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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.

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Police officers in Seattle, Washington held their first gun buyback program in 20 years this weekend, underneath interstate 5, and soon found that private gun collectors were working the large crowd as little makeshift gun shows began dotting the parking lot and sidewalks. Some even had “cash for guns” signs prominently displayed.

Police stood in awe as gun enthusiasts and collectors waved wads of cash for the guns being held by those standing in line for the buyback program.

Lessons learned:

1. Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.
2. Once someone enters government employment, the common-sense area of the brain is removed.

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Who does a better job of serving poor and low-income Americans and students by providing free, high-speed Internet access to those who can’t afford it at home – the government or the market?

Well, there are 15,000 Wi-Fi-enabled public libraries in the country that provide free Internet access. But many public libraries are closed when people and students actually want to access the Internet, like in the evenings, on weekends and on holidays.

The WSJ points out today that McDonald’s has 12,000 Wi-Fi-equipped locations in the U.S., and Starbucks has another 7,000, and they both offer free access, even for those who don’t buy anything. Unlike public libraries, McDonald’s and Starbucks are open in the evenings, on weekends and most holidays.

In terms of addressing the “digital divide” or “Internet gap in education,” you could make a case that the profit-maximizing, private sector is doing a better job than the public sector – McDonald’s and Starbucks have more locations and longer hours than the limited-access public library system.

And you can’t get a Big Mac at the Library, should the urge strike you. In fact, they discourage people eating and drinking there.

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What goes around comes around.

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Another paper, then, called “Detecting and mapping buried buildings with Ground-Penetrating Radar at an ancient village in northwestern Argentina,” published in 2010 in the Journal of Archaeological Science, describes an archaeological survey in which ground-penetrating radar was used “in order to detect new buildings,” including a system of “complex wall distribution and a number of unknown enclosures.”

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The existence of a ‘social safety net’ means that people in the Crust, both the Upper Crust and the Lower Crust (Underclass), no longer really need to work. As automation takes more and more jobs away from ‘working families’, some of them will be fortunate enough to be sorted into the Upper Crust, but most will eventually wind up in the Lower Crust.

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In the long run, children who participate in the taxpayer-funded program do no better than similarly situated children who don’t. But even in the short-run, the benefits of participation are virtually non-existent, as a study earlier found….

Like ethanol in gasoline, once a ‘social’ program is in place, the special interest group that benefits from it typically quickly becomes politically stronger than any opposition.

When a third party (like taxpayers) is paying for something, wasteful spending is almost inevitable. Much federal education spending is wasted, like the $130,000 in stimulus money spent on a book that demonized white people and promoted racial stereotypes. Chicago has rotten schools despite high school spending, and poor-quality teachers. Yet, “Chicago teachers” had “the highest average salary of any city at $76,000 a year before benefits [worth another $30,000 a year on top of their salaries]. The average family in the city only earns $47,000 a year. Yet the teachers rejected a 16-percent salary increase over four years at a time when most families are not getting any raises or are looking for work,” and went out on strike to extract even more money from city taxpayers.

As Jerry Pournelle is fond of saying, the first function of government is to hire and pay government workers. My corollary is that the second function of government is to work toward making the entire population government workers, so as to deepen the moat around the first function.

Growing public disenchantment with dysfunctional public schools and desire for change has triggered a backlash among progressive legal scholars and academics who do not want children to be able to escape failing public schools. For example, a prominent progressive law dean and law professor, Erwin Chemerinsky, is urging the courts and lawmakers to ban private schools and homeschooling in order to force everyone to attend the public schools. In his view, this is the only way to “desegregate” the schools and achieve racial and social equality. (He admits that doing this would severely burden constitutional rights, but argues that doing so would nonetheless be justified to advance a “compelling government interest.”) UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh criticizes this proposal as dangerous and ill-founded, and argues that it is an ill omen for other constitutional freedoms, like freedom of speech and freedom of the press, that could likewise be restricted in the name of promoting equality.

Of course. That’s why ‘progressives’ are so fond of Federal laws and programs — all the better to insure that people can’t escape merely by crossing a state line, as thousands are doing every year by moving from, say, California and Michigan to, say, Texas. The Iron Curtain wasn’t built by Republicans.

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And I’d say more than half are underqualified for their jobs.

Vedder, whose study is based on 2010 Labor Department data, says the problem is the stock of college graduates in the workforce (41.7 million) in 2010 was larger than the number of jobs requiring a college degree (28.6 million).

And yet the government keeps pushing people into college — at taxpayer expense. One of the pervasive flaws in modern public policy is taxpayer-funded oversupply of politically fashionable goods, such as college graduates, ‘family’ farmers, school administrators, and (dare I say it?) government employees.

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A Robotic Fabricator would automate manufacturing and assembly processes to reduce the need for human labor, decrease manufacturing costs, and improve product quality.

Not much room for Rosie the Riveter in this scenario.

Nor for the AFL-CIO, either. Look for Democrats to load it down with so many regulations that it will be most cost-effective to hire proles instead.

Nice concept, though.

Gavin McInnes remembers Amy Winehouse.

Heroin addiction isn’t a disease, as Russell Brand so despondently put it. It’s an indulgence—like obesity, but in reverse.

Drug addicts don’t need kid gloves. They need an iron fist. I know this because I’ve watched a dozen heroin addicts die over the years, and the ones who survived always say the same thing: “I can’t believe you didn’t just punch me in the face.”

But that’s the modern world for you — overindulgence is reinvented as ‘disease’, and abnormality is the new ‘normal’.

Heart Shaped Umbrella

Nipple-Bottomed Reeboks Freak Out the Internet

The Best Electric Knife Sharpener

Frozen Fruit Soft Serve Processor

Fruit Jackets   I am not making this up.

Corn Dog Factory

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The most remarkable thing about this article is, that an article in the Washington Post admits that a fashionable government program failed.

Unfortunately, it can’t let you know the real reason it failed: The Democratic Party is the party of those who want to give you Free Stuff, and among the Free Stuff they like to give out is American residence and American citizenship — it’s one of the chief means they have of buying new voters, and has been since the 19th century. ‘Vote for us and we’ll let to stay here, and let you bring in all of your relatives’ is why Hispanics vote overwhelmingly for Democrat candidates, no matter who the Democrat candidate is.