Read it.

It’s the gift that keeps on taking. The old Giants Stadium, demolished to make way for New Meadowlands Stadium, still carries about $110 million in debt, or nearly $13 for every New Jersey resident, even though it is now a parking lot.

The financial hole was dug over decades by politicians who passed along the cost of building and fixing the stadium, and it is getting deeper. With the razing of the old stadium and the Giants and the Jets moving into their splashy new home next door, a big source of revenue to pay down the debt has shriveled.

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Distracted Oz pedestrians are allegedly dropping like flies to “Death by iPod” – an untimely end provoked by walking out into traffic while in a “zombie trance”.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Japan has confirmed the nation’s first case of a new gene in bacteria that allows the microorganisms to become drug-resistant superbugs, detected in a man who had medical treatment in India, a Health Ministry official said Tuesday.

The gene, known as NDM-1, was found in a Japanese man in his 50s, Kensuke Nakajima said.

Researchers say the gene _ which appears to be circulating widely in India _ alters bacteria, making them resistant to nearly all known antibiotics.

So stay away from India for medical treatments.

Read it.

The entrepreneurs and workers who built the great technology companies that drive our economy are nowhere to be found.  It is the proletariat of the old economy who live in Obama’s imagination.

But what was most Obama-like about the speech was the launching of vicious attacks on his opponents, only to then cry foul over the fact that his opponents push back. Obama, as he did throughout the campaign and has done throughout his presidency, painted a picture of his political opponents as heartless victimizers of others, and of the capitalist system as cruel and inhumane.

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Our analysis suggests not that gangs cause violence, but that violence causes gangs. In other words, gangs form in response to government’s failure to protect youths against violence. The surprising implication of our insight is that efforts to reduce gang activity could actually increase violent crime.

Read it.

Days after the US officially ended combat operations and touted Iraq’s ability to defend itself, American troops found themselves battling heavily armed militants assaulting an Iraqi military headquarters in the centre of Baghdad.

How’s that ‘Hope and Change’ thing working out for ya?

Read it.

Schoolchildren learn more quickly if the brightest and most confident are prevented from putting up their hands, according to a teaching expert.

Yeah, and the quickest thing they learn is that being bright, confident, and willing to put up your hand is punished rather than rewarded. Way to go, ‘education expert’.

Read it.

Scam artists get lists of patients, lists of expensive items they can bill to Medicare, and a bank account. Then they go to town and steal tens of millions of dollars. The whole thing is worth watching and/or reading. Two highlights struck me. First, Steve Kroft interviews the woman in the federal Department of Health and Human Services who is responsible for reducing fraud. Her name is Kim Brandt, Medicare’s director of “program integrity.” You can’t make this stuff up.

Read it.

Well, no, not really.

The whole justification for trains, high-speed or otherwise, is efficiency. The argument runs: If you’ve got 100 people going from e.g New York to e.g. Chicago, then it’s more efficient for them all to ride a train than to take, oh, 73 cars to get there. It will cost less (in total), use fewer resources, emit less pollutants, take up less space, etc., etc. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it. Well, it’s not, and here’s why.

New York and Chicago are big places. A train requires you to go from your actual starting point, which may be (and probably is) different from everyone else’s starting point, and get to the virtual New York (i.e. the New York train station), get there at pretty much the same time as everybody else that’s going to Chicago (whether that’s convenient for you or not), then get on board along with everybody else that’s going to Chicago (a non-trivial exercise, as anyone who’s ridden an airplane can tell you), then ride at a speed and in a manner that is decided by somebody else (who may not, and probably does not, have your preferences at the top of his list), then arrive at the virtual Chicago (i.e. the Chicago train station), get out of the train with everybody else (a non-trivial exercise, as anyone who’s ridden an airplane can tell you), and then get (somehow) to your actual destination. Oh, and don’t get me started on what happens if you have any luggage.

This purported ‘efficiency’ of trains is efficiency from the standpoint of the people running the trains, not of the people riding them. The people riding them don’t see efficiency, they see massive inconvenience: Inconvenience in time (can’t start when you want to, don’t have any flexibility about when you start, can’t pick your own route or how long it takes to get there, can’t arrive when you want to, have to expend extra time being herded hither and yon along with a massive crowd of strangers), inconvenience in passage (you go where they want you to go, not where you want to go, and there’s no freedom to make any side trips or rest stops or whatever it might move you to do on the way), and inconvenience in environment (trains suck compared to automobiles when it comes to comfort – always have, always will). And if you don’t happen to want to go between the two points serviced by trains, then you’re out of luck.

