Scott Johnson of PowerLine looks at one of the many billionaires of which Harry Reid claims Democrats don’t have many.

This past April, with the help of a knowledgeable reader, we took a deep dive into the fossil fuel investments of Democratic money man and environmental poseur Tom Steyer in “The epic hypocrisy of Tom Steyer.” Introducing our reader’s report, John wrote regarding Steyer: “Today, he is a bitter opponent of fossil fuels, especially coal. That fits with his current economic interests: banning coal-fired power plants will boost the value of his solar projects. But it was not always thus. In fact, Steyer owes his fortune in large part to the fact that he has been one of the world’s largest financers of coal projects. Tom Steyer was for coal before he was against it.”

Freeberg has some fun mocking the eminently mockable.

Here’s the deal: You want something and decide your want is actually a need. So, since you need it, your employer buys it for you, because he’s compelled to do so by force of law. Forget about how much it has to do with the contract between you & him, that doesn’t matter because you need it.

And because you need it, you get to dictate the parameters of this thing you need so, so badly — but somehow, can’t quite get around to opening your billfold to pay for it. It is to be provided to suit your preferences, just as if you were the person spending the money. Which is stupid, silly, idiotic…but, it’s gotta be that way. Otherwise, everybody goes completely apeshit, because that’s how they make sure this alternative economic system continues to service them, by going completely apeshit. It’s an economic system built on wrath instead of on greed. And that’s what is happening with this “Hobby Lobby case.” They’re having their pandemic, highly organized temper tantrum, so that consumers in the secondary economic system can enjoy as much choice as consumers in the primary economic system.

Given that, none of this is surprising. Except for the lengths to which these secondary-economic-system advocates will go, to keep on pushing it. It is truly…exhausting. It’s just like the teenager dreaming up endlessly twisting & contorting “legal” arguments about why it isn’t his turn to take out the garbage, when it would be so much less work to just take out the garbage. Why not just earn money for the things they want & need, put it in the bank for awhile, and then spend it? It’s truly baffling. Sandra Fluke, to the best of my knowledge, has yet to answer the question.

The essentially juvenile nature of the “Left” in this country is the truly depressing aspect of most modern political questions. You keep hoping they’ll grow up but they never do.

The Other McCain lays it out for you.

For example, it is often claimed or implied that the development and promotion of oral contraceptives in the 1960s was undertaken in order to “liberate” women; in fact, this project was funded by billionaires (especially David Rockefeller) who were fanatically devoted to a eugenics-influenced vision of population control. (See Donald L. Critchlow’s excellent 2001 history, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Goverment in Modern America.) The arguments that sold The Pill as a particular blessing to women — and which, by obverse correlation, portrayed pregnancy and motherhood as traumatic burdens to be avoided if at all possible — was promulgated by public-relations specialists hired by Rockefeller and other soi-disant “philanthropists” who shared his population-control agenda.

Bryan Caplan realizes that he’s doing it wrong — and so is everyone else.

My lessons were fully effective. Before long, my sons were experts – and so they will remain for their whole lives. Which led to an awkward realization: My technique for teaching shoe-tying is much more effective than my technique for teaching economics. In my experience, only 5-10% of my students master the material by the final exam. And even my best students tend to quickly forget most of what they learned.

I’m tempted to lament the Iron Laws of Pedagogy. But my shoe-tying experience tells me that’s a cop-out. I know how to make my students learn more. If filling my students with life-long knowledge were my top priority, I’d replace my thoughtful lectures with catechisms. I’d make the students chant aloud with me. I’d break every lesson into baby steps, and drive the students to master them one by one. How? I’d randomly and mercilessly put students on the spot, pressing them to apply the lesson aloud – and correct the slightest misstep. We’d meet seven days a week for half an hour, endlessly recapping what we’ve learned. Sure, I’d cover far less ground. Yet after a semester, my students would know the basics for a lifetime.

Why don’t I do this? While I could say, “The best way to teach shoe-tying is radically different from the best way to teach economics,” that’s an excuse. The truth: I don’t teach econ the same way I teaching shoe-tying because I’d hate it, and my students would hate me.

I guess being loved is more important than being effective. (And people wonder why our schools are so ineffective.)

Read it.

A couple of years ago I was invited to a gathering on behalf of Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico who then was a libertarian candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. I was well disposed toward him, but when he started talking, his first subject was legalization of drugs. Now he is the CEO of a marijuana company. Rand Paul is probably the leading libertarian at the moment; he purports to take seriously the threat that someone drinking coffee in an American cafe will be struck by a drone-fired missile.

