Read it.

This sort of thing is why Law School can be incredibly fun.

Jeremy Wagstaff has some good things to say about the future that we’re seeing all around is.

I look at it like this: Written content is platform agnostic. It doesn’t care what it’s written/displayed on. We’ll read something on a toilet wall if it’s compelling enough (and who doesn’t want to learn about first-hand experience of Shazza’s relaxed favor-granting policies?)

We knew this already. (The fact that content doesn’t care about what it’s on, not how Shazza spends her discretionary time.) We knew that paper is a great technology for printing on, but we knew it wasn’t the only one. We also knew the size of the area upon which the text is printed doesn’t matter too much either. From big notice boards to cereal packets to postage-stamps, we’ll read anything.

So it should come as no surprise that reading on a smartphone is no biggie. The important thing is what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi defined as flow: Do we lose ourselves in the reading? Do we tune out what is around us?

Surprisingly, we do. Usually, if I’m in a queue for anything I get antsy. I start comparing line lengths. I curse the people in front for being so slow, the guy behind me for sneezing all over my neck, the check-in staff for being so inept.

But then I whip out my phone and start reading a book and I’m lost. The shuffling, the sneezing, the incompetence are all forgotten, the noise reduced to a hum as I read away.

Wagstaff’s blog, Loose Wire, is always worth reading.

Freeberg is the gift that keeps on giving.

The President is complaining “they [My critics, special interests, the enemy] talk about me like a dog. That’s not in my prepared remarks, but it’s true.”

I have a lot of thoughts about this. Besides the obvious one: What a whiny-butt.

If a dog makes an accident on the rug, he doesn’t blame it on the previous dog.

Read it.

Know your enemy.

Read it.

Japan has confirmed the nation’s first case of a new gene in bacteria that allows the microorganisms to become drug-resistant superbugs, detected in a man who had medical treatment in India, a Health Ministry official said Tuesday.

The gene, known as NDM-1, was found in a Japanese man in his 50s, Kensuke Nakajima said.

Researchers say the gene _ which appears to be circulating widely in India _ alters bacteria, making them resistant to nearly all known antibiotics.

So stay away from India for medical treatments.

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The entrepreneurs and workers who built the great technology companies that drive our economy are nowhere to be found.  It is the proletariat of the old economy who live in Obama’s imagination.

But what was most Obama-like about the speech was the launching of vicious attacks on his opponents, only to then cry foul over the fact that his opponents push back. Obama, as he did throughout the campaign and has done throughout his presidency, painted a picture of his political opponents as heartless victimizers of others, and of the capitalist system as cruel and inhumane.

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What gives rise to this dilemma, of course, is the fanaticism of radical Muslims, who have, indeed, responded violently to real or perceived slights to their religion. There is no parallel phenomenon with other religions. The Taliban blew up ancient statues of Buddha without worrying for a moment that Buddhists would react violently. Saudi Arabia destroys Bibles as a matter of policy, but it never occurs to the Saudis to fear mobs of rampaging Christians–or even Congressional disfavor in this mostly-Christian nation.

America: Where you can burn an American flag but not a Koran that instructs our enemies to kill us.

Perversely, the crazier radical Muslims behave, the more it benefits them. Today it is burning Korans, but the broader objective is to outlaw, de facto, any criticism of Islam. Radical Muslims want to establish a zone of protection around Islam that insulates it against the critiques to which everything else–not just other religions–is subject. If that isn’t the laying of an important foundation stone of sharia, what is it? And if there is one religion that is uniquely exempted from scrutiny or criticism, is it absurd to say that that religion is “established” in the constitutional sense?

Read it.

The Crust and their sycophants among the Underclass are fond of deriding rural Americans as people whose ‘family trees don’t branch’, and yet have nothing to say (apparently) about the widespread inbreeding among Muslims in places like Pakistan. Wonder why that is?

Massive inbreeding within the Muslim culture during the last 1.400 years may have done catastrophic damage to their gene pool. The consequences of intermarriage between first cousins often have serious impact on the intelligence, sanity, and health of their offspring, and on their surroundings.

