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Mark Steyn thinks Jill Kelley, Gen. Allen’s would-be concubine, might be good for secretary of state. First though he follows events in Egypt as Morsi turns himself into a dictator.

.. But don’t worry. As America’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, assured the House Intelligence Committee at the time of Mubarak’s fall, the Muslim Brotherhood is a “largely secular” organization. The name’s just for show, same as the Episcopal Church.

Which brings us to Intelligence Director Clapper’s fellow Intelligence Director, Gen. David Petraeus. Don’t ask me why there’s a Director of National Intelligence and a Director of Central Intelligence. Something to do with 9/11, after which the government decided it could use more intelligence. Instead, it wound up with more Directors of Intelligence, which is the way it usually goes in Washington. Anyway, I blow hot and cold on the Petraeus sex scandal. Initially, it seemed the best shot at getting a largely uninterested public to take notice of the national humiliation and subsequent cover-up over the deaths of American diplomats and the sacking of our consulate in Benghazi. On the other hand, everyone involved in this sorry excuse for a sex scandal seems to have been too busy emailing each other to have had any sex. The FBI was initially reported to have printed out 20,000 to 30,000 pages of emails and other communications between Gen. John Allen, U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and Jill Kelley of Tampa, one-half of a pair of identical twins dressed like understudies for the CENTCOM mess hall production of “Keeping Up With The Kardashians.” Thirty thousand pages! The complete works of Shakespeare come to about three-and-a-half-thousand pages, but American officials can’t even have a sex scandal without getting bogged down in the paperwork.

For the cost of running those FBI documents off the photocopier, you could fly some broad to the Bahamas and have a real sex scandal. Instead, we’ll “investigate” it for a year or three, as we’re doing with Benghazi itself. At her press conference the other day, soon-to-be Secretary of State Susan Rice explained that she would be misspeaking if she were to explain why she misspoke about Benghazi until something called the Accountability Review Board has finished “conducting investigations” into “all aspects” of the investigations being conducted, which should be completed by roughly midway through Joe Biden’s second term.

Pending that “definitive accounting,” one or two aspects stand out. Paula Broadwell had access to Gen. Petraeus because she was supposedly writing his biography. As it turns out, she can’t write, so her publisher was obliged to hire a ghostwriter from The Washington Post. …

… As far as I can tell, our enemies in Afghanistan don’t go in for Soviet-style honey traps. Which is just as well, considering the ease with which, say, a pretend biographer can wind up sitting next to the U.S. commander on his personal Gulfstream. In different ways, Director Petraeus’ judgment and Director Clapper’s obtuseness testify to the problems of America’s vast, sprawling, over-bureaucratized intelligence community. If Director Petraeus can’t see the obvious under his nose in his interventions in the Kelley twins’ various difficulties, why would you expect Director Clapper to have any greater grasp of what’s happening in Cairo or Damascus?

Having consolidated his grip in Egypt, Morsi is now looking beyond. His “peace deal” legitimizes the Muslim Brotherhood’s affiliate in Gaza, and increases the likelihood of the Brothers advancing to power in Syria and elsewhere. As on that night in Benghazi, when the most lavishly funded military/intelligence operation on the planet watched for eight hours as a mob devoured America’s emissaries, America in a broader sense is a spectator in its own fate. As for Afghanistan, it seems a fitting comment on America’s longest unwon war that the last two U.S. commanders exit in a Benny Hill finale, trousers round their ankles, pursued to speeded-up chase music by bunny-boiling mistresses, stalker socialites, identical twins and Bubba the Love Sponge.

Bloomberg News has more on the education bubble.

J. Paul Robinson, chairman of Purdue University’s faculty senate, strode through the halls of a 10- story concrete-and-glass administrative tower.

“I have no idea what these people do,” said Robinson, waving his hand across a row of offices, his voice rising.

The 59-year-old professor of biomedical engineering is leading a faculty revolt against bureaucratic bloat at the public university in Indiana. In the past decade, the number of administrative employees jumped 54 percent, almost eight times the growth of tenured and tenure-track faculty.

Purdue has a $313,000-a-year acting provost and six vice and associate vice provosts, including a $198,000 chief diversity officer. It employs 16 deans and 11 vice presidents, among them a $253,000 marketing officer and a $433,000 business school chief.

Administrative costs on college campuses are soaring, crowding out instruction at a time of skyrocketing tuition and $1 trillion in outstanding student loans. At Purdue and other U.S. college campuses, bureaucratic growth is pitting professors against administrators and sparking complaints that tight budgets could be spent more efficiently.

“We’re a public university,” Robinson said. “We’re here to deliver a high-quality education at as low a price as possible. Why is it that we can’t find any money for more faculty, but there seems to be an almost unlimited budget for administrators?”  …

Perhaps you read about China’s new aircraft carrier. Streetwise Professor says don’t be so impressed yet.

… It is an advance for China, definitely. But a baby step when you consider the complexity of carrier operations, especially at a true operational tempo, with 120 sorties (takeoffs and landing) per 12 hour flight day, sometimes surging to 190 per day. The ballet of the deck is an amazing-and amazingly dangerous-thing. Especially when you start doing it with live ammunition hanging from wings and waiting on deck, and especially especially when you do it day after day and crews become fatigued.

The US Navy has been doing this for close to a century. The accumulated experience and knowledge will take the Chinese a generation to match. (Only four navies-the US, Japan, the UK, and France have operated carriers in a serious way.)

And by the time China catches up with that, the US will have moved on. It is already moving on. For on virtually the same day China landed a manned jet on a carrier, the US loaded an X-47B Unmanned Aerial Vehicle onto the USS Harry Truman for flight testing: …

Readers who do not run will take heart from this from the WSJ.

In a five-kilometer race Thanksgiving morning, Ralph Foiles finished first in his age group, earning the 56-year-old Kansan a winner’s medal.

Or was it a booby prize?

A fast-emerging body of scientific evidence points to a conclusion that’s unsettling, to say the least, for a lot of older athletes: Running can take a toll on the heart that essentially eliminates the benefits of exercise.

“Running too fast, too far and for too many years may speed one’s progress toward the finish line of life,” concludes an editorial to be published next month in the British journal Heart.

Until recently, the cardiac risk of exercise was measured almost exclusively by the incidence of deaths during races. For marathoners, that rate was one in 100,000—a number that didn’t exactly strike fear. Moreover, data showed that runners generally enjoyed enormous longevity benefits over nonrunners.

What the new research suggests is that the benefits of running may come to a hard stop later in life. In a study involving 52,600 people followed for three decades, the runners in the group had a 19% lower death rate than nonrunners, according to the Heart editorial. But among the running cohort, those who ran a lot—more than 20 to 25 miles a week—lost that mortality advantage.

Meanwhile, according to the Heart editorial, another large study found no mortality benefit for those who ran faster than 8 miles per hour, while those who ran slower reaped significant mortality benefits. …

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Walter Russell Mead introduces us to today’s topic; student debt and the folks in academia who allowed this coming disaster to take place.

It’s pretty clear that federal housing policy not only helped inflate the housing bubble, but wrecked the prospects of exactly the low income, marginal, first time home buyers well intentioned people were trying to help. The same thing seems to be happening in the world of higher ed: low income students who are struggling in higher ed are getting the royal shaft as the result of poorly thought through policies intended to help them.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a good piece that illustrates how things have gone wrong. …

… Twice in a row, well intentioned federal policies aimed at helping low income people make it into the middle class have spectacularly backfired and imposed ruinous losses on exactly the people in our society who can least afford them. The answer isn’t to stop thinking about how to help low income people do better in life, but it’s clear that some of our basic policy assumptions need to be rethought.

We need to find a better way.

WSJ has the story of the burden of student debt for those who never graduated.

The rising cost of a college education is hitting one group especially hard: the millions of students who drop out without earning a degree.

A bachelor’s degree remains by far the clearest path to the American middle class. Even today, amid mounting concerns about the rising cost of higher education and questions about the relevance of many college degrees, recent graduates have lower rates of unemployment, higher earnings and better career prospects than their less educated peers.

But as more Americans than ever before attend college, more too are dropping out before they ever don a cap and gown. That means millions of Americans are taking on the debt of college without getting the earnings boost that comes from a degree. Dropouts are more than four times as likely as graduates to default on their student loans.

“Graduating with a lot of debt can be daunting,” says Lauren Asher, president of the Institute for College Access and Success, an advocacy organization promoting access to higher education. “Having a lot of debt and not graduating is even more daunting.”

The complexity of the student-loan system—a web of public, private and subsidized loans that together add up to more than $1 trillion—makes it difficult to know exactly how much debt is held by dropouts. But the scale is massive. According to a 2011 study by the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based research firm, 58% of the 1.8 million borrowers whose student loans began to be due in 2005 hadn’t received a degree. Some 59% of them were delinquent on their loans or had already defaulted, compared with 38% of college graduates. The problem has almost certainly worsened since, as the recession wiped out job opportunities for less-educated workers. …

Zero Hedge posts on the large increases in both student loans and delinquencies. 

