Read it.

Of course, to claim to have a carrier-sinking missile, and to actually have a carrier-sinking missile, are two different things.

Read it.

Oceans of federal money gush into higher education every day, and every administration promises more to come. That gush obscures the real demand for educated workers. The result is lots of cashiers and waitresses with B.A.s, and lots of people with student loan debt that’s tough for them to repay. For most students, the federal subsides geared toward nudging them to consume more education actually result in the acquisition of more education debt.

Read it.

I. In the Spiderman origin story, what is Peter Parker’s liability for letting the armed robber run past him, ultimately leading to his Uncle Ben’s death?

Read it.

According to the Federal Aviation Administration, there are approximately 7,000 aircraft in the air over the continental US at any given time. That looks something like this. Congress has claimed sovereignty over U.S. airspace and has given authority to the Administrator of the FAA to “develop plans and policy for the use of the navigable airspace and assign by regulation or order the use of the airspace necessary to ensure the safety of aircraft and the efficient use of airspace.” 49 U.S.C. § 40103.

Read it.

Let heaven and nature sing.

Read it.

Numerous times this year, members of Congress have held fundraisers and collected big checks while they are taking critical steps to write new laws, despite warnings that such actions could create ethics problems. The campaign donations often came from contributors with major stakes riding on the lawmakers’ actions.

I’m shocked, shocked I tell you.

It always astonishes me that anyone would find this ‘news’. The only reason anybody at all has to give money to a Congressman is in the hope that the Congressman will support legislation in favor of that person or group. The only reason such support is worth something is because a Congressman (or any other legislator or bureaucrat) has immense power to help or hurt someone in business. If they didn’t have that power, it wouldn’t be worthwhile to bribe them.

The answer to that is not legislation mandating ‘ethics’, because ethics aren’t self-enforcing and the enforcement is being left to people who are subject to the same temptation — you don’t have a committee of foxes look into whether a particular raid on a henhouse was ‘ethical’. The answer is to reduce the power of such people so that they are no longer worth bribing. But, of course, those who do most of the handwringing about ‘ethics’ aren’t willing to sacrifice the ability of such people to coerce the Common People into following the handwringers’ political agenda. So the system is broken and will probably never be fixed.

Read it.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial inexplicably siding with Michelle Obama against Sarah Palin on the issue of Mrs. Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity.

Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ seems to be settling into bed with the Crust. Pity.

Mencius Moldbug is back with us.

The chronic UR reader will be familiar with my own humble periodization of American history, arranged by constitutional singularity: USG 1, the Congressional Republic, 1774-89; USG 2, the Original Deal, 1789-1861; USG 3, the Old Deal, 1861-1933; USG 4, the New Deal, 1933-present.

Some of us are so daring as to hope we live to see a USG 5 – or at least, the last of USG 4. For this weird and conceited handful, what better recreation could there be but a study of the intellectual roots of the New Deal?

Iowahawk provides some advice for out-of-work Democrats.

Whether you’re a recently displaced 23-term committee chairman or a formerly smug unemployed staffer with $180,000 of Georgetown student loans, it’s important not to give in to despair. Psychological studies tell us a lost re-election campaign is the single most stressful event in the life of a congressional incumbent, even topping the indictment of a campaign contributor or an appearance at an unscripted town hall meeting. Also, a ballot box layoff is, next to death, the second-leading cause of leaving Congress. The good news is that there are positive, proactive steps you can take to reduce stress and smooth your transition to your new life in the great unknown outside I-95.

Read it.

The Department of Health and Human Services is imposing new reviews on health care premium increases of 10% or more. So I was interested to see a letter from my health insurer, which is raising premiums 9% next year but cutting the benefits.

Markets work even when you don’t want them to. Attempting to force markets to do what you want them to do rather than what they want to do never works. That’s an invincible law. Unfortunately, another invincible law is that bureaucrats never learn from history. ‘This time for sure!’

The Other McCain is on the case.

The left is proof positive that not all children are above average.

Read it.

Apparently some people can’t enjoy Christmas with their families if there’s even the slightest whiff of racism or homophobia about the ol’ homestead. Said people are, of course, uniquely sensitive and qualified to determine the presence of such knuckle-dragging indicia of barbarism.

