Read it.

For those unacquainted with BritSpeak, 24 stone is 336 pounds. (No, I don’t know why they can’t express peopleweight in pounds like a normal person. You can’t blame it on the metric system, because they don’t say it in kilograms, either.)

The basic message here is, ‘I’m a fatty, so I’m picking on McDonald’s.’ Your (or, rather, they’re, since you are presumably wise enough to avoid New York) tax dollars at work.

Just for once I’d like to have someone running for office answer the question ‘What do you think the important issues in this race are?’ with the honest ‘Whatever restriction on individual liberty I think might get me a headline’.

Read it.

You know it had to happen.

I especially like the name ‘The Fair, Accurate, Inclusive and Respectful Education Act’. Sorry, guys; if it’s fair and accurate, it’s not going to be either inclusive or respectful. Reality bites sometimes.

Another find reason to avoid California.

Steve Sailer looks behind the scenes.

(More accurately, that ought to be Bill Gates III and IV. Why they play around with that, other than perhaps to confuse people, escapes me.)

The Gates are Democrats, by the way, just like the Clintons.

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

So, I’m a little skeptical about the notion that Bill Gates Jr. was just a poor rube from the sticks who didn’t know about the importance of lobbying in Washington when his dad was a name partner of the firm that unleashed Jack Abramoff on the world. Moreover, one of the specialties of Preston Gates & Ellis was antitrust defenses of corporations accused of monopoly.

Read it.

Since it’s the New York Times, she doesn’t quite come out and say ‘Yippee!’, but it’s close. Unspoken is any speculation as to why.

What incentive do white people have to produce children? ‘Everybody else get’s a government check for stuff ranging from housing to education; you don’t. In fact, you have to pay for most of it.’ Yeah, that’s a real attractive proposition.

Read it.

When I studied economics in college, I learned that mercantilism supplanted feudalism to become the predominant economic doctrine through the late Middle Ages. Mercantilism, “economic nationalism for the purpose of building a wealthy and powerful state,” is based on this logic: “The richer the nation, the stronger the nation; the stronger the nation, the better for every member of that kingdom.” It wasn’t until the 17th century that mercantilism was seriously challenged, and Adam Smith finally drove a stake through its heart when he published The Wealth of Nations 235 years ago. Perhaps most economists hold this clean view of history, but it seems that the rest of the world never got the memo. Unfortunately, the archaic and counterproductive ideas of mercantilism are alive and kicking in 21st-century America.

No bad idea ever truly dies.

Read it.

Climate like a slice of heaven, a central valley with the most fertile and productive terroire on earth, and California seems grimly determined to piss it all away.

If that doesn’t convince you of man’s fallen nature, I don’t know what will.

Read it.

Well, those draconian anti-gun laws in Britain certainly seem to have worked, haven’t they?

Read it.

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

Contrary to the popular mythology about children rebelling against their parents, most left-wing activists had left-wing activists in the previous generation. The term ‘Red Diaper Baby’ exists for a reason.

Reporter Mollie at Get Religion doesn’t understand the media coverage of the Koran-burning kerfuffle.

Murdering people who have nothing to do with the Koran burning is another animal from rape entirely, but it is still surprising to me to see how the media suggests that the pastor who oversaw the Koran burning — Terry Jones — is responsible for murders he didn’t commit.

Welcome to the Crustian world, Mollie. I hope you enjoy the realization that ‘journalists’ and Muslims share a common outlook: Anything bad that happens is never a Muslim’s fault.

Frankly, I’m finding it incredibly entertaining that our entire Middle East policy could unravel through the efforts of one publicity hound in Florida. Who says the individual can’t make a difference these days?

Lynn Viehl, famous writer (read her books), learns why Tim avoids Facebook.

The second — the absolute split second — I created a Facebook account I got slammed. Two people instantly wanted to be my Friends (they must hook up something that reads the e-mail address you use to create the account that other people are watching for; both people send me endless amounts of SPAM on my regular e-mail.) Facebook demanded all kinds of personal information from me, too: what school had I gone to, who were my friends, who did I want to invite to be my friends, yada yada yada.

