Read it.

And for the ADA blame George H.W. Bush.

Read it.

This sounds fishy to me — entirely too, how shall I say it, convenient. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that this was some kind of a set-up.

Read it.

After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.

Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said.

And Diderot turns to dust at last.

Read it.

Canada is an even more blatant cultural parasite (excrescence may be a better term) subsisting almost entirely on what we send them. It is infuriating to watch Canadian academics clutching our PC best-sellers while lecturing us on how naughty we are for not imposing gay marriage nationwide and not jailing anyone who opposes it. Our social poisons fill Canadian bookstores and permeate Canadian movie screens. If we’re unhappy that anti-American foreigners take our stupidities seriously, let’s stop sending them our entertainment and leftist political tracts.

Read it.

Scottish NHS patients have been denied access to a cancer drug being used to keep the Lockerbie bomber alive after spending watchdogs ruled it is too expensive.

How about that government-provided health care! Don’t you wish we had that on this side of the pond?

Read it.

Because, as we all know, they can’t be bothered to teach the kids English — that’s just SO fifteen minutes ago….

Read it.

Welcome to the People’s Republic, Comrade. Check your standards at the door, and take a number.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California … when they can afford it.

Read it.

The bill spearheaded by Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer banning members of Congress from using nonpublic information to profit their personal investments may hit a wall in the form of Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV).

On Monday, Mr. Reid indicated that he may simply accept the watered down version of the STOCK (Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge) Act passed by the House instead of sending the bill to a conference committee to hammer out the significant differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill.

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

After all, if Congresscritters can’t make a buck or two on the side, what’s the point? Democrats don’t get elected to public office for their health, you know.

Read it. And watch the video.

It would get very ugly very quickly.

Read it.

Two studies published this week calculate the astounding cost of Britain’s go-it-alone obsession with using wind turbines to generate so much of the electricity the nation needs.

Both studies make remarkably generous concessions that favour wind technology; the true cost, critics could argue, will be higher in each set of calculations. One study reckons that the UK can still meet its carbon dioxide emissions targets and save £140bn – but only if it dumps today’s inefficient hippie technology. The other puts the potential saving at £120bn – pointing out that the same amount of electricity could be generated using open cycle gas plants at one-tenth the cost of using wind turbines.

Turns out that wind power is more a religion than an alternative energy source. Who knew?

Read it.

Perhaps because men these days don’t give a shit about it one way or another. And why should they? It’s not as if they have any input into the discussion.

Women have been insisting for half a century that they, and they alone, are qualified/interested/entitled to make decisions about reproduction. Men have more and more just thrown up their hands and said, ‘Fine. Do what you want. I’ll be watching the game.’ It’s not as if men have any control of, or responsibility for, the resulting offspring, except in the rare cases where they wind up on the wrong end of a paternity test and an unsympathetic ‘palimony’ judge. Be careful what you wish for, sluts, you just might get it.

Read it.

On Monday night, the material from the former pupil of King Edward VI High School for Girls pupil, In Birmingham, which charges £10,215 a year, prompted a sexism row among her fellow union members.

Proof positive that there is no sense of humor (excuse me, ‘humour’) left in the entire island of Britain.

Read it.

I’m talking about the second-tier of the warfare, the attempt to intimidate those removed by one or more degrees of separation from the dispute, and to use them as tools against the target.

They wouldn’t do that, would they?

Similarly, when the new Rhode Island Attorney General announced that he would cooperate with the federal goverment in the enforcement of federal immigration laws, protesters not only invaded the lobby of his offices, they picketed his house and confronted neighbors about the issue.  Dragging his neighbors into a dispute which had nothing to do with them did not cause the RI AG to back down, although not for lack of trying.

Well, that’s the Left for you — the personal is political, and vice versa. If you disagree with the Politically Correct position, not only are you wrong, but you are officially an Evil Person, and anything that happens to you — or anyone connected with you — is okay.

Read it.

No wonder the kids want to bring their own.

Made by grinding together connective tissue and beef scraps normally destined for dog food and rendering, BPI’s Lean Beef Trimmings are then treated with ammonia hydroxide, a process that kills pathogens such as salmonella and E. coli.

The resulting pinkish substance is later blended into traditional ground beef and hamburger patties.

How appetizing.

“We originally called it soylent pink,” Custer told The Daily. “We looked at the product and we objected to it because it used connective tissues instead of muscle. It was simply not nutritionally equivalent [to ground beef]. My main objection was that it was not meat.”

Your tax dollars at work. Just think what they can do for your health care.

Alex Tabarrok looks at our dysfunctional education system.

