Read it.

Some Democratic officials are demanding that Apple — in exchange for millions of dollars in tax breaks from Travis County — hire residents who are “economically disadvantaged.”

If Apple wanted to hire the ‘economically advantaged’, they’d do it in China, where they’re REALLY ‘economically disadvantaged’. (Oh, wait — they already do. Well, then.)

Getting Apple to Austin, however, could hinge on the demand from some Travis County Democrats that Apple’s tax breaks be contingent on it hiring a certain percentage of economically disadvantaged residents. Local TV station YNN explained that Apple would have to “give preference to qualified applicants who are at or below the poverty line rather than those who may come across as the most attractive job candidates.”

To do what? Clean the offices? Look after the grounds? Serve meals in the cafeteria?

Democrat Sarah Eckhardt, a Travis County commissioner, complained to YNN that Apple will thus have to change its hiring practices. “They will-hire the low-hanging fruit, and the low-hanging fruit in our community don’t need the hiring preference.”

See #2, below.

Some Apple executives must be thinking about now that some of Austin’s Democrats are a little over the top — clueless about how a business operates.

Yeah, that’s Democrats, alright.

To sum up … Lessons that Apple probably won’t learn:

1. If you take the government’s money, you also get the government’s collar.

2. Politicians don’t see you as a source of products and services, but as a provider of jobs, concerning which see #1.

3. Democrats don’t want you to hire the most qualified person, but rather someone who will vote for them. See #2.

Freeberg has a list — it’s really rather impressive.

First President to apply for college aid as a foreign student, then
deny he was a foreigner.

First President to have a social security number from a state he has
never lived in.

First President to preside over a cut to the credit-rating of the United States

…

Read it.

The death of the 77-year-old man in the Greek capital’s Syntagma Square came after similar incidents in Italy.

The pensioner shot himself with a handgun a few hundred yards from the Greek parliament, in apparent despair over his debts.

He reportedly shouted “so I won’t leave debts for my children” before killing himself in the square, which has been the scene of numerous violent protests against the introduction of tough austerity measures in recent months.

I’m not sure I make the connection, here. ‘Debts’ means that you borrowed money and can’t pay it back. Does Greece not have bankruptcy laws?

In neighbouring Italy, a 78-year-old woman threw herself from the balcony of her third-floor apartment on Tuesday in apparent protest against the fact that her monthly pension had been cut to 600 euros.

So I guess the government is ahead by 600 euros a month. Not what I think of when I think ‘protest’.

Read it.

The Green movement needs to rethink its philosophy from the ground-up. That’s according to Peter Kareiva, a leading conservation expert and chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, the world’s biggest environmental group.

It must abandon the idea that nature is “feminine” and in particular that it’s “fragile”, he said, because not only is this artificial, it’s wrong, and so many bad ideas follow.

Read it.

At least five people including top sporting officials were killed and dozens injured when a teenage female suicide bomber sent by Somalia’s al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabaab blew herself up during a VIP celebration at Mogadishu’s newly-reopened National Theatre.

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

Read it.

In common with its venomless modern cousin, Titanoboa crushed its prey before swallowing the squashed victim, and could doubtless have ingested Jennifer Lopez in one mighty gulp.

Steve Sailer isn’t afraid to ask about the elephant in the room.

The win-win solution against stereotyping is for blacks to stop living down to their profiles.

So what can grownups do to discourage black youths from acting like knuckleheads?

All else being equal, does naming your child after an English poet give him a better chance in life than making up some Ghetto Fabulous name to advertise your commitment to keeping it real?

Couldn’t hurt. There’s a reason why Asians either give their kids an additional ‘Western’ name or the kids adopt a ‘Western’ nickname on their own, and I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that Asians are on average smarter than you and me (and people named Trayvon).

Yet Fryer and Levitt can’t find much evidence on an individual level that naming your child D’Qisykha will make her worse off than all the other problems she will inherit merely from being the daughter of somebody who might name her daughter D’Qisykha.

True that.

Higher-class blacks tend to give their children less self-defeating names. “Danielle” is a clever compromise that shows up three times out of the 142 names of Florida’s black 2012 National Achievement Scholars. The “D” sound is Afro-loyal, but white employers won’t automatically perceive a Danielle’s job application as a discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen.

There’s a reason that Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and Clarence Thomas are more successful than your local Tawanda, Latrina, Antwon, or Trayvon.

What’s the Swahili for ‘unemployed’?

Read it.

A private laboratory in New Jersey is claiming to have fulfilled two key conditions of a workable fusion energy system: it’s confined atomic nuclei in an ion “bottle”, and heated them to 1.8 billion degrees Celsius.

The Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Inc work, published in the American Institute of Physics’ Physics of Plasmas journal, reports that the high-density deuterium ion fusion reactions were confined “for durations of 7-30ns in the cores of plasmoids with typical radii of 300-500 ?m”.

