Read it.

Lyttle—who once quipped that “tunneling is something that should be talked about without panicking”—became internationally known for the expansive network of tunnels he dug under his East London house. The tunnels eventually became so numerous that the sidewalk in front of his house collapsed, neighbors began to joke that Lyttle might soon “come tunnelling up through the kitchen floor,” and, as a surveyor ominously relayed to an English court, “there is movement in the ground.”

Read it.

When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 — already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.

“You can say without any shadow of a doubt,” as I was told then by Drummond Rennie, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had “made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.”

Read it.

At the Atlantic, Garance Franke-Ruta notes Gallup polls that indicate most Americans think around a quarter of our population is gay. The mean is 24.6%, up from 21.7% just eight years ago. An astonishing 35% believe that more than one-quarter of all people are homosexuals. In fact, the number is around two to three percent. So the average poll respondent is off by 1,000%.

Well, they certainly make enough noise for a quarter of the population.

My interest here is not the specific topic of homosexuality, but rather the fact that people’s perceptions are so wildly at odds with reality. How on Earth can the average American believe that one-quarter of the men and women he sees every day are gay? Does that make any possible sense? Are one-quarter of your relatives gay, or your co-workers or neighbors? Of course not (unless you live in certain precincts of San Francisco). Glenn Reynolds’s explanation, perhaps tongue in cheek, was that there are so many gays on television, and I think that must be at least part of the answer. A vastly disproportionate number of characters in TV sitcoms and dramas are homosexual. A second and closely related factor is that homosexuality features disproportionately as a theme in movies, books and so on. It is an extraordinary instance of culture eclipsing reality.

Yeah, that sounds about right. If you control the Media, you control the Narrative, and if you control the Narrative, it doesn’t really matter what the truth might be.

Read it.

Saw that coming.

There must be something in the genetic makeup of ‘progressives’ that leads them to base their lives on Static Analysis, i.e. thinking that if they change the rules the participants won’t change their behavior. To them, all supply and demand curves are totally inelastic, all you have to do is pass a law or a rule in order to fix a situation, etc. You’d think that a ‘reality-based community’ would wise up eventually, but they never do.

Read it.

Some people are serious about partying, and some people less so.

Of course, this happened in Serbia, where they take such things much more to heart.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, speaks the truth that everyone knows but most won’t admit.

Yes, I was a youthful idealist. We all were—including, by his own testimony, VDARE.com’s resident “white nationalist,” American Renaissance Editor Jared Taylor.

So what happened? Whence the “pessimism and cynicism” about race?

Fifty years happened—that’s what happened. Fifty years that thoughtful, observant people of my generation lived through at the regulation speed of one day per day.

We watched the trillions of dollars being spent on social programs—watched the actual dollars disappearing out of our own paychecks. We saw the vast apparatus of make-work government jobs being assembled. We were there, observing, day by day, when the preferences and favoritism and set-asides were being implemented. We watched as jurisprudence was twisted into pretzel shapes in the name of a bogus “fairness.” We saw the independent black nations of Africa and the Caribbean implode into ruin, chaos and beggary.

We lived through it; we saw it all.

And fifty years on, we see the results. Yes, some real gains in equity, though offset by some losses; but also intractable black poverty, intractable gaps in academic achievement, intractable, stupendous differentials in crime rates.

Pessimism and cynicism? Is someone surprised?

Read it.

It was the Roosevelt administration’s prosecution of the Schechters for violating the [fascist] National Industrial Recovery Act, one of the pillars of the New Deal, that led the Supreme Court to declare the act unconstitutional in 1935. FDR was, and remains, so beloved by American Jews that the heroism of the Schechters has been lost as a story of Jewish moral commitment in the face of power. In her history of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes begins the process of rescuing the Schechter brothers from obscurity by spending an entire chapter on their challenge to the New Deal. In this article I build on Shlaes’s account to provide some broader context for their story and draw some implications for Jewish Americans.

Read it.

William Safire once described the “hopefully” rule as the litmus test that separated the language snobs from the language slobs.

