Read it.

Remember the woman in the YouTube video who was convinced that, once Barack Obama was president, she would no longer have to pay to gas up her car? She pretty well summed up the intellectual basis for Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Love the cartoon.

Kenneth Anderson has some interesting thoughts on the occupation.

 Glenn Reynolds is correct in his weekend post to point to the social theory of the New Class as key to understanding the convulsions in the middle and upper middle class; I’ve written about it myself here at VC and in a 1990s law journal book review essay.  The angst is partly income, of course — but it’s also in considerable part, as Glenn notes, “characterized as much by self-importance as by higher income, and is far more eager to keep the proles in their place than, say, [Anne] Applebaum’s small-town dentist. It’s thus not surprising that as its influence has grown, economic opportunity has increasingly been closed down by government barriers.”

The New Class has always operated across the lines of public and private, however, the government-university-finance and technology capital sectors.  It is not a theory of the government class versus the business class — as 1990s neoconservatives sometimes mistakenly imagined.  As Lasch pointed out, it is the class that bridges and moves effortlessly between the two.  As a theory of late capitalism (once imported from being an analysis of communist nomenkaltura) it offers itself as a theory of technocratic expertise first  – but, if that spectacularly fails as it did in 2008, it falls back on a much more rudimentary claim of monopoly access to the levers of the economy.  Which is to say, the right to bridge the private-public line, and rent out its access.

And Megan McArdle takes the ball and runs it down field:

 We have no hereditary aristocracy; all fortunes originated, fairly recently, in “trade”.  Except for a small and peculiar class of people in relatively old coastal cities, we don’t celebrate people who “don’t have to work”–and don’t.  And though I have been surprisingly* often consulted by panicked people worried about “using the wrong fork”**, the class markers are mostly different.  But there are still all sorts of hidden cultural signifiers that tell us, yes, we’re still in the elite, we know that Formula One is cool and NASCAR isn’t (unless you’re watching it ironically.)

Orwell’s next passage points out that it is the lower-upper-middle-class who have the most venom towards those below them–precisely because to preserve their status, they have to keep themselves sharply apart from the workers and tradesmen.  And I think that that does apply here as well, at least to some extent.  One of the interesting things about going back to my business school reunion earlier in the month was simply the absence of the sort of cutting remarks about flyover country that I have grown used to hearing in any large gathering of people.   I didn’t notice it until after the events were over, because it was a slow accumulation of all the jokes and rants I hadn’t heard about NASCAR, McMansions, megachurches, reality television, and all the other cultural signifiers that make up a small but steady undercurrent of my current social milieu, the way Polish jokes did when I was in sixth grade.

Read it. And watch the video.

Developed by Simicon, this new speed sensor promises to take highway surveillance to new heights of precision. Unlike most photo radar systems, which track only one violator at a time, Simicon’s device can simultaneously identify and follow up to 32 vehicles across four lanes. Whenever a car enters its range, the Cordon will automatically generate two images: one from wide-angle view and one closeup shot of the vehicle’s license plate. It’s also capable of instantly measuring a car’s speed and mapping its position, and can easily be synced with other databases via WiFi, 3G or WiMAX. Plus, this device is compact and durable enough to be mounted upon a tripod or atop a road sign, making it even harder for drivers to spot.

Read it.

Churches already struggling to cope with the theft of metal from their roofs are now being targeted for items such as brass crucifixes and bible stands.

What sort of low-life would steal from a church?

Well, Muslims would….

Read it.

A per curiam opinion is a short unsigned opinion on behalf of the whole court. It usually indicates that there wasn’t a lot of disagreement and not much time was spent on it.

The Ninth Circuit (or ‘Ninth Circus’, as Rush would say) Court of Appeals is the most reversed group of judges in the history of the United States.

But nevertheless Justice Ginsburg seems to feel the need to kiss it and make it better.

Smitty from The Other McCain looks at what sort of people petition the Obamessiah.

It is not a pretty sight. But it gets pretty funny.

The man has iron self-control.

Read it.

Remember the U.S. government report report five years ago that polar bears were drowning? Kassie Siegel, director of the U.S.-based Center for Biological Diversity, cited the report in her call to place the polar bear on the endangered species list.  Never mind that we now have 5 times as many polar bears today than we did 50 years ago. We must take action immediately. Based on one report. Because that’s how science works. One report is all it takes to leap to a conclusion that may cost society billions.

