Scott Johnson points out that there is nothing new under the sun.

On July 9, 1858, Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas gave a campaign speech to a raucous throng from the balcony of the Tremont Hotel in Chicago. Abraham Lincoln was in the audience when Douglas prepared to speak. Douglas invited Lincoln to come join him on the balcony to watch the speech. In his speech Douglas rang the themes of the momentous campaign that Lincoln and Douglas waged that summer and fall for Douglas’s Senate seat.

Douglas paid tribute to Lincoln as a “kind, amiable, and intelligent gentleman, a good citizen and an honorable opponent,” but took issue with Lincoln’s June 16 speech to the Illinois Republican convention that had named him its candidate for Douglas’s seat. In that speech Lincoln had famously asserted that the nation could not exist “half slave and half free.” According to Douglas, Lincoln’s assertion was inconsistent with the “diversity” in domestic institutions that was “the great safeguard of our liberties.” Then as now, “diversity” was a shibboleth hiding an evil institution that could not be defended on its own terms.

Read it.

How is this a surprise? All of the populist rhetoric out of Washington is just handwaving to impress the Great Unwashed and get the Fool Vote. Now more than ever, in an age of disintermediation and freely-flowing information, ‘Wall Street’ depends on ever-increasing thickets of government regulation to safeguard their position as gatekeepers to the financial markets.

Read it.

Outside his kitchen, the customers, most of them Vietnamese, are expecting authentic Vietnamese cuisine. German Sierra, born in Honduras, makes sure they get it.

Wonder when the Washington Post will realize that this shoots Identity Politics right square in the ass?

“It is hard to find a chef now — a Vietnamese chef,” said Thi Quach, owner of Viet Taste. “Most young Vietnamese people now, they tend to stay in school and they do professional jobs, so they don’t want to stay in the kitchen, and the older generation are getting old already.”

Gee, don’t they call that … assimilation?

A new study suggests that recent Asian immigrants also tend to have higher levels of education, the majority enter the country legally and they are more likely to hold employment visas than immigrants from other countries. By contrast, a larger percentage of Hispanic immigrants have arrived undocumented and with lower levels of education, making them more likely candidates for lower-paying jobs.

Which is why we want more Asians and fewer Hispanics. Duh.

Read it.

Now I’ve got nothing (aside from the obvious) against models, but while my husband invariably gets to spend dinners making intelligent conversation, I’m forever getting stuck with the Model Wife. These women aren’t genetically stupid, but years of being prized for nothing but their looks have led to a certain amount of decay in the head department. Wit and intellect are like muscles which, left too long unused, wither and die. Nobody has ever asked the Model Wife what she thinks of Obamacare or contemporary art. These women think a Syrian intervention is a new cosmetic procedure. That’s a little unfair, you say – what about Model Husbands? Well, there aren’t many about, accomplished women being less inclined to marry brainless trophies.

Read it.

Yeah, yeah, boring ‘inside baseball’ lawyer stuff. But this is important (unless you, like me, have no intention of visiting foreign parts).

Gary Taubes points out — in the New York Slimes, no less –that what The Government and The Scientists tell us to eat is the worst possible stuff for us.

Color me surprised.

What was done by Dr. Ludwig’s team has never been done before. First they took obese subjects and effectively semi-starved them until they’d lost 10 to 15 percent of their weight. Such weight-reduced subjects are particularly susceptible to gaining the weight back. Their energy expenditure drops precipitously and they burn fewer calories than people who naturally weigh the same. This means they have to continually fight their hunger just to maintain their weight loss. The belief is that weight loss causes “metabolic adaptations,” which make it almost inevitable that the weight will return. Dr. Ludwig’s team then measured how many calories these weight-reduced subjects expended daily, and that’s how many they fed them. But now the subjects were rotated through three very different diets, one month for each. They ate the same amount of calories on all three, equal to what they were expending after their weight loss, but the nutrient composition of the diets was very different.

