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Mr. Buffett says, “I think that people at the high end — people like myself — should be paying a lot more in taxes.” Nothing is stopping him from doing so voluntarily. But instead he has structured his affairs — low annual salary, lots of unrealized long-term capital gains, a big charitable foundation to get around the estate tax — so as to minimize his taxes.

As I never cease to point out, when wealthy people call for ‘higher taxes on the rich’ they mean ‘higher taxes for the rich who aren’t rich enough to afford the sort of tax advice I can’. They’re talking about people who make their money in the form of ordinary income, who are becoming seriously annoying by crowding the best restaurants and resorts rather than leaving them to superrich people — like Warren Buffet (and Bill Gates).

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There must be a special bureaucrat school that they go to for this sort of thing.

Attention! Attention! Common sense has left the building!

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Nanny State, Education Division.

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So I guess the manual will be retitled ‘Recycling for Boys’. The Great Game is become the Great Video Game.

That sound you hear is from Kenya; no doubt they will use Lord Baden-Powell’s spinning corpse as a source of renewable energy.

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From the most deserving recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize comes… the most deserving recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom! John Sweeney, President Emeritus of the AFL-CIO, can now boast the nation’s highest civilian honor.

What exactly has John Sweeney done to warrant this award for freedom? Well, about as much as Obama did for peace his first few weeks in office.

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Fisking New York Times columnists is usually about as challenging as correcting sixth-grade English papers for grammar and spelling, but it can be fun.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is out with a piece headlined “A Hedge Fund Republic?”

He writes, “inequality in the United States has soared to levels comparable to those in Argentina six decades ago — with 1 percent controlling 24 percent of American income in 2007.”

Mr. Kristof uses the word “controlling” rather than “earning” so as not to allow his readers to consider the possibility that these earners might have done something such as work to create value so that customers were willing to pay them that compensation voluntarily.

The major problem is, of course, that most Crustian opinion-mongers are stuck at 1900 and are under the impression that the reason rich people are rich is because their ancestors stole something from somebody sometime and just inherited it. (After all, why is the opinion-monger not rich, being so obviously more deserving? Must be a plot on somebody’s part.)

Remember when Newt Gingrich brought up the subject of orphanages and Hillary Clinton went all Charles Dickens on him? Nobody bothered to tell her that the stuff Dickens wrote about was (a) stuff he made up and (b) a hundred and fifty years ago. And the reason for that is (c) they all believe the same way she does, that absolutely no progress has been made in the past century and a half–we still have people starving in the streets (despite welfare programs that allow poor people to get morbidly obese), black people being lynched (despite affirmative action programs that put the likes of Charlie Rangel and Barack Obama in positions of power), and workers being paid just pennies a day (despite unionized auto assembly line people who make more than a lot of lawyers and accountants).

That’s why they want to get rid of automobiles and planes and go back to horses, bicycles, and trains; it’s where they feel most comfortable.

Read it.

Not that he’s doing anything about it.

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How’s this for timing? The same day that Warren Buffett has an op-ed piece in the New York Times commending the government’s “remarkably effective” actions responding to the financial crisis, President Obama announces he’s giving Mr. Buffett the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

What an amazing coincidence. What are the odds?

The Crust takes care of its own. And the Medal of Freedom joins the Nobel Peace Prize as Just Another Upper Crust Cookie.

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The Great Depression occurred on the Fed’s watch, as have several other recessions.  As for price stability, from the Fed’s creation (in 1913) to 1945, the dollar lost 45 percent of its value; between 1945 and 1980 it lost another 78 percent of its value; and between 1980 and today yet another 62 percent of the dollar’s value was inflated away.  All told, during the less than 100 years that the Fed has been charged with keeping the value of the dollar stable, the dollar has lost 95 percent of its value.  This shrinkage in the dollar’s value since 1913 is especially striking in light of the fact that, between 1790 and 1913, the dollar’s value declined by only about 8 percent.*

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In a letter to the Education Department’s inspector general Wednesday, Mr. Burr of North Carolina and Mr. Coburn of Oklahoma cited public documents indicating the proposed rules were leaked to short-sellers. The department, they wrote, “may have leaked the proposed regulations to parties supporting the Administration’s position and investors who stand to benefit from the failure of the proprietary school sector.”

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

Uh, I have a question: Why do we have a Federal Department of Education? Supposedly we have a Federal government of explicitly enumerated powers; I don’t find any mention of ‘education’ in the Constitution.