In 2009 the United States graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math, and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual-and-performing-arts graduates in 1985.

Most of it subsidized by the taxpayers. And just look where that’s got us! Isn’t it amazing?

Thus, an argument can be made for subsidizing students in fields with potentially large spillovers, such as microbiology, chemical engineering, and computer science. But there is little justification for subsidizing sociology, dance, and English majors.

Sure there is — that’s where the Children of the Crust dwell, and what the Crust want, the Crust get … on YOUR dime.

In the 21st century, an astounding 25 percent of American men do not graduate from high school. A big part of the problem is that the United States has paved a single road to knowledge, the road through the classroom. “Sit down, stay quiet, and absorb. Do this for 12 to 16 years,” we tell the students, “and all will be well.” Lots of students, however, crash before they reach the end of the road. Who can blame them? Sit-down learning is not for everyone, perhaps not even for most people. There are many roads to an education.

And if you take them, you get tasered by your helicopter parents.

Consider those offered in Europe. In Germany, 97 percent of students graduate from high school, but only a third of these students go on to college. In the United States, we graduate fewer students from high school, but nearly two-thirds of those we graduate go to college. So are German students poorly educated? Not at all.

Instead of college, German students enter training and apprenticeship programs—many of which begin during high school. By the time they finish, they have had a far better practical education than most American students—equivalent to an American technical degree—and, as a result, they have an easier time entering the work force. Similarly, in Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland, between 40 to 70 percent of students opt for an educational program that combines classroom and workplace learning.

We used to do that in this country, until the COLLEGE FOR ALL AND DAMN THE EXPENSE BECAUSE ALL THE CHILDREN ARE ABOVE AVERAGE progressives took over. Teenage boys used to come out of high school with a useful skill — my father learned how to set type and run a printing press — and the girls were taught how to cook, sew, and manage a family.

But that was yesterday, and yesterday’s gone.

Read it.

“Businesses on Pico have been very frustrated by code compliance regulations for years,” [Pico Improvement Organization chairman Robert] Kronovet said. “You have a business that might have a sign in the wrong place or a door that isn’t right and the city fines them to the point that they don’t want to stay.

“These are small businesses. They don’t have the money to fight it.”…

The business life in California — which is why all those businesses are going somewhere else.

“We wanted to renovate our bathroom areas to make it more handicap-accessible and it took us almost three years to get all the permits,” Garcia said.

“We kept giving all the paperwork they need, but it took forever. We needed the Pico Improvement Organization to plead our case.”

Even complying with stupid laws takes forever.

California has the nation’s most active entrepreneurial corps of ADA enforcers, roaming business districts to file mass complaints against small businesses over handicap accessibility which they then settle for cash.

That’s the way you get rich in the Nanny State. I’m looking forward to watching Bush the Elder burn in Hell for signing the ADA. This is why people have doubts about Romney — they don’t want another half-Republican President.

Read it.

Read it.

A few weeks ago, I went with a friend to my favorite bar in Midtown (The Bar Downstairs at the Andaz Fifth Avenue). We ordered some cheese to go with our cocktails, and it arrived very cold, like it had just come out of the refrigerator. I was displeased. That is not how you are supposed to serve cheese. But today, I am relieved to learn that I don’t need to blame the bar—the cold cheese was the government’s fault.

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

The problem with any regulatory scheme is that it is based on the (unproved) assumptions that the legislators who created the scheme, and the bureaucrats who enforce it, know everything that there is to know about the subject AND that their motives in creating the regulations are as pure as pure can be. The available evidence suggests that, not only are these assumptions false, but the way to bet is that  the regulations are based on pig-ignorance and corrupt cronyism.

Read it.

Why high tech jobs aren’t coming to a neighborhood near you.

Why wouldn’t he set up there? Hell, we could use 25+ high tech jobs paying 70k!

His response:

1. America doesn’t want him.
I asked him why? He said, he has a B1 Business Visa. He can’t stay more than 3 – 6 months at a time (length of stay decided by Border Protection at the airport on arrival). Investors wouldn’t invest in a company where the CEO isn’t sure if he can stay and for how long. I asked him to convert it to an H1B. He said he needs to have a running company to do that. Running with taxes filed for a few years before he can apply. I asked him to file for an EB5 Investor visa. $500k gets you a visa. He said no. It has to be $500k of YOUR OWN MONEY. Not Angel Investor cash. There is no visa type for a foreign job creator.

2. Ease of doing business.
He says he can incorporate a Delaware company in 10 minutes online. But what’s the use of a company if he can’t open a bank account to collect investments. Tax IDs aren’t issued easily. He has no SSN.

