Tim Carney points out that it’s mostly more cowbell.

Let’s start with the assertion, for which Yglesias offers zero evidence, that “rich businessmen inevitably wind up reaching the view that lower taxes on rich businessmen.”

Who’s the richest businessman in America? Bill Gates of Microsoft. Gates has supported a ballot initiative to raise taxes on the rich. Gates also has spent money to preserve the estate tax.

The second richest man in America is Warren Buffett. Buffett loves taxes on rich businessmen so much that Barack Obama has named a tax on rich businessmen after Warren Buffett. He’s with Gates on keeping the death tax.

Third place is Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. I can’t find his statements on taxes, but his political giving  of the last 20 months — all to Democrats, including Harry Reid — doesn’t suggest someone desperately trying to lower taxes.

Numbers 4, 5, and 8 — Charles and David Koch and Sheldon Adelson — seem to hold the views on taxes and regulation Yglesias attributes to all rich businessmen. But the rest of the top 10 haven’t been reading enough Yglesias to know where they’re supposed to “inevitably” end up.

The Waltons of Wal-Mart wealth are generally conservative, but their company is hardly hammering away for “less regulation of their business.” Yglesias knows this, too, because when Wal-Mart called for a mandate on employers like Wal-Mart, requiring them to provide health-care for employees, the announcement was made in conjunction with Yglesias’s employer CAP, and Yglesias touted it as “an important sign that change is in the air.” Wal-Mart has also lobbied for a higher minimum wage.

Oh, and the only really rich businessman in the Forbes Top 10 I haven’t named yet?

George Soros.

I don’t really have to touch that one, do I?

For all of the class-warfare rhetoric, rich people are mostly Democrats. Why? Well, it might be because, for all of the class-warfare rhetoric, Democrats of the upper class are really most comfortable with other upper-class Democrats. AlGore wrings his hands about global warming and air pollution while living in a ‘house’ that uses as much electricity as a small city. No Kennedy or Rockefeller now living has ever worked a day at a Real Job in his (or her) life. Any objective review of the available evidence will show that Democrats are far more the Party of the Rich than Republicans ever were. Just look at the chief modern icons of each party: Ronald Reagan worked his way up from poverty out in Flyover Country, while FDR was born with a silver spoon in every available orifice with a set left over for his lovely wife Eleanor.

Jonah Goldberg is always worth reading.

But it’s worth noting that when we say there’s no such thing as shovel ready jobs it’s not like saying there’s no such thing as the bogeyman or unicorns or good flan. Those things don’t exist, period. But shovel ready jobs do exist. Drive by your local Home Depot and hire some day laborers. Take them to your back yard and say “I’ll give you $50 to dig a hole.” Guess what? They’ll dig a hole.

What we don’t have is shovel ready government. The only impediment to shoveling is, simply, government. It is government that requires employers to jump through hoops for months to get the right paperwork. It is government that imposes costs on hiring and working. Some of those costs may be warranted, even if the delays are not. But that doesn’t change the fact that there are countless shovel ready jobs, shovel ready workers, and shovel ready shovels. What we don’t have are shovel ready bureaucrats. And that is something Obama could change if he wanted. He is perfectly placed to pursue shovel ready government if he wanted to. But he doesn’t, for political and ideological reasons, as well as a more basic failure of imagination.

Read it.

Men are dropping out. They do this for many reasons.

The same proportion of men are dropping out in Western Europe and Japan, for example. Over a million young men are Hikkimori — they don’t leave their rooms. They have no jobs. They have no life. And nobody can deal with it.

 

Read it.

Results from the Reason-Rupe poll actually demonstrate a willingness by a majority of Americans to increase taxes on the “wealthy.” However these preferences depend greatly on how one defines wealthy. The poll asked the standard question “Do you think the federal government should increase taxes on the wealthy,” with 69 percent in favor and 28 percent opposed. However, respondents in favor were then asked what household income they would use to define someone who is wealthy and should therefore pay higher taxes. Respondents consistently listed incomes that were above their own, even high-income respondents, suggesting that people may want to raise taxes, but just not on themselves.

Funny thing about that.

Read it.

A fun game that everyone can play.

