Read it.

I’m surprised Rice isn’t on the list. And I must confess I’ve never heard of Harvey Mudd College (sounds like something from a Star Trek episode).

Read it.

The world is crazy for soccer, but most Americans don’t give a hoot about the sport. Why? Many years ago, my former White House colleague Bill McGurn pointed out to me the real reason soccer hasn’t caught on in the good old U.S.A. It’s simple, really: Soccer is a socialist sport.

Think about it. Soccer is the only sport in the world where you cannot use the one tool that distinguishes man from beast: opposable thumbs. “No hands” is a rule only a European statist could love. (In fact, with the web of high taxes and regulations that tie the hands of European entrepreneurs, “no hands” kind of describes their economic theories as well.)

Soccer is also the only sport in the world that has “hooligans”—proletarian mobs that trash private property whenever their team loses.

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Examples of why you don’t want the government running anything except perhaps a war.

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The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France has ruled that European countries currently prohibiting same-sex marriage are not violating the human rights of their citizens.

Read it.

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Telling doctors not to perform a particular test or procedure likely won’t be too effective if they think they’ll later be sued for not offering that very test or procedure.

Oh, ya think?

What’s the cost of all this defensive medicine? Hard to say. Study authors cite an estimate of as much as $60 billion. As we wrote last year, direct spending on medical malpractice litigation is pegged at about $30 billion annually, but money spent on tests that wouldn’t have been ordered were it not for the fear of a lawsuit is a more amorphous figure to capture.

We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.

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The New York Times devotes a front-page news article today to attacking the Bloomberg administration for its record on racial diversity. “Top Ranks of Bloomberg Managers Are Largely White,” the article’s headline says. Nowhere is there any acknowledgment that someone could write the same article, just as accurately, about the leadership of the newspaper making the accusation: “Top Ranks of New York Times Managers Are Largely White.”

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Your life under Islam. Don’t say that you weren’t warned.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in Ann Arbor (if it hasn’t already).

Read it.

When President Obama named the members of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, he left little to chance.

Although the Executive Order which created the Commission allowed that its membership

… shall be drawn from among distinguished individuals, and may include those with experience in or representing the scientific, engineering, and environmental communities, the oil and gas industry, or any other area determined by the President to be of value to the Commission in carrying out its duties.

… there are two scientists, no engineers, and no real representatives of the oil and gas industry. The panel is primarily made up of lawyers, environmentalists and career politicians.

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

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A black councillor who called an Asian colleague a “coconut” during a council debate has been found guilty of racially aggravated harassment.

Shirley Brown, 48, a Liberal Democrat, used the term to describe a Conservative opponent, Jay Jethwa, who backed spending cuts for ethnic minority projects at a Bristol City Council meeting last year.

Mrs Brown, who denied racially aggravated harassment, used the term after Mrs Jethwa proposed to cut funding to the city’s Legacy Commission, which was set up in 2007 to educate people on the abolition of the slave trade two centuries ago.

The biter bit.

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Be the first on your block….

Some informative charts.

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

Are there no honest black politicians in the Democrat party?

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The decline and fall of education in America continues.

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More than £2bn of cash has been openly flown out of Kabul airport since 2007, raising fears huge sums of British and American aid are being creamed off by corrupt officials.

Oh, ya think?

Read it.

is anyone documenting how many jobs have been “destroyed or averted” as a result of Obama administration policies and decisions?

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So holds the Court in McDonald v. City of Chicago, by a 5–4 vote. The syllabus suggests that there were four votes (the five conservatives minus Justice Thomas) for the proposition that the Due Process Clause applies the Second Amendment to the states and their subdivisions; Justice Thomas concluded that it is the Privileges or Immunities Clause that does so.

I, of course, agree with Justice Thomas — as I do in most things.

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The sweeping health-care legislation enacted this spring is many things. It is a vast expansion of federal power. It is a budget-busting entitlement. It is a regulatory nightmare. But to a far greater degree than its advocates have acknowledged, it is also a massive expansion of Medicaid. This means that, under the new law, a hugely expensive program already deep in crisis would not only continue essentially unreformed: It would be put at the very center of America’s health-care system.

Medicaid is a joint federal-state program of health coverage for the poor. Its exact rules and practices vary from state to state; generally speaking, however, it is open to people with low incomes (below or just above the federal poverty level) and with some additional compelling condition of need — like being a parent, or having a serious disability. With these eligibility restrictions in place, Medicaid already covers 60 million Americans and accounts for 16 cents of every dollar spent on medical services in the United States.

