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“Once reunited with Rome, they may keep most of the Liturgical celebrations according to their tradition, which is closer to the Tridentine Mass,” La Stampa explained, adding that they would also “keep their married clergy but not married bishops.”

Progress, of a sort. ‘Guys! Don’t stop there! Come back – come all the way back….’

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See, it’s good to be “King,” but what do you do when you’re at Trudy’s “North Star” Tex-Mex Restaurant tucking into a chile relleno (with salsa verde, black beans, and the ground beef filling), and the guy across the table looks you in the eye and offers you enough money that you never have to work again?

Winning the lottery presents one with a similar choice, and the choice that one makes says a lot about one’s character. How many of us have just sat back and pondered for half an hour or so what we would do with sudded access to ‘life-changing’ amounts of money? Try it sometime. ‘I have a check for $10 million in my hand. What do I do with it?’ Step by step. I think you’ll be surprised.

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For decades, neuroscientists have theorized that the brain “time stamps” events as they happen, allowing us to keep track of where we are in time and when past events occurred. However, they couldn’t find any evidence that such time stamps really existed — until now.

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Or it may be a McDonald’s Instant Win puzzle piece. Be the first on your block to win a chance to bitch-slap Tom Hanks.

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Among the media, academia and within planning circles, there’s a generally standing answer to the question of what cities are the best, the most progressive and best role models for small and mid-sized cities. The standard list includes Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, and Denver. In particular, Portland is held up as a paradigm, with its urban growth boundary, extensive transit system, excellent cycling culture, and a pro-density policy. These cities are frequently contrasted with those of the Rust Belt and South, which are found wanting, often even by locals, as “cool” urban places.

But look closely at these exemplars and a curious fact emerges. If you take away the dominant Tier One cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles you will find that the “progressive” cities aren’t red or blue, but another color entirely: white.

In fact, not one of these “progressive” cities even reaches the national average for African American percentage population in its core county. Perhaps not progressiveness but whiteness is the defining characteristic of the group.

As the college educated flock to these progressive El Dorados, many factors are cited as reasons: transit systems, density, bike lanes, walkable communities, robust art and cultural scenes. But another way to look at it is simply as White Flight writ large. Why move to the suburbs of your stodgy Midwest city to escape African Americans and get criticized for it when you can move to Portland and actually be praised as progressive, urban and hip?

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This is pretty neat.

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Hey, it’s still a jungle out there.

The Daily Telegraph has a little list.

The Other McCain indulges in some philosophizing.

Old money can corrupt, and new money can, too. Remember the IPO hot shots of the “dot-com” boom? Or recall those stories about lottery winners who wasted vast winnings and ended up broke again? What about those professional athletes — first-round draft picks and All-Pro stars — who reached their 40s without retaining a cent of their once-fabulous earnings?

God tests us every day. Some He tests with poverty, and some He tests with wealth. Some He tests with bad fortune, and some He tests with good fortune. Some He tests with pain, and some He tests with pleasure. But every hour of every day He is testing us; and how each of us responds to those tests shows what we are worth.

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Fossil boffins say that dense triple-canopy rainforests, home among other things to gigantic one-tonne boa constrictors, flourished millions of years ago in temperatures 3-5°C warmer than those seen today – as hot as some of the more dire global-warming projections.

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Apparently the show’s writers would just insert a marker in the script that would be filled with technobabble later.

As you probably guessed, this is not how I write SF — in fact, it’s the antithesis of everything I enjoy in an SF novel.

Hard to blame him. And yet, being a socialist, he favors government doing the same thing on a grander scale. You’d think he could connect the dots.

Unfortunately, writers and other ‘artistic’ people, many of demonstrable talent and intelligence, just can’t seem to extrapolate from X is stupid when group Y does it to It’s still stupid when the government does it.

I guess Gary Gygax was right: Intelligence and Wisdom are separate rolls.

Steve Sailer takes a look at David Brooks. (He does this stuff so that you don’t have to.)

For example, here is a scan of David Brooks’ brain during his daily reading of iSteve. As you can see, the experience is stimulating both the Man-I-Wish-I-Could-Say-Interesting-Stuff-Like-That and the But-I-Can’t-Or-I’ll-Lose-My-Job-So-I’ll-Say-the-Opposite sectors of his brain.

I love watching a professional at work.

Let us count the ways.

You don’t need to criticize liberals to end up on their “Hate You Forever And Ever” list. You really don’t need to do much of anything at all, because the anger is already churning acridly away before the liberal ever starts to know you, let alone see what you say and do. They are like walking clothes washing machines, always at the high point of the cycle, sloshing pure acid around in their innards instead of water.

The anger has nothing to do with critics or any other outside party. It is caused by the inherent contradiction of liberalism. To understand the anger, you have to understand the contradiction; in order to understand the contradiction, you have to understand Star Trek.

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A Texas firm plans to use power generated by the Gulf of Mexico’s waves to make its salty water drinkable.