I still have yet to see any explanation of how ‘scientists’ can measure the temperature of the entire globe to the precision of 1/10 of a degree Celcius, much less any explanation of how that measurement escapes the Aggregation Fallacy.

David Frum progresses on his career as a contra-conservative. I can see why CNN continues to publish his drivel, but I can’t see any reason for people to continue to read it.

Check it out.

Read it.

The practitioners of the Multicultural Arts are at least subliminally aware that the basic assumptions of their dogma cannot stand up to close scrutiny. This is why the proponents of PC/MC tend to respond to reasonable criticism with accusations of “racism”, vicious ad-hominem attacks, and physical violence. They fear that the edifice in which they have invested so much emotional and physical energy may in fact be spun from pure gossamer. Fear generates anger, and their fury demands the destruction of those who would expose their delusions.

The other day former British prime minister Tony Blair invoked one of the major unexamined premises of Multiculturalism while defending his party’s immigration policy during his time in office: “Britain cannot succeed unless it opens its borders to more people from different backgrounds.”

In what ways was Britain unsuccessful while it was still, well, British? In what ways is it more successful now?

Read it.

The conventional wisdom is that America has become a “service economy,” but actually, in many sectors, “service” is disappearing. There was a time when a gas station attendant would routinely fill your tank and even check your oil and clean your windshield and rear window without charge, then settle your bill. Today, all those jobs have been transferred to the customer: we pump our own gas, squeegee our own windshield, and pay our own bill by swiping a credit card. Where customers once received service from the service station, they now provide “self-service” — a synonym for “no service.” Technology enables this sleight of hand, which lets gas stations cut their payrolls, having co-opted their patrons into doing these jobs without pay.

Read it.

This is the way lawyers do it, and they do it this way because the courts require it, and the courts require it because that’s the way the judges and clerks learned it in law school, and they learned it that way in law school because the Blue Book said to, and the Blue Book is published by the Law Review editors at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia.

Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

Read it.

In 2002, federal reguators predicted it would take between 18-months and three-years for the proposed Cape Wind energy project in Nantucket Sound to receive federal approval.  Nearly ten years later, the project is still awaiting full federal clearance, and has yet to begin construction.  Full operation remains at least two years away.

You want ‘green jobs’? Surprise — for all the rhetoric, the government is the chief impediment. (OF COURSE we want to have the Post Office provide our health care!)

The Cape Wind experience also shows that it does not take much to gum up the regulatory gears for new projects of this sort.  Opposition to Cape Wind has been driven by a few dozen families willing to invest their time and money to influence the regulatory process — and it’s worked.  It does not matter whether a proposed project is popular with local residents, as a relatively small group of naysayers can exploit existing regulatory requirements to slow things down in the hope of eventually killing the project altogether.  If other offshore wind projects are to succeed where Cape Wind has (thus far) failed, they will must prepare for similar opposition, and encourage regulatory reforms that will streamline wind project development and approval.

Meddle not with the environment of the Crust, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

Read it.

Farmer and businessman Ryan Carr of Mayfield has four robots on his farm near Ashburton which allow the cows to decide when they want to be milked.

Mr Carr told Country Life that the robotic system also means cows can eat and move at their own pace.

He says that’s doing wonders for their health and they have a longer life expectancy.

Farm production has also improved and is 4% ahead of this time last year.

Mr Carr said each unit costs about $250,000.

As Gibson said, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

(Cue handwringing from leftists over the agricultural jobs lost and stupid people left without work.)

Read it.

Recent years have seen an explosion of male joblessness and a steep decline in men’s life prospects that have disrupted the “romantic market” in ways that narrow a marriage-minded woman’s options: increasingly, her choice is between deadbeats (whose numbers are rising) and playboys (whose power is growing).

Gee, I wonder why that is.

In 2001, when I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. Allan and I had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. He was (and remains) an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind. My friends, many of whom were married or in marriage-track relationships, were bewildered. I was bewildered. To account for my behavior, all I had were two intangible yet undeniable convictions: something was missing; I wasn’t ready to settle down.

What’s missing is the point where the author changes from a child to an adult. There’s a lot of that going around these days, and what goes around comes around.

Read it … oh, wait, there’s nothing to read. Wonder why that is.

