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Cutting regulation would be a good idea too.  My example of this is raisin bread.  You know, bread with raisins, cinnamon and sugar in it.  In California evidently you have to have your bread as certified as having enough raisins in it to call it “raisin bread.”  Otherwise, we might die of disappointment or something.

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Stay away from hospitals. People die there.

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If schoolyard bullying is a federal issue, then everything must be, right? But in the eyes of the Obama administration, everything is a federal issue.

The Obama administration has taken a keen interest in what otherwise has to be the most local of issues. Last year, Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali issued a “Dear Colleague” letter in which she threatened school districts that don’t do enough to prevent schoolyard bullying. The letter makes it clear that simply punishing bullies who harass others on account of their race, sex, national origin or disability is not enough. Schools must wipe out the culture of bullying.

No hair is too fine for statists not so insist on splitting it. After all, they know what’s best for us; did they not go to Harvard?

Try to imagine George Washington convening a conference on playground bullies. Just try. Or better yet Andrew Jackson. Or Teddy “Bully!” Roosevelt.

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In fact, if you think about how little time most adults have spent actively learning accurate information about science and scientists, it’s a little amazing that more people aren’t equally confused.

And, sadly, many of those confused people wind up in politics and The Media … with results as you see them.

We graduate high school knowing that Issac Newton discovered gravity, the general anatomical location of our stomachs relative to our hearts, and what happens when a car travelling 30 miles per hour crashes into a brick wall. At some point, probably in grade school, somebody told us about the scientific method, but not how that actually plays out in the real world. We learn the basics. We memorize some charts.

And then we live our lives in a world where science is much more complicated, and constantly changing.

Indeed, a world in which an ignorant public lives under a constant cloud of nameless fear generated by professional hand-wringers whose livelihoods depend on scaring the daylights out of people who’d just rather go about their lives in peace. But unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be on the program.

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

Few corporate expenditures seem to receive as high a rate of return as donations to Democrat politicians.

I may have to establish a new Venture Socialism Watch category.

Read it.

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

Any company with a national presence has to spend money on lobbying — nothing nefarious about that; it’s a simple matter of self-defense. As Microsoft found out back in the 1990s, if you don’t pay for lobbyists, you get screwed by the government on behalf of your business rivals, who do pay for lobbyists — hence the anti-trust litigation that never accomplished anything but wasted millions of taxpayer and company dollars. The lawyers got fat, though, which was apparently one of its objectives. Nobody in the tech sector ever forgets that lesson.

Jerry Pournelle is fond of saying that, when legislators can determine what gets bought and sold, the first thing to be bought and sold will be legislators. Willie Brown, out in California, had this down to an art when he was Speaker of the California state legislature — he would introduce some bullshit regulatory legislation that would effectively destroy a company’s business, then drop it when they saw the light and contributed to his political war chest.

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The Justice Department is forbidden by federal law from hiring employees based on political affiliation. Yet the resumes revealed the following ideological breakdown among the new hires:

Leftist lawyers: 113

Moderate, non-ideological, or conservative lawyers: 0.

Read it.

Government officials rushed $535 million to Solyndra because the Obama administration was determined to make the company the centerpiece of its green agenda regardless of the law of supply and demand. Billions more have been wasted by politicians betting on favored companies and making Washington bigger, using the brute force of government to force liberal preferences into the economy. Mr. Obama calls them “investments,” but this is really venture socialism.

All part of the same mindset: You, Ordinary Citizen, are too stupid to spend your money in the best way possible, so we’ll leave you a pittance to live on — if you’re lucky; we’d prefer that you live on government handouts — and let our Harvard-educated Whiz Kids spend it for you.

That’s what ‘socialism’ boils down to … they prate about The People but they actually mean The Government, and The Government means Right Thinking Folks like themselves.

Read it. And watch the video.

Police in Lancashire have told the owner of a Christian café to stop displaying Bible texts on a video screen, because it breaches public order laws.

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

Officers attended the Salt & Light Coffee House on Layton Road, Blackpool, on Monday 19 September, following a complaint about “insulting” and “homophobic” material.

He says the officers told him that displaying offensive or insulting words is a breach of Section 5 of the Public Order Act, and told him to stop displaying the Bible.

Guess they’ve never read the Koran. And why would they? It’s religious.

The Bible texts are displayed on a TV screen at the back of the café. Mr Murray uses a set of DVDs called the Watchword Bible.

