Read it.

As so often happens, what the Crust views as a moral crusade is in actuality merely a fashion statement.

A single 10-mile round trip by car to the grocery store or the farmers’ market will easily eat up about 14,000 calories of fossil fuel energy. Just running your refrigerator for a week consumes 9,000 calories of energy. That assumes it’s one of the latest high-efficiency models; otherwise, you can double that figure. Cooking and running dishwashers, freezers and second or third refrigerators (more than 25 percent of American households have more than one) all add major hits. Indeed, households make up for 22 percent of all the energy expenditures in the United States.

Agriculture, on the other hand, accounts for just 2 percent of our nation’s energy usage; that energy is mainly devoted to running farm machinery and manufacturing fertilizer. In return for that quite modest energy investment, we have fed hundreds of millions of people, liberated tens of millions from backbreaking manual labor and spared hundreds of millions of acres for nature preserves, forests and parks that otherwise would have come under the plow.

Don’t forget the astonishing fact that the total land area of American farms remains almost unchanged from a century ago, at a little under a billion acres, even though those farms now feed three times as many Americans and export more than 10 times as much as they did in 1910.

Read it.

Another excellent reason to stay away from Facebook.

Darwin Award.

Read it.

I don’t know what the Russian word for hubris is, but these folks have got it.

Presumably we can expect the heirs of the Romanovs to weigh in at some point.

Read it.

A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country’s industrial might.

Höffner has researched that early heyday of printed material in Germany and reached a surprising conclusion — unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century.

Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900.

Even more startling is the factor Höffner believes caused this development — in his view, it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom.

Read it.

Well, yeah.

In Islam, however, there is no such thing as a half-Muslim. Like all monotheistic religions, Islam is an exclusive faith.

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.

Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.

His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).

With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings. (Some may point to cases in which lesser punishments were ordered — as with some Egyptian intellectuals who have been punished for writings that were construed as apostasy — but those were really instances of supposed heresy, not explicitly declared apostasy as in Senator Obama’s case.)

Because no government is likely to allow the prosecution of a President Obama — not even those of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the only two countries where Islamic religious courts dominate over secular law — another provision of Muslim law is perhaps more relevant: it prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.

At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House. This would compromise the ability of governments in Muslim nations to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism, as well as American efforts to export democracy and human rights abroad.

Why this ‘religion’ is different from every other religion is left as an exercise for the reader, as is the fate of non-Muslims in a Muslim world.

Read it.

Bloomberg News keeps up its track record of biased coverage of the effort to extend the Bush tax cuts with an article about an effort by business groups who back the tax cuts. The article quotes not a single business owner or executive, but it does quote three professors. If it were an article headlined “liberal professors favor tax increases,” that’d be one thing, but it’s supposed to be an article about a coalition of business groups that favor extending the tax cuts.

Well, professors just know these things, right?

Read it.

There’s a lot of stuff out there that can only be described as “burger junk.” You know, the things sold on late night informercials that try to convince you that your burgers are not good enough, fast enough, or novel enough for discerning modern palates. In the interest of being utterly thorough, this week I’ve decided to round up five of the most popular burger gadgets and put them through their paces.

Read it.

Here’s the deal: Remember how Snooki, drunk or sober, was never seen without that Coach bag dangling from the crook of her arm? Snooki and her Coach were as synonymous as The Situation and his six-pack. But then the winds of change started blowing on Jersey Shore. Every photograph of Guido-huntin’ Snooki showed her toting a new designer purse. Why the sudden disloyalty? Was she trading up? Was she vomiting into her purses and then randomly replacing them? The answer is much more intriguing.

Allegedly, the anxious folks at these various luxury houses are all aggressively gifting our gal Snookums with free bags. No surprise, right? But here’s the shocker: They are not sending her their own bags. They are sending her each other’s bags! Competitors‘ bags!

The bottom line? Nobody in fashion wants to co-brand with Snooki.

Read it.

Actually, that could be a lot of fun. Unfortunately, it’s just another example of government bureaucrats being incompetent.

Read it.

The mechanism on the Clock, at Wells Cathedral in Somerset, will be set manually for the last time next week, following the retirement of the last member of a family who has maintained it for almost a century.

Wells Cathedral officials said the mechanical clock was being replaced because they were unable to find a suitable replacement for Mr Fisher.

Read it.

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

Read it.

And, as we all know, U.S. intelligence sources are absolutely reliable.

Absolutely.

Sure, I believe that.

Don’t think the Israelis will buy it, though.

Read it.

