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Bill Goffe recently (2009) surveyed one of his macro principles classes and found, for example, that the median student believes that 35% of workers earn the minimum wage and a substantial fraction think that a majority of workers earn the minimum wage (Actual rate in 2007: 2.3% of hourly-paid workers and a smaller share of all workers earn the minimum wage, rates are probably somewhat higher today since the min. wage has risen and wages have not).

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The organizers of the failed Gaza flotilla last June are at it again, planning a flotilla to Gaza next January.  At least this time they are honest that it has nothing to do with humanitarian efforts.

Far be it from me to stand in the way of anybody attempting to embarrass Barry the Magic Negro, but this is aimed at the United States, and we ought to support the Israelis in quashing it.

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So public school officials get caught illegally spy on students. But no one gets fired. And none of the offending parties will be fined. Instead, a municipal insurer (which will ultimately affect taxpayers) will pay a decent settlement to one student, a small settlement to another, and a small fortune to their lawyer.

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A heavyweight American boffin has dubbed the global warming movement “the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist”, and resigned in protest from the American Physical Society, saying that the society has deliberately stifled debate on the subject.

Read it.

A woman is recovering in hospital after having her thumb and part of one of her breasts chewed off when she was attacked by her pet zebra, according to reports.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Occupational licensing laws aren’t the only realm in which government deprives us of the freedom of economic choice simply to serve private interest groups. Consider the United Food and Commercial Workers’ war on non-union grocery stores like Wal-Mart.

In many communities, union supporters persuade local officials to use zoning restrictions to bar the opening of Wal-Mart Supercenters or other stores, often using rhetoric about preserving the “local feeing” of “small towns.” In reality, these laws exist to force you to pay more for groceries, not to advance the public good, but to promote the interests of unions that can’t compete fairly in the labor market. This special-interest legislation, however, is allowed by courts that simply look the other way under the “rational basis” test.

Most government intervention in economic matters is in pursuit of stifling free competition.

Nick Gillespie is fed up. Watch the video.

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Read it.

The Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services disappears a promise from its website.

Funny how that works out.

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Embarrassing publicity in a tough election year has forced the administration to back down from one of its vaunted consumer protections. If it were not for a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal, nearly a million low-wage workers would lose their health insurance thanks to new rules imposed by ObamaCare. McDonald’s and 29 other firms have received waivers from a requirement to up the minimum benefit covered by insurance, making it possible for their employees to continue to buy low-cost coverage. But thousands of other workers are not exempted and will not be able to afford the government’s idea of good insurance.

Peter Suderman sounds the alarm.

If it’s an economic decision, the federal government can make it for you. That’s the takeaway from a ruling this afternoon by a federal judge in Michigan.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Read it.

Thousands of flushed condoms threaten to choke the Commonwealth Games village’s drainage system, media reports said, in the latest problem to hit the venue.

Gives ‘athletic’ a whole new meaning.

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An animal-rights activist has claimed he sank his own protest ship in an attempt to “garner sympathy with the public and create better TV” during a clash with a Japanese whaling ship.

Tells you pretty much all you need to know about environmentalists.

Don’t bother to read it.

Who?, I hear you ask. And well you might.

There have been 110 Nobel laureates in literature; I have heard of only 26 of them. This is about on a par with the East Coast NASCAR Championship title; no doubt very significant to a narrow circle, but utterly without value to the general population. Mr Nobel, your money is being wasted.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Back in January 2007, Mayor Bloomberg issued a report complaining that “the prevalence of meritless securities lawsuits and settlements in the U.S. has driven up the apparent and actual cost of business — and driven away potential investors” — and then his own city law department turned around and sued Apple over the city retirement fund’s investment in Apple stock, which was up 600%.

The university payouts are particularly insidious. Do you expect professors at these programs to denounce Apple for caving in to this legal pressure at the expense of its shareholders when the professors themselves are to be beneficiaries of the payout? It’s interesting that NYU, whose Professor David Yermack virtually invented the options backdating issue at the center of the Apple case, gets no money. These corporate governance programs are supposed to be about protecting shareholders from poorly run companies, yet here is a case in which the corporate governance professors themselves are preparing to accept $2.5 million that is being taken away from the shareholders of Apple. It’s outrageous.

Apple’s management doubtless decided that the settlement, which is puny in the context of Apple’s profits or revenues, would be less costly than the legal fees and management time involved in continuing to defend the litigation. Doubtless some shareholders and non-shareholders would have preferred that the company stand on principle and fight, but at least on can understand Apple’s position on the matter.

Well, they realized that the current political climate favors the Crust, so the decided to pay the Danegeld. Modern corporate governance considers six months to be a long-term view.

