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Cybersyn was a project of the socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973) and British cybernetic visionary Stafford Beer; its goal was to control the Chilean economy in real-time using computers and “cybernetic principles.”  The military regime that overthrew Allende dropped the project and probably for this reason when the project is periodically rediscovered it is often written about in a romantic tone as a revolutionary “socialist internet,” decades ahead of its time that was “destroyed” by the military because it was “too egalitarian” or because they didn’t understand it.

Although some sources at the time said the Chilean economy was “run by computer,” the project was in reality a bit of a joke, albeit a rather expensive one, and about the only thing about it that worked were the ordinary Western Union telex machines spread around the country. The two computers supposedly used to run the Chilean economy were IBM 360s (or machines on that order).  These machines were no doubt very impressive to politicians and visionaries eager to use their technological might to control an economy (see picture at right.)  Today, our perspective will perhaps be somewhat different when we realize that these behemoths were far less powerful than an iPhone.  Run an economy with an iPhone?  Sorry, there is no app for that.

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The death certificate of Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the legendary First World War German flying ace better known as ‘Red Baron’, has been discovered in Poland.

Actually, he was known as ‘the Red Knight’ until Schulz put Snoopy atop his doghouse with goggles.

Steve Sailer is the gift that keeps on giving.

Medical slang appears to be slowly dying out due to the discovery process in lawsuits, but it offered a rich lexicon when I first learned of it in the 1980s from a friend who worked in an emergency room.

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This is a list of modern-day carcinogens. Tumors. Things that have a toxic effect. Things that will continue to degrade our culture, make it unhealthy…dysfunctional…by their existence, and by their proximity to other things. Some of them are not causes; they are symptoms, showing by their presence that something malignant is churning away madly under the surface, something that would go undetected otherwise. So that’s it. Causes; symptoms; the balance of what’s left, would be things that, in traditional parlance, are just-plain-uncalled-for.

And people say that I’m a grump … Ha!

I especially like #22. And #28 is right on.

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Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.

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Jane Austen will readily provide us with a moral compass, if we have the wit to take advantage of it.

Steve Sailer is the gift that keeps on giving.

The funny thing is that Britain was just about the only advanced nation that didn’t pass a law calling for the sterilization of mentally retarded people in the 20th Century. (The very progressive Swedes were doing this into the mid-1970s.) Why not? Largely, because another one of Darwin’s relatives, a member of the Wedgwood family, took a strong stand against it in the House of Lords.

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One of the principal arguments used against suburbanization is that its infrastructure is too expensive to provide. As a result, planners around the high income world have sought to draw boundaries around growing urban areas, claiming that this approach is less costly and that it allows current infrastructure to be more efficiently used.

Like so many of the arguments (a more appropriate term would be “excuse”) used to frustrate the clear preferences about where people want to live and work, the infrastructure canard holds little water upon examination.

People talk about ‘sprawl’ as if it were a bad thing. I hear ‘sprawl’ and think ‘comfort’. I guess that’s what they really object to.

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I think that would be a splendid idea. We haven’t had a grownup in the White House since Coolidge.

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It seems to me we have a lot of “Republicans” running around who are still drunk and hung-over on this intoxicating elixir of personality-politics. Palin’s policies and Obama’s policies, they say, are somewhat or mostly irrelevant. The democrats have found a likable guy, so we need to find a likable guy. Palin may be likable but she doesn’t inspire confidence. We have to find a guy who is oh-so-likable, and oh-so-competent looking — that nobody will ever want to make fun of him, ever.

Then we put him up against Barack Obama, in an election that is bereft of any policy discussions just as the election of ‘08 was. And Obama gets hammered into one-term history.

Yeah good luck with that.

Steve Sailer loves pithy phrases that express truths most people won’t allow themselves to think.

One thing the article doesn’t mention is that U. of Virginia has a mean SAT score of 1326, one of the highest for any public university in the country. Maryland’s is about 50-60 points lower, but still pretty good for a state flagship university, and flagships are much harder to get into than a generation ago. To win a college football national championship, you need a whole lot of players who have no business being in college except to play football.

