Read it.

Before today’s battles over cell phones and distracted driving, there were battles over car radios and distracted driving.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Lileks looks at the popularity among the Usual Suspects of ‘nanny taxes’.

There are two issues: One is tax streamlining, which attempts to reduce pointless bewildering complexity so the tax code can be full of intentionally bewildering complexity.

But the bill’s author suggested another rationale: “Just to go after the junk food, “ he said. “Especially the Twinkies and that sort of thing.”

Cute George Harrison….

Paul Rahe turns over a rock.

Most of the New Deal liberals that I once knew have passed on. They have been replaced in positions of authority by a generation for whom everything is political. Its motto is “the personal is political and the political is personal.” What this means in practice is that the members of this generation tend to regard those at odds with them not as merely wrong and perhaps intriguingly, interestingly wrong but as simply immoral. In the face of an argument or observation that does not sit comfortably with what they believe, they resort to denunciation. The dissenter is labeled a racist or a fascist or something worse, and he is read out of the human race. In this environment, conservatives are no longer welcome. No advertisement states that they need not apply for jobs at certain institutions, but that is nearly always the case.

The key to understanding what has happened is that the new generation has made of the university a political instrument. Its purpose, as they see it, is to help them transform the larger world. Those not on board with the program are interlopers to be demonized and driven out, and the quality of the scholarly work and the teaching they do has no weight. One can write and be widely read. One can be invited to conferences and to give lectures. But, if a job comes open at a major university, one will not even be interviewed. Trust me. I know from long experience.

Read it.

Meet Eustace Conway, 51, the owner of Turtle Camp near Boone, North Carolina. He’s a back-to-the-land guy who bathes in a creek, grows his own food, and welcomes others to learn some survival skills at his place (which he runs as an educational nonprofit) for a small fee.

In other words, he’s out from under the Crust.

    A team of health, construction and fire officials showed up for an unannounced inspection of the preserve, acting on an anonymous tip. Escorted by two sheriffs’ deputies, they executed what Mr. Conway describes as a “SWAT-team raid”—peering into outhouses, stomping around log cabins, and climbing hand-hewn ladders.

Their findings are compiled in a 78-page report with a bullet-point list of violations. Mr. Conway’s sawdust urinal and outhouses? Unpermitted, according to the officials. The wood he used to erect two dozen buildings? Built with lumber that isn’t “grade-marked,” meaning it doesn’t specify the mill where it was produced.

The open-air kitchen, with its crates of potatoes and stacks of pots? “Not protected from insects and animals,” according to the report. “It is, in fact, outdoors.”

Which is, in fact, the point.

When I was a kid, this was a free country. Say what you will about the ’50s, we never had to put up with this kind of shit.

Read it.

According to a disturbingly pleasant graphic from Information is Beautiful entitled simply 20^th Century Death, communism was the leading ideological cause of death between 1900 and 2000. The 94 million that perished in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe easily (and tragically) trump the 28 million that died under fascist regimes during the same period.

I suspect that Islam may be a contender for the 21st century.

During the century measured, more people died as a result of communism than from homicide (58 million) and genocide (30 million) put together. The combined death tolls of WWI (37 million) and WWII (66 million) exceed communism’s total by only 9 million.

And yet this is the philosophy being pushed by our schools and ruling class.

Curiously, all of the world’s worst famines during the 20th century were in communist countries: China (twice!), the Soviet Union, and North Korea.

Oh, I don’t think it’s curious at all….

Steve Sailer jerks back the curtain a little bit.

 There shouldn’t be anything too “surprising” about the Rent-a-Minority business, no more than Henry Cisneros being the Hispanic face of Countrywide Financial. Similarly, the tobacco companies poured a lot of money into minority groups before their legal defeat in the 1990s. It’s just that The Narrative gets in the way of people noticing it, just as The Narrative encourages it.

The poster child here is Jesse Jackson the Elder, who has made a tidy fortune from extortion payments contributions from companies who don’t want to get targeted as ‘racist’.

Read it.

Why do ‘liberals’ ‘like’ anticompetitive regulation? Why is that a given nowadays?

According to the plain textbook definition of the word, there is nothing obviously liberal about wanting the government to institute a price-control regulation that has the effect of help big companies squeeze their littler-guy competition. Yet here a ‘liberal’ blogger mentions in passing that ‘liberals’ like just that very thing, seemingly without raising any eyebrows.

