Read it.

Notice that nobody ever talks about ‘the Right’ — it’s always ‘the far-Right’.

Notice that nobody every talks about ‘the far-Left’.

If all you ever read was newspapers, you’d think the the political spectrum had two areas, the Middle and the Far Right.

And there isn’t much discussion of why this symbol of French nationalism needs ‘wresting back’. Hmmm….

Read it.

No matter HOW many people RISE FROM THEIR GRAVES on election day in Chicago, they can only take Illinois.

Can you imagine if you had Florida 2000 style recount shenanigans going on in every state in the country?
Presently, the main reason why fraud is not investigated much in elections is because it rarely changes the outcome—it tends to happen most in areas that are already heavily blue to begin with…that and who..whom of course.

John Hinderaker at Power Line does a review.

It’s been a big week for self-defense, especially of the juvenile variety. The most famous case is that of Sarah McKinley, the 18-year-old widow in rural Oklahoma who was home alone with her infant son when two men tried to break into her house. One of the men had been stalking her and apparently had killed her two dogs.

When one of the men broke in, armed with a 12-inch hunting knife, McKinley killed him with a 12-gauge shotgun.

You go, girl.

Local authorities indicated that a policeman was en route to McKinley’s rural home within seven minutes after her call came in, which reminds us once again of the adage that when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. McKinley won’t be charged, but the dead burglar’s accomplice–who may or may not have entered the house–is being charged with murder. That may seem surprising, but it is the traditional felony murder rule: if you are committing a felony, and anyone dies in the course of it, including your accomplice, you are guilty of murder. It’s just one more inducement to avoid felonious behavior. In the end, the accomplice will no doubt plead to some much lesser charge.

Read it.

Sucking at math is like sucking at cooking. I’m tired of eating shitty food because you’re too much of a dipshit to follow a recipe. Also, I’m tired of hearing people brag about how they can’t cook like it’s some kind of badge of honor. It’s like a race to the bottom with you people. I always hear people one-upping each other about how inept they are at cooking. If you don’t know how to chop up a few carrots to make a decent soup, take your life.

The latest battle in the eternal cage-match between Plato and Aristotle.

John Hinderaker of Power Line issues a wake-up call.

I have already explained, here and elsewhere, why I think that Ron Paul is not just a fringe candidate, but a bad guy. I now want to add another point: he is not a Republican.

Hell, the Republican Party has been running semi-Republicans (and pseudo-Republicans) for President since Tom Dewey. (John McCain? Bob Dole? Ewwwww.) Some of them even won. (Elder Bush? Americans with Disabilities Act. Nixon? EPA, Family Assistance Plan.) Indeed, one could look back at Theodore Roosevelt and ask whether he was really Republican in the sense that Lincoln was. He certainly wasn’t in the sense that Taft (any of them) was.

Read it.

Perhaps no theology more grips the nation’s mainstream media — and the planning community — more than the notion of inevitable suburban decline. The Obama administration’s housing secretary, Shaun Donavan, recently claimed, “We’ve reached the limits of suburban development: People are beginning to vote with their feet and come back to the central cities.”

Yet repeating a mantra incessantly does not make it true. Indeed, any analysis of the 2010 U.S. Census would make perfectly clear that rather than heading for density, Americans are voting with their feet in the opposite direction: toward the outer sections of the metropolis and to smaller, less dense cities. During the 2000s, the Census shows, just 8.6% of the population growth in metropolitan areas with more than 1 million people took place in the core cities; the rest took place in the suburbs. That 8.6% represents a decline from the 1990s, when the figure was 15.4%.

Read it.

The lecture is one of the oldest forms of education there is.

“Before printing someone would read the books to everybody who would copy them down,” says Joe Redish, a physics professor at the University of Maryland.

But lecturing has never been an effective teaching technique and now that information is everywhere, some say it’s a waste of time. Indeed, physicists have the data to prove it.

It’s time and past time to get away from the medieval education model that was as good as they could do with the available technology. We can do better now.

Mazur’s physics class is now different. Rather than lecturing, he makes his students do most of the talking.

One value of this approach is that it can be done with hundreds of students. You don’t need small classes to get students active and engaged. Mazur says the key is to get them to do the assigned reading — what he calls the “information-gathering” part of education — before they come to class.

