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No doubt with his marketing honchos standing over him, tapping blackjacks into their palms, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has been busy walking-back comments he made to NPR in which he described Obamacare as an example of a fascist enterprise. While still critical of the administration’s controversial healthcare scheme, which is heavy on government mandates, he now regrets his choice of words. That’s a damned shame, since he was dead-on with his original description.

 

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You know it when you feel it. You’ve just sat down at your breakfast table, or settled in at your favorite café. You’re a few sips into your brew when, out of nowhere, the urge to download a brownload is becoming urgent. Just a few swigs of coffee and it can feel like you like you’ve mainlined a laxative — but why?

Not being a coffee drinker, I hadn’t been aware that this was a … problem.

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In all areas of personal health, we see prominent media reports that directly oppose well-established knowledge in the field, or that make it sound as if scientifically unresolved questions have been resolved. The media, for instance, have variously supported and shot down the notion that vitamin D supplements can protect against cancer, and that taking daily and low doses of aspirin extends life by protecting against heart attacks. Some reports have argued that frequent consumption of even modest amounts of alcohol leads to serious health risks, while others have reported that daily moderate alcohol consumption can be a healthy substitute for exercise. Articles sang the praises of new drugs like Avastin and Avandia before other articles deemed them dangerous, ineffective, or both.

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In the past, political struggles were largely fought over how to divide up the spoils generated by the basic productive economy; labor, investors and management all shared a belief in the ethos of economic growth, manufacturing and resource extraction.

In contrast, today’s new hegemons hail almost entirely from outside the material economy, and many come from outside the realm of the market system entirely. Daniel Bell, in his landmark 1973 The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, may have been the first to identify this ascension to “pre-eminence of the professional and technical class.” This new “priesthood of power,” as he put it, would eventually overturn the traditional hierarchies based on land, corporate and financial assets.

Forty years later the outlines of this transformation are clear. Contrary to the conservative claims of Obama’s “socialist” tendencies, the administration is quite comfortable with such capitalist sectors as entertainment, the news media and the software side of the technology industry, particularly social media. The big difference is these firms derive their fortunes not from the soil and locally crafted manufacturers, but from the manipulation of ideas, concepts and images.

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I’ve been involved in publishing all my life, and like many others I’ve always accepted as axiomatic the notion that typefaces with serifs (such as Times-Roman) are, in general, are more readable than non-serif typefaces (e.g., Helvetica). It never occurred to me that there was any doubt about the matter. Were the monks who invented serifs and other text ornamentations merely engaging in idle doodling? Weren’t they consciously intending to increase the legibility of the important documents they were transcribing?

It turns out that, as with so many of the things we “know” are right, the idea that serif typefaces are more readable than non-serif typefaces simply isn’t supported by the evidence.

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Leprosy has plagued humans for thousands of years, but that doesn’t mean it has revealed all of its secrets. A new study in mice suggests the disfiguring disease employs a bit of biological trickery to do its damage: It reprograms certain nerve cells to become like stem cells and uses them to infiltrate the body’s muscle and nervous systems. This is the first time that scientists have seen bacteria reprogram cells in this way, and experts say the find could lead to the development of new treatments for leprosy and other neurodegenerative diseases.

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

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You know it had to happen.

Ordinarily I don’t discuss legal issues relating to fictional settings that are dramatically different from the real world in terms of their legal system. Thus, Star Wars, Star Trek, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, etc. are usually off-limits because we can’t meaningfully apply real-world law to them. But the contract featured in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was just too good a topic to pass up, especially since you can buy a high-quality replica of it that is over 5 feet long unfolded.

First mistake: Giving a document to a lawyer.

The Other McCain lets it all hang out.

The problem, really, is that Republicans just don’t hate Democrats the way Democrats hate Republicans.

Most Republicans are born and raised Republicans, and are spiritually attuned to the sentiments of bourgeois respectability that are core values to the decent, honest people the GOP represents. By contrast, Democrats owe their power to the vilest dregs of humanity — corrupt union goons, Marxist academics, criminals, drug addicts, sexual perverts and race hustlers — who have no respect for the values of decent, honest people.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

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If you’ve never heard about the world of high-speed boating, there are some technological and human feats in Fisher’s piece that go far beyond what comes to mind when most of us think of boating — when Larsen and his team broke the outright world speed sailing record in November, the Vesta SailRocket Mark 2 was regularly going in excess of 60 knots.

