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Just another fine day in the Obamanation.

‘Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini

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Three ancient monasteries in Egypt are among the oldest continuously functioning Christian religious establishments in the world. Until the recent insurrection and the overthrow of the Mubarak regime, the monasteries could count on the police protection from marauding Muslim zealots and thieves looking for valuable icons.

When civil order vanished from Egypt a few weeks ago, the Copts appealed to the army for protection. They were told that the military could not protect them, that they must protect themselves. And so they did, building protective fences around the monastery.

Unfortunately, it seems the army prefers that the monasteries remain unprotected: on Sunday soldiers with bulldozers arrived and began destroying the fences. Any Copts who attempted to interfere are being shot at by troops.

The notion that change = progress is the chief intellectual deficiency of the Left.

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Christians, orthodox Jews or anyone with traditional views of sex and marriage should be barred from state university counseling programs unless they agree to violate their beliefs.

That’s the gist of the amicus brief that the ACLU filed on Feb. 11 in a case in which a Christian student is challenging her dismissal from a graduate counseling program at Eastern Michigan University in 2009.

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Public employee unions, which have become one of the nation’s most aggressive and influential special interest groups in recent decades, are unchecked by the competitive constraints and self-interested ownership that help to balance out private sector unions. In his forthcoming book Special Interest, for instance, Stanford’s Terry Moe points out that the Michigan Education Association has distributed a 40-page instructional manual for local leaders that’s entitled “Electing Your Own Employer, It’s as Easy as 1, 2, 3.” And as one high-ranking state union official told me when I wrote Revolution at the Margins, “We knew the school system wasn’t moving to Mexico,” so there was no reason to work with the state negotiator on establishing a prudent salary structure.

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Hey, intimidation works.

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Understand, the Left has nothing against rich people participating in politics. Most rich people who are politically active are liberals, and the Democratic Party gets much more of its support from the wealthy than the GOP. George Soros is only the most famous of a battalion of sugar daddies who fund every left-wing cause. But the Left wants a monopoly. They want wealthy people to be barred from political participation unless they toe the liberal line. Hence their increasingly vicious attacks on the Koch brothers; they are trying to make an example of them.

Maggie Gallagher lays it out.

The culture war will always be ongoing because the left is never going to stop waging it. You can never “give in” and be done with it — they will simply move on to the next item.

The culture war will never be over because the left will never permit itself to declare victory and stop pushing for more.

Maggie and I were at Yale together; she has always been a fighter.

Jerry Pournelle has some thoughts.

In the United States we are experimenting with the limits of liberal democracy. Elections are unimportant: if the losing side simply refuses to accept the result when they lose, nor limits to their actions when they win, the applicability of the term “democracy” comes into question. Then comes the usual transition from democracy to tyranny: one side refuses to accept the results, chaos emerges, and a friend of the people steps up to restore order. He is given temporary powers. After that the stories divide.

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Warning

This morning the Muslim Brotherhood warned the United States that if the United States meddling in Egypt continued, they intend to cut off America’s supply of 7-11 and Motel 6 managers.

If this action does not yield sufficient results, cab drivers will be next, followed by Dell, AT&T and AOL customer service reps.

Finally, if all else fails, they have threatened not to send us any more presidents either. It’s gonna get ugly.

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Assuming Dodd takes the role, he’s already proving himself to be perfect for a Hollywood job, because it makes him a blatant liar. Last summer, Dodd insisted that he would not become a lobbyist. He made this abundantly clear. When asked what he would do, he was explicit: “No lobbying, no lobbying.” Yeah, apparently a million dollar plus salary makes you a liar barely a month after leaving the job. Of course, technically, Dodd is also barred from becoming a lobbyist for two years after leaving the Senate, but there’s a kind of *wink, wink, nudge, nudge* trick that Dodd and others use to technically claim they’re not lobbyists while merely running one of the bigger and most high profile lobbying organizations around.

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

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It’s sad, but what puzzles me most is how in the world three of the four physicians I can identify from these videos and other media reports are faculty members of UW’s Family Medicine department, and one is a senior resident in that same department. It’s a good training program, committed to providing sorely-needed primary care doctors to the state of Wisconsin. It teaches professionalism, and its faculty are supposed to model integrity. What were they thinking?

