What’s next?
Honduran Free Cities
Are they DOA? I visited Honduras back in the nineties. It could certainly use something like this. And I too find it bizarre that a court would find a constitutional amendment unconstitutional.
The Higgs Boson
Well, this sucks. It’s behaving almost exactly as expected.
How The World Almost Ended
Apparently we had a very close call in 1883.
It’s amazing to me how unseriously we take this threat, at least judging by our policy choices.
Those Lazy Job Creators
Frank J. gives them what for:
…that’s the tough line the government needs to take with job creators: You will spit out those jobs we demand — and good ones with health-care benefits! — or we will destroy you and your businesses.
Raising their taxes by repealing the Bush tax cuts is just the start. We need even more taxes and punishing regulations. We need to treat these people like the scum they are, and if they don’t want to watch their companies burn, they’ll yield and finally expand their businesses and create more jobs — and not make any more profit or get richer when they do that, because we find that highly annoying.
We’ve had enough of your sickening greed, business owners, so give us everything we want, and give it to us now.
Right on.
The “Perfect Health Diet”
A new book
It seems to have a lot of good reviews. Here’s another one from an Instapundit reader:
Chalk me and my family up as big fans and beneficiaries of the PHD. It’s been life-altering, literally, for myself and my two daughters.
Given the success of the PHD and other similar diets (like the Paleo Diet and the Primal Blueprint), it’s very likely that most of our chronic health issues in the United States are the result of malnutrition: following the USDA’s dietary guidelines seem to reliably lead to human malnutrition.
Malthus may have been right, although not in the way he thought.
One day people will look back on the late twentieth century nutrition advice in the same manner we view bleeding by leeches. Except the latter will be more respectable.
The DC Economy
Are we living the Hunger Games?
Washington is rich not because it makes valuable things, but because it is powerful. With virtually everything subject to regulation, it pays to spend money influencing the regulators. As P.J. O’Rourke famously observed: “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” But it’s not just bags-of-cash style corruption. Most of the D.C. boom is from lobbyists and PR people, and others who are retained to influence what the government does. It’s a cold calculation: You’re likely to get a much better return from an investment of $1 million on lobbying than on a similar investment in, say, a new factory or better worker training.
So Washington gets fat, and it does so on money taken from the rest of the country: Either directly, in the form of taxes, or indirectly in the form of money that otherwise would have gone to that factory or training program.
I’m not the only one to notice this, or even to make the Hunger Games analogy. As Ross Douthat wrote, “There aren’t tributes from Michigan and New Mexico fighting to the death in Dupont Circle just yet. But it doesn’t seem like a sign of national health that America’s political capital is suddenly richer than our capitals of manufacturing and technology and finance, or that our leaders are more insulated than ever from the trends buffeting the people they’re supposed to serve.”
I always have a sense when I visit DC of a corrupt and decadent capital, bleeding the rest of the country, which it barely deigns to fly over, white.
[Update a while later]
Link was missing before. Fixed now, sorry.
Girls
…there’s an important difference between Apatow’s work and Dunham’s, and that is that Apatow tells and re-tells stories of growing up, while Dunham shows a group of women who stubbornly refuse to do so. Apatow shows characters learning the importance of responsibility and morality, while Dunham’s characters are largely devoid of the former and uninterested in the latter.
The show’s main character, played by Dunham herself, embodies all of this. In the first scene of the pilot, when her parents tell her they won’t be paying her bills any more, she loses it, and informs them that instead of pushing her out of the nest, they should be grateful she isn’t addicted to pills. Her friends are equally appalled by the prospect of a 24-year-old paying her own phone bills, and, for the most part, they’re equally reckless. For instance, in the second episode, one of them misses her abortion appointment because she’s busy having sex in a bar. And their romantic relationships — unsurprisingly — come in about every possible iteration of dysfunction.
…You can almost argue that Lena Dunham sees President Obama as the perfect surrogate for everything missing in her characters’ lives: He’s their gentle lover, supportive parent, and empathetic friend. He’s special. He won’t let them down. He’s Prince Charming. And that kind of defeats the purpose of feminism.
You’d think the feminist elevation of agency would result in women who take pride in being responsible for their own bodies. You’d hope that telling women that they can do whatever they want would imply that they’re responsible for what they do. You’d think serious feminists would argue that true empowerment is something you lay claim to, not something the federal government dispenses in all its benevolence. But for Dunham, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Because feminism was hijacked by the left back in the seventies, despite the fact that campus leftists were some of the biggest male chauvinist pigs around.
3-D Printing
Revolutionizing military logistics.
It’s going to be a crucial technology for space development and settlement as well.
The Magic Of Competition
Gee, it works in space transportation just like it does in any other:
The Boeing and SpaceX spacecraft both ranked high on their technical merits. But NASA raised concerns about Boeing’s financial commitment to the public-private sector partnership.
Ferguson said Boeing is thinking about upping its corporate ante, aiming to advance the date of its first piloted test flight.
“We’re looking heavily into getting some additional Boeing investment to move that (late 2016) date to the left significantly, which we think we need to do to keep pace with SpaceX,” Ferguson said.
To me, at this point, their real problem is Atlas prices. They’ll just have to hope that NASA wants to have redundancy in providers, because they can’t compete with Hawthorne on price.