Read it.

Mostly that we’re a bunch of slackers, but that wouldn’t make for much of a New Yorker article.

Erick Erickson coins a brilliant new phrase.

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McDonald’s could be banned from putting toys in Happy Meals, unless the food is made healthier, under a plan being considered by officials in San Francisco.

And, of course, ‘healthy food’ is whatever is ‘healthy’ in the opinion of the city government. Unfortunately, what most ‘progressives’ think of as ‘healty food’ normal people think of as ‘weird crap’ and  won’t even eat it, much less pay money for it. So it’s a guaranteed business-loser for McDonald’s.

The Nanny State advances. Why any company would consider doing business in San Francisco escapes me.

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What is going on? In a word: bribery.

Millions of $250 checks have been sent to Medicare beneficiaries in recent weeks — and more will be sent in the four weeks remaining until election day.

There’s more to the bribery than $250 checks.

It’s the old “something for nothing” trick. In this case, millions of old folks are getting something for nothing, while millions of younger folks will be getting nothing for something — their tax dollars. But the tax bill hasn’t come due yet because the federal government is still able to borrow money from abroad. And so, most of the people have been fooled — for the time being. By the time they understand what’s happening, it will be too late for them to do anything about it.

Well, sort of.

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Read it.

Sure, ‘Zaha Hadid’ immediately says ‘British architect’ to me….

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Your future under Islam. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in Michigan.

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And why you ought to, as well. I’m hoping that this represents the future of education.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

The Other McCain pulls back the curtain.

As an epithet, “homophobia” has become an all-purpose politicized slur wielded against anyone who disagrees with the Official Gay Rights Agenda. It has little meaning outside that context. If you don’t think public schools should be subjecting first-graders to discussions of masturbation, for example, you are liable to accusations of “homophobia” — the imputation that your beliefs are irrational, constitution evidence of a mental disorder.

Fuck you.

I just had to get that out of my system. That Pam Spaulding and others have been permitted to arrogate to themselves the pseudo-therapeutic license to diagnose people they’ve never met as suffering from “homophobia” — a loaded term the media never bothers to disassemble — is one of the many elephants in this particular room.

Don’t hold it in, Stacy; tell us how you really feel.

Read it.

Hurry up, before the Muslim Arabs extinguish the last remnants of the ancient Egyptian people. It could come sooner than you think.

Read it.

Hey, it could happen to anybody.

Read it.

Counsel: What is your name?

Chrysler: Chrysler. Arnold Chrysler.

Counsel: Is that your own name?

Chrysler: Whose name do you think it is?

Counsel: I am just asking if it is your name.

Chrysler: And I have just told you it is. Why do you doubt it?

H/T Wheels Within Wheels.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Hey, if I were Jesse Jackson, I’d be depressed, too.

Read it.

“The two women were found selling rice in a stall at noon during Ramadan. The sharia forbids selling food during fasting hours at Ramadan,” said Marzuki Abdullah, Aceh’s sharia police head.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.

Katherine Mangu-Ward has the goods.

Today at National Review, Rich Lowry does some education money math on the occasion of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift to Newark public schools. He is pessimistic about the possibility that more money—even private money geared toward reform—can make much of a dent in one of the worst performing school systems in the country.

Hm. Internet billionaire (who went to Harvard) gives hundred million dollars to public school system that spends more and does less than most other public school systems in the country. Hard to imagine a more Crustian thing to do. The boy is fitting in right well.

Now young reformist Newark mayor Cory Booker is poised to try the same gambit, with a little more money and a lot more publicity. Booker’s powerful backer—the Fenty to his Rhee—is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. They seem to be genuinely willing to work together on education reform, which is impressive, since Booker is likely to make a bid for Christie’s job at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Well, good luck to ’em. I can’t see any prospect of breaking the hold of the education unions on a public school system, short of hiring the Mafia to whack 90% of them.

