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Sorry, ‘first-year’ is already claimed by law school. Try ‘FNG’ instead.

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School administrators in Tampa, Florida, are insisting that parents pick up their kids from the bus stop after school lets out. And if they fail to comply, they could receive a visit from child services.

Why is all this statist crap happening in Florida?

According to the Tampa Bay Times, district policy forbids kindergartners to walk home and requires bus drivers to bring them back to school if their parents don’t appear on time.

I was the only one in my family who went to kindergarten, and I walked about a half hour each way, by myself. The worst thing that ever happened was I was late getting home when it rained because I had too much fun jumping in puddles without spoil-sport grownups along to interfere.

Time to homeschool….

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MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, the Obamacare architect who bragged about deceiving the “stupid” American people to secure passage of the bill, has been paid an estimated $5.2 million by the federal government and 12 state governments for consulting services to assist in the design and implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Doing well by doing good.

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Chocolate deficits, whereby farmers produce less cocoa than the world eats, are becoming the norm. Already, we are in the midst of what could be the longest streak of consecutive chocolate deficits in more than 50 years. It also looks like deficits aren’t just carrying over from year-to-year—the industry expects them to grow. Last year, the world ate roughly 70,000 metric tons more cocoa than it produced. By 2020, the two chocolate-makers warn that that number could swell to 1 million metric tons, a more than 14-fold increase; by 2030, they think the deficit could reach 2 million metric tons.

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Think slavery was ended long ago? Think again.

The table below shows the prevalence of slavery, based on the percentage of the population enslaved and the estimated number of people enslaved by country.

No, Ferguson doesn’t even show up.

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Facts are such tedious things, that’s why ‘progressives’ prefer to ignore them.

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Americans have always prided themselves on being a nation of the self-made, where class and the accident of birth did not determine success. Yet increasingly we are changing into a society where lineage does matter—and likely this process has just started, threatening not only our future prosperity but the very nature of our society.

Poster child: AlGore and anybody descended from Joseph P. Kennedy.

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Apparently kicking back at the idiocy of the Social Justice Warriors brings the really special entitled ones crawling out from under whichever rock they were hiding under. That or there’s just something in the air at the moment. Or maybe the water.

…

Honestly. Apparently the moment you scratch a statist you bring out an obsession with genitalia and/or the end product of the digestive system.

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Through the modern miracle of the Internet it is now possible to buy hippie uniforms from China wholesale at “high quality and low prices”.  The phrase “hippie uniform” may sound like a contradiction in terms, but as the Washington Post’s article on mathematician Jonathan Touboul explains, it’s entirely natural. Most hippies are doomed to don — and to change — uniforms.

Touboul concluded that is because “hipsters” define nonconformity in terms of the ‘perceived mainstream’ and because of delays in rebellion toward it, they entered into oscillating states which effectively doomed them to uniforms.

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But they won’t get the death penalty because that would be raaaaaaacist.

Read it.

I’m a young, feminist atheist who can’t bake a cupcake. Why am I addicted to the shiny, happy lives of these women?

Another victim of Identity Politics and Voice of the Crust stares through the bars of her ideology at the Happy Hunting Ground in which she will never get to live.

Read it.

Man dies of incurable disease, so naturally the family sues the hospital that failed to cure him.

Modern American law being what it is (“whoever has the deepest pockets has to pay”), the hospital caved.

There’s our civilization falling in front of your very eyes.

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

While the clickbait headline on the WaPo’s frontpage refers to “pronouns,” the article refers to “nouns.” These days you must say “343 firefighters died in the World Trade Center on 9/11? because saying “343 firemen died in the World Trade Center on 9/11? is an insult to the memory of all the firewomen who died on 9/11.

…

In the 21st Century, for instance, you can tell if somebody is a Bad Person or a Good Person by whether they use the old “B.C. and A.D. ” (Bad Person) or the new “B.C.E. and C.E.” (Good Person).

Doesn’t “B.C.E.” stand for “Before Christian Era” you might ask, so what’s the point?

Oh, no, it stands for “Before Common Era.”

Now, you may wonder what was so “Common” about the era that began in 1 C.E., but you’re missing the point. The point is that you are one of those Bad People.

Read it.

Democrat John Barnes, a member of the Ohio state legislature, has pulled back the curtain on the racial politics that pervade his party. Barnes, who is African-American, alleges in a lawsuit against the Ohio Democratic Party and its outgoing chairman Chris Redfern that he faced discrimination, retaliation, and defamation at the hands of his own party for refusing to join the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus and for raising the issue of racism by Democrats.