A truth so obvious that even CNN gets it.

Many people think that the rich are able to weasel their way out of taxes, but they actually pay an overwhelming majority of the taxes in the United States.

What’s more, their share of the tax burden is increasing.

A fact you won’t hear on the evening news, even though it seems to have sneaked by the thoughtcrime police at CNN.

Read it.

Just because you have water vapor coming out of your tailpipe—if you even have a tailpipe—doesn’t mean that you have zero emissions. It takes energy to create usable hydrogen or charge batteries, and the bulk of our energy is still generated by fossil fuels which create greenhouse gases. This means that discussions about which vehicles produce more carbon dioxide on the road ignore a big source of emissions.

Read it.

The huge number of multinational businessmen being abducted abroad (hundreds a year at ransoms reaching $30 million) has made organized kidnapping a big business. It has also spawned a counter industry — getting them back — and a secret drama involving former spies and revolutionaries. AK-47’s and armored cars, helicopter drops and hideaways in the Andes.

Rod Dreher turns over a rock.

Here’s an incredibly well reported New Republic story from South Africa about how the post-apartheid black ruling elite have treated the poor black masses not much better than the whites who ruled them under apartheid. This excerpt comes after the reader meets Cyril Ramaphosa, who had led the black miners to oppose the apartheid government, but who went on to become a wheeler-dealer under ANC government.

Takeaways.

Whatever the problem is, Obama’s solution is to take things away from the American people.

Budget cutbacks? Take away whatever hurts the American people most.

Take away their guns, their Bill of Rights, their car, their coal, make them turn the thermostat down and tell them what and how much they are allowed to eat.

Reagan’s core philosophy was growth and freedom. Obama’s core philosophy is to take control away from the peasants, and put himself control of everything

When he said “bitter people who cling to guns and religion” it was pretty obvious where he was coming from. The only reason to cling to anything is because someone is trying to take it away from you. That person is Barack Obama.

Read it.

Nearly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates need to relearn basic skills before they can enter the City University’s community college system.

In the Good Old Days, schools taught facts and skills; primary among those skills was literacy and numeracy, the ability to read and write and do basic arithmetic.

Once progressives got hold of the schools, however, they were changed into vehicles for social engineering, to produce the New Soviet Man progressive ideal of the caring and tolerant subject citizen, who feels good about himself (and herself) and strives to produce that same good feeling in others. The original function of schooling, however, got lost along the way.

I remember myself when I graduated from high school. I didn’t feel very good about myself — the nuns saw to that — but by God I could read — the nuns saw to that, as well.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

How shocking! It’s an outrage! Oh, wait….

Normally Mike Masnick is a reasonably intelligent guy who has a common sense view of things, but this is a bit off-base.

 Now, think about that for a second. Since this is for any kids up to 18, we’re talking about most of the teenage years for most kids. These are the years in which many teens rebel against their parents, which is, in many ways, a natural part of growing up and becoming an independent adult. To think that parents should be able to find out information directly from various sites about their kids’ use of those sites seems incredibly problematic. There may be sites where the teens have tried to keep information private from their parents. And maybe that’s because, say, the parents are anti-gay, and the child is gay. Do we really want parents to have easy access to that material? Or… what if it’s a site for abused kids, and they are signing up to get help and to report that abuse? Under this law, it would appear that parents can check up on their kids on those sites.

I can’t think of a better ‘growing up’ experience than for teenagers to learn as soon as possible that (a) their ephemeral impulses don’t govern the world, (b) their ephemeral impulses don’t even govern their own lives, and (c) among the chief virtues of adulthood are circumspection and discretion. There’s nothing like living in a police state to teach you the value — and limits — of freedom, and isolating teens from their parents merely encourages them in delusional thinking that ultimately produces fools like the people who populate most Democratic administrations. This is not a trend that we ought to encourage.

Read it.

Would you be surprised to learn that the professor in question was the US Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration?

Why, yes, I would. And of course he’s right: The Tea Party would dearly love to destroy the U. S. government in its tax-and-spend-socialism-cash-machine incarnation, and return it to its original purpose of defending the country and otherwise letting us go about our business, two things that Robert Reich has fought all his life to prevent. Reich has been an academic and apparatchik Member of the Crust since his earliest days, and illustrates how much better off we’d all be if no Rhodes Scholar were allowed to work in government.

