Morgan Housel is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Highlights:

“Earnings missed estimates.”

No. Earnings don’t miss estimates; estimates miss earnings. No one ever says “the weather missed estimates.” They blame the weatherman for getting it wrong. Finance is the only industry where people blame their poor forecasting skills on reality.

…

“He predicted the market crash in 2008.”

He also predicted a crash in 2006, 2004, 2003, 2001, 1998, 1997, 1995, 1992, 1989, 1984, 1971…

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“The [thing not going perfectly] crisis.”

Boy who cried wolf, meet analyst who called crisis.

Journalists just love to trot that one out.

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Question: What business is it of the government what kind of doorknob is on your building?

More here.

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One thing I am learning about getting old is that while I can still think clearly, and still write some good sentences, everything not only takes longer, but often with all the good intentions in the world I just don’t have the energy to do what I have set out to do.

True that.

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Hint: The Crust think they do.

A plan to squeeze most residents of the San Francisco Bay Area into multifamily housing offers a test case of whether land-use bureaucracies nationwide, encouraged by the Obama administration, should be allowed to transform American lifestyles under the pretext of combating climate change.

Currently, 56 percent of households in the nine-county Bay Area live in single-family homes. That number would drop to 48 percent by 2030, under a high-density development blueprint called Plan Bay Area, recently enacted by the Association of Bay Area Governments and the region’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

…

Planners admit this will make single-family housing in the already high-priced Bay area even less affordable.

Response Objection 1, quoting George Carlin: ‘The planet will be fine. But the people will be fucked.’

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Marty the Magician performed magic tricks for kids, including the traditional rabbit-out-of-a-hat. Then one day: “I was signing autographs and taking pictures with children and their parents,” he told me. “Suddenly, a badge was thrown into the mix, and an inspector said, ‘Let me see your license.'”

In “Harry Potter” books, a creepy Ministry of Magic controls young wizards. Now in the USA, government regulates stage magicians—one of the countless ways it makes life harder for the little guy.

Marty’s torment didn’t end with a demand for his license. “She said, from now on, you cannot use your rabbit until you fill out paperwork, pay the $40 license fee. We’ll have to inspect your home.”

Ten times since, regulators showed up unannounced at Marty’s house. At one point, an inspector he hadn’t seen before appeared. He hoped things had changed for the better.

“I got a new inspector and I said, oh, did my first one retire? She said, ‘No, good news! We’ve increased our budget and we have more inspectors now. So we’ll be able to visit you more often.'”

Here are your tax dollars at work.

The inspectors told Marty that the Animal Welfare Act required him to file paperwork demonstrating that he had “a comprehensive written disaster plan detailing everything I would do with my rabbit in the event of a fire, a flood, a tornado, an ice storm.”

The federal forms list “common emergencies likely to happen to your facility … not necessarily limited to: structural fire, electrical outage, disruption in clean water or feed supply, disruption in access to facility (e.g., road closures), intentional attack on the facilities … earthquake, landslide/mudslide/avalanche … “

Thomas Sowell is under no illusions.

New York City police authorities are investigating a series of unprovoked physical attacks in public places on people who are Jewish, in the form of what is called “the knockout game.”

The way the game is played, one of a number of young blacks decides to show that he can knock down some stranger on the streets, preferably with one punch, as they pass by. Often some other member of the group records the event, so that a video of that “achievement” is put on the Internet, to be celebrated.

The New York authorities describe a recent series of such attacks and, because Jews have been singled out in these attacks, are considering prosecuting these assaults as “hate crimes.”

Many aspects of these crimes are extremely painful to think about, including the fact that responsible authorities in New York seem to have been caught by surprise, even though this “knockout game” has been played for years by young black gangs in other cities and other states, against people besides Jews — the victims being either whites in general or people of Asian ancestry.

Attacks of this sort have been rampant in St. Louis. But they have also occurred in Massachusetts, Wisconsin and elsewhere. In Illinois the game has often been called “Polar Bear Hunting” by the young thugs, presumably because the targets are white.

