Jerry Pournelle sums up the President’s speech.

The Speech from the Oval Office didn’t plug the hole. Apparently the teleprompter wasn’t up to the job. The boot on the neck is still in place, and BP will put $20 billion into a kitty to be administered by Obama’s cronies. There will be another commission of people who have no experience in oil production engineering. Months will go past. More oil will flow into the Gulf.

It’s not the end of the world. It’s a terrible oil spill, a financial disaster for the people of the Gulf Coast, and the harbinger of several bad years for the wildlife in parts of the Gulf. It’s a good illustration of the limits of government power. It’s a good illustration of the inevitable problems of electing a president who has no executive experience. It’s not the end of the world.

The Congress is the Grand Inquest of the Nation. If there’s to be a commission to investigate the causes of the runaway oil gusher with a view to preventing them in future (and to aiding in development of cleanup technology)  – and there should be such a commission — it should be given the usual investigatory powers, and should be technically competent, not a partisan witch hunt. I suspect the best comment here is ‘Good luck with that.’

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Several Senate Republicans told POLITICO that they don’t favor privatizing Social Security, as Angle has supported. Small government conservatives said it doesn’t make sense to eliminate the Energy and Education departments – as she’s called for in the past. And some recoiled at the thought of pulling the United States out of the United Nations, a position Angle has touted.

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

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Arthur Furano voted early — five days before Election Day. And he voted often, flipping the lever six times for his favorite candidate. Furano cast multiple votes on the instructions of a federal judge and the U.S. Department of Justice as part of a new election system crafted to help boost Hispanic representation.

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Although only 14 percent of the public approves of Congress, in an ordinary year 95 percent of all incumbents are re-elected. How is this possible?

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I flew out of Dulles last Wednesday, and the security process there was pure living hell. First there was an endless line just to get to the checkpoint where the TSA guy looks at your passport and boarding pass. Then there was another line — this one snaking back and forth through what seemed like miles of elastic tape barriers — that eventually divided up into several streams to go through the X-ray machines and the metal detectors. Shoes off, coat off, laptop out, liquids into the little bag, go through the Mystical Arch of Examination — and if you’re lucky, they don’t select you for some of that Extra Scrutiny.

Coming home yesterday I had to repeat the same procedure in Zurich, although it was less strenuous there. Unfortunately, however, I had to change planes in Philadelphia (a five-hour layover), and Philly is a point-of-entry. That meant I had to go through passport control (an endless line), and then reclaim my luggage. Next came customs (an endless line), and then I had to re-check my suitcase. And then — here’s the killer — I had to go through security again. A long line down a winding corridor to the checkpoint with the grumpy TSA guy, then the inevitable snake back and forth to the X-ray machines. Shoes off, etc., etc. Once more with feeling.

But — and here’s the kicker — everywhere I went there were Muslims working the security. Muslimas in hijab checking boarding passes. Muslims at the X-ray machines. Muslims wanding people. And in Philly I saw a Muslim guy doing the security screening on an entire family of Muslim travelers — women and girls in hijab, Dad in his little beanie, kids straggling along.

We are less safe after all this folderol because we’re letting people who could well be our enemies screen people who could well be our enemies. Which, needless to say, is insane.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR MUSLIM TERRORISTS, NONE OF THIS HUMILIATING RIGMAROLE WOULD BE NECESSARY.

Freeberg chimes in on the Case of the Combative Congresscritter.

This further supports my theory that progressives are the kids you knew who got away with everything under the sun, now all grown up. Their mommas caught ‘em red handed fishing a cookie out of the jar, and when “I was just putting it back” didn’t work, they went for the tried-and-true “Who ya gonna believe Ma? Me or your lyin’ eyes?” They think this will work, because it always has, and they could very well be right.

In their world, they can’t really be caught at anything. Anything. Ever.

Read it.

Read it. And watch the video.

A Republican would be hounded out of Washington for something like this.

A Democrat … not so much.

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Tigers mauled a man to death after he entered their enclosure with his son at a northern Chinese wildlife park, police and a park spokesman said on Monday.

It doesn’t qualify for a Darwin Award – the tigers didn’t get the kid, too, and Darwin is all about the genes – but it’s still a notable achievement.

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Whenever I read a science fiction story, I give no credibility to any alien species unless they are at least as strange as the Japanese.

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The mother of Abby Sunderland, the American teenage sailor who was feared to be lost in heavy seas last week, has said the family cannot afford to reimburse the Australian Government for the cost of saving her daughter.

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

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Mice get all the best stuff.

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Well, Czechoslovakia split – can Belgium survive?

Freeberg does the flip side.

