Digital Toilet Paper Stand

Four Foot High Roadside Emergency Beacon

Meet Your Maker Sandwich Press

Anti-Drone Depleted Uranium Buckshot Shells

Breakfast Sandwich Maker

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Speaking at a fundraiser in San Francisco on April 3, President Obama said that Adam Lanza, the mass murderer in a New England school shooting, used a “fully automatic weapon” to kill his victims at Sandy Hook Elementary.

This assertion runs counter to the official report of the Connecticut State Police, who list semi-automatic weapons–rather than automatic ones–as those used by Lanza.

George Will blows the whistle on government schools.

The real vocation of some people entrusted with delivering primary and secondary education is to validate this proposition: The three R’s — formerly reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic — now are racism, reproduction and recycling. Especially racism. Consider Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction. It evidently considers “instruction” synonymous with “propaganda,” which in the patois of progressivism is called “consciousness-raising.”

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

Today, the school systems in 20 states employ more non-teachers than teachers. The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice reports that between 1950 and 2009, while the number of K-12 students increased 96 percent, full-time-equivalent school employees increased 386 percent. The number of teachers increased 252 percent, but the number of bureaucrats — including consciousness-raising sensitivity enforcers and other non-teachers — increased 702 percent. The report says states could have saved more than $24?billion annually if non-teaching staff had grown only as fast as student enrollment. And Americans wonder why their generous K-12 financing (higher per pupil than all but three of the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations) has done so little to improve reading, math and science scores.

‘We’re from the government, and we’re here to help. Just kidding.’

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Three years ago, an Arkansas court found police officer Coleman Brackney guilty of negligent homicide in the shooting death of James Ahern. Brackney spent one month in jail and was fired from the Bella Vista police department. But he later got the conviction expunged, and a state board ruled that he could once again serve as a police officer. The Sulphur Springs City Council recently hired Brackney as their new police chief.

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Many small businesses are not as good with bureaucracy and red tape as large businesses are – that’s one reason they did not offer health insurance in the first place. The employee subsidies coming online next year are pretty complicated, as evidenced by the 21-page application that must be completed by each employee, and the fact that any one year’s subsidy has to be estimated based on historical employee data, advanced from the Internal Revenue Service to the insurer, and then later reconciled when the employee’s family income for the year can be fully documented.

I suspect that large businesses will have human resource personnel dedicated to helping company employees complete the application and obtain and accurately reconcile the subsidy to which they are entitled. Employees at smaller business may have to fend for themselves.

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A new Forbes article by Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President and Co-founder Peter Schweizer reveals that former Obama Administration officials and fundraisers are now leveraging their access and influence to bag big billings from Wall Street investment firms as part of the shadowy, emerging industry known as “political intelligence.”

Political intelligence firms are companies that hire former government officials and staffers to vacuum up tidbits of market-related information in and around Capitol Hill. This information is sold to Wall Street firms and financial companies to inform investments. The more connected the power player, the bigger the potential profits investment firms stand to make.

Don’t think of it as selling out — think of it as buying in….

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WHETHER the obscure statute that governs America’s raisin trade is constitutional, Elena Kagan is not sure. She and her fellow Supreme Court justices are pondering that question at the moment, and will rule shortly. But she sounds reasonably confident that the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937 is “the world’s most outdated law”.

Since the 1940s raisin farmers have been obliged to make over a portion of their crop to a government agency called the Raisin Administrative Committee. The committee, run by 47 raisin farmers and packers, along with a sole member of the raisin-eating public, decides each year how many raisins the domestic market can bear, and thus how many it should siphon off to preserve an “orderly” market. It does not pay for the raisins it appropriates, and gives many of them away, while selling others for export. Once it has covered its own costs, it returns whatever profits remain to farmers. In some years there are none. Worse, farmers sometimes forfeit a substantial share of their crop: 47% in 2003 and 30% in 2004, for example.

Participation in this Brezhnevite scheme is mandatory. Although a large majority of raisin farmers approved of it by referendum when it started 65 years ago, they have not been formally consulted since. And raisins are just one of 30 products subject to such “marketing orders” overseen by the Department of Agriculture. The department portrays these arrangements as anodyne efforts to set quality standards and improve marketing. But Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute, a think-tank, argues that the federal government is nurturing a crop of agricultural cartels.

