Read it.

Unfortunately, U.S. view of Muslims still not negative enough.

Veronique de Rugy points out how economic models are biased in favor of government spending.

All these analysts also systematically ignore the fact that GDP numbers include government spending. When the federal government pumps trillions of dollars into the economy, it looks as if GDP is growing. When government cuts spending—even cuts within the most inefficient programs—aggregate GDP shrinks.

But that’s misleading. If Washington spends $1 a year on a bureaucrat’s salary, for example, GDP numbers will register growth of exactly $1, whether or not the employee has produced any value for that money. By contrast, if a firm pays an engineer $1, that $1 only shows up in the GDP if the engineer produces $1 worth of stuff to sell. This distinction biases GDP numbers—and the policies based on them—toward ever-increasing government spending.

Read it.

Hospital emergency rooms, particularly those serving the urban poor, are closing at an alarming rate even as emergency visits are rising, according to a report published on Tuesday.

Gee, maybe those two things are connected.

Emergency departments were most likely to have closed if they served large numbers of the poor, were at commercially operated hospitals, were in hospitals with skimpy profit margins or operated in highly competitive markets, the researchers found.

In other words, they can’t afford to provide free health care to people who can’t afford to pay. Duh.

The aim of the analysis was to figure out what characteristics make a hospital emergency department likely to close, Dr. Hsia said. Rural hospitals were excluded because some are designated “critical access hospitals” and operate under federal mandate.

Hint: The laws of economics work even when you don’t want them to.

Emergency rooms are required by law to provide treatment regardless of ability to pay. “People will have coverage, but there’s a concern that there will be nowhere for them to go,” Dr. Schneider said.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

This entire article is like saying ‘Studies suggest that people who get hit in the head are much more likely to experience head pain than people who don’t.’ The phrase ‘thumb-sucker’ seems barely adequate.

Read it.

I’d be more impressed with ‘economists’ like this one if, just once, they supported something that wasn’t part of the market basket of contemporary ‘progressive’ policies.

And, of course, economists — once they wander into the political field — are as inclined (some would say, more inclined) to commit the fallacy of Unwarranted Aggregation. For example:

Think about that when arguing that the richest country in the world can’t afford Social Security and Medicare starting at age 65 because “everyone” in this country has seen their life expectancy increase.

The problem with this is that ‘the richest country in the world’ can’t afford anything, because ‘the richest country in the world’ doesn’t have one giant bank account that can be tapped for whatever Cool Idea is the latest fad. That’s the tedious trick that most social ‘reformers’ use so often that it’s worn grooves in everybody’s brains and so is no longer even noticed, much less protested. Calling a country ‘rich’ is just a metaphor, a way of summarizing a technical statistical aggregation so that it can be compared with other technical statistical aggregations; using it as if it were a Real Thing that can serve as a foundation for a policy recommendation is the sort of Stupid Mistake that a Real Scientist tries to avoid — which is why when Real Scientists speak, what they say is hedged around with cautions and qualifiers.

Any purported scientist that says something definite without immediately following it with ‘But of course you have to bear in mind that…’ is almost certainly talking out of his ass, and so said opinion is to be accorded no more deference than one would give to, oh, a newspaper story (i.e. not very much).

Read it.

Horseshit. The whole case against waterboarding (including the conceit that waterboarding is ‘torture’) is an intellectual bait-and-switch of the same type that underlies the case for ‘gay marriage’. Like Communists, degenerates have learned that if the language can be changed in their direction, the nature of the argument will change in their direction as well, and eventually they’ll win because their stupid opponents won’t have any way to express a contrary view.

Torture is a term with an established meaning, and that meaning always includes the infliction of pain; the etymology of the word makes that clear. One of the chief signs of the degeneration of modern language (and modern culture) is the inflation of such terms in service of an ideological agenda in order to erase the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate practices.

Waterboarding does not cause pain. It causes distress, certainly; that’s kinda what it’s all about — but it does not cause PAIN, and so IT IS NOT TORTURE, no matter how many hand-wringers bleat otherwise.

No, severe psychological trauma is not pain. No, making you want your mommy is not pain. No, preventing you from sleeping  more than an hour at a time is not pain (it’s ‘boot camp’). Terms have meanings, and allowing those meanings to be corrupted is the first step on the road to Orwellian doublethink and thoughtcrime.