The DVDs cycle through the whole of the New Testament verse by verse, with the words appearing on the screen. Mr Murray mutes the audio.

Yeah, that’s a ‘breach of public order’, all right. George Orwell, call your office.

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Yet more reasons not to use Facebook and Twitter.

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Answer: When seven of the 12 highest-income counties in the country, and four of the top five, are in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

An excellent metric.

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How debased is the term “Bill of Rights” in modern legislative parlance? This debased–California’s Assembly has passed, and its Senate is considering, a “Domestic Worker’s Bill of Rights.” Unlike the original Bill of Rights, which placed limitations on what government to do its citizens, AB 889 demonstrates that government nowadays recognizes few if any bounds at all.

Leftists especially don’t comprehend the difference between ‘rights’ and ‘entitlements’. A right is where you can do something without interference; an entitlement means that somebody has to give you something. A right is good against all other people, whereas an entitlement, while good against all other people in theory, is in practice only good against a designated provider, typically the government.

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When someone predicts that “our soils will become barren” and “the dairy industry will be destroyed,” it’s best to sit up and take notice; a wrathful god wielding some sort of cattle plague is probably in the vicinity. But in 1886, the year those threats were registered with the U.S. House of Representatives, the source of deadly danger wasn’t a peeved deity. It was margarine.

As Hayek pointed out, the worst monopolies are the ones created by the government.

I remember TV ads that compared margarine to ‘the higher-priced spread’; by law, they couldn’t say ‘butter’. Fortunately, we got better.

Making a cheap thing artificially expensive is a great way to create the conditions for a black market. And lo and behold, by 1915 the United States government was deep into the business of locking up folks like oleomargarine bootlegger Charles Wille in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. He was joined by one John L. McMonigle, who served nearly a year for spread-related crimes, and many, many others.

Can you say ‘Prohibition’? Can you say ‘War on Drugs’? I’m sure you can.

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For decades, families fled the dense urban grid for newer types of neighborhoods that felt safer, more private, even pastoral. Through their research, Garrick and colleague Wesley Marshall are now making the argument that we got it all wrong: We’ve really been designing communities that make us drive more, make us less safe, keep us disconnected from one another, and that may even make us less healthy.

And why was that?

The Federal Housing Authority embraced the cul-de-sac and published technical bulletins in the 1930s that painted the urban street grid as monotonous, unsafe, and characterless. Government pamphlets literally showed illustrations of the two neighborhood designs with the words “bad” and “good” printed alongside them.

The FHA had a hand in developing tens of millions of new properties and mortgages, and its idiosyncratic design preferences evolved into regulation. From the 1950s until the late 1980s, there were almost no new housing developments in the U.S. built on a simple grid.

Your tax dollars at work. Whenever the government gets involved, what happens is that a bunch of ‘experts’ decide what’s best for everybody, and so everybody has to do it that way. And when the experts prove to be wrong, as almost inevitably happens, everybody suffers.

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Just before students began returning to classes, the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a new policy that would require all group health care plans provided by employers – including many Catholic institutions – to cover prescription contraceptives and sterilization for women.

And free pork chops to all yeshivas and madrassas! Is this a great country, or what?

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How can that be? According to the Democrats, billionaires are all Republicans!

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Australians applying for new passports now have an extra choice in the gender field, after authorities allowed transgendered people to nominate their official gender as “indeterminate”.

Makes you wonder what kind of she-it they’re going to come up with next.

Maybe they ought to have a spot on the cover that says ‘Y-chromosome [ ] Y [ ] N’.

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

Nineteenth-century American newspapers were, in general, partisan in their politics, and the New York World was a Democrat paper. In 1863, two writers for the World, George Wakeman and David Goodman Croly, wrote a 72-page pamphlet that was published anonymously with the title, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro.

The “Miscegenation Hoax” was a political dirty trick by Democrats from start to finish, and demonstrates how the party has always opportunistically exploited racial animosity for partisan advantage. Indeed, it is one of the marvels of world history that the Democrats, who spent the first 150 years of their existence winning elections by appealing to white racism, were able to become the party of “civil rights” without so much as a blush of shame. (“Civil rights” requiring scare-quotes to convey its actual meaning as a partisan slogan used by Democrats, exactly as “miscegenation” was originally coined for partisan purposes.)

