TIGER MOTHERS: Thoughts on Amy Chua, from Tom Smith. “So why all the piano? I think it must be that it happens to be something you can get prizes for. . . . It seems like an urban upper middle class version of the kiddie beauty contests satirized in Little Miss Sunshine. Yes, parents can do this to kids, but the question is, why would they want to? . . . Imagine, looking back, if you had an IQ of 150 and two Ivy League professors as parents, with the resources of a great university at your fingertips, with all of human culture laid out like a banquet ready for you — would you want to spend three hours a day playing the piano? And never be allowed to talk to other children about the books you were reading, the places you had traveled, your first try at a real poem, learning to ice skate, to sing, dance, fly a kite, make a pizza, shoot a bow and arrow, serve a ball, ski, paint? That’s a helluva expensive piano trophy. . . . Many of us would agree that all this precious over-regard for the self-esteem of children is utter rubbish. Kids’ self-esteem will survive being told to turn off the damn XBox and go do their homework. But this Tiger Mother stuff strikes me as being about as appealing as foot-binding.”

IN THE MAIL: From Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists: A Novel.

SARAH HOYT IS feeling better about E-publishing all of a sudden.

FELIX SALMON: The US won’t default, even if the debt ceiling stays.

In any given month, the government’s income dwarfs its debt-service obligations, which means that the government could simply pay all interest on Treasury bonds out of its cashflow. Greg hasn’t run the numbers on principal maturities, but I’m pretty sure that they too could be covered out of cash receipts—and when that happened, of course, the total debt outstanding would go down, and we wouldn’t be bumping up against the ceiling any more.

The point here is that the government has enormous expenditures every month, and debt service constitutes an important yet small part of them. If the debt ceiling weren’t raised, it stands to reason that just about any other form of government spending would get cut before Tim Geithner dreamed of defaulting on risk-free bonds.

So they could just . . . cut spending in response? No way, that’s crazy-talk!

HOW TO CUT THE GUN DEATH TOLL: CNN Says Don’t Let People Carry Howitzers.

THE STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE OF DANCHO DANCHEV: “Zero Day blogger and malware researcher Dancho Danchev has gone missing since August of last year. Dancho, who was relentless in his pursuit of cyber-criminals, last blogged here on August 18. His personal blog has not been updated since September 11, 2010.” Has he been abducted by Bulgarian authorities? No one’s sure.

ONE DAY ONLY: A two-terabyte external hard drive for $94.99. I wish everything got better and cheaper at the same rate as electronics. I remember when a 10-megabyte (yes, megabyte) hard drive was something, and cost several hundred bucks.

UPDATE: Reader Charles Purvis writes:

I worked for Computer Shopper magazine from 1993-2001, and when I started there, we carried ads for 1 GB SCSI hard drives, for $10,000. They looked like something you would mount to the deck of a battleship with lag bolts, and were easily the size of 2-3 ammo cases.

Now I can get an 8 GB SDHC card for $13.

And reader Steve Nelson emails:

Glenn, I have a 1982 Byte Magazine with an ad on the back cover marveling how for only $6,000, you too could own the very latest in storage technology: the 5-MEGABYTE Winchester hard drive.

Only 1200 bucks a megabyte! Such a deal!

As you can tell, I might have been in this business too long.

Like I say, if only everything got better and cheaper at the same rate as electronics.

CHANGE: Global Food Chain Stretched To The Limit.

UPDATE: Reader Don Wolff points out this bit from the linked article: “Conley estimates that more than a third of the corn produced in the U.S is now used to make ethanol.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: More from Ken Anderson.

POINTS AND FIGURES: Is There An Education Bubble? Things that can’t go on forever, won’t.

CHUMMY IN LOS ANGELES: Sheriff Lee Baca launched a criminal probe at request of fashion magnate. “Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca personally launched a criminal investigation in another police agency’s jurisdiction after a request from a millionaire businessman who later contributed $100,000 to two sheriff’s charities, according to civil court testimony, law enforcement records and interviews. . . . In October, a Times investigation detailed a similar case in which Baca launched a criminal probe inside another agency’s jurisdiction on behalf of Ezat Delijani, a well-connected Beverly Hills businessman who had given the sheriff political contributions and expensive gifts.”

ROBERT VERBRUGGEN: How To Write About Firearms: A guide for liberal columnists who don’t want to sound stupid about guns.

A RESPONSE TO THE BLOOD LIBEL OF 1860 by Abraham Lincoln:

You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper’s Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise. If any member of our party is guilty in that matter, you know it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcusable for not designating the man and proving the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable for asserting it. . .

Sounds a little like this:

To be clear, if you’re using this event to criticize the “rhetoric” of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you’re either: (a) asserting a connection between the “rhetoric” and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you’re not, in which case you’re just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?

In both cases, interestingly, the blood libel was aimed at Republicans, by Democrats. Some things never change, I guess.

Related: “The effort to drag down Sarah Palin for using the term ‘blood libel’ has backfired.”

