Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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The dysfunctional Afro-American subculture once again makes the news.

Be careful not to step in the diversity.

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…Will 1400 do it? 2100? In two weeks, the United Nations will convene its Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro where yet more international treaties to save the planet will be discussed. The conference is being called Rio + 20 to memorialize the history in which the wildly successful United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN’s global economic 100-year plan Agenda 21 were adopted in that city at the first Earth Summit back in 1992.

Notwithstanding the effects of 700 environmental treaties, the United Nations Environment Program has issued a new report, Global Environmental Outlook 5, that finds, despite 20 years of the best efforts of UN bureaucrats, things remain bad and are getting worse.

Of course. Without an ongoing crisis, these U.N. kleptocrats are out of jobs, and being kicked off the gravy train is the last thing they want.

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The most amazing feature of all of this writing is the silence about the failure of the “biological forecasting” of people like Paul Ehrlich.   When Ehrlich’s Population Bomb was published in 1968, the world population was three and one half billion.  Today, the population has just passed seven billion.  This was not supposed to happen.  Ehrlich predicted that mass starvation in the 1970’s would cause a collapse of world population to bring it down to the “carrying capacity” of the Earth. This is the logic of Thomas Malthus:  human population grows until there is not enough food to feed everyone, and then the population drops dramatically through famine, war, or disease until the balance with limited natural resources is restored.  While many people have starved in many parts of the world over the past 50 years, the average human life-span and per capita wealth have increased around the world.

Guess he didn’t have the ‘climate change’ bandwagon on which to ride.

If scientific research is to be judged by falsifiable predictions, then the science of those like Ehrlich has been refuted by their record of falsified predictions.  In contrast to Ehrlich, Julian Simon argued that population growth was good as long as free markets and free trade allowed human entrepreneurial and inventive genius to find new ways to turn natural resources to productive uses.  To prove his point, Simon challenged Ehrlich to a bet.  In 1980, Ehrlich could pick a list of five commodity metals.  If Ehrlich was right, he would predict that by 1990 these metals would be so scarce that their prices would have risen.  If Simon was right, their prices would drop.  Ehrlich lost the bet.  The prices in 1990, adjusted for inflation, had dropped, just as Simon predicted.

And yet, like AlGore, he keeps on bloviating, and people keep on giving him money and respect.

In 1989, I was on a year-long sabbatical at Stanford University doing research on “Darwinian natural right,” and I audited some of the classes in the “Program in Human Biology” at Stanford.  Ehrlich is a Stanford biologist, and he lectured to some of the classes.  The students and faculty treated him with awe.  I was astonished that he was never challenged for his embarrassing failures.  In 1990, he lost his bet.  But he also received the “genius award” of the MacArthur Foundation!

This is a tenured professor at a top-ten university. If you want evidence on how our educational system is broken, look no further.

Read it.

The “Songbun” system, which classifies North Koreans as “loyal,” “wavering,” or “hostile,” has largely escaped notice, even as UN agencies and rights groups have documented abuses, including vast camps of political prisoners, public executions, and extreme information controls, the report from a US-based advocacy group argues.

“Every North Korean citizen is assigned a heredity-based class and socio-political rank over which the individual exercises no control but which determines all aspects of his or her life,” the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea said.

The three classes are further divided into 51 categories by family background or occupation, which determine the precise mix of privileges, punishments or surveillance, the report said.

As we have seen in other places, Communism is merely the Western-respectable window dressing that traditional societies are using to carry on as they have for millenia.

Read it.

Multi-culti chickens come home to roost … and poop all over everything.

The Schengen Area consists of a contiguous group of twenty-five European countries that have agreed by treaty to suspend border controls and travel restrictions within their common territory. Five member states of the European Union — Britain, Ireland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Cyprus — are not signatories of the Schengen Agreement, while three non-EU countries — Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland — have signed on.

The weakness of the Schengen provisions was highlighted last year during the Camp of the Saints crisis in the Mediterranean. Libyans and Tunisians who illegally gained access to Europe by landing on the island of Lampedusa were given temporary residence permits by the Italian authorities. Once they had these valuable pieces of paper in hand, they were theoretically able to travel wherever they wished within the Schengen Area. Since Italy was not their intended final destination — France, Britain, Germany, and Sweden being more highly prized for their lavish welfare benefits — many of the newcomers immediately attempted to travel northwards.