One diet was low-fat and thus high in carbohydrates. This was the diet we’re all advised to eat: whole grains, fruits, vegetables, lean sources of protein. One diet had a low glycemic index: fewer carbohydrates in total, and those that were included were slow to be digested — from beans, non-starchy vegetables and other minimally processed sources. The third diet was Atkins, which is very low in carbohydrates and high in fat and protein.

The results were remarkable. Put most simply, the fewer carbohydrates consumed, the more energy these weight-reduced people expended. On the very low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, there was virtually no metabolic adaptation to the weight loss. These subjects expended, on average, only 100 fewer calories a day than they did at their full weights. Eight of the 21 subjects expended more than they did at their full weights — the opposite of the predicted metabolic compensation.

In other words, ‘paleo’ diets work.

From this perspective, the trial suggests that among the bad decisions we can make to maintain our weight is exactly what the government and medical organizations like the American Heart Association have been telling us to do: eat low-fat, carbohydrate-rich diets, even if those diets include whole grains and fruits and vegetables.

Boy, I can’t wait until the ‘experts’ are in charge of our health care. Put Mike Bloomberg in charge, he’s an elected official and thus no doubt knows more about what you ought to eat than ANYBODY.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, is always worth reading.

If you have been born and raised in the USA, race is never far from your mind. Native Americans—people like my kids—have a mental Race Buzzer that goes off in a thousand different contexts and whose purpose is to drown out certain kinds of thoughts. The darn thing’s on a hair trigger. If you were raised in some other place where race was a thing people hardly ever thought about, this is really hard to get used to. Trust me on this.

…

The rule here, the rule I met when it was too late to internalize it, is that you’re not supposed to notice. He’s black, she’s yellow, they’re Jewish. We all know it, but for goodness’ sake don’t mention it.

That’s why all those reports about mobs, gangs, and riots in Philadelphia, Chicago, Peoria, and DC are telling us about “youths,” “teens,” or “thugs.” In the age of cell-phone cameras and YouTube uploads we can all perfectly well see that the perps are black, but it would be a gross breach of etiquette (one I just committed, I guess) to let on that you’d noticed. I just watched a segment of the O’Reilly show titled “Violent Teen Mobs Causing Chaos Across Country.” In the entire 6:15 segment, neither Laura Ingraham nor either of her two guests used any of the terms “black,” “African American,” or “colored.”

Read it.

Healthcare’s hyperinflation has ignited the DIY Health Reformers to declare what amounts to a Declaration of Insurance Independence. While the reformers recognize insurance plays a vital role for managing high risk events (house fire, car accident, cancer), the fee-for-service model underlying insurance in day-to-day healthcare has created what translates into a 40% “insurance bureaucrat tax” that they want freedom from.

I’ve long said that the two major areas of human endeavor that haven’t been properly automated yet are health care and education. We appear to be on the verge of that happening; Khan Academy is certainly a step in the right direction. This article is about another encouraging step.

Unfortunately, ham-handed attempts to dip the current system in bureaucracy and freeze it in place, like Obamacare, may stifle this initiative in the cradle. But maybe not — entrepreneurs are more nimble than politicians, almost by definition, and they might be able to work around it. I hope.

Tech Crunch does something that is Not Safe For Work.

Ever have one of those days where every news story bugs the living shit out of you? Where your faith in humanity ebbs further away with every click? We’re having one of those days.

I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.

Steve Sailer takes a break from annoying the Crust to watch a movie.

Why the hate for the three Transformers movies? For one thing, most critics are frustrated fiction writers, so they normally love writing plot summaries. But recounting a Transformers storyline, which has been molded to make perfect sense to a small boy, seems demeaning. “Did I read all those Raymond Carver stories to get my MFA just to transcribe complicated gibberish about Deceptibots and Autocons?”

Read it.

Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

Freeberg lays it out.

