Read it.

Yet Another Fascist wants you to do it her way — by law, if necessary.

Amanda Green doesn’t much like our school systems.

Schools today have abdicated their role as institutes of learning. It didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow process. I can’t even say where it started, not for the nation as a whole. Here in Texas, it started when state and federal mandates made it impossible for teachers to teach. Lesson plans suddenly had to be approved first by the department chair and then by the administration. Now, in many districts, lesson plans come from Admin and are filtered down.

Oh, the supporters of this say it is a way to guarantee all our children get the same education. The problem with this is that our kids aren’t all the same. They don’t learn the same ways and they don’t learn at the same rate. That, in essence, is the heart of the first problem of education. Teachers can no longer adjust the curriculum to meet the needs of the individual students. Oh, technically they can, but they have to go through so many administrative hoops that, by the time the deviation from the plan is approved, the harm as has been done. Either it is too late and the semester is over or the kid is so bored or so lost that there is no hope of getting him back.

…

The food police rode in. Students are expelled for bringing peanut butter sandwiches to school because someone might be allergic. The First Lady has made it her mission to make all our kids into “healthy eaters”. I’m sorry, not her job. I repeat: That is not her job. I remember the days when my son wouldn’t eat anything but peanut butter or pizza or any one of several other items. If I didn’t have the option of sending what he’d eat with him to school for lunch, well, he just wouldn’t have eaten. He didn’t care if the First Lady said something was good for him. All he wanted was what tasted good and I guarantee you that wasn’t a salad or broccoli.

Read it.

Stupidest Idea Ever.

Read it.

It sounded simple enough. A second-grade teacher at Colorado’s Talbott Elementary School asked her class to go outside, look at the clouds and then draw what they saw. Kody Smith thought the cloud he saw looked like a gun, so that’s what he drew. His teacher filed a bad behavior report on him.

You’re never too young to escape the notice of the Thought Police.

Read it.

A number of iOS owners in Australia have lost access to their devices courtesy of a digital hack, according to The Age. The first incident appeared on an Apple support forum on Monday and was soon followed by dozens more. Owners of the iPhones and iPads are finding that their devices are locked and will only be unlocked if they send money to a specific PayPal account. While the original issue was constrained to Australia, a U.S. iOS device owner claimed to be hacked in the same manner on Tuesday.

This is God telling you to get an Android phone. Just sayin’.

Scott Johnson is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

It’s been a while since the leftover left took ownership of every nook and cranny of the city of Minneapolis. The city has therefore signed on to multifarious left-wing causes expressing hatred of the United States over the past many years.

In the Cold War, for example, municipal authorities wanted to make it clear that they were on the other side. In 1988, just in time to catch the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Minneapolis adopted a Soviet sister city. The relationship might actually have come in handy in subsequent years. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be in Minneapolis never took advantage of the opportunity to seek advice from our Soviet sister city on the establishment of a multiparty system in a one-party town. Now it’s probably too late for the authorities of Novosibirsk to weigh in constructively.

In the current struggle over the enforcement of immigration law, municipal authorities are of course on the other side. Since 2003, Minneapolis has declared itself a sanctuary city. International sex traffickers have found it a congenial environment. They call it home.

And now, as of late last week, Columbus Day is no more. Minneapolis has declared the holiday Indigenous Peoples Day.

Once again, ‘progressives’ take a celebration of progress and turn it on its head. Presumably they would prefer that ‘native Americans’ continued their former ways of using stone tools, high infant mortality, and endemic internecine warfare.

Read it.

Daycare for an infant is now more expensive than the average cost of in-state tuition and fees at public colleges in 31 states, according to a recent report. Childcare in the U.S. sets a family back $15,000 a year per infant on average. It is more expensive than rent in 22 states. But while many poor women are dropping out of the workforce in part due to these costs, well-to-do families skirt the problem by exploiting loopholes like the U.S. au pair program and by illegally employing undocumented domestic workers to obtain good-quality childcare at below-market prices.

Read it.

Yesterday Google disdained offering a special banner for Memorial Day.  Today they compound this insult with a banner marking the birthday of Rachel Carson, author of the deeply wrong Silent Spring.  Few books since Das Kapital have done more damage to humans—especially poor children in Africa—than Silent Spring, and yet she—and her dreadful book—continues to be honored by the Left.

