had become as heavy a presence on evening-news broadcasts as battlefield dispatches from Vietnam. The Americans who took to the streets to demand government action were often the same demonstrators who were protesting what their government was doing in Vietnam. Out of Vietnam and into Biafra—that was the message. Forsyth writes that the State Department was flooded with mail, as many as twenty-five thousand letters in one day. It got to where President Lyndon Johnson told his Undersecretary of State, “Just get those nigger babies off my TV set.”

Although sadly decayed, the New Yorker still has some of the best writing in the English language.

Read it.

[At work] There are always small-scale, short-term reasons not to upset the apple cart, which is why the proprietors of the apple carts tell you that

(a) you’re playing the game of Monopoly

(b) on a given turn in the game of Monopoly, you roll the dice, move your token, buy and sell properties…and nothing else.

The truth is, though, that you’re not playing Monopoly, either in your job or in your life.

You’re playing D&D.

The great thing about D&D is that it tells you that you’re playing D&D, and that you’ve got infinite choices.

The bad thing about Monopoly is that it tells you that you’re playing Monopoly, and you’ve got finite choices…when, in fact, you’re still actually playing D&D.

Playing D&D is more work than playing Monopoly.

…and it’s a lot more fun.

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Hint: Don’t get on the fargin plane in the first place. That seems plain enough.

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When people tell me how mad they are at Wal-Mart for driving the mom-and-pop stores out of business, I ask them how Wal-Mart managed to do that. Did they go around torching their stores in the middle of the night, threatening the moms and the pops with baseball bats if they didn’t close their stores?

The consumers drove the mom and pops out of business. The consumers preferred Wal-Mart (and Target and K-Mart) to the mom-and-pops. To the extent Wal-Mart did the driving, it was by offering better products at better prices.

George Will is always worth reading.

Unwilling to delay until tomorrow mistakes that could be made immediately, Democrats used 2010 to begin losing 2012.

The Other McCain has some advice for Republican candidates.

Note to future Republican candidates: Do you own damned laundry and wash your own damned dishes. If you have ever employed a domestic servant named “Maria,” please don’t run for office as a Republican.

Hypotheticals are always tricky. When you’re second-guessing Lee’s tactics at Gettysburg, your own plans are always executed flawlessly. So it is in election post-mortems. It is a lot easier to imagine the victories of Sue Lowden in Nevada and Mike Castle in Delaware than it actually would have been to achieve those objectives. And, hey, if you can’t win your own party’s primary, what does that say about your prowess as a candidate?

If the only way the GOP can win a Senate majority is by electing useless turds like Mike Castle, we’ll just have to learn to live without a Senate majority.

If all the GOP offers voters is Liberalism Lite, or if Democrats are allowed to represent their agenda as “centrist” or “moderate” — so that opposition is pre-emptively defined as “extremism” – Republicans will lose their political raison d’etre.

So the strategical upshot is that conservatives should work to defeat Democrat Blue Dogs by exposing the phoniness of their “centrism” and never – ever – support a RINO in a primary.

Preach it, brother.

Arnold Kling points out an inconvenient truth.

The usual bleeding-heart cry is that it is absurd for a society to have people as rich as Bill Gates and still have poverty. But government is much, much, much richer than Bill Gates, and no bleeding heart complains about government’s indifference or misplaced priorities.

Read it.

A key shortcoming of statutes and regulations is that they impose one-size-fits-all rules on the behavior of individuals and businesses. Thus “helpful” statutes and regulations turn out to be unhelpful because they substitute rigid rules for the application of local knowledge and on-scene judgment to unique circumstances.

Jeff Jarvis sees the cracks beginning to form.

Old TV channels have become an unnecessary layer of curation. It’s the shows we want, not the networks. Networks are and always have been meaningless brands. They provided services: distribution, promotion, monetization. But as in the rest of media — as with news publishers, book publishers, radio stations, book stores — those functions can now be taken away from the middlemen and done more efficiently elsewhere.

The problem for Cablevision is that the unraveling has to start at home. It can’t unbundle Glee and the World Series from Fox until it unbundles its huge packages of utterly unwanted channels that cable companies force us to pay for though we never watch them. Physician, heal theyself.

Of course, this unbundling will be painful for cable companies. They gather huge revenue selling those bundles to trapped customers who have no choice but to pay for Fuse if they want Food. It won’t be an easy transition. But once choice arrives, we will demand our freedom from bundles.

And this unbundling will be quite painful — no, fatal — for many channels. No longer subsidized by being sold with Food, Fuse may die.

David Friedman understands the dialectic.