Perhaps it’s just because these ‘OccupyWhatever’ gatherings are just an internal squabble among the Crust, using tools and dupes from the Underclass (and their own silly kids) as proxies.

Steve Sailer says what everybody knows but nobody admits.

Wow, that will definitely heighten awareness among Today’s Youth of Color: Harry Belafonte! Don’t let anybody tell you the NAACP is the National Association for the Advancement of Certain People resting on their laurels.

And it’s amazing how quickly recent immigrants latch on to the We Are Colored Victims trope.

How could they have forgotten America’s litany of historic crimes against Sikhs?

As I said, just an internal squabble among the Crust, using the underclass (and their own kids) as tools and dupes — a more-disorganized-than-usual bit of Street Theater.

So, they are organizing the logistics of their campout: How many different kinds of recycling bins should we have? That sort of thing. Middle class white people find this kind of self-organizing to be pretty fascinating. It also bores the heck out of most minorities and non-middle class whites, which has the salutary effect of driving away undesirables.

Heh.

The obvious model for this is the successful Burning Man campouts that take place each September on a godforsaken dry lake bed in Nevada. A bunch of naked white hippies do a pretty fine job of setting up a huge community for one week each year. (My cousin, the tough hippie, goes there every year, and now his octogenarian mother, a lifelong outdoorswoman, wants to go to Burning Man, too.)

Let’s them blow off steam and forget for a week that NOBODY ELSE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT THEIR PATHETIC ADOLESCENT WHINING.

Burning Man started out in San Francisco, but moved to the middle of nowhere for various reasons, one unmentionable one being: barriers to entry. Ticket prices are now a few hundred dollars for entry, plus the cost of travel and camping equipment. That keeps out the petty criminals, homeless guys, gang-bangers, and other predators, parasites, and losers. Old San Francisco hippies remember, even if they won’t mention it, what kept the Haight-Ashbury Summer of Love in 1967 from continuing: criminals, especially black criminals from the Fillmore district, discovered, to their delight, that drugged-up white hippie chicks were easy prey. So Haight Ashbury went from a utopian middle class scene to a dystopian underclass one in weeks. Hence, it’s really expensive to get to Burning Man now.

Reality always intrudes upon left-wing fantasy. If you own the country and its guns, you can stretch it out for a bit, as the old Marxist-Leninists found out, but eventually either it all comes apart, as the old Soviet Union discovered, or you hold the note and change the key, as the Chinese eventually decided.

Unlike some people, I remember the sixties and seventies, when such demonstrations were the social herpes of college campuses — they’d go into remission for months, only to break out in embarrassing sores when it was most inconvenient for the uninfected.

Read any of the hippy memoirs of the 1964-1974 period and you’ll find that the Voices of the People spent most of their time wrangling over political posturing while badmouthing the Judean People’s Front deviationists. It was very amusing if you were over for a visit but didn’t have to live there, and inexpressibly tedious if you had to step over the dogpiles while trying to get to work.

(I’ve always loved their use of the word ‘demonstration’ — it encapsulates the truth that these gatherings were only for show and didn’t represent an actual working version suitable for production.)

Read it.

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

Read it.

Two weeks into Occupy Wall Street’s takeover of Zuccotti Park, a group of Bronx community organizers and friends rode the subway down to Lower Manhattan to check out a movement they supported in principle.

When they got there, they recalled, they found what they had suspected: a largely white and middle-class crowd that claimed to represent “the 99 percent” but bore little resemblance to most of the people in the group’s own community. That community, the South Bronx, is one of the poorest areas of the country and home almost exclusively to blacks and Hispanics.

“Nobody looked like us,” said Rodrigo Venegas, 31, co-founder of Rebel Diaz Arts Collective, a center for political activism and hip-hop run out of a warehouse in Mott Haven. “It was white, liberal, young people who for the first time in their life are feeling a small percentage of what black and brown communities have been feeling for hundreds of years.

One of the signal hypocrisies of progressivism is that they claim to speak for ‘the people’ but wind up speaking only for their own preconceptions.

Read it.

Like other Tea Party groups, the Richmond (VA) Tea Party has played by the rules. They paid permit fees to hold their rallies, they paid for the extra police and portajohns that such rallies demand. In all, they’ve paid $10,000 for their rallies to the local government.

The occupiers? Not so much. In fact, they haven’t filed for any permits and they haven’t paid a dime.

