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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.

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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.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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That’s okay; these things happen.

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Welcome to the future.

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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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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?

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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?

Check it out.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.