It is also important to remember that Medicaid is not just a health-care program. It is the largest single component of America’s welfare state, far outweighing the dollar value of cash assistance, food stamps, or housing aid. Like these other programs, Medicaid often provides implicit disincentives to work, since increases in income can mean the loss of eligibility for a very valuable benefit. Unless future policymakers introduce reforms to help break the generational cycle of dependency — fixes based on principles that have worked in other welfare overhauls, like time limits and work requirements — the prospect of losing thousands of dollars a year in essentially free health care will perpetuate strong incentives against moving up the economic ladder. Refusing work, or accepting off-the-books jobs with few long-term prospects, will become rational choices for families facing the steep effective tax rates created by the eligibility rules for Medicaid (and soon to be made worse by Obamacare).

I’d say ‘two to the head’, but that’s me. The function of a government is to keep the peace, not hand out goodies.

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In the case of the phone’s shape, Apple has for the first time in the history of its phones clearly chosen form over function.

Apple made the unprecedented decision to put glass on the back of the iPhone 4, just like the front. No, there’s no screen or touch-pad on the back — and no reason at all to put glass there.

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Prof Jeremy Thomas, head of ecology at Oxford University, said it is only now that the climate is warming and suitable spots have been discovered in the Cotswolds that the species is able to start spreading across Britain once again.

Everything bad is good for you.

Read it.

Mencius Moldbug is back … and he’s Bad.

Pseudoscience will generally be found solving problems, such as climate prediction, in which the scientific method does not work at all. Rather, other forms of reason are the only reasonable ways to reason about the problem – or there may be no effective means of prediction at all. Thus, there are no scientists to fight. You can’t beat something with nothing.

Once the actual constitution of a country – the actual rules of decision by which its government operates – has diverged from its official constitution, what is the meaning of the latter? The answer is: it has no meaning at all. A constitution is a contract. Once broken, it is meaningless. “The Constitution” is an interesting historical document, no more valid than the Salic Law. Rather, it is “constitutional law,” ie, the precedents of the Supreme Court, which are the supreme law of the land.

Thus, in the terms of John Austin, who holds sovereignty in the United States? The Council of Nine, also known as the Supreme Court. For they are the unmoved mover, those whose decisions are final and cannot be overridden.

As we have seen, “rule by law” means “rule by judges,” and “rule by social science” means “rule by pseudoscientists.” Either, in other words, equates to “rule by men.” If these men are effective and responsible, they will govern well. Otherwise, they will govern badly. This has been true for all of history and will never change. Only in our time has it been so persistently denied.

To be brutally frank, these bureaucrats have no interest at all in Professor Hanson’s results. For one thing, his ideology is completely incorrect. Behind the veil of pseudoscience lies an oligarchy, of which Professor Hanson is not a member. He and his lessers in the George Mason School are of no relevance at all, because they are wingnuts at a Virginia cow college. At the top, power is always a matter of social exclusion.

Read it.

You hear this soft, inflected tone everywhere that young people below, roughly, 35 congregate. As flat as the bottles of spring water they carry and affectless as algae, it tends to always trend towards a slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences. It has no timbre to it and no edge of assertion in it.

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Scottish and Canadian researchers used a new form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to show it places an unnecessary strain on your back.

They told the Radiological Society of North America that the best position in which to sit at your desk is leaning back, at about 135 degrees.

Guess Mom was wrong.

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Don’t say that we never have useful stuff here.

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I am seriously of two minds about this….

Wisdom. Attend.

The Christian life is no different – for it is not a set of ideas to be memorized – but a life to be lived. For this reason, Christ had disciples. For this reason the Church had a catechumenate that often lasted for three years. We learn the Christian life by doing it. We learn to pray by praying and praying along with those who know how to pray. We read Scripture with those who have read it before us and from them we learn how it is that a Christian reads Scripture. Those who have not been trained in such a manner are like children building a house with bricks. They may have the proper ingredients – but the result is likely to be a house that falls down.

As the bumper sticker says: “If you can read this – thank a teacher.”

Watch it.

Of course, an analogous parody dealing with a black or Hispanic ‘candidate’ would immediately trigger a firestorm in the lamestream media, with charges starting with racism and ending in possible hate-crime prosecutions. But it’s fun to dream.

And God help you if you did one about Muslims. And I mean that literally – your life would be on the line.

Just sayin’.

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It came as something of a shock, the first time I got pregnant, to realise that the contents of my bump were suddenly very much other people’s business. From the first antenatal appointment, the expectant mother is deluged with advice: take folic acid, drink plenty of water and very little wine, say no to Stilton, sushi and swordfish. She is no longer a merrily autonomous individual, but a laboratory on legs.