Handing out residence permits was a somewhat cynical ploy on the part of the Italian authorities, who obviously hoped to hand off their cultural enrichment problems to other parts of Europe. The French were having none of it, however, and sent the Tunisian interlopers straight back to Italy, Schengen or not.

Sky falling. Film at 11.

The author of this article has degrees in philosophy and journalism, and in his bio photo looks like Meathead from All in the Family, so of course he’s qualified to report on environmental issues.

Based on a review of scientific theories, ecosystem modeling and fossils, the researchers concluded that accelerating loss of biodiversity, extreme climate fluctuations and a radically changing total energy budget are precursors to reaching a planetary tipping point that would be followed by an irreversible collapse of our planet’s ecosystems.

In other words, very few actual facts, and a lot of tendentious speculation. How convincing. All of the evidence cited is from the Usual Suspects like the U.N. and the World Wildlife Fund, ‘progressive’ groups united behind the concept that human beings suck and we need to cancel the industrial revolution and live in neolithic poverty or Mother Gaia will be peeved.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, looks at the modern world.

“There aren’t any jobs anymore. My firm only hires temps and contractors now. Employees are just too expensive.”

Now we are plainly sailing into an era when only a privileged class will have jobs. There is already no useful work (I am not counting government make-work) for anyone with an IQ below 90, and the cutoff point is creeping steadily northward.

Read it.

President Obama’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s record in private equity have drawn scorn from his fellow Democrats. But it seems Obama’s anti-free market campaign strategy has attracted at least one prominent endorsement: Mariela Castro Espin, daughter of Raul and niece of Fidel, is backing Obama’s re-election.

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

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Three Brazilians have been charged with murdering three women and eating their flesh as part of a cannibalistic cult in which they sought to purify their souls and control population growth, according to police.

Environmentalists … sheesh.

Well? Did it work?

I remember, even if the rest of you don’t.

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The inclusion of all of America’s long term unfunded liabilities into a single measure paints a far more difficult future picture for the U.S. over the longer term in which debt totals over $50 trillion dollars.

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The Obamassiah’s legacy. Thanks a lot, Barry.

Lileks nails it.

A culture that redefines food choices as moral issues will demonize the people who don’t share the tastes of the priest class. A culture that elevates eating to some holistic act of ethical self-definition – localvore, low-carbon-impact food, fair trade, artisanal cheese – will find the casual carefree choices of the less-enlightened as an affront to their belief system. Leave it to Americans to invent a Puritan strain of Epicurianism.

But self-righteous finger-wagging is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the cruts.

Unless you’re on TV and want everyone to like you because you’re concerned about the right things. Being concerned about fat people like being concerned about Tibet; it requries nothing but expression of the proper sentiment, usually containing sadness for The Children, but also some righteous anger for Big Food, which has tricked everyone into eating more. The idea that some kids are fat because they have lousy parents doesn’t apply, because whoa whoa whoa now we’re blaming the victims, the people who for some mysterious reason can’t arrange a family meal and influence their progeny’s ingestion. For those people, obesity just happens, somehow. But in general, it’s because of soda, because everyone saw that YouTube clip with the stack of sugar cubes, right?

Yes, every time the TV talkers are in the store behind someone poor with a big arse packed in sweatpants buying Doritos and Little Debbie Cakes, the trim concerned commentaror thinks “it’s a big problem that the cost of her health issues will be distributed among 300 million people.” That’s the issue, all right.

And he takes a poke at David Frum, which is all to the good; why any respectable publication would give any space to David Frum always astonishes me.

As I said, it’s not about health. If it was, no one would mention the cost of obesity. It’s an issue only because the rest of us have to pay for it? If that’s the case, then there’s no end to the restrictions we can conjure up and impose with equal parts of sadness and resolution. Smoking was easy because it stinks. Trans-fats was easy because no one knew what they were; it’s not like you go down the store to pick up some trans-fats. The soda laws appeal to the overclass because fat people are disgusting.

Read it.

Two articles are all that is needed to sum up the situation in Seattle, a city that is 67 percent whiteand only two percent (though diversity is increasing in the city)

Read it.

It’s been two years since the annual Gloucester cheese rolling competition was banned on health and safety grounds. But yesterday hundreds took to Cooper’s Hill, at Brockworth for a rogue event.

The Nanny State will get you if you don’t watch out….

Read it.

