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

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Austin, the blue pustule on the butt of Texas, demonstrates why the rest of Texas is a red state.

Charles Stross points out some inconvenient truth.

Our representative systems almost all run on a party system; even pure PR systems like that of Israel rely on a party list. (I could take out Israeli citizenship and run for the Knesset, but I’d be running as “the Charlie Stross Party”, not as myself: if I was a runaway success I’d need to find some extra representatives to tag along on my coat-tails.) Parties are bureaucratic institutions with the usual power dynamic of self-preservation, as per Michels’s iron law of oligarchy: the purpose of the organization is to (a) continue to exist, and (b) to gain and hold power. We can see this in Scotland with the SNP (Scottish National Party) — originally founded with the goal of obtaining independence for Scotland and then disbanding, the disbanding bit is now nowhere to be seen in their constitution.

Per Michels, political parties have an unspoken survival drive. And they act as filters on the pool of available candidates. You can’t easily run for election — especially at national level — unless you get a party’s support, with the activists and election agents and assistance and funding that goes with it. (Or you can, but you then have to build your own machinery.) Existing incumbent representatives have an incentive to weed out potential candidates who are loose cannons and might jeopardize their ability to win re-election and maintain a career. Parties therefore tend to be self-stabilizing.

A secondary issue is that professionals will cream amateurs in any competition held on a level playing field. And this is true of politics as much as any other field of human competition. The US House of Representatives is overwhelmingly dominated by folks with law degrees (and this is not wholly inappropriate, given they’re in the job of making laws). The UK’s Parliament is slightly less narrowly circumscribed, but nevertheless there’s a career path right to the top in British politics, and it’s visible in all the main parties: you go to a private school then Oxford or Cambridge, participate in student politics (if you’re on the left) or debating societies (if you’re on the right), take a post as researcher or assistant for an MP or (less commonly) run for a local council office, then run for parliament. There are plenty of people in every democratic constitutional system who have never held a job outside of politics — and why should they? Such a diversion would be a waste of time and energy if your goal is to make a difference on the national stage.

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 Late in the 1860s novel “Little Women,” heroine Jo March, dreading her friend Laurie’s budding romantic feelings for her, tells her mother she feels “restless and anxious to be seeing, doing and learning more than I am.” Her solution is to move to the city, to live and work in a boardinghouse. There, she has a room to herself, time to write, and the welcome distraction of friendships with her fellow boarders.

Today the notion of the boardinghouse—a “big house full of strangers,” as Jo writes in a letter home, where a variety of people would rent rooms and eat at a common table—seems at best quaint, and at worst unsafe and unsavory, as 19th-century critics had it. In the grand narrative of American home life—farm, small town, suburb, apartment—the boardinghouse feels like a long-vanished footnote.

Try that nowadays without getting arrested.

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Between August 1916 and January 1917 Cobden-Sanderson, a printer and bookbinder, dropped more than a tonne of metal printing type from the west side of the bridge. He made around 170 trips in all from his bindery beside the pub, a distance of about half a mile, and always after dusk. At the start he hurled whole pages of type into the river; later he threw it like bird seed from his pockets. Then he found a small wooden box with a sliding lid, for which he made a handle out of tape—perfect for sprinkling the pieces into the water, and not too suspicious to bystanders.

Those tiny metal slugs belonged to a font of type used exclusively by the Doves Press, a printer of fine books that Cobden-Sanderson had co-founded 16 years earlier. The type was not his to destroy, so he concealed his trips from his friends and family and dropped his packages only when passing traffic would drown out the splash. There were slip-ups, all the same. One evening he nearly struck a boatman, whose vessel shot out unexpectedly from under the bridge. Another night he threw two cases of type short of the water. They landed on the pier below, out of reach but in plain sight. After sleepless nights he determined to retrieve them by boat, but they eventually washed away. After that he was more careful.

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When President Obama takes the oath of office for the second time, he will also usher in a new era in American power politics. Whereas the old left-wing definition of “who rules” focused on large corporations, banks, energy companies and agribusinesses, the Obama-era power structure represents a major transformation.

This shift stems, in large part, from the movement from a predominately resource and tangible goods-based economy to an information-based one. In the past, political struggles were largely fought over how to divide up the spoils generated by the basic productive economy; labor, investors and management all shared a belief in the ethos of economic growth, manufacturing and resource extraction.

In contrast, today’s new hegemons hail almost entirely from outside the material economy, and many come from outside the realm of the market system entirely. Daniel Bell, in his landmark 1973 The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, may have been the first to identify this ascension to “pre-eminence of the professional and technical class.” This new “priesthood of power,” as he put it, would eventually overturn the traditional hierarchies based on land, corporate and financial assets.

I.e., the Crust. More and more people are Catching On.

Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft are far from “the workers of the world,” but closer to modern-day robber barons. Through their own ingenuity, access to capital and often oligopolistic hold on lucrative markets, they have enjoyed one of the greatest accumulations of wealth in recent economic history, even amidst generally declining earnings, rising poverty and inequality among their fellow Americans.

