Freeberg muses upon his scholastic career.

Truthfully, I don’t know why we have career counselors in high schools. The kids who can really make something of themselves, all have the same thoughts about it: Oh alright, I’m to take career advice from some guy who’s a career counselor in a high school. Eyeball-roll. This one thought I should scrub toilets on an Air Force base somewhere. Oh, okay…thankfully, nobody took that any more seriously than I did. All these years later I have to wonder: What purpose was served by this? I still don’t know.

Never saw any use in them, myself. But on the list of inexplicable aspects of the American education system, I can’t say that it was at the top.

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One would expect the presence of large numbers of Muslims in Western European cities to strain the traditional alliance between gays and the Left-Multicultural political establishment. Muslims, after all, make no secret about the fact that their religious law commands them to persecute — and even execute — homosexuals.

But the force of denial is strong. Up until recently there were few cracks in the Rainbow-Multicultural façade. Now things seem to be changing: homosexuals are fleeing their traditional neighborhoods in Hamburg, and are speaking up openly about what is happening.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend — until he has me stoned to death. Ah, well, these things happen.

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Taliban leadership infighting between hardliners and commanders over US talks has broken down into a terror campaign against senior dissidents who support negotiations, a senior insurgency leader has revealed.

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

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Boy, those U.N. sanctions are certainly effective. What would we do without such an excellent international body to show tyrannical regimes that they can’t get away with whatever it is they’re doing?

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One of the most tired talking points of the “hydrocarbon deniers” (as I am going to call them) is that the U.S. must move beyond oil because we have less than 2 percent of the world’s proved reserves, though we consume about 20 percent of global oil production. After last week’s testimony from Anu Mittal, the director of natural resources and environment for the Government Accountability Office, to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, anyone who persists in using this talking point again (that would include the president) deserves to be labeled an anti-science ignoramus.

Mittal reviewed the geological survey data of oil shale in the western United States that show we have about 3 trillion barrels of oil equivalent. This represents about two-thirds or more of the total shale oil estimated to exist worldwide. About half of it, according to Mittal’s testimony, is thought by public and private analysts to be recoverable. With droll understatement, Mittal offered the following conclusion, which should be read slowly: “This is an amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.”

Not that the bureaucrats and enviro-nazis will ever let us do anything about it.

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Kris Barrett, the politically active spouse of Tom Barrett, current mayor of Milwaukee and the Democratic nominee running against Gov. Scott Walker, has been caught using her taxpayer funded e-mail account to lobby and campaign for Democratic candidates and causes. Mrs. Barrett is a public school teacher and last year she was employed by Milwaukee Public Schools, Wisconsin’s largest school district. The district has two policies that prohibit employees from using any government resources, including e-mail addresses, for political purposes.

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

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As is well known now, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin recently renounced his U.S. citizenship. Though no specific reason was given by Saverin for his decision, wise minds could very credibly proclaim him an American hero for doing what he did.

…

Think about the above for a moment. A nation founded on skepticism about politicians and government now has as one of its most powerful institutions a revenue agency meant to badger its citizens about how much they owe a government utterly contemptuous of constitutional limits.  To this insatiable beast, Saverin is apparently saying no.  Good for him!

…

Oddly here, and this speaks to how silly the economic discussion has become, founder Mark Zuckerberg is being lionized for the presumed $1 billion in capital gains taxes he’ll pay the feds. Saverin’s avoidance plan means more capital for business growth while Zuckerberg’s non-avoidance ensures more feeding of the beast, yet Saverin’s the bad guy? Yes, very odd.

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For awhile now, I’ve been focusing on the so-called Ragtag Coalition of Leftist Identity Groups, a sort of parallel phenomenon to the proposed Sailer Strategy in which the Republican party ditches all pretenses and just goes for the white vote, exclusively.  The Ragtag Coalition refers to the tenuous amalgamation of pet minority groups under the Democratic Party’s umbrella;  Matt Yglesias alluded to this last year in saying, “Democrats are more and more seen as the party of non-whites.”  The leftist coalition, which also includes organized labor and single mothers, works as a twofold strategy – ideological and practical.  The ideological narrative focuses on white men as the primary enemy; all enmity, encouraged on liberal blogs and Ivory Tower scholarship, must be directed out of the group towards this nefarious entity.  It also works as a practical voting strategy; the collective group has the cumulative numbers to combat evil white conservatives in the voting booth.