Ron Radosh provides some historical perspective.

When North Korea was still being led by its original founder, Kim Il-Sung, the visitors from the United States to the horrendous Communist regime were not the likes of Dennis Rodman. Today, the founder’s grandson, Kim Jong-Un,  has inherited the mantle of leadership, thereby carrying on the dynasty that rules in the name of Marxism-Leninism, as modified by the founder’s philosophy of juche, or self-reliance, autonomy, and independence.

How far the North Korean Communists have fallen. Back in the day of the old fellow-travelers’ tours to the various communist paradises, the regimes had their praises sung by the likes of the African-American baritone Paul Robeson, who regularly went to the USSR and told the world how great Comrade Stalin was and how the Soviet Union had the only real democracy on Earth. At least Robeson was an All-American football quarterback and the most well-known black American actor and singer in the 1930s and 40s. He also received a law degree at Columbia University. That a man so intelligent could function as a dupe for Stalin was far more worrisome than seeing Rodman do the same today. No one would call Rodman intelligent. He is both a useful idiot as well as a real one; Robeson only filled the first category.

Read it.

The inmates are in charge of the asylum.

Read it.

When Mitt Romney made the case for a state-level health reform as governor of Massachusetts, he promised that insurance would become affordable and “the costs of health care will be reduced.” That didn’t work out so well. Costs continued to rise, and health insurance premiums in the state were among the nation’s most expensive. So last year, Romney’s Democratic successor, Deval Patrick, signed into law an ambitious cap on health cost increases. But now it appears that Patrick’s price controls may not work very well either.

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

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to. So long as health care remains labor-intensive and heavily burdened by government paperwork, its costs will continue to rise.

Read it.

Building something interesting requires a surplus of time and money. Salaried jobs provide neither. Unless the job itself is your dream, stay the fuck away from them.

This applies to IT especially. Information Technology is a New Thing in the world, a field where what you knew five years ago is totally irrelevant to what people expect you to do today — experience isn’t a feature, it’s a bug. You have to spend all of your spare time learning new technologies and brushing up on the more obscure nooks and crannies of current technology; otherwise you will get gob-smacked by some oddity that, OMG, we need right away and I thought you said you knew SQLServer/.Net/Data Warehousing/Web programming/(insert whatever it is you do here)?

So why am I still working in IT? Well, at this point, I really can’t afford to quit….

Read it.

Some on Wall Street may be celebrating the Dow hitting a record high on Tuesday, but a new report says New York City now has a record 50,000 people a night sleeping in the city’s homeless shelters.

Let’s hear it for The Nanny. Focusing on the amount of salt in restaurant food and the size of soft drinks people can buy really zeroes in on the important things in life, doesn’t it?

Read it.

Over the past two decades, a net 3.4 million people have moved out of California for other states. But contrary to conservative lore, there has been no millionaires’ march to Texas or other states with no income tax. In fact, since 2005 California has experienced a net in-migration of households earning more than $200,000, according to the U.S. Census’s American Community Survey.

As it happens, most of California’s outward-bound migrants are low- to middle-income, with relatively little education: those typically employed in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, hospitality and to some extent natural-resource extraction. Their median household income is about $40,000—two-thirds of the statewide median—and about 95% earn less than $80,000. Only one in 10 has a college degree, compared with 30% of California’s population. Roughly 40% of the people leaving are Hispanic.

What happens when an area is left with only the Upper Crust and the Lower Crust, the middle having moved away? Looks like we’re about to find out.

Read it.

When the “Higher Education Bubble bursts, it is going to take the “College -Progressive” Complex with it.

And that is a good thing.

People are beginning to realize that getting a ‘college education’ typically means (a) not really getting much of an education, (b) not getting a job after college, and (c) having to pay off massive amounts of debt without the means of doing so. Eventually this system is going to unravel, and I suspect that we are seeing the beginnings of that right now. If you’re a trust-fund hipster or some Eurotrash scion, spending four (or five) years at Brown drinking, screwing, and protesting isn’t a big deal. But if you’re trying to do the whole social-mobility thing, being the first in your lineage to ‘go to college’, it’s a real problem.

