JACK REACHER sounds better than I expected.

THE AUDI electric bike.

OOPS: Toddler Hides Eggs In His Closet; Hatches 7 Deadly Snakes.

LARRY CORREIA: An Opinion On Gun Control. (Reposted).

OKAY, SOME PEOPLE PREFER REAL BOOKS TO KINDLE BOOKS, AND I’M COOL WITH THAT. But this is pretty darn cool, too: Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, All 6 volumes plus Biography, Historiography and more. Over 8,000 Links (Illustrated) — for $2.99. And particularly apt reading these days.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Great timing. A friend and I were just bemoaning the state of public education yesterday, and I commented to him that I did a huge (for me, then), foot-noted, research paper on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in HIGH SCHOOL. Handwritten notecards, drafted longhand, and transferred to typewriter. That was in 11th grade, I think, about 1976 or 1977, and I picked the book. I remember only one volume, so it must have been an abridged version, but it was still well over 1000 pages.

From what I read of today’s education system, I can hardly imagine a college student doing this, never mind a high schooler. The kid would probably sue if assigned today.

Decline and fall, indeed.

I’m sure there are high schools where this is done. But, yeah.

PRINCE HARRY KILLS TALIBAN.

FLIPFLOP: What Obama said about mass murder after the Aurora massacre, at the second presidential debate. “If reelection gives special weight to Obama’s policy preferences, we should hold him to what he said to [get] the votes.”

SCIENCE: Study: Women With Larger Breasts Are Smarter.

A BOOK THAT SHOULD BE GETTING MORE ATTENTION AMID TODAY’S MEDIA FUSILLADE: The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow’s Headlines. (Bumped).

UPDATE: And here come the copycats. “Four volunteer firefighters responding to a pre-dawn house fire were shot Monday morning, two fatally, leading to a shootout in suburban Rochester, N.Y. with the alleged gunman found dead the scene, police said.” It was apparently set up as an ambush.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Chuck Simmins has much more. Including this: “Chief says Spengler, as a convicted felon, not allowed to possess weapons.”

MORE: Professor Stephen Clark writes:

Spengler is perfect example of Correia’s point that government will not be the last line of defense against the bad guys. Bad guys don’t care about law, they break it; it’s what they do. As for the copy-cat effect, so noted. But…and I keep hammering on this…characters like Spengler are not the only ones watching.

Correia mentions Mumbai. Might the people who produced Mumbai be watching us; watching how our society reacts? What lessons are they drawing? If you are a terrorist organization and want to provoke an overreaction by the state and federal authorities that might, just might, provoke a backlash apropos the last part of Correia’s post, what would you do?

Just another thing to worry about.

WAR AGAINST THE YOUNG: Debt obligations will hit young hardest.

REASON TV: A Joe Biden (War On) Christmas.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Putin Whistles In The Dark As Russia Declines:

President Putin is doing his best to spin the numbers on Russian demography. After catastrophic declines in population since the death of the Soviet Union, Russia saw births outnumber deaths last year and, temporarily, the demographic numbers look better. As the Financial Times reports, the ebullient sounding President remarked that the solution to Russia’s demographic problmes ar at home: “Our women know what to do, and when,” he remarked.

In 2012, births outnumbered deaths in Russia from January through September — the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union that this has happened. Putin would like to claim this as a long term trend that could reverse Russia’s geopolitical slide, but there are two reasons for doubting that the baby boomlet means what he says it does.

The first is numbers: demographers note that the increase in Russian births this year reflects the coming of age of the relatively large generation of Russian millennials. These children of the optimistic perestroika years are now having children. Russia had something of a baby boom in those joyous and optimistic late Soviet days when the doors to a better life seemed to be opening wide. As the privations, lawlessness and social collapse of the ensuing era appeared, Russian women cut back on child bearing and once the echo of the perestroika baby boom fades away, Russia is looking at decades of shrinking numbers of women of child bearing years. The demographic good news is a blip, not a trend.

Much worse from President Putin’s point of view, one suspects, is the question — not addressed in the FT article or mentioned much in polite company in Russia — of just who is having babies in Russia today.

Read the whole thing.

NATIONAL JOURNAL: White House Wavers on Hagel, Considers Others for Defense.

THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS: 卐mas Caroling: The Extremes Hitler Wanted to Go To in Order to Replace Christianity with the “Religion” of National Socialism.

John Gibson, call your office!

AT AMAZON, Year-End Deals.

Also, today only, MP3 albums for $1.99 or less.

REASON TV: Grandma Got Indefinitely Detained.

LAW ENFORCEMENT: “England has 39 police forces, headed by 39 chief constables or commissioners. In the past 18 months, seven have been sacked for misconduct, suspended, placed under criminal or disciplinary investigation or forced to resign. That is not far off a fifth of the total. In the same period, at least eight deputy or assistant chief constables have also been placed under ongoing investigation, suspended or forced out for reasons of alleged misconduct. No fewer than 11 English police forces – just under 30 per cent – have had one or more of their top leaders under a cloud.”

