Freeberg is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

How t’heck did we get here? The nation’s in recession still, government is supposed to fix it, and it’s going to fix the problem by keeping people from being rich?

Welcome to the Obamanation.

My point is, since The Specialty has become so important to our country’s future in 2013 and beyond, we should identify what exactly it is. I can respect the plain fact that we are demanding something of all our elected officials regardless of their political allegiances, and this demand is sufficiently vigorous that it precludes any sort of genuine dummy ever becoming a congressman, senator or president. But still & all, at the same time I think we can admit that pure-smarts is not it. President Obama is plenty smarter than quite a few people who’ll never be president; but, there are other people smarter than He is, and they’re not ever gonna become president either. It’s plain to see there’s something remarkable about Him, in a “You’re not likely to ever meet another” kind of a way. But it isn’t any functional kind of intelligence that does that.

Read it.

This is the sort of thing you ought to be seeing in the New York Times and Washington Post.  But that was then; this is now.

Mostly Democrats (My, what a surprise!) but there are a leavening of Republicans as well — corruption is, after all, no respecter of parties.

Available here.

George Will spanks a Stanford law professor.

Karlan’s disdain for the Citizens United decision — which held that Americans do not forfeit their First Amendment rights when they choose to speak collectively through corporate entities — is muddled. She denounces “spending by outside groups” without explaining what they are outside of. Evidently she accepts the self-interested assumption of the political class — the parties and candidates — that elections are their property and independent participants are trespassers. Karlan approvingly quotes the unsubstantiated assertion of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer — itself disdainful of elected officials to whom Karlan urges vast deference — that contributions “buy candidates’ allegiance.” She seems unaware that abundant social science demonstrates that contributors respond to candidates’ behavior, not the reverse. And when darkly warning about campaign contributions from corporations’ “management,” she seems unaware that much of the corporate political spending is by nonprofit advocacy corporations — Planned Parenthood, not Microsoft.

It is disappointing when a professor at one of the top law schools in the country is so ignorant and confused.

She concludes: “For if the justices disdain us, how ought we to respond?” Her pronoun radiates democratic sentimentality — “us” conflates the citizenry and Congress. Today, just 18 percent of the citizenry approves of Congress’s performance. What becomes of Karlan’s argument when the conservative justices’ distrust of Congress, for which she disdains them as anti-democratic, is exceeded by the public’s distrust of Congress?

Like most progressives, she has a Maoist view of democracy — democracy is only truly democracy when it agrees with the views of the Crust.

Read it.

The bounties were set to “inspire and encourage our Muslim nation for jihad,” the statement said.

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.

Read it.

Blue Boar inn rises again in model and digital form, recreated from detailed drawings found in Leicester family’s archives

Read it.

In the town that launched the War on Poverty 48 years ago, the poor are getting poorer despite the government’s help. And the rich are getting richer because of it.

The top 5 percent of households in Washington, D.C., made more than $500,000 on average last year, while the bottom 20 percent earned less than $9,500 – a ratio of 54 to 1.

That’s because the Crust pay themselves first, and very well indeed. They don’t really care what happens to the poor; that’s just rhetoric to fool the Great Unwashed into keeping them in power with ‘low-information’ voting.

The federal government does redistribute wealth down to struggling Americans. But in the years since President Lyndon Johnson took aim at poverty in his first State of the Union address, there has been an increasingly strong crosscurrent: The government is redistributing wealth up, too – especially in the nation’s capital.

The beneficiaries are not the billionaire financiers and celebrities who have come to personify income inequality in the 21st century. Yet the Washington elite are just as much part of the trend, having influenced laws and decisions that alter the entire country’s distribution of income.

Government doesn’t alleviate poverty — to the extent that there is a bureaucracy dedicated to alleviating poverty, they will strive to preserve poverty in order to safeguard their own jobs and perks.

Read it.

Twenty-one tribal policemen believed to have been kidnapped by the Taliban were found shot dead in Pakistan’s troubled northwest tribal region early Sunday, government officials said.

Officials found the bodies shortly after midnight in the Jabai area of Frontier Region Peshawar after being notified by one policeman who escaped, said Naveed Akbar Khan, a top political official in the area. Another policeman was found seriously wounded, Khan said.

