Read it.

The roach coach is on the pier. I’ll fly if you buy.

Read it.

Historically, most foreign aid has been tied; that is, the recipient was required to spend the money on the donor country’s exports. Relative to cash, tying raises prices and reduces choice and recipient welfare–the deadweight loss of Christmas problem.

US food aid is a classic example. US food aid tends to peak after a glut. It’s cheaper for us to give food away when we have lots and not coincidentally giving food away after a glut helps to keep prices higher, benefiting US farmers. It’s precisely when food is plenty, however, that prices are low and aid is less needed. When food is scarce, prices are high and aid is more needed but then we would rather sell our food than give it away. In addition, we typically require food aid to be transported on US ships which raises costs. Finally, the food we give away is not always best suited to the recipient’s preferences or needs.

Read it.

“Who are those who incurred the wrath of Allah?” CAIR-Michigan Executive Director Dawud Walid asked in a May 25 sermon at the Islamic Organization of North America mosque in Warren, Mich. “They are the Jews, they are the Jews,” he answered himself in Arabic.

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

Read it.

It’s been two years since the annual Gloucester cheese rolling competition was banned on health and safety grounds. But yesterday hundreds took to Cooper’s Hill, at Brockworth for a rogue event.

The Nanny State will get you if you don’t watch out….

Read it.

Saw that coming.

There must be something in the genetic makeup of ‘progressives’ that leads them to base their lives on Static Analysis, i.e. thinking that if they change the rules the participants won’t change their behavior. To them, all supply and demand curves are totally inelastic, all you have to do is pass a law or a rule in order to fix a situation, etc. You’d think that a ‘reality-based community’ would wise up eventually, but they never do.

Read it. Watch the video or not, as you choose.

A pointed reminder (no pun intended) that freedom of religion is not a Muslim value.

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

Read it.

And the feminists say: [chirp] … [chirp] … [chirp]….

Read it.

Be careful not to step in the diversity. It can be Hell getting it off of your shoes.

Read it.

Well — where else would he go? Think about it.

Read it.

Some people are serious about partying, and some people less so.

Of course, this happened in Serbia, where they take such things much more to heart.

Read it.

With the shale gas boom in full swing, gas prices are at 10-year lows. We have the realistic prospect of abundant domestic supplies of a clean-burning fuel for the foreseeable future, who doesn’t like natural gas?

Ask the Sierra Club. This week, the venerable environmental organization announced its “Beyond Natural Gas” initiative, to go along with their “Beyond Coal” and “Beyond Oil” campaigns. Of course, they hate nuclear energy too.

The Sierra Club is so progressive, it want to cancel not only the twentieth century but the nineteenth as well, returning us to the good old days of Lewis and Clark, where power came from wind and water and muscle power and nothing else.

Read it.

After all, Obama’s votes have to some from somewhere.

The Department of Justice has ordered the State of Florida to stop removing non-citizens from its voter rolls, the Miami Herald reports. The DOJ sent a letter to Florida officials Thursday night expressing concern the state’s clean up was violating the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which protects minorities, and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which governs voter purges.

Oh? Did we get a sudden influx of African immigrants that didn’t make it in to the news?

Florida is deciding whether to fight the DOJ on its interpretation of the law. The state claims they were “stonewalled” for nine months by the administration and specifically names the Department of Homeland Security as being uncooperative. The DHS has data on citizenship but refuses to share that database information with Florida. As a result, the state has tried to make these determinations based on its own resources.

Your tax dollars at work.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, speaks the truth that everyone knows but most won’t admit.

Yes, I was a youthful idealist. We all were—including, by his own testimony, VDARE.com’s resident “white nationalist,” American Renaissance Editor Jared Taylor.

So what happened? Whence the “pessimism and cynicism” about race?

Fifty years happened—that’s what happened. Fifty years that thoughtful, observant people of my generation lived through at the regulation speed of one day per day.