Extortionists of the Crust, unite! You have nothing to lose but … well, you really have nothing to lose.

I’m just astonished that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton didn’t try to wet their beaks as well. Although that may be coming.

Read it.

Read it.

Diversity and sustainability are the two most characteristic ideas of the modern academy. Diversity asks us to focus on group identity and personal affiliation, and it puts race at the center of the discussion. Sustainability asks us to focus on humanity’s use of natural resources, and it puts climate at the center of discussion. Outwardly, diversity and sustainability belong to separate narratives. They deal with different topics and might, in principle, have no more friction between them than typically exists between English departments and physics labs. Or between polar bears and tropical fish. But in fact, diversity and sustainability have a complicated, decades-old rivalry.

They vie, in effect, for the same conceptual space and the same passions. Both are about repairing the world; both invite exuberant commitment; both are moralistic; and most of all, both are encompassing ideas that crowd out other encompassing ideas. They also compete for the same financial resources.

Means you’ve actually paid out your own money.

It DOES NOT mean “out of touch”, for which a perfectly adequate traditional phrase is available.

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The right of doctors to refuse to refer women for abortions on conscientious grounds is under threat from the Council of Europe.

Politicians behind the move argue that growing numbers of doctors are refusing to become involved in abortions, depriving women, particularly from poor backgrounds, of treatment to which they are legally entitled.

I’m sure they do.

The proposal has been drawn up by the council’s British Socialist member Christine McCafferty, the former Labour MP for the Calder Valley who lost her seat at the General Election.

I’m sure it was.

Her proposal comes two years after the council adopted a resolution to recognise abortion as a universal human right, and to grant women unrestricted access to the procedure, so it is widely anticipated to win the vote.

And there’s the problem right there. Every day seems to bring a new ‘human right’ that depends on someone else being forced to provide the good to which said ‘right’ applied. So the language is perverted for a political agenda.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Europe.
2. Thank God we aren’t ruled by British Socialists (although Democrats aren’t any better).
3. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California.

Read it.

An excellent appreciation of how the Obamanation is destroying the American economy in favor of foreigners.

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Ah, yes, the writing life! Never a dull minute! Adventure everywhere!

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McDonald’s could be banned from putting toys in Happy Meals, unless the food is made healthier, under a plan being considered by officials in San Francisco.

And, of course, ‘healthy food’ is whatever is ‘healthy’ in the opinion of the city government. Unfortunately, what most ‘progressives’ think of as ‘healty food’ normal people think of as ‘weird crap’ and  won’t even eat it, much less pay money for it. So it’s a guaranteed business-loser for McDonald’s.

The Nanny State advances. Why any company would consider doing business in San Francisco escapes me.

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Sure, ‘Zaha Hadid’ immediately says ‘British architect’ to me….

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

The Other McCain pulls back the curtain.

As an epithet, “homophobia” has become an all-purpose politicized slur wielded against anyone who disagrees with the Official Gay Rights Agenda. It has little meaning outside that context. If you don’t think public schools should be subjecting first-graders to discussions of masturbation, for example, you are liable to accusations of “homophobia” — the imputation that your beliefs are irrational, constitution evidence of a mental disorder.

Fuck you.

I just had to get that out of my system. That Pam Spaulding and others have been permitted to arrogate to themselves the pseudo-therapeutic license to diagnose people they’ve never met as suffering from “homophobia” — a loaded term the media never bothers to disassemble — is one of the many elephants in this particular room.

Don’t hold it in, Stacy; tell us how you really feel.

Katherine Mangu-Ward has the goods.

Today at National Review, Rich Lowry does some education money math on the occasion of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift to Newark public schools. He is pessimistic about the possibility that more money—even private money geared toward reform—can make much of a dent in one of the worst performing school systems in the country.

Hm. Internet billionaire (who went to Harvard) gives hundred million dollars to public school system that spends more and does less than most other public school systems in the country. Hard to imagine a more Crustian thing to do. The boy is fitting in right well.

Now young reformist Newark mayor Cory Booker is poised to try the same gambit, with a little more money and a lot more publicity. Booker’s powerful backer—the Fenty to his Rhee—is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. They seem to be genuinely willing to work together on education reform, which is impressive, since Booker is likely to make a bid for Christie’s job at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Well, good luck to ’em. I can’t see any prospect of breaking the hold of the education unions on a public school system, short of hiring the Mafia to whack 90% of them.

Lowry isn’t wrong to feel hopeless. Money spent on education is like the money spent on a restaurant tab for a large group: The numbers never make any sense or add up properly, and you always feel like you paid for more than you actually got.