In reality though, the coalition is made up of groups who really want nothing to do with each other.  So the professional left has a rather volatile situation on their hands – how to keep everyone focused on the right enemy (white men) and not “offend” the other leftist pet groups.  In what I foresee as a never-ending struggle to maintain harmony, here’s two more examples of why the ragtag coalition has problems.

Check it out.

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This is seriously cool.

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The first drug shown to prevent HIV infection won the endorsement of a panel of federal advisers Thursday, clearing the way for a landmark approval in the 30-year fight against the virus that causes AIDS.

In a series of votes, a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel recommended approval of the daily pill Truvada for healthy people who are at high risk of contracting HIV, including gay and bisexual men and heterosexual couples with one HIV-positive partner.

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We are endlessly told that white people are racist and that white men are sexist. But in my experience people of a different color are much more racist and men of a different color much more sexist. It is just that we do not hear about this racism because no one is allowed to speak about it for fear of being branded…a racist.

Now from Britain comes the latest horrific example of nonwhite racism and sexism. And try as they might, the British media were unable this time to avoid telling us at least part of the truth.

Here it is: Nine British Muslims, eight of Pakistani and one of Afghani origin, gang-raped dozens of underage white girls in the northern England town of Rochdale between 2008 and 2010. One of the nine just happens to be a father of five and a religious-studies teacher in his local mosque.

Will the Isamophobia never cease? Oh, wait….

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Except that Democrats have ordered everybody out of the pool.

On Thursday, a representative of the Government Accountability Office testified before the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and Environment that the Green River Formation alone–it is located at the intersection of the states of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, and mostly underlies federal lands–contains as much oil as the entire proven reserves of the rest of the world combined.

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House Democrats received training this week on how to address the issue of race to defend government programs, according to training materials obtained by The Washington Examiner.

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While studiously avoiding and evading any investigation of Barack Obama’s “youth” (i.e. the period prior to his running for President) or devoting resources to any of the many scandals (selling guns to Mexican drug lords, politicizing along racial lines the Justice Department, etc.) which would have been front page day after day in another administration, WaPo devoted months and resources to investigating what Mitt Romney did in high school.

Media bias? What media bias?

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 One reason our sectional division finally lurched to civil war in the 1850s was the complete nationalization of the slavery issue because of Dred Scott, whose principle, as Lincoln perceived and argued, militated for the legalization of slavery in all states.  While the previous confinement of slavery to the South was unstable (because the South wanted to expand its peculiar institution), it held out the prospect that it could be placed in the course of ultimate extinction through gradual means.

Hypothesis: the nationalization of more and more issues once left to the state and local level is aggravating our divisions today in a similar way.

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Here’s the problem with the press coverage of Barack Obama: the mainstream media is so overwhelmed by his charisma that they often miss the important details. Every decision, speech, policy statement or impromptu visit to the bathroom is presented as a piece of “history” – the dawn of a new era. The Prez could go seal-clubbing and much of the media would see it as a new epoch for winter sports. “Barack Obama Becomes the First President to Kill Six Seals in Under One Minute,” the New York Times would proudly report, while Twitter would be all abuzz with how hot he looks in snow shoes.

Even Brits can see the truth.

So on Monday, Obama was losing dollars on the Hollywood fundraising circuit. On Wednesday, he endorsed gay marriage. On Thursday, he flew to Hollywood for a fundraiser, where 150 donors paid $40,000 each to meet the Prez at the home of George Clooney. Coincidence?

Barack Obama, candidate of the 1%.

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Well, that’s a relief.

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Just another day in the Workers’ Paradise. Say, that Communism is a really successful system; perhaps we could do that over here? Let’s ask the Obamassiah to see what he can do.

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The UN Security Council on Thursday condemned the deadliest bomb attacks of Syria’s 14-month uprising, urging all sides to stick to an international peace plan after at least 55 people were killed.

Actual effect on what happens in Syria: None.

The Patron Saint of Dyspepsia explains it all to you.

And after watching Conservatism Inc. for a quarter of a century running along behind History’s great rumbling juggernaut squealing “Would you mind slowing down just a teeny bit, please?” there is always the faint hope that this other crowd might actually turn us back some way towards liberty, sovereignty, science, constitutionalism.

Non-white supremacy is after all the rule over much of the world, from entire continental spaces like sub-Saharan Africa to individual black-run or mestizo-run municipalities in the U.S.A. I see no great floods into these places by refugees desperate to escape the horrors of white supremacy.

