Read it.

A fascinating look at how Torahs are made.

Read it.

Sometimes it is good to work Inside the Ring.

Read it.

The death rattle of environmentalism will be deafening.  It has too much political momentum and fanatical devotion to go quietly.  The environmental establishment is a billion-dollar a year business, and there are plenty of stupid guilty rich people, idiot Hollywood celebrities, and direct-mail dupes to keep the agitation machine going for many years to come.  The architecture of environmental law and regulation, and the administrative momentum of the EPA, assures that this zombie movement will continue to do great damage to the economy for a long time to come.  But make no mistake—it is a bunch of brain-dead zombies that we face in the environmental movement today.

And about fargin time, too.

Read it.

Illinois had an optimistic outlook when it passed House Bill 3659, which was the state’s affiliate nexus tax. Bill co-sponsor Senator John Cullerton anticipated the new would generate an additional $150 million in much-needed revenues. As the Chicagoist reported today, the reality looks far more grim.

January thruough June 2011, the months before the law went into effect saw the Illinois Department of Revenue collect approximately $139 million use tax. From July 2011 through the end of the year, Illinois collected $127 million in use tax. That’s right, Illinois collected less use tax after their affiliate nexus tax went into effect.

Politicians just don’t grasp that people respond to incentives. The see a stream of money going by and figure that if they start wetting their beaks (hell, dipping out big bucketfuls) the stream will continue as if nothing is happening. This is like thinking that a dog will run just as fast pulling you as it will by itself.

Amazon.com and Overstock.com, two of the biggest affiliate programs online, terminated their affiliate programs in Illinois, just like they have in most other states, meaning they avoided the new tax law completely. That also has the side effect of reducing potential income tax revenue from affiliates.

FatWallet, Inc, a coupon site formerly located in Rockton, IL, moved to Wisconsin to avoid the taxes, taking over 50 jobs and any associated taxes with them.

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

Jehu lays it out in black and white.

Diversity promotes sprawl, by the engine of white flight and NAM crime.  Sprawl promotes obesity, the number one killer of a woman’s value in the SMP and MMP.

That’s the bottom line. The implications are pretty ugly.

Diversity atomizes communities, which makes mass media more influential in relation.  Mass media tends to reduce the status of males relative to females, which is toxic to attraction
The atomization of communities breeds virtual anonymity, which increases the effectiveness of the ‘Cad’ strategy relative to the ‘Dad’ strategy because communities that don’t actually exist find it very difficult to enforce shared norms, especially in ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ sorts of situations.
By importing lots of cheap labor, the value of the average Joe’s labor in the economy is bid down, lowering his status, which is, again, toxic to attraction
Importing lots of voters with a socialist bent tends to move states in a more socialist direction, and the thicker the social safety net, the more devalued the archetypal ‘beta provider’ becomes
Forcing people to walk on eggshells all the time around issues of diversity, ethnicity, or race coerces most people to act like cowards or fools, neither of which is especially attractive.

Be careful not to step in the diversity.

Read it.

The capital city of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg is 52 percent Black (and only 30 percent white) as of the latest US Census.

Though not as big as the failure of Jefferson County, Alabama and the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history (primarily courtesy of the financial mismanagement of 71 percent Birmingham), Harrisburg is an insolvent capital city. With virtually no tax-base (cities that are primarily comprised of Black people tend to have that problem), Harrisburg relies on parking garages and parking meters to as primary cash-generating assets, bankruptcy appears inevitable.

Whatever you do, don’t step in the diversity.

Read it.

Alabama-native and designated Al-Shabaab leader, Omar Hammami, aka Abu Mansour al-Amriki, appears to be at odds with his former group, according to a video posted on YouTube Friday.

In the video, titled “urgentmessage,” Hammami tells viewers in both Arabic and English that because of differences over “matters of Shariah and matters of strategy” he now feels his “life may be in danger by the Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen.”

Hey, it’s like being in the Mafia. When there aren’t any Jews or Americans handy, Muslims will quite cheerfully murder each other.

