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In these degenerate modern times, it’s impossible to tell.

I must say that this is the first time I’ve heard of any Muslim objection to tobacco.

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Let me get this straight……

We’ve passed a health care plan written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn’t understand it,.

It was passed by a Congress that hadn’t read it but exempted themselves from it.

It was signed by a president that also hadn’t read it and who smokes.

The funding is administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes.

It is all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that’s broke.

What the hell could possibly go wrong?

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China, which has been blocking shipments of crucial minerals to Japan for the last month, has now quietly halted some shipments of those materials to the United States and Europe, three industry officials said this week.

“The embargo is expanding” beyond Japan, said one of the three rare earth industry officials, all of whom insisted on anonymity for fear of business retaliation by Chinese authorities.

China mines 95 percent of the world’s rare earth elements, which have broad commercial and military applications, and are vital to the manufacture of products as diverse as cellphones, large wind turbines and guided missiles. Any curtailment of Chinese supplies of rare earths is likely to be greeted with alarm in Western capitals, particularly because Western companies are believed to keep much smaller stockpiles of rare earths than Japanese companies.

Perhaps our government will learn something from this.

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Well, to Democrats, maybe it’s not.

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Well, I’m glad that’s been cleared up.

And the feminists say: (chirp) (chirp) (chirp)….

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Back to the drawing board.

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I have a long list of former American football players I’d like to see caned, starting with that scumbag Roger Staubach.

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But, nowadays, what doesn’t?

The practice of checking the credit histories of job applicants is coming under fire, with critics contending the practice discriminates against blacks and Latinos who tend to have lower credit scores.

You’d think that their credit scores were just something they were born with and couldn’t change.

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The Obmanassiah is all about taking credit. Doing work–not so much.

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You get more of what you pay for–and if you pay for unemployment, well….

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Hispanics, like blacks, can be bought–but, unlike blacks, they want the money up front, rather than pie in the sky by and by.

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The Rev. Gabe Sylvia told The Charlotte Observer the two sons of Jeremy and Jodi Stokes can join the scouting program at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews. He said the parents are also welcome to become volunteers but cannot function as leaders even though Jeremy Stokes is an Eagle Scout.

“Based on a once-over, informal scan, it looked like the Stokes would be good additions to our leadership,” he said. “But when it became clear that they were Mormons, they could not become leaders in our pack. Mormonism is not consistent with historical Christianity.”

The irony of some do-it-yourself Protestant church calling some other group ‘not consistent with historical Christianity’ is fairly obvious.

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Send ’em over to join the polar bears. Or use them for food – I’m told bear tastes pretty good, although (like pork) you have to be sure you cook it long enough.

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Libraries have always dealt with the business world, buying books, journals, and other products. In the past, however, libraries separated the commercial process of acquiring materials from the academic objective of putting those materials to use. But that division has now faded as an unintended side effect of information technology.

Commercialization has impinged on two core facets of university libraries—their collections and their user services. The ownership and provision of research materials, especially academic journals, has been increasingly outsourced to for-profit companies. Library patrons, moreover, are increasingly regarded simply as consumers, transforming user services into customer service. Both developments have distanced libraries from their academic missions.

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Thank you, Crust.

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

China mines 95 percent of the world’s rare earth elements, which have broad commercial and military applications, and are vital to the manufacture of diverse products including large wind turbines and guided missiles. Any curtailment of Chinese supplies of rare earths is likely to be greeted with alarm in Western capitals, particularly because Western companies are believed to keep much smaller stockpiles of rare earths than Japanese companies do.

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Hmmm. Wonder whether that would work for me….

I.U. Law still writes and calls me asking for donations. I guess scrawling “Bite Me” on the form and sending it back just doesn’t get through to them.

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“Youths”, of course, being the newspaper code-word for ‘young Muslim troublemakers’. Merely looking at the pictures is sufficient to reveal that most of them are, how shall we say, ‘of African descent’.

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Note to the Obamassiah: Russia isn’t our friend, either.

