Read it.

According to the theory, if we know what sort of a learner a child is, we can optimize his or her learning by presenting material the way that they like.

The prediction is straightforward: Kids learn better when they are taught in a way that matches their learning style than when they are taught in a way that doesn’t.

That’s a straightforward prediction.

The data are straightforward too: It doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work–not only for the visual-auditory-kinesthetic theory, but for many other learning styles theories that have been proposed and tested since the 1940s.

But, like the other fads in American education, this will linger to destroy the intellectual development of an entire generation of children.

Read it.

The sword is the soul of the samurai.

Police described Rice as a career criminal with a history of 29 arrests who had just been released from prison Saturday after serving a yearlong sentence.

And, since they didn’t mention his race, he was undoubtedly a NAM.

Read it.

Read it.

That makes me feel better, anyway.

Let him ask himself what would have happened to him if he had done that to the head of state of any Muslim country.

Read it.

I’m sure that this is somehow Dick Cheney’s fault.

Read it.

An excellent analysis of the ACORN affair.

* One report from an Acorn office was a fluke. Any large organization, public or private of any creed can be infected by amoral individuals who will try to use the organization to commit illegal or unethical acts. No organization larger than a few dozen people can police the actions of every member, all the time.

* Two reports from two separate Acorn offices was just a disturbing coincidence. The same reasoning as above applies, because in a large organizations, just as in a large installed base of computers, it’s possible for two separate bad eggs carrying out the same acts to show up in the same organization.

* Three identical reports of the same failure from three separate offices indicates the criminality arises from the organization itself. It is highly unlikely that, out of the hundreds of Acorn offices around the nation, the journalist just happened to wander into the three offices whose managers wouldn’t blink an eye at helping to set up a brothel using children.

The really disturbing part is how in all three cases the managers of the Acorn offices don’t even bat an eye when the journalist asks about setting up a brothel. Further, they seem to have the logistics and legal tangles of using a brothel to fund a political career already well thought out. I don’t know about you, but if someone ask me how to run a brothel using minors and how to funnel that money into the a political campaign, I would have to stop and think about it for while. The fact that they have the answers already queued up and ready to go tells us one thing…

… this is far from the first time they have provided this kind of “assistance”. They know the answers because they’ve been asked them before and they’ve answered them. Repeatedly.

Read it.

Then: Romeo and Juliet
Now: The Teen Sex and Suicide Epidemic: What You Need to Know to Protect Yourself and Your Family

The Other McCain is having entirely too much fun with the ACORN thing.

“Poverty rights”? I guess that means ACORN fights for people’s right to be poor. NTTAWWT, but I don’t remember “poverty rights” in the Constitution.

Read it.

The pair claim to have decoded Hitler’s DNA and matching it to cigarette butts found in an Austrian village and a used napkin from a New York restaurant, as well as letters sent from France more than three decades ago.

How big a loser do you have to be to spend your time tracking down Hitler’s relatives? Perhaps they might have some success finding Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Quick! To the Bat Cave!

Read it.

Don’t leave home without it.

I must confess that I am somewhat disappointd not to see the usual “I’d like this in a Kindle edition” button.

Read it.

Imagine a world in which people are so disconnected from adult life that the best thing they can think of to do with their time is to comment on Amazon reviews.

Now imagine yourself stuck in that world.

ii) By avoiding this book you will miss out on the precise location of the heretical surfboard worshipped by the British royal family and the sinister significance of Abe Lincoln’s unholy quadrille. You will also miss out on the explanation of why the Hairy-Eared Dwarf Lemur is really God’s own tree-dwelling angel-on-earth and on the coded instructions showing how to grow a prize-winning mushroom, which the author cunningly gleaned from a close textural analysis of St. Paul’s third birthday card to the Corinthians.

On the other hand, they are pretty funny.

Life is full of such conflicts.

Read it.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees.

Dvorak has an idea.

