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And what does this tell us about rap music and the “culture” that spawned it?

Go on, take a guess.

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Domestic producers of the renewable fuel have been selling huge quantities of biodiesel in Europe and in other foreign markets, where prices are often better, and then receiving a $1-per-gallon tax credit from Uncle Sam.

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

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Colleges and college towns have become bastions of intolerance and enforced conformity. Political correctness? That’s not the tenth of it. I’m talking about the stifling of speech, dissent, or any deviation from orthodoxy. Colleges have gone from citadels of intellectual openness to dungeons of intellectual coercion. And in support of what? High ideals such as the canons of Western thought (freedom, liberty, justice, sovereignty of the individual, the inviolability of property rights)? More often, it’s the undermining of the same.

If this is news to you, you haven’t been paying attention, and you certainly haven’t experienced being flunked for your views (not your scholarship), having your perfectly reasonable points of view confiscated and trashed and/or burned (if they appeared in print), being shouted down, prevented from gaining a hearing, or having your audiences intimidated and threatened, your tenure denied, your application rejected, or your grant stripped.

The Gothic Gulag is alive and well in blue America.

Steve Sailer is quoting someone else but is still to be commended for bringing it to a wider audience, which it richly deserves. (NAM means “Non-Asian Minority”)

Every single one of these has the same form:

1) NAM group behaves badly
2) Media reports it as nonspecific problem of “society” and refuses to mention specific culpability
3) The government increases its power and forces non-NAMs to pay for their bad behavior
4) Refusal to address root causes increased rates of taxation, crime, victimization. Everything from airport security strip searches of grandma to gun seizures from law abiding citizens to forced busing into Rwanda-like schools is a function of this systematic attribution error.

This movie ends badly.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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So, say you’ve had a good relationship with a credit card company and been paying off substantially more than minimum payment over recent months. You’ve also completely paid off other credit cards in recent months. You then get a notice from the credit card company saying they’re reducing your credit limit, right before Christmas. Would you be more than a little miffed?

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Good. Perhaps the Left Coast and New Englad will go join Canada where they belong.

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

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The trouble is, almost everything we’ve been taught about the first Thanksgiving in 1621 is a myth. The holiday has two distinct histories – the actual one and a romanticized portrayal.

Very true.

No one is certain whether the Wampanoag and the colonists regularly sat together and shared their food, or if the three-day “thanksgiving” feast Mr. Winslow recorded for posterity was a one-time event.

Not even close. What the Pigrims were doing is the Martinmas feast, traditional in England from time out of mind.

From the late 4th century CE to the late Middle Ages, much of Western Europe, including Great Britain, engaged in a period of fasting beginning on the day after St. Martin’s Day, November 11. This fast period lasted 40 days, and was, therefore, called “Quadragesima Sancti Martini”, which means in Latin “the forty days of St. Martin.” At St. Martin’s eve, people ate and drank very heartily for a last time before they started to fast. This fasting time was later called “Advent” by the Church. #

Orthodox Christians still observe this pre-Nativity fast. The Pilgrims couldn’t refer to a “papist” Saint’s day, of course, so they “repurposed” it as a harvest festival … but it was the traditional Martinmas feast.

“But wait”, you say, “November 11 is not even close to the last Thursday in November.” Not now, but it used to be — in 1627 the Gregorian Calendar hadn’t yet come to England, and the Julian calendar they used was 11 days ahead of the actual solar time. Let’s see: November 11 plus 11 days equals — November 22! Their November 11 would be our November 22. (Yeah, it’s not exact, but in this, as in so much else, I blame FDR.)

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

Read it.

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Okay, take your best guess: Which one is Peter, and which one Wendy?

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And they want to close Guantanamo….

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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What sort of peckerwood has nude photos of his wife on his cellphone? I think this is God’s way of telling him to grow up.

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Not the sort of news you would expect to find concerning the Outer Hebrides.

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

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

But nobody is talking about the obvious: Will the public works jobs be restricted to American citizens? To American citizens plus legal residents? Or will they just suck in more millions from south of the border as the Housing Bubble did, who will send tens of billions back home, depriving America of Larry’s promised Multiplier Effect?

The real economic collapse is happening in the four sand states, California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida. Sending billions to them for infrastructure projects would mean a large fraction of the public works payroll would go to illegal and legal aliens.

The one sure way to keep the unemployment rate in California (now 8.2%) from growing so fast is to have illegal immigrants go home. It’s a lot cheaper for all concerned if ex-construction workers are unemployed in Mexico or Guatemala than if they are unemployed in California. But nobody is mentioning that.

Read it.

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

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

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Yeah, that sounds about right.

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Sam O’Shea told his mother Angela that he wanted to take the ‘green’ option and ride the two miles to St Paul’s Primary School, in Portsmouth, Hampshire.

However, staff told Sam and Mrs O’Shea that she would have to follow him to school and pick up his bike because there was nowhere to store it.

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Read it.

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Well, that’s what happens when the government tries to run your life — you let it do your work as well. People dumping their unwanted kids off in Nebraska is an illustration of the same situation.

Megan McArdle looks at the one-way left, who demand concessions for their side’s guy that they never gave (or will give) to the other side’s guy.

But beyond the tautological, what does this demand that conservatives recognize that Obama is their president mean?  Are they supposed to root for him to succeed?  One hopes that we are all hoping he will not run the country into the ground.  But since most conservatives believe that Obama’s agenda will, in fact, run the country into the ground, it would not be reasonable to demand that they actually hope he passes it.

