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.

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Recently, USGCB has sought to ban Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) from government buildings even though studies have shown that PVC outperforms other alternatives. And the unintended consequences of these “green guidelines” could do more harm than good to the economy and the environment.

Leadership in Energy Development (LEED) is a certification process run by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGCB), a non profit, that certifies buildings as being “green” enough. And the USGBC has announced, in guidelines which can be seen here, that it will attempt to stipulate hat builders use “materials that do not contain” polyvinyl chloride  (PVC). But the science LEED uses is flawed.

The embattled GSA would adopt the guidelines, which is no surprise since the GSA, which oversees the leasing and administration of all government buildings and properties, has direct ties to LEED. In fact, the GSA’s deputy director of the Office of Federal High-Performance Green Buildings, Donald Horn, is an adviser to LEED’s board of directors.

Hey, one hand washes the other. Good thing it wasn’t the NRA, or they’d really be in trouble.

Environmentalists: Not Happy Until We Cancel the Twentieth Century.

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Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

The Other McCain raises the banner.

Q. How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. That’s not funny!

Don’t laugh: Somebody once laughed at Ashley Judd’s puffy face, and we’ve been suffering from her empowered victimhood ever since.

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“I am not a welfare queen,” says Melissa Bruninga-Matteau.

Although the hyphenated last name does look like spoor of a would-be member of the Crust.

That’s how she feels compelled to start a conversation about how she, a white woman with a Ph.D. in medieval history and an adjunct professor, came to rely on food stamps and Medicaid. Ms. Bruninga-Matteau, a 43-year-old single mother who teaches two humanities courses at Yavapai College, in Prescott, Ariz., says the stereotype of the people receiving such aid does not reflect reality. Recipients include growing numbers of people like her, the highly educated, whose advanced degrees have not insulated them from financial hardship.

Uh, I think the prominent arm tattoos might have something to do with it…. As well as the fact that the  typical business requirement for medieval-history PhDs (outside of academia) is, last time I looked, too small to measure. If her degree were in statistics, she’d be sitting pretty. ODF.

“I find it horrifying that someone who stands in front of college classes and teaches is on welfare,” she says.

I find it horrifying that so fine a fellow as myself has to work for a living at all, but that’s life for you. Markets work, even when they horrify you.

Freeberg is on the case.

If an alien from another planet, fully capable of understanding our language, competent in logic and common sense but entirely unfamiliar with our modern culture, were forced to live with us for about a week or so…I’m sure he’d come to the conclusion that this word we use, “environment,” has something to do with diminished expectations and/or lowered standards.

Companies who talk about protecting the environment, charge a goddamn fortune and their products & services don’t do anything.

Politicians who talk about the environment, just raise our taxes and make everything more expensive.

Scientists who talk about the environment, don’t even practice science.

And the everyday-everywhere-everyman who talks about the environment, is just a smug foppish snot who likes to feel superior to everybody else, doesn’t do shit, knows even less.

Read it.

Sure, just as soon as Muslims give the Middle East back to their native Christian inhabitants. Let’s start with giving Egypt back to the Copts, and Istanbul back to the Greeks. And then perhaps ‘Kaliningrad’ back to the Germans, and Tibet back to the Tibetans, and you can carry on like this all day.

The Other McCain points and laughs.

TechCrunch was a valuable property, because Michael Arrington was a valuable blogger, and the fact that he was willing to walk away from a brand he had created was one of those “Houston, we have a problem” moments, a signal that whatever skills Arianna Huffington brought to AOL, personnel management wasn’t one of them.

Successful people in online New Media tend to value their independence above almost anything else. They spotted a niche, created their sites from scratch and attracted a readership, and you can’t tell them how to do their jobs, because they invented their jobs.

Now try to imagine Michael Arrington, who sold his site to AOL for $30 million, being told a few months later that he’s now got to answer to this infamous Greek gold-digger. Not gonna happen.

Don Boudreaux notices that the emperor is starkers.

Why is it still regarded as scientifically valid to propose a government program (such as the one proposed by Posner and Weyl) whose success requires that the administrators who carry out the program possess and act on a degree of other-regarding motives and unbiased system-wide knowledge that, were such motives and knowledge assumed to guide the actions of people in the private sector, would immediately and properly be dismissed as too unrealistic to take seriously?

Read it.

Cybercrooks have quit pouring barrels of spam into email inboxes in favour of hassling marks on social networks as an easier way to make money.

Yet another reason to steer clear of ‘social media’.

Read it.

Slow news day.

It is perhaps time to vote somebody off the island.

The cartoon Madam & Eve (see right) used to be funny when it was about domestic relations in a formerly institutionally racist society. Now that its focus has turned to South African politics, however, in which I have less interest than belly button lint, and which doesn’t really translate well if you don’t know the characters and situation (which nobody out of South Africa does, I will bet you), it no longer strikes me as sufficiently funny to give it a place in my Cartoons list.