We have already discussed the student loan bubble, and its popping previously, most extensively in this article. Today, we get the Q3 consumer credit breakdown update courtesy of the NY Fed’s quarterly credit breakdown. And it is quite ghastly. As of September 30, Federal (not total, just Federal) student loan debt rose to a gargantuan $956 billion, an increase of $42 billion in the quarter – the biggest quarterly update since 2006

But this is no surprise to anyone who read our latest piece on the topic. What also shouldn’t be a surprise, at least to our readers who read about it here first, but what will stun the general public are the two charts below, the first of which shows the amount of 90+ day student loan delinquencies, and the second shows the amount of newly delinquent 30+ day student loan balances. The charts speak for themselves. …

The above shows what college administrators have wrought. Since college faculties now run our government, how’s that working out? Orange County Register editors take a look at the secrecy of the obama administration.

The public’s business should be conducted in public. When it can’t be viewed as it occurs, such as the countless day-to-day dealings of the vast federal administrative bureaucracy, at least records of what transpired should be made available to the public.

President Barack Obama nobly promised that his would be an unprecedentedly transparent presidency. But from the shrouded Fast and Furious debacle to the administration’s apparent reluctance to be candid from Day 1 about the deadly events in Benghazi, Libya, the president has failed to live up to his promise of transparency.

The unavoidable question is, “Why the hesitancy to disclose, promptly and fully?”

Now the Obama administration is suspected of withholding thousands of emails from public scrutiny, including many allegedly sent through private, rather than government, accounts, expressly to keep them secret.

A House committee investigation recently opened concerning whether EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson used an email alias to hide correspondence from open-government requests and from her agency’s own internal watchdog, something Republicans say may run afoul of the law, reported the Washington Times. …

Since these liberals worship diversity, what do they do in their hiring decisions? Volokh Conspiracy post has some answers.

The Des Moines Register has an interesting article following up on the lawsuit against the University of Iowa law school alleging ideological discrimination in hiring. The judge declared a mistrial because the jury was deadlocked. According to interviews with jurors, however, there was genuine agreement that Teresa Wagner was denied a position because of her conservative views and political activism, but disagreement over whether the Dean could be held responsible. Given the nature of the claim, the Dean was the named defendant, rather than the university (or the faculty, who largely control academic hiring decisions).

… jurors said they felt conflicted about holding a former dean personally responsible for the bias. They wanted to hold the school itself accountable, but federal law does not recognize political discrimination by institutions.

“I will say that everyone in that jury room believed that she had been discriminated against,” said Davenport resident Carol Tracy, the jury forewoman.

Meanwhile, attorneys for Teresa Wagner on Tuesday filed a motion for a new trial in the case that scholars agree could have national implications in what some argue is the liberally slanted world of academia.

The jury’s belief that Wagner was a victim of discrimination is significant as the case heads toward a retrial that will cost the state thousands of dollars to litigate and could cost the university hundreds of thousands of dollars should it lose or settle out of court, scholars following the case said. …

Paul Caron has more here. …

Even though propped up by the federal student loan program, some law schools are getting the message. TaxProf posts on VermontLawSchool.

Vermont Law School is offering voluntary buyouts to staff and may do so soon with faculty as it prepares for what its president and dean says are revolutions about to sweep both the legal profession and higher education.

A sharp drop in the numbers of Americans applying to law schools — triggered by a drop in the number of legal jobs open — already is being felt at the independent law school’s bucolic campus on the south bank of the White River.

The class due to graduate in the spring with juris doctor degrees numbers just over 200. The class that will follow it in 2014 numbers about 150. …

TaxProf also posts on how one college is reacting to obamacare.

Community College of Allegheny County will cut the hours some instructors to avoid paying for their health insurance coverage under new Affordable Care Act rules.

CCAC President Alex Johnson announced in an email to employees last week that the school would cut course loads and hours for some 200 adjunct faculty members and 200 additional employees. The Affordable Care Act — nicknamed Obamacare — classifies employees who work 30 hours or more per week as full-time, and CCAC would be required under the new law to provide employer-assisted health insurance to those employees. Instead, temporary part-time employees, such as clerical, computer, seasonal and other positions, will be limited to working 25 hours per week, and adjunct instructors will only be able to teach 10 credits per semester. Permanent part-time employees, already eligible for health care coverage, will be unaffected. The Pittsburgh-based college estimates the move will save it from spending an additional $6 million. 

The Atlantic reports on an effort to make college more affordable. The effort is in Texas, not in the northeast where colleges are content to continue to live well while impoverishing their customers. 

Texas is experimenting with an initiative to help students and families struggling with sky-high college costs: a bachelor’s degree for $10,000, including tuition fees and even textbooks. Under a plan he unveiled in 2011, Republican Gov. Rick Perry has called on institutions in his state to develop options for low-cost undergraduate degrees. The idea was greeted with skepticism at first, but lately, it seems to be gaining traction. If it yields success, it could prompt other states to explore similar, more-innovative ways to cut the cost of education.

Limiting the price tag for a degree to $10,000 is no easy feat. In the 2012-13 academic year, the average annual cost of tuition in Texas at a public four-year institution was $8,354, just slightly lower than the national average of $8,655. The high costs are saddling students with huge debt burdens. Nationally, 57 percent of students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 2011 from public four-year colleges graduated with debt, and the average debt per borrower was $23,800–up from $20,100 a decade earlier. By Sept. 30, 2011, 9.1 percent of borrowers who entered repayment in 2009-10 defaulted on their federal student loans, the highest default rate since 1996.

In the Lone Star State, 10 institutions have so far responded to the governor’s call with unique approaches, ranging from a five-year general-degree pipeline that combines high school, community college, and four-year university credits to a program that relies on competency-based assessments to enable students to complete a degree in organizational leadership in as little as 18 months. …

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Noemie Emery points out where the GOP has failed miserably. 

During the late and now unlamented campaign of Mitt Romney, the candidate was urged by other Republicans to affect a “separation” from the policies of George W. Bush. They were said by Democrats to have brought on the financial crisis and the “mess” inherited by Barack Obama, which he has been unable thus far to clean up.

They might have done better had they moved years earlier to detach the Bush policies from the cause of the meltdown, since there was little relation between the two. The crash of late 2008 was caused not by Republican dogma, but by efforts going back many years on the part of both parties to facilitate homeownership on behalf of poor people. It seemed like the right thing to do. It pleased both liberals, who wanted to help the downtrodden, and conservatives, who took to heart the old Jack Kemp adage that rental cars rarely get washed. …

… Clinton and Bush were both smart politicians, but there was one thing that both men got wrong. As Glenn Reynolds explained, they tried to expand the middle class by subsidizing things owned by middle-class people — like college educations and homes — assuming that middle-class status would come along with them. But in fact, homeownership was a result of middle-class values — of being willing and able to save, and to defer gratification — and not the cause of them. Instead of expanding the middle class, dodgy home loans for people with no past record of saving merely led to unfunded investments and debt. And to speculation. “All of us participated in the destructive behavior — government, lenders, borrowers, the media, rating agencies,” said Warren Buffett. “At the core of the folly was the almost universal belief that the value of houses was bound to increase.”

Twice, Bush tried to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and twice Democrats (Obama included) moved in to stop him. …

Thomas Sowell points to both parties.

In the spirit of bipartisanship, my newest book — “The Housing Boom and Bust” — shows how both Democrats and Republicans ruined both the housing markets and the financial markets.

Like so many disasters, the current economic crisis grew out of policies based on good intentions and mushy thinking.

For far too long, too many people have regarded home ownership as “a good thing.” It is certainly true that home ownership has its benefits. But, like everything else, it also has its costs and its risks.

Weighing such trade-offs is something that each individual and each family can do for themselves. It is when such decisions are made by politicians — of whatever party — that trade-offs tend to vanish into thin air, replaced by pursuit of a “good thing.”

Beginning in the 1990s, getting a higher proportion of the American population to become homeowners became the political holy grail of government housing policies. Increasing home ownership among minorities and other people of low or moderate incomes was also part of this political crusade.

Because banks are regulated by various agencies of the federal government, it was easy to pressure them to lend to people that they would not otherwise lend to — namely, people with lower incomes, poorer credit ratings and little or no money for a conventional down payment of 20 percent of the price of a house.

Such people were referred to politically as “the underserved population” — as if politicians know who should and who shouldn’t get mortgages better than people who have spent their careers making mortgage-lending decisions.

But, in politics, power trumps knowledge. …

Looking at Egypt, Craig Pirrong says, “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.”

… The timing of this is telling.  Very telling.

Mosri made his move within hours of his brokering of a cease fire in Gaza.  He received fulsome-sick-making, actually-praise from Obama and Hillary Clinton for his role there.  For his peacemaking role, he was lionized.

And more to the point-he was also immunized.  Immunized from criticism of his power grab.  How could Obama possibly criticize him or take measures to oppose him in response to his putsch after having praised him to the heavens just hours before?

