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

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Millions of men think women wear too much make-up and prefer girls who adopt a more natural look, researchers found.

Well, duh. Women don’t dress for men, they dress for other women.

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Apparently not.

Why is this bridge being fabricated in China? The troubling answer, according to a lengthy article in the SF Public Press, is that no American company can do the job. America, a country that once pulled off the most audacious of engineering projects with panache, one that put a man on the moon in the 1960s, now can’t even build a bridge to replace one it constructed with ease in the 1930s.

What’s more disturbing, is that China can’t really build it either – but we are teaching them, and paying for them to learn how.

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… this tragic episode confirms that our intelligence community has no reliable way of determining which one-time jihadists are likely to engage in future terrorism. Yet, the U.S. has released terrorist detainees on the theory that “careful screening” had determined they are not a risk to engage in terrorism after their release.

You can lead a government employee to evidence, but you can’t make him think.

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We now know that when Yousef was captured, in 1995, al Qaeda leaders were working feverishly to attack American targets. Yousef’s uncle is none other than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11 and one of Yousef’s co-conspirators in the failed Bojinka plot to blow up airliners across the Pacific Ocean.

Yet as far as we know, Yousef told U.S. interrogators little or nothing about KSM’s plots and strategy once he was in U.S. custody. This isn’t surprising, since once he was in the criminal justice system Yousef was granted a lawyer and all the legal protections against cooperating with U.S. interrogators. To this day, we don’t recall any official claim that Yousef has provided useful intelligence of the kind that KSM, Abu Zubaydah and other al Qaeda leaders later did when they were interrogated by the CIA.

All of this is directly relevant to the Administration’s rash decision to indict Abdulmutallab on criminal charges immediately after his arrest in Detroit on Christmas weekend. The Nigerian jihadist could have been labeled an enemy combatant, detained indefinitely, and interrogated with a goal of discovering who he had met in Yemen, whether other plots are underway, and much else that might be relevant to preventing the next terror attempt. This is a far higher priority than convicting Abdulmutallab and sending him to jail.

John Fund looks at Rasmussen.

A Useful Table.

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Rule 1: Be a “Creature Unlike Any Other”

Given that Playboy has spent five decades proving the near-universal male predilection for a slender, pretty, large-breasted, blue-eyed blonde, this rule is obviously insane. In fact, most men have distinct preferences that anyone who knows them well can easily identify…Women are naturally attracted to outliers for the sheer sake of their novelty. Men aren’t.

Of the millions of old copies of The Rules that were snatched up all those years ago, I speculate further that more than half of them reek of cat urine.

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Odd advice to get from a magazine called The Chronicle of Higher Education.

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A great advance that eliminates the suspense and lets you watch in helpless horror as your toast burns.

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You, too, can help destroy the language.

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The fact that Michael Moore is still alive ought to tell you something.

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Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by the Younger Dryas mini ice age, or “Big Freeze”. It was triggered by the slowdown of the Gulf Stream, led to the decline of the Clovis culture in North America, and lasted around 1300 years.

Hans Renssen, a climate researcher at Vrije University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, says recent findings from Greenland ice cores indicate the Younger Dryas event may have happened in one to three years. Patterson’s results confirm this was a very sudden change, he says.

Arnold Kling is always worth reading.

Think of government as a charity. From a libertarian perspective, it is a charity run by the Mafia, which will break your knuckles if you don’t make your donations. It is also a badly mismanaged charity. It funnels lots of money into questionable causes, and even when the causes are good the programs that it funds tend to be very wasteful.

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The suit claims that AT&T should turn over unused balances on the calling cards of consumers whose last known address was in Washington, D.C. and have not used the calling card for three years.

“AT&T’s prepaid calling cards must be treated as unclaimed property under district law,” the attorney general’s office said in a statement.

Another shakedown by bureaucrats who are feeling the pinch and have decided to take their share out of someone else’s pocket.

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Rather than the “good old boys,” Obama’s core group hails from what may be best described as the “creative class” – the cognitive elite, or, to borrow from Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Postindustrial Society, the “the hierophants of the new society.” They come not from traditional productive industry, but the self-conscious “knowledge” sectors – such as financial services, the software industry, and academia.

This article points out an important truth: Obama is neither a Democrat nor a Liberal but a Crustian, a member of, and representative of, an ever-more-firmly entrenched Establishment that includes overlapping circles of politicians, academics, bureaucrats, and journalists – what the Soviets used to call the ‘apparatchiks’, Mencius Moldbug’s ‘the Cathedral‘.

