Seth Godin understands the dialectic.

If the industry can’t make money selling what you’re selling, why will they help you?

I especially like this one:

Governments don’t like buying at retail. They prefer custom stuff from high-touch organizations that can bring them the mountain, instead of the other way around. They’d rather pay 10x for an office supply that’s customized just for them, instead of modifying what they want to match what the market sells. It gives them something to do. And all those salespeople! The trips, the bribes, the attention…

Read it.

But bear in mind, there are lawyers who would actually take that case.

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Read it.

Scientists have temporarily suspended an avalanche experiment that involved burying live pigs in snow and monitoring their deaths after being criticised by animal rights activists.

Get some Muslims to do it. They like killing things, they hate pigs, and they don’t give a shit what animal rights activists say.

Megan McArdle has the goods.

Presumably, the unions plan to go back and get their exclusion extended every few years.  Otherwise, the deal doesn’t make much sense.  The ostensible reason for the respite is to allow them to renegotiate new collective bargaining agreements, but in these inflationary times, how many collective bargaining agreements last longer than three years?  I could be wrong about that, but unless I am, 2013 is plenty far enough away for most of the unions in question to negotiate better contracts.

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‘Hey, aid isn’t getting to us fast enough! We’ll show them! We’ll block the roads!’

Ignorance can be cured, but stupid is forever.

Read it.

Recently while I was brushing my teeth, my 6-year-old son scolded me for running the water too long. He severely reprimanded me, and at the end of his censure asked me, with real outrage, “Don’t you love the earth?” And lately he has taken up the energy cause, scampering virtuously around the house turning off lights, even while I’m using them. He seems as stressed and anxious about the sins of environmentalism as I was about masturbation in the days of my Roman Catholic childhood.

And where did he get indoctrinated with all that crap? In school, of course. Don’t send your child to a government school, or s/he will come back a Young Pioneer.

Read it.

Cornucopia is a concept design for a personal food factory that brings the versatility of the digital world to the realm of cooking. In essence, it is a three dimensional printer for food, which works by storing, precisely mixing, depositing and cooking layers of ingredients.

Cornucopia’s cooking process starts with an array of food canisters, which refrigerate and store a user’s favorite ingredients. These are piped into a mixer and extruder head that can accurately deposit elaborate combinations of food. While the deposition takes place, the food is heated or cooled by Cornucopia’s chamber or the heating and cooling tubes located on the printing head.

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Well, there isn’t much you can do with it….

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Leftists like mass transit because it’s centrally planned and reduces personal freedom.

As Yogi Berra would say if he were paid to say it by a libertarian foundation, if people don’t want to come out to a station, covered in flop sweat and carrying heavy packages in both hands, to wait for an inconviently scheduled train full of heavy coughers, nothing’s gonna stop them.

Unfortunately, once people have a choice, they don’t take it unless that’s their only option or it’s so heavily subsidized by taxpayers that it’s cheaper than any other method. But, as Margaret Thatcher said, eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Read it.

Policy uncertainty hurts hiring.

No shit. The economy isn’t going to recover until Congress quits dicking around and allows the situation to stabilize.

Megan McArdle looks at the commercial real estate market.

One of the most persistent narratives of the recent crisis portrays a nation of unsophisticated home buyers led astray by greedy bankers. Supposedly those bankers were willing to write risky loans because they intended to pass them on to some unwary investor. But this explanation falters in the face of a legion of failing commercial deals. Prospective landlords had all the expertise they should have needed to put a fair price on properties—and the majority of lenders who were originating loans for their own portfolios had ample incentive to perform careful due diligence.

Read it.

Nick Reding’s Methland (Bloomsbury, $25) made a number of “Best Books of 2009” lists, but I want to make sure it does not get consigned to the Decade That Was. It is one of the best pieces of book-length journalism that I have read in years, and if you haven’t read it already it should be your must-read book of 2010.

In Oelwein he gives us a sad example of what the introduction of agribusiness can do to employment in a farming community: In 1992, the local Iowa Ham plant was bought by Gilette. Within a day, Gilette dismantled the union and wages fell from $18 to $6.20 an hour. Gilette then sold the plant to Iowa Beef Products, and in 2001 Iowa Beef Products sold the plant to Tyson. With each sale, people were fired. In 2006, Tyson closed the plant for good. (Also with each sale, more and more workers turned to meth, hoping that it would allow them to stay awake for enough shifts at a time that they would be able to earn a decent wage. As Reding notes, meth has always been the drug “associated with hard work.”)