They’ve managed to belittle a public trust between physicians, employers and patients. A doctor’s sick note is a serious document. It represents an employer’s desire to verify through a respected, independent, medically qualified third party the fact of an illness and the true need for convalescence. In the videos now circulating online, we witness multiple members of a noted family medicine department trash one of the well-recognized rights and privileges of their profession, with little forethought as to the consequences.

UW’s doctors have demeaned not only the doctor-patient relationship, but in so doing, risked the stature doctors hold in our discourse on public policy. When commenting on social issues, physicians trade on the honor of our profession, benefiting from the public’s assumption that the wisdom won of caring for so many at their most vulnerable imbues us with some privileged understanding of collective need.

“Ethics? We don’t need no stinkin’ ethics!”

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The workforce of the Internal Revenue Service currently consists of over 93,000 employees to collect and process tax returns and enforce tax laws. While this number is daunting in and of itself, the IRS recently released its new budget which calls for an additional 1,056 new IRS employees citing specifically the new demands placed on the agency due to the new healthcare law. Beyond just more employees the burden of the healthcare law would require more facilities and new systems to handle the task; U.S. News and World Report put the cost to taxpayers at over $359 million in fiscal year 2012 alone.

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Computer Science is an odd discipline when it comes to job interviews for software developers. Specifically, all interviewees are expected to write code on the whiteboard, irrespective of their background and experience. Let’s assume that I get to interview for a job at Google (which will be a very real possibility if I fail to get tenure). Like a fresh college grad, I will be asked to write code on the whiteboard. The fact that I have close to 15 years of combined industrial and academic experience as well as more than 40 peer reviewed, technical publications will not make any difference. I will have to ask questions like: “How would you remove a node from a doubly linked list?” “How can you find all the neighboring links using a heap?” The fact that I have been teaching these skills to undergraduates for more than five years will be ignored completely. Purportedly, some academics who have not written much code in a while claim to hesitate even applying for a job with Google for that reason.

If we are to use a medical analogy, imagine interviewing an experienced (10-15 years on the job) surgeon for a position in a hospital.  Can you imagine asking the surgeon: “What is a scalpel? What kind of scalpels are there?” “Now, cut this cadaver as if you were to perform an appendectomy. Good. Now imagine that there were some complications–show how you’d cut in that case.” I hope you are having a good laugh, because such a situation is unimaginable.

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A man was shot dead at a Latvian cinema after eating his popcorn too loudly during a screen of Black Swan, according to reports.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The Cincinnati Enquirer reports on the string of cases in which the Supreme Court has reversed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.  As the Enquirer story notes, the Sixth Circuit has batted 0–15 over the past three Supreme Court terms.  This is quite remarkable. No other Circuit has been reversed so consistently over this period.  As I noted here, it’s also quite unusual to see a single Circuit reversed so consistently in a single area, such as criminal procedure and habeas rights, as the Sixth was last term.

One of the significant indicia of American decline is the fact that Federal Appellate Court judges are becoming figures of ridicule. Remember that nobody laughs at you if you aren’t funny.

Terry Wogan wants to let sleeping soaps lie.

The Other McCain kicks over a rock and finds — surprise! — Democrat politicians.

Dan Collins at Piece of Work in Progress recounts the story behind the protests in Wisconsin: How Democrats, after losing the November election, called a special lame-duck session in an abortive effort to lock in sweetheart deals for government employee unions. When that didn’t work, Democrats have since tried to prevent Republicans from acting to balance the budget at the expense of government employee unions.

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We have seen the future of the health care system, and it is the doctors on the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, handing out free sick notes to public sector union members so they can fraudulently collect their pay for missing work.

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I am not making this up.

Let’s see him name the kid ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ and see how long he lasts.

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Why don’t they just sink the damned ship? It’s not as if Israel has any friends to lose. What would happen that isn’t going to happen anyway? It would certainly guarantee that there isn’t another exciting episode in the whole ‘flotilla’ soap opera.

The Germans never put up with this shit. Hell, the British never put up with this shit, back when they had balls.