A rough estimate shows that close to half of all Muslims in the world are inbred: In Pakistan, 70 percent of all marriages are between first cousins (so-called “consanguinity”) and in Turkey the amount is between 25-30 percent (Jyllands-Posten, 27/2/2009 “More stillbirths among immigrants”). Statistical research on Arabic countries shows that up to 34 percent of all marriages in Algiers are consanguine (blood-related), 46 percent in Bahrain, 33 percent in Egypt, 80 percent in Nubia (southern Egypt), 60 percent in Iraq, 64 percent in Jordan, 64 percent in Kuwait, 42 percent in Lebanon, 48 percent in Libya, 47 percent in Mauritania, 54 percent in Qatar, 67 percent in Saudi Arabia, 63 percent in Sudan, 40 percent in Syria, 39 percent in Tunisia, 54 percent in the United Arabic Emirates and 45 percent in Yemen (Reproductive Health Journal, 2009 “Consanguinity and reproductive health among Arabs”). The number of blood-related marriages is lower among Muslim immigrants living in the West. Among Pakistanis living in Denmark the amount is down to 40 percent and 15 percent among Turkish immigrants (Jyllands-Posten, 27/2 2009 “More stillbirths among immigrants”). More than half of Pakistani immigrants living in Britain are intermarried: “The research, conducted by the BBC and broadcast to a shocked nation on Tuesday, found that at least 55% of the community was married to a first cousin. This is thought to be linked to the probability that a British Pakistani family is at least 13 times more likely than the general population to have children with recessive genetic disorders.” (Times of India, 17/11 2005 “Ban UK Pakistanis from marrying cousins”). The lower percentages might be because it is difficult to get the chosen family member into the country, or because health education is better in the West.

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Jihad and Genocide offers a timely and important contribution to the study of Islamism, one of the most dangerous phenomena of our times. Rubenstein argues that while the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States was based on calculation, rationality, and power, Islamist terrorism and jihad are based on irrationality: The goal is not just to win a war, but to kill all enemies and infidels, especially Jews.

Rubenstein, 85 and a noted Holocaust specialist, draws parallels between current Islamic terrorism and the Nazi programs of extermination. “Having spent most of my career writing and teaching about the Holocaust,” Rubenstein writes, “I now find myself once again confronted by sworn enemies of the United States and Israel who have promised to exterminate my people. With knowledge gained over many decades, I feel I have no option but to take these people at their word.”

Read it.

Our analysis suggests not that gangs cause violence, but that violence causes gangs. In other words, gangs form in response to government’s failure to protect youths against violence. The surprising implication of our insight is that efforts to reduce gang activity could actually increase violent crime.

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And we would have been happy to get it.

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“Gold is money because people make it money. Paper money is money because governments make it money,” says Peter Schiff, President of Euro Pacific Capital Inc. in Westport, Conn., and a notable dollar bear. “But what happens if people lose their faith in governments, and the U.S. government in particular?”

A very good question.

This latest quest to wean the world off dollars actually began in Adam Smith’s homeland, Scotland, when an aspiring actor named Ian Dallas left his home near Glasgow to seek out the bright lights of London in the 1960s.

Mr. Dallas, now 79 years old, fell into the hippie circuit and played a telepath in the Federico Fellini movie “8½” before ultimately converting to Islam in Morocco.

Mr. Dallas took the name Abdalqadir al-Sufi and set up his own sect, the Murabitun—or “the people of the outposts”—before settling into a wind-blasted mansion named Achnagairn near Inverness in the Scottish highlands.

There, Mr. Dallas and his followers surrounded themselves with banks of computers and began work on creating an Islamic currency to replace the dollar and help speed up the collapse of the West’s credit-driven financial system.

See? It’s impossible to be a Muslim and leave other people the hell alone.

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Don’t have to say that twice.

