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Ah, yes, government-provided health care — works every place it’s tried, doesn’t it?

Steve Sailer reveals the awful truth, just in case you don’t read the Barbados Free Press regularly, which I’m sure you do.

A college roommate of one of my sons said, “Here in America, everybody calls me black, while back home in Jamaica, everybody calls me white.”

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There is nothing new under the sun.

The Bluebird of Bitterness reminds us of the importance of this vital piece of American culture.

HEIDI (noun) – Greeting.

HIRE YEW (verb and pronoun) – Complete sentence. Remainder of greeting. Usage: “Heidi! Hire yew?”

BARD (verb) – Past tense of the verb “to borrow.” Usage: “My brother bard my pickup truck.”

JAWJUH (noun) – The state north of Florida. Capitol is Lanner. Usage: “My brother from Jawjuh bard my pickup truck and took it to Lanner.”

BAMMER (noun) – The state west of Jawjuh. Capitol is Berminhayam. Usage: “A tornader jes went through Bammer an’ left $20,000,000 in improvements.”

MUNTS (noun) – A calendar division. Usage: “My brother from Jawjuh bard my pickup truck, and I ain’t heard from him in munts.”

THANK (verb) – Cognitive process. Usage: “Ah thank ah’ll have a bare.”

BARE (noun) – An alcoholic beverage made of barley, hops, and yeast. Usage: “Ah thank ah’ll have another bare.”

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Last week a federal appeals court ruled that “exigent circumstances” made it appropriate for Milwaukee police to break into the home of a local gun rights activist without a warrant. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit conceded that the officers may have violated the Fourth Amendment when they forced open a locked container and seized the woman’s handgun. But the court concluded that they were protected by qualified immunity because it was reasonable for them to believe their actions were legal. After all, they were only trying to protect her. From herself. The decision shows how a single contested remark during a psychotherapy session can strip a law-abiding citizen of her Fourth and Second amendment rights. It also shows how emergency exceptions to the warrant requirement that usually applies to home searches have been stretched to encompass situations that cannot reasonably be viewed as emergencies.

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Sen. Mark Udall is pleading for an extension for billions in subsidies to prop up the wind industry, a fight to protect tax credits utilized by Warren Buffett and one of the Colorado Democrat’s top donors.

And there you have the American system of government in on succinct paragraph.

I’ll make you a bet about those companies who are looking to move overseas to save taxes: None of them are headed by Obama donors.

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“Even though Media Matters advocates for card check and other pro-union policies, they have fought tooth and nail against a union in their own office. It’s time for them to stop their hypocritical opposition and start respecting their own principles,” the petition reads. “It hurts the legitimacy of the progressive movement when organizations like Media Matters ‘talk the talk’ but don’t ‘walk the walk.’”

Steve Sailer pulls the curtain back on some inconvenient truth.

It’s quite interesting how Americans find Eric Holder’s ancestry invisible to them. Most of Eric Holder ancestors weren’t black. His recent ancestors were middle class mulattos in Barbados who carefully avoided marriage to blacks. (See the last chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” for a description of how people who look like Gladwell and Holder were bred.) Holder grew up in a middle class West Indian enclave in NYC that tried (and in Holder’s case succeeded) keeping out black American influence.

As some people only smoke or drink ‘socially’, so Eric Holder is only black ‘politically’.

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I guess cutting taxes so that firms won’t have a big incentive to leave isn’t an option.

Congressional aides, lawyers and other advisers say talk of corporate exits – known as inversions – is growing, in the wake of several recent deals that have taken major U.S. firms offshore.

‘Inversion’ means ‘escape while there’s still time’. They have to find a name that disguises it’s true nature, like ‘intact dilation and extraction’ in place of ‘partial-birth abortion’, so that they can still feel good about themselves while doing damage.

The U.S. has been hit by a wave of corporate exits in the last few years, as businesses grow impatient with what they regard as antiquated U.S. corporate tax rules, and the slow pace of rewriting them in Congress.

Of course, it’s too much to expect that Congress will do its job and pass laws that promote business rather than punish it.

Recently, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) announced that he will seek to place new restrictions on corporate exits as of May 8, 2014. Mr. Wyden has not drawn a lot of GOP support for his retroactive approach, however, suggesting that the window remains open.

Democrats, the party of punishing people.

The legislation to be unveiled on Tuesday is expected to take several steps to minimize the ability of firms to exit. Those measures also are supported by President Barack Obama. The bill is being sponsored by the influential brothers, Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) and Rep. Sander Levin (D., Mich.), who is the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee.

