Read it.

 The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that 3 of every 4 states that have enacted a ban on texting while driving have seen crashes actually go up rather than down.

It’s hard to pin down exactly why this is the case, but experts believe it is a result of people trying to avoid getting caught in states with stiff penalties. Folks trying to keep their phones out of view will often hold the phone much lower, below the wheel perhaps, in order to keep it out of view. That means the driver’s eyes are looking down and away from the road.

Heh.

Jim Goad wishes he could see all this racism he’s allegedly guilty of.

Don’t blame black pundits—who make a living by being black and talking about their blackness and how hard it is to be black—for stoking racial tension. Don’t blame the ones who see no irony of accusing Romney of “playing the race card” while their own words appear under a banner that says “East Central Florida’s Black Voice.” Don’t blame those who talk about “the childishness of some whites” or that Romney, by not even mentioning race, was somehow contributing to “the niggerization” of Obama.

Read it.

In August, the left found it amusing to speculate about Divine judgment when Hurricane Isaac seemed to be approaching Tampa, FL as the Republican National Convention began.

Even when Isaac veered west and followed a similar path to that taken by Hurricane Gustav in 2008–which also coincided with the Republican convention, in St. Paul, MN–and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, some on the left celebrated the GOP’s misfortune.

As Hurricane Sandy bears down on heavily Democratic mid-Atlantic and northeast states, no one, left or right, is joking.

Well, except for me, of course. You want tasteless political jokes, I’m your boy.

Read it.

You know when it’ll be clear that racism is all but dead and buried?  When so-called liberals stop accusing black conservatives of being Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas.

Mark Steyn has very little patience with academic divas.

A few readers have asked for my reaction to the news that climatologist Michael Mann has decided to proceed with his suit against NR, me, Rand Simberg and the Competitive Enterprise Institute for mocking his hockey stick.

I’m still working on my formal, bland, carefully lawyered official response, so for now just let me do cheap ad hominem cracks.

Read it.

After all, we can’t have that sort of thing going on, can we?

Read it.

Perhaps they’ll think better of it next time.

Read it.

 You, American Airlines, should no longer be flying across the Atlantic. You do not have the know-how. You do not have the equipment. And your employees have clearly lost interest in the endeavor. Like the country whose name graces the hulls of your flying ships, you are exhausted and shorn of purpose. You need to stop.

Flight 121 from Paris to New York began on a clear autumn afternoon. It ended over 30 hours later. For those of us without miles, it is probably still going.

Read it.

Prosecutors in Italy have called for a group of scientists to be sent to prison for four years each for allegedly failing to give adequate warning of the L’Aquila earthquake in 2009 that killed 309 people and injured hundreds more.

I predict a sudden and catastrophic fall in Italian interest in pursuing a scientific career.

Ann Coulter talks about her new book.

 I researched a lot of this already because race and liberal guilt and their despicable history with respect to their race relations in America is a topic that’s interested me. But from watching MSNBC, and particularly the Trayvon Martin nonsense, it was like a flashback to the ’70s and ’80s living in New York where it was just a constant state of racial turmoil and crazy racial demagoguery from the New York Times and all the “respectable” press as if we had the Klan on the New York City police force.

If any black criminal got shot it was proof of racism and police brutality. And then the facts would come out, and as with the Trayvon Martin case, it would just disappear from the news pages. You’d never get the conclusion saying, “Remember that story we’ve been beating you hysterical about for the past three months? Sorry, we were wrong, and actually the kid was mugging the cop.” That’s the famed Edmund Perry case.

I’ve long had a theory that the best thing that ever happened to America, especially to black people ironically enough, was the OJ verdict because multiple millions of people watched that verdict being read, and then they watched law students at Howard University and at McDonald’s and in stores around the country erupt in cheers for the acquittal of an obviously guilty black celebrity. And that was when white people in America said, “That’s it – the white guilt bank has shut down.”

But that was then; this is now.

