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There’s a reason most of us aren’t Cory Doctorow. We don’t want to open up our devices. We don’t want to hack them. We want them to just goddamned work, thanks, and if gluing the case shut makes that possible, bring on the Elmers.

Hate that as much as you want, old-school corner-cases, but it’s the future, it always has been. It’s called “progress,” the continual refinement of the social contract. And it’s no more a betrayal of something vital than any other decision made in rational self-interest. Make your arguments about DRM and closed systems and “Wal-Martization”, but they still don’t come anywhere close to tipping the scale. The iPad (or something like it) is the future of computing for an enormous slice of the population — despite all its political and philosophical flaws — because it’s a pretty goddamned great future. It’s a future that we want.

There is a not-always-visible tension inside the Avante Garde between people who are self-proclaimed ‘progressives’ politically and socially but who are closet libertarians technologically, and those who carry the ‘progressive’ I-Love-Big-Brother corporatist mindset through to its logical conclusion. This appears to be a rant by one of the latter ripping (en passant) one of the former. It’s pretty amusing, and also very illuminating regarding the practical effects of the ‘progressive’ point of view.

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The eminent Victorian Thomas Carlyle famously castigated economics as “the dismal science.” The epithet first appeared in his 1849 screed, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” — in which the “humanist” attacked free-market economists for their role in the anti-slavery movement. For Carlyle and “progressives” such as John Ruskin and Charles Dickens, economics was dismal because it sought to replace hierarchy with democracy.

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Lately I’ve been having conversations with a friend about the importance of the menial, everyday tasks in our lives, and how they provide wonderful opportunities to let our minds loose to roam, explore, and process.

Doing the dishes.

Running a handpress.

Mowing the lawn.

Driving to work, without listening to the radio or CD player.

Sewing.

Ironing.

Sorting all of the pieces of shrimp out of a plate of shrimp fried rice because you love fried rice but detest shrimp. (U.S.S. John F. Kennedy CVA-67, 1970)

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Eet mor chikin.

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The reality of American education is often quite different. Beige classrooms are filled with note-passers and texters, who casually ignore teachers struggling to make it to the end of the 50-minute period. Smart kids are bored, and slower kids are left behind. Anxiety about standardized tests is high, and scores are consistently low. National surveys find that parents despair over the quality of education in the United States — and they’re right to, as test results confirm again and again.

But just as most Americans disapprove of congressional shenanigans while harboring some affection for their own representative, parents tend to say that their child’s teacher is pretty good. Most people have mixed feelings about their own school days, but our national romance with teachers is deep and long-standing. Which is why the idea of kids staring at computers instead of teachers makes parents and politicians extremely nervous.

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And explain to me why the World Irish Dancing Championships are being held in … Glasgow?

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I used to think that ‘pasteurized’ meant the cow was kept outdoors. Shows how much I know.

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The individual mandate is one of the most controversial features of Obamacare, so when it came out that the law makes no provision to enforce the mandate, many were nonplussed.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

Jonah Goldberg spanks the New Yorker.

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Much like the ethanol fad, the ‘local food’ fad is hampered by ignorance of elementary economics. (Although, in an age where ignorance of elementary physics and mathematics seems to be widespread, I suppose we really can’t complain.)

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Actually, it’s not that hard….

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Today’s big news story, along with the epic debate on health care taking place in the Senate, is the Democrats’ claim that some of their Congressmen have been threatened with violence after voting for the government’s takeover of health care. Steny Hoyer claims that more than ten House members “have reported incidents of threats or other forms of harassment.” He also admits that figure is “just an estimate,” which I guess means he made it up. Nor is it clear what “other forms of harassment” means; angry phone calls from constituents, perhaps.

As for the threats, we will take them more seriously if they result in the cancellation of a public appearance by a liberal due to security concerns. But that never happens to liberals, only to conservatives. It happened again last night. That was in Canada, of course; the home of government medicine and little regard for free speech. No coincidence, that.

It is important for conservative leaders to embrace the tea party movement, and it seems that nearly all do. For what it is worth, I do not consider David Brooks to be a conservative leader. To be a leader, you need to have at least a handful of followers.

The fact is that, unlike conservatives, modern liberals have had little quarrel with political violence. This is best demonstrated by their support for card check legislation, the entire point of which it to abolish the secret ballot so that union goons can use the threat of violence to extend union power and thereby enrich the Democratic Party. (If you doubt the truth of that proposition, try to think of another reason why the Democrats want to eliminate the secret ballot in union elections.) The beating of Kenneth Gladrey by union goons–more specifically, the lack of any interest in it by anyone in the Democratic Party, the media, or on the Left generally–shows how hypocritical the Democrats’ current pacifism is. If the day ever comes when conservative groups start hiring goons, we can take the liberals’ purported fears of violence more seriously.

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Tell the truth: Would you want Joe Biden as President? or Nancy Pelosi?

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An island that has been at the centre of a dispute between India and Bangladesh for three decades has disappeared beneath rising seas.

New Moore Island in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged, said Sugata Hazra, a professor of oceanography at Jadavpur University, in Calcutta. Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols, he said.

“What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming,” said Mr Hazra.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

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On a visit to New Zealand, Princess Anne has been attacked, in language too fruity for this column, for her dress sense, “cottage loaf” coiffeur and lack of height and personality. All this from a Brit who has chosen to live in a country so far removed from the cutting edge of anything, that a sheep-shearing competition passes for high culture.

Nobody out-snoots the British.

Bryan Caplan is puzzled.

I would add a fifth possibility: People on the Left, for all their soi-disant intelligence, are actually rather dimwitted and unperceptive — which is why they’re on the Left in the first place.

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Why not? It works for Muslims.

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

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Megan McArdle quantifies things.

Place your bets.

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Hint: Probably not.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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Perhaps she was trying to tell him something.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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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.

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Spend the rest of time as a Reef Ball….

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Points that can be redeemed for valuable prizes….

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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So standards still exist. I am amazed.

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

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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.