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Note that this study only looked at tax return data — so any income that didn’t make it onto the tax returns was effectively invisible.

The research showed that millionaires not only were unmoved, so to speak, by their taxes being raised, “the highest-income Californians were less likely to leave the state after the millionaire tax was passed,” wrote Charles Varner and Cristobal Young in their report.

In fact, the richer the Californian, the more likely he or she was to stay, the study found. Nor did the data suggest that lowering taxes lured millionaires to the state.

Which merely goes to prove my theory that a lot of rich people don’t mind a high tax rate (note that I didn’t say ‘paying high taxes’, which is a different thing entirely) because it hits the almost-rich even harder, and tends to increase effective income inequality rather than reduce it. California is like New York City, a very pleasant place for those who don’t have to count their change.

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The horror! The horror!

(Three words: Off. Site. Backup.)

No doubt PETA will want an appropriate memorial raised, at taxpayer expense.

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Researchers from the Korean Institute of Science and Technology’s Center for Intelligent Robotics (CIR) have been working on a robot named CIROS to help around the house. Earlier versions were fairly life-like but this third-generation model, able to cut cucumbers and pour salad dressing, is positively Julia-Child-like.

I got yer Iron Chef, right here….

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On Tuesday, Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz warned international voting monitors they would be arrested if they showed up to monitor polling locations in Iowa on Election Day.

“My office met with two delegation representatives last week to discuss Iowa’s election process, and it was explained to them that they are not permitted at the polls,” Schultz said in a statement released Tuesday. “Iowa law is very specific about who is permitted at polling places, and there is no exception for members of this group.”

Two data points — looks like a trend.

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 The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that 3 of every 4 states that have enacted a ban on texting while driving have seen crashes actually go up rather than down.

It’s hard to pin down exactly why this is the case, but experts believe it is a result of people trying to avoid getting caught in states with stiff penalties. Folks trying to keep their phones out of view will often hold the phone much lower, below the wheel perhaps, in order to keep it out of view. That means the driver’s eyes are looking down and away from the road.

Heh.

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 Millions of pounds given as aid to fund development work in Uganda has reportedly been siphoned off into the private bank accounts of aides to the country’s prime minister.

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

Gee, sounds like Detroit. Or maybe Chicago. Wonder what the connection might be.

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Experimental concrete that patches up cracks by itself is to undergo outdoor testing.

The concrete contains limestone-producing bacteria, which are activated by corrosive rainwater working its way into the structure.

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Really, why do people continue to put up with this bullshit?

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But only in New York City, so it’s doubtful that anyone will notice. Most of them vote Democrat anyway.

Arnold Kling, a Real Economist, continues pointing out inconvenient truths.

If you own your home, then a lot of your wealth is tied in with the quality of your neighborhood. In theory, this should motivate you to vote more carefully in local elections. On the other hand, if you are a renter, and the neighborhood goes downhill, you will simply leave.

Collectivists prefer to trap households within specific government service areas. Their thinking is that with the “exit” option foreclosed, households will be forced to exercise their “voice” option, to everyone’s benefit. This is an argument against private schools. It goes back at least as far as A.O. Hirschman’s classic book, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.

In my view, the “exit” option works much better than the “voice” option. If a local grocery store does not carry the produce I prefer, the best solution is for me to go to a competing grocer. I feel the same way about schools and local governments. Compared with choosing a competing supplier, it strikes me that writing complaint letters and participating in elections is a feeble way to try to bring about change.

Robert Kling, a Real Economist, is not optimistic.

The loss of key transportation infrastructure raises the cost of imports (food, construction materials, etc.), even as exports (financial services) go down. This drives down equilibrium real wages in many secondary industries (food service, for example), but the adjustment process is not at all smooth. Many small businesses fail and many jobs are lost.

In order to remain ongoing concerns, many financial services firms will “temporarily” relocate to suburban offices and to virtual offices. These “temporary” adaptations will become so well entrenched that many of these businesses will not return to Manhattan.

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Ms. Adler owns Selective Search Inc., a high-end matchmaking service in Chicago. With 28 offices across the nation, the firm pledges to find the ideal mate for clients paying fees that start at $20,000. Not in four presidential elections has Selective Search seen so much love lost over politics.

In this neck-and-neck, ideologically fraught presidential election season, politically active singles won’t cross party lines. The result is a dating desert populated by reds and blues who refuse to make purple.

Pretty stupid. I was married to a Democrat for thirteen years — still would be, if she hadn’t died — with never an unkind word. I can see not wanting to date stupid people, which would eliminate about 90% of those on the Left, but there’s enough windage in that to make having an explicit criterion silly.

