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The Antiplanner is delightfully dyspeptic today.

One of the more ridiculous debates going on this month is the protests over Google and other companies providing commuter bus services for their employees in the San Francisco Bay Area. No one ever comments on how much better it is for the environment that people are taking buses to work instead of driving. No one ever comments on how the fact that at least 18,000 people take private buses to work is a devastating indicator of the failure of the region’s expensive transit system.

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Gun-free zones are where murderers shop for victims. It’s a target-rich environment with no down-side.

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But in the developed world it’s an artifact of the anti-vaccination movement, which has associated the vaccine with autism. That connection, promoted by the discredited British physician Andrew Wakefield and the starlet Jenny McCarthy, has been thoroughly debunked. But its effects live on, as the map shows.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised. Remember that the next time you hear a ‘celebrity’ whining that the sky is falling.

Unmentioned in this Voice of the Crust, of course, is the number of vaccinators being murdered by Muslims in places like Pakistan. That would be raaaaaaacist.

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I’ll just bet that Bill Clinton is kicking himself right now.

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A Georgia cafeteria manager has been arrested after coming under suspicion that she had allegedly stolen hundreds of dollars from a cash-only line every day for at least five years, WSB-TV Atlanta reports.

According to ABC News, Brenda Watts is accused of stealing roughly $500 a day from North Spring High School in Fulton County. In the cafeteria there were four lines with cash registers that were tracked, but the blue cart serving a-la-carte items manned by Watts was cash-only with no cash register, WSB-TV reports.

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There is a certain irony in the fact that Chris Christie is being pilloried because his aides caused a traffic jam that lasted for four days. Across the country, liberals have caused traffic jams that have lasted for years, and they are still trying to make them worse.

Take the Twin Cities, where I live. Like some of those New Jersey residents, I have to cross a river to get to my office. This takes an average of 15 minutes a day longer than it should because our regional planning authorities have deliberately undersized all of the area’s highways. Liberals do this to combat “sprawl,” which means living where you want to. Most people, here as elsewhere, prefer to live in the suburbs. In addition to causing an enormous amount of economic waste, undersizing highways also makes houses in the outer suburbs less valuable, and houses in the city and inner-tier suburbs more valuable. Where do you think most of the people who make regional planning decisions about highways live? While impossible as a practical matter, it would be fascinating to compare the man-hours lost due to anti-”sprawl” policies enforced by liberals with the man-hours lost over a four-day period in New Jersey because drivers from Fort Lee were delayed in crossing the George Washington Bridge.

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I am not making this up.

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Of course. She’s a Democrat, the party of Bill Clinton. That’s what they do.

Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator whose filibuster for abortion rights made her a Democratic superstar and launched her campaign for governor, has admitted to the Dallas Morning News that she lied about key events in her life, including her first divorce. Davis may even have lied under oath, testifying in a federal lawsuit over redistricting that “I got divorced by the time I was 19 years old,” when in fact she was divorced at age 21.

Other missing details have included: her second husband paid her way through law school and she divorced him the day after the last payment was made; her ex-husband accused her in initial court filings of adultery, and was awarded custody of their two daughters; and she first ran for city council in Fort Worth as a Republican.

“My language should be tighter,” she said, admitting her campaign biography has been less than truthful.

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This harvest season in the Central Valley, thieves cut through a fence and hauled off $400,000 in walnuts. Another $100,000 in almonds was stolen by a driver with a fake license. And $100,000 in pistachios was taken by a big rig driver who left a farm without filling out any paperwork.

Investigators suspect low-level organized crime may have a hand in cases, while some pilfered nuts are ending up in Los Angeles for resale at farmers markets or disappear into the black market.

“Disappeared into the black market” is code for “well, we don’t know, so we’ll make up something that sounds ominous”.

Of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with the presence in California of vast quantities of sometimes-legal migrants from a country Down There that is legendary for its lawlessness and crime cartels. Perish the thought!

