Read it.

Buzzword Bingo a là Gingrich.

I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, ponders ethnicity.

The Third World-ification of Britain began in the same way that, according to a famous historian, the British Empire itself began: in a fit of absent-mindedness. As the dissolution of that empire commenced in the years after WW2, it seemed only fair to let some of Her Majesty’s overseas subject go settle in the imperial homeland.

Then, in the 1960s, at about the same time as their American cousins, British socialists and love-the-world globalists realized that mass Third World immigration was a marvelous weapon to wield against both their native working class, who were getting ideas above their station, and domestic conservatives and traditionalists of all kinds, whom the globalists needed to delegitimize so that Davos Man could take over.

Forty years on, one in eight of Britain’s population was born abroad, most in the Third World — in, that is to say, places whose net contribution to human civilization over the last millennium has been zero, if not actually negative.

The consequences fill the pages of Britain’s newspapers. They filled them rather spectacularly in August this year, when the ineducable, unemployable, and unassimilable descendants of those Third World settlers burned and looted British town centers.

And America is well on the way to being the same.

They have filled them this past few days with the story of Emma West, a British woman who, admittedly in salty language, had the audacity to lament the demographic transformation of her homeland in public. Ms West is in jail as I write, charged with “a racially aggravated public order offence,” though no disorder seems to have ensued. Ms West’s children have been “placed in care,” which is to say, sent to re-education camps where they will be taught to hate their mother in between sessions of sex play with the pedophile camp staff. “Being the child of an enemy of the people” was the charge in Stalin’s time.

You will, I am sure, comb the records of British courts in vain to find anyone but a native Briton charged with “a racially aggravated public order offense.”

That, America’s already got.

Read it.

Employers require high school diplomas as prerequisites for many jobs. Yet if the matter gets to court, it can be quite expensive and cumbersome for them to establish that such a screen is “job related and consistent with business necessity” — necessity being of course a legal term of art.

The Americans with Disabilities Act is one of the reasons that George H W Bush will burn in Hell for all eternity.

Read it.

Here is a very nice illustration of the point I made earlier.

(1) Why is the government involved in teachers’ pensions? Because the government pays the teachers, and their pensions. Why is the government paying the teachers? Because in the centralized state that is modern Britain, government controls (and pays for) education. That makes teacher pay — and teacher pensions — a political issue.

(2) Why is the government trying to ‘reform’ teacher pensions? Because they are running out of money, and can’t keep the (ridiculously generous) promises they may earlier. Does the fact that the government eventually won’t have any money with which to pay for teacher pensions at the current level matter to the teachers? Not a shred — hence the language that they ‘cannot accept’ said reform. Since the government is running out of money, how do the teachers get off saying what they will or won’t ‘accept’? Because the teachers vote, and Britain is a Modern Democracy, in which pressure groups rule.

The message from the teacher unions is, essentially, ‘We don’t care that you won’t have the money to pay for these pensions, we want them anyway, and you WILL preserve our right to them, or you elected politicians will be out of a job, because the reality is that you will have an uncertain number of people who like you and a large block of people who hate your guts come next election time. If you cut our pensions, you lose your job. Take whatever action you think appropriate.’ And history shows us that the number of elected politicians who can do the right thing in the face of that threat is negligible.

Dystopia arrives, not on little cat feet, but in great big boots, with spike heels and steel toes.

Baron Bodissey is not optimistic.

Yes, the fantasy is coming to an end. The political and cultural leaders of Europe, North America, and Australia share the same dream. Those at the highest levels of government and business generally view themselves as a trans-national ruling class with no great attachment to any single nation or people. Their collective dream is one of global governance — presided over by themselves, of course — propped up by a financial system that keeps power in the hands of the oligarchs who run it, and prevents any serious irruption from “the mutable, rank-scented many” beneath.

The fall of a system as extensive, wealthy, powerful, and well-entrenched as ours will be catastrophic in scope. Rather than the end of the Third Reich, the fall of the Roman Empire provides an event of comparable historical significance.

The fall of Rome was a slow-motion process that took place over several centuries, even though it appeared rapid in hindsight a millennium later. The collapse of the Westphalian Order may occur more suddenly, given the existence of instantaneous worldwide communication networks. Alternatively, we may be in for a gradual descent into poverty, social degradation, and disorder, followed by the emergence of a new order whose form cannot yet be imagined.

I predict that it will be ugly indeed.

Volokh Conspiracy has assembled a number of useful links to knowledgeable legal discussion of the issue.

