Read it.

Overall, it is neglected knowledge just how much the “Green Revolution” has slowed down since the 1990s.

Thank you, environmental movement.

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Any country that has politically significant ‘tribes’ is not a civilized country. Sorry, but it just isn’t.

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Hundreds of Tunisian and Libyan migrants have set up camp near Paris’s Eurostar terminal with the intention to pay their way into Britain following a French crackdown.

The problem with ‘open borders’ is that it lets the locusts through. Pass the popcorn.

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I don’t think Obama is a Muslim, but I can understand why many Americans are uncertain about his core beliefs. This year, Obama let Easter pass without issuing any sort of proclamation. That can hardly have been an oversight, as he devoted considerable attention to the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, a purely secular event.

Personally, I don’t care whether the president takes note of religious holidays or not. It would be fine for President Obama to say that out of respect for the separation of church and state, he will commemorate only secular holidays and remain silent on all matters of religion. But he doesn’t do that. On the contrary, he has made a point of issuing Presidential proclamations on the occasion of every significant Muslim holiday–Ramadan, Eid-ul-Fitr, Hajj, and Eid-ul-Adha.

Nothing suspicious about that, surely? After all, he’s done similar proclamations for Jewish holidays … wait a minute, I’m sure I can find one …

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If we bought food they way we buy education….

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France’s new data retention law requires online service providers to retain databases of their users’ addresses, real names and passwords, and to supply these to police on demand.

There’s a reason why fascism originated in Europe.

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Obama’s politics of envy and jealousy worked in 2008, but were not the central theme of the campaign.  “Hope and change” was the theme, which amounted to nothing more than the delusional belief that a trained agitator from Chicago would be something other than an agitator as president.

As we approach the 2012 campaign, Obama has gone into full throttle envy and jealousy agitation mode.  The Obama campaign has made the decision that turning those who receive against those who pay is good politics.

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The system of PhD education in the United States and many other countries is broken and unsustainable, and needs to be reconceived. In many fields, it creates only a cruel fantasy of future employment that promotes the self-interest of faculty members at the expense of students. The reality is that there are very few jobs for people who might have spent up to 12 years on their degrees.

Most doctoral-education programmes conform to a model defined in European universities during the Middle Ages, in which education is a process of cloning that trains students to do what their mentors do. The clones now vastly outnumber their mentors. The academic job market collapsed in the 1970s, yet universities have not adjusted their admissions policies, because they need graduate students to work in laboratories and as teaching assistants. But once those students finish their education, there are no academic jobs for them.

Not to mention the fact that a lot of these ‘doctorates’ are in bullshit fields like Queer Studies and Holistic Therapy. In the Middle Ages there were a limited number of doctoral degrees, all of them professional: Medicine, Law, Theology (for those aiming to be prelates). Nowadays, professional degrees are looked down on as ‘not a real Doctor’, and these people who would have had problems surviving an undergraduate course of study in a medieval University parade around with initials after their names.

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He’d better steer clear of Washington, D.C, then.

Cringely meets the Common Man.

I was in Los Angeles last Friday for TV meetings and lost my iPhone 4. It was on my belt and suddenly it wasn’t. Then in one of those deja vu experiences I noticed that I was only steps from an Apple Store, so I went inside to trace my iPhone using the Where is my iPhone? app. But my iPhone was nowhere.

Understand it was fully-charged and I had been using it less than 10 minutes before. My phone was nowhere to be found.

Sadly the kids at the Apple Store knew far too well what had happened because they hear the story every day. My phone was most likely stolen straight from its clip on my belt by a professional iPhone 4 thief. The moment it was grabbed from my belt the thief handed it to an accomplice. Within a minute the phone was powered-off and untraceable. They didn’t want my data, just my iPhone.

My friend Bill, hearing my story, said it is even worse in New York where thieves will steal the iPhone 4 right out of your hand, running off into the inevitable crowd of pedestrians. That will teach us not to use our mobile smart phones when, well, mobile.

From purse snatching to phone snatching. Next we’ll see iPhones on those wire tethers they use in paranoid companies to secure computer equipment.

Read it.

A British tourist survived after Norwegian paramedics accidentally tipped the sick woman into the North Sea in sub-zero conditions as they stretchered her off a cruise ship.

Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it does not.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, chides modern business.

Stopped in at my local office-supplies megastore for some printer ink cartridges. Total expenditure: $47.78. Total length of printed receipt: 34^1/2 inches—nearly a yard.

Been there, done that. (Target, I’m looking at you.)

Having torn off and tossed the bottom 25 inches of that receipt (I need the top part to claim as a business expense; clutter-reduction has its limits), I am in theory poorer by ten dollars, or ten dollars’ worth of the relevant SKU codes, but I don’t care. If you want to boil the thing down to behavioral economics, I’ve paid ten dollars for a little simplicity in my life.

Hear, hear.

Read it.

Freeberg stops the train for a moment.

In fact, is anybody in America in danger of starving to death because their salaries & wages are too much on the skimpy side? Any kids with swollen bellies in American cities, desperately trying to catch rats & pigeons so their starving bodies can get some protein?

I shouldn’t be able to find any poor people with big teevee sets, right? Certainly, no poor people with teevee sets bigger than those owned by some of the “wealthy” taxpayers who subsidize them? Does my social studies teacher’s argument still hold water if the waitress’ kid wears $300 sneakers to school? What if the waitress has a $500 tattoo?

My point is that when some of them are…and that is undoubtedly the case…we are no longer talking about money required for survival. The necessities of survival have, in one way or another, been provided, thus freeing up the cash for these non-staple items. And I don’t necessarily have a problem with that either. Other than this: Don’t characterize it as a discussion about what’s needed to survive, when that is not what we’re really talking about.

Also, 45% is awfully close to 50%. If half of us are not paying any income tax at all, and the matter being referred to the electorate is “should we provide more alms,” then the “we” in that question has lost all practical meaning. If it’s a minority among the electorate doing the providing the question becomes more like one of “should we make those guys over there give us more stuff?”

Radley Balko sums it up.

CNN recently obtained a list of the “behavioral indicators” that could subject you to an enhanced security screeing by TSA. Included on the list:

Passengers who display arrogance and verbally express contempt for security procedures.

Because terrorists are known for drawing attention to themselves by irritating security screeners? Seems doubtful.

The lesson here: Not only will you be subjected to a pointless, hassling, sometimes humiliating screening process every time you fly, but you’ll also now need to pretend like you’re enjoying it.

Read it.

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A student was murdered in her bedroom in Canada as she chatted to her boyfriend on webcam, who watched, powerless, as the attack unfolded.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Despite the endless series of black on white murders, you never see a single story in the media that says that whites were killed by blacks. Nor will you ever see a statement by a public official saying, “Whites are in danger from black criminals and gangs. Avoid all-black areas or exercise extreme caution if you must go there.” The low-level black-on-white intifada continues, never identified as such, but known only by the silent photos of the perpetrators and victims and by code words such as “gangs” and “flash mobs.” And so naive whites, unwarned by their society and trained to believe that it is evil to think that race matters, keep delivering themselves into the maw of death.

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Must have been a Muslim; everyone knows that no Christian would have the balls to do something like that.

No, I take that back; Muslims would have blown up the building.

Read it.

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No, the biggest problem is that half the people who use it are from the left-hand side of the bell curve.

That said, of course tweets are ads. Whenever you have a medium of communication, there’s a certain portion of the population who are going to use that to try to get you to give them money, either for legitimate goods and services or for scams like Nigerian bank transfers or the ‘Democratic’ Party. Like spam, tweets are essentially free, so there’s nothing to prevent you from flooding the world except your own good manners (good luck with that). People who are trying to make money have much more incentive to participate in the ‘tragedy of the commons’ than normal people have to communicate, and eventually the noise drowns out the signal.

‘You can’t stop the signal, Mal.’

No, but you can sure as hell drown it out.

Read it.

The first new guidelines for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease in nearly 30 years establish earlier stages of the mind-robbing disease, paving the way for spotting and possibly treating these conditions much sooner than they are now.

Because, of course, God forbid that anyone treat the disease unless there are guidelines in place.

The change reflects a modern view that Alzheimer’s is a spectrum of mental decline, with damage that can start many years before symptoms appear. The new guidance describes three phases: early brain changes, mild cognitive impairment and full-blown Alzheimer’s.

Sounds like Congress to me.

Read it.

