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South African reader RH sent us the article below, which describes the latest innovative proposal by Desmond Tutu, the retired (Anglican) Archbishop of Cape Town. The Most Rev. Tutu has proposed a new income-redistribution plan that could solve all South Africa’s financial problems: a tax on white people.

Al Sharpton is kicking himself for not having thought of this first. Jesse Jackson is kicking himself because he thought that’s what Obama was going to do — but, as it turned out, Obama screwed him along with all the rest of his supporters.

Come to think of it, isn’t that what was just imposed in England last week? Admittedly, that tax is indirect:

Step 1:		“Youths” of color pilfer the swag from businesses.
Step 2:		The insurance companies reimburse the merchants.
Step 3:		Under the Riot Damages Act of 1886, the Government reimburses the insurance companies.
Step 4:		Taxpayers reimburse the Government.

The vast majority of British taxpayers are, well, white. So there you go.

Steve Sailer reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun.

This speech, given shortly after the race riots that followed the murder of Martin Luther King, effectively destroyed Enoch Powell’s political career. Unfortunately, he was right.

That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect.

Read it.

But of course he’s going to pull us out of there Real Soon Now.

Already, hundreds more American troops have been killed in Afghanistan during the less than three years of the Obama administration than during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration. According to the iCasualties.org Web site, whose count more or less tracks that of other sites devoted to these statistics, 630 American soldiers died in the Afghanistan operation in the years 2001 through 2008, when Mr. Bush was president, while 1097 American soldiers have died in the years 2009, 2010, and 2011. Even if you allocate the 30 or so American soldiers killed in January 2009 entirely to Mr. Bush, who was president until the January 20 inauguration, it is quite a record.

No doubt he’ll get around to it as soon as he’s finished closing down Camp X-Ray at Gitmo.

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Power Line has the answer.

What would liberals do without gaps to close? I think they’d pretty much have to go out of business. You’ve your education gap. You’ve got your power gap. You’ve got your jail gap. You’ve got your income gap, perhaps the granddaddy of them all.

This week Senators Mary Landrieu and Patty Murray took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to introduce us to yet another gap: “The skills gap.” I know when I want to understand issues related to productive employment, Landrieu and Murray are among the first people who spring to mind, and they don’t disappoint.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Landrieu and Murray explain, we have approximately three million job openings, all waiting to be filled. With so many Americans out of work, what’s the problem? I know what you’re thinking. It’s not Obama or his policies! Of course not.

Needless to say, Senators Landrieu and Murray are Democrats who have worked for government all their lives.

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Not surprisingly, the problem is framed in terms of “tribal” issues and not any religious ones. But the tribal courts and the societies that depend on them are informed by the letter and spirit of Islamic law, which cannot be discounted in a discussion of the challenges of improving the rights of women in Islamic countries. Qur’an 4:34 validates the idea of violence as a recourse against “disobedient” women. Qur’an 2:282 renders a woman’s testimony as worth half that of a man, and women’s testimony is routinely inadmissible in cases of adultery under Sharia. And Qur’an 24:13, a conveniently timed revelation that took the heat off of Muhammad’s wife Aisha when she was accused of adultery, has led to the nearly impossible requirement of having four witnesses to establish the crime of rape under Sharia.

These concepts, believed to originate from the mouth of Allah, have played a role in forming the consciences of those who operate and seek the judgment of local jirga courts, contributing to the treatment of women as possessions and commodities, the use of violence to “control” or make an example of them, and the under-reporting of crimes against them, including honor killings and rape.

Women who report the crimes face a second wave of assault — one that is often court-ordered.

Your life under Islam. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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Is this a great country, or what?

Just think of how much more money they’d make in Austin.

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You see, I love it here in San Diego. The weather is amazing, the beaches are beautiful, and the people are friendly and generally entrepreneurial. It’s a refreshing change from the Bay Area, where everyone seemed like they were always “too busy” to hang out. Here, life is more laid-back, and I’ve grown to appreciate it.

But one thing I’ve struggled with about California for years is the government. (Yes, I’m going to break my own unspoken rule and wax political on my blog.) The government is notoriously business-unfriendly–with everything from high taxes on business earnings to badgering businesses into more work.)

This is what happens when Democrats are left in charge.

And California has beautiful weather. Just think of what must be happening in Michigan.

