Read it.

An interesting analysis of the Bales situation.

Read it.

The bar code served as a form of identity for the woman and as certificate of “ownership” by one prostitution ring, and beneath the bar code was also tattooed the amount of money she owed the ring, police said.

Read it.

For liberals, it is always 1962, and we are always in Mississippi.

And that’s the whole story, in a nutshell.

And another thing: What’s with these names? You would think that black parents wouldn’t go out of their way to give their kids names that will ensure that, even without an accompanying picture, any recruiter will see it on a resumé and say, ‘Huh. Black. If we hire him/her, and need to fire him/her later, guaranteed civil rights lawsuit. Don’t need that kind of trouble.’ and trash it without even reading it? What’s up with that?

Nicholas Farrell goes Italian.

Italy, tragically, is riddled with Italians. And Tuscany is even worse because lurking behind every oleander bush is an Englishman with a Panama hat on his head and a glass of Chianti in his hand. In every piazza is a sun-dried American woman of a certain age in a hurry to find an answer to her question, “Yes, but is it organic?”

But that’s not the worst of it.

Carla’s mission (God bless her or perhaps God help her) is to get me to become a Catholic because otherwise there is no chance of me going to heaven because only Catholics go to heaven and time is running out because the apocalypse is due any day now, as we can so clearly see from what is going in Syria, and not forgetting Iran, but also those really weird tornados in America. And in those very few moments of life as we know it left to us on Earth she feels “only half a person” being married to a non-Catholic, which also jeopardizes her own place in heaven.

Read it.

Exposure to germs in childhood is thought to help strengthen the immune system and protect children from developing allergies and asthma, but the pathways by which this occurs have been unclear. Now, researchers have identified a mechanism in mice that may explain the role of exposure to microbes in the development of asthma and ulcerative colitis, a common form of inflammatory bowel disease.

No doubt this explains the robust health that kids in the ga-hetto have always enjoyed. Or maybe having yo momma on crack is not what they meant.

Read it.

Read it.

China is to abolish the transplanting of organs from executed prisoners in the next five years, because they are not as healthy as those who have not served jail time.

Other than that, of course, the program was a great success. Look for Thomas Friedman to praise it in his next column, and the Democrats in Congress to adopt it in a major election coming soon to a theater near you.

Read it.

Education is an important determinant of income — one of the most important — but it is less important than most people think. If everyone had the same education, the inequality of income would be reduced by less than 10%. When you focus on education you neglect the myriad other factors that determine income. The differences of income among people who have the same education are huge.

Read it.

More peer-reviewed science contradicting the warming-alarmist “scientific consensus” was announced yesterday, as a new study shows that the well-documented warm period which took place in medieval times was not limited to Europe, or the northern hemisphere: it reached all the way to Antarctica.

The research involved the development of a new means of assessing past temperatures, to add to existing methods such as tree ring analysis and ice cores. In this study, scientists analysed samples of a crystal called ikaite, which forms in cold waters.

But but but … there’s a Consensus!

Read it.

Obama apology anticipated presently.

Read it. And watch the video.

Read it.

Calvin: You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants don’t help.

An Informative Map.

Get a sharpie and trace the old border between Germany and Russia pre-1918.

Pretty remarkable when you consider that there aren’t any Germans left in that area.

Read it.

Collectively punishing dhimmis—non-Muslims who refused to convert after their lands were seized by Muslims, and who are treated as “second-class” infidels—for the crimes of the individual is standard under Islam. In this instance, dhimmis are forbidden from striking—let alone killing—Muslims, even if the latter perpetrate the conflict. Prior to the fight that killed him, the Muslim in question had, through the help of radical Salafis, burned down the Christian’s home and was threatening him over a property dispute. Still, non-Muslims are forbidden to raise their hands to Muslims, even in self defense.

Note the resemblance to the Mafia — which isn’t surprising when one realizes that Islam is organized crime under the guise of a religion. Every inch of dirt occupied by Muslims outside of the Arabian peninsula was stolen from someone else.

Read it.

