Read it.

So determined are the couple to have a girl that they recently terminated twin boys conceived through IVF.

Boys will be boys … or maybe not.

Read it.

How hip, and trendy. Watch the Windsors turn into the Kennedys before your very eyes. Eventually they’ll be sending their kids to Brown University.

Read it.

Liu had been convicted of conspiracy and fraud involving millions of dollars made not by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing but by counterfeiting presses in a foreign country, presumably North Korea. The quality of these “supernote” forgeries is so high that he’d managed to pass enormous quantities through the electronic detection devices with which every Vegas slot machine is supposed to be equipped.

‘It’s only dirty paper.’ — Bugsy Siegel

The link between Wilson Liu’s counterfeit bills and North Korea’s missiles and nuclear weapons is umbilical. “More than 70 percent of the missiles’ components are imported from overseas,” says Syung Je Park, a director of the Asia Strategy Institute, a think tank affiliated with South Korea’s military, whom I met (at his insistence) at a safe house in London. Park has debriefed more than 1,000 North Korean defectors, including Hwang Jang Yop, once the regime’s chief ideologist and Kim Jong Il’s tutor. North Korea depends on international aid just to keep famine at bay. “They need money,” says Park. “Where else can they get it?” The answer, he and senior U.S. officials believe, is by means of organized crime: not only the production of counterfeit currency but also the manufacture and export of counterfeit cigarettes and pharmaceuticals, and the sale of drugs such as heroin and crystal methamphetamine.

Read it.

Senior Raccoons will remember a time, not too long ago, that abnormal people in our culture actually felt abnormal. They were aware of their deviancy, and how this deviancy contributed to an unhappiness that no government has the power to eliminate.

But under the guise of “tolerance” and multiculturalism, we have deprived these poor souls of the feedback they need in order to know that they are not normal. This is not empathy, but cruelty — like shielding someone from a cancer diagnosis on the grounds that it will make them feel bad, but depriving them of the chance to fight it.

In order to allow such people to feel normal in their abnormalcy, we have had to develop a deviant culture for them to live in, to such an extent that the normal are now made to feel abnormal.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read & heed.

Two-spacers are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste.

David Brooks is an astute observer, although only a pretend-conservative.

You can see a paragon of the Composure Class having an al-fresco lunch at some bistro in Aspen or Jackson Hole. He’s just back from China and stopping by for a corporate board meeting on his way to a five-hundred-mile bike-a-thon to support the fight against lactose intolerance. He is asexually handsome, with a little less body fat than Michelangelo’s David. As he crosses his legs, you observe that they are immeasurably long and slender. He doesn’t really have thighs. Each leg is just one elegant calf on top of another. His voice is so calm and measured that he makes Barack Obama sound like Sam Kinison. He met his wife at the Clinton Global Initiative, where they happened to be wearing the same Doctors Without Borders support bracelets. They are a wonderfully matched pair; the only tension between them involves their workout routines. For some reason, today’s high-status men do a lot of running and biking and so only really work on the muscles in the lower half of their bodies. High-status women, on the other hand, pay ferocious attention to their torsos, biceps, and forearms so they can wear sleeveless dresses all summer and crush rocks with their bare hands.

And there’s more where that came from. This extended description of the SWPL lifestyle (what we here at DP call the Crust) is very entertaining.

Many members of this class, like many Americans generally, have a vague sense that their lives have been distorted by a giant cultural bias. They live in a society that prizes the development of career skills but is inarticulate when it comes to the things that matter most. The young achievers are tutored in every soccer technique and calculus problem, but when it comes to their most important decisions—whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise—they are on their own.

And here’s where Brooks fumbles the ball, because ‘what to love and what to despise’ is at the heart of the SWPL narrative. Young Crustians absorb it from their helicopter parents, their carefully vetted childhood companions, their closely monitored schoolmates, and their fashionable courses of study at colleges everybody has heard of. I have seen it done; it is not a pretty sight.

Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.

