Check it out.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

James Fallon is a happily married father of three, an award-winning neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, the founder of several successful biotech companies, and a scientific advisor to the US Department of Defense. He is also a psychopath.

In 2005, after decades of studying the brain scans of psychopathic killers, Fallon made a startling discovery when examining his own PET scan as part of a separate research project. His brain, Fallon discovered, looked precisely like those of the cold-blooded murderers he’d spent the last 20 years scrutinizing. And after analyzing his DNA, Fallon later uncovered that his genetic profile contained several genes strongly linked to violent, psychopathic behaviors.

Not something you come across every day.

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All the British survivors have gone now (the men, that is. Just possibly there are bereaved women still alive, but nobody seems to ask about them.) In a hundred years, most things fall silent or shrivel into peculiar objects in display cases. The Crimean War began in 1854; in 1954, it was to me no more than a distant pageant of men with uncommon facial hair, pillbox hats and frogged tunics. By the time British troops went back into Afghanistan after 9/11, nobody in this country felt that the Second Boer War (1899-1902) was ‘relevant’ to what was happening. But the Great War, which ought to be in every sense history, keeps on speaking to us.

Theodore Dalrymple cuts to the chase.

There is one group of people whom it is morally permissible to hate, and of whom in these times of speech codes it is allowed or even obligatory to speak hatefully: namely, the rich. This is rather odd when one thinks of it, for economic resentment was ultimately responsible for more deaths in the last century than racial hatred. Yet to be a racist is to put yourself outside the pale of decent society; to be an economic egalitarian is to establish your generosity of spirit and profound sense of justice.

…

Still, hatred of the rich, which people do not hesitate to express as if it were a virtue to do so, rests fundamentally on two human connected emotions, both of them unattractive: envy and resentment. It also rests on the primitive notion of an economy as being a cake of a fixed size to be sliced up according to some plan, just or unjust as the case may be. On this view, a crumb in one man’s mouth is a crumb taken from another man. Poverty is the result, therefore, of wealth: which is true enough if you define poverty as being a certain percentage of the average or median income, as is all too often done. If you define poverty as the lack of subsistence or even physical ease, it is quite otherwise.

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Time is an illusion – at least in a toy model of the universe made of two particles of light. The experiment shows that what we perceive as the passage of time might emerge from the strange property of quantum entanglementMovie Camera. The finding could assist in solving the long-standing problem of how to unify modern physics.

Physicists have two ways of describing reality, quantum mechanics for the small world of particles and general relativity for the larger world of planets and black holes. But the two theories do not get along: attempts to combine their equations into a unified theory produce seemingly nonsensical answers. One early attempt in the 1960s was the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, which managed to quantise general relativity – by leaving out time altogether.

Read it.

The University of Texas at Austin’s spring 2014 course offerings include a graduate course on navigating Obamacare exchange enrollment. The university’s LBJ School of Public Affairs will give aspiring PhD students academic credit for examining the Obamacare enrollment process.

At U.T. Austin, of course, the blue pustule on the butt of Texas.

Read it.

People tend to think of food stamps as being money in the pockets of poor hungry people, but it turns out the money ends up in the pockets of the owners of Walmart, i.e., the Walton family, who are some of America’s richest. It’s somewhat similar to how Pell Grant money, billed as aid to poor college students, winds up in the pockets of relatively well-off professors. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it isn’t often mentioned in the political debates over spending on these programs.

Read it.

Bet: Nine out of ten of them is a Democrat.

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We have the technology. (Good luck getting it past the building code inspector, though.)

Read it.

Of course, no matter how bad the job market is, there are clear distinctions between those who have the privilege to opt for poverty and those who are poor through no choice of their own. If things get rough, Price has a career to fall back on.  Banjo can return to his childhood bedroom, where he stayed before hitting the road. Corey’s young charges aren’t stuck in high-crime neighborhoods with subpar schools and services like most of America’s poor. And people who choose poverty are often free to make exceptions; despite his otherwise modest lifestyle, Price pays $53 a month for a cell phone and owns both an iPad and a MacBook Air.

So it’s all just pretend, sort of an extended vacation camping trip.

The demographics of  these two groups are also starkly different: The pockets of people who choose poverty are nearly all white, experts say, while around half of the impoverished in the U.S. are black and Hispanic.

