Christopher Hitchens is always worth reading.

The first thing to say, when reviewing the question of what America should do about those of its citizens who advocate the murder of random numbers of its civilians, is that it is flat-out astonishing to see the debate being conducted at all. Faced with jeering, sniggering, vicious saboteurs who hide from the daylight and pop up on blogs and cheap CDs, calmly awarding religious permission for the capricious taking of life, what do we imagine Vladimir Putin would do? Or the police and security forces of the People’s Republic of China? Or Israel or Saudi Arabia? To ask the question is to answer it.

That says it all; but the rest is interesting, too, so please read it.

George Will is always worth reading.

Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and former Obama administration regulator (for consumer protection), is modern liberalism incarnate. As she seeks the Senate seat Democrats held for 57 years before 2010, when Republican Scott Brown impertinently won it, she clarifies the liberal project and the stakes of contemporary politics.

The project is to dilute the concept of individualism, thereby refuting respect for the individual’s zone of sovereignty. The regulatory state, liberalism’s instrument, constantly tries to contract that zone — for the individual’s own good, it says.

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Mr. Harold, a 71-year-old Vietnam War veteran who drifted here in the late ’60s, has participated for about a decade in a federal program called H-2A that allows seasonal foreign workers into the country to make up the gap where willing and able American workers are few in number. He typically has brought in about 90 people from Mexico each year from July through October.

This year, though, with tough times lingering and a big jump in the minimum wage under the program, to nearly $10.50 an  hour, Mr. Harold brought in only two-thirds of his usual contingent. The other positions, he figured, would be snapped up by jobless local residents wanting some extra summer cash.

“It didn’t take me six hours to realize I’d made a heck of a mistake,” Mr. Harold said, standing in his onion field on a recent afternoon as a crew of workers from Mexico cut the tops off yellow onions and bagged them.

Six hours was enough, between the 6 a.m. start time and noon lunch break, for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard. On the Harold farm, pickers walk the rows alongside a huge harvest vehicle called a mule train, plucking ears of corn and handing them up to workers on the mule who box them and lift the crates, each weighing 45 to 50 pounds.

And yet the whiners say they can’t get a job. The problem appears to be that they can’t keep a job.

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Social media now perform the ancient function of the hue-and-cry. Old ways, new tools.

Wajeeh Izharuddin, 19, from Ashburton, later appeared before Newton Abbot magistrates.

He was convicted of burglary and placed on probation for six months.

Now there’s a Real English Name for you.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Steve Sailer says about everything that needs to be said on the subject.

I hadn’t been paying attention to the Amanda Knox brouhaha in Italy, but, yeah, it turns out to be just another example of the Hunt for the Great White Defendant. A black burglar raping and murdering a college girl is depressing, boring and stereotypical, even in Italy, so let’s spice up the crime by making up stories about how the victim’s 20-year-old white Seattleite roommate must have been the Real Killer, as OJ would say.

Freeberg has a complaint.

If the money was just left in the free market…the kinda sorta free market…then anybody who wants to complain about where the money’s getting spent, would have to take it up with each of the millions upon millions of people doing the spending. And that is the point to a government stimulus program: To gather the money into one channel, so people can look at how it was spent and then bitch about it. It makes the bitching and blaming and finger-pointing easier. All this talk about how to make the next one work better, is just a crock. This one was as big as we can afford, and it went as well as it’s ever gonna. It was still a complete flop — and that’s what the process looks like. Anyone who needs to run a few more cycles on a merry-go-round so they’ve got time to get that figured out, I think they should go off somewhere and do it in an isolated test environment, with a lot less money. If they find out I’m wrong, let us know…otherwise…don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you.

The problem with government intervention in the economy is that it’s about as effective as trying to create a printed circuit board with a hammer.

Read it.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

The economics of coaching works like this. Consider tennis. Lots of young people love the game and play for free in the hopes that someday they’ll get good enough to get paid. But even those who do become tournament pros are typically physically washed up by 25 or 30. So, there is a huge supply of potential coaches relative to current tournament pros. Coaching offers them a chance to stay in the game in some fashion, even at reduced pay.

