John Tierney is not afraid to write what everybody knows.

Recycling does sometimes makes sense-for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environrnentally safe landfill. And since there’s no shortage of landfill space (the crisis of 1987 was a false alarm), there’s no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative. Mandatory recycling programs aren’t good for posterity. They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups-politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations-while diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems. Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.

Read it.

The emergence of renewable power has had essentially no effect on the amount of carbon emissions involved in energy generation, according to a new report.

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

Acting against these mitigating factors has been the massive world upsurge in coal burning, particularly in China – though lately, Europe has also turned to coal in a bid to wean itself off insecure and pricey Russian gas. Coal is a very carbon-intensive way to generate energy, so all this has effectively wiped out the carbon reductions achieved by gas, hydro and nuclear (and the tiny additional ones from wind, solar etc).

So rapid is the growth, indeed, that the IEA expects coal to supplant oil as the world’s most-used energy source in 2017 on current trends.

Read it.

And is it responsible for MSNBC? I can’t think of any other explanation.

Read it.

Before the hand axes appeared, our ancestors had primitive wrists: good for hanging from branches, but too weak to grasp and handle small objects with much force. And no hand bones had been found to fill the gap between 1.7 million years ago and 800,000 years ago – by which time humans had developed the hands we have today. Now, a new fossil is helping bridge that gap.

Read it.

Jihad? What’s that?

As U.S. service members risk their lives to combat violent jihadists abroad, military leaders, both uniformed and civilian, capitulate to stealth jihadists at home. By bending to Islamists’ appeals for religious sensitivity, these leaders ignore the most crucial lesson of the Fort Hood massacre: Political correctness can kill.

Read it. Do so thoroughly, because I feel a rant coming on.

This article illustrates the sort of crap that passes for thinking among Voices of the Crust these days.

There are two labor markets nowadays. There’s the market for people who have been out of work for less than six months, and the market for people who have been out of work longer. The former is working pretty normally, and the latter is horribly dysfunctional.

‘Horrbly dysfunctional’ is a pretty strong term. This guy must be a trained economist, right, to justify using so strong a term about a natural pattern of human activity that, after all, works whether you want it to or not? Well, as it turns out, no:

 Matthew O’Brien is an associate editor at The Atlantic covering business and economics. He has previously written for The New Republic.

As it turns out, he’s Just Another Left Journalist. My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Okay, let’s look at his journalism.

Long-term unemployment is a terrifying trap. Once you’ve been out of work for six months, there’s little you can do to find work. Employers put you at the back of the jobs line, regardless of how strong the rest of your resume is. After all, they usually don’t even look at it.

The first thing that popped into my mind is a question: Why? I find this situation as counter-intuitive as the writer does, but when I come across such a thing, I want to dig into it. Why are employers — apparently, almost universally — doing this unexpected thing? There’s something going on here that we don’t see. Very puzzling. Ah! But we have an experienced, highly-paid journalist on the case. Let’s see what he finds out.

Except that he doesn’t. Nowhere in this article is any indication that he found out why, or that he even looked. Employers are being shits, and that’s all there is to it. They must be Really Evil People, just picking on a bunch of victims Because They Can.

Let’s be clear. Ghayad’s field study shows employers discriminate against the long-term unemployed.

Ooooh, discrimination. That’s pretty scary. Call in the torturers. But people discriminate all the time, and Voices of the Crust raise no objection. Planned Parenthood discriminates against unborn children, pretty severely at times, and that’s okay. The Obama administration discriminates against white people, and that’s just fine. Federal give-away programs discriminate against anybody who isn’t of the correct Victim Class, and everybody’s good with it. The tax code discriminates against rich people, and that’s not a problem. I discriminate against Mexican food, primarily because I don’t like Mexican food, and I’m not thrown in jail. (Yet, anyway.)

Still, you’d think that any rational adult, much less an experienced journalist, would be interested in the question Why? But this guy is not. (Speculation as to whether journalists qualify as rational adults is an exercise left to the reader.)

