Read it.

In pre-industrial times, ‘of full age’ was considered 14 for males and 12 for females; a number of kings came out of regency at that age. Can you imagine the country being run by a 14-year-old? (I know it seems like that at times, but I’m serious.)

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Residents of a small Italian town where 8,000 people have the same surname have won a legal fight to use their nicknames, which can descend into the derogatory, on official documents.

How refreshingly medieval. Reputedly the Chinese only have 400 surnames for several billion people; I wonder how they do it?

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From its first publication in 1975, Edward O. Wilson’s book Sociobiology has stirred disputes over his claim that ethics is rooted in human biology. Our deepest intuitions of right and wrong, he asserted on the first page of the book, are guided by the emotional control centers of the brain, which evolved by natural selection to help the human animal exploit opportunities and avoid threats in the natural and social environment. In 1998, Wilson’s book Consilience renewed the controversy as he continued to argue for explaining ethics through the biology of the moral sentiments. Human nature is not a product of genes alone or of culture alone, Wilson insisted. Rather, human nature is constituted by “the epigenetic rules, the hereditary regularities of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction rather than another, and thus connect the genes to culture” (164). The biology of the moral sentiments would be the study of the “epigenetic rules” of moral experience as shaped by the complex interaction of genetic propensities and cultural learning. Wilson has often used Edward Westermarck’s theory of the incest taboo as a good example of this.

Steve Sailer looks at Mad Men and its times.

The real sex mismatch happened with the sexual revolution in the later 1960s, when a flood of Baby Boom babes born from 1946 onward came on the mating market and immediately set about stealing prosperous husbands away from their wives.

Men, in the view of social commentators such as James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Groucho Marx, and W.C. Fields, were relentlessly oppressed by women, who refused to sleep with them without a legally binding promise of lifetime support and fidelity.

The contemporary notion that women rose up as one to wrest from men the privilege of bringing home the bacon is one of the more curious myths in folklore.

Read it.

Look at what people learn in the classroom.  Look at what people do on the job.  How much of a connection do you see?

Check it out.

Read it.

Read it.

Queen Himiko is a popular character in Japanese history. She was apparently able to wield great power in the Yamatai Kingdom from around the end of the second century. Legends handed down from the time describe her as “being skilled with magic”.

Japanese revere her as a heroic Boadicea-type figure who unified the kingdom after years of fighting with rival tribes, before her death around 248AD.

Read it.

Bear in mind that this is from the New York Times, so any connection to reality is purely speculative.

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No, this isn’t from The Onion. I double-checked.

Read it.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

— Lt.-Col. John McCrae (1872 – 1918)

Jerry Pournelle takes a long look.

Are all Muslims enemies of everyone not part of the House of Submission to Islam?

But it all depends on how you define “Muslim” and even more importantly, how the Muslim scholars who define Islam define Muslim; and there the question is not so silly. The Koran is explicit on the subject: all true Muslims must make war on the unbelievers and force them either to convert or to pay tribute. There can be truce in that war, but never peace. This is the nature of Islam. In other words, if you are not at war with the unbelievers you are not a Muslim, and thus the answer to our first question is “yes.” Perhaps it is not a silly question at all.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

Seth Godin is always worth reading.

How much of time, staffing and money does your organization spend on creating incredible experiences (vs. avoiding bad outcomes)?

At the hospital, it’s probably 5% on the upside (the doctor who puts in the stitches, say) and 95% on the downside (all the avoidance of infection or lawsuits, records to keep, forms to sign). Most of the people you interact with in a hospital aren’t there to help you get what you came for (to get better) they’re there to help you avoid getting worse.

Read it.

Muslims are the new Communists, in almost every sense.

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The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.

Well, there it is.

Steve Sailer asks the question that every American ought to be asking.

If he survives, the Ft. Hood shooter will of course be charged with murder, but it’s reasonable to inquire whether treason should also be charged. After all, for a major in the U.S. Army, trained at taxpayer expense in the use of weapons, to shoot 40 unarmed comrades-in-arms would seem like a reasonable example of waging war on the United States.

On the other hand, with Jane Fonda still walking around free, one has to wonder whether treason is an obsolescent concept in American law.

Check it out.

Dude, if a lion jumps on the hood of my car, I ain’t gonna be smilin’.

Gotta love Australians.

Read it.