Or at least among the secularized, materialistic, we-can-build-you eschaton-immanentizing ‘progressives’ of the global elite — of which, sad to say, Brooks is a member in good standing.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota can look at attachment patterns of children at forty-two months, and predict with seventy-seven-per-cent accuracy who will graduate from high school.

The remainder will become rap stars, professional athletes, or drug dealers making money in quantities that researchers at the University of Minnesota have difficulty imagining. Is this a great country, or what?

Read it.

No, it’s not from the SWPL site — although it would fit in there quite nicely.

Read it. And weep.

Although it is a fact that we only dare to confront in the occasional dark night of our souls, this country has been teetering on the brink of moral illegitimacy for the last 38 years.

Yesterday, I was forcibly reminded of this when someone sent me this excerpt from the forthcoming book Unplanned, in which former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson explains her conversion from pro-choice activist to pro-life activist, as she watched an abortion being performed live on an ultrasound … If you are able, I encourage you to read the whole thing. I have to confess to you that I almost was not. The horror that Johnson describes is almost unfathomable, accentuated by the cruelty and insensitivity of the conscienceless monsters cracking jokes as they watched the death of a tiny human unfold live before them.

Freeberg nails it, as usual.

The story linked up top says the new tax increase, the “hooray, we’re bilking people more” tax increase, is gonna raise $6.5 billion. It won’t, of course. That number is produced by simple addition and multiplication, and presumes people will maintain consistent earning and spending habits as the tax consequences are in a state of flux. That they won’t change any of the decisions under their control, as the employers that sign their paychecks see less of a profit coming in, and new, artificial expenses are built into the products and services they bring to market.

It is our “free” press that is most at fault for this problem. When the $6.5 billion target is missed, they won’t talk about it. Not in terms of how it should be discussed — “last year, legislators used fourth-grade math to figure out how much extra revenue they’d get from the tax increase, and they turned out to be wrong.” In all my years of reading newspapers, I’ve never seen a statement printed that way, although I have seen it happen time after time. No, they’ll wait until the new deficit is broken down, agency by agency, until it percolates down to the level of social programs…they’ll print up a story about some “vital” assistance being “cut.” Then they’ll find some sad sack who doesn’t know how he’s going to pay his heating bill or get his hangnail treated, and stick him on Page B-1 like they always do.

Read it.

Read it.

Those pesky Italian kids. I swear.

Read it.

Four men and three boys have been charged with raping a woman at Bendigo in central Victoria.

Mohammad Zaoli, 21, Aru Gar, 19, and Mohammad El Nour and Akoak Manon, both 18 years old, are each facing 17 offences including counts of rape and assault.

Three boys aged from 14 to 17 have been charged with the same offences.

That’s a lot of Mohammeds.

George Will demonstrates what a PhD in Political Science is good for.

A characteristic of many contemporary minds is susceptibility to the superstition that all behavior can be traced to some diagnosable frame of mind that is a product of promptings from the social environment. From which flows a political doctrine: Given clever social engineering, society and people can be perfected. This supposedly is the path to progress. It actually is the crux of progressivism. And it is why there is a reflex to blame conservatives first.

On Sunday, the Times explained Tucson: “It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members. But . . .” The “directly” is priceless.

This McCarthyism of the left – devoid of intellectual content, unsupported by data – is a mental tic, not an idea but a tactic for avoiding engagement with ideas. It expresses limitless contempt for the American people, who have reciprocated by reducing liberalism to its current characteristics of electoral weakness and bad sociology.

Read it.

I have a question: Why does every do-gooder group on the planet feel entitled to ‘require’ students to do this, that, and the other? Certainly everybody (not just students) ought to be familiar with CPR, but is forcing them to learn it really going to get the job done? Quite frankly, my reaction to being forced to ‘learn’ something is to ignore in during class and forget it as soon as I’m free; and I can’t believe I’m the only person who reacts that way. If anyone is looking for the roots of the totalitarian impulse, here it is red in tooth and claw. The road to Hell may or may not be paved with good intentions, but the road to the Third Reich certainly is.

