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 Three rocks were thrown through the custom-made glass door, which cost nearly $100,000, according to Denver’s ABC 7 News. By breaking the glass door, the hooded burglar was able to get away with nearly $64,000 in merchandise, making the damage caused even more costly than the theft.

The guys who do the Apple stores think that everybody in the country is a Silicon Valley hipster who loves paying full price for SWPL computing gear.

 “Smash and grabs” at Apple’s retail stores have become something of a trend in recent years, as thieves target the locations for their popular products. In one of the more extreme cases, a burglar crashed into the glass front of a California Apple Store with a BMW X5, causing $600,000 in damage.

Perhaps they will wake up eventually. Apple stores sell more per square foot than Tiffany’s, and Tiffany’s doesn’t have massive walls of glass on their storefront. Just sayin’.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, points and laughs.

No one questions that higher taxes on, say, cigarettes discourage the purchase of cigarettes in the ‘white’ market (that is, outside of the black or gray market in which the taxes are avoided).  Anyone who said “Hmmm….. You say that higher cigarette taxes will discourage their purchase in the white market.  But a real scientist would test that proposition before accepting it.” would be regarded as daft.  Questioning the magnitude of the effect is perfectly legitimate; questioning the effect’s existence and direction is not.

Indeed, quite often the rationale for ‘sin taxes’, especially taxes on booze and tobacco, is precisely because they are an attempt to discourage people from buying booze and tobacco. If raising the price of alcohol and tobacco products is considered effective in reducing sales of alcohol and tobacco, how is raising the price of labor not considered effective in reducing employment?

If you went to the people who make Jack Daniels and said ‘We want to make sure you guys get an adequate return for all your hard work, so we’re going to pass a law saying that everybody has to pay at least $50 a bottle for Jack Daniels’, the response on the part of the makers of Jack Daniels would be a shriek of horror. Unlike legislators, the makers of Jack Daniels know that if you raise the price of something fewer people buy it, a concept that economists know as ‘elasticity of demand’ and politicians know as ‘Huh?’.

And so empirical studies are done to test the law of demand as it applies to human labor and, lo and behold, some studies find that it does not apply while other studies find that it does.  So we are to conclude from this fact that employers of workers whose pay is in the range of the legislated minimum-wage might well not seek to economize on their production costs, in the face of higher mandated wages, by reducing the quantities of labor they hire, by working their laborers harder, or by lowering on other dimensions (say, fewer fringes) their hourly costs of employing labor.

Although this is perfectly in line with the general conviction on the part of those who pass laws that people do not change their behavior when they are socked with new laws but just keep on what they’re doing, dum dee dum dee dum, like sheep standing around waiting to be turned into sweaters and lamp chops.

Of course, seeing that Obama is in his second term, they might actually have a case with respect to a large part of the population. And that would be sad.

Read it.

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

With a flurry of good will and generosity, the Helen Diller Family Fund gave $5 million for Jewish studies in 1999 to the University of California at Berkeley to bring an Israeli professor to the university each year. The intent was partially to balance the anti-Israel invective that permeates that university. As Diller herself put it, “With the protesting and this and that, we need to get a real strong Jewish studies program in there. Hopefully, it will be enlightening to have a visiting professor.” The appointing committee promised that visiting scholars’ political beliefs would not be considered, while Diller indicated her confidence in the committee.

But the Helen Diller Family Programs in Jewish Studies from the start went awry. The university used the funds to hire Oren Yiftachel, a viciously anti-Zionist professor who holds that “Israel has created a colonial setting, held through violent control and a softening illusion of a nation-state and democratic citizenship.” This left the donor displeased and frustrated; in the words of Moment magazine’s Liel Liebowitz, “having given the endowment, there was nothing she could do but wince.”

Too bad Julius Streicher wasn’t available — they could have hired him. After all, he studied Jews a lot.

You can’t beat the Crust on their home turf.