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

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.

Read it.

More recently, Dr. Wagdi Ghoneim — who earlier praised Allah for the death of the late Coptic Pope Shenouda, cursing him to hell and damnation on video — made another video, entitled, “A Notice and Warning to the Crusaders in Egypt,” a reference to the nation’s Copts, which he began by saying, “You are playing with fire in Egypt, I swear, the first people to be burned by the fire are you [Copts].” The video was made in the context of the Tahrir protests against Morsi: Islamic leaders, such as Hegazy and Ghoneim, seek to portray the Copts as dominant elements in those protests; according to them, no real Muslim would participate. Ghoneim even went on to say that most of the people at the protests were Copts, “and we know you hid your [wrist] crosses by lowering your sleeves.”

The heart of Ghoneim’s message was genocidal: “The day Egyptians — and I don’t even mean the Muslim Brotherhood or Salafis, regular Egyptians — feel that you are against them, you will be wiped off the face of the earth. I’m warning you now: do not play with fire!”

The reason Copts have crosses tattooed on the wrists of their children is to prevent Muslims from kidnapping them, claiming that they ‘converted’ to Islam, and raising them as Muslims; especially girl children, who tend to be kidnapped, forcibly ‘converted’, and forcibly married to Muslim men, both in Egypt and in Pakistan.

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.

Read it.

William Marotta and the recipient of his donation signed an agreement that he would have neither rights nor obligations with respect to any offspring that resulted. But the state of Kansas says that shouldn’t insulate him from paying child support for the three-year-old daughter on whose behalf the state picked up $6,000 in medical bills unpaid by the mother, who had fallen on hard times.

This is the essential problem with accepting government ‘benefits’: It provides government with a reasonable-sounding argument that doing so entitles them to regulate the behavior of the person receiving the benefit, even when the benefit and the behavior are things with which the government has no business dealing. He that pays the piper calls the tune.

If government pays for your health care, it’s entitled to regulate your activities that might affect your health, because hey, it’s picking up the tab. This includes whether and how you reproduce.

If government pays for your housing, it’s entitled to regulate where and how you live, because hey, it’s picking up the tab. This includes whether and how you reproduce.

If government pays for your food, it’s entitled to regulate what you eat, because hey, it’s picking up the tab. This includes whether and how you reproduce.

If the government pays for your travel, e.g. the roads, then it’s entitled to regulate how and when you travel,  because hey, it’s picking up the tab. Hence the oft-repeated trope ‘driving is a privilege, not a right’.

If government pays for your education, it’s entitled to regulate how and when you go to school, and what you learn there, because hey, it’s picking up the tab.

It’s all part of the same scheme. To the extent that the government can do something for you, it’s entitled to do something to you.

Óró se do Bheatha ‘Bhaile

Athbhliain faoi mhaise dhaoibh.

P.J. O’Rourke.

Thank you for not being Jimmy Carter.

Hear, hear.

You sent a message to America in your re-election campaign. Therefore you sent a message to the world. The message is that we live in a zero-sum universe.

There is a fixed amount of good things. Life is a pizza. If some people have too many slices, other people have to eat the pizza box. You had no answer to Mitt Romney’s argument for more pizza parlors baking more pizzas. The solution to our problems, you said, is redistribution of the pizzas we’ve got—with low-cost, government-subsidized pepperoni somehow materializing as the result of higher taxes on pizza-parlor owners.

In this zero-sum universe there is only so much happiness. The idea is that if we wipe the smile off the faces of people with prosperous businesses and successful careers, that will make the rest of us grin.

There is only so much money. The people who have money are hogging it. The way for the rest of us to get money is to turn the hogs into bacon.

Steve Sailer continues spelunking through the Crust.

 Continuing to consider the Sixties … let’s take a look at the Sixties through the lens of class, using the long battle in the 1960s over Mt. San Gorgonio in Southern California, which was a harbinger of the coming class wars between the educated elite, the prosperous upper middle class, and, mostly as bystanders, the masses.

Read it.

