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Zimbabweans are lucky they are no longer suffering under the boot of the racist white former regime Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what kind of hell they would be living in now.

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These extravagances are part of the Essential Air Service initiative, which is part of the reason for the recent congressional impasse over a bill to keep the Federal Aviation Administration operating.

But the program survives because most states get some aid and every state has two senators, who usually hang on to every federal dollar as if it were a Super Bowl ticket.

Every time the Federal government spends money, it creates a group who wants that spending to continue. Ultimately, that constituency includes Federal lawmakers, who want the votes that supporting that spending will garner. This is an inherent defect in our present political system that can only be cured by reducing the number of things on which the Federal government is allowed to spend money..

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Last month, only 58.1% of Americans age 16 and over were employed, a significant drop from before the recession and the lowest since 1983.

The Obama Recession just keeps plugging away.

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And, needless to say, not an ethnic Briton.

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Needless to say, none of these gangs is composed of ethnic Britons. Thus does Britain reap the fruits of multiculturalism and unrestricted immigration.

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Our Norwegian correspondent The Observer reported last month on the advent of carbecue season in Oslo. There have been more vehicle-burnings since then, and he sends this translated report on the latest carbecue episode.

Unmentioned in all of this ‘cultural enrichment’ (Muslim immigrant riots) is the fact that if the Ottomans were in charge these people would be lining the roads with stakes up their butts. Muslims don’t put up with this shit from other Muslims; that Europeans do merely encourages them.

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The Economist continues on its social-democratic way.

WITH more than 1m workers, Foxconn may be China’s largest private employer. The secretive electronics giant is renowned for taking designs from Western firms, such as Apple, and using cheap labour to crank them out in huge quantities. But its fantastically successful business model seems to have run its course.

Primarily because of pressure from Euopean and American ‘progressives’ who aren’t satisfied until every country in the world has to deal with the same politically-motivated government-mandated shackles on business from which the rest of us suffer.

At a closed retreat in late July, Terry Gou, the chief executive of the Taiwanese-owned company (which is also known as Hon Hai), unveiled a plan to hire 1m robots by 2013. In a public statement, Foxconn talked about moving its human workers “higher up the value chain” and into sexy fields such as research. But at least some will surely lose their jobs.

Thanks to pressure from etc. First they bitch about how workers are treated, then they bitch when workers lose the jobs that treated them that way. Truly, there’s no pleasing some people.

To pacify its increasingly restive workers, Foxconn has repeatedly bumped up their wages, improved facilities, provided counselling and swathed its factories with nets to catch anyone leaping from a window. All this costs money.

More accurately, to pacify its increasingly restive foreign critics. The implicit subtext here is that satisfying ‘progressive’ complaints always costs money, lots of it, and the more it costs, the more cost-effective robots become. ‘Progressives’ are the primary drivers of unemployment, pushing an agenda that ultimately makes manual labor unaffordable. As costs go up, demand goes down — that’s the elementary fact of life that ‘progressives’ refuse to acknowledge.

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The North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has found a novel way of raising badly needed cash, according to the South Korean authorities: unleashing young hackers on South Korea’s immensely popular online gaming sites to find ways to rack up points convertible to cash. Despite its decrepit economy, North Korea is believed to train an army of computer programmers and hackers. The police in Seoul said Thursday that four South Koreans and a Korean-Chinese had been arrested on charges of drawing on that army to organize a hacking squad of 30 young video gaming experts.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it. And watch the video.

When a wealthy culture-enricher in Vancouver needed a household slave, she sent off to Africa to get herself one. According to the RCMP, by the time the authorities found out what she had done, she had gone abroad to visit relatives, and wasn’t available to be interviewed when Canadian TV news came to call.

The news reporters in this clip can’t bring themselves to use the words “Islamic” or “Muslim”. However, the slaveholder is said to have regularly visited a mosque, so viewers may draw their own conclusions.

There is no incompatibility between Islam and slavery; indeed, slavery wasn’t officially abolished in Saudi Arabia until 1962.

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There’s a shortage today of low-priced, life-saving drugs for cancer patients.  And the cause – surprise, surprise – is the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003.

Not every idiot in government is a Democrat. They just act like ’em.

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Graeme Zielinski, Communications Director for the Wisconsin Democratic Party, is quite a guy.  He was a focus of a post here last month when he tweeted that people should celebrate the 45th anniversay of Medicare by “punching a Republican.”  He then claimed he was just joking.

