Read it.

Proof positive that New York is an entirely separate country.

Ross Douthat points out that California sucks and Texas rocks.

Steve Sailer points out the inconvenient truths.

Much of the popularity of Global Warming Awareness stems from the fact that almost nobody is capable of noticing Global Warming without benefit of Global Warming Awareness Campaigns.

I think that explains a lot of the Gnostic appeal of Global Warming Awareness. When you become Global Warming Aware, you are superior to the unenlightened masses. You have access to evidence of things unseen. You are one of the elite who are aware of knowledge that can only be gathered through the most esoteric means and analyzed by the most profound scholars.

Mencius Moldbug likes Carlyle.

The case of democracy is a case in which the jury has heard only from the defense. Year after year, generation after generation, democracy’s lawyers trot out an ever-changing dog’s breakfast of alibis, character witnesses and Harvard scientists, all singing one tune: the ironclad innocence and stellar nobility of the defendant, who is no more and no less than Gotham’s finest citizen. As for the prosecutor, his corpse has been rotting in the men’s room for years. Sometimes the bailiff, who has a ninth-grade education, a Tennessee accent and a drinking problem, picks up a few pages from his brief and reads them out of order.

But is the trial over? It is all but over. The jury is utterly sold. If they could adjourn and assign the defendant the keys to Gotham for life, they would. They are not even aware that there is a trial. They think they’re deciding whether to award a gold medal or a platinum one. But alas: the verdict of history is never, ever in. Once it does find the truth, though, it tends to stay there.

But in Carlyle’s mirror, the pattern that the ordinary Whig historian and his ordinary student know as steady progress punctuated by brilliant revolutions, becomes a pattern of inexorable decay punctuated by explosions of barbarism.

What we see instead, from both the Carlylean and Alinskyist perspectives, is a monotonic slope. This is the slope of order. Order slopes up to the right: true right, which is reactionary, is always the direction of increasing order, and true left the direction of increasing disorder. It is especially valuable to have a clear definition of this polarization, which seems to have evolved independently so many times in history. David Axelrod would surely get along with the Gracchi, and Pinochet with Sulla.

Consider the difference between the society in which I can get away with this hippie shit, and the society in which I can’t. The society in which obligations can be broken is the society in which loans are either risky, expensive and hard to get, or do not exist at all. Thus we see clearly that the society in which promises are made and kept, the society of order, is more civilized and humane. It is a better society. Once again, there is no Goldilocks effect, no golden mean.

Steve Sailer is on a continual quest to find people to offend.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism: 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.

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

La Griffe du Lion’s great term for the one standard deviation gap between whites and blacks in just about any measurement that’s related in some way to cognition — the Fundamental Constant of Sociology — is actually rather mysterious.

Another reason, however, is that, for a black or Hispanic, taking an FDNY test is like buying a very, very long-lived lottery ticket.

If the damages in Vulcan Society are set at, say, $20 million, the contingency fee lawyers will presumably grab about $7 million, and several hundred or more black and Hispanic test-takers who came close enough on the test so that they would have been hired if there had been no disparate impact will get checks in the mail adding up to $13 million.

Wouldn’t it be totally awesome to get a five-figure check in the mail for something you wasted time on and failed at a decade ago? So, you can see why so many minorities who didn’t have a chance of getting a good score took the firefighters test — because there was always a sizable chance under Disparate Impact theory that a judge would change the rules years after the game was played and send them money.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

As I’ve mentioned, one of the rules of polite journalism in discussing testing firefighters is to assume that paper and pencil tests must be irrelevant to the obviously moronic job of spraying water on burning buildings. Never refer to the voluminous data assembled over the decades by the Pentagon on the relationship between performance on paper and pencil tests and performance on similarly physical jobs.

When researching my 2004 article on John F. Kerry’s and George W. Bush’s IQ scores judging from their performance on the Officer’s Qualification Tests they took in the later 1960s (Bush 120-125, Kerry 115-120, which turned out to fit with their GPAs at Yale), I read a lot of studies from the 1960s by the military’s psychometricians documenting the predictive validity of these exams. I then tried to track down the authors to help me understand Kerry’s and Bush’s scores.

