Read it.

When government has power, those who want the government to exercise that power in their favor will organize and attempt to get that done. This is what ‘regulatory capture’ is all about: Eventually a regulatory agency is staffed with people who are all on the side of the industry that it ought to be regulating, and regulations get promulgated that advance the interests of the major players (those with the deep pockets) rather than the public or the smaller fry.

Read it.

For self-described conservatives, it is easy to be pro-life, pro-troops, and pro-tax cuts. In most races, that is not how you separate the wheat from the chaff. You separate them on the basis of their belief in limited government—in short, do they think that government should do stuff. Period. And there is no better bellwether of politician’s proclivities toward limited government than whether they request and defend earmarks.

Read it.

I’m well aware that both parties do gerrymandering, though the Democrats have been “compelled” to do it by their evident need to keep urban areas together, where their majorities are reliable.  That too bears some consideration.  Why should there be so severe a divide in our country between rural and urban areas?  It would be interesting to find out how many districts with a city of more than 250,000 are “red,” and, conversely, how many districts without a city of more than 50,000 are “blue.”  I’ll have to ferret out the information.  Off the top of my head, I can say that Cincinnati, Columbus, Omaha, Wichita, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and Fort Worth are “red” cities.  I’m not sure if there are any others.  If you look at the national map colored for Democrat and Republican districts, you see a lot of little points of blue in lakes of red, and immediately you can tell, there’s El Paso, Minneapolis, Dallas, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Nashville, Louisville, New Orleans, Sacramento, and so forth.

The centralization of government is a boon to the centralization of business and the centralization of agriculture.  So, over time, the towns produced fewer and fewer of their own goods, and the people living in cities were farther and farther removed from the food they consumed and the natural resources they used.  The intimate connection between the city and its neighboring countryside was attenuated.

Think of the doctors, lawyers, social workers, teachers, realtors, and technocrats whose livelihoods in one way or another are based upon the family breakdown that characterizes our cities.  Or perform the thought experiment in reverse.  Ask, “What would happen if people in our cities married before they had children, stayed married, attended church, raised responsible and noble children, provided for all of their most basic needs and for most of those, like celebrations, that really sweeten human life?  Who would be out of work?”

Read it.

Vanity Fair looks at northern Mexico.

During the past several years, drug-related violence in northern Mexico has soared to unprecedented levels as drug cartels wage war on one another—and on anyone deemed uncooperative, unfriendly, or otherwise inconvenient. There have been more than 28,000 killings since 2006. And, inexorably, the violence is spreading northward, into the United States—whose appetite for drugs is largely responsible for the present tragedy. Ed Vulliamy is a writer for The Guardian and The Observer who has traveled the length of the U.S.-Mexico border to report on the breakdown of civil society and the outbreak of the drug wars. His extraordinary new book, Amexica: War Along the Borderline, will be published next month. Here is an excerpt.

Perhaps we might want to bring some of those fine young men back from Afghanistan and put them along our southern border; you know, just in case.

And maybe, oh, I don’t know, build a wall or something.

Read it.

I wish we could sell them to the French.

Read it.

Read it.

No such thing as liberal fascism? Listen to Nanny Bloomberg for a week and tell me that again with a straight face. (Yeah, I’m looking at YOU, Charlie Stross.)

Public health puritans, appalled at the spread of excess weight, think the government should forcefully guide our dining choices. And when it comes to policy, they are getting a place at the table.

Last week, the San Francisco board of supervisors voted to hose the Happy Meal. No longer would McDonald’s (or any other restaurant) be allowed to provide a free toy with a meal that exceeds specified amounts of fat, sugar, and calories. If the folks at the Golden Arches want to offer a Batman action figure, it will have to be flanked by fruits and vegetables.

The impulse to overrule nutritional choices exists elsewhere too. In his last two budgets, New York’s Democratic Gov. David Paterson proposed a tax on soda.

High-calorie food is not one of those substances that presents a mortal threat to innocent bystanders. Guzzle a liter of Fanta, and you can still be trusted behind the wheel of a car. Walk by a KFC, and you don’t have to worry about secondhand fat.

Read it.

Next time you see a moronic label on a common household utensil, you’ll know why it’s there.

Family members had been concerned about Fiddler because of her past drug use.

Earlier this year they had tried to get her parental rights revoked before the birth of her third child.

The young mother had been arrested in April for taking drugs when she was four months pregnant.

The infant’s father, Benjamin Trammel, said he can’t believe his girlfriend deliberately killed their daughter.

Well, that’s one problem right there.

Read it.

That’s the way it is with these thing, you know. A lot could happen, but almost nothing must happen. Still, his argument was sobering. Basically we are headed toward a peak of sunspot activity in 2012 or so that could well trigger a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) that could take out half or more of all geosynchronous satellites, not just GPS. No more satellite navigation, no more cable TV.