I skipped all that and went to make my profile private. No such luck. I could, however, put up a picture of myself. Tell everyone all about me on my permanently public profile. Stuff started popping up on the sidebar for me to buy, join, check out, etc. And the questions, God. Have you done this? Why not? You’d better do this. And this. My security was too low, fix that.

In two minutes so much crap was thrown at me I almost gave up. But I really wanted to enter the contest, so I skipped as much as I could, put phony info in the stuff I couldn’t, and finally verified it all. At last. I could go to the contest page and get this over with one and for all.

Here’s the real irony: on the contest page? The link to enter the contest didn’t work. So I joined Facebook and went through all that nonsense for nothing.

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

Anyway. I took great pleasure in going to the account settings page so I could delete the stupid account. Only I discovered that I couldn’t delete it; I was only given the option of “deactivating” the account. And before I could do that, I had to tell them why I was deactivating it. I had to explain myself by checking off one of their reason boxes (none of which said “You’re pushy, intrusive dumbasses and I don’t want you anywhere near me or my e-mail”.)

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, listens to Calypso Louis Farrakhan.

I also have a soft spot for black church oratory. I don’t have a religious bone in my body, but taken simply as an art form, this stuff can be quite striking. Al Sharpton, for example, who is an ignorant buffoon in all matters that actually engage my powers of reasoning, is a terrific preacher, with cadences and rhythms really quite musical. I could listen to him for … well, not hours, but quite a lot of minutes.

The really striking thing about the address was the almost total absence of anything Islamic in it. Most of the themes and references were in fact Christian.

Some part of the antisemitism shtick is Holocaust envy — resentment that any other people should claim to have endured suffering comparable to the black man’s. In Ireland the whinier section of the republican movement is scoffed at as “the MOPE faction,” where MOPE stands for “Most Oppressed People Ever.” Nobody in the Rosemont stadium — certainly not Farrakhan — nursed any doubt that black Americans are MOPE.

NOI is in fact just Christianity with a thin coat of Islamic paint.

Read it.

An obvious sign of the End Times.

Read it.

I grew up in a farm state, South Dakota, and still recall a joke that was then popular. It grew out of the fact that the number of farmers in the U.S. was constantly declining, while at the same time the Department of Agriculture was steadily growing. So here is the joke: A guy at the Department of Agriculture is going past a cubicle and he sees one of his colleagues sitting at his desk, crying. He wonders what is wrong and stops to ask his colleague what has happened. The guy looks up and, through his tears, says: “My farmer died.”

I’m sure that happens in the State Department, too: ‘My country died.’

Let’s try this one: if the cowboy gets bigger than the horse, both the horse and the cowboy are in trouble.

We’ve been in trouble for a loooooong time….

Disgusting.

Or at least of the 20th century. Barry is on course to set the bar for the 21st.

He’d better hurry if he wants to be photographed with Lenin’s corpse before they move it out of Red Square, which I’m sure is on his agenda.

Read it.

One is kind of pink and the rest are various shades of brown.

“8 ct. Crayola Washable Multicultural Broad Line Markers is an assortment of ethnic-sensitive color palette. The broad line markers have a unique conical tip that is good for coloring and detailing. Great colors for school projects.”

I am not making this up.

Read it.

In an effort to get closer to the local population, American female soldiers stationed in Afghanistan are being encouraged to wear a Muslim headscarf when interacting with civilians. But some question whether the practice constitutes cultural sensitivity or a form of appeasement that is degrading to U.S. soldiers.

Major Kyndra Rotunda, executive director of the Military Law and Policy Institute and AMVETS Legal Clinic, told The Daily Caller that while the women are not being ordered to wear the head scarf, encouragement is tantamount to a demand.

“They say they are encouraging women to wear the headscarf when they are out and about and on patrol. But the problem is — and I think anyone who has been in the military understands that being encouraged to do something is about the same thing as being ordered — it really puts them in an uncomfortable position when their commander says, ‘We really want you to do this, technically you don’t have to, but we really want you to do this,’” she said.

I wonder whether they’re encouraged to walk behind their male colleagues and only speak when spoken to, as well?

What a victory for feminism.

Read it.

The producer of the syndicated children’s TV series “Zodiac Island” claims that an entire season of the show has been wiped out thanks to a fired employee at its data-hosting company who hacked into networked computers and destroyed its work.

