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A great idea, if you’ve got a bulletproof ABM system. Otherwise, it’s just the Mother of All Juicy Targets that you have conveniently placed with in easy spitting range of the Chinese mainland.

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Whenever I speak with professors of philosophy, I am often surprised by how many of them embrace a Platonic rationalism in their thinking, particularly in moral philosophy. What I mean by that is that they assume that all of morality must rest on an intuition of a cosmic order of goodness or badness, right or wrong, so that moral thinking is like mathematical thinking in being concerned with grasping some eternal patterns of universal and eternal truth.

For many philosophers, this Platonic conception of morality is so strong that they cannot even comprehend how morality could be understood as rooted in the empirical reality of human nature, because for them moral philosophy is not an empirical study at all, but rather a purely normative study, and the standards of normativity transcend any empirical reality of human experience. One can see this in their method of thinking, which relies heavily on thought experiments based on purely imaginary scenarios beyond anything we could know by ordinary experience or historical study. John Rawls’ conception of the “original position” is one example of this.

As a political scientist who studies the history of political philosophy and the application of Darwinian science to political philosophy, I tend to think of moral and political order as arising from human history, and I use Darwinian science to illuminate that history as part of human evolutionary history. This sets me against those moral philosophers who assume that moral order–the normative order–must transcend human history as being “merely empirical.” I find this scorn for the empirical reality of human history and the striving for a transcendent world of utopian normativity to be strange.

So work your brain a little. I will do you no harm.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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These new figures come from my new favorite toy, Maersk’s online shipping rates calculator. The Danish superfirm A.P. Møller – Mærsk Gruppen is the largest shipping group in the world, with offices in 135 countries, 120,000 employees, and roughly 600 container ships, capable of carrying more than 2 million 20? containers at any given time. They’ve also got a thoroughly badass IT system, which they’ve now made accessible to the general public.

Okay, it’s not exactly Amazon.com, or even Fedex. To use Maersk’s calculator, you need to register with the site, download a client browser certificate and accept three server certificates from Maersk before you can access their secure site. But once you do, it’s just a few short clicks before you can calculate the cost of shipping a 20? container of “umbrellas, sun umbrellas, walking-sticks, seat-sticks, whips, riding-crops and parts thereof” (yes, that’s one of the available categories, along with “bone and meal”, “ores, slag and ash” and “straw, esparto, other plaiting materials and articles of straw, esparto, other plaiting materials) from Auckland to Dubai: $2451.02.

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One reason why your convenience-store-clerk job requires a college degree.

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British news is always more … interesting than American news.

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Well, duh–that’s the point: To discriminate against dishonest and stupid people.

The practice of checking the credit histories of job applicants is coming under fire, with critics contending the practice discriminates against blacks and Latinos who tend to have lower credit scores.

The reason they tend to have lower credit scores is because they tend to be less, shall we say, conscientious about paying their debts. But since a credit check targets individual behavior rather than a class, there ought not to be any legal problem with it. (Stop laughing.)

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Hey, live in a dictatorship, that’s what happens. This is God giving you a hint that it’s time to leave.

Mr Chavez argues his administration is doing everything it can to reduce violent crime.

And if you believe that one, he’ll tell you another one.

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The California-based motorcycle club, whose fearsome reputation includes the sudden and brutal application of trademark lawyers, believes the dressmakers, and its retailers, have overstepped the mark with a series of clothes and accessories featuring a skull and wings death head design.

Trademark? I guess they don’t make gangs like they used to.

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Apparently we aren’t the only ones who have noticed the decline in quality.

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Going by her picture, I’d say that she gives ‘white trash’ a bad name.

But I suppose Farmville will do that to you.

Megan McArdle lays it all out.

Wisdom. Attend.

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Next to zombies, Nazis are the easiest, most guilt-free targets you can ask for.

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Welcome to Londonistan.

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It’s better when you have some interesting disease. Best, of course, is when your disease is a fashionable one, like HIV-positive.

Bazzel, who became the college’s communications director two years ago, has already seen the benefits of having real human body parts on display: When high school students come in and see his hips’ deformities, his lecture to them on the importance of safe sex takes on a whole new meaning.

