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Raining reality on the comic book parade.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, takes a look.

Among innumeracy’s great heroes must be reckoned Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Sir Winston. Shown a column of figures that included decimal points, His Lordship grumbled, “I never could make out what those damn dots meant.” Since Lord Randolph was Chancellor of the Exchequer (i.e., Treasury Secretary) at the time, this may help explain Britain’s subsequent decline.

The Other McCain kicks over a rock and — surprise! — finds a ‘progressive’.

The Left really has no use for black people unless they stay on the plantation and work the fields.

Americans are belatedly realizing that Peter Brimelow nailed it when he defined “racist” as “someone who’s winning an argument with a liberal.”

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While activists in New York and D.C. kvetch about Walmart invading poor neighborhoods and providing cheap goods to low-income shoppers, activists in Boston are grumbling that Whole Foods is invading middle class neighborhoods and providing expensive goods to middle-income shoppers.

I’m sure that this question is just burning a hole in your mind.

The Other McCain does it so well.

Such preening moral narcissism, the pharasaical desire to strut one’s superior virtue like a peacock flaunting his tail, is the inescapable essence of liberalism. But you don’t need me to tell you that, when Thomas Sowell has written an entire book about it: The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.

One might describe the liberal’s typical pose as, “I have noble sentiments and virtuous opinions — admire me!” This is why they constantly accuse others of harboring malign motives (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) and why nothing so outrages a liberal as when you deny them the admiration they so desperately crave.

If you’ve ever gotten into an argument with a liberal, you recognize this holier-than-thou game for what it is. One minute you’re arguing about a specific incident (in this case, the charges against Julian Assange) and then next thing you know, the liberal starts lecturing you as if you were a third-grader, demanding that you accede to whatever point he’s pushing. He throws out a hypothetical case or employs some inapt analogy that he thinks will prove him right, and if you call him on that, he’ll take the argument off in some other direction. This is when you realize that the supposed subject of the argument is merely a pretext, and that the real point he’s trying to prove is actually quite simple: “I’m better than you.”

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What’s fascinating (and wonderful) to see today is how the changing marketplace means that the actual content creators are in control. This doesn’t mean the death of middlemen — not by a long shot. There’s still a huge role for middlemen to play — but it’s as enablers, not gatekeepers. In a world with enablers, the content creators are still the ones in control. The middlemen become supporting players. This is why I always find it funny when those who support the old system claim that they’re the ones “helping” creative types. But that’s clearly not the case. What they’re helping are the gatekeeper middlemen, who have done everything possible to pressure content creators into bad deals because they had no other choice. These days, thanks to the wider choices enabled by the internet, content creators are able to restack the pyramid and put themselves in control, with middlemen actually helping, rather than capturing all of the value.

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One question that has come up a number of times is what kind of business entity would be best for superhero organizations like the Avengers or the Justice League.

Yeah, that’s been on my mind a lot lately….

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Useful advice.

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This touches on the essential interface between the state and the individual.

To what extend is reproduction a ‘basic human right’? And to what extent does ‘society’, that complex next of relationships that allow human beings to live together advantageously, have a legitimate interest in regulating reproduction?

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Sarah Lacy is one of the better tech journalists around. This is somewhat long but condenses a lot of interesting information about what’s going on in tech in recent times.

But before we get to the specifics of the Facebook mafia, it bears noting that not all companies produce bona fide mafias. It’s more than just alums doing well. A true “mafia” is a collection of co-founders, early hires and top engineers who’ve been battle-tested together with an enthusiasm and financial resources to start many different ventures immediately. There’s also a communal sense of co-investing in and supporting one another, hence the idea of keeping it “in the family.” While plenty of smart entrepreneurs and angel investors came from or filtered through Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon and Microsoft, those gargantuan successes didn’t really create a mafia that catalyzed at a certain moment of time, resulting in an cluster of cool new stuff.

In fact, few big successful, lasting companies spin out mafias, because those companies grow to such a large size that the unique DNA of the culture gets watered down. And for financial reasons, insiders used to be tethered to the company until after its IPO. By then, they’d missed being in the middle of the next big startup wave. Instead mafias tend to fall out of companies that didn’t go as far as they could have. It creates a frustrated sense of still having something to accomplish, or as Peter Thiel said about the PayPal mafia, “You had a lot of smart, competitive people who all needed something to do.”

Read it.

There is no theoretical or factual argument for income redistribution that cannot be met by a superior theoretical or factual argument against it. In the end, the case for (somehow) reducing income inequality turns on an emotional appeal for “social justice,” that is, for reshaping the world in a way that pleases the pleader. As if the pleader — in his or her pure, misguided arrogance — has superior wisdom about how the world should be shaped.