Not for the first time on the international stage, Obama was not a player.  He was played.

I wonder if he realizes that.  I sort of doubt it.  Speaking of immunized, he seems immune to recognizing his errors.

One more thing about the timing.  Mosri no doubt has been contemplating this for some time: the judiciary has represented the only check on his power.  But he no doubt had to tread carefully, given Egypt’s fraught economic condition (especially regarding its parlous food situation) and resultant dependence on American aid. …

Spengler says the modern day Islamists are the same as other thugs.

… It would be inaccurate to call Islamism a Nazi-influenced ideology, for Islam itself was there before Nazism. Both ideologies are neo-pagan responses to Judaism and Christianity. Writing two decades before Karl Barth, the Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig characterized Islam as a pagan parody of revealed religion, and Allah as the whole colorful pantheon of paganism rolled up into a single deity.

f the world is in greater need of reminder than instruction, as the late Fr. Richard Neuhaus liked to say, Dr. Bostom has assembled a set of reminders that are chilling, even for those of us who are steeped in these issues. We tend to forget how open, obvious, and uncontroversial the relationship between National Socialism and the Muslim Brotherhood has been from the 1940s onward. Bostom quotes John Roy Carlson’s interviews with Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna during 1948-1950:

“It became clear to me [wrote Carlson] why the average Egyptian worshiped the use of force. Terror was synonymous with power! This was one reason why most Egyptians, regardless of class or calling had admired Nazi Germany. It helped explain the sensational growth of the Ikhwan el Muslimin [Muslim Brotherhood].”

Sharia vs. Freedom deserves lengthier discussion, but it requires urgent mention right now considering the rising Muslim Brotherhood threat to Western interests.

NFL.com News tells us how the Jets, in a Thanksgiving Day game, gave up 21 points in 56 seconds. We also have the responding front page of the NY Post.

Give the New York Jets credit. When they lose, they sure do it spectacularly.

During a 56-second span in the second quarter of Thursday night’s 49-19 loss to the rival New England Patriots, the Jets somehow allowed three touchdowns.

Here’s how you lose a game in under 60 seconds: …

Late night from A. Malcolm.

Leno: Good news for the economy. President Obama is out of town.

Fallon: iPhone texting was down for five hours the other day. It was a disaster! People had to actually phone someone to lie about being “five minutes away.”

Fallon: This isn’t good. Police in upstate New York are looking for a man who stole a truck carrying 350 Christmas trees. So keep that in mind over the next few weeks, if you see anyone selling a bunch of Christmas trees on the street.

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Margaret Wente of the Toronto Globe and Mail explores the reasons boys are doing poorly in school.

Everyone knows the girls are clobbering the boys in school. They get higher marks and graduate at higher rates. Women have stormed the gates of medicine and law. They’ve all but taken over pharmacy and veterinary work. They are focused, purposeful and diligent. Their brothers, meanwhile, are in the basement playing video games.

How lopsided have things become? In the most prestigious programs at some of our leading universities, the gender ratio has reached 70:30. Men still dominate the hard sciences and maths, but, on the rest of the campus, they seem to be headed toward extinction. …

… Boys’ existential issues are different from girls’. For a boy, the two most important life questions are: Will I find work that’s significant? And will I be worthy of my parents? When boys themselves are asked what they need, they say: I need purpose. I need to make a difference. I need to know I measure up. I need challenge. Above all, I need a meaningful vocation.

No wonder so many boys are so miserable. The modern world of extended years in school and delayed adulthood cuts them off from what they need most. As Adam Cox, a clinical psychologist who interviewed hundreds of boys across the English-speaking world, writes: “The primary missing ingredient in [their] lives – the opportunity that separates them from a sense of personal accomplishment, maturity, and resilience – is purposeful work.”

Boys long to be part of something bigger than themselves. And the bigger and more challenging the task, the happier they are. “If you tell 10 boys you need volunteers to go downtown and work all night on a big, dirty, tough job, and you still expect them to show up at school the next day, they’ll all jump up and volunteer,” says Ms. Gauthier. …

… If boys are failing schools and schools are failing boys, it’s really not too hard to see some of the reasons why. They really are fish out of water. Before the Industrial Revolution, boys spent their time with fathers and uncles, often engaged in strenuous physical activity. Now they spend their time in the world of women, sitting behind desks. If schools threw out the desks, they’d probably be a lot happier.

But schools can’t give them everything they need. Boys also need the company of men – men who will guide, instruct, esteem, respect and understand them. When asked about the happiest experience of their lives, boys often say it was the time they made something with their fathers. Their mothers matter, too – but, sometimes, there’s no substitute for Dad.

While it may not be the most dramatic entry in Pickings history, the story of the invention of double-entry bookkeeping will be interesting to many.

Our business heroes are entrepreneurs, inventors and even marketers, rarely accountants. Yet the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, which originated in Italy more than six centuries ago, is one of the great achievements of Western civilization. Without this venerable method of accounting, as Jane Gleeson-White notes in “Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance,” it is scarcely possible to conceive of our economic system.

Accountancy has a good claim to being the world’s oldest profession. The first accounts can be traced back to Mesopotamia in the seventh millennia B.C., when transactions were recorded by the transfer of small clay tokens. The ancient Greeks were avid record-keepers. So were the Romans, whose Tabulae Rationum were a rudimentary forerunner of double-entry bookkeeping, comprising twin account books, one for debits and another for credits.

It was no coincidence that double entry emerged in its perfected form among the city states of Renaissance Italy. The busy merchants of Venice, Genoa, Florence and Milan were suffering from data overload. Without a method of keeping systematic accounts, wrote the Tuscan mathematician Luca Pacioli in the late 15th century, “it would be impossible for them to conduct their business, for they would have no rest and their minds would always be troubled.”

Pacioli was an itinerant teacher and Franciscan friar who started his career as a tutor to the sons of a Venetian merchant. He propagated a new mathematics based on Arabic numerals, which were more tractable to calculation than the old Roman ones and therefore useful in commerce. In 1494, Pacioli published a 600-page encyclopedia titled “Summa de Arithmetica.” This book was written in the Italian vernacular, for it was Pacioli’s intention that his writings should be accessible to “each and every man.” Toward the end of the first volume there is a brief section called “Particulars of Reckonings and Writings,” which comprises the first treatise on double-entry bookkeeping. …

Aeon Magazine speculates about animals with a moral sense.

When I became a father for the first time, at the ripe old age of 44, various historical contingencies saw to it that my nascent son would be sharing his home with two senescent canines. There was Nina, an endearing though occasionally ferocious German shepherd/Malamute cross. And there was Tess, a wolf-dog mix who, though gentle, had some rather highly developed predatory instincts. So, I was a little concerned about how the co-sharing arrangements were going to work. As things turned out, I needn’t have worried.

During the year or so that their old lives overlapped with that of my son, I was alternately touched, shocked, amazed, and dumbfounded by the kindness and patience they exhibited towards him. They would follow him from room to room, everywhere he went in the house, and lie down next to him while he slept. Crawled on, dribbled on, kicked, elbowed and kneed: these occurrences were all treated with a resigned fatalism. The fingers in the eye they received on a daily basis would be shrugged off with an almost Zen-like calm. In many respects, they were better parents than me. If my son so much as squeaked during the night, I would instantly feel two cold noses pressed in my face: get up, you negligent father — your son needs you.

Kindness and patience seem to have a clear moral dimension. They are forms of what we might call ‘concern’ — emotional states that have as their focus the wellbeing of another — and concern for the welfare of others lies at the heart of morality. If Nina and Tess were concerned for the welfare of my son then, perhaps, they were acting morally: their behaviour had, at least in part, a moral motivation. And so, in those foggy, sleepless nights of early fatherhood, a puzzle was born inside of me, one that has been gnawing away at me ever since. If there is one thing on which most philosophers and scientists have always been in agreement it is the subject of human moral exceptionalism: humans, and humans alone, are capable of acting morally. Yet, this didn’t seem to tally with the way I came to think of Nina and Tess.

The first question is whether I was correct to describe the behaviour of Nina and Tess in this way, as moral behaviour. ‘Anthropomorphism’ is the misguided attribution of human-like qualities to animals. Perhaps describing Nina and Tess’s behaviour in moral terms was simply an anthropomorphic delusion. Of course, if I’m guilty of anthropomorphism, then so too are myriad other animal owners. Such an owner might describe their dog as ‘friendly’, ‘playful’, ‘gentle’, ‘trustworthy’, or ‘loyal’ — a ‘good’ dog. On the other hand, the ‘bad’ dog — the one they try to avoid at the park — is bad because he is ‘mean’, ‘aggressive’, ‘vicious’, ‘unpredictable’, a ‘bully’, and so on. Nor are these seemingly moral descriptions entirely useless. On the contrary, it is a valuable skill to be able to assess these descriptions when an unfamiliar dog is bearing down on you in the street. If I’m guilty of anthropomorphism, so too, it seems, are many others. .

Andrew Malcolm discovered we have a National Absurdity Day, and he makes the most of it.

