Steve Sailer does the comparison. His conclusions seems to be that Eclipse is a pretty bad movie that nevertheless tunes in to the zeitgeist more effectively than Knight & Day. (Full disclosure: Herself and I did Date Night with Knight & Day and had a great time; while there, we saw a trailer for Eclipse and weren’t impressed.)

A weaker novelist than Rowling, Meyer less understands the adolescent girl’s mind than shares it. Her Bella epitomizes teen self-obsession, the ambition to have every boy fight over you and every girl hate you for it.

Today’s butt-kicking babe films are particularly odd because current audiences also prefer girlier leading ladies than back in the Golden Age of such formidable femme fatales as Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, and Katherine Hepburn.

Ah, those were the days.

In Eclipse’s funniest scene, Bella is livid after beefcake Jacob tries to kiss her, even though Jacob knows perfectly well that she loves Edward. So, like an Angelina Jolie heroine, Bella hauls back and socks Jacob on his square jaw. Jacob, whose neck is wider than his head, doesn’t even flinch, but Bella sprains her own wrist, leaving her whimpering in pain.

Bryan Caplan explains.

Judging everyone as an individual is expensive, and relying on statistical generalizations is a cheap and effective alternative.  You don’t clutch your purse when you see a bunch of little old ladies approaching on a deserted street.  You don’t offer a policeman a joint.  You don’t hire a guy with a mohawk as a receptionist at a law firm – even if he promises to get a hair cut.  Why not?  Because on average, little old ladies don’t commit violent crimes, policemen arrest people for possession of marijuana, and guys with mohawks have trouble with authority.

Read it.

Note how the 2010 election results mirror the 1864 boundaries almost precisely. If you are a Pole and live in a part of Poland that was ruled by Prussia in 1864, you almost certainly live in an area carried by Komorowski. If you live in one of the parts ruled by Russia or Austria, you almost certainly live in an area carried by Kaczynski, unless you live in a large city (over 100,000 people—those are the orange dots in the sea of blue).

That’s really freaky.

Read it.

France is considering forcing tourists and any others who shun government advice and travel to danger zones to foot the costs to free them if they are kidnapped.

What a remarkably sensible idea. Or, better yet, just leave them there.

Watch ’em.

Obvious lacunae: Nothing featuring Toshiro Mifune. But they’re still pretty good.

Freeberg performs an operation known in Biblical terms as ‘rightly dividing the word of truth’.

By “The Davids” what I mean in this case is Frum, although there are others. People who sell themselves as reformed or repentant conservatives, to other people who have no idea what a conservative really is and are never going to know. Conservatives who are “social moderates,” long to reach “across the aisle” — who voted for Barack Obama, not as a protest against the George W. Bush free-spending (heh!), but because “There’s Just Something About Him!”

Anyway. Brock, Brooks, Frum, Weigel — there’s just something about that name “David.” They get a business opportunity and suddenly, there’s an awakening. (Not with Weigel of course, he was busted in a scandal; not that he was fooling anybody.) Oh my! We have to do this one thing — elect Obama, pass ObamaCare, whatever. I’m still a conservative mind you! Although I’m ashamed at some of my fellow conservatives, because it’s true we’re all a bunch of bigots. Except me! But I’m still a conservative. Just a moderate one.

Master Cadfan says:

There was an autistic named Jobs
Who sold shiny baubles to snobs.
They waited in line
For his latest design
And gave him their money in gobs.

To which Master Tadhg responds:

Of course, a technology geek,
When spending his money, is weak;
But when puberty hits,
It will focus his wits —
And it won’t be the Droids that he’ll seek.

Megan McArdle isn’t let marriage soften her brain.

I confess, I fail to see the liberal romance with Social Security.  I don’t mean the notion of making sure that old people don’t go hungry.  I mean an attachment to Social Security in its current form so strong that it interprets any change in benefit levels as tantamount to implementing an ice floe strategy.  The program was implemented in 1935.  What are the odds that its structure and retirement age are suitable for the current era?

Read it.

