One of things I find most annoying about modern times is the solipsism. Everyone is convinced that their ignorance is an important counter to whatever it is you’re saying. The typical formulation is something like “I’ve never heard of ….” That is a response to some statement that contradicts the official narrative. My intern, who I immortalized the other day, used to say this a lot.

Megan McArdle had a different take on this the other day. In the middle of her post she has this summary of the phenomenon.

I’m always fascinated by the number of people who proudly build columns, tweets, blog posts or Facebook posts around the same core statement: “I don’t understand how anyone could (oppose legal abortion/support a carbon tax/sympathize with the Palestinians over the Israelis/want to privatize Social Security/insert your pet issue here).” It’s such an interesting statement, because it has three layers of meaning.

The first layer is the literal meaning of the words: I lack the knowledge and understanding to figure this out. But the second, intended meaning is the opposite: I am such a superior moral being that I cannot even imagine the cognitive errors or moral turpitude that could lead someone to such obviously wrong conclusions. And yet, the third, true meaning is actually more like the first: I lack the empathy, moral imagination or analytical skills to attempt even a basic understanding of the people who disagree with me.

In short, “I’m stupid.” Something that few people would ever post so starkly on their Facebook feeds.

The other stuff about the wrongness of calling people stupid is whatever you want to make of it. I happen to think pointing out the stupid is useful. If we’re not going to let the stupid eliminate themselves from society, we better do what we can to identify them. The stupid are always a danger to others.

Anyway, way back in the olden thymes when Al Gore, peace be upon him, was still working on the details of his contrivance, solipsism changed from a character flaw into a weird defense against uncomfortable facts or opinions. I recall having e-mail exchanges with friends where they would insist on links to back up some point. If you could not furnish a link, then it was assumed your point was invalid.

The simplification of Al Gore’s contrivance through networking platforms like message boards, Facebook and now Twitter has gifted this idiocy to the masses. Maybe before the information barrage, it was easy to avoid people and words that were unwanted. The response to this change in the human condition is to pretend their can be no thoughts, feeling or ideas that are not your own. The more we crowd together, the more we become isolated.

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The former Half Sigma posted this today.

The Middle East is going to hell, and the reason is Obama’s withdrawal from activist foreign policy, allowing things to just happen, because under Obama’s anti-neo-colonialist belief system, American involvement is always bad for the native people.

The Middle East is a bad neighborhood in the global community, just like within the United States there are bad neighborhoods like Ferguson. Although the people in Ferguson hate the cops, without cops they rob and kill each other and go on looting and pillaging rampages. (Which never happens in good neighborhoods. Did anyone riot on the Upper West Side when Bush beat Gore by a handful of votes?) If anything, knowing that they really need white racist cops in order to keep law and order only makes them hate the cops more. But when the cops withdraw and let stuff happen, the result is riots where the people destroy their own neighborhood.

Obama’s Middle East “strategy” was to let Syria and Iraq deal with their own problems, and the result of this non-intervention (which is the foreign policy endorsed by Ron and Rand Paul and the Paulites who leave comments on my blog) is that the region goes to hell and the Islamic State arises. The Islamic State is far more powerful than al-Qaeda ever was. Al-Qaeda was able to pull off a few terrorist attacks, but the Islamic State controls an army that may number in the tens of thousands and they are winning a war against “real” armies like those of Syria and Iraq.

I can still hear those Paulites thinking “so how is this our problem?” Well eventually, the Islamic State will export their ideology outside of Iraq and Syria. An estimated 12,000 of the fighters of the Islamic State are outsiders from other countries, many even from the West. There are hundreds of citizens from Western countries fighting for the Islamic State, and when they return home they will become an Islamic fifth column.

Just as bad neighborhoods like Ferguson needs cops, the world also needs a cop to keep order, and only the United States is able to fulfill that role.

The underlying argument here is that some people and some parts of the world need constant supervision. Someone has to be the game warden and police these people and places. Otherwise, they get out of control. That’s not an irrational position. I don’t necessarily agree, but I don’t think it is crazy either.

The question, as is true of all public policy, is what are the trade offs to the policy choices? Doing nothing, as libertarians prefer, has costs. Big parts of the world and big swaths of America would slip from the grasp of civilization. The Reason Magazine crowd would never set foot in my neighborhood even under ideal conditions. Take away the cops and that weirdo who wears the leather jacket on TV is not getting within 100 miles of my little slice of heaven.

