Read it.

It would be hard to imagine a more apocalyptic battle between synagogue and state than the ballot-box battle that is unfolding in San Francisco over the right of Jews (and anyone else) to circumcise their newborn males. Now the battle is spreading down the left coast to Santa Monica.

Read it.

There’s been a lot of talk about the e-G8 Conference this week, which was an attempt to bring together technology and internet leaders with government officials. The idea, apparently, was for government officials to convince the digerati that it was time for government to take a much more active role in regulating the internet. The initial reports suggest that the tech folks weren’t buying what Nicolas Sarkozy and other government officials were selling — with some putting out scathing reports about any company willing to help the government clamp down on free speech online.

If it moves, tax it. If it’s still moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it and put a government bureaucracy in charge.

Read it.

Behavior meriting the Darwin Award usually occurs in isolated incidents. But in The Australian we learn of an entire organized movement that deserves the Darwin Award: “planking,” described as “the internet-driven phenomenon whereby people lie plank-like in unusual locations and take photos of themselves, often posting them on social media websites.” In the last few days in Australia, one 20-year-old man fell to his death from a seventh-floor balcony railing where he was “planking,” and another 20-year-old man is in a coma after falling from a moving car on which he was “planking.”

Read it.

What they can’t say, because it wouldn’t be Politically Correct, is that this was a targeted ‘mini-riot’ by a black street gang, even though that’s obvious from the films.

Read it.

That’s what unrestricted immigration does for you — all the benefits of South Chicago.

Read it.

Lakeysha Beard, 39, was charged with disorderly conduct after she wouldn’t stop talking on the 16-hour trip from Oakland, California, to Salem, Oregon. The train was stopped short of its destination.

To the extent that there is residual anti-black racism in America, incidents like this exacerbate it.

Beard told Portland’s KATU News that she felt “disrespected” by the incident.

Good.

Read it.

Sex selection of foetuses in India has led to 7.1 million fewer girls than boys up to age six, a gender gap that has widened by more than a million in a decade, according to a study published in The Lancet.

Case in point.

[Assmeblyman Rory Lancman (D-Queens)], who is Chair of the Assembly Subcommittee on Workplace Safety, says the bill would require hotels to provide staff with electronic alert devises that can alert hotel security in an emergency. The devices would act like a “panic” button- much like “life alert.”

Of course they would never think about requiring such an alarm to protect the safety of hotel residents — who cares what happens to tourists?

Freeberg does a fine rant.

My son and I rode the light rail downtown, back in ‘09, and ran into a real live communist. He was all excited about attending his commie demonstration in downtown San Francisco, all about how we can’t take any more oppression from The Man & all, with a special keynote speaker Michael Moore! Yay! The election had only just happened, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing…the election had gone just the way Moore wanted, had it not? The hope, the change, whatever happened to that?

It was like speaking Latin to a dog. When you’re a revolutionary, history always began yesterday morning. So, yeah. There are people out there who think of Barack Obama as a symbol of all the ugliest right-wing shibboleths — blood for oil, corporate greed, keeping grass illegal, blah blah blah. And we need to get rid of Obama so we can bring the government back to The People…but they’re not Tea Party people, they’re high-drama lefties who don’t really care who’s running the show at any given time, that guy needs to go so we can Take Our Country Back. Perfect bliss is constantly one revolution away. The entire life being lived out on a turning point; the inevitable straight-away is something that simply doesn’t fit into their comprehension.

Read it.

Just another fine day in the Obamanation.

Read it.

Oh, like they have a choice.

Read it.

If there is one overwhelming investment trend among the American rich, it is capital flight.

Rather than investing in the U.S., they are putting more and more of their money abroad.

Gee, I wonder why?

Read it.

Modern American government has been dispensing nutritional advice for quite a while, and enough of it has been misguided, erroneous or even harmful that you’d think there’d be a lesson of humility to be learned. Instead, we get a bossier-than-ever crop of new regulators like Thomas Frieden et al.

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

Read it.

