John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, reviews Hungry Ghosts by Jasper Becker.

The greatest human calamity of our century — greater than the Holocaust, greater than World War Two itself — was the famine that swept China in the “three bad years” 1959-61. At least thirty million died.

For a long time the Chinese authorities and their shills in the West denied that there had been a famine at all. As evidence of the catastrophe began to accumulate they fell back to grudging admissions of “severe shortages” caused by “natural disasters” and “adverse climatic conditions.”

Beginning in the early 1980s, researchers in the West (and a few brave Chinese) began probing into Chinese population statistics. The results of those inquiries are now in, the conclusions incontrovertible. There were no natural disasters. The climate in those years was mild. The famine was caused by the policies of the Chinese Communist government, under the inspiration of Mao Tse-tung. The facts have now been set out for a general readership by the British sinologist Jasper Becker (Hungry Ghosts, Free Press, 1997.)

The physical details of the famine — even just the bare statistics — make harrowing reading. Children seem to have suffered especially, not only in the famine itself but in later years, dying from the after-effects of severe malnutrition. In 1957 half of all Chinese who died were under 18; in 1963 half were under 10. These were not the most unfortunate. In the extremity of mass starvation, when rats and insects had long gone and the very bark from the trees had been consumed, peasants resorted to the ghastly custom of yi zi er shi — swap children, then eat. Since no-one could bear to eat his own children, you exchanged yours with a neighbor. Then you ate his, he ate yours.

Read it. And watch the video, if you have a strong stomach.

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

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Time for a School of the Crust to get with the program and get behind the Narrative.

Nothing to see here — move along, move along….

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

If a government-funded study didn’t find that conservatives were more racist than liberals — that would be news. Won’t ever happen, of course.

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Here you go: chapter and verse. The basic distinction between how Islam works and how the Mafia works is in the language spoken; you can learn all you need to know about the Muslim world by watching The Sopranos.

Bottom line: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion, with which no co-existence is possible. As recent history shows, not even being a Muslim yourself makes you safe from violence at the hands of other Muslims.

But you know that … or ought to.

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At the time, the late 1970s felt like shapeless, dreary, forgettable years. Jimmy Carter was in the White House, preaching austerity and public-spiritedness, and hardly anyone was listening. The hideous term “stagflation”, which combined the normally opposed economic phenomena of stagnation and inflation, perfectly captured the doldrums of that moment. It is only with the hindsight of a full generation that we can see how many things were beginning to shift across the American landscape, sending the country spinning into a new era.

The rot actually set in during the mid-60s, but it didn’t start taking over the Crust until the late 70s.

The generation that fought World War II, who had grown up during the Depression, suddenly awash in the prosperity brought by the new industrial techniques that won the war, decided that their kids, the Boomers, would want for nothing — with the inevitable degenerative effect on that generation’s character. The characteristic moral failing of Boomers is entitlement — they want what they want, and see no reason (in heaven or on earth, and I mean that literally) why they shouldn’t get it. They see no reason not to live high on the hog, and pass the bill on to their more frugal neighbors or their invisible descendents. Once these attitudes filtered up into the Crust, generally by way of ideological capture of the universities by the narcissistic Left, then there was no stopping it. The descent from Democracy into Anarchy into Tyranny — foreseen by Aristotle, among others, who was wiser than anybody now taking a government paycheck — is well underway … and I, for one, don’t see any way of stopping it. I just hope I’m dead before its final form clanks down the street.

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And it’s not over yet.

Jerry Pournelle.

Of course all this thrashing about is a misguided attempt to pay attention to the 1983 Commission on education headed by Nobel Laureate Glenn T. Seaborg, which famously concluded that “If a foreign country had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war.” This produced a flurry of top down actions dictated across the nation, most of which, by the time the bureaucrats and unions had got through with them, made things worse.