Call it the College-Progressive Complex. The first part consists of the schools themselves, with their herds of administrators, professors and impoverished grad students chasing the brass tenure ring. Think of it as a liberal tick, sucking blood and growing fatter off the efforts of Americans who actually produce something while contributing nothing to society except the clearly secondary contributions of those few in the fields of science and mathematics.

The other component of the Complex is the progressive element. Colleges and universities serve as a reservoir of leftism in society that serves several functions for those trying to turn America into a less blonde, less macho Sweden. First, it provides a taxpayer-subsidized lifestyle for millions of liberal voters to enjoy without actually having to produce anything. No wonder university types vote 95% for Democrats – they are voting themselves a salary and a sinecure. It’s welfare for people with graduate degrees and “Coexist” bumper stickers.

David Friedman comments on a disturbing trend.

 A pattern I have observed in a variety of public controversies is the attempt to establish some sort of official scientific truth, as proclaimed by a suitable authority—a committee of the National Academy of Science, the Center for Disease Control, or the equivalent. It is, in my view, a mistake,  one based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. Truth is not established by an authoritative committee but by a decentralized process which (sometimes) results in everyone or almost everyone in the field agreeing.

Read it.

If you’re a student in Massachusetts, you now have the option of visiting the locker room of your choosing under the new state guidelines about gender identity. State law now forces nondiscrimination based on gender identity. In other words, if you’re a male identifying as a female, you can hang out in the ladies’ locker room, and vice versa. “We wanted to come up with something that would best address their needs and their safety needs and affirming their identities,” said Grace Sterling Stowell of the Boston Alliance of Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Youth, who used to be a male.

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Business Forward is a 3-year-old trade association designed to be a liberal counter weight to the Chamber of Commerce. Many of its staff have had stints in the White House or the Obama campaign. Funded by corporate donations, it facilitates meetings between business executives and Obama Administration officials. Like OFA, the group raises suspicions of selling access to government officials.

The Associated Press reported this morning that “more than 50 corporate members pay $25,000 or $50,000 a year to be involved in briefings between Obama administration officials and business leaders, small businesses and entrepreneurs.”

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

Read it.

As you know if you have been following this dramatic story unfolding in Brooklyn Park, Maryland, seven-year-old Josh Welch has been suspended for two days after he allegedly fashioned his breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun.

Did I say “dramatic”? I meant “stupid.”

Pretty sure that if your children are “troubled” by another kid biting a pastry into something that looks sort of like a gun and waving said pastry around, you have already failed as a parent.

Steve Sailer looks at the sort of people who are reproducing these days. (Yes, the headline is a pun. His, not mine.)

 With Dennis Rodman back in the news for his exercise in basketball diplomacy in North Korea, it’s worth mentioning Dennis’s dad, Philander Rodman Jr., who is the father of between 29 and 47 children, according to various published reports and what kind of mood Philander Jr. is in when reporters visit his Rodman’s Rainbow Obamaburger in the Philippines.

No word yet on Philander Rodman Sr.

Read it.

We can make all the windmills the world needs, and it won’t bring back the robust jobby-ness of the past, because things just don’t work that way. Economics is not going to change course because it would make it easier for us to structure our world. It would not take that many people to make all the windmills we would ever need, because in modern and efficient businesses it just doesn’t take many people to do things. If these green energy companies really did go on a hiring spree and started employing the numbers that politicians would like to see, they would be (a) unsustainable and (b) replaced by more efficient businesses with less costs.

Taylorism during World War II created ‘good jobs’ for a lot of semi-skilled people — that’s what Tayorism does — but modern industry depends more on skilled labor supporting extensive automation. There isn’t a lot of demand any more for a high-school graduate from the left side of the bell curve putting widgets together on an assembly line, because robots are doing his job at a lower cost and can run 24/7, don’t get benefits or a pension, and can be trusted to do it right every time.

The jobs are never coming back.

Sad but true. People who want ‘good jobs’ need to focus on things that can’t easily be automated. Unfortunately for the populists, many of sad jobs are ‘service’ jobs that require a human brain in a human body … but that’s about all they require, and pretty much anybody can provide that, which means that the labor pool is large, and consequently the wages are small. Not even Barack Obama can change the elementary laws of economics, although he’s giving it the old Harvard try.

Gavin McInnes is, like, upset or something.