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I have often wondered why seemingly intelligent people like most in the IT field refuse to apply that intelligence to political, social, and moral questions. This has effects on the real world that the rest of us live in – check out how many employees of Google and Microsoft and Apple gave money so that a n00b that none of them would have hired was elected President of the United States just because his dad was black. This article is an example of what happens when SWPL conditioning comes up against the Dread Pirate Introspection.

Eric S Raymond connects the dots.

This, people, is blatant data-cooking, with no pretense otherwise. It flattens a period of warm temperatures in the 1940s 1930s — see those negative coefficients? Then, later on, it applies a positive multiplier so you get a nice dramatic hockey stick at the end of the century.

All you apologists weakly protesting that this is research business as usual and there are plausible explanations for everything in the emails? Sackcloth and ashes time for you. This isn’t just a smoking gun, it’s a siege cannon with the barrel still hot.

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Because productivity in agriculture had been growing faster than demand, we needed to shift resources out of agriculture. The Great Depression did this, rather painfully. I would add that the advent of the internal combustion engine greatly re-organized economic life. Because you could move agricultural produce and other goods around by truck, you did not need central cities surrounded by farms. The farms that used to surround big cities were now converted either to suburbs or wilderness.

World War II got people off of the farms and into industry in cities.

Greenwald goes on to say that the same thing is happening today in manufacturing–productivity has been growing faster than demand. This is a problem for the United States, but we have a fair amount of the restructuring behind us. Japan, China, and Germany are the most vulnerable economies right now.

So we need to get people out of industries and into … what?

The transition would be easier if (a) we did not tell workers in declining industries to expect to get their jobs back and (b) we did not limit access to employment in education and health care through licensing, accreditation, unionization, etc.

And then what happens when we eventually automate education and health care, as we did manufacturing, thus bringing the productivity expansion that hit agriculture and manufacturing?

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Their basic problem is that most of what they ‘know’ ain’t so.

That’s why the best remedy for a pigheaded progressive liberal idiot-type is to ask them questions which they can’t slither out of with party line lies they would rotely recite to escape giving an honest, well-thought answer.  You see, if you ask a question that the recipient has heard before, they’ll just parrot how they’ve heard others like them answer.  If you ask a liberal about abortion, for example, you’ll get the liberal talking points.  They’re just repeating what others say about it.  You haven’t engaged their anti-lie mechanism because they aren’t telling their own lies, they’re just telling someone else’s.  The goal is to elicit the emotional response associated with telling a lie.  Since most people who would even be interested in this type of conversation don’t want to be liars – particularly to themselves – if you make them feel their lies, they might be more receptive to altering their worldview, which is of course our end-goal.

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A boffin funded by the US Navy has used a gigantic CT scanner, normally employed for inspecting space rockets, to X-ray the head of a whale. The results apparently indicate that naval sonars can’t be the cause of whale beachings, as the mighty cetaceans are unable to hear the relevant frequencies.

But the ONR announced yesterday that Cranford’s latest findings “suggest that mid-frequency active sonar sounds are largely filtered, or ‘muffled’, before reaching the animal’s ears. The findings also suggest that higher frequencies used by whales to hunt prey are heard at amplified levels without any dampening.”

Mid-frequency active sonar has been in widespread naval use since World War II, though it has only been fingered by pro-whale activists as a cause of beaching in recent times – and beachings are rare, whereas sonar is used constantly in exercises. There have been protracted legal struggles between the US navy and environmental groups in the US courts over the issue, and similar allegations have been made regarding beachings in the UK.

And once again the religion of environmentalism falls before actual science.

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“It’s discrimination, the mayor should have used the money to build houses for us instead,” Kucharova, a 25-year-old Roma, said.

Note the preferred use of public money on the part of an alleged victim.

“The fence doesn’t prevent the Roma from coming to the village,” he said. “It just prevents them from entering private gardens and stealing. It wasn’t just petty theft, especially in autumn.

“People don’t grow vegetables in their gardens any more, there’s no use – everything gets stolen.”

