Steve Sailer has a way with words.

Remember when conspiracy theorists used to get all worked up about the secret meetings of the Bilderbergers? Personally, I thought the idea of senior bigshots like Henry Kissinger and Helmut Schmidt getting together in private to pull strings was reasonably reassuring. Thank God somebody knows what they are doing!

How naive I was …

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(This is me grinning.)

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And you can believe as much or as little of that as you care to.

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

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Irony is no longer a course module in the Home Ec curriculum.

Check it out.

I guess California isn’t totally worthless.

Tyler Cowen has the skinny.

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

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Due to a sales tax measure recently passed in CA state legislature and on its way to be signed by Governor Jerry Brown, Amazon has sent all participants in its California Amazon Associates program the below email, warning of the termination of the program.

They’ve already done it in four states that passed similar legislation.

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Welcome to Canadistan.

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Greg Pavelka, a wildlife biologist with the Corps of Engineers in Yankton, SD, told the Seattle Times that this event will leave the river in a “much more natural state than it has seen in decades,” describing the epic flooding as a “prolonged headache for small towns and farmers along its path, but a boon for endangered species.”  He went on to say, “The former function of the river is being restored in this one-year event. In the short term, it could be detrimental, but in the long term it could be very beneficial.”

And I bet you thought it was just Global Warming.

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Let’s start with the White House title for the speech:

Remarks by the President on the Critical Role the Manufacturing Sector Plays in the American Economy

The manufacturing does not play a particularly critical role in the US economy. Employment in manufacturing as a percentage of total employment has been falling steadily since the end of World War II. But a lot of people think there is something special about manufacturing so the title strikes a resonant chord for many people even outside manufacturing.

Like ‘family farm’, urban density, mass transit, and ‘high speed rail’, the desperate clinging to manufacturing is one of the superficially plausible but substantially reactionary fetishes of the ‘progressives’.

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Glenn Beck says his family was accosted while watching a movie in a New York City park Monday night. On his radio show and his website today, Beck described the incident and said an angry moviegoer kicked a glass of wine onto his wife Tania’s back, and as she got up to walk away, a man shouted: “We hate conservatives here.”

The Left: Thugs R Us.

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Lots of newspaper coverage about supposed Mormon polygamists — and attention from law enforcement — but everybody looks the other way when Muslims are polygamous.

One Muslima who was interviewed for the NPR piece said that Muslim husbands just spring their new marriages on their first wives. “Sometimes he say, ‘OK, I am going to be married tomorrow,’ or ‘I’m going to be married today.’ He’s going to ask you like that. It happened to me.” One Muslima in Philadelphia in 2007 wouldn’t stand for this: Myra Morton shot her husband, Jereleigh, to death just before he was going to fly to Morocco to pick up his second wife.

The Other McCain stretches his fisking muscles.

Advocates of unlimited centralized power habitually seek to portray the Constitution as an obsolete remnant of the “horse and buggy” era, a pejorative phrase popularized by liberal proponents of the New Deal, key elements of which were struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. By the 1950s, however — after two decades of Democrat presidents — the court’s former conservative majority had been replaced by liberals, and for more than three decades the Supreme Court itself became an instrument for the expansion of federal authority.

And, if Justice Kennedy gets replaced by a Ginsburg or a Breyer, it will be so again.

Yet again note how Stengel stigmatizes the past — where Washington, Madison and Jefferson were ignorant of all things modern — so as to flatter contemporary readers as superior in knowledge to the Founders. “You know so much more than those old dead guys,” Stengel is telling them. “Why should we let ourselves be hemmed in by what a bunch of slave-owners with wooden teeth wrote on a silly piece of parchment?”

A bunch of people who, in Chesterton’s apt phrase, people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday just because it is Thursday. Progress is inevitable, therefore the future is necessarily better than the past, without respect to whatever ‘the future’ or ‘the past’ might include.

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Tonight’s final article once again concerns the issue of responsibility for the would-be immigrants who have perished at sea while attempting to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.

Funny how everybody who lives inside the Ummah appears to want to leave. It rather resembles Communism in that respect.

Now, we all know who will ultimately be held responsible….

…white Europeans (or Americans).

It can’t be the Libyans or the Tunisians, with their corrupt kleptocracies and despotic governments.

It can’t be the people smugglers, who send their clients across the water in leaky and antiquated boats after demanding an extortionate price.

