Read it.

The appeals court said Michigan’s Elliot-Larsen Civil Rights Act, which prohibits services of public accommodation from discriminating on the basis of marital status among other grounds, extinguishes doctors’ common law right to decide with whom to undertake a physician-patient relationship.

The California of the North. No wonder its economy sucks.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball pees all over the new Jobs biography … with (I think) good reason.

Jobs was neither. These men make for a poor comparison to Jobs because Jobs didn’t really “invent” anything — not in the sense that Industrial Revolution inventors did. Jobs understood technology but was not an engineer. He had profoundly exquisite taste but was not a designer. What it was that Jobs actually did is much of the mystery of his life and his work, and Isaacson, frustratingly, had seemingly little interest in that, or any recognition that there even was any sort of mystery as to just what Jobs’s gifts really were.

If this is the standard for innovation, then what product, from any company, has truly been innovative? Some people — most people? — can’t get their heads around the idea that “innovation” doesn’t mean “creating something 100 percent new using never before seen technology, ideas, and concepts”. Yes, there were digital music players before the iPod. There were “smartphones” before the iPhone. But, I say, the differences between those products and Apple’s iPod and iPhone weren’t “tweaks”.

Jobs, like Henry Ford, was a genius-level synthesist — taking stuff that was already out there in a rough form and fitting it all together in a way that made it available (and acceptable, which is an oft-neglected essential factor) to a large number of people.

Read it.

Not the sort of thing you see every day.

Read it.

Christensen retells the story of how  Dell [DELL] progressively lopped off low-value segments of its PC operation to the Taiwan-based firm ASUSTek [LSE: ASKD]—the motherboard, the assembly of the computer, the management of the supply chain and finally the design of the computer. In each case Dell accepted the proposal because in each case its profitability improved: its costs declined and its revenues stayed the same. At the end of the process, however, Dell was little more than a brand, while ASUSTeK can—and does—now offer a cheaper, better computer to Best Buy at lower cost.

Christensen also describes the impact of foreign outsourcing on many other companies, including the steel companies, the automakers, the oil companies, the pharmaceuticals, and now even software development. These firms are steadily becoming primarily marketing agencies and brands: they are lopping off the expertise that is needed to make anything anymore.  In the process, major segments of the US economy have been lost, in some cases, forever.

Of course, it’s not the pursuit of profit per se that causes the problem, but the pursuit of insanely short-term profit, a distinction that Christensen doesn’t care to make and which the author of the article appears delighted to avoid.

Christensen recalls an interesting talk he had with the Morris Chang the chairman and founder of one of the firms, TSMC [TSM], who said:

“You Americans measure profitability by a ratio. There’s a problem with that. No banks accept deposits denominated in ratios. The way we measure profitability is in ‘tons of money’. You use the return on assets ratio if cash is scarce. But if there is actually a lot of cash, then that is causing you to economize on something that is abundant.”

Chang, who is Chinese and therefore sensible about business, obviously understands the necessary distinction, and assumes that his listener understands it as well, which I suspect is not the case.

Yet another case of smart people asking the right questions but unfortunately grabbing a not-quite-right answer and running with it. (Cf. the ‘cult of the shoe’ in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.)

Read it.

We’ve all experienced it: The frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do. Or get. Or find.

New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses.

“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” Radvansky explains.

Now, that explains a lot.

Read it.

Print books may be under siege from the rise of e-books, but they have a tenacious hold on a particular group: children and toddlers. Their parents are insisting this next generation of readers spend their early years with old-fashioned books.

This is the case even with parents who themselves are die-hard downloaders of books onto Kindles, iPads, laptops and phones. They freely acknowledge their digital double standard, saying they want their children to be surrounded by print books, to experience turning physical pages as they learn about shapes, colors and animals.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Fresh back from Iraq, Smitty at The Other McCain pulls no punches.

The mental disease that is modern liberalism starts at an early age, with sports, before reaching full bloom in adulthood, when the modern liberal goes into government and starts to sodomize the economy.