Don’t suppose you’ll read about that anytime soon on CNN or MSNBC.

The psychometric expert said something that seemed puzzling to me. He said that the General Factor of intelligence completely dominated job performance as a pilot to such an extent that it really wasn’t worthwhile to give multiple intelligences tests of specific piloting skills, such as the one George W. Bush took in 1968 to measure his 3-d visualization skills.

I remember that test. It was very odd.

I’ve wondered about this expert’s finding over the years, and I think I’ve finally started to figure it out: People with high IQs who would be bad pilots generally figure out for themselves that they would be bad pilots; so, they never take the tests to be pilots. Thus, the high correlation between the g Factor and pilot performance: high IQ individuals are already selected for having pilot-specific skills.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, encounters Wikipedia.

The second thing I noticed was that my Wikipedia page was written by an AAM — that is, an Angry Asian Male. This needs a bit of explanation.

Among East Asian males, there is a large subgroup who are flipped into a mode of blind fury by the thought of Asian women consorting with non-Asian males. In the young-adult cohort of mainland-Chinese males, I would estimate the subgroup as about one in three. These are the AAMs. One recent target of their rage has been Chinese movie star Zhang Ziyi, whose affair with Israeli venture capitalist Vivi Nevo has stirred quite horrifying levels of vituperation against Ms. Zhang on Chinese-language blogs.

That’s Wikipedia for you. They can say what they like about you, employing any level of sub-literacy for the purpose, and there isn’t a darn thing you can do about it, even if you are patient and computer-literate enough to master their mark-up language. I had heard this, but just hadn’t believed they are really so brazen.

Ninety percent of what you read about people in the public prints and forums is malicious lies. Any adult who does not know that should stop reading and take up fishing. Any public person who is bothered by it should retire into private life.

Read it.

I confess that I included this link, and another one, because I hadn’t known that both Lex Luthor and Batman were/are Episcopalians. That probably explains a lot.

Read it.

The guys at Get Religion kick some ass and take some names.

I think I am going to have to create a GetReligion list of “Big Ideas,” the concepts that drive what we do here. These two ideas would certainly be near the top, “Words have meaning” and “Ideas have consequences.”

This is a variation on an old argument that sounds something like this: “This is what I think the word means, so that’s what it means.” There’s a variation on this theme that journalists often use that weaves in a kind of postmodern twist: “Words change. Everyone knows what that word means right now when the great community of mainstream journalists use it that way. Thus, that’s what the word means.” This is a popular argument on the left when using the aforementioned “fundamentalist.” On the right, there are some folks who like to toss around the “cult” word.

Read it. And watch Charles Krauthammer, a Real Psychiatrist, analyze the Obamassiah.

Jack Kelly doubts Purdum’s tale of Alaskans wielding the DSM, but he has been thinking about the question of narcissism. He notes that a man who wrote two autobiographies before he was 45 is no piker when it comes to extravagant self-regard. Kelly adds that if Barack Obama is a narcissist, it would explain his notion that an iPod loaded with his speeches is an appropriate gift for the Queen of England (as well as Obama’s frequent self-references in those speeches).

On the other hand, you never see Obama and Superman at the same time….

Read it.

In the thirties, governments had Four Year Plans.  Today, they have Four Year from Now Plans – big policies that basically don’t kick in until the next election.

Steve Sailer is oftimes even more cynical than I am.

The kind of assimilated American Catholics and Protestants I grew up around tend to assume that the fine print on admissions to taxpayer-funded institutions such as the University of California is made up by experts with the public good always in mind, and if you need to be aware of its implications, you’ll be duly informed by professionals.

The kind of people I talk to now about these questions tend to be Korean, Armenian, Jewish, and so forth. It would never occur to them to trust public institutions to treat their family members well. Nor do they trust the media to explain the rules of the game honestly to them, since everything about public education hinges on race, and everybody is supposed to lie in public about race.