This article once again demonstrates the essentially adolescent attitude of those who write for tReason magazine, and the soi-disant libertarians who are their fellow-travelers. Time to grow up, people. Evil men are standing by to kill us, and our families, and our civilization — and your pusillanimity endangers us all. Man up, or shut up.

Read it.

If Repblicans were doing this in, say, New York, this same NPR would be deriding them as kooks and nutt-cases, of course.

Politically, the Tucson metro area has long been more moderate than other parts of the state.

Meaning ‘more left-wing’ in NPR-speak.

The University of Arizona plays a big role. So do government workers.

Oh, ya think?

And southern Arizona was part of Mexico until 1854. So Eckerstrom says it’s more culturally integrated.

Great, let’s sell it back to the Mexicans. Perhaps we can do the same with Travis County here in Texas, the blue zit on the ass of an otherwise sensible state.

Read it.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Read it.

Even terms such as wildlife are dismissed as insulting to the animals concerned – who should instead be known as “free-living”, the academics including an Oxford professor suggest.

I am not making this up.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg has a hard time with it, too:

I think my pro-animal views are pretty well known and I don’t want Cosmo to think I am a snake in the grass, but you’d have to be crazier than a loon, if not downright batty, to buy into this monkey business. I don’t want to rat these guys out, but they should understand that they are the canaries in the coal mine leading to the end of civilization. If we listen to this bull we’ll all go to the dogs. I mean seriously, don’t have a cow, man. I am all for treating animals humanely, but this is a horse of a different color. When I read it I felt like a deer in the headlights. This dog just won’t hunt.

Read it.

Because, you know, there’s nothing more important that we could devote space in the New York Times to discussing.

Laura Bennett, Assistant Literary Editor of The New Republic, plays the gender card.

It is easy to forget that beneath all the mentions of wide hips and “terror burps” she is actually an attractive, powerful woman. Lorne Michaels once said about her that “She has such a German work ethic … It’s superhuman, the German thing of ‘This will happen and I am going to make this happen.’ It’s just sheer force of will.” In her account of herself, however, Fey is distilled into a mild current of anxious energy, perfectly likable and inoffensive, coasting to the top of her field on a tide of awkward charm. Neurosis, in Bossypants, is an instrument for fitting Fey into what is traditionally a man’s world.

But God help you if you stray off the PC reservation.

Fey’s non-confrontational style sets her sharply apart from other women in the business, many of whom bank on shock value for humor—Sarah Silverman, for instance, whose memoir, The Bedwetter, published last year, was spiky and loud. Silverman doesn’t so much agonize inwardly about her problems as aggressively exorcise them. In her book, she wrings laughs from serious confessions about her own troubled past, with chapter titles such as “An Emotionally Disturbed Teenager Is Given a Bottomless Well of Insanely Addictive Drugs As a Means to Improve Her Life, and Other Outstanding Achievements for the New Hampshire Mental Health Community”. Silverman has turned darkness into shtick. But Fey’s memoir is wholly cleansed of any real darkness. It preempts any probing into real frailties and flaws. Of course, this is the point; it is designed to disarm.

Lesson: If you’re not a thorough bitch (and Sarah Silverman is a thorough bitch), then you’re not a Real Woman.

Read it.

The rich and powerful should be required by law to spend some time every year helping the poor and needy, the Archbishop of Canterbury suggested today.

Ever notice how some people have a lot of enthusiasm for schemes that make other people do stuff? By law? (Yeah, I’m lookin’ at YOU, Barack.)

Read it. And watch the video.

For this year’s Earth Day celebration, Reason.tv is proud to present “The Top Five Environmental Disasters that Didn’t Happen.” The environmental movement began in 1962 when Rachel Carson published her best-selling book Silent Spring. And ever since, chicken littles have warned us about imminent environmental disasters that ultimately didn’t happen.

Jared Diamond, Author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, discusses agriculture.

He’s agin’ it.

Russ Roberts at Café Hayek spanks Joseph Stiglitz of Vanity Fair, who does the usual ‘progressive’ trick of inappropriately lumping shit together and drawing bogus conclusions therefrom.

