Read it.

Diversity training doesn’t extinguish prejudice. It promotes it.

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

Read it.

A public university in Colorado may have violated state law by offering students course credit if they volunteered with President Obama’s re-election campaign. A blog post on the Adams State University website billed the opportunity as a “12 week long organizing internship for the Obama Campaign.”

Of course, no one would even dream of offering course credit for a Republican campaign. Perish the thought.

Read it.

Slate magazine has a Blind Pig moment.

Read it. And watch the video.

A blind woman can now see spots of light after being implanted with an early prototype bionic eye, confirming the potential of the world-first technology.

Australian researchers have been working for years to develop the bionic eye, in which electrodes are inserted into the retina of vision-impaired patients.

Gotta love Australians.

Read it. And watch the video.

 This news clip from Australian TV reports the latest official crime statistics for Victoria, which show that African immigrants, particularly those from Somalia and Sudan, are responsible for an overwhelmingly disproportionate number of crimes in their adopted home.

The only conclusion that can possibly be drawn? These newscasters are racists.

Because Muslim is a race, you see. Didn’t know that? Just read the papers or watch TV.

Read it.

I suspect that this is a First World Effect, but still interesting.

Read it.

I keep tellin’ ya….

I’m not holding my breath, you understand, but wouldn’t that be entertaining?

I’d be happy to chip in for the boat.

Read it.

On August 6, 2011, 30 US service members were killed when a CH-47 Chinook helicopter they were being transported in crashed in Wardak province, Afghanistan. It was the deadliest single loss for U.S. forces in the decade-long war in Afghanistan. 17 members of the elite Navy SEALs were killed in the crash.

Yesterday, Karen and Billy Vaughn, parents of Aaron Carson Vaughn, spoke at the Defending the Defenders forum sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots outside the RNC Convention in Tampa. Karen brought a copy of the form letter they were sent following their son’s death.

It’s a form letter.

It was signed by an electric pen.

 

Because, you know, he’s too busy spending our money and writing checks to groups like Acorn and Planned Parenthood and Solyndra to do more than that. But hey, he killed bin Laden….

Steve Sailer turns over a rock and watch what wiggles out.

Gay marriage has been put to a vote in 32 states. It is currently 0-32.

But nobody cares about that, least of all the ‘Democrat’ party.

I think that exemplifies the main driving force of modern liberalism. It’s not intellectual. In spirit, it’s more like the caste system in India. It’s a system for identifying new Untouchables whose very existence lifts the social status of the liberal. Gay marriage, for instance, is a trivial issue in real world terms, but it has become incredibly important to liberals precisely because it brands huge numbers of their fellow citizens as Dalits for them to hate and feel morally superior to.

Personally, I hate being touched by a liberal — you never know where that hand has been.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, takes a look at The Rich.

In which we learn that the question is not The Rich but Which Rich?

When actual yeoman farmers ceased to be much of a constituency, elements of Jeffersonian flimflam survived in the modern Democratic Party. We hear them today: Evil bankers! Predatory lenders! Wall Street paper-shufflers!

We also hear echoes of that in the modern fetish for The Family Farm, which makes about as much sense as having a similar fetish for The Hand-Made Car — yeah, you can do that, but it will cost you ten times as much, and only The Rich will be able to afford it. (As, indeed, happens today; trying buying Healthy Organic Produce at a place line Whole Foods and see how much of your paycheck is left at the end of the week. My, I’ll go to Kroger and use my Reward card to get $3-a-pound sirloin.)

You can be rich without owning an acre of land, without ever having worked or created anything, just by inheriting your money.

Though it’s hard to argue this is admirable, I can’t see that it’s deplorable. What else should happen to dad’s money? The government should take it? It is highly unlikely they would make any better use of it than the average individual. Surely it is healthy for society to contain a seasoning of persons who need not answer to anyone other than the law for their actions.

Funny how many of them turn out to be raging socialists — Are you listening, AlGore? — but I suppose it’s just guilt working its way out by making us suffer for their feelings of inadequacy (which feelings, of course, don’t extend to Giving Away The Money, any more than it does with Hollywood celebrities).

