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The United Nations, Cyprus residents, and conspiracy theorists will all want to know how a shipment of Iranian explosives came to be in a position where it could be hit by fire and cause such devastation.

A very good question.

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Unions’ political action committees have contributed $4.75 million to federal candidates this year through the end of March, according to the Center’s research. In 2009, union PACs donated $8.44 million — and in 2007, union PACs donated $6.77 million — through the same period.

Their master’s voice….

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Your would-be depravity will be monetized.

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Yet another thing for you to worry about.

How long before we have ‘activist’ groups lobbying for appropriate legislation? And seeking government funding, of course.

Megan McArdle tries her hand at myth-busting.

Hoover did not tighten up on spending.  According to the historical tables of the Office of Management and Budget, spending in 1929 was $3.1 billion, up from $2.9 billion the year before.  In 1930 it was $3.3 billion.  In 1931, Hoover raised spending to $3.6 billion.  And in 1932, he opened the taps to $4.7 billion, where it basically stayed into 1933 (most of which was a Hoover budget).  As a percentage of GDP, spending rose from 3.4% in 1930 to 8% in 1933–an increase larger than the increase under FDR, though of course thankfully under FDR, the denominator (GDP) had stopped shrinking.

Of course, that doesn’t fit the Crustian Narrative, so it goes down the memory hole.

 But there doesn’t seem to be any question that Herbert Hoover raised both spending and government deficits by rather a lot, and quite bravely considering that his critics–a group led by a fellow named Franklin Delano Roosevelt–“accused the president of ‘reckless and extravagant’ spending, of thinking ‘that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible,’ and of presiding over ‘the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history.’ Roosevelt’s running mate, John Nance Garner, charged that Hoover was ‘leading the country down the path of socialism.’ “

A classic case of projection.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, points out some of the many ways in which your government is playing you for a patsy, on your dime.

The downside of our cheerful open-handedness is that it makes the USA a great magnet for freeloaders and unscrupulous lowlifes. In the news, or flitting around the edge of it, at any given time are always half a dozen stories of such.

—

US immigration, asylum, and refugee-resettlement procedures are subjects of intensive study in Third World countries. I doubt if one US citizen in ten thousand could tell you the difference between a K-1 visa and an H-4 visa; in Jakarta, Bogotá, Islamabad, and Ouagadougou, they speak of little else.

—

Job opportunities in print journalism have been dwindling for years. Plenty of citizens would have given a limb for that job Vargas got at the Washington Post. How did he get it? It probably didn’t hurt that he was an affirmative-action three-fer: An immigrant, Hispanic-surnamed (though ethnically Filipino), and homosexual.

—

Zeituni Onyango. Out of the news since her big break last year, Barack Obama’s Aunt Zeituni remains a poster gal for the propositions that: (a) If a US federal judge orders you to do something and you don’t do it, nothing whatever will happen to you. (b) If you make illegal contributions to the campaign of a presidential candidate to whom you are related, and that candidate becomes president, nothing whatever will happen to you. (c) No matter how deep a pit of debt the USA and its states and municipalities sink down into, there’s always $700 a month and free housing to spare for a foreign freeloader.

Read it.

Indianapolis is about to kickoff its Black Expo, an event that was incredibly violent last year and that requires a massive police and volunteer presence to go on this year. On the first day of the expo, two Black people have already been shot.

That’s the problem when an ethnic minority has a dysfunctional culture — they eventually start making trouble for everyone else.

Steve Sailer talks some common sense, as he tends to do.

The other problem is that flying is more dangerous than driving, and not that many people are cut out to be pilots. I’m only an average driver, so I’ve never wanted to be a pilot. I’m not a good quick decisionmaker, and flying seems like a good way for me to turn my bad decisions into my funeral.

Read it.

Not a problem you run into every day.

Megan McArdle runs the numbers.

I wrote earlier about what the jobs numbers mean for the 2012 election (hint: they are not good for the current administration).  But at some level, who cares?  This is the aspect that concerns Washington most, but it is surely the least important consideration:  neither Barack Obama, nor his staff, are going to have any trouble finding new employment in the event that they are terminated come January 2013.

Yeah, Barack & family aren’t in danger of winding up in a homeless shelter.

