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Was just noticing in the genre of scary ghost movies that also happen to be mysteries, when the time comes to sit down in front of Google or a microfiche reader at the library and figure out what’s going on, for some reason that’s the chick’s job.

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Hey, you didn’t have anything else to do today, right?

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And who could blame him?

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Yeah, Latin and Greek would raise the tone of the country beyond measure.

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One wishes to speak carefully here, but without letting pass a compound of willful ignorance, crude ethics, and cruder social doctrine: a compound, indeed, of the sorts of small, soft hearted errors that transform charity into social work, love of the Body of Christ into “altruism,” and a sense of personal obligation to a scheme of bureaucratic methods for getting others to pay for my sense of moral obligation.  Let us note a few things.

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Fortunately, Obama doesn’t speak Italian, otherwise the resemblance would be truly frightening.

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Recently, we pointed out that what’s often called “identity theft” involving someone falsifying bank account info to take your money is really nothing of the sort, but is instead a bank robbery where the victim gets blamed.

And watch the video, which is as funny as a ‘Get a Mac’ ad.

Tyler Cowen thinks he’s figured it out.

My theory is that Apple wants to capture a chunk of the revenue in this nation’s enormous textbook market — high school, college, whatever.  Why lug all those books around?  The superior Apple graphics, colors, and fonts will support all of the textbook features which Kindle botches and destroys.  Apple takes a chunk of the market revenue, of course, plus they sell the iPads and some AT&T contracts.  There are lots of schoolkids in the world.

In the longer run the iPad will compete with your university, or in some ways enhance your university.  It will offer homework services and instructional videos and courses, none of which can work well on the current iPhone or Kindle.

Can you imagine one attached to every hospital bed or in the hands of every doctor and nurse?

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“Progressive” is a buzz word for liberalism, and when liberalism is cloaked behind the P-word it is bait and switch. You act like you’re going to restore power, wealth or both to the “Middle Class” — middle class being an imprecise term that generally refers to the income and property bracket of the person who is listening to you.

As soon as you build up a self-delusional groundswell of populist support, you do this hairpin turn and start parceling out the power and wealth to your friends. Leaving the middle class to twist in the wind.

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A useful chart.

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Without getting crucified at the end, one hopes.

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Well, if they were blind drunk, how valid was the test?

Good to know that the Taiwanese can keep up with professionals.

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There we go: A shovel-ready project. Alert the White House.

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You want to see what meaningless, vague generalities look like — as a Palin hater why they have so much hate.

You want to see what compelling, well-thought-out specifics look like, ask an Obama voter why he’s sorry.

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Just in case you’ve forgotten.

House of Eratosthenes is always worth reading.

Reality teevee is starting to look like droopy butt-crack jeans to me: It appeals to morons, it looks (consequently) as stupid as all holy hell, but for reasons nobody can explain it’s just hanging around like a bad smell, year after year and decade after decade. Who thinks this looks cool? Who likes it? Someone somewhere must.

Slow news day.

Joel Spolsky always has interesting things to say.

Now, we all know that communication is very important, and that many organizational problems are caused by a failure to communicate. Most people try to solve this problem by increasing the amount of communication: cc’ing everybody on an e-mail, having long meetings and inviting the whole staff, and asking for everyone’s two cents before implementing a decision.

But communications costs add up faster than you think, especially on larger teams. What used to work with three people in a garage all talking to one another about everything just doesn’t work when your head count reaches 10 or 20 people. Everybody who doesn’t need to be in that meeting is killing productivity. Everybody who doesn’t need to read that e-mail is distracted by it. At some point, overcommunicating just isn’t efficient.

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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.

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I recommend “PhD Comics” highly.

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On the other hand, it might not.

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Dun-dun-DUN……

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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.

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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.

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Russians are almost as strange as the Japanese.

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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.

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‘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.

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Gotta love Australians.

George Will lets ‘er rip.

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Well. Let that be a lesson to us all.

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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.”

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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.

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

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

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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.).

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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.

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