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One of the nation’s most iconic nonprofit organizations, founded 166 years ago in England as the Young Men’s Christian Association, is undergoing a major rebranding, adopting as its name the nickname everyone has used for generations.

‘Young Men’? Certainly. ‘Christian’? Not so much.

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Which means that most of them haven’t been paying enough attention. ‘Progressives’ have over a century of track record, most of it abysmal. Let’s hope that it doesn’t take another hundred years for the lessons of the last hundred to sink in.

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It’s like watching a snowman melt in the sun.

“People’s patience is running out and many will now be asking whether they should try and practice their Catholic faith in the Church of England,” he said.

Well, no. If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that heresies eventually self-destruct.

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Weight Watchers courses would be an inexpensive and effective way to reduce the burden on the NHS caused by obesity, according to two new studies.

The weight loss programme, which focuses on changing people’s behaviour rather than simply their diet, produced better results than normal care and advice provided by GPs in the trials. a

Whatever would we do without scientists?

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Jihad – it’s not just for Americans any more.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading. Always.

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

A modern child doesn’t want some dumb fire truck that could be improved in 25 different ways. He wants a fully focus-grouped Transformers Inferno fire truck / alien robot that is part of a cartoon show and blockbuster movie series and that comes with dozens of other toys in the series to buy. If professional toy designers, researchers, marketers, McDonald’s Happy Meal executives, screenwriters, advertising agents, and web people haven’t taken dozens of meetings over the fire truck and exchanged countless Notes on how to make the entire branding concept more awesome, he doesn’t want it.

Read it.

Read it.

Every school should have a “useless teacher” so children can learn to deal with incompetent people in authority, the outgoing chairman of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) has claimed.

We’ll be happy to send you some of ours, guys; we have excess of requirements.

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The researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a formula of “phantom” jams, based on the equations that describe detonation waves caused by explosions.

“Phantom” jams are those that occur for no apparent reason, in the absence of an accident or roadworks. In high density traffic, a small disturbance, such as a driver braking too hard, becomes amplified as the cars behind react more strongly. Eventually, many cars behind the initial disturbance, the small incremental increases become a fully fledged, self-sustaining traffic jam. The MIT team call such phantom jams “jamitons”.

Read it. And watch the video.

These people are among the reasons why I work in database development rather than law — it substantially reduces the amount of time I have to spend taking a shower.

Read it.

Over the past few years I’ve been able to observe first hand the devolution of a person into a liberal.  My findings are not surprising but I thought I would share them with you.

Of course it doesn’t take a genius to conclude that if one is allowed to blame upbringing for conservatism and portray that negatively, one should not simultaneously be allowed to exalt liberal indoctrination at college campuses as though it were the product of free thought.  If the family environment creates a conservative, and the college environment creates a liberal, shouldn’t we view any “creation” process in equal terms?  Of course not, because a small house in the hills of Appalachia is a den of ignorance to be derided whereas the shimmering ivory Berkeley campus is a palace of worship deserving of all praise.  In the eyes of a liberal, anyway.  Once made, a liberal must fall over themselves to help these poor unforunate ignoramuses who live in places other than metro areas think and be just like them.  Interesting contradiction, don’t you think?

Since I have known her, she becomes more liberal by the day.  And I find that each liberal virtue she extolls seems to originate in her mind only after the virtue is in someway relevant to her.  I won’t go into the details – use your imagination.

Another less positive way to put it would be like this: the more she fails at life, the more liberal she becomes.  It would appear that her liberal beliefs emerge only to justify a course in life she’s already chosen to take.  Her beliefs did not arise independently.  They exist only as an excuse to justify actions in the past.  Or as a justification for why she isn’t doing what the rest of us are doing, such as respectably contributing to our civilization.  As opposed to whining about it.

Read it.

You want scary? We got scary.

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How can you keep them down in Little Rock after they’ve seen Georgetown?

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Women and minorities hardest hit.

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Henri Pirenne’s posthumously-published Mohammed et Charlemagne (1938) presented to the academic world the results of a lifetime of research and study. His conclusions were stunning. The accepted narrative of western civilization, he maintained, was erroneous in a fundamental way. Classical civilization, the literate and urban culture of Greece and Rome, did not die as a result of the “Barbarian” Invasions of the fifth century. On the contrary, the great cities of the west, of Gaul, of Italy, of Spain and of North Africa, continued to flourish as before, this time under Germanic kings. These monarchs enthusiastically adopted the Latin language as well as Christianity, and regarded themselves as functionaries of the Roman Emperor — who by now however sat in Constantinople. Literature, as well as the arts and sciences, Pirenne found, continued to flourish in the western provinces until the middle of the seventh century. At that point, however, everything fell apart. Now, quite suddenly, a darkness — complete and total — descends. Gold coinage disappears and the great cities go into terminal decline. Within a generation, Europe is in the middle of a Dark Age. The light of classical civilization is utterly and completely extinguished.