But the fixation with “hopefully” is different from those others. For one thing, the word itself is so utterly inconsequential — is that the best you’ve got? And then there’s no rational justification for condemning it. Some critics object that it’s a free-floating modifier (a Flying Dutchman adverb, James Kirkpatrick called it) that isn’t attached to the verb of the sentence but rather describes the speaker’s attitude. But floating modifiers are mother’s milk to English grammar — nobody objects to using “sadly,” “mercifully,” “thankfully” or “frankly” in exactly the same way.

OneSTDV nails it.

Basically, this woman wrote an article for two purposes: to whine about her purported outcast status (do liberal women ever not write about themselves?) and, as I’ve been harping on for awhile now, to buttress the Ragtag Leftist Coalition.  Ms. Sen is refreshingly explicit about who comprises the coalition and even presents the coalition in opposition to the white majority, i.e. “proportions shifted”.

Regarding the “people of color” term – it’s another obvious indicator that the person using it hates white people.  Only racial leftists use the term; it’s not the term in particular, such as “Ice vs Sun people”, but rather the people who choose to use it.  (For some reason that I can’t figure out, essentially any liberal who uses the term “white folks” also hates white people, but the reasoning escapes me.)

Watch it. About 30 minutes.

Read it.

Dayton sits on one side of a growing divide among American cities, in which a small number of metro areas vacuum up a large number of college graduates, and the rest struggle to keep those they have.

The winners are metro areas like Raleigh, N.C., San Francisco and Stamford, Conn., where more than 40 percent of the adult residents have college degrees. The Raleigh area has a booming technology sector and several major research universities; San Francisco has been a magnet for college graduates for decades; and metropolitan Stamford draws highly educated workers from white-collar professions in New York like finance.

Quelle surprise. The kind of jobs that require a college education are the kinds of jobs that exist in cities, and the more citified amenities a city can provide the better college graduates like it. There’s a reason that kids move to New York City and Los Angeles, even though those cities are economic behavioral sinks. Nobody thinks you’re cool if you say you live in Dayton.

Read it.

Remember the term “peak oil”? Whatever happened to it?

Down the memory hole! ‘Never mind!’

So what the heck happened? It’s no great mystery. As supplies tightened and prices rose, producers were motivated to find new sources and develop new technologies. When you hear that only X trillion barrels of “recoverable reserves” of oil exist, remember: The term does not refer to all the oil that there is. It refers to those reserves that are neither too costly to tap at present, nor off-limits because of government policy. Both of those factors can change.

And how. In just the past six years, North Dakota has shot to the No. 2 domestic source of oil, thanks to improved horizontal drilling techniques that have tapped the Bakken and Three Forks fields. Thanks to the oil rush the population of Williston, N.D., has roughly doubled. Unemployment is 1 percent—with 3,000 jobs are still open—and average pay has shot up from $32,000 to $80,000. North Dakota’s oil boom also has been made possible by a new technology, fracking (short for hydraulic fracturing). Fracking has drawn criticism from environmentalists, but it works.

Read it.

After mulling this all around in my giant brain, I think I prefer idiots to smart people. They’re more fun. Despite the fist-clenching rage it inspires to hear this country’s liberal elite talk, they are not dumb. They’re actually pretty intelligent. Sure, they’re so out of touch they think biased news corrects years of “systemic oppression,” but as far as basic IQ goes, they’re well over the mean. But I find them to be about as amusing as leukemia.

Read it.

Maybe — just maybe — he’s not the raging narcissist that his Democratic colleagues are.

Just maybe.

Read it.

One of the under-appreciated challenges of banning stuff is that you have to define with some degree of precision whatever it is you’re trying to outlaw. Write a law too broadly and you might render illegal things (and anger constituencies) that were never on your radar. Write too narrowly, and you miss your target entirely. And if you set out to ban chemicals, natural or artificial, that make people feel good, you soon discover that savvy chemists are perfectly capable of making new chemicals that get people just as high.

Read it.