Brian and I are moving to Austin before the end of the year. At this point, I’m not sure exactly when we’ll move, but it will be in November at the latest. And to California, I say: Love your weather–but good riddance!

Good decision, kid. You’ll never regret it.

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When the Democratic National Committee chose Charlotte, North Carolina as the site for its 2012 DNC Convention, some union bosses’ eyebrows were raised (as well were those on the extreme Left) with the DNC’s decision to go union-free.  While the underlying issue of the Charlotte choice may be a union rift playing out between AFL-CIO unions and the C2W union because Charlotte is becoming a big pain in the ass donkey for Democrats.

Even Democrats realize that dealing with unions is more trouble than it’s worth.

Read  it.

A landmark article went online a few days ago in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. The study was prepared by a team of 32 researchers headed by the University of Edinburgh’s Gail Davies and entitled “Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic.” The study’s methods do not lend themselves to easy explanation unless you’re at home with SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) and inverse variance weighted models used to capture “the variance in the trait that is due to linkage disequilibrium between genotyped SNPs and unknown causal variants.” But the bottom line of the article is reasonably simple. Using nothing but genetic information, the team of researchers was able to establish that the narrow heritability of crystallized intelligence (the kind that can be more easily affected by education) is at least 40 percent. The narrow heritability of fluid intelligence (the kind that involves pure problem-solving ability, independently of acquired knowledge) is at least 51 percent. Note the at least. The study’s authors explicitly state that these estimates are lower bounds.

Shelves of books and articles denying or minimizing the heritability of IQ have suddenly become obsolete. Those who continue to claim that IQ tests don’t measure anything real inside the brain also have their work cut out for them.

Ah, science. ‘Progressives’ claim that it’s on their side, but it keeps debunking their egalitarian mythologies.

That famous trope of Democrat Congressman Dick Gephardt is one of the fixed myths of the ‘progressive’ movement in America. According to the myth, rich people are rich people because they got lucky, and it’s society’s job to make sure that those who didn’t pull a winning ticket in ‘life’s lottery’ should nevertheless get a leg up — at taxpayer expense, of course.

But if you look at real lottery winners (such as this one), you find out that most of those who started out in the, shall we say, lower ranks economically tend to blow their money fairly quickly and wind up worse than they started. This suggests that there is something about the character of those who, acquiring great wealth, manage to keep it that goes beyond luck, and reflects … dare we say it? … intrinsic worth.

Just sayin’.

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The researchers also say numerical talent does not appeared to be linked to all round intelligence.

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Just a little reminder that Islam isn’t the only enemy out there.

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I’m sure you’re all wondering that.

As the WSJ reports today, one 64-year-old male participant suffered a heart attack during the swim and was later pronounced dead at a hospital, while a 40-year-old female spotted floating face-down was taken to the hospital and died early Monday.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Now that Perry is officially a candidate, it’s time for the media hit-pieces to begin. CNN, as befits its seniority as a Voice of the Crust, gets to lead off.

But that doesn’t mean that all is well with employment in the Lone Star State. Texas leads the nation in minimum-wage jobs, and many positions don’t offer health benefits. Also, steep budget cuts are expected to result in the loss of more than 100,000 jobs.

Perhaps most importantly, Texas can’t create jobs fast enough to keep up with its rapidly growing population. Since 2007, the state’s number of working-age residents expanded by 6.6%, nearly twice the national average.

Translation: Well, they may have a lot of growth, but it’s still not enough, so there.

Of course, Texas enjoys advantages that have nothing to do with having Perry at the helm. Rich in natural resources, the state has been benefiting from the high price of oil and the expanded interest in natural gas exploration. Energy employment has soared by 16.8% over the past year alone.

Translation: Well, they may be in good shape,  but they’re just lucky, it doesn’t have anything to do with Perry, so there.

Uh, guys, having the government keep its hands off is far from ‘nothing’. Both Perry and Obama inherited an economy from George W Bush. Obama put his in the toilet by dicking around with it; Perry left it alone, and it’s leading the nation. ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear.’

“We have created jobs, but they are not jobs with good wages and benefits,” said F. Scott McCown, executive director, Center for Public Policy Priorities, which advocates for low-income residents.

So it’s not enough to make more jobs, they have to be ‘good’ jobs, according to some ‘progressive’ standard that is never articulated but which Democrats achieve while destroying economic growth but Republicans can’t seem to reach no matter how many people they put to work. I see.

