Arnold Kling says what I’ve been saying for years.

Health care and education are, of course, the New Commanding Heights. That is, they are the growing sectors of the economy which, if you were Lenin, you would want to be sure that the state controls.

And they’re the major sectors of the economy that haven’t yet benefited from any significant degree of automation. Unless that changes, the situation will only get worse.

Paul Rahe turns his historian’s eye on the soi-disant cognitive elite.

What would it take to elicit servility from an intellectual? Money would help, of course. Just ask the Harvard professors who founded the Monitor Group—which for a time shilled for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in return for a quarter of a million dollars a month. And query the administration at the London School of Economics, recipient of a £1.5-million pledge from a foundation run by Seif, the tyrant’s notably generous, charming, and debonair son and presumed heir, who earned a Ph.D. at the school with a dissertation alleged by some to have been at least partly plagiarized (LSE is investigating those allegations).

But money is certainly not the only coin in which the modern intellectual likes to be paid. There is, after all, nothing quite like celebrity, and proximity to power can easily become for an intellectual in search of renown what a candle is for a moth. If, as they say, power corrupts, then lack of power corrupts absolutely.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, with his worship of the Communist Chinese, comes immediately to mind.

Steve Landsburg fisks the ‘eat local’ crowd.

The locavores, in case you don’t follow this kind of thing, are an environmentalist sect who make a moral issue out of where your food is grown — preferring that which is local to that which comes from afar. For example, as Budiansky puts it, “it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in California because of the energy spent to truck it across the country”.

How, then, could one ever hope to do the right computation? How can we possibly gather enough information to compare the opportunity costs of land, fertlizers, equipment, workers, transportation and energy costs (among many others) and reach a conclusion about which tomato imposes the fewest costs on our neighbors?

Well, it turns out there’s actually a way to do that. You do it by looking at a single number that does an excellent job of reflecting all those costs. That number is known as the price of the tomato. When more New York land is needed for a housing development or a vineyard or a sports complex, the price of New York land goes up and the price of New York tomatos follows. When California workers are needed to build an aquarium or put out a forest fire, the price of California labor goes up, and the price of California tomatos follows.

Markets are not perfect, so the price of a tomato does not, with 100% accuracy, reflect the social cost of acquiring that tomato. But in most circumstances it comes damn close, and in virtually all circumstances it comes a lot closer than Budiansky’s sort of crabbed accounting.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

There’s only one downside to using prices as the primary indicator of social cost — everyone already accounts for them. This robs the locavores of an opportunity to flaunt their moral superiority, and Steven Budiansky of an opportunity to flaunt his math skills. Meanwhile, the rest of us go right on solving the right problem the right way.

Freeberg lets loose.

The sinful: ‘totally’, ‘utilize’, ‘basically’, ‘(mental) abuse’, ‘LOL’, ‘patriarchal’, ‘stereotype/stereotypical’, ‘Godess/Lilith/Earth-Mother’, and ‘alternative’.

Indeed, these are a good start.

9. Alternative

Because “pot-smoking long-haired flea-bitten, smell like Cheetos & ass” is too long.

Read it.

Back in 2005, we reported on a little something called the Prism 200, which allowed its holder to essentially see what folks were doing on the other side of a wall. Since then, we’ve seen plenty of devices that boast the same claims, but it wasn’t until recently that the makers of the Prism 200 created a device that can actually see inside those walls. Looking something akin to an old school punch clock, Cambridge Consultants’ Sprint in-wall radar imaging system provides 3D renderings of items embedded in walls, floors, and even ceilings. Where as existing X-ray systems require access to both sides of a wall, Sprint’s radar setup allows users to see what’s going on inside without dual access.

Read it. And watch the video, if you can stomach listening to Bill Maher.

“There is one religion in the world that kills you when you disagree with them and they say ‘look, we are a religion of peace and if you disagree we’ll fucking cut your head off,'” Maher said.

Truth even Bill Maher can’t ignore.