… they react to a situation precisely the way a rational person would — but, not in that situation, in a different one. Let us call this one “Survival Staples” or “Starvation Imminent.” Without any supporting evidence at all, and without even any persuasive suggestion, liberals tend to behave as if the commodity-of-the-moment is in such short supply, and is so crucial to the continuing survival of the humans, be they in collectives or be they merely individuals — that an inexhaustible supply of the whatever-it-is becomes a “right.” Once they’re on this pathway, they get lost, instantly, for they adhere to the notion that mere difficulty involved in acquiring it, nevermind outright failure, constitutes an intolerable encroachment upon that right.

Crime…without an actual “bad guy.” So, of course, one has to be invented, that’s the next step.

Read it.

In my article, “The Food-Safety Fallacy: More Regulation Doesn’t Necessarily Make Food Safer,” I use ancient and more recent historical examples of flawed rules to rebut the common misconception that more food-safety regulation means safer food. Rather, history shows us that food-safety regulations have often made food (and, consequently, people) less safe.

Paul Rahe looks at the Obamacare decision.

In his opinion, the Chief Justice affirmed the principle asserted by Justices Kennedy, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas. He made it clear that the commerce clause does not give Congress authority over economic activity that we do not engage in. He also made it clear that the necessary and proper clause cannot be applied to achieve this end. In short, he joined these four Justices in setting a clear limit to the commerce clause, and he paved the way for future challenges to extensions of the regulatory state.

At the same time, he dodged the political firestorm, and nearly all of the liberals who have commented on the matter – a slow-thinking lot, in my opinion – have applauded what they take to be cowardice on his part as “judiciousness.” Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit was among the first to recognize that Roberts might be playing an elaborate game. He compared the decision to Marbury v. Madison, where Chief Justice John Marshall surrendered in the case before the court while firmly and eloquently reasserting the Court’s right and responsibility to engage in judicial review; and Reynolds pointed to one crucial fact: Senate rules do not allow a filibuster when the bill under consideration has to do with imposing or repealing a tax. If the Republicans take the Senate and the Presidency, they can now repeal the individual mandate. They will not need sixty votes.

Read it.

Jury nullification, in which jurors refuse to convict defendants under laws they find objectionable or inappropriately applied, is a favored tactic of many libertarians who, rightly or wrongly perceive individual liberty as, at best, a minority taste among their neighbors. They like the idea of a tool that can be wielded on the spot to shield people from powerful control freaks without first having to win a popularity contest. But nullification is useful only if people know about. And last week, New Hampshire’s governor signed a law requiring the state’s judges to permit defense attorneys to inform jurors of their right to nullify the law.

Now, this is very curious. Lynch is a Democrat, which in New Hampshire means he’s a transplant from Massachusetts, one of the most liberal states in the nation. Democrats, especially Massachusetts Democrats (think Kennedys) aren’t famous for being very libertarian. So what’s his agenda here?

Data point 1: New Hampshire, long a bastion of individual rights (which these days is characterized as ‘conservative’, although ‘conservatives’ don’t have a great record when it comes to individual rights), is becoming increasingly liberal because of immigration by left-winger Summer People from the surrounding blue states of Vermont, Maine, and especially Massachusetts.

Data point 2: New Hampshire has a lot of laws that socialists dislike, especially with respect to things like gun rights and property rights.

Suspicion: Lynch sees this as a wedge whereby increasingly liberal immigrants can overturn, in their local communities, laws intended to preserve individual rights without the effort needed to do a state-wide change through a still-Republican-controlled legislature. Muslims are doing the same thing with respect to shari’a law in Britain and Europe, and probably in the United States in places like Michigan (which the Crustian media refuse to report, since it goes against the Party Line).

But only time will tell.

Read it.

The men expended more energy than Olympic athletes as they hand-hauled their supplies on sledges across hundreds of miles of ice and snow.

Read it.

Tell the truth: Would you really trust your life to a Ford?

Eric Raymond has the goods.

