Steve Sailer understands the essence.

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On the other hand, conspiracies do exist, and conspiracies run by very clever people do exist. Where does one draw the line?

Remember: the The Boy Who Cried Wolf did, eventually, see a wolf — and those who ignored him were the losers.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Today, though, I’m fascinated by the credulity of younger, well-educated people toward their elders, and the endurance of their bad old ideas. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, has been dead and gone for years, but the mellifluous old blowhard is still constantly cited by the relatively young as a great thinker whose golden ideas must remain unchallenged by we lesser mortals doomed to live in this age of brass.

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I believe politicians are the number-one cause of gastro-intestinal disorder. I think this is true because I get gas whenever a politician outlines his or her vision for America, or when they speak to us about morality, or lectures us about patriotism. I think this is because if anyone should refrain addressing such weighty issues, it is a politician – mostly because beyond the fact they’ve convinced some number of back-home voters that they deserve to be an elected official, politicians aren’t qualified to lecture me about any of these things — especially about Patriotism.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

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Is there any convincing evidence that actual Latino voters care as much about illegal immigrant legalization as Latino elected offiicials (or the journalists who cover them)?

Steve Sailer ruminates on some inconvenient truth.

Have you noticed that whenever some writer uses the words “vibrant” or “vibrancy” he is almost guaranteed to be yanking your chain? It’s just like how for so many years the phrase “in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate” always preceded utter bilge.

Whenever I read about “vibrant immigrant neighborhoods,” I wonder exactly which ones has the writer has been to, if any. Come to the vast immigrant neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley and check out the vibrancy: there isn’t any. They’re boring, tacky, and low-brow. There’s no culture beyond the video store. It was like that before, too, but 35 years ago we expected the place to improve a little with time, not regress.

Megan McArdle runs the numbers on the “universal childcare” fantasy.

The basic argument is that we should have highly skilled, quality childcare available for every child under the age of five in America. We should ensure this by paying a high wage and good benefits to those workers.

Let’s unpack this a little.

Turns out that, as with many popular socialist programs, we can’t afford it. But wait, there’s more.

There is something truly odd to me about highly educated people who simultaneously believe that they have something better to do than employ their degree in singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” seventy times a day, and also that there should be a large supply of bright, educated people who choose to do just that.

Megan McArdle brings up a very good point.

I’m hardly the first person to make this observation, but I don’t know why it isn’t noted more often: guns are the only weapon that equalizes strength between attacker and attacked. It’s the only time when men’s greater speed, strength, and longer reach make no difference; if you pull the trigger first, you win.

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Some people have entirely too much time on their hands.

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Arnold Kling is always worth reading.

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The claim that there is no such thing as race is understandable but wrong. We should recognise both the genetic reality of race and the uniquely human ability to transcend it.

An odd review to find in Prospect, but worth reading.

Richard Nixon was President, and he only had daughters.

Bill Clinton was President, and he only had a daughter.

George W Bush was President, and he only had daughters.

Barack Obama only has daughters.

Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Vote for McCain.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Some times the old ways are best.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

But, in our culture, we have such a commitment to authenticity that countless women feel that it would be downright immoral to advertise their inherent sluttiness only part time. Hence, tattoos.

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My husband is white; I am African American.

Note that she is not black. Note that her husband isn’t European-American. That tells you a lot about it right there.

Ross Douthat is almost always worth reading.

Eliminate terrorism and nuclear weapons, and you’ll still die. Do away with poverty, clean up the environment, and ensure a fairer distribution of the earth’s resources, and you’ll still die. Find a cure for AIDS, and not only will you still die, but so will everybody you’ve cured.

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One imagines that it would be a much happier world if Leftists faced reality and entered into an honest discussion about just how present-day circumstances might modify or channel the moral impulses that we all have. What they in fact do is refuse to have any discussion, just as they so often refuse to look at the full facts of a matter. Quite clearly, they do all they can to avoid the irrationality in their arguments being exposed. They are in deep fear that they would lose a rational argument. In short, morality is just one of the many realities that Leftists ignore — to our almost certain detriment. It is only the fact that we DO live by rules that makes civilized life possible.

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A useful concept that explains much of the modern world.

Mencius Moldbug continues his disquisition on progressivism.

The great power center of 2008 is the Cathedral. The Cathedral has two parts: the accredited universities and the established press. The universities formulate public policy. The press guides public opinion. In other words, the universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent. It’s as simple as a punch in the mouth.

Government is not a science because it is impractical to construct controlled experiments in government. Uncontrolled or “natural” experiments are not science. Any process which is not science, but claims to be science, or claims that its results exhibit the same objective robustness we ascribe to the scientific process, has surely earned the name of pseudoscience. Thus it is not at all excessive to describe 20th-century “public policy” as a pseudoscience. A good sanity check is the disparity between its predictions and its achievements.