3. Our Corporate and Income taxes will kill his profits.
No argument there.

4. By the end of the year he anticipates having 75+ employees. Health care costs (owing to Obamacare) would kill his profits.
Yet again, no argument there.

Note that all of these problems are caused by government. Your tax dollars at work. It’s as if Congress got up in the morning and thought ‘Now, what can we do today to make sure that Americans are unemployed in greater and greater numbers?’

Read it.

 The Budget Act of 1974 requires the House and Senate to meet certain deadlines, culminating in the adoption of a budget resolution. The Republican House has obeyed the law, but the Democratic Senate has thumbed its nose at the statute, illegally refusing to meet any of the statutory deadlines or to adopt any budget at all for the last three years.

The Senate’s scofflaw ways are shared by the Obama administration. Federal law requires the Medicare trustees to report annually on the solvency of the Medicare program. The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 further provides that if, for two years in a row, more than 45% of Medicare funding is coming from general revenues rather than Medicare taxes, the president must submit legislation to Congress to address the Medicare funding crisis. President Bush dutifully followed the law, but President Obama has ignored it for the last three years.

Today was the deadline for Obama to comply with the Medicare Modernization Act by submitting a plan to rescue Medicare’s finances. Obama, of course, has no intention of doing anything to reform entitlements. So, for the fourth year in a row, he chose to act illegally. He did nothing.

Earlier today, I was on a call with Senator Jeff Sessions, and I asked what can be done to hold the Democrats accountable for their wanton law-breaking. Unfortunately, the statutes in question contain no sanctions or enforcement mechanisms. The only real recourse is to public opinion. For that recourse to be meaningful, Americans would need to know that their president and the Democratic Senate believe that they need comply with the law only when it is convenient for them. Unfortunately, the press has no interest in publicizing the fact that the Democrats are scofflaws. So the Democrats ignore the law, secure in the knowledge that their secret is safe with the national media.

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

Read it.

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

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Oh, wait, it already is.

Read it.

No surprises here. Ron Paul appears completely ignorant of the existential threat to Western civilization posed by Islam. (Unfortunately, most politically active libertarians share the same blind spot.)

Read it.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in Massachusetts.

Read it.

Not that the world-savers care. They’ve got a notion in their heads and there’s no intruding reality into it.

It has been said that the worst part of being poor in the US is having to live next to other poor people.  A huge part of this is that people outside the upper middle class and upper classes aren’t allowed to maintain control over their own neighborhoods.  Hell, under high diversity, they can’t even maintain soft power by controlling normative behavior.   And if this isn’t bad enough, the SWPL/DWL crowd even supports stuffing Section 8 residents into whatever lower income neighborhoods are too functional for their tastes.

Read it. And examine the map very closely.

Iran has called Israel a “one bomb state,” meaning one nuclear bomb could effectively end the existence of the tiny, New Jersey-sized nation. Israel has a population of 7.8 million people. Some 42 percent of the population live in the Tel Aviv metro area.

And this is why it will come as no surprise if Israel does a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Read it.

Read it.

‘What “key 50% mark”?’, I hear you ask. The key 50% mark at which the tax-eaters outnumber the tax-payers. That’s the tipping point at which the  tax-payers realize that theirs is a losing demographic, and so the rush to go from tax-payer to tax-eater becomes a flood, and the system slides every faster into bankruptcy, at which point the starving masses are willing to do anything to keep the wolf from the door, and so the New World Order arises in waves of blood and iron.

Mark my words. It’s coming. And it probably speaks Arabic.

Read it.

I think I may need a new category: The UN — Money Well Spent.

Read it.

Liam Aitchison, 16, was found dead in a derelict building in the Steinish area of Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis in November.

His death was later raised during a newspaper review section on the Wright Stuff show.

He put on a Scottish accent and said ”there’s been another murder”, copying a phrase from TV detective show Taggart, while talking about the teenager’s death with guest Charlie Baker in December last year.

His remarks prompted 2,358 complaints to Ofcom from viewers of the broadcast on December 6.

A statement issued on behalf of Liam’s family at the time said the comments were ”very upsetting”, ”insulting” and ”insensitive”.

To begin with, it wasn’t a news show, it was a talk show, and these Sensitive Souls need to get over themselves. If they don’t like the way the guy does his show, don’t watch. Eventually his ratings will go down enough that he’ll be canned — if enough people agree with them. If not, too bad; don’t watch it.

The more important point, however, is that however much this might be a matter between the guy who made the remarks and his employer, it is most certainly no legitimate business of a government agency.

