Read it.

Crews on Wednesday night removed the Surfing Madonna mosaic from the base of a train bridge on Encinitas Boulevard.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

The piece depicts Our Lady of Guadalupe on a surfboard with the words “Save the Ocean” down the side. Patterson and another person installed the mosaic April 22 without permission from the city.

The mosaic, however, is graffiti under Encinitas municipal code, and city officials said it must come down.

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini

Steve Sailer takes the shot.

Read it.

Actually, it’s Dead Kids + Media-Whore Politicians that make bad laws. Dead Kids are necessary but not sufficient. (You might include stupid narcissistic parents in the mix as a contributing factor, too.)

Just because your kid was stupid and is now dead because of it doesn’t mean you get to stick it to everybody else. Your bad genes, not ours. Just sayin’.

UPDATE: Radley Balko has a good piece on it.

Read it.

Cornel West, who is the Class of 1943 university professor at Princeton, calls President Obama “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”

Princeton ’43 must have been a sparse harvest.

The Boston Globe reports: “West also recounts personal slights by Obama — that his phone calls didn’t get returned, and that he couldn’t get a ticket with his mother and brother to the inauguration.”

As Professor West puts it: “brother Barack Obama had no sense of gratitude, no sense of loyalty, no sense of even courtesy.”

I guess West has turned into a Republican. Pity.

Read it.

Soaps are “certainly not expensive by other entertainment gauges,” says former producer Michael Laibson, a leader of the creative teams at “All My Children” and “Guiding Light.” But “they don’t pay the people [on reality TV] the same kinds of wages. The acting, the above-the-line costs [for creative talent] are much higher on soaps. Generally, on a soap there are about 30 actors that are under contract so they have a guaranteed number of performances per week and a guaranteed salary per performance.”

Union super-minimum wages lead directly to high unemployment. AFTRA requires each of the main performers to be paid at least $913 a day, but stars get much more.

Not really. The soap industry is highly skilled, and “Days of Our Lives” is a more polished product than “The Biggest Loser.” Soaps are more like airlines. The value of their product has dwindled rapidly, but unions don’t provide flexibility for trimming costs to keep up. Since soaps aren’t a separate industry, they can’t use bankruptcy as a wedge to reopen contracts and make cuts. An AFTRA source who didn’t want to be identified says, “We’re certainly mindful of the challenges the industry faces,” although not mindful enough to back down on their main goal: “We want to increase pay and benefits for our members.”

Read it.

When the Cambridge graduate discovered the compromising pictures had been discovered and circulated throughout the £29,670-a-year school she was reportedly escorted home in tears.

The pictures were taken by Fiona Corthine, a fellow teacher who is head of photography.

Read it.

The fact that the homosexual agenda is ‘Freedom for me but not for thee’ is not really news, but this is a useful reminder.

“Exodus’ message is hateful and bigoted. They claim to offer ‘freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ’ and use scare tactics, misinformation, stereotypes and distortions of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) life to recruit clients.”

Well, then, don’t download the app. It is, after all, free. Duh.

“They endorse the use of so-called ‘reparative therapy’ to ‘change’ the sexual orientation of their clients, despite the fact that this form of ‘therapy’ has been rejected by every major professional medical organisation, including the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Counseling Association.”

And, of course, unless a form of therapy is accepted by these credentialing organizations, it can’t possibly work.

I can’t think of any prior historical situation in which there has been such a sustained and determined campaign to force normal people to accept abnormal people as somehow normal. I suspect that all it will accomplish is a backlash that will be worse than any inconvenience they now suffer. (Yes, I said ‘inconvenience’. When it comes to ‘affirmative action’, gay is the new black.) Hope they’re happy with that.

Ronald Baily ponders environmentalism.

Oil? Spills and carbon emissions. Coal? Mountaintop removal and carbon emissions. Natural gas? Fracking and carbon emissions. Hydro? Strangling wild rivers and methane emissions. Wind? OK, but not in scenic areas like off Cape Cod or on mountain ridges in West Virginia and don’t kill any birds. Solar? OK, but not in fragile deserts where it destroys Native American holy sites. Wind & Solar? Certainly don’t want any unsightly high-voltage power lines criss-crossing the countryside.

The Other McCain has more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.