So compared to 25 years ago, the share of income going to the top 1% has doubled, from 12% to almost 25%. But the conclusion that Stiglitz draws, does not follow. It does not follow that their lot in life has improved considerably. There’s no “their” there. The people who were in the top 1% 25 years ago are not the same people in the top 25% today. The numbers that are quoted are two snapshots at two different times. The correct statement is that the people who are in the top 1% today earn a larger share of the income pie than the people who were in the top 1% 25 years ago.

Read it.

For those not au courant, Peter Thiel has established a bunch of fellowships to encourage bright students to start their own companies rather than prolong their adolescence in college.

Needless to say, the educational establishment is rallying ’round to nip this idea in the bud.

Sample sound bites:

Despite having appointments at five elite universities….

… not that I’m one to brag….

Peter Thiel may have made the right calls with Paypal; he certainly made a smart decision by investing in Mark Zuckerberg.  But he is no expert on education.

Uh, dude, education isn’t an end in itself, unless you’ve got a hefty trust fund or win the Tenure Track Lottery; it’s there to get a job.

The best path to success is not to drop out of college; it is to complete it.

Says the disinterested observer. This is like a government employee telling you that what you really need isn’t a job but more benefits.

Most of the deans in the audience were aghast.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Well, you can predict what the deans said as well as I can. There are two concepts here: education as an entity and the education establishment, an industry created to provide that entity. Needless to say, those involved in the industry providing a product are going to do their damnedest to make sure that nobody undercuts demand for their product. Like a phone company that confuses phone call with communication, these guys confuse classroom time (that we get paid for) with education. And, like the phone company, they’re in for a rough ride in the years ahead. My heat breaks for them….

Read it.

There has been a war of language and thought going on in the copyright debate for years.  People think in language just as they speak in language, which is why content industry groups have gone to such lengths to pervert nuanced legal language into stacatto and misleading buzzwords crafted purely for public consumption.  This language war is the reason why when I Google the word “piracy”, the first page gives me the Wikipedia article for the war act of piracy and then in the news items I get a story about lawmakers wondering if search engines contribute to piracy.

Three sentences with so much intellectual dishonesty, subtle word games, and nationalism wrapped up in a tidy knot that it’s sickening.  First, to get it out of the way, note the word games being played through the legally incorrect use of the words “thieves”, “steal”, and “digital theft”.  This is the game they play with words and thought.

Read it.

Secretary of state and cattle-futures queen Hillary Clinton, super-investor Warren Buffett, and best-selling author Stephen King have all recently carped about how rich folks like them should be paying more in taxes. King recently told a Florida rally, “As a rich person, I’m paying 28 percent in taxes. What I want to ask you is, why am I not paying 50?”

Uh, because you don’t want to? Because you’re not sitting down and writing out a check to the U.S. Treasury, which you could so easily do?

All of the rich people who bitch about not being taxed enough are never confronted with the plain fact that, if they want to pay more to the government, there is no anchor on their asses preventing them from doing so.

And that reveals The Rest of the Story.

They don’t want to pay more in taxes; they want OTHER PEOPLE to pay more in taxes — specifically the ‘almost rich’ that are threatening to encroach on the luxury space of the Really Rich.

If I get a million a year and get taxed at 50%, I still have half a million left. Aspen, here I come! But if I get $200k a year and get taxed at 50%, that leaves me with $100k. Not much you can buy in Aspen on $100k a year.

The Other McCain has the goods.

She hates you, does Taffy Brodesser-Akner. She hates you with a depth of contempt you cannot possibly imagine. Your wedding was never reported by the New York Times, which is certainly reason enough for her to hate you. Also, unlike Taffy Brodesser-Akner, you probably didn’t attend a university where tuition is over $40,000 a year.

The Crust is always hiring.

Read it.

The slaughter of at least seven United Nations workers amid a murderous rampage by an Afghan mob enraged at the burning of a Koran in Florida could not have come at a worse time for the United States and Nato.

Yeah — they might be forced to wake up and face reality.

(Knew I couldn’t write that with a straight face….)

Read it.

