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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….

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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.

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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….

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

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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.

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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.

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Darwin Award nominee.

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

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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….”

Steve Sailer looks a the mortgage meltdown discussion.

In public, there are only two sides: the liberal (Corporate Greed!) and the libertarian (Government Interference!).

In contrast, the real divide is between the overwhelmingly dominant Diversity Dogmatists, liberal and libertarian, versus the tiny number of Diversity Heretics. Personally, I don’t oppose government regulation of the mortgage business to prevent over-optimistic borrowers and lenders from causing defaults down the road, so I’m not a libertarian on this. But, in this case, the federal government was (and still is) regulating in the wrong direction: toward more risk.

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Can the U.S. be far behind? We’ve got the same sort of delusional idiots in charge.

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Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.

This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN’s major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week’s meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.

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

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Back when the housing mania was taking off, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank famously said he wanted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to “roll the dice” in the name of affordable housing. That didn’t turn out so well, but Mr. Frank has since only accumulated more power. And now he is returning to the scene of the calamity — with your money. He and New York Representative Anthony Weiner have sent a letter to the heads of Fannie and Freddie exhorting them to lower lending standards for condo buyers.

Somebody doesn’t like the cap & trade bill.

They passed this shameful fraud because they wanted to get out of town for the July 4th holiday. The rest of us get July 4th off. They get a week or more. In fact, who knows when they’ll return from this recess. Will it be to push through another huge, unread bill, this time on health care? We’re two for two now: the Stimulus Attack and the Energy Fraud.

By the way, one of the features of Cap and Trade is that your local agency for building codes will be by-passed. They’re going to set up a building code bureaucracy in Washington and fill it full of time-servers. Which means you can wait till hell freezes over to get an approval or inspection.

Does this mean your local agency will shut down? Heavens, no! They’ll just be the go-between. You’ll have more hoops to jump through, is all. The Imperial Congress strikes again! Practice your hoop-jumping; it’s a non-productive skill you’ll need to survive in this brave new world.

Recession? No problem! We’ll just destroy what’s left of the economy, so everyone is equally miserable! Your tax dollars at work!

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If people want to kill themselves, fine, but it’s narcissistic to do it in a way that inconveniences other people. Idiots.

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Young British actresses who have struggled to find work at home are flocking to Bollywood to capitalise on the Indian film industry’s insatiable appetite for white-skinned talent.

Any cries of outrage from the Racism Industry? No?

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France is to be taken to the European Court of Justice for failing to protect the Alsace hamster, a cuddly rodent threatened with extension in its native eastern France.

Truly, you can’t make this stuff up.

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A decade ago all three states were among America’s most prosperous. California was the unrivaled technology center of the globe. New York was its financial capital. New Jersey is the third wealthiest state in the nation after Connecticut and Massachusetts. All three are now suffering from devastating budget deficits as the bills for years of tax-and-spend governance come due.

Well, that’s what happens when you follow political fashion rather than common sense.

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Indeed, it is so-called “smart land use” (“smart growth”) that intensified the housing bubble in California. “Smart land use” involves planners telling the market where development will and will not occur. In the process it ignores the price signals of the market. Owners of land on which development is permitted naturally and rationally raise their asking prices, while owners of land not so favored can expect little more than agricultural value when they sell. The result is that the land element of housing prices exploded, fueling the unprecedented bubble. Restrictions on supply naturally lead to higher prices, whether in gasoline, housing or anything else.

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One of the worst aspects of both the Human Rights Act and European law generally is that they encourage disreputable behaviour. Much European law consists of vague statements of principle that are concerned with ideals rather than practicalities and in doing so leaves scope for spurious claims by those keen to bask in the bright sunshine of victimhood or who see the chance to enrich themselves with an unearned buck. It might just be that I am too deeply immersed in the English common law to understand the European way of doing things, but I am not so immersed as to be unable to see a style of law that is more concerned with political gestures than with freely agreed individual relationships.

This applies equally well to Latin America, which takes its legal and cultural traditions from Europe, and is therefore constantly awash in high-sounding idealistic slogans papered over perennial violence, oppression, and corruption.

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You’ll be surprised.

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As with most discussions of AIDS and HIV, this proceeds on the assumption that HIV is just something that happens to people, like the common cold. Nowhere is mentioned the irrefutable fact that people who keep their pants zipped just don’t get HIV, period — aside from the miniscule number who contract it from extraordinary circumstances like rape or transfusions, of course. (And it oughtn’t to be necessary to make that reservation but there’s always some nimrod who brings it up in the hopes that there’s somebody else in the room whose two-digit IQ is lower than his. Sheesh.)

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Yeah, it’s impressive, but … some people just have too much time on their hands.