Politician Rich. This is where my blood starts to boil. Did you know that Hillary Clinton is worth $31 million? That’s without ever having done anything you or I would recognize as work. (Yeah, yeah, she lawyered; but she was the governor’s wife.)

And don’t let’s get started with the Obamas, both Barack and Michelle getting well-paying jobs basically for being Token Negroes wherever they went.

Read it.

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.

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

Read it.

 The results of this major, long-awaited study, which began in 1987, are finally in. But it did not bring the vindication calorie restriction enthusiasts had anticipated. It turns out the skinny monkeys did not live any longer than those kept at more normal weights. Some lab test results improved, but only in monkeys put on the diet when they were old. The causes of death — cancer, heart disease — were the same in both the underfed and the normally fed monkeys.

Heh.

Read it.

With a shortage of doctors in the U.S. already and millions of new patients set to gain coverage under President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul, American medical schools are struggling to close the gap.

One major reason: The residency programs to train new doctors are largely paid for by the federal government, and the number of students accepted into such programs has been capped at the same level for 15 years. Medical schools are holding back on further expansion because the number of applicants for residencies already exceeds the available positions, according to the National Resident Matching Program, a 60-year-old Washington-based nonprofit that oversees the program.

If there’s a shortage, government is behind it.

An Informative Map

Surprisingly enough, there are some.

Note that the most Republican area of Manhattan, the 1%-er Upper East Side, is still overwhelmingly Democrat.

Read it.

Hunter Spanjer uses the standard S.E.E., Signing Exact English. He crosses his index and middle fingers and waves them slightly to signify his name. And, Grand Island Public Schools’ policy forbids any “instrument” that “looks like a weapon,” reported NCN (see video above).

Stupid rules enforced by stupid people = extremely stupid results.

Mommas, don’t send your babies to government schools.

Read it.

A team of boffins in Germany say they have found a statistical link between periods of low solar activity and very cold winters in Europe. Some physicists believe that a long period of low solar activity – like the “Maunder Minimum” of the 17th and 18th centuries – could be on the cards in coming decades, so the new research might indicate an upcoming “mini Ice Age”.

That would be entertaining, watching all of the Global Warming crowd trying to keep their heads from exploding.

Lileks has done it again.

Read it. But don’t bother watching the video; it’s just more of the same old shit.

Barack Obama last night told residents of America’s Gulf Coast that they should evacuate their homes if necessary and that they should not to “tempt fate” as Tropical Storm Isaac was upgraded to a category one hurricane.

Because, you know, if he didn’t, then they would just ignore it, having no experience of hurricanes on the Gulf coast.

Read it.

These are the 1%, if anyone is. I’ll leave you to guess how many of them support Obama.

But everybody knows that The Filthy Rich Are Republicans, right? Right.

Read it.

Retired Anglican bishop and South African peace campaigner Desmond Tutu has pulled out of an event because he cannot share a platform with Tony Blair because of the Iraq War.

There’s a win-win: The poseurs get to posture, and Tony Blair doesn’t have to put up with Desmond Tutu.

I suppose it would be too much to expect Tony Blair to pull out of an event with Desmond Tutu because of Robert Mugabe?

Read it.

How did we get to this point? The way I remember things, the left used to be the chin-scratching, idea-weighing side where dissent was encouraged. I don’t think my views have changed. I still hate the government and despite the laughter it brings, I’d still call myself a feminist. The problem is, when the president is black and the fanatics who are oppressing women are brown, it’s racist to complain about the government and religion. The left went from thinking outside the box to becoming myopically fixated on anything that sounds mean or benefits “white males” (AKA someone who reminds them of dad). What remains is a sea of knee-jerk liberals who aren’t just intolerant of other points of view, they literally can’t handle the truth.

Welcome to the modern world. Be careful not to step in the diversity.

Ron Radosh, a convert from communism, would like to remind us that this particular brand of stupidity is still with us.