Lowry isn’t wrong to feel hopeless. Money spent on education is like the money spent on a restaurant tab for a large group: The numbers never make any sense or add up properly, and you always feel like you paid for more than you actually got.

And that about sums it up.

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Ten pretty inappropriate ad placements.

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California, which has money for about 20,000 people, has received fewer than 450 applications, according to a state official. The program in Texas had enrolled about 200 by early September, an official in that state said. Goldman, who runs the pool in Wisconsin, said they’ve received fewer than 300 applications so far, with room for about 8,000 people in the program.

That’s not how it was supposed to work.

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

C’mon, when did the government’s ‘plan’ every come true? But it certainly provides additional scope for bureaucrats to lie about it:

“We don’t think this is getting off to a slow start,” said Jay Angoff, director of a new insurance oversight office at the Department of Health and Human Services. “We think this is getting off to a good and orderly start.”

Read it.

We as a people, whether in Greece or the USA, should not forget our history, especially when it comes to Islam.

Those who live in the West and have never suffered under the yoke of Islam would do well to profit from the experience of those nations who have — and do today.

The sad fact is that while many Janissaries were Greek, their conversion and adherence to Islam forever severed them from any Hellenic consciousness or connection with Greek society. The Christian population throughout the Balkans, resented the recruitment of the children and it was often carried out by force. Those who would not submit and surrender the most healthiest, the most handsome, and the most intelligent children faced stiff penalties. Parents who refused were immediately put to death by hanging.

Can history repeat itself? Yes, it can. And, unless Islam reforms, it will.

Read it. And watch the video.

The Expresso Book Machine is a Truly Clever Device. It may just revolutionize the dead-tree book business — if enough vendors buy it.

Read it.

Lesson One:  Don’t honk unless it’s friendly.  And for goodness’ sake don’t honk at the Ford stopped interminably at the town’s lone traffic light.  It’s bound to be Miss Carrie, age 82, deciding whether or not she needs to go the bank (right), or straight on home to start dinner (left).  What’s your hurry anyway?  Honk and make her jump and you’ll feel guilty for a month.  Also the older men seated on the courthouse bench will catch you at it.

Wisdom. Attend.

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Among liberals in the planning profession today, the story of the Great American Streetcar Conspiracy is widely known. There are more nuanced variants, but it goes something like this: Streetcars were once plentiful and efficient, but then along came a bunch of car and oil companies like General Motors and Standard Oil, and they bought up all the streetcar companies, tore out their tracks and replaced the routes with buses, and ultimately set America on its present path to motorized suburban hell. Although the story dates back to a 1950 court conviction and was retold by academics and government employees throughout the ’60s and ’70s, the theory leapt into the public consciousness in 1988 with both a 60 Minutes piece and a fictionalized account in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Even today it resonates with liberals – The Atlantic casually mentions it as the reason America abandoned mass transit, The Nation wrote a whole article about it a few years ago, Fast Food Nation discusses it, and in the last week I’ve seen two references to the theory in the planning blogosphere.

It is perhaps because of this progressive complicity in streetcars’ demise, along with continued loyalty to state ownership and regulatory power, that the modern liberal narrative omits the true reasons for the decline of streetcars in America.

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Developed over a decade by researchers at the University of Guelph in Canada, the pigs are genetically modified to better digest and process phosphorus. They don’t need phosphorus food supplements, so they are cheaper to feed. And because they release 30% to 70% less phosphorus in their waste, they’re apparently good for the environment, too. Swine waste is a significant source of pollution.

It could be a while before this little piggy goes to market. Enviropig,  which some environmentalists are already calling Frankenswine, is still under review by two Canadian regulatory agencies, Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. A few months ago, another agency, Environment Canada, approved production of the animals under “containment procedures.” The FDA is still reviewing data about the pig to see if it’s safe to eat.

‘Environmentalists’ ought to be exposed for what they are — reactionaries who won’t be satisfied until we cancel the Industrial Revolution and return to the Middle Ages.

