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Anthropologists had long believed humans migrated to the Americas in a relatively short period from a limited area in northeast Asia across a temporary land corridor that opened across the Bering Strait during an ice age.

But government archaeologist Alejandro Terrazas says the picture has now become more complicated, because the reconstruction more resembles people from southeastern Asian areas like Indonesia.

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As the desert landscape unfolds ahead, the jet fighter pilot glances to his right. Spotting an enemy target, a sensor attached to his helmet relays the information straight back to his flight controls, allowing him to fire immediately without turning his aircraft.

U.S. defense company Raytheon Inc. is giving the first glimpse of its Scorpion helmet technology for F-16 and A-10 combat jets on a simulator at the Farnborough International Airshow after this week announcing a $12.6 million contract with the U.S. Air Force.

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And that really tells you everything you need to know about the Church of England and its derivatives.

Freeberg, of course, distills the essence.

Somewhere out there is a democrat talking point that says this: Talk these things up at your heart’s content, make money on your book deals, that’s all fine & good — but make sure at the end of the day that the character of conservatives is impugned. In fact, make sure that’s the case every time you end a sentence and come to a (.) dot.

Had Sherrod taken the time to think this thing out…or if she wasn’t making an effort to talk to morons…she would have seen the strategy runs into some real problems here. Andrew Breitbart received a video. The NAACP saw the same video. They both came to the same conclusion, as did Vilsack. This makes Breitbart a terrible person and the other two parties innocent pawns. How’s that work? Breitbart has gone on the record to say the video was whittled down before it got to him, and I know of no evidence to suggest anything different.

I saw this before, recently. Yes, a number of democrat legislators voted for the AUMF, the Authorization of Use of Military Force in Iraq, so they could look all tough. And then, as if someone said “go!” it was time to be all dovish and anti-war. (Maybe someone really did say it.) Suddenly, it was George W. Bush’s war. He fooled us all. We’re still saying “Somewhere in Texas a village is missing an idiot,” but the idiot fooled us. Those right-wingers. So stupid, and yet successfully fooling everybody. And they never get fooled, oh no. They’re just evil.

Liberals would be able to connect with people so much better if they’d just allow us to make up our own minds about who’s a monster. They must have figured out somewhere they cannot afford to do this.

However, from about Wednesday on there has arisen a sense that Sherrod, personally, doesn’t really feel this way. She really does see issues as race-based even if they don’t need to be. She’s as racist as anybody else. From that point in time two days ago, I would have characterized this as likely-but-irrelevant. I left it unaddressed because it was not germane to the point, and it was idle speculation. Granting it the benefit of the doubt — Shirley Sherrod is giving a speech saying when we help people we should be race-blind, and she doesn’t personally believe this so she’s standing up there lying. Then her comments are taken out of context and she’s fired. Alright, you may say that’s poetic justice. But it’s still a raw deal, and not just for Sherrod. The people who saw the chopped-down version should still understand what was in the longer version.

But if that’s part of the story, it’s also part of the story that the woman is a liar and a manipulator. To me, we can’t even make it to the question of whether she’s a racist or not. We don’t make it that far, because she’s a democrat party activist and she’s read & chosen to practice this talking point about make-all-conservatives-look-like-monsters. Because her mouth moves faster than her brain, it’s extraordinarily blatant in this case.

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We have the technology.

Seth Godin is one of those business-buzzword gurus who is famous chiefly for uttering trendy oracular aphorisms and selling books to fashionable corporate executives (and those who would be etc.). But even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.

It’s paper that makes the economics of the newspaper industry work (or not work). It’s paper that creates cost and slows things down and generates scarcity. And scarcity is what they sell.

It’s paper that makes the book industry what it is. As soon as you remove paper from the equation, the costs change, the timing changes, the barriers to entry change, the risk changes. And defenders of the status quo don’t like change.

Is there not enough paper in your life? Why are we wringing our hands about the demise of paper as the economic gating factor for ideas? In fact, some of the trees I know are delighted that we’ve found a better, faster, cheaper way to spread ideas.