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No good deed goes unpunished in New York: the state has abruptly cut off a contract with the independent auditor who found that the state had been wasting federal money meant to be spent on Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts.

Thomas Sadowski, the fired consultant, told the Times Union that he was escorted out of the building when he visited the New York Office of Emergency Management shortly after he filed his report on November 17.

The state hired Sadowski for his extensive experience in emergency procurement management with the federal government. The certified public accountant also did similar work for 10 years at the U.S. Department of Interior’s Inspector General’s office. Sadowski also trained the U.S. Forest Service, Alaska Fire Service, National Interagency Fire Center, Colorado Wildfire Academy, and other government agencies.

“I didn’t believe I did anything to be escorted off the premises,” Sadowski told the Times Union. “I wasn’t trying to get back at anybody or get anybody in trouble.” But Sadowski said he believed he was fired for finding the waste. “I was relieved of my duties because I identified these problems,” he said.

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

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A Pakistan-born Chicago businessman was sentenced to 14 years in prison Thursday for his role in a plot to attack a Danish newspaper and providing material support to the Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT).

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?
That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.
Of course, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

Read it.

Like many people whose houses were badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy, my family and I have been living in a rented house since the storm. Unlike some whose houses were totalled, we could have repaired things and been home toasting our tootsies by our own fireplace by now. What happened?

Two things: zoning (as in “Twilight Zone”) and FEMA.

The chief obstacle to repairing the damage of hurricanes and other natural disasters is — surprise! — government red tape.

Before you could get a building permit, however, you had to be approved by the Zoning Authority. And Zoning—citing FEMA regulations—would force you to bring the house “up to code,” which in many cases meant elevating the house by several feet. Now, elevating your house is very expensive and time consuming—not because of the actual raising, which takes just a day or two, but because of the required permits.

Kafka would have liked the zoning folks. There also is a limit on how high in the sky your house can be. That calculation seems to be a state secret, but it can easily happen that raising your house violates the height requirement. Which means that you can’t raise the house that you must raise if you want to repair it. Got that?

Hey, we’re from the government, and we’re here to help.

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According to Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, anyone found to have uttered words derogatory to the Prophet Muhammad can be put to death.

And those who are accused are sometimes lynched by mobs even if they are found innocent by the courts.

It could be worse; she could own an assault weapon.

The allegations against Rehman, which revolve around comments she made on Pakistani television in 2010, are being brought by Muhammad Faheem Ahkter Gill, a 31-year-old businessman who owns a marble business in the city of Multan.

Gill was watching the television interview with Rehman with two friends. He said he felt her comments were derogatory to the Prophet Muhammad and, being a Muslim, it was his responsibility to do something about it.

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?
That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.
Of course, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

Read it.

It’s one thing to ask an open-ended technical question that lends itself to straightforward answers (e.g., “What are some things you could do to minimize the time spent in garbage collection?”). It’s quite another to subject the interviewee to game-show riddles. “Four people want to cross a bridge. They all begin on the same side. You have twelve minutes to get all of them across to the other side. It is night. There is one flashlight. A maximum of two people can cross at one time,” etc.

I have only faced one such interview, and (no doubt as punishment for my sins) accepted their offer; I learned within a month that the guy was a micromanaging asshole. Fortunately it was a contract position so I could bail out without too much damage to my résumé. But it was Hell while it lasted.

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All the better to blow you up, my dear, you filthy Zionist.

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Poachers are slaughtering elephants across Africa at an unprecedented pace. But scientists tracking the animals’ carcasses—their faces and ivory hacked away—are seldom able to explain in detail what these deaths mean to the pachyderms’ populations and social structure. Now, a 14-year study of elephants in northern Kenya concludes that the adult behemoths are more likely to die at the hands of humans than from natural causes. At the same time, the elephants have responded to the heavy poaching with a baby boom, providing the researchers some hope for the jumbos’ survival.

The dirty little secret that nobody dares mention,of course, is that none of this ‘poaching’ is being down by People of Pallor(TM).