He goes on to say that “Much of what is said and done by today’s left—including its ‘anti-Zionism’—is unintelligible without grasping that when ‘anti-imperialist struggle’ displaced ‘class struggle’ as the organizing category of thought and the basis of political identity.” After 1967, that outlook quickly became the necessity of branding the Israelis as “the new Nazis,” and the supposedly oppressed Palestinians as the “new Jews.”

Today, it is that SDS mentality — not that of Johnson and Berman — that makes up the contemporary Left’s ideology. And because the liberals adhered to the doctrine of “no enemies on the Left,” Voegeli adds,  the “respectable liberals couldn’t bring themselves to criticize the tame activists, who couldn’t bring themselves to dissociate from the fierce ones.” Thus, Voegeli writes, “the 60’s liberals in academia, journalism and politics fawned over the New Left radicals who delighted in tormenting them.”  After all, they thought they had a common enemy with the New Left, even though they opposed their tactics. And, worse than the New Left was the boogeyman of the Right. Hence they had a corollary to their doctrine, that of “no allies on the Right.”

The truth is that today’s liberals never came to terms with the legacy of the New Left, just as many Germans for a long time failed to come to terms with the Third Reich. Voegeli is on the mark when he writes: “The radical fringe wanted to live outside the law and also inside the law. Respectable liberals wanted to let them. They lent a hand by praising the radicals with faint damns, then quickly changing the subject to the extenuating circumstances that rendered the fringe’s deeds kinda-sorta understandable, acceptable, and even admirable.”

Read it.

Words of (possible) wisdom from Paul Graham.

Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies weren’t designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically.

Read it.

As with all such writings, if it doesn’t happen on the Other Left Coast it’s not important, but the article is interesting all the same.

Read it.

Crimes and infractions are not evenly distributed across racial groups, as the Supreme Court noted in United States v. Armstrong, 517 U.S. 456 (1996).  As that 8-to-1 Supreme Court ruling noted, there is no legal “presumption that people of all races commit all types of crimes” at the same rate, since such a presumption is “contradicted by” real world data, in which “more than 90% of” convicted cocaine traffickers “were black” in 1994, and “93.4% of convicted LSD dealers were white.”  But the Maryland Board of Education has chosen to ignore reality by proposing a rule that would require school systems to discipline and suspend students in numbers correlated to their race, and require school systems that currently don’t do so to implement plans to eliminate any racially “disproportionate impact” over a three-year period.  Thus, it is imposing quotas in all but name.

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

The fact that a higher percentage of black students are suspended than whites in most schools reflects greater infraction rates associated with poverty and single-parent households — not racism against minorities by school officials.  As a scholar at the Brookings Institution notes, “children who spend time in single-parent families are more likely to misbehave, get sick, drop out of high school and be unemployed.”  As the federal CDC notes, while most whites and Asians are born to two-parent families, most blacks and other minority groups are born out of wedlock.

Note the clever way they dance around the truth — that black culture is corrupt, and promotes and sustains socially dysfunctional behavior in its children — under the mealy-mouthed discussion of ‘poverty’ and ‘single-parent households’ … treating the symptoms as if it were the disease.

A review.

Maraniss is not at all happy about the curious fact that Obama skeptics seem to like to read about Obama more than Obama supporters do.

Hey – he’s the Magic Negro. What more do you need to know?

Obama possesses an impressive understanding of the conventional wisdom. But he seems averse to original thought.

Of course. Original thought is risky and might disturb the Faithful. Better to fit himself into the stereotypes and become the Obamassiah than strike out on his on and impair his career prospects.

Time and again, Maraniss reassures us that Obama was never quite as leftist as all of his Marxist Muslim millionaire buddies from Pakistan. Well, okay …

Yeah, that would take commitment and passion, two characteristics that seem absent from Obama’s character except when it comes to himself and his own advancement.

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action. Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Everybody’s iris – the colored portion of their eye – is unique. Even identical twins.

Of course, no one could possible know that for a fact; like the uniqueness of fingerprints, it is merely supposition.

Read it.

Four years ago at the beginning of Harvard’s school term, I was going over an assignment with a freshman when she confessed that she was feeling guilty—because she was working for the Obama campaign. I assumed she meant that her campaign work was taking too much time from her studies, but she corrected me: She was feeling guilty because she supported John McCain.