Read it.

I guess they thought they were prospective Hogwarts students or something.

One of the tourists said the GPS insisted the drive was possible, so they followed its advice.

Guess they didn’t hear the snickering.

Think of it as evolution in action. The machines are on our side.

Read it.

SUDBURY, ONT. – Family members are shocked after Grade 7 Catholic school students received oral sex pamphlets meant for 18 year olds.

I guess Canada isn’t as boring as people say.

“They had a booth in the gymnasium, so they had to have permission to get in there. They wouldn’t have just been able to set up without somebody’s permission,” said James-Poulin, grandmother to one of the girls who came home with the sexually explicit pamphlet.

Well, I guess Catholic schools have changed more than I supposed.

Catholic school board officials and an AIDS information organization are at a loss to explain how the oral sex pamphlet ended up in the students’ possession.

Degenerate modern culture seems an obvious suspect, but that’s just me, I suppose.

Read it.

I’d get signatures to ban people from going door-to-door to get signatures, but I’d have to go door-to-door to do it.

At least I’d know when to do it: supper.

Read it.

People often dismiss philosophical disputes as mere quibbles about words.   But shifts in terminology can turn the tide in public debates.

Which is why ‘progressives’ fight so hard to control the terms of debate, ‘gay marriage’ being the poster child for this struggle — their desperate attempts to shoehorn a relationship that isn’t marriage into the term ‘marriage’ is the linchpin of their program; if they can succeed at that, then the rest is just a matter of time. The attempts to paint everything from pointing out that black people commit more crimes than white people to cutting off welfare benefits to goldbricks (who — I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked — tend to be black more than white) as ‘racism’ is the long-term effort that has proven the most rewarding in this respect.

(Of course, this article, being by a Voice of the Crust — as if anyone else would be printed in the New York Times — uses an anti-Republican example, but the point remains valid.)

There are, of course, many cases of athletes who are primarily students, particularly in “minor” (i.e., non-revenue producing) sports.  But what about Division I football and men’s basketball, the big-time programs with revenues in the tens of millions of dollars that are a major source of their schools’ national reputation?  Are the members of these teams typically students first?

Quit snickering.

The N.C.A.A.’s own 2011 survey showed that by a wide variety of measures the answer is no.  For example, football and men’s basketball players (who are my primary focus here) identify themselves more strongly as athletes than as students, gave more weight in choosing their college to athletics than to academics, and, at least in season, spend more time on athletics than on their studies (and a large majority say they spend as much or more time on sports during the off-season).

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

It’s clear, then, that on the whole members of these teams are athletes first and students second, both from their own standpoint and from that of their schools.

Which comes from using colleges as the farm team system for football and basketball. I suppose the only reason it’s not used for baseball as well is the historical fluke that school tends to be out during the baseball season.

At a minimum, there’s the harm of saying that players are primarily students when they are not.  This is a falsehood institutionalized for the benefit of a profit-making system, and educational institutions should have no part in it.

Oh, are we drawing up a list of ‘falsehoods institutionalized for the benefit of a profit-making system’? Let’s start with Congress….

The deeper harm, however, lies in the fact that, in the United States, there is a strong strain of anti-intellectualism that undervalues intellectual culture and overvalues athletics.

… from the point of view of the Crust, of course, of which (memorandum) this writer is a Voice. The Crust is stuffed full with effete faineant intellectuals (think Dick Cavett, or maybe Truman Capote) who are the spiritual heirs of Oscar Wilde and regard sweating (except in the pursuit of sexual gratification) to be distinctly Lower Class.

This, mind you, is in marked contrast to the Classical tradition — you know, Greeks, Romans, those kinds of people — of which the Crust pretend to be the curators, who took seriously the ‘in corpore sano’ half of their educational program. Correctly understood, there is nothing anti-intellectual about participating in, or even enjoying watching, athletics. Indeed, professional sports are among the most intellectual activities available to modern man … at least, if one wants to win on a consistent basis.

