Read it.

Jihad, a holy war against the infidel, is the personal duty of every Muslim, and if he does not wage it, he will die as a religious hypocrite, someone who only outwardly practices Islam but does not truly believe, and be damned for all eternity. The terrorists I interviewed told me that waging jihad is, for the mujahed, the way to partake of Allah’s mercy for themselves and the members of their families, and to go directly to paradise without the Islamic “tortures of the grave” and without undergoing a painful examination by angels before they are allowed to enter.

Exhilaration and ecstasy accompany jihad fighters in their search for arenas of excitement around the globe. They look for places where they can rape and kill with impunity and fight the infidel in the name of Allah, reaching the pinnacle of masculinity and honor reserved for the shaheed. Superficially, they may seem to be fighting for an ideal, but in reality, even in suicide bombing attacks, there is an element of desire for reward, both in this world and the next. The overwhelming desire of many Muslim adolescent boys, even those educated in the West or who are converts to Islam, especially those living in countries where there is no real governance, is excitement. To that end they stream into confrontation zones like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chechnya, Libya, Iraq, Africa (such as the recent terrorist attack in Kenya), and Syria to experience the mission, the excitement and promise of being a shaheed as the ultimate in self-realization.

Frustration, alienation and a sense of inferiority accompany the increase in the pace of modern life, and the gap between East and West continually grows. The deprivation, restrictions and solutions imposed by Islamism lead people to seek a group to which they can belong and which will help them channel their negative feelings for the other, the different, the “infidel,” feelings which are common to all. In addition, the need for adventure and excitement has helped create a kind of “jihad tourism” especially but not exclusively relevant for young Muslim men, including those born in the West. Today in Syria there are jihadist fighters from 60 countries, among them converts to Islam, who star in videos and help the jihadists recruit supporters and spread propaganda. Jihad tourism is a subculture of fun and excitement, a festival of violence, similar to the Western criminal and gang subcultures. The jihadist lifestyle allows them to shake off the confines of the disintegrating patriarchal family. As opposed to ordinary criminals, whose social status is lowered when they are classified as felons, the Islamic terrorists feel they are performing good deeds for the sake of Allah, raising their status. They act on violent impulses, are unrestrained in their aggression and try to impress those around them by taking risks, hoping for admiration and praise. They butcher people of all ages, use both sarin gas and hatchets, behead, rape and mutilate their “enemies” with no regard for the fact that until recently the enemy was a neighbor, or at least shared their language and culture.

‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’ — Ephesians 6:12

Read it.

This new demography—essentially a marriage of rich, young singles and the poor—has created an urban electorate increasingly one-dimensional, and less middle class, not only in economic status, but also, perhaps more importantly, in attitude. This can be seen in the very low participation rates in de Blasio’s victory in New York, where under one quarter of the electorate voted in the election compared to some 57 percent in the 1993 Giuliani vs Dinkins race. Historically, middle class voters were the most reliable voters and their decline has led to record low participation not only in New York, but also in Los Angeles, where new Mayor Eric Garcetti was elected with the lowest turnout, barely twenty percent, in a contested election in recent memory.

The decline in voter participation occurs as cities are becoming ever more one-party constituencies. Two decades ago a large chunk of the top twelve cities were run by Republicans, but today none are. America’s cities have evolved into a political monoculture, with the Democratic share growing by 20 percent or more in most of the largest urban counties.

Under such circumstances the worst miscues by liberals are largely ignored or excused as politics and media take place in a kind of left-wing echo chamber. Even the meltdown of the healthcare law, which has hurt the president’s approval rating in national polls, seems to have not impacted his popularity in urban areas.

In New York and other cities this shift leftward, ironically, has been enabled by the successes of Bloomberg and other pro-business pragmatists whose successful policies on issues like crime have shifted the political agenda to other matters. “This election is not going to be about crime, as some previous elections were,” de Blasio told National Journal last month. “It used to be in New York you worried about getting mugged. But today’s mugging is economic. Can you afford your rent?”

Read it.

This strikes me as an excellent summary of my thoughts on the subject, to the extent that I have any.

Read it.