When I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, a very long time ago, it was common for undergraduate acquaintances to have, and talk about having, a shrink—a psychoanalyst. I never saw much evidence that psychoanalysis was improving their psyches to any significant degree, which led me to suspect that the real function of the shrink was to make the patient feel better, and perhaps more important, by paying attention to him or her. A friend who was getting his doctorate in psychology asked one of his professors what the evidence was that psychoanalysis worked, read the articles the professor suggested, and concluded that the evidence was that it didn’t; I take that as at least mild support for my interpretation of the role of the shrink.

Read it.

A reminder that you can find good stuff in Wikipedia if you look hard enough.

Read it.

Read it.

Whenever I speak with professors of philosophy, I am often surprised by how many of them embrace a Platonic rationalism in their thinking, particularly in moral philosophy. What I mean by that is that they assume that all of morality must rest on an intuition of a cosmic order of goodness or badness, right or wrong, so that moral thinking is like mathematical thinking in being concerned with grasping some eternal patterns of universal and eternal truth.

For many philosophers, this Platonic conception of morality is so strong that they cannot even comprehend how morality could be understood as rooted in the empirical reality of human nature, because for them moral philosophy is not an empirical study at all, but rather a purely normative study, and the standards of normativity transcend any empirical reality of human experience. One can see this in their method of thinking, which relies heavily on thought experiments based on purely imaginary scenarios beyond anything we could know by ordinary experience or historical study. John Rawls’ conception of the “original position” is one example of this.

As a political scientist who studies the history of political philosophy and the application of Darwinian science to political philosophy, I tend to think of moral and political order as arising from human history, and I use Darwinian science to illuminate that history as part of human evolutionary history. This sets me against those moral philosophers who assume that moral order–the normative order–must transcend human history as being “merely empirical.” I find this scorn for the empirical reality of human history and the striving for a transcendent world of utopian normativity to be strange.

So work your brain a little. I will do you no harm.

Megan McArdle lays it all out.

Wisdom. Attend.

Read it.

Next to zombies, Nazis are the easiest, most guilt-free targets you can ask for.

Read it.

The more emphasis you place on finding work you love, the more unhappy you become when you don’t love every minute of the work you have.

I hate passionate people. Passionate people are surrendering control over what they do to impulse and emotion. Such people are less than human.

I especially hate employers who want their subordinates to be ‘passionate’. That’s like employing convicted felons; sure, it might work out, but it has a lot of potential to end Very Badly.

I prefer being actionate myself. Actionate people get results; passionate people merely suffer entertainingly.

Read it.

I wonder how soon some hacker will change it from ‘Blink Now’ to ‘Drink Now’.

Perhaps we ought to establish some sort of prize….

Freeberg fisks a liberal cliché.

If the sacrifice means everything and the effect of the gift means nothing, I’ll tell you where this puts us. It means: Helping people is not about helping people. Helping people, instead, is about bragging rights. That, and nothing else. Hey, look at me…I have no money, because I gave it all away…to…well, I dunno, and who cares about that. Maybe that bum will buy himself his first hot meal in over a week, or maybe he’ll blow it on hooch. Who cares? He’s got all my money. I’m broke and virtuous, that’s all that matters.

Steve Sailer points out that most of our Emperor class are buck naked.

What we really need is an in-depth analysis of the systematic causes of anti-empirical bias in elite discourse.

The first is the professional deformation that journalists and fictional storytellers experience in their hunt for non-boring Man Bites Dog stories.You make more money coming up with interesting stories about anomalies than for pointing out the same old same old.

The second is the Platonic Temptation among intellectuals to think only in terms of absolute categories: e.g., Vedantam projects his own bias against thinking probabilistically when he claims, without citing any evidence, that there are “Those who would explicitly link all Muslims with terrorism…”

The third is The Smartest Guy in the Room Syndrome: the presumption that the more moving parts and unlikely assumptions in your theory, the smarter you must be to hold it all together in your head, so, therefore, you win.

The Other McCain does a beat-down.

The problem is that Frank Rich doesn’t understand economics any better than the president does. Neither being a film critic nor attending Harvard Law requires any knowledge of economics. For reasons of pure partisan politics, Democrats have spent nearly a decade screaming “tax cuts for the rich” as an indictment of the Bush policy, without once bothering to ask themselves whether ”tax cuts for the rich” was actually a bad idea, in macroeconomic terms.

It’s just a matter of having the right “message.” And never mind whether the policies actually work, or whether your “message” is actually true.

Charles Murray is always worth reading.