I don’t like foreigners learning English littered with the word “like” as if it were so much roadside garbage. I hate hearing old men use it, and I’m disappointed the word has made it all the way to Britain, but when my daughter uses it, that’s where I draw the line. I immediately called up a sign-maker in Oregon and had him make a sign for my house that says, “You Are Entering A ‘Like’-Free Zone.” He was taken aback by the request and said, “You live around a lot of Valley Girls or something?” I was so happy to hear someone say this. Finally, one human being who thinks it’s unusual to talk as if you’re a really stupid teenage girl on the phone with an even dumber teenage girl really late at night. “No,” I replied, “I live in New York City where EVERYONE says ‘like.’ Businessmen, moms, politicians, teachers, cops. It’s an epidemic.” It isn’t just New York—it’s the entire English-speaking world. People at airports, on trains, and in convention centers use the word at least half-a-dozen times per sentence and they don’t even know it. Do you? Am I the only one pulling my hair out because of this fucking word?

I think he’s kicking against the pricks, here.

The whole thing reeks of insecurity. I remember back in college when a student was asked a question, they’d answer in this neurotic interrogative tone that rose about four octaves at the end. “I’m not sure, but, like—” they’d begin an answer to a Wuthering Heights question, “—I guess, like, Heathcliff loved Catherine?” Those last three words would go high enough to shatter a wine glass. Then we got older and realized we were right about a lot more stuff than we thought, so we confidently said, “It’s a love story” in a monotone. Be brave. Say: “He said, ‘There’s no way we are going to get across the river.’” I realize you don’t have a transcription of what he said. It’s a given that you’re paraphrasing. You don’t need to qualify it with a big fat “like” at the beginning, you pussy.

Good luck with that.

Read it.

Only 14 years after the park opened, the space age that Walt Disney had imagined was becoming a reality. Before President Eisenhower had signed the Interstate Highway legislation, Autopia allowed riders to experience Disney’s interpretation of what the system would one day be like. Autopia accurately envisioned the future of America’s soon to be multilane limited-access highways.

Another addition to Tomorrowland was the Monsanto House of the Future, added in 1957. Items such as picture phones, television remote controls and a microwave oven familiarized many visitors with these ideas for the first time. Tomorrowland continued to prove itself as an innovative predictor of the near future.

Ah, yes, the heady days of optimism, before the Counterculture Left ruined everything.

The oldest members of today’s world lived through the invention or development of the airplane, skyscraper, suspension bridge, radio, television, antibiotics, atomic bombs, and interstate highways. The mid-life individuals went through the first moon landing, the popularization of personal computers and invention of search engines, biotechnology, and cellphones. Participants of the younger generation have seen much up- tuning of these devices, but are greatly lacking in brand new revolutionary inventions.

Read it.

Soft-drink companies have spent huge sums retrofitting their assembly lines to accommodate Mayor Bloomberg’s new soda crackdown, according to industry insiders.

The law, which kicks in March 12, forbids hundreds of city eateries from selling soda in containers larger than 16 ounces.

Few drink makers in New York put beverages in that size bottle — and none is a soda. They include Snapple, Pom and Sunny Delight.

But the 16.9-ounce bottle is a popular size for Coke, Pepsi and other carbonated beverages.

That’s because 16.9 fluid ounces is one-half liter, and can be sold internationally (in, say, Canada and Mexico). So Nanny Bloomberg is forcing vendors to stock two slightly different sizes, one that fits his fascist sensibilities, and one slightly larger that fits the natural market.

If ever there were an example of the negative consequences of heavy-handed government interference with the free market, this is it.

Taki’s Magazine takes a look at government doing what it does best.

Lord Acton’s famous maxim that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is such a nakedly accurate observation of human nature that one might assume no one ever needed to articulate it, much less keep reminding anyone about it.

But a cornerstone of the Grand Leftist Delusion is the notion that when you give human beings the power to legally extort a significant chunk of other human beings’ productive income, this will bring out their best behavior rather than their worst.

And yet, as luck and magic would have it, wherever there is government on Earth, there is corruption. And it’s almost an inviolable law of physics that the bigger the government, the bigger the corruption.

Read it.

 Meat glue is a powder officially known as transglutaminase. Originally, the natural enzyme was harvested from animal blood. Now it’s primarily produced through the fermentation of bacteria. Added to meat, it forms a nearly invisible and permanent bond to any other meat you stick it to.

Hmm.