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Only one of the officers who came to the accident scene that day had any integrity. That would be Seifert, a cop with an exemplary record who once shot an armed man to free two hostages. Seifert is the one who took the witness statements that implicated McCue. He is also the one who documented Bowling’s injuries and testified for Bowling in Bowling’s lawsuit. Here is how The Kansas City Star described what happened to Seifert next:

For crossing “the thin blue line,” U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson wrote, Seifert was forced into retirement.

“Seifert was shunned, subjected to gossip and defamation by his police colleagues and treated as a pariah,” Robinson wrote. “…The way Seifert was treated was shameful.”

Seifert also lost part of his pension and his retirement health insurance. So what happened to the cops involved in the cover-up? Ronald Miller, then Kansas City’s police chief, is now the police chief in Topeka. Officer Robert Lane went on to become a councilman for the town of Edwardsville; he was later convicted of participating in a ticket-fixing scheme and sentenced to 10 days in jail plus probation. Steven Culp, then Kansas City’s deputy police chief, is now, incredibly enough, executive director of the Kansas Commission on Peace Officers’ Standards and Training. Agent McCue is still with the DEA.

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With the new television season upon us, here are a few things you are virtually certain to see again and again and again: lots of folks spending the better part of their day surrounded by their friends and family in happy conviviality; folks wandering into the unlocked apartments and homes of friends, family and neighbors at any time of the day or night as if this were the most natural thing in the world; friends and family sitting down and having lots of tearful heart-to-hearts; Little League games, school assemblies and dance recitals, all attended by, you guessed it, scads of friends and family.

What makes this so remarkable is that it has been happening at a time when it is increasingly difficult to find this kind of deep social interaction anyplace but on TV. Nearly a decade ago, Harvard professor Robert Putnam observed in his classic “Bowling Alone” that Americans had become more and more disconnected from one another and from their society. As Putnam put it, “For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago — silently, without warning — that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous current.” It was a current that pulled Americans apart.

This decline in real friendships may account in part for the dramatic rise of virtual friendships like those on social-networking sites where being “friended” is less a sign of personal engagement than a quantitative measure of how many people your life has brushed and how many names you can collect, but this is friendship lite. Facebook, in fact, only underscores how much traditional friendship — friendship in which you meet, talk and share — has become an anachronism and how much being “friended” is an ironic term.

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These would be the four Democrats [Sen. Barbara Boxer (D, CA); Rep. Henry Waxman (D, CA-30); Rep. Dennis Kuchinich (D, OH-10); and Rep. Raul Grijavla (D, AZ-07)] who provided letters of introduction and support to the pro-terrorist groups Code Pink/Global Exchange in 2004.  Those groups used these letters to facilitate their delivery over a half a million dollars’ worth of aid to terrorists in Fallujah actively fighting American troops; which is, by the way, treason by any reasonable interpretation of the US Constitution.

Eurabia advances.

Germany has announced it will fund Islamic studies at three state universities to train prayer leaders and religion teachers more in tune with Western society than the foreign imams preaching at most mosques here.

Why not just send the Muslims back home?

Darwin Award Nominee.

“I saw him holding onto the top of the glass barrier with one hand, and trying to grasp something with the other,” one unnamed tiger keeper at the zoo told the Southern Metropolis newspaper. He added that he saw “four or five” tigers rushing towards Mr Sheng and quickly ran to the pen to try to save him.

By the time he reached the spot, however, Mr Sheng had already lost his grip and fallen into the tiger pack. “He sustained a lethal injury to his neck,” said the tiger keeper.

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Well, duh.

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Almost two years ago, the Food and Drug Administration ignored the advice of its scientists and approved a knee implant after being lobbied by members of Congress. On Thursday, the agency issued an unprecedented “mea culpa,” saying the device should not have been approved.

The agency said it is taking steps to revoke approval of the Menaflex implant, made by ReGen Biologics. The announcement comes a year after the agency first acknowledged that its decision to approve the device was influenced by outside pressure, including lobbying by four lawmakers from the company’s home state of New Jersey.