‘… our President would have a pair.’

Jerry Pournelle at his finest.

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

 First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

David Brooks, actually making sense for once. Enjoy it while you can.

Most people overrate their own abilities and exaggerate their capacity to shape the future. That’s fine. Optimistic people rise in this world. The problem comes when these optimists don’t look at themselves objectively from the outside.

The planning fallacy is failing to think realistically about where you fit in the distribution of people like you. As Kahneman puts it, “People who have information about an individual case rarely feel the need to know the statistics of the class to which the case belongs.”

Read it.

We’ve been puzzling over the Author’s Guild’s decision to sue several university libraries for participating in the digitization and storage of millions of works (largely in connection with the Google Books project) and making scans of some of those works available to the academic community. Simply put, it appears that the Guild is dead set on wasting time and money addressing imaginary harms, whether or not its efforts might actually benefit either its members or the public.

What puzzles me is why anybody pays attention to a group suing on behalf of people who are not members of their group. How do they have what we lawyers like to call ‘standing’?

Read it.

His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like
underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy
who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those
boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at
high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one
of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

 

Read it.

But in a few years, the government will require electric cars and gasoline-electric hybrids to emit some type of noise at low speeds, when their battery-driven motors usually run silent. The promised rules—aimed at making the vehicles safer for vision-impaired pedestrians and others who rely on aural cues—have launched auto makers on a quest for the perfect sound.

Well, a 5-liter V-8 doesn’t have these problems. Just sayin’.

Read it.

I’m confident that her grandchildren’s views would horrify Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, as well.

Read it

Over the course of a quarter-century, a journalist witnessed the transformation of George W. Bush.

.

Arnold Kling is always worth reading.

The paradox is this. A job seeker is looking for something for a well-defined job. But the trend seems to be that if a job can be defined, it can be automated or outsourced. The marginal product of people who need well-defined jobs is declining. The marginal product of people who can thrive in less structured environments is increasing.

Megan McArdle takes the ball and runs with it.

Why is this troubling?  Aren’t routine jobs stifling? Soul-destroying? A tool of the oppressive overclass?

Well, that’s what we used to say when we had more than enough to go around.  The assembly-line was grinding modern man into just another machine part; the stultifying conformity of the white collar world was producing a nation of anal-retentive Casper Milquetoasts.

Then the jobs started to go away and we discovered that many people like dreary predictability–at least, compared to the real-world alternative, which is risk.  What many, maybe most, people actually want, it turns out, is the creativity and autonomy of entrepreneurship combined with the stability of a 1950s corporate drone.  This is a fantasy, of course, but given their druthers, it’s not clear that most people will pick risk over dronedom.

Unfortunately, they’re being given no choice.  Even if we stopped outsourcing, we’re not going to somehow stop automation.

UPDATE: Smitty at The Other McCain kicks the extra point.

Restated, jobs that involve information management, especially in well-bounded cases, are readily re-stated in software.

So, knowing how to

• write code,
• administer information systems,
• do jobs that have a significant ‘real-world’ component (fixing cars),
• involve creativity,
• are not easily structured in code (customer service)

are likely to remain longer.

Back on topic, though, the Information Age has blown away vast swaths of the private sector, and is even now crushing the public sector. Private citizens just do not require the government, especially the federal government, managing their birth, housing, health, education, employment, and retirement. Private citizens do not need legions of civil servants reading email, shuffling from meeting to meeting, and emitting PowerPoint all day. This must stop.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Strikingly, Mann defines globalization as bringing about the dawning of the “Homogenocene”—the era of cultural and even biological homogenization. Proponents of globalization like to congratulate themselves on fostering diversity—that great talisman word of our age—the reality is that the world is becoming, in many ways, more homogeneous. Diets, for example, became more similar around the world in the wake of Columbus.

There are, by nature, two kinds of diversity: micro and macro. Globalization drives the world toward micro-diversity, but away from macro-diversity. Practically every strip mall in Los Angeles, for example, features a Mexican taco restaurant, a Cambodian donut shop, and an East Asian nail salon. Each strip mall is therefore diverse within itself. Yet, even the most ardent diversiphile has to admit that every strip mall seems an awful lot like every other strip mall in L.A.

