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The sheeple are restless. Better stand baaaaaack.

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Notice the map. Notice the pink spots on the map. These are the areas that need to be a radioactive desert.

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Well it turns out I was living the livable life style when I was growing up in Queens, New York in the fifties and didn’t know it. Here all along I just thought we were poor.

In my town of College Point, Queens when the factory whistle blew a few thousand walked in the gate and out again when the whistle blew in the evening. People don’t live outside the factory gate anymore and haven’t for awhile. Again, specialization and division of labor are the main factor. Job groupings are far smaller today, and the rate of job turnover means more people won’t/can’t move every time they change jobs. Moreover, about 70% of workers live in a household with other workers – whose job will they live next to?

There remains, of course, lots of room now within the existing land use distribution to make it easier for those who wish to live closer to shops, jobs or entertainment. People also are free to go to the nearest store or nearest doctor. The fact that so few do so reflects the oft-forgotten fact that people have their own notions of what is most important. Trying to coerce them to live the way government – particularly the upper bureaucracy – thinks they should live holds many perils. The American people have no obligation to live in ways that make it convenient for government to serve them. Government isn’t smart enough to know how people should live or to order their lives in more “convenient” arrangements.

Turns out that government buzzwords are a substitute, not a tool, for thought.

It’s on the practical side that the concepts of livability really fail. The central failure inheres in what the Europeans call subsidiarity, proposes that any necessary activity of an authority should be conducted by that level of governance closest to the problem that can effectively address it. Having livability rise to become central principle of federal transportation investment planning is an egregious failure in our historical system of decentralized government. If sidewalks and bike paths are federal then everything is federal.

The problem here is a total disconnect between what people in a diverse democracy want, and what the central bureaucracy, and their academic allies, wish to impose. The livability agenda may be popular in the press and among pundits, but for most communities and people it’s neither popular nor remotely democratic.

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A member of the Lower Crust discovers that the Side Crust are not her friends.

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Britain is learning what America knows: Rail sucks, and people only take trains when (a) the alternative is a horse, or (b) the government forces them into it. The latter is accomplished by a combination of jawboning, explicit attempts to discourage using automobiles, and massive taxpayer-funded subsidies for rail travel. This house of cards easily comes down if any one of the legs of the tripod falter, and that’s what’s happening here.

If doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, then our governing classes have been insane for the last hundred years.

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During the campaign it was noted that tens of thousands of dollars came in to the Obama campaign from a Hamas-controlled camp in Gaza. Pamela Geller observed that Al-Jazeera actually ran a story on Obama phone banks in Gaza (video below).

Geller discovered one large contributor to the Obama campaign (Monir Edwan) who was listed on FEC documents as contributing to Obama from the city of Rafah in the state GA. “If you were reading quickly,” Geller wrote, “you might have thought it was just a contribution from Georgia. But there is no city of Rafah in the Peach State. Monir Edwan sent money to Obama from Rafah, Gaza.”

Needless to say, all of this is incredibly illegal.

Hamas’s love of Obama endures. Now comes Amir Taheri to report on the latest installment of the story. Taheri reports that the slogan “Abu Hussain! Palestine loves you!!!” appears in English on a poster and other products produced by Hamas and put on sale in Gaza. Yeseterday it was depicted on the front pages of several leading Arab dailies.

But don’t say that he’s a secret Muslim. That would be raaaaaaaacist.

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I used to hope that in spending over a decade explaining how the music industry could have responded better to file sharing, that other industries wouldn’t go down the same path. Yet, what we’ve seen over and over and over again is that every new industry that faces disruptive innovation involving a previously scarce product suddenly becoming an infinite good — and that they pretty much all react the same. They try to prevent the inevitable. They try to fight the technology. They go against consumer wishes. They try to protect the old business models. They invent moral panics and bogus statistics. And, of course, they throw a ton of money at politicians to make laws that preserve their old business models. It’s happened plenty of times in the past, and it will definitely happen once 3D printing technology reaches that tipping point.

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The bien-pensants who run Belgium — which stands as the model for the European Union: a non-nation cobbled together for political reasons without the consent of its citizens — have devised an updated version of Multiculturalism. They hope to sneak it under the political radar by renaming it “Interculturalism”, but it’s the same old decaying rose, and by any other name smells just as fetid.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder. The Crust doesn’t miss a bet in it’s program to grasp every rein of power.

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I’d like to see them try that in a Muslim country.

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The ACLU of Pennsylvania recently filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of a couple whose newborn baby was kidnapped by Lawrence County Children and Youth Services (LCCYS) because her mother recklessly consumed an “everything” bagel from Dunkin’ Donuts the day before the birth. Jameson Hospital, where Isabella Rodriguez was born on April 27, has a policy of testing expectant mothers’ urine for illegal drugs and reporting positive results to LCCYS, even without any additional evidence that the baby is in danger of neglect or abuse. LCCYS, in turn, has a policy of seizing such babies from their homes based on nothing more than the test result. Unfortunately for Isabella’s parents, Elizabeth Mort and Alex Rodriguez, Jameson sets the cutoff level for its opiate test so low that it can be triggered by poppy seeds, which is why two caseworkers and two Neshannock Township police officers visited their home the day after baby and mother returned from the hospital. LCCYS seized the three-day-old girl and put her in foster care for five days before conceding it had made a mistake.

We’re from the government, and we’ re here to … take your kids away.

Google, mirabile dictu, actually says what they mean by ‘underrepresented’.

We define underrepresented languages as those which, while spoken by millions, have little presence in electronic and physical media, e.g., webpages, newspapers and magazines. Underrepresented languages have also often received little attention from the speech research community. Their phonetics, grammar, acoustics, etc., haven’t been extensively studied, making the development of ASR (automatic speech recognition) voice search systems challenging.

We believe that the speech research community needs to start working on many of these underrepresented languages to advance progress and build speech recognition, translation and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. The development of NLP technologies in these languages is critical for enabling information access for everybody. Indeed, these technologies have the potential to break language barriers.

This is a fairly pure example of ‘business that thinks it’s more than a business’, an outgrowth of the Crustian ‘social responsibility’ kick. Such businesses aren’t content to just make some money for their investors; they have this grandiose notion that they exist ‘to be a force for good’. How well this works out in practice is left as an exercise for the reader.

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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.

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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.

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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?”

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.).

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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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.

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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?

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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.”

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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

But I suppose Farmville will do that to you.

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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.

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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.

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I can assure you, it’s not my fault.