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Political correctness isn’t a political belief where people want to stimulate a discussion and get to the truth. It’s a totalitarian religion dedicated to the exact opposite. They hate hatefacts and want all sinners to be burned at the stake no matter what the collateral damage. The unfortunate thing about their holy war is that it’s virtually nothing but collateral damage.

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The United States is running out of helium.

Yes, helium. Thanks, in part, to a 1996 law that has forced the government to sell off its helium reserves at bargain-bin prices, the country’s stockpile of the relatively rare and nonrenewable gas could soon dwindle.

Sky falling. Film at 11.

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And about damned time, too.

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Another day, another person fired from a prestigious writing gig for perceived racism.

You wonder why they even bother.

John McWhorter, a black academic critical of the discipline, wrote for the Manhattan Institute that the mission of most of these departments “is to teach students about the eternal power of racism past and present.” He added, “however, too often the curriculum of African American Studies departments gives the impression that racism and disadvantage are the most important things to note and study about being black.”

Well, duh. You can’t have a victim-industry without victims, and black kids whose parents are doctors and academics who went to prep school and Ivy League colleges have to be trained to realize that they are, in fact, victims (although you wouldn’t know it to look at them…).

A case in point is Zachary Brewster and Sarah Nell Rusche’s article in The Journal of Black Studies titled “Quantitative Evidence of the Continuing Significance of Race: Tableside Racism in Full-Service Restaurants.” Brewster and Rusche analyze the “culture of white servers” in which white waitstaff allegedly infringe on black patrons’ civil rights by profiling them and providing them with poor service. The authors surveyed waiters and waitresses—people who earn most of their income through tips—and found that many of them assume that black patrons tip worse and display worse behavior than other groups.

This research documents a legitimate concern, but it is incomplete and typical of Black Studies research. A more complete study would consider black patrons’ actual tipping behavior.

What!? Confuse the issue with facts!? That’ll never happen….

When Black Studies programs explore the causes of economic and social disparities, they always begin with the conclusion that white racism is the root of the problem. It assumes that all-pervasive racism is tucked behind every political, social, or economic interaction in which blacks participate and that blacks are always the victims. The discipline seems to borrow the format of the popular game show Jeopardy! It begins at the end and works back toward the question. That’s not how academic inquiry should work. And Naomi Schaefer Riley’s ouster suggests that it probably won’t change.

As, indeed, it probably won’t — so long as there is power and pelf to be had in being victims. You always get more of what you pay for.

Steve Sailer notes a disturbing trend.

Clearly, some whites are being punished to encourage the others. But … to encourage the others to do what, precisely?

To not even think about not re-electing the black President. Don’t go there. The message that’s being sent is: bad stuff happens to people who don’t like blacks, which, for practical purposes in 2012 can be defined as people whom blacks don’t like, or whom blacks might not like if they ever noticed them.

Perhaps that answers the perennial puzzle of why black people feel attracted to Islam, despite the deep involvement of Muslims in the historical slave trade.

The ultimate message is one that can’t be sent publicly, at least not before a lot more ground is prepared via Two Minute Hates or Two Month Hates in the case of George Zimmerman:

Nice little gentrified downtown you’ve got there. It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it Election Night because some vibrant youths were displeased that their side lost.

Muslims have already learned that particular lesson, and applied it with great success in Europe. If you’re going to pick a model, go with a winner.

Read it.

“If you are tired of your mother’s old Bible, which printed the words of Jesus in red, you can choose a more trendy Green Bible, with all the eco-sensitive passages printed in green ink. If you are a feisty woman unfazed by possibly misdirected allusions, then maybe you would like the Woman Thou Art Loosed edition of the NKJB (New King James Bible). If you should be a high-end of the TV-channel charismatic, there are ‘prophecy Bibles’ coded in several colors to justify your eschatology of choice.”

And that’s before we get to the super-trendy editions like the Common English Bible, which renders Psalm 122:1 (“I was glad when they said unto me/Let us go to the Lord’s house”) as “Let’s go to the Lord’s house.” This is not just dumb;  as Dr. Jeffrey points out, is also “verges on a grotesque secularism at the level of ‘Let’s go to Joe’s place – he has the biggest TV.’” And lest you think Jeffrey exaggerates, please note that the CEB renders “Son of Man” as “the Human One.” Yuck.