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The mediocre triumph because, having little or nothing else to do, they can devote themselves to intrigue, backstabbing, and jockeying for power. In my own little career, I have often seen the genuinely gifted and morally upright pushed aside or thwarted by schemers and apparatchiks who viewed their betters with a mixture of fear and hatred. An apparatchik may be defined as a person who doesn’t mind how long a meeting goes on unless he has another meeting to attend. He is interested in power for its own sake, divorced from purpose though he claims to want it for the good of humanity, but has very sensitive antennae for the power of others. When that power is strong, he retreats; when it shows a weakness, he pounces. Apparatchiks, like the Clintons, never forget; their minds are like filing cabinets.

…

The explanation lies in the expansion of tertiary education. Earlier in my life I used to think that this was unequivocally a good thing: The more educated a population, the better. But length of education, or attendance at supposedly educational establishments, is not the same thing as education itself. But in the modern world, where governments have to demonstrate tangible progress to their electorates, length of education and education are confounded.

The Other McCain has some fun.

See, this is the niche that “small liberal arts schools” fill: The offspring of permissive parents who will give their Special Snowflakes whatever their selfish hearts crave. The kid isn’t smart enough or hard-working enough to get into a genuinely elite school, but they’re just too doggone special to attend a state school (let alone community college), and so there’s always that trendy little campus that will charge them $35,000 a year to pretend that they’re better than those disgusting low-brow slobs at State U.

This is not about education, it’s about aspiration.

The “small liberal arts school” is a luxury that the rich can afford, but borrowing money to attend one? That’s just crazy.

Maybe Randye Hoder‘s daughter can apply her knowledge of “the politics and culture of food” at Burger King.

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Sure, the Irish are a little slow, but it took them longer than you’d think to leap onto the “genocide” bandwagon (or should that be “cattle car”?).

Recently released in paperback, historian Tim Pat Coogan’s tellingly titled The Famine Plot is the latest volley in the campaign to win prestigious (and lucrative) “ethnic cleansing” status for the storied Irish Potato Famine.

…

This matters (if not to Coogan, then to others) because as professional victimhood lobbyists know so well, thar’s gold in them thar wedding rings and dental fillings. “Genocide” earns you abject official apologies, socially leverageable favored victim status, and, best of all, financial reparations. Just ask Japanese Americans.

George Will blows turns over a rock.

Soon the crucial distinction will be between those with meaningful college degrees and those with worthless ones. Many colleges are becoming less demanding as they become more expensive: They rake in money — much of it from government-subsidized tuition grants — by taking in many marginally qualified students who are motivated only to acquire a credential and who learn little.

Lindsey reported that in 1961, full-time college students reported studying 25 hours a week on average; by 2003, average studying time had fallen to 13 hours. Half of today’s students take no courses requiring more than 20 pages of writing in a semester. Given the role of practice in developing expertise, “the conclusion that college students are learning less than they used to seems unavoidable.” Small wonder those with college degrees occupying jobs that do not require a high school diploma include 1.4 million retail salespeople and cashiers, half a million waiters, bartenders and janitors, and many more.

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Quick show of hands: who’s surprised to learn the global warming fanatics think communism is super-awesome?

Oh, I know what you’re thinking, People Who Have Your Hands Down.  You’ve seen what communist countries look like.  They’re absolute environmental disasters, horrifying wastelands of garbage and toxic pollution.  You’re wondering how anyone could possibly review the history of communism and come to the conclusion that it’s a political philosophy that leads to wise stewardship of the planet.

You need to switch off your critical thinking skills, People Who Have Your Hands Down, and master the crucial global warming skill of ignoring evidence that contradicts your ideology.  That’s what this scam has been all about since the beginning.  Ignore 70 percent of the data, declare what remains “science,” and treat anyone who disagrees as the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier.  If you don’t actually look at communist China, whose capital is currently enveloped in a choking cloud of pollution that’s literally driving people off the streets, you can come to the ideologically motivated conclusion that they’re the best little global warming fighters on the whole planet.

