Read it.

Read it.

How hard is it to grasp that if you raise the price of something, people buy less of it? Six-year-olds understand that; many professors and legislators, alas, do not.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

I just got interesting email from Amazon: the Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers […] We and many others strongly opposed this legislation, known as HB 10-1193, but it was enacted anyway. Regrettably, as a result of the new law, we have decided to stop advertising through Associates based in Colorado. We plan to continue to sell to Colorado residents, however, and will advertise through other channels, including through Associates based in other states. The message goes on to say that they’ll pay out all the money they owe me but I won’t earn any more money for referring people to them.

This reminds me of the complaint by the Beggar at the beginning of Fiddler on a Roof:

‘Here’s one kopek.’
‘One kopek? Last week you gave me two kopeks.’
‘I had a bad week.’
‘So you had a bad week – why should I suffer?’

Read it.

The great mystery of the health care debate is why liberals, who don’t trust doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies or insurers, trust Congress and federal bureaucrats.

Perhaps because they’re on the same side?

Read it.

The welfare state cannot be deliberately scaled back by the politicians allegedly in control of it. It can only collapse.

Read it.

Using fossil fuel in vehicles is better for the environment than so-called green fuels made from crops, according to a government study seen by The Times.

The findings show that the Department for Transport’s target for raising the level of biofuel in all fuel sold in Britain will result in millions of acres of forest being logged or burnt down and converted to plantations. The study, likely to force a review of the target, concludes that some of the most commonly-used biofuel crops fail to meet the minimum sustainability standard set by the European Commission.

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

Jerry Pournelle asks some pointed questions.

“You want me to pay more taxes so that your tuition will be lower. What are you learning that will benefit me? What is it you intend to do that will make my investment worth while?”

Read it.

An online dictionary to explain the opaque terms and phrases – or “edubabble” – used by educationalists has been developed to help parents, students and even confused teachers.

Read it.

The traditional British chip is already thicker  –  and therefore healthier  –  than the French fries served by big fast-food chains.

Despite this, officials from the Food Standards Agency watchdog are encouraging chip shop owners to produce even thicker versions, much like potato wedges.

Check it out.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

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

Matt Welch takes a look at entitlement spending, and it is not a pretty sight.

Read it.

Yet Another Promise Broken.

Read it.

A newlywed couple spent their wedding night in separate Cape Cod jail cells after the bride was arrested for trying to run over an old girlfriend of the groom, police said.

Well. There’s Massachusetts for you.

Read it.

Slate likes public schools. Of course, if parents didn’t have to pay for CRAP (Communist Re-education And Programming) public schools, they could afford to send their kids to private schools.

Jerry Pournelle is outraged.

I remember growing up in a land in which it was presumed that people were free to do things, and there were not silly laws about how much grass you must have on it. We don’t seem to live there any longer.

There are people in this world who want to control others. They tend to become public employees. Once they have some authority they want to go justify their pay, so they find things to enforce like an ordinance that says you have to have 40% green coverage on your lawn. This one actually got the householder to court, where he had to plead not guilty. Once this became public the silliness stopped, but who is going to pay for it all? And why is this redundant employee still being paid?

Read it.

Read it.

Hey, this is a serious issue.

The Other McCain weighs in on Frank Rich.

Accusing opponents of dangerous insanity has become so commonplace in the Age of Obama that such discourse is now taken for granted.

Read it.

It doesn’t, and never has. The Navy and Marines show how air forces can be integrated into a traditional service to great effect. Having a separate air force just adds coordination problems between air power and surface power.

Since its founding, the Air Force has existed primarily to support its daring and chivalrous fighter and bomber pilots. Even as they are being displaced by new technology, these traditional pilots are fighting to retain control over the Air Force and its culture and traditions.

Read it.

How do I get a job like that?

Read it.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

CBS follows up with a reasonable question: “Is Maxine Waters really as dumb as she seems?”

Well, you can’t say that she doesn’t represent her district.

Read it.

Let them go back to being their own Kingdom and see how they like it.

Read it.

It needs to be made.