Last year the tech oligarchs emerged as major political players. Microsoft, Google and their employees were the largest private-sector donors to the president. More important still, tech workers also provided the president and his party with a unique set of digital tools that helped identify potential supporters among traditionally uninformed and disinterested voters, particularly among the young.

An even greater beneficiary of the second term will be the administrative class, who by their nature live largely outside the market system. This group, which I call the new clerisy, is based largely in academia and the federal bureaucracy, whose numbers and distinct privileges have grown throughout the past half century.

Gee, there’s an echo in here.

Most distinctive about the clerisy is their unanimity of views. On campus today, there is broad agreement on a host of issues from gay marriage, affirmative action and what are perceived as “women’s” issues to an almost religious environmentalism that is contemptuous toward traditional industry and anything that smacks of traditional middle class suburban values. These views have shaped many of the perceptions of the current millennial generation, whose conversion to the clerical orthodoxy has caught most traditional conservatives utterly flat-footed.

As befits a technological age, the new clerisy also enjoys the sanction of what Bell defined as the “creative elite of scientists.” Prominent examples include the Secretary of Energy, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist David Chu; science advisor John Holdren; NASA’s James Hansen; and the board of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In the words of New York Times hyper-partisan Charles Blow, Republicans have devolved into the “creationist party.” In contrast Obama reigns gloriously hailed as “the sun king” of official science.

Let’s be clear — this new ascendant class is no threat to either the “one percent,”  or even the much smaller decimal groups. Historically, the already rich and large economic interests often profit in a hyper-regulated state; the clerisy’s actions can often stifle competition by increasing the cost of entry for unwelcome new players. Like Cardinal Richelieu or Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, our modern-day dirigistes favor state-directed capital that has benefited, among others, “green” capitalists, Wall Street “too big to fail” firms and, of course, General Motors.

All this complaining and Occupying Wall Street is merely street theater on the part of the ruling class, as one can easily tell from the number of Filthy Rich People who support the Democratic Party and their bag-man, Barack Obama. It is designed to manipulate the Lower Crust whose votes are the wind beneath the wings of the new corporate state. Since most of them come from the left side of the bell curve, and are kept there by the corruption of public education (the only education any of them can afford), it’s not a lot of heavy lifting.

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The evidence from twin studies, adoption studies and even from DNA evidence is relentlessly consistent: in children, in Western society, the heritability of IQ scores is about 50 per cent. The other half comes equally from family (shared environment) and from unshared individual experiences: luck, teachers, friends.

This numerical precision easily misleads us into thinking genes and environment struggle against each other. In fact, they are like two pillars supporting an arch: nature makes you seek out nurture, which brings out your nature. But here is where things get interesting. The acceptance of genetic influence on intelligence leads to some surprising, even paradoxical implications, some of which turn the assumptions of both the Right and the Left upside down.

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Nothing is more important in agriculture than place. What is successful on one kind of soil in one kind of climate won’t necessarily work in another place with a different soil or different weather patterns. Farmers have always gained the knowledge necessary to understand a place through hard-won and rarely transferable experience. What farmer Brown knows about his land might travel down the road a few miles, but it is less applicable on a similar farm in a different part of the country. This idea of place is what drives the local food movement. Wineries brag about the perfection of the marriage between their varietals and soil. On our farm, every acre that I’ve farmed for 35 years and that my father has farmed for 65 years has a story. We know which weeds grow where, when the wet spots will appear, and we all remember that time the combine caught on fire down by the hackberry tree. Farmers’ personal relationship to place, one of the salient facts that distinguish agriculture, is about to change.

Most combines traveling across fields in the Midwest this fall had a GPS receiver located in the front of the cab. Although agriculture has been experimenting with this technology for a decade or so, only now is the industry starting to consider all the uses of this transformative technology. For several years, farmers have had the ability to map yields with global positioning data. Using that information, firms can design “prescriptions” for the farmer, who uses the “scrips” to apply seed and fertilizer in varying amounts across the field. Where the yield maps show soil with a lower yield potential, the prescription calls for fewer seeds and less fertilizer. This use of an individual farmer’s data to design a different program for each square meter in a field spanning hundreds of acres could replace a farmer’s decades of experience with satellites and algorithms. What we have gained in efficiency and by avoiding the overuse of scarce and potentially environmentally damaging inputs, we may be losing in the connections of the farm family to the ancestral place. Precision technology will allow managers to cover more acres more accurately and will likely lead to increasing size and consolidation of farms. While Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, and Alice Waters continue to argue that we need to turn back the clock on technology in agriculture, much of the world is moving in a quite different direction.

More and more, ‘farms’ are turning into food factories that just happen to be outdoors. As capital requirements increase, the size of the operation also needs to increase in order to reach necessary economies of scale.

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The White House’s annual Economic Report of the President pushes a raft of proposals designed to make the U.S. economy stronger and more productive in the long run. Some of them run the risk of making a subset of U.S. workers, who have been front and center for the White House lately, more vulnerable in the short run.

Not to worry. No government program ever made the U.S. economy stronger and more productive in the long run.

(Or maybe that’s what they meant…?)