The reason why people prefer automobiles to trains is FREEDOM. Freedom to set your own schedule and vary it to suit yourself, freedom to set your own route and vary it to suit yourself, freedom to carry as much stuff with you as your vehicle will carry (plus a trailer if it can pull one) and have it instantly available to you at your destination, and just generally freedom to run your own life instead of giving it over into the hands of service-industry bureaucrats who care about their jobs first, their own convenience second, and you dead last.

The people who push trains are at heart people who have no compunction about running your life for you because they are convinced that they are smarter than you (just talk to one sometime) and know better than you (ditto) and are therefore justified in making you do it their way rather than your way, just because they backpacked through Europe one summer during college and had a great time on the trains there. ‘Fascists’ is not too strong a term, although most of them will claim to be ‘progressives’.

Shun them. Deny them power, especially the power to steal your money through taxation and spend it foolishly on this or any other foolish scheme.

ADDENDUM: This post from Carolyn illustrates the situation very nicely:

When I was stuck on the train between New York City and my college for two hours with no dinner last year, that loaf kept me from going crazy. The same thing happened when my friends and I were stuck waiting for customs for hours on our train to Montreal. They had teased me about the bag of mini bagels I’d been shlepping around, but they sure were thankful for it later.

Who, having traveled on a train or an airplance, can’t tell a similar story? If you ask anybody in that situation, ‘Would you rather be here on this train/plane, or in a car?’, is there any doubt what the answer would be?

Read it.

Hours after winning thousands of dollars in a jackpot at a California gambling hall, a 55-year-old man was followed from the casino, robbed, run over and killed by another man who fled the scene, the Los Angeles Times reported.

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

Lest we forget.

Read it.

Read it.

Thilo Sarrazin was fired today by the Bundesbank for reporting the truth about Muslim immigrants in Germany. His recently-published book has brought down the wrath of the German establishment upon his head, but all the shunning and condemnation haven’t silenced him.

If you break from the Crust, they call you a flake.

In all countries concerned — whether Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark or Norway — one makes similar observations about the group of Muslim migrants, namely:

• Below-average labor market integration;
• Above-average dependence on welfare benefits;
• Below-average participation in education;
• Above-average fertility;
• Spatial segregation with a tendency towards the emergence of parallel societies;
• Above-average religiosity with growing penchant for traditional and fundamentalist movements in Islam;
• An above-average criminality, from “ordinary” violent street crimes to participating in terrorist activities.

In Germany, an army of integration committees, Islam researchers, sociologists, political scientists, organizational representatives and a group of naive politicians work intensively, hand in hand, on trivialization, self-deception and denial of the problem.

Read it.

Medal of Honor, of course. (Can we talk ‘oxymoron’ now?)

The latest installment in the Medal of Honor video game series, scheduled to be released by Electronic Arts next month, is set in Afghanistan and allows players to fight for the Taliban in the online version. That feature has attracted criticism from politicians such as British Defense Minister Liam Fox, who called the game “thoroughly un-British,” and at least one mother of an American soldier killed in Afghanistan, who said it is “disrespectful” to base a game on an ongoing war.

Criticism? Whatever for? It’s just a game! And they can make money with it! What could be more American than that?

Read it.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca on Wednesday took aim at the medical marijuana industry, citing last week’s triple murder in West Hollywood as an example of how enterprising criminals have infiltrated some of the dispensaries.

Baca said the dispensaries have strayed from their original mission — to aid the seriously ill — and are now the target of criminals who see an easy way to make money and get drugs.

“The medicinal marijuana program that voters authorized years ago has been hijacked by underground drug-dealing criminals who are resorting to violence in order to control their piece of the action,” Baca said.

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

RINOs everywhere.

Of course, Cao is a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic district — one he won only because of former Rep. William Jefferson’s numerous scandals. Some say he’s the most vulnerable Republican incumbent. He was the only Republican to vote for the House’s original health-care bill (though he voted against the final legislation). He’s also backed financial reform and a repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.”

John Stossel kicks over a rock.

You own a business, maybe a restaurant. You’ve got a lot to worry about. You have to make sure the food is safe and tastes good, that the place is clean and appealing, that workers are friendly and paid according to a hundred Labor Department and IRS rules.

On top of that, there are rules you might have no idea about. The bathroom sinks must be a specified height. So must the doorknobs and mirrors. You must have rails. And if these things aren’t right—say, if your mirror is just one inch too high—you could be sued for thousands of dollars.