The reason it’s worth thinking about is, that Britain is about a year farther down the path to cultural toiletry than we are, and if something stupid is happening in Britain, we have a limited amount of warning before it shows up on our shores.

Steve Sailer isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions.

So, why would you invest in getting trained (typically, on your own dime), when executives have been boasting to Wall Street for years about how they’ll offshore your future job the moment you start to make real money?

Indeed.

Read it.

Read it.

Some analysts (including myself), when pondering the Obama decision to reject Canada’s application to build a pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf coast, have laid the blame at the feet of the environmental movement and political operatives within the Obama administration. I’ve speculated that the decision was purely political, and I presumed it was driven by the intense urge to shove a thumb in the eye of Congressional Republicans. Turns out, I was wrong.

Now we know that the decision to reject the Keystone pipeline really came down to the desires of one ultra-wealthy person: Susie Tompkins Buell, a leading donor to Democrats….

Democrats: Party of the Rich, although you’re not supposed to know that.

Mike Masnick sounds the alarm.

The federal government has been paying lip service to the idea that it wants to encourage new businesses and startups in the US. And this is truly important to the economy, as studies have shown that almost all of the net job growth in this country is coming from internet startups. Thankfully some politicians recognize this, but the federal government seems to be going in the other direction. With the JotForm situation unfolding, where the US government shut down an entire website with no notice or explanation, people are beginning to recognize that the US is not safe for internet startups.

Read it.

It always surprises people when the Chinese Communists act like Communists.

Read it.

I think you would have to be coming from a very unusual place to think that legislation that did this was a good idea.  Why would you ever think that some small committee meeting in secret in DC should decide for the entire country and the entire medical profession and all insurance companies what medical screening tests should or should not be covered by insurance?

Being a government employee helps.

Read it.

Hey look, here’s a big omnibus article by David Pimentel of the Florida Costal School of Law on all the ways you are potentially legally screwed if you let your kid do stuff that was considered normal at some point in the less intensively parented past.

No wonder people aren’t having kids any more. They don’t dare.

Read it. And watch the video.

This is what Democrats want to turn America into. And they just might succeed, if one can use so fair a word for so foul a thing.

Read it.

In absolute terms, I’m not worried about being persecuted by child welfare services.  But power-mad bureaucrats probably outnumber kidnappers and serial killers at least a thousand to one.

I’m convinced that one of the reasons that people in the First World have quit having children is because of the tremendous legal liability it opens you up to. Who wants all that hassle? Get a dog. They’ll love you a lot longer.

Read it.

The pattern of behavior from the US Department of State (DOS) is to shut down adoption programs from countries that do not participate in the Hague Convention for Inter-Country Adoption. Superficially, the DOS appears to believe that rate of unethical adoptions out of countries that do not participate in the Hague Convention is too high, and therefore moves to shut down all adoptions out of those countries.

Apparently the fact that most orphans in the world reside in non-Hague countries is lost on the DOS.

Under US law, the DOS is required to accept and review adoptions originating from all countries. Further, they have yet to provide evidence that the rate of unethical adoptions out of non-Hague countries is higher than 1%, much less “too” high. Instead, they throw around headline grabbing terms like “child trafficking” and “fraud”, which gives them the political cover to advance their agenda.

Nowhere in this debate do we hear from the State Department is a discussion of what happens to the children who are left behind, who are not adopted because the DOS has blocked all adoptions from that country.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, speaks for all right-thinking people. Well, me, anyway.

Call me naïve, but the left’s coarse brutishness still shocks me. The only thing that shocks me more is the right’s suicidal cowardice.

You can read the rest of the article, but you don’t really need to. This says it all, all that really needs to be said about modern life.

George Will points out the chickens coming home to roost. Watch the video.

You asked the question, ‘How did this come about?’ George, this is what liberalism looks like. This is what the progressive state does. It tries to break all the institutions of civil society, all the institutions that mediate between the individual and the state. They have to break them to the saddle of the state.

Sometimes I think that George Will is the only adult on TV today.

Read it.

Not while there are Democrats willing to use it as an election issue.

For now, shortfalls in expected revenues for Social Security are being made up through general fund revenues. But over the course of the expected 10-month extension, that will add $100 billion to the federal deficit.

“There’s a concern that, even though the Social Security trust funds are being held harmless for the time being, that might be difficult to do over the longer run,” says Paul Van de Water, a senior fellow at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and another former Social Security Administration official.

Oh, ya think?

They’ve actually picked the only ‘tax cut’ that will exacerbate the looming bankruptcy of the Social Security and Medicare systems … coincidence? I think not.

Read it.

