DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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Asim Kausar, 25, from Bolton, kept the information on a computer pen drive.

The material only came to light after Kausar’s family suffered a burglary and the memory stick was handed in to police.

Kausar pleaded guilty to four charges under the Terrorism Act at Manchester Crown Court.

The memory stick contained details about ricin, assassination and torture techniques, and how to construct improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

Must be one o’ them IRA terrorists. Asim Kausar sure sounds like an Irish name, don’t it?

His mobile phone was also seized which contained a photograph of Kausar posing with an AK rifle – believed to have been taken in Pakistan.

The court was also told about a letter written by Kausar in which he said: “I want to fight jihad for Allah”.

The letter also asked “whether he would be able to fight and whether his martyrdom would be accepted”.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace you got there, Mohammed.

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Carrying on (allegedly) with “different men from the neighborhood”: haram. Murdering with an axe the person so accused: halal.

Calling kufrs who notice ‘Islamophobes’: Priceless.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

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The jizya tax is a state protection racket. This was a private-enterprise version, of which there are many in Egypt now, as this report describes.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

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When there aren’t any Jews or Americans handy, Muslims will quite cheerfully blow each other up.

Funeral, schmuneral — Hey! Thanks for lining up like that!

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And here I thought it was just because they were Union-made POS crap.

(Hey, sheik: The reason it looks like a cross is because it is a cross.)

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

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Those who wage jihad to impose Sharia push a circular argument: Sharia is the only way to peace and security because it is the only condition under which they will allow peace and security to take hold. They try to prove the supposed necessity of Sharia by attempting to create it, through harassment, sexual assaults, and acts of terrorism.

It is this man’s mindset that also likely explains some of the reported surge in sexual assaults in the Maldives, and in Scandinavia as well. When you are a second class citizen, as women and unbelievers are under Sharia (women become perpetual minors, and unbelievers are dhimmis), you bear a disproportionate burden to keep the peace by knowing your “place.” If you are found to be out of that place, you forfeit your protection, such as it is.

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The parent company of an electric car battery maker that received a $118 million grant from the Obama administration filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Thursday.

Boy, he’s just got the golden touch, doesn’t he?

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Bans on soda and “junk food” in public schools, while less objectionable than policies aimed at adults, have always struck me as symbolic. Since what kids eat (not to mention how much energy they expend) is determined by so many factors other than what’s available at school, it seems unrealistic to expect that getting rid of vending machines selling candy bars, potato chips, and sugary drinks will have a noticeable impact on their diets or waistlines.

Yeah, but it lets the people in charge Feel Good About Themselves, like they Made A Difference, and that’s all that counts with such people. Such Wellness Theater matches the Security Theater we see at the airports — it doesn’t have any effect, but so long as it looks like something is being done, that’s enough. ‘How can you say we were ineffective? Look at all the stuff we did! Look at all the money we spent!‘

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Were the (completely true) accusations against, say, Romney or Santorum, they would almost certainly be fatal, as they were against Cain and a host of other politicians.  But Newt deftly deploys a reframe and shames the questioner, and probably gains support rather than loses it.  The fact that he’s consistently talked a ‘family values’ line that he manifestly fails to live up with is irrelevant.  Only non-alphas get held to standards of hypocrisy by the neurotypical woman who is on the same side of the red/blue tribal boundaries.  Perhaps the easiest way to describe Newt is a lesser Bill Clinton, an appetite in a suit.  They’ve got nearly all the same markers, but Clinton is (IMO) slightly smarter—I view Clinton as likely @3 sigma and Newt between 2 and 3–and somewhat more charismatic.  Neither lacks the ability to seduce though, and they have nearly exactly the same vices.  I suppose some of the delta between their respective approval ratings can be explained by their median media coverage (Clinton, fawning vs Newt, hostile).

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With a high school dropout rate hovering around 30 percent and a majority of college-bound graduates requiring remediation in English and math, the Golden State would appear to be a prime candidate for serious reform. But with a calcified state legislature, an impenetrable state education code, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a powerful state teachers’ union, and a governor who owes his 2010 election to union support, preservation of the status quo is almost a given.

Yet another good reason not to live on the Left Coast.

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In the past few weeks, several reports have been released related to federal lands.  These reports attempt to explain how federal lands could be better used to access energy sources. Both the American Petroleum Institute and the Institute for Energy Research found that the amount of domestically produced oil and natural gas has greatly reduced since Obama assumed office in 2009.  The United States has some of the largest natural gas, oil and coal resources in the world.  The reports found that these are resources that are not being used to their full potential.