 Liberals didn’t really need to white guilt America when they were only running against John McCain. This time, Obama has a record to run on; it’s not a good record. They certainly can’t talk about that. And they’re up against a pretty tough candidate especially for their campaign techniques which usually involve digging up sealed divorce records and child custody records and basically forcing Obama’s opponents to default. You’re not going to be able to do that with the clean-living Mormon who gave $4 million to charity last year and whose roughest drink is chocolate milk.

So what are they going to do? It’s going to be nonstop racial demagoguery. MSNBC kicked it off during the Republican National Convention when every night it was one more insane claim after another about anything Republicans say is racist, many of which I go through in my book.

With thanks to Bob, who has all the good stuff.

via Steve Sailer:

Read it.

The class-action gravy train may have hit something on the tracks.

It would be unseemly for law firms to collude on their billable rates in an antitrust case. Interestingly, however, the billable rates cluster around certain levels: $750-$950 for senior partners, $375-$450 for experienced associates, and $200-$300 for junior partners. While the legal industry might be as competitive and efficient as, say, the egg business, it’s difficult to see how this many firms, linked together with a web of referral agreements, can actually compete on price so their clients get the best deal possible. Especially since the clients aren’t actually bargaining for anything; the law firms themselves drive most consumer antitrust cases and only the judge  — and lawyers’ own sense of ethics — stand in the way of full-on collusion with each other and the defendant to strike a settlement that is lucrative for the lawyers and nobody else.

Read it.

Impossible. Everyone knows that only Republicans can be racist.

The Democratic National Committee is trying to cover up an incident at the party’s National Convention in which a Puerto Rican member of the New Progressive Party called a politician of African descent a “monkey” at a DNC luncheon.

Lornna Soto referred referred to Rafael Cox Alomar, a Puerto Rican of African descent, as “el monito,” which translates to “the monkey.”

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

Read it.

This twist was hardly surprising given the controversial discussions of the underrepresentation of women in SF — particularly Hard SF — that have been unfolding at SFsignal and elsewhere in the online SF community. However, it did bring into clearer focus something that has surprised me over the last few months: the gusto with which people have been flinging around labels. Feminist SF. Women’s SF. SF by Minorities. White Male SF. People have been deploying these phrases as if they were listing elements in the periodic table. As if they thought that they had some objective lock on the difference between the writings of men and women, or of people with differing skin colors. As if they thought that the author photo on the back cover was the single relevant datapoint for determining which genre a book belongs to and who can reasonably be expected to read it … you know, for fun, and because it’s good science fiction, instead of just to fulfill their annual guilt-expiating requirement for reading books by people who don’t look like them.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the degeneration of modern culture is the intrusion of Identity Politics into every nook and cranny of life — especially the concept of ‘underrepresented’, as if ‘representation’ has any legitimate significance outside of the political realm. (But, of course, under Identity Politics, there is nothing that is outside of the political realm.)

Read it.

Unfortunately, it’s the Onion. Even more unfortunately, there’s a lot of truth in it.

Read it.

…it seems that the Obama Administration’s “Affordable Care Act” has made health insurance less affordable for North Carolina’s college students.

CNN’s Political Ticker reports that Tom Ross, the president of the University of North Carolina system, informed the university’s board of governors that there would be a significant increase in the cost of university-provided insurance plans that would result in students paying nearly twice as much as they do now.

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

Read it.

 The Wikileaks founder breached the conditions by seeking political asylum before he was due to be extradited to Sweden to face sexual assault charges.

A raft of high-profile figures including socialite Jemima Khan, journalist John Pilger, film director Ken Loach and publisher Felix Dennis have all confirmed they raised the cash as security to help free him which a judge ordered be forfeited at an earlier hearing.

Nine high profile backers, including two members of the British aristocracy, a Nobel Prize winner and an academic, were today told at Westminster Magistrates Court they have a month to show why the £140,000 they promised between them if he refused to surrender to the authorities should also not be lost.

Plenty of room for rich fools under the bus. Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Diversity training doesn’t extinguish prejudice. It promotes it.

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

Read it.

