Read it.

In the spring of 2012, a senior examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York determined that Goldman Sachs had a problem.

Under a Fed mandate, the investment banking behemoth was expected to have a company-wide policy to address conflicts of interest in how its phalanxes of dealmakers handled clients. Although Goldman had a patchwork of policies, the examiner concluded that they fell short of the Fed’s requirements.

That finding by the examiner, Carmen Segarra, potentially had serious implications for Goldman, which was already under fire for advising clients on both sides of several multibillion-dollar deals and allegedly putting the bank’s own interests above those of its customers. It could have led to closer scrutiny of Goldman by regulators or changes to its business practices.

Before she could formalize her findings, Segarra said, the senior New York Fed official who oversees Goldman pressured her to change them. When she refused, Segarra said she was called to a meeting where her bosses told her they no longer trusted her judgment. Her phone was confiscated, and security officers marched her out of the Fed’s fortress-like building in lower Manhattan, just 7 months after being hired.

“They wanted me to falsify my findings,” Segarra said in a recent interview, “and when I wouldn’t, they fired me.”

The Crust not only take care of their own, they punish heretics.

Read it. And watch the video.

PowerLine looks at what would happen if an Ordinary Citizen ™ were to handle money the way the Federal government does.

Read it.

Very little, I suspect, of real substance. A lot of handwaving, a lot of bloviating, a lot of finger-pointing, all paid for by taxpayers.

Read it.

Survivors and family members of nearly 700,000 Haitians who have contracted cholera are suing the United Nations for billions of dollars, accusing the U.N. of covering up its role in starting the worst outbreak of the deadly disease in modern history.

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

The people who founded the U.N., I suspect, had a vision of the Enlightened Nations of the West stepping in to suppress disorder and spread beneficence among ‘developing nations’, as European nations did during the 19th century. What they got was contingents of Third World rent-a-thugs, paid for by unwitting First World taxpayers, under a blanket of tedious and tendentious rhetoric so thing that by itself it promotes Global Warming.

“They have to help us because there are so many kids that are orphans now, that lost their mom, that lost their dads,” said plaintiff Felicia Paule, 45, who survived cholera but lost a daughter, brother and nephew to the disease. “They’re responsible, so they have to help.”

Yeah, well, good luck getting any ‘help’ from the U.N. You’re not part of the gravy train, so you’re not important. Sorry.

The suit will be filed in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday despite the U.N.’s longstanding immunity to all legal claims of wrongdoing.

Don’t forget the unicorn-poop you need to power the process with.

Since the cholera outbreak began near Mirebalais, Haiti in late 2010, just ten months after a devastating earthquake, more than 650,000 Haitians have contracted the disease, which had been unknown in the country for centuries. It has now spread to Venezuela, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and has now killed more than 8,500 people.

Sounds like the U.N. to me.

Read it.

Matthew Yglesias observes that, because of the government shutdown, farmers don’t know how much pigs are worth. The USDA normally keeps track of and publishes pork prices. Yglesias concludes that the government shutdown is threatening our farm economy.

The correctly conclusion, however, is that we should let the unreliable government do things that can be done by private parties. If USDA weren’t publishing pork prices, someone else would, and they would not have to rely on a continued flow of tax dollars to keep them going.

And that’s the truest thing you’ll read today.

Steve Sailer thinks about hard stuff so that you won’t have to.

Last month in Taki’s Magazine, I wrote about Bill Clinton-lookalike Frances Frei, the Dean of Something at the Harvard Business School, and her war on slutty Halloween costumes. I mentioned that Frei is gay-married to a former student at HBS named Anne Morriss. Now, a reader points out that, in one of those iSteve Convergences, Morriss is involved with a new Lesbian Eugenics firm.

Really, you can’t make this shit up.

I could imagine a scenario — feel free to use this in a Lifetime movie — in which a woman is choosing between Donor X and Donor Y, and Genepeeks says Donor Y is clean but Donor X has a 1 out of 1000 chance of horrible Disease Z. But the lady says, But, from their pictures, I like X’s smile more than Y’s, so I’ll go with Donor X. But then the baby is born with Disease Z, for which the mother can’t forgive herself. Until, she discovers that … well, I don’t know what the plot twist would be because I lose interest in making up my own narratives with consistent rapidity.

And there was much rejoicing….

