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Hey, me too.

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     One thing that’s remarkable about the testimony of Rachel Jeantel is that it puts on display a black whom one would simply never see under the standard media unspoken rules. Any depiction of a black who came across as so deeply ignorant, frankly stupid, transparently hostile, and flagrantly dishonest would be met with accusations of racism because it is so unflattering. One sees such blacks turning up in youtube videos of course, but I’m not sure I’ve seen any such in the media, even in news reports of crimes, which, I’m sure, are likewise sanitized for public view.

Of course not. It wouldn’t fit The Narrative.

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The diplomat had reportedly been operating at high levels of government. Alan Mzengi was found to be liable for a $1 million civil judgement for forcing a young woman to live and work against her will as a domestic servant on U.S. soil. The judgement came in 2008 after the woman escaped from four years of slavery. She had been kept against her will by the diplomat and forced to be a domestic servant for no pay.

The diplomat fled back to Tanzania in order to avoid consequences for forcibly enslaving the African woman. The Tanzanian president then allowed the slave “owner” to function as an advisor and suffer no legal consequence at home, according to the Washington Post.

Which won’t affect the next fulmination by the Congressional Black Caucus concerning all those Southern Racists Who Would Have Slavery Back In A Second If They Could.

Read it.

Yet another reason to avoid Facebook, a leading indicator of the degeneration of our times.

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This guys is obviously unaware that There Is A Consensus. He’d better get with the program.

‘The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind.’ — Thomas Paine , Common Sense

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To anyone that’s ever broken a bone, the negatives of traditional plaster casts are familiar: they’re cumbersome, heavy, and can get rather smelly. Victoria University of Wellington graduate Jake Evill is looking to change all that with his Cortex cast. A mere concept for now, Evill says the cast — which is specifically fitted to each wearer based on X-rays of the fractured bone and a 3D scan of its surrounding limb — introduces many benefits. First and foremost, you’d be able to wear a longsleeve shirt over the lightweight, ventilated nylon cast. The open design is also shower-friendly, unlike bulky plaster casts.

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“The overthrow of the ancien régime in France, the Tsars in Russia, the Shah of Iran, Saddam in Iraq and Mubarak in Egypt may have produced benefits for many people,” writes Gray, “but increased freedom was not among them. Mass killing, attacks on minorities, torture on a larger scale, another kind of tyranny, often more cruel than the one that was overthrown—these have been the results. To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake.”

This sort of realism is ‘progressives’ deny, and why they keep getting the rest of us into scrapes, like Bullwinkle having another go at the hat — ‘This time for sure!’

Such thinking puts Gray severely at odds with the predominant sentiment of modern Western man—indeed, essentially with the foundation of Western thought since at least the French Encyclopedists of the mid-eighteenth century, who paved the way for the transformation of France between 1715 and 1789. These romantics—Diderot, Baron d’Holbach, Helvétius and Voltaire, among others—harbored ultimate confidence that reason would triumph over prejudice, that knowledge would prevail over ignorance, that “progress” would lift mankind to ever-higher levels of consciousness and purity. In short, they foresaw an ongoing transformation of human nature for the good.

And they were wrong–with results as you see them: 12 million dead from Hitler, 20 million from Lenin and Stalin, 30 million from Mao … and that doesn’t include the small fry like Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Ruhollah Khomeini, and Saddam Hussein.

The noted British historian J. B. Bury (1861–1927) captured the power of this intellectual development when he wrote, “This doctrine of the possibility of indefinitely moulding the characters of men by laws and institutions . . . laid a foundation on which the theory of the perfectibility of humanity could be raised. It marked, therefore, an important stage in the development of the doctrine of Progress.”

And we’ve all been suffering since.

