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Everywhere you go in a certain segment of bourgeois America you see men and women dressed in childish togs trooping off to yoga class or heading to the gym for aerobics or jogging along—six, seven, eight miles, often at a toddler’s pace—in the heat, dust, and traffic of the late afternoon. Then a shower, a change of clothes, and off to the health-food store before it closes to get the right supplements and a quart of blueberries shipped up specially—it’s off season—from Colombia or Peru.

Why all the fuss? Why all the sweat and bother? To feel good, of course. To stay alive, naturally. What other reason could there be?

But the intensity of pursuit makes one pause and speculate a bit. What is this all about, this amazing attentiveness to health? There is a quasi-heroic dedication to all this conscientiousness about food, a saint’s rigorous commitment to the demands of exercise. And the devotees think about their health all the time. Is man the rational animal? More and more what he thinks about—if he is middle class; if he has been to college; if he has read the right books—is how to go on living. He concocts strategies ostensibly for the prolongation of a healthy life.

But on some level one senses—let speculation take full charge here—that what the man or woman oriented to health most wants to do is to live forever. In one of Tom Wolfe’s novels there is a young man perpetually deep in his computer. He wears titanium-framed glasses and a look of enduring intensity. His name is Wismer Stroock. “The Wiz,” says Wolfe, “was only thirty-two, but he had a bony neck and a bony jaw and sunken cheeks and cadaverous cheekbones from getting up every morning, every morning, before dawn and running six miles through the streets of a Dunwoody subdivision called Quail Ridge.” He drinks bottled water and eats purified foods of all descriptions. He is devoted to the purging of the body. He is very pale. He is a young man, Wolfe suggests, not unrepresentative of many in his generation. On some deep level he has decided that it is his goal to live forever. He is never going to die.

Read it.

In a spectacle that might have beguiled poets, lovers and songwriters if only they had been around to see it, Earth once had two moons, astronomers now think. But the smaller one smashed into the other in what is being called the “big splat.”

The result: Our planet was left with a single bulked-up and ever-so-slightly lopsided moon.

The astronomers came up with the scenario to explain why the moon’s far side is so much more hilly than the one that is always facing Earth.

Bryan Caplan puts you to the question.

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Because we often think about evolution over the great sweep of time, in terms of minuscule changes over millions of years, when we went from fin to scaly paw to opposable-thumbed hand, it is easy to assume that evolution requires eons. That assumption makes us feel that humans, who have gone from savanna to asphalt in a mere few thousand years, must be caught out by the pace of modern life, when we’d be much better suited to something more familiar in our history. We’re fat and unfit, we have high blood pressure, and we suffer from ailments that we suspect our ancestors never worried about, like post-traumatic-stress disorder and AIDS. Julie Holland, a psychiatrist writing in Glamour magazine, counsels that if you “feel less than human,” constantly stressed and run-down, you need to remember that “the way so many of us are living now goes against our nature. Biologically, we modern Homo sapiens are a lot like our cave woman ancestors: We’re animals. Primates, in fact. And we have many primal needs that get ignored. That’s why the prescription for good health may be as simple as asking, What would a cave woman do?”

You can tell by this that the author is female and probably a pain in the ass about it.

Marlene Zuk is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota. This essay is excerpted from her book Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live….

Female? Check. Academic? Check. Blue State? Check. Pushing a new book? Check.

It’s hard to escape the recurring conviction that somewhere, somehow, things have gone wrong. In a time with unprecedented ability to transform the environment, to make deserts bloom and turn intercontinental travel into the work of a few hours, we are suffering from diseases our ancestors of a few thousand years ago, much less our prehuman selves, never knew: diabetes, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis. Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that for the first time in history, the current generation of children will not live as long as their parents, probably because obesity and associated maladies are curtailing the promise of modern medicine.

Occupy Fashionable Leftist Memes About How the Sky Is Falling? Check.

