Read it.

And you think you’ve got problems.

Freeberg nails it.

We confuse a sense of true accomplishment with a feeling of self worth, and make the mistake of thinking the little brats can have the latter without going through the trouble of earning the former.

Read it.

When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, one of the first thoughts of many was that it was an ultra-right winger who did. Turned out to be a Karl Marx fan.

When Congresswoman Giffords was shot, immediately the media wanted to discuss heated rhetoric and the tea parties. Turned out the shooter is a Karl Marx fan.

Prior to Ronald Reagan’s attempted assassination, many lefties were very vocal that they hoped he’d be assassinated or die because of his age because he’d otherwise start a nuclear war with the Soviets.

When Hinckley attempted to assassinate Reagan, there was no discussion the media about left-wing rhetoric or attempts to blame the left.

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One topic that we’ve been asked about by several people is the issue of superpowered minors, whether acting as superheroes or supervillains.  There are many examples, such as the Teen Titans, young mutants like Kitty Pryde, and Spider-Man (in his younger days). This post, the first in a series, is about the minors themselves and their criminal liability.  Future posts will cover torts and contracts.  The legal issues involving their parents, guardians (like Bruce Wayne), and school teachers (like Professor X) will also be addressed in future installments.

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In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.

Africans call these folks the ‘waBenzi’, and have been dealing with them a long time.

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We might say that the philosopher and the mother have the same task: to find order in the world, one through reason and the other through beauty. Nor are we allowed to privilege one approach over the other, since both are necessary. But the philosopher has this advantage: since he deals in abstract thought, his errors may lie hidden for centuries; the mother deals in the real world, and her errors become apparent all too quickly. The mistakes of the philosopher get a mild critique; the mistakes of the mother get therapy. The mother may nag because the world nags back at her.

Read it.

How much withholding does Superman pay? Will Bruce Wayne be means-tested?

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Alert and pro-active passengers, not TSA fondling your privates, is what we need for airline security.

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You know you want to.

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To commit genocide, it is not always necessary to perpetrate acts of violence, or indeed murder. There are many definitions of genocide, all equally effective, albeit not all as speedy as the ones chosen in Rwanda.

Bearing the points above in mind I invite you to consider where we, the native peoples of Europe have been brought to, in particular over the 65 years since the guns fell silent at the end of a war which our grandfathers were told they were fighting in order to save the future for their children.

Far from saving the future for their children, I would suggest to you that, since World War II, conditions of life have been introduced by those who hold power over us which are calculated to bring about the destruction, at the very least in part, of those very children, the native people of Europe. Meanwhile measures have been introduced intended to significantly reduce the number of Native European births.

Megan McCardle spanks a tool of the Crust.

This is to me a rather surprising characterization, as I read the same post, and was not blown away by its irrefutable factual basis. It’s Garrett Epps’ opinion.  An informed opinion to which he is perfectly entitled, but certainly not something that we can characterize as “stating plainly what is true” in the journalistic sense.  It’s more like what my evangelical friends mean when they talk about sharing the truth of Christ’s death for our salvation.  Of course, they may well be right.  But I still maintain that the Washington Post’s front page should not treat this as an established fact.

A reminder for those who might be wondering: Just because someone is a lawyer, or even a law professor, or even a ‘constitutional scholar’, doesn’t mean that such a person knows more about the Constitution than you do; it merely means that he (or she) knows more about what other people think the Constitution is than you do. That’s what ‘scholar’ means.

The Constitution says what it says, and what it says is a matter of fact. What the Constitution means when it says what it says, is a matter of opinion, and anyone who maintains that the Constitution means anything other than what it plainly says, has the burden of proof that their opinion is superior to anyone else’s. And that’s the plain truth.

Freeberg nails it once again.

It’s just common sense. Someone’s trying to build something, you help them or get out of the way. Someone’s trying to destroy something, you move to stop them. If something works well, you keep on doing it, and if it’s been given a few shots and has never panned out then you shelve it.