The main reason for many people’s surprise is that the mainstream media have usually suppressed news about the “knockout game” or about other and larger forms of similar orchestrated racial violence in dozens of cities in every region of the country. Sometimes the attacks are reported, but only as isolated attacks by unspecified “teens” or “young people” against unspecified victims, without any reference to the racial makeup of the attackers or the victims — and with no mention of racial epithets by the young hoodlums exulting in their own “achievement.”

Despite such pious phrases as “troubled youths,” the attackers are often in a merry, festive mood. In a sustained mass attack in Milwaukee, going far beyond the dimensions of a passing “knockout game,” the attackers were laughing and eating chips, as if it were a picnic.
One of them observed casually, “white girl bleed a lot.”

I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now. (Except white people, of course.)

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Fidel Castro shares at least one belief with the majority of Americans: He is convinced that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was not the work of a lone gunman, but was the culmination of a broad conspiracy. According to a recent Gallup poll, 61 percent of Americans believe Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in Dallas 50 years ago. But Castro suspects that Oswald might not have been involved in the assassination at all. Here is what he told me–to my great surprise–over lunch one day in Havana: “I have reached the conclusion that Oswald could not have been the one who killed Kennedy.” Castro is of course a confident man, but he said this with a degree of surety that was noteworthy.

There you have it — straight from the horse’s ass mouth.

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The Bureaus of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is writing up regulations on what other people should do when guns go missing.

The appropriate analogy to Obamacare is left as a not-very-difficult exercise for the reader.

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It’s a match made in heaven….

Tom Smith has the right of it.

The 50th of JFK’s assassination is coming up, so we have to expect coverage like this.  But it’s still worth remembering that JFK was a bad President and a bad man.  It pains me to say that.  My mother worshipped him and how could she not?  He was an Irish Catholic and a handsome one at that.  When he was elected, St. John’s and St. Joseph’s in Boise, Idaho, and thousands of other parishes and schools around the country became less ghettos and more part of the mainstream.  He didn’t just get Catholics accepted; he showed they could be glamorous.  But that was all on the surface.  Underneath the surface, and not way underneath either, but just a little, there was a cess pool of personal immorality, addiction and abuse.  I mean, honestly, the whole family was corrupt from Joseph, to Jack, to Teddy, to their children.

If we’re going to remember, we need to remember the truth.

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Places, note, run by Democrats.

I am not making this up.

Few cottage industries are so robust these days as that of sticking ‘-phobia’ on the end of terms describing those whose distinguishing characteristic is the ability to cause normal people to go ‘Ewwww’, even though such kakologisms serve primarily to advertise the ignorance and intolerance of those creating them.

My favorite, of course, is ‘homophobia’, which (according to its structure) ought to mean ‘fear of people like me’, but sadly does not. Regressives aren’t really happy unless they’ve got a hate-name to stick on their victims, whether it makes sense or not. Every person they can make believe normality is somehow a disease represents a victory.

And I refuse to believe that there’s such a thing as a ‘transgender community’;  the use of ‘community’ in modern politics seems primarily a tool in the intellectual shell game of trying to make abnormal people seem somehow normal, no matter how flimsy the Clever Plastic Disguise.

I wait with bated breath for the first sighting of  ‘paranoiac community’ and ‘misanthrope community’, although ‘misanthrophobia’ is both correctly formed and has a nice ring to it. (Next time somebody shaggy and unwashed accuses you of being a h8ter, call them a misanthrophobe and watch their brains lock up.)

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We tell ourselves that things like farmland preservation, high-speed rail, and smart-growth housing policies are needed for the good of society. But really, we just want them for ourselves, so long as someone else pays for them, preferably people who we don’t like, such as those members of the working class who drive loud cars and live in little suburban homes but don’t really appreciate the great outdoors. Until we get it out of our heads that other people should pay for the things we want, our society will continue to grow less equitable and, for the most part, less wealthy each year.

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The UK’s Met Office has refused to release historic climate discussions dating from before 2007, even though such scientific discussions are required to be “open and transparent”.

David Holland, the man whose FoI requests – refused by the Met Office – triggered the Climategate scandal, wants to see what scientists are discuss at an early, important stage of the IPCC process – called the “Zero Order Draft” stage. Subsequent stages One and Two involve NGOs and government officials, so the ZOD stage – the only part of the process which doesn’t have bureaucrats in the room – is an important one.

Bryan Caplan, a Real Economist, blows the whistle.

