Alex Tabarrok does the numbers.

Number of birds killed by the BP oil spill: at least 2,188 and counting.

Number of birds killed by wind farms: 10,000-40,000 annually.

Somehow I don’t suppose that PETA and the Sierra Club will be bashing wind farms quite as much as they bash BP. Ya think?

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Suddenly the phenomenon of class resentment is a live political issue. Some commentators describe it as the Democrats’ “middle-class problem”, which means that there has been a spectacular collapse of support for the administration among the core blue-collar voters who should constitute its base.

Liberal politics is now – over there as much as here – a form of social snobbery. To express concern about mass immigration, or reservations about the Obama healthcare plan, is unacceptable in bien-pensant circles because this is simply not the way educated people are supposed to think. It follows that those who do think (and talk) this way are small-minded bigots, rednecks, oiks, or whatever your local code word is for “not the right sort”.

Indeed, American politics is looking more like that of a Third-World kleptocracy, with Obama and his cronies ushering in our own sort of waBenzi.

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Romneycare affords us a glimpse into the not very distant future if Obamacare is not repealed. Employers are dumping their health care plans. The governor is essentially attempting to impose price controls on insurers. If the governor is successful, insurers would just throw in the towel. When that happens under Obamacare, we will take our nationalized medicine straight.

What puzzles me is that Republicans revile Obama for Obamacare, yet appear to give Romney a pass on Romneycare. Why is that? It may be just the fact that Romneycare was already demonstrably failing when Obama pushed his program through, and that he deserves obloquy for persisting in the face of failure. But I really can’t see any reason for people to consider Romney a legitimate candidate for the Republican Presidential nod, as he obviously is, when his chief accomplishment as Governor of Massachusetts is a failed program identical to the chief priority of our current leftist Democrat in the White House.

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Good to know that there are still some standards left.

My friend adds that much of the gossip is about which country club the couple will be allowed to join. Hassan Nemazee, a former Clinton fundraiser, tried to introduce them to a 120-year-old golf club of which he was a member. Unfortunately, he is now serving a 12-year prison sentence for bank fraud.

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Oh, ya think? Find a non-white person who has ever, ever, been tagged for a ‘hate crime’.

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What could be more depressing than a well-meaning corporation and a closely associated foundation, concerned about the quality of math education in our nation, applying a large amount of resources that are not only wasted, but generally have exactly the opposite effects that they want?

Oh, I don’t know — how about a well-meaning government doing the same thing? With our money?

Steve Sailer turns over a rock and watches the Crust take care of its own and co-opt the best of the Underclass.

The box students checked off on the racial question on their application was thus shown to have an extraordinary effect on a student’s chances of gaining admission to the highly competitive private schools in the NSCE database. To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550.

Having money in the family greatly improved a white applicant’s admissions chances, lack of money greatly reduced it. The opposite class trend was seen among non-whites, where the poorer the applicant the greater the probability of acceptance when all other factors are taken into account. Class-based affirmative action does exist within the three non-white ethno-racial groupings, but among the whites the groups advanced are those with money.

Read it. And watch the video.

It’s funny how the political class is always wringing its hands about the potential for violence at Tea Party rallies, while 100% of the actual violence and intimidation that take place at political events is committed by union goons.

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What can $1,475 buy you in modern China? Not a Tiffany diamond or a mini-sedan, say Robert Zhou and Daisy Chao. But for that price, they guarantee you something more lasting, with unquestioned future benefits: an American passport and U.S. citizenship for your new baby.

Zhou and Chao, a husband and wife from Taiwan who now live in Shanghai, run one of China’s oldest and most successful consultancies helping well-heeled expectant Chinese mothers travel to the United States to give birth.

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There have been several occasions when the American people have voted for smaller government; most notably in 1972, 1980 and 1994. But it really doesn’t matter. You can vote for limited government, but you can’t get it; the political class won’t let you. This is not to assert the silly proposition that there is no major difference between Democrats and Republicans. The fiscal disaster that we have witnessed since the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007 proves the contrary. But still: experience shows that voting for Republicans hasn’t been enough to offset the power of the political class.

Bruce Nussbaum is one of the worst SWPL handwringers I’ve encountered in years.