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Puts history in an entirely new perspective.

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In astrophysics, a black hole is also referred to as a singularity. When matter in a collapsed star is compressed past a certain point — known as the Schwarzschild radius — it becomes impossible for anything to escape the body’s gravity well, and all electromagnetic energy and matter within that radius must continue to collapse, producing a point-mass of infinite density. From the point of view of the rest of the universe, within such a singularity the laws of physics are no longer applicable.

So there’s a resemblance between Islam and this type of singularity. When the density of a Muslim population reaches a certain point, nothing can prevent a general collapse into a sharia singularity, within which normal political processes are no longer applicable.

Islam is, of course, singular in another way: it’s different from all other religions. Its apologists maintain that Islam is just like Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and all the others. So what if it has a different holy book and its own unique religious precepts? To them, it’s still essentially the same.

But this is not true: Islam is a singular religion. Its texts very specifically mandate not just a rigorous moral code, but a particular political structure, a system of jurisprudence, and an elaborate social regimen that directs the minutiae of daily life down to the finest details.

Read it.

Well, yeah, but unfortunately most of it is wrong.

The problem is not a lack of interest in learning among the young: it is the lack of a structure in which that appetite for learning can be satisfied. There are not enough good, useful, challenging degree courses to go around. And, with increasing numbers of pupils getting good grades at A level, it has become harder and harder for universities to sort the wheat from the chaff at the application stage.

Not so long ago, the idea that you could go to university, get a good degree, then have to join the dole queue like everyone else, was anathema. I remember, as a student in the late Seventies, staring horrified at a front-page news story about an Oxford graduate with a first-class degree who was still unemployed nine months after graduating. That story would not make the front pages today; in fact, it would hardly be worth reporting at all. The unemployed graduate, with a five-figure student loan to pay off, but not a sniff of a job, is part of the social furniture of our times.

Funny how that ol’ supply-and-demand thing works.

Read it.

Yeah, like a potter’s vessel. But that’s me.

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All sorts of silly fads catch on among smart people, but it doesn’t make them smarter. Does wearing a tie boost your brainpower?

Vegetarianism is God’s way of distinguishing the herd from the pack.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Ayn Rand once again anticipates modern social science: Critics of the free market are more neurotic (i.e. lower in Stability) than proponents.

People low in Stability, on the other hand, habitually blow minor problems out of proportion.  Even when they live in First World countries, they manage to convince themselves that the sky is falling.  Their typically neurotic response is to beg for Big Brother to save them from their largely imaginary problems.  When government solutions don’t work out, they misinterpret it as further proof that life is hopeless – not that their “solutions” were ill-conceived.

Read it.

And explains it in terms so simple that even Democrats ought to be able to follow along.

One key thing to remember is that there’s a big difference between a situation where the government is a sizeable buyer/producer, and one where the government is essentially the only buyer/producer.  In the latter case, the market still works, even if the government presence distorts it–prices are set by supply and demand, research is done, and so forth.  Indeed, it is not well appreciated on the left how dependent Medicare is on private insurers to tell them what the competitive price is for the treatments and products it pays for–if the private sector went away, Medicare would have to develop some sort of pricing system, and so would all the health care systems abroad.  Once the government becomes the dominant player, however, everything changes.

Right now, the US has a market–no matter how screwed up–for medical goods.  It is not a good market.  But no one in the market, except Medicare, has enough pricing power to totally undermine the market mechanism, so it grinds out an equilibrium that bears some resemblance to consumer demand.  In turn, Europe can buy those market-produced products.  But if you kill the last market, everything suddenly looks very different.  What’s the right price for innovation?  What should we research?  Those questions stop being decided on the basis of the number of consumers served, and start being decided on the basis of who has the best lobby.

It’s not uncommon for Americans getting treatment in Europe to be asked “You’d never be able to afford this in America, right?” by their doctors and nurses, when “this” is stitches or antibiotics.  I’d be terrified of switching places with an American too, if American health care were actually one eighth as bad as most Europeans seem to believe.  Yet despite that, as far as I know the net migration is actually the other way.