But what Mr. Hubbard, Mr. Mankiw, and Mr. Cowen are talking about is a consumption tax and an income tax. There’s nothing to prevent the politicians from making this deal on reducing income tax rates to get a consumption tax, then turning around a few years later and raising the income tax rates back to what they were before, using the same approach that President Obama is now using as an argument for returning to the Clinton-era tax rates. If history is any guide, the consumption tax rate will get increased over time too, same as the Medicare tax rate and the Social Security tax rate have been. At least in the absence of a consumption tax, the politicians can’t keep raising the rate of it.

Read it.

The New York City public schools have adopted a policy that bans most bake sales but allows the sale of pre-packaged items such as Doritos and Pop-Tarts, the New York Times reports. The policy is in the name of the students’ health….

Student health is, of course, to be overseen by the public school, an instrumentality of the State, rather than by the parents, who just Aren’t Qualified to make such decisions. (I’ve got the machine that goes ‘ping’ over here somewhere….)

Read it.

To flip through the latest draft of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, in the works for seven years now, is to see the discipline’s floundering writ large. Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications. Patients who seek psychiatric help today for mood disorders stand a good chance of being diagnosed with a disease that doesn’t exist and treated with a medication little more effective than a placebo.

My view is that psychiatry is a pseudo-science, like astrology, in which the principles of the discipline bear no causal relationship to the real world and its operations. To the extent that it actually accomplishes anything at all, it is because of incorporation of real scientific fields like medicine.

Jerry Pournelle says:

DSM has, in my judgment, far too often been influenced by the pharmaceutical industry, and used to justify payments from insurance; it is, in my judgment, one of the many reasons for the high costs of health care, since “mental health” coverage is now generally required in state mandated healthcare insurance policies as one of the “minimum” requirements. As to the conflicts between the Freudian analyst based theories of mental disorder and the behavior-based medical theories that generally prescribed chemical treatment, that was just beginning when I left psychology graduate school. Of course my emphasis in psychology was in engineering and human factors on the one hand, and mathematical and statistical analysis using tests and measurements on the other, so I am hardly an expert on abnormal psychology.

I am very glad that the DSM did not exist when I was growing up. I would almost certainly have been diagnosed with a disorder that could only be cured by drugs. As it happens, I was “cured” by being forced to learn a modicum of self-discipline.

Read it.

What if we achieved the urbanist dream, with people deciding en masse to move back to the city? Well, that would create a big problem, since there would be no place to put them. Many cities hit their peak population in 1950, when the US total was 150 million. Today it is over 300 million, with virtually all the growth taking place in the suburbs.

A similar problem arises with mass transit: If everybody shifted to using public transportation, as the Crust keeps insisting they must, it couldn’t handle the load — and the tax-funded subsidies necessary to prop up most mass-transit fare strutures would quickly break government budgets.

Read it.

Stan Still, Anna Sasin, Hazel Nutt, Barb Dwyer and Justin Case are among some of the country’s unluckiest people who have been given the unfortunate names by their parents, it found.

Some parents think of their children as pets, judging by the names they hand out. I’d sue.

Read it.

The fact that so many celebrities – and especially footballers – have the emotional attention span of the average teenager ought, you would think, to be taken into account before they let the needles at them.

Without being personally acquainted, we can be sure that now Johnny (Depp) has found contentment with Vanessa (Paradis) he deeply regrets that large Winona (Ryder) Forever on his right bicep.

Oh, the intolerable burdens of modern life…. I seem to recall Angelina Jolie having the same problem when she broke up with Billy Bob Thornton. And I won’t even get into the Tommy Lee/Pamela Anderson story.

Eric Raymond.

I knew it was getting bad out there, with the nominal unemployment rate at 10% and the actual hitting 17% and 6 applicants for every job. But my friends are mostly university-educated professionals in high-skilled tech jobs — last fired, first hired, and bright enough that if they had to change careers or found their own business they could probably hack it. Except…except for these two, who I’ll call A and B. What’s happening to them is bad. Very bad. And it illustrates a problem that’s going to get worse barring some drastic changes in the system.

We’ve spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and downside risks associated with hiring a worker — which meant the minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn’t make sense has crept up and up and up, gradually. This effect was partly masked by credit and asset bubbles, but those have now popped. Increasingly it’s not just the classic hard-core unemployables (alcoholics, criminal deviants, crazies) that can’t pull enough weight to justify a paycheck; it’s the marginal ones, the mediocre, and the mildly dysfunctional.

