Read it.

Everything bad is good for you.

Read it.

Get ready for the great environmental civil wars. So far the environmental community has been fighting industry, developers, utilities and other villainous purveyors of human stuff. But going forward its big battles might be with itself.

Pass the popcorn. As Kissinger said about the Iran/Iraq war, ‘A pity both sides can’t lose.’

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He watched doctors treat up to 40 patients a day and have at least four staff members each to handle the nitty-gritty paperwork.

“It’s around 70 percent overhead,” he says. “It wasn’t like this decades ago. Doctors served their neighborhoods, took cash, and didn’t charge a lot because there was so little overhead. So I designed a process that went back to this model, looking at it from the patient’s perspective, and just injected a little technology.”

There are two major fields remaining in which automation is long overdue: Education and health care. This is a very good start.

 With $1,500, he set up a house-call-only practice in his Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood, serving only two zip codes. He created a website through Apple’s iWeb that featured his resume, and posted his schedule on a Google Calendar so patient’s could enter in an appointment time online.

Note: No office, so no office expense. (When was the last time you saw a doctor make a house call? I remember one when Eisenhower was President. Nothing since.) Scheduling is done online, which ensures that (a) his prospective patients are at least middle-class, since they have Internet access, and so will probably be able to pay him, and (b) no staff expense.

Read it.

Good thing they didn’t extend it to embarrassing train wrecks; it would be difficult to take a picture of the economy in places like Michigan, California, and New York.

Read it.

Boy, that Obama stimulus really worked out great, didn’t it? Wonder what he’ll come up next time — cancer, maybe?

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Read it.

These have always struck me as probably being uncomfortable, putting too much artificial space between the toes. On the other hand, if you’re trying to convince people that you’ve found BigFoot, this would seem a good start.

Read it. And watch the video.

As of Thursday morning, there have been 202 incidents of sabotage since 45,000 Communications Workers of American (CWA) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) members went out on strike to preserve their Cadillac health plans.

Of course, that was Thursday morning and, since the strike has been going on for about 10 days, the number of incidents caused by unionunknown vandals will have likely increased, which makes the number cited in this Verizon-prepared video already outdated….

Look for … the Union label….

Read it.

So far, it’s worked in mice for up to 140 days.

Mice always get the good stuff.

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Was it something he said?

The Other McCain has an insight.

After all, why spoil a good thing?

Read it.

Another day, another flashmob story.  A bunch of people in Baltimore used the internet (platform unspecified) to organize a stop and rob.

More accurately, a bunch of black people. Guess criminals don’t treasure diversity as much as the Crust does.

Read it.

The New York Times takes a while to catch up. Bashing the E.P.A. has been a theme in the G.O.P. race since Nixon resigned.

Read it.

Congress? Who pays any attention to Congress?

The Obama administration announced Thursday that it would launch a case-by-case review of illegal immigrants slated for deportation, in a move that could grant a reprieve to so-called DREAM Act beneficiaries and thousands of others.

The DREAM Act is a proposal in Congress to give illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children a chance at legal status if they complete two years of college or military service. Though the bill has not passed, supporters and critics alike suggested Thursday’s announcement could serve to unilaterally carry out its provisions.

Read it.

Immigrant rights advocates this week are organizing protests against a federal initiative aimed at deporting illegal immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes.

There can be no legitimate objection to such a program. In fact, the government ought to consider it a core duty and function to get rid of such people.

But critics of the program have staged protests in cities across the country this week, claiming Secure Communities should be terminated on the grounds that it snares minor offenders, many of whom are never even convicted of a crime, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Apparently these ‘critics of the program’ don’t know what ‘illegal’ means in the phrase ‘illegal immigrant’. If someone is in this country illegally, then they are by definition a criminal, and not a ‘minor offender’.

Read it.

A hiker who became lost in mist-shrouded fells was saved after she used her BlackBerry to send rescuers a photograph of the surrounding landscape.

We have the technology.

George Will turns over a rock.

We are in the fifth month of the Libyan intervention that Barack Obama’s administration said would involve “days, not weeks,” an undertaking about which Prime Minister David Cameron was much more enthusiastic than Obama, who rarely mentions it. The intervention resulted from Cameron’s and French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s sudden zest for waging humanitarian war.