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The Washington Post reports that the Washington National Cathedral will host a Muslim prayer service this Friday. The cathedral, part of the Episcopal Church, has long been the site of important services, including memorial services for presidents, some of whom are buried there. But the Cathedral has never before been used for Muslim services.

…

This is not the first time that the Episcopal Church has sent a message via its policy on usage of the Cathedral. As Munro reminds us, in 2011 evangelicals were excluded from services commemorating the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

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Being run by Democrats will do that for you.

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Of course he can.

He said Mr. Shepherd, who is currently living in Bavaria, could face up to 18 months in prison in the U.S. for desertion.

I guess the days when they shot people like that are long gone. Pity.

I’d mention that he was black but that would be raaaaaaacist. (Truth is like that.)

Read it.

This country is too full of fascists who think that we need a ‘National Policy’ on everything under the sun – and pandering politicians only too ready to take them up on it.

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Another crooked black Democrat politician. This is news?

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Everything you need to know about what happened in Benghazi. It’s long but very thorough.

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Mike Brown was trash and he came from trash, and that’s becoming plainer and plainer.

Steve Sailer gives us the news.

Jeez, if he just tried a little harder he could have found a black woman with a Hispanic surname. What an opportunity missed!

Of course, Steve focuses on the less important aspects of the pick:

So, kind of a parody of an Obama AG nomination: an upper crust black woman (Obama isn’t comfortable around blacks who didn’t go to Harvard), but with experience working with Rev. Al to fight the Greatest Problem of Our Time, the White Racist War on Black Babies’ Bodies.

By the way, all this obsession lately with the phrases “black babies” and “black bodies?” I wonder if it’s really a setup by the thinner-lipped sort of Talented Tenth Harvard African-Americans who see themselves as the natural leaders of the black masses to get their blacker potential rivals to embarrass themselves trying to say “black babies’ bodies.” Somebody should try to get Jesse Jackson on video attempting to say “black babies’ bodies.”

That would indeed be amusing, to the extent that anything about Jesse Jackson is amusing.

Read it.

Although you would think that the ‘legalize ’em all, let Rand sort it out’ crusaders at tReason magazine would be all for that. But I guess not.

It’s been a bad public relations year for the violence- and corruption-plagued Rikers Island Correctional Facility in New York City. Reports of prison guards savagely bludgeoning inmates to death—and more often than not getting off scot-free. Hundreds of inmates suffering serious injury from guard brutality. A culture of fear and intimidation to suppress any repercussions for officers and their superiors. And all this at a hefty price for taxpayers.

So, how much do you care:

[] Not much

[] Even less than that

Gavin McInnes observes a new trend.

Young women today are realizing their grandmothers didn’t have it so bad. The greatest generation sure seems happier than all these divorced baby boomers bitching about their ex-husband as they take half his salary every month.

Read it.

As one woman pauses to wipe the sweat from her eyes, she spots me studying her. I’ve been trying not to stare, but it’s a strange spectacle, this John Henry workout of theirs, hammering away in front of a women’s fitness center, just a few doors down from a smoke shop and a hair salon. It looks exhausting, and more than a little dangerous. (What if a sledgehammer slips and flies from one woman’s hands, braining her companion?) It also looks fruitless. Why not join a roofing crew for a few hours instead? Surely, there’s a tunnel somewhere that needs digging, or at least some hot tar that needs pouring.

Hint: Fifty percent of the population is below average in intelligence. That’s a lot of gym memberships.

Read it.

Michael Brown’s mother has been named as one of the ‘attackers’ who assaulted and robbed vendors selling t-shirts commemorating the youngster’s death.

…

Pearlie Gordon, 54, Brown’s mother-in-law, and two men were selling ‘Justice for Mike Brown’ merchandise when the subjects ‘jumped out of vehicles and rushed them’ during what police are classifying as an armed robbery.

Obviously they weren’t letting Mom wet her beak.

More here.

The robbery is apparently part of a family feud over who is allowed to benefit from the sale of Michael Brown memorabilia such as T-shirts.

Read it.

That will make a lot of ‘progressive’ heads explode.

Freeberg cuts to the root.

From watching the video, one becomes aware of an uneasy truth: Too many people who see something wrong with some of the behavior see something wrong with all of it. This creates a problem in the definitions: If everything qualifies, then nothing does. Yes, saying “Hello” does cross the line. The activists won’t stop short of a new taboo, criminally enforced, that a man may not address a woman until she speaks first.

