HOMELESS IN ORLANDO? It's Disney's fault.

CAT TALES TAILS: Just in case you didn't know....

FREE SPEECH. For me. But you have to pay.

Read the comments as well.

ONLY BECAUSE THEY'RE RUNNING OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY: Illinois Democrats back off Obama library plan after accusations of 'shenanigans'.

PIERS MORGAN tries to insert both feet in his mouth -- and succeeds.

EVERYTOWN FOR GUN SAFETY: Guns for me, but not for thee.

DEMOCRATS: Hey, we need another squirrel, stat!

[T]he Democrat Party is the country’s natural home to racists and ethnic eliminationists. And now we have über liberal real estate mogul and sports owner, Democrat Party contributor and philanthropist, Donald T. Sterling in the news with yet another case of vile leftist racial hatred.

Read the whole thing.

RAND PAUL tells doctors Democrats will be begging for ObamaCare cure. I propose they be prescribed the 'hair of the dog'.

This could be in addition to VOX.COM's prescription for confiscatory taxation.

Added: I can't help myself, I have to note this comment. "'Liberals have big hearts,' Paul said, 'but small brains. They haven’t thought through what the repercussions are.'" Heh.

THE POWER OF INSTAPUNDIT: Glenn touted the benefits of 'foam rolling', so I clicked on this link to see what one looked like. Within minutes, I was seeing ads for them on every web site I visited....

VOX.COM: the case for confiscatory taxation.

Maybe this isn't as stupid as it first looks. Here's the idea. Since the purpose of confiscatory taxation is to discourage bad behavior, let's tie lawmakers' tax rates to the number of laws they vote for -- on a steeply progressive scale: one law, 5%; two laws, 15%; three laws, 40%; and so on, ending at 99%.

Remember, these VOX.COM folks are the 'smartest thinkers' addressing the 'toughest questions'.

CHAOS IN AMERICA'S CLASSROOMS:

After being forced to subdue an 18-year-old classroom drug dealer with hostility towards authority and an apathy for education, Santa Monica High School science teacher and wrestling coach, Mark Black, immediately found himself under attack from a second teenager inside his inner-city classroom. As if enduring multiple attacks were not enough for the day, Black then found himself abandoned by his politically-correct superintendent.

My wife is a suburban elementary school teacher. With the possible exception of drug dealing, the problems described of disruptive behavior, parental uninvolvement, and administration cowardice 'political correctness' are equally at home in suburban elementary schools.

DAVID HARSANYI: What Thomas Piketty's popularity tells us about the liberal press. Inequality is growing. Mobility is shrinking. Meritocracy is dead. We all live in a sprawling zero-sum fallacy. So we must embrace redistribution on a massive scale.

I’d ask if there are any historical examples that prove that skewed wealth in a generally prosperous nation is more damaging to its democratic institutions than the reallocation of wealth by a coercive state. But then I realize, as with any Marxist revival, the answer is: This time we’re gonna do it right!

Think Cuba. And Venezuela.

JAPAN'S PLAN for centimeter-resolution GPS location/navigation.

My first job -- while I was still in college in the early 1960's -- was to work on the initial attempts at satellite-based location. Location, not navigation. We were thrilled that after years of data collection we were finally able to distinguish two stationary antennas at the opposite ends of a 300-foot long building. Today, only 50 years later, we can tell whether a moving antenna (e.g., car) is driving on the wrong side of a 20-foot wide highway.

Note: if you bother to read the comments, they are mostly wrong.

BIG DATA and 'social engineering'.

[O]ur greatly expanded ability to gather behavioral data will allow scientists to develop “a causal theory of social structure” and ultimately establish “a mathematical explanation for why society reacts as it does” in all manner of circumstances. As the book’s title makes clear, Pentland thinks that the social world, no less than the material world, operates according to rules. There are “statistical regularities within human movement and communication,” he writes, and once we fully understand those regularities, we’ll discover “the basic mechanisms of social interactions.”

We may think of ourselves as rational actors, in conscious control of our choices, but most of what we do is reflexive. Our behavior is determined by our subliminal reactions to the influence of other people, particularly those in the various peer groups we belong to. “The power of social physics,” he writes, “comes from the fact that almost all of our day-to-day actions are habitual, based mostly on what we have learned from observing the behavior of others.” Once you map and measure all of a person’s social influences, you can develop a statistical model that predicts that person’s behavior, just as you can model the path a billiard ball will take after it strikes other balls.

This strikes me, unfortunately, as a technocratic Nineteen Eighty-Four. This comment,

Pentland’s idea of a “data-driven society” is problematic. It would encourage us to optimize the status quo rather than challenge it,

seems especially appropriate, although I'm inclined to think more in terms of stagnation than status quo.

CAN THIS MARRIAGE BE SAVED? The Republican establishment needs the grassroots, and vice versa. Of the first part, I'm certain. But vice versa? I'm not so sure.

ALABAMA DEMOCRAT offers $100K for proof of white families adopting black kids; families show up to take his offer.

Needless to say, he didn't pay up.

And as a side note, when my wife and I were at breakfast this morning, one such family showed up at the restaurant -- and no one paid any attention.

THOMAS SOWELL on the high cost of liberalism:

Liberals don't talk -- or perhaps even think -- in terms of the actual consequences of their policies, when it is so much more pleasant to think in terms of wonderful goals and lofty rhetoric.

Progressivism -- all emotion, no brain.

OBVIOUSMAN STRIKES AGAIN: "Biofuels produced from waste products left from harvested corn plants are worse than gasoline in terms of carbon emissions, according to a $500,000 study paid for by the federal government (my emphasis) and published in the journal Nature Climate Change."

But that won't stop the environmentalists from going ballistic.

Deep down in the emotions where they keep their 'reality world' they know they're right.

IT'S PUNDAY! Bad, bad, Punday.

IT IS SPRING, INDEED. Outside this morning, I notice that the beech trees have finally started unfurling their leaves. Around here, that's the definitive sign of spring.

A POSSIBLE REASON I gave up reading science fiction a few years back.

Linked from Instapundit.

NOW WE KNOW what Hillary Clinton accomplished as Secretary of State.

EXCELLENT! Mia Love wins GOP nomination for Utah seat.