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The CEOs of hotel chain Marriott International and telecom giant AT&T are calling on Congress to grant them immigration reform so they can hire more cheap labor from outside the United States – at a time when an unprecedentedly high number of Americans are out of work.

In a lengthy post on his LinkedIn page, Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson said he wants amnesty and a massive increase in legal immigration in order to staff up Marriott’s various resorts around the country.

“As unemployment inches downward, we also need a functioning immigration system that helps us staff positions that might otherwise go unfilled, especially in our seasonal resorts,” Sorenson wrote.

Meanwhile, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, according to The Hill, wants more guest workers brought into the United States from foreign countries. Stephenson wants both more high-tech workers brought into the country and a streamlined and increased temporary worker program. “I get a sense that there’s momentum for doing something like this in Congress, and I hope [Obama] just does encourage it and it’s a high priority for his administration,” Stephenson said.

Stephenson is speaking in his capacity as both AT&T CEO and chairman of the business lobbyist organization Business Roundtable. In a Jan. 15 letter to President Barack Obama, Stephenson and the Business Roundtable’s 208 CEOs asked that Obama pressure Congress “to create a larger pool of visas for higher-skilled workers” and “enact a new visa system for lower-skilled workers,” while also granting amnesty to illegal aliens already inside the United States.

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And these people are educating our children. No wonder the kids are functionally illiterate.

And we might perhaps bear in mind that when criminals go on these shooting sprees in schools, the homeschooled kids are safe and sound.

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Hint: Yes.

Perhaps it’s because most of them look, talk, and act like jerks. That’s just a guess, mind you.

When you picture a feminist or an environmental campaigner, what kind of a person do you think of? If you’re like the US and Canadian participants in this new paper, then you’ll have in mind an eccentric, militant, unhygienic person. Nadia Bashir and her colleagues say this commonly held stereotype of an activist is partly responsible for the sluggishness of social change. Large sections of the public agree with activists’ messages, but are put off by not wanting to affiliate themselves with the kind of person they think makes an activist.

Gee, I wonder why that is….

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An African-American teenager, currently on probation for a robbery conviction, is in custody for assaulting a Rochester woman with a roundhouse punch to the back of her head. The incident is being compared to the “knockout game” attacks that have been rampant throughout cities nationwide.

The attack occurred as the woman exited a convenience store. The event was filmed by an accomplice who was so thrilled by the incident that he shouted, “Smack Cam” five times. The alleged assailant, Devin Alexander, 16, was first identified in a video viewed on a Facebook page titled “True Goon Tocool Sneekey.”

I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now. Except for white people, of course.

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that any genre movie dumped upon us in the barren month of January is likely a dog. When the movie’s producers withhold it from press scrutiny until the night before it opens, that likelihood approaches certainty. And when the movie’s director is revealed to be Renny Harlin, whose past transgressions are several, the case is all but closed.

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Of course. You cross the Crust, and they punish you, using all of their Voices.

UNC issued a statement Wednesday night saying it did not believe Willingham’s account of a basketball player who could not read or write.

It went on: “University officials can’t comment on the other statistical claims mentioned in the story because they have not seen that data. University officials have asked for that data, but those requests have not been met.”

As well as questioning UNC many times about the story before publication, CNN has also detailed Willingham’s research.

And purported e-mail exchanges obtained by CNN since August show that Willingham did share her findings at least twice — once with Executive Vice Provost James W. Dean Jr., and once with a member of a university committee on academics and athletics.

In addition, Willingham says her research on the students in the athletics programs that make money for the university was done based on screenings that the university itself paid for. And, she says, she has gotten permission from the university several times since 2008 to access those findings to continue her research.

“It’s already available to them,” Willingham said. “It’s in their system. … They have all the data and more. It belongs to them, and they paid a lot of money for it.”