Artur Davis was first elected to Congress from Alabama in 2002. The Harvard Law School grad was quickly tapped as a rising star among Democrats. He became a Senior Whip for the caucus, co-chair the New Democrat Coalition and even headed up the Southern region for the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee. His eight years in Congress showed him to be a thoughtful, independent and energetic member. Yesterday, he announced he is now a Republican.

What does he know that you don’t?

‘On the specifics, I have regularly criticized an agenda that would punish businesses and job creators with more taxes just as they are trying to thrive again. I have taken issue with an administration that has lapsed into a bloc by bloc appeal to group grievances when the country is already too fractured: frankly, the symbolism of Barack Obama winning has not given us the substance of a united country. You have also seen me write that faith institutions should not be compelled to violate their teachings because faith is a freedom, too. You’ve read that in my view, the law can’t continue to favor one race over another in offering hard-earned slots in colleges: America has changed, and we are now diverse enough that we don’t need to accommodate a racial spoils system. And you know from these pages that I still think the way we have gone about mending the flaws in our healthcare system is the wrong way—it goes further than we need and costs more than we can bear.’

Read it.

Because we humans seem to be natural-born signal hunters, we’re terrible at regulating our intake of information. We’ll consume a ton of noise if we sense we may discover an added ounce of signal. So our instinct is at war with our capacity for making sense.

Lileks. ‘If you can’t figure out Twitter on your own, do the world a favor and stay off Twitter’.

And that goes for politics, as well.

Read it.

And, last time I looked, Obama still hasn’t tried to do anything about it. He talks a good game, though.

Read it.

I have trouble accepting the idea that Hitler was a vegetarian. He just didn’t seem that pushy.

It’s not pretty.

Of all the annoying identity movements under the giant rancid rainbow, what is it that causes militant vegetarians to be the most obnoxious? What is it about the Vegetarian Personality that makes me wish someone would cannibalize them? What is it about being lectured by vegans that makes me want to drive straight to Wendy’s and order a Classic Triple?

Because they are the most irrationally self-righteous, which irritates the living shit out of normal people, even if they can’t articulate why.

Human beings evolved to, among other things, eat meat. Modern ‘progressives’ delight in forcing people to acknowledge moral superiority for things that are against nature (‘gay marriage’ comes immediately to mind), all the while proclaiming that their adversaries are ‘anti-science’. This hearkens back to Tertullian’s famous dictum ‘Credo quia absurdam’ and just reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun.

Read it. And watch the video.

“We have never been in danger of running out of resources,” says Dr. Robert Zubrin, “but we have encountered considerable dangers from people who say we are running out of resources and who say that human activities need to be constrained.”

Read it.

The resemblances might surprise you.

And, then again, they might not.

Read it.

When scholars gathered at Harvard last month to discuss the political tumult convulsing China’s ruling Communist Party, a demure female undergraduate with a direct stake in the outcome was listening intently from the top row of the lecture hall. She was the daughter of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president and heir apparent for the party’s top job.

Xi’s daughter, Xi Mingze, enrolled at Harvard University in 2010, under what people who know her there say was a fake name, joining a long line of Chinese “princelings,” as the offspring of senior party officials are known, who have come to the United States to study.

The current Chinese ‘Communist’ regime is merely the ancient Mandarin regime without an Emperor and wearing a Clever Plastic Disguise. As such, they represent the Platonic ideal of The Crust towards which all Western imitators vainly strive.

“This is about haves and have-nots,” said Hong Huang, the stepdaughter of Mao’s foreign minister Qiao Guanhua and a member of an earlier generation of American-educated princelings. “China’s old-boy network .?.?. is no different from America’s old-boy network,” said Hong, who went to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and whose mother served as Mao’s English teacher.

Freeberg just keeps on thinkin’.