We must pause here over this doctrine of progress. It may be the most powerful idea ever conceived in Western thought—emphasizing Western thought because the idea has had little resonance in other cultures or civilizations. It is the thesis that mankind has advanced slowly but inexorably over the centuries from a state of cultural backwardness, blindness and folly to ever more elevated stages of enlightenment and civilization—and that this human progression will continue indefinitely into the future. “No single idea,” wrote the American intellectual Robert Nisbet in 1980, “has been more important than, perhaps as important as, the idea of progress in Western civilization.” The U.S. historian Charles A. Beard once wrote that the emergence of the progress idea constituted “a discovery as important as the human mind has ever made, with implications for mankind that almost transcend imagination.” And Bury, who wrote a book on the subject, called it “the great transforming conception, which enables history to define her scope.”

This is the great intellectual STD from which all of modern society now suffers.

Gray rejects it utterly. In doing so, he rejects all of modern liberal humanism. “The evidence of science and history,” he writes, “is that humans are only ever partly and intermittently rational, but for modern humanists the solution is simple: human beings must in future be more reasonable. These enthusiasts for reason have not noticed that the idea that humans may one day be more rational requires a greater leap of faith than anything in religion.” In an earlier work, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, he was more blunt: “Outside of science, progress is simply a myth.”

I like him already.

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A 15-year-old high school junior from Victoria, British Columbia, Ann Makosinski, created a hollow flashlight powered by the holder’s body heat for the Google Science Fair. The invention made her one of 15 finalists, who will travel to Mountain View, California for a prize ceremony held this coming September. Google will choose one winner each out of three age groups, then from that will decide on the final winner, who will receive a grand prize of $50,000 and a trip to the Galapagos Islands.

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Endgame Syria is a free interactive exploration of events unfolding in Syria today. Rejected by Apple’s App Store but now on PC, Endgame:Syria is a newsgame; a simulation that uses interactivity to explore a real world event. The original version was developed in around two weeks, this updated version allows users to explore the options open to the Syrian rebels as they push the ongoing conflict to its endgame. Each choice the user makes has consequences – the types of military units you may deploy, the political paths you choose to tread. Not only does each choice impact the current situation but your choices may also impact the final outcome. Users can play and replay events to see how different choices on the ground might lead to different outcomes. There is more info, links and sources data on the game’s site. Will you choose to accept peace at any cost? Can you win the war and the peace that follows? Find out in Endgame Syria.[emphasis added]

Oh, guess what, Political Correctness isn’t just a government problem. Every Hollywood movie that attempts to deal with terrorism can’t have Muslim jihadists as the villains, because it would ignite a political firestorm even if the ‘progressives’ in charge of the movie business could bring themselves to do it; and now game developers can’t deal with controversial subjects in Apple-platform games because the New Age metrosexuals in charge in Cupertino won’t allow it.

Rawlings previously produced strategy title Endgame: Syria that used game mechanics to explore that nation’s civil war. Endgame: Syria drew some criticism for using real-life current events in a game, and Apple blocked its release on the iOS App Store. The studio was able to get it back on the App Store after removing the references to real places and governments. Rawlings feels that this is an unfair double standard.

No shit. I remember the halcyon days when I was a Lifetime Subscriber to Strategy & Tactics magazine, where it seemed as if every issue had a new game that focused on a tense situation ‘ripped from the headlines’. But that was The Good Old Days, and Jim Dunnigan buckled under to nobody.

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What would The Working Class be without Karl Marx? Not much, apparently.

Karl Marx, writes Jonathan Sperber in this splendid new biography, was “a true and loyal friend, but a vehement and hateful enemy”. To be in his small circle was to feel part of something historic, but also to be exposed to constant critical scrutiny. Once he feared for his political reputation, Marx let no politesse hold him back.

Sounds a lot like Ayn Rand.

It’s certainly true that Marx needs to be understood in his nineteenth century context. It is also true that, as an intellectual, he must be rooted in the canon of political thought his century inherited. As Sperber neatly puts it, Marx’s “communist aspirations” derived from “ideas about abolishing distinctions between individuals and civil society”. These ideas were far from novel.

Baltimore Pit Beef.

Fracture: Glass Photos

Whisk: Home Cooking Made Easy

Squatty Potty. I am not making this up.