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Guess the system works. Sort of.

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As it so happens, I’ve written on this issue before. So let me lazily quote myself rather than come up with something new. Specifically, I’m pulling from a piece I wrote for the Las Vegas Review-Journal after Hurricane Katrina.

But government officials really did prevent experienced private relief organizations and convoys of supplies from reaching people in need in the wake of Katrina. Police and bus drivers really did abandon their posts. And private companies really were ready to help.

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An Australian pilot and crew were held hostage at Shanghai airport for more than six hours by a mob of angry passengers after their flight was diverted due to bad weather.

Fly the friendly skies….

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Drug bosses in Rio de Janeiro have issued a ‘death order’ against a sniffer dog named Boss, according to reports.

It’s a dogs life.

Todd Zywiki takes on Neil Barofsky, naive bureaucrat.

Yet throughout his tome, Barofsky repeatedly remains shocked to find politics at the heart of the TARP process.  Even at the end he seems to believe that such programs can and should be insulated from political pressure—all that is necessary is to put people like him in charge and allow them to do what is right.  But, of course, this dream of eliminating politics from government decision-making and the allure of putting unaccountable do-gooders in charge of the government are the same warmed-over naive platitudes that are so responsible for the soaring growth of government and special-interest rent-seeking since the Progressive Era first foisted the model on America at the beginning of the twentieth-century: appoint more wise and incorruptible people like me and everything will be fine.  If only it were so easy.

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As Schumpeter pointed out in 1942, a university education makes it psychologically much harder to consider manual trades, even if employment opportunities are greater there.  It’s psychological as well as the material expense involved, particularly these days.  I’d add another, as well, though: it’s not simply the college experience and the expectations it creates – it’s also the way in which the system pushes students to prepare to compete for college while still back in high school, with fewer students of the upper middle class, especially, working the jobs that they used to work, in fast food or retail or other things.  The kind of work in high school that was ordinary and normal even for very smart, college and beyond-bound students, coming from the middle and even upper middle classes, is both less available and  less respected – disrespected, even – by parents, by the college entrance system, by the students themselves.  So much for the intrinsic dignity of labor.

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For months, an Islamist regime has been terrorizing northern Mali. Hundreds of thousands have already fled the region, and those who have stayed behind are experiencing new forms of cruelty with each passing day. A SPIEGEL reporter documents a two-week journey through a region Europe fears will become the next Somalia.

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?

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

Of course, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

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In Newton County, Georgia, 8-year-old Andrew Berry found he’d accidentally brought an unloaded BB gun to school in his backpack. So he immediately told his third-grade teacher. Bad move. The teacher told the principal, who suspended Berry for 10 days and filed a police report.

Well, at least that teaches the kid to keep his mouth shut and not talk to grownups.

How educational is that?

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Just in case you were feeling cheerful about something.

Ross Douthat examines the creepy Obama regime.

 To today’s Obama supporters, these forays — like the campaign’s broader “war on women” framing, and its recent attempts to make the election a referendum on abortion in cases of rape — just emphasize that the president is on the side of female empowerment, sexual, professional and otherwise.

But given the way Obama’s once-enormous edge among female voters has shrunk in many polls, tomorrow’s feminists may look back on his campaign’s pitch to women and see a different theme emerge: a weirdly paternalistic form of social liberalism, in which women are forever single girls and the president is their father, lover, fiancé and paladin all rolled into one. (Our future dissertation author may note with bemusement, for instance, that Dunham’s ad mirrors a similar advertisement cut for … Vladimir Putin.)

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Moscow police have discovered a brothel on the premises of a monastery whose abbot is thought to be President Vladimir Putin’s spiritual adviser.

That sounds exactly like the sort of ‘spiritual adviser’ that a former KGB apparatchik would have.

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I have one suggestion for the Obama campaign and supporters thereof:

Moratorium on the creepy campaign ads with choirs of children singing about how much of a savior President Obama is.

Maybe it’s a Halloween thing, I don’t know.

‘To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.’ — Conan the Barbarian

‘To sit in a comfy chair with a good book, a mug of hot cocoa, and a cat purring in your lap.’ — Tim of Angle

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Thanks to federal incentives, it was revealed recently, New York’s education department at one point had forty school lunch specialists compared with one specialist in science education. The lunches kept getting worse, too, or so I observed as a New York public school parent. Now they’re moving on to federally funded school breakfast, weekend, and summer feeding. We can’t all afford to escape these dismal mandates by fleeing to private school, but as Baylen has pointed out, most of us can afford to pack bag and box lunches. Policy recommendation? Get ready to fight the inevitable attempts to restrict food sent from home.