The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve want to fix the United States economy by spending more money. But while that approach might work for Europe, it is risky for the US. The nation would be better off embracing traditional American values like self-reliance and small government.

And this is written by a European.

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Almost everyone is pretty screwed up. That’s not my opinion, that’s official – according to a new paper in the latest British Journal of Psychiatry.

Let’s see — according to a field that makes it’s money from repairing alleged mental difficulties, which repairs cannot be objectively measured, finds that there’s a lot of fixing needed out there. Okay.

Read it.

The University of Haifa team say people use both sides of their brain when they begin reading a language – but when learning Arabic this is wasting effort.

The detail of Arabic characters means students should use only the left side of their brain because that side is better at distinguishing detail.

I can’t imagine that it would be harder than, say, Japanese or Chinese.

When someone learns to read Arabic they have to work out which letters are which, and which ones go with which sounds.

It is the ability to tell letters apart that seems to work differently in Arabic – because telling the characters apart involves looking at very small details such as the placement of dots.

Not sure how this differs from Hebrew.

Characters in English and Hebrew are easier to tell apart because there are clearer differences between them than there are in Arabic.

Oh, okay.

Read it.

This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.

It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.

Read it.

Days after the US officially ended combat operations and touted Iraq’s ability to defend itself, American troops found themselves battling heavily armed militants assaulting an Iraqi military headquarters in the centre of Baghdad.

How’s that ‘Hope and Change’ thing working out for ya?

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The End Times must be near. Better go pack.

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Schoolchildren learn more quickly if the brightest and most confident are prevented from putting up their hands, according to a teaching expert.

Yeah, and the quickest thing they learn is that being bright, confident, and willing to put up your hand is punished rather than rewarded. Way to go, ‘education expert’.

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Scam artists get lists of patients, lists of expensive items they can bill to Medicare, and a bank account. Then they go to town and steal tens of millions of dollars. The whole thing is worth watching and/or reading. Two highlights struck me. First, Steve Kroft interviews the woman in the federal Department of Health and Human Services who is responsible for reducing fraud. Her name is Kim Brandt, Medicare’s director of “program integrity.” You can’t make this stuff up.

Read it.

Alexander the Great was killed by a deadly bacterium found in the River Styx, rather than by a fever brought on by an all-night drinking binge in ancient Babylon, scientists believe.

American researchers have found a striking correlation between the symptoms suffered by Alexander before his death in 323BC, and the effects of the highly toxic bacterium.

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As far as Islamization goes, Europe is ahead of the United States by about a decade. The proportion of Muslims in our country is no more than a fifth of that of the most enriched nations of Western Europe, such as the Netherlands, Britain, and France. And many of the Muslims in this country are “black Muslims” — the Nation of Islam and similar race-based organizations — which constitute a problem in their own right, but not the same as the one posed by the substantial seditious Turkish, Algerian, Moroccan, and Pakistani minorities found in various European countries.

The main difference, however, lies in the manner of Islamization. Europe is heading for sharia from the bottom up — its leaders betrayed their people thirty or forty years ago, allowing in the masses of immigrants who became de facto colonizers via intensive breeding and “family reunification” policies. Demands for Islamic law in Europe are driven by demographic pressure, and some countries are already bowing to what they consider the inevitable. A case in point is the official support in France for métissage, the melding of races, or the fact that Nicolas Sarkozy is willing to get tough on gypsies, but not on Muslims.

In America, on the other hand, Islamization is proceeding from the top down, even though the Muslim population is not large enough to give the Ummah the required clout. CAIR and ISNA routinely claim there are 6-7 million Muslims in the USA, but this is nonsense — it’s propaganda designed to make them outnumber American Jews. The correct figure is more like 1.5 to 2 million.

Wakey, wakey.

Read it.

Extinction of mammoths, camels, giant sloths and other large mammals in the New World may have cooled the global climate about 11,500 years ago, suggest paleobiologists.

The culprit? Less of the greenhouse gas, methane, emitted by the massive herbivores.

