Read it.

Now, perhaps you’re like me and any time you hear someone say something that so clearly dismisses anyone else’s well-being aside from their own, your brain shuts down your ears for fear that your entire faith in the basic providence of humanity would be vanquished in an angry mind-fire. So let me break this down for you. Samuels, President of a union of teachers, is saying that they’ll block online courses regardless of any evidence as to their efficacy if it results in even oneless lecturer on campus. Learning? Rising costs in education for students? Technological progress? Unimportant, fools! This is where I think back to the union leaders of old, who pushed for social reforms effecting those outside their union members, and wonder where it all went wrong.

Read it.

An independent British medical watchdog says the first treatment proven to help people with the deadliest form of skin cancer is too expensive to be used by the U.K.’s health care system, a recommendation critics called a potential death sentence.

Don’t you just love that government-provided health care? Don’t you just wish we had a system just like that?

Well, then, vote for the Magic Negro and he’ll do his best to … well, probably just ignore you — but he’ll certainly talk a good fight.

Read it.

The pigs want to be fed.

Read it.

Attorney Martin White says he and Haley Cobb’s family have patiently waited for 11 months for the $9.7 million they’re owed from winning a medical malpractice case the largest jury award in Trumbull County’s history.

That’s a bunch.

Read it.

An article in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Play details not only how much children’s play time has declined, but how this lack of play affects emotional development, leading to the rise of anxiety, depression, and problems of attention and self control.

“Since about 1955 … children’s free play has been continually declining, at least partly because adults have exerted ever-increasing control over children’s activities,” says the author Peter Gray, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology (emeritus) at Boston College. Gray defines “free play” as play a child undertakes him- or her-self and which is self-directed and an end in itself, rather than part of some organized activity.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

Occupy Wall Street protesters said yesterday that packs of brazen crooks within their ranks have been robbing their fellow demonstrators blind, making off with pricey cameras, phones and laptops — and even a hefty bundle of donated cash and food.

“Stealing is our biggest problem at the moment,” said Nan Terrie, 18, a kitchen and legal-team volunteer from Fort Lauderdale.

“I had my Mac stolen — that was like $5,500. Every night, something else is gone. Last night, our entire [kitchen] budget for the day was stolen, so the first thing I had to do was . . . get the message out to our supporters that we needed food!”

Don’t see what room they have to complain — stuff should be free, they’re sayin’; some just take it closer to home than others.

Hey parasites! Be careful what you wish for!

John Hinderacker turns over a rock.

To be blunt, people this dumb should be ashamed to show their faces in public, let alone try to tell the rest of us how to run the country.

Read it.

Saturday night I watched Bill Clinton give himself a blowjob for four hours, and it wasn’t pretty.

But nobody does it better. Barack is still in training.

Read it.

Read it.

The flapping sound you hear is the chickens coming home to roots. They have no one to blame but themselves, for voting into office the people who are destroying their economy and their lives.

“The people at the bottom, young people trying to start their career, the underclass, people in the service and agricultural industries, they have got an insurmountable problem in attaining the California dream. A young person leaving college and wanting to start a family in California today goes to Texas.”

… where they will be welcome, if they are willing to work and willing to keep their noses out of other people’s business, i.e. leave their California ways behind.

The stark divide between the haves and have-nots is growing. Beverly Hills 90210, with its $50 million mansions, was named the fifth most expensive zip code in America this week by Forbes magazine. But two of the state’s other cities, Fresno and San Bernardino, are among America’s ten poorest population centres of over 200,000 people.

That’s what socialism does. The nomenklatura live in luxury, and everbody else starves. That’s why rich people in California are all liberal Demorats — if you aren’t a member of the pack, you’re prey.

Perhaps the starkest example of how far some people have fallen in the economic downturn is a man in his 50s, who once earned a six figure salary as a producer on television studio sitcoms and small budget Hollywood movies.

A few years ago he lived in a three-bedroom house with two cars in the drive and occasionally mixed with A-list stars. Now, he lives with his wife and two children in one room at the Union Rescue Mission. He calls it the shelter’s “penthouse suite.”

