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Since the fall of Mubarak, the Obamites and neocons, like global limousine liberals, have shifted the focus of their do-gooderism from Egypt to the next great liberal/neocon cause, helping overthrow Kaddafi, even as Egypt has steadily moved in exactly the direction that the Islam critics predicted. Below is a powerful and well-written article by a liberal Muslim in Canada who expresses total disillusion with the Islamic rise to power and the concomitant persecution of Christians that have resulted from the great democratic revolution.

Reality keeps reminding us that democracy is a means, not an end, and like any tool can produce undesirable results. Our leaders keep not getting the message.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

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By definition, artisan foods are ingredients and foods that are hand-crafted, created in small quantities, and tend to be high-quality products.

Almost by definition, they tend to be very pricey and affordable only by the Crust and their friends.

Jeff Jarvis isn’t afraid to ask hard questions.

The answer to this question is probably yes. But I don’t think it should be answered until we reconsider the delivery industry from the ground up, seeing what is no longer needed and what the market can provide in the digital age.

The traditional argument for a government-run postal service is a standard one for non-essential government services in general: It’s a good thing, people ought to have it, private companies won’t provide it where there’s no money to be made, so the government has to be the ‘provider of last resort’. (If anything reminds you of the ‘health care debate’, you’re not alone.) On this basis, one might deduce that government-provided postal service will be a money-losing proposition, and that’s certainly the case in the modern world. (How much of that is due to the traditional corruption and inefficiency that the government brings to anything it touches, and how much is just a reflection of market forces, is an exercise left to the reader.)

Do we still need the Postal Service’s guarantee of universal delivery? Likely yes, but it’s worth asking whether that obligation to get deliveries to remote outposts should be carried out with offices and trucks owned by the government or through subsidies to private industry. Does the Postal Service have a role to play in and identity (could it be a guarantor?) and security (our mail is protected from warrantless spying but our email so far is not). What are the principles and rights to privacy and security that should govern even private and electronic delivery? What impact does all this have on broadband policy?

Good questions all. Nobody in the government is asking them, of course, because government employees don’t have any incentive to reduce the services provided by government (and hence the number of government employees). So those of us who are paying for all this need to start asking them, and ought to be pressing our elected representatives (when they can take some time from fund-raising in order to get re-elected) to ask them as well.

Good luck with that.

Read it.

It is hard for us in America to grasp how consuming this story must be to the French. Imagine that in January 2008 Barack Obama, having won the Iowa caucuses and become the front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, had been arrested for attempting to rape a hotel maid in New York City, photographed in handcuffs, and imprisoned in Rikers Island.

Many of us would have said ‘Mission accomplished.’ and gone back to whatever we were doing.

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Lots of people sympathize with the basic argument that your private life is private, and it seems unfair to have private affairs spread across the news. And yet, if someone really is doing something egregious — or potentially harmful — is seeking to gag the press and others from making that information public only giving them cover to progress further and commit potentially heinous acts?

How many times have we read stories about people attempting to investigate possible malfeasance on the part of an organization only to be firewalled by assertions that privacy policies (and sometimes privacy laws) don’t allow any information to be released?

Steve Sailer has some fun with the culture.

Thus, evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa finds himself widely hated today for posting an item on Psychology Today asking “Why are black women rated less physically attractive than other women, but black men are rated better looking than other men?” It caused such a furor (described here) that the magazine deleted it, so only a screenshot survives. Of course, the reason the whole world got so angry with Dr. Kanazawa is because black women are rated less physically attractive than other women on average.

So, you aren’t supposed to say that. If he had said “Why are Slavic supermodels rated less physically attractive than other women?” nobody would have much cared.

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San Francisco’s much-heralded “social justice” requirements for city contracts are costing local taxpayers millions of dollars a year in overcharges, according to workers in departments ranging from the Municipal Transportation Agency to the Department of Emergency Management.