Well, okay, we don’t know why. And if we don’t know why, we can’t really start trying to ‘fix’ it, can we? Ah, my friend, you underestimate the Left Journalist mind — there is an answer, the same answer they have to every problem they sort-of-look-into: More Government.

It’s time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed. Or, at the least, start giving employers tax incentives to hire the long-term unemployed.

For a guy who didn’t bother to look into why a situation is happening, he seems awfully quick with a solution, doesn’t he? Let’s just have government pick up the slack, with all of that extra money they have, no doubt distilled out of unicorn farts.

The worst possible outcome for all of us is if the long-term unemployed become unemployable. That would permanently reduce our productive capacity.

The worst possible outcome? For all of us? I suggest that the worst possible outcome is for the government to become the default employer for those who can’t get a job, using all the money that they don’t have any more; by that reasoning, the government would be buying all those buggy whips that nobody needs anymore.

And it’s not a problem for those of us who have a job, or can get a job in less than six months — obviously this guy doesn’t read his own writing. Lefty Journalists just like to take molehills and make them into Mount Rushmore (awaiting the addition of Barack Obama’s smiling visage).

And I’ve got news for you, neighbor: THEY’RE ALREADY UNEMPLOYABLE. YOU JUST BITCHED ABOUT IT. The question is WHY and you went right by it as if it were invisible (which, I suppose, to a Left Journalist it is). DO YOUR JOB. FIGURE OUT WHY. Then maybe we’ll listen to your proposal on how to fix it.

We can do better, and we need to start doing so now. We can’t afford long-term thinking in either the short or the long-term.

Let that one sink in for a bit. We can’t afford long-term thinking, as if short-term thinking ever solved a problem for longer than the short term. No, Mr Lefty Journalist, long-term thinking is precisely what we need, and badly; and precisely what we AREN’T GETTING: Not from you, not from your fellow ‘journalists’, and not from the people who hold the Reins Of Power.

And THAT’S the real problem here. One in which you appear not interested.

And they pay people good money to write this swill. I’m in the wrong line of work, obviously.

Joel Kotkin turns over a rock, one well-tended by the Crust.

Perhaps no idea is more widely accepted among urban core theorists than the notion that higher population densities lead to more productivity and sustainable economic growth. Yet upon examination, there are less than compelling moorings for the beliefs of what Pittsburgh blogger Jim Russell calls “the density cult,” whose adherents include many planners and urban land speculators.

The Crust, you see, like to have all of the proles crowded into slums where they will be conveniently at hand for any purpose, from providing Union thugs to Get Out The Vote and intimidate Wrong-Thinking People to being servants and wait staff. And, of course, if they are stuffed into the cities, they aren’t in the suburbs or the Hamptons, leaving more room for golf courses and country estates.

Read it.

And why should they? Sheriffs and immigration agents are not, after all, of the Crust.

Fantasy Caskets

The Fisher Wallace Stimulator

Interactive Headstone

Portable Wine Glass

Waterless Washing Machine

Read it.

Drawing on the old adage, “if you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less, tax it,” politicans around the country have turned to burdensome tariffs on stuff they don’t like as a proxy for the hard work of passing formal prohibitions. Booze, tobacco and ammunition have been popular targets of late, But maybe politicans need an annotated version of that adage. As the cigarette market demonstrates, when you wield revenue collection as a tool of social engineering, what you get is less of the legal version of the product that you’re trying to tax the hell out of. As outright prohibitionists discovered (but ignored) long ago, savvy black marketeers always stand ready to dodge the law to give people what they want. And among the things people want are smokes at an affordable price. That’s an important point to remember just days after the president called for a 94 cent hike in federal cigarette taxes.

But Obama is a politician, and politicians never learn.

Read it.