NeverWet

RiffUp

SmartHeadlight

9 surprising foods that fight pain

Steve Sailer sums up.

It’s bizarre that immigrant groups—who chose to come to America, warts and all—are recipients of affirmative action. Indeed, it’s so inexplicable that virtually nobody attempts to explicate it. Even more strangely, opponents of ethnic preferences have largely failed to attack this indefensible salient. (Likewise, the quotas angle goes almost unmentioned in the immigration “debate” such as it is.)

…

The more cunning colleges have figured out that the solution to their “black lack” is to give affirmative action to “African Americans” who aren’t very black and/or aren’t very American. (Barack Obama is the very model of the modern affirmative-action admittee.) In 2004, black Harvard professors Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier estimated that only one-third of black Harvard undergraduates were (like Michelle Obama) descended from American slaves through all four grandparents.

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So he actually is a Democrat after all. Somehow I always suspected as much.

Most of the damage to the Republican party is from RINOs like Bush. (Bloomberg, are you listenin’?)

Of course, the reason they’re wringing their hands of this NOW is because they’re trying to distract from the tyrannous activities of The Magic Negro. Who knows? It might even work.

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Yellowish tubes that feed on microorganisms, tunicates are the only animal known to produce cellulose. Cellulose breaks down into sugars that can produce bioethanol. Tunicate are also 60 percent protein when dried and a rich source of omega 3 fatty acids, making them a sought-after addition to salmon feed. They can produce 100 times more protein per 10 square feet than any land-based protein source.

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In the future, patients and doctors will monitor health with data collected constantly inside the body and beamed directly to their mobile device or computer.

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To a surprising degree, the Japanese language is littered with foreign loan words, many of them English. Terms ranging from “internet” to the quotidian “rice,” and everything in between, get shoehorned into the native syllabary, turning “compliance” into the tongue-twisting “conpuraiansu.” Many, including the country’s Ministry of Education, have recognized the increase in foreign vernacular as a problem, but one 71-year-old man from Gifu Prefecture has had enough. He’s suing the national broadcaster NHK for “undue mental distress” because he can’t understand what people are saying on TV.

Read it.

Former Roseanne writer Joss Whedon is very upset with Clarence Thomas for his failure to support affirmative action:

Clarence Thomas is against affirmative action. There isn’t a hashtag big enough to contain the irony.

Let me unpack this for you: Joss Whedon, a wealthy white liberal, thinks it’s ironic that Clarence Thomas, a black conservative who is the grandson of a sharecropper and grew up in the Jim Crow south yet managed to work his way to the nation’s highest court, isn’t grateful for the handouts that Joss and his ilk have given him. Doesn’t that uppity idiot realize that he only serves at the pleasure of those, like Mistuh Whedon, who deigned to give him a helping hand? Surely he doesn’t think he earned that spot on the Supreme Court. He couldn’t be that clueless, could he?

In a supreme bit of irony, Whedon managed to validate every single negative thing that Clarence Thomas has ever written about affirmative action. And he did it in fewer than 140 characters! Now that’s economy.

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Have you given much thought to the vast amount of material out in space? It turns out there is plenty of amazing stuff in the hundreds of asteroids that pass near Earth every year, and one startup working on getting those materials back down planetside.

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Unlike larger robots, microrobots for applications in the body are too small to carry batteries and motors. To address this challenge, we power and control robots made of magnetic materials using external magnetic fields. Developed at ETH Zurich’s  Multi-Scale Robotics Lab (MSRL), the OctoMag is a magnetic manipulation system that uses electromagnetic coils to wirelessly guide microrobots for ophthalmic surgery. The OctoMag is capable of generating magnetic forces and torques in three dimensions, and is physically restricted to a single hemisphere to allow easy access for patients and physicians. Using an early OctoMag prototype, ex-vivo experiments were performed in pig eyes to study the navigation tasks required for retinal surgery. Following these experiments, a next-generation system was built to accomodate a small animal head, allowing for in-vivo trials. With this system, mobility experiments were conducted in which a microrobot with a diameter of 285 µm (about four times the width of a hair) was navigated reliably through the eye of a rabbit, demonstrating the feasibility of using this technology in surgical applications.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

More drivel from the New York Times.