What, Pirenne mused, could have caused such a total and dramatic disintegration? The conclusion he reached was almost as dramatic as the civilizational collapse he described. It was, to use Pirenne’s own phrase, explainable in one word: Mohammed.

Steve Sailer is always willing to talk about things that other people avoid.

Everybody is in favor of in-depth analysis of educational statistics in theory, but when they actually finally look at them, the obvious leaps out: Holy cow, compared to everything else, race really matters. You can’t adjust it away (except by using cynical proxies for race the way Steven Levitt tried to do a few years ago: e.g., favorite soda flavor is Grape or the rough equivalent). And when it comes to physics and a few other subjects, sex matters.

Steve likes to say that a ‘race’ is actually an endogamous extended family, concerning which genetic differences are not only natural but inevitable.

Read it.

A vigorous 60-minute workout on a treadmill affects the release of two key appetite hormones, ghrelin and peptide YY, while 90 minutes of weight lifting affects the level of only ghrelin, according to a new study. Taken together, the research shows that aerobic exercise is better at suppressing appetite than non-aerobic exercise and provides a possible explanation for how that happens.

So the reason I get hungry is because I’m a slug? I’m okay with that.

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The snotty tone is pure Crustian. ‘I know a better way, so why doesn’t everyone else get with the program? You all must be idiots!’

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

Non-Muslims are the niggers of the Middle East.

The Other McCain doesn’t shrink from saying what we all know to be true.

This pattern illustrates a common-sense truth so basic that it seems a bit silly to state it directly: Criminals commit crime.

Contrary to media distortions, criminality is not evenly distributed throughout the population. A small and fairly distinct group of career criminals — recidivists, habitual violators, call them what you will — account for the majority of serious crime in America.

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Medical helicopters are supposed to save lives. Too often, they put both flight crew and patients in danger instead. Here, in this Popular Mechanics special report, we investigate the crashes and statistics that make medical helicopter an unacceptable risk.

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It seems almost unthinkable, but Islamist groups are, as we speak, hard at work creating Muslim states-within-states in the U.S. Indeed, this process has been unfolding for a long time across the Western world, through the creation of isolated Muslim enclaves in both rural and urban areas, as well as through the designation of “no-go zones” where governments admit to having little authority over Muslims living there, essentially leaving them to function as autonomous regions.

Daniel Pipes has tracked numerous examples since 2004 of Muslim groups working to create communities based solely on Islam and run by Shari’a law. As discussed by David Kennedy Houck in 2006, “Although such concepts are antithetical to a free society, U.S. democracy allows the internal enclave to function beyond the established boundaries of our constitutional framework.”

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Sometimes we even get good news. Britain has been the epicenter for ‘libel tourism’ in recent years, which has had a chilling effect primarily on books and other publications exposing the dirty little secrets of Islam and those who enable terrorism.

Read it.

Wally Olson was two years ahead of me at Yale and his decades-long struggle to point out how lawyers are bringing our civilization down is good and useful work.

And, as in this case, sometimes pretty amusing.

Read it.

Hey, don’t ever say we never have useful stuff here.

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When they can’t find Christians or Jews to kill, they kill each other.

That’s some Religion o’ Peace you got there, fellah.

Read it.

At least under this system, when government wanted your land, you knew.

Not so under many of today’s taking methods, the most insidious of which occur by tame-sounding names and friendly partnerships among government, special interest, and landowner. Take National Heritage Areas (NHAs), a voluntary program of the National Park Service that confers honorary titles on properties deemed historically significant and crucial to telling stories of America’s past. Forty-nine such areas currently exist, and more are in the works.

The enabling legislation also requires the NHA to have a management entity oversee creating and implementing a management plan for the site that the Secretary of the Interior must approve. And examples abound of these management boards—comprised of volunteer members of local government, conservation and preservation groups, U.S. Parks Department personnel, and other interested individuals—acting as a quasi-government body that pressures local land-use changes.

