David Friedman is always worth reading.

Or consider the widely held view that global warming on the scale suggested by the IPCC reports—a few degrees C over about a century—would obviously be a catastrophe. It cannot be based on the idea that humans cannot live with somewhat higher temperatures, since humans already exist, indeed prosper, across a much wider temperature range. It cannot be based on the idea that increased temperature is inherently bad, since there are obviously lots of places that would be better suited to human habitation if a little warmer, including most of Canada, Alaska and Siberia. The world was not, after all, designed for our benefit, so there is no reason to believe that current climate is optimal for us. There has been a good deal of talk about higher sea levels, but most of it ignores the fact that the increase suggested by the various IPCC models is only a foot or so—much less than the usual difference between high tide and low.

Rapid climate change is presumptively undesirable, since our present way of doing things—what crops we grow where, where our housing is located and how well it is insulated—is optimized to present conditions. But over a hundred years, farmers will change crops several times over, a large fraction of the housing stock will be replaced or modified, we will change what we are doing for lots of reasons unrelated to climate change. Hence it is hard to argue any strong presumption that climate change at the rates suggested by current models is bad.

Yet discussions of the subject almost always take it for granted that it is not merely bad but catastrophically bad, worth bearing very large present costs to prevent. A clear case of status quo bias.

Why these people are considered ‘progressives’ rather than obviously rabid reactionaries has always puzzled me. Environmentalists the same way; there is no substantive difference between ‘conservationist’ and ‘conservative’.

Watch it.

Frank Zappa in a suit. Just seems wrong, somehow.

Read it.

Of course, anecdotes do not prove that a healthy socialization is not possible in a public school, and there are many success stories that establish the possibility. But the horror stories do seem to blunt the blanket criticisms of homeschooling. The real question that should be asked is not whether a child will be socialized but how the child will be socialized.

I have seen firsthand the sort of ‘socialization’ that goes on in American grade and high schools. Short of sending them to live with the Taliban, I can’t think of anything worse we could do to them. I am prepared to argue that our children are better off without it.

But maybe that’s just me.

It is, to be sure, efficient to divide children into age cohorts and to educate them as a group. Doing otherwise is virtually unimaginable and would require a return to something like the one room school house where children of various ages were educated together. When education is conducted on a large scale such an arrangement would be simply untenable. Yet, it seems almost unavoidable that educating children according to age cohort invariably socializes them to think of themselves as part of a certain group designated by age. That is, at best, a limited preparation for an adult world where one ought to be capable of dealing with people of a variety of ages.

Indeed. Welcome to the Industrial Age Factory School. You, child, are part of batch 1997-C. Wear it with pride; it will help if we need to do a recall later.

Watch it.

Scott Joplin played by the St Luke’s Bottle Band. This has to be seen to be believed.

God bless America.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Watch it.

Who knew Steve Martin could sing?

Read it.

Yeah, more of that religion stuff. Feel free to skip it if you’re in a hurry.

This isn’t actually about the post that I reference — although it’s a fine piece, and you ought to read it — but rather about the thought that it triggered in my own mind: The overwhelming majority of people have no clue what prayer is for or about for a Christian. (This also has resonance with a comment left on the blog a bit ago by Eric S. Raymond; Eric, for all his intelligence, can be a hell of a lazy and superficial thinker when he wants to be.)

Even in historically Christian countries, people look at the the formal nature of prayer and dismiss it as some primitive relic out of man’s barbarian past. ‘Yeah, we’re asking God for something. Like that’s going to do any good.’ And then they move on, without giving it any thought. A few might get a dim inkling of what’s going on: ‘Wait a minute! God knows what I want. Why do I have to go through the effort of actually asking?’ That’s a good question, but they rarely bother trying to find an answer — again, dismissing it as a primitive survival. But, if pursued, it’s really the start of a journey that will lead you to buried treasure.

The Christian God is omniscient; He knows everything, including (a) what you want, (b) what you need, and (c) what you lack (and those are three different things; don’t get them mixed up or you’ll regret it). Why are all these people wandering around telling us to ask Him for stuff, when He already knows? Even He pesters us to ask him for stuff, when the available evidence indicates that He’s probably going to ignore us; how does that help?