 GUN manufacturers have gone to great lengths to avoid any moral responsibility or legal accountability for the social costs of gun violence — the deaths and injuries of innocent victims, families torn apart, public resources spent on gun-related crime and medical expenses incurred.

Similarly, socialists have gone to great lengths to avoid any moral responsibility or legal accountability for the social costs of their totalitarian beliefs — the deaths and injuries of innocent victims, families torn apart, public resources wasted on socialism-related crime and poverty incurred. Oh, wait — the authors are law professors. Well, that’s even worse than being socialist.

But there is a simple and direct way to make them accountable for the harm their products cause. For every gun sold, those who manufacture or import it should pay a tax. The money should then be used to create a compensation fund for innocent victims of gun violence.

Funny, I don’t see the criminals who actually use guns to commit crimes being brought under this rubric of ‘accountable for the harm these products cause’. I guess they were just holding the thing when it decided to go off by itself. Pesky things, those guns; you never know when they’re going to take it into their heads to shoot somebody.

This proposal is based on a fundamentally conservative principle — that those who cause injury should be made to “internalize” the cost of their activity by paying for it.

So you’re a fan of more prisons, stop-and-frisk programs, and mandatory minimum sentences for gun-related crimes? And the death penalty for people who use a gun to kill somebody else? (Somehow I don’t think so….)

Now, gun manufacturers and sellers are mostly protected from lawsuits by federal law.

Primarily to keep them from being subject to lawfare by people like, well, you two.

 As it happens, a model for this approach already exists. Under the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, those injured by vaccines are eligible for compensation from a fund financed by an excise tax on the sale of every dose of vaccine. In creating this no-fault system in the 1980s, Congress sought to provide care for those injured by vaccines while protecting manufacturers from undue litigation.

No, Congress thought to stick it to the people with deep pockets when bad things happen to people who claim to have been injured by vaccines, without resort to those pesky formalities otherwise required by the law like having to prove that a certain manufacturer actually provided the vaccine that supposedly caused the injury, and indeed without resort to having to prove that the vaccine in question actually caused the injury in the first place. My torts professor used to deal with these cases on what he called Fuddlehead Friday, since he knew we were all just waiting for the weekend; perhaps understandably, most of these cases came from the California Supreme Court.

Guns, of course, are not essential for public health. But Congress has made painfully clear that it values the largely unfettered ownership of guns and their manufacture — despite the social costs of the violence that results when guns work as designed.

No, they’ve made it clear that they’ve actually read the Constitution — which, oddly enough, these ‘law professors’ appear to have dodged.

 Some of the victims of recent mass shootings — including the massacres at Aurora, Colo., Newtown, Conn., and Virginia Tech, as well as those who survived the 9/11 attack — have recently banded together to ask Congress to enact a National Compassion Fund, to make sure that charitable donations get to their victims rather than being swallowed up in administrative costs.

Oh, sure, passing the money through the Federal government is a sure cure for funds being eaten up in administrative costs. I really wonder what planet these people are from.

 Gun makers know that their products are lethal, and sometimes used illegally. They know that some of their dealers’ sales practices contribute to guns’ falling into criminal hands. They know that each year a significant number of innocent people will be killed or maimed by the use of guns. But quite often, the shooters themselves cannot be held fully or even partially accountable, financially, because they are unknown, destitute or dead.

So we’ll look under the lamp post because the light is better there. Sure, that makes perfect sense.

But why stop there?

Next up will be a tax on automobile manufacturers because of all the deaths and injuries caused by drunk drivers and illegal immigrants who can’t be bothered to carry insurance.

And how about all those uninsured people getting injured and killed? Hey, a tax on the insurance companies sounds like a lovely idea!

Read it.