Democrats, the party of punishing people. One of the hallmarks of a totalitarian regime is that they try to keep people from escaping.

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BBC references aside, the instrument’s proper name is a Heptagon Acoustic Tweezer, and it has been developed to maneuver cells into patterns so that they can be used to repair damage to the human body.

The device uses the interference pattern produced at the intersection of two waves of sound to manipulate the tiny cells within a culture of phosphate-buffered saline. The sound system managed to align 25–50,000 cells in experiments.

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

Amanda Green has a complaint.

Some time ago, Sarah asked where her aircar was. I want to know where our space exploration program is. That’s been especially true of late when I’ve seen more and more stories about whether or not Putin would try to claim the Moon for Mother Russia. Then there was the article – and I can’t find the link to it right now – about someone actually selling advertising on the Moon.

…

Somewhere along the line, our priorities changed. The space race turned into a crawl. Our government was suddenly more interested in studying the sex life of a tree frog than it was in continuing the space program. There are times it seems clear that the politicians who are supposed to have our country’s best interest at heart have forgotten the advantages of being the first in the space race. I’m not talking about just the cache of being “first”. There are the defense advantages as well as the potential economic and scientific advantages as well.

…

We now find ourselves in a country where it is more important to make sure no one feels they might not be as good as the next person than it is to nurture a pioneering spirit or an inquisitive mind. We are dumbing down our schools, and doing our children a great disservice, by not pushing our kids to do their best. Instead of trying to push students to raise the bar, we instead go to the lowest common denominator. Consequences are no longer of any, well, consequence. Bullies know they can get away with their actions because the bullied kids will think twice before fighting back because they don’t want to be suspended. Parents don’t put consequences on their kids in too many situations and, as a result, we now have the affluenza defense.

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Early tests reveal that the Twin Cities’ new light-rail cars require 67 minutes to go the 11 miles from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul for an average speed of 10 miles per hour. Metro Transit managers say they expect to get the time down before the line opens for service on June 14, but the 39 minutes promised on the agency’s web site seems unattainable considering they have added three stops since the line was originally planned. Even 39 minutes is less than 17 mph, hardly a breathtaking speed.

Buses currently do the same trip in a mere 26 minutes. Some people are mildly outraged that the region has spent $100 million per mile to get slower service. Too bad they weren’t outraged when the line was being planned.

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The first “confirmed” jackalope specimen was secured by one Douglas Herrick, who in 1932 found a dead one sprawled in his shop in Douglas, Wyoming. If you want to get technical, though, it was an ordinary dead rabbit next to some deer horns on the floor. But Herrick mounted the rabbit, horns and all, thus begetting a slew of taxidermic jackalopes in bars all across the West.

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When Sir Isaac Newton died in 1727, he left behind no will and an enormous stack of papers. His surviving correspondences, notes, and manuscripts contain an estimated 10 million words, enough to fill up roughly 150 novel-length books. There are pages upon pages of scientific and mathematical brilliance. But there are also pages that reveal another side of Newton, a side his descendants tried to keep hidden from the public.

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A popular study from the 1970s that helps sell millions of dollars’ worth of fish oil supplements worldwide is deeply flawed, according to a new study being published in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology.

Can Global Warming be far behind?

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What if he went straight to the raw chemical components? He took a break from experimenting with software and studied textbooks on nutritional biochemistry and the Web sites of the F.D.A., the U.S.D.A., and the Institute of Medicine. Eventually, Rhinehart compiled a list of thirty-five nutrients required for survival. Then, instead of heading to the grocery store, he ordered them off the Internet—mostly in powder or pill form—and poured everything into a blender, with some water. The result, a slurry of chemicals, looked like gooey lemonade. Then, he told me, “I started living on it.” Rhinehart called his potion Soylent, which, for most people, evokes the 1973 science-fiction film “Soylent Green,” starring Charlton Heston. The movie is set in a dystopian future where, because of overpopulation and pollution, people live on mysterious wafers called Soylent Green. The film ends with the ghastly revelation that Soylent Green is made from human flesh.

As you would expect from an article in The New Yorker, the Upper West Side ‘canoeing among the natives’ tone comes through perfectly.

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On a sweltering summer morning in the California desert, deputies looking for methamphetamines and bearing automatic weapons barged into the home of Eugene Mallory, an 80-year-old retired engineer living a quiet life in the small community of Littlerock. Moments later, Mallory lay in his bed bleeding to death from six bullets fired from an MP5 9mm submachine gun. The officers found no meth on the property. As Zach Weismueller of Reason TV writes, the murky circumstances that led to the shooting are now the subject of a federal lawsuit.