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“Technological revolutions happen in two main phases: the installation phase and the deployment phase,” observes Angel of the Year and new Andreessen Horowitz GP Chris Dixon, who says that the turning point between those phases for the Age of Information is…now.

tReason Magazine adopts the ‘journalism’ of the Left.

President Obama gets lots of kudos for his supposed efforts on immigration reform, even as his administration spends billions of dollars to chase them out of the country. It’s an apparent case of a politician gazing DREAMily out at the country and asking, with a winning smile, “Who are you gonna believe? Me? Or your lying eyes?” Now we find that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have made a specific goal of high deportation figures, and have resorted to using even the most trivial of offenses, including traffic violations, as an excuse to hustle people across the border.

I guess it’s too much to expect the people who are tasked with enforcing the immigration laws to, you know, enforce the immigration laws. I guess it’s unimportant that the people who are being ‘hustled across the border’ are HERE ILLEGALLY and that the reason they GOT CAUGHT was that they BROKE THE LAW WHILE HERE.

This is a great example of the reason why I have nothing but contempt for ‘movement libertarianism’ — the total lack of perspective and the adolescent priorities. We live on a planet that contains A BILLION PEOPLE whose religion is the most anti-libertarian totalitarian ideology in the modern world, and whose adherents are responsible for 95% of the acts of terrorism in the last hundred years, and it’s somehow a moral imperative to let anybody and his bomb-toting brother just waltz over the border whenever he wants to?

Really? REALLY?

The economy is being trashed by a ruling class whose proletarian clients are willing to demonstrate the flaws of democracy election cycle after election cycle, but what we really need to worry about is the fact that people keep getting arrested for buying and using recreational drugs?

Really? REALLY?

I keep waiting for these guys to grow up but they never do. They never do.

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Indeed, there is nothing new under the sun. The ‘progressive’ program, for all its failures, refuses to learn from history, and therefore condemns all of us to repeat it.

Even the glittering island of Manhattan was unnaturally composed of a thin sliver of the rich, garrisoned in wealthy neighborhoods, and a massively enlarging population of the ghetto poor, with very little in between; a million middle-class New Yorkers bolted the city between 1955 and 1965, and the exodus was continuing. The year 1965 was the first in which the city’s elementary schools had a greater proportion of blacks and Puerto Ricans, 50.8 percent, than whites. All races and classes had to cope with a rash of pathologies, from noise pollution and clogged streets to an alarming crime rate. In the first three months of 1965, “serious crime” on subways rose 41 percent. After one particularly brutal and senseless subway killing, in April, Wagner ordered night patrols on every train, with additional cops posted at each of the system’s 480 stations, to combat the predations of “the mugger, the hoodlum and the young punk.”

Sounds very much like your typical Blue state: California, say, or Michigan.

Writing in The New York Review of Books in October 1965, Paul Goodman, author of the countercultural manifesto “Growing Up Absurd,” discerned the specter of Big Brotherism in L.B.J.’s grand liberal vision. It was fine when the government summoned its resources “to prevent or remedy social and physical evils, like urban poverty, exploitation of labor, traffic congestion, air pollution,” Goodman wrote. But this “safeguarding function is entirely different from government trying to make life excellent, to make society moral, civilized or magnificent.” Strip away its vaunting promises and the Great Society, in practical terms, “multiplies professional-client and patron-client relationships” with its “large stable of mandarins” employed to “raise the tone, use correct scientific method, and invent rationalizations. Also, the literate mandarins write the speeches.”

The Crustian utopia in a nutshell. (Emphasis on the ‘nut’.)

Many people don’t remember that William F. Buckley Jr was the first public figure to advocate bike lanes in a major city.

