Read it.

Gee, I wonder why?

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Well, those cousin-dating fundamentalist Southern rednecks have really crossed the line, now….

They are looking for George Zinkhan, a professor in the Department of Marketing and Distribution at the University of Georgia.

He is described as a white man with a goatee, last seen wearing a polo shirt and blue shorts, and may be traveling in a red car.

Oh, wait, that can’t be right….

Mr Hardy says his son told him that the victim, his friend Tom Tanner, was shot twice — once in the front and the back. “At 22 you’re not supposed to watch people die,” he said.

Tell it to the Marines, kid.

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If al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest of the Looney Tunes brigade want to kick America to death, they had better move in quickly and grab a piece of the action before Barack Obama finishes the job himself. Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people – not even Jimmy Carter.

Pretty bad when even British journalists are noticing.

Obama’s problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead, it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US Constitution. Obama is not at war with terrorists, but with his Republican fellow citizens. He has never abandoned the campaign trail.

Well, that sounds like a typical Democrat to me.

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Turns out that trains are like organic food — a costly option being foisted on the public by people who would like to cancel about the last century of progress. (How did these guys steal the name “progressive”, anyway?)

The enduring problem of “mass transit” is that it’s inefficient from the point of view of the passenger — it takes you from point A, which is probably not where you live, to point B, which is probably not where you want to be, at a time that is convenient to somebody else. Thus the enduring popularity of individualized transportation like automobiles, despite constraints like air pollution and traffic congestion; the history of America is proof that people will put up with quite a bit of inconvenience to get freedom.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Who could possibly have imagined back when the solons of California came up with the idea of having a high school exit exam that NAMs would fail it at a higher rate? And that girls would do worse at math than boys? That’s just crazy talk!

Surprise, surprise.

The study by researchers at Stanford University and UC Davis concluded that girls and non-whites were probably failing the exit exam more often than expected because of what is known as “stereotype threat,” a theory in social psychology that holds, essentially, that negative stereotypes can be self-fulfilling.

There certainly couldn’t be any other explanation.

Stanford has a School of Education? Who knew? Wouldn’t it be fun to hear what Stanford’s Electrical Engineering Department professors say in private about the quality of their colleagues in the Education Department?

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A German mother who abandoned her three small children at a pizzeria in northern Italy at the weekend when she went outside to smoke a cigarette with her boyfriend was found on Thursday wandering in the woods, Italian police said.

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Now comes further evidence of this effect. Two days ago, economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund published an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examining the ratio of male to female births in “U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean, and Asian Indian parents.” Among whites, the boy-girl ratio was essentially constant, regardless of the number of kids in a family or how many of them were girls. In the Asian-American sample, the boy-girl ratio started out at the same norm: 1.05 to 1. But among families whose first child was a girl, the boy-girl ratio among second kids went up to 1.17 to 1. And if the first two kids were girls, the boy-girl ratio among third kids went up to 1.5 to 1. This 50 percent increase in male probability is directly contrary to the trend among whites, who tend to produce a child of the same sex as the previous child.

There’s no plausible innocent explanation for this enormous and directionally abnormal shift in probability. The authors conclude that the numbers are “evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage.”

If you think of yourself as a techno-progressive—someone who believes, as Barack Obama does, that “maximizing the power of technology” will help fix everything from energy to the environment to health care—the increase in sex selection should give you pause.

Technology can facilitate regression as easily as it facilitates progress.

Oh, really? Imagine that.

Read it.

And subscribe to the RSS feed.

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Beware of birds with butts.

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All those Commies on the list?

Turns out they were Commies (and Soviet agents) after all.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

n September 2006, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Codie Stott, asked a teacher if she could sit with another group to do a science project as all the girls with her spoke only Urdu. The teacher’s first response, according to Stott, was to scream at her: “It’s racist, you’re going to get done by the police!” Upset and terrified, the schoolgirl went outside to calm down. The teacher called the police and a few days later, presumably after officialdom had thought the matter over, she was arrested and taken to a police station, where she was fingerprinted and photographed. According to her mother, she was placed in a bare cell for 3 1/2 hours. She was questioned on suspicion of committing a racial public order offence and then released without charge. The school was said to be investigating what further action to take, not against the teacher, but against Stott. Headmaster Anthony Edkins reportedly said: “An allegation of a serious nature was made concerning a racially motivated remark. We aim to ensure a caring and tolerant attitude towards pupils of all ethnic backgrounds and will not stand for racism in any form.”

Well. There it is.