That’s why long-term unemployment has become such a problem.  Our unemployment problem is not, as in previous recessions, that too many people are entering unemployment. Layoffs and discharges are actually lower than they’ve been in a decade.  Rather, our problem is that people aren’t exitingunemployment.  And that’s a much bigger issue.

Human capital is like almost any other form of capital: it is a depreciating asset.  The longer you stay out of the workforce, the less valuable you are to potential employers.  You lose market intelligence and industry connections.  Your technical knowledge and skills atrophy.  And as my colleague Don Peck wrote in a devastating piece last year, the psychological effects of long-term unemployment change you permanently.  Many of the people who have now been unemployed for years may never work again, or not at anything like the income that they had been expecting.

Walter Olson turns over a rock.

Vicious cycle: EPA gives money to busybody groups; busybody groups sue EPA to force more regulation; courts play along; EPA’s empire expands; EPA gets more money to fund expanded empire; EPA shares the wealth with busybody groups. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Your tax dollars at work, forging new chains for your daily life.

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United Nations peacekeepers failed to intervene as Sudanese civilians fleeing fighting were beaten to death, or dragged away to be shot, eyewitnesses told The Daily Telegraph.

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

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Gee, I feel a lot safer now. How about you?

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The “Bimbo” in question is Bimbo Ayelobola, who, as we discussed the other day, came from Africa to Britain in order to give birth to her quintuplets (at a cost of £200,000) and have them taken care of, as long as their special needs exists, by the British taxpayer. Hey, if it’s ok with Britain, why shouldn’t it be ok with Bimbo?

One of the major defects of the British National Health Service is that its doors are open to everyone, whether a British taxpayer or not. Hence Britain sees a lot of ‘medical tourism’, as here, that is just one of the feathers breaking the camel’s back of the UK budget. This is a great deal for the parasites but not so good for the hosts.

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The most serious problems occur when the bus is passing through La Boca, a working-class district in the south of the city well known for its tango dancers and brightly painted houses.

Last November the route was changed to avoid a particularly violent street after a nine-year-old girl from the city of Córdoba was seriously injured when a stone hit her in the face. The most serious incidents are logged with the police, but they appear powerless to stop the problem.

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The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is floating a proposal that would alter the way workplace elections are currently held. The board, made up of three Democrats and one Republican, has drafted rules that would speed up the election process and require employers to hand over information on its employees – like email addresses and phone numbers to prospective unions.

Thursday, former union steward Larry Getts testified on Capitol Hill, telling members of the House Education and Workforce Committee that union officials never needed help tracking down non-union workers.

“We found the UAW officials waiting in our break room,” Getts said. “They would even follow us to our vehicles before and after work, some to our homes.”

Getts testified that he eventually left union leadership after it became clear they were intent on abolishing the right to secret ballot elections.Supporters of the NLRB proposal say the current system has long favored employers, and it’s time for a change.

“When it takes 12 years to try to get a place unionized something is wrong,” said Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., as some attending the hearing broke into applause.

Read it.

A 12th Century guide to Spain’s Way of Saint James pilgrimage has disappeared from the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

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A document drop by LulzSec has revealed an ominous bulletin from police officials in Tucson, Arizona. In short, law enforcement is advised to be on the lookout for Hezbollah terrorists operating in the traditional smuggling corridors on our (wide-open) southern border with Mexico.

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

Because what could possibly go wrong with Hezbollah terrorists, who are assisting Mexican drug cartels, which have been armed and equipped by Eric Holder’s Department of Justice?

What, indeed?

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Don’t look now, but the real action in Washington this week isn’t the parti san wrangling over the debt ceiling but something — literally — even more incendiary: Operation Fast and Furious, which seems about to explode right in the face of Attorney General Eric Holder — and maybe other administration officials, too.

…

The ATF’s acting director, Kenneth Melson, has been singing like a canary to congressional investigators as he pushes back against administration pressure for him to resign and take the fall for something that, at the very least, had to include the US Attorney’s Office, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and possibly the Homeland Security Department.

Democrats discovered violating the law.

How surprising.

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Let us suppose that everything the prosecution alleged about Casey Anthony is true – that she decided she didn’t want to be a mom anymore, killed her small child with chloroform, dumped her body unceremoniously in a swamp, and proceeded to go out partying for the next 30 days. While I agree that this is reprehensible behavior, our Supreme Court decided in 1973 that it was also constitutionally protected behavior, and that if mothers decide they want to kill their children in order to prevent an interruption in their nightlife, then the State can’t say “boo” about it one way or the other, so long as the child is in utero.