 In 11th grade, I took Advanced Placement U.S. History.  I enjoyed it at the time.  Once I started studying economics, however, I was outraged by the economic illiteracy of my history textbooks.  Mainstream historians barely mentioned the unprecedented miracle of sustained economic growth.  Instead, they focused on distribution: How poor workers used labor unions and regulation to pry their fair share from the heartless capitalists who employed them.  These historians never mentioned the negative side effects of unionization and labor market regulation – or even the view that such negative side effects existed.  My historical miseducation eventually inspired my lecture on “Why the Standard History of Labor Is Wrong.”

Jerry Pournelle is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

I continue to raise the more fundamental question, to what are people entitled by reason of citizenship, or, lately, sheer residence legal or not? Your father lay with your mother, and you now claim a portion of my goods and earnings to pay for your health care although you and I have no relationship other than you live a few miles away in a part of the city I seldom visit. Why should I pay that?

Plus he includes an interesting colloquy with a Real Doctor about health care in the U.S. generally. Recommended.

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In a profanity-laced tirade at Eastern Michigan University, self-described animal rights activist Gary Yourofsky told students that eating meat is worse than the Holocaust.

In addition, Yourofsky compared eating meat to cheese or eggs, or drinking milk to bestiality, according to a report by Michigan Capital Confidential.

And people wonder why a college degree is no longer a sure way to a good job any more.

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Of course he does, in the Obamanation.

On his website Kimathi posited, “In order for black people to survive the 21st century, we are going to have to kill a lot of whites–more than our Christian hearts can possibly count.” He warned that “whites and their enablers like President Obama” are doing their best to “homosexualize” black males “in order to make them weaker.”

He also lashed out at blacks whom he viewed as not being militant enough, calling for the “ethnic cleansing” of “black-skinned Uncle Tom race traitors.”

Kimathi has been with DHS since 2009, and his income last year was $115,731.

Be careful not to step in the diversity.

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This sort of thing it why I don’t practice law — it would take too much of my day just washing my hands.

The resurrection of John Edwards, erstwhile presidential candidate and philanderer, has begun. Not content with simply restarting his career as a trial lawyer after the debacle of his affair with his campaign videographer and her subsequent pregnancy and his trial on corruption charges, Edwards made the announcement of his return with the help of a public relations agency. He is reopening his law practice by rejoining his former partner, David F. Kirby, to form Edwards Kirby, where his daughter, Cate Edwards, who went to Harvard law school, will join him on the payroll.

How she can stand to be in the same room with the guy who treated her mother so shamefully is pretty good proof that mendacity is genetic.

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You didn’t know about that? It’s right next to the section that says you can murder your unborn child. I’m surprised you missed it.

In a column about the case, New York Times legal writer Adam Liptak claims “there are constitutional values on both sides of the case: the couple’s right to equal treatment and Ms. Huguenin’s right to free speech.” But the Constitution guarantees equal treatment by the government, not by private individuals or organizations. The 14th Amendment cannot justify requiring photographers to treat all couples equally any more than the First Amendment can justify requiring publishers to treat all authors equally. By erroneously suggesting that deciding Huguenin’s case means choosing between competing “constitutional values,” Liptak lends cover to the American Civil Liberties Union, which in this case is arguing that Huguenin’s civil liberties should be overridden by a principle that cannot be found in the Bill of Rights.

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Let’s hear it for the Transportation Security Theater Administration.

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Of course, ‘poacher’ is one of those weasel-words (like ‘price gouging’ and ‘profiteering’) used by the Crust for people who dare to do things of which they disapprove.

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Sign me up.

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However, the university specifically pointed out that it didn’t purposefully kill the incredible specimen. “The longest-lived clam was collected along with many others and, as it is impossible to age the clams until their shells have been opened, there was no indication of its extreme age until after this had been done,” the university writes in a press release. “The notion that scientists knew in advance that it was the longest-lived species and then deliberately destroyed it is plainly incorrect.”

They were well-meaning morons, not malicious. Well, that’s all right, then.

And this tells you everything you need to know about ‘climate scientists’.

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Now count up the number of Crustian politicians who are old.

Now count up the number of Crustian politicians who are obese.

Now figure out why a Voice of the Crust would run this story.