In 2002, during preparations for the invasion of Iraq, the then head of the British army, returning from a Washington visit, told Hastings, “Mass matters — and we don’t have it.” Hastings notes that the U.S. Marine Corps’ air wing is larger than the Royal Air Force. Americans know that “if the British army shrinks as scheduled after withdrawal from Afghanistan, we shall thereafter be able to deploy only a single brigade group of 7,000 to 8,000 men for sustained operations overseas.”

Read it.

Soya got pregnant by a 17-year-old boyfriend who is allowed by Janis to stay overnight at the family home.
Jobless single mum Janis, 48, said she was delighted because the council will now have to give her a bigger house. . . .

She added: “Our three-bedroom place was already overcrowded with her sisters Coco and Ritzy, her brother Tarot, Soya’s boyfriend Jake and one of her sister’s babies.

“Once the new baby comes the council will have to find us a place with four or five bedrooms. . . .
“I’m sure she’ll make a wonderful mum and will teach her children discipline like I have.”

Read it.

After all, dirt is so … bucolic, don’t you know, and vulgar — the sort of thing that Republicans do out there in Flyover Country.

Read it.

President Obama is barnstorming the heartland to boost US jobs in a taxpayer-financed luxury bus the government had custom built — in Canada, The Post has learned.

Hey, he doesn’t get his political ideas from America — why should he get his bus from America?

Read it.

With around 25 employees, John King owns one of the largest non-union electrical contracting businesses in the Toledo, Ohio area. As a non-union contractor, his business happens to be doing well at a time when unions in the construction industry are suffering. This, it seems, has made the usual animosity unions have for him even greater, making him a prime target of union thugs. So much so, that one of them tried to kill him last week at his home.

Hey, they aren’t called ‘union thugs’ for nothing.

Since he’s been in business, in addition to the legal battles and verbal abuse, King’s company has been vandalized and threatened on numerous occasions.

“Back then, it was nothing to have to regularly buy a new set of tires.” King said during a telephone interview on Tuesday. “The ice pick was the weapon of choice.”

Until Wednesday, the worst of the union attacks on King and his business came in the mid-eighties during the UAW strike at AP Parts. During a lull during the lengthy strike, King’s business was picketed by more than 50 IBEW picketers. This was at a time when he only had eight or nine employees. One of his employees, whose car was trashed by the union picketers, was also beaten up by IBEW thugs.

Look for … the Union label….

Paul Rahe is smarter than you and me put together. He was a Classics/History grad student at Yale when I was an undergrad, and never uttered a trivial word.

The tone of the speech and the manner of delivery were pitch-perfect for Texas. I am not, however, certain that this will play for a national audience. I do not mean to suggest that Perry should never be folksy. He comes from Paint Creek, and this comes naturally to him. Moreover, he needs at the outset to gather to him those who belong to his natural constituency – which is made up of white people who live in the countryside and in small towns. But to persuade a wider audience, Perry will have to pitch his argument to an audience that thinks itself more sophisticated. I am not arguing that the city slickers really are more sophisticated; I am arguing that they are in the grips of a powerful prejudice against people from places like Paint Creek.

You will respond that Bill Clinton came from Hope, Arkansas, and you will be correct. But Bill Clinton went to Georgetown University and Yale Law School, and he did a stint at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He was vetted. Perry is an outsider. Even in some circles in Texas, Aggies are regarded as hicks. It is easy to see what sort of campaign David Axelrod and his associates will gin up against Perry. It will draw on the instinctive bigotry that made it so easy to demonize Lyndon Baines Johnson and the younger Bush. Obama cannot run on his record. To win, he must demonize the alternative. It is going to be ugly.

Read it.

The Washington Post has a look at the economy of the national capital, which is booming.

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

You’ll wonder where the money went
If you make Obama President….

Read it.

Full disclosure: I don’t like Rick Perry for our next president. I have my reasons that aren’t worth going into here. However, when I was watching the GOP debate and pro-Perry people started bringing up Rick Perry’s job numbers as a cudgel against other candidates, I looked into the BLS data on Texas jobs. Having familiarized myself with the data, I started noticing claims on the Texas jobs data that started popping up that directly contradicted what I was seeing in the data. So I wanted to clear up a couple of these common misconceptions.

Read it.