And that tells you everything you need to know about Google — in which (full disclosure) I do not own any stock.

Bryan Caplan is always worth reading.

Within economics, the idea that education has a larger effect on income than productivity is vaguely right-wing. Why? Because economists realize that this premise undermines the textbook efficiency case for governments’ massive education subsidies.

Outside economics, however, the idea that education has a larger effect on income than productivity is vaguely left-wing. Why? Because non-economists realize that this premise undermines the legitimacy of the status quo – which they think of as “capitalism.”

Read it.

We said it couldn’t be done. We said that there would never be a more incompetent President than Jimmy Carter.

We were wrong.

Read it.

On May 11 Breitbart News reported that Jack in the Box told law-abiding customers it would “prefer” they not bring guns into its restaurants any more.

Since then, there have been three incidents at Jack in the Box restaurants involving armed men who prey on unarmed ones.

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

Read it.

I’ll bet the Koch Brothers have something to do with it, and that ultimately it will be found to be all George W. Bush’s fault.

Read it.

Billionaire Tom Steyer’s environmental group, NextGen, revealed the seven major races it is targeting this fall, drawing on the $100 million that Mr. Steyer has pledged to raise to tip midterm elections toward environmental-friendly candidates.

Democrats, party of the 1%.

NPR tells the truth for once.

Read it.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Amanda Green has a complaint.

Some time ago, Sarah asked where her aircar was. I want to know where our space exploration program is. That’s been especially true of late when I’ve seen more and more stories about whether or not Putin would try to claim the Moon for Mother Russia. Then there was the article – and I can’t find the link to it right now – about someone actually selling advertising on the Moon.

…

Somewhere along the line, our priorities changed. The space race turned into a crawl. Our government was suddenly more interested in studying the sex life of a tree frog than it was in continuing the space program. There are times it seems clear that the politicians who are supposed to have our country’s best interest at heart have forgotten the advantages of being the first in the space race. I’m not talking about just the cache of being “first”. There are the defense advantages as well as the potential economic and scientific advantages as well.

…

We now find ourselves in a country where it is more important to make sure no one feels they might not be as good as the next person than it is to nurture a pioneering spirit or an inquisitive mind. We are dumbing down our schools, and doing our children a great disservice, by not pushing our kids to do their best. Instead of trying to push students to raise the bar, we instead go to the lowest common denominator. Consequences are no longer of any, well, consequence. Bullies know they can get away with their actions because the bullied kids will think twice before fighting back because they don’t want to be suspended. Parents don’t put consequences on their kids in too many situations and, as a result, we now have the affluenza defense.

Read it.

On a sweltering summer morning in the California desert, deputies looking for methamphetamines and bearing automatic weapons barged into the home of Eugene Mallory, an 80-year-old retired engineer living a quiet life in the small community of Littlerock. Moments later, Mallory lay in his bed bleeding to death from six bullets fired from an MP5 9mm submachine gun. The officers found no meth on the property. As Zach Weismueller of Reason TV writes, the murky circumstances that led to the shooting are now the subject of a federal lawsuit.

Bet it wouldn’t have happened if he’d been an Obama fundraiser.

Read it.

Science is not a set of dogmas, and it is not a pronouncement by a committee. It is a method.

…

The catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory is based entirely on models, which are programmed by their creators to predict disaster. But we know for a fact that the models are wrong, because they disagree with reality. When the facts collide with a theory, the facts win.

Except in America. In America (and other places), what the Crust believes, wins.

Read it.

The whitest city on the Left Coast displays it’s ‘progressive’ chops.

Read it.

Send your kid to a government school,
And he will turn out a fool;
That’s the way
Things are today —
Your tax bucks at work and play!

Read it.

Raul Silva Corona had driven 35 miles in the wrong direction on three freeways with a blood alcohol level of .238 percent in the wee hours of Monday morning before he killed Mesa Police Officer Brandon Mendoza, according to the AP’s report.

Just another fine day in the Obamanation.

Steven Hayward blows the whistle.

I’ve been referring to the climate campaigners here as the “Climatistas” to chide their cult-like resemblance to the romantic Sandinista sympathizers of the 1980s, but it should not be forgotten that the real Sandinistas were a pack of nasty thugs.  Likewise, the climate establishment behaves more like the Mafia today, telling any scientist or academic who might consider any departure from orthodoxy: “Nice little scientific career you have here; shame if anything were to happen to it.”

