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

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If it were any good, we’d be moving there rather than them moving here.

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About two in three Americans say they prefer to live around people belonging to different races, religions and income groups. In reality, however, survey research shows that people are increasingly clustering together among those who are just like themselves, especially on the one attribute that ties the others together — political affiliation.

A trend much reported on, but only dimly understood. Unfortunately, most “journalists” are charter members of the “we value diversity” crowd and find wanting to live around people more or less like oneself to be between barbaric and incomprehensible. Hence what makes it into the dinosaur media is typically fairly incoherent. This article is a step in the right direction.

This might explain the loathing many Republicans and Democrats feel for each other. It isn’t about taxes or terrorism: The yoga people simply can’t stand what the lawn-chemical people represent, and vice versa. This might explain why, despite all of Obama’s calls for an America that is larger than its differences, political polarization at the county level intensified between 2004 and 2008.

And that expresses it very neatly.

Steve Sailer never hesitates to grasp the nettle firmly.

The Pashtun are disagreeable bad-tempered back-stabbers. But, they live there. And we don’t.

Read it.

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Perhaps that’s why we’ll never get rid of government.

Francis Fukuyama likes Shop Class as Soulcraft.

“Shop Class as Soulcraft” is a beautiful little book about human excellence and the way it is undervalued in contemporary America.

Matthew B. Crawford, who owns and operates a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Va., and serves as a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, notes that all across the United States, high school shop classes teaching mechanical arts like welding, woodworking or carpentry are closing down, to free up funds for computer labs.

Question: Were Crawford not a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advance Studies in Culture — were his claim to fame merely owning and operating a motorcycle repair shop — would Professor Fukuyama be as smitten with what Crawford has to say? I suspect that he would not.

Read it.

So why are behavioral geneticists so eager to downplay the practical relevance of their field?  The most plausible explanation is that these scientists already have enough trouble with political correctness.  They don’t want to amplify their public relations problem by pointing out that their science undermines a bunch of popular, feel-good policies.

Critics of behavioral genetics are prone to hyperbole, but they do have good reason to fear this science.  It really does undermine a lot of their sacred cows.  Example: If differences in talent – not differences in opportunities – explain the inter-generational income correlation, people with normal values will conclude that a lot of redistribution is unjustified.  “Giving everyone a chance to realize his potential,” isn’t the only rationale for redistribution, but it is an important one.  If people admitted that family environment has little effect on economic success in our society, there is every reason to expect a decline in support for redistributive policies.

Read it.

“If information cannot be freely exchanged, if journalists must fear being sued over information reported in good faith on matters crucial to our defense, matters such as the financial networks supporting jihadist terror, then we cannot make sound security policy,” former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said at a recent conference on “libel lawfare.” This is a useful term to describe lawsuits to suppress facts about radical Islam and terrorism.

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Last Sunday, late-term abortion doctor George Tiller was gunned down in the foyer of his Lutheran church, where he served as an usher. As anyone with even a cursory understanding of Lutheranism in America could surmise, that church was a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Of the various Lutheran church bodies in America, the ELCA is the most mainline and has the most supportive position on legalized abortion.

What none of these stories have explained is that Tiller had previously been excommunicated by a Lutheran congregation on account of his lack of repentance about and refusal to stop his occupation. That Lutheran congregation was a member of my church body, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Excommunication doesn’t happen terribly frequently in this day and age but it’s not unheard of. I don’t know any of the specifics about his past congregation or what led to the discipline and anticipated learning more about it when it was covered by the mainstream media. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened.

There is obviously quite a difference between a church body that would discipline a practicing abortion doctor and one that would welcome him in membership.

No shit.

Read it.

Well, I’m hoping….

Cringely thinks it through.

Forget for the moment about data incursions within the DC beltway, what happens when  Pakistan takes down the Internet in India?  Here we have technologically sophisticated regional rivals who have gone to war periodically for six decades.  There will be more wars between these two. And to think that Pakistan or India are incapable or unlikely to take such action against the Internet is simply naive.  The next time these two nations fight YOU KNOW there will be a cyber component to that war.