That’s what happens when you’ve got a niche skill. When the niche goes away, so do you. If he were a plumber or an electrician — or a computer programmer — he’d probably still have a job.

Read it.

Call us paranoid, but we obtained a law-enforcement-grade software extraction tool for the iPhone to see exactly what data is up for grabs. You’d be surprised to see just how much data today’s smartphones can store — and police can access.

Legally, during traffic stops, officers need a warrant to search your cell phone; however, if you give them your phone voluntarily, they can use these tools to search it. Next time an officer asks you to give up your phone, ask to see a warrant first.

Read it.

Hint: Probably. Why should they remain in a country where English is becoming a foreign language?

Read it.

Thanks a lot, Barry.

Read it.

At middle schools across the country, metal lockers that were long considered decorated if they had photos of friends or the teen heartthrob of the moment — Shaun Cassidy years ago, Justin Bieber today — have suddenly become the latest frontier in nesting.

Peek inside, and find lockers outfitted with miniature furry carpets, motion-sensor-equipped lamps that glow when the door opens, mirrors, decorative flowers, and magnetic wallpaper in floral and leopard-print patterns.

It is hard to say whether retailers have merely capitalized on or actually created demand among girls for the accessories. Either way, they are being embraced from Little Rock, Ark., where an owner of an upscale children’s boutique, the Toggery, said the demand for locker chandeliers had led to “snatching and grabbing” in the store’s normally genteel aisles, to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where shoppers at Lester’s who failed to pounce quickly enough found themselves picking over the dregs before the school year even started.

These are the kids who, in ten or twenty years, will wind up camping out with signs in a park in the City, wondering how their lives went so horribly wrong.

Read it.

But they benefit American producers, who have big bucks to spend on lobbyists (and Congresscritters). Nobody gives a shit about American consumers, who stupidly keep voting the same Congresscritters back into office.

Read it.

In official Washington, there is an afterlife, and it’s a crowded, cacophonous place. Called the public speaking circuit, this D.C. Elysium is bound by the same transactional laws as the realm that preceded it. But instead of political parties, it is governed by speakers bureaus that promise visibility to those who sign up. In the past 30 years, a proliferation of bureaus has promoted, booked and enriched former lawmakers, candidates, consultants, Cabinet members, political reporters and gadflies.

“Let’s say you are secretary of something — there are two ways you are going to make a really good living: a lobbyist or a speaker, or a combination of the two,” said James Carville, the political consultant and a client of the Washington Speakers Bureau, the agency that represents Gates.

Doing well by doing … well….

Read it.

Despite his rhetorical attacks on Wall Street, a study by the Sunlight Foundation’s Influence Project shows that President Barack Obama has received more money from Wall Street than any other politician over the past 20 years, including former President George W. Bush.

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

Message: Extortion works.

I guess the Occupy Wall Street people are occupying the wrong Wall Street. (Does D.C. even have a Wall Street? Maybe a StoneWall Street….)

Read it.

A father has been questioned by police under anti-terror laws for taking pictures of his own daughter in a shopping centre.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. (Actually, in California, this would probably be enough to make him register as a sex offender.)

Read it.

The villages and farming communities that surround Uganda’s capital, Kampala, are gripped by fear.

Schoolchildren are closely watched by teachers and parents as they make their way home from school. In playgrounds and on the roadside are posters warning of the danger of abduction by witch doctors for the purpose of child sacrifice.

The ritual, which some believe brings wealth and good health, was almost unheard of in the country until about three years ago, but it has re-emerged, seemingly alongside a boom in the country’s economy.

The mutilated bodies of children have been discovered at roadsides, the victims of an apparently growing belief in the power of human sacrifice.

Thank God for the U.N. and the International Community, or Africa would still be suffering under the boot of those Oppressive White Regimes. God knows what sort of a hell-hole it would be today without that blessed circumstance.

Read it.

