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I’ve spent the past month that I’ve been off from school downtown in the Financial District. I walk past Ground Zero daily, and there are – typically – a gaggle of tourists outside the 9/11 memorial and museum. I can’t say I’ve ever been in, but it looks like a pretty high tech preview of what will be built… eventually, I guess. Seeing as the actual site isn’t even remotely open yet, though, and just this small “museum” exists, you can imagine my surprise to find that “11 staffers at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum each pulled down more than $170,000 in total compensation in 2009, according to the most recent filings. Four execs took home more than $320,000.” Oh, and it gets worse, “[schoolchildren] thought their penny jars and bake-sale proceeds would go toward building a 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero — not the six-figure salaries of nonprofit execs.”

Read it. And watch the video.

The Englishman who made this video was threatened with death for filming Muslims engaging in dawah on a public street.

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When there aren’t any Jews or Americans handy, Muslims will quite cheerfully kill each other.

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So, in Illinois, it’s okay for the police to record you, but it’s a felony for you to record the police. That’s the Chicago Way in this Obamanation.

Steve Sailer sounds the alarm.

vThe NYT has maps showing demographic winners and losers in New York City between the 2000 and 2010 Censuses. By far, the biggest losers are American-born blacks, whose numbers are growing only on the remote peripheries of the city.

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I am not making this up.

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The Left’s attempt to link the Tucson shootings to angry rhetoric (not theirs, of course) was stage one of a broader strategy–what both military men and political strategists refer to as preparing the battlefield. The movement to feign nonpartisanship at the State of the Union address by seating Republicans and Democrats together is another aspect of this stage. At the same time, the Left is moving on to stage two–an effort to cash in on battlefield preparation by attacking specific figures on the right and trying to shut down speech that the Left finds inconvenient.

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I can see an argument for tolerating abnormality but I can see no rationale for celebrating it.

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Over the last few years, we’ve all become familiar with the sight of masses of Muslim men clogging up public spaces in major Western European cities with their posteriors pointed skyward as they pray towards Mecca.

Paris is the most notorious in this regard, although similar occasions have been observed in Switzerland, Germany, Britain, and other countries — even across the Atlantic in front of the U.S. Capitol. To devout Muslims, such actions are well understood as a symbolic occupation of infidel territory, and a preliminary claim of that territory for Islam.

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“Recently completed testing and data analysis show that E15 does not harm emissions control equipment in newer cars and light trucks,” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in the announcement. “Wherever sound science and the law support steps to allow more home-grown fuels in America’s vehicles, this administration takes those steps.”

Especially when the ethanol lobbyists have showered this administration with cash.

Ethanol, while popular in corn-growing regions, faces much criticism from environmentalists, cattle ranchers, food companies and a broad coalition of other groups. Opponents argue that its increased use makes animal feed more expensive, raising prices at the grocery store and disrupting land.

Why should the Environmental Protection Agency care about what environmentalists think? Much less cattle ranchers, food companies, and, oh, people who drive.

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Jesse Jackson, call your lawyers.

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We have the techology.

The plan worked. Eikrem said he was able to drive away the wolves by playing the song “Overcome” by the American hard-rock band Creed. “They didn’t really get scared,” Walter said. “They just turned around and simply trotted away.”

Perhaps they figured that someone with such bad taste would surely taste bad.

Now if it would only work with those shits from Twilight….

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If all ‘Palestinians” were to die tomorrow, the amount of hate in the world would decrease by about a third.

The Other McCain nails it, as he so often does.

Liberal women are the active, driving force behind hatred of Sarah Palin, while liberal men’s behavior is passive and manipulative.

One of the necessary consequences of the Modern Professional Feminist Career Woman Lifestyle is that it tends to limit women’s procreative capacity. It isn’t merely that feminism’s embrace of the Culture of Death elevates abortion to sacramental status. Rather, it is that feminist notions of Progress require that women foresake (or at least postpone) the love-marriage-motherhood model of happiness in pursuit of careerist equality. Even if a woman does not actually go all-out in following the anti-phallocratic ideology — “Feminism is the theory; lesbianism is the practice,” to quote Ti-Grace Atkinson — her pursuit of the career woman lifestyle inevitably restricts her reproductive opportunities.

