Read it.

Read it.

Not sure Ian Fleming would approve.

Steve Sailer becomes a Puerto Rican nationalist.

Cuba helped bankrupt the Soviet Union by costing the Russkies about $6 billion per year in subsidies. Economist Art Laffer estimates that Puerto Rico costs the U.S. government almost four times as much, mostly in tax breaks to corporations. And the cost of Open Borders between Puerto Rico and the U.S. has been sizable, especially to Eastern Seaboard cities during the decades before the government started bribing Puerto Ricans to stay home. And Puerto Ricans become instantly eligible for affirmative action benefits the moment they step off the plane in the 50 States, which doesn’t do Americans any good.

Read it.

As other countries watch the United States lacerate its intelligence service — for activities already investigated or never undertaken — perhaps they admire America’s commitment to democracy and the rule of law. More likely, I fear, they conclude that we are just plain nuts.

Indeed.

The Hog looks at abortion, eugenics, and Justice Ginsburg.

The reason abortion is legal is that the majority hopes that “undesirable” segments of the population will use abortion so enthusiastically that their numbers will be self-limiting. Were it not for this hope, abortion support would be very limited. Americans want to prevent the births of “unwanted” babies, and generally, “unwanted” means “black.” And our policy is working beautifully. Black women are much, much more likely to have abortions than white women, and over 16 million black babies have been destroyed. You can read all about it at Blackgenocide.com. This is the chief reason the percentage of black Americans has remained stable. Margaret Sanger’s racist hopes have been fulfilled.

Planned Parenthood is actually doing what these innocent purveyors of fast food are falsely accused of. They are reducing the black population. They put about 90% of their mills in minority neighborhoods. Planned Parenthood was founded by a racist and classist who openly admitted she wanted to reduced the numbers of blacks and the poor. Why is it that blacks patronize Planned Parenthood with no qualms, while muttering slanders against a company that sells chicken? If I were black, and I were likely to impregnate women to whom I wasn’t married, and I believed this nonsense, I’d just eat the chicken. It’s cheaper.

Read it.

The Spanish woman who became the world’s oldest mother when she gave birth to twins days before turning 67 has died, leaving her sons orphaned before their third birthday.

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

The former shop worker, who was single, sparked great controversy over her decision to become a mother so late in life. Her own family called her “selfish and irresponsible” for rendering it so likely that her children would be orphaned.

No shit.

Read it.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. (What am I saying? That’s California straight up….)

Read it.

Well. These things happen.

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Officials say they are learning of an increasing number of cases in which immigrant parents in Finland are forcibly sending teens back to their home countries to de-westernize them.

Let’s send Barack Obama back to his home country to de-Westernize him.

It couldn’t hurt.

Read it.

Oddly enough, “American youths” don’t do that for Independence day.

I wonder why not.

Today, disaffected youths from bleak suburban housing projects around major cities use it to express their frustration with high unemployment rates and what they see as France’s failure to integrate ethnic minorities.

Perhaps that’s why.

Read it.

Unfortunately, it is incomplete; no mention of socialism.

Steve Sailer uncovers the seamy side of college admissions.

At the heart of the Ricci case, which Judge Sonia Sotomayor attempted to bury so that it couldn’t be appealed when she heard it by upholding the lower court’s anti-Ricci decision without an opinion (outraging her mentor Judge Jose Cabranes), is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Four-Fifths Rule.

This regulation says that on any employment test, the lowest scoring ethnic group better pass at a rate at least 80% as high as the highest scoring ethnic group.

The fashionable Advanced Placement tests provide us with a database to test the reasonableness of the rule that gives the Disparate Impact theory its teeth. As I mention in post below, blacks only pass AP tests at a per capita rate not Four-Fifths but One-Twentieth of the Asian rate.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

A German chef accidentally blew off both of his hands while attempting to create a dish with liquid nitrogen, according to a newspaper report.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

It is a guarantee that whenever it is announced that a popular book is being turned into a movie, white people will get upset. This is partly due to their fear that something they love will be made accessible to more people and thus enjoyed by more people which immediately decreases the amount of joy a white person can feel towards the original property. Yes, it’s complicated.

But more importantly, once a book has been made into a movie, a white person can no longer read that book. To have read the book after the movie is one of the great crimes in white culture, and under no circumstances should you ever admit to doing this. Literally dozens of white friendships have imploded when it was revealed that someone read Fight Club after 1999.