This would appear to be similar to the ‘flip the day around’ method used by schools adopting the Khan Academy videos.

“In class, we work on trying to make sense of the information,” Mazur says. “Because if you stop to think about it, that second part is actually the hardest part. And the information transfer, especially now that we live in an information age, is the easiest part.”

Indeed. Getting information is no longer the hard part. Let’s focus on working it into people’s brains.

“It used to be just be the ‘sage on the stage,’ the source of knowledge and information,” he says. “We now know that it’s not good enough to have a source of information.”

Mazur sees himself now as the “guide on the side” – a kind of coach, working to help students understand all the knowledge and information that they have at their fingertips. Mazur says this new role is a more important one.

Freeberg is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Mkay, I’m gonna go ahead and say it. I just don’t get football.

Football fans seem to be driven by a constant frenzied hunger, starved out of their minds, for something I get to “enjoy” in a greater abundance than any sane man could possibly want: The frustration of holding a stake in something that is being managed by someone failing to keep your confidence. What is it with that? Are they not put in this situation in their everyday lives? Or is it one of those things that, the more you get of it, the more you want? Kind of a weird, Stockholm-syndrome masochist whip-me-beat-me-make-me-write-bad-checks thing?

I can watch football for about five minutes, and then I get bored — pretty much on a par with watching flocks of birds maneuver as they fly south for the winter. ‘Huh. That’s pretty neat. Wonder how they do that?’ And then on to something more central to my life.

Read it.

What do they know that you don’t?

Read it.

In India, the choice to live outside the faltering grid of government services is usually reserved for the rich or middle class, who can afford private housing compounds, private hospitals and private schools. But as India’s economy has expanded during the past two decades, an increasing number of India’s poor parents are now scraping together money to send their children to low-cost private schools in hopes of helping them escape poverty.

The government’s response, of course, is inevitable: Regulate the competition out of existence.

Faced with sharp criticism of the woeful state of government schools, Indian policy makers have enacted a sweeping law intended to reverse their decline. But skeptics say the litany of new requirements could also wipe out many of the private schools now educating millions of students.

“It’s impossible to fulfill all these things,” said Mohammed Anwar, who runs a chain of private schools in Hyderabad and is trying to organize a nationwide lobbying campaign to alter the requirements. Referring to the law, he said, “If you follow the Right to Education, nobody can run a school.”

All in the name of ensuring that all these privately-educated kids get the same quality education as those who go to government schools, of course. The ironic result, of course, is that it doesn’t raise the quality of the private schools, but lowers it.

We’re working through the same situation in the United States – every kid has a ‘right’ to an education, but that education is provided through government-provided schools, which generally suck. Anybody who can afford to send his kids to private schools does so, and the School Voucher movement attempts to allow even those who can’t afford private schools to do so, diverting some of the vast sum that is currently wasted on government schools.

This is astonishing, when you consider that government schools are either free or provided at less than cost through taxpayer subsidy. What does it say about the quality of a free product when people are willing to pay (and sometimes sacrifice other aspects of their life in order to afford to pay) for an alternative?

… which leads to a larger question: Throughout history, goods provided by the government always and everywhere cost more (and suck more) than those provided by private enterprise; so why are people so eager to have stuff provided by the government?

Read it.

It isn’t until you get to #19 on the list that you hit one that leans Republican.

After all, Republicans are the Party of the Rich™. Everybody knows that.

Read it.

Heather Peters is an angry consumer who knows she has little chance of winning a war with Honda Motor Co. and its army of high-priced lawyers.

The Los Angeles resident is miffed that her 2006 Honda Civic hybrid doesn’t get its claimed fuel economy. And she isn’t satisfied with a proposed class-action lawsuit settlement that would give trial lawyers $8.5 million while Civic owners would get as little as $100 and rebate coupons for the purchase of a new vehicle.

Barring lawyers from courtrooms could lead to the same counter-intuitive but positive results as removing traffic signals and signs from roads and intersections.

If she’s successful in getting others to follow her example, Peters could inspire a whole new litigation strategy in the auto industry and other businesses. Working together but filing lawsuits independently, consumers could force companies to go mano a mano with individual plaintiffs in far-flung courtrooms nationwide.

