Read it.

A converted church would make a great house. Many of the older ones are in a pretty Gothic style.

Read it.

We have written many times about the Progressive movement and its open hostility toward both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We have also noted that modern progressives have generally had the good political sense to keep their opinions about the Constitution to themselves, beyond whatever critique is implicit in terming it a “living” document that is liable to call forth previously unknown “rights” at any moment.

Today’s New York Times editorializes on the Republican takeover of the House. You could paraphrase the editorial as “wah-wah-wah;” the paper basically cries over its party’s November defeat. But in the course of doing so, the editorialists are surprisingly open about their contempt for the Constitution….

Read it.

While others wish the new Congress well today on its swearing-in, I plan to light a 100-watt incandescent bulb and hoist a caffeinated alcoholic beverage in honor of a different milestone: starting today, the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee will no longer be under the control of Henry Waxman (D-Calif.).

Some lawmakers can talk a decent game about lean ‘n’ smart regulation, but no one ever accused Waxman of having a light touch. (The 900-page Waxman-Markey environmental bill, mercifully killed by the Senate, included provisions letting Washington rewrite local building codes.) He’s known for aggressive micromanagement even of agencies run by putative allies: his staff has repeatedly twisted the ears of Obamanaut appointees to complain that their approach to regulation is too moderate and gradual. More than any other lawmaker on the Hill, he’s stood in the way of any meaningful reform of the 2008 CPSIA law, which piles impractical burdens on small makers of children’s products, thrift stores, bicycles and others.

Read it.

NYC Department of Sanitation workers dumped tons of dirty snow on graves in NYC’s largest Jewish cemetery, toppling tombstones and obliterating graves. The city is apparently not helping with the cleanup….

Read it.

More signs the incoming House Republican leadership gets it. Even before the new Congress took power today, the power of congressional appropriators had been circumscribed, as Republicans forced the committee to surrender its power to place special interest earmarks into the 12 annual spending bills under its purview.

Woo-hoo!

Read it.

Why are so many of the most talented officers now abandoning military life for the private sector? An exclusive survey of West Point graduates shows that it’s not just money. Increasingly, the military is creating a command structure that rewards conformism and ignores merit. As a result, it’s losing its vaunted ability to cultivate entrepreneurs in uniform.

In many respects (weapons, tactics, logistics, training), the Army did transform. But the talent crisis persisted for a simple reason: the problem isn’t cultural. The military’s problem is a deeply anti-entrepreneurial personnel structure. From officer evaluations to promotions to job assignments, all branches of the military operate more like a government bureaucracy with a unionized workforce than like a cutting-edge meritocracy.

The most blatantly anti-entrepreneurial aspect of the Army is the strict time-in-service requirement for various ranks. Consider the mandatory delay for becoming a general. Active-duty officers can retire after 20 years of service. But to be considered for promotion to general requires at least 22 years of service, and that applies to even the most talented and inspiring military officer in the nation.

Read it.

Scozzafava, a Republican, dropped out of the 23rd Congressional District race three days before the 2009 election and infuriated some Republicans by throwing her support to Democratic candidate Bill Owens – not Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman.

‘And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.’ Luke 16:9

Read it.

The degeneration of our culture in the name of Political Correctness proceeds apace.

Thanks to the intervention of one Dr. Alan Gribben, American kids will no longer be racist after reading Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and timorous teachers will now feel comfortable assigning a book that once featured 219 instances (according to Gribben) of the word “nigger.” Gribben’s new edition of Huckleberry Finn will excise all those bits that make people feel uncomfortable—because good literature never, ever makes people feel uncomfortable.

Dr Gribben got his PhD from Berkeley, of course.

Read it.

You know you want to.

Read it.

Duh.

It’s unclear who’s the bigger thumbsucker here: Those who did the study, or the Telegraph for publishing it.

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

Read it.

To commit genocide, it is not always necessary to perpetrate acts of violence, or indeed murder. There are many definitions of genocide, all equally effective, albeit not all as speedy as the ones chosen in Rwanda.

Bearing the points above in mind I invite you to consider where we, the native peoples of Europe have been brought to, in particular over the 65 years since the guns fell silent at the end of a war which our grandfathers were told they were fighting in order to save the future for their children.

Far from saving the future for their children, I would suggest to you that, since World War II, conditions of life have been introduced by those who hold power over us which are calculated to bring about the destruction, at the very least in part, of those very children, the native people of Europe. Meanwhile measures have been introduced intended to significantly reduce the number of Native European births.

Read it.