I really like the redesigned format for VDARE.COM. Much more readable.

One definition of “dystopia” is “a society characterized by human misery, such as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.”

For example, an American city run by Democrats. Detroit comes immediately to mind, as does Los Angeles.

James Taranto points out some inconvenient truth.

Perhaps the most striking statement at last night’s Republican presidential debate came not from Rick Perry or Mitt Romney but from the audience, which applauded the preface of one of moderator Brian Williams’s questions.

Capital punishment draws strong emotional reactions on both sides, doesn’t it? And whatever one thinks of the death penalty or the audience’s behavior last night, the harshness, self-righteousness and simple-mindedness of these responses belie the left’s self-image as intellectually sophisticated and tolerant of other viewpoints.

It seems to us that the crowd’s enthusiasm last night was less sanguinary than defiant. The applause and the responses to it reflect a generations-old mutual contempt between the liberal elite and the large majority of the population, which supports the death penalty.

Jonathan Last cuts through the crap.

What has amazed me over the last week or so is the silliness of those who treat the argument as if it’s somehow out of bounds just because Rick Perry is making it. Believe it or not, Rick Perry is not the first person to view Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme.”

The first person I’ve found drawing the parallel is economist Paul A. Samuelson. In the November 13, 1967 Newsweek Samuelson defended Social Security by pointing out that it was linked to population growth and that “A growing nation is the greatest Ponzi scheme ever devised. And that is a fact, not a paradox.”

Read it.

Seven dogs starved of food and water for two weeks are suspected of eating their Indonesian owner after he returned to his hometown in Manado from a holiday, local media reported on Tuesday.

A neighbourhood guard was curious when he saw luggage lined up at the front of Andre Lumboga’s house, days after the 50-year old arrived back home. He approached the house, smelled something foul and called the police, according to a report.

“His skull was found in the kitchen, and his body was found in the front of his house,” Eriyana, a local police chief in Batam, an island off Sumatra, told VIVAnews website.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

In the ideal world, this latest stupendous failure of the push for a planned-energy economy will be the end of the matter, and governments will embrace a free-enterprise energy economy. Of course, we don’t live in that world. Instead, watch for the re-branding, where “green” becomes “clean,” and the same failed ideas are offered up as the new panacea.

Read it. And watch the video.

And he’s exactly right. If the ordinary voter is as stupid as term-limit legislation assumes, then the ordinary voter is too stupid to be allowed to vote. You can’t have it both ways. Either you support democracy or you don’t. People ought to be obliged to live with their choices.

David Friedman is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

The argument for large and expensive efforts to prevent or reduce global warming has three parts, in principle separable: Global temperature is trending up, the reason is human activity, and the consequences of the trend continuing are very bad. Almost all arguments, pro and con, focus on the first two. The third, although necessary to support the conclusion, is for the most part ignored by both sides.

Read it.

Private property rights specify the property owner’s rights to decide how property will be used, to accrue income from its uses, and to transfer these rights to others in various voluntary arrangements. Because the content of private property rights is complex, threats to such rights can arise from many different sources, including actions by legislators, administrators, prosecutors, judges, juries, and others (e.g., sit-down strikers, mobs).

Because of the great variety of ways in which government officials can threaten private property rights, the security of such rights turns not only on law “on the books,” but also to an important degree on the character of the government officials who administer and enforce the law. An important reason why regime uncertainty arose in the latter half of the 1930s, for example, had to do with the character of the advisers who had the greatest access to President Franklin Roosevelt at that time—people such as Tom Corcoran, Ben Cohen, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, and others of their ilk. These people were known to hate businessmen and the private enterprise system; they believed in strict, pervasive regulation of the market system by—who would have guessed?—people such as themselves. So, as bad as the National Labor Relations Board was on paper, it was immensely worse (for employers) in practice. And so forth, across the full range of new regulatory powers created by New Deal legislation. In a similar way, the apparatchiki who run the federal regulatory leviathan today can only inspire apprehension on the part of investors and business executives. President Obama’s cadre of crony capitalists, which he drags out to show that “business is being fully considered,” in no way diminishes these worries.

