We might as well let the cream of the crop immigrate here and reap the rewards of high paying local jobs.

By contrast, a lot of manual labor is specific to a locale: gardening, cleaning, garbage collection. There's no reason to have able-bodied Americans collecting welfare because illegal aliens take those first jobs on the rung of the economic ladder because taxes and regulations have made them cheaper to employee under the table than to comply with a hose of regulations and taxes for hiring Americans.

Importing brain labor increases the nation's net economic output. hiring illegal aliens that send significant portions of their pay back to Mexico while Americans sit idle decreases the nation's economic output.

Unrest in Middle East
African Regime Unstable, May Collapse
Congressman Indicted
Experts Say Hurricane "Extremely Dangerous"
Audit Finds Serious Misuse of Funds
Green Energy Firm Declares Bankruptcy
Apple's Latest Product Selling Like Hotcakes
Patch Released for Serious Windows Vulnerability
Unemployment Rises, Unexpectedly

There's your headlines for the year.

Low taxes, low cost of living, great climate, great freeways, first class universities, an influx of returning GIs, marijuana and LSD.

Now California is verging on a failed state. High taxes (a rate of 9.5% for those millionaires making $48,942), high cost of living, a bloated state bureaucracy in league with public employee unions to bankrupt the state, decaying infrastructure, a failing education system on par with Mississippi, one third of the nation's welfare recipients, an outflux of Americans and an influx of low-skill illegal aliens. The only things left are the marijuana and LSD.

The future of business in general and startups in specific are low-tax, now-state-income tax, low-regulation state like Texas and Florida.

Without the desktop publishing revolution, it's hard to see Apple surviving long enough for Jobs to retake the helm.

Increasingly musicians (and movie makers, and writers) are realizing that they can cut the middle man out entirely, become their own label, and deal with Apple/Amazon/etc. directly. It's a lot of freaking work, but it gives artists total control, and have longer and more profitable careers than record labels that want to churn flash-in-pan artists for maximum profit before going on to the Next Big Thing.

And Apple and Amazon, for all the bitching people do about them, are the ones whose domination of Internet sales has allowed musicians to break the parasitic grip major labels had on the marketplace. The Internet would have accomplished the same disintermediation sooner or later, but Apple alone probably hastened the results by a decade.

In the future, all artists will be their own integrated vertical monopolies.

GM exists to fund UAW pensions and get bailed out by the government.

Making competitive cars isn't part of equation anymore.

It does a number of things, some of them vaguely useful, but none as well as other stand-alone tools, it's awkward as hell, and people hate using it.

Raise the price on it and even some of the most MS-centric IT shops will go "Fine, we'll just set up an internal Apache server and Confluence instead."

Lesson: Facts do not cease to be facts just because they were reported on Fox News.

Different members of the Obama Administration have said different things about Benghazi at different times.

American forces in a position to help were evidently told repeatedly to stand down.

Charles Woods, the father of the slain Tyrone Woods, thinks Obama is lying. And the mother of slain State Department employee Sean Patrick Smith just came out and said "I believe that Obama murdered my son” though his negligence. Compare the amount of press given to them compared to Cindy Sheehan.

Now two chain-of-command figures central to the Benghazi controversy, CIA Director David Petraeus and General Carter Ham, commander of AFRICOM, have resigned, while a third, Rear Adm. Charles M. Gaouette, has been reassigned.

None of this necessarily means that Obama issued the stand-down order, or validates the speculation in some quarters that Ambassador Stevens may have been involved in arms transfers. But how blind do you have to be to think that the fact that no additional forces were sent to protect Americans during a seven hour battle with jihadests is unworthy of being investigated?

From an interview:

RD: "I'm pessimistic about the Islamic world. I regard Islam as one of the great evils in the world, and I fear that we have a very difficult struggle there."

Narrator: "Why is it more problematic than Christianity, for instance?"

RD: "There is a belief that every word of the Koran is literally true, and there's a kind of closemindedness which is, I think, less present in the former Christendom, perhaps because we've had long - I don't know quite why - but there's more of a historical tradition of questioning. There are people in the Islamic world who simply say, 'Islam is right, and we are going to impose our will.' There's an asymmetry. I think in a way we are being too nice. I think that it's possible to be naively overoptimistic, and if you reach out to people who have absolutely no intention of reaching back to you, then you may be disillusioned."

Command economies result is massive misallocations of capital compared to market economies, and this is also true of China. The "Ghost Cities" are the biggest manifestation of economic distortion, but hardly the only one.

On the plus side, communist China is only killing thousands of its own people every year, a vast improvement on the millions (or tens of millions) killed in the past. Progress!

And if you forgot to erase the clay slate? Man, you'd be out in the school's livestock pen plucking goose quills all day!

"Federal highway spending doesn't get subjected to strict cost-benefit analysis"

You can take out the word "highway" and the statement remains true. Or rather, no cost-benefit analysis exists for the taxpayer. But every dollar spent benefits the permanent Washington insider class that rakes its profits off of an ever-expanding government.

  Another true statement:

"Federal regulation doesn't get subjected to strict cost-benefit analysis."

And for the same reason.

So, France is going to cut (or at least pretend to cut) deficits from 4.5% of GDP to 3% of GDP, while hiking taxes.

That is not real austerity. You know what real austerity is? Cutting spending until it matches the amount of revenue actually coming in. This is the hard discipline that the vast majority of private enterprises have to adhere to, but which no government with a European welfare state seems capable of.

No Eurozone country (with the possible exception of Estonia) has actually practiced real austerity. You know that "Greek Austerity" measure, the one that had Greeks rioting in the streets? That reduced deficit spending from 9.0% of GDP to 7.5% of GDP. And even that amount was probably a lie.

Politicians need deficit spending the way a junkie needs heroin because the cradle-to-grave welfare state is unsustainable, and no one is willing to face up to that fact. And the price of that delusion will be the destruction of our economy.

Instead of looking civilized, we look weak, as athiest commentator Pat Condell makes clear:

"There was a time when Islam was given the benefit the doubt by many people in the west. Now we think it’s poison and we wish we’d never heard of it, because 20 years of baseless grievance mongering and knee-jerk offense have shown us this religion for what it really is. Now we don’t like it, we don’t trust it, and we are never going to respect it. And we don’t care how Muslims feel about that."