Apparently this guy has has never been to Washington. We all know where it goes.

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I am not making this up.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, is a very wise man.

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.

The greatest obstacle to calm, rational, evidence-based thinking about human nature, is human nature. Pessimism doesn’t come easily. You have to struggle your way towards it.

Read it.

Read it.

But you knew that.

Read it.

Some of these I like a lot; some are really silly. But it’s worth thinking about.

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This must have all happened after I left in 1980.

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Of course. All it needs is an oscillation overthruster and you’re there.

Read it.

Texas, increasingly, is the economic and intellectual leader of the U.S. During the last 18 months before the current recession took hold, while the country as a whole was still creating jobs, more than half of those jobs were created in a single state: Texas.

Texas has usurped the leadership position that, decades ago, belonged to California. Today California is in decline, likely irreversibly so.

The debate, really, is over. High-tax states don’t deliver a better lifestyle–not for taxpayers, anyway. One of these days, voters will figure out that the same thing holds true at the national level. Higher taxes may be OK if you’re a public employee; otherwise, they’re a dead loss.

Read it.

Peace is not a process. Peace exists when one of two conditions is met: 1) two groups of people have no wish to kill one another (e.g., the U.S. and Canada), or 2) one or both of the groups would like to kill the other, but is deterred or otherwise prevented from doing so (e.g., the Cold War). In neither case is a “process” typically involved. Negotiation, unlike peace, is indeed a process. But negotiations, even when they lead to a treaty or agreement, cannot bring peace unless one of the above conditions is also met. (See Munich, Oslo, countless others).

People have been talking about a “peace process” in the Middle East for a long time, but those discussions have little or nothing to do with the actual existence of peace, which has depended on other factors. See number 2 above.

How do you make peace with a sickness?

Read it.

The medieval castle, seen by millions of Harry Potter fans in the films, is the home of the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland.

We have the technology.

Steve Landsburg isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions.

1. Insurance is not part of the solution; it’s part of the problem. Many people—and especially poor people— get too little health care in this country. That’s largely because many other people—and especially rich people—are overinsured. People with insurance demand more health care, which drives up prices. More insurance coverage will make this problem worse, not better.

3. A public option can only make things worse. A government run insurance system can only do one of two things: Mimic the private insurers, or do something different. If it mimics the private insurers, it serves no purpose. If it does anything different, it can only be worse.

After all, what can it do different? Approve more claims? But where will the money come from? Higher premiums? But we’ve already agreed that if people wanted that kind of insurance it would already be offered. A more efficient bureaucracy? But if there were a way to save money by streamlining the bureacracy, why wouldn’t all those greedy private insurers have adopted it already? Does anyone believe that the major insurance companies are too lackadaisical to make an easy extra buck?

Read it.

Each team is made up of 15,000 people, pulling a 656 ft rope.

Whenever I read a science fiction story that involves an alien species, I can never get into it unless the alien species is at least as weird as the Japanese.

Steve Sailor is always worth reading.

Military researchers have found that two groups of personnel are particularly good at spotting anomalies: those with hunting backgrounds, who traipsed through the woods as youths looking to bag a deer or turkey; and those who grew up in tough urban neighborhoods, where it is often important to know what gang controls which block.

Personnel who fit neither category, often young men who grew up in the suburbs and developed a liking for video games, do not seem to have the depth perception and peripheral vision of the others, even if their eyesight is 20/20.

The best troops he’s ever seen when it comes to spotting bombs were soldiers from the South Carolina National Guard, nearly all with rural backgrounds that included hunting.

Read it.

In relevant part:

The Fourth Amendment protects our homes from unreasonable searches and seizures, requiring that, absent special circumstances, the government obtain a search warrant based on probable cause before entering. This is strong privacy protection for homes and the items within them in the physical world.

When a person uses the Internet, however, the user’s actions are no longer in his or her physical home; in fact he or she is not truly acting in private space at all. The user is generally accessing the Internet with a network account and computer storage owned by an ISP like Comcast or NetZero. All materials stored online, whether they are e-mails or remotely stored documents, are physically stored on servers owned by an ISP. When we send an e-mail or instant message from the comfort of our own homes to a friend across town the message travels from our computer to computers owned by a third party, the ISP, before being delivered to the intended recipient. Thus, “private” information is actually being held by third-party private companies.

Read it.

The Democrats would scream like little girls. And probably blame Bush.

