Read it.

Megan McArdle quantifies things.

Place your bets.

Read it.

Hint: Probably not.

Read it.

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

Here are three words that will permanently cure you of democracy – if any three words can. Imperium is conserved.

That is: no form of government can be defined as un-government or self-government. There is always a government; there is always a process by which this government makes decisions; this process always consists of the decisions of one or more human beings, and no other party or force. Therefore, either you rule, or you are ruled by others. Typically the latter. As Maine writes in Popular Government: “democracy is a form of government.” In other words, it lacks any spiritual connotation; like any form of government, it can only be judged by its results.

The democrat, who is typically also an aristocrat, thinks or allows himself to think that, by dethroning the king and transferring the king’s powers to an assembly, he is destroying the sovereign imperium. But he is not; he is only dispersing it.

A Bourbon Gulag or a Tudor Holocaust are entirely inconceivable. Even St. Bartholomew’s was a peccadillo by the standards of a Marat, a Lenin or a Mao. Why? Because imperium  is conserved. A stable monarch has no reason to massacre the Jews or shoot the Old Bolsheviks. Being stable, holding a monopoly of power, he has nothing to fear. Stalin and Hitler did. Hence, tyranny results not from the concentration of imperium, but from its dispersal.

Read it.

How does one relate the news of a particularly embarrassing demise, muses Nigel Farndale.

Read it.

Yeah, it’s called ‘poverty’. People prefer freedom, when they can afford it, which is why they move out, live in the suburbs, and drive cars rather than take trains.

Read it.

There were a series of blog posts, detailing some of the details of the sickness, tests that had been done, and some of the general questions that the doctors were trying to zone in on. It even included a list of possible diagnoses, crossing out the ones that had been ruled out. Relatively quickly, two separate readers came up with an obscure medical journal article from South Korea from 1994 “about heptatic mega-hemagionas and FUOs,” which apparently quite accurately described the situation.

An elegant illustration of Hayek’s dictum that none of us knows as much as all of us, which he thought was the ultimate proof that markets were superior to central planning.

Read it.

Consider: You’re waiting for something, it doesn’t matter what, and to while away the time you use what’s available to you — in most cases, your phone. The advent of the ‘smart phone’ puts in our pockets a number of activities that previously were only available at home … in this case, games; in other cases, e-books and such. I find that the .mobi reader on my Blackberry Storm has replaced the paperback stuffed in the back pocket as the preferred tool for idle-time-reading. My wife uses her Kindle for the same purpose.

And, if worst comes to worst. you can make a phone call. How cool is that?

Read it.

A new version of the online payments service’s iPhone app debuted on Monday, with a feature that allows you to pass money from one person to the next by bumping–or simultaneously shaking–two phones. (You need not worry about all your money accidentally pouring out of the phone in your pocket; both sides have to set up and confirm the transfer in the software before it goes through.)

An interesting concept.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

Perhaps she was trying to tell him something.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

Except perhaps to whine that they’re not getting their fair share.

Indeed, if you look at all of human history, probably 99.999999% of it has been about dealing with the issues of scarcity. In fact, our entire original economic philosophy (which is really just two and a half centuries old) was based on “resource allocation in the presence of scarcity.” Historically, abundance just hasn’t been an issue that we’ve had to deal with very much. And the problem is that people try to apply the mental rules of scarcity to abundance and they basically kick out an error message. It’s a “divide by zero” sort of problem. You get infinity as a result, and you think it’s wrong.

So the response is almost always the same. Rather than actually trying to deal with what abundance enables, people try to force abundance back into a feeling of scarcity — which they’re comfortable with. That is, they try to apply artificial rules and restrictions to make the abundance feel like it’s scarce, so that they can understand it again.

George Will tags the Obamassiah with his true nature.

Hating Wilson is the best use of your time I can think of.

Read it.

Spend the rest of time as a Reef Ball….

Read it.

Points that can be redeemed for valuable prizes….

Read it.

My back-of-the-envelope calculations (explained in a footnote below) suggest that if you drive one of the Toyotas recalled for acceleration problems and don’t bother to comply with the recall, your chances of being involved in a fatal accident over the next two years because of the unfixed problem are a bit worse than one in a million — 2.8 in a million, to be more exact. Meanwhile, your chances of being killed in a car accident during the next two years just by virtue of being an American are one in 5,244.

So driving one of these suspect Toyotas raises your chances of dying in a car crash over the next two years from .01907 percent (that’s 19 one-thousandths of 1 percent, when rounded off) to .01935 percent (also 19 one-thousandths of one percent).

I can live with those odds. Sure, I’d rather they were better, but it’s not worth losing sleep over. And I don’t think it’s worth all the bandwidth the Toyota story has consumed over the past couple of months.

Read it.

Thanks to lobbying, Congress chooses to subsidize foods that we’re supposed to eat less of.

‘Crony capitalism’ trumps ideology. My, what a shocker.

Read it.

Read it.

Increasing innovation and economic growth is absolutely key — but such things do displace people and jobs, and those people will fight like hell to have the government protect those jobs, and will become angry when the government fails to do so, and that can create social unrest and populist political movements that do more harm than good. But those movements aren’t necessarily driven by the same people that Manzi was discussing earlier as “have nots.” In fact, many of those movements are often engineered by the “haves” who are seeking to just have the government prop up their existing markets in the face of competition driven by innovation.

Read it.

I have my doubts.

Steve Sailer speaks wisdom.

Going to the movies has been one of the few things that hasn’t gotten more complicated. Seemingly everything else in my life has gotten complicated due to the number of choices available to me. I hate choices.

Read it.

A new book has claimed that Robin Hood was not as selfless as he is often depicted, suggesting he stole from the rich and lent money to the poor as an early kind of loan shark.