Read it. And watch the videos.

Today’s entry: This video from Rebuild the Dream, the new organization of former Obama green jobs czar and 9/11 truther Van Jones, in which cute kids mouth bizarrely sophisticated talking points, including words and phrases they almost certainly don’t understand, such as “infrastructure,” “living wage,” and “tax brackets.”

Read it.

The Knigge Society says the practice of greeting colleagues and business partners with a kiss on the cheek is uncomfortable for many Germans.

Yeah, if they wanted to be French, they’d move.

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Mark Duggan, the man whose death sparked the beginning of riots across Britain, was the nephew of a renowned gangland criminal with a history of violence.

I knew they’d get around to blaming the Irish eventually.

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And if you believe that one, he’ll tell you another one.

“I’m going to keep at it until every single American who wants a job can find one,” he said.

Or until we’re all broke, whichever comes first.

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The members of Congress’s new Deficit Reduction Committee are charged with figuring out how to raise revenues and reduce spending in order to address the nation’s burgeoning debt.

Political supporters of  Rep. Xavier Becerra (D., Calif.), one of the appointees to deficit-reduction committee, have already figured out how to raise revenue—by touting his seat on the panel to raise money for his political campaign.

About two hours after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi named Mr. Becerra to the committee on Thursday, a political supporter began notifying Wall Street lobbyists about a $1,500-per-person fund-raising event on Aug. 31.

For the playbook, watch The Distinguished Gentleman with Eddie Murphy.

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NCAA bans use of skraeling names. (Can’t be insensitive, you know, not that it’s any of the NCAA’s business.)

North Dakota university sues NCAA. (Butt out. None of your business. We’re proud of our Fighting Sioux.)

University settles with NCAA; name to be discontinued. (Academics cave under charges of raaaaaaaacism, as usual.)

North Dakota passes law ordering that the name be kept. (Nyaa, nyaa.)

A quartet of skraeling students, under the wing of a law firm famous for greenmail class-actions against corporations, sue the university, the governor, the legislature (and probably George W. Bush, for all I know). (Sue! Sue! It’s what Americans do!)

So your guess is as good as mine — except that I can’t help but think that everybody involved has better things to do rather than sue about the Sioux.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you should want to do.

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“We leave our DNA everywhere,” Jules Epstein, law professor at Widener University told the ABA Journal. “If you smoke a cigarette and drop it or if you go to the barbershop and your hair is cut, you are leaving your DNA behind. To the extent that DNA has been abandoned, there is no invasion of privacy if others collect it.”

Read it.

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Santa Clara County’s housing authority could have spent $16 million of federal funds to help more struggling families put a roof over their heads. Instead, it chose to more than double the value of its employees’ retirement benefits.

That may sound unusual, but federal housing officials say it was an allowable expense. Still, the switch from a 401(k)-style retirement plan to a pension allowing workers to retire early — with guaranteed lifetime payments — is raising eyebrows at a time when generous public employee pensions are under fire.

As Jerry Pournelle is fond of saying, the purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers. If there’s any money left over, it gets used for government.

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British troops who face being axed from the military under plans to reduce the country’s defence budget are being offered courses in massage and aromatherapy.

Solidiers who have spent their careers training and fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan can also prepare for civilian life by qualifying in pottery.

I am not making this up.

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A firefighter who retired on a $74,624 disability pension, only to compete in mixed-martial arts matches, will be allowed to keep collecting his tax-free checks for life even after being found fit to go back to work.

The city decided to throw in the towel in the groundbreaking case of John Giuffrida, 43, following a deadlocked vote last month by the Fire Department Pension Fund Board over whether he should have to return to his job once an independent medical review determined he was no longer disabled.

All the city officials on the board voted he should. All the fire-union officials voted he shouldn’t.

And you know that not one of those officials, on either side, is a Republican.

Read it.

Scientists are reporting the first clear success with a new approach for treating leukemia _ turning the patients’ own blood cells into assassins that hunt and destroy their cancer cells.

They’ve only done it in three patients so far, but the results were striking: Two appear cancer-free up to a year after treatment, and the third patient is improved but still has some cancer. Scientists are already preparing to try the same gene therapy technique for other kinds of cancer.

Steve Sailer just loves to talk about modern life. Be sure to watch the video.