In not one of these instances were landowners deprived of their lands. That’s why supporters can claim NHAs do not take property rights. But only the most dishonest would insist that NHA designations do not lead to land-use changes from local governments. While one might opt out of inclusion in the NHA, how does one opt out of local zoning?

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

That’s a big transaction cost. It’s much more efficient to be able to trust somebody you are doing business with when he tells you orally that the diamond is flawless. But how do you trust him? Because if he gets a reputation for cheating his relatives, his children will never find spouses.

In addition to being a fascinating story, it also serves to limn Sailer’s oft-propounded thesis that a ‘race’ is merely a large extended family that practices endogamy. This is an idea worth exploring, but which doesn’t get a lot of attention from the Crust. And there are implications:

But, I was struck while reading Michael Chabon’s 2007 alternative history bestseller, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, that the book is pretty dull until the villains in black hats are finally introduced. And the villains are literally in black hats: they’re ultra-Orthodox men who wear black hats. The book takes wing when Chabon — who is quite representative of mainstream modern American Jewish ethnocentric sentiments (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) — gets to indulge his fine, fierce hatred of ultra-Orthodox Jews. Sure, there are a few pages about how much his Yiddish policemen heroes despise American Republican goyim, but Chabon’s heroes really, really hate the black hats.

Chabon is a 21st Century Jew — all that 20th Century Jewish teamplay might be falling apart.

Read it.

She looks like a model and he looks like a dork. What’s up with that?

I see a romantic spy/chick flick starring Justin Timberlake and Megan Fox.

Read it.

The Russian government has realized that Obama can be rolled, so they are busy rolling him.

The Kremlin is upset—but not exceedingly so—at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for pointing out the obvious: Russian troops are occupying Abkhazia and South Ossetia in violation of the ceasefire agreement that ended its brief war with Georgia. The deal, brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, required the Soviet military to withdraw to prewar boundaries. Instead, it is has built permanent bases in the breakaway republics.

Vladamir Putin’s response was noticeably restrained: “While some think South Ossetia is occupied, others think it is liberated.” The message from Moscow is, more of less, this: The Obama administration’s “reset” is paying dividends for us—NATO membership for Georgia is unlikely in the near future, missile defense is a dead issue, the START treaty was but a minor concession—so why respond to Clinton’s empty assurances to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili?

When Kruschev met with JFK in Vienna and realized he could be rolled, the result was the Cuban Missile Crisis. What will Obama, that gift that keeps on giving, get us?

Read it.

Sell a guinea pig, go to jail.

That’s the law under consideration by San Francisco’s Commission of Animal Control and Welfare. If the commission approves the ordinance at its meeting tonight, San Francisco could soon have what is believed to be the country’s first ban on the sale of all pets except fish.

San Francisco seems determined to be on the cutting edge of idiocy in North America.

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Prevailing wisdom holds that elected officials work for the public good, while private individuals are motivated by their own personal goals—including selfish things like profits. But does this notion hold true in practice? Definitely not in Detroit. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that with the Motor City no longer financially capable of providing many basic services, private volunteers are filling in the gaps.

Read it.

The unstated goal of any piece of advertising is to rip the reader’s attention away from what they were really interested in, and focus it for a moment on something they likely don’t give a damn about. It belies a complete lack of respect for the reader or viewer, and suggests that their sole reason for producing content is to ambush the consumer with unrelated garbage: it’s nothing but Mahalo or a typo-squatter, a tawdry bait-and-switch that leaves the user feeling, well, used.

My List:

1. Ads that make noise, whether you want them to or not. (Example: Background talking that starts up automatically when you land on the page.)
2. Ads that move. Period. (Example: Self-starting flash videos.)
3. Pop-ups that totally block the site and require playing ‘hunt for the close control’.

Read it.

More junk science from ‘nospank.net’. Correlation does not imply causation. More likely hypothesis: Children with low IQs are more likely to be spanked.

Read it.

Read it.

Hint: It was tending down until 2008, then went through the roof. Wonder why?

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The ThunderCats cartoon writer Stephen Perry was murdered by his roommate, according to police in central Florida.

Everyone’s a critic….

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A metal detector enthusiast has unearthed the second largest haul of Roman coins ever found in Britain, little over a year after the discovery of the ‘Staffordshire Hoard’.

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A former detainee held at Guantanamo Bay for nearly three years has been arrested in Pakistan on terrorism charges. Pakistani officials told Agence France Presse that Issa Khan, who had been detained in Afghanistan in late 2001, held at Gitmo, and then repatriated to Pakistan in September 2004, was arrested today in the Bannu district of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa).

