David Friedman is always worth reading.

Arnold Kling is always worth reading.

After Iain Murray’s talk yesterday, a woman who works for a small libertarian organization in France told me that half of recent French graduates of top universities are currently residing outside of France.

Mencius Moldbug would have us consider undesired government programs, regulations, and taxes as a form of rent that we pay. George Lakoff prefers to think of “membership dues.” Perhaps the rent in France has gotten too high for some of the best and brightest there, so they are moving to the UK and the U.S.

Tibor Machan.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

He’s also pretty good at asking pointed questions.

Further thoughts here.

The minimum marriage age was raised from 14 to 16 only three years ago. So a woman who is currently 17 might have been legally married at 14 and had one or more children by now.

A lot of the support for the attack on the FLDS comes from the widely held view that the normal pattern is for girls to be married off to older men shortly after they reach puberty and promptly start having babies. It is hard to see how that can be true if, as the Texas authorities have admitted, only two girls out of 53 in the 14-17 year age group were pregnant. And if that picture is false, that undercuts the whole argument for the extraordinary treatment they have been subjected to.

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Barry Obama a psychopath?

And as someone who has studied psychopathy (I have a couple of academic journal articles on the subject) that is very familiar. Psychopaths also typically present a “nice guy” image — something that sucks in the females wholesale. The psychopath says and does all the right things and people promptly put their trust in him. And then when they least expect it, he “goes bad” on them. “Why did he do that?” is the typical distressed response, “He was so nice and then he went and did ….”.

Hmm.

Steve Sailer knows some very interesting people.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

News stories on the FLDS case refer to them as polygamists but the legal arguments in the case seem to be based on the age of the wives, not their number. This raises an interesting question: In what sense is polygamy itself currently illegal?

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Well, for one thing, it can tell us we’re getting pretty rusty at it.

Of course, this is Jared Diamond, so take it with a grain of salt. Or two.

Kaus looks at the reality on the ground.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Like me, Obama is essentially a writer, not an extemporaneous speaker. He needs a few drafts to work things out. So, he developed a conversational style where he doesn’t try to persuade anybody in unscripted conversation of anything other than that “I have understood you,” knowing that most people assume that the only reason anybody disagrees with them is because they are too dumb to understand. Obama watched how fast people got sick of Newt Gingrich. Americans like to imagine their leaders know more than they are saying.

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This is interesting of itself but also as an example of the wider implications of the “economics of abundance” concept.

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You know, it may be hard to find a candidate who doesn’t belong to a church whose leader delivers eyebrow-singing speeches on the evils of America and also built a house Jim Bakker would approve, and it may be hard to find a candidate who doesn’t move with ease in the same social circles as some people who bombed the Pentagon, but it can’t be that hard to find one who doesn’t do both.

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Too bad we the public cannot conspire, away from the calculating gaze of the political/media class, to pay no heed at all to “gaffes.” To starve them once and for all of the raw material of manufactured controversy, a random bludgeon of opportunity that only serves to introduce an element of caprice into politics and further chill our already tepid national discourse. No, occasional disciplinary lapses into honesty should be encouraged and welcome for what they often are: the brief lifting of the veil of rhetorical obscurity between the people and the governing elite.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

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A good thing for all of us to remember. The distinction between price and value has always confused socialists and others ignorant of basic economics.

David Friedman asks a very obvious question.

So far, however, they seem to have been unable to identify the girl who made the phone call. They did identify the man she accused–who turned out to be in Arizona, said he hadn’t been in Texas since 1977, and has not been arrested, which I assume means that the evidence supports his claim. 

Funny how that works out.

Which suggests an obvious conjecture—that the phone call was a fake, possibly by someone in law enforcement who wanted an excuse to raid the ranch, possibly by someone else in the area who disapproved of the FLDS and wanted to set off such a raid. I find it surprising that none of the news stories, at least that I have seen, have even mentioned that possibility.

Indeed.

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That’s because a lot of health care jobs are labor-intensive and don’t take a lot of training.

Rather like manufacturing jobs were during their Golden Age.

Perhaps someday we’ll be talking about “scrub-green collar” workers.

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Making excuses for autonomous human actors is always a form of condescension, I’d say. But when you make excuses for arguably what many people regard as normal, even laudable behavior, you double down on the disrespect, because you are also challenging your subjects’ moral framework

Would that more liberals realized that.

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If nothing else, do it for the children.

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Manifest behavior is always the summation of competing wishes and inhibitions, most of which are unconscious. When someone makes a great show of his personal piety yet his manifest behavior is often damaging to others, it is worth wondering if he is expressing forbidden unconscious wishes in ways that are disguised and acceptable to himself. Jimmy Carter, our nation’s worst ex-President, offers an excellent case in point.

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Wonder what they’ll do when the Episcopalian Church finally disintegrates.

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Of course, this is from the BBC, so you’ll want a second source for the information.

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Here’s a thought: How would it be if you could depend on every chain supermarket to have a mini-Emercency Room, where you could go and get stabilized and maybe transferred to a Real Hospital if necessary? What would that do for the health care system? What would that do for health care, period?

Read it and see.

Where do you draw the line?