In fact, “social justice” usually (but not always) is code for redistributing income, either directly (through the taxing and spending power of government) or indirectly (through the power of government to require favoritism toward certain groups of persons). Make no mistake, there is no justice in “social justice.” True justice consists of two things, and only two things: the enforcement of voluntary, mutual obligations; the punishment of wrongdoing.

Robert Samuelson speaks truth to power.

We are deluged with Ronald Reagan celebrations and retrospectives, but most are misleading. They omit Reagan’s singular domestic achievement and the wellspring of his popularity: the defeat of double-digit inflation. In 1979 and 1980, inflation averaged 13 percent; by 1984, it was 4 percent — and falling. Without subdued inflation, the economy would have remained a mess and Reagan might have lost his 1984 re-election bid. He certainly wouldn’t have won his 58.5 percent to 40.4 percent landslide.

Without Reagan, Volcker would have failed. But this story confounds the preferred narratives of both liberals and conservatives. The lesson liberals draw (and urge Obama to imitate) is that Reagan’s political success reflected his optimistic presidential stagecraft. It wasn’t policy, it was presentation. Wrong. Reagan earned his success the hard way — by backing policies that, though initially unpopular, served the nation’s long-term interests. That’s called leadership, a quality Obama has yet to demonstrate.

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I’ve decided that all of this child pornography hysteria has nothing to do with protecting teenaged girls who willingly take their clothes off for online and mobile phone audiences from damaged self esteem.  I’ve decided that all of this child pornography hysteria has to do with protecting the egos of old feminist battleaxes so past their prime that their wrinkled ugly faces and fat distorted bodies pale so greatly in comparison that no man with a penis would ever choose her over a ripe teenage girl at the peak of her beauty.

Arnold Kling looks at how things are shifting around.

Consider the following hypotheses.

1. The Great Depression and World War II ended the last vestiges of the Jeffersonian agricultural economy in America. The yeoman farmer disappears.

2. The current recession is accelerating a transition away from the industrial era in which efficiency requires ever-increasing scale along with tight worker discipline. The robotic human worker disappears.

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The parents of a dead Israeli man have launched a legal action in the hope that a court will let them use his frozen sperm so that they can have a grandchild.

I can’t see how anybody could have a problem with this.

And don’t get.

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Russia will from next autumn stop putting its clocks back in the winter, because it is causing people “stress and illness” according to Dmitry Medvedev.

You know it’s bad when Russians are more sensible than we are.

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Arianna came up with a great business model.  Create a place where liberals could tell each other how smart they were, where they could write blog posts without being paid, and where they could create a community of commenters who routinely attacked the evil Republicans…

and then sell out for mucho dinero.

Is this a great country, or what?

Read it.

I count libertarians as part of the right because libertarians’ anti-statist views are aligned with the views of the traditional (small-government) conservatives who are usually Republicans. Having said that, the results reported in “IQ and Politics” lead me to suspect that the right is smarter than the left, left-wing propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding. There is additional evidence for my view.

Those who self-identify as persons of the right are 15% more likely to qualify for membership in Mensa than those who self-identify as persons of the left. This result is plausible because it is consistent with the pronounced anti-government tendencies of the very-high-IQ members of the Triple Nine Society (see “IQ and Politics”).

Idealists (“liberals”) are bound to be less happy than realists (conservatives and libertarians) because idealists’ expectations about human accomplishments (aided by government) are higher than those of realists, and so idealists are doomed to disappointment.

If you are very intelligent — with an IQ that puts you in the top 2% of the population — you are most likely to be an INTJ, INTP, ENTJ, ENTP, or INFJ, in that order. Your politics will lean heavily toward libertarianism or small-government conservatism. You probably vote Republican most of the time because, even if you are not a card-carrying Republican, you are a staunch anti-Democrat. And you are a happy person because your expectations are not constantly defeated by reality.

Read it.

I enter into conversations with unsuspecting men sitting next to me on airplanes, on the subway and in coffee shops and give them a chance to share their innermost thoughts anonymously. My goal is to dig out the inner, unspoken perceptions that affect women every day in the workplace and at home.

The interesting thing is that I can’s see a man caring about such information regarding women.

Read it.

There’s nothing really new when it comes to guns.