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The Palestinian Authority has honored the terrorist responsible for the “Passover Massacre,” a 2002 bombing of Netanya’s Park Hotel that killed more than 30 mostly elderly Israelis attending a Seder.

Not really a surprise, but a useful reminder.

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The father of a 12-year-old girl killed by a failed asylum seeker yesterday launched a fierce attack on judges and human rights laws that have allowed him to stay in the UK indefinitely.

He was jailed for four months over her death, but was allowed to remain in the UK on his release because of human rights after an immigration judge ruled he had established a family life here.

Can’t really blame him. But there’s a lot of that going on these days.

Read it.

WOMEN, because of their natural empathy, make better doctors than men. An article in today’s New York Times illustrates why this widely-held belief is false. The entry of large numbers of women into the medical profession has diminished the level of dedication and personal care. Doctors who are mothers are empathetic. But they are empathetic to their children too. They don’t want to work the hours demanded by the traditional medical practice and prefer bureaucratically-administered hospital or clinical jobs that come with regular shifts.

The grandfather of a woman who is a doctor comments on the changes. “My son and I had deeper feelings for our patients than I think Kate will ever have,” Dr. William Dewar II said over lunch at a diner in Honesdale, about 30 miles northeast of Scranton. Munching on a club sandwich, Dr. William Dewar III gestured toward the diner’s owner, who had greeted them deferentially.

“I’ve had three generations of his family under my care,” he said as a waitress brought his usual Diet Coke without being asked. “Kate will never have that.”

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Now opening a book on how many of these will eventually cost the U.S. money and/or lives….

Read it.

There has been a war of language and thought going on in the copyright debate for years.  People think in language just as they speak in language, which is why content industry groups have gone to such lengths to pervert nuanced legal language into stacatto and misleading buzzwords crafted purely for public consumption.  This language war is the reason why when I Google the word “piracy”, the first page gives me the Wikipedia article for the war act of piracy and then in the news items I get a story about lawmakers wondering if search engines contribute to piracy.

Three sentences with so much intellectual dishonesty, subtle word games, and nationalism wrapped up in a tidy knot that it’s sickening.  First, to get it out of the way, note the word games being played through the legally incorrect use of the words “thieves”, “steal”, and “digital theft”.  This is the game they play with words and thought.

Read it.

Secretary of state and cattle-futures queen Hillary Clinton, super-investor Warren Buffett, and best-selling author Stephen King have all recently carped about how rich folks like them should be paying more in taxes. King recently told a Florida rally, “As a rich person, I’m paying 28 percent in taxes. What I want to ask you is, why am I not paying 50?”

Uh, because you don’t want to? Because you’re not sitting down and writing out a check to the U.S. Treasury, which you could so easily do?

All of the rich people who bitch about not being taxed enough are never confronted with the plain fact that, if they want to pay more to the government, there is no anchor on their asses preventing them from doing so.

And that reveals The Rest of the Story.

They don’t want to pay more in taxes; they want OTHER PEOPLE to pay more in taxes — specifically the ‘almost rich’ that are threatening to encroach on the luxury space of the Really Rich.

If I get a million a year and get taxed at 50%, I still have half a million left. Aspen, here I come! But if I get $200k a year and get taxed at 50%, that leaves me with $100k. Not much you can buy in Aspen on $100k a year.

David Friedman drags us back to the facts.

Kristof has his historical facts precisely backwards. From 1929 to 1932  federal spending increased by 50% in nominal terms, doubled in real terms, tripled relative to national income. Judged by that measure, Herbert Hoover makes Barack Obama look like a fiscal conservative.

As I pointed out there, we do have an example of a Republican president who responded to a surge in unemployment in the way they think Hoover did. From 1920 to 1921, unemployment rose from 5.2% to 11.7%, almost as sharp an increase as from 1930 to 1931. Harding responded by sharply cutting spending. By 1922, federal expenditure relative to national income had dropped almost fifty percent. And the unemployment rate was back down to 2.4%.