The House Judiciary Committee passed a bill yesterday that would make it a federal crime for U.S. residents to discuss or plan activities on foreign soil that, if carried out in the U.S., would violate the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) — even if the planned activities are legal in the countries where they’re carried out. H.R. 313, the “Drug Trafficking Safe Harbor Elimination Act of 2011,” is sponsored by Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), and allows prosecutors to bring conspiracy charges against anyone who discusses, plans or advises someone else to engage in any activity that violates the CSA, the massive federal law that prohibits drugs like marijuana and strictly regulates prescription medication.

This Is Not Good.

George Will is always worth reading.

Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and former Obama administration regulator (for consumer protection), is modern liberalism incarnate. As she seeks the Senate seat Democrats held for 57 years before 2010, when Republican Scott Brown impertinently won it, she clarifies the liberal project and the stakes of contemporary politics.

The project is to dilute the concept of individualism, thereby refuting respect for the individual’s zone of sovereignty. The regulatory state, liberalism’s instrument, constantly tries to contract that zone — for the individual’s own good, it says.

Read it.

Mr. Harold, a 71-year-old Vietnam War veteran who drifted here in the late ’60s, has participated for about a decade in a federal program called H-2A that allows seasonal foreign workers into the country to make up the gap where willing and able American workers are few in number. He typically has brought in about 90 people from Mexico each year from July through October.

This year, though, with tough times lingering and a big jump in the minimum wage under the program, to nearly $10.50 an  hour, Mr. Harold brought in only two-thirds of his usual contingent. The other positions, he figured, would be snapped up by jobless local residents wanting some extra summer cash.

“It didn’t take me six hours to realize I’d made a heck of a mistake,” Mr. Harold said, standing in his onion field on a recent afternoon as a crew of workers from Mexico cut the tops off yellow onions and bagged them.

Six hours was enough, between the 6 a.m. start time and noon lunch break, for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard. On the Harold farm, pickers walk the rows alongside a huge harvest vehicle called a mule train, plucking ears of corn and handing them up to workers on the mule who box them and lift the crates, each weighing 45 to 50 pounds.

And yet the whiners say they can’t get a job. The problem appears to be that they can’t keep a job.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Steve Sailer says about everything that needs to be said on the subject.

I hadn’t been paying attention to the Amanda Knox brouhaha in Italy, but, yeah, it turns out to be just another example of the Hunt for the Great White Defendant. A black burglar raping and murdering a college girl is depressing, boring and stereotypical, even in Italy, so let’s spice up the crime by making up stories about how the victim’s 20-year-old white Seattleite roommate must have been the Real Killer, as OJ would say.

Freeberg has a complaint.

If the money was just left in the free market…the kinda sorta free market…then anybody who wants to complain about where the money’s getting spent, would have to take it up with each of the millions upon millions of people doing the spending. And that is the point to a government stimulus program: To gather the money into one channel, so people can look at how it was spent and then bitch about it. It makes the bitching and blaming and finger-pointing easier. All this talk about how to make the next one work better, is just a crock. This one was as big as we can afford, and it went as well as it’s ever gonna. It was still a complete flop — and that’s what the process looks like. Anyone who needs to run a few more cycles on a merry-go-round so they’ve got time to get that figured out, I think they should go off somewhere and do it in an isolated test environment, with a lot less money. If they find out I’m wrong, let us know…otherwise…don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you.

The problem with government intervention in the economy is that it’s about as effective as trying to create a printed circuit board with a hammer.

Read it.

Read it.

Globally population growth rates are likely to continue dropping – to less than 0.8 percent worldwide by 2025 – largely due to an unanticipated drop in birthrates in developing countries such as Mexico and Iran. These declines are in part the result of increased urbanization, the education of women, and higher property prices. Already the global fertility rate, including the developing countries, has dropped in half to an estimated 2.5 today (Longman, 2010a). Close to half the world’s population lives, notes demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, in countries with below replacement rate birth-rates. The world, he suggests, is experiencing a “fertility implosion” (Eberstadt, 2010).

Right now the situation seems dire. Fertility rates are projected to continue their decline. Increasing life expectancy is contributing to a substantial increase in the elderly population. In many nations, the size of the elderly population will exceed that of the under 15 population for the first time.

This could not have happened at a worse time, because the elderly have become ever more dependent on the state in many nations. Supporting a larger elderly population requires a larger work force, however it will be smaller.

