Jerry Pournelle has some thoughts.

Most interesting to me:

The best thing one can do for giant corporations is to thicken the business environment with regulations requiring compliance specialists; the result is to prevent newcomers from entering the business, thus ensuring that the business will be dominated by the existing giants.

The same logic applies to tax policy, and this can be recast as: ‘The best thing one can do for rich people is to thicken the tax environment with regulations requiring compliance specialists; the result is to prevent newcomers from entering the “rich people” business, thus ensuring that the “rich people” business will be dominated by the existing wealthy.’ Which is what I’ve been saying all along about Warren Buffet and his fellow travelers.

Read it.

Charles Moore reviews Radical by Maajid Nawaz.

The Other McCain blows the whistle.

Zoning is the closest thing to fascism most Americans will ever know, and it’s remarkable how local governments use zoning laws to limit the rights of the little guy while rewarding the wealthy and well-connected. Big developers who know how to work the system can almost always get whatever they want from zoning boards, while the small property owner is at the mercy of politicians and bureaucrats.

True that.

Quin Hilyer reacts to Jonathan Chait’s thesis that the reason Republicans dislike Obama is racism.

What a steaming load of diseased dung this is. The time has come to call this “racism” wolf cry what it really is: the Left’s version of McCarthyism. As with the original, the game is to accuse adversaries of something awful, and awfully untrue, purely for political effect, to cause a political wound. (The difference is that at least McCarthy had some small basis for his vilely overstated accusations, as the Venona documents have since shown; this cry of racism, here as in so many of the Left’s uses of it in recent years, has not even a shred of truth to it.)

Yup.

The reason Barack Obama’s outlook is alien to the American tradition is not because he is black; it is because he was mentored by a Communist, raised by leftists, inculcated with foreign values in Indonesia, befriended (and willing befriending of) some of the vilest radicals and terrorists on American soil, studied and emulated the evil Saul Alinksy, and consciously chose (by his own testimony in his crafted, semi-fictionalized “autobiography”) the persona of a man disaffected from and antagonistic to many of the values historically adopted and admired by most Americans.

Yup again.

Freeberg nails it once again.

If the economy improves, people prosper. If people prosper, Barack Obama sees them as the problem. If a leader thinks people are the problem when they’re making the economy stronger, clearly the economy cannot improve under His leadership.

Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna illustrates the recent discussion here about how mentally challenging it can be toeing the ‘progressive’ Party Line.

The rules vis-à-vis “race” that govern public discourse are extraordinarily complex and Byzantine. They are never explicitly stated, and are thus very difficult for even the most well-informed person to understand. Most high-minded and politically correct people run afoul of them at one time or another, since there are so many lines in so many places that cannot be crossed.

Virtually every day a politician or celebrity makes an error and inadvertently breaks the rules of discourse about “race”. The TV viewer is then subjected to the degrading spectacle of the offender’s repeated pitiful apologies, protests of good intentions, and abject groveling before the media outlets that shine the klieg lights on him. None of it does him any good, of course. Once the bucket of “racist” tar has been emptied over one’s head, the sticky goo remains indefinitely.

These rules only apply to white people, however (and to Jews, who for practical purposes are considered at least as “white” as I am). “Brown” people are given an unlimited supply of “Get Out of PC Jail Free” cards, and may thus say whatever they like about race with impunity.

Steve Sailer doesn’t much like the attitude of the Voices of the Crust.

The Anglo-Saxons have turned out to be the biggest winners in history. Their language dominates the world in 2012.

And the reason the Anglo-Saxons won is because they figured out a lot of better ways to do things, such as the British parliamentary system. And a big reason they figured out better ways is because they valued freedom of discussion and tried less hard than most people to shut down all criticism and unwelcome speech.

But, the way things work in the modern world is that it’s hateful and poisonous for anybody to be publicly proud of being related to a winner. To win these days, you should proclaim your victimhood whenever possible, which gives you moral authority to silence your critics.

