A classic cartoon.

The Other McCain waxes philosophical.

Keeping your britches on is the kind of “choice” that feminists don’t advocate, just as they never advocate (as an alternative to what theocratic reactionaries would call fornication) that men and women form permanent pair-bonds, sanctified by religious vows to forsake all others until death do them part.

Alas, the ceremony of innocence is drowned by the blood-dimmed tide and the falcon turning in its widening gyre cannot hear the falconer.

Without faith or tradition to guide them, young people must seek secular sanction for doing what they do, and the dismal science offers little to improve on the basic supply/demand equation of “free milk and a cow.” In a buyer’s market flooded with free milk, the sale of cows has declined. Young men have no incentive to marry and what woman would want to marry one of these slovenly slacker guys anyway?

Read it.

Does anybody care?

Didn’t think so.

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Liberals say that conservatives are anti-science, and yet they ignore science when it doesn’t fit their fantasy world. Here’s some inconvenient truth for the Left.

Read it.

And they’re refusing to talk to us, the churls.

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How can women avoid choosing the wrong man? If you start dating a loser in your late twenties and he dumps you at 32, that’s it. You’re done. He just threw your ovaries in the garbage. If you managed to make a baby during that mistake, that’s even worse.

Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

If you met him via infidelity, you are going to lose him to infidelity.

Yeah, I’m lookin’ at YOU, Callista Gingrich.

Smitty at The Other McCain has some useful thoughts.

I’d like to show that, once again, the Progressives are taking a Postmodern wrecking ball to the Enlightenment, and destroying rational debate. And I’ll conclude that racism is what you do, not what you feel.

Read it.

Carl Simpson, executive director of Denver 911, has apologized after instructions given by a 911 operator led to the death of one man. Jimma Reat called 911 to report that the occupants of a red Jeep had thrown bottles at his vehicle and threatened him and family members traveling with him. The operator told Reat to return to the scene of the incident. Reat at first refused and argued with the operator but relented after the operator threatened to not send police if he didn’t go back. Reat went back to the scene to wait on police, where he was shot and killed by the occupants of the Jeep.

Your tax dollars at work.

Steve Sailer looks under the hood … so to speak.

I have some fun below with the Dave Barry-ish Florida special prosecutor lady overcharging George Zimmerman with 2nd degree murder, but it’s worth keeping in mind (because nobody else will) how this is the mirror image of the Jena Six brouhaha.

This is not to say that blacks are never the victims of racist injustice, but that crime stories involving blacks that the prestige press gets most worked up over (Dominique Strass-Kahn, Duke Lacrosse, various campus hate hoaxes, etc.) turn out, with remarkable regularity, to be travesties.

Read it.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

This website offers true random numbers to anyone on the internet. The random numbers are generated in real-time in our lab by measuring the quantum fluctuations of the vacuum.

If, of course, it’s random numbers you’re looking for.

Read it.

When Trenton Oldfield, weird and wrongheaded, jumped into the River Thames last Saturday to protest the Cambridge-Oxford Boat Race specifically and elitism in sports generally, he did us all a favor. Not only did he cement his blazing idiocy in sports history, but he re-energized the debate over elitism in sports. And while doing so, gave us hard proof that it’s needed and necessary.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, responds to his critics.

Goodness, what a fuss!

I don’t know why people have so much difficulty thinking statistically, as we behave statistically all the time. The sky is overcast; I have to go out to an event where I’ll be in the open; I take an umbrella. If, after all, it does not rain, do I feel like an idiot for having taken the umbrella? Of course not. I yielded to my inner statistician. I went with the percentages. We all do it a dozen times a day. It’s statistical common sense. The trouble-free black neighborhood is the rain-free overcast day: It happens a lot, but take that umbrella.

I say what I think, and I’m very much obliged to Taki’s Mag for letting me do so. If you don’t like the kinds of things I say, there is a very simple remedy available to you: Don’t read me.

Read it.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, owes up to $1.5 million to Bank of America, thanks to a loan he took out to buy a car wash. So what, you ask? You’re paying for it.

