Read it.

Yet another good reason to stay away from Facebook.

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Obama persists in acting as if he were president of a University rather than President of the United States.

Specifically, he has bypassed the Senate confirmation procedure by (1) installing Don Berwick, via recess appointment, as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and (2) making Elizabeth Warren a “special adviser” so she can create and oversee the new consumer financial protection bureau.

Read it.

Now that we have entered the implementation phase of ObamaCare, things are becoming more clear.  Many of the bold promises that were offered to sell ObamaCare to the American public were not based in reality.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Taxes increases hit Americans next year and, in many states, they are already seeing health insurance rates increase as a result of ObamaCare. In addition to the Obama Administration promising that insurance rates would not go up, they have also promised that rationing of care would not happen.  But bad things seems to be happening sooner than expected and contrary to explicit promises of this Administration.

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

Read it.

How liberal sentimentality often leads to genocide.

Read it.

Life has become extremely complex in the University of New Mexico’s English department in the three years since Lisa D. Chávez, a tenured associate professor, was discovered moonlighting as the phone-sex dominatrix “Mistress Jade,” and posing in promotional pictures sexually dominating one of her own graduate students.

Sounds like every professor’s dream.

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Mao Zedong caused the death of 45 million people according to a scholar who was given unprecedented access to Chinese Communist Party archives.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Read it.

Take the rail link between Tampa and Orlando that imagineers hope will shuttle theme-parkers at speeds reaching 186 m.p.h. President Obama has already thrown $1.25 billion at the line. Presumably, the named expresses will be The Absentee Balloter and The Recount.

The reason high-speed rail has more allure in Europe is because people live in cities. Nor do they like driving their cars on the cobblestones of historic quarters. In China, cities are megalopolises and few Chinese own cars or want to drive them across the vast country. France is a one-city country, so all rail lines lead quickly to Paris, as Louis XIV would have wanted.

David Friedman nails it.

Bush is responsible for the Republican insurrection and the Tea Party Movement twice over. To begin with, he spent eight years demonstrating that Republicans were at least as willing to increase the size of government, and to do it with borrowed money, as Democrats—indeed, more willing than the most recent Democratic administration. That was a good reason for Republicans who believe in the sorts of things Bush said he believed in to conclude that electing Republicans was no great improvement over electing Democrats, hence that renominating current incumbents would mean the wrong people being elected—whoever won. From there it is a short step to nominating someone else, even at the risk of losing the subsequent election.

The best thing you can say about George W. Bush is that he was better than his father.

Read it.

Since transit is heavily subsidized by the taxpayers anyway, I guess it doesn’t really matter in the long run.

We could just give union members welfare payments directly and save all of the frictional costs of pretending to launder it through the market–but that would be too honest for our political system to cope with, I suspect.

Read it.

How much would it cost to get them to do the rest of us the same favor?

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How do entrenched, corrupt Democratic Congressmen extract money from lobbyists? Through an old-fashioned shakedown. If you want to see how crude the Democrats’ techniques are, listen to the voicemail message that Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton left for a D.C. lobbyist.

And it’s not just limited to Democrats – there are plenty of corrupt Republicans who work the same scams. Democrats are merely more polished and professional about it.

Read it.

The owners of Mickey Mouse have a lot to answer for, as do the Congressmen that they bought.

This one is from a few months back, but I think it’s an interesting topic that deserves some discussion. Rufus Pollock decided to look at how many books would be in the public domain today  if we’d either kept copyright law at its original 14 years (plus the possibility of a 14 year renewal) or if we had copyright set at 15 years flat (a number that a recent research project suggested was the optimal length for copyright (pdf). Not surprisingly, he found that a hell of a lot more works would be in the public domain.