As a result, intellectual culture receives far less support than it should, and is generally regarded as at best the idiosyncratic interest of an eccentric minority.

… which, in modern times, it obviously is.

Athletics, by contrast, is more than generously funded and embraced as an essential part of our national life.

… which it certainly ought to be … and, thank God, still hangs in there. When people put their money where their mouths are, more of them are willing to shell out to watch the Steelers play the Pats than are willing to spring for what passes for art, literature, or any of the other quasi-intellectual pursuits that occupy the culture pages of such Establishment bastions as, oh, say, the New York Times.

Anyone who finds this author’s suggestions attractive need only look at the Ivy League schools, who follow it about as strictly as any American colleges could be expected to. How many Ivy League graduates, certifiably students first and athletes second, wind up in the pros? You could certainly count the number without resorting to taking your shoes off. And I’m sure this Professor of Philosophy is perfectly comfortable with that, despite the agita it would undoubtedly cause Plato or Aristotle.

Read it.

A Royal Military Police investigation is now underway to examine if his access might have given him information that the American defence secretary was about to arrive in Camp Bastion.

It will also examine why the man who was heavily vetted by British security attempted to carry out a terrorist act by driving a blazing truck onto the runway as Mr Panetta’s plane came in to land.

The lesson to learn here is that there is no objective way to tell which Muslim will be peaceful and which Muslim will be a jihadist until circumstances make it obvious.

Read it.

The movie industry is run the same way, which is why smart people work for a share of the gross, a figure less readily played.

Both are amateurs compared to the government, of course.

George Will blows the whistle on a practice that is sadly all to common.

The “gift clause” in Arizona’s Constitution and similar provisions in some other states’ constitutions are supposed to prevent the state government or municipal governments from conferring special benefits on “any individual, association, or corporation.” The proscribed benefits include gifts, loans of state credit, donations, grants or subsidies.

This clause has been largely vitiated by Arizona courts’ decisions allowing entanglements of government and private interests that supposedly serve a “public purpose” or provide a “public benefit.” These are loopholes large enough to drive a truck through — a truck carrying $900,000. That is the estimated value of the release time taxpayers are funding just for the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association (PLEA), the police union. The $900,000 pays union officials to work exclusively performing undefined union business, including lobbying, on the city’s time and the taxpayers’ dime.

Read it.

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) is launching a new effort today to target 36 commentators who speak out against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people.

The Commentator Accountability Project (CAP) “aims to educate the media about the extreme rhetoric of over three dozen activists who are often given a platform to speak in opposition to LGBT people and the issues that affect their lives,” the media monitoring organization said in a press release. Among those activists are Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council; Bob Vander Platts, the president of The Family Leader; Candi Cushman, an education analyst at Focus on the Family; and Bill Donahue, the head of the Catholic League.

Now: Imagine — it won’t be hard — the firestorm and 24/7 outrage that would consume the media were an organization like the Family Research Council to do something similar to high-profile shills for homosexual privilege.

Jehu is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

It was that the public changed its expectation regarding the impact of a hijacking from ‘we’ll take an unscheduled vacation to Cuba and pick up some cigars’ to ‘some SOB wants to turn us into charcoal by using our plane as a guided missile’.  Changing the expectation is all that it took to make such behavior impractical.  All of the rest is theatre—expensive, humiliating, and time-consuming theatre.  All of the terrorist incidents that have been thwarted recently have been done so by…you guessed it…passengers, or, if you prefer, by the unorganized militia of the US.  Not for nothing did Sun Tzu say, if you put your men on deadly ground (i.e., ground where it is clear that you must fight and/or die, retreat is obviously impossible) they will live (because most of the slaughter in ancients battles came after one side’s morale had broken, and those ‘on deadly ground’ tend to have very strong morale).  Because the public now recognizes a hijacking as ‘deadly ground’, it is extremely unlikely that we’ll see a successful repeat of the tactic.

But that’s the government way — as armies prepare for the last war, governments strip-search everybody coming out of the barn after the horse has long since taken off.