In contrast, in teaching, it’s not clear when the average teacher gets too old for the classroom, but it’s considerably older than when the average tennis pro gets too old for Wimbledon. What is clear, however, is that a lot of teachers get sick of teaching other people’s children and would like to transition into a nice, child-free education job dealing mostly with other grown-ups, especially because the pay isn’t less, it’s the same or even higher. That’s one reason for the huge expansion over the years in the number of staffers and consultants in school districts, most of whom are ex-teachers. Promoting your best teachers (to the extent that any school district knows who their best teachers are) to teach teachers might well hurt students more than help teachers.

The problem with our education system is that we don’t really know what works and what doesn’t, and nobody is willing to experiment with kids to find out.

The problem with teaching is that it’s a lot like being a doctor in the 18th Century. Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, was the most celebrated doctor in England. King George III asked him to cure him of his madness. Erasmus, no fool, turned him down.

You see, 18th Century doctors had relatively few ways to actually cure anybody of anything, so their reputations for healing the sick mostly depended upon their skill at “prognosis.” Erasmus Darwin was the best at figuring out which potential patients would likely improve on their own and which wouldn’t. He avoided the latter like the plague, even if they were the King of England. Similarly, nobody knows (or much cares) how good, say, Harvard is at teaching undergraduates. But Harvard is outstanding at prognosis of high school seniors. And that’s what counts at present in education.

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Globally population growth rates are likely to continue dropping – to less than 0.8 percent worldwide by 2025 – largely due to an unanticipated drop in birthrates in developing countries such as Mexico and Iran. These declines are in part the result of increased urbanization, the education of women, and higher property prices. Already the global fertility rate, including the developing countries, has dropped in half to an estimated 2.5 today (Longman, 2010a). Close to half the world’s population lives, notes demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, in countries with below replacement rate birth-rates. The world, he suggests, is experiencing a “fertility implosion” (Eberstadt, 2010).

Right now the situation seems dire. Fertility rates are projected to continue their decline. Increasing life expectancy is contributing to a substantial increase in the elderly population. In many nations, the size of the elderly population will exceed that of the under 15 population for the first time.

This could not have happened at a worse time, because the elderly have become ever more dependent on the state in many nations. Supporting a larger elderly population requires a larger work force, however it will be smaller.

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With its vote on September 21, the Senate Appropriations Committee ended the rail boosters’ hopes of getting a meaningful appropriation for high-speed rail in the new (FY 2012) fiscal year. It probably also dealt a decisive death blow to President Obama’s loopy goal of “giving 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail.”

By including only a token $100 million for high-speed rail as a “placeholder” in their FY 2012 budget recommendations (a sum that is likely to be further cut in the House-Senate negotiations on the FY 2012 appropriations), Senate appropriators have done more than merely declare a temporary slowdown in the high-speed rail program. They have effectively given a vote of “no confidence” to President Obama’s signature infrastructure initiative. Along with their House counterparts who had denied the program any new money, the Senate lawmakers have sent a bipartisan signal that Congress has no appetite for pouring more money into a venture that many lawmakers have come to view as a poster child for wasteful government spending.

And one more attempt by ‘progressives’ to revert to the nineteenth century bites the dust. Good riddance. I just wish that taxpayers could get their money back.

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In a decision denying basic property rights and even exceeding the FDA’s contempt for the rights of private contract and food freedom of choice, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Patrick J. Fiedler has issued an order holding that owners of cows do not have a fundamental right to consume milk from their own cow.

In his opinion the Judge rejected out of hand the Zinniker plaintiffs’ argument that they had a fundamental right to possess, use and enjoy their property (including “a fundamental right to own a cow, and to use their cows in a manner that does not cause harm a third party”); he stated this claim was “wholly without merit.”

When I was a kid, this was a free country.

