Read it.

Read it.

Of course, nothing beats just staying where the hell you already are.

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I don’t know — I’d have thought that $15 million worth of Legos would be bigger than that.

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In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

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But are vitamins worth it? In the past few years, several high-quality studies have failed to show that extra vitamins, at least in pill form, help prevent chronic disease or prolong life.

“I’m puzzled why the public in general ignores the results of well-done trials,” said Dr. Eric Klein, national study coordinator for the prostate cancer trial and chairman of the Cleveland Clinic’s Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute. “The public’s belief in the benefits of vitamins and nutrients is not supported by the available scientific data.”

Mind, it’s in the New York Times, so you would need to check it through a second source.

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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You knew it had to happen.

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Living proof that some people have too much time on their hands.

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And this is in Michigan (Dearborn, where else?), not Egypt or Iraq. A Michigan PUBLIC school, not some sort of quasi-madrassah.

Steve Sailer points out the inconvenient truths.

Much of the popularity of Global Warming Awareness stems from the fact that almost nobody is capable of noticing Global Warming without benefit of Global Warming Awareness Campaigns.

I think that explains a lot of the Gnostic appeal of Global Warming Awareness. When you become Global Warming Aware, you are superior to the unenlightened masses. You have access to evidence of things unseen. You are one of the elite who are aware of knowledge that can only be gathered through the most esoteric means and analyzed by the most profound scholars.

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A “top ten” list to take with you on the road. Some cornerstones of American culture.

Arnold Kling makes a libertarian cultural reference that not all will catch.

Read it.

Willie Sutton, asked why he robbed banks, was alleged to have answered: “that’s where the money is.” Like common bank robbers, progressives don’t really care what effect their money grab has on the rest of the country. They just want more funds for new social experiments and welfare patronage programs. If they have to grab it from the Americans who drove 75 percent of economic growth over the last several decades, then so be it!

Read it.

Blue states are rich states; now you know why.

Mencius Moldbug likes Carlyle.

The case of democracy is a case in which the jury has heard only from the defense. Year after year, generation after generation, democracy’s lawyers trot out an ever-changing dog’s breakfast of alibis, character witnesses and Harvard scientists, all singing one tune: the ironclad innocence and stellar nobility of the defendant, who is no more and no less than Gotham’s finest citizen. As for the prosecutor, his corpse has been rotting in the men’s room for years. Sometimes the bailiff, who has a ninth-grade education, a Tennessee accent and a drinking problem, picks up a few pages from his brief and reads them out of order.

But is the trial over? It is all but over. The jury is utterly sold. If they could adjourn and assign the defendant the keys to Gotham for life, they would. They are not even aware that there is a trial. They think they’re deciding whether to award a gold medal or a platinum one. But alas: the verdict of history is never, ever in. Once it does find the truth, though, it tends to stay there.

But in Carlyle’s mirror, the pattern that the ordinary Whig historian and his ordinary student know as steady progress punctuated by brilliant revolutions, becomes a pattern of inexorable decay punctuated by explosions of barbarism.

What we see instead, from both the Carlylean and Alinskyist perspectives, is a monotonic slope. This is the slope of order. Order slopes up to the right: true right, which is reactionary, is always the direction of increasing order, and true left the direction of increasing disorder. It is especially valuable to have a clear definition of this polarization, which seems to have evolved independently so many times in history. David Axelrod would surely get along with the Gracchi, and Pinochet with Sulla.

Consider the difference between the society in which I can get away with this hippie shit, and the society in which I can’t. The society in which obligations can be broken is the society in which loans are either risky, expensive and hard to get, or do not exist at all. Thus we see clearly that the society in which promises are made and kept, the society of order, is more civilized and humane. It is a better society. Once again, there is no Goldilocks effect, no golden mean.

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Blogging from the ER. Darwin Awards drop from the very ceiling tiles.

Tonight I learned yet another helpful life lesson from one of my patients. If you’re on the street corner selling coke and you see the cops coming to bust you don’t eat all your coke. Having been taught this valuable lesson I will now know better than to do this and wind up going to the ER in handcuffs, seizing uncontrollably, aspirating my vomit and doing all of this with a white powder moustache looking like and ad for “Got Coke?”

Never, ever leave flashlights, shampoo bottles, beer bottles or any long, circular object on the floor because someday you will fall on it and it will somehow, work its way up your rectum.

Iowahawk. ’nuff said.

Steve Sailer is on a continual quest to find people to offend.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism: The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.

Interview in some left-wing rag. Warning: He looks like the Cowardly Lion.

Where are you politically these days?
I became a registered Republican about five or six years ago because to have a successful democracy you have to have at least two parties, and one of them was failing miserably. We had enough good Democrats. We needed a few more good Republicans. We needed a loyal opposition.

Like Lindsay Graham, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Arlen Specter?

Have you ever seen “American Idol”?
No, I have never watched it. But I’m thankful we’re living in a world where we can actually afford to waste your time. What a great thing that is.

Steve Sailer isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions.

La Griffe du Lion’s great term for the one standard deviation gap between whites and blacks in just about any measurement that’s related in some way to cognition — the Fundamental Constant of Sociology — is actually rather mysterious.

