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And FP reminds us that this is an “administration that has prosecuted more government officials under the Espionage Act of 1917 for sharing classified information with the media than all previous administrations combined.”

I realize that the people at tReason magazine see this as a Bad Thing, but I consider it the most positive things I’ve heard about Obama since he got elected. I’m still waiting for him to get around to the New York Times, however.

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I totally want one of these.

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The “Songbun” system, which classifies North Koreans as “loyal,” “wavering,” or “hostile,” has largely escaped notice, even as UN agencies and rights groups have documented abuses, including vast camps of political prisoners, public executions, and extreme information controls, the report from a US-based advocacy group argues.

“Every North Korean citizen is assigned a heredity-based class and socio-political rank over which the individual exercises no control but which determines all aspects of his or her life,” the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea said.

The three classes are further divided into 51 categories by family background or occupation, which determine the precise mix of privileges, punishments or surveillance, the report said.

As we have seen in other places, Communism is merely the Western-respectable window dressing that traditional societies are using to carry on as they have for millenia.

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No shit, Sherlock.

The case of Rahman, 25, and Hannan, 36, has raised concerns that their victims, all from Rochdale, Greater Manchester, were failed by police and prosecutors when they first reported they had been attacked.

As you can tell by the names, ‘Asian’ is a Politically Correct code-word for ‘Muslim’.

The convictions are the latest following a string of recent trials in which groups of men, predominantly of Pakistani origin, have been accused of sex crimes in towns and cities across northern England and the Midlands.

Oh, yeah, ‘Asian’.

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When there aren’t any Jews or Americans handy, Muslims will quite cheerfully blow each other up.

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A wave of local and state Democrats throughout the U.S. are leaving the party due to controversy over its leaders’ support for “gay marriage,” as well as concerns about religious freedom and the defense of the unborn.

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Blind spots have long been a common (and dangerous) part of driving a car, but a new patent awarded to Drexel University in Philadelphia could help make them a thing of the past. Dr. R. Andrew Hicks has created a mirror design that is able to triple your field of view without drastic image distortion. By using a mathematical algorithm first described by Dr. Hicks in 2008, the mirror acts like a disco ball, in the sense that light reflected off of it is bounced in different directions. The difference in this instance is that the mirrors are so close, and so finely tuned, that light is refracted across a smooth surface at precisely controlled angles.

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When a young girl is raped and murdered by Muslims in the West — say, in Blackpool, in northern England — her neighbors may become angry, and they may demonstrate in public to express their outrage. Some of them may even throw bottles and get themselves arrested. All of them will be demonized as “racists” and “right-wing extremists” by public officials and the press.

But no Muslims will be hurt in the making of such a demo. Some of the protesters may wish they could inflict violence on the perpetrator(s). But Muslims in their local community will generally remain unharmed.

Not so in Burma (I’m old-fashioned, and refuse to use “Myanmar”). After a Burmese woman was raped and killed by a gang of Muslim youths, Buddhists in Taunggoke in the western Burmese state of Rakhine attacked a busload of Muslims and beat ten of the passengers to death.

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Nailing Obama:

President Obama’s problem now isn’t what Wisconsin did, it’s how he looks each day—careening around, always in flight, a superfluous figure. No one even looks to him for leadership now. He doesn’t go to Wisconsin, where the fight is. He goes to Sarah Jessica Parker’s place, where the money is.

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Members of the congregation of the Masjid-al-Tawhid in East London are shocked — shocked! — to learn that their mosque has been a congenial host to Salafist terrorists.

And the BBC seems to share local Muslims’ astonishment at the connections with Abu Qatada and Anwar al-Awlaki. How could such a thing have happened?

Be careful not to step in the diversity.

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Multi-culti chickens come home to roost … and poop all over everything.

The Schengen Area consists of a contiguous group of twenty-five European countries that have agreed by treaty to suspend border controls and travel restrictions within their common territory. Five member states of the European Union — Britain, Ireland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Cyprus — are not signatories of the Schengen Agreement, while three non-EU countries — Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland — have signed on.

The weakness of the Schengen provisions was highlighted last year during the Camp of the Saints crisis in the Mediterranean. Libyans and Tunisians who illegally gained access to Europe by landing on the island of Lampedusa were given temporary residence permits by the Italian authorities. Once they had these valuable pieces of paper in hand, they were theoretically able to travel wherever they wished within the Schengen Area. Since Italy was not their intended final destination — France, Britain, Germany, and Sweden being more highly prized for their lavish welfare benefits — many of the newcomers immediately attempted to travel northwards.

Handing out residence permits was a somewhat cynical ploy on the part of the Italian authorities, who obviously hoped to hand off their cultural enrichment problems to other parts of Europe. The French were having none of it, however, and sent the Tunisian interlopers straight back to Italy, Schengen or not.