Since the fall of Mubarak, the Obamites and neocons, like global limousine liberals, have shifted the focus of their do-gooderism from Egypt to the next great liberal/neocon cause, helping overthrow Kaddafi, even as Egypt has steadily moved in exactly the direction that the Islam critics predicted. Below is a powerful and well-written article by a liberal Muslim in Canada who expresses total disillusion with the Islamic rise to power and the concomitant persecution of Christians that have resulted from the great democratic revolution.

Reality keeps reminding us that democracy is a means, not an end, and like any tool can produce undesirable results. Our leaders keep not getting the message.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Read it.

By definition, artisan foods are ingredients and foods that are hand-crafted, created in small quantities, and tend to be high-quality products.

Almost by definition, they tend to be very pricey and affordable only by the Crust and their friends.

Jeff Jarvis isn’t afraid to ask hard questions.

The answer to this question is probably yes. But I don’t think it should be answered until we reconsider the delivery industry from the ground up, seeing what is no longer needed and what the market can provide in the digital age.

The traditional argument for a government-run postal service is a standard one for non-essential government services in general: It’s a good thing, people ought to have it, private companies won’t provide it where there’s no money to be made, so the government has to be the ‘provider of last resort’. (If anything reminds you of the ‘health care debate’, you’re not alone.) On this basis, one might deduce that government-provided postal service will be a money-losing proposition, and that’s certainly the case in the modern world. (How much of that is due to the traditional corruption and inefficiency that the government brings to anything it touches, and how much is just a reflection of market forces, is an exercise left to the reader.)

Do we still need the Postal Service’s guarantee of universal delivery? Likely yes, but it’s worth asking whether that obligation to get deliveries to remote outposts should be carried out with offices and trucks owned by the government or through subsidies to private industry. Does the Postal Service have a role to play in and identity (could it be a guarantor?) and security (our mail is protected from warrantless spying but our email so far is not). What are the principles and rights to privacy and security that should govern even private and electronic delivery? What impact does all this have on broadband policy?

Good questions all. Nobody in the government is asking them, of course, because government employees don’t have any incentive to reduce the services provided by government (and hence the number of government employees). So those of us who are paying for all this need to start asking them, and ought to be pressing our elected representatives (when they can take some time from fund-raising in order to get re-elected) to ask them as well.

Good luck with that.

Read it.

Lots of people sympathize with the basic argument that your private life is private, and it seems unfair to have private affairs spread across the news. And yet, if someone really is doing something egregious — or potentially harmful — is seeking to gag the press and others from making that information public only giving them cover to progress further and commit potentially heinous acts?

How many times have we read stories about people attempting to investigate possible malfeasance on the part of an organization only to be firewalled by assertions that privacy policies (and sometimes privacy laws) don’t allow any information to be released?

The Other McCain has some fun with our Politically Correct culture.

Why is it that so many liberals can’t tell the difference between “poor” and “black”?

A local Dallas talk show yesterday afternoon had a caller, from her accent black, who denounced the phrase ‘food stamp President’ as obvious racism, yet was unable to explain how ‘food stamps’ were a race, or linked to any particular race. Being a talk-show host these days is both easy and depressing, I would guess.

Read it.

Teachers are giving up trying to make boys read long books because they cannot get past 100 pages, new research as found.

I have a fix for that — two words: Tom Clancy.

Freeberg has a beef.

Now, I do have my preferences on things, but I’m a live-and-let-live kinda guy. So what’s my beef with the hippies? I didn’t have any complaints when you saw them here & there…I didn’t even complain when you saw them all over the place. Hippies can be interesting people. No, my complaint is when you can’t get away from them. Let’s face it, since the sixties the hippie lifestyle has been one of cognitive dissonance. “We just want to be left alone to grow our vegetables & whatever, and do our own thing, man”…coupled up with…”change the world, one [insert name of incremental thing] at a time. Man.” They like having the props that come with wanting to do-your-own-thing — freedom lovers — but they aren’t wholly dedicated to that. In fact, not even in the slightest. All too often, they want to make other people do things their way, but not admit to it.

