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For more than a century, the lengthy school days of French children have been punctuated by a midweek day off, in recent decades for most children on Wednesdays, originally created for catechism studies.

But nobody does catechism any more.

The long hours and peculiar weekly rhythm have been criticized as counterproductive to learning and blamed for keeping women out of the full-time work force, as well as widening inequalities between rich and poor because of the demands they place on working parents. Yet the Wednesday break has remained a fulcrum of French family life.

God forbid that French family life should stand in the way of keeping women out of the full-time work force.

 With all that in mind, the government of President François Hollande recently issued a decree introducing a half day of school on Wednesdays for children 3 to 11 starting in September, while reducing the school day by 45 minutes the rest of the week. In a country with a broad consensus in favor of shortening a school day that typically runs from 8:30 a.m. to at least 4 p.m., and sometimes longer, Mr. Hollande’s government still did not expect the plan to be controversial. It has not worked out that way.

Note the key word ‘decree’. Government knows best, so better get with the program.

 Instead, the edict has incited a wave of protest from France’s powerful teachers unions, parents associations and city governments, which say it was produced without their consultation, is short on details and fails to address deeper concerns about the middling performance of French schoolchildren compared with their peers in other industrialized countries.

Sure sounds like a government program to me. Where’s the problem?

John Podhoretz uncovers the rocks in the SOTU speech and watches what crawls out.

Last night, Barack Obama told Congress that “The American people don’t expect government to solve every problem.”

They might not expect it, but don’t worry, he’s got a plan for every problem — and in every case, the solution is more government.

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Actually, I should think that putting the entire Other Left Coast under about 30 feet of water would be a net gain for the nation.

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And not for the better.

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The U.S. government spent about $2.2 billion last year to provide phones to low-income Americans, but a Wall Street Journal review of the program shows that a large number of those who received the phones haven’t proved they are eligible to receive them.

And why should they? It’s the Free Obama Phone!

The Lifeline program—begun in 1984 to ensure that poor people aren’t cut off from jobs, families and emergency services—is funded by charges that appear on the monthly bills of every landline and wireless-phone customer. Payouts under the program have shot up from $819 million in 2008, as more wireless carriers have persuaded regulators to let them offer the service.

Isn’t that what government is all about? Taking money from wage-earners and giving it to freeloaders?

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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This pope has left a record of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of words and it is astounding how many liberal Catholics have read none of them. For a so-called Catholic pundit to talk about the pope and his place in history without having read a single word of the more than 50 books the Holy Father has written is like someone covering the Washington Nationals and not knowing Bryce Harper’s stats.

This is why, for the next few weeks of media attention on Rome, the progressive, leaning forward Catholic left will offer the most juvenile and reactionary coverage. There are basically three requirements to writing liberals columns and books about the Catholic Church:

1) Don’t know your subject. It is especially important that liberal Catholic intellectuals not read any of Pope Benedict’s writings. His books, particularly the popular Jesus of Nazareth series, are much more accessible than the works of John Paul II, which could get bogged down in academic jargon. He has also written tens of volumes about the liturgy, theology, Church history, and his own life. And in the unfortunate event that you do read some of his work, make sure you misquote it or use deceptive ellipses — see Wills, Gary.

2) Bring the snark. “The pope, following Sarah Palin’s lead, resigns.” So tweeted Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post shortly after the news broke of Pope Benedict’s abdication. I call this the Ana Marie Coxing of journalism. In order to debase the pope, it’s necessary to drag him into your pop culture frame of reference — even if doing so results in a joke that is neither insightful nor funny. The low end of this is, of course, Andrew Sullivan, who jokes about the pope wearing a “dress” and nice shoes.

3) Bring straw men. Lots of them. Throw a party. The pope hates women and gays. He’s turned his back on the Second Vatican Council. He doesn’t understand the modern world. Crucial to this step is a firm grounding in step #1.

Equally important is the iron insistence that the western world has not moved to the left in the last 50 years. To ignore the liberal shift means that one can simply say that gay marriage, the welfare state, and sexual “freedom” are simple facts of life, and that to be against them is like standing against the tides.

Hey — why treat the Pope with any more respect than they treat the average Republican? One must maintain standards, you know, and being a Voice of the Crust is a challenging (but deeply superficial) career.