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A reminder that there is still trash to be taken out.

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Texas is #2. No mention of Michigan.

Sky falling. Film at 11.

The author of this article has degrees in philosophy and journalism, and in his bio photo looks like Meathead from All in the Family, so of course he’s qualified to report on environmental issues.

Based on a review of scientific theories, ecosystem modeling and fossils, the researchers concluded that accelerating loss of biodiversity, extreme climate fluctuations and a radically changing total energy budget are precursors to reaching a planetary tipping point that would be followed by an irreversible collapse of our planet’s ecosystems.

In other words, very few actual facts, and a lot of tendentious speculation. How convincing. All of the evidence cited is from the Usual Suspects like the U.N. and the World Wildlife Fund, ‘progressive’ groups united behind the concept that human beings suck and we need to cancel the industrial revolution and live in neolithic poverty or Mother Gaia will be peeved.

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Scientists are puzzled today by the discovery that millions of years ago levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were lower – and yet, temperatures were higher than today’s.

The Nature paper, indeed, states that in the boffins’ opinion oceanic temperature and atmospheric carbon levels – generally considered to be firmly connected in today’s climate science – were “decoupled”.

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But that’s not the funny part – the funny part is:

An education minister in one of India’s poorest states has demanded the sacking of its examinations board chief after his two children failed for the second successive year.

Does that not sound like something that a Democrat Congresscritter would do?

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Doubt that it’s original to The Other McCain, but that’s where I saw it first.

Extra special: ‘Modern Liberalism is an alliance of the Pointy Haired Boss and Wally against Dilbert and Alice.’

And that’s the truth.

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A Japanese airline has instructed its passengers that flight attendants will not help them with their luggage, do not have to be polite and complaints will not be tolerated.

Steve Sailer persists in asking the questions no one else will ask, and throwing some daylight on the mainstreaming of abnormality.

“The best defense is a good offense” may explain much of the otherwise puzzling gay marriage project. Gay Liberation unleashed a number of Big Gay Screw-Ups, such as AIDS and the Catholic Church scandals. But rather than admit that, it was much easier emotionally to just go on the offensive over some random issue like gay marriage.

There are big advantages to having the press constantly up in arms about how you  are a victim of discrimination. For example, it can help cover up your own discriminating. Many industries appear to have, as Marc Ambinder admitted yesterday about Washington D.C., gay mafias discriminating against non-gays. That’s usually laughed off, as Ambinder and Robert Wright did, with the assumption that the victims of discrimination are straight men, so that’s A-okay.

But what happens when the victims are members of a Designated Victim Group? For example, most of the competition in the fashion business is between gay men and women, and that industry’s powerful gay mafia notoriously treats aspiring female designers badly.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, looks at the modern world.

“There aren’t any jobs anymore. My firm only hires temps and contractors now. Employees are just too expensive.”

Now we are plainly sailing into an era when only a privileged class will have jobs. There is already no useful work (I am not counting government make-work) for anyone with an IQ below 90, and the cutoff point is creeping steadily northward.

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President Obama’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s record in private equity have drawn scorn from his fellow Democrats. But it seems Obama’s anti-free market campaign strategy has attracted at least one prominent endorsement: Mariela Castro Espin, daughter of Raul and niece of Fidel, is backing Obama’s re-election.

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

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Well, if you’re really concerned….

So what vast sums of money did the duplicitous executives at General Electric lavish on the Reason Foundation in 2008 and 2009 to support an implied campaign to traduce climate science? Exactly $325. How much did GE spend on matching and direct grants on the six think tanks identified by the UCS as being pro-climate consensus? That would be $497,744. At least with regard to General Electric’s contributions, it appears that the Union of Concerned Scientists has salted a follow-the-money trail with pieces of fool’s gold, which certain unwary news outlets obligingly picked up and reported as real bullion.

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And I, for one, am glad it did.

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Zeolites (literally “boil stones”) aren’t exactly new: The term was coined in 1756 by Axel Cronstedt, a Swedish mineralogist who noted that some minerals, upon being heated, release large amounts of steam from water that had been previously adsorbed. For the last 250 years, scientists have tried to shoehorn this process in a heat storage system — and now, the Fraunhofer Institute, working with industrial partners, has worked out how to do it.

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I was wondering where all that missing weight from the dinosaurs went.

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Sorry, got no time for that — busy worrying about the rampant racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, Islamophobia, whateverelseisgoingonophobia in the United States, which all right-thinking people correctly consider the be The Greatest Problem Ever.

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Three Brazilians have been charged with murdering three women and eating their flesh as part of a cannibalistic cult in which they sought to purify their souls and control population growth, according to police.