By the time she finishes college and grad school and establishes herself firmly en route to an upper-middle-class socioeconomic future, the the Modern Professional Feminist Career Woman is 30 or older. Even if she could meet Mister Right, she’s not going to abandon her career — for she has been taught to consider life meaningless without a professional career — in favor of domesticity. Ergo, even if she marries and decides she can afford a baby, she’ll have to hire someone to raise it for her while she returns to the job from which she derives her sense of purpose and identity.

Such women are, however, usually skilled enough at math to recognize that their boutique babies — usually just one, but never more than two — will be vastly outnumbered by the offspring of women who aren’t following the Modern Professional Feminist Career Woman Lifestyle. Those other women, with their non-elite educations and their unruly broods of children, inevitably appear to the feminist career woman’s mind as The Problem.

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Mostly “HATE YOU!” If all Palestinians were to die tomorrow it would decrease the total amount of hate in the world by about a third.

During the past decade, Washington has repeatedly failed to gauge the extent of Palestinian anti-peace sentiments with devastating consequences. The July 2000 Camp David summit triggered the worst wave of Palestinian violence since 1948 (euphemized as the “al-Aqsa Intifada”); the Palestinian parliamentary elections of January 2006 led to a victory for the Hamas Islamist group. Now that President Obama has announced his ambitious timeline for Israeli-Palestinian peace, could the administration be rushing headlong into yet another diplomatic failure?

A recent nine-week study by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) of online Palestinian political sentiments suggests that this could be the case. Palestinian Internet users often derided diplomatic initiatives, and their discussion of the peace process was overwhelmingly negative. More alarmingly, the study revealed several troubling trends among Palestinian social media users—notably the prevalence of Islamism, fissures between factions, and the inability of liberal reformers to be heard—that cast doubt on both the prospects for peace and the likelihood that a democratic Palestinian state will emerge.

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It’s disturbing to think of the federal government’s pressuring and jawboning a private business to reformulate perfectly lawful products, cut prices on some lines of goods, and so forth.

But, hey, that’s the way it is in the Obamanation.

Read it.

WARNING: This is not a parody, however much it sounds like one.

The urge to insinuate herself into other people’s lives was evident in her earliest artworks. Ms. Nakadate (pronounced nah-ka-da-TAY) grew up in Ames, Iowa, and moved to Boston in the mid-1990s to attend a program sponsored by Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. A friend at Wellesley College introduced her to the social rituals at that women-only school, especially the legendary parties featuring young men from Harvard and M.I.T. who would arrive at the campus on a weekend shuttle bus.

“It was this moment in the girls’ sort of postfeminist movement where their way of empowering themselves was having these enormous parties where they didn’t apologize for anything,” said Ms. Nakadate, who was fascinated by peers “so unafraid of failure,” and seemingly unconcerned with “trying to please people, or trying to put on the correct veneer.” She spent the next four years shadowing students at Wellesley and other nearby women’s colleges, interviewing them and documenting their lives in photographs.

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It’s a week before the biggest day of her life, and Anna Williams is multitasking. While waiting to hear back from the Ivy League colleges she’s hoping to attend, the seventeen-year-old senior at one of Manhattan’s most exclusive private schools is doing research for a paper about organic farming in the West Bank, whipping up a batch of vegan brownies, and, like an increasing number of American teenagers, teaching her dog to use an iPad.

I haven’t seen such stereotypical SWPL prose since I first opened a Playboy magazine as a callow youth.

A member of a generation that seems to have lost interest in the idle pleasures of sleepaway camp, Anna has spent the last three summers working on an ibex farm in the Catskills, just ninety minutes from her Manhattan home. Anna’s parents, Leslie Wilhelm, an editor of style and fashion books, and Walter Gilliam, a partner at a boutique investment firm, love that they can see their daughter often. (Williams, Anna’s last name, is a portmanteau of her parents’ surnames.) How often? “The toll collectors on the New York Thruway are becoming close friends,” cracks Anna’s father, referring to the highway connecting New York City to the Catskills. “We’ve always let Anna pursue her dreams, but we like to be able to visit wherever they may take her,” counters Anna’s mother, who has accompanied her daughter on long trips to Uganda, Bangladesh and the Mississippi Delta.

At Yael Farms, Anna gets plenty of exercise. She spends the day herding ibex, drawing water from a well, and moving heavy stones. After a Deuteronomy-friendly dinner of figs, unleavened bread and honey-drizzled ibex, she practices her Mandarin. Like many of the ibex farms sprouting up across the northeastern United States, Yael offers an intensive Chinese-language immersion course.

