The Other McCain pulls no punches.

The latest Census report is not good news for the Party of Baby-Killing and Barebacking.

This means that the odds of Democrats recapturing the House of Representatives before 2023 are roughly equal to the chances of Andrew Sullivan siring a baby with Ellen DeGeneres.

The future belongs to the fertile.

Read it.

Mitsubishi WD-60638At least two major superheroes, Batman and Ironman, are the alter egos of  billionaire “industrialists,” Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark respectively. Both are the at least titular heads of their respective corporate empires, Wayne Enterprises and Stark Industries. Both are major defense contractors, i.e. arms merchants. Wayne Enterprises is generally described as a multi-industry conglomerate with significant revenues in a number of unrelated businesses, while Stark Industries is primarily in the arms business, but both appear to derive a significant portion of their revenues from selling weaponry of all sorts.

This raises two interesting issues. First, how exactly do these companies get the money for these sorts of secret projects? And second, do our various heroes break any laws when they leave the country or provide this equipment to others?

Read it.

China’s state press and publishing body said such words were sullying the purity of the Chinese language.

I note without comment the fact that no government or publication that uses English has ever banned using foreign words because they were sullying the purity of the English language.

Read it.

In the real world comic book characters and their likenesses have been made into toys, video games, movies, television shows, lunchboxes, bed sheets, and innumerable other things.  All of these secondary uses are mediated through intellectual property rights, particularly copyright and trademark rights.  But if Superman were a real person, how might the situation be different?  Could just anyone slap his image or iconic S shield on a lunchbox?  What about uses that suggest that Superman endorses a product or service?  (“Try Metropolis Brewery Beer, the choice of the Man of Steel!”)  Or worse, what about revealing a superhero’s secret identity?

Charlie Stross demonstrates why he’s a best-selling author, and you’re not.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

Everything you need to know about Islam that the Crust are attempting to hide.

To learn about Islamic law, what we read must have these characteristics:

1.         It must be written by a Muslim.
2.         The author must be recognized within the Muslim community as an expert on Islamic law.
3.         The work must be intended for a Muslim audience.

This is not as difficult as it seems. Despite what Muslim spokesmen would like you to believe, it isn’t necessary to know Arabic, since four-fifths of the world’s Muslims don’t understand Arabic. Many authoritative books on Islamic law that are intended for a Muslim audience are written in English.

Read it.

Most of the time when property is damaged, the property owner has insurance that will pay to restore their property to approximately the state it was in before the loss occurred. But when Doomsday goes on a rampage of destruction across at least three states or the Joker blows up half of downtown Gotham, insurer’s aren’t actually going to want to pay for that, and there is reason to believe that under the terms of standard insurance contracts, they wouldn’t have to. The reason has to do with the way insurance policies are written, which is a matter of contract as much at it is a matter of law.

So the focus of this post is not whether supervillains can get insurance, but whether standard insurance policies will pay for damage that they cause.

Megan McArdle kicks over a rock.

So the latest talking point I’m seeing is that the individual mandate is no big deal–just a tax dodge like we’ve always had.  The government is raising taxes, and then giving a deduction of equal size to those who buy health insurance.  Why the fuss?

Well, for starters, this is not what they wrote in the law.  They called it a penalty.  Now they’re worried that maybe their Commerce Clause powers aren’t quite as great as they thought, suddenly it’s a tax.

Read it.

Square inch anthropology says, in effect, “look, we don’t claim to know everything about this culture, but we do have relative confidence in one or two things within it.  In this case: Cocktail culture and the Betty Page style.”  We may now make claims to knowledge without pretending any overarching knowledge or competence.

Read it.

But there’s more to civil rights than the Constitution.  Congress and the state legislatures have also passed laws that go beyond the constitutional minimums.  One of the most important of these is the Americans with Disabilities Act.  Could the ADA be applied to superpowers?  As is so often the case, the answer is mixed.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

I do hate Brussels sprouts, though.