Read it.

Read it.

A new promotion by RadioShack electronics chain in the US states of Idaho and Montana is offering free guns to first-time subscribers of satellite TV service Dish Network.

They know their market.

Read it.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

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Notice the way the Crust operates:

1. Pick a Bad Thing in which ‘minorities’ participate greater than their portion of the population;
2. Ascribe the cause of this ‘disparity’ to race, without any attempt to eliminate other possible reasons (such as, notoriously, poverty);
3. Create a taxpayer-funded race-based preference program that may or may not solve the problem but will certainly buy a lot of votes.

Steve Sailer is, as always, on top of things.

The benefits of US citizenship

1. If your child is born in America, he will immediately have US nationality and will enjoy the rights of a citizen. When the child is 21, the parents can apply to be sponsored as family members, will have a permanent green card, will not have to wait their turn for the quota, and it will provide the basis for future immigration.

Read the whole thing.

Freeberg points out that the President of the United States isn’t in any position to criticize somebody over poor gas mileage.

Read it.

No doubt regular readers will recall the US military’s cunning plan to develop unmanned submarine-hunting robotic frigates – warships which would prowl the oceans like automated Mary Celestes, remorselessly tracking enemy submarines regardless of how their pale, sweaty, malodorous captains might twist and turn.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it has been decided that the best way to hammer out a set of tactics for ACTUVs is to develop a game-style simulation pitting ACTUV against submarine and get people to play it – so crowdsourcing the methods and tactical principles that will then be coded into the robo-frigates’ AIs.

Read it.

Funny thing how we keep discovering more oil and gas. But of course we’re running out and need to conserve and find alternatives.

You know you want to.

The Other McCain has the goods.

She hates you, does Taffy Brodesser-Akner. She hates you with a depth of contempt you cannot possibly imagine. Your wedding was never reported by the New York Times, which is certainly reason enough for her to hate you. Also, unlike Taffy Brodesser-Akner, you probably didn’t attend a university where tuition is over $40,000 a year.

The Crust is always hiring.

Read it.

Here’s a cause we can ALL get behind.

1. Blue makes for a great icon color and everyone else uses it — be the exception, not the rule.
2. Make the name of your app/service something that a normal person can pronounce, on first try, without help.
3. Spell the name like a normal person. Twitter works because it makes logical sense, spelled as it sounds. Tumblr is hard to explain to a non-tech user — tell your Mom to go to Tumblr.com and see what she types in. I don’t want to remember which consonant you doubled or which vowel you dropped. Things like Digg work because you can tell people: “it has a double g” — stray from the basics too far and your service/app will confuse people.

Etc.

Read it.

One of the nice things about a potential government shutdown (or, for that matter, a big Washington D.C. snowstorm) is the clarity it provides about which government workers are “essential” personnel, who come to work even in a shutdown, and which are “nonessential” personnel, who don’t come to work. The question that naturally arises is, if they are nonessential personnel, why are the taxpayers funding their employment to begin with?

I’ll bet we could save a bundle by getting rid of these ‘nonessential’ parasites.

Read it.

A new analysis of wind energy supplied to the UK National Grid in recent years has shown that wind farms produce significantly less electricity than had been thought, and that they cause more problems for the Grid than had been believed.

Read it.

Doesn’t sound like the sort of thing you’d expect in Britain, does it?

Read it.

The “conservative” Washington Times expands on the Australian survey which evaluates the states of the U.S. by how peaceful, i.e., non-violent, they are, but, just like yesterday’s Boston Globe, makes not the slightest reference to the fact that the most peaceful states are, ahem, the whitest states, and that the least peaceful states are those with very high black and Hispanic populations. The Times avers that being a peaceful state is a highly valuable achievement worth emulating and pursuing (“Those who seek the proverbial peaceful life should head to Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont,” the article tells us), but declines to mention the most salient factor in that peacefulness–or any factor.

The truth that dare not say its name.

Read it.

