Read it. Apparently being a thug from a fashionable minority pays very well.

FuturePundit. Good news for Fred the Farmer — he can finally cash out by selling the Old Homestead to Archer-Daniels-Midland and buy that condo near the grandkids he’s always wanted. The rest of us take it in the shorts, of course, but that never stopped the damn-the-unintended-consequences, full-scheme-ahead crowd.

WSJ($). Another chapter in the continuing saga of why I don’t fly.

This summer, rampant flight cancellations and delays are forcing many travelers to languish, sometimes for hours, before they can board their flight. Unfortunately, that’s nothing compared with what may await them on the plane.

Tales of sweaty waits on un-air-conditioned planes, smelly bathrooms, dirty seats and tray-tables smeared with mysterious schmutz abound this season. Travelers complain that the environment on packed planes can degenerate quickly — and often long before the plane actually starts moving.

“When you get off a plane, it looks like the morning after a fraternity house party,” says Tim Winship, publisher of FrequentFlier.com, a Web site that offers frequent-flier program information and advice.

WT. Ah, those were the days. 300,000 arrested adolescents demonstrating once and for all that the sixties were all about never growing up. The Boomers ought to be renamed the “Peter Pan” generation.

Read it. Oh, a far from common criminal.

NYT. Unfortunately, the article fails to point out that the Black Muslims are a looney cult with only a superficial resemblance to real Islam, which one can find out from asking any real Muslim.

PowerLine. One is evil, the other stupid; guess which is which.

Read it. Apparently it is not a pretty sight.

NYT. Why is it that people have such a hard time realizing that just passing a law is not enough to solve a problem?

We see this all the time. There are umpteen different laws on the books addressing problem X, which has not gotten any better, and so they want to pass umpteen more. Hint: Unless you change the culture, the law will not be enforced. Laws that are not enforced might as well not exist. (Actually, that’s not true: It reduces respect for all laws, even the good ones.)

Prohibition is the poster child for this concept, but the immigration “reform” issue is as fresh as yesterday’s headlines. To solve the problem, we don’t need new laws; we just need people to enforce the laws we have. But the ruling class doesn’t want to do that: They don’t want to spend the money, and they like having cheap illegal immigrants to mow their lawns, pick their crops, and mind their children, and besides if we make them citizens they’re so stupid they’ll vote for us.

Sheesh.

WT. I’m curious just what differentiates “neoconservatives” from “traditional conservatives”. It sounds to me that it just means “conservatives who embrace positions I don’t like”.

WT. Perhaps someone should point out to him that he’s not the boss here.

Read it. Perhaps global warming will be a net improvement. It’s not like anybody is considering it.

UR. Tacitus makes Mencius waxes philosophic.

Sine ira et studio. I doubt these words were idly chosen, and we kids these days could do a lot worse than to imitate them. No one gives a rat’s ass about Tiberius now. But I see no shortage of either ira or studio.

Read it to find out what all this has to do with Rhodesia.

Today’s Europeans simply cannot understand why Republicans, at least populist Republicans, are allowed to exist within the American political system. They look at it rather the way you’d look at someone who kept a pet leopard in his closet.

And what it has to do with us.

NYT. Good old Unintended Consequences.

Cringely is pessimistic.

LGF. One word: Leavenworth.

WSJ. An excellent review of how badly this country is degenerating.

Kimberley Strassel points out how Democrats may just possibly be finally getting it through their thick skulls that taxes aren’t just tapping into the Great Money Pot in the Sky, but actually have real-world consequences — many of which they might not particularly like.

WT. Surprised it took him that long. Sometimes it feels like the 16th century all over again.

Read it. Spam is actually rather good, if you fry it. Let’s try that trick on spammers. Hey, it might work.

NYT. So young, and already a Yuppie. The People of the Crust train the next generation.

NYT. But of course we can’t use DDT because that would be bad for the environment. As piles of rotting human corpses apparently are not.

NYT. Notice that they don’t name the eight nay-sayers, from which (this being the Times) one can assume that they were Democrats.

LGF. Actually, any good news at all at any time is a problem for Democrats, because their power depends on the people needing them to stave off whatever the latest trumped-up disaster might be. (Of course, depending on Democrats to cope with a disaster leads you to New Orleans, where a Democrat mayor and a Democrat governor of a staunchly Democrat state watched and whined as everything came apart around their ears.)

Techdirt. Mike Masnick is almost as much of a grump as I am. I like that.

LGF.

Read it. The inherent flaw in top-down design.

WSJ. Voter fraud — an inside look. And oddly enough, this ties in with my earlier remarks about voting machines.

Techdirt. I had always wondered about that. The RIAA doesn’t sound like such a bargain for the artists, however much it may benefit the labels.

NYT. See? It’s all about the money. “Principle” is only for the dimwitted who read the press handouts and watch the well-named Boob Tube.

NYT. The Nanny State at work: Nobody wants to risk selling something new unless the bureaucracy has approved it.

LanguageLog looks at the hyperwhiteness of nerds.

Conspicuous by its absence is any discussion of the historical anomaly of upper and middle class adolescents taking their cultural cues from the underclass.

Being a loser is cool; doesn’t anybody wonder about that?

Arnold Kling is a fan of consumption taxes.

Politicians frame the issue as taxing certain types of people. Economists look at what activities are being taxed.

Economists, naive fellows that they are, don’t understand the dialectic. The reason politicians concentrate on what people are being taxed is because they are using taxes as a weapon of social policy, to help certain favored groups and punish certain disfavored groups.

Of course, only in our modern dysfunctional world would unproductive people be rewarded and productive people punished. I’d like to be able to say with confidence that in a hundred years people will look back on this system and say, “Geez, what were they thinking?” Unfortunately, it’s only gotten worse in the last hundred years, and I don’t really expect it to get any better in the next hundred. Unless the Muslims take over, in which case taxation rates will be the least of our worries.

LanguageLog. It’s not as easy as it may first appear.

NYT. Guess it goes to show that you really can’t trust anybody. Fortunately I won’t ever be famous so I won’t have to endure having my private correspondence show up in the New York Times.