NOW UP TO NUMBER TWO, Robert Heinlein still needs your vote!

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 171.

RODRIGO SERMENO: ‘Stop Watching Us’ Rally Calls for an End to Mass Surveillance. “Stop Watching Us, a coalition of more than 100 public advocacy groups, organized the event calling for an end to mass surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA). The group brings together organizations ranging from the conservative and libertarian Young Americans for Liberty and the Competitive Enterprise Institute to Occupy Wall Street NYC, from Tea Party-aligned Freedom Works to progressive groups like Demand Progress and MoveOn.org.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: The Great Pension-Bonus Giveaway Fiasco.

The difference between me and Taibbi is that I see public pension officials making bad decisions not because they’re deluded right-wing ideologues, but because they and their predecessors, and the legislators who made the pension laws, made a bunch of awful decisions that have left them with few good options. Plunging pension assets into hedge funds and similarly risky investments was a Hail Mary pass to save a failing system.

The problem is that, unlike most Hail Mary passes, this one could actually make the pension situation much worse. Hedge funds took huge fees for their troubles, and riskier investments can underperform as well as overperform. Those desperate pension managers may have — and in some cases, definitely have — taken a bad situation and made it worse.

For that, I do think we can blame the professionals, as well as the pension managers — and not just the hedge fund managers. I’ve been shocked to find out how common “extra payments” or “13th checks” have become among public pension funds. Basically, when returns were higher than the projected average return (generally around 8 percent), they funneled off the extra into a bonus check. This is … well, gee, profanity is too weak. It is an insane mangling of the concept of an “average return.” As should be obvious to anyone who sat through high school math, that average is composed of some years when the return will be higher than the average, and some years when it will be lower. You can’t siphon off the “excess” returns from the up years unless you also put in extra cash during years when the market underperforms. It goes without saying that they did not top up during the bad years. The result is the current mess in Detroit, and elsewhere.

Read the whole thing.

SARAH HOYT: Selling Your Writing In 13 Weeks.

AT AMAZON, Top Deals in Camera, Photo & Video.

Also, coupons galore in Industrial & Scientific. Always interesting to see what shows up in that category.

And, today only: DEWALT Laser Distance Measurer, $78.99 (67% off).

REASON TV: Taxi Wars: How Government Tries to Kill Innovative Ride Services Customers Want.

I HEARD AN NPR PROMOTION FOR THIS AND THOUGHT OF HIM: Prof. Joseph Campbell: Upcoming PBS show on ‘War of Worlds’ may reinforce media myth — in cheesy fashion.

MICHAEL LOTUS: The transformation of the USA — here comes America 3.0.

Today’s political regime is like legacy software, built for an earlier world.

Institutions of the 20th Century welfare state that once looked permanent are crumbling. The old operating system has been kludged so many times it won’t work much longer. It has to be replaced.

The time-worn liberal-progressive wisdom is simple: See a problem, create a government program to fix it.

ObamaCare proves this approach no longer works. . . . The government shutdown, and the failures of ObamaCare, are dramatic symptoms of an old systems reaching its end.

But this is a time of transition, not decline.

I highly recommend his book with Jim Bennett — especially as reading for 2014 and 2016 aspirants.

THE CONTRAST WITH LAW SCHOOL IS STRIKING: Medical School Applicants, Enrollment Hit All-Time Highs.

IN THE OBAMA ERA, who needs fake horror? “It is deeply ironic that young people, one of the main constituencies that helped elect Obama, will be the ones trying to dig this country out from the effects of this administration long after I am dead and gone. My condolences to the young people who refused to be scammed, but who are along for a very rocky ride anyway.”

BLUE STATE TURNS RED: A frustrated and angry West Virginia has been cutting ties with its reliably Democratic roots. So they’re capable of learning. Puts them ahead of some other Dem constituencies I can think of. Though the WaPo story tries to make them sound like ungrateful peasants.

HERE’S A REPORT ON MY KEYNOTE SPEECH at the Information Systems Security Association a couple of weeks ago that I just ran across. I am, apparently, overly optimistic.

SALENA ZITO on the GOP’s new youth outreach effort.

PEGGY NOONAN: ObamaCare Is Taking On Water: It’s not just a buggy website, it’s a disaster of Titanic proportions.

We should not lose The Headline in the day-to-day headlines. This is big history, not small. The ObamaCare rollout is a disaster for the White House, not a problem or a challenge or an embarrassment, not a gaffe or a bad few weeks. It is a political disaster, and the only question is whether it is partially recoverable, meaning the system can be made to work in a generally satisfactory way in the next few weeks. But—it has to be repeated—they had 3½ years after passage of the Affordable Care Act to make the program into something the American people could register for and feel they were benefiting from. Three and a half years! They had a long-declared start date: It would all go live Oct. 1, 2013, and everyone in the government, every contractor and consultant, knew it.

The president put the meaning of his presidency into the program—it informally carries his name, it is his brand. It was unveiled with great fanfare, and it didn’t work. For almost anybody. Crashed systems, frozen screens, phone registration that prompted you back to the site that sent you to the 800 number, like a high-tech Möbius strip.

All this from the world’s greatest, most technologically sophisticated nation, the one that invented the computer and the Internet. And from a government that is able to demand and channel a great deal of the people’s wealth.