Read it.

…a shame if anything should happen to it! The Democrats took gangster government to a new level today with attacks on Bank of America by Dick Durbin and President Obama. The attacks arise out of the Durbin Amendment to Dodd-Frank, which, as we wrote here, directed the Fed to fix the fees which banks can charge for debit card transactions. The rate set by the Fed is inadequate and will take something like $14 billion out of the pockets of major banks. So a number of banks, including Bank of America, have announced that they will replace the lost revenue by charging a monthly fee for debit cards; in BoA’s case, $5. Even though this was entirely predictable (and was in fact predicted), it has enraged the Democrats.

It is unprecedented, as far as I can recall, for a government official like Durbin to urge customers not to do business with a particular company because he doesn’t like that company’s pricing policies. If another bank offers customers debit cards for $3 and there are no compensating advantages at BoA, it would be reasonable for a customer to shift its business elsewhere. But businesses are entitled to price their products and services however they choose. It is up to consumers to decide which company’s offer they want to accept, if any. The Democrats are such inveterate bullies that they refuse to acknowledge this simple proposition.

Obama’s ignorance of economics is impressive in its comprehensiveness. We need a Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to “prevent this kind of stuff from happening.” What kind of stuff? Banks charging money for their services, like everyone else does? Banks “don’t have some inherent right just to get a certain amount of profit.” Of course not. It is only government that is entitled to your money, regardless of how well or poorly government serves you. But banks certainly do have an inherent right to charge prices that are set by them, not by a government agency, as long as those prices are not collusive.

2012 can’t come soon enough.

Read it.

Considering that he spends all of his time yapping, wagging his tale, whining, and licking his own groin, that probably true. Oh, and let’s not forget pooping on other people’s property and peeing on things to mark what he thinks ought to be his territory. Actually, the similarity is rather frightening….

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

That’s Democrats for you. ‘Bill of Rights? How intolerant. How about Bill of Suggestions? We’re much more comfortable with that.’

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. ‘ — Benito Mussolini

Read it.

And, of course, it takes a British newspaper to notice the smell, and investigate.

More crapitalism.

There was also a focus on terminology, attendees said. For example, the audience was told to use the word “marketplace” and not “exchange” when discussing the law. BCBSA senior vice president Alissa Fox said the meeting was simply a continuation of BCBSA’s long-held belief that “all states should set up their own marketplaces.”

But doooooon’t call it DoubleSpeak….

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” — Adam Smith

Read it. And watch the video.

Recently bringing back it’s popular Monopoly game, incentivizing packages of Big Mac’s and extra large Coke’s with the chance to win prizes and cash, a McDonald’s in Brooklyn was the stage for the latest example of 365Black behavior. Rumors that the Black guy shot in broad daylight (all of this was captured by the beauty of video-recording devices) had just found a Park Place and Boardwalk on his Big Mac packaging have, thus far, gone uncorroborated.

‘Black Muslim’ is beginning to sound redundant.

Read it.

Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal featured an in-depth look at how federal laws increasingly apply criminal penalties for violations involving no mens rea, roughly translated as a “guilty mind.” The stricture against criminal penalties for unwitting violations is an age-old, bedrock legal principle. Alas, in today’s dangerously armed, bureaucratic super-state, ancient legal principles go by the wayside when politicians pretend to be “tough on crime” and when officious civil “servants” indulge their fetishes for power.

U.S. governments at every level these days are prone to “overcriminalization,” which means turning ordinary activity into violations of the law, turning what should be civil violations into criminal ones, and applying penalties far harsher than should be warranted.

Read it.

The European Commission has threatened to take legal action against Britain if ministers do not water down rules limiting foreigners’ ability to claim benefits.

Ministers fear the move could leave taxpayers handing out as much as £2.5? billion to EU nationals, including out-of-work “benefit tourists”, a new cost that could wreck Coalition plans for welfare reform.

Read it.

Washington press and political circles have been abuzz this week over the new Kaiser Family Foundation survey that found families enrolled in employer-provided health care plans have seen their premiums rise by 9 percent in just the past year, a significant increase. The Kaiser Foundation’s report attributes over 16 percent of the premium hike to ObamaCare.