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Energy globocorp Royal Dutch Shell has announced plans to deploy a fleet of monster processing ships – the biggest ever constructed – to exploit so-called “stranded” gas fields, ones which can’t be harvested economically by conventional means.

We have the technology.

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It’s a pretty good list.

1. Aliens are basically humans with silly foreheads

Megan McArdle cuts to the chase and does an autopsy on the healthcare debate.

Anything you could do to a putative new system, you could do to Medicare.  And the reason we haven’t is not that we just thought of comparative effectiveness research, healthcare IT, or strong-arming provider payments last week.  These ideas have all been kicking around for a long time, and in the case of the provider payments, have already been tried more than once.  Providers learn to game the new payment rules, and if they don’t, they get Congress to undo them.

It’s no good saying that well, we should try to be more like the Netherlands–you can’t build a system on the assumption that you will, suddenly and for no apparent reason, be able to import someone else’s political culture.

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That reminds me that I need to revisit my set of The Office DVDs.

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How geeks look at coins.

Tim Cavanaugh at Reason magazine doesn’t like investment bankers much.

I’ve seen this fear of the appearance of conflict of interest before. It never translates into any concern that you might actually have a conflict of interest and thus shouldn’t be doing what you want to do. That pattern holds here: At several points in Sorkin’s story, officials who used to work at Goldman or Morgan, who have multiple professional and personal overlaps with the firms, are quickly granted waivers from Treasury and Fed conflict-of-interest rules so they can help out their old allies. Hypocrisy being the tribute vice pays to virtue, we should probably be grateful that anti-conflict niceties exist at all. But it’s just the old constitution-is-not-a-suicide pact dilemma: The rules exist right until the moment they’re actually needed; then you suspend the rules.

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We have the technology.

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He was taught the technique called echolocation, similar to sonar used by bats, by Daniel Kish, a blind Californian who founded the World Access for the Blind charity.

An Informative Flow Chart.

Jerry Pournelle has some thoughts on the subject.

Burke said that for a man to love his country, his country ought to be lovely, and there is something to be said for that. Investment in the general welfare was written into the Constitution, but that meant harbors, roads, canals, parks, public buildings and monuments, all of which had to be paid for by taxing the productive — almost by definition the unproductive don’t have much to tax — but it hardly meant a direct transfer of resources from the productive to the unproductive.

Apparently that’s just the way things are. If you’re productive you owe it to those less fortunate. And there is a class that has the right to pay itself — by taxing you — for taking your output and distributing it among those who weren’t so fortunate as you. Get used to it.

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Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

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Trad is, quite simply, a safe haven for sartorially selective gentlemen amid the ever-growing chaos of department stores and runways.

“Trad is sort of the antithesis of what’s happening in fast fashion right now,” said Michael Williams, 30, who obsesses over classic American men’s clothing on his blog, A Continuous Lean. “It’s like the opposite of what all the men’s wear designers are doing,” Mr. Williams continued. “It’s not fashion; it’s clothes.”

J. Press safeguards the core values of our civilization.

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Gotta go with Byron on that one.

Bryan Caplan points out that economics isn’t hard if it’s explained properly.

Economists often off-handedly remark that basic economics is “counterintuitive.”  In one of the papers he presented at GMU, Scott Sumner has a whole appendix on “Why is economics so counterintuitive?”  Even my hands aren’t clean here: In The Myth of the Rational Voter, I wrote that “…Smith’s thesis [the harmony of private and public interest] was counterintuitive to his contemporaries, and remains counterintuitive today.”  However, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that if basic economics seems counterintuitive, it’s being poorly explained.  If Bastiat could make econ intuitive, so can we.

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And usually it’s socialism. You might say “In times like these, we have to pull together and nobody can make a profit providing a service so essential to the rest of us.” You would not say “Because it’s Tuesday and my butt itches, we have to pull together and nobody can make a profit providing this service.” With the latter, even a flaccid mind would immediately recognize — duh, hey wait a minute…if the service is so essential, how do we make sure it continues to be provided if nobody can make a profit providing it? But “In times like these” goes over like Free Ice Cream night in Hell. Why yes! That makes perfect sense!

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Something that has perplexed me for a long time is why we put up with government providing so-called public services. Ask the little people two questions and I think I know what the answers will be. “Would you send your children to an independent school if you could afford to?” “Would you use private healthcare if you could afford to do so?” There will be some who will answer in the negative on grounds of political ideology, but my guess is that the vast majority would give affirmative answers. Then ask them why they would use private-sector services and my guess is that they would say they are better than the services offered by the State. It would, of course, be fair to point out that many of the answers would not be based on direct knowledge of the superior quality of private-sector schools and hospitals (although increasing numbers are now receiving treatment in private hospitals where they have had to wait too long for a new NHS hip or the removal of a gall bladder). However, one factor cannot, in my view, be denied namely that those providing services in the private sector have to keep their standards high or they will lose customers.