Well, bunkie, I’m here to tell you how it helps. Prayer isn’t aimed at God. It’s aimed at you.

That may sound strange, but bear with me. How many of you have had the experience of thinking you know something, and then being asked to explain it to somebody else, and quickly realizing that, hey, maybe you didn’t know it as well as you thought you did? I have, more times than I can count. (In fact, many people will tell you that the best way to learn something is to try to teach it to somebody else.) Again: How many of you have had the experience of describing a problem you’ve got to somebody else, and in the course of doing so, received a flash of insight that solves (or helps solve) the problem? Again, I have, more times than I can count. We even have a name for the Other Guy in that process: a ‘sounding board’.

And that’s the function of prayer. It articulates something that is just wandering around in your head like Caspar the Friendly Ghost, and makes it explicit. And once something is explicit, it’s a concrete thing that can be worked on, and with.

Prayer deals with two things: Where we are and where we want to be. Face it, nobody prays when sitting on a beach chair in St Tropez sipping on a margarita and waiting for José to bring the cracked crab for lunch.  Prayer indicates that you aren’t where in life you want to be. And nobody prays for something bad to happen; prayer indicates where in life you want to move to. Making those two things explicit in prayer focuses your mind on them, as teaching a subject or describing a problem does, and that puts your mind to work on it. And, as the classic phrase has it, knowing you’ve got a problem is the necessary first step in solving it.

Think about it. Kids pray for different things than adults, because their situations are different from those of adults. Men pray for different things than women, because their situations are different from those of women. Americans pray for different things than Australians, because their situations are different from those of Australians. Each individual has a unique situation and a unique goal, and prayer is a great method for focusing on those two core aspects of life.

Prayers are different from wishes, because they’re more realistic. We can wish for the moon — sometimes literally — without embarrassment: I wish I had super powers. I wish I were King of the World. I wish I had Bill Gates’ money and he was locked in Steve Jobs’ attic. It doesn’t matter. But nobody prays for that sort of thing, because we realize that, if God answers a prayer, it’s going to be something realistic.

Let’s try an exercise. If I were to ask you to pray (‘ask God’) for something, what would it be?

I guarantee that it would be important (you don’t bug God for trivialities), it would be realistic (this isn’t the genie in the lamp we’re talking to), and it would be a concrete indication of where in your life you would rather be other than right here. And that’s its value. It points out what your next priority in life needs to be. It gives you a hook on which to hang some serious thought. Why am I not happy where I am in life? Why do I think that this particular change will put me in a better place? And the most important thought of all: How can I get from here to there? You may think it’s impossible — probably so, otherwise you wouldn’t be praying about it, you’d be doing it. But what if it’s not impossible? What if it just seems impossible? Maybe if you set your mind to it, you’ll find a way? You can be pretty sure God isn’t going to give you what you’re asking for (has He ever?), but what He will do is help you find out how to get it for yourself. God is like a good coach or a good teacher: He’s not going to tell you the answer, but he’ll help you find it on your own, if you’re willing to get with the program.

And that’s the importance of prayer. Prayer doesn’t tell God anything He doesn’t already know; it tells you what you need to get to work on. It’s focuses your own mind on your most important unsolved problem. This is why Paul, in Thessalonians, says ‘Pray without ceasing’, because focus is an unnatural state, and we need to work on it All The Time.

Now, go focus on what you were praying about, and make your life a little better.

Read it.

The ‘publishing industry’, broadly defined, is changing in so many ways that it’s hard to keep track. This piece, from a site aimed at writers, has some interesting thoughts on the subject.

Read it.

Well, to an extent.

The Phylo developers want the game to appeal to people who would otherwise play Farmville.

A scary thought.

Read it.

I love old catalogs.

Read it.

Handing battlefield decisions to the collective intelligence of robot soldiers sounds risky, but it is the essence of a research project called ALADDIN. Autonomous Learning Agents for Decentralised Data and Information Networks, to give its full name, is a five-year-old collaboration between BAE Systems, a British defence contractor, the universities of Bristol, Oxford and Southampton, and Imperial College, London. In it, the grunts act as agents, collecting and exchanging information. They then bargain with each other over the best course of action, make a decision and carry it out.