Read it.

Many liberals reacted to the erosion of their brand by changing labels. They became self-identified “progressives.” Although this was a shrewd move, it has been undermined by the large-scale unpopularity of the policies served up by progressives the first time (in modern history) that they governed under that label.

The alternative to re-labeling is de-labeling. And, though most progressives seem willing to stick with the progressive label for a while longer, some nervous nellies have concluded that resisting labels – and hoping that conservatives somehow will be shamed into following suit – will better serve their interests.

Read it.

Remember Mystique impersonating the asshole Senator in the first X-Men movie.

Read it.

Wolverine is one of a number of comic book characters who is extremely difficult to kill. It has been theorized that it would take decapitation followed by immediate removal of his head from the vicinity of his body to effectively kill him. Similarly, though Superman has died, he can survive far, far more punishment than a standard homo sapiens sapiens.

Which raises the question: if it is impossible for a given action to kill a potential target, does it constitute a crime? And if so, which crime?

Megan McArdle is always worth reading.

Take the Endangered Species Act, which is supposed to protect species on private land.  But of course, if you find an endangered species, the thing to do is get rid of its habitat right away, because if anyone else finds your endangered species, you my substantially lose the use of your land.  If the government were paying for endangered species, on the other hand, people would be searching assiduously for snail darters and spotted owls.

If we only want things when we can stick other people with the bill, then we probably shouldn’t have most of those things.

Read it.

Comic book supervillains, like real world criminals, often form groups and work together to advance their nefarious schemes.  The Legion of Doom, the Brotherhood of (Evil) Mutants, and the Evil League of Evil are examples of organized supervillain teams.  With organization comes a price, however.  Participating in these groups makes their members more vulnerable to criminal prosecution and civil claims under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO (there are also similar state laws).  But before discussing RICO and its applicability to supervillain teams, let’s first consider why other theories of criminal liability may not be the best fit.

Speech to the House of Commons 1841.

Can you imagine a modern Congressman making a speech like this?

Can you even think of one that wouldn’t need to have it explained to him in simpler words?

Read it.

Rejection stings, but it’s exactly what Shen wants. He’s on a self-imposed, self-improvement plan to get rejected by a different person every day for a month – a quest to get over his fear of rejection.

It’s all part of the 30-Day Rejection Therapy Challenge – a real-life game created in September by a Canadian Web designer with an anxiety disorder. And it has become a cult phenomenon as the idea spreads through Facebook, Twitter, the Hacker News blog and other social media.

Adherents in New York, Washington, San Francisco, Denmark and Hungary are documenting their denials on Facebook and Twitter. Followers can either buy a deck of cards on the rejectiontherapy.com website with suggested ways to get denied – Invite someone you’ve never socialized with out to dinner, ask someone their political affiliation – or players can come up with ideas on their own.

I’m waiting for the first suicide that can be traced to this game. But that’s me.

Check it out.

Read it.

An acclaimed outdoorsman who wrote movingly about testing himself against nature is presumed to have died after a crocodile snatched him from his kayak while he led an American expedition from the source of the White Nile into the heart of Congo.

Think of it as evolution in action. The SWPL gene is a prime target for Natural Selection, that’s clear.

“He also had a fantastic social conscience,” he said, explaining that Coetzee ran kayak trips for underprivileged kids in Sudan. “He was one of those people that would look after others not only in a physical sense but also nurture them spiritually and mentally.”

Oh, yeah, that’s the first thing what occurs to me when I look for something to benefit underprivileged kids in the Sudan — kayak trips! It’s so obvious!

I’d like to see a shark get one, just to drive the point home. Or maybe a polar bear.

Read it.