Markups from approved vendors range from 10 to 150 percent, employees said, with one calling the city’s requirement that contractors provide health care benefits for domestic partners “the expensive white elephant standing in the middle of the room (that) no one wants to mention.”

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you suprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Roiling debates in state capitals across the land demonstrate a backlash against the unions. But a new book by Terry Moe argues that it’s technology, not politics, that will be their undoing. Moe is a political science professor at Stanford and has long been a leading advocate for charter schools and vouchers. Special Interest is in part a solid history of the rise of the unions not so long ago — in the 1960s and ’70s. But the book’s analysis of sweeping trends is what’s most compelling. Moe says legislative reforms like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top “are small things by comparison, and they can be blocked.” By contrast, “education technology is a tsunami that is only now beginning to swell.” Unions “can’t stop it, although they will try.”

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A clever device that is not much known in the U.S.

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And no doubt blamed the Americans.

An Egyptian princess who lived more than 3,500 years ago is the oldest known person to have had clogged arteries, dispelling the myth that heart disease is a product of modern society, a new study says.

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Gotta love Australians.

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Mark Twain is credited with the remark that history doesn’t repeat itself–but it rhymes.* Over the last 48 hours I think we’ve seen an ironic rhyme of an old career-killing incident: Newt Gingrich has had his Romney Moment. No–not the Romney moment you’re thinking; not Newt’s tentative embrace of an individual mandate for health care, which is the 8,000-pound millstone sinking Mitt Romney’s prospects. I think Newt’s problem is his alignment with another Romney–Mitt’s dad, George Romney.

Newt would make a good Vice-President, though.

The Other McCain has some fun with our Politically Correct culture.

Why is it that so many liberals can’t tell the difference between “poor” and “black”?

A local Dallas talk show yesterday afternoon had a caller, from her accent black, who denounced the phrase ‘food stamp President’ as obvious racism, yet was unable to explain how ‘food stamps’ were a race, or linked to any particular race. Being a talk-show host these days is both easy and depressing, I would guess.

Read it.

Photovoltaics suffer from gross inefficiency, despite incremental improvements in their power producing capabilities. According to research by a team led by a University of Missouri professor, however, newly developed nantenna-equipped solar sheets can reap more than 90 percent of the sun’s bounty — which is more than double the efficiency of existing solar technologies. Apparently, some “special high-speed electrical circuitry” is the secret sauce behind the solar breakthrough.

Read it.

Teachers are giving up trying to make boys read long books because they cannot get past 100 pages, new research as found.

I have a fix for that — two words: Tom Clancy.

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Julien Moise envisioned a device that’s powered by blown air, displaying the time only when you want to see it.

We do these silly things so you don’t have to.

Freeberg has some fun. Watch the  video.

Read it.

More than $20 billion has been given to Pakistan since Sept. 11, 2001. President Obama is proposing almost $3 billion in aid for the supposed ally in the War on Terror for fiscal year 2012.  That includes:

– $1.6 billion for police and military;

– $150 million for what the State Department calls “good government and democracy building”;

– $122 million for health, AIDS and “family planning”;

– $145 million for education.

The rest goes to economic development and humanitarian assistance.

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The converter employs up to one thousand tiny cantilevers attached to a one square inch surface (e.g. a computer chip) to produce between one and ten milliwatts of electricity — admittedly a very small amount of energy. However, it’s creators are quick to point out that a slew of these converters could generate enough power to perform small tasks in the heat-generating device — things like sensing when a server room gets too hot for comfort.

This is pretty cool.

The Other McCain paints in stark colors.

. . . and she was just 17 years old. Simona was born in Lithuania, when that nation was still under the heel of Soviet despotism. When she was 3 years old, her family emigrated to Israel.

On the evening of June 10, 2001, Simona and some friends wanted to attend a dance party for young emigres from the former Soviet Union.

The beachfront disco that Simona visited that night in June 2001 was at the Dolphinarium, scene of one of the most heinous atrocities of the Second Antifada — a suicide bombing that killed 21 people, 16 of whom were just teenagers.