Read it.

The built-in “marriage penalty” in both House and Senate healthcare bills has received scant attention. But for scores of low-income and middle-income couples, it could mean a hike of $2,000 or more in annual insurance premiums the moment they say “I do.”

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Oh, weep, weep for Starbucks.

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… intellectuals gain notoriety either by saying something that no one else is saying and making a case for it or by making a particularly clever argument that disagrees with the generally held wisdom. An “intellectual” who agrees with common sense positions and traditional ways of doing things generally isn’t considered an “intellectual” at all. Why is that? Well, how can you be smarter than everyone else if you have the same opinions held by the common man?

The main problem is that a lot of what they ‘know’ ain’t so.

Read it.

I hate it when that happens.

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Read it.

Read it.

Unfortunately, the old required courses in the law—the courses necessary to master the law’s basic anatomy—have largely been crowded out by courses about the law. Almost every self-respecting law professor is now an amateur sociologist engaged in “ground-breaking” and “cutting-edge” scholarship that has a gender, race, or sexual identity hook. Those who are less sociologically inclined are likely preoccupied with some ultra-technical aspect of the Constitution, some piece of legislation, or a regulation. Many professors manage to cobble together entire courses around their preoccupations.

Professional schools need to strike a balance between book-learning and real-world experience. The American law school now deserves failing grades in both departments.

Hear, hear.

Read it.

Yet another good reason not to eat curry.

Read it.

Read it.

Millions of men think women wear too much make-up and prefer girls who adopt a more natural look, researchers found.

Well, duh. Women don’t dress for men, they dress for other women.

Read it.

Apparently not.

Why is this bridge being fabricated in China? The troubling answer, according to a lengthy article in the SF Public Press, is that no American company can do the job. America, a country that once pulled off the most audacious of engineering projects with panache, one that put a man on the moon in the 1960s, now can’t even build a bridge to replace one it constructed with ease in the 1930s.

What’s more disturbing, is that China can’t really build it either – but we are teaching them, and paying for them to learn how.

Read it.

We now know that when Yousef was captured, in 1995, al Qaeda leaders were working feverishly to attack American targets. Yousef’s uncle is none other than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11 and one of Yousef’s co-conspirators in the failed Bojinka plot to blow up airliners across the Pacific Ocean.

Yet as far as we know, Yousef told U.S. interrogators little or nothing about KSM’s plots and strategy once he was in U.S. custody. This isn’t surprising, since once he was in the criminal justice system Yousef was granted a lawyer and all the legal protections against cooperating with U.S. interrogators. To this day, we don’t recall any official claim that Yousef has provided useful intelligence of the kind that KSM, Abu Zubaydah and other al Qaeda leaders later did when they were interrogated by the CIA.

All of this is directly relevant to the Administration’s rash decision to indict Abdulmutallab on criminal charges immediately after his arrest in Detroit on Christmas weekend. The Nigerian jihadist could have been labeled an enemy combatant, detained indefinitely, and interrogated with a goal of discovering who he had met in Yemen, whether other plots are underway, and much else that might be relevant to preventing the next terror attempt. This is a far higher priority than convicting Abdulmutallab and sending him to jail.

Read it.

Odd advice to get from a magazine called The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Read it.

A great advance that eliminates the suspense and lets you watch in helpless horror as your toast burns.

Read it.

The suit claims that AT&T should turn over unused balances on the calling cards of consumers whose last known address was in Washington, D.C. and have not used the calling card for three years.

“AT&T’s prepaid calling cards must be treated as unclaimed property under district law,” the attorney general’s office said in a statement.

Another shakedown by bureaucrats who are feeling the pinch and have decided to take their share out of someone else’s pocket.

Read it.

Rather than the “good old boys,” Obama’s core group hails from what may be best described as the “creative class” – the cognitive elite, or, to borrow from Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Postindustrial Society, the “the hierophants of the new society.” They come not from traditional productive industry, but the self-conscious “knowledge” sectors – such as financial services, the software industry, and academia.