Unfortunately, Britain has lost the mind-your-own-business tradition that is still fighting for life in the U.S., so they’re farther on the way to an Orwell-world than we are — although not as far as Europe, which is always falling into that pit and crawling out of it again.

Jeff Jarvis waxes dyspeptic (and, in passing, gives a poke in the eye to the PC Language Police).

I don’t think that is society’s myth. We all know better than to believe that men have no beliefs — because we are all merely men* with beliefs of our own.

No, the opinionless man is an institutional myth, a fiction maintained by news organizations, political organizations, governments, businesses, churches, and armies. The opinionless man is meant to be an empty vessel to do the bidding of these hierarchies. But opinions and openness about them subvert hierarchies. Or to translate that to modern times, via the Cluetrain Manifesto, links subvert hierarchies. This is the age of links. So hierarchies: beware. One opinion leaks out of the opinionless man and it is shared and linked and spread instantly. The institutions treat this revelation as a shock and scandal — as a threat — and they eject the opinionated men. That is what happened to McChrystal and Weigel.

Read it.

Americans lament the partisan venom of today’s politics, but for sheer verbal savagery, the country’s founders were in a league of their own. Ron Chernow on the Revolutionary origins of divisive discourse.

Yeah, well, they didn’t have to deal with no-loads like Barack Obama.

Read it.

Lots of lessons here:

1. They talk a lot but they’re afraid, profoundly afraid (can you imagine the RG generals talking to the Supreme Leader? “But Excellency, they will kill us all…”);

2. They will not risk direct confrontation, because any defeat will encourage the Iranian people to bring them down;

3. They talk a lot about the glories of martyrdom, but the martyrs they have in mind are the Arabs they send into battle or on suicide missions against us;

4. The trouble with American leaders is that they want to be loved, whereas a healthy dose of fear will do wonders for the region.

David Brooks lifts the curtain on Washington.

The most interesting part of my job is that I get to observe powerful people at close quarters. Most people in government, I find, are there because they sincerely want to do good. But they’re also exhausted and frustrated much of the time. And at these moments they can’t help letting you know that things would be much better if only there weren’t so many morons all around.

And all of them are right. And you’re paying their salaries. Aren’t you proud?

Read it.

What a difference 54 years makes. Of course, Schumpeter told us it would happen.

What if our government, in 1956, had been focused on saving the jobs of the people who manufactured the parts and materials in the IBM Hard Drive, rather than promoting policies which allowed and encouraged technological innovation?

You would have the current Democratic Party policies which focus on subsidizing non-economically viable union jobs in the public and private sectors for political reasons, while punishing wealth creation in the name of fairness.

Yeah, what if?

Read it.

And as an obsession with the lamestream media, now that one of their own  is President. Funny how that works.

Read it.

At the moment, perennial grains capable of matching annuals don’t exist. However, Reganold and Glover argue that they can be bred with sufficient effort: it’s purely a matter of resources put into research. It’s perhaps worth noting that there’s not as much obvious revenue in perennials for major agro firms as there is in some kinds of annuals – there would be no continual requirement for new seed.

Seth Godin gets scammed by the USPS.

I needed to send a package today and figured I’d try them out. Visited the site on my Mac, got all the way through registration, entered my card to pay for stamps and then (and only then) did I find out their software doesn’t work on a Mac. Of course, they knew I was on a Mac but didn’t bother to alert me early on.

Now they have my card, but hey, it’s the USPS, so I trust them. Just for kicks, I call in to ask about the Mac compatibility issue. It turns out that by entering my card to pay for stamps, I’ve agreed to pay them $15.95 a month. Forever. And ever. Or until I notice.

I go online to cancel my account and discover that you can’t cancel your account online. You have to call them. Oh. (The people on the phone are friendly, for what it’s worth…)

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

Read it.

In 2000, in a book called Losing the Race, I argued that much of the reason for the gap between the grades and test scores of black students and white students was that black teens often equated doing well in school with “acting white.” I knew that a book which did not focus on racism’s role in this problem would attract bitter criticism. I was hardly surprised to be called a “sell-out” and “not really black” because I grew up middle class and thus had no understanding of black culture. But one of the few criticisms that I had not anticipated was that the “acting white” slam did not even exist.