I concluded last Saturday’s report with an account of the granting of temporary residence visas to the Tunisian immigrants at the Ventimiglia refugee camp in Italy. Ventimiglia is a short distance from the border with France, and many of the Tunisians have relatives in France. As a result, as soon as they leave Ventimiglia, they attempt to cross the border.

Every body knows this. The French know it and the Italians know it. Those temporary visas serve as “passports”, and the Italians think they should allow migrants free access to the entire Schengen Area. However, the rest of the EU disagrees, especially France. By granting visas to the migrants, Italy is saying, in effect: “OK, France — we’re going to help these culture-enrichers get into the Promised Land in France. What are you going to do about it?”

The French promptly demonstrated just exactly what they were going to do about it: yesterday they stopped Italian trains from crossing the border at Ventimiglia.

I don’t suppose anybody would consider, oh, shipping them back to North Africa. No, I suppose not.

Read it.

The Finnish parliamentary elections coming up this weekend just keep on getting ever more hilarious, the desperation and anger of the watermelon Greens (the urban SWPL party that has long ago kicked out anyone who can tell a crow from a magpie) starting to boil over. The Greens are trying to frame this election as an epic battle between them as the cosmopolitan and enlightened forces of light versus those dumb and uneducated reactionaries (as somebody quipped, “We are intellectual opposites: we are intellectual, and you are the opposite”) who are trying to bitterly cling to an idealized past. I mean, that is pretty damn rich coming from the party whose every social, cultural and economic goal can essentially be summed up as return to the small tribal societies of the Pleistocene. Greens also like to bang their own drum of how “tolerant”, “humane” and “open-minded” they are towards different views, which is also quite hilarious in light of not only their open hatred of both sexual and speech freedoms of straight middle-aged men, but also the fact that despite 40% of their voters supporting nuclear power, not even one of their candidates supports nuclear power. I mean, really, with a couple hundred candidates across the nation, how astronomically long would the odds of such complete uniformity of thought be in a party of independent individuals?

Read it.

Europe discovers that it actually has nations after all.

Italy infuriated the French last week by giving out temporary residence visas, allowing the immigrants to travel in the European Union.

Many want to go to France because they speak French, and because they believe that President Nicolas Sarkozy’s approach to the war in Libya means he will be sympathetic to them.

But the French government insists it will only allow in those with the financial resources to live in France independently – a requirement which rules out most of those who have fled to Europe.

Heh.

Security has been stepped up right across the Franco-Italian border, including along ancient foot paths linking the two countries.

Italian officials have confirmed that thousands of immigrants have been arrested by the French and then sent back to them over the past few weeks.

Gee, imagine that.

Read it.

As I tell my constitutional law students, Congress’s ultimate power is the power of the purse. If Congress objects, for example, to military action engaged in by the president, it can simply refuse to allocate funds.

But the Obama Administration’s position seems to be that so long as it issues a signing statement refusing to abide by restrictions on funding that it deems to interfere with executive prerogatives, it can simply create the funding out of thin air. If there is no statutory funding for the czars, where exactly is the money coming from?

Well, from us, of course. After all, it’s the government’s money, right? They just magnanimously allow us to keep some of it. Usually.

Read it.

Let’s ponder what this means. If politicians in Washington spend too much and cause more red ink, which happens on a routine basis, Obama wants a provision that automatically would raise taxes on the American people.

Kind of like the we-get-a-raise-automatically-unless-we-vote-not-to law now in effect regarding Congressional pay.

Read it.

A seemingly innocuous headline in Thursday’s Financial Times has ominous overtones. “Wall St executives enter debt debate,” it said, but the first sentence of the article reads, “The Obama administration is trying to enlist Wall Street executives in the debate over increasing the debt ceiling and convince congressional Republicans that a U.S. default would be catastrophic for the markets.” In the past, there was nothing strange about the idea that financial specialists might be enlisted to help guide congressional policy, but in the era of the Dodd-Frank Act, it is necessary to consider whether these Wall Street executives are doing this voluntarily or because they fear government retaliation if they refuse.

Of course. Big Government would rather have one big firm, or a handful of big firms, that they could then regulate the hell out of (and squeeze money out of) than try to herd cats. For example: The major auto manufacturers.

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I know exactly how he felt.