For some reason, the years 1997-2001 unleashed a torrent of such works. Most were by obscure writers who, I guessed, were hoping to get their books onto the reading lists of university Women’s Studies programs. Skimming through the books during train-and-bus rides home, I discovered that most of these stories had a predictable narrative arc: Young woman goes to college; sleeps with boyfriend; has abortion; breaks up with boyfriend; gets involved with anti-war protests; is sexually exploited by a series of boyfriends from the anti-war movement; becomes involved in Women’s Lib; and, at some point past the prime of her promiscuous youth, discovers that she is in fact a lesbian.

So many of my classmates in college went through that arc that I think it may actually have been a formal major.

Whatever any self-identified feminist may consider the general benefits of the women’s movement, can you deny that its benefits were and are greatest to the women who earn their living on the payroll of Feminism, Inc.? How many women today enjoy full-time employment as university professors of Women’s Studies, with tenure, six-figure salaries, and a teaching load of perhaps two classes per semester? What are the salaries of the top officials at NARAL and NOW and the other feminist non-profits? (Memo to liberals: Just because it’s non-profit doesn’t mean nobody gets paid.)

There is no such thing as ‘identity theft’.

Let me repeat that.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ‘IDENTITY THEFT’.

Theft means that somebody takes something from another person. If you ‘identity’ is ‘stolen’, do you become anonymous? Of course not. You still have your ‘identity’.

What is commonly called ‘identity theft’ is merely fraud that depends on one person successfully masquerading as another. The reason this works is because remote transactions, such as that over the Internet, depend upon proofs of identity that have no natural connection to whoever is being impersonated; it’s just information, and person X can present information relevant to person Y, if he knows it, just as easily as person Y can. This is why driving licenses and most other forms of identification have pictures on them. (This is why Democrats fight requirements for picture ID for voting; they want to make it easier, not harder, to impersonate other people for voting purposes. They won’t admit it, but that’s all it is.)

So why do they call it ‘identity theft’? To escape blame. If your ‘identity’ was ‘stolen’ and that information was used to clean out your bank account, then the term ‘identity theft’ lets the bank off the hook. ‘Oh, well, your identity was stolen and along with it your money. Just one of those unfortunate things in which we were just as much the victims as you were. A terrible thing for which we are not to blame. Sucks to be you. Have a nice day.’

That’s the bottom line. Institutions, especially financial institutions, don’t want to spend what it takes to do proper security, because a lot of customers will whine about what a hassle it is. So they sock it to the people who are defrauded because, let’s face it, they’re not going to be customers of the bank anymore anyway.

So the next time you hear somebody use the phrase ‘identity theft’, make sure you still have your wallet. Your identity is not at risk, just your money.

Read it.

Think about that next time you hear a ‘progressive’ whining about income inequality and hard times for the poor. The so-called ‘poor’ nowadays are comfortably middle class by the standards of my parents’ generation, and quite well-to-do compared to what my grandparents got by with.

Read it.

The federal Department of Education would categorize Michelle López-Mullins — a university student who is of Peruvian, Chinese, Irish, Shawnee and Cherokee descent — as “Hispanic.” But the National Center for Health Statistics, the government agency that tracks data on births and deaths, would pronounce her “Asian.” And what does Ms. López-Mullins’s birth certificate from the State of Maryland say? It doesn’t mention her race.

Ms. López-Mullins, 20, usually marks “other” on surveys these days, but when she filled out a census form last year, she chose Asian, Hispanic, Native American and white.

But its really, really important, you see….

The biter bit.

Those who live by progressivism die by progressivism.

Todd Zywicki is shocked, shocked that credit card issuers are fulfilling his predictions.

Wow, who could have possibly predicted that the Credit CARD Act’s rules that limit non-interest fees and the ability to raise interest rates when a borrower’s risk changes would result in “record high” interest rates (other than me, of course, when I testified to the Senate Banking Committee in 2009 that the act would result in higher interest rates and other than the sponsor of the law, who has acknowledged that it has resulted in higher interest rates but has decided for the rest of us that higher rates is a good thing)?  Even more amazing, it appears that these restrictions on risk-based pricing has hit poor credit risks even harder than less-risky consumers.

Read it.

Well. Isn’t that special.

Read it.

Back of the bus, kid. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

Read it.

Congratulations to David Dayen of Firedoglake.

Tom Smith illuminates how Nicholas Kristof, like all ‘progressive class-warriors, is just another arrested-adolescent whiner.