That is practically the definition of a caste system. And that’s the real issue here. Leftists, far from being all about equality, are all about castes. They’re all about special social privileges for identified classes. The real story here is that we have a “lefties feeding on their own” moment because, once again, they’re in conflict with their own kind about which privileged class should enjoy the most exalted privileges.

Read it.

In February of 2011, as the revolution gathered strength in Tahrir Square, all across the country the police disappeared, and in the Buried teams of looters opened more than two hundred pits. It wasn’t until the end of March, after President Hosni Mubarak resigned and the national situation had stabilized somewhat, that village police resumed patrols of the site.

…

The evidence was clear: looters had mistakenly targeted a modern structure. Adams speculated that it might have been a shepherd’s hut from the nineteen-fifties, or even a field house from an early archeological dig. Around the turn of the last century, large-scale excavations dramatically reshaped the landscape, leaving mounds of backfill all across the Buried. Adams told me that looters often targeted these mounds, which they assumed were situated above buried tombs. “It’s a mistake,” he said. “But we don’t want them to know that.”

Presumably it’s safe to assume that none of the Egyptian looters read The New Yorker.

Read it.

Only tiny pockets of culture that maintain extreme separation from the new pattern – especially through refusing outside education and preventing women from contact with the outside world – have fertility patterns plausibly consistent with uncontrolled fertility. These may include the Amish and Hassidim in the United States. Once the fertility transition to controlled fertility occurs in a population, its fertility generally continues to decline until it is below replacement. The benefits of the new pattern are increased material wealth per person, a reduction in disease, starvation, and genocide, and upward social mobility. The main drawback is the onset of a dysgenic phase that may end civilization as we know it.

I know a number of situations where four grandparents only have one grandchild, the only child of two only children.

Read it.

Mostly she learns that the Factory Model of education, which hasn’t changed in 200 years, is pretty inefficient.

But students move almost never. And never is exhausting. In every class for four long blocks, the expectation was for us to come in, take our seats, and sit down for the duration of the time. By the end of the day, I could not stop yawning and I was desperate to move or stretch. I couldn’t believe how alert my host student was, because it took a lot of conscious effort for me not to get up and start doing jumping jacks in the middle of Science just to keep my mind and body from slipping into oblivion after so many hours of sitting passively.

The urge to drift off to sleep during class is universal. And yet nothing is done about it.

I was drained, and not in a good, long, productive-day kind of way. No, it was that icky, lethargic tired feeling. I had planned to go back to my office and jot down some initial notes on the day, but I was so drained I couldn’t do anything that involved mental effort (so instead I watched TV) and I was in bed by 8:30.

That not only sounds like my schoolday, that sounds like my workday as well.

In eight periods of high school classes, my host students rarely spoke. Sometimes it was because the teacher was lecturing; sometimes it was because another student was presenting; sometimes it was because another student was called to the board to solve a difficult equation; and sometimes it was because the period was spent taking a test. So, I don’t mean to imply critically that only the teachers droned on while students just sat and took notes. But still, hand in hand with takeaway #1 is this idea that most of the students’ day was spent passively absorbing information.

Students are treated like widgets moving down the assembly line, having things done to them by the worker bees. Imagine what would happen if you tried to train a cat or a dog like that.

In addition, there was a good deal of sarcasm and snark directed at students and I recognized, uncomfortably, how much I myself have engaged in this kind of communication. I would become near apoplectic last year whenever a very challenging class of mine would take a test, and without fail, several students in a row would ask the same question about the test. Each time I would stop the class and address it so everyone could hear it. Nevertheless, a few minutes later a student who had clearly been working his way through the test and not attentive to my announcement would ask the same question again. A few students would laugh along as I made a big show of rolling my eyes and drily stating, “OK, once again, let me explain…”

Welcome to Law School, where first year is dedicated to the proposition that the professor is God and you are a rock.

I have a lot more respect and empathy for students after just one day of being one again. Teachers work hard, but I now think that conscientious students work harder. I worry about the messages we send them as they go to our classes and home to do our assigned work, and my hope is that more teachers who are able will try this shadowing and share their findings with each other and their administrations. This could lead to better “backwards design” from the student experience so that we have more engaged, alert, and balanced students sitting (or standing) in our classes.

Don’t hold your breath….

Read it.

If that’s the sort of thing that bothers you, feel free to run around screaming and pulling your hair. We promise not to laugh.