The problem, of course, is not ‘the drug companies’, but rather the FDA; the drug companies are merely letting the government do the heavy lifting for them.

Since Slate is a Voice of the Crust, however, it can’t pin the blame on Big Government where it belongs — no, it has to be the fault of Evil Corporate Greed.

Read it.

We find out that the four had snuck into Libya from Egypt without visas. These idiots put themselves in the middle of an African civil war without visas.

Well, you know ‘journalists’ — they think they’re bulletproof.

Read it.

Well, that’s a relief.

Read it.

The decision of a news reporter at the Washington Post to go to work for Vice President Obama as communications director is raising some eyebrows. Yahoo! News reports that the reporter “was still covering legislative battles and Biden’s role up until a few weeks ago.” A commenter at Politico suggests, “Her reporting on Biden was basically a ‘job tryout.'”

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Right now, CNN is expanding its coverage of the Libyan situation by interviewing … Bernard Henri-Levi.

Yeah, when there’s a war on, the first guy I want to hear from is a French ‘writer & philosopher’.

The talent pool from which CNN recruits is getting more and more shallow as we watch….

Read it.

It’s been a rough year. First came the firing of a black man, Juan Williams, by extremely white liberals for a frank and innocent remark deemed to be racist according to extremely white liberals’ interpretation of racism.

As last week’s “sting”-slash-luncheon attests, NPR’s motto should be, “Frankly, we don’t care for much of the public.”

Especially that, that “Middle America.”

The Other McCain kicks over a rock.

An unfairness, a bias — call it what you will, but Regular Joe sees stuff like that and gets the sneaking feeling that all the Really Important Big Shots have made a secret deal behind closed doors: “Hey, let’s not report this stuff in a way that might make Regular Joe angry, because everybody knows those ignorant yahoos are just a bunch of racists looking for an excuse to do terrible things to brown people.”

Whatever you think about Regular Joe, however, he’s not so stupid that he doesn’t know the smell of bullshit when he gets downwind of a big fresh steaming pile of it.

Read it.

Why this qualifies as news is difficult to understand. China has no tradition of democracy, multi-party or otherwise, and the fact that the current one-party state masquerades as a Communist dictatorship (which in turn masquerade as representative governments) is just multiple layers of window-dressing. China is China, and this autocratic government is not appreciably different from any other autocratic government they’ve had in the last 6,000 years; it just uses a Clever Plastic Disguise with modern buzzwords.

Read it.

These days saying “organic” isn’t good enough: being an eco-foodie has become a high art. If you want scallops, you don’t just buy scallops. They need to be labelled “hand-dived”: a dirty big trawler didn’t drag them and their delicate eco-system from the ocean floor; instead, a wholesome, Buddha-worshipping man donned a diving suit and soft gloves before he swam to the bottom of the sea, asked the scallop’s permission to remove him from his rock, and then lulled him to sleep with soft music playing from an iPod.

John Hinderaker of Power Line takes a tour of the coming revolution in Wisconsin.

Big Government posted this funny video of Communists in Madison, Wisconsin, who are convinced that the revolution is just around the corner. First Tunis, then Cairo, then Tripoli–and now, Madison! Christian Hartsock traveled to Wisconsin on behalf of Big Government and was invited to a meeting of the local chapter of the International Socialist Organization. Some of the Communists at the meeting turned out to be representatives of public sector unions.

The video actually reminds me of my youth; I attended meetings a lot like this. Very little has changed, although I don’t think the radicals of the 1960s and 1970s were quite this dim.

Wisconsin has always been the Massachusetts of the Midwest, so this isn’t really news, but it is a useful reminder. I guess socialism requires proximity to large bodies of water.

Read it.

Apparently Eric Hobsbawm is at it again.

It is a deeply puzzling thing.  The grip, that is, of Marxism on the minds of so many evidently intelligent people.  I think I understand the appeal of Marxism on the brain of the early twenty something, having suffered through it, not to mention my poor father, myself.  (That is, he suffered through my infatuation with Marxism.)  But it goes way beyond that. You have to think that if our planet were ever to be discovered by some moderately ethical star faring race, and they were able to appreciate along with everything else the history of communism and all its acolytes, the case against just sterilizing the muddy ball on which we live would be made considerably weaker.  What an appalling, nasty, weak-minded and heartless batch of insects it makes us look. And even that’s unfair to insects — ant colonies work well at least.  They don’t set up little ant gulags.  If the aliens arrive, somebody will have to make sure Hobsbawm STFU.  He merits the dubious distinction of having made scholarship a crime against humanity.