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 The strike that began Wednesday, which idled more than half of the city’s school buses and forced about 113,000 children to find new ways to school, was prompted by a fight over union jobs. But its true roots are in an attempt to reform one of the most inefficient transportation systems in the country, one that costs almost $7,000 a year for each passenger, an amount so high that many of those children could hire a livery cab for about the same price. By comparison with the next three largest school districts, Los Angeles spends about $3,200, Chicago about $5,000, and Miami, $1,000.

Much as with the Labour Party in Britain, the capture of the Democrats by trade unions leads to waste, inefficiency, and ever-increasing debt.

Tell me again how great unions have been for the working man — but include the bit about bleeding everyone else to death, just for balance.

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

Quite appropriate for all those Wisconsonites to feel ashamed for their long history of bigotry and racism.

Then there’s the cheese….

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A dramatic decline in cases of pubic lice has been linked to growing enthusiasm for the Brazilian bikini wax, and trimmed shrubbery in general.

Phthirus pubis is estimated to infest between 2 and 10 per cent of people worldwide, according to this report, but the species could be heading for “disaster” if humans persist in mowing their nether regions.

A 2011 study by Kenyon College in Ohio revealed that “more than 80 per cent of college students in the US remove all or some of their pubic hair, as well as a majority of university-aged men and women in Australia”.*

Hair today, gone tomorrow. Say not that the struggle nought availeth.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, is uncharacteristically insouciant.

Mass enstupidation worries a lot of the Edge-heads. David Gelernter cruelly reproduces part of a piece Sean Penn wrote for the Huffington Post. That you can be rich, famous, and admired by millions while having the IQ of a nematode is not news, but reminders never hurt. (Penn’s words are the penultimate graf in Gelernter’s piece: The editors forgot to indent it. God bless the editors of Taki’s Mag, who never fail to follow my indentation instructions!)

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Another in what appears to be a continuing series.

This one is even funnier than the last one. And still frighteningly realistic.

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Nadia Mohamed Ali, who was raised a Christian, converted to Islam when she married Mohamed Abdel-Wahhab Mustafa, a Muslim, 23 years ago. He later died, and his widow planned to convert her family back to Christianity in order to obtain an inheritance from her family. She sought the help of others in the registration office to process new identity cards between 2004 and 2006. When the conversion came to light under the new regime, Nadia, her children and even the clerks who processed the identity cards were all sentenced to prison.

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?
That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.
Of course, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

Read it.

Unfortunately, it’s frighteningly realistic.

Steve Sailer unloads some inconvenient truth.

 The destruction of Austin next door threatened to spread to Oak Park, with its spectacular stock of Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie-style homes. But the city fathers responded with a wise (if presumably wholly illegal) racial quota system. The “black-a-block” system restricted real estate agents in Oak Park to selling only one home per block to a black family.

Yet, as James Kabala pointed out once, it’s hard to find any mention on the Internet of Oak Park’s “black-a-block” quota, presumably because it violated federal law, but was winked at because important people felt it worthwhile to save Oak Park’s architectural heritage.

…

Race quotas have been popular with the Establishment in hiring and college admissions, so why, since they worked out well in Oak Park, weren’t they encouraged elsewhere in housing?

“Who? Whom?” of course. Race quotas to increase the numbers of Designated Victim Groups are good, race quotas to limit their numbers are bad, and that’s all you need to know.

Read it.

The very rich in America increasingly work in finance, marry each other and care passionately about politics

I still have yet to see a persuasive argument that the highly-complained-of ‘income inequality’ is necessarily a Bat Thing; in a land where ‘the poor’ are the poster children for the ‘obesity epidemic‘, I don’t see that the fact that person X has a ginormous amount of income more than person Y, unless person Y is starving or person X stole the money, is a Problem — except to those who are somehow offended by the fact that person X has more than person Y regardless.

And most of these Crustians are Democrats in fact, even though they may call themselves Republican:

Bob Perkowitz embodies these contradictions. A rich entrepreneur, he now devotes much of his time to a non-profit environmental outfit. He is a lifelong Republican who objects to George Bush junior’s tax cuts for the wealthy, and backed Barack Obama in 2008. Having restructured companies himself, he has no trouble with Mr Romney’s private-equity work but agrees with Occupy Wall Street that corporations have too much power.