Some of our nostalgia for a simpler past is just the same old amnesia that every generation has about the good old days. The ancient Romans fretted about the young and their callous disregard for the hard-won wisdom of their elders. Several 16th- and 17th-century writers and philosophers famously idealized the Noble Savage, a being who lived in harmony with nature and did not destroy his surroundings. Now we worry about our kids as “digital natives,” who grow up surrounded by electronics and can’t settle their brains sufficiently to concentrate on walking the dog without simultaneously texting and listening to their iPods.

Gratuitous swipe and people who refuse to prefer Wednesday to Tuesday merely because it is Wednesday? Check.

Given this whiplash-inducing rate of recent change, it’s reasonable to conclude that we aren’t suited to our modern lives, and that our health, our family lives, and perhaps our sanity would all be improved if we could live the way early humans did. Our bodies and minds evolved under a particular set of circumstances, the reasoning goes, and in changing those circumstances without allowing our bodies time to evolve in response, we have wreaked the havoc that is modern life.

Ah, but you would be wrong, Neanderthal Breath, and she (who is smarter and more credentialed than you) is going to Explain It All To You.

Newspaper articles, morning TV, dozens of books, and self-help advocates promoting slow-food or no-cook diets, barefoot running, sleeping with our infants, and other measures large and small claim that it would be more natural, and healthier, to live more like our ancestors. A corollary to this notion is that we are good at things we had to do back in the Pleistocene, like keeping an eye out for cheaters in our small groups, and bad at things we didn’t, like negotiating with people we can’t see and have never met.

All of which has a lot of evidence to support it, although that evidence won’t even be mentioned, much less refuted, in an academic sneer piece like this.

The paleofantasy is a fantasy in part because it supposes that we humans, or at least our protohuman forebears, were at some point perfectly adapted to our environments. We apply this erroneous idea of evolution’s producing the ideal mesh between organism and surroundings to other life forms, too, not just to people.

Uh, oh. Sounds like the Sierra Club to me.

It’s common for people to talk about how we were “meant” to be, in areas ranging from diet to exercise to sex and family. Yet these notions are often flawed, making us unnecessarily wary of new foods and, in the long run, new ideas. I would not dream of denying the evolutionary heritage present in our bodies—and our minds. And it is clear that a life of sloth with a diet of junk food isn’t doing us any favors. But to assume that we evolved until we reached a particular point and now are unlikely to change for the rest of history, or to view ourselves as relics hampered by a self-inflicted mismatch between our environment and our genes, is to miss out on some of the most exciting new developments in evolutionary biology.

In other words, I’m a Progressive and Change Is Good! Why am I not surprised.

Behold the 900-MPH Supersonic Ping-Pong Bazooka

Cordless Neuromuscular Back Pain Reliever

Rechargeable LED Reading Glasses

Read it.

In the quest to find new materials with exotic properties such as superconductivity, physicists are always on the lookout for new ways electrons can push each other around. For example, last week scientists announced they’d created a new kind of solar cell by discovering new electronic properties using a large-scale computer simulation. To discover properties that occur under more extreme conditions, theoretical physicists like Coleman write the equations that are sent over to experimental physicists who run tests using devices like the Large Hadron Collider to see if they hold up. “Along the way, we sometimes stumble across something amazing like high temperature superconductivity, which works well for levitating trains,” Coleman said.

Read it.

 Automakers have long resorted to incentives like zero-percent financing, rewards points and rebates to inspire customer loyalty. Now Honda is offering a different deal: inexpensive home solar power systems for customers.

Read it.

Among Derocher’s scenarios is using helicopters to airdrop food on polar bears as their icy habitat continues to melt — at a cost of $32,000 per day for the “most accessible” bears. (The hope is that such interventions would last days per year, not months).

“It’s a lot better to have some animals in the wild even if they are being supplemented in their food. If we were basically the sole food source for these animals, then we’re going to have some very serious issues. Then it won’t really be a polar bear anymore,” Derocher said on the phone. “It will be a semi-wild, semi-captive, free-ranging carnivore. And it probably wouldn’t do that well even if the ice started to come back” since the bear would become so dependent on the airlifted food that he may forget how to hunt.

(Sigh). It’s really come to this.

The Other McCain blows the whistle.

The other day, Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen of Politico published a long story about the dysfunctional relationship between the Obama administration and the White House press corps, saying that the lack of access and deliberate manipulation were making it difficult for reporters to do their jobs.