Read it.

From next year, British atheists and their offspring will be able to join the Scouting movement without having to lie or breach their Scout’s honour, thanks to an amended promise.

All Scouts, and Scout leaders, are required to make the promise. The words vary with age group, and alternatives exist for different religions, but until now there’s been no atheistic version so members who don’t believe in any god have been forced to make an empty promise. But come January, Scouts will get an option on a new promise which takes the Big Guy out of the picture entirely….

Steve Sailer does the hard stuff so you don’t have to.

Continuing its blanket coverage of the problems of people who don’t really have problems, The New York Times turns from the plight of female Harvard Business School students to the tribulation of female Yale physics majors.

Hey, the NYT covers what it’s readers (i.e. the Crust and its hangers-on) want to read about, viz. themselves and their progeny.

The Other McCain turns over a very big, very flat rock.

Watch MSNBC all day long and keep in mind that, for the vast majority of the reporters covering politics in Washington, MSNBC is the Gospel Truth. Realize that the ambitious younger journalists in the White House press corps dream of the day when they’ll have their own regular spot on MSNBC or, perhaps, they will be appointed to a job in the Obama administration itself, like their hero and mentor, Jay Carney.

All of these reporters are Democrats. They hate and despise Republicans, and consider it their most important duty as journalists to help elect more Democrats and then to help the Democrats to advance their political and legislative agenda. To these reporters, the superiority of the Democrats is an objective fact, and anyone who says a word in favor of Republicans is therefore a liar or a fool or both.

No reporter in the White House press corps watches Fox News, except for amusement, to laugh at it as crude sport. Nor, for that matter, does any reporter in the White House press corps read conservative blogs or Web sites. Insofar as the Internet has any influence on them, the sites that are most influential among D.C. journalists are such venues as Think Progress, Media Matters, Mother Jones and Salon.

…

Was it “unbelievable” that Obama faced no tough questions at the press conference? It would have been unbelievable if he had.

The press corps is a constituency of the Democrat Party in the same way that the AFL-CIO, the NAACP and Planned Parenthood are constituencies of the Democrat Party. If any of them have any criticism of Obama, it arises from the feeling that he is not liberal enough.

Our nation’s “mainstream” media are, actually, Democrat Party propagandists. Let’s stop pretending that they are interested in truth.

Read it.

Pat Vaillancourt went on a trip last week that was intended to showcase some of America’s greatest treasures.

Instead, the Salisbury resident said she and others on her tour bus witnessed an ugly spectacle that made her embarrassed, angry and heartbroken for her country.

Vaillancourt was one of thousands of people who found themselves in a national park as the federal government shutdown went into effect on Oct. 1. For many hours her tour group, which included senior citizen visitors from Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States, were locked in a Yellowstone National Park hotel under armed guard.

The tourists were treated harshly by armed park employees, she said, so much so that some of the foreign tourists with limited English skills thought they were under arrest.

America is rapidly turning into a banana republic — without the bananas.

Read it.

My favorite is the ‘Luna Sea Hotel’.

Read it.

When you start out as a criminal, the rest is a piece of cake.

Over the past several years, the Obama administration has narrowed the scope of immigration enforcement, promising to focus on what President Obama considers “the worst of the worst” violent offenders. But just because an illegal alien isn’t a violent threat to society, it does not follow that his or her presence is not a threat to the rule of law, taxpayers, and society generally. Despite the opinion of amnesty advocates — namely, that the United States can give a pass to violations of law without suffering any repercussions — our nation’s immigration laws do serve a variety of purposes and are ultimately meant to protect those who are in the United States lawfully.

Read it.

Uh, last I looked, ‘Muslim’ is a religion, not a race. ‘You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.’

Read it.

Indiana University is firing 50 maintenance and custodial workers and shifting them to a temp agency to avoid incurring Obamacare costs.

How’s that Hope & Change workin’ out for ya?

Read it.

Breaking Down the New Feudalism: The Emerging Class Structure

The emerging class structure of neo-feudalism, like its European and Asian antecedents, is far more complex than simply a matter of the gilded “them” and the broad “us.” To work as a system, as we can now see in California, we need to understand the broader, more divergent class structure that is emerging.