Muslims famously insist that people who read the Koran must read it in Arabic, and they seem to be on to something there. I feel that anybody who wants to start talking about ‘what the Bible says’ ought to learn Greek first — it’s not that hard, certainly not as hard as Mandarin, which is pretty fashionable these days — but that’s me.

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Taxpayers paid almost $3.7 million last year for the expenses of ex-presidents, including $119,000 in phone bills, $123,000 for travel, $76,000 for postage and $1.2 million in rent, according to government figures.

Former President George H.W. Bush cost $844,000, including $56,000 for travel. More than half of Bill Clinton’s $1 million in expenses covered his $586,000 office rent. Jimmy Carter claimed $517,000, including $15,000 for postage.

Well, you know — I think half a mil is a cheap price to pay to make sure that Jimmy Carter isn’t President any more. And don’t get me started on Bill Clinton.

Actually, if we could get rid of Barack Obama for a guarantee of $2 million a year, I don’t doubt that there would be some rich Republicans who’d be happy to step up to the plate and cover the cost. If I could afford it, I’d jump at the chance.

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Conceived of as a way to help people reduce waste, the Repair Cafe concept has taken off since its debut two and a half years ago. The Repair Cafe Foundation has raised about $525,000 through a grant from the Dutch government, support from foundations and small donations, all of which pay for staffing, marketing and even a Repair Cafe bus.

Don Quixote loves this sort of thing, but Sancho Panza would like to point out a few flies in the ointment:

1. In the Good Old Days, things were made to last and were simple enough that a reasonably handy individual could both make them and fix them. That is no longer the case. Most things today are made by highly automated specialized machinery that can do stuff that simply cannot be done by hand outside of a few highly sophisticated shops — and, because of that automation, can do it cheaper than it would take to do even a simpler model by hand. As a byproduct of that manufacturing process, most of this stuff is not intended to be repairable, which exaggerates the next factor:
2. In modern times, the chief limiting factor of any manufacturing process is the cost of the human labor that goes into it — which is, of course, why it was economically feasible to automate it in the first place. Automated manufacturing processes cost a lot up front but each individual widget costs a pittance, and as long as you can do a manufacturing run that will allow you to amortize your initial capital expenditure, a predominantly manual process simply can’t compete. We get our tableware from Oneida, not Paul Revere, because in order for Paul Revere to make a ‘living wage’ he’d have to charge so much that only (relatively) rich people could buy his stuff. There is a niche market for the Paul Reveres (or Christian Diors) of this world, but most manufacturers are targeting the people who buy at Walmart, not Tiffany’s.
3. ‘But that was yesterday, and yesterday’s gone.’ Sure, we’d all like to have a world in which we could hand down our household gear to our grandchildren, but it ain’t gonna happen. Markets work, even when you don’t want them to, and people (especially almost-poor people who need to squeeze every nickel) aren’t going to pay $10 for something Made In America when they can get something that will do the job (not ‘just as good’ — that’s not the criterion; the criterion is do the job) for $1 that was Made In China. (The landed aristocracy in England got a similar rude awakening in the 1870s when people discovered that they could buy grain from America and beef from Australia for less than the ‘locovore’ stuff.) This nostalgia for The Way Things Used To Be that started in the hippy-dippy Whole Earth Catalog 1960s (and makes a mockery of the term ‘progressive’) is the same emotion that motivated the British upper classes to pass the Corn Laws, and the American upper classes to pass the Smoot-Hawley tariff, and the results in both cases was a disaster when the laws of the market eventually took their revenge.

It’s fine to yearn for the past, but don’t ever let it get in the way of hopping on board the train to the future, because somebody else is already doing so, and you’ll be left at the station. Living in the past is a rich person’s hobby, and if that ain’t you, then you can’t afford it.

Steve Sailer examines the ongoing ‘progressive’ attempt to cancel the 20th century.

It’s worth keeping an eye out for what the cultural trends are among the more privileged of younger people because they can signal the beginning of sea changes.

The word “locavore” was invented in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2005 to describe people who make an effort (a fetish?) to eat only food grown locally. In Brooklyn, where the climate is less propitious and land is either built-upon or toxic, this urge has mutated into people trying to eat what is manufactured locally.