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A Los Gatos, CA women reportedly is the latest victim of the heinous “knockout game” that is being carried out across the nation’s cities. The woman had just dropped her daughter off at dance class when she was reportedly attacked.

The suspect allegedly “clocked” the woman with a vicious punch to her face, knocked her off her feet, and left her lying on the ground.

Police are looking for the suspect, described as a black man in his early to mid twenties who stands at around 5’9″ to 6′ tall, with short brown hair and a slender frame. CBS reported that he was wearing jeans, a white t-shirt, and a backwards white baseball cap.

I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now. Except for white people, of course.

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They have the technology.

You’d think that politicians would learn not to make it profitable to break the law, but they never do.

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The rise of wearable fitness trackers like Fitbit and Basis are training us to pay more attention to our sleeping habits by tracking how often we wake up during the night and how many hours of rest we really get. Now Select Comfort, makers of the popular Sleep Number line of beds, is building its tracker directly into the bed. The x12, which the company is showing off at CES for the first time, automatically measures your breathing rate, movement, and average heart rate. “All you have to do is sleep,” the company says.

Data from your sleep is displayed in companion apps for smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers. The technology, which the company is calling Sleep IQ, scores your rest and offers you suggestions for how to improve it. The company says SleepIQ can be turned off and that your data remains private.

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American has a “youth” problem or, as sometimes put, a problem with “youfs” or “teens” or even “thugs.” Most people correctly understand this as underclass black teenagers (of both sexes) waging a violent war on whites. In some instances the targets are individuals—the knockout game and polar bear hunting—while other victims are innocent whites caught in black-on-black chaotic “flash mob” brawls at shopping malls, movie theaters, and just about anywhere else young blacks congregate.

…

Leaving aside the possibility of an impending race war, this violence is consequential for its destructive impact on public space, which in turn undermines civilized life. Further add killing off brick-and-mortar businesses and all the associated jobs. Why visit the mall if you are unlucky enough to arrive the day when the newest Air Jordans go on sale? Better to stay home, order online, and avoid human contact altogether. Youf attacks resemble neutron bombs—the people vanish, but the now empty buildings remain untouched.

It is their randomness that makes these attacks so terrifying. Normal prudence is no defense. A purse-snatcher will ignore a little old lady who wisely left her handbag home; not so for a knockout artist—a victim can be anybody who is handy, provided that they are white. Even surveillance cameras cannot deter—perpetrators love the publicity and happily post their exploits on YouTube.

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Since the arrival of Socialist President François Hollande in 2012, income tax and social security contributions in France have skyrocketed. The top tax rate is 75 percent, and a great many pay in excess of 70 percent.

As a result, there has been a frantic bolt for the border by the very people who create economic growth – business leaders, innovators, creative thinkers, and top executives. They are all leaving France to develop their talents elsewhere.

And it’s a tragedy for such a historically rich country. As they say, the problem with the French is they have no word for entrepreneur. Where is the Richard Branson of France? Where is the Bill Gates?

In London. With a cellphone. And a checkbook.

Read it.

I was at a wedding this weekend and saw someone I’ve known for a long time. She’s not a very political person.

She’s a therapist, and she volunteered to several of us how at this holiday time of year, her patients normally complain about family problems.

But this year, all people wanted to talk about was how anxious and worried they were about losing their health care plans, or relatives and friends who were losing their plans. She said the spontaneous voicing of concerns about loss of insurance really took her aback.

Steve Sailer smells a rat.

 I took a lecture course in industrial and organizational psychology in college, and one student assigned to my study group had just been named the first team All-American quarterback. I looked around for him, but he never seemed to show. Yet, when the grades on the final were tacked up, the QB had scored pretty well, which seemed awfully industrious and organized of him. He must have done a lot of studying on his own.

Well, all the studies show that black people are, on average, more intelligent than whites and Asians … Oh, wait….