If Morgan Tsvangirai is charged with treason, WikiLeaks will have earned the ignominy of Robert Mugabe’s gratitude

And so, where Mugabe’s strong-arming, torture and assassination attempts have failed to eliminate the leading figure of Zimbabwe’s democratic opposition, WikiLeaks may yet succeed. Twenty years of sacrifice and suffering by Tsvangirai all for naught, as WikiLeaks risks “collateral murder” in the name of transparency.

But, hey, they were just trying to help. After all, it’s not as if these people in Zimbabwe were self-righteous White People, like Assange.

The Other McCain spanks faux-Catholic faux-Conservative Andrew Sullivan.

I know, I know, fish in a barrel, but it’s still funny.

Possibly related: The Department of Health and Human Services has an online calculator to help single mothers determine whether they’ll lose welfare benefits by marrying their baby-daddy.

Because that’s what life is really all about: Maximizing your benefits.

Read it.

And why not? There are a lot of stupid people in the world. It’s not as if it costs anything.

Tom Smith illuminates how Nicholas Kristof, like all ‘progressive class-warriors, is just another arrested-adolescent whiner.

It looks like Mr. Kristof got the memo.  Speaking of inequality, doesn’t he look like the guy who got an A not because he was smart but because he sucked up so assiduously to the teacher?  Look at his face and tell me he doesn’t look like that.  Maybe it’s just me.

See also the link below in my post below, but one of the new it-books of 2011 is evidently by two British sociologists who have crunched data and determined that inequality makes us sad.  It’s just not fair that hedge funders and bankers have so much more money than I do and how come they do and and I want some too and mommymommymommymommy it’s not fair!  It causes depression, weight gain and no doubt excessive female hairiness too.

Megan McCardle spanks a tool of the Crust.

This is to me a rather surprising characterization, as I read the same post, and was not blown away by its irrefutable factual basis. It’s Garrett Epps’ opinion.  An informed opinion to which he is perfectly entitled, but certainly not something that we can characterize as “stating plainly what is true” in the journalistic sense.  It’s more like what my evangelical friends mean when they talk about sharing the truth of Christ’s death for our salvation.  Of course, they may well be right.  But I still maintain that the Washington Post’s front page should not treat this as an established fact.

A reminder for those who might be wondering: Just because someone is a lawyer, or even a law professor, or even a ‘constitutional scholar’, doesn’t mean that such a person knows more about the Constitution than you do; it merely means that he (or she) knows more about what other people think the Constitution is than you do. That’s what ‘scholar’ means.

The Constitution says what it says, and what it says is a matter of fact. What the Constitution means when it says what it says, is a matter of opinion, and anyone who maintains that the Constitution means anything other than what it plainly says, has the burden of proof that their opinion is superior to anyone else’s. And that’s the plain truth.

Read it.

Upon examining the US, we find out that Texas fits the bill nicely.  In fact, Texas has 261,797.12 square miles of land, and that is (261792.12<ENTER> 1.602<ENTER> 1.602 × ×) 671,877.17 square kilometers!  Which is, in fact, more than the area we need to house all 7 billion of us at typical New York City densities.  Meaning every man, woman, and child living and breathing on the face of the Earth could fit in relative comfort within the land territory of the State of Texas.

The other 49 states: empty.  Canada?  A wasteland as empty as the northern extremes of Nunavut.  Europe?  Empty.  Asia?  Nobody home.  Africa, Australia, South and Central America, all the islands?  None left.  The entire world outside of Texas contains not a single living, breathing person.

With just over half the daily average outflow of the Columbia River, we could meet the freshwater needs of the entire world’s population.  Now, that is a big pipeline to Texas, but if we could get everyone there in the first place, the pipeline is child’s play!

To recap: so far, we can put every living person on the planet within the land territory of Texas, with density about equal to New York City (not just Manhattan; all 5 boroughs).  And we can give them all adequate water with just over half the water from the Columbia River.

Read it.

Be the first on your block….

Read it.

One question that we get frequently here on Law and the Multiverse is whether superheroes that wear identity-concealing costumes could wear them in court.  A closely related question is whether a superhero could testify under his or her alias and refuse to answer questions about his or her secret identity.  In the US, these are important issues because of the Confrontation Clause, which is where our analysis will focus. We briefly discussed this issue as part of the alter ego post from Dec. 2010; this is a fuller treatment of the specific question of the legal issues related to testifying while disguised.

Read it.

The climate campaign establishment increasingly looks like its own self-contained and self-referential lunatic asylum, unable to exercise any self-restraint in finding positive proof of climate change in every weather surprise. Several years back, climate campaigners in Britain, citing the latest warming models, ostentatiously predicted that snowstorms would soon be a thing of the past in Britain, something schoolchildren would read about in history books or hear tales about from their grandparents. Then this fall just past, the British Met Office predicted a 60 to 80 percent change of a warmer-than-average winter this year.