The Small Business Administration supported the loan, meaning that if Cleaver fails to make payments, the SBA picks up the tab on $1.1 million. Cleaver is likely to default on the loan in toto – he’s spent ten years paying off the original $1.35 million loan, and still has $1.2 million in unpaid principle, plus another $300,000 in late fees and charges.

Damn those racist white people and their racial profiling.

Read it.

Crowds in Stockton, California massed for a protest against the police yesterday over the police shootings of Luther Brown Jr. and James Rivera. Brown was shot after grabbing an officer’s baton and beating him with it; he was a gang member. Rivera was shot after he tried to back over police officers in his vehicle during a traffic stop.

Ah, yes; just innocent victims of The Man. Looks like Derb was right.

An Informative Chart.

Freeberg makes up a useful new word.

1. You have a problem and want everyone to know about it; it is the very same problem other people have had, and have managed to solve, while keeping it to themselves.
2. This doesn’t bother you in the slightest.
3. The answer you have in mind for your problem involves a change in the rules that would affect EVERYONE.
4. You partner up with special-interest and advocacy groups, politicians, “community organizers” and so forth, and give lots of press conferences and interviews about this problem you’ve got…that thousands, maybe millions, of other people have managed to solve without bugging anyone at all.
5. That doesn’t bother you either.
6. You have your problem in years that are divisible by 4.
7. Inexplicably and strangely, while yammering away about how helpless you are until such time that the rules are changed so that everyone is forced to reckon in some way with your problem, and bitching up a storm about some guy on the radio calling you dirty names, you still want to let everyone know how tough you are and how you don’t back down, that you’ve got a backbone of solid steel, your will be done, you’ll triumph over anything, never get discouraged…blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
8. Just like a kid on the playground at recess during third grade, you are entirely unable to distinguish between people who have logical/moral reservations against your idea (which, as noted above, would impact everyone)…and…well, you’ll slander ‘em any which way you possibly can, won’t you. Chauvinists, sexist pigs, Nazis, monsters, DirtyRottenCreepyJerks…nobody can be a decent human being unless they back your idea. Because your skin is too thin to handle disagreement, skepticism or legitimate criticism.

Next up. Motherfluker. Suggested definitions are now being accepted.

See, there’s the thing. In the pre-teen years, the dudes have to make a choice. They can grow up to be sissies who are constantly complaining that this-or-that basic challenge in life is tooooooo haaaaaard…can’t handle it by themselves, start hollering for help even where it’s obvious they should be able to succeed by themselves. But you have to give up your big-badass title to do that. You can act like a smug prick if you want, like our current Commander in Chief. You can wrap yourself up in a thick blanket of that “NPR male” not-quite-masculine sissy-rage, like Keith Olbermann or Alan Alda used to do when people were still paying attention to them. But you can’t go strutting around like a modern Conan The Barbarian when you need someone else to twist the top off your soda pop for ya. If you insist on having your cake and eating it too, you get your ass kicked. It’s wired into the male DNA. We put up with bossy male progs, expecting that after they’re done strutting around and acting imperious, they’ll go away, or at least get out of the way. To actually take the top-dog spot, for reals, pulling rank after you got done proving you aren’t good for anything — that’s a whole different story. Men don’t tolerate this in other men.

Oh, noes! Sex-linked differences! How politically incorrect!

We’re now very deep into the Age of the Fluker. I hope it’s a brief blip on the radar of our history. I don’t know if it’s up to the women to stop it, or up to the men to stop it, or to motivate the women to stop it, or if the two sexes need to work together on it somehow. Whatever the case may be, this cannot continue. There are reasons men make other men choose between prestige and the soft blanket of helplessness. No society can survive for long when its rules are created and refined by the wanker set.

Hear, hear.

Read it.

There’s a label for that….

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Note the photo of Obama campaign staff. The only non-white face is some poor Asian chick right in the middle — who is the only one not smiling. Wonder why that is.

Read it.

An artificially excavated limestone pit in the south of France will soon host star-making technology, New Scientist reports. “If all goes well,” the magazine explains, in a few year’s time the pit will “rage with humanity’s first self-sustaining fusion reaction, an artificial sun ten times hotter than the one that gives our planet life.”

We have the technology … I hope.