We watched the trillions of dollars being spent on social programs—watched the actual dollars disappearing out of our own paychecks. We saw the vast apparatus of make-work government jobs being assembled. We were there, observing, day by day, when the preferences and favoritism and set-asides were being implemented. We watched as jurisprudence was twisted into pretzel shapes in the name of a bogus “fairness.” We saw the independent black nations of Africa and the Caribbean implode into ruin, chaos and beggary.

We lived through it; we saw it all.

And fifty years on, we see the results. Yes, some real gains in equity, though offset by some losses; but also intractable black poverty, intractable gaps in academic achievement, intractable, stupendous differentials in crime rates.

Pessimism and cynicism? Is someone surprised?

Read it.

Read it.

Few local law-enforcement officials in the United States have proven themselves more Islamist-friendly than Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, whose department has been dogged by allegations of malfeasance in office, and the Los Angeles Police Department’s top deputy handling counterterrorism issues, Michael Downing.

Read it.

I was wondering when that was going to happen. There’s nothing like being surrounded by religious fanatics committed to your elimination to concentrate the mind — and fuel an arms race.

Read it.

Hey, look at his skin color — he’s obviously a Disadvantaged Minority.

I like the way the matching diamond ear studs add to the family resemblance.

Read it.

The Department of Health and Human Services launches $20M contract with PR company to foment race-consciousness to obtain minority support of Obamacare.

PR Week reported that Obama’s HHS launched a $20M campaign last week with Porter Novelli to sell Obamacare to the public. A “competitive” process resulted in the selection of a public relations company. This company just so happens to be led by Catherine “Kiki” Mclean, a former on-air surrogate for Obama’s campaign in 2008.

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

This promotional campaign is not targeting all Americans equally. The campaign creates race-consciousness in order to win over the minority vote. Obama has prioritized reaching Hispanics, African Americans, and women through this PR blitz. For example, an email to HHS in January from the Vice President of Ogilvy PR Worldwide stated, “I realize we really can’t use the blond mom and child for this audience” in regards to a banner ad campaign. With the election on the horizon, Obama realizes he must secure the minority vote.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

It was the Roosevelt administration’s prosecution of the Schechters for violating the [fascist] National Industrial Recovery Act, one of the pillars of the New Deal, that led the Supreme Court to declare the act unconstitutional in 1935. FDR was, and remains, so beloved by American Jews that the heroism of the Schechters has been lost as a story of Jewish moral commitment in the face of power. In her history of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes begins the process of rescuing the Schechter brothers from obscurity by spending an entire chapter on their challenge to the New Deal. In this article I build on Shlaes’s account to provide some broader context for their story and draw some implications for Jewish Americans.

Read it.

William Safire once described the “hopefully” rule as the litmus test that separated the language snobs from the language slobs.

But the fixation with “hopefully” is different from those others. For one thing, the word itself is so utterly inconsequential — is that the best you’ve got? And then there’s no rational justification for condemning it. Some critics object that it’s a free-floating modifier (a Flying Dutchman adverb, James Kirkpatrick called it) that isn’t attached to the verb of the sentence but rather describes the speaker’s attitude. But floating modifiers are mother’s milk to English grammar — nobody objects to using “sadly,” “mercifully,” “thankfully” or “frankly” in exactly the same way.

OneSTDV nails it.

Basically, this woman wrote an article for two purposes: to whine about her purported outcast status (do liberal women ever not write about themselves?) and, as I’ve been harping on for awhile now, to buttress the Ragtag Leftist Coalition.  Ms. Sen is refreshingly explicit about who comprises the coalition and even presents the coalition in opposition to the white majority, i.e. “proportions shifted”.

Regarding the “people of color” term – it’s another obvious indicator that the person using it hates white people.  Only racial leftists use the term; it’s not the term in particular, such as “Ice vs Sun people”, but rather the people who choose to use it.  (For some reason that I can’t figure out, essentially any liberal who uses the term “white folks” also hates white people, but the reasoning escapes me.)

Read it.