Read it.

A lot of that discussion focused on folks going into early retirement or giving up the search for jobs, but there’s another factor, which is the disappearance of teens in the workforce.

If teen Labor Force participation held the level of 41.4% from December 2007, there would be 2.6 million unemployed teens. Teens represent just over 3% of employed persons, a record low (the 1973 peak was 8.7%).

Read it.

With its cone-shaped crenellations and palm wood drainage spouts, the grand facade seems outside time and helps illustrate why this ancient city in eastern Mali is an official World Heritage site.

But the guidelines established by Unesco, the cultural arm of the United Nations, which compiles the heritage list, demand that any reconstruction not substantially alter the original.

“When a town is put on the heritage list, it means nothing should change,” Mr. Maiga said. “But we want development, more space, new appliances — things that are much more modern. We are angry about all that.”

Too bad, guy. The Crust wants to freeze you in plastic. And these are the ‘progressives’; you can imagine what ‘reactionaries’ would do….

Read it.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

I heard on the news a minute ago an infobabe say that the President was going to ‘ask all Americans to pause this morning for a moment of silence to honor the victims of the Arizona tragedy.’

That struck me as odd. ‘Honor’ the victims? Remember, certainly. Sympathize with, of course. Pray for, absolutely; and their families, which I doubt that the President will remember to do. But … honor? What did they do that was worthy of honor, other than be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time?

And that, I think, shines a light on the great divide between ‘progressives’ (like the President) and normal people. To the left, being a Victim is ‘honorable’, an accomplishment that deserves praise and recognition. By contrast, most rational people would say that being a victim is an unfortunate circumstance but hardly something to be celebrated. But ‘progressives’ just love victims, because victims are the leverage that ‘progressives’ use (indeed, need) in order to accomplish what they want to accomplish. No victims? No need for ‘progressives’. It’s a basic power equation.

Read it.

New York’s a hard town. Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Boy, I wonder whether that would work…?

Read it.

The highest court in Massachusetts ruled against U.S. Bancorp and Wells Fargo Friday in a pivotal mortgage foreclosure case that could spark more turmoil and uncertainty in a housing market already mired in depression.

The Supreme Judicial Court affirmed a lower court judge’s ruling invalidating two mortgage foreclosure sales because the banks, in their capacity as trustees for mortgage securities, did not prove that they actually owned the mortgages at the time of foreclosure.

Last fall, the banking industry’s foreclosure machine came under intense scrutiny with revelations that low-level employees called “robo signers” powered through hundreds of foreclosure affidavits a day without verifying a single sentence. At the time, analysts warned that the banks’ allegedly fraudulent document procedures could imperil their ability to prove that they owned the mortgages. The Massachusetts ruling stokes those concerns.

In a separate statement U.S. Bancorp said the judgment has no financial impact on the company. “The issues addressed by the court revolved around the process of servicing the loan on behalf of the securitization trust, which was performed in this case by the servicer, American Home Mortgage,” the bank, which is based in Minneapolis, said.

It later issued another statement saying that as a trustee of the securitization trust that it has no responsibility for the terms of the underlying mortgage, foreclosure procedure, the conduct of the servicer, the process by which the mortgage is transferred to the trust, or the sufficiency of the mortgage documentation.”

Read it.

So assuming the BBC quoted McKeon correctly, immediately upon taking power, the allegedly anti-waste, anti-spending GOP handed the Armed Services Committee over to a congressman whose reaction upon hearing about a round of proposed defense cuts was . . . concern for the well-being of defense contractors.

Not a good sign.

Freeberg turns over a rock.

It’s an old rule. I think Ann Coulter once observed that if it was possible to take an anti-American position in Scrabble or Parcheesi, liberals would take that position and then scold you with genuine hatred if you notice it & point it out.

The “Joe Six-Pack” voter, the guy whose vote means so much because he doesn’t know a single thing about Washington politics and doesn’t care to learn, has now seen it up close for two or three days solid: The democrat party wants to govern without any restraint. They think the Constitution is an obstacle, and not an authoritative one, just a pain-in-the-ass one. It’s undeniable now.