Thus, in practice, Barack Obama rivals George H.W. Bush as the WASPiest-acting President of my lifetime, vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, playing golf, and reading Marilynne Robinson novels about Congregationalist ministers. But, if he were Brooke Osborne instead of Barack Obama, would he have ever been considered Presidential Timber? Would anybody have ever even noticed him? Of course not. Among people with a mellifluous prose style, Obama is not the most perceptive observer, but he;s got that figured out, as shown by naming his autobiography after the deadbeat African father he barely knew. Thus, Obama was offended to discover that his nasty but sensible rich African grandfather had spent his life as a head servant for the English colonists, studying the ways that made them rich and powerful, and applying them in Kenyan countryside.

In theory, we now admire losers. (In reality, we admire power and money, same as always.)

Read it.

Of course he does.

Speaking to a nation raw from its latest mass shooting, US President Barack Obama vowed on Wednesday to pursue “common-sense” measures to make sure mentally unbalanced people cannot get their hands on guns.

We already have such measures in place. And, from everything I’ve seen in the media, James Holmes exhibited no decisively significant symptoms of ‘mental unbalance’ before the attack. So I’m thinking that what the Obamassiah has in mind are criteria whereby somebody who, oh, say, doesn’t support ‘gay marriage’ will be deemed sufficiently ‘mentally unbalanced’ so as to justify denying such a person the right to own a gun.

Laugh if you will; the Chick-fil-A situation suggests that it could happen — ThoughtCrime is alive and well among big-city Democrats … of which, ad perpetuum rei memoriam, Obama is one.

Read it.

It’s said that most Americans under the age of 30 reflexively dislike movies made before 1970, especially those that were shot in black-and-white. If this is so, I suspect it’s because such films portray an America that no longer exists. Those of us who are a couple of decades older than that well up with intense nostalgia at the sight of that reassuringly familiar place, even the uncomfortable districts that harbored desperate souls hurtling toward a rendezvous with film-noir death. After all, that’s the place where we grew up. For those under 30, though, black-and-white America is an impenetrably strange land peopled with creatures who look like human beings but live in a parallel universe of fedoras, dial telephones, three-channel TV sets and more or less nuclear families.

The key was the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. That’s when the rot set in, and it’s been downhill ever since.

My father, WWII vet, habitually wore a hat when he went outside until well into the 70s. He bought me one when I was about 14; it sat on the ledge in our front coat closet. Don’t know what ever happened to it.

South Bend Seven sums it up.

One hundred people are given apples, flour, sugar, butter, etc.

Some people make delicious apples tarts and pies that everyone wants.

Some people eat their apples, and manage to make passable loaves of coarse bread which others will eat.

Some people eat their apples and have no idea what to do with the baking material.

Some people leave the apples out to spoil, and the butter to go rancid, and everything goes to waste.

How do you conclude from this that the people who made the delicious pies needs to pay for everyone’s ingredients next month?

And that’s all you really need to know on the subject.

I have nothing to say about Penn State.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, puts the boot in.

But why don’t you – as, presumably, the owner of your own business – raise the wages that you pay to your employees?  You’re perfectly free to do so.

You’ll reply that such arbitrary increases in wages by individual employers put firms that so raise their wages at a competitive disadvantage relative to firms that don’t raise their wages.  That is, you understand that there’s a cost to arbitrarily raising wages – and it is a cost that you seek to shove off of yourself and onto others by having government oblige all firms to pay a higher minimum-wage.

Why, though, should I endorse a policy that shifts much of cost of arbitrarily raised wages from you to other people?  A rise in the legislated minimum-wage will oblige your customers to pay higher prices (given that firms will be unable to gain competitive advantages by hiring workers at wages below the minimum).  A big chunk of the cost of such an arbitrary hike in wages, therefore, will be shifted by legislation from you to consumers.  Worse, to the extent that such cost-shifting is avoided, a higher minimum-wage will likely condemn many low-skilled workers to the hell of longer periods of unemployment.

Read it.

Just to repeat the obvious, since a lot of people seem oblivious to it.

Read it.

Our nation is saddled with a tiny cadre of Leftists who, unfortunately, hold many key positions both inside and outside of government. These Leftists assert with great, though completely unfounded, authority that they know best how private businesses should do their thing.

Leftists think they know exactly how every little facet of the giant, endlessly faceted private economy works, which is remarkable, considering their enormous disdain for it.

CNN has a video of him at Science Camp in 2006.