The Oligarchs: The swelling number of billionaires in the state, particularly in Silicon Valley, has enhanced power that is emerging into something like the old aristocratic French second estate. Through public advocacy and philanthropy, the oligarchs have tended to embrace California’s “green” agenda, with a very negative impact on traditional industries such as manufacturing, agriculture, energy, and construction. Like the aristocrats who saw all value in land, and dismissed other commerce as unworthy, they believe all value belongs to those who own the increasingly abstracted information revolution that has made them so fabulously rich.

The  Clerisy: The Oligarchs may have the money, but by themselves they cannot control a huge state like California, much less America. Gentry domination requires allies with a broader social base and their own political power. In the Middle Ages, this role was played largely by the church; in today’s hyper-secular America, the job of shaping the masses has fallen to the government apparat, the professoriat, and the media, which together constitute our new Clerisy. The Clerisy generally defines societal priorities, defends “right-thinking” oligarchs, and chastises those, like traditional energy companies, that deviate from their theology.

The New Serfs: If current trends continue, the fastest growing class will be the permanently property-less. This group includes welfare recipients and other government dependents but also the far more numerous working poor. In the past, the working poor had reasonable aspirations for a better life, epitomized by property ownership or better prospects for their children. Now, with increasingly little prospect of advancement, California’s serfs depend on the Clerisy to produce benefits making their permanent impoverishment less gruesome. This sad result remains inevitable as long as the state’s economy bifurcates between a small high-wage, tech-oriented sector, and an expanding number of lower wage jobs in hospitality, health services, and personal service jobs. As a result, the working class, stunted in their drive to achieve the California dream, now represents the largest portion of domestic migrants out of the state.

The Yeomanry: In neo-feudalist California, the biggest losers tend to be the old private sector middle class. This includes largely small business owners, professionals, and skilled workers in traditional industries most targeted by regulatory shifts and higher taxes. Once catered to by both parties, the yeomanry have become increasingly irrelevant as California has evolved into a one-party state where the ruling Democrats have achieved a potentially permanent, sizable majority consisting largely of the clerisy and the serf class, and funded by the oligarchs. Unable to influence government and largely disdained by the clerisy, these middle income Californians are becoming a permanent outsider group, much like the old Third Estate in early medieval times, forced to pay ever higher taxes as well as soaring utility bills and required to follow regulations imposed by people who often have little use for their “middle class” suburban values.

Read it.

But there is, in my view, an even more fundamental objection to government control over health care: anything run by the government inherently becomes political. The result is that the interests of politicians take precedence over everything else. For a case in point, see the United Kingdom. Over the last year or more, we have covered the unfolding scandal of Britain’s National Health Service, where appallingly bad care–not just inept, but callous–has led to many fatalities and has shaken Britons’ faith in the NHS.

Read it.

Well guess what, mom?  Turns out new research shows that while most people hold sympathy for environmental causes, it turns out they don’t much like environmentalists.  Or feminists.  And it may have the effect of reducing people’s efforts (I’ll resists saying compliance or submission—more accurate terms in many ways) with the idealism of the mother-earth-saving mothers.  (I mean, if you really want to stare into the abyss, just contemplate environmental feminists.)  I know a lot of people who disdain recycling, even when it makes resource and market sense, simply in healthy reaction to the relentless moral hectoring of environmentalists.

Read it.

Just before the weekend, the National Park Service informed charter boat captains in Florida that the Florida Bay was “closed” due to the shutdown. Until government funding is restored, the fishing boats are prohibited from taking anglers into 1,100 square-miles of open ocean. Fishing is also prohibited at Biscayne National Park during the shutdown.

…

Apparently, according to an anonymous Park Service ranger, “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”

If Obama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

Read it.

We already know how software will eat manufacturing (robots and 3D printing) and transportation (self-driving vehicles.) This new servant economy shows us how software will eat much of the service sector; by turning turn many of its existing full-time jobs into a disconnected cloud of temporary gigs.

…

The slow transformation of a huge swathe of the economy from steady jobs to an ever-shifting maelstrom of short-term contracts with few-to-no benefits, for which an ever-larger pool of people will compete thanks to ever-lower barriers to entry, in a sector where most jobs are already poorly paid…does this sound to you like it will decrease inequality and increase social mobility? Maybe, it certain specialized high-skill areas. But across the spectrum? I doubt it.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Next: Rum for Rugrats. Once they pass out, they’re quiet for the rest of the day….