Our Israeli correspondent MC offers some speculation about the first wave of Islamic invasion in the Near East, North Africa, and Europe. He notes its relevance to what is unfolding now throughout the Western world during this, the Third Wave of the Great Jihad.

Steve Sailer looks at the daily lives of female Crustians who, against their innate inclinations, decide to reproduce.

A reader commends to me the discussion site UrbanBaby.com for the displaying the id of upper crust white new mothers and mothers-to-be as they confront realities associated with reproduction, causing them to think inappropriate thoughts.

Which devolves into

 Anyway, I’ve always wanted to turn this discussion around and discuss how non-criminal black males signal to white people on the street that they aren’t violent. A lot of white people would probably like to stereotype more accurately, but our society makes almost zero effort to educate well-intentioned whites in how to do it.

A useful skill. And the bottom line is

 On the whole, it’s good for Mexicans that white people don’t find them cool.

And you can’t say any fairer than that.

Read it.

Remember when the media used to cover the war in Afghanistan almost daily? Back then it worked to the media’s advantage to report those stories because the president was a Republican. In the age of Obama, this war has become a footnote.

Read it.

Local official SS Meenakshi Sundaram said some 700 tea garden workers surrounded the manager’s bungalow on Wednesday evening and set it on fire. Two vehicles belonging to the manager were also torched.

The charred bodies of Mridul Kumar Bhattacharyya and his wife, Rita, were later recovered from the debris, Mr Sundaram said.

I guess the SIEU still has a way to go.

Read it.

If germs hung a recruiting sign for their hosts, it would probably be a version of the World War I poster of Uncle Sam pointing: We want YOU to help us reproduce. All hosts were equally eligible for service, infectious-disease researchers thought. Assuming the recruits weren’t immune due to a prior infection or vaccination, anyone should have roughly the same potential to spread a disease’s pathogens. But then came severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

This pandemic started as just another strange pneumonia from southern China, but in 2003 it turned into a global outbreak that infected 8,098 people and killed 774. Key to the disease’s spread, researchers found, was a small but crucial portion of the population that became known as “superspreaders,” people who transmitted the infection to a much greater than expected number of new hosts. The more scientists learn about superspreaders, the more they are beginning to realize that this tiny segment of the population is the driving force behind the emergence and spread of infectious diseases.

Read it.

Proving that there are idiots even in Texas.

Read it.

Hugh White, a professor at Australian National University and a former Australian defense official, believes this is the latest sign the two countries are heading to war.

And the U.S. will be dragged in.

Read it.

It’s extremely hard to lose a government job, even when your poor performance results in the deaths of other Americans under your responsibility. Despite claims that heads were rolling after a report identified egregious security lapses in Benghazi, it appears the individuals responsible are merely being reassigned to new jobs.

The Crust takes care of its own. As John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, always says: ‘GET A GOVERNMENT JOB!’

Read it.

A week after the Newtown massacre, The Journal News published an interactive Google Map with the names and addresses of gun permit owners in select New York cities. The bold move has escalated into a transparency arms race, after a Connecticut lawyer posted the phone number and addresses of the Journal‘s staff, including a Google Maps satellite Image of the Publisher’s home. “I don’t know whether the Journal’s publisher Janet Hasson is a permit holder herself, but here’s how to find her to ask,” read Christopher Fountain’s blog post. The double irony here is that open data was heralded as a tool of enlightened civic dialog, and has been co-opted for fierce partisanship, bordering on public endangerment.

Hm. What’s the appropriate cliché here? Sauce for the goose? The biter bit? Turn about is fair play? Two can play at that game? Take that you jive-ass bitch? It’s hard to choose….

Read it.

Washington State has found a way to make up for revenue lost from owners of electric cars: everyone who took advantage of the thousands of dollars in federal and state incentives to purchase a gas-free vehicle will now be charged a $100 annual fee.

The new tax will take effect February 1, 2013; lawmakers claim the electric car owners are avoiding paying the taxes for roadway usage because such taxes are included in the price of gasoline. The state of Washington includes a 37.5 cents per gallon tax on gasoline, the state’s largest source of transportation dollars.