The reason this looks so much more complicated than it really is, is that it’s hard to demonstrate the true nature of something without contrasting it with something else. And when you place conservatism alongside liberalism, liberalism tends to want to talk about some things and not other things. There are many examples of what I’m talking about but I’ll just stick with “working families” as the best one. When liberals use this term, they don’t want you to take it literally, like “working families should keep more of their money” — you’re supposed to implicitly understand it means “people who make less than some amount, whether they work or not.”

Which ties in with my contention that what they actually mean is ‘working class families’, i.e. people who don’t have access to the paper-pushing that constitutes employment for the Crust.

So you translate “working families keep more of their money” to mean “working families who make more than half a million a year, getting a tax cut” and of course while this logically qualifies, it is no longer within the class that the liberal is really trying to describe.

This makes it tough to define liberalism, which poses some challenges in defining conservatism. The biggest obstacle to this is encountered when the liberal is actually engaged; they think their cause is noble, and so if honesty would reverse course on their progress even a little tiny bit, I’ve found a lot of them will stoop to deception without a moment’s conscious thought. At the very least, they’ll change the subject, on a macro- or a micro-level.

Therefore, I submit all significant conservative/liberal dust-ups fall into this pattern: The liberal wants a certain thing done, because there is a “good” class of people and a “bad” class of people, and the solution should work for the good people and against the bad people. The conservative is left stammering something equivalent to “What in…how in blazes is that supposed to solve the prob-a-luhm???” For daring to utter so much as a peep of protest against the solution the liberal has figured out is obviously the right way to go, the liberal calls the conservative stupid.

Joel Kotkin is always worth reading.

The contemporary city-state has flourished primarily in two regions: the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia. The development of Hong Kong and Singapore provided a critical stage for Southeast Asia, which has been home to the world’s the greatest economic expansion. Hong Kong, now a quasi-independent part of China, competes with London’s West End as the world’s most expensive office market. By one account, it is experiencing the fastest growth in rents of major office markets in the past year. Once known for their poverty and destitution, these Asian city-states now boast incomes comparable to many European and North American cities.

The Persian (or, as some like to call it, Arabian) Gulf constitutes the other hot bed for 21st Century city-states. Over the past decade, a string of once obscure cities from Dubai and Abu Dhabi to Qatar and Bahrain have risen to positions of global significance. Qatar, a tiny emirate with roughly 1.7 million people, will host the 2022 World Cup–an announcement that surprised nearly everyone. Abu Dhabi, a desert metropolis of some 2 million people, is undergoing the largest cultural development project on the planet, financed by the emirate’s huge oil wealth. This includes three massive museums: an outpost of the Louvre, a branch of the Guggenheim 12 times the size of the New York original, and a museum on maritime history.

Read it.

Even in the midst of his relentless narcissism, Eric S Raymond more often than not writes things worth reading; which, I suppose, is why people put up with him. And he always writes very well — this is one such piece, most interesting because we all exhibit haterboy tendencies to a greater or lesser degree. (I’m claiming Embittered Old Fart for myself, of course.)

Read it.

A fascinating discussion. He nails the Brits square on.

Now, I am no expert on the British Constitution, but if the British government is a true reflection of that constitution, then it is merely a pure democracy with a vestigial monarchy. Parliamentary supremacy is near total. My English friends will insist that the queen retains some real powers, but since their constitution can be changed by a simple act of Parliament, the actual exercise of any royal power is always subject, in practice, to the approval of Parliament, which means that any acts of the “sovereign” are really acts of Parliament, or at least acts to which Parliament chooses to raise no objection.

Although America is considered a young country, it is actually the oldest regime in the world. Some might think that honor goes to Britain, but the many constitutional “reforms,” notably the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884, have changed that government from a mixed constitution to a nearly pure democracy.

And the Americans.

Other amendments that damaged the constitution were the Sixteenth and the Seventeenth, both passed in 1913. That was a particularly bad year for the Republic, since it also saw the establishment of the Federal Reserve System. The Sixteenth Amendment established the income tax, which made the federal government the largest funding source. It is not an exaggeration to say that federalism died with this amendment, since power will always flow to the money. Cities and states were all too happy to kick problems upstairs to Washington, since the feds had the funds. When Joe Biden ran for Vice-President, he boasted that he had put “11,000 cops on the beat.” His claim is likely true, but it is odd for a senator to boast that he had done the job of a city councilman.