Ever since we found out about it yesterday, today is one of our favorite days of the year.

That’s because today is National Absurdity Day, a day when as a nation we note some of the most totally, absolutely ridiculous things in our lives. Feel free to scroll down and add your own candidates in Comments below.

Gee, where to begin? We’re not going to rehash the recent presidential campaign, when two-out-of-three people believed the country was headed way off in the wrong direction. So voters opted to stick with the same divisive lackluster leader who got us into that mess. And keep a ninny as vice president because the president thinks it makes himself look more intelligent.

So what else is absurd?

Absurdity A: A judge for the district court of the United States of America, whose motto is “In God We Trust,” ruled that a city named for a Roman Catholic saint can ban public Nativity scenes.

In California, Federal Judge Audrey Collins ruled Monday that the holiday displays erected by a coalition of religions in Santa Monica for the past six decades can be prohibited. She halted any and all construction. …

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Streetwise Professor thinks we might be seeing evidence of a capital strike.

After the US economy began to recover rather robustly in the mid-1930s, a series of ill-considered government policies, notably a tax on undistributed profits, a big increase in marginal rates on high incomes, the Wagner Act, and a Fed contraction of the money supply led to a substantial contraction in 1937.  The depression within the Depression.

One notable feature of the 1937 episode was the so-called “Capital Strike”, a sharp decline in corporate investment.

The imminency of Obamacare and Frankendodd, and the continued failure to address seriously the country’s fiscal situation, with the associated uncertainty about taxes and spending, may be creating a modern-day version of the capital strike.  The WSJ reports that growth in investment expenditure has slowed to a standstill, and that many large companies are slashing investment plans.  The article places the blame on the “Fiscal Cliff”, but in reality, this is overdetermined, as they say.  There are multiple factors at work, and all in the same bearish direction: the regulatory friction (epitomized by Obamacare, Frankendodd and the EPA) is a major drag on growth, and a major source of investment-killing uncertainty.  Indeed, I would put the least weight on the Fiscal Cliff as it is conventionally portrayed: that conventional portrayal is almost purely comic book Keynesian in nature, focusing on “aggregate demand”.  IMO, the handling of the expiration of various tax reductions and the potential for sequestration is relevant not because of AD-a slippery and largely chimerical concept-but because of what it portends about the future course of government spending, and in particular the appetite to deal with entitlements and transfer payments.

If what the WSJ reports is indeed a harbinger of a modern day capital strike, that would be consistent with my broad forecast in my post-election post.  A protracted period of stagnation/slow growth.  Which will only exacerbate the fiscal situation and increase the risk of a rollover/funding crisis.

As if we really should need another Ghost of Christmas Future to warn us, take a look at Japan right now.  Just saying.

Similar thoughts from Jonathan Tobin. 

Polls have consistently shown that far more Americans still blame George W. Bush for the country’s economic difficulties than those who were prepared to place responsibility on the man who has been president for the last few years. That fact, along with an economy that wasn’t very good but still not as terrible as many thought it might be, was enough to re-elect Barack Obama earlier this month. In doing so, Obama became the first president to successfully run for a second term, while blaming his predecessor for his own failures, since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who buried Alf Landon in 1936 by running against his predecessor Herbert Hoover.

That was quite a trick, but President Obama should be wary of emulating FDR in every respect. As Amity Shlaes wrote yesterday in Bloomberg News, Roosevelt’s second term provides some ominous precedents for an Obama second term. As our colleague John Steele Gordon wrote earlier this year, it may always be 1936 for liberals who believe conservatives are doomed to perpetual defeat. But what the president and his supporters should be worrying about is whether 2013 turns out to be a repeat of 1937, when a country mired in the Great Depression suffered another economic setback that heightened the country’s misery. As Shlaes points out, signs abound that the “Great Recession” that Obama claimed to save the country from during the campaign may be about to get worse. …

In London’s Telegraph, Janet Daley warns that the second term of obama could lead to a permanent no-growth economy.

Forget about that dead parrot of a question – should we join the eurozone? The eurozone has officially joined us in a newly emerging international organisation: we are all now members of the Permanent No-growth Club. And the United States has just re-elected a president who seems determined to sign up too. No government in what used to be called “the free world” seems prepared to take the steps that can stop this inexorable decline. They are all busily telling their electorates that austerity is for other people (France), or that the piddling attempts they have made at it will solve the problem (Britain), or that taxing “the rich” will make it unnecessary for government to cut back its own spending (America).

So here we all are. Like us, the member nations of the European single currency have embarked on their very own double (or is it triple?) dip recession. This is the future: the long, meandering “zig-zag” recovery to which the politicians and heads of central banks allude is just a euphemism for the end of economic life as we have known it.

Now there are some people for whom this will not sound like bad news. Many on the Left will finally have got the economy of their dreams – or, rather, the one they have always believed in. At last, we will be living with that fixed, unchanging pie which must be divided up “fairly” if social justice is to be achieved. Instead of a dynamic, growing pot of wealth and ever-increasing resources, which can enable larger and larger proportions of the population to become prosperous without taking anything away from any other group, there will indeed be an absolute limit on the amount of capital circulating within the society.

The only decisions to be made will involve how that given, unalterable sum is to be shared out – and those judgments will, of course, have to be made by the state since there will be no dynamic economic force outside of government to enter the equation. Wealth distribution will be the principal – virtually the only – significant function of political life. Is this Left-wing heaven? …

NY Times reports on discoveries in South Africa that point to an early creation of sophisticated tools by modern humans.

At a rock shelter on a coastal cliff in South Africa, scientists have found an abundance of advanced stone hunting tools with a tale to tell of the evolving mind of early modern humans at least 71,000 years ago.

The discovery, reported in the current issue of the journal Nature, lends weight to the hypothesis that not only did anatomically modern Homo sapiens emerge in Africa but also, to a previously unsuspected extent, their cognitive capacity for abstract and creative thought and the conception of increasingly complex technologies associated with modern human behavior.

The report describes the stone tools as microliths, thin blades about only an inch long that could be affixed to wood or bone. These tipped projectiles were either arrows propelled by bows or, more likely, spears launched by atlatls, wooden extensions of the throwing arm that act as a lever, imparting greater speeds and distances to the weapon. This technology, the researchers said, may have been pivotal to the success of Homo sapiens as humans left Africa and entered Eurasia some 50,000 years ago, encountering Neanderthals who were limited to hand-thrown spears.

The new evidence appeared to answer some critics who have contended that previous findings of early modern human behavior in Africa have been spotty and short-lived — a “flickering” pattern of experimentation with little or no continuity over time and across regions. The rock shelter excavations at Pinnacle Point, near MosselBay, east of Cape Town, show that this micro-blade technology continued over 11,000 years, until 60,000 years ago. The report says the technology was also “typically coupled to heat treatment” processes in shaping sharp and durable blades that persisted for nearly 100,000 years.

In their article in Nature, the researchers conclude, “Early modern humans in South Africa had the cognition to design and transmit at high fidelity these coupled recipe technologies.”

One of the authors, Curtis W. Marean, director of the research and a paleoanthropologist at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, said, “Every time we excavate a new site in coastal South Africa with advanced field techniques, we discover new and surprising results that push back in time the evidence for uniquely human behaviors.”  …

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Even the house organs of the obama administration can’t stomach his selection of Susan Rice for State. Dana Milbank started it Friday in WaPo.

… Even in a town that rewards sharp elbows and brusque personalities, Rice has managed to make an impressive array of enemies — on Capitol Hill, in Foggy Bottom and abroad. Particularly in comparison with the other person often mentioned for the job, Sen. John Kerry, she can be a most undiplomatic diplomat, and there likely aren’t enough Republican or Democratic votes in the Senate to confirm her.

Back when she was an assistant secretary of state during the Clinton administration, she appalled colleagues by flipping her middle finger at Richard Holbrooke during a meeting with senior staff at the State Department, according to witnesses. Colleagues talk of shouting matches and insults.

Among those she has insulted is the woman she would replace at State. Rice was one of the first former Clinton administration officials to defect to Obama’s primary campaign against Hillary Clinton. Rice condemned Clinton’s Iraq and Iran positions, asking for an “explanation of how and why she got those critical judgments wrong.”

Clinton got a measure of revenge in 2010 after she worked out a deal with the Russian foreign minister on a package of Iran sanctions to be adopted by the U.N. Security Council. The White House wanted Rice to make the announcement (part of a campaign to increase her profile that included high-visibility foreign trips and TV appearances), but a Clinton aide got Kerry to ask Clinton about the matter during an unrelated Senate hearing. …

… Rice’s pugilism provoked the Russians to weigh in this week in opposition to her nomination as secretary of state. The Russian business daily Kommersant quoted an anonymous Russian foreign ministry official as saying that Rice, who quarreled with Russia over Syria, is “too ambitious and aggressive,” and her appointment would make it “more difficult for Moscow to work with Washington.”