Simona’s killer was Sa’id Hasan Houtari. Both Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad initially claimed credit for the bombing, but it was eventually determined that Hamas was responsible. News of this murderous atrocity “was greeted with jubilation in Ramallah and parts of Gaza, where people danced in the streets and fired guns in the air. ” Documents captured during Israel’s 2002 military invasion of the West Bank showed that the Palestinian Authority had paid $2,000 to the family of the suicide bomber Houtari, who was celebrated as a “martyr” by the Palestinians.

They don’t want peace. They want dead Jews.

And that says all that needs to be said on the subject.

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

Freeberg has a beef.

Now, I do have my preferences on things, but I’m a live-and-let-live kinda guy. So what’s my beef with the hippies? I didn’t have any complaints when you saw them here & there…I didn’t even complain when you saw them all over the place. Hippies can be interesting people. No, my complaint is when you can’t get away from them. Let’s face it, since the sixties the hippie lifestyle has been one of cognitive dissonance. “We just want to be left alone to grow our vegetables & whatever, and do our own thing, man”…coupled up with…”change the world, one [insert name of incremental thing] at a time. Man.” They like having the props that come with wanting to do-your-own-thing — freedom lovers — but they aren’t wholly dedicated to that. In fact, not even in the slightest. All too often, they want to make other people do things their way, but not admit to it.

And that goes for ‘progressives’ in general. They’re all in favor of ‘power to the people’, except that they mean ‘power to our people and to hell with your people’.

So in the long run, the European smaller-portions thing doesn’t work for me. What seldom to never gets mentioned is that European portions-control is tailored around European physical activities; which, near as I can make out, consists of sitting at a tiny table with a tiny teacup and bitching about Americans. Well, this American likes to spend some calories doing things.

Read it.

God forbid that anyone should eat something not certified by the government.

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In the wonderful new world that’s being lovingly sculpted by the nice people who know what’s best for us, peace on Earth will apparently never come until everyone everywhere is either offended or apologizing all the time.

Read it.

My own first reaction was: why in the world is the head of the International Monetary Fund a socialist?

Which is distinct from, and not as interesting as, the question of why in the world is a socialist the head of the International Monetary Fund.

But none of it matters, because ‘socialism’ is merely the latest Clever Plastique Disguise by which the Crust attempts to rationalize drawing all power into the hands of the government (i.e. theirs).

Steve Sailer kicks over a rock.

Read it.

Thousands of artifacts dating to between 13,200 and 15,500 years ago were uncovered by researchers led by Michael R. Waters of Texas A&M University. They report the discovery in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

The find was located 5 feet below materials left by the well-known Clovis culture, which was once thought to have been the first American settlers around 13,000 years ago.

The Other McCain is perplexed.

It is nowadays said by many that Barack Obama is the worst president in American history. If this is so, President Obama will have eclipsed a mark that most observers believed would stand unchallenged until the final trumpet: The abysmal record of James Earl “Jimmy” Carter.

It’s a tough choice.

Read it.

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

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Think of it as evolution in action.

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Their latest project, Mycoform, places mushroom roots known as mycelium spores into a mold and feeds them with agricultural byproducts like buckwheat husks. In just over a week at 80 degrees, the spores grow to fill the form, resulting in a light yet solid structure. The brick is heated to 100 degrees when complete to kill the spores, preventing further growth.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Is it time to leave yet?

Read it.

US military boffins have added cheap “fire and forget” autonomous seeker heads to basic, lightweight dumb rockets of a type which can be fired in large numbers. By seriously reducing the size and cost of smart weapons, this development is yet another big step towards changing the way wars are fought.

A single helicopter armed with LCITS 70mms would be able, as the ONR suggests, to cause a frightful slaughter among a “swarm” of attacking speedboats. Normally the chopper crew would be slowed up or even stymied by the need to hold laser dots on targets moving at high speed and probably weaving or jinking unpredictably. There is a “fire and forget” version of Hellfire but it can only be shot from more sophisticated Apache copters mounting the Longbow radar: and an Apache can only carry 16 Hellfires as opposed to 76 LCITS 70mms.