Might a legislature properly pass laws restricting what people eat? But of course we already have that. Might a legislature properly conclude that selling trans fats is as great a crime as it would be to sell heroin? If a legislature can forbid marijuana, why can’t it forbid tobacco? If you can’t sell carbon tetrachloride bombs as fire extinguishers (when I was a lad, there were Popular Mechanics advertisements inducing young people to make their fortunes selling carbon tet bombs door to door) why could not a legislature forbid you to sell butter?

But of course we are here discussing the powers of the states. I continue to ask this question: if it required the 18th Article of Amendment to the Constitution to allow the Federal Government the power to forbid the possession and sale of alcohol — prior to the 18th the Court threw out the Volstead Act — and the 18th was then repealed, under which provision of the Constitution does the Congress have the power to forbid the possession and sale of marijuana? Heroin? Cocaine? Forbid their interstate shipment, yes, perhaps, but forbid a California farmer from growing hemp for sale within California? The states have such powers, but does Congress?

I suspect that Kagan would not make such a nice distinction, but I have no way of knowing. Will the joining of a sociological jurisprudence law professor to a wise Latina make for a better Court? Or even add to its diversity?

Good questions all.

Read it.

Mencius Moldbug is back … and he’s Bad.

Pseudoscience will generally be found solving problems, such as climate prediction, in which the scientific method does not work at all. Rather, other forms of reason are the only reasonable ways to reason about the problem – or there may be no effective means of prediction at all. Thus, there are no scientists to fight. You can’t beat something with nothing.

Once the actual constitution of a country – the actual rules of decision by which its government operates – has diverged from its official constitution, what is the meaning of the latter? The answer is: it has no meaning at all. A constitution is a contract. Once broken, it is meaningless. “The Constitution” is an interesting historical document, no more valid than the Salic Law. Rather, it is “constitutional law,” ie, the precedents of the Supreme Court, which are the supreme law of the land.

Thus, in the terms of John Austin, who holds sovereignty in the United States? The Council of Nine, also known as the Supreme Court. For they are the unmoved mover, those whose decisions are final and cannot be overridden.

As we have seen, “rule by law” means “rule by judges,” and “rule by social science” means “rule by pseudoscientists.” Either, in other words, equates to “rule by men.” If these men are effective and responsible, they will govern well. Otherwise, they will govern badly. This has been true for all of history and will never change. Only in our time has it been so persistently denied.

To be brutally frank, these bureaucrats have no interest at all in Professor Hanson’s results. For one thing, his ideology is completely incorrect. Behind the veil of pseudoscience lies an oligarchy, of which Professor Hanson is not a member. He and his lessers in the George Mason School are of no relevance at all, because they are wingnuts at a Virginia cow college. At the top, power is always a matter of social exclusion.

Wisdom. Attend.

The Christian life is no different – for it is not a set of ideas to be memorized – but a life to be lived. For this reason, Christ had disciples. For this reason the Church had a catechumenate that often lasted for three years. We learn the Christian life by doing it. We learn to pray by praying and praying along with those who know how to pray. We read Scripture with those who have read it before us and from them we learn how it is that a Christian reads Scripture. Those who have not been trained in such a manner are like children building a house with bricks. They may have the proper ingredients – but the result is likely to be a house that falls down.

As the bumper sticker says: “If you can read this – thank a teacher.”

Jeff Jarvis waxes dyspeptic (and, in passing, gives a poke in the eye to the PC Language Police).

I don’t think that is society’s myth. We all know better than to believe that men have no beliefs — because we are all merely men* with beliefs of our own.

No, the opinionless man is an institutional myth, a fiction maintained by news organizations, political organizations, governments, businesses, churches, and armies. The opinionless man is meant to be an empty vessel to do the bidding of these hierarchies. But opinions and openness about them subvert hierarchies. Or to translate that to modern times, via the Cluetrain Manifesto, links subvert hierarchies. This is the age of links. So hierarchies: beware. One opinion leaks out of the opinionless man and it is shared and linked and spread instantly. The institutions treat this revelation as a shock and scandal — as a threat — and they eject the opinionated men. That is what happened to McChrystal and Weigel.

Read it.