Thousands of mothers every day decide they’d rather party/go to school/whatever than be a mom, and so they hire a doctor to kill their baby with either sharp instruments or chemicals and then have them dropped in a trash can. Thousands a day. Hundreds of thousands (if not over a million) a year in this country alone. And the only difference between them and and Casey Anthony is that they realized that they didn’t want to be a mom before the child escaped the womb. None of them will ever face even the threat of prosecution, thanks to the Supreme Court.

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Fascism comes to the U.S.A.

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Shaina Perry remembers the punch to her face, blood streaming from a cut over her eye, her backpack with her asthma inhaler, debit card and cellphone stolen, and then the laughter.

“They just said ‘Oh, white girl bleeds a lot,’?” said Perry, 22, who was attacked at Kilbourn Reservoir Park over the Fourth of July weekend

But of course black people can’t be racist — she must have been mistaken.

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Needless to say, government employees excel at evasiveness.

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The Obama administration is foot-dragging on approving a pipeline to deliver abundant Canadian oil to the United States at the same time the Chinese are investing in a pipeline that could send that oil to China.

…

The Canadian province of Alberta has the world’s third-largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, and more than Russia or Iran. Daily production from oil sands is expected to rise from 1.5 million barrels today to 3.7 million in 2025.

Delivering the oil will mean building two pipelines, one south to the refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast and the other west toward the Pacific, where it can be exported to China.

If the United States doesn’t approve its pipeline promptly due to environmental concerns, “Canada might increasingly look to China, thinking America doesn’t want a big stake in what environmentalists call ‘dirty oil,’ which they say increases greenhouse gas emissions,” according to a report from The Associated Press.

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

Jeff Jarvis cuts the cord.

I was a “member” of American Express for 35 years. No more. And Amex doesn’t give a shit. So fine. We’re well rid of each other.

My brief experience with American Express was uniformly negative.

Read it.

Apparently the TSA’s Security Theater is a comedy.

Your tax dollars at work … or not.

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The current edition of The Economist (July 2nd, 2011) has a provocative cover story. With the retirement of the last space shuttle this month, and the de-orbiting of the International Space Station in 2020, The Economist believes ‘the game will be up’ for manned spaceflight: there will be no more of it. And with all the planets already visited by robot craft, even unmanned space exploration will soon be sputtering out.

The tag line for the article is: ‘Inner space is useful. Outer space is history’. The Economist sees much future activity in the economically-valuable torus bounded by low-Earth and geosynchronous orbits, a volume destined to become a ‘tamed wilderness’. But beyond that: nothing.

Read it.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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Starting with Air Force One.

Obama’s attack on “corporate jet owners” provides a short course in populist demagogy. From the sound of it, you’d think Obama was against the deductibility of corporate jets — “a tax break for corporate jet owners” — but no. The attack was in service of a proposal to increase the depreciation schedule on corporate jets from five to seven years — even though Obama himself had signed the legislation reducing the depreciation schedule to its current form.

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

Professor Epstein characterizes Obama’s economics as “primitive” and explains: “First, it is not possible to gain more money for the public treasury by taxing heavily those practices that are efficient for a firm. Putting a special tax on corporate jets will cut corporate profits, leaving nary a dime to fund the worthy causes that the president promotes. To repeat a constant refrain, taxation policies that are unsound in good times do not become sound in bad times.”

Read it.

No one ever proposed a radical restructuring of the criminal justice system, one that would replace jury trials with a supposedly superior system of charge-and-sentence bargaining. Like the growth of government in general, plea bargaining slowly crept into and eventually grew to dominate the system.

This is because prosecutors have an incentive to get through lots of cases quickly with as high a conviction rate, no matter for what, as possible, because they’re using it as a stepping-stone to the next political office. The system is structurally defective. (Just like our legislative process.)

