Jerry Pournelle runs what may be the original blog and always has interesting things to say.

On education, the usual critique of charter schools is that they are guilty of “cherry picking” which is to say, they accept only students who want to learn something and are willing to be disciplined. Thus an academically accomplished charter school in DC was not allowed. Cherry picking is supposed to be a bad thing? As opposed to the current practice of making those who would like to learn in DC go to a school that accepts those who do not want to learn and refuse to be disciplined? And this from people who are supposed to be liberal? It seems to me a very good way to keep the blacks in their place. Make them go to lousy schools filled with disorder while you send yours to schools that have discipline, and then on to Harvard. Is that the goal of liberalism? To keep the blacks down? Because I think of no better way to accomplish that goal than what is happening in DC. Tons of money spent on truly horrible schools that no one who could possibly escape them would go to? Would anyone who had in mind the good of black children in DC permit the current school system there to exist for ten minutes more?

The money is spent, and the results are known, and nothing is to be done. Yet under the Constitution the Congress is responsible. One presumes that both parties intend the results obtained since neither party makes any attempt to do anything about it.

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What does that say about tadpoles and frogs?

Megan McArdle is always worth reading.

First of all, as it shows in the articles I linked earlier, something like 90% of homicides are committed by people with criminal records, i.e. people who probably cannot legally own a gun. A lot of the rest are committed by juveniles, or mentally unstable people, who also cannot legally own a gun.

It is perfectly true that adding a gun to a dispute involving violent criminals increases the likelihood that someone will be shot.  But violent criminals are not like the rest of us.  They have very poor impulse control, and, well, a demonstrated willingness to use violence.  They also are not likely to apply for a permit before packing heat.

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The supreme court in Argentina has ruled that it is unconstitutional to punish people for using marijuana for personal consumption.

This will be interesting.

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Need to evacuate people quickly through a narrow opening? Put something in their way.

Physicists timed a crowd of 50 women as they exited as fast as possible through a door, and then repeated the experiment with a 20-centimetre-wide pillar placed 65 centimetres in front of the exit to the left-hand side.

The obstacle improved the exit rate by an extra seven people per minute – from 2.8 people to 2.92 people per second.

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One might still ask why the power-seekers tend to predominate over those who place a higher value on the public good. The key explanation is selection effects. A politician willing to do anything to take and hold on to power will have a crucial edge over an opponent who imperils his chances of getting elected in order to advance the public interest. The former type is likely to prevail over the latter far more often than not. This is especially true in a political environment where most voters are often ignorant and irrational about government and public policy. Candidates have strong incentives to pander to this ignorance and exploit it in order to win elections. Those unwilling to exploit public ignorance because they place the public interest above political success are likely to be at a serious disadvantage relative to their less scrupulous opponents. Thus, those who value power above other objectives are more likely to succeed politically. As economist Frank Knight wrote back in the 1930s, “[t]he probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation.”

Not a very complicated notion, but apparently some people have to have Gresham’s Law explained in simple terms.

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Ambrose Bierce had some language issues.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

If you think of CIA less as the puppet-master of world history and more as merely one well-funded player in an international version of the municipal Favor Bank familiar from Bonfire of the Vanities and The Wire, then the idea that Obama got help from CIA-connected individuals along the way seems less shocking and more plausible. He’s not the Manchurian Candidate, he’s just a kid whose parents exploited Cold War tensions to get him a favor or two.

Steve Sailer is, yet again, not afraid to look hard issues square in the eye.

The main positive finding of the comprehensive Coleman Report of 1966 (funded by LBJ’s the 1964 Civil Rights Act) was that after all the differences in student backgrounds were accounted for, the one thing that schools could do to help students was give them higher IQ teachers. (Coleman, as he admitted in 1991, downplayed this finding in his report because black teachers averaged lower IQs than white teachers.)

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Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Mercies and the God of All Comfort, who comforts us in all of our afflictions.

Problem solved.

Jerry Pournelle discusses the health care debate.

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

The fundamental observation of colonialism is that non-European societies thrive under normal European administration, at least in comparison to their condition under native rule. This observation was obvious during the colonial period. Since, it has only grown more so – at least, to those who can handle the truth.

The various colonial regimes were by no means perfect. But to assert that their average quality of government service was anything but far better than either their predecessors, or their successors, is a political distortion of history which I have no trouble at all in comparing to Holocaust denial. Far more people were murdered in decolonization and postcolonial violence than in the Holocaust. Moreover, only a few fringe nutcases deny the Holocaust – whereas anticolonialism is a core tenet of everyone’s college education. Oops.

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Let us not, therefore, pretend that there is a deeply rooted ethos of ownership in America; the main tradition in our culture was conceived on wealth, not on property, and on “booming” not on “sticking” (to give Wendell Berry his two cents).  Tocqueville rightly found the sight vertiginous, a threat rather than an achievement in the first modern nation.  He correctly predicted it would aid in the creation of an elite plutocracy and the barbarization of the great masses.  Our culture seems even now to have a weak conception of what ownership and property really mean, and indeed this misconception contributed substantially to our present depressed economic condition.  The belief that housing was a financial investment, rather than an investment in a family’s long term stability and rootedness, led to a conception of property as measurable in terms of wealth.  But homes cannot be measured in terms of wealth primarily because, first, they cannot consistently and perpetually accrue in monetary value and, second, they are peculiarly illiquid assets — which suggests they should not be thought of as assets in any case.