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Must have been one of those neo-Nazi white people done it. No way it was any law-abidin’ black folks.

(A brilliant way to ensure that the next Neighborhood Watch guy who approaches a black kid will be unarmed.)

Read it.

Electronic Arts is being criticised by Christian campaign groups who say it is setting a bad example for young people.

Uh, where in their Articles of Incorporation does it say anything about ‘setting a good example for young people’ as one of their business purposes? Sell games, I would believe; make money, sure. But ‘setting a good example’? I don’t think so.

The company has reportedly described the complaints as “political harassment” and said the ‘gay’ content is only an customisable option, not a mandatory part of the game.

Some people need to learn to mind their own business.

Read it.

She sketched a mural that showed the growth of a boy into adulthood. The last image showed a man with a woman and child and wedding rings over their heads.

Sounds pretty normal.

Some people at the school felt the mural didn’t accurately represent many students at Pilgrim and school officials decided to paint over the right side.

I guess the new normal isn’t the same as the old normal. I guess we don’t want all of those teenage slackers having kids out of wedlock to feel, you know, uncomfortable.

On Friday, Bierenday spoke with John DePetro on WPRO-AM about the mural and said she was told that her original design may be offensive or a religious symbol.

Oh, yeah, that famous offensive religious symbol, the wedding ring. It’s all clear to me now.

Read it.

My, how unusual — a corporation taking advantage of a low-tax jurisdiction in order to avoid paying money to a high-tax jurisdiction. That’s certainly headline news.

Apple was targeted in a new report by the Daily Mail, which noted that the company has a major operation based out of Ireland to take advantage of its low tax rate. The tax rate in Cork is just 12.5 percent, or about half the 24 percent corporate rate in the U.K.

In other words, what they did was perfectly legal. (Hey, U.K. — if your taxes weren’t so high, people wouldn’t be trying so hard to avoid them. Take the hint, already.)

The attention on Apple’s taxes comes as rival Amazon is under investigation from the U.K.’s HM Revenue & Customs after it was discovered that the online retailer did not pay any British corporation tax in 2010 or 2011. Amazon was able to avoid taxes after switching its European headquarters to Luxembourg.

In other words, what they did was perfectly legal. I’m not seeing any news here — a lot of whining, but no news.

Read it.

This trend is of a piece with those that seek to ban such things as smoking, trans-fats in foods, and salt in restaurant meals. In every case, political power is used to force an ideological agenda on people who are obviously Not With The Program. In every case, it divides a population into the Smart People who are enacting the ban and the Dumb People who don’t know what’s good for them and hence have to be forced into it.

Such strictures are one of the primary reasons that people are deserting places like California and New York and Michigan, and moving to places like Texas, where personal liberty is still a respected concept. You will no doubt have noticed that such ideological advocacy groups tend to prefer to get their programs enshrined into law on the  Federal level whenever they can, precisely to prevent such ‘voting with the feet’.

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Scientists monitoring water flow in streams at test sites across the USA have found, unexpectedly, that the global warming seen in the late 20th century had basically no effect on most of the ecosystems they studied.

I guess we’re not all going to die after all. Imagine that.

Thanks, Freeberg.

Read it.

A majority of us consume chocolate each day. Although the U.S. produces only 6% of the world’s cocoa, we consume more than 20%.

The threat is obvious. It’s time for government to step in and promote alternatives.

Read it.

White college girls from Arkansas go to a national step dancing competition — a dance form that is a hallmark of black fraternities and sororities — and, gee whiz, win the whole darned thing! Boy, are the black sorority sisters steamed!

But wait!

In the final reel, five days after the results set off a national ruckus, show organizers say they discovered a “scoring discrepancy.” They say the second-place sorority from Indiana University, the pink-and-green Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s oldest black sorority, is also a winner! Each team gets $100,000 in scholarships!

I notice that each of the sorority girls in the photo has ‘white girl hair’. Guess they’re just comfortable bein’ black.

But later, when it was announced that the Zetas won, the feel-good vibe evaporated. Large sections of the crowd starting booing. Then Internet and radio-call-in warfare broke out when the videos were posted on YouTube. There were allegations of cultural theft and reverse racism, not to mention race-based taunting and name-calling.