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

Read it.

Since the recession ended, businesses had increased their real spending on equipment and software by a strong 26%, while they have added almost nothing to their payrolls.

Employment appears to be making a transition such as transportation made when we went from horses to cars. Buying a new machine means that you, well, buy a new machine. Hiring a new employee means sticking your foot into a tarpit of actual and potential legal and financial liabilities that many companies are looking at and saying, ‘Nope, don’t wanna go there.’

Maybe things would be different if machines could vote….

Read it.

Apple reckons the iPhone 4S deserves the moniker ‘cos it has a CDMA radio as well as supporting GSM, but it turns out that a 4S will roam only from CDMA onto GSM, not the other way round. So if you’re a European hoping your 4S will work across the USA you’ll be disappointed.

CDMA compatibility needs a secure element as well as a radio – a role fulfilled by the SIM on GSM networks. That can only come from a CDMA operator, so (as the small print reveals) an iPhone 4S can only work on CDMA networks if it was supplied by such a CDMA operator.

Even if you’re an American traveller who bought your phone from Sprint or Verizon (the predominant CDMA operators) you’ll be lucky to get a signal when abroad. The CDMA radio in the 4S doesn’t support the 450MHz band so popular around the Scandinavian countries and across Russia; it’s limited to 800 and 1900MHz, so the majority of CDMA networks will be closed to you even if they had roaming agreements in place.

Pretty lame.

Read it.

The documentary notes, “[P]rohibition turned law-abiding citizens into criminals, and criminals into kings,” “It made a mockery of the justice system, caused illicit drinking to seem glamorous and fun, encouraged neighborhood gangs to become national crime syndicates, permitted government officials to bend and sometimes even break the law…” Unfortunately that is still the case today. The regulatory scheme enacted to “safely reintroduce” alcohol into society following Prohibition’s repeal has grown into a labyrinth of state-based rules, resulting in a number of negative consequences — many similar to those of Prohibition.

Many readers may balk at that, and ask “Sure, we’ve got some blue laws here and there, but how bad could it be?” Examining the regulations on the sale of just one type of alcoholic beverage, beer, makes it clear that significant remnants of Prohibition and even the temperance movement are still with us today —strangling small businesses, protecting cartels and making criminals out of honest citizens.

Read it.

Pretty sad when the cheese-eating surrender monkeys are more willing to step up to the plate than America.

George Will puts his gun in the barrel and pulls the trigger.

Fond of diversity in everything but thought, a certain kind of liberal favors mandatory harmony (e.g., campus speech codes). Such liberals, being realists at least about the strength of their arguments, discourage “too much” debate about them (e.g., restrictions on campaign spending to disseminate political advocacy). Now Frank wants to strip the presidents of the Fed’s 12 regional banks of their right to vote as members of the policymaking Federal Open Market Committee.

Frank is a Democrat, you see, so he loves freedom — freedom of speech, especially.

Frank says he has “long been troubled” from a “theoretical democratic standpoint” by the “anomaly” of important decisions affecting national economic policy being made by persons “selected with absolutely no public scrutiny or confirmation.” It was not, however, until August that this affront to Frank’s democratic sensibilities became so intolerable that he proposed a legislative remedy.

Hey, nothing is more democratic than suppressing incorrect opinions.

Nevertheless, it is notable that the left now has its Ron Paul. Notable and, in a sense, appropriate because one of liberalism’s steady aims is to break more and more institutions to the saddle of centralized power.

Read it.

Note that he isn’t a law professor at Catholic University; it’s as pure a case of gratuitously sticking your nose into other people’s business as I’ve been able to find.

Read it. And watch the video.

In 1949, President Harry Truman signed the Housing Act, which gave federal, state, and local governments unprecedented power to shape residential life. One of the Housing Act’s main initiatives – “urban renewal” –  destroyed about 2,000 communities in the 1950s and ’60s and forced more than 300,000 families from their homes. Overall, about half of urban renewal’s victims were black, a reality that led to James Baldwin’s famous quip that “urban renewal means Negro removal.”