Why are the members of the New Elite feeling so put upon? They didn’t object back in 1991, when Robert Reich said we had a new class of symbolic analysts in his book “The Work of Nations.” They didn’t raise a fuss in 2000 when David Brooks took an anthropologist’s eye to their exotic tribe and labeled them bourgeois bohemians in “Bobos in Paradise.” And they were surely pleased when Richard Florida celebrated their wonderfulness in his 2002 work, “The Rise of the Creative Class.”

That a New Elite has emerged over the past 30 years is not really controversial. That its members differ from former elites is not controversial. What sets the tea party apart from other observers of the New Elite is its hostility, rooted in the charge that elites are isolated from mainstream America and ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans.

Far from spending their college years in a meritocratic melting pot, the New Elite spend school with people who are mostly just like them — which might not be so bad, except that so many of them have been ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth and have never been outside the bubble of privilege. Few of them grew up in the small cities, towns or rural areas where more than a third of all Americans still live.

When the New Elite get around to marrying, they don’t marry just anybody. One of the funniest and most bitingly accurate parts of “Bobos in Paradise” was Brooks’s analysis of the New York Times’s wedding announcements. Go back to 1960, and the page was filled with brides and grooms who grew up wealthy but whose educations and occupations did not offer much indication that they were going to set the world on fire. Look at the page today, and it is studded with the mergers of fabulous résumés.

The more efficiently a society identifies the most able young people of both sexes, sends them to the best colleges, unleashes them into an economy that is tailor-made for people with their abilities and lets proximity take its course, the sooner a New Elite — the “cognitive elite” that Herrnstein and I described — becomes a class unto itself. It is by no means a closed club, as Barack Obama’s example proves. But the credentials for admission are increasingly held by the children of those who are already members. An elite that passes only money to the next generation is evanescent (“Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” as the adage has it). An elite that also passes on ability is more tenacious, and the chasm between it and the rest of society widens.

There so many quintessentially American things that few members of the New Elite have experienced. They probably haven’t ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club or Rotary Club, or lived for at least a year in a small town (college doesn’t count) or in an urban neighborhood in which most of their neighbors did not have college degrees (gentrifying neighborhoods don’t count). They are unlikely to have spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line (graduate school doesn’t count) or to have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian. They are unlikely to have even visited a factory floor, let alone worked on one.

Read it.

Kenneth Anderson points out some common sense.

So, I have been strongly identified with, and have been robustly urging, that one possible ground justifying the use of drone warfare and targeted killing, as well as setting rules for its conduct, is the international law of self defense.  I maintain, and certainly continue to maintain, that there are circumstances in which the use of targeted killing can and as a proper legal description should be understood to be the use of force as a lawful act of self defense even though it takes place outside of an armed conflict, and even though that use itself does not create an armed conflict.  It seems to me, before as now, crucial to be clear of the existence of this category of the use of force as a lawful possibility for the United States, particularly looking down the road to conditions and situations that do not implicate the current struggle with Al Qaeda, has nothing to do with 9/11, is not covered by the AUMF — a new terrorist group with different terrorist aims, for example, emerging in Latin America or somewhere in Asia twenty-five years from now, and having no connection to any of today’s issues.

I still think that is a perfectly good way to see the use of force.  The new groups present a threat; they present a threat in a place where the armed conflict is not actually underway with respect to them; the US targets them as self-defense in the absence of an armed conflict.  Alternatively, however, if you think either that the people you are targeting are part of the armed conflict to start with because they are linked sufficiently to AQ and the authors of 9/11, or even more directly because they are AQ or affiliates fleeing Pakistan or Afghanistan in search of new safe havens, then the case for viewing this as simply the continuation of the existing non-international armed conflict is also highly plausible.

Read it.

Unfortunately, fax machines refuse to die.

Freeberg takes a look at credentialism and the Crustian snottiness it generates.

Lots of people find themselves in college not because they particularly care about what they can learn there, but because it’s a hoop through which they’re expected to jump.

Our over-educated set has this bad reputation of not being able to handle criticism. There’s a reason this bad rep is there. It has been earned. Let’s face it: A lot of the appeal of following an established process, is that if it earns criticism the criticism has to be routed to someone else. It’s easy to get hooked on this. And a lot of people are graduating from higher ed curricula with massive, incurable, lifetime addictions.

I’m sure that makes a lot of sense if you have a worldview of “Everything I Ever Needed To Know About Life I Learned In College.” And some people do, I know. But here’s the shocker: That does not make you an educated person. It actually makes you pretty shallow, because real life has a lot to teach us before we reach college, and even more to teach us after we graduate.