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The number of injunctions, in which a court orders a newspaper not to publish a story, has risen since the introduction of the Human Rights Act in 1998.

In addition to a straightforward injunction, there is the so-called “super injunction” which means a newspaper may not even say that an injunction was sought.

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Check it out.

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The body of one of France’s best-known chefs was discovered hidden in a freezer after his girlfriend revealed to her daughter that “something unfortunate” had happened to him, police said.

That’s pretty cold.

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In July Mayor Michael Bloomberg  announced the shut down of 32 bus routes around the city, to the inconvenience of thousands of New Yorkers. Those same cuts eliminated the jobs of about 500 drivers and mechanics who are members of the Transport Workers Union  (TWU). Its distress was compounded, because simultaneously with the cuts, the mayor announced that as of Aug. 15, 2010, the City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC), headed by David Yassky, would allow private van services to pick up passengers along the routes on which public bus service has been eliminated.

On July 28, 2010, TWU’s President John Samuelsen sued in Manhattan state court to force Yassky and the TLC to block these private carriers from entering into service, in order to pressure the City to restore the cuts. His motives are clear: “This is an effort to replace solid jobs that come with medical and pension benefits … with low-paid, non-unionized workforce without medical or pension benefits. Any politician that supports this is basically supporting an unprovoked attack against the TWU.”

Well, yeah. The problem is that the Union is too expensive but has a lot of political power (‘He who robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.’) and so this is the only politically feasible way to cut costs. The basic Union position is that, either you use overpriced Union labor for this service, or the public can walk for all they care. And that tells you pretty much all you need to know about public-sector unions.

Steve Sailer will discuss anything, anything at all.

For one thing, how much do blacks want to act white?

As far as I can tell, blacks, on the whole, have a blast being black.

They not only like being black, they like to talk about being black with other blacks. They have one of the more homogeneous cultures in the world, in part because they are constantly discussing being black with each other.

Sounds like being black is like belonging to the world’s largest Frat. Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

The reigning theory is that white culture will rub off on blacks by osmosis, but there is precious little evidence to back it up. Indeed, exposure to white people just makes blacks focus more on their blackness.

So much for modern theories of ‘assimilation’. Black people have been in America for four hundred years; if they aren’t assimilating, what are the chances of Latinos doing so? (Of course, Latinos are fond of pointing out that they were here first; which claim I’d take more seriously if more of them spoke Nahuatl or Athapascan rather than, oh, say, that native American language Spanish.)

Instead of blacks competing for white approval, whites today compete with each other over how much they approve of blacks.

Not surprisingly, that doesn’t do much to improve black behavior.

Hey, life is full of hardship.

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At a fundraiser here, he trotted out his latest joke, chuckling as he told it. The punch line came after his usual story about refusing to give Republicans back the keys to the economy because they drove it into a ditch.

Speaking of cars, he said: “You want to go forward, what do you do? You put it in ‘D.’ When you go backward, what do you do? You put it in ‘R.'”

Then, with another chuckle, he added: “I’m just sayin’ that’s not a coincidence.”

And when you want it in a condition where it doesn’t do anything by itself but can be easily pushed around, you put it in ‘N’. Welcome to the post-racial society.

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A survey of North Dakota has turned up hundreds of genetically modified canola plants growing along roads across the state.

There is, of course, no such thing as a ‘canola plant’. ‘Canola’ is a trademarked term that stands for ‘Canadian oil of low acidity’ and refers to a highly-processed form of the oil from the RAPESEED PLANT. This is as brainless as referring to a cow as a ‘cream animal’.

Darwin Award Nominee.

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But Islamic scholars hope the clock’s influence will stretch far further than the sands of Saudi Arabia, as part of a plan for Mecca to eclipse the Greenwich Observatory as the “true centre of the earth”.

As Mohammed al-Arkubi, manager of one of the hotels in the complex, put it: “Putting Mecca time in the face of Greenwich Mean Time. This is the goal.”

This claim that the holy city is a “zero magnetism zone” has won support from some Arab scientists like Abdel-Baset al-Sayyed of the Egyptian National Research Centre who says that there is no magnetic force in Mecca.

“That’s why if someone travels to Mecca or lives there, he lives longer, is healthier and is less affected by the earth’s gravity,” he said. “You get charged with energy.”