Apparently, in the name of ‘equality’, gender differentiation in high school sports is not permitted, so boys are joining the ‘girls’ team and kicking ass. And the girls are calling ‘No fair!’ As well they might. But the problem is the government that mandates the situation, and that’s where they ought to be pointing the finger.

Read it.

More than 2 million years ago, scores of whales congregating off the Pacific Coast of South America mysteriously met their end.

Chilean scientists together with researchers from the Smithsonian Institution are studying how these whales, many of the them the size of buses, wound up in the same corner of the Atacama Desert.

Read it.

A jobseeker from Florida who responded to a bogus Craigslist ad for a job on a southeast Ohio cattle farm was found dead, buried in a shallow grave, and another from South Carolina was shot but escaped by running away through the woods, a sheriff said Thursday.

Well, that’s one answer to the unemployment problem. I don’t think it will scale, though.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

The future is arriving on track #4; please have your tickets ready.

This is actually very unsettling — we have seen the disruption caused by the flow of information losing most of its friction; what will happen when the creation of goods goes the same way? Read Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age for a hint, but really, there’s no telling how this will shake out.

Read it.

Ford essentially argues that we have hit an inflection point at which technology destroys jobs faster than it creates them. Kling writes (at length, but it’s worth reading): “The new jobs that emerge may not produce a middle class … gains in well-being that come from productivity improvements [may] accrue to an economic elite … we could be headed into an era of highly unequal economic classes. People at the bottom will have access to food, healthcare, and electronic entertainment, but the rich will live in an exclusive world of exotic homes and extravagant personal services.”

To what extent are our existing social frameworks dependent on structural friction? The whole distinction between a republic and a democracy is based on the thought that the latter is impractical — we can’t all vote on every question that comes up, so we elect representatives who do these silly thing so we don’t have to. With information flow becoming more and more frictionless, does that assumption still apply? Applied to employment, this becomes the now-getting-old notion of ‘disintermediation’ — in times past you needed middlemen to handle distribution, and customers are becoming more and more able to connect directly with suppliers. And ‘middle management’ in companies has been dissolving for decades, ‘flattening hierarchies’ being a corporate buzz-phrase for almost as long.

The takeaway thought seems to be that if you have a job that can be automated — and look around at the jobs that people thought could never be automated that (surprise!) actually have been once we have the breakthrough technology — you’re in trouble and had better be prepared to jump from the roof of the train before the tunnel mouth gets here. Just sayin’.

Read it.

Scientism is “the uncritical application of scientific or quasi-scientific methods to inappropriate fields of study or investigation.” When scientists proclaim truths outside the realm of their expertise, they are guilty of practicing scientism. Two notable scientistic scientists, of whom I have written several times (e.g., here and here), are Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer. It is unsurprising that Dawkins and Singer are practitioners of scientism. Both are strident atheists, and a strident atheists, as I have said,  “merely practice a ‘religion’ of their own. They have neither logic nor science nor evidence on their side — and eons of belief against them.”

I would have to disagree with the last sentence. The problem is epistemology — how do we know what we know? Atheists, especially ‘scientistic’ atheists, take the position that the modern scientific methodology of observation, measurement, and extrapolation from observation and measurement, is sufficient to detect anything that Really Exists — and that the burden of proof is on those who propose that something Really Exists that cannot be reliably observed and measured; which is of course impossible within that mental framework. They have plenty of logic and science on their side, and their ‘evidence’ is the commonly-accepted maxim that it is impossible to prove a negative.

Religious people, of course, rarely try to tackle scientists on their own ground, perhaps feeling (naturally enough) that the ground is grossly slanted against their position. I think that a large part of it is the pervasive ‘scientism’ that underlies the modern world — science has given us all these wonderful toys, so it must be the way to go, right? — so religious people just refuse to enter the ring, so to speak, since they know how it comes out and aren’t going to wast their time in an effort doomed to failure.