Read it.

All of which will be paid by the taxpayers, of course. Not that the ACLU gives a shit about taxpayers — hey, it’s free government money, right?

The Jackson City School District, located in Jackson, reached a deal on Friday after the ACLU, along with the Wisconsin-based Freedom from Religion Foundation, sued the district in February, citing “unconstitutional” actions and charging that students and visitors to the school “will continue to suffer permanent, severe and irreparable harm and injury,” according to the lawsuit.

The picture had been hanging in Jackson’s high school since 1947 as part of a “Hall of Honor” display meant to highlight famous historical figures.

I’m curious as to what ‘irreperable harm and injury’ is caused by including Jesus among ‘famous historical figures’.

Read it.

Yeah, this makes me feel old. I remember all of them except the milk pass-through — back in the day when there were milk deliveries, we had an insulated box that would sit on the porch into which the milk guy would put the stuff. (This was in the early 60s, so it wasn’t all that long ago.) (Or maybe it was….)

Read it.

Eventually I’m allowed to leave the premises with my shopping, having managed to get through the automated Fast Checkout service with the assistance of two shop employees, a public-spirited member of the public and 26 primary school children.

Read it. And watch the video.

Freeberg is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Anyway, I was thinking this morning around five o’clock, heading southbound on I-680…gee, I can’t imagine why…how assholes are made. Isn’t that what really bothers us about assholes? It isn’t that the assholes are there, or that we encounter them. We should expect this. We’re all sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, who got kicked out of the Garden of Eden because they were a couple of assholes. And I think deep down everyone realizes that. So we’re bothered when we meet assholes, but the existence of the asshole is not what bothers us.

…

You lay down just one single incentive that goes in the right direction, makes life easier for non-assholes or provides a much-needed challenge or rebuke to the assholes — the assholes are fine with it, but the asshole-makers start squawking. They do more than that, they’ll gouge your eyes out if you’re not careful. Starving wild animals being kept away from the beef steak. Asshole-makers will not quit the asshole-making lifestyle. And the older I get, the more certain I am that they, more than the assholes, are the real problem. Think of Count Dracula going around biting people turning them into vampires. The “freshman vampires” are not the real problem, Dracula is the real problem. These are Asshole Dracula people.

Read it.

That few reporters knew which end of that sort of big long gun-thingy the bullet came out of made them easy marks for Reformers. I knew something about tanks, having gone through armor school in the Marine Corps and served in an AMTRAC battalion in Vietnam. I could talk shop with guys in armor. But how do you explain to a J-school grad why thermal imagers are superior to micro-channel photomultipliers?

…

Long-range missiles were in their infancy and did not work terribly well. Ignoring the common experience that what works sort of today will work a lot better tomorrow and like gangbusters by next Thursday, Boyd and the Fighter Mafia wanted a philosophical Sopwith Camel. It didn’t bother them that nobody else did. Israel, with the best tactical-fighter force of the age, was and is big on electronics. The Israelis had to win their wars, not talk about them.

Mike Masnick doesn’t think so.

 In the short-term tech-kills-jobs view, you could easily see this new “technology” as killing jobs. Indeed, it’s reported that there are somewhere around 18,000 telephone operators in the US today. But… there are also about 100,000 call center operators and 290,000 telemarketers (and of course, in a globalized world, many of those jobs have moved overseas). But, more importantly, moving from having a human operator connect you to an automatic switched network was just an early step in leading to tremendous follow-on innovations that created all kinds of new jobs and economic growth. Automatic switched phone networks created all kinds of new business opportunities and convenience, but also eventually enabled easy access to the internet. And the internet has since created millions of new jobs (including mine!).

Yeah, but for whom? I doubt that Mike Masnick would have been a telephone operator in any conceivable parallel universe. The point of concern about technology and jobs is not that the absolute number of jobs might be less — it obviously is not — but who gets the jobs that result? Eliminating jobs for average-IQ people and creating new jobs for high-IQ people still leaves more and more average-IQ people out of work. Nobody I know of worries about high-IQ people getting work — it’s the average and low-IQ people that are worrisome. This is not Lake Woebegone — by definition, half of the population has a below-average IQ. When my parents were in their 30s and 40s, somebody of average intelligence with a high-school education (which was really a high-school education in those days, not just marginally functional literacy and numeracy masquerading as such) could get a semi-skilled job and make enough to buy a house and support a family. That day is rapidly disappearing, if it hasn’t disappeared already.