Call it a small-claims flash mob.

Look for legislators (the best that money can buy, and most of them lawyers themselves) to run, not walk, to ban this ‘loophole’.

Read it.

Most so-called “high-skilled” immigrants (scientists, engineers, computer programmers, and the like) come to the United States under the H-1B visa program. Congress caps the number of visas issued at 65,000 each year and allows an additional 20,000 exceptions for immigrants with advanced U.S. degrees.

Last week U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services announced that the Fiscal Year 2012 cap was reached, which was two months ahead of last year’s pace. ComputerWorld noted that before the recession, the cap was routinely reached in just a week. It took only one day in 2007.

A number of people associated with National Review argue that every degree from an American University ought to come with a green card for those who need them. That certainly might serve to balance a little the guys who are digging the drug-running tunnels under the Mexican border.

Read it.

Talk about First World problems….

Read it.

Interestingly enough, few Catholics these days go to confession either—the matter is considered scandalous.  So there’s all kinds of unresolved guilt that people have in modern America.  And how do they resolve it?

Well, there’s a new step in the evolution of indulgences.  Instead of doing penance for one’s sins, or paying for an indulgence for the same, we now, in our upper middle class SWPL segments, outsource the penance and payment for the indulgences instead to other groups that we don’t like or who compete with us for status.

So, instead of giving to the poor, we lobby for income redistribution away from other groups. Instead of living simply so others could simply live, we lobby to force other people to live more simply.  To expiate the perceived sins of racism, we lobby for Section 8 housing in OTHER people’s neighborhoods, and for the discrimination in terms of allocation of society’s goodies against OTHER people’s children.

Read it.

All civilizations go through strong and weak phases, and some of them fall. But no civilization in history exploded on a global scale within the space of a single century as modern Europe has done.

The European percentage of the world’s population has plummeted within the same period of time. Native Europeans are currently being displaced at a breathtaking pace in their own homelands, at least in the western half of the Continent. Western authorities and ruling elites are not very concerned about this fact, however. They are too busy worrying about carbon dioxide and what the weather will be like in the year 2089.

Perhaps the great upward expansion of European civilization that started in the 16th century and appeared to escape the long-standing human tradition of civilizations rising/flourishing/falling is about to come crashing down after all, once again demonstrating that what goes up must come down.

The worst part will be all the whining on the part of ‘progressives’ as the central tenet of their philosophy, that progress is inevitable, is refuted by Actual Events.

Freeberg is skeptical.

This is a constant in progressive rhetoric, I notice. Put the money where we tell you to put it…and, see, when you do that, [whoever gets it] is going to spend it, and that will invigorate the economy and create jobs. Wheeeee! Whereas, if the money was left with whoever had it in the first place, who knows what they’d do with it. Wipe their butts with it or something…

One rule of inference and prediction that has never let me down is: Everybody adapts, in some way, to everything. If consumers are feeling tight with their dollars, the businesses are going to anticipate a dwindling revenue stream and look for ways to cut expenses. If everybody picks up a certain amount of money being unemployed, then even valuable employees will be “parked” by the businesses — let go, told to re-apply, maybe we’ll re-hire you when things turn around again. If it actually works that way, then the employee has been converted into a sort of rental commodity. Rent the employees just like you’d rent a car: Define the need, pay for it as long as you need it, when you’re done return it to the state which is the actual owner of the “car.”

The government as a temp placement agency. I suppose there’s no shortage of people running around who think that’s how it’s actually supposed to work.

Read it.

Do Tennessee fans take umbrage at such ribald putdowns? Of course they do — and that’s exactly my point. If promiscuity did not inspire an instinctive moral horror, then there would be no offense in saying that UT coeds put out like Pez dispensers.

Contrary to feminist dogma, the stigma attached to “sexually active women . . . who are not in monogamous relationships” isn’t a learned response inculcated by The Patriarchy, but rather a reflection of our innate sense that such behavior is contrary to the social good.

Piercings and tattoos are the ultimate Fashion Statement, representing a monumental commitment to a degree of narcissism that serves as the cornerstone of a deeply flawed character.

Read it. And get the free e-book.