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Muslims are like vampires — they may seem suave and sophisticated, but when you least expect it the teeth come out and your neck pays the price.

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In a speech this week in Doha, Qatar, Hersh advanced the notion that U.S. military forces are directed and dominated by Christian fundamentalist “crusaders” bent on changing “mosques into cathedrals.”

Oh, would that it were true. But this delusion is like unto the super-sophisticated gear that the CIA uses in the Bourne movies: A left-wing fantasy. We should be so lucky.

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Now comes a book that exactly lines up with the way our thinking has evolved at Gates of Vienna. Rebecca Bynum nails it in Allah Is Dead: Why Islam is Not a Religion. I’ve been saying this for a while now so it’s exciting to see that someone has written a book laying out systematically what it took us so many years to understand, to wit: Islam is a totalitarian system tricked out to look like a religion, and it fools even many of its adherents. In reality, Islam is a prison – as those who try to leave know all too well. You wonder sometimes what would happen if Islam’s so-called ‘apostasy’ were done away with? How many adherents would still be in the system? Especially I wonder how many women would remain if they were free (as in really free from physical retaliation) to get on the bus, Gus.

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“To support our practice, we ask patients to pay a low annual membership fee of $199.” For this you can “schedule your appointments online,” “see your doctor on time,” and “email your doctor with questions.”

How many other professional service businesses are there where, on top of the whatever fee the customers pay for the service, the customer has to pay an extra annual fee for the privilege of e-mailing the professional or of having the professional show up on time for meetings? In most other fields, these are the sort of things that are basic courtesy and communication, not something you have to pay extra for. If a college professor asked students to pay him extra to guarantee that he showed up for class on time, or if a lawyer tried to charge extra for communicating with her by email rather than phone or in person, the students or clients would probably think there was something strange going on. But with health care, the baseline customer experience is often so poor that the alternative sounds attractive.

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It’s amazing how often ‘pro-union’ people wind up using the same anti-union tools that they condemn in others.

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Well. Isn’t that special.

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Abortion is the third pillar of the three great American evils that the democratic party has supported. The first was Slavery, the second was Jim Crow and the third is Abortion (Ironically all three target blacks and/or minorities). The day will come when people shake their heads wondering what folks were thinking for abortion in the same way they do on the others.

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Mark Steyn.

If I am pessimistic about the future of liberty, it is because I am pessimistic about the strength of the English-speaking nations, which have, in profound ways, surrendered to forces at odds with their inheritance. “Declinism” is in the air, but some of us apocalyptic types are way beyond that. The United States is facing nothing so amiable and genteel as Continental-style “decline,” but something more like sliding off a cliff.

Within a decade, the United States will be spending more of the federal budget on its interest payments than on its military.

Within the next five years, the People’s Liberation Army, which is the largest employer on the planet, bigger even than the U.S. Department of Community-Organizer Grant Applications, will be entirely funded by U.S. taxpayers.

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ISLAMIC preacher Ibrahim Siddiq-Conlon points heavenwards to emphasise his message for the governments of Australia — there is no God but Allah and only his laws should be obeyed.

“My attack is on the Prime Minister of Australia,” he said yesterday. “I hate the parliament in Canberra. I want to go straight for the jugular vein and advise the parliament that they have no right to legislate. They should immediately step down and let the Muslims take over.”

An Australian-born convert to Islam, Siddiq-Conlon is the self-anointed leader of a group called Sharia4Australia, which is pushing for the introduction of sharia courts as a first step towards achieving Islamic law.

“One day Australia will live under sharia; it’s inevitable,” he said. “If they (Australians) don’t accept it, that’s not our problem. We hope, and our objective is to have a peaceful transition, but when you look at history that has never been the case. There’s always been a fight. It is inevitable that one day there will be a struggle for Islam in Australia.”

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.

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Banfield turned upside down the commonplace notion that wonks were politically neutral problem-solvers.  Rather, he wrote, wonks tend to contribute problems not solutions to the political process.  From their perches in academia and the upper echelons of government, social scientists and policy analysts identify “problems” in need of government  attention.  Regrettably, wonks’ solutions tend to be politically infeasible.  The presidency and the Congress are contentious political institutions that rarely translate wonk ideas into neat policy solutions.

