Read it.

The family are refugees from Afghanistan and the father is deeply traumatised by his experiences in the war-torn country.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

You’ve seen them, I’ve seen them. We’ve all seen them. Those screamingly pompous email footers that IT departments append to millions – billions? – of emails every day, urging us to “Consider the environment!” before asking “Do you really need to print this email?”

I’ve become a real fan of Paul Carr at TechCrunch.

Fuck the environment. Print this email immediately. And then burn it.

Oh, I know the feeling.

So, for the sake of human civilization, I urge you to join the fight. Update your footer right now and help us take back our inboxes from the footer fascists. And if you work for a big company’s IT department… well… go on… you know you want to…

Steve Sailer kicks over a rock — and (surprise!) finds the DOJ Civil Rights Division.

In 2000 (the most recent data I can find), the NOPD was 51% black. I can’t find anything in the Obama Administration’s report on the racial identity of these NOPD police officers they are criticizing. That seems like a bit of an omission for a Civil Rights Division report, no? How often does that division forget to mention the racial makeup of an organization they are criticizing?

Read it.

The central theme of Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward’s account of the Obama administration’s Afghan policy debates, is the ongoing battle between Obama’s military and civilian advisers. The military advisers — Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, along with Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs — believe that a counterinsurgency strategy, which helped reverse the deteriorating military situation in Iraq in 2007, could do the same in Afghanistan. The civilian advisers — Vice President Joe Biden and other White House officials — suggest that Vietnam is a more apt analogy for Afghanistan and a quagmire a likelier outcome if counterinsurgency strategy is applied there.

Hm, let’s see — who shall we listen to about running a war, David Petraeus or Joe Biden? Boy, that’s a puzzler.

Read it.

In the 1980s and ’90s, enclosed malls were the supermodels of American commerce: youthful, gorgeous, and incredibly seductive, the people’s choice for Best Place to Spend Disposable Income on Candlesticks. In 2011 they’re America’s retail cougars, doing everything they can to stay sexy while competing with younger, fresher shopping paradigms.

I remember when every mall had a Waldenbooks and a B. Dalton. Ah, those were the days.

Even Victor Gruen, the architect who invented the enclosed mall, ended up hating his creation. In 1954 he designed the Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota. Featuring not just department stores and smaller retailers but a public auditorium, a kiddie zoo, a post office, a garden court, an aviary, and the first works of art commissioned specifically for a shopping center, it was an ambitious, utopian attempt to bring urban density and the kind of pedestrian-friendly European café culture that Gruen was familiar with from his Viennese childhood to the sprawl and isolation of the suburbs. It would eliminate trips to traffic-clogged, crime-ridden downtowns. It would give harried suburban automatons a place to walk safely and bond with their neighbors. It would foster community.

I guess not.

Ronald Baily ponders environmentalism.

Oil? Spills and carbon emissions. Coal? Mountaintop removal and carbon emissions. Natural gas? Fracking and carbon emissions. Hydro? Strangling wild rivers and methane emissions. Wind? OK, but not in scenic areas like off Cape Cod or on mountain ridges in West Virginia and don’t kill any birds. Solar? OK, but not in fragile deserts where it destroys Native American holy sites. Wind & Solar? Certainly don’t want any unsightly high-voltage power lines criss-crossing the countryside.

Read it.

Pakistani television stations reported claims that the United States government had paid $10 million and promised green cards to members of the families to clinch Raymond Davies’ release.

Funny how nobody wants to move from America to Pakistan; they all want to move from Pakistan to America. Wonder why that is.

Read it.

Fears of range anxiety have loomed over EVs since their inception, and those fears were validated courtesy of a couple unfortunate souls whose Nissan Leafs apparently died on them while driving. The drivers put their faith in the Leaf’s remaining range calculation, and were sorely disappointed when the car’s dash said they had enough juice to go 10+ miles, but the batteries had other ideas. Turns out, the Leaf needs some time to get to know you and your lead foot before it can accurately determine the bounds of its own range.