To dig itself out of recession, Britain hiked its income-tax rate to 50% for those making £150,000 or more. Proponents said the tax was needed to bring fairness to an economy, in which the rich were getting richer and not contributing enough to the cause. Critics said the tax would chase out the job creators.

As it turned out, the real impact was in tax avoidance. According to the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s budget announced today, the income-tax hike caused “massive distortions” that cost the government.

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

People move their money — and themselves — from high-tax jurisdictions to low-tax jurisdictions if they can. Rich people pretty much always can. As a result, taxes intended to ‘soak the rich’ not only don’t raise the revenue increases that bureaucrats predict under static analysis (‘we can do anything we want and they’ll just sit there and take it’), but don’t even get the revenue that they would have gotten under the old tax structure, because the income stream is entirely gone.

“No Chancellor can justify a tax rate that damages our economy and raises next to nothing,” he said.

But the Obamassiah can.

Raise your hand, anybody who thinks that the U.S. government will let this reality intrude on their liberal fantasies.

No, me neither.

Read it.

In fact, the rule would generate only about $47 billion in extra revenues over the next decade, according to a new estimate by the nonpartisan congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. That’s less than some outside experts had expected, and not enough to make a dent in federal deficits, which now are running at more than $1 trillion a year.

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

Of course, the writer presumes that the reason for it is to raise revenue, which is just a smokescreen. The ‘Buffet Rule’ isn’t intended to hurt the super-rich, but help prevent the merely-rich who aspire to be super-rich. Buffet and his fellow Crustians don’t want the rabble intruding on their activities.

Read it.

The Sacketts wanted to build a home on a 0.63-acre lot near pristine Priest Lake in the Idaho panhandle that they bought for $23,000. But after three days of bringing in fill dirt and preparing for construction in 2007, officials from the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ordered the activity stopped and said they suspected the land contained wetlands.

Months later, the agency sent the Sacketts a “compliance order” that said the land must be restored as a wetlands before the couple could apply for a building permit. The government acknowledged that fines for failure to comply with the orders could be as much as $75,000 a day.

Your tax dollars at work.

The question for the justices was whether the couple had the right at that point to appear before a judge and contest the agency’s contention that their land contained wetlands subject to the Clean Water Act.

The agency didn’t even want to allow them access to a court to challenge the order. That’s the EPA all over.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined in the criticism in a concurring opinion, saying the position taken by the federal government in the case “would have put the property rights of ordinary Americans entirely at the mercy of Environmental Protection Agency employees.”

As if they aren’t already.

Read it.

Workers at a large Russian company are to boycott British goods over the UK Government’s support for businesses that ban Christians from openly wearing crosses or crucifixes at work.

Pretty sad when Russians have more respect for freedom of religion than the British government.

Read it.

Yet another excellent reason to steer clear of Facebook.

John Hinderaker at PowerLine never tires of pointing out the inconvenient truth.

At the American Thinker, Jack Cashill writes that the open speculation by European talking heads was that the killer sought for the shootings at the Jewish school in Toulouse was a Neo-Nazi, thus someone on the “extreme right,” a possibility that energized the media. Cashill titles his post “A neo-Nazi named ‘Muhammed’?”

Cashill doesn’t actually name the suspect. Murray Wardrop is covering the siege that has been laid to the suspect’s apartment live for the Telegraph. Turning to Wardrop’s live coverage, we learn that the suspect is indeed named Mohammed — Mohammed Merah. He is 23 and of French nationality. Reuters reports that Merah was jailed for bombings in Afghanistan in 2007, but escaped months later in a mass prison break organized by Taliban insurgents.

Poor LameStream Media — forever waiting for the new Timothy McVeigh and forever disappointed with Yet Another Guy Named Mohammed.

Read it.

The American government, which has been shoveling out federally guaranteed loans to American solar power companies, is now going to try to help by taxing the companies’ foreign competitors, the Wall Street Journal reports….

So we see that ‘solar power’ is not a goal to be accomplished, but rather an excuse for more taxpayer-funded cronyism on the part of the administration. How’s that Hope and Change working out for you?

Read it.