The number of congressmen was fixed by law in 1911 at 435. This was at a time when the population was 92 million, or less than one-third of what it is today. Each congressman purports to represent the wishes of 713,000 of his countrymen. That’s an awful lot of wishes. It’s also an awful lot of money; districts that large in an electoral system require huge campaign funds. The average winning campaign in 2008 cost $1.4 million. This means that a congressman who wishes to keep his job must raise $1,900 for every one of the 730 days he is in office. Sundays, Christmas, Easter and holidays included; there is no rest from fund-raising. But there is a lot of help. The sources for that kind of money are limited, but they are extremely eager to lend a hand, and all they ask in return is, well, a decent return on their money. Who can blame them? Under such circumstances, the “people’s house” must exclude the people; it is not that the congressman isn’t willing to listen to all, but he must listen to the people who have paid for the privilege.

Read it.

Over the past few years, the raging debate in economic development has been over whether cities should be cool or uncool. Should cities pursue “the creative economy” by going after arts, culture, creative research & development, and innovation? Or should they focus on the bread-and-butter economy: hard infrastructure, traditional industries like manufacturing, and blue-collar jobs?

Usually a raging debate is an indication that the wrong question is being asked, and that’s the case here. The question is not whether cities must be cool or uncool in order to prosper. Clearly, there are some cities in each camp that prosper, and some cities in each camp that do not. The question is deeper: In both cool and uncool cities, what is the underlying nature of the economy? Does the city simply import money from other places, or does it export goods and services to other places? Because it is this distinction – not cool or uncool – that serves as the dividing line between prosperity that is real and prosperity that is illusory.

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Every supervillain or supervillain organization worth its salt needs a secret lair, and a location outside the jurisdiction of any government would be ideal. The legal benefits are numerous: no pesky employment laws or civil rights for henchmen, no local police, no taxes.  But in the age of air travel and GPS is there anywhere left for a supervillain to set up shop? Here we consider three possibilities: unclaimed land, the high seas, and outer space.

One of the coolest aspects of being a supervillain is that you get Minions and Henchmen. I’ve always wanted Minions and Henchmen, but alas my income has never been in that range; presumably they don’t work for free.

Where to they find these guys? Is there a Minion & Henchmen Employment Agency somewhere? Look at The Incredibles — Syndrome has at least a couple of battalions of guys in uniform, not counting the scientists and assembly line workers needed to create his machines, plus administrative staff. And Underminer didn’t build that huge drilling machinein his garage.

And how doe the doctrine of respondeat superior work when you’re laying waste to a city? I worry about these things.

Read it.

Probate law is just one aspect of the law affected by death and resurrection. Criminal law and contract law are also implicated.

Read it.

The superpowers of many comic book heroes and villains are often in a state of flux.  Powers can be gained, lost, used up, given away, abandoned, shared, and stolen, which sounds a lot like the attributes of property.  Comic book characters even speak of powers as though they were possessions.  Here we consider whether superpowers should be treated as personal property and the legal consequences of that view.

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Superheros and supervillians too numerous to count have, for various reasons, been killed, lost, or otherwise presumed dead, only to come back at a convenient date. It’s gotten a little silly at times.

Read it.

Is being immortal illegal?

Probably not as such, but living longer than the standard three-score and ten, as many superheros in both major multiverses are wont to do, does create some interesting legal issues.

Grant McCracken has some interesting observations.

The old model of retail says, in effect, “you come to us.”  You, the buyer, must stop what you are doing and come to the mall, the high street, the retail outlet.  The trip there is time consuming.  Parking is almost always a high stress exercise.  The place is crowded.  The choices too numerous.  The undertaking mostly joyless.

How better it is to visit Amazon.com and make the purchase in our “work flow.”  Amazon then takes care of virtually every thing else, and the package stacks, quite literally, on our door step.  It’s ready when we are.  Not the other way round.