And be careful. If you fail to let a customer bring a large snake, which he calls his “service animal,” into your restaurant, you could be in trouble.

All of this is because of the well-intentioned Americans With Disabilities Act, which President George H.W. Bush signed 20 years ago.

And Bush Senior will burn in Hell for it.

What does it do? The ADA prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities, requiring businesses to provide the disabled “equal access” and to make “reasonable accommodation” for employees. Tax credits and deductions are available for special equipment (talking computers, for instance) and modifying buildings to comply with the accessibility mandate.

The ADA was supposed to help more disabled people find jobs. But did it?

Strangely, no. An MIT study found that employment of disabled men ages 21 to 58 declined after the ADA went into effect. Same for women ages 21 to 39.

How could employment among the disabled have declined?

Because the law turns “protected” people into potential lawsuits. Most ADA litigation occurs when an employee is fired, so the safest way to avoid those costs is not to hire the disabled in the first place.

Whatever the government touches turns to shit. Believe it.

Dana Milbank, ordinarily a dependable Voice of the Crust, wanders off the reservation.

Lunch at the National Press Club on Wednesday caused some serious indigestion.

It wasn’t the food; it was the entertainment. Christina Romer, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, was giving what was billed as her “valedictory” before she returns to teach at Berkeley, and she used the swan song to establish four points, each more unnerving than the last:

She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be. She still doesn’t understand exactly why it was so bad. The response to the collapse was inadequate. And she doesn’t have much of an idea about how to fix things.

What she did have was a binder full of scary descriptions and warnings, offered with a perma-smile and singsong delivery: “Terrible recession. . . . Incredibly searing. . . . Dramatically below trend. . . . Suffering terribly. . . . Risk of making high unemployment permanent. . . . Economic nightmare.”

This person was Chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors. After confessing to being totally clueless, she’s off to teach economics at Berkeley. I think it’s time to be afraid.

Read it.

A golfer managed to set fire to a course when he accidentally struck a rock with his iron, sending sparks into the Californian rough.

Dangerous game, golf.

Read it.

Well, that certainly sounds suspicious to me….

Cringely has had a bad experience.

These are great cameras when they work, but when they don’t work they are simply $7,800 bricks.  Sony clearly doesn’t care about its prosumer customers.  Interestingly you can get customer support on the weekend for Sony’s cheapest consumer camcorder but not for this baby.

Tell a friend.  Tell them that Sony makes fine prosumer camcorders but doesn’t support them worth a damn.  Tell them that Sylvia is a liar.  Tell them to expect to pay $3000 to rent a $7000 replacement camera if they need a repair.

And tell them to do what I probably should have done in the first place, which was stick with Panasonic. ?

I try not to buy Sony when I can help it. My experiences with them have not been … encouraging.

Steve Sailer likes to point out where your money is being wasted.

Freddie Mac has named Subha V. Barry to the position of chief diversity officer (CDO). In this position, Barry will lead the company’s newly formed Office of Diversity and Inclusion, with overall responsibility for the combined functions of Diversity and Inclusion and Supplier Diversity. She will be responsible for developing business strategies focused on the needs of a diverse workforce, working closely with other members of Freddie Mac’s senior management team to ensure the company is effectively utilizing diverse talent (both within its employee base and its suppliers), enhance the annual diversity planning process and manage performance against the company’s diversity plans.

Needless to day, Subha Barry is a black female, thereby encapsulating in herself the goals of her office. ‘I’ve achieved diversity, and so can you! Or else!’ (Am I the only one bothered by a quasi-governmental body having a ‘diversity plan’?)

Steve also doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to Crustian fashions:

By the way, Subha V. Barry? Is “Subha” one of those oddly-spelled names that African American schoolgirls make up when they’re pregnant? Or is Subha V. Barry an Indian immigrant riding the Diversity Gravy Train, which most Americans naively think exists to benefit the descendants of American slaves?

Judging from her picture, I think it’s more likely the latter. But these days you can never tell.

Read it.

Watch Britain plunge downhill….

Read it.

Disgusting. I rather doubt that the Marines make the same choices.

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I can hear Nelson spinning in his grave from Texas.

Read it.

In his January State of the Union speech, President Obama woefully declared that “each time lobbyists game the system or politicians tear each other down instead of lifting this country up, we lose faith.” But by the following month, The Hill was reporting that “despite his push to rein in special interests, President Barack Obama sparked a boom on K Street.” Lobbyists for the health care industry in particular were given an enormous boost in Washington as the health care bill rolled slowly through Congress and then moved on to the regulatory phase.