Note that there was a time – presumably before the Roma arrived – when there wasn’t a theft problem. Now there is. How are public authorities supposed to handle that? This would seem a minimally-invasive action, to borrow a medical phrase.

“The children have been stealing apples from the gardens but what can we do – they are just children,” admitted the 21-year-old Roma mother of one.

Do other, non-Roma children have the same problem?

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Some of which aren’t really all that silly, when you think about it. The first one, for example.

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Recent evidence that prominent climate scientists have tried to intimidate academic journals into not publishing papers submitted by “climate change” skeptics have caused a major brouhaha in the ongoing political battle over global warming. At least some of the scientists in question certainly seem to have put ideology above the search for truth. The effort to keep skeptical articles out of academic journals also raises the issue of whether the academic “consensus” supporting global warming theory is genuine, or a product of systematic exclusion of dissenting voices.

Ponder the fact that the people who most loudly support the notion of Global Warming are also the people who most proudly claim to be part of a ‘reality-based community’. You can’t make this stuff up.

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Say you take a person with a performance orientation (“Paul”) and a person with a mastery orientation (“Matt”). Give them each an easy puzzle, and they will both do well. Paul will complete it quickly and smile proudly at how well he performed. Matt will complete it quickly and be satisfied that he has mastered the skill involved.

Now give them each a difficult puzzle. Paul will jump in gamely, but it will soon become clear he cannot overcome it as impressively as he did the last one. The opportunity to show off has disappeared, and Paul will lose interest and give up. Matt, on the other hand, when stymied, will push harder. His early failure means there’s still something to be learned here, and he will persevere until he does so and solves the puzzle.

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“Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.”

Most law professors use the same trick, although inadvertently.

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Being rousted out of bed for a couple of months by an E-7 with an affection for great noise early in the morning works pretty well, too, and doesn’t require batteries. Grogginess really isn’t an option.

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One interesting conclusion of the research is that “food miles” are a largely pointless measure. Far more important than the distance food has travelled before being eaten is the means of travel used.

This directly contradicts the advice offered by Greenpeace, for instance, which says “choose line-caught fish wherever possible”.

Ah, yes, the eternal conflict between science and religion.

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The children of the bureaucracy — and those who aspire to join them — are pissed that they can’t make the common people pay for their education.

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Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

Of course, nobody will believe it, because Oxford was the product of an ancient noble family while Shakespeare came out of nowhere and went straight back. The latter fits the modern egalitarian narrative better.

Paul Graham examines Political Correctness.

The most extreme of the things you can’t say would be very shocking to most readers. If you doubt that, imagine what people in 1830 would think of our default educated east coast beliefs about, say, premarital sex, homosexuality, or the literal truth of the Bible. We would seem depraved to them. So we should expect that someone who similarly violated our taboos would seem depraved to us.

The most entertaining thing about technically-oriented people is that they can blow through a social paradigm without hardly noticing it.

In fact, finding the outer limits is very, very hard. Popular controversialists just go for the low hanging fruit. To really solve the problem would take years of introspection. You have to untangle your ideas from the ideas of your time, and that’s so hard that few people in history have even come close. Isaac Newton, smart as he was, wasted years on theological controversies.

This in turn reveals a ‘default educated east coast belief’: that theology is a waste of time for a smart person like Isaac Newton. (Don’t get him started on Thomas Aquinas, I guess.)  In every century other than this one, most intelligent educated people would characterize that as the best use of his time – and brain.

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I recently asked readers for their “tricks of the trade,” and was amazed by the response. It seems every profession is rich with clever little occupational secrets.

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As if there were cats that weren’t weird.

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And lately it seems to work both ways. If you think carbon is dangerous (more on this later) but there’s no cause for concern over giving Kalid Shiekh Mohammed a civilian trial, you must possess some keen insight, perhaps some X-ray vision, that gives you wisdom beyond the three dimensions and the earthly domain.

If, on the other hand, you just call things as they are — taxes hurt the economy, if you execute the bad guy he won’t kill any more little kids, cities with magnanimous social programs have teeming masses of homeless because if I was homeless I’d head down there too, maybe kids have attention deficit problems because they aren’t getting their asses whipped anymore — then you’re more mundane. You have demonstrated no irony, therefore you haven’t demonstrated this keen extra-dimensional insight. Therefore you must not have it, therefore you must be something of a dimwit. And far more horrifyingly still, you’re a little bit on the boring side.