Pardon me while I LAUGH LIKE A MANIAC at these putzes. There.

The Other McCain has more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.

For some reason, the years 1997-2001 unleashed a torrent of such works. Most were by obscure writers who, I guessed, were hoping to get their books onto the reading lists of university Women’s Studies programs. Skimming through the books during train-and-bus rides home, I discovered that most of these stories had a predictable narrative arc: Young woman goes to college; sleeps with boyfriend; has abortion; breaks up with boyfriend; gets involved with anti-war protests; is sexually exploited by a series of boyfriends from the anti-war movement; becomes involved in Women’s Lib; and, at some point past the prime of her promiscuous youth, discovers that she is in fact a lesbian.

So many of my classmates in college went through that arc that I think it may actually have been a formal major.

Whatever any self-identified feminist may consider the general benefits of the women’s movement, can you deny that its benefits were and are greatest to the women who earn their living on the payroll of Feminism, Inc.? How many women today enjoy full-time employment as university professors of Women’s Studies, with tenure, six-figure salaries, and a teaching load of perhaps two classes per semester? What are the salaries of the top officials at NARAL and NOW and the other feminist non-profits? (Memo to liberals: Just because it’s non-profit doesn’t mean nobody gets paid.)

Read it.

One of the most amusing aspects of American politics is now little the so-called Democratic Party likes, or practices, democracy.

Read it.

Al-Qaeda has earned more than £13m in ransoms by kidnapping European citizens, the security minister has disclosed as a senior official described the terrorist organisation as a “money making machine.”

Read it.

Well, I think it’s funny.

Read it.

Never say that we don’t have useful stuff here.

Read it.

A founder member of the rock group Electric Light Orchestra died when a 63 stone (400kg) bale of silage rolled nearly 200ft (60m) down a steep field on to his moving car.

Read it.

Two members of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ official security forces were arrested in conjunction with this past weekend’s bloody massacre in which five family members were brutally stabbed to death inside their home in the Jewish village of Itamar, WND has learned.

Two cousins are now in Israeli custody and are suspected in the slayings. Ahmed Awad is an officer in Abbas’ Preventative Security Services in the northern West Bank city of Nablis. Iyad Awad is an officer in Abbas’ General Intelligence services in Ramallah.

Read it.

I’d hate to have to switch from Pepsi to Coke, but these guys are pushing it.

The bottle is made from switch grass, pine bark, corn husks and other materials. Ultimately, Pepsi plans to also use orange peels, oat hulls, potato scraps and other leftovers from its food business.

Why don’t they just pee in it and be done with it?

The new bottle looks, feels and protects the drink inside exactly the same as its current bottles, said Rocco Papalia, senior vice president of advanced research at PepsiCo. “It’s indistinguishable.”

Yeah, and if you believe that one they’ll tell you another one. That’s what they’ve been saying about diet soda for the last 20 years, and it’s just as big a lie now as it was then.

Read it.

What this has to do with religion (it’s in the ‘On Faith’ column) is far from clear, but it’s an interesting technology story nevertheless.

Read it.

An interesting journey, for those who enjoy that sort of thing.

Read it.

In English, Hamas denies responsibility for the murders and distances itself from them:Palestinian National Movement Hamas official Ezzat Al-Rashak said that the movement is not responsible for the murder of the five family members from the Itamar settlement.

The message in Arabic, however, is quite different. As translated by Al Mutarjim, Hamas wrote, in part: Five Zionist usurpers were killed the morning of Saturday, 12 March 2011, in a knife-stabbing carried out by a Palestinian in the usurper (settlement) of Itamar east of the city of Nablus.

Read it.

Diyya or Diyat is monetary compensation paid by a killer to the victim’s family.