This strikes me as a mistake. The medieval scholastics certainly had no hesitation using the tools of science (to the extent that they had any) to develop their religious viewpoints; Thomas Aquinas is the obvious poster child here, but this sort of thing was the chief intellectual product of the university system for upwards of 400 years.

Their approach was fairly straightforward and ‘scientific’: Certain things happened in times past that are outside the observable, measurable operation of the natural world, and for which we have multiple eyewitness accounts; we go with the traditional explanation until somebody comes up with an alternative the fits the facts (as they saw them) better. If you see a guy in a red and blue suit faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound — a lot of people will, absent any other explanation of how he can do that, take him at face value as Superman. Similarly, if a Jewish carpenter of no known special talents works a bunch of miracles and, when tortured to death by the government, comes back to life, there are people who are willing to take His word for it that he can do all this because He’s the Son of God, since they can’t come up with a ‘scientific’ explanation. As Sherlock Holmes was fond of saying, if you’ve eliminated the impossible, what’s left, however improbable, is likely to be the truth.

The distinguishing characteristic of ‘scientistic’ atheists, of course, is that they start from the a priori assumption that non-natural explanations of such phenomena are on the realm of the impossible rather than the realm of the improbable, thereby constricting (plainly tendentiously) the circle of ‘acceptable proof’ to exclude their religious opponents on the definitional level. When you define your opponents’ position as incorrect, then you win by default every time; and there’s a lot of justice in said opponents’ cry of ‘Hey! That’s not fair!’ But the ‘fairness’ of that approach is something that the religious and the irreligious will never agree on, so we’re stuck with permanently incompatible viewpoints.

Read it.

Pretty perceptive. But that raises the obvious question of ‘Why?’

Are there just ‘fashions’ in movie poster arrangements? Is it all based on some sort of fad or trend?

Or is it just an indication of the ongoing development of a set of conventions in movie making (note that the author never has to hunt for a ‘tag’ to sum up the sort of films being advertised), like the ‘genre’ tags used in book publishing?

Or is there something deeper going on there, some reflection of universal design principles dictating that, in order to sell a movie of a particular type, the visual elements have to be arranged in a certain way?

I’m sure there’s a film major somewhere working under a government grant to answer these questions. I hope she publishes her results.

Read it.

The city of Ulan Bator, Mongolia, will attempt to keep itself cool over the summer by way of a kind of artificial glacier.

According to the Guardian, this “geoengineering trial” will try to “‘store’ freezing winter temperatures in a giant block of ice that will help to cool and water the city as it slowly melts during the summer.” Project directors “hope the process will reduce energy demand from air conditioners and regulate drinking water and irrigation supplies.” The cool air will presumably be pumped through the city via a continuous and monumental network of ducts.

James Altucher allows us to profit from his mistakes. Don’t forget to say Thank You.

I’ve written before on 10 reasons Parents Should Not Send Their Kids to College and here is also Eight Alternatives to College but it’s occurred to me that the place where college has really hurt me the most was when it came to the real world, real life, how to make money, how to build a business, and then even how to survive when trying to build my business, sell it, and be happy afterwards. Here are the ten things that if I had learned them in college I probably would’ve saved/made millions of extra dollars, not wasted years of my life, and maybe would’ve even saved lives because I would’ve been so smart I would’ve been like an X-Man.

Writing. Why can’t college teach people how to actually write. Some of my best friends tell me college taught them how to think. Thinking has a $200,000 price tag apparently and there is no room left over for good writing.

My roommate for instance would tell me, “Reagan is definitely getting impeached this time.” And I visited his dad’s mansion over Christmas break and he told me all about Trotskyism and the proletariat and I had to work jobs 40 hours a week while taking six courses so I could A) graduate early and B) pay my personal expenses and when I would run into him he had long hair and would nod about how a lot of the college workers (but not the lowest-paid, poorest treated ones—the students who worked) were thinking of unionizing and he was helping with that. “Do you have a job?” I asked and he said, “no time”. And that’s politics in college.

