Read it.

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.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Ponder the role of those whose shops involve no sweat.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

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.

Read it.

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?

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.