A strategic component of any such attack would be to hobble tech services in both economies by destroying source code repositories.  And an interesting aspect of destroying such repositories — in Third World countries OR in the U.S. — is that the logical bet is to destroy them all without regard to what they contain, which for the most part negates any effort to obscure those contents.

Try to do a security audit of Argentina or Bangladesh and see what nightmare is unveiled.  Yet this is exactly where major international companies are deploying more and more technical resources.

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The history of socialism is the history of failure—and so is the history of capitalism, but in a different sense. For the history of socialism is one of fundamental failure, a failure to provide incentives and an inability to coordinate information about supply and effective demand. The history of capitalism, by contrast, is the history of dialectical failure: it is a history of the creation of new institutions and practices that may be successful, even transformative for a while, but which eventually prove dysfunctional, either because their intrinsic weaknesses become more evident over time or because of a change in external circumstances. Historically, these institutional failures have led to two reactions. They lead to governmental attempts to reform corporate and financial institutions, through changes in law and regulation (such as limited liability laws, creation of the FDIC, the SEC, etc.). They also lead market institutions to reform themselves, as investors and managers learn what forms of organization and which practices are dysfunctional. The history of capitalism, then, is the history of success through dialectical failure.

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But dissident economists and investment professionals offer a much different take: Most of Washington is dead wrong.

Instead of fighting over what should go in the economic stimulus bill, pitting infrastructure spending against tax cuts and contractors against contraceptives, they say lawmakers should be fighting against the very idea of any economic stimulus at all. Call them the Do-Nothing Crowd.

“The economy was too big. It was all phantom wealth borrowed from abroad,” says Andrew Schiff, an investment consultant at Euro Pacific Capital and a card-carrying member of the stand-tall-against-the-stimulus lobby. “All this stimulus money is geared toward getting consumers spending and borrowing again. But spending and borrowing were the problem in the first place.”

Read it.

Did you know that fair is one-to-one untranslatable into any other language–that it is distinctly Anglo in origin?

Mencius Moldbug looks at the Supreme Court.

It so happens that Judge Sotomayor is replacing Justice Souter, a typical late 20th-century Justice – an Outer Party nonentity who betrayed those that brought him to power, and became a consistent Inner Party vote. Thus, the replacement does not change the partisan ratio, and again is interesting only as an illustration.

(This pattern of systematic treason (there’s really no other word for it) is a legacy of the era in which Inner Party domination was so total that the Outer Party had no scholarly institutions at all. With new institutions such as the Federalist Society, it probably won’t happen again. The Outer Party has no shortage of sound, talented ideologues. This, in itself, is a problem for the Modern Structure – though not yet a major one.)

By working surreptitiously and dishonestly to direct the State, whose humble and disinterested servants they claim to be, the Platonic guardians these thinkers postulate must violate any professional codes of honor that they may have. It is impossible to be dishonest in one field of endeavor and honest in another.

In other words, the progressive movement is actually far more corrupt than its banal kleptocratic predecessor, because it corrupts the very fields of knowledge on which all successful governments must rely. In a society steeped in science, law, history, and economics, it seems remarkably attractive to shift the foundations of one’s sovereign away from robber barons and machine politicians, and toward scientists, lawyers, historians, and economists. (And journalists, of course. But the journalists of 1909 were already quite corrupt enough.)

Read it.

For me, the really important reason for doing for yourself, is that it lets you move a portion of household activities outside the realm of the money economy. That can be critically important during hard times–whether your own personal hard times, due to a shortfall in income or an unplanned expense, or hard times in the greater economy due to inflation, recession, resource depletion, or any of the many ills that economies suffer.

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Today, the rivalry is not between the champions of an industrial America and an agrarian America. Rather, it is a rivalry between the champions of a neo-industrial America, which includes world-class industrial agriculture, and a post-industrial America, in which most if not all manufacturing and even agriculture will be outsourced. In this formulation, post-industrial America emerges as a consumerist paradise populated by investors, executives of multinational companies, rentiers, realtors, government and nonprofit bureaucrats, and a supporting cast of service sector proletarians including nursing aides, nannies, gardeners, security guards and restaurant and hotel workers.