Environmentalists … sheesh.

Well? Did it work?

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The US town of Boring has voted in favour of becoming a “sister community” to the small Scottish village of Dull.

Gotta admire places with a sense of humor.

On the other hand, I’d prefer living in either to any major metropolitan area.

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Volusia County, Florida, officials are defending a nurse who withheld a student’s inhaler from him during an asthma attack.

Gotta love those government schools — you can trust your kid to the local bureaucrat, so long as all your papers are in order.

I remember, even if the rest of you don’t.

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And since Madison is a famous hotbed of Republicanism, we know who’s doing the cheating … oh, wait….

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The inclusion of all of America’s long term unfunded liabilities into a single measure paints a far more difficult future picture for the U.S. over the longer term in which debt totals over $50 trillion dollars.

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Everyone has heard about the Bakken shale, the huge expanse of oil-bearing rock underneath North Dakota and Montana that billionaire Harold Hamm thinks could yield 24 billion barrels of oil in the decades to come. The Bakken is a huge boon, both to the economic health of the northern Plains states, but also to the petroleum balance of the United States. From just 60,000 barrels per day five years ago, the Bakken is now giving up 500,000 bpd, with 210,000 bpd of that coming on in just the past year. Given the availability of enough rigs to drill it and crews to frack it, there’s no reason why the Bakken couldn’t be producing more than 1 million bpd by the end of the decade, a level that could be maintained for halfway through the century.

But as great as the Bakken is, I learned last week about another oil shale play that dwarfs it. It’s called The Bazhenov. It’s in Western Siberia, in Russia. And while the Bakken is big, the Bazhenov — according to a report last week by Sanford Bernstein’s lead international oil analyst Oswald Clint — “covers 2.3 million square kilometers or 570 million acres, which is the size of Texas and the Gulf of Mexico combined.” This is 80 times bigger than the Bakken.

But we’re going to run out of oil any day now, depend on it.

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The Obamassiah’s legacy. Thanks a lot, Barry.

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

Actually, I’m surprised that the Federal debt hasn’t ballooned even more than it has, with Obama and his henchmen passing out taxpayer money to any flim-flam artist who wanders by muttering, ‘Green energy? Green energy?’.

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Biden: The gift that keeps on giving.

What can you say about the judgment of a man who would pick this moron as his Vice-President? (And don’t get me started on the people of Maryland, who elected him to the Senate for 36 years….)

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Obama reminds Scott Johnson at POWERLINE of George McGovern.

Those with a long memory will recall that Senator Tom Eagleton of Missouri was McGovern’s first pick for vice president. Eagleton had to step down from the ticket when it was revealed that he had twice undergone electroshock therapy to treat “nervous exhaustion.” By contrast, Obama’s first pick for vice president got to stay on the ticket. He only talks like someone whose brain has been messed with.

Ah, those were the days.

McGovern’s small business venture ended unhappily. McGovern concluded his column with a timely observation:

I’m lucky. I can recover eventually from the loss of the Stratford Inn because I’m still able to generate income from lectures and other services. But what about the 60 people who worked for me in Stratford? While running my struggling hotel, I never once missed a payroll. What happens to the people who counted on that, and to their families and community, when an owner goes under? Those questions worry me, and they ought to worry all of us who love this country as a land of promise and opportunity.

Obama doesn’t think or talk like that, and it’s not just a function of age and experience. It’s hard for someone who thinks he knows it all to learn from experience.

One of the disadvantages of having an Obamateur as President is that we get to suffer from his mistakes.

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A man is under arrest in Germany after killing his wife in front of his six young children and cutting her into pieces.

Orhan Sircasi then ran on to the roof of his apartment building clutching her severed head in one hand and a butcher’s knife in the other.

He was probably under a lot of stress. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Couldn’t have anything to do with Islam, of course, even though he was shouting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ 

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

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Injured during the attack, the man, who was not identified, suffered lacerations to the back of his head and was taken to Whistler Health Care Center for treatment.

Police responded to the incident, locating the bear about 100 meters away as it headed for a wooded area.

“The bear was destroyed,” the police statement said. According to local media, police shot and killed the bear.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Lileks nails it.

A culture that redefines food choices as moral issues will demonize the people who don’t share the tastes of the priest class. A culture that elevates eating to some holistic act of ethical self-definition – localvore, low-carbon-impact food, fair trade, artisanal cheese – will find the casual carefree choices of the less-enlightened as an affront to their belief system. Leave it to Americans to invent a Puritan strain of Epicurianism.

But self-righteous finger-wagging is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the cruts.