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

Read it.

With admirable clarity, Marsh goes on to explain the gerund and subjunctive, the difference between comparing to and comparing with, and the correct use of “whom”, avoidance of which has given this book its deliberately teeth-grating title. Cleverly, Marsh here inverts the usual reasons for understanding conventions. You need to know the rule for “whom” not because you should use “whom” whenever appropriate (because it will sometimes sound pompous), but because you need absolutely to avoid using “whom” when it should actually be “who”, since that will sound both pompous and stupid.

This is a book that I plan to buy.

Read it.

The big insurance companies themselves are doing fine–they just jack up their rates to cover all the new patients and benefits, passing the costs along to their customers, who no longer have a choice but to buy (and to taxpayers, who will foot the bill for new subsidies). It’s the consumers’ side of the industry that has been gutted. We cannot choose a product we like the most, but must bear one we hate the least.

When “progressives” think about “industry,” they conjure images of fat, greedy barons; groaning, suffering workers; and and dirty, polluting smokestacks. They never think of the consumers who are made happier by what industry produces. They view selling a product to a customer who needs or wants it as a form of “abuse,” which is how Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) described the individual insurance market on Wednesday.

At bottom, they have contempt for consumers, because they cannot imagine that any purchase really happens of the customer’s own free will. They refuse to accept that a family might feel happier if it can buy bare-bones insurance that allows it to pay other bills, rather than bells-and-whistles insurance that forces it to make lifestyle changes, to go into debt or to become dependent on state assistance programs like Medicaid.

Rich Lowry kicks some left-wing butt.

Henry Waxman made a plea at the end of Wednesday’s House hearing grilling of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. The California Democrat and liberal lion asked Republicans to reach across the aisle to work with Democrats to improve Obamacare.

Yes, Henry Waxman, who has made a career of ideological witch hunts and smash-mouth partisanship, wants a cease-fire over Obamacare, or so he says.

He just wants somebody else to whitewash his fence.

They insisted on this particular law, at this particular time. They own it. They own every canceled policy, every rate increase, every unintended consequence and every unpopular intended consequence. It is theirs, lock, stock and two smoking barrels.

But they can’t stop whining.

Hey, it’s what they do.

Read it.

More locovore tribulation.

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Certain types of device are specifically excluded from the rules – chiefly GPS screens, media players, satellite radio systems, and display panels that are built into the car. Whether Glass, which projects images into your eyes, can be counted among these – it’s perfectly capable of displaying GPS information, for example – is something lawyers will have to figure out.

The future is here, it’s just locked away by government gatekeepers.

You may remember the Segway….

Read it.

The way the internet currently works, content is mostly delivered to client devices such as PCs and smartphones from powerful computers called servers, which are generally housed in data centers. This represents a centralization of computing power and storage that some argue is becoming outdated, what with the beefy processors and (sometimes) capacious storage devices we carry around in our pockets these days.

The Cambridge University prototype would represent a dramatic revamp of that way of doing things. Part of a wider EU-funded project called Pursuit, the putative protocol operates more like the popular filesharing mechanism BitTorrent, in that users share information directly with one another, rather than through a server. Simplistically put, Person B might receive content from Person A’s device, then become a source for that data so Person C could then download it, and so on.

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John Boudreaux, the local official coordinating the containment of the sinkhole and the accompanying methane gas leaks, is the one who shot the video. He’s hoping all the attention will inspire help from the federal government, but that hasn’t happened yet.

Waiting has become a theme in Bayou Corne.

“My estimate for just gas removal is three to five years from now, and we’ve been in this event for a year,” says Boudreaux, who’s been at the site every day by 8AM since the sinkhole showed up. “It’s quite frustrating, the amount of time it’s taken to get things accomplished.”

Worthy of remark is the blithe assumption on the part of all that if the Federal government doesn’t do something, nothing will get done. That’s the Obamanation for you.

The sinkhole is now 25 acres at the surface, more than 350 feet deep at its lowest point, and expected to double in size. It’s mostly dormant, except for occasional earthquakes and “burping,” in which large bubbles of air, oil, and gas erupt at the surface. Every now and then it sucks down a few trees from the surrounding swamp.