If the demise of paper means that good people doing good work in important industries will have to find faster and better ways to do their jobs, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

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I’d heard that carjacking was a problem in South Africa, but really….

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Remember Fremont, Nebraska? In June, citizens of the 25,000-person town voted in favor of banning illegal immigrants from renting property or landing a job in the town.

The law, which requires town officials to evaluate the citizenship of anyone renting property, has put the town at the center of the roiling immigration debate.

How dare they restrict the activities of, well, criminals. I guess the fact that one is here unlawfully ought not to be allowed to harsh one’s mellow. I guess the ACLU won’t be happy until every city is a Sanctuary City.

The suit claims that Fremont’s law interferes with the federal government’s authority over immigration matters and further that it has a discriminatory effect on those who look or sound “foreign.”

Not sure how helping the Feds enforce the law (which they haven’t been doing all that well so far, so obviously they need something in the way of help) “interferes” with their authority; and since all it does is allow “discrimination” against illegal aliens, and since discrimination against people who “look or sound foreign” is already against the law (and enthusiastically defended by, uh, the ACLU), it’s not clear that there would be any “effect” that a court can take cognizance of.

But that’s just common sense, and we all know that common sense doesn’t last long in the brains of the ACLU — or courts, for that matter.

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This article addresses what should be a puzzling question: Why did Barack Obama nominate Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court? Not only has Kagan never been a judge, but, far more problematically, she has over the course of a 25-year legal and political career taken almost no public positions on any significant legal or political questions. This latter fact would, at first glance, seem to disqualify her from consideration for a lifetime appointment to one of America’s most powerful political institutions. That it has not tells us a great deal about deep-seated cultural myths regarding the possibility of separating law from politics, and about the elite institutions that have molded Obama, Kagan, and so many other members of America’s contemporary legal, political, and economic establishment. Ultimately, in one sense Kagan remains, on the eve of her confirmation by the Senate, as much of a blank slate as ever. Yet in another we, like Barack Obama, can venture a good guess regarding what sort of Supreme Court justice she will make. That we can do so reflects both the cultural and ideological power wielded by the elite institutions that are producing the contemporary American establishment, and the relatively narrow range of political views those institutions generate among those who go on to become part of that establishment.

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The end times are near.

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Underneath West Virginia is a series of underground chambers.  They constitute an emergency shelter for the entire United States Congress, a hideout and bolt hole in case of nuclear war, hidden away beneath a benign-looking hotel.

The neat thing is that eventually they become outdated and are sold for cheap. Really cool if you can afford to buy one, not so much if not.

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Everyone knows that the UN is a sinkhole of corruption.

Actually, he could have stopped there … but he goes on to give details.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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Guess things really haven’t changed over there in the last 200 years.

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The ceremony, which featured Pakistan Rangers and Indian Border Security Force troops in full dress uniform marching up to their rivals on the border line in exaggerated goose-steps while shouting loudly. These scenes, cheered on by jingoistic crowds on either side chanting pro-Pakistan and India slogans, were shown on Michael Palin’s celebrated BBC documentary series Himalaya.

They have to wear those hats and they decide to complain about the goose step?

The whole damned thing looks extremely silly. What’s the Hindi for “Yo mama!”?

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Consider what the academic job market now looks like.  You have a small elite on top who have lifetime employment regardless of how little work they do.  This lifetime employment commences somewhere between 35 and 40.  For the ten-to-fifteen years before that, they spend their lives in pursuit of the brass ring.  They live in poverty suck up to professors, and publish, for one must publish to be tenured.  It’s very unfortunate if you don’t have anything much worth saying; you need to publish anyway, in order to improve your chances.  Fortunately, for the needy tenure seeker, a bevy of journals have sprung up that will print your trivial contributions.  If nothing else, they provide a nice simple model which helps introductory economics professors explain Say’s Law.