Even a bad example is socially useful. Is this a great country, or what?

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Fortunately, it targets users of social networks, i.e. the weak and stupid.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Well, of course, he didn’t ‘attack’ the Congressman for being a Muslim; he urged that the Congressman not be re-elected because he is a Muslim, which is a perfectly reasonable position for anybody who has, you know, actually read the Koran … which I suspect that nobody at the Washington Post has actually done.

But, of course, that’s an invincible blind-spot on the part of those who are psychologically committed to the position that Islam is ‘just a religion’ and hence ought to be excluded from any debate on public policy–despite the fact that Islam is not just a religion but a totalitarian ideology based on religion, and despite the fact that those who write for (and read?) the Washington Post wouldn’t give any religion other than Islam the respect that they would give, say, a convicted murderer.

Especially amusing is the accompanying photograph, showing Muslims engaged in their customary ‘hate speech’ with the caption ‘Muslims begin education campaign to counter U.S. backlash’ (a ‘backlash’ for which there is absolutely no evidence, unlike the daily evidence that all the hate is on the part of Muslims–as this photograph makes plain).

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

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Well, perhaps; so what? Pedestrians are ‘at risk’ whenever a new road is built; we don’t avoid building new roads because of that.

A new ferry route across the Strait of Gibraltar is threatening the largest concentration of whales and dolphins in the Mediterranean, environmentalists have warned.

The correct term for these people is not ‘environmentalist’ but rather ‘anti-humanist’–they give every other species priority over their own. You won’t see any animals, for example, doing stupid stuff like that. Animals are smarter than environmentalists.

“There is an exclusion zone that is ignored already and now they are going to create a new route that slices it in two,” Pilar Marcos, head of Greenpeace Spain’s coastal campaign, told Spanish newspaper El Pais.

What ‘exclusion zone’? The one that Greenpeace would like to pretend exists where they want it to?

Instead it will urge freighters sto reduce their speed during the crossing to 13 knots and post lookouts on deck to “avoid collisions with cetaceans”.

Sure, whales that can’t be bothered to get out of the way are an adequate reason to creep across the ocean. Hey, guys, the point of going from point A to point B is to get there in as little time as possible; this isn’t a senior-citizen Golden Years cruise. Thirteen knots might have been hot stuff when sails were in vogue but I’ve ridden bicycles that go faster.

“In 2002 we saw one close up. A freighter passed by our side and ran into a sperm whale, which was left expelling jets of blood,” said Renaud de Stephanis, president of CIRCE.

It’s not as if these were stealth watercraft. Whales that are too stupid to get out of the way will die and not reproduce; eventually you have a whale population that knows enough to avoid ships. That’s called ‘evolution’, and all the cool species are doing it. (For all their supposed fondness for nature, these ‘environmentalists’ seem remarkably clueless as to how it works.)

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The entire police force of a small northern Mexican town quit after gunmen attacked their recently inaugurated headquarters, according to local reports on Wednesday.

Los Ramones Mayor Santos Salinas said nobody was injured in Monday night’s attack, during which gunmen fired more than 1,000 bullets at the building’s facade, according to Noroeste newspaper’s website. Six grenades, of which three detonated, were also flung at the building, the newspaper reported.

I guess that the Bad Guys are winning.

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Toppan Printing has demonstrated a credit card with a colour screen and keypad, claiming that you don’t need a mobile phone to manage mobile commerce.

The card, which at 3.9mm thick squeezes into the definition of such, has a 2.2-inch colour screen with a 320×240 resolution, but most importantly Toppan Printing reckons it will cost under $25 when production ramps up next year. As highlighted by NFC World: a card like this makes proximity payments viable without relying on a mobile telephone.

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The more emphasis you place on finding work you love, the more unhappy you become when you don’t love every minute of the work you have.

I hate passionate people. Passionate people are surrendering control over what they do to impulse and emotion. Such people are less than human.

I especially hate employers who want their subordinates to be ‘passionate’. That’s like employing convicted felons; sure, it might work out, but it has a lot of potential to end Very Badly.