This spells the end of retail as we know it.  We might use a traditional model and say this represents the “disintermediation” of the buying process and the elimination of the middle of the chain.  And this much is exactly what is happening.  But I think the deeper, cultural motive here, is the wish to respond to the dynamism and sheer press of our lives with a model of interaction that organizes time more intelligently.  To do everything called of us we are embracing another kind of disintermediation, dispensing with that to-do list stop and go model for something more fluid and just-in-time.  Thus does “time management” gives way to “improv.”  Thus does planning gives way to something closer to an instantaneous “sense and respond” model.  Thus do we move in the direction of what Stuart Kauffman calls complex adaptive systems.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

Or consider the widely held view that global warming on the scale suggested by the IPCC reports—a few degrees C over about a century—would obviously be a catastrophe. It cannot be based on the idea that humans cannot live with somewhat higher temperatures, since humans already exist, indeed prosper, across a much wider temperature range. It cannot be based on the idea that increased temperature is inherently bad, since there are obviously lots of places that would be better suited to human habitation if a little warmer, including most of Canada, Alaska and Siberia. The world was not, after all, designed for our benefit, so there is no reason to believe that current climate is optimal for us. There has been a good deal of talk about higher sea levels, but most of it ignores the fact that the increase suggested by the various IPCC models is only a foot or so—much less than the usual difference between high tide and low.

Rapid climate change is presumptively undesirable, since our present way of doing things—what crops we grow where, where our housing is located and how well it is insulated—is optimized to present conditions. But over a hundred years, farmers will change crops several times over, a large fraction of the housing stock will be replaced or modified, we will change what we are doing for lots of reasons unrelated to climate change. Hence it is hard to argue any strong presumption that climate change at the rates suggested by current models is bad.

Yet discussions of the subject almost always take it for granted that it is not merely bad but catastrophically bad, worth bearing very large present costs to prevent. A clear case of status quo bias.

Why these people are considered ‘progressives’ rather than obviously rabid reactionaries has always puzzled me. Environmentalists the same way; there is no substantive difference between ‘conservationist’ and ‘conservative’.

Watch it.

Frank Zappa in a suit. Just seems wrong, somehow.

Read it.

Of course, anecdotes do not prove that a healthy socialization is not possible in a public school, and there are many success stories that establish the possibility. But the horror stories do seem to blunt the blanket criticisms of homeschooling. The real question that should be asked is not whether a child will be socialized but how the child will be socialized.

I have seen firsthand the sort of ‘socialization’ that goes on in American grade and high schools. Short of sending them to live with the Taliban, I can’t think of anything worse we could do to them. I am prepared to argue that our children are better off without it.

But maybe that’s just me.

It is, to be sure, efficient to divide children into age cohorts and to educate them as a group. Doing otherwise is virtually unimaginable and would require a return to something like the one room school house where children of various ages were educated together. When education is conducted on a large scale such an arrangement would be simply untenable. Yet, it seems almost unavoidable that educating children according to age cohort invariably socializes them to think of themselves as part of a certain group designated by age. That is, at best, a limited preparation for an adult world where one ought to be capable of dealing with people of a variety of ages.

Indeed. Welcome to the Industrial Age Factory School. You, child, are part of batch 1997-C. Wear it with pride; it will help if we need to do a recall later.

Read it.

Yeah, more of that religion stuff. Feel free to skip it if you’re in a hurry.

This isn’t actually about the post that I reference — although it’s a fine piece, and you ought to read it — but rather about the thought that it triggered in my own mind: The overwhelming majority of people have no clue what prayer is for or about for a Christian. (This also has resonance with a comment left on the blog a bit ago by Eric S. Raymond; Eric, for all his intelligence, can be a hell of a lazy and superficial thinker when he wants to be.)

Even in historically Christian countries, people look at the the formal nature of prayer and dismiss it as some primitive relic out of man’s barbarian past. ‘Yeah, we’re asking God for something. Like that’s going to do any good.’ And then they move on, without giving it any thought. A few might get a dim inkling of what’s going on: ‘Wait a minute! God knows what I want. Why do I have to go through the effort of actually asking?’ That’s a good question, but they rarely bother trying to find an answer — again, dismissing it as a primitive survival. But, if pursued, it’s really the start of a journey that will lead you to buried treasure.

