Read it.

A trio of US Democratic congresswomen have criticized top tech firms’ lack of diversity.

Read it.

To the list of defense contractors recruiting retiring Pentagon officials, corporate law firms hiring former SEC and Justice Department officials, and trade associations signing up former senators, add another new hot recruiting field for the private sector. Universities are snapping up employees with experience related to the federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which is in charge of enforcing Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

Read it.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) spent nearly $500,000 to study how getting mothers to dance with their daughters can fight obesity.

The three-year study is focusing on African-American girls, who the authors say “suffer disproportionately from obesity.” The aim of the research is to see whether “Afro-centric” dance can get girls to exercise.

For that money they could have sent them to Africa to learn the real thing.

Remind me how it’s the Federal government’s business to worry about whether people are obese…?

Read it.

More than half of legal and illegal immigrant households from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are on at least one form of public assistance, according to an analysis of government data by a limited immigration group.

Mark Steyn follows the money.

Toronto Dominion is a Canadian bank which also operates south of the border under the amusing name of “TD – America’s Most Convenient Bank®”. It’s certainly proved remarkably convenient for Bill Clinton. TD has paid millions to the future first First Gentleman of the United States, during his wife’s tenure as Secretary of State and in her ongoing role as designated President-in-Waiting.

What exactly are they paying for? Speeches? He’s less dull a public speaker than the average politician, or average former president (Gerald Ford, say). But nothing he says would seem to merit, for example, the $525,000 TD paid Bill in one 24-hour period alone, which convenience-wise is about as good as it gets. So again: what exactly are TD getting for their shareholders by putting all this money in the Clintons’ pockets?

Read it.

The amount of taxpayer money involved is unprecedented. “Obamacare seems due to join Social Security and Medicare in one respect: as a public policy advertising phenom, a program that is reviled and perhaps eventually revered in political advertising for billions of dollars in ad spending to come,” Elizabeth Wilner, vice president for strategic initiatives at Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG), wrote in a press release last year.

Such government P.R. campaigns have become a regrettable staple of American politics, since the default attitude among those in power is that propaganda is only bad when the other guy does it. When the Bush administration got caught violating a statutory ban on “covert propaganda” by passing off fake news reports to local TV stations and paying a columnist hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote the “No Child Left Behind” law, Democrats were justly outraged. And yet, these days Democrats are untroubled that their own campaign to sell Obamacare is taking government propaganda to new heights-and depths.

Read it.

It’s state law: all public universities must teach about the nation’s founding documents, but University of South Carolina President Harris Pastides is refusing to follow it. He says teaching about the Constitution and other founding-era writings is “archaic.” Ironically, the college claims the law itself is unconstitutional. The Daily Signal reports:

When asked about this by a student at an academic forum in 2013, the vice provost of USC, Dr. Helen Doerpinghaus, claimed that while the university did not follow the letter of the law, it did follow the “spirit of the law” by handing out pocket-sized Constitutions on Constitution Day. Under this logic, the university must believe it could teach students chemistry by handing out a copy of the Periodic Table on World Science Day on Nov. 10.

Read it.

Speaking to farmers in Mhangura, a small mining town about 120 miles north of the capital Harare, Mr. Mugabe said all remaining white farmers should leave – and closed the door even on white families renting farms from black owners, as some several hundred have been doing since most were violently chased away a decade ago.

Read it.

Researchers have uncovered the fossil of an extinct bird with a mouthful of tooth-like spikes and wings just smaller than a World War I fighter plane’s. At 20 to 24 feet from wingtip to wingtip, the new species had the biggest wingspan of any known bird, outstripping the next-biggest feathered flyer by 15% or more.

Read it.

Lawmakers and regulators have tightened the requirements over the years after high-profile companies like Fruit of the Loom, Seagate and Tyco shifted some or all of their business to places like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda.

But with the trend seemingly on the rise, some say it is time for yet more stringent requirements. Among them is Rep. Sander Levin, a senior Democrat whose office distributed the CMS report.

Note that the response of Crustian legislators is to pass laws making it more difficult, not reforming the tax system. Show where their priorities lie.

