At Cato, Patrick J. Michaels in (supportive) response to this superb lead essay:

Imagine if a NASA administrator at a congressional hearing, upon being asked if global warming were of sufficient importance to justify a billion dollars in additional funding, replied that it really was an exaggerated issue, and the money should be spent elsewhere on more important problems.

It is a virtual certainty that such a reply would be one of his last acts as administrator.

So, at the end of this hypothetical hearing, having answered in the affirmative (perhaps more like, “hell yes, we can use the money”), the administrator gathers all of his department heads and demands programmatic proposals from each.  Will any one of these individuals submit one which states that his department really doesn’t want the funding because the issue is perhaps exaggerated?

It is a virtual certainty that such a reply would be one of his last acts as a department head.

The department heads now turn to their individual scientists, asking for specific proposals on how to put the new monies to use. Who will submit a proposal with the working research hypothesis that climate change isn’t all that important?

It is a virtual certainty that such a reply would guarantee he was in his last year as a NASA scientist.

(Don’t miss Jim on the same topic, here.)

The witch-craze seems to be running out of juice, according to some  thought-provoking Ngram data organized by Brad Trun.

The charge of “Racist!” is losing its sting as its overzealous hurlers increasingly render it farcical. “Racist” is, for the first time since the neologism’s inception 80 years ago, starting to fall out of favor. Zooming in on the post–1930 period in Google Ngram Viewer and eliminating smoothing reveals that “racist” references topped out as the calendar switched to the new millennium.

My welcome news receptors are so corroded, that I can’t help wondering: what’s wrong with this story?

(In other news, Peak African is still some way off. Caplan will no doubt be thrilled. Does anybody sensible think that a billion Nigerians by 2100 sounds like a future that might work? It’s probably a racist question, but you have to do what you can for dying traditions.)

ADDED: “We’ve set up a system where the world’s most easily offended people get to decide what’s offensive and what’s not …”

Jason Richwine on structural media dishonesty:

What causes so many in the media to react emotionally when it comes to IQ? Snyderman and Rothman believe it is a naturally uncomfortable topic in modern liberal democracies. The possibility of intractable differences among people does not fit easily into the worldview of journalists and other members of the intellectual class who have an aversion to inequality. The unfortunate — but all too human — reaction is to avoid seriously grappling with inconvenient truths. And I suspect the people who lash out in anger are the ones who are most internally conflicted.

But I see little value in speculating further about causes. Change is what’s needed. And the first thing for reporters, commentators, and non-experts to do is to stop demonizing public discussion of IQ differences. Stop calling names. Stop trying to get people fired. Most of all, stop making pronouncements about research without first reading the literature or consulting people who have.

Good luck with that.

When old white racists attack.

Look, a squirrel aliens!

(via)

ADDED: Pouring oil on the water (or something): “Christendom has moved on since 1546 when the college [Trinity] was founded. If Islam has not moved on during the same period, perhaps Muslims might consider asking why, and whether something could be done about it.”

Bryan Caplan passes on the news that “The Open Borders blog is sponsoring an Open Borders logo contest.” Everyone should get involved — it’s time to make an impact.

This is my recommendation:

(If there was an obvious symbol for selectivity I’d have preferred it.)

Kevin Williamson channels Foseti:

… the United States is not going to fall for a strongman government. Instead of delegating power to a would-be president-for-life, we delegate it to a bureaucracy-without-death. You do not need to install a dictator when you’ve already had a politically supercharged permanent bureaucracy in place for 40 years or more. As is made clear by everything from campaign donations to the IRS jihad, the bureaucracy is the Left, and the Left is the bureaucracy. Elections will be held, politicians will come and go, but if you expand the power of the bureaucracy, you expand the power of the Left, of the managers and minions who share Barack Obama’s view of the world. Barack Obama isn’t the leader of the free world; he’s the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of total politics.

ParaPundit captures America’s game of political chicken with exceptional acuity:

The sorts of people who can generate the incomes (and therefore tax revenues) to pay all these [pension] liabilities are becoming rarer. Of course this means the Republicans are road kill. But the demographic ascent of the Democrats into power will give them something like command of the Titanic as it hits an iceberg. In fact, the Democrats decided to head for the iceberg as their sure fire way to get permanent control of the ship.

Richard Fernandez on the importance of the Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace process':

Perhaps the saddest thing about President Obama’s Middle East peace initiative is how tangential it is. R[e]uel Marc Gerecht and Anthony Cordesman examine the upheavals in the region, focusing on Egypt and Syria respectively, without even mentioning Palestine, the jewel in Kerry’s crown. It is as if one were diagnosed with cancer, but the doctors says “I can’t cure the cancer but I can manicure your nails.”

The story that follows was stolen from somewhere, but I’ve not been able to recover the source. It has a definite neoconservative edge to it, which isn’t surprising given the early-nullities brain-feed it was no doubt extracted from, but it’s neat enough to be passed on.

If Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires in space, the First World War was the equivalent burial ground in time. The German Second Reich, the Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg) Empire, the Russian (Romanov) Empire, and the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire were all interred by it. In their place arose new geopolitical entities based upon an unstable mixture of ethno-nationalist self-determination and moral-universalist internationalism. The role of American ideas in the New Order – most immediately conveyed by the vehicle of ‘Wilsonism’ – was both substantial and ambiguous. A tight swirl of Americanization and Anti-Americanism would be essential to everything that followed.

If Austro-Germanic imperial collapse can be considered one thing, for the sake of elegance, the true narrative marvel of this story can unfold, because each dead empire was the germ of a world war, structuring history in its fundamentals up to the present day. From each imperial grave, in succession, came a challenge to the Anglophone global order, distinct in certain respects, but also displaying common, recognizable features.

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“… if the people that are supposedly running the country aren’t actually performing any of the functions of governing, who is?” asks Foseti. Anybody who follows his writing will recognize where this is coming from. It belongs to a consistent (and thus informal) critique of formalist illusion. To confuse government  with constitutional structures, legislation, or political offices, is to be blind to the real machinery of power.

Steve Sailor offers a pointed example of this reality in the field of higher educational administration, whose authorities are adamant in the determination to pursue systematic racial discrimination against Asian candidates (in particular). ‘Constraining’ legislation, which explicitly criminalizes these practices, is treated as a formal obstacle course, rather than a prohibition. It complicates anti-meritocratic racial profiling, but is utterly incapable of preventing it.

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