However, once I got used to it and resigned myself, it was great. Even though I knew I had a worrying illness, I was happy as a pig in mud. I no longer had the arrogance of being frustrated with slow people, I abandoned many projects which reduced a lot of stress, I could enjoy films without knowing what would happen (my nickname before this used to be ‘comic book guy’ if you get the reference), and I became amazingly laid back and happy go lucky. I got on with people much better. I developed much more respect for one of my friends in particular who I always considered slow – it turned out he is much deeper than I thought, I just never had the patience to notice before. You could say I had more time to look around. The world just made more sense. The only negative, apart from struggling to perform at work, and having to write everything down, was that I no longer found sci-fi interesting – it just didn’t seem important. (I’m not joking, although it sounds like a cliché.)

Fortunately this person doesn’t appear to have been greedy and dishonest as well, otherwise the pressure to run for Congress would have been irresistible.

Read it.

The 1860 Census was the last time the federal government took a count of the South’s vast slave population. Several months later, in the summer of 1861, the United States Coast Survey—arguably the most important scientific agency in the nation at the time—issued two maps of slavery that drew on the Census data, the first of Virginia and the second of Southern states as a whole. Though many Americans knew that dependence on slave labor varied throughout the South, these maps uniquely captured the complexity of the institution and struck a chord with a public hungry for information about the rebellion.

Read it.

Science is about understanding the origins, nature, and behavior of the universe and all it contains; engineering is about solving problems by rearranging the stuff of the world to make new things. Conflating these separate objectives leads to uninformed opinions, which in turn can delay or misdirect management, effort, and resources.

In short: Engineers build useful stuff. Scientists don’t.

Russ Roberts makes some good points.

People argue that we should raise taxes on the rich because they have gained x% of the increase in income since 1980. There is no “they” there. The people who were in the top 1% today are not the same people who were there in 1980. Some of them are dead. Some dropped out of the top 1% because they made bad decisions or had bad luck. Some of the top 1% today were not there ten or twenty years ago. Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google. They were not in the top 1% in 1980. They were 7 years old. Their parents as far as I can tell were not in the top 1%. Now they’re both very wealthy because they created something that is gloriously pleasant in our lives. Thank you, gents. Some who were in the top 1% are still in the top 1% and received a lot of income and wealth by making great products are providing great services. Bill Belichick might be in that group. In 1980 he was an assistant coach for the New York Giants. He was probably very well paid. Now he makes a lot more as head coach of the New England Patriots. Congrats, Bill, on your commitment to excellence and your success. And some in the top 1% were there in 1980 and are still there because they feed at the great rent-seeking trough. Wall Street, please get a life like the rest of us where bad financial decisions have consequences.

Remember it.

Erick Erickson plays the cynic very well.

There are two immutable laws of Washington, D.C. To understand the tax compromise in the Senate, you must know the laws.

1. Politicians in leadership believe that if they make both the left and right angry they must have done something right; and,
2. If Democrats and Republicans come together in a compromise — no matter how bad that compromise may be — the media will herald the compromise and inevitably use the word “tone” in discussing it.

Then there is a corollary to the two rules: people who want a seat at the table with the politicians and media will turn into sycophants and tell you how delicious the compromise tastes.

Freeberg captures the whole program of the Crust in a few pithy words.

Doing crimes, doing time: The people who fuck around shouldn’t have to pay any penalty, and the people who help other people shouldn’t benefit.

Earning money: The people who fuck around shouldn’t have to pay any penalty, and the people who help other people shouldn’t benefit.

Paying taxes: The people who fuck around shouldn’t have to pay any penalty, and the people who help other people shouldn’t benefit.

And that sums up the ‘progressive’ agenda very nicely.

Freeberg spanks Trunk in an interesting way.

One of the major problems in the world is people who are so fanatical about tolerance and diversity that they seem congenitally incapable of MINDING THEIR OWN BUSINESS. Penelope Trunk is one such. Freeberg refuses to let her get away with it.

It all comes down to this — if your productivity & cheerful demeanor slip a notch or two because you were just reminded someone has a different belief from yours, then you are the problem. Just like the wedding guest who says “I’m not coming if X is coming” is the problem.