Are conservatives supposed to suddenly like Obama? Or at least give him the benefit of the doubt? As far as I can tell, precisely none of the liberals urging this on conservatives obeyed their dicta when George Bush was supposed to be the object of their affections.

Megan McArdle puts on her economist’s hat and runs some numbers.

The real cost center is retiree health care, and as noted above, this is negotiated as part of the labor contract for the current workers.  Due, I’m told, to the UAW’s slightly strange constitution, retirees have more voting power than current workers.  That’s why GM’s medical costs rose at such a staggering rate; they were sacred to the real power in the union.

Read it.

We’ve pointed out plenty of times in the past, that any time there’s a database of info out there, the data is almost certain to be abused.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

It’s not the particular government program that’s of major interest, it’s the message the Bush Administration was sending. Federal regulators are supposed to take away the punchbowl when the party gets interesting, but announcing that the President hates down payments, that the Chief Executive feels that requiring people with bad credit to put money down on a house is UnAmerican and probably racist, at a homebuilder’s convention in Las Vegas, well, I’ve exhausted all the punchbowl similes … This is liking filling all the nasal decongestant inhalers at the Betty Ford Clinic with pure pharmaceutical cocaine.

Read it.

Senate Approves Plan Aimed at Protecting Savings From Global Crisis

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Yeah, they don’t want any threat to the liberal lock on the Civil Service, and they have judged (and who can say they’re wrong?) that he’s just enough of a pussy to roll over for them on that.

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I have an idea: Why not just leave them the hell alone?

Megan McArdle points out how the Indians are doing the job that Americans won’t do.

Read it.

If a fully loaded commercial airliner crashed every single day, killing all passengers and crewmembers on board, how long would it take for dramatic safety improvements to be mandated? Traffic experts say the equivalent is happening on our nation’s roads, with 42,000 people dying every year in automobile accidents, an average of 115 each day.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Most of the people I know who’ve been in car accidents were run into by (uninsured, often unlicensed) drunk illegal immigrants. Not a word about that in the story, of course.

Read it.

And so it starts.

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But he said a carrier fleet would only be used for defence, unlike that of “another country”.

And if you believe that one, he’ll tell you another one.

George Will points to an inconvenient truth.

The distribution of a trillion dollars by a political institution — the federal government — will be nonpolitical? How could it be? Either markets allocate resources, or government — meaning politics — allocates them. Now that distrust of markets is high, Americans are supposed to believe that the institution they trust least — Congress — will pony up $1 trillion and then passively recede, never putting its 10 thumbs, like a manic Jack Horner, into the pie? Surely Congress will direct the executive branch to show compassion for this, that and the other industry. And it will mandate “socially responsible” spending — an infinitely elastic term — by the favored companies.

Thomas Sowell takes a look at our modern Brahmin caste and their claims to authority.

Intellectuals, according to Mr. Kristof, are people who are “interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity,” people who “read the classics.”

It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

During the 1930s, some of America’s leading intellectuals condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model – all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large food exporter.

In the 1930s, it was the intellectuals who pooh-poohed the dangers from the rise of Adolf Hitler and urged Western disarmament.

Read it.

Among the full roster of about 150 staff members being assigned to government agencies between now and Inauguration Day are dozens of former lobbyists and some who were registered as recently as this year. Many more are executives and partners at firms that pay lobbyists, and former government officials who work as consultants or advisers to those seeking influence.

Change you can believe in.

Not.

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That’s right. According to WaPo, the American people are just too darn stupid or absent-minded to stop themselves from rushing down to their local dealership and buying the largest, most gas-sucking SUV on the lot. Never mind that you’re trying to figure out how to pay the heating bill for the winter ahead, the editors of the Washington Post just know that deep down inside, you have an irresistible compulsion to go into more even debt for the next 72 months to finance a new energy-inefficient vehicle.

Read it.

Some professors responded too much to financial incentives for the university’s liking.

Nope, can’t have that.

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Somebody call AlGore and give him the bad news.

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The increasing reversion of international society into an economic caste system proceeds apace.

The foyers of hotels across the city – from the Four Seasons to the Park Hyatt – resemble the United Nations in full session, with ordinary guests pushed out of the way to make way for delegations from around the world.

An email from First Lady Laura Bush’s office detailed the lavish menu. Leaders feasted first on fruitwood-smoked quail with quince gastrique, followed by thyme-roasted rack of lamb with an aubergine fondue.

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… it’s an unintended consequence of the decision by the federal government to mandate a nationwide 55mph speed limit back in 1974. Setting such an artificially low speed limited basically made people realize that speed limits had little, if any, relationship to actual safety regulations, and felt more comfortable trusting their own judgment in terms of what speed was safe for driving.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Another fine illustration of the general truth that government is far more often the problem than the solution.

Darwin award nominee.

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Spain is embroiled in a deepening row over an expensive artwork at the UN headquarters in Geneva that is being paid for by Spanish taxpayers from the overseas aid budget.

Hey, wasting money is what the U.N. do best. Spending taxpayer money on useless shit is what Socialist governments do best. Why complain about this brilliant intersection of core competencies?

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Boy, there’s a British name for you.

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Funny how you never see that with a Republican administration.