The Supreme Ulema Council of Morocco plans to issue a fatwa decreeing the death penalty for apostasy, according to Moroccan news website Lakome.  This council, which consists of religious Muslim scholars (ulema) appointed by the Ministry of Religious Endowments and Islamic Affairs, is considered the highest religious government institution in Morocco.

Lakome reports that this information was made public earlier this week by the Moroccan daily newspaper Akhbar Al Youm.  The Council recently voiced its opinion on freedom of religion, claiming that the death penalty should be applied to Moroccan Muslims who convert from Islam. According to another Moroccan website Medias24, this issue was discussed all day long this past Tuesday on Moroccan radio.

I’m thinking Yes.

Read it.

 It has seemed quite strange to see how strongly Rogers has been fighting for CISPA, refusing to even acknowledge the seriousness of the privacy concerns. At other times, he can’t even keep his own story straight about whether or not CISPA is about giving information to the NSA (hint: it is). And then there was the recent ridiculousness with him insisting that the only opposition to CISPA came from 14-year-old kids in their basement. Wrong and insulting.

Of course, as we’ve noted all along, all attempts at cybersecurity legislation have always been about money. Mainly, money to big defense contractors aiming to provide the government with lots of very expensive “solutions” to the cybersecurity “problem” — a problem that still has not been adequately defined beyond fake scare stories. Just last month, Rogers accidentally tweeted (and then deleted) a story about how CISPA supporters, like himself, had received 15 times more money from pro-CISPA group that the opposition had received from anti-CISPA groups.

So it seems rather interesting to note that Rogers’ wife, Kristi Clemens Rogers, was, until recently, the president and CEO of Aegis LLC a “security” defense contractor company, whom she helped to secure a $10 billion (with a b) contract with the State Department. The company describes itself as “a leading private security company, provides government and corporate clients with a full spectrum of intelligence-led, culturally-sensitive security solutions to operational and development challenges around the world.”

Although the article doesn’t say, Rogers is a Republican, which makes this sort of corruption even more shameful. Black people are famous for criticizing other black people for ‘acting white’; I think it would be a Good Thing if Republicans started criticizing other Republicans for ‘acting Democrat’.

Read it.

Consider some facts: St. Mark Cathedral—named after the author of the Gospel of the same name who brought Christianity to Egypt some 600 years before Amr bin al-As brought Islam by the sword—is not simply “just another” Coptic church to be attacked and/or set aflame by a Muslim mob (see my forthcoming book, Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians, for a comprehensive idea of past and present Muslim attacks on Coptic churches). Instead, it is considered the most sacred building for millions of Christians around the world—above and beyond the many millions of Copts in and out of Egypt. As the only apostolic see in the entire continent of Africa, its significance and evangelizing mission extends to the whole continent, including nations such as Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria, to name just a few. As an apostolic see—the actual seat of an apostle of Christ—the cathedral further possesses historical significance for Christianity in general.

In short, Muslim mobs—aided and abetted by the state of Egypt under Muslim Brotherhood tutelage—did not merely attack yet one more Coptic church, but rather committed an act of war against all Christianity. Such an open attack on a Christian center which holds symbolic and historic significance for all Christians—St. Mark, whose relics are in the cathedral and who authored one of the four Gospels of the Bible, belongs to all Christians not just Copts—was an open attack on a universally acknowledged Christian shrine. It was precisely these sorts of attacks on Eastern and Orthodox churches—including the destruction of the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem in 1009—that presaged the way for the crusades (back when Christianity was not utterly fragmented and disunited as it is today).

James Taranto turns over a rock.

Thus today’s insight: To be white in America is to have the privilege of being able to define one’s political identity in terms of one’s own superiority, whether real or imagined, over other members of one’s own race.

Read it.

During famines, desperate people often try to survive by eating things like grass and tree bark. That doesn’t do much to alleviate their hunger since trees and grass are chiefly composed of cellulose which people’s guts cannot digest. Starch, found in wheat, corn, rice, and potatoes, makes up a big portion of the modern human diet. Now researchers at Virginia Tech have announced in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they can turn cellulose into edible starch.