Late last week, Sprite officials said they discovered the scoring discrepancy. This was odd because the show’s host, rapper Ludacris, assured the crowd that the judges’ scores had been “double-checked.”

God forbid that white people should ever win anything ‘black’. After all, what would happen if some black kid won an Irish dance competition? They’d rig it so a white kid won too, wouldn’t they? (Oh, maybe not….)

“If you take race out of it, it doesn’t matter if the Zetas won,” Ross said. “They were good. They won. It’s reasonable to believe the AKA routine was better, but it’s debatable. That’s it. The only reason people are upset about the winners is because they were white.”

Fancy that. Can’t be racism, of course, ’cause only white folks can be racist. It’s in the rules.

Steve Sailer, of course, has some comments.

Read it.

When we hear the word “refugee”, we tend to think of “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. That image, however — the earnest but impoverished foreigner, lined up along with hundreds of others on Ellis Island eager to work hard for a pittance to make a new life in America — is at least a hundred years out of date.

The typical “wretched refuse” of the 21st century is an illiterate from a backward and barbaric Third World despotism, usually a Muslim one. He’s eager to make a new life in the land of milk and lavish welfare benefits.

An entire industry has been built around the “refugee” process, because big money can be made by the well-connected symbiotes of the federal government inhabiting the public-private penumbra that surrounds the American immigration bureaucracy.

Doing well by doing good.

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For the past two years he has braved death threats, intimidation and been forced to flee his home all in the name of a moustache that demands 30 minutes of grooming every morning. (It’s a highly specialised regimen involving almond oil, hairdryers and a secret wax that no amount of pleading will make him reveal.)

“They arrested me in broad daylight, put me in their car,” he told me. “They took me to a religious scholar who declared the moustache un-Islamic and ordered it removed.

“There was nothing I could do. I was surrounded by guns. If I had resisted I would be dead.”

Yet another reminder the Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.

Daniel Salinas, Democrat.

The Associated Press manages to write 600 words about the mayor-elect of Sunland Park, New Mexico, Daniel Salinas — “Alcohol, padded expense reports, prostitutes and kickbacks. Those are some the latest charges filed in New Mexico against the mayor-elect of the troubled border town” —without mentioning his political party affiliation.

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In any neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), every baby is connected to dozens of monitors. And each monitor is streaming hundreds of readings per second into various data systems. They can generate alerts if anything goes severely out of spec, but in normal operation, they just generate a summary report for the doctor every half hour or so.

IBM discovered that by applying machine learning to the full data stream, they were able to diagnose some dangerous infections a full day before any symptoms were noticeable to a human. That’s amazing in itself, but what’s more important is what they were looking for. I expected them to be looking for telltale spikes or irregularities in the readings: perhaps not serious enough to generate an alarm on their own, but still, the sort of things you’d intuitively expect of a person about to become ill. But according to Anjul Bhambhri, IBM’s Vice President of Big Data, the telltale signal wasn’t spikes or irregularities, but the opposite. There’s a certain normal variation in heart rate, etc., throughout the day, and babies who were about to become sick didn’t exhibit the variation. Their heart rate was too normal; it didn’t change throughout the day as much as it should.

Read it.

I’ll refrain from expressing an opinion regarding the metrosexuals who would subscribe to a monthly grooming kit. It would be like kicking a puppy.

Read it.

1. Every fifth man in America is out of a job. Indeed, black male unemployment is now at the highest rate it has ever been since the U.S. government began collecting statistics on the subject in 1972. Just 56.9 percent of black men over the age of 20 are now working. Indeed, according to Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), one out of every six African Americans, male or female, are now unemployed.

2. Every seventh person you pass on the sidewalk now relies on food stamps.

3. On the last day of President Bush’s presidency, gas prices were $1.84 a gallon. Today under Obama, the average price of a gallon of gas costs $3.94. Easter weekend in Catalina Island, California, drivers saw prices topping $7 a gallon.

4. In 2006 and 2007, 90% of all college graduates found a job. Under Obama, just56% of college graduates are able to find a job.