So why, I asked, was she working for his opponent? She answered: “Because I wanted so badly to get along with my roommates and with everyone else.”

I know the feeling well. But I strangled it at birth.

At Yale, where the Party of the Right has been a conservative and libertarian redoubt since the 1950s, feisty undergraduates have founded a new group to promote “genuine intellectual diversity” in the face of excessive ideological uniformity. Named for one of Yale’s most famous mavericks, the William F. Buckley Jr. Program takes its motto from the mission statement of Buckley’s magazine, National Review, standing against “the conformity of the intellectual cliques,” and supporting “excellence (rather than ‘newness’)” and “honest intellectual combat.”

We are the champions.

Nowadays, the pressure for conformism comes more from the faculty, which tips Democratic like the Titanic in its final throes. Programs that once upheld the value if not the practice of intellectual diversity tend to function more like unions, trying to keep their membership in line. Some professors make a habit of insulting Republican candidates and conservative ideas with the smirking assurance of talk-show hosts, unaware that their laugh lines reap from some students the contempt that they sow.

The increased political conformism at universities may be traced in part to the redefinition of diversity that accompanied the introduction of group preferences, aka “affirmative action.” Schools instituting this policy never acknowledged that it conflicted with competing commitments to equal consideration “irrespective of race, religion, or gender,” or that at least half the country questioned its wisdom.

And if a Harvard Professor says it, are we not obliged to believe it?

Read it.

At the end of the 1970s, Iranian fundamentalists invented the term “Islamophobia” formed in analogy to “xenophobia”. The aim of this word was to declare Islam inviolate. Whoever crosses this border is deemed a racist. This term, which is worthy of totalitarian propaganda, is deliberately unspecific about whether it refers to a religion, a belief system or its faithful adherents around the world.

But confession has no more in common with race than it has with secular ideology. Muslims, like Christians, come from the Arab world, Africa, Asia and Europe, just as Marxists, liberals and anarchists come or came from all over. In a democracy, no one is obliged to like religion, and until proved otherwise, they have the right to regard it as retrograde and deceptive. Whether you find it legitimate or absurd that some people regard Islam with suspicion – as they once did Catholicism – and reject its aggressive proselytism and claim to total truth – this has nothing to do with racism.

Read it.

Like Baptists, but more serious.

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

Read it.

 This is a nice theory. But is it true? To find out, my colleagues and I recently measured daily energy expenditure among the Hadza people of Tanzania, one of the few remaining populations of traditional hunter-gatherers. Would the Hadza, whose basic way of life is so similar to that of our distant ancestors, expend more energy than we do?

Our findings, published last month in the journal PLoS ONE, indicate that they don’t, suggesting that inactivity is not the source of modern obesity.

Read it.

 The production of France’s Roquefort cheese is being threatened by the return of the wolf to the country’s southern mountains.

Read it.

Charlie Stross is Doing Stuff (getting more books out, I hope, since he is one of my Recommended Writers over there on the right – buy and read his books; you’ll be glad you did) and so is having some guests in on his blog. This is one of them:

Let me say it again, louder. THERE IS NO EVIDENCE FOR THIS. The bulk of our extant sources – law codes and chronicles, saints’ lives and charters, prose tales and poems – paint a picture that is almost the exact opposite. Women in early mediaeval Wales and Ireland were far from equal. They remained, lifelong, legal minors, subject to the control of their father, husband or son. Their lives were worth less than those of men. They could not own land, nor could they own much property, and, with a few minor exception (all small personal items, clothing mainly) they could not dispose of their property without the permission and sanction of the man who controlled them. They could not bear witness in court, even to acts of violence against them, because, legally, they were not fully people, their words weren’t valid in law. They could not inherit land (save in very, very unusual circumstances) nor could they inherit offices. They could not choose their own husbands, and, while they could divorce their husbands in some circumstances, their children would remain with the father (whose property they were) and a divorced woman would probably have to return to her birth kin. Once there, she was likely to end up as a servant, unless her father was very powerful and could find a man willing to marry a non-virgin. Women whose kin cast them off had nowhere to go, no options beyond service or prostitution. And, if they left the lands of their husband, father, son or overlord, they could be enslaved without sanction. (This latter could befall men, too: outside your homeland, your legal status became much lower.) Women did not rule, did not become warriors, did not make laws or participate in public society. They were, by and large, property. Irish law codes make this explicit: the two units of currency recognised under them are cattle and slave girls. Women were commodities, not full legal people.