Read it.

Life is hard. It’s harder still when an entire class of people with their hands out stands between you and success.

Unfortunately, that’s increasingly the problem, all around the world. A recent New York Times piece tells the story of a Greek woman’s efforts to survive that country’s financial collapse. After losing her job, she tried to start a pastry business, only to find the regulatory environment impossible. Among other things, they wanted her to pay the business’s first two years of taxes up front, before it had taken in a cent. When the business failed, her lesson was this: “I, like thousands of others trying to start businesses, learned that I would be at the mercy of public employees who interpreted the laws so they could profit themselves.”

Read it.

Thank God for those strict gun control laws, or the place would be as bad as Texas.

Read it.

LiveLeakPublished at LiveLeak by Buck O’Fama (just possibly a pseudonym) is this video demonstration of a 3D-printed pistol version of a Ruger 10/22—a popular semiautomatic .22 rifle. The receiver is 3D printed and glued together, with metal parts added, including what appears to be the bolt (and, I assume, a synthetic after-market stock*).

Read it.

Coming soon to a Security Theater near you.

Check it out.

Google won’t search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don’t find Chuck Norris, he finds you.

Admittedly, of limited appeal.

The Other McCain has the skinny.

Holly Grigg-Spall (@hollygriggspall) is a British feminist who last year published a book called Sweetening the Pill: or How We Got Hooked on Hormonal Birth Control. The term “hormonal birth control” includes not only The Pill, but also Depo-Provera and Yasmin/Yaz, the latter of which is the target of lawsuits that blame side effects of the drug for causing nearly two dozen deaths.

…

Liberal feminists have called her book “dangerous” and use name-calling techniques in attempts to push Griggs-Spall to the margins of feminist discourse. As many of us know, being insulted and told to keep quiet are tools used to keep us away from discovering truths and maintain the status quo. Grigg-Spall is referred to as a “crank” (how feminist!), and potential readers of her book are warned that discussing female biology and women’s experiences is inherently “essentialist”. . . . There are several critiques of this book that have similar tones and I found the pro-pill apologism quite transparent.

…

So the radical feminist believes that the arguments of “sex-positive/mainstream feminism” are just coincidentally aligned with the interests of the pharmaceutical industry that promotes hormonal birth control. I’d bet that if a diligent researcher looked closely at the financing behind institutional feminism, they would discover that this alignment is not entirely coincidental, like how “mainstream feminism” sold out to the porn industry in the 1980s. People need to be more skeptical. Not everybody who says they’re your friend is actually your friend.

Read it.

Trying to quell a controversy over a $225,000 speaking fee at UNLV, Hillary Clinton told ABC News Friday that all her speaking fees from colleges were “donated” to the family’s Clinton Foundation. It naturally didn’t occur to ABC News to ask whether Hillary deducted this “pass-through” from her taxes, as would likely be legal under the tax code.

“All of the fees have been donated to the Clinton Foundation for it to continue its life-changing and life-saving work. So it goes from a foundation at a university to another foundation,” Clinton told ABC.

The political value of large amounts of money comes not from the power to spend it but rather from the power to determine how it is spent. Control of spending on the part of a well-funded ‘non-profit’ is just as politically valuable as having it in your own bank account. You don’t have to own an airplane if whenever you fly somewhere you can charter one and charge it to someone else. The power of the Presidency doesn’t stem from the magnitude of the office’s salary.

The Clinton Foundation has grown to a non-profit behemoth, with over $225 million in assets. It isn’t entirely clear what the foundation actually does. Reading a summary of its activities filed with its annual 990 reads like a Clinton State of the Union address. With over $50 million in annual donations, Hillary’s speaking fees would be a very small part of its operations.

Hillary says it does “life-changing and like-saving work,” but it pays twice as much in salaries as it gives out in grants. It stands astride the nexus between government, big business and mega-wealthy individuals. The potential conflict of interest between its work and a Hillary presidential term would ordinarily invite thorough media scrutiny and vetting.

Read it.

“We think this is the responsible thing to do for those less fortunate in our community,” said Moore.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Read it.

