Read it.

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

Read it.

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

Tyler Cowen boils it down.

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

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

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

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

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

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

Bryan Caplan looks behind the handwaving.

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

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

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

Check it out.

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

Read it.

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

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

Steve Sailer is always worth reading. Always.

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

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

Read it.

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

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

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

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

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

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

Steve Sailer remembers the inconvenient stuff.

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

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

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

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

Steve Sailer just loves to stir the pot.

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

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

Read it.

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

Still are, some would say.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Ah — but do they yawn, as well?

Read it.

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

Megan McArdle is not afraid to ask the pointed question:

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

A cartoon from Diversity Lane.

Read it.

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

Read it.

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

Tyler Cowen is always worth reading.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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

Read it.

Seth Godin comes out swinging.

Joe Wikert is always worth reading.

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

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

Speed the day.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Read it.

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”).

Read it.

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….