It can’t be the enrichers themselves, who choose to set sail without resources or visas in an attempt to reach the Land of Milk and Welfare Benefits.

No, only white people are considered to have agency, so only white people can be to blame. Everyone else is an innocent dupe, or a pawn, or a prisoner of circumstances beyond his control.

Paul Carr and Sarah Lacy are Not Safe For Work.

Delightfully entertaining. (Complaints always sound more sincere in a British accent.)

My favorite is PETA wanting to re-name the Tenderloin area in San Francisco to ‘the Tempe district’. I am not making this up.

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Good to see somebody else picking up on what I’ve been saying for years.

What commonality binds Haim Saban, Penny Pritzker, and Warren Buffett, aside from membership in the billionaire’s club?  Guilt, and not the quotidian variety — unfulfilled potential, disappointing behavior, lost love — that afflicts most of us.  Theirs is a guilt that only afflicts the very rich — a guilt that arises from wanting more equitable outcomes coupled with an unwillingness to pay the requisite taxes to achieve those outcomes.  It’s the same guilt that has plagued Rockefeller, Kennedy, and Mott progeny for decades.

That special kind of guilt that doesn’t manifest itself in behavior modification, but rather self-righteous attempts to interfere with how others live their lives. White liberal guilt.

Most income earners — salary and wage earners, in particular — are stuck with their onerous tax burden (which, by the way, is why they rarely bitch about paying too little tax).  The very rich, in contrast, enjoy the economy of scale to defer and avoid taxes through trusts, off-shore accounts, property exchanges that resemble barters, and myriad manipulations of the tax code.  Their tax-importuning subset are like the chatty members of a group dinner who convince everyone to order the foie gras, caviar, and truffles but skip out before the bill arrives.

And even if they stuck around, they would take comfort in the fact that after the bill is paid, they’d still have folding money in their pockets while the rest of the party had pockets full of change. Small change.

There are solutions to this vexing tax problem.  There is the obvious: The whiny woeful rich could simply write an additional tax check each year.  But that solution doesn’t allow the rich to step down from their pedestals when the mood strikes to commiserate with the lesser rich, nor does it allow them to join idiotic self-congratulatory Web sites like Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength.  As for the psychosis, it is really a fear of being the lone patsy writing addition checks to the government.

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

But let’s be honest: The very rich don’t want to pay more tax, they want you to pay more taxes.  …  These rich tax agitators know that the real cost of any tax freight is borne by the comfortable and very comfortable, the almost rich and nearly rich income earners.

Exactly so. They want to impoverish the up-and-comers who are breathing down their necks, financially. They want to prevent competition from Those People for the luxury goods on which they’ve become so psychologically dependent.

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Perhaps this will bring home to people the stupidity of visiting places where the per-capita annual GDP is less than one of a burger-flipper’s paychecks.

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

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The governor of Afghanistan’s central bank, Abdul Qadeer Fitrat, has resigned and fled the country, saying his life is in danger for investigating fraud.

He said the government had interfered in his efforts to pursue those responsible for corruption at the privately-owned Kabul Bank.

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

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Iran has made dramatic progress in its ballistic missile programs over the past year, unveiling three new missiles it claims are already in production, including an innovative design that could be a “game-changer” if used against U.S. aircraft carriers, an Israeli expert widely considered one of the world’s top authorities on Iranian missile programs says.

Also significant were three unannounced tests of longer-range missiles most experts believe were designed to carry a nuclear warhead.

Boy, that sure makes me feel better. Doesn’t it make you feel better?

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Spain’s state-controlled rail operator has been forced to axe one of its newest high speed train services after it emerged that the only nine passengers were using it each day.

Oh, hey, we need one of those in this country….

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They examined data from a representative sample pf physicians. Specifically, they looked at how often physicians accepted new patients by insurance type and year.

What did they find? The overall acceptance rate of new patients was pretty static from 2005-2008, going from 94.2% to 95.3%. The percentage of physicians accepting new Medicare patients dropped from 95.5% from 92.9% (about 2.5%). But here’s the thing. There was a bigger drop in physician acceptance of patients with private noncapitated insurance from 93.3% to 87.8% (about 5.5%). In fact, they found that over 90% of physicians accepted new Medicare patients. Reports of reimbursement rates driving away physicians may be more anecdotal than widespread.

And who could blame them?

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Undesirable or dangerous immigrants who may face ill-treatment at home cannot be deported, no matter how bad their crimes in Britain, human rights judges have ruled.