On the other hand, the cost of being the world’s cop is steep. The citizens have a right to wonder if it makes sense to pay for keeping Iraq or Libya under control. Today, a lot of white people are wondering if it makes sense to even bother policing the ghetto. All they get is a bunch of grief and a bill for higher property taxes.

The problem with the comparison is I have no moral obligation to safeguard the wellbeing of Libyans or Syrians. I do have a moral obligation to do what I can to safeguard the wellbeing of my fellow citizens. Just because they live in the ghetto and like to burn their neighborhood down does not relive me of that obligation. Not all of them are rioting, not even most. They are my people and as a citizen I have duty to them.

The thing no one likes to discuss in either realm is when is it enough? At what point have I done enough to fulfill my duties to my country? Where’s the limit to what we can do for the people of Syria or Libya? A politician that stands up and says, “The blacks have generous welfare programs, easy access to drugs and alcohol and plenty of food. That’s all we are obligated to supply them” is not going to be around long. Whether you agree with him or not, you prefer not to look that bit of reality in the eye. You’d rather not answer the phone than tell your brother you won’t lend him any more money.

It is the free rider problem. If we sealed off the Middle East, stopped shipping them food, technology and culture, the resulting riots, mayhem and bloodletting would make Ferguson look like Utopia. In other words, without the West, a few billion people in tumbledown parts of the world die within a few months. Similarly, without the American tax payer, about a third of the American public falls back into the 19th century. Mississippi and West Virginia don’t become Iraq, but they get a lot poorer.

The trouble is we have no good way of saying no to those who want to ride in the cart. Religion used to make that easy. Riding in the cart was immoral for the able bodied. Religion allowed us to be quite harsh with those who would not pull their weight. Just as important, good people felt good telling the able bodied to get off their ass and get a job. Similarly, Americans had no trouble bringing the hammer down on dependent foreign populations when they got out of line. Being the world’s cop is easy when you think God is on your side.

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If you’re a gun nut, you probably know about the Don Lemon flap over his preposterous claims about buying machine guns in Colorado. Frankly, I would not know Don Lemon if I drove over him with my truck. I’m not even sure I have CNN on my television system. Plus, there have been so many foolish claims by the media regarding guns, I no longer pay attention.The only reason I’m aware of this story is it has been bouncing around the 2A community.

The striking thing about gun grabbers is how little they know about guns, gun laws and gun statistics. It’s just another example of how America is a foreign country to the typical media member. I think that’s why these types of stories get so much traction in the gun owning community. The lies are intended to dismiss gun owners as cranks.

Charles Cooke, a British import at National Review, has been all over it. Like a lot of Europeans who move here, Mr. Cooke has become a gun nut. I’ve known a few of them. It’s not that other countries restrict firearms so much as they don’t have a gun culture. The first time I traveled to Texas for business, my host took me to a range after work. Americans like shooting guns. You just don’t run into that everywhere. Heck, I’ve been on dates to the gun range. Mr. Cooke has embraced that part of his new country with gusto.

The question I asked in the comments is if there’s any proof Lemon ever bought a gun of any type. It is a huge pain to buy a gun in another state. Most states have laws against transferring firearms to non-residents. The FFL dealer will work with another dealer in your home state, but the home state controls the purchase. That way, they can make sure you’re not dodging local laws. You can buy from a private seller, but that’s not the claim Lemon made on TV.

As an endowment level member of the NRA, I naturally went to the NRA-ILA site to see the local laws in Colorado. It seems to me that Colorado is like any other state. They would have forced Lemon to go through a local FFL in his home state to complete the transfer. I’m also skeptical about his confusion over full auto versus semi-auto. How do you not know that after having bought an AR-15?

I think Don Lemon is probably lying about all of it. He would not be the first nitwit from the media to get caught like this. These people know so little about firearms and firearms laws, they don’t know how ridiculous their lies sound to people who do know the facts. The comparison I make is to guys who lie about their military service. The whopper works only if you know nothing about the military.