Lots of lessons here:

1. They talk a lot but they’re afraid, profoundly afraid (can you imagine the RG generals talking to the Supreme Leader? “But Excellency, they will kill us all…”);

2. They will not risk direct confrontation, because any defeat will encourage the Iranian people to bring them down;

3. They talk a lot about the glories of martyrdom, but the martyrs they have in mind are the Arabs they send into battle or on suicide missions against us;

4. The trouble with American leaders is that they want to be loved, whereas a healthy dose of fear will do wonders for the region.

Read it.

As David H. Freedman notes in “Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—And How to Know When Not to Trust Them,” such cluelessness is all too common in our expert-mediated world. Look at all those economists who failed to predict the great crash of 2008 or the rating agencies whose metrics melted into mere wishful thinking. Realtors, who are supposed to know more than you or I about the housing market, predicted housing prices would trend up for 2008. Experts, schmexperts.

Read it.

A ‘monster’ great white shark measuring up to 20 ft long is on the prowl off a popular Queensland beach, according to officials.

Swimmers were warned to stay out of the water off Stradbroke Island after the shark mauled another smaller great white which had been hooked on a baited drum line.

The 10-foot great white was almost bitten in half.

Is it Shark Week yet?

Read it.

Six months ago, Kevin Rudd was one of Australia’s most popular prime ministers in history. The brainy and intense Labourite had beaten four-time PM John Howard in a smashing victory and his Australian Labour Party was comfortably ahead in the polls. Today he’s gone, resigning mid-term rather than be dumped by his own party. What happened?

Gotta love Australians. They may be crazy but they’re not stupid.

Read it.

Gotta love Australians.

Freeberg cuts to the chase.

Look how democrats run their own party. When there’s a position available, and there’s a person available to be appointed to it, all they seem to care about is whether he’ll be effective in that position. Nothing else matters. They want to win. If you’re available, and your skin color would inject some much-desired “diversity” into the ranks that’s missing now but you’re likely to fuck it up, then out you go. White, black, red, yellow, green, purple, gay, straight, male, female — if he can do the job, then what the hell, hire him.

It is quite alright, when a democrat runs up against some enemy of the democrats, to allow his passions to run unchecked and wild. They feel no shame about the fantasies they have about making that enemy sorry his parents ever met. It is commonplace that a democrat waxes lyrically about the day he’ll be able to waterboard Sean Hannity, and all of a sudden waterboarding isn’t quite so bad. I’d like to see my country defended with that kind of passion.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

One of the odd things about the topic of immigration is that the Canada, that beau ideal of progressivism, has always officially subscribed to the notion that the purpose of immigration policy is not to benefit immigrants but to benefit current Canadians, whereas in the U.S., that idea is considered almost unmentionable. Here, it’s considered just plain racist to point out that even illegal immigrants’ posterity aren’t likely to be big contributors to the common weal.

It’s also amusing that the author is concerned about the Harper government’s lack of enthusiasm for letting immigrants’ parents and grandparents immigrate. Immigration is publicly justified in Canada as providing the young workers who will pay for the pensions and free government health care of old Canadians. But, the immigrants themselves keep demanding that their aged parents and grandparents (!) be let in to provide them with uncompensated (and thus untaxed) child care.

Robert Samuelson takes a look behind the smoke and mirrors.

Just once, it would be nice if a president would level with Americans on energy. Barack Obama isn’t that president. His speech the other night was about political damage control — his own. It was full of misinformation and mythology. Obama held out a gleaming vision of an America that would convert to the “clean” energy of, presumably, wind, solar and biomass. It isn’t going to happen for many, many decades, if ever.

Unless we shut down the economy, we need fossil fuels. More efficient light bulbs, energy-saving appliances, cars with higher gas mileage may all dampen energy use. But offsetting these savings will be more people (391 million vs. 305 million), more households (147 million vs. 113 million), more vehicles (297 million vs. 231 million) and a bigger economy (almost double in size). Although wind, solar and biomass are assumed to grow as much as 10 times faster than overall energy use, they provide only 11 percent of supply in 2035, up from 5 percent in 2008.

Read it.

