DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

We have seen the future, and it sucks.

Archive for May, 2015

Habit of a Lifetime: Why Are Increasing Numbers of Women in Britain Becoming Catholic Nuns?

31st May 2015

Read it.

Perhaps they’re looking for an environment in which they don’t have to listen to people refer to God as ‘she’.

 

Posted in Think about it. | 1 Comment »

Barnard College for Women May Accept Transgender Students

31st May 2015

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I’ve seen women from Barnard; I doubt that anyone will notice.

Posted in Dystopia Watch, News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Barnard College for Women May Accept Transgender Students

SURVEY: A Bunch of Harvard Students Report They’ve Had Their Feelings Hurt

31st May 2015

Read it.

Poor babies.

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Islamic Jizya: Fact and Fiction

31st May 2015

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Muslim demands for non-Muslim “infidels” to pay jizya on pain of death are growing, even as the West fluctuates between having no clue what jizya is and thinking that jizya is an example of “tolerance” in Islam.

‘Nice home and family you’ve got there, dhimmi. Be a shame if anything happened to it.’

Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Islamic Jizya: Fact and Fiction

Hawaii Fisherman Dies After Being Impaled by Swordfish’s Bill

31st May 2015

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A Hawaii fisherman has died after being impaled by a swordfish’s bill when he shot the fish with a spear gun.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The Feminist-Industrial Complex: Fat Lesbians vs. the ‘Heteronormative Gaze’

31st May 2015

The Other McCain continues peering under the rock.

It should be noted that, according to federal research, 2.3% of the U.S. population (about 1-in-40 American adults) is either gay or bisexual. Yet lesbianism is vastly overrepresented in the faculty and curricula of Women’s Studies programs to such an extent that Carmen Rios, communications director of the Feminist Majority Foundation, jocularly described these departments as “Lesbo Recruitment 101.” This anti-heterosexual bias is reflected in the contents of Feminist Frontiers, which includes selections with titles like “Hetero-Romantic Love and Heterosexiness in Children’s G-Rated Films” (p. 153), “Doing Gender, Doing Heteronormativity: ‘Gender Normals,’ Transgender People, and the Social Maintenance of Heterosexuality” (p.  309) and “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” (p. 536). Among the lesbian feminist authors cited as references by the contributors are Mary Daly, Sheila Jeffreys, Andrea Dworkin, Celia Kitzinger, Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Marilyn Frye, Gayle Rubin, Audre Lorde and Arlene Stein.

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Anonymously Ask a Black Person

31st May 2015

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The epitome of Identity Politics.

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a … Black Person.

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Out on Bail and Thinking About Killing a Priest

31st May 2015

Read it. And watch the video.

A Catholic church in Brampton, a suburb west of Toronto, was vandalized by a culturally enriched young fellow named Iqbal Hessan. Based on surveillance videos, Mr. Hessan damaged and desecrated St. Catherine of Siena church. And he also told police investigators that he wanted to kill a priest.

So what did the magistrate do? Why, he let the miscreant out on bail, of course!

Ah, those wacky Canadians.

Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Out on Bail and Thinking About Killing a Priest

The Darker Side of Solar Power

31st May 2015

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The industry doesn’t talk much, or at all, about the downsides of manufacturing solar panels or where all these panels will end up when they conk out. Think of how much toxic waste is generated by consumer electronics and you get a small inkling of what a world lit with solar power, and the batteries needed to store their energy, might look like.

Solar power is still a marginal energy source, accounting for about 1 per cent of global electricity production. Yet, its environmental impact is already considerable, according to the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. The San Francisco-based group started out three decades ago tracking the e-waste produced by high-tech industry. It now produces an annual Solar Scorecard on panel manufacturers that depicts an industry that has got worse over time. Most producers refuse to provide any environmental data on their supply chains or manufacturing operations at all.

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All Aboard San Francisco’s Hipster Bus for Leather Seats, Wi-Fi and Iced Coffee

30th May 2015

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The Guardian is, of course, a famous snooty British Lefty rag, and conveniently ignores the fact that any random passenger on this bus has had a more positive impact on the world than they in the last 100 years.

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Good News Everyone! We Can Finally Add Hurdling to the Scary Robot Olympics

30th May 2015

Read it. And watch the amazing video.

Me want robot horse.

Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on Good News Everyone! We Can Finally Add Hurdling to the Scary Robot Olympics

Harry Potter in Ancient Greek

30th May 2015

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My intention was to recreate a version of the book which would make sense to a Greek from any era up to the 4th century AD who had managed by some magical process (such as would only be taught only to very advanced students at Hogwarts!) to reach the 21st century. Objects and ideas would be unfamiliar – but once he’d got used to his new surroundings, the book would make complete sense. So I thought it was very important to have this time-travelling Greek in mind at all times, and continually ask myself “would that have any meaning for him? what would he make of that?” In other words a cultural transposition is involved, not just finding the words. Perhaps one could conceive of a device like the Teleporter in Star Trek – no more fanciful than many things actually dscribed in the JKR corpus!

Greek isn’t a dead language … it’s just resting. Beautiful plumage….

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‘Real food’ Movement on Campus Funnels Real Money to Left-Wing Causes

30th May 2015

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A movement to bring “real food” to Northwestern University may have less to do with improving nutrition than paying into the coffers of a host of left-wing special-interest groups.

A group of students called Real Food at NU rallied last week to convince the school to buy 20 percent of its dining-hall food from “real” sources by 2020, according to The Daily Northwesterner.

The effort is part of a national organization, the Real Food Challenge, which lists its criteria for real food as “local and community-based,” “fair,” “ecologically sound” and “humane.”

Mark Swenson serves on the board of directors for the Food Alliance, and also works for Bon Appetit Management Co., which is closely affiliated with the Real Food Challenge. Another Bon Appetit executive, Maisie Greenawalt, advises the organization as well.

According to the Real Food Challenge website, some of its advisers are leaders of worker rights groups.

One such adviser, Richard Mandelbaum, the social justice coordinator for the Farmworkers Support Committee, gave a presentation on “food democracy” in 2009 at the Left Forum, a self-described socialist group.

Mandelbaum is also an original founder of the Agricultural Justice Project, one of the designated certifiers of whether or not food is “fair.”

In order to be certified as having fair labor practices, the project recommends workers join a worker rights group, such as the Food Chain Workers Alliance.

Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on ‘Real food’ Movement on Campus Funnels Real Money to Left-Wing Causes

Black Workers Can No Longer Rely on Blue Jobs

30th May 2015

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Public sector jobs are in decline, and one community has been hit particularly hard: African Americans. Historically, the black middle class has relied on the government for good jobs. One in five African Americans are employed by the government, making them more dependent on public sector employment than whites and Hispanics. But those jobs are disappearing….

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Public University Hosts Special Graduation Party for Illegal Immigrants

30th May 2015

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Undocumented students graduating from San Francisco State University (SFSU) received an extra treat this week—a special celebration at the university in their honor.

California: Not really part of America.

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The Changing Geography of Racial Opportunity

30th May 2015

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We found, for all three major minority groups,   that the best places were neither the most liberal in their attitudes nor had the most generous welfare programs. Instead they were located primarily in regions that have experienced broad-based economic growth, have low housing costs, and limited regulation. In other words, no matter how much people like Bill de Blasio talk about the commitment to racial and class justice, the realities on the ground turn out to be quite different than he might imagine.

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on The Changing Geography of Racial Opportunity

Quotation of the Day

30th May 2015

For Congress to guarantee a right to health care, or any other good or service, whether a person can afford it or not, it must diminish someone else’s rights, namely their rights to their earnings.  The reason is that Congress has no resources of its very own.  Moreover, there is no Santa Claus, Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy giving them those resources.  The fact that government has no resources of its very own forces one to recognize that in order for government to give one American citizen a dollar, it must first, through intimidation, threats and coercion, confiscate that dollar from some other American.  If one person has a right to something he did not earn, of necessity it requires that another person not have a right to something that he did earn.

— Walter Williams, American Contempt for Liberty, p. 284

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Quotation of the Day

Why Do Rich Married Ladies Compete Over Handbags?

30th May 2015

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

A rich lady named Wednesday Martin who lives on the Upper East Side has published an article (“Poor Little Rich Women“) and book “Primates of Park Avenue” applying her anthropology degree to the other rich (but not super-rich) stay at home moms she hangs out with. Of course, it winds up being about:

A. How rich stay-at-home-moms are oppressed by society.

B. How the author is better than the rich stay-at-home moms because while it may look like she’s doing exactly what they are doing, she’s actually pursuing her career of anthropology by researching them by going out to lunch a lot.