A team of boffins in Germany say they have found a statistical link between periods of low solar activity and very cold winters in Europe. Some physicists believe that a long period of low solar activity – like the “Maunder Minimum” of the 17th and 18th centuries – could be on the cards in coming decades, so the new research might indicate an upcoming “mini Ice Age”.

That would be entertaining, watching all of the Global Warming crowd trying to keep their heads from exploding.

Read it.

Crimes and infractions are not evenly distributed across racial groups, as the Supreme Court noted in United States v. Armstrong, 517 U.S. 456 (1996).  As that 8-to-1 Supreme Court ruling noted, there is no legal “presumption that people of all races commit all types of crimes” at the same rate, since such a presumption is “contradicted by” real world data, in which “more than 90% of” convicted cocaine traffickers “were black” in 1994, and “93.4% of convicted LSD dealers were white.”  But the Maryland Board of Education has chosen to ignore reality by proposing a rule that would require school systems to discipline and suspend students in numbers correlated to their race, and require school systems that currently don’t do so to implement plans to eliminate any racially “disproportionate impact” over a three-year period.  Thus, it is imposing quotas in all but name.

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

The fact that a higher percentage of black students are suspended than whites in most schools reflects greater infraction rates associated with poverty and single-parent households — not racism against minorities by school officials.  As a scholar at the Brookings Institution notes, “children who spend time in single-parent families are more likely to misbehave, get sick, drop out of high school and be unemployed.”  As the federal CDC notes, while most whites and Asians are born to two-parent families, most blacks and other minority groups are born out of wedlock.

Note the clever way they dance around the truth — that black culture is corrupt, and promotes and sustains socially dysfunctional behavior in its children — under the mealy-mouthed discussion of ‘poverty’ and ‘single-parent households’ … treating the symptoms as if it were the disease.

Read it.

The Democratic National Committee is taking flak from women’s groups for the lack of child care that is being provided at the convention.

The Charlotte Observer reports that children will not be allowed access on the floor of the Democratic National Convention and that daycare will not be provided for delegates who bring their kids.

How dare they have kids! What are they, Mormons?

Read it.

The Internet doesn’t like me — or, at least, it doesn’t care much for my name. My first name consists of two words and I have accent marks in both my first and last names, which seems to complicate my online life considerably. When trying to purchase an airline ticket or sign up for an email newsletter, I’m never completely certain whether it will go through, or how my name will come out of the transaction, but I’m usually pretty sure it won’t be right.

Tell me about it. At least it guarantees that I’ll never run for political office. Damn you, white males! Oh, wait….

“I think software is slowly conforming to us. It’s just inconceivable that English will be the sole winner of the Internet,” Miller said, noting that bigger tech companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and Google are keenly focused on internationalization. As these companies incorporate more diverse programming, others will follow, and eventually because the Internet is so global, older systems will be replaced, too.

Uh, the winner will probably be Chinese, in which case accent marks are the least of our problems. C’mon, guys, think it through.

Read it.

Of course not. Spending other people’s money is what Democrats live for. Four more years!

Read it.

Will the homophobia never cease?

Read it.

Yeah, we’re making all these poor underdeveloped (don’t call them ‘backward’!) nations feel low self-esteem.

Instead, lets distribute medals based proportionally on sex and skin tone. Oh, and sexual preference. That would be more ‘fair’.

But none to the Jews, of course, since they’re icky. And a few more to the Muslims, of course, or they’ll start blowing people up — you know how they are.

Read it.

And why not? At least polygamy has a history behind it, unlike ‘gay marriage’ — although I don’t think we’ll find Rahm Emanuel coming out in favor of Mormon values any time soon.

Read it.

And thank God for that. For a Responsible Opposing Viewpoint, let’s go to  Tim Hawkins.

Read it.

Cinemark Holdings Inc., owner of the theater where these murders took place exercises its rights as an owner of private property in Colorado to bar those who hold concealed carry permits from exercising their rights in its theaters. As a result, law-abiding citizens, including owners of concealed carry permits, who were in the theater that dreadful night were unarmed and thus unable to defend themselves and their fellow movie-goers from the murderous attack visited upon them.