Debates among people who share utopian goals, in fact, are nothing new. I remember coming out in the 1970s and 1980s into a world of cultural feminism and lesbian separatism. Hardly an event would go by back then without someone feeling violated, hurt, traumatized by someone’s poorly phrased question, another person’s bad word choice or even just the hint of perfume in the room. People with various kinds of fatigue, easily activated allergies, poorly managed trauma were constantly holding up proceedings to shout in loud voices about how bad they felt because someone had said, smoked, or sprayed something near them that had fouled up their breathing room. Others made adjustments, curbed their use of deodorant, tried to avoid patriarchal language, thought before they spoke, held each other, cried, moped, and ultimately disintegrated into a messy, unappealing morass of weepy, hypo-allergic, psychosomatic, anti-sex, anti-fun, anti-porn, pro-drama, pro-processing post-political subjects.

Read it.

Bison bonasus was driven to extinction in the wild across Europe in 1927 after decades of decline from hunting and habitat loss. But it has become that rare endangered species: a conservation success story.

There are now thousands in the wild, all descended from the 54 individuals in captivity when the last wild one was killed in Poland’s Bialowieza forest.

Despite the increase in numbers, the European bison is still rarer than other high profile species, such as the black rhino, even with the reintroductions. There are over 5,000 European bison, with about 3,200 in the wild.

Read it. And watch the video.

The bricks — which are patent pending — are much like Lego in that they come in a variety of forms for different purposes and can easily connect together, with rows of knobs along the top of bricks that slot into voids along the bottom of other bricks. A special adhesive — which works like a super-strong double-sided sticky tape, a bit like 3M VHB — dispenses with the need for cement. They can be delivered to building sites in a kit complete with traditional doors and windows allowing for structures to be assembled with a minimum of debris and labour. Steel bars can be slotted through dedicated channels in the bricks to provide the same support as traditionally reinforced concrete.

Read it.

In recent years we in America have lived through a disturbing reversal of our concept of the citizen and our foundational rejection of the hereditary model.

Despite the fact that we are more than three hundred million strong, when it comes to political power, we seem intent on reestablishing the old hereditary aristocracy rejected, dismissed and dissolved by our ancestors.

Unlike the contemporary British model, with the Queen cozily ensconced in Buckingham Palace where she can do no harm, we Americans seem to be succumbing to the lure of a neo-aristocracy, one in which we endow our neo-aristocrats, our “royal families,” with full and unfettered political power and all that that entails.

The photographs of Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are not accidental.

If Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush were to become president of the United States it would mean the power and influence of the presidency remained in the hands of the Clinton family for possibly sixteen years, and that’s not even counting the princess in waiting, Chelsea; and in the case of the Bush family, possibly twenty years, and that’s not counting the heir apparent, George Prescott Bush.

Read it.

I do have one hunch about what will happen: social science research in to gay marriage will be discouraged, when it is not suppressed or demonized because any finding that might deviate from the current triumphalism will be politically incorrect. Just as most graduate students in social science stay away from certain aspects of research on minorities (see Jason Richwine for what can happen when you try it), this will become another area marked off limits.

Read it.

The original DRM.

Read it.

Why have the costs of a middle class lifestyle soared while income has stagnated?Though it is tempting to finger one ideologically convenient cause or another, there are four structural causes to this long-term trend:

1. Baumol’s Cost Disease
2. Systemic headwinds to the current version of capitalism
3. Dominance of global corporate capital
4. Financialization

Read it.

At this year’s event, I bumped into many friends and met a raft of new people—preachers, academics, diplomats, think-tankers, journalists—from every point on the political spectrum and from a kaleidoscope of religious traditions.  In between the discussions about the efficaciousness and evolution of RTP (“Responsibility to Protect) in international relations—there remain serious deficits in systematic application of a consistent standard which can require collective action, whether economic, diplomatic, or sometimes, military, by the international community in order to protect populations from crimes that their states are unwilling or unable to stop—and the analysis of challenges posed by social media as a tool for religious radicalization, mobilization, and action—religious extremist groups are using Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook with unprecedented scope and sophistication, as echo chambers to amplify hate and provoke violence—I couldn’t help but wonder: Why has the international community demonstrated no sense of responsibility to protect the Christian communities of the Middle East, given the mounting evidence that very existence is becoming ever-more tenuous because of the crimes perpetrated by jihadi extremists who are uploading 72-hours-per-minute of real-time horrors from the killing zones of Syria and Iraq?