In Saudi Arabia, when a person has been killed or caused to die by another, the prescribed blood money rates are as follows[8]:

* 100,000 riyals if the victim is a Muslim man
* 50,000 riyals if a Muslim woman
* 50,000 riyals if a Christian or Jewish man
* 25,000 riyals if a Christian or Jewish woman
* 6,666 riyals if a Hindu man
* 3,333 riyals if a Hindu woman.

And that shows you the relative value of different types of person under Muslim law. Women aren’t worth as much as men, Christians and Jews aren’t worth as much as Muslims, and Hindus are hardly worth anything at all. (Discrimination! Call Eric Holder! Oops, sorry, he’s too busy making sure that police have the correct color mix by dumbing down testing requiremenst. Forget I even mentioned it.)

Of course, in the West, not only will the killer be expected to compensate the victim’s family, but he’ll probably get locked up (or snuffed) as well, under the no-doubt-quaint notion that he’s a danger to society and ought to be removed. But that’s apparently not a big concern in the Dar al-Islam.

Read it.

What should you do when you really, REALLY have to “go”? Make important life decisions, maybe. Controlling your bladder makes you better at controlling yourself when making decisions about your future, too, according to a study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Read it.

Speaking of optimism….

Eric Raymond speaks the simple truth.

Political persuasion matters most when when policy options are relatively open and unconstrained by objective conditions that politics cannot alter. It matters less when policy options are more constrained, and not at all when there are no choices left.

Politics as we know it has had a structural problem for a long time; the self-destructive interest-group scramble that Mancur Olson identified in The Logic of Collective Action continually makes parasitic demands beyond the capacity of the underlying economy to supply, and the difference has to be papered over by massive government borrowing.

This is all very well until, as Margaret Thatcher put it about socialism, “you run out of other peoples’ money.” The system is reaching that point now. Bond investors are figuring out that the debt load has become impossible and are increasingly refusing to either purchase new debt or roll over existing paper. The muni and state-bond market in the U.S. is near-moribund, and the threat of sovereign debt default is tearing the Euro zone apart. U.S Treasuries increasingly look like Wile E. Coyote running in midair; they’ll keep selling only as long as nobody actually looks down.

A year ago the U.S. government was only taking in a third of what it needed to cover annual outlays; today it’s so much worse that individual monthly deficits are larger than the entire Bush administration’s. The money’s all gone. Our options are closing down to default or hyperinflation.

Read it.

Under the National Labor Relations Act, employees are presumably free to choose to unionize or not to unionize free from coercion or interference.  In previous cases, the National Labor Relations Board had considered threats (even by third parties) enough cause for an election to be overturned.

Unbelievably, on Friday, the union-controlled NLRB ruled that threats of physical violence by pro-union supporters is not coercive.

Just another fine day in the Obamanation.

Read it.

I run a small software business in central Japan.  Over the years, I’ve worked both in the local Japanese government (as a translator) and in Japanese industry (as a systems engineer), and have some minor knowledge of how things are done here.  English-language reporting on the matter has been so bad that my mother is worried for my safety, so in the interests of clearing the air I thought I would write up a bit of what I know.

See, the thing that people don’t realize is that Honshu is massive. It is larger than Great Britain.  (A country which does not typically refer to itself as a “tiny island nation.”)  At about 800 miles long, it stretches from roughly Chicago to New Orleans.  Quite a lot of the reporting on Japan, including that which is scaring the heck out of my friends and family, is the equivalent of someone ringing up Mayor Daley during Katrina and saying “My God man, that’s terrible?—?how are you coping?”

Miyagi is the prefecture hardest hit by the tsunami, and Japanese TV is reporting that they expect fatalities in the prefecture to exceed 10,000.  Miyagi is 200 miles from Tokyo.  (Remember?—?Honshu is massive.)  That’s about the distance between New York and Washington DC.

Read it.

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism recently described an experiment in which two student journalists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison tested how quickly they could “score” Adderall—a prescription stimulant designed to treat attention-deficit disorders, but often used by healthy students as a study aid. The reporters walked into a campus library, tapped a studying stranger on the shoulder, and were connected to an Adderall supply in less than one minute.