Compared with this, the flap over Libya is relatively minor — but revealing. It’s true that, in her much-criticized TV performance, she was reciting talking points given to her by the intelligence agencies. But that’s the trouble. Rice stuck with her points even though they had been contradicted by the president of the Libyan National Assembly, who, on CBS’s “Face the Nation” just before Rice, said there was “no doubt” that the attack on Americans in Benghazi “was preplanned.” Rice rebutted the Libyan official, arguing — falsely, it turned out — that there was no evidence of such planning.

True, Rice was following orders from the White House, which she does well. But the nation’s top diplomat needs to show more sensitivity and independence — traits Clinton has demonstrated in abundance. Obama can do better at State than Susan Rice.

Maureen Dowd was next.

… Ambitious to be secretary of state, Susan Rice wanted to prove she had the gravitas for the job and help out the White House. So the ambassador to the United Nations agreed to a National Security Council request to go on all five Sunday shows to talk about the attack on the American consulate in Libya.

“She saw this as a great opportunity to go out and close the stature gap,” said one administration official. “She was focused on the performance, not the content. People said, ‘It’s sad because it was one of her best performances.’ But it’s not a movie, it’s the news. Everyone in politics thinks, you just get your good talking points and learn them and reiterate them on camera. But what if they’re not good talking points? What if what you’re saying isn’t true, even if you’re saying it well?”

Testifying on Capitol Hill on Friday, the beheaded Head Spook David Petraeus said the C.I.A. knew quickly that the Benghazi raid was a terrorist attack.

“It was such a no-brainer,” one intelligence official told me. …

… An Africa expert, Rice should have realized that when a gang showed up with R.P.G.’s and mortars in a place known as a hotbed of Qaeda sympathizers and Islamic extremist training camps, it was not anger over a movie. She should have been savvy enough to wonder why the wily Hillary was avoiding the talk shows. …

Two days ago we took a swipe at university administrators. The Austin American-Statesman provides an example of their aberrant behavior.

A forgivable loan program benefiting law professors and a former law dean at the University of Texas raises legal concerns and should be permanently ended, according to a report by the UT System and a review of that report by the state attorney general’s office.

The American-Statesman obtained copies of the documents under the Texas Public Information Act.

The UT System report was especially critical of the former dean, Larry Sager, who remains on the faculty of the School of Law and who, while dean, sought and received a $500,000 forgivable loan from the UT Law School Foundation.

Although the foundation approved his loan, campus administrators did not sign off on it and were unaware of it, the report said.

“Obviously, this lack of transparency and accountability is unacceptable and, at a minimum, it creates an impression of self-dealing that cannot be condoned,” said the report, which was written by Barry Burgdorf, the system’s vice chancellor and general counsel.

Glenn Smith, a spokesman for Sager, took issue with parts of the report and parts of the review by the attorney general’s office. …

Since abuses like the above are widespread in graduate education, there are going to be some changes. Above the Law Blog covers some suggested changes to legal education.

As I mentioned the other day, I recently attended an excellent conference at George Mason Law in honor of the late Larry Ribstein. At a panel entitled “The Past and Future of Legal Education,” Professor John O. McGinnis presented a paper arguing for an undergraduate option for legal education.

It’s not an entirely novel proposal — Elie attended a conference over the summer where another professor presented a similar idea — but it’s certainly worth considering. Here’s how McGinnis described his proposal in a Wall Street Journal piece (co-authored with Russell Mangas of Kirkland & Ellis):

“States should permit undergraduate colleges to offer majors in law that will entitle graduates to take the bar exam. If they want to add a practical requirement, states could also ask graduates to serve one-year apprenticeships before becoming eligible for admission to the bar.

An undergraduate legal degree could be readily designed. A student could devote half of his course work to the major, which would allow him to approximate two years of legal study. There is substantial agreement in the profession that two years are enough to understand the essentials of the law—both the basics of our ancient common law and the innovations of our modern world. A one-year apprenticeship after graduation would allow young lawyers to replace the superfluous third year of law school with practical training.

This option would reduce the law school tuition to zero. And the three years of students going without income would be replaced by a year of paid apprenticeship and two years earning a living as a lawyer.”

I support the idea of reducing classroom time and combining formal instruction with paid apprenticeship. I outlined a similar proposal in the New York Times last year.

In his conference presentation, Professor McGinnis suggested that about 60 credit hours of coursework could suffice for an undergraduate degree in law. This might require change from the American Bar Association, since the ABA currently requires 80 hours of coursework to earn a law degree from an ABA-accredited law school, and many jurisdictions require those who sit for the bar to have graduated from an ABA-accredited school. (Northwestern Law’s former dean, David Van Zandt, has persuasively argued why this requirement should be reduced.) …

Interesting look at learning in different cultures from NPR.

In 1979, when Jim Stigler was still a graduate student at the University of Michigan, he went to Japan to research teaching methods and found himself sitting in the back row of a crowded fourth-grade math class.

“The teacher was trying to teach the class how to draw three-dimensional cubes on paper,” Stigler explains, “and one kid was just totally having trouble with it. His cube looked all cockeyed, so the teacher said to him, ‘Why don’t you go put yours on the board?’ So right there I thought, ‘That’s interesting! He took the one who can’t do it and told him to go and put it on the board.’ ”

Stigler knew that in American classrooms, it was usually the best kid in the class who was invited to the board. And so he watched with interest as the Japanese student dutifully came to the board and started drawing, but still couldn’t complete the cube. Every few minutes, the teacher would ask the rest of the class whether the kid had gotten it right, and the class would look up from their work, and shake their heads no. And as the period progressed, Stigler noticed that he — Stigler — was getting more and more anxious.

“I realized that I was sitting there starting to perspire,” he says, “because I was really empathizing with this kid. I thought, ‘This kid is going to break into tears!’ ”

But the kid didn’t break into tears. Stigler says the child continued to draw his cube with equanimity. “And at the end of the class, he did make his cube look right! And the teacher said to the class, ‘How does that look, class?’ And they all looked up and said, ‘He did it!’ And they broke into applause.” The kid smiled a huge smile and sat down, clearly proud of himself.

Stigler is now a professor of psychology at UCLA who studies teaching and learning around the world, and he says it was this small experience that first got him thinking about how differently East and West approach the experience of intellectual struggle.

“I think that from very early ages we [in America] see struggle as an indicator that you’re just not very smart,” Stigler says. “It’s a sign of low ability — people who are smart don’t struggle, they just naturally get it, that’s our folk theory. Whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity.” …

Late Night Humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Leno: So, we’re headed for a fiscal cliff. The bad news is we just reelected a guy whose campaign slogan was “Forward.”

Leno: What’s so hard about counting votes in Florida? They just finished. Half the population there can play 10 Bingo cards at once. But they can’t count votes?

Leno: Hillary Clinton denies she’ll run for president in 2016. Says all she wants to do is sleep. So, she should probably be vice president.

Fallon: A 76-carat diamond went up for auction in Switzerland. The jeweler called it “a priceless stone.” David Petraeus’ wife called it, “a start.”

Fallon: Man this David Petraeus scandal just keeps getting bigger. It turns out that another top general and an FBI agent had inappropriate contact with Jill Kelley, the woman who sparked the investigation. They need to stop pulling the thread on this thing or we’re gonna end up with nobody left to run the government. …

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Minyanville on why Twinkies will live and the Volt should die.

Reports of the death of Twinkies have been greatly exaggerated. You can bet your less-than-a-UAW-worker’s next paycheck that the delightfully unnatural confections and wondrous white breads from Interstate Bakeries Corp. are not going away, news stories to the contrary notwithstanding.

I wish we could say the opposite about the financially disastrous, US-government-subsidized Chevy Volt, but we can’t. The fact that the Invisible Hand will ultimately keep us in golden sponge cake reveals everything about what goes wrong when the bumbling hand of politics intervenes in free markets, as it did in the case of General Motors (NYSE:GM).

As you’ve by now read over and over via today’s dominant Facebook (NASDAQ:FB)/Twitter meme, we are about to see the death by liquidation of Interstate Bakeries Corp., maker of Hostess Twinkies, Ding-Dongs, and Wonder Bread, among other nutritionally vacant delights. The sentiment behind most of the posts is one of sadness at the pending disappearance of the products, along with rampant nostalgia for the days when we all carried them in our lunchboxes.

Dry your creme-puffed eyes, my friends. The spongy confections with all the qualities of tasty blown-in foam insulation will almost certainly not disappear from store shelves for very long, if at all.

Why not? Because the economics of selling Twinkies still work just fine. The economics of making Twinkies with a grumpy, highly unionized labor force don’t. And our system can and will correct that.

Interstate said its Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union-member line workers would need to take significant wage and benefit cuts to allow the company to bring its operating costs into line with other industry players. As a result, the workers told the company where it could shove its Twinkies. Interstate’s ownership group essentially responded by saying, “You Ding-Dongs — forget it. We’re closing it all up and selling off the assets.”