It occurs to me that perhaps there’d be less consternation and contention if alternatives were provided. How can people show off their wonderfulness? My short answer would be: Just stop showing off. After all, if you look to others to confirm that you’re wonderful, and what you’re really after is self-confidence, obviously you’re never going to get there — you have to develop your own internal barometer for your wonderfulness. You need to be sure. You have to get hard-nosed enough that a whole room full of people can tell you you’re wrong about something, and deep down you’ll still know you’re right. You have to measure this independently.

Read it.

Scott Adams is an absolute genius at making money from things that suck. Here’s how.

People ask me how it feels to take the side of moral bankruptcy. Answer: Pretty good! Thanks for asking. How’s it feel to be a disgruntled victim?

I hate BP, but I admire them too, in the same way I respect the work ethic of serial killers.

Instead of investing in companies you hate, as I have suggested, perhaps you could invest in companies you love. I once hired professional money managers at Wells Fargo to do essentially that for me. As part of their service they promised to listen to the dopey-happy hallucinations of professional liars (CEOs) and be gullible on my behalf. The pros at Wells Fargo bought for my portfolio Enron, WorldCom, and a number of other much-loved companies that soon went out of business. For that, I hate Wells Fargo. But I sure wish I had bought stock in Wells Fargo at the time I hated them the most, because Wells Fargo itself performed great. See how this works?

If you buy stock in a despicable company, it means some of the previous owners of that company sold it to you. If the stock then rises more than the market average, you successfully screwed the previous owners of the hated company. That’s exactly like justice, only better because you made a profit. Then you can sell your stocks for a gain and donate all of your earnings to good causes, such as education for your own kids.

Read it.

Forget Karate Kid. Watch Shanghai Noon. Just do it.

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But you knew that.

Now, it has been discovered that science itself is racist. I wonder if we’ll have to change the phrase “the science is settled” to “the racist science is settled”?

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Now that the seekers of cosmic justice have taken care of health inequalities by ensuring that everyone enjoys equally poor health under Obamcare, they are turning their attention to inequalities in beauty. Here’s the lowdown:

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Because he’s the smartest guy in the room, you see. It’s right there on the program.

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Now a failed gubernatorial nominee is flipping out on the Black Legislative Caucus because they didn’t nominate him because they are all Uncle Tom’s and the old white guys in SC are running the Democrat party like a plantation

Politics is getting more and more entertaining.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, gives us a treat.

I wasn’t aware of Larkin, though.

A misogynist, child-hater and stone atheist, Larkin was naturally a political conservative, who said that all his life he had identified liberals with “idleness, greed, and treason.”

My kind of guy.

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The researchers concluded that, prior to the invention of shoes, people had healthier feet. Among the modern subjects, the Zulu population, which often goes barefoot, had the healthiest feet while the Europeans—i.e., the habitual shoe-wearers—had the unhealthiest.

White People just love to have the practices of millenia exposed (preferably by a Crustian mag) as absurd, especially when backed by ‘science’ and most especially when the implication is that they are stupider than their primitive ancestors (and, by extension, primitive cultures today).

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Nearly three decades ago, Gary Lauder received a traffic ticket. “I didn’t come to a complete stop at an intersection,” he said in a phone interview. “There were zero oncoming cars, and I rolled. The ticket only raised revenue and maybe filled a quota. It really bugged me.”

Mr. Lauder’s idea is informed as much by environmental stewardship as a desire to avoid unwarranted stops. “By bringing a vehicle to an unnecessary stop, energy is wasted on multiple levels,” he said. “Efficiency is more than just about the vehicle, it’s also about the road.”

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Rather than betting that aid dollars can beat poverty, Romer is peddling a radical vision: that dysfunctional nations can kick-start their own development by creating new cities with new rules—Lübeck-style centers of progress that Romer calls “charter cities.” By building urban oases of technocratic sanity, struggling nations could attract investment and jobs; private capital would flood in and foreign aid would not be needed. And since Henry the Lion is not on hand to establish these new cities, Romer looks to the chief source of legitimate coercion that exists today—the governments that preside over the world’s more successful countries. To launch new charter cities, he says, poor countries should lease chunks of territory to enlightened foreign powers, which would take charge as though presiding over some imperial protectorate. Romer’s prescription is not merely neo-medieval, in other words. It is also neo-colonial.

I am not making this up.

George Carlin once said, ‘If you nail together two things that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it.’ This is living proof.

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Cool. We’ll come home and he can see what kind of luck he has on his own.

Sounds like a plan.

Check it out.

Be the first on  your block to name your startup after a thinly disguised bowel movement.

Fred is a populist, which means he thinks with his heart rather than his brain. Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

The exceedingly intelligent form a social class seldom mentioned but inordinately influential. They are not recognized as what they are because they do not append IQs to their by-lines. As a quite ordinary example, consider the magazine The American Conservative, with many of whose writers I have some familiarity. The publisher, Ron Unz, studied theoretical physics at Stanford after graduating from Harvard. Bill Lind, Pat Buchanan, Taki, Steve Sailer, Kara Hopkins, John Derbyshire—I doubt that there is an IQ below 140 in the bunch. The same could be said of many other political slicks, left or right.

