Freeberg rips the mask off of the Usual Suspects.

It’s from one lefty to a bunch of other lefties who’ve abandoned President Obama for not being lefty enough. Yeah I know, you were thinking “Oh good, mystery finally solved”…so was I.

The bullet points are interesting. And very well written, as far as implementing the lessons from, uh, “How to cover up your BS and make it look like something that isn’t BS.”

Hey, that’s what lefties do best. After all, if they were honest with people, they’d be strung up from the nearest tree.

Read it.

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

Read it. And watch the video.

It would get very ugly very quickly.

Read it.

Amanda Clayton hit it big playing the Michigan Lottery. Like many winners, she used her $1 million prize to buy a new house.

But the Lincoln Park, Michigan, resident is receiving money in another form — $200 a month in state food assistance, according to CNN Detroit affiliate WDIV.

“I thought that they would cut me off, but since they didn’t, I thought, maybe, it was OK because I’m not working,” Clayton, 24, told WDIV when it asked whether it was appropriate for her to receive the money.

And that’s pretty much all you need to know about Michigan.

Read it.

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

Perhaps if we encourage Muslims to fight each other, which they appear so willing to do, they will leave us alone.

We can hope.

Read it.

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

Warning Philippines: You’re next on the Nanny-Staters’ hit list.

‘When times are bad and things are going badly, people do not seek the causes. They seek someone to blame. Whom do they blame? The first target is almost always the group that appears to be favored, that has more than they do, and whose numbers are small. Only if those in that group are powerful do they seek another group to blame, but even so their resentment and anger remain.’

— L. E. Modesitt, Jr., Imager

Gee, that used to be the Jews, but not so much any more. Who could it be? Hm…. ‘the 1%’ … Not the real cause but a convenient whipping boy? Check. Appears to be favored? Check. Has more than they do? Check. Numbers are small? Check. I think we have found the new scapegoat.

Read it.

Two studies published this week calculate the astounding cost of Britain’s go-it-alone obsession with using wind turbines to generate so much of the electricity the nation needs.

Both studies make remarkably generous concessions that favour wind technology; the true cost, critics could argue, will be higher in each set of calculations. One study reckons that the UK can still meet its carbon dioxide emissions targets and save £140bn – but only if it dumps today’s inefficient hippie technology. The other puts the potential saving at £120bn – pointing out that the same amount of electricity could be generated using open cycle gas plants at one-tenth the cost of using wind turbines.

Turns out that wind power is more a religion than an alternative energy source. Who knew?

Even Jacob Sullum at tReason magazine can’t buy what she’s selling.

Whatever his intentions, Limbaugh’s sexist tirade reinforced a narrative that depicts resistance to the contraceptive mandate as part of “a systematic war against women,” as Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) put it last week. But that narrative remains false, no matter how many stupid jokes Rush Limbaugh makes.

Read it.

Perhaps because men these days don’t give a shit about it one way or another. And why should they? It’s not as if they have any input into the discussion.

Women have been insisting for half a century that they, and they alone, are qualified/interested/entitled to make decisions about reproduction. Men have more and more just thrown up their hands and said, ‘Fine. Do what you want. I’ll be watching the game.’ It’s not as if men have any control of, or responsibility for, the resulting offspring, except in the rare cases where they wind up on the wrong end of a paternity test and an unsympathetic ‘palimony’ judge. Be careful what you wish for, sluts, you just might get it.

The Other McCain blows the whistle.

But the fact that the Left never stopped defending the contemptible Ted Kennedy — a man who was permitted to shamelessly abuse his inherited privilege simply because of his political posture as a defender of the downtrodden — and that Kennedy was especially a hero to feminists, would seem to demonstrate the validity of my analysis.

And don’t get us started on Bill Clinton — or Chris Dodd.

Feminism’s embrace of the vile Kennedy very much resembles the way the Left celebrates such monsters as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, et al., who have ruthlessly slaughtered innumerable innocents in pursuit of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. That the Left’s heroes butcher (actual) peasants and workers as an alleged means of advancing the (theoretical) rights of peasants and workers is one of those contradictions that the Left can never explain to the satisfaction of any honest observer.

Arnold Kling does a review.

“When you start measuring something and then judge people based on that measurement, you encourage people to game the measurement instead of doing whatever it is you wanted in the first place.”

That, in a nutshell, is why principal-agent problems are difficult, why organizations tend to be dysfunctional, and why regulations work less well than intended.

Truest thing you’ll read this year.

Read it.

On Monday night, the material from the former pupil of King Edward VI High School for Girls pupil, In Birmingham, which charges £10,215 a year, prompted a sexism row among her fellow union members.

Proof positive that there is no sense of humor (excuse me, ‘humour’) left in the entire island of Britain.

Read it.