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

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With a recent publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the NAS seems to have comprehensively studied history and decided the proper role model for their institution is…Joseph McCarthy. The NAS has published a new “study” in the PNAS attempting to boost public trust in catastrophic climate predictions, which have been undermined recently by reports of scientific corruption, partisanship, skullduggery, and worse. Specifically, the “study” seeks to marginalize scientists who have dared to dissent from the “consensus” the United Nations (UN) asserts on climate science.

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Of course, persuading many Americans that Progressivism initiated a struggle over the soul of America is a hard sell. For decades, liberal scholars and politicians have attributed the 20th-century growth of government to changes in the mere material circumstances of American life. The Progressive era’s progressive reforms, we have been told, were the necessary and inevitable response to problems created by the closing of the frontier, the rise of huge corporations and a transition to large-scale factory production, population shifts out of the countryside and into the city, large waves of immigration, etc. The New Deal, in turn, was simply a response to the economic hardships caused by the Great Depression. By attributing these periods’ reforms to America’s changing material circumstances, the orthodox view implies that there was no change of philosophical or moral import likewise under way. More to the point, it implies that the Progressives’ reforms were guided by the principles of the American Founding.

And yet this is demonstrably false.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

But, men play the Great Game not because it makes sense but because they like to win. So, it’s unlikely that China and India will sit out the Great Game for the rest of the century. Let’s assume that China and India eventually decide to play for dominance of the world.

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There are small sidewalk-affixed plaques in many locations in Berlin, including on my street.  Here are some visual examples and here are many more.  They sit by the victim’s former home and list the victim’s name, the date he or she was taken away, and date and place he or she was murdered.  The word given is the more brutal “murdered” (ermordet), not “killed.”

A great idea. We could do the same in Washington, putting little plaques to memorialize where individual rights were murdered by the government.

Read it.

Peter Bethune, an environmental campaigner who boarded a Japanese whaling vessel in the Antarctic Ocean in February, has been sentenced to a suspended two-year prison term in Tokyo.

Not a positive development. All you have to do these days is label yourself (or be labelled by the lamestream media) an ‘activist’ and you can get away with behavior that would land any ordinary person in prison. This merely encourages such ‘activism’. That’s not what the law is there to do; it’s supposed to discourage that sort of thing.

Read it.

A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has rejected an Oregon man’s petition for habeas corpus relief (PDF). This despite acknowledging that the man has established actual innocence for the crimes for which he’s being imprisoned (sexual abuse and sodomy of a four-year-old). The reason: He was late filing his petition. By the panel’s reckoning, adherence to an arbitrary deadline created by legislators is a higher value than not continuing to imprison people we know to be innocent.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (the most reversed Federal Appellate Circuit in the country) is a constant disgrace.

Holly Lisle, famous (well, to me, anyway) SFF author, is embarking on a new venture that deserves the support of all right-thinking people. Hit the link and do your bit.

Here’s the battlefield.

Read it.

Business executives who whine about government intrusion into commerce really ought not to accept positions on government ‘advisory’ bodies designed to promote government intrusion into commerce. That seems rather straightforward.

Why does the President even have an ‘Export Council’, anyway? And how much is it costing the taxpayers during this Era of Constantly Expanding Red Ink?

Eric Raymond has some useful stuff to say.

No matter what you think you are and no matter what “reality” may be, the experience that you have to deal with (like every other human being) is of being thrown into a surrounding that does things independently of your thoughts. Shit happens, and you have to deal with it. The first step to dealing with it is to be able to predict it.

All truth claims can be unpacked as predictions. Sometimes they’re predictions about obvious, directly observable events in our immediate environment (”Rain will make your head wet.”). Sometimes they’re predictions about events we can’t observe directly but which have consequences we can observe (”Electricity is a flow of electrons,” or “Genetic information is carried by DNA.”) Sometimes they’re predictions about the distribution of outcomes in repeated tests (”A flipped coin will fall heads-up half the time and tails-up half the time.)

We can also say what “theory” is. A theory is just a machine for generating predictions. We judge the theory’s “truth” by whether those predictions are correct. And, remember, we make predictions because we need to cope with the shit that happens. A theory is a survival adaptation: we are theory-builders because we are prediction-needers because we are goal-seekers because we are survival machines.

Read it.

Everything bad is good for you.

No wonder Microsoft gives everybody free soda. Can you imagine Steve Ballmer without it? The mind reels.

Watch it.

Be the first on your block to have the Führer’s face on your jammies.