Forget the obsessive-compulsive tracking of every event in your life — the real killer feature of Facebook Timeline is the huge banner-style cover photo that’s become the de rigeur way to express yourself online. Members of Congress have joined in with relish, too, carefully selecting images for maximum constituent impact, and the Washington Post has collected some of the best. From inspiring landscape photography to abstract shots of the American flag, it’s all right there on Facebook.

The only surprise here is that the compulsive narcissists in government have taken so long to clasp to their bosoms the chief vehicle for displaying compulsive narcissism in our time. But, then, Congress specializes in locking the barn door after the horse has gone, gotten hooked up, had a passel of colts, and come back in search of food stamps and housing assistance, so perhaps this is the first sign that Facebook is, like, so over.

Read it.

After Dharun Ravi was convicted of “bias intimidation” crimes that carry a penalty of up to 10 years in prison, many people wondered why he had rejected a plea deal that would have kept him out of jail. Ravi’s lawyer explained that the 20-year-old defendant’s parents “didn’t believe their son acted with hate, or bias, and they didn’t want him labeled like that for life.” But it turns out you can be convicted of a hate crime without hating anyone….

Oh brave new world, that has such bullshit in it.

Read it.

From the ‘Do Something Even If It’s Wrong’ chronicles: Midnight basketball for the Children of the Crust.

One of the perennial problems of modern revolutionary movements is ‘What do you do if you win?’ Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao all faced this problem and answered it in different ways: Hitler by external war, Lenin and Stalin by internal purge, and Mao by cultural suicide. I think one can safely say that the these were all, shall we say, less than successful.

The modern Crust likes to encourage ‘activism’ amongst its juvenile tools (including, of course, its own offspring) — witness the ‘anti-fascist’ movement in Europe, whose chief characteristic is that they are actually the chief tool of the ideology that they claim to be fighting. There are two reasons for this, so far as I can tell: It gives Restive Youth something to do rather than effectually opposing those who actually run the circus, and it creates a handy tool to use against those who refuse to Get With The Program, such as the Tea Party movement in America and the Anti-Islamist movement in Europe.

The continuing problem, of course, is that ‘activists’ are active, and they might chance upon some cause that does not comport with the New World Order. So they must have straw men to fight, lest they turn and render their handlers. Hence projects such as these.

This week, Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games” hits the big screen. As the latest wildly popular young adult (Y.A.) novel becomes a film franchise, it’s not just box office dollars that will be captured, but potentially nascent citizens.  At least that’s the goal of the social campaign called “Hunger Is Not a Game” which aims to connect fans to the global food justice movement.

This is a perfect example of the increasingly fashionable trend that might best be described as a ‘theme circle-jerk’. It resembles nothing so much as what the authors of the Illuminatus trilogy called a ‘Bavarian fire drill’ — at the end of the exercise, everyone is back in their cars, having changed nothing but nevertheless having worked off some steam, imbued with a vague but satisfactory feeling of accomplishment.

The ‘global food justice movement’ is almost a poster child for the sort of thing with which the Crust occupies its more ADD denizens. What, exactly, is ‘food justice’? And in what respect is it ‘global’? This is one of those inchoate concepts that Voices of the Crust love to drop en passant in the sure and certain knowledge that those whose lives are a constant struggle with Fear Of Missing Out will nod sagely and say, ‘Why, yes, of course, the global food justice movement’, having no clue as to what it means but unwilling to acknowledge that they aren’t up to speed with the In Crowd.

It is, of course, more redistributionist nonsense — the fact that there are hungry people in the world and well-fed people in the world OF COURSE means that the well-fed have somehow done the hungry people a mischief, which it is the goal of the activists to shame them into correcting, preferably by means of giving the activisst money for them to distribute (with a healthy cut for themselves, naturally, for being so well-meaning). Nothing significant ever comes of it, of course — a wad of taxpayer-supplied cash to play with, a few meals augmented here and there, a notch on multiple resumés, but no real mark in the sands of time.

Food prices in recent years have hit record highs, leading to riots worldwide. Oxfam’s pledge calls for simple reforms: create policies that encourage crops for food, not fuel, reform food aid procedures and support small farmers.