Rich people typically become rich because they don’t accept the conventional wisdom in their chosen fields, being more ready to ‘think outside the box’ and achieve success thereby. But intellectually they’re as stuck in the box as everybody else. And it’s a pretty silly box.

Successful entrepreneurs-turned-philanthropists typically say they feel a responsibility to “give back” to society. But “giving back” implies they have taken something. What, exactly, have they taken? Yes, they have amassed great sums of wealth. But that wealth is the reward they have earned for investing their time and talent in creating products and services that others value. They haven’t taken from society, but rather enriched us in ways that were previously unimaginable.

Read it.

Ask yourself whether the Washington Post would be urging no retrial were the defendant a former Republican Governor. The question almost answers itself.

I guess some animals are more equal than others.

Read it.

Ponder why an Asian country of 230 million people needs handouts from a European country of 17 million people. Might the fact that 90% of the population is Muslim have something to do with it?

Watch it.

Apparently there are a whole collection of these ‘Literal Video Versions’ of famous music videos. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard in my life.

Read it.

Certainly a more productive use of one’s time.

Read it.

A court in Saudi Arabia is seeking medical advice on whether it is possible to cut the spinal cord of a man as a punishment after he was indicted of causing paralysis to another man during a fight, a local daily reported on Thursday.

The unidentified defendant hit Abdul Aziz Al Mutairi, another Saudi, with a cleaver during a fight more than two years ago and the trial has been delayed because Mutairi is insisting that his attacker suffer the same injury.

Read it.

In the frenzy to get kindergartners into the top private schools, parents are now hiring consultants to coach their children on the art of the interview, which these exclusive schools term “playdates.”

It’s hard out there for the Crust.

Check it out.

Around 500 actors for The National Youth Theatre of Great Britain perform S’Warm at Battersea Power Station in London to raise awareness of the alleged global environmental crisis caused by dwindling bee populations

Mostly, silly stunts like this raise awareness that a lot of people in the world (actors, especially) have too much time on their hands.

Read it.

Hand him 50 feet of hemp and let him chew on that for a while.

Read it.

They don’t make Naval officers like they used to, apparently.

Ensign Steve Crowston claimed that when he was called into a room with fellow officers to be given their call signs, his name had been written on a white board with a list of suggestions that included “Gay Boy” and “Cowgirl”.

He said the group eventually voted for him to be known as “Romo’s Bitch” because he was a fan of Tony Romo, the Dallas Cowboys quarterback.

Mr Crowston, an administrative officer with Strike Fighter Squadron 136 at Naval Air Station, Oceana, Virginia, has not disclosed his sexual orientation but complained to senior officers.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell apparently doesn’t include Don’t Whine.

Read it.

I suspect that C. Van Carter and I were brothers in an earlier life.

Kathleen Parker used to be a conservative. She then sold out and is now comfortable as a Voice of the Crust.

Reason tells us something else: The Muslims who want to build this mosque didn’t fly airplanes into skyscrapers. They don’t support terrorism. By what understanding do we assign guilt to all for the actions of a relative few?

That’s not reason, that’s invincible stupidity.

When members of a group commit atrocities in the name of the group, and the fundamental principles of said group do not rule out the commission of atrocities in service to the advancement of the power of the group, AND THE FOUNDER AND ROLE MODEL OF SAID GROUP COMMITTED ATROCITIES IN THE PAST, and other members of that same group neither denounce those atrocities nor renounce the commission of atrocities in service to the advancement of the group, said Other Members, WHETHER OR NOT THEY HAVE COMMITTED ATROCITIES, are reasonably suspect of being open to the commission of atrocities, and may reasonably be treated as enemies by people not in the group, who would be natural targets for further atrocities.

This is why Communists are our enemies, and always will be.

This is why Nazis are our enemies, and always will be.

This is why Fascists are our enemies, and always will be

And this is why Muslims are our enemies, and always will be.

THAT is reason. And Kathleen Parker is an idiot.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Perhaps because Voices of the Crust like the New York Times encourage them to feel as if they world owes them a living.

Read it.

And, most important, how Blago’s people got to her.

Fellow jurors say one person refused to budge on multiple counts in a trial covering racketeering, conspiracy, wire fraud, bribery and extortion charges.

Steve Sailer pierces the veil.

One other reason is to discriminate against African-Americans when advertising for a nanny. Putting in a foreign language requirement is a legal way to state No African-Americans Need Apply.

Interestingly enough, I read an article many years ago that postulated that the classic Southern accent came about because so many Southern white kids were effectively raised by black nannies, and the African-influenced version of English that they imparted gradually mutated into what we know today. This, of course, may account for why Negro dialect sounds ‘southern’ to most non-Southerners.

Read it.