And that goes for ‘progressives’ in general. They’re all in favor of ‘power to the people’, except that they mean ‘power to our people and to hell with your people’.

So in the long run, the European smaller-portions thing doesn’t work for me. What seldom to never gets mentioned is that European portions-control is tailored around European physical activities; which, near as I can make out, consists of sitting at a tiny table with a tiny teacup and bitching about Americans. Well, this American likes to spend some calories doing things.

Read it.

My own first reaction was: why in the world is the head of the International Monetary Fund a socialist?

Which is distinct from, and not as interesting as, the question of why in the world is a socialist the head of the International Monetary Fund.

But none of it matters, because ‘socialism’ is merely the latest Clever Plastique Disguise by which the Crust attempts to rationalize drawing all power into the hands of the government (i.e. theirs).

Steve Sailer kicks over a rock.

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

There’s trouble down at the Crust.

In affidavits, family friends say that the girl went from being outgoing to anxious and sad.

Yeah, well, being exposed to psychiatrists will do that to you.

Read it.

The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a ‘job’ should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly. The idea of a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his lessons! Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a man when the other is still a baby.

America used to be like that.

Read it.

Bottom Line: What often gets overlooked by politicians in Washington is that real people, not corporations like ExxonMobil, ultimately pay all taxes. Higher taxes on oil companies will get passed on to actual people, and can only mean higher prices for consumers at the pump, lower wages and fewer jobs for employees, and/or lower dividends for shareholders. There might be a political payoff to raising taxes on oil companies, but it will be an economic disaster that will also make us more dependent on foreign oil.

Read it.

As recession-racked cities struggle to balance their budgets with everything short of feeling behind sofa cushions for loose change, a growing number are seeking more money — just don’t use the word taxes — from nonprofit institutions that occupy valuable land but by law do not pay property taxes.

Boston has been sending letters to its largest nonprofit institutions this year, telling them the value of their land and asking them to begin making annual payments that would eventually rise to a quarter of what they would owe if they paid property taxes. Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel of Chicago wants the city to begin charging water fees to nonprofits, which have been spared them in the past. And the mayor of Providence, R.I., Angel Taveras, cited Boston’s example this month when he called on nonprofits to pay more money to the city.

The technical term for this is ‘shakedown’.

Read it.

OK, the incredible details of the operation to silence Osama bin Laden are, indeed, irresistible — but our government’s been saying way too much about them, tipping off al Qaeda and clueing in other bad guys.

You can’t blame the press; its job is to get the story. But you can finger the White House and other government officials for not keeping enough of a zipped lip on some elements of the historic operation.

Read it.

The word “antifa” comes from Antifaschismus, the German term for anti-fascism. Dressed in their preferred street garb of black clothes, boots, balaclavas, and anti-Nazi patches are young people, almost all white, driven by an ideology as powerful and magnetic as communism. French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut has warned, “I think that the lofty idea of ‘the war on racism’ is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology. And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what communism was for the 20th century: a source of violence.”

Antifa activists do not debate their enemies; after all, their enemies are fascists and thus have no legitimacy. Their goal is to confront and silence them.

And this differs from fascists … how?

Steve Sailer is on the case.

Once upon a time, rich people like the Rockefellers and Bushes donated a lot of money to population limitation charities. Now, that is vastly out of fashion because it’s considered racist.

What if, though, the efforts of Bill and Melinda Gates to force every child to go to college are really a triple bankshot superduper secret effort to lower birthrates among underclass NAMs by making them waste time in college before having children?

After all, they can’t really give to Planned Parenthood any more.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning….

Read it.

A disturbing new element has crept into our political life: organized efforts to intimidate private citizens who choose to support certain political causes or otherwise participate in civic affairs. This, as far as I know, is unprecedented in our modern history. Our democracy depends on citizen involvement, and until now, Americans have felt free to participate in public life and to support whatever causes, political and otherwise, they choose. But if the Left has its way, that may be about to change.

History repeats itself. This sort of intimidation was a hallmark of the statist political movements during the 1930s; Hitler’s brownshirts were particularly notorious in that respect. So this appears to be just another attempt to make us more like Europe.