I find it difficult to take seriously a group of people who worry more about legalizing pot than sharing a world with a billion adherents of a religion that has at its core a requirement to conquer and oppress all who don’t join up, not to mention what it does to those who do.

American liberty is indeed under attack, and a libertarian movement is needed more than ever. But the threat to freedom is not drug laws or drone attacks. The principal threat is the administrative state, which increasingly hems in everything we do and depends hardly at all on the will of voters. This morning, Scott published commentary by Professor Philip Hamburger, author of Is Administrative Law Unlawful?. It is, in my opinion, the most important post we have had on Power Line in a very long time. Hamburger argues that the “modern” administrative state has been accepted as the inevitable concomitant of a complex contemporary society. In fact, he says, it is nothing new: it is, rather, the same kingly rule by extralegal “prerogative” that our Constitution was specifically designed to prevent.

Sarah Hoyt hears her Bullshit Detector go off.

About five to ten years ago, I started noticing a disturbing trend. Every fledgeling I had who was younger than, oh, thirty, didn’t understand the difference between victimhood and goodness.

If someone was being kicked around by fate, they were ipso facto good and heroes, even if the book failed to establish any of this and even, in fact, when their own story telling made them self centered and repulsive little maggots.

Steve Sailer wonders what Peter Beinart has been smoking.

But every four years during the World Cup, white American liberals project their status strivings onto soccer and their convoluted ethnic resentments onto traditional American sports. Even though the World Cup embodies nationalist chauvinism at its most frenzied, liberal whites in this country see it as a repudiation of patriotic Americans. For example, former New Republic editor Peter Beinart trumpets in The Atlantic: “Ann Coulter Is Right to Fear the World Cup: America’s growing coalition of soccer fans looks a lot like the coalition that got Obama elected.”

This might come as news to the core of the Obama coalition, African Americans. The key to Obama’s reelection in 2012 was the unexpectedly high turnout among blacks, especially older women. And church ladies who like Tyler Perry movies aren’t hugely excited by the World Cup, much less FC Barcelona.

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The reality is that soccer, like most major sports in today’s world, is a triumph of WASP cultural imperialism.

Read it.

Planned Parenthood claims its business is “women’s healthcare,” but its recent award certificate to a Colorado abortion clinic for “exceeding abortion visits [in the] first half of FY12 compared to the first half of FY13,” affirms that its most valued business is abortion.

John Hinderaker at PowerLine has a new game for us to play.

One of the few things that interest Barack Obama, other than golf, is the annual NCAA basketball tournament bracket. So reader Brad Mirakian came up with the Obama Scandal Bracket. He did a good job of it too; he probably left off a scandal or two, but he also wisely left one blank for the scandal yet to come.

More fun than the world cup.

Read it.

A black Mississippi pastor has emerged to claim Sen. Thad Cochran’s (R-MS) campaign paid “thousands” of Democrats $15 each to vote in the June 24 GOP runoff – and that he was part of the scheme.

Rev. Stevie Fielder, an associate pastor at First Union Missionary Baptist Church in Meridan, Mississippi, says Cochran’s campaign “told me to offer blacks $15 each and to vote for Thad.”

Fielder, who was paid by freelance journalist Charles C. Johnson for the story, provided a new outlet launched by Johnson—GotNews.com—with four text messages from a person purporting to be Cochran campaign staffer Saleem Baird.

The messages cite an official Cochran campaign email address—Saleem@ThadForMs.com—and include detailed discussions of the campaign providing envelopes of money to distribute to people who vote.

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

Read it.

According to Politico, “Members of the Congressional Black Caucus are talking about what they want Cochran to do” if he gets re-elected for another six-year term. Their wishlist includes “maintaining funding for food stamps, beefing up programs that help poor blacks in Mississippi and even supporting the Voting Rights Act.”

“Absolutely we have expectations,’’ Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH), the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, told Politico. Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) said after Cochran was “desperate” enough to court the black vote, he hopes that Cochran is now “responsive to the voters that pushed him over the top.” And Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) said he hopes Cochran “comes to the realization that African Americans are the reason I have this final six years and therefore I’m going to try and be more responsible than I have been.”

I guess they couldn’t afford him before.

Read it.

Scotland wants to treat all families as potentially abusive and appoint a “named person” (that is, a guardian) as soon as the child is born and up through age 18 to oversee the parenting. This “shadow parent” would be empowered by the government under the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act, which will take effect in 2016.

