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The sheeple are restless. Better stand baaaaaack.

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Notice the map. Notice the pink spots on the map. These are the areas that need to be a radioactive desert.

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Well it turns out I was living the livable life style when I was growing up in Queens, New York in the fifties and didn’t know it. Here all along I just thought we were poor.

In my town of College Point, Queens when the factory whistle blew a few thousand walked in the gate and out again when the whistle blew in the evening. People don’t live outside the factory gate anymore and haven’t for awhile. Again, specialization and division of labor are the main factor. Job groupings are far smaller today, and the rate of job turnover means more people won’t/can’t move every time they change jobs. Moreover, about 70% of workers live in a household with other workers – whose job will they live next to?

There remains, of course, lots of room now within the existing land use distribution to make it easier for those who wish to live closer to shops, jobs or entertainment. People also are free to go to the nearest store or nearest doctor. The fact that so few do so reflects the oft-forgotten fact that people have their own notions of what is most important. Trying to coerce them to live the way government – particularly the upper bureaucracy – thinks they should live holds many perils. The American people have no obligation to live in ways that make it convenient for government to serve them. Government isn’t smart enough to know how people should live or to order their lives in more “convenient” arrangements.

Turns out that government buzzwords are a substitute, not a tool, for thought.

It’s on the practical side that the concepts of livability really fail. The central failure inheres in what the Europeans call subsidiarity, proposes that any necessary activity of an authority should be conducted by that level of governance closest to the problem that can effectively address it. Having livability rise to become central principle of federal transportation investment planning is an egregious failure in our historical system of decentralized government. If sidewalks and bike paths are federal then everything is federal.

The problem here is a total disconnect between what people in a diverse democracy want, and what the central bureaucracy, and their academic allies, wish to impose. The livability agenda may be popular in the press and among pundits, but for most communities and people it’s neither popular nor remotely democratic.

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A member of the Lower Crust discovers that the Side Crust are not her friends.

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Britain is learning what America knows: Rail sucks, and people only take trains when (a) the alternative is a horse, or (b) the government forces them into it. The latter is accomplished by a combination of jawboning, explicit attempts to discourage using automobiles, and massive taxpayer-funded subsidies for rail travel. This house of cards easily comes down if any one of the legs of the tripod falter, and that’s what’s happening here.

If doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, then our governing classes have been insane for the last hundred years.

Lynn Viehl enjoyed this conversation entirely too much.

Now he stared at me. “You don’t have any apps on your phone?” In the same tone someone might ask, “You don’t have any panties on?”

To show him I wasn’t lying, I took out the disposable cell phone I’ve been lugging around for the last four years. It still has nearly all of the 1300 minutes I got for free when the disposable phone company forced me to give up the original phone I bought (seven years ago) because their equipment no longer supported the clunky old thing (they also gave me a newer, slimmer phone for free.) P.S., it also has another 1200 free minutes I’ve collected over the last four years when I renew my airtime.

The nice young man examined it with the awe of an Egyptologist discovering a lost king’s tomb. “What does it do?”

“It sends and receives phone calls.” I thought for a minute. “And it rings. That’s pretty much it.” Before he could launch into the “But don’t you want a phone that can take pictures, check the internet, play music, access Twitter and Facebook, realign the Hubble” speech I added, “That’s all I need it to do.”

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And about time, too.

Google, of course.

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Fully 52% of voters with incomes of $200,000 or more pulled the lever for then-Sen. Obama, compared with 46% for Sen. John McCain. Sen. Obama also did better than the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, who won only 37% of the vote from people with $200,000 or more in income. Mr. Obama raised more money than Sen. McCain in eight of the wealthiest 10 zip codes in the U.S.

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During the campaign it was noted that tens of thousands of dollars came in to the Obama campaign from a Hamas-controlled camp in Gaza. Pamela Geller observed that Al-Jazeera actually ran a story on Obama phone banks in Gaza (video below).

Geller discovered one large contributor to the Obama campaign (Monir Edwan) who was listed on FEC documents as contributing to Obama from the city of Rafah in the state GA. “If you were reading quickly,” Geller wrote, “you might have thought it was just a contribution from Georgia. But there is no city of Rafah in the Peach State. Monir Edwan sent money to Obama from Rafah, Gaza.”

Needless to say, all of this is incredibly illegal.