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

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The American Petroleum Institute has said that this new sulfur regulation will increase the cost of producing gasoline by 9 cents, costs which consumers will bear. A Baker and O’Brien analysis calculates that the regulation will force refiners to spend around $10 billion to comply with the rule and an additional $2.5 annually to maintain compliance. All of this means higher gasoline prices for drivers.

‘We’re from the government, and we’re here to help. Just kidding.’

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

 The findings underscore that elite public and private colleges, despite a stated desire to recruit an economically diverse group of students, have largely failed to do so.

That’s because they aren’t interested in white kids that might be, God help us, Republicans.

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Hey, haters gotta hate. Gay people got no use for children anyway.

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Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States. In large part, that’s because less than half of the population that should be getting screened isn’t getting screened.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Medical science has found a way to use CT scanners to do screenings non-invasively, negating the need to insert a colonoscope into the rectum and large intestine. But for regulatory hurdles, people could just go to a clinic, pay for a quick photo & analysis session and be on their way.

However, as of 2010, 13 states require medical institutions to get permission, in the form of a “certificate of need,” before purchasing new CT scanners. Other states require doctors to obtain a certificate of need before offering new medical procedures like virtual colonoscopies, which are still relatively cutting edge.

‘We’re from the government, and we’re here to help … just kidding.’

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Located on the corner of Figueroa and 101st Street in South Central Los Angeles, Tam’s Burgers has been a part of the neighborhood for almost 30 years, serving burgers and fries through multiple recessions and even the 1992 L.A. riots. “When the markets were burned down, liquor stores were burned down, everything was burned down, people had nowhere to go, they came to us,” says Nick Benetatos, who took over the restaurant in 1989 after his father retired.

But in 2012 the city declared Tam’s a “public nuisance,” claiming the late-night joint was a haven for criminals. Benetatos says he is simply located in a high-crime area and has tried to work with the Los Angeles Police Department, honoring its requests that he remove pay phones on the property and tables for outdoor seating, which he says resulted in a 15 percent decline in revenues.

The city’s zoning board then ordered Benetatos to comply with 22 separate conditions, such as hiring a full-time security guard, fencing in the entire property, and installing a security camera that links directly to the LAPD’s electronic surveillance system. After losing a December zoning appeal, Benetatos says he is close to throwing in the napkin and closing up shop.

The Other McCain is on the case.

The New York Times tells the story of the Atlanta teacher cheating scandal. Teachers systematically changed students’ answers on standardized tests, erasing wrong answers and changing them to the right ones, and the deception went all the way to the top: Dr. Beverly Hall, the Atlanta superintendent, was hosted at the White House and named superintendent of the year by the American Association of School Administrators. She collected more than $500,000 in performance bonuses.

And now Dr. Hall has been indicted by a grand jury on charges that could send her to prison for the rest of her life.

Pay attention, kids. This might be on your final exam.

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A trend started by Ted Kennedy, by the way.

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With his BIGHEART Ministries, he fulfilled his calling, helping clothe and counsel the crowds who came to him for a meal.

“It grew, grew, grew… until we were feeding thousands of people,” he said…..

In 2005, the city of Dallas passed an ordinance, requiring organizations feeding the homeless to get the city’s approval, provide bathrooms, and meet a list of public safety requirements.

Hart said he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to comply.

“It kept getting worse, until finally police were coming out,” said Hart.

Even Texas has its quota of fascist tools, mostly in the big cities, which are chock full of fashionable minorities and hence run by Democrats. Every now and then, though, common sense breaks out.

One of the reasons that private charity cannot handle taking care of the needy in the modern world is that it is loaded down with oppressive and nonsensical government regulations, government not being fond of competition and wanting to reduce the citizenry to dependence.

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In the public policy basket case that is my native state of California, one of the most underrated of the many mind-blowing statistical measures of decline is the fact that–for the first time in recorded history–a majority of the Golden State’s residents were born there. Which helps explain, among other things, why California in 2010, again for the first time, failed to pick up a seat in the House of Representatives. A state whose very identity and economic engine were founded on attracting dreamers from elsewhere has not really come to grips with the fact that it is no longer doing that anymore.

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So it now turns out that Jeffrey Hillman, the barefoot beggar who famously received a free pair of boots from a big-hearted police officer, not only has an apartment but pockets as much as several hundred dollars a day while pretending to be homeless.

