…and not knowing why.
The Kochs are the Left’s latest Goldstein.
Disparate Impact
OK, so according to the administration, racial outcomes that don’t match societal proportions should be treated as racism. Can Mssrs. Perez or Holder explain to us why we shouldn’t similarly assume that disproportionate IRS treatment of limited-government/pro-Israel/other-things-the-administration-disagrees-with groups is political?
Ten Rules Of Evolution
…in science fiction. H. G. Wells was as ignorant of evolution as any creationist is.
Molecular Bonds
Imaging them at an atomic level.
When I took chemistry, I always wondered if the structural diagrams that chemists came up with were accurate depictions, or just a conceptual model. Now we know.
High-Speed Police Chases
Why they’re going away.
Shep Smith is hardest hit.
Leviathan Fail
Jonah Goldberg reviews Kevin Williamson’s new book:
Williamson offers a wonderfully Nockian tutorial on how all states — and nearly all governments — begin as criminal enterprises, while acknowledging that not all criminal enterprises are evil. Criminals — whether we’re talking Somali warlords, Mafia dons, or the Tudors of England — often provide vital goods and services, from food to security. Often what makes them criminal is that they are competing with the State monopoly on such things.
Sidestepping the distinction between State and government, Williamson instead identifies what causes the Dr. Jekyll of government to transform into the Mr. Hyde of the State. He calls this elixir “politics.”
Williamson’s core argument is that politics has a congenital defect: Politics cannot get “less wrong” (a term coined by artificial-intelligence guru Eliezer Yudkowsky). Productive systems — the scientific method, the market, evolution — all have the built-in ability to learn from failures. Nothing (in this life at least) ever becomes immortally perfect, but some things become less wrong through trial and error. The market, writes Williamson, “is a form of social evolution that is metaphorically parallel to biological evolution. Consider the case of New Coke, or Betamax, or McDonald’s Arch Deluxe, or Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt Shampoo. . . . When hordes of people don’t show up to buy the product, then the product dies.” Just like organisms in the wild, corporations that don’t learn from failures eventually fade away.
Except in politics: “The problem of politics is that it does not know how to get less wrong.” While new iPhones regularly burst forth like gifts from the gods, politics plods along. “Other than Social Security, there are very few 1935 vintage products still in use,” he writes. “Resistance to innovation is a part of the deep structure of politics. In that, it is like any other monopoly. It never goes out of business — despite flooding the market with defective and dangerous products, mistreating its customers, degrading the environment, cooking the books, and engaging in financial shenanigans that would have made Gordon Gekko pale to contemplate.” Hence, it is not U.S. Steel, which was eventually washed away like an imposing sand castle in the surf, but only politics that can claim to be “the eternal corporation.”
Read the whole thing, and buy the book
Detroit
This is another grim reminder of just how destructive Detroit’s corrupt machine politics have been. At one time, Detroit was the manufacturing capital of America and one of the country’s great cities; today it’s trying to stave off a kind of modern-day bonfire of the vanities.
This is the fate of the country at large if we don’t send a better class of people to Washington.
The Lie That Won’t Die
No, Tim McVeigh was not a Christian:
The DOJ political appointee adds in the article that the upcoming presentation will also focus on Muslim culture with a special emphasis on the fact that the religion is no different from others, even though some in the faith have committed terrorist acts, Christians have done the same. As an example he offers that the worst terrorist attack in the U.S. prior to 9/11 was committed by American Christians in Oklahoma City. He also mentioned the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting last year in which another Christian, an American white supremacist, fatally shot six people and wounded four others.
Tim McVeigh was a self-avowed agnostic. So by definition, he was not a Christian. OK City had nothing to do with Christianity.
And if you read this article about the Sikh temple shooter, you know what you find no mention of? Christianity. Which isn’t surprising, given that he has a picture of himself in front of a swastika, and Hitler himself wasn’t Christian. He was a white supremacist, and it really is a slander to Christians to attribute his actions to that religion.
It’s really amazing how these people try to pretend that Islamist terrorism, like Fort Hood or the Boston Marathon bombing, has nothing to do with Islam, while grabbing for straws and outright lying about non-Islamic terrorism and its non-relationship to Christianity, or religion in general, all in order to strip us of our First Amendment rights. They need to be called on it, each and every time.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I didn’t get all the way to the end, so in fairness, I need to call Judicial Watch on this nonsense:
The president has even ordered the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to shift its mission from space exploration to Muslim diplomacy…
It’s amazing how many people actually believe this, based on nothing but an idiotic interview that Bolden gave to Al Jazeera. I suppose, though, because it seems pretty plausible that this administration would do something that stupid, even though it didn’t.
Hippie Punching
Asking the important questions: whence the arrival of the phrase?
Short answer — blame Frank J.
Old Blighty
Maybe it’s not yet time to consign England to the dustbin of history. I hope that UKIP takes advantage of this — the Tory squishes probably won’t.