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I have a twitter account for the blog. I don’t have much interest in social media as it is mostly stupid people aping one another in a ritualized fashion. My first look at MySpace years ago told me it was a fun thing for women and kids. Facebook confirmed it. Twitter, built on a technology popular with ten year old girls, always looked like fly paper for the stupid. Morons grunting at one another. Then all the hipsters decided it was the cool thing and you can’t do anything without being beat over the head with Twitter.

Anyway, I had this exchange with someone who turned up in my twitter feed:

Colin Daileda is probably a nice young man, but I bet my goldfish knows more about the world. Hiring young people as writers is a cheap way to fill column inches, but no one cares what young people have to say about pretty much anything. The reason is they don’t know anything. In modern times, they are stunningly obtuse due to living such sheltered lives. Unless you were in the service or prison, the typical 20-something is clueless about the realities of the world.

But, the public debate these days is designed to cater to Colin. My sarcastic quip is answered with a link to a second generation race hustler. Poor Colin’s self-beclownment is made all the better by the fact he is blind to it. In the moronverse, it does not matter. The young skulls full of mush just fling crap at one another thinking it makes them seem clever. It is too soon to know, but my sense is it just intensifies the dullness of the participants.

A few years back I had an intern about the same age as Colin. Nice kid who wanted to be a lawyer. I gave him a research task that I thought would be perfect for an internet savvy young person. Google would do the heavy lifting. He just had to catalog the results for me. Yet, he struggled mightily. Working with him, it struck me that all the “critical thinking” and “approaches to learning” had produced a young man who knew nothing of any value.

Yet, he was constantly clicking away on his phone. He was either texting, on Facebook or twitter. I’d sit here imagining what sort of inanities he and the other dimwits were sharing so fast and furious with one another. The worst part of it was he thought he was a smart guy. His teachers all said he was a smart guy. His friends probably thought they were smart too. Yet, I found it nearly impossible to teach him anything. It was that obtuseness that got in the way.

This blend of moral preening and staggering ignorance is best explained by way of example. We wanted to do a small mailing. We do these in-house. We print the letter. Someone signs them and then we run them through a folding machine that then prepares them for stuffing into an envelope. This is a devise a child can master. I gave the intern a basic lesson on how it all worked and he appeared to get it. I left him alone and went about my business.

A half hour later, he is in my office telling me the folder is broken. We go to take a look and I see that he got paper jammed into it some how. I begin to show him how to unjam the thing and I note that he is looking at me like I’m doing magic tricks. He had messed the thing up so bad I had to take off the cover. I sent him to my office to get a screwdriver. He did not know what a screwdriver was, apparently, so I had to explain that to him. To this day I can’t understand how you make it to adulthood not knowing such a thing.

I decided to be the fatherly type and explain to him how the machine worked and how you fix it when it breaks. The look of amazement on his face was incredible. You would have thought I was splitting atoms right in front of him. He asked me how I knew such things and I pointed to the instructions taped to the side of it. That’s when it hit me. His generation has a near total lack of curiosity. When confronted with a puzzle, they expect someone to supply the answer. When none is forthcoming, they move on never having solved the puzzle.

That’s what makes the moronverse work. No one has to know anything or learn anything. They just pass around links, hashtags and pics to one another in the same way monkeys fling poo at one another. It’s a world where everyone is shaking their piety bracelets at each other all the time, jostling for seats on the branches of the tree.

One of the worst things about the fake nerd movement is the belief that statistics is the same as science. Science certainly uses statistics for all sorts of things. Correlations can narrow the search for causal relationships. But, you have to use other tools to reveal those links. That’s no more obvious than in how the sabermetrics crowd completely missed the steroid era. Bill James, the godfather of baseball stat-nerds, was silent on the steroid era. You would think his spreadsheets would have revealed to him what everyone noticed from the stands.

This story on Grantland is another fin example of missing the forest for the trees.

One of the things that makes it such a joy to watch the Chicago Cubs’ rebuilding plan unfold is that the team’s approach is completely transparent. There’s no trickery here, no deceit, no super-secret process that’s inscrutable to everyone outside of the front office.

I don’t simply mean that the Cubs are rebuilding with complete conviction; under the terms of MLB’s collective bargaining agreement, that’s really the only way to go.1 Nor do I mean that the Cubs are nearly the extremists that the Houston Astros are. I’m referring instead to the core principle with which the Cubs have been trying to build a championship roster since team president Theo Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer were hired after the 2011 season, a principle that distinguishes this rebuilding project from almost every other one in baseball history: They’re building an offense from within and a pitching staff from spare parts.