Until recently he split his time between conservative Charlotte, North Carolina, and liberal Washington, DC. His wife, Lisa Renstrom, used to manage hotels inherited from her father, a prosperous Republican businessman. Now she campaigns on climate change and backs Wealth for the Common Good, a group of rich people who back Occupy Wall Street. Her father used to give his occupation as “capitalist”. “I grew up believing that [capitalists] were making the world a better place,” she says. “The capitalism we have has left us with degraded infrastructure, threats to our health, and global warming.”

No one who voted for Obama is, in any legitimate sense, a Republican, however much they may claim to be. The fact the the authors of this Economist article don’t even blink at this absurdity demonstrates the unconcious Crustian bias that permeates the ‘journalism’ profession in the modern world.

But Mr Perkowitz and Ms Renstrom are utterly typical of the 1% in that they are far more politically engaged than the average 99-percenters.

And, obviously, engaged on behalf of notably Democrat causes. Yeah, those are Republicans, all right.

Bryan Caplan has the answer.

Of course, popular acceptance wouldn’t extend to mutants who openly embraced or acted upon an ideology of mutant supremacy.  But as long as mutants spoke like loyal citizens of their nations of origin, we’d treat them better, not worse, than normal.  We’d fawn on mutants even if they were arrogant jerks.  See the folks on the covers of our supermarket tabloids.

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Ms. Radin begins by arguing that boilerplate contracts—which as early as 1919 were widespread enough of a commercial practice as to be a subject of case law—aren’t really contracts at all. Because the terms aren’t bargained over, it follows that they aren’t consented to in any traditional sense; there is no meeting of the minds between the parties.

The absence of real agreement means that boilerplate contracts are inconsistent with the moral basis of contract law, which, after all, uses the power of the state to enforce the transfer of one person’s property to another on the ground that both agreed to the transfer. This degradation of the moral basis of contract law, in turn, undermines the classical liberal justification for the state, which rests on the need for a public entity that enhances freedom by enforcing private agreements.

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Nevertheless, he is pleased, because he was able to bring notes, bits of debris and bones back to Heidelberg. Yule has concluded that Zafar was the center of an Arab tribal confederation, a realm that was two million square kilometers (about 772,000 square miles) large and exerted its influence all the way to Mecca.

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And why not? Technology give the ordinary middle class family amenities that Kings a hundred years ago couldn’t have. (Not didn’t have; couldn’t have, because the technology didn’t exist yet.)

Most of the over-the-top spending you see in the papers and on TV is the result of rich people trying to impress — their guests, their friends, their neighbors, the aforesaid papers and TV, and most importantly themselves. There is an essential distinction between a ‘rich person’ and a ‘person who has a lot of money’.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Scientology is the most successful of the New Age scams designed to part fools from their money.

There was a time when the cult could sue a few critics and thereby intimidate everybody else. But the Internet makes it impossible to silence the truth, and the truth is not Scientology’s friend.

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“There are three things in life that people like to stare at: a flowing stream, a crackling fire and a Zamboni clearing the ice.”

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If the Bloomberg v. Union showdown proceeds as the Rahm v. Union did this summer, next will come t-shirts, floats in parades, partying with violent and radical neo-fascists, and eventual capitulation by the mayor.

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THE humid streets of Waco, Tex., may not have much in common with the misty glens of Scotland, home to some of the world’s best malt whiskeys.

Not much, that is, until last month, when a single-malt whiskey from the Balcones Distillery in Waco bested nine others, including storied Scottish names like the Balvenie and the Macallan, in a blind panel of British spirits experts.

Not me.

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Hm. A Democrat mayor charged with corruption. My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Yeah, gotta stop those people breathing, they’re screwing everything up.

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‘Hey, you fucked up! You trusted us!’

Thomas Sowell blows the whistle.

San Francisco is a classic example of a city unexcelled in its liberalism. But the black population of San Francisco today is less than half of what it was back in 1970, even though the city’s total population has grown.

Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city. The same thing has happened in a number of other California communities dominated by liberals.

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President Obama has only once submitted his budget on time. Obama’s first budget wasn’t submitted until May, his second came on deadline, and his last two were submitted in late February. That, says Rep. Ryan’s office, gives Obama the distinction of missing more budget deadlines than any president since the 1920s.

What are they going to do? Fire him?

Unmentioned in the article is the fact that when he actually does get a budget, it is overwhelmingly voted down in the Senate, which is controlled by his own party.