The Christian God is omniscient; He knows everything, including (a) what you want, (b) what you need, and (c) what you lack (and those are three different things; don’t get them mixed up or you’ll regret it). Why are all these people wandering around telling us to ask Him for stuff, when He already knows? Even He pesters us to ask him for stuff, when the available evidence indicates that He’s probably going to ignore us; how does that help?

Well, bunkie, I’m here to tell you how it helps. Prayer isn’t aimed at God. It’s aimed at you.

That may sound strange, but bear with me. How many of you have had the experience of thinking you know something, and then being asked to explain it to somebody else, and quickly realizing that, hey, maybe you didn’t know it as well as you thought you did? I have, more times than I can count. (In fact, many people will tell you that the best way to learn something is to try to teach it to somebody else.) Again: How many of you have had the experience of describing a problem you’ve got to somebody else, and in the course of doing so, received a flash of insight that solves (or helps solve) the problem? Again, I have, more times than I can count. We even have a name for the Other Guy in that process: a ‘sounding board’.

And that’s the function of prayer. It articulates something that is just wandering around in your head like Caspar the Friendly Ghost, and makes it explicit. And once something is explicit, it’s a concrete thing that can be worked on, and with.

Prayer deals with two things: Where we are and where we want to be. Face it, nobody prays when sitting on a beach chair in St Tropez sipping on a margarita and waiting for José to bring the cracked crab for lunch.  Prayer indicates that you aren’t where in life you want to be. And nobody prays for something bad to happen; prayer indicates where in life you want to move to. Making those two things explicit in prayer focuses your mind on them, as teaching a subject or describing a problem does, and that puts your mind to work on it. And, as the classic phrase has it, knowing you’ve got a problem is the necessary first step in solving it.

Think about it. Kids pray for different things than adults, because their situations are different from those of adults. Men pray for different things than women, because their situations are different from those of women. Americans pray for different things than Australians, because their situations are different from those of Australians. Each individual has a unique situation and a unique goal, and prayer is a great method for focusing on those two core aspects of life.

Prayers are different from wishes, because they’re more realistic. We can wish for the moon — sometimes literally — without embarrassment: I wish I had super powers. I wish I were King of the World. I wish I had Bill Gates’ money and he was locked in Steve Jobs’ attic. It doesn’t matter. But nobody prays for that sort of thing, because we realize that, if God answers a prayer, it’s going to be something realistic.

Let’s try an exercise. If I were to ask you to pray (‘ask God’) for something, what would it be?

I guarantee that it would be important (you don’t bug God for trivialities), it would be realistic (this isn’t the genie in the lamp we’re talking to), and it would be a concrete indication of where in your life you would rather be other than right here. And that’s its value. It points out what your next priority in life needs to be. It gives you a hook on which to hang some serious thought. Why am I not happy where I am in life? Why do I think that this particular change will put me in a better place? And the most important thought of all: How can I get from here to there? You may think it’s impossible — probably so, otherwise you wouldn’t be praying about it, you’d be doing it. But what if it’s not impossible? What if it just seems impossible? Maybe if you set your mind to it, you’ll find a way? You can be pretty sure God isn’t going to give you what you’re asking for (has He ever?), but what He will do is help you find out how to get it for yourself. God is like a good coach or a good teacher: He’s not going to tell you the answer, but he’ll help you find it on your own, if you’re willing to get with the program.

And that’s the importance of prayer. Prayer doesn’t tell God anything He doesn’t already know; it tells you what you need to get to work on. It’s focuses your own mind on your most important unsolved problem. This is why Paul, in Thessalonians, says ‘Pray without ceasing’, because focus is an unnatural state, and we need to work on it All The Time.

Now, go focus on what you were praying about, and make your life a little better.

Read it.

The ‘publishing industry’, broadly defined, is changing in so many ways that it’s hard to keep track. This piece, from a site aimed at writers, has some interesting thoughts on the subject.

Read it.

Some supervillains (e.g., Gorilla Grodd, The Puppeteer) have the ability to control others through mental powers, hypno-rays, or the like.  But if they forced you to commit a crime, would you still be liable?  And would you have any claim against them?