More to the point: How many people has the Department of Education actually educated?

The schools have ramped up lobbying efforts against the regulations, which would require career colleges and training programs to prove they’re preparing students for gainful employment.

Whoa — there’s a hole with no bottom. Take a look at most PhD programs. I’d like to see some proof that they’re ‘preparing students for gainful employment’. We could start with Harvard. We could start with Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, Fashionable-Buzzword-of-the-Moment Studies, and any academic program that FDR never heard of.

For-profit universities have come under scrutiny because they receive federal dollars through financial aid programs, and critics say students are often left with big debts and little education.

Uh, I have a question: Why are there ‘federal dollars’ for ‘financial aid programs’, except maybe for veterans? Where is that in the Constitution?

Read it.

Uh, I have a question: Why does the Federal government have a ‘Secretary of Transportation’ at all? Supposedly the Federal government is a government of explicitly enumerated powers — I don’t see any mention of ‘transportation’ in the Constitution.

I’d be much happier if we had somebody looking into technology to disable Washington bureaucrats.

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Ok, let’s just be clear here. Abdulmutallab — last year’s underwear bomber — was successful in getting on the plane. What stopped him was not TSA security, but passengers on the plane seeing what he was up to. That brings up a separate question. Has the TSA ever caught anyone with a bomb with these procedures, ever? Security theater doesn’t make people safer.

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I’ve always had an issue with the Theatrical Security Administration. In my opinion, if we were concerned with anything other than creating the illusion of security, we would lay-off half of the TSA agents, hire bomb and chemical-sniffing dogs to check the plane after boarding and cargo hold, and put a US Marshal on every flight – in addition to requiring full searches for airport personnel and their vehicles. As it stands now, airport personnel – restaurant workers, baggage handlers, etc – are not subject to the same security requirements as passengers, and oftentimes only have to wave their badges in order to get into the secure areas of the airport.

And, of course, any smart terrorist would work through the maintenance system to plant explosives, rather than try to sneak them on the plane as a passenger. But I guess we’re only interested in catching the dumb ones.

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As if anybody cared.

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The problem with having academics in government is that they live their entire lives off of other people’s money — their parents pay for them to go to school, scholarships and academic jobs subsidize their graduate study, and they beg for money from government and foundations ever afterward.

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The irony that Haiti’s putative saviours, in the aftermath of hurricanes and an apocalyptic earthquake, may have brought a water-borne bacterium called Vibrio cholerae has hit what were already fraught preparations for elections on 28 November. Foreign diplomats are holding their breath for the vote to go ahead on schedule.

The facts are thus: an exploding epidemic has killed more than 1,000, infected tens of thousands and spread anxiety through slums and tent cities. There had been no cholera here in living memory. The strain appears to be from south Asia. Soldiers from Nepal, which has cholera, moved into a base beside the Artibonite river in early October. The base has sanitation problems. A week later the river was contaminated and people in the area started vomiting and getting diarrhoea.

So much for Third-World Solidarity. Guess those Nasty Old White Imperialists may be good for something after all.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Nor is Federal grant money going to come looking for you.

Read it. And watch the video.

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

Last week, the DOJ released a rather weird report on five U. S. Attorneys who stayed in hotels that were more expensive than generally permitted by Department guidelines between 2007 and 2009. The point of the report would be difficult to grasp without the additional information, readily supplied by reporters, that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was “U.S. Attorney C.” Sort of like Client Number 9, except that the total amount of Christie’s alleged budget-busting added up to a whopping $2,176. Most of this was because Christie stayed at hotels where he was to deliver a speech the next day.

Imagine that–actually staying at the hotel where he was to speak the next day. The swine! String him up! (Use lots of rope, because he’s a fattie!)

Jacob Sullum kicks over a rock.

First the government encouraged illicit production of methamphetamine by restricting access to legal speed. Then it encouraged pseudoephedrine-based production by banning or restricting other precursors. Appalled by all the scary, toxic, flammable meth labs that subsequently popped up around the country, it restricted access to cold and allergy remedies containing pseudoephedrine, forcing customers to ask pharmacists for them, sign a registry, and abide by quantity limits. Those restrictions, in turn, encouraged a shift to the “shake and bake” method for producing meth, which is less complicated and does not require as much pseudoephedrine but is in some ways more dangerous and more environmentally destructive. The next logical step, according to Lincoln County, Oregon, District Attorney Rob Bovett, is to require a prescription for products containing pseudoephedrine, thereby banning all over-the-counter sales. This time for sure!