Read it.

One man was killed and two more injured as the gate-crasher exchanged fire with guests. The gunmen unloaded nearly 50 bullets outside the gathering in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, before following one of the survivors to a nearby hospital, where more shots were fired.

Boy, those white people sure are violent. Oh, wait….

Read it.

The moves now being made by the world’s political establishment to lock us into December’s Copenhagen treaty to halt global warming are as alarming as anything that has happened in our lifetimes. Last week in Italy, the various branches of our emerging world government, G8 and G20, agreed in principle that the world must by 2050 cut its CO2 emissions in half. Britain and the US are already committed to cutting their use of fossil fuels by more than 80 per cent. Short of an unimaginable technological revolution, this could only be achieved by closing down virtually all our economic activity: no electricity, no transport, no industry. All this is being egged on by a gigantic publicity machine, by the UN, by serried ranks of government-funded scientists, by cheerleaders such as Al Gore, last week comparing the fight against global warming to that against Hitler’s Nazis, and by politicians who have no idea what they are setting in train.

What makes this even odder is that the runaway warming predicted by their computer models simply isn’t happening. Last week one of the four official sources of temperature measurement, compiled from satellite data by the University of Huntsville, Alabama, showed that temperatures have now fallen to their average level since satellite data began 30 years ago.

Be afraid.

Steve Sailer isn’t afraid to call a spade a spade, you should excuse the expression.

This one sentence is the most interesting part of the op-ed: Sturm und Guinier give away the hushed up fact that “civil rights” — as currently understood by, say, Sonia Sotomayor — is an assault on America’s once proud tradition of civil service reforms.

Objective written tests for would-be government employees originated in Imperial China, and the idea was transmitted to Europe by early Jesuit missionaries, such as the great Matteo Ricci, who were impressed by how much better China was administered than their own countries. The Chinese tests were not seemingly all that “job-related” — they consisted of questions requiring elegant essays on the Confucian classics, with bonus points for artistic calligraphy. That doesn’t, at first glance, seem to have much to do with, say, keeping the Grand Canal dredged and open to shipping. But, of course, they were tests of IQ, literacy, and diligence, which predicts a lot more about job performance than, say, who you know.

However, as minority political power grew, minorities stopped wanting blind-graded testing extended to fight bigotry and instead wanted it rolled back to benefit themselves over more qualified job applicants. Thus, in January 1981, the outgoing Carter Administration signed a consent decree in the Luevano discrimination case junking PACE, and promising that the federal government would replace it in the future with a test that would be both predictively valid and have much less disparate impact. Of course, 28 years later, the federal government, despite its vast resources, has never been able to come up with that mythical replacement test.

Fire departments, like most government agencies, are monopolies, so they aren’t inherently incentivized by market competition to hire the most effective managers and employees. Thus, strict civil service rules have been developed to produce objective competition for jobs. The diversicrats like Guinier and Sotomayor hate blind-graded competitions, precisely because they are honest and fair.

Read it.

A year after she ran away from her master, Barakatu Mint Sayed prays that the election on July 18 will mark the beginning of the end of slavery in Mauritania.

Her nation is one of the last places on Earth where large numbers of humans are still kept as property.

Paging Al Sharpton…. Paging Jesse Jackson….

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I wasn’t, really.

Read it.

The latest episode comes courtesy of Silvestre Reyes, Chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. In a letter leaked to the press on Wednesday, he claims the agency “misled” Congress about its activities after 9/11. Recall that this all started when Speaker Nancy Pelosi insisted the CIA failed to brief her in 2002 about aggressive interrogations during her time on Intelligence earlier this decade. CIA Director Leon Panetta in May said the agency didn’t, as policy or practice, “mislead Congress.” Briefing notes from the time showed Mrs. Pelosi was told and didn’t object to waterboarding. The CIA this week felt compelled to issue another denial in response to the Reyes letter.

There’s apparently no limit to how far Speaker Pelosi’s friends on the Hill are willing to go to salvage her reputation. The intentions are transparent enough. The Reyes letter was addressed to Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on Intelligence. Mr. Hoekstra yesterday said the media received the missive before he did. And two days after the Panetta testimony last month, six Democratic Members of the committee called on the CIA Director to “correct” his statement in May that the CIA doesn’t lie to Congress. He didn’t. The six are allies of Speaker Pelosi. Her public standing — and poll numbers — have been battered since her run-in with Mr. Panetta and the facts this spring.