Think of it as biodiesel for people.

Read it.

HSAs are tax-advantaged savings accounts used for health expenses, to meet your insurance deductible.  Nearly 15 million Americans have adopted HSA plans in recent years. These HSA accountholders will collectively save $2.3 billion for the 2012 tax year.

During the debate over Obamacare, many experts feared that its enactment would destroy Health Savings Accounts. But in a surprise turn of events, the exact opposite appears to have happened.

It has become clear—even to President Obama—that in the near future HSAs will be the most “affordable” options in the “Affordable” Health Care Act. As a result, the administration is clearing the way for HSAs to be the low cost option on public exchanges.

A possible silver lining to ObamaCare. I am a big fan of Health Savings Accounts; they effectively allow individuals to get the same tax break for health care expenses that businesses get.

Breitbart News gives you a little access.

I haven’t read it, and I don’t intend to, but I predict that it will turn out to be a piece of shit, because huge bills that Democrats have a hand in making always are.

Go ahead — prove me wrong.

Read it.

Self-tracking is a budding area of research for pollsters — it was the headliner metric for the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s last health-focused report in January. Pew spoke to patients, not doctors, and found that 69 percent of people said they tracked at least one health metric, although half of those people were just tracking in their heads. More to the point, Pew’s research found that about a third of trackers share their data with someone else, and of those who share, about half share with a clinician. So if all the numbers are accurate, about one sixth of Americans are sharing health data with clinicians, but seven out of ten physicians have at least one patient in that group.

Including me — I track my weight and blood pressure daily, and give the printout to my primary care physician every six months when I go in for my checkup.

Steve Sailer reminds us that what is ‘in the news’ is a cleverly constructed shadow play in service of the Crust.

Covert agendas play a sizable role in the gun-control debate. If you were to pay attention solely to the handful of homicide cases the press emphasizes, you would assume that the country’s biggest problem is white males committing mass shootings. Yet the total death toll from all mass shootings in the entire country over the last three decades is only about as bad as 2012’s murder count in Chicago alone.

The vast majority of which was — dare we say it? — the result of activities of Persons of Color.

As I pointed out in “Guns and Race” a couple of weeks ago, an obscure Obama Administration report noted that blacks accounted for 56.9 percent of all gun-homicide offenders over the years 1980-2008. During that era, blacks comprised about 13 percent of the American population, so the black rate of gun homicides was far greater than that of the rest of the population.

But you won’t read that ‘in the news’.

Read it.

Organized labor was instrumental in getting the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, but more recently has voiced concerns that the law could lead members to lose their existing health plans. The United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers is believed to be the first union to initially support the law and later call for its repeal.

I suspect that they didn’t so much see the light as felt the heat.

B.O.G.U.S.

Read it.

Monday, Regal Entertainment Group, the largest movie theatre chain in the country, announced that thousands of employees will have their work hours cut — as a direct result of the added cost of the new ObamaCare mandates that become effective later this year.

In a memo to employees, management was blunt: “To comply with the Affordable Care Act, Regal had to increase our health care budget to cover those newly deemed eligible based on the law’s definition of a full-time employee.”

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

Read it.

Read it.

The head of an extremist Jordanian Muslim Salafi group says he’s “happy to see the horror in America” after the explosions in Boston.

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?
That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.
Of course, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

Read it.

The UK’s “irrational” use of biofuels will cost motorists around £460 million over the next 12 months, a think tank says.

A report by Chatham House says the growing reliance on sustainable liquid fuels will also increase food prices.

The author says that biodiesel made from vegetable oil was worse for the climate than fossil fuels.

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

Read it.

Automation lowers costs by eliminating manual labor.

Ponder the positive and negative externalities of that.

Read it.

Sometimes the system works.

Read it.