The centennial of Alan Turing’s birth brings us the news that Alan Turing probably did not commit suicide by eating a poisoned apple, was not depressed at the time of his death, and that the hormone treatments intended to suppress his homosexual urges had been discontinued a year before he died. I am not in the least surprised by any of this; in fact I have been half-expecting such inversions ever since I began noticing, twenty years or so ago, the increasing mythologization of Turing’s life.

…

Ada Lovelace has been falsely mythologized as the first programmer because she was a woman. In a present struggling with issues of sexual equality, her femaleness has served propaganda purposes too obvious to need rehearsing. Turing’s homosexuality, too, has become a sort of marker or talking point in today’s culture wars.

Read it.

In short, 95.1 percent of all murder victims and 95.9 percent of all shooting victims in New York City are black or Hispanic. And 90.2 percent of those arrested for murder and 96.7 percent of those arrested for shooting someone are black and Hispanic. I don’t even know where to begin to describe the horror I still feel looking at those numbers. But the word “hunted” comes to mind.

What’s this got to do with The Dark Knight? Well might you ask.

Unlike most major American cities, where Black people engaged in a war of attrition to drive whites out and take political power (though, as Detroit, Memphis, Birmingham, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Philadelphia shows, this does not correlate to economic power), Nolan’s Gotham City is one that appears to be 80 percent or more white.

In the world of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises, the villains are white men like mob boss leader Carmine Falcone, The Scarecrow, The Joker, The League of Shadow’s leader Ra’s Al Ghul, Harvey Dent/ Two-Face, and Bane; men of extraordinary intelligence, motivated by very different reasons to bring Gotham City to its knees.

David Henderson blows the whistle.

There are two ways to take lousy government for granted: (1) to understand clearly how lousy, petty, vicious, self-serving, and narcissistic most government is, and (2) to understand implicitly how lousy, petty, vicious, self-serving, and narcissistic most government is but get so used to it that you hardly notice. I’m in category (1). There are a lot of people in category (2) whom I’m trying to get to category (1).

Case in point: The Supreme Court decision about Obamacare.

The decision is likely to come out next week. Yet we’ve been told that the actual decision was made months ago and it’s probably the case that all the opinions were written weeks ago. So why can’t they tell us? Why make us wait?

Imagine that Apple found a bug in its iPad and came up with a fix. How would you feel if you had just bought an iPad and found out that Apple was going to wait 2 months before releasing the fix? My guess is that you would be angry. Yet I don’t see people getting angry at the Supreme Court. Why? Check out reason (2) above. We are so used to government officials being narcissistic and self-serving that we just accept that they take their sweet time telling us. The fact that waiting until the end of June instead of finding out in, say, mid-May, will cause the misallocation of billions of dollars? No biggie.

This is why, when doctors do clinical trials, if it quickly becomes obvious that the medicine being examined works to fix what’s wrong with people, they cancel the trial and give it to every sick person involved; they don’t wait to finish the trial. Doctors figure that their job is to help sick people, not carry through with some procedural Kabuki dance. Lawyers — not so much.

Read it.

A historical thesis popularized by Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel, postulates that the tiny and remote Easter Island suffered a devastating ecological collapse as the result of poor stewardship of natural resources by its inhabitants. Diamond goes on to suggest this “ecocide” parallels our own global situation. But these claims have now been challenged by a pair of archaeologists working to investigate the real history of Easter Island.

In a new book titled The Statues That Walked, Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt argue that the story of the downfall of Easter Island as popularized in Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is almost completely false.

Read it.

In early 1979, a pair of identical twin brothers who had been separated at four weeks were reunited after 39 years. Both named Jim, they discovered that they smoked the same brand of cigarettes, vacationed in the same town and both called their dog “Toy.” Struck by the story, psychologists at the University of Minnesota started studying separated twins that same year. Their efforts blossomed into the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, which ran for a quarter century, attracting world-wide fascination and antipathy.