Read it.

An earless baby bunny that was a rising star on Germany’s celebrity animal scene had his 15 minutes of fame brought to an abrupt end when he was accidentally stepped on by a television cameraman.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

And for the ADA blame George H.W. Bush.

Read it.

The British Library have released the first audio guide to how Shakespeare’s plays would have sounded in the original pronunciation.

Read it.

Vice President Joe Biden addressed 87 wealthy Democrats last night attending a fundraiser at the home of Sen. John Kerry in Georgetown. As they dined on grass-fed New York strip steaks and white truffle mashed potatos underneath a outdoor tent, Biden criticized Republicans for being out of touch.

“These guys don’t have a sense of the average folks out there,” Biden said according to the pool report, “They don’t know what it means to be middle class.”

87 guests paid a minimum of $10,000-per-couple to attend the dinner.

No comment necessary, I think.

Read it.

This sounds fishy to me — entirely too, how shall I say it, convenient. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that this was some kind of a set-up.

Read it.

No word on whether the people doing the course have to answer to the name ‘Bruce’.

Read it.

Planet Moron does the work so that you don’t have to.

Such is the problem some people have with understanding Sandra Fluke, an innocent doe-eyed youngster barely 30 years out of diapers who came to fame when testifying at a make-believe congressional hearing (it’s fun to play pretend!) at which she pointed out her friends at Georgetown Law were going broke having sex.

And people say Congress doesn’t have the courage to take on tough issues like deficit spending, entitlement reform, and promiscuous co-eds.

It can be a problem.

Sandra Fluke, was so hurt and shocked from all the unwanted attention that she did what any purely private citizen would do involuntarily thrust into the limelight:

Hire a publicist with close connections to the White House and appear on eight national news programs.

It’s all part of the healing process.

We feel her pain.

Fluke: “Access to contraception.”
Translation: When someone else pays for your contraception.

Fluke: “Guaranteeing women access to contraception.”
Translation: Guaranteeing that someone else will pay for women’s contraception.

Fluke: “Restricting access.”
Translation: Having to pay for contraception yourself.

Fluke: “Silencing women’s voices.”
Translation: Criticizing Sandra Fluke.

Fluke: “Raising this issue in our public consciousness.”
Translation: Agreeing with Sandra Fluke.

Fluke: “Unfair obstacles to participating in public life.”
Translation: Having children.

Fluke: “Attacking women who use contraception by calling them prostitutes.”
Translation: Attacking women who want someone else to pay for their contraception so they can have sex by calling them prostitutes.

Fluke: “The regulation under discussion has absolutely nothing to do with government funding: It is all about the insurance policies provided by private employers and universities that are financed by individual workers, students and their families — not taxpayers.”
Translation: Taxpayers will not pay for Ms. Fluke’s free contraception unless they happen to be workers, students or their families.

Fluke: “99% of sexually experienced American women have used [contraception].
Translation: We’ll never get that number higher if we don’t start making it free.

As The Other McCain points out, this template works for about 90% of Leftist NewSpeak, since the distortions are fairly constant over the domain of affected concepts.

Read it.

A somewhat mixed result from using Khan Acacemy videos in school.

Read it.

In the district of Asosa, the land is thick with bamboo.   People plant it and manage the forests. They rely on its soil-grabbing roots to stabilize steep slopes and riverbanks, cutting erosion. They harvest it to burn for fuel, to make into charcoal sticks to sell to city dwellers and to build furniture.

Asosa is not in China, not even in Asia.    It is a district in the west of Ethiopia, on the Sudanese border.   To many people, bamboo means China.   But it’s not just panda food — mountain gorillas in Rwanda also live on bamboo.   About 4 percent of Africa’s forest cover is bamboo.

What!? No complaints from the ‘environmentalists’ about introducing ‘invasive species’? Where’s the Sierra Club on this?

Read it.

(Cue Sha-Na-Na….)

