"An economics professor has a plan for raising children: have lots of them..."

"... and don't stress about nurturing their potential."

Bryan Caplan... says that a child is helped the most if they are in a positive atmosphere.

And if they follow that step, Caplan says, parents can relax — and focus on having even more children. Caplan, who teaches at George Mason University, has three children himself — twin 8-year-olds and an infant.

Here's his book: "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think." There's a big excerpt from the book at the first link, including:

Children cost far less than most parents pay, because parents overcharge themselves. You can have an independent life and still be an admirable parent. Before you decide against another child, then, you owe it to yourself to reconsider. If your sacrifice is only a fraction of what you originally thought, the kid might be a good deal after all.

"The white margin to watch: 61-39. That’s the rough break-even point."

"Obama likely needs more than 39 percent of whites to assure re-election. Romney likely needs at least 61 percent of whites to assure Obama’s defeat (or 60.5 in some scenerios). These are estimates based on an electorate that matches the diversity of 2008 or is slightly less white. It presumes the Electoral College outcome does not diverge from the winner of the popular vote (loose talk aside, it’s only happened four times in U.S. history)."

The "white margin to watch"... is that the way we talk now? I find that pretty unpleasant, and it's also odd to be talking with such specificity — 61-39! — while rejecting the powerfully specific mechanism that is the Electoral College. Once you tip to a plurality in a state, it doesn't matter how many white or nonwhite voters go this way or that (except in Maine and Nebraska). So polling that ignores the Electoral College is inherently inaccurate in a close election.

The campaigns are designed around winning the Electoral College. George Bush explained it well, when challenged about his 2000 win that lacked a popular vote majority. (Despite what it says at the link, that interview took place on Dec. 5, 2000.)

You know... had this been an election on who got the most popular votes I suspect we might have had a little different strategy. 

Typical Bush humor. Of course, he means he would have had a completely different strategy.

For example, I might have spent more time in my own home state of maximizing the vote here. One of the reasons why the Electoral College is in place, is it forces candidates like me to go and spend time in some of the smaller states that candidates might ignore. And so I-I-you know, I understand the results. But my whole strategy was based on securing enough electoral votes to become the president. 

As I wrote in a law review article on the Electoral College (“Electoral College Reform: Déjà Vu,” 95 Northwestern University Law Review 993 (2001)):

Muslim Brotherhood candidate wins the Egyptian presidency.

"... handing the Islamist group a symbolic triumph and a new weapon in its struggle for power with the ruling military council."

In Tahrir Square, where hundreds of thousands had gathered to await the result, the confirmation of Mr. Morsi’s win brought instant, rollicking celebration. Fireworks went up over the crowd, which took up a pulsing, deafening chant: “Morsi! Morsi!”...

But Mr. Morsi’s recognition as president does little to resolve the larger standoff between the generals and the Brotherhood over the balance of power over the institutions of government and the future constitution. Under the generals’ plan, Mr. Morsi, 60, will assume an office stripped of almost all authority under a military-issued interim constitution.

Having dissolved the democratically elected and Brotherhood-led Parliament on the eve of the presidential vote, the generals who seized control after Mr. Mubarak’s ouster abrogated their pledge to hand power by June 30, eliciting charges of a new military coup.

After 84 years as an often outlawed secret society struggling in the prisons and shadows of monarchs and dictators, the Brotherhood is now closer than ever to its dream of building a novel Islamist democracy....

Utilikilts.

Instapundit brings up the topic this morning, pointing to Manolo, who says he gets the idea:

You are the unconventional, free-spirited, manly-dude, who wishes to show the world that you march to the beat of your own Iron John drum circle, even as you not-so-surreptitiously air your junk out in public.

However...

Real Scottish kilt, worn properly = The Sexy.
Utilikilt, worn by you = The Dorky....

I learned the word "Utilikilt" on October 18, 2010, when Meade and I were "very politely accosted" on State Street (Madison, Wisconsin) by a young man with a spiral notebook who was getting people to write the answer to his question "What is your American dream?" I didn't write in his book, but while Meade was writing — "To live in freedom" — I interviewed him about his project and his attire:

I said I was especially interested in the subject of men in skirts...

Because I saw the potential for getting men out of shorts (which really are The Dorky)...