Congress claims it needs to better monitor Presidential intelligence decisions. But the real lesson of the last few years is that Congress wants to know about, and often second-guess, intelligence decisions without being responsible for the result. Mrs. Pelosi could have objected to waterboarding but didn’t at the time, becoming a critic only when it became a political uproar. Senator Jay Rockefeller could have resisted warrantless wiretaps of al Qaeda but instead wrote a letter and stuck it in a drawer.

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

Read it.

If New Yorkers fantasize that doing business here in Los Angeles would be less of a headache, forget about it. This city is fast becoming a job-killing machine. It’s no accident the unemployment rate is a frightening 11.4% and climbing.

But we have no choice. The city’s bureaucrats rival Stalin’s apparatchiks in issuing decrees, rescinding them, and then punishing citizens for having followed them in the first place.

Read it.

Darwin Award nominee.

Unfortunately, his girlfriend is pregnant, so at least some of the defective genes might escape.

Read it.

“Attacks inside Alaska and largely invisible to the national media had paralyzed her administration,” someone close to the governor told me. “She was fully aware she would be branded a ‘quitter.’ She did not want to disappoint her constituents, but she was no longer able to do the job she had been elected to do. Essentially, the taxpayers were paying for Sarah to go to work every day and defend herself.”

Since Ms. Palin returned to Alaska after the 2008 campaign, some 150 FOIA requests have been filed and her office has been targeted for investigation by everyone from the FBI to the Alaska legislature. Most have centered on Ms. Palin’s use of government resources, and to date have turned up little save for a few state trips that she agreed to reimburse the state for because her children had accompanied her. In the process, though, she accumulated $500,000 in legal fees in just the last nine months, and knew the bill would grow ever larger in the future.

Read it.

Mr Vaughan-Evans, who was in his late seventies, was killed on the eve of his wife Jean’s 80th birthday.

“She is frail and in a wheelchair from a previous attack, also in their home,” he said.

Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

Read it.

The elephant-in-the-room irony is that the liberal cause is supposed to be about improving the prospects and economic security of ordinary Americans, whose beliefs and intelligence liberals so often enjoy deriding.

Thus, higher education is remedial education, and the affliction it remedies is an American upbringing.

The professors, by contrast, expect to be deferred to, not to be the ones deferring. Their “intellectual arrogance” is a consequence of the assumptions of progressivism, an ism that treats progress as the fundamental reality. The belief in progress is the belief that the present is better and wiser than the past, and the future will be better and wiser than the present. Truths outside of history, such as the laws of nature and nature’s God, either don’t exist, can’t be known, or don’t matter. Unlike the Marxist, the progressive does not believe history is following a defined path to a specific, inevitable conclusion. Rather, the evolution of human society is constant and eternal. Its entirety is unknowable, the idea that it has an ultimate destination a complete misconception, but history’s next phase can be discerned by some better than others.

We see here all the basic elements, employed for the past 28 years, of liberal condescension. Every issue of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone makes clear that the policy positions of George W. Bush, Republicans and conservatives in general are wicked and stupid. The real problem, however, is that everything about these people—where they reside, what they believe, how they live, work, recreate, talk and think—is in irredeemably bad taste. To embark on a conversation with one of them, based on straight-faced openness to the possibility of learning something interesting or important, would be like choosing to vacation in Wichita instead of Tuscany.

Read it.

Too much television really is bad for you.

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And who could blame them?

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The media and political pundits refuse to see this gap between the state’s budget and its ability to pay as an essential issue.

But the fundamental problem remains. California’s economy–once wondrously diverse with aerospace, high-tech, agriculture and international trade–has run aground. Burdened by taxes and ever-growing regulation, the state is routinely rated by executives as having among the worst business climates in the nation. No surprise, then, that California’s jobs engine has sputtered, and it may be heading toward 15% unemployment.

Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect. Rinse. Repeat. Go bankrupt.

Read it.

Speaking to the American Medical Association last month, President Obama waxed enthusiastic about countries that “spend less” than the U.S. on health care. He’s right that many countries do, but what he doesn’t want to explain is how they ration care to do it.