The New York Pizza Burger ($12.99), a 9-and-a-half-inch wide burger made with four Whopper patties topped with pepperoni, mozzarella cheese, marinara sauce, and Tuscan pesto sauce. It’ll be available exclusively at the New York City Whopper Bar starting in September to fulfill that longtime desire for a giant burger that sort of tastes like a pizza.

Is. This. A. Great. Country. Or. What?

Read it.

The private lives of young people are now so well documented on the internet that many will have to change their names on reaching adulthood, Google’s CEO has claimed.

Perhaps after a Spirit Quest. Burning Man would probably do.

Thomas Sowell doesn’t like what he’s seeing.

While various political leaders have, over the centuries, done things that violated either the spirit or the letter of the Constitution, few dared to openly say that the Constitution was wrong and that what they wanted was right.

It was the Progressives of a hundred years ago who began saying that the Constitution needed to be subordinated to whatever they chose to call “the needs of the times.” Nor were they content to say that the Constitution needed more Amendments, for that would have meant that the much disdained masses would have something to say about whether, or what kind, of Amendments were needed.

Steve Sailer pulls no punches.

Four decades into the feminist era, the number one movie at the box office is Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables, in which Eighties action heroes blow stuff up. Right behind is Julia Roberts’ Eat, Pray, Love, in which a divorcée expensively feels sorry for herself in Italy, India, and Indonesia. (Iowa, Indiana, and Idaho presumably being all booked up.)

When depressed about the intellectual flaccidity of the 21st Century, I cheer myself up by noting that nobody wholly subscribes to feminist orthodoxy anymore. Most people can now admit that social conditioning isn’t what differentiates the sexes; instead, it’s the only hope of their ever getting along civilly. When allowed to indulge their inner fantasies, however, as incarnated in movies such as The Expendables and Eat, Pray, Love, the sexes barely seem to inhabit the same planet.

The glossy lifestyles portrayed in chick flicks always raise the question, “How can she afford that?” Yet, money goes unmentioned as unromantic. That reminds me of the 1970s when I was repeatedly told that free agency would make pro sports unpopular by exposing tawdry fiscal matters. Money talk, though, just made pro sports even more popular.

In my experience, women are extremely interested in how much things cost. I suspect that, just as men like talking about LeBron James’ contract, women would enjoy a romance movie that dishes on how much the heroine is shelling out.

Read it.

Soon to be a major motion picture, starring Angelina Jolie.

Read it.

So how are biotech sugar beets (already approved by the USDA, mind you) significantly affecting the human environment? Activists at the Center for Food Safety and the Sierra Club argued in federal court that sugar beets improved to resist the herbicide glyphosate might result in the development of superweeds or might interbreed with organic chard and regular beets.

When did ‘activist’ become a career field?

Unlike drugs which can sell for beaucoup bucks, crops are commodities that sell for dollars per bushel. So only big companies can marshal the financial and legal resources required to get approval for crops that sell by millions of bushels and bales, corn, soybean, canola, and cotton. Meanwhile the biotech improvement of smaller niche crops, say tomatoes and green beans, that might benefit even backyard gardeners remains stymied.

Read it.

The Dutch Royal Library is currently making available online all newspapers from the Second World War, which includes Nazi propaganda. Now the Dutch department of Justice has advised the library not to make digital versions of these publications, because it is possible that the Public Prosecutor might accuse the Royal Library of distributing publications that incite hatred.

This is too absurd for words. Government bureaucrats are like dim-witted robots. Anything that fits their target parameters is attacked, whether it makes sense or not. Eventually we’ll wind up like the Nazis, with Goverment Agency A at war with Government Agency B, and the ordinary citizen trampled in the ensuing riot.

Steve Sailer reminds us that large differences in phenotype come in small genotype packages.

So, in the big picture, Labrador retrievers and pit bulls don’t actually differ very much genetically. They do differ genetically on a very small number of genes. But some of those few genes that differ are related to biting. Labs tend to retract their teeth and gum whatever they’re handling with their mouths, while pit bulls tend to bite down and, more unusually, not let go while they whip their heads back and forth. So, that tiny, tiny fraction of the dog genome is important when deciding which breed of dog to buy depending on your needs — e.g., pet for your toddlers or guard dog for your crack stash.

Read it.

I can think of one: ‘What does the inside of that tank look like?’

Read it.

Hundreds of hobbits at risk from hypertension.

Eleanor Clift has been a Voice of the Crust so long that it has made her tone-deaf.

