Jim Goad looks at the current scene.

Why has the American media suddenly snapped out of a self-induced coma to pay attention to the Knockout Game? Gullible journos are acting as if it’s a spanking-new phenomenon that is sweeping the country, but the practice of black wolf packs cold-cocking pedestrians for cheap thrills has been going on for years. The only thing that’s sweeping the country is the media’s sudden willingness to talk about it. And not only are they talking, they’ve also dropped dog whistles such as “youths” and “teens” and are openly noting the assailants’ and victims’ race. What was the tipping point?

…

Throughout history, those who rule the streets have often served as the shock troops and enforcers for those who rule the nation. This isn’t some empty nihilistic ritual—it’s a highly political act of establishing dominance and marking one’s territory.

…

Black Atlanta radio host T. J. Sotomayor recorded a 16-minute video where he says white people should counter the Knockout Game with one called Shootout Game.

True that.

Joel Kotkin nails it.

The yeoman class, whom the Russian Communists called ‘kulaks’ and attempted to liquidate, are the backbone of any society, as Jefferson appreciated.

Obamacare’s first set of victims was predictable: the self-employed and owners of small businesses. Since the bungled launch of the health insurance enrollment system, hundreds of thousands of self-insured people have either had their policies revoked or may find themselves in that situation in the coming months. More than 10 million self-insured people, many of them self-employed, could meet a similar fate.

Unlike large companies or labor unions, which have sought to delay or duck implementing the Affordable Care Act, what could be called the yeoman class lacks the political might to make much of a dent in Washington policies. Indeed, in the Obama era, with its emphasis on top-down solutions and Chicago-style brokering, Americans who work for themselves probably are more marginalized today than at any time in recent memory.

The Antiplanner calls bullshit.

The United States is now producing more oil than it imports for the first time since 1995. Not only is the U.S. producing more oil than Saudi Arabia today, it is poised to become the world’s largest oil producer (ahead of Russia, which is currently number one) by 2015.

Despite these dramatic changes, there are some who still want to harp on peak oil. “A new multi-disciplinary study led by the University of Maryland calls for immediate action by government, private and commercial sectors to reduce vulnerability to the imminent threat of global peak oil,” says one news article.

In fact, the study in question doesn’t predict that peak oil will take place soon, only that if it does, it will have serious consequences. But even that conclusion is wrong, as the “multidisciplinary team” would have known if one of the disciplines had been economics.

Read it.

Doctors began using phages to treat bacterial infections nearly a century ago, but the idea that phages could protect against food-borne pathogens came about in the past decade. “The food industry isn’t known for its quick adaptation for new innovations,” says Dirk DeMeester, director of business development for Micreos Food Safety, the Dutch company that developed Listex. Yet the idea seems to be slowly gaining traction. DeMeester declined to provide sales figures, but he hinted that business is booming. “Our growth is exponential,” he says. “People are starting to understand that it’s more than just a good idea. It’s going to be an industry standard.”

Read it.

Among the team’s findings is that the genus Equus — which includes all horses, donkeys, and zebras — dates back more than 4 million years, twice as long ago as scientists had previously believed.

Check it out.

So much for the ‘family farm’.

Read it.

New uses for it are constantly being discovered – but it’s possible that one day we’ll be able to stop mining the ore, and rely completely on recycling.

Especially if our First World reproductive rates continue below replacement level. I haven’t seen a lot of Muslims use aluminum.

Read it.

And if it doesn’t come in the form of an app, they’ve got no time for it.

Welcome to ADD nation.

Read it.

Neoreactionaries believe that while technology and capitalism have advanced humanity over the past couple centuries, democracy has actually done more harm than good. They propose a return to old-fashioned gender roles, social order and monarchy.

Oh, noes! We’re a movement!

Enough has been written on neoreaction already to fill at least a couple of books, so if you prefer to go straight to the source, just pop a Modafinil and skip to the “Neoreaction Reading List” at the end of this post. For everyone else, I’ll do my best to summarize neoreactionary thought and why it might matter.

Set phasers for ‘strawman’….

“Reactionary” originally meant someone who opposed the French Revolution, and today the term generally refers to those who would like to return to some pre-existing state of affairs.

In other words, most Eco-nazis, public transit aficionados, urban density proponents, paleo-diet mavens, back-to-the-land hippies, ‘family farm’ activists, opponents of ‘sprawl’, AlGore, and illegal immigrants who would like to stay where they are but have it be Mexico again. Lot of Democrats there. But I don’t thing those are who he has in mind….