Indeed. Judging by her discussion, Trunk is Jewish; her whole tirade is just “What about me?” writ large, which matches her other writings: It’s the world’s job to bend itself to fit her interests and objectives (and personal peculiarities, of which there are many), and if it doesn’t, well, then, the world had better get with the program. And she completely misses what Christmas (among other social institutions) is all about.

You know what I hear when someone says “Merry Christmas”? Lots of things, chief among them the very same thing I hear when someone says “Welcome to Hooters sir!” I know I’m someplace where there aren’t any tightasses. I hear “Come, let us break bread together because we’re all here together, we’re all brothers and sisters; maybe we have some long-simmering dispute, but if we do, we’ll pick it up in January. Have a seat at our table, and leave your troubles on the doorstep!”

And you can’t say any better than that.

Read it.

Far be it from me to say good about anything connected with Harvard, but this interview has a lot of meat to it. I especially like Norquist’s take on the ‘rich people for higher taxes’ snowjob:

I’m all in favor of, you know, rich people wanting to contribute money to somebody else. One of the things that’s interesting is none of the rich liberals actually believes in government. Warren Buffett, who says he’s a big liberal who liked Obama, he has millions of dollars. If he thought any of the United States government spent money better than he does, he could make a contribution to the federal government. And he never does. He gives all his money to private charities, because he thinks he can spend his money better than the government can, but he wants everybody else to have higher taxes because he thinks the government can spend your money better than you can. This is not an endorsement of government. It’s an expression of contempt for you.

The Other McCain fill you in.

“Inequality” is not a synonym for injustice.

Not until we have grasped that concept, and eschewed the fallacy of thinking we can bring about an ideal condition of “fairness,” can we meaningfully discuss economic policy. Idiots who want to go chasing after egalitarian will-o’-th’-wisps are free to do so, but we must refuse their invitation to join them on The Great Social Justice Snipe Hunt.

Freeberg creates a new word.

A mental illness in which a patient is simply unable to accept a situation in which another thinking person possesses a commensurately durable command of the relevant facts, and has pursued some valid and competent thinking process to arrive at different ideas regarding what it all means or what should be done. Persons suffering from this disease leap instantly to the conclusion that if you disagree, you have to be stupid.

So the College-itis patient suffers from something worse than a lack of experience. He ends up suffering from an extreme lack of appreciation for its very significance (other than, of course, his own experience taking the class which is all-important). The sufferer has been programmed to accept the concept of negative knowledge: Just as a person’s opinion might be dismissed as ignorant if it is formed prematurely, with a scarcity of observed fact or opinion to back it up — and then that person could be labeled “stupid” and ejected from subsequent discussions as well — the same goes for a person who has managed to gain command of an uncontrolled abundance of knowledge, or knowledge outside the body of knowledge that is approved by the authorities — knowledge outside the syllabus. That person is to be labeled exactly the same way the ignorant person is to be labeled, with no recognized necessity for distinguishing between the two, now or forevermore.

Megan McArdle is always worth reading.

Having recently entered into homeownership, I am now in the unhappy state of having to advocate against my own interest. As someone whose freelance expenses make it worthwhile to itemize, I plan to take the mortgage interest tax deduction until they phase the damn thing out, or I pay off the house, whichever comes first.  But as an economics journalist, I retain my deep hatred for the thing.

The reason we have a mortgage interest tax deduction is that all interest used to be deductible, because way back when the income tax was invented, consumer credit wasn’t really much of a concept, so interest on loans was much more likely to be a business expense incurred in the acquisition of an income-producing asset, rather than a personal expense incurred in the acquisition of a 60-inch flat panel television with built-in Blu-ray player.

I remember being able to deduct my credit-card interest. It made being a Conspicuous Consumer a lot more bearable.

It was fairly obvious that, with the possible exception of the student loans, none of this debt had any connection to an income-producing asset.  So they pencilled out the deductibility of interest payments.  Then they realized what this would do to housing prices, and the mood of taxpayers who had just lost their largest deduction, and pencilled it right back in.