Rather than 19% of all books being in the public domain — as the situation is today — we’d have 52% of books being in the public domain under the 14+14 scenario and 75% of works being in the public domain under the 15 yr copyright scenario. As he notes, that latter number is comparable to the percentage of works in the public domain in 1795, in the early days of copyright law in the US. This is important to note, because if you actually understand the history of copyright law, you would know that it’s true purpose was to expand the public domain, and thus it seems worthy to look at how it may be doing the exact opposite of that. In the past century, copyright law in the US has only expanded — with the single exception of recognizing that federal documents (mostly) don’t deserve copyright. Nothing new has entered the public domain through copyright expiring in quite some time, and nothing new will do so for many years as well (and don’t be surprised if we get another attempt at copyright extension soon…).

Truly, we have the best government that money can buy.

Read it.

I’m all for people actually looking out for consumer rights, but sometimes I wonder who appointed these folks as our “watchdogs?”

A very good question, and one that is too infrequently asked.

Read it.

Now fears have been raised over the safety of the activity, after a mother-of-two was left paralysed following an accident during a pole-dancing class.

Debbie Plowman, 32, suffered devastating injuries when she fell, breaking her neck and severely damaging her spinal cord.

She was left paralysed from the chest down and remains on a ventilator to enable her to breathe. She can communicate only through a computer that tracks her eye movements.

The obvious question, of course, is why a mother-of-two was pole dancing.

She’s not eligible for a Darwin Award because she’s already reproduced.

Read it.

Read it.

The police have told Sverigedemokraterna (the Sweden Democrats) that they must cancel all their public meetings because their safety cannot be guaranteed.

In other words, Swedish law enforcement admits that it either can’t or won’t prevent anarchist and Muslim thugs from assaulting and firebombing the meetings of a officially registered political party whose members are assembling lawfully and peacefully.

This is what the electoral process has become in modern multicultural Sweden.

The classic response to this, as seen throughout Europe in the 1930s, is for the party to form paramilitary forces of its own, leading to increasingly violent clashes in the streets between the two sides. We’ve been down that road before, and it always ends badly.

Read it.

They really do want everyone except the public employees to leave.

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Mark Levin creeps me out; he’s not quite in Michael Savage territory, but he still rubs me the wrong way. Right now he appears to be in a pissing contest with the guys at Powerline that seems to have started with the Maryland Republican Senate primary race.

Read it.

At a faculty lunch yesterday, I heard about an ingenious scheme used by some universities in New York, where much rental housing is rent controlled.  Here are the three key elements, as it was described to me by one of my colleagues:

1. The university buys a rent-controlled building.  The purchase price is low, because the existing landlord cannot make much money renting it.

2. The university then rents the apartments to its own senior faculty, who view this as a great perk.  In essence, the difference between the free-market rent and the controlled rent is a form of compensation for the professor.  As a result, the university can reduce the professor’s cash compensation by an equivalent amount.  The university is effectively earning the market rent for the apartment.

3. But it gets even better.  The implicit rental subsidy is a form of non-taxed compensation.  Normally, if an employer gives an employee a perk like this, the subsidy is taxable income (unless the perk is deemed a working condition required to do the job, like a hotel manager living in a hotel).  But here, the university can claim there is no subsidy: It is only charging what the rent-control law requires.  Because of this tax treatment, the implicit subsidy is worth even more to the professor than the equivalent cash compensation.  This fact allows the university to reduce the professor’s cash compensation by an even greater amount.  Thus, the university effectively earns even more than the free-market rent on a real estate investment purchased much lower than the free-market price would have been.

The Crust takes care of its own.

Read it.

I suspect that they don’t; they just find it a useful stick with which to beat their opponents in light of the fact that they’ve successfully convinced NAMs of the myth.

Plus there’s the standard liberal meme of ‘We’re not racist. They’re not us. Therefore they must be racist.’ that crops up wherever politically fashionable thought abounds.

I suspect that a large part of it is the conflation of ‘conservatism’ as a temperament with ‘conservatism’ as a political program; Southern Democrats who backed the Jim Crow laws were ‘conservative’ in temperament in the sense that they liked the system they had and didn’t want it to change, and the distinction between the two has been blurred by ‘progressives’ (whether deliberately or not) in order to tar the latter with the alleged faults of the former.