How’s that Hope & Change thing working out for ya?

The Crust takes care of its own.

Read it.

So.  We have a legislator named Eddie Bernice Johnson (D, TX-30), member of the Congressional Black Caucus, and thus one of the people whose responsibility it is to hand out partial college scholarships to worthy recipients.  A worthy project, to be sure: good policy, good politics, good publicity.  There is – sensibly – a non-nepotism rule; and there is – also sensibly – a rule that this money is to be given to students in your district.  But there is apparently no oversight at all over who gets the money, which is why Rep. Johnson was able to use this money gave 15 scholarships to six ineligible kids – four grandchildren and two kids of an aide – and none of them live in the district.  Important point, there: even if grandchildren and children of aides don’t count under the anti-nepotism rule (an argument which the CBC itself rejects), the point of the whole thing is to foster local education.  Rep. Johnson’s defense?  She’s a nine-term Congresswoman who somehow missed the fact that she wasn’t supposed to give CBC scholarships to out-of-district family members.

She’s a female black Democrat politician, a gold-standard victim and member of the Crust, and therefore above criticism.

Please remember this when Rep. Johnson is defended – and she will be.  They’ll talk about her relative lack of personal wealth; they’ll talk about how she at least didn’t actually steal the money; they’ll talk about the relatively small amounts involved; they’ll talk about the need of those kids for those scholarships; and they’ll undoubtedly call people racists for even broaching the subject of yet another member of the CBC who’s involved in shenanigans.  What they won’t do is admit that Rep. Johnson has no right to be defended.  She was given money dedicated to bettering the lives of her constituents.  She instead used it to better the lives of her family and subordinates.

Muslims would understand, because that’s what they’d do. Normal Americans? Not so much.

Read it.

‘Progressives’? No, bedbugs. (There is a distinction. Trust me.)

Read it.

For all the talk of their support for women, there is no one on a national level doing for liberals what Sarah Palin is doing for conservatives in this election. Who is helping the Democratic women win seats? The highest ranking woman in the Democratic Party? No, Nancy is focused on investigating the Ground Zero Mosque detractors and still trying to sell a health care plan that has already been passed. … Instead of finding better candidates to run against the fresh crop of small government advocates, Nancy Pelosi is cherrypicking the candidates she can throw under the bus this fall.

And don’t get me started with Hillary Clinton.

The problem with women of the Left is that they’re too tightly focused on forcing their way into what they view as the Old Boy’s Club; they don’t realize that, once they’ve forced their way in, it merely makes them Old Boys with boobs.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Britain is on the verge of being a Scandinavian country with respect to its military.

When you spend (and borrow against) all your tax revenue on free butter, there isn’t anything left for guns.

Read it.

You, too, can risk having to learn to breathe water.

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Ground Zero workers are on the hook to pay steep interest on money their lawyers borrowed from a group of investors that include Silver and his law partners, The Post has learned.

Silver’s partners at the Weitz & Luxenberg law firm are top board members of a business that quietly loaned money at 18 percent a year to the law firm representing some 9,800 Ground Zero workers with toxic-illness suits against the city.

New York politicians are corrupt? Whoda thunkit?

Read it.

‘Forward into the future, Comrades!’ I can see the ghost of Lenin smiling.

Read it.

An examination of the semi-Luddite proclivities of the premier Voice of the Crust.

Is checking your email while you’re waiting in line at the grocery store really hurting your ability to learn?

That’s the basic premise of Matt Richtel’s very popular New York Times story this week, “Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Valuable Downtime.” The article couches its arguments in the language of science, but its actual scientific content is pretty sparse.

And these are the ‘progressives’. Like ‘Democratic Party’, a more entertaining oxymoron has not been seen on this planet for time out of mind.

Freeberg piles on.

But did you notice the other thing all these issues in Krauthammer’s list have in common? Someone needs to be told to go stick it where the sun don’t shine. Someone’s just-plain-bad. The Islamophobes need to learn to live with the Victory Mosque, which they really hate, but that’s a good thing because once it’s there they won’t be able to do anything about it, and they deserve it. They need to suffer because they’re bad people. Ditto for those xenophobes in Arizona, dang it, they deserve to have all those brown people who “aren’t like them” streaming through their fences. I hope they choke on their chewing tobacco over it!