A couple in Shanghai strung their 12-year-old son to a metal pole by his hands and feet and beat him with whips and a wooden club after he stole their rent money to play video games.

Under the Chinese one-child policy, if they snuff him, do they get to try again?

Freeberg always gets the good stuff.

Read it.

The End Times are very near….

Read it.

I guess that’s why the Republicans are The Party of the Rich … people like AlGore – 0h, wait – well, then, the Rockefellers – oh, wait – then maybe Warren Buffett or Bill Gates – oh, wait….

Rich people don’t get rich by wasting their money. So what are these ‘heavy hitters’ getting for their money? Hmmm?

And … oh, look … more than half are labor unions. But, but, but … labor unions claim that labor is getting hammered; where does all that money come from? Hmmmm?

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch understands the dialectic.

What I really didn’t understand until recently though is why so many rich Americans seem to loathe their richness as much as everyone else does. Many in Silicon Valley want to tax the rich into the middle class and let government spend and spend and spend. The super rich tech elite flock to Obama, joining in the call to screw the rich as loudly as all the rest.

Whenever something doesn’t make sense, you’re not seeing the whole picture.

Then I figured it out. As I wrote then, the super rich won’t mind at all if we “tax the rich” as it’s currently defined. That’s because people who are super rich don’t really pay taxes. They pay taxes on this year’s income, and capital gains on accumulated wealth. But the only “tax” that can ever touch what they’ve already made is inflation.

All you can do is tax their income this year. That doesn’t touch what’s in the Money Bin.

The super rich love to talk about higher taxes on the rich because it’s a competitive barrier protecting them from competition. If the people making a lot of money today have to pay much higher taxes, they probably won’t ever accumulate enough wealth to be “super rich.”

Yup. There’s the Secret Agenda that the Lower Crust don’t see.

Buffett calls for an increase in all types of taxes – income, dividend and capital gains. That would be a nice triple layer of protection against any newcomers, and still preserve all – 100% – of the $47 billion he’s accumulated until now.

Funny how that works.

Rich people are very good at staying rich. And Warren Buffett is the smartest rich person I know. That’s why he’s able to say feel good bullshit about how he should be paying higher taxes when he has absolutely no intention of letting the government anywhere near his real money.

And that’s the dirty little secret of all these ‘super-rich’ tax-and-spenders; if they feel undertaxed, they could just write a check to the government, but they never will, because what they really object to is the low level of taxation on people who aren’t super-rich yet but are trying to become so … just like them.

Read it.

Everything bad is good for you.

Don’t like this finding? Wait a month or two, and they’ll change it.

John Hinderaker does the math.

The remarkable thing about the anthropogenic global warming hoax is that it isn’t even a close call. Anyone who takes the trouble to investigate the science will quickly learn that the alarmist position is a fraudulent one, driven, I think, by the billions of dollars that are thrown at those who are willing to sell out scientific method in support of the statist line. Hiding the decline is way more lucrative than presenting objective, and unalarming, scientific findings.

Read it.

A while ago two of my students said they were going to ‘turn over’ a large house in a wealthy area near them. I asked why? They said they had it tough, they wanted a new TV, and it was something to do.

I listened, and then explained that just because they were poor they didn’t need to rob a house. I told them that I didn’t even have a TV, which amazed them. I explained to them how my Grandparents grew up in the East End during the great depression. There were few jobs, no money and no welfare. They went without food on occasion, suffered discrimination and had to deal with fascism, yet they emerged from poverty. I explained how they did it: They worked hard, sacrificed for the future, educated themselves, showed respect for the law and other people, had strong families and never gave up. The two boys looked thoughtful for a while and then one said: ‘Yes, but I never had a father to tell me that’.

Read it.

A coalition of nonprofit groups is calling on customers of Amazon.com to cancel their accounts unless the Internet retailer stops resisting a California law that requires more online retailers to charge a state sales tax.

The nonprofits along with several state lawmakers Monday called on Amazon to “stop cheating California” by trying to repeal the law through a ballot referendum.

‘MOMMEEE! JOHNNY HIT ME BACK!’ I suppose it’s ‘cheating’ the robber by attempting to hang on to your wallet.

I guess that, not only are they nonprofit groups, they want to make sure that Amazon is a nonprofit group, too.