However, if there’s anybody out there who reads it regularly, sing out in the comments. Otherwise it will be expunged come Saturday morning.

George Will blows the whistle.

His “People’s Rights Amendment” declares that the Constitution protects only the rights of “natural persons,” not such persons organized in corporations, and that Congress can impose on corporations whatever restrictions Congress deems “reasonable.” His amendment says that it shall not be construed “to limit the people’s rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free exercise of religion, freedom of association and all such other rights of the people, which rights are inalienable.” But the amendment is explicitly designed to deny such rights to natural persons who, exercising their First Amendment right to freedom of association, come together in corporate entities to speak in concert.

Read it.

On September 27th, 2010 the solar-powered MS Tûranor (also known as PlanetSolar) departed from Monaco with the goal of travelling around the entire globe using only the power of the sun — and now the ship has finally arrived back where it started. In doing so PlanetSolar becomes the first solar-powered ship to circumnavigate the globe, and over its lengthy journey it crossed the Atlantic ocean, the Panama Canal, the Pacific ocean, the Indian ocean, the Suez Canal, and the Mediterranean as it kept as close to the equator as possible to ensure plenty of sunshine.

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Taxpayers footed the bill for a Tucson Police Department security detail assigned to protect first lady Michelle Obama during her political fundraising stop here on Monday.

Tucson police Sgt. Maria Hawke said the department is still calculating how much was spent on the 39 officers, including 14 who were paid overtime, in response to an Arizona Daily Star inquiry. But she said TPD does not anticipate being reimbursed by the Obama campaign or anybody else.

A helicopter, one patrol car, 14 motorcycles and one bomb-trained dog were also used during Michelle Obama’s 2 1/2 hours in the Old Pueblo, Hawke said.

Michelle Obama was in town to raise money for her husband’s reelection campaign.

The Patron Saint of Dyspepsia brings us up to speed.

Read it.

Points to note:

1. The guy is a foreigner. Foreigners value the classics. Native-born Americans do not. Used to be that Americans would do something like this. No longer.
2. The guy is middle-aged. Young people’s idea of ‘the classics’ is Seinfeld.
3. No whining about being poor and needing to have the taxpayer pay for his schooling. He saw a great deal and took advantage of it. I’ll trade him for any two Kennedys in a heartbeat.

Read it.

Mike Kinde, writer for the site Ideas Illustrated, has created a project that visualizes the etymology of the English words used in various passages — a sports article, a medical article, a United Nations document, Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations,” and Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

Read it.

‘Most prisoners confessed within five minutes of the first application’

Warning: These are trained professionals. Do not try this at home.

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Read it.

No pun intended, of course.

Solar power researchers at Princeton University have discovered that by mimicking the surface of leaves, they can create solar cells that are better at capturing sunlight for a 47 percent efficiency boost.

In the kind of discovery that’s obvious after the fact, the researchers have “roughed up” the surface of their cells, in imitation of the way that leaves use microscopic irregularities in their surfaces to maximize their harvesting of the sun.

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I remember being bullied when I was a kid, but no one considered it a crisis then. I just did the healthy thing and put a hard shell around my feelings while developing a seething bitterness toward the world.

Has bullying really gotten worse? Maybe kids have just gotten sissier.

Actually, the real bullying crisis is the bullying on the part of ‘activist’ groups and their Big Brother, the government. ‘You’d better do it my way, or my brother will beat you up!’

We’re far removed from the days when children entertained themselves by shooting each other in the face with BB guns; childhood is now all about safety, being attuned to our emotions and avoiding peanut allergies.

This isn’t good for the country. Think: When Elvis was drafted, he at least looked capable of holding a rifle; you can’t say the same about Justin Bieber.

And there you have it.

Read it.

Read it.

A plan by a Native American tribe to kill two bald eagles for use in a religious rite has drawn the ire of a fellow tribe, which says it doesn’t want any eagles sacrificed on the Wyoming reservation they share.

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It is a medieval solution to a very modern problem. The ancient role of the lengthsman, who would “walk the length of the parish” to ensure ditches and drains were clear, is being revived across the country.

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US government funded scientists have measured the speed of glaciers in Greenland as they move down to the sea over the past ten years, and discovered that – while the glaciers have speeded up somewhat – there’s no indication that this will mean major sea level rises.

Well, shucks. What’s a global warming alarmist to do?

Need proof? Got it right here.

You might have heard that Windows 8 won’t come with Media Center, but that’s not the only missing multimedia piece of the puzzle. This week, Microsoft revealed that the new operating system won’t have any kind of DVD playback, unless you specifically purchase Media Center or use third-party DVD software.