Very refreshing. Even more refreshing would be one of these fine folks casting the cold light of reality on the New Age socialist claptrap that Charlie pushes whenever he gets off of the Writing Reservation. But I suppose that would be too much to expect. Pity.

Read it.

Scouts have abandoned a near 80-year-old tradition of marching on St George’s day because they are too embarrassed to parade through a town.

Poor Baden-Powell.

Read it.

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

Although the dimwitted refuse to acknowledge it, merely calling yourself a Republican doesn’t make you a Republican, any more than calling watch a Rolex makes it a Rolex.

Certain people run for election as ‘Republicans’ because the competition for pro-government pro-welfare pro-degeneracy candidates is less in the Republican party than it is in the Democrat party, and there are a lot of apparatchiks in the Republican party who regard it as some sort of sports contest in which winning is everything so they’re willing to play along. Nanny Bloomberg in New York is one such (Hey, it worked for John Lindsay, didn’t it?), and Charlie ‘The Tuna’ Crist in Florida is another.

Read it.

A man who was photographing a grizzly bear in Alaska’s Denali National Park was mauled and killed by the animal in the first fatal attack in the park’s history.

Think of it as evolution in action. Perhaps we could get some animal-rights activists up there to ‘talk the bear down’.

 Investigators have recovered the camera and looked at the photographs, which show the bear grazing and not acting aggressively before the Friday attack, Denali Park Superintendent Paul Anderson said.

A Muslim bear? Not impossible, I guess.

 Rangers in a helicopter spotted a large male grizzly bear sitting on the hiker’s remains, which they called a “food cache” in the underbrush about 100 to 150 yards (meters) from the site of the attack on Friday.

Waste not, want not.

Read it.

An NHS doctor on leave from a London hospital was part of a heavily-armed extremist gang who took a British journalist hostage in war-torn Syria.

The Kalashnikov-toting doctor – believed to be around 28 – told photographer John Cantlie he had taken a sabbatical from his medical work to come to Syria and fight a ‘holy war’.

The bearded medic, who spoke with a south London accent and said he had a wife and a child back in the UK, told the captive photographer he intended to return to an NHS job in Britain after his time in Syria.

A pointed reminder that a Muslim’s first loyalty is to the Ummah, not to whatever part of the Dar al-Harb in which they might currently be living. There are no British Muslims, merely Muslims living in Britain.

Read it.

But do we really need Barack Obama Sr. to account for his son’s hostility toward America and its traditional beliefs and values? I don’t think so. Obama came of age, over a period of decades, in an environment that can charitably be described as hard-left. His father and mother were both socialists or worse. His maternal grandfather selected a mentor for young Barry who was a long-time member of the Communist Party USA. The socialist New Party listed him as a member. His friend, colleague and fundraiser Bill Ayers is a terrorist who says he wishes he had set off more bombs. His college professor Edward Said was the leading intellectual voice of those who want Israel destroyed. His law school mentor Roberto Unger was too far left for Brazil’s socialist party, and was sent back to Harvard, where he declined all interviews lest he endanger Obama’s electoral prospects. The minister who converted him to Christianity was Jeremiah “Gad damn America” Wright. You can go on and on.

Obama would be a communist if he wanted to put in the work.

Read it.

One of Barack Obama’s recent ads for his re-election campaign purports to feature Republican women who have turned away from the GOP to support Obama/Biden. But, as it turns out, one of the women in the ad is not so “Republican.”

Maria Ciano has been a registered Democrat for the last six years — several years longer than Obama has been president — according to her voting records.

Steve Sailer lays it out.