Assuming, of course, that you care about that sort of thing.

Mike Masnick hears the crowd of angry peasants coming.

We’ve talked a lot in the past about how the tech industry frequently ignores what’s happening in Washington DC, and takes the attitude that it doesn’t want to be involved in policy debates, because folks are busy focusing on actually building companies. However, as we repeatedly learn, just because we want to ignore DC, it doesn’t mean that DC ignores us. And that’s a problem. It allows others to use the government as a weapon against innovations they don’t like. For years, Hollywood has been able to do this successfully — but, when they push too far, it seems they may awaken a political beast they’d rather not deal with: the geeks. You don’t want to make the geeks angry. Yet, that’s exactly what Hollywood has done with SOPA/PIPA… and this time, most of the public is on the side of the geeks, because we’re all geeks now. We all use these technologies and services. It’s why there’s widespread public outcry against SOPA, but absolutely no grassroots support for the bill.

Read it.

Of course politicians, like bankers, have the capacity to make the situation worse, and they’ve grabbed the opportunity.

Yet they are not the cause of the problem. They are a symptom. The real cause of the crisis and why leaders are forever advocating piecemeal policies lies beneath the speeches and posturing at summits. The tourniquet applied to the Brussels machine is held tight by voters and not politicians.

Whether it is Germans refusing to share with Greeks or rich Greeks with their fellow countrymen, the euro crisis is a case of democracy in action. The problem centres on the demographic development of recent decades that means many voters are over 55 and still retain much of the wealth they gained in the boom. Even those who have lost a large proportion of their pensions continue to vote for politicians who promise to do all in their power to protect what’s left of their other assets.

The economic crises hitting Europe (and America) are the result of the conjunction of two unhealthy trends.

The first is the tendency in the centralizing modern state to put every issue in the hands of the government, which necessarily makes every issue a political issue, decided by political means without regard to the reality of the situation.

The second is the maturation of democracy, where blocs of voters with a common interest have discovered that they can, with their votes, make their wishes come true in political questions, again regardless of the reality of the situation.

Want more money? Vote yourselves some out of the public purse. Public purse empty? Not our problem; we’re still voting for more money, because nobody can stop us.

Under democracy, the voters aren’t accountable to anybody for how they vote; if they vote for something manifestly stupid, selfish, and short-sighted, they still win. Technically, fundamental political principles such as those embedded in the United States Constitution serve as a limit on what democratic majorities can do, but history suggests that no document can forever withstand a majority (or a very focused minority) with the bit in its teeth and access to the political process.

In order to fix this process, that conjunction has to be broken at some point. Unfortunately, it may be that the only way to break it is for the political structure itself to collapse and be reformed, and reformed in such a way that either these questions are no longer political or democracy no longer determines how the issues are handled. I’m in favor of the first, but I’m very much afraid we’re going to wind up with the second.

Read it.

Concern that the Arctic Ocean is becoming massively less salty due to its ice cap melting – which could have knock-on consequences for the planet’s climate – is unfounded, NASA scientists have said.

For years, researchers have seen falling salinity readings in the Canadian half of the Arctic Ocean. This has led them to theorise that large amounts of fresh water were being added due to permanent disappearance of ice. In itself this might not mean a lot – sea levels would be unaffected, as the Arctic ice floats atop the sea – but it had been feared that addition of so much fresh water could impact the oceanic “conveyor belt” which moves heat around the planet, with major consequences for the climate.

The enviro-nazis, of course, went ballistic. But it was another case of ‘sky-is-falling’ premature ejaculation.

According to Kwok and his colleagues, analysing readings from the satellites overhead, new freshwater in the Beaufort Sea comes not from melted ice but from rivers in Russia. Formerly this freshwater would have stayed largely in the Russian side of the Arctic, but a shift in circulation has occurred.

Read it.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Read it.

Didn’t think that the day would ever come that the Royal Navy’s ‘mightiest ship’ was a Destroyer.

Let’s see:

1. Massive influx of Muslims creating social problems for which the government always blames the victims? Check.
2. Police that won’t show up if it’s too dangerous? Check.
3. Army fit only for parades and occasional UN peacekeeping duty? Check.
4. Miniscule Navy that’s basically a glorified Coast Guard? Check

Guess it’s just another Toy Scandinavian Monarchy now.

Read it.

And that’s what makes Us different from Them.

Read it.

