FAREWELL TO ALL THAT:  As usual, it’s been both an honor, a pleasure and daunting to be 1/8th of Glenn.  As usual I’m more in awe than ever of the fact he does this while holding down a job and writing books! Should any of you wish to drop by and say “hi” my little blog is According To Hoyt and I try to blog every day (though the next week will have a lot of guest bloggers, as I struggle to finish a novel.)  And for the writer side, this is my web page. Thank you for your patience with the ditsy writer and for making this gig fun.  And thank you to Glenn for letting me play. (UPDATE: And thank you to all my co-bloggers.  I didn’t think to say that, because I thought it was obvious, but sometimes the obvious must be said.  They always seem so competent and on top of things compared to me, that I wonder how I slipped into the team. Glad I did though.  It’s lots of fun.)

EDUMAKAYSHUN: “Today we have more formal education than ever.  But it may be time to ask: of what should it really consist? Is it a credential? Or is it a set of attitudes and skills that will help the learner get by in life? Are we getting value for money from the vast multibillion dollar educational establishment? What can we learn from the past?”, Richard Fernandez asks at the Belmont Club.

But how can you learn from history when you view it as nothing but black armbands all the way down?

WAR ON MEN: Capons of America, Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Brains.

IF SO, I’M NOT SURE THAT MAKES THE NSA LOOK ANY BETTER: Edward Jay Epstein: Was Snowden’s Heist a Foreign Espionage Operation? Those who know the files he stole think he was working for a foreign power, perhaps Russia, where he now lives.

WHAT HAPPENED? We live in a fast-changing world, right. Still, how to account for this sequence of headlines in Politco Pro a friend on Capitol Hill pointed out this morning:

Headline from 11/27/13 edition of Politico Pro proclaims: State successes show health law can work.

Headline from 5/11/14 edition of Politico Pro notes: $474m for 4 failed Obamacare exchanges.

HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN, JIGGITY-JIG: Well, I’m tanned, rested, and back on the job. I’ll have some Cayman reporting and video later, but in the meantime let me thank my guestblogging crew. As always, I think the blog’s more interesting when I’m away!

RESPONDING TO TINA BROWN: “If Matt Drudge got out ahead of all that major media, it’s because they did not do their job. Ironically, it was really they who were not journalists.” And it’s only gotten worse since.

CALIFORNIA: Attempted $1B cover-up can’t even crack Top 5 of bullet-train outrages. “With any big public works project, a report that an independent consultant had been pressured by the responsible government agency to hide a nearly $1 billion increase in project cost is absolutely outrageous. Pathetically enough, when it comes to the bullet train and the California High-Speed Rail Authority, it’s far from the worst outrage.”

#BRINGBACKOURBALLS: “It is hard not to have total contempt for a political culture that thinks the picture at right is a useful contribution to rescuing 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by jihadist savages in Nigeria,” Mark Steyn writes. “Yet some pajama boy at the White House evidently felt getting the First Lady to pose with this week’s Hashtag of Western Impotence would reflect well upon the Administration. The horrible thing is they may be right: Michelle showed she cared — on social media! — and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

Read the whole thing™.

ANNALS OF SCIENCE-DENIAL: 30-year New York Times Science Writer Out After Writing Book About Genetics, Race.

Remember, there are some things you’re not allowed to talk about. We make fun of the Victorians for their prudishness and censoriousness, but our society is just as prudish and censorious. Just about different things.

UPDATE: Note that the article has now been corrected. Wade wasn’t fired, but had already left the Times.

YOUNG BLOOD: Derek Lowe on Anti-Aging Science. “You also have to wonder what something like this would do to the current model of blood donation and banking, if it turns out that plasma from an 18-year-old is worth a great deal more than plasma from a fifty-year-old. I hope that the folks at the Red Cross are keeping up with the literature.”

A CASE FOR JURY NULLIFICATION? After Life Sentence, Juror Says, “Had I known…I would have had to have found not guilty.”