Non-Muslims are not welcome in Mecca. In fact, the Hajj exhibit acknowledges this fact by reproducing in a work of art the famous traffic sign in Saudi Arabia that directs non-Muslims away from the road to the holy shrines.

Why is this all right with the British Museum? How would the esteemed intellects on its board of directors feel if an exhibit about the Vatican featured a sign that said “Non-Christians Not Allowed”?

Well, we all know the answer to that. And we also know that Islam is special. It gets a free pass for its exclusion, for its discrimination, for its intolerance of the infidel. Its special status also grants it permission to conceal a lot of truths about itself, truths that might awaken resistance among the former Christians it is colonizing, if only they were aware of them.

The violence and brutality of Islam are not only endemic to it, they are canonical — they are written up in its core texts for anyone to see, and have been there since its founding in the 7th century.

Read it.

After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.

Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said.

And Diderot turns to dust at last.

Read it.

And guess who will win? Hint: Not the Sioux tribe. Political correctness always trumps reality.

“The Fighting Sioux” is the nickname and logo of the University of North Dakota. It is also the source of a decade-long controversy.

The NCAA opposed the nickname on the grounds that it was offensive to Native Americans.

God forbid that they should ask, you know, real Native Americans.

Through it all, the Sioux tribe has maintained that it does not find the name offensive—and has granted permission for UND to keep it.

Not that it matters to the NCAA. They know what they know, and don’t confuse them with facts.

Read it.

Canada is an even more blatant cultural parasite (excrescence may be a better term) subsisting almost entirely on what we send them. It is infuriating to watch Canadian academics clutching our PC best-sellers while lecturing us on how naughty we are for not imposing gay marriage nationwide and not jailing anyone who opposes it. Our social poisons fill Canadian bookstores and permeate Canadian movie screens. If we’re unhappy that anti-American foreigners take our stupidities seriously, let’s stop sending them our entertainment and leftist political tracts.

Mike Masnik connects the dots.

In 2008 James Bessen and Michael Meurer came out with a truly excellent book, Patent Failure. It’s chock full of excellent information and a pretty wide survey of the research showing just how much patents harm innovation. While I don’t necessarily agree with the “solutions” proposed, the key thesis of the book makes a tremendous amount of sense: to have a functioning market, you need property with clear borders. If the borders aren’t clear at all, the end result is that no one knows when they’re trespassing or even what they’re buying, and the benefits of a market collapse, and instead you get mired down in legal disputes. That’s exactly what we’re seeing with patents today. Of course, one of the key reasons for this — as we’ve been explaining for years — is that patents are not property — and thus the attempt to force property-like rules on something that is naturally abundant is going to make it impossible to creates reasonable boundaries.

Read it.

Compare the press coverage of this atrocity with that of the American solder who killed civilians in Afghanistan.

But I suppose ‘news’ means ‘something unusual’, and there isn’t anything unusual about Muslims killing people.

Read it.

Scottish NHS patients have been denied access to a cancer drug being used to keep the Lockerbie bomber alive after spending watchdogs ruled it is too expensive.

How about that government-provided health care! Don’t you wish we had that on this side of the pond?

The Other McCain jerks the camouflage off of the modern race-victim industry’s program.

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, “civil rights” has become a code phrase for “whatever Democrats want,” so that anyone who disagrees with Democrats is said to be “anti-civil rights.” Case in point, the Texas voter ID law:

The Justice Department’s civil rights division on Monday objected to a new photo ID requirement for voters in Texas because many Hispanic voters lack state-issued identification.

Why do Hispanic voters in Texas “lack state-issued identification”?

No drivers license? No passport? Nothing?

Is it cynical — or perhaps even racist — to suggest that many Hispanics in Texas don’t have ID because they are illegal immigrants and, as such, are not actually legal voters? Are Republicans just a bunch of xenophobic bigots for suspecting that Democrats oppose voter ID laws because they hope to use the votes of illegal aliens (or other methods of vote fraud) to elect Democrats?

Oh, say it ain’t so.