I should like to propose that anyone who uses the word ‘under-represented’ except in speaking of a political system be thrown in the lake until they quit.

That’s my idea; what’s your idea?

Dan Fromer does this stuff so you don’t have to.

While Apple Pay is designed to make payments as easy as possible—by riding on existing payments infrastructure, with security and privacy in mind—using CurrentC actually looks harder than typical payment techniques. Because it’s designed to skirt the existing credit-card infrastructure, CurrentC’s current version only supports payments via checking accounts and certain store cards. And it comes with a questionable privacy requirement: To “confirm your identity,” CurrentC demands both your driver’s license number and social security number.

No CVS for me, thanks.

It is, of course, possible that CurrentC’s management will learn from its mistakes and improve its experience. Especially, if, say, Apple opens up the iPhone’s NFC chip—which it uses for contactless payments—to other app makers in the future. But the brick-and-mortar retail industry has few tech or user-experience successes to offer as proof that it’s going to get it right this time. (Witness its dispiriting collection of implementation failures in e-commerce, store design, previous mobile payment apps, or keeping our credit card numbers secure. Or just take yourself through the current checkout process in any large chain store.) Everything about MCX and CurrentC looks like it’s being instituted to make things better for retailers first and customers later.

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

Read it.

It’s all about the DRM, baby.

We’ve been meaning to weigh in some more on the whole Amazon/Hachette battle, because lot of misinformation has been spewed around (including by Paul Krugman). Unfortunately there have just been too many other things to cover and we haven’t had the time to do a more thorough piece. However, Tim Lee, over at Vox, has a good short piece detailing how many of the publishers’ problems are really because of copyright law and the stupid DRM that the publishers themselves demanded — and which now gives Amazon its power over them in the market. The issue? The DMCA and the fact that Section 1201 makes it illegal to circumvent any DRM (even if for non-infringing purposes). End result, all those books on Amazon are stuck on Amazon.

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

On January 27, 2011, from a stage in the middle of the San Antonio Convention Center, Jonathan Haidt addressed the participants of the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. The topic was an ambitious one: a vision for social psychology in the year 2020. Haidt began by reviewing the field that he is best known for, moral psychology. Then he threw a curveball. He would, he told the gathering of about a thousand social-psychology professors, students, and post-docs, like some audience participation. By a show of hands, how would those present describe their political orientation? First came the liberals: a “sea of hands,” comprising about eighty per cent of the room, Haidt later recalled. Next, the centrists or moderates. Twenty hands. Next, the libertarians. Twelve hands. And last, the conservatives. Three hands.

Steve Sailer reflects.

First, I had never heard until very recently that the murderer, Winston Moseley, was black. A historic black crime wave was washing over New York City in 1964, but the race of the confessed killer wasn’t mentioned in the famous NYT article. In fact, I don’t recall the killer’s race ever being mentioned in the 1960s/1970s. As a child, I just assumed he looked like all the muggers in cartoons then. I can see now that mentioning that the killer was black would have been distracting from the political lessons White America was supposed to be draw at the climax of the Civil Rights era.

As feminist Susan Brownmiller pointed out in the 1970s, sex crimes tended to have political connotations. The big increase in black-on-white sex crimes in New York City, Brownmiller suggested, wasn’t unrelated to black liberation. But that’s complicated and distasteful, so let talk about Apathy.

…

Second, Moseley was a serial killer, a sex maniac who confessed to murdering two other women. He wasn’t just some complete loser: he had a white collar job, a wife, two kids, a mortgage, and a 3 digit IQ. He was just evil. The jury gave him the death penalty, but an appeals court let him off with life, at which point he escaped from prison and kidnapped and raped another woman before being recaptured.

Read it.

But requiring voter ID would be raaaaaaacist.

Watch it.

But voter ID laws are raaaaaaacist.

Read it.

But voter ID laws are raaaaaaacist.

Read it. And watch the video.

Several voters in Rock Island County have already claimed publicly about similar problems with local voting machines in early voting. One local voter, Christina Kirk, told local NBC News affiliate KWQC 6 last week: “When I went to cast my vote and touch the screen for my Republican candidate, the Democrat candidate was the one that would pop up with my x, even though I pressed the Republican candidate.”

