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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Actually, Hemingway warned about this sort of thing in Death in the Afternoon. But does anybody listen?

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Well, they would know.

Apparently the FBI doesn’t quite recognize that “Big Brother” is the government.

Funny how that works.

Check it out.

That’s me on the right.

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Here is my definition of a recession:

• two or more consecutive quarters in which real GDP lower than real GDP in an earlier quarter, and

• the year-over-year change in real GDP is negative in at least one quarter.

The latest GDP estimates from the Bureau of Economic Analysis indicate that the recession continues. By my definition, it has now lasted 14 quarters: 2008Q1 through 2011Q2. Real GDP for 2011Q2 was $13,270.1 billion (annualized rate, chained 2005 dollars), which is lower than the pre-recession peak of $13,326.0, which was reached in 2007Q4. Average annual real growth over the 3.5 years from 2007Q4 to 2011Q2 was -0.12 percent.

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Well, that’s what happens when the government provides your health care.

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“Perhaps you’ve noticed the trend among certain people these days,” wrote Neil Genzlinger in The New York Times the other day, “to decide that certain other people are not living acceptable lives and must be reformed.”

Yes. There certainly is a lot of that going around.

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In a series of hearings, Rep. Darrell Issa and Sen. Charles Grassley have been systematically dismantling the administration’s preposterous claim that no one in the Justice Department — which oversees the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — knew anything about the so-called gun-tracking operation.

In Fast and Furious, ATF officials encouraged “straw buyers” in Arizona — including two convicted felons who should have been stopped by the FBI — to purchase more than 2,000 heavy-duty firearms, including AK-47 variants and .50-caliber sniper rifles, and then resell them to the Mexican drug cartels, allegedly to trace and stop crossborder arms trafficking.

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Well, I’m certainly glad they haven’t anything more important to worry about.

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A Mexican judge on Tuesday sentenced a 14-year-old American boy to three years in prison for homicide, kidnapping and drug and weapons possession.

Authorities say the teen confessed to killing four people whose beheaded bodies were found hanging from a bridge.

I wonder where all the ‘prisoners’ rights’ people are.

Jimenez was born in San Diego, California. He and a sister were arrested in December as they tried to board a plane to Tijuana, where they planned to cross the border and reunite with their mother in San Diego.

Yeah, we really need to re-unite these kids with their parents.

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Shoulda moved to New York.

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A Whole Foods employee has sent a blistering 2,343-word email to staff after quitting his job, describing the company as a “faux hippy Wal-Mart.”

Hey, that’s a feature, not a bug.

The Other McCain has video.

One hesitates to say President Kabuki has hit rock bottom, because there’s probably no limit on how far down the low road he’s willing to go.

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Well, to start with, he’s a non-Hispanic white male.

While 1,500 CEOs say that creativity is the single most important quality for success today – and studies bear out the greater success of creative, innovative leaders – the study found that when it came to hiring and promoting practices businesses consistently marked down the creative managers and bypassed them, selecting less creative types!

Quelle surprise.

Don’t forget, the Apple Board fired Steve Jobs some 20 years ago to give his role to a less creative, but more “professional,” John Scully.  Mr. Scully was subsequently fired by the Board for creatively investing too heavily in the innovative Newton – the first PDA – to be replaced by a leadership team willing to jettison this new product market and refocus all attention on the Macintosh.  Both CEO decisions turned out to be horrible for Apple, and it was only after Mr. Jobs returned to the company that its fortunes re-blossomed when the company replaced outdated industrial management philosophies with innovation.  But, oh-so-close the company came to complete failure before re-igniting the innovation jets.

Kenneth Anderson at the Volokh Conspiracy has a fundamental insight.

I call Washington all f**ked up and mean, because no rational person would seriously entertain default.  You call Washington all f**ked up and mean, because no rational person would agree to these kinds of deficits.  We think — in the current twitter-talk of a pox on both their DC houses — Washington is a mess because we can’t find a compromise.  The truth is, however, we don’t actually think there is much room to compromise and, given that our principles on this represent a fairly sizable difference in world view, that’s probably right.  The structural problem of Washington is that everyone has a hold-up; “let’s vote and majority policy wins” doesn’t work because we’ve allowed a consensus system informally to take hold, rather than a majoritarian one (albeit one revisable at least in part by a future majority).