Gunmen in Nigeria on Friday opened fire on friends and relatives gathered to mourn the deaths of three Christians killed on Thursday, leaving up to 20 more people dead.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Read it.

Notice that nobody ever talks about ‘the Right’ — it’s always ‘the far-Right’.

Notice that nobody every talks about ‘the far-Left’.

If all you ever read was newspapers, you’d think the the political spectrum had two areas, the Middle and the Far Right.

And there isn’t much discussion of why this symbol of French nationalism needs ‘wresting back’. Hmmm….

Read it.

Starting January 1, the European Union has begun imposing a requirement that all airlines landing in Europe must show that they have bought carbon emissions permits equal to the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the aircraft. Airlines without the proper number of allowances would be fined up to $130 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions and could be barred from European airspace.

And what exactly is the nature of these ‘carbon emission permits’? How do they halt or reverse ‘climate change’? Or are they just a way for Eurocrats to wet their beaks by piggybacking on the latest Chicken Little trend?

Read it.

Mother Yasmin Chaudhry drowned her one year old baby daughter in a bucket live on Skype while her boyfriend watched from Britain.

Yeah, nothing says ‘Norwegian’ like ‘Yasmin Chaudhry’. Sailed with the Vikings, her ancestors did.

The baby’s father now lives in Pakistan after splitting with the mother, his lawyer commenting that ‘he is of course, very shocked’.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing he can do, because there is no penalty under shari’ah for a parent killing his or her child.

Read it.

Gunmen burst into a church in northern Nigeria on Thursday, killing at least five people in the latest attack of a coordinated campaign against the country’s Christians.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Read it.

No matter HOW many people RISE FROM THEIR GRAVES on election day in Chicago, they can only take Illinois.

Can you imagine if you had Florida 2000 style recount shenanigans going on in every state in the country?
Presently, the main reason why fraud is not investigated much in elections is because it rarely changes the outcome—it tends to happen most in areas that are already heavily blue to begin with…that and who..whom of course.

Bryan Caplan despairs.

The main problem with democracy, I keep arguing, is that harmful policies reliably win by popular demand.  But there are exceptions.  Take Obamacare.  It appears to be genuinely unpopular.  But not only did Obama pass it; it’s now very likely that his Republican opponent will be Mitt Romney, who brought the prototype of Obamacare to Massachusetts.

For once a majority of the public wants to repeal a genuinely unpopular harmful policy.  And what options does American democracy give them?  A choice between the Obamacare’s Jesus and Obamacare’s John the Baptist.  What gives?

Welcome to my world.

John Hinderaker at Power Line does a review.

It’s been a big week for self-defense, especially of the juvenile variety. The most famous case is that of Sarah McKinley, the 18-year-old widow in rural Oklahoma who was home alone with her infant son when two men tried to break into her house. One of the men had been stalking her and apparently had killed her two dogs.

When one of the men broke in, armed with a 12-inch hunting knife, McKinley killed him with a 12-gauge shotgun.

You go, girl.

Local authorities indicated that a policeman was en route to McKinley’s rural home within seven minutes after her call came in, which reminds us once again of the adage that when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. McKinley won’t be charged, but the dead burglar’s accomplice–who may or may not have entered the house–is being charged with murder. That may seem surprising, but it is the traditional felony murder rule: if you are committing a felony, and anyone dies in the course of it, including your accomplice, you are guilty of murder. It’s just one more inducement to avoid felonious behavior. In the end, the accomplice will no doubt plead to some much lesser charge.

Read it.

The trial was deemed so successful that a £5 million scheme will now be rolled out nationwide, targeting up to 50,000 unemployed.

Government officials were said to have been shocked by the figures, which they believe prove that a core group of claimants have no intention of working.

The Other McCain looks at ‘journalists’.

Journalism has become an elite profession, and attracts basically three kinds of people:

1. “Save the World” types who think of journalims as a sort of humanitarian charitable endeavor, wherein they’ll “make a difference” on behalf of the oppressed victims of society. Such people should be encouraged to join the Peace Corps instead.
2. Neurasthenic intellectuals with literary pretensions. These people are essentially dilettantes, slumming it in the news business as a way to pay the bills until they can sell a screenplay or a novel.
3. Would-be TV stars. The cable-news era has created a niche market for camera-friendly “personalities,” and a lot of these young kids in journalism nowadays are writing news or punditry as a means of auditioning for a TV gig. They wake up in the morning, turn on MSNBC, and imagine the days when they’ll be sitting at the table with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski, who will chuckle at their pithy aphorisms and bon mots.