Opponents of the Second Amendment and concealed carry laws call the areas created by Cinemark’s decision “gun-free zones.” They are not. As we discovered to our great horror in the early morning hours of July 20 and as we have discovered in the past, they are free only of the guns owned by law-abiding citizens.

‘Shooters! Get your unarmed victims here!’

Read it.

And don’t forget Aunt Zeituni.

Read it.

But of course they’re nasty racist sexist bigot homophobes because they oppose ‘gay marriage’ so eating there makes you a moral leper.

Steve Sailer examines a Voice of the Crust.

For Mehl and Schmader, this was the smoking gun that an insidious psychological phenomenon called “stereotype threat” was at work. It could potentially explain the disparity between men and women pursuing science and math careers.

Few people are better than the fashionistas of the left in coming up with fancy names for reasons why everything is the fault of people they don’t like.

Read it.

Um, is that a surprise?

Convicted killer Daniel Webb says he and others on Connecticut’s death row are also being punished for the crimes committed by two men convicted of the brutal home-invasion slayings of a Cheshire mother and her two daughters.

Uh, no, you’re being ‘punished’ — if that’s the word for feeding and housing you rather than executing you, which is what you were sentenced to — for the crimes for which you were convicted. ‘Not abolishing the death penalty’ is not a punishment.

Webb tells The Associated Press in an exclusive interview from prison that he believes Connecticut would have repealed capital punishment for all inmates if not for the 2007 killings by Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes.

Connecticut instead abolished the death penalty in April for all future crimes.

The reason for which is … why? Are ‘future crimes’ not actually, you know, crimes? People no longer being killed in Connecticut?

Webb is on death row for the 1989 murder of Diane Gellenbeck, a 37-year-old banking executive who was abducted from a Hartford parking garage and shot multiple times.

Well, there’s the answer then. Take him out and shoot him ‘multiple times’ and he won’t be on death row FOR TWENTY THREE YEARS any more. Win-win.

Read it.

On December 28, 2005, David Calder tried to start a fire in his wood-burning stove in his trailer home—by inserting the nozzle of a $3.99 gas can into the stove to pour gas onto the fire, which Calder admitted was “stupid.” (The container itself had “KEEP AWAY FROM FLAMES, PILOT LIGHTS, STOVES, HEATERS, ELECTRIC MOTORS, AND OTHER SOURCES OF IGNITION.” impressed into the plastic; nevertheless, Calder included a failure-to-warn claim in his suit.) The resulting catastrophe killed his two-year-old daughter and severely burned Calder. This was, Calder argued, the fault of Blitz USA, the manufacturer of the gas can, for not including more idiot-proofing, though no gas container could reasonably protect against the idiocy of Calder’s actions. A Clinton-appointed federal district judge refused to throw the case out, and refused to let Blitz USA argue the “state-of-the-art” product liability defense or argue that it complied with government regulations for the manufacture of gas cans. A sympathetic jury found millions of dollars of damages, and blamed Blitz USA to the tune of 70% of the damages. So Blitz USA, which used to employ 117 people at a factory in Oklahoma to manufacture about 75% of the gas cans sold in the US, is liquidating in bankruptcy, and Americans will have to get their gas cans from Chinese manufacturers—or resort to even more unsafe containers like milk jugs if there is a gas-can shortage during this year’s hurricane season. So trial lawyer greed and a trial-lawyer-friendly judicial appointment has cost jobs, made Americans less safe, and increased carbon emissions from the need to import bulky gas cans from overseas.

Read it.

Well, obviously The Rich™ aren’t paying Their Fair Share™.

Just how progressive does the U.S. income tax code need to be to satisfy the redistributionists?

Only when they pay nothing but get all the benefits, while the people they don’t like (Good Rich People™ like AlGore or Warren Buffett or George Soros or John Kerry or those who donate to the demagogue Democrat Party don’t count, of course) pay for everything.

Read it.

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

After all, Democrats are right up there with Muslims as far as being peace-loving people who wouldn’t harm a fly.

Read it.