Concerned observers of this trend, most notably at Britain’s Academy of Medical Sciences, have characterized the use of “study drugs” as a form of cheating, akin to the use of steroids in sports. Having diagnosed the problem as an issue of unfair competition, the academy has called on universities to consider banning the use of cognition-enhancing drugs by healthy students. This past October, Wesleyan University did just that, amending its student code of conduct to recognize “misuse” of prescription drugs as a violation of the college’s prohibition against receiving “improper assistance” in completing academic work.

What a crock. College isn’t an athletic competition. The point is not for kids to ‘compete fairly’ for grades. The purpose of school is to learn, grades are how we gauge learning (for better or worse), and the objective is to have every kid earn an ‘A’ if we can do so legitimately — legitimately meaning in a way that has a rational relationship to the material being learned, rather than dumbing-down the standards with grade inflation.

If such drugs really do improve academic performance among healthy students (and the evidence is scant), shouldn’t colleges put them in the drinking water instead? After all, it would be unfair to permit wealthy students to use them if less privileged students can’t afford them.

My thought exactly.

Of course, to the extent that such drugs pose health risks, it’s prudent to restrict their use. But that seems like an argument about safety, not fairness. While safety is a valid concern, it is one that might be overcome by better drug design. If we are still troubled by the idea of a study drug that is safe and universally available, we have to look for other sources of our discomfort.

The technical term is ‘unclear on the concept’. There’s a lot of that going around.

The Other McCain kicks over a rock.

An unfairness, a bias — call it what you will, but Regular Joe sees stuff like that and gets the sneaking feeling that all the Really Important Big Shots have made a secret deal behind closed doors: “Hey, let’s not report this stuff in a way that might make Regular Joe angry, because everybody knows those ignorant yahoos are just a bunch of racists looking for an excuse to do terrible things to brown people.”

Whatever you think about Regular Joe, however, he’s not so stupid that he doesn’t know the smell of bullshit when he gets downwind of a big fresh steaming pile of it.

Read it.

Gaza residents from the southern city of Rafah hit the streets Saturday to celebrate the terror attack in the West Bank settlement of Itamar where five family members were murdered in their sleep, including three children.

Residents handed out candy and sweets, one resident saying the joy “is a natural response to the harm settlers inflict on the Palestinian residents in the West Bank.”

Consider what sort of creatures could celebrate and hand out candy when a three-year old child is stabbed to death in its sleep. Such creatures are not human, no matter that they look and sound human. Killing such creatures is not manslaughter, it is pest control.

I’m waiting for some ‘civilized’ government to wake up to that fact. (Not holding my breath, of course.)

Read it.

Not just Turks, but Japanese as well live in Germany in parallel societies, and they teach their children Japanese first. Nonetheless that makes no one nervous.

So I wonder why we have a problem with the Turks and no problem with the Japanese, not even in Düsseldorf. Nobody inquires after their birth rate. No authorities are putting interpreters at their disposal. There has not been a summit on Japan — or Asia — with the ministry of the interior. There has been no Christian-Japanese working group on Protestant Church Day. We don’t even know what religion they belong to. They make no secret of it, but they don’t make a big fuss about it either.

There must be other reasons. Could it have something to do with the fact that no Japanese has gone to court to sue for a prayer room in a school? Or that no Japanese has refused to stack drinks in a supermarket, which his religion has forbidden him to drink? Or that the Japanese are under-represented in the ranks of multiple offenders and over-represented among those who have graduated from secondary school? The Japanese, too, live in parallel societies, marry among themselves and teach their children Japanese first and then German.

Read it.

It is true that the unrest in the Middle East and North Africa has had some impact on gas prices. Though Libya produces only 1.5m barrels of oil a day (more context on this number to come), the demand for oil, as a key input of production, energy, transportation, and the entire global economy is relatively inelastic. That means that even very small shocks to the supply of oil can ripple quite quickly and drastically through the world.