One day Corsi was handing out pamphlets at a county fair. One of the people who took a flyer was Ed Ryder, a Republican and a member of the local Board of Elections. Corsi didn’t have much nice to say about Ryder. So Ryder did what any petty Napoleon would do: He went after Corsi using Ohio’s campaign-finance laws.

Long story short: Because Corsi spent money, no matter how little (his website cost all of $40), the Ohio Election Commission said Corsi should have incorporated his group and registered with the state as a political action committee — hiring a lawyer to help with the “very complicated” process. As far as Ohio is concerned a political action committee can consist of as few as two people. Besides, Corsi engaged in “express advocacy” about politicians. The horror.

Two courts have ruled in the commission’s favor. The Center for Competitive Politics, which is based in Arlington, has asked the Supreme Court to hear Corsi’s case. Let’s hope the justices agree to do so, because the Corsi case epitomizes a growing problem: the censoring of free speech through back-door regulation.

That was precisely the problem at issue in the scandal over the IRS’ treatment of tea-party groups: Organizations with certain political views were singled out for special scrutiny — their applications sidetracked, their activities probed, their members’ reading habits and religious practices investigated — at the behest of government officials such as Sens. Chuck Schumer and Al Franken. (A few progressive groups got caught up in the sweep. But like dolphins caught in tuna nets, they were not the intended target.)

Read it.

The president said something recently that I believe was interesting and underreported.? At a Democratic campaign fundraiser, the president said he was “not a particularly ideological person.” Assuming he meant it, that was a remarkable thing to say, given that Republicans think of him as a classic liberal ideologue. How did so many get the wrong idea? The president doesn’t see an ideological bent in his actions; he sees himself doing what needs to be done without any ideological motivation. Interesting. ?

During his brief time in the Senate, Obama was rated as the most liberal senator in the entire body in 2007. In the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama famously told Joe the plumber that he was going to raise taxes because “when you spread the wealth, it’s good for everybody.” What could be more ideological than wealth redistribution? What is Obamacare if not an ideological drive for government control and wealth redistribution?  And let’s not forget that the president pursues pointless – some say punitive – environmental policies meant to shape Americans’ lifestyles in furtherance of the ideological embrace of liberal global warming orthodoxy.

Freeberg has some thoughts.

Wonder what it’s like working for this type? Anyone subordinate would have to wonder what his or her place is in the organization, with the guy at the top possessing a complete monopoly on that coveted skill of quality decision-making. I wonder what goes on in your head if you’re about to bring game-changing information to the boss. What if the boss isn’t expecting it? What if He’s wallowing around in the end-zone of His divine decision-making process, just taking His leisurely weeks & months to close in on the answer because it’s, like, really hard and stuff, and this new nugget of information you’re offering might change the result? You’d be obliged to bring it, toot-sweet, of course. But what if it doesn’t change the game after all? Why, then you’d come off looking like an advocate for the “wrong” outcome. Oh well, I’m sure Barack Obama is plenty mature enough to recognize the difference between an advocate for the wrong outcome, and an earnest underling merely doing due diligence, bringing the boss the information needed. Sure He is! Better keep that resume brushed up…

Read it.

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

Consider the numbers: in 2008, ABC News reported 97,848 background checks on Black Friday. In 2009, the numbers remained somewhat static but then began to grow exponentially as the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats began to flex their muscles.  By 2011, there were 129,166 background checks on Black Friday alone.

As the National Shooting Sports Foundation reported, the jump in 2011 marked “a 32.01 percent increase over” the sales on 2008 Black Friday–the year Obama was first elected.

In 2012, the number of Black Friday background checks rose to 154,873. Remember that because numerous guns can be purchased with each background check, these figures don’t even begin to indicate how many firearms may actually have been sold.

Cordless automatic stirrers

3D Clue game

Gifts for the Chef

Jet Capsule

Dungeon-Building Dice   — Gamer? Lazy? We got you covered….

Your Very Own Cold Fusion Reactor

Handwarmer with Smart Phone Recharge

AeroMobil Flying Car

WeMo Light Switch

Read it.

With the area economy rebounding, San Francisco is in the midst of a housing crisis as many residents are evicted from their apartments. “It is a situation rooted in limited housing stock and surge in demand that has pushed the median rent up from $2,968 in 2010 to $3,414 this year…,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle.

