Read it.

Too bad it didn’t happen to Tolkien before he died.

Read it.

Read it.

Why do so many terrorists have engineering degrees?

Engineers like to blow things up?

Christopher Hitchens is always worth reading.

Read it.

Some cruel, mysterious force or deity prevents me from hearing the name of anyone I’m introduced to, admits Michael Deacon.

And I know exactly what he means.

Read it.

Well, okay for Canada, but the American electoral system already does that very elegantly.

Read it.

Everything good is bad for you.

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

Teh Internets are a big place, though, surely with room for a good liberal racist. Naturally, LB’s goal is to convince liberals to be racist rather than racists to be liberal, and he is not always good about replying when served. But he can take off the gloves and hit a little. I charge him with contempt for history; he suggests that I should be burned as a witch. We could both be right.

Read it.

Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, identified what he called the “three laws of prediction,” reflecting an optimistic view of ingenuity: 1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong; 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture past them into the impossible; and 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

He has some good ones.

David Friedman points out that markets will show up even when they aren’t invited, that you can learn a lot about life from role-playing games even when you’re not trying to, and that much of what people ‘know’ about economics is nonsense based on silly word games.

Read it.

You are dealing with people who can be targeted, and it is not necessary, under the rules in effect, to make a decision about whether the person could be detained.  You can shoot first.  There is no affirmative duty to ask first if they want to surrender.  In that case, the decision is not a serial one of decide whether you have an obligation to try and detain; and if it seems too dangerous then to strike to kill.  You are legally permitted to strike to kill, without warning and without obligation to offer surrender.  If that’s the case, and if the personal legal risks to you or your career, now or down the road, are as they are now, and disfavor interrogation or detention, then the incentive runs toward a targeted killing.

Read it.

To be sure, it was a year that saw plenty of bad news. But in almost every instance, there was offsetting good news:

Bad news: The economy remained critically weak, with rising unemployment, a severely depressed real-estate market, the near-collapse of the domestic automobile industry and the steep decline of the dollar.

Good news: Windows 7 sucked less than Vista.

Bad news: The downward spiral of the newspaper industry continued, resulting in the firings of thousands of experienced reporters and an apparently permanent deterioration in the quality of American journalism.

Good news: A lot more people were tweeting.

Bad news: Ominous problems loomed abroad as — among other difficulties — the Afghanistan war went sour, and Iran threatened to plunge the Middle East and beyond into nuclear war.

Good news: They finally got Roman Polanski.

Read it.

Whether such constant exposure to corporate socialism is a symptom or a cause of why California is a social and financial basket case is an exercise left to the reader.

Read it.

Sign me up.

Read it.

A key part of the programme entails undoing some of the damage done to buildings by British Rail.

To All My Liberal Friends:
Please accept with no obligation, implied or explicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2010, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

To All My Conservative Friends:
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Check it out.

Check it out.

I want one of these for my house.

Cringely thinks so, anyway.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Check it out.

Read it.

A fascinating discussion from supposedly intelligent and certainly technically knowledgeable people. We are doomed, as John Derbyshire (Patron Saint of Dyspepsia) says in his latest book.

Read it.

It’s always amusing when a newspaper invites in a guest editorialist who then disembowels a policy that the paper had a major hand in setting up.

Read it.

Every now and then, someone does a brilliant analysis of contemporary cultural phenomena.

This is one such.

Read it.

Roy King, who died on November 8 aged 65, was an archer and master craftsman of the English longbow – mixing historical and artisanal expertise to produce weapons similar to those that proved so devastating at Agincourt almost 600 years ago.

Read it.

So you don’t know what ‘charcuterie’ means. So look it up.