Welcome to the buckraking phase of the Obama era. If the campaign was about hope, and the early presidency was about change, increasingly the administration has settled into a kind of normalcy in which it accommodates itself to Washington far more than Washington accommodates itself to Obama. That’s not necessarily a bad thing when the result is a bipartisan schmooze-fest at the Jefferson Hotel. But when it comes to the D.C. custom of trading a White House security clearance for a private-sector sinecure, there’s a lot to be said for not going native so easily.

…

There is, for example, a loose taboo against joining a K Street lobbying shop and explicitly trading on administration connections. And while joining a consulting firm is acceptable, those who do are reluctant to work for clients reviled by liberals: gun makers, tobacco companies, Big Oil, union busters. Above all, there is a simple prohibition against excessive tackiness. “It’s like: Don’t embarrass yourself. You were part of something special,” says a longtime Obama adviser. “I think if [Obama] were to send an all-staff e-mail, it would be along the lines of Ron Burgundy—‘Stay classy, San Diego.’ ”

Read it.

As I’m sure we all have.

Some people just have too much time on their hands.

Read it.

The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless the latter is identified with the number of patents awarded – which, as evidence shows, has no correlation with measured productivity. This is at the root of the “patent puzzle”: in spite of the enormous increase in the number of patents and in the strength of their legal protection we have neither seen a dramatic acceleration in the rate of technological progress nor a major increase in the levels of R&D expenditure – in addition to the discussion in this paper, see Lerner [2009] and literature therein.

As we shall see, there is strong evidence, instead, that patents have many negative consequences. Both of these observations, the evidence in support of which has grown steadily over time, are consistent with theories of innovation that emphasize competition and first-mover advantage as the main drivers of innovation and directly contradict “Schumpeterian” theories postulating that government granted monopolies are crucial in order to provide incentives for innovation.

The differing predictive and explanatory powers of the two alternative classes of models persist when attention is shifted to the historical evidence on the life-cycle of industries. The initial eruption of small and large innovations leading to the creation of a new industry – from chemicals to cars, from radio and TV to personal computers and investment banking – is seldom, if ever, born out of patent protection and is, instead, the fruits of highly competitive-cooperative environments.

Read it.

Well, Ponzi schemes are like that — eventually you run out of new suckers to include in the program, and it all comes apart.

Read it.

Gallup noted that the most recent high of Americans viewing taxes as fair came in 2003, after then-President George W. Bush implemented tax cuts weeks after the Iraq War started. Sixty-four percent viewed their federal income tax as fair at the time.

“Perceptions of income tax fairness, perhaps surprisingly, vary little by household income level. Fifty-seven percent of those whose annual household income level is below $75,000 say their taxes are fair, as do 54 percent of those whose income is $75,000 or above,” Gallup’s Jeffrey M. Jones wrote in the release. “In fact, there are no notable differences by most major demographic groups. The biggest differences are based on political affiliation, with Democrats and political liberals much more likely than Republicans and conservatives to believe their taxes are fair.”

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

Read it.

Well, they can just join the club.

David Friedman blows the whistle.

 A recent post by Chuck Marr on a Huffington Post blog provides a nice demonstration of how to use true facts to support a false claim. It contains a series of charts with information on taxes, mostly federal. One of them is labeled: “Bush Tax Cuts Heavily Tilted to the Top,” and shows that the percentage increase in after-tax income as a result of the tax cuts was almost three times as large for taxpayers with incomes of more than a million dollars as for those with incomes of $40,000-$50,000.

What it does not mention, but what one can see from other charts on the page, is that high income taxpayers pay in federal taxes about three times as large a fraction of their income as middle income tax payers. So if the tax cuts reduced everyone’s taxes by the same percentage, the result would have been almost exactly what the chart shows. Indeed, the author could have made his claim even more striking by pointing out that taxpayers near the bottom of the income distribution got nothing out of the tax cuts—and neglecting to mention that the reason was that they were not paying any taxes.

