Read it.

Imagine being at a dinner event and having your plate served with (plastic) cockroaches scattered over the food. Envision going to a hospital with a loved one only to be confronted with the hint that the hospital food is infested with bugs, flies, mold, and rat droppings. Pretty disgusting, right? Well, imagine how disgusting it is that these tacticss are due to a union’s efforts to unionize the “offending” company’s employees. At least, that’s the allegations being made by the French-owned company Sodexo.

Read it.

The family are refugees from Afghanistan and the father is deeply traumatised by his experiences in the war-torn country.

I am not making this up.

Steve Sailer kicks over a rock — and (surprise!) finds the DOJ Civil Rights Division.

In 2000 (the most recent data I can find), the NOPD was 51% black. I can’t find anything in the Obama Administration’s report on the racial identity of these NOPD police officers they are criticizing. That seems like a bit of an omission for a Civil Rights Division report, no? How often does that division forget to mention the racial makeup of an organization they are criticizing?

Read it.

The central theme of Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward’s account of the Obama administration’s Afghan policy debates, is the ongoing battle between Obama’s military and civilian advisers. The military advisers — Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, along with Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs — believe that a counterinsurgency strategy, which helped reverse the deteriorating military situation in Iraq in 2007, could do the same in Afghanistan. The civilian advisers — Vice President Joe Biden and other White House officials — suggest that Vietnam is a more apt analogy for Afghanistan and a quagmire a likelier outcome if counterinsurgency strategy is applied there.

Hm, let’s see — who shall we listen to about running a war, David Petraeus or Joe Biden? Boy, that’s a puzzler.

Read it.

One of the most amusing aspects of American politics is now little the so-called Democratic Party likes, or practices, democracy.

Read it.

I’d hate to have to switch from Pepsi to Coke, but these guys are pushing it.

The bottle is made from switch grass, pine bark, corn husks and other materials. Ultimately, Pepsi plans to also use orange peels, oat hulls, potato scraps and other leftovers from its food business.

Why don’t they just pee in it and be done with it?

The new bottle looks, feels and protects the drink inside exactly the same as its current bottles, said Rocco Papalia, senior vice president of advanced research at PepsiCo. “It’s indistinguishable.”

Yeah, and if you believe that one they’ll tell you another one. That’s what they’ve been saying about diet soda for the last 20 years, and it’s just as big a lie now as it was then.

Eric Raymond speaks the simple truth.

Political persuasion matters most when when policy options are relatively open and unconstrained by objective conditions that politics cannot alter. It matters less when policy options are more constrained, and not at all when there are no choices left.

Politics as we know it has had a structural problem for a long time; the self-destructive interest-group scramble that Mancur Olson identified in The Logic of Collective Action continually makes parasitic demands beyond the capacity of the underlying economy to supply, and the difference has to be papered over by massive government borrowing.

This is all very well until, as Margaret Thatcher put it about socialism, “you run out of other peoples’ money.” The system is reaching that point now. Bond investors are figuring out that the debt load has become impossible and are increasingly refusing to either purchase new debt or roll over existing paper. The muni and state-bond market in the U.S. is near-moribund, and the threat of sovereign debt default is tearing the Euro zone apart. U.S Treasuries increasingly look like Wile E. Coyote running in midair; they’ll keep selling only as long as nobody actually looks down.

A year ago the U.S. government was only taking in a third of what it needed to cover annual outlays; today it’s so much worse that individual monthly deficits are larger than the entire Bush administration’s. The money’s all gone. Our options are closing down to default or hyperinflation.

Read it.

Under the National Labor Relations Act, employees are presumably free to choose to unionize or not to unionize free from coercion or interference.  In previous cases, the National Labor Relations Board had considered threats (even by third parties) enough cause for an election to be overturned.

Unbelievably, on Friday, the union-controlled NLRB ruled that threats of physical violence by pro-union supporters is not coercive.

Just another fine day in the Obamanation.

Read it.

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism recently described an experiment in which two student journalists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison tested how quickly they could “score” Adderall—a prescription stimulant designed to treat attention-deficit disorders, but often used by healthy students as a study aid. The reporters walked into a campus library, tapped a studying stranger on the shoulder, and were connected to an Adderall supply in less than one minute.

