Read it.

Assuming, of course, that that is what you want to do.

Read it.

 Why “Rent The Chicken”?  We provide all of the supplies you need with the rental:  portable chicken coop, two egg laying hens, enough food for the length of your rental, food & water dishes as well as instructions on how to keep your chickens happy! Within two days of the arrival, your chickens will lay eggs ready to use!  These eggs have 1/3 less cholesterol, 1/4 less saturated fats, and 2 times more omega 3 fatty acids than store bought eggs.  Your Rent The Chickens should lay 8-14 eggs per week.  You will know exactly what your chickens eat!

Read it.

Read it.

In a Huffington Post op-ed penned by Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) on Labor Day, the congresswoman blasted McDonald’s CEO Donald Thompson, “one of corporate America’s most successful African Americans,” for making too much money.

Black people are supposed to be POOR and DEPENDENT ON THE GOVERNMENT! Not RICH and SUCCESSFUL! Let’s get with the program!

Read it.

A Queens teenager’s obsession with high-powered model helicopters ended in gruesome death yesterday, when one of his beloved toy whirlybirds spun out of control in a Brooklyn park and scalped him, sources said.

Roman Pirozek, 19, — a chopper aficionado who bragged about his exploits on YouTube — was piloting the small machine at Calvert Vaux Park in Gravesend at around 3:40 p.m., when something went horribly wrong, cops said.

The toy aircraft turned toward the teen as he tried to pull off an unusual stunt. It hit him at high speed with the rotors spinning into his head and taking out “good chunk,” law enforcement sources said.

Let that be a lesson to us all….

Read it.

That gives us a baseline: Syria is more important than California, but less important than Martha’s Vinyard.

Good to know.

Read it.

The drones can carry as much as 6.6 pounds and fly 330 feet in the air.

They couldn’t do that in America, of course, because of government ‘safety’ regulations.

Read it.

Oh, no, the sky is falling again. (yawn…) $10 says that the first politician to jack his/her jaw about it will be a Democrat….

Read it.

If you’re an illegal immigrant worried about being caught, help is only a mouse click away. An article from the radical website DreamActivist.org will give you a quick lesson on how to lie about your status. It’s all part of the aggressive pro-illegal immigration ‘Dreamer movement’ that is leading the fight for “comprehensive” immigration reform, with a boost from President Barack Obama and many in Congress.

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

Never has an American government been so dedicated to subverting the law.

Read it.

A man is reportedly in a coma and may be brain dead after authorities say a suspect who declared he was going to punch the first white person he saw knocked him to the ground Wednesday.

Authorities say John Babbitt, 62, who is white, was punched by 31-year-old Lashawn Marten in New York City’s Union Square.

If the races were reversed, of course, this would have HATE CRIME all over the front page of newspapers across the country.

I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now. (Except white people, of course.)

Read it.

And soon another rationalization for murdering an unborn child will be history.

Read it.

We have the technology.

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When you give out free money, crooks will find a way to funnel it into their pockets. After all it’s Somebody Else’s Money.

Read it.

Although why they would want to is anybody’s guess.

As with all high-minded impulses, the difficulty may be getting down to the details. (A similar ruling, announced with less public fanfare late last year by Spain’s Ministry of Justice, has become mired in controversy – slowed by long waits, onerous regulations like renouncing other citizenship and what Rebelo describes as “a large Muslim lobby we don’t have in Portugal.”)

Read it.

School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted — far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we have been compelling our children to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there is strong evidence (summarized in my recent book) that this is causing serious psychological damage to many of them. Moreover, the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.

…

When schools were taken over by the state and made compulsory, and directed toward secular ends, the basic structure and methods of schooling remained unchanged. Subsequent attempts at reform have failed because, though they have tinkered some with the structure, they haven’t altered the basic blueprint. The top-down, teach-and-test method, in which learning is motivated by a system of rewards and punishments rather than by curiosity or by any real, felt desire to know, is well designed for indoctrination and obedience training but not much else. It’s no wonder that many of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs and innovators either left school early (like Thomas Edison), or said they hated school and learned despite it, not because of it (like Albert Einstein).