CME’s come in various sizes and velocities. CME’s aren’t intrinsically aimed at the Earth and could just as easily dissipate into empty space. Many CME’s don’t even make it as far as the Earth. But if conditions are right, CME’s can do a lot of damage. A CME hit Quebec in 1989 causing a nine-hour blackout and $4.3 billion in damages to the Canadian power grid. The mother of all CME’s in 1859 took down every telegraph in the world, causing arcing, fires, and melted wires in the equipment. Imagine what something like that would do to your PC or cellphone!

Read it.

After donating upwards of 700 toys a year in the past, it will have to discontinue the program in future since it can’t afford the third-party testing required under the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, sponsored by area members of Congress Bobby Rush and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.).

Read it.

Cancer patients are being “left in the dark” about life-extending drugs that are not available on the NHS, charities said last night.

So much for the supriority of government-provided health care.

William Saletan, in Slate magazine, makes a good case.

But if health care did cost the party its majority, so what? The bill was more important than the election.

If your goal is ideological, then it doesn’t matter whether you survive the battle, so long as your ideological accomplishment remains in place.

The big picture isn’t about winning or keeping power. It’s about using it.

We still have Obamacare and a multi-trillion-dollar expansion of the Federal debt. And those aren’t likely to go away any time soon; trimmed, perhaps, but still there. Call it ‘Ratcheting Socialism’ if you will.

A party that loses a House seat can win it back two years later, as Republicans just proved. But a party that loses a legislative fight against a middle-class health care entitlement never restores the old order. Pretty soon, Republicans will be claiming the program as their own. Indeed, one of their favorite arguments against this year’s health care bill was that it would cut funding for Medicare. Now they’re pledging to rescind those cuts. In 30 years, they’ll be accusing Democrats of defunding Obamacare.

I wish I could say that he’s wrong. But, given the record of the Republican Party during my lifetime, I’m very much afraid that he’s right. The problem with being ‘a conservative’ is that what there is to be conserved keeps moving to the Left.

Read it.

When even Slate magazine notices, now that’s corruption.

Read it.

Read it.

On Wednesday, after workers represented by the International Association of Machinists voted down a contract offer for the second time, they learned that their employer was not bluffing about moving their jobs to Mississippi.

Read it.

Read it.

Dude, this is what minions and henchmen are for. Don’t you read? Or watch movies? What a maroon. If I had a billion, security would be one of the biggest line items on my budget.

Read it.

Last year, we had a discussion about all of the various transit authorities that had been threatening various app makers for creating rather useful train schedule apps for mobile devices. Now you might think (if you thought) that transit groups would be thrilled with such apps, which would make taking the train easier and more convenient. And, really, when you realize that others would be building these apps that get more people to take the train, without you even having to pay them as developers, it sounds absolutely great for the folks who make the trains run. If they thought. But, apparently, thinking is not a pre-requisite for some of these jobs, and many of them couldn’t think beyond “those apps use our data” and freaked out. In some cases it was because the train operators wanted to license the data. In some cases it was because they were offering or building their own, competing, app.

It’s all about the power, Larry.

Read it.

Identity politics is alive and well among the Voices of the Crust.

How much Congress is straight, white, or male matters only to people who ought not to be allowed to vote in the first place.

Read it.

The measure, known as Initiative 1098, went down in flames, with nearly two-thirds of voters against. The ballot measure would have taxed individuals earning more than $200,000 a year or households earning more than $400,000, but cut property taxes and taxes on small businesses. The money raised was to go to schools and health care.

Most people appreciate that when rich people call for higher taxes, there’s some motivation behind it other than increasing government revenue. After all, there’s nothing preventing a rich person who thinks his taxes are too low from just writing a check to the government. No, what they really want is to keep people who aren’t rich already from becoming rich, as they did. After all, of you tax Bill Gates Sr at 50%, or even 90%, he’s still rich; but somebody who’s doing well with his own small business can’t absorb that kind of hit.

The death tax (which Bill Gates Sr famously also supports) operates on the same principles; Really Rich People can afford accountants and tax lawyers that will avoid most of it; a well-to-do farmer or small business owner can’t afford that kind of expertise, so that even if they fight off the IRS vultures during their lifetimes they won’t be able to pass what they’ve earned on to their kids.

So when you hear rich people advocate tax hikes, or bad-mouth tax cuts, ask yourself why this guy isn’t just giving more money to the government voluntarily, rather than calling for increased burdens on everybody. (Yeah, I’m looking at you, Bill Clinton.)

Read it.

Why college isn’t for everyone. And he’s certainly right on the money about law school; I’ve often wished I could get a refund.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

This happens in every close election. It happened in Washington State in the 2002 Gubernatorial Rossi-Gregoire race – Rossi won the first and second recounts, with King County Democrats finding more and more votes until Gregoire finally won – on the third recount. At which point, WA newspapers began calling on Rossi to accept the “results” and concede.