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Ponder the role of those whose shops involve no sweat.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

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This is one of the best analyses of the current situation I’ve seen.

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I think much the same thing is happening in the adoption process and at the local animal shelter. It’s not that adoption case-workers or pet shelter volunteers are consciously wasting peoples’ time to make themselves feel more powerful. I’m sure they sincerely believe that their efforts are helping kids and cats, respectively. But I think they’re wrong.

A big part of the problem is that people have a natural tendency to over-estimate their own importance. Nobody takes a job he believes is a waste of time, and people self-select into professions they happen to think make a big difference in society. So TSA security screeners believe they’re making air travel safer, even when the evidence says they’re not. Patent attorneys believe they’re promoting innovation, even in industries where the evidence says otherwise. And adoption officials naturally believe that they play a vital role in ensuring kids get placed in loving homes.

This is in continuation of his previous article on the same subject, which is also worth review.

The concept in question, of course, is “Primum non nocere”, “First, do no harm”, which few employees of governments or similar Serve The Public Good organizations seem to have on their radars. The CPS rampage in San Angelo is a fairly obnoxious case in point. No one doubts that these do-gooders have the best of intentions, but, in the classic phrase, that road leads to Hell. The problem is not their intentions but their effects, and the arrogance that underlies the assumption that good intentions will necessarily lead to a good result.

Arnold Kling attempts to promote an intellectual cage match.

Victor Davis Hanson has some ideas.

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What the air force is really worried about is not getting chastised by the boss, but being put out of a job by new technology. The UAVs take away the original job for the air force, air reconnaissance. Now smart bombs have made it so easy to deliver accurate firepower to the ground troops that even the new army Predator can drop them.

And, indeed, this points up the absurdity of having a separate Air Force. In the Industrial Age environment of massed air fleets this might have been justified, but the modern “retail” nature of the battlefront merely underscores its obsolescence. The Navy and Marine Corps provide excellent models for integrating air assets into the overall force structure; time to turn the Air Force back into the Army Air Corps where it belongs.

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A brief hiatus from bitching. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Arnold Kling stands conventional wisdom on its head.

In my view, macro seriously undermines sound economics. It treats work as scarce and consumer wants as insufficient, which is the opposite of what we teach in micro. Macro treats saving as contractionary and international trade deficits as contractionary, which is contrary to general equilibrium micro. Most people with no economics training intuitively believe that jobs are scarce, that they help the economy when they spend rather than save, and that trade deficits are bad. In general it is the job of economists to explain why those views are fallacies.

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Let’s just say I’m not convinced. Although it does have its moments of unintended humor.

This turns out to be a controversial point for economists, surely members of the only profession that could argue about whether smoking is rational.

And there is nothing necessarily irrational about deciding to embark on a course of action that many find enjoyable but that is painful to reverse. Otherwise, marriage would be irrational too.

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I suspect that there’s also a difference in the quality of the “college education” that each side gets. I’d love to see an analysis of the difference in attitude matched to the majors and types of courses taken.

No doubt two people who spent their college years studying “queer theory” and Aristotle, respectively, are going to differ on their responses to the available scientific evidence regarding man-made climate change.

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Marion Barry comes out in favor of school vouchers.

I am not making this up.

Steve Sailer isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions. I think.

Megan McArdle has been discussing the minimum wage. This post is particularly excellent.

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I still have my copy of the Compact OED. Wouldn’t part with it for anything. And the magnifying glass came in handy for many occasions, too.

Megan McArdle thinks so that you don’t have to.

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I can’t think of any place in Africa or South America that wouldn’t profit from a large influx of Chinese. Hell, I wish we had more of ’em here.

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Guess the American people really hate that war in Iraq and Afghanistan, don’ t they? Young people especially.

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Gee, perhaps that’s why they’re poor. Ya think? I know for a fact that I work about 20 hours a week less than Bill Gates.

For the rich, working is what they do for fun. That’s why they’re rich. Duh.

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Of course this review is a classic of its kind:

The movie’s central conflict, which is also Stark’s internal one, has to do with the ambiguity inherent in waging war.

Have you ever heard such a chemically pure distillation of  Theater Major drivel in your life? Dana Stevens has a great career ahead of him as an Overclass pet.

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Trust your precious bodily fluids to Victoria Principal. You know you want to.

Joseph Stalin is said to have screened the 1940 movie “The Grapes of Wrath” in the Soviet Union to showcase the depredations of life under capitalism. Russian audiences watched the final scenes of the Okies’ westward trek aboard overladen, broken-down jalopies — and marveled that in the United States, even poor people had cars.