… for forty years now, I’ve heard feminists tell me that everyone needs to think and live the way the feminists tell them to, because their way is the right way; over those forty years, they’ve gone from insisting women can have everything and don’t need to choose anything, nor should they have to — to, you can’t be invested with real authority, as a woman, if you happen to look good. So the inconsistency bothers me a lot. But also, it leads to an elite layer of female leaders, one that is somewhat detached from the rest of society and yet, in many cases, making highly influential decisions about how the rest of society should live. The decisions they make, then, are consistently wrong.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, reads a magazine on the train home.

New York magazine is an unlikely purchase for me—it’s a lefty-metrosexual-fashiony thing filled with subject matter of zero interest to me and with advertisements for things I shall never buy. In some cases I do not even understand what’s being sold (“latitude and longitude cufflinks”…wha?). In other cases I actively deplore what’s being sold (“designer children’s wear”—right, let’s get the little tots on the consumerist-fashion treadmill as early as we can). This issue’s “Intelligencer” page featured an array of 36 celebrities. The only one I’d ever heard of was Angela Lansbury. I think the last time I bought an issue of New York was in some year beginning “197-.” So, no, I’m not a big reader of New York.

Freeberg waxes philosophical, and makes some very good points.

With that in mind, then, now consider my complaint about women who have real power — women who can argue with others about what is to happen to my health care, my taxes, and the products I require, from bullet cartridges to light bulbs. It is a close-cousin complaint of “Real women don’t look like that,” with two important differences: One, rather than being beautiful, they’re all ugly. Opposite direction, but equal distance. Even greater distance, really. I can go out on a weekend, shopping, meeting random people — I’m very, very sure I will catch a glimpse of some women who look like Megyn Kelly before I meet even one that looks like Donna Shalala, Janet Reno, Sonia Sotomayor, Geraldine Ferarro, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Madeleine Albright.

Second difference: These ugly broads have real power. Gretchen Carlson can’t make me do a damn thing, other than occasionally wish some centerpiece on the coffee table would be moved slightly out of the way. Can’t stop me from doing anything. Can’t make anything I buy any harder to get, or more expensive…she can’t even start to do any of these things.

Read it.

What do copyright and parking laws have in common?

The short answer: no one takes either very seriously.

Read it.

n a preliminary hearing, he is supposed to have the opportunity to get the charges dismissed if the preponderance of evidence (a slightly more than 50% standard) can be satisfied that he acted in self defense.

Based on the fact that nobody is going to wager with their own money at even odds, this should be a slam dunk.  But it won’t be, for the reasons of cowardice and mendacity.  The fact that the judge even needs to think about it or deliberate in his chambers is proof only of the qualities above.  Yes, to act justly or honorably is going to devastate any future career advancement, and probably will result in riots.  But that’s your job.  You can, and probably will shirk your duty.  Don’t be surprised when people loathe you as a result.  Such things create hatreds that NEVER die.

Welcome to America. Stick around for the race war, it will be happening Real Soon Now.

Bryan Caplan speaks a little inconvenient truth.

Imagine writing a list of everything wrong with the world.  There’s hunger.  Broken hearts.  Unemployment.  Screaming at your kids after a bad day at work.  Cheating on your girlfriend.  Pollution.  Heretics.  Burning of heretics.  Promiscuity on TV.  Promiscuity in real life.  Obese kids.  Obese adults.  People coughing without covering their mouths.  The Islamist threat.  Seniors eating dog food.  The decline of marriage.  Bosses who scream at their workers.  Kids who don’t call on Mother’s Day.  People who don’t read books.  School bullying.  Boring jobs.  Boring teachers.  Men dying years younger than women.  People who don’t know how to start small businesses.  You could go on and on.  And on and on and on.

Go on, try it.

Now ask yourself, “How many of these problems does government even claim to try to alleviate?”  No matter how statist your society is, there are probably ten problems the government ignores for every problem it tries to address.

Read it.

There are mostly four kinds of coins in circulation in the U.S: 1 cent, 5 cents, 10 cents, and 25 cents. But is it the most efficient way to give back change?

As it turns out, probably not.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, has some thoughts.