They tried to get car trunk ballots added to the tally in Ohio in 2004. They successfully got them added multiple times in the Minnesota 2008 Coleman-Franken race and a myriad of races in between.

Each time, the Democrats, their special interest groups, and their friends in the Press, from local newspapers up to the alphabet soup networks have shrieked that Republican objections to the counting of votes from “lost” ballot boxes miraculously found by Democratic activists in their closets and car trunks a week after the election which – “shockingly” – always overturn Republican leads, is because Republicans want to “suppress” the vote.

Read it.

Students and professors at the University of Manitoba are rallying around a math professor who has been suspended for three months without pay after he took legal action to overturn the university’s decision to award a PhD to a student who hadn’t met all the requirements.

Gábor Lukács said the U of M is demeaning the reputation of other PhD students and the professors who teach them. “The shadow of suspicion that the present case casts on all other, hard-working students who did fulfil their requirements bothers me a lot,” Lukács said.

Lukács said the U of M awarded a PhD in mathematics in October to an individual who lacked the academic requirements, who failed a critical exam twice, and was then informed he didn’t have to take the exam.

Standards? In a modern university? What’s up with that?

Read it.

Formed in 1926, Pontiac made cars for the working class until a sales slump in the 1950s nearly killed it. GM revived the brand by connecting it to auto racing. From then on, each Pontiac sales boom was driven by speed.

The brand’s most storied muscle car, the GTO, came about when some GM engineers took a small car called the Tempest and put a powerful V8 engine under the hood. The letters stood for “Gran Turismo Omologato,” Italian for “ready to race.”

Read it.

Read it.

Most of Mexico’s violence and corruption has as much to do with our war on drugs than anything indigenous. It is thus preventable with a change of U.S. policy. This is not only in Mexico’s interest but ours as well: the drug-related violence has already begun to spill over into the United States.

Huh. So it’s our fault that people attempt to make money by breaking our laws. I agree that it’s preventable with a change in U.S. policy: If our policy were to execute anybody caught with illegal drugs–shoot them right there in the street–then the problem would be much reduced. But I somehow don’t think that’s what they had in mind.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, does a public service.

Oddly, the front page of the A&L section is dominated by a huge black and white photograph showing the cracked, cratered, pock-marked surface of an asteroid. Taken by the Cassini space probe, no doubt … Oh, no, wait a minute; it’s actually a close-up photograph of Keith Richards.

Second lead: “Taylor Swift is Angry, Darn It.” Who she? Can I be bothered to find out? Nah.

What else? “In a new column, a defense of women’s right to long hair, even if it’s gray.” I can feel my will to live draining away. Let’s move on.

Read it.

One reason why your convenience-store-clerk job requires a college degree.

Read it.

Hey, live in a dictatorship, that’s what happens. This is God giving you a hint that it’s time to leave.

Mr Chavez argues his administration is doing everything it can to reduce violent crime.

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

Read it.

The California-based motorcycle club, whose fearsome reputation includes the sudden and brutal application of trademark lawyers, believes the dressmakers, and its retailers, have overstepped the mark with a series of clothes and accessories featuring a skull and wings death head design.

Trademark? I guess they don’t make gangs like they used to.

Read it.

Going by her picture, I’d say that she gives ‘white trash’ a bad name.

But I suppose Farmville will do that to you.

Read it.

The entire police force of a small northern Mexican town quit after gunmen attacked their recently inaugurated headquarters, according to local reports on Wednesday.

Los Ramones Mayor Santos Salinas said nobody was injured in Monday night’s attack, during which gunmen fired more than 1,000 bullets at the building’s facade, according to Noroeste newspaper’s website. Six grenades, of which three detonated, were also flung at the building, the newspaper reported.

I guess that the Bad Guys are winning.

Read it.

Speaking Spanish, our captain told us, “The majority of the people from this town are in the United States.”  They sent back remittances, which explained the remodeled homes, the satellite dishes, the schoolchildren buying ice cream.

Charles Murray follows up on his smackdown of the Crust.

The thesis of the piece is that a New Elite has come into existence that is more segregated from mainstream American society than elites of the past—not “elite” in the sense of wealthy bluebloods from Beacon Hill, but “elite” in the sense of the people who run the most important media outlets, the executives who run the nation’s leading companies and financial institutions, the academicians who teach at the leading universities, and politicians and administrators in senior positions in government.

What Mencius Moldbug calls ‘the Cathedral’ and what I refer to as ‘the Crust’. Welcome to the party, Dr. Murray. Took you long enough.