The Ochlophobist is not impressed.

What was of interest to me was that the newsmongers interviewed a number of late middle aged to elderly women who were quite evidently of the UCC / Unitarian spectrum – they spoke using the usual liberal end of Mainline Prot rhetoric and mannerisms. And yet they were all wearing head-coverings and there was video footage of them sitting in the back of the mosque with the other women during the ceremony.

It struck me that if these women are like 99.9% of the other women from the religious “traditional sphere” these women appear to come from, they would be downright pissed and beligerant if they were asked to cover their heads and sit in the back of a Christian church of any sort – especially a Christian church that does not ordain women in something of the same manner that we know this Muslim community is not going to have a woman as imam.

Read it.

The fundamental problem with the VAT is political — or more precisely, a public choice problem rather than a fiscal economics one.  The hidden nature of the VAT makes it a politically feasible way to creep up tax revenues, because of the fact of rational political ignorance on the part of voters, and public choice incentives on the part of politicians to increase government and the concomitant revenues to fund it.  This is a slightly different point than Mitchell makes in his piece; Mitchell focuses on more revenue streams available eventually equals government to match, as Friedman argued.  But the specific argument against the VAT is the politically hidden nature of the tax, because it is imposed at each stage of value-added, but then is no longer visible to the end user as a tax, but merely as part of the “cost.”  If you’re a voter, that should be a bug, not a feature.  If you’re a member of the political class, so to speak, it is much more likely to be regarded the other way around.

Read it.

For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, American liberals distinguished themselves from conservatives by what Lionel Trilling called “a spiritual orthodoxy of belief in progress.” Liberalism placed its hopes in human perfectibility. Regarding human nature as essentially both beneficent and malleable, liberals, like their socialist cousins, argued that with the aid of science and given the proper social and economic conditions, humanity could free itself from its cramped carapace of greed and distrust and enter a realm of true freedom and happiness. Conservatives, by contrast, clung to a tragic sense of man’s inherent limitations. While acknowledging the benefits of science, they argued that it could never fundamentally reform, let alone transcend, the human condition. Most problems don’t have a solution, the conservatives maintained; rather than attempting Promethean feats, man would do best to find a balanced place in the world.

Why, then, did American liberalism, starting in the early 1970s, undergo a historic metanoia, dismissing the idea of progress just as progress was being won? Multiple political and economic forces paved liberalism’s path away from its mid-century optimism and toward an aristocratic outlook reminiscent of the Tory Radicalism of nineteenth-century Britain; but one of the most powerful was the rise of the modern environmental movement and its recurrent hysterias.

If one were to pick a point at which liberalism’s extraordinary reversal began, it might be the celebration of the first Earth Day, in April 1970.

Like the Tory Radicals, today’s liberal gentry see the untamed middle classes as the true enemy. “Environmentalism offered the extraordinary opportunity to combine the qualities of virtue and selfishness,” wrote William Tucker in a groundbreaking 1977 Harper’s article on the opposition to construction of the Storm King power plant along New York’s Hudson River. Tucker described the extraordinary sight of a fleet of yachts—including one piloted by the old Stalinist singer Pete Seeger—sailing up and down the Hudson in protest. What Tucker tellingly described as the environmentalists’ “aristocratic” vision called for a stratified, terraced society in which the knowing ones would order society for the rest of us. Touring American campuses in the mid-1970s, Norman Macrae of The Economist was shocked “to hear so many supposedly left-wing young Americans who still thought they were expressing an entirely new and progressive philosophy as they mouthed the same prejudices as Trollope’s 19th century Tory squires: attacking any further expansion of industry and commerce as impossibly vulgar, because ecologically unfair to their pheasants and wild ducks.”

