Newmark's Door

Milo Yiannopoulos, doing his thing:

So perhaps there is, in this case, some justification for a bit of middle-class discomfort, particularly when you consider how bizarre and inconsistent and dysfunctional the city of San Francisco is: it’s a place that turns a blind eye to illegal immigrants, proudly admitting its “sanctuary city” status, while effectively evicting poor hard-working families and allowing large sections of its own downtown to become lawless, homeless hellholes.

Via Ed Driscoll, blogging at Instapundit, who notes, "Troll level: Grandmaster"

Kyle Smith, reviewing  Ronald Bailey's new book, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century:

Environmentalist groups are, of course, in the same business as the folks who brought you the “Saw” movies. Their fundraising depends on it, and the media rarely go back to fact-check past predictions, instead blustering ahead with the next dire warning.

Bailey doesn’t claim that global challenges simply resolve themselves — although, as we have seen, some scares were fictitious, based on junk science to begin with.

The doomsayers simply never account for the role of human cooperation and ingenuity in confronting challenges. . . .

So will global warming, a much more complicated issue than CFCs, be resolved by cooperation or ingenuity? Ask yourself which science has seen more breakthroughs in the last few decades — political science or technology.

Related: Matt Ridley, "The Green Scare Problem".

Also related: Jonathan V. Last, "Remember Ebola?"

"What recent research says about fraud, errors, and other dismaying academic problems."

Related: "Science Isn’t Broken: It’s just a hell of a lot harder than we give it credit for". Includes a very clever simulation exercise, "Hack Your Way to Scientific Glory".

Also related: "Many Psychology Findings Not as Strong as Claimed, Study Says" and "A Deep Dive Into the Blockbuster Study That Called Into Doubt a Lot of Psych Research". (I'll bet you the best drink in the house that these problems currently affect psychology and sociology more than economics.)

And still more, on a related but separate problem: "64 more papers retracted for fake reviews, this time from Springer journals".

Arnold Kling, with yet another terrific post. This one is on "the analytical gap between the theory of market failure and actual policy". His example is housing policy:

From the standpoint of the theory of market failure, the subsidize-demand, restrict-supply pattern almost never makes sense. If there is a market failure that results in under-production of a good, then it makes sense to subsidize both demand and supply. If the market failure results in over-production, then it makes sense to restrain both demand and supply. Subsidies for demand and restrictions on supply inherently work at cross purposes.

But, hey, who minds cross purposes when there is graft to get and there are interest groups to pay off?

Related: "Is Market Failure a Sufficient Condition for Government Intervention?"

Words to remember:

As the Nation‘s article notes, “Most ordinary people behave remarkably well when their city is ripped apart by disaster. They did in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake; in New Orleans during Hurricane Betsy in 1965; in Mexico City after the 1985 earthquake; in New York City in the aftermath of 9/11; and in most disasters in most times and places.

“Those in power, on the other hand, often run amok.”

Link via Instapundit.

Glenn Reynolds offers a compact and very discouraging review.

As late as 2010, things were going so well in Iraq that Obama and Biden were bragging. Now, after Obama’s politically-motivated pullout and disengagement, the whole thing’s fallen apart. This is near-criminal neglect and incompetence, and an awful lot of people will pay a steep price for the Obama Administration’s fecklessness.

It sure looks that way. Advice on salt, dietary cholesterol, and, now, saturated fat appear to have been seriously wrong.

I can't vouch for all of it, but taken at face value, there's a bunch of stuff here I certainly didn't know.

Persuades me.

I kinda think that unless he's a criminal, if he wants to get in that badly, let him in.