The Justice Department’s decision to let former House majority leader Tom DeLay off the hook and end the six-year-long investigation that drove him out of Washington at the peak of his power should win the Obama administration some points with Republicans, if not Democrats. This is the second high-profile Republican that Attorney General Eric Holder has vindicated, the other being the late senator Ted Stevens, whose corruption case Holder declined last year to prosecute.

Let’s see if I understand this: Because Holder has decided to say “Never mind!” to a politically-motivated legal proceeding once its objective (to destroy the effectiveness of a powerful opponent) is accomplished, He’s The Nice One? That’s like having a wrestler throw sand in the other guy’s eyes and having a commentator say, “Hey, he didn’t kick him in the groin while he was distracted! What a great guy!”

In Washington, these big scandals almost always end anti-climactically.

That’s because the objective wasn’t to actually follow through, but to put the other side off balance. C’mon, Eleanor, how long have you been in Washington that you don’t know this?

Power Line sums it up:

Tom DeLay exemplifies a thoroughly modern phenomenon: a public figure whose career–and, one suspects, whose life–has been ruined by the prosecutorial/media/political complex. After six years of headlines, DeLay’s persecutors have nothing to show for their efforts. Except, of course, that they ruined the former Majority Leader of the House of Representatives.

Read it.

Subhead: Canceling the Democrat Class Warfare Talking Points.

Joel Spolsky turns into a Grumpy Old Man.

When I was a kid, I learned to program on punched cards. If you made a mistake, you didn’t have any of these modern features like a backspace key to correct it. You threw away the card and started over.

Heck, in 1900, Latin and Greek were required subjects in college, not because they served any purpose, but because they were sort of considered an obvious requirement for educated people. In some sense my argument is no different that the argument made by the pro-Latin people (all four of them). “[Latin] trains your mind. Trains your memory. Unraveling a Latin sentence is an excellent exercise in thought, a real intellectual puzzle, and a good introduction to logical thinking,” writes Scott Barker. But I can’t find a single university that requires Latin any more. Are pointers and recursion the Latin and Greek of Computer Science?

Read it.

Well, they’re just Christians, we can forget about them.

The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America accused New York officials on Tuesday of turning their backs on the reconstruction of the only church destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks, while the controversial mosque near Ground Zero moves forward.

“We have people that are saying, why isn’t our church being rebuilt and why is there … such concern for people of the mosque?” Father Alex Karloutsos, assistant to the archbishop, told FoxNews.com. He said “religious freedom” would allow a place of worship for any denomination to be built, but accused officials with the Port Authority of making no effort to help move the congregation’s project along.

Read it.

In the greatest movement of people the world has ever seen, China is secretly working to turn the entire continent into a new colony.

Reminiscent of the West’s imperial push in the 18th and 19th centuries – but on a much more dramatic, determined scale – China’s rulers believe Africa can become a ‘satellite’ state, solving its own problems of over-population and shortage of natural resources at a stroke.

With little fanfare, a staggering 750,000 Chinese have settled in Africa over the past decade. More are on the way.

Read it.

On the one hand, we demand that older people work longer. On the other hand, we want them out of the way so that new and younger people will new ideas and energy and innovations will carry productivity forward.

Read it.

The wartime slaughters of the twentieth century eclipsed anything previously seen in history and exposed to humanity the depths of its own brokenness as never before; humanity appears to have looked into its abyss and seen nothing redeemable.

Europe’s self-loathing is reflected in the uniformly low birthrates which–among non-immigrants–average less than 1.5 children per female. Cultures and peoples unable or unwilling to sustain a replacement rate of 2.1 per female are cultures and peoples that will die out.

Michael Rubin lays it out.

When Iran develops nuclear weapons, determining their command-and-control will become America’s overriding intelligence objective. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s genocidal rhetoric shocks the West. Would he control the bomb? Not likely. In the Islamic Republic, the president is subordinate to the supreme leader. Khamenei may be the ultimate political authority in Iran, but will an aide carrying launch codes generated daily shadow him day and night? Equally unlikely; the ayatollah allows no aide so close.

Possession is 90% of the law. And in that sense, on a day-to-day basis, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – which will “own” the arsenal – will control it. This is no comfort: Not only do the Revolutionary Guards contain Iran’s most radical ideologues, but they also remain effectively a big, black box to Western analysts.

Read it.

The biofuel uses the two main by-products from the whisky production process – ”pot ale”, the liquid from the copper stills, and ”draff”, the spent grains, as the basis to produce the butanol that can then be used as fuel.

The Other McCain marvels at American culture.

Allow me to suggest that let’s not scream “raaaaacism” at these idiots. Rather, let’s point out the ironic absurdity of someone whose native language is Spanish telling other people to “go back to Europe.”