Michelle Malkin has the goods.

Bleeding-heart sympathizers seriously speculated that al-Murisi had simply mistaken clearly marked lavatory doors for the clearly marked cockpit door (because, you know, it’s normal to shout “God is great” repeatedly just before relieving yourself as your plane is about to land). Some federal authorities and media whitewashers proclaimed that al-Murisi’s motives were “unknown.”

So how, despite a massive transportation and homeland security apparatus, did al-Murisi get into this country and get on a plane? He had no keys, no luggage, $47 cash, two curious posted checks totaling $13,000, and a trove of expired and current state IDs from New York and California — where relatives said he had not notified them that he was coming. He is young, male, brought no family with him, had no job or other discernible income, and hails from the terror-coddling nation of Yemen. Yes, the same Yemen that is Osama bin Laden’s ancestral home, harbors al-Qaida operatives who are burning the “torch of jihad,” and is deemed a “special interest country” whose citizens warrant increased scrutiny by DHS when they cross the border illegally.

Well, you know, those TSA guys were too busy patting down suspicious-looking babies to pay attention. Only so many hours in the day, you know.

Read it.

There’s trouble down at the Crust.

In affidavits, family friends say that the girl went from being outgoing to anxious and sad.

Yeah, well, being exposed to psychiatrists will do that to you.

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The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a ‘job’ should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly. The idea of a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his lessons! Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a man when the other is still a baby.

America used to be like that.

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Bottom Line: What often gets overlooked by politicians in Washington is that real people, not corporations like ExxonMobil, ultimately pay all taxes. Higher taxes on oil companies will get passed on to actual people, and can only mean higher prices for consumers at the pump, lower wages and fewer jobs for employees, and/or lower dividends for shareholders. There might be a political payoff to raising taxes on oil companies, but it will be an economic disaster that will also make us more dependent on foreign oil.

Arnold Kling calls out the Crust.

1. The main reason we have them is because parents love it when their kids are placed in them. It is a huge status thing for parents. G&T programs could have negative effectiveness and still be enormously popular.

2. Either you believe your bright kids should experience going to class with students who are not so bright, or you don’t. If you don’t, then pay for private school. G&T allows you to send your kids to private school while claiming they are still in public school.

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The draining away of working-class support isn’t a problem confined to the Labour Party. Left-wing parties all over Europe are facing similar difficulties. Labour was punished by the British electorate last year, polling its lowest share of the vote since 1983, but not as severely as the Social Democrats were by the Swedes, polling their lowest share of the vote since universal suffrage was introduced in 1921. This was the first time in the Social Democrats’ history that it lost two elections in a row. Only 22 per cent of those Swedes in work voted Social Democrat in 2010, a number that fell to 13 per cent in the Stockholm region.

On the face of it, mass immigration has been the undoing of leftwing political parties across Europe since it erodes the shared values that are an essential prerequisite of a well-funded welfare state. Why should indigenous, working populations support the high levels of taxation necessary to sustain generous welfare payments if the beneficiaries are people unlike themselves? If they can’t look at a benefit recipient and think, “There, but for the grace of God, go I”, why should they continue to pay such high taxes? This problem was spelt out by David Willetts a few years ago:

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Well, you don’t want to rush into these things.

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Now all he has to do is change his name to ‘Barack’.

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As recession-racked cities struggle to balance their budgets with everything short of feeling behind sofa cushions for loose change, a growing number are seeking more money — just don’t use the word taxes — from nonprofit institutions that occupy valuable land but by law do not pay property taxes.

Boston has been sending letters to its largest nonprofit institutions this year, telling them the value of their land and asking them to begin making annual payments that would eventually rise to a quarter of what they would owe if they paid property taxes. Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel of Chicago wants the city to begin charging water fees to nonprofits, which have been spared them in the past. And the mayor of Providence, R.I., Angel Taveras, cited Boston’s example this month when he called on nonprofits to pay more money to the city.