No establishment politician dared to say it, but racial tension, more than any other factor, was responsible for the “crisis” of the city. Crime, narcotics, substandard schools and housing, white flight, the soaring costs of social services – all these were related to the distinct problems of New York’s underclass, a million-plus blacks and 730,000 Puerto Ricans, most of them trapped in vermin-infested ghettos, where two children were bitten by rats on average each day. Products of the city’s poorest schools and excluded from key labor unions, black men faced unemployment and idle days. No fewer than half a million of the urban poor were wards of an overstressed welfare system that would drain almost half a billion dollars from city coffers in 1965 alone.

And just look how things have improved from that day to this! (That was a joke. HA HA. Fat chance.)

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Public records show Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, who is known for being stingy with concealed-weapons permits in an anti-gun jurisdiction, may be giving out permits disproportionately to his friends and political supporters and donors.

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

After all, what’s the good of being a Servant of the Crust if you can’t take care of your friends and family? Let’s get real.

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Sex change operations and nudity workshops.

And four years in Providence, Rhode Island. (I know — curb your enthusiasm.) Plus the chance to rub elbows with lot of Children of the Crust (if that’s important to you) and their European counterparts, like Emma Watson and Victoria of Sweden.

After toying with the prospect of being meritocratic institutions of higher learning, in which the best and brightest of the nation’s rising generation are given the tools to bring us forward into the future, the upper tier schools like the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, etc., have reverted to their traditional role of Networking Camp for the Children of the Crust and Intake Processing for those (chiefly rich ‘oppressed minorities’ who demonstrate Right Thought) desiring to join their number.

There is nothing new under the sun.

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Air Force pilots and sensor operators who fly what the military calls remotely piloted aircraft–drones, to the rest of us — are not eligible for the most prestigious awards for valor. Because they fly the planes from 3,000 miles away, their lives are not on the line.

But outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced Wednesday that he was establishing a new award to recognize the contributions of drone pilots, cyber warriors and others who influence the battlefield from afar.

The new Distinguished Warfare Medal  will rank below the Distinguished Flying Cross.  The Defense Department said it can be awarded for actions in air, land, sea, space or cyberspace but not for actions that involve life-threatening “acts of valor.”

Needless to say, the military already has plenty of awards for desk-jockeys, including six (6) different Distinguished Service Medals (all of which rank higher than the Silver Star), plus the Defense Superior Service Medal and the Legion of Merit. This is just another gong for people who don’t actually risk anything other than eyestrain and maybe carpal tunnel.

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For more than a century, the lengthy school days of French children have been punctuated by a midweek day off, in recent decades for most children on Wednesdays, originally created for catechism studies.

But nobody does catechism any more.

The long hours and peculiar weekly rhythm have been criticized as counterproductive to learning and blamed for keeping women out of the full-time work force, as well as widening inequalities between rich and poor because of the demands they place on working parents. Yet the Wednesday break has remained a fulcrum of French family life.

God forbid that French family life should stand in the way of keeping women out of the full-time work force.

 With all that in mind, the government of President François Hollande recently issued a decree introducing a half day of school on Wednesdays for children 3 to 11 starting in September, while reducing the school day by 45 minutes the rest of the week. In a country with a broad consensus in favor of shortening a school day that typically runs from 8:30 a.m. to at least 4 p.m., and sometimes longer, Mr. Hollande’s government still did not expect the plan to be controversial. It has not worked out that way.

Note the key word ‘decree’. Government knows best, so better get with the program.

 Instead, the edict has incited a wave of protest from France’s powerful teachers unions, parents associations and city governments, which say it was produced without their consultation, is short on details and fails to address deeper concerns about the middling performance of French schoolchildren compared with their peers in other industrialized countries.

Sure sounds like a government program to me. Where’s the problem?

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And not for the better.

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The Washington Post reports that Jack Lew, President Obama’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, held money in an investment fund registered in the very Cayman Islands building that Obama called a notorious haven for tax abuse. The address of the fund is a building called the Ugland House. Obama singled out that building in a 2009 speech against tax haven abuse. With his characteristic subtely, the president declared, “Either this is the largest building in the world or the largest tax scam in the world.”