Perhaps because the Obama administration hates America and it’s people and is making a valiant attempt to destroy their economy. Hey, if they wanted to do that, what would they have done differently?

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I’ve written a couple of times about the Food Stamp program, citing ridiculous examples of waste, fraud, and abuse. These include:

• Using food stamps to buy luxury coffee at Starbucks.
• Buying steaks and lobster with food stamps.
• The Obama Administration rewarding states that sign up more food stamp recipients.
• Proposals to make it easier to use food stamps at fast food restaurants.
• College kids scamming the program for handouts.
• New York City giving food stamps to newly released prisoners and running foreign-language ads encouraging more people to sign up for the program.

As a taxpayer, I get upset about these examples. But as a public policy economist, I’m much more worried about the fiscal and economic impact of the program.

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Tuesday’s New York Times provided two more entries to the paper’s already-bulging “Name that Party” file, wherein the paper leaves off the party affiliation of Democrats who find themselves in legal or ethical trouble, yet readily names controversial Republicans.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Almost certainly, you, too are ordering more and more of your merchandise via an online retailer.  There’s nothing wrong with that, of course.  But it gets a little sketchy when you start visiting big box retailers like Best Buy and Target so that you can have a look at the goods–and then place your order on Amazon.com.

There’s nothing sketchy about it at all. It’s called ‘competition’. We do that in America. As it happens, I have a Target just down the street, and I shop there all the time — especially now that they carry essential groceries and produce. I don’t shop at Best Buy because every time I have I was most impressed by how indifferent their salespeople were to customers.

Since it’s probably a lot cheaper to sell over the internet than to pay for prime real estate and employees to walk you through all the features, it’s hard to see how the brick-and-mortars can compete with see-it-here, buy-it-there.

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An Informative Chart.

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We have written many times over the years about liberal newspapers, in particular the New York Times, which have published classified information in violation of the Espionage Act. They did thus to undermine the foreign policies of the United States, and in particular to attack the Bush administration. Today the curtain was raised on one of those episodes, as a former CIA official who was more recently a Democratic staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was indicted. The Washington Post has the story (without mentioning, however, that the criminal defendant, John Kiriakou, was a Democratic staffer).

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Katherine Mangu-Ward correctly points out the legal immigration into the U.S. is a nightmare.

We got your bureaucracy, right here.

And, of course, whenever bureaucratic nightmares arise, it generates a passel of lawyers devoted to gaming the system.

It is not a pretty sight, and will need to be fixed if we ever hope to get a handle on illegal immigration.

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Early in his presidency, President Obama made disparaging remarks about business owners whose companies had corporate jets. This was done in a blatant attempt to incite class warfare, despite the fact that the country was in a deep recession. By his words, the President willingly sacrificed the jobs of the very people who supported him through union dues. He knew the liberal media would not expose the tragic result his words would have on the private jet and airplane manufacturing industry.

In Wichita, Kansas, the home of private aircraft manufacturing has suffered tremendously, as thousands of union employees employed by Cessna and Beechcraft have been laid off, not to mention the thousands of jobs affiliated with general aviation lost across the country including manufacturers, part suppliers, fuel, pilots, mechanics, FBO services and insurance providers. Additionally, due to the loss of significant sales, use, income environmental and aviation tax revenues, thousands of local, state and federal employee positions, many of which were union jobs, have disappeared.

Reminds me of the stupid ‘luxury tax’ on yachts during the Clinton years that singlehandedly destroyed the large-boat-building industry in the U.S. — nowadays, if you want to build a big boat, you have to go to Germany.

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The National Education Association (NEA) and its state affiliates push an agenda that benefits union bosses at taxpayer expense. In America’s 28 forced-unionism states, teachers in NEA-organized schools who opt not to join must still pay dues, creating a huge pot of money for NEA to spend portraying teachers as victims and union bosses as their only friends.

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Muslims’ right to rob non-Muslims has been established since their prophet (always “their”, not “the”) attracted fighters by allowing booty and rape when attacking non-Muslims. An anonymous Danish police officer now says that “immigrant” criminals are targeting non-Muslims because they want them to leave the area. I guess the non-Muslims could avoid such attacks if they paid jizya to the local mosque.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

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When there aren’t any Jews or Americans handy, Muslims will quite cheerfully blow each other up.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

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That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace you got there, Mohammed.