While the guidelines are complex, NICE currently holds that, except in unusual cases, Britain cannot afford to spend more than about $22,000 to extend a life by six months. Why $22,000? It seems to be arbitrary, calculated mainly based on how much the government wants to spend on health care. That figure has remained fairly constant since NICE was established and doesn’t adjust for either overall or medical inflation.

The NICE precedent also undercuts the Obama Administration’s argument that vast health savings can be gleaned simply by automating health records or squeezing out “waste.” Britain has tried all of that but ultimately has concluded that it can only rein in costs by limiting care. The logic of a health-care system dominated by government is that it always ends up with some version of a NICE board that makes these life-or-death treatment decisions. The Administration’s new Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research currently lacks the authority of NICE. But over time, if the Obama plan passes and taxpayer costs inevitably soar, it could quickly gain it.

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The 1996 murder of seven French Catholic monks in Algeria, called the Martyrs of Atlas because of the Atlas mountains where their monastery was located, was not the work of Islamist militants as officially stated at the time, according to testimony by a retired French general to an inquiry into the killings.

In fact, he told a closed-door inquiry in Paris, Algerian troops in a helicopter inadvertently gunned down the Trappists when they strafed an isolated camp they believed belonged to the radical Armed Islamic Group (GIA) that was battling the Algerian state at the time. When they landed to inspect the scene, the troops found the bullet-ridden bodies of the monks who had been kidnapped two months beforehand. Algeria then concocted the story that the Islamists had slit the monks’ throats to hide their fatal blunder.

The GIA has a sordid part in this story, as they apparently abducted the monks after the Trappists had been kidnapped by Algerian agents in a complicated plot. But if these testimonies are correct, the monks did not die at the hands of Islamists who slit their throats, as the official Algerian explanation has it.

Truth will out.

Read it.

It will only take about ten years for the bureaucrats to catch up.

There’s probably a fat Ph.D. dissertation in cataloging all of the laws that enshrine outmoded science.

Read it.

Yet another reason not to play cricket.

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Telling the school that the children were related to European royalty and that his brother was a senior Army officer, the father is said to have asked for permission – which was granted – to pick up his children inside the two schools attended by his eldest children.

However, one of the head teachers went to the police because of her “concerns”.

Lord Monckton, who has investigated the allegations, described the episode as “the worst case of child abduction by social services that I have ever come across”.

He accused a social worker and a police officer, both female, of plotting together against the couple, who live in the east of England.

The father has told the peer that when he was asked to accompany her, he demanded to see her identification but she refused to show him. He claims he was then hancuffed by two police officers.

His wife was also detained when she went to remonstrate, and their youngest child was taken away screaming, according to the family’s account. Later all three children were taken into care.

Good thing they weren’t Mormons — they’d never get their kids back.

Read it.

They are the traditional pleasures of a British summer fair. But the spin of the tombola and the fun of the coconut shy are being eclipsed by the rustle of paperwork and the shuffle of the inspector’s footsteps.

Village fete organisers say they are having to cancel events because volunteers are struggling to cope with the demands of officialdom.

Saw that comin’.

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

Read it.

Works for me.

Better yet, let’s put a stake through his heart, cut off his head, and fill his mouth with garlic.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

So even though I tend to focus on under-the-radar euphemisms in this column, sometimes you have to take your radar and throw it in the bathtub, rubber duckies be damned. Hiking the Appalachian trail is too good to pass up, and if we’re lucky, it may describe cheaters far into the future, even during the long-prophesied era when the right to gay-marry Martians is hotly contested.

Read it.

Wal-Mart buys protection by selling out its competitors.

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Those of us dedicated to the zoology of celebrity should have known it was over when the death of next-to-nobody Anna Nicole Smith filled the airwaves in 2007 for a week. Celebrity had lost its meaning. We will bury its golden age in Jacko’s tomb.

South Carolina and New York can have only one deranged governor. Mass marketing can’t produce politicians and cheapen them further. Most of the time they don’t do much of anything, just like celebrities. Meet Senator Franken.

A poll in the last election found that most people think they could do a better job than their own Member of Congress. So I expect that TV will soon create a reality Congress show. Average people could pretend to run a whole country, just like the celebrities who are pretending to run Washington.

Steve Sailer cuts to the chase.

