Read it.

And well he might.

Read it. And watch the video.

Jerry Pournelle has an interesting rant.

The big problem is described by Peggy Noonan in today’s WSJ : people see the parties now as the Nuts — Democrats — vs. the Creeps — Republicans. Both parties have been captured, the Creeps by the Country Club crowd who think they have an hereditary right to rule and to the spoils of election, and the Nuts by a bunch of political theorists who dig Marx or his intellectual descendents allied with the union leaders who just want more and provide much of the ground game power.

Who can blame the union leaders? If the government is going to tax and spend, the logical position is “Don’t tax me, spend on me, and I’ll vote for you.” The problem is that what the nation needs is people who do NOT directly benefit from government, and don’t vote for a party for what they can get out of it, but for what it will do for the country. That’s a hard position to take if you’re unemployed and your health care runs out and you can’t afford COBRA and your kids are sick. Even if you know better, even if you know that in the long run we can’t exist by having government workers be the only people with secure employment and a real income, the temptation to take something from the government — hell I paid taxes for all those years — and vote to continue, or simply to get into the secure employment sector, is enormous.

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

Professor Hanson is not, of course, a retard, and of course I never suggested that he was. Quite the contrary – he is an American social scientist of the 20th century. This phenomenon, in which non-retards express retarded ideas, is no novelty in that time and place.

The basic problem is that the robber-barons of Silicon Valley, unlike their Victorian forebears, do not realize that, if they want all this science, they will actually have to pay for it – themselves. Instead, they look at their tax forms and think: I gave at the office. But they didn’t. They gave to scientocracy. Now, they need to figure out how to patronize science – or there will be no science. Just scientific Bondo, sanded to perfection and painted with meticulous care.

Read it.

I recommend “PhD Comics” highly.

Read it.

On the other hand, it might not.

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Dun-dun-DUN……

Read it.

The end of an era.

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The overwhelmingly liberal tilt of university professors has been explained by everything from outright bias to higher I.Q. scores. Now new research suggests that critics may have been asking the wrong question. Instead of looking at why most professors are liberal, they should ask why so many liberals — and so few conservatives — want to be professors.

Read it.

Now — if only believing you can get richer would make you richer….

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked. I think there’s one of these in my community.

Read it.

Russians are almost as strange as the Japanese.

Read it.

A twelfth-century poem newly translated into English casts fresh light on the origin of today’s Francophobic stereotypes.

Things haven’t really changed that much.

Read and Heed.

Read it.

‘I’m sure it’s fun as a networking device for teenagers but there’s something undignified about adults using it.’

My thought exactly.

Check it out.

How to be a success in any job.

Read it.

Gotta love Australians.

George Will lets ‘er rip.

Read it.

Well. Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Orthodox Christianity has a tradition of saints who are known as fools-for-Christ, people who have attacked the sin of pride by behaving in ways that seem, to the casual observer, insane. To date, there is no tradition in Orthodoxy of wiseguys-for-Christ, which is a shame: that would be handy category for Fr. Joseph Huneycutt.

The book laces together personal memories, stories from the life of a priest, and fictional episodes to form a set of tales about what it’s like to be an Orthodox convert in a country where “Orthodox” is usually understood to mean “Jewish men with old-fashioned hats” and where a hearty “Christos Anesthi” is more likely to be met with “gesundheit” than “Alithos Anesthi.”

Read it.

Let’s spell out the logic. The United Nations is a pain in the butt. It pays no taxes and annoys hard-working New Yorkers with its sloth, pretensions and cavalier disregard for traffic laws. The place is a sinkhole dominated by anti-American, anti-Semitic and authoritarian fantasies. It is far from the elegant crown jewel that celebrated the U.S.’s global ascendancy after the Second World War.

Sheikh Mohammed could offer to build a United Nations City to house the U.N. in any number of vacant office towers. Business Bay has 65 million square feet of office space under construction in more than 200 high-rises. Dubai already has thousands of newly constructed apartments that await the international delegates. More than 2 billion people in Africa, Europe and Asia are within a six-hour flight from Dubai. Travel connections through the world’s largest airport would be a breeze. Dubai has 55 five-star hotels to accommodate every regal and royal delegation, as well as the Harvard Medical School Dubai Center, a $1,400,000,000 facility branded with the Harvard crest, just in case one of the U.N.’s elite workers breaks a gasket.