 Bessen does note that the type of work and skills may change — tellers are more focused on more complex transactions rather than simple ones, just like call center employees have to help customers with problems, rather than just connect person A to person B. But is that such a bad thing?

Yeah, if you’re the guy who doesn’t have the brainpower to handle these complex transactions. People like Mike Masnick live in a high-IQ bubble of tech people and journalists; they need to get out to 7-11 and Walmart and find out what the Lower Half is actually going through.

The Flight

When the grey geese heard the Fool’s tread
Too near to where they lay,
They lifted neither voice nor head,
But took themselves away.

No water broke, no pinion whirred-
There went no warning call.
The steely, sheltering rushes stirred
A little–that was all.

Only the osiers understood,
And the drowned meadows spied
What else than wreckage of a flood
Stole outward on that tide.

But the far beaches saw their ranks
Gather and greet and grow
By myriads on the naked banks
Watching their sign to go;

Till, with a roar of wings that churned
The shivering shoals to foam,
Flight after flight took air and turned
To find a safer home;

And, far below their steadfast wedge,
They heard (and hastened on)
Men thresh and clamour through the sedge
Aghast that they were gone!

And, when men prayed them come anew
And nest where they were bred,
“Nay, fools foretell what knaves will do,”
Was all the grey geese said.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, points out some inconvenient truth.

First-responders’ pay is as low as it is because there are plenty of people able and willing to work as high-quality first-responders relative to the ‘need’ that we have for first-responders.  With so many highly skilled and dedicated people already working as first-responders, the value of the additional first-response services that we’d enjoy if we hire one more equally skilled and dedicated person to work as a first-responder is very low.  So we’re – rightly – unwilling to pay very much to hire this additional first-responder.  It makes no sense to pay an additional, say, $100,000 annually to get labor services that produce an additional, say, $30,000 worth of output.

So understand our good fortune!  We live in a society blessed with an abundant supply of high-quality live-saving labor services.

Ask: would you prefer to live in a society in which people’s ability and willingness to work as first-responders were as scarce, relative to our ‘need’ for such services, as is the ability to work as a N.F.L. quarterback?  If our society were populated not with tens of thousands, but only with a few dozen, people who can supply top-notch first-response services, would we be better off than we are in reality today or would be worse off?  The answer is obvious: we’d be worse off.

First-responders would be better off.  They would each be paid very handsomely for their services.  But many more of us would, as a result of this wage-raising scarcity of first-responders, die in automobile accidents and home and workplace fires.  High-quality first-response services would be very scarce and, hence, very highly priced.  Fortunately for us, our world has an abundance of high-quality first-responders.  It’s a blessing that we get such essential life-saving and life-enhancing services at relatively low costs.

Markets work even when you don’t want them to. Teachers are another illustration of the basic principle that how well people are paid is not a function of how important is the work that they do but of how many people can provide the same service.

Read it.

(You’ll have to hack your way through the spin.)

 Confusion persisted Wednesday around the long-awaited opportunity for Americans to sign up for coverage through new health-insurance marketplaces, with the federal Web site for more than half the states remaining balky and health plans uncertain whether they had any new customers.

Welcome to dealing with the government. This ought not to have come as a surprise to anybody. Nobody ever puts ‘efficiency’ or ‘effectiveness’ or ‘user-friendly’ and government in the same sentence except as a contrast.

The federal site, Healthcare.gov, was sluggish and flashed error messages much of the day. The Obama administration said the delays were simply the result of an initial rush of people flocking to the site — 4.7 million unique visitors in the first 24 hours — while some in the health-care industry suggested that the problem was more serious.

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

Officials at the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services insisted that some people were able to get far enough into the site to peruse their insurance options, find out whether they qualify for financial help and ultimately enroll in a health plan. But administration officials, for a second day, declined to disclose how many people actually had enrolled and where in the country they live.

Or how old they are. Remember that much of the purported benefit of Obamacare is predicated on spreading the cost of insurance coverage for old people over the premiums paid by young people who are less likely to submit claims, and critics have said from the start that young people are stupid but not that stupid; they may not be able to read but they can count.

