Read it.

After all, who wouldn’t want a murderer delivering his mail?

I am not making this up.

Read it.

In August a team of heavily armed Orange County, Florida, sheriff’s deputies raided several black- and Hispanic-owned barbershops in the Orlando area. There were more raids in September and October. According to the Orlando Sentinel, barbers and customers were held at gunpoint, some in handcuffs, while police turned the shops upside down. A total of nine shops were raided, and 37 people were arrested.

By all appearances, these raids were drug sweeps. Shop owners told the Sentinel police asked where they were hiding illegal drugs and weapons. But in the end, 34 of the 37 arrests were for “barbering without a licence,” a misdemeanor for which only three people have ever served jail time in Florida. Two arrests were for misdemeanor marijuana possession. Just one person was arrested on felony drug and weapon charges.

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Geez, seems as if I’ve been waiting forever for that damned thing to fall over….

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California’s budget crisis has highlighted one of the most important tax issues of our time: a growing dependence on wealthy taxpayers for government revenue.

In a column in yesterday’s Sacramento Bee, Dan Walters cited the need to reduce “the corrosive dependence on income taxes from a handful of wealthy people by broadening the tax base.”

Good luck with that.

In 2005, the richest 13.5% of California taxpayers (or those earning more than $100,000) paid 83% of all income taxes. Capital gains from the top 5% of taxpayers accounted for $100 billion out of the $111 billion in total capital gains reported.

No shit.

What governments need to do (aside from structural cost cuts, of course) is recognize the boom-and-bust nature of today’s wealthy and save money during the booms so they can spend during the busts. That way they can smooth out the inevitable tax swings.

Good luck with that, too.

Steve Sailer gets all the fun stuff.

Read it.

Can’t say that I blame him.

The surgeon’s actions, which are now under investigation, have triggered widespread debate in Germany over just where doctors can or cannot draw an ethical line.

Seems to me they ought to be able to draw it wherever they want to.

Read it.

Apparently there’s a program in Britain that pays kids to stay in school.

I’d love to get in on that….

Read it.

Of course — Fella and Ursula.

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Michael Allison, a 41-year-old backyard mechanic from southeastern Illinois, faces up to 75 years in prison for an act most people don’t realize is a crime: recording public officials.

Allison’s predicament is an extreme example of a growing and disturbing trend. As citizens increase their scrutiny of law enforcement officials through technologies such as cell phones, miniature cameras, and devices that wirelessly connect to video-sharing sites such as YouTube and LiveLeak, the cops are increasingly fighting back with force and even jail time—and not just in Illinois. Police across the country are using decades-old wiretapping statutes that did not anticipate iPhones or Droids, combined with broadly written laws against obstructing or interfering with law enforcement, to arrest people who point microphones or video cameras at them. Even in the wake of gross injustices, state legislatures have largely neglected the issue. Meanwhile, technology is enabling the kind of widely distributed citizen documentation that until recently only spy novelists dreamed of. The result is a legal mess of outdated, loosely interpreted statutes and piecemeal court opinions that leave both cops and citizens unsure of when recording becomes a crime.

Read it.

With the exception of, perhaps, Texas governor Rick Perry, no public official wants to publicly admit an obvious fact: The United States of America will likely be forced to invade Mexico. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.  The question then becomes: What to do with Mexico after we invade it and wipe out the drug cartels (as much as can be). Does the United States merely return Mexico to a nation state of corrupt politicians, failed economic policies, and lawlessness, or do we annex Mexico and turn it into the 51st state?

The Mexican government has, so far, been unable to curtail the violence and it is likely that, without intervention, the country will become far more deadly than Afghanistan prior to 9/11. Worse, Islamic terrorists have been long suspected of using Mexico as a gateway into the U.S.

He that hath an ear to hear, let him hear.

Read it.

These numbers are big enough that we’re not seeing a clsuter of arty comp lit major-novelist-waiters picking up some cash while living their dream in a garret. The stats show people who probably wouldn’t have gone to college in another era, responded to incentives like cheap loans and went to college in the ’90s or ’00s, graduated at 22- or 23-years-old, and then got the same gigs they would have been qualified for at 18.

Read it.

The European Commission has been condemned for spending three million euros hosting a lavish anti-poverty development conference for 6,000 people in Brussels.

It’s all about the Crust.