Sarah Palin can’t raise your taxes. She can’t send your children to war. Yet almost five years after her failed bid to occupy Number One Observatory Circle, Palin’s Pavlovian effect on rabid liberals (and not a few conservatives) is only slightly diminished.

I don’t quite understand this phenomenon….

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According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States spent an average of $15,171 in 2010 on each student when college or vocational training was factored in—the highest in the world. The average for each elementary student was $11,000 per elementary student and more than $12,000 for each high school student. Switzerland spent $14,922 per student, Mexico averaged $2,993, and the average OECD nation spent $9,313.

The survey showed that brand-new and experienced teachers in the United States had higher salaries than most of their foreign equivalents. As a percentage of the economy, U.S. spending on education was higher than the average; the U.S. spent 7.3 percent of its economy while the average was 6.3 percent.

But all of the money spent does not guarantee success; U.S. fourth-graders ranked 11th in the world in math in 2011; U.S. eighth-graders ranked ninth. Among 15 year-olds in 2009, the math literacy rate was 31st in the world—lower than the international average—while they were 23rd in science.

Can you say ‘teacher unions’? I’m sure you can. As with any other field of human endeavor, the existence of unions corresponds to a low-quality product, and the proliferation of unions marks the lowering of that quality over time.

Oh, and aren’t government employees all unionzed now? Hmmm….

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It generally takes a decent-sized particle accelerator to produce antimatter, but a team of physicists working at the University of Michigan says they’ve developed a table-top system that can create short bursts of positrons – anti-electrons.

We have the the technology, heh heh heh….

Never fear, however: as the image below shows, a mere lump of Teflon is sufficient to absorb the positrons, so the setup doesn’t actually risk the earth-shattering kaboom of a matter-antimatter annihilation.

Well, shucks.

Lileks.

Behold the list of things I do not wish to do: yea verily, biking to work is prominent among them. Fine if you do; hats off and applause and all that, but I like driving to work.

Preach it, brother.

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No wonder Bill Clinton retired to New York. I guess Arkansas was too uptight for him.

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The business model that parents thought was an innovation, but that Labor sees as a menace, is simple but effective. You might have heard of it: cooperation.

We rent a large space for a few days, say an unused department store. Parents with clothes and children’s items to sell sign up online, enter their items into a computerized tracking system and choose their sale price. Then they bring the clothes and other items to the sale location, label them with preprinted price tags and display the clothes. Parents keep 70%; we keep 30%. It is easier than a garage sale, makes more money for parents, and shoppers efficiently find good deals.

A big part of our success are the hundreds of parents — both consignors and shoppers — who voluntarily work brief shifts to help set up before the sale starts. In exchange, these parents get to shop first with more choices and better merchandise.

In January, though, the Department of Labor noticed all this cooperation going on. Months later, investigators concluded that volunteers are “employees” under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

This means paying the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, filling out IRS paperwork and complying with who-knows-what other rules. And all for a pop-up business that lasts days.

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini

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I’m not sure I believe it, but hey, it makes a great story.

David Brooks astonishes me by having something quasi-sensible to say … although he still needs some work.

 A half-century ago, 14 percent of college degrees were awarded to people who majored in the humanities. Today, only 7 percent of graduates in the country are humanities majors. Even over the last decade alone, the number of incoming students at Harvard who express interest in becoming humanities majors has dropped by a third.

And, of course, Harvard is representative of the entire country. (Or maybe he means that if the trust-funders at Harvard can’t afford to be humanities majors, nobody can?)

Most people give an economic explanation for this decline. Accounting majors get jobs. Lit majors don’t. And there’s obviously some truth to this. But the humanities are not only being bulldozed by an unforgiving job market. They are committing suicide because many humanists have lost faith in their own enterprise.

A polite way of saying ‘perverted the living shit out of their own field’. But you can’t say that in The New York Times, unless you’re talking about George W Bush.

 Somewhere along the way, many people in the humanities lost faith in this uplifting mission. The humanities turned from an inward to an outward focus. They were less about the old notions of truth, beauty and goodness and more about political and social categories like race, class and gender. Liberal arts professors grew more moralistic when talking about politics but more tentative about private morality because they didn’t want to offend anybody.