What had happened was that the singer’s femur had partially disintegrated, a portion of bone actually breaking away from the shaft. Incredibly, Ferrier’s singing was so mesmerizing, the audience had no idea anything was wrong. She had been diagnosed with cancer two years before and died from the disease eight months later. Ferrier was born in 1912. That’s the centenary I missed.

His stuff is always interesting, which is why you ought to Support John Derbyshire (See link at right on the home page.)

Freeberg muses upon his scholastic career.

Truthfully, I don’t know why we have career counselors in high schools. The kids who can really make something of themselves, all have the same thoughts about it: Oh alright, I’m to take career advice from some guy who’s a career counselor in a high school. Eyeball-roll. This one thought I should scrub toilets on an Air Force base somewhere. Oh, okay…thankfully, nobody took that any more seriously than I did. All these years later I have to wonder: What purpose was served by this? I still don’t know.

Never saw any use in them, myself. But on the list of inexplicable aspects of the American education system, I can’t say that it was at the top.

Read it.

As is well known now, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin recently renounced his U.S. citizenship. Though no specific reason was given by Saverin for his decision, wise minds could very credibly proclaim him an American hero for doing what he did.

…

Think about the above for a moment. A nation founded on skepticism about politicians and government now has as one of its most powerful institutions a revenue agency meant to badger its citizens about how much they owe a government utterly contemptuous of constitutional limits.  To this insatiable beast, Saverin is apparently saying no.  Good for him!

…

Oddly here, and this speaks to how silly the economic discussion has become, founder Mark Zuckerberg is being lionized for the presumed $1 billion in capital gains taxes he’ll pay the feds. Saverin’s avoidance plan means more capital for business growth while Zuckerberg’s non-avoidance ensures more feeding of the beast, yet Saverin’s the bad guy? Yes, very odd.

Read it.

For awhile now, I’ve been focusing on the so-called Ragtag Coalition of Leftist Identity Groups, a sort of parallel phenomenon to the proposed Sailer Strategy in which the Republican party ditches all pretenses and just goes for the white vote, exclusively.  The Ragtag Coalition refers to the tenuous amalgamation of pet minority groups under the Democratic Party’s umbrella;  Matt Yglesias alluded to this last year in saying, “Democrats are more and more seen as the party of non-whites.”  The leftist coalition, which also includes organized labor and single mothers, works as a twofold strategy – ideological and practical.  The ideological narrative focuses on white men as the primary enemy; all enmity, encouraged on liberal blogs and Ivory Tower scholarship, must be directed out of the group towards this nefarious entity.  It also works as a practical voting strategy; the collective group has the cumulative numbers to combat evil white conservatives in the voting booth.

In reality though, the coalition is made up of groups who really want nothing to do with each other.  So the professional left has a rather volatile situation on their hands – how to keep everyone focused on the right enemy (white men) and not “offend” the other leftist pet groups.  In what I foresee as a never-ending struggle to maintain harmony, here’s two more examples of why the ragtag coalition has problems.

Read it.

 One reason our sectional division finally lurched to civil war in the 1850s was the complete nationalization of the slavery issue because of Dred Scott, whose principle, as Lincoln perceived and argued, militated for the legalization of slavery in all states.  While the previous confinement of slavery to the South was unstable (because the South wanted to expand its peculiar institution), it held out the prospect that it could be placed in the course of ultimate extinction through gradual means.

Hypothesis: the nationalization of more and more issues once left to the state and local level is aggravating our divisions today in a similar way.

The Patron Saint of Dyspepsia explains it all to you.

And after watching Conservatism Inc. for a quarter of a century running along behind History’s great rumbling juggernaut squealing “Would you mind slowing down just a teeny bit, please?” there is always the faint hope that this other crowd might actually turn us back some way towards liberty, sovereignty, science, constitutionalism.

Non-white supremacy is after all the rule over much of the world, from entire continental spaces like sub-Saharan Africa to individual black-run or mestizo-run municipalities in the U.S.A. I see no great floods into these places by refugees desperate to escape the horrors of white supremacy.

Read it.

