ECONOMY GOT YOU DOWN? 5 Ways America Is Still On Top.
Archive for 2011
September 26, 2011
ACHIEVING EQUALITY THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY: Income Gender Gap Narrows As Male Earnings Fall.
AT AMAZON, Top Deals In Electronics.
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Americans Express Historic Negativity Toward U.S. Government. Including this: “49% of Americans believe the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. In 2003, less than a third (30%) believed this.”
Related: New Low: 17% Say U.S. Government Has Consent of the Governed.
UNLOCKING THE LAW: If you missed it last week, the whole of Truth On The Market’s Symposium on Deregulating the Legal Profession is now online in one place.
BETTER SEX through better sleep?
PHILLIP LONGMAN: Actually, The Children Aren’t The Future: The World Will Be More Crowded — With Old People. “The U.N. now projects that over the next 40 years, more than half (58 percent) of the world’s population growth will come from increases in the number of people over 60, while only 6 percent will come from people under 30. Indeed, the U.N. projects that by 2025, the population of children under 5, already in steep decline in most developed countries, will be falling globally — and that’s even after assuming a substantial rebound in birth rates in the developing world. A gray tsunami will be sweeping the planet.”
NOT SURE THIS APPLIES IF YOU’RE MARRIED: How the ‘price’ of sex has dropped to record lows. “Women are jumping into the sack faster and with fewer expectations about long-term commitments than ever, effectively discounting the ‘price’ of sex to a record low, according to social psychologists.”
SURVIVING a Tornado.
CONCEALED CARRY: Looking for some crowdsourcing help.
IN WISCONSIN, IT’S BROWNSHIRTS VS. BROWNCOATS: ‘Firefly’ and Anti-Fascism Posters Get Professor Threatened with Criminal Charges on University of Wisconsin Campus.
A professor has been censored twice, reported to the “threat assessment team,” and threatened with criminal charges because of satirical postings on his office door. Campus police at the University of Wisconsin–Stout (UWS) censored theater professor James Miller’s poster depicting a quotation from actor Nathan Fillion’s character in the television series Firefly, and the police chief threatened Miller with criminal charges for disorderly conduct. After UWS censored his second poster, which stated, “Warning: Fascism,” Miller came to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.
“Colleges and universities are supposed to foster brave and bold environments of freewheeling intellectual inquiry and expression. If a quote from a network science fiction show is a bridge too far, something has gone seriously wrong,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “As both president of FIRE and a huge Firefly fan, I call on the chancellor of UW–Stout to rein in his overreaching administration and to restore both free speech and basic common sense.”
My advice to Wisconsin voters and legislators — remember this at budget time. Meanwhile, as a show of solidarity, I’m replacing the Battlestar Galactica poster on my door with one for Serenity.
UPDATE: Reader Eric Akawie emails:
I wonder if the Firefly poster would be considered acceptable if it were the same words over a silhouette of Che Guevara.
Not that that was a philosophy Che would have likely espoused anyway.
Not hardly, as Che was a cowardly loser.
ANOTHER UPDATE: The Clear And Present Danger Posed By Space Captains.
CANADA: Greenpeace call for “mass civil disobedience” over oilsands brings out dozens. It’s hard to get people to protest Ethical Oil.
ADMINISTRATIVE LAW JUDGES IN SOCIAL SECURITY DISABILITY CASES: Unconstitutional?
WHO’S PROGRAMMING HIS TELEPROMPTER? L.A. Times: New gaffe: Obama confuses Jews with janitors. Video and transcript at the link.
UPDATE: Related: Maxine Waters: Obama would never tell the Jews or the gays to stop complaining.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Report From The Middle East: Part One. “President Obama fell into a trap when he made a settlement freeze a precondition for talks. Secretly, both Israelis and Palestinian leaders are, I think, delighted that the US is now so tangled up in this demand that it has lost most of its influence over negotiations. The Palestinians are happier than the Israelis; it looks to world opinion as if it is Israeli intransigence on the settlement issue that is the chief obstacle to peace. But the Israeli government — while angry at Obama for making them look even worse than usual to much of the world — is also relieved that the settlement demand is so unpopular in Israel that Prime Minister Netanyahu pays no domestic political price for rejecting it.”
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Why Does The Good Life End?
Redistribution of wealth rather than emphasis on its creation is surely a symptom of aging societies. Whether at Byzantium during the Nika Riots or in bread and circuses Rome, when the public expects government to provide security rather than the individual to become autonomous through a growing economy, then there grows a collective lethargy. I think that is the message of Juvenal’s savage satires about both mobs and the idle rich. Fourth-century Athenian literature is characterized by forensic law suits, as citizens sought to sue each other, or to sue the state for sustenance, or to fight over inheritances.
The subtext of Petronius’s Satyricon is an affluent, childless, often underemployed citizenry seeking inheritances and lampooning the productive classes that produce enough excess for the wily to get by just fine without working. Somewhere around 1985 in California I noticed that my students were hoping for a state job first, a federal job second, a municipal job third — and a private one last. Around 1990, suddenly two sorts of commercials were aired everywhere: how to join a law suit by calling a law firm’s 1-800 number or how to get a free power chair, scooter, or some other device by calling the 1-800 number of a health care company that would do the paper work for Social Security on your behalf.
Why is it more moral for a federal bureaucrat in a state-supplied SUV to shut down an offshore oil rig on grounds that it is too dangerous for the environment than for a private individual to risk his own capital to find some sort of new fuel to power his government’s SUV fleet? All affluent societies believe that they are just too rich not to be able to afford another regulation, just one more moralizing indulgence, yet again an added entitlement. But as we see now in postmodern America, idle 250,000 acres of farmland for a tiny fish, shut down an entire oilfield, put off a new natural gas find in worry over possible environmental alteration, add a cent to the sales tax, mandate yet another prescription drug entitlement not funded, or offer yet another in-state tuition discount to an illegal alien — and the costs finally equate to an implosion as we see in Greece or California.
Read the whole thing.
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT IN TURMOIL over allegations of political hiring.
POLITICO: Can This Congress Do Anything Right? That was a rhetorical question, wasn’t it?
CHUCK FLEISCHMANN: Less Government, More Jobs. That does seem to be how it works. . . .
UPDATE: Related: New-Home Sales Fall To Six-Month Low.
TODAY ONLY SALE: The First 7 Harry Potter Movies on DVD or Blu-Ray.
Also, while they last, get Seinfeld: The Complete Series for $99.99.
NOT SET IN STONE: On Facebook, Rich Galen reminds us: “4 yrs ago the GOP leaders were Giuliani (28%) & Thompson (23). Dems were Hillary (47) & Obama (26).”
SYRIAN DISSIDENTS ORGANIZE THEIR OWN ARMY.