A polite way of saying etc. etc.

So now the humanities are in crisis.

Well, no, they’re not, unless you hold to some bizarre ‘disparate impact’ theory of college majors, where the humanities are entitled to a certain percentage of the student body, and if they don’t get it, it’s a vile plot by Somebody Nefarious Probably Republicans.

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Everyone knows that stereotypes are inaccurate, especially psychologists:

[multiple quotations from unimpeachable sources, reflecting an Incontrovertible Consensus]

Except stereotypes are not inaccurate.  There are many different ways to test for the accuracy of stereotypes, because there are many different types or aspects of accuracy.  However, one type is quite simple — the correspondence of stereotype beliefs with criteria.  If I believe 60% of adult women are over 5′ 4″ tall, and 56% voted for the Democrat in the last Presidential election, and that 35% of all adult women have college degrees, how well do my beliefs correspond to the actual probabilities?  One can do this sort of thing for many different types of groups.

And lots of scientists have.  And you know what they found?  That stereotype accuracy — the correspondence of stereotype beliefs with criteria — is one of the largest relationships in all of social psychology.  The correlations of stereotypes with criteria range from .4 to over .9, and average almost .8 for cultural stereotypes (the correlation of beliefs that are widely shared with criteria) and.5 for personal stereotypes (the correlation of one individual’s stereotypes with criteria, averaged over lots of individuals).  The average effect in social psychology is about .20.  Stereotypes are more valid than most social psychological hypotheses.

The New Republic, a Voice of the Crust, is forced to admit the truth: Ain’t no such thing as Global Warming.

Even as scientists asserted an incontrovertible consensus on climate change, a funny thing has happened over the last 15 years: Global warming has slowed down. Since 1998, the warmest year of the twentieth century, temperatures have not kept up with computer models that seemed to project steady warming; they’re perilously close to falling beneath even the lowest projections.

I got your incontrovertible consensus, right here.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, deals some inconvenient truth.

 The pretense of science is not science. If government officials truly wish to be scientifically driven, they would allow each of us adults to choose which drugs we wish to take, regardless of the objective likelihood that someone will die or be seriously injured if he or she chooses to be treated with some drug.

Put differently, the scientifically correct level of riskiness of drugs for me is whatever level of riskiness I choose to tolerate. I — not some third party, not even one with an M.D. and who is appointed by government — am the only person on Earth capable of knowing the truth about what is, for me, the appropriate level of riskiness of drugs. Ditto for you.

Read it.

The protesters claim cheating is endemic in China and that sitting the exams without help puts their children at a disadvantage.

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Dr. Rafael Grossmann, of the Eastern Maine Medical Center, recently performed his first Google surgery with Google Glass in tow. As far as we can tell, it’s also the first such Google Glass-equipped surgery in the device’s history – complete with a corresponding Google Glass Hangout (which wasn’t open to the public, for those looking to tune in to a live surgery when the thrill of a YouTube video just isn’t enough anymore).

“By performing and documenting this event, I wanted to show that this device and its platform, are certainly intuitive tools that have a great potential in Healthcare, and specifically for surgery, could allow better intra-operative consultations, surgical mentoring and potentiate remote medical education, in a very simple way,” Grossmann writes.

No surprises.

Wonder whether it will lower his malpractice insurance rates?

Jake Knapp, a guy who works for Google Ventures, channels Edmund Burke.

Some ideas are stacked up on shelves because, for one reason or another, they’re just bad. Others are set aside because, while they might be good, they’re either really hard to execute or the team isn’t ready to pursue them. Or maybe the timing isn’t right or the person who had the idea doesn’t know how to convince others of its merit. Regardless, once an idea begins to age, it can be difficult to tell whether it has potential. All old ideas are then sullied with the bad-idea funk and people forget how promising those good ideas once were. After a while, it’s hard to tell them apart.