“Very, very few people that we’re aware of have enrolled in the federal exchange,” said one insurance industry official, who like many in the industry, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for possibly offending the Obama administration. “We are talking single digits.”

Emphasis added to highlight the fact that insurance officials aren’t stupid either; they know that the tiger is going to be eating people, and they want to be near the end of the list rather than at the start.

A spokesman for one major Blue Cross Blue Shield plan in a southern state said that, as of Wednesday afternoon, it had not received word from federal health officials of any customers who had completed enrollment in the plan — even though a local news outlet had reported about a man who thought he had signed up. So, plan officials didn’t know whether the man’s enrollment was incomplete or whether the federal reporting of enrollment was running behind.

One guy. Wow. There’s a market worth pursuing.

“It’s a little confusing,” said Beigel, who earns $8,000 a year running a small cleaning service and likely will qualify for free care under expanded Medicaid. “It’s not so great.”

Yeah, there’s the bottom line. People won’t take a bad product even if it’s free.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

People, just minding their own business but relying in some way on something-or-another, are having their plans disrupted because strangers are not achieving agreement with other strangers. Thousands of miles away. Strangers who will remain strangers, who will always be strangers. And what the hell does failed-to-reach-agreement mean, anyway? Each side did a diligent and judicious job of minimally choosing its “hill I wanna die on” positions, and some of those were found to be mutually exclusive, so they gave it a few more hasty tries while the clock chimed midnight, and then collapsed in despair? Like that? Or is it more like, someone didn’t even bother to show up. Maybe no one did? Or phoned it in, literally and figuratively?

I can certainly appreciate how it’s so aggravating. I don’t understand how people keep falling for it over & over again. I don’t understand why some people choose to make a lifestyle out of this. It’s quite silly, when you look at it from a distance, or ponder it for awhile. Oh goody, the strangers I’ll never meet happened to agree on something, so I get…access to a park. A paycheck. A seat at the ball game. A boat ride. So glad they agreed…this time.

Yeah, these things are all ratchet-traps; the dependents are in a situation in which they have no choice. But that’s usually because, before, they passed some point where the choice went away. Because they gave it up. All this debating & discussing about “ObamaCare” was about exactly that, was it not?

…

The question is not whether this is one of those deals where people love to complain about something, but won’t get off their fat asses to solve it. That’s settled. The question is, what forces are at work here; what dynamics; what is happening to them. On this, I’m less than certain. I must form theories. And my favorite theory at this time is — this is a process of urbanization.

Purifying Cutting Board System

32 Real-Life Cheat Codes

Log & Roll Paper Towel Holder

Chillsner Beer Cooler

Read it.

“In Austin today, our current leadership thinks promises are just something you make to the people who write big checks,” she said. “But the promise I’m talking about is bigger than that. It’s the promise of a better tomorrow for everyone. Texans deserves a leader who will protect this promise. Texas deserves a leader who will keep it.”

More abortions will make a better tomorrow for everyone? It certainly won’t make things better for the innocent babies who are murdered — I guess they don’t deserve any kind of tomorrow.

And promises to people who write big checks? The people writing big checks these days (George Soros? John Kerry? Pick a Kennedy, any Kennedy) are writing them to Democrats, if you really take a look around you.

Texas deserves a leader who will let people spend their own money rather than having it confiscated by the government and wasted. But that has never been the Democrat agenda.

Read it.

1. barrycade

1. A barrier (usually temporary) that exists for no reason.

2. A barrier erected for political reasons.

“Dude, Obama barrycaded the park.”

“Hey, let’s put up some barrycades to keep those World War II veterans away from the open-air World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., in order to try and score some cheap political points.”

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, has a new piece at Taki’s Mag.

The disappearing middle. A study out of Oxford University, written up on Slate.com, says that 47 percent of US jobs are “at risk” of being automated in the next 20 years. The Slate guy says we have to Fix The Schools so that everyone is still employable. In the leftist mind there’s no social problem that can’t be solved by Fixing The Schools, which seems to translate as “making dumb people smart.” Yeah, we should get right on that.

Which is why it’s important to SUPPORT JOHN DERBYSHIRE. See link at right.

Read it.

The drug candidate, SR9009, is one of a pair of compounds developed in the laboratory of TSRI Professor Thomas Burris and described in a March 2012 issue of the journal Nature as reducing obesity in animal models. The compounds affect the core biological clock, which synchronizes the rhythm of the body’s activity with the 24-hour cycle of day and night.