Read it.

Most of us bake, roast, and broil our food using a technology that was invented 5,000 years ago for drying mud bricks: the oven. The original oven was clay, heated by a wood fire. Today, the typical oven is a box covered in shiny steel or sparkling enamel, powered by gas or electricity. But inside the oven, little has changed.

Well, except for me — if it can’t be cooked on a range or in a microwave, I don’t eat it. But it’s a problem for other people.

Read it.

For a decade or more, scientists have assumed our seas carry millions of tons of plastic, much of which should be floating in open water, forming vast midocean “gyres” — islands of man-made mess such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But according to a new study, something more worrying is happening to 99 percent of the ocean’s plastic: it’s disappearing.

Think about that for a second: Because an actual scientific study can’t find all the plastic that ‘scientists have assumed’ exist in the seas, it must have gone missing somehow. Oh noes!

I am reminded of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin puts a couple slices of bread in a toaster, waits, and shows Hobbes the resulting toast. Hobbes looks carefully at the toaster: “Wow. Where does the bread go?” and Calvin responds “Beats me. Isn’t that strange?”

These are the people who believe in Global Warming. Be very afraid.

A brief primer.

ISIL (al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria) began as Sunni Arab nationalists who lost their jobs, power and wealth when Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party were overthrown in early 2003. Saddam Hussein was a secular dictator, who tolerated Islamic terrorists if they attacked his enemies and behaved while hiding out in Iraq. After Saddam’s forces were thrown out of Kuwait in 1991 his policy changed and he declared that he was actually religious and he backed Sunni Islamic terrorist groups as long as they helped him keep the Shia Arab majority of Iraq under control. Sunni Islamic terrorists were willing to do this because Sunni conservatives consider Shia heretics worthy only of torture and death. The Iraqi Shia had staged a major rebellion against Saddam right after Saddam’s army get chewed up trying to hang onto Kuwait in 1991. That rebellion festered throughout the 1990s. Saddam and his key associates developed relationships with Sunni tribal leaders and Sunni Islamic terrorist groups, who had for decades been forced to keep their heads down. Once Saddam was out of power in 2003 the Sunni tribes and Islamic terrorists lost the financial and military support Saddam provided for over a decade. The Sunni Arab minority (about 20 percent of Iraqis) also lost control of the Iraq economy and all that oil money. This came as a big shock. Many of these Sunni Arabs wanted their wealth and power back and were willing to do anything to accomplish that task. That led to support for Islamic terrorist groups. The Sunni Arab minority in what is now Iraq has long dominated the area and feels that this domination is a right and a responsibility. They were always wealthier, better educated, more organized and prone to ruthlessness. By merging with Islamic terrorists they acquired the belief they had divine approval for their goals.

Read it.

Few are so conforming as non-conformists.

Since credentials are so important these days, here are mine. I’m a progammer, and a good one. I’ve worked at several companies that went on to be acquired and one that went IPO. I’ve founded companies and conducted hundreds of interviews. I’ve written well-respected books, am regularly invited to speak, and have been honored by the White House. I’ve devised novel ways to optimize billion-dollar computer clusters. You’ve almost certainly run code that I wrote.

I wouldn’t make it past the résumé screen if I were starting my career today.

…

Clothing is the least of it. Your entire lifestyle and outside interests are under examination, as is your “commitment”. Say you’re asked out for coffee on short notice, which you decline because you’re busy. Is that a “ding”? Did that lose you the job? Who knows? Maybe it did. You’re still trying to figure out what they mean by “wowing” them. Should you ask? Maybe you’ll seem desperate if you ask. Oh, shit!

The obscurity and arbitrariness are very much by design, and is why explainer posts are supposed to be so valuable. Having engineered an unfair situation, insiders then offer secret guides to winning it.