Works for me.

Read it.

Perhaps because most ‘scientists’ today are time-serving hacks? That’s just a guess, of course.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Real reform of complex institutions is always hard, but it is possible. Consider a storied, historic, indeed iconic American institution that had developed an internal structure so convoluted that information did not flow through it—fiefdoms abounded, and duplication and delays were the rule. After many failed efforts at reform, only the threat and actuality of bankruptcy forced this institution to slim down, streamline and focus.

We are referring, of course, to the U.S. auto industry. The domestic automakers’ organizational structures were notoriously complex and top-heavy. While Toyota had been selling the same car worldwide, Ford had insisted that American consumers would not buy the cars successfully produced by Ford for sale in Europe. As a result, every stage of production from R&D to actual manufacturing was duplicated in the two markets.

We have an unwieldy multiplicity of agencies that operate largely independently. Dysfunctional bureaucratic incentives decree that an attack involving a repetition of a known terrorist procedure is the most damaging politically, so shoes are scanned because a shoe was used in an attempted airplane bombing. Now underwear will be scanned as well. The government seems always to be playing catch-up to the terrorists.

We can fix this. As with the auto industry, the moment of crisis is the right moment to tackle in-depth reform of the intelligence services. One possibility that deserves serious consideration would be a consolidation of most existing agencies into four primary agencies: a foreign intelligence agency, a military intelligence agency, a domestic intelligence agency, and a technical data collection agency (satellite mapping, electronic interception, etc.).

Read it.

Whenever I hear the term ‘carbon footprint’ I reach for my revolver.

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And you can believe as much or as little of that as you want to.

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In the view of the New York Times, of course, if it isn’t happening in The City, it isn’t happening.

Read it.

Read it.

Cringely looks ahead.

This column is about homeland security, which is something our government isn’t very good at and I predict won’t get any better at this year because of a systemic inability to do correctly even the most basic things to protect our society, our privacy, and our way of life.

Preaching to the choir, here, bubba.

hese changes are minimal but I doubt they’ll even be implemented because this is a system that inevitably reverts to little fiefdoms run by idiots.

We call it ‘government’. It is not your friend.

Read it.

I guess ‘King’ doesn’t mean what it used to.

John Stossel sees an eerie parallel.

Even though Rand published Atlas in 1957, her descriptions of intrusive and bloated government read like today’s news. The “Preservation of Livelihood Law” and “Equalization of Opportunity Law” could be Nancy Pelosi’s or Harry Reid’s work.

The novel’s chief villain is Wesley Mouch, a bureaucrat who cripples the economy with endless regulations. This sounds familiar. Reason magazine reports that “as he looks around Washington these days,” Rep. Paul Ryan “can’t help but think he’s seeing a lot of Wesley Mouch.”

Read it.

Bill Gates is gone and Redmond is settling into a comfortable middle age. While this may not be good it was probably inevitable as Steve Ballmer rebuilds the company in his own image. What’s sad is it probably means an end to changing Microsoft strategy over a weekend and sending the company into a tizzy as Gates liked to do. Recent layoffs at Microsoft, for example, have much more to do with remaking the internals of the company in a new, more pinstriped model, than with cost savings.

‘Bill Gates is gone’? Time to sell your Microsoft stock.

David Pogue discovers the true nature of the Internet.

Reader feedback about my review of Google’s new cellphone yesterday was unusually voluminous and, in some sectors, vitriolic. Where I had written, “The Nexus One is an excellent app phone, fast and powerful but marred by some glitches,” some readers seemed to read, “You are a pathetic loser, your religion is bogus and your mother wears Army boots.”

Read it.

Na’vi is a constructed language spoken by the fictional indigenous race (the Na’vi) on Pandora in James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar. The language was created by Paul Frommer, a professor at USC with a doctorate in linguistics. This website exists to share this beautiful language with all who want to learn.

And to make money, of course. Don’t forget that. Monetizing a doctorate in linguistics isn’t like being a welder, you know.

Check it out.

Tell the truth: We’ve all wanted to do that.

John Fund looks at Rasmussen.

Read it.