If you don’t back it up, you won’t get it back.

Our entire government.

Oh, wait, you mean that’s for real? Bummer….

Read it.

Read it.

Due to the sheer number of jobs that directly or indirectly benefit from Koch Industries, the Left’s undertaking to topple the Koch brothers and their companies may have the negative consequence of actually hurting those the Left purports to want to help—namely union workers. This has a top official with the United Steelworkers concerned.

One of the most glaring holes in the distributionist agenda is their perennial refusal to cope intellectually with production — their fight is about how to divide up a pie that apparently just drops from heaven — and so they keep shooting themselves in most of their lower body when they start agitating for ‘social justice’.

Notice that the union defense of the Koch brothers isn’t based on what’s fair or what’s best for America; it’s totally based on what’s best for union members. The essential message is ‘don’t cut off our nose to spite your face’. So principle is all well and good when only the other side is getting hurt, but another thing entirely when it comes out of the wallets of the kind of people the Left is supposedly defending.

So the problem for the advocates of a boycott against Koch is that it can only marginally hurt Koch, and the workers who are the epitome of what advanced manufacturing jobs in the United States ought to look like, would be the first casualties of a boycott. Of course, this will eventually drive a wedge between groups that are otherwise in political alignment.

In other words, don’t go pissing in the soup.

As in most such cases, ‘follow the money’ is a good rule of thumb.

Read it.

A newspaper claimed the unnamed 34-year-old sportsman had launched a murderous rampage in revenge after his daughter was gang-raped and infected with HIV.

Only a Voice of the Crust could call that ‘murder’.

Meanwhile some fear the tragedy could create fresh fissures in South Africa’s fragile race relations.

The vast majority of South African rugby stars are white and it is possible the suspect could be accused of deliberately targeting black victims.

Perhaps he objected to a gang of black thugs raping and infecting his daughter. Does that come as such a surprise? It’s not as if the South African police are all that efficient at preventing — or solving — violent crimes.

Probably not.

So much for the hope that Iraq and Afghanistan might actually have taught the West anything lasting about trying to impose democracy at the point of a gun. Instead, it is as if Iraq, which, in the United States, was initially welcomed by most liberal internationalists and neoconservatives alike as a war of liberation, had never happened, and, instead, we have traveled backward in time. Remember those halcyon days of the late 1990s when Tony Blair was promising the world that in the future the West would fight wars in the name of its values, not just of its interests, in effect promising that the wars of the twenty-first century would be noble wars of altruism? If you don’t, well, don’t worry: If the war in Libya is any indication, you’ll have the chance to live them all over again. Of course, the catastrophe in Iraq was supposed to have sobered us, and made even the most ardent liberal interventionists realize that Pascal’s great phrase, “He who would act the angel, acts the beast,” expresses the stark truth about what we self-flatteringly call humanitarian interventions. But instead, here we go again.

Read it.

We haven’t mocked a Kennedy in a while, so I guess it’s time.

Until I read Howie Carr’s Boston Herald column this morning, I had missed the big news from Brown University. Former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy has graciously accepted a two-year appointment as a visiting fellow at the Brown Institute for Brain Science, through the 2012-13 academic year.

Carr cruelly comments: “I guess the rocket-science school was full up. He is quite the scholar, of course.” Carr quotes Kennedy speaking on the floor of the House: ‘I myself have educated myself.'”

I haven’t mocked Brown (the Safety School of the Ivy League) in a while, either, so I guess it’s time for that, too.

Read it.

These bills have grown less popular as people became aware of them, and started to ask basic questions, like: “why should a huge corporation dictate what my town or city does with its own infrastructure?” Or: “Why should a random partisan bloviator 2,000 miles away dictate what my town or city does with its own infrastructure?” The fact is that these communities wouldn’t be putting this time and effort into infrastructure improvements if local monopolies and duopolies were meeting their needs.

Good question.

Time Warner Cable, who in most markets has the luxury of lagging on network upgrades due to limited competition, isn’t sure what to do with this “problem.” Like most large corporations unused to competition, they’ve gone the protectionist route and have spent millions lobbying North Carolina lawmakers like Rep. Marilyn Avila. As a result, well-lobbied North Carolina politicians do what well-lobbied politicians always do, and last night passed Time Warner Cable’s anti-community fiber bill with a vote of 81-37.