But now Britain is having its second extremely cold winter in a row, with record snowfalls nearly strangling the nation. Oops.

Not to worry. The climateers have swung into action, and have explained why cooling is really warming. Judah Cohen, a private “seasonal forecaster,” took to the pages of the New York Times to explain how the warming arctic led to more snowfall over the Siberian land mass, which in turn cooled the air circulating over the northern hemisphere, and there you have it, big cold weather storms in the United States and Europe. Or, as Mr. Cohen puts it, “the overall warming of the atmosphere is actually creating cold-weather extremes.” (Bryan Walsh at Time magazine offers a rundown of similar counterintuitive explanations for why warming causes cooling.)

This is all a lot more understandable if you’ve got a Crustian Secret Decoder Ring. Being very drunk also probably helps.

Read it.

The President of Egypt and the President of the United States both falsely stated that both Muslims and Christians were killed; all of the killed and almost all of the wounded were Christian.

Today brought two new developments: evidence that there was careful advanced co-ordination for the blast, and reports by witnesses that the security detachment guarding the church abruptly departed about an hour before the bomb exploded.

Read it.

Look for … the Union label….

Watch it.

I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it. And watch the video.

The rate of emigration of Jews from the Netherlands is accelerating. The number of attacks against visually identifiable Jews has increased, and almost all the perpetrators — when they can be found — are Muslims.

Read it.

Message: Stay out of hot air balloons.

Idiot.

Read it.

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

We ought to ask India how much they would charge to nuke Pakistan. I’d contribute.

Read it.

You may ask yourself, ‘Why is a publication called The Chronicle of Higher Education writing about “evangelicals”‘? I wonder that, too. Feel free to search the article for some connection with ‘higher education’; I couldn’t find one. It appears to be Yet Another SWPL hit-job on Christianity — or at least what the author understands Christianity to be, which isn’t at all close — in the guise of an academic overview.

Yet as soon as evangelicalism becomes a subject, it splinters and splits. Indeed, taken together, recent studies by more-or-less outsiders show there is no such thing as evangelicalism. The term represents a broad range of significantly different theologies, practices, and religious movements within Christianity, and there are often tensions among and within them. Which is no revelation at all to most more-or-less insiders, who call themselves evangelicals, however qualified, and who argue as much with others who do the same as with those of us who don’t.

Apparently the author doesn’t know much about history (cue Herman’s Hermits). ‘Evangelicals’ are people who accept the Protestant Reformation dictum of sola scriptura, the belief that the Bible and what may be found therein, is the sole and ultimate authority for Christian practice. This is why ‘evangelicals’ insist on their congregations being ‘Bible-based’.

From the standpoint of historical goes-back-to-the-Apostles Christianity, of course, this is absurd; the Christian ecclesia isn’t just a religion, it’s also a church in the sense of a corporate body with an organic historical existence and a hierarchy of authority. One might as well say that all it takes to be a Marine is a set of dress blues and a Marine Corps Manual, the silliness of which is immediately obvious. ‘To you you’re a pilot; maybe even to me you’re a pilot; but to a pilot are you a pilot?’ Sadly, no. But the article never touches on this; indeed, the author might not even be aware that it’s an issue (which wouldn’t surprise me a bit).

But there it is. It saddens me that the intellectual rigor of The Chronicle of Higher Education seems to be decaying as quickly as that of Higher Education itself.

Alfie Boe sings for his supper.

I predict that everything that can get worse, will get worse; and some things that you would think couldn’t get worse, will get worse nevertheless.

Take whatever action you think appropriate.

Read it.

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

Freeberg nails it once again.

It’s just common sense. Someone’s trying to build something, you help them or get out of the way. Someone’s trying to destroy something, you move to stop them. If something works well, you keep on doing it, and if it’s been given a few shots and has never panned out then you shelve it.

The reason this looks so much more complicated than it really is, is that it’s hard to demonstrate the true nature of something without contrasting it with something else. And when you place conservatism alongside liberalism, liberalism tends to want to talk about some things and not other things. There are many examples of what I’m talking about but I’ll just stick with “working families” as the best one. When liberals use this term, they don’t want you to take it literally, like “working families should keep more of their money” — you’re supposed to implicitly understand it means “people who make less than some amount, whether they work or not.”

Which ties in with my contention that what they actually mean is ‘working class families’, i.e. people who don’t have access to the paper-pushing that constitutes employment for the Crust.