And that’s the fundamental problem — searching for a consensus that doesn’t exist, and an unwillingness to let the side with more votes win. Granted that the latter isn’t a panacea — Democrats had two years where they complete control of the government, and they still didn’t do anything — nevertheless it’s better than what we have now. Politicians just aren’t willing to put their names on a policy and push it through, because if it fails they own it; they’d rather dither and moan and let things fall apart, because then they can keep pointing the finger at the other side in hopes of improving their chances of re-election.

Read it.

We’ve all been there; You’re at an outing or a dinner table with friends but itching to check your email or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Google+ or Yammer or what ever digital hit of serotonin you prefer. Have you ever “gone to the bathroom” in order to check email or come up with a socially appropriate excuse to pull out your smartphone just so you can check your @ replies on Twitter?

Remember when the critical mass of smokers used to leave the table or meeting in groups to go indulge their habit? I straight up open my laptop at bars and parties, and then feel more guilty about that than drinking.

Soon we will have implants — call them the ‘electronic cigarettes’ of the tech world.

Read it.

(Don’t you just love the way they picked a photograph that makes it appear as if he’s wearing a red armband, just like — wait for it — the Nazi party members used to do? And this is the Telegraph, not your Usual Suspect. Pure class, the media.)

Glenn Beck has a problem, and I don’t see that it’s a problem he’ll be able to fix. However much he may have noticed this resemblance — and there is a resemblance, although (considering the ideologies involved) I’d have characterized it as ‘Young Pioneers’ rather than ‘Hitler Youth’ — and however reasonable it may be to mention this in private conversation, he ought to have known that to say it in public would be … unhelpful, let us say.

Now, if he had been a commentator on CNN or MSNBC positing a resemblance of a gathering of Young Republicans to Hitler Youth, nobody would have blinked an eye. But that’s the world we live in, and Beck has been in that world long enough to realize it, and to learn to deal with it. Sadly, he hasn’t.

Read it.

Fifty years ago, Congress passed legislation that allowed the public to give voluntary gifts to lower the federal debt. The government has set up a P.O. box and even an online site where citizens concerned about the debt can make contributions to pay it down.  Every month, about 30 to 50 gifts come in, averaging less than $500, often accompanied by letters from citizens expressing their gratitude for our country and their desire to lift the burden of debt from the shoulders of future generations.

So what does Washington do with the money that citizens send in to reduce the debt?  Turns out the federal government … spends it.

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

The next time Obama – or Bill Gates Sr., or Warren Buffet, or any other rich mouthfarter– complains that his taxes are too low, tell him ‘Write a check!’

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An excellent article (how surprising to find it in the New York Times) about one of the central issues in the Civil War, and the ways that it really affected the people in the trenches, so to speak.

It is almost impossible for us today to appreciate how people of the mid-19th century felt about slavery, most especially those who supported it; the obvious contradictions inherent in being a pro-slavery American are so clear to us, that we literally cannot conceive how anyone could see it any other way. And yet there were enough of them to fight a war. Wrapping our heads around that is the first step on the road to understanding similar evils in the modern world, from the Judenhasse that still afflicts the European upper classes to the way Muslims look at, well, everybody.

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Boy, those unions — putting people to work, eh?

Arnold Kling is not afraid to expose the man behind the curtain.

One of the other panelists, Maya Wiley, made no pretense of humility. She would gladly spend whatever it takes (of other people’s money, of course) to give everyone broadband Internet access, whether they want it or not. I can imagine a scene where she announces getting government funding for fiber-optic Internet connections to a poor neighborhood, and while she stands beaming in front of a group of poor people, several of them get out their smart phones and ask her, “You’re not going to make me give up my 4G, are you?” (And, yes, poor people are adopting smart phones.)

‘I want to move to a country where the poor people have smart phones.’

Basically, Wiley and LaMarche reinforced my view that non-profits are for people who would rather dictate to customers than serve them.

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

In the non-profit sector, donors are comparable to shareholders and agencies are comparable to management. But the beneficiaries have no say in the matter.

Much like taxpayers in the ‘public sector’, if you call donors ‘contributors’.

What’s worse than a non-profit that by its nature ignores the wishes of beneficiaries and instead gives them what the donors and managers think they should want? A non-profit that by its nature uses the coercive mechanisms of government to ignore the wishes of beneficiaries, etc.

And, baby, do we have a overabundance of those.

Read it.