I predict that (a) it won’t work; Amazon is just too convenient, and (b) these are customers that Amazon will be just as well off without.

Read it.

And YOU, the American taxpayer, paid for it! Aren’t you proud?

Read it.

Thus, we have the central idea that forms a distinct brand of Islamic anti-Semitism: namely the motif that Jews are most hostile to Islam and Allah’s revelations among humanity, and therefore prone to treachery in dealings with others, arrogant self-righteousness, slaying Allah’s messengers and prophets, and other forms of evil conduct.

For example, the Qur’an itself affirms, “You will surely find that the people most hostile to the believers are the Jews and pagans” (5:82). This verse could be taken as just a reference to Muhammad’s historical conflicts with the Jewish and pagan tribes of Arabia, but orthodoxy did not interpret it that way, seeing the Qur’an as literally valid in its axioms for all times and places.

This theme of unique Jewish hostility in Islam appears to have been a continual thread throughout Muslim history. Writing in the ninth century, the polymath al-Jahiz wrote that the local Muslim populations generally find the Jewish people more repulsive than the Christians because the former, supposedly delighting in their sense of superiority, choose not to intermarry with those outside their religion. He also identified 5:82 quoted above as a reason why the Jews were regarded by the Muslims of his time as more treacherous and guilty of unbelief.

Read it.

One of the dirty little secrets of Islam — actually, it isn’t all that secret — is that a Muslim’s first loyalty is always to the Ummah; everything else comes after.

To anyone familiar with Muslim doctrine, Pfc. Naser Jason Abdo’s actions — from refusing to deploy to Afghanistan lest he kill fellow Muslims to plotting a terror attack to kill fellow Americans — make perfect sense and accord well with Islam’s dichotomous doctrine of wala wa bara, often translated as “loyalty and enmity.”

Built atop numerous Koran verses and backed by Sharia, wala requires Muslims to be loyal to fellow Muslims, and explains why Abdo refused to deploy to Muslim nations.

While loyalty may appear admirable, it has a flipside, bara, which requires Muslims to disassociate themselves from non-Muslims — to be disloyal to them (see al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri’s 60 page treatise titled “Loyalty and Enmity” in The Al Qaeda Reader for details).

Joel Kotkin sounds the alarm.

The hardening of class divisions    has been building for a generation, first in the West but increasingly in fast-developing countries such as China. The growing chasm between the classes has its roots in globalization, which has taken jobs from blue-collar and now even white-collar employees; technology, which has allowed the fleetest and richest companies and individuals to shift operations at rapid speed to any locale; and the secularization of society, which has undermined the traditional values about work and family that have underpinned grassroots capitalism from its very origins.

David Henderson celebrates an anniversary.

Today is the 40th anniversary of President Nixon’s announcement of price controls on the American economy. He imposed an immediate freeze on all wages and prices that lasted for 90 days. Then he went through the various phases of control, leading to decontrol by 1974. With one main exception: oil and gasoline. Controls remained on oil and gasoline and these controls led to a lot of damage.

We can also blame Nixon for the 55-mph speed limit and the CAFE standards that have screwed up the auto industry from that day to this. (On top of the EPA and Food Stamps.) It’s hard to think of what a Democrat President would have done differently, or worse.

Read it.

Frederick Hess has an interview with the former New York State commissioner of education, David Steiner, who reports: “Because of federal largess, we had at some points in the agency over 40 experts in nutrition around the issue of school lunches. At the same time, we had one person who was an expert on science education because the federal funding was there for the nutrition experts, but we had to rely on state funding for the science curriculum expert.”

Your tax dollars at work. Remind me why the federal government is involved in school lunches. Shit, remind me why any government is involved in school lunches.

Read it.

Downing Street has admitted that it is powerless to force the return of the Lockerbie bomber to Britain almost two years after the Libyan was released from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds.

Hey, I’ve got an idea: Why not … wait for it … bomb him? They’re bombing everyone else in Libya, and it is his turn….

Read it.

Russia’s FSB intelligence service has arrested four suspected Islamist terrorists and charged them with plotting to blow up a high-speed commuter train travelling between Moscow and St Petersburg.

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

Read it.

Arnold Kling calls out the fat cat of Omaha.

Read it.

The New York Times takes it’s turn doing a hit-piece on Rick Perry. Who’s next? Boston Globe? L.A. Times? MSNBC?