Banfield viewed this situation as a recipe for the endless growth of government and public cynicism as “problems” were declared but never got solved. He encouraged a healthy skepticism toward the wonk-problem-government-solution complex. Government, he thought, needed fewer wonks and more statesmen who would “foster a public opinion that is reasonable about what can and cannot be done to make the society better.” He was right.

Whenever you hear on TV reference to the phrase ‘our X policy’, X refers to an issue into which the government ought not to stick its nose, but will nevertheless, at the prompting of some official who want to get re-elected and figures this is the horse that will carry him (or her) there.

Read it.

An online translation of the work of one of the greatest engineers in history.

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Tinfoil hats! Get yer tinfoil hats, right here! Can’t avoid the mind-control lasers without a tinfoil hat!

This is what passes for journalism these days. No wonder newspapers are dying.

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Yeah, that sounds like Tennessee.

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Thank you, HOV lanes.

Jerry Pournelle weighs in on several subjects.

Meanwhile, the 2009 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize has thrown a state dinner for the man who has imprisoned the winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Another previous Nobel Peace Prize winner was in attendance at this honor. Except for Rush Limbaugh I have heard no comments on this curious anomaly from the media. I suspect that when there is media attention it will be in denigration of Limbaugh for pointing it out. So it goes.

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All’s fair in love and Jihad.

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Fenugreek, a key curry ingredient, helps to fend off a common cold, it has been claimed, but also has a number of other apparent health benefits.

I’m sorry, but Fenugreek sounds like a character from Star Trek.

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Actually, we’re not hot on having him as Governor, either, but the alternative was worse.

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Mothers should be taught how to cuddle and talk to their babies as part of a major Government drive to stop children descending into a life of crime as they grow up.

I swear, I am not making this up.

Bryan Caplan looks underneath the covers.

My friend in the insurance industry once let me in on a little secret: De facto, though not de jure, virtually every big firm is also a health insurance company with an exclusive clientele: Its own labor force.  Once a firm is big enough, orthodox “health insurance companies” just charge the firm a fee equal to all its employees’ health care costs plus a handling fee.  Big firms aren’t buying insurance from insurance companies; they’re subcontracting their paperwork.

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[S]tate bankruptcy could even permit a restructuring of the Cadillac pension benefits that states have promised to public employees. These are often “vested” under state law, and in some states, like California, are protected by the state constitution. Under state law, little can be done to adjust them to more reasonable amounts.

A central feature of these promises in many states and municipalities is the capture of both sides of the bargaining table by public employee unions.  It is a classic process described by public choice theory, through which the campaign contributions of a highly motivated subset of voters capture the political offices that negotiate economic terms with that same set of voters-as-employees.  I have sometimes wondered whether a legal theory — far fetched in court, of course, but not so very far from the situation in economic terms — of fraudulent conveyance could be raised against these kinds of negotiations, as a basis for being overturned in bankruptcy.

One of the problems with government is the propensity for corruption whereby those running the government pass laws favoring the politically powerful class, which then rewards those running the government by keeping them in power. In Britain, for example, this was as true for the upper class, when they were in charge of politics (look up the history of the Corn Laws and the Black Act, for example), as for the lower, when the trades unions ran the government in the period between Churchill and Thatcher.

Yet another argument for having government with strictly limited powers. Nobody’s going to bother buying politicians who can’t pay them back with taxpayer money.

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I’m surprised that even made it into a newspaper.

Ever notice how Muslims are really into beheading people?

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I rarely use ATMs. Here’s one reason why.

Well, no.

In the New Testament (and other early Christian literature), much is said about nonviolence, never is violence commanded or even suggested; it is forbidden. Not so, early Muslim literature. The contrast is to be expected: Jesus was anti-violent, Muhammad was violent (a military leader as well as a religious leader).

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Now, though, another gang of astro-turfing thugs has targeted (yes, targeted) the private home of a real estate developer for the audacity of building a WalMart that will employ up to 1200 DC-area residents.

With unemployment in Washington, DC at 10.2%, it is hard to imagine anyone not wanting to see jobs added. That is, unless that someone is a union that doesn’t like the fact that WalMart operates its U.S. stores union-free.

Look for … the union label….

Read it.

The insanity defense is fairly well-defined, and depending on the jurisdiction it seems like that a lot of supervillains would not actually count as “insane” in a way which would prevent their convictions.

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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And Somali pirates are:

[] Christians   [] Jews  [] Hindus   [] Muslims