Marrying a rich guy and staying home is a career choice that is far more open to women than to men, and still gets a lot of enrollees despite being denigrated whenever it’s mentioned at all.

It’s pretty common for anthropologists to get pranked by their subjects who figure out what they want to hear and then exaggerate and plain make up stuff. Margaret Mead getting taken in by the tall tales of Samoan teens is only the most notorious example. Pacific Islanders sometimes concoct elaborately silly rituals and folklore to amuse themselves at the expense of visiting academics.

But ‘progressives’ have no sense of humor so are thus more easily pranked.

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Don’t Play With Girls — You’ll Catch Kafir Cooties!

30th May 2015

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The Ontario high school system has a rule: if you’re a girl who can compete successfully in a sport that’s normally all-boys, and your school doesn’t have a girls’ team for that sport, you may participate on a boys’ team.

Sounds sensible. Unless you’re a Muslim, that is. Then it violates your freedom of religion, and opposing teams must remove the girls from their ranks so your boys won’t be made unclean by contact with them.

The sidelining of the girls on this high school soccer team was actually voluntary — the coach didn’t force the girls to sit out the game, he just played on their sense of guilt by invoking the welfare of the team. Which is actually worse, in a way: as Vlad points out, the coach, like other cultural and political leaders throughout the West, is pre-emptively surrendering to Islam by complying with the tenets of sharia law.

I guess dhimmitude trumps feminism. Who knew?

Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Don’t Play With Girls — You’ll Catch Kafir Cooties!

Phoenix Mosque Protest Kinda What America is All About

30th May 2015

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Someone organized a protest outside a Phoenix mosque today. Jon Ritzheimer has been critical of Islam, and says that criticism led to death threats, so he organized a protest outside of a mosque in Phoenix tonight, asking supporters to come armed but remain peaceful. That protest may include a draw Mohammed contest. Phoenix’s mayor condemned the contest and protest as “purposefully provocative,” saying he wasn’t happy it was happening while admiting protesters had the right to free speech. Would he have made the same comment if a Slut Walk were organized in his city?

Of course not.

Counter-protesters showed up for a “love in,” and the cops showed up to stand in the middle and “keep the peace.”  Authorities say they’re not worried about the protest getting violent, unless outsiders infiltrate it, a common refrain.  A group of bikers was supposed to meet a nearby Denny’s before joining the protest, so the Denny’s closed. Police say they’ve installed cameras around the mosque to monitor the protest.

What, no Muslims traveling across country to shoot the place up? Well, there’s one difference.

Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Phoenix Mosque Protest Kinda What America is All About

The Art of Villainy

30th May 2015

Richard Fernandez does the modern unravel.

In the last few hours two news stories have developed in parallel but with strikingly contrasting plotlines.  The first was the re-election by a convincing margin of FIFA president “Sepp” Blatter.  The second was the indictment for making false statements in connection with blackmail,  of former speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.

If these were television shows, a reviewer juxtaposing them might be tempted to conclude that the joint moral of the stories isn’t that “crime doesn’t pay”, but that crime should pay enough to provide for its own defense.  For in the one relative “innocence” — if such a term exists — is no protection against punishment.  The other show proves the only protection against payback is power.  Innocence and guilty are empty terms.  It is the power to hire lawyers, or intimidate  your pursuers that really matters.

Thus the surest protection against retribution isn’t a lack of guilt but the surfeit of it.  If one plans on being a crooked sports association president the smart strategy is to go all the way. For it doesn’t pay to corrupt only some parts of the system, leaving the honest bits to turn against you.   The only logical course is to corrupt all of it.  Nuke its governance from orbit.  It’s the only way.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Art of Villainy

USEFUL STUFF SATURDAY

30th May 2015

Reusable Cups & Saucers from Old Coffee Grounds.

Portable Air Pump.

Pizza Hut Australia To Launch Meat Pie Stuffed Crust Pie

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NJ Cops Chase Man Into Library, Shoot and Kill Him

30th May 2015

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Police in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, reportedly chased 36-year-old Kevin Allen into a local library, and shot and killed him on the second floor. Fox 5 in New York reported he may have been armed with a knife, but police would not confirm or deny that.