Joel Kotkin is always worth reading; he is involved with a new project, which this article introduces.

In our attempt to look at the emerging world order, we have followed the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun’s notion that ethnic and cultural ties are more important than geographic patterns or levels of economic development. In history, shared values have been critical to the rise of spheres of influence across the world. Those that have projected power broadly – the Greek, Roman, Arab, Chinese, Mongol and British empires – shared intense ties of kinship and common cultural origins. As Ibn Khaldun observed: “Only tribes held together by a group feeling can survive in a desert.”

One would think that increasing globalization would be dissolving (or perhaps expanding would be a better word) local ties, and when it comes to commerce that’s pretty much true. But on the other hand, in the political sphere, the tendency seems to be toward fragmentation — the attempt to unify Europe is coming apart as we watch, and even such formerly tightly-integrated countries as Britain and Spain are feeling devolutionary pressures.

The prospects for the last great global grouping, the Anglosphere, are far stronger than many expect. Born out of the British Empire, and then the late 20th Century, the Anglosphere may be losing its claim to global hegemony, but it remains the first among the world’s ethnic networks in terms of everything from language and global culture to technology. More than the Indian Sphere and Sinosphere, the Anglosphere has shown a remarkable ability to incorporate other cultures and people.

Read it.

Boffins at California’s HRL Laboratories have developed what they claim is the world’s lightest material, a nickel structure that is a hundred times lighter than styrofoam.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all. (Coulda been worse; coulda been a moose….)

Read it.

It was a tradition at bars like the ones in Sardi’s in the theater district: a communal cheese pot with a knife sticking out, and some crackers. First-nighters or late-nighters grabbed the knife and a cracker, spread the cheese — cheddar — and ate. Some called it dinner.

Now, after a health department inspection that complained about “food not protected from potential source of contamination,” the communal pot is gone.

Other bar-food staples like peanuts and pretzels in little bowls? Sardi’s has taken them off the bar, too.

Bureaucrats are never happy unless other people aren’t.

Read it.

If they don’t straighten up, next time we’ll send Michelle.

Read it.

Read it.

I’m sure this weighs heavily on your mind, as it does on mine. And Slate‘s, too, of course. I’m glad at least one Voice of the Crust is willing to write about such serious concerns.

Read it.

A team of open source enthusiasts is putting together instructions for how to build 50 tools essential to establishing – or reestablishing – a civilization.

The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is being developed by the Open Source Ecology (OSE) group, and includes such basic tools as a well drill, steam engine, and brick making machine, along with more complicated devices such as a bulldozer, 3D printer, and 50kW wind turbine. These can be built from scrap or recycled materials at a fraction of the cost of commercial machinery.

Read it.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Read it. And watch the video.

Two dozen “patriotic millionaires” traveled to the national’s capital on Wednesday to demand that Congress raise taxes on wealthy Americans.

The Daily Caller attended their press conference with an iPad, which displayed the Treasury Department’s donation page, to find out if any of the “patriotic millionaires” were willing to put their money where their mouth is.

As everyone who is paying attention (alas, a minority of the voting-age population) knows, the reason these ‘patriotic millionaires’ (or ‘buffets’, as I call them) push for higher taxes but don’t care to give on their own is not because they think that they’re taxes are too low, but rather that they think that the taxes of the people below them are too low. Raising rates will increase their relative advantage, and they’re all for that. If Hector makes $200, 000 a year, and Algernon makes $200,000,000 a year, raising the tax rate to 50% will certainly make Algernon pay more than Hector — but Algernon will still be making $100,000,000 a year, and Hector will only be making $100,000 a year, and guess which one is closer to not being able to make ends meet, especially if (say) they’ve got kids in college? Not to mention the fact that Algernon can hire a lot of fancy lawyers and accountants with that $100,000,000 that he would otherwise pay in taxes, and I’ll bet you a healthy chunk of $100,000 that those lawyers and accountants will make sure that Algernon won’t be paying any 50%.