Read it.

No wonder California is broke — and likely to get broker.

I know of no other instance of a court upholding a subsidy for criminals.

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Their transitional federal administration controls little more than a few blocks of the capital, and then only thanks to the muscle provided by several thousand African Union peacekeepers.

Beyond those few streets, there is chaos. There has been no central authority to build roads, hire teachers, stock hospitals or impose order for almost two decades.

Into that vacuum rushed powerful clans, whose head-men cut up the country into fiefdoms they taxed like mediaeval lords, to pay for guns. When there was no policeman to arrest them, or courts to try them, their rule was absolute.

In other words, they’re exactly where they were when the Europeans got there two hundred years ago, except with modern weapons technology. This is where most of Africa and Asia would be if left to their natural inclinations.

Read it.

Of course, we’ve seen similar stories before. But where this one got even odder is that after he went to the ticket counter and was able to get his ticket refunded (even though it was a non-refundable ticket), he was approached by a man in a suit and two of the people who had both detained him in the security area and escorted him out of it — and told that he could not leave the airport until he submitted to the invasive screening. If he tried to leave, he was told he would be sued and could face fines of $10,000.

Oh, I would so love to be the lawyer representing him in this case.

Time to take back our lives from the mind-numbed bureaucrats. Wakey wakey.

Matt Welsh follows the money.

And who could blame him? I’d rather work at Google than a second-rate university any day.

But the most interesting part, to me, is this:

And of course the amount of overhead and red tape (grant proposals, teaching, committee work, etc.) you have to do apart from the interesting technical work severely limits your ability to actually get to that point.

Note that TEACHING is considered OVERHEAD/RED TAPE, like begging for money (grant proposals) and shuffling paper (committee work).

This points up one of the basic flaws in the modern university system: Its primary objective is research, and teaching is only something they do on the side, like begging money from the government and holding interminable faculty meetings. This is, of course, the baleful influence of the German system that was imported into the U.S. in the 19th century and has been festering here every since.

Joel Kotkin lays it out.

In the future, historians may likely mark the 2010 midterm elections as the end of the California era and the beginning of the Texas one. In one stunning stroke, amid a national conservative tide, California voters essentially ratified a political and regulatory regime that has left much of the state unemployed and many others looking for the exits.

Instead of a role model, California  has become a cautionary tale of mismanagement of what by all rights should be the country’s most prosperous big state. Its poverty rate is at least two points above the national average; its unemployment rate nearly three points above the national average.

This state of crisis is likely to become the norm for the Golden State. In contrast to other hard-hit states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada, which all opted for pro-business, fiscally responsible candidates, California voters decisively handed virtually total power to a motley coalition of Democratic-machine politicians, public employee unions, green activists and rent-seeking special interests.

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God forbid two kids should sell cupcakes without a permit.

When Councilman Michael Wolfensohn found out the sale wasn’t for charity–the kids instead hoped to earn enough to one day open a restaurant–he called in the officers.

There’s public service for you.

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Tanzania’s first elected albino member of parliament fears his life could be in danger in the east African country where albino hunters kill their victims and use their blood and body parts for witchcraft.

Sounds like most Democrats’ view of Utah.

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When it comes to protecting against terrorism, this is how things usually go: A danger presents itself. The federal government responds with new rules that erode privacy, treat innocent people as suspicious, and blur the distinction between life in a free society and life in a correctional facility. And we all tamely accept the new intrusions, like sheep being shorn.

Rather depressing, when you come to think about it. Not many Minutemen in the security line.

Read it.

China’s military can destroy five out of six U.S. bases in Asia with waves of missile strikes as the result of its large-scale military buildup that threatens U.S. access and freedom of navigation in East Asia, according to a forthcoming congressional report.

Moe Lane is irate.

Yes, “steal.”  Rep. Charles Rangel was not allowed to use money from his leadership PAC to pay his legal bills, it beggars belief that he did not know that he was not allowed to use money from his leadership PAC to pay his legal bills, and yet he did it anyway.  If we can’t call the deliberate diversion of money that was raised and allocated for other people’s use ‘theft’ then we might as well give up the entire civilization thing now and go back to living in caves.

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

Read it.

Door #1: Have nude pictures of yourself beamed to some video monitor to be viewed by a total stranger where it may or may not be stored; or,

Door #2: Allow yourself to be groped, poked, patted down, felt up, frisked, and squeezed at the hands of some police academy reject in a Smurf-blue uniform; or…

Door #3: Don’t travel.