The main engine is, of course, a new wrinkle in status-seeking. That localism emerged first in the San Francisco Bay Area has much to do with the fact the Bay Area is, as ex-sailor Richard Henry Dana explained to Americans in his 1840 bestseller Two Years before the Mast, just about the most favored locale for human habitation on Earth. It’s not surprising that Northern Californians are building barricades of local solidarity against the rest of the world.

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At dinner, he was asking the customary endless chain of whys when it suddenly dawned on me that my five year old was doing Root Cause Analysis.

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The question of whether donkeys are stubborn or simply “misunderstood” has been discussed at a conference held by a leading British university.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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very weekday in recent months, fancy-food trucks have been rumbling into the gigantic freight elevator of the Starrett-Lehigh Building at 601 West 26th Street in West Chelsea. After being hoisted aloft, they roll out into the concrete truck bays on the upper floors of the 81-year-old, 19-story commercial building. There, they post menus and proceed to sell inventive meals to office workers and their guests.

The upper class discover the conveniences of the lower class. Progress? We report, you decide.

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And don’t get me started about cats.

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Then they can use their EBTs at the Farmers Market to avoid getting obese.

Michigan — sliding gently but inevitably into the Third World….

Read it. And weep.

Here’s a horrifying fun fact about occupational licensing: “States consider an average of 33 days of training and two exams enough preparation for EMTs, but demand 10 times the training—372 days, on average—for cosmetologists.”

Read it.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

By Freeberg, of course.

See, Barack Obama and people like Him, are celebrated as special people and have been celebrated as that for so long, that they can’t deal with losing the identity. Oh, you thought I meant black people? No…there are tons and tons of privileged, pampered whites in this crowd I’m describing. They say jump, the crowd says how high…it’s worked this way since third grade, or earlier, and nobody envisions it ever going any other way, because they don’t, and they don’t because nobody else does. So they go through life frustrated because they know there’s something different about them — but that something is never really defined. Something to do with speaking well, being confident, but they’re actually apprehensive deep down inside. They can’t shake the feeling that maybe, whatever is special about them, might be something external to them. And this fills them with fear. Because that would mean everything inside, is just humdrum and ordinary.

So the question comes up: What is one plus one? Barack Obama will immediately rule out “two” as a possible answer because, hey, that’s what an ordinary person would say. Thus we see, with this simple math exercise, someone like President Obama “enjoys” a greater likelihood of getting it wrong, than an answer-producing method that relies purely on random chance. You’re better off rolling the dice to answer the one-plus-one problem than asking President Obama. And, because it works that way with the simple problems, it works that way with the more complicated ones as well. People like Obama have this natural phobia, a natural revulsion, against the common-sense answer. They’re more likely to get it wrong than a decision-making method that works by chance.

Hence the Crustian affection for ‘nuance’ and ‘complexity’. Important questions can’t possibly have common-sense answers, because if they did, even the Filling could answer them, and there wouldn’t be any need for the Crust. The Crust views common sense the way Eeyore views learning:

“What is Learning?” asked Eeyore as he kicked his twelve sticks into the air. “A thing Rabbit knows! Ha!”

Freeberg is never afraid to ask the hard questions.

And answer them, too, of course.

Back in those exciting days when Bill Clinton was finishing up his first term, not that long ago by any means…the conservative/liberal conflict was pretty clear-cut. The conservative position represented in the new Gingrich Congress was, our social-services safety net had become something of a vicious cycle, as the largess of the state had created a dependency class, which in turn reproduced without the mainstream concerns about where the college fund comes from, how does Sugarlump get hold of a car & how does he get insured…and then each new generational wave threw itself upon the over-extended safety net. A caused B and B caused A, with no end in sight, so something had to be done. The liberal response was twofold: 1) Nuh-huh, that doesn’t happen, and 2) Well, it does happen and you tighty-righties need to just get used to it, it’s a necessary evil.

Fast-forward to Anno Julia, and the debate has shifted quite aways without our consciously noticing it. And the direction in which it is shifted is not a good one. The debate has not come closer to being resolved, it’s drifted further away, as we now disagree on what the goals are. As anyone who’s watched “Life of Julia” can recognize right away, when President Obama campaigns for re-election this year, He will be doing so on behalf of a constituency that, from His explanation of it, thinks things are supposed to be this way — and who’s to say they are not.

Steve Sailer, as usual, says what needs to be said.