For years, Angray Kang at Westminster University and colleagues have been testing whether they could genetically tweak a fungus to kill the malaria parasite carried by mosquitoes.

Now they’ve found that in lab experiments, mosquitoes exposed to the fungus show a sharp drop in levels of the parasite. If it works that way in the wild, that should make it harder for the disease to infect people.

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Single bottles of wine from La Romanée-Conti, the legendary vineyard of Burgundy, sell for upwards of $10,000. In 2010 the owner received a threat, the vineyard would be poisoned unless the owner paid one million euro. When the owner didn’t pay a map was delivered that identified several vines that had already been poisoned by drill and syringe. The French don’t want to talk about this and for good reason, agricultural extortion is very easy and they fear copycats.

It would be easy to do billions of dollars worth of damage to crops and animals with little risk of being caught. As the Chilean case indicates, even a hoax can damage. Fortunately, criminals usually aren’t very smart. The vine poisoner mentioned earlier, for example, was caught trying to collect the money. A little bit of economics would have taught him that you can make lots of money from agricultural extortion without ever having to collect from the victim (and no, I am not saying how although it won’t be a mystery to most readers of this blog). Of course, a terrorist doesn’t even have to collect damages to succeed–just a bit of mad cow or corn rust and we are in trouble (and those aren’t even the biggest threats.)

Read it.

Wielding crowbars and sledgehammers, two dozen Islamists arrived at the Sidi Abdel Rahman shrine in the middle of the night aiming to smash it to pieces. Word spread quickly through the narrow, dirt roads of the poor Egyptian town of Qalyoub. Within minutes, the group were surrounded and attacked by residents who rallied to defend the site revered by their families for generations.

“They say the shrine is haram (something forbidden in Islam), but what they are doing is haram,” said Hussein Ahmed, 58, describing the shrine attackers as Sunni fanatics, at least two of whom witnesses said were then badly beaten.

When there aren’t any Jews or Americans handy, Muslims will cheerfully beat up each other. That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Read it.

People actually get paid to do this….

A modest proposal.

Could Social Security’s debt be settled at a discount by voluntary transactions with its creditors, namely American citizens? I propose that it could. Every time this happened, it would reduce Social Security’s net deficit, because its debt would go down by more than its assets, just as with any individual or company in a similar situation. This is basic balance sheet arithmetic: if your debt goes down more than your assets do, your net position improves.

I would. In a heartbeat.

Read it.

And about time that somebody did.

The federal government has been meddling with sugar production since 1934. Today’s convoluted system of supply controls, price supports, and trade restrictions benefits domestic sugar producers at the expense of consumers and utilizing industries. In other words, sugar producers “win” and the rest of the country “loses.”

Of course that doesn’t differ from any other such subsidy program. Those who produce a commodity are small in number, typically know each other and have formed a ‘trade association’ to buy Congressmen lobby Congress concerning their ‘issue’ and win out over the vast mass of consumers who never notice that they’re paying more for something than they would in a free market.

Know, incidentally, that Indiana doesn’t produce any sugar to speak of.

Read it.

For many mayors across the country, including New York City’s Michael Bloomberg, the recently announced results of the 2010 census were a downer. In a host of cities, the population turned out to be substantially lower than the U.S. Census Bureau had estimated for 2010—in New York’s case, by some 250,000 people. Bloomberg immediately called the decade’s meager 2.1 percent growth, less than one-quarter the national average, an “undercount.” Senator Charles Schumer blamed extraterrestrials, accusing the Census Bureau of “living on another planet.” The truth, though, is that the census is very much of this world. It just isn’t the world that mayors, the media, and most urban planners want to see.

I love that name, ‘urban planners’. What a marvelous reflection of the innate statism of those who are in control of city life these days! I suppose it must be a lot like ‘cat wrangler’ — lots of failure, but hey, you still get paid.

Read it.

As more and more systems care about time at the second and sub-second level, finding a lasting solution to the leap seconds problem is becoming increasingly urgent.

