Read it.

Here is the problem, which no one wants to discuss. If we are going to keep raising the debt ceiling, why have it at all? We’ve set ourselves up for an elaborate and cynical kabuki dance with a pre-ordained outcome and, ultimately, no incentive to cut spending.

In fact, it is the adults in the room — the ones who supposedly aren’t speaking enough — who have created the problem. I don’t want those people to speak. I want them to shut the heck up.

They’ve driven up debt. They’ve driven up spending. They’d drive up taxes if we let them. And they know, they absolutely know, that they can do it with impunity because high minded pundits will take to the pages of USA Today and call them adult, back them up, and insist on more debt so we can have more spending. Of course most will fail to mention the “more spending” problem.

Read it.

Early Celtic rulers of a community in what’s now southwestern Germany liked to party, staging elaborate feasts in a ceremonial center. The business side of their revelries was located in a nearby brewery capable of turning out large quantities of a beer with a dark, smoky, slightly sour taste, new evidence suggests.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

Goldman Sachs will offer the chance to invest in Facebook only to its clients outside the United States, the New York Times reports.

Advocates of a strong Securities and Exchange Commission, or those who believe that at $50 billion Facebook is overvalued, will perhaps see this as a success. American investors are protected from investing in Facebook, while foreigners who lack SEC protection are left undefended against Goldman Sachs and Facebook.

Critics of a strong SEC, or those who believe that at $50 billion Facebook is a bargain, will perhaps see this as a disaster. American investors are prevented from investing in Facebook, while foreigners are allowed to. And Facebook is deprived of American capital that it would have otherwise been able to raise.

Read it.

Nuyia Youssif Nuyia is a specialist cardiologist, very well known in the region. He was the private physician of the late Msgr. Faraj Rahho and many priests and religious. Formerly a military doctor and professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Mosul, Nuyia is married with four children. Those who know him said that Nyuia is a Chaldean Catholic, very attached to his faith and his Church.

I’ll bet it was those Baptists again. You know how much they dislike Catholics.

Read it.

The family of late Polish president Lech Kaczynski who died with 95 others in an April 2010 air crash in western Russia said on Monday that Moscow may have plotted to assassinate him.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

A young Russian woman acclaimed as ‘Norwegian of the Year’ who wrote a book about life as an illegal immigrant in Norway, is being thrown out of the country.

Pretty cold.

Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian prime minister, has acknowledged that many people feel strongly about the girl’s case but said no exceptions can be made.

“We must handle individuals equally and not give them special treatment just because somebody receives a lot of attention,” he told Norwegian media. “If we bend the rules for one person, we will then get thousands of refugees lodging baseless applications for asylum. Nobody wants that.”

Boy, sounds like a tea-partier to me. Let’s get the Obamassiah on the case.

Read it.

Another fine day in the Obamanation.

Read it.

Read it.

An interesting article from the latest Atlantic Monthly highlights the emergence of a new plutocracy: global in scope, fabulously wealthy, ambitious, hard-working, and given to projects on a grand scale. The author, Chrystia Freeland, argues that members of this plutocracy are bound by class consciousness, and have transcended national identities, bound only by “interests” and “activities.”. In one telling passage, she quotes one of these new plutocrats as saying: “‘…we are engaged as global citizens in crosscutting commercial, political, and social matters of common concern. We are much less place-based than we used to be.’”

I’ve already posted about the Atlantic article, which takes a look at the increasingly globalized Crust and its activities. This is an interesting reaction.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering: For Muslims to steal from, cheat, or rob non-Muslims is no crime. Indeed, Mohammed (the ‘perfect man’) made a career of it, personally leading raids and supervising mass-murder.

Read it.

First off there are many more gadgets available for comparison than primary care doctors for many Americans. While you can hop online and start looking for gadgets at Amazon, Best Buy, eBay and a hundred other locations when you go looking for a new primary physician you need to find one within a reasonable distance from your home and one that is also covered by your health insurance plan which severely limits the scope.