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini

Read it.

A herd of hippopotamuses once owned by the late Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar has been taking over the countryside near his former ranch – and no-one quite knows what to do with them.

…

Valderrama, whose job until recently included watching over the hippos in the Magdalena, has seen animals up to 250km (155 miles) away from Hacienda Napoles. Fishermen are terrified of the three-tonne herbivores, he says. At night, the animals roam the countryside, wandering into ranches, eating crops and occasionally crushing small cows.

You’ve heard the phrase ‘First World problem’; well, here’s a corresponding Third World problem.

Read it.

The outlines of this new epoch are clear in numerous ways. There is the diminished role for small business, greater concentration of financial assets, and a troubling decline in home ownership. On a cultural level, there is a general malaise about the prospect for upward mobility for future generations.

Not everyone is suffering in this new age. For the entitled few, these have been the best of times. With ever more concentration of key industries, ever greater advantage of capital over labor, and soaring real estate values in swanky places such as Manhattan or San Francisco which , as one journalist put it, constitute “vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself.” The top hundred firms on the Fortune 500 list has revenues, in adjusted dollars, eight times those during the supposed big-business heyday of the 1960s.

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Good luck with that. Trying to get money out of a Clinton is like trying to get blood back from a tick.

Besides, that’s better than half the annual salary of the President. For about two hours work. if she had to make the choice, which do you think she’d choose?

But she won’t ever have to make that choice — what are these ‘student leaders’ going to do, vote for a Republican? It is to laugh.

Read it.

An excellent reason never to vote for either Huckabee or Alexander.

Read it.

Illegal and legal immigrants have accounted for all of the job growth in the United States since 2000.

On the one-year anniversary of the passage of the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” comprehensive immigration reform bill, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released a report on Friday that revealed that even though native-born Americans accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the total working-age population since 2000, the number of native-born Americans with jobs declined by 127,000.

While there were 114.8 million working-age native-born Americans with jobs in the first quarter of 2000, there were only 114.7 million with jobs in the first quarter of 2014. On the other hand, 17.1 million working-age immigrants (legal and illegal) had jobs in 2000 while 22.8 million did in 2014, which is an increase of 5.7 million.

Read it.

You have to hand it to the liberals: they never miss an opportunity to convert tragedy into political gain. In the wake of Elliot Rodger’s six murders–three with a knife and three with a gun, plus injuries inflicted with an automobile–they are calling, once again, for gun confiscation. I guess they are, anyway. As usual, they denounce conservatives and say things like “end the madness,” but confiscation seems to be the point of it all.

Once again, though, liberals are denied the holy grail of mass murderers–a conservative perpetrator, preferably a follower of the Tea Party. Rodger, like most of the others, was a devoted liberal. He followed the Young Turks on YouTube, a far-left group led by a goof named Cenk Uygur who once was an MSNBC host. So, foiled once again, liberals can make only their broader propaganda points.

Perhaps if we ban kids from being liberal, this madness would cease. (Makes about as much sense as what they’re saying.)

Check it out.

A comprehensive catalog of all the various forms of racism in your life that you probably missed.

Read it.

For understandable reasons, the IRS scandal has largely focused on the political question of whether the White House deliberately targeted its opponents. To date there’s no evidence that it did. That’s good for the president, but it may not be good for the country, because if the administration didn’t target opponents, that would mean the IRS has become corrupt all on its own.

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Now, I don’t believe we are becoming anything like 1930s Russia, never mind a real-life “1984”. But this idea that bureaucrats — very broadly defined — can become their own class bent on protecting their interests at the expense of the public seems not only plausible but obviously true.

Freeberg has some thoughts.

One of the ways we might assess that a society has become soft and spoiled, is the observation that its demands have begun to take on the profile of the supplies. In other words, lots of people “need” something simply because it’s there to be had. What’s been going on with tattoos would be an apt illustration of this. The tattoo ink artist paying the rent by swiping the credit cards held by guilted and bullied small-em moms, ultimately, is a solution in search of a problem. Kids want the tattoos because the tattoos are there. And all the other kids have them. Because they’re there.

I make it a general practice to steer clear the things indulged in by the majority of the criminal population — tatoos, smoking, recreational drugs. I figure, maybe they know something I don’t know, and ought to avoid.

Read it.

Ed Klein, author of The Amateur, an unflattering account of Barack Obama’s presidency, has a new book coming out. It promises to be fun. If you thought the Hatfields and McCoys didn’t like each other, just wait until you read about the Clintons and the Obamas.