Read it.

Did human evolution really stop? If not, our sense of who we are — and how we got this way — may be radically altered. Messrs. Cochran and Harpending, both scientists themselves, dismiss the standard view. Far from ending, they say, evolution has accelerated since humans left Africa 40,000 years ago and headed for Europe and Asia.

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The Japanese are actually an alien species. Here’s proof.

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Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.

Tyler Cowen boils it down.

The case against is simple too.  Say that previously unprovided health insurance would have cost the employer 60 and would have been valued by the worker at 40.  You’re imposing a tax of 20 on the employment relation.  In the short run firms will hire less labor and during a recession is an especially bad time to produce that effect.

In the longer run, if the market is competitive, wages will fall by 20.  We’re forcing relatively poor workers to consume more medical insurance, and more medical care, than they wish to, at the expense of their cash income.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

That Justice Ginsburg’s dissent in Ricci managed to get four out of nine votes points out major flaws in both American intellectual life and in the Supreme Court.

Some of what’s wrong with the Supreme Court is structural. Justices used to drop dead of heart attacks before they aged too far into mental decline.

A more subtle defect in the Supreme Court is the lack of adult supervision. We still have the obsolete system of ailing Justices such as 76-year-old Ginsburg (cancer surgery in February) and extremely elderly Justices (Stevens is a ridiculous 89) being assisted solely by clerks who are largely in their late 20s: the senile being aided by the puerile.

Bryan Caplan looks behind the handwaving.

If an economist wants to ward off the spirit of laissez-faire insurance policy, all he has to do is repeatedly chant “moral hazard and adverse selection.”  The funny thing about this two-part mantra, though, is that the “moral hazard” part doesn’t do any of the work.  Almost no one even pretends that governments do anything to mitigate it.

Bottom line: Real-world insurance regulation has little or nothing to do with economists’ “moral hazard and adverse selection” mantra.  The “intellectual” bases of real-world regulation of insurance are rather populism and paternalism: Big bad insurers won’t cover people unless it’s profitable, and simple-minded consumers don’t care enough about their own health to pay for it themselves.

Contrary to e.g. Krugman, insurance isn’t a “special” market where laissez-faire doesn’t work.  Instead, it’s a normal market where democratic politics doesn’t work, because both the public and economists remain wedded to populism and paternalism.

Check it out.

I’m sure they’d want some money along with, but we’d still profit on the deal.

Read it.

The past may have always been worse than the present, but some periods were better than others. And as Thomas Malthus showed, what made for an enjoyable era was plenty of disease, war, and other disasters beforehand — to clear out a good chunk of the population, leaving much more stuff to go around per person among the survivors.

So, the simple way to get plenty of this vitamin is to steal it. Find an animal that has spent all day processing the plants that are rich in the precursors — this animal will have created true vitamin A from all this junk, and it will have stored most of the unused portion in its liver. Kill this animal and eat its liver — and boom, you’ve hit the vitamin A jackpot. And all without letting a single leaf of spinach enter your mouth.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading. Always.

In general, in cities that have tipped toward minority political dominance, where conmen like Rev. Kimber are trying to get their hands on control of the jobs, unions sometimes provide a bulwark against race discrimination.

This provides a new/old perspective on the much-denounced subject of teachers’ unions. It’s widely believed that if only we got rid of teachers unions, then we’d have superstar teachers in every inner city classroom. Yet, history suggests that we might wind up with worse teachers because rising politicians would try to fire the old white teachers and give their jobs to co-ethnics.

Read it.

Tacked to my wall is a lithograph of the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington. For many years, it graced my mother’s one-room schoolhouse in Lime Rock, N.Y. Antiquarian relic or enduringly relevant image? The same question may be asked of the “little red schoolhouse” itself, whose reality and legend are the subject of “Small Wonder.” Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor at New York University, sets out to tell “how — and why — the little red schoolhouse became an American icon.” Mr. Zimmerman proves a thoughtful and entertaining teacher.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

In one case, a group of Iraqi soldiers saw a Pioneer flying overhead and, rather than wait to be blown up, waved white bed sheets and undershirts at the drone—the first time in history that human soldiers surrendered to an unmanned system.