It seems to me that the problem with State education and healthcare is that they are provided by the State rather than just funded by the State. It leaves them open to political interference which, as we have seen in spades, creates huge difficulties for those actually delivering the services at the bottom of the pyramid. Constant chopping and changing of performance criteria does nobody any favours. One manifestation of that problem is that a top-down nationwide system of anything requires so many layers of bureaucracy that vast sums of money are consumed passing information back and forth.

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After losing his job in hotel management in 1997, Bertram Rohloff wanted to open a stand to sell sandwiches but found he could not get the necessary permits to set up shop. So instead he envisaged an evolution in food-preparation technology, a step beyond the rolling hot-dog cart, because without the necessary permits, neither the grill nor the sausages could touch the ground.

Regulation is the mother of invention? Say rather than markets work whether you want them to or not.

Steve Sailer is never afraid to ask the hard questions.

It’s a fascinating symbiotic relationship between capitalists and professional anti-capitalists. The capitalists aren’t just paying protection money to avoid a few protesters. They are also buying ACORN’s reputation as a leftist power-to-the-people street organization to demonstrate to center-left politicians that their giant project is good for the poor.

Have you ever noticed that leftist organizations that claim to represent poor people of color don’t always follow strict affirmative action guidelines when it comes to their really good jobs? Like the Hispanic union SEIU, which is headed by Andy Stern. Or, for example, here’s a picture of ACORN’s founder Wade Rathke, who looks like if he ever went outside in the sun, he might explode into flames.

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

While these organs are not monolithic or hierarchically organized, they somehow magically seem to always agree with each other. The Washington Post never gets into an organizational catfight with the New York Times, or Harvard with Stanford. This, of course, is because all are ticks on the same horse – Washington – and must gallop together.

The Cathedral indeed contains many shades. They are not shades of grey, however. They are shades of brown. A drop of wine in a barrel of sewage makes sewage; a drop of sewage in a barrel of wine makes sewage.

Why, exactly, are all civilized governments on earth run in the way they are? Because they are all run, more or less, by the New York Times. More precisely, they are run by civil servants, who were trained by professors, both of whose reward systems are administered by the New York Times. This is the direct path. On the indirect path, ten percent of the population reads the Times or a comparable highbrow organ; the other ninety gets its thought from more lowbrow intermediaries, who all read the Times and wish they worked there. Together, these paths form the Modern Structure, which if not indestructible is almost so.

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The research challenges the notion that India’s notorious rigid caste system, with its priestly Brahmans and low-status ‘untouchables’, was largely manufactured by the British.

I had never heard that anybody thought the Indian caste system was created by the British. Sounds like one of those wacky notions from the hate-Western-civilization Left.

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That explains a lot.

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Walk-in medical clinics run by CVS, Wal-Mart and other retailers provide care for routine illnesses that is as good as, and costs less than, similar care offered in doctors’ offices, hospital emergency rooms and urgent care centers, according to a new Rand Corp. study. The cost savings over emergency rooms, in particular, was quite dramatic.

Well, that’s capitalism for you.

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Eating raw food is time-consuming and, in calorific terms, unrewarding. Some things, such as meat or tubers, require exhausting levels of mastication (chimps spend up to five hours a day gathering and chewing their food), and much of it is indigestible anyway, passing straight through the system. Cooking these ingredients breaks down the molecular structures, releasing the calories and making them easier to get through.

Well, I’ve always wondered about that.

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Actually, a generation of economic stagnation has taught the Swedes a lesson. They’ve learned that government does not produce wealth, and if they want more people to work, jobs have to pay better, after taxes. Sweden is therefore in the midst of a series of tax cuts aimed at preserving the long-term viability of its economy. Today’s headline: “Sweden slashes income tax further to boost jobs.”

Bryan Caplan has an interesting thought.

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Economically, the print media are in the business of marking up paper. We can all imagine an old-style editor getting a scoop and saying “this will sell a lot of papers!” Cross out that final S and you’re describing their business model. The reason they make less money now is that people don’t need as much paper.

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Oh, I mean, really — who bothers with that sort of thing any more? Yes we can!

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I’m sure that this is somehow Dick Cheney’s fault.

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Then: Romeo and Juliet
Now: The Teen Sex and Suicide Epidemic: What You Need to Know to Protect Yourself and Your Family

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Imagine a world in which people are so disconnected from adult life that the best thing they can think of to do with their time is to comment on Amazon reviews.

Now imagine yourself stuck in that world.

ii) By avoiding this book you will miss out on the precise location of the heretical surfboard worshipped by the British royal family and the sinister significance of Abe Lincoln’s unholy quadrille. You will also miss out on the explanation of why the Hairy-Eared Dwarf Lemur is really God’s own tree-dwelling angel-on-earth and on the coded instructions showing how to grow a prize-winning mushroom, which the author cunningly gleaned from a close textural analysis of St. Paul’s third birthday card to the Corinthians.

On the other hand, they are pretty funny.

Life is full of such conflicts.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees.

Dvorak has an idea.