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Chicago insists a legal weapon permit holder must have a signed affidavit from a firearms instructor affirming that he or she completed a training course, including at least one hour of gun range training. Chicago simultaneously prevents its residents from meeting that criterion in the city they live in. Yes, that’s right: The city demands gun range training to own a gun yet bans gun ranges at the same time. Well, not all gun ranges. The already existing ranges for government employees at the local Postal Service, Federal Reserve (!), and border authority offices are still in business.

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As gubernatorial candidates, Republicans Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio campaigned hard against federal stimulus money for high-speed rail projects in their states, dismissing it as useless big-government spending that would cost their states much more in the long run than the job gains they’d see in the short run.

Both men won. Today, they faced the consequences.

The Department of Transportation yanked $1.2 billion from Wisconsin and Ohio high-speed rail efforts and redirected it to other states that want to move forward, especially California, which got half that money, $624 million. Unlike the voters of those two Midwestern states, Californians elected a Democrat, Jerry Brown, as their next governor.

You cross the Big Boys, they punish you.

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Today Susan Collins continued her career long practice of duplicity by reneging on her agreement with her caucus and voting for cloture on the pressing subject of legalizing buggery in the Armed Forces. A vote that failed.

The problem with our moderates is not only that they don’t believe in anything not even in the sanctity of their own pledge to their caucus.

That’s what being a RINO is all about: A Democrat in a Clever Plastic Disguise who gets to pretend to be a Republican in public, being sure of a welcome from those idiots in the Republican party who think that labels actually determine the nature of a thing rather than the other way around. The people who need to be expunged are not the RINOs but those ‘pragmatists’ who tolerate them.

Read it.

If even Slate magazine sees it as a problem, you know it’s really a problem.

This immense imbalance has political consequences. When President Obama appears Wednesday on Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters (9 p.m. ET), he will be there not just to encourage youngsters to do their science homework but also to reinforce the idea that Democrats are the party of science and rationality. And why not? Most scientists are already on his side. Imagine if George W. Bush had tried such a stunt—every major newspaper in the country would have run an op-ed piece by some Nobel Prize winner asking how the guy who prohibited stem-cell research and denied climate change could have the gall to appear on a program that extols the power of scientific thinking.

Indeed. The Left prides itself on being the smartest guys in the room, even while embracing obvious loonies like environmentalists and animal-rights wackos.

Paul Carr at TechCrunch has an unconventional perspective.

Both the Pentagon Papers and Watergate involved scandalous information that almost nobody knew. “Cablegate”, on the other hand, involved cables that were routinely shared between members of the US government and armed forces, and trusted figures from friendly nations.

Thousands – maybe millions – of people had access to the cables – which, as openness goes, is pretty impressive. Hell, even a lowly Private like Bradley Manning – the junior soldier with a grudge against the American military who allegedly leaked the documents to Wikileaks – had access to them. Now, however, thanks to Wikileaks, all of that is likely to stop. What’s also likely to stop is the routine documenting of casual conversations, the candid sharing of opinions between allies – and a whole bunch of other acts of openness which if Wikileaks actually meant a word it said, the organisation should be all for. And for… what? So that millions of us who had no real business – beyond a basic prurient interest – in knowing what conversations are being had behind closed diplomatic doors could feel important. Well, great. Responsible openness’ loss is a few million busybodies’ gain.

Read it.

This actually says something very profound. The one who is ‘challenging socially-constructed hair norms’ is, in technical terms, a ‘dork’. Norms exist for a reason. Those who ‘challenge’ them aren’t being bold and independent, they’re being sociopathic. Like tattoos and piercings, they make a fashion statement: ‘I’m on the lunatic fringe, and I intend remaining on the lunatic fringe. Feel free to ignore me, unless I’m in a group, in which case I represent an algae bloom in the gene pool’.

Read it.

More hand-wringing about the disappearance of things of no possible interest to anyone whose academic career didn’t depend on it.

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No doubt Thomas Friedman, famous New York Times columnist, is standing by to cheer them on. After all, the Chinese know so much more about democracy and good government than Americans do.

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In what Japan said was an unprecedented show of force two ‘submarine hunter’ Ilyushin-38 jets from Russia’s Pacific Fleet circled the biggest joint US-Japanese military exercise in history for several hours in an apparent attempt to gather intelligence.