But are there other explanations for this recent spike in gas prices other than brown people looking for freedom?

I’m so glad you asked.

Because the real reason for the recent spike in gas prices has, at best, an attenuated, ancillary, and secondary relationship to the current unrest in the Arab world.

The primary party is Wall Street.

As Rahm Emmanuel so famously said, ‘Never let a crisis go to waste.’

Read it.

Hopefully we’ll have a Republican President by then, so we’ll have some chance of winning said war.

Nick Gillespie takes the famous writer to the woodshed.

The answer, of course, is that he chooses not to. The IRS is happy to accept extra payments from just about anyone. (And speaking of which, maybe the IRS should look into King’s return based on his claim below. The upper limit of the 28 percent rate is $200,000 for a married couple filing jointly [and lower still for other statuses], which seems far below what the best-selling author would be pulling in annually.)

Every now and then the arrested adolescents of tReason magazine get it right. (Hey, even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.)

If ever anyone needed evidence that expertise in one area of life is completely disconnected from the ability to find one’s butt with both hands in any other area of life, professional writers knock it out of the park.

And don’t get me started on Michael Moore….

The Other McCain reacts to feminist criticism.

We are at that stage of the argument you have with your wife when whatever started the argument has ceased to be relevant, and the point of the argument has become: She is right, you are wrong, and your refusal to acknowledge her unquestioned rightness is regarded as an intolerable insult.

Just as I’ve read more Marx than most Marxists, I’ve read more about feminism than most feminists.

To every woman who has ever been passed over for a promotion that instead went to a guy, or otherwise felt herself subjected to sexist discrimination, the guy who criticizes feminism is mentally associated with That Awful Creep. This isn’t necessarily my fault, or the women’s fault, it just is what it is.

For women writers, feminism is “this thing of ours,” a subject on which they expect to exercise a monopoly. You will note here a distinction between women who write for a living, or at least as an amateur vocation, and women who have no ambition to be regarded as “writers.” Insofar as any woman aspires to be a writer, one of the subjects about which she can always write — and never have to worry about competing for readership with male writers — is feminism.

No matter how much historical evidence I cite in support of the fact that Second Wave feminism was deeply rooted in the anti-American Left — both Betty Friedan’s pro-Soviet Old Left and the radical New Left roots of the Women’s Liberation Movement — they will not concede the point, because I was born with a penis, and no one born with a penis can be permitted to write with authority as a critic of feminism.

Here.

For the last 18 months or so, the previews for the presidential contest have been really encouraging. Obama has bled support among independents. The Tea Parties have succeeded in framing the debate in ways that make E. J. Dionne want to punch a clown. Nancy Pelosi had her gavel taken away. Some of the states Obama needs to win the Electoral College have been drifting away.

Everything was looking great.

But then, when I look at the field of candidates, I get that “Directed by Michael Bay” feeling. It’s not as bad as I felt in 1996 when it was clear that Bob Dole was going to be the nominee. That was like watching Stephen Hawking heading out to sea on a surfboard. You didn’t know exactly what would happen, but you knew it would end badly.

This time around, you just get the sense that this isn’t the A-Team. In fact, if this were an action movie, these guys would be the team that gets wiped out in the first ten minutes to establish that what’s really needed is the A-Team.

I wrote a column earlier this week about the funk on the right, and it was interesting to read the feedback. Everyone agrees!

That’s not a great sign either.

I’m not saying all is lost or anything of the sort. But I feel a bit like a dog who suddenly realizes the car is heading to the vet, not the park.

And that says everything you need to know about the current political scene.

Read it. And watch the video.

Professor Jacobson asks, reasonably: Why do these people, many of whom are professionals, feel no fear in expressing such death wishes in the open?

I think the answer is that as liberals, they assume they are immune from scrutiny. Glenn Reynolds agrees: “They’ve lived for years in a culture of impunity. But that’s changing faster than they realize.” Maybe. But I don’t think it’s changing fast enough.