Read it.

Because, as we all know, they can’t be bothered to teach the kids English — that’s just SO fifteen minutes ago….

Read it.

Welcome to the People’s Republic, Comrade. Check your standards at the door, and take a number.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California … when they can afford it.

Eric S Raymond liked it.

And so did I.

Read it.

I just started a new job at Microsoft and the hiring process has been on my mind a lot lately. I read articles on the Internet and hear people talking about how hard it is to find good development talent. They say there are plenty of people looking for jobs, but hardly any worth hiring. I don’t think that’s necessarily true.

I just went through the interview process with a bunch of big software companies in the Seattle area and I only received one job offer. I’m generalizing here, but I think that if I’m qualified to work for Microsoft, I’m probably qualified to work just about anywhere. For all but 2 companies, I didn’t make it past the phone screens.

To me, this says that something is wrong with the interview process.

Read it.

In an article in the March 8 issue of the journal PLoS Computational Biology, physicists Travis Craddock and Jack Tuszynski of the University of Alberta, and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff of the University of Arizona demonstrate a plausible mechanism for encoding synaptic memory in microtubules, major components of the structural cytoskeleton within neurons.

Read it.

THE NEWS that Lord Monckton was to give his “Climate of Freedom” lecture at Union College in Schenectady, New York, had thrown the university’s environmentalists into a turmoil. The campus environmentalists set up a Facebook page announcing a counter-meeting of their own immediately following Monckton’s lecture. There is no debate about global warming, they announced. There is a consensus. The science is settled. Their meeting would be addressed by professors and PhDs, the “true” scientists, no less. Sparks, it seemed, were gonna fly.

Free speech? We don’t need no stinkin’ free speech.

As they filed in, Lord Monckton was chatting contentedly to a quaveringly bossy woman with messy blonde hair who was head of the college environmental faction. Her group had set up a table at the door of the auditorium, covered in slogans scribbled on messy bits of recycled burger boxes held together with duct tape (Re-Use Cardboard Now And Save The Planet). “There’s a CONSENSUS!” she shrieked.

“That, Madame, is intellectual baby-talk,” replied Lord Monckton. Had she not heard of Aristotle’s codification of the commonest logical fallacies in human discourse, including that which the medieval schoolmen would later describe as the argumentum ad populum, the headcount fallacy?  From her reddening face and baffled expression, it was possible to deduce that she had not. Nor had she heard of the argumentum ad verecundiam, the fallacy of appealing to the reputation of those in authority.

Heh.

Then he said that, unlike the IPCC, he was going to speak in plain English. Yet he proposed to begin, in silence, by displaying some slides demonstrating the unhappy consequences of several instances of consensus in the 20th century.

The Versailles consensus of 1918 imposed reparations on the defeated Germany, so that the conference that ended the First World War (15 million dead) sowed the seeds of the Second. The eugenics consensus of the 1920s that led directly to the dismal rail-yards of Oswiecim and Treblinka (6 million dead). The appeasement consensus of the 1930s that provoked Hitler to start World War II (60 million dead). The Lysenko consensus of the 1940s that wrecked 20 successive harvests in the then Soviet Union (20 million dead). The ban-DDT consensus of the 1960s that led to a fatal resurgence of malaria worldwide (40 million children dead and counting, 1.25 million of them last year alone).

Whoda thunkit.

Lord Monckton ended, devastatingly, by showing that a sufferer from trichiasis, a consequence of trachoma that causes the eyelashes to grow inward, causing piercingly acute pain followed eventually by blindness, can be cured at a cost of just $8. He showed a picture of a lady from Africa, smiling with delight now that she could see again. He said that the diversion of resources away from those who most urgently and immediately needed our help, in the name of addressing a non-problem that could not in any event be cost-effectively dealt with by CO2 mitigation, must be reversed at once for the sake of those who needed our help now.

Saving actual people rather than ‘the planet’? What a bizarre notion.