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Why are so many leading modern scientists intellectually dull and lacking in scientific ambition? The short answer is: because the science selection process ruthlessly weeds-out interesting and imaginative people.

Bears Fighting

Lions Hunting

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How do we know that institutions are so central to the wealth and poverty of nations? Start in Nogales, a city cut in half by the Mexican-American border fence. There is no difference in geography between the two halves of Nogales. The weather is the same. The winds are the same, as are the soils. The types of diseases prevalent in the area given its geography and climate are the same, as is the ethnic, cultural, and linguistic background of the residents. By logic, both sides of the city should be identical economically.

And yet they are far from the same.

On one side of the border fence, in Santa Cruz County, Arizona, the median household income is $30,000. A few feet away, it’s $10,000. On one side, most of the teenagers are in public high school, and the majority of the adults are high school graduates. On the other side, few of the residents have gone to high school, let alone college. Those in Arizona enjoy relatively good health and Medicare for those over sixty-five, not to mention an efficient road network, electricity, telephone service, and a dependable sewage and public-health system. None of those things are a given across the border. There, the roads are bad, the infant-mortality rate high, electricity and phone service expensive and spotty.

The key difference is that those on the north side of the border enjoy law and order and dependable government services — they can go about their daily activities and jobs without fear for their life or safety or property rights. On the other side, the inhabitants have institutions that perpetuate crime, graft, and insecurity.

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Schools risk being branded inadequate by government inspectors for failing to promote race relations, gender equality and human rights.

This is why it’s always a bad idea to allow government intrusion into education, because then everything in school becomes a political decision subject to political fads.

Even those with good educational records could be placed in “special measures” by Ofsted under new rules that put equality on a par with exam results and child safety. Official guidance tells inspectors to be aware of “gender imbalances” in upper-ability sets and ensure that after-school sport is not dominated by pupils from one ethnic group.

Britain: A nation where a ‘good educational record’ isn’t enough to qualify as a ‘good’ school.

Actually, if it means that said schools will be less attractive to those whose chief interest is ‘race relations, gender equality and human rights’, and they wind up with those who are merely interested in an education, it could prove a blessing in disguise.

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Duke University, whose faculty and president rushed to judgment against lacrosse players falsely accused of rape, has adopted a revised sexual misconduct policy.  Stuart Taylor argues that the new policy “makes a mockery of due process and may well foster more false rape charges by rigging the disciplinary rules against the accused.

The revised policy requires the involvement of the University’s Women’s Center (about which more below) in the dispciplinary process for all known allegations of sexuall misconduct, and empowers the Office of Student Conduct to investigate even if the accuser does not want to proceed.

The only way for male students to avoid a possibly life-destroying prosecution is to go to a school that doesn’t accept female students. Perhaps in Riyadh.

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Note how Barbara Strauch establishes her progressive bona fides in the first paragraph:

I LOVE reading history, and the shelves in my living room are lined with fat, fact-filled books. There’s “The Hemingses of Monticello,” about the family of Thomas Jefferson’s slave mistress; there’s “House of Cards,” about the fall of Bear Stearns; there’s “Titan,” about John D. Rockefeller Sr.

How she resisted including Dreams From My Father in her list of ‘fat, fact-filled books’ is a puzzle. I love reading history, and the shelves of my living room are filled with books like The Art of Medieval Hunting by John Cummins, The History of Money by Jack Williamson, and John Adams by David McCullough — not the sort of shelf-liners that will get you a gig writing for the New York Times.

The problem is, as much as I’ve enjoyed these books, I don’t really remember reading any of them. Certainly I know the main points. But didn’t I, after underlining all those interesting parts, retain anything else? It’s maddening and, sorry to say, not all that unusual for a brain at middle age: I don’t just forget whole books, but movies I just saw, breakfasts I just ate, and the names, oh, the names are awful. Who are you?

A common problem among the Crust, for whom it is more vtal to display the right opinion-accessories than actually to have a thought. It’s a wonder they find their way to the office every day. Of course, they have people to do that for them.

Barbara Strauch is The Times’s health editor.

Of course. The health of The Times could certainly use some editing.

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The motto of the Democrat party. RINOs too, of course. (Yeah, I’m looking at YOU, Hutchison.)

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Just in case you had some cash laying around idle after Christmas.

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The man, a 27-year-old Somalian who was armed with an axe, was caught trying to break into the home of Kurt Westergaard at 10pm local time, police said.