Good luck with that, OK?

In other words, ‘journalism’ is now show business for English majors.

Read it.

That is, the ones not keeping an eye out for birds.

Read it.

I was totally brainwashed from the time I was born that Islam is the true religion of God and Mohammed is the best human being in the history of humanity, and that there can never be anyone like him. Of course, it is right in a way; there could never be anyone like him. He was the most clever and conniving son of a bitch, and Hitler probably apotheosized, because I really do believe that Adolf Hitler was a clone of Mohammed. Do you have any idea what he did to the Jews of Medina? He slaughtered them heartlessly in front of their wives and then raped their wives that very night.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Read it.

According to his official record, Fazl is a war criminal who has massacred thousands of people, has close relationships with al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, is involved in narcotics trafficking, and is so senior in the Taliban hierarchy that he once threatened the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Omar. He is considered to pose a “high risk” to American forces and our allies if released.

Really — if Obama were actually a Muslim, what would he have done differently?

Read it.

A police lieutenant, fired for covering up a hit and run crash involving a fellow officer who she was involved in a relationship with, has been reinstated following an arbitration decision that chastised the city’s Police Commission.

But Christine Burns was demoted to patrol officer and assigned to the Police Department’s records division. She was granted about six months back pay.

Read it.

The new entrepreneur: Making money off of helping people cope with the bureaucracy. Not that this is a new thing (do a Google search for ‘tax help’) but they have a nice narrow niche and they’re serving it beautifully well.

Read it.

The Church hopes that its official status will remove the legal stigma that surrounds file-sharing.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

I’ll bet you good money that the ‘Britons’ in question are named ‘Rashid’ or ‘Achmed’ and are ‘Britons’ only by virtue of having British passports.

Of course, God forbid that a news article would actually contain the names — that would be raaaaaaacist.

Read it.

Oh, as if that ever works.

Read it.

Sucking at math is like sucking at cooking. I’m tired of eating shitty food because you’re too much of a dipshit to follow a recipe. Also, I’m tired of hearing people brag about how they can’t cook like it’s some kind of badge of honor. It’s like a race to the bottom with you people. I always hear people one-upping each other about how inept they are at cooking. If you don’t know how to chop up a few carrots to make a decent soup, take your life.

The latest battle in the eternal cage-match between Plato and Aristotle.

Read it.

Nigeria is an example of a country on the cusp of becoming Islamic: its population is now about 50% Muslim. As a result, it is subject to continuous low-level internecine warfare, punctuated by occasional flare-ups into massive violence, such as the Christmas Day bombings that killed dozens of people.

Yet Nigeria is not a true nation. It is not a homogeneous ethnic and cultural entity, but simply a patchwork relic of British colonialism. If it had formed naturally, it would consist of at least two states: a northern one (mostly Muslim) and a southern one (mostly non-Muslim).

The devout Muslims of northern Nigeria, as represented by the terrorist group Boko Haram (“Western education is a sin”), are now trying to create a de facto sharia state in their portion of the country. That’s what the Christmas Day bombings were about. And now the follow-up is an effort to drive the Christians out of the north and into the south.

John Hinderaker of Power Line issues a wake-up call.

I have already explained, here and elsewhere, why I think that Ron Paul is not just a fringe candidate, but a bad guy. I now want to add another point: he is not a Republican.

Hell, the Republican Party has been running semi-Republicans (and pseudo-Republicans) for President since Tom Dewey. (John McCain? Bob Dole? Ewwwww.) Some of them even won. (Elder Bush? Americans with Disabilities Act. Nixon? EPA, Family Assistance Plan.) Indeed, one could look back at Theodore Roosevelt and ask whether he was really Republican in the sense that Lincoln was. He certainly wasn’t in the sense that Taft (any of them) was.

Read it.

Perhaps no theology more grips the nation’s mainstream media — and the planning community — more than the notion of inevitable suburban decline. The Obama administration’s housing secretary, Shaun Donavan, recently claimed, “We’ve reached the limits of suburban development: People are beginning to vote with their feet and come back to the central cities.”

Yet repeating a mantra incessantly does not make it true. Indeed, any analysis of the 2010 U.S. Census would make perfectly clear that rather than heading for density, Americans are voting with their feet in the opposite direction: toward the outer sections of the metropolis and to smaller, less dense cities. During the 2000s, the Census shows, just 8.6% of the population growth in metropolitan areas with more than 1 million people took place in the core cities; the rest took place in the suburbs. That 8.6% represents a decline from the 1990s, when the figure was 15.4%.