I picked Door #3 ten years ago and never regretted it.

It’s nice to see some public pushback on this, but it won’t last. The TSA will, under political pressure, back off just enough for the noise to go down to an acceptable level, and will then keep on doin’ what they’re doin’.

An intelligent government would look at how El Al Airlines does their security screening: They don’t have to put up with this shit, and they don’t have bomb scares, either. But ‘intelligent’ and ‘government’ don’t go together in North America, and that’s the sad truth.

Read it.

The Security Theater at airports is turning into a game of Angry Birds.

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Right now it’s a joke, but soon it will be a reality.

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A woman who smashed a broken bottle into Leonardo DiCaprio’s face has pleaded ‘no contest’ to assault with a deadly weapon.

Tell the truth: Haven’t we all wanted to do that?

Read it.

Looking around for something else to ban, having successfully driven Happy Meals underground, the good people of San Francisco will be asked to consider a ballot measure to forbid circumcision.

This is of course based on the SWPL notion that male infant circumcision is somehow equivalent to female genital mutilation.

A proposed ballot measure for the November 2011 ballot – when voters will be electing the San Francisco’s next mayor – would amend The City’s police code “to make it a misdemeanor to circumcise, excise, cut or mutilate the foreskin, testicle or penis of another person who has not attained the age of 18.”

And, of course, God help you if you do it without the required (expensive) educational credential and government license.

According to a number of studies, circumcision can significantly reduce the risk of HIV transmission—and San Francisco accounts for 3 percent of all HIV cases in the United States.

There is something about the ocean that makes reality take a vacation in adjoining areas.

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The cop mentality without the cop excuse.

Flying is a privilege not a right. As such, it can be and is regulated. Requirements can and are set up to ensure that everyone who flies is safe. If you don’t like it, then don’t fly.

Works for me.

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An Illinois woman launched an ill-considered assault on a cop with a “rigid female pleasure device” after an altercation over an unpaid Crab Shack bill.

A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.

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A Minnesota woman has been charged with stealing racy photos of Cleveland Indians centerfielder Grady Sizemore from the email account of his Playboy bunny girlfriend.

Didn’t know there were any Playboy Bunnies any more. Well, you learn something new every day.

It’s the latest episode to demonstrate the insecurity of password-reset features offered by Yahoo, and so many other online services, which allow users to reset passwords based on the answers to questions such as what high school did you attend? That folly is only compounded by clueless users who make hackers’ jobs easier by posting the answers to Facebook and other social networks.

Yet another good reason to stay away from Facebook.

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The sheeple are restless. Better stand baaaaaack.

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Notice the map. Notice the pink spots on the map. These are the areas that need to be a radioactive desert.

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Well it turns out I was living the livable life style when I was growing up in Queens, New York in the fifties and didn’t know it. Here all along I just thought we were poor.

In my town of College Point, Queens when the factory whistle blew a few thousand walked in the gate and out again when the whistle blew in the evening. People don’t live outside the factory gate anymore and haven’t for awhile. Again, specialization and division of labor are the main factor. Job groupings are far smaller today, and the rate of job turnover means more people won’t/can’t move every time they change jobs. Moreover, about 70% of workers live in a household with other workers – whose job will they live next to?

There remains, of course, lots of room now within the existing land use distribution to make it easier for those who wish to live closer to shops, jobs or entertainment. People also are free to go to the nearest store or nearest doctor. The fact that so few do so reflects the oft-forgotten fact that people have their own notions of what is most important. Trying to coerce them to live the way government – particularly the upper bureaucracy – thinks they should live holds many perils. The American people have no obligation to live in ways that make it convenient for government to serve them. Government isn’t smart enough to know how people should live or to order their lives in more “convenient” arrangements.

Turns out that government buzzwords are a substitute, not a tool, for thought.

It’s on the practical side that the concepts of livability really fail. The central failure inheres in what the Europeans call subsidiarity, proposes that any necessary activity of an authority should be conducted by that level of governance closest to the problem that can effectively address it. Having livability rise to become central principle of federal transportation investment planning is an egregious failure in our historical system of decentralized government. If sidewalks and bike paths are federal then everything is federal.

The problem here is a total disconnect between what people in a diverse democracy want, and what the central bureaucracy, and their academic allies, wish to impose. The livability agenda may be popular in the press and among pundits, but for most communities and people it’s neither popular nor remotely democratic.

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A member of the Lower Crust discovers that the Side Crust are not her friends.