Plus, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach: Sarah Palin Is Right About ‘Blood Libel’: Judaism rejects the idea of collective responsibility for murder. Of course, what we have here is collective non-responsibility for murder, which makes the libel even more libel-y.

UPDATE: Reader Vito DiPaola writes: “Has anyone commented on the fact that some of the people criticizing Sarah Palin for using the term ‘blood libel’ are the same people that use the term ‘deniers’ when criticizing global warming skeptics?”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Joe Pompeo writes: “Based upon the Lincoln quote it would appear that Sarah Palin, rather than acting ‘unpresidential’ in her response this week as her critics claim, was acting quite presidential after all. Even Lincoln-esque.” Does this mean that if we elect Sarah Palin President, New York, Massachusetts and California will secede?

ANOTHER MADMAN, firing indiscriminately.

TRANSPARENCY: Kentucky Legislature Puts Salaries and Expenses Online.

GEORGE WILL CALLS FOR A CONGRESS THAT REASSERTS ITS POWER:

Many congressional Republicans, and surely some Democrats with institutional pride, think Congress is being derogated and marginalized by two developments. One is the apotheosis of the presidency as the mainspring of the government and the custodian of the nation’s soul. The second is the growing autonomy of the regulatory state, an apparatus responsive to presidents.

The eclipse of Congress by the executive branch and other agencies is Congress’s fault. It is the result of lazy legislating and lax oversight. Too many “laws” actually are little more than pious sentiments endorsing social goals – environmental, educational, etc. – the meanings of which are later defined by executive-branch rule-making. In creating faux laws, the national legislature often creates legislators in the executive branch, making a mockery of the separation of powers. And Congress makes a mockery of itself when the Federal Register, a compilation of the regulatory state’s activities, is a more important guide to governance than the Congressional Record.

Unfortunately, courts long ago made clear that they will not seriously inhibit Congress’s scandalous delegation of its lawmaking function to others. So Congress should stop whining about the actions of the EPA (emissions controls), the FCC (“net neutrality”), the Interior Department (reclassifications of public lands) and other agencies and should start rereading Shakespeare: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

The problem is, Congress decided decades ago that it would rather cede power to the bureaucracy than keep it to itself, so long as it could also cede responsibility and then point fingers when things go wrong. Will that change? Maybe.

WHY THEY’D RATHER TALK ABOUT SARAH PALIN (CONT’D): Munis Crashing For Third Straight Day, And This Is The Worst Yet.

COULD TENNESSEE HAVE its own Jesse Ventura? Let’s hope he’s better than that.

Related: Tea party takes agenda, concerns to Tennessee lawmakers. “Tennessee tea party activists took to the halls of the state legislature Wednesday, warning Republican leaders not to misinterpret the results of the November election as a sign of implicit tea party support. . . . Activists were on the Hill to let GOP lawmakers know the tea party’s next step in Tennessee is to influence legislation and to hold Republicans ‘accountable’ on a variety of policy measures, including fighting federal health-care reform.”

AT AMAZON, markdowns on DVD and Blu-Ray.

DAVID STEINBERG: “From the list of things I didn’t expect to happen when I woke up today: Chris Matthews calling someone a cracker.”

I BLAME THE OVER-THE-TOP RHETORIC: Shock CBS Poll: 77% of Americans are Extremist Teabaggers, Want to Cut Government Spending.

TOM SMITH ON CRAZINESS: “We learn of anosognosia, a word spell check has never seen before, which refers to the schizophrenic’s lack of insight about his own illness. But that’s just an exaggerated version of what say, Professor Krugman has. Krugman is evidently blissfully unaware that the concept of a conscience is almost the exact opposite of the disposition, on flagrant display today, one may have to always think that one is right and good and those one disagrees with are wrong and evil. If someone were to say, oh, my conscience, that’s the little voice inside me that tells me I am smarter, and morally better than others. No, Paul, that’s not your conscience; your ego maybe, but not your conscience. But I suspect your efforts to convince Krugman of this would be as successful as efforts to convince the Arizona shooter that the government is not trying to control his mind with grammar.” Is it just me, or have law professors been especially hard on Krugman this week?

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “They are a special interest. End of story.”

AT MEGAN MCARDLE’S, an important comment on the foreclosure mess:

You’ll have a hard time finding any market as highly regulated as mortgages and finance. The idea that a LACK of regulations are a major problem here is laughable. It also comes from this bizarre idea that a lot of people have that there is some “Regulation Knob” that government has control of, and they can turn the knob to the right to “increase regulation” and turn it to the left to “decrease regulation”. This just is not the case at all – there is bad regulation and good regulation. The idea that some people think the solution to all of our problems is simply more rules and more employees at regulatory agencies is bizarre.

Much more at the link.

A CHARITABLE PARTNERSHIP to send George Washington’s 110 Rules of Civility to lawmakers.

RETRACTO THE CORRECTION ALPACA turns his attention to David Frum. Can’t we all just get along?