We wrote here about a disgraceful episode in which approximately 500 union members were bused to the home of a lawyer who works for Bank of America, where they “demonstrated” on his lawn, thereby terrifying his teenage son, who was home alone. The event was supposed to have something to do with foreclosures.

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

Read it.

Now that’s just silly.

Read it.

Hey, remember back in the old days when you could post a picture on Twitter and not have it ransacked by news organisations and picture agencies? Yeah, those days are gone. All these picture sharing apps are looking lovingly at the feed of images coming in and licking their lips. Whether you like it or not, one day these apps will have to monetize and there is gold in them there photos…

So there’s been a huge blow-up around the use of these images. Twitpic is being reported as claiming the copyright on your images. And entertainment news and photo group WENN has signed a deal with the photo app, ” to represent those images.” Oh really? How convenient for everyone. But what about the users?

Lesson: Put your stuff online, others will use it … whether you like it or not, whether your rights are respected or not, whether your privacy is respected or not, whether you’re paid or not, and inevitably to your detriment. Putting your information online is like putting all of your worldly possessions out in the yard and then trucking off to work. Don’t be surprised if it’s not there when you get back — or if it’s been destroyed in the meantime. Verbum sapientis sat est.

Tim Cavanaugh writes the obituary.

The only way railroads are useful is when the alternative is feet, either yours or a horse’s. When the alternative is a self-propelled individual vehicle, like an automobile, then rail is always the inferior choice. These ‘progressives’ have got to stop living in the past.

Read it.

At some point during the attack, the man and the cat reportedly were injured by a knife the man was holding. The man was taken to Cleveland Regional Medical Center before being transported to Houston.

They can surprise you.

Read it.

A controversial new scheme will allow parents in South Africa to dump unwanted infants anonymously in a ‘babe safe’ mounted on a public wall.

They call it a ‘baby safe’ because ‘garbage pail’ was already taken.

Read it.

Government-run health care is like entropy: You can’t win the game, you can’t break even in the game, and you can’t get out of the game.

Read it.

It won’t happen. Two words: ‘Building code’. Like most tax laws, the building code in New York City is the size of a set of encyclopedias and enshrines various political favors that politicians have given various unions and other special interests for nigh unto two hundred years. Like the Internal Revenue Code or immigration law, it has also spawned a specialist slither of lawyers who specialize in gaming the system–for a price.

I do admire their charming optimism, though. Kids can be so cute.

Read it.

The background (which I didn’t know until fairly recently), is that any investment where the return does not depend on the investor’s active, day-to-day involvement is considered a security. And securities, no matter how small, are either regulated by the SEC or state securities departments. There are no de minimis exceptions; shares in a lemonade stand would require registration, which I’m told costs $50,000-$100,000 or more (federal) or $20,000-$50,000 (state), mostly legal fees. For VC-free startups based on people doing things that they care about, these costs are prohibitive.

As usual, under the guise of protecting us against nefarious consequences, government involvement in daily life increases the hassle of doing anything productive to the point where only those willing and able to commit large amounts of resources to an enterprise are in a position to do so. (Or you could get a government grant….)

Read it.

According to a new report, 47 percent of Detroiters are  ”functionally illiterate.” The alarming new statistics were released by the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund on Wednesday.

But I’ll bet they’ve got lost of diversity and self-esteem.

William Hague and Margaret Beckett are either liars or idiots. Either eventuality would disturb me, since Hague is Foreign Secretary and Beckett was Foreign Secretary.

The system currently in place is called ‘first past the post’ which means that whoever gets the most votes in a parliamentary election wins. Example: Candidate A gets 40% of the vote, candidate B gets 30% of the vote, and candidate C gets 30% of the vote, candidate A wins even though 60% of the voters voted for somebody else. This is the system that Hague and Beckett praise as being ‘equal votes’. I suspect that their position is informed more by vested interest than by any interest in either fairness or democracy.