I don’t even have to say anything.

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“It feels like a recessionary environment. What they call it later on I can’t tell you,” says Bart van Ark, chief economist of the Conference Board, who put the odds of recession at 45%. Since 1988, every time the Conference Board’s estimate of the probability of recession topped 40%, a downturn followed shortly thereafter. “The consumer has never really thought that we got out of the recession,” he adds.

Read it.

Eventually the jackals start eating each other. Basic ‘progressive’ principle: What we call fairness applies to Them, not to Us.

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

Read it. And watch the video. A Pepto-Bismol moment.

“I’ll put it this way, you don’t deserve to keep all of it. It’s not a question of deserving, because what government is, is those things that we decide to do together,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) told the Don Wade & Roma show on WLS-AM.

“I think you need to pay your fair share for things we’ve decided are our national priorities,” Schakowsky added.

Don’t really need to say anything, do I?

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“It needs to be a federal entitlement,” Romney said. “I will save Social Security financially as a federal program.”

Which tags Romney as a RINO. Now, a RINO is better than nothing (and nothing at all would be better than Obama), but let’s not have John-McCain-With-Hair as the Republican nominee — that’s how we got in this mess in the first place.

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Well, Slovenia got over socialism; Britain hasn’t yet.

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An economic concept that requires a deep understanding of how to use and manipulate fractions is elasticity: the percentage change in X/percentage change in Y. I wonder: how many students struggle with elasticity formulas because they struggle to manipulate and understand fractions?

Another aspect of the mental arithmetic gap that is easily overlooked is its widening over time. Calculators became affordable in the mid- to late-1970s. Students in the 1980s were taught by teachers who had learned mathematics without calculators, and could do basic mental arithmetic. Students today might be taught by a teacher who is himself unable to work out 37+16 without help. The consequences are neatly described in an “Alex” cartoon I have on my fridge about a proposal to ban the use of calculators in school. “Faced with home work which requires him to work out simple sums in his head today’s lazy seven-year-old will instinctively turn to the quick and easy method of arriving at the answer… i.e. asking his dad, who, embarrassingly also wouldn’t have a clue without a calculator.”

I don’t imagine things are any better in the U.S.

Recent research is suggesting that deep understanding of mathematical concepts is related to basic number sense. A person who can look at two sets of dots and quickly determine which set is larger will also generally be better at abstract, conceptual, mathematical reasoning. I have had a student in my office who could not work out 3×5=? without a calculator. I wonder: what else was she missing out on?

Indeed.

Read it.

Your tax dollars at work. They don’t care, they already have a job, one that’s a lot safer than yours. And besides, you’re just a bunch of poopy-head polluters, so there.

The problem with narrowly focused agencies like the EPA is that the mechanics of what they do requires them to develop a form of tunnel vision — it doesn’t matter whether what they do is smart or stupid, they have to continue to do it regardless because (a) the law requires it and (b) if they don’t do it, no matter how justified their forbearance, they look like they aren’t doing anything … so they get sued by environazis or their funding gets cut or the administrator loses his job or they might even be abolished. So there’s every reason to press ahead with stupid regulations and no reason not to.

Read it.

A new earth-shattering and metaphysically incontrovertible study is out, this one saying that watching SpongeBob SquarePants can cause learning problems in little kids. How bad is it? According to a USA Today writeup, “just nine minutes of that program can cause short-term attention and learning problems in 4-year-olds.”

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

Michelle Malkin is on the hunt for Obama’s uncle Onyango, who (despite being under a deportation order) was apparently released by the Keystone Kops in charge of our immigration system, if one may use the term so loosely.

Uncle Omar is once again the beneficiary of America’s reckless immigration catch-and-release policies.

He has been quietly released from federal custody and all lips are sealed. DHS won’t say a word. The White House won’t say a word. Onyango Obama’s immediate family in Boston won’t say a word. And the lawyer who was all set to appeal his deportation is out of the loop.

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Never lend money. You’ll never get it back.

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Call it Dodd-Frank Inc. A year after Congress passed the broadest financial overhaul since the Great Depression, the law has spawned a host of new businesses to help Wall Street comply — and capitalize — on the hundreds of new regulations.

Besides the lawyers, there are legions of corporate accountants, financial consultants, risk management advisers, turnaround artists and technology vendors all vying for their cut.