Western scientists have challenged such assertions, noting that the Magnetic North Pole is in actual fact on a line of longitude that passes through Canada, the United States, Mexico and Antarctica.

But what is mere science if Muslim supremacy is at stake?

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Good luck getting another job, sweetheart.

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Perhaps because the government is run by stupid people who think they’re smarter than the people who pay their salaries? That’s just a guess, of course.

In hidden vaults across the country, the US government is building a stockpile of $1 coins. The hoard has topped $1.1bn – imagine a stack of coins reaching almost seven times higher than the International Space Station – and the piles have grown so large the US Federal Reserve is running out of storage space.

Americans won’t use the coins, preferring $1 notes. But the US keeps minting them anyway, and the Fed estimates it already has enough $1 coins to last the next 10 years.

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An overweight man, Brian Machin, was arrested for unlawful killing after sitting on and suffocating a carjacker trying to steal his vehicle, an inquest heard.

The case was eventually dropped because prosecutors could not “establish that the force used was excessive”.

On Tuesday Ian Smith, the North Staffordshire Coroner, recorded a verdict of accidental death.

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They’ll come in handy when we destroy their army as we destroyed Saddam’s.

Just sayin’.

Joel Kotkin is always worth reading.

Despite promises that the $8 billion invested in rail lines over the past two decades would lessen L.A.’s traffic congestion and reshape how Angelenos get to work, the sad reality is that there has been no increase in MTA transit ridership since before the rail expansion began in 1985.

Much of the problem, notes Tom Rubin, a former chief financial officers for the MTA’s predecessor agency, stems from the shift of funding priorities to trains from the city’s more affordable and flexible bus network. Meanwhile, traffic has gotten worse, with delay hours growing from 44 hours a year in 1982 to 70 hours in 2007.

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Citing text messages she sent her boyfriend shortly before the incident, Montana prosecutors contend that Justine Winter’s crash at 85 mph into an oncoming vehicle was a deliberate suicide attempt. Winter, who faces trial on homicide charges in the deaths of Erin Thompson, the woman she ran into, and Thompson’s 13-year-old son, has now sued Thompson’s estate as well as the construction company that built the interstate overpass where the accident occurred.

Well, what has she got to lose? And, considering some of the way such suits have gone these days, is it so far-fetched?

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A lot of truth here.

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Tim Cavanaugh points out some Inconvenient Truth.

A tax system that’s both fairer and better? What’s not to like? Well, here’s one thing: The proper role of taxation is not to promote fairness or equality or social engineering. It is to raise revenue to fund the appropriate functions of government. Nowhere in his argument does Surowiecki ask whether tax hikes on the idle rich actually raise more revenues. It’s a good question to avoid, because they don’t.

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Alibekov has had just about enough. This 30-year-old conservative blogger, French-born, newlywed, with a good university education, has just decided to turn his back on his home country, where his grandparents hid Jews during the Second World War. He has almost completed his immigration papers for Canada. He is leaving soon. Next step, possibly: the United States.

After university, Alibekov lived and worked for six years in Africa. He returned home a short while ago to the Paris region. What he saw horrified him.

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The notion that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution bars the government from adhering to the traditional understanding of what is and is not marriage strikes me as ludicrous. That understanding was nearly universal in this country when the Amendment was enacted and remained so for at least one hundred years. It still prevails today. Should the time come when it no longer prevails, it can and will be overturned democratically.

If an argument that adherence to the traditional understanding of marriage is unconstitutional can be cobbled together from existing Supreme Court jurisprudence, that tells me this jurisprudence is hopelessly misguided, not that there is a constitutional right to gay marriage. In other words, Judge Walker’s decision represents the reductio ad absurdum of left-wing “living Constitution” jurisprudence. If the Supreme Court reaches the same result, its opinion will probably replace Roe v. Wade as the symbol of judicial activism intolerably run amok.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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Unfortunately, I don’t have a ‘coals to Newcastle’ category.

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Dallas and Los Angeles represent two distinct models for successful American cities, which both reflect and reinforce different cultural and political attitudes. One model fosters a family-oriented, middle-class lifestyle—the proverbial home-centered “balanced life.” The other rewards highly productive, work-driven people with a yen for stimulating public activities, for arts venues, world-class universities, luxury shopping, restaurants that aren’t kid-friendly. One makes room for a wide range of incomes, offering most working people a comfortable life. The other, over time, becomes an enclave for the rich. Since day-to-day experience shapes people’s sense of what is typical and normal, these differences in turn lead to contrasting perceptions of economic and social reality. It’s easy to believe the middle class is vanishing when you live in Los Angeles, much harder in Dallas. These differences also reinforce different norms and values—different ideas of what it means to live a good life. Real estate may be as important as religion in explaining the infamous gap between red and blue states.