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Budget? We don’ need no stinkin’ budget….

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In San Francisco this past weekend, the Occupy movement bolstered by labor unions and the rebranded California ACORN group ACCE once again terrorized private businesses and got into direct clashes that included throwing furniture, bricks and Bibles at police officers. This was another “Day of Action” for Occupy San Francisco, in a move that was designed to show the world that #Occupy is still relevant despite being thrown out of their encampments. 23 protesters were arrested and two police officers were injured. As one activist said to the San Francisco Examiner, “I think things went well on Friday.”

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Nigerian police said they found cars and vans filled with explosives in the northern city of Kano on Monday, three days after Islamist sect Boko Haram carried out a deadly attack there. Security in Nigeria’s second largest city has been beefed up since Friday when bomb attacks and fierce gun battles between the sect and police killed at least 178 people.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

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And at last perhaps we’ll be able to detect the disguised Klingons among us.

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In a ruling likely to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Montana Supreme Court last month upheld the state constitution’s prohibition on corporations directly spending on state campaigns. For those concerned with academic matters, the case is important for reasons quite unrelated to political debates about Citizens United. In a significant case involving history (the Montana court relied heavily upon the scholarship and words of historians to reach its conclusions), all the books cited were more than 35 years old. And that wasn’t a coincidence: the kind of U.S. history relevant to influencing legal and public policy debates increasingly has been banished from an academy obsessed with scholarship organized around the race/class/gender trinity.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

One-sided scholarly approaches tend to produce one-sided views on contemporary political and public policy issues. In recent years, controversies in the history departments at Duke and the University of Iowa revealed that neither department had even one registered Republican. Political registration figures are the crudest possible measurement of a faculty’s pedagogical breadth, but a partisan ratio of dozens-to-zero raises some troubling questions about the open-mindedness of a department’s hiring process. So too did the justifications offered for the imbalance. Iowa’s Sarah Hanley rationalized, “I don’t think there is a downside [to having a department that, according to a survey done by the local newspaper, had 22 registered Democrats and zero registered Republicans]. If it is a downside, then it would be a downside to have states to be so-called blue or so-called red. It would be casting a pall on the democratic system where people are free to choose.” The then-chairman of Duke’s history department, John Thompson, dismissed findings that his department had 32 registered Democrats and zero registered Republicans, on grounds that “the interesting thing about the United States is that the political spectrum is very narrow.”

At least when it comes to Voices of the Crust, it certainly is.

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In the West, the neutral and non-combatant nature of charities like the Red Cross is sacred, and along with ethical considerations, is meant in part to protect it from becoming a target in war. Under Islamic law, there is no such distinction: charity also exists to aid those fighting in Allah’s cause (Qur’an 9:60). It is thus to be expected that Hamas would have no qualms about exploiting the sanctuary of the Red Cross and making its workers human shields, just as we have seen other jihadist conflicts with fighters reportedly hiding or escaping in ambulances.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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A crude new method of making methamphetamine poses a risk even to Americans who never get anywhere near the drug: It is filling hospitals with thousands of uninsured burn patients requiring millions of dollars in advanced treatment … a burden so costly that it’s contributing to the closure of some burn units.

In the good old days, such people would die, and eventually all the stupid ones would have been killed off, and the trend would bottom out. In today’s new Kinder Gentler World, of course, intelligent people are on the hook for repairing the mistakes of stupid people. I predict that such a civilization won’t last very long.

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A MAN arrested in a police counter-terrorism operation told an officer he would “cut your head off and machine gun the lot of you”, a court has heard.

Mohammed Abdin, 21, will be sentenced in Cardiff Crown Court next month after admitting throwing furniture and threatening officers when they stormed a meeting in Canton Community Centre, Cardiff, on Thursday.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Any country that lets Muslims inside its borders has a deathwish.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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You are not a brand. Stop confusing yourself with things. You don’t need to build a brand. You may need to establish a business side of your work, something separate from the other aspects of your life, that helps you have a conversation with people who might pay you. But if you broadcast all of the stupid things you do, how you got drunk, who you had sex with, and how bored you are at your job, I am less likely to hire you (the same goes for others who decide such things—trust me on that). I have passed over people for jobs because their broadcast personal life made them seem unreliable (one particular applicant for a job pasted their site with the job that really wanted to do, and it wasn’t even close the job they were applying for).

At last. Some sense.

The Other McCain is the home of the itchy trigger finger.