And that about sums it up.

Read it.

Ten pretty inappropriate ad placements.

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Read it.

The ends of true schooling are also not the good of an individual alone, but of a community as well.  When we educate the young properly, we transform them into thoughtful, civil persons, capable of understanding their duties in a well-ordered society, and capable of carrying out those duties.  A young person benefits from being so molded, but the rest of us benefit equally by receiving into our midst such virtuous citizens.  The traditions of the various learned disciplines are benefited too by true education.  Rational argumentation, principled politics, scientific knowledge – all of these things, and the goods that they entail, are preserved when we teach our young correctly.  And since the preservation of these traditions is one end of education, we must hold students to the standards derived from those traditions, demanding of them nothing less than the kinds of learned excellence embodied in the “best that has been thought and said in the world.”

Our individualistic culture, with its emphasis on self-esteem, self-affirmation, and self-fulfillment, is at enmity with each and every one of these principles, and will admit none of them into its pantheon of prevailing educational dogmas.  A near unanimity of American parents regard a school simply as an institution designed for the benefit of their child, and not also for the community as a whole.  As each and every negative appraisal of their child’s performance constitutes a threat to his self-esteem, they will allow his teachers to make no such appraisals.  They will allow his teachers to maintain no standards which are beyond the capacities of their child, even temporarily, for fear that the resulting failures will fracture his psychological placidity.  Such things confound their cherished conception of education, which is essentially therapeutic – the prolonged cultivation of their child’s emotional ease.  As a consequence, rather than holding the students to certain expectations, our schools now frame their expectations to the limits of their students; this is the process of “dumbing down” which has been an unmistakable feature of the American educational landscape for over three generations.

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The military’s control over the vast Marange fields — the source of a quarter of the world’s diamonds — has become an important factor in the future of Zimbabwe.

The eight-member Joint Operational Command (JOC) of military and police leaders earns revenues from the mines through the control of companies.

The campaign group Global Witness says smugglers also sell on stones dug by forced labour gangs overseen by the military. The group’s researchers say locals are made to mine them by gun-wielding soldiers.

The diamonds are smuggled over the Mozambican border, where they are traded on the black market.

The revenues then return to the military.

Zimbabweans are lucky they are no longer suffering under the boot of the racist white former regime Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what kind of hell they would be living in now.

Read it.

Anthony Graber was charged with illegal wiretapping for recording plainclothes state trooper J.D. Uhler jumping from his unmarked sedan and drawing his gun — and waiting a good five seconds before identifying himself as a police officer. The tape was shot with a conspicuous, helmet-mounted camera that captured the video and audio of the confrontation.

Read it.

Well, duh. Most of the bums I want to throw out are Democrats and beloved of their constituents. And most of the bums Democrats want to throw out are Republicans and beloved of their constituents. So most of them come back term after term.

Read it.

Exercising Discretion: Limited-benefit health insurance plans, such as the one offered by McDonald’s, may get some leeway in meeting the health-care overhaul law’s requirement that 80% to 85% of premiums are spent on medical rather than administrative costs, the WSJ reports. The Obama administration says HHS head Kathleen Sebelius will “exercise her discretion” in enforcing the requirement for those “mini-med” plans, which tend to have a higher proportion of administrative costs because of lower claims payments and higher turnover among the hourly employee workforce. Regulatory guidance won’t be out until late in the year.

Translation: Whether or not you have to pay major amounts of money for high-priced health insurance is entirely at the whim of a bureaucracy, and God help you if you piss them off at any point in the procedure. Oh, and did we mention that it certainly wouldn’t hurt to be a major contributor to the President’s party coffers?

Read it.

A security  researcher has infiltrated the highest levels of America’s intelligence agencies using nothing more than Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and a picture of a pretty woman.

Some organisations did prove too tough for Ryan to crack, though. “I didn’t manage to make any friends in the CIA, the FBI or Secret Service,” he admits. “The mentality there is different: they just don’t trust you from the beginning. And it was harder to get friends from colleges  than it was from security and intelligence. The universities I picked… were prestigious and kind of cliquey. If they don’t remember you, they’re not going to talk to you.”

Read it.

Another excellent reason to avoid Facebook.

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It’s clearly not easy, being Larry Summers. For all his millions, he still needs to travel from A to B, and keeps on finding himself stymied. First of all he lost his Harvard town car and chauffeur when he moved to Washington, and stood out there for demanding a similar car and driver in recompense for not getting the job of Fed chairman.