…

Making the decision to double down on something old — especially something that hadn’t worked yet — can be difficult. New ideas are fun, and they’ve got that new idea smell. It’s easy to get excited about them. As CustomMade CEO Mike Salguero said, “Building something new is far more tempting.”

But even famous inventors got famous with old ideas. Take Thomas Edison and the light bulb. Greatest invention of all time, right? And the universal symbol for having an idea. But wait. The light bulb was invented in 1840 — seven years before Thomas Edison was even born. So while he didn’t invent the light bulb, he figured out how to make it commercially viable. How? By creating a vacuum with the recently introduced Sprengel pump, invented by… you guessed it, some dude named Hermann Sprengel. The light bulb wasn’t a brand-new idea for Edison. It was an old idea that was difficult to execute on. It was the Mailbox of the 1800s.

So the next time you’re stumped, the next time you don’t know how to proceed, the next time you’re tempted to invent new ideas, take a good long look at your old ones. There might be a light bulb in there somewhere.

Read it.

Scientists say they found linguistic patterns they believe to be meaningful words within the text.

Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

What he said.

David Friedman asks an important question.

As best I understand the view, at least the version presented in the book I have just been reading, all Muslims eventually make it to heaven—although that has to be qualified by the observation that someone with sufficiently heretical beliefs doesn’t count as a Muslim even if he thinks he does. Punishment is what a Muslim has to go through before he gets there, reward is what he gets when he finally makes it. Hell, for Muslims, is purgatory. It is permanent only for some non-Muslims.

Read it.

The battle over math education is often conceived as a referendum on progressive ideals, with those on the reform side as the clear winners. This is reflected, for instance, in the terms that reformists employ in defending their preferred programs. The staunchest supporters of reform math are math teachers and faculty at schools of education. While some of these individuals maintain that the standard algorithms are simply too hard for many students, most take the following, more plausible tack. They insist that the point of math classes should be to get children to reason independently, and in their own styles, about numbers and numerical concepts. The standard algorithms should be avoided because, reformists claim, mastering them is a merely mechanical exercise that threatens individual growth. The idea is that competence with algorithms can be substituted for by the use of calculators, and reformists often call for training students in the use of calculators as early as first or second grade.

Reform math has some serious detractors. It comes under fierce attack from college teachers of mathematics, for instance, who argue that it fails to prepare students for studies in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. These professors maintain that college-level work requires ready and effortless competence with the standard algorithms and that the student who needs to ponder fractions — or is dependent on a calculator — is simply not prepared for college math. They express outrage and bafflement that so much American math education policy is set by people with no special knowledge of the discipline.

The goal of pre-college education ought to be inculcation of those facts and skills that will make life easier for the ordinary citizen, including but not limited to getting a remunerative job and exercising good judgment in daily life. Treating every child in America as a potential trust-fund baby whose chief problem is how to best ‘actualize’ himself (or herself) is what has produced the massive illiteracy and innumeracy that plagues our population in These Degenerate Modern Times.

If I had a child, which thank God I don’t, I would bend every effort to keeping that child safe from anybody who had a degree in Education as I would from a carrier of a communicable disease.

Jerry Pournelle makes a good point:

The problem is that we no longer know what the public schools are for, and we no longer recognize that a good public school system would make high school the normal education for citizens, with junior colleges to teach skills not so easily learned in apprenticeships, colleges as the place for those who want more education or need some credentials to make a living (teachers, accountants) and universities for those who are seriously going into professions needing high levels of technical competence. Liberal arts colleges we will leave for another discussion – there are many publications on that.

But the essential point is that public education can’t give everyone the same education. We need not go to the extremes they have in Japan and other places where early examination scores determine the course of your education and your life from then on; but we do need to recognize that not everyone needs to know algebra and calculus, and trying to bestow that as a right is to doom the ones who should know it to being forced to learn at the pace of those who never will learn them.

I second Jerry’s recommendation to read Jacques Barzun’a A Teacher in America.

Read it.

The Children of the Crust know which side their bread is buttered on.