Steve Sailer, voice of the actual reality-based community, is always worth reading.

So, maybe importing so many millions of foreigners from 2000 to 2007 to “do the jobs [African] Americans weren’t willing to do” wasn’t such a hot idea after all? Well, don’t ask Ms. Ehrenreich about immigration. She evidently has no opinion on the subject, since it doesn’t come up in her long spiel.

In other words, blacks weren’t as good credit-risks on average, even when incomes were the same. So, why, then, four decades of government effort to change the culture of lending in order to get more mortgage dollars into the hands of minorities? Maybe the old culture had a more accurate view of the creditworthiness of blacks than the new government-nurtured culture?

It’s like Ptolemy’s complex system of epicycles intended to “save the appearances” of the theory that all planetary orbits were perfect circles. Our era’s Ptolemaic theory is that minorities can only be victims of discrimination, not beneficiaries of discrimination, so the only logical solution is that all those blacks who defaulted on their subprime loans were victims of discrimination: see, they should have gotten prime loans!

Read it.

Martin (pictured) wrote: “God, I hate those cyclists. Every last herbal tea-drinking, Harriet Harman-voting one of them. That’s one of the reasons I live in the countryside, where birds tweet, horses roam, pigs grunt and Lycra-clad buttocks are miles away. But recently, there’s been a disturbing development.

“Each Saturday, a big black truck appears at the bottom of my road, with bikes stuck to the roof and rear. Out of it step a bunch of City-boy ponces in fluorescent Spider-Man outfits, shades, bum bags and stupid cleated shoes, who then pedal around our narrow lanes four abreast with their private parts alarmingly apparent. Do they enjoy it? They never smile. I’m sure they just come here to wind me up.”

Yeah, that about sums it up. And, of course, being good leftoid sleazes, they decided to trash him on Wikipedia.

Well, this didn’t go down at all well in the pedal-bothering community, and enraged Spider-Man cyclists moved quickly to vent their spleen on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia: Just Another Crust Media Outlet.

Read it.

The Cookstop is more energy efficient and heats up faster than conventional coil hot plate models. But contrary to those coil models, the Fagor Induction Cookstop doesn’t heat the air around the heating element, thereby keeping inadvertent skin burns to a minimum (not to mention dorm room fires due to forgetting to turn it off).

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

The scenario: Medicare’s three-year limit on payment for anti-organ-rejection drugs led to a woman needing a second kidney transplant, because she couldn’t afford to the medicine that would have allowed her to keep her first transplanted kidney in healthy, working condition.

The cost of anti-rejection drugs for the patient? $1,000 to $3,000 a month. Cost of the second transplant? $125,000. The average Medicare expenditure per kidney transplant patient care is $17,000 yearly, while it’s $71,000 a year for dialysis patients and $106,000 for a transplant, according to the Times.

That’s the problem with having the government pay for this stuff: If the law allows for discretion on the part of providers, it opens itself up to fraud and abuse; if it doesn’t, it leads to ridiculous (and expensive) outcomes. The only solution is to keep government completely out of the process.

Read it.

Read it.

No, no, pirates … not thieves, pirates….

Read it.

We live in amazing times.

Read it.

You can’t be in the business world for long without being impressed by how hard companies work to be good at what they do. And yet, here and there, there are exceptions. In recent years, the liberal news media–what used to be known as the “mainstream” media–have been in that category. Time after time, with mind-numbing regularity, they miss news that would be of interest to their readers. Of course, the stories they miss are not random–they are stories that make the Democratic Party, or liberal politicians or organizations, look bad.

Read it.

The value of £5,000 a year (in 1800 terms) is, of course, self-evident.

Read it.

If this had happened in a “fundamentalist Christian compound”, the Dinosaur Media would be all over it.

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The biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history lies at anchor east of Singapore. Never before photographed, it is bigger than the U.S. and British navies combined but has no crew, no cargo and no destination  –  and is why your Christmas stocking may be on the light side this year

Read it.