So far, ALADDIN’s researchers have limited themselves to tests that simulate disasters such as earthquakes rather than warfare; saving life, then, rather than taking it. That may make the technology seem less sinister. But disasters are similar to battlefields in their degree of confusion and complexity, and in the consequent unreliability and incompleteness of the information available. What works for disaster relief should therefore also work for conflict. BAE Systems has said that it plans to use some of the results from ALADDIN to improve military logistics, communications and combat-management systems.

Charles Murray is a brilliant man.

Read it.

Some supervillains (e.g., Gorilla Grodd, The Puppeteer) have the ability to control others through mental powers, hypno-rays, or the like.  But if they forced you to commit a crime, would you still be liable?  And would you have any claim against them?

Steve Sailer ponders the SWPL trendline.

You can tell by looking at parents’ fads in Los Angeles, which is a generation or more ahead of the rest of the country in terms of immigration. I’ve lived on-and-off in Los Angeles since the 1950s. My parents engaged in the same kind of discussion as this in 1972 when my mom wanted me to take French in high school and my father wanted me to take Spanish, which he argued, like Kristoff in 2010, was more practical.

I would endorse Spanish as the most reasonable choice for fulfilling a mandatory foreign language requirement, but I think English is becoming so globally dominant that we should probably reconsider whether we should have mandatory foreign language requirements at all. (If we should, then we ought to start them in elementary school, not after puberty when the language learning capability starts to shut down.)

I studied Latin and French in school and then German, Russian, and Greek in college. My most useful language has been Latin.

If any language is trendy with LA parents, it’s Chinese. For example, one of the public elementary schools that Davis Guggenheim, director of Waiting for “Superman,” drove his kid past in Venice to get to their private school has switched to Mandarin immersion and has recruited a much more fashionable set of children. I can’t recall knowing any any white liberal parents in LA looking for a Spanish immersion school.

Perhaps because it already exists in LA — it’s call the streets.

Read it.

If there aren’t any Jews or Americans handy, Muslims will cheerfully slaughter each other.

Dar al-Islam: Northern Ireland without the whisky.

Read it.

Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away….

Read it.

Even those of us who know better refer to copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and other monopolies as “IP.” Some of us excuse this by saying “IP” stands for “Imaginary Property” (the word imaginary is weaker than intellectual) or “Intellectual Privilege” (privilege is much weaker than property), but neither of those phrases have the power of intellectual property. On the other hand, they keep the initials IP, which is good – they can be used wherever “IP” is. But we need to use bigger guns. What this problem calls for is a word of the same potency as property – one that sticks in the head so that once the association is made, it can never be lost.

That word is pooperty.

I love it when people agree with me.

Read it.

How would you like to have to pay a license to own (not use, mind you, just own) a TV?

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California.

Steve Sailer kicks over a rock.

Any time a student is sent out of the classroom to maintain order — whether to the dean’s office, to after school detention, to home for a suspension, or out the door on an expulsion — can be counted and thus used as evidence in a disparate impact discrimination lawsuit against a deep-pocketed school district. Lawsuit settlements typically require that voluminous statistics then be maintained and published on disciplinary actions by race in order to facilitate future disparate impact lawsuits.

Teach for America’s model for who will make a good teacher is A) got into an exclusive college (i.e., smart), B) got good grades there (i.e., hard-working), and C) has a demonstrated track record of leadership accomplishment (i.e., charismatic alpha personality).

That’s swell, but smart, hard-working people with commanding personalities, such as Steve Jobs, James Cameron, Bill Belichik, Warren Buffett, Margaret Thatcher, and the like sometimes have better things to do than be schoolteachers. We need to be thinking instead about how our institutions can provide teachers who are not paragons with the support they need to do their jobs.

Read it.

A few days ago, we noted the strange fact that the Obama administration is pleased with Colombia’s new president for cozying up to Hugo Chavez, the long-time sworn enemy of Colombia. Never mind that the Venezuelan tyrant is also the sworn enemy of the United States. And never mind that he reportedly is now receiving Iranian missiles with which to threaten portions of the Western Hemisphere. For Obama, the friend of my enemy is my friend.