I have lived in the country all my life and I know what a pub means to a village or a hamlet. When I was a student, I used to work in a country pub, which I still think – thanks to the charismatic personality of the landlord – was perhaps the best I have ever set foot in. It was truly the centre of the village’s life; it had the atmosphere of a rather good club, though one without a waiting list or any sense of social exclusivity.

Apparently the old Britain is not yet dead.

Read it.

When Stella Hardesty had taken all the abuse she could handle from her no-good husband, she took him out with a wrench. It was self defense, plain and simple, and Stella was acquitted. Nowadays she owns Hardesty Sewing Machine Repair & Sales and runs a little vigilante attitude adjustment service on the side. Word gets around, whispered from woman to woman. When a wife or girlfriend needs protection from the jerk she hooked up with in a moment of stupidity, she’s likely to hire badass Stella to pay the jerk a not-so-friendly visit.

I am actually motivated to read this book.

Read it.

This is the sort of original thinking that usually winds up getting somebody arrested.

Read it.

A lot of heavy thinking in one place. Check it out.

Seth Godin is always worth reading.

I think #3 is the dominant factor here.

Freeberg does the flip side.

It occurs to me that perhaps there’d be less consternation and contention if alternatives were provided. How can people show off their wonderfulness? My short answer would be: Just stop showing off. After all, if you look to others to confirm that you’re wonderful, and what you’re really after is self-confidence, obviously you’re never going to get there — you have to develop your own internal barometer for your wonderfulness. You need to be sure. You have to get hard-nosed enough that a whole room full of people can tell you you’re wrong about something, and deep down you’ll still know you’re right. You have to measure this independently.

Read it.

Scott Adams is an absolute genius at making money from things that suck. Here’s how.

People ask me how it feels to take the side of moral bankruptcy. Answer: Pretty good! Thanks for asking. How’s it feel to be a disgruntled victim?

I hate BP, but I admire them too, in the same way I respect the work ethic of serial killers.

Instead of investing in companies you hate, as I have suggested, perhaps you could invest in companies you love. I once hired professional money managers at Wells Fargo to do essentially that for me. As part of their service they promised to listen to the dopey-happy hallucinations of professional liars (CEOs) and be gullible on my behalf. The pros at Wells Fargo bought for my portfolio Enron, WorldCom, and a number of other much-loved companies that soon went out of business. For that, I hate Wells Fargo. But I sure wish I had bought stock in Wells Fargo at the time I hated them the most, because Wells Fargo itself performed great. See how this works?

If you buy stock in a despicable company, it means some of the previous owners of that company sold it to you. If the stock then rises more than the market average, you successfully screwed the previous owners of the hated company. That’s exactly like justice, only better because you made a profit. Then you can sell your stocks for a gain and donate all of your earnings to good causes, such as education for your own kids.

Read it.

Nearly three decades ago, Gary Lauder received a traffic ticket. “I didn’t come to a complete stop at an intersection,” he said in a phone interview. “There were zero oncoming cars, and I rolled. The ticket only raised revenue and maybe filled a quota. It really bugged me.”

Mr. Lauder’s idea is informed as much by environmental stewardship as a desire to avoid unwarranted stops. “By bringing a vehicle to an unnecessary stop, energy is wasted on multiple levels,” he said. “Efficiency is more than just about the vehicle, it’s also about the road.”

Read it.

Rather than betting that aid dollars can beat poverty, Romer is peddling a radical vision: that dysfunctional nations can kick-start their own development by creating new cities with new rules—Lübeck-style centers of progress that Romer calls “charter cities.” By building urban oases of technocratic sanity, struggling nations could attract investment and jobs; private capital would flood in and foreign aid would not be needed. And since Henry the Lion is not on hand to establish these new cities, Romer looks to the chief source of legitimate coercion that exists today—the governments that preside over the world’s more successful countries. To launch new charter cities, he says, poor countries should lease chunks of territory to enlightened foreign powers, which would take charge as though presiding over some imperial protectorate. Romer’s prescription is not merely neo-medieval, in other words. It is also neo-colonial.

David Friedman sticks up for Real Science.