I’d recommend staying out of New Jersey.

 

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Prof Who Faced Down Title IX Inquisition Unmasks Money-Making Scheme for Lawyers, Bureaucrats

30th May 2015

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n February, Northwestern University Professor Laura Kipnis denounced the sexual paranoia taking hold at American college campuses. Soon after, she learned that her essay on the subject had triggered protests, petitions, and even formal Title IX complaints from students who disagreed with her.

Now Kipnis has penned a second essay for The Chronicle Review detailing the formal review process she underwent as a result of those complaints—which, again, were filed because students objected to the content of a tenured professor’s speech and asserted that federal anti-harassment laws entitled them to protection from opinions that bothered them.

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The EPA Manufactures Its Own Consent

30th May 2015

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In his 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media, co-author Noam Chomsky decried how newspaper, radio, and television peddles “system-supportive propaganda” in the service of ideological goals. The masses are diverted from challenging the system by Necessary Illusions promoted by the political class. Of course, as a committed leftist Chomsky is convinced that a corporate power elite is in charge of the process of manufacturing consent and disseminating necessary illusions.

As it happens, President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has apparently learned a trick or two when it comes to manufacturing consent. Earlier this week, the agency released its new surface water regulations. Let’s set aside for the moment whether or not the agency actually has the authority to adopt the new regs, and look instead at how the agency managed the process of creating the necessary illusions to justify their adoption.

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ACLU: Minneapolis Police Are Racist, Should Do Less Policing

30th May 2015

Read it.

Ask the ‘people of color’ in Baltimore how they like that idea.

Why might that be? Astonishingly, neither the ACLU report nor the Star Tribune story on it ever mentions the Asian “disparity,” even though the ACLU casually assumes that “[t]he numbers show a startling disparity in the way police enforce low-level offenses.” Would the ACLU have us believe that the Minneapolis police are conspiring to cover up low-level crimes by Asians? Presumably not: it is obvious that Asians are “under-represented” among such arrests because they rarely commit such crimes.

But if that is true, the whole racism hypothesis falls apart. How do we know that blacks and Indians are not “over-represented” in low-level arrests because they commit a disproportionate number of such crimes? In fact, it is a well-known and easily documented fact that these demographic groups are over-represented in the criminal population. The ACLU report never mentions this uncomfortable fact.

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Legitimizing Censorship: ‘Islamophobia Studies’ at Berkeley

30th May 2015

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“Islamophobia studies” is the latest addition to the academic pantheon of politicized, esoteric, and divisive “studies” whose purpose is to censor criticism of differing views by stigmatizing critics as racist or clinically insane.

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The Nature of the Beast

30th May 2015

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Astonishingly, the incessant dodging, dissembling, duplicity, deceit, deceptiveness, and dishonesty are so widely understood to be inseparable from politics that sophisticated pundits and professors treat with contempt any and all suggestions that the prevalence of such dishonorable qualities among politicians is a good reason to dial down government’s powers.  The theory seems to be that if an eight-year-old child can easily spot and be repulsed by these unattractive features of politics, then these features are far too mundane and obvious to serve as a basis upon which serious arguments for reducing the power of governments can be built.

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Panacea

30th May 2015

Freeberg nails it yet again.

Hurricanes…more laws, raise taxes
Tornado[e]s…more laws, raise taxes
Hot…more laws, raise taxes
Cold…more laws, raise taxes
Flooding…more laws, raise taxes
Drought…more laws, raise taxes
Earthquakes…more laws, raise taxes
Missing Child…more laws, raise taxes
Someone Offended…more laws, raise taxes

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Panacea

The Chamber of Corporate Welfare

30th May 2015

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Here’s a half-serious question: How much do taxpayers have to pay off Boeing to make the Export-Import Bank – finally and irrevocably go away? If the feds wrote a check to Boeing for $100 billion, would they then let the Exim Bank fade away after the current portfolio winds down?

I ask this because the airplane manufacturing company is, of course, the largest beneficiary of the Exim Bank. The bank provides subsidized loans and insurance contracts to foreign companies that buy American exports. Exim Bank doles out billions of dollars of loans and insurance subsidies every year and has become the poster child for corporate cronyism in Washington. Think of the bank as food stamps for America’s Fortune 500 companies. Ever since the early Reagan years, conservatives have been trying to eliminate the subsidies, but the bank has multiple lives.