Elliott Abrams lays out the proof that Obama is an incompetent amateur.

Read it.

The Affordable Care Act includes four significant, permanent, implicit unemployment assistance programs, plus various implicit subsidies for underemployment. Every sector of the economy, and about half of nonelderly adults, is directly affected by at least one of those provisions. This paper calculates the ACA’s impact on the average reward to working among nonelderly household heads and spouses. The law increases marginal tax rates by an average of five percentage points (of employee compensation), on top of the marginal tax rates that were already present before the it went into effect. The ACA’s addition to labor tax wedges is roughly equivalent to doubling both employer and employee payroll tax rates for half of the population.

Increase taxes will make things more affordable! Of course! Why couldn’t we see that?

Read it.

More here.

His novel with Cyril Kornbluth, Gladiator-at-Law, was the fundamental impetus for me becoming a science-fiction fan (and going to law school – well, one out of two ain’t bad).

Read it.

A group of Minnesota teachers say that discrimination is the reason their schools don’t have air conditioning.

Perhaps they didn’t understand the progressive memo on such units, deemed evil because they contribute to global warming.

Or perhaps they were themselves the product of government schools, with their well-known tendency to falter when inducing literacy in their victims.

There are many possibilities.

Read it.

Jack Miniard, the school district’s director of school and community nutrition, was on hand to explain that the federal government now governs both food choices and portion sizes in most American school districts including Harlan County.

Under the National School Lunch Program, participating schools must provide lunches — including free or reduced price lunches — with minimum amounts of fresh fruits, fresh vegetables and whole grains. Also, in what presumably falls outside the hunger-free aspect of the act, there’s a calorie cap: 850 for high school lunches, 700 for middle schools and a mere 650 calories for kids in elementary school.

Students can only have one serving of meat or other protein. However, rich kids can buy a second portion each day on their own dime.

Guys, get a clue: You want a free lunch, you take what they give you. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and when the Feds pay for your lunch, they get to say what you eat. If you don’t like it, you can always provide your own kid’s lunch, which you ought to be doing anyway.

Read it.

New York’s attorney general sued Donald Trump for $40 million Saturday, saying the real estate mogul helped run a phony “Trump University” that promised to make students rich but instead steered them into expensive and mostly useless seminars, and even failed to deliver promised apprenticeships.

So how does that differ from, say, Harvard?

An amazing map.

Biggest losers: Blue states. But you knew that.

Biggest winners: Red states. But you knew that too.

When people vote with their feet, they vote for freedom. (That’s why a lot of people want to come to the U.S., and not many want to go to Zimbabwe or Haiti.)

Read it.

The economic way of thinking tells you that incentives matter and that therefore when something seems odd, you should look at where the incentives lie. Often the incentives for stupid and wasteful behavior are outdated government regulations that no one can be bothered to change. So it is with the seat belt demonstration, at least under American law (other jurisdictions undoubtedly have similar regulations).

Fear of being sued, and the horrible consequences of losing a lawsuit as opposed to the relatively minor inconvenience of pissing off customers or looking ridiculous. Case in point: ‘zero tolerance’ policies in schools and other places.

Want to know why you can’t buy a new 5-gallon flush toilet any more? Because the government requires manufacturers to offer 1.6 gallon tanks for sale, and it’s not worth the money making more than one size of tank. So too bad, disgruntled comsumer, your tax dollars at work are to blame, not the profit-maximizing manufacturer.

Read it.

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

Read it.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way: John Maynard Keynes, one of the founders of modern economics, made a famous prediction that by 2030, advanced societies would be wealthy enough that leisure time, rather than work, would characterize national lifestyles.

And, as we all know, Keynes was always right.

In addition to relaxing during long holidays, the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze. “The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed,” notes Shor. “Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure.”

Most of which was spent trying to figure out where their next meal was coming from. The modern day laborer is the functional equivalent, and if you aren’t willing to trade your day job for that life, then quit whining.

