Read it.

Although close to the United States in population and combined economic power, our European allies and partners continue to shrink in terms of military capabilities.

Read it.

I’m worried that the wells of attention are being drilled to depletion by linkbait headlines, ad-infested pages, “jumps” and random pagination, and content that is engineered to be “consumed” in 1 minute or less of quick scanning – just enough time to capture those almighty eyeballs.

The problem appears to arise because of a mismatch in expectations between the site and the prospective reader. The reader is there to read. The site is there to make money, of which providing something to read may or may not play a part. In the online world, advertising is the prevalent business model; and in the advertising model, money goes to those who attract attention. Unfortunately, much of the advertising world doesn’t differentiate between favorable attention and unfavorable attention. (See here for why this is a bad idea.) In any event, providing an unencumbered reading experience is lower in priority for the site than for the prospective reader.

Read it.

Yeah, hows that hope & change working out for ya?

Amnesty International on Tuesday accused Egypt’s rulers of levels of brutality that sometimes exceed those of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, saying that the hopes of protesters had been “crushed” since the former president was forced to step down.

This is where conservative pessimism about change shows ‘progressive’ optimism the door.

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Consider the resources that GE spends to lowers its tax bill, not just the many millions spent on clever accounting and accountants and the many millions spent on lobbying but also the many inefficient ways that GE structures its businesses just to avoid paying taxes and the many millions it invests in socially wasteful projects just in order to produce privately valuable tax credits. Now add to that the allocational inefficiencies of taxing some firms at different rates than others and you have a corporate tax system which wastes a lot of resources and raises relatively little revenue. Indeed, a corporate tax system with a tax rate of zero could well be preferable as it would waste fewer resources and raise not much less revenue.

And consider that this same throw-money-at-the-problem system exists for people like, oh, say, Warren Buffett — which is why one always hears a sniggering sound in the background as he loudly claims that his taxes aren’t high enough.

Read it.

Now a Bloomberg News headline takes the means-testing argument to an entirely new level: “Taxpayers Billed for Millionaires’ Kids at Charter School.” It’s a public charter school, so one wonder what exactly Bloomberg News would propose as an alternative policy to prevent the situation it finds so headline worthy. Should the children of millionaires be barred at the doors from public schools that are open to other children? Or should they be forced to pay tuition to attend schools that other children attend tuition-free? Has it not occurred to the Bloomberg editors that the “taxpayers” and the “millionaires” are not two mutually exclusive groups and that millionaires actually turn out to pay a lot of taxes, too? What’s next — headlines about how taxpayers pay for roads on which millionaires are also allowed to drive? For playgrounds on which children of millionaires are allowed to run arou

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Occupy Wall Street and many other leftists tend to see their causes as the Vitally Important New Civil Rights Movement (TM) of the day, justifying the use of tactics from the tumultuous 1960?s and 1970?s in political movements in 2011.  Sometimes, they make this point explicitly (such as how gay is the new black), but other times they seem to act like they can do whatever the want because their cause is just.

Combine this with their use of numbers and political power to partially protect them from the enforcement of the law, and what we have is not civil disobedience: it is low-grade political violence against order in general.  This is not surprising coming from the anarchist OWS movement, but it should be surprising to those who believe that OWS is merely about the richest Americans having too much money.

Thus, I propose to liberals the following paradigm for protest etiquette:  If a hypothetical Occupy Planned Parenthood movement were to use the tactic in question, would you want them arrested?  If so they should declare the OWS tactic in question to be out of bounds.

Read it.

The job losses we’ll see in the coming years will make what we’ve seen thus far look like a jaunt in the park. A quick review of recent articles describing the impact of the massive regulatory state (the EPA alone has grown 120 percent under Obama) offers some ominous projections for future job losses.

Hope and Change: We’re changing you from working to non-working, and hope you don’t figure it out.

Liberals, drones, progressives and other anti-American malcontents would be hard-pressed to prove that this President isn’t intentionally trying to establish a permanent underclass, whose subsistence is dependent upon the largesse of the federal government.