As an economist, Summers should know that it makes perfect sense for great resorts to spend enormous amounts of energy on the kind of quality he’s talking about: that’s their comparative advantage, the very heart of what they’re selling. Meanwhile, Summers isn’t really even the customer of the airports he’s passing through: the airlines are the customers, and the passengers are the goods being transported. So the airport doesn’t have much in the way of economic incentives to ease Summers’s way.

The Other McCain is irate.

[Lindsey] Graham tells us that he is “OK” with Murkowski keeping her ranking status.

Worthless bastard.

Don’t hold it in, Stacy, tell us how you really feel….

Read it.

See ads on the page? Chances are the publisher gets paid by the pageviews—maybe not directly, but the volume of traffic is what dictates the price of the ads. This means that to make money they have to get you to visit as many pages as possible on their site. Doesn’t matter what you do on the page, they can’t track that effectively yet, all that matters is that the ads load.

The swine.

This creates a tension between you and the publisher since the motivations for your visit differ. You’re there because you want to learn, be informed, or be entertained. The publisher wants you there because they’re making money for having you there. They make even more money when you browse more of their pages, loading more ads in the process. Their primary motive is not to teach, inform, or entertain because the visitors are not paying them for that service. Indeed, the visitors are not even the customers—the real customers are the advertisers who are purchasing eyeballs by the thousand.

Read it.

As the threat of major terror attacks rises, the European Commission has chosen to take action.  Of a sort.  It’s about to violate its existing antiterror agreement with the United States – and in a way that will make the current threat worse.

Read it.

Ponder a war between China and Japan.

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There are 116,000 dead eligible voters in Massachusetts.  And in Florida, one major newspaper recently investigated and reported that almost 15,000 dead Floridians are still hanging around on the election rolls – just six weeks before one of the most vicious and important election cycles in our history.  Can it be the sun?  Most States have similar statistics.  Every two years, states must report to the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) information about the integrity and accuracy of their voter rolls.  The latest report is not good news for our democracy – or our international reputation.  South Dakota, Texas, Kentucky, Mississippi and Indiana report in excess of a dozen counties with more registered voters than breathing human beings old enough to vote.  West Virginia, Maryland, Iowa and North Carolina also reported having eligible deceased voters on their rolls.  The list goes on and on.  And so does the real risk that these voters will have illegal votes registered in their names.  Close races, like the Franken/Coleman race in Minnesota can be decided on just a handful of votes.  We may have to go to purple thumbprints at this rate.  Hugo Chavez must be howling at this American disgrace.

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Perhaps the realization that we’re a bunch of self-absorbed, narcissistic slackers. But that’s just a theory, you understand.

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A lesbian martial arts expert has staged a jailbreak to free her under age female lover from protective custody where she was being “cured” of her attraction to women, according to reports.

Police are investigating the escape of the 15-year-old girl, who allegedly admitted to having a sexual relationship with her 26-year-old taekwondo teacher in east Jakarta.

The girl, Tn, who comes from a community that only uses one name, left home to live with her teacher, Sj, for a month.

Soon to be a major motion picture, I have no doubt, perhaps starring Lindsay Lohan.

Read it.

Patrick Poole reports that a known Hamas operative and unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history – Kifah Mustapha – was recently escorted into the top-secret National Counterterrorism Center and other secure government facilities, including the FBI’s training center at Quantico, during a six-week “Citizen’s Academy” hosted by the FBI as part of its “outreach” to the Muslim Community. The group was accompanied by reporter Ben Bradley of WLS-Chicago (ABC), who filed a report on the trip yesterday.

Makes you wonder whose side our government is on. I’m getting the impression that it isn’t that of the American people.

Joel Kotkin is always worth reading.

What characterized great cities such as Amsterdam—and, later, places such as London, New York , Chicago, and Tokyo—was the size of their property-owning middle class. This was a class whose roots, for the most part, lay in the peasantry or artisan class, and later among industrial workers. Their ascension into the ranks of the bourgeoisie, petit or haute, epitomized the opportunities for social advancement created uniquely by cities.

In the twenty-first century—the first in which the majority of people will live in cities—this unique link between urbanism and upward mobility is under threat. Urban boosters still maintain that big cities remain unique centers for social uplift, but evidence suggests this is increasingly no longer the case.

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And the Nanny State of Britain forges ahead.

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In thinking that you and I are one of Walter Alvarez’s “astronomically improbables,” it’s only a small mental step to realizing who else, specifically, had to be too.

Other names begin to crowd the head, in no particular order. Roosevelt. And Churchill. Tojo and Patton. Submit your own favorites to be grateful — or ungrateful — for.

Don’t laugh yet. Read it first.

Read it.

I’m glad someone besides me has noticed that.