The days of having to put down bags of shopping in order to open the car boot could soon be over, after Ford unveiled a door that opens when the car’s rear bumper is kicked.

Using sensors in the bumper that are programmed to detect a person’s shin and kicking motion, the boot door will open so long as the car’s owner has the keys somewhere on their person.

Read it.

So why does the media decide to highlight only cases of white violence at schools – turning it into a national story – and refrain from even mentioning the almost daily violence that is found at all-Black, 75 percent Black, all-Hispanic, 75 percent Hispanic, or the dreaded half and half Hispanic/Black school?

Taki lays it out.

Very briefly: The camel drivers posing as Saudi royals got the heebie-jeebies after Uncle Sam invaded Iraq, enabling the Shiites to come to power after the Sunni majority had kicked them around since the 1920s. Iraq’s Shiites and neighboring Iranian Shiites were natural allies. The Saudis began paying al-Qaeda to foment revolution in Syria, the main country standing between Israel and the Shiite regional powers of Iran and Iraq. That is when I believe the camel drivers got a telephone call from Israel: Let’s keep this quiet, but between you and your money, and us with our power over the Americans, we can knock Assad over in no time.

The pathetic media, desperate for a bad guy to demonize, blind to reality but open to PR hucksters, played along. Like lemmings, journalists and newspapers have parroted the script that dictated this was a revolution by Syrian people yearning for freedom. The truth, however, is that the Syrian conflict is a Sunni move against what the Saudis and Israelis view as a Shiite move toward Middle Eastern hegemony.

Read it.

I’m talking about the second-tier of the warfare, the attempt to intimidate those removed by one or more degrees of separation from the dispute, and to use them as tools against the target.

They wouldn’t do that, would they?

Similarly, when the new Rhode Island Attorney General announced that he would cooperate with the federal goverment in the enforcement of federal immigration laws, protesters not only invaded the lobby of his offices, they picketed his house and confronted neighbors about the issue.  Dragging his neighbors into a dispute which had nothing to do with them did not cause the RI AG to back down, although not for lack of trying.

Well, that’s the Left for you — the personal is political, and vice versa. If you disagree with the Politically Correct position, not only are you wrong, but you are officially an Evil Person, and anything that happens to you — or anyone connected with you — is okay.

Read it.

No wonder the kids want to bring their own.

Made by grinding together connective tissue and beef scraps normally destined for dog food and rendering, BPI’s Lean Beef Trimmings are then treated with ammonia hydroxide, a process that kills pathogens such as salmonella and E. coli.

The resulting pinkish substance is later blended into traditional ground beef and hamburger patties.

How appetizing.

“We originally called it soylent pink,” Custer told The Daily. “We looked at the product and we objected to it because it used connective tissues instead of muscle. It was simply not nutritionally equivalent [to ground beef]. My main objection was that it was not meat.”

Your tax dollars at work. Just think what they can do for your health care.

Alex Tabarrok looks at our dysfunctional education system.

In 2009 the United States graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math, and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual-and-performing-arts graduates in 1985.

Most of it subsidized by the taxpayers. And just look where that’s got us! Isn’t it amazing?

Thus, an argument can be made for subsidizing students in fields with potentially large spillovers, such as microbiology, chemical engineering, and computer science. But there is little justification for subsidizing sociology, dance, and English majors.

Sure there is — that’s where the Children of the Crust dwell, and what the Crust want, the Crust get … on YOUR dime.

In the 21st century, an astounding 25 percent of American men do not graduate from high school. A big part of the problem is that the United States has paved a single road to knowledge, the road through the classroom. “Sit down, stay quiet, and absorb. Do this for 12 to 16 years,” we tell the students, “and all will be well.” Lots of students, however, crash before they reach the end of the road. Who can blame them? Sit-down learning is not for everyone, perhaps not even for most people. There are many roads to an education.

And if you take them, you get tasered by your helicopter parents.

Consider those offered in Europe. In Germany, 97 percent of students graduate from high school, but only a third of these students go on to college. In the United States, we graduate fewer students from high school, but nearly two-thirds of those we graduate go to college. So are German students poorly educated? Not at all.

Instead of college, German students enter training and apprenticeship programs—many of which begin during high school. By the time they finish, they have had a far better practical education than most American students—equivalent to an American technical degree—and, as a result, they have an easier time entering the work force. Similarly, in Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland, between 40 to 70 percent of students opt for an educational program that combines classroom and workplace learning.

We used to do that in this country, until the COLLEGE FOR ALL AND DAMN THE EXPENSE BECAUSE ALL THE CHILDREN ARE ABOVE AVERAGE progressives took over. Teenage boys used to come out of high school with a useful skill — my father learned how to set type and run a printing press — and the girls were taught how to cook, sew, and manage a family.

But that was yesterday, and yesterday’s gone.