Bet it wouldn’t have happened if he’d been an Obama fundraiser.

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But perhaps a Libyan source was not necessary. When I was in Nigeria I was told that the police and army either rented out their arms by the night or sold them to armed robbers, that is to say to common criminals. Everything else was for sale too; ministers rented their offices to swindlers who pretended to be minister for a day so that they could extract sums from foreign businessmen as earnests for contracts that did not exist. At least half the medicines on sale in the country were fake. What was astonishing was not that things did not work well, but that they worked at all.

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Science is not a set of dogmas, and it is not a pronouncement by a committee. It is a method.

…

The catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory is based entirely on models, which are programmed by their creators to predict disaster. But we know for a fact that the models are wrong, because they disagree with reality. When the facts collide with a theory, the facts win.

Except in America. In America (and other places), what the Crust believes, wins.

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It is a common refrain of pious Muslims in the face of atrocities done by other Muslims in the name of Islam that Islam must not be shamed. Whenever an Islamic atrocity potentially dishonors Islam, non-Muslims are asked to agree that ‘This is not Islamic’ so that the honor of Islam can be kept pristine. The real issue, however, is not what would be good or bad for Islam’s reputation; Islam is not the victim here. The pressing issue is not to get people to think well of Islam, but how, for instance, in the case of Boko Haram’s kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls, the girls can be rescued and, above all, how Boko Haram’s murderous rampage can be halted.

…

But does the claim that Boko Haram is not Islamic hold up to scrutiny?

What counts as a valid manifestation of Islam? Ahmaddiyah beliefs can be considered Islamic, for those who hold them do so on the basis of a reasoned interpretation of Islamic canonical sources, even if the majority of Muslims reject them as Muslims. By the same token, the beliefs of Boko Haram must also be considered a form of Islam, for they too are held on the basis of a reasoned interpretation of Islamic canonical sources.

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Researchers determined that a plant like Rinorea niccolifera can be used when removing metallic materials from a polluted ecosystem.

Once the plant absorbs a significant amount of metal, they can also be harvested for their commercially valuable contents, according to the release.

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The whitest city on the Left Coast displays it’s ‘progressive’ chops.

Gavin McInnes lays out some inconvenient truth.

Some of my best friends are black and many of them turn purple with rage when I suggest this possibility. The most common response is that I may not even ponder such things because I’m white. One woman told me about the hell she goes through as a person of color because store employees follow her around like she’s a shoplifter. She is the only individual in her family who has an education. Her sister is in jail and both her brothers are dead from gang-related murders. The shopkeepers who are suspicious of her are only off by one sibling. That’s not prejudice. That’s postjudice. What’s more important than leering stares is that she had the same opportunities as everyone else. Because she tried hard in school and refused to waste time partying, she became a successful and happy Woman of Color.

Lileks scratches his head.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the new fad among Kids These Days, which is jumping into cold water. Goes by many names: the Polar Plunge, the Cold Water Challenge, the Frigid Folly, doesn’t matter. It’s simple: Kid goes into the water. Friend shoots a video of the event, because the point of doing anything these days is to do it for the camera, and then it’s posted online, because otherwise it didn’t happen.

It’s for charity, supposedly. Perhaps the American Association for Halting Hypothermia Health Hazards, or AAHHH, which is the sound you make when you jump into cold water.

…

Why is it popular? Because it’s all about the dare. They say it’s not, but that’s the heart of it. If you are dared, you must comply, or you are chicken, and this stays with you the rest of your life:

“Well, Ms. Horgensted, your résumé is most impressive, and your multilingual aptitude is just the sort of thing our international branches are looking for. I’d say you were a natural fit for our French office, but we’re looking for someone who can meet new challenges square in the face, and according to our NSA intercepts of your social media activity from 10 years ago, you declined to walk into cold water when taunted by a peer. I’m sorry, but we’re looking for a leader. Someone who jumps off a bridge, and everyone else follows.”

One thing I’ve always wondered about is the mystical power of the phrase ‘I dare you.’ (Sometimes the ante is upped by ‘I double-dog dare you’, which is really stupid when you think about it, which of course nobody ever does, except in bootless ruminations such as this one.) The classic measure of susceptibility to peer pressure, at any age, is what you will do in response to ‘I dare you’. Of course, the desired outcome is a successful doing, followed by an admiring ‘I can’t believe you actually did that.’ The key here is the admiring tone, which Makes All Worthwhile; the same phrase, uttered in a appalled tone, would rip off the facade of fashionability and reveal the cold hard truth that this was actually an incredibly stupid thing to do. But peer pressure has one of the lowest IQs on the block.