Freeberg reiterates a few inconvenient truths.

This has been exposed as a falsity the first time we cut tax rates and experienced increased tax income as a direct result. And then, we did that a few more times. I’ve yet to hear of it going the other way; we cut a tax rate, and aw darn the revenues fell because the rate was cut. Are there examples of this? I don’t see anyone offering any. That is why we have this notion of a “tax cut costs money” down as Item #7 on our list of things that give you away as a clueless dork.

So our usual leftists are irked by the idea of taxes being cut for the “wealthy,” and they like to see the taxes increased in those brackets. This is not new, and it may be legitimate to say in these post-French-Revolution times, this is a good definition for what that word “left” really means: Make some profit for yourself, and you shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. The more you’re taxed, the better.

There are rich liberals around, and I’m not just talking about Warren Buffet. Some liberals are richer than other liberals. How come we don’t have liberals grilling other wealthier liberals about mailing off extra dough to the IRS, until the glorious day comes that their tax liabilities are assessed at the level they should be?

I don’t understand why the average progressive mind becomes so agitated and unhinged about the slope of this taxation curve. Even if they are the direct beneficiaries of the associated services, this country has been drunk on deficit-spending for decades so it’s not like they’ll feel it when the rich are soaked-real-good. Is this nothing more than a middle-school-level “us versus them” thing? I just don’t understand it, the hatred.

Freeberg takes a look at the latest incarnation of the Nullification concept.

We have a lot of lavishly funded political movements lately — ObamaCare was one, but there are many others — that have something to do with a “deflowering” event. Say yes here, and it will never be possible to say no, ever again.

Read it.

Could it be that the insurance industry depends on the Death Tax to make about half of its product lines even halfway attractive. Could it be?

UPDATE: Megan McArdle goes into greater detail.

Read it.

The Hague Conventions of 1907 (Article 31) declared that if you happened to be able to catch a spy alive, you were supposed to give them a trial before executing them; however, nothing contained therein indicated that the trial had to be anything more than a field military tribunal. This tribunal could be limited to the issue of whether the person you caught was, in fact, guilty of the espionage in question. Of course, if you have to kill the spy to prevent ongoing espionage, well, them’s the breaks.

And there’s your jihadis and your Somali pirates. Dead men walking.

A “spy” is defined under the same conventions as one who “acting clandestinely or on false pretences, [] obtains or endeavours to obtain information in the zone of operations of a belligerent, with the intention of communicating it to the hostile party.” This, of course, is a textbook explanation of what Assange has done, during the course of paying Manning (and perhaps others) to illegally and clandestinely obtain information on America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and communicate them to any and all hostile parties with access to the Internet. And from all indication (based on his own words and promises) he intends to continue doing it for as long as he can escape prosecution for being a rapist. Therefore, if we can catch him alive, then I suppose he must be given a field tribunal of some sort – it’s not all bad, though, because that will give us the opportunity to kill him in a way less painless than a small-caliber round to the back of the head. Of course, I’d certainly never suggest torturing him to death – perish the thought. If the bastard runs, forcing us to kill him, well, they shoot horses, don’t they?

That sums up my position on the subject pretty well.

As a side note, I have been informed that some exceptionally ignorant people are referring to Pfc. Bradley Manning as a “whistleblower.” Folks, if Bradley Manning is a whistleblower, so was Aldrich Ames. The word “spy” has a meaning, it is applicable to an identifiable class of people (including both Ames and Manning) and it is an insult to “whistleblowers” to associate them with this filth. The willingness of some to use “whistleblower” as applied to Manning is just further evidence that to some people, anyone who harms America’s military can’t possibly be anything other than a hero.

Read it.

Be the first on your block….

Read it.

And, of course, these are THE RICH who need to be taxed more.

Read it.