Nancy Segal’s “Born Together—Reared Apart” is a thorough history of the project and of the 137 pairs of star-crossed twins who made it possible. Ms. Segal, a key member of the Minnesota team, focuses on the many scientific publications that emerged from the data. But along the way, readers meet leading twin researchers and a whole lot of twins—including the “Jim twins,” the “giggle twins” (who both laughed almost nonstop) and, most incredibly, Oskar, raised as a Nazi, and his identical brother, Jack, who was raised as a Jew.

Read it.

Since “urban” is synonymous with minority and Black in American lexicon, anytime meteorologists start predicting heat waves for cities with vibrant, diverse populations like New York City, Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Memphis, Milwaukee, or Philadelphia, the great fear is that the risk of a “crime wave” rises with each uptick in the Fahrenheit temperature.

…

Violent crime committed by Black people in Philadelphia, Chicago, Newark, St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Washington D.C., and Baltimore might increase, but it’s already at astronomically high rates (compared to the white population) that it’s hard to notice a difference.

But cities that are “overwhelmingly” white (does any newspaper ever say Detroit is “suffocatingly” Black… because they should) don’t have the same problem with increases in temperature.

Steve Sailer looks at why California sucks (despite the great climate) and Texas rocks (despite the shitty climate).

The struggles of even the best-connected California celebrities to nail down every last one of the permits they need to build on their own property helps demonstrate why differences in topography drive Californians toward voting for environmentalist Democrats and Texans toward pro-business Republicans.

…

Paradoxically, Democratic California is a nice place to be wealthy and white, while Republican Texas increasingly attracts the working class, especially minorities and immigrants.

It’s not paradoxical at all to those who keep their eyes open. The Democrats are the party of rich white people and their ethnic fashionable-victim clients, a conspiracy of the Overclass and the Underclass against the middle class — the Crusts versus the Filling. Republicans are people who don’t want to be tagged as Democrats, be their reasons pecuniary (such as Bloomberg and the New England RINOs) or philosophical (such as Jonah Goldberg and anybody who can read him without spitting up).

In contrast, most of Texas is so flat that few people can see much from their backyards, so they tend to mind their own business more. (Austin, the hilliest big city in Texas, is also the most liberal.)

The essence of being a Democrat is looking down on other people. If you’re rich, you can do that physically. If your poor or one of the fashionable-victim ethnic clients, you have to be content to do so morally. Even homeless bums can raise their noses high enough to look down them at the Politically Incorrect; you don’t have to be sober.

Read it.

Commerce Secretary John Bryson has resigned. Here’s a provocative idea: don’t replace him.

Bloomberg News observes that the Commerce Department has 47,000 employees and a $7.5 billion annual budget. America didn’t have a separate commerce department until 1913, yet somehow Americans managed to engage in commerce before that time without a federal government bureaucracy to assist them in doing so.

Read it.

If you receive government benefits, about 150 million.

Read it.

Missing, of course, is any answer to the question ‘Why?’

People seem to think that it’s enough to say ‘Oh noes! X is endangered!’ to trigger a panic reaction on the part of all within earshot. Unless there is something uniquely useful about these languages (and I suggest that any who were uniquely useful wouldn’t be endangered) then I don’t see the point.

Languages are like Household Stuff. Just because it was useful once doesn’t mean it’s worth keeping forever. Sometimes you just have to Take Out The Trash.

If I were a Google shareholder I’d be thinking of some pointed questions to be asking at the next shareholder meeting.

Steve Sailer always has that inconvenient fact or two handy.

Marco Rubio:

“Many people who came here illegally are doing exactly what we would do if we lived in a country where we couldn’t feed our families,” he writes in An American Son, which was released Tuesday. “If my kids went to sleep hungry every night and my country didn’t give me an opportunity to feed them, there isn’t a law, no matter how restrictive, that would prevent me from coming here.”

Hm. Are people starving in Mexico?

Let’s take a look at the obesity by nation chart that Steve provides, taken from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Oh, look, the U.S. is #1, and Mexico is #2. Well. I guess not.

So what the fuck is Rubio on about? Or is this just Identity Politics infecting supposed conservative Republicans?

Read it.