The back story before the video starts is that the mother shown getting off the bus had spanked her child, which led to a verbal protest from the fellow with a shaved head and a beard in a reddish brown t-shirt. The mother then got on her cell phone and called for some backup to meet her at the bus stop to help her, as Dave Chapelle would say, in keeping it real.

Evidently, the insulted mother called the brother of the father of her baby, who then recruited a bunch of relatives and friends to help him defend the honor of his brother’s baby mama’s childrearing techniques. Students of altruistic and nepotistic urges might want to diagram out the most distant linkage between the insulted woman and the least connected man involved. I don’t know what they are exactly, but they might be something like “My half-cousin’s uncle’s brother’s baby mama got dissed, so do you wanna help us kill the guy?” Sounds like a plan!

Needless to say, none of these are white people.

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A remote Amazonian tribe, which made global headlines after being photographed for the first time, may have been massacred by drugs traffickers in recent weeks, authorities fear.

Be careful not to step in the diversity.

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Harvard, which as a non-profit doesn’t pay taxes at the corporate level and in fact is a huge beneficiary of government spending via research grants and contracts, subsidized student loans, and Pell Grants, is emerging as a hotbed of anti-Tea Party, pro-tax-increase sentiment.

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“He confuses the two, mixing up details about the first expedition with those of the second. In his account of the first invasion, he describes the fleet leaving Korea and being hit by a typhoon before it reached the Japanese coast,” said Daniele Petrella of the University of Naples, the leader of an Italian archeological project in Japan.

Read it.

How many times have we heard it said that Mr. Obama is the smartest president ever? Even when he’s criticized, his failures are usually chalked up to his supposed brilliance. Liberals say he’s too cerebral for the Beltway rough-and-tumble; conservatives often seem to think his blunders, foreign and domestic, are all part of a cunning scheme to turn the U.S. into a combination of Finland, Cuba and Saudi Arabia.

I don’t buy it. I just think the president isn’t very bright.

But when has he ever had to be? He’s been an affirmative-action baby all his life.

Read it.

Hundreds of Londoners took to the streets this morning to clean up damage caused during last night’s riots – but the Twitter-organised community action was partially hampered by health and safety rules.

Notice that the people cleaning up are all white people, unlike the rioters.

That’s modern government for you: it can’t impede the rioters, but it sure can get in the way of the people trying to clean up afterward.

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Burgess is an idiot. Being a socialist fool isn’t an impeachable offense, unfortunately, and nothing Obama has done to date fits the Constitutional criteria. (Not sayin’ he won’t get there eventually — he is, after all, a socialist fool — but he’s not there yet.) Impeachment isn’t just a tool to get rid of a guy you don’t like. That a Congressman can mistake so fundamental a principle of the law merely illustrates that our government is run by ignorant blowhards.

There ought to be a test for prospective legislators, like the one they give prospective citizens. I doubt that very many of the current incumbents would pass.

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Britain’s police forces could face a bill for tens of millions of pounds from insurance companies because property was damaged in the rioting while the “police effectively failed to keep law and order”.

Good luck with that.

Read it.

IT’S a long way from the marble halls of Congress to the ailing mining towns of eastern Congo, but the residents of Nyabibwe and Nzibira know exactly what’s to blame for their economic woes.

The “Loi Obama” or Obama Law — as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act of 2010 has become known in the region — includes an obscure provision that requires public companies to indicate what measures they are taking to ensure that minerals in their supply chain don’t benefit warlords in conflict-ravaged Congo. The provision came about in no small part because of the work of high-profile advocacy groups like the Enough Project and Global Witness, which have been working for an end to what they call “conflict minerals.”

Unfortunately, the Dodd-Frank law has had unintended and devastating consequences, as I saw firsthand on a trip to eastern Congo this summer. The law has brought about a de facto embargo on the minerals mined in the region, including tin, tungsten and the tantalum that is essential for making cellphones.

The smelting companies that used to buy from eastern Congo have stopped. No one wants to be tarred with financing African warlords — especially the glamorous high-tech firms like Apple and Intel that are often the ultimate buyers of these minerals. It’s easier to sidestep Congo than to sort out the complexities of Congolese politics — especially when minerals are readily available from other, safer countries.

For locals, however, the law has been a catastrophe. In South Kivu Province, I heard from scores of artisanal miners and small-scale purchasers, who used to make a few dollars a day digging ore out of mountainsides with hand tools. Paltry as it may seem, this income was a lifeline for people in a region that was devastated by 32 years of misrule under the kleptocracy of Mobutu Sese Seko (when the country was known as Zaire) and that is now just beginning to emerge from over a decade of brutal war and internal strife.