The turd in the beer of the Chattering Classes during this affair is the utter lack of the Usual Suspect Influences. A cornerstone of the ‘progressive’ mindset is that people are born blank slates, and if they turn out bad it was because they were bent the wrong way by their parents or their teachers or various nefarious social influences. So when somebody like James Holmes comes along, they can’t cope. There’s nothing that they can point to and say ‘Aha! You see? You see?’

Jim Goad sums up modern American life.

In the wake of Friday morning’s bloodbath at a Colorado movie theater, America struggles to figure out who or what to blame.

They’ve obviously ruled out the shooter.

Dymphna looks at mass murder as seen through the prism of modern journalism.

Breivik emerged from the dark, demonic side of nice, nice Norway, and he terrifies them for that very reason. Not given to much in the way of introspection, they have no clue as to how to prevent another mass murderer from popping up out of the woodwork. The political elites’ refusal to permit a public discussion of Norway’s cultural pressures prevents the larger world from granting them full respect. It also guarantees another murderous breakout by some seriously disturbed soul.

Norway hardly has the only violent male who commits mass murder in cold blood. America has plenty of them. Here, the kabuki theatrics by the media are different: first, the mad dash to find his connections to conservatism — the Big, Bad RightWingExtremists. No particular conservative has to be demonized, though. There is no special Fjordman slot in America. The closest we come to demonization is finding some connection to that infamously violent hate group, the Tea Party.

It is beside the point that the Tea Party is responsible for zero murders, no mayhem, and doesn’t advocate violence in behalf of its quest for smaller government and fewer taxes. Whatever. “Everyone knows” they’re evil.

But surely he was a Republican? And a White Supremacist?

As a matter of inconvenient fact, the Colorado killer had registered as a Democrat at one point. So there goes that narrative.

Well, shucks. But surely he was a loner, shunned by a society that he in turn rejected, oppressed by a normality into which he could never quite fit?

… in fact, he’s already been identified as having a normal high school experience, complete with high academics and success at athletics. His advisors in college noted his high IQ and the fact that he captured honors in science before going on to graduate school. A quiet fellow. Didn’t bother anyone, but no one seemed to know him.

Boy, the Voices of the Crust don’t have a lot to work with, here.

An Informative Chart.

William Jacobson adds a little perspective.

A mass murder like Aurora, Colorado, naturally grabs the headlines and attention, as it should.  A presidential recognition of the murders is appropriate.

Yet more than twice as many people have been murdered this month in the president’s hometown of Chicago than were killed in the Aurora shooting.  They are just statistics for whom there will be no presidential visits or flags flown at half staff.’

Most of them weren’t white people. Perhaps that made a difference. The Crust always worries a lot more when white people die — after all, they’re mostly white people (and their pet black people) — than when non-white people die, unless there’s some political juice to be extracted, as in the Trayvon Martin case.

Read it.

That’s if you’re interested. A lot of people, many of whom have written extensively on the subject, aren’t.

Katherine Mangu-Ward takes exception.

Actually, most traditional classrooms contain more monologue than dialogue already. (“Anyone? anyone?”). But dozens of for-profit companies (and nonprofits) are working right now to solve that problem by offering products that make it possible for teachers to get feedback from their students in real time. Weekly quizzes, midterms, or final papers are crude tools to gauge whether anyone in the room has any idea what the teacher is talking about. A bunch of kids sitting at computers can be tested twice a day, twice an hour, or twice a minute to make sure they are following the lesson. If they’re not, a human teacher can intervene—by chat, email, phone, or in person—or the program can just serve up pre-crafted remedial modules that have helped kids with similar problems in the past. Edmundson may be right that the very best, top of the line education experience should have a face-to-face component. But for an awful lot of students, an automated program may be able to offer more of a dialogue than in-person profs have the ability or inclination to do.

If this guy had a case, then movies would never have pushed out the live theater.

The Other McCain piles on.

The unemployment applications exceeded forecasts by 21,000 and that’s just “typical,” eh? Unemployment is just “somewhat elevated,” eh?

And by the way, does anyone remember the Labor Department’s unemployment numbers being revised downward during this administration? Or am I correct in suspecting that the initial report pretty much always understates the numbers, and then they come back to “revise upward” later on when they think we won’t notice?

Read it.