Memo to the Crust: Just because they aren’t (formally) Communists any more doesn’t mean that they’re our friends.

Read it.

Certainly that’s how it turned out after this year’s general election in Australia. That resulted, as over here, in a hung parliament, the first for more than 70 years. As here, the incumbent Labour Party lost the vote by most meaningful measurements (they ended up with the same number of seats as their conservative rivals, and under Australia’s version of the AV system a considerably smaller share of first preferences). The three independent MPs who found themselves kingmakers all came from rural constituencies, whose electors appeared much happier with the idea of a centre-right government than a centre-left one. But that did not stop two of the three from throwing in their lot with Labour, allowing the seemingly humiliated Julia Gillard to remain as prime minister. The rationale was straightforward: they were able to get more out of her, in the form of money, jobs and all the other little titbits of power that a government has at its disposal. They also believed that her relative weakness made her a more trustworthy partner: she was less likely to cut and run, because she had much more reason to be frightened of the voters. And luckily, being politicians (and Australians), they seem to have been unembarrassable.

Read it.

Nothing brings back the sixties like students getting kicked away from the public trough.

The occupation began at a ‘What Next?’ meeting on the day of the second student march when a group of UCL students voted to take over the Jeremy Bentham Room (students at SOAS had gone into occupation two days before). A general meeting was then held to draft their demands. The most important, and most often repeated, is that UCL’s management issue a statement ‘condemning all cuts to higher education’. They also want things they might be able to get: for the university to pay UCL cleaners the London living wage, to bring outsourced support staff in-house and to change the composition of the university council to get rid of the majority of corporate, non-UCL members (they’d like a quarter each of management, students, tutors and support staff). Decisions are made by consensus – ‘better than democracy’ a first-year undergraduate explained – at two lengthy daily meetings. Students are divided into working groups according to their talents – IT, media, process (analysis of how the occupation itself is working) – but there’s no leader, everyone insisted. An email account, Facebook page, website and Twitter feed were set up overnight and messages of support started to come in from people like Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky and Billy Bragg; comedians came to tell jokes, bands to play, novelists to read their books, tutors to give seminars. On 29 November, the day before the third march, they sent a delegation to protest outside the Oxford Circus Topshop about Philip Green’s alleged tax evasion. And on the day of the march itself, another delegation was sent to Trafalgar Square, while tweeters back at the occupation offered tea and biscuits to anyone running away from the police.

I wonder how they would cope if they were just left to sit and rot for a year or two? It’s not as if anybody needs them or their campus buildings. They might even serve as a tourist attraction. ‘Come see the student demonstrators! Like Madame Tussaud’s, only they move and smell bad!’

Proof positive that environmentalism is just some wierdo pagan religion.

Does this raise your consciousness about how mankind is harming the planet? Or does it just creep you out? We report, you decide.

Check it out.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Yeah, that U.N. really helps.

Read it.

Read it.

She wrestled with accepting a smaller settlement than she considered fair. Then a lawyer referred her to Balance Point Divorce Funding, a new Beverly Hills lender that offers to cover the cost of breaking up — paying a lawyer, searching for hidden assets, maintaining a lifestyle — in exchange for a share of the winnings.

In October, Balance Point agreed to invest more than $200,000 in Ms. Pont’s case.

“It’s given me hope,” Ms. Pont said. “I don’t view it as a loan; I view it as an investment in my future. They are helping me to get what is rightfully mine.”

Read it.

The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial “Copenhagen accord”, the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.

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

It’s bad enough that the U.S. government is using junk science to destroy the American economy; nothing will do, apparently, except that the rest of the world has to be screwed as well.

Todd Zywicki has some good points.

Justice Scalia notes (in a Matter of Interpretation if I recall correctly) that what is striking about the 19th Amendment is how quaint it seems that in order to give women the right to vote it was thought that you actually had to amend the Constitution in order to bring that result about.  Today, of course, someone would just file a lawsuit and have the judges order that result.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

You are a state governor dealing with a strike of state employees. To end it, you must offer them something. One possibility is to raises their wages. Another is to agree to a more generous pension plan.