SHELDON RICHMAN ON GERARD DEPARDIEU: Taxpayers Aren’t Stationary Targets: Raising tax rates in a struggling economy will help assure that the economy keeps struggling.

Change the tax environment by raising rates or adversely modifying the rules, and taxpayers, especially those in the upper echelons of earners, can be counted on to modify their conduct accordingly; there’s no reason to think their wish to hold on to their money has diminished just because the tax code has changed.

Economists as far back at J. B. Say and Gustave de Molinari in the 19th century understood this. As Molinari wrote in his 1899 book, The Society of To-morrow, “The laws of fiscal equilibrium set a strict limit to the degree within which it is possible to impose new taxes, or to increase the rates of those already in force. The relative productivity of taxes soon shows when this point has been overstepped, for then returns not only cease to rise, but immediately begin to fall.”

Things can work in the other direction too. Other things being equal, cutting tax rates can prompt revenues to rise. This is not to say rising revenue is a good thing. As Milton Friedman once said, if a tax-rate cut brings in more revenue, the rates weren’t cut enough. Hear, hear! . . .

Leaving recessions out of the account, for the past 60 years federal tax revenues have been rather steady at just under 19 percent GDP regardless of the tax rates. The top income-tax rate has ranged from a low of 28 percent in 1988-90 to a high of 92 percent in 1952-53, yet the flow of money has been a fairly constant proportion of the economy. This would seem to confirm the apparently controversial hypothesis that taxpayers are purposive human beings who can be counted to modify their behavior according to the incentives and disincentives that government places in their paths.

Yet most politicians don’t get it.

Two things. First, most politicians aren’t good at math. That’s one reason they went into politics in the first place. Second, it’s not so much about revenue as it is about control. Particularly in Obama’s case, it’s about punishing high-earners — or as he puts it, “fairness.”

Also, while revenue may be roughly the same at different tax rates, higher tax rates produce more distortions in the economy, and inflict deadweight losses from conduct that is driven by taxes rather than economics. That’s why research shows that GDP grows faster when tax rates are lower. But if you derive your own sense of importance from slicing up the pie, you don’t care as much whether the pie grows or not.

WE’VE BEEN ZIRPED:

Father-son talks are always difficult, but it was time to teach my teenager about how things work. I dragged him to our local branch of Wells Fargo and opened a checking account with ATM card privileges and a savings account where he deposited his hard-earned umpiring cash. Having worked on Wall Street for 25 years, I stroked my chin and provided some sage advice: Checking accounts don’t pay interest, so keep your money in the savings account and just move it to checking when you need it. None other than Albert Einstein, I noted, said, “compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe.”

His first bank statement showed interest income of $0.01​—​and a series of $35 fees for insufficient funds, wiping out all his money. I got a “You’re a financial genius, Dad,” dripping with sarcasm.

My son got ZIRPed. Senior citizens living on fixed incomes are getting ZIRPed. We all are. Since December 2008, when Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve started buying mortgage backed securities in order to “solve” the financial crisis, we have all been subject to a zero interest rate policy. . . .

Conceptually, ZIRP has worked. The stock market is up 12 percent in 2012. Bank stocks like Bank of America’s have doubled off their lows. Real estate investment trusts, or REITs, are up 15 percent. Yet in the real world, ZIRP is a huge FAIL. GDP growth in 2012 will come in at an anemic 2 percent after a 1.7 percent tick up in 2011. ZIRP is not growing the economy. And no growth means no jobs.

Unemployment is still a nasty 7.7 percent. And talk in hushed tones to Wall Street hedge funds, and they may explain the dollar carry trade, the one where you borrow or even short U.S. dollars and buy currencies, bonds, and stocks in higher yielding, emerging market countries​—​yes, the Fed is stimulating, but in places like India, South Africa, and Brazil. . . . Savers are getting ripped off. Interest rates are near zero, yet the inflation rate as of October 2012 was 2.2 percent, which means real interest rates are negative 2 percent, so savings are being diluted by 2 percent a year. It’s a stealth, non-voted-on tax, maybe as much as $200-300 billion a year.

It’s behind the Senior Squeeze.

IN BRITAIN, A DAWNING REALIZATION: The truth is that politicians are telling lies: Government is simply unaffordable. “The immediate emergency created by the crash of 2008 was not some temporary blip in the infinitely expanding growth of the beneficent state. It was, in fact, almost irrelevant to the larger truth which it happened, by coincidence, to bring into view. Government on the scale established in most modern western countries is simply unaffordable.”

Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. Debt that can’t be repaid, won’t be. Promises that can’t be kept, won’t be.