.... and he agreed to be photographed...

Photographs at the link...

... and introduced me to the term Utilikilt. There was some talk about its usefulness to, for example, a carpenter.

I observed that it would be a useful defense against plumber's crack (since the back isn't attached to the front beneath the legs, so there's no downward pull when you crouch), and he made the less subtle point that it wasn't good if you had to use a ladder.  

We talked to him about his project, and he said he was hitchhiking all over the country — would you pick up a man in a Utilikilt? — getting answers to his question, and naturally he had a website, which I linked to. The website was americandreamorbust.com, but I guess it went bust, because it's not there anymore.

Now, you might say, well, that's part of the American Dream. No safety net. You can win or lose. Free markets! Capitalism! He just lost. And hitchhiker in a Utilikilt soliciting entries to a spiral notebook turned out to be a loser. But he took his shot, and had his day in the sun. There's nothing to cry about.

But here's the mistake I see: He shouldn't have bought his own domain. If he'd gone with americandreamorbust.blogspot.com that website would still be there, and whatever the project was, it would be preserved. He paid to get a more-ambitious-looking URL, but then, he didn't keep it up, and the links that he got now go nowhere.

This is why I stay on Blogger. It seems weaker, perhaps, not to have one's own domain. But I think it's stronger. It's stable. It's a floor of permanence under your project. It's not vulnerable to the winds of change.

Beware the winds of change.



Especially if you're wearing a skirt.

At the AFSCME convention, "any serious consideration of a fundamental change in strategy..."

"— something that many labor and political experts say the union badly needs to win more public support."

Judging from the talk on the convention floor, one would hardly know that they had experienced a huge defeat this month in their effort to recall Wisconsin’s governor, or that they faced lawmakers and voters across the country who have grown increasingly unsympathetic to public sector workers....

At most they're saying, they lost in Wisconsin because they were outspent, says Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University, but "It would have been much more encouraging if they said, ‘We lost because we are out of touch with the public.’ They don’t understand that in hard times, everyone must sacrifice."

Numerous studies have shown that wages for public sector and private sector workers are not far different. One analysis found that government workers with college degrees tend to have lower wages than private sector workers with similar educations, while those without college degrees tend to do better than their private sector counterparts.

But public employees generally have more generous health and pension plans. In a report this month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said state and local workers averaged $26.85 in wages an hour, with compensation totaling $41.16 an hour when pensions and other benefits are included.

Designing the pay package like that is a way to keep the public from seeing how generous it is. What happened in Wisconsin was a new transparency. Something most people hadn't noticed became the focal point, as Scott Walker and the GOP legislature selected, for budget cutting purposes, exactly the item that people hadn't really noticed. It wasn't about cutting salaries or firing public workers, so when they protested, they were yelling about something that looked rather lavish to other citizens... which made them sound out of touch and entitled.

“I wouldn’t write off labor unions just yet. Their obituary has been written frequently over the past 70 years,” said Harley Shaiken, a professor of labor studies at the University of California, Berkeley. However, “the status quo for them is untenable,” he said. “Unions will require imaginative, bold leadership going forward.”

But at the convention, AFSCME voted for Lee Saunders as their new president, and he's saying:

“We have to be as politically active as we can possibly be in the 2012 elections at the national, state, local, school district level because there are a lot of people out there who want to hurt this union and who want to hurt you,” he said. “We have to be organized to fight back.”

Does that sound like imaginative, bold leadership going forward?

"Wearing Brave Face, Obama Braces for Health Care Ruling."

NYT headline. Article by Jodi Kantor:

Former advisers are emphasizing the many aspects of the bill that are not connected to the mandate, like the subsidies to buy insurance. Some aides even argue privately that losing the mandate could be a political boon, because it would rob Republicans of their core complaint against the law.

Yeah, that's what I've been saying. Plus, Obama would get a new issue: The Supreme Court has too many conservative activists and needs re-balancing; a Democrat should make the next appointment(s). And if the decision goes the other way, Romney will have the corresponding arguments: 1. We need a President who will sign the repeal of Obamacare, and 2. The Supreme Court has too many liberals who don't respect the Constitution and we need a conservative President to re-balance it.

Back to Kantor:

"Should Ann Romney become first lady, perhaps she can promote the therapeutic benefits of horseback riding..."