5. More than one in four U.S. homeowners are “under water” or owe more than their homes are worth. The housing crisis has now destroyed $7 trillion in U.S. household wealth. Another 9.5 million homes are still at risk of default, sparking what analysts believe will be a second wave of foreclosures in the months to come.

6. President Obama has increased the national debt more in three years than President Bush did in eight. Under Bush, the debt rose $4.899 trillion in eight years. In three years, Obama has exploded the debt by $4.939 trillion.

7. A record 87,897,000 Americans are no longer in the labor force. When the number of individuals who have stopped looking for a job and/or who are working part-time but desire full-time employment is included–a figure known as the “underemployment rate”–real unemployment stands at 19.1%.

Jim Goad doesn’t much like anyone, apparently with good reason.

These days, “racist” is the favorite smear word for the ideologically intolerant. When people ask me if I’m a “racist” I always ask them for their personal definition of that eternally shape-shifting and ever-expanding social construct. I then explain either why I am or am not a racist based solely on their definition. I also explain that I think the term itself is silly and ultimately meaningless, but it’s not a word that scares me like it appears to cause testicles to leap out of nutsacks and hit the floor running nationwide. But my interrogators—or, just as often, my accusers—hardly ever seem to be looking for explanations. They don’t even seem to know the difference between scientific inquiry and the Spanish Inquisition. Rather, they seem hell-bent on using a rusty knife to pry open my cold heart like a stubborn oyster shell to discover the boundlessly irrational primal HATE they are certain throbs inside. True believers that they are, they take it as an article of faith that evil lurks within the hearts of those who don’t think like they do, and goddamnit, they’re going to find it whether it’s there or not.

The Daily Telegraph has a piece that slovenly characterizes John’s article as ‘racist’ but is otherwise fairly accurate.

The disappointing thing is the number of people who, had it been a black guy talking about white people, would have praised it for its ‘courage’ and ‘speaking truth to power’, yet are in the forefront of those howling for his scalp, while out-and-out racists like Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson apparently get a pass.

Nothing so strongly supports what John has to say as the reactions to it.

Read it.

Car bombers blocked by police from approaching a church instead detonated their explosives in a busy street in Nigeria on Sunday, killing 38 people in an apparent repeat of Islamists’ attacks on Christians on Christmas Day.

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

Read it.

Obamacare is a Trojan horse, intended, as Barack Obama has said, to lead to the extinction of private health insurance and its replacement by socialized (“single payer”) medicine. So it is pertinent to observe how socialized medicine has worked out in countries where it has been in place for some decades, like the United Kingdom. One key feature of socialized medicine, wherever it exists, is the establishment of death panels. Death panels are needed to ration health care by designating those who are not worth treating, usually by virtue of their age.

Steve Sailer has one of those excellent ideas that won’t go anywhere.

Far more people have lost loved ones to crime over the decades, and they deserve a serious memorial on the National Mall to commemorate their tragedies. We also have a Victims of Communism Memorial, a Holocaust Museum, and and increasing number of ethnic victim remembrance sites under the names of museums. It’s time for a tasteful, somber memorial to all the people whose losses disappear down the memory hole because their loved ones were random citizens brutalized by criminals.

Of course, the reason it won’t go anywhere is that it will be a constant reproach to those who are ultimately responsible for those deaths, those whose responsibility it was to protect those innocent victims but who, through venality or incompetence or ambition, decided that they had more important fish to fry.

Yeah, Eric Holder, I’m looking at you.

The Other McCain jumps into the latest SWPL controversy, this one involving John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspspsia.

What you might not notice is that this is a skirmish on the fringes of the Trayvon Martin controversy, which has turned into a stalemate, so that now frustrated people are in scalp-taking mode. The NBC producer got taken out by conservatives and now, for some strange reason, NR‘s John Derbyshire just volunteers himself as a target for the Left?

It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it. Since Derb turned up with cancer perhaps he’s looking for a grenade to fall on.

One problem I’ve discovered in trying to communicate with intellectuals is that so many of them are wimps from sheltered backgrounds whose mamas wouldn’t let them play football — apple-polishing goodie-two-shoes who never strayed outside the confines of their safe, wholesome, upwardly-mobile affluent cocoon.