When I visited last month they were rubbing down a few pork bellies with rosemary sprigs and a salt cure and experimenting with a new Italian sausage recipe. On the back porch, alongside the potted rosemary, three smokers issued thin white plumes that filled the neighborhood with a sweet, meaty perfume. Two contained slabs of bacon and the third—a ceramic tile Big Green Egg—held half a dozen of the paprika-and-mustard-rubbed chickens that Erik periodically smokes for favored mothers of his daughter’s classmates.

That ought to give you a clue.

“The regulations are written for industrial food operations,” says Mate. “And if you apply them to small-scale local producers, no one’s gonna do it. It’s legislating local food out of the market. Unfortunately, the health departments don’t appreciate that. But that food is actually safer. It’s easier for someone on that small scale to move things more quickly and be more careful. Local markets are self-regulating. If there’s anything wrong with your products and someone gets sick from it, then you’re out of business.”

Your tax dollars at work.

Read it.

That says something profound but I’m not quite sure what it is.

Read it.

Little capsules, full of fish oil,
Little capsules, with Omega-3,
Little capsules, full of fish oil,
That improve cholesterol.

There’s a yellow one, and a yellow one,
And a yellow one, and a yellow one,
Little capsules, full of fish oil,
And they all look just the same.

Read it.

The face of Tom Hanks can be almost seen if you squint hard enough.

Read it.

Well, how much did you pay for it? It’s worth that much to at least one person.

Read it.

A dozen bad science fiction movies come to life before your very eyes….

Watch it.

Or, at least, to Italians.

Of course, we can do that, too.

Read it.

· Remember always that your word is your bond. “Off the record” means off the record, unless it’s something you can use to embarrass a Republican.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

Is there a ‘Rod Dreher’ wing of the Republican party?

House of Eratosthenes is not impressed.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

I was visiting a typical Southern California public high school, one in which the student body is close to three-fourths Latino, when it dawned on me that virtually all the kids’ hallway conversations with friends were conducted in English. Indeed, most of the students spoke English without an accent. Well, to be pedantic, they had teen accents — it’s practically impossible for a high school girl to roll her eyes and exclaim “That is so gay” without sounding a little like Moon Unit Zappa in Valley Girl — but only a minority of the Hispanic students had Spanish accents.

I went home and read up on bilingual education. I quickly discovered the topic of educating “Limited English Proficient” (LEP) students is buried under a bureaucratic jargon that appears to consist of literal translations from some distant language unknown to Earthlings. For example, when an LEP child masters English, he becomes a Reclassified-Fluent English Proficient (R-FEP). His R-FEP status is tabulated at the federal Office of English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement for Limited-English-Proficient Students (OELALEAALEPS).

Unintended consequences predominate because the reigning dogma of the education industry—the intellectual equality of all students—is wrong. This obdurate refusal on the part of everybody who is anybody in the education business to admit publicly the manifold implications of some kids being smarter than others makes it difficult to get anything done in the real world.

Judith Rich Harris, author of the The Nurture Assumption, pointed out, “The problem with bilingual education is that these programs create peer groups of children who do not speak English well. They don’t have to learn English in order to communicate with the children they want to play with, and they don’t have to learn English in order to be accepted by their classmates. So, their motivation to learn English is no different from their motivation to learn the state capitals or the multiplication tables.”

Which leads to the inevitable question: That there exists a ‘black accent’ no one can doubt — and it’s not just a ‘Southern accent’, as anybody who has listened to black Southerners and white Southerners in the same conversation is aware. Is the whole meme of denigrating (no pun intended) black kids who ‘talk white’ promoted to keep blacks an isolated and thus more easily manipulated cultural minority? In that respect, I highly recommend the book He Talk Like a White Boy by Joseph C. Philips.

George Orwell.

There is no use in multiplying examples. The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

Read it.

Some good news, for a change.

Samuelson was the first American winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and, through his highly influential economics textbooks, set American government policy on a statist course for over fifty years — with results as you see them. Send him some marshmallows for use in his new home.

Read it.