With the shale gas boom in full swing, gas prices are at 10-year lows. We have the realistic prospect of abundant domestic supplies of a clean-burning fuel for the foreseeable future, who doesn’t like natural gas?

Ask the Sierra Club. This week, the venerable environmental organization announced its “Beyond Natural Gas” initiative, to go along with their “Beyond Coal” and “Beyond Oil” campaigns. Of course, they hate nuclear energy too.

The Sierra Club is so progressive, it want to cancel not only the twentieth century but the nineteenth as well, returning us to the good old days of Lewis and Clark, where power came from wind and water and muscle power and nothing else.

Read it.

After all, Obama’s votes have to some from somewhere.

The Department of Justice has ordered the State of Florida to stop removing non-citizens from its voter rolls, the Miami Herald reports. The DOJ sent a letter to Florida officials Thursday night expressing concern the state’s clean up was violating the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which protects minorities, and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which governs voter purges.

Oh? Did we get a sudden influx of African immigrants that didn’t make it in to the news?

Florida is deciding whether to fight the DOJ on its interpretation of the law. The state claims they were “stonewalled” for nine months by the administration and specifically names the Department of Homeland Security as being uncooperative. The DHS has data on citizenship but refuses to share that database information with Florida. As a result, the state has tried to make these determinations based on its own resources.

Your tax dollars at work.

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Few local law-enforcement officials in the United States have proven themselves more Islamist-friendly than Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, whose department has been dogged by allegations of malfeasance in office, and the Los Angeles Police Department’s top deputy handling counterterrorism issues, Michael Downing.

Read it.

I was wondering when that was going to happen. There’s nothing like being surrounded by religious fanatics committed to your elimination to concentrate the mind — and fuel an arms race.

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Black Pack Attack violence against primarily white people (most of the time individual whites, though increasingly Asians are being targeted as well); a media refusing to acknowledge anything; a political class dedicated to enacting laws that protect those who partake in Black Pack Attacks and promote those who cover for Organized Blackness in every level of society (all three branches of government, academic, military, corporate, and both private and public sectors jobs).

Read it.

On Valentine’s Day, Nick Bergus came across a link to an odd product on Amazon.com: a 55-gallon barrel of … personal lubricant.

He found it irresistibly funny and, as one does in this age of instant sharing, he posted the link on Facebook, adding a comment: “For Valentine’s Day. And every day. For the rest of your life.”

Within days, friends of Mr. Bergus started seeing his post among the ads on Facebook pages, with his name and smiling mug shot. Facebook — or rather, one of its algorithms — had seen his post as an endorsement and transformed it into an advertisement, paid for by Amazon.

ODF. That’s what you get for engaging in ‘social media’.

Read it.

Such accusations, you see, are part of the belief system by which the far Left justifies its lawless radicalism: Because their enemies are all, in one way or another, guilty of political ThoughtCrimes (a category that the Left is always willing to expand and re-define as necessary), the Left need not be scrupulous as to the means by which it advances its goals.

If you buy into the premises of their argument, then the conclusion logically follows that any outcome other than the complete triumph of the Left — the extermination of all resistance — is unacceptable, and whatever foul, unjust and illegal actions are necessary to accomplish that triumph can be justified.

Read it.

There was a time, perhaps, when U.S. defense spending could accommodate both our strategic interests/defense needs and the political needs of our legislators. Ashton Carter and Peter Schweizer correctly insist that this time has passed.

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One of the leaders honored by President Obama yesterday with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, is Dolores Huerta, an honorary chair of Democratic Socialists of America.

The Democratic Socialists Web site calls for “massive redistribution of income” and sharp cuts to defense spending.

Read it. And listen to the music.

He will be missed.

Read it.

Or maybe not. Jacob Sullum appears to intend to criticize current drug policy while actually criticizing news coverage, but hey, it’s all criticism, right?

Read it.

There are big differences between doing business with a private vendor and doing business with a public agency. If the private vendor doesn’t like the way you use its services, it might ding you on the price or even sever ties and send you elsewhere. If the public agency doesn’t care for your interpretation of the arrangement, it has the power to throw your ass in jail. Which is how Diane Tran, a Houston-area high school honor student who takes advanced placement courses, gets straight-As and works full-time to support herself and two siblings, found herself in jail for “truancy.”

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Yet another reason to avoid government schools — every issue necessarily becomes a political issue, and comes under the political agenda of whoever holds power for the time being.

Makes you wonder what sort of she-it they’ll come up with next….