 People who track killings of environmental activists say the numbers have risen dramatically in the last three years. Improved reporting may be one reason, they caution, but they also believe the rising death toll is a consequence of intensifying battles over dwindling supplies of natural resources, particularly in Latin America and Asia.

Once again, we appear to have a Third World solution to a First World problem.

Read it.

If Aubrey de Grey’s predictions are right, the first person who will live to see their 150th birthday has already been born. And the first person to live for 1,000 years could be less than 20 years younger. A biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of a foundation dedicated to longevity research, de Grey reckons that within his own lifetime doctors could have all the tools they need to “cure” aging — banishing diseases that come with it and extending life indefinitely.

Read it.

And who should be in charge of measuring welfare, summing it, and weighing the gains and losses in order to arrive at a socially “just” distribution of income, whatever that is? Well, we know the answer to that question: It has to be the state — or more accurately — elected officials and bureaucrats: people not known for their perspicacity, objectivity, and even-handedness.

In the alternative, a just society could be one where individuals engage in voluntary, cooperative exchanges of goods and services for their mutual betterment, and from the fruits of which they voluntarily aid those whom they know to be in need of aid.

The alternative is inevitably attacked as “unjust.” But it should be noted that such attacks come from individuals (philosophers, politicians, do-gooders, etc.) who would impose their own views of “social justice” on everyone. How any such imposition can be considered more “just” than a regime of voluntary, cooperative, mutually beneficial behavior is beyond me.

Me, too.

Read it.

The real agenda, I suppose, is to force the rest of us to be vegetarians. The hoaxers and bureaucrats who stir up global warming hysteria would no more stop eating filet mignon than they would give up their private jets. They just want power over the rest of us. Thankfully, hardly anyone is silly enough to believe that humanity can regulate the Earth’s climate by eating tofu instead of bacon. Still, next time you are in a restaurant, it might be fun to order a 32-ounce Porterhouse. In addition to all the usual reasons, you will be defying some of the world’s most obnoxious busybodies.

Read it.

This is the real problem. Technology actually is approaching the magic point. You want to know how your laptop works. You can’t know. Even the people who made it don’t know. Apple has to call up LG or Sharp when it wants a high-density display. LG has to call Samsung when they want MLC flash storage. Samsung has to call NVIDIA when they want graphics cores. NVIDIA has to call ARM to make SoC architecture. Vertical integration is a thing of the past because no company can do it all. It took Intel five years and billions of dollars to develop just the processor your laptop runs today. The whole system is the culmination of a century of work by geniuses and specialists. Control over your hardware is the flimsiest of illusions. You only understand the snow frosting the top of the iceberg, and even then all you can do to fix it is pay for more.

Read it.

A new study shows that the ranks of people earning $1 million or more are highly variable from year to year. That implies that millionaires aren’t quite the monolithic class that some political rhetoric might suggest.

Read it.

“Sometimes I think that the only people in this country who worry more about money than the poor are the very wealthy,” Kenny says. “They worry about losing it, they worry about how it’s invested, they worry about the effect it’s going to have. And as the zeroes increase, the dilemmas get bigger.”

Read it.

It’s hard to know which is worse: the progs’ pride in their “nuanced thinking” or the complete absence of any evidence of it in their actions.  Or – no – maybe that’s a little over-simple.  There is one way in which they show an amazing plasiticity, which no doubt fools them into thinking that they’re nuanced.  They are masters of winnowing out some measly sliver of a difference between what they are vociferously condemning and what they are in fact advocating or doing at the moment.  Then they project searchlight levels of wishful thinking at that sliver in the hope of casting enough of a shadow for them to hide in.

Freeberg at his best.

Progressives have a strange relationship with the time stream, just as they have a strange relationship with that word “democracy.” Just as they seem to define “democracy” as “everyone does everything my way, whether they want to or not” — they speak of future events as if they have occurred in the past. More specifically, they speak of them as if it is entirely responsible & safe to forget all about probability.

