Here you go:  GooBing Detroit Read more

(Trying my hand at something different tonight.) No, he’s not the kind of car guy that rebuilds a hot rod with his buddies in his garage.  He’s more of a suburban middle-class kind of car guy. My dad grew up on a farm outside of Denver — more of a hobby farm, with livestock.  His parents grew up on farms in Nebraska but came to Denver during the depression, and his dad worked at the Gates Rubber Company, and they... Read more

Just a quick late-lunch comment on an article in today’s Tribune, “At dawn of same-sex marriage, wedding business is booming.”  The article profiles wedding vendors expecting a boost in business due to the legalization of same-sex marriages — and there may be some reality behind the expectations, if there are significant numbers of couples for whom a non-legally-recognized commitment ceremony or a legal but deemed-inferior civil union didn’t merit a big celebration, or didn’t merit having at all, but a... Read more

Here’s a story, from drudge, about Sacramento taxi drivers facing, among other things, an English test:  “New Regulations Bring English-Only Requirement To Sacramento Taxicabs.”  Curious for more details, I found this story on abcnews.com:  “Another Word for Taxi Is _____. English Test Rankles Cabbies.” And here’s the key quote: Competition for customers has gotten so fierce that fist-fights have broken out between drivers, he says. The small independents don’t have a central dispatcher, so must depend on capturing airport-bound fares... Read more

To read more fully later:  “Sweden has lots of wealth inequality” from marginalrevolution.com.  Interesting points:  Sweden still has a lot of its wealth controlled by nobility (literal nobility, not figurative), and “In Sweden, because of extensive tax evasion, [wealth inequality] is harder to calculate.” Extensive tax evasion among the wealthy in a country with high tax rates and a high degree of out-of-country taxation — who’d’ve thought? Read more

So here’s a “Daily Caller” article on Eric Cantor’s primary challenger Dave Brat, who is framing his candidacy as opposing amnesty, and Cantor as an amnesty supporter.  Cantor touts his credentials as refusing to bring up the Senate bill for consideration, and opposing similar legislation.  As for Brat? Cantor said “immigration reform” was a top priority for 2013, said [Brat campaign manager Zachary] Werrell, but now “he’s realizing that voters in his district are overwhelmingly against it, and all of... Read more

So a while back some psychologist or sociologist declared that his research definitively proved that conservatives are deficient in being too pessimistic and focused on Bad Things That Can Happen, and conservatives basically, owned this claim by saying that, parallel to this, liberals are too naive about unintended consequences and think if they just wave their magic wand of government policy, the world can be a better, nearly utopian place, ignoring costs, risks, and unintended consequences. And the reparations debate... Read more

“FAA’s hiring diverts from recruit pipeline; Air traffic control jobs going to general public over college trainees.” That’s the headline in today’s Tribune.  The story:  after developing the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative Program in which college students prepare for traffic controller employment by majoring in the subject at college, some 25 years ago, the FAA abruptly changed approaches to hire from the general public — anyone with a high school diploma — instead. What’s more, the first step in... Read more

That’s a throw-away line you hear periodically:  we need a Marshall Plan in the inner cities, for black Americans, for Africa, and so on.  It’s shorthand for “if only we spend gobs of money on the problem, we’ll fix it,” with a measure of “we were willing to spend gobs of money on defeated Germans, so we ought to be equally-willing to do so for” some other group. I read this line again today, and looked up the Marshall Plan... Read more

OK, so everyone’s talking about Ta-Nehesi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations.”  And it’s fun to ridicule the concept.  I have, so far as we’ve figured out, one ancestor, a great-great grandmother, from the South, and more likely to have been dirt-poor than a slave-owner (a census record appears which may belong to her, in which she is being raised by a widowed mother, with both mother and 13-year-old daughter working in the cotton mill in 1880).  All other ancestors settled... Read more