John Hinderaker looks at Cuba.

Socialism is, by a very wide margin, the worst disaster in the history of the human race. Nothing else comes close. It always fails, and it always brings death-dealing totalitarianism in its wake. Socialism is, in essence, rule by a criminal gang. It generally works for members of the gang, but it never works for anyone else.

Given socialism’s history of universal and comprehensive failure, why does the idea still have allure for so many Westerners who have not experienced it? This remains, in my view, a great mystery, unless one assumes that there are lots of people who envision themselves as part of the ruling gang. Seen from that perspective, maybe socialism looks OK.

Read it.

All those coastal Democrat constituencies under water. What a calamity. They might have to move to fly-over country. My heart breaks for them.

Read it.

For white males, checking your privilege has nothing to do with confronting uncomfortable facts. It’s not what you have to confront—it’s about what you’re being forced to ignore. Checking one’s privilege is almost exclusively a process of evading the most plausible reasons for why white males began dominating the world until others were able to start guilt-tripping them and telling them to check their privilege. It involves living in complete denial. Instead of realistically confronting unearned privilege, it involves swallowing unearned guilt.

Pretend it makes sense that it’s currently considered the pinnacle of virtue to eagerly hand over what you have instead of fighting to keep it. Pretend that all other groups aren’t actually fighting loudly and brazenly and openly in their own self-interest. Pretend that it’s only wrong when white males do it.

Mark Steyn is not optimistic.

Islamic law is a bitch to live under because it has a complete lack of proportion, an inability to tolerate any dissent from orthodoxy, and a disinclination to recognize the concept of private space. On the other hand, in a western world in which a man can be fined $2.5 million for expressing the view in a private conversation in his own home that he’d rather his mistress didn’t go around with black men, who are we to judge?

Either way, it’s all a bit arbitrary. In Islam, a woman must be submissive. In America, you’re not supposed to call a woman “bossy”, and the expression “Man up!” is about to be banned. These days, we’re all living under apostasy regimes. My bet is that Islam’s will prove more durable.

Read it.

At which, no doubt, Republcans and ‘the 1%’ will be ritually denounced.

Read it.

Last November, when the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) proposed moderating years of escalating mandates by reducing the amount of ethanol that must be mixed into gasoline, a top ethanol lobbyist seemed perplexed. “We’re all just sort of scratching our heads here today and wondering why this administration is telling us to burn less of a clean-burning American fuel,” Bob Dineen, head of the Renewable Fuels Association, told The New York Times.

Here are a few possible reasons why: America’s ethanol requirement destroys the environment, damages car engines, increases gas prices, and contributes to the starvation of the global poor. It’s an unmitigated disaster on nearly every level.

Read it.

Even a Voice of the Crust such as the Washington Post admits that bureaucracy feeds on itself in cycles of make-work.

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

Planned Parenthood abortion clinics have come under fire countless times over the years for not reporting cases of statutory rape to authorities as required by state law. Now, in Arizona, officials says the abortion giant failed again to provide the proper report to authorities about a victim of a young man who is a serial rapist.

Not only did Planned Parenthood intentionally fail to report the rape but, in so doing, it allowed the rapist to rape as many as 18 or more teenage girls, authorities say, making it so the abortion company is partially responsible for victimizing them as well.

Read it.

Yeah, for somebody who works there. God help some poor kid who wanders in off the street.

A story on Letts from ThinkProgress focuses on her insistence on how pain-free and safe the procedure was – for her.

Of course, it wasn’t so pain-free and safe for the baby, but there is no mention of the baby in the entire article – or, for that matter, his or her father.

Steve Sailer dishes the dirt.

Harvard U. is full of people who clawed their way into Harvard, so it’s not surprising that they often can’t stand each other. Fortunately, 21st Century Harvard students have a vocabulary of whom to blame for any and all frustrations they feel.

It wasn’t this bad at Yale in the ’70s, but it was still pretty bad.

Freedom of expression, open debate, and the clash of intellects are all very fine, but they are hardly appropriate values at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

And that tells you everything you need to know about Harvard.

Read it.

Well, socialism will do that to you. As Lady Thatcher famously said, the trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Read it.

