Read it.

Texas, increasingly, is the economic and intellectual leader of the U.S. During the last 18 months before the current recession took hold, while the country as a whole was still creating jobs, more than half of those jobs were created in a single state: Texas.

Texas has usurped the leadership position that, decades ago, belonged to California. Today California is in decline, likely irreversibly so.

The debate, really, is over. High-tax states don’t deliver a better lifestyle–not for taxpayers, anyway. One of these days, voters will figure out that the same thing holds true at the national level. Higher taxes may be OK if you’re a public employee; otherwise, they’re a dead loss.

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Peace is not a process. Peace exists when one of two conditions is met: 1) two groups of people have no wish to kill one another (e.g., the U.S. and Canada), or 2) one or both of the groups would like to kill the other, but is deterred or otherwise prevented from doing so (e.g., the Cold War). In neither case is a “process” typically involved. Negotiation, unlike peace, is indeed a process. But negotiations, even when they lead to a treaty or agreement, cannot bring peace unless one of the above conditions is also met. (See Munich, Oslo, countless others).

People have been talking about a “peace process” in the Middle East for a long time, but those discussions have little or nothing to do with the actual existence of peace, which has depended on other factors. See number 2 above.

How do you make peace with a sickness?

Read it.

The medieval castle, seen by millions of Harry Potter fans in the films, is the home of the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland.

We have the technology.

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

1. Insurance is not part of the solution; it’s part of the problem. Many people—and especially poor people— get too little health care in this country. That’s largely because many other people—and especially rich people—are overinsured. People with insurance demand more health care, which drives up prices. More insurance coverage will make this problem worse, not better.

3. A public option can only make things worse. A government run insurance system can only do one of two things: Mimic the private insurers, or do something different. If it mimics the private insurers, it serves no purpose. If it does anything different, it can only be worse.

After all, what can it do different? Approve more claims? But where will the money come from? Higher premiums? But we’ve already agreed that if people wanted that kind of insurance it would already be offered. A more efficient bureaucracy? But if there were a way to save money by streamlining the bureacracy, why wouldn’t all those greedy private insurers have adopted it already? Does anyone believe that the major insurance companies are too lackadaisical to make an easy extra buck?

Read it.

Each team is made up of 15,000 people, pulling a 656 ft rope.

Whenever I read a science fiction story that involves an alien species, I can never get into it unless the alien species is at least as weird as the Japanese.

Steve Sailor is always worth reading.

Military researchers have found that two groups of personnel are particularly good at spotting anomalies: those with hunting backgrounds, who traipsed through the woods as youths looking to bag a deer or turkey; and those who grew up in tough urban neighborhoods, where it is often important to know what gang controls which block.

Personnel who fit neither category, often young men who grew up in the suburbs and developed a liking for video games, do not seem to have the depth perception and peripheral vision of the others, even if their eyesight is 20/20.

The best troops he’s ever seen when it comes to spotting bombs were soldiers from the South Carolina National Guard, nearly all with rural backgrounds that included hunting.

Read it.

In relevant part:

The Fourth Amendment protects our homes from unreasonable searches and seizures, requiring that, absent special circumstances, the government obtain a search warrant based on probable cause before entering. This is strong privacy protection for homes and the items within them in the physical world.

When a person uses the Internet, however, the user’s actions are no longer in his or her physical home; in fact he or she is not truly acting in private space at all. The user is generally accessing the Internet with a network account and computer storage owned by an ISP like Comcast or NetZero. All materials stored online, whether they are e-mails or remotely stored documents, are physically stored on servers owned by an ISP. When we send an e-mail or instant message from the comfort of our own homes to a friend across town the message travels from our computer to computers owned by a third party, the ISP, before being delivered to the intended recipient. Thus, “private” information is actually being held by third-party private companies.

Read it.

The Democrats would scream like little girls. And probably blame Bush.

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The Church of Scientology was found guilty of fraud in France on Tuesday and fined more than half-a-million pounds, but judges stopped short of banning the group.

Cringely peers behind the curtain.

Is Windows 7 really worth $70 more than Snow Leopard?