This is all political posturing on the part of the Crust, a show put on for the rubes.

Read it.

Titanium dioxide does a couple of clever tricks that mean we may well be seeing a lot of it in the future: it’s self-cleaning, and it breaks down pollutants in the air.

And the fact that thin films of it are clear is the reason that a number of manufacturers use it in glass applications such as skylights.

Read it.

Sorry if this comes as a surprise, as I’m sure it will to Some. (One of the most amazing things about ‘progressives’ is their ability to ignore basic economics when it suits them. Then they act so surprised when those Unintended Consequences bites them square on the butt. Unfortunately, the rest of us get our butts bitten as well.)

I am reminded of Michelle Obama’s plea to graduating college students to not go work in for-profit businesses, but to work for government or NGO’s.  The problem is that workers, particularly young workers, don’t get to define what is productive labor and what is not.  You can’t go out in the world expecting to work really really hard at puppeteering or for the cause of Mayan feminism and necessarily expect to get paid a lot.  In any job, how much you make is determined by how valuable others see that work.

Well, you can understand her point. When her husband became a Senator, the University of Chicago Hospitals created a position especially for her that paid about twice what her husband was making — and when she left with him for Washington, they abolished the position. She’s living proof that companies exist just to provide well-paying positions for excellent and deserving people such as herself. Live the dream.

Read it.

Now a Bloomberg News headline takes the means-testing argument to an entirely new level: “Taxpayers Billed for Millionaires’ Kids at Charter School.” It’s a public charter school, so one wonder what exactly Bloomberg News would propose as an alternative policy to prevent the situation it finds so headline worthy. Should the children of millionaires be barred at the doors from public schools that are open to other children? Or should they be forced to pay tuition to attend schools that other children attend tuition-free? Has it not occurred to the Bloomberg editors that the “taxpayers” and the “millionaires” are not two mutually exclusive groups and that millionaires actually turn out to pay a lot of taxes, too? What’s next — headlines about how taxpayers pay for roads on which millionaires are also allowed to drive? For playgrounds on which children of millionaires are allowed to run arou

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When it comes to farm robots, fruit gets all the attention. But it looks like trees and shrubs could win the prize for first significant agricultural market for small mobile robots.

Massachusetts startup Harvest Automation is beta testing a small mobile robot that it’s pitching to nurseries as the solution to their most pressing problem: a volatile labor market.

Cue handwringing from leftists worrying about how illegal immigrants are going to support their families, and insisting that government step in to help at taxpayer expense.

Read it.

We’d get rid of a lot of ‘crime’ by legalizing certain recreational drugs. Never did understand that.

Read it. And watch the video.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have figured out how to neatly fold plastic using infrared light and an inkjet printer. Deep black lines are printed onto the plastic sheets, which then absorb the light and cause the material to fold without anyone having to touch it. The wider the line, the greater the angle of each fold, so it’s possible to set, say, a 90-degree bend for a cube or 120 degrees for a pyramid.

Read it.

A Child of the Crust will never want for bread.

‘And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.’

Read it.

Tunisia’s secularists said their fears about an Islamist takeover were being realized on Tuesday after a senior official in the moderate Islamist party which won last month’s election invoked the revival of a caliphate, or Islamic state. Footage posted on the Internet showed Hamadi Jbeli, the secretary-general of the Ennahda party, telling supporters that “We are in the sixth caliphate, God willing.”

No doubt the outcry was ‘Allahu Akbar!’

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Some school districts are moving beyond school lunches and school breakfasts to free school dinners. The Memphis Commercial Appeal reports: “As part of Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids legislation passed in 2010, the federal government is now in the supper business, budgeting $641 million over 10 years to make sure children in the nation’s ever-growing poor pockets get one more balanced meal a day.”

Next step: Putting them up overnight. SURPRISE! The government just (re)invented boarding school.