Reading the article, it becomes plain that the not-invented-here objections raised (by native members of the Crust) reflect a dislike of having traditional power relationships disrupted than any actual, demonstrable flaws in the projects.

Our foreign aid programs have the same gauntlet to run — unless they’re funneled through the local wa-Benzi (who extract their customary percentage), they run the risk of being denounced as ‘imperialism’; the local wa-Benzi know this and know well how to game the system.

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The children of the Crust are constantly indoctrinated with “America sucks!”, so it’s no surprise when some of them actually take action.

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Remember the left cheering when the New York Times did this stuff to the Bush Administration? Somehow I suspect they’ll still actually cheer for this, which won’t exactly do anything to reassure the American people that those in charge are good on national security issues.

Makes you wonder whose side they’re on. (Oops, I forgot, we already know that: Anybody But America.)

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Friday’s development: A Phoenix police officer has sued over the Arizona immigration law, arguing that he could be sued for racial profiling if he enforces the Arizona law.

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Recent reports from the L.A. Times show that since 2007, nearly $4.8 million in welfare funds have been withdrawn from ATMs in California casinos. And a new report shows that more than $12,000 from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program was withdrawn from ATMs in California strip clubs.

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They coulda let Bear Stearns’s creditors or AIG’s or LTCM’s or Mexico’s or Continental Illinois’s lose some, just some of their money. They shoulda. And they woulda if it had been safe. Or so they claimed. But it was too risky.They–the regulators and politicians didn’t give all that money to creditors because the creditors were politically powerful. No. The politicians and regulators did it for the country. At least that’s what they told us. They just couldn’t let lenders pay a price, even a very small one, for making imprudent loans if the lenders were large. I doubt the regulators will see their way to doing it differently the next time either. They could, of course. They just won’t.

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Nothing personal — it’s just business.

Financial reform might irk Wall Street, but the president’s real problem is with small businesses—the engine of any serious recovery.

And, as the BP executives have found out to their sorrow, Obama is not an Honest Politician; he doesn’t stay bought.

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1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in Ann Arbor.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, yanks back the curtain.

In the dismaying-but-not-surprising category of news stories recently, this one in the July 2 New York Times got my attention. It describes how the Obama administration is killing off the summer-internship programs, many of them unpaid, that are so popular with high-school seniors and college students.

What seems to be going on here is a war against the notion that any American citizen should do any kind of non-academic work before the age of 25 — before, that is, a college degree and a couple of years of law school have been completed.

A person acquainted with the real world would recognize this for what it is: the romantic piffle of fools living in money-padded cocoons. There, however, you see the circularity of the issue. The overclass types who extrude this gibberish are not much acquainted with the real world; and one reason for this is, they have never done low-paid, low-skill work. They may have done higher-status internships for little or no pay, but it seems the administration now wants to shut youngsters off from even that much acquaintance with the world of work.

I have noticed that if, among 30-something colleagues, I mention one of my own school or college summer jobs — factory or construction work, dishwashing, retail sales, bartending — my colleagues will look amused, and a bit baffled. How come a guy as well-educated as Derb was shoveling concrete? Boy, he’s a real eccentric! No, I’m not. Those experiences were perfectly normal for a person of my generation. They’re just not normal any more, not for children of the American middle and upper classes.

When I was in college, I spent my summers building mobile homes. My Yale T-shirt was unusual, but I worked alongside people from Notre Dame and Purdue and the local Bible college. It’s not a bad thing for a college graduate to know how to use a screw-gun or a band-saw.

Nor was physical labor always thought shameful. In the older American ideal, which is now as dead as the one-room schoolhouse, physical labor was held to have a dignity to it. Even elites believed their youngsters would benefit from a taste of it. Calvin Coolidge put his 15-year-old son to work in the tobacco fields of Hatfield, Mass., as a vacation job. (When the lad happened to mention who he was, one of his co-workers said: “Gee, if the president was my father, I wouldn’t be working here.” Cal Jr.: “You would, if your father were my father.” For a comparison with the “conservative” sensibility of our own time, recall Karl Rove’s remark: “I don’t want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes.” Good heavens, Karl, of course you don’t: The poor lad might break a fingernail.)