Read it.

As scholars ranging from the liberal political scientist Ira Katznelson to the libertarian legal historian David Bernstein have now documented, organized labor’s rise to power typically came at the expense of black workers. Consider collective bargaining, the legal arrangement whereby a union selected by a majority of employees receives the monopoly bargaining power to exclusively represent all employees. This valuable union tool first became part of federal law under section 7A of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. Since blacks were barred from the vast majority of unions at that time, collective bargaining served as a de facto ban on all black workers in unionized shops.

‘Progressives’ do many historically odd things, such as the embrace of the Democratic Party, which was the party of slavery from Andy Jackson’s time up through the Civil War, and the party of Jim Crow from the Civil War up through LBJ.

The Other McCain must spend most of his time laughing.

The Lara Logan story proves to be the gift that keeps on giving, thanks to a predictable pattern: Someone attempts a reaction more complex than “rape is bad,” and immediately gets shouted down by angry feminists.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Read it.

It’s interesting to observe the media engaged in pack-like behavior and worth considering its causes and effects. Sometimes I wonder why the media just stopped covering the mosque in lower downtown Manhattan. Did it go away? No, but the media did.

Media rule of thumb: Christians getting murdered is never news; Muslims feeling insecure is  always news.

Read it.

Who will own the brains of smart cities–citizens or corporations? At stake is an impending massive trove of data, not to mention issues of privacy, services, and inclusion. The battle may be fought in the streets between bands of Jane Jacobs-inspired hacktivists pushing for self-serve governance and a latter-day Robert Moses carving out monopolies for IBM or Cisco instead of the Triborough Bridge Authority. Without a delicate balance between the scale of big companies and the DIY spirit of “gov 2.0” champions, the urban poor could be the biggest losers. Achieving that balance falls to smarter cities’ mayors, who must keep the tech heavyweights in check and “frame an agenda of openness, transparency and inclusivness.”

You have to love an article that fills up your Buzzword Bingo card in the first paragraph. What I find most amusing about such things is the artificial separation it assumes between alleged ‘huge corporations’ like ‘IBM or Cisco’ and us aw-shucks down-home folks like … the Rockefeller Foundation and the ‘Institute for the Future’. How thin and threadbare that curtain is can be seen by looking at the contributors:

The roster of expert contributors comprises a who’s who of ubiquitous computing and gov 2.0 types, including MIT Senseable City Lab director Carlo Ratti, Everyware author Adam Greenfield, the Santa Fe Institute’s Nathan Eagle, Intel Labs Director Genevieve Bell, Microsoft Research’s Jonathan Donner, and San Francisco CIO Chris Vein.

All members in good standing of the Crust, whether from ‘huge corporations’ or their academic/governmental counterparts. The whole emphasis of projects like this is top-down ‘design’ and control, rather than getting these fumblers out of the way of individuals working on market-based solutions to problems of which the top-downers are the primary cause. I am reminded of the scenes from Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the crowd shows up outside of Brian’s house and plead with him to tell them how to think for themselves.

Read it.

And it took them quite a while to notice.

And we’re all still waiting for someone to care.

Read it.

Obama lied? Say in ain’t so.

Read it.

Rudolph P. Byrd is a professor of African-American studies and founding director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a professor of African and African American studies and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University.

And both are, evidently, explicit racists, subscribing to the ‘one drop of blood’ theory.

Read it.

More hand-wringing from the New York Times.

Species die. It has become a catastrophic fact of modern life. On our present course, by E.O. Wilson’s estimate, half of all plant and animal species could be extinct by 2100 — that is, within the lifetime of a child born today. Kenya stands to lose its lions within 20 years. India is finishing off its tigers. Deforestation everywhere means that thousands of species too small or obscure to be kept on life support in a zoo simply vanish each year.

The only species whose extinction I am not prepared to tolerate is my own. In that I suspect I am differ from most environmentalists.