Road and highway improvements are primarily funded through taxes at the pump, and Washington State lawmakers are demanding electric car owners compensate the state for the loss in tax revenue. The $100 “fee” will be required to be paid upon annual vehicle registration renewal. This tax will be in addition to the standard vehicle registration fees already charged.

‘Save the planet! Pay the government!’

Suuuuuccccckkkkkeeeeerrrrrsssss….

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds reminds us that the world is changing.

‘Nobody ever got shot or knocked up in an online school.” That’s the comment offered by a friend when my daughter — in search of more AP classes than her public school offered, and anxious to graduate early — decided to switch to an online high school.

An excellent point. A reminder that the sort of ‘socialization’ that goes on in schools is mostly turning kids into little socialists.

But the larger question of whether it makes sense to warehouse a bunch of kids together, sorted by age, remains.

Sure. Get all the dysfunctionality concentrated in one place. Nobody ever got bullied or had his lunch money stolen plowing a furrow or tending a loom.

Putting kids together and sorting by age also created that dysfunctional creature, the “teenager.” Once, teen-agers weren’t so much a demographic as adults-in-training. They worked, did farm chores, watched children and generally functioned in the real world. They got status and recognition for doing these things well, and they got shame and disapproval for doing them badly. But once they were segregated by age in public schools, teens looked to their peers for status and recognition instead of to society at large.

With results as you see them.

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds with some inconvenient truth.

 According to the CNN timeline for the Sandy Hook tragedy, “Police and other first responders arrived on scene about 20 minutes after the first calls.” Twenty minutes. Five minutes is forever when violence is underway, but 20 minutes — a third of an hour — means that the “first responders” aren’t likely to do much more than clean up the mess.

‘When seconds count, police respond in minutes.’ This is the great pothole that rips the oil pan out of all the left-wing rhetoric about only police ought to have guns.

Then there are our homes. If police took twenty minutes to respond at a school, how likely are they to get to your house in time? For those of us without “security teams,” the answer isn’t reassuring.

Indeed. The question that nobody in the ‘lamestream’ media is willing to ask, much less answer.

 A 20-year-old lunatic stole some guns and killed people. Who’s to blame? According to a lot of our supposedly rational and tolerant opinion leaders, it’s . . . the NRA, a civil-rights organization whose only crime was to oppose laws banning guns. (Ironically, it wasn’t even successful in Connecticut, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation.)

It doesn’t really matter who’s really to blame — the hand-wringers will round up the Usual Suspects.

The hatred was intense. One Rhode Island professor issued a call — later deleted — for NRA head Wayne LaPierre’s “head on a stick.” People like author Joyce Carol Oates and actress Marg Helgenberger wished for NRA members to be shot. So did Texas Democratic Party official John Cobarruvias, who also called the NRA a “terrorist organization,” and Texas Republican congressman Louis Gohmert a “terror baby.”

Left-wingers are the biggest and baddest h8ters in the country. ‘End the hate — shoot a liberal.’

Read it.

Chicago is one of the most heavily gun controlled cities in the nation. The state of Illinois has an all-out ban on concealed weapons. All firearms in the city of Chicago are registered. The permit must to purchase must be renewed every three years at a cost of $100. Chicago has an assault weapons ban and a ban on magazines that carry 10 rounds. In November, shootings jumped 49 percent over the prior year. Nonetheless, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is calling for even more gun control.

1970: Four white college kids dead in Ohio — a nation weeps.

2012: Seven (probably nonwhite) people dead in Chicago on Christmas — a nation yawns.

How ‘progressive’.

Read it.

Every morning five-year-old Tristan starts his school day by reading in bed with his mother. He especially likes Enid Blyton. And even though he often doesn’t bother to get out of his pyjamas in time for his first class of the day, at the age of five he has a reading age of between seven and eight. He is also ahead of his peers in a variety of subjects—all, his mother reckons, thanks to home schooling.

Read it.

While liberals on Twitter pointed at the shooting of four firefighters in upstate New York as evidence that more gun control is necessary, NBC News reports that the gunman, one William Spengler, was already banned from owning guns.

Stopped him cold, didn’t they? My, those gun control laws really work, don’t they?

Read it.