Setup: For those who don’t follow these things (and who could blame you?), Christine Peliosi is the daughter of Crustian power-broker Nancy Pelosi — a child of the Left Coast Establishment who has a non-career as a Democratic party political operator. She is a poster child for the second-generation Crust-guppies that clog our upper-tier universities while their leather chair waits at the non-prof. They lack for nothing and produce nothing, except occasional pious sentiments and righteous indignation, all in a Good Cause. (She comes by it honestly, though; her siblings are just as bad:

Among Christine’s siblings include environmental activist Paul Pelosi, Jr. and filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi.

– per Wikipedia.) An entire nest of First-World drones. Put them in a homeless shelter with nothing but the clothes on their backs and $10 in their pockets, and they’d starve to death in a week.

But that’s not the entertaining part. The entertaining part is Smitty’s comment on unions:

For those unaware, a union is a corporation without a product. Unions produce not-work, in a fashion similar to that of organized crime. The threat of not-work is used to extort dues from workers and benefits from companies. These monies and favors are then used to buy politicians in a non-virtuous cycle. In the Navy, we called a union a ‘mutiny’.

And I’ve never heard it put better.

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The point is, our goal should never be to “create jobs”. Our goal should be to enable people to contribute something valued by other people. The value is the point, not the work. If someone finds a way to provide value to hundreds of millions of people and it requires no more effort from them than batting their eyelashes, that would be a win.

So why are economists like Cowen and Brynjolfsson talking about jobs? The stories they are telling, while far from the same, have a common theme which I interpret as follows: the forward march of technology has made it very difficult for people who have traditionally had low-skill or even middle-skill occupations to contribute value.

More inconvenient truth from a Real Economist. The whole emphasis on ‘creating jobs’ is a species of Cargo Cult — the reason jobs exist is because they contribute to the production process; if they don’t produce, they’re Just Another Welfare Program in a Clever Plastic Face-Saving Disguise.

This is not a matter of semantics. If you think the problem is a lack of jobs, all sorts of dangerous “solutions” may come to mind. Anything from having the government hiring en masse to do make-work, valueless jobs, to setting high tariffs and immigration restrictions so that domestic companies and labor do not have any foreign competition.

Usually an economy, especially a champion economy like ours, has enough surplus to support a limited number of these not-really-jobs welfare slots, but we’re in danger of having the exceptions swallow the rule.

Getting a job is not an end unto itself; the whole point is to trade our labor for other things that we want. Getting a job at the cost of not being able to afford anything is an absurd proposition.

Not that Democrats and other congenital pork-barrel politicians shrink from absurd propositions when it means more power for them.

As for make-work jobs, I would rather the government send the poor a check to do what they want with than to force them to “play real job”. At least then they would have the time to think about how they can contribute something of real value!

Amen.

Commenter Rubberpants on tech site TechDirt does an excellent and thorough fisking of a statement relating to the obnoxious legislative proposals commonly known as SOPA and PIPA.

Read The Whole Thing as an example of how every intelligent citizen ought to analyze any statement by members of the Crust, including (but not limited to) elected officials and corporate crapitalists.

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And why? Because Muslims are treated as a privileged class in the New Multi-Culti Britain.

Sources claim that converts are attracted by the chance  of better food and a more comfortable regime.

But there are also fears that some are being radicalised.

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That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

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A rather pointed reminder that freedom of religion is not a Muslim value.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

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At least 170 people have died in attacks since the beginning of the year, many of them Shiite pilgrims attending religious commemorations. The last American soldiers left the country Dec. 18.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

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That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

‘He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.’ — Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence.

There is nothing new under the sun.

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It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Donald Boudreaux, Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University, explains why for the dimwitted:

Your report on Apple’s allegedly inadequate job creation in America is titled “How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work” (Jan. 22).  Although your reporters missed it, the answer to this question is a happy one: Americans remain exceptionally prosperous.

According to The Economist, labor costs are only 7 percent of an iPad’s retail price.*  This reality suggests that, in addition to the fact that the bulk of each Apple product is made by machine, most of the labor that is used to bring the likes of iPads and iPhones to market is of the low-skilled and low-paid sort that is abundant in developing countries.  Should Americans lament the loss here of such low-paid jobs?

No.  As your reporters admit, Apple uses lots of overseas workers precisely because those workers are willing to work in worst conditions and for lower pay than are American workers – strong evidence that the options open to even low-skilled Americans are far superior to those of most workers in developing countries.  Our prosperity enables even the poorest of us to avoid such toil.

