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

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

J. Press safeguards the core values of our civilization.

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Gotta go with Byron on that one.

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

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

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

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

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

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As long as they have their papers.

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

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

Steve Sailer is never afraid to ask the hard questions.

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

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

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

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

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

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

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

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

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That explains a lot.

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

Well, that’s capitalism for you.

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

Well, I’ve always wondered about that.

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

Bryan Caplan has an interesting thought.

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

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

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

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

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

Now imagine yourself stuck in that world.

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

On the other hand, they are pretty funny.

Life is full of such conflicts.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees.

Dvorak has an idea.

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The value of £5,000 a year (in 1800 terms) is, of course, self-evident.

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This week and over the coming weeks the media and the nation will once again focus on healthcare. Before we launch into the next phase of the argument, though, we should first dismiss a couple of “Red Herring” claims that we spend too much on health care.

These claims are the ones based on a view of healthcare spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or that look at the increase in healthcare spending over time. Proponents say that spending 14 to 17 percent of gross product on health care is evidence that we spend too much. Or, they say that health care spending is increasing at a far faster rate than the economy is growing.

So what?

There is no optimal amount of healthcare as a percentage of GDP. Remember, healthcare is a good thing.

Arnold Kling has an interesting thought.

Russ Roberts is working on a paper suggesting that the fragility of our financial system could be the result of past bailouts, in which unsecured creditors and counterparties of financial institutions were always made whole. In some sense, the fact that the Fed fears contagion makes them turn such liabilities into ex post nearly riskless assets for investors.

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The article in Washington Monthly discusses a company called StraighterLine, which offers online college classes, but it totally disrupts the traditional business model of university learning. While the classic model is that you pay per class (or per semester as a fully matriculated student), StraighterLine has a simple model: you pay $99/month and get an all-you-can-eat offering. You go at your own pace — so if you have lots of time (and can complete the work) you can take multiple classes in that month. In the opening story of the article, a woman completes four full classes in just two months — for a grand total of $200. Taking those same classes at either local universities or online would have cost thousands, and would have taken much longer to complete. And, it’s not as if the StraighterLine courses skimp either. According to the article (and it would be great to hear from anyone who’s tried it to see if this is true), they use the same materials found in many college courses.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

You can get a better overview of how good a film is by looking at the average scores on an aggregator site like Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB that give you the wisdom of crowds. (You just have to keep in mind the biases of the various crowds, whether underemployed ex-English majors on Rotten Tomatoes or bachelor fanboys on IMDB.)

My general prejudice is to view over-achieving films made by underdogs through the glass-is-half-full lens and underachieving ones made by overdogs through the half-empty lens. Thus, recent Quentin Tarantino films tend to annoy me because Tarantino long ago demonstrated his enormous talent, and elaborate meta-explanations about why it’s cool that he’s wasting his powers making ingenious crud bore me. It’s not that I’m not intellectually sophisticated enough to understand the rationalizations. I just don’t care.

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Nowhere did anyone address the fundamental question: under what principle do we all acquire a right to health care paid by someone else, and under what principle do those who have to pay acquire the obligation? Whatever principle that is must have some other consequences, and I’d like to know what those are. It’s a pretty fundamental change in our political philosophy. Does it mean that everyone is entitled to anything that someone else can afford? It probably doesn’t apply to health care alone. Where does this right stop? Does it apply to cosmetic surgery for burn victims? Those with genetic malformations? Aging skin sag? Breast implants? I don’t ask these questions frivolously: since I don’t know what principle is being applied to infer that everyone is entitled to health care whether they can afford it or not, it’s hard to see what else that principle implies. There must be other implications, but what are they?

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Ah, well, the Irish aren’t what they used to be — most of those came over here.

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A South African IT outfit has shamed telecoms operator Telkom by sending 4GB of data 60 miles by pigeon in two hours – faster than it arrived by the ISP’s broadband service.

We have the technology.

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The psychology of political attention and labeling here is fascinating. ‘Stimulus’, according to Merriam-Webster, is “something that rouses or incites to activity.” So the very terminology, ‘economic stimulus,’ already decides the debate in favor of the view that it boosts the economy.

Bryan Caplan examines an interesting thought.

The Other McCain waxes philosophical.

The September issue of Commentary has a symposium in which six writers discuss Norman Podhoretz’s latest book, Why Are Jews Liberals?

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It’s always fun to “run the numbers” with respect to politics; you can wind up with some very interesting stuff.

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Stuff about pens to make your brain hurt. Just sayin’.

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Joel Spolsky is always worth reading.

Lacking a program manager, your garden-variety super-smart programmer is going to come up with a completely baffling user interface that makes perfect sense IF YOU’RE A VULCAN (cf. git). The best programmers are notoriously brilliant, and have some trouble imagining what it must be like not to be able to memorize 16 one-letter command line arguments. These programmers then have a tendency to get attached to their first ideas, especially when they’ve already written the code.

Steve Sailer is always — let me repeat that: ALWAYS — worth reading.

From this perspective, the 1960s cultural revolution look like an Elites Liberation movement, in which Unitarians, Congregationalists, Jews, Episcopalians, Christian Scientists, and similar products of centuries of bourgeois culture decided that they, personally, could get by without the old rules, which, indeed, many of them could. Moreover, they were tired of being expected to be role models of starchy behavior for the proles.

But the tenor of the times demanded that this Elites Lib movement be cloaked in egalitarian and civil rights rhetoric and policies (such as refocusing AFDC from Roosevelt’s aim of supporting widows to supporting single mothers, because we wouldn’t want to discriminate against blacks), with disastrous effects on people toward the bottom of society, especially blacks.

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I am saddened to see no Democrats on this list. Well. Perhaps the Internet is not the panacea that I had hoped it would be.

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Ted Kennedy’s death sort of shook up the list, I don’t doubt.

Megan McArdle is on the case.

It seems clear to me that switching freight to rail whenever possible should be a policy priority, but it’s the red-headed stepchild of the environmental movement.  We need freight cars that look more like pandas.

Mencius Moldbug continues the seminar.

For example, your old decision structure might be: the Constitution of the United States of America, under the laws of Congress and the several states, as executed by the President and judged by the Supreme Court, answering through free and fair democratic elections to the self-governing American people. Your new decision structure might be: Chuck Norris.

Michael Pollan talk about food. A fascinating guy, for a communist.

But here’s what I don’t get: How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.

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Bryan Caplan is not afraid to ask the Politically Incorrect question.

Textbook accounts of monopoly usually take the existence of a monopoly for granted, then analyze its consequences.  When I was an undergraduate, this usually provoked me to argue with the textbook.  “Where did this ‘monopoly power’ come from?!” I’d ask.  My inner rant then continued: “If the firm has a monopoly because the government made competition illegal, the solution isn’t antitrust; it’s legalizing competition.  If the firm has a monopoly because it’s the best, the solution isn’t antitrust; it’s a little freakin’ appreciation.”

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Hey, whatever works. (Actually, they were wondering how this dork ever came to be considered funny, but he obviously doesn’t speak gorilla.)