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Chicago experienced more waves of violence on Saturday night and Sunday morning as one person was killed and six more were wounded by gunfire in the city with perhaps the nation’s most draconian gun-control laws.

Funny how the places with the strictest ‘gun control’ laws always seem to have the worst record on gun violence. One might almost think that there was a connection between the two.

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The rapidly growing use of shale gas in the U.S. has also driven down carbon-dioxide emissions by replacing coal in the generation of electricity. U.S. carbon emissions are falling so fast they are now back to levels last seen in the 1990s. So the two technologies most reliably and stridently opposed by the environmental movement—genetic modification and fracking—have been the two technologies that most reliably cut carbon emissions.

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Branded the Sky WiFi Smartpen, it works with proprietary physical notebooks to preserve your handwritten notes and linked audio files on a minimum of 2GB of onboard storage, and then it sends them directly to your Evernote account via WiFi — from where you can access them on pretty much any PC, tablet or smartphone. If you’re wondering a how the pen selects the right network and enters a password, then it’s actually pretty straightforward: Livescribe’s new stationery is printed with connection buttons that, in conjunction with the OLED display on the pen itself, guide you through the procedure in a few seconds. The latest notebooks also have buttons for sending your captured thoughts to Google Drive, Dropbox and Facebook, although those services won’t be activated until early next year.

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Attendees at a Racine, Wisc., Tea Party rally Saturday were met with a parking lots full of nails deliberately placed there early in the morning before the event, which I attended.

This incident adds to a week where a gay Republican campaign worker was brutally beaten and, in a separate incident, a son of a local state senator was hospitalized after defending his Romney sign after two people attempted to remove it from his yard.

I’m sure George W Bush was behind it all.

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In August, the left found it amusing to speculate about Divine judgment when Hurricane Isaac seemed to be approaching Tampa, FL as the Republican National Convention began.

Even when Isaac veered west and followed a similar path to that taken by Hurricane Gustav in 2008–which also coincided with the Republican convention, in St. Paul, MN–and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, some on the left celebrated the GOP’s misfortune.

As Hurricane Sandy bears down on heavily Democratic mid-Atlantic and northeast states, no one, left or right, is joking.

Well, except for me, of course. You want tasteless political jokes, I’m your boy.

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Fifteen leaders from U.S. Christian denominations—mostly Protestant, including the Lutheran, Methodist, and UCC Churches—are asking Congress to reevaluate U.S. military aid to Israel, since “military aid will only serve to sustain the status quo and Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian territories.”

These are the same church leaders who utter nary a word concerning the rampant persecution of millions of Christians from one end of the Muslim world to the other—a persecution that makes the Palestinians’ situation insignificant in comparison.

Lenin had a term for it: Useful Idiots. Modern governments are run by them.

Gene Weingarten is a man after my own heart.

As a person who is both old and grouchy, I have to fight the temptation to be a curmudgeon. So I am always looking for common ground with the young and the hip. (I like Ghostface Killah! Mostly! When his grammar isn’t really bad!)

Keeping the curmudgeon in me at bay isn’t easy, because I am increasingly annoyed by unacceptable modern incursions into what is Right and Proper, dagnabbit. I experienced this the other day when I saw a page of notes taken by my Washington Post colleague Rachel Manteuffel for a story she was writing. It resembled a page from an economics textbook.

“You don’t write in cursive,” I said.

“I was never taught cursive,” she said.

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The almost zodiac-like craft has been an ongoing project over recent years, and contains a fully automated system which the Navy calls a “Precision Engagement Module” which uses an Mk-49 mounting with a dual missile launcher manufactured by Rafael.

I suggest they call it a ‘Wetator Drone’.

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You want unrestricted immigration? Fine: China, Korea, Japan — bring ’em on. Our economy would explode.

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 The news has been full of the attacks on our embassies throughout the Muslim world, and in particular, the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others in Benghazi , Libya . However, apart from the shameful amount of disinformation willingly distributed by the Main Stream Media and the current administration, there’s a little known story of incredible bravery, heroics, and courage that should be the top story of every news agency across the fruited plain.

Know their names: Tyrone Wood. Gene Doherty. Neither will get the honors that they deserve. Memory eternal!

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You know when it’ll be clear that racism is all but dead and buried?  When so-called liberals stop accusing black conservatives of being Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas.

Steve Sailer explains it all to you.

I know which one I want….

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It’s not easy being green.

Watch the Young Pioneers of the Democrat Party sing for the Dear Leader.