“It is a full-employment act,” said Gregory J. Lyons, a partner at Debevoise, where a team of a half-dozen lawyers has drafted 30-plus comment letters in the last six months.

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

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The 53-year-old was grating soap into a saucepan at his home after trawling the internet for bomb-making tips, a court heard.

The two officers were responding to a complaint about eggs being thrown at his house in May when they found Smith “stressed and anxious” as he made the concoction.

It helps not to confess to making napalm while being interviewed by police.

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Everyone who’s dealt with “Gypsies” or the dozen or so different tribes affiliated with the word know they’re about as romantic as abortion. I first learned my utopian vision of them was bullshit back in 1993 when I spent some time in Palermo and saw toddlers stationed on highway medians covered in soot and begging for change. All over Italy, I saw dirt-encrusted pickpockets under the age of ten, and few of them had shoes. The only time I’ve ever seen adult male Gypsies anywhere in Europe has been in bars partying their asses off. One Essex cop told me they shut down all pubs in a ten-mile radius of a Gypsy wedding because there is inevitably complete chaos if they don’t. The men drink all the booze, vandalize the pub, and leave without paying a cent.

The Gypsies in Dale Farm are affectionately referred to as Irish Travellers because although they have essentially the same culture as the Roma, they are white and talk very differently (see Brad Pitt in Snatch). Nobody’s sure why the Irish nomads are so similar to their Romanian counterparts because it’s been this way for hundreds of years. One theory is the redheads met the brunettes at an annual horse fair in the northwest of England called Appleby which began shortly after Oliver Cromwell’s war against the Irish left so many of them wandering aimlessly throughout the countryside in the 1600s. I personally couldn’t give a shit exactly where one Gypsy culture strays from the other. They all suck and for the exact same reasons. The men are king and do nothing but sit on their asses all day. The women are barely considered human beings. The children rank way below that.

Outside of the children, the primary breadwinners in these communities tend to be the women, but when they are arrested for their various petty crimes, the kids are left with no guardian. Men see looking after kids as beneath them, so the police wind up sending the poor bastards to foster care. It’s not unusual for Gypsy women to use foster care itself as a hustle. They play victim, but their entire income is based on scamming innocent victims.

The ones in Dale Farm who will be facing the police on the 19th (along with an army of volunteer soldiers) embody many things the left purports to hate. The examples of environmental destruction, misogyny, homophobia, and child abuse rival extremist Islam. A great behind-the-scenes book about it is Gypsy Boy by Mikey Walsh. It’s the true story of a Romanian Gypsy who grew up getting the shit kicked out of him every day by his bare-knuckled boxing coach/dad and then getting raped every night by his uncle. When Walsh realized he was gay he was forced to leave the group because Gypsies tend to agree with Ahmadinejad when it comes to homosexuality in their community—it does not exist.

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Harbor Beach Community Schools paid one teacher tens of thousands of dollars to leave, despite the teacher getting caught kissing some students and head-locking one after being confronted for his behavior. Dearborn Public Schools paid four teachers a total of $197,353 to get rid of them after charges of sexual misconduct and possession of illegal substances on school grounds. Gladwin Community Schools has dished out about $40,000 thus far in a legal case against a kindergarten teacher arraigned on charges of furnishing alcohol for minors.

These are a few of at least 156 tenure cases brought by Michigan public school districts over the past five years. These 156 cases cost school districts and taxpayers at least $7.7 million to cover the costs of removing, or attempting to remove, tenured teachers.

Must be something in the water.

Read it.

For months, gay men have been using a hugely popular iPhone application, Grindr, to find nearby dates. Now the company behind Grindr is going straight with the more innocently-named Blendr.

The new free app comes weeks after OKCupid, the free dating site, launched an app that lets its members scroll through a list of other members who happen to be close by. Like Grindr, Blendr and OKCupid Locals use the mapping software on iPhones to give you a list of singles (or non-singles, for that matter) who are within walking distance and willing to meet up for, say, a drink.

Yeah. Sure. A drink.

‘Hey, what are you drinking?’ ‘Don’t ask the question if you’re not ready for the answer.’

Like Grindr, Blendr will also monitor profiles for inappropriate material like nude photos and profanity. Users can also report others for “offensive content and conduct.” And when necessary, the company will cooperate with authorities to track down people who have broken the law while using the service.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

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Cops in Florida have written thousands of tickets to motorists for flashing their lights to warn other motorists of speed traps. Problem is, flashing your lights to communicate isn’t against the law in the Florida.