No surprises here. One law for the Crust, another for the enemies of the Crust; how very European. Totally consistent, when you think about it.

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I am not making this up.

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‘We don’t fly commercial. Only the little people fly commercial … and get felt up by the TSA.’

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I don’t really understand the prohibitionist impulse, which is probably no surprise, considering that I work for Reason, where I like to think the only forbidden word is “forbid.” But I admit that I have more than a philosophical objection. In fact, I have more grounds than most people to understand that making things illegal doesn’t make them go away. Provided that there’s demand for the subjects of a ban (and would anybody bother banning something that nobody wanted?) making things illegal creates business opportunities for those willing to work in the shadows, and despite the law. I know this, because much of the history of my family in the United States consists of providing goods and services that government officials don’t want Americans to have. So when former Rep. Patrick Kennedy and his cronies demand that the federal government enforce marijuana prohibition against the explicit wishes of the residents of Washington and Colorado, I have to wonder if my extended relations are breathing a sigh of relief. And when a gaggle of ill-informed congresscritters cook up an unlikely scheme for banning certain firearms and related accessories, I peer into the background at the press conference, looking for the familiar face of a cousin or uncle of mine suppressing a grin.

Baptists and bootleggers both want booze banned. But markets work even when you don’t want them to.

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Not that anybody will be able to tell the difference….

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The year was 1947. World War II had come to an end, and nations across the globe were rebuilding. For Canada, that meant a return to free market capitalism after years of government-mandated freezes on wages and the price of goods and services. Looking to recover from nearly a decade of thin profit margins, companies began to raise the price on everything from vegetables to automobiles, sending inflation through the roof, and putting a crunch on everyone’s pocketbooks.

The problem, of course, was government actions that lessened the value of the ‘money’ that was ripped loose from the discipline of gold. But government never gets blamed for the problems it causes; it lets businesses who are trying to cope with those problems take the rap.

From Slate, of course.

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How about that Global Warming, eh?

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The central mystery, of course, is never mentioned: Why anyone would want to eat the stuff.

It is, of course from Slate ‘magazine’, the home for ‘…the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, All centuries but this, and every country but his own…’

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And it’s not going to do anyone a damned bit of good, because ‘progressives’ have enough red tape at their disposal to tie up for a hundred years any attempt to get at them.

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What goes around comes around.

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In the long run, children who participate in the taxpayer-funded program do no better than similarly situated children who don’t. But even in the short-run, the benefits of participation are virtually non-existent, as a study earlier found….

Like ethanol in gasoline, once a ‘social’ program is in place, the special interest group that benefits from it typically quickly becomes politically stronger than any opposition.

When a third party (like taxpayers) is paying for something, wasteful spending is almost inevitable. Much federal education spending is wasted, like the $130,000 in stimulus money spent on a book that demonized white people and promoted racial stereotypes. Chicago has rotten schools despite high school spending, and poor-quality teachers. Yet, “Chicago teachers” had “the highest average salary of any city at $76,000 a year before benefits [worth another $30,000 a year on top of their salaries]. The average family in the city only earns $47,000 a year. Yet the teachers rejected a 16-percent salary increase over four years at a time when most families are not getting any raises or are looking for work,” and went out on strike to extract even more money from city taxpayers.

As Jerry Pournelle is fond of saying, the first function of government is to hire and pay government workers. My corollary is that the second function of government is to work toward making the entire population government workers, so as to deepen the moat around the first function.

Growing public disenchantment with dysfunctional public schools and desire for change has triggered a backlash among progressive legal scholars and academics who do not want children to be able to escape failing public schools. For example, a prominent progressive law dean and law professor, Erwin Chemerinsky, is urging the courts and lawmakers to ban private schools and homeschooling in order to force everyone to attend the public schools. In his view, this is the only way to “desegregate” the schools and achieve racial and social equality. (He admits that doing this would severely burden constitutional rights, but argues that doing so would nonetheless be justified to advance a “compelling government interest.”) UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh criticizes this proposal as dangerous and ill-founded, and argues that it is an ill omen for other constitutional freedoms, like freedom of speech and freedom of the press, that could likewise be restricted in the name of promoting equality.