Sounds like New York.

The median home price has soared to nearly $900,000, which helps explain why nearly two-thirds of the city’s residents are renters. So the rent hikes are particularly acute—and have put the city’s tough rent-control laws in the spotlight. As property values have rebounded, an increasing number of San Francisco owners are getting out of the rental business and cashing out their properties to turn them into co-ops.

Sounds like New York.

While the city’s rent-control ordinance places strict limits on the ability of landlords to increase rents, a state law called the Ellis Act allows property owners to take their property off the rental market after providing tenants with a 120-day notice (and much longer for elderly or disabled tenants).

Sounds like New York.

“Speculative investments in housing has resulted in the loss of thousands of affordable apartments through conversions and demolitions,” according to a recent statement from a tenants’ rights coalition. Yet landlords ask whether further regulating and even prosecuting them in some instances, as the tenant groups propose, is the best way to encourage more people to get into the rental-housing business, which is what’s needed to increase supply and reduce rents. It’s an old economic rule that you get less of whatever you punish.

Just like New York.

In cities where the market reigns, people tend to be mobile, but in places such as San Francisco tenants stay put in their apartments given that they don’t want to leave their rent-controlled units. So few apartments become available. Restrictions on rent prices diminish the incentive of landlords to improve the buildings, thus leading to more substandard buildings, rent-control critics argue.

Just like New York.

San Francisco is a sought-after city on a tiny peninsula, which leads to a tight supply. “But the biggest problem with the Bay Area is 75 percent of the land area is off limits to development so you can’t build your way out of this,” said Lawrence McQuillan, senior fellow at the libertarian Independent Institute in Oakland. Even for cities without rent control, such as San Diego, these basic “supply and demand” lessons are useful for anyone whose “values” include affordable housing.

San Francisco: New York without the Mafia and the subways.

Read it.

Here we present our map of American lake monsters (view it large here), showing the spread of cryptids that might be lurking in the depths of the waters of the United States.

Read it.

David Niven is no doubt turning over in his grave.

Read it.

Confirming me in my determination to limit exercise to acting as pallbearer for my sweaty friends.

Read it.

Booker, too, funneled a sizable portion of Zuckerberg’s donation to charter schools–on top of supporting limits on teacher tenure.

As mayor, instead of outlawing stop-and-frisk, the racially charged practice of searching suspects on the street without a warrant, his approach was radical transparency. Every stop must now meticulously record the race, location, and reason; that data is then opened to the public for scrutiny.

His novel approach won accolades from Newark’s American Civil Liberties Union for balancing public safety and individual rights. But, a traditional liberal would likely have just outright banned the practice.

Very interesting…. If Booker et al. can divert the Democratic Party into results-based policies rather than the Same Old Socialism, America might be in for an interesting time.

Read it.

Well, duh.

The Other McCain waxes philosophic.

The beginning of economics is the division of labor. If we were all hunter-gatherers, there would little for us to exchange in the marketplace. Hunter-gatherer societies are universally poor. Agriculture and the domestication of livestock were the first steps beyond subsistence and those steps were attended by the development of sex roles. It is only with the affluence and convenience provided by advanced industrial market economies that any idea of “sexual equality” becomes feasible.

Our pioneer ancestors never could have conquered the frontier if the men had stayed home cooking, while sending the womenfolk out to hunt, plow and fight off savage Indians.

A great problem of young people today is that they have been so indoctrinated in the gospel of Equality (capitalized, to signify its status as a quasi-religious belief) that they lack even the vocabulary to discuss ideas like sex roles and complementarity.

…

Egalitarianism itself is creepy. No sane person desires to live in that androgynous asexual utopia where men and women are the same, but this is the future to which feminism proposes to lead us.

Read it.

This is, of course, the New York Times, so you’ll want to confirm this using a reliable source.

Read it.

Apple has issued a formal objection to the court-appointed lawyer assigned to monitor its compliance with the decision handed down in its e-book pricing fixing case back in July. The monitor was assigned by the DOJ back in October, and has apparently been charging Apple a very high price for his services – he made $138,432 in his first two weeks on the job, according to Apple’s official filing on the matter.