They wouldn’t do that, surely?

Alex Tabarrok turns over a rock.

I have written several times before (e.g. here and here) about how Washington insiders, politicians and staff, use their knowledge of behind the scene deals to profit in the stock market (see also Megan McArdle’s recent piece from which I stole the headline). Last night 60 Minutes reported on the story based on new research in Throw Them All Out a forthcoming book by Peter Schweizer.

Read it.

Basically: Do it like Apple. His is an experience that we’ve all had.

Don’t care.

Ain’t my school, ain’t my state, got more important things to think about.

Read it.

If you have ever wondered what would happen in a society consisting entirely of liberals, the Occupier movement is providing the answer: devolution. It is almost impossible to keep up with the downward spiral, but here are some of the highlights of the last 24 hours….

Read it.

Hey, they made that bed, they can just sleep in it.

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Last March the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an $14 million award to John Thompson, a Louisiana man who spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row, because prosecutors in the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office deliberately withheld crucial exculpatory blood evidence. Since the prosecutors themselves enjoyed “absolute immunity” for their egregious misconduct, Thompson argued that their office should be held liable for failing to properly train them in their constitutional obligations. A federal jury agreed, and so did the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. But the Supreme Court reversed that ruling, saying Thompson had not demonstrated a pattern of disregard for constitutional rights under District Attorney Harry Connick that was tantamount to official policy. Today the Court saw more evidence of that pattern as it considered a case in which Connick’s office failed to disclose a key witness’s conflicting statements to Juan Smith, the defendant in a multiple murder trial. Justice Antonin Scalia, who voted with the majority in Connick v. Thompson, lost patience with Assistant District Attorney Donna Andrieu, who persisted in arguing that the prosecution was not obligated to share the statements under Brady v. Maryland, the 1963 decision that established a defendant’s due process right to see such evidence. “Surely it should have been turned over,” Scalia said. “Why don’t you give that up?”

Read it.

The men who killed the al-Qaeda chief have decided to speak out because they are tired of their “shabby treatment” by politicians who claim they were on a “kill mission”.

“I’ve been a Seal for 30 years and I never heard the words ‘kill mission’. It’s a fantasy word. If it was a kill mission you don’t need Seal Team 6; you need a box of hand grenades.”

He said the men were angry with President Barack Obama for announcing Bin Laden’s death on TV just hours after they completed the mission on May 1.

“There isn’t a politician in the world who could resist trying to take credit for getting Bin Laden but it devalued the ‘intel’ and gave time for every other Al-Qaeda leader to scurry to another bolthole,” he said.

Way to go, Barry … Chuck Schumer in not-so-black face.

Read it.

Even a left-wing rag can’t avoid realizing the Unintended Consequences of Yet Another Politically Motivated Boondoggle.

The California High Speed Rail Authority, the agency trying to build the bullet train, couldn’t have found a more politically sensitive target. The school is where House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield), one of the project’s staunchest opponents in Congress, sends his children.

Critics say such blunders are routine for the rail authority. Across the length of the Central Valley, the bullet train as drawn would destroy churches, schools, private homes, shelters for low-income people, animal processing plants, warehouses, banks, medical offices, auto parts stores, factories, farm fields, mobile home parks, apartment buildings and much else as it cuts through the richest agricultural belt in the nation and through some of the most depressed cities in California.

Although the potential for such disruption was understood in general terms when the project began 15 years ago, the reality is only now beginning to sink in.

Once again, ‘progressive’ pie-in-the-sky can’t be bothered to think it through.

Read it.

Hundreds of protesters affiliated with Occupy DC shut down streets on Friday night near the Washington convention centre, where Americans for Prosperity was holding its annual conference. That day, the conference was addressed by the leading republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Herman Cain.

Read it. And watch the video.

Yesterday a crazed Wall Street Occupier who apparently has been part of the protest for the last three months went on a violent rampage, attacking Occupiers’ tents in Zuccotti Park. He was finally stopped by another Occupier, who turned out to be crazy also.