In general, India seems to win hands down in a contest of stereotypical images in the heads of SWPLs.

The upper middle class spends much time and money stage-managing their children’s lives to get them into the right institutions with the right sort of people for them to find the right sort of spouse, but then the ungrateful little scions fail to pull the trigger. So, why not take the next step and instead of just hiring tutors and consultants to get them into nice colleges and nice law schools, go all the way and hire matchmaking consultants to get them a nice husband or wife?

Read it.

The Internet doesn’t like me — or, at least, it doesn’t care much for my name. My first name consists of two words and I have accent marks in both my first and last names, which seems to complicate my online life considerably. When trying to purchase an airline ticket or sign up for an email newsletter, I’m never completely certain whether it will go through, or how my name will come out of the transaction, but I’m usually pretty sure it won’t be right.

Tell me about it. At least it guarantees that I’ll never run for political office. Damn you, white males! Oh, wait….

“I think software is slowly conforming to us. It’s just inconceivable that English will be the sole winner of the Internet,” Miller said, noting that bigger tech companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and Google are keenly focused on internationalization. As these companies incorporate more diverse programming, others will follow, and eventually because the Internet is so global, older systems will be replaced, too.

Uh, the winner will probably be Chinese, in which case accent marks are the least of our problems. C’mon, guys, think it through.

Read it.

Consumer interest in farmers markets has similarly exploded across Pennsylvania. According to USDA data, there are more than 250 farmers markets in the state—about two-dozen of which are located in Philadelphia.

In spite of these great numbers, Pennsylvanians should be grateful to have access to any farmers markets at all this year. That’s because the direct-to-consumer bounty farmers provide might have all but disappeared. And though drought concerns persist in some parts of Pennsylvania, the specter of a summer with fewer farmers selling less produce at markets in the state was due not to Mother Nature but—instead—to state legislators and regulators.

Read it.

Of course. The alternative is to admit that you screwed up, and that’s not going to happen.

Besides, hating is what Democrats do best.

Read it.

To prevent VIP politicians from entering frozen zones and clashing with cops during the West Indian Day Parade, Mayor Bloomberg yesterday said the NYPD at this year’s parade will bar credentialed officials from entering frozen zones entirely.

“Any government IDs or other status symbols that you want to pull out and say, ‘Hey, I’m a big deal,’ we’re just not going to let that happen,” the mayor said. “We’ve got to let the police do their job free of distractions.”

The move comes in reaction to an incident at last year’s event, where City Councilman Jumaane Williams (D-Brooklyn) and Kirsten John Foy, a former aide to Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, got into a tussle with cops who didn’t realize they had been given permission by a higher-up to enter a frozen zone.

Foy is suing the city, saying he was injured in the encounter.

“The mayor’s missing the forest for the trees,” Foy told The Post. “The real issue was caused out of a lack of respect that is borne out of discriminatory policing practices. The incident last year was not caused by who was allowed into the frozen zones.”

Moral: Don’t be lacking in respect to a VIP like a former aide to a Public Advocate. They can be right down there with high school girls when it comes to being petty and vindictive.

Oh, and be careful not to step in the diversity — you just can’t get that stuff off of your shoes.

Sort of expresses an eternal truth.

Read it.

But, despite the amazing benefits, immunization rates have been falling, driven by a fear that vaccines cause health problems such as autism. The autism risk has been both thoroughly debunked and the paper that originally suggested it turned out to be the product of an unethical, financially motivated individual. Despite this debunking, surveys show that a quarter of US parents think that vaccines can trigger autism, and rates of vaccination have continued to fall in many states. A new study looks at incoming kindergartners in California, and finds that the lack of vaccination is threatening herd immunity in some schools, and that some measures of risk have doubled in just three years.

Read it.

A team of researchers has shown that, in some sense, negative frequencies can be observed through the generation of radiation with a positive frequency. To explore this idea, they looked at very intense light fields moving through certain types of glass and glass fibers. When the light field is very intense—as is the case when a very short, intense burst of light is created—this can lead to some very cool effects. In particular, when the light is passing through a material, the light field pushes the electrons around so hard that the electrons start to push back.