Sounds like a great setting for a Stephen King novel. Still no evidence that it’s any business of the government at all, much less the Federal government.

While it hasn’t actually swallowed any property — as far as massive sinkholes go, it’s pretty tame — it has caused methane to leak into a nearby aquifer. The fear is that the highly combustible gas will collect in a crevice or enclosed space and then ignite.

So there isn’t really any danger, everybody is just afraid that there might be some danger someday somehow somewhere. So the taxpayers have to pay for ‘fixing’ it. Welcome to the Obamanation.

Even after recruiting a team of international researchers to study the sinkhole, local officials still don’t know exactly what caused it or what it will do next. Scientists are using 3D seismic imaging, a mapping technique similar to sonar, to produce mangled-looking images of the subterranean topography. Just these maps take six weeks to set up and several months to process.

So they don’t really know anything about it, except that the Federal government must Do Something, and that taxpayers have to pay for it. Welcome to the Obamanation.

Louisiana, Mississippi, and parts of Texas sit atop large salt deposits shaped like domes. The easiest way to mine the salt is to dig out a cavern, pump water through, and suck it back out as brine. The salt is then extracted and sold for use in household petrochemical products such as PVC pipe, CDs, and bleach.

So the people who do that would appear to be responsible for fixing any problems that might arise. Still no evidence that it’s any business of the Federal government.

But two years later, something happened. “Our employees came to work and looked out, and the swamp had disappeared,” says Sonny Cranch, the crisis public relations specialist hired by Texas Brine.

And was replaced by — a pond. I’m sure there’s a significant difference, there, but I can’t think of it right now.

Texas Brine is now being sued by the state of Louisiana to recoup the $8 million it has spent responding to the sinkhole, most of which went to hiring scientists to figure out what’s going on. The company is also the target of a class action suit.

So they’re suing the company that did what any normal person would have thought was the right thing to do, mainly to get them to pay for the state government poking around for they don’t know what, and without any allegation that they, you know, like broke the law or anything. There’s the Obamanation red in tooth and claw.

No one feels the pain of waiting more than the residents of Bayou Corne, who saw their quiet, tight-knit community turn into the 24-hour sinkhole show. The residents who stayed — and many who left — don’t go a day without thinking about the sinkhole.

So charge admission. These people must be illegal immigrants — they have no clue as to how Real Americans react to a crisis.

Nick Corcodilos is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Here’s how human resources departments across America “recruit.” They put impossible mixes of keywords about jobs into a computer. They press a button and pay billions of dollars for a chance that Prince Charming might materialize on their computer displays. When the prince fails to appear, they pay to play another day. (Last year, companies polled said 1.3% of their hires came from Monster.com and 1.2% from CareerBuilider. Source: CareerXroads.)

Meanwhile, in the real world, over 25 million people — many of them immensely talented and capable of riding a fast learning curve without falling off — are ready to work.

Employers need to get off their butts, remove the Taleo straps from around their necks, and go outside to actually find, meet, recruit, cajole, seduce, and convince good workers to come work for them.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, take a look at a modern shibboleth.

“Sincere” is from Latin sincerus, which means clean, pure, or sound—the real thing. Thence the word wandered into medieval Romance languages: Middle French sincérité, recorded in 1237. The ancient and medieval senses, however, applied to inanimate things: gems, wine, doctrine. It was the Reformation that decisively coupled outward show to private conscience to give us the modern notion of sincerity.

…

The problem with a community dedicated to sincerity is that impostors will quickly learn the appropriate outward show. As the old showbiz adage has it: “Sincerity—if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” (I have a feeling that one’s a favorite with political consultants, too.) La Rochefoucauld noted in 1665 that: “What usually passes for sincerity is only an artful pretense designed to win the confidence of others.”

Steve Sailer has doubts.

 Coleman’s philosophy basically appears to be the same as every other educational reformer: Be Like Me. Coleman is a bright, cultured former McKinsey consultant, and thus his Common Core write-up would be a good outline for the home schooling of David Coleman Jr.

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen much evidence that he knows much at all about, say, psychometrics.

…

The point of having standardized college admission tests is to fill in the obvious shortcoming of just using high school GPA. Making the SAT more like high school seems pointless. If we are all supposed to be into “critical thinking,” maybe we should make high school more like the old SAT?