This sort of thing is why tReason magazine has to be treated with heaping doses of skepticism.

“Over the last 32 years its cost California tax payers about 4 billion dollars to have the death penalty, and over that period only 13 executions have been carried out,” says LMU Law Professor Paula Mitchell.

So the basic argument is that maintaining an apparatus for executing prisoners isn’t c0st effective because (and I am not making this up) not enough prisoners are being executed to justify the money spent.

Mitchell’s study, “Rethinking the Death Penalty in California,” shows that once the death penalty comes into play for a case, the legal costs skyrocket to an extra $134 million dollars per year, well above the cost to implement life without possibility of parole. Death penalty cases require more attorneys, more experts, and an automatic review by the California Supreme Court, making it a seemingly endless process.

And the obvious reason for this is that bleeding-hearts in the legislature and the courts (not to mention the mob) have placed so many fetters on the justice system when it comes to executions that it’s not surprising that the costs have skyrockets. Get rid of the administrative and technical bottlenecks, and even these tender souls would be surprised at how cheap the death penalty becomes. But, of course, that’s not what they’re after; they’re after a political objective that can’t be obtained through legitimate democratic political activity and has to be effected by such intellectual sleight-of-hand as this.

This is exactly on a par with the guy who murdered his parents and then pled for clemency on the basis of being an orphan, and not too far removed from the statists (and there are more of them writing for tReason magazine than you might think) who put in place programs to pay for people’s medical procedures and then claim the power to regulate behavior based on the fact that certain things are costing the taxpayer more money than is proper.

Read it.

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

Young people, thrown into close proximity without proper adult supervision, will revert to a more primitive polity, as also happens in prisons.

Read it.

There are times when the phrase ‘fucking stupid’ is just inadequate.

Read it.

Let’s start with the fine and life suspension. Lawyers and legal experts generally seem to think that on these two moves, Mr. Silver was on sound legal footing.

…

Mr. Silver on Tuesday indicated he was moving forward with plans to force Mr. Sterling to sell the Clippers.

Under the NBA constitution, such a move would require the support of at least three-quarters of the league’s owners. But whether the owners would have grounds to oust Mr. Sterling from the league under the NBA constitution is a more difficult question, said Howard Wasserman, a sports-law expert at Florida International University.

Read it.

Like fellow movements around the world, the US Communist Party suffered a crippling blow with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But a small group of die-hard members persevered.

Curious indeed — after all, they’ve got the Democrats; why have a separate party?

Read it.

A new Gallup poll finds that nowhere is the desire to move out-of-state greater than in Connecticut and Illinois. About half of the residents in each of these states say that, if they had the chance, they would move to a different state.

And who could blame them?

Read it.

And thereby FedEx avoids legal liability, which is the whole point of such useless signs.

Read it.

Students at Harvard University just got an important lesson in real world business problems.

A student-run enterprise was shut because it couldn’t meet requirements from the administration.

Welcome to the real world, kids!

Read it.

Other wealthy folks – notably some in Hollywood and Silicon Valley – also support a California planning regime that makes difficult the purchasing and construction of family-size homes, largely as a means to reducing the dreaded human “carbon footprint.” Yet they, too, are often unconsciously hypocritical, as many of them live in palatial houses, and often fly on private jets, one of the quickest ways to boost one’s carbon emissions. Google’s top executives, among the most reliable allies of the middle-class-destroying green and urban-planner lobby, famously have a fleet of planes based at San Jose Airport.

Others, like the environment magazine Grist, embrace a more idealistic vision of a new generation that rarely owns and doesn’t embrace conventional ambitions. They see the current millennial generation, facing limited economic prospects and high housing prices, as “a hero generation,” rejecting the material trap of suburban living and work that engulfed their parents.

Joel Kotkin turns over a rock.

Starting in the 1980s, a mythology grew that the new tech entrepreneurs represented a new, progressive model that was not animated by conventional business thinking. In contrast to staid old east coast corporations, the new California firms were what futurist Alvin Toffler described as “third wave.” Often dressed in jeans, and not suits, they were seen as inherently less hierarchical and power-hungry as their industrial age predecessors.

Silicon Valley executives were not just about making money, but were trying, as they famously claimed, to “change the world.” One popularizing enthusiast, MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte, even suggested that “digital technology” could turn into “a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony.”