Which virtually guarantees Twinkies will survive. Given their notoriously long shelf life, my guess is they’ll be back in production before your stash even runs out. Why? Because the products made by Interstate are still in high demand. They wouldn’t be on every store shelf in America if they weren’t, so the brands will be revived and improved. …

Just two items today because of the length of this piece from Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine. It is the story of a man who tends a graveyard that sits abandoned next to his home. See if it affects you the way it did Pickerhead. You’ll want to know more about David Young and also Rachael Maddux who made his story so engaging.

In ancient Greece, the story goes, there lived a man named Sisyphus—a powerful man, the founder and king of Corinth—who was so proud that he spurned the gods and tried to cheat death. For these transgressions, he was punished, banished to the underworld and made for all eternity to roll a boulder up a hill, reach the summit, watch the rock crash all the way back down, follow it, then start all over again.

Here is another man, in another time, another world. David Young is not overly proud and he is certainly no king. But he too once stood at the bottom of a hill, looked up at the summit and saw his fate—his own land of the dead, the crumbling, overgrown cemetery that he has shouldered all responsibility for over the last three decades and counting.

Like Sisyphus, David toils alone; unlike the punished man, David’s burden was a choice. Yet no explanation of his devotion seems to suffice. He values the cemetery’s history, enjoys the feeling of working hard without hope of reward or recognition, thrives on the structure and sense of purpose it gives his life—yes, all these things are true.

But he has committed himself to the cemetery so fully, it is as if the cemetery owns him, as if his actions are nudged along by some force much greater than mere human motives. There is something else at play, that unknown element complicit when a person commits to an act beyond standard human kindness—that mystery of service, the ineffable arithmetic of someone giving and giving and giving of themselves until they are both nearly gone and, somehow, even more fully alive.

David H. Young III is 71 years old, thin-framed; he used to be all right angles, but time has rounded most of his corners, and there’s a hunch to his shoulders that suggests he’s perpetually shrugging something away, a worry or a compliment or a question too big to answer. His hair, once nearly black, has finally decided it’s time to turn gray, though his brows are holding out, almost as dark as when he was a boy.

He grew up in Georgia, Macon and Rockmart. His father was a Tech alum, an insurance agent and a smalltime farmer; his mother, an Agnes Scott graduate, helped her husband with his business. David was sent up to the DarlingtonSchool in Rome, then graduated with a degree in industrial management from Georgia Tech in 1963. He met a girl in college—Barbara, another Scottie—and, once he’d paid his dues to Uncle Sam, he came back home and married her. Barbara found a job up in Chattanooga, and he enrolled in the accounting program at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; they bought a little white house in Chattanooga’s Shepherd Hills neighborhood, settled in, never left.

They bought the house for the closets—Barbara required closets—but the backyard was nice, too, a green lawn stretching out then ascending in a series of terraces, like an amphitheater. David kept it tidy, tended to the whole swath of it right up to the chain-link fence that marked the back property line. Every so often he’d climb the stair-stepped slope and do battle with the ivy and weeds that never stopped seeping through the fence from the wooded lot beyond.

Standing in his dining room, looking out his big picture window and up at that beautiful backyard, he could see points of a wrought-iron gate and gray crests of tombstones among the dark tangle of vines and trees at the top of the hill. …

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Mandate smandate says David Harsanyi.

Debbie Wasserman Shultz: “There was no mandate” in an election in which the president’s opponent, Sen. John Kerry, won 48% of the vote, she says. “Half the country agreed with us.”

Barack Obama:  ”Our task is not to shove our views down the throats of the losers but to see if we can arrive at common ground,” Obama says.

James Taranto plays back some words from “Audacity of Hope.”

“Maybe peace would have broken out with a different kind of White House, one less committed to waging a perpetual campaign–a White House that would see a 51-48 victory as a call to humility and compromise rather than an irrefutable mandate.”

Yeah, well, shut up, you Republican losers. Obama won, which means a majority of Americans support his policies. Stop being obstructionist and get with the program.

Oh wait, sorry. That quote wasn’t from a Republican but from a recently elected Democrat. It was referring not to Obama but to George W. Bush after the 2004 election. The author: Barack Obama, junior senator from Illinois. The book: “The Audacity of Hope.”

In the following paragraph, Sen. Obama goes on to complain about antitax activist Grover Norquist, who was “unconstrained by the decorum of public office.” On Tuesday, as PBS’s “NewsHour” reports, President Obama met with a group of similarly unconstrained “leaders of labor and liberal groups” at the White House to discuss economic policy.

Dennis Van Roekel, president of the teachers union that styles itself the National Education Association, told the network: “I brought the message that, number one, it’s important that we let the Bush tax cuts disappear for the wealthiest 2%. As we’re looking for a $1.2 trillion solution, $829 billion takes us a long way there.”

Do you see the problem here? The annual budget deficit has been running at around $1.2 trillion. (The Hill reports the deficit for October alone was $120 billion.) Raising taxes on “the wealthiest 2%,” it is estimated, would increase government revenues $829 billion over a decade. When Van Roekel says the tax hike “takes us a long way there,” he’s off by an order of magnitude.

The president’s answer is still more massive, job-killing tax increases: …

Megan McArdle with a mini-rant about 4 lb. bags of sugar.

… This is, of course, beyond moronic, since it doesn’t help us actually need less food.  Instead, we can shop more, or fill the trunk with more packages. But it exploits human attentional flaws: we tend to look at the headline number and ignore the details.  That’s why companies will frequently woo you with a great price on a television (and a terribly inflated shipping charge), and why big box retailers push wildly inflated extended warranties.  People will leave the store to save $100 on a washer-dryer, but it will not occur to most of them to check the price of your competitors’ warranty programs.  

This is super-annoying in a world that was designed around stable package sizes–my sugar canister was clearly intended to hold a five pound bag, and now I know why it’s never quite full.  I also have a fair number of recipes that call for 12 ounces of something that is now being sold in a ten ounce package.  Now you have to either buy two, or break out the calculator.

The fact that producers are shrinking the packages instead of raising the price also contributes to something I’ve recently seen popping up both on personal finance boards, and in personal conversations: people expressing surprise and frustration at their inability to control their soaring grocery bills. …

There is little chance there is one group more responsible for the present problems in our society than college administrators. The recent election shows how poorly educated their graduates have become. And the student debt crisis shows how little college leaders care about their customers. Educators live high on the hog while they load students with debts that will plague them for much of their adult lives. Just this past week FordhamUniversity’s president demonstrated his callous disregard of one of our essential freedoms when he criticized a student group for inviting Ann Coulter to speak. That kerfuffle lead to this weeks WSJ interview with the leader of a group that tries to protect free speech on college campuses. That’s right, there is actually is a need for a group that fights for free speech for college students – Foundation for Individual Rights in Education or FIRE.

… Administrative self-interest is also at work. “There’s been this huge expansion in the bureaucratic class at universities,” Mr. Lukianoff explains. “They passed the number of people involved in instruction sometime around 2006. So you get this ever-renewing crop of administrators, and their jobs aren’t instruction but to police student behavior. In the worst cases, they see it as their duty to intervene on students’ deepest beliefs.”

Consider the University of Delaware, which in fall 2007 instituted an ideological orientation for freshmen. The “treatment,” as the administrators called it, included personal interviews that probed students’ private lives with such questions as: “When did you discover your sexual identity?” Students were taught in group sessions that the term racist “applies to all white people” while “people of color cannot be racists.” Once FIRE spotlighted it, the university dismantled the program.

Yet in March 2012, Kathleen Kerr, the architect of the Delaware program, was elected vice president of the American College Personnel Association, the professional group of university administrators.

A 2010 survey by the American Association of Colleges and Universities found that of 24,000 college students, only 35.6% strongly agreed that “it is safe to hold unpopular views on campus.” When the question was asked of 9,000 campus professionals—who are more familiar with the enforcement end of the censorship rules—only 18.8% strongly agreed.

Mr. Lukianoff thinks all of this should alarm students, parents and alumni enough to demand change: “If just a handful more students came in knowing what administrators are doing at orientation programs, with harassment codes, or free-speech zones—if students knew this was wrong—we could really change things.”

The trouble is that students are usually intimidated into submission. “The startling majority of students don’t bother. They’re too concerned about their careers, too concerned about their grades, to bother fighting back,” he says. Parents and alumni dismiss free-speech restrictions as something that only happens to conservatives, or that will never affect their own children.

“I make the point that this is happening, and even if it’s happening to people you don’t like, it’s a fundamental violation of what the university means,” says Mr. Lukianoff. “Free speech is about protecting minority rights. Free speech is about admitting you don’t know everything. Free speech is about protecting oddballs. It means protecting dissenters.”

It even means letting Ann Coulter speak.

If you’re adventuresome and like to travel maybe avoiding Stalin’s Atlantis might be a good idea. Der Spiegel with a look at town on stilts in the Caspian Sea.