It’s all about what fits the Narrative, and a Voice of the Crust like Huffington Post gets with the program.

Read  it.

What went wrong? Plenty. The stimulus was rushed to passage based on economic assumptions that remain hotly contested. Its implementation was marred by politics, logistics, and red tape. And the aid it directed toward the country’s least well off may have undermined the very recovery it was designed to hasten. This is what happens when politicians insist that something big must be done, even if they’re not sure what that something should be.

Read it.

Scientists have implanted a laboratory-grown kidney into a rat for the first time, a medical milestone that they hope will soon lead to similar solutions for human beings needing full organ transplants. “It’s the first one ever that’s been implanted into an animal,” said Harald Ott, MD and PhD at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Regenerative Medicine and the lead researcher behind the project, to The Verge.

Ever notice how rats get all the good stuff?

Read it.

Read it.

Here is something I don’t understand: liberals are often revealed as vile, vulgar hatemongers–not all of them, of course, but far too many–yet they never seem to pay a penalty at the polls. Why is that?

Margaret Thatcher’s death has been the latest occasion for the Left to show its true stripes. All across the U.K., there have been demonstrations–vulgar at best, and violent at worst. In Bristol, lefties celebrating a Thatcher “death street party” started fires, destroyed property and battled police….

…

Here in the U.S., the last similar display from the Left was the Occupy Wall Street movement, but liberal violence and general hatefulness have a long and consistent history. Recall, to cite just one of many examples, the liberals who attacked buses containing delegates and dropped cement blocks on cars from a highway overpass during the 2008 Republican convention in St. Paul. It is notable that violent leftists are never denounced by Democratic Party politicians. On the contrary, as we have seen most recently with Kathy Boudin, they find them well-paid jobs as professors when they can. And it is not hard to understand why liberals tend to be so angry; nearly every communication that emanates from the Democratic Party is a hateful, over-the-top smear against Republicans.

Read it. And watch the video.

Of course, people will say, ‘Fine — who needs all that money?’ But remember that the thin edge of the wedge eventually becomes much larger — originally, the income tax rate was only 1%, and we see what happened there.

Read it.

Similar to the classes Communist regimes used to run where students indulged in ‘self-criticism’ for being so gauche as to be not workers or peasants.

Of course, Officially Non-White people could eliminate all of this ‘white privilege’ merely by ‘acting white’ — which, of course, they will never do.

Cathy Young calls him out.

This deplorable history of sexism is very real. Yet to insist that any mention of a woman’s attractiveness must therefore be off-limits in any work-related setting is, in effect, to let sexism win. Such a taboo subtly perpetuates, rather than undercut, the notion that a beautiful woman is unlikely to be smart or competent (after all, even to acknowledge her beauty implies it’s the sole basis of her success!). It also promotes a blatant double standard: since men do not face the same cultural burden of being “the fair sex,” a female politician can compliment a man’s good looks with impunity. (Would eyebrows have been raised if Hillary Clinton had referred to San Francisco’s mayor Gavin Newsom as the country’s best-looking mayor?)

Read it.

A Kickstarter project to turn back the clock.

The Vermont Sail Freight Project is a contemporary re-invention of a historic regional foodway, and is sponsored by the Willowell Foundation of Monkton, Vermont.  In 2013, the Sail Freight team, led by farmer Erik Andrus and Willowell staff, will build a simple low-cost sailing barge 39 feet in length, 10′ in beam (width) and with 12 tons of cargo capacity with which to trade Vermont-produced foods in New York City and the Lower Hudson.

All this with nary a Teamster in sight. What’s not to like?

Read it.

It is possible to imagine another Times writer discussing higher education’s role as a class sorting machine. But the liberals would end the op-ed with a call for admitting more people to college, and Brooks would trail off into nostalgia for the alleged era when Ivy graduates had more noblesse oblige and the rest of the country reciprocated by respecting their authority. And maybe someone would try to argue for a “national service” program, the better to get the elite out into the world for a bit before they run it. Douthat, who has a healthy decentralist streak, seems to suggest there’s something wrong with the whole setup to begin with. Better still, he’s doing it in the paper that serves as the class in question’s community bulletin board.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Steve Sailer says what others merely think.