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Class warfare is trickier than it looks.

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Perfect wedding ring for engineers.

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At last I understand why Brad dumped her.

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More than three-quarters of the states and a majority of the people in each of those states have prohibited gay marriage. But one judge in California has, through his own “fact finding” decided gender no longer, after 5000 years, plays any role in marriage.

There is a great and growing divide between those who govern and those who are governed. But those who govern are forgetting that they only govern by the consent of those who are governed. That consent is being revoked.

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That’s as may be, but job advertisements still read ‘four-year college degree’, not ‘four-year college education’. Don’t weep for Harvard quite yet.

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It isn’t?

When I was a kid, I heard the term ‘butterscotch’ and thought that it would probably taste like butter. Then I tried some and found out that it tasted like crap. But I guess ‘crapscotch’ would be inappropriate.

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A former British army captain is about to finish the longest jungle trek in history after completing a 6,000 mile expedition along the Amazon River.

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A “Potemkin village” has come to mean “any deliberate construct which lacks actual substance, but is cynically designed to fool others into thinking it is real”. As the modern bureaucratic welfare state has metastasized into the gargantuan tumor that it is today, the incidence of Potemkin-like behaviors has increased exponentially. The more labyrinthine the bureaucracy, the more opportunities for its functionaries to set up false fronts to fool their superiors — or the public they ostensibly serve.

The Other McCain examines a cultural phenomenon.

Including $346,000 a year for Morris Dees. Can’t help noticing that even though Heidi Beirich has a Ph.D., she isn’t on the list.

“Heck, the SPLC is whiter than a bunch of MSNBC hosts at a Broadview Security commercial burglars’ convention.”

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Pundits, planners and urban visionaries—citing everything from changing demographics, soaring energy prices, the rise of the so-called “creative class,” and the need to battle global warming—have been predicting for years that America’s love affair with the suburbs will soon be over. Their voices have grown louder since the onset of the housing crisis. Suburban neighborhoods, as the Atlantic magazine put it in March 2008, would morph into “the new slums” as people trek back to dense urban spaces.

But the great migration back to the city hasn’t occurred. Over the past decade the percentage of Americans living in suburbs and single-family homes has increased. Meanwhile, demographer Wendell Cox’s analysis of census figures show that a much-celebrated rise in the percentage of multifamily housing peaked at 40% of all new housing permits in 2008, and it has since fallen to below 20% of the total, slightly lower than in 2000.

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California has long been a destination for those seeking a better place to live. For most of its history, the state enacted sensible policies that created one of the wealthiest and most innovative economies in human history. California realized the American dream but better, fostering a huge middle class that, for the most part, owned their homes, sent their kids to public schools, and found meaningful work connected to the state’s amazingly diverse, innovative economy.

What went so wrong? The answer lies in a change in the nature of progressive politics in California. During the second half of the twentieth century, the state shifted from an older progressivism, which emphasized infrastructure investment and business growth, to a newer version, which views the private sector much the way the Huns viewed a city—as something to be sacked and plundered. The result is two separate California realities: a lucrative one for the wealthy and for government workers, who are largely insulated from economic decline; and a grim one for the private-sector middle and working classes, who are fleeing the state.

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Whatever it is, they’re against it.

A child who was perfectly content with a video stream, an MP3, and a chat flowing past him is suddenly ordered to sit still, shut up, and listen while a grown-up scrawls on a blackboard and delivers a monologue. And school is even worse for the older girls down the hall. The center of their universe is on social networking and chat sites, so spending six hours a day marooned in a building with no WiFi is akin to water torture. The same pre-teen who will happily while away hours playing Scrabble with her friends on Facebook dreads each Thursday afternoon, when she will be forced to laboriously write out a list of spelling words in silence alongside two dozen peers.

Read it.

A groom accidentally killed three relatives at his wedding in Turkey when he fired into the air with an assault rifle in celebration, according to reports.

Well, you know, these things happen.

Per Freeberg.