Of course, some people (apparently including, according to your report, Pres. Obama) wonder why Apple doesn’t simply hire American workers at American wages to do more of those jobs.  Alas, the unavoidable result of that policy would be a substantial rise in the price of Apple products and a fall – likely total – in the number of such products produced and sold.

Put differently, your report, like Mr. Obama, insinuates that low-wage jobs overseas (and jobs currently performed by machines) would, if transferred to America, somehow become the same – but higher paying – jobs for workers here.  This insinuation is wrong.   If Apple followed Mr. Obama’s suggestion, there would soon be no Apple and, hence, no “iPhone work” that the U.S. could possibly “lose out on.”

Lileks.

Huge blocks of artisanal ice were imported for the Modern Sculpture Ice Carving Competition, and local artist Hannah Botello’s “Incomprehensible Thing Meant to Encourage Despair” won top honors, with second prize going to a piece of conceptual art called “Essence,” a dish of liquid water over a can of Sterno.

“Challenges our very notions of ice,” said one judge.

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According to the report published in Science, the engineered bacteria can metabolize alginate, which is seaweed’s primary sugar constituent. Not only that, but it works without requiring heat or chemicals to pre-treat the seaweed, reducing the number of processing steps needed to create a biofuel.

DNA from E. coli – a workhorse in the lower intestine, but with a few strains that cause illness, giving it a poor reputation in the popular mind – was mixed with DNA from various marine microorganisms. These included Pseudoalteromonas, which provided genes to produce an enzyme to break up alginate; and Vibrio splendidus to digest the alginate.

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The fallout over Barack Obama’s decision to kill 20,000 (mostly) union jobs on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project continues as the Laborers International Union of North America left the BlueGreen Alliance Friday afternoon.

Founded in 2006, the BlueGreen Alliance is a political pairing of left-wing unions and environmental groups whose mission (so to speak) is to ensure that America’s conversion to a green economy results in union jobs as jobs in industries like coal are destroyed.

Heh. Pass the popcorn.

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America is coming apart. For most of our nation’s history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. “The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. “On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day.”

Americans love to see themselves this way. But there’s a problem: It’s not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.

Why does this come as such a great surprise? Classes in times past were largely accidental; who you became was largely a product of who your ancestors were, and had very little to do with individual merit. When the Great Shakeup of the Industrial Revolution came, all of a sudden pathways opened up for those with talent in the former lower classes to rise to rise as far as they could drive themselves — the phrase ‘rags to riches’ actually meant something, as it would not in prior days.

But that great bubble-sort has pretty much run it’s course. Those with talent and intelligence are on the upper levels, and those without are on the lower levels, and never the twain shall meet except at the drive-thru window. What education you can get and who you wind up marrying (and breeding with) is determined not by accident but by your own innate qualities — and that, in turn, is predominantly influenced by what genes your parents gave you. We have achieved meritocracy, and are discovering that it comes with some pretty uncomfortable side effects.

A lot of the discomfort comes from the fact that the ‘progressive’ slogan that ‘every child is born potentially equal to every other child’ is growing increasingly threadbare. Some children really are above average, and (more to the point) an equal number are below average, and the latter are never ever going to be as successful as the former, no matter how hard they try or how many government programs they qualify for or how much their self-esteem gets enhanced Lake Woebegon remains what it always was, a ‘progressive’ myth, and the chickens are coming home to roost.

And the isolation is only going to get worse. Increasingly, the people who run the country were born into that world. Unlike the typical member of the elite in 1960, they have never known anything but the new upper-class culture. We are now seeing more and more third-generation members of the elite. Not even their grandparents have been able to give them a window into life in the rest of America.

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More than 370,000 migrants who were admitted to Britain to work, study or go on holiday are now claiming out-of-work benefits, according to official figures compiled for the first time.

Bloated welfare rolls are the persistent legacy of left-wing governments — Labor in the U.K., Democrats in the U.S. — because the cornerstone of the ‘progressive’ program is to have everybody possible a dependent of the state and the political class that runs it. Britain is further advanced on this road than we are; remember their example the next time you hear some politician bloviating about a ‘path to citizenship’ for the criminals who snuck into this country to leech off of the institutions of a culture far advanced of their own.

Read it. And watch the video.

It is no accident or coincidence that Muslims commit 91 percent of honor killings worldwide. A manual of Islamic law certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, says that “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” (‘Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2). In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law.

Another pointed reminder that what we consider murder Muslims don’t, necessarily.