Read it.

Imagine a world with a strong China reshaping Asia; India confidently extending its reach from Africa to Indonesia; Islam spreading its influence; a Europe replete with crises of legitimacy; sovereign city-states holding wealth and driving innovation; and private mercenary armies, religious radicals and humanitarian bodies playing by their own rules as they compete for hearts, minds and wallets.

It sounds familiar today. But it was just as true slightly less than a millennium ago at the height of the Middle Ages.

Read it.

Read it.

Let’s see Obama go and try spreading some of their wealth around.

Read it.

Who knew that being a superhero had so many legal pitfalls?

Read it.

Liberals are big on gaps. The gap between rich and poor is a particularly fertile source of big government schemes. It’s a perennial inspiration of plans to tax and plans to spend.

Minneapolis Star Tribune education reporter Norman Draper brings us a new but nevertheless “glaring gap” that must be filled. You have undoubtedly missed it. It’s the “dearth of books the [Muslim] students can relate to and from which others can learn.”

The Koran seems to be sufficient; Muslim students can relate to it, although others tend to have a problem learning from it.

We could discuss the gap between the number of people Muslims kill and the number of Muslims that are killed by other people. That might prove entertaining.

Read it.

In all of Mexico, there is only one gun store. The shop, known officially as the Directorate of Arms and Munitions Sales, is operated by the Mexican military. The clerks wear pressed green camouflage. They are soldiers.

The only gun store in Mexico is not very busy.

Well, duh. When guns are illegal, only crooks have guns, and they don’t buy them; they steal them (that’s why they’re called crooks).

Mexico has some of the toughest gun-control laws in the world, a matter of pride for the nation’s citizens. Yet Mexico is awash in weapons.

Just like D.C. and New York City and Chicago and ….

Asked whether Mexico’s gun-control laws were working, Mendoza said, “Ask the criminals.”

Heh.

Read it.

Perhaps they heard about the Mayan Calendar and decided to loot the rubble.

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), an independent non-commercial organization, released a sensational statement.

Three giant spaceships are heading towards Earth. The largest one of them is 240 kilometers wide. Two others are smaller. At present, the objects are beyond the orbit of Pluto.

The spaceships were detected by HAARP search system. The system, based in Alaska, was designed to study the phenomenon of northern lights. According to SETI researchers, the objects are nothing but extraterrestrial spaceships. They will be visible in optical telescopes as soon as they reach Mars’s orbit. The US government has been reportedly informed about the event. The ships will reach Earth in December 2012.

Read it. People are moving from Blue to Red.

The South is our largest region. For the first time, it now has more population than the Northeast and Midwest combined. The South has nearly 115 million people, the Northeast 55 million, and the Midwest 67 million. The West is now the second-largest region, with 72 million, surpassing the Midwest in the ten years since the 2000 census. The South added more population from 2000-2010 (14.3 million) than the three other regions combined.

No state in either the Midwest or Northeast grew faster than the national growth rate. No state in the West grew slower than the national growth rate. Montana grew at exactly the national growth rate of 9.7 percent. California was the second-slowest growing Western state at 10 percent, a growth rate which would be remarkable for a Midwestern or Northeastern state.

These figures are distorted somewhat by the fact that they count Texas as in the South; I’d put it in the West, myself.

Bryan Caplan is always worth reading.

Political correctness isn’t just hypersensitivity; it’s hypersensitivity designed to place a permanent stamp on impressionable young minds.

Not so long ago, as Eugen Weber observes, most people were only dimly aware of what nation they “belonged” to.  They took little offense at insults to their country, its people, or their flag, because they just didn’t much identify with their country, its people, or their flag.  Then came the patriots, descending upon their nations’ schools like locusts.  They taught children a litany of bizarre nonsense.  They urged them to love millions of complete strangers who happened to live inside a Magic Line (a.k.a. “the border”), and loathe those who snickered during the Pledge of Allegiance or  improperly folded the flag.

Well, almost always.

Read it.

Guess how much time the Archbishop of Canterbury actually spends in Canterbury.

Go ahead, guess.

Hint: It’s more time than the Patriarch of Antioch spends in Antioch.