Read it.

Why, yes.

It’s certainly looking that way: the Democrat-run (Democrat-dominated) state legislature has just passed a bill to tax online purchases (via Points and Figures, via Instapundit): the bill is just waiting for Governor Pat Quinn’s (D) signature, which is almost certainly inevitable.  In fact, the state of Illinois is going to raise taxes across the board – because that’s what Democrats do.  Business is good; raise taxes.  Business is bad; raise taxes.  Business is in a surreal zone where it’s actually a peanut butter sandwich; raise taxes on jelly and mandate jelly’s inclusion in all corporate endeavors.

And, just as inevitable as the sunrise, comes the first report that Amazon.com will end their Illinois Amazon Affiliate program in response.  That first link is generally grim reading for Illinois residents: not only does it indicate that the big online retailers are apparently still perfectly willing to drop their affiliate programs in large states, but the smaller online retailers that depend on companies like Overstock and Amazon for their business are well aware that they can do their business in, say, Ohio.  Translation: Illinois Democrats are about to damage their business tax base in the course of (unsuccessfully) trying to raise its business tax revenue.

“Business” as usual, in other words.

Read it.

I got your Affordable Housing, right here.

Read it.

Four days after President Obama signed into law the Zadroga bill providing no-cost health care to people who were near ground zero on September 11, 2001, or afterward, a law firm is already advertising for clients. The Web site sept11-zadroga-act.com, maintained by the law firm Kreindler & Kreindler LLP, advises visitors: “The assistance of a lawyer is not required, but it is recommended.” I got to the site via a paid Google text ad.

Federal Election Commission records show that a lawyer at the firm, James P. Kreindler, contributed a total of $4,800 in September of 2010 to the campaign of the senator who championed the September 11 health bill, Kirsten Gillibrand. In the same month, Mr. Kreindler gave $2,400 to the campaign of Senator Harry Reid.

This is one of the reasons I don’t practice law. You have to spend too much of your time washing your hands.

Read it.

The problem with government planners is that a lot of what they ‘know’ ain’t so.

The flaw is this: Most of the benefits don’t accrue to those who bear the costs. So the creation of a park causes a rise in the value of the land around it? So what? If I don’t own some of that land, all I get out of it, except for an occasional visit to the park if it’s close to me, is a higher tax bill.

This is the same logic behind public schools: Proponents say that public education leads to an informed citizenry and Better Lives for All. Oh, really? I don’t have kids; why am I obliged to pay for educating someone else’s? My parents were taxed to support public education, but, desiring a decent education for their children (which local public schools, even then, did not provide), sent them to parochial schools, thus paying twice for the same thing.

And what ‘general benefit’ accrues from having the half of the population that are below average in intelligence — and remember, by definition half of the population is below average in intelligence — educated beyond basic literacy and numeracy? Anything that a 90-IQ person is going to be able to do won’t require more than an 8th-grade education (although, granted, graduating from 8th grade these days doesn’t even guarantee that). Putting them through high school, much less college, is just pissing away the taxpayers’ money.

As the cited article illustrates, the people who mostly benefit from public schemes are the ‘bootleggers’ (those who benefit directly — like teachers) and ‘Baptists’ (those who get to feel good about themselves — typically ‘progressives’ and other self-righteous do-gooders). A pox on both of them, I say.

Read it.

Turn about is fair play. I’m still waiting for the Russians and Poles to give back East Prussia.

Read it.

Read it.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison’s curious silence about her 2012 plans have Texas Republicans increasingly convinced she’s rethinking her decision to retire and quietly plodding ahead toward a fourth term.

The uncertainty surrounding her future has frustrated a list of ambitious politicians who watched her declare that she would resign her seat to pursue a primary challenge to Gov. Rick Perry. One year later, after suffering a crushing defeat, she reversed course, citing the need to stay and help her colleagues battle the Obama administration’s policies.

After breaking the 12-year term limit she pledged in 1993….