These thumb-suckers who write 1000-word essays that boil down to complaints about American having ‘no national vacation policy whatsoever’ are about as tedious as Old Media can get, and the fact that such crap fills the pages of the New York Times is certainly a contributory factor to why they’ve been losing money hand over fist.

Read it.

Stealth wear, clothing and accessories created to protect their wearers from surveillance, has largely been an abstract concept. Most designs are created as prototypes, not items that can be purchased in a department or drug store.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro….

Read it.

A man who squared up to cops after a domestic disturbance stabbed himself in the chest three times before biting the officers’ dog, according to reports from the US.

This is news?

The incident began at about 7.45pm when a deputy sheriff responded to a report of a domestic dispute in the Californian city of San Jose.

Oh, well, California — say no more….

Read it.

Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing is spreading the wealth around again this year, giving away some $3.25 million from his personal bonus to the company’s employees around the world, reports Bloomberg. That’s an extra $250,000 over the $3 million he gave away in an identical gesture last year, and will roughly amount to an extra month’s pay for most of the 10,000 recipients. To put it in context, Yang made about $14.6 million last year, including just over $4 million in bonuses.

Something neither Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs ever did. Nor any of the ‘my taxes aren’t high enough!’ moguls who support Obama-socialism.

Read it.

Our ice router Victor has been very clear in what lies ahead. He writes, “Just to give you the danger of ice situation at the eastern Arctic, Eef Willems of “Tooluka” (NED) pulled out of the game and returning to Greenland. At many Eastern places of NWP locals have not seen this type ice conditions. Residents of Resolute say 20 years have not seen anything like. It’s, ice, ice and more ice. Larsen, Peel, Bellot, Regent and Barrow Strait are all choked. That is the only route to East. Already West Lancaster received -2C temperature expecting -7C on Tuesday with the snow.”

But there’s still a consensus!!

Don Boudreaux gives us a little elementary economics.

One way – there are many ways, of course – to highlight the marvelousness of our age is to note that, unlike for the multitudes of all of our pre-industrial ancestors, nearly everything that an ordinary denizen of our age consumes is something that

(1) that person did not personally make;

and, most spectacularly,

(2) no single person knows how to make – that it, it is something the construction and supply of which require the knowledge, skills, and efforts of literally millions of individuals.

Read it.

I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now. (Except white people, of course.)

Read it.

Because, you know, doctors tend to have that whole Hippocratic-oath ‘First do no harm’ thing going, and it makes them very tedious.

(No word yet on whether coat hangers come under Obama’s new tax on ‘medical devices’.)

John Stossel blows the whistle.

Advocates also point out something that seems obvious to them: Infrastructure is a job that must be done by government. Who else would launch big projects like the New York City subway system? Subways are what Big Government supporters call a “public good.”

Yeah, but….

Most of New York’s subways were actually built by private companies. Few New Yorkers even know that. Private companies dug the first tunnels and ran the trains for about 40 years. But when they wanted to raise the fare to a dime, the politicians said they had to “protect” the public. Government took over the system, saying only “public ownership” could guarantee affordable fares.

But government doesn’t do anything well. Under government management, profit disappeared and the fare rose well beyond the inflation-adjusted equivalent of what the private companies had wanted to charge.

And, between the city government, the unions, and the Mafia, a private company couldn’t afford to build something like a subway today.

Now, politicians want you to buy them new trains. Who wouldn’t like a shiny new train? The Obama administration gave your money to California politicians who want to build a 200-m.p.h. train to take people from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Somehow, in the tradition of political boondoggles everywhere, the train that politicians actually approved doesn’t yet come close to either city. It starts, and ends, “in the boondocks,” says Reason magazine’s Adrian Moore.

Well, it’s not as if they were spending their own money.

Read it.

Former Illinois Republican Party Chairman Pat Brady has signed on with the American Civil Liberties Union to lobby House Republicans to pass a same-sex marriage bill in the land of Lincoln.

When people are offered a choice between a real Democrat and a fake Democrat, they go with the real Democrat every time.

Read it. And watch the video.

Too bad it won’t be affordable unless heavily subsidized.