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The study used data from the Bureau of Labor statistics to measure how many times more money the top-earning income bracket of a state made than bottom earners. Researchers compared the top 25th percentile earner to the bottom 25th percentile earner and divided the sums into each other, then ranked states by number. California, in which a top 25th percentile earner makes 2.55 times more than a bottom 25th percentile earner, is by far the most unequal state, followed by New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and President Obama’s home state of Illinois.

In Washington, D.C., however, a top 25th percentile earner makes 2.6 times the amount of money a bottom 25th percentile earner makes, which represents the biggest gap in the nation. Maryland and Virginia both make the top ten group of biggest gaps in income, and Maryland experienced the largest gap increase in the past decade of any state: 12.05%. Breitbart News has previously reported that eight of the 13 wealthiest counties in the U.S.A. are in the D.C. region. Texas and Louisiana are the only red states in the top ten.

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In October of last year, the Michigan Education Association (MEA) made the claim that “99 percent” of its members remained happily unionized despite the state’s ten-month-old worker freedom law.

It is true that the union has allowed some teachers to leave without opposition as long as they had filed their separation papers last year in August, the one month during the year that the union claims teachers are “allowed” to leave. State law does not sanction this. It is only a union policy.

Regardless that it is not an enforceable law, the union threatened to send teachers who stopped paying dues to collection agencies. Letters were also sent to all union members that they must hand over bank and credit card account numbers so that the union can automatically deduct dues from their accounts.

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The new devices work not by frying a car’s electronics as military electromagnetic pulse weapons do, but by temporarily disabling them. “We want to disturb the car’s electronics so we can stop it, but we don’t want to break the car and leave it stuck on the motorway. And we don’t want to harm the occupants, nearby pedestrians or the police with the beam either,” says Macé. Drivers should not feel the beam – but they might hear something. “This is known as the Frey microwave hearing effect and consists of audible clicks… just a pop in the ear,” she says.

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Among other things, it teaches us that the government routinely engages in behavior for which it would throw anybody else in jail.

Predatory pricing is one of the simplest business practices to explain: Sell at a loss until you bankrupt your competitors.  When you think about it, public schools apply this predatory strategy to an extreme degree.  They don’t just sell education at a loss.  They “sell” education for free!

What can we learn from this epiphany?  First and foremost, predation is a lot less effective than you’d think.  After practicing predation to the utmost degree, public schools have only captured 90% of the market.

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The case is a legacy of America’s westward expansion during the late 19th century, when Congress gave public land to private railroads to spur development of a transcontinental transportation network.

Not every project was successful, however. In 1996, one such railroad in Wyoming gave up and tore out the tracks. The U.S. Forest Service then sought to use the rights of way—which crossed through the Medicine Bow National Forest as well as 31 parcels of private property—for public trails. Read the full WSJ story here.

All but one property owner acquiesced to the trails plan: Marvin Brandt, whose 83-acre property was by far the largest and one associated with his family since his father began working at a local sawmill in 1939.

The government argued that when the railroad ended operations, certain property rights reverted to the government, such as using the right of way for a trail.

Mr. Brandt, represented by the conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation, contended that under the 1875 act providing the right of way, the railroad held only an easement, or limited right to use another’s property for a specific purpose, which expired when that use was abandoned. By a vote of 8-1, the Supreme Court agreed.

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This gravity-defying US$40k catamaran rises completely out of the water at speed on a pair of hook-shaped hydrofoils. It looks like the work of David Copperfield, but it’s real, and it’s set to start a revolution in the sailing world.

Jim Goad is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

There are two types of ignorant people: those who don’t know, and those who know but choose to ignore. While nary a day goes by when our pink snouts aren’t rubbed in black slavery and the Holocaust, I can’t remember the last time the media made a peep about white slavery in the American colonies—nor even its more benign term, white indentured servitude. Then again, one can’t forget—nor even remember—what you don’t know about in the first place.

I can count at least one distant ancestor who was transported to the New World as an indentured servant. I’ve dealt with the white-hot topic of white slavery in my book The Redneck Manifesto and in a magazine article that was factually correct yet allegedly cost the magazine in question significant ad revenue from disgruntled White Slavery Deniers. And every time I’ve dared to raise the subject, I am shouted down, scoffed at, spat upon, pooh-poohed, and falsely accused of trying to say “Black slavery wasn’t bad.” My true motive is to say, “Hey, numskulls—you’re missing the big picture and creating poisonous levels of misunderstanding and resentment.” I’m only trying to show the similarities between white and black slavery, while others seem compelled to deny the similarities and focus exclusively on the differences. Interestingly, black people generally seem far more receptive to my humble mission. Then again, the false narrative that white people have never suffered is usually peddled by white people who have never suffered. Funny how that works.

Indeed it is.

Knowing my suggestions will be ignored, I will stubbornly sally forth and suggest two possible Hollywood adaptions of real-life white slavery. The first would involve the Barbary Coast and the estimated million-plus white Christians who were kidnapped by African Muslims and forced to endure hardships and torture that rival and may surpass what black slaves in America experienced.