Some readers have responded by saying that there are lots of different “mainstreams” in American life, and the white working class doesn’t understand the black middle class or Latino farm workers or the New Elite any more than the New Elite understands them. Absolutely true. But only one of those groups shapes legislation, crafts regulations, litigates constitutional jurisprudence, and in other ways has the power to affect profoundly the lives of their fellow citizens. I don’t care if truck drivers can’t empathize with the priorities of Yale economics professors. I do care if Yale economics professors (or producers of the News Hour or the Secretary of Commerce or employers of thousands of workers) haven’t a basis in their own life experiences for understanding the priorities of truck drivers.

Read it.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

I can assure you, it’s not my fault.

Read it.

In yesterday’s New York Times, University of Florida law professor and former Air Force officer Diane Mazur seeks to explode the “myth” that Ivy League universities have banned Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs from their campuses. This myth, she argues, is a convenient “fiction” that “lets the military (and to some extent, the universities) off the hook when it comes to the growing distance between civil and military America.”

However, in her haste to hold the military accountable, Mazur goes too easy on elite schools and their faculties. Her main argument is that if there were a ban against ROTC at Ivy schools, the military would have already punished the offenders under the Solomon Amendment, which allows the government to deny federal funding to universities if they bar either ROTC or military recruiters from campus. This is simply not persuasive. First, the military has made clear that it would prefer, for a variety of reasons, to wait to be invited back to campuses rather than strong-arming ROTC’s presence via Solomon. Second, university presidents certainly understand the current situation as a ban against on-campus ROTC. Harvard University President Drew G. Faust, for instance, has repeatedly stated that ROTC is officially unwelcome on campus so long as “don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) remains policy. Columbia University’s Lee Bollinger has made similar statements.

‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ is, of course, merely a convenient excuse; if the military were to allow homosexuals to serve openly, the academic Crust would come up with some other specious rationalization.

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.

Read it.

Which immediately tells you that it’s a bad idea. He’s very dependable.

Read it.

Steve Sailer goes to the movies.

Remember when economists, having permanently perfected the economy, graciously allowed their attention to wander to crime fighting, sumo wrestling, baby naming, and other fields not traditionally enlightened by their insights?

The most entertaining is the segment by Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) on those not fully thought-through first names with which some African-Americans have saddled their babies ever since the late 1960s’ Black Pride movement. For example, scholars have counted 228 varietals of “Unique,” including “Uneek” (a fine name for a future rodent exterminator).

Are black children’s lives permanently damaged by all this parental originality? In 2005, Levitt and Dubner rather callously concluded that, in effect, if your parents named you “M’qheal” rather than “Michael,” your bigger problem is likely your last name. You are evidently descended from some mighty poor decision-makers.

Spurlock, however, adds a useful coda from another social scientist who mailed out résumés under white and black first names that were otherwise identical. Job applications bearing Ghetto Fabulous monikers are more likely to go straight into Human Resources Departments’ circular files. So, African-American parents: For the sake of your kids’ careers, please resist your whimsical urges. (Somebody should study the impact of the science-fictiony first names that Mormons dream up, such as D’Loaf, Zanderalex, and ElVoid.)“

Read it.

A former American student in China whom Chinese intelligence recruited as a spy was caught after he sought work in the CIA’s espionage branch, highlighting Beijing’s efforts to plant spies inside the agency.

U.S. officials said screening by security and counterintelligence officials led to the discovery that Glenn Duffie Shriver, a Detroit resident, had close ties to Chinese intelligence agents working for the Ministry of State Security, who paid him at least $70,000 to work secretly as an informant in the CIA.

Note that the fellow was not ethnically Chinese.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Frank Caprio is livid after the Providence Journal reported Monday morning President Obama would not endorse Caprio during his visit to the state today.

“He can take his endorsement and really shove it”, Caprio told John Depetro and the WPRO morning news. Caprio told WPRO he did not seek the President’s endorsement and calls the snub Washington politics.

“We had one of the worst floods in the history of the United States a few months back and President Obama didn’t even do a fly over of Rhode Island. He ignored us and now he’s coming into Rhode Island and treating us like an ATM machine”, said Caprio.

Erick Erickson is irate.

That’s rather galling to me. They are not supposed to be in this country and are out trying to affect the public policy of this country?!?! They shouldn’t be empowered. They should be deported.

Don’t hold it in, Erick; tell us how you really feel.

Read it.

TechCrunch reader Steve Manuel claims to have found a workaround to Firesheep, the controversial Firefox extension that allows anyone on an insecure open Wifi network to access user login info for almost every single social network in existence.

Unmentioned, of course, is the most certain way of avoiding the problem: Stay away from ‘social networks’. Just sayin’.

Read it.

Even a hippy enclave like San Francisco is still subject to the eternal rule that existing businesses will use the law to exclude competition whenever they can get away with it.

Limited government gives you progress. But that’s not a ‘progressive’ value.