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We can tell that the “culture wars” are not over because Democrats and liberals are still fighting them. We know culture warriors won’t disappear from national politics because one of them just won the presidential election. And if Beinart means that conservatives are losing the culture wars, that’s far from a certain bet, and one the Democrats would be ill-advised to take.

Read it.

Al’s the man.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Now, I’m not a doctor, but it’s my impression that rather than our “uncomfortable feelings about sexuality” that “have caused STDs to be stigmatizing,” it’s more the oozing sores.

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Steve Sailer is always worth reading. This was done back in November and I put it in my “ponder at leisure” stack; it’s still worth thinking about.

My basic theory is that Democrats do best in states with metropolitan areas where land for homes is scarce because they are hedged in by oceans or Great Lakes; while Republicans do best in inland areas where homebuyers can look around for homes in a 360 degree radius around job sites. I call this the Dirt Gap: Republicans are found more in areas with more dirt and less water.

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Mr Niemoeller used resin-soaked paper processed to form thin, light and strong panels. The material is also an excellent insulator, and is flexible, making it appropriate in earthquake-risk zones.

Not to mention incredibly flammable, and easy to get rid of when the government wants to clean an area up for tourists.

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Moral: Don’t surf.

But he said he does not blame the shark and has pledged to return to surfing.

Darwin Award waiting to happen. The System Works.

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The 52-year-old farmer is a conservative Democrat who bet on Republican John McCain and lost, a description that would apply to many in the white South. Now Loewer wonders about his place in Obama’s America.

And well he might.

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The question is — Is it our problem? Bush would have said “yes”; what will the Obamessiah say? (Something confusing and ambiguous, I suspect.)

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

The two most impressive companies I called upon in my corporate career were Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble. Wal-Mart had a fanatical policy about never letting anybody trying to sell anything to Wal-Mart spend a dime on a Wal-Mart employee. Wal-Mart felt that most retailers had been corrupted by vendors with NFL skyboxes and the like. So, you were not allowed to see Wal-Mart employees in restaurants (which is why the finest restaurant in Bentonville in 1991 was a Ponderosa steakhouse filled with world-class salesmen in $1500 suits and great haircuts, sitting alone, morosely chewing their $3.95 chicken-fried steaks). All negotiations were conducted in windowless interrogation cells. After a few hours of relentlessly being hammered by Wal-Mart employees, not only would you be willing to lower your price to Wal-Mart by 20 percent, but you’d leap at a chance to sign a confession that you were part of a Trotskyite wrecker cell attempting to assasinate Comrade Stalin if only they’d promised to make it all stop.

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“They pointed an stun gun at a waiter and demanded the cash from the till, but the staff grabbed kitchen knives and charged at the men,” he said.

A pack, not a herd. Note that the staff weren’t French.

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Our business model eliminates the catch. We’re giving away great textbooks and making them open because it solves real problems for students and instructors. In so doing, we are creating a large market for our product. We then turn around and sell things of value to that large market – more convenient ways to consume our free book (print, audio, PDF) and efficient ways to study (study aids). Sure, we’ll make less money per student than the big guys. But that’s okay. We’ll be selling to a lot more of them, and we’ll be doing it for a lot less money (thanks to technology like web-hosted services, XML, print-on-demand, and more). Like we said… just a smarter way to do business. For all of us.

In theory, this is a very smart strategy, based on the most modern thinking.

In practice … well, we’ll see.

Read it.

This is the difference between real history and antihistory: the difference between Mick Jagger and Cyndi Lauper.

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Looking at history, it’s almost certainly not the goverment. How many years have they been trying to computerize the air traffic control system? And the IRS? Unless the problem is with killing people and breaking things, the government is not the answer.

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Though you might consider finishing school or having a good job to be “accomplishments” many white people view them as burdens.  As such, they can only handle them for so long before they start talking about their need to “take a year off” to travel, volunteer, or work abroad.