Now the Japanese language is being transformed by blogs, e-mail and keitai shosetsu, or cellphone novels. Americans may fret over the ways digital communications encourage sloppy grammar and spelling, but in Japan these changes are much more wrenching. A vertically written language seems to be becoming increasingly horizontal. Novels are being written and read on little screens. People have gotten so used to typing on computers that they can no longer write characters by hand. And English words continue to infiltrate the language.

House of Eratosthenes connects the dots.

Well, I played a round of Obama Speech Bingo with it last night. I didn’t count the word “my” as a “me,” and mostly because of this, by the time I made it to the end we were seven squares away from a total blackout. Pretty good speech.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss?

Read it.

This would seem to be a self-correcting problem.

(Thirty stone is 420 pounds — the British never use a unit that everyone uses if they can find an obscure one that only they use.)

Read it.

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

Why this was in the ‘Religion’ RSS feed of the Washington Post is left as a exercise for the reader.

Steve Sailer has some ideas….

Read it.

His fortune was allegedly accumulated during his late wife Benazir Bhutto’s two terms of government when he became known as “Mr Ten Per Cent”. It was the subject of a series of corruption cases until they were dropped under an amnesty to allow the late Miss Bhutto and her supporters to return to Pakistan.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that…. It’s not as if his wife were given a newly-created job when he went into politics that paid three times what she’d been getting before, and which was conveniently abolished when he became President.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

Witnesses, in this case or others, might lie. In other cases, one thing discouraging them from perjury is that if it is discovered that their false testimony led to the execution of an innocent defendant, they will be found guilty of murder and themselves executed. But if their testimony leads to the execution of an innocent defendant who is himself dying of a lethal disease, they won’t be executed, because killing someone who is dying of a lethal disease isn’t murder.

Since the witnesses are not at risk of execution for perjury, they might commit it, so their testimony can not be trusted—cannot be taken as sufficient evidence to convict someone of murder. So if someone who is himself dying of a lethal disease commits murder, and doesn’t do it in the presence of the court, he cannot be convicted.

Do that twelve hours a day for three years. Congratulations! You’ve just been through law school.

Steve Sailer is the gift that keeps on giving.

A certain share of the craziness in the world is the fault of freelance journalists looking for something to write about. Combine that with the fact that most of the market for women’s journalism revolves around self-improvement, since only men will read about The Crisis in Yemen (there is one, isn’t there?) and pretend it’s conceivably relevant to their lives (“What if the White House calls seeking my advice on Yemen? I must be ready for The Call.”)

Read it.

Meanwhile, assume that rising CO2 levels are undesirable. I say assume, because CO2 level have certainly been higher in the past, and there are some reasons to welcome increased CO2 — plants love it, as an example. There is no particular reason to assume that the levels that prevailed when we began CO2 measurements are “better” in some sense than the somewhat higher ones of today. It may be that today’s are “too high”, but I haven’t seen any detailed analysis of why that is so, or of what the optimum might be. I haven’t seen much discussion of just what “optimum” is, nor of what the “optimum” temperature of the Earth might be. Optimum for what? And for whom?

But you may be sure they are not discussing such measures in Copenhagen as they use up all the limousines in Denmark. What’s at stake in Copenhagen has little to do with achievable CO2 levels, or real temperatures. What’s at stake is control. If the EPA can assert that CO2 is a public health threat, they can assert anything; and if you believe that breathing in a few more parts per million of CO2 is dangerous to your health, you will believe anything. And so it goes.

Read it.

I have argued that universities will move to a superstar market for teachers in which the very best teachers use on-line instruction and TAs to teach thousands of students at many different universities.  The full online model is not here yet but I see an increasing amount of evidence for the superstar model of teaching.  At GMU some of our best teachers are being recruited by other universities with very attractive offers and some of our most highly placed students have earned their positions through excellence in teaching rather than through the more traditional route of research.

Read it.

That’s okay; these things happen.

Read it.

Welcome to the future.