Hillman freely admitted as much to a team of Post reporters who followed him home on the subway Sunday — and then watched as he calmly counted a huge wad of bills. Not to mention that he seems to be the Imelda Marcos of the streets, with at least 30 pairs of shoes and boots.

Most New Yorkers will doubtless be disappointed to learn that the inspiring tale of a police officer’s kindness to a man in distress would have such a cynical denouement. Few, however, will be surprised. Even so, there is a moral to this story that is especially timely.

This is an old problem — Sherlock Holmes famously dealt with a similar case.

Read it. And watch the video.

Two Sarasota County, Florida, sheriff’s deputies seemed a bit miffed when Charles Ross jumped over a picnic table they were sitting on. But when they noticed he was recording them they got really angry. Threatening to ruin his day, they pulled him to the ground, handcuffed him and arrested Ross for breach of the peace and disorderly conduct.

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Curiouser and curiouser. I’m waiting to see how long it will take for somebody to blame it on Israel or the United States.

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Big government likes big providers. That’s why ObamaCare is gradually making the local doctor-owned medical practice a relic. In the not too distant future, most physicians will be hourly wage earners, likely employed by a hospital chain.

Why? Because when doctors practice in small offices, it is hard for Washington to regulate what they do. There are too many of them, and the government is too remote. It is far easier for federal agencies to regulate physicians if they work for big hospitals. So ObamaCare shifts money to favor the delivery of outpatient care through hospital-owned networks.

The irony is that in the name of lowering costs, ObamaCare will almost certainly make the practice of medicine more expensive. It turns out that when doctors become salaried hospital employees, their overall productivity falls.

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

ObamaCare’s main vehicle for ending the autonomous, private delivery of medicine is the hospital-owned “accountable care organization.” The idea is to turn doctors into hospital employees and pay them flat rates that uncouple their income from how much care they deliver. (Ending the fee-for-service payment model is supposed to eliminate doctors’ financial incentives to perform extraneous procedures.)The Obama administration also imposes new costs on physicians who remain independent—for example, mandating that all medical offices install expensive information-technology systems.

The chief obstacle to a person going into business for himself is government regulations, always and everywhere.

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

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I’m not sure what it is about “Homeowners Associations” (HOAs), but I can’t recall ever coming across one which didn’t involve all sorts of acrimony. A few years back, I lived in a house that was a part of a (mandatory) HOA. I was renting, so I didn’t really care or pay much attention to any details. And then, one day I found a bright yellow document sitting on my front step, which had a long and rambling letter from a neighbor who apparently was challenging the HOA on something and the fight had escalated. He had placed the letter on the front steps of every single house in our neighborhood. While I don’t even recall what the argument itself was about, I do recall him explicitly asking that the police be present at the next HOA meeting, and the phrase: “I fear my life will be taken; I fear my wife will become a widow; if this situation is not brought under control.” The whole thing seemed so bizarre to me — who would ever take an HOA so seriously? — that I remember telling people about that phrase, and it’s stuck with me.

And the thing is, every time I ever hear anything about HOAs, it always seems to involve some similar crazy story. A few months back, we wrote about an HOA president in Indiana going ballistic with bogus legal threats towards pretty much anyone who criticized him. And now, here’s a story out of Naples, Florida, where an HOA for “Fiddler’s Creek” is using homeowners’ fees to sue one of their own homeowners, a resident named James Schutt, because he made some comments the HOA board members don’t like on a blog about the community.

Anybody who buys a home covered by a mandatory home owners’ association is obviously insane.

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And that may be the future for all the people the robots throw out of work.

Of course, whenever the government showers money, there will be people with buckets waiting.

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As John Derbyshire always says: Get a government job!

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

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Unions are experts at remembering bad things that happened to workers but very conveniently ignore the violence for which union members have historically been responsible.

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Millions of Americans are officially jobless, but that doesn’t mean they’re not earning money. To help make ends meet, many unemployed and underemployed people are working in what economists call the ‘shadow economy.’

And who could blame them? Considering that the alternative is to walk around with Obama’s hand in your wallet.

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

 At no point in the article does anybody suggest that non-whites ought to care more about the environment. It’s all about nonwhites getting more jobs and grants to cash in bigger on the environment racket.

Presumably, environmental organizations pay a little less than the corporations they pester. So, trustfunders tend toward Greenpeace and diversity hires gravitate toward BP. The only way to alter this is for the environmental organizations to devote less of their budget to doing whatever it is they do and more toward bidding wars for diversity hires.