Of course. That’s why ‘progressives’ are so fond of Federal laws and programs — all the better to insure that people can’t escape merely by crossing a state line, as thousands are doing every year by moving from, say, California and Michigan to, say, Texas. The Iron Curtain wasn’t built by Republicans.

Read it.

The most remarkable thing about this article is, that an article in the Washington Post admits that a fashionable government program failed.

Unfortunately, it can’t let you know the real reason it failed: The Democratic Party is the party of those who want to give you Free Stuff, and among the Free Stuff they like to give out is American residence and American citizenship — it’s one of the chief means they have of buying new voters, and has been since the 19th century. ‘Vote for us and we’ll let to stay here, and let you bring in all of your relatives’ is why Hispanics vote overwhelmingly for Democrat candidates, no matter who the Democrat candidate is.

Chicago style persists even when the Obamassiah has moved to Trantor.

Many opponents to the meters worry about the type of data the smart grid will collect, opening up a potential for hackers and criminals to know when residents are home or not. Also, because the meters work on a wireless RF system, some are concerned about health safety in their home. Reports of health risks due to the meter’s wireless transmitter’s emission of electromagnetic frequencies surfaced in 2011. People with the meters installed on their homes reported symptoms such as headaches, insomnia, tinnitus, and DNA breakdown.

C’mon, Big Brother knows best! Give up on this individual liberty thing and get with the program!

Read it.

Mamet points out that this is just more ‘progressive’ feel-good Security Theater.

Mamet describes it as a “hoax”– a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, because “assault weapons” are used in few crimes, and the very designation “assault weapon” is based on a gun’s cosmetics–i.e., does it look menacing?

Going after such guns makes some people feel safer because they have slowly, and perhaps unknowingly, traded their independence for a “government knows best” mentality.

Think about Ronald Reagan’s 10 most dangerous words in the English language–“Hi, I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Reagan saw these words as dangerous because they were indicative of an encroaching government that had taken unto itself the role of determining what was best for you and for me: a role for which our government simply was not designed.

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Borlaug is an eighty-two-year-old plant breeder who for most of the past five decades has lived in developing nations, teaching the techniques of high-yield agriculture. He received the Nobel in 1970, primarily for his work in reversing the food shortages that haunted India and Pakistan in the 1960s. Perhaps more than anyone else, Borlaug is responsible for the fact that throughout the postwar era, except in sub-Saharan Africa, global food production has expanded faster than the human population, averting the mass starvations that were widely predicted — for example, in the 1967 best seller Famine — 1975! The form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths.

Yet although he has led one of the century’s most accomplished lives, and done so in a meritorious cause, Borlaug has never received much public recognition in the United States, where it is often said that the young lack heroes to look up to. One reason is that Borlaug’s deeds are done in nations remote from the media spotlight: the Western press covers tragedy and strife in poor countries, but has little to say about progress there. Another reason is that Borlaug’s mission — to cause the environment to produce significantly more food—has come to be seen, at least by some securely affluent commentators, as perhaps better left undone. More food sustains human population growth, which they see as antithetical to the natural world.

In other words, the Enviro-nazis and their krewe hate him because he stands in the way of their turning the world into a human-free zone.

Imagine how much better life would be if all of those who worry about too many humans being on the planet decided to Do The Right Thing and subtract themselves from the gene pool. The world would have fewer people and we wouldn’t have to put up with all of their whining. Win-win!

Read it.