At the end of the process, most of the aspirants do not have tenure; they have dropped out, or been dropped, at some point along the way.  Meanwhile, the system has ripped up their lives in other ways.  They’ve invested their whole youth, and are back on the job market near entry level at an age when most of their peers have spent ten years building up marketable skills.  Many of them will have seen relationships ripped apart by the difficulties of finding not one, but two tenure-track jobs in the same area.  Others will have invested their early thirties in a college town with no other industry, forcing them to move elsewhere to restart both their careers and their social lives.  Or perhaps they string along adjuncting at near-poverty wages, unable to quite leave the academy that has abused them for so long.

Could one deliberately design a process more guaranteed to produce a train wreck of an educational system?

Most scholars in their sixties are not producing path-breaking new research, but they are precisely the people that tenure protects.  Scholars in their twenties and thirties, on the other hand, have no academic freedom at all.  Indeed, because tenure raises the stakes so high, the vetting of future employees is much more careful–and the candidates, who know this, are almost certainly more careful than they would be if they were on more ordinary employment contracts.  As a result, the process of getting a degree, getting a job, and getting tenure has stretched out to cover one’s whole youth. So tenure makes young scholars–the kind most likely to attack a dominant paradigm–probably more careful than they would be under more normal employment process.

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It’s a tedious job, but somebody has to do it.  Every time Tom Friedman chides us about how eco-irresponsible we are, how we all have to suck it up and pay more for everything that uses energy (which would be, uh, everything), somebody has to remind us that the honorable Friedman has a carbon footprint bigger than us, everybody who reads this blog, their families, friends, pets, hobbies, vacations and church groups, put together, times ten.

What’s eleven thousand square feet in the face of ecological collapse?

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The nation’s three dominant credit-ratings providers have made an urgent new request of their clients: Please don’t use our credit ratings.

The odd plea is emerging as the first consequence of the financial overhaul that is to be signed into law by President Obama on Wednesday. And it already is creating havoc in the bond markets, parts of which are shutting down in response to the request.

Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings are all refusing to allow their ratings to be used in documentation for new bond sales, each said in statements in recent days. Each says it fears being exposed to new legal liability created by the landmark Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

That is important because some bonds, notably those that are made up of consumer loans, are required by law to include ratings in their official documentation. That means new bond sales in the $1.4 trillion market for mortgages, autos, student loans and credit cards could effectively shut down.

In an effort to avoid another financial crisis, they actually created one. Smooth move, guys.

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What we have is One-Party Media: newspapers, broadcast networks, newsmagazines which represent the views and preoccupations of the Democratic Party and the political left, and consistently denigrate or ignore the views and preoccupations of the political right or centre-right; and which very often systematically ignore any news or information which might reflect badly on the one party, or reflect well on the policies, proposals, or values of the other.  (Fox is the exception – and how it is reviled for it! – although in its actual news stories, Fox often, although not always, follows the “narrative” of the other media.)  (The Wall Street Journal is the other partial exception, but with the same proviso for many of its actual news stories, and at any rate the Journal is still largely a specialised business paper with a specialised readership.  There are essentially no other major exceptions in either print or broadcast news.)

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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For anyone who has been in a cave, JournoList was an invitation-only email discussion group among “progressive” journalists and academics on which they exchanged candid views on the state of the nation and discussed the themes that should be pushed or suppressed as dictated by the needs of the movement.

The real problem with JournoList is that much of it consisted of exchanges among people who worked for institutions about how to best hijack their employers for the cause of Progressivism. Thus, the J-List discussion revealed yesterday in the DC was about how the group could get their media organizations to play down the Reverend Wright affair and help elect Barack Obama.

Steve Sailer says: ‘Sometimes I get discouraged when I realize that I’ve been debunking dumb ideas for many years now, yet dumb ideas remains wildly popular. ‘

Oh, tell me about it….

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Let’s see: Disobey the rules + Disrupt everyone’s life = $35,000

Nice work if you can get it.

Gates of Vienna is one of the web sites doing the heavy lifting in the effort to keep us all from being assimilated by the Borg of Islam.