What is most insidious about the Exim bank, beyond the cronyism and risk of its $140 billion portfolio of taxpayer guaranteed loans, is that it turns business into advocates for big government. (This may explain, in part, why liberals like Nancy Pelosi who normally hate corporations, love the program so much.) This also explains why the largest business lobby in America, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is spending more than $1 million on a lobbying campaign to save the program . There’s something that stinks to high heaven about a government racket in which businesses profit from government subsidies, and then turn around and employ lobbyist organizations to lobby for more tax dollars.

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World Health Organization Blocks Interpol From Meetings on Illicit Tobacco Trade

29th May 2015

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WHO seems intent on keeping Interpol out of the discussion, despite the international police organization applying for observer status. The reason cited is that Interpol has a financial agreement with Philip Morris International (PMI), the largest publicly traded tobacco company. PMI contributes 15 million euros a year to help lower the underground tobacco trade.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one. Any bureaucracy knows that if you get rid of the problem you’re supposed to be getting rid of, then you’ll be gotten rid of as well — and the UN is all about the bureaucracy; it would never endanger the goose that lays those golden, golden eggs.

Terrorist organizations find tobacco ideal for smuggling because, as Interpol notes, “The product is small, lightweight and profitable…the sale price is many times the cost of manufacture, mostly due to high levels of local tax in most countries.” A report from the EU Commission found that illicit tobacco trade, driven almost exclusively by criminal groups, results in a €10 billion loss of tax revenue every year for European Union member states. Cities and states often increase cigarette taxes to discourage consumption.

In other words, it wouldn’t be so much of a problem if the government weren’t profiting from it so much. I guess ‘irony’ isn’t a word that most bureaucrats understand.

Tobacco smuggling by terrorist organizations is pervasive and increasing. In some cases, authorities have seized 10 million cigarettes, but backlash from law enforcement clearly hasn’t dissuaded groups that stand to gain tremendously, as a result of selling cigarettes in exchange for cash, drugs and humans. Prominent Middle Eastern terror groups profit considerably from illegal cigarette operations in the United States.

So of course the WHO wouldn’t want to get in the way of that, doing so would be ‘Islamophobic’.

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Mediterranean Migrants: Libya to COUNTER-ATTACK if ‘Colonial’ EU Uses Military Force

29th May 2015

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The North African country’s Prime Minister, Khalifa al-Ghawi, today likened any forceful action co-ordinated by Brussels to the “colonial mentality” of Libya’s Italian occupiers in the 20th century.

Warning of his country’s “ability to defend our sea and our land”, Mr al-Ghawi said the deployment of European armed forces during the ongoing migrant crisis is “completely unacceptable in the modern world”.

Sticking up for their right to invade and conquer. Sounds pretty Muslim to me.

Of course, Mexico makes much the same noises. So you never can tell.

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May 29: International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers

29th May 2015

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Wouldn’t it be nice if, for just one day, they were able to keep the peace somewhere?

 

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Don’t Go to College!

29th May 2015

John Stossel is agin it.

College has become a scam.

Some students benefit: those with full scholarships and/or rich parents so they don’t go deep into debt, those who love learning for its own sake and land jobs in academia and those who get jobs that require a college credential.

But that’s not most students.

Half today’s recent grads work in jobs that don’t require degrees. Eighty thousand of America’s bartenders have bachelor’s degrees.

The problem is that high schools suck so badly that businesses have to require a college degree in order to get employees who are as educated at what used to be considered a high school level. Don’t blame business, they’re just doing the best with the materials they’re given.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Don’t Go to College!

Why Disney’s “First African Princess” Is The Spirit Animal For Global White Supremacy

29th May 2015

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Attention, victims! Since you are too stupid to recognize when you are being oppressed, Voice of the Crust Salon (which is run by white people much smarter than you) will lay it out for you.

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Feds Spend $579,301 on Video Game to Teach College Students About Rape

29th May 2015

Read it.

I am not making this up.

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Brent Budowsky: The Coming Terror Attacks

29th May 2015

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I strongly and consistently opposed the Iraq War that was initiated by former President George W. Bush and would equally strongly oppose any similar large-scale military venture today. But with ISIS gaining strength and calling on followers through social media to launch terror attacks in multiple nations, there is an urgent need for multilateral action to destroy ISIS before ISIS succeeds in mass murdering more of us.