Apple says that’s the highest rate it’s paid a lawyer in its history, which is saying a lot given the company’s decidedly litigious streak. Apple’s lawyers explained in the filing that they believe Bromwich is charging so much simply because he can, as Apple has no say in who is chosen for the position, and must pay for the court-appointed monitor as per the decision handed down by the DOJ in the antitrust price-fixing case. Apple also objected to a provision in the DOJ’s ruling that would allow Bromwich to interview company personnel and report back to the court without Apple’s own lawyers around to represent the company’s interests.

The function of government is to hire and pay government workers. It’s rarely as blatant as this.

Read it.

Read it.

Illinois copyKeep your eyes on Democrat-run Illinois over the next couple of weeks, where legislative leaders have hammered out a scheme to address the crisis of the state’s underfunded public employee pension scheme.  The unfunded liability for the state’s pension obligations is officially estimated somewhere around $100 billion over the next 30 years, but the actual figure is likely much higher as Illinois, like many self-serving public pension funds, still assumes very optimistic rates of return on assets going forward.

Charles Krauthammer turns over a rock.

We’ve now reached a point where a flailing president, desperate to deflect the opprobrium heaped upon him for the false promise that you could keep your health plan if you wanted to, calls a hasty news conference urging both insurers and the states to reinstate millions of such plans.

Except that he is asking them to break the law. His own law. Under Obamacare, no insurer may issue a policy after 2013 that does not meet the law’s minimum coverage requirements. These plans were canceled because they do not.

The law remains unchanged. The regulations governing that law remain unchanged. Nothing is changed except for a president proposing to unilaterally change his own law from the White House press room.

That’s banana republic stuff, except that there the dictator proclaims from the presidential balcony.

Read it.

The biggest lie of all is that 15-30 million additional people who will be enticed or shoved onto Medicaid will receive quality health care.

In reality, they will receive health care “insurance,” but there will be few doctors willing to see them because the reimbursement rates are so low.

I have mentioned before how, anecdotally, almost every doctor with whom I speak sings that same song, that Medicaid reimbursements are so low they either have to restrict or eliminate Medicaid patients.

Mencius Moldbug does what he does best.

 No, obviously no one should ever respond to a journalist.  (Or a Stasi-Mann.)  It’s a mistake to think these people have opinions.  They have careers.  They’re paid by the click and not paid well.  If you or I had Mr. Jones’ job,  we’d write what he writes or lose it – maybe in slightly better English.  It’s a mistake to anthropomorphize Mr. Jones.  He’s a piece in a machine.

The basic nature of constitutional government is the formalization of power, and democracy is the formalization of mob violence.  Why is America’s constitution democratic?  Because the Puritan mob drove Charles I (who, like Louis XVI and Nicholas II, was basically just a nice guy) out of London in 1642.  In a present world where mob violence is a thing of the past, we wouldn’t expect to see genuine demotic opinion actually matter in the political process – much as we wouldn’t expect to see feudal knights matter in a world that’s invented the musket.  For instance, the closest thing America has to a non-astroturf political force is the Tea Party.  Which doesn’t even litter.  Nor does it matter, and this is not a coincidence.

…
(In Rome, I’d be instantly exposed as a ridiculous poser for talking about Ovid when I never even learned Latin. Whereas in Pontus, just the fact that I’ve heard of Ovid makes me sound like a fag.)

John Hinderaker blows the whistle.

It happens every Thanksgiving: leftists crawl out from under their rocks and tell us that the holiday is a shameful celebration of “genocide.” These days, their preferred medium is Twitter.

…

Actually, some Indian tribes were victims of genocide. The Iroquois wiped out the Huron, the Erie and others. The Sioux nearly succeeded in their attempt to kill all the Pawnee. The Sioux themselves likely would have been exterminated by the Ojibwa if they had not fled from the forests to the Great Plains. So it is not unreasonable to link the word “genocide” with American Indian tribes.

Read it.

Ellen Richardson went to Pearson airport on Monday full of joy about flying to New York City and from there going on a 10-day Caribbean cruise for which she’d paid about $6,000.

But a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent with the Department of Homeland Security killed that dream when he denied her entry.