One of the commenters at Feministe linked to the video below, giving instructions on how to tell people they are racist.

For those of you who have not experienced racist comments at Christmas dinner, you probably aren’t listening carefully enough.  Please follow these instructions on How to Recognize Racism.

I am not making this up.

Megan McArdle has some seriously wicked friends.

So first, the serious tip: Commenting is a performance, not a conversation.. Most people who read your work will never respond. Sure, when you get into a reply string, you should always address the comment above yours, because it’s kind of rude to be mugging for the spectators in a reply (“Look at this idiot! He doesn’t know anything!”). But the fact is, your interlocutor is not your audience, so your goal is not to persuade that person, it’s to persuade (or perhaps merely entertain) the silent majority, or what we in the business call “the jury.”

Read it.

I vote for Hawaii. It’s farther away.

No doubt this will be settled in traditional Democrat fashion, i.e. whoever offers the largest bribe will win.

Read it.

“Your [Christmas] fireworks will act as an alarm for the time of our devices to blow up — devices that we, not Santa Claus, are going to offer to you as gifts, to turn your night into day and your blood into rivers,” said a member of the Shumukh al-Islam forum.

Special for Roy.

Read it.

Never before in history has such a powerful nation amassed such incredible firepower and spent such great treasure for such amorphous and poorly-defined goals. No wonder we’re still at war nine years later — and being blown up by the “allies” on whom we have lavished so much attention, training, and cash.

A few days ago I discussed the fact that Western cultural and political leaders have cut themselves off from complete and accurate information about their own societies. By imposing a priori ideological constraints on information, they have foreclosed the possibility of gaining a true understanding of what is happening within their own populace in the face of Islamization.

The corollary to this fact is that the most crucial part of the current information war is being fought in a semi-clandestine fashion at the lowest levels via horizontally-linked distributed networks. Necessity requires that our most dedicated information warriors bypass official channels, since those channels deny the very premises on which the info-war is fought.

Read it.

Your digital camera may embed metadata into photographs with the camera’s serial number or your location. Your printer may be incorporating a secret code on every page it prints which could be used to identify the printer and potentially the person who used it. If Apple puts a particularly creepy patent it has recently applied for into use, you can look forward to a day when your iPhone may record your voice, take a picture of your location, record your heartbeat, and send that information back to the mothership.

This is traitorware: devices that act behind your back to betray your privacy.

And of course you’re so damned important that everyone, including important government agencies, wants to know. Feel free to panic. I’m going to go take a nap.

A Poem By Yochnan Lavie

We’re All Multicultural Here … as long as it’s funny.

Read it.

Arkansas Peppered Bacon, Sam Edwards Virginia Breakfast Sausage Links, Broadbent’s Kentucky Smoked Sausage, La Quercia’s Prosciutto, 2 Bacon Cheddar Scones, Zingerman’s Peppered Bacon Farm Bread. To round things out, Mo’s Bacon Chocolate Bar packaged in a Zingerman’s bag.

Tim Cavanaugh looks at why pennies are stupid.

Someday, probably within your lifetime, the one-cent coin will go away. The penny, the first coin minted in the United States, was obviated by inflation before most members of today’s work force were born. Its production cost is more than half again as much as its face value. Its detractors include respected economists, forward-looking realists, and coastal cosmopolitans; its supporters consist largely of sentimentalists, hoarders, the zinc lobby, and the dwindling number of women named Penelope.

Well, if the government would quit inflating our currency, this wouldn’t be a problem.

Read it.

Read it.

Markets work even when you don’t want them to.

It’s amusing how quickly the people who advocate the legalization of drugs because ‘you can’t stop people from getting and using them’ are nevertheless the first to pummel lawmakers into screwing down restrictions on ‘predatory lending’ on the part of banks and credit card companies, thereby driving high-risk borrowers into the back-alleys of … really predatory lending.

Read it.

The new rules of the newly Republican House of Representatives provide for the entire Constitution to be read aloud in the House on January 6. Also, “members will not be able to introduce a bill or joint resolution without a ‘statement citing as specifically as practicable the power or powers granted to Congress in the Constitution to enact’ it.”