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In the early days, things were clearer: you were a filthy, exsanguinated revenant, doomed to wander graveyards after dark, feeding on the blood of living humans (often children), sleeping in coffins, biting necks and hiding your face from sunlight, mirrors and God. You were a rat whisperer. One step up from a zombie. You were neither rich nor sexy. You did not sparkle.

But then the Romantics discovered you, and you went from being an underground word-of-mouth legend to a supernatural star of page, stage, screen and cereal box. The newly industrialized culture was mesmerized by you. No longer a mere monster, you ascended to metaphor.

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 Since the 1980s, in part because of “political correctness” concerns about racially insensitive speech and sexual harassment, and in part because of the dramatic expansion in the ranks of nonfaculty campus administrators, colleges have enacted stringent speech codes. These codes are sometimes well intended but, outside of the ivory tower, would violate the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech. From protests and rallies to displays of posters and flags, students have been severely constrained in their ability to demonstrate their beliefs. The speech codes are at times intended to enforce civility, but they often backfire, suppressing free expression instead of allowing for open debate of controversial issues.

We report, you decide.

The Other McCain raises a disturbing issue.

The flapping sound is chickens coming home to roost. And, funny thing about that, they’re all wearing ‘Vote Democrat’ buttons.

Robert Samuelson spanks the New York Times.

 Who creates most jobs? Hint: It’s not the government. Almost everyone seems to grasp that the private sector is the true jobs machine. But here’s a notable exception to the consensus: the editorial page of The New York Times. The other day, its lead editorial was “The Myth of Job Creation: The government does in fact create jobs, important jobs, millions of them.” In 35 years, I can’t recall ever writing a column refuting an editorial. But this one warrants special treatment because the Times’ argument is so simplistic, the subject is so important and the Times is such an influential institution.

The Voices of the Crust at the Times ignore the fact that the ‘jobs’ the government ‘creates’ are tax-eaters, not tax-payers.

What the Times omits is the money to support all these government jobs. It must come from somewhere — generally, taxes or loans (bonds, bills). But if the people whose money is taken via taxation or borrowing had kept the money, they would have spent most or all of it on something — and that spending would have boosted employment.

Job creation in the private sector is mostly a spontaneous and circular process. People buy things they need and want. Or businesses and private investors take risks by investing in new products, technologies and factories. All this spending, driven by self-interest and the profit motive, supports more jobs. In a smoothly functioning market economy, the process feeds on itself. By contrast, public-sector employment grows only when government claims some private-sector income to pay its workers. Government is not creating jobs. It’s substituting public-sector workers for private-sector workers.

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While GED holders are as smart as graduates, in terms of future outcomes (annual income, unemployment, divorce, drug use) they look exactly like dropouts.

The study made clear that “non-cognitive skills” like persistence, planning and self-control can be more important than intelligence in the long run.

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A wave of attacks that came as Muslims marked the second day of Eid al-Adha, a major festival, claimed at least 15 lives in the Baghdad area and in the northern Sunni city of Mosul, police officials said Saturday.

At least five Shiite pilgrims were killed when a roadside bomb in Taji, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of the capital, Baghdad, struck a minibus carrying them to visit Al-Askariya, or the “Golden Mosque.”

A dozen more were wounded in the blast. Police said most of those killed and injured were Iranian pilgrims.

A roadside bomb also exploded in an outdoor market in al-Mamel Shiite neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad, killing five people and wounding 13 others, police officials said.

In Mosul, about 380 kilometers north of Baghdad, five people were killed and seven more wounded in four separate attacks in different locations in and around the city, according to police officials.

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?

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

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The reputation of possibly America’s least-favorite fondlers, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), has taken yet another hit with the discovery that its shoddy security allows passengers in its PreCheck system to pick their own security status.

PreCheck allows some frequent fliers willing to pay $100 for a background check to skip some of the onerous security checks, like taking off shoes and unpacking laptops or toiletries. PreCheck customers are still subject to more intensive searches on a randomized basis, however.

Aviation blogger John Butler discovered that the barcode information used for the boarding passes of Precheck fliers wasn’t encoded, and could be read by a simple smartphone app. It contained the flier’s name, flight details, and a number, either a one or a three, with the latter confirming the passenger was cleared for lesser screening.

It would be a relatively simple job to scan the issued boarding pass, decode it, and then change the security setting if you are planning to bring something naughty aboard, or even change the name on the ticket to match a fake ID. After putting the new information into a barcode, and a couple of minutes of cut and paste, the new boarding pass would work as normal, Butler explained.