Read it.

Iran has been systematically plundering large amounts of oil from southern Iraq for years, a theft on a grand scale that’s helping the Islamic Republic withstand sanctions aimed at throttling its oil exports, a U.S. security consultancy says.

“Tehran has built a complex oil smuggling network that allows it to bring in significant revenues from southern Iraq’s oil production,” observed Stratfor, which has its offices in Texas.

These funds, worth around $20 million a day, enable Iran, which is predominantly Shiite Muslim, “to maintain its influence in the region while preparing to defend itself from stringent sanctions against its oil exports,” Stratfor said.

Stratfor said that roughly 10 percent of the oil produced in the Basra region of Shiite-dominated southern Iraq, where two-thirds of Iraq’s oil reserves lie, “is smuggled, most of which ends up in Iran for export.”

What you won’t see on a T-shirt near you: ‘No Blood For Oil’ in Arabic — or Farsi.

Read it. And watch the video.

When you care enough to send the very best.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, extrapolates, as mathematicians like to do.

I am going to put to you what I think you will find a rather startling, perhaps absurd, proposition: that the elite classes of the U.S.A. may turn racist.

As startling as it may be, this is not an original idea.

Our elites are snobs, but not fools. The dissonance between what all good folk are supposed to believe, and the evidence of our lying eyes, must sooner or later be resolved, when enough little boys have called out that the Emperor has no clothes.

If you want to say that such dramatic turnarounds simply don’t happen, I need only remind you that our elites well within living memory expressed opinions about race that would disqualify them from public office nowadays. About other things, too. Quote: “To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.” That was the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court — a person I think can fairly be taken to belong to the elite. The date was 1986, Bowers v. Hardwick.

Steve Sailer keeps asking the hard questions.

Of course, today we all know that welfare couldn’t have dysgenic and/or dyscultural effects. In fact, Science tells us that welfare state Britain couldn’t possibly wind up after a few generations with lots of anti-intellectual yobs who think that studying is only for toffs and poofters, that toffs are poofters. How unscientific Keynes was! He must have been a poofter toff himself to be so unscientific.

Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

Thomas comes out in favor of simple justice.

Anyway, if women can use the power of the state to force others to pay for their contraceptives (via higher insurance premiums), men certainly should be able to use the power of the state to acquire goodies that are essential to “men’s health.” I therefore demand that the Obama administration force insurance companies to cover the following items:

• free tickets to sporting events

• beer, whiskey, and wine on demand

• free premium sports packages on cable or satellite TV

• Mondays and Fridays off, with full pay

• provocative clothing (intimate and otherwise) for one’s “partner”

• free subscriptions to various forms of lascivious entertainment

I’m sure there are many other things that are essential to “men’s health,” but that’s a good start.

Hear, hear.

Steve Sailer just loves asking questions that nobody else would dare to touch.

As I pointed out in a couple of articles in 2005, class is the big divide in Britain rather than race. “Class” is a 1500-year-long project to civilize the Conan the Barbarian warlords who inundated the Roman Empire to act like “gentlemen.” By the late 20th Century, all that politeness, all that studying, all that self-discipline, was striking young males of the lower classes as pretty gay. Thus, chavism.

As historian David Starkey pointed out during the English looting last summer, that blacks were in the lead, but whites were right behind in the looting — something you don’t see in the U.S much at all.

Read it. And watch the video.

‘Judge, it needed killin’.’ Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

For complex socio-technical systems (web engineering and operations) there is a myth that deserves to be busted, and that is the assumption that for outages and accidents, there is a single unifying event that triggers a chain of events that led to an outage.

This is actually a fallacy, because for complex systems:

there is no root cause.

Jonah Goldberg, in discussing Diane Sawyer and the pseudo-debates:

The point here isn’t simply to highlight for the millionth time the reality of media bias. It’s to note how issues like homosexuality now only have one purpose when it comes to political reporting: Make conservatives look weird. In all of these debates gay marriage and similar issues are not brought out to elicit a serious argument or elucidate a meaningful principle. The whole point is to get Republicans to look sex obsessed, “homophobic,” or mean.

If the substance of the issue mattered, you’d think Diane Sawyer would ask the one guy running for president with any control over the issue to explain himself. Heck, you’d think she’d ask the one guy whose position on these matters is an incoherent mess to clarify his views. But no. Asking Obama about these things would only hurt Obama. And that’s not why she’s in this business.

If you don’t subscribe to the G-File, you’re missing out.

Read it.

Four people were killed when pill addict David Laffer robbed a Medford, N.Y. pharmacy. Now the survivors of victim Jamie Taccetta are suing a variety of defendants including the drugstore whose pharmacist was killed, the Suffolk County police and a former commissioner, “and pharmaceutical companies that make the drug oxycodone.”

Of course.

Read it.

Billy Clay Payne and Billie Jean Hayworth were killed last month after they deleted Jenelle Potter, the daughter of one of the suspects, from their “friends” list.

Both were shot in the head and Mr Payne’s throat was cut.

Another fine reason to steer clear of ‘social media’.