Arnold Kling looks on the bright side.

Twenty years ago, most well-off US citizens owned a camera, a video camera, a CD player, a stereo, a video game console, a cell phone, a watch, an alarm clock, a set of encyclopedias, a world atlas, a Thomas Guide, and a whole bunch of other assets that easily add up to more than $10,000. All of which come standard on today’s smart phones…that’s how quickly $10,000 worth of expenses can vanish.

Freeberg looks at Michelle Obama and says ‘Huh?’

The left seems to have a fascination with this that goes back aways — children being wise sages uniquely qualified to dispense the kind of wisdom that is attained only through experience.

Near as I can figure, it’s part of a much greater and broader perspective in which it’s important to see everything as the opposite of what it really is. We have to spend lots of money to keep from going broke, we show the greatest respect toward women when we systematically eliminate every reason for their existence, we’re “shoring up” capitalism by stealing money from the people who’ve been productive and giving it to people who’ve chosen to live destructive and self-destructive lifestyles…et al.

Read it.

And sends even more of your tax money down the world’s largest rathole, solar power.

On Monday, yet another Department of Energy funded solar energy company –the world’s largest solar power plant—filed for bankruptcy.

The Oakland-based company has held rights for the 1,000-megawatt Blythe Solar Power Project in the Southern California desert, which last April won $2.1 billion of conditional loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy. It is unclear how the bankruptcy will affect that project.

The Reuters story states that the company won the loan, but as the Washington Post reported that the company turned down the loan in late September of 2011. The CEO of Solar Trust, Uwe T. Schmidt thought that the loan was “too risky”. The Obama administration was willing to loan more than two billion taxpayer dollars to a company who was unwilling to take that kind of risk. The company’s bankruptcy filings indicate they employed only nine people.

Read it.

The Granite City, Missouri, School Board has barred William Carruba from attending his senior prom wearing a kilt. Carruba says he bought a kilt made out of the family’s tartan to honor his mother’s Scottish heritage. But when he asked school officials about wearing it to the prom, Carruba says his principal said he should dress like a man. Superintendent Harry Briggs denied that anyone questioned the manliness of kilt wearers.

Next they’ll be disparaging the size of his dirk. Time to get the claidheamh mòrs out.

Read it.

I guess some animals are more equal than others.

Read it.

Last week, an arbitrator ruled that under state law, members of the Clark County Education Association are required to make increased contributions to the state’s retirement system – just like all other public employees.

The decision saves the Clark County School District $10 million dollars, which equals the cost of 134 teacher positions, reports the ReviewJournal.com.

It is often said that the purpose of a Union is to save worker jobs. This is not, strictly speaking, accurate.

The original reason for forming a Union probably was to look after the interests of workers, but as soon as a Union grows big enough to have paid Union officials, then (in accordance with the Iron Law of Bureaucracy), the purpose of the Union is to look after the interests of Union officials. Actual workers are the cards, not the players. As Nick Nolte so famously said in North Dallas 40: ‘Team?! Hell, they [owners and coaches] are the team! We [players], we’re the equipment!‘ Union bosses have uniformly demonstrated that they will gladly accept layoffs of any amount of workers in order to preserve the pay and perks of those who are left — because the Union bosses are elected (and re-elected) by the ones whose pay and perks they’ve preserved, not the ones who got laid off.

Read it. And try not to puke.

Smoking gun: ‘The overriding thing that struck me about this article is here is a company that brought in over 45 billion dollars (yes, that’s billion with a B last year) and has given next to nothing in its home base where it employs more than 9,000 people.’

Note the blind spot: It employs 9,000 people, and yet that is ‘next to nothing’. What matters is not how many jobs a company provides for a community, how much it enriches their lives (and those of their customers around the fucking world), but what it ‘gives’ to the locality in which it is headquartered.

Apparently, in the world of Josie Leavitt, the purpose of a company isn’t to conduct a profitable business, employing people, making its customers’ lives better by providing goods and services, and giving its investors a return on their money; no, the purpose of a business is to serve as a fountain of cash to any do-gooder with a hand out (and there are always plenty of them) who passes by.

Amazon needs to move its headquarters from this behavioral sink on the Left Coast to someplace like Dallas, where its generous contributions to the community will be appreciated rather than sneered at.

Steve Sailer translates the Protocols of the Elders of Selma.

From the NYT, a classic statement of how only white people possess moral and empirical agency, and everybody else today is just a puppet of how white people felt generations ago. It’s not like new immigrants would be so uncouth as to believe their lying eyes about African Americans; instead, they must be picking up the white man’s vibes from Jim Crow days. Blacks and Hispanics in 2012 are just automatons under the control of powerful brainwaves sent out by Lester B. Maddox from the Great Beyond.