Hamas’s love of Obama endures. Now comes Amir Taheri to report on the latest installment of the story. Taheri reports that the slogan “Abu Hussain! Palestine loves you!!!” appears in English on a poster and other products produced by Hamas and put on sale in Gaza. Yeseterday it was depicted on the front pages of several leading Arab dailies.

But don’t say that he’s a secret Muslim. That would be raaaaaaaacist.

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I used to hope that in spending over a decade explaining how the music industry could have responded better to file sharing, that other industries wouldn’t go down the same path. Yet, what we’ve seen over and over and over again is that every new industry that faces disruptive innovation involving a previously scarce product suddenly becoming an infinite good — and that they pretty much all react the same. They try to prevent the inevitable. They try to fight the technology. They go against consumer wishes. They try to protect the old business models. They invent moral panics and bogus statistics. And, of course, they throw a ton of money at politicians to make laws that preserve their old business models. It’s happened plenty of times in the past, and it will definitely happen once 3D printing technology reaches that tipping point.

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ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger has been awarded a column in the New York Times, which explains that ProPublica “produces investigative journalism in the public interest.” The formulation makes one wonder in whose interest the rest of journalism is published in.

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The bien-pensants who run Belgium — which stands as the model for the European Union: a non-nation cobbled together for political reasons without the consent of its citizens — have devised an updated version of Multiculturalism. They hope to sneak it under the political radar by renaming it “Interculturalism”, but it’s the same old decaying rose, and by any other name smells just as fetid.

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The Department of Justice annually awards millions of dollars in grants to local governments to compensate for the cost of jailing illegal aliens, even when those governments have policies obstructing immigration law enforcement or encouraging illegal settlement. In 2010, the grant program, known as the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP), doled out a total of roughly $400 million to about 850 cities, counties, and states.¹ Among them were 27 jurisdictions widely considered to be sanctuary jurisdictions, which together received more than $62.6 million, or 15.6 percent of the total (see Table 1).

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If you’re looking to improve your child’s chanting skills or enhance their moon dancing, Lincolnshire may soon be the place to go – as the county decided this week to let individual schools decide on the teaching of pagan doctrine.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder. The Crust doesn’t miss a bet in it’s program to grasp every rein of power.

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A detailed genetic study of one of the first farming communities in Europe, from central Germany, reveals marked similarities with populations living in the Ancient Near East (modern-day Turkey, Iraq and other countries) rather than those from Europe.

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I’d like to see them try that in a Muslim country.

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The ACLU of Pennsylvania recently filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of a couple whose newborn baby was kidnapped by Lawrence County Children and Youth Services (LCCYS) because her mother recklessly consumed an “everything” bagel from Dunkin’ Donuts the day before the birth. Jameson Hospital, where Isabella Rodriguez was born on April 27, has a policy of testing expectant mothers’ urine for illegal drugs and reporting positive results to LCCYS, even without any additional evidence that the baby is in danger of neglect or abuse. LCCYS, in turn, has a policy of seizing such babies from their homes based on nothing more than the test result. Unfortunately for Isabella’s parents, Elizabeth Mort and Alex Rodriguez, Jameson sets the cutoff level for its opiate test so low that it can be triggered by poppy seeds, which is why two caseworkers and two Neshannock Township police officers visited their home the day after baby and mother returned from the hospital. LCCYS seized the three-day-old girl and put her in foster care for five days before conceding it had made a mistake.

We’re from the government, and we’ re here to … take your kids away.

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Economics aspires to be a science. But in this it does not succeed. Neither does finance. This despite the fact that there is an annual, optimistically named Nobel Prize in “Economic Sciences.”

Financial crises keep happening—the list is long. Could they be avoided if economics and finance were science? To paraphrase financial observer James Grant: science is progressive, but finance is cyclical.

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Americans are hearing the talking point that earmarks don’t cost the taxpayers any money.  This simply is not true.  Citizens Against Government Waste, a Congressional watchdog group, has put out a report on wasteful projects from Fiscal Year 2010.  They identify $16.5 billion in pork.

Of course, the whole issue is a red herring. When a legislator can direct general tax revenues into a particular local project, the obvious purpose of which is to improve his standing among his constituents, it changes the governmental appropriation process into a spoils system for which the term ‘corruption’ is perfectly appropriate.