Concerned observers of this trend, most notably at Britain’s Academy of Medical Sciences, have characterized the use of “study drugs” as a form of cheating, akin to the use of steroids in sports. Having diagnosed the problem as an issue of unfair competition, the academy has called on universities to consider banning the use of cognition-enhancing drugs by healthy students. This past October, Wesleyan University did just that, amending its student code of conduct to recognize “misuse” of prescription drugs as a violation of the college’s prohibition against receiving “improper assistance” in completing academic work.

What a crock. College isn’t an athletic competition. The point is not for kids to ‘compete fairly’ for grades. The purpose of school is to learn, grades are how we gauge learning (for better or worse), and the objective is to have every kid earn an ‘A’ if we can do so legitimately — legitimately meaning in a way that has a rational relationship to the material being learned, rather than dumbing-down the standards with grade inflation.

If such drugs really do improve academic performance among healthy students (and the evidence is scant), shouldn’t colleges put them in the drinking water instead? After all, it would be unfair to permit wealthy students to use them if less privileged students can’t afford them.

My thought exactly.

Of course, to the extent that such drugs pose health risks, it’s prudent to restrict their use. But that seems like an argument about safety, not fairness. While safety is a valid concern, it is one that might be overcome by better drug design. If we are still troubled by the idea of a study drug that is safe and universally available, we have to look for other sources of our discomfort.

The technical term is ‘unclear on the concept’. There’s a lot of that going around.

Read it. And watch the video.

Professor Jacobson asks, reasonably: Why do these people, many of whom are professionals, feel no fear in expressing such death wishes in the open?

I think the answer is that as liberals, they assume they are immune from scrutiny. Glenn Reynolds agrees: “They’ve lived for years in a culture of impunity. But that’s changing faster than they realize.” Maybe. But I don’t think it’s changing fast enough.

I have a question for Michael Moore: If this is war, does that mean we get to shoot you? Because I’m totally down with that.

Read it.

Last night, a mob seized control of Wisconsin’s state Capitol. The Capitol was supposed to be secured, but the mob was let in through the ground-floor window of a Democratic legislator.

Ah, those Democrats. Bastions of respect for law and order.

Read it.

Last night Col. Ralph Peters was on Bill O’Reilly’s show, talking about Libya. Peters thinks we should act on behalf of the rebels there, but he expressed skepticism that President Obama will ever do anything. “Obama loves the idea of being President,” Peters said, “but he can’t make a decision.”

I think there is a lot of truth to that, even in domestic policy, where Obama has passively deferred to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi on all legislative matters. One can debate whether action is appropriate in Libya or not, but Peters is certainly right when it comes to foreign policy–it is a safe bet that Obama will do nothing, because doing something would require a decision.

Read it.

Oddly enough, there isn’t a Presbyterian in the bunch. No Mormons, either.

“Though Muslims represent about 1 percent of the American population,” the IPT notes, “they constitute defendants in 186 of the 228 cases DoJ lists.” Thirty of the terror cases listed, or about 13 percent, involve homegrown Islamist terrorists.

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

King’s past support of the IRA is not to his credit. But it is of no relevance except as a political talking point to attack King’s hearings. “The fact is,” King himself told the Times, “the IRA never attacked the United States. And my loyalty is to the United States.” Is this a difficult point?

Read it.

Which is nonsense, of course; they aren’t a government, they’re just rebels. They may turn into a government some day, when things settle down, but that day has not yet come. It’s like calling Al-Qaida a government merely because they’re successful at blowing things up and causing trouble for the real government.

But, then, the French have historically been a bit confused as to what a proper government looks like, so I suppose we ought not to be too picky.

Read it.

The last time that HG Matthews used wood to fire its Buckinghamshire brick kilns was in 1926, during the General Strike.

Shades of Atlas Shrugged.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Megan McArdle responds to David Weigel, statist whiner.

I myself like rail, and think that the culture-war rhetoric with which conservatives frequently reject it is out-of-proportion to its importance in the grand political scheme of things.  At the same time, I don’t think that rail is going to work at anything close to a decent cost-benefit ratio in most of America, and I thought that the idea of running a train from Busch Gardens to Disney was fairly insane–high speed rail takes a lot of time and energy to accelerate (and brake), so the shorter the route, the less benefit it offers to either riders or the environment.

The elephant in the room, of course, is that trains are an outdated technology and inferior the the automobile, which enables personal freedom. Personal freedom is what statists hate most.

Read it. And watch the video.

Examples include cameras that block saving images as RAW files, phones that are designed to identify and drain third-party batteries, and, of course, printers that are designed to reject third-party ink.

Read it.