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In 2009, a poll of nearly 12,000 people by online dating site Shaadi.com, revealed that skin tone was considered the most important criteria when choosing a partner in three northern Indian states.

“Indians believe that if you have fair skin you belong to the higher caste, the Brahmins,” he added, explaining that a succession of light-skinned colonisers in India reinforced the association of fairness with power.

Varna, the term conventionally used to describe the ‘caste’ system in India, literally means color.

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So he’s dumping the trophy wife he dumped his first one for.

The couple have been married for 16 years and have four children together.

I assume that his father is rotating rather briskly by now.

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The Nanny State proceeds apace in Britain.

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A notable achievement. Message: The future is against the law.

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A rogue Afghan soldier shot dead a British colleague in his sleeping quarters before killing two more by firing a rocket-propelled grenade into a control room.

This is exactly the sort of situation that the British Army spent two centuries coping with prior to World War II. Unfortunately, the modern British soldier isn’t just some yob swept up off the street and drilled rigid, but a highly-trained specialist who is more talented to start with and represents a significant investment in time and money.

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Next time, use MasterCard.

The 23-man squad, plus families and supporters, want to travel on traditional Haudenosaunee – or Iroquois – passports which represent six nations of indigenous North Americans.

However, the UK has said the passport is not an internationally recognised travel document.

It is understood the US authorities are also refusing to recognise the document.

Yeah, they might be Muslim terrorists (They’re everywhere! They’re everywhere!) or something. Government Rule #1: Never pass up an opportunity to inconvenience somebody for no good reason.

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There were some unusual moments during the first hearing of the presidential commission on the BP-Deepwater Horizon accident. And no, we’re not talking about the speakers who showed up claiming to represent the Communist Party. Or the witness who pulled out a guitar and crooned a song about the accident.

Sometimes Congress is the most entertaining thing around.

No, the really odd moment came when Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement that he was looking to the commission for information that could inform the administration’s position on halting deepwater drilling.

Salazar’s statement stunned the commission’s two co-chairmen, William K. Reilly and Bob Graham, who said they had been assured by Salazar’s office and the White House that giving advice on the moratorium wasn’t their job.

Oh, gee, the Obama administration lied to you? How could that happen? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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On one stretch of the border, Chinese troops apprehended five North Korean soldiers in May alone. Prior to the sinking of the South Korean corvette Cheonan in March, allegedly by a torpedo fired from a North Korean submarine, it was rare for troops to be taken into custody on the Chinese side of the Yalu River.

“In the past there have been cases of North Korean troops crossing the border and plundering Chinese farms for their food, which they then took back to their posts in the North,” Kim Sang-hun, a human rights activist in Seoul, told The Daily Telegraph.

The defectors apprehended by the Chinese were reportedly returned to North Korea, where they face execution.

Those Communists, they’re just so warm and fuzzy.

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The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the main opposition party in the Indian parliament, wants to ban beef from the menu at this year’s Commonwealth Games in New Dehli on Oct. 3-14 to showcase the country’s “cultural values and age-old traditions”.

Don’t tell me – let me guess: the ‘cultural value’ they’d be ‘showcasing’ is ‘Do It Our Way’ and the ‘age-old tradition’ is Suppression of Freedom. On historical grounds, I must admit that they have an excellent case.

Muslims have an equally good case to make that Killing Non-Muslims And Stealing Their Land is likewise one of their ‘cultural values’ and ‘age-old traditions’; indeed, the Moguls had been doing that in India for about 300 years before the British stepped in and ruined all the fun.

I wonder whether the BJP would be down with that?

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The new regulations, which kick in at the start of 2012, require any taxpayer with business income to issue 1099 forms to all vendors from whom they purchased more than $600 of goods and services that year. That promises to launch a fusillade of new paperwork: An estimated 40 million taxpayers will be subject to the requirement, including 26 million who run sole proprietorships, according to a report released this week by National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson….

“The new reporting burden, particularly as it falls on small businesses, may turn out to be disproportionate as compared with any resulting improvement in tax compliance,” the Taxpayer Advocate Service wrote in a report released this week.

Unintended Consequences, thy name is Obama.