Google, mirabile dictu, actually says what they mean by ‘underrepresented’.

We define underrepresented languages as those which, while spoken by millions, have little presence in electronic and physical media, e.g., webpages, newspapers and magazines. Underrepresented languages have also often received little attention from the speech research community. Their phonetics, grammar, acoustics, etc., haven’t been extensively studied, making the development of ASR (automatic speech recognition) voice search systems challenging.

We believe that the speech research community needs to start working on many of these underrepresented languages to advance progress and build speech recognition, translation and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. The development of NLP technologies in these languages is critical for enabling information access for everybody. Indeed, these technologies have the potential to break language barriers.

This is a fairly pure example of ‘business that thinks it’s more than a business’, an outgrowth of the Crustian ‘social responsibility’ kick. Such businesses aren’t content to just make some money for their investors; they have this grandiose notion that they exist ‘to be a force for good’. How well this works out in practice is left as an exercise for the reader.

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Back in April 2009 a unanimous Iowa Supreme Court ruled that gay marriage was a constitutional right in Iowa notwithstanding law, and several millenia of human tradition, to the contrary. In one fell swoop seven justices used the brute force of their office to intervene in what was clearly a political decision. Unfortunately for three of their number Iowa is a state in which at least some judges remain accountable to the people. Last Tuesday the voters of Iowa created a shockwave by dismissing three Supreme Court justices, Chief Justice Marsha Ternus, Justice David Baker, and Justice Michael Streit, via a retention election.

By investing any group of people with near absolute power and absolute unaccountability you end up with the Ninth Circuit. You end up with the mind bending experience of constitutional amendments being declared unconstitutional.

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When government has power, those who want the government to exercise that power in their favor will organize and attempt to get that done. This is what ‘regulatory capture’ is all about: Eventually a regulatory agency is staffed with people who are all on the side of the industry that it ought to be regulating, and regulations get promulgated that advance the interests of the major players (those with the deep pockets) rather than the public or the smaller fry.

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Some mutations are so rare that they are known only by their chromosomal address: Samantha and Taygen are two of only six children with the diagnosis “16p11.2.”

It turns out that individuals (and their parents) who share these diagnoses are meeting and exchanging information and forming mini-alliances.

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For self-described conservatives, it is easy to be pro-life, pro-troops, and pro-tax cuts. In most races, that is not how you separate the wheat from the chaff. You separate them on the basis of their belief in limited government—in short, do they think that government should do stuff. Period. And there is no better bellwether of politician’s proclivities toward limited government than whether they request and defend earmarks.

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I’m well aware that both parties do gerrymandering, though the Democrats have been “compelled” to do it by their evident need to keep urban areas together, where their majorities are reliable.  That too bears some consideration.  Why should there be so severe a divide in our country between rural and urban areas?  It would be interesting to find out how many districts with a city of more than 250,000 are “red,” and, conversely, how many districts without a city of more than 50,000 are “blue.”  I’ll have to ferret out the information.  Off the top of my head, I can say that Cincinnati, Columbus, Omaha, Wichita, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and Fort Worth are “red” cities.  I’m not sure if there are any others.  If you look at the national map colored for Democrat and Republican districts, you see a lot of little points of blue in lakes of red, and immediately you can tell, there’s El Paso, Minneapolis, Dallas, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Nashville, Louisville, New Orleans, Sacramento, and so forth.

The centralization of government is a boon to the centralization of business and the centralization of agriculture.  So, over time, the towns produced fewer and fewer of their own goods, and the people living in cities were farther and farther removed from the food they consumed and the natural resources they used.  The intimate connection between the city and its neighboring countryside was attenuated.

Think of the doctors, lawyers, social workers, teachers, realtors, and technocrats whose livelihoods in one way or another are based upon the family breakdown that characterizes our cities.  Or perform the thought experiment in reverse.  Ask, “What would happen if people in our cities married before they had children, stayed married, attended church, raised responsible and noble children, provided for all of their most basic needs and for most of those, like celebrations, that really sweeten human life?  Who would be out of work?”

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The Wall Street Journal succumbs to the Identity Politics Error.

Despite more diversity initiatives, as well as maternity-leave and part-time policies that are generally viewed as female-friendly, women remain dramatically underrepresented in law firms leadership ranks, according to a new study from the National Association of Women Lawyers.