Read it.

It has been interesting to watch the word cowboy become a term of abuse, politically, over the last decade. Critics often described Bush’s foreign policy approach, in particular, as reckless, unthinking or bombastic – a case of “cowboy diplomacy.” My guess is that the vast majority of people employing this term have never met an actual cowboy. Real North American cowboys are often very deliberate and measured when they speak, but they do tend to have limited patience for being pushed around – a combination of qualities as useful in foreign policy as in life.

The chief thing to remember about cowboys is, that you don’t want to fuck with ’em. And ‘Don’t Mess With Texas’ is trademarked by the state. I wouldn’t mind having Gary Cooper as Secretary of State, with Jimmy Stewart as President and John Wayne as Secretary of Defense. I think that lineup might just get the job done.

To be sure, President Obama is no “cowboy.” He instinctively scolds and shifts blame, splits every difference, appears peevish when criticized, views himself as a kind of international community organizer, and places tremendous faith in the power of endless talk – especially his own. Elite transatlantic liberal opinion continues to view this overall approach, self-referentially, as the height of sophistication, regardless of its practical failures.

Perhaps we might call this approach Kindergarten Diplomacy.

Notice that Obama’s one undisputed international success, the killing of Osama Bin Laden, was achieved through an uncharacteristic reliance on aggressive interrogations and unilateral military action without permission from anybody. If a Republican president had engaged in this sort of act, no doubt we would have heard much more hand-wringing about the dangers of a rootin’-tootin’ approach to counter-terrorism. But then that’s cowboy diplomacy for you.

Maybe it’s time to tell Barry that recess is over.

Read it.

It’s been called the Gig Economy, Freelance Nation, the Rise of the Creative Class, and the e-conomy, with the “e” standing for electronic, entrepreneurial, or perhaps eclectic. Everywhere we look, we can see the U.S. workforce undergoing a massive change. No longer do we work at the same company for 25 years, waiting for the gold watch, expecting the benefits and security that come with full-time employment. We’re no longer simply lawyers, or photographers, or writers. Instead, we’re part-time lawyers-cum- amateur photographers who write on the side.

Today, careers consist of piecing together various types of work, juggling multiple clients, learning to be marketing and accounting experts, and creating offices in bedrooms/coffee shops/coworking spaces. Independent workers abound. We call them freelancers, contractors, sole proprietors, consultants, temps, and the self-employed.

Perhaps the reason there are no jobs being created is that the very idea of ‘job’ is outdated.

Read it.

What does it mean to “look presidential,” and why does it matter? An enormous amount of the media coverage of presidential candidates is focused on whether or not he (or, very rarely, she) “looks presidential.”

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Between those who predicted a flowering liberal democracy in a post-Mubarak Egypt and those who predicted the empowerment of radical, Muslim Brotherhood aligned forces in a post-Mubarak Egypt, it is clear today that the latter were correct. Moreover, we see that the US’s abandonment of its closest ally in the Arab world has all but destroyed the US’s reputation as a credible, trustworthy ally throughout the region. In the wake of Mubarak’s ouster, the Saudis have effectively ended their strategic alliance with the US and are seeking to replace the US with China, Russia and India.

The very notion that robust internationalists like Bachmann and Palin could be thrown in with ardent isolationists like Paul and Buchanan is appalling. But it is of a piece with the prevailing, false notion being argued by dominant voices in neoconservative circles that, “You’re either with us or you’re with the Buchanaites.”

In truth, the dominant foreign policy in the Republican Party, and to a degree, in American society as a whole is neither neoconservativism nor isolationism. For lack of a better name, it is what historian Walter Russell Mead has referred to as Jacksonianism, after Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the US. As Mead noted in a 1999 article in the National Interest entitled, “The Jacksonian Tradition,” the most popular and enduring US model for foreign policy is far more flexible than either the isolationist or the neoconservative model.

Jonathan Last jerks back the curtain on Mitt Romney.