Read it.

Read it.

The ends of true schooling are also not the good of an individual alone, but of a community as well.  When we educate the young properly, we transform them into thoughtful, civil persons, capable of understanding their duties in a well-ordered society, and capable of carrying out those duties.  A young person benefits from being so molded, but the rest of us benefit equally by receiving into our midst such virtuous citizens.  The traditions of the various learned disciplines are benefited too by true education.  Rational argumentation, principled politics, scientific knowledge – all of these things, and the goods that they entail, are preserved when we teach our young correctly.  And since the preservation of these traditions is one end of education, we must hold students to the standards derived from those traditions, demanding of them nothing less than the kinds of learned excellence embodied in the “best that has been thought and said in the world.”

Our individualistic culture, with its emphasis on self-esteem, self-affirmation, and self-fulfillment, is at enmity with each and every one of these principles, and will admit none of them into its pantheon of prevailing educational dogmas.  A near unanimity of American parents regard a school simply as an institution designed for the benefit of their child, and not also for the community as a whole.  As each and every negative appraisal of their child’s performance constitutes a threat to his self-esteem, they will allow his teachers to make no such appraisals.  They will allow his teachers to maintain no standards which are beyond the capacities of their child, even temporarily, for fear that the resulting failures will fracture his psychological placidity.  Such things confound their cherished conception of education, which is essentially therapeutic – the prolonged cultivation of their child’s emotional ease.  As a consequence, rather than holding the students to certain expectations, our schools now frame their expectations to the limits of their students; this is the process of “dumbing down” which has been an unmistakable feature of the American educational landscape for over three generations.

Read it.

Every now and then, a Supreme Court justice or Supreme Court justice wannabee writes a history of the Supreme Court. With a few variations, they are all the same. In the interest of saving Balkinization readers time and money, I present the following condensed version of those histories.

Chapter Four. The Taney Court was pretty good, except Dred Scott. Everything is wrong about Dred Scott, including the penmanship.

Chapter 8. Once we know why Brown was rightly decided, we also know why my votes on abortion, gay marriage, guns, the commerce clause and the most valuable player in the NFL are also right.

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The military’s control over the vast Marange fields — the source of a quarter of the world’s diamonds — has become an important factor in the future of Zimbabwe.

The eight-member Joint Operational Command (JOC) of military and police leaders earns revenues from the mines through the control of companies.

The campaign group Global Witness says smugglers also sell on stones dug by forced labour gangs overseen by the military. The group’s researchers say locals are made to mine them by gun-wielding soldiers.

The diamonds are smuggled over the Mozambican border, where they are traded on the black market.

The revenues then return to the military.

Zimbabweans are lucky they are no longer suffering under the boot of the racist white former regime Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what kind of hell they would be living in now.

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Anthony Graber was charged with illegal wiretapping for recording plainclothes state trooper J.D. Uhler jumping from his unmarked sedan and drawing his gun — and waiting a good five seconds before identifying himself as a police officer. The tape was shot with a conspicuous, helmet-mounted camera that captured the video and audio of the confrontation.

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Should California incur the costs and delays of economic impact studies?

California should, because political decisions matter and too many California politicians don’t believe it. I’ve had a State Legislator, sitting in her office in the Capital, tell me in essence that decisions made in this building won’t impact California’s economy.

This illustrates the chief rationale for limited government. The skills necessary to win and keep political office in the modern world bear absolutely no relation to the skills needed to run the modern Nosy Parker government, and so the more scope that this government-by-amateurs has, the worse its performance will be.

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Well, duh. Most of the bums I want to throw out are Democrats and beloved of their constituents. And most of the bums Democrats want to throw out are Republicans and beloved of their constituents. So most of them come back term after term.

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In a week when I have been researching the stories about the supposed Moslem destruction of the library of Alexandria, it is curious to witness an actual, real-life Moslem attempt to destroy literature.

