The image of Americans was once one of cowboys in the Wild West or soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima. That has all been replaced by the Brian Kellys of the United States of Whiners:

Brian Kelly, a passenger on the flight, said he sat on the plane for nearly four hours before the flight was ultimately canceled for the night.
During his wait, Kelly said he saw members of the flight crew climbing into the plane’s engine, while one of the pilots snapped photos.
NBC 5 DFW confirmed the person snapping the photos was the flight’s captain. We’re told a flight attendant asked for the photos to be taken because she is close to retirement and she wanted a keepsake for one of her last trips to Costa Rica.
Kelly began snapping photos of the crew from his window seat. He says, “They’re having fun to me. That seemed like an enjoyable time, and I’m stuck in a plane and can’t go anywhere. It just didn’t seem right.”

Via Iowahawk we find out that the Democratic convention had the NSA-free version of Apple and Blackberry products.

While many renters in Vancouver are frustrated at the high prices of real estate, this doesn’t seem like a very intelligent way to solve the problem. Dare we speculate how many of the culprits ever voted for the Tories?!

And that’s why I have barbed wire on my fence.
H/t, Glenn

“I Want A Government That Is Going To Help Me”
More here.

Reuters;

New York City has agreed to pay Occupy Wall Street protesters more than $100,000 for property damaged or lost when police cleared out their encampment in a downtown Manhattan park in 2011, according to court documents signed on Tuesday.

h/t signaler222

Italy may be providing a preview of how other countries are going to handle their out-of-control spending problems: Spend even more!

Those old solutions [to financial woes] … emphasize fiscal frugality (cuts to social welfare), flexible labour markets (low wages) and structural adjustment (throwing people out of work).” Given a choice, voters will choose anything else: “they will vote for anyone who promises another way. If the only ones promising another way are racists, sybarites and clowns, that’s who people will vote for.”

h/t Mark L.

And that’s why my basement windows are booby-trapped.
(Related)

If you’re an old fogie like me then you may have been similarly perplexed over the years as to how high school and university students were able to achieve extremely top marks yet seemed exceptionally ignorant about so-called basic facts. Quiz many of them on basic economics or history or geography or even the Times Tables and more often than not a blank stare is all you get back.
There is now an explanation for this and it lies in a trend called Grade Inflation. Simply put, this is the tendency of student grades to rise over time. There are several possible reasons for this phenomenon. All of them should lead employers to be very suspicious about the veracity of transcripts provided by younger applicants.
Some educators are trying to fight back against it but guaranteed there will be a lot of forces pushing back against them. Too many students now feel entitled to top marks even if they’ve done little to no work to justify them.

Continue reading →

In what will surely have the heads of big government supporters spinning in surprise, the following was recently revealed about the free phone program in America:

The U.S. government spent about $2.2 billion last year to provide phones to low-income Americans, but a Wall Street Journal review of the program shows that a large number of those who received the phones haven’t proved they are eligible to receive them.
A review of five top recipients of Lifeline support conducted by the FCC for the Journal showed that 41% of their more than six million subscribers either couldn’t demonstrate their eligibility or didn’t respond to requests for certification.