The Golden Age of American education came back when the question of “Federal Aid to Education” was an actual political topic, and there was no massive Federal Aid to education. American schools were run by mostly local school boards, and the school boards were elected by the local taxpayers who paid for the schools. The result was a mixture, of course, with some schools being starved of funds while others had plenty of money but it was not well spent, but overall it worked quite well. In a few places like Los Angeles where the schools were consolidated into enormous districts of hundreds of schools the system was so large that the only controls were bureaucratic, and the school boards were professional politicians, but by and large local communities got the schools they wanted and deserved.

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Well, it looks like the Republicrats are going to join the Demoplicans in permanently altering these United States of America into a Third World slough of despond. According to Sen Pansy Graham (Scalawag-South Carolina), the Senate has 70 votes (probably 15 Republican, 55 Democrat) to report it out of the Senate. Word on the street is that the Gang of Eight Amnesty Atrocity will probably pass the House of Representatives even though an overwhelming majority of House Republicans oppose it. How will they do this? All they need is two dozen or so Chamber of Commerce bootlickers to join the America-skeptical Democrats and it’s “Por Espanol, oprima numero dos” forever.

And this is a religion blog, so you can see how far things have gone.

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Across-the-board cuts in federal spending have not only damped short-term economic growth but also threaten long-term investments that could provide a boon in the future, the White House chief economist said Tuesday.

Alan Krueger, the departing chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, warned the cuts, known as the “sequester,” are harming important federally-funded research and development that can eventually lead to new technologies that drive the economy.

Of course. If the Federal government doesn’t spend your money on research, research won’t happen.

Makes you wonder how anything got invented before the Federal government paid for it. (Maybe it came from the same alternate dimension as all of the goods that the Social Justice folks want to ‘redistribute’.)

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

According to the Miami Herald, the Cutler Bay Farmer’s Market ran every Sunday for the past two years. A handful of food trucks came to event as well. Somebody anonymously complained to the city about unlicensed vendors (how would an average person know who was or wasn’t licensed to do business at a farmer’s market? Good question!). It turned out the town had an ordinance that prohibited allowing food trucks at the market, but it wasn’t being enforced. So the city sent the market’s volunteer manager warnings about it. Rather than booting the food trucks, he shut the whole affair down. The reason he did so is because the food trucks, even though there were only a handful of them, played a huge role in drawing people to the market….

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Why does the fate of an old building matter?

Because Hagia Sophia — Greek for “Holy Wisdom” — was for some thousand years Christianity’s greatest cathedral. Built in 537 A.D. in Constantinople, the heart of the Christian empire, it was also a stalwart symbol of defiance against an ever encroaching Islam from the east.

After parrying centuries of jihadi thrusts, Constantinople was finally sacked by Ottoman Turks in 1453. Its crosses desecrated and icons defaced, Hagia Sophia — as well as thousands of other churches — was immediately converted into a mosque, the tall minarets of Islam surrounding it in triumph.

So no one is entitled to complain when Orthodox Christians do the same thing to mosques once they retake the lands stolen from them by Muslims.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Hastings had a thorough contempt for journalistic customs, including objectivity, which he dismissed as a “fallacy.” As I wrote of him in a profile, Hastings was “a liberal who shared the anti-war, anti-Republican sentiments widespread in his generation of journalists.” Hastings was at least honest about his bias, as opposed to the allegedly objective reporters who cover politics. Most of the young journalists who followed Mitt Romney around on the campaign trail last year may as well have been paid members of Obama’s campaign staff, given their intense commitment to helping defeat the Republican. Journalists have always been predominantly liberal, but recent years have seen an influx of young writers like Hastings who came of age in the anti-war campus cauldrons of the Bush era, and to them the GOP is an enemy more dangerous than any foreign dictator or Islamic terrorist.

Having crusaded to spare the nation of another Republican presidency, young liberal writers like Michael Hastings seemed genuinely shocked by recent revelations of the Nixonian nature of the regime they did so much to help re-elect. Last year, Hastings praised Obama with the enthusiasm of a 12-year-old girl describing a Justin Bieber concert, but two weeks ago he seemed disillusioned. “Transparency supporters, whistleblowers, and investigative reporters … have been viciously attacked by the Obama administration and its allies in the FBI and DOJ,” Hastings wrote, denouncing “Democratic two-facedness on civil liberties.”