A STAR FALL, A PHONE CALL, IT JOINS ALL: Perhaps Tina Brown dipping her pen into more arsenic than usual (even for her) when describing the Lewinsky affair and its aftermath is due to the “interesting parallels between Brown’s and Lewinsky’s career,” Neo-Neocon writes:

Brown alternates between sympathy for Monica Lewinsky and approbation, although she leans more to the sympathy side. That’s not surprising, since there are some interesting parallels between Brown’s and Lewinsky’s career, although the British Brown was tremendously much more successful with her own sexual escapades as a young woman. It helped that, at least for quite a while, she was also quite good at the publishing business, specializing in making cold properties hot. But it’s also the case that she got her start by being taken up in her early 20s by literary lights with whom she’d slept.

A tiny bit later on, one of them turned out to be the publisher of the British Sunday Times Harold Evans, who left his wife and three kids for Brown in the mid-70s. They married in 1981 and are still together, so their relationship seems to have stood the test of time, unlike that of the much-more-ill-fated Lewinsky and her married paramour. But at the beginning there were more parallels with Lewinsky than the mere fact that Brown had an affair with a married man: Evans was Brown’s powerful boss, and she was about twenty-five while he was about fifty years old. It’s not such a stretch to imagine that, when Brown writes, “Other women can often be the worst at cutting any slack towards the love interest in a sex scandal” she might be thinking of her own experience.

Read the whole thing.

LONGTIME CALIFORNIA BLACK-OWNED BOOKSTORE CLOSES, AP reports:

One of the oldest black-owned bookstores in the nation has been evicted from its longtime home in a historic San Francisco neighborhood.

The co-owners of Marcus Book Stores in the Fillmore District said in an open letter this week that the property owner changed the locks after they fell behind on rent payments. The store has been shuttered since Tuesday.

The bookstore, which emerged as a pillar in the black community since its opening in the area once nicknamed “The Harlem of the West,” celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2010. It was named after early 20th century black nationalist Marcus Garvey and has been at its current location since the early 1980s.

“San Francisco is a classic example of a city unexcelled in its liberalism. But the black population of San Francisco today is less than half of what it was back in 1970, even though the city’s total population has grown,” Thomas Sowell noted last year in a piece titled, “Liberalism versus Blacks.”

As Sowell wrote, “Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city. The same thing has happened in a number of other California communities dominated by liberals.”

OVER AT MY PLACE: The Rise of Boko Haram.

WHY INDEED:  Why did Hillary Clinton defend Boko Haram?

THE PUSH FOR RAISING THE MINIMUM WAGE WILL SEE THIS IN US TOO:  McDonald’s hires 7,000 touch-screen cashiers.

BOKO HARAM: Five Things the Media and Government Won’t Tell You.

GOOD: Star Wars-style robotic arm approved for mass production.

OH, GET OVER IT. Lebanon in uproar over Maronite patriarch’s planned visit to Jerusalem.

WARNING: Clean Up Space Junk or Risk Real-Life ‘Gravity’ Disaster, Lawmakers Say. Of course, because it’s lawmakers saying it, I immediately wonder if it’s wrong.

WELL, WE WOULDN’T WANT TO “OFFEND” ANYONE!:  Rand Paul tells the NY Slimes that he thinks the GOP is going “too crazy” over voter ID and “offending people.”  So I guess using this logic, the GOP should stop opposing affirmative action, abortion, supporting traditional marriage, or taking any other conservative position that might “offend” liberals/progressives.   Puh-leeze.

THIS ISN’T NEWS: Mel Brooks on Blazing Saddles “They can’t make that movie today because everybody’s so politically correct.”  And because I’ve realized I somehow neglected to quote Heinlein all week, this must be done here:

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything — you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him – Robert  A. Heinlein

IT’S NOT LIKE WE DIDN’T TELL THEM:9 Obamacare Predictions That Have Come True.