The system being proposed is often called the ‘Australian system’ because they are the chief proponents of it; it is also often called the ‘automatic runoff’ system. Each voter marks his ballot in order of preference, first choice and second choice and third choice etc. When the votes are counted, if no candidate gets a majority, then the candidate who got the least votes gets dropped and the ballots that went for him as first choice get redistributed based on their second choice. If again no candidate gets a majority, then again the lowest candidate gets dropped and his ballots get redistributed. And so on until somebody gets a majority; by the time you get to two candidates, a majority for one of them is inevitable. (Hence the characterization ‘automatic runoff’.) In any event, the winner of the election is guaranteed to have a majority behind him. This is the system that Hague and Beckett call ‘unfair’ and ‘some votes are counted more than others’. (The latter, of course, is pure bullshit – they’re counted more than once only in a mechanical sense.)

Any objective consideration of the two processes reveals that the latter is actually the fairer and more democratic system. It is a measure of the degeneration of the modern Conservative party in Britain that two senior government officials indulge in such fairy tales. They might as well change their party name to ‘Democrats’ and be done with it.

UPDATE: I rarely agree with Charlie Stross in anything, but his take on this issue is spot on.

Steve Sailer smells a rat, and says what we all ought to be thinking.

It turns out that Osama was living in a huge compound built in 2005 that is only a few hundred meters from the Pakistan Military Academy.

Pakistan had to know. This location can’t possibly be a coincidence. Pakistani government insiders put him right in their pocket so they could protect him. They hugged him to their bosom.

They’ve been scamming us for billions of dollars for years pretending to help us chase Osama Bin Laden while they’ve been sheltering him in their equivalent of West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs rolled into one. He was an official guest of the Deep State of Pakistan. Maybe the elected leaders didn’t know, or didn’t want to know because they might end up as dead as Benazir Bhutto.

Freeberg, as usual, says all that needs to be said.

I tend to agonize much more about take-out. I drive over, she swipes my card, out comes a paper tape for me to sign and it’s got “gratuity” on it — I’m not even looking at my food yet and here I am filling the damn thing out. What’s the food gonna be like? Are they going to bollux it up? Lose track of the order and make me wait an extra twenty minutes? If I don’t know any of this, then why am I tipping?

If a ‘gratuity’ is a necessary part of the price, then why is it not included in the price? Forced ‘gratuities’ are like taxes – they distort the market for a product and make it more difficult for consumers to make informed choices.

If I choose not to pay over and above the formal price of a meal, I don’t see how the ‘waitperson’ has a beef with me, as oppose to his or her employer, who is deliberately paying them a sub-market wage on the expectation that the customer will make up the difference.

I suppose this is just another instance of the ‘entitlement’ mentality that is dragging down our culture. Ah’m agin’ it.

Read it.

If pretty much any area can be declared blighted and condemned, no one’s land is safe unless, of course, they have a lot of political clout.

The trial court ruling is only the first step in an ongoing legal battle. California courts are historically very deferential to blight condemnations, and it’s certainly possible that the trial court will be overruled, at least on some issues.

Read it.

Still anticipating that day when the Church of England gives up on that whole ‘Christianity’ thing as not being sufficiently hip and trendy.

Next Thursday, say.

Read it.

See, here’s where Donald Trump might be an asset.

For more than six years Akridge, a developer in Washington, had its eye on a 10-story office building in Bethesda, Md., which had been vacant since the National Institutes of Health moved out in 2002.

But the federal government did not put the building on the market until November 2009. By then, of course, the real estate market had slumped. Akridge and its partner, Rockwood Capital, a real estate investment fund in White Plains, finally bought the building last October, paying $12.5 million, less than the $14 million asking price.

What? The Federal government lose money? But that’s What It Does!

Yet various obstacles make it difficult for the government to unload buildings it no longer wants.

For one thing they must first be offered to other federal, state and local agencies. Officials also have to ascertain if the building has a community use — say, for a homeless shelter.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Ah, those French; so impulsive.

Read it.

… which would be more significant if there were any work to be had.

Read it.

The French, they’re so impulsive.

Read it.

Government service corrupts, and absolute government service corrupts absolutely.