Gartrell’s study was limited to lesbian couples. On theoretical grounds, one could take her result as evidence not that homosexuals are good at child rearing but that women are, in which case it would imply the precise opposite of what she suggests. Insofar as the quote is evidence of anything, it is evidence of bias on the part of the researcher. As anyone familiar with statistical work knows, there are a lot of ways in which a researcher can tweak the design of a study, deliberately or not, to produce the result the researcher wants.

Read it.

But I have found a reason to love the Cash for Clunkers program:  it is a fabulous demonstration project for just how utterly pointless government stimulus programs can be.  Stimulus programs tend to be hard to evaluate in our complex economy — sort of like trying to calculate the effect of a butterfly flapping its wings on world climate.  But since cash for clunkers only lasted a few weeks and hit only one industry, we can learn a lot about the effectiveness of government stimulus.

Freeberg understands the dialectic.

I’m just on the light side of 44 now, and in a flash of insight I lately realized that nearly all of the things that have infuriated me beyond all reason…or simply irritated me mildly…have been done by people anxious to prove they’re wonderful. If only people weren’t so desperate to find new ways to prove their wonderfulness, my disposition would be considerably sweetened and I’d probably have a lot more years ahead of me on terra firma right about now.

Preach it, brother.

Read it.

The Orthodox year has a rhythm, much like the tide coming in and going out – only this rhythm is undulation between seasons of fasting and seasons (or a few days) of feasting. Every week, with few exceptions, is marked by the Wednesday and Friday fast, and every celebration of the Divine Liturgy is prepared for by eating nothing after midnight until we have received the Holy Sacrament.

It is a rhythm. Our modern world has lost most of its natural rhythm. The sun rises and sets but causes little fanfare in a world powered and lit by other sources. In America, virtually everything is always in season, even though the chemicals used to preserve this wonderful cornucopia are probably slowly poisoning our bodies.

Orthodox do not starve when they fast – we simply abstain from certain foods and generally eat less.

But it is a rhythm – fasts are followed by feasts. The fast of the Apostles begins on the second Monday after Pentecost and concludes on the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul on June 29. Most of Christendom will know nothing of any of this – that Eastern Christians will have begun a Lenten period while the world begins to think of vacations.

Read it.

Ronald Baily actually looks at the science.

However, the researchers found that how students divided up money changed as they became older when it was earned and depended on individual achievements and luck. Most fifth graders (63 percent) remained strict egalitarians, dividing up the money equally, despite the fact that some players earned more money through individual achievement. However, the portion of egalitarians dropped to 40 percent by 7th grade; falling eventually to 22 percent by 13th grade. Conversely, the share of meritocrats rose from 5 percent in the fifth grade, to 22 percent in 7th grade, rising eventually to 42 percent in the 13th grade. A full 42 percent of players in the 13th grade kept more money for themselves because they believed that they have earned it. The authors of the Norwegian study conclude that the meritocratic fairness view increases as the cognitive abilities of children mature. In other words: yes, kids outgrow socialism.

Read it.

Yet Another Example of the eternal truth that most poor people are going to wind up poor no matter how much money you give them. They’re poor because of defects in character, not because of some sort of bad luck.

Freeberg is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

I’d sure like to know what magical power, what birth star, blood line, what is it exactly? — What’s supposed to make these government regulators so much wiser than the people they’re regulating. I’ve talked and talked and talked to these “we need more regulation” people and none of them have ever been able to tell me.

Jacob Sullum has an excellent piece on maintaining legitimate distinctions.

Libertarians such as Epstein, Bernstein, and Sanchez would like to have prevented this one exception from multiplying. “When you say, this is such a wonderful idea, let’s carry it over to disability,” Epstein says, “you create nightmares of the first order.” But if one thing can be confidently predicted based on the history of U.S. government, it is that exceptions made for one particular purpose will be extended to others, to the point where they become the rule rather than the exception.

Read it.

This strikes me as an important development.

Read it.

The interesting part is that the New York Times suffers from the same blindness that Peter the Great did: The conviction that change proceeds from the top, and the only question left to answer is what particular technique will produce the best results.

