Read it.

Wouldn’t surprise me.

Read it.

And, then again, they might not. Economists do study some weird stuff.

Read it. Or maybe not.

Lileks talks about the city and the country, and makes some obvious points.

Mencius Moldbug is off on one of his inimitable journeys into stuff you never dreamed of.

Victor Davis Hanson takes a look at the People of the Crust.

Barack Obama may have gone to exclusive private schools. He and his wife may both be lawyers who between them have earned four expensive Ivy League degrees. They may make about a million dollars a year, live in an expensive home and send their kids to prep school. But they are still apparently first-hand witnesses to how the American dream has gone sour. Two other Ivy League lawyers, Hillary and Bill, are multimillionaires who have found America to be a land of riches beyond most people’s imaginations. But Hillary also talks of the tragic lost dream of America.

I am reminded of the pundit who characterized modern politics as a conspiracy by the upper class and the underclass against the middle class.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

The widespread illusion that smart people are going to be experts at life just because they’re smart is well worth debunking — we all know a lot of smart but foolish people if we stop and think about it, even aside from the obvious political candidates.

The mental ability to process and manipulate information doesn’t help when the “business rules” being applied are themselves flawed. I’m fond of drawing an analogy to role-playing games: intelligence and wisdom are almost always distinct characteristics.

George Will doesn’t like John McCain any more than I do. Unfortunately, Will has been in Washington too long; he has swallowed the Democrat line that the Congress runs foreign policy, not the President. Perhaps it’s his academic background in political science. Perhaps it’s because he went to Princeton, where there’s apparently something in the water. (How else do you explain Woodrow Wilson?)

Read it. Some intelligent observations (and inconvenient truths).

Read it.

Read it. Truly, tenure at Harvard is a wonderful thing. It’s like being rich without the tedious forms and publicity.

Steve Sailer keeps coming up with interesting thoughts.

Apparently not. The way economists deal with externalities is monetary. Most non-economists prefer more coercive measures.

Read it. An excellent illustration of why we ought to be using this technique on terrorists: It Just Works, without doing any actual damage.

(And on teachers in community colleges. But that’s me, somebody who also spent six years in the Navy.)

This explains a great deal.

Read it. Not until we purge the species of the genetically deficient.

That’s not on their copy, of course.

Read it.

Peggy Noonan.

Lileks. If you’re not reading Lileks, you’re missing out.

Read it. One RINO sticks up for another, and a conservative is supposed to pay attention?

Read it and wallow in antipathy. We do that a lot here.

Steve Sailer points out that it’s not a conspiracy if you call it a conference and invite everybody, right?

Peggy Noonan.

As a conservative I would say Ted Kennedy has spent much of his career being not just wrong about the issues but so deeply wrong, so consistently and reliably wrong that it had a kind of grandeur to it.

Which makes even more significant instances when so-called conservatives cozen up to him — as Bush did on education, or McCain did on amnesty for illegal immigration.

Take a look at the picture. Evil has a face. “A man can smile, and smile, and be a villain.”

Steve Sailer brings up a good point.

He resembles a model playing an executive in a fashion layout for a men’s business attire chain, or the CEO bad guy in a movie on the Lifetime channel about children being poisoned by corporate toxic waste.

And in politics, where appearance is 50% of reality, that’s a killer. If you aren’t qualified to be President, you at least better look like you could play one on TV. Perhaps we could get him to wear a Martin Sheen mask….

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

I am pretty confident that “Australia” is more or less what everyone thinks it is. I am not at all confident that the same can be said for “democracy.”

As you can see, there is a certain amount of contempt in this perspective. This makes sense, because it’s more or less the perspective of the global ruling class.

Having to deal with an American high school was not pleasant, but it gave me a certain respect for America: it exists. Once you go to college, you are no longer in the real America. You are in a fortified outpost of future America, which has been planted in the real America to enlighten and assimilate it. Respect is not on the menu.

I think I once saw a pro-Israeli crowd in New York. It was maybe ten or twenty people. Of course, it wasn’t in 1984, either. On the other hand, when I think of “aggressive and vociferous” in 1984, what I think of is the anti-apartheid divestment movement. Was there ever an anti-Palestinian divestment movement? Promising not to invest in companies that do business with Arab states that support Palestinian terrorism? Maybe I just missed it.

By compiling the facts of history and expecting some objective algorithm to magically arrange them in the most plausible narrative, we think we are being scientific. In fact we have only rediscovered artificial stupidity.

I love this guy. Don’t always agree with him, but he has a fresh perspective, and that’s rare.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Also, can somebody explain exactly what the difference is between McCain and Giuliani? They both are invade-the-world, invite-the-world, in-hock-to-the-world guys, just like Bush. So, why is McCain doing well and Giuliani is in the tank? Is it just because McCain showed up in the first few primaries while Giuliani was off acting like he had something better to do than run for President? Perhaps Woody Allen was right and 90% of success is showing up.