     In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class.…I learned to look on the commercial middle class with loathing and contempt. Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher, which was also the revenge of the commercial middle class. The academics lost their power and prestige and the business people took over. The academics never forgave Thatcher….

The only thing I’d add is that in reality, a commercial middle class usually breeds its own critics. And I’m using “breeds” literally. Consider the perhaps most prestigious clan in the history of the British intellectual middle class — the Darwin-Galton-Wedgwood-Benn-Keynes agglomeration.

Deborah Copaken Kogan, as one might expect from a female writing in The Nation, demonstrates that even people who make their living from words can’t seem to grasp that ‘inequality’ and ‘inequity’ are not synonyms. Ah, well. Life is full of whiners.

John Derbyshire remembers Margaret Thatcher.

One of the first things Margaret Thatcher’s government did was to remove exchange controls. It was a small thing but a blessing for ordinary people like me. (For the rich there had always been ways to move money across borders. Governments of any party rarely inconvenience the rich.)

John describes this as ‘semi-Sovietized’, and that’s pretty accurate. These policies were what made the Rolling Stones tax exiles and move George Harrison to write ‘The Taxman’ — not that it prevented either from voting for the same twits who originated that legislation in the first place; creative people seem to have a problem connecting those particular dots.

 Capitalism, like dentistry, is a matter of creative destruction. There is nothing creative in the Thatcher-haters’ cruelty. It’s just purposeless malice.

Yup.

Read it.

One problem that stems from the relatively unchanged nature of higher education is its geography. The country looks very different from the way it did 100 years ago, but the distribution of our leading universities still has 19th-century echoes.

Yeah, the fact that the top colleges are located in Blue areas leads to an economy dominated by socialists, and we all know where that leads — East Germany. (Of course, you won’t read that in the New York Times….)

Read it.

One reason why we need to shut down our conscious selves to perform routine maintenance is that our visual system is so greedy. Glucose metabolism is a zero-sum game, and functional MRI studies show a radically different pattern of glucose metabolism during sleep, with distinct regions activated either in active or sleep states but not in both. As soon as we close our eyes for sleep, a large proportion of available energy is freed up. Just as most planes must be grounded to refuel, we must be asleep to restore our brains for the next day. A radical sleep technology would permit the equivalent of aerial refuelling, which extends the range of a single flight (or waking day).

…

Never mind that if we are to speak of maintaining natural sleep patterns, that ship sailed as soon as artificial light turned every indoor environment into a perpetual mid-afternoon in May.

Read it.

The man who spread himself across a street in Mortlake, London, after falling from an aircraft undercarriage has been identified. Police finally managed to crack open the SIM in his pocket and study it to discover who he was.

Jose Matada was the chap’s name and he was 30 years old, the BBC tells us. He landed on Portman Avenue with a “massive bang” at 7.42am on 8 September last year, but the impact of the fall made identifying him a huge challenge.

An aeroplane from Angola was coming into Heathrow at the time, and would have dropped its landing gear at roughly the right moment to place the bloke on that street. But despite creating a photofit of his face and circulating copies of his tattoos, it was the SIM that finally gave investigating officers a name.

You don’t want to be the guy who they identify by his tattoos. Trust me on this.

Gavin MacInnes lets it go.

Examining New York politics is like dipping a ladle into the sewer: Any random sampling will yield nothing but toxic shit water.

New York City’s 2013 mayoral election is seven months away, but the stench of New York politics is already intense enough to make you gag.

Welcome to the Blue States. Be careful not to step in the diversity.

Read it.

Don’t you just love that government-provided health care? Don’t you just wish we had a system like that in the United States?