Guns were the software of the 19th century; the most dynamic age of development was roughly 1870 to 1900, when the modern forms were perfected. Two primary operating systems emerged for handguns: the revolver, usually holding six cartridges and manipulated by the muscle energy of the hand, and the semiautomatic, harnessing the explosively released energy of the burning powder to cock and reload itself. Since then, design and engineering improvements have been not to lethality but to ease of maintenance and manufacture, or weight reduction. A Glock is “better” than a Luger because you don’t need a PhD to take it apart, nor a fleet of machinists to produce the myriad pins, levers, springs and chunks of steel that make it go bang. Moreover, you can lose a Glock in a flood and find it six months later in the mud, and it still will shoot perfectly, while the Luger would have become a nice paperweight.

In fact, the extended magazine actually vitiates the pistol’s usefulness as a weapon for most needs, legitimate or illegitimate. The magazine destroys the pistol’s essence; it is no longer concealable.

Stephen Hunter is author of the Bob Lee Swagger series of novels. I’ve read two of them, and they’re as good as anything Tom Clancy ever wrote. Highly recommended.

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An excellent idea. Put him in the next cell.

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I am not making this up.

I am tired of hearing about Egypt.

I don’t care what happens in, on, around, or to Egypt.

I DON’T GIVE A SHIT about Egypt.

There. I feel better now.

Read it.

Clint Eastwood talks to Jeff Dawson about race, euthanasia, politicians, capital punishment – and how he really feels about the ‘fascist’ role that made him famous.

Eastwood has no time for Lee’s gripes. “He was complaining when I did Bird [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker]. Why would a white guy be doing that? I was the only guy who made it, that’s why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else.” As for Flags of Our Fathers, he says, yes, there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima as a part of a munitions company, “but they didn’t raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn’t do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people’d go, ‘This guy’s lost his mind.’ I mean, it’s not accurate.”

There are actually echoes of Dirty Harry in Changeling, Eastwood says, and he’s not making any concessions to liberals: “I get a kick out of it because the judge convicts the killer to two years in solitary confinement, and then to be hanged. In 1928 they said: ‘You can spend two years thinking about it and then we’re going to kill you.’ Nowadays they’re sitting there worrying about how putting a needle in is a cruel and unusual punishment, the same needle you would have if you had a blood test.”

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After spending hundreds of millions to ensure they owned the party, Lefties and union members have got to be feeling just a little betrayed after the Democratic National Committee’s convention planners chose Charlotte, North Carolina—the least unionized state in the nation—as the site to hold the 2012 convention. While progressive activists’ heads are still spinning, you can bet that, if union bosses in Washington did not agree with the move, and with other “union” cities in the running (including such illustrious hotspots as Cleveland, Minneapolis, and St. Louis), Charlotte would not be having the convention. So, what’s the real reason Charlotte—a city without a single unionized hotel, as well as a union-free convention center—was chosen?

Perhaps it was just a matter of the Crustian nomenklatura not wishing to be inconvenienced by the same minions that it uses to inconvenience their opponents.

Mike Masnik takes a look at the implications of disintermediation.

In fact, that’s part of the reason why middlemen exist in so many areas. Asking for money is difficult, and asking for and handling the money is a function that many people just feel more comfortable handing off to a third party. Yet, after all of this, when the deal does go through, and you realize that it’s a direct connection between two people who are happy about how each came out of the transaction, people begin to realize it shouldn’t be awkward at all.

Of course, this is the crux of what a market economy is supposed to actually be about: transactions where all parties are better off post transaction, and happier for it. That may sound crass and businesslike, but if everyone’s better off, isn’t that a good thing?

Read it.

This is absolutely fascinating.

Megan McCardle casts her mind back.

“Food prepared in the home” consumes less than 10% of the average family budget; in 1950, that figure was almost 30%.  It shows in the cookbooks.  The Betty Crocker is full of economizing tips: ways to stretch ground beef by adding Wheaties; noodle and rice rings that artfully disguise the fact that there isn’t much protein to go around; “one egg” cakes praised for being economical.  This was not a handout for welfare recipients; it was expected that the average housewife would be anxiously counting the cost of the eggs and milk used in her baked goods, and looking for ways to stretch out even cheap cuts of meat at the end of the month.  Now, I’m sure there are still people in this country who worry about the price of adding an extra egg to their cakes–but they are not the average, or even close to the average.  Cooking is both much better, and much easier for those who choose to do it, than it was when my kitchen was built.  And the dishwasher knocks twenty or thirty minutes off the time cost of that cooking–not a small improvement.