Higher wages will come, at least for the next few years, out of your budget—and there are a lot of other things you would like to spend the money on. Higher pensions will be paid, almost entirely, from the budget of later governors. It looks like an easy choice. And, since you aren’t the one paying, there is no good reason for you to be stingy in your offer, especially if being generous might end the strike sooner and buy you future political support from the currently striking union. Follow out the logic of the situation and one can see why many U.S. states currently face serious budget problems, in part due to very generous employee pension plans.

Read it.

For some reason I just can’t see a language as an appropriate subject for a ‘major’. I suppose they actually mean the literature of the language, as ‘English Major’ is actually shorthand for ‘English Lit Major’.

Read it.

Al Qaeda has gotten to the sharks.

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It’s been said that, as a productive civilization devolves, society will become ruled, not by law, but by special interest groups—each competing with one another to seize control in order to feed on the carcass of society. The more a civilization moves toward collectivism and devolves, the more citizenry will turn to tribalism—fighting over, like a pack of jackals, whatever scraps are left (or thrown to it by an all-powerful government). Eventually, society will get to the point that it will be controlled by whichever tribe (or pack) has the greater number, the sharpest teeth, the biggest club or largest gun.

The Other McCain speaks for me.

He lost me at “not”:

“We are not going to deport 11 million people,” Gingrich said Thursday as he kicked off his first forum on Latino issues. “There has to be some zone between deportation and amnesty.”

We are also not going to be able to kill or capture every terrorist in the world, but we don’t go around proclaiming that in public, do we?

What Newt is saying here is simple: Surrender.

The problem with politicians is that they get hung up on practicality and always let it trump principle. Whether we can deport 11 million people is a speculation without any evidence to support a determination one way or another (How will we know unless we try?); the point being lost sight of here is that it’s not a binary decision, i.e. the choice is not between ‘deport none of them’ and ‘deport all of them’, with nothing in between. Let’s deport as many as we can catch, and live with the fact that every one we deport makes our situation better.

Read it.

Thieves in Britain are using Google Earth to target lead roofs on Church of England buildings to sell on the lucrative metals market, a Church spokesman said. About 8,000 insurance claims have been made for lead theft worth about 23 million pounds ($35.93 million) during the past three years, Church estates commissioner Tony Baldry said during a debate in Westminster Hall this week.

Quasimodo is never around when you need him.

On the other hand, if some guy is on top of your church stripping the lead off of it, isn’t that going to be rather obvious?

Read it.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to delegates gathered in Cancun, Mexico, noting that Ixchel was not only goddess of the moon, but also “the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving. May she inspire you — because today, you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change, using both reason and creativity as your tools.”

Which just underscores the notion that environmentalism is just a form of neo-paganism. Imagine the uproar if a U.N. official had said a Christian or Jewish (or Hindu or Buddhist) prayer? (Not that a U.N. official would do such a thing, of course).

Read it.

AIDS forgotten? Sure, like Sarah Palin is forgotten.

Koop’s 1988 “Understanding AIDS” report, mailed to every household in the nation, was aimed at democratizing a disease with specific  risk groups caused by extremely specific risk factors. A heterosexual couple appears in the first picture, with the first captioned image that of what  appears to be a lesbian saying AIDS is also a woman’s disease. Lesbian-to-lesbian sexual contact as a risk factor? “To date there are no confirmed cases,” declared a 2008 CDC report 18 years later.

Today American black males have 30 times the HIV infection rate of white females.

Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are the nation’s sixth and 14th-leading causes of death of death respectively, yet HIV/AIDS gets 34 times and 25 times more per fatality respectively.

And no, it’s not homophobic to point out that AIDS is essentially 100% preventable while none of these other diseases is preventable at all.

Heterosexual men have a greater chance of getting breast cancer than AIDS. So I care about AIDS the same way I care about skate-board-induced quadriplegia: Dude, it’s your Own Damed Fault.

And guess who it’s being hinted should pay for prescriptions for the nation’s entire population that engages in high-risk activities? Yes, give and give generously. Uncle Sam insists.

Why such grotesquely favorable treatment for AIDS? Partly it’s simple inertia. But much is because a huge AIDS bureaucracy now exists, with vast numbers of organizations and their employees voraciously feeding at various international, national, state and privately funded troughs.

Read it.

No one other than Barack Obama and the Kremlin care about START.

But we should. We should also care that the Senate GOP, thanks to the “skillful” negotiations of Jon Kyl (R-AZ), have decided to sell us down the river to Moscow in order to temporarily avoid the Obama tax increase.