Neoreactionaries believe “The Cathedral,” is a meta-institution that consists largely of Harvard and other Ivy League schools, The New York Times and various civil servants. Anissimov calls it a “self-organizing consensus.” Sometimes the term is used synonymously with political correctness. The fundamental idea is that the Cathedral regulates our discussions enforces a set of norms as to what sorts of ideas are acceptable and how we view history — it controls the Overton window, in other words.

What I call the Crust, which I think is a more useful term since it more readily captures its relationship to the bulk of the population.

Read it.

VCs and entrepreneurs tend to be well educated. Well educated people think about education as an investment. You put as many of your resources in to an investment as you can. It may take 20 years to pay off, but if the return-on-investment is high (which it is for education) then you invest. This group of people — if you’re reading this, you fall into this group — generally understand that education is an investment, and as a result are price insensitive and will optimize for quality (a higher return on investment). For this group of people, quality is the primary driver of a purchasing decision, not cost.

The average, middle class person thinks about education as an expenditure, not an investment. It’s something they have to do because it’s mandated and the lack of the highest quality education hasn’t negatively impacted their lives in a meaningful way. Step back for a second before you judge. Imagine it’s 2005, and you live in a small town in the middle of Ohio (where I grew up) and you don’t get a college degree. If you get a factory job and make $25k/year and your wife gets a factory job and makes $25k/year, you’re making $50k/year. But houses only cost $90,000 and food is affordable and you can get a loan for a car for $300/month. So you’re not doing terribly and the default state for your children is the same life. You can afford a house, food, have a car, and have weekends off.

So, what has the lack of an education done to the typical American’s life? It’s removed job security, screwed your retirement, and maybe set you up to go bankrupt if you get sick. There are no immediate consequences, there are no immediate consequences for your children, but there is an immediate cost. So the average person thinks of education as an expenditure. If you get sick when you’re 70, you’re screwed. Or if you don’t save in your 401k, you may have to work till you’re dead. Or maybe your children won’t be as competitive in a global workforce 30 years. Don’t believe me? Only 15% of kids taking the SAT pay for an out of school test prep course like Kaplan. Over 50% of Americans don’t have beyond a high school degree.

Read it.

Help us celebrate rich white people creating works of art to sell to other rich white people in order to raise pocket change (relatively to the net worth of the people involved) that will go (nominally) to benefit poor black people (but actually line the pockets of First World bureaucrats and Third World kleptocrats) and allow these same rich white people to feel all warm and fuzzy about themselves, while middle class people in their own countries can’t find a job because the politicians that the same rich white people helped put into office are busy destroying their economy and their culture.

Lenin was right.

Read it.

With his palatial mansion behind him and clouds of steam rising from his body, the wealthy eccentric stood as two large attendants dried him in a plush towel and then wrapped an equally luxurious blanket around his bare shoulders. “In the span of two hours, my machine brought the sea from 47 degrees to a balmy 82,” Hodgegrass announced. “After a few adjustments and a bit of time, I expect all my affluent neighbors to have one of these machines,” he continued, adding, “Nature will no longer dictate how we spend our leisure time.”

I look forward to watching the eco-nazis and global warming control freaks blow a gasket. Pass the popcorn.

Read it.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

Read it.

We recently noted that black college students at Bowie State University in Maryland lost their low-cost student health insurance plan  due to Affordable Care Act regulations (“Obamacare”).

The College Fix provides some students reviews of the President and his signature legislation.  They aren’t flattering.

Hey, you broke it, you own it.

Read it.

Thursday, we told you about the bizarre sex scandal in which Phoenix Police Officer Christopher Wilson, gay “community liaison” for the department, was accused of having illegal sex with two boys, ages 14 and 17. The older of Wilson’s victims, Caleb Laieski, now 18, has now been charged for having sex with the younger boy in a three-way with Wilson. Now details have emerged about how Laieski allegedly tried to prevent the 14-year-old from reporting the crime.

Laieski, who had moved to Washington in 2012, feared the scandal would ruin his chances of getting a job at the White House.

“[P]olice records show that Laieski actively pressured his young friend not to tell anyone about the abuse in order to protect his rising star from being tarnished, even after the younger boy became suicidal,”  Kirsten Andersen of LifeSiteNews.com reported Thursday….

Ordinarily that might be a problem, but with this White House, you never know.