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Well, not really … they’re billionaires, and they’re giving away pots of money — but billionaires do that, and the pots they are giving away are pretty much the smallest pots in their money bins.

Even a leftist rag like Business Insider has nice things to say about rich people when they Follow the Progressive Program — because the whole Progressive Narrative is about redistribution, people who have by some unexamined but probably nefarious means accumulated more than their ‘fair share’ who have decided to get right with Obama by ‘spreading the wealth around’. Nowhere will you find any praise for how they got so rich in the first place: providing goods and services (and, oh, by the way, jobs) for people that they value and for which they are willing to fork over money.

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As Medicare whacks away at what doctors are paid and health insurers move away from paying fees for service to bundled payments, more physicians who own their own practices will start direct pay or concierge medicine in the next one to three years.

I’m surprised that it’s taking this long.

Under direct primary care, doctors contract directly with patients to provide all of their primary care needs free of insurance interference at a price generally between $50 and $60 a month per patient. It’s what the New York Times last spring called “concierge for the masses” because it was much cheaper than the historically high cost of concierge medicine some Congressional investigators found to be $5,000 to $15,000 a year or more.

I’d jump on it.

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Pity they aren’t yellow….

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Since some data is simply not available, BEA has to make assumptions about the direction of the changes that they cannot record.  For example, for the first quarter of 2011, the BEA assumed that nondurable manufacturing inventories increased, exports increased, and imports increased. When you read that exports increased this year, that is because the BEA assumed it increased – they did not actually have any data to measure it when they released the new GDP numbers.

Daniel Pipes has forgotten more about international relations than you or I will ever know.

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To me, the greatest fun lies in imagining how snazzy downtown high-speed rail stations might reshape and revive the fortunes of cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis. Opponents of mass transit point out that such cities are built around the automobile, not mass transit, and thus lack the density needed to support a high-speed rail system. Proponents tend to agree—but note that cities can change. The federal government today spends more on highways in a single year than it does on Amtrak in 40. Hypothetically, a shift in transportation funding back to rail might spur a 21st-century boom in downtown redevelopment, much as the construction of the highway system spawned the suburbs in the post-World War II era.

Yeah, and maybe by then we’ll have our flying cars.

The reason why ‘progressives’ (statists, really) love trains and hate cars is that cars go from where you are to where you want to go, whereas trains go from where the statists think you ought to be to where they think you ought to want to go. Automobiles empower individual freedom, which is why statists hate them; trains are the fair-haired children of those who like density and central planning.

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Well, I’m glad that’s settled. I’d hate to go through life not knowing for sure what killed off the dinosaurs.

At least it wasn’t Global Warming.

Freeberg understands the dialectic.

    I think progressivism holds appeal because it does the opposite of what people say about it: It sorts people into different levels and locks them in place there. This guy here at the top is supposed to decide everything, that guy there has the authority to destroy people because his judgment is completely perfect, all these other people at the bottom should just mill about waiting to be told what to do.

Funny thing is, that’s exactly how the enthused progressives are [naturally] configured. Some of them want to boss strangers around, and others want to line up for their three hots every day and just be told what to do. So the allure i[s] that you’ll be locked into the plateau that is most comfortable to you. It seems there isn’t a progressive anywhere who’s entertained the thought, even momentarily, that maybe this perfectly-run United Federation of Planets will find the “right” role for him that is different from what he’s envisioned.

Danielle Morrill points out that we have a lot more control over our lives than we think we do; we just have to exercise it.

These aren’t job titles, but roles I’ve played in the past that I no longer care to play. During YC (Summer 2012) I made a clean break from a lot of these things in order to totally focus on building Referly, and after letting those activities go for a few months I discovered something cool: I don’t want them back in my life at the same level of importance as before.

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The Washington Post reports that Jack Lew, President Obama’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, held money in an investment fund registered in the very Cayman Islands building that Obama called a notorious haven for tax abuse. The address of the fund is a building called the Ugland House. Obama singled out that building in a 2009 speech against tax haven abuse. With his characteristic subtely, the president declared, “Either this is the largest building in the world or the largest tax scam in the world.”

No surprises here. One law for the Crust, another for the enemies of the Crust; how very European. Totally consistent, when you think about it.