Assuming you did want to do additional research for a healthcare provider, doing so online isn’t nearly as easy as looking up gadget reviews. Some doctors have included “gag orders” in new patient signup forms to prevent online reviews of the doctor. Thankfully we haven’t come across a new gadget license agreement that prohibits bad online reviews.

Further complicating the problem is the fact that most American consumers will gladly post their thoughts on the latest iPod anywhere, but when it comes to talking about medical information we are pretty quiet outside of our close circle of friends.

Read it.

Just another fine day in the Obamanation.

The tax increase affects any family that has an HSA or FSA.  Therefore, it is clear violation of President Obama’s oft-repeated promise not to raise “any form of taxes” on any family making less than $250,000 per year.

You mean the Obamassiah lied to us? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Steve Sailer sounds kinda bitter.

Promoting resentment might seem like divisiveness and vitriol, but in Tucson the taxpayers were being forced to pay for the promotion of resentment of whites, so that’s A-Okay. Discord and intolerance is not subsidizing  resentment toward a class, as long as the class is whites.

Read it.

Oxymoron alert.

I remember thinking to myself, wow, the BBC makes NPR sound like Fox News.

Read it.

It is one thing to look back with nostalgia and edifying memory to the place one came from.  It is entirely different to allow attachment to a past place to prevent someone from putting down roots where he is today. The communities we long for, if they are to be built, will be built and maintained by a mongrel horde. Not only is it important for us to put down roots, we need to help our neighbors do so as well. If we have to wait a fourth of our lives, or more, for full local citizenship, most collections of folk will never be communities.

I still consider myself a Hoosier, although I’ve lived in Texas significantly longer than I ever lived in Indiana (and I’ll probably still be here when I check out).

But psychologically, picking up and moving to Seattle or Orlando or Anchorage or DC would be an adventure (and I hate adventures); moving to some place in Indiana or Michigan or Illinois, on the other hand, would just be going back home. Ain’t sayin’ that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s a thing.

Read it.

I suspect that most Haitians, given a choice between having their country run by the U.N. and international ‘aid’ agencies, on the one hand, and a Duvalier, on the other, would pick the latter. Can’t say that I’d blame them.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

This article is somewhat old but raises some interesting issues for those of us who read. You know who you are.

Stephen R. Covey, one of the most successful business authors of the last two decades, has moved e-book rights for two of his best-selling books from his print publisher, Simon & Schuster, a division of the CBS Corporation, to a digital publisher that will sell the e-books to Amazon.com for one year.

When I was at EDS, my manager gave a copy of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People to each member of his team, at his own expense.

Many authors and agents say that because the contracts for older books do not explicitly spell out electronic rights, they reside with the author. Big publishing houses argue that clauses like “in book form” or phrases that prohibit “competitive editions” preclude authors from publishing e-books through other parties.

Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Simon & Schuster, declined to comment directly on Mr. Covey’s moves, but said, “Our position is that electronic editions of our backlist titles belong in the Simon & Schuster catalog, and we intend to protect our interests in those publications.”

And that’s going to be a very interesting fight.

The skirmish over e-books is part of a larger multidimensional chess match being played among publishers, authors, agents and book retailers. The big publishing houses hate the uniform e-book price of $9.99 that Amazon and others have set for newer titles. Although the retailers are subsidizing that price, executives say they believe that such pricing harms the market for more expensive hardcovers, and some publishers have reacted by announcing they will delay the publication of certain e-books by several months after they are made available in hardcover.

Practically, e-books are the new mass market paperback, especially now that there are free  e-book reader apps for smartphones.

Read it.

Increasing inequality in the United States has long been attributed to unstoppable market forces. In fact, as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson show, it is the direct result of congressional policies that have consciously — and sometimes inadvertently — skewed the playing field toward the rich.

Read it.

So determined are the couple to have a girl that they recently terminated twin boys conceived through IVF.

Boys will be boys … or maybe not.

Read it.

How hip, and trendy. Watch the Windsors turn into the Kennedys before your very eyes. Eventually they’ll be sending their kids to Brown University.

The Guild does for online gaming what Galaxy Quest did for Star Trek. Herself and I watched the first season during Date Night last night and enjoyed it immensely.

Do you want to date my avatar?

Game on!