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I’m a photographer. I mainly do street photography now, but i still do the odd bit of contract work. I travel with expensive gear though not that much of it. I like to travel light. The INS do not like that. If I turn up with just my camera backpack and a small bag of clean underwear for a one week stay I usually have to spend a lot of time being interrogated for my lack of a huge suitcase. (I guess they suspect I live in the US illegally. Which borders on comical since nobody knows more about my travel patterns than the US government. Besides, my passport is usually filled with stamps that should tell them that I travel a lot and that even if I lived in the US, I spend most of my time flitting around the world)

Paranoid as the INS are, the TSA are even worse. Mostly because they are a huge bureaucracy where nobody seems to be accountable and their on-the-ground personnel are mostly people who had to choose from a range of other low paying jobs. On several occasions I’ve had expensive gear disappear from my carry-on during security checks and last year a TSA agent dropped my Canon 1D Mk3, smashing both the lens and the camera body. No apology, but more importantly: I was never compensated. I’m not rich and that camera (and the lens) was important to my livelihood. An expensive piece of kit lost that meant that I basically didn’t make any money that month.

I’ve been to Russia before the cold war ended. I’ve been all over the middle east. I’ve been to China. I’ve travelled all over Europe. I’ve been to Cuba and I’ve been to Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Nicaragua.

What all of these places have in common is that going there was a far more pleasant experience than going to the US. Yes, you read correctly: going to the US is more unpleasant than going to Soviet era Russia or even Iran 10 years ago. Sure, you sometimes have to bribe people, but at least I’ve not had gear stolen off me during security checks or had people break my gear without at least compensating me.

Welcome to the Obamanation. Bend over and spread ’em.

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Few people are aware the San Francisco has had a tax provision in its municipal code since 2004 that requires companies to pay a payroll tax on gains from employee stock options. No one pays it, and San Francisco hasn’t enforced it to date, but companies are becoming increasingly agitated that the city may change that policy at any time. The number of high profile and high value startups based in San Francisco – like Twitter and Zynga – may be too big of a temptation for the city to ignore.

We’re hearing that some of the city’s biggest startups are increasingly concerned that the city will start applying its local payroll tax to employee stock options– something even the Federal government doesn’t do. This would create potentially huge costs for startups that they can sidestep simply by moving a few miles to the North, East or South. If enforced, expect an exodus of San Francisco jobs to surrounding areas.

And rightly so. Like the Mafia, governments can’t stand to see other people making money without thinking that they deserve a cut.

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Crespo wants trains to come to a complete stop while drivers — he says conductors, but the drivers would do it — inspect the tracks for people before moving ahead very slowly. The cost in lost productivity due to slower commutes alone would wipe out the savings in human life and liability payments.

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I guess high-speed rail isn’t as wonderful as the reactionaries progressives make it out to be. Too bad, Barry.

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To avoid a vote on a proposal to limit collective bargaining rights in the state of Wisconsin, 14 legislators have fled the state, to an undisclosed location. I am not sure if there is a precedent for this. The reason they crossed state lines was to dodge the Wisconsin police

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Money flows to those who can afford to buy Congressmen make campaign contributions.

But the amendments are likely to be killed, if not in the House then in the Senate, on the grounds that such changes are “complex” and should be addressed in the next farm bill, due to be negotiated in 2012. The subtext of the message, especially in the Senate, will really be “Get lost; the amendments’ deficit impacts are negligible and, as usual, we don’t want to take any grief from the major farm organizations whose leaderships disproportionately consists of large-scale farm operators and whose members have a regrettable habit of voting.”

Steve Sailer watches some chickens coming home to roost.

We now mostly just squabble amongst ourselves, minorities v. whites and whites v. whites over who cares about whites least. So these kind of divisions are pretty easy for the Larry Ellisons to manipulate to add a few billions to their net worth.

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I think of it as evolution in action.

These dead bodies serve a function similar to the heads on spikes above a city gate. However, like the latter, the deterrent effect is less than it might be.

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Roughly one-fifth of tests that bone and joint specialists order are because a doctor fears being sued, not because the patient needs them, a first-of-its-kind study in Pennsylvania suggests.

Well, duh. Can you blame them?

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Two TSA agents were busted today at Kennedy Airport for stealing $160,000 in cash from bags, authorities said.

Yeah, I feel safer already.

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Considering how badly Mexico treats illegal immigrants from elsewhere in Latin America — of course, they’d scream bloody murder if the U.S. treated Mexican illegal immigrants that badly — I doubt that this will fly. But you never know.