Read it.

A little-known campaign loophole allows members of Congress to make high-interest personal loans to their own campaigns and then never pay them off—a scheme that generates passive streams of profit worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And why not? They’re not in this business for their health, you know.

“What if the problem is not bribery… but extortion?” asks Schweizer. “What if the Permanent Political Class in Washington, made up of individuals from both political parties, is using its coercive public power to not only stay in office but to threaten others and to extract wealth, and in the bargain pick up private benefits for themselves, their friends, and their families?”

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

Read it.

Note that each of these is a distortion of a Protestant distortion of a Roman Catholic distortion of true Christian theology.

To call this person a Professor of Theology is like calling an astrologer an astrophycist.

Read it.

But a funny thing is going to happen when the machines start taking the jobs of doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, managers and professors. We’re not quite there yet, but the day is coming very soon when many of what had traditionally been considered untouchable jobs will be done just as effectively or better by machines. Diagnostics and radiology will be handled by machine, with basic examination and nursing work the most common medical professions. Humans won’t be needed for legal services beyond the courtroom and mediation room itself, computer programs will pick investments better than any human, employee evaluation and workforce structuring will be better assessed by analytics than by any middle manager, and mass online education programs will render teachers and professors little more than test proctors and homework readers. None of which assumes the actual intelligent robotic AI of science fiction, which is a whole other story and is also likely coming sooner than we think. Some people see this as utopia, some as dystopia. But either way, it’s coming and coming soon.

Read it. And watch the video.

Someone has collected video clips of all of Obama’s lies in one place.

As Jimmy Carter was the worst President of the 20th century, Obama will go down in history as the worst of the 21st.

Read it.

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

How long before they in effect conscript doctors, as the National Health Service does in Britain?

Read it.

When ancient Voices of the Crust like Cohen start deserting the ship, it’s pretty clear that it’s sinking.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

As your arteries pump blood, it causes tiny movements in your eardrum at a frequency of about 1Hz. Using the earphones’ speaker as a microphone, the software can detect and interpret this movement to determine your pulse rate.

Read it.

What happens when health care is thought to be a fundamental right?

Hint: We’re all fucked, especially health care providers, who now officially become slaves.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, lays out some inconvenient truth.

Specifically, Mr. the Aaron objects to my claim that, because there are no government-enforced prohibitions on the hiring of low-skilled workers, anyone who truly believes that monopsony power in this labor market exists should start a company that uses low-skilled workers.  Mr. the Aaron calls my claim “not practical” and “comical.”  But I stand by my claim.  The researcher who found genuine monopsony power would, by starting his or her own company, earn profits and directly improve the economic lot of low-skilled workers.  The reason, again, is that the exercise of monopsony power by existing employers keeps the prevailing wage lower than the value of what workers produce, at the margin, for their employers.

In short, monopsony power in labor markets keep workers underpaid.  With all those underpaid workers out there – and because there are no government-enforced prohibitions on starting companies that employ low-skilled workers – a true believer that monopsony power is a prevalent reality can profit by exploiting this pool of underpaid workers.  Yet they do not.  They remain in their faculty offices writing papers and issuing commentary.  I continue to insist that this inaction is sufficient evidence against the proposition that monopsony power prevails in the market for low-skilled workers – and, hence, conclusive evidence that the higher the minimum wage, the worse are the job prospects of low-skilled workers.

If an academic tells you that his research finds that the price of Acme Corp. stock – a stock traded, say, on the NYSE –  is too low, what would be the first question you ask this scholar?  The first question I would ask him is “How much of that stock are you buying?”  If the scholar tells me “none,” or looks at me befuddled as he explains that he’s an academic and not an investor, I would dismiss his research on this front.  That person, as I see him here, offers proof as good as it gets that he does not believe what he asserts.

Read it.

After reading NY Times journalist Jane Brody’s condescendingly smug article about the benefits of living in a walkable neighborhood with short commutes, I wanted to know more about where she lives.

So I did some research and discovered that she owns a brownstone in Park Slope that’s valued, according to Zillow, at $2.85 million.

In the end I have to agree with the lesson from the article. If you can become rich enough to afford a $2.85 million home, you too can live in a really great location and smugly look down upon the poor people who can’t afford to live your lifestyle.