Aaron Sorkin is why people hate liberals. He’s a smug, condescending know-it-all who isn’t as smart as he thinks he is. His feints toward open-mindedness are transparently phony, he mistakes his opinion for common sense, and he’s preachy. Sorkin has spent years fueling the delusional self-regard of well-educated liberals. He might be more responsible than anyone else for the anti-democratic “everyone would agree with us if they weren’t all so stupid” attitude of the contemporary progressive movement. And age is not improving him.

Not the sort of thing you expect to find in Salon, which is usually a reliable Voice of the Crust. But  I guess there are limits.

Oh, you can easily substitute pretty much any obnoxiously liberal actor’s name — Alec Baldwin, Barbra Streisand, Susan Sarandon, Morgan Freeman, Barack Obama — for Aaron Sorkin and it’s still accurate.

Steve Sailer ponders leftist doublethink about racism.

But what strikes me as more interesting is that nobody in the press seems to think that there is anything objectionable about Chinese racial bias in favor of Lin.

Keep in mind that this isn’t Chinese nationalism at work. Lin was born in America and his parent are from Taiwan. This is Chinese racialism. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Gee. Imagine that.

I think a couple of things are going on. While nobody has a problem with Chinese rooting for an American-born Taiwanese out of sheer racialism, practically zero American whites will admit even to themselves that they would find it cool to see a foreign white do well in the NBA just because they are white.

On the other hand, white Americans in the Obama Age are slowly, quietly getting a little tired of blacks. So, a Chinese-American “victim of stereotypes” makes an ideal proxy for white fans who are horrified by the thought of themselves being even a little bit racialist (but who, deep down, are). The only thing that could have made Lin more perfect for them is if he were also gay.

And there you have it. Asians are honorary SWPL white people. Just in case you were wondering.

Judge Napolitano explains why it’s important.

The greatest distinguishing factor between countries in which there is some freedom and those where authoritarian governments manage personal behavior is the Rule of Law. The idea that the very laws that the government is charged with enforcing could restrain the government itself is uniquely Western and was accepted with near unanimity at the time of the creation of the American Republic. Without that concept underlying the exercise of governmental power, there is little hope for freedom.

Tom Smith lays it out.

Much could be said about how stupid was President Obama’s recent comments about business founders not really having built their businesses by themselves, but rather owing them in large part to things others, especially the government, did for them. You drove on a public road to meet your 457th potential angel investor. Your third grade public school teacher taught you always to say please. And so government gets a lot of the credit for the thing you sweated blood to create. Big surprize. If you build anything, you can absolutely bet people will line up for the credit, like Al Gores for the internet. Failure, you can keep the credit for that.

But here’s the question to ask — how many more successful businesses, inventions, products, services, toys, tools, insights, and just plain fun would there be, if government did not in the first place make it so ridiculously difficult to start a business and keep it going? I don’t see our young president taking credit on behalf of the state for all the failures it help cause, all the ideas that never got off the ground because the regulatory hurdles were so high, or all the established companies that never had to face competition because they had managed to get their rents written into law. This is part of the seen and not seen insight of Bastiat. What you see is a successful business when it manages to survive, and then people run up, the same people who taxed and regulated it nearly to death, and say I helped! I helped! What you don’t see are all the businesses that perished or never got started because of the heavy hand of the state. And it’s a very heavy hand.

David Bernstein chimes in:

Not to mention the times when government directly destroys businesses. For example, my paternal grandfather opened business after business that failed (but always eventually paid his debts to his creditors, so he was always able to start again). He finally achieved some modest success in his forties. New York City, however, had other plans, and took his business via eminent domain, paying a nominal sum for his inventory and precisely nothing for his most valuable asset, goodwill. Lord knows how many thousands of small businesses were destroyed by (generally) misconceived urban redevelopment projects, with inadequate compensation to their owners. I don’t know the full details, but would anyone be surprised to learn that the developers who built on the condemned land had a lot more political power than the displaced small businessmen? That’s government, too.

All too often, what entrepreneurs build is successful not because of government but in spite of persostent government attempts to get in the way.

Bernstein again, with the bottom line:

Sure, the government can provide useful services, and undoubtedly my father benefited from public schooling and other services (which is not to say that at least some of those services might not have been better-provided privately). But it’s an atrocious logical error to argue that if government does some things with at least minimal competence and efficiency that this somehow justifies any other intervention into civil society by government, or that the fact that most of us appreciate some government means that we should inherently want more government (or for that matter, that we shouldn’t want less government).

