SHUT UP AND PLAY YOUR COMPUTER: Product Review: Jam Origin’s MIDI Guitar 2 VST Plugin.

Apologies to Frank Zappa and his awesome “Shut Up and Play Your Guitar” albums for the above headline — but over at the PJ Lifestyle blog, I have a review of a pretty cool new computer music recording plugin for those who would like to get their electric guitars playing (reasonably) nicely with their software synthesizers.

MORE GOOD NEWS ABOUT SPACE: My USA Today column: Cashing In On The Final Frontier. You know, space development may turn out to be Obama’s main positive legacy.

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NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Don’t Hire The Hot Nanny. On Twitter, somebody invoked Arnold Schwarzenegger as the counterexample, but I think the answer is that if you’re on enough testosterone, they’re all hot.

THE NATIONAL INTEREST: Political Correctness Goes To War on American History. “George Orwell once remarked that Stalin’s Soviet Union was a place yesterday’s weather could be changed by decree. America, it seems, is not wholly immune to this totalitarian impulse either.”

JOSH BLACKMAN SPANKS RICHARD POSNER: Posner: The 14th Amendment is “Old, Cryptic, or Vague.” But What About Article III? “At bottom, Posner candidly rejects any fidelity to the text of the Constitution. That invariably includes, of course, the parchment barrier that allows him to append the honorific ‘Judge’ to his name. Yes, Richard Posner’s powers derive not from his boundless intellect, but from the bounds of Article III.”

This has implications that go far beyond the judiciary. The only reason for not tarring and feathering any government official for effrontery when they tell us what to do is that their power to do so is somehow legitimate. But that legitimacy comes from the exercise of constitutional power. If the Constitution doesn’t mean anything, well, then, maybe it’s time to go long on pitchforks. Because without the Constitution the angry mob is just as legitimate as the perfumed princes of the state.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Charles Koch: Most Businessmen Don’t Support Free Market Capitalism.

Far more businessmen cease being capitalists and morph into corporatists, once their business reaches a large enough size.

EPA NEW-HIRE HITS BONUS JACKPOT: An unnamed EPA finance executive allegedly did such a fantastic job that she got two performance bonuses totaling $9,000 even though she’d been on the job for less than three months. The acting director of her office didn’t even know about the second bonus. The EPA’s inspector general said there are no rules that bar such quick bonuses but he could find no prior examples to match this one.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 935.

BRINGING NEW MEANING TO THE PHRASE, “RUN TO DAYLIGHT:” As it turns out, the NFL’s arrest streak is alive and well at 80 months.

After blogging quite a bit about the NFL during the early days of Ed Driscoll.com in 2002-2003, I cut back greatly when I noticed that category was starting to resemble the police blotter far more than the sports page.

NO BLOW IS TOO LOW WHEN THE NARRATIVE IS AT STAKE: WaPo: Let’s hold free speech guilty for the acts of a lunatic, shall we? Ed Morrissey is uncharacteristically fierce:

So let’s get this straight. When a lunatic shoots up a Family Research Council office, it has nothing to do with its political opposition. When an abortionist runs loose because public officials are too intimidated to enforce the laws that do exist, it has nothing to do with political support for abortion. But when a lunatic shoots up an abortion clinic, it’s the fault of millions of Americans who oppose abortion, and who argue peacefully for limits on the practice and better oversight of those who operate in the industry?

Even when “police have not yet identified a clear motive for the shooting”?

The shootings in a clinic and the deaths of two people are horrific acts that everyone with a lick of sense and humanity abhors. But what the Washington Post and pro-abortion advocates are conducting in its wake is an attack on free speech and the political process, not to mention the unconscionable smearing of millions of Americans. It’s disgusting, manipulative, exploitative, and un-American. Shame on them, and shame on the Washington Post for its egregious bias.

Just think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Getting To The Next American Dream:

It’s small businesses that revitalize neighborhoods, give poor people a chance to get ahead. And ultimately, it’s some of the small businesses of today that will become the innovative big firms of tomorrow.

But these aren’t normal times, and small business matters even more. We live in times when the old drivers of employment like big business, government, and the NGO sector are less and less effective at generating growth and prosperity. The collapse of employment in the manufacturing sector, and the steady pressure on white collar and clerical work driven by automation, means that established firms aren’t generating jobs as quickly. That’s driving wage stagnation and exacerbating inequality. And the new normal of slower job growth also means that many of the conventional career tracks in business and the professions aren’t as reliable a glide path to a comfortable middle class existence as they used to be.

Accelerating the formation of innovative new businesses is the only real way to address this problem in the long run. Millennials and their successors are going to have to create the jobs they want rather than hoping that corporate and government bureaucracies will provide them with lifelong careers.