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An amazing collection of design disasters.

It starts, appropriately enough, with clamshell plastic packaging.

Read it.

Speaking last week at Tufts University, Pelosi said, among other things, “To my Republican friends, take back your party so that it doesn’t matter so much who wins the election because we have shared values.” In other words, it’s fine if Republicans win elections so long as they agree with us. But she couldn’t stop there. She added this: “The fact is, elections shouldn’t matter as much as they do.”

Freeze frame right there. Tom Bethell used to argue in the American Spectator that the permanent government in Washington viewed elections as a nuisance, something to be endured like summer thunderstorms that blow over in a few minutes, allowing them to get back to the job of administering the country in the name of “the common good.” Pelosi perfectly expresses in her comment the old Progressive view that “politics” and political argument should be less and less relevant to the main business of government. (This is one aspect of contemporary Progressive thought that has not changed from the old Progressives of a century ago, in contrast to the series I posted here last month.) The object of Progressivism was best expressed in Saint-Simone’s famous phrase that “the government of men should be replaced by the administration of things.” Of course, if you determine that a function of government, like traffic enforcement or tax collecting, should be beyond the reach of partisan political argument, then you have essentially ruled the other party out of order when it objects. Pelosi and confreres believe that once any welfare state measure is in place, it cannot be questioned. The tacit premise of Pelosi’s remark is that today’s Republican Party is an illegitimate party, akin to Nazis or Communists or other subversives who reject the principles of the Constitution. At best, elections to the Progressive mind would increasingly become ceremonial exercises, like Fourth of July picnics. At worst, it is an argument for tyranny.

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No shit.

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A Nigerian immigrant left his African wife and daughter in Dublin and got involved with a beautiful Polish woman whom he knocked up and had a child with. He subsequently strangled the Polish woman, then in desperation, after a standoff with the Gardai, jumped off a cliff into the sea and apparently died.

Soon to be a major motion picture, I’m thinking.

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Throughout the project, the mantra that the Central Artery had severed the city, and that its burial underground* somehow would “knit the city back together” seemed oblivious to the fact that it was not the Artery which had severed the city, really, but the demolition of over 1,000 buildings for the Artery’s right of way which had done so.  Removing the Artery simply revealed that pre-existing wound to the heart of the city, a gap so wide and poorly-defined even Baron Haussman might have thought it could use a little narrowing.

With no one able to agree on anything in particular, the environmentalists of the late 1980s stepped in to offer the compelling alternative of nothing, packaged under the name “open space,” and obtained a requirement that 75% of the land above the buried highway be set aside for it.  The realization has only recently sunk in that even “nothing” must be paid for, as the conservancy tasked with maintaining the Greenway has now proposed taxing abutting property owners to raise funds, the largesse of Boston’s citizens, already maintaining several very large parks in close proximity, apparently falling short.  Thus, land that, under private ownership, might have provided millions of dollars in tax revenue to the city, and hosted thousands of jobs and apartments, has become a money pit.

Read it.

I am uncomfortable with this. I have no problem with imposing restrictions on those wearing all-encompassing coverings — no, you can’t enter any building or area that would make a juicy suicide-bomber target wearing one — but to criminalize conduct that is arguably religiously required by people who aren’t inherently inconveniencing other people seems to me to be excessive.

Kudos to the French for finally pushing back against the slow-motion Muslim conquest of Europe, of course, but I think that there are more legitimate ways to do it.

Right now I have 28 ‘starred’ items that cannot be unstarred — I can click on the star, and it goes away, but when I do a refresh, there they all are again, big as life.

My ‘home’ screen claims that I have 212 unread messages, while the ‘message’ screen denies that I have any unread mail at all.

And, of course, there is no effective feedback mechanism by which to tell Google that there’s a problem. (Oh, Google has ‘Help Forums’, but they appear to exist mainly to allow Google users a way to blow off steam — there are complaints about the ‘cannot unstar’ problem over six months old, and there is no indication that anyone at Google is even listening, much less working on it.)

UPDATE: My lurking unread messages that don’t actually exist have shrunk to 189. Perhaps it’s like a bathtub that only drains when nobody is looking. My ‘starred’ items are indestructible, however. Perhaps I ought to notify the Pentagon….