This would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. The reason food prices are high is because governments provide price supports, precisely to ‘support small farmers’ but chiefly benefiting Huge Corporate Farmers; of these ‘simple reforms’ that Oxfam would do: (a) ‘encourage crops for food, not fuel’ is directly contrary to official government policies based on the clamor of their fellow ‘activists’ in the environmental movement, and now set in stone for benefit of the typical special interests that grow up around any foolish government money-spending program; (b) ‘reform food aid procedure’ would have to mean getting the government (and NGOs like Oxfam) out of it, and you know that’s not going to happen; and (c) ‘support small farmers’ is a strategy guaranteed to keep prices high, since such farmers can’t use the economies of scale that actually bring prices down. So, as you see, it’s all hot air.

It’s worth paying attention to this campaign, not just because “The Hunger Games” film is projected to make $90 million at this weekend’s box office, but because Imagine Better is an example of how social change organizations are looking to tap into the extraordinary market power of Y.A. fiction — now the world’s fastest growing literary genre.

How to keep young people active but ineffectual? Key their themed circle-jerk to a current fad. You didn’t think that Lady Gaga got where she is today based on actual talent, did you? And it’s brilliant. Having ensured that two entire generations of young people will have no useful skills by pushing them into college and luring them into such wanker majors as art history, gender studies, and queer theory, the Crust capitalizes on the sort of ‘literature’ that is most popular with the arrested-adolescent set by keying their ineffectual ‘activism’ exercises to it.

Perhaps the most effective practitioner of fan-fueled social change is Andrew Slack, the 32-year-old founder of The Harry Potter Alliance and the force behind Imagine Better. Since Slack, who started out as a comedian, founded the Harry Potter Alliance, he has motivated Potterphiles to send five cargo planes with $123,000 worth of relief supplies to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, donate more than 88,000 books across the world, raise awareness about net neutrality and genocide and make forays into politics — taking on Maine’s 2009 ballot initiative that sought to repeal same sex marriage.

The ‘most effective practitioner’ is named Slack (surely this is a joke?), 32 years old but head of the Harry Potter Alliance (bet he still lives in his parents’ basement), and is ‘most effective’ … how? Sending food handouts to Haiti (an amount that Congress spends in about ten minutes on ethanol subsidies) rather than, you know, helping them grow their own food; donating a lot of books (and doesn’t that fill the stomach?); ‘raising awareness’ about net neutrality (seriously? ‘net neutrality’?) and genocide (not trying to prevent it, mind you, but just ‘raising awareness’ — for the Crust, ‘raising awareness’ is almost as good as actually doing something); and ‘forays into politics’ (in support of a typical Crustian political initiative — yeah, there’s hope and change for you). Really, you can’t make this shit up.

The rest is more of the same.  The problem is that you can’t parody this stuff; they write a better parody than you can, and present it as news.

Read it.

A Japanese researcher has used thousands of strands of spider silk to spin a set of violin strings.

The strings are said to have a “soft and profound timbre” relative to traditional gut or steel strings.

Read it.

And who are we to say he’s not?

“It was a magnificent home,” he told the Sentinel. “Did we need it? No. Did we want it? Yes.”

Yeah, that’s always said ‘frugal’ to me….

Read it.

How ’bout that ‘Arab Spring’?

When it comes to the Dar al-Islam, there are no good guys.

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

Read it.

“[Glenn] Richter has been collecting food from places like the Ohav Zedek synagogue and bringing it to homeless shelters for more than 20 years, but recently his donation, including a ‘cholent‘ or carrot stew, was turned away because the Bloomberg administration wants to monitor the salt, fat and fiber eaten by the homeless. … Richter said that over the years he’s delivered more than two tons of food to the homeless.” The NYC mayor says he’s not planning to reconsider the recently adopted policy.

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

Steve Sailer lets his brain run free, to our benefit and that of all right-thinking people.

Murray says, in a throwaway line in Coming Apart, that the growing problems of the white working class don’t have much to do with race or immigration. Of course, these days, you have to say that to be accepted in polite society. Only poor white trash would think otherwise.

In fact, it’s obvious that class, race, and immigration are indeed intimately intertwined in complicated ways. But we are less and less equipped to understand them—as class taboos harden over what refined folk are supposed to notice about race and immigration.