Documenting the ‘progressive’ impulse to make things better by making them worse, and then looking around and saying, ‘What?’

New York City’s Manhattantown (1951) was one of the first projects authorized under urban renewal and it set the model not only for hundreds of urban renewal projects but for the next 60 years of eminent domain abuse at places such as Poletown, New London, and Atlantic Yards. The Manhattantown project destroyed six blocks on New York City’s Upper West Side, including an African-American community that dated to the turn of the century. The city sold the land for a token sum to a group of well-connected Democratic pols to build a middle-class housing development. Then came the often repeated bulldoze-and-abandon phenomenon: With little financial skin in the game, the developers let the demolished land sit vacant for years.

But Charlie Brown keeps running up to kick the football, no matter how many times Lucy pulls it away … and laughs.

The community destroyed at Manhattantown was a model for the tight-knit, interconnected neighborhoods later celebrated by Jane Jacobs and other critics of top-down redevelopment. In the early 20th century, Manhattantown was briefly the center of New York’s black music scene. A startling roster of musicians, writers, and artists resided there: the composer Will Marion Cook, vaudeville star Bert Williams, opera singer Abbie Mitchell, James Weldon Johnson and his brother Rosemond, muralist Charles Alston, writer and historian Arturo Schomburg, Billie Holiday (whose mother also owned a restaurant on 99th Street), Butterfly McQueen of “Gone with the Wind” fame, and the actor Robert Earl Jones.

A real community that doesn’t depend on government? Well, we can’t have that.

Seth Godin is just a bundle of cheer.

Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever? The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created.

For which the only solution the left has, is to try to delay the inevitable by burning through other people’s money. And when that runs out, well, we’re back in the shit, only this time without the resources to build something new, the seed corn having been distributed in the form of welfare checks. Thanks a lot, guys.

Read it.

I thought of that Barbie column that when reading part one of a Deseret News feature that ran under the headline, “The end of innocence: The cost of sexualizing kids.”

This may sound strange, here at GetReligion, but one of the strongest points of this feature is that it seriously downplays the religion side of this subject, leaning instead on source after source after source from mainstream academia and other research organizations. It’s hard to count them all.

The story starts in the tarted-up atmosphere of the typical American shopping mall — in Salt Lake City, the big city in the middle of Mormon territory. You walk along with the young families and their young children, seeing what there is to see. Then the story moves you into the land of pre-teen and teen television.

Steve Sailer keeps trying to fix what’s wrong with the country. I admire his optimism.

However, there have long been complaints about the SAT. The most fashionable involved The Gap. Whites averaged higher scores than blacks. This posed a major PR problem for the academic establishment. The SAT (and ACT) is essential for their continued thriving, but saying that blacks are less intelligent than whites on average is The Worst Thing in the Whole World. But that’s what the SAT says. And the SAT is the cornerstone of academic elitism, which has made American academia globally the envy of the academic world.

Thus, over the last half century or so, there have been anguished discussions between the front men for the academic world and the psychometricians at ETS about how to Close the Gap, without throwing the baby of predictive power out with the bathwater.

So much for the ‘reality-based community’. Unfortunately, the delusions of the upper classes have deleterious effects on us all.

But white parents still tend to assume that SAT stands for Scholastic Aptitude Test. It’s not an achievement test in their heads. The College Board says there is no point in studying extra hard for the SAT, and why would a prestigious not-for-profit institution spin the truth? If you can’t trust the College Board, who can you trust? And signing your child up for intensive test prepping would be unfair to poor blacks who can’t afford all that tutoring and drilling. Plus, prepping for years would be a lot of work for little Taylor, so just let him have his fun.

Meanwhile, lots of people from Fujian are showing up in America whose merchant ancestors ascended to mandarin status by spending their mercantile profits at Confucian literature cram schools for their sons. The assumptions about the SAT flitting around in white people’s heads would never occur to them. “Test prep is unfair to poor blacks? Huh? You crack me up! I like you! You are very funny!”

