Steve Sailer is, yet again, not afraid to look hard issues square in the eye.

The main positive finding of the comprehensive Coleman Report of 1966 (funded by LBJ’s the 1964 Civil Rights Act) was that after all the differences in student backgrounds were accounted for, the one thing that schools could do to help students was give them higher IQ teachers. (Coleman, as he admitted in 1991, downplayed this finding in his report because black teachers averaged lower IQs than white teachers.)

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Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Mercies and the God of All Comfort, who comforts us in all of our afflictions.

Problem solved.

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Gambetta argues that criminals often cover themselves with tattoos precisely because they ruin the criminals’ prospects to go straight; they allow the criminals to signal “that defection would be not so much unprofitable as impossible.”

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The U.S. Transportation Department, billions of dollars behind in paying “cash-for-clunkers” rebates, has hired private contractors and solicited volunteers from the Federal Aviation Administration and its own executive ranks to work overtime to clear the backlog.

And this program was absurdly simple. Imagine what will happen if they take over health care.

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And yet the “Democrats” want more of the same. That’s “democracy” in these United States.

Jerry Pournelle discusses the health care debate.

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The inspector general said one recently retired official, Jennifer S. Duncan, improperly approved numerous bonuses and “acted as if she was given a blank checkbook to write unlimited monetary awards.”

During the two years in question, Duncan received over $60,000 in bonuses, according to the report.

In addition, the report concluded that the Office of Information and Technology managers were fiscally irresponsible when authorizing nearly $140,000 in improper academic degree funding, some of which went to Duncan’s family and friends.

Yeah, putting our health care in the hands of the government is really going to save money.

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Gotta love Australians.

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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Macabre but cool.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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As Mencken put it, Holmes was no “advocate of the rights of man,” but rather “an advocate of the rights of lawmakers.” With rare exceptions, he ruled that legislators could do almost anything they wanted, even if it contrasted the plain text of the Constitution, or the original meaning. Mencken accurately points out that under Holmes’ judicial philosophy, “there would be scarcely any brake at all upon lawmaking, and the Bill of Rights would have no more significance than the Code of Manu.”

Hear, hear.

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Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

The fundamental observation of colonialism is that non-European societies thrive under normal European administration, at least in comparison to their condition under native rule. This observation was obvious during the colonial period. Since, it has only grown more so – at least, to those who can handle the truth.

The various colonial regimes were by no means perfect. But to assert that their average quality of government service was anything but far better than either their predecessors, or their successors, is a political distortion of history which I have no trouble at all in comparing to Holocaust denial. Far more people were murdered in decolonization and postcolonial violence than in the Holocaust. Moreover, only a few fringe nutcases deny the Holocaust – whereas anticolonialism is a core tenet of everyone’s college education. Oops.

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Let us not, therefore, pretend that there is a deeply rooted ethos of ownership in America; the main tradition in our culture was conceived on wealth, not on property, and on “booming” not on “sticking” (to give Wendell Berry his two cents).  Tocqueville rightly found the sight vertiginous, a threat rather than an achievement in the first modern nation.  He correctly predicted it would aid in the creation of an elite plutocracy and the barbarization of the great masses.  Our culture seems even now to have a weak conception of what ownership and property really mean, and indeed this misconception contributed substantially to our present depressed economic condition.  The belief that housing was a financial investment, rather than an investment in a family’s long term stability and rootedness, led to a conception of property as measurable in terms of wealth.  But homes cannot be measured in terms of wealth primarily because, first, they cannot consistently and perpetually accrue in monetary value and, second, they are peculiarly illiquid assets — which suggests they should not be thought of as assets in any case.

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

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Unless there’s a Society for Creative Anachronism blog out there, can you really top an online video in which Glenn Reynolds interviews a sci-fi author and discusses, inter alia, “the suckiness of the Starship Troopers movie”?

Well, it’s a good interview, but McCain obviously doesn’t know that his “SCA buddies” almost certainly got laid a lot more than he did. Just sayin’.

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“You see it was your identity. They said they were you!”
“And you believed them?”
“Yes, they stole your identity.”
“Well, I don’t know. I seem to still have my identity, whereas you seem to have lost several thousands of pounds. In light of that, I’m not sure why you think it was my identity that was stolen instead of your money.”

The problem isn’t “identity theft.” It’s bad security and verification processes by a financial institution.

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Evidently Ecotopia hasn’t completely gone over the edge.

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Living in caves, I always thought, but that’s just a guess.

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New research reveals that musicians can pick out relevant speech sounds from a noisy environment better than non-musicians, suggesting that musical training helps people hear better under “speech-in-noise” conditions like a restaurant or crowded room.

Stupidest. Headline. Ever.

The Hog is no longer doing politics.

It bothers me when the stock market rallies. I don’t want the economy to turn around until our immune system kills the socialist flu. If Obama’s Marxist approach fails to prevent a recovery, everyone on the left will say he saved us, and the swing voters in the middle will believe it, because they are the most gullible, least informed people on earth. Then we’ll get more socialism, and the economy will tank, and we’ll be told the answer is even more socialism, and before you know it, we’re Italy or Greece or England.

Nope, no politics. Just tools and God, not necessarily in that order. Politics has no room in this bus.

Arnold Kling points out that there is really nothing new under the sun.

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This sort of thing is why I checked out of the culture around 1980. Our country is being taken over by aliens, and I don’t mean the guys from Mexico.