I prefer being actionate myself. Actionate people get results; passionate people merely suffer entertainingly.

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Speaking Spanish, our captain told us, “The majority of the people from this town are in the United States.”  They sent back remittances, which explained the remodeled homes, the satellite dishes, the schoolchildren buying ice cream.

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Charles Murray follows up on his smackdown of the Crust.

The thesis of the piece is that a New Elite has come into existence that is more segregated from mainstream American society than elites of the past—not “elite” in the sense of wealthy bluebloods from Beacon Hill, but “elite” in the sense of the people who run the most important media outlets, the executives who run the nation’s leading companies and financial institutions, the academicians who teach at the leading universities, and politicians and administrators in senior positions in government.

What Mencius Moldbug calls ‘the Cathedral’ and what I refer to as ‘the Crust’. Welcome to the party, Dr. Murray. Took you long enough.

Some readers have responded by saying that there are lots of different “mainstreams” in American life, and the white working class doesn’t understand the black middle class or Latino farm workers or the New Elite any more than the New Elite understands them. Absolutely true. But only one of those groups shapes legislation, crafts regulations, litigates constitutional jurisprudence, and in other ways has the power to affect profoundly the lives of their fellow citizens. I don’t care if truck drivers can’t empathize with the priorities of Yale economics professors. I do care if Yale economics professors (or producers of the News Hour or the Secretary of Commerce or employers of thousands of workers) haven’t a basis in their own life experiences for understanding the priorities of truck drivers.

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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I can assure you, it’s not my fault.

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British news is always more interesting than American news.

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In yesterday’s New York Times, University of Florida law professor and former Air Force officer Diane Mazur seeks to explode the “myth” that Ivy League universities have banned Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs from their campuses. This myth, she argues, is a convenient “fiction” that “lets the military (and to some extent, the universities) off the hook when it comes to the growing distance between civil and military America.”

However, in her haste to hold the military accountable, Mazur goes too easy on elite schools and their faculties. Her main argument is that if there were a ban against ROTC at Ivy schools, the military would have already punished the offenders under the Solomon Amendment, which allows the government to deny federal funding to universities if they bar either ROTC or military recruiters from campus. This is simply not persuasive. First, the military has made clear that it would prefer, for a variety of reasons, to wait to be invited back to campuses rather than strong-arming ROTC’s presence via Solomon. Second, university presidents certainly understand the current situation as a ban against on-campus ROTC. Harvard University President Drew G. Faust, for instance, has repeatedly stated that ROTC is officially unwelcome on campus so long as “don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) remains policy. Columbia University’s Lee Bollinger has made similar statements.

‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ is, of course, merely a convenient excuse; if the military were to allow homosexuals to serve openly, the academic Crust would come up with some other specious rationalization.

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Zimbabweans are lucky they are no longer suffering under the boot of the racist white former regime Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what kind of hell they would be living in now.

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Which immediately tells you that it’s a bad idea. He’s very dependable.

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An uphill road.

The issue, in the eyes of the campaign: The justices joined a 7-0 opinion ruling that a state law limiting marriage to between a man and a woman violated the constitutional rights of equal protection.

So why not all seven? Apparently its a ‘sustain’ election, not an impeachment.

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I wonder how soon some hacker will change it from ‘Blink Now’ to ‘Drink Now’.

Perhaps we ought to establish some sort of prize….

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Steve Sailer goes to the movies.

Remember when economists, having permanently perfected the economy, graciously allowed their attention to wander to crime fighting, sumo wrestling, baby naming, and other fields not traditionally enlightened by their insights?

The most entertaining is the segment by Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) on those not fully thought-through first names with which some African-Americans have saddled their babies ever since the late 1960s’ Black Pride movement. For example, scholars have counted 228 varietals of “Unique,” including “Uneek” (a fine name for a future rodent exterminator).

Are black children’s lives permanently damaged by all this parental originality? In 2005, Levitt and Dubner rather callously concluded that, in effect, if your parents named you “M’qheal” rather than “Michael,” your bigger problem is likely your last name. You are evidently descended from some mighty poor decision-makers.