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The free channel, which the Associated Press reports will allow teachers to upload class material and expand upon their research, and students to download podcasts, videos and other multimedia lessons, comes after a nearly year-long effort by the state to gather the best of existing teacher training videos and programs for students. Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, told students at a Houston high school yesterday that the program “will really consolidate” existing content.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Read it.

To begin with, combat in Iraq is not over, and we should not uncritically repeat suggestions that it is, even if they come from senior officials. The situation on the ground in Iraq is no different today than it has been for some months. Iraqi security forces are still fighting Sunni and al-Qaida insurgents. Many Iraqis remain very concerned for their country’s future despite a dramatic improvement in security, the economy and living conditions in many areas.

As for U.S. involvement, it also goes too far to say that the U.S. part in the conflict in Iraq is over. President Obama said Monday night that “the American combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country.”

However, 50,000 American troops remain in country. Our own reporting on the ground confirms that some of these troops, especially some 4,500 special operations forces, continue to be directly engaged in military operations. These troops are accompanying Iraqi soldiers into battle with militant groups and may well fire and be fired on.

When you’ve lost Cronkite, you’ve lost America.

Perhaps Obama ought to have had a banner in the background saying ‘MISSION ABANDONED’.

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Orszag is the eighteenth individual (that we know of) to transition between the White House and the mainstream press. He will surely not be the last. That amazingly high number again underscores the ideological similarities between members of the Obama administration and members of the press.

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

An Informative Chart.

Thanks to Catherine for this one.

Read it.

Well, no, not really.

The whole justification for trains, high-speed or otherwise, is efficiency. The argument runs: If you’ve got 100 people going from e.g New York to e.g. Chicago, then it’s more efficient for them all to ride a train than to take, oh, 73 cars to get there. It will cost less (in total), use fewer resources, emit less pollutants, take up less space, etc., etc. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it. Well, it’s not, and here’s why.

New York and Chicago are big places. A train requires you to go from your actual starting point, which may be (and probably is) different from everyone else’s starting point, and get to the virtual New York (i.e. the New York train station), get there at pretty much the same time as everybody else that’s going to Chicago (whether that’s convenient for you or not), then get on board along with everybody else that’s going to Chicago (a non-trivial exercise, as anyone who’s ridden an airplane can tell you), then ride at a speed and in a manner that is decided by somebody else (who may not, and probably does not, have your preferences at the top of his list), then arrive at the virtual Chicago (i.e. the Chicago train station), get out of the train with everybody else (a non-trivial exercise, as anyone who’s ridden an airplane can tell you), and then get (somehow) to your actual destination. Oh, and don’t get me started on what happens if you have any luggage.

This purported ‘efficiency’ of trains is efficiency from the standpoint of the people running the trains, not of the people riding them. The people riding them don’t see efficiency, they see massive inconvenience: Inconvenience in time (can’t start when you want to, don’t have any flexibility about when you start, can’t pick your own route or how long it takes to get there, can’t arrive when you want to, have to expend extra time being herded hither and yon along with a massive crowd of strangers), inconvenience in passage (you go where they want you to go, not where you want to go, and there’s no freedom to make any side trips or rest stops or whatever it might move you to do on the way), and inconvenience in environment (trains suck compared to automobiles when it comes to comfort – always have, always will). And if you don’t happen to want to go between the two points serviced by trains, then you’re out of luck.

The reason why people prefer automobiles to trains is FREEDOM. Freedom to set your own schedule and vary it to suit yourself, freedom to set your own route and vary it to suit yourself, freedom to carry as much stuff with you as your vehicle will carry (plus a trailer if it can pull one) and have it instantly available to you at your destination, and just generally freedom to run your own life instead of giving it over into the hands of service-industry bureaucrats who care about their jobs first, their own convenience second, and you dead last.

The people who push trains are at heart people who have no compunction about running your life for you because they are convinced that they are smarter than you (just talk to one sometime) and know better than you (ditto) and are therefore justified in making you do it their way rather than your way, just because they backpacked through Europe one summer during college and had a great time on the trains there. ‘Fascists’ is not too strong a term, although most of them will claim to be ‘progressives’.

