1. When the government funds education, it can only do so with money it has already taken from the people.
2. That taxation reduces the ability of the people to independently fund their own education.
3. If you jump through the right hoops, they will give your money back to you, but only if your education is in line with what they want you to learn.
The `Restore Patriotism to University Campuses Act’ was introduced a few days ago. Some folks are upset that:
Through their invitation, Columbia University provided a public, prestigious platform on United States soil from which on September 24, 2007, President Ahmadinejad spoke and defended his wide-ranging support for terrorist activities.
Oh, what a mucked up situation this is!
Chuck Norris doesn’t target inflation. He roundhouse-kicks it until it begs for mercy.
The Chuck Norris dollar buys 3 Canadian dollars, and trades at parity with the euro.
When the U.S. economy sneezes, the world catches a cold. When Chuck Norris sneezes, the U.S. economy catches pneumonia.
And my favorite:
Chuck Norris doesn’t buy gold to hedge against inflation. Gold buys Chuck Norris to hedge against inflation.
More from Mark Gilbert here.
Well at least if there is demand. And, apparently, there is demand.
“Demand is the smallest hurdle,” says Elaine Lissner of the Male Contraception Information Project, part of Our Bodies Ourselves, a Boston-area women’s health-education organization. “Basically a majority in pretty much every country is interested in male contraception.”
Yep, that’s right a “male pill” may soon be coming.
Researchers are having difficulties though.
The male machinery that produces sperm — at a rate of 1,000 per heartbeat — is incredibly hard to disable.
So how long until men achieve equality with women in this overlooked area of gender unbalance?
“I’ve been saying ‘five to seven years’ for about 20 years,” Bremner [chairman of the UW School of Medicine] admits. “I will again say ‘five to seven years.’ I just want to give you a dose of reality.”
If the demand is there, it’s only a matter of time until it happens.
Exit question: When it becomes available, will you use it?
The most recent PhD comic got me thinking. Conventional wisdom, even among fairly liberal people, seems to be that communism will always fail because people are too greedy to share–call it “the Tragedy Of The Commons,” if you like, or “the Incentive Problem.” But I don’t think this is historically true.
As in the comic, or in The Onion (and again here), the assumption seems to be that Communism establishes a communal set of goods which tempts people to take more than their fair share, so the system breaks down. But can anyone think of a Communist or socialist country in history that has ever managed to accumulate such a set of communal goods to be shared? I can’t. Because in order to get that community stock of goods, you have to confiscate them from their prior owners, which means you have to centralize power and probably use violence. Human nature being what it is, there will always be someone who will hijack this mechanism for his own benefit. [Obvious Cliched Examples here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) So, long before the Tragedy Of The Commons or the Incentive Problem rear their ugly heads, there will be tyranny.
Thus the problem with Communism isn’t that it always breaks down, but that it can never really begin. In this sense die-hard Marxists are right, Communism has never actually existed. But they fail to realize that people are people, and it doesn’t matter how long they fantasize, communism can never work and will always devolve into bloody tyranny.
Obviously Communism is dead, but I think this is still an important point because of the eternal allure of schemes that promise that we can just start over from scratch. We can’t. Everything happens in a historical context, and Communism’s real failing is that it doesn’t recognize this. Communists are so busy fantasizing over how the world will be that they usually don’t give much thought to how they’ll accomplish the preliminary step from the world-as-it-is to the world-with-goods-consolidated. But it’s exactly this step that will end in gulags and unmarked graves, long before the Incentive Problem ever shows up.
…the NYT can’t seem to avoid running afoul of it. George Will details this schaudenfreude-laden story.
While talking about the UAW GM strike, but the question was about unions in general.
And yes you read that right, Bradley Fellow in Labor Policy at the Heritage Foundation, James Sherk. (James and I both went to Hillsdale College and were on the debate team together, so I think it’s hilarious to see him on TV. And he’s probably been on TV bunches before, but this is the first I’ve seen.)
Not trying to say he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, because he assuredly does. Along with BeardofWisdom poster Will, he is one of the two people who seemed to know something about everything.
Anyway, watch the video here.
My favorite line is:
Reporter: “Have we sort of written unions off and they actually have a lot more power than we give them credit for?”
James Sherk: “Not really.”
Ahh, James. Never one to pull punches.