So the Richmond Tea Party, seeking fair treatment, has invoiced the Richmond city government to get its costs reimbursed. This is a brilliant move that other Tea Party groups should follow, if for no other reason than to highlight how the so-called 99% continue to mooch off of law-abiding citizens.

Time for a little equality, it would seem.

Read it.

Organizers of Occupy Portland say they fear as much as $20,000 donated to the group through a PayPal account has disappeared.

They also say the group’s finance committee has hijacked the demonstration’s Internet domain name and filed for incorporation against the wishes of the group’s decision-making body.

The demonstrator who filed the papers with the state said Wednesday she did so to protect the protest, and she has received death threats as a result.

Ah, yes, the Left in action. The most disorganized fascists in history. It would be funny if it weren’t so pitiful.

Read it.

A quarter of ebook readers are too embarrassed to tell the truth about the ebooks they are reading, a poll of British readers has found.

Read it.

Hey, those things can turn on you.

Read it.

Yes, Cathy, I’m looking at you.

Read it.

Whether you’re a warrior in the boardroom or the bedroom, make your underwear match your samurai spirit with our world-exclusive Samurai Underwear. These-ultra premium briefs breathe like you wouldn’t believe, won’t itch, and feel silky-smooth against your skin. On top of that, have you ever seen a cooler or more manly-looking pair of underwear?

Read it.

This is seriously cool.

Read it.

German archaeologists have unearthed “sensational” evidence of a lost Roman camp that formed a vital part of the frontier protecting Rome’s empire against the Germanic hordes.

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Well, not exactly.

A new survey from Spectrem Group found that 68% of millionaires (those with investments of $1 million or more)  support raising taxes on those with $1 million or more in income. Fully 61% of those with net worths of $5 million or more support the tax on million-plus earners.

So it’s actually semi-rich people supporting higher taxes — not on themselves — but rather people who are maybe twenty or thirty times richer than they are.

I see.

Still no word on why these public-spirited people don’t just send in a check to the Treasury. They could do that right now — if they really wanted to.

Read it.

At last — somebody at the New York Times gets a clue.

It’s readership (as reflected in the comments), on the other hand, remain stuck in another universe.

But, in recent years, some financiers have chosen to live in a government-backed featherbed. Their platform seems to be socialism for tycoons and capitalism for the rest of us. They’re not evil at all. But when the system allows you more than your fair share, it’s human to grab. That’s what explains featherbedding by both unions and tycoons, and both are impediments to a well-functioning market economy.

And let’s ask how many of these folks are registered Democrats, shall we?

The upshot is that financial institutions boost leverage in search of supersize profits and bonuses. Banks pretend that risk is eliminated because it’s securitized. Rating agencies accept money to issue an imprimatur that turns out to be meaningless. The system teeters, and then the taxpayer rushes in to bail bankers out. Where’s the accountability?

There’s no room in the box — the ambiguity has put on weight.

Check it out.

Read it.  And ponder the graphs.

The Democrats are pushing for more spending and more debt, emphasizing the supposed need to spend more on teachers and schools. In fact, however, this country has carried out a laboratory experiment over the past four decades, and we have conclusively proved that more spending on education has nothing to do with successfully educating our children.

Read it.

In the remote, windswept state of North Dakota, job fairs often bustle with more recruiters than potential workers. The North Dakota unemployment rate hasn’t risen above five percent since 1987.  In the state’s oil country, unemployment hovers at around two percent, and pretty much everyone who wants a job—as long as they are old enough and not incarcerated—is employed.  North Dakota has either tied for or had the lowest unemployment in the country since 2008.

I’m sure they would even take people from Michigan.

Read it.

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

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

Read it.

Both were already said to be in the hands of pirate gangs in central Somalia close to the town of Haradhere.

Truly, you can’t make this stuff up.

Any non-Muslim who steps foot in Somalia except as an armed member of a military force is an idiot.

Read it.

Andrew Goodram, 31, suffered a punctured lung and two broken ribs after the gang of four yobs shouted: “white bastard” at him before subjecting him to a vicious assault.

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

Of course, if this had been white people beating on non-white people, the explosion in the media would have been heard round the world.

Note the term used: ‘yobs’. You’ll see why in a minute.

“I’m scared now and when I see groups of Asian people and this attack has changed how I feel about going out.

