Read it. If you squint just right you might even believe he’s serious.

This is the sort of thing Scott Adams would write, if Scott Adams could write as well as he can draw.

Read this for the moral.

Just as chemistry is a special case of physics and biology is a special case of chemistry, a government is a special case of a corporation.

Truest thing you know.

Read it. The impact of science upon identity. How much can we change before we turn into somebody else? If we do turn into somebody else, is this necessarily a bad thing?

Read it. Consider the impact of religion on food, and vice versa.

Cringely has some interesting news.

NYT. That’s what Wi-Fi is all about. Come on down … and bring your laptop.

Pogue has some good points to make about products that have demand but no supply. Here are two I especially like:

The great cellphone carrier. When the iPhone came out, everybody grumbled and moaned about how Apple had chosen AT&T as its exclusive carrier. I grumbled along with them—and then it hit me: Whom wouldn’t people have grumbled about?

 The touch-tone alarm clock. The modern clock radio can play CDs, wake up two people at different times, and even beam the current time onto the ceiling. So why do we have to set the time using the same controls cavemen used in the Stone Age?

Pogue points to an interesting notion. Not sure I buy it, but it’s worth thinking about.

Engadget. The Library of Congress in your hand. Or close enough….

Read it. Think you could be President? A lot of unlikely people think they could.

Read it. Bureaucracy will get you if you don’t watch out.

EconLog. Good stuff, Maynard.

Techdirt. I was waiting for somebody to think of this. What’s the next step — simulating nuclear weapons?

Paul Graham.

Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it’s “worth?” The only way you’re ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don’t have any immediate use for it, you probably never will.

One of the hardest lessons that anyone can learn. Some never do.

And unless you’re extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one’s spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there’s less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there’s more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what’s around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.

I have yet to find an effective way to get this through the skulls of the untidy people among whom I live.

NYT. Notice that this is the same argument used by proponents of the dysfunctional public schools: If people are allowed the freedom to choose something else, there won’t be enough left for the political pressure needed to fix the existing system.

WSj. More sense than you’ll see from anybody in Congress.

Peggy Noonan.

Young recruits are often middle class, and their interest is often sparked by an immediate or protracted crisis–the loss of a job, a change in family circumstances. They do not necessarily come from anything particular lacking in the family, but they have nothing to hold onto until this absolute thing, this fundamentalist belief, and its grievances, comes by. Their rage is tended and encouraged by spiritual and operational leaders who offer a sense of community, of belonging and of approval.

Not to mention the fact that they are constantly bombarded by their teachers in school and the headlines in the newspapers that America sucks, and white people suck, and people who are actually working for a living are a bunch of oppressive slavemasters, and the fact that they are pathetic losers isn’t actually their fault.

UR. We got yer democracy … right here.

Can you imagine a 21st-century post-demotist society? One that saw itself as recovering from democracy, much as Eastern Europe sees itself as recovering from Communism? Well, I suppose that makes one of us.

A fairly obvious truism:

The main difference between fascism and communism was not in mechanism, but in origin – fascist elites tended to be militarist, communist elites intellectual. But the one-party state is a clear case of convergent evolution.

A really inconvenient truth:

 A political party is a political party. It is a large group of people allied for the purpose of seizing and wielding power. If it does not choose to arm its followers, this is only because it finds unarmed followers more useful than armed ones. If it chooses less effective strategies out of moral compunction, it will be outcompeted by some less-principled party.

Freeman Dyson is smarter than you and me put together.

In the modern world, science and society often interact in a perverse way. We live in a technological society, and technology causes political problems. The politicians and the public expect science to provide answers to the problems. Scientific experts are paid and encouraged to provide answers. The public does not have much use for a scientist who says, “Sorry, but we don’t know”. The public prefers to listen to scientists who give confident answers to questions and make confident predictions of what will happen as a result of human activities. So it happens that the experts who talk publicly about politically contentious questions tend to speak more clearly than they think. They make confident predictions about the future, and end up believing their own predictions. Their predictions become dogmas which they do not question. The public is led to believe that the fashionable scientific dogmas are true, and it may sometimes happen that they are wrong. That is why heretics who question the dogmas are needed.

Believe it.

Techdirt. An even more interesting issue is the “TV license” that Britons have to pay just for owning a TV; this is what is used to fund the BBC. If people can watch American programs over the Internet, and get them quicker and without needed to pay a license fee, who’s going to buy a TV any more?

NYT. Review of The World Without Us, which I look forward to reading.

Mr. Weisman speaks to the darkest parts of our collective imagination as well as some of the strangest.