So you translate “working families keep more of their money” to mean “working families who make more than half a million a year, getting a tax cut” and of course while this logically qualifies, it is no longer within the class that the liberal is really trying to describe.

This makes it tough to define liberalism, which poses some challenges in defining conservatism. The biggest obstacle to this is encountered when the liberal is actually engaged; they think their cause is noble, and so if honesty would reverse course on their progress even a little tiny bit, I’ve found a lot of them will stoop to deception without a moment’s conscious thought. At the very least, they’ll change the subject, on a macro- or a micro-level.

Therefore, I submit all significant conservative/liberal dust-ups fall into this pattern: The liberal wants a certain thing done, because there is a “good” class of people and a “bad” class of people, and the solution should work for the good people and against the bad people. The conservative is left stammering something equivalent to “What in…how in blazes is that supposed to solve the prob-a-luhm???” For daring to utter so much as a peep of protest against the solution the liberal has figured out is obviously the right way to go, the liberal calls the conservative stupid.

Read it.

Much of my library consists of paper books — 4000 at last estimate. They take up a lot of the space in my house; if it weren’t for them, my wife and I could survive in half the space. If I want to find one, good luck; I know roughly where it ought to be, but there are no guarantees.

The files in my LIBRARY directory (28,704 as of this minute) include full books, short stories, articles, and literally anything I can download from Google Books, Project Gutenberg, or print from the Internet through the Mac’s built in PDF printer driver; they occupy 37 GB on an external drive attached to my Mac Mini that is about the size of a Happy Meal. I keep them classified by LC number but with Spotlight I don’t even need that.

Consequently I am rapidly turning the Real Books into PDFs (what I don’t just buy in MOBI or EPUB format to begin with); they then go to the local public library, where I’m sure they’ll find a loving home.

We live in amazing times.

Watch ’em.

In praise of Dead White Males.

Joel Kotkin is always worth reading.

The contemporary city-state has flourished primarily in two regions: the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia. The development of Hong Kong and Singapore provided a critical stage for Southeast Asia, which has been home to the world’s the greatest economic expansion. Hong Kong, now a quasi-independent part of China, competes with London’s West End as the world’s most expensive office market. By one account, it is experiencing the fastest growth in rents of major office markets in the past year. Once known for their poverty and destitution, these Asian city-states now boast incomes comparable to many European and North American cities.

The Persian (or, as some like to call it, Arabian) Gulf constitutes the other hot bed for 21st Century city-states. Over the past decade, a string of once obscure cities from Dubai and Abu Dhabi to Qatar and Bahrain have risen to positions of global significance. Qatar, a tiny emirate with roughly 1.7 million people, will host the 2022 World Cup–an announcement that surprised nearly everyone. Abu Dhabi, a desert metropolis of some 2 million people, is undergoing the largest cultural development project on the planet, financed by the emirate’s huge oil wealth. This includes three massive museums: an outpost of the Louvre, a branch of the Guggenheim 12 times the size of the New York original, and a museum on maritime history.

Read it.

Fast forward to today, and ScienceFiction.com has launched as a way for fans to access information about all things science fiction, ranging from movies, TV shows, games, books, comic books and technology.

Read it.

Good news — if they do it right.

Read it.

I don’t see any indicia of Pravda here (other than the innate intellectual resemblance of the Pacific Northwest to the old Soviet Union), so Jay can rest easy.

Read it.

Even in the midst of his relentless narcissism, Eric S Raymond more often than not writes things worth reading; which, I suppose, is why people put up with him. And he always writes very well — this is one such piece, most interesting because we all exhibit haterboy tendencies to a greater or lesser degree. (I’m claiming Embittered Old Fart for myself, of course.)

Read it.

If there are two things that characterize Islamic culture, they are terrorism and inbreeding. The latest research shows that these two things might be closely connected.

Read it.

Nobody learns anything any more; they just learn how to look it up.

Think of that habit which I and likely everyone reading this succumb to now and then. You are talking with a friend, and can’t remember who that guy was in that movie. Without thinking, you pull out your phone and search. Mystery solved, it was Patrick Swayze. Harmless enough, right? The web in our pocket allows us to settle bar bets and track down trivia with ease. A tiny load off everyone’s mind.

The problem lies with the trend. We’re looking up more things, more often, and not because we’re more curious. It’s because we can’t be bothered to retain even the data that matter to us. The GPS in cars is an advance party of this trend: every couple months we hear of some driver who has followed the GPS to the bottom of a lake, or used a highway as a walking path because it was labeled as such on their phone’s map. My dad, who has driven to visit my brother in Vancouver, B.C., a dozen times, still uses the GPS despite my brother living in the same neighborhood for several years now. When I went up with him a month ago, the GPS route was slightly different, and my dad nearly had a panic attack. I convinced him to take the correct exit, but he was this close to doing something he knew was wrong simply because the map indicated he should.