The state debt clock for Connecticut indicates that 10% of the state’s population currently receives food stamps. Broken down by citizen, every state resident is approximately $11,000 in debt due to government spending. Given the state’s unemployment numbers, approximately 8%, combined with tax rates and breaks, we know not all of them will pay much, if anything, in taxes.

Despite massive debt and high unemployment, the state government of Connecticut will be giving Fishman’s group, Progressive Education and Research Associates, three hundred thousand dollars in hard-earned tax payer dollars for building renovations. Progressive Education and Research Associates just happens to share headquarters with the Connecticut Communist Party. Connecticut’s government isn’t broken, it’s actively working against the Nutmeg State’s working population.

Read it.

Black Pack Attack violence against primarily white people (most of the time individual whites, though increasingly Asians are being targeted as well); a media refusing to acknowledge anything; a political class dedicated to enacting laws that protect those who partake in Black Pack Attacks and promote those who cover for Organized Blackness in every level of society (all three branches of government, academic, military, corporate, and both private and public sectors jobs).

Watch it. About 30 minutes.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Dayton sits on one side of a growing divide among American cities, in which a small number of metro areas vacuum up a large number of college graduates, and the rest struggle to keep those they have.

The winners are metro areas like Raleigh, N.C., San Francisco and Stamford, Conn., where more than 40 percent of the adult residents have college degrees. The Raleigh area has a booming technology sector and several major research universities; San Francisco has been a magnet for college graduates for decades; and metropolitan Stamford draws highly educated workers from white-collar professions in New York like finance.

Quelle surprise. The kind of jobs that require a college education are the kinds of jobs that exist in cities, and the more citified amenities a city can provide the better college graduates like it. There’s a reason that kids move to New York City and Los Angeles, even though those cities are economic behavioral sinks. Nobody thinks you’re cool if you say you live in Dayton.

Read it.

It was a fairly typical lunch at an academic conference in the East after the New Hampshire primary in 2008. There was a smattering of endowed professorships and international reputations at the table, perhaps eight academics in all.

Along with the sweet tea and penne pasta came the inevitable skewering of George W. Bush.

“Never has a president experienced such horrible poll approval numbers in the midst of a war,” one professor quipped.

“That is, if you overlook Harry Truman,” I interjected into an uncomfortable silence.

It was going to be that kind of meal.

Illustrating once again Jonah Goldberg’s theory of The Tyranny Of Clichés: Nobody in the Crust likes George W Bush, so obviously he’s The Worst President Ever; everybody in the Crust loves Barack Obama (although that love is wearing kinda thin recently), so obviously he’s The Best President Ever. Record? Who cares about the record?

“I couldn’t vote for a Mormon,” one professor said. There was some polite (or perhaps impolite) head-bobbing. “It’s a cult. Very intolerant, and their opinions about women, and, well … ” and his voice trailed off.

Ask him his opinion of Muslims, and I expect that he would fall all over himself proclaiming his willingness to vote for one for President.

I’ve attended numerous scholarly conferences since that lunch where Mormonism has been discussed, and it is amazing to confront snide and disdainful comments and even overt prejudice from intellectually and sophisticated academics. And it seems perfectly acceptable to express this bias. Mormons are abnormal, outside the mainstream; everybody knows that. They don’t drink alcohol and coffee. Their women are suppressed. They don’t like the cross, and their most holy book seems made up. And there’s that multiple-wives thing. At one session involving a discussion of Utah’s history, several dismissive comments were spoken, rather blithely and without any sense of embarrassment. Belittling comments were made about Mormons’ abstemiousness, and there was a general negative undercurrent. The LDS Church was referred to as the Mormon Church, something many members object to. They don’t mind being called Mormons, but their church is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or LDS Church. At least some of the professors who were making these remarks knew that.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/05/29/essay-about-prejudice-academe-against-mormons#ixzz1weV83BeG
Inside Higher EdI’ve attended numerous scholarly conferences since that lunch where Mormonism has been discussed, and it is amazing to confront snide and disdainful comments and even overt prejudice from intellectually and sophisticated academics. And it seems perfectly acceptable to express this bias. Mormons are abnormal, outside the mainstream; everybody knows that. They don’t drink alcohol and coffee. Their women are suppressed. They don’t like the cross, and their most holy book seems made up. And there’s that multiple-wives thing. At one session involving a discussion of Utah’s history, several dismissive comments were spoken, rather blithely and without any sense of embarrassment. Belittling comments were made about Mormons’ abstemiousness, and there was a general negative undercurrent. The LDS Church was referred to as the Mormon Church, something many members object to. They don’t mind being called Mormons, but their church is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or LDS Church. At least some of the professors who were making these remarks knew that.