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…a shame if anything should happen to it! The Democrats took gangster government to a new level today with attacks on Bank of America by Dick Durbin and President Obama. The attacks arise out of the Durbin Amendment to Dodd-Frank, which, as we wrote here, directed the Fed to fix the fees which banks can charge for debit card transactions. The rate set by the Fed is inadequate and will take something like $14 billion out of the pockets of major banks. So a number of banks, including Bank of America, have announced that they will replace the lost revenue by charging a monthly fee for debit cards; in BoA’s case, $5. Even though this was entirely predictable (and was in fact predicted), it has enraged the Democrats.

It is unprecedented, as far as I can recall, for a government official like Durbin to urge customers not to do business with a particular company because he doesn’t like that company’s pricing policies. If another bank offers customers debit cards for $3 and there are no compensating advantages at BoA, it would be reasonable for a customer to shift its business elsewhere. But businesses are entitled to price their products and services however they choose. It is up to consumers to decide which company’s offer they want to accept, if any. The Democrats are such inveterate bullies that they refuse to acknowledge this simple proposition.

Obama’s ignorance of economics is impressive in its comprehensiveness. We need a Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to “prevent this kind of stuff from happening.” What kind of stuff? Banks charging money for their services, like everyone else does? Banks “don’t have some inherent right just to get a certain amount of profit.” Of course not. It is only government that is entitled to your money, regardless of how well or poorly government serves you. But banks certainly do have an inherent right to charge prices that are set by them, not by a government agency, as long as those prices are not collusive.

2012 can’t come soon enough.

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

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Not long ago The Huffington Post reported that roughly 170,000 U.S. families are living in homeless shelters. Who set up those shelters? Elves? No, countless caring individuals and charitable groups did. There probably isn’t a decent-sized church in America that doesn’t have a program to help the poor. Countless more Americans contribute to secular anti-poverty nonprofits, from well-known ones such as Habitat for Humanity and the Children’s Defense Fund to more obscure ones such as Hopelink and the Food Not Bombs movement.

And still we are told that “nobody cares about the poor.”

The other day Cornel West showed up at the Occupy Wall Street protest with a sign reading, “If only the war on poverty was a real war, then we would actually be putting money into it.” Funny. But the premise is flat-out wrong. In 2009 alone Washington spent $591 billion  on means-tested anti-poverty programs. (Others, such as Medicare and Social Security, are not means-tested.) By comparison, 2009 federal appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were $130 billion. Since the War on Poverty began, Americans have shelled out more than $13 trillion to fight it.

Lileks.

I should have to say any more.

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Considering that he spends all of his time yapping, wagging his tale, whining, and licking his own groin, that probably true. Oh, and let’s not forget pooping on other people’s property and peeing on things to mark what he thinks ought to be his territory. Actually, the similarity is rather frightening….

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Jihadi forum Ansar al-Mujahideen recently published a new e-book, The Just Scale – On the Permissibility of Killing the Infidels’ Children and Women, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). Each of its eight chapters presents alleged proof from the Quran and Islam’s legal tradition, in an attempt to refute mainstream arguments against killing certain types of civilians.

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

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

Steve Landsburg spanks Paul Krugman, who seems (for a Nobel Laureate in Economics) to be remarkably ignorant of the basic elements of his field. Perhaps the Nobel Prize isn’t the guarantee of excellence that everyone takes it to be. Just sayin’. (Remember Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize? I’m sure the people of Iraq and Afghanistan would agree that the Nobel committee really nailed that one.)

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The minimum wage may be pricing young people out of work because employers are finding it too expensive to give them their first job, Government pay advisers have said.

Gee, whoda thunit.

Markets work even when you don’t want them to.

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Truly, you can make anything out of Legos.

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I am not making this up.

Steve Sailer apparently doesn’t like Rick Perry.

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And if cutting off their allowance doesn’t work, next step is putting them in Time Out.

After that, they’re grounded.

That’ll teach ’em.

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That’s Democrats for you. ‘Bill of Rights? How intolerant. How about Bill of Suggestions? We’re much more comfortable with that.’

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. ‘ — Benito Mussolini

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And, of course, it takes a British newspaper to notice the smell, and investigate.

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Would you like to have chimp genes to fight cancer and malaria? Or maybe kudzu genes for antioxidants?