In technology circles, new products that change the rules of the game, such as what the iPod did to portable music players, are called “killer applications.” Foster-Miller’s new product gives this phrase a literal meaning. The Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System (SWORDS) is the first armed robot designed to roam the battlefield. SWORDS is basically the Talon’s tougher big brother, with its gripping arm replaced by a gun mount that can carry pretty much any weapon that weighs under three hundred pounds, ranging from an M-16 rifle and .50-caliber machine gun to a 40mm grenade launcher or an antitank rocket launcher. In less than a minute, the human soldier flips two levers and locks his favorite weapon into the mount. The SWORDS can’t reload itself, but it can carry two hundred rounds of ammunition for the light machine guns, three hundred rounds for the heavy machine guns, six grenades, or four rockets.

The small UAVs, like the Raven or the even smaller Wasp, fly just above the rooftops, sending back video images of what’s on the other side of the street; Shadow and Hunter circle over entire neighborhoods; the larger Predators roam above entire cities, combining reconnaissance with the ability to shoot; and too high to see, the Global Hawk zooms across an entire country, capturing reams of detailed imagery for intelligence teams to sift through. Added together, by 2008, there were 5,331 drones in the U.S. military’s inventory, almost double the number of manned fighter planes. That same year, an Air Force lieutenant general forecast that “given the growth trends, it is not unreasonable to postulate future conflicts involving tens of thousands.”

In some ways, this seems reasonable. Many wartime atrocities are not the result of deliberate policy, wanton cruelty, or fits of anger; they’re just mistakes. They are equivalent to the crime of manslaughter, as compared to murder, in civilian law. Unmanned systems seem to offer several ways of reducing the mistakes and unintended costs of war. They have far better sensors and processing power, which creates a precision superior to what humans could marshal on their own. Such exactness can lessen the number of mistakes made, as well as the number of civilians inadvertently killed.

Steve Sailer remembers the inconvenient stuff.

A great tragic story could be made about how Milk’s gay liberation movement unleashed its own nemesis. Within two decades of Milk’s arrival, gay rights had transformed Castro Street into the plague spot of the Western world, with AIDS killing its 10,000th San Franciscan in 1993.

Left out is almost everything that could add context and flavor, such as Milk’s alliance with Jim Jones’s Maoist Peoples Temple cult. Just ten days before Milk and Mayor George Moscone were murdered by working class politician Dan White, 907 ex-San Franciscans drank the Kool-Aid in Jonestown.

At least on TV, the suave candidate displayed only a hint of his native Long Island accent, while Penn plays him as an annoying noodge. And, oddly enough, the real Milk was better looking than the movie star. Penn, who in the 1980s would add slabs of muscle for roles as rapidly as Mickey Rourke did for “The Wrestler,” is now, at only 48, as wrinkled as a Shar Pei puppy.

During television appearances, Milk came across as a calm, moderately masculine presence, with only slight gay mannerisms. In contrast, Penn’s histrionic act sets your gaydar clanging like the meltdown siren at a nuclear power plant. That’s important, because Penn’s decision to play Milk as utterly unable to pass for straight robs Milk’s story of much of its interest. The real man, who had served without incident as a Naval officer, chose to come out of the closet.

Steve Sailer just loves to stir the pot.

The 1970s were not a time when gay liberation “advanced haltingly;” in reality, the 1970s were when all effective legal restrictions on industrial scale homosexual promiscuity were utterly ended in precisely those cities — e.g., San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York — where AIDS broke out most virulently in the early 1980s.

Instead, we’re all supposed to believe AIDS was caused by discrimination against homosexuals in the military, the absence of gay marriage, and/or Ronald Reagan. Indeed, it’s precisely because the evidence for cause and effect is so overwhelmingly clear that the pressure to lie and to submit to others’ lies is so intense.

Read it.

