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There are many factors contributing to this trend. Diminishing social mobility, the cult of celebrity, the decline in serious learning, the increasing disregard for empiricism and social attitudes verging on “valuephobia” all threaten to cast a shadow on the enlightened western Liberalism which has taken us so far.

Distracted by celebrity, softened up by the education system, we have also succumbed to what you could call intellectual relativism. We have reached a state of affairs whereby people believe that the validity of their views is determined by the strength with which they hold them, not by any reference to empiricism. And so we hear phrases such as “Well that is your truth – it’s not mine”, or, increasingly, the word which is doing untold damage to the concept of objectivity: “whatever”. When confronted with evidence which undermines the current fashion or your own prejudices, simply lift your hand and say “whatever”, and you can avoid all the discomforts of the value of truth, or objectivity, or of being plain wrong.

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And there you have the modern world in a nutshell.

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College graduates are now looking toward government to start their careers, since there aren’t a lot of other places to look. Unemployment for government employees is about half the rate of almost all private industry workers, and Washington, D.C., is a rare U.S. city that seems recession-proof.

When working for the government is the best job out there, you are officially a Third World country. Just so you know.

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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.

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When the federal government keeps changing the rules, it’s like having Darth Vader in control, John H. Cochrane, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said during a panel. “I have changed the deal,” he intoned like Vader, the “Star Wars” villain. “Pray I don’t change it any further.”

And that tells you everything you need to know abut government “regulation” of the economy.

Mr. Vedder playfully offered another analogy: the recession of 1920. Why was that slump, over and done with by 1922, so much shorter than the following decade’s? Well, for starters, he said, President Woodrow Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke at the end of 1919, while his successor, Warren G. Harding, universally considered one of the worst presidents in American history, preferred drinking, playing poker and golf, and womanizing, to governing. “So nothing happened,” Mr. Vedder said.

Of course Mr. Vedder does not wish ill health — or obliviousness — on any chief executive. Still, in his view, when you’re talking about government intervention in the economy, doing nothing is about the best you can hope for from any president.

And that’s the truest thing you’ll read today.

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One of the reasons we’re often skeptical of legislative/regulatory solutions to things is that they almost always have unintended consequences that do a lot more harm than good — and quite often those unintended consequences are the exact opposite of what the regulation was supposed to do.

Every legislator ought to have that tattooed on his (or her) forehead.

A few years back, the government passed a bill to encourage “greener” transportation by providing tax credits for the use of alternative fuels — including for the use of fuel mixtures that combined alternative fuels with gasoline or diesel. As Chris Hayes explains, this resulted in America’s paper companies suddenly dumping diesel into their production process solely to qualify for the tax credit.

Free markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

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Our aim today is to restore narrative coherence to the 20th century, ridding it of mystical obfuscations, poltergeists, and winds of change. In UR’s 20th century, when things happen, they generally happen for a reason. The reason is generally the obvious reason.

The 20th century was the golden age of lies. The liars of the 20th century, like the painters of the 16th, will be remembered forever as the Old Masters of their art. I know UR has many readers who are Christians or Jews, and sometimes I even regret my own inability to believe in God. But no one who knows anything about the 20th century can fail to believe in the Devil.

Thus the standard story of the 20th century includes one set of actors which are portrayed accurately (the fascist regimes), one set which was portrayed inaccurately but has since been repaired with the assistance of whiteout (the revolutionary regimes), and one set whose mythos remains gloriously intact (the democratic regimes). From this stew, clarity is not to be expected.

A conservative is someone who helps disguise the true nature of a democratic state. The conservative is ineffective by definition, because his goal is to make democracy work properly. The fact that it does not work properly, has never worked properly, and will never work properly, sails straight over his head. He therefore labors cheerfully as a tool for his enemies.

The most gross misstatement about fascism presently understood, however, is that the Axis constituted a plot to take over the world. It is truly amazing that people believe this today, for there is no evidence for it whatsoever. However, most historians simply treat it as a given.

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Guess AIG’s problem was that they weren’t a quango — yet.

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Yeah, that Industrial Revolution is quite overrated.

Next: Reintroducing the Organic Corn Laws.

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Doesn’t appear to have been a Muslim, which is somewhat surprising.

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Don’t ever say we don’t do important stuff here.

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The story of my life.

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Guess the ghost doesn’t get out much.

Update: Link fixed.

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And there you have it.

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And yet leftist students do this habitually to “right-wing” flyers and newsletters published on campus that they disagree with, yet nothing ever happens to them.

Funny how that works.

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Yeah – what’s up with that?

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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

They have the backing of President Obama, who promised on the campaign trail that collective bargaining and workplace protections “will be a priority” for his administration. “It is unacceptable for TSOs to work under unfair rules and without workplace protections — this makes it more difficult for them to perform their jobs,” Obama wrote in a letter to the American Federation of Government Employees in October. “Since 2001, TSA has had the unfettered ability to deny its workforce even the most basic labor rights and protections.”

Oh, they object to being treated the same way they treat airline passengers? Quelle domage.

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As of today, smokers will have to pay an additional tax 61 cents per pack of cigarettes, amounting to a 156 percent increase – and the very people President Obama promised to spare from higher taxes are bearing the brunt of the cost, since (as ATR has been pointing out on numerous occasions)

• 55 percent of smokers are “working poor”
• One in four smokers live below the poverty line
• On average, smokers, whose median income is a little more than $36,000, make about 30 percent less than non-smokers.

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Shores of Tripoli under Jefferson, yes; shores of Somalia under Obama, no.

Change you can believe in.

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Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their five children, aged from three to 11, will appeal to a court on Thursday in Tennessee, where they fled after attempts by German police three years ago to force the family to obey the country’s laws which make school attendance compulsory.

Huddled masses yearning to breathe free — good luck with that. And stay away from California.

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I’m perfectly comfortable with that.

The “white” label can hurt them with universities and companies that use the information to promote diversity, they say.

“Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking with the quota….”

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California has furloughed workers and slashed programs to close a $41 billion budget gap, but it still has more than 400 judges in Los Angeles County who each make more than the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

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

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Justice Department lawyers concluded in an unpublished opinion earlier this year that the historic D.C. voting rights bill pending in Congress is unconstitutional, according to sources briefed on the issue. But Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who supports the measure, ordered up a second opinion from other lawyers in his department and determined that the legislation would pass muster.

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

Of course, if the Bush administration had done something like this, both Congress and the media would be screaming “Politicization! Partizanship!” for the next ten years. But it’s the Obama Nation, so that’s all right then.

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“We’re from the government, and we’re here to help … ourselves.”

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I am not making this up.

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I remember when one could buy a 5 or 10 MB hard drive on a card that plugged into the computer’s backplane (do they still use that word?). We have come far since then.

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The coming shakeout in the journalism biz is one of the more entertaining situations to come down the pike. And, unless the government gets involved, the result is likely to be both surprising and useful.

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None are in Blue states. Four are in Texas, two in North Carolina.

Come on down!