Read it.

And not the British kind, either.

It’s about time for some constitutional impiety on the right, and F.H. Buckley answers the call in his bracing and important new book, The Once and Future King. Buckley, a professor of law at George Mason University and a senior editor at The American Spectator, is unmistakably conservative. But that doesn’t stop him from pointing out that America’s not so all-fired exceptional—or from arguing that our Constitution has made key contributions to our national decline.

Scott Johnson of PowerLine looks at one of the many billionaires of which Harry Reid claims Democrats don’t have many.

This past April, with the help of a knowledgeable reader, we took a deep dive into the fossil fuel investments of Democratic money man and environmental poseur Tom Steyer in “The epic hypocrisy of Tom Steyer.” Introducing our reader’s report, John wrote regarding Steyer: “Today, he is a bitter opponent of fossil fuels, especially coal. That fits with his current economic interests: banning coal-fired power plants will boost the value of his solar projects. But it was not always thus. In fact, Steyer owes his fortune in large part to the fact that he has been one of the world’s largest financers of coal projects. Tom Steyer was for coal before he was against it.”

Read it.

In the not-too-distant future, everyone could be an electric company, selling power into the grid just like the owners of giant generating plants.

The idea of powering the electric grid from a multitude of sources is called distributed generation. Homeowners can already buy solar generators and furnaces that simultaneously produce heat and electricity. On the horizon are home battery systems that could let homeowners store solar power generated during the day for use at night.

Distributed generation isn’t pie-in-the sky — the know-how exists to build these systems. But the technology is held back by cost and by regulations that don’t allow for tiny contributions to the power grid. Federal energy experts figure costs will drop and regulatory issues will be overcome, and that the amount of electricity homes and businesses produce through distributed generation could roughly double over the next 25 years. That’s not enough to replace big generating plants, but enough to have a big impact.

Matador Pocket Blanket

Waffles on a Stick

Portable Security Door Device. For when the SWAT team mistakes your door for that of the drug dealer down the street. (Maybe this time they won’t shoot your dog.)

Edible Cupcake Wrappers.

Distance-Calculating Binoculars. In case you run across some Tuskan raiders.

LED Grill Light Spatula. In case you’re grilling in the dark for some reason.

Bottle Opener Cuff Links. If James Bond had had ’em, he would have used ’em.

Leatherman Skeletool. What Optimus Prime carries in his back pocket.

Finger-Friendly Guitar Company Keyboard. In case you don’t want karate-master calluses on your left hand.

Personalized Earbuds. Stick it in yer ear.

Beer Slushie Maker. For those who like that sort of thing (you know who you are).

Read it.

After puppy-cams, you know it had to happen.

I’d be interested in a shark-cam, myself.

Read it.

Democrats — the party of the 1%.

Read it.

President Barack Obama is fond of describing the deep inequality afflicting American society. And then he goes off to play golf. He’s getting near the 200-round mark for his entire presidency, a sporting feat perhaps worthy of Teddy Roosevelt for its sheer audacity.

Golf is the most unequal sport in America, demanding expensive fees or country club memberships. Yet if the president plays it so often, golf must be inherently patriotic–right?

Read it.

The population of Mogadishu is moving to Minneapolis, through the miracle of chain immigration. I don’t know whether there is any limiting principle to this or whether all of Mogadishu will one day reside along the Mississippi, but in any event, the Somali influx is already impacting Minnesota politics.

Despite being “natural conservatives”–imagine what they must think of abortion and gay marriage!–the Somalis have so far been reliable Democratic voters. This has created one of this year’s most interesting local races, in which Phyllis Kahn, a left-wing Democrat who has represented her district in the Minnesota House of Representatives for 42 (!) years, is being challenged in a primary by one Mohamud Noor. Kahn has long enjoyed the perks of a Democratic insider, including the privilege of owning a $1 house on prime Minneapolis real estate. But so far, all of that seems to avail her little as she fights for her political life against Mr. Noor.

Freeberg has some fun mocking the eminently mockable.