Taxpayers paid almost $3.7 million last year for the expenses of ex-presidents, including $119,000 in phone bills, $123,000 for travel, $76,000 for postage and $1.2 million in rent, according to government figures.

Former President George H.W. Bush cost $844,000, including $56,000 for travel. More than half of Bill Clinton’s $1 million in expenses covered his $586,000 office rent. Jimmy Carter claimed $517,000, including $15,000 for postage.

Well, you know — I think half a mil is a cheap price to pay to make sure that Jimmy Carter isn’t President any more. And don’t get me started on Bill Clinton.

Actually, if we could get rid of Barack Obama for a guarantee of $2 million a year, I don’t doubt that there would be some rich Republicans who’d be happy to step up to the plate and cover the cost. If I could afford it, I’d jump at the chance.

Read it.

Conceived of as a way to help people reduce waste, the Repair Cafe concept has taken off since its debut two and a half years ago. The Repair Cafe Foundation has raised about $525,000 through a grant from the Dutch government, support from foundations and small donations, all of which pay for staffing, marketing and even a Repair Cafe bus.

Don Quixote loves this sort of thing, but Sancho Panza would like to point out a few flies in the ointment:

1. In the Good Old Days, things were made to last and were simple enough that a reasonably handy individual could both make them and fix them. That is no longer the case. Most things today are made by highly automated specialized machinery that can do stuff that simply cannot be done by hand outside of a few highly sophisticated shops — and, because of that automation, can do it cheaper than it would take to do even a simpler model by hand. As a byproduct of that manufacturing process, most of this stuff is not intended to be repairable, which exaggerates the next factor:
2. In modern times, the chief limiting factor of any manufacturing process is the cost of the human labor that goes into it — which is, of course, why it was economically feasible to automate it in the first place. Automated manufacturing processes cost a lot up front but each individual widget costs a pittance, and as long as you can do a manufacturing run that will allow you to amortize your initial capital expenditure, a predominantly manual process simply can’t compete. We get our tableware from Oneida, not Paul Revere, because in order for Paul Revere to make a ‘living wage’ he’d have to charge so much that only (relatively) rich people could buy his stuff. There is a niche market for the Paul Reveres (or Christian Diors) of this world, but most manufacturers are targeting the people who buy at Walmart, not Tiffany’s.
3. ‘But that was yesterday, and yesterday’s gone.’ Sure, we’d all like to have a world in which we could hand down our household gear to our grandchildren, but it ain’t gonna happen. Markets work, even when you don’t want them to, and people (especially almost-poor people who need to squeeze every nickel) aren’t going to pay $10 for something Made In America when they can get something that will do the job (not ‘just as good’ — that’s not the criterion; the criterion is do the job) for $1 that was Made In China. (The landed aristocracy in England got a similar rude awakening in the 1870s when people discovered that they could buy grain from America and beef from Australia for less than the ‘locovore’ stuff.) This nostalgia for The Way Things Used To Be that started in the hippy-dippy Whole Earth Catalog 1960s (and makes a mockery of the term ‘progressive’) is the same emotion that motivated the British upper classes to pass the Corn Laws, and the American upper classes to pass the Smoot-Hawley tariff, and the results in both cases was a disaster when the laws of the market eventually took their revenge.

It’s fine to yearn for the past, but don’t ever let it get in the way of hopping on board the train to the future, because somebody else is already doing so, and you’ll be left at the station. Living in the past is a rich person’s hobby, and if that ain’t you, then you can’t afford it.

Read it.

At dinner, he was asking the customary endless chain of whys when it suddenly dawned on me that my five year old was doing Root Cause Analysis.

By Freeberg, of course.

See, Barack Obama and people like Him, are celebrated as special people and have been celebrated as that for so long, that they can’t deal with losing the identity. Oh, you thought I meant black people? No…there are tons and tons of privileged, pampered whites in this crowd I’m describing. They say jump, the crowd says how high…it’s worked this way since third grade, or earlier, and nobody envisions it ever going any other way, because they don’t, and they don’t because nobody else does. So they go through life frustrated because they know there’s something different about them — but that something is never really defined. Something to do with speaking well, being confident, but they’re actually apprehensive deep down inside. They can’t shake the feeling that maybe, whatever is special about them, might be something external to them. And this fills them with fear. Because that would mean everything inside, is just humdrum and ordinary.