The commentators don’t realize that not everybody is like them. Those with IQs of 140 and up (130 gets you into Mensa, I think) unconsciously believe that anything is possible. Denizens of this class know that if they decided to learn, say, classical Greek, they could. You get the book and go at it. It would take work, yes, and time, but the outcome would be certain.

They don’t understand that the waitress has an IQ of 85 and can’t learn much of anything.

Populists are good at whining but they don’t have any solutions. As Jerry Pournelle points out, ‘Compassion is all very well but it doesn’t actually change the way things work.’

Dorothy Rabinowitz pulls back the curtain.

A great part of America now understands that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.

Read it.

A U.S. Marine who served in Iraq is suing the federal government for distributing billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to the Shariah-supporting American International Group.

I don’t know where they find these guys….

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A year after “Kung Fu” actor David Carradine died from a dangerous sex practice, his wife has filed suit, claiming he would still be alive if he hadn’t been left alone in a hotel that night.

Carradine was in Bangkok shooting the film “Stretch” when he was found dead on June 4, 2009 in his hotel room closet with ropes tied around his neck and genitals — a likely victim of auto-erotic asphyxia.

The suit claims that Carradine was supposed to have dinner that night with the film’s director but the assistant responsible for his schedule and transportation to the set and meetings left him behind at the hotel after failing to reach him.
When Carradine reached the assistant an hour later he was told “they were already across town and David Carradine would have to make his own arrangements that evening,” the suit stated.

As apparently he did. Not clear how that’s actionable.

David Friedman sticks up for Real Science.

Gartrell’s study was limited to lesbian couples. On theoretical grounds, one could take her result as evidence not that homosexuals are good at child rearing but that women are, in which case it would imply the precise opposite of what she suggests. Insofar as the quote is evidence of anything, it is evidence of bias on the part of the researcher. As anyone familiar with statistical work knows, there are a lot of ways in which a researcher can tweak the design of a study, deliberately or not, to produce the result the researcher wants.

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

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No doubt this is what White People in Britain eat.

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If not the future of education, this is certainly a future of education.

We need to do an end-run around the government-monopoly factory-style school. This could be one such.

Your masters aren’t.

According to a Zogby International survey that I write about in the May issue of Econ Journal Watch, the answer is unequivocal: The left flunks Econ 101.

Rather than focusing on whether respondents answered a question correctly, we instead looked at whether they answered incorrectly. A response was counted as incorrect only if it was flatly unenlightened.

Adam Smith described political economy as “a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator.” Governmental power joined with wrongheadedness is something terrible, but all too common. Realizing that many of our leaders and their constituents are economically unenlightened sheds light on the troubles that surround us.

Read it.

Inmates are converting to Islam in order to gain perks and the protection of powerful Muslim gangs, the Chief Inspector of Prisons warns today.

Dame Anne Owers says that some convicted criminals are taking up the religion in jail to receive benefits only available to practising Muslims.

And that’s precisely why most of the Middle East is Muslim to this day. Why mess with a system that has worked for a thousand years?

Read it.

We are well on the way to creating a subspecies like the Ringworld’s ‘Night People’. I predict that they will, over time, come to resemble cockroaches in appearance as well as lifestyle.

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As long as all hands are Democrats, of course.

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

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Yeah, we sure want more of these people in the United States.

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Don’t ever say that we never have useful stuff here.

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A ‘stone’ is 14 pounds. Why the Brits can’t use ‘pounds’ for weighing stuff (or even kilograms) passes all understanding.

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Turns out you just need more cowbell.

But Savory’s prescription seems shockingly simple–and it’s taken him 50 years of work to convince others that he’s not crazy. The core of Holistic Management is simply grazing local livestock in super dense herds that mimic the grazing patterns of big-game (which have since disappeared). Those livestock in turn till the soil with their hooves and fertilize it with their dung–thus preparing the land for new vegetation in a cycle that was evolved over millions of years.

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And about time, too.

Read it. Who knew Slate had a sense of humor?

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There are two types of country in the world, it must be understood:

a)		normal countries, in which people care about their national identities, and where the importance of the various ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic pillars upon which those identities stand is taken for granted, and
b)		Disneyland countries, which are fun parks for the entire world.

Britain is, needless to say, a Disneyland country, which all the peoples of the world are entitled to access, to pursue that which their hearts hold dear. British passports must be handed out as necessary. Happily, this will not be problematic as the amount of paper required to produce them is small and should not put undue pressure on the public finances. These are, of course, infinite anyway and therefore open to being commandeered by foreigners without ill effect.

Note the complete contempt for British citizenship implicit in this attitude.

Where White People shop.

Read it.

Hope springs eternal….