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To a surprising degree, the Japanese language is littered with foreign loan words, many of them English. Terms ranging from “internet” to the quotidian “rice,” and everything in between, get shoehorned into the native syllabary, turning “compliance” into the tongue-twisting “conpuraiansu.” Many, including the country’s Ministry of Education, have recognized the increase in foreign vernacular as a problem, but one 71-year-old man from Gifu Prefecture has had enough. He’s suing the national broadcaster NHK for “undue mental distress” because he can’t understand what people are saying on TV.

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No wonder Bill Clinton retired to New York. I guess Arkansas was too uptight for him.

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The protesters claim cheating is endemic in China and that sitting the exams without help puts their children at a disadvantage.

Read it.

The battle over math education is often conceived as a referendum on progressive ideals, with those on the reform side as the clear winners. This is reflected, for instance, in the terms that reformists employ in defending their preferred programs. The staunchest supporters of reform math are math teachers and faculty at schools of education. While some of these individuals maintain that the standard algorithms are simply too hard for many students, most take the following, more plausible tack. They insist that the point of math classes should be to get children to reason independently, and in their own styles, about numbers and numerical concepts. The standard algorithms should be avoided because, reformists claim, mastering them is a merely mechanical exercise that threatens individual growth. The idea is that competence with algorithms can be substituted for by the use of calculators, and reformists often call for training students in the use of calculators as early as first or second grade.

Reform math has some serious detractors. It comes under fierce attack from college teachers of mathematics, for instance, who argue that it fails to prepare students for studies in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. These professors maintain that college-level work requires ready and effortless competence with the standard algorithms and that the student who needs to ponder fractions — or is dependent on a calculator — is simply not prepared for college math. They express outrage and bafflement that so much American math education policy is set by people with no special knowledge of the discipline.

The goal of pre-college education ought to be inculcation of those facts and skills that will make life easier for the ordinary citizen, including but not limited to getting a remunerative job and exercising good judgment in daily life. Treating every child in America as a potential trust-fund baby whose chief problem is how to best ‘actualize’ himself (or herself) is what has produced the massive illiteracy and innumeracy that plagues our population in These Degenerate Modern Times.

If I had a child, which thank God I don’t, I would bend every effort to keeping that child safe from anybody who had a degree in Education as I would from a carrier of a communicable disease.

Jerry Pournelle makes a good point:

The problem is that we no longer know what the public schools are for, and we no longer recognize that a good public school system would make high school the normal education for citizens, with junior colleges to teach skills not so easily learned in apprenticeships, colleges as the place for those who want more education or need some credentials to make a living (teachers, accountants) and universities for those who are seriously going into professions needing high levels of technical competence. Liberal arts colleges we will leave for another discussion – there are many publications on that.

But the essential point is that public education can’t give everyone the same education. We need not go to the extremes they have in Japan and other places where early examination scores determine the course of your education and your life from then on; but we do need to recognize that not everyone needs to know algebra and calculus, and trying to bestow that as a right is to doom the ones who should know it to being forced to learn at the pace of those who never will learn them.

I second Jerry’s recommendation to read Jacques Barzun’a A Teacher in America.

Read it.

The Children of the Crust know which side their bread is buttered on.

Read it.

With the launch of The American Wine Consumer Coalition today, U.S. wine consumers now have a place in public policy debates for the first time ever.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that U.S. wine consumers didn’t ‘have a place in public policy debates’. I’ll bet you still don’t know why they ought to have a place in public policy debates. In fact, I challenge you to think of a legitimate reason for wine consumption to figure in ‘public policy debates’.

Well, they don’t, of course. But with tendrils of government working their way into every nook and cranny of our everyday lives, people have realized that if they’re not calling the shots, they’re the ones getting shot at.

Read it.

June Atkinson, North Carolina’s superintendent of public instruction, recommended the unusual tax policy on Monday, reports The Charlotte Observer. The Democrat indicated that she would not have advocated such a teacher tax cut if teachers would instead receive a salary increase next year.

No recognition of the fact that teachers are getting more and more pay for increasingly worse and worse results.

No surprises that this was initiated by a Democrat — another payoff for one of their core constituencies, teachers and especially teachers’ unions.

And if this trick works, they’ll show you another one — perhaps state government employees (most of whom are unionized as well these days). And on, and on, and on, until the only people paying taxes are Republicans in the private sector, who will be expected to subsidize the entire Welfare State.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, reviews Hungry Ghosts by Jasper Becker.

The greatest human calamity of our century — greater than the Holocaust, greater than World War Two itself — was the famine that swept China in the “three bad years” 1959-61. At least thirty million died.