Now that’s comedy.

Actually, this is a good test of how people react to unexpected changes in circumstances. All you have to do is look at the door you came out of and ask yourself how come a meeting room opens onto a port-a-pottie, and you have to realize that All Is Not As It Seems. But most people don’t think that quickly.

Arnold Kling is always worth reading.

When libertarians read Alan Brinkley’s The End of Reform, they will frequently nod with approval when Brinkley refers to some faction within the Roosevelt Administration as “statists.” Just bear in mind that for Brinkley, that term is not derogatory.

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Earlier tonight I noted with some derision the “two Americas” of John Edwards’ myth. However, as we have noted before, there are indeed two Americas: the fault line just doesn’t lie where Edwards and other liberals place it. Rather, the key dividing line in American politics is between a strapped private sector and a flush, overflowing-with-cash public sector. Intuitively, it is odd: one might have assumed that those who pay the bills would look out for their own needs over the interests of those whom they employ. But this hasn’t happened. A large majority of voters have been asleep at the switch, and public employees have been awarding themselves constantly-increasing salaries and pension benefits. Those benefits have now swelled to the point where there is no possibility that taxpayers can fund them.

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The Politico story  at issue is about how members of the Black Congressional Caucus are playing the race card against fellow Democrats over the ethics prosecutions of Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters (emphasis mine):

Democrats have been playing the race card for so long and so hard against Republicans and conservatives and Tea Party supporters that … well … go for it.

Steve Sailor discusses White Guilt.

Personally, I don’t think we need particularly sophisticated psychological theories about “white guilt.” I haven’t noticed many people particularly wracked by personal guilt over race. Instead, it’s more an effective tool for people to get what they want from other people, money, power, admiration, or to reassure themselves that they are better than other people. For lots of people, the mentality of white guilt is simply the substance in which they swim, and they are no more inclined to stop and think about it than a fish thinks about water.

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In the 1990s, Paul Romer revolutionized economics. In the aughts, he became rich as a software entrepreneur. Now he’s trying to help the poorest countries grow rich—by convincing them to establish foreign-run “charter cities” within their borders. Romer’s idea is unconventional, even neo-colonial—the best analogy is Britain’s historic lease of Hong Kong. And against all odds, he just might make it happen.

As Reagan so famously said, there are simple answers to these problems, just not easy ones. These simple answer typically boil down to: Keep government bureaucrats away from the economy (taxes and regulations), and people will amaze you with what they can do.

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Note that, except for India (which has a HUGE Muslim minority and worse exposure to Islamic terrorism than we do), they’re all Muslim countries.

Perhaps they know something that we don’t.

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“I first went to the health clinic, but it was closed. So I rang the medical help line and they told me that it shouldn’t be closed, so I went to emergency and sat there,” the man named only as Jonas told the newspaper.

After an hour-long wait in a treatment room, he lost patience and proceeded to sew up his own wound.

But hospital staff were not as impressed by his initiative and have reported the man on suspicion of criminal dispossession (egenmäktigt förfarande) for having used hospital equipment without authorization.

But hospital staff were not as impressed by his initiative and have reported the man on suspicion of criminal dispossession (egenmäktigt förfarande) for having used hospital equipment without authorization.

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Many apparently mainstream Muslim groups have the same ideology as violent Islamists, according to a secret report from the think tank Quilliam.

A conclusion inescapable to anybody with two brain cells to rub together. It’s secret, of course, because the government doesn’t contain anybody with that much intellect.

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The Montgomery Advertiser has a 60-photo lifestyle spread on “The home of Morris Dees and Susan Starr in Montgomery, Ala.” Mr. Dees is, of course, the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and poverty has been very, very good to him, judging by the staggering amount of expensive bric-a-brac he and Ms. Starr have accumulated.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, of course, specializes in finding things to scare White People into donating to … the Southern Poverty Law Center. It apparently pays really well.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

‘He who robs Peter to pay Paul can always be sure of the support of Paul.’

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The telephone, in other words, doesn’t provide any information about status, so we are constantly interrupting one another. The other tools at our disposal are more polite. Instant messaging lets us detect whether our friends are busy without our bugging them, and texting lets us ping one another asynchronously. (Plus, we can spend more time thinking about what we want to say.) For all the hue and cry about becoming an “always on” society, we’re actually moving away from the demand that everyone be available immediately.