STRANGE THINGS HAPPENING with the Exclusionary Rule.

RAND SIMBERG: 2010: A Momentous Year For Commercial Spaceflight.

A BLOG REPORT: Ashley Smithwick And The Paring Knife. “The whole thing struck me as silly. There was no reason to call an emergency meeting to have a discussion in private, to issue a press release. I can’t think of how they could have been more irritating in how they did it short of actually getting rude. The Chairman and the Superintendent were politicians. Who knew that a pair of leaders of a little school board in a small county in rural North Carolina would come across like seasoned politicians? They refused to characterize the situation at all. . . . When the discussion arose about the Smithwicks providing a written release, the Superintendent said that he would not, in their place, give a release to the press, because he would not want the press to be rooting around in his child’s records. That struck me as an implied threat.”

CATCHING ON to the entitlement disaster.

HMM: Report: Tesla Model S will be profitable thanks to cheaper batteries.

BYRON YORK: ObamaCare Mess Is Legacy Of Dems’ Moment of Power.

NOT SMART: GOP Goes All Wobbly On Fannie and Freddie.

IN THE MAIL: From Judge Irene Sullivan, Raised by the Courts: One Judge’s Insight into Juvenile Justice.

YA THINK? The Hill: Dem regrets language in memo on ‘death panels’ that reignited debate.

MORE ON THE HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE:

The indubitable virtue of increased public spending on higher education has become another theory, like global warming, that has a divided life. As the general public grows more and more skeptical about it, the people society pays to be skeptical—professors and journalists—by and large continue to see nothing amiss. . . . Generally, if the topic is acknowledged at all, it is done so in scorn for the philistines who would reduce the “value” of a college degree to the job prospects and earnings of graduates. Never mind that higher education has been busy selling itself to the public in precisely those terms for the last fifty years and that the official position of the Obama administration is that our “national competitiveness” depends on a huge expansion in the number of young people who earn college degrees.

But I’m ready to concede the point. Higher education should be about more than gaining a credential that gives one a leg up in the marketplace. But if we are going to re-focus the debate on the non-utilitarian substance of higher learning—on the transmission of disciplined intellectual inquiry, on developing civilized discernment, on aspiration for genuinely higher knowledge—we had better be prepared to rethink our national preoccupation with mass higher education. Judged by those standards, contemporary American undergraduate education as a whole is a colossal failure.

Which is it? Do we want to run a mass credentialing service that the public increasingly views as an expensive con? Or do we want to engage in rigorous higher education as something that has intrinsic value, but which our current system is ill-suited to provide?

Read the whole thing.

RAND SIMBERG: The Shelby Swindle. NASA is forced to spend a half-billion dollars on a canceled rocket, and Rand observes: “It’s always useful to note that half a billion dollars is about what SpaceX has spent to date on: creating a company, purchasing/leasing/modifying test, manufacturing and launch facilities, developing from scratch and demonstrating engines, two orbital launch systems, and a pressurized return capsule.”

Related: “Perhaps the most dysfunctional Congress in history.” Well, at least it’s over.

STILL OFFERING A BUNCH OF YEAR-END DEALS AT AMAZON. But not for much longer!

THAT LEE COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD EMERGENCY MEETING: InstaPundit reader (and blogger himself) Sean Sorrentino is there and emails: “I’m in the meeting. There’s a TV camera here, and about half a dozen spectators currently. I’ll take notes and let you know what happens.”

UPDATE: Transparency! Sorrentino follows up: “The first and only thing that was said was for the Vice Chair, John T Bonardi to move to go to closed session. They are currently in closed session upstairs to discuss ‘information not subject to public records,’ and to ‘preserve the attorney client privelige.’ There’s still time for more Sanford locals to show up.” They sound nervous. As, it seems, they should be.

IS THIS THE NEW GOLDEN AGE OF TV?

NEW YORK POST: Sanitation Workers Targeted Specific Neighborhoods In Snow Slowdown. “The selfish Sanitation bosses who sabotaged the blizzard cleanup to fire a salvo at City Hall targeted politically connected and well-heeled neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn to get their twisted message across loud and clear, The Post has learned. Their motives emerged yesterday as the city’s Department of Investigation admitted it began a probe earlier this week after hearing rumblings of a coordinated job action. Sources told The Post several neighborhoods were on the workers’ hit list — including Borough Park and Dyker Heights in Brooklyn and Middle Village in Queens — because residents there have more money and their politicians carry big sticks.”

I think that Whacking Day is coming around, and they may regret that choice . . . .

AND KIDS HAVE GOTTEN STEADILY FATTER THE WHOLE TIME:

For all the talk in Washington of finally regulating schools into better food choices – the core purpose of the child nutrition bill that the President signed into law earlier this month – a bit of sore news during this sweet holiday season: the federal government has been in the business of micro-managing our children’s lunches for 30 years.

The people busy subsidizing corn production and talking up the consumption of cheese (paying for a $12 million ad campaign for Domino’s new line of cheese-heavy pizzas), will now be charged with better regulating the school-lunch programs they’ve been negligently regulating for 3 decades.

Add in the fact that millions of kids’ meals are federally sponsored with the school lunch program, meaning that the unhealthy food served often receives a double subsidy (to agribusiness and then to schools). Taxpayers are paying and paying again.

With rising rates of childhood obesity, Washington has been regulating and subsidizing a new generation of diabetics.

If this weren’t the government, it would be prosecuted as a criminal enterprise.

PROGRESS: University of Virginia Reforms Speech Code.

SAYING GOODBYE TO KODACHROME.

JULIAN ASSANGE DEFENSE: It’s not rape-rape. “… just because he’s a rapist doesn’t mean I’m saying he’s some some sort of violent… It’s such a loaded term….”

IS LIBERTARIANISM a “weird perversion?” Or is that just a sales slogan? . . . .

EIGHT BOTCHED ENVIRONMENTAL FORECASTS. Snow? A thing of the past!

Plus, a rare image of Time Magazine’s How To Survive The Coming Ice Age cover.

UPDATE: So rare it’s a Photoshop. Well, dang.

THE NEW YORK SNOW DEBACLE: Time To Rethink Public Employee Unions. If by “rethink” you mean “outlaw.”

DOGMA AND THE NEW PROGRESSIVES.

UNSURPRISING: “I have an easier time being openly gay with conservatives than I do being a conservative with other gay people.”

MAKING THE RUBBLE BOUNCE: Victor Davis Hanson on Colman McCarthy.

What does “the intellectual purity of a school” mean in 2010? That was tragically lost a long time ago in the 1960s when “relevant” courses (particularly -studies courses) became deductive, with preconceived ends that justified biased means of teaching. Examine questions of free speech, intellectual diversity, and tolerance for minority opinion on an average campus, and the notion of “intellectual purity” is rendered Orwellian

They told me if I voted Republican, narrowminded zealots would be subjecting universities to “intellectual purity” tests. And they were right!