 Terje took powder and dusted it liberally over the meat pieces. The coated stew meat then went into a circular tin to give it a nice, round filet mignon shape. He was also able to make a New York strip out of thin cuts of round steak. Adding water makes a soupy glaze, and an easier way to coat the meat.

Yuck.

Twenty-four hours later, the humble $4-a-pound stew meat now looks like a $25-a-pound prime filet.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration lists transglutaminase as “generally recognized as safe.” It’s OK to eat cooked meat that’s been glued.

But here’s the problem: the outside of a piece of meat comes in contact with a lot of bacteria making its way from slaughterhouse to table. Usually cooking a steak on the outside will kill all that off. The center of a single cut of steak is sterile, that’s why you can eat it rare. But glued pieces of meat could contain bacteria like E. coli on the inside.

Check it out.

Dedicated to government employees and Union members everywhere. Do not think that your efforts are unappreciated.

Steve Sailer feels somebody’s pain.

 I can totally relate to complaints about how great-grandpa wasn’t allowed to join the Los Angeles Country Club, so he had to make do with joining Hillcrest CC instead (Hillcrest had the better dining room, but LACC had the better golf course). But, I’m fascinated by how Sen. Schumer (D-NY, 1600 SAT score, Harvard BA, Harvard JD, youngest New York legislator since Teddy Roosevelt, never lost an election) is hurt that when his ancestors 700 years ago were invited by the nobles to move to Poland they weren’t allowed to become serfs but had to go into finance instead.

Senator Chuck Schumer is an anti-Semite’s wet dream. Having lived all his life in the loving arms of the Crust, he has dedicated that life to making sure that no taxpayer dollar remains unspent, no wealth remains untaxed, no issue remains undistorted or unexploited, and no television camera remains focused anywhere other than on him.

‘O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!
My tables—meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain—’

Read it.

Oh, noes! Do you mean Bary lied to us?

Read it.

A Louisiana state health inspector poured bleach on 1,600 pounds of venison donated to a homeless shelter last month because the health department doesn’t recognize the group that provided it.

Just wait until people like this are put in charge of our health care. Won’t that be fun.

Read it.

It has been said that Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal and Bill Clinton’s lies about his affair with Monica Lewinsky respectively started and accelerated the distrust Americans have for both political parties, elected officials, its institutions, and the federal government.

But a new film, “District of Corruption,” directed by Stephen K. Bannon, exposes the real roots of the modern disenchantment with the political system — the commercialization of government started by the Clinton administration, continued under George W. Bush’s administration, and put on steroids by the Obama administration.

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This was in Tel Aviv, demonstrating that government workers are much the same the world over.

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Beretta USA in Maryland is thinking of pulling up stakes and moving out of the state because of pending assault-weapons ban legislation. Beretta USA is a division of Beretta, the 500-year-old family owned company which won a contract in 1985 to become the standard sidearm of all U.S. servicemen, replacing the Colt 45.

Funny how that works.

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There’s an idea that the person with a degree is “better” than a person without one. Indeed, The New York Times recently reported on the relatively new phenomenon of companies hiring people with college degrees for jobs that historically didn’t require college degrees. Are you doing this in your business?

If so, I have to ask, better for what? Yes, having a four year degree does show a degree of dedication. You have to pick a major, take class after class, write paper after paper and work on dreaded group projects. (Which, in my humble opinion, should be banished off the face of the educational earth unless the professor is willing to act as a proper manager, which most are not.) But, anyway, in theory you learn some things and you demonstrate that you have stick-to-itiveness. This is worth something.

But what? You also have to assume that no one enrolled in college, shelled out fantastic amounts of tuition and studied for hours to memorize the philosophies of 40 different dead people with ambitions of becoming an administrative assistant. No, they had other goals.

Read it.

A federal appeals court has agreed to hear arguments from a German couple who are seeking asylum in the U.S. According to Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, the German authorities could take their five children away from them if they return to Germany because they want to homeschool their children.

This sort of thing is why America is superior to Europe. Our bureaucrats are assholes idiosyncratically, but their are assholes systematically.

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For a surprisingly long time, the British were proud of their system of socialized medicine, apparently because it was considered egalitarian. Now, however, a series of scandals in the National Health Service has focused attention on how low-quality government medicine is. The National Health Service has been rocked by one report after another of appallingly bad care, with many Britons demanding that NHS officials be criminally prosecuted.