‘Gee, somebody needs to do something about that. Not us, of course, I’m opposed to that; but somebody needs to.’

This is what passes for ‘journalism’ these days. People get paid to write this crap.

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Baltimore Residents Fearful Amid Rash of Homicides

29th May 2015

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Perrine’s brother is one of 36 people killed in Baltimore so far this month, already the highest homicide count for May since 1999. But while homicides are spiking, arrests have plunged more than 50 percent compared to last year.

The drop in arrests followed the death of Freddie Gray from injuries he suffered in police custody. Gray’s death sparked protests against the police and some rioting, and led to the indictment of six officers.

Now West Baltimore residents worry they’ve been abandoned by the officers they once accused of harassing them. In recent weeks, some neighborhoods have become like the Wild West without a lawman around, residents said.

“Before it was over-policing. Now there’s no police,” said Donnail “Dreads” Lee, 34, who lives in the Gilmor Homes, the public housing complex where Gray, 25, was arrested.

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

I’m not sure whether this is an example of Biting The Hand That Feeds You or Be Careful What You Wish For, or maybe You Made Your Bed Now You Have To Lie In It.

Or maybe it’s just evolution in action.

 

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The Word That Wasn’t There

29th May 2015

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In his report yesterday on the latest OSCE conference, Henrik Ræder Clausen included this summary of a dominant meme among ideological leaders in the West:

Panel members stressed the importance of not calling the Islamic State the “Islamic State”, for doing so could give the impression that Islam motivates people to war, terrorism and other crimes.

The avoidance of the I-word seems to have become a fixation in the revolving-door world of NGOs and state functionaries, particularly in Europe. It’s as if all the participants have been mysteriously hypnotized, and now wander around glassy-eyed, muttering the phrase “nothing to do with Islam” over and over again, their repetitive chant forming a background susurrus at every international function where important people assemble to hand down momentous policy decisions.

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Hawaii Military Carve Out May Play Role in Voting District Case

28th May 2015

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Hawaii may figure prominently when the Supreme Court this fall considers a case where plaintiffs are seeking to have legislative districts drawn based on a count of eligible voters rather than the total number of residents.

That’s because for nearly half a century, the Aloha State has had the high court’s permission to ignore transients when drawing its political maps. While the Constitution requires equal population among legislative districts, a 1966 opinion said that Hawaii’s “special population problems” justified using registered voters as the baseline.

The problem, as Hawaii saw it, was the large concentration of military facilities on Oahu. Counting tens of thousands of service members would distort the electoral maps by awarding legislative seats to military bases.

I have no problem with that.

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The Changing Geography of Racial Opportunity

28th May 2015

Read it.

We found, for all three major minority groups,   that the best places were neither the most liberal in their attitudes nor had the most generous welfare programs. Instead they were located primarily in regions that have experienced broad-based economic growth, have low housing costs, and limited regulation. In other words, no matter how much people like Bill de Blasio talk about the commitment to racial and class justice, the realities on the ground turn out to be quite different than he might imagine.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Changing Geography of Racial Opportunity

Woman Calls Non-Emergency Number to Get Help for Suicidal Boyfriend. Cops Arrive, Kill Him.

28th May 2015

Read it.

When was the last time you got that level of service from a police department.

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Sanders Save the Children Fund

28th May 2015

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I’m starting to think Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign is going to supply a great deal of high quality entertainment in this presidential cycle. His economic ignorance—too many choices of deodorant!—is right out of the 1950s (but then, as Glenn Reynolds noted his morning, the whole Democratic field has a Lawrence Welk feel to it). Leave it to Remy to offer Bernie some fundraising help:

As Tom Bethell asked years ago when Sanders first went to Congress, how can you tell the difference between Sanders and any other Democrat?

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Amtrak Has Problems, But a Lack of Federal Funding Is Not One of Them

28th May 2015

Veronique de Rugy pulls back the curtain.