Lion of the Blogosphere has the right of it.

The NY Times finally acknowledges the existence of the knockout game, or rather they acknowledge the existence of people talking about it, because the take of the article is that it’s really an urban myth and the purported knockout-game attacks are just random violence.

Furthermore, the writer of the article deftly implies that people who are talking about the existence of such a game are racist while at the same time completely avoiding reporting that the perpetrators of the attacks are black and the victims white.

One interesting nugget from the article is that the prole whites in predominately Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn are taking the threat very seriously.

As well they might, since a lot of these ‘games’ target Jews specifically.

Read it.

Broward Circuit Judge Lisa Porter has been in law for 25 years in Florida, but she never saw a case like this one. Five teenagers allegedly organized and then beat, held down, and videotaped a 16-year old girl while she was raped by 19-year old Jayvon Woolfork.

At the hearing for Patricia Montes, 15, and Erica Avery, 16, prosecutor Maria Schneider handed over the defendants’ cellphones and told Porter the victim pleaded with the attackers to stop. The girl broke bones in her face and bled from her ears when she was thrown down the stairs and her head smashed against the concrete. Her eyes were beaten in until they were swollen shut.

I guess we’re all Trayvon (rhymes with ‘Jayvon’) Martin now. (Except for white people, of course.)

Read it.

 Bumping fists has a negative bro-stigma, but it’s better than shaking hands—in that it transmits significantly fewer bacteria. At a time of global concern that our antibiotics are becoming obsolete, new research shows how fist bumping could save lives.

This is from The Atlantic, a Real National Magazine. They actually pay people to write about this stuff.

I regard someone holding a fist out at me as an unsolicited act of aggression, and reserve the right to respond accordingly.

Take a look at this guy and tell me, with a straight face, that you would put him in charge of anything related to education at any level.

Read it.

    Chantal Chagnon with the Idle No More movement, said they’re trying to get the attention of the energy industry and the Canadian Parliament to the growing global opposition to “pipelines, tar sands expansions and other polices that contribute to runaway climate change.”

“We’re seeing the effects of global warming and we can’t keep denying it because obviously something is happening,” Chagnon said.

Well, maybe not:

    Originally about 300 people were slated to participate in the Calgary protest, but due to a snow storm only about 50 showed up.

Funny how that works.

The Other McCain is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Fortunately, the Secret Service need not worry about Friedersdorf purchasing a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle just now. The focus of his manic obsession is not the current president, but his predecessor.

Bush Derangement Syndrome — the psychiatric malady that seized the minds of liberals for eight years of their paranoid nightmares — has left the landscape littered with deranged kooks. In 2011, Jared Loughner succumbed to 9/11 Truther craziness and went berserk in Tucson. Barrett Brown flipped out last year, ranting about a mad conspiracy against him. Down in Alabama, Roger Shuler is convinced he is the target of a corrupt scheme masterminded by Karl Rove. Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond blames Bush, too.

Then there is Conor Friedersdorf, superficially rational yet consumed by the delusion that George W. Bush was the worst president in American history, and in the grip of a dread fear that there will be a Second Coming of Dubya if the GOP ever wins another election.

Like David Frum, Friedersdorf (who Mark Levin calles ‘Friedersdork’, not without reason) is somebody who leveraged a fringe position as a Perhaps Bright Young Conservative into fifteen minutes of fame and then promptly left the reservation, never to return.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

Larry Summers, former head of the National Economic Council, thought having Jarrett represent the White House was a mistake. Business leaders “felt patronized and offended by Valerie,” Summers told Woodward, largely due to her tendency to insist that she spoke for the president, and an approach to problem-solving that involved little more than scheduling multiple lunch meetings. One CEO complained to Alter that “when we go to the White House, we talk to people we wouldn’t hire.” Alter himself has likened Jarrett’s role in the White House to “the CEO putting his sister in charge of marketing.”

…

Who thinks it is a good idea for non-producers to control production? Who fails to see that this is steering in the direction of no longer producing things? It seems so obvious. It’s embarrassing to have to take time to point it out. Is this one of those things where there is a division between the malevolent and the ignorant, between the active and the passive? As in: Valerie Jarrett wants to tell people who know far better than her, how to make something, so let’s put her in a position where she gets to do that…meh, okay, alright, can’t see a reason not to. I suppose that’s why Obama is where He is. His fans don’t claim to understand the particulars of cellular phone technology, or health insurance, or any other kind of business. They claim the opposite. I’ve spoken to them. Obama’s just fun to watch. Gives great speeches. Is it all like that?