So one motorist has filed a class action.

Which sounds odd, since each ticket is supposed to carry a citation to the statute supposedly violated. If, in fact, no statute has been violated, then the recipient ought to be able to challenge the ticket in traffic court. (Of course, few people bother to challenge tickets in traffic court.)

Richard Cohen, Court Jester for the East Coast Establishment, reveals a ghastly truth.

Over the Labor Day weekend, I went to a number of events in the Hamptons. At all of them, Obama was discussed. At none of them — that’s none — was he defended. That was remarkable. After all, sitting around various lunch and dinner tables were mostly Democrats. Not only that, some of them had been vociferous Obama supporters, giving time and money to his election effort. They were all disillusioned.

Oh noes! When you’ve lost the Crust, you’ve lost it all.

Read it.

Crony capitalism is not just a game Americans play.

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The Obama administration made what was supposed to be a pre-emptive strike on Texas Governor Rick Perry, but which turned out to be, in baseball terms, a “swing … and a miss.” The administration unleashed Education Secretary Arne Duncan to attack Texas’s record on education, with Duncan saying he feels “very, very badly for the children.” When pressed to explain precisely what Texas has done wrong on education, Duncan came up a bit short on specifics. The Education Secretary’s arguments have generated a lot of useful discussion across the web, but I thought I would throw some rudimentary data analysis into the picture.

Not really news, but a useful reminder. Crustian bureaucrats are no more a dependable source of information than Crustian media; neither can be trusted without independent corroboration.

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Welcome to the modern Security State. Bend over and spread ’em.

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The full extent of the campaign of intimidation, attacks and death threats made against scientists by activists who claim researchers are suppressing the real cause of chronic fatigue syndrome is revealed today by the Observer. According to the police, the militants are now considered to be as dangerous and uncompromising as animal rights extremists.

And you can’t get more dangerous and uncompromising than people who can’t see any significant difference between people and animals. (Of course, in their case, they’re probably right.)

Read it.

My father used to tell me that if I worked hard, it would pay off in the long run. How could he have been so blind? Laziness pays off now!

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How’s that Hope and Change working out for everybody?

Tevi Troy turns over a rock.

Recent statements and actions by Pelosi and other Democrats reveal that the Democratic Party believes that making political use of Medicare is more important than ensuring the viability of the program itself.

The eagerness to exploit the politics of Medicare is already influencing the Democratic party’s approach to policy. The Washington Post recently reported that Senator Patty Murray, chairwoman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC)—and newly appointed Democratic co-chair of the deficit reduction super committee—is working behind the scenes to stop any Democratic compromise or effort to reform Medicare. A source close to Murray described her political rationale: “We shouldn’t be giving away our advantage on Medicare….We should be very careful about giving away the biggest advantage we’ve had as Democrats in some time.”

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Four obese children are on the brink of being permanently removed from their family by social workers after their parents failed to bring their weight under control.

In the first case of its kind, their mother and father now face what they call the ‘unbearable’ likelihood of never seeing them again.

Their three daughters, aged 11, seven and one, and five-year-old son, will either be ‘fostered without contact’ or adopted.

Send them to Pakistan, that will thin them down right quick.

Welcome to Nuremberg Scotland.

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In a new AEI Education Outlook “Grade Inflation for Education Majors and Low Standards for Teachers: When Everyone Makes the Grade,” University of Missouri economist Cory Koedel reports that grades awarded to education students at America’s universities are considerably higher than grades in every other academic discipline. What makes those findings especially striking is that education majors score significantly lower on standardized college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT than students majoring in other academic areas like science, business, social sciences and humanities. In other words, it’s a case of the least academically qualified college students getting the highest grades and GPAs on campus.

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

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The welfare state chickens coming home to roost. All of the progressive policies of the last fifty years have taken a land flowing with milk and honey and are proceeding to destroy it utterly.

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Prosecutors throw the book at people in order to scare them into plea-bargaining for a lesser offense, thus increasing their conviction rate and advancing their political careers. It works, to the extent that innocent people will often plead guilty to something they didn’t do in order to avoid the catastrophic results that might ensue from the original charges in our Who Knows What A Judge Or Jury Will Do? judicial system.

Yet another way in which our political system is structurally corrupt.