Read it.

As the glamour of Barack Obama fades, Americans are likely to turn to entirely different presidential candidates next time, argues Toby Harnden in Washington.

Karl Rove? John Hodgman?

Read it. And watch the video.

The evidence of my senses tells me that being for this President, has something to do with monopolizing the conversation. It’s not true of all of Obama’s supporters, of course, but there is certainly a correlation there: “I’m not here to debate your or check your facts, I’m here to throw them down the memory hole.”

But being an Obama supporter seems to have a lot to do with shut-uppery.

Read it.

So standards still exist. I am amazed.

Read it.

10. Anytime Obama calls on Congress, they see it’s him through caller ID and let it go to voice mail.

Read it.

Q: Why is it called the OED? Why not just say Oxford English Dictionary?

A: Simple. If you say “OED,” everybody knows you’re an English major. If you say “Oxford English Dictionary,” people will assume you’re in Engineering.

Read it.

The problem, of course, is what happens when you actually open these up to regulatory interference. Suddenly, they become political footballs. We’ve seen this with copyright, where it’s become a case of regulatory capture — laws are pushed to protect entrenched interests, rather than to support what copyright is supposed to do (promoting the progress).

Jacob Sullum at Reason weighs in.

Read it.

Might even be purple. You never know.

Read it.

The New York Times finally arrives at the party.

Bryan CaplanIf we were starting from scratch, I agree that it would be great to scrap both “capitalism” and “socialism.”  Etymologically, capitalism does sound like a system of rule by capitalists for capitalists – and socialism sounds like a system of rule by society for society.  Since neither etymological suggestion is true, I wish the terms had never been coined.

As Sheldon admits in his talk, however, changing words is like changing currencies.  If they’re already widely accepted, you need a really good reason to abandon them.  Awkward etymology notwithstanding, I think the concepts of capitalism and socialism are good enough to keep using.
picks a nit or two.

Read it.

Gotta love Australians.

Jeremy Wagstaff does some deep thinking.

We watch, read, scan and listen to news sources not only to discover information, but to discover, or confirm, the absence of information: the absence of news. Non-news.

We need to know, in other words, what isn’t happening because that way we can be sure that we’re safe. That we’re not about to be swallowed up by a tsunami, or a rate cut, or a virus.

Read it.

The responses tended to split into two categories: One said that I was overemphasizing the pragmatic aspects of graduate school at the expense of the “life of the mind” for its own sake. The other set of responses, and by far the more numerous, were from graduate students and adjuncts asking why no one had told them that their job prospects were so poor and wondering what they should do now.

More discussion about graduate study in the humanities.

The myth of the academic meritocracy powerfully affects students from families that believe in education, that may or may not have attained a few undergraduate degrees, but do not have a lot of experience with how access to the professions is controlled. Their daughter goes to graduate school, earns a doctorate in comparative literature from an Ivy League university, everyone is proud of her, and then they are shocked when she struggles for years to earn more than the minimum wage. (Meanwhile, her brother—who was never very good at school—makes a decent living fixing HVAC systems with a six-month certificate from a for-profit school near the Interstate.)

Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon “the life of the mind.” That’s why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility.

Read it.

PG has just released their proposal today, in a “healthcare manifesto.” The central problems facing hospital design happen to have already been solved in the design of first-class cabins for airlines, they say.

Read it.

Well, they are French, after all.

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

When all is said and done, what’s in it for you? Or, better yet, what’s in it for them, the “social-justice queers”? They’ve got their tenured positions at the universities or their jobs at liberal magazines or their book contracts. They’ve got their six-figure executive salaries at gay-rights groups and their prestigious appointments to government jobs. And you’ve got (maybe) some symbolic policy change that is, at most, of indirect value to your quality of life.

Wake up, chumps. The poverty of the poor is not caused by the wealth of the rich, and discontents of gay people aren’t the result of heterosexuals monopolizing happiness. The politics of spite and envy — which is to say, the agenda of the Democratic Party — can never lead to “social justice,” because there is no such thing as “social justice.”

Read it.

I don’t think I’ve ever been sad when a Supreme Court Justice has retired.

Preach it, brother.

Read it.

This is news?

Read it.

After 4 years of no numerical or posted daytime speed limits on these classifications of highways outside of urban areas, Montana recorded its lowest number of fatal accidents on the affected roadways.

Read it.

A few weeks ago, I linked to a picture of civil rights activist John Salter being attacked by a mob during a lunch counter sit-in during the 1960s. I also linked to a newspaper op-ed in which Salter explained how he and other civil rights workers used firearms for protection from Klansmen and other terrorists—when Klansmen knew that a homicide would not be witnessed by the news media. Since that blog post drew great interest from the readers, I thought that some persons might be interested in the longer version of Salter’s history of the role of armed self-defense in the Civil Rights Movement.

Read it.

Scientists worship at the altar of peer review, and I use that metaphor deliberately because it is rarely if ever questioned.

There are a few studies that suggest peer review is somewhat better than throwing a dice and a bunch that say it is much the same. It is at its best at dealing with narrow technical questions, and at its worst at determining “importance” is perhaps the best we might say. Which for anyone who has tried to get published in a top journal or written a grant proposal ought to be deeply troubling. Professional editorial decisions may in fact be more reliable….

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

I have always fancied being bored on a huge and stylish scale. I’m talking Great Gatsby boredom, with everyone lying around in white clothes and floppy hats, sipping long drinks with cooling names, and being utterly and divinely bored. How sophisticated can one get, goes my thinking, that even when surrounded by the best things in life, it’s not enough? Boredom wins through.

Read it.

The flowchart is especially amusing.