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If you love beer, thank a monk. Monks have been producing beer for 1,500 years, and in that time, they have revolutionized and perfected the beer-making process.

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Earlier this year, in “How to Eat Apples Like a Boss,” a video by Foodbeast, the Internet was promised the gift of confidence in apple-eating. Elie Ayrouth ate an apple starting at the bottom, proceeding to up to the top, and finishing with a wink to the camera, as bosses do. Eating as such, Foodbeast said, the core “disappears.”

I do them one better and say that it never existed. The core is a product of society, man. There is a thin fibrous band, smaller in diameter than a pencil and not bad to the taste. If you eat your apple vertically, it is not noticeable.

Ponder a publication that pays somebody to write about how to eat apples. (You know he didn’t write that for free.)

Ponder a society in which how much of an apple to eat is a controversy worthy of discussion in a national publication. (Message from the Third World: ‘Give me the fucking apple and I’ll make it disappear. No more problem.’)

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As if that mattered to somebody at Harvard….

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 When a city is badly broken, it can be very tough to fix.

Just ask Darren Green, president of a coalition of community groups in Trenton, N.J., where deep budget cuts in 2011 forced the city to lay off a third of its police force.

“We’re at a place now where it’s very dangerous to walk the streets,” he said, his thoughts periodically interrupted by the distant sound of passing sirens. “The school system is dysfunctional and not working. You have young people who are robbing elders. Young people who are destroying communities. With no leadership and the community in disarray, there’s a lot of bad here.”

Well, that’s what happens when you put Democrats in charge.

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An analysis found that the “area’s 1-percenters are most likely to be lawyers and executives, or those who work in management consulting or IT. Nearly 1 in 10 of those households is headed by a government worker.”

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

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No, it doesn’t involve a torque wrench. I think.

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Microsoft’s former chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold loves both science and food, a combination that resulted in Modernist Cuisine, a six volume foodie encyclopedia that’s now available in a digital form exclusively as an iPad app.

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MIT researchers published a paper in Nature Communications today detailing an unusual manufacturing technique that could help the batteries edge closer to being ready. Each time a lithium air battery charges or discharges, it needs a location for electrochemical reactions to take place. Nanowires — tiny wires the width of a red blood cell — do the job nicely, but generally need to be manufactured at extremely high temperatures with dangerous chemicals.

The researchers found they could make the nanowires at room temperature by relying on an unexpected ally: genetically modified viruses. The viruses capture metal molecules from water and build them into the long nanowires with spiky surfaces. The spikes create a greater surface area than the smooth, industrially produced nanowires have, which creates more area for electrochemical activity to take place. This allows faster charges and discharges.

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Actually, I’m surprised it’s even that good.

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Inequality grows hand-in-hand with the growth of the regulatory state. The proliferation of regulations increases economic inequality, since powerful people and politically connected companies know how to shape and manipulate the regulatory process to harm their rivals and enrich themselves at the expense of the public. As the Roman senator and historian Tacitus observed, ‘The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” Moreover, regulations disproportionately increase the cost of consumer staples that are a larger part of middle class people’s budgets than of rich people’s budgets.

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And why not? He’s much more relevant than some old dead white Republican.

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

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For decades, Head Start has consistently disappointed anyone who expected it to make a real difference in the fortunes of the poor.

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While printers that work with multiple materials already exist, Shapeways has yet to offer printing services that utilize them. Weijmarshausen said file formats are not yet standardized enough and user-friendly software needs to appear. But the appeal of printers that mix materials with incredible precision is great, as they would give rise to totally new textures and lend objects new properties.

“That capability, we as humans, have never had,” Weijmarshausen said. ”You don’t just design a product, you design a material.”

Read it.

Great news.

Jim Goad is marvelously dyspeptic today.

I don’t own a TV—yes, I’m one of those people—so most of what I’ll say about today’s fare will be based on inferences drawn from online synopses. I couldn’t even bring myself to watch sample clips on YouTube—I’m usually willing to bleed for you, dear readers, but there are some things I simply won’t do. Eating live insects is one. Watching modern TV or movies is another. We all have our limits.

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We have replaced the corny with the trashy and called it progress.