In a test case ahead of more than 200 similar actions pending against the UK, the Strasbourg judges decreed that the UK’s duty to protect people against torture or inhuman treatment is ”absolute”.

How long before the Brits realize that joining the EU was possibly the stupidest thing the British government has done since pissing off their American colonies?

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If it moves, regulate it. If it keeps moving, tax it. If it quits moving, subsidize it.

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

The Other McCain reminds us of some Inconvenient Truth.

One of the easiest things in the world to do is to tell other people how to raise their children. This is especially easy if you have no children of your own.

Got it in one.

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They have the technology.

“They have a very clever mechanism, with several advantages. The first is financing, which they have better access to because Chinese companies are mostly state-owned. It is getting more and more difficult for European contractors to access financing, and you need to have a lot of finance in the construction industry,” he said.

“Then they have managed to transfer Chinese workers, who are cheaper.

They can also use construction machinery they have built in China.

Finally, because they can generate still profit despite their low bids, they use that money to hire famous architects and demonstrate they can deliver a project above the normal standard”.

I remember, when I was young, seeing signs on products that said ‘Hand-made by slave labor in the Soviet Union’. Who says that slavery is economically inefficient?

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The British settlement of Sydney in 1788 has been officially declared an “invasion”, following strong pressure from the Aboriginal contingent of the city council.

The City of Sydney voted 7-2 to remove the words “European arrival” from documents and rejected a compromise plan to describe the First Fleet’s arrival as “colonisation”.

Of course, you can’t ‘invade’ something that wasn’t a nation at the time. It’s comforting to know that Australians have to suffer through the same Politically Correct ‘oh, the poor suffering natives’ nonsense with which the rest of us are afflicted. Perhaps they ought to look to the American experience and dump all the Aborigines in some outback reservation area (without clothes or medical care) to resume their former stone-age existence. Sheesh.

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Three dialysis patients have received the world’s first blood vessels grown in a lab from donated skin cells. It’s a key step toward creating a supply of ready-to-use arteries and veins that could be used to treat diabetics, soldiers with damaged limbs, people having heart bypass surgery and others.

We have the technology.

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While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation.

I guess they regret having invented automobiles. Forward into the past!

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But only on ‘the rich’, of course.

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And, if we listened to such experts, progress would never happen.

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The Russian double agent who betrayed Anna Chapman and nine other Kremlin spies to the CIA last summer has been found guilty of state treason as a Moscow military court revealed a poignant final message he wrote to his wife.

A poignant reminder that just because the Russians are no longer Communist doesn’t mean they aren’t still our enemy.

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The nanny state run wild.

Actually, we ought to be grateful to San Francisco — they do all the stupid things so we don’t have to.

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There seems to be a deliberateness to the chaos, a purpose to the ever-increasing exclamation points, as in crisis (!), catastrophe (!!), act now or else (!!!), … we’re on the verge of (!!!!). An attempt to keep so many parts moving so quickly that by the time we realize what has happened, we will have an economic and political system based on punishing achievement in the name of fairness, redistributing goods and services in the name of equality, and above all, dependence on a government which controls everything by endlessly proclaiming that only it has good intentions.

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I am not making this up.

No doubt it never occurred to them that, in their attempt to avoid stereotypes, they’re actually confirming a really big one.

Charles Murray is a smart guy, and he asks the right questions, but he doesn’t have a lot of answers.

The New York Times’s David Leonhardt has weighed in with a defense of college-for-all. Arnold Kling dissects some of its obvious flaws on econlog. But the larger problem is that Leonhardt misses the point. The choice should not be framed in terms of college or no college. Almost everyone needs more education after high school. The problem is a piece of paper called the bachelor’s degree that has become both the requirement for first class citizenship in this country (being “just a high school graduate” makes you distinctly second class) and at the same time has become meaningless as an indication of what you have learned. End the BA, stop requiring four years worth of courses, stop glorifying the residential campus, and create a post-high-school educational system that takes advantage of all the ways that technology offers to let high school graduates tailor their post-secondary education to what they need to realize their abilities. Forget about the percentage of people going to college and focus instead on how antiquated, inefficient, and punitive the BA system is.

Easy to say; harder to do. The problem is that, when applying for a job, it’s not enough to say ‘I know Kung Fu!’; you have to demonstrate it somehow. And an employer isn’t going to give a prospective engineer a comprehensive set of exams to verify that he is, actually, qualified to be an engineer; that’s why they ask for a bachelor’s degree. (Actually, these days, with the degeneration of the educational system, employers are more than likely asking for a bachelor’s degree to make sure that applicants have what would in the Good Old Days have been considered a decent high-school education.)