Even the best of thinkers are constrained by their environment. Thinking outside the box gets you nowhere if the people you’re trying to reach are trained to look only inside the box for their inputs.

Among the intelligentsia, why has not thinking intelligently about immigration become a mark of gentility?

The most obvious explanation: class-based economic self-interest. People higher up the social pyramid compete less with immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, and employ them more.

Duh. Rich people don’t worry about illegal immigration for the same reason that slaveowners didn’t worry about civil rights violations.

Of the 18 NYT editorial board members today, one is black, one is Chinese, and the other16 are white. None have Spanish surnames.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

The Left used to have a ready-made set of class-based explanations for just about everything. For example, they said racial conflict in the Jim Crow South was stirred up by the landowning class to keep black and white sharecroppers from uniting against their oppressors. Similarly, the highly successful leader of the United Automobile Workers union, Walter Reuther (1907-1970), a pillar of the Democratic Party during its mid-Century dominance, preached black-white worker solidarity against management.

That was then, this is now. Nowadays the Left is run by the Upper Crust. So class-based arguments would be, uh, unhelpful.

In recent months, the Left has begun congratulating itself on rediscovering class with its Occupy Wall Street protests. Yet, a glance at the original poster in Adbusters that kicked off the movement should raise doubts. The irony is that this Photoshopped image of a ballerina surmounting sculptor Arthur Di Modica’s iconic symbol of Wall Street, Charging Bull, struck very few protesters as ironic. Ballet is perhaps the most expensive and aristocratic of all performing arts, having attained classical perfection under the patronage of the Czars. Ballet would wither without the rich.

Love the poster. Not every group would announce so publicly that their ‘movement’ is primarily a fancy dance perched on a heap o’ bull.

The Victorians notoriously considered discussion of sex vulgar. Nice people didn’t notice. Likewise, elite Americans now believe that being well informed about race (and, increasingly, immigration) is a sign of ill-breeding.

Suitable only for the rubes in Flyover Country. Listen to any Garrison Keillor monologue for details.

Without massive immigration from Latin America over the last four decades, the U.S. Hispanic population would have become more diffuse. The more talented and ambitious would have married into the general population. Hispanics would have inevitably become even less of a potential political bloc.

But what actually happened was continued mass immigration—and government and opinion leaders actively working to retard Latin assimilation by rewarding Hispanic racialists with Affirmative Action money and prizes.

Who benefits from that? I wonder….

I recently tried to look up how big the Hispanic population was in 1960, the initial point in the half century covered in Murray’s book—only to find that the Census Bureau never asked about Spanish background in the 1950 and 1960 enumerations. During the more idealistic early civil rights era, Hispanics were officially considered just plain white. But that changed as the Quota Era took off from 1969 onward and it began to pay to be officially a minority.

Who benefits from that? I wonder….

But today Chavez’s years of struggle against illegal immigration have almost completely disappeared down the Memory Hole as the MSM has posthumously converted him into the Patron Saint of Undocumented Workers.

To the point of getting a street named after him in downtown Dallas, a city with which he has no connection whatsoever — almost as absurd as naming one after St Patrick.

The issue of immigration is one of the weirder class phenomena of our era. Thus on St. Patrick’s Day, the New York Times ran an op-ed by a Maine-based novelist named Peter Behrens, entitled: It’s About Immigrants, Not Irishness. [March 16, 2012]

No!—St. Patrick’s Day really is about Irishness!

But the Irish aren’t a politically fashionable minority, so we have to ‘spread the wealth around’.

Thus, despite all the elite press effort to get Mexicans to feel simmering hatred over immigration, the numbers suggest that immigration is less of a big deal to Mexican-American voters than it is to the journalists sent to cover them.

And their race-industry pets among the ‘activist’ groups like La Raza, of course — but that’s economically-based, too, because being victims is their meal ticket.

Read it.

Given that liberal/left heterosexuals have been campaigning against the institution of marriage for decades, why can’t liberal-left homosexuals? And why support gay marriage and not polygamy if love-feelings are all the rage? Where is the consistency in all of this “equality” talk?