For a long time the Chinese authorities and their shills in the West denied that there had been a famine at all. As evidence of the catastrophe began to accumulate they fell back to grudging admissions of “severe shortages” caused by “natural disasters” and “adverse climatic conditions.”

Beginning in the early 1980s, researchers in the West (and a few brave Chinese) began probing into Chinese population statistics. The results of those inquiries are now in, the conclusions incontrovertible. There were no natural disasters. The climate in those years was mild. The famine was caused by the policies of the Chinese Communist government, under the inspiration of Mao Tse-tung. The facts have now been set out for a general readership by the British sinologist Jasper Becker (Hungry Ghosts, Free Press, 1997.)

The physical details of the famine — even just the bare statistics — make harrowing reading. Children seem to have suffered especially, not only in the famine itself but in later years, dying from the after-effects of severe malnutrition. In 1957 half of all Chinese who died were under 18; in 1963 half were under 10. These were not the most unfortunate. In the extremity of mass starvation, when rats and insects had long gone and the very bark from the trees had been consumed, peasants resorted to the ghastly custom of yi zi er shi — swap children, then eat. Since no-one could bear to eat his own children, you exchanged yours with a neighbor. Then you ate his, he ate yours.

Read it. And watch the video, if you have a strong stomach.

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

Read it.

At the time, the late 1970s felt like shapeless, dreary, forgettable years. Jimmy Carter was in the White House, preaching austerity and public-spiritedness, and hardly anyone was listening. The hideous term “stagflation”, which combined the normally opposed economic phenomena of stagnation and inflation, perfectly captured the doldrums of that moment. It is only with the hindsight of a full generation that we can see how many things were beginning to shift across the American landscape, sending the country spinning into a new era.

The rot actually set in during the mid-60s, but it didn’t start taking over the Crust until the late 70s.

The generation that fought World War II, who had grown up during the Depression, suddenly awash in the prosperity brought by the new industrial techniques that won the war, decided that their kids, the Boomers, would want for nothing — with the inevitable degenerative effect on that generation’s character. The characteristic moral failing of Boomers is entitlement — they want what they want, and see no reason (in heaven or on earth, and I mean that literally) why they shouldn’t get it. They see no reason not to live high on the hog, and pass the bill on to their more frugal neighbors or their invisible descendents. Once these attitudes filtered up into the Crust, generally by way of ideological capture of the universities by the narcissistic Left, then there was no stopping it. The descent from Democracy into Anarchy into Tyranny — foreseen by Aristotle, among others, who was wiser than anybody now taking a government paycheck — is well underway … and I, for one, don’t see any way of stopping it. I just hope I’m dead before its final form clanks down the street.

Read it.

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

Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) opponents warned it would happen, but now there’s mounting proof that full-time employees are being replaced with part-timers, at least in the retail industry where Walmart is focused on keeping the majority of workers to part-time hours only.

A new hiring policy uncovered by Reuters shows that nearly half of its stores are only hiring part-time employees, thus avoiding the mandate to provide health care or pay a fine.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

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The contradictions and deleterious effects of feminism are well documented—not just in the manosphere but beyond. What the growing backlash against feminism fails to acknowledge are seemingly trivial and ancillary forces that do more damage than they let on.

The most powerful among those factors is you-go-girlism—the empowerment ethos that tells women, at every turn, that they can not only do anything a man can do, but also all of the things women used to do. Women and girls are the smarter, more capable, and generally “better” than men. Girls are encouraged to do things that are traditionally masculine—like manly professions and sports—and are given a pass on negative behaviors, from sexual promiscuity to weight gain to physically attacking men, all with the same trite cheer, “You go girl!”

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 I’ve recently joined the ranks of San Francisco landlords who have decided that it’s better to keep an apartment empty than to lease it to tenants. Together, we have left vacant about 10,600 rental units. That’s about five percent of the city’s total — or enough space to house up to 30,000 people in a city that barely tops 800,000.

I feel a twinge of guilt for those who want to settle in this glorious city but can’t find a flat. But after renting out a one-bedroom apartment in my home for several years, I will never do it again. San Francisco’s anti-landlord housing laws and political climate make it untenable.

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The deleted entry, which has since been restored, concerned a 2010 scandal in which Johnson was found to have “awarded 23 scholarships over five years to two of her grandsons, two sons of her nephew and the children of her top congressional aide in Dallas.” It was a clear violation of the scholarship fund’s anti-nepotism and residency rules. Johnson eventually repaid the foundation more than $31,000 for the misappropriated scholarships, but has been hammered over the issue by rivals during her two most recent campaigns.

Yet another Corrupt Black Democrat caught with hand in cookie jar. You’d think they’d learn.