This isn’t an impossible dream. Today labor costs are relatively low and information and communications technology are creating resources that smart and creative people can use to build new businesses. Harnessing the power of the internet and information technology to improve the lives of people around you is one of the greatest business opportunities of all time. But as a society, we are making it harder, not easier, for these creative new business ideas to emerge.

Free enterprise is great for growth, income mobility and self-actualization. But it produces insufficient opportunities for graft.

But if you’re a campaign policy maven or speechwriter and you want to do something about this, let me recommend Jim Bennett and Michael Lotus’s America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century: Why America’s Greatest Days Are Yet to Come. Read it. You’ll be glad you did.

BILL DE BLASIO RETREATS TO HIS SAFE SPACE:

Mayor de Blasio’s affordable-housing plan is in shambles. There’s traffic chaos in the streets. Sixty percent of New Yorkers say they see more homeless people around. And 48 percent of New Yorkers don’t want de Blasio to have a second term.

So what does the mayor do? He races back into the arms of the special interests who helped get him elected. That’s right — he’s re-embracing the nuts who want to ban the Central Park carriage horses.

Back in early 2011, when New York City was hip deep in a foot and a half or more of white powdery global warming and snow removal was spotty at best and nonexistent at worst, Victor Davis Hanson coined “The Bloomberg Syndrome:”

It is a human trait to focus on cheap and lofty rhetoric rather than costly, earthy reality. It is a bureaucratic characteristic to rail against the trifling misdemeanor rather than address the often-dangerous felony. And it is political habit to mask one’s own failures by lecturing others on their supposed shortcomings. Ambitious elected officials often manage to do all three.The result in these hard times is that our elected sheriffs, mayors, and governors are loudly weighing in on national and global challenges that are quite often out of their own jurisdiction, while ignoring or failing to solve the very problems that they were elected to address.

Quite simply, the next time your elected local or state official holds a press conference about global warming, the Middle East, or the national political climate, expect to experience poor county law enforcement, bad municipal services, or regional insolvency.

And in de Blasio’s case, the biggest political obsession with horses since Caligula.

THE FRAGILE FRENCH REPUBLIC: The country’s politics are beset by a unique anxiety that the entire system could collapse. Why? Because they’ve been living a fantasy for half a century.

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JOEL KOTKIN: Jerry Brown’s Insufferable Green Piety.

Outsiders think of California as a prosperous place that mints billionaires, but overall the state’s economic recovery has done little for many, if not most, state residents. Even with the boom in Silicon Valley, roughly one in three Californians live check to check, the state has [a] higher rate of poverty than Mississippi, as well as one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. Among the emerging Latino majority, a prime Brown constituency, the state’s cost-adjusted poverty rate is more than 33 percent, compared to just 22.7 percent in Texas, a state often derided as unenlightened and cruel.

During this “boom,” most California blue-collar workers in farming, fishing, and forestry have experienced actual average wage decreases. Employment in fields such as construction and manufacturing remain well below their 2007 levels. Much of this has to do with environmental regulation, which has raised energy costs almost twice those of nearby competitors and also helped raise housing prices to an unsustainable level.

Once the beacon of opportunity, California is becoming a graveyard of middle-class aspiration, particularly for the young. In a recent survey of states where “the middle class is dying,” based on earning trajectories for middle-income cohorts, Business Insider ranked California first, with shrinking middle-class earnings and the third-highest proportion of wealth concentrated in the top 20 percent.

Most hurt, though, are the poor. California is home to a remarkable 77 of the country’s 297 most “economically challenged,” cities based on levels of poverty and employment, according to a recent USC study; altogether these cities have a population of more than 12 million. Some stressed cities exist cheek-to-jowl with the state’s uber-rich—Oakland, Los Angeles, as well as Coachella, near Palm Springs. Most others are in the poorer, more heavily Latino interior, places like Riverside, Stockton, and Vallejo. Journalists who come to California to praise the governor may think it’s still “California Dreamin’” but for all too many, particularly away from the coast (PDF), it’s more like The Grapes of Wrath.

Of course, there’s a long history of such bifurcated society, where people tend to stay in their class and the poor depend largely on handouts from their spiritual “betters.” It’s called feudalism.

And that’s what our “betters” want for all of us.

ANDREW KLAVAN: Narrative Wrestling After Colorado Planned Parenthood Shooting Dishonors the Dead:

In moments like this, it is always wise to remember Klavan’s First Rule of Mainstream Media Reporting: Whenever the prejudices and illusions of left-wingers are confirmed by an individual incident, the incident is treated as representative; when those prejudices and illusions are contradicted, the incident is considered an aberration — and treating it as representative is deemed hateful.