Read it.

Futher adventures in the quest by the Southern Poverty Law Center to keep the money rolling in.

Forget Arabs flying planes into buildings, you stupid cops and spies. The SPLC—whose dispatches are “sent to every law enforcement agency in the country”—has named the real enemy: white men unzipping their flies.

David Friedman is a wellspring of good sense.

Even if one takes seriously the output of that sort of procedure, there is a striking asymmetry in their approach. They do not appear to have asked any experts what the chance is that preventing global warming would cause a catastrophe—or, to put it differently, that global warming will prevent one. Yet, as I keep pointing out, earth’s climate was not designed for us, hence there is no a priori reason to assume that large negative results due to a few degrees of warming are more likely than large positive ones.

In other words, we have no clue whether the total effect of ‘global warming’, assuming that it even exists, will be a bad thing rather than a good thing.

Be sure to read the comments.

Read it.

The New York Times shows how you, too, can belong to a fashionable oppressed minority.

Mixed-race blacks have an ethical obligation to identify as black — and interracial couples share a similar moral imperative to inculcate certain ideas of black heritage and racial identity in their mixed-race children, regardless of how they look.

That way they won’t have to acknowledge that any part of their heritage comes from Icky White People.

One of the most interesting aspects of modern America is the number of opportunities it presents for people to make money off of the fact that their skin is darker than most, without any need to display any other talent or useful skill.

Ilya Somin responds here.

Williams’ argument in regards to blacks has superficial plausibility because blacks have been victims of major historic injustices in this country. But it is not clear why other blacks – or mixed-race individuals – have a special obligation to combat those injustices that is greater than that of other people. If anything, the duty to combat an injustice falls most heavily on those who inflicted it – who, in this case, were mostly white.

Read it.

Who could have done this? Probably someone from a group that makes a habit of targeting Jews for random murder, especially innocent children. Who could that be? Let me think….

Read it.

Look at the crime statistics from areas that are 90% white, and then at the crime statistics from areas that are 90% black (or 90% Latino).

Matt Welch looks at Graydon Carter, Voice of the Crust.

You just know Carter is going to work himself up into a righteous hatred of his own class without once examining his own culpability; the only question is how he’ll get there:

One of the most amusing things about the Lame-Stream Media is the amount of time they spend criticizing the sort of people that they either are or aspire to be. I should have such a job.

Graydon Carter got rich making journalism and parties about other rich people who make movies and music and architecture and journalism. No harm in that! But can we stop, at long last, pretending that these and only these pursuits are the acceptable pathways to the One Percent Club? Or that only “hedge-fund tyros” (and–shudder–businessmen) are motivated by greed?

The whole point of a Crust is that it is rigid, flaky, and just an extraneous layer on the outside of what’s really worthwhile. You can have the filling and no Crust and be pretty well off, but if you’ve got Crust and no filling, all you’re left with is a whole lot of empty.

Read it.

Class action lawyers are suing the government of Iowa on an theory that “subconscious” bias resulted in employment discrimination against black employees and job-seekers. “The plaintiffs — up to 6,000 African-Americans passed over for state jobs and promotions dating back to 2003 — do not say they faced overt racism or discriminatory hiring tests.” Instead, they are relying on the work of an expert witness who is the developer of something called an Implicit Associations Test meant to measure subconscious bias.

Look out, or you’ll be placed on Double Secret Probation.

Stanley Fish has decided that they don’t have to pretend to be fair any more.

The idea is that in the public sphere (as opposed to the private sphere in which you can have and vent your prejudices) you should not privilege your own views to the extent that they justify treating those with opposing views unequally and unfairly.

Yeah, that is the idea … for the rest of us. Stanley, however, has a different idea.

If we think about the Rush Limbaugh dust-up from the non-liberal — that is, non-formal — perspective, the similarity between what he did and what Schultz and Maher did disappears. Schultz and Maher are the good guys; they are on the side of truth and justice. Limbaugh is the bad guy; he is on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy. Why should he get an even break?

In other words, let’s all be Mafia, the primary adherents of this approach in the modern world. If you’re not a Made Guy, you ain’t shit, and needn’t be treated as anything but shit. Hey, presto, let’s just erase the last four hundred years of human progress.