Read it.

For sufficiently large values of ‘college’. Those who have the education that somebody going to college 60 years ago are all employed. The others? Well, they spent a number of years at institutions calling themselves colleges.

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

But the Democrats’ number is by no means random. On the contrary, the $14 billion that Conrad added is enough to match the discretionary spending that was called for in President Obama’s proposed budget–the one that not a single Democratic Senator or Representative voted for. So here the Democrats are engaging in the ultimate hypocrisy. They vote against the President’s budget because they do not want to associate themselves with its profligacy, lest they pay a price with voters. But then they turn around and slide the appropriators enough extra money to match the budget that they just voted against, confident in the belief that budgetary matters are too complicated for voters to understand, and that their friends in the media won’t blow the whistle on them.

Read it.

Remind me again how much worse things were when Europeans were running this area.

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The Reich flight tax that the Nazis imposed on Jews trying to flee in the 1930s was 25 percent. Democrats want Saverin to pay 30 percent.

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Be the first on your block to become permanently unemployable, deeply in debt, yet feel really really good about yourself.

Impress your friends, who are as worthless as you are.

Read it.

Welcome to ‘civil asset forfeiture’, the law that allows local governments to do retail what the Feds have been doing wholesale since Woodrow Wilson. (Google “Chuck Schumer” for a picture to go with.)

Apparently the best government that money can buy feels undervalued.

For further adventures in government pocket-picking, see When the Government Is the Looter by George Will.

And people wonder why Republicans don’t trust government and want to shrink it.

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The biggest problem with vegetarians, and their most Puritan variation—Vegans—is not so much their holier-than-thou attitude (after all, most enthusiasts, from fitness freaks to fundamentalists, have the same attitude), but the barely concealed will to power to impose veganism on the rest of us.  It is another form of the totalitarian temptation.

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And every damned one of them a Republican! Oh, wait….

Federal law requires states to have a reasonable voter list maintenance program and gives the Eric Holder Justice Department the power to sue states that don’t. Not surprisingly, Holder’s DOJ has not brought a single case under the law to require states to clean up corrupted voter rolls. Indeed, when I served at the DOJ Voting Section, an announcement was made in November 2009 that this provision of the law would not be enforced. The political leadership was philosophically opposed to the law, and they said so.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised. Very nice of Attorney General Holder to leave all those bogus Republican voters on the rolls. What a guy.

Read it.

School food is always a hot topic, and is perhaps more so now than it’s ever been. From a publicity standpoint, school food has taken off as an issue largely due to the efforts of Oliver and First Lady Michelle Obama. But viewed from the standpoint of edibility, cost, and healthiness, food served by public schools via the USDA’s National School Lunch Program was already an issue because that program and its food have a decades-long track record of sucking. And in spite of the best efforts of Oliver and Mrs. Obama, along with new rules set to take effect in the coming months, I’m not optimistic that the quality of school food is likely to change anytime soon.

Since when is it the job of the government to take charge of what kids eat in schools?

Since when is it the job of the Federal government to take charge of what kids eat in schools?

Since when is it the job of a non-boarding school to provide students with breakfast, lunch, and (in all to many cases) dinner?

Consider the ‘pink slime’ controversy earlier this year. Whether you were up in arms over chemically treated meat or thought it was completely fine to eat, the truth is if you’re a public school parent whose child eats a school lunch you still have little say over whether or not your child eats pink slime—or genetically-modified foods, sugars, starches, and a whole host of other foods about which decent parents (and experts) disagree.

Too bad. Nanny knows best.

Read it.

While we’re still curious to see if Microsoft can better integrate the desktop and Metro environments of its latest operating system, the company has now revealed a significant change to the desktop portion of Windows 8 — a completely restyled visual appearance. As you might remember from the Consumer Preview, window borders and widgets featured a simplified and subdued look in comparison to the glass-like materials of Aero, which Microsoft now calls “dated and cheesy.” With the latest refresh, however, the company has pushed its modernistic philosophy even further to reveal a spartan (yet functional) interface that draws less attention to the chrome elements and allows the user to focus more on content.

In other words, using the power available in modern graphics chips for a dramatically beautiful interface is ‘dated and cheesy’, but reverting to a look that could have been accomplished on Windows 3.1 is not. I see. It’s all clear to me now.