This flies in the face of more than a century of conventional baseball wisdom, which states that (1) pitching wins championships, and (2) a team can never have too much pitching. The Cubs’ approach is completely counterintuitive. It’s also completely right.

Again, no mention of steroids. From World War 2 through the eighties, you followed a well known template to build your team. Power at the corners, defense up the middle. Mark Belanger could start at short on a title team with a .228 batting average. Elrod Hendricks could make a career as a catcher, despite a .220 career average. Pitching was a given. It was starts and innings you wanted from the rotation. That 1971 Oriole team had four starters account for 1080 innings.

Then the steroid era happened. Suddenly everyone in the lineup was a masher. Pitchers were getting killed. That changed how teams looked at pitching. Getting hitters was easy. Getting pitchers that could give you 30 starts was rare. Every team shifted resources into getting and developing pitchers. Teams would draft nothing but pitchers some years. Technology was brought to bear to help pitchers compete with hitters who were jacked up on roids.

Now, the steroids have gone away. The stat guys have not noticed, but front offices have noticed. The Red Sox traded four pitchers for hitters at the deadline. They just signed a Cuban slugger. The Cubs are doing the same thing. They traded their two best pitchers for hitters. Those teams that acquired the pitchers, by the way, are now struggling. Oakland has slumped and Detroit is fading. There’s plenty of pitching to be had these days. It is hitting that is rare.

It is why statistics are not science. The over reliance on statistics is good for passing yourself off as a smart guy, like we see with economics. They’re not very good for making decisions unless there is context and an understanding of what drives the statistics.

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One of the amusing parts of following the Ferguson riots was watching TV people turn themselves into pretzels avoiding the obvious. You’re simply not allowed to notice vast swaths of reality. When it comes to race, you could find yourself living in Steve Sailer’s basement if you slip and notice something. That makes reporting on human activity difficult. This story is a good example.

Technology may be getting smarter, but humans are getting dumber, scientists have warned.

Evidence suggests that the IQs of people in the UK, Denmark and Australia have declined in the last decade.  Opinion is divided as to whether the trend is long-term, but some researchers believe that humans have already reached intellectual peak.

An IQ test used to determine whether Danish men are fit to serve in the military has revealed scores have fallen by 1.5 points since 1998. And standard tests issued in the UK and Australia echo the results, according to journalist Bob Holmes, writing in New Scientist.

The most pessimistic explanation as to why humans seem to be becoming less intelligent is that we have effectively reached our intellectual peak. Between the 1930s and 1980s, the average IQ score in the US rose by three points and in post-war Japan and Denmark, test scores also increased significantly – a trend known as the ‘Flynn effect’.

This increase in intelligence was due to improved nutrition and living conditions – as well as better education – says James Flynn of the University of Otago, after whom the effect is named.

Now some experts believe we are starting to see the end of the Flynn effect in developed countries – and that IQ scores are not just levelling out, but declining.

Scientists including Dr Flynn think better education can reverse the trend and point out the perceived decline could just be a blip. However, other scientists are not so optimistic.

Some believe the Flynn effect has masked a decline in the genetic basis for intelligence, so that while more people have been reaching their full potential, that potential itself has been declining.

Some have even contentiously said this could be because educated people are deciding to have fewer children, so that subsequent generations are largely made up of less intelligent people.

Richard Lynn, a psychologist at the University of Ulster, calculated the decline in humans’ genetic potential.

He used data on average IQs around the world in 1950 and 2000 to discover that our collective intelligence has dropped by one IQ point.

Dr Lynn predicts that if this trend continues, we could lose another 1.3 IQ points by 2050.

Michael Woodley, of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, claims people’s reactions are slower than in Victorian times, and has linked it to a decline in our genetic potential.

It has previously been claimed that quick-witted people have fast reactions and Dr Woodley’s study showed people’s reaction times have slowed over the century – the equivalent to one IQ point per decade.

Jan te Nijenhuis, a psychology professor at the University of Amsterdam, says Westerners have lost an average of 14 IQ points since the Victoria Era.

He believes this is due to more intelligent women have fewer children than those who are less clever,The Huffington Post reported.

Dr Woodley and others think humans will gradually become less and less intelligent.