The key shell-game-word here is ‘underrepresented’. Using the term ‘underrepresented’ assumes (without attempting to prove) that women are somehow entitled to some sort of ‘representation’ within the legal field — presumably a proportion matching the number of women in the population as a whole, or in the college-educated population, or some other arbitrary percentage — and that if reality doesn’t match that ideal number, there is Something Nefarious Afoot.

The truth is that the mix of people in a particular profession IS NOT A REPRESENTATIVE FUNCTION; there is no ‘one person one vote’ rule in how people go about making their livings. It’s as irrelevant as whether or not you have as many dollar bills in your wallet as other people in your ‘group’, however that ‘group’ may be defined. The two are not connected, and are determined by nothing more than your preference for carrying around dollar bills, or pure chance.

The Identity Politics Nanny Brigade have succeeded in getting this ‘underrepresented’ meme in circulation so well that even so presumably-well-educated a person as Vanessa O’Connell (and who the hell is Vanessa O’Connell?) is snookered by it. The depth of this corruption is her reference later on in the article to this ‘underrepresentation’ as ‘inequity’, as if it’s somehow unfair on the part of Somebody (who, exactly?) that this ‘underrepresentation’ exists.

Read it.

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Identity politics doesn’t always lead to clear-cut solutions.

If this election proves anything, it is that immigrant bashing is not a white-only sport. Non-whites can play it just as well. Advocates of liberal immigration policies, therefore, can’t count on the coming end of white domination to automatically propel this country in their direction. They have to keep making their case to the American public regardless of its hue—brown, black, or Avatar blue.

Of course, this being an article in tReason magazine, the assumption here is that More Immigrants Is Good, Restrictionism Is Bad. (When you don’t like a viewpoint, cast it into an ‘-ism’ and all will feel good about trashing it.) But it has some interesting information carried along with the political posturing, sort of by accident.

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Asia Bibi, a 37-year-old farm worker mother of two, was convicted of committing blasphemy before her fellow workers during a heated discussion about religion in the village of Ittanwali in June last year.

Some of the women workers had reportedly been pressuring Bibi to renounce her Christian faith and accept Islam. During one discussion, Bibi responded by speaking of how Jesus had died on the cross for the sins of humanity and asking the Muslim women what Muhammad had done for them.

The Muslim women took offence and began beating Bibi. Afterwards she was locked in a room. According to Release International, a mob reportedly formed and “violently abused” her and her children.

Your future under Islam. Don’t say that you weren’t warned.

Time for a new Crusade, I think.

Vanity Fair looks at northern Mexico.

During the past several years, drug-related violence in northern Mexico has soared to unprecedented levels as drug cartels wage war on one another—and on anyone deemed uncooperative, unfriendly, or otherwise inconvenient. There have been more than 28,000 killings since 2006. And, inexorably, the violence is spreading northward, into the United States—whose appetite for drugs is largely responsible for the present tragedy. Ed Vulliamy is a writer for The Guardian and The Observer who has traveled the length of the U.S.-Mexico border to report on the breakdown of civil society and the outbreak of the drug wars. His extraordinary new book, Amexica: War Along the Borderline, will be published next month. Here is an excerpt.

Perhaps we might want to bring some of those fine young men back from Afghanistan and put them along our southern border; you know, just in case.

And maybe, oh, I don’t know, build a wall or something.

Read it.

Statement that food prices are rising?  Smart! Sarah Palin agreeing with your statement that food prices are rising?  Dumb!

And they wonder why even their own reporters don’t read the papers anymore.

Check it out.

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It don’t take long if you’re good.

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The utensil was actually described way back in 1988 by archaeologist David Sherlock in his seminal work A combination Roman eating implement, published in the Antiquaries Journal, [xlix, 310-311] and which harks back to Sherlock’s earlier opus Roman folding spoons [Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 62, 1976, p.128-129].

The gadget was manufactured between AD201 and AD300.

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This is a bit of a provocative post, and its impressions (I dare not promote them to the level of conclusions) should be taken with the amount of salt found in a McDonald’s Happy Meal. Essentially, I was doing some reading about medieval medicine and was struck by some of the similarities between it and computer engineering, which I attempt to describe below.

This guy has some interesting notions.

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I wish we could sell them to the French.