So the question comes up: What is one plus one? Barack Obama will immediately rule out “two” as a possible answer because, hey, that’s what an ordinary person would say. Thus we see, with this simple math exercise, someone like President Obama “enjoys” a greater likelihood of getting it wrong, than an answer-producing method that relies purely on random chance. You’re better off rolling the dice to answer the one-plus-one problem than asking President Obama. And, because it works that way with the simple problems, it works that way with the more complicated ones as well. People like Obama have this natural phobia, a natural revulsion, against the common-sense answer. They’re more likely to get it wrong than a decision-making method that works by chance.

Hence the Crustian affection for ‘nuance’ and ‘complexity’. Important questions can’t possibly have common-sense answers, because if they did, even the Filling could answer them, and there wouldn’t be any need for the Crust. The Crust views common sense the way Eeyore views learning:

“What is Learning?” asked Eeyore as he kicked his twelve sticks into the air. “A thing Rabbit knows! Ha!”

Freeberg is never afraid to ask the hard questions.

And answer them, too, of course.

Back in those exciting days when Bill Clinton was finishing up his first term, not that long ago by any means…the conservative/liberal conflict was pretty clear-cut. The conservative position represented in the new Gingrich Congress was, our social-services safety net had become something of a vicious cycle, as the largess of the state had created a dependency class, which in turn reproduced without the mainstream concerns about where the college fund comes from, how does Sugarlump get hold of a car & how does he get insured…and then each new generational wave threw itself upon the over-extended safety net. A caused B and B caused A, with no end in sight, so something had to be done. The liberal response was twofold: 1) Nuh-huh, that doesn’t happen, and 2) Well, it does happen and you tighty-righties need to just get used to it, it’s a necessary evil.

Fast-forward to Anno Julia, and the debate has shifted quite aways without our consciously noticing it. And the direction in which it is shifted is not a good one. The debate has not come closer to being resolved, it’s drifted further away, as we now disagree on what the goals are. As anyone who’s watched “Life of Julia” can recognize right away, when President Obama campaigns for re-election this year, He will be doing so on behalf of a constituency that, from His explanation of it, thinks things are supposed to be this way — and who’s to say they are not.

Steve Sailer, as usual, says what needs to be said.

Perhaps all those The Making of… documentaries included on DVDs inculcated a love of military precision. A movie set is a sort of pretend military operation with the director as the commanding officer. (But you can’t enlist unless your uncle was in the union. And what neither the recruiters nor the documentaries tell you is that the main sensation of both is Hurry Up and Wait.)

Well, now that homosexuals are welcome in the military, can a union be far behind?

Whedon’s fictitious Helicarrier is equipped with J-35 vertical landing fighters, a quasi-real warplane first seen in the 2007 blockbuster Live Free or Die Hard, but which remains, five years later, still in flight tests despite its estimated $1.5-trillion lifetime cost. Every Pentagon gizmo in The Avengers had me scratching my head and wondering: How much am I going to be paying in taxes for the rest of my life for this boondoggle?

Further adventures of The Fluke.

Dare I say this is even misogynistic – viewing modern womanhood not as some ethereal conception but rather the generation that successfully agitated for condoms!  Is this really what they want to brag about?  The Left is content on celebrating abstract “achievements”, like “diversity” and women’s “rights”, that they can imbue with value; so I suppose getting birth control is sort of like discovering relativity or landing on the Moon.

Funny how the cause of ‘reproductive choice’ is always about just the one choice. (If a feminist chooses to have a child, does her ‘reproductive rights’ entitle her to a dick of her choice? Gives the whole concept of Selective Service an extra dimension.)