Read it.

The President has brought in workers from off furlough to barricade the national monuments in the Mall. Last time I visited that place I was able to walk through the Korean War memorial and up to the Lincoln Memorial, and all along the Mall, at midnight, and I never saw anyone; there were no barricades or barriers and none were needed. Of course there is a need for maintenance, but the money spent putting up the barricades would have paid for weeks of routine maintenance of the mall and reflecting pool, and if that weren’t true then a short appeal for public help in keeping America beautiful would have turned out an embarrassing number of volunteers complete with retired officers to organize them: there is no danger that the national war memorials will be neglected whether the government shuts down or not. The President knows this, but the barricades went up anyway.

This is small and petty, as is the refusal to negotiate anything.

Newt Gingrich visited Mount Vernon – a privately operated national monument and well worth a visit – and has noted that the bus turnaround (a paved turnaround off the national highway) has been closed by the Federal Government. Taking those barriers out there and setting them up cost money: normally it’s just a place for busses to pull off the highway and turn around, there are no facilities and it has no operating personnel, so the barriers are an added cost. No word on whether bus operators have simply throws the barricades off, as the WWII vets sort of did at the WWII monument on the mall.

This is the new presidential leadership. It is probably effective. The Republicans closed down the government. Any inconvenient consequences of that clearly are the fault of the stubborn Republicans who want to keep the poor from getting their free health care.

Read it.

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

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 Conventional parking garages are inefficient. They require ramps, driving lanes, room for doors to open and close, and significant chunks of concrete and metal between each level. AutoMotion Parking Systems, a builder of automated garages and the company behind the Brooklyn project, will do away with all of this, replacing those bulky and disorienting double helices with a half-dozen 200-foot-long bays, each lined on both sides with car-size cubbies stacked three to five high. Via five automated hoists, vehicles will be whisked on metal pallets from the entry rooms to their temporary homes and back again. “It’s like a vending machine for cars,” Ari Milstein, executive director of AutoMotion, says.

We have the technology.

Read it.

“The National Treasury Employees Union will be leading the fight to make that happen,” said the union’s president, Colleen Kelley. The NTEU represents IRS workers. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, an ally of President Obama, stated, “As of today, it is clear that the Republican Party and the Tea Party have become one and the same when it comes to federal fiscal policy.” Matt Biggs, legislative director for the International Federation of Professional Technical Engineers, added, “We are trying to maintain pressure on this White House that in the event of a government shutdown, that any negotiated settlement includes an agreement that all federal employees — essential and non-essential alike — get paid when the government reopens.”

Of course. Being a government employee is all about getting paid for not working.

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 Yesterday the administration looked awful when it “closed” and barricaded the World War II memorial on the Mall. The memorial is, by its nature, open. There is nothing to close. And the administration knows that every day, tour groups consisting of WWII vets, now mostly in their late 80s or early 90s, come to Washington to visit the memorial. So the administration couldn’t resist closing the WWII memorial by putting up barricades, as part of their effort to dramatize how terrible the government “shutdown” is.

Yesterday, as we noted here, the administration suffered a public relations disaster when a group of elderly vets from Mississippi, aided by one or more Republican Congressmen, pushed the barriers aside and visited the memorial. But the administration was still undeterred: a park service employee threatened to arrest any vets who may try to visit the WWII memorial in the future, while the shutdown is in effect.

It’s all about the Narrative.

After about an hour, about 20 SEIU protesters arrived on the scene chanting “Boehner, get us back to work” and claiming they were federal employees furloughed because of the shutdown.

In the video below these protesters were marching towards the press gaggle and I was asking them to show their federal IDs to prove they were in fact federal workers. No one wore their federal ID and none would provide it to prove their claim.

Then, remarkably, a guy carrying a sign passed by wearing a McDonald’s employee shirt, which I noted. I then began asking them how much they had been paid to protest, at which point the guy wearing the McDonald’s shirt came back and admitted he had been paid $15 to attend the protest.

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

Read it.