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

Read it.

Mary Reason, 73, returned home from shopping to find her front door smashed down and a squad of police waiting.

The pensioner was due to give evidence at court but officers became concerned when she failed to contact witness services for three days.

Police broke down the door to her home in Staverton, near Gloucester, then billed Mrs Reason for £100 to pay for the cost of repairing the damage.

Now the pensioner is refusing to pay.

I’m a pensioner who has had a stroke and I shouldn’t have to deal with stuff like this from the police,” she said,

“They had no reason to break in. I get home and I find them in the house. The curtains were open and everything was neat and tidy.

“They could have just walked round and seen there were no problems. I won’t be paying – I shouldn’t have to.”

Well. There it is.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. (Oops — it already does, wherever fine drugs are sold.)

Read it.

Well, really, it’s a Communist dictatorship. What did you expect?

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Quite frankly, I’m surprised that they don’t have them already.

Hmmm. Perhaps they do — but just aren’t telling anybody.

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That’s because Mandela is and always has been a Marxist revolutionary, not the South African Martin Luther King that everyone tries to paint him as.

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Your tax dollars at work.

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Great. I can blame my grumpy neighbors.

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Sales of Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s autobiography and apologia for his anti-semitism, are soaring in India where business students regard the dictator as a management guru.

I’ve read Mein Kampf – Drucker would be a better choice, guys.

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Ha. Told you so.

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We have the math. And the graphs.

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“This budget makes clear that the era of Big Government is back, and Democrats want you to pay for it,” said House Republican leader John A. Boehner.

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I must confess I have a hard time getting upset about a correspondent for NPR and the Washington Post being thrown in jail by a regime whose behind her employers spend so much time smooching.

On the other hand, she’s an American citizen, and, while that doesn’t count for a lot in these degenerate modern times, it ought to.

We will continue to vigorously raise our concerns to the Iranian government.

Oh, I’m sure they’re perfectly acquainted with your concerns. Thinly veiled threats would be much more effective, although we’re not likely to see that with this yellow-dog administration.

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Yet, many governments have been doing the exact opposite: putting lives at risk, just to bring in more revenue (often to pay off those private companies that installed the cameras). On top of that, there are still plenty of locations that don’t leave any pause between switching lights between cross traffic. Here in California, for example, it’s quite rare for there to be any pause between a light turning red in one direction, and the perpendicular traffic light turning green. Studies have shown that a slight pause — where all directions are red — decreases the number of accidents as well. And yet… governments focus on using traffic cameras solely to increase revenue.

Insert your favorite conspiracy theory here:

Any theory has to include an explanation for HOV lanes — not a high bar.

Read it.

The jolly typeface has spawned the Ban Comic Sans movement, nearly a decade old but stronger now than ever, thanks to the Web. The mission: “to eradicate this font” and the “evil of typographical ignorance.”

“If you love it, you don’t know much about typography,” Mr. Connare says. But, he adds, “if you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.”

Indeed. Obsessing about little things suggests an unconscious realization that one has no power over bigger; this is why a spread of interest in “graphic novels” and video games is a disturbing indication that collectivism and over-regulation are growing, not shrinking, in the world.

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Well, not really — if he did, they would just shoot him, thereby demonstrating that they understand how the world works a lot better than he does … and, of course, saving America a lot of grief, but not really doing that much for Mexico.

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Sixteen million girls are missing in China. And now we know what happened to them: They were aborted because they weren’t boys.

And this was in Slate? Hell has just frozen over.

Two hundred boys for every 100 girls. The number is mind-boggling.

Indeed. Historically, having a lot more young boys than young girls leads to war. China’s no threat? Just wait.

It’s a terrible convergence of ancient prejudice with modern totalitarianism. Girls are culturally and economically devalued; the government uses powerful financial levers to prevent you from having another child; therefore, to make sure you can have a boy, you abort the girl you’re carrying.

A pro-choice policy that carries its own cure for feminism. Thank you, Margaret Sanger.

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Can’t have him act like a jihadist, after all.

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They would never do that, surely? After all, they’re Popular Insurgents™!

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After all, the purpose of a school is to hire and pay teachers, not educate students — if that were not the case, we wouldn’t be spending more and more on “education” while student test scores plummet, as is currently the case. That’s as clear as the nose on your face.

Read it.