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

Anybody who would trust their health care to the functional equivalent of the Post Office deserves what they get.

Read it.

 Class mobility is not what it used to be in our country, but there are few notions less constructive than that the only way to a middle class life is college. Vocational training should be thought of as the American Dream just as much as four years in a dorm.

For one thing, plenty of people without B.A.s have nice homes and raise nice kids. Besides, too many people in college are there only to get “that piece of paper” for things college has nothing to do with. In a better America, we’d let them realize themselves years earlier.

I like a report by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce . First, mandatory schooling should end after 10th grade. That 10-year education would be fully packed, based on schooling techniques proven to work.

This is how it works in Britain. People who finish what we would call 10th grade get their GCSE; only those headed to college take the two-year program called Sixth Form.

 But factory jobs are not the only ones that don’t require college. Did the guy who installed your cable-TV service have a college degree? How many sound technicians, mechanics or building inspectors spent four years on a college campus? How about the person who did your ultrasound? They are perfectly skilled — without having gone to college.

Most jobs in Information Technology are the same way. Nothing that I do in my daily job, for which I get paid six figures, is built on any one of my three degree programs. What matters in native intelligence — as notorious college dropouts Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg demonstrate quite handily.

 You will hear that some employers are requiring college degrees for low-level jobs, but this is static amid a larger reality. Commonly, those employers are grooming these people for higher-level jobs that have always required college.

Horseshit. They require a college degree to have some confidence that their applicants know at least what high school graduates of our parents’ generation knew — our educational system sucks that bad. Modern American high school graduates are lucky if they graduate with the literacy and numeracy skills that elementary school graduates had back before WWII.

Read it.

From my interaction with Google recruiters, I can tell that by not knowing anyone at Google I am unfit to work at Google. This reminds me of the classic Economist article on the topic of teacher credentialing that shows a picture of Einstein with the caption “unfit to teach.” A hiring heuristic that gives massive preference to internal referrals means you’ll throw away some of the best candidates.

Reading all three-million unsolicited resumes is certainly not the solution either. Using technology like the Bright Score, TalentBin, Entelo, or Linkedin, smart companies can mine the pool to find the best talent. It is surprising, however, that the company that revolutionized the way we find information is still basing its hiring decisions largely on internal word of mouth.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, waxes poetic.

Interesting and unusual quality books, fiction and nonfiction alike, used to make a huge splash, and that “used to” is not so long ago. In 2001 everyone seemed to be reading McCullough’s biography of John Adams; and before that, Charles Frazier’s novel Cold Mountain. A few years earlier, it was Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories if you wanted to keep your end up at dinner parties—I read the first 17 of them seriatim. (And a biography to boot.) Even further back, in the 1970s, you could get a conversation going with lower-middle-class cube jockeys about James Clavell’s Shogun or Julian Jaynes’s Origin of Consciousness. It’s been a decade and a half since I worked in a business office, but I feel pretty sure they’re not talking about books around the water cooler nowadays.

Read it.

Their intentions are, and always have been, crystal clear–unlimited immigration and unconditional amnesty. Everything else is a lie.

Behold the 900-MPH Supersonic Ping-Pong Bazooka

Cordless Neuromuscular Back Pain Reliever

Rechargeable LED Reading Glasses

Read it.

For two months, reporters and lawmakers have ignored a devastating report from the federal government itself, which warns that the nation’s current fiscal policy will lead to economic collapse.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO)—the personal auditor of President Obama and the federal government—released its assessment of the federal government on January 17, 2013. The report’s findings illuminate just how dire America’s spending problem is and, therefore, how little the current cuts debated by Congress do to fix it.

Read it.

According to a report on the investigation:

“Professor Sweet strongly encouraged or mandated that students from several classes sign a pledge card that stated, ‘I pledge to vote for President Obama and Democrats up and down the ticket.’ She also misrepresented her intentions to multiple students, indicating at various times that she was conducting voter registration for the college, that the pledge cards were non-partisan voter registration forms, and that the pledge was a ‘statistical analysis.’”

Prediction 1: It won’t happen. She’ll keep her job, and the whole thing will get swept under the rug.

Prediction 2: Even if it does happen, they’ll get sued six ways from Sunday by various liberal groups, and she’ll wind up with her job back.