Another reason, however, is that, for a black or Hispanic, taking an FDNY test is like buying a very, very long-lived lottery ticket.

If the damages in Vulcan Society are set at, say, $20 million, the contingency fee lawyers will presumably grab about $7 million, and several hundred or more black and Hispanic test-takers who came close enough on the test so that they would have been hired if there had been no disparate impact will get checks in the mail adding up to $13 million.

Wouldn’t it be totally awesome to get a five-figure check in the mail for something you wasted time on and failed at a decade ago? So, you can see why so many minorities who didn’t have a chance of getting a good score took the firefighters test — because there was always a sizable chance under Disparate Impact theory that a judge would change the rules years after the game was played and send them money.

Read it.

If this blog blinks out of existence, you’ll know it worked. Personally, I’m betting not.

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And the feminists in America say … nothing.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

As I’ve mentioned, one of the rules of polite journalism in discussing testing firefighters is to assume that paper and pencil tests must be irrelevant to the obviously moronic job of spraying water on burning buildings. Never refer to the voluminous data assembled over the decades by the Pentagon on the relationship between performance on paper and pencil tests and performance on similarly physical jobs.

When researching my 2004 article on John F. Kerry’s and George W. Bush’s IQ scores judging from their performance on the Officer’s Qualification Tests they took in the later 1960s (Bush 120-125, Kerry 115-120, which turned out to fit with their GPAs at Yale), I read a lot of studies from the 1960s by the military’s psychometricians documenting the predictive validity of these exams. I then tried to track down the authors to help me understand Kerry’s and Bush’s scores.

Don’t suppose you’ll read about that anytime soon on CNN or MSNBC.

The psychometric expert said something that seemed puzzling to me. He said that the General Factor of intelligence completely dominated job performance as a pilot to such an extent that it really wasn’t worthwhile to give multiple intelligences tests of specific piloting skills, such as the one George W. Bush took in 1968 to measure his 3-d visualization skills.

I remember that test. It was very odd.

I’ve wondered about this expert’s finding over the years, and I think I’ve finally started to figure it out: People with high IQs who would be bad pilots generally figure out for themselves that they would be bad pilots; so, they never take the tests to be pilots. Thus, the high correlation between the g Factor and pilot performance: high IQ individuals are already selected for having pilot-specific skills.

Read it.

Or — to switch metaphors — consider cultural Marxism as the HIV of the West. Islam is just a virus of opportunity, a pneumonia that has taken advantage of our immunological deficiencies and ushered in the onset of full-blown AIDS in our culture.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, encounters Wikipedia.

The second thing I noticed was that my Wikipedia page was written by an AAM — that is, an Angry Asian Male. This needs a bit of explanation.

Among East Asian males, there is a large subgroup who are flipped into a mode of blind fury by the thought of Asian women consorting with non-Asian males. In the young-adult cohort of mainland-Chinese males, I would estimate the subgroup as about one in three. These are the AAMs. One recent target of their rage has been Chinese movie star Zhang Ziyi, whose affair with Israeli venture capitalist Vivi Nevo has stirred quite horrifying levels of vituperation against Ms. Zhang on Chinese-language blogs.

That’s Wikipedia for you. They can say what they like about you, employing any level of sub-literacy for the purpose, and there isn’t a darn thing you can do about it, even if you are patient and computer-literate enough to master their mark-up language. I had heard this, but just hadn’t believed they are really so brazen.

Ninety percent of what you read about people in the public prints and forums is malicious lies. Any adult who does not know that should stop reading and take up fishing. Any public person who is bothered by it should retire into private life.

Read it.

The lawsuit—which we first wrote about in April—concerns Bailey Perrin & Bailey, a Houston law firm tapped by the Rendell administration to prosecute Janssen Phamaceuticals over the marketing of its antipsychotic drug Risperdal. When states lack the resources or expertise to bring certain suits, it’s not uncommon for them to seek help from private lawyers. But in this case, it appears as if pay-to-sue politics was involved in the choice of Bailey Perrin.

While F. Kenneth Bailey, the law firm’s founding partner, was negotiating a potentially lucrative no-bid contingency fee contract with the Governor’s office, he was also making political donations totaling more than $90,000 to Mr. Rendell’s 2006 re-election campaign. Janssen, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, filed a motion in January with the state Supreme Court that cited these campaign contributions and questioned the appropriateness of the state hiring for-profit lawyers to sue on its behalf.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

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I confess that I included this link, and another one, because I hadn’t known that both Lex Luthor and Batman were/are Episcopalians. That probably explains a lot.

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Sam Colt would be proud.

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The guys at Get Religion kick some ass and take some names.

I think I am going to have to create a GetReligion list of “Big Ideas,” the concepts that drive what we do here. These two ideas would certainly be near the top, “Words have meaning” and “Ideas have consequences.”