On this date in 1571 the forces of jihad were checked at sea, and the long rollback of Muslim conquest would begin a hundred years later outside the gates of Vienna in 1683.

Looks like they’ve got momentum on their side again — nature abhors a vacuum, and that’s what we’ve got for governments these days.

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Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.

The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. “Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

An Informative Chart.

David Gelernter actually has something worth reading.

Jobs was an original, but he was also the latest of a long line of seers all carrying the same message: Technology is design. To be great, technology must be beautiful.

Whatever his formal titles, at Apple and the other companies he created, bought or shook up, Jobs was always designer-in-chief. He knew from the start that his task was to tell engineers, here’s how it should look, sound, feel; here’s how the controls should work; it should be this big and cost that much. Now do it. Let me know when you’re finished.

More crapitalism.

There was also a focus on terminology, attendees said. For example, the audience was told to use the word “marketplace” and not “exchange” when discussing the law. BCBSA senior vice president Alissa Fox said the meeting was simply a continuation of BCBSA’s long-held belief that “all states should set up their own marketplaces.”

But doooooon’t call it DoubleSpeak….

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” — Adam Smith

Read it. And watch the video.

Recently bringing back it’s popular Monopoly game, incentivizing packages of Big Mac’s and extra large Coke’s with the chance to win prizes and cash, a McDonald’s in Brooklyn was the stage for the latest example of 365Black behavior. Rumors that the Black guy shot in broad daylight (all of this was captured by the beauty of video-recording devices) had just found a Park Place and Boardwalk on his Big Mac packaging have, thus far, gone uncorroborated.

‘Black Muslim’ is beginning to sound redundant.

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Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal featured an in-depth look at how federal laws increasingly apply criminal penalties for violations involving no mens rea, roughly translated as a “guilty mind.” The stricture against criminal penalties for unwitting violations is an age-old, bedrock legal principle. Alas, in today’s dangerously armed, bureaucratic super-state, ancient legal principles go by the wayside when politicians pretend to be “tough on crime” and when officious civil “servants” indulge their fetishes for power.

U.S. governments at every level these days are prone to “overcriminalization,” which means turning ordinary activity into violations of the law, turning what should be civil violations into criminal ones, and applying penalties far harsher than should be warranted.

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The European Commission has threatened to take legal action against Britain if ministers do not water down rules limiting foreigners’ ability to claim benefits.

Ministers fear the move could leave taxpayers handing out as much as £2.5? billion to EU nationals, including out-of-work “benefit tourists”, a new cost that could wreck Coalition plans for welfare reform.

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Washington press and political circles have been abuzz this week over the new Kaiser Family Foundation survey that found families enrolled in employer-provided health care plans have seen their premiums rise by 9 percent in just the past year, a significant increase. The Kaiser Foundation’s report attributes over 16 percent of the premium hike to ObamaCare.

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

Read it.

Since the recession ended, businesses had increased their real spending on equipment and software by a strong 26%, while they have added almost nothing to their payrolls.

Employment appears to be making a transition such as transportation made when we went from horses to cars. Buying a new machine means that you, well, buy a new machine. Hiring a new employee means sticking your foot into a tarpit of actual and potential legal and financial liabilities that many companies are looking at and saying, ‘Nope, don’t wanna go there.’

Maybe things would be different if machines could vote….

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Apple reckons the iPhone 4S deserves the moniker ‘cos it has a CDMA radio as well as supporting GSM, but it turns out that a 4S will roam only from CDMA onto GSM, not the other way round. So if you’re a European hoping your 4S will work across the USA you’ll be disappointed.

CDMA compatibility needs a secure element as well as a radio – a role fulfilled by the SIM on GSM networks. That can only come from a CDMA operator, so (as the small print reveals) an iPhone 4S can only work on CDMA networks if it was supplied by such a CDMA operator.

Even if you’re an American traveller who bought your phone from Sprint or Verizon (the predominant CDMA operators) you’ll be lucky to get a signal when abroad. The CDMA radio in the 4S doesn’t support the 450MHz band so popular around the Scandinavian countries and across Russia; it’s limited to 800 and 1900MHz, so the majority of CDMA networks will be closed to you even if they had roaming agreements in place.