We know what the problem is. What’s the solution?

Former Congressman Jim Leach is Obama’s head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a poster-child for the proposition that the Federal government in the modern era has abandoned any pretext to be a government of derived and strictly limited powers.

Jim Leach was allegedly a Republican Congressman from Iowa for 30 years. In that time, according to Wikipedia, his accomplishments were:

• the creation of an international AIDS Trust Fund,
• debt relief for the world’s poorest countries,
• authorization of an International Monetary Fund quota increase,
• making the Peace Corps an independent federal agency,
• requiring the federal government to use soy ink,
• prohibiting Internet gambling,
• restraining federal employee growth, and
• redressing certain Holocaust asset losses.

Eight bullet points — of which only 25% are even plausibly Republican. Chop off the last two, and Barney Frank would be hard put to beat it.

This is the challenge for the Republican party: Develop a program that differs from the Democrats, and stick to it; not running candidates who are merely ‘Democrat light’. Unless and until it does that, it is doomed to failure.

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A look at how little protection is afforded in New York for those who choose not to embrace same-sex ‘marriage’.

(There are no protections in New York for vendors who are not clergy or religious institutions.)

So if you refuse to sell something that is to be used in a same-sex ‘marriage’, or rent property, or publish notices, or whatever — unless you’re clergy or a religious institution, you get whacked with the Discrimination Bat.

But that’s really only the tip of the iceberg — and probably the easiest conflicts to resolve — when it comes to discussions of religious liberty and gay rights. Will same-sex marriage laws impact the rights of religious organizations to place children for adoption as they see fit? What about Lutheran parochial schools that have faced civil rights lawsuits over their honor code? Will Muslim doctors have the right to refuse to do in vitro fertilization treatment on a woman in a lesbian marriage? Will an evangelical referring a patient to someone without religious qualms over same-sex marriage lose her job or license? What about the civil servants who have religious objections to same-sex marriage? Apart from wedding vendors, there are all sorts of other lines of work where individual religious liberty and religiously-motivated objections to same-sex marriage where the questions persist. What about adoption services, for instance? How might public school curriculum change? Will that pose a challenge for any public school teachers who are Muslim, Jewish or Christian?

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Congressman Clyburn is a deep-dyed black Democrat career politician, so we look to him to give us the Party Line; and he does not disappoint:

The fact of the matter is, we have on the table all kinds of revenue raises that they keep calling tax increases. How do you call closing loopholes to oil companies that are making billions of dollars in profits, closing up these loopholes that would generate $40 to $50 billion in revenue, how do you call that a tax hike? That is no tax hike. You only hike taxes when you raise rates. We are not asking anybody to raise anybody’s rates. We want us to have an effective tax collection and close these loopholes, stop giving billions of dollars in breaks to millionaires and billionaires.

‘You only hike taxes when you raise rates.’ Uh, no, Congressman, you hike taxes when the amount of tax you pay after a change is more than what you pay before the change. That’s what ‘hike taxes’ means. (I always knew that black people didn’t always speak the same brand of English as the rest of us, but I never suspected that they didn’t necessarily understand standard English, either. But here’s proof.)

The sad truth that goes unspoken here is that most of those ‘loopholes’ that give ‘billions of dollars in breaks to millionaires and billionaires’ were put in place in the tax code by Democrat Congressmen JUST LIKE YOU for ‘millionaires and billionaires’ who are OVERWHELMINGLY DEMOCRAT. Warren Buffet. Bill Gates Sr. George Soros. Al Gore. Pick a Kennedy. Pick a Rockefeller. The reason why the Koch brothers are catching such shit from the Left is that they refuse to stay on the Democrats’ Rich People Plantation. (And don’t get me started on what happens to people, like Clarence Thomas, who refuse to stay on the Democrats’ Black People Plantation.)

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Can Dick Cheney be far behind? Stay tuned.

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RAF chiefs fear that the “cream” of the air force is leaving after a dozen group captains resigned or asked for voluntary redundancy in the past month, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.

And, really, who could blame them? There is no ‘career’ available in the British military any more.

Senior RAF sources have said that the officers decided to quit after they had “seen the writing on the wall” with reductions in equipment and personnel.

Yuval Levin tries to get things back on track.