Read it. Donate.

‘For the scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn. And, The laborer is worthy of his hire.’ How much more then do we owe those who never cease in their efforts to rouse the somnolent when the wolf is, almost literally, at the door?

Read it. Donate.

On June 20th, 1969, a human being set foot on the moon. I remember that day.

So does Jerry Pournelle: ‘When I was reading science fiction  in high school I never doubted that I would live to see the first man on the Moon. I didn’t think I would live to see the last one.’

Quite frankly, neither did I. But it’s looking increasingly likely.

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Well, I have to say, the feeling is mutual.

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The  Senate Judiciary Committee, by a vote of 13 to 6, has sent Elena Kagan’s nomination to the full Senate for a vote by that body. Naturally, ever Democrat on the Committee voted “yes,” and naturally Republican Lindsey Graham voted “yes” as well. Graham explained that Kagan is “funny” which “goes a long way in my book.”

RINOs, RINOs everywhere….

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This month, Oakland laid off 80 police officers, just over 10 percent of its total force, in order to balance the city’s budget. As a result, the city’s police chief says cops will no longer respond to 44 categories of crimes, including grand theft. The city’s elected officials regret the change but say they simply cannot afford to maintain current staffing levels. Whether that’s true depends upon your definition of “afford.”

At current levels of compensation, yes, Oakland cannot afford to maintain a police department with 776 employees. That’s because total compensation for an OPD employee averages an astounding $162,000 per year. But at a more reasonable level of pay and benefits, Oakland could afford to maintain its force, or even grow it.

Oakland police officers’ compensation is generous along every dimension. As touted on the department’s own recruiting website, cadets start out at a salary of $64,656 plus benefits. (For comparison, the NYPD pays police academy attendees a starting salary of $44,744). Once an OPD officer finishes training, he or she is entitled to a starting base salary, before overtime and benefits, ranging from $71,841 to $90,459. And the payscale continues upward from there.

Katherine Mangu-Ward takes a look at your Friendly Neighborhood Nanny State.

That’s 12-year-old Jasmine Palmer, speaking her mind to agents from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, Los Angeles County Sheriff, Ventura County Sheriff, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture. She was objecting to the loss of her third computer in an early morning raid on her family’s Ventura County farmhouse. They stand accused of selling raw milk goat cheese to members-only food clubs.

I suppose one could say ‘Thank God I don’t live in California’, but the situation’s just as bad everywhere else.

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Not being run by Democrats is a good first step.

One reason that Texas did so well is that it fully escaped the “housing bubble” that did so much damage in California, Florida, Arizona, Nevada and other states. One key factor was the state’s liberal, market oriented land use policies. This served to help keep the price of land low while profligate lending increased demand. More importantly, still sufficient new housing was built, and affordably. By contrast, places with highly restrictive land use polies (California, Florida and other places, saw prices rise to unprecedented heights, making it impossible for builders to supply sufficient new housing at affordable prices (overall, median house prices have been 3.0 times or less median household incomes where there are liberal land use policies).

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You know you want to.

Ross Douthat pulls back the curtain.

For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”

Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially tinged conspiracy theories that Beck and others have exploited — that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants, and so forth.

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We use the cross-county introduction of the program in the 1960s and 1970s to estimate the impact of the program on the extensive and intensive margins of labor supply, earnings, and family cash income. Consistent with theory, we find modest reductions in employment and hours worked when food stamps are introduced. The results are larger for single-parent families.

In other words, people who got Food Stamps worked less. Welfare payments have that effect.

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If God occasionally intervenes in the world to shoot down an atheist—to show who’s boss, or simply to vent—it makes sense for Him to target the esophagus.

No matter what Christopher Hitchens’ views or activities might be, the case for a Christian praying for him — as I do — is unimpeachable, starting with Matt. 5:4 and Luke 6:28 and progressing into the rarefied heights of scholastic theology.