The Ricci reactions have made more evident that liberals are peeved that anybody takes seriously all that language in the civil rights laws about equal protection. In the liberal mind, the specific wording of the laws was just a sham to get them approved. The laws are really simply about “Who? Whom?” Thus, the idea of civil rights laws being used by the Supreme Court to protect the civil rights of white guys like Frank Ricci is an affront against all that is holy (i.e., civil rights laws).

Read it.

New claims of torture and abuse of Iraqi civilians by British soldiers will be made in 20 fresh cases being prepared by human rights lawyers in London, it is reported.

Hm. No mention of there being any human rights lawyers in Baghdad. Wonder why that is?

I have an idea: Let’s torture the human rights lawyers. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Read it.

One of the country’s leading sculptors is suing for damages after his “life’s work” was destroyed when a garage was knocked down to make way for a housing project, a court heard.

This is what happens when you put your life in storage.

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The Minnesota Supreme Court yesterday declared Democrat Al Franken the winner of last year’s disputed Senate race, and Republican incumbent Norm Coleman’s gracious concession at least spares the state any further legal combat. The unfortunate lesson is that you don’t need to win the vote on Election Day as long as your lawyers are creative enough to have enough new or disqualified ballots counted after the fact.

If we’re going to have a Senate that’s a joke, the least we could do is get somebody who’s actually funny, like Robin Williams.

Read it.

Go ahead. You’re free to donate to cancer research.

David Brooks is back on the reservation, if only for a visit.

Freud said we’re forever changed by the traumas of our youth, and so it is with the Democrats and Clintoncare. Even as you watch the leading Democrats today in their moment of glory, you can still see wounds caused by the defeat of the Clinton health care initiative. You see the psychic reactions and the scars and the lessons they have taken away so that sort of debacle never happens again.

All of this has produced a ruthlessly pragmatic victory machine. Last week Democrats were able to pass a politically treacherous cap-and-trade bill out of the House. The Democratic leaders were able to let 44 members vote no and still bribe/bully/cajole enough of their colleagues to get a win. This was an impressive achievement, and a harbinger for health care and other battles to come.

The great paradox of the age is that Barack Obama, the most riveting of recent presidents, is leading us into an era of Congressional dominance. And Congressional governance is a haven for special interest pleading and venal logrolling.

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The bottom line about the international aspects of climate change is that the very idea of an effective response assumes the existence of a generally cooperative international environment. It doesn’t assume the non-existence of the odd “rogue” state here or there, but it assumes the absence of any kind of serious great power rivalries. Not just China, but also India and probably Russia, Brazil, and Indonesia as well are going to need to cooperate in a serious way with the OECD nations on this. And I just don’t see how you’re going to get where you need to get through coercion. If anything, I think attempted economic coercion of China is more likely to wind up breaking down solidarity between the US, EU, and Japan than anything else. First, we impose our carbon tariff. Then suddenly Airbus and European car companies are getting all kinds of sales because the EU hasn’t followed suit. Now not only are the Chinese mad at us, we’re mad at the Europeans. Optimistically, at this point everyone decides coercion is unworkable and we start to back away.

Read it.

So what are they afraid of? Communist bureaucrats are very dependable — if they ban something, it’s almost certainly good for you.

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Well, it’s Afghanistan. They’re the ones who dynamited the famous ancient Buddha statues. What do they care about anything that happened pre-Islam?

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For “grant system” read “government funding”.

One major impediment, scientists agree, is the grant system itself. It has become a sort of jobs program, a way to keep research laboratories going year after year with the understanding that the focus will be on small projects unlikely to take significant steps toward curing cancer.

Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy strikes again.

The institute’s reviewers choose such projects because, with too little money to finance most proposals, they are timid about taking chances on ones that might not succeed. The problem, Dr. Young and others say, is that projects that could make a major difference in cancer prevention and treatment are all too often crowded out because they are too uncertain. In fact, it has become lore among cancer researchers that some game-changing discoveries involved projects deemed too unlikely to succeed and were therefore denied federal grants, forcing researchers to struggle mightily to continue.

Your tax dollars at work, so to speak.

In other words, had we been depending on the government to support the necessary research, large numbers of women would be dead now. Private money (of the worst kind: corporate money) came to the rescue.

Read it.

“Well, with King Ferdinand spinning in his grave like that we figured it would be a shame not to harness that as a source of green power….”