But Dr Flynn says if the decline in IQ scores is the end of the Flynn effect, scores should stabilise.

He thinks that even if humans do become more stupid, better healthcare and technology will mean that all people will have fewer children and the ‘problem’ will regulate itself.

The study referenced in the story does not adjust for race. Logically, if you increase the number of people from low IQ populations, average IQ will fall. The population explosion in Africa and the Middle East probably accounts for most of it. But, you’re not allowed to point out that Arabs, for example, like marrying their cousins, resulting in a lot of pinheads. Britain is now 4% Arab and those Arabs account for a third of the genetic defects.

I do think there is some truth to the argument that smart people are having fewer children than in previous eras. Big families used to be a status symbol for the rich. Then there is the Idiocracy angle. Smart people have made being stupid less risky, thus reducing death by misadventure. Walk around the ghetto and you see lots of people who should have been dead a long time ago. Modern science has mitigated the consequences of their bright ideas.

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Apparently, listening to hip-hop causes young Muslims men to go crazy and start lopping of heads.

A British rapper whose father is awaiting trial in Manhattan for a pair of US embassy bombings is a leading suspect in the barbaric beheading of American journalist James Foley, it was revealed on Friday.

Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary — who recently tweeted a photo of himself holding up a severed head — was among three Brits identified as possibly being the masked killer known as “John the Beatle.”

Bary, 24, is the son of an Egyptian-born militant who is awaiting trial on terror charges tied to the deadly 1998 bombings of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Also under investigation are the brother of a British doctor once charged with kidnapping two Western war correspondents, and a former gang member who converted to Islam and traveled to Syria, Britain’s Telegraph newspaper reported.

A dozen American counterterrorism experts are expected to fly to the UK “within days” to help identify Foley’s killer, Britain’s Daily Mail reported.

Former hostages held by ISIS have said he is one of several jihadists they nicknamed “the Beatles” due to their British accents, with two of his cronies referred to as “George” and “Ringo.”

Bary, who went to Syria last year to fight in its bloody civil war, has a build, skin tone and ­accent all similar to those of “John,” according to The Telegraph.

Clearly, we must do something about this hip-hop music before all of our fine young Muslim men run off to Syria.

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The only thing I miss about posting on Marginal Revolution is mocking posts like this one and the idiots who applaud it.

Maybe less than you thought, at least after adjusting for other variables. The Economist reports:

In Sweden the age of criminal responsibility is 15, so Mr Sariaslan tracked his subjects from the dates of their 15th birthdays onwards, for an average of three-and-a-half years. He found, to no one’s surprise, that teenagers who had grown up in families whose earnings were among the bottom fifth were seven times more likely to be convicted of violent crimes, and twice as likely to be convicted of drug offences, as those whose family incomes were in the top fifth.

What did surprise him was that when he looked at families which had started poor and got richer, the younger children—those born into relative affluence—were just as likely to misbehave when they were teenagers as their elder siblings had been. Family income was not, per se, the determining factor.

That suggests two, not mutually exclusive, possibilities. One is that a family’s culture, once established, is “sticky”—that you can, to put it crudely, take the kid out of the neighbourhood, but not the neighbourhood out of the kid. Given, for example, children’s propensity to emulate elder siblings whom they admire, that sounds perfectly plausible. The other possibility is that genes which predispose to criminal behaviour (several studies suggest such genes exist) are more common at the bottom of society than at the top, perhaps because the lack of impulse-control they engender also tends to reduce someone’s earning capacity.

The original research, by Amir Sariaslan, Henrik Larsson, Brian D’Onofrio, Niklas Långström and Paul Lichtenstein is here, here is how the authors report the conclusion:

There were no associations between childhood family income and subsequent violent criminality and substance misuse once we had adjusted for unobserved familial risk factors.

There seems to be a trend in economics to take all controversial topics over to Scandinavia. If it is race related, then South Africa is a suitable place. Neither place is representative of anywhere else on earth. Sweden has one of the lowest crime rates on the planet. Maybe that’s why a lot of crime studies done by economists are done in Sweden. There are so few criminals, the researchers can pretend they are casting a wide net.