Somehow, I don’t think Obamacare will take us there….

Read it.

The Washington Times is preparing a lawsuit after federal agents raided the Maryland home of award-winning investigative reporter Audrey Hudson and confiscated her notes.

The agents had a warrant, but it was for unregistered firearms suspected of belonging to her husband. Only after they left did Hudson realize that some of her notes, which included interviews with confidential sources, were missing. The notes pertained to her reporting on problems within the Department of Homeland Security’s federal air marshal service.

During the raid, a Homeland Security agent asked Hudson if she was the reporter who had written the air marshal stories for the Times.

How’s that Hope & Change thing workin’ out for ya?

Kathy Shaidle is delightfully dyspeptic today.

So has everyone finally recovered from United Nations Day?

October 24th seems to roll around faster every year. I almost forgot to order the “blue helmet”-shaped cake with cholera-shaped sprinkles and was late mailing out the novelty parking tickets with the comically huge fines you don’t really have to pay.

Costco started selling chocolate landmines right after Labor Day. The whole thing’s become way too commercial.

Read it.

Over forty years ago, The Camp of the Saints predicted a Third World mass invasion of Europe, causing the downfall of Western civilization. This process was compressed in time so that what might take fifty years in real life took fifty days in the book. Also, the main bulk of illegal immigrants in the novel came from India. Today, while immigration to Europe comes from every corner of the planet, much of it comes from the Islamic world and Africa.

Apart from that, the novel was remarkably prescient in describing the dysfunctional mindset of the modern Western world. We have become so wedded to unsustainable humanitarian ideals that we are mentally incapable of defending our own continued national existence. When faced with millions of people coming from the global South, we simply raise a white flag and say that they are welcome to colonize our countries.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

 After nearly five years of planning, a large-scale attempt to turn a big chunk of Detroit into an urban forest is now underway. The purchase of more than 1,500 vacant city-owned lots on the city’s lower east side – a total of more than 140 acres – got final approval from Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder last week.

The buyer is Hantz Farms, and it’s a venture of financier John Hantz, who lives in the nearby Indian Village neighborhood. Indian Village is an affluent enclave of manor-scale historic homes, but much of the surrounding area is blighted. Hantz Farms will pay more than $500,000 for the land, which consists of non-contiguous parcels in an area where occupied homes are increasingly surrounding by abandoned properties.

Rich white people who’d rather be surrounded by trees than by non-rich and non-white people. Betcha most of them are Democrats.

Read it.

 The Los Angeles Unified School District’s $30 million program to outfit 47 campuses with iPads is running substantially richer than planned, with the system paying nearly $100 more per tablet than originally budgeted.

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

Read it.

What is “the cheapest, most nutritious and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history” Hint: It has 390 calories. It contains 23g, or half a daily serving, of protein, plus 7% of daily fiber, 20% of daily calcium and so on.

“McDouble”, in case you’re curious.

The outraged replies to the notion of McDouble supremacy — if it’s not the cheapest, most nutritious and most bountiful food in human history, it has to be pretty close — comes from the usual coalition of class snobs, locavore foodies and militant anti-corporate types. I say usual because these people are forever proclaiming their support for the poor and for higher minimum wages that would supposedly benefit McDonald’s workers. But they’re completely heartless when it comes to the other side of the equation: cost.

Once again, rich white people laying down the law what non-rich and non-white people ought to be eating.

Read it.

Reliance on hard facts, scientific standards, and cautious conclusions seems to be withering away. Even well-school researchers have become involved in the game of activism and alarmism, using carefully chosen rhetoric to generate headlines and fear based on inconclusive and largely meaningless studies and even unpublished research.

See e.g. the Fedearl budget or any speech by Barack Obama.

Instapundit lays it out.

Not far from me is Norris Dam, the very first dam built by the Tennessee Valley Authority. It was filled in 1936, less than three years after the Tennessee Valley Authority Act passed Congress. Note that it was not less than three years after construction started, but less than three years after the act creating the agency that built it passed Congress. Norris Dam worked, and it’s still there today, more than 70 years later.

The Obamacare website — which took longer to create — doesn’t work, and certainly won’t be around in 70 years. And if you think about it, it seems like the moon landing was one of the last times the federal government delivered a big successful program ahead of schedule. I can’t think of many others since.