For perhaps the first time in his life, he’s telling the truth.

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

Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) opponents warned it would happen, but now there’s mounting proof that full-time employees are being replaced with part-timers, at least in the retail industry where Walmart is focused on keeping the majority of workers to part-time hours only.

A new hiring policy uncovered by Reuters shows that nearly half of its stores are only hiring part-time employees, thus avoiding the mandate to provide health care or pay a fine.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

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Because naming it after Barry would just be a bit much — better wait until after 2016.

Now, imagine what an outcry there would be if some school district named a school after Sarah Palin — who has done a shitload more for America than Michelle Obama ever did.

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Hint: They’re spending your money, not their money.

Let me run that by you again: Contractors didn’t just perform services for a higher cost than it would cost to pay federal exmployess to do the same thing, they also charged the government more than the going rate within the private market for such services. Of course, that makes sense because contractors earn profits by being the middleman. If Booz Allen hires a computer expert at the going market rate of, say, $100,000 a year, it’s not going to make any money if it then bills the government that same amount. It only makes money if it bills more and keeps the difference.

But the obvious question here is why should we taxpayers be underwriting private middlemen who live in mansions in McLean?

Hint: Because they’re the Crust, and you’re not.

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The contradictions and deleterious effects of feminism are well documented—not just in the manosphere but beyond. What the growing backlash against feminism fails to acknowledge are seemingly trivial and ancillary forces that do more damage than they let on.

The most powerful among those factors is you-go-girlism—the empowerment ethos that tells women, at every turn, that they can not only do anything a man can do, but also all of the things women used to do. Women and girls are the smarter, more capable, and generally “better” than men. Girls are encouraged to do things that are traditionally masculine—like manly professions and sports—and are given a pass on negative behaviors, from sexual promiscuity to weight gain to physically attacking men, all with the same trite cheer, “You go girl!”

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With Hollywood involved, how could it be otherwise?

Matt Yglesias wonders why Superman is wasting his time by saving peoples lives instead of submitting to being used as a giant solar power cell, or something….

Yeah, I wonder that, too.

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A doubling of home ownership is associated with more than a doubling of the long-run unemployment rate.

We are not sure what explains our correlation. But we show, using various micro data sets, that higher home ownership leads to lower labour mobility, greater commute-to-work times, and a lower rate of business formation. Our hunch, on which further work will be needed, is that the housing market exerts powerful externalities upon the labour market. This would not have surprised Milton Friedman, who, in his writings on the natural rate of unemployment, emphasised the need for labour mobility in an efficient economy.

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Last month, Aetna announced it would not join with California’s new state-run insurance market for consumers, a key component of the new federal healthcare law. In 2011, Aetna trailed Anthem Blue Cross, Kaiser Permanente, and Blue Shield of California; the three groups totaled 87% of the market share in the state, while Aetna only had 5.2%.

Just as minimum-wage laws mean that some people get priced out of the job market, government-controlled insurance means that some people will get priced out of the insurance market. Too bad, so sad. Clutch your Obama Phone and weep.

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

 “The F.B.I. takes very seriously any shooting incidents involving our agents, and as such we have an effective, time-tested process for addressing them internally,” a bureau spokesman said.

But if such internal investigations are time-tested, their outcomes are also predictable: from 1993 to early 2011, F.B.I. agents fatally shot about 70 “subjects” and wounded about 80 others — and every one of those episodes was deemed justified, according to interviews and internal F.B.I. records obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

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Carl Malamud is suing the IRS over a problem you probably haven’t heard about: the agency’s unwillingness to let the rest of us easily scrutinize nonprofits.

Malamud, a California-based transparency activist, knows a few things about liberating public records. He’s the reason the Securities and Exchange Commission started putting the submissions of public companies online back in the 1990s, why you can see so many hearings on C-SPAN, and why lists of legally enforceable codes and standards may finally become available for free. He’s been badgering the IRS to put nonprofit data online for over a year now, and in the meantime, has uploaded the last decade’s worth of 990s to his Web site Public.Resource.org. It costs him a few thousand dollars a year — a considerable sum for his small organization, but nothing for a massive government agency.