It looks like Mr. Kristof got the memo.  Speaking of inequality, doesn’t he look like the guy who got an A not because he was smart but because he sucked up so assiduously to the teacher?  Look at his face and tell me he doesn’t look like that.  Maybe it’s just me.

See also the link below in my post below, but one of the new it-books of 2011 is evidently by two British sociologists who have crunched data and determined that inequality makes us sad.  It’s just not fair that hedge funders and bankers have so much more money than I do and how come they do and and I want some too and mommymommymommymommy it’s not fair!  It causes depression, weight gain and no doubt excessive female hairiness too.

Read it.

They could become Christians. Problem solved.

Read it.

She looks pretty white to me. When I think of aborigines, I think of someone like this. Perhaps she’s a Magic Aborigine, like the Obamassiah is a Magic Negro.

Read it.

Dozens of asylum seekers are feared to have died after their boat was smashed against the rocks of Christmas Island in rough seas.

Recently, there have been reports of overcrowding at the centre and of detainees being forced to live in tents.

Earlier this year detainees staged a protest over the conditions, sewing their lips together and refusing to eat.

Sounds like a win-win.

What is this widespread assumption that if somebody likes Country A more than his home country, he has some sort of innate right to go to Country A?

Read it.

As high-flying lawyer Deidre Clark seeks £3.5 million in damages following her sacking after writing an erotic novel based on her experience as an expat in Moscow, Iain Hollingshead discovers that behaving badly is a prerequisite of working abroad.

There’s a career plan for you.

The biter bit.

Let’s face it, with a name like ‘Winkevoss’ you’re going to lead an interesting life whether you want it or not.

Read it.

In 2008 (the latest year for which accurate data are available), the bottom 95 percent of income-earning households in the U.S. – a group that surely includes “middle-income taxpayers” – paid 41 percent of the revenue taken in by Uncle Sam from the personal income tax, while the top 5 percent of income-earning households paid 59 percent of this tax revenue.  And looking only at the top 1 percent of income-earning households – surely “the wealthy” – they paid a whopping 38 percent of federal personal income tax revenue.

In 2008, for the typical household in the top one-percent of income-earning households in America, the percent of its adjusted gross income that it paid in federal income taxes was 23.27.  Middle-income households paid less.  For households whose earnings put them in the top 50 percent, but below the top 25 percent, of income earners, the percent of their adjusted gross income paid in income taxes was, on average, 6.75.  For households in the bottom 50 percent of income-earners, the percent of their adjusted gross income paid in income taxes was, on average, 2.59.

Yeah, those ‘rich people’ are sure getting away with highway robbery, aren’t they?

Read it.

They’ve been caught time and time again using the poor and homeless to do the jobs their own members won’t do for themselves. The Carpenters’ union has a history of hiring the homeless to march around in circles, chanting for union wages, benefits and pensions, things they don’t receive from the union.

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

Read it.

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

Read it.

Probably the most striking thing about last week’s student demo against the Lib-Con government’s cuts and tuition fees agenda was not the protest itself – which, like all youth protests, was loud, bracing and had some good points as well as bad ones – but rather the sad-dad effect. It was the way in which university lecturers, teachers, journalists and middle-class parents – the respectable adult world – gave a vigorous nod of approval to the demonstration, fantasising that it was some kind of genetic or educational extension of their own inner youthful radicalism….I remember when it was considered embarrassing if your mum phoned a mate’s house to check if you were okay during a sleepover. But to phone the cops to find out, in the words of one demo-approving dad, ‘when our children will be home’? That’s the death-knell of radicalism right there.

Kind of like the Institutional Revolutionary Party in Mexico. ‘Sure, we’ve got a permanent revolution here. Be sure to fill out the forms.’

I suppose it would be too cruel if we were to laugh….

Read it.

“Well, to start out with, we were stupid.” No, they didn’t actually say that — it would have been honest, and honesty is to be avoided when the story is how much of a victim you are.

Memorandum: If you do something stupid, and bad things happen to you as a result, you’re not a victim, you’re an idiot.

Read it.

Fully 52% of voters with incomes of $200,000 or more pulled the lever for then-Sen. Obama, compared with 46% for Sen. John McCain. Sen. Obama also did better than the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, who won only 37% of the vote from people with $200,000 or more in income. Mr. Obama raised more money than Sen. McCain in eight of the wealthiest 10 zip codes in the U.S.

Read it.

Well, duh–that’s the point: To discriminate against dishonest and stupid people.