Cringely has some surprising observations.

Few would look to the Amish as role models yet they are remarkably good at what they do.

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A question not often considered. English is famously more compact than languages such as French, and I think a good case could be made that Latin is more compact than most modern languages.

A thought just occurred to me — can you think of anything more absurd than putting Bill Maher in charge of a program called ‘Politically Incorrect’? Perhaps putting AlGore in charge of a program called ‘The Coming Ice Age’, but short of that, I can’t think of any.

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Now there’s a shocker.

Cringely takes on an unusual topic for a tech columnist.

As my friend Henry from down the road in Mansfield, Ohio, points out, the Amish have been on this same “new” educational path forever. Their ability to produce nearly 100 percent productive citizens (and very nice furniture) for about fifty bucks per student per year is especially galling to those government schools that spend $16K and turn out a lot of slackers.

Or maybe not.

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Note that they have joined neither the European Union nor the U.N. What do they know that we don’t.

The nation also has a high degree of personal freedom, linked to a decentralized government in which voters are the ultimate sovereign through an elaborate system of direct democracy—citizens can both propose their own laws and challenge any action of the government.

Well, quite a lot, really….

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Economists write the darnedest things.

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This sort of thing is why otherwise normal people consider going to law school.

Victor Davis Hanson thinks isolationism a Bad Thing.

On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for Minding One’s Own Business.

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THE BEST-INFORMED PERSON I EVER KNEW was a friend of my grandfather’s back in the Bronx, where I grew up. Every morning of every day of his life, this elderly man — his name, as I recall, was Boris — would dress impeccably in a suit and waistcoat and shuffle to the public library, where more than a dozen of the day’s local and out-of-town newspapers were threaded through bamboo poles and hung from racks. One by one, Boris would read them all, front to back; at dusk, he would walk home alone. This daily pilgrimage was conducted with ecclesiastic solemnity, a quiet, dignified homage to the majesty of knowledge. Even as a little boy, in that intuitive if primitive way that children comprehend important things, I understood the fundamental truth that Boris was, in some clear but compelling way, a douche bag.

Not your usual newspaper story.

Jeremy Wagstaff is always worth reading.

The bigger solution, of course, is to ditch the whole ‘presentation thing’ in favor of participation. I know my class are more attentive if they know I’m going to ask random questions of them. An audience is going to be more attentive if the speaker is not merely droning on but offering a compelling performance and engaging them as much as possible. A meeting leader is going to have the attention of the room if s/he doesn’t waste their valuable day giving some PR schtick but keeps it short and genuinely meets the other participant, rather than lectures them.

The truest thing you’ll read today. Nobody checks e-mail in Kingsfield’s class.

This is where a tablet PC comes into its own. Not only does your note-taking (or whatever else you’re doing) look like traditional scribble-on-legal-pad activity, most tablets come with an unobtrusive built-in microphone quite adequate to capture a speaker or lecturer. Run the result through a program like Dragon Naturally Speaking and you have a verbatim transcript of the talk. Meld this with your notes in a program like OneNote, and you’re shiny.

Which is why I’m waiting for Apple to come out with a decent tablet. C’mon, Steve, get on the stick. And I want at least a 14″ screen.

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I find the following particularly trenchant:

Candor is surely the necessary starting point for a useful national conversation on race (the one that Obama didn’t seem to want to have until his pastor got him in political hot water). One side says, “You’re scared of young black men.” The other side says, “Yes, and here’s why.” Progress becomes possible. One side says, “You get all these breaks just because of your race.” The other side says ,”We have to be twice as good to get the same respect.” If you don’t ever have the argument you probably can’t get over the argument.

Jeremy Wagstaff on the unrealized potential of Starbuck’s.

I find it interesting that his mind would automatically go to what sort of things could be marketed to these hangers-on at coffee shops. Is that distinctively American, or merely human?

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The Naked Ape meets Up the Organization.

Of course, no mention is made, in this Rousseauian analysis, of the observations of Hobbes. A glaring omission.

Cringely is nearly always worth reading.

The last major change to the way we educate children and young adults came with the introduction of the textbook in the 16th century. I think it’s about time.

We have the technology for inexpensive, individualized custom-paced education. Let’s use it.

Tom Stoppard. Yes, that Tom Stoppard.

Yeah, that’s pretty much the way I remember it.

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And no, it’s not about religion.

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Outsourcing taken to its logical extreme.

Ross Douthat is always worth reading.

What does it mean to be “rich” in America today? You might be surprised … at how “rich” you are. I know I was.

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Is it ‘offensive’ to hit too close to the sensitive weak spot of Democratic race-preference ideology in a Democratic primary? I guess.

Jerry Pournelle has an interesting essay on the subject.

Read it.

Some people have entirely too much time on their hands.

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An excellent question, to which I have yet heard no good answer.

To quote my old boss in the ’76 Reagan campaign, Larry Uzzell: “The next four years are going to be a disaster, and we’d rather they were a Democrat disaster than a Republican disaster.” And Jimmy Carter stepped up to the plate and provided us with one — and gave us Reagan.

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And the sooner they realize it, the sooner they’ll get better at it, and we’ll all beneift.