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A homosexual sperm donor who fathered two babies by a lesbian after placing an advert in a magazine is now engaged in a legal dispute over access to the children.

Not your grandfather’s Britain. Not even close.

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I’m in.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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But it would be totally illegitimate for us to kill him first, of course.

America would be a great and successful country if it weren’t for about 20% of our population.

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No such thing as liberal fascism? Listen to Nanny Bloomberg for a week and tell me that again with a straight face. (Yeah, I’m looking at YOU, Charlie Stross.)

Public health puritans, appalled at the spread of excess weight, think the government should forcefully guide our dining choices. And when it comes to policy, they are getting a place at the table.

Last week, the San Francisco board of supervisors voted to hose the Happy Meal. No longer would McDonald’s (or any other restaurant) be allowed to provide a free toy with a meal that exceeds specified amounts of fat, sugar, and calories. If the folks at the Golden Arches want to offer a Batman action figure, it will have to be flanked by fruits and vegetables.

The impulse to overrule nutritional choices exists elsewhere too. In his last two budgets, New York’s Democratic Gov. David Paterson proposed a tax on soda.

High-calorie food is not one of those substances that presents a mortal threat to innocent bystanders. Guzzle a liter of Fanta, and you can still be trusted behind the wheel of a car. Walk by a KFC, and you don’t have to worry about secondhand fat.

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Remember the movies where the CIA and other government agencies have all of this sophisticated fancy equipment? Forget it. That’s fantasy, not reality.

The unsexy answer to this debate is that how government spends our money is just as important as what it spends it on. “Federal Procurement” is the process by which the federal government buys things. It’s governed in the 2,000+ page Federal Acquisition Regulation and the similarly sized Defense Acquisitions Regulations System. These tomes sit at the very root of all of the major issues we face today.

The Federal Acquisition Regulation is meant to optimize the dollars spent by the federal government. It’s designed to get government the best price for what it purchases, and it’s designed to make sure that those dollars get spent in a way that creates meaningful social impact. It fails at both, and in some cases— succeeds more at doing the opposite. It keeps small businesses under the thumbs of big ones, and creates so much overhead that government gets outrageous prices.

This foundational regulation that affects all of government is completely and totally broken. One need only look at CIO-Of-The-Federal-Government Vivek Kundra’s desk for the evidence. Last time I was in there, he had a 17″ all in one Gateway computer sitting on it because regulations prohibit him from buying a reasonable machine. He’s the CIO!

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

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Next time you see a moronic label on a common household utensil, you’ll know why it’s there.

Family members had been concerned about Fiddler because of her past drug use.

Earlier this year they had tried to get her parental rights revoked before the birth of her third child.

The young mother had been arrested in April for taking drugs when she was four months pregnant.

The infant’s father, Benjamin Trammel, said he can’t believe his girlfriend deliberately killed their daughter.

Well, that’s one problem right there.

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Ever wonder what happened to your high school valedictorian? He or she might just have wound up in Washington, D.C. That metro area has the nation’s highest percentage of residents with college degrees.

Call it America’s brainiest place to live.

That must be why the national government is such a lean, mean, efficient machine.

I’ve lived around people with college degrees, and most of them can’t find their butt with both hands, a strip map, and a ground guide. Smartest? Not so much.

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That’s the way it is with these thing, you know. A lot could happen, but almost nothing must happen. Still, his argument was sobering. Basically we are headed toward a peak of sunspot activity in 2012 or so that could well trigger a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) that could take out half or more of all geosynchronous satellites, not just GPS. No more satellite navigation, no more cable TV.

CME’s come in various sizes and velocities. CME’s aren’t intrinsically aimed at the Earth and could just as easily dissipate into empty space. Many CME’s don’t even make it as far as the Earth. But if conditions are right, CME’s can do a lot of damage. A CME hit Quebec in 1989 causing a nine-hour blackout and $4.3 billion in damages to the Canadian power grid. The mother of all CME’s in 1859 took down every telegraph in the world, causing arcing, fires, and melted wires in the equipment. Imagine what something like that would do to your PC or cellphone!

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Communications, like publishing, is in the middle of changing from a caterpillar to a butterfly, without benefit of cocoon. And we’re all caught in the process, which can be pretty disconcerting. Hopefully things will settle down soon.