Read it. This explains why our political system sucks.

Read it. And you can believe as much or as little of that as you care to.

Just because Bill Gates has a lot of money doesn’t make him an expert economist, or a political philosopher. The same goes for Warren Buffet, although I’ll listen to Buffet when it comes to business analysis, since he has a good track record there. Bill Gates doesn’t even have all that good a track record in IT, much less Econ.

I wish non-socialist people would just quit using the term “capitalism”, a word invented by Marxists that operates entirely within their little sandbox of a focus on production. The free market is not about production and never has been; it’s about distribution, unrestricted exchange, and I wish there were a good term for that. “Freemarketarian” is about as close as I’ve seen, and it’s pretty ugly.

Read it.

Peggy Noonan on how the scales are falling from Democrat eyes about Bill Clinton. And other things.

George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.

And that will be Bush’s “legacy”, like it or not.

Jerry Pournelle is feeling morose.

We do note, though, that the American people are not stupid: unlike most countries we don’t save money. We know darned well that politicians cannot resist stealing from any pool of money they can find: retirement funds, savings accounts, real estate equity: if they can see the money they will have it. Interest rate meddling, tax rebates to those who don’t pay taxes when there’s no money in the first place, all these are easy ways of getting at savings. The American people know this which is why we don’t save much. Can anyone blame them?

Read it. It’s amazing how often non-rich people who don’t really have to work for a living (writers, politicians, that crowd) seem to feel that they’re in a unique position to be able to tell rich people how they can better spend their money.

Dudes, if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich? There’s a reason….

Read it. Your morning dose of speculative fiction.

Read it. The vital distinction between value and price has tripped up many otherwise intelligent people.

Value drives demand — but price is set by the intersection of demand and supply. If supply is abundant, it’s not going to matter how valuable your product is, price will get pushed towards zero.

Air is the most valuable thing you’ll see today, but when it’s free for the breathing it’s price is zero unless you do something like move it or compress it..

Read it.

Read it. This is actually a very interesting concept that makes a lot of sense.

Read it. And consider the agenda of all these people who want to convince you that we’re in a recession.

Read it. Free markets work every time they’re tried. Economic democracy is like that.

Read it. Any science fiction novel in which the aliens are not at least as strange as the Japanese gets tossed on the discard pile.

Read it. Can the ACLU be far behind?

Read it.

Tyler Cowen hits some high points.

In my view anyone doing policy economics has an obligation to learn more about ethics — much more — than the guy in the street would know.  Would someone doing experimental economics feel free of the obligation to learn some empirical psychology?  Would someone doing trade feel free of the obligation to learn some trade law, some history, and some political science?  No.  What’s the difference?  Economists like to separate the “positive” and “normative” aspects of what they do, but this distinction has not much impressed the moral philosophers who have looked at it nor has it impressed Amartya Sen.  The very decision to use economic tools emphasizes some considerations and excludes others.  The final policy analysis is not just pure prediction but rather it is also an implicit presentation and weighting of both different kinds of information and different values.  So if you are doing policy economics, it is imperative that you think about ethics at a very deep level, and read widely in ethics.  You are doing ethics whether you like it or not!

Frank Fruedi of Spiked is agin it.

David Hume wrote about the tendency to jump from is to ought — but nobody reads any more.

Christopher Hitchens is always worth reading.

Although Steve Sailer isn’t all that impressed.

Read it. Presumably the other half want to be Steve Jobs.

Apparently Mencius Moldbug supports Ron Paul. With reservations.

(part 1)

(part 2)

Suppose Ron Paul is elected President. What makes you think that President Paul can fix the US Federal Government?

What makes you think that any President can fix the US Federal Government?

What makes you think that the US Federal Government can be fixed at all?

And if you don’t think it can be fixed, what do you hope to achieve by voting in its elections?

And those are good questions for everyone to be asking.

Read it.

Obama’s ‘I’m not an operating officer’ admission seems near-disastrous.

a) Obama makes the presidency sound like a grand, slo-mo transformation of vision into legislation. But there are crisis requiring quick, coordinated action, and the type of leader who can act effectively in a crisis is likely to be a good “operating officer” rather than a visionary;

b). Once you pass a law you have to implement it, which requires getting results out of the civil service departments. This would seem to be especially true of national health care. The president who ignores the bureaucracy and focuses on ‘vision’ is apt to be defeated by that bureaucracy.

c) Immersing yourself up to the elbows in the various departments is one way to find out the information that bureaucrats are unlikely to pass up the chain of command.

… I’m not saying Obama’s model of the presidency can’t work if he chooses the right “operating” officer to actually run his administration. I’m saying voters would be justified in preferring a president who was a good “operating officer.”

Anne Applebaum looks at the Tata Nano. Try and say that three times fast.

Read it. There’s a lot of old people out there. Some people think that’s a problem.

The inimitable Mencius Moldbug is not afraid to deploy the Hot Needle of Inquiry upon appropriate occasion.