No surprises here.

Every time politicians pee in a process because they think that doing so will make it taste better, it winds up tasting … about what you would expect.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, as my granny used to say.

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But we NEED People of Color to add DIVERSITY! Otherwise the country will SUCK!

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Young males are particularly prone to rioting. Witness the football and basketball riots at fine U.S. universities, or the recent Vancouver hockey riot. Indeed, the photographs here and elsewhere make painfully clear what is happening in Tottenham and now other parts of London—young men are flooding the streets looking to have some fun. This is no spontaneous group reaction to a perceived injustice; before leaving home these able-bodied lads are dressing up in hoodies, covering their faces in bandanas, and checking Twitter and the like to see where the action is. They want to get drunk, mix it up with the police, and grab all the liquor, pricy sneakers, snazzy clothes, and electronics they can.

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The 1986 illegal alien amnesty was supposed to be one prong of a two part compromise strategy: amnesty illegal aliens already here, but enforce workplace hiring to prevent more from coming. The amnesty went off on a massive scale, but enforcement seldom happened: big employers tended to have politician friends who warned off federal enforcement agencies. It’s the kind of corruption that the press hasn’t shown much interest in, because That’s Racist!

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The White House and much of the chattering class cooed on Friday when unemployment dropped to 9.1 percent and 117,000 jobs were reportedly created in July. But these numbers, upon closer inspection, show no progress on the jobs front.

Buried in the job stats was a number — 193,000 — that dwarfed all the rest. That is the number of workers who left the job market. If 193,000 left and only 117,000 jobs were added, we lost 76,000 jobs. Moreover, this is not an aberration.

When President Obama took office in January of 2009, the labor participation rate was 65.7 percent. Now, “The labor force participation rate is currently 63.9 percent. That is the lowest level since 1984,” says Matt McDonald, a communications and business strategist who previously worked in the Bush administration. “If the labor force participation rate today were 65.7 percent, there would be an additional 4.2 million people in the workforce.” In that case, the unemployment rate would be 11.5 percent not 9.1 percent.

Welcome to the Obamanation.

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A story in Friday’s New York Times describes another horrifying local twist on China’s population control policy: Officials in Longhui County, a rural area of Hunan Province, have a history of kidnapping unauthorized babies and selling them on the black market when the parents are unable to pay exorbitant fines that may amount to five times their annual income. “I can’t even describe my hatred of those family planning officials,” says Yang Libing, the father of a nine-month-old girl who was snatched from his parents’ home in 2005 while he was working in another town. “I hate them to my bones. I wonder if they are parents too. Why don’t they treat us as humans?”

I suspect Tom Friedman won’t be writing about this one.

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Good luck with that.

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Wearing a linen trouser suit, neon-green Nike trainers and a CNN lapel-mic, Jill Biden sat in the shade of an acacia tree and listened solemnly to Fatuma Adem’s story.

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Palestinian security forces raided the house of a Palestinian journalist Saturday and arresting her brothers in an apparent attempt to force her to surrender, reports Maan News. Majdoline Hassouneh refused a summons from the Palestinian Authority [PA], which questioned her coverage of demonstrations by the families of political prisoners.

Freedom of the Press is apparently not a Muslim value.

Ronald Bailey points to some inconvenient truth.

Matt Welch reviews recent expressions of disgust by the Crust.

Jacob Weisberg, Slate:

there’s no point trying to explain complicated matters to the American people.

Read it.

New rule: If you find yourself using the phrase “mid-century vernacular” in the commission of telling a homeowner that she can’t tear down her chain-link fence, it’s time step far, far away from a government salary and any power to tell people what to do.

And here’s your requisite Stockholm Syndrome quote:

Charles Hall has been helping his sister with the red tape. He said he understands the need for zoning rules. “You cannot have everybody in the city doing what they want,” he said. “You’d have chaos.”

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When asked by reporters whether officers would consider arresting tweeters in relation to incitement to violence, Mr Kavanagh said “absolutely”.

He later added: “That investigation is already under way and that is exactly the sort of thing we are looking at.”

Just a reminder: Ain’t no Bill of Rights in Britain, and the European Human Rights Commission is already backed up.