The genocide charity movement seems to be gathering momentum. They don’t actually plan genocide as such, no Saddamesque gassing or Stalinesque starvation is mentioned in their plans, but as sure as nuts is nuts the result of their proposals will be massive loss of life among those least able to ride out difficult times. I speak, in particular, about the Optimum Population Trust. which has just proudly announced the support of Sir David Attenborough, the well-known creator and presenter of staggeringly expensive (and sometimes rather good) television programmes about gorillas, fish, insects and fluffy bunnies. Sir David is in no danger of starvation himself so he has a free hand to support any bunch of fanatical fruitcakes he wishes without their dangerous practices ever affecting the availability of lentil and garlic bake at his table.

According to their “ecological footprint” analysis the population of Africa is sustainable but the populations of the USA and the UK are not.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, we can see what actually happens. To my unjargonised mind we can measure the sustainability of a population by asking whether they eat or starve, live to adulthood or perish in infancy, keep warm in winter or risk freezing to death, have clean water and good sanitation or cholera, in short by asking whether they have a long or a short average lifespan. The current population of the USA and the UK are entirely sustainable because we have advanced economies which, despite current difficulties, allow us to have warm homes, food, clean water and good sanitation. We have average lifespans unimaginable even fifty years ago. Much of Africa, on the other hand, suffers through political corruption and economic ineptitude resulting in its current population containing a great many who will die in infancy and few who will last as long as the average pie-munching fat Englishman.

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Who knew that Duncanville was such a hotbed of fascism?

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Note that none of them were American. Heh.

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The modern slacker’s dilemma.

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How appropriate that a perceptive article about the financial meltdown should appear in the effete lifestyle magazine Vanity Fair.

“Yes, I know Björk,” a professor of finance at the University of Iceland says in reply to my question, in a weary tone. “She can’t sing, and I know her mother from childhood, and they were both crazy. That she is so well known outside of Iceland tells me more about the world than it does about Björk.”

I know how he feels.

Back away from the Icelandic economy and you can’t help but notice something really strange about it: the people have cultivated themselves to the point where they are unsuited for the work available to them. All these exquisitely schooled, sophisticated people, each and every one of whom feels special, are presented with two mainly horrible ways to earn a living: trawler fishing and aluminum smelting. There are, of course, a few jobs in Iceland that any refined, educated person might like to do. Certifying the nonexistence of elves, for instance. (“This will take at least six months—it can be very tricky.”) But not nearly so many as the place needs, given its talent for turning cod into Ph.D.’s. At the dawn of the 21st century, Icelanders were still waiting for some task more suited to their filigreed minds to turn up inside their economy so they might do it.

Truly, Barack Obama’s dream world. “When everybody’s somebody, then no one’s anybody.”

Read it.

That European Union thing is really working out well for them, isn’t it?

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

Read it.

Police have been told not to evict illegal gipsy camps from private land unless they are causing additional problems such as crime.

Gee, I sorta thought that “illegal gipsy camps” were “crime” all by themselves … but apparently not.

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Except farmers, of course — and corporate mega”farmers” like ADM most of all. And their Congresscritters, of course. And environmentalists, of course. And the politically fashionable, of course.

Recall that the 2007 energy bill requires refiners to mix 36 billion gallons into the gasoline supply by 2022. The quotas, which ratchet up each year, are arbitrary, but evidently no one in Congress wondered what might happen if the economy didn’t cooperate.

Americans are unlikely to use enough gas next year to absorb the 13 billion gallons of ethanol that Congress mandated, because current regulations limit the ethanol content in each gallon of gas at 10%. The industry is asking that this cap be lifted to 15% or even 20%. That way, more ethanol can be mixed with less gas, and producers won’t end up with a glut that the government does not require anyone to buy.

The ethanol boosters aren’t troubled that only a fraction of the 240 million cars and trucks on the road today can run with ethanol blends higher than 10%. It can damage engines and corrode automotive pipes, as well as impair some safety features, especially in older vehicles. It can also overwhelm pollution control systems like catalytic converters. The malfunctions multiply in other products that use gas, such as boats, snowmobiles, lawnmowers, chainsaws, etc.

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This public option will supposedly “compete” with private alternatives. As President Obama likes to put it, those who are happy with the insurance they have now can keep it — and if they happen to prefer the government offering, well, gee whiz, that’s the free market at work. The reality is far different. Not only will the new program become the default coverage for the uninsured, but Democrats intend to game the system to precipitate — or if need be, coerce — an exodus to government from private insurance. Soon enough, that will be the only “option” left.

Well, that’s what Democrats do.

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Quelle surprise. Gaming the system is what activist groups do.