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“You see it was your identity. They said they were you!”
“And you believed them?”
“Yes, they stole your identity.”
“Well, I don’t know. I seem to still have my identity, whereas you seem to have lost several thousands of pounds. In light of that, I’m not sure why you think it was my identity that was stolen instead of your money.”

The problem isn’t “identity theft.” It’s bad security and verification processes by a financial institution.

The Hog is no longer doing politics.

It bothers me when the stock market rallies. I don’t want the economy to turn around until our immune system kills the socialist flu. If Obama’s Marxist approach fails to prevent a recovery, everyone on the left will say he saved us, and the swing voters in the middle will believe it, because they are the most gullible, least informed people on earth. Then we’ll get more socialism, and the economy will tank, and we’ll be told the answer is even more socialism, and before you know it, we’re Italy or Greece or England.

Nope, no politics. Just tools and God, not necessarily in that order. Politics has no room in this bus.

Jerry Pournelle goes back to first principles and takes a look at the whole thing.

Assertion: everyone has a right to health care.

Questions: from whence does the right come, and on whom falls the obligation to provide it or pay for it? How is that obligation acquired or imposed?

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This may not be all that funny to people who don’t (as I do) haunt the blogs of literary agents, but it’s still pretty funny.

As for the main protagonist – is it likely that children will relate to a fifty-something man with hairy feet who lives in a pit? Might I suggest making Bilbo younger and perhaps a tad less hairy?

Someone who looks like Elijah Wood, for example. (I’m sorry, I just can’t see Elijah Wood as being 55, which is the age Frodo is when he sets off from the Shire. But that’s me.)

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Now there’s a scary thought.

On the other hand, the Scots could use the business.

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If you find yourself trapped in the middle of the woods without electricity, running water, or a car you would likely describe that situation as a “nightmare” or “a worse case scenario like after plane crash or something.” White people refer to it as “camping.”

In theory camping should be a very inexpensive activity since you are literally sleeping on the ground. But as with everything in white culture, the more simple it appears the more expensive it actually is.

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While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment. Here are eight reforms that would greatly lower the cost of health care for everyone:….

I’m sure that “eat more arugula” is in there somewhere, but I’m too lazy to look for it.

Megan McArdle kicks ass.

I was writing about my deeper opposition to the entire project of providing, paying for, or otherwise guaranteeing health care.  Since for most people on the left, this is akin to declaring that I would like to take up killing orphans in my spare time, I outlined why I think that this is morally correct even if you take the liberal set of initial values, and don’t place any moral weight on taxation or other coercive action by the state.  I have voiced my various practical objections to the particular options on the table at various moments.  But the main thing is that I don’t want to give the government a greater role in health care markets.  Nay, not even if all the other countries . . . well, all the cool countries, anyway . . . are doing it.  To the liberals proclaiming that, unlike those of us in the conservative or libertarian camps, they are practical people just seeking the best way to make us all better off, I say:  I think your utilitarian calculus is badly wrong.

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Remember that the next time you watch one of those stupid action/adventure movies.

1. No, the CIA and the military don’t get the latest and greatest equipment. Typically their stuff is 20 years out of date, and was provided by the lowest bidder.

2. No, you can’t plunge through a plate glass window without getting cut all to shit. Ask an ER doctor if you don’t believe me.

3. No, not even Steven Segal can beat six armed opponents with bare hands. Don’t try this at home.

Arnold Kling is always worth reading.

Consider the following definition of freedom: the absence of monopoly.

The absence of monopoly means that you can exercise exit, even if you cannot exercise voice. The presence of monopoly means that, at most, you can exercise voice.

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You can find anything on the Internet.

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Don’t believe the surrender-monkeys.

Mencius Moldbug reveals the truth.

UR can deliver this remarkable savings in both time and tuition because, and only because, our “economics” is an entirely different product from the standard academic sausage. We’ve considered changing the word – but this feels hokey. It also conceals our feeling that (a) for most customers, UR’s “economics” is a more than satisfying replacement for 20th-century industrial numerology; and (b) our version is far closer to the original artisanal craft.

Megan McArdle says all that really needs to be said on the subject.

Whether a dish was dreamed up by Mario Batali or the staff at the Cheesecake Factory, preventing people from having it “for their own good” still represents an actual hedonic loss, as well as an actual loss of freedom.  You may think they have some meta-self which will thank you later, but their current self has still had both its liberty and its joy restricted.  Invoking the demon food scientists of agribusiness does not actually relieve you of the obligation to prove that intervening in the liberty of both the customers and the company is morally pressing.

Ultimately, the answer to “what could it hurt”? is that all actions have costs, which you cannot assume away on the grounds that those costs don’t interest you.  But they should interest you, because not least among those costs is the simple fact that the government cannot do everything well.  Making all sorts of changes in the name of obesity means not making others that might be more important, because we have limited political and bureaucratic bandwith.  Do you want obesity intervention, cap and trade, or health care reform?  You may not be able to have any of them.  But you probably can’t have all three.  And if you did, you’d make it more likely that the government would screw all of them up.

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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.

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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.

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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….

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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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.

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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.

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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.