"... and encourage a culture that funnels the countless unwanted or retired horses to riding farms where emotionally or physically distressed people can enjoy the special communion between human and horse."

Michelle Obama wants to take away your cheeseburgers, but with Ann Romney, everybody gets a pony!

By the way, attacking Ann Romney about her horses was a big mistake, and not just because of this MS/disability angle. Women and horses. It's a thing. Not for all women, but for some women. Do not interfere with a woman and her horse! There's a mystical connection there. Break it up and you create some dangerous energy.

Without question, there is a connection between women and horses. This bond lures both young girls and older women into a web of seduction.

"So there’s a reason why there’s no knives at your table and the forks will be collected. ... And I’m not joking."

Said National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials board member Raquel Regalado to the delegates at its annual conference.

Is this a special Secret Service rule applied to Latinos? Or is this just the first time somebody conspicuously vocalized the policy? Apparently, it's the latter, according to the SS, but the Regalado clip is pretty funny and, unsurprisingly, went viral.

ADDED: This makes me what to quote my favorite verse of Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark":

"'You may seek it with thimbles—and seek it with care;
You may hunt it with forks and hope;
You may threaten its life with a railway-share;
You may charm it with smiles and soap—'"

Hope... that's quite the Obama word. Forks and Hope... I love that. I once wrote a Civil Procedure exam with made-up facts that included a restaurant I called Forks and Hope. (That was many years ago, when I wove little jokes into the fact patterns, and if anyone had ever let on that they noticed and felt the oppression of exam-taking lightened a tiny notch, I'd still do it today.)

"Conservatives wanted the White House to stop spending on the health care law until the Supreme Court rules on whether it’s constitutional."

"But the administration has forged ahead, spending at least $2.7 billion since oral arguments in the case ended on March 28. That’s more than double the amount that was handed out in the three-month period leading up to the arguments...."

Why don't more girls sign up for the automotive technology class?

Is that a difficult question? Females were once completely excluded from some things that very few of us wanted to do. That's the way it was when I went to junior high school and the girls were required to study sewing and cooking in the same class period where the boys were forced to do mechanical drawing and shop. Obviously, a few boys would have thrived in sewing and/or cooking (and there are serious careers, full of men, at the end of that line of education). And some girls could have benefited from access to the mechanical drawing/shop track.

It's good that Title IX changed that. But the now-clear wrongness of the total exclusion does not mean that a male/female imbalance is a problem. And yet that's how NPR portrays it in this piece titled "The Shop Class Stigma: What Title IX Didn't Change." See? The assumption is that if male/female balance doesn't ensue, it's because entering a male-dominated field makes females feel stigmatized.

TalkLeft says George Zimmerman "was not the aggressor" — "This is self-defense."

This opinion — by Jeralynn Merritt — is based on poring over the evidence.

Zimmerman... did nothing to provoke Trayvon Martin’s beating him, breaking his nose and slamming his head into concrete. He had every right to respond with deadly force to stop Trayvon’s physical attack on him and to prevent Trayvon from getting control of his weapon.

Much detail — Merritt's interpretation of Zimmerman's various statements — at the link. Excerpt:

George’s suspicion was aroused because he saw someone milling around between houses in the rain. He knew this person didn’t live at the house he was standing by because it had been burglarized before and he knew who lived there. The guy wasn’t exercising. He did nothing to get out of the rain. He thought to himself, who stands out in the rain and stares at houses?...

If the state has no evidence George initiated the verbal confrontation, then the affidavit for probable cause for second degree murder contained a lie....

Read the whole thing. I'm eliding a lot.

"Should We Hire Even More Teachers, Cops, and Firemen?"

"Not if we want the economy to recover any time soon," says Nick Gillespie at Reason.com.

Unless you believe that the primary function of the public sector is to be a jobs program, there is no reason to sweat recent cuts to public-sector jobs, whose numbers, as Mickey Kaus has pointed out, have "been bloating since around 1980."...

As it happens, Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and many others (let's call them stimulatarians), seem to believe that a key function of government is precisely to employ lots of people who otherwise would look for work elsewhere....