While this continued faith in government’s ability to heal most wounds with funding is par for the course in Washington, it’s time to set the record straight. The reasons for Amtrak’s struggles have more to do with its history of poor management than they do with its lack of cash. One need only peruse reports from the Government Accountability Office and Amtrak’s own inspector general to see what can go wrong when the discipline of the market is absent. As the IG noted last year, Amtrak “has not consistently used sound business practices in each phase of the capital planning process, including developing sound project proposals with performance measures, learning from the execution and outcome of projects, and controlling unauthorized expenditures.”

Amtrak’s fundamental problem, however, is the same one that afflicts all government endeavors: Operational decisions are often made on the basis of political concerns rather than sound economic and financial reasoning. The clearest examples of this are Amtrak’s money-losing long-distance passenger routes, which are kept on life support with federal funds because politicians generally prefer to waste other people’s money than confront the tiny but vocal minority of people who benefit.

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Hezbollah Prepares

28th May 2015

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The Syrian war has been good for Hezbollah in that respect. They’ve cleaned out Assad’s depots and brought the goods back to Lebanon.

The Israelis can’t afford a war of attrition with Hezbollah. The Iran-backed terror group has the ability to saturation bomb Israeli civilians with 1,500 projectiles a day, every day, for over two months. They will try to bring down Tel Aviv’s skyscrapers with ballistic missiles. They will try to fly suicide drones into Israel’s nuclear reactor. They will try to detonate Israel’s off-shore energy infrastructure. They will try to destroy Israeli military and civilian runways. And – mainly but not exclusively through their tunnels – they will try to overrun Israeli towns and drag away women and children as hostages. Israeli casualties would range in the thousands to tens of thousands.

And so the Israelis will have to mobilize massive force to shorten the duration of a future war. One of the things they’ll do is immediately is move to eliminate as much of Hezbollah’s vast arsenal as possible. Hezbollah is counting on the resulting deaths of their human shields – and they’ve guaranteed to that the body count will be significant – to turn Israel into an international pariah. But the Israelis can’t let Hezbollah level their entire country with indiscriminate rocket fire and advanced missiles, just because no one in Lebanon is willing or able to expel the group from Shiite villages.

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Journal Retracts Study on Changing Attitudes on Same-Sex Marriage

28th May 2015

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A leading scientific journal on Thursday retracted a highly publicized study reporting that attitudes toward same-sex marriage could be altered by brief face-to-face conversations with people who have a stake in the issue.

The study, published by the journal Science in December, came under question this month when a pair of graduate students trying to follow up on the work found evidence that the data had been misrepresented.

The study’s senior author, Donald P. Green, a prominent political scientist at Columbia University, asked that the study be retracted last week, after his co-author, Michael J. LaCour, a graduate student in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, declined to furnish the raw data he had used to reach his conclusions.

Nice try, Child of the Crust.

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Scared British Truckers AVOID Calais as Desperate Migrants Become Violent

28th May 2015

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BRITISH lorry drivers are avoiding Calais because of iron-bar wielding illegal immigrants trying to force their way on to their vehicles.

The Home Office said more than 40,000 attempts by illegal immigrants to get to the UK had been thwarted in 2014 but drivers say the situation is now far worse than last year.

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Tattooed New Yorkers Report All Kinds of Nasty Skin Conditions

28th May 2015

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All no doubt richly deserved — people with tattoos are all narcissists to a greater or lesser degree, more worried about how they appear to others than what they actually are.

More here: In Addition To Regret, Tattoos Can Pose Serious Health Risks

Not to mention that it makes you look like a douchebag Underclass wannabe.

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Low-Speed, Infrequent Rail

28th May 2015

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Quentin Kopp, who once chaired the California High-Speed Rail Authority and led the effort to persuade voters to pass the 2008 law authorizing its construction, is speaking out against the project as currently planned. To succeed, he says, high-speed rail needs to run on dedicated tracks at high speeds and frequencies.

Instead, the current plan calls for California’s high-speed trains to run on the same tracks as slower Amtrak and commuter train. This will greatly reduce the average speeds because high-speed and conventional trains can’t be safely operated together. The current projected frequencies are two to four trains per hour (half in each direction), while Kopp says 10 to 20 trains per hour is needed for the trains to be “financially secure,” which presumably means that fares cover operating costs as required by the 2008 law.

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Self-Parking Volvo Ploughs Into Journalists After Owner Neglects to Pay for Extra Feature That Stops Cars Crashing Into People

28th May 2015

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Now that’s comedy.

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