That’s one find Religion o’ Peace™ you’ve got there, Abdul.

Read it.

‘You might have less-than-perfect credit and we’re OK with that,” read an October credit-card solicitation from South Dakota-based First Premier Bank. The interest rate, however, will strike some as usurious: 79.9%. That’s a more than eightfold increase from the 9.9% the bank previously collected for a similar card.

Wait, wasn’t Congress supposed to have passed legislation against predatory lending? As a matter of fact, yes. The whopping rate increase is First Premier’s way of complying with the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009. Among other provisions, that law prohibits fees of more than 25% above a card’s credit limit. First Premier has been offering an account with a $250 limit and annual fees of $256. By law the latter figure must come down to $75. To compensate for the lost $181 in fees, the bank is raising the rate by 70% of $250, or $175, a year.

Markets appear even when you don’t want them to, and even when Congress doesn’t want them to. Clamp down on one part and a compensating bulge appears somewhere else. For some reason legislators never seem able to learn this simple lesson in elementary economics.

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Columbia University is one of New York’s largest landowners, and perhaps the one with the most to gain from the city’s power to seize private property. But in a surprise ruling in early December, a state court struck down the city’s attempt to take private land in West Harlem and give it to the university. Now that case is becoming an important beachhead in the fight over eminent domain.

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The Israeli system is obviously safer than ours, but we can’t adopt it. Why? Because it consists essentially of profiling. Sure, it’s mostly behavior profiling, but here in the U.S. it is unacceptable to say publicly that a young Muslim man traveling light, for no apparent purpose, who answers questions vaguely and nervously, is suspicious. We couldn’t even send the traveling imams on their way without cash reparations. Another way of putting the difference between the Israelis and us is that they are serious and we aren’t.

Mark Steyn, sitting in for Rush Limbaugh on Tuesday, 29 December:

‘This movie they made about Gitmo showed some like emaciated figure hanging from the walls, right? The average weight gain for a Guantanamo detainee is eighteen pounds. And so if you tried to shackle them to the wall, the wall’s gonna collapse.’

‘This is where Amnesty International is going after all the wrong issues. … This is American innovation. Normally, if you go to a death camp, if you like went to a death camp run by the Soviets, the Chinese, the Cambodians, Ida Amin, you name it, the point of a death camp is that they starve you to death. The American death camp – this is the American cunning for you – you come in as a lean, wiry, fit Afghan jihadist, and you waddle out as a corpulent New Jersey lardbutt.’

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The policy aim, Democrats say, was to maintain public services and aid. The political aim, although Democrats don’t say so, was to maintain public-sector jobs—and the flow of union dues to the public employees unions that represent almost 40 percent of public-sector workers.

Those unions in turn have contributed generously to Democrats. Services Employee International Union head Andy Stern, the most frequent nongovernment visitor to the Obama White House, has boasted that his union steered $60 million to Democrats in the 2008 cycle. The total union contribution to Democrats has been estimated at $400 million.

Democrats: Buying votes with your money since time out of mind.

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This year B&Q started to stock pig arcs to cater for those wanted to rear pigs in their back gardens.

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This refers to a Roman military policy toward cities the Romans placed under siege. The local authority would be told that, as a matter of policy, once the first battering ram touched the city wall, there would be no surrender accepted, no quarter and no mercy.

Say what you will about the Romans, they knew how to do foreign policy so that it stuck.

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This Cute Break is for my wife. Happy New Year, sweetie.

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Not the sort of headline one is accustomed to seeing in the Wall Street Journal, but these are unusual times.

Neil Gaiman describes the sort of thing that one need not go through if one avoids flying.

Just sayin’….

This would be awful on our own. Together it was just some kind of interesting adventure.

Which is why I try never to go anywhere on my own.

I wondered for whose benefit the pat-down and baggage rummage was, and decided it was to make everyone feel safer without actually being inconvenienced in the way you’d have to be if you wanted to make sure no-one actually brought something dangerous onto the plane.

Oh, really?

Now that’s comedy.

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A road cleaner was given a £70 parking ticket for stopping his sweeping machine for a minute to pick up a broken bottle.

As Britain is, so we shall be; the TSA is merely the gust front.

You think I’m kidding? Crash victim given five tickets while in hospital

Isaac Asimov used to dream of us having robots, never realizing that they’re already here in the form of government employees.

Steve Sailer explains golf.

