While I have my doubts about some of the more asinine gun control measures passing at the federal level, here in Colorado things aren’t looking so good for gun owners. Among the measures that stand a good chance of passing both houses of the legislature is banning concealed carry permit holders from bringing guns on [...]

Until yesterday, if someone asked me what I thought about Dr. Ben Cason, I would have had no idea who you were talking about. After listening to his speech (below) from the National Prayer Breakfast from a few days ago with President Obama just a few feet away, I thought this speech was too good [...]

There is so much economic ignorance/stupidity in this video (below), I wouldn’t even know where to begin. John Maynard Keynes himself would probably be embarrassed by this video courtesy of the California* Federation of Teachers and narrated by the great economist of our time Ed Asner. I don’t have much else to say about this [...]

As has been discussed here recently, Chicago teachers are striking, even though they already make an average salary nearly double that of the average Chicago family, and are being offered a 16% raise over four years. I dunno about you, but as a free market partcipant in our economy today, that sounds like a pretty [...]

The teacher strike in Chicago has entered its third day. This is one of the few facts the MSM is reporting along with the fact that the city and the union are far from reaching an agreement. What is missing from much of the coverage is what are their demands? Sure, the MSM reports that [...]

The AP, lamenting the fact that so many new college grads are having trouble finding work: College graduates who majored in zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and humanities were among the least likely to find jobs appropriate to their education level Actually, like the guy interviewed with a “creative writing” degree who now works as [...]

On August 14, 1990, Milton Friedman gave a speech at the International Society for Individual Liberty’s 5th World Libertarian Conference on the subject of libertarianism and humility. There are many adjectives which can be ascribed to libertarians but “humble” usually isn’t one of them. Among the quotable parts of the speech, Friedman said the following: [...]

“Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot.” I designated the above tweet by 18 year-old high school senior Emma Sullivan tweet of the day, not due to the content itself (it’s actually quite juvenile), but for her refusal to write an insincere apology letter to Gov. Brownback [...]

Here’s a very fascinating video taken at New York’s Zuccotti Park where Peter Schiff has a dialogue with some of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Schiff brought a sign that read “I Am the 1% Let’s Talk,” and talk they did. One of the things that occurred to me watching this was how little true [...]

Marks, Percy, “Under Glass”, Scribner’s Magazine Vol 73, 1923, p 47 The idea is, of course, that men are successful because they have gone to college. No idea was ever more absurd. No man is successful because he has managed to pass a certain number of courses and has received a sheepskin which tells the [...]

From a commenter over at Kevin Drum’s place. The discussion was about problems with the American educational system: Yep. And as the posts by Aaron Carroll and Austin Frakt have shown over the last year (link below) the same is true of our health care system. We’ve gone through a 30+ year binge of hypercapitalism, [...]

Ezra Klein, on education & health care costs: I’m not going to end this post with some wan paragraph explaining how to transform these two industries into something closer to their potential. My ideas on health-care reform are available elsewhere on the blog and I don’t know enough about education to say anything worthwhile. But [...]

Re: “Don’t Forget Your Homework…or Your Miranda Card” Liberalism in the United States has, over the past forty years, been usurped by the socialist agenda. Our public schools are little more than indoctrination camps for the pacification of future generations. At the same time, conservatism in the United States has been usurped by war-hawks and [...]

In all the coverage I’ve read, listened to, and watched concerning the public sector unions in Wisconsin and elsewhere, there is one term that is usually very much present in the political debate that seems to be conspicuously absent: special interests. Special interests, we are so often told, have a very corrupting influence on our [...]

And now it’s time for another post in which I irritate my socially conservative readers… Watch all the way to the end please, and listen… unless rather serious vulgarity and profanity offend you in which case don’t watch the video, or just skip to the end spoken word bit (yes, this is VERY VERY NSFW): [...]

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable. -H.L. Mencken I’ve long been of the opinion that a critical flaw in [...]

Yesterday, we posted some new videos from the controversial self-described citizen journalist James O’Keefe. The videos highlighted racy footage taken at a New Jersey Education Association and the problems associated with teacher tenure.  O’Keefe has just launched a third video dealing with the NJEA, this one alleging voter fraud in a 1997 Jersey City mayoral [...]

Noted for his role in taking down ACORN, gonzo filmmaker James O’Keefe is at it again. The Daily Caller provides an overview: O’Keefe, best known as the force behind last year’s ACORN scandal, said the first video was shot at a meeting of the New Jersey Education Association in August. Entitled Teachers Gone Wild, the [...]

A common lament these days is that America “doesn’t build anything anymore”. John Ratzenberger takes that thought and expands upon it at Big Hollywood, suggesting that not only do we not build anything, we have nobody to do the building. Unfortunately for John, he’s made enough logical errors, irrelevant points, and misdiagnoses of the problem [...]

The Economist’s Babbage, on computing education: That, for me, sums up the seductive intellectual core of computers and computer programming: here is a magic black box. You can tell it to do whatever you want, within a certain set of rules, and it will do it; within the confines of the box you are more [...]