This is old, but so ridiculous I had to share it.
The press release from the University of Texas details how the researchers came to their conclusion.
Refuting the popular stereotype that females talk more than men, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have found women and men both use an average of 16,000 words each day…
For more than a decade, researchers have claimed that women use far more words each day than men. One set of numbers that is commonly tossed around is that women use 20,000 words per day compared to only 7,000 for men…
For eight years, the psychology researchers have developed a method for recording natural language using the electronically activated recorder (EAR). The unobtrusive digital voice recorder tracks people’s interactions, including their conversations.
The researchers analyzed the transcripts of almost 400 university students in the United States and Mexico whose daily interactions were recorded between 1998 and 2004. The research participants could not control the EAR, which automatically records for 30 seconds every 12.5 minutes, and did not know when the device was on.
At the end of the study, the researchers examine one potential criticism.
A potential limitation of our analysis is that all participants were university students. The resulting homogeneity in the samples with regard to sociodemographic characteristics may have affected our estimates of daily word usage. However, none of the samples provided support for the idea that women have substantially larger lexical budgets than men. Further, to the extent that sex differences in daily word use are assumed to be biologically based, evolved adaptations, they should be detectable among university students as much as in more diverse samples. We therefore conclude, on the basis of available empirical evidence, that the widespread and highly publicized stereotype about female talkativeness is unfounded.
Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune published a great response that is amusing enough for a full read through. Some of my favorite lines were:
All I can say is that if the average male is putting out 16,000 words every day, then I’m living in a verbal desert. Some guys I haven’t met must be gushing verbiage like Old Faithful to make up for the ones I know, many of whom might easily be mistaken for victims of lockjaw. That is not a description I would apply to many women of my acquaintance…
We revere Abraham Lincoln because he made the greatest speech in U.S. history while uttering just 269 words and taking up only two minutes of his audience’s time. (His predecessor on the platform at Gettysburg, famed orator Edward Everett, gassed for two solid hours, and nobody remembers a thing he said.) We’d gladly give up cell phones for a return to Morse code.
Our motto is, “Talk less, think more.” Our hero is Calvin Coolidge, known as Silent Cal, and our favorite story is the time a woman sat by him at a dinner party and said she had made a bet she could get three words out of him. “You lose,” he replied. In a more talkative moment, he confided that “nothing I never said ever did me any harm.”
From the Washington Post:
The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials…
But new details about the information being retained suggest that the government is monitoring the personal habits of travelers more closely than it has previously acknowledged. The details were learned when a group of activists requested copies of official records on their own travel. Those records included a description of a book on marijuana that one of them carried and small flashlights bearing the symbol of a marijuana leaf…
The DHS database generally includes “passenger name record” (PNR) information, as well as notes taken during secondary screenings of travelers. PNR data — often provided to airlines and other companies when reservations are made — routinely include names, addresses and credit-card information, as well as telephone and e-mail contact details, itineraries, hotel and rental car reservations, and even the type of bed requested in a hotel…
Ann Harrison, the communications director for a technology firm in Silicon Valley who was among those who obtained their personal files and provided them to The Post, said she was taken aback to see that her dossier contained data on her race and on a European flight that did not begin or end in the United States or connect to a U.S.-bound flight…
Zakariya Reed, a Toledo firefighter, said in an interview that he has been detained at least seven times at the Michigan border since fall 2006. Twice, he said, he was questioned by border officials about “politically charged” opinion pieces he had published in his local newspaper. The essays were critical of U.S. policy in the Middle East, he said. Once, during a secondary interview, he said, “they had them printed out on the table in front of me.”
Not only is it invasive, you’re being forced to pay for it.
Also, I think it’s great when security notices that passengers are carrying “small flashlights bearing the symbol of a marijuana leaf”, but can’t find fake bombs. Don’t you?
Bill Clinton as first lady jokes and slams.
Mitt Romney says his wife would make a “prettier first lady” than former President Clinton. (Comments on that page are also amusing. Some Ds have a real hard accepting a joke coming from the other side.)
Fred Thompson introduced his wife at a NRA meeting by saying his wife “would make a much better first lady than Bill Clinton.”
Bill himself even got in on the act on the Daily Show, where he joked he may slit his throat as First Husband.
I wonder if McCain or Rudy jump on the bandwagon.
All links via Drudge.