For those who have the free time, it’s fun to make up a score card and see how many of these fallacies a typical news story (or, even worse, press release) can contain. Similar to the ‘buzzword bingo’ that people often play in business meetings, it allows us to laugh a bit when we really want to cry.

Read it.

No app built for reading starts with the premise that the publisher has done an acceptable job.

You would think that those in the publishing business would have some sort of basic appreciation of why people come to their sites, and some sort of basic aversion to doing things that irritate their users. Unfortunately, you would be wrong therein.

If you have a site, presumably you want to have people visit the site — more than once, if possible. So why go out of your way to irritate them by making the Content difficult to get to?

A pop-up window that obscures the Content, and has to be clicked somewhere to get rid of it, is irritating, no matter what it’s for. Starting the user experience by being an asshole BEFORE SOMEONE EVEN GETS TO YOUR SITE is not a formula for success. (Yes, this means bullshit ‘registration’ requirements. ‘But it’s free!’ No, it’s not; it takes time and effort, and my time and effort are limited, and therefore valuable — and clicking the BACK button is less time and effort than your bullshit registration process, however ‘free’.)

Things that move (advertisements, twitter feeds, breaking ‘news’) are irritating, no matter what they’re for. We are hard-wired to be attracted to movement, and moving shit THAT IS NOT THE CONTENT WE CAME FOR is an unprofitable distraction. I always make a note of vendors who do this sort of thing, so I know to avoid them — not, I suspect, the hoped-for result. No such thing as bad publicity? Dude, keep thinking that way; the vultures will feast on your flesh.

Thomas, once again, speaks for me.

“Activists” try my patience, and exhaust it. Their message — no matter the particulars of content or phrasing — boils down to this: Government should “do something” about “something.” This is a formula that has been invoked since the beginning of the Republic, though increasingly more often since the onset of the Progressive Era in the late 1800s. The exhortation betrays three beliefs, unconscious as they may be on the part of those who do the exhorting.

Proponents of government action will counter with the excuse that “something must be done” because of “market failure,” which is the failure of markets to produce outcomes preferred by the proponents. And yet they overlook government failure, and often seek to rectify it by exhorting more government action, which leads to more government failure, and so on.

Here are some salient examples of government failure — and its correlate, misfeasance — that ought to (but will not) give pause to the “do something” crowd:….

Read it.

A discussion of Truman’s decision to drop the A-bomb on Japan introduces a review of when, if ever, it is legitimate to sacrifice innocent lives if doing so will save even more lives.

Andy Leonard has some useful things to say.

I believe once a person has demonstrated they are capable of unacceptable behavior – to anyone, for any reason – they have demonstrated they are capable of that same behavior towards you. Why? It’s on their ILAA. They just proved it to you. If you witness a co-worker take something that belongs to another co-worker, they are demonstrating they are capable of stealing from you. If you observe your business partner treat another partner – or a competitor, or a customer, or anyone – unfairly, they are communicating they are capable of treating you unfairly. If you see an organization abuse one person, that organization is explaining “You could be next”. If it is on the ILAA, everyone is a potential target. Remember, this is about what is inside the individual.

Read it.

We used to PT at 0530 in an urban area. We had 4 or 5 students get hit by cars on indiviual runs. When the senior Marine Officer was asked why he didn’t make us wear reflective belts, he responded, “If they are not smart enough to avoid traffic; they are not smart enough to lead Marines.”

Read it.

    Because he is black, his opinions about race are controversial. If he were white, they probably would be unpublishable. This is a rare case in which we are all beneficiaries of American racial hypocrisy. That he works in the special bubble of permissiveness extended by the liberal establishment to some conservatives who are black (in exchange for their being regarded as inauthentic, self-loathing, soulless race traitors) must be maddening to Sowell, even more so than it is for other notable black conservatives. It is plain that the core of his identity, his heart of hearts, is not that of a man who is black. It is that of a man who knows a whole lot more about things than you do and is intent on setting you straight, at length if necessary, if you’d only listen. Take a look at those glasses, that awkward grin, those sweater-vests, and consider his deep interest in Albert Einstein and other geniuses: Thomas Sowell is less an African American than a Nerd American.

Read it.