If you ever hear anyone complain about ‘no women in tech’, point them to Felicia Day (accepted at Julliard but went to UT Austin instead, double major in math and music, National Merit Scholar, class valedictorian, etc.). She was homeschooled, of course.

Read it.

Electric cars are like tulip bulbs in 17th century Holland: Just another Crustian fad.

Read it.

With gaming threatening to unseat cinema and TV in terms of time and cash invested, this change from a top-down to a bottom-up development process isn’t just a curiosity, it’s a momentous change. The time has come when not only are the tools for creation available to the dedicated independent developer, but also the means of distribution and popularization. The heavy hitters in the industry will find themselves much more under threat soon from the proverbial two guys in a garage. Minecraft’s success may seem a lark born of big-budget backlash and social media, but pretty soon, that kind of success won’t be a lark, it’ll be a back door to a billion-dollar market.

Read it.

Keynes was no brilliant economist, if indeed he can be said to have been an economist at all.  He was instead a brilliant public intellectual who knew just enough economics to enable him to transform a decades- (centuries?-)old mistaken understanding of the economy held by business people into “the new economics.”

This mistaken understanding is an understandable result of being a businessperson: the greater is the demand for your product, the better is your business.  And the better is your business, the more workers you hire and the more of other inputs you buy – thus making your suppliers’ business prospects better, too.

It’s easy to be a Keynesian – most business people are, and swarms of pseudo-economists long before Keynes were saying largely the same thing that Keynes himself said in 1936.  It is, alas, far more difficult to be a real economist.

Read it.

Liu had been convicted of conspiracy and fraud involving millions of dollars made not by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing but by counterfeiting presses in a foreign country, presumably North Korea. The quality of these “supernote” forgeries is so high that he’d managed to pass enormous quantities through the electronic detection devices with which every Vegas slot machine is supposed to be equipped.

‘It’s only dirty paper.’ — Bugsy Siegel

The link between Wilson Liu’s counterfeit bills and North Korea’s missiles and nuclear weapons is umbilical. “More than 70 percent of the missiles’ components are imported from overseas,” says Syung Je Park, a director of the Asia Strategy Institute, a think tank affiliated with South Korea’s military, whom I met (at his insistence) at a safe house in London. Park has debriefed more than 1,000 North Korean defectors, including Hwang Jang Yop, once the regime’s chief ideologist and Kim Jong Il’s tutor. North Korea depends on international aid just to keep famine at bay. “They need money,” says Park. “Where else can they get it?” The answer, he and senior U.S. officials believe, is by means of organized crime: not only the production of counterfeit currency but also the manufacture and export of counterfeit cigarettes and pharmaceuticals, and the sale of drugs such as heroin and crystal methamphetamine.

Read it.

Senior Raccoons will remember a time, not too long ago, that abnormal people in our culture actually felt abnormal. They were aware of their deviancy, and how this deviancy contributed to an unhappiness that no government has the power to eliminate.

But under the guise of “tolerance” and multiculturalism, we have deprived these poor souls of the feedback they need in order to know that they are not normal. This is not empathy, but cruelty — like shielding someone from a cancer diagnosis on the grounds that it will make them feel bad, but depriving them of the chance to fight it.

In order to allow such people to feel normal in their abnormalcy, we have had to develop a deviant culture for them to live in, to such an extent that the normal are now made to feel abnormal.

Read it.

As explicitly Islamic states go, the range seems to be Saudi Arabia (bad) through Iran (worse) to Pakistan (worst).

Note that there is no Islamic country in which life is good for non-Muslims; some are just less bad than others.

Read it.

Hey, if it were easy, anybody could do it.

Read it. And watch the video.

This is creepy and cool at the same time.

Read it.

Professor Joseph, Malayalam Head of the Department of the Private Newman college in Thodupuzha was attacked on July 4. He was returning home along with his family members, after a Sunday mass at a church in Muvattupuzha in Ernakulam district.

The hand had been cut off at the wrist on allegations of blasphemy by Muslim radicals belonging to PFI for preparing a question paper for B.Com semester students which reportedly had some references to Prophet Mohammed.