Termites collect particles of precious metals such as gold when they are burrowing and then stockpile them in their mounds, often indicating a larger deposit underneath.

A study published in PLoS One and Chemistry: Exploration, Environment, Analysis found that termite mounds in West Australian goldfields contained high concentrations of gold. This means that the insects can be used to help humans find gold and other mineral deposits.

Read it.

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

Ross Douthat lays down some inconvenient truth.

The leading gun control chorister was Michael Bloomberg, and this was fitting, because on a range of issues New York’s mayor has become the de facto spokesman for the self-consciously centrist liberalism of the Acela Corridor elite. Like so many members of that class, Bloomberg combines immense talent with immense provincialism: his view of American politics is basically the famous New Yorker cover showing Manhattan’s West Side overshadowing the world, and his bedrock assumption is that the liberal paternalism with which New York is governed can and should be a model for the nation as a whole.

And, in a town that has had the Sullivan Act, used as a model for ‘gun control’ laws throughout the nation, needs to walk around with 24/7 armed guards. By their fruits ye shall know them. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Read it.

Shortly after the ink was dry on the state’s new “Right to Work” law, Michigan Governor  Rick Snyder reports that state economic development officials are hearing from manufacturers interested in moving to area.

They’d still be better off in Texas than a losertopia like Michigan.

Read it.

The race for the South Carolina House seat vacated by Rep. Tim Scott, who was appointed to the Senate seat left open by Jim DeMint, is going to be mighty interesting.

Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who left the governorship in 2009 after revelations of his extramarital affair came to light, says he’s going to make a run—and so is his ex-wife.

Perhaps we’ll see whether character matters in South Carolina.

Read it.

If ‘gun control’ worked, of course, they wouldn’t need such protection.

 Both Bloomberg and Cuomo come from the jurisdiction where major gun control legislation was established by New York State Democratic Senator Timothy “Big Tim” Sullivan. Sullivan became known as a Tammany Hall crook intent on protecting his mobsters from prosecution and disarming innocent civilians in New York State.

The Sullivan Act was passed in 1911 after a murder suicide shooting in Gramercy Park. The law mandated that New York residents must have police issued licenses for concealed handguns, otherwise it would be considered a felony.

…

Thousands of gun control laws later, politicians like Mayor Bloomberg walk the streets of New York with armed security.

The mayor of Dallas, for contrast, has no police protection — nor needs it.

Freeberg once again brings up an important question. (He does that a lot.)

As I’ve observed before about liberalism: The irony of it is, they want to make an egalitarian world, one in which every cog is in place and spinning smoothly, producing effects that are equally beneficial for everybody concerned, in which everybody has a voice. But on the way to that plane of perfection, they are curiously obsessed, at the perceptible expense of the attention they can pay to all other things, with figuring out who should not have a say in how it all works. Show me ten pages written by liberals and I can show you eight or more pages that are nothing more than “so-and-so needs to be shown the door so us smarty-pants types can finish drawing up our plans.” For egalitarians, they are curiously captivated with the idea of the few unilaterally dictating the tastes and obligations of the many.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the left is that anyone who is not of the left is automatically an enemy, not just wrong but malevolent and malignant. ‘We know we’re right, because we’re the smartest people in the room; you’re either too stupid to be of any account or you know we’re right, too, and are therefore evil to oppose us.’

Out of all the destructive statements we are somehow obliged to avoid viewing in any way as destructive statements, one of my favorites has long been: “These rules are put into effect in order to foster/create a work environment that is safe and non-threatening to everyone…it is also important to keep in mind that in evaluating a gesture or statement as potential sexual harassment, the intent of the person making the gesture is entirely irrelevant, the perception of the offended person decides everything.” Holy shit. Perhaps there is some other written statement, equally concise, that would be more effective in making the work environment threatening. But I honestly cannot think of what that might be. And the double-speak involved in here is something that could only be produced by lawyers looking for ways to produce new revenue. It completely blows my mind, and it’s not just me, all men can see what’s wrong with this, along with not too few common-sense women as well. And yet, the ritual endures…because, and only because, some among us toil under an obligation to avoid acknowledging, let alone defending ourselves from, enemies.