Well, no, he speaks to the darkest parts of the Brahmin imagination; those of us in Flyover Country don’t spend a lot of time worrying about these things. No doubt the People of the Crust would point to this as being a major component of the problem; those of us who compose the Filling merely see this as evidence of the eternal truth that those who want to borrow trouble usually have an unlimited credit line.

UR. A puzzling phenomenon.

Certainly, if there is a system of institutions in which anti-Americanism predominates, it’s the Western university system, certainly the West’s most prestigious universities are in America, and certainly anti-Americanism is no hardship to an American academic career. Where does Noam Chomsky teach? Not at the Sorbonne.

NYT. The key, of course, was the medieval universities, which formed a network to transmit scientific advances from where they were made to where they could be exploited.

Steve Sailer has his own take.

Read it. This is a discussion on the Immigration question from Scott Adams’s blog that I found quite interesting. (Thanks to an anonymous commenter on Steve Sailer’s blog, whom I would thank if I knew who it was. Memes travel interesting paths in the Modern World.)

One of Scott Adams’s non-virtues is that he tries to be Dave Barry and can’t quite pull it off.

On the other hand — many of the commentors need to have their meds adjusted.

In any event, it shows several of the dimensions of the problem.

NYT. Ostensibly a review of Lee Harris’s The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West, this is about as close to intellectual honesty as we can expect from a member of the Brahmin caste.

Lee Harris is one of the most underappreciated thinkers of our day; get his books (all of them) and read them.

NYT. Why does this remind me of the scene in The Time Machine with the Eloi and the Morlocks?

Arnold Kling looks at an interesting proposal by Tyler Cowan.

PEGGY NOONAN.

Read it.

 The western left seems always to be behaving as if they want to tear down the government and the culture that supports it while not admitting to the knowledge that were there to be a change of regime, even a leftist one, the vast majority of them would be among the very first to be purged, imprisoned or marginalized by whatever autocratic or totalitarian regime arose in its place. They are literally sitting on the limb that they appear to be trying to saw off.

Read it twice, because you’ll miss stuff the first time. I did.

UR. The inimitable Mencius Moldbug has some interesting things to say about the field of “computer science”, a field composed of academics who suddenly woke up one day and realized that the employment prospects for math majors were not all that better than those for English majors and that they’d have to get a Real Job, like, soon.

So here’s the first thing that’s wrong with CS research: there’s no such thing as CS research. First, there is no such thing as “computer science.” Except for a few performance tests and the occasional usability study, nothing any CS researcher does has anything to do with the Scientific Method. Second, there is no such thing as “research.” Any activity which is not obviously productive can be described as “research.” The word is entirely meaningless. All just semantics, of course, but it’s hardly a good sign that even the name is fraudulent.

“Computer Science” is like “gender studies”, a way for people who want to play for a living can get funding from governments and other people who ought to know better.

 The reason why CS research produces so little that can be called creative programming these days is that the modern process of grant-funded research is fundamentally incompatible with the task of writing interesting, cool and relevant software. Rather, its goal is to produce publications and careers, and it’s very good at that.

Read The Whole Thing.

WSJ. Celebrity is no vaccine against acting like an idiot. In fact, there’s a pretty strong correlation.

The simple idea that Mr. Bonds and Ms. Lohan ought to go find something resembling a church to offset the compulsions of modern life drives the no-religion people nuts. If so, they should stop making funny jokes about sprinkling holy water and start proposing an alternative way to learn integrity, self-respect and character that will have a longer shelf-life than “Don’t Be Evil.”

Funny how that works.

No link — the bare fact is enough to generate a collective sigh of relief from the middle class. The People of the Crust are in mourning, of course, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I had a girlfriend in college who enjoyed Bergman films and claimed to understand them. Thirty years later she’s a distinguished professor of law and I’m happily married to someone else, which shows you that life works out for the best more often than you might suspect.

UR. One of the most entertaining analyses it has ever been my delight to read.

By my count, Anglophone North America ex Canada is on its fifth legal regime. The First Republic was the Congressional regime, which illegally abolished the British colonial governments. The Second Republic was the Constitutional regime, which illegally abolished the Articles of Confederation. The Third Republic was the Unionist regime, which illegally abolished the principle of federalism. The Fourth Republic is the New Deal regime, which illegally abolished the principle of limited government.

A good way to find the most powerful people in the US is to find the most responsible people. No one in the US is scheming for power. A lot of them seem to be working for change. No one in the US is brainwashing the masses. A lot of them seem to be educating the public. No one in the US is ruling the world. A lot of them seem to be making global policies.

UR. Another examination of how our ruling class operates by the inimitable Mencius Moldbug.

Note, for example, that in this hefty article on terrorism, there is no discussion of actual terrorists. Power seems completely uninterested in the actual motivation and organization of these friends we haven’t gotten to know yet.

Read The Whole Thing.