     Last month a grand jury in Orange County, N.C., indicted Julius Nyang’oro for defrauding UNC by accepting payment for teaching a no-show course on “blacks in North Carolina.” The 19 students in AFAM 280 were current or former members of the Tar Heels football team, allegedly steered to the phantom class by academic advisers who sought to help elite athletes maintain high enough grades to remain eligible for competition. AFAM 280 was one of dozens of courses offered by North Carolina’s African & Afro-American Studies Department, formerly chaired by Nyang’oro, that never actually met, according to investigators. Known for rigorous academics, North Carolina allegedly operated a Potemkin department since the late 1990s.

Oh, dear….

Read it.

Read it.

The student who was extorted for sex found himself in this situation after he sent nude pictures to the accused who was posing as a woman.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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“There is no more neutrality in the world,” said Black Panther leader, civil rights activist and fun-loving rapist; Eldridge Cleaver. “You either have to be part of the solution, or you’re going to be part of the problem—there ain’t no more middle ground.”

We live in Eldridge Cleaver’s world now, a world with no more middle ground. Where not doing anything does not mean you will be left alone. This is no longer a nation founded on the curious premise that the government should leave people alone unless they are causing problems.

That peculiar idea was held by a nation of farmers and merchants who fled religious persecution, and whose great contribution to human history was the notion that governments shouldn’t be all-powerful and that everyone should mind their own business when it comes to other people’s affairs. Our present-day rulers revile them as racist slave owners who only cared about money, but they also happen to be racist slave owners who only care about money, and they have far more of both.

The average American still holds the fanciful belief that, if he isn’t annoying anyone, he should be left alone. To the people running his country, this is as bizarre and unworkable as Phrenology or the Geocentric theory or handing out universal health care without also compelling everyone to buy it.

Steven Hayward certainly speaks for me.

2014 is just a few hours old, but we’ve already got the apparent winner for the Nanny of the Year, and it’s New York’s brand new mayor Bill de Blasio.  According to the NY Daily News, de Blasio wants to do Bloomberg one better in the authoritarianism department by shutting down all of the city’s remaining horse-drawn carriages.

…

Naturally there are “advocacy groups” behind this.  What would we do without advocacy groups.  It sounds like this is driven by the PETA types, rather than by environmentalists or health nuts worried about the tiny residue of horse manure around Central Park.  Either way, New York City is in for a miserable next four years from de Blasio. Maybe we can bring Rudy back in 2017?

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The books On the Road, Atlas Shrugged, and The Cat in the Hat, the films The Bridge on the River Kwai, Funny Face, and The Prince and the Showgirl, the play Endgame (“Fin de Partie”), and more. . .

Freeberg sums it up.

It’s funny. Whether the victim-class is defined according to race, gender, creed, obesity, language, immigration status, income level or sexual preference, the rules are always the same.

1. We should never hold the members of that class to any kind of a standard, be it a standard of performance or a standard of behavior;
2. We should treat it as a human-rights violation if any member of that class wants something, and ends up not getting it;
3. If any member of that class falls short of what they were supposed to do or screws up, we’re not allowed to notice it or talk about it;
4. They should never, under any circumstances, at all, anywhere, whatsoever — have to prove anything.

Theodore Dalrymple is fluent.

My late friend, the distinguished economist Peter Bauer, used to say that the only true unemployment in the modern world was among satirists, for the world had grown so ridiculous that what was intended as satire was either a description of what already existed or a prophecy of what would soon come to exist.

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Mind you, I understand their feelings.

Andrew told the media that he had just finished a call and placed his iPhone 4S on the table when a young man came up to the table, grabbed the phone, and ran. Andrew gave chase immediately but was quickly confronted by two teenaged girls just outside the coffee shop.

Note that they don’t mention the race of the perpetrators. That’s usually a good sign that they were black.

Police arrested Letaija Shapree Cutler-Cain, 18, and a 17-year-old accomplice whose name was not released because she is a minor.