Read it.

“Businesses on Pico have been very frustrated by code compliance regulations for years,” [Pico Improvement Organization chairman Robert] Kronovet said. “You have a business that might have a sign in the wrong place or a door that isn’t right and the city fines them to the point that they don’t want to stay.

“These are small businesses. They don’t have the money to fight it.”…

The business life in California — which is why all those businesses are going somewhere else.

“We wanted to renovate our bathroom areas to make it more handicap-accessible and it took us almost three years to get all the permits,” Garcia said.

“We kept giving all the paperwork they need, but it took forever. We needed the Pico Improvement Organization to plead our case.”

Even complying with stupid laws takes forever.

California has the nation’s most active entrepreneurial corps of ADA enforcers, roaming business districts to file mass complaints against small businesses over handicap accessibility which they then settle for cash.

That’s the way you get rich in the Nanny State. I’m looking forward to watching Bush the Elder burn in Hell for signing the ADA. This is why people have doubts about Romney — they don’t want another half-Republican President.

Read it.

While the pulse produced by a creature’s heart is an age-old indicator of life and death, it’s been a tricky thing for the medical field to replicate — but the pulse doesn’t appear to be necessary for life.

In fact, it ought to be beneficial by evening out your blood pressure and preventing pressure spikes that would stress blood vessel walls.

The Other McCain isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions.

My, I’m good with it. I’m still wondering where these $1,000-a-year-for-contraception chicks were when I was in law school.

A recent survey I’ve conducted indicates that 27% of men are attracted to women with the “varsity softball scholarship” look. In fact, seven out of 10 Eritrean immigrant cab drivers in the D.C. metropolitan area say that they would be attracted to Sandra Fluke, especially if her family were willing to provide a dowry that included a small herd of goats, or if they could score a Permanent Residency Visa out of the deal.

Also, if given a choice between Maureen Dowd and Sandra Fluke, the Eritrean cab drivers would unanimously choose Fluke.

And there you have it.

Read it.

And, of course, your friendly local Queer Studies major is going to want to rush right out and do that.

Read it.

Muslim gratitude. Don’t say that you weren’t warned.

The Other McCain speaks truth to power.

If women prefer more masculine men — as science would seem to indicate — and if such men are disadvantaged in terms of education and employment, then the men who are most desireable as mates increasingly lack the kind of economic wherewithal to fulfill the breadwinner role of husband and father.

Many young women complain that they find themselves working in offices surrounded by “girly-men” and are perplexed by the apparent shortage of marriageable men. Meanwhile, the lower rungs of the socio-economic scale are increasingly crowded by unmarried mothers and fatherless children. And amid all this misery, we are not permitted to wonder aloud whether these problems are side-effects of a regime of “equality” which in fact has drastically unequal consequences.

Don Boudreaux, my third favorite economist, weighs in on the latest Rush Limbaugh tsimmis.

A truly civilized person doesn’t demand that other people pick up the bill for her contraception.  A truly civilized person – especially one who can afford to be a full-time student at a prestigious law school – would refuse any invitation to publicly play the role of a victim wronged by being told to pay for her own pills or condoms.  A truly civilized person does not hold in contempt other people for their resistance to being forced to subsidize his or her ‘lifestyle choices’ (whatever those choices might be).

When someone violates standards of civility – as Ms. Fluke has done by self-righteously (and, frankly, also rather incredibly) insisting that she and her fellow students are grievously harmed by the prospect of having to pay for their own contraception – she should not be surprised when other people violate such standards in response.

Charlie Stross, despite being a deluded leftist, is sound on the vegetables question.

Cauliflower (and brassicae in general — broccoli, brussels sprouts, aragula/rocket, cabbages, and so on)

I know some folks appear to like eating this family of vegetables (I’m married to one), but they induce reactions in me ranging from mild dislike (sauerkraut, kimchee) to vomiting. It’s probably the only thing I have in common with George H. W. Bush: a total aversion to an entire family of plants based on a combination of texture and flavour.

Preach it, brother.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Much of what drives political passions in the U.S. are different kinds of white women trying to put each other down.

Paul Rahe at his most incisive.

The bishops, priests, and nuns of the American Catholic Church may be dismayed, but they should not be in any way surprised. The situation that they now find themselves in is one of their own making. Thirty-eight years ago, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision inRoe v. Wade, the country was resolutely hostile to abortion on demand. At that time, many Democratic politicians, not all of them Catholic, announced their opposition to abortion. For a time, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were in their number. Had the Church pressed the question resolutely at the time, the 5-4 court decision would quickly have been reversed. As Mr. Dooley was wont to say, the Supreme Court follows the election returns.

The reason why people make ‘slippery slope’ arguments is because all too often they turn out to be correct. And all the ‘oh, fiddlesticks’ handwaving can’t change that simple historical fact.