After experimenting on 24 adults, a research team at the University of California, Berkeley has determined that viewing content on a stereo 3D display hurts your eyes and your brain. The scientific term is “vergence-accomodation,” which means that the eye must constantly adjust to both the distance of the physical screen and that of the 3D content. This can supposedly cause visual discomfort, fatigue, and headaches, which I had thought were just a part of life but apparently there’s a scapegoat: 3D technology.

In his Journal of Vision article, The Zone of Comfort: Predicting Visual Discomfort with Stereo Displays, author Martin S. Banks (also professor of optometry and vision science) writes, “When watching stereo 3D displays, the eyes must focus — that is, accommodate — to the distance of the screen because that’s where the light comes from. At the same time, the eyes must converge to the distance of the stereo content, which may be in front of or behind the screen.”

We hates it, my precious.

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For purely peaceful purposes, you understand. So we can go ahead and cut the defense budget in order to pay out more welfare benefits. Not a problem.

Maybe we can make a deal with the Chinese: They ship us manufactured goods and we ship them poor people.

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Quelle domage.

The federal government pays oil companies about $6 billion a year to blend ethanol into your gasoline; it’s been subsidizing ethanol for 33 years now.

No mention the damage done to cars and their owners by the ethanol mix. After all, who cares about them?

The government forces oil companies to use ethanol. And that mandate is growing. Next year, it will call for more ethanol than the industry produced this year.

Of course, reality has never intruded into the world of government mandates.

A tariff on imported ethanol will die with the subsidy. But that’s not likely to stop ethanol production from using about 40 percent of all the corn grown in the United States.

Corn that could be used to, oh, I don’t know, feed people perhaps. But I guess nobody in government cares about them, either.

Read it.

The issue is whether work done at a new $200 million grain terminal will be done by the ILWU or by non-union labor.

However, there is now another union entering the picture (the Operating Engineers) that may cause this volatile situation to escalate even further.

Ruh-roh.

John Bolton wants to know.

An excellent question, to which numerous answers suggest themselves.

With President Obama’s Libya policy staggering from one embarrassment to another, last week he and Secretary of State Clinton outdid themselves. They publicly welcomed Russia’s effort to insert itself as a mediator, an act of such strategic myopia that it must leave even Moscow’s leadership speechless.

Permanent Security Council members Russia and China abstained on the initial resolution authorizing force to create a Libya no-fly zone and to protect innocent civilians. By not casting a veto, Russia thereby tacitly allowed military action to proceed. As they did, Russia repeatedly second-guessed and harshly criticized NATO’s operations. Now, as a mediator, Russia will, in effect, have the chance to rewrite the Council’s resolution according to its own lights.

Some of us remember this as the day that man landed on the moon, a proud day in the history of mankind and in the history of America.

Google decided to show a doodle honoring Gregor Mendel — a fine person, to be sure, and important in the Great Scheme of Things … but more important than landing on the moon?

I wonder whether they’d have done a moon-landing doodle if it had been somebody other than Americans who had first landed on the moon.

Read it.

Consistently Obama treats the FICA pay-in as merely another tax to be played with as part of a redistributionist policy.  During and immediately after the 2008 campaign it was a plan to issue refundable tax credits which amounted to double-dipping, and in the past year it has been the FICA tax holiday.

The common theme throughout Obama’s proposals has been to divorce benefits and pay-ins, and to treat Social Security benefits as merely another government welfare program.

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Benyamin Mizrahi, 23, the Israeli man who died in the damaged van, was found to have five passports on his person, the Southland Times newspaper reported.

Three surviving Israelis who were in the van with Mr Mizrahi fled New Zealand within 12 hours, making their way back to Israel.

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This Apple Store looks so real we still can’t quite believe it isn’t. The KIRF-ers have excelled themselves this time: mimicking or at least reinventing everything from the Brave New World posters down to the dog-tags and “We live here” demeanor worn by the staff. There were a few giveaways, however, which led observant blogger BirdAbroad to whip out her camera and start gathering evidence: slight imperfections in the decor, a lack of individual names on staff badges, plus an unlikely location in the Chinese Backwaterville of Kunming.

They have the technology.

Read it.

The United Egg Producers and the Humane Society of the United States have partnered to work toward the enactment of federal legislation that would set national standards for hens involved in U.S. egg production. The proposed standards, if enacted, would be the first federal law addressing the treatment of animals on farms.

How this is any business of the Federal government is, of course, not discussed.