And the name and accompanying picture confirms it.

“I was targeted because the phone was out and I’m 63 years old, and I’m sure they thought that I was easy pickins,” Andrew said.

Of course, being a Democrat, he can’t afford to mention ‘… and I was white.’

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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I was talking with a friend the other day about that perennial subject of conversation in the Valley, Google. And finally she gave me the clue that made the whole place make sense. “It’s about infantilizing people,” she explained. “Give them free food, do their laundry, let them sit on bouncy brightly-colored balls. Do everything so that they never have to grow up and learn how to live life on their own.”

And when you look at it that way, everything Google does makes a sick sort of sense.

I guess that explains why most of them vote Democrat.

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If you ever wondered how come unions and organized crime are so often found together, look no further.

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I guess she wasn’t as hot as she thought she was.

Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon we ought to be talking about real management. Unfortunately, the education industry approaches aerospace-sized projects with more starry-eyed optimism than is prudent for a bake sale, much less a war.

Whenever ‘educators’ (most of whom aren’t, really, just administrators of educational programs and institutions, which isn’t the same thing) run up against the inconvenient fact that American education sucks compared to ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, they reflexively shout “More cowbell money!”, as if money were some sort of tidal force that will eventually carry all before it. Tain’t necessarily so.

In an age when Silicon Valley trumpets “disruptive technologies,” it’s hardly surprising that the education reform establishment is addicted to the concept of magic bullets that will finally Fix the Schools. Who doesn’t love the allure of a revolutionary technological, doctrinal, or organizational fix for all that ails us?

Well, the good news is, we have that disruptive technology available. The bad news (for ‘educators’) is that it necessarily involves fewer jobs for ‘educators’, just as robotics means higher quality vehicles but fewer UAW members. Increased automation will not only break us free from the assembly-line batch-processed factory model school that has been in place since the middle ages, saving money in the process, but it will also allow us to tailor instruction to each individual’s interests and capabilities, just as modern CAD-CAM systems allow us to do ‘custom mass production’.

The junkyard of school solutions includes the 2002 No Child Left Behind act that mandated that every student in America be above average by next May.

The ‘Lake Woebegone’ fallacy. It’s no coincidence that Garrison Keillor is a raving ‘progressive’.

Lately, 45 states have signed on to junk their current curricula and tests in favor of the “Common Core,” a series of guidelines concocted by a former McKinsey consultant named David Coleman, whose only teaching experience is some tutoring of New Haven urban youth while he was buffing his Rhodes Scholarship application.

And such one-size-fits-all programs are going squarely in the wrong direction.

The education business has a short memory that keeps it from getting discouraged but also prevents it from learning from its mistakes. One reason fads are so common in public schools is that the incentive structure pays more to administrators with Ph.D.’s. A doctorate in education means you came up with some gimmick and then spent a few years documenting it. Education schools are thus novelty generation machines. Nobody gets to call himself “Doctor” for being good at making old ideas work together.

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Human-rights groups and assorted do-gooders have been filling up my Twitter timeline with news of a phenomenon many think no longer exists: literal witch hunts.

In 2009 the leader of The Gambia, the self-titled Sheikh Professor Dr. Yahya Abdul-Aziz Jemus Junkung Jammeh—perhaps best known for being the inventor of an herbal HIV “cure”—launched a witch-hunting campaign. Police, army, and national intelligence agents kidnapped up to 1,000 people at gunpoint. They were taken to secret detention centers and severely beaten, almost to the point of death. They were forced to confess and to drink “potions.” At least two died from potion-induced kidney failure.

Hey, all they have to do is re-name it ‘Child Protective Services’ and everybody would be fine with it.

Self-appointed witch hunter and self-described “Lady Apostle” Helen Ukpabio recently launched a crusade she calls “Witches on the Run” in Nigeria. The Observer reports that accused children in the country are “burnt, poisoned, slashed, chained to trees, buried alive or simply beaten and chased off into the bush.” Some have had nails driven into their heads.

