Newmark's Door

Here's good news.

(But we need our government to encourage, rather than discourage, energy production and we need our schools to keep up with all this technology.)

. . . resorts to attacking the Kochs. Some of the fine responses I've seen:

"The Washington Post Responds to Me, and I Reply to the Post". (Pro tip: don't make John Hinderaker angry. Brit Hume writes "[The Post writers] get eviscerated again.")

"The Washington Post's Suspect Attack on the Koch Brothers".

"That Deceptive Koch Chart …"

"Kochs Add Life: The 'evil' Koch brothers pour billions into schools, cures, arts, and nature".

As usual, the Democrats have are doing things quite similar to what they allege others are doing:

"Papa Reid". Yes, ladies and gentlemen, he is the Senate Majority Leader.

"Hedge Funds, K Street, and the Ugly Underbelly of the Democratic Party".

"Gas Attack: How Democratic donors benefit financially from climate policy".

. . . tries to smear Paul Ryan. Some of the fine responses I've seen:

"Paul Ryan’s White Hood".

"Why Paul Ryan Must Be Denounced".

"The Left’s Laughable Effort to Label Paul Ryan ‘Racist’ Crumbles".

And Glenn Reynolds observes:

. . . just as the Koch attacks aren’t really about the Kochs, but about discouraging other rich people from becoming donors, so the racial attacks on Paul Ryan aren’t so much about Paul Ryan as about discouraging Republicans from talking about poverty.

Another bulletin from what we're so pleased to call "higher education". 

(What's worse: a "paper" that's just one paragraph or that there are five mistakes in that one paragraph?)

(The whistleblower, Mary Willingham, has a blog, paperclassinc.com, with UNC-CH history professor, Jay Smith, here.)

See also "NCAA in Turmoil: Why UNC Can't Get Past Its Fake Classes Scandal".

"My name is Mischa Oldman. I train dogs for a living, and you don't know as much about your best friend as you'd like to think . . ."

This is a truly excellent point:

Every year, The New York Times writes about how ridiculously low this number is. This year is no exception. The difference this year is that NYC has a new mayor who based a big part of his election campaign on getting rid of the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), the sole criterion used for deciding which students get into Stuyvesant, as well as the other seven specialized high schools (an eighth, LaGuardia a.k.a. the “Fame” school, requires an audition instead).

The mayor thinks the test is the problem and believes as yet unspecified “other criteria,” like possibly grades, recommendations, portfolios, interviews, community service, etc. . . should be used instead.

In my opinion, the test is not the problem. The problem is that the majority of New York City’s middle schools are doing a horrible job preparing their students for the test.

The U.S. has the third hardest. 

At 87 Bill Elwell is a bit cranky, but he's still cooking.

Bill Elwell doesn't want any more customers, but they just keep coming.

Twenty-plus year old Sports Illustrated article I ran across. Interesting.

(Also interesting is Citadel's "Tips for Incoming Freshmen From the Class of 2014". For an update on the article's theme, see here.)

Sandy Ikeda does a nice job. Sample:

1) The free market creates scarcity and higher prices. In any economic system—socialist, interventionist, or free market—the quantity of a good will typically not be enough to satisfy demand when the price is zero. In a free market, in which people trade their legitimate claims to those resources, prices will tend to rise or fall to the level where the quantity supplied equals the quantity demanded, and in that way prices help us to cope with scarcity. Not only that, the free market, via a system of profit and loss, gives entrepreneurs an incentive both to supply more of scarce resources and to discover alternatives to them. (But not all “trade” is conducted this way. See No. 4 below.)