Read it.

I anticipate a Democrat Congressperson will soon introduce legislation to establish a FootCare Initiative to make sure that The Poor Of The World get in on this technological bonanza. At your expense, of course.

Read it.

Rjukan, home to about 3,500 residents and situated about 70 miles west of the capital, Oslo, has installed a trio of giant mountaintop mirrors to focus light into the valley town’s square during the cold (and dark) winter months.

Good to know that somewhere has enough money to spend on such a project. I am somewhat surprised that, being NPR, they didn’t root out some homeless or oppressed people and bemoan how that money could have been better used for a soup kitchen or something.

Read it.

For years now the world has been trying to tell The Netherlands that one of its favorite holiday traditions is an unacceptably racist vestige of colonial bloodletting, but the stubborn Dutch bastards just won’t listen. So now the United Nations has decided to get involved.

So you know that stupidity will ensue.

Read it.

Historically, progressives were seen as partisans for the people, eager to help the working and middle classes achieve upward mobility even at expense of the ultrarich. But in California, and much of the country, progressivism has morphed into a political movement that, more often than not, effectively squelches the aspirations of the majority, in large part to serve the interests of the wealthiest.

The modern Regressive movement is predicated on rich white people fooling non-rich and non-white people into believing that the rich white people hate the same people that the non-rich and non-white people hate, namely rich white people, and that the rich white people will strive mightily to arrange things so that rich white people (like themselves) will suffer for the benefit of non-rich non-white people. (This is the cornerstone of every Democratic Party platform since Roosevelt.) The fact that this works so well is a primary data point for the notion that non-rich and non-white people come from the left side of the Bell Curve.

Primarily, this modern-day program of class warfare is carried out under the banner of green politics. The environmental movement has always been primarily dominated by the wealthy, and overwhelmingly white, donors and activists. But in the past, early progressives focused on such useful things as public parks and open space that enhance the lives of the middle and working classes. Today, green politics seem to be focused primarily on making life worse for these same people.

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

In this sense, today’s green progressives, notes historian Fred Siegel, are most akin to late 19th century Tory radicals such as William Wordsworth, William Morris and John Ruskin, who objected to the ecological devastation of modern capitalism, and sought to preserve the glories of the British countryside. In the process, they also opposed the “leveling” effects of a market economy that sometimes allowed the less-educated, less well-bred to supplant the old aristocracies with their supposedly more enlightened tastes.

In other words, Regressives.

The gentry, of course, care little about artificially inflated housing prices in large part because they already own theirs — often the very large type they wish to curtail. But the story is less sanguine for minorities and the poor, who now must compete for space with middle-class families traditionally able to buy homes. Renters are particularly hard hit; according to one recent study, 39 percent of working households in the Los Angeles metropolitan area spend more than half their income on housing, as do 35 percent in the San Francisco metro area — well above the national rate of 24 percent.

The phenomenon of rich people complaining that their taxes are too low is part of the same scheme — If Warren Buffet loses half of his income, he might yawn, but if I lose half of mine, I lose sleep trying to figure out how to make ends meet. (That inconvenient little truth never makes it into the ‘news media’, which are typically run by rich white people who aren’t likely to give the game away.)

The green gentry’s power has been enhanced by changes in the state’s legendary tech sector. Traditional tech firms — manufacturers such as Intel and Hewlett-Packard — shared common concerns about infrastructure and energy costs with other industries. But today tech manufacturing has shrunk, and much of the action in the tech world has shifted away from building things, dependent on energy, to software-dominated social media, whose primary profits increasingly stem from selling off the private information of users. Servers critical to these operations — the one potential energy drain — can easily be placed in Utah, Oregon or Washington where energy costs are far lower.

When Apple manufactures stuff, it doesn’t do so in California, so California energy prices don’t mean shit to Apple. (Substitute ‘Microsoft’ for ‘Apple’ and ‘Washington’ for ‘California’ if you like.)

Even more critical, billionaires such as Google’s Eric Schmidt, hedge fund manager Thomas Steyer and venture firms like Kleiner Perkins have developed an economic stake in “green” energy policies. These interests have sought out cozy deals on renewable energy ventures dependent on regulations mandating their use and guaranteeing their prices.