The Other McCain is outraged.

Maybe Egyptians could use one of Filipovic’s pious lectures about “no means no” and “stop means stop.” I’d probably be accused of some sort of thought-crime if I were to suggest that the spontaneous outburst of savagery against Lara Logan of CBS News says anything about the future course of democracy in Egypt.

I don’t know who Jill Filopovic is, but I doubt that I would like her.

There is a sort of tournament among feminists, in which they compete for prizes by striving to excel their rivals in the denunciation of misogynist scapegoats. And because feminism is a phenomenon of the Left, it’s preferable if the scapegoats can be somehow linked to the Right.

As with all leftist ideologies, feminism is collectivist in nature. Rape is therefore not a crime perpetrated by specific criminals against specific victims. Rather, rape is men’s collective crime, of which women are the collective victims: All men are therefore complicit in every rape, and all women suffer when any woman is raped.

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Tammy Church and Eric Dunlap of St. Louis filed separate suits Monday in St. Louis Circuit Court. Their son, Jeremy Dunlap, 21, was stabbed at the center by another homeless man Feb. 12, 2008. That man, Robert Gamble, was  convicted of murder and is serving a 30-year prison sentence.

Uh-huh. Where were they when their son needed help? But they’re quick enough to sue the people who were doing the job the parents ought to have been doing.

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Ah, back to the good old days. I guess even wolves couldn’t make it under Communism.

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Further adventures from the fantasyland of ‘intellectual property’.

Well, here’s a pleasant surprise. We’ve been talking a lot about the rise of publicity rights as a relatively “new” form of intellectual property, driven by a collection of confusing state laws that create a poorly defined “right” for someone to block the use of their likeness (and, in some cases, their appearance, voice, mannerisms, gestures and more…). This has given rise to a new group of what can best be called “publicity rights trolls,” looking for ways to exploit these laws for cash. There are some cases making their way through the courts that question whether or not publicity rights violate the First Amendment, but in a surprise ruling up in Washington, a federal judge has ruled that the state’s publicity rights law is unconstitutional.

Cringely reads the tea leaves.

That’s why Nokia did the deal with Microsoft, which will be assuming the burden of all that software development and paying Nokia for the privilege. It’s a short-term play that makes perfect sense in an industry where CEOs last an average of four years. Stephen Elop’s four years are now fairly certain, his golden parachute packed and ready.

When watching the clip of Elop and Steve Ballmer appearing together on stage, I kept waiting for Ballmer to pat Elop on the head and say ‘Good dog! Good dog!’

(Does Steve Ballmer look like Uncle Fester, or is it just me?)

Robert Samuelson takes the government to the woodshed.

There’s something wildly irresponsible about the national government’s undermining states’ already poor long-term budget prospects by plying them with grants that provide short-term jobs. Worse, the high-speed rail proposal casts doubt on the administration’s commitment to reducing huge budget deficits (its 2012 budget is due Monday). How can it subdue deficits if it keeps proposing big new spending programs?

Despite the subsidies, Amtrak does not provide low-cost transportation. Longtime critic Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute recently planned a trip from Washington to New York. Noting that fares on Amtrak’s high-speed Acela start at $139 one-way, he decided to take a private bus service. The roundtrip fare: $21.50. Nor does Amtrak do much to relieve congestion, cut oil use, reduce pollution or eliminate greenhouse gases. Its traffic volumes are simply too small to matter.

The reasons why passenger rail service doesn’t work in America are well-known: Interstate highways shorten many trip times; suburbanization has fragmented destination points; air travel is quicker and more flexible for long distances (if fewer people fly from Denver to Los Angeles and more go to Houston, flight schedules simply adjust). Against history and logic is the imagery of high-speed rail as “green” and a cutting-edge technology.

Power Line does some fisking.

Obama made his mark on the NEH with the appointment of Republican former Rep. Jim Leach to serve as its chairman for a four-year term. Or should that be former Republican Rep. Jim Leach? Having been defeated for reelection to the House in 2006, Leach abandoned his party and endorsed Obama in a speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. For his service to Obama, Leach must have had dreams of office higher than the chairmanship of the NEH — his name was floated as the possible United States Ambassador to the United Nations — but the NEH is what he got. Leach was sworn in as chairman on August 13, 2009.