Steve Sailer ponders the SWPL trendline.

You can tell by looking at parents’ fads in Los Angeles, which is a generation or more ahead of the rest of the country in terms of immigration. I’ve lived on-and-off in Los Angeles since the 1950s. My parents engaged in the same kind of discussion as this in 1972 when my mom wanted me to take French in high school and my father wanted me to take Spanish, which he argued, like Kristoff in 2010, was more practical.

I would endorse Spanish as the most reasonable choice for fulfilling a mandatory foreign language requirement, but I think English is becoming so globally dominant that we should probably reconsider whether we should have mandatory foreign language requirements at all. (If we should, then we ought to start them in elementary school, not after puberty when the language learning capability starts to shut down.)

I studied Latin and French in school and then German, Russian, and Greek in college. My most useful language has been Latin.

If any language is trendy with LA parents, it’s Chinese. For example, one of the public elementary schools that Davis Guggenheim, director of Waiting for “Superman,” drove his kid past in Venice to get to their private school has switched to Mandarin immersion and has recruited a much more fashionable set of children. I can’t recall knowing any any white liberal parents in LA looking for a Spanish immersion school.

Perhaps because it already exists in LA — it’s call the streets.

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Imagine a world with a strong China reshaping Asia; India confidently extending its reach from Africa to Indonesia; Islam spreading its influence; a Europe replete with crises of legitimacy; sovereign city-states holding wealth and driving innovation; and private mercenary armies, religious radicals and humanitarian bodies playing by their own rules as they compete for hearts, minds and wallets.

It sounds familiar today. But it was just as true slightly less than a millennium ago at the height of the Middle Ages.

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Who knew that being a superhero had so many legal pitfalls?

Bryan Caplan is always worth reading.

Political correctness isn’t just hypersensitivity; it’s hypersensitivity designed to place a permanent stamp on impressionable young minds.

Not so long ago, as Eugen Weber observes, most people were only dimly aware of what nation they “belonged” to.  They took little offense at insults to their country, its people, or their flag, because they just didn’t much identify with their country, its people, or their flag.  Then came the patriots, descending upon their nations’ schools like locusts.  They taught children a litany of bizarre nonsense.  They urged them to love millions of complete strangers who happened to live inside a Magic Line (a.k.a. “the border”), and loathe those who snickered during the Pledge of Allegiance or  improperly folded the flag.

Well, almost always.

Read it.

Guess how much time the Archbishop of Canterbury actually spends in Canterbury.

Go ahead, guess.

Hint: It’s more time than the Patriarch of Antioch spends in Antioch.

Mencius Moldbug limns the difference between Then and Now.

Andrew Cove is not afraid to ask the Hard Questions.

Read it. And watch the video.

Read it.

We can make our own Top Ten list of presidents, but let’s start at the bottom, since we live in an upside-down world.  Personally, I don’t think Obama is the worst president in history.  So far, he’s about average, in terms of badness.  In choosing the worst, there are many good candidates, but I vote for Woodrow Wilson.  Betrayer of the Jefferson-Jackson-Bryan tradition in the Democratic Party.  Enemy of racial equality.  Opponent of woman suffrage.  Architect of centralized government.  Bellhop of Wall Street.  Father of the Federal Reserve.  Enthusiast of World War I.  Violator of civil liberties.  Champion of the League of Nations.  Mentor of Franklin Roosevelt.  The damage he did to the nation and the world was immense.

The Other McCain looks at the ‘media’.

During the recent midterm congressional campaign, many Republican candidates were quite nearly ignored by local media. In fact, if you had been reading local newspapers in some key competitive districts, you’d have scarcely known there was an election coming up — much less that the incumbent Democrat was locked in a fight for his political life.

And this kind of non-coverage continued until the folks picked up their paper the Wednesday morning after Election Day and saw — for the first time in a front-page headline — the name of the previously ignored Republican who’d just gotten elected to Congress.

Arnold Kling looks at education.