Read it.

Just about every product or service that makes our lives better requires a mass market or it’s not economic to bother offering. Those who invent and produce for the mass market get rich. And the more these innovators better the rest of our lives, the richer they get but the less they can differentiate themselves from the masses whose wants they serve. It’s the Pages and Bransons and Zuckerbergs who have made the unequal equal: So, sure, income equality may widen, but consumption equality will become more the norm.

Read it.

Ms Hayek is currently promoting Puss in Boots, a film in which she provides the voice for a character called Kitty Softpaws.

President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that she will become a Chevalier – or Knight – of the Legion of Honour for her services to the French Republic.

Read it.

Hollywood lost a legend yesterday when it was announced that renowned sword master and Olympian Bob Anderson died at a hospital in England early on New Years’ Day.

The name may not be familiar, but his work surely is. If you’ve ever been awed by a sword fighting scene in a movie then you have Bob Anderson to thank. With a career spanning over 55 years, Anderson has contributed his skills as a swordsman, stuntman and fight coordinator to some of the best well known films in Hollywood.

Anderson’s first film work was in 1952 when he choreographed stage fights and coaching Errol Flynn on the swashbuckler film ‘The Master of Ballantrae.’ From there he went on to become one of the industry’s most sought after sword masters and has worked on several well-known movies as ‘Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back’, ‘Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi’, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, ‘The Princess Bride’, ‘The Mask of Zorro’, ‘Pirates of the Carribean: Curse of the Black Pearl’, ‘The Three Musketeers’, and ‘Highlander’ (both the series and  original movie).

Read it.

If you’re visiting Atlanta and aren’t looking to be shot in the face, swarmed by smack dealers, stopped by cops merely for being white, or set ablaze by an HIV-positive crackhead squatter, stay away from the area known as “The Bluff.”

Cue the fat-necked politicians to stroll The Bluff’s blown-out streets being photographed for campaign ads in oddly inappropriate Tor Johnson zombie poses, blaming the homeowners who fled the area rather than the residents who scared them into fleeing.

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

A question the well-funded sociologists and overpaid politicians never seem brave enough to pose is why conditions always seem to degenerate when an area becomes majority-black. It’s deemed hateful to ask why Haiti melted into putrefaction after they slaughtered all the French or why Zimbabwe went to seed when they started decapitating the white farmers. Scanning the globe, it’s hard to deny that conditions are better for blacks when they’re around whites than when they aren’t. Why is that? It’s an honest question based on honest observations. One needn’t inject “hate” into that question—or maybe one does, if one wants to avoid the question altogether. And until one can ask that question without fear of being charged with a hate crime—or at least a career-destroying thoughtcrime—there will never be answers for places such as The Bluff.

Read it.

When there aren’t any Jews or Americans handy, Muslims quite cheerfully blow each other up.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Read it.

The lecture is one of the oldest forms of education there is.

“Before printing someone would read the books to everybody who would copy them down,” says Joe Redish, a physics professor at the University of Maryland.

But lecturing has never been an effective teaching technique and now that information is everywhere, some say it’s a waste of time. Indeed, physicists have the data to prove it.

It’s time and past time to get away from the medieval education model that was as good as they could do with the available technology. We can do better now.

Mazur’s physics class is now different. Rather than lecturing, he makes his students do most of the talking.

One value of this approach is that it can be done with hundreds of students. You don’t need small classes to get students active and engaged. Mazur says the key is to get them to do the assigned reading — what he calls the “information-gathering” part of education — before they come to class.

This would appear to be similar to the ‘flip the day around’ method used by schools adopting the Khan Academy videos.

“In class, we work on trying to make sense of the information,” Mazur says. “Because if you stop to think about it, that second part is actually the hardest part. And the information transfer, especially now that we live in an information age, is the easiest part.”

Indeed. Getting information is no longer the hard part. Let’s focus on working it into people’s brains.

“It used to be just be the ‘sage on the stage,’ the source of knowledge and information,” he says. “We now know that it’s not good enough to have a source of information.”

Mazur sees himself now as the “guide on the side” – a kind of coach, working to help students understand all the knowledge and information that they have at their fingertips. Mazur says this new role is a more important one.

Read it.

Pretty sad — is there really a ‘journalist’ in the world who doesn’t know how the Crust live? This guy needs to buy a clue.