Your tax dollars at work … for Time-Warner.

Read it.

Kirkland & Ellis LLP is pleased to announce a significant expansion of its already strong antitrust practice with the addition of former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Tim Muris and his FTC Chief of Staff Christine Wilson to the Firm’s Washington, D.C., office. Muris is the only former FTC chairman with an active private practice.

No doubt.

“The enforcement experience of this group promises to provide our clients with unsurpassed insights about the regulatory environment in which they operate,” said Gene Assaf, a partner in the Washington, D.C., office who serves on Kirkland’s Global Management Executive Committee….

Translation: How to game the system.

Muris served as the chairman of the FTC from 2001 to 2004.

Another fine legacy from the younger Bush, the Nixon of a new generation.

Read it.

Australia’s Federal and State police forces have deployed resources to investigate virtual worlds to combat money laundering by cybercriminals.

NSW Detective Superintendent Commander Colin Dyson told iTnews at the Cards and Payments Australasia conference in Sydney today that cybercriminals were using virtual, gaming platforms to communicate and transfer funds around the globe.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Electrons do….

Read it.

A Swedish boy has been mauled by a bear after he disturbed the hibernating animal by skiing over its lair.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Read it.

American corporations moving business overseas to avoid America’s high corporate tax rates was the topic of a thirteen-and-a-half minute story by Leslie Stahl on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” show Sunday.

On a certain level, it was an illuminating story, because it showed how America’s high corporate tax rate essentially pushes economic activity to lower-tax jurisdictions overseas. But it was also a frustrating story to watch, because, like the Times, “60 Minutes” seems to be coming at it from the perspective of wanting to dream up some way to force the companies to pay higher taxes.

Indeed, for a sane person to watch a Voice of the Crust in action is highly frustrating. But one must remember that there is an Agenda here, and that Agenda has little to do with what we used to call Common Sense.

Everything for the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State. — Benito Mussolini

By attempting to avoid taxes, corporations violate Fascist Principle #1; by doing so by escaping overseas, they violate Fascist Principle #2. Neither can be tolerated.

One of my key tests for a country has always been whether people are lined up trying to sneak in or lined up trying to sneak out. East Berlin, North Korea, and the Soviet Union are bad by that test; America is good, because immigrants want to come here. You could apply a similar test to countries for whether companies want to be based there. America shouldn’t have to pass some kind of law preventing companies from moving their operations to Zug or Ireland, as Mr. Doggett seems to suggest. We should have laws that create such an attractive business environment that the companies in Zug and in Ireland are falling over themselves trying to figure out a way to move here.

A good rule of thumb.

Read it.

Food finickiness, in other words, is a luxury, not a mandate. Most people couldn’t indulge it even if they wanted to. Our friend keeps this in perspective. In recent years, however, the locavore, foodie lifestyle has transmogrified from what it obviously is—a luxury—into a quasi-spiritual ideology resembling late-stage environmentalism.

The truth is, if we abandoned industrialized farming and everyone adopted the locavore lifestyle, the human race would be much poorer, and several billion people wouldn’t have food.

Read it.

There are more than 150 former normal schools like Winona, educating hundreds of thousands of students nationwide. Nearly all followed an identical progression: They became teachers colleges, then dropped the “teachers,” then dropped the “college.” Usually, they are medium-size, relatively obscure, and located away from central metropolitan areas. That’s why directions on how to get there are often embedded in their name—Northern Iowa, Eastern Michigan, University of Maine at Presque Isle, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. Most of the rest, like Winona, are stamped with the reassuring label of “State.”

Why did almost every institution do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way? Because we have only one way of thinking about higher-education excellence in this country. We are all entranced by visions of the academic city-state, the palace of learning on the hill. That’s where the administrators and faculty who populated the former normal schools came from, and where they wanted to return. If their alma mater wouldn’t have them, a copy would do.