If passed by Congress, the legislation would supersede state laws including those that have already been passed in Arizona, California (Proposition 2), Michigan and Ohio. The agreement to pass comprehensive federal legislation for standards of egg production puts a hold on planned ballot measures related to egg-laying hens in both Washington and Oregon. Home growers will face the same regulations – even those with small chicken coops.

And that’s what brought the United Egg Producers in; only major factory farm operations can afford the cost of compliance with this sort of regulatory regime. The Humane Society, of course, is one of the pioneers among organizations that exist solely to stick their noses into other people’s business.

The Other McCain doesn’t seem to think so.

Dan Collins called Thursday night and, among other things, we talked about how politically correct revisionist history has convinced young people that the past was a hateful and benighted era, furnished wall-to-wall with racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of oppression.

If you surveyed liberals and asked them, “What was the most evil time and place in human history?” they would almost certainly name Germany under Hitler, but America during the 1950s would be a close second.

I remember that period as being less troublesome than what we have today. Fewer busybodies wandering around poking their noses into other people’s business, certainly.

There are many liberal couples who, when inevitably confronted with what economists would call the “division of labor” dilemma, choose to apportion their marital obligations in a more or less traditional fashion: Husband as father/breadwinner, wife as mother/homemaker.

From time to time, a liberal feminist will write an essay musing in semi-guilty tones about her satisfaction as a stay-at-home mother. These writers often emphasize that they don’t consider themselves as having abandoned The Sisterhood by embracing the “Just A Mom” lifestyle.

Such is the power of their indoctrination — and so pervasive now is the worldview they express — that these women writers feel obligated to declare their continued commitment to the intellectual abstraction of feminism, even while confessing their discovery that there is joy and pleasure to be found by living in contradiction to everything they were ever taught by Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, et al.

Funny how that works out. I am reminded of the arena scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

Read it.

Indians have arrived in droves even as the overall number of illegal immigrants entering the U.S. has dropped dramatically, in large part because of the sluggish American economy. And with fewer Mexicans and Central Americans crossing the border, smugglers are eager for more “high-value cargo” like Indians, some of whom are willing to pay more than $20,000 for the journey.

Ought we to be as worried about illegal immigrants from India as we would be about illegal immigrants from other countries?

The influx has been so pronounced that in May, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a Senate committee that at some point this year, Indians will account for about 1 in 3 non-Mexican illegal immigrants caught in Texas.

I must confess that I find it hard to get worked up about it, perhaps because I am not worried that they will (a) attempt to blow people up, like Muslims, or (b) attempt to subvert the existing American culture, like Hispanics. But is that a reasonable position? I must confess that I’m not all that sure.

Read it.

Saw that coming.

“It’s hard to imagine they’ll be able to stay here now everyone knows they’ve got £161m in the bank. They will be pestered to death,” neighbour David Simpson told the Mail on Sunday.

“No one would have known if they’d kept it quiet. Why let the cat out of the bag?”

Why indeed?

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A Washington Post journalist on the scene confirmed the first lady, who’s made a cause out of child nutrition, ordered a ShackBurger, fries, chocolate shake and a Diet Coke while the street and sidewalk in front of the usually-packed Shake Shack were closed by security during her visit.

Imagine the media firestorm if a Republican had indulged in this sort of hypocrisy.

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Just think how nice and friendly they’ll be when they’re unionized.

Is this a great country, or what?

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As unbelievable as this may sound, a union boss with New Jersey’s Police Benevolent Association (a union that represents police in Monmouth County, NJ) is pressing charges within the union against one of his own union members for violating his membership loyalty oath to the union–for doing his job as a New Jersey state legislator.

Hey, this thing of ours trumps any outside interests.

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A shadowy industry dedicated to asylum fraud thrives in New York, where many of the country’s asylum claims are filed. Immigrants peddle personal accounts ripped from international headlines, con artists prey on the newly arrived and nonlawyers offer misguided advice.

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

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Oh, like that trick ever worked.

‘We don’t obey laws. Laws are for the little people.’

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It has taken three decades, but Americans are finally living through Jimmy Carter’s second term.

Now we’ve got Jimmy Jr. barking at us from the White House about eating our peas and ripping off our Band-Aid. He might not even let us have our Social Security checks.

These are just the latest in a long line of nagging lectures. Already, we have been taught how we should sneeze into the crook of our arm. We need to drive less. And we need to caulk up those drafty houses of ours.