The American Roman Catholic Church is full of people, from Mario Cuomo to Ted Kennedy to Kathleen Sibelius to Nancy Pelosi, who would have been instantly excommunicated prior to the 1960s. It is small comfort to recognize that the degeneration of the modern Church merely tracks the same degeneration in the culture at large.

The Blunt-Nelson amendment failed to pass the Senate today for one reason and one reason only. The supporters of abortion-on-demand are serious about the matter. They will do what it takes to punish at the polls any Democrat who crosses them. The bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States have spent almost four decades intimating with a wink and a nod that they are not really serious about this question. In the process, they have made themselves politically irrelevant.

Say what you will about the Left, they never make the mistake of bringing a knife to a gun fight.

Read it.

Pity poor Senator Olympia Snowe, forced to actually take a position on issues rather than collecting a government paycheck (a rather hefty government paycheck) for emitting bromides and blowing with the wind and living the serene RINO life. Ah, the cruelty!

This article is a rather pure example of a Voice of the Crust in full yap. The Vital Center, that dumping ground for the oh-I-don’t-know, I-suppose, why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along, politics-is-boring-let’s-watch-basketball side of the bell curve, is in danger! The horror! People might actually have to think about questions! And make a choice! Oh, the humanity!

Quite characteristic is the tendentious coloration of the term ‘partisanship’, as if we all got handed a Team Ticket when we entered the public arena and what political party we’re assigned to is purely random, like water sprayed from a fountain — so it doesn’t really matter, does it? Except that it does matter, a bunch. ‘Partisan’, despite the Left’s attempt to re-define it as ‘those stupid, ugly, flyover-country people who for some unaccountable reason don’t agree with me’, means ‘belonging to a party’, and people belong to a party because they’ve made a choice about what they want to have done, and that is what the whole business of politics is about. ‘Partisan’, in the mouth of this sort of lamestream-media driveler, means ‘benighted people who refuse to get with the program’. ‘Non-partisan’, of course, correspondingly means ‘people who are willing to do it our way’.

A world in which Olympia Snowe will no longer be allowed to pretend to be a Republican is a better world. Now, let’s see whether we can get Susan Collins to go retire to Florida as well.

Read it.

Read it.

The immune system response in which antibodies bind to specific molecules they recognize has been exploited to create a self-assembling protein-based transistor.

Read it.

In the Jurassic, that is.

The monster bloodsuckers were thought to have used ruggedised straw-like mouths to prey on dinosaurs.

Read it.

The answer to a Democrat’s prayer.

Read it.

A few weeks ago, I went with a friend to my favorite bar in Midtown (The Bar Downstairs at the Andaz Fifth Avenue). We ordered some cheese to go with our cocktails, and it arrived very cold, like it had just come out of the refrigerator. I was displeased. That is not how you are supposed to serve cheese. But today, I am relieved to learn that I don’t need to blame the bar—the cold cheese was the government’s fault.

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

The problem with any regulatory scheme is that it is based on the (unproved) assumptions that the legislators who created the scheme, and the bureaucrats who enforce it, know everything that there is to know about the subject AND that their motives in creating the regulations are as pure as pure can be. The available evidence suggests that, not only are these assumptions false, but the way to bet is that  the regulations are based on pig-ignorance and corrupt cronyism.

Read it. And watch the video.

I’ve always wanted a huge robot spider like the one in Wild Wild West. It may be coming.

Read it.

Why high tech jobs aren’t coming to a neighborhood near you.

Why wouldn’t he set up there? Hell, we could use 25+ high tech jobs paying 70k!

His response:

1. America doesn’t want him.
I asked him why? He said, he has a B1 Business Visa. He can’t stay more than 3 – 6 months at a time (length of stay decided by Border Protection at the airport on arrival). Investors wouldn’t invest in a company where the CEO isn’t sure if he can stay and for how long. I asked him to convert it to an H1B. He said he needs to have a running company to do that. Running with taxes filed for a few years before he can apply. I asked him to file for an EB5 Investor visa. $500k gets you a visa. He said no. It has to be $500k of YOUR OWN MONEY. Not Angel Investor cash. There is no visa type for a foreign job creator.

2. Ease of doing business.
He says he can incorporate a Delaware company in 10 minutes online. But what’s the use of a company if he can’t open a bank account to collect investments. Tax IDs aren’t issued easily. He has no SSN.

3. Our Corporate and Income taxes will kill his profits.
No argument there.

4. By the end of the year he anticipates having 75+ employees. Health care costs (owing to Obamacare) would kill his profits.
Yet again, no argument there.

Note that all of these problems are caused by government. Your tax dollars at work. It’s as if Congress got up in the morning and thought ‘Now, what can we do today to make sure that Americans are unemployed in greater and greater numbers?’