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Bill Ayers, the former University of Illinois professor and former member of the Weather Underground, has said that Obama should be put on trial for war crimes. However, Ayers insists that he still likes Obama on a personal level.

‘Ze Fuehrer was a better dancer than Churchill, he told funnier jokes….’

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 I’ve recently joined the ranks of San Francisco landlords who have decided that it’s better to keep an apartment empty than to lease it to tenants. Together, we have left vacant about 10,600 rental units. That’s about five percent of the city’s total — or enough space to house up to 30,000 people in a city that barely tops 800,000.

I feel a twinge of guilt for those who want to settle in this glorious city but can’t find a flat. But after renting out a one-bedroom apartment in my home for several years, I will never do it again. San Francisco’s anti-landlord housing laws and political climate make it untenable.

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Why are public school union heads always black women who weigh 300 pounds? Is there some formal requirement, or just an ‘understanding’?

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 In 1936, when the French were poised to merge the newly formed Alawite coastal state into a larger Syrian republic, six Alawite notables sent a petition begging them to reconsider. “The spirit of hatred and fanaticism embedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims against everything that is non-Muslim has been perpetually nurtured by the Islamic religion,” they wrote. “There is no hope that the situation will ever change. Therefore, the abolition of the mandate will expose the minorities in Syria to the dangers of death and annihilation, irrespective of the fact that such abolition will annihilate the freedom of thought and belief.” One of the petition’s signers was Sulayman al-Assad, the grandfather of Syria’s current president. Later, after the French abandoned them, the Alawites rushed to embrace the cause of Syrian nationalism, and went to great lengths to make the rest of the country forget their separatist ambitions.

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Bones are made of collagen and a mineral — soft and brittle materials, respectively. But combine the two into a bone and they become much stronger. The mineral provides structure while collagen distributes energy over a larger area.

The two interlock in complicated ways, so first the researchers modeled a bone on a computer. Software translated this into a design readable by a Stratasys 3D printer capable of printing with two materials. Within hours, the researchers had their synthetic bone. The 3D printer produced a sheet of polymer about half the size of a piece of paper and one-eighth inch thick. Hard polymer formed the hard bricks of mineral while soft polymer worked as flexible collagen mortar. The material was as tough as bone and more than 20 times stronger than printed polymers that resembled just collagen or mineral, the paper said.

Tom Smith makes it.

The thing that makes the IRS scandal really troubling is that it was (or is) an attempt to manipulate our political process. Again, obviously, it was an attempt by pro-Obama persons to suppress political activity that they disagreed with, and that their superiors disagreed with, and that was contrary to the party in power in the Senate and White House. I hate to say, this strikes at the heart of, but this really does strike at the heart of the democratic compact under which we live. If the party in power can use its influence to subvert the electoral process, then all bets are off. Of course, this is exactly how machine politics in Chicago have worked since the Daley machine and before. One party gets ahold of things, uses its influence to subvert the process, and then you don’t have a democracy any more. To oppose the party in power becomes too dangerous, too expensive or just too futile. I suppose this would not be so bad, except that the Democrats are such a lot of hohos.

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It remains to be seen how far governments will go. Laws are made to protect people from harm, but they’re also made by taking into account the interests of special interests who spend billions to lobby the halls of Congress. Innovation like the types cited here directly threaten a range of powerful, incumbent, cash-rich industries who view lobbying costs as a minor line-item expense, the cost of doing business in America. The other side of this coin is that, right now, government regulation that overreaches to the point of suppressing an individual’s ability to earn a living wage is the political equivalent of playing with fire. It’s early, but consumer demand is pointing in a direction where the democratization of access to technologies like electric vehicles, 3-D printers, alternative currencies, and peer-to-peer lending puts more power into peoples’ hands than government can realistically control.