Case closed.

Read it.

Another oddity is that the neighborhood Barack and Michelle chose to buy their big house in is the neighborhood chosen by the friends of the friends of the people who assassinated Barack’s boyhood idol, Malcolm X. As he explained to the Chicago Tribune, he chose Tony Rezko to help him out with his buying his house because Tony knows all about real estate in that neighborhood. What the Tribune didn’t explain was that the reason Tony knows all about real estate there is because he was long the business manager for the inner circle of the Nation of Islam, and that’s where they live. That would kind of weird me out, but of course nobody has ever asked Obama about that.

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We know that: windfarms ruined the ocean view of late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Cape Cod home; are shredding birds to smithereens like carrots in a Cuisinart; and are too intermittent and unreliable as a stand-along energy source and usually needs back up by awful fossil fuel sources. But do they also cause global warming?

The irony that a cure for global warming is actually causing global warming might be too good to be true. But what is true is that had wind energy not been powered by crony capitalism, it would have been long ago blown away by the gales of destruction unleashed by its more viable competitors.

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Assembly Democrats want to raise New York’s minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.50 an hour. Gov. Cuomo’s left the door open to this job-killer, so it could yet become law this year. Yet this mandate would make New York’s business climate even more uncompetitive — while harming the people it’s supposed to help.

Few if any of the folks pushing the minimum-wage hike have ever run a private-sector business. They have zero understanding of how hard it already is for job-creators in New York to run their businesses.

Indeed, I think it’s safe to say that few if any of the folks pushing the minimum-wage hike have ever held a minimum-wage job.

It doesn’t take a great deal of intelligence to grasp the simple fact that if you raise the price of something, you lessen demand for it. Yet politicians of all stripes seem to think that demand for low or unskilled labor is so inelastic that you can play with the price all you want without affecting how many people get employed. That this sort of stupidity makes its way into law is one of the chief indicators that our political system is badly broken.

Watch it.

Geert Wilders on Hannity’s show. Because Wilders speaks the truth about the Islamic threat, he needs 24/7 protection and has been subected to Muslim and dhimmi lawfare under Europe’s fascist ‘hate’ laws.

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This actually looks pretty useful — at least until the checkout people in Target and Kroger can be broken of the habit of putting each item purchased in its own separate plastic bag.

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Actually, it turns out that Obama always said that his New York squeeze was a fake.

A white fake, you will note.

What stands out from the composite story isn’t that Obama amalgamated characters, it’s that the press hadn’t noticed until now. As with the dog story, this confirms the suspicion that the mainstream media gave Obama a free pass in 2008 and declined to check too deeply into his background. Even The Atlantic’s Graham admits that he’s never read Dreams From My Father, and neither, it would seem, has anyone else in the press corps. They have the excuse that the book is incredibly narcissistic and boring, but otherwise isn’t this exactly the sort of character assessment/assassination that should have happened four years ago?

Ya think?

Read it.

President Obama’s campaign re-election website has put up a public relations initiative called “The Life of Julia.” The goal of this initiative: to compare “how President Obama’s policies would help one woman over her lifetime – and how Mitt Romney would change her story.” It’s propaganda of the worst order. It’s a typical Obama scare tactic. And worst of all, it assumes that Julia will remain dependent on the government her entire life.

Well, under Obama’s policies, she will.

Julia’s story begins when she’s 3. Thanks to President Obama, the website says:

Julia is enrolled in a Head Start program to help get her ready for school. Because of steps President Obama has taken to improve programs like this one, Julia joins thousands of students across the country who will start kindergarten ready to learn and succeed.

Well, no. Head Start has been one of the worst failures of the federal government. The Department of Health and Human Services itself found that the government has invested $150 billion in Head Start since 1965 … and that has yielded precisely zero impact for the kids involved. But according to Obama, that dastardly Romney fellow would cut Head Start by 20%. The horror, the horror!

Apparently, nothing happens in Julia’s life until she’s 17. There’s a reason for that – America’s public school system is an utter failure, and Obama knows it. But Obama says that Julia at age 17 is flourishing (presumably she isn’t one of the approximately 25 percent of all students who drop out of school, or one of the 40 percent of black or Hispanic students who do so). Here’s Julia’s life under Obama at 17:

Julia takes the SAT and is on track to start her college applications. Her high school is part of the Race to the Top program, implemented by President Obama. Their new college- and career-ready standards mean Julia can take the classes she needs to do well.

Julia must be one of the lucky ones to get into a charter school. If she goes to one of America’s normal public schools, this is a pipe dream. But according to Obama, nasty Romney would cut funding for public education “to pay for tax cuts to millionaires.” Because what we need is more education spending, not less – even while districts like the Los Angeles Unified School District expend about $30,000 per year per student to achieve the worst results in the nation.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Freeberg is on a roll.