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The British Library, famed for holding every book published in the UK over the past hundred years, has added digital copies of some of its older manuscripts. The works were digitized as part of an ongoing project to make fragile historical documents available to the public, and include a Leonardo Da Vinci notebook, the Harley Golden Gospels, and the oldest-known copy of Beowulf. All of the manuscripts are available through the British Library’s Digitised Manuscript page, along with hundreds of other documents.

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I am not making this up.

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‘We don’t fly commercial. Only the little people fly commercial … and get felt up by the TSA.’

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I don’t really understand the prohibitionist impulse, which is probably no surprise, considering that I work for Reason, where I like to think the only forbidden word is “forbid.” But I admit that I have more than a philosophical objection. In fact, I have more grounds than most people to understand that making things illegal doesn’t make them go away. Provided that there’s demand for the subjects of a ban (and would anybody bother banning something that nobody wanted?) making things illegal creates business opportunities for those willing to work in the shadows, and despite the law. I know this, because much of the history of my family in the United States consists of providing goods and services that government officials don’t want Americans to have. So when former Rep. Patrick Kennedy and his cronies demand that the federal government enforce marijuana prohibition against the explicit wishes of the residents of Washington and Colorado, I have to wonder if my extended relations are breathing a sigh of relief. And when a gaggle of ill-informed congresscritters cook up an unlikely scheme for banning certain firearms and related accessories, I peer into the background at the press conference, looking for the familiar face of a cousin or uncle of mine suppressing a grin.

Baptists and bootleggers both want booze banned. But markets work even when you don’t want them to.

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Not that anybody will be able to tell the difference….

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So avoid the whole problem and just read the Bible in Greek.

Mencius Moldbug points and laughs.

 Poor Charles Stross.  Not that he’s the first revolutionary to discover that the revolution bus doesn’t stop where the sign said it was supposed to stop.  And not that he’ll be the last.  But still – can’t we be a little sad?  Just a little?

Charlie Stross is a damned fine writer but a knee-jerk ‘progressive’ who can’t be bothered to think it through on political questions — he’s one of the tiresome crowd who dismissed Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism without bothering to read it because the title was inconveniently incompatible with his preconceived notions — and Mencius here does a little dissection of the sort of contortions that produces. An entertaining read, if you like snark (and I do — ask anybody).

 In postwar Europe, there is a codeword for a political persuasion in which power flows upward.  The codeword is “populist.”  Needless to say, no more vile slur can pass the lips of a good Party man.  A “beige dictatorship?”  Please, man.  Don’t complain about the dish you ordered.

Indeed.

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The new New Republic, pictured to the right, makes the brave, original case that Republicans are white people.

While we wait for Sam Tanenhaus’s “historical investigation” to be made available online, a quick Wikipedia investigation of the magazine’s 15 editors throughout its century of publishing reveals that each and every one–Herbert Croly, Bruce Bliven, Henry A. Wallace, Michael Straight, Gilbert A. Harrison, Marty Peretz, Michael Kinsley, Hendrik Hertzberg, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Kelly, Charles Lane, Peter Beinart, Franklin Foer, Richard Just, and Chris Hughes–was not just white, but white and male. Hey white boy, watcha doin’ uptown?Though word on the street is that TNR is now “add[ing] women’s voices to a magazine that has long been short on them,” so hooray for progress, etc.

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Damn those Presbyterians! Oh,wait….

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Only in Japan….

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The year was 1947. World War II had come to an end, and nations across the globe were rebuilding. For Canada, that meant a return to free market capitalism after years of government-mandated freezes on wages and the price of goods and services. Looking to recover from nearly a decade of thin profit margins, companies began to raise the price on everything from vegetables to automobiles, sending inflation through the roof, and putting a crunch on everyone’s pocketbooks.

The problem, of course, was government actions that lessened the value of the ‘money’ that was ripped loose from the discipline of gold. But government never gets blamed for the problems it causes; it lets businesses who are trying to cope with those problems take the rap.

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If Superman existed to show us how high the human spirit could fly, and Batman to show us the darkness within even our most noble, Aquaman is here to show us the world that triumphs in our absence. The ocean is not ours, and no matter how great our technology, we will never master it as we have mastered land, but Aquaman has. Through this lonely ocean wanderer, we can experience a world that we can never truly command. In many ways, Aquaman was stronger than the Man of Steel and darker than the Dark Knight. He knew loneliness that the orphan and the alien exile never could.