A basic rule of life: If you volunteer to be somebody’s doormat, you forfeit the right to complain about the footprints on your back.

The White House has merely exploited the unabashed fandom of the journalistic elite, which is so overwhelmingly liberal that they were only too happy for the opportunity to publish daily valentines to their presidential heartthrob. Predictably, this posture of eager sycophancy has not earned reporters the respect of those they flatter, and so White House correspondents — journalists at the very peak of professional prestige — are shocked to find themselves treated like rent-boys by the administration’s P.R. machinery.

Read it.

For two months, reporters and lawmakers have ignored a devastating report from the federal government itself, which warns that the nation’s current fiscal policy will lead to economic collapse.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO)—the personal auditor of President Obama and the federal government—released its assessment of the federal government on January 17, 2013. The report’s findings illuminate just how dire America’s spending problem is and, therefore, how little the current cuts debated by Congress do to fix it.

Read it. And watch the video.

Speaking of Islam and beheading, two Copts in Jersey City were shot to death, beheaded, and had their hands cut off. The alleged perpetrator has a clearly Islamic name, but police have not yet identified a motive.

Why, goodness, what motive could they possibly have?

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.

A classic First World problem. Let it fill your world.

Read it.

For a universe so old and so illustrious, the end may be boring and lightning quick: According to one Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory theoretician, if what we know about the Higgs boson subatomic particle is true, the universe may come to an end when another universe slurps us up at light speed.

“If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it’s bad news,” Joseph Lykken said at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston on Monday. “It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out. This has to do with the Higgs energy field itself.”

Well — something to look forward to, then.

Read it.

In large part, I would say that science fiction authors lean socialist — people like John Scalzi, China Mieville, Charles Stross, Usula Le Guinn, and Steven Brust are just the tip of a very large iceberg. Even those who pretend to be libertarian, like Cory Doctorow, are socialist underneath the Clever Plastic Disguise and talk about actual policies. Needless to say, government-provided health care are very big with writers in general, as are other government benefits that don’t require holding down a day job.

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According to sources for CBS local in New York, “Sources indicated that Lanza wanted to top Breivik’s death toll, and chose Sandy Hook because it was an easy target with a large cluster of people.” The fact that Sandy Hook was a gun free zone could not have gone unnoticed by Lanza.

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

Read it.

Because the Obama administration classified the shootings, which ended with 13 people dead and 32 others wounded, as workplace violence, those who survived have not receive Purple Hearts and medical benefits normally extended to people wounded in action.

Why, sure — everybody Going Postal in the workplace is of Arabic descent and shouts ‘Allahu Akbar!’ when they’re shooting up the local grocery store. Nothing to see here, move along, move along….

Read it.

Philipp Ronnenberg, a masters student in design interactions at the Royal College of Art in London, recently showed off the first prototype sensors for his alternate “Open Positioning System,” which are designed to pick up regular seismic waves given off by large machinery in nearby power plants and factories. Once a sensor detects at least three different nearby seismic wave sources, Ronnenberg theorizes it should be able to determine its location.

I have my doubts. But it’s an interesting idea.

Read it.

All Around Pizza and Deli in Virginia Beach, VA, is offering a 15% discount to customers who carry a gun in with them or show a concealed carry handgun permit.

Virginia Beach is the off-base residential suburb of Norfolk preferred by those working at the Norfolk Naval Base and a number of other Navy installations, including the East Coast SEAL teams.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

John Hinderaker blows the whistle on the Axis of Drivel.

The liberal media manifest their bias not primarily by writing things that aren’t true–although that sometimes happens–but rather, by selecting what they do and do not report as news. Major scandals and events of great importance are simply ignored if they do not reflect well on the Democratic Party, while minor stories receive endless attention if they advance the liberal agenda. You could illustrate this every day; here are a few examples from today’s news.

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I am fully prepared to believe it.