Yeah, that matches my experience. Couple of years in the military would straighten them out — but usually that sort of thing is too yucky for them, so they just stay drones. So we wind up with a country run by drones, which results as you see them.

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One activist who tried to enter pointed out that the 40-story building where the event took place was owned by “Bain and company”–you know, that evil Mitt Romney’s company.

She also called Juan Williams “a known Republican.”

But perhaps the most remarkable accusation came when she said, “If charter schools were so good, why didn’t the white folks keep them for themselves?”

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

Read it.

A high school science teacher in the Bronx who had already been warned about touching female students brushed his lower body against one student’s leg during a lab exercise, coming so close that she told investigators she could feel his genitals through his pants.

That guy’s still in the classroom, as are a math teacher who harassed a female student via phone and text messages and a health teacher who simulated anal sex on one of his male students. In these and other cases, the Times reports, New York school officials’ efforts to fire such teachers were stymied by contractually-required arbitration that, while finding the teachers at fault, didn’t go so far as to fire them.

And why? Because it’s a government school

1. Being a government school means being controlled through politics.
2. Being controlled through politics means being subject to whoever has the most and loudest votes.
3. Unions almost always have enough (and loud enough) votes to control the political process especially if Democrat are involved.
4. In a large city, Democrats are always involved — after all, they invented the big city political machine.

Read it.

There are more, but let’s face it, if the title were Top 246 reasons, who would look?

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Children of the Crust can do no wrong.

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Black kids beat up old white guy.

While Mr. Watts was down the boys kicked him, over and over, shouting, “[Get] that white [man]. This is for Trayvon … Trayvon lives, white [man]. Kill that white [man],” according to a police report.

Obama White House, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson: Yawn.

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We have the technology.

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Really, California is the Land of Fruits and Nuts.

Parham’s suit had claimed that McDonald’s overt practice of catering to children was “inherently deceptive and unfair” as “children eight years old and younger do not have the cognitive skills and the developmental maturity to understand the persuasive intent of marketing and advertising.”

Well, since they aren’t the ones buying the product, what they believe or don’t believe doesn’t really matter.

arham claimed her daughter, Maya, successfully wheedled the her into buying her Happy Meals to obtain the following toys: I-Carly lip gloss and note pad; Barbie lip gloss and small comb; Shrek movie character figures; Strawberry Shortcake mini-dolls with paper and mini-stamps; and an American Idol toy. As a result, Maya’s health has been harmed “without her knowledge or comprehension…. Given the choice, Maya wants to eat Happy Meals instead of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains because McDonald’s has convinced her that she needs to get the toy…. McDonald’s has unfairly interfered with Parham’s relationship with Maya.”

Damn you, McDonald’s! You know I can’t resist my child’s whining! You must pay!

In December of last year, a city ordinance forbidding fast food restaurants from giving away a toy with a meal unless that meal met agreed-upon health standards. McDonald’s and other fast food outlets emasculated that law, however, by simply charging 10 cents for the toy in a separate transaction. Not only has San Francisco’s heavy-handed effort not made local children healthier or spared parents the hell of whiny kids demanding a Happy Meal — it has, arguably, worsened the problem. Before the “Healthy Meal Incentive Ordinance,” parents could simply buy the toys for a low price and forgo the fast food. Now that is no longer an option — in order to obtain the toy, one must buy the Happy Meal and then make a 10-cent charitable donation.

Be careful what you wish for….

Read it.

A couple of years ago I attended a conference which discussed various aspects of public sector and government, and education in particular. During this event I got taken aside by someone who apparently did something fairly high up in the department of education, probably because of my previous work on Elgg which has been linked – for better or worse – to the field of E-Learning.

During our rather meandering conversation on education and politics, he admitted that the education time bomb, as he called it, was a widely acknowledged problem, but that they had no solution whatsoever for it.

He went so far as to admit to me that given the lead time involved for any solution to have an effect it was almost certainly too late to do anything about it in any case.

His candour shocked me, and I asked what he suggested as a recommended course of action; “Leave.”, was his reply, “Before it gets really bad.”

I think this guy is really Dennis in a Clever Plastic Disguise.