No doubt much will be lost if we abandon cursive completely. Without it, how will we be able to understand the full historical significance of Sarah Palin’s motorhome? If we stop practicing looped descenders, will our fine motor skills be honed enough to thread needles and assemble motherboards in hellish Chinese factories? And what will we use to teach our kids the efficacy of valuing style over substance? As Vanderbilt education professor Steve Graham points out in the Journal, “People judge the quality of your ideas based on your handwriting.” According to at least one study he cites, visually impressive handwriting can elevate a “generic classroom test score from the 50th percentile to the 84th percentile” while sloppy penmanship “could tank it to the 16th.”

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‘Where we’re going, we won’t need … minimum wages?’

 No longer will they say, “He’s going to end up flipping burgers.” Because now, robots are taking even these ignobly esteemed jobs. Alpha machine from Momentum Machines cooks up a tasty burger with all the fixins. And it does it with such quality and efficiency it’ll produce “gourmet quality burgers at fast food prices.”

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But you knew that.

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Officials at Pennsylvania’s Mount Carmel Area Elementary School suspended a 5-year-old kindergarten student for making terroristic threats. The girl allegedly threatened to shoot another girl and herself with a pink Hello Kitty soap bubble gun. The girl’s family says police interrogated her for three hours without their knowledge after she made the “threat.”

I am not making this up.

Their police force must be recruiting from the extreme far left of the intellectual bell curve.

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How this happened is anyone’s best guess, since routes for government-sanctioned parades are designated gun-free zones by Louisiana law.

I guess they really work, huh….

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Welfare has become a major political issue in the United Kingdom. During the 13 years when Labour was in power, it seems not to have occurred to most Britons that Labour’s open-door immigration policy, combined with the U.K.’s liberal welfare benefits, were likely to lead to abuse. Now, people are starting to notice.

Will we learn from their mistakes? Not bloody likely.

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For an academic organization based on language and the study of English, the Modern Language Association seems to have only one thing on its mind and it isn’t language.

What’s language got to do with politics? Well, the MLA seems to think it does.

• Queer Theory without Antinormativity;
• Postqueer? Postrace? The Political Stakes of Queer;
• Queer Theory in a Post Colonial World;
• Queerness as Form;
• Transgender France;
• Movements, Incantations, and Parables of Queer Performance
• LGBTQI Graduate Students and Academia;
• Queer Sexualities in African Literatures and Film;
• Queer Occupations;
• Gay Culture in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union;
• Racing, Queering and Psychoanalysis;
• Queer Times: Affect, Phenomology, Temporality; and
• What is Post-AIDS Literature?

Hey, English teachers get bored with their day jobs and surf the net just like everybody else….

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Legislators pass entitlements out to as much of the population as they can get away with, i.e., as close to 50% of the population as they can, so they that they are able to ensure themselves re-election. They are paid back by crony lobbyists, who provide them with soft-dollar payoffs for votes, and when the time is right, crony corporations provide revolving door opportunities outside of Congress (or dark cellar opportunities if they stay in Congress).

Which results in this. The crony military-industrial complex still exists, but it is quickly becoming second fiddle to the Entitlement-Crony Complex. From Social Security, to Medicare to food stamps and free cell phones, the voting public is being manipulated for its vote. At the same time the crony elitists have expanded well beyond the military, and include Big Pharma and crony insurance, among many others. And, of course, the banksters always collect their fees.

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That’s because academics won’t get you on national TV, nor the cover of USA Today.

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

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Why are Americans working less? While there are a number of factors, the phenomenon is due mainly to a variety of public policies that have reduced the incentives to be employed.

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

Compare 2010 with October 2012, the last month for which food-stamp data have been reported. The unemployment rate fell to 7.8% from 9.6%, and real GDP was rising steadily if not vigorously. Food-stamp usage should have peaked and probably even begun to decline. Yet the number of recipients rose by 7,223,000. In a period of falling unemployment and rising output, the number of food-stamp recipients grew nearly 10,000 a day. Congress should find out why.

When you pay for something, you get more of it. When you pay people for being unemployed, you get more unemployed people. Economics 101.