I suspect that my response to such a phrase these days would be ‘Why? Why is it so important to you that I do this (probably) very stupid thing?’ To which, of course, the dare-er has no ready response–other than, perhaps, ‘Well, that’s what we do.’

My theory is that it’s all about control. If I can persuade you to do a stupid thing merely by saying ‘I dare you’, then I exercise a degree of control over your actions. In this regard I think it is important to appreciate the context: We don’t accept dares from people whom we don’t respect, whose regard we do not value. Accepting a dare is a way of validating our membership in a particular social circle, sort of like voluntarily submitting to a humiliating fraternity initiation ritual. ‘I value membership in this group sufficiently to sacrifice my dignity and perhaps risk life and limb; please honor this sacrifice and welcome me into the group.’

Unfortunately, none of us realize this at twelve, when it would be most valuable. As my granny used to say, ‘We is too soon old, and too late smart.’

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On the faculty discussion board, a staff member posted a complaint about a student walking around barefoot in a building. A response is what set off the larger discussion:

One professor wrote: “My approach would be to assure this student that going barefoot is not against the rules because the assumption is that by the time they reach college, students are expected to understand why wearing shoes is expected on campus. If s/he disrespects his or her peers and the college community enough to (un)dress like a hillbilly here, I would say, then s/he should be prepared to be dismissed as one, in whatever pursuits s/he favors, in the preference of someone more attuned to proper decorum and respectful behavior.”

A professor who was troubled by that response forwarded the comment to the Appalachian studies email list with the question: “Colleagues, if you read the following on your institutional discussion board in reference to a complaint about a barefoot student, how would you respond to the professor?” The responses came quickly. Many were furious that a faculty member would feel free to to talk about “hillbilly” behavior in this way.

One suggested response was: “Spit on their car.”

Larry Summers does Thomas Piketty.

A brief look at the Forbes 400 list also provides only limited support for Piketty’s ideas that fortunes are patiently accumulated through reinvestment. When Forbes compared its list of the wealthiest Americans in 1982 and 2012, it found that less than one tenth of the 1982 list was still on the list in 2012, despite the fact that a significant majority of members of the 1982 list would have qualified for the 2012 list if they had accumulated wealth at a real rate of even 4 percent a year. They did not, given pressures to spend, donate, or misinvest their wealth. In a similar vein, the data also indicate, contra Piketty, that the share of the Forbes 400 who inherited their wealth is in sharp decline.

Jag Grill BBQ Table.

iStick.

Cover Blubber.

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Send your kid to a government school,
And he will turn out a fool;
That’s the way
Things are today —
Your tax bucks at work and play!

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Raul Silva Corona had driven 35 miles in the wrong direction on three freeways with a blood alcohol level of .238 percent in the wee hours of Monday morning before he killed Mesa Police Officer Brandon Mendoza, according to the AP’s report.

Just another fine day in the Obamanation.

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You mess with the bull, you get the horns every time.

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People who are worried about climate change emit far more carbon dioxide in their daily lives than the average American, according to data gathered by a new app that can track one’s carbon footprint.

Ian Monroe, the chief executive of Oroeco, told Grist that his app, which syncs social media data and online shopping habits to estimate users’ daily carbon emissions, reveals environmentalists to be some of the biggest “carbon polluters.”

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Government run health care has come under increased scrutiny as America has learned of the bureaucratic decisions to let patients die rather than receive treatment.

No, this story isn’t about Obamacare, although it does provide a pretty bleak look into the future as the death panels and cost based health decisions come flowing out of Health and Human Services cubicle farms.

This preview is provided by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, a Department which runs the crumbling VA health system.

The VA healthcare system is, in the classic phrase, health care brought to you by the Post Office, and the only good thing one can say about Obamacare is that it isn’t completely run by government bureaucrats.

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First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign is claiming water made Albert Einstein smart, Muhammad Ali a Heavyweight champion, and Audrey Hepburn stylish.

Of course it did. Why, just look what it did for Barack Obama. On the other hand, Winston Churchill always drank champagne. So what does that tell you?

It tells you that not since Eleanor Roosevelt have we had a ‘First Lady’ who was so much of a nagging nanny-state pain in the ass. Say what you will about Hillary, she was never this bad.

Steven Hayward blows the whistle.