Read it.

Standard Multicultural imagery functions as a visual shibboleth. Businesses, charities, educational institutions, and all levels of government must display the correct icons of diversity or expect to be cast into cultural outer darkness. The ideological guidelines are fairly rigid at any given moment, but they shift over time. Imagery that was acceptable and even laudable to display in 1960 has become doubleplus ungood, and hence unthinkable here in the second decade of the 21st century.

The next time you hear somebody say ‘Diversity is our strength!’ say ‘Prove it.’ and watch them blubber and turn red.

Try searching Google images for “diversity business”. I spent an hour or so last night doing exactly that, and the results were fascinating, albeit frightening. Diversity really is a huge business. Someone is shelling out billions and billions of dollars to all those consultants, think tanks, seminars, and focus groups.

As George Carlin famously said, ‘If somebody nails together two things that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it from you.’

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, opines.

The state ideology–“political correctness,” “the Narrative”–seems to me quite robust. I don’t expect it to change over the next 20 years.

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With ever fewer jobs for the left side of the bell curve, a universal dole–a federally-guaranteed minimum income–will be in force.

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To the degree that party politics is of any importance, we shall be in a period of Democratic Supremacy. The Republican Party will either have contracted to its conservative (that is white, Christian, Southern) core and be nationally irrelevant, like 18th-century British Tories, or it will continue to offer the Narrative fronted by different personalities, as at present.

Read it.

Yet another ‘green energy’ scam runs headlong into the Reality Wall.

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

Read it.

Planning of outer southeast Portland has failed so badly that even the planners are recommending that the city slow densification of the area. As reported in the Oregonian late last year, the city upzoned the area to much higher densities but failed to install basic urban services to support those densities. The result is just one more disaster in the model of urban planning called Portland.

Planning only works when the people doing the planning know what they’re doing. Case in point: American foreign policy. But the world is full of people who are convinced down deep in the bottom of their souls that they know better than you do how you ought to be living your life. Case in point: the Democrat Party.

Read it.

More than 5,000 French Jews are expected to leave France for Israel due to the struggling economy and the rise of radical Islam and the far-right political party, Fox News reports.

The economic prospects for France coupled with an increase in anti-Semitism are the two driving forces for this mass emigration.

I guess France is the new Germany.

Read it.

After all, how dare a Catholic Archbishop come out in support of Catholic teaching?

As SFGate reports, in a letter to Cordileone, Pelosi, a self-proclaimed Catholic who supports abortion on demand and same-sex marriage – both of which are against the teachings of the Catholic Church – described the March for Marriage event as “venom masquerading as virtue” and said the participants show “disdain and hate towards LGBT persons.”

In the Good Old Days, she’d have long since been excommunicated. (Actually, the way it really works, she would have been recognized as having excommunicated herself.) But these are not those days.

And, of course, nothing is said of the ‘disdain and hate’ that ‘LGBT persons’ show toward normal people. ‘Degenerate is the new normal’ I guess.

Read it.

The paramount privilege at universities is not race, class, or gender but intellectual soft despotism. More revealing, those who have pushed the check-your-privilege religion have not grasped this lesson.

A student whose worldview clings to that of university administrators and professors has the advantage of accessing university resources, money, and time to drive his cause. These instruments are far more powerful in granting benefits to politically preferred groups in higher education than subconscious biases in favor of particular races or classes.

…

Implicit acts of intellectual congruity—or “micro-aggressions,” in check-your-privilege parlance—are no less powerful in molding students’ minds into believing political discourse is acceptable only within certain boundaries. Subconscious decisions to assign course readings polished with a liberal slant; use class time to disproportionately cover liberal paradigms; and grade “conservative” arguments more critically in writing assignments are inevitable in a field in which 96 percent of Ivy League professors showered political contributions on President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, and in a field in which almost 90 percent of its members self-identify politically as “far left,” “liberal,” or “middle of the road.”

Mark Steyn does what he does best.

My boys wanted to see X-Men 12 or whatever it is, so we tootled along and climbed into the old 3D specs. The film has a novel addition to Kennedy conspiracy theory, and Nixon stages the world’s most disastrous photo-op. But other than that it doesn’t intersect with anything real. Indeed, it felt kind of weird to be watching a movie where the good guys have to figure out how to save America from the most advanced, evolved, giant-sized, invincible supervillains ever devised, and then leave the theater and return to a world where, in Afghanistan, America is losing to goatherds and, in Iraq, to jihadist bandits whose greatest strategic insight is that you wait for the Great Satan to give the Iraqi Army state-of-the-art tanks and guns and then you stroll into town and steal them all. You can see why moviegoers might prefer the comfort of enemies who are all-powerful beings. I’ve been a little queasy about this cinematic trend for a few years now.