I must confess that the travails of Aquaman never loomed large in my thought.

From Slate, of course.

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If you’re already feeling nostalgia over the recent ending of National School Choice Week, take heart – there’s always a new horror to uncover connected to the operations of our public education system. Auditors have discovered that some of California’s largest school districts are skimming money meant to pay for meals for low-income students and spending it elsewhere.

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

The state Senate report concluded that the eight California school districts examined dramatically understaffed school cafeterias and tended to serve processed foods rather than more expensive fresh foods. Consequently, they were able to hoard large sums of federal and state student meal money that they then diverted to illegal uses, the report said.

Jerry Pournelle is always worth reading.

The first and most important problem in public education is to understand what the goal is. It may be that the best way to do that is to ask why someone without children should pay for the education of other people’s children. Education is not a Constitutional right or entitlement, and even the aggressive federal courts don’t assert that.

The usual argument in favor of compulsory education is that an educated electorate is necessary to the health of a republic. A secondary one is that an educated public is a good investment since it promotes economic growth and a wealthier nation.

The available evidence from the the most recent century suggests that the accuracy of this line of reasoning is far from being as intuitively obvious as most of those parroting it seem to think.

When entitlement rights get involved in education, the educational results generally are worse, and often are far worse. Of course some will argue that it is good for the children of normal and above normal intelligence to be exposed to the sub-normal because there is something inherently good about Diversity, but there don’t seem to be any valid studies showing that you learn algebra better if your class includes someone who never will learn it.

Indeed. I never profited from being roped into the same class with stupid and sociopathic people of the same age, other than to heavily reinforce my natural inclinations toward supporting regular and rigorous subtractions from the gene pool. Exposure to ‘diversity’ merely makes most people fear and distrust all the more people who ‘aren’t like them’.

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While we pray for those murdered and everyone who might be in danger, we cannot forget that the media and its allies in the Democratic Party have set a standard when it comes to reporting on the possible political motives of mass murderers. Though they generally make things up to turn the death of innocents into a talking point against the Right, it is still the left who set this precedent.

And what do you know, Chris Dorner, the former police officer suspected of being behind the murder rampage presently unfolding in Los Angeles, has apparently left behind a manifesto addressed to America that the media are already selectively reporting on to leave out the more inconvenient portions. You see, there is no political upside for the media to reveal the politics of this suspected madman.

What is being reported as Mr. Dorner’s manifesto not only endorses Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 and vigorously defends Barack Obama and the Democrats’ current gun control push; he also savages the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre while expressing all kinds of love for some of the biggest stars in the left-wing media — by name.

Which is why it hasn’t been all over the news, as it would have been had they been able to spin him as a right-winger.

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How about that Global Warming, eh?

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(Thanks to reader RealRick for this one.)

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

“You’d be a fool not to leave California,” says Ed Botowsky of Chapwood Investments who manages the finances of several professional athletes and high income Californians.  Botowsky says some of his clients have already made the decision to flee the state to avoid the tax crunch.

Indeed.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

I especially like the Hamblin glasses.

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The central mystery, of course, is never mentioned: Why anyone would want to eat the stuff.

It is, of course from Slate ‘magazine’, the home for ‘…the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, All centuries but this, and every country but his own…’

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The headline is taken from an amusing study by two Pennsylvania State University economists who calculate the implied price in terms of presidential campaign contribution of desireable ambassadorships. The subtitle explains it all: “Political Influences on Ambassadorial Postings of the United States of America.” Interestingly, it appears that the current ambassador got the job on the cheap side (see below).

The best government money can buy.

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Two economics professors at the University of California, Davis have published a paper arguing that mixed-gender high schools are at least partially to blame for the persistent gender gap in the salaries of men and women.