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Jeez, you’d think it was Los Angeles or something.

On Friday, it emerged that Mr Duggan had been travelling in a minicab and was gunned down after an apparent exchange of fire.

A police officer’s radio was found to have a bullet lodged in it afterwards, suggesting they may have narrowly escaped being struck.

Officers had been attempting to carry out an arrest under the Trident operational command unit, which deals with gun crime in the black community, according to the IPCC.

So this was basically a race riot (which is plain if you can find an article with pictures, although the media won’t dare point that out) after some gangbanger got into a shootout with police. Maybe it is Los Angeles after all.

But you have to get down to the end of the report to find out the essentials of the story, which in the days of Real Journalism would have been in the first paragraph.

Steve Sailer is an optimist.

I must confess that when I read articles from the mainstream media in Europe denouncing immigration restrictionists with angry rhetoric but little substance, I sometimes wonder if my leg is being pulled. For example, is this April 29, 2011 article from Spiegel on Denmark’s decade-long success in implementing a more rational immigration policy a self-parody? Perhaps the reporter secretly wanted to laud the Danish government as thoughtfully reformist, but had to lather it in spiteful PC rhetoric to get it published  … I don’t know. (I particularly like the chosen photo, with the fat lout trying to look surly in the front and the youth with the “Soldier of Allah” sweatshirt.)

According to the figures, migrants from non-Western countries who did manage to come to Denmark have cost the state €2.3 billion, while those from the West have actually contributed €295 million to government coffers.

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The idea that a capitalist economy can support a socialist welfare state is collapsing before our eyes, says Janet Daley.

Scott Adams writing in the Wall Street Journal. Is this a great country, or what?

I make my living being creative and have always assumed that my potential was inherited from my parents. But for allowing my creativity to flourish, I have to credit the soul-crushing boredom of my childhood.

My period of greatest creative output was during my corporate years, when every meeting felt like a play date with coma patients.

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This is a disaster of unparalleled gravity. SEALs are the best of the best; this is like having two dozen Rolls Royces destroyed.

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For all those poor people out there who can’t eat healthy food because capitalism is ‘pressin’ ’em.

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You know what’s going to happen….

So what happens when, using Khan Academy, you wind up with a kid in fifth grade who has mastered high school trigonometry and physics—but is still functioning like a regular 10-year-old when it comes to writing, history, and social studies? Khan’s programmer, Ben Kamens, has heard from teachers who’ve seen Khan Academy presentations and loved the idea but wondered whether they could modify it “to stop students from becoming this advanced.”

God forbid that anything interfere with the batch-process age-group factory-style government school method.

It’s not an uncommon phenomenon. People get so caught up in “the way things are done” that they can’t possibly comprehend any other way of doing things. Therefore, when you show them a child learning faster than his or her peers, the focus is not on how fantastic it is, but on how we’ll be able to keep that child in the same class as other kids their age. Why is it necessary to group kids by age? Because it’s just what we do. When a child is bumped up a grade, why do we do it for all subjects at once, instead of each subject separately? Because it’s just what we do. The educational system was created to teach children; now it exists to perpetuate the current educational system.

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Now that’s America.

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The events at the Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee are chilling. Not shocking, since this type of Black Behaving Badly (BBB) activity has transpired in Milwaukee and in cities throughout the nation, necessitating curfews, massive police presences at Black cultural events, and a further allocation of monetary resources in attempts to protect law-abiding citizens from Black thuggery.

But that, of course, would be politically incorrect.

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Unfortunately, the “deal” announced Thursday will restore the cuts to the EAS program, but without Congressional approval. Although the Senate passed the House’s version of the bill, Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood will strike out the EAS language. In effect, the Executive conspired with the Senate to carry out an end-run around the intent of the legislation, all to protect subsidized flights for politicians who don’t want to be bothered to use major airports. This is both a scandalous waste of taxpayer funds and a blatant abuse of executive power.

Sounds like Democrats to me….

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The Australian outback town of Broken Hill will no longer host the production of a Mad Max sequel after record rains made the surrounding countryside too green to pass for a post-apocalyptic landscape.

In a pinch, they could always use Barack Obama’s subconscious.