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According to a report on the investigation:

“Professor Sweet strongly encouraged or mandated that students from several classes sign a pledge card that stated, ‘I pledge to vote for President Obama and Democrats up and down the ticket.’ She also misrepresented her intentions to multiple students, indicating at various times that she was conducting voter registration for the college, that the pledge cards were non-partisan voter registration forms, and that the pledge was a ‘statistical analysis.’”

Prediction 1: It won’t happen. She’ll keep her job, and the whole thing will get swept under the rug.

Prediction 2: Even if it does happen, they’ll get sued six ways from Sunday by various liberal groups, and she’ll wind up with her job back.

Read it.

In Benghazi, four alleged Christian missionaries–from the U.S., Egypt, South Korea and South Africa–have been arrested for distributing extracts from the Bible, and may face the death penalty.

Well, what about all of those Muslim proselytizers who are condemned to death in Europe and America? Oh, wait … they get welfare benefits.

Read it.

Usually, public college administrators who blatantly violate the Constitution and due process rights get off scot-free even when they lose, as their employers (read: the taxpayers) get stuck with the bill for their transgressions. The thin reed of reason on which this “qualified immunity” rests is that administrators supposedly didn’t know that their actions were unconstitutional when they took them. (Yes, that’s pretty farfetched in most of the case FIRE sees, but courts tend to buy it.)

Zaccari appealed this finding, and it went all the way to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, where Zaccari lost. When the appeals were finished and the case came before a jury, the jig was up: Zaccari personally owes Barnes $50,000—and the court has not even assessed attorneys’ fees yet.

A step in the right direction, but I predict it won’t go beyond that single step. The Crust will take care of their own, and if a judge wanders in who refuses to get with the program, he (or she) will soon be replaced.

Read it.

 Three rocks were thrown through the custom-made glass door, which cost nearly $100,000, according to Denver’s ABC 7 News. By breaking the glass door, the hooded burglar was able to get away with nearly $64,000 in merchandise, making the damage caused even more costly than the theft.

The guys who do the Apple stores think that everybody in the country is a Silicon Valley hipster who loves paying full price for SWPL computing gear.

 “Smash and grabs” at Apple’s retail stores have become something of a trend in recent years, as thieves target the locations for their popular products. In one of the more extreme cases, a burglar crashed into the glass front of a California Apple Store with a BMW X5, causing $600,000 in damage.

Perhaps they will wake up eventually. Apple stores sell more per square foot than Tiffany’s, and Tiffany’s doesn’t have massive walls of glass on their storefront. Just sayin’.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, points and laughs.

No one questions that higher taxes on, say, cigarettes discourage the purchase of cigarettes in the ‘white’ market (that is, outside of the black or gray market in which the taxes are avoided).  Anyone who said “Hmmm….. You say that higher cigarette taxes will discourage their purchase in the white market.  But a real scientist would test that proposition before accepting it.” would be regarded as daft.  Questioning the magnitude of the effect is perfectly legitimate; questioning the effect’s existence and direction is not.

Indeed, quite often the rationale for ‘sin taxes’, especially taxes on booze and tobacco, is precisely because they are an attempt to discourage people from buying booze and tobacco. If raising the price of alcohol and tobacco products is considered effective in reducing sales of alcohol and tobacco, how is raising the price of labor not considered effective in reducing employment?

If you went to the people who make Jack Daniels and said ‘We want to make sure you guys get an adequate return for all your hard work, so we’re going to pass a law saying that everybody has to pay at least $50 a bottle for Jack Daniels’, the response on the part of the makers of Jack Daniels would be a shriek of horror. Unlike legislators, the makers of Jack Daniels know that if you raise the price of something fewer people buy it, a concept that economists know as ‘elasticity of demand’ and politicians know as ‘Huh?’.

And so empirical studies are done to test the law of demand as it applies to human labor and, lo and behold, some studies find that it does not apply while other studies find that it does.  So we are to conclude from this fact that employers of workers whose pay is in the range of the legislated minimum-wage might well not seek to economize on their production costs, in the face of higher mandated wages, by reducing the quantities of labor they hire, by working their laborers harder, or by lowering on other dimensions (say, fewer fringes) their hourly costs of employing labor.