Politicians lie, and career politicians lie automatically.

Read it.

Banks have been scrambling to find new sources of revenue after a wave of legislation that brought changes to their consumer products. The new rules limit interest rate increases on credit cards, banned many overdraft charges and reduced the amount of money banks receive each time a debit card is swiped. The last move alone could cost Bank of America $2.3 billion a year in revenue, the company has said.

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

Government regulation always increases costs, rarely increased benefits.

Read it.

With around 2.3 million members, and a further 510,000 reserves, China’s People’s Liberation Army is the world’s largest military force, and one that is in the process of rapid modernisation.

Not that anybody in the Obamanation cares — or could do anything about it if they did.

Wakey, wakey.

Read it.

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

This is the Europe that Democrats want us to be more like. No surprise there, either.

Read it.

We have written many times about the Progressive movement and its open hostility toward both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We have also noted that modern progressives have generally had the good political sense to keep their opinions about the Constitution to themselves, beyond whatever critique is implicit in terming it a “living” document that is liable to call forth previously unknown “rights” at any moment.

Today’s New York Times editorializes on the Republican takeover of the House. You could paraphrase the editorial as “wah-wah-wah;” the paper basically cries over its party’s November defeat. But in the course of doing so, the editorialists are surprisingly open about their contempt for the Constitution….

Read it.

Why are so many of the most talented officers now abandoning military life for the private sector? An exclusive survey of West Point graduates shows that it’s not just money. Increasingly, the military is creating a command structure that rewards conformism and ignores merit. As a result, it’s losing its vaunted ability to cultivate entrepreneurs in uniform.

In many respects (weapons, tactics, logistics, training), the Army did transform. But the talent crisis persisted for a simple reason: the problem isn’t cultural. The military’s problem is a deeply anti-entrepreneurial personnel structure. From officer evaluations to promotions to job assignments, all branches of the military operate more like a government bureaucracy with a unionized workforce than like a cutting-edge meritocracy.

The most blatantly anti-entrepreneurial aspect of the Army is the strict time-in-service requirement for various ranks. Consider the mandatory delay for becoming a general. Active-duty officers can retire after 20 years of service. But to be considered for promotion to general requires at least 22 years of service, and that applies to even the most talented and inspiring military officer in the nation.

Read it.

The degeneration of our culture in the name of Political Correctness proceeds apace.

Thanks to the intervention of one Dr. Alan Gribben, American kids will no longer be racist after reading Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and timorous teachers will now feel comfortable assigning a book that once featured 219 instances (according to Gribben) of the word “nigger.” Gribben’s new edition of Huckleberry Finn will excise all those bits that make people feel uncomfortable—because good literature never, ever makes people feel uncomfortable.

Dr Gribben got his PhD from Berkeley, of course.

Read it.

If Morgan Tsvangirai is charged with treason, WikiLeaks will have earned the ignominy of Robert Mugabe’s gratitude

And so, where Mugabe’s strong-arming, torture and assassination attempts have failed to eliminate the leading figure of Zimbabwe’s democratic opposition, WikiLeaks may yet succeed. Twenty years of sacrifice and suffering by Tsvangirai all for naught, as WikiLeaks risks “collateral murder” in the name of transparency.

But, hey, they were just trying to help. After all, it’s not as if these people in Zimbabwe were self-righteous White People, like Assange.

The Other McCain spanks faux-Catholic faux-Conservative Andrew Sullivan.

I know, I know, fish in a barrel, but it’s still funny.

Possibly related: The Department of Health and Human Services has an online calculator to help single mothers determine whether they’ll lose welfare benefits by marrying their baby-daddy.

Because that’s what life is really all about: Maximizing your benefits.

Read it.

Look for … the Union label….

Read it.

Read it.

Message: Stay out of hot air balloons.

Idiot.

I predict that everything that can get worse, will get worse; and some things that you would think couldn’t get worse, will get worse nevertheless.

Take whatever action you think appropriate.

Read it.

Nobody learns anything any more; they just learn how to look it up.