Bear in mind that this is the New York Times, so all they’re doing is Rounding Up The Usual Suspects, but there’s some good information along with the hand-waving.

Read it.

‘I think I can, I think I can….’

Read it.

What you don’t find in small factories is people being employed unless their work is thought to contribute to the overall effectiveness of the business. For example, they don’t employ a Five-a-Day Outreach Advisor to give readings on the virtues of broccoli in the canteen at lunchtime. Nor do they employ five people in the accounts office when the work can be done by four. Nor do they pay for design consultants to create a new corporate logo unless they see a clear need to do so. The reason none of these items of expenditure is incurred is that it would add unnecessary costs to the business; the additional costs would be unnecessary because any benefit they might deliver would be less than the cost.

My idea of a public sector non-job is necessarily affected by my view of the proper role of the State. For example, I see no good reason for the State to tell people what to eat. We all receive quite enough information on that subject throughout our lives from parents, teachers, friends, spouses, television and radio that there is no need for a single penny of tax to be spent on the matter. Exit Healthy Eating Initative Facilitators and Five-a-Day Counsellors, non-jobs of the first water.

Read it.

As our government hands over billions to Wall Street bankers, jobless Americans live in tent cities and collect food stamps in record numbers. Now when we need it the most, growing our own food may be against the law and punishable by a fine of up to $1,000,000. Think I’m joking? Meet Bill HR 875, The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, introduced by Rosa DeLauro whose husband Stanley Greenburg works for Monsanto. The insanity doesn’t stop there—fishing boats, hotdog stands, neighborhood vegetable booths and farmers’ markets will be federally regulated under the same draconian law. As always, the spin is designed to make you (the public) believe these new provisions are for your own good. Under the deceitful guise of protection, the goal of this bill is crystal clear: to prevent us from locally growing our own food so multinational agribusiness can completely control the production and distribution of our food supply. I refer you to the usual suspects—Monsanto, ADM, Sodexo, Tyson, and Smithfield.

Needlesss to say, DeLauro is a Democrat (and, from the look of her picture, a Yooguly Feminist).

Tyler Cowen has some harsh words.

FOR years now, many businesses and individuals in the United States have been relying on the power of government, rather than competition in the marketplace, to increase their wealth. This is politicization of the economy. It made the financial crisis much worse, and the trend is accelerating.

Read it.

This week and over the coming weeks the media and the nation will once again focus on healthcare. Before we launch into the next phase of the argument, though, we should first dismiss a couple of “Red Herring” claims that we spend too much on health care.

These claims are the ones based on a view of healthcare spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or that look at the increase in healthcare spending over time. Proponents say that spending 14 to 17 percent of gross product on health care is evidence that we spend too much. Or, they say that health care spending is increasing at a far faster rate than the economy is growing.

So what?

There is no optimal amount of healthcare as a percentage of GDP. Remember, healthcare is a good thing.

Read it.

No one has been a more uncritical cheerleader for the Obama administration than liberal blogger Andrew Sullivan. Now, Sullivan has gotten his reward, courtesy of Obama’s Department of Justice.

Sullivan was caught smoking marijuana in a National Park and was prosecuted, consistent with the usual policy of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. But Sullivan’s pull with the Obama administration got him a sweetheart deal: the U.S. Attorney decided to drop the charges, even though there evidently is no doubt about Sullivan’s guilt. The issue here isn’t whether marijuana possession should be illegal, or should be prosecuted. It is illegal, and the U.S. Attorney in Massachusetts does routinely prosecute such cases. But not Sullivan: Barack Obama and Eric Holder paid him off for his slavish devotion.

Read it.

We have the technology. It’s just a matter of getting past the sclerotic establishment gatekeepers that’s holding things up.

This doesn’t just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of tenure are all threatened.

Pass the popcorn.