It’s not a drive toward left-wing politics; if it was, it would be far less dangerous because it would capture the fascination only of those who are enamored of left-wing politics. This phenomenon has a deep impact on people who don’t give a rat’s ass about politics. It’s a mistaken realization of what intellectual wherewithal really is. It is an excessive fascination with where above-average intelligence might take a thought, with an inadequate understanding of how exactly that works.

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A flying-car company which has struggled for 15 years to win acceptance for its radical gyrocopter/aeroplane technology may have finally broken through into the mainstream. It was announced this week that Carter Aviation technologies – aspiring designer of the CarterCopter Personal Air Vehicle – has partnered with successful military robot maker AAI.

Salon does a debunking. No, really.

Yet, like many people who acquire mega-celebrity, the vampire has developed an eating disorder. Read the books. Watch the movies. You’ll see vampires who manage nightclubs, build computer databases, work as private investigators, go to prep school, lobby Congress, chat with humans, live near humans, have sex with humans, and pine over humans, but the one thing you won’t see them do is suck the blood of humans.

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In October, we wrote about how, just as Rupert Murdoch and crew look to put up paywalls for online content, the operators of the London Evening Standard were going in the other direction and making their physical paper free. So, how’s that been working out? mowgs alerts us to the news that the paper has doubled its circulation in just a month. Not bad. But what’s more interesting is that it’s also slashed its distribution costs massively. It used to cost about 30p, and now it’s just 4p per paper.

Those media outlets who figure out the new business model will be with us yet, those that don’t are in the dumpster. It’s just that simple.

The most amusing aspect is that those media outlets that cling most tightly to espousing socialism in their editorial positions — and, increasingly, in their news sections — are the ones most desperately trying to find ways to charge their readers for stuff that their readers are just not willing to pay for. Perhaps in historical terms it will be a sad thing to see the New York Times and the Washington Post go the way of the New York Herald and the Washington Star, but I for one won’t be crying.

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To believe the truth is not the same thing as having a correct opinion – indeed the two have almost nothing to do with one another. And this is a great difficulty – for most of the things that we think of ourselves as believing – we in fact only hold as opinions. What a man believes, in the way the word is used in the New Testament, is not seen or heard in the syllogisms he is willing to confess, but rather in how he lives his life.

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It does seem to bring out the creativity in people.

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You know that book “Men are from Mars, Women from Venus”? Well, here’s a prime example of that.

Now that’s comedy.

Check it out.

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In 1965 the two nations were equal in wealth. Four decades later, their standing was dramatically different. What accounts for the difference?

An interesting comparison.

Link is just for attribution; complete item is reproduced below–it’s short.

One day, the father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to the country with the express purpose of showing him how poor people live.

They spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of what would be considered a very poor family.

On their return from their trip, the father asked his son, “How was the trip?”

“It was great, Dad.”

“Did you see how poor people live?” the father asked.

“Oh yeah,” said the son.

“So, tell me, what did you learn from the trip?” asked the father.

The son answered: “I saw that we have one dog and they had four. We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden and they have a creek that has no end. We have imported lanterns in our garden and they have the stars at night. Our patio reaches to the front yard and they have the whole horizon.

“We have a small piece of land to live on and they have fields that go beyond our sight.

“We have servants who serve us, but they serve others. We buy our food, but they grow theirs.

“We have walls around our property to protect us, they have friends to protect them.”

Then his son added, “Thanks Dad for showing me how poor we are.”

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I suspect that being tired means you have less energy to worry. But that’s just me.

Bear in mind that this is the New York Times so you really need to confirm this with another source.

Megan McArdle takes a look at the personal finance evangelist.

On a fine summer day at the end of August, I paid $220 for front-row seats on the floor of a minor-league hockey rink in Detroit, just to hear Ramsey talk for five hours. The ostensible topic: getting your financial life in order. Afterward, my fiancé, who grew up in the Bible Belt, called me to ask what I’d thought.