This image has insulated the tech elite from the kind of opprobrium meted out to their rival capitalist icons in other, more traditional industries. In 2011, over 72 percent of Americans had positive feelings about the computer industry as opposed to a mere 30 percent for banking and 20 percent for oil and gas. Even during the occupy protests in 2012, few criticisms were hurled by the “screwed generation” at tech titans. Indeed, Steve Jobs, a .000001 per center worth $7 billion, the ferocious competitor who threatened “war” against Google if they did not cooperate in his wage fixing scheme, was openly mourned by protestors when news spread that he had passed away.

Steve Sailer picks up the Narrative.

A couple of law professors eventually slip a little affordable family formation heresy into Slate’s XX after the usual Bad White Man verbiage….

…

You know, Lily, if Carl is such a loser that you don’t want to marry him, why did you want 50% of your child’s genes to be his? Are you really that convinced that your 50% are going to be so awesome that your kid won’t wind up a loser?

The Other McCain isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions.

So, apparently, this was The Week When Everybody Became Officially Racist. First it was Cliven Bundy, and now L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling has been caught on audio saying racist — RAAAAACIST! — stuff to his hot young girlfriend, who just happens to be half-black and half-Mexican. Rich elderly white guy is OK with dating this exotic young hybrid, but he seems to perceive some kind of image issue with his girlfriend hanging out with black people.

Can this be explained? Maybe. But if you find yourself forced to explain a remark about race, face it — you’re Officially Racist.

Read it.

As violence in Chicago continues to spin out of control, businesses are reacting in logical ways. A Subway sandwich shop with a bulletproof enclosure for employees, for instance, made the news in the Windy City, showing that violence is affecting everyone, not just gang members.

Well, thank God for those strict Chicago gun control laws. Wouldn’t want them winding up like, say, Texas.

Read it.

A high-dollar Obama donor who was caught on video brutally beating his girlfriend got off with 25 hours of community service last week after he pled guilty to domestic battery charges.

CCTV footage caught Gurbaksh Chahal, the CEO of San Francisco tech startup RadiumOne, kicking his girlfriend 117 times, including blows to the head, and trying to smother her with a pillow during a vicious 30-minute assault.

He faced 45 felony charges until the footage was deemed inadmissible. As a result, Chahal has managed to avoid jail time, the Daily Mail reported on Thursday.

Coincidence? We report, you decide.

It was not immediately clear whether activists who boycotted Mozilla for its former CEO’s opposition to gay marriage would also target RadiumOne and other Chahal startups.

He’s a ‘person of color’ so he gets a pass on acting in a civilized manner.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds turns over a rock.

Full-time administrators now outnumber full-time faculty. And when times get tough, schools have a disturbing tendency to shrink faculty numbers while keeping administrators on the payroll. Teaching gets done by low-paid, nontenured adjuncts, but nobody ever heard of an “adjunct administrator.”

But it’s not just the fat that is worrisome. It’s administrators’ obsession with — and all too often, abuse of — security that raises serious concerns. At the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Clyde W. Barrow, a leading professor, has just quit, complaining of an administration that isolates itself from students and faculty behind keypads and security doors.

Isolation is bad. But worse still is the growing tendency of administrators to stifle critics by shamelessly interpreting even obviously harmless statements as “threats.” A recent example took place at Bergen Community College, where Professor Francis Schmidt was suspended, and ordered to undergo a psychiatric examination over a “threat” that consisted of posting a picture of his 9-year old daughter wearing a Game Of Thrones T-shirt. The shirt bore a quote from the show, reading: “I will take what is mine with fire & blood.” Bergen administrator Jim Miller apparently thought the picture, which was posted to Schmidt’s Google Plus account, was somehow intended as a threat to him. (Schmidt had filed a labor grievance a couple of months earlier.)

Jesse Walker hears his bullshit detector go off.

Today McCarthy has come to symbolize the entire postwar Red Scare, allowing the hearings to serve as a tidy end to a tidy story about a demagogue who attained outsized influence and then was cut down to size. But the crusade against Communist subversion that marked the late 1940s and the ’50s began before McCarthy seized the issue; and if his downfall was a sign that those fears were fading, it did not bring them to an end. The biggest myth of the McCarthy era is that it was a McCarthy era, rather than an episode in which McCarthy was merely one of the most noisy and irresponsible figures.