I’ve been referring to the climate campaigners here as the “Climatistas” to chide their cult-like resemblance to the romantic Sandinista sympathizers of the 1980s, but it should not be forgotten that the real Sandinistas were a pack of nasty thugs.  Likewise, the climate establishment behaves more like the Mafia today, telling any scientist or academic who might consider any departure from orthodoxy: “Nice little scientific career you have here; shame if anything were to happen to it.”

John Hinderaker looks at Cuba.

Socialism is, by a very wide margin, the worst disaster in the history of the human race. Nothing else comes close. It always fails, and it always brings death-dealing totalitarianism in its wake. Socialism is, in essence, rule by a criminal gang. It generally works for members of the gang, but it never works for anyone else.

Given socialism’s history of universal and comprehensive failure, why does the idea still have allure for so many Westerners who have not experienced it? This remains, in my view, a great mystery, unless one assumes that there are lots of people who envision themselves as part of the ruling gang. Seen from that perspective, maybe socialism looks OK.

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The homeowner, who then pulled his AR-15 from under the bed, said, “I peeked around the corner, saw a tall, slender black gentleman standing over me with a pistol.” The intruder fired a 9mm round at Haith and missed. Haith returned fire with the AR-15, striking the intruder in “the stomach and shoulder.”

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In Daytona Beach, Florida, a couple—Debbie and Chico Jimenez—out of the kindness of their hearts have for the past year on Wednesdays offered full cooked meals to the city’s homeless in Manatee Island park. Over 100 hungry are typically fed.

Naturally, they’ve been fined by the city for it, along with some of their helpers—including a wheelchair-bound man who himself just escaped homelessness. (Maybe this fine can push him back in it! See this previous article from me about how even the pettiest of state fines can ruin lives.)

The crew of criminal philanthropists owe a total of $2,238 in fines.

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A top editor at one of the nation’s oldest liberal magazine says unionization has destroyed diversity in the newsroom.

Richard Kim, executive editor at the Nation, told the American Prospect that union restrictions on hiring and firing have made it impossible to bring more minorities on board. Hindering his ability to fire workers means there are few vacancies that can bring fresh viewpoints to the pro-Stalin magazine.

Dude, unionization is one of the prime vehicles of keeping ‘minorities’ unemployed. Try reading a little history rather than just breathing your own exhaust.

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Remind me how this is any business of the Federal government.

Remind me how this is the business of any government, other than perhaps Hitler’s.

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Who would read a book by a Treasury Secretary who can’t even remember to pay his own taxes? Or so he claimed.

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“It really is an amazingly distressing situation,” says Pennsylvania State University glaciologist Sridhar Anandakrishnan, who was not affiliated with either study. “This is a huge part of West Antarctica, and it seems to have been kicked over the edge.”

The researchers say the fate of the glaciers is almost certainly beyond hope.

Remember this when it a couple of years they come back and say ‘Oops! Never mind!’

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The debate over climate change is often a contentious one, and key players in the discussion only rarely switch sides. But late last month, Lennart Bengtsson, the former director of the Hamburg-based Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, one of the world’s leading climate research centers, announced he would join the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

How can he do that? I thought that ‘the science is settled’? I thought that ‘the debate is over’?

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A poll released last week reported that 7 percent of American journalists say they are Republicans. The survey also found that the news force is aging, having a median age of 47. And 62 percent of journalists are men. A mere 8.5 percent of full-timers are minorities. Less than 1 in 4 are “very satisfied” with their job. In short, the profession that dubbed the Republican Party a refuge for “angry white men” is teeming with angry white men.

The irony here is wasted on the ink-stained-wretch community.

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Sounds like the perfect Government Job.

A current employee alleges that there is no work for employees to do, so they often sit idly staring at computer screens.

Serco is supposed to process Obamacare applications, input the data into computers, and complete the sign up process, but the employee told KMOV that weeks could pass without an employee processing an application.

Trade ya. In a heartbeat.

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The surrendering fighters are said to have assembled in a courtyard, only to be suddenly fired upon, and that many died on the spot, while most of those who managed to flee were hunted down and killed.

Four prisoners survived the massacre and were transferred to Transjordan. Immediately following the surrender on May 13, the kibbutz was looted and razed to the ground.

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All those coastal Democrat constituencies under water. What a calamity. They might have to move to fly-over country. My heart breaks for them.

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To look at an ancient globe is to look at the Earth as it was seen by the people of another time. It reflects their understanding of the continents and seas, and it captures political divisions that have long since shifted. Even the typography and colors of a globe are indicative of the time and place of its origin, says Sylvia Sumira, a London-based conservator of ancient globes.

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Hey, that’s what being a Voice of the Crust is all about.