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The surest sign that a market is free is that it is competitive; there should be a rich variety of products provided by a vast number of firms, a situation which affords entrepreneurs many opportunities to enter the market and workers many places to sell their labor. And when we waltz into our local Wal Mart, that is what we seem to see. Alas, it is an illusion of competition rather than the reality. For example, if you want eyeglasses, you can go to Pearl Vision, or Lenscrafters, Sears Optical, JC Penney, Target, Macy’s, Sunglass Hut, or buy frames from 25 different manufacturers. Surely choice and competition prevail in this market. But no. All of these are one company, the Italian conglomerate Luxottica. And as with glasses, so also with so many other products. Most of our beer—even some that try to pass themselves off as “craft” beer—is provided by just two companies, ImBev of Belgium or the South African Brewing Company. Proctor & Gamble provides 75% of razors, 60% of detergent, 50% of feminine pads, etc. Even what few companies remain in each market often engage in collusion rather than competition. Wal Mart, for example, appoints one company as a “category manager” to allocate shelf space for all the “competing” companies.

Read it.

Now watch the government sit on it for a decade or two.

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I can vouch for it.

Read it.

Yet another excellent reason to avoid Facebook.

The more other people know about you, the worse off you are. Trust me on this. (Or don’t. You’ll learn.)

Read it.

Federal employees wouldn’t skip out on their taxes, would they?

Read it.

Ah, the perils of treating politics as a substitute for religion. George W. Bush never had that problem; nobody really came to politics for the first time in 2000 because they thought voting for Bush would make them feel personally fulfilled, would end politics as we have known it, would end the nation’s racial divisions and make the world love us, or that he would pay their mortgage and car payments. Bush got elected because he seemed like a guy who could be trusted to do the job. And of course, that’s before you get to Obama’s actual job performance….

Moe Lane kicks over a rock.

The scheme goes like this: Maxine Waters (D, CA-35) regularly puts out a mailer to LA residents with her sample ballot recommendations.  To get on it, you have to pay out money to ‘cover the costs.’ It’s described as ‘reimbursement’ rather than ‘payment’ because that way there’s no federal campaign funding restrictions, which effectively means that candidates and groups can be charged as much money as Rep. Waters likes.  And a third of that money ends up getting funneled into a PR firm owned by Waters’ daughter – and before you object: the article linked above notes that the firm’s “fees do not include expenses for printing and mailing, which are paid separately by the committee.”

And here’s the kicker: that payola’s all perfectly legal, mind you.  Rep. Waters has worked out a method where she can sell her patronage to other Democrats and funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars to her family, and the FEC can’t touch her for it (it’s also not part of her ethics investigation).

Read it.

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

Read it.

Another very good reason to avoid Twitter and the twits who inhabit it.

Never was there a business more aptly named.

Read it.

Hey, that’s what I pay them for.

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For nearly two years, Amazon has been trying to get manufacturers to adopt “frustration-free packaging” that gets rid of plastic cases and air-bubble wrap — major irritants for consumers and one of Amazon’s biggest sources of customer complaints.

But the frustration persists. Only about 600 of the millions of products Amazon sells come in frustration-free versions. And other big online retailers, like Walmart.com and Target.com, have not embraced the new packaging, even when manufacturers make it available.

Read it.

George Grier said he had to use his rifle on Sunday night to stop what he thought was going to be an invasion of his Uniondale home by a gang he thought might have been the vicious “MS-13.” He said the whole deal happened as he was about to drive his cousin home.

“I went around and went into the house, ran upstairs and told my wife to call the police. I get the gun and I go outside and I come into the doorway and now, by this time, they are in the driveway, back here near the house. I tell them, you know, ‘Can you please leave?’ Grier said.

Grier said the five men dared him to use the gun; and that their shouts brought another larger group of gang members in front of his house.

“He starts threatening my family, my life. ‘Oh you’re dead. I’m gonna kill your family and your babies. You’re dead.’ So when he says that, 20 others guys come rushing around the corner. And so I fired four warning shots into the grass,” Grier said.

