ENDANGERING PROSPERITY: A Global View of the American School.

Based on the book of the same name.

“SMART DIPLOMACY:” Bruce Thornton: Watching The Middle East Implode.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: The Crushing Racism of Low Expectations: Why won’t America’s public schools and teachers’ unions raise the bar for African American students?

MEGAN MCARDLE: Ain’t I A Woman? “I have never let worries about being perceived as unfeminine stop me from expressing an opinion. I can’t claim any feminist cred for this, I’m afraid, because it’s not a decision. It’s just how I’m built. If I get interested in an idea, I start talking, and if I think someone’s wrong, I’ll tell them they’re wrong. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more tactful about it, but the basic constitutional impulse to argue about ideas remains. So I never retired from a classroom argument in order to preserve my dateability. . . . Then, as now, women were less likely to go into finance, and much more likely to go into marketing. Judging by my reunion, ones who went into finance mostly did not stay there, especially if they had kids. That was also true of a lot of women who went into consulting. A pretty substantial percentage of the women I went to school with were home with kids or working on small home businesses. And seemingly pretty happy with the choice. I mean, perhaps they won’t be in 10 years, when the kids are well settled in school and they want to get back into work, but I have no particular reason to think they’ll regret their choices any more than the rest of us regret having to make trade-offs with the limited span of years and opportunities we’re allocated. . . . If I had been a man, could I have brought myself to take an entry-level journalism job that paid a third of what I’d been expecting as a consultant? I sort of doubt it. Just because our choices are made in the context of sexist assumptions doesn’t mean that our choices are wrong.”

CHARLIE MARTIN: What If We Actually Had A War On Terror?

LIFE AMONG THE BARBARIANS: 8-year-old Yemeni girl dies from internal injuries on wedding night.

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AN EXCELLENT REVIEW of Jim Bennett & Michael Lotus’s America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity In The 21st Century.

While “America 3.0” should be eagerly consumed by the political class and concerned citizens alike, it needs a champion. Twenty years ago, Newt Gingrich saw the future in Alvin Toffler’s “The Third Wave” and brought it to the political mainstream. It was a book tailored to fit its bullish, technocratic times. “America 3.0” is a more serious book written for more serious times, and it deserves a serious booster. Sen. Rand Paul — and his supporters — should make “America 3.0” their book of ideas.

Good advice.

A LOSS FOR GOOGLE: Ninth Circuit Holds That Intercepting Unencrypted Wireless Internet Communications is Covered by the Wiretap Act.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Grow Your Own Hops.

FLASHBACK: What 12 of The World’s Biggest Websites Looked Like at the Beginning

VIDEO: “Two Million Bikers” Rally Roars Into D.C. Area for 9/11.

A large rally to commemorate 9/11 is roaring through the Washington, D.C., area.

Thousands of bikers with the group “Two Million Bikers to D.C.” are snarling traffic on the Beltway with a ride honoring the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the members of the military called to serve after the attacks.

On their Facebook page, in all caps, the group said they will stand by the Constitution and Bill of Rights, adding that they’re “against any fundamental transformation of America.”

You know, I think marches on Washington are good. It’s helpful to remind the political class that they are outnumbered. That they did it without a permit is better. Much more here.

READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Ed Robinson, Leap of Faith: Quit Your Job and Live on a Boat.

K.C. JOHNSON: The Anti-Male Craziness At Yale. “One of the first signs that this was happening came in 2011, when Yale concluded that causing someone to worry could come under the heading of sexual assault.”

SCIENCE: How Chemistry Can Explain the Difference Between Bourbon and a Tennessee Whiskey.

IT’S ALMOST LIKE A HARRY POTTER SEQUEL: Limbaugh’s children’s book still #1 on Amazon, in pre-release.

WASHINGTON POST: The Colorado recalls dealt a serious blow to gun-control advocates. Here’s why. “Something pretty remarkable happened in Colorado on Tuesday night. John Morse, the Democratic president of the state Senate, was recalled from office. So was Democratic state Sen. Angela Giron. Taken together, the losses arguably represent the biggest defeat for gun-control advocates since the push for expanded background checks failed in the U.S. Senate earlier this year. . . . It’s not every day that you see an incumbent recalled from office, let alone someone as high-profile as a state Senate president. The message the defeat of Morse and Giron sends to legislators all across the country is unmistakable: If you are thinking about pushing for new gun-control laws, you could face swift consequences.”

Well, when you try to deny people’s civil rights, there should be swift consequences.