This article points out an important truth: Obama is neither a Democrat nor a Liberal but a Crustian, a member of, and representative of, an ever-more-firmly entrenched Establishment that includes overlapping circles of politicians, academics, bureaucrats, and journalists – what the Soviets used to call the ‘apparatchiks’, Mencius Moldbug’s ‘the Cathedral‘.

Read it.

Why are so many leading modern scientists intellectually dull and lacking in scientific ambition? The short answer is: because the science selection process ruthlessly weeds-out interesting and imaginative people.

Read it.

Schools risk being branded inadequate by government inspectors for failing to promote race relations, gender equality and human rights.

This is why it’s always a bad idea to allow government intrusion into education, because then everything in school becomes a political decision subject to political fads.

Even those with good educational records could be placed in “special measures” by Ofsted under new rules that put equality on a par with exam results and child safety. Official guidance tells inspectors to be aware of “gender imbalances” in upper-ability sets and ensure that after-school sport is not dominated by pupils from one ethnic group.

Britain: A nation where a ‘good educational record’ isn’t enough to qualify as a ‘good’ school.

Actually, if it means that said schools will be less attractive to those whose chief interest is ‘race relations, gender equality and human rights’, and they wind up with those who are merely interested in an education, it could prove a blessing in disguise.

Read it.

Duke University, whose faculty and president rushed to judgment against lacrosse players falsely accused of rape, has adopted a revised sexual misconduct policy.  Stuart Taylor argues that the new policy “makes a mockery of due process and may well foster more false rape charges by rigging the disciplinary rules against the accused.

The revised policy requires the involvement of the University’s Women’s Center (about which more below) in the dispciplinary process for all known allegations of sexuall misconduct, and empowers the Office of Student Conduct to investigate even if the accuser does not want to proceed.

The only way for male students to avoid a possibly life-destroying prosecution is to go to a school that doesn’t accept female students. Perhaps in Riyadh.

Read it.

The motto of the Democrat party. RINOs too, of course. (Yeah, I’m looking at YOU, Hutchison.)

Read it.

Not the sort of headline one is accustomed to seeing in the Wall Street Journal, but these are unusual times.

Neil Gaiman describes the sort of thing that one need not go through if one avoids flying.

Just sayin’….

This would be awful on our own. Together it was just some kind of interesting adventure.

Which is why I try never to go anywhere on my own.

I wondered for whose benefit the pat-down and baggage rummage was, and decided it was to make everyone feel safer without actually being inconvenienced in the way you’d have to be if you wanted to make sure no-one actually brought something dangerous onto the plane.

Oh, really?

Read it.

A road cleaner was given a £70 parking ticket for stopping his sweeping machine for a minute to pick up a broken bottle.

As Britain is, so we shall be; the TSA is merely the gust front.

You think I’m kidding? Crash victim given five tickets while in hospital

Isaac Asimov used to dream of us having robots, never realizing that they’re already here in the form of government employees.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Read it.

California was once the world’s leading economy. People came here even during the depression and in the recession after World War II. In bad times, California’s economy provided a safe haven, hope, more opportunity than anywhere else. In good times, California was spectacular. Its economy was vibrant and growing. Opportunity was abundant. Housing was affordable. The state’s schools, K through Ph.D., were the envy of the world. A family could thrive for generations.

Today, California’s economy is not vibrant and growing. Housing is not affordable. There is little opportunity. Inequality is increasing. The state’s schools, including the once-mighty University of California, are declining. The agricultural sector is threatened by water shortages and regulation. Its aging, cracking, highways are unable to handle today’s demands. California’s power system is archaic and expensive. The entire state infrastructure is out of date, in decline, and unable to meet the demands of a 21st century economy.

Hint: Government had something to do with it.

Read it.

In my Silicon Valley hometown, there seemed to be only one speed for raising children: fast forward to college. Here kids are prepped for “success” (i.e. the right colleges) as soon as they can toddle to a sport or art class, if not before with nannies to assure their bilingualism. In my public high school, I saw only honors and AP (advanced placement) kids outside of classes like art and typing; we practiced our college entrance exams in English class; and 27 of us went to Stanford, and nearly an equal number went to Ivy Leagues (I don’t think I knew anyone who didn’t go to college at all).

Much of Slow Parenting is simply re-learning how things used to be before we starting treating parenting as product development, or as something to be learned via books, videos, magazines or classes.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

Too late. The EPA has spoken, and all controversy is settled.