Combine that with the rest of his runs and you get a 17-year career average of 5-18. I don’t think you could find any other figure in politics who has run this far below the Mendoza line and still managed to get taken seriously as a presidential candidate. In fact, the only reason Romney gets taken seriously is his money. Strip away the $500M treasure room and the willingness to blow large chunks of his kids’ inheritance, and he’s Ron Paul without the ideological moorings and grassroots support.

Read it.

The origins of the financial crisis and the Great Recession are widely attributed to “market failure.” This refers primarily to the bad loans and excessive risks taken on by banks in the quest to expand their profits. The “Chicago School of Economics” came under sustained attacks from the media and the academy for its analysis of the efficacy of competitive markets. Capitalism itself as a way to organize an economy was widely criticized and said to be in need of radical alteration.

Although many banks did perform poorly, government behavior also contributed to and prolonged the crisis. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates artificially low in the years leading up to the crisis. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two quasi-government institutions, used strong backing from influential members of Congress to encourage irresponsible mortgages that required little down payment, as well as low interest rates for households with poor credit and low and erratic incomes. Regulators who could have reined in banks instead became cheerleaders for the banks.

This recession might well have been a deep one even with good government policies, but “government failure” added greatly to its length and severity, including its continuation to the present. In the U.S., these government actions include an almost $1 trillion in federal spending that was supposed to stimulate the economy. Leading government economists, backed up by essentially no evidence, argued that this spending would stimulate the economy by enough to reduce unemployment rates to under 8%.

Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s sane brother) gets a nomination to be a Patron Saint of Dyspepsia.

The moment has come to admit that I loathe the Arab Spring and almost everything about it.

It looks to me pretty much like a football crowd armed with AK-47s and bazookas, with the added ingredient of Islamic militancy. Why am I expected to like it?

For we are all supposed to approve of it. Every media outlet, every politician, every church pulpit, treats it as an unmixed Good Thing.

Not me. I look at these wild characters in baseball caps and tracksuit bottoms blasting ammunition into the sky (often killing or injuring innocents far away, but they don’t care) and I am mainly thankful that they are a long way off.

So of course he must be a raaaaacist.

Jim Goad speaks for the silent majority.

While reading yet another headline about, oh, I don’t know, a wayward dromedary whose scrotum was implanted with a cell-phone-triggered incendiary device designed to blow up a VW minibus filled with sorghum-harvesting kibbutz workers, it hit me like a suicide bomb:

I don’t care.

It’s not that I’ve ever cared about the Middle East—it’s that I’ve finally realized I don’t care. How much don’t I care? A whole lot. There’s almost an intensity to my not caring. A ferocity, if you will.

I know I’m supposed to care about the Middle East. And I know that if I don’t care, I’m supposed to feel guilty, but I can’t even manage that much. I can’t even feel bad about not feeling bad—that’s how much I don’t feel bad. Should I feel bad about that? I don’t care. I’m sorry for that. Actually, no—I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry at all.

Read it.

Good thing they didn’t extend it to embarrassing train wrecks; it would be difficult to take a picture of the economy in places like Michigan, California, and New York.

Paul Rahe is smarter than you and me put together. He was a Classics/History grad student at Yale when I was an undergrad, and never uttered a trivial word.

The tone of the speech and the manner of delivery were pitch-perfect for Texas. I am not, however, certain that this will play for a national audience. I do not mean to suggest that Perry should never be folksy. He comes from Paint Creek, and this comes naturally to him. Moreover, he needs at the outset to gather to him those who belong to his natural constituency – which is made up of white people who live in the countryside and in small towns. But to persuade a wider audience, Perry will have to pitch his argument to an audience that thinks itself more sophisticated. I am not arguing that the city slickers really are more sophisticated; I am arguing that they are in the grips of a powerful prejudice against people from places like Paint Creek.

You will respond that Bill Clinton came from Hope, Arkansas, and you will be correct. But Bill Clinton went to Georgetown University and Yale Law School, and he did a stint at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He was vetted. Perry is an outsider. Even in some circles in Texas, Aggies are regarded as hicks. It is easy to see what sort of campaign David Axelrod and his associates will gin up against Perry. It will draw on the instinctive bigotry that made it so easy to demonize Lyndon Baines Johnson and the younger Bush. Obama cannot run on his record. To win, he must demonize the alternative. It is going to be ugly.