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At least symbolically, JFK’s assassination marked the beginning of what would commonly come to be understood as “the sixties.” What followed is known in many quarters as “progress,” although to me it seems like an ongoing process of deconstruction and outright destruction. I doubt that today’s culture-busters have any idea what they intend to build, but they’re finely attuned to what they’re trying to destroy. And that’s probably the main reason I don’t have a TV anymore.

James C. Scott (‘He teaches anthropology and political science at Yale’) reviews Jared Diamond’s new book, The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

Like many Voices of the Crust, he is a ‘progressive’ and so has no use for tradition.

It’s a good bet a culture is in trouble when its best-known intellectuals start ransacking the cultural inventory of its ancestors and its contemporary inferiors for tips on how to live.

I’d hardly call Jared Diamond a ‘best known intellectual’, nor would I accept the suggestion that ‘ransackign the cultural inventory of its ancestors’ is quite so widespread as Scott seems to think. (Of course, with ‘progressives’ any trace or remnant of anti-progressive thinking is Cause for Alarm and calls for beating to quarters to repel boarders.)

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Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and two other senators and joined Representative Tom Graves (R-GA) and 18 other representatives in introducing the Transportation Empowerment Act. This bill would phase out most federal involvement in surface transportation, including 80 percent of the federal gas tax, over five years. In the meantime, federal funds would be given to the states as “block grants” with few strings attached.

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Since 2007, the federal government has made an aggressive push into corn-based ethanol: oil companies are now required to add millions of gallons of ethanol to gasoline, and farmers are encouraged to plow more land in a bid to keep up with demand. But the stated goals of those efforts — produce more green energy and curb global warming — aren’t coming to pass. And the government may very well have known, early on, that they wouldn’t.

Oh, ya think?

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Searching for today’s article on line, I found virtually the same article was written 25 years ago. At least in that one, there is a grudging admission that the man who pulled the trigger on November 22, 1963, was actually a Marxist. Today’s article failed to mention the political orientation of JFK’s assassin or anything about him. Why ruin a good story with a distracting fact?

Read it.

Late-night comic Conan O’Brien tweeted Friday night: “Marvel Comics is introducing a new Muslim Female superhero. She has so many more special powers than her husband’s other wives.” The predictable self-righteous firestorm ensued.

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

O’Brien was referring to “Kamala Khan,” Marvel Comics’ new Muslim superhero, unveiled with great fanfare last week. They are only introducing this Muslim superhero because of the hugely successful post-9/11 campaign by Islamic supremacists and their Leftist allies to portray Muslims as victims of “Islamophobia” and “hatred” — when actually the incidence of attacks on innocent Muslims is very low (not that a single one is acceptable or justified), and the entire “Islamophobia” campaign is an attempt to intimidate people into thinking that there is something wrong with fighting against jihad terror and Islamic supremacism.

Whose turn is it to be the victim? The one who gets blown up, or the ones who blow him/her up?

A legion of Leftists descended upon O’Brien’s Twitter feed, accusing him of being a “f***ing racist scumbag” and “Islamophobic,” and his joke of being “kinda tasteless,” “really ignorant and terrible,” “in very poor taste,” and “f***ing gross and racist.”

“Racist”? What race is Muslim polygamy again? I keep forgetting.

Obviously not in tune with The Narrative. There are no h8ters like the Left.

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Jamaat ul-Fuqra (“Community of the Impoverished”, also known as “Muslims of America” or “Muslims of the Americas”) was founded by a known terrorist, the Pakistani Sheikh Syed Mubarik Ali Hasmi Shah Gilani. Over the past thirty years it has established a network of dozens of rural training compounds across the United States and Canada. It recruits new members primarily through proselytizing in the prison system.

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A slew of new studies were released last week, many of them only confirming what was already common wisdom. Has there ever been a study to determine whether such studies benefit anyone except those paid to perform the study?

Online dating website “Are You Interested” sifted through 2.4 million interactions on their site to conclude that men like Asian women the most and black women the least, as if all seven billion people in the world didn’t already know that. “I think it’s very disheartening for African-American women, said Demetria Lucas of The Root. “It’s always the same result and it’s always about how no one’s reaching out for black women.”

Well, that explains a lot about Michelle Obama. And don’t get me started on Oprah….