A study of the prehistoric remains has revealed that human flesh formed part of the diet of early man and children and adolescents in particular were regularly killed and eaten.

Still are, some would say.

Read it.

Andy Kessler, who’s been thinking an awful lot about these issues (and whose book The End of Medicine hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves) has an interesting article discussing why the industry has resisted the move to e-healthcare records. While it would save some money, he notes, it would also expose the entire scam of the healthcare system: which is that they make a ton of money from inefficiencies baked into the system, which are totally hidden from view. It’s a massive boondoggle for the industry, and e-healthcare records would actually make it easier for people to understand that the healthcare system profits from people being sick and not from having them be well.

Read it.

Cage match: 4th Century meets the 19th. Pass the popcorn.

Megan McArdle is not afraid to ask the pointed question:

But here’s the thing:  Army hospitals have all the advantages that single-payer advocates love about the VA.  They’re unified.  There’s no profit incentive–indeed, the doctors are on quite low salaries.  They have great incentives for preventive care.  They certainly don’t have any profit motive to provide bad care.  So why did Walter Reed suck?  And what guarantees that the VA is the system we’ll follow, rather than the multiple other dysfunctional government systems everyone hates?

A cartoon from Diversity Lane.

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The truth is that tenure has served as an instrument of conformity since tenure votes are often glorified popularity contests. The fact that university professors donated to President Obama’s campaign over John McCain’s by a margin of eight to one is only the tip of the iceberg. Those professors who want tenure and disagree with the prevailing trends in their field — or the political fashions outside of it — know that they must keep their mouths shut for at least the first seven years of their careers.

Bryan Caplan looks at insurance from an economist’s point of view.

The reason for my delight: As soon as she said that no insurance companies covered this treatment,  I knew it would be reasonably priced!

Read it.

I’ve always wondered what those silly shoulder-harnesses for non-sled-dogs were for. Now I know.

“Would you open up your Schnauzer please, sir?”

Read it.

She had already completed a 20,000-word dissertation and three pieces of coursework while heavily pregnant, as well as juggling three part-time jobs.

Tyler Cowen is always worth reading.

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But while on a sightseeing excursion to the city’s teeming slums, Tooley observed something peculiar: private schools were just as prevalent in these struggling areas as in the nicer neighborhoods. Everywhere he spotted hand-painted signs advertising locally run educational enterprises. “Why,” he wondered, “had no one I’d worked with in India told me about them?”

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We don’t condone “mercenaries,” sniffs the UN. But a system where the top 10 payers of peacekeeping dues (rich countries like the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, etc.) rely on the top 10 troop contributors (poor countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Jordan, Nepal, Ghana, etc.) to do their dirty work sounds pretty mercenary to me. Countries that provide troops get roughly $1,100 a month per soldier, many times the salary of a Bangladeshi private at home—not that he’d see much of it. Critics worry about accountability of private military companies, since they operate in a murky legal environment. But their forces seem no less accountable than, say, the miscreant UN contingents serving in Congo, and they would certainly be more effective. Some UN relief agencies already rely on military contractors for security. Why not extend that protection to the populations they’re trying to keep alive?

Read it.

Seth Godin comes out swinging.

Joe Wikert is always worth reading.

Adoption of the textbook was the last really major change in the education process, being a major improvement over a master at the front of the class reciting information and the students vainly attempting to write it all down — and that, of course, was a function of the lack of technology for disseminating information quickly and inexpensively. Once printing came along: Problem solved, let’s pump up the information flows. (The introduction of home appliances to replace servants had a similar impact.)

The problem here isn’t that the customers are not willing to try new alternatives to the tired old textbook.  No, the real problem is with the system itself.  Publishers, schools, authors (which oftentimes means “professors”) and campus bookstores all have plenty at stake and have enjoyed the current model for far too long.  It’s yet another case of The Innovator’s Dilemma.  You’d think it would be an excellent opportunity for an upstart to come in and completely obliterate the system, sort of like what Craigslist did to the newspaper industry.

Speed the day.

Read it.

Or perhaps just the end of the Mayans. It’s hard to say.