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

(Hey, the batshit-crazy are part of the 99%, right?)

Read it.

It’s that flapping sound again….

Maybe Men’s Wearhouse will learn from this lesson.  But I can’t guarantee it.

Indeed.

David Harsanyi points out that all of the equality-mongers focus on bringing the high low rather than hoisting the low up. Makes you wonder whose side they’re on.

If the wealthy get wealthier, no one has to become one penny poorer. This childish idea that the economy is a zero-sum game might appeal to the populist sentiments of the so-called 99 percent—or to the envious nature of some others or to the emotions of many struggling through this terrible economy—but in the end, it doesn’t stand up to the most rudimentary inspection.

The explanation lies in ‘income distribution’, as if ‘income’ were a waterfall coming from the stars and what we need to do is ensure that The Wrong Crowd don’t get more than their ‘fair share’. This is what reading Rawls in college will do to you. For the Useless Class, ‘incomes’ are being passed out somewhere and the ‘fat cats’ are cutting in at the head of the line. The swine! Of course, the Useless Class have no idea where ‘incomes’ come from (except perhaps when they get their welfare remittance — ‘It’s free! It’s free! Just swipe your EBT!’), but they’re pretty sure they’re not getting their cut.

You will notice that the Occupy Wall Street crowds—and the progressives who support them—focus on bringing the wealthy down to earth rather than lifting the 99 percent. They have a nearly religious belief that too much wealth is fundamentally immoral and unhealthy for society. The economic systems they cheer on would coerce downward mobility for the sake of equality but ignore prosperity for the people they claim to represent.

And that is a degenerate cultural position that causes more damage than their political activity ever could, entertaining though it might be..

Mark Steyn is gratifyingly dyspeptic today.

The thing is, for better or worse, we are defined by our differences, and if Barack Obama didn’t understand that when he was at a podium addressing a room filled with representatives of Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Venezuela, and the whole gang of evil, the rest of the world certainly did as soon as Qaddafi appeared. Obama and Qaddafi may both have been the heads of state of sovereign nations, but if you’re on an Indian Ocean island when the next tsunami hits, try calling Libya instead of the United States for help and see where it gets you.

The global reach that enables America and a handful of other nations to get to a devastated backwater on the other side of the planet and save lives and restore the water supply in a matter of days isn’t a happy accident or a quirk of fate. It is something that derives explicitly from our political system, our economic liberty, our traditions of scientific and cultural innovation, and a general understanding that societies advance when their citizens are able to fulfill their potential in freedom.

That was then. This is now.

The United States government currently spends one-fifth of a billion dollars that it doesn’t have every hour, every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year including Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Ramadan. A fifth of a billion dollars every single hour—so the $7 billion that John Boehner calls “a real enforceable cut for financial year 2012” represents what the government of the United States currently borrows every 37 hours. In the time between the Friday announcement of the plan and the Sunday morning talk shows’ discussion of it, the government borrowed back every dime of those painstakingly negotiated savings.

Your tax-eaters at work.

You can see this at work—or rather, not at work—every time you’re on the isle of Manhattan. The Empire State Building was put up in one year and 45 days in the middle of a depression. Ground Zero is still a building site after a decade. 9/11 is something America’s enemies did to us. The 10-year hole in the ground is something we did to ourselves.

Or not, as the case may be.

If we don’t turn this thing around by mid-decade, if we let China become the dominant economic power in a world where the Iranians are nuclearizing and where Russia is making whatever mischief it can, we will see something new in world history. Something terrifying. This will not be like the transition from Britain to America, from a crucible of liberty to its greatest exponent. This will be the greatest step backwards for the civilization that built the modern world and spread its blessings across the map. There will be no new world order. There will be no world order.

Take whatever action you deem appropriate. It might even matter. But probably not.

Read it.

Seniors in Maranville’s “capstone” business strategies course complained because he didn’t lecture enough. After a year on the job, citing negative student course evaluations, the university denied Maranville tenure.