Read it. And watch the video.

Most readers will be familiar with the spectacle of mass Muslim prayer on the streets of Paris’ 18th Arrondissement. The following video, however, shows the breathtaking scope of the Islamic occupation of certain districts of Paris.

Now, imagine what would happen if even a small portion of this number (five, say) attempted to pray in the street in, oh, say, Saudi Arabia (or Turkey or Egypt or Iran or … well, you get the picture).

Mencius Moldbug limns the difference between Then and Now.

Andrew Cove is not afraid to ask the Hard Questions.

Read it.

Actually, even the headline is a lie (Objective Journalism At Work): She didn’t ‘refuse to study’ with them, she asked to be put in a different group BECAUSE NONE OF THEM SPOKE ENGLISH AND SHE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND THE NON-ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN WHICH THEY WERE DISCUSSING THE MATERIAL.

“I said ‘I’m not being funny, but can I change groups because I can’t understand them?’ But she started shouting and screaming, saying ‘It’s racist, you’re going to get done by the police’.”

There was racism present that day, but it was on the part of the teacher. Would she have said anything if Cody hadn’t been white?

A complaint was made to a police officer based full-time at the school, and more than a week after the incident on September 26 she was taken to Swinton police station and placed under arrest.

What kind of a school has a ‘police officer based full-time at the school’?

It had the worst GCSE results in the entire Salford LEA last year with just 15 per cent of pupils achieving five good passes including English and maths, a third of the national average.

The school is now investigating exactly what happened before deciding what action – if any – to take against Codie.

I have an idea: How about deciding what action to take against her teacher and the administration of her school?

“A lot of these arrests don’t result in prosecutions – they aim is to frighten us into self-censorship until we watch everything we say.”

And that’s God’s truth. It isn’t Big Brother you have to watch out for, it’s Big Nanny. She’s got a stick, and she’s not afraid to use it.

Read it.

A spokesman for prosecutors in Mexico’s northern Chihuahua state says a search has started for 28-year-old Ericka Gandara, who hasn’t been seen Dec 23.

Perhaps we might want to bring back some of those nice young men from Afghanistan and put them along our southern border. And also, I don’t know, build a wall or something.

Read it.

Matthew Boyle of The Daily Caller reported the “Diversity Committee” of the Society of Professional Journalists wants a yearlong “education campaign designed to inform and sensitize journalists” that the words “illegal immigrant” are hurtful and insensitive. In an article for the SPJ magazine The Quill, reporter Leo Laurence insisted that since our legal system presumes innocence until proven guilty, “Simply put, only a judge, not a journalist, can say that someone is an illegal.” (The National Association of Hispanic Journalists has also argued that the I-word unfairly “criminalizes a person.”)

Check it out.

Read it.

And past time.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done. — George Bernard Shaw

So how do we make sending spam very expensive? How about if we would start killing spammers? I know, I know. Not really in the Christmas spirit. But come-on, we have been putting up with this shit for years now. Tolerating that 98% of all messages are spam? What are we??? Spineless?

Steve Sailer is dyspeptic today.

In contrast, the wholly non-self-explanatory phrase “jump the shark” shows up on 376,000 webpages. That phrase requires the recounting of an incredibly boring backstory about some television episode, which suggests that the Atlantic got it all backward by looking for clever terms. The stupider and more abstruse the etymology, the more likely chance it has to flourish.

That seems to be true not just with neologisms. Etymology is perhaps the most intellectually frustrating field of study because, as a general rule, all clever theories about the origin of any word are wrong. The real explanation is always something boring and senseless, like “from a West Frisian word for turnip greens.”

Read it.

How omebody named ‘Hassan Abu-Jihaad’ ever got access to classified information in the first place beggars belief.

Read it. And watch the video.

Read it.

Quite frankly, I’m surprised it’s that many.

Read it.