Read it.

I guess that’s why the Republicans are The Party of the Rich … people like AlGore – 0h, wait – well, then, the Rockefellers – oh, wait – then maybe Warren Buffett or Bill Gates – oh, wait….

Rich people don’t get rich by wasting their money. So what are these ‘heavy hitters’ getting for their money? Hmmm?

And … oh, look … more than half are labor unions. But, but, but … labor unions claim that labor is getting hammered; where does all that money come from? Hmmmm?

John Hinderaker does the math.

The remarkable thing about the anthropogenic global warming hoax is that it isn’t even a close call. Anyone who takes the trouble to investigate the science will quickly learn that the alarmist position is a fraudulent one, driven, I think, by the billions of dollars that are thrown at those who are willing to sell out scientific method in support of the statist line. Hiding the decline is way more lucrative than presenting objective, and unalarming, scientific findings.

Joel Kotkin sounds the alarm.

The hardening of class divisions    has been building for a generation, first in the West but increasingly in fast-developing countries such as China. The growing chasm between the classes has its roots in globalization, which has taken jobs from blue-collar and now even white-collar employees; technology, which has allowed the fleetest and richest companies and individuals to shift operations at rapid speed to any locale; and the secularization of society, which has undermined the traditional values about work and family that have underpinned grassroots capitalism from its very origins.

Arnold Kling calls out the fat cat of Omaha.

Read it.

Is Paul the Right’s Lyndon LaRouche?

If you know who Lyndon LaRouche is, you need to get out more.

Again and again Paul has dissented, been laughed at, and been proven correct. That may be one reason he evokes so much scorn in certain corners of the Right.

Another is that he tends to have opinions and policy preferences that the voters don’t like, something that doesn’t get a lot of time in coverage like this.

The fact that he’s ‘been proven correct’ may qualify him to be a pundit on TV, or a Presidential adviser; but being President is more than just seeing what’s wrong — it’s being able to craft a solution and persuade people to get with the program, something for which Paul (through over 20 years in Congress) hasn’t demonstrated any talent. If it were enough to figure out what the problem is, Ross Perot would have been President. People vote for those whom they think can fix the problem, not just those who can diagnose it correctly.

Read  it.

A landmark article went online a few days ago in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. The study was prepared by a team of 32 researchers headed by the University of Edinburgh’s Gail Davies and entitled “Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic.” The study’s methods do not lend themselves to easy explanation unless you’re at home with SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) and inverse variance weighted models used to capture “the variance in the trait that is due to linkage disequilibrium between genotyped SNPs and unknown causal variants.” But the bottom line of the article is reasonably simple. Using nothing but genetic information, the team of researchers was able to establish that the narrow heritability of crystallized intelligence (the kind that can be more easily affected by education) is at least 40 percent. The narrow heritability of fluid intelligence (the kind that involves pure problem-solving ability, independently of acquired knowledge) is at least 51 percent. Note the at least. The study’s authors explicitly state that these estimates are lower bounds.

Shelves of books and articles denying or minimizing the heritability of IQ have suddenly become obsolete. Those who continue to claim that IQ tests don’t measure anything real inside the brain also have their work cut out for them.

Ah, science. ‘Progressives’ claim that it’s on their side, but it keeps debunking their egalitarian mythologies.

That famous trope of Democrat Congressman Dick Gephardt is one of the fixed myths of the ‘progressive’ movement in America. According to the myth, rich people are rich people because they got lucky, and it’s society’s job to make sure that those who didn’t pull a winning ticket in ‘life’s lottery’ should nevertheless get a leg up — at taxpayer expense, of course.

But if you look at real lottery winners (such as this one), you find out that most of those who started out in the, shall we say, lower ranks economically tend to blow their money fairly quickly and wind up worse than they started. This suggests that there is something about the character of those who, acquiring great wealth, manage to keep it that goes beyond luck, and reflects … dare we say it? … intrinsic worth.

Just sayin’.

Read it.

“We leave our DNA everywhere,” Jules Epstein, law professor at Widener University told the ABA Journal. “If you smoke a cigarette and drop it or if you go to the barbershop and your hair is cut, you are leaving your DNA behind. To the extent that DNA has been abandoned, there is no invasion of privacy if others collect it.”