The second would be based on the book White Cargo. One in a long series of books and essays that have exhaustively documented this otherwise whitewashed phenomenon, White Cargo goes into great detail regarding the brutality of the white slave trade to America and how English and Irish adults and children were kidnapped, beaten, tortured, and worked to death in the New World. For a touch of personal pathos, the screenplay might focus on the tale of a skeleton that was discovered in a Maryland basement in 2003 “in a hole under a pile of household waste.” The remains are presumed to be those of a 16-year-old so-called white indentured servant who’d been worked to death and cast aside as white trash rather than given a proper burial. Let’s see that poor soul’s story up on the silver screen, Mr. Weinstein.

Bryan Caplan points out the elephant in the room, so to speak.

 When I blame people for their problems, Democrats and liberals are prone to object at a fundamental level.  One fundamental objection rests on determinism: Since everyone is determined to act precisely as he does, it is always false to say, “There were reasonable steps he could have taken to avoid his problem.”  Another fundamental objection rests on utilitarianism: We should always do whatever maximizes social utility, even if that means taxing the blameless to subsidize the blameworthy.

Strangely, though, every Democrat and liberal I know routinely blames one category of people for their vicious choices: Republicans.  Watch their Facebook feeds.  You’ll see story after story about how Republicans – leaders and followers – shirk their basic moral duties.  Republicans ignore their duty to help the less fortunate.  Republicans ignore scientific evidence on global warming.  Republicans lie to foment war.  The point of these claims is not merely that Republican policies have bad consequences, but that Republicans are blameworthy people.

The underlying logic is rarely stated, but it snaps neatly into my framework of blame.  Why are Republicans blameworthy?  Because there are reasonable steps they could have taken to avoid being what they are.  Instead of ignoring their duties to help the less fortunate, Republicans could show basic humanity.  Instead of ignoring scientific evidence on global warming, Republicans could calmly defer to the climatological consensus.  Instead of lying to foment war, Republicans could tell the truth.

Are these “reasonable” alternatives?  Sure.  This is clearly true for the Republican rank-and file.  Since one vote has near-zero chance of noticeably changing political outcomes, political virtue is effectively free.  Asking the typical Republicans to reverse course on global warming isn’t like asking him to unilaterally give up his car.  It’s like asking him for a one-penny donation.  Totally reasonable.

The same goes for Republican leaders.  Yes, a successful Republican politician who broke ranks with his party would probably lose his job.  But he could easily find alternative employment that didn’t require him to spurn the poor, scoff at climate science, and make up stories about WMDs.  Stop heinous activity, keep your upper-middle class lifestyle.  Quite reasonable.

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Oddly, the news media and Democratic leaders don’t think it’s a big deal when a federal official — Lerner was the head of the unit that deals with tax-exempt organizations when she first invoked the Fifth last May — won’t answer questions about her actions as a federal official, but they are in a huff because the committee’s chairman, Darrell Issa, abruptly called an end to the hearing and shut off the microphone.

A government employee taking the Fifth ought to ring alarm bells across the fruited plain. But, of course, the supposed news media are just press agents for the Democrats, so nothing happens.

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On one hand you have an upper-middle class and upper class who go to good colleges and have skilled jobs. These people tend to have healthy family values – they get married and stay married, they pay a lot of attention to their kids. They are civically engaged and physically healthy. On the other hand you have uneducated masses, who tend not to stay married, to leave child-raising to single mothers, and to neglect the kids. They are overweight, bedraggled, and disengaged from the community. The former he calls “Belmont”, the latter “Fishtown”, after two semi-imaginary neighborhoods where they cluster.

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The Three Year Economic Saving Program, which supervises Muhammad farms, is owned by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. The farm is located in Georgia, but the government subsidies, nearly $160,000, have gone to Farrakhan’s home in Chicago since 2002. The program, which was incorporated on Sept. 12, 2001, has been listed as “Not in Good Standing” by Illinois’s secretary of state since last September. The Office of the Illinois Secretary of State said the program was “involuntarily” dissolved by the State of Illinois on Feb. 1.

Stealing from the taxpayer is a constant temptation when what is effectively a rounding error from the government’s perspective is wealth beyond the dreams of avarice to the individual.

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Cities are polluting the air, ground, and water around them with heat. Roads and rooftops absorb sunlight, and swapping trees for pavement removes shade. Add all these factors together, and you get something called an “urban heat island,” an air temperature increase of up to 22 degrees Fahrenheit as you get closer to a large city. While the average human is more likely to feel this in the air, these changes also create a well of heat below the ground — and that heat, ironically, can be used as renewable energy even as it changes the ecosystem. Now, thanks to a study from Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, we know just where most of it’s coming from, and how it could be better harnessed to replace traditional heaters and air conditioners.

George Will blows the whistle.

The most intrusive and potentially most punitive federal agency has been politicized; the IRS has become an appendage of Barack Obama’s party. Furthermore, congruent with exhortations from some congressional Democrats, it is intensifying its efforts to suffocate groups critical of progressives, by delaying what once was the swift, routine granting of tax-exempt status.

