Darwin Award nominees.

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Well, yeah, but unfortunately most of it is wrong.

The problem is not a lack of interest in learning among the young: it is the lack of a structure in which that appetite for learning can be satisfied. There are not enough good, useful, challenging degree courses to go around. And, with increasing numbers of pupils getting good grades at A level, it has become harder and harder for universities to sort the wheat from the chaff at the application stage.

Not so long ago, the idea that you could go to university, get a good degree, then have to join the dole queue like everyone else, was anathema. I remember, as a student in the late Seventies, staring horrified at a front-page news story about an Oxford graduate with a first-class degree who was still unemployed nine months after graduating. That story would not make the front pages today; in fact, it would hardly be worth reporting at all. The unemployed graduate, with a five-figure student loan to pay off, but not a sniff of a job, is part of the social furniture of our times.

Funny how that ol’ supply-and-demand thing works.

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The monetary value of those little moments previously considered priceless have just been calculated in a new book.

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Why Islam is doomed to failure.

Islam acts as an ESS by a variety of behaviors:

• Demanding the death of those who attempt to leave it.
• Declaring its core scripture (its DNA, if you will) perfect, immutable, and unquestionably correct.
• Requiring its adherents to marry within the system and have as little contact as possible with outsiders.
• Mandating coercive proselytization, through violence if necessary, in order to enlarge the system.

This creates a kind of homeostasis within the Ummah, which can thus remain unchanged as long as its environment stays the same.

However, because the system is parasitic — it produces no wealth, but depends on booty, slave labor, and tribute to maintain itself — the environment must eventually change. When the host dies, so does the parasite. The ESS fails, and Islam reaches a dead end.

Neither Muslims nor Leftists understands the psychology of achievement and inevitably kill the golden goose, ending up with a dismal standard of living for all but a small elite wherever Muslim or Leftist ideas predominate. They’re like evil children who destroy the things they have no idea how to build or repair.

Slate has the good news.

Well, that’s a relief.

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Well, I think it looks rather cool.

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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.

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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.

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Unfortunately, it is incomplete; no mention of socialism.

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Yeah, like a potter’s vessel. But that’s me.

The Other McCain puts it in a nutshell.

People who like Sarah Palin don’t hate women. But everybody hates whiny bitches like you.

And that about says it all.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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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Regina Benjamin is a family doctor who runs a rural clinic that treats many poor patients in the town of Bayou La Batre, Alabama. She has an MBA and she was the first black woman to be elected to the AMA’s board of trustees.

Look at the picture and tell me true: Would you have known that Obama’s pick for Surgeon General was a “black woman” unless somebody told you?

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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.

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All sorts of silly fads catch on among smart people, but it doesn’t make them smarter. Does wearing a tie boost your brainpower?

Vegetarianism is God’s way of distinguishing the herd from the pack.

Be afraid.

Best Tombstone Ever.

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No doubt payback for the “eat more chikin” campaign.

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Since December 2007, when the current recession formally began, the nation has lost approximately 6 million jobs. Only two states, Alaska and North Dakota, have lost a smaller percentage of jobs than Washington, DC, which has seen a job loss of 0.6%, or 4,400. Simply put, Washington has done better in this recession than 48 of the fifty states when it comes to job performance.

Washington has always been a one industry town: that’s why it has an intrinsically self-absorbed monotonic culture. Everyone there depends on government for their livelihood. It is fundamentally not a city of competitive industries, but a giant taxpayer-funded office park, surrounded by museums and memorials. The great presidents: Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson, have their own monuments, while more recent leaders have concert halls and office buildings named after them.

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

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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Here’s some economic logic to ponder. The unemployment rate in June for American teenagers was 24%, for black teens it was 38%, and even White House economists are predicting more job losses. So how about raising the cost of that teenage labor?

Sorry to say, but that’s precisely what will happen on July 24, when the minimum wage will increase to $7.25 an hour from $6.55. The national wage floor will have increased 41% since the three-step hike was approved by the Democratic Congress in May 2007. Then the economy was humming, with an overall jobless rate of 4.5% and many entry-level jobs paying more than the minimum. That’s a hard case to make now, with a 9.5% national jobless rate and thousands of employers facing razor-thin profit margins.

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Imagine, if you will, a 3D picture of Helen Thomas.

Surely one can find a better use for $600?

Check it out.

Muammar Gaddafi doing to Barack Obama what we’d all secretly like to do.