A Republican candidate for Congress in Oregon against Democrat Peter DeFazio, Art Robinson, claims that his three children are being expelled from the nuclear engineering graduate program at Oregon State University in retaliation for his political activity.

ThoughtCrime is punished wherever it goes.

Read it.

“There’s many people that are beginning to believe this is a delay tactic by the Democrats in the Senate so that these recall elections can be organized by the Obama team out of Chicago, which they are, as we start to do the research on the people that have filed the petition,” Fitzgerald told Newsradio 620 WTMJ’s “Wisconsin’s Morning News.”

No surprises here, but a useful reminder.

The Other McCain is on the case.

The U.S. military is too white and too male at the top and needs to change recruiting and promotion policies and lift its ban on women in combat, an independent report for Congress said Monday.

Under the provisions of The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009, Section 596, Public Law 110-417, Congress established the Department of Defense (DoD) Military Leadership Diversity Commission (MLDC).

Imagining our enemies laughing their butts off.

The problem is, that when more women and minorities wind up in uniform, ‘progressives’ go ballistic about the American military machine taking advantage of these poor exploited classes.

Read it.

Chinese blogger and activist Michael Anti wants to know why he is less worthy of a Facebook account than company founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dog.

A very good question.

Read it.

I’m just guessing, here, but I don’t think that our paleolithic ancestors had this problem.

Read it.

This is both funny and scary at the same time.

What’s really scary is, that people make pots of money doing this sort of thing.

Many of them are PhD economists….

Read it.

Ever since Jay Gould, Leland Stanford, and Cornelius Vanderbilt acquired their first legislatures, railroads have been best understood as political networks, rather than as transportation lines. The Obama administration is hyping high-speed rail (HSR) with a $53 billion proposal not because the president is a trainspotter or because he collects back copies of the Official Guide of the Railways (like I do). Rather, it’s because politicians understand that the states blew their money on generous pension plans, pretentious sports stadiums, and bridges to nowhere, and now need billions to plug their budget deficits. It’s easier to funnel money into tapped–out state capitals under the smoke and mirrors of a feel-good rail project than it is to announce that the federal government stands behind states’ subprime debts. The Government Accounting Office estimates unfunded state liabilities at $405 billion, which is probably what HSR would, in the end, cost. Think of it as the Stimulus Express.

Actually, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, I don’t suspect the TSA of being under orders to make the process of flying so unpleasant that people will prefer — and vote to fund — High Speed Rail. That would show an unprecedented degree of foresight on the part of government employees, who have never in the past demonstrated even plain common sense, much less showed any inclination than to look more than about 15 minutes into the future.

Read it.

But we’ll never do it, because the designs the govocrats choose are typically both PC and fugly and people won’t use them.

Jerry Pournelle has a great idea:

I wonder what would happen if the US demanded of Gaddafi that he turn over Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi for trial in the US? Al-Megrahi was released from imprisonment in Scotland on compassi0nate grounds because he was supposedly dying of prostate cancer, and should be allowed to go home and die. That was some time ago, and he has miraculously recovered his health. President Obama keeps looking for terrorists to try in the regular US courts: Megrahi would seem to be a good candidate.  Failure to turn him over to us for trial would be as good a casus belli as any, better than we had against Saddam Hussein after 9/11.

Teddy Roosevelt would definitely do it.

Reagan might do it. Bush might do it. Hell, even Hillary might do it.

But Obama, alas, would never do it.

Even Wikipedia thinks that flying in the U.S. sucks.

Read it.

Mandy is one of a growing number of people who pretend to suffer illness and trauma to get sympathy from online support groups. Think of Tyler Durden and Marla Singer in Fight Club, only these support groups are virtual, and the people deceived are real. From cancer forums to anorexia websites, LiveJournal to Mumsnet, trusting communities are falling victim to a new kind of online fraud, one in which people are scammed out of their time and emotion instead of their money. The fakers have nothing to gain from their lies – except attention.

Ruh-Roh.

The festival is held in the state’s Yorke Peninsula region, which was populated by Cornish miners who came to work in the region’s copper mines.

Steve Sailer critiques Bill Gates.

For the last dozen years, I’ve listened to Bill Gates explain how to improve education. First, it was small learning communities (which he now says the Gates Foundation wasted $2 billion upon), then it was making everybody pass Algebra II to graduate from high school, then it was something else, now it’s giving the best teachers bigger classes (see Gates’s latest op-ed: “How Teacher Development Could Revolutionize Our Schools”).