We’re talking about the abolishment of leap seconds, a crude hack added 40 years ago, to paper over the fact that planets make lousy clocks compared with quantum mechanical phenomena.

Read it.

There’s two kinds of people in this world: Those that can sleep on buses, trains and planes, and those who can’t. If you are the former, you’re welcome – TravAlert is an GPS enabled iPhone, Blackberry and Android app that allows you to get your precious ZZZs (or read a book, or listen to music) while you travel, without having to worry about whether you’ll miss your stop.

Back when I was riding buses and trains, I would have killed for something like this. It’s a great time to be alive.

Joe Wickert has some fun.

The impossibility of any system of ‘digital rights management’ merely underlines my contention that ‘intellectual property’ is an oxymoron.

Read it.

For those unacquainted with BritSpeak, 24 stone is 336 pounds. (No, I don’t know why they can’t express peopleweight in pounds like a normal person. You can’t blame it on the metric system, because they don’t say it in kilograms, either.)

The basic message here is, ‘I’m a fatty, so I’m picking on McDonald’s.’ Your (or, rather, they’re, since you are presumably wise enough to avoid New York) tax dollars at work.

Just for once I’d like to have someone running for office answer the question ‘What do you think the important issues in this race are?’ with the honest ‘Whatever restriction on individual liberty I think might get me a headline’.

Read it.

Michael Arrington loves stirring the pot, but here he may have a legitimate long spoon.

Read it.

You know it had to happen.

I especially like the name ‘The Fair, Accurate, Inclusive and Respectful Education Act’. Sorry, guys; if it’s fair and accurate, it’s not going to be either inclusive or respectful. Reality bites sometimes.

Another find reason to avoid California.

Read it.

I’m not going to say it. I’m just not going to say it.

Steve Sailer looks behind the scenes.

(More accurately, that ought to be Bill Gates III and IV. Why they play around with that, other than perhaps to confuse people, escapes me.)

The Gates are Democrats, by the way, just like the Clintons.

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

So, I’m a little skeptical about the notion that Bill Gates Jr. was just a poor rube from the sticks who didn’t know about the importance of lobbying in Washington when his dad was a name partner of the firm that unleashed Jack Abramoff on the world. Moreover, one of the specialties of Preston Gates & Ellis was antitrust defenses of corporations accused of monopoly.

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Since it’s the New York Times, she doesn’t quite come out and say ‘Yippee!’, but it’s close. Unspoken is any speculation as to why.

What incentive do white people have to produce children? ‘Everybody else get’s a government check for stuff ranging from housing to education; you don’t. In fact, you have to pay for most of it.’ Yeah, that’s a real attractive proposition.

Read it.

All the fun of the S.C.A. and none of the downers, sounds like.

Read it.

The idea: Take a picture of your food, send it in to Meal Snap, and after some techno-sorcery and number crunching, it’ll spit out a rough estimate of the calorie count and track it for you.

Read it.

Each of these is guaranteed to get you shot by a nervous Homeland Security  employee. (Harry Connolly obviously doesn’t spend all his time writing Twenty Palaces novels.)

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In other words, the Koran. But you knew that.

Evidently Lindsay Graham’s RINOness didn’t sit well with a young woman in Colorado, who did a couple of YouTube videos expressing her displeasure.

The second video shows her tearing out pages — bookmarked with strips of bacon — from the Koran, and burning them one by one.

Now THAT is hard core.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Steve Sailer wants to help.

I want to introduce a concept to public discussion based on the old Victorian concept of the Deserving Poor: the Deserving Dumb. There are many millions of children in America who, at least when it comes to passing a non-watered down version of Algebra II, are truly the Deserving Dumb. If you force them to take Algebra II, they will come to class, not disrupt the teacher, ask questions, try to do their homework, maybe get some afterschool tutoring. And they will still bomb the final and, thus, fail to graduate. They’ll probably get GEDs later, but they still go through life as high school dropouts. They simply don’t have the powers of abstraction necessary for Algebra II.