Here’s the deal: You want something and decide your want is actually a need. So, since you need it, your employer buys it for you, because he’s compelled to do so by force of law. Forget about how much it has to do with the contract between you & him, that doesn’t matter because you need it.

And because you need it, you get to dictate the parameters of this thing you need so, so badly — but somehow, can’t quite get around to opening your billfold to pay for it. It is to be provided to suit your preferences, just as if you were the person spending the money. Which is stupid, silly, idiotic…but, it’s gotta be that way. Otherwise, everybody goes completely apeshit, because that’s how they make sure this alternative economic system continues to service them, by going completely apeshit. It’s an economic system built on wrath instead of on greed. And that’s what is happening with this “Hobby Lobby case.” They’re having their pandemic, highly organized temper tantrum, so that consumers in the secondary economic system can enjoy as much choice as consumers in the primary economic system.

Given that, none of this is surprising. Except for the lengths to which these secondary-economic-system advocates will go, to keep on pushing it. It is truly…exhausting. It’s just like the teenager dreaming up endlessly twisting & contorting “legal” arguments about why it isn’t his turn to take out the garbage, when it would be so much less work to just take out the garbage. Why not just earn money for the things they want & need, put it in the bank for awhile, and then spend it? It’s truly baffling. Sandra Fluke, to the best of my knowledge, has yet to answer the question.

The essentially juvenile nature of the “Left” in this country is the truly depressing aspect of most modern political questions. You keep hoping they’ll grow up but they never do.

Read it.

The militant group called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria seemed to surprise many American and Iraqi officials with the recent gains it made in its violent campaign to create a new religious state. But the victories achieved in the past few weeks were built on months of maneuvering along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which define a region known as the cradle of civilization.

Read it.

And here I thought Cilantro was a character in the newest teen-vampire book. Or perhaps some disgusting condition for which they’ve recently developed a creme.

Read it.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel have been directed to no longer refer to illegal immigrant children crossing the border alone as “UACs” (unaccompanied alien children).

Instead these individuals are to be referred to as “unaccompanied children” in official correspondence, according to an internal ICE email obtained by the Center for Immigration Studies and shared with Breitbart News.

And the government prepares to cave once again.

The Other McCain lays it out for you.

For example, it is often claimed or implied that the development and promotion of oral contraceptives in the 1960s was undertaken in order to “liberate” women; in fact, this project was funded by billionaires (especially David Rockefeller) who were fanatically devoted to a eugenics-influenced vision of population control. (See Donald L. Critchlow’s excellent 2001 history, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Goverment in Modern America.) The arguments that sold The Pill as a particular blessing to women — and which, by obverse correlation, portrayed pregnancy and motherhood as traumatic burdens to be avoided if at all possible — was promulgated by public-relations specialists hired by Rockefeller and other soi-disant “philanthropists” who shared his population-control agenda.

ISIL Staged ‘Mass Executions’ in Iraq’s Tikrit

ISIS’s Horrifying Propaganda Reveals Who They Really Are

Sunni militants declare Islamic state in Iraq and Syria

Gunmen torch churches, kill dozens in Nigeria

Marine who disappeared in Iraq in 2004 is back in US custody

After Iraq Gains, Qaeda Offshoot Claims Islamic Caliphate

Three Kidnapped Israeli Teens Found Dead in Hebron

‘Moderate’ Palestinian Leader Justifies Murder of Three Teens

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Message as Caliph

Read it.

It’s no secret that one-percenters have occupied more than their share of Manhattan’s rent-controlled apartments. High profile freeloaders of the past include New Yorker editor William Shawn, singers Carly Simon and Cyndi Lauper, TV personality Alistair Cooke, Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Philippe de Montebello, former Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen, screenwriter Nora Ephron, Mick Jagger’s ex, Bianca, and Mayor Ed Koch (D). Manhattan Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-13th District) famously pigged out on four rent-controlled pads—three to live in and one for his campaign office.

Democrats – party of the 1%. That’s not on your copy, of course.

De Blasio, who ran on a promise to reduce inequality, is now enabling upper middle class New Yorkers to tap into these subsidies to serve their housing needs. In a city in which one in five households lives below the poverty line, spending limited government dollars so professionals earning six figures don’t have to leave their favored neighborhoods is obscene.