“I was turned away, I was told, because I had a hospitalization in the summer of 2012 for clinical depression,’’ said Richardson, who is a paraplegic and set up her cruise in collaboration with a March of Dimes group of about 12 others.

The Weston woman was told by the U.S. agent she would have to get “medical clearance’’ and be examined by one of only three doctors in Toronto whose assessments are accepted by Homeland Security. She was given their names and told a call to her psychiatrist “would not suffice.’’

In 1621, the English hadn’t gotten around to adopting the Gregorian calendar yet, so their year was 10 days behind what we know now.

The traditional harvest feast in Europe was Martinmas, held on November 11.

Add 10 days to November 11 and you get November 21, which this year falls on the third Thursday of November.

So all you people who are celebrating Thanksgiving today are a week late.

Just so you know.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Alas, I misunderstood. Despite weeks of devastating revelations about the twisted freak at the center of this story, the unwavering devotion to “Saint Kate of the Blessed Finger” not only continued, but became increasingly manic. By the time Kaitlyn Hunt was finally sentenced to jail in October, I realized that her hard-core supporters are a deranged bunch of perverts, wackos and criminal deviants.

In other words, Democrats.

Read it.

The student who staged the hoax is part of the school’s so called Bias Incident Response Team.

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

Paul Rahe lays out some inconvenient history.

William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony, reports that, at that time, he and his advisers considered “how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.” And “after much debate of things,” he then adds, they chose to abandon communal property, deciding that “they should set corn every man for his own particular” and assign “to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end.”

The results, he tells us, were gratifying in the extreme, “for it made all hands very industrious” and “much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” Even “the women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”

Moreover, he observes, “the experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years . . . amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times . . . that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing.” In practice, America’s first socialist experiment “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.”

I give thanks for the Jews, the Chosen People of God.

What advantage then hath the Jew? or what profit is there of circumcision?

Much in every way: chiefly, because that unto them were committed the oracles of God.

For what if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect?

Romans 3:1-3

Read it.

Q. Your new book begins with a falsehood that has endured to the present: That people in the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat.

A. Yes, and even cultivated people still repeat it to this day. The official culture in the Middle Ages was absolutely convinced that the earth was spherical and they accepted the Greek idea of the measure of the equator. It’s just intellectual and cultural laziness. We are also continuously told that during the Middle Ages they burned witches, when the real burning of witches started in the Renaissance.

Read it.

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Anft writes that “most researchers who have looked into the issue—those who don’t receive their money from technology companies or their private foundations –say the notion that there is a  STEM-worker shortage is “a myth”

Silicon Valley lobbying groups have spent over $130 million on lobbying efforts to triple the number of visas the country currently awards on a yearly basis in an immigration bill, and those like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have said that their high-tech companies need more workers from the STEM fields. If not, they have claimed that “a continuing shortage of workers in those fields will sink the nation and its economy beneath the surface of an ever-flatter world, overrun by lower-paid foreigners who have outpaced us in STEM education.”

According to Anft, though, “Unemployment rates within STEM fields generally, while lower than the overall unemployment rate of 7.2 percent, are often higher than they’ve been in years—a sign that there is a shortage of jobs, not workers.” He notes that if there were a shortage, there would be a “rise in wages in technology and science fields. And that isn’t happening.”

Read it.

Civilians can still experiment with hydrogenated fats at home, but while Catalan chefs can play with liquid nitrogen and celebrate candy-bar food additives such as lecithin as though they were the Philosopher’s Stone, heaven help the one Mayor Bloomberg catches with a can of Crisco.

Read it.

How does a confessed child porn criminal keep his community college salary?

He’s in a union, of course.

Read it.

In regulations released just ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, the administration signaled it is looking at ways to increase payments to insurance companies if they end up taking on more risk. That might happen in some states that agreed to the Obama administration’s mid-November request to let carriers reinstate policies that would otherwise have been canceled because they didn’t meet certain coverage requirements under the Affordable Care Act.

Unmentioned in this, or in any other, reporting on the subject that they are doing so with YOUR money. They don’t have any of their own; all they can do is give away yours.

Read it.