So, the IRS, far from repenting of its abusive behavior, is trying to codify the abuses. It hopes to nullify with new rules the existing legal right of 501(c)(4) groups, many of which are conservative, to participate in politics. The proposed rules have drawn more than 140,000 comments, most of them complaints, some from liberals wary of IRS attempts to broadly define “candidate-related political activity” and to narrow the permissible amount of this.

…

The rules that Obama says befuddled the IRS boneheads — to his benefit — read today exactly as they have read since 1959. For half a century they did not prevent the IRS from processing applications for tax-exempt status in less than three months. Some conservative group should offer $10,000 to anyone who can identify a liberal group that had the experience scores of conservative groups have had — an application delayed more than three years and receipt of an IRS questionnaire containing at least 60 questions.

Speaking of questions: Can anyone identify a Democratic Senate candidate whose tax records were leaked, as Christine O’Donnell’s were when she was the Republican candidate in Delaware in 2010? Is it a coincidence that in January 2011, after Catherine Engelbrecht requested tax-exempt status for two conservative groups she founded in Texas — King Street Patriots and True the Vote — the Engelbrecht family business was notified of its first IRS audit? Does James Comey wonder why (this was before he became FBI director), five months after Engelbrecht’s tax-exemption request, FBI agents appeared seeking information about attendees at the King Street Patriots meetings? Were five subsequent FBI contacts “checking in” for “updates” on the group’s activities really necessary? Why did the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives show a sudden intrusive interest in the Engelbrechts’ business, which has nothing to do with alcohol or tobacco or firearms or explosives?

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‘You’re a racist!’ ‘No, you’re a racist!’

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China’s high-speed rail lines are becoming a major transport force for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), allowing the rapid movement of military forces throughout the country, a recent state-run news report revealed.

Since few nations are likely to invade China, the recent discussion in a Communist Party news outlet about military uses of the new rail network is raising questions about the PLA’s future role in quelling domestic unrest.

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It is February 2008. President Mubarak reigns over Egypt these days, and the nation’s antiquities service is led by a forceful, charismatic archaeologist called Zahi Hawass.

Gad isn’t the first to attempt to test Tutankhamun’s DNA, but he is the first to get this far. Previous efforts by foreigners were cancelled at the last minute. After decades of outside interference, Egypt’s politicians were reluctant to hand over the keys to the pharaohs’ origins—especially when the results, if dropped into the crucible of the Middle East, might prove explosive.

Now American television, with its lavish budgets, has bought its way to the king. The Discovery Channel has paid millions of dollars to film a pioneering study of Tutankhamun’s genetic heritage, this time carried out by the Egyptians themselves. If successful, the project could fill state coffers, achieve a scientific coup and reclaim dented national pride. Yet the goal is so ambitious that many of the world’s top researchers insist it isn’t even possible.

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Having lived through the Watergate scandal and the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon, I recall that one conservative journalist stood out from the pack. As the Washington columnist for National Review, George Will regularly exposed the Nixon administration’s lines of defense as the lies that they were. He distinguished himself both for his merciless analytical rigor and his skills as an anatomist.

…

George Will’s intellect made him one of a kind in the profession, but is there a liberal columnist who is willing to serve Will’s role in the current crisis of the Obama administration? Something is rotten in the Obama administration. The problem is that the political rot is instrumental to the goals of the Democratic Party. No liberal journalist has emerged to dog the administration on the multifarious IRS scandals. They are lapdogs all.

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To give Campbell his due, he is not calling for a forced state solution to his problem of wanting other people to take care of him, merely that he hopes to find them somewhere out there. Best of luck.

Screw Grabber.

Berry Breeze.

AuctionZip.

Opternative.

Leatherman Skeletool.

Keybrid.

Convertible Pool Table.

Tear by Hand Mailing Tape.

Modular Wall Unit Kitchen.

K5 Security Robot.

Greenlid.

Pet-safe paint. I am not making this up.

Wiring Complete.

Low tire pressure indicator caps.

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They have the technology.

Joel Kotkin blows the whistle.

Rather than a beacon for upward mobility, the Valley increasingly represents a high-tech version of a feudal society, where the vast majority of the economic gains go to a very select few. The mostly white and Asian tech types in Palo Alto or San Francisco may celebrate their IPO windfalls, but wages for the region’s African American and large Latino populations, roughly on third of the total, have actually dropped, notes a recent Joint Venture Silicon Valley report, down 18 percent for blacks and 5 percent for Latinos, from 2009-11.

Meanwhile, the poverty rate in Santa Clara County since 2001 has soared from 8 percent to 14 percent; today one of four people in the San Jose area is underemployed, up from a mere 5 percent just a decade ago. The food-stamp population in Santa Clara County, meanwhile, has mushroomed from 25,000 a decade ago to almost 125,000 last year. San Jose, the Santa Clara County seat, is also home to North America’s largest homeless encampment, known as “the Jungle.”

What the Valley increasingly offers America is an economic model dominated by the ultrarich, and generally well-educated, with few opportunities for working-class people, women and minorities. As Russell Hancock, president of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, recently acknowledged, “Silicon Valley is two valleys. There is a valley of haves, and a valley of have-nots.”

And, not surprisingly, the place is overwhelmingly ‘progressive’.