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According to US Department of Fish and Wildlife representative John McCamman, “They are just ripping stuff up.” But residents can’t do anything about the delinquent condors, due to federal and state regulations. In fact, the California State Fish and Game Commission recently prohibited use of lead ammunition in areas in which condors nest. Actually, about the only thing you can do to the condor in California is kill it using a wind turbine.

Or you could move to Texas….

Read it.

Yet another set of reasons not to fly.

Steve Sailer reports what you won’t see on the evening news.

Authorities in western Mexico say a tanker truck carrying tar has slammed into a highway toll booth that had temporarily been taken over by protesting teachers. They say seven people are dead and another 14 injured.

And there’s a bit of Own Damned Fault here:

The runaway truck ramp placed just before the toll booth was blocked by vehicles left by … the protesting teachers killed in the accident!

Hey, we really want more of these people in this country, don’t we?

 Why does the Gang of Eight want to make America more like Mexico?

What an excellent question….

Bruce Schneier wakes to reality.

If you’ve started to think of yourself as a hapless peasant in a Game of Thrones power struggle, you’re more right than you may realize. These are not traditional companies, and we are not traditional customers. These are feudal lords, and we are their vassals, peasants, and serfs.

Except that they feel no obligation of Good Lordship, which is why actual feudalism is preferable.

(You can look it up.)

Read it.

News, perhaps, but hardly unexpected.

The three-day LA Pride parade that ended Sunday in West Hollywood had an unfortunate ending for a resident of the city- a giant mastiff.  The huge sculpture of a hot pink dog was stolen from its 5 compatriots. The mastiff, situated on La Cienega Boulevard, a major thoroughfare, was part of a group of 6 dogs, three of which were pink and three red, that were sculpted by an artist named William Sweetlove as a part of his exhibit titled “Cloned Bulldogs With Water Bottle.”

Paid for by the taxpayers, of course.

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And that’s not a good thing to be.

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Dozens of lawmakers and aides are so afraid that their health insurance premiums will skyrocket next year thanks to Obamacare that they are thinking about retiring early or just quitting.

The fear: Government-subsidized premiums will disappear at the end of the year under a provision in the health care law that nudges aides and lawmakers onto the government health care exchanges, which could make their benefits exorbitantly expensive.

God forbid that the Ruling Class should have to live like Ordinary Folks.

Steve Sailer clues you in.

 My dad and I drove around Mexico City in 1975. One day we tried to get to the Palace of Fine Arts, a vast marble theater so heavy it had sunk two dozen feet into Mexico City’s dry lakebed since it was built in the mid-1800s. We could see it looming over the lesser buildings, but the randomness of the street layout made it hard to approach. Finally, we discovered a six lane boulevard leading directly to the Palace. As soon as my dad turned on to it, a policeman blew his whistle. Suddenly, six cars abreast came roaring at us — it was a one-way street.

The traffic cop was standing right under where the One-Way sign should have been. He, or a predecessor, probably took it down to increase business. Police sergeants auction off the most lucrative corners in Mexico City, so the lowly patrolmen who win the rights to a tourist-heavy spot like this have to be enterprising just to break even on bribe rake-offs, much less turn a profit.

Sure, we really need more of these people in this country, in addition to the 11 million who have already snuck in illegally.

Read it.

We know what happened in the case of QWest before 9/11. They contacted the CEO/Chairman asking to wiretap all the customers. After he consulted with Legal, he refused. As a result, NSA canceled a bunch of unrelated billion dollar contracts that QWest was the top bidder for. And then the DoJ targeted him and prosecuted him and put him in prison for insider trading — on the theory that he knew of anticipated income from secret programs that QWest was planning for the government, while the public didn’t because it was classified and he couldn’t legally tell them, and then he bought or sold QWest stock knowing those things.

This CEO’s name is Joseph P. Nacchio and TODAY he’s still serving a trumped-up 6-year federal prison sentence today for quietly refusing an NSA demand to massively wiretap his customers.

Read it.

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

If Mussolini came back as a Democrat, he’d be President today.

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At least 436 Department of Health and Human Services employees–and possibly more at the White House Office of Management and Budget–received advance notice of an $8 billion Medicare decision that sent private health insurers’ stocks soaring.

Sometimes it is good to be Minions of the Crust.

Grassley says potentially market-moving government information “should be available to everyone at the same time, not handled loosely in a way that allows special access to some individuals.”

Good luck with that.

Read it.

They’re dropping like flies.

RossDouthat reveals some inconvenient truth.