It’s fascinating how in the 21st Century, ancestry trumps just about everything else. It’s kind of like the era of the divine right of hereditary monarchs in that who you are descended from seems to be considered the most important trait in determining your moral worth.

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Colt Manufacturing is considering a move out of Connecticut after 175 years in business due to the new gun bans being mulled by the state legislature and Democrat Governor Dannel Malloy.

Come to Texas, my friend, where you will be welcomed and treasured as the American institution that you are.

“Now Gov. Dannel P. Malloy says that with or without bipartisan consensus, he intends to ban this rifle. But a ban of the most popular semiautomatic rifle in the United States for what are essentially cosmetic reasons would make no one safer and punish a vital Connecticut industry.”

Hey, Democrats pander — it’s what they do — and it’s all about getting re-elected in a very Blue state. To hell with your business and any jobs that you might be supporting.

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Health-care delivery in the United States already suffers from a lack of emphasis on customer service. You can schedule oil changes and haircuts with more precision than you can an appointment with the doctor. But keep a stiff upper lip, folks, because it can – and almost certainly will – get worse.

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I remain fascinated by people who voluntarily work as thought police for the PC regime. As I’ve said before, totalitarian regimes have always had to pay or threaten people into doing their bidding. Today’s progressive regime has lots of people who are apparently willing to ruin the lives of others to enforce unwritten speech codes.

When it comes to haters, the Left just can’t be beat.

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And why not? He is their ideal.

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The Old Line State — where kids have been suspended for making guns with their fingers and with toaster pastries — now boasts a school district that prohibits hugging and homemade food in public elementary schools for anyone except a parent’s own children.

Parents must also register to enter the playground and they can’t push anyone except their own kids on the swings.

All the better to turn your children into suspicious, anti-social freaks.

Officials with St. Mary’s County Public Schools say the new rules are necessary to provide a generally safe environment.

‘Generally safe environment’, of course, means for the school’s employees; it guards against them getting sued by their dysfunctional left-wing parents.

Steve Sailer points out another inconvenient truth.

 With the most spectacular element of the Bush Administration’s Invade the World – Invite the World grand strategy now a decade old, it’s worth taking a look at the U.S. military death tolls by ethnicity and sex. This is an infrequently covered subject of scant interest to the press because women and minorities were not hit hardest.

In the mid 2000s, non-Hispanic whites made up about 61% of the 25-year-olds in the U.S. But through this 2009 report by Hannah Fischer of the Congressional Research Service, whites made up 74.7% of Iraq war fatalities, while minorities only accounted for 25.3%. So, whites gave the last full measure of devotion at an 89% higher per capita rate than nonwhites in Iraq.

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Om Malik’s brief post on the demise of Google Reader raises a good point: If we can’t trust Google to keep successful applications around, why should we bother trying to use their new applications, such as Google Keep?

Given the timing, the name is ironic. I’d definitely like an application similar to Evernote, but with search that actually worked well; I trust Google on search. But why should I use Keep if the chances are that Google is going to drop it a year or two from now?

Google obviously didn’t think this through — or it’s worse than anybody thought. A lot of people structure their online lives around Google products; if they’re going to jerk the rug out from under dedicated users like this, who’s going to trust them in the future?

Apparently ‘Don’t Be Evil’ operates under a different definition of ‘Evil’ than that used by the average person.

The Other McCain raises a good point.

Under any Pope’s teaching, Pelosi and Biden (and any other pretended Catholic who supports abortion, ‘gay marriage’, and similar bullshit) ought to be excommunicated — although it won’t happen, because American Catholic bishops are about as spineless a bunch as you’ll find outside of Congressional Republicans.

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And that’s just for starters.

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What sort of costs will ObamaCare impose on small business owners? A New York Times story on San Diego bakery Baked in the Sun offers a hint.

Under the law, employers with more than 50 employees must either offer qualifying health insurance to all full time employees or pay a fine of $2,000 per worker each year. Currently, Baked in the Sun does not offer health insurance to 90 of its 95 employees, which means that owners Rachel Shein and Steve Pilarski face a difficult choice: They can offer health insurance to their employees and figure out how to finance the additional cost; they can pay a fine for not offering health insurance; or they trim their full time workforce below 50 employees so that they can avoid both the cost of offering insurance and the cost of the penalty.