As the heart pumps blood around the body, the aorta – the main vessel from the heart – stretches to accommodate the blood-flow. In most people it relaxes back to normal size, but for people with Marfan syndrome it can fail to recover, gradually enlarging over time.

From an early age, Mr Golesworthy was fully aware he was living with the risk his aorta could one day stretch so much it would burst. And during a regular check-up in 2000, he was told the time had come to consider pre-emptive surgery.

Read it.

A meta-study carried out by the American Psychological Association has claimed that playing computer games has many positive effects on children and, in some cases, the more violent the game the more beneficial the effect.

The research, published in the latest issue of American Psychologist, found that modern video games are much more socially orientated, thanks to the growth on massive online gaming environments, and that certain types of game can help kids learn problem-solving skills and creativity.

“Important research has already been conducted for decades on the negative effects of gaming, including addiction, depression and aggression, and we are certainly not suggesting that this should be ignored,” said lead author Isabela Granic PhD, of Radboud University Nijmegen in The Netherlands. “However, to understand the impact of video games on children’s and adolescents’ development, a more balanced perspective is needed.”

Good luck with that ‘balanced perspective’ thing, Doc.

Read it.

Read it.

Eight Americans already feeling the sting of that broken promise work for Nancy Clark, a small business owner in New Hampshire who was featured in a White House online ad promoting ObamaCare. “The healthcare law is about me. It’s NancyCare,” Clark gushes.

The entire premise of Clark’s video ad is how ObamaCare will allow her to continue to offer health insurance for her employees and maybe even make it easier to hire new ones. Her expectation last years was that ObamaCare would make the employee-health insurance more affordable for company:

You broke it, you own it.

Read it.

In fact, many of the supposed negative costs of cars are purely imaginary, while others are rapidly declining. Each year’s crop of new cars is safer, more fuel-efficient and less polluting than before. Department of Energy data show that in 1970 cars used twice as much energy per passenger mile as did mass transit. Today, they are practically tied, and in a few years driving will use less energy and emit less pollution than public transit.

For more than 60 years, Americans have consistently spent around 9% of their personal incomes on driving, even though per-capita miles have tripled since 1950. According to data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics—counting both user costs and subsidies—public transportation costs nearly four times as much per passenger mile as driving, while Amtrak costs well over twice as much.

Read it.

How to continue living in your parents’ basement without the inconvenience of having Mom & Dad hanging around all the time and cramping your style.

As I once told a friend who spent his spare time climbing rocks and jumping out of perfectly good airplanes: ‘You know, if you joined the military they would actually pay you to do that….’

Read it.

Each year, the McRib makes a brief visit to Earth. Its arrival elicits reactions ranging from horror to awe. And for good reason: this would-be rib sandwich is really a restructured pork patty pressed into the rough shape of a slab of ribs, its slathering of barbecue sauce acting as camouflage as much as coating.

“Pork” is a generous term, since the McRib has traditionally been fashioned from otherwise unmarketable pig parts like tripe, heart, and stomach, material that is not only cheap but also easier to mold and bind into a coherent, predetermined shape. McDonald’s accurately lists the patty’s primary ingredient as “boneless pork,” although even that’s a fairly strong euphemism. Presumably few of the restaurant’s patrons would line up for a Pressed McTripe.

There are few paths to becoming a highly-compensated Voice of the Crust more sure than penning screeds making fun of what the Great Unwashed eat. That way the people who read the Atlantic and pride themselves on being Exemplars of Wealth and Taste. Never mind that under different circumstances they’d be the first to push Locally Sourced Tripe as the sort of thing that Authentic Native Peoples do, and so you have to try it.

Read it.

It’s tempting to call David Perlmutter’s dietary advice radical. The neurologist and president of the Perlmutter Health Center in Naples, Fla., believes all carbs, including highly touted whole grains, are devastating to our brains. He claims we must make major changes in our eating habits as a society to ward off terrifying increases in Alzheimer’s disease and dementia rates.

Actually, it’s tempting to call it just the latest fad food scare.

And yet Perlmutter argues that his recommendations are not radical at all. In fact, he says, his suggested menu adheres more closely to the way mankind has eaten for most of human history.

And, of course, we’re still living the way we have lived for most of human history. Makes perfect sense, it does.