As the security expert Bruce Schneier wrote recently, it isn’t that the Internet has been penetrated by the surveillance state; it’s that the Internet, in effect, is a surveillance state.

…

It is at least possible to participate in online culture while limiting this horizontal, peer-to-peer exposure. But it is practically impossible to protect your privacy vertically — from the service providers and social media networks and now security agencies that have access to your every click and text and e-mail. Even the powerful can’t cover their tracks, as David Petraeus discovered. In the surveillance state, everybody knows you’re a dog.

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

In what amounts to self-parody, an elementary school in California will hold a toy gun exchange — similar to the real gun exchanges run by police departments for real guns — in order to remove the, er, threat of toy guns at school.

Your tax dollars at work.

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From the 1999 Columbine shooting to Sandy Hook Elementary to the June 7th shooting in Santa Monica, CA, an overarching narrative from public shootings in gun-free zones is the demeanor of the shooter(s)–they are confident their victims will not be able to fire back and therefore feel little reason to stop their rampages.

We saw this in the way the Columbine shooters moved through the cafeteria; we saw it again in various reports on the June 7th shooting in Santa Monica, where the shooter was described as “calm” and “methodical.”

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, gently weeps.

In a society such as the modern West, where intelligence is declining, where fertility trends are dysgenic, where cognitive elites enforce assent to feel-good ideological claptrap and the mass of citizenry is absorbed in frivolities, science hovers always on the edge of extinction. Saint Leibowitz was martyred following a nuclear Armageddon; on present evidence the Armageddon won’t be necessary. We’ll be barbecuing scientists for the fun of it when reality TV and smartphones begin to pall.

Michael Arrington casts aspersions.

I guess the answer would be No. (Remember, all of these people voted for Obama. Every damned one of them.)

The Other McCain is on the case.

The evidence pointing toward Harry Hopkins’s complicity in a plot of subversive Soviet influence within the FDR White House is more extensive than this one incident, but this incident by itself is shocking enough to deserve front-page headlines.

The FBI had gotten clear proof that the Soviet Union was using diplomatic cover to insert Comintern agents into the United States, and that these agents were, in turn, funding and directing espionage aimed at our top-secret Manhattan Project. And when J. Edgar Hoover told the president’s most trusted aide about this investigation, in a letter that emphasized the confidential nature of the information, Harry Hopkins tells the Soviet embassy about it?

I guess Alger Hiss had company.

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Manually, it takes a team of painters 4.5 hours to do the first coat. The robots do it in 24 minutes with perfect quality. Boeing began using the machine in February. By midsummer, all 777 wings will be painted this way.

Your future in a nutshell. Soon the only jobs will be working for the government, sticking your nose into other people’s business — that’s the only part that they can’t get robots to do, because robots don’t care what you do.

Read it.

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

Glenn Reynolds initiated the “Unexpectedly!” theme several years ago; since then there have been countless news stories about the U.S. economy’s “unexpected” failures to perform. Observers generally offer micro-explanations based on trends of the moment. Currently, among other things, the minute sequester cuts are blamed for some portion of the drop in manufacturing.

But this narrow focus obscures the broader point: the American economy has performed terribly, by any objective standard, over the last few years. The recovery of 2009 to the present is the weakest–by far–of any postwar recovery. Unemployment and poverty are sky-high because economic growth is anemic. But why is growth so sluggish? After all, there are powerful forces that should be driving the economy forward, foremost among them the North American energy boom. Take the current data on manufacturing: it has been widely reported that manufacturing is returning to the U.S. because cheap energy here, the result of the shale oil and gas revolution, balances out lower labor costs in Asia. But if this is the case–and it is–then why is domestic manufacturing declining?

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A community activist is challenging Gov. Deval Patrick’s pick for board chairman at the troubled Roxbury Community College because the new leader is white, but the administration is standing by the appointment.

Sadiki Kambon, who said he represents a group called Friends of Roxbury Community College, sent Patrick a letter Monday demanding that Gerald Chertavian, who was named board chairman last week, be replaced by “another qualified candidate (Black).”

“It’s important for our young people to see someone who looks like us who is the position of leadership in our academic community. We feel that someone from our community has the skill set necessary to run that institution,” Kambon told the Herald.

Kambon declined to identify other members of his group, which sent the letter to Patrick earlier this week. The letter labels the governor’s selection of Chertavian, who is white, “insulting” because the college is a “predominantly Black institution.”

Racism doth never prosper, what’s the reason? If it doth prosper, none dare call it racism.

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A U.S. EPA-mandated device meant to reduce diesel emissions may have shut down an ambulance carrying a suspect who had been shot by police in Washington, D.C.