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One of the nation’s most iconic nonprofit organizations, founded 166 years ago in England as the Young Men’s Christian Association, is undergoing a major rebranding, adopting as its name the nickname everyone has used for generations.

‘Young Men’? Certainly. ‘Christian’? Not so much.

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It’s like watching a snowman melt in the sun.

“People’s patience is running out and many will now be asking whether they should try and practice their Catholic faith in the Church of England,” he said.

Well, no. If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that heresies eventually self-destruct.

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Every school should have a “useless teacher” so children can learn to deal with incompetent people in authority, the outgoing chairman of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) has claimed.

We’ll be happy to send you some of ours, guys; we have excess of requirements.

Read it. And watch the video.

These people are among the reasons why I work in database development rather than law — it substantially reduces the amount of time I have to spend taking a shower.

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Over the past few years I’ve been able to observe first hand the devolution of a person into a liberal.  My findings are not surprising but I thought I would share them with you.

Of course it doesn’t take a genius to conclude that if one is allowed to blame upbringing for conservatism and portray that negatively, one should not simultaneously be allowed to exalt liberal indoctrination at college campuses as though it were the product of free thought.  If the family environment creates a conservative, and the college environment creates a liberal, shouldn’t we view any “creation” process in equal terms?  Of course not, because a small house in the hills of Appalachia is a den of ignorance to be derided whereas the shimmering ivory Berkeley campus is a palace of worship deserving of all praise.  In the eyes of a liberal, anyway.  Once made, a liberal must fall over themselves to help these poor unforunate ignoramuses who live in places other than metro areas think and be just like them.  Interesting contradiction, don’t you think?

Since I have known her, she becomes more liberal by the day.  And I find that each liberal virtue she extolls seems to originate in her mind only after the virtue is in someway relevant to her.  I won’t go into the details – use your imagination.

Another less positive way to put it would be like this: the more she fails at life, the more liberal she becomes.  It would appear that her liberal beliefs emerge only to justify a course in life she’s already chosen to take.  Her beliefs did not arise independently.  They exist only as an excuse to justify actions in the past.  Or as a justification for why she isn’t doing what the rest of us are doing, such as respectably contributing to our civilization.  As opposed to whining about it.

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Medical helicopters are supposed to save lives. Too often, they put both flight crew and patients in danger instead. Here, in this Popular Mechanics special report, we investigate the crashes and statistics that make medical helicopter an unacceptable risk.

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Wally Olson was two years ahead of me at Yale and his decades-long struggle to point out how lawyers are bringing our civilization down is good and useful work.

And, as in this case, sometimes pretty amusing.

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At least under this system, when government wanted your land, you knew.

Not so under many of today’s taking methods, the most insidious of which occur by tame-sounding names and friendly partnerships among government, special interest, and landowner. Take National Heritage Areas (NHAs), a voluntary program of the National Park Service that confers honorary titles on properties deemed historically significant and crucial to telling stories of America’s past. Forty-nine such areas currently exist, and more are in the works.

The enabling legislation also requires the NHA to have a management entity oversee creating and implementing a management plan for the site that the Secretary of the Interior must approve. And examples abound of these management boards—comprised of volunteer members of local government, conservation and preservation groups, U.S. Parks Department personnel, and other interested individuals—acting as a quasi-government body that pressures local land-use changes.

In not one of these instances were landowners deprived of their lands. That’s why supporters can claim NHAs do not take property rights. But only the most dishonest would insist that NHA designations do not lead to land-use changes from local governments. While one might opt out of inclusion in the NHA, how does one opt out of local zoning?

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She looks like a model and he looks like a dork. What’s up with that?

I see a romantic spy/chick flick starring Justin Timberlake and Megan Fox.

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The Russian government has realized that Obama can be rolled, so they are busy rolling him.

The Kremlin is upset—but not exceedingly so—at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for pointing out the obvious: Russian troops are occupying Abkhazia and South Ossetia in violation of the ceasefire agreement that ended its brief war with Georgia. The deal, brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, required the Soviet military to withdraw to prewar boundaries. Instead, it is has built permanent bases in the breakaway republics.