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The Church of Scientology was found guilty of fraud in France on Tuesday and fined more than half-a-million pounds, but judges stopped short of banning the group.

Cringely peers behind the curtain.

Is Windows 7 really worth $70 more than Snow Leopard?

The better question to ask is why Microsoft decided to set the price point where they did? And the answer to that one is quite simple: Microsoft doesn’t actually want you to upgrade to Windows 7 at all.

Microsoft wants you to buy a new Windows 7 PC instead.

Read it.

No, it wasn’t. One side was English, the other French. Nothing fair about it.

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We have the technology.

Read it.

Developers have reproduced All Saints Church, Brockhampton, Herefordshire, to cater for a demand from Japanese couples to marry in Western-style churches.

Whenever I read a science fiction story that deals with an alien species, I always have a hard time getting into it unless the alien species is at least as strange as the Japanese.

Read it. And watch the video.

Nancy Pelosi and others on the Left have proposed a value added tax as a way to feed the federal beast. The VAT is familiar in Europe but little known to most Americans. In this video, Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute analyzes the implications of a national VAT.

Read it.

But what has me annoyed is that every time I’ve seen this question posed, people blather on and on about the relationship between a college education and future earnings. Usually we learn that yes, if you finish college you are likely to earn more money than someone who doesn’t finish college. Whoo-hoo.

The truth is that what you pay for a college education is only part of what you put into a college education, and arguably not the most important part. Call me crazy for saying this, but: how much you care about education matters, too. Like all teachers, I have students who pore over assignments and get inspired and take risks and attend extracurricular lectures and discover new skills and passions. I also have students who don’t do that so much, despite all sorts of institutional and personal encouragements to do so. There are students, in other words, who really seem to embrace a spirit of education, students who are spirited about education. And in my experience, those students who put so much of themselves into college are the ones who come out of college with more internships and fellowships and professional school acceptances and – I have to throw something all mushy and unquantifiable in here – better senses of themselves and what they have to give other people and what it means to lead a good life.

This is actually a book review by Mark Steyn. Presumably he didn’t pick the headline.

In his new novel Heart of the Assassin, Robert Ferrigno recreates the Saudi school burning in every particular except one: the madrassa is now in America.

I’ve got the two earlier Assassin books by Ferrigno, and they are well worth the price.

Read it.

First, and as is most evident in Atlas Shrugged, Rand turns Marxism on its head.  While Marxists argue that “capitalists” make their profits on the backs of the working class, Rand illustrates that the working class, as such, makes almost no contribution to wealth, but relies on the efforts, risks, sacrifices, and most of all the genius of the entrepreneurial class.  Consider, as a thought experiment, what living standards would be like if every person in the world had an IQ around the median of 103, and otherwise had average talents and ambition.  Does anyone seriously doubt that “workers,” and everyone else, would be a lot poorer than they are today, and indeed would likely be living as poorly as our hunting and  gathering ancestors?

Read it. And watch the video.

Gotta love Australians. Even their seagulls have attitude.

Read it.

Gotta love Australians.

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We have the technology.

Jerry Pournelle takes a look.

Population growth: there is now a scheme to persuade people for not having kids by giving them a carbon credit. Like all population limiting schemes, this one seems designed to breed those who pay attention to population growth arguments out of the human race.

We’re doing well at convincing some Western cultures to commit suicide, as predicted by James Burnham in Suicide of the West. Burnham was fond of saying that Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide. That was thought to be an obsolete observation after the end of the Seventy Years War; perhaps it is not so irrelevant as some thought.

Read it.

Percy the cat has become the most famous pet in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, after it was revealed that he often leaves his home on Green Howard’s Drive and travels to the Sea Life Centre by rail.

The six-year-old animal spends the day watching the fish and penguins before hopping back on to the miniature North Bay Railway train when it is time to go home.

A role model for modern Britain: A slacker cat.

Dymphna, at Gates of Vienna, has some worthwhile observations.

First of all, my larger contention: that the national Republican Party has so completely lost its integrity, vigor, and moral sensibility that it is in grave danger of losing the confidence of all the American people.

I have refused the Republican denomination for quite some time, as have many people I know. When asked, we usually reply that we’re “conservative” or “libertarian”. Though those labels aren’t a good fit, they are at least not a shameful one.

And that pretty well sums up my position, too.