Read it.

Seen from Tehran, Pakistan is not a failed state, but a tremendous success.

Pakistan may be a poor country, but the Pakistani military establishment manages to protect the privileges of the officer class, which constitutes the ruling elite of Pakistan. Pakistan did experience international sanctions in the wake of its nuclear tests, but the nuclear capability has since provided Pakistan with a protective shield which makes it a beneficiary of U.S. military aid. This is despite a record of contribution to proliferation of the nuclear bomb, despite being caught harboring Osama Bin Laden, and despite U.S. Army accusations of Pakistan supporting terrorist networks killing American troops in Afghanistan.

Inspired by the Pakistani role model, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is transforming Iran into a military dictatorship, where the IRGC is not only constitutionally tasked with “safeguarding the revolution and its achievements,” but also rules Iran. The IRGC is also aggressively pursuing a nuclear program—the “possible military dimensions” of which the International Atomic Energy Agency has expressed “serious concerns” about.

Read it.

To me, the real and practical problem of grade inflation is that it causes students to alter their choices, away from fields with tougher grading, like the sciences and economics, and toward fields with easier grading.

But, of course, since we don’t know the students involved, we’re not entitled to speculate about their motives, the poor babies.

Read it.

Read it.

Occupy Wall Street and many other leftists tend to see their causes as the Vitally Important New Civil Rights Movement (TM) of the day, justifying the use of tactics from the tumultuous 1960?s and 1970?s in political movements in 2011.  Sometimes, they make this point explicitly (such as how gay is the new black), but other times they seem to act like they can do whatever the want because their cause is just.

Combine this with their use of numbers and political power to partially protect them from the enforcement of the law, and what we have is not civil disobedience: it is low-grade political violence against order in general.  This is not surprising coming from the anarchist OWS movement, but it should be surprising to those who believe that OWS is merely about the richest Americans having too much money.

Thus, I propose to liberals the following paradigm for protest etiquette:  If a hypothetical Occupy Planned Parenthood movement were to use the tactic in question, would you want them arrested?  If so they should declare the OWS tactic in question to be out of bounds.

Read it.

The job losses we’ll see in the coming years will make what we’ve seen thus far look like a jaunt in the park. A quick review of recent articles describing the impact of the massive regulatory state (the EPA alone has grown 120 percent under Obama) offers some ominous projections for future job losses.

Hope and Change: We’re changing you from working to non-working, and hope you don’t figure it out.

Liberals, drones, progressives and other anti-American malcontents would be hard-pressed to prove that this President isn’t intentionally trying to establish a permanent underclass, whose subsistence is dependent upon the largesse of the federal government.

They wouldn’t do that, surely?

Alex Tabarrok turns over a rock.

I have written several times before (e.g. here and here) about how Washington insiders, politicians and staff, use their knowledge of behind the scene deals to profit in the stock market (see also Megan McArdle’s recent piece from which I stole the headline). Last night 60 Minutes reported on the story based on new research in Throw Them All Out a forthcoming book by Peter Schweizer.

Read it.

Further news on the Analytical Engine project.

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The game is called – perhaps inevitably – Persian Incursion, and is the brainchild of technothriller writer Larry Bond, formerly well known as a designer of tactical combat games (Bond has collaborated with Tom Clancy, and it’s said that his games were used extensively in development of such seminal Cold War works as The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising).

Give Obama a copy, maybe he’ll learn something.

Read it.

Or maybe aliens with anger management issues. You never really know.

Why is it that Japanese, Chinese, and Indian people whose families have been in this country for two generations can speak perfectly understandable English, while black people whose families have been here for three hundred years can’t?

Read it.

Computer scientists and pathologists at Stanford University now have a computer system that can look a tissue sample and diagnose breast cancer more accurately than a human doctor. The computer system, called C-Path (Computational Pathologist), even went one step further and identified previously-undiscovered cellular structures that can be used by computers and humans alike to improve the diagnosis and prognosis of breast cancer patients in the future.