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Because, you see, it doesn’t matter what the contract says — silly one — what matters is what the Union wants. And it wants guaranteed jobs for its members, guaranteed pay raises for its member, and guaranteed more members, so the Union officials can have guaranteed lush paychecks, guaranteed lush pensions, and guaranteed political power.

Educating kids? Sorry, that’s not in the contract.

(I repeat my question about why do all Teacher Union officials seem to be fat ugly black women. Haven’t gotten an answer yet, but I’ll keep looking.)

Read it.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said Wednesday she will vote against President Barack Obama’s nominee for U.S. trade representative.

He must REALLY suck, from a left-wing point of view.

I like him already.

Read it.

With the launch of The American Wine Consumer Coalition today, U.S. wine consumers now have a place in public policy debates for the first time ever.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that U.S. wine consumers didn’t ‘have a place in public policy debates’. I’ll bet you still don’t know why they ought to have a place in public policy debates. In fact, I challenge you to think of a legitimate reason for wine consumption to figure in ‘public policy debates’.

Well, they don’t, of course. But with tendrils of government working their way into every nook and cranny of our everyday lives, people have realized that if they’re not calling the shots, they’re the ones getting shot at.

Read it.

Despite what you’ve heard about the time stopping effects of the sequester, government hiring and spending continues. Imagine that.

Still looking for anybody that the Department of Education has educated. Still haven’t found any.

Read it.

June Atkinson, North Carolina’s superintendent of public instruction, recommended the unusual tax policy on Monday, reports The Charlotte Observer. The Democrat indicated that she would not have advocated such a teacher tax cut if teachers would instead receive a salary increase next year.

No recognition of the fact that teachers are getting more and more pay for increasingly worse and worse results.

No surprises that this was initiated by a Democrat — another payoff for one of their core constituencies, teachers and especially teachers’ unions.

And if this trick works, they’ll show you another one — perhaps state government employees (most of whom are unionized as well these days). And on, and on, and on, until the only people paying taxes are Republicans in the private sector, who will be expected to subsidize the entire Welfare State.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, reviews Hungry Ghosts by Jasper Becker.

The greatest human calamity of our century — greater than the Holocaust, greater than World War Two itself — was the famine that swept China in the “three bad years” 1959-61. At least thirty million died.

For a long time the Chinese authorities and their shills in the West denied that there had been a famine at all. As evidence of the catastrophe began to accumulate they fell back to grudging admissions of “severe shortages” caused by “natural disasters” and “adverse climatic conditions.”

Beginning in the early 1980s, researchers in the West (and a few brave Chinese) began probing into Chinese population statistics. The results of those inquiries are now in, the conclusions incontrovertible. There were no natural disasters. The climate in those years was mild. The famine was caused by the policies of the Chinese Communist government, under the inspiration of Mao Tse-tung. The facts have now been set out for a general readership by the British sinologist Jasper Becker (Hungry Ghosts, Free Press, 1997.)

The physical details of the famine — even just the bare statistics — make harrowing reading. Children seem to have suffered especially, not only in the famine itself but in later years, dying from the after-effects of severe malnutrition. In 1957 half of all Chinese who died were under 18; in 1963 half were under 10. These were not the most unfortunate. In the extremity of mass starvation, when rats and insects had long gone and the very bark from the trees had been consumed, peasants resorted to the ghastly custom of yi zi er shi — swap children, then eat. Since no-one could bear to eat his own children, you exchanged yours with a neighbor. Then you ate his, he ate yours.

Read it. And watch the video, if you have a strong stomach.

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

Read it.

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

If a government-funded study didn’t find that conservatives were more racist than liberals — that would be news. Won’t ever happen, of course.

Read it.

Here you go: chapter and verse. The basic distinction between how Islam works and how the Mafia works is in the language spoken; you can learn all you need to know about the Muslim world by watching The Sopranos.

Bottom line: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion, with which no co-existence is possible. As recent history shows, not even being a Muslim yourself makes you safe from violence at the hands of other Muslims.

But you know that … or ought to.