Think of that habit which I and likely everyone reading this succumb to now and then. You are talking with a friend, and can’t remember who that guy was in that movie. Without thinking, you pull out your phone and search. Mystery solved, it was Patrick Swayze. Harmless enough, right? The web in our pocket allows us to settle bar bets and track down trivia with ease. A tiny load off everyone’s mind.

The problem lies with the trend. We’re looking up more things, more often, and not because we’re more curious. It’s because we can’t be bothered to retain even the data that matter to us. The GPS in cars is an advance party of this trend: every couple months we hear of some driver who has followed the GPS to the bottom of a lake, or used a highway as a walking path because it was labeled as such on their phone’s map. My dad, who has driven to visit my brother in Vancouver, B.C., a dozen times, still uses the GPS despite my brother living in the same neighborhood for several years now. When I went up with him a month ago, the GPS route was slightly different, and my dad nearly had a panic attack. I convinced him to take the correct exit, but he was this close to doing something he knew was wrong simply because the map indicated he should.

If these things you’ve collected are important to you, or you found them interesting, why aren’t they inside you? Why aren’t they becoming part of the sea of experiences that makes up your unique intelligence and personality? If you fail to integrate an experience, it was, for all intents and purposes, no better than a dream.

Power Line describes the Crust without actually using the name.

Karl Marx classified people according to their relationship to the means of production. That was, perhaps, a plausible approach in the 19th century. Nowadays, however, it makes more sense to classify people according to their relationship to the trillions of dollars that flow from the productive private sector to the parasitic public sector. One could argue, with a great deal more force than Marx was able to muster, that 21st century America has a ruling class. It consists of those who direct and profit from the trillions of dollars that our government, at its various levels, extracts from working Americans. The footsoldiers of today’s ruling class are the public employees who command ever-increasing salaries and benefits and who, through their unions, provide much of the money and many of the votes that keep our ruling class in power.

Read it. And weep.

This is the Crust in all it’s glory. Child of divorce marries child of divorce, sees their kids’ grandparents as a resource to be exploited (and who could blame her?), has at most a shallow commitment to marriage as an institution or family as anything more than people who just happen to be ‘related’ to each other by a roll of the dice and the quirks of the legal system.

Oh, and lives in New York, writes poems for a living (or so it seems), and exposes the Crust for the New York Times. We can’t forget that.

Read it.

Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away….

Read it.

Even those of us who know better refer to copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and other monopolies as “IP.” Some of us excuse this by saying “IP” stands for “Imaginary Property” (the word imaginary is weaker than intellectual) or “Intellectual Privilege” (privilege is much weaker than property), but neither of those phrases have the power of intellectual property. On the other hand, they keep the initials IP, which is good – they can be used wherever “IP” is. But we need to use bigger guns. What this problem calls for is a word of the same potency as property – one that sticks in the head so that once the association is made, it can never be lost.

That word is pooperty.

I love it when people agree with me.

Read it.

How would you like to have to pay a license to own (not use, mind you, just own) a TV?

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California.

Steve Sailer kicks over a rock.

Any time a student is sent out of the classroom to maintain order — whether to the dean’s office, to after school detention, to home for a suspension, or out the door on an expulsion — can be counted and thus used as evidence in a disparate impact discrimination lawsuit against a deep-pocketed school district. Lawsuit settlements typically require that voluminous statistics then be maintained and published on disciplinary actions by race in order to facilitate future disparate impact lawsuits.

Teach for America’s model for who will make a good teacher is A) got into an exclusive college (i.e., smart), B) got good grades there (i.e., hard-working), and C) has a demonstrated track record of leadership accomplishment (i.e., charismatic alpha personality).

That’s swell, but smart, hard-working people with commanding personalities, such as Steve Jobs, James Cameron, Bill Belichik, Warren Buffett, Margaret Thatcher, and the like sometimes have better things to do than be schoolteachers. We need to be thinking instead about how our institutions can provide teachers who are not paragons with the support they need to do their jobs.