Read it.

Britain is learning what America knows: Rail sucks, and people only take trains when (a) the alternative is a horse, or (b) the government forces them into it. The latter is accomplished by a combination of jawboning, explicit attempts to discourage using automobiles, and massive taxpayer-funded subsidies for rail travel. This house of cards easily comes down if any one of the legs of the tripod falter, and that’s what’s happening here.

If doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, then our governing classes have been insane for the last hundred years.

Read it.

During the campaign it was noted that tens of thousands of dollars came in to the Obama campaign from a Hamas-controlled camp in Gaza. Pamela Geller observed that Al-Jazeera actually ran a story on Obama phone banks in Gaza (video below).

Geller discovered one large contributor to the Obama campaign (Monir Edwan) who was listed on FEC documents as contributing to Obama from the city of Rafah in the state GA. “If you were reading quickly,” Geller wrote, “you might have thought it was just a contribution from Georgia. But there is no city of Rafah in the Peach State. Monir Edwan sent money to Obama from Rafah, Gaza.”

Needless to say, all of this is incredibly illegal.

Hamas’s love of Obama endures. Now comes Amir Taheri to report on the latest installment of the story. Taheri reports that the slogan “Abu Hussain! Palestine loves you!!!” appears in English on a poster and other products produced by Hamas and put on sale in Gaza. Yeseterday it was depicted on the front pages of several leading Arab dailies.

But don’t say that he’s a secret Muslim. That would be raaaaaaaacist.

Read it.

I used to hope that in spending over a decade explaining how the music industry could have responded better to file sharing, that other industries wouldn’t go down the same path. Yet, what we’ve seen over and over and over again is that every new industry that faces disruptive innovation involving a previously scarce product suddenly becoming an infinite good — and that they pretty much all react the same. They try to prevent the inevitable. They try to fight the technology. They go against consumer wishes. They try to protect the old business models. They invent moral panics and bogus statistics. And, of course, they throw a ton of money at politicians to make laws that preserve their old business models. It’s happened plenty of times in the past, and it will definitely happen once 3D printing technology reaches that tipping point.

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The bien-pensants who run Belgium — which stands as the model for the European Union: a non-nation cobbled together for political reasons without the consent of its citizens — have devised an updated version of Multiculturalism. They hope to sneak it under the political radar by renaming it “Interculturalism”, but it’s the same old decaying rose, and by any other name smells just as fetid.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder. The Crust doesn’t miss a bet in it’s program to grasp every rein of power.

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I’d like to see them try that in a Muslim country.

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The ACLU of Pennsylvania recently filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of a couple whose newborn baby was kidnapped by Lawrence County Children and Youth Services (LCCYS) because her mother recklessly consumed an “everything” bagel from Dunkin’ Donuts the day before the birth. Jameson Hospital, where Isabella Rodriguez was born on April 27, has a policy of testing expectant mothers’ urine for illegal drugs and reporting positive results to LCCYS, even without any additional evidence that the baby is in danger of neglect or abuse. LCCYS, in turn, has a policy of seizing such babies from their homes based on nothing more than the test result. Unfortunately for Isabella’s parents, Elizabeth Mort and Alex Rodriguez, Jameson sets the cutoff level for its opiate test so low that it can be triggered by poppy seeds, which is why two caseworkers and two Neshannock Township police officers visited their home the day after baby and mother returned from the hospital. LCCYS seized the three-day-old girl and put her in foster care for five days before conceding it had made a mistake.

We’re from the government, and we’ re here to … take your kids away.

Google, mirabile dictu, actually says what they mean by ‘underrepresented’.

We define underrepresented languages as those which, while spoken by millions, have little presence in electronic and physical media, e.g., webpages, newspapers and magazines. Underrepresented languages have also often received little attention from the speech research community. Their phonetics, grammar, acoustics, etc., haven’t been extensively studied, making the development of ASR (automatic speech recognition) voice search systems challenging.

We believe that the speech research community needs to start working on many of these underrepresented languages to advance progress and build speech recognition, translation and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. The development of NLP technologies in these languages is critical for enabling information access for everybody. Indeed, these technologies have the potential to break language barriers.

This is a fairly pure example of ‘business that thinks it’s more than a business’, an outgrowth of the Crustian ‘social responsibility’ kick. Such businesses aren’t content to just make some money for their investors; they have this grandiose notion that they exist ‘to be a force for good’. How well this works out in practice is left as an exercise for the reader.