The Brits call this a “gap year”, which is typically devoted to getting raped, robbed, or killed in some Third World hell-hole during the interval between their equivalent of high school and university. Never saw the attraction, myself.

Read it.

What the Chinese know that Barack Obama doesn’t.

t really does all boil down to the generation of power, primarily electricity. Without machines we cannot make things sufficiently cheaply in sufficient numbers to allow comforts to be available to all, and without power we cannot make machines, without power we cannot run machines, without power we cannot transport goods in bulk and so it goes on.

Read it.

Been waiting for this to happen.

An introduction to the most delightfully thought-provoking blog I know.

The basic premise of UR is that all the competing 20th-century systems of government, including the Western democracies which came out on top and which rule us to this day, are best classified as Orwellian. They maintain their legitimacy by shaping public opinion. They shape public opinion by sculpting the information presented to the public. As part of that public, you peruse the world through a lens poured by your government. Ie: you are pwned.

Except for a few unimportant institutions of non-mainstream religious affiliation, we simply do not see multiple, divergent, competing schools of thought within the American university system. The whole vast archipelago, though evenly speckled with a salting of contrarians, displays no factional structure whatsoever. It seems almost perfectly synchronized.

Whatever you make of the left-right axis, you have to admit that there exists some force which has been pulling the Anglo-American political system leftward for at least the last three centuries. Whatever this unfathomable stellar emanation may be, it has gotten us from the Stuarts to Barack Obama. Personally, I would like a refund. But that’s just me.

Read it.

Question: Who ought to have the authority to “approve” a genetically engineered animal? Note that the FDA is here approving, not the animal, but the drug the animal is allegedly engineered to produce. So if you’re not producing a drug, do you have to get anybody’s “approval”?

Read it.

In case you were wondering. I know I was.

Of course, they don’t mention “drowning in left-wing bullshit”, since that would be giving the game away….

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Government action is urgently needed to address this monstrous injustice!

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Think about that one for a while.

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Waitress Maria Murray, 41, had warned her children that was unlikely to be able to buy them Christmas presents before winning £1million on a £5 Merry Millions scratchcard.

And there it is.

The father of her children, mechanic Tim Hunt, 48, has reportedly told friends he would like a share of the jackpot.

I’m sure he would.

But lawyers are said to have advised Miss Murray that she owes him nothing since they split up over a year ago.

Ha!

Read it.

Or don’t. Your choice. I haven’t watched television since they took FIREFLY off, and I can’t say that I’ve missed it.

Bryan Caplan is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

In hindsight, I’m amazed that people who don’t think twice about killing conscripts (or even civilians) are so reluctant to justify violence against serial killer statesmen.  What could be less objectionable than trying to stop mass murder by killing the specific individuals most responsible for it?

Actually, come to think of it, it’s not really a hard question at all. The hard question is, What are these numbwits thinking that are so opposed to terminating psychopaths like bin Laden, Assad, Chavez, Morales, and Achmedinijad? It goes beyond stupid.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

And yet, when you think about it, like medieval noblemen, they really don’t have to be, do they?

Read it.

To tell the truth — most of them, it wouldn’t help.

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Further evidence that legalizing recreational drugs isn’t the cure-all that some arrested adolescents would have you believe.

Jerry Pournelle waxes dyspeptic.

Government can protect some people from bad guys. It doesn’t always do that and never does it perfectly, but it can, sometimes, do that.  It can, sometimes, as Adam Smith notes, undertake projects that have great benefit to all with little benefit to any one person — he had in mind roads and canals and fire departments, not the over-all direction of the economy. Alas, it doesn’t take a lot of bad thinking to expand that list, and everyone does. After all, if we can put a man on the moon, surely we can give every child a world class university prep education, can’t we? Not just in the United States, but everywhere. And guess what: all the university professors, both tenured and wannabe, agree completely, and rub their hands in anticipation — since of course they won’t be paid by those who will benefit from universal university education, but by the taxpayers who won’t be asked what they think about having everyone go to university and get a degree if they want to become a manager at Jack In The Box. The largest joke is that even the taxpayers can’t pony up enough, and everyone who goes to these overpaid institutions will get to pony up a grand a month for the rest of their lives; this in exchange for the pretended education they get in order to get the credentials that prove they are educated and worthy of having a job. Of course that credential can lead to one of the coveted positions among the governing class.