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Now, what kind of a moron doesn’t know to put the car in neutral and coast back to the level portion of the highway? This one ought to have been a Darwin Award nominee.

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Here is but the latest act of submission to Islam by your State Department. A State Department cable has just been sent out with this announcement:

The Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) has assembled a range of innovative and traditional tools to support Posts’ outreach activities during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

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Stefan Gatward has been inserting a missing apostrophe into road signs, observes Harry de Quetteville. Is he a terrorist or a freedom fighter? Vigilante of the virgule or Keeper of the comma?

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The AP is technically correct in stating that end-of-life counseling is not the same as a death panel.  The New York Times is also correct to point out that the health care bill contains no provision setting up such a panel.

What both outlets fail to point out is that the panel already exists.

H.R. 1 (more commonly known as the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, even more commonly known as the Stimulus Bill and aptly dubbed the Porkulus Bill) contains a whopping $1.1 billion to fund the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. The Council is the brain child of former Health and Human Services Secretary Nominee Tom Daschle. Before the Porkulus Bill passed, Betsy McCaughey, former Lieutenant governor of New York, wrote in detail about the Council’s purpose.

Daschle’s stated purpose (and therefore President Obama’s purpose) for creating the Council is to empower an unelected bureaucracy to make the hard decisions about health care rationing that elected politicians are politically unable to make. The end result is to slow costly medical advancement and consumption. Daschle argues that Americans ought to be more like Europeans who passively accept “hopeless diagnoses.”

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THE journey seemed simple enough, on the map anyway. Allison Fine left her home to drive to Vermont, just a few hours north on a major highway. She had studied the route and had a GPS gadget to help her. Nevertheless, she soon had absolutely no idea where she was.

The key term here, I think, is “she”.

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Under the Bush Administration, the U.S. already granted terrorists more rights than any other country had granted enemy combatants in the history of the world. Now, many of those same terrorists are being transferred to the U.S. where they will be given even more constitutional rights and full access to U.S. courts. According to one Guantanamo Bay official, “That’ll free up space down here for U.S. health care patients who’ll be denied all access to judicial review.”

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It doesn’t pack people in like sardines, so some hippy organization somewhere is going to condemn it is “not ecologically sustainable.”

But it does look kinda cool.

So what happens if you get stuck in one with someone who decides to rob you?

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Bhut Jolokia, the world’s hottest chilli, could be used in hand grenades by Indian security forces to control rioters and fight insurgents.

Curried rioters. Yeah, that works.

Jerry Pournelle goes back to first principles and takes a look at the whole thing.

Assertion: everyone has a right to health care.

Questions: from whence does the right come, and on whom falls the obligation to provide it or pay for it? How is that obligation acquired or imposed?

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And it was probably George W Bush’s vault. Or Sarah Palin’s, I keep forgetting.

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Along with a new Tsar, Russia has new Boyars. And they’re not stupid; they’re investing abroad.

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Only if they had a Democrat government.

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This may not be all that funny to people who don’t (as I do) haunt the blogs of literary agents, but it’s still pretty funny.

As for the main protagonist – is it likely that children will relate to a fifty-something man with hairy feet who lives in a pit? Might I suggest making Bilbo younger and perhaps a tad less hairy?

Someone who looks like Elijah Wood, for example. (I’m sorry, I just can’t see Elijah Wood as being 55, which is the age Frodo is when he sets off from the Shire. But that’s me.)

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Now there’s a scary thought.

On the other hand, the Scots could use the business.

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I’d be astonished if one for the American market weren’t in development.

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You, too, can be Bush-whacked.

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Yeah, well, but what about the rest of the country?

The Hog comes clean.

When I started getting into tools, I got myself a big pump jar full of Gojo, because ordinary soap is useless on the kind of greasy dirt you pick up from working on machinery. And the Gojo did not work very well. In the old days, it was great. It took just about anything off, and you didn’t even need to add water to it. It was miraculous. So I was disturbed to see that the new stuff didn’t do the job.

Finally, I pinpointed the likely culprits. Hippies. Who else routinely removes great products from the marketplace? I knew the old Gojo was full of scary chemicals. The new stuff says “natural” on the bottle, and “natural,” like “eco-friendly,” is often a synonym for “more expensive yet totally ineffective.” Like the pathetic pyrethrin-based bug sprays South Florida insects cackle at. I don’t know what the hippies didn’t like about the petroleum-based chemicals in Gojo, but they must have found fault with them, because Gojo is worthless now. I will never buy it again. I also tried Zep, and it’s also worthless.

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Keeping Dad company in the hospital for five weeks had left me befuddled. How can a facility featuring state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment use less-sophisticated information technology than my local sushi bar? How can the ICU stress the importance of sterility when its trash is picked up once daily, and only after flowing onto the floor of a patient’s room? Considering the importance of a patient’s frame of mind to recovery, why are the rooms so cheerless and uncomfortable? In whose interest is the bizarre scheduling of hospital shifts, so that a five-week stay brings an endless string of new personnel assigned to a patient’s care? Why, in other words, has this technologically advanced hospital missed out on the revolution in quality control and customer service that has swept all other consumer-facing industries in the past two generations?

All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results.

But fundamentally, the “comprehensive” reform being contemplated merely cements in place the current system—insurance-based, employment-centered, administratively complex. It addresses the underlying causes of our health-care crisis only obliquely, if at all; indeed, by extending the current system to more people, it will likely increase the ultimate cost of true reform.

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We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur.

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