What was going on in Maranville’s classroom that generated such a backlash? He says he simply required students to do what most employers wish colleges would do: connect academic concepts to the real world. To facilitate that process, Maranville used the Socratic method, creating classroom dialogue by asking students open-ended questions that necessitated creative thought and participation—even if they hadn’t raised their hands. He also required them to work in teams and participate in small-group discussions during class time.

Pretty heinous.

Read it.

“$30 would get me there, so I thought,” she told a reporter from KGO TV in San Francisco. “Now it’s $25 for one bag, $35 for another bag.”

She explained that she had no money and asked if she could pay upon her arrival in Idaho, but says the airline refused. She even offered to leave one of her bags behind, but the airline said this was against security rules.

Read it.

Most federal programs have never been evaluated for true effectiveness. And most evaluations that are conducted – and there are many – aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. They may examine a national program only locally, or lack a “control group” to compare against.

And we aren’t likely to find out, either.

Read it.

Every few months, it seems, we hear of another online content store dying or changing… and with it, out goes all the content that people thought they were “legitimately” buying, because the connected DRM server goes dead. It makes you wonder why anyone buys any DRM’d content at all, knowing that in a flash, it might all go away.

Which is why I never store stuff ‘in the cloud’, because when the sun comes out the clouds go away.

Read it.

Thanks, guys, you’re really helping.

(No millionaires were harmed in the making of this hippie behavioral sink.)

Read it.

Let’s start with the good news. Arson in Detroit (you know, Devil’s Night, where the Motor City’s Black occupants burn down buildings) was down 50 percent this year. The bad news: how much of Detroit is there actually left to burn?

An excellent question.

Read it.

Of course, if a Republican were President, this would be covered wall-to-wall 24/7.

Funny thing about that. You’d think the media were … what is that phrase? Biased?

Read it.

Churches already struggling to cope with the theft of metal from their roofs are now being targeted for items such as brass crucifixes and bible stands.

What sort of low-life would steal from a church?

Well, Muslims would….

Read it.

A per curiam opinion is a short unsigned opinion on behalf of the whole court. It usually indicates that there wasn’t a lot of disagreement and not much time was spent on it.

The Ninth Circuit (or ‘Ninth Circus’, as Rush would say) Court of Appeals is the most reversed group of judges in the history of the United States.

But nevertheless Justice Ginsburg seems to feel the need to kiss it and make it better.

Read it.

The conventional wisdom is that America has become a “service economy,” but actually, in many sectors, “service” is disappearing. There was a time when a gas station attendant would routinely fill your tank and even check your oil and clean your windshield and rear window without charge, then settle your bill. Today, all those jobs have been transferred to the customer: we pump our own gas, squeegee our own windshield, and pay our own bill by swiping a credit card. Where customers once received service from the service station, they now provide “self-service” — a synonym for “no service.” Technology enables this sleight of hand, which lets gas stations cut their payrolls, having co-opted their patrons into doing these jobs without pay.

Read it.

Recent years have seen an explosion of male joblessness and a steep decline in men’s life prospects that have disrupted the “romantic market” in ways that narrow a marriage-minded woman’s options: increasingly, her choice is between deadbeats (whose numbers are rising) and playboys (whose power is growing).

Gee, I wonder why that is.

In 2001, when I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. Allan and I had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. He was (and remains) an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind. My friends, many of whom were married or in marriage-track relationships, were bewildered. I was bewildered. To account for my behavior, all I had were two intangible yet undeniable convictions: something was missing; I wasn’t ready to settle down.

What’s missing is the point where the author changes from a child to an adult. There’s a lot of that going around these days, and what goes around comes around.

Steve Sailer says what everybody knows but nobody admits.

Wow, that will definitely heighten awareness among Today’s Youth of Color: Harry Belafonte! Don’t let anybody tell you the NAACP is the National Association for the Advancement of Certain People resting on their laurels.