…

Political figures achieve their high position, within politics, because of…politics. Period. We forget this out of convenience. But we forget it at an extraordinary cost to ourselves, and to the things we claim are important to us.

Michael Barone turns over a rock and watches what wiggles out.

The defects of the Obamacare website have become well known. But the problems with the law go further than the website. These problems are not incidental, but central to its design and the intentions of its architects.

Many Obamacare backers, including Barack Obama, would prefer “single-payer” health insurance. The government would pay for everything and you would get health care for free.

…

Government hasn’t yet proposed subsidizing the purchase of clothing. But the thought is that health care, imposing disproportionate costs on some individuals, should be provided for free.

Obamacare’s architects knew the votes weren’t there for single-payer insurance, so they fashioned their health care legislation and regulations to reduce out-of-pocket costs for people with different health care needs.

Freeberg nails it again.

The generation that comes to power after JFK’s demise, thinks big. Too big. Rather than feed a child, they want to “end famine and poverty.” Rather than find a diplomatic alternative to the latest war, they want to “end war.” Politicians on both sides fall prey to this thinking — although it seems only Republicans get nailed for it — with George W. Bush widely, and perhaps rightfully, lampooned for wanting to “end terrorism.” End, end, end. I’m guessing their perception must be, and I partly sympathize with this, that all (or most) bad things that happen are merely echoes of something that came before, and if we can just somehow bring it all to a stop, the tragic echoing will cease forever. Like making a species extinct, except it’s something bad going extinct, and that would be a good thing. End disease, end blight, end bigotry and racism, end war, end hate, end all sorts of things…that horrify us, but are part of life, and will endure as long as life endures. Even death is a part of life. But with this innocence-lost event now five decades past, the prevailing viewpoint has no time to understand that. It’s too busy ending things.

…

We tend to think of a loss of innocence as having something to do with an acquisition of knowledge. There may be some truth to that. But, knowledge doesn’t do you any good if you can’t think straight.

Read it.

Two quick-thinking men on Newfoundland’s northeast coast managed to save a Greenland shark from choking to death on a large piece of moose hide this past weekend.

They just had to help him out, eh.

Check it out.

The Internet works, even when there’s no point.

Pop-Out Outlets

Aussie multimedia-electro-tool-chest

Desktop siege engines

The Bulletproof Suit

Read it.

And than God for that.

Officers refine counseling and interrogation skills on artificially intelligent virtual humans. Commanders execute complex battle drills as if they were a giant round of World of Warcraft. Soldiers dispose of improvised explosive devices in driving simulators. Immersive, portable, and tailor-made for the Xbox generation, these simulations are being used to do everything from treating post-traumatic stress disorder to familiarizing a soldier with an enemy base, as in the case of the Afghanistan scenario I experienced.

“We don’t give them a manual, we don’t send them home for three weeks to study,” says James Blake, head of the U.S. Army Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation. “We just put them in the environment, put the device on them, and exercise.”

Read it.

The seemingly inexorable march towards economic socialism and political statism has been accomplished through legislative and judicial ratchets which, once established, were all but impossible to reverse in part because the filibuster helped lock in the agenda and those supporting the agenda.

Because of the ratchet, the nation moved only in one direction: Towards redistribution of wealth, and bigger government.

Because of the ratchet, there was little or no hope of fundamental reversals.

Not anymore.

When Democrats — the embodiment of redistribution and statism — exercised the Nuclear Option yesterday, they blew up the ratchet. The filibuster is dead for all purposes, even if superficially only as to non-Supreme Court nomninees. No one will respect the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees or important legislation — the Senate can’t be half pregnant.

Gavin McInnes reflects.

I told him of a recent revelation where I realized it’s not a choice between “Do they hate us because they’re inbred?” or “Do they hate us because of Israel?”

It’s both. They hate us because they’re inbred and also because of Israel.

He disagreed and said it was neither. “It’s because the book says to kill us and they think God wrote the book.” We then talked about seemingly random attacks on Vancouver and Glasgow and how little our foreign policy in Israel has to do with terrorism in the Philippines right now. The conversation ended with both of us agreeing that nobody kills more Muslims than Muslims do.

Read it.