Read it. Then read it again, paragraph by paragraph. Pay attention to what is not being said as well as what is, and how it is.

Note certain unspoken assumptions:

• Unless the federal government is involved, especially in funding, forget optimism.
• These dastardly local communities are wasting their time focusing on “core courses”, i.e. essential literacy and numeracy training at which American schools, especially American government schools, notoriously suck.
• High-school computer education needs to focus on abstract computer science rather than practical stuff that might, you know, get you a job.

The basic attitude toward education is equally clear: forget all this practical stuff, let’s get our hands into the theory and be abstract. The writer, and the people he cites, quite obviously lose sight of the distinction between high school and college. They forget that half of the people in the country are below average in intelligence, and hence aren’t appropriate targets for this concentration on abstract science; they need something that they can do for pay that will keep themselves and their families fed. Every kid in America isn’t Chelsea Clinton, child of two Crustian over-achievers and destined from the womb for AP courses and an investment banking – or computer science – career.

This is the flaw in the ‘progressive’ world-view, as ironically delineated by that classic über-Liberal Garrison Keillor: it assumes that all women are strong, that all men are good-looking, and especially that all children are above average. In other words, it is completely detached from reality. And, as with most things completely detached from reality, programs built upon these fanciful theories inevitably come crashing down–after you and I have paid for them with our tax money, of course.

Read it.

Urban Democrats are flooding rural districts to steal elections.

Read it.

Ilir Kumbaro, a former east European spy master, is alleged to have kidnapped and tortured three men in his Albanian homeland. But after falling out with officials there, he fled to Britain in 1996.

He allegedly used the alias Shaqa Shatri to claim asylum and moved to a council estate in Fulham, London.

He is understood to be claiming thousands of pounds in jobseeker’s allowance and housing benefits, having never worked during his 13-year life in Britain.

And why not? His side won, after all.

Read it.

Read it.

But, again, since this is the Kindle we’re talking about, shouldn’t Amazon make the distinction between purchased and rented? When someone buys a physical book from Amazon, they then own that book and can do pretty much what they want with it, including reselling it or giving it away. When they “purchase” an ebook from Amazon, that’s not the case at all. They’re quite limited in what they can do with it. They can’t resell it. They can’t share it with a friend (unless they give up their entire Kindle and all the books on it). And, of course, Amazon can make the ebook disappear at will — though, it insists it will never do this again. Even though it can. So, congrats to Amazon, for renting more books on a day when such rentals are to be expected and when physical book sales are probably at their very lowest.

Perhaps ‘leased’ would be the most correct term.

Read it.

If you want to know if a ship is going to sink, watch what the richest passengers do.

If you want to know whether a culture is degenerating, watch for those who cannot distinguish between ‘if’ and ‘whether’. But read the piece anyway.

Read it.

First, as I pointed out in this post, many of the TSA’s most intrusive and annoying policies are not used by Israeli airport security, generally considered to be the best in the world; these include forcing people to take off their shoes and confiscating all liquids other than those in special containers. Interestingly, the measures used by the TSA, but not by the Israelis, tend to be highly visible and intrusive to the average traveler. That leads me to suspect that the TSA has adopted them for “security theater” reasons, so as to make it seem that they are making a great effort to combat terrorism, and make people feel more secure. If the public sees the TSA making a major visible effort, fear will perhaps decrease and the agency is less likely to be blamed for any security failures that may occur in the future. Thus, the agency engages in “political theater” measures despite the inevitable grumbling by passengers. The Israeli public, by contrast, may demand less in the way of security theater than American voters, because of the nation’s vastly greater experience in dealing with terrorist attacks.

Read it.

He ought to come to the U.S., where such a video would be a qualification for Governor or Senator, if not President.

If he were caught on video with three boys, however, he could only be a Congressman from Massachusetts. Sorry.

Read it. Points to note:

1. These people are not trying to sneak into France. They are already in France. They are trying to sneak into Britain. Apparently France isn’t good enough. Can’t fault their judgment.
2. France has established a camp near the relevant transport links to serve those wanting to sneak into Britain as a convenient staging area, rather than shipping them back where they came from. Thanks a lot, France.
3. One wonders what the British government is doing about all this. If such camps were established by the Mexican government by our southern border, would the U.S. government not be taking some sort of action against it? Oh, wait — they are, and it isn’t. Forget I even mentioned it.