Read it.

Isn’t it fascinating how in this environment where rich people are being demonized at every turn all you need to do is a support a popular liberal cause and your financial sins are instantly forgiven?

With this in mind, the good folks at Big Journalism have uncovered some rather startling financial connections between this media mogul and the Arab world that haven’t raised any eyebrows from journalists that love to follow the money when there’s a conservative at the other end of the smoking wallet.

Read it.

The environmental law community is buzzing over a brief filed by the Solicitor General’s Office this week on behalf of the Tennessee Valley Authority in American Electric Power v. Connecticut.  As reported by the Washington Post, the WSJ’s Washington Wire, and Greenwire, environmentalist groups are shocked and dismayed by the SG’s decision to enter the case.  “Obama Sides with Polluters” reads the title of a blog post by UCLA’s Jonathan Zasloff at Legal Planet.

How’s that Hope and Change working out for ya?

In AEP, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (that initially included then-Judge Sonia Sotomayor) allowed several states and private groups to pursue public nuisance claims under federal common law against a handful of the nation’s largest utilities, including the TVA, for their contribution to global warming.  Among other things, the court held the states had standing and that their nuisance claims were not displaced by federal regulatory authority over greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.  This suit, like others filed elsewhere, has increased pressure on utilities and others to accept federal climate change legislation.

Poor babies. Apparently there actually are some grownups working for the government after all, and Mother Gaia will have to look elsewhere in hopes of reversing the Industrial Revolution. (Why are ‘environmentalists’ considered ‘progressives’? If you look at the policies they push they’re the most reactionary people around; they won’t be happy until the world is returned to the way it was during Teddy Roosevelt’s administration.)

Read it.

One of the cleverest tricks of the cultural Left is demonizing perfectly reasonable actions and opinions by giving them sinister names. It is the logical go-to technique for those whose ideas have failed in every practical application but who nonetheless still dominate the media by which ideas are spread.

For anyone born with the gift of laughter, the term is absurd to the point of hilarity. A phobia, after all, is an irrational fear. Given that Islam is cancerous with violence in virtually every corner of the globe, given the oppressive and exclusionary nature of many Islamic governments, given the insidious Islamist inroads against long-held freedoms in western Europe, and given those aspects of sharia that seem, to an outsider at least, to prohibit democracy, free speech, and the fair treatment of the female half of our species, those who love peace and liberty would, in fact, be irrational not to harbor at least a measure of concern.

Victor Davis Hanson connects the dots.

1. Two sets of rules. The public senses there are two standards in America — one for elite overseers, quite another for the supposedly not-to-be-trusted public. The anger over this hypocrisy surfaces over matters from the trivial to the profound. Sometimes the pique arises because the spread-the-wealth, we-all-have-skin-in-shared-sacrifice presidential sermons don’t apply to those who do the preaching, as in the president’s serial polo-shirted golf excursions or Michelle’s movable feast from Marbella to Martha’s Vineyard.

Freeberg piles on.

But did you notice the other thing all these issues in Krauthammer’s list have in common? Someone needs to be told to go stick it where the sun don’t shine. Someone’s just-plain-bad. The Islamophobes need to learn to live with the Victory Mosque, which they really hate, but that’s a good thing because once it’s there they won’t be able to do anything about it, and they deserve it. They need to suffer because they’re bad people. Ditto for those xenophobes in Arizona, dang it, they deserve to have all those brown people who “aren’t like them” streaming through their fences. I hope they choke on their chewing tobacco over it!

Today’s liberalism is retrograde but natural machismo, repressed through artificial disciplinary techniques and then exploding elsewhere in an uncontrolled and unhealthy way. Go through the list of things liberals do that embarrass them once the wrong people find out about them, but that they can be counted on to do once they’re among friends in a “JournoList” type of setting. It is the same list of things boys do when their hormonal rushes are driving them into that Venturi manifold toward manhood — and when they’re under-supervised.

It’s as if they missed out on the coming-of-age when they were thirteen or so, and are trying to make up for it.

Read it.

I note that 7 of the 10 are by Americans.

Read it.

I certainly learned more about management in the Navy than I did in my MBA program. And they paid me rather than me paying them.

Watch it.

This. Is. So. Cool. I want one of these so badly, I’m speechless.

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‘Fiendishly clever’, I think, is the correct term for this.

Read it.

Read it.

The Ultimatum Game works like this: You are given $100 and asked to share it with someone else. You can offer that person any amount and if he accepts the offer, you each get to keep your share. If he rejects your offer, you both walk away empty-handed.

How much would you offer? If it’s close to half the loot, you’re a typical North American. Studies show educated Americans will make an average offer of $48, whether in the interest of fairness or in the knowledge that too low an offer to their counterpart could be rejected as unfair. If you’re on the other side of the table, you’re likely to reject offers right up to $40.

It seems most of humanity would play the game differently. Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia took the Ultimatum Game into the Peruvian Amazon as part of his work on understanding human co-operation in the mid-1990s and found that the Machiguenga considered the idea of offering half your money downright weird — and rejecting an insultingly low offer even weirder.

Turns out that WEIRD is an acronym for ‘Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic’ — which makes Job Bob Briggs’ newsletter We Are the Weird even more apropos that one might think.

