Young African American men, especially ex-offenders, face high obstacles to employment. City Startup Labs hopes to help change that by teaching them the skills necessary to become entrepreneurs:

This new non-profit was created to take at-risk young African American men, including ex-offenders, and teach them entrepreneurship, while creating a new set of role models and small business ambassadors along the way. City Startup Labs contends that an alternative education that prepares these young men to launch their own businesses can have far more impact with this population than other traditional forms of job readiness or workforce training.

Read more on Creating a New Class of Young African-American Entreprenuers…

Foreign fighters seek Islamic state in post-Assad Syria
Yara Bayoumy, Reuters

“Yes, they have the sword and beheading, but only for those people who deserve it,” said Hadi, a bearded rebel who spoke in the corridor of a bombed-out building that served as a gateway to a frontline.

Read more on PowerLinks – 01.14.13…

In the current Acton Commentary, I take a look at the common temptation to consider ourselves as somehow uniquely beyond the mundane obligations of the moral order. I do so through the lens of the hero of Les Misérables, Jean Valjean, and a particular moral dilemma he faces.

Read more on Heroic Morality is Mundane…

Samuel Gregg on Money Radio 1510, Scottsdale, Ariz.:

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Samuel Gregg on the Janet Mefferd Show::

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Gregg’s new book Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future is now available. You can purchase the hardcover or Kindle version here.

Daniel Hannan, British Conservative Member of the European Parliament, said “‘Becoming Europe’ might not sound so bad: old buildings, long lunches, generous welfare. But, believe me my friends, it’s not where you want to be. Europe is a terrifying example of what happens when the state gets too large and the money runs out. Don’t imagine that it couldn’t happen to you.”

Also, the Westminster Institute near Washington will host a book event for Gregg next month. Read more on Audio: More ‘Becoming Europe’ interviews with Samuel Gregg; Washington book event…

For those who voted for Mitt Romney, the Presidential Inauguration on January 21st could be a difficult day. Presidential elections have always been simultaneously exciting and frustrating. Today, alarmists on the left and the right place television advertisements, preach sermons, design billboards, and the like, proclaiming the apocalyptic consequences of the wrong person assuming the office of President of the United States. In the last election, Republicans and Democrats spent over $1 billion each courting support and votes from us, the people. But were all the negative ads, nasty rhetoric, baby kissing, money, and black-tie dinners really necessary given the fact that neither my vote nor yours actually determined the outcome of this presidential election? In all of U.S. history no single vote has been the deciding vote for president.

We are all aware that with respect to the presidency, voters last November were essentially voting in state elections in order to pass along to their representatives in the Electoral College which presidential candidate they prefer. Therefore, the actual weight of our votes varied by state since every state gets a number of electors that is the total of all of its representatives in each house of Congress. The fairness of this system has been debated for decades, and I offer it to remind us that we do not rely on direct democracy to select our president. America’s Founders understood this as a formula for future tyranny.

Given the campaign rhetoric, the millions of dollars spent soliciting voters, the way some religious leaders bound the consciences of their followers, and so on, I wonder if these activities gave voters the false impression that their individual presidential vote will make a difference and that politics is the only means of social change in America. In the 1968 article, “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting,” published in the American Political Science Review, William H. Riker and Peter Ordeshook made the point that, given the way our system works, an individual voter has virtually no chance of influencing the outcome of the election. Moreover, according to recent work of Columbia University professor Andrew Gelman, an individual voter has possibly less than 1 in 100 million chance of determining the outcome of the current race to the White House. In fact, it may be better to think of November 6th as the day when tennis fans show up to cheer their favorite player but do not have a direct impact in the outcome of the match.
Read more on Preventing Inauguration Blues…

During the mid-1990s I spent a tour of duty as a Marine recruiter in southwestern Washington State. One of my primary tasks was to give talks at local high schools, but because many of the guidance counselors were not exactly pro-military, I was expected to give generic “motivational” speeches.

I soon discovered my idea of what constituted a motivational speech was not widely shared.

“Your parents and teachers have not been straight-forward with you,” I told the students in my first presentation. “You’re not really all that special. There are hundreds of thousands of kids just like you. And the fact is that you cannot be anything you want. Most of you don’t have the physical skills necessary to be a pro-athlete or the mental acuity to be a neurosurgeon. If you want to be successful in life you are going to choose a vocation that fits with your aptitude and abilities. And you’re going to have to compete with others who are smarter and more talented than you are. You don’t have to be the best and brightest, but you do need to be the hardest-working.”

Needless to say, that message wasn’t well received by the students. Having a dream is the most important thing in life, one young girl told me and asked why I wanted to crush her (wildly unrealistic) ambitions. Another student, a slight, bespectacled young man said that while there were no 5’9” centers currently playing in the NBA, he’d be the first because he “wanted it more than anything else in the world.”

But while I was taken aback by the cluelessness of the students, I was even more surprised by the reaction of the teachers. They made it clear that I would not be invited back for I had undermined their attempts to build the “self-esteem” of the kids. I asked if they really believed that Johnny was going to be a basketball star and that Susan was going to achieve her outlandish dreams of being a famous actress. Of course they didn’t, but they couldn’t understand why that would matter. They seemed to believe that while an inflated sense of self-worth wasn’t a sufficient condition for success, it was certainly a necessary one. Therefore they believed that it was their duty to make sure that as many of the kids as possible “believed in themselves.”

The teachers couldn’t recognize that they were setting their students up for a life of failure by instilling in them “illusory superiority”, a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their positive qualities and abilities and to underestimate their negative qualities, relative to others. This is sometimes referred to as the Lake Wobegon Effect, named after Garrison Keillor’s fictional hometown “where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.”
Read more on Virtue and the Lake Wobegon Effect…

Pop Goes the Culture
Andrew Ferguson, The Weekly Standard

One man’s quest to preserve and defend the good, the true, and the beautiful.

The Giglio Imbroglio — The Public Inauguration of a New Moral McCarthyism
Albert Mohler

Read more on PowerLinks – 01.11.13…

Over at Thought Life, Owen Strachan uses David Platt’s book, Radical Together, as a launching pad for asking, “Are you and I making and using money as if there is no such thing as the work of the gospel?”

Read more on David Platt, Wealth, and the Work of the Gospel…

There are more people living in the city of Los Angeles than live in New Zealand. Yet the small country in Oceania beats out the the U.S. in several key areas, such as on the production of movies about hobbits, ratio of sheep to humans (9 to 1), and . . . economic freedom.

Read more on Freedom for Kiwis, But Not for Thee…

Samuel Gregg, director of research at the Acton Institute, recently joined Al Kresta of Ave Maria Radio to discuss Gregg’s new book, Becoming Europe.

Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man and Coolidge, said this about the book: “Gregg spotlights the perils of American progressive arrogance so clearly they can no longer be denied or ignored. His logic is incontrovertible. Every economist, historian, and politician should read Becoming Europe.”

Read more on Audio: Samuel Gregg on ‘Kresta in the Afternoon’ Show…