Read it.

Darwin Award nominees.

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Why should the tribulations of distant strangers be as important as those of people near and dear to us? What requires us to care about the sufferings of faraway people whom we will never meet?

The answer is obvious: Nothing.

Neither evolutionary biology, nor tradition, nor common sense would dictate any concern for distant peoples with whom we share neither kinship, language, nor customs.

The imperative to empathize with distant alien peoples is an artifact of our times, a product of the strange and inverted moral structure that has emerged out of the wreckage of the twentieth century.

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Recycling is one of the bedrocks of the environmentalist religion. Every local council exhorts us to sort out paper from metal from plastic from glass and put them each in different bins so they can be taken away and turned into something else, failure to do so can result in hefty financial penalties and being named and shamed as a murderer of fluffy seal pups. The problem I have with the religious fad for recycling is that it conflates two distinctly separate points and, at least to some degree, can do more harm than good.

Read it.

Perhaps we actually do have the technology.

What’s more, according to the same computer simulations, the cumulative effect of thousands of years of human influence on climate is preventing the world from entering a new glacial age, altering a clockwork rhythm of periodic cooling of the planet that extends back more than a million years.

Of course, all this flatulance about Global Warming is based on computer simulations, too, so don’t get your hopes up.

Read it.

Be the first on your block….

Read it.

Two words: Engergy density. But read the whole thing.

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Clive Crook doesn’t have a lot of affectoin for Malcolm Gladwell.

Since the first chapter of “Tipping Point” I have been enduring Gladwell out of an increasingly weary sense of professional obligation. This is what they pay me to do, I tell myself. The man has a nose for interesting tales, I grant you, but his unfailing combination of intellectual parasitism, credulity, false modesty, and self-importance repels me.

And he’s no fan of David Brooks, either.

For this premature outburst, blame David Brooks. “Outliers” is an “important” book, he says, in an excess of professional courtesy. (Important to whom?) Further compliments follow. In the end he criticises a little, but quite respectfully. I see no blood on the floor. It’s disappointing.

Baron Bodissey expresses an Eternal Truth.

Other powerful nations don’t expect gratitude. You’ll never catch the Russians or the Chinese asking for gratitude from their neighbors. Britain may have done a service to India by colonizing it, but the British did not expect gratitude from their colonial subjects. Unlike the United States, these empires acted (or act) as empires, that is, in their own interests. Their foreign policy is not based on altruism, so gratitude is never an issue.

Within six months or two years or five years from when the United States finally withdraws its military forces from Iraq, the Iraqis will either revert to their customary ways and install a strongman in power, resort to civil war, or become an Islamic theocracy like Iran. The only way we can prevent such an outcome is to occupy the country for decades — or pave it over.

And, no matter what happens, gratitude will never be forthcoming. Expecting it is utter foolishness.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Here’s an interesting question: How many other Ponzi schemes and similar frauds of which we are as of yet unaware have managed to survive so far due to the trillions of bailout dollars handed out?

Read it.

Because people are stupid and seldom think things through? That’s just a guess, mind.

I guess I’d rather give my money to people who are going to use it to try to make more money (i.e. save/spend it in the market system) than give it to people who are going to use it to try and get re-elected.

Yah, sure, you betcha. Wake me up when that actually happens.

Read it.

I suggest the name “Moldtown”.

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Professional associations and unions, not employers, ought to be the ones providing health insurance.

Steve Sailer distills the essence.