Read it.

Because of horrific conditions in Latin America coupled with President Obama’s decision to stop deportations of young illegal immigrants, 47,017 unaccompanied children were apprehended on the border from October through May, an increase of 92 percent from just one year ago, the National Catholic Register reports.

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

Read it.

Coming soon to a major Reality Show near you….

Read it.

And don’t think that President Hillary wouldn’t bear that in mind.

Tyler Cowan sees deeper than most.

Stross is a smart guy and I am an admirer of his writing. But my view remains pretty straightforward: when dislike of the policy choices of the electorate leads to a serious movement for secession, something has gone deeply wrong with the preconditions for democratic attachment.

Stross is a smart guy, but, like many ‘smart guys’ (especially those who make their living from ‘the arts’), he’s pretty much clueless when it comes to political (and, in these degenerate modern times, that includes economic) questions. The impression I get is that the reason Scots want their independence is that they don’t think that the current England-dominated regime in London is socialist enough; I’d be in favor of giving them independence and then seeing how long it takes them to wake up when there isn’t a robust English economy propping up their dream welfare state.

The fact that Stross sees ‘dark forces of reaction cropping up across Europe’ is precisely because of the policies that he, politically, favors — an all-encompassing welfare state, confiscatory levels of taxation in the pursuit of ‘equality’, and an open-door policy toward immigration that is greasing the skids for Britain to become Just Another Failed Muslim State. When decrying ‘reaction’, it is always a good idea to think ‘reaction against what?’ and consider that perhaps said ‘reaction’ might be justified. This ‘reaction’ isn’t coming from the ruling class — they’re doing very well off of socialist-state cronyism, as did people like Putin back in the day — but rather people who are expected to pay for all of this idealistic clap-trap. Look at who is supporting the BNP and UKIP; it isn’t David Cameron and his Old Etonians, nor the red-diaper babies like the Millibands. John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, has been vox clamantis in deserto for years on behalf of these squeezees, to little effect.

Read it.

The left loves to cite corporate America when lambasting the greed of the mega-wealthy 1 percent. But what about public universities, where top administrators make millions of dollars while students flounder in debt?

Hey, some animals are just more equal than other.

The Other McCain is on the case.

The #YesAllWomen hashtag has been going crazy all day because of a Washington Post column by Brad Wilcox and Robin Wilson which demonstrates — as a matter of social science — what all social scientists already know: Marriage is highly correlated with good outcomes for women and children. This isn’t really controversial, if you have paid attention to the research, but feminists don’t give a damn about research if the facts contradict their theories, and feminist theory has been implacably hostile to marriage for more than 40 years.

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Being pro-marriage is now “Neanderthal,” no matter how much research data you produce in support of your argument.

Feminist theory is utterly impervious to evidence. If there is anything feminists hate more than they hate men, it’s facts and logic.

Read it.

Planners are middle-class, and while they support the idea of helping low-income and working-class families in theory, in practice they don’t really like such people. Too many of them are tea partiers, and even the ones that aren’t don’t fit into middle-class neighborhoods: they drive big trucks, eat red meat, and wouldn’t be caught dead at a Whole Foods.

Urban planning today is about rebuilding cities to look the way the upper-middle class wants them to look, and that means pretending the lower classes don’t exist or will happily adopt high-density lifestyles that minimize auto use. The idea that reducing congestion and increasing auto ownership will help people out of poverty just does not fit in to that point of view.

I once calculated that giving every carless low-income family in the Denver area a new Toyota Prius would be both cheaper and more likely to reduce poverty than building one light-rail line. When I pointed this out at a light-rail debate, the head of Denver’s transit agency responded, “We can’t give poor people cars. It would cause too much congestion.”

In short, for too many planners, reducing auto driving is more important than reducing poverty.

Don Boudreaux muses on Gordon Tullock.

Note that Gordon does not say here that lying by politicians is unnecessary; he says that lying is insufficient. Lying must be accompanied by persuasive props on the political and governmental stages designed to dupe the audience into thinking that something noble (or at least in the self-interest of most members of the broad audience) is taking place – while, in fact, what is really taking place is something quite ignoble and almost surely at odds with the self-interest of most members of the broad audience.