Although this is perfectly in line with the general conviction on the part of those who pass laws that people do not change their behavior when they are socked with new laws but just keep on what they’re doing, dum dee dum dee dum, like sheep standing around waiting to be turned into sweaters and lamp chops.

Of course, seeing that Obama is in his second term, they might actually have a case with respect to a large part of the population. And that would be sad.

Read it.

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

With a flurry of good will and generosity, the Helen Diller Family Fund gave $5 million for Jewish studies in 1999 to the University of California at Berkeley to bring an Israeli professor to the university each year. The intent was partially to balance the anti-Israel invective that permeates that university. As Diller herself put it, “With the protesting and this and that, we need to get a real strong Jewish studies program in there. Hopefully, it will be enlightening to have a visiting professor.” The appointing committee promised that visiting scholars’ political beliefs would not be considered, while Diller indicated her confidence in the committee.

But the Helen Diller Family Programs in Jewish Studies from the start went awry. The university used the funds to hire Oren Yiftachel, a viciously anti-Zionist professor who holds that “Israel has created a colonial setting, held through violent control and a softening illusion of a nation-state and democratic citizenship.” This left the donor displeased and frustrated; in the words of Moment magazine’s Liel Liebowitz, “having given the endowment, there was nothing she could do but wince.”

Too bad Julius Streicher wasn’t available — they could have hired him. After all, he studied Jews a lot.

You can’t beat the Crust on their home turf.

Read it.

“Technological revolutions happen in two main phases: the installation phase and the deployment phase,” observes Angel of the Year and new Andreessen Horowitz GP Chris Dixon, who says that the turning point between those phases for the Age of Information is…now.

The Other McCain is on the case.

In all honesty, when you hear the word “feminist,” does anyone think of adjectives like pleasant, cheerful, successful and attractive?

No, of course not. You think of adjectives like strident, angry, bitter and ugly. Also, quite often, ridiculous — as illustrated by the deranged mob of strident, angry, bitter, ugly women who showed up for a “One Billion Rising” Valentine’s Day demonstration in San Francisco.

By the same token, anyone who thinks that “honest” and “Democrat” ever belong together in the same sentence is probably suffering from some form of mental illness, and speaking of the mentally ill: Jesse Jackson Jr. will reportedly plead guilty to federal corruption charges.

tReason Magazine adopts the ‘journalism’ of the Left.

President Obama gets lots of kudos for his supposed efforts on immigration reform, even as his administration spends billions of dollars to chase them out of the country. It’s an apparent case of a politician gazing DREAMily out at the country and asking, with a winning smile, “Who are you gonna believe? Me? Or your lying eyes?” Now we find that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have made a specific goal of high deportation figures, and have resorted to using even the most trivial of offenses, including traffic violations, as an excuse to hustle people across the border.

I guess it’s too much to expect the people who are tasked with enforcing the immigration laws to, you know, enforce the immigration laws. I guess it’s unimportant that the people who are being ‘hustled across the border’ are HERE ILLEGALLY and that the reason they GOT CAUGHT was that they BROKE THE LAW WHILE HERE.

This is a great example of the reason why I have nothing but contempt for ‘movement libertarianism’ — the total lack of perspective and the adolescent priorities. We live on a planet that contains A BILLION PEOPLE whose religion is the most anti-libertarian totalitarian ideology in the modern world, and whose adherents are responsible for 95% of the acts of terrorism in the last hundred years, and it’s somehow a moral imperative to let anybody and his bomb-toting brother just waltz over the border whenever he wants to?

Really? REALLY?

The economy is being trashed by a ruling class whose proletarian clients are willing to demonstrate the flaws of democracy election cycle after election cycle, but what we really need to worry about is the fact that people keep getting arrested for buying and using recreational drugs?

Really? REALLY?

I keep waiting for these guys to grow up but they never do. They never do.

Read it.

This week’s State of the Union address was full of plans for government action and spending to combat U.S. economic malaise. At the same time, the President claimed that there were drastic cuts to the federal budget on the way (referring to sequestration, under which spending actually continues to grow but at a slower rate). This doublespeak mirrors that of European politicians and hides reality: more government isn’t making the economy any better.