I have a question for Michael Moore: If this is war, does that mean we get to shoot you? Because I’m totally down with that.

The Other McCain clears the air.

Few things — not even the threat of a coffee shortage — bother me quite so much as what I call the Existential Theory of Liberalism:

Everything that exists must be subsidized by the federal government; ergo, to argue against government subsidies for something is to advocate the abolition of that thing.

The Existential Theory of Liberalism can be seen in action whenever any conservative proposes reducing federal expenditures for, say, the National Endowment for the Arts, and is therefore accused by liberals of being “anti-art.” By the same token, if you criticize the federal Department of Education, you are “anti-education,” and if you oppose using taxpayer dollars to fund embryonic stem-cell research, you are “anti-science.”

Read it.

A mother and four of her children have been killed in South Africa after a bolt of lightning struck their thatched home during a thunderstorm on Wednesday night.

Let that be a lesson to us all. Stay out of thatched huts during thunderstorms.

Read it.

Last night, a mob seized control of Wisconsin’s state Capitol. The Capitol was supposed to be secured, but the mob was let in through the ground-floor window of a Democratic legislator.

Ah, those Democrats. Bastions of respect for law and order.

Read it.

Last night Col. Ralph Peters was on Bill O’Reilly’s show, talking about Libya. Peters thinks we should act on behalf of the rebels there, but he expressed skepticism that President Obama will ever do anything. “Obama loves the idea of being President,” Peters said, “but he can’t make a decision.”

I think there is a lot of truth to that, even in domestic policy, where Obama has passively deferred to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi on all legislative matters. One can debate whether action is appropriate in Libya or not, but Peters is certainly right when it comes to foreign policy–it is a safe bet that Obama will do nothing, because doing something would require a decision.

Read it.

Oddly enough, there isn’t a Presbyterian in the bunch. No Mormons, either.

“Though Muslims represent about 1 percent of the American population,” the IPT notes, “they constitute defendants in 186 of the 228 cases DoJ lists.” Thirty of the terror cases listed, or about 13 percent, involve homegrown Islamist terrorists.

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

King’s past support of the IRA is not to his credit. But it is of no relevance except as a political talking point to attack King’s hearings. “The fact is,” King himself told the Times, “the IRA never attacked the United States. And my loyalty is to the United States.” Is this a difficult point?

Read it.

Why this qualifies as news is difficult to understand. China has no tradition of democracy, multi-party or otherwise, and the fact that the current one-party state masquerades as a Communist dictatorship (which in turn masquerade as representative governments) is just multiple layers of window-dressing. China is China, and this autocratic government is not appreciably different from any other autocratic government they’ve had in the last 6,000 years; it just uses a Clever Plastic Disguise with modern buzzwords.

Read it.

Which is nonsense, of course; they aren’t a government, they’re just rebels. They may turn into a government some day, when things settle down, but that day has not yet come. It’s like calling Al-Qaida a government merely because they’re successful at blowing things up and causing trouble for the real government.

But, then, the French have historically been a bit confused as to what a proper government looks like, so I suppose we ought not to be too picky.

There is no such thing as ‘identity theft’.

Let me repeat that.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ‘IDENTITY THEFT’.

Theft means that somebody takes something from another person. If you ‘identity’ is ‘stolen’, do you become anonymous? Of course not. You still have your ‘identity’.

What is commonly called ‘identity theft’ is merely fraud that depends on one person successfully masquerading as another. The reason this works is because remote transactions, such as that over the Internet, depend upon proofs of identity that have no natural connection to whoever is being impersonated; it’s just information, and person X can present information relevant to person Y, if he knows it, just as easily as person Y can. This is why driving licenses and most other forms of identification have pictures on them. (This is why Democrats fight requirements for picture ID for voting; they want to make it easier, not harder, to impersonate other people for voting purposes. They won’t admit it, but that’s all it is.)