Rule 1: Be a “Creature Unlike Any Other”

Given that Playboy has spent five decades proving the near-universal male predilection for a slender, pretty, large-breasted, blue-eyed blonde, this rule is obviously insane. In fact, most men have distinct preferences that anyone who knows them well can easily identify…Women are naturally attracted to outliers for the sheer sake of their novelty. Men aren’t.

Of the millions of old copies of The Rules that were snatched up all those years ago, I speculate further that more than half of them reek of cat urine.

Read it.

The fact that Michael Moore is still alive ought to tell you something.

Arnold Kling is always worth reading.

Think of government as a charity. From a libertarian perspective, it is a charity run by the Mafia, which will break your knuckles if you don’t make your donations. It is also a badly mismanaged charity. It funnels lots of money into questionable causes, and even when the causes are good the programs that it funds tend to be very wasteful.

Bears Fighting

Lions Hunting

Read it.

How do we know that institutions are so central to the wealth and poverty of nations? Start in Nogales, a city cut in half by the Mexican-American border fence. There is no difference in geography between the two halves of Nogales. The weather is the same. The winds are the same, as are the soils. The types of diseases prevalent in the area given its geography and climate are the same, as is the ethnic, cultural, and linguistic background of the residents. By logic, both sides of the city should be identical economically.

And yet they are far from the same.

On one side of the border fence, in Santa Cruz County, Arizona, the median household income is $30,000. A few feet away, it’s $10,000. On one side, most of the teenagers are in public high school, and the majority of the adults are high school graduates. On the other side, few of the residents have gone to high school, let alone college. Those in Arizona enjoy relatively good health and Medicare for those over sixty-five, not to mention an efficient road network, electricity, telephone service, and a dependable sewage and public-health system. None of those things are a given across the border. There, the roads are bad, the infant-mortality rate high, electricity and phone service expensive and spotty.

The key difference is that those on the north side of the border enjoy law and order and dependable government services — they can go about their daily activities and jobs without fear for their life or safety or property rights. On the other side, the inhabitants have institutions that perpetuate crime, graft, and insecurity.

Read it.

Read it.

This year B&Q started to stock pig arcs to cater for those wanted to rear pigs in their back gardens.

Read it.

This refers to a Roman military policy toward cities the Romans placed under siege. The local authority would be told that, as a matter of policy, once the first battering ram touched the city wall, there would be no surrender accepted, no quarter and no mercy.

Say what you will about the Romans, they knew how to do foreign policy so that it stuck.

Now that’s comedy.

Steve Sailer explains golf.

The current theory for why golf courses are so attractive to millions (mostly men), perhaps first put forward in John Strawn’s book Driving the Green: The Making of a Golf Course, is that they look like happy hunting grounds—a Disney-version of the primordial East African grasslands. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, author of the landmark 1975 book Sociobiology, once told me, “I believe that the reason that people find well-landscaped golf courses ‘beautiful’ is that they look like savannas, down to the  scattered trees, copses, and lakes, and most especially if they have vistas of the sea.”

Any reflection on why Obama spends so much time on the links (IYKWIMAITYD, as Joe Bob would say) would be castigated as racist, so I’ll refrain; I’d hate to get the reputation as a harborer of thoughts controversial.

Generally, men (the hunters) tend to prefer sweeping vistas, while women (the gatherers) prefer enclosed verdant refuges. Perhaps it’s no accident that a longtime favorite book among little girls is called “The Secret Garden.” Similarly, women make up a sizable majority of gardeners while men often obsess over lawn care.

Overgeneralizations that promote sexual stereotypes, on the other hand, are just fun.

Read it.

Special New Year’s advice.

Read it.

If, like me, you’re long since tired of reading stories about Tiger Woods’ sordid personal life, please hang with me for one more.

An interesting aspect to an otherwise boring affair.

Read it.

When considering revolutionary new products, we can not simply compare them with existing products, but must instead compare them with the products that don’t yet exist, but should. For example, the PC was more than just an expensive, hard-to-use typewriter — it was a whole new thing that just happened to have some typewriter features. Obviously this comparison is much more difficult than the “count the checkboxes” approach that we like to use when evaluating the “better mousetrap”, but it’s critical if we’re going to understand or create anything truly new.