How can this be? I thought that the 1% (among which the owners and employees of Google certainly rank) are all homophobe Republicans?

Read it.

 When you label someone an “illegal alien” or “illegal immigrant” or just plain “illegal,” you are effectively saying the individual, as opposed to the actions the person has taken, is unlawful. The terms imply the very existence of an unauthorized migrant in America is criminal.

That’s because it’s a fact. If you are in this country contrary to the law, you are illegal and a criminal. That’s just a fact. Anyone who objects to being called an illegal immigrant can avoid the whole problem by STAYING HOME. It’s not hard.

In this country, there is still a presumption of innocence that requires a jury to convict someone of a crime. If you don’t pay your taxes, are you an illegal? What if you get a speeding ticket? A murder conviction? No. You’re still not an illegal. Even alleged terrorists and child molesters aren’t labeled illegals.

That’s because there’s a difference between what you are and what you are labelled. If you commit a crime, you are a criminal, whether or not you are ever convicted of that crime. Our courts have a presumption of innocence based on the legal effect of their proceedings, not on the existential nature of what you do. If you murder somebody, you’re a murderer, whether or not you ever get convicted — or even accused — of the crime.

This is the sort of intellectual dishonesty that lawbreakers — and those who support lawbreaking — perennially use to try to weasel their way out of the consequences of their lawbreaking. If you don’t like the law, have it changed. If you can’t get it changed, then you aren’t entitled to work your way around it by attempting to pervert the language.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Actually, it’s the people who have to deal with them who are doing the suffering.

I’m suffering from Wishing to Punch a Democrat in the Face Disorder. Where do I go to sign up for government benefits?

Read it.

Pakistan’s new prime minister has started to make good on his promise to end the crippling blackouts that are blighting the country by adding guaranteed supply to his own home.

Hey, gotta start somewhere. Obama would do the same.

Read it.

Well-to-do people are taking advantage of the city’s long-protected practice of limiting rent increases to preserve affordable housing by using their cheap apartments as weekend getaways.

Read it.

I thought they’d never leave…. Seriously, is it such a surprise when an explicitly racist organization acts like an explicitly racist organization? (Thought experiment: Visualize the fate of a group called ‘Congressional White Caucus’. Which tells you all you need to know about Black-Run America.)

Read it.

Words fail me.

Read it.

 Nassau County, N.Y., had let go 71-year-old veteran lifeguard Jay Lieberfarb after he failed a swim test. Charging that the county had not always dismissed younger guards who had failed the same test, the EEOC proceeded to negotiate a $65,000 back pay settlement, a three-year consent decree and other relief.

Sometimes it is good to be the victim … or at least profitable. At taxpayer expense, of course.

Read it.

Assange was cuffed by Met police on a European Arrest Warrant in December 2010. He was later granted conditional bail by London’s High Court with a bond of £200,000, collected from Assange’s celebrity supporters.

One of those conditions was that Assange had to adhere to an overnight curfew at his bail address between 22.00 and 08.00.

Let us all pause and shed a tear for the celebutards now financially hosed by befriending a ‘progressive’ like Assange.

Pass the popcorn.

Read it.

Just as Tracy Morgan learned that “gay” trumps “black” in the media’s politically correct pecking order, the Cherokee are about to discover that “American Indian” does not trump “pasty-white, wealthy female leftist who could unseat a sitting Republican in the U.S. Senate.”

Sure sounds as if they’re being treated like family….

Read it.

A prominent economist has found that expanding the social safety net, a key factor to President Barack Obama’s economic agenda, has nearly doubled job losses.

University of Chicago Prof. Casey Mulligan, author of the soon-to-be-released The Redistribution Recession, found that without the rapid increase of the social safety net during the economic crisis, unemployment per capita would have increased by 4 percentage points, half of the 8 point jump the U.S. experienced.

“The less painful it is to be without a job, the less reasons employees and employers have to work together to save a job,” Mulligan said. “By making the safety net more generous, you’re going to have more businesses close up because of higher costs, and you’re going to see employees who will refuse to work if their wage is going to be less than their unemployment.”

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