Sounds like Democrats in action.

In 2008 police in the Democratic Republic of Congo arrested 13 people for using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises.

Maureen Dowd had better steer clear.

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Waddoups calls a 19th-century Supreme Court ruling banning polygamy “racist” and “orientalist,” because it asserted that Christianity’s teaching on marriage is superior to the polygamous arrangements that some Africans and “Asiatics” (presumably this means Arab Muslims) live by. This is an important point, it seems to me. If Christianity and the Christian moral and societal framework is no longer viewed as normative in laws governing sexual practice, then the slippery slope to legalizing polygamy is here. We already know from the Lawrence ruling that the state may not regulate private consensual sexual conduct; if the principle that privileging Christian marital norms is impermissible is accepted, by what standard do we prevent polygamy? I suppose you could say it harms society in some way, but this judge rejected that argument.

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I agree 100% with the sentiment of the article, but the article doesn’t really point out that the number one goal of educational policy for the last three decades has been to close the gaps between whites and non-Asian minorities. To the extent that gap-closing is the number-one goal, better education for the smartest students, who are overwhelmingly white and Asian, is a negative goal because that would increase the gap.

This is why if you have smart children, the only way to ensure they get a quality education is to send them to an elite and expensive private school. (Or at least a public school in an overwhelmingly upper-middle-class district where there’s a strong PTA controlled by parents who want their gifted children to get advanced education.)

In other words, Scions of the Crust. For the rest, the goal is equality, not excellence; we don’t want these uppity middle class kids competing with our Precious Legacies for the best jobs.

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Some cheerful news to start your day.

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High speed rail is marketed as a sustainable alternative to air traffic. According to the International Union of Railways, the high speed train “plays a key role in a stage of sustainable development and combating climate change”. As a regular long-distance train traveller in Europe, I have to say that the opposite is true. High speed rail is destroying the most valuable alternative to the airplane; the “low speed” rail network that has been in service for decades.

The introduction of a high speed train connection invariably accompanies the elimination of a slightly slower, but much more affordable, alternative route, forcing passengers to use the new and more expensive product, or abandon the train altogether. As a result, business people switch from full-service planes to high speed trains, while the majority of Europeans are pushed into cars, coaches and low-cost airplanes.

A look at European railway history shows that the choice for the elite high speed train is far from necessary. Earlier efforts to organize speedy international rail services in Europe accompanied affordable prices and different ways to increase the speed and comfort of a rail trip. Quite a few of these services were even faster than today’s high speed trains.

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It’s so corrupt….

We have written many times about the corruption of the global warming movement. Billions and billions of dollars are being poured into the pockets of global warming alarmists, because they perform such a valuable service: they help to persuade voters that governments should be given greater control over the world’s economies. What’s a few billion dollars when trillions are at stake?

We have written mostly about the corruption of Greens in America, where Al Gore has become a standing joke. But the Daily Mail has performed the valuable service of exposing the corruption that is rampant among British environmentalists; specifically, global warming alarmists….

Read it.

One of the greatest actors to appear in my lifetime.

‘Ow! That hurts!’
‘Of course it hurts.’
‘Wot’s the trick, then?’
‘The trick is, not minding that it hurts.’

Read it.

How did the once-sovereign states become wards of Washington? They did it to themselves. State politicians came to recognize that they would benefit from a more powerful national government. As scholars like Michael Greve and Todd Zywicki have shown, state actors helped to break down the original constitutional system of “competitive federalism,” which kept government limited as states competed with each other to attract business and labor. In its place they contrived a parasitical “cooperative” or “cartel” federalism, in which states extract wealth from each other through the federal government.

Actually, it started when the South lost the Civil War. It was our misfortune that they were on the wrong end of the moral argument about slavery and so lost the more fundamental principle of states’ rights for all of us.