Specifically, if anything bad might happen, then it definitely will happen, and by God we’d better get cracking on heading it off. No time to waste!

Normal people with fully working brains, see “democracy” as what it really is. It’s an exchange. We’re all going to give up a lot of control, now, so that later on we can say “right or wrong, this was the decision of those who took the time to participate.” It does not make the final outcome more correct, or even more virtuous, nor is it supposed to. It solves no problem at all, other than the complaints that might properly be aired, later on, that so-and-so was not consulted.

The greatest value of ‘democracy’ is what the Don Draper crowd would call buy-in. Those who are affected by a decision feel better if they were consulted, even if they didn’t come out on top when the decision is made. That’s why the Founding Fathers were so on about ‘taxation without representation is tyranny’. They didn’t necessarily have things go their way; but they felt entitled to input.

Whatever problems you have that are related to resentments about this person or that person not having a say, will be addressed, and all the other problems will not be. All this is self-evident to those of us who see democracy as what it really is; those of us who are not brain damaged.

Indeed. Democracy doesn’t fix all problems, or guarantee the best result — all it does is guarantee that everybody is more or less okay with the decision.

Gavin McInnes nails it.

The Turd World will catch up with us in a hundred years, so leave ’em be and let ’em have at it. We need to get out of the Middle East because you can’t fast-forward progress. Let nature run its course.

…

Do you remember when we forbade calendars with pictures of kittens on them? Me, neither. How about that strange epoch when Christians insisted women could only hang out with men they breast-feed? Never happened. Islam isn’t a culture that needs to be coaxed toward Western values. It’s a culture that has gone off the deep end forever. I no longer care if it’s because of inbreeding or cultural hijacking or brainwashing. That part of the world is irretrievably lost and there’s nothing we can do about it. Let’s cut the cord and bid them adieu for good. They can hop on their camels and drive through whatever alternate universe they choose and take whatever turn they want as long as they don’t end up in our backyard.

Paul Gottfried is down with it.

But I believe New York City has a legal and even moral right to enact the mayor’s law. He was duly elected. And his periodic attempts to control people’s eating habits represent exactly the kind of leftist government that New Yorkers seem to relish. Bloomy’s proposed measure already enjoys 42% public approval. If the media work a bit harder, they may be able to ratchet up the approval ratings to 60 or even 70 percent. In a federal republic of the kind this country used to be, there should be different places for people with different lifestyles. I’d be delighted if all the nuts moved to New York, San Francisco, and a few other urban centers, as long as they and their governments left me alone.

Read it.

To which one must also add: Don’t take any shit from the natives.

Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, takes a look at Smithsonian, a Voice of the Crust.

And do people still use the word “vibrant” non-ironically to mean something other than “crime-riddled multicultural slum”? On one hand, Key West is whiter than the USA at large, though only slightly (66.1%). On the other, it has 19% more crime than the US average given by city-data.com, with particularly high levels of burglary and theft.

Jehu is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.

If you’re a URM (Under-represented minority), and we can plausibly delude ourselves that you MIGHT be adequate to the task, we are ALWAYS hiring.  You’ll find this true of most companies.  So where’s the white privilege?

Oh, I hear you saying, but white people have an easier time getting the necessary credential—you hire pretty much just STEM MS and PhD holders right?

Do you really want to go there?  You’ll find that as a minority of the non-Asian variety, your ability to get accepted into graduate school, and more importantly, to get a full ride there is vastly enhanced.  So where’s the white privilege?

Read it.

Blogger Lindsay Leveen at Green Explored explains, in layman’s terms, how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has created data “that disobey the laws of thermodynamics so that the worthless government policy of favoring plug in vehicles over gas or diesel powered vehicles can be supported by the public.” The key, according to Leveen, is that the EPA deliberately ignores energy losses at each stage of the electrical process–meaning that the EPA’s claim of 118 miles per gallon (MPG) for the Honda Fit means less than 41 MPG in reality.