From a defendant’s perspective, plea bargaining extorts guilty pleas. People who have never been prosecuted may think there is no way they would plead guilty to a crime they did not commit. But when the government has a “witness” who is willing to lie, and your own attorney urges you to accept one year in prison rather than risk a 10-year sentence, the decision becomes harder. As William Young, then chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, observed in an unusually blunt 2004 opinion, “The focus of our entire criminal justice system has shifted away from trials and juries and adjudication to a massive system of sentence bargaining that is heavily rigged against the accused.”

The trope ‘Admit your guilt and you’ll get a lighter sentence; be a butt about it and we’ll throw the book at you’ is a standard one in cop shows, to the point where more people consider it some sort of law of nature. The fact that juries are composed of people from the left side of the IQ bell curve — and that everyone is aware of that fact — certainly doesn’t help. Having watched ‘juries’ deliberate through one-way glass during trial practice exercises in law school, the last thing I would want is for my fate to be in the hands of a typical jury.

One point often stressed by progressives is that trials bring scrutiny to police conduct. But when deals are struck in courthouse hallways, judges never hear about illegal searches or detentions. This only encourages further misconduct. Conservatives, meanwhile, are right to wonder whether overburdened prosecutors give the guilty too many lenient deals. Why should an armed robber get to plead guilty to a lesser crime such as petty theft?

Modern courts aren’t about justice, they’re about resolution. Getting the case resolved is what goes on ‘your permanent record’ as an attorney or judge; justice doesn’t enter into it.

It is remarkable how few people will openly defend the primary method by which our courts handle criminal cases. The most common apologia for plea bargaining is a pragmatic argument: Courthouses are so busy that they would grind to a halt if every case, or even a substantial share of them, went to trial. But there is nothing inevitable about those crushing caseloads. Politicians chose to expand the list of crimes, eventually turning millions of Americans into criminals. Ending the disastrous war on drugs would unclog our courts in short order.

Shooting one-in-ten legislators whose session ended with more laws on the books than when they started would be another effective method, and (I suggest) much more satisfying to the public.

But that’s me.

Read it.

One of the most tedious aspects of the homosexual-activist movement is their incessant whining. They whine about people being intolerant, when they are one of the most intolerant groups on the planet. They whine about persecution, when they are the petted and pampered mascots of the chattering classes, the fashionable accessories of the establishment, beneficiaries of preferences and plaudits showered upon them by those who thereby pat themselves on the back for their broadmindedness. They whine, whine, whine until one longs to take them by the nose and say, ‘Look, we don’t hate you because you’re homosexual — we hate you because you’re assholes!’

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I guess, now that Senator Hutchison is retiring, Senator Cornyn has decided to take up the Texas RINO badge.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Ponder a world in which teachers engage in ‘industrial action’.

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The problem isn’t that the TSA is harassing the wrong people. The problem is that the TSA is harassing anyone.  The TSA is encroaching on fundamental liberties and providing no discernable benefit. I’ve written before that the TSA should be abolished. The latest outrage is just more evidence in the case against a government administration we would be better off without. The Transportation Security Administration does not provide transportation security. It provides what security expert Bruce Schneier calls “security theater.” The effect of the all the trimmings and trappings at airport security is to give travelers the impression that the government is going about Very Serious Business. The net effect, though, is perhaps a trivial increase in safety achieved at massive costs in terms of time, treasure, and lives: it is well known that driving is more dangerous than flying. By making flying less convenient, we encourage people to drive more.

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To me, the most offensive of the many abhorrent usages now current is the treatment of “data” as a singular noun. A person who says “data is” is at best an ignoramus and at worst a Philistine.

Preach it, brother.

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(This is me grinning.)

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Due to a sales tax measure recently passed in CA state legislature and on its way to be signed by Governor Jerry Brown, Amazon has sent all participants in its California Amazon Associates program the below email, warning of the termination of the program.

They’ve already done it in four states that passed similar legislation.

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Welcome to Canadistan.

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Glenn Beck says his family was accosted while watching a movie in a New York City park Monday night. On his radio show and his website today, Beck described the incident and said an angry moviegoer kicked a glass of wine onto his wife Tania’s back, and as she got up to walk away, a man shouted: “We hate conservatives here.”

The Left: Thugs R Us.

The Other McCain stretches his fisking muscles.

Advocates of unlimited centralized power habitually seek to portray the Constitution as an obsolete remnant of the “horse and buggy” era, a pejorative phrase popularized by liberal proponents of the New Deal, key elements of which were struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. By the 1950s, however — after two decades of Democrat presidents — the court’s former conservative majority had been replaced by liberals, and for more than three decades the Supreme Court itself became an instrument for the expansion of federal authority.