It also avoids the big taboos. Black crime is different from white crime. For instance, whites commit far more sex crime than blacks. Assault is also more common with whites. On the other hand, blacks commit many more murders. It gets even more thorny when you look at theft. Whites and blacks both prefer to rob white people. When you bring Hispanics in to the mix, it gets more dangerous, because not all Hispanics are the same, no matter how often the Democratic Party says it.

As far as what causes crime, people have known that since human settlement. Criminals cause crime. There’s no fun in that as it takes real science and real intellect to tease out why criminals are criminals. You’re not doing that with Excel and a truck load of jargon. That leaves no room for economists to gas-bag about it.

What I used to love about these topics at MR was how the posters would get upset whenever someone mentioned the obvious. The appearance of Steve Sailer was sure to cause a mass fainting spell. It was as if a stripper showed up at the bridge club and started dry humping one of the grannies.

Maybe less than you thought, at least after adjusting for other variables.  The Economist reports:

In Sweden the age of criminal responsibility is 15, so Mr Sariaslan tracked his subjects from the dates of their 15th birthdays onwards, for an average of three-and-a-half years. He found, to no one’s surprise, that teenagers who had grown up in families whose earnings were among the bottom fifth were seven times more likely to be convicted of violent crimes, and twice as likely to be convicted of drug offences, as those whose family incomes were in the top fifth.

What did surprise him was that when he looked at families which had started poor and got richer, the younger children—those born into relative affluence—were just as likely to misbehave when they were teenagers as their elder siblings had been. Family income was not, per se, the determining factor.

That suggests two, not mutually exclusive, possibilities. One is that a family’s culture, once established, is “sticky”—that you can, to put it crudely, take the kid out of the neighbourhood, but not the neighbourhood out of the kid. Given, for example, children’s propensity to emulate elder siblings whom they admire, that sounds perfectly plausible. The other possibility is that genes which predispose to criminal behaviour (several studies suggest such genes exist) are more common at the bottom of society than at the top, perhaps because the lack of impulse-control they engender also tends to reduce someone’s earning capacity.

The original research, by Amir Sariaslan, Henrik Larsson, Brian D’Onofrio, Niklas Långström and Paul Lichtenstein is here, here is how the authors report the conclusion:

There were no associations between childhood family income and subsequent violent criminality and substance misuse once we had adjusted for unobserved familial risk factors.

– See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/08/how-much-does-poverty-drive-crime.html#sthash.v6zQ8kNY.dpuf

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My chief complaint against libertarianism is that it is a convenient hiding place for people unwilling to take on the Left. If you reject central planning of the national economy, but are afraid to be called bad things by the local lunatics, calling yourself a libertarian is a nice safe haven. It’s most obvious in the homosexual marriage debate. Libertarians choose a third option with no basis in reality, one that makes them sound like anarchists, rather than face off against the Left.

In war, you have to know the guy next to you will do his job, have your back and fire his weapon at the enemy. In the culture war, libertarians will never go over the top and will, once in a while, turn their weapons on their comrades. You just can’t trust them to fight. I recognize that’s not a critique of the ideology, but of the ideologues, but I’ve never figured out how to separate one from the other.

And maybe that’s it. Libertarianism is fine. It’s libertarians that are the problem. A good example that comes to mind is the uncommonly dim Alex Tabarrok.

How does a stop for jaywalking turn into a homicide and how does that turn into an American town essentially coming under military control with snipers, tear gas, and a no-fly zone? We don’t yet know exactly what happened between the two individuals on the day in question but events like this don’t happen without a deeper context.

First off, we know it was not a stop for jaywalking. The giant was walking in the middle of the street. That’s not jaywalking. Second, the giant slugged the cop. As far as the deeper context nonsense, most of life has no “deeper context.” Shit does, in fact, just happen – a lot. In this case, the giant punched the cop because he felt like. Poor people lack self-control and often do crazy shit for no reason. This is the sort stuff a fully formed adult needs to know.

He then quotes himself:

Debtor’s prisons are supposed to be illegal in the United States but today poor people who fail to pay even small criminal justice fees are routinely being imprisoned. The problem has gotten worse recently because strapped states have dramatically increased the number of criminal justice fees….Failure to pay criminal justice fees can result in revocation of an individual’s drivers license, arrest and imprisonment. Individuals with revoked licenses who drive (say to work to earn money to pay their fees) and are apprehended can be further fined and imprisoned.