Illustrating this point is the dichotomy in economic performance between Western European countries — whose politicians claim to have made cuts but in reality have increased budgets each year since the Eurocrisis began in 2009 — and their Baltic counterparts — which underwent actual cuts in the size of government.

Read it.

I’m impressed.

The Other McCain blows the whistle.

San Diego’s former mayor, Maureen O’Connor, is a liberal Democrat. But now that she’s been charged in a massive scandal — she stole more than $2 million from a charity established by her late husband, in order to fund a decade-long gambling binge – the New York Times somehow can’t bring itself to mention her partisan affiliation.

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

Read it.

 I hypothesized that the body doesn’t need food itself, merely the chemicals and elements it contains.

I haven’t eaten a bite of food in 30 days, and it’s changed my life.

Guaranteed to make Locovore heads explode.

Read it.

Indeed, there is nothing new under the sun. The ‘progressive’ program, for all its failures, refuses to learn from history, and therefore condemns all of us to repeat it.

Even the glittering island of Manhattan was unnaturally composed of a thin sliver of the rich, garrisoned in wealthy neighborhoods, and a massively enlarging population of the ghetto poor, with very little in between; a million middle-class New Yorkers bolted the city between 1955 and 1965, and the exodus was continuing. The year 1965 was the first in which the city’s elementary schools had a greater proportion of blacks and Puerto Ricans, 50.8 percent, than whites. All races and classes had to cope with a rash of pathologies, from noise pollution and clogged streets to an alarming crime rate. In the first three months of 1965, “serious crime” on subways rose 41 percent. After one particularly brutal and senseless subway killing, in April, Wagner ordered night patrols on every train, with additional cops posted at each of the system’s 480 stations, to combat the predations of “the mugger, the hoodlum and the young punk.”

Sounds very much like your typical Blue state: California, say, or Michigan.

Writing in The New York Review of Books in October 1965, Paul Goodman, author of the countercultural manifesto “Growing Up Absurd,” discerned the specter of Big Brotherism in L.B.J.’s grand liberal vision. It was fine when the government summoned its resources “to prevent or remedy social and physical evils, like urban poverty, exploitation of labor, traffic congestion, air pollution,” Goodman wrote. But this “safeguarding function is entirely different from government trying to make life excellent, to make society moral, civilized or magnificent.” Strip away its vaunting promises and the Great Society, in practical terms, “multiplies professional-client and patron-client relationships” with its “large stable of mandarins” employed to “raise the tone, use correct scientific method, and invent rationalizations. Also, the literate mandarins write the speeches.”

The Crustian utopia in a nutshell. (Emphasis on the ‘nut’.)

Many people don’t remember that William F. Buckley Jr was the first public figure to advocate bike lanes in a major city.

No establishment politician dared to say it, but racial tension, more than any other factor, was responsible for the “crisis” of the city. Crime, narcotics, substandard schools and housing, white flight, the soaring costs of social services – all these were related to the distinct problems of New York’s underclass, a million-plus blacks and 730,000 Puerto Ricans, most of them trapped in vermin-infested ghettos, where two children were bitten by rats on average each day. Products of the city’s poorest schools and excluded from key labor unions, black men faced unemployment and idle days. No fewer than half a million of the urban poor were wards of an overstressed welfare system that would drain almost half a billion dollars from city coffers in 1965 alone.

And just look how things have improved from that day to this! (That was a joke. HA HA. Fat chance.)

Gavin McInnes says what all right-thinking people … well, think.

The biggest misconception about so-called “assholes” is that they’re total assholes. I know a lot of them and though they don’t suffer fools gladly, they will defend to the death your right to be foolish. Maybe that’s why they’re so grumpy. They’re always prepared to fight.

Nice people, on the other hand, are dicks. The most dangerous people out there are the ones pretending to be nice. They’re fakes and will happily stab you in the back if it helps their cause.

And that pretty much says everything that needs to be said on the subject. But go ahead and read the whole thing anyway.

Timothy Egan writes for the New York Times on American politics and life, as seen from the Upper West Side.

Voices of the Crust, like Gorillas in the Mist, are totally predictable.