The YouTube footage is the first visual report of the alleged problem with the voting machines. The error appears to occur when the voter’s finger is slightly off center in the Republican box, which appears below the Democrat box. It is apparently still possible to vote for the Republican candidate, and it is possible for a vigilant voter to correct the mistake and vote again, but a voter in a hurry might easily register a mistaken vote for the Democrat by mistake and fail to notice. The problem seems to recur throughout the ticket of races. (No test involving a voter trying to choose the Democratic candidate and selecting the Republican instead is shown.)

But there isn’t really any vote fraud; just ask King Putt.

Read it.

Next up: A law to require kids to eat their vegetables. (Oops, sorry, Michelle Obama has that one in hand….)

Read it.

Thank God for those strict gun control laws, or the place would look like Texas.

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As many as they can, obviously. ‘Democrat’ is, after all, a synonym for ‘political machine’.

There’s a bombshell academic study out on this issue right now that the media is mostly ignoring (the only exception being the Washington Post’s very fine wonky MonkeyCage blog), in part because it appears in an obscure academic journal, Electoral Studies, that is behind an expensive subscription paywall, and in part because any reporter who does a story about it will be called a racist. Since I’m an academic these days, I’ve got access to the article, “Do Non-Citizens Vote in U.S. Elections?”, by Jesse T. Richman and Gulshan A. Chattha of Old Dominion University and David C. Earnest of George Mason University.

Read it.

A central tenet of government finance is that money borrowed over the long term should be spent on projects that will outlast the debt – things like buildings, bridges or other essential infrastructure.

That’s not what upstate New York’s Niagara County did with much of its money from tobacco bonds.

Golf carts. Computers. Defibrillators. Portable radios. Even a grease trap for the jail’s kitchen. The list of goods or projects with just a few years’ useful life goes on – all paid for with debt that will last decades.

Nor did the money go toward the health care costs of smoking – as hoped by framers of the 1998 legal settlement with tobacco companies that has paid billions to states, counties and other governments.

Since then, Niagara County repeatedly borrowed against its share of the settlement, about $3.5 million a year. For some of this debt, it borrowed at nearly 8 percent interest and used the proceeds to pay down debts charging half as much.

Niagara’s experience shows how “securitizing” the tobacco money – and the windfall of upfront cash it puts at politicians’ disposal – creates pressure to spend quickly and with less regard to long-term costs.

It also highlights a weakness in IRS rules, which are meant to rein in the use of long-term, tax-exempt debt for items with a short, useful life but still allow many to slip through.

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

Read it.

Much like the artificial noise that some regulators want to impose on electric cars because they’re ‘too quiet’ and therefore unsafe.

The world is full of people who think they know better than you how you ought to live.

Read it.

Conspicuous by its absence is any mention of law-enforcement agencies; I guess only self-appointed progressive busybodies are entitled to encouragement.

Michelle Malkin lays it out.

Everything you need to know about Beltway nepotism, corporate cronyism and corruption can be found in the biography of Robert Hunter Biden. Where are the Occupy Wall Street rabble-rousers and enemies of elitist privilege when you need them? Straining their neck muscles to look the other way.

Hunter Biden, Scion of the Crust, is the poster boy for the way that our new ruling elite is turning America into Britain of, say, two hundred years ago, where who your parents are and who your parents know determine what opportunities you get and how little work you have to do to get them.

Scott Johnson sums it up:

How unqualified was Hunter Biden? He was too old to join the Naval Reserve at age 43. He sought an officer’s commission for which he didn’t qualify. He received waivers to fill a part-time position in public affairs for which he wasn’t needed. After navigating these shoals, Biden was discharged within a month because he flunked a drug test.

Read it.

And you were wondering why Gates, Zuckerberg, et al. are so hot for more H-1B visas.

Read it.

An upcoming study to be published in the publication Electoral Studies has its authors positing the question “Could non-citizens decide the November election?”
Writing in the Washington Post, Old Dominion University political science professors Jesse Richman and David Earnest preview some of the results of their findings, using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

According to the author’s preview published Friday, more than 14 percent of non-citizens in 2008 and 2010 “indicated” they were registered to vote and some did.

“Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010,” wrote Richman and Earnest.

They note that non-citizens tend to be Democratic voters and that in their 2008 sample, 80 percent of non-citizens cast ballots for Obama. Given that, they conclude that non-citizen participation “was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections.”

And it must be true! Because professors!

Read it.

A law enforcement source told NBC News that the gunman Friday used a small pistol. Doug Dawson, special agent in charge of the Seattle office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said the weapon was legally acquired.

Thank God it was a ‘gun free zone’, or who knows how many bodies they would be carting out.