A single layer of tin atoms could be the world’s first material to conduct electricity with 100 percent efficiency at the temperatures that computer chips operate, according to a team of theoretical physicists led by researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University.

Researchers call the new material “stanene,” combining the Latin name for tin (stannum) with the suffix used in graphene, another single-layer material whose novel electrical properties hold promise for a wide range of applications.

Read it.

Thirty years ago the Wall Street Journal published Edward Jay Epstein’s essay “Who was Lee Harvey Oswald” on the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. Ed has sent along his draft of his essay with the question: “How much has changed?” If anything has changed, it is the ever increasing quantity of ignorance and stupidity abroad in the land on the subject of the Kennedy assassination. Here is Epstein’s 1983 short course on Lee Harvey Oswald.

Taki waxes wroth.

Black rappers in America use the N-word ad nauseam, and rap savages hate, boast sexual degradation of women, and call gay people faggots. Jay-Z, a freak billionaire, boasts about the drugs he used to sell, uses the N-word nonstop, and ends up on the cover of Vanity Fair! The networks in America and Britain show mostly mass slaughter as supplied by assault rifles and are replete with fires, explosions, guns, and mayhem. People regularly walk into schools or malls with high-powered rifles and shoot children and innocent bystanders. Black professional basketball and football players in the states are regularly arrested for violence against women and even murder, but newspapers don’t even bother writing about those arrested under the influence with guns in their cars.

Yet when Alec Baldwin uses the C-word, he gets canned and the tabloids go wild. American colleges are the only ones in the world who pay for student athletes not to attend classes but to graduate literally illiterate. What they’re really doing is pumping out criminals because less than one percent of college athletes make the pros. Once out in the real world with absolutely no credentials or education whatsoever except a useless degree, they more often than not go into crime. But Alec Baldwin is the bad guy.

Read it.

The script for the Fox Searchlight project is being written by Tolkien “superfan” David Gleeson, whose credits include screenwriter on Irish movies Cowboys & Angels and The Front Line. Gleeson has an eventful life to pick through: Tolkien lived through both World Wars, serving as a signals officer during World War I, and training as a codebreaker in Britain’s Bletchley Park during World War II, before crafting the world of Middle Earth and populating it with elves, orcs, and dwarves.

Read it.

A generic op-ed suitable for any occasion.

I was inspired to write this piece by Currently Fashionable Polemicist, who summarised the Issue better than I could when they said “oversimplification that makes me feel smart”. I have a strong opinion on this Issue, and my sharing it with you at this time is in no way attributable to opportunism on my part, due to the Issue’s sudden prominence in the news cycle. I haven’t exaggerated my position in the interests of raising my public profile, and here I am casually dropping in a reference to a long-ago instance that proves I have cared about the Issue for longer than you.

And there you have everything you need to know on the subject.

Read it.

In a survey of staff at clinics across England, the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) found that more than a third said patients were “sometimes” losing their sight needlessly because of delays to treatment and follow-up care caused by capacity problems.

Don’t you just love that government-provided health care? Don’t you just wish we had a system like that here in the U.S.?

No, I thought not….

Read it.

I noted earlier today that many politicians, pundits and newspapers have been hypocrites on the filibuster, favoring it when their party is in the minority and opposing it when their party controls the Senate. But of all the hypocrites, the most shameless must be the editorial board of the New York Times. Have they forgotten that Google exists? Are they unaware that anyone can search their web site and see what they wrote about an issue when the shoe was on the other foot? Or are they so resigned to being known as partisan hacks that they just don’t care?

That the New York Times are a bunch of partisan hacks comes as no surprise — and hasn’t for at least sixty years. That their target reader has the memory of a two-year-old — Look, squirrel! — comes as no surprise, either.

Read it.

The modern “environmental” movement has little or nothing to do with the environment, and a great deal to do with the real green stuff: money. One hundred thirty-two governments are in a huff because their latest attempt at extortion has failed….

And, of course, they’re miffed that the U.N. isn’t living up to its obligation to transfer money from First World taxpayers to Third World kelptocrats. C’mon, let’s get with the program!

Read it.

Covered California, that state’s insurance exchange, has rejected President Obama’s request that people be allowed to remain in non-compliant health insurance plans for another year. This decision is highly significant because California has experienced by far the most insurance policy cancellations of any state, reportedly around 900,000 of them.

Obama: “Hey, guys, let’s just, you know, not obey the law. I won’t arrest you for it.”