The current theory for why golf courses are so attractive to millions (mostly men), perhaps first put forward in John Strawn’s book Driving the Green: The Making of a Golf Course, is that they look like happy hunting grounds—a Disney-version of the primordial East African grasslands. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, author of the landmark 1975 book Sociobiology, once told me, “I believe that the reason that people find well-landscaped golf courses ‘beautiful’ is that they look like savannas, down to the  scattered trees, copses, and lakes, and most especially if they have vistas of the sea.”

Any reflection on why Obama spends so much time on the links (IYKWIMAITYD, as Joe Bob would say) would be castigated as racist, so I’ll refrain; I’d hate to get the reputation as a harborer of thoughts controversial.

Generally, men (the hunters) tend to prefer sweeping vistas, while women (the gatherers) prefer enclosed verdant refuges. Perhaps it’s no accident that a longtime favorite book among little girls is called “The Secret Garden.” Similarly, women make up a sizable majority of gardeners while men often obsess over lawn care.

Overgeneralizations that promote sexual stereotypes, on the other hand, are just fun.

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Special New Year’s advice.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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A 13th-century letter from Genghis Khan’s grandson demanding homage from the pope is among a collection of documents from the Vatican’s Secret Archives that has been published for the first time.

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California was once the world’s leading economy. People came here even during the depression and in the recession after World War II. In bad times, California’s economy provided a safe haven, hope, more opportunity than anywhere else. In good times, California was spectacular. Its economy was vibrant and growing. Opportunity was abundant. Housing was affordable. The state’s schools, K through Ph.D., were the envy of the world. A family could thrive for generations.

Today, California’s economy is not vibrant and growing. Housing is not affordable. There is little opportunity. Inequality is increasing. The state’s schools, including the once-mighty University of California, are declining. The agricultural sector is threatened by water shortages and regulation. Its aging, cracking, highways are unable to handle today’s demands. California’s power system is archaic and expensive. The entire state infrastructure is out of date, in decline, and unable to meet the demands of a 21st century economy.

Hint: Government had something to do with it.

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If, like me, you’re long since tired of reading stories about Tiger Woods’ sordid personal life, please hang with me for one more.

An interesting aspect to an otherwise boring affair.

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In my Silicon Valley hometown, there seemed to be only one speed for raising children: fast forward to college. Here kids are prepped for “success” (i.e. the right colleges) as soon as they can toddle to a sport or art class, if not before with nannies to assure their bilingualism. In my public high school, I saw only honors and AP (advanced placement) kids outside of classes like art and typing; we practiced our college entrance exams in English class; and 27 of us went to Stanford, and nearly an equal number went to Ivy Leagues (I don’t think I knew anyone who didn’t go to college at all).

Much of Slow Parenting is simply re-learning how things used to be before we starting treating parenting as product development, or as something to be learned via books, videos, magazines or classes.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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When considering revolutionary new products, we can not simply compare them with existing products, but must instead compare them with the products that don’t yet exist, but should. For example, the PC was more than just an expensive, hard-to-use typewriter — it was a whole new thing that just happened to have some typewriter features. Obviously this comparison is much more difficult than the “count the checkboxes” approach that we like to use when evaluating the “better mousetrap”, but it’s critical if we’re going to understand or create anything truly new.

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Too late. The EPA has spoken, and all controversy is settled.

Read it. Then read it again, paragraph by paragraph. Pay attention to what is not being said as well as what is, and how it is.

Note certain unspoken assumptions:

• Unless the federal government is involved, especially in funding, forget optimism.
• These dastardly local communities are wasting their time focusing on “core courses”, i.e. essential literacy and numeracy training at which American schools, especially American government schools, notoriously suck.
• High-school computer education needs to focus on abstract computer science rather than practical stuff that might, you know, get you a job.

The basic attitude toward education is equally clear: forget all this practical stuff, let’s get our hands into the theory and be abstract. The writer, and the people he cites, quite obviously lose sight of the distinction between high school and college. They forget that half of the people in the country are below average in intelligence, and hence aren’t appropriate targets for this concentration on abstract science; they need something that they can do for pay that will keep themselves and their families fed. Every kid in America isn’t Chelsea Clinton, child of two Crustian over-achievers and destined from the womb for AP courses and an investment banking – or computer science – career.

This is the flaw in the ‘progressive’ world-view, as ironically delineated by that classic über-Liberal Garrison Keillor: it assumes that all women are strong, that all men are good-looking, and especially that all children are above average. In other words, it is completely detached from reality. And, as with most things completely detached from reality, programs built upon these fanciful theories inevitably come crashing down–after you and I have paid for them with our tax money, of course.