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Something’s amiss at the Department of Interior. Eight government scientists were recently fired or reassigned after voicing concerns to their superiors about faulty environmental science used for policy decisions. Which begs the question, “Are some government agencies manipulating science to advance political agendas?”

Oh, ya think?

Radley Balko blows the whistle.

Prosecutors have enormous power. Even investigations that don’t result in any charges can ruin lives, ruin reputations, and drive their targets into bankruptcy. It has become an overtly political position — in general, but particularly at the federal level. If a prosecutor wants to ruin your life, he or she can. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it.

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No doubt with his marketing honchos standing over him, tapping blackjacks into their palms, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has been busy walking-back comments he made to NPR in which he described Obamacare as an example of a fascist enterprise. While still critical of the administration’s controversial healthcare scheme, which is heavy on government mandates, he now regrets his choice of words. That’s a damned shame, since he was dead-on with his original description.

 

Read it.

Like many people whose houses were badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy, my family and I have been living in a rented house since the storm. Unlike some whose houses were totalled, we could have repaired things and been home toasting our tootsies by our own fireplace by now. What happened?

Two things: zoning (as in “Twilight Zone”) and FEMA.

The chief obstacle to repairing the damage of hurricanes and other natural disasters is — surprise! — government red tape.

Before you could get a building permit, however, you had to be approved by the Zoning Authority. And Zoning—citing FEMA regulations—would force you to bring the house “up to code,” which in many cases meant elevating the house by several feet. Now, elevating your house is very expensive and time consuming—not because of the actual raising, which takes just a day or two, but because of the required permits.

Kafka would have liked the zoning folks. There also is a limit on how high in the sky your house can be. That calculation seems to be a state secret, but it can easily happen that raising your house violates the height requirement. Which means that you can’t raise the house that you must raise if you want to repair it. Got that?

Hey, we’re from the government, and we’re here to help.

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It’s one thing to ask an open-ended technical question that lends itself to straightforward answers (e.g., “What are some things you could do to minimize the time spent in garbage collection?”). It’s quite another to subject the interviewee to game-show riddles. “Four people want to cross a bridge. They all begin on the same side. You have twelve minutes to get all of them across to the other side. It is night. There is one flashlight. A maximum of two people can cross at one time,” etc.

I have only faced one such interview, and (no doubt as punishment for my sins) accepted their offer; I learned within a month that the guy was a micromanaging asshole. Fortunately it was a contract position so I could bail out without too much damage to my résumé. But it was Hell while it lasted.

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All the better to blow you up, my dear, you filthy Zionist.

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 The strike that began Wednesday, which idled more than half of the city’s school buses and forced about 113,000 children to find new ways to school, was prompted by a fight over union jobs. But its true roots are in an attempt to reform one of the most inefficient transportation systems in the country, one that costs almost $7,000 a year for each passenger, an amount so high that many of those children could hire a livery cab for about the same price. By comparison with the next three largest school districts, Los Angeles spends about $3,200, Chicago about $5,000, and Miami, $1,000.

Much as with the Labour Party in Britain, the capture of the Democrats by trade unions leads to waste, inefficiency, and ever-increasing debt.

Tell me again how great unions have been for the working man — but include the bit about bleeding everyone else to death, just for balance.

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

Quite appropriate for all those Wisconsonites to feel ashamed for their long history of bigotry and racism.

Then there’s the cheese….

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Unfortunately, it’s frighteningly realistic.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Scientology is the most successful of the New Age scams designed to part fools from their money.

There was a time when the cult could sue a few critics and thereby intimidate everybody else. But the Internet makes it impossible to silence the truth, and the truth is not Scientology’s friend.

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If the Bloomberg v. Union showdown proceeds as the Rahm v. Union did this summer, next will come t-shirts, floats in parades, partying with violent and radical neo-fascists, and eventual capitulation by the mayor.

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Hm. A Democrat mayor charged with corruption. My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Yeah, gotta stop those people breathing, they’re screwing everything up.