Fritz has the right of it.

Economic goods are not rationed by price; price facilitates voluntary transactions between willing buyers and sellers in free markets. Rationing is what happens when a powerful authority (usually a government) steps in to dictate the organization of markets, the specification of goods, and — more extremely — who may buy what goods and at what prices (though dictated prices are essentially meaningless because they do not perform the signaling function that they do in free markets)….

Read it.

Ordinarily a pseudo-conservative and a quasi-liberal pretending to be Sage Commentators on the Current Scene would not attract my attention, but it’s 3:42 a.m. and I can’t sleep so I’m desperately trying to bore myself into being able to resume snoozing; this looked like the best candidate. (Reading most newspaper columns is like watching a guy carve a statue of Dale Earnhardt out of butter … I’m thinking: He’s actually getting paid to do that. But I digress.)

One statement by Brooks, however, struck me as a Blind Pig Moment:

Obama’s ad is cynicism on stilts. Companies that outsource jobs become more competitive. They grow faster and then end up hiring more people at home. Outsourcing increases employment levels.  Outsourcing increases productivity. It also decreases the prices consumers pay for stuff. Obama knows all this. He’s just paying the economic nationalism card for his own gain.

I was struck by how much that encapsulates modern American politics.

Some politician knows, or ought to know, the truth about Situation X, but ignores it and pretends that some specious falsehood about Situation X is instead the truth because he knows that a lot of people with only a casual interest in the subject — too casual to actually ferret out the facts — will believe his version of the truth because he’s an important politician and we’ve been trained to feel that important politicians are smarter than we are. And the reason the politician does this is because by doing so he can gin up some controversy or outrage or other kerfuffle that he hopes to be able to ride to re-election/increased name-recognition/greater status in the political landscape. ‘Screw what’s right for the country, I’m doing what’s right for ME.’ The people I immediately think of in this context are mostly Democrats (Chuck Schumer! Bill Clinton! I’m lookin’ at YOU!), but there are enough Republicans with the same disease (Lisa Murkowski appears to be a hereditary case) that the notion of the political class being more united by cynical self-serving greed than it’s divided by party identity is one that most people accept without a lot of argument.

The problem is, of course, as I’ve long said, that our political system is so arranged that the incentives are all aligned to promote this sort of behavior. The way one gets power and influence is by attracting votes. Lying will get you more votes than telling the truth. Spending tax money on specific constituencies, whether corporations or the proletariat, will get you more votes than being a careful steward of the public purse. Doing favors for special interest groups, be they the National Association of Tobacco Growers or the Sierra Club, gets you more money (and eventually more money gets you more votes) than doing what’s best for the public generally. Spending 24/7 campaigning for office and getting your face on the evening news gets you more votes than buckling down and doing the job for you were nominally elected. Pandering to the mob gets you more votes than doing the right thing, almost by definition. Markets work, even when you don’t want them to; the political market is rigged to reward bad behavior over good, and while (as with an actual market) you can go counter to entropy for a while, eventually you’re going to lose out to someone who moves with the flow rather than against it.

That’s the problem. So what’s the solution? Dunno. Wish I did. I think it’s a defect inherent in the democratic form of government, and the only sure way to get rid of it is to get rid of democracy itself — and, however bad the disease might be, that ‘cure’ is worse.

Mind you, at times it’s very attractive. One of my abiding interests is the history of the British upper classes, and on more than one occasion — I’m thinking specifically of the 1832 Reform Act and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 — a government controlled by a landowning ‘aristocracy’ took actions that they could not have been forced to take and that were directly contrary to their own interests. The closest modern examples I can think of are tax reform under Reagan and welfare reform under Clinton, where Democrats went along with programs that were directly contrary to their historical and avowed political positions — and they’ve been walking back from those ever since, something that the British upper classes never tried to do. (There’s our pathological political system doing its thing again.)

The practical problem with discarding democracy for some other system is that any alternative would be run by the same people that are running the current system — and, not coincidentally, levering the country into the toilet. No joy there. History teaches us that ‘enlightened government’ eventually winds up in the hands of dim bulbs, and you don’t even get the satisfaction of being able to say, ‘Well, we gave it our best shot.’