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I was under the impression that suicide was an honored part of Japanese culture. I guess there’s no pleasing some people.

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Why ‘jailed’? Why not ‘executed’?

Check it out.

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A transgendered golfer, who was born a man and became a woman, is suing the sport’s American professional body because it will not allow her to enter its tournaments.

Of course. Hate to break the news to you, guys, but however much it may look like a woman, it’s still a man. That whole Y chromosome thing, you know?

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The public sector can no longer build. It has tied itself in knots with regulations and interest group special deals, such as the Davis-Bacon sop to construction unions and an astonishing array of environmental assessments, payment rules, appeal rights for rejected contractors, and preference programs for minority-owned firms and small businesses, requiring an army of compliance personnel to administer. Dubious high-speed rail plans are another example: the United States will never be a major market because service would be cost-effective on only a few routes, but instead of buying trains cheaply from a high-volume foreign producer with economies of scale, the Obama administration’s stimulus funding has a 100% Buy American requirement (subscription may be required).

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Yet another reason to avoid Facebook.

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Bill Goffe recently (2009) surveyed one of his macro principles classes and found, for example, that the median student believes that 35% of workers earn the minimum wage and a substantial fraction think that a majority of workers earn the minimum wage (Actual rate in 2007: 2.3% of hourly-paid workers and a smaller share of all workers earn the minimum wage, rates are probably somewhat higher today since the min. wage has risen and wages have not).

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The organizers of the failed Gaza flotilla last June are at it again, planning a flotilla to Gaza next January.  At least this time they are honest that it has nothing to do with humanitarian efforts.

Far be it from me to stand in the way of anybody attempting to embarrass Barry the Magic Negro, but this is aimed at the United States, and we ought to support the Israelis in quashing it.

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So public school officials get caught illegally spy on students. But no one gets fired. And none of the offending parties will be fined. Instead, a municipal insurer (which will ultimately affect taxpayers) will pay a decent settlement to one student, a small settlement to another, and a small fortune to their lawyer.

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A heavyweight American boffin has dubbed the global warming movement “the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist”, and resigned in protest from the American Physical Society, saying that the society has deliberately stifled debate on the subject.

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A woman is recovering in hospital after having her thumb and part of one of her breasts chewed off when she was attacked by her pet zebra, according to reports.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Occupational licensing laws aren’t the only realm in which government deprives us of the freedom of economic choice simply to serve private interest groups. Consider the United Food and Commercial Workers’ war on non-union grocery stores like Wal-Mart.

In many communities, union supporters persuade local officials to use zoning restrictions to bar the opening of Wal-Mart Supercenters or other stores, often using rhetoric about preserving the “local feeing” of “small towns.” In reality, these laws exist to force you to pay more for groceries, not to advance the public good, but to promote the interests of unions that can’t compete fairly in the labor market. This special-interest legislation, however, is allowed by courts that simply look the other way under the “rational basis” test.

Most government intervention in economic matters is in pursuit of stifling free competition.

Nick Gillespie is fed up. Watch the video.

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The Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services disappears a promise from its website.

Funny how that works out.

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Embarrassing publicity in a tough election year has forced the administration to back down from one of its vaunted consumer protections. If it were not for a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal, nearly a million low-wage workers would lose their health insurance thanks to new rules imposed by ObamaCare. McDonald’s and 29 other firms have received waivers from a requirement to up the minimum benefit covered by insurance, making it possible for their employees to continue to buy low-cost coverage. But thousands of other workers are not exempted and will not be able to afford the government’s idea of good insurance.

Peter Suderman sounds the alarm.

If it’s an economic decision, the federal government can make it for you. That’s the takeaway from a ruling this afternoon by a federal judge in Michigan.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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Thousands of flushed condoms threaten to choke the Commonwealth Games village’s drainage system, media reports said, in the latest problem to hit the venue.

Gives ‘athletic’ a whole new meaning.