Hey, 30 years as a Congressman makes it hard to say no when the price is right.

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Of course. Souls don’t come cheap, even these days.

Steve Sailer does Hollywood.

That’s pretty funny when you think about it: a major player in Hollywood is a Scientologist for his entire career, but he finally rebels because … one Scientologist staffer in another city signed a petition against gay marriage.

To me, the most interesting thing about Scientology is how it was an outgrowth of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. L. Ron Hubbard was a sci-fi writer, the great editor John W. Campbell heavily promoted his Dianetics (which was originally intended not as a religion but as an equally plausible and cheaper competitor for Freudianism), and Hubbard’s pal Robert A. Heinlein supposedly gave him the idea that you could get rich starting your own religion.

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Police launched a full-scale search for the leopard following Tuesday’s attack, which happened near the town of Brits in South Africa’s North West province.

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US security officials are reportedly worried that a new generation of drug-smuggling submarines – able, unlike their predecessor semi-submersibles, to travel completely submerged beneath the waves – might be used to carry out terrorist operations.

The Texan paper also quotes Laurence McCabe, a professor at the US Naval War College, as stating that the appearance of true submarines in criminal hands is causing much concern in military and security circles.

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Is any other subculture reported on so exclusively by its own members? Or with a frequency and an extensiveness that bear so little relation to its size? (The “slow food” movement that we keep hearing about has fewer than 20,000 members nationwide.)

The Roman historian Livy famously regarded the glorification of chefs as the sign of a culture in decline. I wonder what he would have thought of The New York Times’ efforts to admit “young idols with cleavers” into America’s pantheon of food-service heroes.

Naturally the food-obsessed profess as much respect for tradition as for evolution. Hamilton, in Blood, Bones and Butter, writes of her childhood dinners: “The meal was always organized correctly, traditionally, which I now appreciate.” Even relatively young traditions like the Thanksgiving turkey must be guarded zealously against efforts to change or opt out of them. Foreign traditions destigmatize every dish even for the American. In Best Food Writing 2010, one foie gras lover asks another whether he would eat tortured cat if there were sufficient Mongolian history behind the dish; the answer is yes.

I am not making this up.

Steve Sailer finally gets on the bus.

What I’m reminded of is that fairly similar stuff happens in Mexico regularly without the U.S. press paying much attention at all.

All these years, I’ve been trying to pay attention to Mexico when everybody else is obsessing over the Middle East. After all, I reasoned, Mexico is right next door to us, while the Middle East isn’t. Plus, you gotta admit this Mexican stuff can be pretty colorful. How about the growing cults of Jesus Malverde, the narco saint, and Santa Muerte?

On the other hand, how much of this Mexican history has turned out to be all that important? Mexico seems to keep on being Mexico, just with more Wal-Marts and more chopped heads. Maybe the American press was right to pay little attention to Mexico. On the other hand, how much of this Middle East stuff that preoccupies them turns out to matter much either?

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An Australian teenager has died after he fell from a multi-storey car park while typing a text message.

19-year-old Ryan Robbins escorted a couple of women to their car late last Friday, in Melbourne. After they parted ways, Ryan began texting a friend, while walking.

He did not notice the railing – about waist-high – and tripped over, plunging to his death. Ryan had been drinking but was not drunk, according to his grandmother Patricia Schroeter.

Think of it as evolution in action. And, of course

In an interview with the radio station 3AW, she blamed inadequate safety measures at the car park for Ryan’s death and called for taller barriers to be mandatory.

“I don’t want anyone else to lose their children or… to go like this, not if it can be prevented,” she said.

Teaching the kid to be NOT QUITE SO CLUELESS is apparently off the table.

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Liberals — particularly in academia and the social sciences — have a tribal mentality which results in discrimination against conservatives.

What is shocking is not that such tribal mentality exists, but that anyone is expressing surprise.

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A former Army bomb disposal expert tried to murder his pregnant wife by planting a hand grenade in her car after she confronted him about an affair, a court heard yesterday.

And they always told me that skills learned in the military weren’t transferable to civilian life.

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China has secretly built a concrete aircraft carrier for pilot training as part of its military build-up, intelligence sources have disclosed.