GEORGE WILL ON Education’s Status Quo.

ANOTHER PASSOVER MASSACRE.

CHARGES OF “POLITICAL CORRUPTION AND BACKROOM DEALS” in the Bank of America robo-signing settlement.

AT AMAZON, a clearance on outdoor and athletic clothing.

WHO IS WATCHING THE COPS? “The ticket-fixing scandal in New York City is a reminder that police officers cannot be trusted to patrol their own, and citizens must pick up the slack.”

Of course, here’s a guy who was beaten and subjected to false arrest for filming Las Vegas police.

WATCHING THADDEUS MCCOTTER on a DVR’ed episode of Redeye. He’s surprisingly funny.

WAPO: WikiLeaks discloses new details on whereabouts of al-Qaeda leaders on 9/11. “On Sept. 11, 2001, the core of al-Qaeda was concentrated in a single city: Karachi, Pakistan.”

BARACK OBAMA: The Unhappy President?

FARID GHADRY: Where is your Syrian Humanitarian Flotilla Erdogan?

PHOTO ESSAY: Robots At Work And Play.

UPDATE: Yes, the one with Obama does look like Photoshop-fodder, doesn’t it?

NEW YORK SUN: Sarah Palin For The Fed?

The big question as Chairman Bernanke gets set for his first quarterly press conference is how Sarah Palin was able to figure out sooner than everyone else that the Federal Reserve’s campaign of quantitative easing wouldn’t work. Disappointment in the Fed’s policies is being reported this morning at the top of page one of the New York Times. It reports that “most Americans are not feeling the difference” from the Fed’s “experimental effort to spur a recovery by purchasing vast quantities of federal debt.” It reports that “a broad range of economists say that the disappointing results show the limits of the central bank’s ability to lift the nation from its economic malaise.”

It’s a terrific story, and well-timed, given that on Wednesday Mr. Bernanke will break tradition and meet with the press. It is part of the Fed’s effort to get ahead of what is emerging as a public relations catastrophe, as gasoline is nearing six dollars a gallon at some pumps, the cost of groceries is skyrocketing, and the value of the dollars that Mr. Bernanke’s institution issues as Federal Reserve notes has collapsed to less than a 1,500th of an ounce of gold. Unemployment is still high. Shakespeare couldn’t come up with a better plot. But how in the world did Mrs. Palin, who is supposed to be so thick, manage to figure all this out so far ahead of the New York Times and all the economists it talked to?

She did this back in November in a speech at Phoenix, which the Wall Street Journal, in a laudatory editorial at the time, characterized as zeroing in on the connection between a weak dollar and rising prices for oil and food. “We don’t want temporary, artificial economic growth brought at the expense of permanently higher inflation which will erode the value of our incomes and our savings,” the Journal quoted Mrs. Palin as saying. “We want a stable dollar combined with real economic reform. It’s the only way we can get our economy back on the right track.” Now here is the New York Times quoting a raft of economists who have reached the conclusion that Mrs. Palin’s warning was right down the line.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Don Surber:

The Fed bet $900 billion it didn’t have — and it lost. . . . There should be severe penalties and frankly, not only should we fire Ben Bernanke, but we should strip him of his pension and sue him for economic malpractice. There should also be a federal grand jury investigating this monumental failure.

I think we’ll hear more sentiments along this line as the news of the Fed’s failure sinks in.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Mike Cardwell writes:

Inflation is poorly understood, but let me submit a basic propositions. The much more obvious reasons for inflation are rising input prices due to increasing restrictions on supply of these key ingredients. There’s much to blame Obama and the Democrats for. They’ve made working more expensive (min wage, health care, etc) and crummy foreign policy is making oil more expensive. Labor and oil are basic ingredients to most every good created by our economy, and so we get price inflation.

Whatever the policy failings of the Fed are (and I could go on at length on them), this isn’t one of them. The simple truth is both easier to understand and more damning. But we have to understand it in order to fix it.

The test of understanding is predictive power. And reader Eric Schubert emails:

As much as it pains me, I have to strongly disagree with you and Sarah. I’m a financial historian by background whose doctoral study focused on financial crises. I strongly agree with the Fed Chairman’s choices in quantitative easing. He is more than aware of some of the inflation risk associated with his actions, but I agree with his assessment that the absolute devastation that accompanies real deflation more than offsets the well-know downsides of QE. The Chairman made his bones studying the Great Depression, and he is determined to avoid that death spiral. He should be applauded, not condemned.

If you need to blame someone, blame the President and former Speaker Pelosi who utterly wasted $800 billion on a rushed, ill-conceived, politically-driven stimulus package. Spending on public goods can be very beneficial when they complement the private sector, rather than focusing on consumption spending or social engineering.