And it’s amazing how quickly recent immigrants latch on to the We Are Colored Victims trope.

How could they have forgotten America’s litany of historic crimes against Sikhs?

As I said, just an internal squabble among the Crust, using the underclass (and their own kids) as tools and dupes — a more-disorganized-than-usual bit of Street Theater.

So, they are organizing the logistics of their campout: How many different kinds of recycling bins should we have? That sort of thing. Middle class white people find this kind of self-organizing to be pretty fascinating. It also bores the heck out of most minorities and non-middle class whites, which has the salutary effect of driving away undesirables.

Heh.

The obvious model for this is the successful Burning Man campouts that take place each September on a godforsaken dry lake bed in Nevada. A bunch of naked white hippies do a pretty fine job of setting up a huge community for one week each year. (My cousin, the tough hippie, goes there every year, and now his octogenarian mother, a lifelong outdoorswoman, wants to go to Burning Man, too.)

Let’s them blow off steam and forget for a week that NOBODY ELSE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT THEIR PATHETIC ADOLESCENT WHINING.

Burning Man started out in San Francisco, but moved to the middle of nowhere for various reasons, one unmentionable one being: barriers to entry. Ticket prices are now a few hundred dollars for entry, plus the cost of travel and camping equipment. That keeps out the petty criminals, homeless guys, gang-bangers, and other predators, parasites, and losers. Old San Francisco hippies remember, even if they won’t mention it, what kept the Haight-Ashbury Summer of Love in 1967 from continuing: criminals, especially black criminals from the Fillmore district, discovered, to their delight, that drugged-up white hippie chicks were easy prey. So Haight Ashbury went from a utopian middle class scene to a dystopian underclass one in weeks. Hence, it’s really expensive to get to Burning Man now.

Reality always intrudes upon left-wing fantasy. If you own the country and its guns, you can stretch it out for a bit, as the old Marxist-Leninists found out, but eventually either it all comes apart, as the old Soviet Union discovered, or you hold the note and change the key, as the Chinese eventually decided.

Unlike some people, I remember the sixties and seventies, when such demonstrations were the social herpes of college campuses — they’d go into remission for months, only to break out in embarrassing sores when it was most inconvenient for the uninfected.

Read any of the hippy memoirs of the 1964-1974 period and you’ll find that the Voices of the People spent most of their time wrangling over political posturing while badmouthing the Judean People’s Front deviationists. It was very amusing if you were over for a visit but didn’t have to live there, and inexpressibly tedious if you had to step over the dogpiles while trying to get to work.

(I’ve always loved their use of the word ‘demonstration’ — it encapsulates the truth that these gatherings were only for show and didn’t represent an actual working version suitable for production.)

Read it.

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

Read it.

Hey, those things can turn on you.

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Andrew Goodram, 31, suffered a punctured lung and two broken ribs after the gang of four yobs shouted: “white bastard” at him before subjecting him to a vicious assault.

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

Of course, if this had been white people beating on non-white people, the explosion in the media would have been heard round the world.

Note the term used: ‘yobs’. You’ll see why in a minute.

“I’m scared now and when I see groups of Asian people and this attack has changed how I feel about going out.

The attackers were Asian and aged between 20 and 30. One of the men has been described as Asian, in his early 30s, 6 ft 2 in, of heavy build, with a bald head and a thin ‘lined’ type beard.

‘Asian’, of course, is code for Pakistani Muslims. But they can’t say that, otherwise it couldn’t be printed.

“I do believe the attack was racially motivated because I am white but I don’t understand why. I thought we are supposed to live together in peace.”

Sure, just keep on thinking that until they cut your head off. After all, you obviously have no use for it.

Read it.

The cathedral has now been closed for a fifth day over health and safety fears; the longest time it has been shut in living memory. At the height of the Blitz, German Luftwaffe bombers only managed to keep the cathedral closed for four days.

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Indeed, two Americas do exist: the makers and the takers.

No one should prejudge the patriotism of any American, but your station in life informs your own political views.