Like everyone else with a perverse curiosity about a castle-bound community fussing over whether to use a bouillon or a melon spoon, I’ve been consumed by the turns in “Downton Abbey,” the latest export from England to keep American public television afloat.

‘Perverse curiosity’? How about a more honest ‘secret longing’? Scribblers in service to the Crust have a secret wallet-envy for their inherited-wealth masters that often breaks out in the most revealing ways. At times it even leads them into inadvertent admissions of truth, such as this one that American public television is so bad it depends on foreign imports to stay above water.

But if someone with grease on his hands and an accent from a workaday neighborhood can rise to an estate management position in the rigid British class system, what, by comparison, are we to make of the American experience nearly a century removed?

Note that this apparently doesn’t apply to people named Kennedy who are in their fourth generation of living off the pile left by a former bootlegger and Democrat machine-politician.

Oh, but we are a nation free of class conflict, we tell ourselves daily, and live with the illusion that everyone with a job is somehow middle class.

As, indeed, they think of themselves – try to find somebody who goes to a job everyday that doesn’t describe himself (or herself) as ‘middle class’, however much they may have in the bank. It is this perception of themselves as ‘middle class’ that makes Americans, well, middle-class, especially in their outlook. The only people these days who think of themselves as ‘upper class’ (although they are never so gauche as to say it out loud) are the trust-fund babies of the Crust and their lickspittles in the press and the academy; again, it is self-perception, rather than bank balances, that maketh the man (or woman).

And yet, a raft of recent studies has found the United States to be a less upwardly mobile society than many comparable nations, particularly for men.

A trend that Democrats, Party of the Crust, keep hammering home, with policies ranging from the minimum wage (to keep working class people from entering the middle class) to confiscatory tax rates on income and inheritance (to keep middle class people from competing with the Crust for tony restaurant seats, slips in the marina, and condos in Aspen). The most ironic aspect of ‘less upwardly mobile’ in America is that the people complaining most loudly about it are the people most responsible for it in the first place.

One survey reported that 42 percent of American boys raised in the bottom fifth of income stayed there as adults.

Two words: Minimum wage. (Two more words: Gangsta culture.) If your idea of success in life is Kanye West or Tupac Shakur, then yeah, you’re going to be in the bottom fifth of income for pretty much ever.

Read it.

Because God forbid anybody should think them different from men.

A totally righteous argument, right? But the petition, which has 716 signatures at the time of this writing, says that this sort of language is “counterproductive to the women’s equality the President is ostensibly supporting.” It goes on to explain, “Defining women by their relationships to other people is reductive, misogynist, and alienating to women who do not define ourselves exclusively by our relationships to others. Further, by referring to ‘our’ wives et al, the President appears to be talking to The Men of America about Their Women, rather than talking to men AND women.”

Seven hundred and sixteen. An amazing crowd. The White House will be swamped.

Read it.

The Crust have their panties in a wad once again.

Ms. Stewart continued: “This photo cements stereotypes, perpetuates an imbalance in the power dynamic, is reminiscent of centuries of colonialism (and indentured servitude) and serves as a good example of both creating a centrality of whiteness and using ‘exotic’ people as fashion props.”

They actually pay people to write this crap. No wonder the country is screwed up. No Kleagle of the KKK was ever so obsessed with race as these drones of the political Left.

Read it.

A team from the University of Southern California (USC) has built a lithium battery that provides three times the power capacity of conventional designs, with a recharge time of just ten minutes and a predicted long life-span.

Steve Sailer points and laughs.

It’s like if all the most advanced thinkers agreed that witches don’t exist, but that the career of witch-hunting remained lucrative and admired.

…

It’s fascinating how even the people who write and edit for the New York Times on human genetics-related subjects don’t actually read the New York Times’s excellent reporting on human genetics.

Read it.

Public records show Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, who is known for being stingy with concealed-weapons permits in an anti-gun jurisdiction, may be giving out permits disproportionately to his friends and political supporters and donors.

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

After all, what’s the good of being a Servant of the Crust if you can’t take care of your friends and family? Let’s get real.