That pattern, documented by Christensen in scores of other industries, begins with new organizations’ using new technology to create low-cost alternatives to traditional products and services. Crucially, the new products tend not to be very good at first. So established firms ignore them, preferring to continue selling better, more-expensive services to well-off customers in the traditional way. The crisis comes years later, after upstart firms have used steadily improving business practices and technology to move up the industry food chain, and older businesses remain shackled by outdated organizational models and cultures. By the time the upstarts have caught up and become competitive, the old firms simply can’t change quickly enough to avoid oblivion. Once you’ve spent $20-million on a campus gym, you can’t just sell it for cash or stop paying people to work there. Once you’ve established 18 academic departments in the college of liberal arts, it’s hard to shut any of them down.

Steve Sailer indulges in some irony.

From the outside, they looked like other recently built San Gabriel townhouses — two stories, Spanish style, with roofs of red tile. Inside they were maternity centers for Chinese women willing to pay handsomely to travel here to give birth to American citizens.

All that stuff is just plain illegal. No way no how can you move walls around without proper permits.

On the other hand, random foreigners grabbing lifelong U.S. citizenship for their children — including such perks as 13 years of free public education in an upscale San Gabriel Valley school district, cheap tuition at UC Berkeley, low interest SBA loans, government contracting minority preferences, the right to import their parents and put them on Medicare and in public old folks homes, and other goodies — through these scams is, legally speaking, A-OK, 100% on the up and up….

Read it.

Remind me why we still have troops in Germany. Last I heard, the Russians are no longer a threat.

Read it.

The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

‘Loopholes! Get your hot fresh loopholes, right here!’

Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm. Indeed, the company’s slogan “Imagination at Work” fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.

‘We’re the Crust. We dodge taxes so you don’t have to.’

Read it.

I don’t have conflicted feelings on nukes. Do you have conflicted feelings on nukes?

Perhaps the Crust has conflicted feelings on nukes … but, then, they have conflicted feelings on anything that was invented after 1900.

Perhaps if someone developed a nuclear-powered high-speed commuter train, they’d get over it.

Read it.

1. Even it New York, people have standards.
2. Especially in New York, Americans will sue anybody about anything.

Read it.

If there’s some non-stupid reason behind sending female reporters to cover a war in a Muslim country, I confess I don’t see what it is.

Read it.

Read it.

The top ten percent of American taxpayers pay more to the national government in taxes, both as a percentage of the total taxes collected and in proportion to their share of the national income, than upper-income taxpayers in any other developed country.

A very informative list.

Read it.

The problem with the critiques is that the underlying assumptions are wrong. They are based on what has been called “the transmission belt theory” of regulation, which is that Congress sets forth a need and the parameters of a delegation to an expert agency. The agency then acts as the expert problem solver for Congress, analyzing the alternatives and decreeing the pro bono publico that our worthy solons would require if only they had the time. Regulatory analysis is a way to systematize and facilitate this pursuit.

Any resemblance between this model and the real world is strictly coincidental. Regulation is the continuation of political and budgetary wars by other means. Agencies are created because of a kernel of public need, and some concern for the public interest is usually somewhere in the mix of motives. But they are also captured by ideological and economic interests, which then use them to promote the ideology and the economic interests of the constituents.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Read it.

Here is the catch. DOJ will only investigate bullying cases if the victim is considered protected under the 1964 Civil Rights legislation. In essence, only discrimination against a victim’s race, sex, national origin, disability, or religion will be considered by DOJ. The overweight straight white male who is verbally and/or physically harassed because of his size can consider himself invisible to the Justice Department.

So if you get beaten up at that inner-city school to which you’ve been bused in pursuit of ‘diversity’, you’re on your own. Your parents’ tax dollars at work.

“We can only take action where we have legal authority,” wrote DOJ spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa in a December 2010 e-mail to The Washington Times Water Cooler.

Love that name. Wonder how many affirmative-action check-boxes they were able to tick off when they hired her? Maybe she’s partially-black, as well; double points for that.

The Justice Department’s anti-bullying initiative is tantamount to bringing hate crime legislation to the public school system.

Yet another hint to avoid the government factory school system.

Read it.

Republican House Speaker John Boehner has been quoted as expressing some concerns about President Barack Obama’s war against Libya. “Before any further military commitments are made, the administration must do a better job of communicating to the American people and to Congress about our mission in Libya and how it will be achieved.”