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“One of top five industries in the U.S. by expenditure is elementary education, and as opposed to other large industries, the median experience is bad from every angle,” he explains. The dysfunction and relative slow-to-change nature of the educational system is one of his biggest frustrations. The cost of education is increasing, he adds, but that isn’t translating into children excelling more effectively at skills like reading and math.

That’s one of the problems, because education is seen as being an ‘industry’ and it’s really not. As an industry, kids are pushed in one end, as raw materials, and are expected to come out the other end as finished products. This batch process method mirrors the automotive factory and is intended to do so. This whole factory approach to education is a major reason why educational unions are metastasizing and bringing educational progress to a grinding halt.

“If a time traveler came back from the early 1900?s, and looked at schools, they would look relatively the same. And there’s something wrong with that, because children and our world have changed.”

Specifically, we now have the technology to deal with children on individual basis, which we’ve never had before. This means that, instead of treating students as interchangeable parts to push through a designed-for-the-average manufacturing process, we can now tailor individual programs to suit individual talent levels and personalities, as the Khan Academy approach is so famously doing.

He started researching where success was actually taking place at a broader scale in schools, in early education. What ties these schools together is the notion of child centeredness, he says, which is providing individualized education where the student learns at his or her own pace in ways most nurture them and their education.

Exactly.

The more he imagined what his vision would look like in reality, the more it sounded like a home school environment but with a larger group, skilled teachers, and a curriculum that focused on exposing children to experiences, as well as skill-building.

Which is why homeschooled kids typically kick the asses of kids from a ‘factory’ school.

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In the late 1980s, scientists at Osaka University in Japan noticed unusual repeated DNA sequences next to a gene they were studying in a common bacterium. They mentioned them in the final paragraph of a paper: “The biological significance of these sequences is not known.”

Now their significance is known, and it has set off a scientific frenzy.

The sequences, it turns out, are part of a sophisticated immune system that bacteria use to fight viruses. And that system, whose very existence was unknown until about seven years ago, may provide scientists with unprecedented power to rewrite the code of life.

In the past year or so, researchers have discovered that the bacterial system can be harnessed to make precise changes to the DNA of humans, as well as other animals and plants.

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is going to spend $22.3 million to lease temporary office space for two years in a building controlled by an Obama friend and campaign bundler while the new agency’s future headquarters undergoes a $145 million renovation, the Washington Examiner reports. There’s a word for what is being done to taxpayers by this agency’s real estate deals, and “protection” isn’t it.

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

In a normal world of checks and balances as envisioned by the founders and enacted in the Constitution, Congress would simply refuse to appropriate these funds, and the agency would find some less expensive workspace. But the agency, as created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, is funded not by Congress but by the Federal Reserve.

We used to have a Constitution; wonder where it went to.

The essential guide.

When it comes to boyfriends, there’s a fine line between endearing quirks and severe personality disorders. Is he a pedophile or is he simply good with kids? How to Tell If Your Boyfriend Is the Antichrist teaches women to identify the warning signs associated with a spectrum of Mr. Wrongs….

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This is exactly as I predicted a year ago, “the rich will return to the old ways of having a large staff working for them so that they have more time to self-actualize”

I’ve also previously pointed out that providing personal services for the rich will become an increasingly common middle-class jobs as other jobs are replaced by automation and robots.

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Doubters have been poo-pooing Texas’ economic growth ever since it shook off the economic recession even as the rest of the country continues to try to scrape the thing off its shoes. Yeah, Texas may be creating jobs, they say, but only for burger-flippers. But data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas shows that those must be some well-paid burger-flippers. Texas, according to a new paper, outstrips the rest of the country when it comes to creating not just jobs, but jobs that pay well.

Damn straight.

Read it.

After successful testing last year, the Navy is preparing to deploy its first directed energy weapon to the fleet. When it puts to sea this summer, the afloat forward staging base ship USS Ponce will be equipped with the Navy’s Laser Weapon System (LaWS).

Taki Theodoracopulos is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Now, don’t for a minute think I’m defending slavery. We Greeks didn’t have slaves in modern times, just 2,500 years ago. We stopped after Jesus Christ told us we were all equals in the eyes of God. The fact that Arabs and Africans did not, however, is something Hollywood sharks have chosen to ignore.

Along with the Government, the Media, the Educational Establishment, the Grievance Industry, and all the rest of the usual suspects.

The fact that slavery is still practiced in Africa seems to have escaped the film industry. A lot of American blacks take Arab names and become Muslims, an irony in view of the fact that Arabs in cahoots with African tribal leaders were the ones that enslaved the poor souls that ended up in slave ships. The Brits, too, made a quick buck transporting them to the New World, where the Americans put them to work in chains. Slavery was the most horrendous of institutions, but it has been over since 1865—at least in America. It’s still thriving in Africa, and—I know, I know—blacks in America need a sort of helping hand, but as the great James Burnham wrote, “Human differences are so profound, it is neither possible nor desirable to eliminate all inequalities, hierarchies and distinctions.”

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The Red Army raped close to three million German women, but you never hear about that in Hollywood movies, much less ones that win Best Picture. Go see The Book Thief.