Pretty lame.

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No more Russian boomers. The end of a era.

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The documentary notes, “[P]rohibition turned law-abiding citizens into criminals, and criminals into kings,” “It made a mockery of the justice system, caused illicit drinking to seem glamorous and fun, encouraged neighborhood gangs to become national crime syndicates, permitted government officials to bend and sometimes even break the law…” Unfortunately that is still the case today. The regulatory scheme enacted to “safely reintroduce” alcohol into society following Prohibition’s repeal has grown into a labyrinth of state-based rules, resulting in a number of negative consequences — many similar to those of Prohibition.

Many readers may balk at that, and ask “Sure, we’ve got some blue laws here and there, but how bad could it be?” Examining the regulations on the sale of just one type of alcoholic beverage, beer, makes it clear that significant remnants of Prohibition and even the temperance movement are still with us today —strangling small businesses, protecting cartels and making criminals out of honest citizens.

Read it.

Read it.

Researchers at the Spanish Superior Scientific Research Council (CSIC) have successfully completed Phase I human clinical trials of a HIV vaccine that came out with top marks after 90% of volunteers developed an immunological response against the virus. The MVA-B vaccine draws on the natural capabilities of the human immune system and “has proven to be as powerful as any other vaccine currently being studied, or even more”, says Mariano Esteban, head researcher from CSIC’s National Biotech Centre.

Retroviruses are among the biggest challenges medicine faces today. This is a significant milestone on the road to beating them.

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Mossberg likes it:

I’ve been testing this new iPad app, and I like it. It is much cleaner and more attractive than the cluttered Britannica website and sports some nice features, including a dynamic “link map” showing the relationship between topics in a visual format. Unlike the Web version, it is free of ads. The app is expected to be available in a couple of weeks.

Ignorant? There’s an app for that….

Read it. And watch the video.

Alaa Alsaegh is an Iraqi Muslim living in the St. Louis area. Last month he wrote a poem in Arabic for a pro-Israel website, expressing his support for Israel.

His reward? Two strangers trapped him on a deserted street and carved a Star of David in his back with a knife.

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

Read it.

Pretty sad when the cheese-eating surrender monkeys are more willing to step up to the plate than America.

George Will puts his gun in the barrel and pulls the trigger.

Fond of diversity in everything but thought, a certain kind of liberal favors mandatory harmony (e.g., campus speech codes). Such liberals, being realists at least about the strength of their arguments, discourage “too much” debate about them (e.g., restrictions on campaign spending to disseminate political advocacy). Now Frank wants to strip the presidents of the Fed’s 12 regional banks of their right to vote as members of the policymaking Federal Open Market Committee.

Frank is a Democrat, you see, so he loves freedom — freedom of speech, especially.

Frank says he has “long been troubled” from a “theoretical democratic standpoint” by the “anomaly” of important decisions affecting national economic policy being made by persons “selected with absolutely no public scrutiny or confirmation.” It was not, however, until August that this affront to Frank’s democratic sensibilities became so intolerable that he proposed a legislative remedy.

Hey, nothing is more democratic than suppressing incorrect opinions.

Nevertheless, it is notable that the left now has its Ron Paul. Notable and, in a sense, appropriate because one of liberalism’s steady aims is to break more and more institutions to the saddle of centralized power.

The Other McCain has some fun with Crustian culture.

Curious statement from U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz:

“I want the public to understand that Mr. Ferdaus’ conduct, as alleged in the complaint, is not reflective of a particular culture, community or religion. In addition to protecting our citizens from the threats and violence alleged today, we also have an obligation to protect members of every community, race, and religion against violence and other unlawful conduct.”

Hmmmm. What “particular culture, community or religion” was notreflected in the acts of 26-year-year-oid Rezwan Feradaus? Obviously, the U.S. Attorney must be afraid that some people will use this to cast aspersions on . . . Northeastern University physics students, perhaps? Rock band drummers?

Hey, those rock band drummers can be really intense.