The better question to ask is why Microsoft decided to set the price point where they did? And the answer to that one is quite simple: Microsoft doesn’t actually want you to upgrade to Windows 7 at all.

Microsoft wants you to buy a new Windows 7 PC instead.

Read it.

No, it wasn’t. One side was English, the other French. Nothing fair about it.

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We have the technology.

Read it.

Developers have reproduced All Saints Church, Brockhampton, Herefordshire, to cater for a demand from Japanese couples to marry in Western-style churches.

Whenever I read a science fiction story that deals with an alien species, I always have a hard time getting into it unless the alien species is at least as strange as the Japanese.

Read it. And watch the video.

Nancy Pelosi and others on the Left have proposed a value added tax as a way to feed the federal beast. The VAT is familiar in Europe but little known to most Americans. In this video, Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute analyzes the implications of a national VAT.

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But what has me annoyed is that every time I’ve seen this question posed, people blather on and on about the relationship between a college education and future earnings. Usually we learn that yes, if you finish college you are likely to earn more money than someone who doesn’t finish college. Whoo-hoo.

The truth is that what you pay for a college education is only part of what you put into a college education, and arguably not the most important part. Call me crazy for saying this, but: how much you care about education matters, too. Like all teachers, I have students who pore over assignments and get inspired and take risks and attend extracurricular lectures and discover new skills and passions. I also have students who don’t do that so much, despite all sorts of institutional and personal encouragements to do so. There are students, in other words, who really seem to embrace a spirit of education, students who are spirited about education. And in my experience, those students who put so much of themselves into college are the ones who come out of college with more internships and fellowships and professional school acceptances and – I have to throw something all mushy and unquantifiable in here – better senses of themselves and what they have to give other people and what it means to lead a good life.

This is actually a book review by Mark Steyn. Presumably he didn’t pick the headline.

In his new novel Heart of the Assassin, Robert Ferrigno recreates the Saudi school burning in every particular except one: the madrassa is now in America.

I’ve got the two earlier Assassin books by Ferrigno, and they are well worth the price.

Read it.

First, and as is most evident in Atlas Shrugged, Rand turns Marxism on its head.  While Marxists argue that “capitalists” make their profits on the backs of the working class, Rand illustrates that the working class, as such, makes almost no contribution to wealth, but relies on the efforts, risks, sacrifices, and most of all the genius of the entrepreneurial class.  Consider, as a thought experiment, what living standards would be like if every person in the world had an IQ around the median of 103, and otherwise had average talents and ambition.  Does anyone seriously doubt that “workers,” and everyone else, would be a lot poorer than they are today, and indeed would likely be living as poorly as our hunting and  gathering ancestors?

Read it. And watch the video.

Gotta love Australians. Even their seagulls have attitude.

Read it.

Gotta love Australians.

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We have the technology.

Jerry Pournelle takes a look.

Population growth: there is now a scheme to persuade people for not having kids by giving them a carbon credit. Like all population limiting schemes, this one seems designed to breed those who pay attention to population growth arguments out of the human race.

We’re doing well at convincing some Western cultures to commit suicide, as predicted by James Burnham in Suicide of the West. Burnham was fond of saying that Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide. That was thought to be an obsolete observation after the end of the Seventy Years War; perhaps it is not so irrelevant as some thought.

Read it.

Percy the cat has become the most famous pet in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, after it was revealed that he often leaves his home on Green Howard’s Drive and travels to the Sea Life Centre by rail.

The six-year-old animal spends the day watching the fish and penguins before hopping back on to the miniature North Bay Railway train when it is time to go home.

A role model for modern Britain: A slacker cat.

Dymphna, at Gates of Vienna, has some worthwhile observations.

First of all, my larger contention: that the national Republican Party has so completely lost its integrity, vigor, and moral sensibility that it is in grave danger of losing the confidence of all the American people.

I have refused the Republican denomination for quite some time, as have many people I know. When asked, we usually reply that we’re “conservative” or “libertarian”. Though those labels aren’t a good fit, they are at least not a shameful one.

And that pretty well sums up my position, too.

Read it.

“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….’

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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?

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.