Check it out.

Tell the truth: You’ve always suspected as much….

George Will nails it.

The U.S. defense budget is about 43 percent of the world’s total military spending — more than the combined defense spending of the next 17 nations, many of which are U.S. allies. Are Republicans really going to warn voters that America will be imperiled if the defense budget is cut 8 percent from projections over the next decade? In 2017, defense spending would still be more than that of the next 10 countries combined.

Do Republicans think it is premature to withdraw as many as 7,000 troops from Europe two decades after the Soviet Union’s death? About 73,000 will remain, most of them in prosperous, pacific, largely unarmed and utterly unthreatened Germany. Why do so many remain?

The American message to the world: We spend all this money so you don’t have to!

Read it.

As I’ve noted in the past, one of the basic memes of environmental reporting holds that anything good that happens is actually bad: When nature turns out to be stunningly resilient in the face of human activity, it’s bad, because it empowers humans. When biologists find new species, it’s bad, because they’re threatened by development. If scientists ever find a lost valley full of dinosaurs, the headline will read “Dinosaurs Survive Untold Millennia! Now Threatened by Climate Change.”

‘Women and Minorities Hardest Hit’.

Read it.

Members of a terror gang that plotted to bomb the London Stock Exchange could walk free in less than six years after they were given double the normal reduction in sentence for entering guilty pleas yesterday.

The suicide of Western civilization.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Undoubtedly in a Blue state.

Read it.

The Keynesian multiplier is bogus, for reasons spelled out in “A Keynesian Fantasy Land.” By bogus, I do not mean that government spending (G) has no effect on gross domestic product (GDP). What I mean is that the effect of G on GDP is (1) overrated and (2) irrelevant.

Read it.

FOOTBALL FANS in the central African state of Congo were hurling accusations of witchcraft at each other yesterday after a freak blast of lightning struck dead an entire team on the playing field while their opponents were left completely untouched.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

“Henry Ford Health System will pay $70,000 to a family who alleges the system failed to provide sign language interpreters to a patient and family members in 2004, and must train staff on the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to a settlement announced … by the U.S. Justice Department.”

And that’s why Detroit only has half of the number of people that it was built for. The smart ones are leaving, and the stupid ones are in charge of the government.

Read it.

Oh, the humanity….

On the other hand, perhaps if she wore a sweater vest she could get a guy to hang around. Just saying.

Read it.

Mice get all of the good stuff.

Read it. And watch the video, which is freaky.

We have the technology … almost.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Check it out.

Really, does it get any better than this?

Freeberg explores the wonderful world of computer errors.

Read it.

One by one, the more honest of the scientists who fell for the anthropogenic global warming hoax are confessing their error.

Freeberg lets ‘er rip.

For the record: It’s now been two years, plus a couple months since I said it…on the occasion of the Fort Hood shooting. My long-term memory is showing some signs of age, and is no longer infallible assuming it ever was. But as far as what I had in mind, I think the “calling dangerous things safe” had to do with Islamic weird-beards and Jihad bullshit and Saddam Hussein. You’ll notice our “intellectuals” have been pretty consistent in lecturing us that we have nothing to worry about there…and none of them have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, in terms of substantiating such reassurances to us. Just whistlin’ dixie, as they say.

And the “calling safe things dangerous” would be carbon in the atmosphere. Oh, yes, if you have one of those powerful, capable minds, you’re grousing away like Chicken Little about what’s going to happen to Mother Earth…probably driving a huge truck that gets four miles to a gallon, but who cares what you do, listen to what you say. That makes you an intellektshewel.

What he said….

Read it. And watch the video.

Now that’s entertainment.

Read it.

Stockman writes: “If you spend a little time with these numbers you will know that they are being made up.”

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

I wish for a new ice age, so that all of this foolishness will be forgotten.

Perhaps a human charity can sue the government on behalf of 100 million ‘slave’ taxpayers.

Read it.

Read it.

The feeling you get when you receive a tax refund — until you realize that you’re just getting your own money back after the government has ‘wet its beak’.

Read it.

There were no other witnesses to the punch, which came after the man had approached a patrol as a passenger on a motorcycle. His partner pulled a gun on a member of the Afghan National Army and was shot dead.

Ahmed Wali denied he was a member of the Taliban when he was questioned by Corporal C but prosecutors admitted his evidence was “unreliable”.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California.

Read it.

Look, Jane. See Michigan. See Michigan rot.

Read it.

In his address to the Sydney Institute on January 24, the director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, David Irvine, pointed out that ”of the 38 people prosecuted for terrorism-related offences in Australia, 37 were Australian citizens and 34 were either born here or lived here since childhood”. Clearly home-grown terrorism is a threat in Australia.

Well, unfortunately, ‘home-grown terrorism’ is a concept only valid if one accepts the silly utopian modern notion that if, for example, one is born and raised in Australia, one is necessarily ‘an Australian’ in every sense of the term. This is ludicrous with respect to anyone brought up outside the mainstream culture of the country, and especially ludicrous in the case of Muslims, whose first allegiance is to the Umma of all Believers, and maybe (or maybe not) to whatever country they happen to be living it for the time being — a fact that Britain and the Scandinavian countries are having their noses rubbed in at this very moment.