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Two months after New York made it illegal to own ammunition magazines with more than seven rounds, state lawmakers say they may increase the limit to ten.

Being in business in a Blue State nowadays is like that scene in Galaxy Quest where the good guys have to make it through a passageway that has huge pistons smashing together in a seemingly random sequence. If you time it just right, you’re good; if not, you’re paste.

Joel Kotkin looks behind the Clever Plastic Disguise.

Among the most pervasive, and arguably pernicious, notions of the past decade has been that the “creative class” of the skilled, educated and hip would remake and revive American cities. The idea, packaged and peddled by consultant Richard Florida, had been that unlike spending public money to court Wall Street fat cats, corporate executives or other traditional elites, paying to appeal to the creative would truly trickle down, generating a widespread urban revival.

Urbanists, journalists, and academics—not to mention big-city developers— were easily persuaded that shelling out to court “the hip and cool” would benefit everyone else, too. And Florida himself has prospered through books, articles, lectures, and university positions that have helped promote his ideas and brand and grow his Creative Class Group’s impressive client list, which in addition to big corporations and developers has included cities as diverse as Detroit and El Paso, Cleveland and Seattle.

Well, oops.

Since Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the Crust has been all about the notion that Clever People Planning Things is a guarantee of success in any endeavor, unlike the sloppy and sub-optimal results of the free market.

Florida himself, in his role as an editor at The Atlantic, admitted last month what his critics, including myself, have said for a decade: that the benefits of appealing to the creative class accrue largely to its members—and do little to make anyone else any better off. The rewards of the “creative class” strategy, he notes, “flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers,” since the wage increases that blue-collar and lower-skilled workers see “disappear when their higher housing costs are taken into account.” His reasonable and fairly brave, if belated, takeaway: “On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits.”

Funny how the people who reflexively deride ‘trickle-down’ when talking about supply-side economics seem to think that it works perfectly well when it’s them, the Smart People, doing it. Any city with a self-styled ‘Arts District’ knows that sinking feeling taxpayers get as they see more and more of their money poured down the sink-hole of trying to beat the dead horse of urban downtowns back to life.

“You can put mag wheels on a Gremlin,” comments one long-time Michigan observer. “but that doesn’t make it a Mustang.”

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The University of Virginia is expecting a roughly 7-million bill for Obamacare’s new employer penalties, said Susan Carkeek, the University’s vice president and chief human resources officer. “We’re expecting fairly significant cost implications from the Affordable Care Act that pass on new penalties and charges, fees to employers – probably in the order of $7 million a year,” she explained in an interview.

Community colleges across the country are slashing employee hours to avoid costly Obamacare mandates. For example,”Pennsylvania’s Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) is slashing the hours of 400 adjunct instructors, support staff, and part-time instructors to dodge paying for Obamacare.” Youngstown State University is also “trimming staff hours to avoid Obamacare’s fiscal burden.”  Other university are also cutting employee hours, which is “a double whammy” for instructors, who are “facing a legal requirement [under the new law] to get health care and if the college is reducing our hours, we don’t have the money to pay for it,” said an adjunct biology professor.

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 After a year an a half as a “guidance counselor” I am convinced that the education system is not about the children (though there are educators in the system who do genuinely care about the students, but it is the only system we have to work within).  In reality, American public education is a government business. It is about politics and power, educators keeping their jobs, and federal and state funding. The bottom line for schools is performance ratings tied to funding. It is about “no dollar left behind”.

The current education system has little to do with the reality of over half of my students’ lives and futures.  It is a poorly run circus and my job is to hold the one-sized flaming hoop at one predetermined height and figure out a way to coax them to jump, limp or crawl through it, if they can at all.  If they can’t we have to find a way to move them out so their performance doesn’t “ding” our school’s ratings. Education needs not reforming, it needs to be blown up and re-built from the ground up.

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

Among the many, many components of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007was a requirement that U.S. use of biofuels increase from 4.7 billion gallons in 2007 to 36 billion gallons in 2022. The number seemed to have been pulled from the air, since nobody can really know what fuel requirements will be years in the future, although continuing growth in demand for gasoline was assumed. In fact, though, gasoline use has slid since the year the law passed, from 3,389,269,000 barrels per day to 3,185,312,000 barrels per year*. And car manufacturers advise against using gasoline blended with more than ten percent ethanol, unless the car was designed for it, which most aren’t. But companies that supply gasoline are still required to increase biofuel consumption, which means ethanol, because that’s what’s available, so …

But you knew that.