Still weirder is the status of the Federal Trade Commission’s site. Browse to any of their pages and you’ll see, for a split second, the full content of the page you want—only to be redirected to a shutdown notice page also hosted at FTC.gov. But that means… their servers are still up and running and actually serving all the same content. In fact they’re servingmore content: first the real page, then the shutdown notice page. If you’re using Firefox or Chrome and don’t mind browsing in HTML-cluttered text, you can even use this link to navigate to the FTC site map and navigate from page to page in source-code view without triggering the redirect. Again, it’s entirely possible I’m missing something, but if the full site is actually still running, it’s hard to see how a redirect after the real page is served could be avoiding any expenditures.

Read it.

Eight-year-old Jordan Bennett was suspended from school in Florida after being accused of an “act of violence” for using his finger to make an imaginary gun during a game of cops and robbers.

According to Fox News, administrators at Harmony Community School in Harmony, FL, suspended  Bennett for a day; school district officials said their code of conduct “prohibits students from playing with invisible guns.”

‘You did a bad thing! Your punishment is that you get to go home and read comic books the rest of the day.’ Cool — sign me up.

Send your kid to a government school,
And he will turn out a fool —
That’s the way
Things work today;
Your tax bucks at work and play!

Read it.

The pattern of federal agencies spending recklessly at the end of the fiscal year so they use up their whole budgets was the topic of a post here earlier. Now the Washington Post has a wonderful article with even more examples….

John Stossel reveals some inconvenient truth.

I call them “government” instead of “public” schools because not much is “public” about them. Members of the public don’t get to pick their kids’ schools, teachers, curriculum or cost.

By contrast, supermarkets are “private” yet open to everyone. You can stroll in 24 hours a day. Just try that with your kid’s public school. You might be arrested.

…

Defenders of government schools often claim their schools are what create the American “melting pot.” Different races, ethnic groups and income levels mix together in government-funded schools.

Bunk. If it was ever true, it isn’t now.

University of Arkansas education professor Jay Greene examined school classrooms and found that public schools were more likely to be almost entirely white or entirely minority.

He also looked at who sat with whom in school lunchrooms. At private schools, students of different races were more likely to sit together.

Read it.

As we survey the smoking, shattered remains of the federal goverment… Oh, wait, that was a rerun of Independence Day. Awesome scene. Anyway, as we yawn and gaze on the histrionics over the government not-so-shutdown of 2013, there are definitely a few upsides to be seen. I might go so far as to venture that it’s mostly upsides, but let’s stick with a few highlights for now.

Read it.

You might wonder how it’s any business of the Federal government how faculty at the University of Montana think.

I wonder that, too.

The University of Montana’s (UM’s) new sexual harassment policy threatens the First Amendment rights of students and faculty. Drafted in consultation with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), the policy was approved by the agencies last week. Faculty members are also alarmed that a list of faculty who refuse to attend the university’s trainings on the new policy will be reported to the federal government.

“Not only has the federal government approved an unconstitutional speech code, it has demanded a list of the names of faculty members who don’t attend a training session about it,” said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff. “Worse still, students and faculty may face discipline even if they are cleared of harassment and discrimination charges. Couple these flaws with broad, vague definitions, and the result is that UM has vast discretion to silence students and faculty members, to the detriment of fairness, clarity, and free speech.”

Read it.

Sweden is proud that it guarantees freedom of the press. Every news outlet is free to publish anything it wants — provided that it agrees with the consensus of the government and the major political parties, if the minister of culture has her way.

Swedish media outlets depend on government subsidies for the survival of their operations. Without the help of taxpayers’ kroner, a newspaper would find it hard to survive, as attested by the recent experience of Dispatch International.

Up until now the government has guaranteed the impartiality of press subsidies. No matter the opinion expressed, the government would not curtail the funding of any newspaper. But what the government may grant, it may also withhold, and the temptation to manipulate content by withholding state subsidies is all but irresistible.

One suspects that this principle of government neutrality has been more honored in the breach than in the observance, even in Sweden. However, the real state of affairs has now been revealed — the iron fist is out of the velvet glove.

Steve Sailer reveals an inconvenient truth.

 For a long time, I’ve been pointing out that many standard statistics of income, poverty, or cost of living fail to fully get at the underlying question of most interest: standard of living. Now, a new study from the Public Policy Institute of California that includes a better cost of living measure and government benefits finds that California, home to Silicon Valley and Hollywood, has the worst poverty rate of any state in the country, with vast Los Angeles County having the worst poverty rate in the state.

Having Democrats run your state (into the ground) will do that.