If these things you’ve collected are important to you, or you found them interesting, why aren’t they inside you? Why aren’t they becoming part of the sea of experiences that makes up your unique intelligence and personality? If you fail to integrate an experience, it was, for all intents and purposes, no better than a dream.

Power Line describes the Crust without actually using the name.

Karl Marx classified people according to their relationship to the means of production. That was, perhaps, a plausible approach in the 19th century. Nowadays, however, it makes more sense to classify people according to their relationship to the trillions of dollars that flow from the productive private sector to the parasitic public sector. One could argue, with a great deal more force than Marx was able to muster, that 21st century America has a ruling class. It consists of those who direct and profit from the trillions of dollars that our government, at its various levels, extracts from working Americans. The footsoldiers of today’s ruling class are the public employees who command ever-increasing salaries and benefits and who, through their unions, provide much of the money and many of the votes that keep our ruling class in power.

Read it.

For some reason you never read anything positive about Republicans in the New York Times. I wonder why that is?

Read it.

Considering that their government is composed of the PlayStation’s target demographic, what could be more appropriate?

Read it.

Of course it does.

Read it.

He told police: “I received a phone call anonymously that my daughter was involved with a guy 40 years older than her. You said you couldn’t stop him – so I did.

“I saw it as my duty as a father.”

Sometimes the old ways are best. In related news:

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner to marry girlfriend

Be careful out there, Hef. Just sayin’.

Read it.

A fascinating discussion. He nails the Brits square on.

Now, I am no expert on the British Constitution, but if the British government is a true reflection of that constitution, then it is merely a pure democracy with a vestigial monarchy. Parliamentary supremacy is near total. My English friends will insist that the queen retains some real powers, but since their constitution can be changed by a simple act of Parliament, the actual exercise of any royal power is always subject, in practice, to the approval of Parliament, which means that any acts of the “sovereign” are really acts of Parliament, or at least acts to which Parliament chooses to raise no objection.

Although America is considered a young country, it is actually the oldest regime in the world. Some might think that honor goes to Britain, but the many constitutional “reforms,” notably the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884, have changed that government from a mixed constitution to a nearly pure democracy.

And the Americans.

Other amendments that damaged the constitution were the Sixteenth and the Seventeenth, both passed in 1913. That was a particularly bad year for the Republic, since it also saw the establishment of the Federal Reserve System. The Sixteenth Amendment established the income tax, which made the federal government the largest funding source. It is not an exaggeration to say that federalism died with this amendment, since power will always flow to the money. Cities and states were all too happy to kick problems upstairs to Washington, since the feds had the funds. When Joe Biden ran for Vice-President, he boasted that he had put “11,000 cops on the beat.” His claim is likely true, but it is odd for a senator to boast that he had done the job of a city councilman.

The number of congressmen was fixed by law in 1911 at 435. This was at a time when the population was 92 million, or less than one-third of what it is today. Each congressman purports to represent the wishes of 713,000 of his countrymen. That’s an awful lot of wishes. It’s also an awful lot of money; districts that large in an electoral system require huge campaign funds. The average winning campaign in 2008 cost $1.4 million. This means that a congressman who wishes to keep his job must raise $1,900 for every one of the 730 days he is in office. Sundays, Christmas, Easter and holidays included; there is no rest from fund-raising. But there is a lot of help. The sources for that kind of money are limited, but they are extremely eager to lend a hand, and all they ask in return is, well, a decent return on their money. Who can blame them? Under such circumstances, the “people’s house” must exclude the people; it is not that the congressman isn’t willing to listen to all, but he must listen to the people who have paid for the privilege.

Watch it. Feel free to laugh — they do.

The SWPL guide to, well, you know, those icky religious people who live in Flyover Country, don’t send their kids to the right schools, and don’t worry about the Really Important Things in Life, like global warming and income inequality and whether Starbucks puts too much foam in their lattes.

Read it. And weep.

This is the Crust in all it’s glory. Child of divorce marries child of divorce, sees their kids’ grandparents as a resource to be exploited (and who could blame her?), has at most a shallow commitment to marriage as an institution or family as anything more than people who just happen to be ‘related’ to each other by a roll of the dice and the quirks of the legal system.

Oh, and lives in New York, writes poems for a living (or so it seems), and exposes the Crust for the New York Times. We can’t forget that.