Read the whole thing.

VIOLENCE ERUPTS IN PARIS AS CLIMATE PROTESTERS TRASH MEMORIAL FOR TERROR VICTIMS:

Over 200 people were arrested earlier today in Paris when protesters on hand for the COP21 global warming talks turned violent and trashed a memorial at the Place de la Republique for the victims of the terror attacks earlier this month.

Huh — when headlines last year proclaimed that “Democrats say climate change a bigger threat than ISIS,” who knew this was what they had in mind?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON THE UPSIDE DOWN CAMPUS PROTESTOR:

One common denominator characterizes almost all unrest on college campuses: the demands to create more “-studies” courses (black, Latino, feminist, gay, etc.) and thus to hire more -studies professors.

An empiricist from Mars might observe that the chief beneficiaries of the protests are -studies academics. They alone will win more jobs and classes, which otherwise few students wish to attend and from which fewer gain any factual knowledge, written and oral speaking skills, or improvement in inductive thinking.

A good leftist would cite conflict of interest: the more -studies professors egg on students to protest for more -studies professors, the more their friends, students, and mentors profit. Or is it more insidious: students also want more -studies courses to ensure more gut classes with easy As to inflate GPAs and free up more time to hit the gym and the local protest? So far there are few demands to make the physics department more diverse or to hire more engineering professors.

If some right-wing nut wished to harm leftist students and wanted to ensure that they stay indebted, leave college poorly prepared, and do not impress future employers, then he would likely advocate for the curtailment of traditional history, language, science, math courses and their faculty, and the expansion of more -studies courses and professors.

Go forth and read the whole thing!

THEY’LL DO FOR IT WHAT THEY’VE DONE FOR HEALTHCARE, IF THEY’RE ALLOWED: Congressional Q&A: Feds finding ways to grab control of Internet.

Since the Federal Communications Commission passed Title II regulations reclassifying Internet service providers as common utility companies in February, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., has been at the forefront of the fight to reverse them. Critics say the rule change represents an overreach by the FCC, erodes consumer protection and curtails free speech rights.

If a federal court takes action, there may be no need for a congressional solution. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is set to hear oral arguments against the rules on Dec. 4. Blackburn has led a coalition of 22 lawmakers in filing an amicus brief supporting appellants in the case, arguing that Congress never granted the FCC the statutory authority to reclassify an industry on its own.

This should play out like MCI v. AT&T, but the courts have been AWOL a lot on administrative overreach.

AGE OF OFFENSE REACHES NEW LOW, Christine M. Flowers writes in the Philadelphia Daily News:

The reason? Well, they tried to dress it up in language that did not seem as if Tina Fey had written it for a Saturday Night Live sketch, but the truth was fairly obvious: “Yoga has been under a lot of controversy lately due to how it is being practiced and what practices from what cultures . . . they are being taken from. Many of these cultures are cultures that have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy, and we need to be mindful of this and how we express ourselves and while practicing yoga.”

The day that yoga becomes culturally offensive is the day that Mr. Rogers becomes a metrosexual icon. In other words, anyone who has a problem with Westerners (or rather, 21st-century colonialists) teaching yoga classes to disabled students — for free! — is a real pain in the asana.

This is up there with women on campus carrying around mattresses because they want the world to take their complaints about sexual abuse seriously (right, toting a Serta through the cafeteria line is exactly the way to avoid ridicule). This is up there with complaining about red Starbucks cups at Christmas. This is up there with Ivy League students being told what Halloween costumes they can wear so as not to offend indigenous zombies. This is right up there with a white guy going on a hunger strike until the University of Kansas instituted “mandatory, intense” racial re-education workshops for students (bro, look in the mirror). And yes, this is up there with allowing a same-sex couple to throw a legally compensated hissy fit because one particular baker out of the hundreds of thousands of millions in the world would not serve up a wedding cake.

Heh. Unless things have changed dramatically from when I last regularly read the Philadelphia Daily News 20 years ago, given the Bletchley Park-level sensitivities to offense of that paper’s readers, I’m surprised this article didn’t come with a giant red “TRIGGER WARNING” atop it.

Related: There Is No Bigger Threat to Millennials Than Liberalism.

GREAT MOMENTS IN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: Firewoman allowed to graduate NYC Fire Academy despite flunking physical injured 10 days into job.

(Headline via Power Line.)

WASHINGTON POST: Hillary Clinton panders to middle-class voters with unrealistic tax promises.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT OVER THE WEEKEND: Walter Olson Highlights Demands Of Campus Activists.