Grier was later arrested.

This is obviously God warning you to stay out of New York.

The Other McCain calls out the MahaRushie.

El Rushbo is on Facebook? All of my illusions, shattered….

Read it.

The government has begun to use teleworking, sometimes known as telecommuting or working from home, but expanding that effort would yield significant benefits. Moreover, government policies at the state level create an obstacle to this practice in the private sector, and require reform.

The government is creating an obstacle? Say it ain’t so!

Possibly the biggest barrier to telework are state tax laws. Many states implement some form of double taxation on out-of-state teleworkers. For example, New York applies a “convenience of the employer” doctrine on out-of-state teleworkers who work for a New York–based organization, which requires them to pay income tax to New York for telework days outside of the state. All work done outside of New York is subject to New York income tax, unless the work is done outside of New York out of necessity to the employer . In 2005, the New York State Court of Appeals upheld the “convenience of the employer” doctrine in Huckaby vs. New York State Division of Tax Appeals. Thomas Huckaby, a Tennessee resident, worked for a New York–based company, but teleworked 75 percent of the time. On his New York State nonresident tax returns, Huckaby allocated 25 percent of his income to New York, and 75 percent to Tennessee; however, the New York State tax department determined that Huckaby should have paid New York income tax on 100 percent of his income. The court sided with the New York State tax department, stating that the doctrine was constitutionally applied. As many as 35 states have some form of double taxation for teleworkers.

The eternal goal of the bureaucrat is to leave no potential revenue source untapped.

Read it.

It’s the gift that keeps on taking. The old Giants Stadium, demolished to make way for New Meadowlands Stadium, still carries about $110 million in debt, or nearly $13 for every New Jersey resident, even though it is now a parking lot.

The financial hole was dug over decades by politicians who passed along the cost of building and fixing the stadium, and it is getting deeper. With the razing of the old stadium and the Giants and the Jets moving into their splashy new home next door, a big source of revenue to pay down the debt has shriveled.

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Distracted Oz pedestrians are allegedly dropping like flies to “Death by iPod” – an untimely end provoked by walking out into traffic while in a “zombie trance”.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Japan has confirmed the nation’s first case of a new gene in bacteria that allows the microorganisms to become drug-resistant superbugs, detected in a man who had medical treatment in India, a Health Ministry official said Tuesday.

The gene, known as NDM-1, was found in a Japanese man in his 50s, Kensuke Nakajima said.

Researchers say the gene _ which appears to be circulating widely in India _ alters bacteria, making them resistant to nearly all known antibiotics.

So stay away from India for medical treatments.

Read it.

The entrepreneurs and workers who built the great technology companies that drive our economy are nowhere to be found.  It is the proletariat of the old economy who live in Obama’s imagination.

But what was most Obama-like about the speech was the launching of vicious attacks on his opponents, only to then cry foul over the fact that his opponents push back. Obama, as he did throughout the campaign and has done throughout his presidency, painted a picture of his political opponents as heartless victimizers of others, and of the capitalist system as cruel and inhumane.

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Our analysis suggests not that gangs cause violence, but that violence causes gangs. In other words, gangs form in response to government’s failure to protect youths against violence. The surprising implication of our insight is that efforts to reduce gang activity could actually increase violent crime.

Read it.

Days after the US officially ended combat operations and touted Iraq’s ability to defend itself, American troops found themselves battling heavily armed militants assaulting an Iraqi military headquarters in the centre of Baghdad.

How’s that ‘Hope and Change’ thing working out for ya?

Read it.

Schoolchildren learn more quickly if the brightest and most confident are prevented from putting up their hands, according to a teaching expert.

Yeah, and the quickest thing they learn is that being bright, confident, and willing to put up your hand is punished rather than rewarded. Way to go, ‘education expert’.

Read it.