Well, you could always hitch a horse to the front of it. Think of how many MPG you’d get then.

Read it.

I sincerely wish that the word “fair” could be deleted from all political conversations.  No one this side of sociopathy openly campaigns for unfairness.  The question for all fair-minded (!) people is “what is fair?”  Just because, in your view, reality situation Y is unfair does not prove that Y is indeed unfair.  An equally magnanimous, well-meaning, and fair-minded (!) person might well assess Y to be fair.

Read it.

And FP reminds us that this is an “administration that has prosecuted more government officials under the Espionage Act of 1917 for sharing classified information with the media than all previous administrations combined.”

I realize that the people at tReason magazine see this as a Bad Thing, but I consider it the most positive things I’ve heard about Obama since he got elected. I’m still waiting for him to get around to the New York Times, however.

Read it.

Read it.

Nailing Obama:

President Obama’s problem now isn’t what Wisconsin did, it’s how he looks each day—careening around, always in flight, a superfluous figure. No one even looks to him for leadership now. He doesn’t go to Wisconsin, where the fight is. He goes to Sarah Jessica Parker’s place, where the money is.

Steve Sailer persists in asking the questions no one else will ask, and throwing some daylight on the mainstreaming of abnormality.

“The best defense is a good offense” may explain much of the otherwise puzzling gay marriage project. Gay Liberation unleashed a number of Big Gay Screw-Ups, such as AIDS and the Catholic Church scandals. But rather than admit that, it was much easier emotionally to just go on the offensive over some random issue like gay marriage.

There are big advantages to having the press constantly up in arms about how you  are a victim of discrimination. For example, it can help cover up your own discriminating. Many industries appear to have, as Marc Ambinder admitted yesterday about Washington D.C., gay mafias discriminating against non-gays. That’s usually laughed off, as Ambinder and Robert Wright did, with the assumption that the victims of discrimination are straight men, so that’s A-okay.

But what happens when the victims are members of a Designated Victim Group? For example, most of the competition in the fashion business is between gay men and women, and that industry’s powerful gay mafia notoriously treats aspiring female designers badly.

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Obama reminds Scott Johnson at POWERLINE of George McGovern.

Those with a long memory will recall that Senator Tom Eagleton of Missouri was McGovern’s first pick for vice president. Eagleton had to step down from the ticket when it was revealed that he had twice undergone electroshock therapy to treat “nervous exhaustion.” By contrast, Obama’s first pick for vice president got to stay on the ticket. He only talks like someone whose brain has been messed with.

Ah, those were the days.

McGovern’s small business venture ended unhappily. McGovern concluded his column with a timely observation:

I’m lucky. I can recover eventually from the loss of the Stratford Inn because I’m still able to generate income from lectures and other services. But what about the 60 people who worked for me in Stratford? While running my struggling hotel, I never once missed a payroll. What happens to the people who counted on that, and to their families and community, when an owner goes under? Those questions worry me, and they ought to worry all of us who love this country as a land of promise and opportunity.

Obama doesn’t think or talk like that, and it’s not just a function of age and experience. It’s hard for someone who thinks he knows it all to learn from experience.

One of the disadvantages of having an Obamateur as President is that we get to suffer from his mistakes.

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The Vermont anomaly, if you will, is more than just the readiness of mostly-urban newcomers to buy into a rural/small-town state, their advantage based on above-average levels of wealth, past achievement, political skills, and business acumen. The pre-existing Green Mountain State taxation, regulatory, and general business climate, as shown in numerous state rankings and analyses, is exactly the motivating set of governmental and grass-roots forces typically responsible for the out-migration of just such folks from (perhaps more normal) states like California, Illinois, Maryland, or New Jersey. In those places, the same factors that are a draw in Vermont have been causally linked to just the opposite phenomenon: upper-middle-class exodus patterns.

“Burdensome tax and regulatory policies will be of relative advantage to the rich and powerful, who can employ specialists to work through the maze of rules that impose traps for unwary members of the middle class.”