UPDATE: Slow Learner: Wendy Davis Wants Double-Barreled Assault on Texans’ Gun Rights. “The Texas Democrats of ‘white primary’ infamy are lining up behind state Sen. Wendy Davis of Fort Worth as she mulls a run for governor. Texas has not elected a Democrat governor since 1990, and has not elected any Democrat to any statewide office in a generation. One would think that the Democrats in Texas would take a lesson from its decades of defeat and moderate toward the middle. That doesn’t seem to be in the cards.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: More from Dave Kopel. “It’s one thing for a deliberately polarizing legislator like Morse to lose a close race in a swing district. It’s quite another for Giron to lose by 12 points in a district that is 47% Democratic and 23% Republican. One reason is that in blue collar districts like Pueblo, there are plenty of Democrats who cling to their Second Amendment rights. As the Denver Post noted, 20% of the voters who signed the Giron recall petitions were Democrats.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 125.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Four In Ten College Grads Don’t Need A Degree For Their Work.

A majority of American workers have jobs that do not require a college degree, according to a new Gallup poll. This finding wouldn’t be particularly surprising if it were only blue-collar workers saying this, but the poll also found that four in ten college grads agreed that they don’t need a college degree for the work they do.

It’s not exactly a shock at this point that college grads haven’t been able to make the most of their degrees, but when nearly half of the country’s college students are wasting money on degrees that they believe have done nothing to prepare them for their jobs, there’s obviously a problem.

These findings can’t be chalked up entirely to undergraduates’ poor choices; college degrees have increasingly become prerequisites for jobs that could easily be performed by high school grads. In many cases, employers are just looking to a college degree as a quick signifier of an applicant’s determination and work ethic, not as a sign of skills learned.

Perhaps there’s a way to reform the employment system so we stop wasting time and money on degrees that are only useful as behavioral signifiers. What would this kind of reform look like?

For starters, it would seek to separate training from education, so that students could accomplish the former as quickly and conveniently as possible without necessarily taking on the latter. This likely means a shift away from the four-year college model for many, toward something that looks more like vocational training, with a greater focus on specific skills and less focus on campus life and subject diversity.

Next, it would reduce dumb bachelor’s degree requirements, so that job seekers and employers could be brought together based on aptitude and achievement tests rather than meaningless but expensive paper credentials.

Old-school academics may balk at these general ideas, but they shouldn’t; none of this has to mean the end of classical education as we know it.

Nope.

WHIPSAWED BY THE PARTY LINE: So this piece at The Atlantic yesterday — published at noon — tries to connect people opposing Obama’s attack-Syria plan with (in the Democrats’ latest buzzword) “Neo-Confederates.” But then, within hours, Obama himself had turned Neo-Confederate, asking Congress to postpone his vote. Oops! The window where you were racist if you didn’t want to bomb brown people has slammed shut.

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THIS VIDEO MONTAGE OF OBAMA ADMINISTRATION STATEMENTS ON SYRIA IS ABSOLUTELY DEVASTATING.

Meanwhile, here’s Rand Paul’s response to Obama’s Syria speech.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, BRITPUNDITS WOULD SCORN OUR PRESIDENT’S BUMBLING. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Nile Gardiner: Barack Obama’s Syria speech was an incoherent mess – he is outperforming Jimmy Carter as the most feeble US president of modern times.

SO NOW IT’S THE 12TH ANNIVERSARY OF 9/11. Twelve years ago, InstaPundit was new. Now it’s not, and some people are even warning of “blogger burnout.” But I’m still here. On prior 9/11 anniversaries, I’ve given shooting lessons to a Marine, I’ve taken the day off from blogging, and I’ve even gone to a Tea Party with Andrew Breitbart.

This year, as in most past years, it’ll be blogging as usual. And here’s a link to my original 9/11 coverage — just scroll on up. At this late date, I don’t have much new to say on 9/11. But these predictions held up pretty well. Which is too bad.

The picture above is by my cousin-in-law Brad Rubenstein, taken from his apartment that day. You might also want to read this piece by James Lileks.

And here’s a passage from Lee Harris’s Civilization And Its Enemies.

Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.
…
They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.

They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for — yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part — something that we could correct. And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.

The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours.

I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating today.

Now, of course, with the Syria debacle, it seems like we’ve gone from tragedy to farce. Obama tried to channel W. last night, but he didn’t have it in him, and Syrian gas attacks on Syrians aren’t the same as Al Qaeda attacks on Americans. But a farce, however farcical, at least isn’t a tragedy. Yet, anyway.