Perhaps all those The Making of… documentaries included on DVDs inculcated a love of military precision. A movie set is a sort of pretend military operation with the director as the commanding officer. (But you can’t enlist unless your uncle was in the union. And what neither the recruiters nor the documentaries tell you is that the main sensation of both is Hurry Up and Wait.)

Well, now that homosexuals are welcome in the military, can a union be far behind?

Whedon’s fictitious Helicarrier is equipped with J-35 vertical landing fighters, a quasi-real warplane first seen in the 2007 blockbuster Live Free or Die Hard, but which remains, five years later, still in flight tests despite its estimated $1.5-trillion lifetime cost. Every Pentagon gizmo in The Avengers had me scratching my head and wondering: How much am I going to be paying in taxes for the rest of my life for this boondoggle?

Read it.

Tim Larkin, a US self-defence instructor who teaches pupils to “inflict crippling pain from injury to easily damaged body parts” has been barred from Britain where he was due to give seminars in areas hit by last year’s riots.

Apparently defending yourself is yet another thing one is not allowed to do any more in Britain.

“The Home Secretary will seek to exclude an individual if she considers that his or her presence in the UK is not conducive to the public good.”

This is the kind of power that Eric Holder dreams of….

Further adventures of The Fluke.

Dare I say this is even misogynistic – viewing modern womanhood not as some ethereal conception but rather the generation that successfully agitated for condoms!  Is this really what they want to brag about?  The Left is content on celebrating abstract “achievements”, like “diversity” and women’s “rights”, that they can imbue with value; so I suppose getting birth control is sort of like discovering relativity or landing on the Moon.

Funny how the cause of ‘reproductive choice’ is always about just the one choice. (If a feminist chooses to have a child, does her ‘reproductive rights’ entitle her to a dick of her choice? Gives the whole concept of Selective Service an extra dimension.)

One wonders why these chicks don’t just cut to the chase and have their tubes tied. Problem solved, both theirs (them reproducing) and ours (them reproducing).

Read it.

A prisoner in Texas has received 4 out of 10 votes in West Virginia’s democratic primary after managing to get his name added to the ballot.

I don’t know which is more amusing, what the fact that 40% of West Virginia Democrats prefer a real criminal against a politician says about Democrats, or what the fact that 40% of a solidly Democrat jurisdiction prefer a criminal to Barack Obama says about Obama.

Maybe it’s both.

Or it just may be that some Americans prefer anyone from Texas, even a criminal, to someone from Washington DC via Chicago. That would be pretty amusing too.

Read it.

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

Laws relating to self-defense are entirely a state concern. This is one of many areas where the federal government has no legitimate role.

But, of course, that never stopped them before — and probably won’t in the foreseeable future, either.

Read it. And watch the video.

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

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

Read it.

Characteristically combining arrogance with silliness, President Obama has given Congress a to-do list. The list includes the same chestnuts Obama has been promoting for a while; it really is directed to the House of Representatives only. Notably absent from Obama’s list is any suggestion that the Senate should adopt a budget, as is required by law.

I mean, really — obeying the law and saving the country from financial meltdown is just so fifteen minutes ago. Let’s move on to the really important stuff, like shutting down coal plants and ‘gay marriage’.

Read it.

Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ordered a preliminary injunction barring Cook County from enforcing the Illinois Eavesdopping Act against “people who openly record police officers performing their official duties in public.” The law, the strictest of its kind in the country, makes such recording a Class 1 felony, punishable by four to 15 years in prison.

Well, let’s see what the blue states are up to these days.

• Michigan adopts state socialism, and descends into anarchy, with race war around the corner. Check.
• Illinois adopts fascism (i.e. state socialism in a Clever Plastic Disguise), and turns into a police state. Check.
• Both states are reliably Democrat. Check.

Hmmm. No surprises here. Well, maybe there’s something on television….

Read it.

A cause we can all get behind. Jeff is, of course, one of our Recommended Writers (see right).

Kathy Shaidle speaks truth to power.

Rich Lowry owes John Derbyshire an apology.

When Lowry fired Derbyshire from National Review for writing a “racist” column here at Taki’s, he took particular issue with Derb’s contention that whites should “Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.”

Lowry was clearly unfamiliar with (black) comedian Chris Rock’s 1996 bit about avoiding any street in America named Martin Luther King Boulevard. As everyone (except National Review editors) knows, avenues christened in honor of that self-proclaimed champion of nonviolence usually run through black neighborhoods and tend to be among the country’s most dangerous.