Health insurance companies spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying on the health care bill. In return for that investment, they convinced the government to require everyone in the country to buy their products, on pain of a fine. As it turns out, the law has done more than grow their customer base — The Washington Post reports today that those customers will soon be paying through the nose….

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If you think the Dodd-Frank or ObamaCare regulations are rough, try opening a wood-fired pizza restaurant in New York City.

Where would we be without the Nanny State to save us from wood-fired pizza?

Anyway, that’s the reality in New York, that an entrepreneur setting out to grow seeks money not so much for marketing expenses or salaries or ingredients or capital equipment but for the cost of complying with the environmental regulations, or hiring professionals — “expediters” — who can make the system navigable, for a fee.

Your tax dollars at work….

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Before today’s battles over cell phones and distracted driving, there were battles over car radios and distracted driving.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Lileks looks at the popularity among the Usual Suspects of ‘nanny taxes’.

There are two issues: One is tax streamlining, which attempts to reduce pointless bewildering complexity so the tax code can be full of intentionally bewildering complexity.

But the bill’s author suggested another rationale: “Just to go after the junk food, “ he said. “Especially the Twinkies and that sort of thing.”

Cute George Harrison….

Paul Rahe turns over a rock.

Most of the New Deal liberals that I once knew have passed on. They have been replaced in positions of authority by a generation for whom everything is political. Its motto is “the personal is political and the political is personal.” What this means in practice is that the members of this generation tend to regard those at odds with them not as merely wrong and perhaps intriguingly, interestingly wrong but as simply immoral. In the face of an argument or observation that does not sit comfortably with what they believe, they resort to denunciation. The dissenter is labeled a racist or a fascist or something worse, and he is read out of the human race. In this environment, conservatives are no longer welcome. No advertisement states that they need not apply for jobs at certain institutions, but that is nearly always the case.

The key to understanding what has happened is that the new generation has made of the university a political instrument. Its purpose, as they see it, is to help them transform the larger world. Those not on board with the program are interlopers to be demonized and driven out, and the quality of the scholarly work and the teaching they do has no weight. One can write and be widely read. One can be invited to conferences and to give lectures. But, if a job comes open at a major university, one will not even be interviewed. Trust me. I know from long experience.

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Meet Eustace Conway, 51, the owner of Turtle Camp near Boone, North Carolina. He’s a back-to-the-land guy who bathes in a creek, grows his own food, and welcomes others to learn some survival skills at his place (which he runs as an educational nonprofit) for a small fee.

In other words, he’s out from under the Crust.

    A team of health, construction and fire officials showed up for an unannounced inspection of the preserve, acting on an anonymous tip. Escorted by two sheriffs’ deputies, they executed what Mr. Conway describes as a “SWAT-team raid”—peering into outhouses, stomping around log cabins, and climbing hand-hewn ladders.

Their findings are compiled in a 78-page report with a bullet-point list of violations. Mr. Conway’s sawdust urinal and outhouses? Unpermitted, according to the officials. The wood he used to erect two dozen buildings? Built with lumber that isn’t “grade-marked,” meaning it doesn’t specify the mill where it was produced.

The open-air kitchen, with its crates of potatoes and stacks of pots? “Not protected from insects and animals,” according to the report. “It is, in fact, outdoors.”

Which is, in fact, the point.

When I was a kid, this was a free country. Say what you will about the ’50s, we never had to put up with this kind of shit.

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According to a disturbingly pleasant graphic from Information is Beautiful entitled simply 20^th Century Death, communism was the leading ideological cause of death between 1900 and 2000. The 94 million that perished in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe easily (and tragically) trump the 28 million that died under fascist regimes during the same period.

I suspect that Islam may be a contender for the 21st century.

During the century measured, more people died as a result of communism than from homicide (58 million) and genocide (30 million) put together. The combined death tolls of WWI (37 million) and WWII (66 million) exceed communism’s total by only 9 million.

And yet this is the philosophy being pushed by our schools and ruling class.

Curiously, all of the world’s worst famines during the 20th century were in communist countries: China (twice!), the Soviet Union, and North Korea.

Oh, I don’t think it’s curious at all….