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The very blue state of Massachusetts, whose voters preferred Barack Obama by 61% over their own former governor last November, gets by just fine with a flat tax of 5.25%, well below NC’s top rate. Ballot measures to create a graduated income tax system have been put before voters in this bastion of liberalism five times and five times Massachusetts voters have decided to keep their flat tax in place. The Bay State’s ever-so-progressive voters, who have voted for the Democratic candidate in the last seven presidential elections, seem to like their flat tax just fine and don’t want to get rid of it. If flat tax opponents truly believe their own hyperbolic rhetoric, they must consider places like Boston and Cambridge to be some dystopian wasteland.

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And perfectly suited to the people who get them, who are the most worthless people on campus.

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The humorlessness of feminism is an old story, but it is interesting to see a backlash building in mainstream America and not just among conservative critics.  The most interesting recent story you may have missed concerns Rebecca Walker, the daughter of the celebrated feminist author Alice Walker, who, according to her daughter, is an egregiously awful human being because of her feminist views.

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The deleted entry, which has since been restored, concerned a 2010 scandal in which Johnson was found to have “awarded 23 scholarships over five years to two of her grandsons, two sons of her nephew and the children of her top congressional aide in Dallas.” It was a clear violation of the scholarship fund’s anti-nepotism and residency rules. Johnson eventually repaid the foundation more than $31,000 for the misappropriated scholarships, but has been hammered over the issue by rivals during her two most recent campaigns.

Yet another Corrupt Black Democrat caught with hand in cookie jar. You’d think they’d learn.

The Other McCain is on the case.

“You can’t do that.”
   But it makes me feel good.
“It’s against the law.”
   Then we should change the law.
“Why?”
   Because it makes me feel good.
“Who cares about your feelings?”
   Hater.

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According to US Department of Fish and Wildlife representative John McCamman, “They are just ripping stuff up.” But residents can’t do anything about the delinquent condors, due to federal and state regulations. In fact, the California State Fish and Game Commission recently prohibited use of lead ammunition in areas in which condors nest. Actually, about the only thing you can do to the condor in California is kill it using a wind turbine.

Or you could move to Texas….

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The Oath Keepers are a coalition of current and former military, police, and other public officials who have pledged not to obey unconstitutional commands. They’re extremely controversial, with critics accusing them (inaccurately) of fomenting terrorism and (more accurately) of attracting people with an affinity for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric. Since they were launched in the first year of the Obama administration, they are also sometimes accused of being unconcerned with the constitutional violations of the Bush years.

The latter charge doesn’t match what I’ve observed in my reporting about the group. Still, I was interested to see how they would react to the unfolding NSA story. In particular, I wondered whether they’d see Edward Snowden’s decision to leak the PRISM documents as the sort of disobedience they champion, and I wondered how much their discussion of the story would extend to Bush-era as well as Obama-era surveillance.

Wonder no more. Stewart Rhodes, the group’s founder, has emailed me a statement about Snowden….

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A.  Human nature is a blank slate to be written upon by the Laws of the Cathedral.

B.  Evolution exists but only insofar as it is a club to beat up on religion.  Otherwise, the logical conclusions of evolution (such as meaningful racial or gender differences) must be silenced.  All group differences must be ignored.  No cognitive or behavioral differences between groups exist; evolution occurred only from the neck down.

C.  Homosexuality has a genetic cause but only homosexuality is heritable.  Everything else (like violence, intelligence or stupidity) is the result of culture.

D.  Race does not exist…except when it does.  For non-whites, racial pride, racial resentment, racial organization and the excuse of racism for all their failings are permissible.  For whites, race does not exist; it is a cultural construct.  Behaviorally and cognitively, all races are identical.  Remember the decree:  neck down!

E.  Gender does not exist in any meaningful way.  There are no substantial differences between the genders because, well, they don’t really exist…except when they do.  Feminism is permissible, but that’s it. Behaviorally, genders are identical.  Remember the decree:  neck down!

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Reality intrudes.