We can make our own Top Ten list of presidents, but let’s start at the bottom, since we live in an upside-down world.  Personally, I don’t think Obama is the worst president in history.  So far, he’s about average, in terms of badness.  In choosing the worst, there are many good candidates, but I vote for Woodrow Wilson.  Betrayer of the Jefferson-Jackson-Bryan tradition in the Democratic Party.  Enemy of racial equality.  Opponent of woman suffrage.  Architect of centralized government.  Bellhop of Wall Street.  Father of the Federal Reserve.  Enthusiast of World War I.  Violator of civil liberties.  Champion of the League of Nations.  Mentor of Franklin Roosevelt.  The damage he did to the nation and the world was immense.

Read it.

The liberal media sells liberal candidates as brilliant and even-tempered and “sophisticated” and “nuanced” of thought; all of these are non-ideological attributes which appeal to most, whatever one’s politics. And they need to do this, as only about 25% of the country can be persuaded to come along on the basic liberal message of higher taxes, more spending, more government power to dictate the affairs of men, and less freedom.

Meanwhile, Republican candidates get the opposite treatment from the media. I’ve noted before that every single Republican candidate is claimed by the media to be:

1. Stupid

2. Evil

3. Crazy

4. Out-of-touch

…and pretty much you can categorize every Republican office-seeker since Eisenhower (Out of touch) in this way. Nixon: Evil and Crazy; Reagan: Stupid and Crazy and possibly Evil; Bush I: Out of touch; Bush II: Stupid, Crazy, Out of Touch and Evil.

The Other McCain looks at the ‘media’.

During the recent midterm congressional campaign, many Republican candidates were quite nearly ignored by local media. In fact, if you had been reading local newspapers in some key competitive districts, you’d have scarcely known there was an election coming up — much less that the incumbent Democrat was locked in a fight for his political life.

And this kind of non-coverage continued until the folks picked up their paper the Wednesday morning after Election Day and saw — for the first time in a front-page headline — the name of the previously ignored Republican who’d just gotten elected to Congress.

Wisdom. Attend.

Extroverts are easy for introverts to understand, because extroverts spend so much of their time working out who they are in voluble, and frequently inescapable, interaction with other people. They are as inscrutable as puppy dogs. But the street does not run both ways. Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion. As often as I have tried to explain the matter to extroverts, I have never sensed that any of them really understood. They listen for a moment and then go back to barking and yipping.

And pooping on the rug.

Extroverts therefore dominate public life. This is a pity. If we introverts ran the world, it would no doubt be a calmer, saner, more peaceful sort of place. As Coolidge is supposed to have said, “Don’t you know that four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still?” (He is also supposed to have said, “If you don’t say anything, you won’t be called on to repeat it.” The only thing a true introvert dislikes more than talking about himself is repeating himself.)

Hear, hear.

We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts’ Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say “I’m an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush.”

Arnold Kling looks at education.

There is a term that Daniel Klein alerted me to called “white hat bias.” What it means is that findings that favor a popular political viewpoint will be published, while those that contradict that viewpoint will tend to be discarded. So many people have a vested interest in believing that teachers make a difference that one has to be very wary of white hat bias in studies that purport to show such differences.

The Other McCain sounds the alarm.

One cannot help but notice that the Cult of Fitness has arisen during the same period that traditional religion in the West has declined. It is as if people have embraced physical righteousness in a society whose standards of moral or spiritual righteousness have become so ambiguous.

So whereas couples once married while still in full natural vigor of their youthful attractiveness and then grew older together, today’s yuppies must attempt to extend their peak attractiveness much longer – while they finish law school, get an MBA, etc. — and the Cult of Fitness is their safeguard against becoming unattractively flabby before they land a mate. You’ll not be surprised to learn that Jen A. Miller, who describes her marathon-induced muscle damage in the New York Times article linked above, is 30 and single.

… “Dead Butt Syndrome” would be such a great name for a punk-rock band.

Read it.

Apparently Japanese women don’t like Japanese men enough to marry them.

Read it.

Intriguingly, across the world the main social groups which practice polygyny do not consume alcohol. We investigate whether there is a correlation between alcohol consumption and polygynous/monogamous arrangements, both over time and across cultures. Historically, we find a correlation between the shift from polygyny to monogamy and the growth of alcohol consumption. Cross-culturally we also find that monogamous societies consume more alcohol than polygynous societies in the preindustrial world. We provide a series of possible explanations to explain the positive correlation between monogamy and alcohol consumption over time and across societies.

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