Read it.

The U.S. Commerce Department is considering a petition to include Arab Americans on the list of socially and economically disadvantaged minority groups eligible for special business assistance.

The petition was submitted earlier this year by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) to make Arab Americans eligible for the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA). The MBDA helps minority entrepreneurs establish and grow their businesses.

According to the ADC petition there has been an increase since 9/11 in “discrimination and prejudice in American society resulting in conditions under which Arab-American individuals have been unable to compete in a business world.”

Guess people don’t want to do business with potential terrorists. Wonder why that is?

Read it.

Approximately 2,000 Palestinians attended a “national rally” on behalf of the “martyrs” at the Palestinian presidential compound in Ramallah, including Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and other government officials. While Hamas members attended the Ramallah ceremony, their primary event was held in Gaza. Hamas members fired 21-bullet salutes in honor of the suicide attackers, as a “salutation for their sacrifices.”

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

Read it.

ZoomLee Sheldon of Bloomington’s Indiana University is using an experience point (XP) system rather than the traditional grading method in two of his game design classes. Borrowing from RPGs and MMORPGs, students begin the program with an avatar at level one. To gain experience, students must complete assignments camouflaged as RPG-based tasks such as quests, crafting, and more. In real life, they’re making presentations, taking quizzes, and doing all that other boring school-related work.

It’s hip, and trendy. I must confess that I would strive mightily to avoid taking a class taught by somebody named ZoomLee, but I suppose that’s just me.

Read it.

Ford is working with State Farm to add all Sync-equipped vehicles to the insurance provider’s list of Drive Safe and Save approved vehicles. Once a customer signs up for the program, they can run a Vehicle Health Report which will then relay miles-traveled to State Farm for potential discounts of “up to 40 percent.” While Sync’s automatic integration with State Farm will be limited to Utah for the time being, it intends to expand this support to other areas in the near future.

I’m opening a book on how long it will take for some Nosy Parker social-welfare ‘activist’ group like the ACLU to sue for discrimination because their slumdog proteges aren’t getting the discounts even though they drive like six-year-olds. I’m thinking less than a year.

And that’s not including the fringies who decry this as the next seven-league-step toward an Orwellian future.

Timothy Egan purportedly writes for the New York Times purportedly ‘from the West’ (I think they mean ‘the Upper West Side’).

His nominal thesis is that it would not be a good thing to require that a President have business experience.

Well, there goes Teddy Roosevelt, the writer, rancher and police commissioner, not to mention his distant cousin Franklin Roosevelt, the assistant naval secretary and politician, or Dwight Eisenhower, the career soldier. Ike’s résumé, which includes defeating the world’s most concentrated form of evil in Nazi Germany, would not be not enough to qualify him for the presidency.

I don’t know about you, but it wouldn’t bring a tear to my eye to have had any of those three miss the Presidency. Teddy Roosevelt was the living icon of Progressivism, and laid the groundwork for the explicit fascism of Woodrow Wilson; Franklin Roosevelt took a Depression and, by his policies, stretched it out as long as he could; and Eisenhower not only sat on his hands during the Polish and Hungarian revolts against Soviet hegemony in 1956, but jerked the rug out from under the British and French when they attempted to respond to that poster child for third-world-dictator confiscation, the theft of the Suez Canal by Nasser. Not one of them had any more business experience than Barack Obama, and not one of them was a positive influence on world history. So that dog won’t hunt.