Somebody (was it John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia? I forrget) once wrote that there wasn’t anything wrong with any major American city that dumping about a million ethnic Chinese on it couldn’t fix. That sounds about right. Look at Singapore.

Not surprisingly, we see vast amounts of white upper middle class rage directed at Amy Chua.

In America today, 98% of the thinking devoted to college admissions goes to figuring out how your own kid can claw his way to the top, and the other 2% goes to airy handwaving theorizing about Closing The Gap. That leaves 0% devoted to thinking about improving the system overall.

Don Boudreaux, Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University, calls out know-it-all politicians.

Here’s a quick question for anyone who takes seriously politicians’ pronouncements about what particular industries are “vital” or are “of the future” or are “crucial to meeting consumers’ needs”: Why do virtually none of these politicians, when they leave office, found their own non-political firms – firms that specialize neither in granting clients access to incumbent politicians nor in projects that depend upon getting subsidies or other favors from those same politicians?

In Texas we have a saying: All Hat and No Cattle. I suspect that it applies often in politics.

But surely if, say, President Jimmy Carter was as smart and as full of correct foresight as he would have had to be in order for sensible people to take seriously his late-1970s pronouncements on the future of America’s energy economy, he could have made a personal fortune, starting at 12:01pm on 20 January 1981, launching and running an energy company (or, more precisely, a synthetic-energy company).  Yet he didn’t even try.  He selfishly denied to Americans – indeed, to the world – the blessings of synfuels.

And what of Pres. Obama?  Even if he wins a second term in the White House, he’ll be only 55 years old when he leaves office.  Will he found and run a health-insurance company?  How about a ‘green’ energy firm?  Or will he, perhaps, found and run a firm specializing in offering middle- and low-income Americans better and more fully disclosed access to consumer credit?  Will he create a successful automobile firm?

I’ll bet (seriously) a good deal of money that he’ll do none of these things.  He’ll not even try.  And for good reason: not only does he know nothing about these matters, he knows nothing about finding investors willing to stake their own funds, or about finding skilled workers and managers willing to cooperate together in such upstart enterprises, so that such enterprises become realities with real prospects for success.

He knows no more about the economic matters upon which he pronounces than does a soap-opera actor portraying a physician know about cardiology or obstetrics.

Read it.

This may not seem like it matters, but it does. We haven’t had a pro-life first lady in the post-Roe era. Every first lady since Lady Bird Johnson, Republican or Democrat, has been openly pro-choice. The last person the leader of the free world talks to before they go to bed matters.

Yes, that includes both Mrs. Bushes. Considering the number of black babies that have been murdered by Planned Parenthood in the last forty years, you would think that Michelle-ma-belle would be sensitive to this issue. But life in the Crust trumps skin color … except when it fits the Narrative.

Read it.

Not really news, but a useful reminder. This prevents job creation in two ways: Employers have less money to pay new employees because they’re supporting more and more unemployed people through the unemployment tax, and employers are more reluctant to hire new employees because it costs real money to get rid of them once they’re on board. These are also major reasons behind chronic high unemployment in Europe (coupled with the disincentive to go back to work when being paid not to work is always an alternative).

Last year, employers paid 27.8% more in state jobless taxes, said Doug Holmes, president, UWC Strategic Services on Unemployment & Workers’ Compensation, a business trade association.

“Unemployment taxes, which were a relatively low bottom-line cost in 2008, are now becoming a significant cost,” Holmes said. “It discourages companies from electing to hire new employees.”

But wait! There’s more!

This is the first time during this economic downturn that states have had to pay interest on their federal borrowing, which currently totals nearly $38 billion. The 2009 stimulus act waived interest payments for two years, giving both cash-strapped states and their employers some breathing room.

The problem with socialism, as Margaret Thatcher so famously pointed out, is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

For Margery Keskin, an executive at four construction-related companies in upstate New York, the extra $2,000 her companies had to shell out means less money goes to bonuses or profit sharing for her roughly 40 employees. And she will have to think twice before she hires anyone.

“We try not to hire because we will be socked by a bigger tax bill for unemployment insurance,” said Keskin.

Thank you, Obamassiah, for all you’ve done for us.