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Although parents worked with the Fairfax County Public Schools facilities department, purchased the equipment, hired a contractor and had the playground ready for recess, the school system suddenly deemed the play equipment too dangerous. Since Nov. 30 it has been off-limits, parents say.

Never mind that the same equipment is installed at more than 1,200 parks and schools across the country, including a public park in the county.

Your tax dollars at work. Hey, let’s put people like this in charge of our health care.

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Sex change operations and nudity workshops.

And four years in Providence, Rhode Island. (I know — curb your enthusiasm.) Plus the chance to rub elbows with lot of Children of the Crust (if that’s important to you) and their European counterparts, like Emma Watson and Victoria of Sweden.

After toying with the prospect of being meritocratic institutions of higher learning, in which the best and brightest of the nation’s rising generation are given the tools to bring us forward into the future, the upper tier schools like the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, etc., have reverted to their traditional role of Networking Camp for the Children of the Crust and Intake Processing for those (chiefly rich ‘oppressed minorities’ who demonstrate Right Thought) desiring to join their number.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Ultra Ever Dry

Hobbit Hole Litter Box

Terrarium Desk

Luxury Pet Products

LEGO 8MP Digital Camera

Toilet Tablet Tool

Marinade Express

The Other McCain draws an historical parallel.

After Facebook zillionaire Chris Hughes purchased The New Republic, he proclaimed that the magazine, which has long since lost the prestige it enjoyed in the 1980s and ’90s, would “strive to be free of party ideology or partisan bias.” This proclamation was instantly falsified by the magazine’s first print cover story under the new publisher, a smear of the Republican Party by Sam Tanenhaus.

That inspired a memorable Twitter beatdown of Chris Hughes by Ace of Spades — if you haven’t seen it, you simply must — who pointed out that, despite its partisan heckling of Republicans as “The Party of White People,” The New Republic‘s editorial staff is a monochromatic swath of vanilla honkydom. What is true of The New Republic is, of course, true of liberalism in general. The folks who were most eager to brand the Tea Party movement “racist” were white liberals, and this tells you something about what Shelby Steele called the White Guilt mentality of liberals: “Vote Democrat, cracker, in order to signify your moral righteousness on race issues.”

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 “As I was processing the collection, I glimpsed this weird red flying-disc icon in the corners,” Rhodes says. Inside the box was a trove of oddities: cutaway schematics of disc-shaped aircraft, graphs showing drag and thrust performance at more than Mach 3, black-and-white photos of Frisbee shapes in supersonic wind tunnels. The icon was a flying saucer on a red arrow—the insignia of a little-known and strange sideshow in aeronautical design. Rhodes was leafing through the lost records of a U.S. military flying saucer program.

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The geographic clusters are  based on county proximity, urban area, and commuting patterns.

I just love funky maps.

Now, let the political operatives with their computer programs start gerrymandering it….

The Other McCain has the story.

Bad policy cannot be advocated by honest rhetoric. Dishonesty is therefore a hallmark of bad government. In terms of honesty, the Obama administration’s rhetoric is somewhere in the range between Baghdad Bob and North Korea.  Kirsten Powers says Tuesday’s State of the Union address was as if “President Obama’s chief speechwriter has been replaced by a cliché-generator circa 1960.”

Read it.

Air Force pilots and sensor operators who fly what the military calls remotely piloted aircraft–drones, to the rest of us — are not eligible for the most prestigious awards for valor. Because they fly the planes from 3,000 miles away, their lives are not on the line.

But outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced Wednesday that he was establishing a new award to recognize the contributions of drone pilots, cyber warriors and others who influence the battlefield from afar.

The new Distinguished Warfare Medal  will rank below the Distinguished Flying Cross.  The Defense Department said it can be awarded for actions in air, land, sea, space or cyberspace but not for actions that involve life-threatening “acts of valor.”

Needless to say, the military already has plenty of awards for desk-jockeys, including six (6) different Distinguished Service Medals (all of which rank higher than the Silver Star), plus the Defense Superior Service Medal and the Legion of Merit. This is just another gong for people who don’t actually risk anything other than eyestrain and maybe carpal tunnel.