The weird thing is that the Way to Fix the Schools has basically never been, according to Gates, about the main way the rest of economy gets more productive — and also the one thing Bill Gates definitely knows a lot about: information technology.

And look: Steve agrees with me:

And yet, common sense says that information technology offers the main hope of us ever being able to afford on a mass scale the one educational tool that works more often than anything else, especially with math: individualized tutoring. It often doesn’t work, but over thousands of years it’s tended to work enough that that’s what rich people get for their kids. And it’s a lot more likely to work than the latest fad.

Read it.

Unlike pretty much any other publication, all of the writing for these publications is done for free. Hell, in some subjects and for some journals, you actually have to pay to submit your papers. The “peer review” is all done for free and often any editing is done for free by an academic to build his or her reputation and CV. So, basically, you have just a tiny fraction of the costs of most any other publication, and yet, the mega-publishers behind these journals charge ridiculous amounts for subscriptions and even for single articles. Even worse, a significant percentage of academic research is still heavily funded by the US government (our taxpayer dollars), yet much of it is locked up behind these incredibly high prices. In many cases, the journals forbid the researcher from releasing the paper elsewhere (though many academics, thankfully, ignore this and offer up PDF downloads). NIH now requires research it funded to be publicly published a year after its published in a proprietary journal, and there are efforts to expand that to other government funding as well — but the publishers have lobbied very hard against this, and even wish to repeal the NIH rule.

The swine. This is what the historical fiction of ‘intellectual property’ leads to — a worse life for all of us.

Read it.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

It was entirely predictable — and predicted — that if a black Democrat were ever elected President, he would spend most of his time claiming that any opposition to his policies was rooted in racism. There are no surprises with Obama. If he spent as much time being President as he does being black, the country would be much better off.

Read it.

The plaintiff’s bar has plenty to do with this silly — and costly — trend. Sham product-liability cases can rack up very real damages. In 2007 the median jury award in product liability cases was just north of $1.9 million, estimates Jury Verdict Research, which tracks results of personal-injury claims.

“America’s legal system is based on the fact that there are some things so obvious that you don’t need to warn about [them],” says Bob Dorigo Jones, senior fellow for the Foundation for Fair Civil Justice, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the American legal system. Still, he adds, “it doesn’t stop people from suing because the legal system has become a litigation lottery.”

Will Wilkinson is on the case.

University of Virginia professor of psychology Jonathan Haidt (rhymes with “kite”) recently argued in a keynote address at a conference of social psychologists that his field and theirs, a strongly left-leaning discipline that specializes in detecting prejudice and discrimination invisible to the untrained eye, may be itself guilty of subtle bigotry. After all, Haidt asked, shouldn’t there be some conservative social psychologists? At least a few? (A show of hands at Haidt’s lecture revealed just three self-described conservatives among about 1000 assembled psychologists.) The statistical improbability of this near-total absence of conservatives in social psychology suggests that the discipline may be less-than-welcoming to young Republicans.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

But, of course, it is by no means clear that ethics or social justice are the sort of things about which there are truths at all, much less the kind of truths accessible by impartial inquirers employing standard scientific methods. In any case, scientists have, let us say, a checkered record in this regard. From the dawn of the 20th century through the 1930s many of America’s most eminent progressive scientists were enthusiastic eugenicists. And not a few of last century’s “best minds in science” were advocates of communism–a system of “intergroup relations” that that killed upwards of 100 million people. Does Jost suppose that the political consensus of those more recently socialized into the scientific community should be assumed to be less disastrously misguided because science has at long last uncovered the truth about ethics? Did I miss the write-up in Scientific American?

Do tell.

Read it.

With Facebook, recruiters see the “real” you – not the “interview” you. They also see your “real” family, friends, pets, old sweethearts, ex-wives… everything.

The see how you handle conflict and confrontation. They are witness to your conversational style and ability to communicate. They see what you’re passionate about, and the areas in your life where you may be a bit passive. They see if you are ready for the next stage in your career development, or still have pictures of the intoxicated you with your shirt off in 23 degree weather with the ‘A’ from “WILDCATS” painted on your chest during a football game (not exactly their idea of a “team player”).

Yet another reason to steer clear of Facebook.

An Informative Picture.

In classical mythology, the Hydra was a beast with multiple heads; every time the Hero chopped one off, several more grew in its place.

Modern government is Jabba the Hutt with multiple tails; every time one is chopped off, several more grow in its place, and they all try to wag the body, often at the same time.

Read it.