This guy tends to get the vapors over stuff that most of us just shrug at and move on. That’s not uncommon with hot house flowers. Regardless, if you don’t pay your fine, the fines get bigger and the risk of prison increases. That’s the point. If it did not work that way, no one would bother paying the fine. How can he not know this?

This is the line that makes my eyes bleed.

You don’t get $321 in fines and fees and 3 warrants per household from an about-average crime rate. You get numbers like this from bullshit arrests for jaywalking and constant “low level harassment involving traffic stops, court appearances, high fines, and the threat of jail for failure to pay.”

What an idiot. The people with the fines and warrants don’t have an average crime rate. They commit a lot of crimes, which is why they have all of those fines and warrants. You can be sure that the black crime rate in Ferguson is something like the black crime rate nationally. That’s seven times the white crime rate. The reason the cops spend all of their time in the ghetto areas is that’s where the crime happens.

But, throwing a fit and stomping of in a huff is the libertarian way out of addressing the elephant in the room. That elephant is the massive disparity in crime rates between whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians. As soon as you notice that well known bit of reality, you risk being called bad things by the screeching harpies on the Left. That defeats the purpose of being a Libertarian.

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I workout daily and I’m a bit obsessive about my diet. At my age, working out means weight training four days a week and various forms of cardio a few times a week. Sports are no longer sensible. I guess cycling is a sport, but I don’t do it competitively. I do 30-40 mile rides at a 20 mph pace. At my age that’s good enough. As far as diet, I track calories, keep my carbs down to about 25% of my intake. That means avoiding take out, fast food and a lot of common snacks like chips and ice cream.

Now, I exercise because I enjoy it. The health benefits, if any, are unimportant to me. An hour of lifting heavy weight gets out the stress of the day and clears my mind. Plus, I can listen to music and not talk to other people. Similarly, cycling and running offer a nice respite from the daily grind. I obsess over my diet because I don’t want to get fat. I have a very slow metabolism. I weigh 200 pounds, about 20 over my fighting weight, and I maintain it on less than 2000 calories a day.

In other words I do these things because I enjoy them. Physical and spiritual health play no role.

Even so, I enjoy ice cream on occasion. I have pizza once a month and cheeseburger on Friday. Life is for living and denying yourself pleasure is just stupid. That’s why I liked this post at Maggie’s Farm.

We have commented on the subject of the human diet and health before, but it’s time for another comment, because the NYT Science Times has written on it.

“Healthy food” has been an on-and-off American obsession, comparable to the obsession with flavor in France.

This is a great point and something I attribute to the German and Calvinist influences. There’s some overlap there, obviously. We got way too many of the tall-serious type of German. I’m kidding about that, of course. It is a strange bit of American culture. Self-denial is always seen as good, while pleasure is always assumed to be decadent and immoral.

Since Rev. Sylvester Graham, a minister, vegetarian, and food-obsessive invented the Graham Cracker in the 1820s to provide “digestive fiber,” Americans have been food faddists and vulnerable to food quackery.

More famously, Dr. John Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan, an 1870s charlatan with a diet fad, fooled Americans into thinking that cereal was breakfast food. It is not. In Yankee-land, breakfast is eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, potatoes, fruit and apple pie.

I like oatmeal and some cold cereals, but nothing beats eggs, bacon, sausage, toast and spuds for breakfast. Eggs Benny, maybe. Chipped Beef is a favorite at Che Z, but that’s more out of loyalty to my class than anything else.

Eat what you want, and be happy. All humans are prone to “magical thinking” – aka “wishful thinking.” We’d like to imagine that we have some control over things like health, and that things we put in our mouths will make a difference. There is essentially no evidence for that idea, assuming absence of a disease, or a problem like high cholesterol, or pregnant, etc.

Even being fat doesn’t seem to make any significant difference to health. (Being obese is a bad plan, though.) I advise patients to eat plenty of salmon, trout and char for their magical properties, and whatever else they want; to exercise and work out if they want to be strong and fit but not because they will live forever; to lose weight if they want to look better and feel less tired; to eat all the salt and steak they want; and to avoid magical health diets. Vegetarian? Fine. Leaves more lamb and steak for me. Just don’t imagine that it’s about health. What’s a healthy diet? Any average mix of stuff, but most of all – enjoy it, and don’t fuss about it too much.

Yep. Life is for living.

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