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The whole concept of ‘intellectual property’ is a myth that is long past it’s use-by date. The essence of property is exclusion; you can’t use my property while I’ve got it; and if you steal it, it’s no longer available for my use. If you compose a bunch of songs or stories, and I copy those, even though I now have them, you still have them too; there has been no transfer of exclusive use. Anything that can be transmitted to another without depriving the originator of its full enjoyment does not come within the concept of property, period. ‘Intellectual property’ is a purely artificial legal construct that has no natural foundation; it’s principal effect in the modern world is to stifle innovation rather than to promote it.

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And I can’t say that I blame them. Obviously they weren’t getting the support from the Federal government that they needed to persevere. No sense in throwing good blood after bad.

Perhaps we ought to bring some of those nice young men we have in Iraq and Afghanistan back over here and take care of our neighborhood rather than poking our noses into somebody else’s. Just a thought.

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 It’s taken three years to find a winner that could meet the high standards set forth by the DOE, specifically “ensuring that performance, quality, lifetime, cost, and availability meet expectations for widespread adoption and mass manufacturing.” Requirements further stipulated that the 60W incandescent killer use less than 10 watts of power, and provide energy savings of 83 percent.

Lileks is on the case.

On this web page I will be showing some of the buildings of Mayberry that were used in 2 episodes of Star Trek, the orginal series. The Episodes are “Miri” and “The City on the Edge of Forever”. Both have some great glimpses of Mayberry that we normally never see in a TAGS episode.

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In a few weeks, an overwhelming majority in the United Nations General Assembly will likely vote for collective recognition of a Palestinian state. But which Palestinian state? Of the three Palestinian states the assembly could recognize, two are real and arguably could meet the requirements for statehood. But it is the third, purely imaginary one that the assembly will endorse, one that neither has a functioning government nor meets the requirements of international law.

Palestinians are Arabs, and Arabs already have a state — actually, about a dozen of them.

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Last week a federal judge in Orlando ruled that Florida’s Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention & Control Act violates the constitutional right to due process because it allows conviction without proof of mens rea, the “guilty mind” that is normally considered a crucial element of a criminal offense. The decision could have a sweeping impact, casting doubt on convictions under the law since 2002, when the statute was enacted in its current form. “It has one of the largest potential effects on criminal law in the past decade,” a local defense attorney told the St. Petersburg Times. “We’re talking hundreds of thousands of drug cases.”

Thank God. The trend toward removing the mens rea requirement from offenses was getting pretty ugly.

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How cool is that?

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ASBO stands for ‘Anti-Social Behavior Order’ and is apparently one of those mini-fascist penalties you can get in Britain for Not Playing Well With Others.

Two thirds of older teenagers also broke their conditions.

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A healthy diet is expensive and could make it difficult for Americans to meet new U.S. nutritional guidelines, according to a study published Thursday that says the government should do more to help consumers eat healthier.

*sigh* No, eating according to somebody’s bogus definition of a healthy diet is expensive. This is just another transparent ploy to get more government control over everyday life.

“We know more than ever about the science of nutrition, and yet we have not yet been able to move the needle on healthful eating,” he said.

That’s because most of what you ‘know’ ain’t so. Get back to me when ‘scientists’ stop flip-flopping on what foods are good for you and what are bad.

The government should provide help for meeting the nutritional guidelines in an affordable way.

All at taxpayer expense. The government should get out of the business of ‘nutritional guidelines’ and do its job, which is keeping the peace.

UPDATE: David Friedman agrees:

The trick is quite simple. The article pretends to be about what healthy eating costs. It is actually about what people who eat healthily spend. Higher income correlates with better education, so people who spend more also, on average, spend better, nutritionally speaking. That is no evidence that good nutrition costs more—and, as a comparison between the price of spareribs and the price of pork and beans or fruit salad would demonstrate, it often does not. Precisely the same analysis could be used to show that people who spend more on rent eat better too.

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This is getting extremely silly. You’d think these guys had better things to do with their time.

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And, even if they haven’t, can they convince a gullible public that they have?

In reality, based on the somewhat blurry images, no one is quite sure what exactly the object is; its mysterious dimensions have already caused quite a bit of speculation, and of course UFO enthusiasts are already preparing their “I told ya so” stories. Whatever it may be, its seemingly circular shape is somewhat of an anomaly for the sea floor.

Take a close look at the picture and see for yourself.