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After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations. For example, if they know the population of a metropolitan area in a given country, they can estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people “agglomerate,” cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars. It doesn’t matter if the place is Manhattan or Manhattan, Kan.: the urban patterns remain the same. West isn’t shy about describing the magnitude of this accomplishment. “What we found are the constants that describe every city,” he says. “I can take these laws and make precise predictions about the number of violent crimes and the surface area of roads in a city in Japan with 200,000 people. I don’t know anything about this city or even where it is or its history, but I can tell you all about it. And the reason I can do that is because every city is really the same.” After a pause, as if reflecting on his hyperbole, West adds: “Look, we all know that every city is unique. That’s all we talk about when we talk about cities, those things that make New York different from L.A., or Tokyo different from Albuquerque. But focusing on those differences misses the point. Sure, there are differences, but different from what? We’ve found the what.”

Steve Sailer puts the Crust under a spotlight.

Presumably “HYPS” stands for “Harvard-Yale-Princeton-Stanford”, although Stanford isn’t technically an Ivy League school. I’m always astonished that MIT is frequently left out of groupings of “top tier” schools; my experience has been that they’re right up with the best.

Wisdom. Attend.

Tim Cavanaugh has some fun with the self-righteous.

In the grand ol’ tradition of “Libertarian reluctantly calls fire department,” all and sundry are having fun with the news that Ayn Rand received Social Security and (apparently) Medicare in her dotage.

But the Randicare brouhaha is completely opportunistic. This is all part of the game of holding libertarians to some standard you would never imagine imposing on a follower of mainstream politics. If a Democrat complains about a bad day at the DMV, nobody claims he deserves it because he wants the regulations that make the DMV inevitable. But let a libertarian send a letter through the U.S. Postal Service and he’s fricking Tartuffe. It’s a goofy game, but you can see why it’s so tempting to play, given that libertarians have such a stranglehold on foreign policy, drug prohibition, financial regulation, health care, and so many areas of public policy.

Jerry Pournelle draws some historical parallels.

I remember September 1970 — my ship was at Gitmo doing workups prior to deployment, which wasn’t scheduled for several months more. We woke up one morning to an announcement that, Surprise!, we were on our way to the Mediterranean. Those were interesting times. I don’t like interesting times.

Megan McArdle ponders the issue of the day.

I have had a hard time tearing myself away from CNN to write about business news, so I might as well write about the topic on everyone’s mind: when does rioting produce regime change?

Read it.

But don’t forget that we’re running out of oil. All the Smart People say so.

Charlie Stross tours a nuclear reactor in Scotland.

Unfortunately, it’s due to socialists like him that ‘nothing like this will be built again’, but Charlie is apparently too busy with life to connect the dots. Ah, well. Enjoy the tour.

Read it.

Ikea’s store layout is a psychological weapon used to confuse and disorientate shoppers into spending more, an expert claimed.

Alan Penn, director of the Virtual Reality Centre for the Built Environment at University College London, said visitors to the firm’s shops were so baffled by their surroundings that if they see something they like, they pick it up straightaway because it would be too hard to find it later.

I’ve only been in an Ikea once and I can testify that I was totally confused.

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The last publishers discontinued their participation in 2011.

The end of an era.

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The Left’s attempt to link the Tucson shootings to angry rhetoric (not theirs, of course) was stage one of a broader strategy–what both military men and political strategists refer to as preparing the battlefield. The movement to feign nonpartisanship at the State of the Union address by seating Republicans and Democrats together is another aspect of this stage. At the same time, the Left is moving on to stage two–an effort to cash in on battlefield preparation by attacking specific figures on the right and trying to shut down speech that the Left finds inconvenient.

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We have the techology.

The plan worked. Eikrem said he was able to drive away the wolves by playing the song “Overcome” by the American hard-rock band Creed. “They didn’t really get scared,” Walter said. “They just turned around and simply trotted away.”

Perhaps they figured that someone with such bad taste would surely taste bad.

Now if it would only work with those shits from Twilight….

Bryan Caplan looks underneath the covers.

My friend in the insurance industry once let me in on a little secret: De facto, though not de jure, virtually every big firm is also a health insurance company with an exclusive clientele: Its own labor force.  Once a firm is big enough, orthodox “health insurance companies” just charge the firm a fee equal to all its employees’ health care costs plus a handling fee.  Big firms aren’t buying insurance from insurance companies; they’re subcontracting their paperwork.

Read it.

An interesting article from the latest Atlantic Monthly highlights the emergence of a new plutocracy: global in scope, fabulously wealthy, ambitious, hard-working, and given to projects on a grand scale. The author, Chrystia Freeland, argues that members of this plutocracy are bound by class consciousness, and have transcended national identities, bound only by “interests” and “activities.”. In one telling passage, she quotes one of these new plutocrats as saying: “‘…we are engaged as global citizens in crosscutting commercial, political, and social matters of common concern. We are much less place-based than we used to be.’”