Like the so-called ‘limit on the national debt’, this will serve as just another tedious exercise in sophistry rather than as any limit on the spending of money.

Read it.

The companies that build futuristic airport scanners take a more old-fashioned approach when it comes to pushing their business interests in Washington: hiring dozens of former lawmakers, congressional aides and federal employees as their lobbyists.

About eight of every 10 registered lobbyists who work for scanner-technology companies previously held positions in the government or Congress, most commonly in the homeland security, aviation or intelligence fields, a Washington Post review of lobbying-disclosure forms and other data shows.

The surest way to wealth in modern America is to hire a former government employee to get his former colleagues to write your product into the law, then just sit back and watch the (taxpayer) money roll in.

Read it.

They could become Christians. Problem solved.

Power Line illuminates the latest power grab by Kathleen Sibelius.

Obamacare figures to be a fount of gangster government if and when it is ever fully implemented. Over time it will render us all subjects of the administrative state.

As Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius is giving us a preview of coming attractions.

The left keeps whining, ‘But what’s wrong with affordable health care for everybody?’ Well, this is what — too much power in the hands of the Federal government over every fargin aspect of your life.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

India’s financial capital was on high alert Friday after authorities said four terrorists had entered the country and were plotting attacks here during the holidays.

Mumbai police officials said late Thursday night that they suspected the men belonged to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani group that Indian and American officials say carried out the November 2008 attacks in this city that killed more than 163 people. They released a sketch of one of the men, identified as Waleed Jinnah, and asked the public to call the police if they saw him or had any information about the attackers.

After all, just think of all those Christian groups that set off bombs during Ramadan!

Oh … wait … those were Muslim groups, weren’t they?

That’s a fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

The Other McCain has the goods.

The OECD study — titled ‘Growing Unequal?’ — also found that the ratio of taxes paid to income received by the top 10% was by far the highest in the U.S., at 1.35, compared to 1.1 for France, 1.07 for Germany, 1.01 for Japan and 1.0 for Sweden (i.e., the top decile’s share of Swedish taxes is the same as their share of income). . . .

Read it.

Let me show you how this works. Next year, as you probably know, workers subject to Social Security taxes will pay only 4.2 percent of their “covered wages” -wages up to $106,800 – rather than the normal 6.2 percent. This will reduce Social Security’s cash proceeds by $112 billion, according to Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation.

What impact will this cash shortfall have on the Social Security trust fund? None. Zero. Zip.

How can a $112 billion cut in Social Security revenues not affect the trust fund? Because Treasury will give the trust fund the same amount of bonds it would have gotten had the two-percentage-point tax holiday didn’t exist.

In other words, Treasury isn’t selling bonds to Social Security, it is creating them out of thin air and putting them into the trust fund. The missing cash? Uncle Sam will just borrow $112 billion from somewhere.

Read it.

Read it.

New London, Connecticut ne’er-do-well Jerome Taylor thought his iPhone to be a suitable facsimile for a handgun in his failed attempt to hold up a local restaurant.

John Stossel kicks over a rock.

I often bash government. I say it can’t do anything better than people in a free market.

But the government is unequalled in producing one thing: negative unintended consequences. Show me a government activity, and I will show you bad results that even the program’s advocates probably don’t like.

Read it.

“So I plan to tax the living shit out of him! That’ll give him an incentive to do even better if he wants to be able to eat something besides Ramen for dinner!”

There’s the Democrat platform in a nutshell.

Read it.

Some superheroes like Batman and Iron Man are independently wealthy.  Some, like Wolverine, seem content with a fairly rough and tumble lifestyle.  But what about your everyday, working superheroes, the ones that have to take jobs on the side to make ends meet?  Some, like Spiderman, may work a normal job held by their alter egos.  Sometimes, though, superheroes take jobs that explicitly require the use of their powers.  For example, in one alternate continuity, Colossus worked as a construction worker, a job for which his super strength was no doubt very useful.

But these are comic book superheroes, which we know are prone to losing their powers for a variety of reasons.  What happens if a superpowered individual contracts around his or her powers and then loses them? Or what if Metropolis is attacked by a supervillain and our hero is called away to deal with it? The answer depends on whether the promised work is now impossible to perform.

The Other McCain pulls back the curtain.