We live in fortunate times.  Out of pure generosity, the USA has given the internet to the world, and it has made freely available a huge mass of data and enjoyment and learning to us all.  It has made it possible for ordinary people to contribute, in such a way that every one of us benefits.   It is an act of astonishing beneficence, which we take for granted.  In turn we lesser contributors do our best to increase the amount of knowledge available online, accessible to everyone and anyone.

Then there are those who take this gift, and seek to abuse it.  It is inevitable, given recent history, that there would be Moslems who do this.

Another dweller in the Ivory Tower has his nose rubbed in the truth. Let the word spread.

Freeberg has a way with words.

A normal person says…I want to do this, but the consequences are not acceptable. Or it’ll piss somebody off. Usually, when I say that, it has something to do with throwing a heavy object at my teevee. You probably have your own examples to offer.

I think Barack Obama has that same pecking-order going on in His head with pros and cons of doing things. Except in His Holy Dome, “what I want to do” is the eight hundred pound gorilla. Nothing…nothing…emerges victorious after going up against it. It trumps all. Barack wants to do it.

Read it.

You’ve got a great new app that uses the iPhone 4 hi-res camera to check the state of my cooking pasta and tell me exactly how much longer to cook it for optimum flavor. Your new Web 2.0 collaborative messaging app will enable an unprecedented level of office productivity in a cloud-hosted distributed web-scale architecture. You are thrilled to tell me about the next leap forward in social dynamics and how your app is an enabler for the next level of financial integration with social media which will future-proof antiquated institutions from disruptive technologies. Guess what? I don’t give a fuck.

We used to send men to the moon. We once figured out how to split the atom and release vast quantities of energy in the process. We invented a novel device called the transistor. We discovered penicillin. We developed vaccines that have saved the lives of about half of all children born in the last century. We’ve mapped the human genome. We gave everyone in democratic countries the right to vote regardless of skin color and ended apartheid. The Soviet Union is no more.

But you want me to get excited about your little piece-of-shit app like it’s the next greatest thing since the Magna Carta. Well sorry to bust your bubble ego boy, but it’s not. In fact, more likely than not its useless and annoying. Even if you’re successful, what have you done? Created the next facebook? Another colossal fucking waste of human energy whose main purpose seems to be to get people to spend their hard earned money on virtual farm buildings?

And that says about all that needs to be said on the subject.

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Exercising Discretion: Limited-benefit health insurance plans, such as the one offered by McDonald’s, may get some leeway in meeting the health-care overhaul law’s requirement that 80% to 85% of premiums are spent on medical rather than administrative costs, the WSJ reports. The Obama administration says HHS head Kathleen Sebelius will “exercise her discretion” in enforcing the requirement for those “mini-med” plans, which tend to have a higher proportion of administrative costs because of lower claims payments and higher turnover among the hourly employee workforce. Regulatory guidance won’t be out until late in the year.

Translation: Whether or not you have to pay major amounts of money for high-priced health insurance is entirely at the whim of a bureaucracy, and God help you if you piss them off at any point in the procedure. Oh, and did we mention that it certainly wouldn’t hurt to be a major contributor to the President’s party coffers?

Read it.

Taleb explained his simple metric for judging whose economic opinions are worth his time: “Did someone predict the crisis before it happened? … If the answer is no, I don’t want to hear what the person says. If the person saw the crisis coming, then I want to hear what they have to say.”

“You have a million people on this planet who call themselves economists,” Taleb said. “How many people understood the risks of the system [before the crisis]? … Paul Krugman was not one of them.”

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A security  researcher has infiltrated the highest levels of America’s intelligence agencies using nothing more than Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and a picture of a pretty woman.

Some organisations did prove too tough for Ryan to crack, though. “I didn’t manage to make any friends in the CIA, the FBI or Secret Service,” he admits. “The mentality there is different: they just don’t trust you from the beginning. And it was harder to get friends from colleges  than it was from security and intelligence. The universities I picked… were prestigious and kind of cliquey. If they don’t remember you, they’re not going to talk to you.”

