Pun Salad

I am 26% Hippie.

I need to step away from the tie-dye. I smell too good to be a hippie and my dad is probably a cop. Being a hippie is not a fashion craze, man. It was a way of life, in the 60.s, man.

Take the
Hippie Test
@ FualiDotCom

Frankly, I'm a little shocked at scoring that high. (Heh, he said "high", man.)

I believe that this could well be one of the signs of the Apocalypse; if these two giants are facing off, we mere mortals can only hope, at best, to scavenge for food and shelter for ourselves and our families in the glowing rubble afterwards.

• Alex Tabarrok has a short but pungent article on the difference between activists and scholars. Case in point is (scholar) Steve Levitt's work that seems to show that car seats don't help much in improving safety for kids older than two. Versus (activists) Dennis Durbin and Flaura Winston who freaked (heh) in a letter to the NYT. Todd Zywicki at the Volokh Conspiracy also has useful observations.
• David Gelernter has a great LA Times op-ed on affirmative action.

  In practice, affirmative action means cheating in a good cause. (But all cheating, for any cause, gnaws at a nation's moral innards like termites.) Affirmative action means a plus factor in university admissions, job hiring and promotion for candidates from protected groups, in the interests of "diversity." (But why should "diversity" mean official "minorities" and women but not libertarians, farmers, Mormons, Texans, children of soldiers, aspiring Catholic priests, etc.?)

  Exactly. One of the manifestations of moral-innards-gnawing is the deception that becomes second nature to some Affirmative Actioneers. You want examples? See here for a Dartmouth example; here for a University of Idaho example; here for Auburn; here for the University of Michigan; here for Indiana.

  (Pointer to Gelernter's op-ed from La Shawn Barber, who also has comments worth reading.)

• But to end on a positive note: this is probably the funniest thing I've seen today. It's got a good shot of the funniest thing of the week.