This is a variation on an old argument that sounds something like this: “This is what I think the word means, so that’s what it means.” There’s a variation on this theme that journalists often use that weaves in a kind of postmodern twist: “Words change. Everyone knows what that word means right now when the great community of mainstream journalists use it that way. Thus, that’s what the word means.” This is a popular argument on the left when using the aforementioned “fundamentalist.” On the right, there are some folks who like to toss around the “cult” word.

Read it.

And it doesn’t even include any XKCD strips.

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What would we do without scientists?

Immediate counter-example: Helen Thomas.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

The article starts with a boring but characteristic story of Jarrett talking a tired and annoyed Obama into wasting time making an appearance at the Pink Ice Ball gala hosted by the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, an African-American sorority notorious for its decades of using the brown paper bag test to decide who could pledge. (Michelle Obama wouldn’t have passed; Valerie Jarrett would have with flying colors.)

Steve Sailer piles on that toddlin’ town.

Patrick Fitzgerald has a fun job. The chief federal prosecutor in Chicago enjoys a “target-rich environment.” Besides nailing two Illinois governors, Tony Rezko, Conrad Black (and even Scooter Libby on a sojourn in D.C.), there are the colorful local characters.

Most towns – and states – run by Democrats provide a similar source of amusement.

The Obama family knows all about waste in the health care industry. Back when Mr. Obama was merely the chairman of the Illinois Senate Health and Human Services committee, Mrs. Obama got paid $122,000 annually as the University of Chicago Hospitals community outrage coordinator. When he got promoted to U.S. Senator, she got a $195,000 raise. When she quit, her job turned out to so incredibly important that the position she filled was eliminated.

Nope, nothing suspicious about that at all.

Read it.

Had the whole scenario played out correctly, the Harvard professor would have:

• a wonderful, center-stage part as the offended Negro;
• an opportunity to get attention from The Choir (those credulous journalists who already have a prefabricated meme for White Racism — oops, a redundancy. Only Whitey can be racist);
• a chance to grab President Obama for a “Black Brothers United Against Whitey” photo op;
• more donations for his purported charity “Inkwells”;
• a good basis for a resentful/outraged documentary on race in America (with Gates as the star, naturally);
• a gathering of prominent black Personalities to talk about the eternal evil of whiteness in America;
• and so on — back to the first, second and third motives captured in a Mobius strip of Offended Negro, breathless attention from The Choir, and a tidy profit to be made off the guilty White suckahs.

It almost worked. In fact, his scheme looked real good before the bomb of reality went off in his hands.

Read it.

Curiouser and curiouser.

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It was delightfully appropriate that, as large parts of Argentina were swept by severe blizzards last week, on a scale never experienced before, the city of Nashville, Tennessee, should have enjoyed the coolest July 21 in its history, breaking a record established in 1877. Appropriate, because Nashville is the home of Al Gore, the man who for 20 years has been predicting that we should all by now be in the grip of runaway global warming.

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The EHRC is falling apart because many of the people who run it are not concerned about equality at all, but rather with gaining preferential treatment for their own specific set of clients.

So, whatever their criticisms of Mr Phillips’s leadership style, Kay Hampton also resigned because not enough was being done for ethnic groups. Bert Massie and Jane Campbell insisted that disabled people were being neglected, while Ben Summerskill, also head of the gay rights group Stonewall, protested that the commission was failing to protect millions whose lives were “disfigured by prejudice”. Under the guise of demanding protection against discrimination, each victim group is in reality campaigning for privileges at the expense of everyone else.

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The American Psychiatric Association risks losing sight of that distinction by grimly—and rather inexpertly—debating whether avid shopping should be considered a sign of mental illness. The fifth edition of the association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is expected in 2012. The APA isn’t just deciding the fate of shopaholics; it’s also debating whether overuse of the Internet, “excessive” sexual activity, apathy, and even prolonged bitterness should be viewed, quite seriously, as brain “disorders.” If you spend hours online, have sex more frequently than aging psychiatrists, and moan incessantly that the federal government can’t account for all its TARP funds, take heed: You may soon be classed among the 48 million Americans the APA already considers mentally ill.

Read it.

Read it. And watch Charles Krauthammer, a Real Psychiatrist, analyze the Obamassiah.

Jack Kelly doubts Purdum’s tale of Alaskans wielding the DSM, but he has been thinking about the question of narcissism. He notes that a man who wrote two autobiographies before he was 45 is no piker when it comes to extravagant self-regard. Kelly adds that if Barack Obama is a narcissist, it would explain his notion that an iPod loaded with his speeches is an appropriate gift for the Queen of England (as well as Obama’s frequent self-references in those speeches).

On the other hand, you never see Obama and Superman at the same time….

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Let’s see: We’re losing customers, so make it impossible for customers to use our service. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Everybody who wants these people in charge of our health care system, raise your hand.

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Guess how many are in Texas?

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Girly men aren’t born, they’re made.

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Archaeologists have found five well-preserved Roman shipwrecks deep under the sea off a small Mediterranean island, with their cargo of vases, pots and other objects largely intact.

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Adding another voice to the political turmoil surrounding the arrest last week of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, a black police officer who was on the scene said he supported the arresting officer 100%, the Associated Press reports.

Pretty bad when even the black cops are racist. Oh, wait….