Which is how AlGore got to be a multi-millionaire, despite having the carbon footprint of a small city — not so much selling out as buying in, you might say.

Ironically, the biggest losers in this shift are the very ethnic minorities who also constitute a reliable voter block for Democratic greens. Even amid the current Silicon Valley boom, incomes for local Hispanics and African-Americans, who together account for one-third of the population, have actually declined — 18 percent for blacks and 5 percent for Latinos between 2009 and 2011, prompting one local booster to admit that “Silicon Valley is two valleys. There is a valley of haves, and a valley of have-nots.”

And yet they still vote for the people whose policies are screwing them — the root of the phrase ‘low-information voter’, which is a polite way of saying ‘stupid ignorant voter’.

Due to the rise of the green gentry, California is becoming divided between a largely white and Asian affluent coast, and a rapidly proletarianized, heavily Hispanic and African-American interior. Palo Alto and Malibu may thrive under the current green regime, and feel good about themselves in the process, but south Los Angeles, Oakland, Fresno and the Inland Empire are threatened with becoming vast favelas.

And the Crust are good with that.

This may constitute an ideal green future — with lower emissions, population growth and family formation — for whose wealth and privilege allow them to place a bigger priority on nature than humanity. But it also means the effective end of the California dream that brought multitudes to our state, but who now may have to choose between permanent serfdom or leaving for less ideal, but more promising, pastures.

Like, say, Texas.

Read it.

Not that they won’t do their damnedest….

60 Minutes is normally a reliable Democratic Party news outlet, but tonight it turned its back on its friends in the Obama administration with a scathing report on the Benghazi scandal. CBS says the report was more than a year in the making; it’s too bad some of this couldn’t come out before the 2012 election.

Tom Smith cuts to the chase.

Big government has gotten to the point where it cannot do any longer the things it aspires to. First, as we all know, it is running out of money.  To remedy this problem, the Dems propose taking more out of my already stretched to the breaking point budget, and yours too.  I’m enough of an egalitarian not to mind if George Soros gets a few billion skimmed off the top of his cache, but the idea apparently is to go after me and lots of people like me, whatever 100 minus 47 percent is, and raise the money that way.  I’m against that.  But beyond that, it won’t be enough money. But other people are making that argument better than I can.  What strikes me is not only that there isn’t remotely enough money, but not enough time and competence, to construct the massive machines government wants to construct in order to build the dreamlands of tomorrow they want.  Why can’t we have an insurance system where policies get sold as easily as books?  Straightforward, on the web, with government backstopping the sorts of things that are for sale?  It turns out to build such a thing is beyond the capabilities of our government and probably any government.  I think building such a thing is wrong, but forget that.  I might think building the Tower of Babel was wrong as well. The point is the Babylonians lacked as it happened steel and so could not build such a tall tower. We similarly lack the technical wherewithall to build such a big, complicated website, where the only people who want to build it are governed by the hugely complex rules of procurement regulations and motivated by the strands of public choice economics. It’s very like what happened to the old Soviet Union.  It’s not that big missiles and tractors and potatos were beyond technology as such. We had had them for a long time.  It’s the combination — those things, but built by an enormous state-planned political economy, where the planning was done by fallible and corrupt human beings.

John Hinderaker nails it.

Lenin wrote that the only question in politics is “Who-whom.” Filling in the ellipsis, the question is, Who is screwing whom? Sadly, many Americans–based on recent election results, perhaps a majority–are now Leninists. In their eyes, government is merely a means to steal someone else’s money. They rebel only if it turns out that they are on the wrong end of the screwing. This is, to put it very mildly, not what the Founders had in mind.

Read it.

Read it.

Rails to Trails is a government program to convert abandoned railroad tracks to recreational trails. Sounds great, except that the tracks run over private property, and the private landowners haven’t been paid for this permanent land grab.

Bryan Caplan does what economists do best – take absurd policy prescriptions to their logical extreme to show how ridiculous they are.

A few nay-saying libertarians and unschoolers aside, almost everyone favors compulsory K-12 education.  Yet virtually no one favors compulsory college.  It’s quite a mystery.  If mandatory education is a great idea at the primary and secondary levels, why would it be a horrible idea at the tertiary level?  What is the origin of this peculiar policy discontinuity?