That would be a great name for a culturally imperialistic movement. (I’d organize it myself but it would be too much like work.)

“If you’re a Westerner, your intuitions about human psychology are probably wrong or at least there’s good reason to believe they’re wrong,” Dr. Henrich says.

Privileged Westerners, uniquely, define themselves by their personal characteristics as opposed to their roles in society.

Nick Gillespie doesn’t take himself or his movement very seriously … which is why he’s one of the best writers at tReason Magazine.

I think part of the problem with these sorts of discussions, including Brink Lindsey’s liberaltarianism, is that participants are constantly mixing levels of discussions (I know I do). Liberals and conservatives are used interchangeably for Democrats and Republicans, right wing and left wing, etc. While the Dems are reliably more liberal (in a contemporary sense) than Republicans, the overlap isn’t perfect and many liberals have libertarian or even conservative sympathies. And while their numbers are small, there are in fact libertarian Democrats along with liberal Republicans. Most importantly, how someone governs is probably less a reflection of ideology than other material concerns (there’s the Marxist libertarian in me!).

Reason.tv examines the Commerce Clause, that universal Leatherman that Congress uses to stick its nose into our daily lives. It’s only ten minutes, and will teach you a lot about how our government had degenerated.

Read it.

Detractors have pointed out that Dr. Galembeck’s team may be generating the droplets’ electrical charge by the act of pumping the air over the metals — which might imply you couldn’t practice this technique with still, humid air — while there’s also the rather large caveat that the little electricity they were able to collect from vapor was a hundred million times less than what you could obtain from a solar cell of equivalent size. Still, it’s another new door unto a potential alternative energy source and we don’t ever like having to close those.

Read it.

Great. Let’s have him blow up Fidel Castro.

(I can see Fidel and Raoul watching the MSNBC reporter come in and muttering to each other “Let’s have some fun with this guy.”)

James Taranto casts a critical eye on the Crust.

If you think it’s offensive for a Muslim group to exploit the 9/11 atrocity, you’re an anti-Muslim bigot and un-American to boot. It is a claim so bizarre, so twisted, so utterly at odds with common sense that it’s hard to believe anyone would assert it except as some sort of dark joke. Yet for the past few weeks, it has been put forward, apparently in all seriousness, by those who fancy themselves America’s best and brightest, from the mayor of New York all the way down to Peter Beinart.

What is the nature of this contempt? In part it is the snobbery of the cognitive elite, exemplified by a recent New York Times Web column by Timothy Egan called “Building a Nation of Know-Nothings”–or by the viciousness directed at Sarah Palin, whose folksy demeanor and state-college background seem terribly déclassé not just to liberals but to a good number of conservatives in places like New York City.

The British philosopher Roger Scruton has coined a term to describe this attitude: oikophobia. Xenophobia is fear of the alien; oikophobia is fear of the familiar: “the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours.’ ” What a perfect description of the pro-mosque left.

Read it.

The Environmental Protection Agency has denied a petition filed by environmental activists seeking to ban lead in ammunition and fishing tackle, saying such regulation is beyond the agency’s authority.

How many people think that this is a pro-environment rather than an anti-gun/anti-fishing scheme?

A coalition of conservation groups had filed its petition earlier this month arguing that the use of lead in ammo and tackle is poisoning the nation’s lakes, ponds and forests and asking the EPA to ban the “manufacture, processing and distribution” of lead shot, bullets and fishing.

According to the petitioners, who include the Center for Biological Diversity and the American Bird Conservancy, up to 20 million birds and other animals are killed each year due to lead poisoning in the United States, and at least 75 wild bird species — including bald eagles, ravens and endangered California condors — are poisoned by spent lead ammunition. They say roughly 3,000 tons of lead are expelled into U.S. hunting grounds annually, with another 80,000 tons released at shooting ranges, and another 4,000 tons of lead fishing lures and sinkers are lost in ponds and streams.

Although, of course, there’s no suggestion of how they ‘know’ this.

We’re not trying to ban handgun ammunition. This is strictly a toxicity issue, with lead poisoning wildlife.”

And if you believe that one, he’ll tell you another one.

Read it.

Read it.

If your children attend public school, you are among those parents whose rights will end the moment your child enters the school. That’s because in 2005 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found in Fields v. Palmdale School District “that the Meyer-Pierce right [of parents to direct the upbringing of their children] does not exist beyond the threshold of the school door.”

“We conclude that the parents are possessed of no constitutional right to prevent the public schools from providing information on the subject [of sexuality] to their students in any forum or manner they select” (emphasis added).

It is no longer safe to send your kid to a government school.

This is an outrage. The 9th Circus Court of Appeals, the most reversed Appellate court in the United States, has outdone itself.

Read it.

The Fides news agency, a branch of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, said aid was handled either by Muslim relief organisations or by government officials close to fundamentalists.

Both discriminated against Christians and other minorities in distributing aid essential to survival, it said.

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

Christians are officially obliged to extend charity to all. Muslims are officially obliged to extend charity only to other Muslims.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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Not a headline that you read every day.

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Hope he doesn’t think that will make him bulletproof.