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

Yet, the American Dream is under serious threat – and this predates today’s faltering economy. A key component lies in the machinations of an urban policy and planning elite contemptuous of the comfortable lifestyles achieved by so many Americans. Instead they propose creating an environment in which households would have to pay more for their houses and spend more of their lives traveling from one place to another.

The automobile plays the role of the Great Satan in this morality play. The goal of many ‘progressive’ urbanists is to force people into transit and stop road building. Transit, of course, has its place. There is no better way to get to your job south of 59th Street in Manhattan, to Chicago’s Loop or to a few other of the nation’s largest downtown areas. But the stark reality is that transit can not substitute for the automobile for the overwhelming majority of trips, except for these niche markets. Further, failing to expand highways to keep up with traffic growth increases traffic congestion (and air pollution) and reduces economic productivity (read: “increases poverty”).

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So the real problem here is not a lack of laws, but a lack of enforcement of what already exists on the books. Our reluctance to act on this reality has serious consequences. First, we don’t focus on punishing the perpetrators. Our government says they don’t have time for “finger pointing” because they are too busy rushing rapidly to fix the problem – a problem they have yet to define. So we pour money into institutions, allow huge bonuses to be paid with public money, lavish retreats on insurance company executives – and then insist what we need is massive regulatory reform.

But this is the wrong approach. The real question isn’t new laws – although that may make good headlines for vote-seeking congressmen. The more basic question should be: where has the lawman been?

Read it.

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

When even Pravda thinks you’ve gone too far left, well….

Megan McArdle has a low Bullshit Threshhold.

GM’s main problems are

1)  A terrible, bloated cost structure
2)  A terrible, bloated bureaucracy
3)  A bunch of meh car lines

Which of these is the government going to solve?  That terrible, bloated cost structure supports a bloated union whose jobs are the entire rationale for the government intervention.  Leaning on the parts suppliers just risks UAW jobs further down the supply chain.  Maybe we can take it out of the budget for copy paper and pencils.

Forgive me if I am skeptical that the government is going to show GM how to streamline its bureaucracy.

Rick Brookhiser knows whereof he speaks.

Read it.

That depends on Dad; if he were a liberal….

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No surprise, when you’ve been paying attention. “Necessity is the mother of invention” is essentially the same conceptual framework as the Keynesian “demand-pull” approach to economics, and (as we’ve seen from history) that doesn’t accurately describe how the real world works.

Read it.

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

Anyone who has read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance will feel immediately at home. (And anyone that hasn’t is to be pitied.)

Read it.

Quite frankly, the concept “Anglican Dominican nun” does not compute.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

David Friedman does an interesting historical comparison.

We can learn a little more by looking at a different Great Depression—the one that didn’t happen. From 1920 to 1921, the consumer price index fell by 10.8%, more than in any year of the Great Depression; it fell another 2.3% in the next year. Unemployment rose to about its 1931 level. Looking just at that data, it’s obviously the start of a depression.

Harding did what Hoover is supposed to have done, reducing taxes and government expenditure. By 1923 the recession was over. It was the Great Depression that didn’t happen.

Jeff Jarvis is just full of interesting ideas. Unfortunately his thinking on the subject of change seems to be curiously incomplete.

There are three responses to change: (1) Resist it, which is futile. (2) Complain about it, which is unproductive. (3) Find the opportunity in it.

Actually, I can think of two more just off the top of my head: (4) suppress it, and (5) control it. These don’t appear to have occurred to him, and absent dealing with them his discussion is fatally flawed.

One might argue that (4) is merely a species of (1), but it isn’t, really; “resist” is passive, whilst “suppress” is active. Anyone can resist, but only those with power can suppress, and that takes it in an entirely different direction. It is of the essence of the conservative personality type to resist change, and when conservative people hold the reins of power, that resistance is often expressed as attempted suppression. (And that has no connection with popular ideas of political ideology — what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989 was a conservative attempt at suppressing change, and was rightly so characterized by the dinosaur media, outraged howls from American “conservatives” notwithstanding.)