“I think I just attended my first prayer meeting,” I told him.

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General intelligence is not just a cognitive ability; it is also a cognitive disposition. So, the greater cognitive abilities of higher IQ tend also to be accompanied by a distinctive high IQ personality type including the trait of ‘Openness to experience’, ‘enlightened’ or progressive left-wing political values, and atheism.

You can have a genius IQ and still be an idiot, in the original Greek sense of the term.

Preferential use of abstract analysis is often useful when dealing with the many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing societies; but is not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for which humans have evolved ‘domain-specific’ adaptive behaviours. And since evolved common sense usually produces the right answers in the social domain; this implies that, when it comes to solving social problems, the most intelligent people are more likely than those of average intelligence to have novel but silly ideas, and therefore to believe and behave maladaptively.

Michael Savage may be right that liberalism is a mental disorder.

The cognitively-stratified context of communicating almost-exclusively with others of similar intelligence, generates opinions and behaviours among the highest IQ people which are not just lacking in common sense but perversely wrong.

That certainly matches what you see in the newspapers.

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… I noted some of the uncanny parallels between George W. Bush and Herbert Hoover: Both were president during a time of economic crisis; both presided over vast expansions of government that helped cause the crisis or at least make it worse than it might have been otherwise; finally both were (inaccurately) portrayed by their political opponents as dogmatic free market advocates, when in fact both were highly statist. After leaving the presidency, Bush is unconsciously imitating Hoover in yet another way — by rhetorically supporting free markets and criticizing the even more interventionist policies of his Democratic successor (which in both cases built on the expansions of government initiated by the Republicans who preceded them).

The only good things I can say about George W Bush is that he wasn’t as bad as his dad and he was better than the alternative. Damning with faint praise? I’m good with that.

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There are advantage to universal standards. The most important is economies of scale–once you learn the standard, it applies everywhere. But the disadvantages are subtle and usually much greater than the advantages.

I don’t want standard of health care, one standard of what’s “best.” Everyone is different and what is best for me may not be best for you. More importantly, what is best is unknowable to a committee of experts. Not hard to know. Not difficult to discover. Unknowable. What age should a women have a mammogram is not a question that has an answer. There are many answers. One reason is that women are different. A more important reason is that our knowledge evolves. What is thought to be “best” (wait until 40) may turn out to be different (wait till 50). But even more importantly, when power is centralized, the very idea of “best” no longer applies. The incentives aren’t there. When there is one standard set by the political process, the experts’ incentives on whatever committee determines the universal standard are inevitably going to be politicized. So give me “inefficient” competition among standards. Let different standards vie for attention.

This is just a spontaneous observation in response to the apparent rampant historical ignorance about the holiday of Thanksgiving. There seems to be a general belief that Thanksgiving was a once-in-a-century lucky thought on the part of the Pilgrims that arose from their unique conditions.

NOPE.

Thanksgiving was a celebration of the traditional harvest festival, Martinmas, that had been going on in England since it became Christian. Being Dissenters, the Pilgrims wouldn’t have use such a ‘Popish’ term as the traditional one, but they would celebrate the feast nevertheless, just as modern atheists will wish you ‘Happy Holidays’ rather than the more offensive ‘Merry Christmas’ but they’ll still say something. Remember that this took place in 1621, prior to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar by the English over a century later, and what they would consider November 11 (Martinmas) we would consider November 21, which is right around the current politically-determined date for Thanksgiving.

Just in case you were wondering.

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We have the technology.

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And the place hasn’t changed all that much from then to now.

Steve Sailer decides to kibitz the discussion between Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell.

I would suggest that the reason Gladwell is choosing to make a big deal over Pinker calling BS on Gladwell’s assertion that performance as an NFL quarterback “can’t be predicted” is because Malcolm realizes this minor issue is characteristic of his entire career.

Well, yeah.

Read it.

Good. Cleansing the Republican party of RINOs is just as important as beating Democrats. You can’t do any heavy lifting when the floor you’re standing on is rotten.