I grew up in a college town myself; I’ve had occasion to meet the middle-aged-hippy-woman who’s on the faculty at the campus, who doesn’t believe in eating meat and burns incense at home and droning on about patriarchy and nobody-made-it-on-their-own and what-not. A little bit of them goes a long way. I don’t know why anyone thought the voters would flock to her. And that’s before she got caught lying to advance her career.

Ran into a number of those myself. Tiresome is the most polite thing I can say.

Read it.

In related news, Prince Charles wins twentieth consecutive Upper Class Twit of the Year award, gains permanent possession of the trophy.

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

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LiveLine faced a new challenge while developing the technology — constant motion. The process used for field sports requires geostationary reference points, while yachting is typically filmed from inside a helicopter. LiveLine combines military grade GPS receivers, high-powered radios, and gyroscopically stabilized cameras to triangulate the distance between competitors. Once this data is transmitted to the ground, operators can add metrics like wind speed, nautical speed, placement in the race, waypoints, and even what country the boat represents, all in real time.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

‘There were giants in the earth in those days….’ Genesis 6:4.

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Iran imported weapons worth over £350 million in the space of three years despite being the target of a United Nations arms embargo, Oxfam will disclose on Thursday.

Yeah, that U.N. is really effective. That $5 billion (22% of which is provided by the U.S.) is certainly money well spent.

Read it.

Well, I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.

In other breaking news, war has been discovered to be bad for some people, better for others.

Stay tuned.

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Yesteryear’s states’-rights, secession-prone freedom fighters have been replaced by watered-down tools who attach anti-smoking stickers to their Prius windows and vote Democrat.

These days you can hardly mention the Confederacy without the maggots crawling all over you.

Read it.

A Defense Department employee was stopped at Newark Airport yesterday after inspectors found inert land mines in her luggage.

Roxan Hatcher, 32, of Union Township, was headed for an early-morning flight to San Francisco with two unarmed Claymore mines she planned to use in a Special Forces training exercise, law-enforcement sources said.

Hatcher, a mechanical engineer at the Army’s Picatinny Arsenal in Morris County, told cops that a co-worker headed for the same destination had an inert mine in her checked baggage that TSA inspectors did not detect.

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Dianne Wilton, the wife of a former British ambassador to Kuwait, has been treated for third degree burns after a suspected Islamist threw a pot of boiling water over her in a restaurant.

Mrs Wilton, who has been discharged from hospital, is due to fly back to Britain on Thursday. She had been in the country to discuss a new school.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

There’s definitely one African-American in the back row-center (a large man in a black shirt). There might be another black or two in the back row, but that appears to be about it.

And let’s not forget the Asian chick looking lost and alone dead center.

Read it.

… the [New York] city’s Health Department recently suspended expansion of the Breakfast in the Classroom (BIC) program, which serves free breakfast in the classrooms of 381 of 1,750 public schools. The program is ostensibly meant to ensure that hungry kids start the day with something to eat.

But the school system already offers every kid, all 1.1 million of them, regardless of income, the opportunity to have free breakfast in the school cafeteria. BIC simply puts that breakfast on every kid’s desk.

Since when do schools, other than boarding schools, consider it part of their mission to provide breakfast? Shouldn’t kids be having breakfast with, oh, I don’t know, their families?

The Health Department reined in BIC after finding that roughly 20 percent of all kids might be eating two breakfasts: one before arriving at school and another at their desks, adding on average about 90 unneeded calories to their daily intake.

I guess some of them were. Who knew?

Read it.

It takes a lot to kick a star out of a galaxy, but a group of Vanderbilt University astronomers say they’ve found a group of more than 675 stars that look like they’re headed for the exit door.

Rod Dreher brings the heat.

Honestly, Maureen Dowd writing about anything having to do with religion is about like me writing about the storm and stress of the PGA Tour. In her column, she recycles every tired cliche about the Mean Old Men of the Vatican picking on the Poor, Defenseless Church Ladies. Even though the Vatican report is publicly available information, Dowd never once mentions the main reasons for the Vatican investigation into the nun group nor does she bring up the fact that the Vatican did not investigate all American nuns, only those who had substituted radical feminism and related ideologies for Catholic doctrine.

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I notice that there is no choice for taking the salaries of top government employees.

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Prior to today’s meeting of the Commissioners Court, the Austin American-Statesman reported on some of the tweaks to the contract, including language requiring Apple to pay the lowest-salaried 10% of its new employees at the site an average of $35,000 per year. Contractors, which may comprise up to 25% of the new hires, will be paid a minimum of $11 per hour.

Cool — they managed to buy a bunch of votes, and used Apple’s money to do it. High-fives all around the Commissioners Court today, for sure.