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Guidance issued recently by the Equality and Human Rights Commission for public bodies suggseted it may be illegal for any school to require girls to wear skirts as part of their uniform, since this could discriminate against transsexual pupils.

It warned of legal action if uniforms were deemed “gender specific”.

Nurse Caroline Petrie was suspended after offering to say a prayer for an elderly lady on her ward. The tribunal heard that the patient was not offended. Ms Petrie said she “trying to do is help”. Andrea Williams, founder and director of the Christian Legal Centre, said people with traditional values were being silenced “in the name of equality and diversity policies”. Ms Petrie was later reinstated.

Political Correctness is rotting the bones of our culture.

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What comedian doesn’t make jokes about his (or her) ex? (Brett Butler comes immediately to mind.)

And yet … what person wants to be held up to ridicule in public for years on end?

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In the early 1800s, nearly 25 per cent of all females in the United Kingdom were called Mary. If you add to these many Marys the crushing numbers of Elizabeths, Sarahs, Janes and variform Anns (Nancys, Nans and Hannahs), you would have the Christian names of something close to 80 per cent of the female population. There was a similar pattern with Johns. About one fifth of all males in the UK between 1800 and 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William.

Ah, those were the good old days. No Courtney or Britney, no Tyrone or Latonya, no Brooke or Travis. No Mohammed or Fatimah, either.

Read it.

At last — something useful on the Internet.

Bryan Caplan does a little analysis.

At this point, it’s tempting to dismiss Keynesianism as a dogmatic cult.  But in fact, there are key issues where their self-confidence is well-deserved.  The only problem: They’re too scared to admit why.  So let me answer for them: The source of Keynesian confidence is not “empirics,” but introspection.

One of the things that our legal system fights continually, and not always successfully, is the concept that seems plausible (and sometimes even compelling) but for which there is no actual evidence. ‘But he couldn’t possibly have been able to do that, therefore he didn’t do it.’ Economists most times don’t even fight notions that they consider intuitively obvious but for which there aren’t any supporting facts — and for which sometimes the facts point entirely the other way.

Erik Erickson observes a columnist in the wild.

You see, I was sitting across from you on the Acela Express last week from New York to Washington. We all saw and all heard you berate the Amtrak worker for not picking up your trash quickly enough. We all heard you complain that you were trapped in your seat because, heaven forbid, you had your tray table down and couldn’t be bothered to move your laptop to get up.

Read it.

One thing totally missing from this discussion is the fact that Islam is radically different from every other religion in the U.S. It is not a tenet of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, or Vedantism (or Sikh or Bah’ai or Jain or whatever) to subject everyone in the community to their religious law, by force if necessary. That is a tenet of Islam, and so to extend to Islam the same tolerance as has been traditionally (and harmlessly) extended to other religions is both ignorant and stupid.

To refuse to defend a community against a clear and present danger to that community is treason; to actively prevent others from defending themselves is, if possible, even worse.

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Is there a ballpoint pen in your pocket?  How fast is it?
What do you mean, you don’t know? You didn’t ask the salesman?

There is indeed a maximum speed at which the little ball in the pen can roll and still leave a satisfactory trace of ink upon the page.  Would you pay extra for a faster model?  If not, why not?  What would you do if someone were to sell you a costly yet noticeably slow pen?

Read it.

Household chores, for many people, are an annoyance—one more thing to check off on an already lengthy to-do list. But for some folks, doing household tasks, like cooking, cleaning and yard work, is a welcome, relaxing escape from other family and work demands.

Absolutely. Washing dishes, vacuuming, scrubbing the sink, any repetitive mechanical operation that doesn’t take a lot of thought is very relaxing. You can do it at your own speed, and once you’re done your world is better than it was.