Oh, I’m sure it’s fauxtography, but I still had to laugh. It would make a superb poster.

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Azad Ali, a Muslim civil servant suspended after comments appeared on his personal website justifying the killing of British troops in Iraq, has returned to work at the Treasury.

I don’t even have to say anything, do I?

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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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Dr Tom Shenton, a reader in engineering at Liverpool University who is leading the project, said: “We are running engines everyday in our laboratory with this system now and our ultimate objective is have it inside cars driven by consumers.

The Other McCain takes a look at David Brooks’ ordeal.

My theory is that the Senator wanted to borrow a pair and too late realized his mistake.

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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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INDISCRIMINATE gluttons and discerning gourmands alike have long been crazy for pizza. But over the last few years, they have elevated their passion to a vocation, sending pizza into a whole new stratosphere of respect. It isn’t just loved, and it isn’t just devoured. It’s scrutinized and fetishized, with a Palin-esque power to polarize.

They actually pay people to write this stuff.

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“Even if the Americans remain nowhere but a small spot in the Iraqi desert … so every Muslim should battle them until they are expelled,” the voice, reported to be Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, head of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq, said in the recording posted on a website used by jihadists.

Note that this struggle is not characterized as a political or ethnic struggle, but explicitly as a religious struggle.

Islam is the only religion on earth that has adherents killing other people on the basis of religion.

The only one.

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How appropriate.

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

For serious UI geeks, one way to see an intelligent control interface is as a false affordance – like a knob that cannot be turned, or a chair that cannot be sat in. The worst kind of false affordance is an unreliable affordance – a knob that can be turned except when it can’t, a chair that’s a cozy place to sit except when it rams a hidden metal spike deep into your tender parts.

Like most hubristic UIs, Wolfram Alpha is operating with a completely fictitious user narrative. The raison d’etre of the natural-language interface, stated baldly, is to create a usable tool for stupid people who might be confused or intimidated by a tree of menus. The market of stupid people is indeed enormous. The market of stupid people who like to use data-visualization tools is, well, not. (And since the interface is not in fact easy but actually quite difficult, it achieves the coveted status of a non-solution to a non-problem.)

But for the actual developers, this compensation mechanism is far more effective. The actual developers (a) have enormous experience with the hubristic UI, (b) have enormous patience with its flaws, and (c) most important, know how it actually works. So their internal model can be, and typically is, orders of magnitude better than that of any naive user. So the product actually seems to work for them, and does. Unfortunately, it’s hard to make money by selling a product to yourself.

I love you, man.

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I wonder whether he yelled “Fire!” in a Tommy Smothers voice?

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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

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Ayn Rand once again anticipates modern social science: Critics of the free market are more neurotic (i.e. lower in Stability) than proponents.

People low in Stability, on the other hand, habitually blow minor problems out of proportion.  Even when they live in First World countries, they manage to convince themselves that the sky is falling.  Their typically neurotic response is to beg for Big Brother to save them from their largely imaginary problems.  When government solutions don’t work out, they misinterpret it as further proof that life is hopeless – not that their “solutions” were ill-conceived.

Steve Sailer points and laughs.

Like I’ve been saying since last August, Biden is “kind of a bozo,” which is fine in a Senator or blogger or whatever, but not so fine in a Vice President, especially when he’s talking foreign policy, because foreigners might not realize he’s just Old Joe Biden running off at the mouth again, but might take what he says seriously on the assumption that he’s, like, you know, the Vice President of the United States of America. (As a commenter points out, Biden was brought on board specifically to impart foreign policy gravitas to the newcomer from the South Side of Chicago.)

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Well, be prepared, that’s what I always say….

Tim Kidwell does an English usage rant.

If you’re like me, at the end of the day you’re tired. You’re not looking for a fight, but you’ll stand your ground if you think you’re being played. And that’s precisely the limit I’ve reached with this sprig of verbal parsley.

Fun to see such a thing in a major publication. If you can only afford one newspaper, the Wall Street Journal is the one to get.

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Even in Washington, it’s unusual to see an actual price tag placed on a chance to “alter the debate,” as the Post’s flier tastefully put it. Stranger still is it to see the city’s scourge of public corruption — the Post broke the Watergate story and the Walter Reed scandal, among others — seemingly offering its own good offices for hire.

One hand washes the other. The separate components of The Hive work together like any other form of social insect.

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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.