Read it.

“He confuses the two, mixing up details about the first expedition with those of the second. In his account of the first invasion, he describes the fleet leaving Korea and being hit by a typhoon before it reached the Japanese coast,” said Daniele Petrella of the University of Naples, the leader of an Italian archeological project in Japan.

Read it.

How many times have we heard it said that Mr. Obama is the smartest president ever? Even when he’s criticized, his failures are usually chalked up to his supposed brilliance. Liberals say he’s too cerebral for the Beltway rough-and-tumble; conservatives often seem to think his blunders, foreign and domestic, are all part of a cunning scheme to turn the U.S. into a combination of Finland, Cuba and Saudi Arabia.

I don’t buy it. I just think the president isn’t very bright.

But when has he ever had to be? He’s been an affirmative-action baby all his life.

Read it.

The idea that a capitalist economy can support a socialist welfare state is collapsing before our eyes, says Janet Daley.

Scott Adams writing in the Wall Street Journal. Is this a great country, or what?

I make my living being creative and have always assumed that my potential was inherited from my parents. But for allowing my creativity to flourish, I have to credit the soul-crushing boredom of my childhood.

My period of greatest creative output was during my corporate years, when every meeting felt like a play date with coma patients.

Read it.

On June 13, the resident conservative (which means additional leftist) on The New York Times’ editorial page, David Brooks, revealed his plan for “national greatness,” which Brooks designates as the “Hamiltonian agenda.”

For those who may have forgotten, “national greatness” was a theme that Brooks’s pals Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan discussed at length in The Weekly Standard and Foreign Affairs in the 1990s. Back then this term meant a neo-Wilsonian foreign policy characterized by the militaristic promotion of our updated version of “democracy” and “human rights.” Although twenty years ago “national greatness” was not explicitly about glorifying our federal welfare state, it was implicitly about feeding a big government that could mobilize a contented population for war.

An Informative Chart.

Read it.

The Other McCain has a dream.

If you consider the 16th & 17th Amendments, plus the Federal Reserve act in isolation, you can come up with one set of arguments. That’s the mathematical combination of three things, one at a time.

For those who aren’t paying attention, the 16th authorizes the Federal income tax and the 17th changed election of Senators from state legislators to direct popular vote.

Now, if you blow away all three of these federal zombies in one one shotgun chorus (great name for a band there), then you can undo the 1913 Progressive triumph of Woodrow [censored] Wilson. He may have emoted well about the need for Progress, and the imperfections of the Founding Fathers, but his ideas have proven ruinous.

I can supply that missing middle name; in fact, my insertion into that space would run several paragraphs.

Read it.

And I’m sure this applies to World of Warcraft mutatis mutandis.

That’s your Rationalization of the Day. We now return you to your originally scheduled boring life.

Read it.

There’s a stunning lack of transparency when it comes to SEAs reporting basic staffing and budgeting data, making it difficult to analyze agency performance. Federal dollars, usually the dominant funding source for SEAs, are also typically tied to specific programs and employees, giving the state chief little control over how these funds are spent and thus little room to maneuver. Perhaps most important, though, is that these agencies are often overly focused on compliance, not reform.  “The traditional role of the SEA,” we observe, “is to administer state and federal funds, and customarily SEA employees have worked to ensure the SEA complies with the law rather than focusing on how to best help districts and schools increase student achievement.”

Well, he that pays the piper calls the tune. Yet another reason not to send your kid to a government school.

Steve Sailer recognizes that modern politics is a joint effort by the Upper Crust and the Lower Crust against the Middle.

But, here’s another factor that helped drive American women away from programming careers: H-1B. Bill Gates and other zillionaires have added even more billions to their fortunes by getting the government to let in lots of foreign programmers to do for less money the lower level programming that American women tended to be doing. Logically, feminists should therefore have been anti-Bill Gates and anti H-1B, but logic doesn’t play a big role in modern America in determining which Diversity Card trumps which. As a general Hi-Lo v. Middle rule, rich guys playing the race card against average whites are likely to win.