So there it is. We’re stuck with a defective system, and appear likely to remain so. Our only available course of action seems to be to try to pick the best possible people for political office in the hope that they will be able to resist the longest being corrupted by the system. ‘Eventually I will betray you’, they will say, if honest, and our only available response is ‘We know that, but we hope to get as much value out of you as we can before you screw us.

Read it.

Indeed, we all save from living in Texas rather than New York — and that’s even ignoring the ‘cost of living’.

Pretty smart, especially for a Harvard guy.

Verb. sap.

Read it.

If Obama and Romney really want to create jobs, then they should propose a ban on interstate trucking.

Read it.

As the Obama campaign and the media continue to press Mitt Romney to release more of his tax returns, and to suggest–without a shred of evidence–that he is a “felon,” it is worth noting how much critical information Barack Obama has withheld from view–both as a candidate in 2008, and during his term in office.

Just because Obama is easy to see through doesn’t mean he’s being transparent.

William Jacobson lays it out.

Obama, doing his Elizabeth Warren imitation, was insulting the people who make this country work, and was rejecting the heart of our system.

Obama needs to learn a few things, and the first is that the source of national wealth and prosperity is not the government. That doesn’t mean that government has no role, but is does mean that anyone who values our system understands that roads were built with tax dollars confiscated from private citizens who created wealth.

Read it.

In a competitive economy, $5,000 computers become $500 tablets. Consumers get to spend the difference elsewhere in the economy.

Did Mitt Romney and Bain Capital help office-supply retailer Staples create 88,000 jobs? 43,000? 252? Actually, Staples probably destroyed 100,000 jobs while creating millions of new ones.

Not that they’ll get any thanks for it. Everybody hears the complaints of the Crust about losing their ‘friendly neighborhood bookstore/stationery store/whatever’ and nobody (certainly nobody in the Voice of the Crust Media) pays attention to consumers, more often than not poor people, who now have more money to spend on other things

Read it.

The “you didn’t build that” passage of President Obama’s Roanoke speech has gone viral on the Internet, with the Republican National Committee posting posters of Steve Jobs, the Wright Brothers, and Alexander Graham Bell. The Wall Street Journal has an editorial calling it “the line of the year.”

And anyone who said that Obama is not a socialist is now shown to be a fool … or a liar.

Read it.

What do you get if you cross Alan Turing with the London Olympics?

We have the technology.

Read it.

Saw that coming.

Read it.

Just as long as you’re using it ironically.

Read it.

Under a law signed by former President George W. Bush, all unions must publicly disclose their assets and expenses. Such disclosures reveal the  political contributions made by unions and the salaries  of top union officials.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal used the public data to examine the broad array of political contributions of the two most powerful teachers’ unions — the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. Over the weekend, Fox News used the data to show that union bosses make ten times more than the average American worker.

For the Union makes us wrong….

Read it.

We almost have the technology.

Read it.

Hint: No.

IN 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Episcopal bishop of Newark, published a book entitled “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Spong was a uniquely radical figure — during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition — but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise. Thus their church has spent the last several decades changing and then changing some more, from a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive Christian bodies in the United States.

As a result, today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict XVI suddenly adopted every reform ever urged on the Vatican by liberal pundits and theologians. It still has priests and bishops, altars and stained-glass windows. But it is flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.

It’s hip, and trendy.

Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.

Guess it’s not working.

Read it.

He was skeptical of preachers and their effect on God-and-gun clinging Americans, and saw the Catholic Church as an obstacle to his policies, plans, and vision for the state.

At the same time, he argued that Christians should support his ideas and enthusiastically sought the support of the “social justice” Religious Left for various causes and campaigns. And yet, many people were unclear about his personal religious beliefs, including whether he was a Christian. Some even dared to call him a communist, while he described himself as “progressive.”

Sound familiar? Who is this man? If you answered “Barack Obama,” you’re only half right. The answer is Frank Marshall Davis, Hawaii mentor to a young Barack Obama, and Communist Party USA (CPUSA) member 47544.

The fruit doesn’t fall very far from the tree.