Consider today’s economic reality. Last year, 47 percent of Americans paid no federal income tax. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that nearly half (48.5 percent) of all Americans received “some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2010,” according to census data, making American families “more dependent on government programs than ever.”

Those Americans – call them “takers,” a crude term but one that accurately describes them as receiving more from government than they contribute – do not have a direct personal interest in fiscal responsibility, limited government or reduced spending. In fact, their livelihoods depend on the “gravy train” continuing uninterrupted.

For the Americans whose income levels require them to pay income taxes – call them the “makers” – they have a discrete and clear interest in taxes remaining low and in government being made leaner and more efficient. This dynamic has been described in Patrick J. Buchanan’s new best-selling book, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”

Today, the top 1 percent of all income earners account for 40 percent of the federal taxes. If you confiscated every penny earned by the top 1 percent, you would gain about $1 trillion, wiping out these productive Americans and still not balancing the budget.

Read it.

Yet more reason not to send your kid to a government school.

Read it.

Gee, if you squint really hard, that looks a lot like ‘devolution’ and maybe even ‘self-determination’.

Somalia is one of those relics of European colonial rule. Africa as a whole would be better off if the colonial-era countries would break up into more natural subdivisions. The chief obstacle is the WaBenzi and their armies; they prefer to have a larger population from which to steal.

Read it.

A faltering economy explains much of the job shortage in America, but advancing technology has sharply magnified the effect, more so than is generally understood, according to two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The automation of more and more work once done by humans is the central theme of “Race Against the Machine,” an e-book to be published on Monday.

“Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine,” the authors write.

Read it.

Millions of women obtain abortions because they do not want baby girls.

It’s shocking, but incontrovertible. Two decades ago, Harvard economist Amartya Sen, in an arrestingly titled article, documented the statistical reality that “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing.” In a recently published book, Unnatural Selection, journalist Mara Hvistendahl convincingly demonstrates that the overwhelming reason for the increasingly large demographic disparity in the male-female birth ratio is sex-selection abortion. Hvistendahl estimates the number of missing or dead now to be 160 million and counting. Women have abortions because (among other reasons) they are able to learn the sex of their unborn baby and kill her if she’s a girl.

Scott Johnson at Powerline likes to point and laugh.

In his statement marking the death of Muhammar Gaddafi last week, President Obama inserted a mystifying passage: “[T]he Libyan people now have a great responsibility — to build an inclusive and tolerant and democratic Libya that stands as the ultimate rebuke to Qaddafi’s dictatorship….”

“An inclusive and tolerant and democratic Libya.” Can we mull that over with a glass of wine at the faculty club?

Obama is the poster child for Leftists Out of Touch With Reality.

No sooner had Obama read his statement than Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the chairman of the National Transitional Council and de facto president, announced that Libyan laws would have Sharia as their “basic source.” Just to get the ball rolling, he immediately lifted one law from Gaddafi’s era that he said was in conflict with Sharia — the law banning polygamy. Happy days are here again.

Yeah, there’s that Hope and Change stuff in action.

Read it.

Another layer to the depth of the Sebelius abortion corruption has been revealed with today’s AP report that Kansas health department (KDHE) in 2005 destroyed the state late-term abortion reports at the heart of the felony charges against Planned Parenthood.

The pre-trial hearing for felony “false-writing” charges had been scheduled for Monday Oct. 24, Since the original reports have now been discovered as destroyed, the Johnson County District attorney’s office had asked for a delay so they could engage other witnesses to verify the authenticity of copies of the state reports.

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

KFL Executive Director, Mary Kay Culp, said, “Only guilty people destroy evidence; not even we anticipated Sebelius and her administration could stoop this low to protect abortion industry criminality, but this proves they did. Sebelius wanted to insure that evidence of illegal abortions was removed before Kline could use it to convict her abortion industry campaign supporters. We truly can’t find words to adequately convey how outrageous this is. We are especially incredulous given that Sebelius’ Health department testified about these reports in Johnson County court in 2008 without once mentioning that the reports had been destroyed!  It’s all so unbelievable, and yet, given the players, so very believable indeed!”