All over the developed world, nations are coming to terms with the fact that the social-democratic welfare state is turning out to be untenable. The reason is partly institutional: The administrative state is dismally inefficient and unresponsive, and therefore ill-suited to our age of endless choice and variety. The reason is also partly cultural and moral: The attempt to rescue the citizen from the burdens of responsibility has undermined the family, self-reliance, and self-government. But, in practice, it is above all fiscal: The welfare state has turned out to be unaffordable, dependent as it is upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era. Sustaining existing programs of social insurance, let alone continuing to build new ones on the social-democratic model, has become increasingly difficult in recent years, and projections for the coming decades paint an impossibly grim and baleful picture. There is simply no way that Europe, Japan, or America can actually go where the economists’ long-term charts now point — to debts that utterly overwhelm their productive capacities, governments that do almost nothing but support the elderly, and economies with no room for dynamism, for growth, or for youth. Some change must come, and so it will.

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‘Social justice’ is one of the great shibboleths of American political mythology.

And who should be in charge of measuring welfare, summing it, and weighing the gains and losses in order to arrive at a socially “just” distribution of income, whatever that is? Well, we know the answer to that question: It has to be the state — or more accurately — elected officials and bureaucrats: people not known for their perspicacity, objectivity, and even-handedness.

In the alternative, a just society could be one where individuals engage in voluntary, cooperative exchanges of goods and services for their mutual betterment, and from the fruits of which they voluntarily aid those whom they know to be in need of aid.

The alternative is inevitably attacked as “unjust.” But it should be noted that such attacks come from individuals (philosophers, politicians, do-gooders, etc.) who would impose their own views of “social justice” on everyone. How any such imposition can be considered more “just” than a regime of voluntary, cooperative, mutually beneficial behavior is beyond me.

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To understand the impact, I’ll exaggerate to make a point—your healthcare provider doesn’t care about you unless they can see the whites of your eyes. Why is that? Today’s flawed reimbursement scheme only compensates the healthcare provider for a face to face visit. It’s hard to fault the primary care physician who has been put on a hamster wheel of 30-40 appointments per day and can’t even give their practice away upon retirement (that was once their retirement plan) for not wanting to deal with their patients sending email or sharing information from their personal health record.

My doctor will allow me to e-mail him questions and concerns — if I sign up for a paid subscription plan. Which I won’t do, because my medical insurance doesn’t cover it.

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A former president of the Maryland State Medical Society, Dr. Sroka has practiced family medicine for 32 years in a small, red-brick building just six miles from his childhood home, treating fishing buddies, neighbors and even his elementary school principal much the way doctors have practiced medicine for centuries. He likes to chat, but with costs going up and reimbursements down, that extra time has hurt his income. So Dr. Sroka, 62, thought about retiring.

He tried to sell his once highly profitable practice. No luck. He tried giving it away. No luck.

Considering the way the government and the insurance companies (under the lash of the goverment) treat doctors these days, it’s a surprise anybody wants to go to med school.

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An eight-year-old girl has been killed after insurgents used her in a bomb attack on police in southern Afghanistan, the government has said.

The interior ministry said insurgents gave the girl a package and told her to take it to a police vehicle, detonating it as she approached.

But they’re not terrorists, of course; they’re insurgents.

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

David Friedman is always worth reading.

Textbooks are notoriously boring, in part perhaps because they are selected by the professor who assigns them not the students who read them, and some have the reputation of being seriously dumbed down in intellectual level while unusably broad in coverage. What books are there that are used as textbooks but also bought and read in significant numbers by people who are reading them because they want to?

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The bodies of soldiers killed in Afghanistan will no longer be honoured with a public parade but will be driven through back streets to avoid upset, it has emerged.

…

“I am not sure taking coffins in hearses past schools, past families, past married quarters is necessarily the thing that everybody would wish to see … the focus must be on the families of the dead service personnel. They are the people who care most. That is where our focus is.”

Not Churchill’s Britain any more, is it?

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I’ve seen pictures of the Glastonbury festival — like Woodstock, without the organization.

Perhaps he got a glimpse of what the future holds for Britain and took the natural way out.

Can’t say that I blame him.

Read it.

Apparently all the Indian MPs under 30 are children of MPs. (Al Gore, are you listenin’?)

Some nations embrace the Crustian lifestyle more than others, and John Derbyshire isn’t the only guy saying “Get a government job!”

The more things change, the more they remain the same.