In a working paper published by the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, economists Massimo Anelli and Giovanni Peri demonstrate that students who attended all-boys or all-girls high schools are considerably more likely to embrace college majors associated with high-paying jobs, such as medicine or engineering.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Most insects have no trouble moving around when the moon is bright, but darker nights can make nighttime navigation a bit more difficult. African dung beetles, however, have apparently found a workaround — the Milky Way. A recent study from researchers in Sweden and South Africa found that on moonless nights, dung beetles use the stars to help orient themselves, a rather surprising tactic for a creature that spends so much time with its nose to the ground. In fact, scientists say these findings are the first evidence of any insect having celestial navigation capabilities.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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And it’s not going to do anyone a damned bit of good, because ‘progressives’ have enough red tape at their disposal to tie up for a hundred years any attempt to get at them.

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The first products designed specifically to wipe one’s nethers were aloe-infused sheets of manila hemp dispensed from Kleenex-like boxes. They were invented in 1857 by a New York entrepreneur named Joseph Gayetty, who claimed his sheets prevented hemorrhoids. Gayetty was so proud of his therapeutic bathroom paper that he had his name printed on each sheet. But his success was limited. Americans soon grew accustomed to wiping with the Sears Roebuck catalog, and they saw no need to spend money on something that came in the mail for free.

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Tudor and Stuart histories insist that the remains contained in an urn designed by Sir Christopher Wren are those of Edward V and Richard Duke of York who were “stifled with pillows … by the order of their perfidious uncle Richard the Usurper”, as the 17th-century inscription puts it. A concerted attempt to get the urn opened was made by the Richard III Society, the group behind this week’s confirmation of Richard III’s remains, together with the BBC in 1993 and again by Channel 4 in 1995. A Home Office file shows the then dean of Westminster, the Very Rev Michael Mayne, strongly resisted both requests despite being “pressed very hard to agree” to allow the bones to be submitted to carbon dating, to match their deaths to Richard III’s reign, and DNA testing to prove their identities.

Buckingham Palace and then home secretary, Michael Howard, were consulted and both the Queen and the minister were in “full agreement” with the church authorities that matter should not be reopened. The dean took advice from the historian Lord Blake and an Oxford archaeology professor, Edward Hall, who said carbon dating of a sample from the late 15th century would only establish the accuracy of the bones within plus or minus 50 years. Richard III occupied the throne for two years between 1483 and 1485 before his death in the battle of Bosworth Field. “It could not therefore differentiate between Richard III or Henry VII – or another – being the guilty party. Nor would the C/14 technique give any clue as to the age at death of the children,” the dean said.

Jared Diamond rounds up the Usual Suspects.

 I now think of New Guineans’ hypervigilant attitude toward repeated low risks as “constructive paranoia”: a seeming paranoia that actually makes good sense. Now that I’ve adopted that attitude, it exasperates many of my American and European friends. But three of them who practice constructive paranoia themselves — a pilot of small planes, a river-raft guide and a London bobby who patrols the streets unarmed — learned the attitude, as I did, by witnessing the deaths of careless people.

Like avoiding groups of black males on the street. Just ask John Derbyshire what that advice is worth.

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[I]f your car is ever stolen, your first calls should be to every cab company in the city. You offer a $50 reward to the driver who finds it AND a $50 reward to the dispatcher on duty when the car is found. The latter is to encourage dispatchers on shift to continually remind drivers of your stolen car. Of course you should call the police too but first things first. There are a lot more cabs than cops so cabbies will find it first -and they’re more frequently going in places cops typically don’t go, like apartment and motel complex parking lots, back alleys etc. Lastly, once the car is found, a swarm of cabs will descend and surround it because cabbies, like anyone else, love excitement and want to catch bad guys.

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If you know a quotation from Shakespeare’s Richard III, chances are it is the king’s last, desperate plea to escape his fate.

But the writer’s imagination aside, the discovery of his skeleton beneath a Leicester car park – combined with historical research and weapons analysis – means we now are closer to the grisly truth.

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At-home dads aren’t trying to be perfect moms, says a recent study in the Journal of Consumer Research. Instead, they take pride in letting their children take more risks on the playground, compared with their spouses. They tend to jettison daily routines in favor of spontaneous adventures with the kids. And many use technology or DIY skills to squeeze household budgets, or find shortcuts through projects and chores, says the study, based on interviews, observation of father-child outings and an analysis of thousands of pages of at-home dads’ blogs and online commentary.

And about time, too.

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In today’s exciting episode, we learn  yet again that attempts to cancel the 20th century do not represent progress, however ‘progressive’ they may be labelled.