What’s deviant, he insists, is our modern diet. Dementia, chronic headaches, depression, epilepsy and other contemporary scourges are not in our genes, he claims. “It’s in the food you eat,” Perlmutter writes in his bestselling new book, Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar – Your Brain’s Silent Killers. “The origin of brain disease is in many cases predominantly dietary.”

And, of course, he’s got a book to flog, with a title ripped from the headlines in [insert supermarket tabloid name of your choice]. It’s what the fad food scare people do.

Read it.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked….

Praet had to state the obvious because until this year economists, in particular those who make forecasts, put their faith in models that ignored those differences. Those that the ECB and the International Monetary Fund used to predict the future relied on a “representative agent,” a single imaginary person who stands in for everyone.

Your international tax dollars at work. (Think you, the taxpayer, aren’t paying for these international organizations? Well, where do you think they get their money? It ain’t George Soros.)

The problem was that these models failed to predict the consequences of the austerity programs that several European countries adopted in 2010. It turned out that actual people didn’t behave like the imaginary proxy. Economists are learning that the poor and the wealthy respond differently to austerity and stimulus. This could present challenges to politicians. If people behave differently, then policy might have to treat them differently.

Oh, since when have politicians ever listened to reality, rather than their own tendentious fantasies?

Read it.

Your tax dollars at work.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Perhaps they’ve finally cottoned to the fact that a Communist country isn’t a really healthy environment for rich people. Just possibly.

Read it.

“Bands played, balloons soared, fireworks banged and politicians and business leaders glowingly praised Richmond’s future yesterday as several thousand people attended the noontime grand opening of the Sixth Street Marketplace,” the Times-Dispatch reported back in the autumn of 1985.

…

Within five years, the “future of downtown” in Richmond was draining millions from the city’s public treasury just to stay afloat. Soon, experts from the Urban Land Institute were recommending it be torn down. Several years and many millions of dollars later, it was.

I ask that you keep in your thoughts and in your prayers my late wife, Ruth Woodring, who was taken from us in body but not in spirit on this date fifteen years ago.

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord,
And may perpetual light shine upon her;
May her soul,
And all the souls of the faithful departed,
Through the mercy of God,
Rest in peace.

Steve Pressfield is optimistic.

When I was a kid my dad’s dream for me was that I would become an engineer and work all my life for Lockheed or G.E.  In other words be an employee. That was how the middle-class dream expressed itself in the days of American pre-eminence post-WWII, before the European countries had rebuilt their shattered economies, before the rise of Asia, India, South America, before outsourcing, before globalization, before the satellite and the microchip and the web.

Now all we hear is that the American Dream is dead. As I write this, I’m looking at an article in the L.A. Times (probably the 500th I’ve read) titled “Poof Goes the Middle Class.”

Well, that sure looks like the trend.

Maybe I’m delusional, but I think a sea-change is taking place right here, right now. I mean a good change. It’s below the radar. The government has nothing to do with it. The government doesn’t even know it’s going on.

What is this change? It’s happening on ten thousand blogs like this one and at a hundred thousand informal academies and webinars and one-on-one teaching exchanges or one-to-a-hundred mentoring events. Individuals on their own, driven by necessity and by their own dissatisfaction with their lives and their futures, are teaching themselves a new way of working in the world.

The change is reflected, even championed, by words like Seth Godin’s, “Don’t wait to be picked, pick yourself.”

People are becoming entrepreneurs. The mind-set of the employee is vanishing like the factory where it was born. It has to. We’ll all die if we wait for some force outside ourselves—business or government—to bring us jobs or teach us who we are or how we ought to live.

Root, hog, or die.

Classic Paul Graham essay from seven years ago.

People who worry about the increasing gap between rich and poor generally look back on the mid twentieth century as a golden age. In those days we had a large number of high-paying union manufacturing jobs that boosted the median income. I wouldn’t quite call the high-paying union job a myth, but I think people who dwell on it are reading too much into it.

Read it.

As the Dodd Frank regulations about conflict minerals approach the date at which people actually have to do something about them, it’s worth seeing if they’re really the monstrously ghastly clusterfuck I’ve been predicting they will be. Much to my surprise they’re not: they’re worse.