Stuart Buck at last brings together all of the relevant evidence and puts paid to two myths. The first is that the “acting white” charge is a fiction or just pointless marginal static. The other slain myth, equally important, is that black kids reject school as alien out of some sort of ingrained stupidity; the fear of this conclusion lies at the root of the studious dismissal of the issue by so many black thinkers concerned about black children. Buck conclusively argues that the phenomenon is a recent and understandable outgrowth of a particular facet of black people’s unusual social history in America—and that facet is neither slavery nor Jim Crow.

Read it.

As David H. Freedman notes in “Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—And How to Know When Not to Trust Them,” such cluelessness is all too common in our expert-mediated world. Look at all those economists who failed to predict the great crash of 2008 or the rating agencies whose metrics melted into mere wishful thinking. Realtors, who are supposed to know more than you or I about the housing market, predicted housing prices would trend up for 2008. Experts, schmexperts.

Read it, if you can stay awake.

But I can save you some trouble:

“It’s a great moment. I’m proud to have been here,” said a teary-eyed Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), who as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee led the effort in the Senate. “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works. But we believe we’ve done something that has been needed for a long time. It took a crisis to bring us to the point where we could actually get this job done.”

(Emphasis added) That’s all you really need to know.

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There are no Secret Service agents posted next to the barista and no presidential seal on the ceiling, but the Caribou Coffee across the street from the White House has become a favorite meeting spot to conduct Obama administration business.

But because the discussions are not taking place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they are not subject to disclosure on the visitors’ log that the White House releases as part of its pledge to be the “most transparent presidential administration in history.”

Politics, Chicago style.

How’s that hope and change thing working out for you? I guess the ‘hope’ is that they don’t get caught, and the ‘change’ is from the more honest way that previous Administrations have operated.

Read it.

As I argued in the Wall Street Journal  in 2008, the income tax code is inadequately indexed for the growth of incomes. The income tax brackets—the dollar amounts that designate the tax rates that apply to an individual’s income—are indexed only for inflation, while incomes tend to rise about 1 percent faster than inflation each year. The result is that a greater and greater share of individuals’ incomes will fall into higher tax brackets, increasing taxes even if the formal tax rates remain the same.

The effects of this are larger than you’d think. According to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data, individual income tax receipts averaged 8.15 percent of Gross Domestic Product from 1953 through 2008. Due to the recession, this year they’re projected to equal around 8 percent of GDP.

But by 2020, income tax receipts are projected to rise to 9.5 percent of GDP, even if all of President Bush’s tax cuts are made permanent. By 2030, income tax receipts will rise to 10 percent of GDP, 22 percent higher than the historical level.

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Democrats want to raise carried-interest taxes from the current 15% rate to the top income tax rate, scheduled to hit 39.6% on January 1. The sales pitch is that this will only whack hedge fund managers and other unsympathetic types. Yet Democrats wrote the law so broadly that it may sweep up millions of Americans in family partnerships.

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

Read it.

Read it.

Every wonder why, with all the shit that tobacco companies take from the government, tobacco products aren’t just banned outright? Follow the money:

This week the New York legislature approved a $1.60-per-pack hike in the state’s cigarette tax. As of July 1, the state tax will be $3.10, the highest in the country. That’s in addition to a federal tax of $1.01. In New York City, which imposes its own levy of $1.50 a pack, the total tax will be $5.61, not counting a sales tax of 8.5 percent. The upshot is that premium brands will cost more than $11 a pack, with taxes accounting for most of the price. In New York City, the government will be making about 20 times as much on each pack of cigarettes as the tobacco companies do. (Nationwide, by R.J. Reynolds’ reckoning, the government’s average profit on each pack of cigarettes was $3.17 in 2009, compared to the company’s profit of 30 cents or so, which makes Philip Morris et al. look like minor shareholders in the business.)

And, of course, whenever government screws around with prices, what happens? Black markets!

Terrorists win when smokers/grocers buy bootleg, untaxed cigarettes. Bootleggers will have an enormous incentive to smuggle untaxed cigarettes into New York. A convicted bootlegger funded the Lackawanna Six. Phony tax stamps were found in apartments used by the 1993 WTC bombers and a group of Bronx Muslims arrested last month. Interpol and the ATF have identified cigarette smuggling as a revenue source for international terrorism….Yesterday’s budget action has set plans in motion for those who wish the USA and Israel harm.

Read it.

A ‘monster’ great white shark measuring up to 20 ft long is on the prowl off a popular Queensland beach, according to officials.

Swimmers were warned to stay out of the water off Stradbroke Island after the shark mauled another smaller great white which had been hooked on a baited drum line.

The 10-foot great white was almost bitten in half.

Is it Shark Week yet?