I’m a tad too young to remember nickel Cokes, though I can remember when they were a dime.
It’s tempting to say that in vending machines today “they’re now a dollar.” But in fact the four quarters you’re shoving in the slot consist mostly of copper and contain not a smidgen of silver, so your mistake lies in believing those four copper sandwich slugs add up to “a dollar.”
Was someone asking, recently, whether over-the-top federal regulators — and private loonies authorized by the same “enabling legislation” to use the federal courts to the same ends — are blocking almost every good-faith effort to create jobs and provide mankind with a better life on these shores?
Federal wildlife officials said Monday they will conduct an in-depth review of 32 Great Basin and Mohave Desert spring snails to determine whether they should be listed for protection as threatened or endangered species.
English was not the first language of the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. Hearing his graduate students at New York University repeatedly use the colloquial expression “loopholes,” he asked for an explanation. After the concept had been explained to him, according to his late student Murray Rothbard, the great economist said, “Ah, so a loophole is when they leave you something that’s not taxed.”
Nevada’s state treasurer, Kate Marshall, is currently the Democratic candidate in the special election to fill Nevada’s Second District congressional seat. She visited us for an endorsement interview, a week back.
Sen, Harry Reid, D-Nev., staged his fourth annual “National Clean Energy Summit” at the Aria hotel-casino in Las Vegas during the final days of August.
Tellingly, most of the featured speakers were not energy engineers or even entrepreneurs, but left-leaning politicians, including Vice President Joe Biden.
That “laser-like focus” of the Obama administration on jobs?
Maybe they meant “on destroying jobs.”
I see where our drug police — including the Nevada Department of Wildlife and the Drug Enforcement Agency — have found and seized four acres of scattered marijuana plants growing on Mount Charleston, northwest of Las Vegas. The pot farmers are bad people because they litter and sometimes hunt wildlife out of season, says Forest Service spokesgal Judy Suing.
Suing says the field was accidentally discovered by a police rescue helicopter months ago. By waiting all summer, authorities get to claim more tonnage destroyed. It’s unlikely accidents led to the discovery of the six other local fields Suing says authorities are soon planning to exterminate, though. In fact, these outfits spend millions of our tax dollars overflying sparsely inhabited areas, employing high-resolution thermal imaging to find these plants. Then, hundreds of thousands more are spent eradicating a harmless ditch weed which Nevadans — like residents of a whole bunch of other states — have said should be legalized for medical use and otherwise treated as the lowest law enforcement priority.
Following up on a draft released in May, the Obama administration Tuesday outlined federal rules changes that it says will save private businesses about $10 billion over five years.
The changes include accelerating payments to 60,000 small businesses working on Defense contracts, and requiring the Small Business Administration to adopt a single electronic application for borrowers, Bloomberg News reports.
Last week, in response to Coercion-Schooling Secretary Arne Duncan’s Aug. 8 announcement that he would encourage all 50 states to apply for waivers of testing requirements under “No Child Left Behind” — the Secretary asserting such testing serves as an “Impediment” and “disincentive” to what America’s professional educrats are really supposed to be doing — I promised to detail New York (city and state) Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto’s assessment of “What Really Goes On” in the government schools, from his great book “An Underground History of American Education.”
Mr. Gatto explains, based on his years in the New York City public schools, that reading, spelling and arithmetic are only the “cover” curricula of these schools. Their more basic curriculum — the one for which math and English tests form a mere distraction and “impediment” — is built into their structure, and the way they structure a child’s behavior.
Mark Aug. 8 on your calendar. Few realize it, but the events of Aug. 5 through 8 marked the beginning of massive changes in America.
No, I don’t write today about the overdue Standard & Poor downgrade of the actuarially bankrupt federal government’s bond rating, or even the (possibly more important) whining, petulant, vapid reaction of Barack Obama, an affirmative action baby confronting for the first time the undeniable failure of the memorized socialist “blame the rich” claptrap that served him so well in his first two careers, as professional affirmative action student and professional motivational speaker for rabble-rousing leftist outfits on the taxpayer dole.
It used to take years to get a book into print. And during the laborious process of re-keyboarding the manuscript, plenty of people had a go at the thing.
Today’s technology has enormously speeded the process of creating a book from the author’s original computer disc. But in an era when young high school graduates will actually argue with me that there was never any “golden age” in which 16-year-olds knew who commanded the Yankee forces at both Yorktown and Vicksburg — or at least in which years and in which wars those battles were fought — the results can be shocking.
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