Which immediately poses the question: Why do we still have troops in Germany? Do they need protection from the Russians and Poles? Still?

The Other McCain, unlike the LameStream Media, is on the case.

Watch the video for left-wing thuggery in action.

I guess this is the new ‘civility’ that the Obamassiah keeps droning on about.

Read it.

Huckabee is an idiot. I’d vote for McCain before I’d vote for him, and I’d vote for a dead rat before I’d vote for McCain.

Read it.

Remember, in Liberal World, it is all about intentions, not outcomes

1. Have a gripe, Someone needs to do something
2. Pass a law based on feelings
3. Unintended shit happens

Read it.

Which is nonsense, of course, because such premiums are actuarially-based and females have statistically proven lower insurance risks.

Once again, PC comes to the European Union.

Read it.

One of today’s under-reported stories is Canada’s steady movement to the right. My impression is that most businessmen now regard Canada as a better place to do business than the United States. And compared to Mexico, it has the advantage that people don’t get kidnapped and murdered.

One of the “Ms” in 3M used to stand for Minnesota. No more. The company still has its headquarters here, but it has moved much of its operations to the more profitable environment of Texas. Companies that are engaged in global competition can’t afford to humor politicians who are ignorant of economics. Like Barack Obama.

George Will celebrates the last American veteran of The Great War.

Buckles never saw combat, but “I saw the results.” He seems vague about only one thing: What was the First World War about?

The First World War was also the first ‘modern war’ in which the government of the United States, under the reins of its most fascist President ever, decided to stick its nose into the sort of conflict that hitherto had been considered solely the business of the Europeans.

On June 28, 1914, an assassin’s bullet in Sarajevo killed the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The war that followed took more than 116,000 American lives — more than all of America’s wars after the Second World War. And in a sense, the First World War took many more American lives because it led to the Second World War and beyond.

Funny how Democrat Presidents seem to have a talent for getting us into these wars and shit. (Republicans are more constrained — ‘kick some wog ass and go home’ is more their style, except we seem to have lost the ability to go home afterward.) Sigh.

Melanie Phillips lays it out.

You really do have to wonder which is the more extreme effect of our politically correct culture — the way in which it brutalises people, or the way it turns them into cerebrally-challenged automatons?

Both attributes were on startling display in the latest piece of advice to emanate from no less august a body than the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

This guidance, intended for all doctors, nurses and counsellors advising women contemplating having an abortion, said such women should be told that terminating a pregnancy was safer than having a baby.

To which one can only ask: safer for whom, precisely? Not for the baby, certainly.

Bryan Caplan has some thoughts on Amy Chua’s less controversial book.

The negative side effect of free-market reforms: The market-dominant minorities disproportionately benefit, increasing popular resentment.  The negative side effect of democratization: Market-dominant minorities disproportionately suffer, because the majority finally gets a chance to legally enforce its resentment.  Pushing both reforms on developing countries simultaneously – which Chua claims the U.S. government habitually does – gives the worst of both worlds: Increasing resentment – and the opportunity to politically act upon it.  If the stars align badly enough, preaching democratic capitalism gives you Yugoslavia or Rwanda.

Read it.

Well, that’s the problem with lifetime appointments. The Roman Catholic Church has the same problem.

Read it.

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

Markets work even when you don’t want them to.

And the frog starts to boil.

Step 1. Come up with some plausible excuse to carve off special lanes for the privileged, even though that increases congestion for everyone else. ‘Oh, we have to have carpool lanes to ecourage people to carpool and so reduce emissions and save the world.’ No mention of the fact that the extra emissions of people crawling along at five or ten miles an hour vastly outpaces any savings from the minuscule number of people who carpool.

Step 2. Don’t mention the fact that Mr Rich Liberal Democrat and his chauffeur can use the carpool lane, as can the sixteen illegal immigrants in a POS van on their way to trim hedges for same, while Joe Sixpack on his way to a construction job site can wave to them while he’s stuck in traffice.

Step 3. Once we’ve got people used to the idea of special privileged lanes, let’s charge people to use them, once again giving the Crust a way to bypass the Great Unwashed while charging people for the use of roads that were built using their tax money.

Sounds like a win-win for the government; the only loser is the ordinary middle-class taxpayer, and who cares about them?

Read it.

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

This has been widely touted as ‘the first time a man has been social secretary’.

I don’t even have to say anything, do I?

Read it.

Zimbabweans are lucky they are no longer suffering under the boot of the racist white former regime Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what kind of hell they would be living in now.