In the 1950s, Soviet engineers built a massive city in the Caspian Sea off the coast of Azerbaijan. It was a network of oil platforms linked by hundreds of kilometers of roads and housing 5,000 workers, with a cinema, a park and apartment blocks. Gradually disintegrating but still closely guarded, this astonishing place inspired a fiery scene in a James Bond movie. …

… After the war, Soviet engineers took a closer look at a reef that mariners called the “Black Rock.” They built a shed on the tiny island and conducted test drilling. During the night of Nov. 7, 1949, they struck top-quality oil at a depth of 1,100 meters below the seabed and shortly thereafter, the world’s first offshore oil platform was built at the spot, now renamed Neft Dashlari, or “oily rock.” “Platform” is a hopelessly inadequate word for the many-armed monster of steel and timber that gradually spread across the waves of the sea, which is only 20 meters deep on average, over the following years.

The foundation of the main settlement consists of seven sunken ships including “Zoroaster,” the world’s first oil tanker, built in Sweden. In Neft Dashlari’s heyday, some 2,000 drilling platforms were spread in a 30-kilometer circle, joined by a network of bridge viaducts spanning 300 kilometers. Trucks thundered across the bridges and eight-story apartment blocks were built for the 5,000 workers who sometimes spent weeks on Neft Dashlari. The voyage back to the mainland could take anything between six and twelve hours, depending on the type of ship. The island had its own beverage factory, soccer pitch, library, bakery, laundry, 300-seat cinema, bathhouse, vegetable garden and even a tree-lined park for which the soil was brought from the mainland.

It was a Stalinist utopia for the working class. A Soviet stamp from 1971 summed up the gigantic hopes it embodied in a tiny image: against the black outline of a drilling rig, a road made of bridges snaked its way across the deep blue sea towards further rigs and a red sun on the horizon. …

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Frederic Hayek’s book Road to Serfdom has an important chapter that attempts to explain why countries with powerful governments pass a tipping point and end up with tyranny. Hayek’s thesis was the lowest types of people would be willing to do the worst things to achieve political power. The last Pickings which was posted Nov. 6th closed with November’s Imprimis from HillsdaleCollege. In it, Norman Podhoretz asked if America was an exceptional nation. We got our answer that day when barack obama was rewarded for his despicable disgusting campaign of dishonesty and dishonor.

Andrew Malcolm sums up election day.

… To cap the evening’s entertainment, Americans got for their electoral edification the traditional pair of speeches that reveal much of what could have been and what will be.

Exactly 10 years and one day after victoriously claiming the Massachusetts governor’s office, for which he took no salary, Romney in 703 words graciously admitted his loss. He said the word “America” five times, the word “pray” three times and the words “Thank you” 21 times.

The Real Good Talker, who’s never seen anything he couldn’t throw a speech at, took 2,163 words to claim victory in what is traditionally a moment to call for unity and healing after a divisive campaign.

The victorious Chicagoan, who promised before the last election to end Washington’s partisan bitterness, strangely uttered the word “fight” five times and “thank you” but seven times. He spoke the word “unify” zero times, “unity” zero times, “heal” zero times and “pray” zero times.

He did, however, manage to mention himself 27 times. …

Michael Barone explains the two Americas. 

You know who won the election (or whether we face another Florida 2000), and as I write I don’t.

But whether Barack Obama is re-elected to a second term or Mitt Romney is elected the 45th president, the contours of their support during this fiercely fought campaign show that we live in Two Americas.

The culturally cohesive America of the 1950s that some of us remember, usually glossing over racial segregation and the civil rights movement, is no longer with us and hasn’t been for some time.

That was an America of universal media, in which everyone watched one of three similar TV channels and newscasts every night. Radio, 1930s and 1940s movies, and 1950s and early-1960s television painted a reasonably true picture of what was typically American.

That’s not the America we live in now. Niche media has replaced universal media.

One America listens to Rush Limbaugh, the other to NPR. Each America has its favorite cable news channel. As for entertainment, Americans have 100-plus cable channels to choose from, and the Internet provides many more options.

Bill Bishop highlighted the political consequences of this in his 2008 book “The Big Sort.” He noted that in 1976, only 27 percent of voters lived in counties carried by one presidential candidate by 20 percent or more. In 2004, nearly twice as many, 48 percent, lived in these landslide counties. That percentage may be even higher this year.

We’re more affluent than we were in the 1950s (if you don’t think so, try doing without your air conditioning, microwaves, smartphones and Internet connections). And we have used this affluence to seal ourselves off in the America of our choosing while trying to ignore the other America.

We tend to choose the America that is culturally congenial. …

We have had this piece on the new class divide from Joel Kotkin before, but it is worth looking at again.  

… Obama’s core middle-class support, and that of his party, comes from what might be best described as “the clerisy,” a 21st century version of France’s pre-revolution First Estate. This includes an ever-expanding class of minders — lawyers, teachers, university professors, the media and, most particularly, the relatively well paid legions of public sector workers — who inhabit Washington, academia, large non-profits and government centers across the country.

This largely well-heeled “middle class” still adores the president, and party theoreticians see it as the Democratic Party’s new base. Gallup surveys reveal Obama does best among “professionals” such as teachers, lawyers and educators. After retirees, educators and lawyers are the two biggest sources of campaign contributions for Obama by occupation. Obama’s largest source of funds among individual organizations is the University of California, Harvard is fifth and its wannabe cousin Stanford ranks ninth.

Like teachers, much of academia and the legal bar like expanding government since the tax spigot flows in the right direction: that is, into their mouths. Like the old clerical classes, who relied on tithes and the collection bowl, many in today’s clerisy lives somewhat high on the hog; nearly one in five federal workers earn over $100,000.

Essentially, the clerisy has become a new, mass privileged class who live a safer, more secure life compared to those trapped in the harsher, less cosseted private economy. As California Polytechnic economist Michael Marlow points out, public sector workers enjoy greater job stability, and salary and benefits as much as 21% higher than of private sector employees doing similar work. …

… The GOP, for its part, now relies on another part of the middle class, what I would call the yeomanry. In many ways they represent the contemporary version of Jeffersonian farmers or the beneficiaries of President Lincoln’s Homestead Act. They are primarily small property owners who lack the girth and connections of the clerisy but resist joining the government-dependent poor. Particularly critical are small business owners, who Gallup identifies as “the least approving” of Obama among all the major occupation groups. Barely one in three likes the present administration.

The yeomanry diverge from the clerisy in other ways. They tend to live in the suburbs, a geography much detested by many leaders of the clerisy and, likely, the president himself. Yeomen families tend to be concentrated in those parts of the country that have more children and are more apt to seek solutions to social problems through private efforts. Philanthropy, church work and voluntarism — what you might call, appropriately enough, the Utah approach, after the state that leads in philanthropy.

The nature of their work also differentiates the clerisy from the yeomanry. The clerisy labors largely in offices and has no contact with actual production. Many yeomen, particularly in business services, depend on industry for their livelihoods either directly or indirectly. The clerisy’s stultifying, and often job-toxic regulations and “green” agenda may be one reason why people engaged in farming, fishing, forestry, transportation, manufacturing and construction overwhelmingly disapprove of the president’s policies, according to Gallup….

Mark Steyn says the real world will not need 270 electoral votes to prevail.

… Reality doesn’t need to crack 270 in the Electoral College. Reality can get 1.3 percent of the popular vote and still trump everything else. In the course of his first term, Obama increased the federal debt by just shy of $6 trillion and, in return, grew the economy by $905 billion. So, as Lance Roberts at Street Talk Live pointed out, in order to generate every $1 of economic growth the United States had to borrow about $5.60. There’s no one out there on the planet – whether it’s “the rich” or the Chinese – who can afford to carry on bankrolling that rate of return. According to one CBO analysis, US government spending is sustainable as long as the rest of the world is prepared to sink 19 percent of its GDP into U.S. Treasury debt. We already know the answer to that: In order to avoid the public humiliation of a failed bond auction, the U.S. Treasury sells 70 percent of the debt it issues to the Federal Reserve – which is to say the left hand of the U.S. government is borrowing money from the right hand of the U.S. government. It’s government as a Nigerian email scam, with Ben Bernanke playing the role of the dictator’s widow with $4 trillion under her bed that she’s willing to wire to Timmy Geithner as soon as he sends her his bank account details.

If that’s all a bit too technical, here’s the gist: There’s nothing holding the joint up.

So, Washington cannot be saved from itself. For the moment, tend to your state, and county, town and school district, and demonstrate the virtues of responsible self-government at the local level. Americans as a whole have joined the rest of the Western world in voting themselves a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. The longer any course correction is postponed the more convulsive it will be. Alas, on Tuesday, the electorate opted to defer it for another four years. I doubt they’ll get that long.

Over at Powerline Blog, John Hinderaker finds the silver lining.

