The Council of the District of Columbia approved legislation Tuesday that would pay residents in the nation’s capital for not committing crimes.

No, really: 

First reported by the Associated Press, the bill penned by Democratic Council-member Kenyan McDuffie gained unanimous approval from the D.C. Council. The legislation, called the “Neighbourhood Engagement Achieves Results Amendment Act of 2016 (NEAR Act),” would establish an office to identify as many as 200 residents annually who are at risk of committing violent crimes or becoming a victim of such crimes. The individuals would be instructed to participate in life planning, trauma informed therapy, and other programmes; if they comply and do not commit crimes, the individuals would receive a stipend. The legislation was based on a Richmond, California, programme that pays individuals who participate as much as $9,000 annually.

Mr McDuffie describes his bill as “bold and innovative,” “a step in the right direction,” and “working to prevent crime by treating its root causes.”

Update, via the comments: 

Isolation almost invariably means poverty and backwardness. You’re not aware of how the basic things of life are done differently in other parts of the world, and so people who are isolated will keep doing things the same way for centuries or thousands of years. For example, when the British landed in Australia, they found the Australian aborigines living at a Stone Age level. The aborigines had no idea of iron. Australia is one of the great sources of iron ore in the world.

Thomas Sowell discusses retrogressive culture, the importance of geography, and leftism versus success: 

Previously. And before that. And Sowell’s book The Vision of the Anointed is pretty much a must-have.  

FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff talks with the Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas: 

Not only is the situation on campus bad for freedom of speech, I think we’re teaching students to engage in cognitive distortion. We’re teaching them to magnify problems, we’re teaching them to personalise problems, we’re teaching them to engage in all-or-nothing thinking. All things, research indicates, that if you adopt them as mental habits are going to make you miserable. 

“Censorship is like taking Xanax for syphilis. Essentially, it just makes you feel a little better, calms you down, but it sure isn’t doing anything for your disease.”

New York Times, December 8, 1985:  

For the most part, the portable computer is a dream machine for the few… On the whole, people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper. Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so.

In 1985, the New York Times claimed a weekday circulation of just over one million copies. Specifically, 1,013,211 on March 31. In 2015, when most Americans have computers in their pockets (and even use them at the beach and on trains), print sales of the New York Times have fallen to around half that figure, and the paper is chiefly read via the kind of devices once dismissed as implausible. Rather than “whiling away the hours reading the sports or business section,” the majority of readers are now “flybys,” their stays lasting for an average of four minutes, generally to read something linked via email and social media. And browsing one article isn’t quite the same thing as reading a newspaper.  

Via Kevin D Williamson. 

If Thomas Sowell had a Twitter account it would look something like this.

By all means share any Sowellisms that catch your eye.

Via dicentra.