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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It is rather ironic that, last week, union bosses used the anniversary Rev. Martin Luther King’s assassination to try to drum up support for the union cause. You see, even after all these years, racism and discrimination within the walls of the House of Labor is still very real. As noted by UnionFacts.com, since 2000, there have been over 4,200 complaints filed against unions for racial discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. In some cities, it is a bigger problem than in others. However, the one area where union racism seems to rear its ugly head the most often is with the construction trade unions, where African Americans are often excluded from work.

When was the last time you saw a black plumber? Electrician? Bricklayer? Iron worker? Heavy equipment driver? Telephone lineman?

‘Look for … the union label….’

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Every level above the local becomes more and more isolated from its nominal constituency and hence more self-interested and corrupt. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy will triumph over every reality.

Conservative and Ukip MEPs voted for the cost-saving proposals but Labour and Liberal Democrat members either voted against or abstained.

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

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1. Union member violates safety regs.
2. Another union member reports the violation.
3. The union punishes the whistleblower.
4. The punishment is upheld by the court.
5. Some animals are more equal than others.

‘Look for … the union label….’

Read it.

Arnold Kling says what I’ve been saying for years.

Health care and education are, of course, the New Commanding Heights. That is, they are the growing sectors of the economy which, if you were Lenin, you would want to be sure that the state controls.

And they’re the major sectors of the economy that haven’t yet benefited from any significant degree of automation. Unless that changes, the situation will only get worse.

Paul Rahe turns his historian’s eye on the soi-disant cognitive elite.

What would it take to elicit servility from an intellectual? Money would help, of course. Just ask the Harvard professors who founded the Monitor Group—which for a time shilled for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in return for a quarter of a million dollars a month. And query the administration at the London School of Economics, recipient of a £1.5-million pledge from a foundation run by Seif, the tyrant’s notably generous, charming, and debonair son and presumed heir, who earned a Ph.D. at the school with a dissertation alleged by some to have been at least partly plagiarized (LSE is investigating those allegations).

But money is certainly not the only coin in which the modern intellectual likes to be paid. There is, after all, nothing quite like celebrity, and proximity to power can easily become for an intellectual in search of renown what a candle is for a moth. If, as they say, power corrupts, then lack of power corrupts absolutely.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, with his worship of the Communist Chinese, comes immediately to mind.

Read it.

The father of a 12-year-old girl killed by a failed asylum seeker yesterday launched a fierce attack on judges and human rights laws that have allowed him to stay in the UK indefinitely.

He was jailed for four months over her death, but was allowed to remain in the UK on his release because of human rights after an immigration judge ruled he had established a family life here.

Can’t really blame him. But there’s a lot of that going on these days.

Read it.

Now opening a book on how many of these will eventually cost the U.S. money and/or lives….

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Steve Sailer is, as always, on top of things.

The benefits of US citizenship

1. If your child is born in America, he will immediately have US nationality and will enjoy the rights of a citizen. When the child is 21, the parents can apply to be sponsored as family members, will have a permanent green card, will not have to wait their turn for the quota, and it will provide the basis for future immigration.

Read the whole thing.

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A new analysis of wind energy supplied to the UK National Grid in recent years has shown that wind farms produce significantly less electricity than had been thought, and that they cause more problems for the Grid than had been believed.

Read it.

Single bottles of wine from La Romanée-Conti, the legendary vineyard of Burgundy, sell for upwards of $10,000. In 2010 the owner received a threat, the vineyard would be poisoned unless the owner paid one million euro. When the owner didn’t pay a map was delivered that identified several vines that had already been poisoned by drill and syringe. The French don’t want to talk about this and for good reason, agricultural extortion is very easy and they fear copycats.

It would be easy to do billions of dollars worth of damage to crops and animals with little risk of being caught. As the Chilean case indicates, even a hoax can damage. Fortunately, criminals usually aren’t very smart. The vine poisoner mentioned earlier, for example, was caught trying to collect the money. A little bit of economics would have taught him that you can make lots of money from agricultural extortion without ever having to collect from the victim (and no, I am not saying how although it won’t be a mystery to most readers of this blog). Of course, a terrorist doesn’t even have to collect damages to succeed–just a bit of mad cow or corn rust and we are in trouble (and those aren’t even the biggest threats.)