And if you believe that one, he’ll tell you another one. Fortunately, the people being invited to break the law are wise to that game.

The irony is only superficial. Blue State leaders are saying no because, as liberals, they dislike private plans and, more importantly, want to offer no escape from Obamacare for the young and the healthy whose participation in exchanges is needed to subsidize the middle-aged and the sick.

…

This raises the question of whether Obama really wants states to agree to his fix. More likely, he views the situation the way California, New York, etc. do, and has offered his fix as a stunt to reduce the political damage resulting from his false promise that people who like their plan can keep their plan.

Read it.

Even though his health-care website is still in need of dire repair, President Obama was in the port of New Orleans earlier this month talking about repairing a much bigger problem: the nation’s aging highways, bridges and ports. Saying that 1 in 9 bridges are structurally deficient and more than 40 percent of major highways are congested, Obama repeated his call for major infrastructure investment, but it’s unclear how or if that will happen.

As long as the government keeps wasting money on bullshit projects that people don’t want or need, like high-speed rail and HOV lanes, there won’t be any money for the things that people do want and need, like roads and bridges that aren’t falling apart.

Read it.

All this artful dodging about the murder of President Kennedy began, of course, nearly 50 years ago with the Warren Commission, the blue-ribbon panel that was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson — not to get at the truth, but to “lay the dust” (in the words of one commissioner) on all the disturbing rumors that were swirling around the bloody events in Dallas. Two new books take us inside the Warren Commission sausage factory, and show in often shocking detail how the august panel got it so terribly wrong.  Soon after the Warren Report was released in September 1964, polls began showing that the American people rejected its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of the president – and nearly a half century later, the report remains a notorious symbol of official coverup. [This does not prevent Abramson from blithely declaring that “the historical consensus seems to have settled on” the lone gunman theory – there is no such consensus, only a deeply fractious ongoing debate.]

Read it.

A river runs through it — and Uncle Sam isn’t far behind.

That’s what several Republican lawmakers and even state farming groups and local governments are warning, after a draft rule from the Environmental Protection Agency proposed expanding which waterways are federally protected under the Clean Water Act.

The concern is that the move could give the feds authority over virtually any stream or ditch, and hand environmentalists another way to sue property owners. In other words, critics say, the government might soon be able to declare jurisdiction over a seasonal stream in your backyard.

If so, good luck getting a permit to expand building space on your property, or marketing your land to prospective developers.

Read it.

A teen playing the “Knockout Game” in Lansing, Michigan unwittingly targeted a concealed carry permit holder and was shot twice. He survived and is now in jail.

Gotta geta gun.

Read it.

The craven act of sucker punching an unsuspecting person known as the “knockout game” is being played in cities across the nation. The object of the game is to walk by a person unaware that your intention is to punch him in the face or the back of the head and try to knock the person unconscious with one swift blow. The game has resulted in at least one death and many seriously injured people. The only perpetrators identified thus far have been black teenagers.

Read it.

Thus far, gun control is a commonality between the attacks and the cities in which they are happening. It appears the attackers are choosing victims in cities where both the victim and bystanders lack the ability to be armed in self defense.

Read it.

Hey, Asians look white in the dark….

Read it.

Most people don’t want to know how the McRib and McNuggets are made for the same reason they don’t like hanging around slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants, and to suggest that there’s something wrong with this is itself wrong. It’s a clear signal that the writer doesn’t understand ordinary folks and how they think and feel. Unfortunately, this is a common problem with the academic Pecksniffs among us, who can’t understand why Americans prefer tasty, affordable mass-produced hamburgers and pork sandwiches to tasteless, expensive “organic” foods that can’t be easily consumed while on the road in the family minivan. Or, for that matter, a preference for clinging to guns and religion in a time when the intellectualoids and their Lightworker are in charge and straining to produce a national transformation.

Read it.

Google has launched an ambitious Chrome experiment today, in partnership with The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. It’s an interactive updated version of those great hand-drawn maps Tolkien included in his print edition of the works upon which these movies are based, that provides a guided tour of Middle-earth and the people, elves, trolls, wizards and other beasts that populate it.

Read it.

If that’s what you want to do, of course — and can afford to travel to Krakow.

Read it.

Officer Chris Wilson was the Phoenix Police Department’s “community liaison to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community” until August 2012, when he was arrested and charged with having sex with two teenage boys.

Set a thief to catch a thief; set a pervert to ‘liase’ with perverts. What could go wrong?