The current municipal government is all-black. The population of Pritchard is 84% black. And many (but not all) of the retirees are white.

Does that have something to do with the seeming indifference of the city council to its pension obligations? Perhaps this is irrelevant, but I have a hard time imagining that the New York Times would ignore such a factor if an all-white city government in an 84-percent white town were cheating its black pensioners.

It’s only racism if white people do it.

Read it.

Defenders of public employee pension systems often make the case that pension benefits are not all that generous. The outrageous cases you see on the news — Long Island police retiring in their 40s with pensions in excess of base pay, administrators “retiring” with six-figure pensions and then going back to work with another government agency, one ex-FDNY firefighter running marathons on his $86,000 “disability” pension — are the exceptions, they say.

The data, however, tells a different story. According to the Census Bureau, the average New York retiree receiving a corporate or union pension — a retiree from the private sector — was receiving an annual benefit of $13,100 in 2009. For state and local government retirees, that figure was more than twice as high: $27,600. And that average figure includes retirees who were part-time workers or only spent part of their careers in government; full-career retirees often do far better.

Read it.

But the interesting question is, where did the Port Authority go? And why?

Was it because they needed less space than an entire Manhattan city block (2.9 million square feet)?

Or was it that they needed more?

Steve Sailer waxes sarcastic.

Jay Matthews delivers breathtaking news in the Washington Post: acceptance rates to get into Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, perhaps the hardest public science school in the country (average exiting SAT score of 2220 out of 2400)….

So,  Asians first, whites second, Hispanics third, blacks fourth. What an astonishing result! Who has ever seen that rank ordering before in any competition involving test scores and grades? It’s an anomaly!

Read it.

Read it.

As hard as it is to believe, there are unions that would rather see people unemployed than have them work at a company that the union doesn’t like. The Teamsters is apparently one of those unions.

Because it’s all about power. Duh.

Read it.

Evidently the message is that children’s bodies are a collective resource that needs to be managed by agents of the state for their own good and the good of society, regardless of what they or their parents think. A fifth-grader at Gebeke’s school displays the sort of counterproductive mentality that the school district is determined to stamp out:

“All my friends say, ‘This really sucks,'” said Misky Salad, a 10-year-old fifth-grader at Chelsea Heights Elementary. “A lot of us feel it should be up to us to determine what we should do with our bodies.”

You can kill your unborn child, but you can’t eat a twinkie. Welcome to the pro-choice world, Misky.

Read it.

John D Lavelle was demoted and forced to retire in April 1972 after being relieved of duty for violating presidential restrictions on aerial bombing during the Vietnam War.

He maintained his innocence during congressional hearings held after his dismissal and died in 1979.

Declassified documents and transcripts of President Richard Nixon’s Oval Office audio tapes now show that more aggressive bombing in North Vietnam had been secretly authorised in early 1972.

Nixon’s the one.

Read it.

One of the most frequent questions this blog has generated, both in comments and in emails, is “What about Superman’s immigration status?”

And how about Hawkman? Not to mention Thor.

Read it.

Read it.

Wouldn’t surprise me any.

Read it.

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

Read it.

An Air Malta flight from London Heathrow was forced to return to the terminal after a passenger started praying and chanting in the aisle just before take-off.

The man got to his knees on Tuesday and started chanting in Arabic and ignored instructions by cabin crew to return to his seat, a spokesman for the airline said.

Passengers panicked when they heard the man chanting, and he had to be restrained by passengers and crew, according to media reports.

Oh, will the Islamophobia never cease?

Read it.

An initial study involved 80 undergrads spending five minutes thinking about either their fifteenth century ancestors, their great-grandparents or a recent shopping trip. Afterwards, those students in the two ancestor conditions were more confident about their likely performance in future exams, an effect that seemed to be mediated by their feeling more in control of their lives.

Three further studies showed that thinking or writing about their recent or distant ancestors led students to actually perform better on a range of intelligence tests, including verbal and spatial tasks (in one test, students who thought about their distant ancestors scored an average of 14 out of 16, compared with an average of 10 out of 16 among controls). The ancestor benefit was mediated partly by students attempting more answers – what the researchers called having a ‘promotion orientation’.

Sometimes the old ways are best.