I’ve already posted about the Atlantic article, which takes a look at the increasingly globalized Crust and its activities. This is an interesting reaction.

Read it.

Read it.

It is one thing to look back with nostalgia and edifying memory to the place one came from.  It is entirely different to allow attachment to a past place to prevent someone from putting down roots where he is today. The communities we long for, if they are to be built, will be built and maintained by a mongrel horde. Not only is it important for us to put down roots, we need to help our neighbors do so as well. If we have to wait a fourth of our lives, or more, for full local citizenship, most collections of folk will never be communities.

I still consider myself a Hoosier, although I’ve lived in Texas significantly longer than I ever lived in Indiana (and I’ll probably still be here when I check out).

But psychologically, picking up and moving to Seattle or Orlando or Anchorage or DC would be an adventure (and I hate adventures); moving to some place in Indiana or Michigan or Illinois, on the other hand, would just be going back home. Ain’t sayin’ that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s a thing.

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This article is somewhat old but raises some interesting issues for those of us who read. You know who you are.

Stephen R. Covey, one of the most successful business authors of the last two decades, has moved e-book rights for two of his best-selling books from his print publisher, Simon & Schuster, a division of the CBS Corporation, to a digital publisher that will sell the e-books to Amazon.com for one year.

When I was at EDS, my manager gave a copy of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People to each member of his team, at his own expense.

Many authors and agents say that because the contracts for older books do not explicitly spell out electronic rights, they reside with the author. Big publishing houses argue that clauses like “in book form” or phrases that prohibit “competitive editions” preclude authors from publishing e-books through other parties.

Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Simon & Schuster, declined to comment directly on Mr. Covey’s moves, but said, “Our position is that electronic editions of our backlist titles belong in the Simon & Schuster catalog, and we intend to protect our interests in those publications.”

And that’s going to be a very interesting fight.

The skirmish over e-books is part of a larger multidimensional chess match being played among publishers, authors, agents and book retailers. The big publishing houses hate the uniform e-book price of $9.99 that Amazon and others have set for newer titles. Although the retailers are subsidizing that price, executives say they believe that such pricing harms the market for more expensive hardcovers, and some publishers have reacted by announcing they will delay the publication of certain e-books by several months after they are made available in hardcover.

Practically, e-books are the new mass market paperback, especially now that there are free  e-book reader apps for smartphones.

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With gaming threatening to unseat cinema and TV in terms of time and cash invested, this change from a top-down to a bottom-up development process isn’t just a curiosity, it’s a momentous change. The time has come when not only are the tools for creation available to the dedicated independent developer, but also the means of distribution and popularization. The heavy hitters in the industry will find themselves much more under threat soon from the proverbial two guys in a garage. Minecraft’s success may seem a lark born of big-budget backlash and social media, but pretty soon, that kind of success won’t be a lark, it’ll be a back door to a billion-dollar market.

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Keynes was no brilliant economist, if indeed he can be said to have been an economist at all.  He was instead a brilliant public intellectual who knew just enough economics to enable him to transform a decades- (centuries?-)old mistaken understanding of the economy held by business people into “the new economics.”

This mistaken understanding is an understandable result of being a businessperson: the greater is the demand for your product, the better is your business.  And the better is your business, the more workers you hire and the more of other inputs you buy – thus making your suppliers’ business prospects better, too.

It’s easy to be a Keynesian – most business people are, and swarms of pseudo-economists long before Keynes were saying largely the same thing that Keynes himself said in 1936.  It is, alas, far more difficult to be a real economist.

Freeberg nails it.

Observations: Every stupid thing Palin says is the stupidest thing she has ever said. Every wonderful speech Obama gives is the greatest speech Obama has ever given. Conclusion: People who love Obama and hate Palin are like that guy in “Memento”; they have absolutely no working long-term memory.

Charles Murray is always worth reading, and has a fondness for inconvenient truths.

Guess what. Amy Chua has really smart kids. They would be really smart if she had put them up for adoption at birth with the squishiest postmodern parents. They would not have turned out exactly the same under their softer tutelage, but they would probably be getting into Harvard and Princeton as well. Similarly, if Amy Chua had adopted two children at birth who turned out to have measured childhood IQs at the 20th percentile, she would have struggled to get them through high school, no matter how fiercely she battled for them.

Accepting both truths—parenting does matter, but genes constrain possibilities—seems peculiarly hard for some parents and almost every policy maker to accept.