Read it.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Fortunately it’s not likely to happen in the United States, because the places most likely to implement such a requirement, e.g. San Francisco, would consider it gay-bashing.

Read it.

Trade lawyer Scott Lincicome catches the Obama administration in another late Friday news dump, this time imposing prohibitive tariffs on imports of Chinese automobile and light truck tires under section 421 of the trade law protecting American industries against surges in imports. It’s a somewhat complicated issue that is susceptible to the mystification in which the Obama administration wraps it. Lincicome links to the Wall Street Journal report with the administration’s defense of the decision, but carefully takes apart the defense.

Inside the mystification Lincicome unwraps is — surprise! — the United Steel Workers union. Lincicome writes that the section 421 decision forced President Obama to choose between the narrow interests of the USW and everyone else in America, the United States’ image as the world’s free trade leader, and the future of both the American and global economies. Obama opted for the USW.

Read it.

This month the University of California at Berkeley opened a Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements. The center is housed in the Institute for the Study of Social Change, which the university advertises online as an institution placing “issues of race, gender, and class at the center of the agenda,” conducting “research with a conscience,” and capitalizing on “Berkeley’s history as the birthplace of transformative social movements.” Needless to say, the center is not promoting conservatism. This is, as the university reminds us, Berkeley.

Ponder the fact that nobody anywhere is establishing a Center for the Comparative Study of Left Wing Movements.

Ponder further the undoubted truth that the establishment of any such Center would trigger a firestorm of condemnation, with “McCarthyism” being the mildest of the epithets employed.

Ponder further the existence of institutions such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which allegedly tracks “hate groups” (not something you could figure out from its name), all of whom are — what a coincidence! — “right wing”.

Ponder finally that this is being done at the expense of the taxpayers of California, whom (judging from the news) one would think had better things to do with the money.

Feel free to weep for America.

Arnold Kling has an interesting thought.

Russ Roberts is working on a paper suggesting that the fragility of our financial system could be the result of past bailouts, in which unsecured creditors and counterparties of financial institutions were always made whole. In some sense, the fact that the Fed fears contagion makes them turn such liabilities into ex post nearly riskless assets for investors.

Read it.

Read it.

Of course we all know that this Star Wars stuff will never work. Just ask a Democrat.

Read it.

The article in Washington Monthly discusses a company called StraighterLine, which offers online college classes, but it totally disrupts the traditional business model of university learning. While the classic model is that you pay per class (or per semester as a fully matriculated student), StraighterLine has a simple model: you pay $99/month and get an all-you-can-eat offering. You go at your own pace — so if you have lots of time (and can complete the work) you can take multiple classes in that month. In the opening story of the article, a woman completes four full classes in just two months — for a grand total of $200. Taking those same classes at either local universities or online would have cost thousands, and would have taken much longer to complete. And, it’s not as if the StraighterLine courses skimp either. According to the article (and it would be great to hear from anyone who’s tried it to see if this is true), they use the same materials found in many college courses.

Read it.

– No, we do not have a free market in health care. Medicine is socialized between the ages of 0 and 18, and 65+, and for many of the poor. Private insurance is heavily regulated. Do you know that many states force insurance to cover infertility treatment? That means that stupid poor people who breed early are subsidizing the life choices of intelligent richer people who keep putting off having children for the sake of advancing their career or furthering their education. But that’s what the stupid voters demand through their representatives.

– Doctors make a lot of money because licensing limits the labor supply and they can bid up their services. Yes, nurses can do most of what a family doctor does. No, doctors are not geniuses, I helped some current practicing M.D.’s with their chemistry and calculus homework back in the day, and let me tell you that there is one emergency room physician who had a notorious tendency to “space out” randomly who I wouldn’t want to be treated by in a pinch (though she was a very nice person). I recently went in to get some medicine for my bronchitis and I told my M.D. exactly what to prescribe and she diligently complied after a minimal check-over of my health status. $150 that insurance pays up just for signing the prescription!