Of course.

A 13-year-old boy has walked free from court after admitting smashing up a shop with a stolen golf club as his mother said the riots are because the government does “f*** all” for children.

Gee, I thought it was parents who were supposed to do stuff for children, not the government. Guess that goes to show how far Britain has degenerated under Labour.

Read it.

And if you believe that one they’ll tell you another one.

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Wonder what took him so long. The rest of America wrote off New York years (nay, decades) ago.

Much of the opposition to Wal-Mart in cities like New York is led by unions. Organized labor, fearing that the retailer’s low prices and modest wages will undercut unionized stores, have built anti-Wal-Mart alliances with Democratic members of city councils.

Low prices for consumers don’t matter — what matters is high wages for union members. The Democrat party at prayer.

“We don’t care if they’re never here,” said Ed Ott, executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council. “We don’t miss them. We have great supermarkets and great retail outlets in New York. We don’t need Wal-Mart.”

Says somebody who’s never had to shop for stuff in New York. If you’re Warren Buffett, and can afford Warren Buffett prices, you’re golden; for anybody else, it’s arm-and-a-leg time. Asshole probably lives in the suburbs on Long Island or Westchester.

But Wal-Mart, a cost-minded retailer known for its dowdy merchandise, and New York, a city of excesses known for cutting-edge style, have long had an uneasy relationship.

“Dowdy merchandise”? There’s your ‘objective reporting’ in the New York Times for you.

Wal-Mart, which has nearly 4,000 stores in the United States, has sought to open stores in Rego Park, Queens, and in Staten Island, but both plans fell through in the face of intense union, community and political opposition.

Note that the opposition is not on the part of consumers, but on the part of those who want to keep consumers enslaved to their political rent-seeking. If consumers, especially the poor people who Walmart helps stretch their paychecks, didn’t want Walmart, then they wouldn’t shop there, and the places would go broke; but that never happens. Democrats love democracy except where it counts, at the checkout line.

Despite setbacks in each of these cities, Wal-Mart has had success in urban areas. In Chicago, for example, Wal-Mart opened a store last year that attracted thousands of job applicants and has, Mr. Scott said, performed better than expected.

Gee, I wonder why.

“We don’t like how they do business,” Mr. Ott, the New York union official, said.

And, of course, you must impose that dislike on other people. No wonder people characterize unions as un-American.

Read it.

Is Paul the Right’s Lyndon LaRouche?

If you know who Lyndon LaRouche is, you need to get out more.

Again and again Paul has dissented, been laughed at, and been proven correct. That may be one reason he evokes so much scorn in certain corners of the Right.

Another is that he tends to have opinions and policy preferences that the voters don’t like, something that doesn’t get a lot of time in coverage like this.

The fact that he’s ‘been proven correct’ may qualify him to be a pundit on TV, or a Presidential adviser; but being President is more than just seeing what’s wrong — it’s being able to craft a solution and persuade people to get with the program, something for which Paul (through over 20 years in Congress) hasn’t demonstrated any talent. If it were enough to figure out what the problem is, Ross Perot would have been President. People vote for those whom they think can fix the problem, not just those who can diagnose it correctly.

Check it out.

Steve Sailer kicks over a rock.

Have you noticed how the smarter the offender against political correctness, the more the establishment denounces him for stupidity? A few nights ago, English historian David Starkey intellectually mopped the floor with the other three participants on a BBC talk show about the riots. Slowly the outraged losers in the debate are trying to gather their wits and respond.

We see this same effect in the U.S. all the time. Every Democrat candidate is the second coming of Einstein, while every Republican is a knuckle-dragger just down from the trees. This was especially silly with respect to George W Bush, who graduated from Yale and Harvard Business School, credentials that any Democrat candidate would give his left nut (assuming one could find it) to achieve. When it was revealed that Bush got better grades than Kerry at Yale, the silence of the Crust was deafening, since there wasn’t any available response and all they could do was ignore it and hope it went away … which it did, because something that would have been trumpeted for years had the situation been reversed didn’t fit the Narrative so had to be buried.

This is especially amusing when it comes to AlGore, who talks like a ten-year-old and has the apparent IQ of a carrot. Yet when he was running for President, he was the Smart Guy and Bush was the Dumb Guy.