Mark Steyn looks at Canadian culture.

On the radio, the CRTC requires you to play a certain amount of Canadian music – you get points according to whether your record has a Canadian performer, a Canadian producer, a Canadian composer, a Canadian lyricist. This is to strengthen and support Canadian culture. I had no idea a similar system applies to Canadian pornography, but ’tis so….

Read it.

Let me note that some pundits insist that choking off the legal availability of this particular service somehow defies the laws of supply and demand and doesn’t breed an illegal market. Robert Mayer, in an oft-cited law review article conflates high-interest loans in the early, unregulated market with illegal loans in the regulated market in a way that seems deliberately obtuse (he gets away with this because the term “loan shark” was originally little more than an epithet for a lender borrowers resented, and then evolved). He also seems ignorant of how illegal markets develop, and that it may take time to evolve the infrastructure for them. Go read his piece and decide for yourself.

I find those pundits unconvincing, though. Supply and demand are universals. It seems unlikely that thwarting demand in the legal market won’t drive it to the illegal market, and I have yet to be persuaded otherwise.

High-interest rate loans suck. But if there’s demand for them, somebody will offer supply. Better that the debts are collected over the phone or by nastygram than by somebody like my cousin.

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

Read it.

Replacing the US Constitution of 1787 began in the 1930s, slowly and imperceptibly, always with bipartisan support. Now it rushes to completion, unmistakably. Democrat President Barack Obama’s proclamation: “I can do anything I want,” only exaggerated the reality of the 2014 constitution, which the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives re-confirmed quickly by effectively tossing yet one more part of the 1787 Constitution onto the dead-letter pile — the provision that the US government may borrow money only as authorized by law. In short, simply by ignoring the Constitution, our ruling class is imposing a new one on us. Insofar as we suffer it, we deserve it.

The new constitution is best understood by asking, in the light of the many new powers that a Democrat president has asserted and to which the Republican leadership has assented, what may the president of the United States NOT do, so long as at least one third of the Senate protects him from being removed from office. The answer is: “not much.” This amounts to a not-so-constitutional monarchy in which the king rules unless and until he is replaced by another, just like him.

Read it.

Scientists have successfully modified the white blood cells of 12 patients living with HIV, making their cells resistant to the retrovirus and improving the study participants’ overall ability to fight off infection. The researchers achieved this result through a gene editing technique, described today in The New England Journal of Medicine.

In the study, scientists extracted white blood cells, called CD4 T cells, from the participants’ blood. They then modified these cells by removing the gene responsible for the production of a protein called CCR5. The CCR5 protein is what allows HIV to enter white bloods cells in the first place, so its removal conveyed resistance. After verifying that nothing else had been altered within the cells, the researchers returned them — 10 billion of them — to the patients via blood transfusion. “The modified [white blood] cells survive longer in the presence of HIV, which we proved by stopping [antiretroviral] therapy in some patients,” says Pablo Tebas, an infectious disease physician at the University of Pennsylvania and study co-author.

Steve Sailer calls Bullshit!

 Yesterday, David Coleman of the College Board announced a new SAT that will go into use in early 2016. Some of the ideas sound pretty good, some not so hot, but my big question is: Is Coleman just making this up as he goes along? Or have they actually tested these planned changes and found they work as hoped?

The usual practice with the SAT is to slip experimental questions into real SATs. The unvalidated new questions don’t count for the students’ scores, but ETS checks to make sure they aren’t worse than the old questions. I don’t see much evidence that this has been done with Coleman’s reforms yet.

…

So, the College Board won’t be able to tell you whether a 500 on the new SAT is better or worse than a 500 on the old SAT until after hundreds of thousands of kids take the new one for real in April 2016.

Is Coleman just making this up as he goes along and is hoping the psychometricians can eventually come up with data to support his intuitions? My guess is that Coleman’s intuitions are less stupid than those of most figures in the education reform biz, but still …

Read it.

The Dating Ring, a Y Combinator-incubated, group matchmaking startup that recently expanded from New York to San Francisco, is running a Crowdtilt campaign with the stated goal of flying women from NYC to SF. Here’s how the campaign page explains it:

    There are tons more single women in NYC, and tons more single men in SF. And, see, the two cities are only separated by a bunch of crappy airports, flight delays, and cheap roundtrip flights.

    So, we started joking about doing some cross country matchmaking. And you know what they say – make a joke 12 times and it becomes a Crowdtilt. So, America, let’s make this happen.

Read it.

Geneticist J. Craig Venter, who has made headlines for his genomic research and helping develop what’s been called the first synthetic life form, is launching a new company with the goal of delaying aging and extending human lives. Human Longevity, Inc. is co-founded by Venter, biotechnologist and entrepreneur Robert Hariri, and Peter Diamandis, who founded the X Prize Foundation and more recently co-founded asteroid mining startup Planetary Resources. Its goal is to create the world’s most comprehensive human genome sequencing project, capturing and cross-referencing genetic information from a cross-section of people both sick and healthy — it hopes to sequence 40,000 human genomes a year, with an eventual goal of 100,000 annually.