That suppression of change never works has embedded itself into popular myth, but it remains a myth nevertheless; the Chinese Emperors successfully suppressed change for centuries, until their society was broken by European technical superiority. That same technical superiority gives any modern state adopting it (North Korea, anybody?) the means to suppress change so long as outside forces refrain from rocking the boat.

Similarly, (5) might arguable be considered a species of (3), but I suggest not. Finding opportunity in change appears to be a “Find the silver lining in every cloud” approach — what the Army calls “embrace the suck”. I see this as qualitatively different from an attempt to control change. Both perspectives view change as inevitable, leaving the only question our response to it; but jumping on the boat is not quite the same thing as attempting to seize the tiller. Jarvis is one of the former, and looks at change in terms of economic opportunity. AlGore and his ilk number among the latter, and their response to change has both economic and political dimensions.

I look forward to Jarvis’s next book, chiefly because I want to see whether this incomplete approach leads him into a defective approach, which I suspect that it might.

David Brooks demonstrates why, even though he’s a wussy RINO, he’s often worth reading.

Schama was born in Britain and makes documentaries for the BBC, but he has spent more time in the United States than most Brilliant authors, having taught at Harvard and now Columbia. But this is very much an outsider’s book, and if Schama doesn’t come from a strictly European perspective, let’s just say he comes from the realm of enlightened High Thinking that exists where The New York Review of Books reaches out and air-­kisses The London Review of Books.

His book is called “The American Future: A History” (which is a puerile paradox before you even open the cover), and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the American future.

Read it.

It’s amazing any of us survived childhood.

Read it.

AlGore isn’t the only guy getting rich off of climate-change hysteria.

Read it.

All of your Star Wars illusions destroyed.

The core point is that the Jedi are not to be trusted:

Read it.

Much has been written about how suburbs have taken people away from the city and that now suburbanites need to return back to where they came. But in reality most suburbs of large cities have grown not from the migration of local city-dwellers but from migration from small towns and the countryside.

Most suburban growth is not the result of declining core city populations, but is rather a consequence of people moving from rural areas and small towns to the major metropolitan areas. It is the appeal of large metropolitan places that drives suburban growth.

Read it.

Read it.

I wouldn’t be surprised.

Read it.

Like zoning laws? I don’t — one of the more pernicious legacies of Herbert Hoover, they make sure that our cities aren’t going to be interesting ever again. Are we stuck with them? Maybe not….

As middle income residents have fled, the city itself has become a place of many have-nots and a few haves. Rather than invest to engender pride, safety, and a sense of community in the city’s neighborhoods – the small unstylish work of organizing – the doctrine sought to make downtown attractive, livable and appealing by applying the “edifice complex” or the “Field of Dreams theory”: if you build it they will come. Then the planners and developers get to stand around and wonder why downtown still feels empty.

The middle class watched, grew frustrated, and left for the periphery. Despite some of the most glorious – and reasonably priced – architecture in America, the middle class has left, taking with them much of the urban tax base. This creates a hole out from which few cities emerge.

David Friedman isn’t afraid to push the envelope.

There is no antitrust law in WoW, which makes it a good place to observe collusive behavior by sellers. My wife, who spends more time in the auction house buying ad selling than I do, has observed both an attempt to corner a market and an attempt, at least partly successful, to form a cartel—a cartel she was invited to join. Her refusal was met by a threat to drive her out of the market by underselling her. The organizer of the cartel had apparently not read Aaron Director’s analysis, reflected in McGee’s classic article on the myth of predatory pricing; it had not occurred to him that if he was selling, at an artificially low price, ten times as many gems as the interloper, he was also losing money ten times as fast. It took only a few days for him to discover the flaw in the strategy and abandon it.

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

Political power is a property right, however you slice it. It is owned, not deserved. It is not a natural or “human” right. And it has no more to do with freedom than brake fluid with fondue.

So what we’d expect, just from rational first principles, is that if you start with a libertarian democracy, it will eventually become socialist. Socialism, as a theology of vote-buying and worse, is perfectly preadapted for Darwinian success in a democracy. If democracy is like cancer, socialism is like terminal cancer – the natural, entropic endpoint of the process.

Read it.