The attackers were Asian and aged between 20 and 30. One of the men has been described as Asian, in his early 30s, 6 ft 2 in, of heavy build, with a bald head and a thin ‘lined’ type beard.

‘Asian’, of course, is code for Pakistani Muslims. But they can’t say that, otherwise it couldn’t be printed.

“I do believe the attack was racially motivated because I am white but I don’t understand why. I thought we are supposed to live together in peace.”

Sure, just keep on thinking that until they cut your head off. After all, you obviously have no use for it.

Read it.

The cathedral has now been closed for a fifth day over health and safety fears; the longest time it has been shut in living memory. At the height of the Blitz, German Luftwaffe bombers only managed to keep the cathedral closed for four days.

Read it.

A Zimbabwean man has told a court that he hired a prostitute who during the night transformed into a donkey, and that he is now “seriously in love” with the animal, according to state media.

Tell him to go to California and wait a couple of weeks.

Sure, these people are ready for self-government….

Read it.

Read it.

Not if the Democrats have anything to say about it. Their ability to tax and regulate American labor into uncompetitiveness is without peer, and their ability to pander to let’s-cancel-the-2oth-century envirofascists is second to none. If it ever looks as if American labor is becoming competitive, or American sources of energy productive, the Obamanation will swing into action to return us to those thrilling days of yesteryear.

Read it.

Indeed, two Americas do exist: the makers and the takers.

No one should prejudge the patriotism of any American, but your station in life informs your own political views.

Consider today’s economic reality. Last year, 47 percent of Americans paid no federal income tax. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that nearly half (48.5 percent) of all Americans received “some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2010,” according to census data, making American families “more dependent on government programs than ever.”

Those Americans – call them “takers,” a crude term but one that accurately describes them as receiving more from government than they contribute – do not have a direct personal interest in fiscal responsibility, limited government or reduced spending. In fact, their livelihoods depend on the “gravy train” continuing uninterrupted.

For the Americans whose income levels require them to pay income taxes – call them the “makers” – they have a discrete and clear interest in taxes remaining low and in government being made leaner and more efficient. This dynamic has been described in Patrick J. Buchanan’s new best-selling book, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”

Today, the top 1 percent of all income earners account for 40 percent of the federal taxes. If you confiscated every penny earned by the top 1 percent, you would gain about $1 trillion, wiping out these productive Americans and still not balancing the budget.

Read it.

What if David Frum quite pretending to be a conservative?

We may never know….

Read it.

You, too, can be a liberal wonk.

Read it.

Yet more reason not to send your kid to a government school.

Read it.

Gee, if you squint really hard, that looks a lot like ‘devolution’ and maybe even ‘self-determination’.

Somalia is one of those relics of European colonial rule. Africa as a whole would be better off if the colonial-era countries would break up into more natural subdivisions. The chief obstacle is the WaBenzi and their armies; they prefer to have a larger population from which to steal.

Read it.

Read it.

Let’s do the numbers.

Read it.

Fans of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ know the quiet New Zealand town of Matamata as the location of Hobbiton, the home of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, and the beginning and end of their respective quests. Having been vacant for nearly a decade, with just the frames of hobbit holes carved into the hills to mark the location, Matamata has been a favorite stop for fans who take the ‘Lord of the Rings’ tours in New Zealand.

Well, fans have good and bad news. The bad news: as of last week, Matamata is closed to the public. The good news: it’s because they’re rebuilding the Hobbiton set for a two week shoot. As location shooting for ‘The Hobbit’ ramps up, Hobbiton is back and in full swing once again!

Read it.

A faltering economy explains much of the job shortage in America, but advancing technology has sharply magnified the effect, more so than is generally understood, according to two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The automation of more and more work once done by humans is the central theme of “Race Against the Machine,” an e-book to be published on Monday.

“Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine,” the authors write.

Read it.

Millions of women obtain abortions because they do not want baby girls.

It’s shocking, but incontrovertible. Two decades ago, Harvard economist Amartya Sen, in an arrestingly titled article, documented the statistical reality that “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing.” In a recently published book, Unnatural Selection, journalist Mara Hvistendahl convincingly demonstrates that the overwhelming reason for the increasingly large demographic disparity in the male-female birth ratio is sex-selection abortion. Hvistendahl estimates the number of missing or dead now to be 160 million and counting. Women have abortions because (among other reasons) they are able to learn the sex of their unborn baby and kill her if she’s a girl.