So you’d think it would sort of work. And it didn’t. Which is a disaster. . . . It was Bill Daley — accomplished political player, former commerce secretary and, most killingly, former chief of staff of President Obama — who Thursday, on “CBS This Morning,” admitted the scale of the problem. Asked whether Kathleen Sebelius should be fired, he said: “To me that’s kind of like firing Captain Smith on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg.”

The Titanic. Some will see his comments as disloyal. Actually they were candid and realistic. Although in fairness, the Titanic at least had three good days, and Edward Smith chose to go down with the ship.

We used to launch men to the Moon. Now the U.S. government can’t launch a website.

Plus:

And there is the enduring mystery of why the president, who in his career has attempted to persuade the American people to have greater faith in and reliance on the federal government’s ability to help, continues to go forward with an astounding lack of interest in the reputation of government.

He talks but he doesn’t implement, never makes it work. He allows the IRS under his watch to be humiliated by scandal, waste, ill judgements prompted by ideological assumptions. He allows his signature program, the one that will make his name in the history books, to debut in failure. In response he says bland, rounded words that leave you wondering what just got said.

We’re all reading of Jack Kennedy. He stayed up nights with self-recrimination after failure. “How could I have been so stupid?” he asked about the Bay of Pigs. A foreseeable mistake and he’d blown it, listened to the wrong people, made the wrong judgments. That man suffered over his missteps. He worried about his reputation, and the reputation of his government, and of America.

It is disorienting to not see this in a president. It is another thing about this story that feels not only historic, but historically strange.

Our president is historically strange, and I predict that future historians will find themselves marveling at just how strange.

THE HILL: GOP comfortable ignoring Obama pleas for vote on immigration bill. I think people are getting more comfortable just ignoring Obama, period.

CHANGE: Believe it: Ted Cruz can beat Hillary in 2016, says … David Frum?

MARK STEYN: Obamacare’s Magical Thinkers: Not even the coolest president ever can conjure up a national medical regime for 300 million people.

CGI is not a creative free spirit from Jersey City with an impressive mastery of Twitter, but a Canadian corporate behemoth. Indeed, CGI is so Canadian their name is French: Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique. Their most famous government project was for the Canadian Firearms Registry. The registry was estimated to cost in total $119 million, which would be offset by $117 million in fees. That’s a net cost of $2 million. Instead, by 2004 the CBC (Canada’s PBS) was reporting costs of some $2 billion — or a thousand times more expensive.

Yeah, yeah, I know, we’ve all had bathroom remodelers like that. But in this case the database had to register some 7 million long guns belonging to some two-and-a-half to three million Canadians. That works out to almost $300 per gun — or somewhat higher than the original estimate for processing a firearm registration of $4.60. Of those $300 gun registrations, Canada’s auditor general reported to parliament that much of the information was either duplicated or wrong in respect to basic information such as names and addresses.

Sound familiar?

Also, there was a 1-800 number, but it wasn’t any use.

Sound familiar?

So it was decided that the sclerotic database needed to be improved.

Sound familiar?

But it proved impossible to “improve” CFIS (the Canadian Firearms Information System). So CGI was hired to create an entirely new CFIS II, which would operate alongside CFIS I until the old system could be scrapped. CFIS II was supposed to go operational on January 9, 2003, but the January date got postponed to June, and 2003 to 2004, and $81 million was thrown at it before a new Conservative government scrapped the fiasco in 2007.

So, basically, these CGI folks are heroes of liberty! Hats off to a company that’s done more to frustrate the Leviathan State than practically anybody!

I’LL GIVE UP MY SERENITY POSTER WHEN THEY TEAR IT FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS: Dayton Faculty Object to No-Poster Policy For Doors.

HOPEY-CHANGEY: All The Wrong People Are Getting ObamaCare. “In almost half the states with exchanges, the overwhelming majority of enrollments are coming from Medicaid, not the new insurance markets — 87 percent in Washington, 82 percent in Kentucky and, last time I looked, 100 percent in Oregon (which delayed opening its insurance exchange in order to work out technical bugs). The Medicaid expansion side of the bill seems to be working fine in the states that opted for the expansion. But the private insurance side doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of pickup.”

GOOGLE BREAKS ITS PROMISE, experiments with banner ads.

SO EVEN SOME OF THE (FEW) “COMPLETED APPLICATIONS” ARE BOGUS? Healthcare.gov processed an application I did not submit.

VULTURE CAPITALISM: WaPo: In annuity deal tied to McAuliffe, 2 investors knew they bet on specific, dying people.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “I Quit Academia,” an Important, Growing Subgenre of American Essays. “In its insularity and single-mindedness, academe is also very similar to a fundamentalist religion (or, dare I say, cult), and thus those who abdicate often feel compelled to confess. But there’s an important way that Ernst’s essay distinguishes itself: Most I Quitters are like me, which is to say failed academics, or like Lord, whose disillusion hit her midway down the tenure track. Ernst is part of the sub-subgenre of quitters who did the unthinkable, giving up tenure. He joins, for example, scientist Terran Lane, who left the University of New Mexico for Google, and writer Anne Trubek, who ditched idyllic Oberlin when freelance writing was able to pay her bills.”

Original essay here. “I’ve had one foot in the academic world and the other in the business world for a few years. It’s been fascinating to observe the differences between the values of a small start-up and a large university. . . . What makes me pessimistic about my own university and public universities in the United States in general is that their inability to adapt isn’t due simply to bad leadership or an unfavorable economy. It’s based on structural features that are self-reinforcing.”

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.