The Fed Chairman was the only adult in the room in economic policy from the Fall of 2008 through the Fall of 2010. He can’t control the stalemate in Congress, nor can he be held responsible for the unwillingness of large portions of the public to face up to our poor long-term finances.

Well, that’s certainly true.

LOTS OF PEOPLE HAVE SENT ME this piece on David Eagleman and neuroscience. It’s very interesting, and I particularly like the bit on drummers’ sense of time. It’s real, but I think it can be cultivated: When I was producing blues and rock, drummer Doug Weinstein would spot stuff rushing or lagging the beat that I couldn’t hear unless he pointed it out. But once I started producing techno, my sense of beat-timing became vastly more refined, and even slight departures stood out to me. Synesthesia helps, too — I can (or could, back when I was doing that sort of thing regularly) hear tiny differences in delay time quite clearly, but “hear” isn’t quite the right word, because really they looked different.

The thing about drummers hearing beats everywhere, and that being as much a curse as a blessing, is true, too. . . .

PROF. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s Rich: Bob Woodward Bemoans Celebrity Journalism.

JON HENKE EMAILS: “I was thinking about the ongoing revolutions in the Middle East and surrounding areas and I recalled something you wrote in 2002 that really captured what is happening in that region today. Concerning ‘preference cascades’, you wrote…”

This illustrates, in a mild way, the reason why totalitarian regimes collapse so suddenly. (Click here for a more complex analysis of this and related issues). Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it – but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.

This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers – or even to the citizens themselves. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they’re also often true: Even if one loathes the regime, few people have the force of will to stage one-man revolutions, and when preferences are sufficiently falsified, each dissident may feel that he or she is the only one, or at least part of a minority too small to make any difference.

One interesting question is whether a lot of the hardline Arab states are like this. Places like Iraq, Syria, or Saudi Arabia spend a lot of time telling their citizens that everyone feels a particular way, and punishing those who dare to differ, which has the effect of encouraging people to falsify their preferences. But who knows? Given the right trigger, those brittle authoritarian regimes might collapse overnight, with most of the population swearing – with all apparent sincerity – that it had never supported them, or their anti-Western policies, at all.

Perhaps we should think about how to make it so.

He continues: “It is becoming so. Preferences are cascading against the current regimes. Let us hope their preferences continue to cascade towards democratization and freedom, rather than simply into the arms of new dictators.” Indeed. I had pretty much forgotten that column, but it does fit today’s events pretty well.

Er, read the whole thing, as they say. . . . And if you want to know more about this phenomenon, I highly recommend Timur Kuran’s Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, which inspired that column.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? How Obama Failed to Close Guantanamo Bay. “The White House asserts it was fully engaged in the effort to close Guantanamo.”

AT AMAZON, Up to 50% off cordless power tools.

WEAPONIZING GPS TRACKING DEVICES: “Those low-cost embedded tracking devices in your smartphone or those personal GPS devices that track the whereabouts of your children, car, pet, or shipment can easily be intercepted by hackers, who can then pinpoint their whereabouts, impersonate them, and spoof their physical location, a researcher has discovered.”

XCOR CEO JEFF GREASON: Making Space Pay and Having Fun Doing It.

“‘Daddy, is it really true that people used to fly to the Moon when you were a boy?’ It shook me, because that’s how a Dark Age begins.”

REDISCOVERING the Mighty Thor.

ASK DR. HELEN: Pathological Altruism: Does Evil Wear a Politically Correct Mask? Talking with Barbara Oakley about Cold-Blooded Kindness and political correctness.

SUSANNAH BRESLIN: How Your Journalism Sausage Gets Made, Part One.

And here’s Part Two.

Also, Part Three. Good advice in all of them for people who want to make it in media today.

SO MUCH FOR THOSE OFF-THE-RACK SUITS we heard about. I want the record to reflect my early suspicions.

TOM FRIEDMAN WAS UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: China seizes Christians in Easter raid. “Dozens of Chinese Christians were arrested on Sunday when police prevented an evangelical Protestant church from holding its Easter Sunday service, as the state continued its attack on protests against one-party rule. . . . Yesterday’s arrests were a continuation of the authorities’ increase in repression of dissenters to stop any chance of a revolution such as those seen in North Africa and the Middle-East.”

TELEGRAPH: Lobbyists who cleared ‘Climategate’ academics funded by taxpayers and the BBC. Hmm.

HMM: Botox May Deaden Ability to Empathize, New Study Says. “According to a study published in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science, Botox may not only numb facial muscles, but also – and for the same reason – numb users’ perception of other people’s emotions.”