But where’s the Reagan waiting in the wings to save us? I don’t see one.

At least Carter had been a Naval Officer and a nuclear engineer. All Obama has ever been is a ‘community organizer’ who affirmative-actioned his way through college and law school on the color of his father’s skin.

Read it.

… companies are worried about another standard that requires they offer care that is “affordable,” or roughly 9.5% of an employee’s household income. The employers say they can’t calculate that without asking employees how much their spouses or dependents earn—a potential privacy violation that may not be verifiable, either.

So employers may be put in a situtation in which they either forced to either violate the law or intrude into the family finances of their employees. At minimum, this provision has the potential to seriously alter how Americans conduct salary and compensation negotiations: Who wants to pay Sally more when her husband brings in a million bucks a year on Wall Street? Why give Mike a raise this year when his wife just made partner at her law firm, and brought in a giant bonus? Even if employers make it explicit policy to avoid making compensation decisions on such factors, the knowledge that one employee’s spouse makes a ton of money is almost sure to have a subtle effect.

Yet another example of how grandiose social nostrums translate into intrusive and burdensome government regulation.

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

Read it.

Hint: No.

And it just so happens that the Social Security trust fund is holding $2.6 trillion of special issue Treasury bonds, which are backed by the full faith and credit of the government and are even subject to the debt limit. In other words, the trust fund puts Social Security in the first tier of creditors, along with Wall Street and the Chinese, while most other federal spending programs would have to scramble for what is left.

So, in his haste to scare retirees, the president pointed to a program that is in fact one of the least likely to cut benefits even if the debt limit is not increased.

Gee, the President wouldn’t lie to us, would he?

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Welcome to the Obamanation.

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Can’t imagine why.

Buffeted by high taxes, strict regulations and uncertain state budgets, a growing number of California companies are seeking friendlier business environments outside of the Golden State.

Oh, gee, guess the government is not here to help them after all.

And governors around the country, smelling blood in the water, have stepped up their courtship of California companies. Officials in states like Florida, Texas, Arizona and Utah are telling California firms how business-friendly they are in comparison.

The old Soviet Union was business-friendly in comparison.

Companies are “disinvesting” in California at a rate five times greater than just two years ago, said Joseph Vranich, a business relocation expert based in Irvine. This includes leaving altogether, establishing divisions elsewhere or opting not to set up shop in California.

“There is a feeling that the state is not stable,” Vranich said. “Sacramento can’t get its act together…and that includes the governor, legislators and regulatory agencies that are running wild.”

Guess having the state run by Democrats is a real advantage.

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Breaking news: If you base teacher layoffs on seniority rather effectiveness, you wind up firing some really good teachers and keeping some teachers who are pretty meh.

Not that anybody in the teachers’ unions care. Their priorities are (1) the organization, (2) the existing members of the organization, (3) politicians who are friends of the organization, (4) possible future members of the organization, and (5) the nominal reason why the organization exists in the first place.

OK, that’s not breaking news. But a new study by Dan Goldhaber and Roddy Theobald from the University of Washington does the important and depressing work of quantifying just how many effective teachers (as measured by value-added scores) are getting the boot—and how many senior teachers are handing around until their pensions kick in—thanks to powerful teachers unions and the “last in, first out” policies they favor.

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

Read it.

Since nationalism is one of the most potent impediments to a universal Crust, it is no surprise that the ruling classes oppose it.

Many believe that a Belgian bust-up would signal the break-up of the wider European “project” which is already under intense strain from popular German, Dutch and Finnish pressure over the soaring cost of bailing out the euro and growing Greek, Portuguese and Irish protests over savage austerity imposed on them by EU central bankers.

Since the ‘wider European project’ is merely another way of privatizing profit while socializing losses, it ought not to come as any surprise that eventually the cattle will get tired of the leeches.

Read it.

AMMAN – Protesters loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad briefly broke into the US embassy in Damascus on Monday and security guards used live ammunition to prevent them storming the French embassy, diplomats said.

Where were the Marines? Probably locked in the basement by some wuss of a Foreign Service officer.

“We are calling in the Syrian charge [d’affaires] to complain,” said the US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“We feel they failed [in their responsibility to protect US diplomats]. We are going to condemn their slow response.”

Ooooh, a Strongly Worded Note. I can hear the Syrian government tremble from here.