Spurlock, however, adds a useful coda from another social scientist who mailed out résumés under white and black first names that were otherwise identical. Job applications bearing Ghetto Fabulous monikers are more likely to go straight into Human Resources Departments’ circular files. So, African-American parents: For the sake of your kids’ careers, please resist your whimsical urges. (Somebody should study the impact of the science-fictiony first names that Mormons dream up, such as D’Loaf, Zanderalex, and ElVoid.)“

Freeberg fisks a liberal cliché.

If the sacrifice means everything and the effect of the gift means nothing, I’ll tell you where this puts us. It means: Helping people is not about helping people. Helping people, instead, is about bragging rights. That, and nothing else. Hey, look at me…I have no money, because I gave it all away…to…well, I dunno, and who cares about that. Maybe that bum will buy himself his first hot meal in over a week, or maybe he’ll blow it on hooch. Who cares? He’s got all my money. I’m broke and virtuous, that’s all that matters.

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Being the Washington Post, of course, you’ll never see a headline ‘Pro-Muslim Feelings Propel Left Wing in Europe’.

Note, too, that this is a ‘religion’ column. Except for the fact that it mentions Muslims and the reactions to Muslims, it’s really all about politics.

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A former American student in China whom Chinese intelligence recruited as a spy was caught after he sought work in the CIA’s espionage branch, highlighting Beijing’s efforts to plant spies inside the agency.

U.S. officials said screening by security and counterintelligence officials led to the discovery that Glenn Duffie Shriver, a Detroit resident, had close ties to Chinese intelligence agents working for the Ministry of State Security, who paid him at least $70,000 to work secretly as an informant in the CIA.

Note that the fellow was not ethnically Chinese.

Steve Sailer points out that most of our Emperor class are buck naked.

What we really need is an in-depth analysis of the systematic causes of anti-empirical bias in elite discourse.

The first is the professional deformation that journalists and fictional storytellers experience in their hunt for non-boring Man Bites Dog stories.You make more money coming up with interesting stories about anomalies than for pointing out the same old same old.

The second is the Platonic Temptation among intellectuals to think only in terms of absolute categories: e.g., Vedantam projects his own bias against thinking probabilistically when he claims, without citing any evidence, that there are “Those who would explicitly link all Muslims with terrorism…”

The third is The Smartest Guy in the Room Syndrome: the presumption that the more moving parts and unlikely assumptions in your theory, the smarter you must be to hold it all together in your head, so, therefore, you win.

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Death will not release you….

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Law firms looking to bolster their profits might want to consider electing a managing partner with powerful looks.

That is the conclusion to be drawn from a somewhat bizarre study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, in which the photos of 73 managing partners from leading US firms were judged on the basis of “dominance, maturity, attractiveness, likability, and trustworthiness.”

Dominance and maturity in particular were strong predictors of law firm profitability, according to this press release about the study, which was conducted by a professor at the University of Toronto and one from Tufts University.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know. Besides, lawyers have money, and funding is where you find it.

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Muslim pupils and parents in France are increasingly making religious demands on the state school system that teachers should rebuff by explaining the country’s secular principles, according to an official report.

The High Council for Integration (HCI) reported growing problems with pupils of immigrant backgrounds who object to courses about the Holocaust, the Crusades or evolution, demand halal meals and “reject French culture and its values.”

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

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Democratic gubernatorial candidate Frank Caprio is livid after the Providence Journal reported Monday morning President Obama would not endorse Caprio during his visit to the state today.

“He can take his endorsement and really shove it”, Caprio told John Depetro and the WPRO morning news. Caprio told WPRO he did not seek the President’s endorsement and calls the snub Washington politics.

“We had one of the worst floods in the history of the United States a few months back and President Obama didn’t even do a fly over of Rhode Island. He ignored us and now he’s coming into Rhode Island and treating us like an ATM machine”, said Caprio.

Erick Erickson is irate.

That’s rather galling to me. They are not supposed to be in this country and are out trying to affect the public policy of this country?!?! They shouldn’t be empowered. They should be deported.

Don’t hold it in, Erick; tell us how you really feel.