Some believers, however, grapple with whether Hitchens’s vituperative contempt for all things religious places him outside the circle of those for whom believers should pray. Jeffrey Goldberg, on his Atlantic.com blog, consults a mutual friend of his and Hitch’s, Rabbi David Wolpe, who debated Hitchens on God’s existence.

“I asked David,” Goldberg writes, “what sort of intercessory praying a believer should do on behalf of a declared nonbeliever, or if one should pray at all, and he wrote back with some very wise words: ‘I would say it is appropriate and even mandatory to do what one can for another who is sick; and if you believe that praying helps, to pray. It is in any case an expression of one’s deep hopes. So yes, I will pray for him, but I will not insult him by asking or implying that he should be grateful for my prayers.”

Exactly correct. And if his chemotherapy turns out not to be effective, he shall (paraphrasing Thomas More) have our prayers to fall back on.

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There was never any guarantee Falcone would succeed in the marketplace. But if Falcone fails due to these regulatory obstacles, it is not clear that the intended beneficiaries (those without wireless service in rural areas, for example) are any better off. It is worth asking the FCC if the harm done by regulations outweighs benefits that never materialize.

Alex Tabarrok does the numbers.

Number of birds killed by the BP oil spill: at least 2,188 and counting.

Number of birds killed by wind farms: 10,000-40,000 annually.

Somehow I don’t suppose that PETA and the Sierra Club will be bashing wind farms quite as much as they bash BP. Ya think?

Nancy Kress, famous science fiction author [read Beggars in Spain unless you want to remain an uncultured boob] and one of my Recommended Writers, does a review of the recent flick INCEPTION. (I just wish she would opt for legibility over hip-and-trendy and lose the white-print-on-black format. *sigh*)

INCEPTION is, in microcosm, the state of much current SF. It is so complex and self-referential that much time is spent figuring out what is happening, rather than inhabiting what is happening. Is this good or bad? I guess that depends why you like stories. If you want them to be puzzles, then INCEPTION is brilliant. If you want them to be reflections of human experience, then INCEPTION is still good but not as good as it could have been if the film maker, Christopher Nolan, had kept things a bit simpler (for one thing, characters could then have spent less time giving us info dumps). However, judging from the enthusiastic audience reaction last night, puzzles are what is wanted. People applauded at the end. Lobby comments afterward were positive (I eavesdropped). This is, apparently, what SF means to a mass audience.

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Suddenly the phenomenon of class resentment is a live political issue. Some commentators describe it as the Democrats’ “middle-class problem”, which means that there has been a spectacular collapse of support for the administration among the core blue-collar voters who should constitute its base.

Liberal politics is now – over there as much as here – a form of social snobbery. To express concern about mass immigration, or reservations about the Obama healthcare plan, is unacceptable in bien-pensant circles because this is simply not the way educated people are supposed to think. It follows that those who do think (and talk) this way are small-minded bigots, rednecks, oiks, or whatever your local code word is for “not the right sort”.

Indeed, American politics is looking more like that of a Third-World kleptocracy, with Obama and his cronies ushering in our own sort of waBenzi.

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Romneycare affords us a glimpse into the not very distant future if Obamacare is not repealed. Employers are dumping their health care plans. The governor is essentially attempting to impose price controls on insurers. If the governor is successful, insurers would just throw in the towel. When that happens under Obamacare, we will take our nationalized medicine straight.

What puzzles me is that Republicans revile Obama for Obamacare, yet appear to give Romney a pass on Romneycare. Why is that? It may be just the fact that Romneycare was already demonstrably failing when Obama pushed his program through, and that he deserves obloquy for persisting in the face of failure. But I really can’t see any reason for people to consider Romney a legitimate candidate for the Republican Presidential nod, as he obviously is, when his chief accomplishment as Governor of Massachusetts is a failed program identical to the chief priority of our current leftist Democrat in the White House.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

Check it out.

Tyler Cowen does his economist thing.