Unless you’re on TV and want everyone to like you because you’re concerned about the right things. Being concerned about fat people like being concerned about Tibet; it requries nothing but expression of the proper sentiment, usually containing sadness for The Children, but also some righteous anger for Big Food, which has tricked everyone into eating more. The idea that some kids are fat because they have lousy parents doesn’t apply, because whoa whoa whoa now we’re blaming the victims, the people who for some mysterious reason can’t arrange a family meal and influence their progeny’s ingestion. For those people, obesity just happens, somehow. But in general, it’s because of soda, because everyone saw that YouTube clip with the stack of sugar cubes, right?

Yes, every time the TV talkers are in the store behind someone poor with a big arse packed in sweatpants buying Doritos and Little Debbie Cakes, the trim concerned commentaror thinks “it’s a big problem that the cost of her health issues will be distributed among 300 million people.” That’s the issue, all right.

And he takes a poke at David Frum, which is all to the good; why any respectable publication would give any space to David Frum always astonishes me.

As I said, it’s not about health. If it was, no one would mention the cost of obesity. It’s an issue only because the rest of us have to pay for it? If that’s the case, then there’s no end to the restrictions we can conjure up and impose with equal parts of sadness and resolution. Smoking was easy because it stinks. Trans-fats was easy because no one knew what they were; it’s not like you go down the store to pick up some trans-fats. The soda laws appeal to the overclass because fat people are disgusting.

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Look it up.

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The Vermont anomaly, if you will, is more than just the readiness of mostly-urban newcomers to buy into a rural/small-town state, their advantage based on above-average levels of wealth, past achievement, political skills, and business acumen. The pre-existing Green Mountain State taxation, regulatory, and general business climate, as shown in numerous state rankings and analyses, is exactly the motivating set of governmental and grass-roots forces typically responsible for the out-migration of just such folks from (perhaps more normal) states like California, Illinois, Maryland, or New Jersey. In those places, the same factors that are a draw in Vermont have been causally linked to just the opposite phenomenon: upper-middle-class exodus patterns.

“Burdensome tax and regulatory policies will be of relative advantage to the rich and powerful, who can employ specialists to work through the maze of rules that impose traps for unwary members of the middle class.”

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Lyttle—who once quipped that “tunneling is something that should be talked about without panicking”—became internationally known for the expansive network of tunnels he dug under his East London house. The tunnels eventually became so numerous that the sidewalk in front of his house collapsed, neighbors began to joke that Lyttle might soon “come tunnelling up through the kitchen floor,” and, as a surveyor ominously relayed to an English court, “there is movement in the ground.”

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When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 — already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.

“You can say without any shadow of a doubt,” as I was told then by Drummond Rennie, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had “made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.”

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At the Atlantic, Garance Franke-Ruta notes Gallup polls that indicate most Americans think around a quarter of our population is gay. The mean is 24.6%, up from 21.7% just eight years ago. An astonishing 35% believe that more than one-quarter of all people are homosexuals. In fact, the number is around two to three percent. So the average poll respondent is off by 1,000%.

Well, they certainly make enough noise for a quarter of the population.

My interest here is not the specific topic of homosexuality, but rather the fact that people’s perceptions are so wildly at odds with reality. How on Earth can the average American believe that one-quarter of the men and women he sees every day are gay? Does that make any possible sense? Are one-quarter of your relatives gay, or your co-workers or neighbors? Of course not (unless you live in certain precincts of San Francisco). Glenn Reynolds’s explanation, perhaps tongue in cheek, was that there are so many gays on television, and I think that must be at least part of the answer. A vastly disproportionate number of characters in TV sitcoms and dramas are homosexual. A second and closely related factor is that homosexuality features disproportionately as a theme in movies, books and so on. It is an extraordinary instance of culture eclipsing reality.

Yeah, that sounds about right. If you control the Media, you control the Narrative, and if you control the Narrative, it doesn’t really matter what the truth might be.

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Identity Politics red in tooth and claw.

Touting a move to make its faculty more diverse, CUNY administrators have broken out Jews into a separate minority group: “White/Jewish.”

Hoo, boy. Reap the whirwind.

“It’s an insult and idiotic,” said Hershey Friedman, deputy chairman of the Finance and Business Management Department at Brooklyn College. “Most Jews are brown-skinned. We also have black Jews and Asian Jews. Once you mix religion with race you’re opening a Pandora’s box — and you look stupid.”

‘How dare you call us white people! You racist!’

But Jewish professors told The Post that marking them as Jews won’t make them the chosen people on campus — and may even shrink their ranks if Jews are found to be “overrepresented.”

“White,” said a Jewish professor at Kingsborough Community College, “is in every way a detriment to be categorized because of the push to hire minorities.”

Sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a minority deprived of its Official Victim status.

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Two articles are all that is needed to sum up the situation in Seattle, a city that is 67 percent whiteand only two percent (though diversity is increasing in the city)