Both Roosevelts railed against those with money as corrupters of all that’s good and fair in America.  Both thought the way to return to a “fair” society was by expanding the role of government.  And both thought the best way to pay for their efforts was to redistribute the wealth.  If that doesn’t sound like Barack Obama, I don’t know what does.

While we are not told what fairness means, we are told the government can attain it.

And, of course, the country pays for all this “fairness” by raising taxes.  “Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective—a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.”  Teddy said that—even before those taxes existed—but it could have just as easily been Obama.

Read it.

The only honest discussion of race and education in America that you’ll see this decade.

And I’d still shoot Roger Staubach on sight, given the opportunity.

Unfortunately, you have to  subscribe to his e-mail column The Goldberg File to get the best stuff. Do it.

Here’s a sample:

1. Nationalism = socialism. I’ve been saying for years that the presumption that nationalism and socialism are opposites — an idea ingrained in many Marxist minds — is nonsense. Nationalism, in terms of public policy if not necessarily culture, is socialism. When we nationalize health care, we socialize medicine. Teddy Roosevelt’s “new nationalism” was a call for a “new socialism” — a point his advisers, Charles van Hise, Richard Ely et al., would have happily conceded.

2. President Obama has been shockingly nationalistic. Sputnik moments, “Beat China!” “We owe it to the troops to support green energy,” “Kneel Before Zod!” And now he disinters Teddy Roosevelt’s “new nationalism.” In actual policy terms, he’s been vastly more nationalistic than George W. Bush was. The difference is that liberals hate cultural nationalism. They hate it so much they even see overt displays of patriotism as scarily nationalistic. But they love programmatic nationalism — Everyone shut up and build things liberal like! The danger is when you get cultural nationalists joining forces with socialists. In fact, that’s called national-socialism. Maybe you’ve heard of it?
 
3. Where the hell are the “new ideas”? Perhaps because I wrote a book arguing that liberalism remains loyal to the progressive philosophy first laid out over a century ago, or maybe because my next book is in no small part about how they try to hide this fact, I’m particularly vexed by the fact that conservatives are supposedly in thrall to “old ideas” but liberals are all about new ones. In his Kansas speech, Obama kept insisting that conservatives are beholden to the failed ideas of the past. Er, okay. And that’s why you dusted off a 101-year-old speech by a failed third-party candidate? Got it. Obama talks as if raising taxes on rich people so they can pay their “fair share” is a new idea when “let’s take more from that guy to pay for stuff I want” was an old idea when proto-humans were drawing stick figures on cave walls with saber-tooth-tiger scat. And yet somehow Republican politicians never turn the tables on this incandescently stupid argument. It vexes me. I am exceedingly vexed.

Speaking truth to stupidity. Nobody does it better.

Read it.

Once a streetcar suburb reaches a critical density of white people, it has officially arrived at its Platonic ideal Form, and redevelopment must be halted for fear of yuppies casting shadows on hipsters.

What do the Crust talk about amongst themselves? Look and see.

Steve Sailer asks an important question.

Are people being pulled by the top or pushed by the bottom? Bigger houses, especially when mandated by developers and / or zoning, are not only an attempt to get closer to the top, they are very much an attempt to get farther away from the bottom, to physically escape to neighborhoods and school districts where the bottom can’t afford to live.

The median home foreclosed in California was about 1500 square feet. Professors and journalists have a hard time grasping the scale of the various factors because they spend so much more of their time around the hugely rich than anybody else in their pay grade. They also try to avoid spending time with the 85-100 IQ working class, so they are pretty clueless.

Read it.

Ezekiel Emanuel reminded New York Times readers last week of something health economists have known for eight decades. Health expenditures are highly concentrated, with just 10 percent of the population accounting for nearly two-thirds of annual health spending. Wall Street protesters have sparked a fierce debate over trends in the share of income and wealth controlled by the top 1 percent. But no informed American aspires to be in the health spending 1 percent.

Of course, the assumption in this article, as in every article I’ve seen on the subject, is that we simply must find a way to spread the cost of the 1 percent over the wallets of the 99% so that everybody winds up paying the same. But why? We don’t make all purchasers of automobiles pay the same, whether they’re buying a Cadillac or a Kia. We don’t make all purchasers of houses pay the same, whether they live in Beverly Hills or Detroit. We don’t make all diners pay the same, whether they’re eating at Alinea or McDonald’s.