Why, said a professor of environmental sciences in a rambling question apparently designed to prevent anyone else from getting a question in, had Lord Monckton not cited peer-reviewed sources?  He had cited several, but he apologized that the IPCC – which he had cited frequently – was not a peer-reviewed source: indeed, fully one-third of the references its 2007 gospel had cited had not been peer-reviewed.

If, indeed, that matters to you: The Consensus has not been peer-reviewed.

Lord Monckton, sternly but sadly, told those who had raised their hands: “You know, from the plain and clear demonstration that I gave during my lecture, that the IPCC’s statistical abuse was just that – an abuse. Yet, perhaps out of misplaced loyalty to your professor, you raised your hands in denial of the truth. Never do that again, even for the sake of appeasing authority. In science, whatever you may personally believe or wish to be so, it is the truth and only the truth that matters.”

Read it.

When Britain still had an Empire, what mattered most was to get your daughters married and your sons into a good regiment. In Homeland America, all that matters to middle-class and affluent parents is getting their children into the best colleges that money can buy or that the Standardized Aptitude Test will allow.

Not that it will do them much good nowadays. The best way to make it into Harvard is to be black (you don’t have to actually look black, however, as long as you’re at least as black as Barack Obama or Eric Holder or Colin Powell) with an Hispanic surname.

Read it.

Diana West has written with insight and wisdom about the debacle which constitutes our presence in Afghanistan.

A recent essay of hers puts the murder of the six members of our military by Afghan security personnel in its proper context — i.e., another example of lethal, treacherous Muslim Rage.

What was it that Zenster termed this characterological aspect of Islam, this tendency to murderous tantrums? The wording may not be exact here, but he diagnosed their reactivity as the result of inhabiting the thinnest of emotional skins whilst being forced to live in a sandpaper world. An apt summation of the insoluble problem; at least insoluble for the West. For jihadists, this thin-skinned, always-about-to-go-off trait probably serves well. It keeps them ready to lash out instantly in what Michael Coren has called a kind of lust for death. The deaths of infidels is the intention, but far more Muslims die for the faith of their fellow Muslims — collateral damage and a callous disregard for human life. They merely follow in the footsteps of their Prophet.

Read it.

After applying 15 engineers to the problem, the team concluded that towing an iceberg from the waters around Newfoundland to the Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa, could be done, and would take under five months, though it would cost nearly ten million dollars.

Can Obama and his Federal checkbook be far behind?

Steve Sailer points out that the Emperor is bare-assed.

The irony, of course, is the that the rapid development of the gene sequencing technology celebrated in 2000’s orgy of Race Does Not Exist pronouncements, immediately began undermining the dogma in its moment of greatest triumph. … A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on, especially when the lie ties into the status system.

Read it.

Of course, what ‘misogyny’ has to do with poverty, Southern or otherwise (or law, for that matter), is a question best left to those who steep themselves in left-wing fantasy.

It is truly sublime that a group the DHS cited in its controversial report on right-wing terrorism now turns to a website called “Man Boobz” for its hate-group reporting.

And once more the SPLC keeps its position on the cutting edge of the Preserve-Funding-Through-Finding-New-And-Better-Victims effort.

The frightening part? “…the SPLC’s Intelligence Report gets sent to every law enforcement agency in the country.”

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Gourmands in Austria have called for “discriminatory” names for food, such as “n—–bread” and “whore’s pasta” to be banned on the grounds that they are offensive.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Millions of viewers were stunned this morning as they tuned into a BBC breakfast news bulletin – and found the presenter apparently asleep on his desk.

I do know how he feels.

Slow news day.

Read it.

The bill spearheaded by Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer banning members of Congress from using nonpublic information to profit their personal investments may hit a wall in the form of Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV).

On Monday, Mr. Reid indicated that he may simply accept the watered down version of the STOCK (Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge) Act passed by the House instead of sending the bill to a conference committee to hammer out the significant differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill.

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

After all, if Congresscritters can’t make a buck or two on the side, what’s the point? Democrats don’t get elected to public office for their health, you know.