But other people don’t wear those blinkers:

“Competition produces innovation,” said Cliff Kupchan, a director at the Eurasia Group, a global risk-consulting firm based in New York. “I still don’t see a working appreciation of that.”

Read it.

Justin Amash is running for Congress as a Republican in Michigan. He’s currently a state legislator. And as part of his campaign for higher office [UPDATE: He’s been posting votes for a year], he’s posting every one of his votes on Facebook, with a short account of why he voted the way the did.

I’d vote for him, just to have him there as an exemplar.

Arnold Kling wonders where the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage came from.

Freeberg takes a look.

She is brilliant at what she does. But I’ve always had some reservations with what she does.

This is one of the most penetrating analyses I’ve seen in a long time. Read it twice.

Obama doesn’t have it. We haven’t seen Him actually maintain anything, besides relationships; and human emotions being what they are, with relationships you don’t work with the rewards or the wreckage of your work the day before. Obama, from the best information we’ve managed to seize about Him, seems to have spent a lifetime being blissfully insulated from the conditions of things.

Fer chrissakes, we don’t even have a story about a bicycle lovingly maintained, or a household pet. He doesn’t have the “guardian” personality. He is not, by personal inclination, a steward of something. There is no evidence whatsoever to indicate a refinement of the requisite skills, or a personal interest in refining them.

That hits the nail right on the head.

Read it.

Cynthia does good work, and deserves your support. Time presses, so climb on board.

Read it.

A golfer has defied odds greater than a lottery win by sinking an incredible two holes-in-one in a row during a single game.

I think I’d rather have the lottery win. But, then, I’m not a golfer.

Read it.

Steve Ballmer has been CEO of Microsoft since 2000. During his tenure, Microsoft came out with Windows Vista, perhaps the most unsuccessful operating system in modern history (Windows ME doesn’t count, since Microsoft’s core customer base was using NT/2000); it tried a “Microsoft inside” strategy in digital music and, when that failed, launched the Zune, which also failed; it watched Firefox (and Safari and Chrome) eat a large chunk of its lunch in Internet browsers, the application most people use more than everything else put together; it launched Windows Live, a marketing strategy with no noun behind it, which completely flopped at whatever it was supposed to do; it got blown away in Internet search to the point where it had to re-launch as Bing, a plucky underdog;  and in mobile phones, which everyone has known for a decade would be the next big thing, it stuck with its bloated, awkward Windows Mobile for far too long, letting everyone (RIM, Apple, Google, and even Palm) pass it by to the point where it has no customer base left. (BlackBerry rules the corporate market, Microsoft’s traditional stomping grounds.) Recently I saw a headline saying that Microsoft is going to try to relaunch Hotmail to make it cool. Really, why bother?

Check it out.

Read it.

The Times editorial and other media pronouncements have perpetuated a drastic misreading of history and of government’s role in ending racial discrimination in this nation. This history is far more nuanced than is widely assumed. At the center of the Jim Crow system lay the “Jim Crow laws.” They were indeed laws, i.e., requirements that persons and businesses and government agencies must practice racial discrimination or face civil or criminal penalties. In other words, government had bolstered discrimination instead of suppressing it. For example, the famous 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which endorsed “separate but equal” treatment in railroad travel and eventually in other spheres such as public education, was about whether an 1890 state law in Louisiana requiring segregation was constitutional. The court said it was.

The Jim Crow system did not start in the South. It first arose in the North (although the term dates only from the early 20th century) as a way to deal with free blacks, including ex-slaves. After the Civil War ended slavery in the South, some politicians rallied poor whites and newly freed blacks in support of economic populism, while others sought different forms of accommodation that stopped well short of systematic, state-enforced racial separation. It was only in the last two decades or so of the 19th century—especially in the 1890s—that the Southern states enacted laws to force a level of segregation that had not arisen spontaneously, creating the rigid legal apparatus that some people still remember from the first half of the 20th century. Far from forming the vanguard of segregation, businesses tended to lag, with the railroads particularly notable for their persistence in maintaining a substantial degree of integration until forced by law to halt their practices.