And check out the caricature of Obama at the first link. All swirly hallucinogenic shapes and psychedelic colors. I showed it to Meade and said "That's the way I was always drawing when I was in high school," and he said he did too. (I'm class of 1969, and he's '72.)

It's "truly stunning" that the result in the Obamacare case hasn't leaked.

Says Ethan Leib (at PrawfsBlag):

Is it possible that no clerk mentioned what s/he is working on to a spouse?  That no spouse with the information mentioned it to a parent or friend, even accidentally?  That no parent or friend let it leak to a sniffing journalist or day trader in the community?  With an aggressive press corps dying for a scoop, well-connected within the community of people that work in and around the Court, doesn't it seem surprising that a secret could be so well kept? 

Perhaps it seems so amazing in contrast to the way other things have leaked — notably the many national security leaks from the Obama White House. Another way of looking at this picture is with the template that everyone is probably doing what they really want to do. Nothing is actually an impressive feat of maintaining secrecy. People can keep secrets. We're surprised when they do only because of the rarity of wanting to keep secrets.

Just an alternate theory.

"Instead of fighting gay marriage, I’d like to help build new coalitions bringing together gays who want to strengthen marriage..."

"with straight people who want to do the same,"  says David Blankenhorn (formerly a conspicuous opponent of gay marriage).

For example, once we accept gay marriage, might we also agree that marrying before having children is a vital cultural value that all of us should do more to embrace? Can we agree that, for all lovers who want their love to last, marriage is preferable to cohabitation? Can we discuss whether both gays and straight people should think twice before denying children born through artificial reproductive technology the right to know and be known by their biological parents?

I don't know what that last question has to do with the rest of it. Putting that aside, he's talking about generic conservative values relating to marriage. I suppose it's easy to "agree" that these things are better than the alternative. It's harder to give up all that sex outside of marriage.

And let's not forget that one of the leading gay-rights voices, Dan Savage, has used his position to push adultery acceptance. 

[Savage] does not believe in promiscuity; indeed, his attacks on the anonymous-sex, gay-bathhouse culture were once taken as proof of a secret conservative agenda. And he does not believe that monogamy is wrong for all couples or even for most couples. Rather, he says that a more realistic sexual ethic would prize honesty, a little flexibility and, when necessary, forgiveness over absolute monogamy. And he believes nostalgically, like any good conservative, that we might look to the past for some clues.

“The mistake that straight people made,” Savage told me, “was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous. Men had concubines, mistresses and access to prostitutes, until everybody decided marriage had to be egalitar­ian and fairsey.” In the feminist revolution, rather than extending to women “the same latitude and license and pressure-release valve that men had always enjoyed,” we extended to men the confines women had always endured. “And it’s been a disaster for marriage.”

See? Straight people make the "mistake" of not structuring sexual norms around the male. That's the message from one man who's only interested in sex with men. What about women? Well, let them "enjoy" the sexuality that man take to naturally. Liberation, baby. The man who has no desire whatsoever to have sex with bodies like yours says so.

I can't imagine that people like Savage will tone it down because Blankenhorn is now offering to form a coalition. Wouldn't he — as I do — write off Blankenhorn as a guy who's trying to re-leverage his importance? Who needs him?

After his lawyer said he'd "probably die of a heart attack" if he were a acquitted...

... Jerry Sandusky is convicted on 45 counts of child sex abuse.

Why are you so selfish?

If you're on the left, you're sensitive about that aren't you? Well, then...

Got a birthday, anniversary, or wedding coming up?

Let your friends know how important this election is to you—register with Obama 2012, and ask for a donation in lieu of a gift. It’s a great way to support the President on your big day. Plus, it’s a gift that we can all appreciate—and goes a lot further than a gravy bowl.

Setting up and sharing your registry page is easy—so get started today.

It's the Obama Event Registry, and I know they are making fun of it over at Hot Air and Instapundit and all those right-wing places that attract the greedy sort of person who doesn't know what it means to truly bleed deep in your heart for the poor and suffering people of the world to whom Barack Obama will minister in his second term when he is finally free of the bonds of the electoral system. It is time to sacrifice — and to display to your friends and family how much you sacrifice — for the betterment of humankind. And if any of them are receiving presents for their wedding/anniversary/birthday, may they feel the shame and, in their weakness, may they know that you are a finer, truer liberal than they.