Almost half of our GDP is eaten up by layers of government, only a couple of percentage points below Europe.

Read it.

For decades, sugar beet and sugar cane farmers and processors have been the beneficiaries of a sugar program that stealthily drives up sugar costs—and, consequently, the cost of that heart-shaped box of chocolates. Over the past 30 years, the annual burden on U.S. consumers has averaged over $3 billion in higher food prices.

The “no-romance” sugar program has largely been ignored by legislators and groups concerned with tax burdens because there are no direct federal subsidies for the sugar industry. Instead, U.S. sugar policy raises prices indirectly by taxing consumers through the marketplace. A system of import quotas and domestic supply controls works to raise sugar prices for households and food processors to a target level of 23.3 cents per pound of raw sugar when world prices fall below that amount. This system drives up consumer food prices and destroys jobs in the food processing sector because of reduced competitiveness in the global marketplace.

Over the 30-year period from 1980 through 2009, the sugar program effectively doubled the price U.S. consumers paid for sugar and increased annual food costs by about $9 per person. That may not sound like a big price tag, but it resulted in a $1.3 billion deadweight loss for the U.S. economy (think of all the extra money that could’ve been spent on red roses and high-end confectionary!). And how did the sugar farmers, who are fewer than 20,000 in number and relatively wealthy, fare? They received a $1.7 billion net gain.

Read it.

The surface evidence is clear – I created a new foursquare account on my iPhone and it immediately told me that 402 of my contacts were on Foursquare and suggested I connect with them.

There are theoretical (but highly unlikely) ways Foursquare could connect me with them without uploading my contacts, but it’s highly unlikely. So a developer I know went to the trouble to proxy the iPhone through Charles Proxy to sniff the traffic. It showed a substantial amount of data being uploaded to Foursquare from the phone immediately before the screen above was shown with contact information. We perused that data, and it included email addresses and phone numbers for everyone in the phone contacts.The surface evidence is clear – I created a new foursquare account on my iPhone and it immediately told me that 402 of my contacts were on Foursquare and suggested I connect with them.

There are theoretical (but highly unlikely) ways Foursquare could connect me with them without uploading my contacts, but it’s highly unlikely. So a developer I know went to the trouble to proxy the iPhone through Charles Proxy to sniff the traffic. It showed a substantial amount of data being uploaded to Foursquare from the phone immediately before the screen above was shown with contact information. We perused that data, and it included email addresses and phone numbers for everyone in the phone contacts.

 

Walter Olson totes up the many ways in which politicians are total whores.

Wally is a friend of mine, two years ahead of me at Yale, and has never wavered from his appreciation of the incongruities of American political life.

Read it.

Iran has been systematically plundering large amounts of oil from southern Iraq for years, a theft on a grand scale that’s helping the Islamic Republic withstand sanctions aimed at throttling its oil exports, a U.S. security consultancy says.

“Tehran has built a complex oil smuggling network that allows it to bring in significant revenues from southern Iraq’s oil production,” observed Stratfor, which has its offices in Texas.

These funds, worth around $20 million a day, enable Iran, which is predominantly Shiite Muslim, “to maintain its influence in the region while preparing to defend itself from stringent sanctions against its oil exports,” Stratfor said.

Stratfor said that roughly 10 percent of the oil produced in the Basra region of Shiite-dominated southern Iraq, where two-thirds of Iraq’s oil reserves lie, “is smuggled, most of which ends up in Iran for export.”

What you won’t see on a T-shirt near you: ‘No Blood For Oil’ in Arabic — or Farsi.

Read it.

Four people were killed when pill addict David Laffer robbed a Medford, N.Y. pharmacy. Now the survivors of victim Jamie Taccetta are suing a variety of defendants including the drugstore whose pharmacist was killed, the Suffolk County police and a former commissioner, “and pharmaceutical companies that make the drug oxycodone.”

Of course.

Read it.

Billy Clay Payne and Billie Jean Hayworth were killed last month after they deleted Jenelle Potter, the daughter of one of the suspects, from their “friends” list.

Both were shot in the head and Mr Payne’s throat was cut.

Another fine reason to steer clear of ‘social media’.

Read it.

As I’ve noted in the past, one of the basic memes of environmental reporting holds that anything good that happens is actually bad: When nature turns out to be stunningly resilient in the face of human activity, it’s bad, because it empowers humans. When biologists find new species, it’s bad, because they’re threatened by development. If scientists ever find a lost valley full of dinosaurs, the headline will read “Dinosaurs Survive Untold Millennia! Now Threatened by Climate Change.”

‘Women and Minorities Hardest Hit’.