We’ve been hearing about the science of Star Trek for years, but what about the engineering of Star Trek? Star Trek’s writers may pay precious little attention to scientific accuracy, but sadly, they pay even less attention to engineering. Science and engineering are two different, albeit related concepts, and Star Trek has successfully butchered them both, while claiming to champion them.

Every Federation starship has a chief engineer, right? And the chief engineer’s job is to keep everything running and solve problems, right? Right, but unfortunately, that’s about the only thing they get right.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

If I had a dollar for every time the Enterprise nearly blew up, I’d be a rich man.

Mike Masnik is somewhat disgruntled.

With all of the new security procedures we keep hearing about, it’s important for the government to keep convincing us that we’re under a very real immediate threat that could put us at risk at any moment. Along those lines, you may have heard over the weekend about how the FBI supposedly stopped a terrorism bomb plot in Portland, Oregon. Except it appears more and more people are scratching beneath the surface and realizing that the entire plot appears to have been cooked up by the FBI itself. Yes, it sounds like they found a dumb kid who was willing to carry out a bombing. But there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that he actually had any ability to actually do so… until the FBI came along and provided him with all the details.

I have no problem with it. In fact, I have no problem with the concept of ‘entrapment’ in general.

There are two types of people in the world: Those who are willing voluntarily to comply the the social strictures necessary to preserve our society as a functioning system, and those who aren’t. When the latter actually Do Something (and that something varies from time to time and place to place), we call them criminals, and Do Something, typically unpleasant, in response. ‘You can’t cheat an honest man’, as they say, and you can’t entrap someone who isn’t already strongly inclined in that direction.

When it comes to terrorism, which by its nature involves covert and secretive activities, the case is less straightforward. Pace Bill Engval, potential terrorists don’t go around wearing a sign saying ‘Potential Terrorist’. It is, nevertheless, a socially useful thing — and, I suggest, a fruitful use of the resources of our public safety agencies — to identify such people before they have a chance to Make Trouble.

For better or worse, however, we can only do Bad Things to Bad People after they have taken a legally significant step on the road to Badness. It’s not good enough to say, ‘He’s a doofus, forget him’, because there’s no guarantee that he won’t (a) progress sufficiently beyond doofus in the future to emerge as a problem child, or (b) fall in with Evil Companions who might use him as a Useful Idiot on the road to a more competent Badness. Terrorism is like a sweater: When you pull on a loose end, you never know how far it will unravel; but you have to pull regardless, because you never know how far it will unravel.

I am therefore happy that this particular loose end has been tied up, and hope that eventually he will be locked up, and I look forward to many more in the future.

The Telegraph reviews his latest book.

Never one to keep his mouth shut, PJ O’Rourke’s knack for seeing the funny side of things has made him one of the world’s most controversial and celebrated humorists. His latest book is an attack on big government – but no subject is really safe from his wit.

Wow, there’s a shocker. By my count he’s written ‘an attack on big government’ at least six times now.

But, it wasn’t the taxes that turned him back into a true Republican. It was seeing his reflection in a shop window: “dirty jeans and a work shirt with mystic chick embroidery on it”. He dumped the Left because he didn’t like the threads. As a man suspicious of new ideas, it didn’t occur to him to separate the ideology from the outfits.

Hey, a man’s gotta have priorities.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

The King’s Speech illustrates G. K. Chesterton’s 1905 insight that hereditary kingship is “in essence and sentiment democratic because it chooses from mankind at random. If it does not declare that every man may rule, it declares the next most democratic thing; it declares that any man may rule.” Colin Firth portrays that “anyman” as King George VI (reigned 1936-1952), father of the current queen, a man who was callously raised as the unimpressive spare to the glamorous heir, his older brother Edward VIII.

And Edward VIII was the Barack Obama of his day, a self-centered narcissist who just couldn’t understand why he couldn’t have everything his way. As result he quit when the going got tough, and stuck his brother with a thankless job for which he had no preparation and even less inclination, but in which he stepped up to the plate and hit a home run despite impressive odds.

Read it.