I’m still waiting for Bill Gates to bitch-slap Steve Ballmer for ruining his company. Steve Jobs wouldn’t have tolerated this shit.

Read it.

Life in a country with no Fourth Amendment. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.

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Justice Breyer is a statist who joined the majority in the Kelo case, which ruled (and I use that word deliberately) that a local government stealing people’s homes in order to give the property to a developer who will pay more taxes on it is a ‘public purpose’ within the meaning of the Fifth Amendment. Needless to say, the desired ‘benefit’ never happened, and the land is now a city dump.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. What goes around, comes around.

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The U.S. is the only country that taxes its citizens on their world-wide income, no matter where they live.

OK, there’s also Eritrea. It imposes what is derisively termed a “diaspora tax” on its citizens.

Otherwise, though, the basic rule is that countries impose their taxes on individuals based on their residency, not their citizenship.

Hey, nobody has statist class warriors to match ours. Chuckie Schumer alone could destroy the economies of half the members of the U.N.

Read it.

This is totally insane. Any legal system that allows CRAP like this to happen needs to be totally rebooted.

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Other than Under the Bus, of course.

I have often suspected that the reason Barack Obama adopted Wright as his preacher was that he wanted to be around a ‘black’ man who looks whiter than he is. Part of his attempt to self-identify as black, no doubt.

When we see on the news and in the papers ‘black people’ like Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Jeremiah Wright, and Colin Powell, who would be taken for white in any part of sub-Saharan Africa, can one wonder at Elizabeth Warren pretending to be a Cherokee?

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Apprently not. It would seem that poor people eat energy-dense non-SWPL foods because they taste good, which makes perfect biological sense.

Obviously, not all shoppers are trying to minimize calories, but that doesn’t mean they are trying to maximize them. Different consumers have different values, tastes, and preferences, and some would rather eat the calorie-dense foods they enjoy than forgo that pleasure for the sake of better health in the long run. Is that really so hard to comprehend?

Only by people who think that they are the Burger King, and would rather that you have it their way.

Rod Dreher sounds the alarm.

Remember how no clergy member will be forced to perform same-sex marriages against their will. If the Obama administration has its way, all US military chaplains will have to do so. Excerpt:

     The Obama administration “strongly objects” to provisions in a House defense authorization bill that would prohibit the use of military property for same-sex “marriage or marriage-like” ceremonies, and protect military chaplains from negative repercussions for refusing to perform ceremonies that conflict with their beliefs, according to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

If this goes through, the Catholic and the Orthodox chaplains will have to be withdrawn from the US military. Many Evangelical chaplains will choose to leave. If same-sex marriage is constitutionalized by Supreme Court ruling, then I don’t see how even a legislative exemption would be possible. This is another one of the answers to the question, “How does my gay neighbor’s marriage to his partner affect me?”

It should come as no surprise that politicians lie to get their programs passed, and then let the hammer down.

The strategy of the pro-SSM side seems to be to deny that anything like this could possibly happen, and that people who say it could are being irresponsible scaremongers. Then when it actually happens, they’ll say oh, who cares; those bigots deserve what they get.

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

Read it.

Read it.

One of the most tired talking points of the “hydrocarbon deniers” (as I am going to call them) is that the U.S. must move beyond oil because we have less than 2 percent of the world’s proved reserves, though we consume about 20 percent of global oil production. After last week’s testimony from Anu Mittal, the director of natural resources and environment for the Government Accountability Office, to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, anyone who persists in using this talking point again (that would include the president) deserves to be labeled an anti-science ignoramus.

Mittal reviewed the geological survey data of oil shale in the western United States that show we have about 3 trillion barrels of oil equivalent. This represents about two-thirds or more of the total shale oil estimated to exist worldwide. About half of it, according to Mittal’s testimony, is thought by public and private analysts to be recoverable. With droll understatement, Mittal offered the following conclusion, which should be read slowly: “This is an amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.”

Not that the bureaucrats and enviro-nazis will ever let us do anything about it.

Read it.

Just another day in the Workers’ Paradise. Say, that Communism is a really successful system; perhaps we could do that over here? Let’s ask the Obamassiah to see what he can do.

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Political correctness isn’t a political belief where people want to stimulate a discussion and get to the truth. It’s a totalitarian religion dedicated to the exact opposite. They hate hatefacts and want all sinners to be burned at the stake no matter what the collateral damage. The unfortunate thing about their holy war is that it’s virtually nothing but collateral damage.