Vladamir Putin’s response was noticeably restrained: “While some think South Ossetia is occupied, others think it is liberated.” The message from Moscow is, more of less, this: The Obama administration’s “reset” is paying dividends for us—NATO membership for Georgia is unlikely in the near future, missile defense is a dead issue, the START treaty was but a minor concession—so why respond to Clinton’s empty assurances to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili?

When Kruschev met with JFK in Vienna and realized he could be rolled, the result was the Cuban Missile Crisis. What will Obama, that gift that keeps on giving, get us?

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Sell a guinea pig, go to jail.

That’s the law under consideration by San Francisco’s Commission of Animal Control and Welfare. If the commission approves the ordinance at its meeting tonight, San Francisco could soon have what is believed to be the country’s first ban on the sale of all pets except fish.

San Francisco seems determined to be on the cutting edge of idiocy in North America.

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The unstated goal of any piece of advertising is to rip the reader’s attention away from what they were really interested in, and focus it for a moment on something they likely don’t give a damn about. It belies a complete lack of respect for the reader or viewer, and suggests that their sole reason for producing content is to ambush the consumer with unrelated garbage: it’s nothing but Mahalo or a typo-squatter, a tawdry bait-and-switch that leaves the user feeling, well, used.

My List:

1. Ads that make noise, whether you want them to or not. (Example: Background talking that starts up automatically when you land on the page.)
2. Ads that move. Period. (Example: Self-starting flash videos.)
3. Pop-ups that totally block the site and require playing ‘hunt for the close control’.

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Hint: It was tending down until 2008, then went through the roof. Wonder why?

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Of course, persuading many Americans that Progressivism initiated a struggle over the soul of America is a hard sell. For decades, liberal scholars and politicians have attributed the 20th-century growth of government to changes in the mere material circumstances of American life. The Progressive era’s progressive reforms, we have been told, were the necessary and inevitable response to problems created by the closing of the frontier, the rise of huge corporations and a transition to large-scale factory production, population shifts out of the countryside and into the city, large waves of immigration, etc. The New Deal, in turn, was simply a response to the economic hardships caused by the Great Depression. By attributing these periods’ reforms to America’s changing material circumstances, the orthodox view implies that there was no change of philosophical or moral import likewise under way. More to the point, it implies that the Progressives’ reforms were guided by the principles of the American Founding.

And yet this is demonstrably false.

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Peter Bethune, an environmental campaigner who boarded a Japanese whaling vessel in the Antarctic Ocean in February, has been sentenced to a suspended two-year prison term in Tokyo.

Not a positive development. All you have to do these days is label yourself (or be labelled by the lamestream media) an ‘activist’ and you can get away with behavior that would land any ordinary person in prison. This merely encourages such ‘activism’. That’s not what the law is there to do; it’s supposed to discourage that sort of thing.

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A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has rejected an Oregon man’s petition for habeas corpus relief (PDF). This despite acknowledging that the man has established actual innocence for the crimes for which he’s being imprisoned (sexual abuse and sodomy of a four-year-old). The reason: He was late filing his petition. By the panel’s reckoning, adherence to an arbitrary deadline created by legislators is a higher value than not continuing to imprison people we know to be innocent.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (the most reversed Federal Appellate Circuit in the country) is a constant disgrace.

The Other McCain is having entirely too much fun.

Joe Miller  is the Republican primary challenger to Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who was rated No. 5 on the Human Events list of “Top 10 Senate RINOs” (and that was when Arlen Specter was still a Republican).

Matt Welch is bummed.

Our grandchildren won’t believe our stories about the 1990s. Yes, there really was a time before the World Wide Web and ubiquitous portable communication devices in sub-Saharan Africa. Yes, you really could travel to some foreign countries without a passport, without a return ticket, without a credit card, and without entering multiple government databases. Yes, the Pittsburgh Pirates really did once play winning baseball.

But as the Bush-Obama era of bailout economics and Keynesian rehabilitation settles into something like cruising speed, perhaps the most fantastic fact to swallow will be that once upon a time the United States had a president who restrained government spending, balanced the budget, argued forcefully for the benefits of free trade, and declared that “the era of big government is over.” And he was a Democrat.

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PowerPoint – it’s not just boring, it’s insecure.