Read it.

This article from Fast Company illustrates the myopia with which much, if not most, of the Crust is afflicted. Guys: There are much more important things going on it Egypt right now than lack of access to the Internet. Back up a bit and gain some perspective.

The worst part about late January is that my RSS reader becomes choked with crap from people who think that the world is waiting with bated breath for what they have to say about the most useless piece of political theatre outside of an airport.

One thing Barry won’t say is, “Take a look at Michelle’s butt and tell me we don’t have an obesity crisis in this country.” That would demonstrate a sense of humor; I’d pay to see that.

Read it.

In a speech this week in Doha, Qatar, Hersh advanced the notion that U.S. military forces are directed and dominated by Christian fundamentalist “crusaders” bent on changing “mosques into cathedrals.”

Oh, would that it were true. But this delusion is like unto the super-sophisticated gear that the CIA uses in the Bourne movies: A left-wing fantasy. We should be so lucky.

Read it.

It’s amazing how often ‘pro-union’ people wind up using the same anti-union tools that they condemn in others.

Read it.

Read it.

Tinfoil hats! Get yer tinfoil hats, right here! Can’t avoid the mind-control lasers without a tinfoil hat!

This is what passes for journalism these days. No wonder newspapers are dying.

Read it.

Mothers should be taught how to cuddle and talk to their babies as part of a major Government drive to stop children descending into a life of crime as they grow up.

I swear, I am not making this up.

Steve Sailer sounds kinda bitter.

Promoting resentment might seem like divisiveness and vitriol, but in Tucson the taxpayers were being forced to pay for the promotion of resentment of whites, so that’s A-Okay. Discord and intolerance is not subsidizing  resentment toward a class, as long as the class is whites.

Read it.

Electric cars are like tulip bulbs in 17th century Holland: Just another Crustian fad.

Read it.

What would have happened if the Congresswoman with whom Jared Loughner apparently had been more or less obsessed since 2007 had been a Republican? Would Republicans have blamed the Tucson murders on Democrats’ “eliminationist rhetoric”? They would have had a relatively good case; to take just one of many examples, they could have pointed to Democratic Congressman Paul Kanjorski, who said that the Republican candidate for Governor of Florida should be put against a wall and shot. I am not aware of a single instance where any Republican politician has said anything so inflammatory. But no: frankly, it would not have occurred to conservatives to try to make a connection between Democrats, no matter how disreputable they may be, and the act of a deranged lunatic in Arizona.

How about the Democrats? Would they have responded to the murder of a Republican Congresswoman by calling on Democrats to tone down their rhetoric and get off the radio or television? Just kidding, obviously.

Read it.

The first and most serious is the sickness living in Loughner’s head.  Evidence in the form of farewell videos, internet postings, and the recollections of people who knew him reveal a profoundly disturbed person who had veered far into a paranoid world.  Loughner’s complaints about government mind control and other rants were not “anti-government” in any political sense, but anti-government or anarchist in the Ted Kazynski-deranged sense.  We do not know Loughner’s motives, but those motives whatever they were were the byproduct of Loughner’s clearly delusional view of the world.

There also was a second sickness on display, and it was the swiftness and the vigor with which the left-wing blogosphere and some more mainstream Democrats immediately sought to blame Sarah Palin and right-wing “vitriol” in general for the shooting.

The usual suspects.

Not a shred of evidence connecting Loughner to Palin, the Tea Parties, or the right wing, yet the left-blogosphere, mainstream media and Democratic politicians have erupted into a frenzy of name-calling directed at Palin and those who oppose Obama’s agenda.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Arnold Kling ponders one of the more odious personality characteristics of ‘progressives’.

With The Attitude, progressives do not take on the actual ideas expressed by conservatives or libertarians. Instead, they sneer and engage in self-congratulation.

Do all progressives display The Attitude? No, but those who do tend to achieve more prominence than those who don’t. As a result, sometimes I fear that progressivism is going to degenerate into nothing but The Attitude. I think that when progressives are on the defensive, they are more likely to fall back on The Attitude. Right now, I think progressives should be thinking about where they stand with respect to large financial institutions, the long-term fiscal outlook, and the political power of public sector unions.