If you do that you will not be displaying a double standard; you will be affirming a single standard, and moreover it will be a moral one because you will be going with what you think is good rather than what you think is fair. “Fair” is a weak virtue; it is not even a virtue at all because it insists on a withdrawal from moral judgment.

And there you have the ‘progressive’ program in a nutshell. Muslims would love this guy; they all think the same way.

An Informative Chart.

Want to know why American health care is screwed up? One word: Government.

Read it.

The jobs-killing Obamacare law contains 20 new or higher taxes on families and employers. Here are the 5 tax hikes that most hurt seniors.

Read it.

Well, you know, you can’t take any chances — or, God forbid, do any ‘profiling’.

I notice that it’s a white kid. You know he wouldn’t dare do that to a black kid.

Read it.

One in five young Asians believe women deserve “physical punishment” if they dishonour their families, a survey has revealed.

By ‘Asians’, of course, they mean Pakistanis and Indian Muslims, but it wouldn’t be politically correct to say so.

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

Read it.

Back when I was a grade schooler, in a few of our classes, we had a ‘propaganda unit’, wherein many of the common techniques of propaganda used historically were detailed and analyzed, perhaps with the intent of inoculating students against them.

Unfortunately, the techniques studies were not the ones actually used most frequently by cultural Marxists—they were really more those of 1950s-1960s Mad Men and WWII propaganda posters.  The really dangerous techniques were never described.

Bryan Caplan points out that there really is nothing new under the sun.

Historians often act like Lenin’s tyranny was a bolt from the blue: Who would have expected a bunch of socialists to be so bloodthirsty?  Admirers of Lenin, in contrast, often paint him as a great innovator – at least as a strategist.  A dictatorship of the proletariat run by a vanguard party of bourgeois intellectuals?  Only Lenin could have conceived it.  When you read 19th-century Russian literature, however, “Leninist” memes clearly predate the birth of Lenin.  Contrary to many historians, Lenin’s atrocities were foreseeable.  And contrary to Lenin’s admirers, his strategy of atrocity was pure cliche.

Charlie Stross has an amusing tale of the sort we all go through on a more or less perennial basis.

Let’s look at the last paragraph particularly, shall we?

Final observation: today’s monopoly status can be as lost as easily as it was gained. Virgin Media have a monopoly on cable TV in the UK … but there are rivals; Sky for satellite TV (if you live in an area where satellite dishes are permitted), digital terrestrial TV, and BT have upgraded their phone network to the point where TV-over-ADSL services such as BT Vision become practical. The instant I can get the channels this household needs from some organization other than Virgin I will be out of that contract. And all because they stuck after-sales technical support in the wrong column of the balance sheet — as a liability, rather than an infrastructure investment.

So why is this significant? Because Charlie Stross is a socialist, and rather tiresome about it; particularly in his bad-mouthing of capitalism and all its works. And yet the competition and free markets that are the distinguishing characteristics of capitalism, and that invariably disappear in socialist systems, is what he loudly wants — and, presumably, would be the first to vote to get rid of if he got the chance. There’s enough irony here to sink an aircraft carrier (of which Britain no longer has any, poor dears, since their government spends like our government but they’ve run out of other people’s money first).

Megan McArdle articulates (much better than I could) her position (with which I agree) regarding certain aspects of modern life.

A good kitchen gadget lowers the marginal cost, in time or money, of producing good food.  More than occasionally, they also produce better food than you can do unassisted.  Toasters make better toast than your oven does.  Food processors make better pie crust than tediously fooling with two forks or a pastry blender while your fat gets warm.   Genoise can fail on even the most expert cook, but the Thermomix method is basically foolproof–and produces a product just as good as the old hand method.

And that’s what progress is all about: Getting machines to do the boring and tedious parts of a process, so that humans can spend more time on the interesting and fun parts, and so that we get a final result that as many people as possible can afford.

Read it.

Perhaps that’s because it had more life to start with than the modern world.

Read it.

A fascinating look at how Torahs are made.

Read it.

Sometimes it is good to work Inside the Ring.