Pay special attention to the demo. Note that the human component filling orders in this warehouse need not be literate, need not be numerate, need only about an 80 IQ in order to function — the only reason there’s a human involved at all is because equipment of comparable flexibility would cost more than the minimum wage required for an adequate human.

This reminds me of a number of science-fiction dystopias I’ve run across.

Read it.

A woman government official is dragged from a lorry to the execution ground, made to kneel in the snow and then shot in the head, her last moments recorded in a set of photographs that have caused a sensation in China.

“Woman government official”. Hm. I’m thinking Nancy Pelosi, here.

However, rather than eliciting sympathy, the 30-year-old pictures have prompted calls for more executions of corrupt officials in modern China.

I certainly understand the feeling.

Megan McArdle has the goods.

Read it.

But Austin’s growth evinces another pattern. As Austin and its suburbs have grown, families with children have left central Austin for its fringes, ceding central Austin to singles and couples without children.

In the end the key reason people have been moving to the suburbs lies in a mundane reality. Austin families have been moving to the suburbs because the suburbs have bigger, better and cheaper houses.

Families want space, and the central housing stock is either too small or too expensive. This basic reality has transformed Austin into essentially two largely successful cities: a central core left to small households and suburbs that offer either larger housing, or smaller housing at much cheaper prices.

Austin’s McMansion ordinance will ensure that its central Austin neighborhoods remain the domain of small, aging bungalows – and people without children – for the foreseeable future. In this way, it will reflect the demographic realities of many prosperous, “hip” cities from San Francisco and Boston to Seattle and Portland.

Yet there’s an ironic side to this. Alarmed by the decline of families in the city, the same city council that enacted the McMansion ordinance created a new task force a few months later to determine why central Austin has now so few families with children.

Read it.

This is one of the most entertaining movie reviews I’ve ever read.

Kimberley Strassel is, despite her ‘-ley’ name, always worth reading.

Purely from a philosophical standpoint, Mr. Specter’s move means nothing, because he didn’t leave his party on philosophical grounds. As even the good senator acknowledged in his press conference, his top priority is, and always has been, staying in office. Had the GOP last year allowed Mr. Specter to pen the entire party platform to his liking, he’d still have bailed this week. The Pennsylvanian has only ever been purely ideological on one issue: the polls.

In other words, a professional politician who will be more comfortable in the party of professional politicians.

The point here being that Mr. Specter isn’t necessarily a good indicator of how open, or not, the GOP is to “ideological” diversity. As it happens, the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate that Mr. Specter is now so unwilling to be “judged” by didn’t suddenly turn against him because he was pro-choice (he always has been) or pro trial-lawyer (ditto). He got in trouble after he voted for the blowout $787 billion stimulus bill. (More on that later.)

Steve Sailer is not very impressed with David Brooks.

Look, to say that Mozart wasn’t special because he was just like Tiger Woods is the kind of skull-crushingly stupid thing that you can only get away with saying if you’re telling everybody what they want to hear.

Tiger Woods is 33 years old. He’s been celebrated on national television for his golf skills for over 30 years. Here’s a video (starts 0:45 in) of a two and a half year old Tiger being interviewed by Bob Hope and Jimmy Stewart on a nationally syndicated TV talk show.

The truth is, unsurprisingly, that Tiger Woods is special. And so was Mozart.

I have to say I rather agree with him.

How many kids lives get wrecked by this kind of thinking by their parents? When you read about 23-year-old Anthony Kim, who got a prototypical Korean-American maniacal drilling upbringing at the driving range where I hit balls when I was a kid, it’s a story that appears now to have a happy ending. But just two or three years ago, Kim looked like he was headed for Skid Row, he was drinking so heavily in rebellion against his domineering parents. His parents now tell other Korean parents who ask how they too can mold a pro golfer: Don’t even try.

You only see the stories with a happy ending. The stories you don’t see would be about all the Asian kids whose parents thought they could have a Tiger Woods too, and turned their kids’ childhood into a hell.

Good points all.

Read it.

Pontiac, now sacrificed for General Motors to reorganize, was ironically a car that helped GM survive the Great Depression.