Veronique de Rugy takes another lefty scribbler to the woodshed.

Over at New York magazine’s website, Jonathan Chait challenges my claim that the United States’ federal tax system is more progressive than other Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development  (OECD) nations, including countries that Chait probably admires for their welfare states such as France.

I assume this fact bothers him because he likely believes that one factor behind income inequality is a lack of progressivity in the tax code. If I’m correct that the United States has a more progressive tax code than other countries that may have less income inequality than the U.S., it undermines one of the arguments for higher tax rates on the rich.

Read it.

While the U.S. has been busy trying to bring order to failed states in Afghanistan and elsewhere, The Daily’s Mara Gay reports that its own failed city, Detroit, is continuing its steady descent into the state of nature. Residents, unable to rely on a dwindling police force to keep them safe, are taking matters into their own hands. Justifiable homicide in the city shot up 79 percent in 2011 from the previous year. The local rate of self-defense killings now stands 2,200 percent above the national average.

“Judge, he needed killin’.”

Read it.

Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune tells the world how painful it was for his lobbying group to stop taking millions in donations from natural gas companies. And what organization wouldn’t be happy to rake in $26 million in donations?

Now the Sierra Club has decided that natural gas is just another evil fossil fuel that it getting in the way of the solar, wind, geothermal future that the organization wants to impose on Americans. And that’s OK. Environmentalism as an ideology is driven by the constant need to create an endless series of monsters to fear – natural gas is now one of the newer ones. The Sierra Club flip flop on natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to the low-carbon energy economy was motivated by NIMBY concerns of local chapters and the fact that cheap abundant natural gas makes the case for expensive renewable energy sources even less economically plausible.

Read it.

Read it.

Expecting a group of feral fox and pig hunters on safari to the back of Bourke, the property owner left directions in a mailbox and saw just one man, who simply called himself ”Joe”.

The company Joe kept alarmed the locals. The seven men – led by Aimen Joud from Melbourne and Mohamed Ali Elomar from Sydney – got lost and had to ask for directions.

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”They stood out to the local community when they were driving through … Some of them were wearing camouflage fatigues … Some of them are large gentlemen, so just their physical presence stands out,” NSW Police terrorism investigations squad head Detective Inspector David Gawel, says.

Of course, Adam George was a fake name that had been previously used to try to buy laboratory gear to manufacture chemicals to build a bomb.

Any country that allows Muslims across its border has a death wish. And they’re happy to oblige.

Read it.

Apparently this very rich man decided to adopt his girlfriend to shield a large amount of assets from a potential civil judgment in the aftermath of DUI charges against him.  Both of his kids are minors, and apparently his trust for his children could still be hit by a future judgment against him, but with the adoption of another daughter who is not a minor, the trust becomes immune to such judgments.  Enter the girlfriend and the strategic adoption.  Rational Economic Man never disappoints in his ability to desacralize institutions and game systems.

Read it.

If this were just the hard Left within a few trade unions and a fringe collection of Socialist Workers’ Party headbangers, it would not much matter. But the truth is that a good proportion of the population harbours a vague notion that there exists a whole other way of doing things that is inherently more benign and “fair” – in which nobody is hurt or disadvantaged – available for the choosing, if only politicians had the will or the generosity to embrace it.

Read it. And watch the video.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Welcome aboard, Niall. Don’t forget to wipe your feet.

Read it.

What a piker. I’d like to erase the entire decade 1910-1920, which is the pile of shit from which all our modern trouble grow (and not just in the United States).

Read it.

The Obama administration has become a budget-free zone, in flagrant violation of federal law, which prescribes a process for developing a federal budget which the Democrats have simply flouted. Has our nation ever seen such fecklessness? $15 trillion in debt, the credit of the United States being downgraded, hundreds of thousands leaving the labor force, and the Democrats don’t think our government should have a budget? Or a plan to dig our way out of a $15 trillion hole? How out of touch can the Democrats be?

Read it.

Yeah, I’ve played with people like that. But it’s the way he would’ve wanted to go.

Cardiac arrest brought on by low temperatures and a lack of physical movement is likely to be the cause of death.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Uh oh. Romney’s in trouble.

Read it.

The Jewish National Fund (JNF) was established with the hope to help the birth of the State of Israel. JNF plants trees for forest development in Israel, creates parks, battles forest fires, is responsible for soil conservation, pioneers innovative solutions to help Israel’s water supply, among other notable work.

The “Stop the JNF Campaign” alleges that the Jewish National Fund “was instrumental in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in the 1948 Nakba, and continues to play a central role in maintaining Israel’s regime of apartheid.” It calls for the revocation of JNF’s charity and to isolate the group by breaking all ties with it.

Despite its shrill and nonsensical premise, the “Stop the JNF Campaign” has garnered support from organizations across the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries around the world. It also has spread to American and Canadian college campuses.