Freeberg is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Mkay, I’m gonna go ahead and say it. I just don’t get football.

Football fans seem to be driven by a constant frenzied hunger, starved out of their minds, for something I get to “enjoy” in a greater abundance than any sane man could possibly want: The frustration of holding a stake in something that is being managed by someone failing to keep your confidence. What is it with that? Are they not put in this situation in their everyday lives? Or is it one of those things that, the more you get of it, the more you want? Kind of a weird, Stockholm-syndrome masochist whip-me-beat-me-make-me-write-bad-checks thing?

I can watch football for about five minutes, and then I get bored — pretty much on a par with watching flocks of birds maneuver as they fly south for the winter. ‘Huh. That’s pretty neat. Wonder how they do that?’ And then on to something more central to my life.

Read it. And watch the video.

Utilizing a ceramic compound, the group’s optimized ProMetal 3D printer builds dissolvable scaffolds coated with a plastic binding agent that serve as a blueprint for tissue growth. The team’s already logged four long years fine tuning the process, having already achieved positive results testing on rats and rabbits, but it appears there’s still a ways to go — about 10 -12 years, according to the project’s co-author Susmita Bose — before orthopedic and dental surgeons can begin offering “printed” bone replacements.

Read it.

Renaissance fairs. White people dressing up as… white people from the 10th – 15th centuries, in celebration of the culture and traditions that were found in England during this time period.

For Black people, a renaissance fair is just another reminder that even white people 500 – 700 years ago were far more advanced and lived in safer communities then Black people in Africa do now. The so-called “Dark Ages” that preceded this boom weren’t even that dark, not compared to the darkness that has followed white flight from Detroit, Baltimore, Birmingham and other major American cities (not to mention former European colonies in Africa) and what Black people who inherit these cities/nations have been able to sustain.

Read it.

What do they know that you don’t?

Read it.

In India, the choice to live outside the faltering grid of government services is usually reserved for the rich or middle class, who can afford private housing compounds, private hospitals and private schools. But as India’s economy has expanded during the past two decades, an increasing number of India’s poor parents are now scraping together money to send their children to low-cost private schools in hopes of helping them escape poverty.

The government’s response, of course, is inevitable: Regulate the competition out of existence.

Faced with sharp criticism of the woeful state of government schools, Indian policy makers have enacted a sweeping law intended to reverse their decline. But skeptics say the litany of new requirements could also wipe out many of the private schools now educating millions of students.

“It’s impossible to fulfill all these things,” said Mohammed Anwar, who runs a chain of private schools in Hyderabad and is trying to organize a nationwide lobbying campaign to alter the requirements. Referring to the law, he said, “If you follow the Right to Education, nobody can run a school.”

All in the name of ensuring that all these privately-educated kids get the same quality education as those who go to government schools, of course. The ironic result, of course, is that it doesn’t raise the quality of the private schools, but lowers it.

We’re working through the same situation in the United States – every kid has a ‘right’ to an education, but that education is provided through government-provided schools, which generally suck. Anybody who can afford to send his kids to private schools does so, and the School Voucher movement attempts to allow even those who can’t afford private schools to do so, diverting some of the vast sum that is currently wasted on government schools.

This is astonishing, when you consider that government schools are either free or provided at less than cost through taxpayer subsidy. What does it say about the quality of a free product when people are willing to pay (and sometimes sacrifice other aspects of their life in order to afford to pay) for an alternative?

… which leads to a larger question: Throughout history, goods provided by the government always and everywhere cost more (and suck more) than those provided by private enterprise; so why are people so eager to have stuff provided by the government?

Read it.

Bloomberg News has a dispatch on the surge in intercity bus operators like Megabus.com and BoltBus. Left unexplored are two policy angles: first, how inconvenient and intrusive federally mandated airport security procedures, which don’t apply to bus travel, have helped to make buses a more attractive option than flying for some trips. And second, how the market is meeting the same need for intercity transportation that President Obama wants to address by spending $53 billion in taxpayer dollars on high speed rail. What a contrast between the efficiency of an entrepreneurial, market-driven, dynamic approach and the cost of a government-driven, central planning approach.

Compared to trains, buses are more flexible (using the existing road network, their routes and destinations can be changed ‘on the fly’), less expensive (no need for costly rail infrastructure), and safer (they don’t fall down if the engine stops), more secure (nobody highjacks a bus to Cuba or drives it into an office building). So, of course, ‘progressive’ politicians and activists are all for rail.