Forty-five reasons that it would probably be a waste of money.
It’s primarily a sop to the teachers’ unions.
Intelligence
Have they found a genetic basis for it?
It was always kind of loopy to imagine there isn’t one. That’s the sort of thing that only a leftist could believe.
Nutrition Science And Climate Science
How they’re alike:
Nutrition science and climate science share some common challenges: complex system(s) and many confounding factors. Severe tests for nutrition science can in principle be done, but they are very expensive and take decades. Severe tests for climate science require better observational evidence, particularly in the past.
When there’s no evidence to falsify what is merely a supposition,we are left with ”magical theories that explains absolutely everything – including diametrically contradictory phenomena, lack of logic and absence of evidence.”
There’s a lot of junk science associated with both.
The Second Amendment
Of course it secures the right to carry a gun. It’s astounding that anyone would argue otherwise.
[Update a few minutes later]
Eugene Volokh analyzes the ruling:
I think the Ninth Circuit majority’s analysis is correct on this, and the dissent’s is mistaken. The dissent keeps stressing that the case should be about whether the California ban on concealed carry is constitutional, and that Heller says that the concealed carry ban is indeed constitutional. But the California ban on concealed carry is part of a general scheme that bans the great bulk of all carrying in public for self-defense (unless one has a permit that the police may choose not to grant). It is this general scheme that violates the Second Amendment, even if a ban on concealed carry that left people free to carry openly would not do so.
The California ban was just an attempt to get around the Second Amendment, and even the Ninth Circuit recognized that.
A Camera Falling Into A Pigpen
Well, here’s something you don’t see every day.
It’s interesting how the thing first tumbles, then stabilizes as it probably hits terminal velocity. Also that it stabilized looking down, and not up, which made it all the more interesting.
Free Enterprise In Space
Linda Billings hates the thought of it.
Sid Caesar
Peter Robinson has a tribute. His peak was before I was born, but my parents (who were the same generation — he was my mother’s age) used to rave about him when I was a kid. The Carl Reiner character in the Dick Van Dyke show was modeled on him.
The Martydom Of Mark Steyn
James Delingpole is envious.
Mojave
Alan Boyle has a longish piece on what the place is all about.
The Arbitrary Health-Care Mandate
“My whim is my command“:
…the sudden demand that businesses stop adjusting for regulatory policy is nearly the height of hypocrisy for this administration, which has repeatedly offered short-term gimmicky tax credits for business decisions that boost its policies, including an ill-considered credit for hiring that ended up costing taxpayers millions for hiring decisions that would have been made anyway. Suddenly, the Obama administration has to take action outside of the law because employers respond to regulatory signals more predictably than one-off credits.
In other words, it’s a demonstration of arbitrary power, of precisely the kind predicted by Hayek. And it’s no longer just opponents of the ACA noticing.
At National Journal, Major Garrett blasted the latest unilateral changes in enforcing statutory law by noting, “The Affordable Care Act means what it says and says what it means. Until it doesn’t. … [T]he arbitrary is the norm.”
The editorial board at The Washington Post blasted Obama for his “increasingly cavalier approach to picking and choosing how to enforce this law. “ Garrett’s colleague Ron Fournier and the Daily Beast’s Kirsten Powers both declared their patience at an end to the arbitrary changes and continuing incompetence from the Obama administration – and all of these people support the law in principle.
The attempt to create a command economy in the health-insurance market has failed, in the same manner that Hayek predicted, and resulted in the same arbitrary use of power to attempt to compensate for those failures. The demand for businesses to “self-attest” that they aren’t following standard business principles foreshadows the later stages of unreality that will take from F. A. Hayek to George Orwell on a long enough continuum.
This is what tyranny looks like.
[Update a while later]
“Obama is legislating without the legislative branch. This is corrosive of self-government, counter to our constitutional system and contemptuous of the rule of law.”
Nothing new for him.