And, if Justice Kennedy gets replaced by a Ginsburg or a Breyer, it will be so again.

Yet again note how Stengel stigmatizes the past — where Washington, Madison and Jefferson were ignorant of all things modern — so as to flatter contemporary readers as superior in knowledge to the Founders. “You know so much more than those old dead guys,” Stengel is telling them. “Why should we let ourselves be hemmed in by what a bunch of slave-owners with wooden teeth wrote on a silly piece of parchment?”

A bunch of people who, in Chesterton’s apt phrase, people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday just because it is Thursday. Progress is inevitable, therefore the future is necessarily better than the past, without respect to whatever ‘the future’ or ‘the past’ might include.

Read it.

The governor of Afghanistan’s central bank, Abdul Qadeer Fitrat, has resigned and fled the country, saying his life is in danger for investigating fraud.

He said the government had interfered in his efforts to pursue those responsible for corruption at the privately-owned Kabul Bank.

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

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Iran has made dramatic progress in its ballistic missile programs over the past year, unveiling three new missiles it claims are already in production, including an innovative design that could be a “game-changer” if used against U.S. aircraft carriers, an Israeli expert widely considered one of the world’s top authorities on Iranian missile programs says.

Also significant were three unannounced tests of longer-range missiles most experts believe were designed to carry a nuclear warhead.

Boy, that sure makes me feel better. Doesn’t it make you feel better?

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Spain’s state-controlled rail operator has been forced to axe one of its newest high speed train services after it emerged that the only nine passengers were using it each day.

Oh, hey, we need one of those in this country….

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They examined data from a representative sample pf physicians. Specifically, they looked at how often physicians accepted new patients by insurance type and year.

What did they find? The overall acceptance rate of new patients was pretty static from 2005-2008, going from 94.2% to 95.3%. The percentage of physicians accepting new Medicare patients dropped from 95.5% from 92.9% (about 2.5%). But here’s the thing. There was a bigger drop in physician acceptance of patients with private noncapitated insurance from 93.3% to 87.8% (about 5.5%). In fact, they found that over 90% of physicians accepted new Medicare patients. Reports of reimbursement rates driving away physicians may be more anecdotal than widespread.

And who could blame them?

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Undesirable or dangerous immigrants who may face ill-treatment at home cannot be deported, no matter how bad their crimes in Britain, human rights judges have ruled.

In a test case ahead of more than 200 similar actions pending against the UK, the Strasbourg judges decreed that the UK’s duty to protect people against torture or inhuman treatment is ”absolute”.

How long before the Brits realize that joining the EU was possibly the stupidest thing the British government has done since pissing off their American colonies?

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If it moves, regulate it. If it keeps moving, tax it. If it quits moving, subsidize it.

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

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They have the technology.

“They have a very clever mechanism, with several advantages. The first is financing, which they have better access to because Chinese companies are mostly state-owned. It is getting more and more difficult for European contractors to access financing, and you need to have a lot of finance in the construction industry,” he said.

“Then they have managed to transfer Chinese workers, who are cheaper.

They can also use construction machinery they have built in China.

Finally, because they can generate still profit despite their low bids, they use that money to hire famous architects and demonstrate they can deliver a project above the normal standard”.

I remember, when I was young, seeing signs on products that said ‘Hand-made by slave labor in the Soviet Union’. Who says that slavery is economically inefficient?

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The British settlement of Sydney in 1788 has been officially declared an “invasion”, following strong pressure from the Aboriginal contingent of the city council.

The City of Sydney voted 7-2 to remove the words “European arrival” from documents and rejected a compromise plan to describe the First Fleet’s arrival as “colonisation”.

Of course, you can’t ‘invade’ something that wasn’t a nation at the time. It’s comforting to know that Australians have to suffer through the same Politically Correct ‘oh, the poor suffering natives’ nonsense with which the rest of us are afflicted. Perhaps they ought to look to the American experience and dump all the Aborigines in some outback reservation area (without clothes or medical care) to resume their former stone-age existence. Sheesh.

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While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation.

I guess they regret having invented automobiles. Forward into the past!