Suckers….

Read it.

Finally. People are beginning to catch on.

Mark Steyn occasionally lets reality harsh his mellow.

Naftali Frenkel was a US citizen. That’s to say, he was entitled to the protection of Obama and his worthless State Department. In geopolitical terms, the problem is not Mr Frenkel’s murderers: every society has its share of blood-lusting savages. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians exult in Mr Frenkel’s murder.

Palestinian “nationalism” is a euphemism for a death-cult whose pathologies seep into almost every routine daily transaction: The last time I was there, a few years ago, the affable proprietors at almost every convenience store had various local Martyrs of the Week pinned up on the wall behind the cash register, and the Education Ministry was giving first prize in its letter-writing competition to a seventh-grader from Jenin pledging to his deceased father to become a suicide bomber and “propel my living-dead body into your arms”. Their own corpses are historic victories, and Jewish corpses are the spoils thereof. There is no evidence of “nation-building”, nor any appetite therefor. Invited to choose between nation-building and Jew-killing, they plump for the latter, every time.

Obama did not create this sickness, but he is rewarding it. If you can kill Jews and US citizens without the Great Satan putting a stop on the nine-figure check, then you’ve got the best of both worlds.

Bryan Caplan realizes that he’s doing it wrong — and so is everyone else.

My lessons were fully effective. Before long, my sons were experts – and so they will remain for their whole lives. Which led to an awkward realization: My technique for teaching shoe-tying is much more effective than my technique for teaching economics. In my experience, only 5-10% of my students master the material by the final exam. And even my best students tend to quickly forget most of what they learned.

I’m tempted to lament the Iron Laws of Pedagogy. But my shoe-tying experience tells me that’s a cop-out. I know how to make my students learn more. If filling my students with life-long knowledge were my top priority, I’d replace my thoughtful lectures with catechisms. I’d make the students chant aloud with me. I’d break every lesson into baby steps, and drive the students to master them one by one. How? I’d randomly and mercilessly put students on the spot, pressing them to apply the lesson aloud – and correct the slightest misstep. We’d meet seven days a week for half an hour, endlessly recapping what we’ve learned. Sure, I’d cover far less ground. Yet after a semester, my students would know the basics for a lifetime.

Why don’t I do this? While I could say, “The best way to teach shoe-tying is radically different from the best way to teach economics,” that’s an excuse. The truth: I don’t teach econ the same way I teaching shoe-tying because I’d hate it, and my students would hate me.

I guess being loved is more important than being effective. (And people wonder why our schools are so ineffective.)

Read it.

A couple of years ago I was invited to a gathering on behalf of Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico who then was a libertarian candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. I was well disposed toward him, but when he started talking, his first subject was legalization of drugs. Now he is the CEO of a marijuana company. Rand Paul is probably the leading libertarian at the moment; he purports to take seriously the threat that someone drinking coffee in an American cafe will be struck by a drone-fired missile.

I find it difficult to take seriously a group of people who worry more about legalizing pot than sharing a world with a billion adherents of a religion that has at its core a requirement to conquer and oppress all who don’t join up, not to mention what it does to those who do.

American liberty is indeed under attack, and a libertarian movement is needed more than ever. But the threat to freedom is not drug laws or drone attacks. The principal threat is the administrative state, which increasingly hems in everything we do and depends hardly at all on the will of voters. This morning, Scott published commentary by Professor Philip Hamburger, author of Is Administrative Law Unlawful?. It is, in my opinion, the most important post we have had on Power Line in a very long time. Hamburger argues that the “modern” administrative state has been accepted as the inevitable concomitant of a complex contemporary society. In fact, he says, it is nothing new: it is, rather, the same kingly rule by extralegal “prerogative” that our Constitution was specifically designed to prevent.

Read it.

Beginning on July 21, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will increase its passenger security fees from $2.50 per flight to a flat rate of $5.60 each way. These fees help cover the TSA’s baggage and behavior screening programs.

Similar to the way concentration camps would remove gold fillings from the teeth of the people they gassed.