What’s remarkable about such a comment is how Boehner takes it for granted that the President of the United States can go to war by his own decision, while the Congress waits passively for the President’s explanation for his decision. Notice that no one inside or outside the Congress is saying anything about the fact that the Constitution of the United States clearly grants to the Congress the power to declare war. What this means, of course, is that that part of the Constitution has been set aside. In effect, the power to declare war has become a prerogative of the President.

Ross Douthat piles on.

In its month-long crab walk toward a military confrontation with Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Obama administration has delivered a clinic in the liberal way of war.

In its opening phase, at least, our war in Libya looks like the beau ideal of a liberal internationalist intervention. It was blessed by the United Nations Security Council. It was endorsed by the Arab League. It was pushed by the diplomats at Hillary Clinton’s State Department, rather than the military men at Robert Gates’s Pentagon. Its humanitarian purpose is much clearer than its connection to American national security. And it was initiated not by the U.S. Marines or the Air Force, but by the fighter jets of the French Republic.

But there are major problems with this approach to war as well. Because liberal wars depend on constant consensus-building within the (so-called) international community, they tend to be fought by committee, at a glacial pace, and with a caution that shades into tactical incompetence. And because their connection to the national interest is often tangential at best, they’re often fought with one hand behind our back and an eye on the exits, rather than with the full commitment that victory can require.

The Other McCain is having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have with our new President, George W. Obama.

First it was Michael Moore and now they’re all piling on. Ralph Nader says Obama should be impeached for war crimes, Josh Marshall says the president’s Libya policy is “a mess, poorly conceived, ginned up by folks with their own weird agendas,” and Andrew Sullivan . . .

Yeah, my heart breaks for Andrew Sullivan.

Pass the popcorn.

Read it.

Sunday’s breaking business story is the announcement that unionized AT&T will be buying union-free T-Mobile for $39 billion. With 42,000 mostly union-free employees, German-owned T-Mobile has long been a target of the red-shirted Communications Workers of America. Now, as the mostly unionized AT&T Mobility has agreed to allow the CWA to unionize its employees without secret-ballot elections (via neutrality and card-check), the red-shirted union bosses are seeing the green that will likely come from T-Mobile’s employees.

Not to mention that T-Mobile users can watch their service plunge into the toilet, as happened to me when the Old AT&T was bought by Cingular.

Read it.

An Austrian member of the European Parliament has resigned after being exposed in a newspaper sting for taking £87,000 a year in a “cash for laws” scandal.

In America, they would name a road or a courthouse after you – if you were a Democrat.

We appear to be at war with Libya. (Well, what would you call 110 Tomahawk cruise missiles taking out air defense installations? For a hint, ask the people at Pearl Harbor.)

Funny thing, I don’t recall the Congress making any kind of declaration about that. Nor to I recall any mention of Libyans invading the United States, or making mischief with American citizens or property. I guess that’s not required any more.

Now, ask yourself: What if a Republican President had done this?

Anne Applebaum points out some inconvenient truth.

If you don’t live in this country all of the time, and I don’t, here is what you notice when you come home: Americans — with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession and, above all, their addiction to government spending programs — demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world. They don’t simply want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is prevented, or that they are fully compensated in the event something goes wrong. And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the government responsible for that, too.

The Other McCain points out a curiousity (with video).

A suspicious similarity between Obama’s speech announcing U.S. strikes against Libya and George W. Bush’s speech announcing the Afghanistan invasion….

Read it.

Society rewards extroverts. They get the job, the money, the girl (or boy), and the front page. Fortune 500 companies are run by 499 extroverts, plus Bill Gates. There are 435 extroverts in the House of Representatives and 100 in the Senate, two from each state. In fact, the only introvert in the District of Columbia is David Souter.

If “interpersonal skills” really means skills, then I can’t object, but I’m afraid that in the wrong hands it means something more like “interpersonal style”, and in particular it means the style of extroverts. I have the same concern about “communication skills.” People have different styles; if my style isn’t the same as yours, does that mean I lack skills?

As for teamwork, well, I’m sure there are some problems that are best solved with collaborative, active learning, but I am equally sure that there are problems you can’t solve with your mouth open.