Shun them. Deny them power, especially the power to steal your money through taxation and spend it foolishly on this or any other foolish scheme.

ADDENDUM: This post from Carolyn illustrates the situation very nicely:

When I was stuck on the train between New York City and my college for two hours with no dinner last year, that loaf kept me from going crazy. The same thing happened when my friends and I were stuck waiting for customs for hours on our train to Montreal. They had teased me about the bag of mini bagels I’d been shlepping around, but they sure were thankful for it later.

Who, having traveled on a train or an airplance, can’t tell a similar story? If you ask anybody in that situation, ‘Would you rather be here on this train/plane, or in a car?’, is there any doubt what the answer would be?

Read it.

I later realized that I was looking at the project as I would a school assignment. I took it for granted that the instructions I’d been given were set in stone and must be followed precisely. But in the office, requirements are always changing, and the person who designs form questions is not necessarily a design expert. When I graduate in a year and transition from college to industry, I’m going to have to make a mental shift from accepting projects as they’re assigned to examining instructions more critically. After all, why would I be given a project if whoever assigned it didn’t think I had some expertise on the subject?

Read it.

Or perhaps just killing everyone who tries to find you. Word gets around.

But that’s just me.

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To answer the question specifically: technologies that show the potential to be most widely adopted will have a combination of network effects, a sticky user experience, and a low-resistance path-to-market that focuses on users and circumvents institutional decision making.

Works fine, lasts a long time, fails safe, and drains to the bilge.

Education is what happens while we’re going to school, even though there is no necessary connection between the two.

Read it.

Perhaps we just need a new metaphor to point the way to salvation.

David Friedman ponders a zombie.

Macro is not my field. One of the reasons it is not my field is that, so far as I can tell, it lacks a theoretical structure as solid or as well supported as price theory—popularly but misleadingly called “Micro.” One result is that a course on the subject is a tour of either a cemetery or a construction site.

The cemetery is the orthodox Keynesian account according to which a depression is the result of insufficient demand due to the exhaustion of investment opportunities, monetary policy is useless because the economy is in a liquidity trap, and the proper solution is for the government to run a large deficit, converting the excess savings into government expenditure. That was the accepted wisdom fifty years ago. As best I could judge, as observer not participant, it fell out of favor among academic economists in the ensuing decades, due to both theoretical and empirical problems.

The construction site is the attempt to replace the old orthodoxy. Some of it gets labeled “monetarism,” some “neo-keynesianism,” some other things. None has been sufficiently successful to have achieved the status of a new orthodoxy.

Read it.

Loners often hear from well-meaning peers that they need to be more social, but the implication that they’re merely black-and-white opposites of their bubbly peers misses the point. Introverts aren’t just less sociable than extroverts; they also engage with the world in fundamentally different ways. While outgoing people savor the nuances of social interaction, loners tend to focus more on their own ideas—and on stimuli that don’t register in the minds of others. Social engagement drains them, while quiet time gives them an energy boost.

Yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about….

Read it.

Hours after winning thousands of dollars in a jackpot at a California gambling hall, a 55-year-old man was followed from the casino, robbed, run over and killed by another man who fled the scene, the Los Angeles Times reported.

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

Read it.

Funny how one never hears of a Christian preacher calling for a Muslim to be beheaded for insulting Christianity. Wonder why that is?

Lest we forget.

Read it.

There are many passages that now appear quaint, and a few that will offend the kind of person who believes that it was wicked of our ancestors not to subscribe to late-twentieth-century intellectual fads. Towards the subject peoples of the British Empire, Baden-Powell nursed the same mixture of disgust, paternalism, and respect that one finds in Kipling — that was, in fact, normal among thoughtful, humane Englishmen at the height of the Empire (Baden-Powell was born in 1857).