Any environment in which one must always be on guard that something one says or does might be ‘suspicious’ under some standard that is unknowable in advance is functionally indistinguishable from living in a police state. America is rapidly approaching that condition.

Read it.

The spraying campaigns that ended U.S. epidemics of malaria and dengue in the 1940s turned out to be only a temporary solution. National eradication programs petered out in 1972, and the main dengue vector, Aedes aegypti, quickly returned; it is now in 23 states and ranges as far north as New York City.

Thank you, Rachel Carson.

Read it.

Because God forbid that kids who have seen their classmates and teachers gunned down by an armed psychopath should be allowed the opportunity to practice dealing with armed psychopaths and maybe learn something that will keep them alive the next time.

Steve Sailer must have a lot of fun.

What really works, I imagine, is for prep schools that have a long and deep relationship with elite colleges to make confidential assessments: “The faculty here at Groton is in near unanimous agreement that this applicant adds more to classroom discussions than any Groton student since Bill Smith four years ago, whom you will have noticed just became a Rhodes Scholar. As you know, we value our relationship with Harvard’s admissions’ committee over all others, so we would not steer you wrong when we call your attention to this applicant’s intangibles.” That kind of thing coming from a top 100 prep school would probably swing some weight, while recommendations from teachers and staff at non-elite high schools probably don’t get taken too seriously because of small sample sizes.

…

But, in the long run, Harvard will get away with lots of stuff that FDNY wouldn’t dream of trying, because it’s Harvard.

Jehu looks at food and its discontents.

It’s been my observation that the least annoying variety of vegetarians are the sort that were raised in a bona fide culture that is vegetarian.  Most of the others, especially the vegans, seem to be almost all SWPLs with degrees that don’t pay much who are desperately trying to distinguish themselves from the hated proles.

Ain’t that the truth.

Ann Althouse blows the whistle.

“Santa is a role model, and kids don’t want to have a role model that’s fat.”

Kids don’t want? Has any kid ever complained about Santa being fat? But various adults are keen on controlling the messages that reach kids, and in this light, Santa needs to be thoroughly examined for inappropriate messages.

Read it.

A convicted killer who got caught because he’d tattooed a graphic mural of the murder scene on his chest raked in more than $30,000 in unemployment benefits while he sat in the Los Angeles County jail system, a sheriff’s spokesman said.

Anthony Garcia, 26, had family and friends cashing his $1,600-per-month checks while he served time, said Capt. Mike Parker, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. His accomplices would then deposit a portion of the money into Garcia’s jail account. They also shared the cash with Garcia’s fellow incarcerated gang members.

No wonder people are moving to Texas.

Read it.

Nothing has been more central to America’s self-confidence than the faith that robust economic growth will continue forever. Between 1891 and 2007, the nation achieved a robust 2% annual growth rate of output per person. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests to me that future economic growth will achieve at best half that historic rate. The old rate allowed the American standard of living to double every 35 years; for most people in the future that doubling may take a century or more.

A find dose of pessimism to start your Christmas season off right.

Read it.

 In the “sure wish we had a video” category, aptly-monikered defense contractor Rheinmetall has run a highly successful test of its 50kW high-energy laser weapon. It works by hunting down incoming targets using a so-called Skyguard radar system, then locking in with an optical scanner before firing multiple, superimposed beams for extra energy. During the Swiss trials, the German-made HEL cannon managed to cut through a 15mm steel girder from over 3,200 feet away and knock down several drones diving at over 110 mph. Most impressively, the laser succeeded in dipatching an 82mm steel projectile in flight, showing the viability of beam-based weapons against potential mortar attacks. Rheinmetall has quintupled the power in just the last year, and plans to ramp up the juice to 60kW in 2013 trials, saying “nothing stands in the way” of a future 100kW system. Of course if that doesn’t work out, it could always start up a death metal band.

Read it.

The bad news is that our repopulation rate is going down — not as bad as the Japanese or Europeans, but still not good. The good news is that the boom is in red states and the bust is in blue states, so it bids fair to be a self-correcting problem.

Read it.