People never tire of bitching & moaning about the cost of health care, but it’s only a problem because people don’t pay for their own — everybody pays either too much or too little, with no obvious connection between what you pay and what you get. That’s insane.

Read it.

Some time ago, I got to talking with my grandfather (WWII generation) about the Baby Boomers.  I was somewhat surprised by his generational admission—not so much by what he said, but by the fact that he essentially said mea culpa for the Greatest Generation as a whole.

He explained to me that growing up during the Depression was really hard.  City kids frequently had to keep cows and such (in the city no less) and really scrounge to make ends meet.  Because of this, they really really wanted to make sure that their own kids in the future would never have to do anything like that.  This of course led them to ask very little if anything of their own kids (the Baby Boomers), probably contributing heavily to that generation’s narcissism.

Exactly what I’ve been saying for years.

Read it.

A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

Actually, beer is full of carbohydrates — it’s not quite a direct substitute for bread in a diet, but its contribution to the diet can be substantial.

Eric Raymond spreads some truth.

In a discussion thread that wandered to the subject of Walmart and its enemies, I said “Scratch a Walmart-basher and you’ll find a snotty elitist, a person who hates capitalism and consumption and deep down thinks the Wrong People have Too Much Stuff.”

Preach it, brother.

I find that, as little as I like excess and overconsumption, voicing that dislike gives power to people and political tendencies that I consider far more dangerous than overconsumption. I’d rather be surrounded by fat people who buy too much stuff than concede any ground at all to busybodies and would-be social engineers.

Yeah, we’re looking at you, Michelle-ma-belle.

Jehu reminds us of what America used to be like.

My wife and little ones are big fans of going to the beach, even though beaches in Oregon and Northern California aren’t about swimming.  On the way to many of our favorite spots though, we pass through lots of extremely white small towns on the coast.  One thing that jumps out is the very high levels of trust that persist there (the second being the celebrity treatment my two little tiny redheads get from the many grandparents that inhabit such places).  Here is an example—it strikes me as profoundly alien every single time I pass it because of all the things it implies.
In the middle of a very small parking lot—really more of a spot where one could pull off the coastal highway than a parking lot honestly—there are stacks of bundles of firewood, and a sign advertising them for sale for the customary $5 or so.  Next to the sign is a bucket where you can put your payment.  That’s it.  No watchman or clerk, no cameras…Nothing.  But it’s been here for years now, so apparently the guy who cuts the wood must not get ripped off often.  This speaks to positively alien levels of trust by the standards of the societies that I’ve been a part of.

Just to hammer the point home with a large mallet, try doing that in a place that has large numbers of black or Latino people.

Read it.

Well, it’s really an extrapolation. But it makes as much sense as anything she’s actually said.

Jehu points a gimlet eye at the degenerate modern world.

Most talk of redistribution and fairness strikes me this way.  Obviously, most people lack the self-awareness to recognize this even when it perfectly encapsulates their revealed preferences.

For instance, the very smart tend to want raw intelligence to be a big part of the metric according to which society hands out its goodies.  They call it meritocracy.  There are certainly arguments of efficiency, but there’s no moral reason why, for instance, someone with a 3 sigma IQ and a 0 sigma level of physical development should be favored over someone with 2 sigma IQ and 1 sigma of physical development for spots at say, Harvard.  Those who have the power to do so or control over the cultural battlespace get to define the formula and then afterwards we all are expected to pretend that it is henceforth sacred.

Read it.

I can hear Dennis now: ‘Yet more jobs lost! Will the madness never end?’

Read it.

Clue: No.

Would students go to med schools that boasted of having as teachers people who had never seen a patient? And yet that’s what most big-name law schools depend on. The way to a fabulous lifetime job as a law professor is to go to a top-tier law school, make law review, clerk for a federal judge or (even better) Supreme Court justice, and then slip into your professorate. (If you’re feeling adventurous, you can work in-house for some government agency or legislator.) The wipe-the-farmyard-dirt-off-your-boots guys who have actually practiced law are relegated to the ranks of ‘adjunct’ faculty (and you can hear the sneer when the tenured profs say it) who are only hired when third-year students are panicking because they’ve realized that they have no clue where to go to file a lawsuit (should the occasion ever arise, which it probably won’t).