Today’s liberalism is retrograde but natural machismo, repressed through artificial disciplinary techniques and then exploding elsewhere in an uncontrolled and unhealthy way. Go through the list of things liberals do that embarrass them once the wrong people find out about them, but that they can be counted on to do once they’re among friends in a “JournoList” type of setting. It is the same list of things boys do when their hormonal rushes are driving them into that Venturi manifold toward manhood — and when they’re under-supervised.

It’s as if they missed out on the coming-of-age when they were thirteen or so, and are trying to make up for it.

Read it.

Hope he doesn’t think that will make him bulletproof.

Charles Krauthammer is fed up.

And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

— Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

— Disgust and alarm with the federal government’s unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

— Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

— Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become “ungovernable,” last year’s excuse for the Democrats’ failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.

Well, obviously, the only solution is for the government to get a new populace; this one just isn’t working out.

Read it.

‘Please, sir, we’d like you to show up for a necktie party.’

‘No, thanks, I think I’ll pass.’

Smart boy.

Read it.

Maybe it’s just me,  but every time I see the Governor of New York I think of Mel Brooks as Governor Lepetomaine in Blazing Saddles.

Read it.

Joshua Lee Campbell, 23, had apparently been enjoying a few liveners with a fellow worker at the Twilight Concert in Pioneer Park, and later nipped back to work to shoot the server with a .45-calibre automatic.

Hey, we’ve all had one of those days….

Read it.

The Obama administration has riled up environmental groups by siding with big utilities in a lawsuit over whether states can sue power plant operators for contributing to climate change.

It isn’t that the Obama administration is in favor of unfettered emissions. The Department of Justice brief, filed with the Supreme Court this week, says the Environmental Protection Agency is already on the job, and doesn’t need help from private plaintiffs.

So it’s basically a turf war. What’s the point of centralizing government power if some buttinskys try to horn in on it?

Read it.

I’ve always thought that collecting adolescents together during the time of life when they are most like primitive tribesmen (genetics isn’t the only area in which ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) is responsible for much of what is wrong in the world today. Homeschooling kids is really the only sane solution.

Read it.

Dramamine first, though.

Read it.

Presumably this can be disabled. What a great business opportunity!

I’d want one that sounds like a dog growling. That would make them wake up.

Read it.

Which tells you everything you need to know about ‘academics’ these days.

Stanley’s supporters in Denbigh have raised the £31,000 needed to pay for the bronze monument, after a vote among residents found that a clear majority wanted to commemorate the town’s most famous son.

Whatever Stanley’s personal character flaws, it is an undoubted fact that he was a classic Victorian-era globetrotting British adventurer, who was famous during his lifetime and who would have a guaranteed position in any unbiased history of the period.

The people of the area have decided to erect a monument to this legitimate historical figure. What fargin business is it of ’60 academics, authors, and campaigners’ — i.e. useless people, not one of whom lives in the area — whether they do it or not?

The letter, whose signatories include the Welsh transsexual author Jan Morris and Dr Bambi Ceuppens of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium, says: “It is impossible to disconnect Stanley, or any other imperialist of the period, from that suffering.”

Oh, those are names that inspire confidence. The distinguishing characteristic of this degenerate modern age is the prevalence of self-righteous assholes who think they have a natural right to stick their noses in other people’s business. (Of course, they’d be the first to scream if someone else tried to do it to them.)

Megan McArdle is on the case.

Not really a surprise.

Steve Sailer points out an inconvenient truth.

Third World population growth is becoming an unmentionable in the press. There’s nothing much more fundamental in human affairs than population, but we talk about it less and less.

This reflects the general anti-reductionist trend in Western thought. As the education level of the elites rise, the popularity of Occam’s Razor seems to decline. Who wants to figure out the simplest way to comprehend how things basically work when it’s better for your career to assert that everything’s very, very complicated, and only an expert like yourself could possibly begin to grasp the complexities of it all?

Read it.

Back in May it was reported that the failing, yet politically-connected Shorebank in Illinois was to be bailed out. The bank actually closed last Friday, but was resurrected yesterday and turned into a new bank – one that will of course have no obvious relationship to Rep. Jan Schakowsky (IL-09), who lobbied very strenuously to save Shorebank… even though it’s not based in her district. It is, however, the bank that Schakowsky’s convicted felon husband Robert Creamer used to partially extricate himself from the consequences of his fraud scheme; the bank provided critical assistance to Creamer that allowed him to avoid default – which would have beneficial effects on his sentencing a decade later*. There is a strong whiff of this transaction being part of a quid pro quo – with the latter half being paid off, well, right about now.

It must be part of that old Culture of Corruption that Nancy Pelosi keeps going on about — Oh, wait, she means Republicans….