The sad part is that we could get the Bush tax cuts extended even without selling out our national security.

Actually, one could just set up a template ‘Senate GOP Sells out X for Y’ and run with it pretty much every day, substituting appropriate values for X and Y.

The problem with compromising with ‘progressives’ is as follows:

What they get: They get to do A.

What we get: They don’t get to do B, C, D, E, and F.

Thus each ‘compromise’ leaves us worse off and them farther toward their objective, until they win and we lose.

Let’s not even go there.

Read it.

Rep.-elect Tim Scott (R., S.C.) said Wednesday that he’s not going to join the Congressional Black Caucus.

“While I recognize the efforts of the CBC and appreciate their invitation for me to caucus with them, I will not be joining at this time,” Mr. Scott said in a statement. “My campaign was never about race.”

Thereby cementing the CBC’s position as an explicitly Democrat organization. (We already knew that it was an explicitly racist organization.)

Read it.

Well, that’s a relief.

The ones who do hate the rich, the article explains, are journalists and professors jealous that their college and private school classmates are making so much more money than they are.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

Bloomberg reports:

Citigroup Inc., recovering from its $45 billion bailout in 2008, is in advanced talks to hire former White House Budget Director Peter Orszag, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Orszag, 41, may take a job in the New York-based firm’s investment-banking division, the people said, declining to be identified because the discussions are private. An announcement may come as early as today, one of the people said.

Notice that he’s going to take “a job.” It doesn’t tell us what kind of job because it doesn’t really have to. The important thing is that he’s on the payroll. What skills does he bring to the table? He’s a smart guy but one thing he brings is his ability to call people in the White House and the Fed and have them return his call.

Read it.

And yet: Which of us has not been tempted to do the same?

Read it.

‘Stand back, everyone. I take very large steps.’

My question is: How come they all dress like girls?

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Mr. Obama is sending his Attorney General to Switzerland to lobby for the World Cup. Yes, apparently the most important job for the American Attorney General is to make sure we get a soccer tournament in 2022.

Check it out.

A red-faced headteacher has apologised after a school report containing 14 spelling mistakes and grammatical errors was sent to a parent by a form tutor. Plain English campaigners slammed the error-laden email and said the teacher should be sent back to school herself. The school report errors are revealed just days after the government’s education secretary Michael Gove called for teachers to crackdown on poor spelling and grammar.

Apparently British teachers aren’t any better than American ones.

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Ever since Willett, there have been two groups of people who are unhappy with the existing arrangement. Some would like to return to GMT, the country’s natural time zone, all year round – but they have never put forward legislation to this end and such a move is, in any case, no longer permitted under an EU directive.

Sounds like a good reason not to belong to the EU.

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It’s no wonder wind energy is so expensive; it’s not the cost of erecting the windmills, it’s the cost of hiring all the former government officials to get the windmills approved! The conclusion I reached about the Maine situation bears repeating in the Rhode Island case: If this were all being done by an oil company there’d probably be a much bigger uproar, but because it’s wind, it has an image as “clean” energy.

Read it.

Over 60,000 people have been hit in the past few hours on Facebook by a scam which claims that after installing an app called ePrivacy you can see who checked your profile. Needless to say the app does not work. Instead it just lets the scammer access your profile and post “OMG OMG OMG… I cant believe this actually works!” to your wall, with a link to the app, thus spreading it further.

Yet another excellent reason to avoid Facebook.

Read it.

The troubled “Hobbit” film project has become mired in a race row after reports that a British woman of Pakistani heritage was told she was not white enough to take part as an extra.

This is not a matter of ‘race’ (what ‘race’ are Pakistanis?), but one of ‘color’ (for which ‘race’ is the politically fashionable surrogate), and this requirement is directly related to the job. Next they’ll be demanding that Othello be played by a lesbian Latino in order to promote ‘diversity’.

She has started a Facebook group called “Hire Hobbits of all colours! Say no to Hobbit racism!”

What an idiot. She ought to be disallowed because hobbits aren’t as shit-stupid as she appears to be.

And 5′ is not ‘the perfect height to play one of Tolkein’s hobbits’; the perfect height to play one of Tolkein’s hobbits is 3′, which any ass who had read the books would know. It’s common these days for journalists to write about stuff concerning which they are grossly ignorant, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to put up with it.