Danny Sullivan brings some sense to a ‘progressive’ stupid-fest.

“I’m standing in front of a Planned Parenthood,” the CNN reporter says, “And Siri can’t find it when I search for abortion clinic.” No, it can’t. It’s not because Apple is pro-life. It’s because Planned Parenthood doesn’t call itself an abortion clinic.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

It also doesn’t call itself an organization devoted to genocide against black people, although that’s how it started.

Read it.

In general, being less helpful is essential to helping students learn to be self-sufficient, to learn better study skills, and to develop better study habits. It’s just as important a part of their education as any lecture on higher-order procedures.

Actually, in my case it’s just generalized misanthropy garnished with occasional bloody-mindedness, but this serves as a convenient rationalization.

Read it.

The lesson seems clear: Unions go on strike = life gets more pleasant for everybody.

Read it.

What vegetarianism eventually leads to. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here.

Read it.

A large explosion has been reported in the Iranian city of Isfahan as the regime issued conflicting reports apparently designed to deny any suggestions of a sabotage attack on its nuclear facilities.

Not another one….

Pass the popcorn.

Bryan Caplan tells the truth about education.

I’ve been in school for the last 35 years – 21 years as a student, the rest as a professor.  As a result, the Real World is almost completely foreign to me.  I don’t know how to do much of anything. While I had a few menial jobs in my teens, my first-hand knowledge of the world of work beyond the ivory tower is roughly zero.

And the same goes for the vast majority of professors, especially in ‘humanities’.

Yes, I can train graduate students to become professors.  No magic there; I’m teaching them the one job I know.  But what about my thousands of students who won’t become economics professors?  I can’t teach what I don’t know, and I don’t know how to do the jobs they’re going to have.  Few professors do.

Treasure this moment of honesty.

Many educators sooth their consciences by insisting that “I teach my students how to think, not what to think.” But this platitude goes against a hundred years of educational psychology. Education is very narrow; students learn the material you specifically teach them… if you’re lucky.

Other educators claim they’re teaching good work habits. But especially at the college level, this doesn’t pass the laugh test. How many jobs tolerate a 50% attendance rate – or let you skate by with twelve hours of work a week? School probably builds character relative to playing videogames. But it’s hard to see how school could build character relative to a full-time job in the Real World.

Ross Douthat pees all over the Legend of JFK. And about time, too.

THE cult of John F. Kennedy has the resilience of a horror-movie villain. No matter how many times the myths of Camelot are seemingly interred by history, they always come shambling back to life — in another television special, another Vanity Fair cover story, another hardcover hagiography.

Kennedy was arguably the most incompetent President of the 20th century until Jimmy Carter.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

My theory is mostly the same, although simpler. It’s like saying, how come only-children aren’t as excited about becoming competitive? Answer there, as with here, is: There is no reason to be. Logic is the Great Equalizer with creed and race; group-think is not. Group-think reverberates its messages within social or working groups, and the simple fact is that our social and working groups remain racially polarized. Yes, it is embarrassing to the left, to the protest movements, and to Occupy Wall Street. It puts the big-reveal on the idea that we as a society cannot protest our way toward racial harmony.

If it made sense, you could recruit across communities, racial, gender, sex-preference lines. The irony is that capitalism does this. If something makes sense, people move. Occupy Wall Street doesn’t make sense, and it only appears to make sense when you’re being moved toward it as part of a big flash-mob crowd. Things look different outside of the crowd. Rather like drinking large amounts of alcohol; the drunk thinks all his jokes are funny, and he isn’t quite talking loud enough.

Read it.

Tell the truth, we’ve all had days like that.

Read it.

She had hosted the bash – which saw guests knock back champagne, wine and beer – to celebrate the birthday of her wealthy ex-husband, Roderick Hamilton.

Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist, points out some inconvenient truth.

It’s one of the ironies of American history that when the Pilgrims first arrived at Plymouth rock they promptly set about creating a communist society.  Of course, they were soon starving to death.

A fine illustration of the fact that there is no truth about human behavior, nor a so high a stack of empirical proof, that cannot be ignored by the foolish and ignorant.