Read it.

Talk about a renewable resource….

David Brooks lays out the party line.

Foreign tourists are coming up to me on the streets and asking, “David, you have so many different kinds of inequality in your country. How can I tell which are socially acceptable and which are not?”

Of course, the key step-back question here is, ‘Acceptable to whom?’ And Brooks, the Crust’s official pet ‘conservative’, actually has to lay out the official establishment road map.

The amusing part is that whether or not a particular form of inequality is ‘acceptable’ or not is entirely a First World problem; the rest of the world has more real-world concerns to occupy their minds.

Read it.

The thing is, a government is like a rifle: there are certain tasks for which no other tool will do. There are certain tasks you can do with other tools, but the rifle does them better if used with care, so using it is wise. But there’s a world of tasks out there that it’s terrible for, and trying to use it for those purposes will end up breaking the thing you want to fix and catching your neighbors in the stray fire. So you keep careful track of where you point the thing, and keep your finger off the damn trigger.

So I don’t hate government any more than I hate rifles, but I respect the damage both can do, and insist on keeping strict muzzle and trigger discipline. When you’ve built a government with a hundred-thousand employee strong bureau dedicated to regulating every aspect of agriculture and food, with an attitude of such pervasive, granular control that it thinks nothing of creating a “Christmas Tree Checkoff Task Force” to “strengthen the position of fresh cut Christmas trees in the marketplace and maintain and expand markets for Christmas trees within the United States”, you’re waving your damn rifle around with your booger-hook on the bang-switch, and other people on the firing line are right to be concerned.

Extending the analogy, there are people in the world who long to get control of the government because that way they can have things done their way, just as the guy with the rifle will often think that it makes him the boss. But simply being the boss doesn’t make you the smartest guy in the room, it just makes you the most powerful, which is why we need some serious controls on the people with rifles (government).

And the rifle makes a good synecdoche, as well, because the essential function of government is the sort of thing best done with rifles, i.e. defending people against thieves and murderers, both domestic and foreign. Once you get beyond that and use rifles for other purposes, such as forcing people to Do Things Your Way, you’re getting into Opression Territory, and you need to learn not to  go there.

And there are other problems as well, per Freeberg:

There’s unfortunately even more to add on. Government does not fire at a target, miss, and try again. Every time the weapon is discharged, what our government is doing is “legislating” that a round will be fired at such-and-such a direction every year from now until the end of time. In other words, if another bullet is fired in some different direction, with the intent of hitting exactly the same target, and that one is a hit, our government doesn’t have the inclination or the incentive or the track record of going back and saying “Okay, the target is over there…so that legislation obliging us to fire in this direction, to hit that target, is wrong. No need to argue this point, it’s an established fact. We need to repeal that legislation and stop firing over here.” Can’t do that. Because the bad legislation is “law,” you see. It’s also a jobs program.

Read it.

If you’re a parent who accepts Medicaid payments from the State of Michigan to help support your mentally-disabled adult children,  you qualify as a state employee for the purposes of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). They can now claim and receive a portion of your Medicaid in the form of union dues.

Hey, sucking on the public teat – that’s what it’s all about;
You can goof off all you want to, and they can’t turn you out;
And if they try to cut your pay, just wave your signs and shout:
Look For The Union Label, it gives you lots of clout!

Megan McArdle is pretty much always worth reading.

Democratic governments cannot do even obvious right things if the public will not tolerate it.  Even dictators have interest groups whose support they must buy.
This has come home to me forcefully several times over the last few years, but never more than now.  The leaders of the eurozone have a dual mandate to keep the euro intact, and to not do the things which could keep the euro intact.  They cannot fiscally integrate to the extent necessary because, as I wrote for the Daily the other day, the Greeks do not want to act like Germans, and the Germans do not want to share their credit rating with anyone who won’t.

Government, like Soylent Green, is people. And people are not always rational.