Just as the London and Broadway stages, and as Hollywood movie sets, select for success those actors who can act most persuasively – those actors who can best convince audiences to believe in make-believe – the stage that is politics selects for success those politicians who can act most persuasively. The political process is biased against the success in politics of honest people – people who, if not incapable of lying and engaging in dupery, at least feel badly enough about doing so that their guilt at the prospect of performing such unethical shenanigans shows on their faces.

Steve Sailer turns over a rock and finds a lot of green.

Thomas Piketty is worried that the rich will get ever richer because they won’t give their money away; but perhaps we should also worry about what happens when the rich do give their money away.

Lyndsey Layton offers a solid article in the Washington Post on how Bill Gates bought off all credible expertish opposition to the not-unintelligent Common Core school standards.

The essential problem with the Common Core is simply megalomania. The foremost author of the Common Core, David Coleman, is a smart guy, but his assumption that he can sit down and write a set of instructions for turning every student into American into the kind of close-reader he likes to point out he proved himself to be during his Bar Mitzvah speech, is, uh, probably over-confident.

Similarly, Bill Gates’ decision to not let Coleman’s Common Core be tried out first in one willing guinea pig state like Kentucky, but to try to hustle almost every state in the Union into adopting this untested system is megalomaniacal.

Why in the world are we betting the country on Coleman’s and Gates’ un-proven brainstorm?

Well, because Gates bribed more or less all of respectable opinion.

So, when you hear denigrations of opponents of Common Core as “angry,” well, of course they are angrier than the “experts,” since the experts are all fat and happy on the Gates Foundation Gravy Train.

Read it.

Apparently the Chinese have learned the lesson that Obama only does nice things for our enemies.

Today is D-Day. Google, which has a penchant for creating special ‘doodles’ on its home page for Special Events, apparently considers today Nothing Special.

Of course, for Rachel Carson, Google pulled out all the stops, although Carson’s book Silent Spring prompted a jihad against DDT and other insecticides that has been responsible for more deaths from tropical disease around the world than occurred during the Normandy invasion.

Maybe that’s it — there’s a death count threshold that has to be exceeded in order to rate a special ‘doodle’ on Google.

Read it.

Remember that the definition of “beta-male rage” is that the perpetrator has no history of violence, criminal behavior or thugishness, does not have a wife or girlfriend and has below-average success with women, and is not suffering from a mental illness such as schizophrenia.

George Sodini used to be the most well-known case of beta-male rage, but that mantle of infamy has now passed to Elliot Rodger.

Read it.

On June 5 one person was shot dead at Seattle Pacific University, a school where security guards are not allowed to carry guns.

Chalk up one more for ‘gun free zones’.

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The data reveal a clear break in 2000. Between 1992 and 2000, each successive entry cohort has a higher share in cognitive occupations at the outset of their working lives, with the proportion increasing by 0.1 between the 1994 and 1998 cohorts. After 2000, with the exception of the difference between the 2004 and 2006 entry cohorts, each successive cohort has a lower share in these occupations, with the share at entry for the 2010 cohort being approximately the same as for the 1990 cohort. Given all the attention that has been paid to growing demand for cognitive skills, this complete reversal is striking.

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I pity Bowe Bergdahl. It must be quite a trial to have a father who’s a werewolf. (Look at this picture and tell me I’m wrong.)

Theodore Dalrymple lays out some inconvenient truth.

In the developed world, our problems are much less acute. And we are fortunate in actually needing large numbers of educated and trained people. Yet we have nevertheless made a similar mistake, and there is now often little connection between the market in education and the market in employment. The economic value of a university degree has correspondingly declined (of its intellectual or cultural value I dare not speak, for the vast majority of students now regard their education merely as a means to an end, and not as an end in itself), and it has become obvious to more and more students that the main purpose of their tertiary education is to lower the rate of youth unemployment for the propaganda benefit of government. In many countries, worse still, students are now being made to pay, by means of indebtedness, for their own unemployment. But while the economic value of a degree has declined, it is something they cannot do without, for without it they have no chance even of a job for which they would have been overqualified a few decades ago. Thus they are on a treadmill from which they cannot alight. Awareness of this accounts for the Indignés in Europe and the Occupy Wall Street movement in America. They are Boko Haram in a minor key; for them, too, the personal is political.

Read it. And watch the  video.

The institutions responsible for informing the public about what is going on in their government are willing tools of the most corrupt elements of both political parties, with results as you see them.

Read it.

‘Green energy’ — it’s not just for birds any more.