While medics yesterday were transporting the injured man, who was suspected of shooting at officers, to the hospital, the emergency vehicle shut down. Another ambulance took the man to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

D.C. fire officials said the shutdown likely occurred because of a device designed to burn diesel toxins. When the device isn’t working, warning lights go off in the vehicle and it eventually loses power.

Well, then, there it is. Your tax dollars at work.

Per EPA regulations, the device is required on all newer models of diesel vehicles. Critics of the mandate have previously called for an exemption for emergency vehicles.

“We’re not in a position to fight the EPA regulations, and we’re not even going to try,” Donnelly said.

Sad but true.

Read it.

There is a reason the GOP is often called the “stupid party.” Although every poll finds the public firmly on the center-right side of the political spectrum, the GOP has become expert at alienating voters on issues they ought to command. On Thursday, the Republican State Leadership Committee, tasked with electing Republicans to state office, announced via press release that it was launching a program with a set quota of recruiting 200 minority candidates for office. Yes, the GOP wants to help its standing with minorities by establishing a racial quota system.

The chief factor in making the GOP the stupid party is that it is run by stupid people, and the rank-and-file put up with it.

Read it.

Our colleges are raising generations of willing slaves. Of course, that’s what they’re designed to do.

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Remember the dreams of the late 20th century? Orbiting solar panels would beam down the planet’s power supply. Machines on the moon would grind out raw materials and spit them into space to build space colonies and zero-gravity factories. Everything we wanted would be manufactured molecule by molecule, via contraptions smaller than the smallest objects we previously knew.

And we were on track to do that, before LBJ’s War on Poverty and Great Society sucked up all of the money, and the Democrats decided that they wanted to use the welfare system to destroy the black family and cement the Lower Crust as their reliably-voting faithful client class.

Read it.

There’s been plenty of talk about how the Democratic Party is strongly supported by Hollywood — and MPAA boss Chris Dodd famously threatened politicians that Hollywood might not fund their campaigns if they didn’t support SOPA. So it’s quite interesting to see Mother Jones’ detailed analysis of Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg’s strong support of President Obama’s last campaign. There’s a lot of nuance in there, so this is not just a case of clear tit-for-tat political funding in exchange for political favors. The article states multiple times that Katzenberg doesn’t really seem that focused on getting anything back for his efforts and money.

Democrats, the Party of Corruption since Boss Tweed.

Read it.

It’s always hard to say whether economic changes are cyclical or structural, but I think it’s fair to say that there’s a slowly accumulating consensus that technology is now destroying jobs faster than it’s creating them, and that the resulting two-track economy is here to stay…and growing steadily more disparate.

…

In other words, the US government is already quietly paying a significant fraction of the American population not to work. If jobs keep disappearing, while the overall wealth of America and the world keeps increasing, then we can expect initiatives like that to keep expanding. George Monbiot is the latest to propose a basic income, which “gives everyone, rich and poor, without means-testing or conditions, a guaranteed sum every week.”

I’m just a little ray of  sunshine today, am I not?

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Allow me to suggest that part of this paucity of suavity stems from the weaponization of gender relations. Men can be excused for feeling uncomfortable casually bantering with women because men can never be sure what will be taken in good humor and what will be considered a grave offense. In the workplace setting this pressure is even more intense and the stakes higher, with lawsuits for casual comments a real fear. It’s better to shut down entirely than risk incurring the wrath of HR (or an aggrieved husband whose wife complains about your back and forth after the fact).

I blame feminism. But that’s me.

Read it.

Nobody questions John McCain’s courage or fortitude.

Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, however … and it’s a drawer that famously contains quite a collection of very dull blades….

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Oh, say it ain’t so!

These small online business believe that true Main Street physical retailers and true Main Street Internet retailers are not at odds, but, in fact, allies.  eMainStreet makes the point that “in 2012, big-box retailers accounted for more than 83 percent of online sales. Their online market-share is increasing, and by way of the MFA the growth of their retail oligopoly will accelerate.” This is precisely what happened in the physical retail space.

The point is that, just as rich people are in favor of increasing taxes that they are in a better position to survive, big companies are in favor of increased taxes on commerce (and regulatory burdens) that they are also in a better position to survive.

Read it.

It’s not a political alliance people are used to seeing. But in states like Texas and North Carolina, Tea Party supporters have been teaming up with Democrats to defeat measures that would expand gun rights for lawmakers but not the general public.

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A tragic loss. Vance had as distinctive a voice as P G Wodehouse, and will be greatly missed.

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Hey, this is the state that elected Ted Kennedy to the Senate year after year.

Your tax dollars at work.

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The Obama administration has passed Jimmy Carter and is headed toward Nixon territory.