– Americans demand more and more services and refuse to stop complaining about the increased premiums which those services entail. A large number of patients at my doctor’s office refuse to be seen by the nurse practitioner for basic appointments because they want “the best” care. The reality is that in most of these cases you’re getting very little extra medicine (if any) for multiples more of price. Americans demand more government services and lower taxes, so this sort of behavior is not surprising.

Cringely reveals what we all know to be true.

Read it.

Bottom-feeder journalism.

Read it.

Beyond that, the Democrats’ protestations about Wilson’s lack of civility ring hollow, to say the least. After all, Obama himself called Sarah Palin a liar in the very speech that so enraged Wilson. And do the Democrats really believe that voters have forgotten how they treated President Bush for the last six years of his administration? A voter would have had to spend those years in Albania not to know that “You lie!” was nicer than most of the things the Democrats had to say, both on and off the floors of Congress.

I personally think Wilson ought to resign. We don’t need somebody with impulse control that poor in Congress. Of course, Democrats do that sort of thing all the time, but Republicans at least ought to act like adults.

Read it.

Last month we reported on the violence of “youths” in the culturally enriched suburb Vollsmose of the Danish city Odense. The “youths” were enraged because one of their number had a car accident while fleeing from the police, and fired at the police with automatic weapons to show their displeasure.

Kim Thyssen states that Bøgeparken is mainly inhabited by Arabs, and a group of stateless Palestinians are in control of crime in the neighborhood. Many of the youths the local police are in contact with are also very unintelligent. School-psychologists in the area have even diagnosed some of them as being on “the level of mental retardation” as it is called in technical terms.

Experts in the Municipality of Odense, interviewed by DANSK POLITI [the independent professional paper of the Danish Police in which the article appeared] agree that lack of caring and stimulation and the effects of marriage between cousins are causing the low intelligence and consequently the reason why they easily end up committing crimes. They look up to their older friends and gain recognition by committing criminal acts.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

You can get a better overview of how good a film is by looking at the average scores on an aggregator site like Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB that give you the wisdom of crowds. (You just have to keep in mind the biases of the various crowds, whether underemployed ex-English majors on Rotten Tomatoes or bachelor fanboys on IMDB.)

My general prejudice is to view over-achieving films made by underdogs through the glass-is-half-full lens and underachieving ones made by overdogs through the half-empty lens. Thus, recent Quentin Tarantino films tend to annoy me because Tarantino long ago demonstrated his enormous talent, and elaborate meta-explanations about why it’s cool that he’s wasting his powers making ingenious crud bore me. It’s not that I’m not intellectually sophisticated enough to understand the rationalizations. I just don’t care.

Read it.

We wrote here and here about the corruption of the National Endowment for the Arts in the Age of Obama. Now comes word that on August 12, a group of 21 arts organizations endorsed President Obama’s health reform plan only 48 hours after a conference call in which a top National Endowment for the Arts official asked arts groups for help in advancing the administration’s policy agenda, including health care.

One reason the arts organizations may have been so swift to follow the administration’s suggestion is that 16 of the groups and affiliated organizations received nearly $2 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in the 150 days before the conference call. According to the linked Washington Times analysis of NEA records, more than $1 million of that total came from the stimulus package. The NEA has moved from silence to disinformation regarding these events, but the money was obviously well spent.

Read it.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Indiana.
2. The rot has already set it.

Read it.

The thing about the bully pulpit is that Presidents can make the most fantastic claims and it takes days to sort the reality from the myths. So as a public service, let’s try to navigate the, er, remarkable Medicare discussion that President Obama delivered on Wednesday. It isn’t easy.

Medicare’s unfunded liability—the gap between revenues and promised benefits—is currently some $37 trillion over the next 75 years. Yet the President uses this insolvency as an argument to justify the creation of another health-care entitlement, this time for most everyone under age 65. It’s like a variation on the old Marx Brothers routine: “The soup is terrible and the portions are too small.”