One can understand why the concept of American exceptionalism underwhelms Obama. As Tumulty notes (per Seymour Martin Lipset), the concept often has been invoked as an explanation for why the U.S. is the only industrialized country that does not have a significant socialist movement or Labor party. Much of Obama’s career, especially his many years as a community organizer, strongly suggests that he is less than comfortable with the fact that the U.S. is exceptional in this respect. No wonder he put the concept of American exceptionalism down when asked about it in France.

Eric Raymond is basically sound.

“The trouble with socialism,” Margaret Thatcher once famously said, “is that sooner or later you run out of other peoples’ money.” This observation is the key to understanding the wave of government bankruptcies that has already begun to break over us.

What’s actually happening here is that bond investors are catching wise about the largest political truth of the post-Cold-War era: government is bankrupt. It’s not just individual governments that are headed for financial collapse, but the entire model of ever-expanding statism that began with Otto von Bismarck’s Prussian state-pension system in the late 1800s.

Took ’em long enough.

Read it.

Some interesting thoughts on work and non-work.

The point is, crank-widget work is easy to define and measure in objective terms. Information work is different. Drucker offered the correct, but mostly useless idea that part of information work is defining the work to begin with, which makes it very ambiguous. Call it define-and-do work.

But when you are doing define-and-do Druckerian work, it is basically impossible to decouple definition from execution a priori in useful ways (“my job is to define my job and do it” — sounds like a GNU recursive acronym, doesn’t it?). “Work” is whatever the hell you need to do to “get the job done.” A non-constructive definition.

By the same standard, you sometimes need a  vacation to recover from a vacation if the original vacation involved meeting family expectations. I am sure that’s especially true for many Americans who are returning after stressful family weekends. That’s a “work” vacation because between the turkey and the pumpkin pie, you may have had to justify your career/life to your Dad, and the reaction mattered. If this is true for you, then for better or worse, your Dad is your customer for a product you are creating called “my life.”

Power Line looks at the SWPL phenomenon.

But is this group an elite? There’s a place where one can reasonably aspire to be part of the elite based on taste in TV shows, books, and recreational activites. That place is high school (or maybe middle school). In the adult world, elite status depends mainly on the money one accumulates, the things one accomplishes, and the power one exercises.

Read it.

If the Swiss can do it, why can’t we?

Cringely takes a look from 10,000 feet.

What’s happening to e-mail is complex but comes down to changing contexts and competing media. Back in 1992 communication for me meant e-mail (which at that time for me was cc:mail, MCI Mail, and Internet mail), snail mail, Usenet newsgroups, bulletin board systems like The WELL, telephone, and fax. Today the mix has changed almost completely and I have Internet mail, snail mail, SMS, various chat systems (Skype, iChat, ICQ, etc.), twitter, Facebook and other social networks, and the big one for me — WordPress. BBS’s are gone as are proprietary e-mail systems, my fax machine was thrown-away long ago and Usenet has been subsumed into the Internet as a whole.

Then spam spoiled it all. I hate spam. I feel betrayed by spam and the spam industry. Remember those proposals to put an ISP postage charge on e-mails to eliminate spam? Those proposals failed because it looked too much like a restriction of speech or a violation of net neutrality, but I wish it had worked. I’d gladly pay a couple bucks per month to be truly spam-free.

Facebook has brought for non-professional writers in us the same e-mail effect I saw when I jumped to WordPress: every wall or chat posting makes unnecessary at least one e-mail, maybe several.

Bryan Caplan takes a poke at the hornet’s nest.

Eisner dwells on the Protocols‘ zombie-like ability to survive despite repeated conclusive disproof.  To me, of course, that’s not surprising at all.  Countless religious and political texts remain sacred to true believers despite conclusive proof of their historical inaccuracies.

Can you say ‘Book of Mormon’? Of course you can. But you won’t, because that would be impugning someone’s religion. If we’re going to impugn religion, let’s pick the low-hanging fruit … like, oh, say, Islam.