The technical term for this is ‘shakedown’.

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OK, the incredible details of the operation to silence Osama bin Laden are, indeed, irresistible — but our government’s been saying way too much about them, tipping off al Qaeda and clueing in other bad guys.

You can’t blame the press; its job is to get the story. But you can finger the White House and other government officials for not keeping enough of a zipped lip on some elements of the historic operation.

Read it.

I’d be more impressed with ‘economists’ like this one if, just once, they supported something that wasn’t part of the market basket of contemporary ‘progressive’ policies.

And, of course, economists — once they wander into the political field — are as inclined (some would say, more inclined) to commit the fallacy of Unwarranted Aggregation. For example:

Think about that when arguing that the richest country in the world can’t afford Social Security and Medicare starting at age 65 because “everyone” in this country has seen their life expectancy increase.

The problem with this is that ‘the richest country in the world’ can’t afford anything, because ‘the richest country in the world’ doesn’t have one giant bank account that can be tapped for whatever Cool Idea is the latest fad. That’s the tedious trick that most social ‘reformers’ use so often that it’s worn grooves in everybody’s brains and so is no longer even noticed, much less protested. Calling a country ‘rich’ is just a metaphor, a way of summarizing a technical statistical aggregation so that it can be compared with other technical statistical aggregations; using it as if it were a Real Thing that can serve as a foundation for a policy recommendation is the sort of Stupid Mistake that a Real Scientist tries to avoid — which is why when Real Scientists speak, what they say is hedged around with cautions and qualifiers.

Any purported scientist that says something definite without immediately following it with ‘But of course you have to bear in mind that…’ is almost certainly talking out of his ass, and so said opinion is to be accorded no more deference than one would give to, oh, a newspaper story (i.e. not very much).

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The word “antifa” comes from Antifaschismus, the German term for anti-fascism. Dressed in their preferred street garb of black clothes, boots, balaclavas, and anti-Nazi patches are young people, almost all white, driven by an ideology as powerful and magnetic as communism. French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut has warned, “I think that the lofty idea of ‘the war on racism’ is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology. And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what communism was for the 20th century: a source of violence.”

Antifa activists do not debate their enemies; after all, their enemies are fascists and thus have no legitimacy. Their goal is to confront and silence them.

And this differs from fascists … how?

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Well, of course. What else could she do with it?

Steve Sailer is on the case.

Once upon a time, rich people like the Rockefellers and Bushes donated a lot of money to population limitation charities. Now, that is vastly out of fashion because it’s considered racist.

What if, though, the efforts of Bill and Melinda Gates to force every child to go to college are really a triple bankshot superduper secret effort to lower birthrates among underclass NAMs by making them waste time in college before having children?

After all, they can’t really give to Planned Parenthood any more.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning….

Read it.

A disturbing new element has crept into our political life: organized efforts to intimidate private citizens who choose to support certain political causes or otherwise participate in civic affairs. This, as far as I know, is unprecedented in our modern history. Our democracy depends on citizen involvement, and until now, Americans have felt free to participate in public life and to support whatever causes, political and otherwise, they choose. But if the Left has its way, that may be about to change.

History repeats itself. This sort of intimidation was a hallmark of the statist political movements during the 1930s; Hitler’s brownshirts were particularly notorious in that respect. So this appears to be just another attempt to make us more like Europe.

We wrote here about a disgraceful episode in which approximately 500 union members were bused to the home of a lawyer who works for Bank of America, where they “demonstrated” on his lawn, thereby terrifying his teenage son, who was home alone. The event was supposed to have something to do with foreclosures.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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‘Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.’

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Just in case you want to know what you’re missing.

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Syrian tanks shelled residential areas in the city of Homs on Wednesday, targeting civilians at random in a significant escalation of violence to crush the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad.

History repeats itself.