Matt Yglesias suggests the notion is implausible, but I am surprised to read those words.  Keep in mind, we have had a recovery in output, but not in employment.  That means a smaller number of laborers are working, but we are producing as much as before.  As a simple first cut, how should we measure the marginal product of those now laid-off workers?  I would start with the number zero.  If a restored level of output wouldn’t count as evidence for the zero marginal product hypothesis, what would?  If I ran a business, fired ten people, and output didn’t go down, might I start by asking whether those people produced anything useful?

I’d like to know how many of them worked for the government. I have my suspicions.

This would actually seem to be a legitimate case of ‘right-sizing’. Firms are where they ought to be in terms of efficient use of human resources. And classical economic theory says that such is one of the benefits of economic downturns — business processes that were using resources inefficiently get that inefficiency wrung out, and sometimes that means that people get wrung out as well; the basic laws of economics really don’t care whether you as an individual had one of those misallocated jobs.

There is another striking fact about the recession, namely that unemployment is quite low for highly educated workers but about sixteen percent for the less educated workers with no high school degree.  (When it comes to income groups, the lowest decile has an unemployment rate of over thirty percent, while it is three percent for the highest decile; I’m not sure of the time horizon for that income measure.)  This is consistent with the zero marginal product hypothesis, and yeta few analysts ask whether their preferred explanation for unemployment addresses this pattern.axw

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Good to know that there are still some standards left.

My friend adds that much of the gossip is about which country club the couple will be allowed to join. Hassan Nemazee, a former Clinton fundraiser, tried to introduce them to a 120-year-old golf club of which he was a member. Unfortunately, he is now serving a 12-year prison sentence for bank fraud.

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Oh, ya think? Find a non-white person who has ever, ever, been tagged for a ‘hate crime’.

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What could be more depressing than a well-meaning corporation and a closely associated foundation, concerned about the quality of math education in our nation, applying a large amount of resources that are not only wasted, but generally have exactly the opposite effects that they want?

Oh, I don’t know — how about a well-meaning government doing the same thing? With our money?

Steve Sailer turns over a rock and watches the Crust take care of its own and co-opt the best of the Underclass.

The box students checked off on the racial question on their application was thus shown to have an extraordinary effect on a student’s chances of gaining admission to the highly competitive private schools in the NSCE database. To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550.

Having money in the family greatly improved a white applicant’s admissions chances, lack of money greatly reduced it. The opposite class trend was seen among non-whites, where the poorer the applicant the greater the probability of acceptance when all other factors are taken into account. Class-based affirmative action does exist within the three non-white ethno-racial groupings, but among the whites the groups advanced are those with money.

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Hey, it’s summer. We do ice cream in summer.

Read it. And watch the video.

It’s funny how the political class is always wringing its hands about the potential for violence at Tea Party rallies, while 100% of the actual violence and intimidation that take place at political events is committed by union goons.

Eric Raymond is always worth reading.

One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this recently that I’ve decided that it needs a name. I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping”, and the above the Model A kafkatrap. In this essay, I will show that the kafkatrap is a form of argument that is so fallacious and manipulative that those subjected to it are entitled to reject it based entirely on the form of the argument, without reference to whatever particular sin or thoughtcrime is being alleged. I will also attempt to show that kafkatrapping is so self-destructive to the causes that employ it that change activists should root it out of their own speech and thoughts.

My reference, of course, is to Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”, in which the protagonist Josef K. is accused of crimes the nature of which are never actually specified, and enmeshed in a process designed to degrade, humiliate, and destroy him whether or not he has in fact committed any crime at all.

Much like traveling on a modern airline.

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Here’s a fascinating paradox of liberalism, one that affects not only them but anybody who lives where they have influence. Who you are determines truth. Ted Kennedy or Robert Byrd drop dead, and if Fox News says that’s what happened then it hasn’t really happened yet. Vice President Joe Biden says the Recovery & Reinvestment Act has saved-or-created a bunch of jobs, and it must be so because Joe Biden has done something to advance the progressive agenda. Thurgood Marshall was a deity, don’t say a word against his judicial philosophy or you’ll be the opposite. Identity determines everything.