But that’s not the worst part.

The college authorities have terminated his services.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Freeberg nails it.

Observations: Every stupid thing Palin says is the stupidest thing she has ever said. Every wonderful speech Obama gives is the greatest speech Obama has ever given. Conclusion: People who love Obama and hate Palin are like that guy in “Memento”; they have absolutely no working long-term memory.

Read & heed.

Two-spacers are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste.

Read it.

And so the old story goes: in 2001, the Illinois Cosmetology Association left their heads under the dryer too long and got steamed over people making money in the centuries-old art of African natural hair braiding. Braiders weren’t shelling out the $15,000 required for a beauty school degree. How could they possibly be trusted with hair care? The Illinois Legislature dutifully responded to the calls for “consumer protection.”

If Illinois had set out to eliminate minority- and woman-owned businesses while reducing the number of community gathering spots, it couldn’t have done better work. The new costs created an uneven playing field. Those who did comply saw that extravagant schooling and licensing costs made turning a profit nearly impossible. Many shops closed, eliminating formerly vibrant neighborhood social centers. As an added bonus, the state exposed its weak enforcement power: Braiders still operating illegally became so inured to cease-and-desist letters they trashed them on receipt.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Most chilling part:

Which brings us to those tattoos on the wrists of Coptic Christians, tattoos that make it harder to kidnap young people and children and force them to convert. This tradition is not new and it exists for a reason.

Your future under Islam. Don’t say that you weren’t warned.

David Brooks is an astute observer, although only a pretend-conservative.

You can see a paragon of the Composure Class having an al-fresco lunch at some bistro in Aspen or Jackson Hole. He’s just back from China and stopping by for a corporate board meeting on his way to a five-hundred-mile bike-a-thon to support the fight against lactose intolerance. He is asexually handsome, with a little less body fat than Michelangelo’s David. As he crosses his legs, you observe that they are immeasurably long and slender. He doesn’t really have thighs. Each leg is just one elegant calf on top of another. His voice is so calm and measured that he makes Barack Obama sound like Sam Kinison. He met his wife at the Clinton Global Initiative, where they happened to be wearing the same Doctors Without Borders support bracelets. They are a wonderfully matched pair; the only tension between them involves their workout routines. For some reason, today’s high-status men do a lot of running and biking and so only really work on the muscles in the lower half of their bodies. High-status women, on the other hand, pay ferocious attention to their torsos, biceps, and forearms so they can wear sleeveless dresses all summer and crush rocks with their bare hands.

And there’s more where that came from. This extended description of the SWPL lifestyle (what we here at DP call the Crust) is very entertaining.

Many members of this class, like many Americans generally, have a vague sense that their lives have been distorted by a giant cultural bias. They live in a society that prizes the development of career skills but is inarticulate when it comes to the things that matter most. The young achievers are tutored in every soccer technique and calculus problem, but when it comes to their most important decisions—whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise—they are on their own.

And here’s where Brooks fumbles the ball, because ‘what to love and what to despise’ is at the heart of the SWPL narrative. Young Crustians absorb it from their helicopter parents, their carefully vetted childhood companions, their closely monitored schoolmates, and their fashionable courses of study at colleges everybody has heard of. I have seen it done; it is not a pretty sight.

Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.

Or at least among the secularized, materialistic, we-can-build-you eschaton-immanentizing ‘progressives’ of the global elite — of which, sad to say, Brooks is a member in good standing.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota can look at attachment patterns of children at forty-two months, and predict with seventy-seven-per-cent accuracy who will graduate from high school.

The remainder will become rap stars, professional athletes, or drug dealers making money in quantities that researchers at the University of Minnesota have difficulty imagining. Is this a great country, or what?

Read it.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.

The Midnight Rider.

Representative of the luxury days of railroad travel, she is classified as a “Tractor-Trailer Limousine”, and is the only one ever built.

At 50,000 pounds, it still weighs less than a Sherman tank.

Read it.