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So, the person the Obama Administration has placed all our chips on in Egypt, the supposedly moderate Mohamad Morsi (pay no attention to the Muslim Brotherhood behind the curtain), turns out not to like Israel or Jews.

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

But the exposure this month of his virulent comments from early 2010, both documented on video, have revealed sharp anti-Semitic and anti-Western sentiments, raising questions about Mr. Morsi’s efforts to present himself as a force for moderation and stability.

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?
That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.
Of course, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

The Other McCain is on the case.

News from the competitive victimhood sweepstakes in Great Britain indicates that transsexuals have won the Most Oppressed Group prize, and are now able to demand complete deference.

…

All of this uproar began, remember, with a feminist’s jocular complaint about ridiculous pressures on women about their looks. And the moral of the story: Angry bullies always win!

From whom did the transgender community learn this lesson?

Why, yes, of course: From feminists themselves, who ruthlessly bullied their way to power by organizing hate-fests to denounce men whom they accused of sexism, discrimination, and/or harassment.

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Not that we want to be controversial or anything….

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Insert here my standard rant about health care and education being the last two major human endeavors in which automation hasn’t been intelligently applied, and which are therefore overly and increasingly expensive.

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From reading it, I must assume this is a parody. I would have a hard time taking usage advice from someone who misuses ‘should’ in the place of ‘ought’.

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I’d have to add AT&T to the list.

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We have the technology.

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An international team of scientists has successfully found a way to spin tens of millions of carbon nanotubes into a flexible conductive thread that’s a quarter of the thickness of human hair.

“We finally have a nanotube fiber with properties that don’t exist in any other material,” said lead researcher Matteo Pasquali of Rice University. “It looks like black cotton thread but behaves like both metal wires and strong carbon fibers.”

Joel Kotkin blows the whistle.

The demographic dilemma facing California today might be better illustrated by pictures of aging hippies with gray ponytails, of legions in wheel-chairs, seeking out the best rest home and unemployed young people on the street corner, watching while middle-age families drive away, seeking to fulfill mundane middle-class dreams in other states.

Taki makes a good case.

Maureen Dowd. The female version of the three stooges mentioned above, she is as politically correct as they come. She keeps reminding us that she was born a pleb. Gee whiz, Mo, did you think any of us ever mistook you for anything but a lowlife? La Dowd was in ecstasy when Romney bit the dust. A lot of people were, but she went on for days writing how the next time we will have more gays, more blacks, more Hispanics, and more women, making sure no white guy is ever president again. Is that what they mean when they call this kind of hysteria penis envy?

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“Air travel has a hassle factor. You have to turn off devices for takeoff and landing and there is often no Wi-Fi,” Schwieterman said. “On the other hand, you can get on a bus with your laptop and you’re set for the day.”

Not to mention getting your junk groped by the Post Office TSA.

“You look at the economics of single-occupant driving, and young people see it as almost ridiculous to drive long distances alone,” he said. “Gas itself is far more than the bus fare if you look at the typical price from, say, Chicago to Detroit [roughly $35 round-trip].”

And God alone knows how much it would cost by air, assuming your flight doesn’t get cancelled.

Expanding rail service, meanwhile, has been a difficult proposition in recessionary times because it requires years of planning and regulation.

And costs out the ass, usually at taxpayers’ expense, and they just aren’t willing to put up with such boondoggles any more.

“Taxpayers have been footing the bill for Amtrak’s gravy train for over 40 years, and all they’ve gotten in return for their $40 billion investment is an inefficient, costly, Soviet-style passenger rail system,” he said at a hearing in September. Former presidential nominee Mitt Romney, too, said that, if elected, he would end all U.S. taxpayer support for the railroad, which totaled roughly $1.4 billion for fiscal year 2012.

Your tax dollars at work. Private industry does things much more efficiently — after all, they actually have to make money

And then there’s the bus, which requires much less overhead, uses existing infrastructure and entails no taxpayer support.

To which politicians and the Usual Suspects in the media react like a vampire faced with holy water. What? No lucrative taxpayer-funded contracts to give out to highly-unionized, lobbyist-supporting, Democrat-donating firms? No points to be gained with the enviro-Nazis who want to cancel the 20th century? The horror! The horror!