I can see only one good outcome from yesterday’s election: the fact that Barack Obama will be the president who inherits the mess left by Barack Obama. The economy is in awful shape; it won’t get much better given Obama’s policies, and may get worse. Many billions of dollars in capital that have been sitting on the sidelines, awaiting the outcome of this year’s election, will now give up on the United States and go elsewhere. Plants will be built in Korea and Brazil that would have been built here if the election had gone differently. The chronically unemployed–a group that is larger now than at any time since the Great Depression–aren’t going back to work. Nor are the millions who have signed up for permanent disability. Incomes will continue to stagnate. I don’t understand why anyone would vote for four more years of unemployment and poverty, but that is what the American people voted for, and that is what they are going to get. …

… Obama will now have to reveal his agenda for a second term, heretofore a closely-guarded secret. In particular, what is he going to do about the nation’s $16 trillion debt? Obama’s answer during his first term was “nothing.” His budget, incorporating any number of optimistic assumptions, called for the debt to rise to $20 trillion. I don’t see how Obama can get through his second term without articulating some plan, however half-baked, for dealing with the debt. Ben Bernanke can’t keep interest rates at zero for another four years; at least, I don’t think he can. As soon as interest rates start to rise, the budget–no, wait, we don’t have a budget, but you know what I mean–is blown. It will be difficult for the press to conceal from the American people the fact that we are broke.  …

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Kyle Smith in the NY Post says Obama has “mud on his hands.”

Watch the campaign news segment with the sound turned down. You can see what’s happening in their faces: Mitt Romney is earnest, optimistic and forward-looking. Barack Obama is sour with sarcasm, peevish, defensive and even downright angry. …

… When the history of Campaign 2012 is written, let it not be forgotten that Barack Obama has spent more money on character assassination than anyone at any time in the entire history of humanity. The man who once predicted that Republicans would say about him, “He’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?” has run a campaign based on exactly that level of substance. The shrinks call this “projection.”

For the most part, Obama hasn’t even tried to campaign on his actual accomplishments, because voters made it clear they didn’t think much of them at the time and haven’t changed their minds. He doesn’t mention the $800 billion of wasted stimulus, barely talks about ObamaCare and omits mention of how he ignored the recommendations of his own blue-ribbon debt-reduction commission.

He even cut the “al Qaeda on the run” line from his standard speech, because in fact al Qaeda is on the prowl and Obama would rather voters not be thinking about how terrorists on Sept. 11 attacked the US consulate all night long in Benghazi while he did nothing.

Nor, for the most part, has Obama run on Romney’s actual record, because he’d rather not encourage the fact-check mafia to mention that during the Romney governorship, the Massachusetts unemployment rate went from 5.6% to 4.7% while the budget was balanced.

Instead, Obama, whose campaign strategists have been up front about their strategy from Day One (Politico, after talking to the president’s minions, headlined its Aug. 9, 2011 story, “Obama Plan: Destroy Romney”) has deployed hundreds of millions of dollars primarily to create a fictitious Romney, a heartless jobicidal monster who hides his money in shadowy offshore accounts and is, as the infamous ad put it, “Not one of us.” A Romney ad that said the same about Obama would, of course, be racist.

Ads from the super PAC run by Obama’s former campaign secretary shamelessly and falsely blamed Romney for the death by cancer of a Kansas City woman whose husband had earlier starred in an official Obama campaign ad. Obama ads have described Romney as the “outsourcer in chief,” as though Romney were responsible for the basic economic principle that causes jobs to go to those willing to do them for the lowest wages.

Another official Obama ad asked, …

Jennifer Rubin posts on 10 surprises from the election this year.

In some respects the 2012 presidential campaign has played out in predictable fashion. The focus has been on the economy. President Obama has tried to make Mitt Romney unacceptable. A ton of money was spent. In a polarized country the race is close. But much about the 2012 elections has surprised voters and pundits alike. Here are only 10:

1. The meltdown of GOP Senate candidates: Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, Connie Mack IV, Tommy Thompson and George Allen have showed, one GOP insider wisecracked to me, “It must be really hard to run a competent campaign.” Some of these candidates might win, but most won’t. Republicans as a result are unlikely to take back the Senate, something that seemed very possible only a few months ago.

2. The debates were the surprise: For weeks liberals denied it, but in fact the debates (all four) fundamentally changed the trajectory of the race and the perception of Mitt Romney. Democrats didn’t expect that Romney to show up, but, candidly, Republicans were just as surprised. …

This election will tell us if our country is going to continue as a beacon to the world. Since we will soon learn if our country is actually an exceptional place, it seems a good time to pass along Norman Podhoretz’s piece for The Imprimis of Hillsdale College that is titled; “Is America Exceptional?” 

ONCE UPON A TIME, hardly anyone dissented from the idea that, for better or worse, the United States of America was different from all other nations. This is not surprising, since the attributes that made it different were vividly evident from the day of its birth. Let me say a few words about three of them in particular.

First of all, unlike all other nations past or present, this one accepted as a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. What this meant was that its Founders aimed to create a society in which, for the first time in the history of the world, the individual’s fate would be determined not by who his father was, but by his own freely chosen pursuit of his own ambitions. In other words, America was to be something new under the sun: a society in which hereditary status and class distinctions would be erased, leaving individuals free to act and to be judged on their merits alone. There remained, of course, the two atavistic contradictions of slavery and the position of women; but so intolerable did these contradictions ultimately prove that they had to be resolved—even if, as in the case of the former, it took the bloodiest war the nation has ever fought.

Secondly, in all other countries membership or citizenship was a matter of birth, of blood, of lineage, of rootedness in the soil. Thus, foreigners who were admitted for one reason or another could never become full-fledged members of the society. But America was the incarnation of an idea, and therefore no such factors came into play. To become a full-fledged American, it was only necessary to pledge allegiance to the new Republic and to the principles for which it stood.

Thirdly, in all other nations, the rights, if any, enjoyed by their citizens were conferred by human agencies: kings and princes and occasionally parliaments. As such, these rights amounted to privileges that could be revoked at will by the same human agencies. In America, by contrast, the citizen’s rights were declared from the beginning to have come from God and to be “inalienable”—that is, immune to legitimate revocation.

As time went on, other characteristics that were unique to America gradually manifested themselves. For instance, in the 20th century, social scientists began speculating as to why America was the only country in the developed world where socialism had failed to take root. As it happens, I myself first came upon the term “American exceptionalism” not in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, where it has mistakenly been thought to have originated, but in a book by the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, who used it in connection with the absence in America of a strong socialist party. More recently I have discovered that the term may actually have originated with Joseph Stalin, of all people, who coined the term in the same connection but only in order to dismiss it. Thus, when an American Communist leader informed him that American workers had no intention of playing the role Marx had assigned to the worldwide proletariat as the vanguard of the coming socialist revolution, Stalin reputedly shouted something like, “Away with this heresy of American exceptionalism!” And yet Stalin and his followers were themselves exceptional in denying that America was exceptional in the plainly observable ways I have mentioned. If, however, almost everyone agreed that America was different, there was a great deal of disagreement over whether its exceptionalism made it into a force for good or a force for evil. This too went back to the beginning, when the denigrators outnumbered the enthusiasts.

At first, anti-American passions were understandably fuelled by the dangerous political challenge posed to the monarchies of Europe by the republican ideas of the American Revolution. But the political side of anti-Americanism was soon joined to a cultural indictment that proved to have more staying power. Here is how the brilliant but volatile historian Henry Adams—the descendent of two American presidents—described the cultural indictment as it was framed in the earliest days of the Republic:

“In the foreigner’s range of observation, love of money was the most conspicuous and most common trait of the American character . . . . No foreigner of that day—neither poet, painter, or philosopher—could detect in American life anything higher than vulgarity . . . . Englishmen especially indulged in unbounded invective against the sordid character of American society . . . . Contemporary critics could see neither generosity, economy, honor, nor ideas of any kind in the American breast.”

In his younger days, Adams defended America against these foreign critics; but in later life, snobbishly recoiling from the changes wrought by rapid industrialization following the Civil War, he would hurl the same charge at the America of the so-called Gilded Age.

We see a similar conflict in Tocqueville. Democracy in America was mainly a defense of the country’s political system and many of its egalitarian habits and mores. But where its cultural and spiritual life was concerned, Tocqueville expressed much the same contempt as the critics cited by Henry Adams. The Americans, he wrote, with “their exclusively commercial habits,” were so fixated “upon purely practical objects” that they neglected “the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts,” and it was only their proximity to Europe that allowed them “to neglect these pursuits without lapsing into barbarism.” Many years later, another Frenchman, Georges Clemenceau, went Tocqueville one better: “America,” he quipped, “is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone from barbarism to decadence without the usual interval of civilization.”  …

… With all exceptions duly noted, I think it is fair to say that what liberals mainly see when they look at America today is injustice and oppression crying out for redress. By sharp contrast, conservatives see a complex of traditions and institutions built upon the principles that animated the American Revolution and that have made it possible—to say yet again what cannot be said too often—for more freedom and more prosperity to be enjoyed by more of its citizens than in any other society in human history. It follows that what liberals—who concentrate their attention on the relatively little that is wrong with America instead of the enormous good embodied within it—seek to change or discard is precisely what conservatives are dedicated to preserving, reinvigorating, and defending. …