It’s simple guys. Give up coffee and tea. Don’t flagellate yourself over it. Don’t invent terribly strict rules to try to govern yourself with a rod of iron. Give up caffeine. Cool your heels, calm your brain, avoid those depressing downs and then watch yourself. Make a daily focus list if you must. Have lists of tasks to do in your email client if you must. Work out what tricks work with you. I am not giving you a tightly worded prescription, iron-bounded rules.

Read it.

No, it’s not from the SWPL site — although it would fit in there quite nicely.

Read it.

The blood of Egyptian Christians has been spilled again, this time on a train en route to Cairo. A policeman on his way to work boarded the train, looked around until he found a group of people who were identifiably Coptic, and started shooting. One man was killed and five people were seriously wounded. Witnesses said the gunman shouted “Allahu akhbar!” before he started firing.

Dhimmis in a Muslim state are treated the way Negroes were treated in the Jim Crow South: Like second-class citizens at best, slaves or animals at worst, and nobody takes their ‘rights’ seriously.

Your future under Islam. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Cringely doesn’t like Steve Jobs much.

Apple has a long history of milking early adopters. Even the crappy products (remember the Newton? the Mac Cube?) would sell a few hundred thousand units to the faithful before those faithful learned the sad truth. But just as they were learning that truth, along would come Steve Jobs (okay, not in the case of the Newton, but generally) gleefully proffering the real fantastic product people had been expecting months before. Then those same early adopters, reenergized, would buy all over again, whether it was an iMac, iPod, MacBook, iPhone, whatever. Why should we think this week’s Verizon iPhone announcement is any different?

On the other hand, those of us who own Apple stock take comfort that there are millions of people out there who regularly drink the Apple Kool-Aide, and ponder the classic business adage, ‘Never give a sucker an even break.’

Why are we smiling? Take a look.

For the record: I do not own an iPhone, nor do I have any intention to get one.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it. And weep.

Although it is a fact that we only dare to confront in the occasional dark night of our souls, this country has been teetering on the brink of moral illegitimacy for the last 38 years.

Yesterday, I was forcibly reminded of this when someone sent me this excerpt from the forthcoming book Unplanned, in which former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson explains her conversion from pro-choice activist to pro-life activist, as she watched an abortion being performed live on an ultrasound … If you are able, I encourage you to read the whole thing. I have to confess to you that I almost was not. The horror that Johnson describes is almost unfathomable, accentuated by the cruelty and insensitivity of the conscienceless monsters cracking jokes as they watched the death of a tiny human unfold live before them.

Freeberg nails it, as usual.

The story linked up top says the new tax increase, the “hooray, we’re bilking people more” tax increase, is gonna raise $6.5 billion. It won’t, of course. That number is produced by simple addition and multiplication, and presumes people will maintain consistent earning and spending habits as the tax consequences are in a state of flux. That they won’t change any of the decisions under their control, as the employers that sign their paychecks see less of a profit coming in, and new, artificial expenses are built into the products and services they bring to market.

It is our “free” press that is most at fault for this problem. When the $6.5 billion target is missed, they won’t talk about it. Not in terms of how it should be discussed — “last year, legislators used fourth-grade math to figure out how much extra revenue they’d get from the tax increase, and they turned out to be wrong.” In all my years of reading newspapers, I’ve never seen a statement printed that way, although I have seen it happen time after time. No, they’ll wait until the new deficit is broken down, agency by agency, until it percolates down to the level of social programs…they’ll print up a story about some “vital” assistance being “cut.” Then they’ll find some sad sack who doesn’t know how he’s going to pay his heating bill or get his hangnail treated, and stick him on Page B-1 like they always do.

Charles Murray is always worth reading, and has a fondness for inconvenient truths.

Guess what. Amy Chua has really smart kids. They would be really smart if she had put them up for adoption at birth with the squishiest postmodern parents. They would not have turned out exactly the same under their softer tutelage, but they would probably be getting into Harvard and Princeton as well. Similarly, if Amy Chua had adopted two children at birth who turned out to have measured childhood IQs at the 20th percentile, she would have struggled to get them through high school, no matter how fiercely she battled for them.

Accepting both truths—parenting does matter, but genes constrain possibilities—seems peculiarly hard for some parents and almost every policy maker to accept.

Read it.