The correct answer is “Maybe,” or, more specifically, “Maybe, but probably not.” The specific model of the Bushmaster rifle has not been publicly disclosed, and without knowing that we cannot tell whether it is an assault weapon as defined in the defunct federal law. (The phrase “assault weapon” has no meaning apart from the federal law; it was invented by politicians for political reasons.) We can guess that it probably isn’t, since Connecticut already bans the sale of “assault weapons,” and there is no indication that Nancy Lanza bought or owned her guns illegally.

They can’t call it an ‘assault rifle’ because ‘assault rifles’ are fully-automatic weapons, not semi-automatic such as the ones they want to ban. (The term ‘assault rifle’ was coined by Hitler because he thought it sounded scary — which it does, but adding ‘assault’ to ‘rifle’ has no more objective significance than adding ‘king’ to ‘size’.) It’s just another tendentious propaganda term, like ‘price gouging’ or ‘black market’, used by activists to cause anxiety in the intellectually challenged.

Russ Roberts takes a look at What Everybody Knows.

When I was younger, everyone knew that the New Deal had saved the US economy from the ravages of the Great Depression. Everyone knew that Keynes was right–look what had happened when Roosevelt implemented his ideas–the Great Depression ended! Eventually, everyone knew that story was false. The New Deal wasn’t that big and the Great Depression didn’t really end when the New Deal was implemented.

Now everyone knows that World War II ended the Great Depression. Of course, private consumption fell during WWII and the vaunted Keynesian multiplier seemed to only work for the defense industry. Someday, perhaps, people will understand that when a war takes over most of the industrial sector, you don’t get much stimulus. And it’s not hard to reduce unemployment when you force a huge chunk of the male working-age population into the army.

When the war ended, all the Keynesians predicted disaster and a horrible depression because of the cuts in government spending and men coming home from Europe and the Pacific. Well, when that didn’t happen, people should have known that there isn’t a simple relationship between government spending and prosperity. But somehow, people didn’t learn that lesson. And everyone forgot about it. (If you’re interested in how people maintained a belief in a theory that had been entirely discredited by events, you can read my earlier observations, here.)

How does it come to pass that everyone comes to know something that isn’t true? A simple answer is that if enough people treat it as true and those people have some credibility, then most people will assume it is true.

Read it.

Are government employees overpaid? A six-part Bloomberg report answers that question with a resounding “Yes.” It also singles out one state as the biggest spender by far: California. This isn’t a case of a handful of isolated incidents. The team of Bloomberg reporters found a pattern of fiscal irresponsibility characterized by:

• Lack of control in overtime pay and unused vacation time payouts;

• Lack of coordination among state agencies which in one instance launched a costly salary bidding war for qualified personnel; and

• Compensation for pension fund managers that bears little relation to performance.

Unions are, by their nature, criminal organizations — the only tool in their toolbox is extortion. ‘Nice business you got here. Pity if something happened to it.’

Combine that with the natural tendency of government workers to squeeze the maximum amount of money out of the minimum amount of work (which miminum is often zer0), this result comes as no surprise.

Read it.

Los Angeles County Assessor John Noguez has been in jail since mid-October because a campaign fundraiser allegedly bribed him to lower property taxes for his individual clients, but the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday decided they will not remove him from office and continue paying his $197,000 annual salary, which has already increased by $5,000 since July due to a cost-of-living adjustment.

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

According to the Times, “elected officials in California typically can’t be removed from office unless they are convicted of a job-related crime or voted out in a recall.” And Los County officials were reluctant on Tuesday to invoke a rarely used “provision that would have allowed them to remove Noguez for failing to perform his duties for three consecutive months.”

As Jerry Pournelle never tires of saying, the function of government is to hire and pay government workers; in blue states, criminality is no bar to government employment.

Read it.

 What everyone must understand is that American politics doesn’t work the way you’d think it would. Most people presume that government officials would never willfully withhold penicillin from men with syphilis just to see what would happen if the disease went untreated. It seems unlikely that officers would coerce enlisted men into exposing themselves to debilitating nerve gas. Few expected that President Obama would preside over the persecution of an NSA whistle-blower, or presume the guilt of all military-aged males killed by U.S. drone strikes. But it all happened.

It’s not selling out if you get nothing in return….

“Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.”