The less experience in business, the better the president.

So much for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and all those old Dead White Males. By this standard, the election of Barack Obama (who has less business experience than any kid who has run a corner lemonade stand) ought to have brought in Utopia. How’s that hope and change thing working out for you?

Read it.

Remember the term “peak oil”? Whatever happened to it?

Down the memory hole! ‘Never mind!’

So what the heck happened? It’s no great mystery. As supplies tightened and prices rose, producers were motivated to find new sources and develop new technologies. When you hear that only X trillion barrels of “recoverable reserves” of oil exist, remember: The term does not refer to all the oil that there is. It refers to those reserves that are neither too costly to tap at present, nor off-limits because of government policy. Both of those factors can change.

And how. In just the past six years, North Dakota has shot to the No. 2 domestic source of oil, thanks to improved horizontal drilling techniques that have tapped the Bakken and Three Forks fields. Thanks to the oil rush the population of Williston, N.D., has roughly doubled. Unemployment is 1 percent—with 3,000 jobs are still open—and average pay has shot up from $32,000 to $80,000. North Dakota’s oil boom also has been made possible by a new technology, fracking (short for hydraulic fracturing). Fracking has drawn criticism from environmentalists, but it works.

Read it.

After mulling this all around in my giant brain, I think I prefer idiots to smart people. They’re more fun. Despite the fist-clenching rage it inspires to hear this country’s liberal elite talk, they are not dumb. They’re actually pretty intelligent. Sure, they’re so out of touch they think biased news corrects years of “systemic oppression,” but as far as basic IQ goes, they’re well over the mean. But I find them to be about as amusing as leukemia.

Read it.

On Valentine’s Day, Nick Bergus came across a link to an odd product on Amazon.com: a 55-gallon barrel of … personal lubricant.

He found it irresistibly funny and, as one does in this age of instant sharing, he posted the link on Facebook, adding a comment: “For Valentine’s Day. And every day. For the rest of your life.”

Within days, friends of Mr. Bergus started seeing his post among the ads on Facebook pages, with his name and smiling mug shot. Facebook — or rather, one of its algorithms — had seen his post as an endorsement and transformed it into an advertisement, paid for by Amazon.

ODF. That’s what you get for engaging in ‘social media’.

Read it.

Such accusations, you see, are part of the belief system by which the far Left justifies its lawless radicalism: Because their enemies are all, in one way or another, guilty of political ThoughtCrimes (a category that the Left is always willing to expand and re-define as necessary), the Left need not be scrupulous as to the means by which it advances its goals.

If you buy into the premises of their argument, then the conclusion logically follows that any outcome other than the complete triumph of the Left — the extermination of all resistance — is unacceptable, and whatever foul, unjust and illegal actions are necessary to accomplish that triumph can be justified.

Read it.

When dealing with Muslims, you never know what will set them off.

In spite of all their goodwill, the Italian volunteers were simply rolled over by events. Last Thursday the Vodafone company wanted to distribute free telephone cards in the San Felice Sul Panaro camp in the province of Modena. There a scuffle took place among North African immigrants, during which one of them pulled out his knife and stabbed one of his fellow countrymen.

On Saturday a big revolt broke out in the same camp as an Italian voluntary worker served a Muslim girl a dish of spaghetti Bolognese. Those in charge of maintaining the civil order in the camp explained that everything had simply been a mistake: “The worker gave her the wrong meal by mistake.” But the Muslim girl began to cry, summoned all of her family members, and accused the managers of the camp of having purposefully insulted Islam. The help of the plain-clothes security personnel was needed to restore peace.

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

I have an idea: Let’s everybody quit trying to help Muslims in trouble and let them get out of their own predicaments. It’s not as if they ever express any gratitude for the help they’re given, or hesitate to blow up non-Muslims because of it.