Read it.

Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

John Stossel whacks the FDA.

We’ll hear from people like Bruce Tower. Tower has prostate cancer. He wanted to take a drug that showed promise against his cancer, but the Food and Drug Administration would not allow it. One bureaucrat told him the government was protecting him from dangerous side effects. Tower’s outraged response was: “Side effects—who cares? Every treatment I’ve had I’ve suffered from side effects. If I’m terminal, it should be my option to endure any side effects.”

Read it.

Doing well by doing good — for himself and his cronies.

Want to know why Warren Buffet and Bill Gates Sr. like  high taxes? Because they’re still left with millions while you’re left with squat.

Read it.

Have you ever noticed that people who like mass transit are the sort of people who, in an earlier age, would have played with trains? Instead, because they were deprived as children, they seek to play with our transportation choices — and our money too, of course.

Total travel time for the trip: Just over 2 and a half hours – nearly twice as fast as driving. Projected one-way ticket price: $55 – less than half the cost of a flight.

How much less exiting that would be, phrased as “Just over 2 and a half hours – twice as slow as flying. Projected one-way ticket price: $55 – more than twice the cost of a drive.”

Read it.

The Bloomberg administration has made getting rid of inadequate teachers a linchpin of its efforts to improve city schools. But in the two years since the Education Department began an intensive effort to root out such teachers from the more than 55,000 who have tenure, officials have managed to fire only three for incompetence.

Slow? Say ‘glacial’.

The rot spreads.

I’m glad I got out before everything well to Hell.

Read it.

Not a step up.

Read it.

A pointed reminder that corporate executives are bureaucrats, not capitalists.

I am reminded of the Jew, caught, who denounced other Jews to the Gestapo so that he wouldn’t be the only one on the train to Auschwitz.

Needless to say, I don’t buy from Sears.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

We have 16 separate intelligence agencies. No wonder people aren’t connecting the dots.

The national intelligence apparatus of the U.S. has fewer employees than GM had in its prime, yet it consists officially of 16 separate agencies, and unofficially of more than 20. Each of these agencies is protected by strong political and bureaucratic constituencies, so that after each intelligence failure everything continues pretty much the same and usually with the same people in charge.

Read it.

In november 2009, one of the uglier fruits of the current practice of seeding mothers into the American military burst briefly onto the national stage. Ordered to Afghanistan from Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia, an Army cook named Alexis Hutchinson refused to go. A 21-year-old single mother, she explained that there was no one to care for her infant son because initial plans to leave him with her own mother had fallen through.

What happened next should disturb anyone who has so far succeeded in ignoring the fact that the United States now sends soldier-mothers off to war. Specialist Hutchinson was arrested and threatened with court martial and her son was temporarily placed in foster care — because, as the Fort Stewart spokesman explained, the 30-day extension that she had been granted was “plenty of time” to find some other babysitter for that ten-month-old while the only parent seemingly present in his life went off to Afghanistan.

This is one face of contemporary battle that no one wants to contemplate point-blank. Nevertheless, face it somebody should. Ever since Congress in the 1970s passed a law allowing women with dependent children to enlist in the military, the collision visible in the Hutchinson case between motherhood and soldiering has been waiting in the wings. The wonder is not that an Army cook and mother would choose staying stateside with her child over her deployment. It is rather that — given two wars and current American military policy — more cases like Hutchinson’s have not erupted already.

Read it.

It’s fashionable to hold up the Internet as the road to democracy and liberty in countries like Iran, but it can also be a very effective tool for quashing freedom.

Read it.

Read it.

A little more than a year ago, when the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim increased his stake in the New York Times Company (NYT), I wrote “I pity the Times Mexico bureau chief who has to tiptoe through who is and isn’t out of favor with the paper’s new sugar daddy.” Now we have a very clear example of how the Times treats Slim within its pages; it’s not pretty, and the journalistic compromise can be seen well beyond Mexico.

Read it.

I’m not sure I really want to know what a ‘Buddhist tattoo’ looks like. I have this vision of a fat guy in an orange robe on a Harley.