This edition includes, as an appendix, Baden-Powell’s warning against self-abuse, headed “Continence.” The author had wanted this section in the 1908 edition, and in fact fought for its inclusion. Both publisher and printer believed the material to be obscene, and the printer finally resolved the matter in their favor by simply stopping his presses until Baden-Powell gave way. Reading the passage now, it seems unexceptionable. Baden-Powell probably overstates the negative physical and mental consequences of excessive masturbation, but his advice here, as almost everywhere else in his book, is on the whole practical and sound: “[I]t is easier to stop it at first than when it becomes a habit … Avoid listening to stories or reading or thinking about dirty subjects … Restrain yourself when you are young and you will be able to restrain yourself when you grow up …” etc., etc. Of course, anyone suggesting such self-control to young boys nowadays would very likely end up in jail for some offense against political correctness — “onanophobia,” perhaps. That, however, is our fault, not Baden-Powell’s.

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Read it.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Tom Smith is disappointed.

Maybe it’s just too hard for a British intellectual to understand how Walmart shoppers think.

A public project is greeted with skepticism.

At the San Francisco Chronicle‘s “Open Forum,” retired Stanford professor Alain Enthoven and banker William Grindley count the ways that the California High Speed Rail project (funded in part by $2.25 billion of your money, non-Californians) deals in plain fiction.

The kind of comparison Enthoven and Grindley do here is part of the basic diligence a 14-year-old organization would have done somewhere in the course of spending its first $250 million. It’s easy to run comps in Europe and Asia, where high-speed rail has been commonplace for decades. Yet the California High-Speed Rail Authority has never bothered to find out. This is as good a time as any to bring up an old journalismism: When people are having trouble getting you information, there’s something wrong with the information.

Steve Sailer kicks over a rock, and finds Slate magazine.

I’m always getting accused of being obsessed with IQ, but it seems an awful lot of people are obsessed with showing off how smart they are. In general, that would be a good thing, except that our culture has got itself into a culdesac whereby a proof of being “thoughtful” is by how little thought you give to crucial topics such as immigration, and by how mindlessly you sneer at those who actually have thought hard on the subject.

Read it.

Thilo Sarrazin was fired today by the Bundesbank for reporting the truth about Muslim immigrants in Germany. His recently-published book has brought down the wrath of the German establishment upon his head, but all the shunning and condemnation haven’t silenced him.

If you break from the Crust, they call you a flake.

In all countries concerned — whether Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark or Norway — one makes similar observations about the group of Muslim migrants, namely:

• Below-average labor market integration;
• Above-average dependence on welfare benefits;
• Below-average participation in education;
• Above-average fertility;
• Spatial segregation with a tendency towards the emergence of parallel societies;
• Above-average religiosity with growing penchant for traditional and fundamentalist movements in Islam;
• An above-average criminality, from “ordinary” violent street crimes to participating in terrorist activities.

In Germany, an army of integration committees, Islam researchers, sociologists, political scientists, organizational representatives and a group of naive politicians work intensively, hand in hand, on trivialization, self-deception and denial of the problem.

Read it.

Medal of Honor, of course. (Can we talk ‘oxymoron’ now?)

The latest installment in the Medal of Honor video game series, scheduled to be released by Electronic Arts next month, is set in Afghanistan and allows players to fight for the Taliban in the online version. That feature has attracted criticism from politicians such as British Defense Minister Liam Fox, who called the game “thoroughly un-British,” and at least one mother of an American soldier killed in Afghanistan, who said it is “disrespectful” to base a game on an ongoing war.

Criticism? Whatever for? It’s just a game! And they can make money with it! What could be more American than that?

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Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca on Wednesday took aim at the medical marijuana industry, citing last week’s triple murder in West Hollywood as an example of how enterprising criminals have infiltrated some of the dispensaries.

Baca said the dispensaries have strayed from their original mission — to aid the seriously ill — and are now the target of criminals who see an easy way to make money and get drugs.

“The medicinal marijuana program that voters authorized years ago has been hijacked by underground drug-dealing criminals who are resorting to violence in order to control their piece of the action,” Baca said.

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