Obama was trying to follow Washington’s career path (state legislature, House of Representatives, mayor) when he ran for ex-Black Panther Bobby Rush’s House seat in the 2000 Democratic primary. But his rejection by black voters for not being black enough crushed his spirit and plunged him into a depression that he only got out of when he resolved in 2001 to that his future lay not in black districts but with appealing to the Stuff White People Like voting bloc.

Read it.

“Farewell and adieu, ye fair Spanish ladies….”

Read it.

Can you translate games, in the sense that you can translate languages? More precisely, can you translate an instance of one game — a match or a round or whatever — into an instance of another game, as you can translate a sentence or a paragraph of Chinese into a sentence or a paragraph of English?

This is why linguists are such fun at parties.

The FatBigot has a bone to pick.

So what is a partner? In popular usage it covers those who engage in bodily coupling, those who live together without benefit of clergy (whether or not there is much bodily coupling involved) and those who are in business together. Many a prostitute falls into all three categories. When a government minister uses the term the reality is usually that someone is being (ahem) penetrated by the government although they pretend to be working with their victim.

Brad DeLong of the Cato Institute takes a realistic look at the crisis du jour.

Thus we have an impulse — a $2 trillion increase in the default discount from the problems in the mortgage market — but the thing deserving attention is the extraordinary financial accelerator that amplified $2 trillion in actual on-the-ground losses in terms of mortgage payments that will not be made into an extra $17 trillion of lost value because global investors now want to hold less risky portfolios than they wanted two years ago.

Our current financial crisis remains largely a mystery: a $2 trillion impulse in lost value of securitized mortgages has set in motion a financial accelerator that we do not understand at any deep level that has led to ten times the total losses in financial wealth of the impulse.

Read it.

Actually, it kinda sorta looks like a SteamPunk version of a cellphone. I guess there’s no accouting for tastes.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

One of the oddities of the standard narrative of the Housing Bubble is how it glosses over just how regional it was. In large expanses of America, there wasn’t much of a Bubble at all. The New York Times reports on the economy in North Dakota, where there was no Housing Bubble, no subsequent Mortgage Meltdown, and no Financial Catastrophe … so far.

Texas is doing just fine, thank you. Look at the places that are having the most trouble, and you’ll find their governments, state and city, are run by Democrats. Take whatever action you think is appropriate.

Cringely lets his dreams take shape.

And dream it is:

But what would happen if just one of those companies — say Chrysler — decided that two years from now it would no longer actually assemble ANY of its own vehicles? Instead they’d put out an RFQ to every company in the world for 300,000 Chrysler Town & Country minivans as an example. Now THAT would be a dramatic move. And a good one, frankly, because with a single pen stroke most of the overcapacity would be removed from the U.S. car market. Chrysler would have to shut down all those plants and lay off all those people, true, but doing it all the way all at once would change the nature of the company’s labor agreements such that there wouldn’t be a whimper.

Whimper? No. Nuclear explosion. UAW -> Congressional Democrats -> Chrysler: “No you won’t. The law to make sure that you don’t will be on the President’s desk within fifteen minutes, and Our Boy Barack will sign it if he knows what’s good for him.”

But keep dreamin’. It makes for entertaining reading.

Read it.

Sometimes, the cleverest people are also the silliest. You only need to glance at Sally Adams to see that she is an academic: the Frida Kahlo eyebrows, the socks and sandals, the determinedly shapeless mound of clothes topped by an ethnic hat. You have to be very clever indeed to look this dowdy.

This time, she has a clearer idea of what she wants: a baby with brains. Although she lives in Hampstead, north London, she has placed newspaper adverts in Oxford and Cambridge, in the hopes of attracting a donor of the highest scholastic calibre. “I’m looking for someone who is educated, intellectual and possibly with connections to the colleges,” she says. “Oxford is a very good possible catchment area. I studied at Oxford University.”