Scam artists get lists of patients, lists of expensive items they can bill to Medicare, and a bank account. Then they go to town and steal tens of millions of dollars. The whole thing is worth watching and/or reading. Two highlights struck me. First, Steve Kroft interviews the woman in the federal Department of Health and Human Services who is responsible for reducing fraud. Her name is Kim Brandt, Medicare’s director of “program integrity.” You can’t make this stuff up.

Read it.

Well, no, not really.

The whole justification for trains, high-speed or otherwise, is efficiency. The argument runs: If you’ve got 100 people going from e.g New York to e.g. Chicago, then it’s more efficient for them all to ride a train than to take, oh, 73 cars to get there. It will cost less (in total), use fewer resources, emit less pollutants, take up less space, etc., etc. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it. Well, it’s not, and here’s why.

New York and Chicago are big places. A train requires you to go from your actual starting point, which may be (and probably is) different from everyone else’s starting point, and get to the virtual New York (i.e. the New York train station), get there at pretty much the same time as everybody else that’s going to Chicago (whether that’s convenient for you or not), then get on board along with everybody else that’s going to Chicago (a non-trivial exercise, as anyone who’s ridden an airplane can tell you), then ride at a speed and in a manner that is decided by somebody else (who may not, and probably does not, have your preferences at the top of his list), then arrive at the virtual Chicago (i.e. the Chicago train station), get out of the train with everybody else (a non-trivial exercise, as anyone who’s ridden an airplane can tell you), and then get (somehow) to your actual destination. Oh, and don’t get me started on what happens if you have any luggage.

This purported ‘efficiency’ of trains is efficiency from the standpoint of the people running the trains, not of the people riding them. The people riding them don’t see efficiency, they see massive inconvenience: Inconvenience in time (can’t start when you want to, don’t have any flexibility about when you start, can’t pick your own route or how long it takes to get there, can’t arrive when you want to, have to expend extra time being herded hither and yon along with a massive crowd of strangers), inconvenience in passage (you go where they want you to go, not where you want to go, and there’s no freedom to make any side trips or rest stops or whatever it might move you to do on the way), and inconvenience in environment (trains suck compared to automobiles when it comes to comfort – always have, always will). And if you don’t happen to want to go between the two points serviced by trains, then you’re out of luck.

The reason why people prefer automobiles to trains is FREEDOM. Freedom to set your own schedule and vary it to suit yourself, freedom to set your own route and vary it to suit yourself, freedom to carry as much stuff with you as your vehicle will carry (plus a trailer if it can pull one) and have it instantly available to you at your destination, and just generally freedom to run your own life instead of giving it over into the hands of service-industry bureaucrats who care about their jobs first, their own convenience second, and you dead last.

The people who push trains are at heart people who have no compunction about running your life for you because they are convinced that they are smarter than you (just talk to one sometime) and know better than you (ditto) and are therefore justified in making you do it their way rather than your way, just because they backpacked through Europe one summer during college and had a great time on the trains there. ‘Fascists’ is not too strong a term, although most of them will claim to be ‘progressives’.

Shun them. Deny them power, especially the power to steal your money through taxation and spend it foolishly on this or any other foolish scheme.

ADDENDUM: This post from Carolyn illustrates the situation very nicely:

When I was stuck on the train between New York City and my college for two hours with no dinner last year, that loaf kept me from going crazy. The same thing happened when my friends and I were stuck waiting for customs for hours on our train to Montreal. They had teased me about the bag of mini bagels I’d been shlepping around, but they sure were thankful for it later.

Who, having traveled on a train or an airplance, can’t tell a similar story? If you ask anybody in that situation, ‘Would you rather be here on this train/plane, or in a car?’, is there any doubt what the answer would be?

Read it.

Hours after winning thousands of dollars in a jackpot at a California gambling hall, a 55-year-old man was followed from the casino, robbed, run over and killed by another man who fled the scene, the Los Angeles Times reported.

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

Lest we forget.

Read it.