The practice of checking the credit histories of job applicants is coming under fire, with critics contending the practice discriminates against blacks and Latinos who tend to have lower credit scores.

The reason they tend to have lower credit scores is because they tend to be less, shall we say, conscientious about paying their debts. But since a credit check targets individual behavior rather than a class, there ought not to be any legal problem with it. (Stop laughing.)

Read it.

Instapundit passes along an excellent point from one of his readers: the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy has been ordered suspended, via judicial fiat.  The military has complied with the court order, although they strongly disagree with it: there is a moratorium on enforcing DADT, and openly gay soldiers may serve.  Whether you are happy with this development or not*, there is one detail about this which is kind of important: the stated reason Ivy League colleges typically give for forbidding ROTC programs on campus has just gone away.  The military just stopped discharging openly gay soldiers.  It’s over.  The Ivy League won.

As one of the many people who attempted to get ROTC back at Yale, I’m not holding my breath–homosexuality is only one of the reasons, although perhaps the most obvious one, why ROTC was excluded from the Crustian training grounds. But this can certainly be used to embarrass the Drones In Charge about it, which is always entertaining.

Read it.

Quelle domage.

Read it.

Watch it.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

I guess they just assumed that ‘Episcopal School’ meant ‘not so Christian as you’d notice’.

They are disappointed that their daughter was denied an education there because of who they go to bed with at the end of the day.

I’m disappointed that they know so little of Christianity.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Read it.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

Imagine my distress. ‘Well, we don’t have the death penalty any more, so we can’t execute you, but we can send you to prison instead, which will work out about the same.’ That’s modern life for you.

Read it.

The U.N. sanctioned two activist groups Monday after a Saudi Arabian nameplate was vandalized at a recent climate change conference.

Three members of the World Wildlife Fund and Oxfam International were barred from future meetings for taking the Saudi plate at a June meeting, breaking it into pieces and distributing photographs of it in a toilet bowl.

One wonders what the reaction would have been had it been the nameplate of the U.S. or any European country that had been so treated. My suspicion is that the Arabs (with behind the hand participation by the Saudis) would have been the first to nod, wink, and applaud.

Read it.

Read it.

Works for me.

Marie Brennan, fantasy author, has some gender issues.

Still, the question is an interesting one, however her take on it might not be.

Read it.

Do not get on the wrong side of a New Zealand dog.

Read it.

Monsanto Company, the Missouri-based biotechnology firm, has donated seeds to Haiti to help kickstart food production in the earthquake-ravaged country. In so doing, they’ve stirred up the kind of controversy that seems to follow the company. The 475-ton donation has sparked a storm of protest not only in Haiti but also in the United States. A coalition of Haitian peasant groups organized a protest march in June and have vowed to burn the donated seed.

This is not Monsanto’s first rodeo, as we Missourians would say, so the company has made it clear that no genetically modified seeds were included in the donation. This delicacy did not impress the marchers, who protested under banners of “Down with GMO and hybrid seeds.” Genetically modified seeds have long been controversial, but it’s a surprise to find that hybridization, around since Gregor Mendel’s time in the 1800s, can also inspire protest marches. Somehow, it doesn’t seem obvious that hybrid broccoli seeds are the 82nd Airborne of cultural imperialism.

Fine. Let them plant the seeds that they brought with them. Or starve. I fail to see what contribution Haiti has made to world progress or culture that would justify giving them two seconds’ thought, much less all of the handwringing we see in the lamestream media.

Read it.

Fashionably liberal rich people wake up to the fact that Democrat pols don’t hesitate to bite the hands that feed them.

Read it.

Buying an $8.8 million California mansion months before announcing their divorce wasn’t the only puzzling real-estate transaction for the Gores.

A month after snagging the Montecito estate in October 2009, Al and Tipper Gore transferred nine properties in Carthage, Tenn., from their own names into a limited liability company.

The transfer on Nov. 30, 2009, came after an Oregon masseuse lodged a January 2009 police complaint accusing the former vice president of sexual abuse.

Coincidence? I think not.

Perhaps we will soon learn why the Gores have decided t0 split after all these years.

Read it.

Now a failed gubernatorial nominee is flipping out on the Black Legislative Caucus because they didn’t nominate him because they are all Uncle Tom’s and the old white guys in SC are running the Democrat party like a plantation

Politics is getting more and more entertaining.