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On June 13, the resident conservative (which means additional leftist) on The New York Times’ editorial page, David Brooks, revealed his plan for “national greatness,” which Brooks designates as the “Hamiltonian agenda.”

For those who may have forgotten, “national greatness” was a theme that Brooks’s pals Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan discussed at length in The Weekly Standard and Foreign Affairs in the 1990s. Back then this term meant a neo-Wilsonian foreign policy characterized by the militaristic promotion of our updated version of “democracy” and “human rights.” Although twenty years ago “national greatness” was not explicitly about glorifying our federal welfare state, it was implicitly about feeding a big government that could mobilize a contented population for war.

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Supermodel Linda Evangelista is asking French billionaire Francois Henri-Pinault for $46,000 a month in child support. He’s the father of Ms. Evangelista’s four-year-old son, Augustin James. And Ms. Evangelista argues that $46,000 is the minimum required to provide for young Augustin in the manner to which he has grown accustomed.

Readers outside New York are probably thinking: “What’s this kid eating ?!”

Readers in New York are thinking: “She should ask for more.”

Moral: Stay away from supermodels. Their ability to get pregnant trumps your ability to make money.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Actually, Hemingway warned about this sort of thing in Death in the Afternoon. But does anybody listen?

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Well, they would know.

Apparently the FBI doesn’t quite recognize that “Big Brother” is the government.

Funny how that works.

Check it out.

That’s me on the right.

An Informative Chart.

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Wouldn’t it be amusing if some Presbyterian flew a plane into it?

Just sayin’.

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Yes, we need to get rid of bad teachers. But we can’t demand that teachers be excellent in conditions that preclude excellence.

In other words, we need more money and smaller class sizes. Couldn’t be that we’re expecting teachers to run special-needs day care centers, no indeed.

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Here is my definition of a recession:

• two or more consecutive quarters in which real GDP lower than real GDP in an earlier quarter, and

• the year-over-year change in real GDP is negative in at least one quarter.

The latest GDP estimates from the Bureau of Economic Analysis indicate that the recession continues. By my definition, it has now lasted 14 quarters: 2008Q1 through 2011Q2. Real GDP for 2011Q2 was $13,270.1 billion (annualized rate, chained 2005 dollars), which is lower than the pre-recession peak of $13,326.0, which was reached in 2007Q4. Average annual real growth over the 3.5 years from 2007Q4 to 2011Q2 was -0.12 percent.

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When the richest man in the world either divorces her or dies with her as his sole heir.

This is such a silly article it’s difficult to know where to start. Well, let’s look at the first sentence:

Women may be doing better than men in the broader economy, but they’re still under-represented at the very top.

Anybody who thinks that wealth is somehow a ‘representative’ thing has greater intellectual issues than this one. But it’s a common delusion these days: Anytime a given group of people don’t have the precise mix of sexes and ethnic groups as the population as a whole (and such comparisons invariably look for the largest general population they can get away with), the cry of ‘under-representation’ goes up, as if it had any relevance whatsoever. The only reason that nobody is complaining that men are under-represented among those becoming pregnant is that they can’t figure out how to word it so that it doesn’t sound stupid on its face, although I’m sure that there are some who are willing to give it a shot nevertheless.

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Don’t ever say we don’t have useful stuff here.

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This fearsome contraption is the handiwork of a couple of amateur DEFCON-types who reckoned that any self-respecting spy plane ought to be able to impersonate cellphone towers. And that’s exactly what the Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform does — it tricks AT&T and T-Mobile handsets into connecting to it, then re-routes the incoming calls via VOIP so they don’t drop, while simultaneously recording all conversations to 32GB of onboard storage. It can also handle a bit of WiFi snooping on the side, thanks to a Linux-based hacking toolkit and a 340 million word dictionary for guessing passwords. What’s more, the WASP apparently achieves all of this without breaking a single FCC regulation.

Women and minorities hardest hit.

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It was the beginning of an Afghan love story that flouted dominant traditions of arranged marriages and close family scrutiny, a romance between two teenagers of different ethnicities that tested a village’s tolerance for more modern whims of the heart. The results were delivered with brutal speed.

This month, a group of men spotted the couple riding together in a car, yanked them into the road and began to interrogate the boy and girl. Why were they together? What right had they? An angry crowd of 300 surged around them, calling them adulterers and demanding that they be stoned to death or hanged.

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

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Now: Imagine what the press reaction would have been had Cheney done that.