Read it.

Life is not a race. Speed is good for things you want to get past, not for important things you enjoy. “It was an efficient meal.” “I had a quick life.” If you are doing something meaningful you’d want the experience to last. You would try to savor and consider every single moment to extract the maximum value from it.

Sometimes people brag to me about how many books they read each year. “I read 40 books” or “I read 60 books.”  My first thought is they’re probably reading the wrong books. Or reading them the wrong way. Any book I feel the urge to speed through means it’s either not very good or I’m not very interested.

Or maybe you’re just slow.

Read it.

While other scriptures contain contradictions, the Koran is the only holy book whose commentators have evolved a doctrine to account for the very visible shifts which occur from one injunction to another. No careful reader will remain unaware of the many contradictory verses in the Koran, most specifically the way in which peaceful and tolerant verses lie almost side by side with violent and intolerant ones. The ulema were initially baffled as to which verses to codify into the Shari’a worldview—the one that states there is no coercion in religion (2:256), or the ones that command believers to fight all non-Muslims till they either convert, or at least submit, to Islam (8:39, 9:5, 9:29). To get out of this quandary, the commentators developed the doctrine of abrogation, which essentially maintains that verses revealed later in Muhammad’s career take precedence over earlier ones whenever there is a discrepancy. In order to document which verses abrogated which, a religious science devoted to the chronology of the Koran’s verses evolved (known as an-Nasikh wa’l Mansukh, the abrogater and the abrogated).

‘Never mind!’

But why the contradiction in the first place? The standard view is that in the early years of Islam, since Muhammad and his community were far outnumbered by their infidel competitors while living next to them in Mecca, a message of peace and coexistence was in order. However, after the Muslims migrated to Medina in 622 and grew in military strength, verses inciting them to go on the offensive were slowly “revealed”—in principle, sent down from Allah—always commensurate with Islam’s growing capabilities. In juridical texts, these are categorized in stages: passivity vis-á-vis aggression; permission to fight back against aggressors; commands to fight aggressors; commands to fight all non-Muslims, whether the latter begin aggressions or not. Growing Muslim might is the only variable that explains this progressive change in policy.

How convenient.

That Islam legitimizes deceit during war is, of course, not all that astonishing; after all, as the Elizabethan writer John Lyly put it, “All’s fair in love and war.” Other non-Muslim philosophers and strategists—such as Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes—justified deceit in warfare. Deception of the enemy during war is only common sense. The crucial difference in Islam, however, is that war against the infidel is a perpetual affair—until, in the words of the Koran, “all chaos ceases, and all religion belongs to Allah.” In his entry on jihad from the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Emile Tyan states: “The duty of the jihad exists as long as the universal domination of Islam has not been attained. Peace with non-Muslim nations is, therefore, a provisional state of affairs only; the chance of circumstances alone can justify it temporarily.”

In other words, Islam is the worst existential threat ever faced by any non-Muslim society. Islam cannot coexist with any non-Muslim culture. Communism was an upstart squeak by comparison.

Read it.

Soon after it was applied to their brains, 15 people with severe brain damage showed signs of consciousness, including moving their hands or following instructions using their eyes. Two people were even able to answer questions for 2 hours before drifting back into their previous uncommunicative state.

“I don’t want to give people false hope – these people weren’t getting up and walking around – but it shows there is potential for the brain to recover functionality, even several years after damage,” says Steven Laureys at the University of Liège in Belgium, who led the research.

Read it.

The folks at Oscar Mayer have found a way around that, though – an iPhone app and dongle that will make sizzling sounds and release a bacon scent when your alarm goes off.

The aroma comes from a diffuser made by Scentee, which uses high-frequency waves to release the aroma of a bacon scent capsule.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Capitalism was much talked about, because it stood in such clear opposition to the state socialism of our Cold War enemy. Again, though, the corrosive effects of capitalism on the nation-state do not seem to have been on anyone’s mind. Schumpeter had already put the phrase “creative destruction” into circulation, but it was discussed mainly as something that happened within a national economy, American makers of buggy whips finding new employment as American auto mechanics.

“Creative destruction” is none the less destruction, and “destroy” is still antonymous with “conserve.” These elementary points of vocabulary were too little noticed by Cold War conservatives.

As the economic manifestation of individual liberty, standing in contrast with socialist tyranny, capitalism was given a pass. The only Cold War conservatives to offer any significant critique of capitalism were Southern agrarians like Richard Weaver, drawing on the old sectionalist Southern prejudices seeing Yankees as cold-blooded, ruthless seekers of profit.

…

Thus the conservative critique of capitalism deserves an airing. We conservatives whose opinions were cooked in the mid-to-late 20th century tend to look kindly on capitalism, in part because we saw close up the horrors and inefficiency of state socialism. But the traditionalist-conservative critique reminds us that capitalism is not necessarily a friend of liberty.

Capitalists— well, some capitalists— are quite happy to crush your liberties if it’s good for business, which it sometimes is. Indeed, as we see from all the business lobbying for open borders, they’re happy to crush national sovereignty, debase the value of citizenship, and displace American workers, if those things are good for the bottom line.