One wonders why these chicks don’t just cut to the chase and have their tubes tied. Problem solved, both theirs (them reproducing) and ours (them reproducing).

Read it.

A prisoner in Texas has received 4 out of 10 votes in West Virginia’s democratic primary after managing to get his name added to the ballot.

I don’t know which is more amusing, what the fact that 40% of West Virginia Democrats prefer a real criminal against a politician says about Democrats, or what the fact that 40% of a solidly Democrat jurisdiction prefer a criminal to Barack Obama says about Obama.

Maybe it’s both.

Or it just may be that some Americans prefer anyone from Texas, even a criminal, to someone from Washington DC via Chicago. That would be pretty amusing too.

Kathy Shaidle speaks truth to power.

Rich Lowry owes John Derbyshire an apology.

When Lowry fired Derbyshire from National Review for writing a “racist” column here at Taki’s, he took particular issue with Derb’s contention that whites should “Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.”

Lowry was clearly unfamiliar with (black) comedian Chris Rock’s 1996 bit about avoiding any street in America named Martin Luther King Boulevard. As everyone (except National Review editors) knows, avenues christened in honor of that self-proclaimed champion of nonviolence usually run through black neighborhoods and tend to be among the country’s most dangerous.

Freeberg is on the case.

If an alien from another planet, fully capable of understanding our language, competent in logic and common sense but entirely unfamiliar with our modern culture, were forced to live with us for about a week or so…I’m sure he’d come to the conclusion that this word we use, “environment,” has something to do with diminished expectations and/or lowered standards.

Companies who talk about protecting the environment, charge a goddamn fortune and their products & services don’t do anything.

Politicians who talk about the environment, just raise our taxes and make everything more expensive.

Scientists who talk about the environment, don’t even practice science.

And the everyday-everywhere-everyman who talks about the environment, is just a smug foppish snot who likes to feel superior to everybody else, doesn’t do shit, knows even less.

The Other McCain points and laughs.

TechCrunch was a valuable property, because Michael Arrington was a valuable blogger, and the fact that he was willing to walk away from a brand he had created was one of those “Houston, we have a problem” moments, a signal that whatever skills Arianna Huffington brought to AOL, personnel management wasn’t one of them.

Successful people in online New Media tend to value their independence above almost anything else. They spotted a niche, created their sites from scratch and attracted a readership, and you can’t tell them how to do their jobs, because they invented their jobs.

Now try to imagine Michael Arrington, who sold his site to AOL for $30 million, being told a few months later that he’s now got to answer to this infamous Greek gold-digger. Not gonna happen.

Don Boudreaux notices that the emperor is starkers.

Why is it still regarded as scientifically valid to propose a government program (such as the one proposed by Posner and Weyl) whose success requires that the administrators who carry out the program possess and act on a degree of other-regarding motives and unbiased system-wide knowledge that, were such motives and knowledge assumed to guide the actions of people in the private sector, would immediately and properly be dismissed as too unrealistic to take seriously?

It is perhaps time to vote somebody off the island.

The cartoon Madam & Eve (see right) used to be funny when it was about domestic relations in a formerly institutionally racist society. Now that its focus has turned to South African politics, however, in which I have less interest than belly button lint, and which doesn’t really translate well if you don’t know the characters and situation (which nobody out of South Africa does, I will bet you), it no longer strikes me as sufficiently funny to give it a place in my Cartoons list.

However, if there’s anybody out there who reads it regularly, sing out in the comments. Otherwise it will be expunged come Saturday morning.

Read it.

Another oddity is that the neighborhood Barack and Michelle chose to buy their big house in is the neighborhood chosen by the friends of the friends of the people who assassinated Barack’s boyhood idol, Malcolm X. As he explained to the Chicago Tribune, he chose Tony Rezko to help him out with his buying his house because Tony knows all about real estate in that neighborhood. What the Tribune didn’t explain was that the reason Tony knows all about real estate there is because he was long the business manager for the inner circle of the Nation of Islam, and that’s where they live. That would kind of weird me out, but of course nobody has ever asked Obama about that.