There is a term that Daniel Klein alerted me to called “white hat bias.” What it means is that findings that favor a popular political viewpoint will be published, while those that contradict that viewpoint will tend to be discarded. So many people have a vested interest in believing that teachers make a difference that one has to be very wary of white hat bias in studies that purport to show such differences.

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Intriguingly, across the world the main social groups which practice polygyny do not consume alcohol. We investigate whether there is a correlation between alcohol consumption and polygynous/monogamous arrangements, both over time and across cultures. Historically, we find a correlation between the shift from polygyny to monogamy and the growth of alcohol consumption. Cross-culturally we also find that monogamous societies consume more alcohol than polygynous societies in the preindustrial world. We provide a series of possible explanations to explain the positive correlation between monogamy and alcohol consumption over time and across societies.

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

Read it.

I. In the Spiderman origin story, what is Peter Parker’s liability for letting the armed robber run past him, ultimately leading to his Uncle Ben’s death?

Read it.

According to the Federal Aviation Administration, there are approximately 7,000 aircraft in the air over the continental US at any given time. That looks something like this. Congress has claimed sovereignty over U.S. airspace and has given authority to the Administrator of the FAA to “develop plans and policy for the use of the navigable airspace and assign by regulation or order the use of the airspace necessary to ensure the safety of aircraft and the efficient use of airspace.” 49 U.S.C. § 40103.

Mencius Moldbug is back with us.

The chronic UR reader will be familiar with my own humble periodization of American history, arranged by constitutional singularity: USG 1, the Congressional Republic, 1774-89; USG 2, the Original Deal, 1789-1861; USG 3, the Old Deal, 1861-1933; USG 4, the New Deal, 1933-present.

Some of us are so daring as to hope we live to see a USG 5 – or at least, the last of USG 4. For this weird and conceited handful, what better recreation could there be but a study of the intellectual roots of the New Deal?

Special for Roy.

A Poem By Yochnan Lavie

We’re All Multicultural Here … as long as it’s funny.

Read it.

Some superheroes like Batman and Iron Man are independently wealthy.  Some, like Wolverine, seem content with a fairly rough and tumble lifestyle.  But what about your everyday, working superheroes, the ones that have to take jobs on the side to make ends meet?  Some, like Spiderman, may work a normal job held by their alter egos.  Sometimes, though, superheroes take jobs that explicitly require the use of their powers.  For example, in one alternate continuity, Colossus worked as a construction worker, a job for which his super strength was no doubt very useful.

But these are comic book superheroes, which we know are prone to losing their powers for a variety of reasons.  What happens if a superpowered individual contracts around his or her powers and then loses them? Or what if Metropolis is attacked by a supervillain and our hero is called away to deal with it? The answer depends on whether the promised work is now impossible to perform.

Read it.

But the interesting question is, where did the Port Authority go? And why?

Was it because they needed less space than an entire Manhattan city block (2.9 million square feet)?

Or was it that they needed more?

Steve Sailer waxes sarcastic.

Jay Matthews delivers breathtaking news in the Washington Post: acceptance rates to get into Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, perhaps the hardest public science school in the country (average exiting SAT score of 2220 out of 2400)….

So,  Asians first, whites second, Hispanics third, blacks fourth. What an astonishing result! Who has ever seen that rank ordering before in any competition involving test scores and grades? It’s an anomaly!

Read it.

One of the most frequent questions this blog has generated, both in comments and in emails, is “What about Superman’s immigration status?”

And how about Hawkman? Not to mention Thor.

Read it.

An initial study involved 80 undergrads spending five minutes thinking about either their fifteenth century ancestors, their great-grandparents or a recent shopping trip. Afterwards, those students in the two ancestor conditions were more confident about their likely performance in future exams, an effect that seemed to be mediated by their feeling more in control of their lives.

Three further studies showed that thinking or writing about their recent or distant ancestors led students to actually perform better on a range of intelligence tests, including verbal and spatial tasks (in one test, students who thought about their distant ancestors scored an average of 14 out of 16, compared with an average of 10 out of 16 among controls). The ancestor benefit was mediated partly by students attempting more answers – what the researchers called having a ‘promotion orientation’.

Sometimes the old ways are best.