So why do they call it ‘identity theft’? To escape blame. If your ‘identity’ was ‘stolen’ and that information was used to clean out your bank account, then the term ‘identity theft’ lets the bank off the hook. ‘Oh, well, your identity was stolen and along with it your money. Just one of those unfortunate things in which we were just as much the victims as you were. A terrible thing for which we are not to blame. Sucks to be you. Have a nice day.’

That’s the bottom line. Institutions, especially financial institutions, don’t want to spend what it takes to do proper security, because a lot of customers will whine about what a hassle it is. So they sock it to the people who are defrauded because, let’s face it, they’re not going to be customers of the bank anymore anyway.

So the next time you hear somebody use the phrase ‘identity theft’, make sure you still have your wallet. Your identity is not at risk, just your money.

Read it. And watch the video.

Airborne refueling is a very tricky operation. This is very encouraging.

Read it.

The last time that HG Matthews used wood to fire its Buckinghamshire brick kilns was in 1926, during the General Strike.

Shades of Atlas Shrugged.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it. And watch the video.

… a news report — from CNN, of all places — about the enslavement of black Christians from southern Sudan by Muslim Arabs in the north. It is believed that thousands of slaves are still being held by Arabs in northern Sudan.

Islam has no problem with slavery, and Muslims were key players in the trans-Atlantic slave trade for 400 years — which makes the current popularity of Islam among black Americans fairly ironic.

Read it.

The only rational purpose of a tax paid school system is to produce more productive and better citizens. If it doesn’t accomplish that, there is no justification for making everyone pay for it. There is certainly no justification for taxing a person on a $44,000 income to pay salary and benefits including pensions to someone making $50,000 simply because the teacher is entitled to the money. (In California the top state income tax bracket starts at $44,000, and I think no tenured teacher makes less than $50,000. If those numbers don’t apply in your state, supply your own, but you get the idea). The most effective way to get better and more productive citizens is to allocate resources in a way that benefits those who can benefit the most: make sure the best and the brightest regardless of their race or social or economic status get the most education. If you have a little more time to spend with a student, put that time into make the bright ones learn more rather than trying to make the dummies just a little less uninformed.  Of course that is now what we do: the whole system, and particularly No Child Left Behind, is geared in the opposite direction. You can ameliorate that a bit by assigning the best and the brightest teachers to the best and the brightest students, but you can’t if the unions are allowed to negotiate the work rules. You certainly can’t accomplish much when saddled with tenure and seniority rules.

The American school system is a bad parody of an optimum allocation of resources, and nearly everyone knows it, but we always talk as if it were not so. Of course we never discuss the basic premises of public education to begin with.

Read it.

Think about that next time you hear a ‘progressive’ whining about income inequality and hard times for the poor. The so-called ‘poor’ nowadays are comfortably middle class by the standards of my parents’ generation, and quite well-to-do compared to what my grandparents got by with.

Megan McArdle responds to David Weigel, statist whiner.

I myself like rail, and think that the culture-war rhetoric with which conservatives frequently reject it is out-of-proportion to its importance in the grand political scheme of things.  At the same time, I don’t think that rail is going to work at anything close to a decent cost-benefit ratio in most of America, and I thought that the idea of running a train from Busch Gardens to Disney was fairly insane–high speed rail takes a lot of time and energy to accelerate (and brake), so the shorter the route, the less benefit it offers to either riders or the environment.

The elephant in the room, of course, is that trains are an outdated technology and inferior the the automobile, which enables personal freedom. Personal freedom is what statists hate most.

Freeberg expands upon Thomas Sowell’s recent article.

The creation of wealth, or lack thereof, and the ramifications involved — it’s fascinating how so many of our progressive friends remain ignorant of these crucial concepts. Many of them boast impressive educational credentials, and you’d better believe that means something, because if you ever forget they’ll remind you. But if you just listen to them distinguish “private sector” and “public sector” a little while, it becomes apparent they haven’t a clue.