Unless it’s a bunch of nude Greek pagans sweating in Thessaly, it ain’t the Olympics.

Get over it.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, with some more inconvenient truth.

Back in 1982 a faction of Lebanese Arabs massacred Palestinian Arabs at two refugee camps in Beirut. The Israeli army, in the neighborhood at the time, was accused of turning a blind eye to the killings. Hearing of this, Menachem Begin famously muttered: “Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews.”

Hence my title. NAM is an abbreviation for “Non-Asian Minority” commonly used among us wicked people who notice What Should Not Be Noticed.

Read it.

Denise Rich, the wealthy socialite and former wife of pardoned billionaire trader Marc Rich, has given up her U.S. citizenship – and, with it, much of her U.S. tax bill.

Ah. Another Republican 1%-er. The swine.

Rich, 68, a Grammy-nominated songwriter and glossy figure in Democratic and European royalty circles, renounced her American passport in November, according to her lawyer.

Wait a minute…. Democratic circles?

Marc Rich received a presidential pardon in 2001 on President Bill Clinton’s last day in office. Federal prosecutors and Congress investigated the pardon, and in 2002 a House of Representatives committee concluded Denise Rich had swayed the action through donations to the Clinton library and campaign.

Whoa….

One way or another, Obama’s ‘soak the rich’ program will make sure that American soon has no more rich to soak.

Read it.

Earlier this week, President Obama gave listeners a history lesson on why he was running for higher office. “The reason I ran for president,” Mr. Obama said, “the reason I ran the first time for a state senate seat [in 1996] on the south side of Chicago, was because . . . we had gone through a decade where people were working harder and harder but we didn’t see an increase in income. . . . Jobs weren’t growing fast enough. And the cost of everything . . . kept going up faster than people’s income.”

Was high unemployment, high inflation, and low growth what the U.S. was experiencing in 1996, or in the decade before that? No. That describes the 1970s–a decade of big government with price controls, the war in Vietnam, price fixing in oil, and massive inflation of the currency by the Federal Reserve. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which topped the 1,000 mark in 1966, was at about 800 fifteen years later. The 1980s, however, began a change. We saw a more stable currency, tax rate cuts, decontrol of oil prices, and relative peace abroad (and the collapse of the Soviet Union).

In 1996, the year President Obama ran for the Illinois state senate, President Clinton downsized government through welfare reform. By cutting welfare benefits, the welfare rolls were cut by almost 50%, and President Clinton had budget surpluses his last two years in office. In 1996, the U.S. saw 2,500,000 new jobs created and only 3% inflation. Americans, contrary to the president’s statement, experienced massive job increases, and they watched their growing incomes outpace inflation. The U.S. economy had strong decades in the 1980s and 1990s.

So, why the pretend history? Because pretend history is the only way to make increases in debt and in the size of government appear to be the correct political move.

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Climate change, this global warming thing, it’s going to mean that the tropical forests frazzle up and then we all die, right? It will mena the death of the “lungs of the planet” – such as the miles upon miles of Amazon jungle – which turn CO2 into the O2 that we inhale. It’s titsup for humanity, basically. Except, according to one new paper in Nature, that’s not the way it will work. CO2 is indeed plant food and more plant food means more plants, more forests and thus we’re all saved: or perhaps not quite as screwed as some seem to think at least.

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

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Why is it that some technologies cause moral panic and others don’t? Why was the introduction of electricity seen as a terrible thing, while nobody cared much about the fountain pen?

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“The first push-back is going to be about kids. Is it making our children vulnerable? To predators? To other forms of danger? We will immediately then regulate access. I don’t want to seem cynical because there is a reason why we worry about children, but I do think you can tell that’s where it’s going to start.”

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Many will wonder what the fuss was about. The answer concerns the clarity of a sentence. As Lynne Truss proved with her massive bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which was at heart about the accurate placement of commas and apostrophes, a lot of people care about such things. I’m one of them. To judge by the mail, many of this column’s readers are, too.

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Many of the sounds we hear every day are entirely fabricated by engineers to persuade us to buy things.

Hundreds of items have their acoustics deliberately tweaked to make us happy, according to Trevor Cox, professor of acoustic engineering at the University of Salford.

The dastards. Oh, sorry … I was thinking of journalists. Carry on.