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Leprosy, the disease that causes skin lesions and eventually permanent disfigurement, was a constant threat in Medieval Europe, with as many as one in 30 people infected in some areas. But something remarkable happened around the mid 1500s — disease rates dropped sharply, according to historical records, although scientists were not quite sure why. Now an international team of researchers has uncovered DNA evidence that suggests humans rapidly evolved to fight off the disease.

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Danielle Powell was close to getting her bachelor’s degree when she was kicked out of her university for being gay in 2012, and now says the only way the school will transfer her credits to another school is if she agrees to pay $6,300. In response, Powell has launched an online petition to pressure the school to forgive the debt.

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

Michael James, executive vice president at Grace, told The Huffington Post that the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act prevents them from discussing any student’s particular case. But he did confirm the student handbook states that “Any student involved in sexually immoral behavior, including premarital sex, adultery, and homosexual acts, is at minimum placed on University probation and may be subject to a Judiciary Hearing.”

The question I have is, why was she attending a religious university? Could somebody please send her a clue?

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Yet another set of reasons not to fly.

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After some to’ing and fro’ing Soylent were kind enough to ship Vulture West a week-long supply of the stuff, so with a mild amount of trepidation we began our Soylent adventure on a muggy Thursday night in Oakland, California.

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What a great idea!

Hey, I ‘identify’ as a Congressman! Does that mean I can use their gym and barber shop?

Steve Sailer reports what you won’t see on the evening news.

Authorities in western Mexico say a tanker truck carrying tar has slammed into a highway toll booth that had temporarily been taken over by protesting teachers. They say seven people are dead and another 14 injured.

And there’s a bit of Own Damned Fault here:

The runaway truck ramp placed just before the toll booth was blocked by vehicles left by … the protesting teachers killed in the accident!

Hey, we really want more of these people in this country, don’t we?

 Why does the Gang of Eight want to make America more like Mexico?

What an excellent question….

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Here are the facts: the IRS targeted political opponents of the current administration, while repeatedly giving an easy ride to friends of the current administration – going so far as to retroactively approve a so-called charity which was run by the President’s brother, which just happened to be named after the President’s father.

This kind of thuggery and nepotism is usually only found in basket-case countries like North Korea, not in the United States. And yet, over the past few weeks, we have seen example after example of President Obama’s political friends and insiders getting fast-tracked by the IRS, while those of us who dare call ourselves “Patriots” were taken to the woodshed by the powerful tax agency.

What Nixon only dreamed of, Obama brought to pass.

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ReasonGovernment officials like to use eminent domain for the convenience of their preferred policies and/or the enrichment of themselves and their buddies. Usually, they get away with it, because the folks on the receiving end are too few and powerless to hold their tormentors to account. In Hackensack, New Jersey, however, the officials who targeted Michael Monaghan’s property for seizure as part of an “area in need of redevelopment,”  even while denying him the right to develop it himself, pushed too many people around, too often. Last month, voters booted out the entire city council.

Bruce Schneier wakes to reality.

If you’ve started to think of yourself as a hapless peasant in a Game of Thrones power struggle, you’re more right than you may realize. These are not traditional companies, and we are not traditional customers. These are feudal lords, and we are their vassals, peasants, and serfs.

Except that they feel no obligation of Good Lordship, which is why actual feudalism is preferable.

(You can look it up.)

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Of course he does. Servants of the Crust ought not to have to suffer what they put the rest of the country through! That’s just wrong!

The report indicates that Democrats want to alter the requirement, but know that it may not be easy politically. That’s hardly surprising given that “the provision was put in the bill in the first place on the theory that if Congress was going to make the country live under the provisions of Obamacare, the members and staff should have to as well.” Rep. John Larson, a Democrat from Connecticut, however, thinks that requirement is unreasonable. If the problems many Hill staffers have with the requirement are not resolved, he told Politico, “I think we should begin an immediate amicus brief to say, ‘Listen this is simply not fair to these employees.’ They are federal employees.” So it’s unfair to require federal employees to participate in one of the central features of a law they passed?