What’s wrong with Kansas? Well, they have a bad habit of electing Democrats, for one thing….

Read it.

“Passing the Regents don’t mean nothing,” Ms. Thomas said. “The main focus in high school is to get you to graduate; it makes the school look good. They get you in and get you out.”

I’m convinced that one of the reasons that so many job openings these days specify a college degree, even for positions for which such a requirement seems silly, is because that’s one way employers can be sure of getting people with at least what used to be considered a high-school education.

Read it.

The minivan driver who knocked Wang down, and then ran over her deliberately, has since surrendered to the police, but offered a curious explanation for his action. He said he had been talking on his mobile phone when he hit the girl, but decided to run her over because it would have cost him less to pay off a dead girl’s parents than to pay for her hospital expenses.

“If she had died, I would have been required to pay only about 20,000 yuan (about Rs 1.5 lakh) in compensation, but if she were injured, it would cost me hundreds of thousands of yuan in hospital expenses,” he said.

My question is, did it ever have a soul to begin with.

Read it.

A look at the Boy Scout’s Handbook.

The Boy Scouts of America celebrated their hundredth anniversary last year, and this year is the centennial of The Handbook for Boys, their first official manual. Comparing it with the current edition of the handbook—the 12th, published in 2009—shows that the small outpost of civilization manned by the Scouts holds on bravely in America. But decades of aggressive political correctness have had their effect, and the Scouts have lost some of the confident American boyishness that loves heroes and makes for heroes. This is too bad for the more than 3 million boys enrolled in the Scouts today, and for the society in which they will grow up to become men.

The Boy Scouts of America have endured their share of criticism over the years, to be sure. Before the First World War, they were accused of being militaristic. More recently, they have been attacked for excluding girls, for insisting that belief in God (any god) is a requirement of citizenship, and especially for being anti-homosexual. This last indictment has taken the BSA all the way to the Supreme Court; in Boy Scouts v. Dale (2000), the Court upheld the right of the organization, as a voluntary association, to refuse to hire homosexual scoutmasters. Criticism on this theme has continued since the ruling, and seems to have gotten even nastier in the ensuing decade. The Boy Scouts today bear the scars of these attacks, and their latest handbook reveals that they have succumbed in some ways to these relentless demands for political correctness.

I have a copy of the re-issue of the 1908 Boy Scout Manual, and it is a delight to read.

The new handbook retains the traditional focus on the outdoors, with much of the same information on how to camp, hike, fish, sail, and fend for oneself in the wilderness. But its discussions of these things have been pared down and lack the verve, punch, and adventurous spirit—the manliness—of the original handbook. Whereas the first edition imparts tough-minded common sense, the 12th edition brims with cautionary tales and safety checklists, emphasizing timidity rather than adventure. The front cover contains a pull-out manual for parents on How to Protect your Children from Child Abuse. It’s as if the first thought our boys should have is that they are potential victims.

I wouldn’t waste money on the current edition.

Read it.

And none of them mention the books that leftists in the Crust get rid of because they’re Politically Incorrect, like Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus. And God help you if you want to watch Disney’s Song of the South.

Katherine Mangu-Ward does a little fisking of the zeitgeist.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s decision to stay out of the Republican presidential race means that the American people will be spared months of discussion about his ample waistline and the bad example it sets. Nonetheless, with first lady Michelle Obama urging everyone to get moving, obesity remains a political hot potato, or maybe a tater tot. Below, a helping of skepticism about the causes of Americans’ poor eating habits—and the effectiveness of political fixes.

It is entirely possible that there are people out there who know better than you do what you ought to be eating. I suggest, however, that none of them are elected officials.

Read it.

A Black high school football team (Hancock County) attacks the opposing teams head coach (Dave Daniels) in Georgia after he coaches his team to victory. Daniels is white; his attackers were all-Black.

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