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Yeah, that’s the first idea that comes into my head when I’m depressed — let’s go jump in a zoo with a bunch of polar bears.

Zoo keepers who saved the life of a woman who jumped into a polar bear enclosure at Berlin Zoo revealed on Monday that they were moments away from shooting the animals.

They ought to have been prepared to shoot the woman instead.

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Carolyn Lorimer, a woman who let out her flat to a young couple, evicted them after discovering photographs of wild parties at the property on the social networking website Facebook.

Well. There it is.

Read it.

And about time, too. The old doctrine was based on an assumption of a clear and rational foreign policy, and in a world where “Democrat administratoin” => “dithering punctuated by spasms of overreactive violence”, such an assumption is manifestly false. We need to return to the principle expressed by James Madison that we are the friends of liberty everywhere but the guardians only of our own.

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I was intrigued to note when I bought a £216 air ticket to New York that an additional £80 was charged in tax introduced to combat global warming, When I got home it was reported that 5,000 more UK companies, from banks to hotels, are faced with a yearly cost of £660 million to buy “carbon credits” under the EU’s “emissions trading scheme” (ETS).

Doubtless the believers in global warming are quite happy to pay thousands of pounds a year for their faith. But for the rest of us this is all the most shameless excuse for stealing our money since they put a tax on windows.

More here.

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Quite possibly. One of the many ways in which the arrogant narcissism of social media like FaceBook comes back to bite the arrested adolescents who indulge in it.

Mind your own business, and encourage other people to mind theirs. Good fences make good neighbors, and that applies to information as much as to anything else.

Read it.

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

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Personally, I can’t make head nor tail of the newspaper’s account of his doings. But, from what I’ve learned about the bankers, developers, and “advocates” in the housing racket, when they all agree on something or somebody’s wonderfulness, you’d better get a good grip on your wallet.

Help me out here to see if I understand the process correctly: Developer X announces plans to build an apartment building of the legally maximum height for the neighborhood. Neighbors complain, saying it will block their sunlight, increase congestion, make parking harder to find, etc. and demand that the building be only a fraction of X height.

Shaun Donovan grants the developers’ wish for X height, as long as the developer makes some of the units “affordable” — i.e., charges below-market rates. In other words, because housing development is highly regulated, much of the profit from the development stems from getting permission from the government to build a tall building on a particular piece of land. Because the government can bestow or withhold that permission as it sees fit, it can extract some of the profit from the developers. (Sorry, neighbors, about your new sunshine shortage, but you should have invested more in the right politicians. Maybe next time you’ll be wiser.)

The obvious question, but one that seldom seems to occur to reporters explaining the wonders of the affordable housing racket, is: Who gets these “affordable” units? The right to buy or rent at below market values is hugely valuable so there will be no shortage of applicants. Some allocation method is necessary to choose from all the applicants. If the government doesn’t determine who gets in, the developers will just take under-the-table kickbacks to bring the net price up close to the market level. Am I being overly cynical in assuming that politics plays some role in determining who winds up in the “affordable” units?

Let me make a wild guess that some of those 1,833 were in some way affiliated with “affordable housing advocates.” A common phenomenon that has emerged in recent decades in America, but remains so off-the-radar that I’ve never heard a name for it, is the business of setting up leftwing pressure groups that make their living by reaching mutually profitable agreements with regulated businesses so that the business can do what it wants.

Read it.

This is why the Democrats, the party of corruption, cannot be trusted with government.

Darwin Award nominee.

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When the woman who calls herself Queen Omega moved into a three-bedroom house here last December, she introduced herself to the neighbors, signed contracts for electricity and water and ordered an Internet connection.

What she did not tell anyone was that she had no legal right to be in the home.

Ms. Omega, 48, is one of the beneficiaries of the foreclosure crisis. Through a small advocacy group of local volunteers called Take Back the Land, she moved from a friend’s couch into a newly empty house that sold just a few years ago for more than $400,000.

In other words, she’s a thief. This is the reduction ad absurdam of the entitlement culture: If you want something, just take it. If somebody has something that you don’t have, you have somehow been cheated of it, you’re entitled to “take it back”.

In a functional culture, the legal system takes care of such systems, quickly and surely. In a dysfunctional culture, such as we are rapidly becoming, the law is ineffective. When it comes to be seen as ineffective, and when people whose property is being stolen grasp that emotionally, then you get vigilante groups enforcing the property rights that the official government can’t or won’t. And then Hell descends upon the just and the unjust alike.

These people are sowing the wind, and forgetting that they will reap the whirlwind.