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The class-action gravy train may have hit something on the tracks.

It would be unseemly for law firms to collude on their billable rates in an antitrust case. Interestingly, however, the billable rates cluster around certain levels: $750-$950 for senior partners, $375-$450 for experienced associates, and $200-$300 for junior partners. While the legal industry might be as competitive and efficient as, say, the egg business, it’s difficult to see how this many firms, linked together with a web of referral agreements, can actually compete on price so their clients get the best deal possible. Especially since the clients aren’t actually bargaining for anything; the law firms themselves drive most consumer antitrust cases and only the judge  — and lawyers’ own sense of ethics — stand in the way of full-on collusion with each other and the defendant to strike a settlement that is lucrative for the lawyers and nobody else.

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 Friday night’s arrest of Adel Daoud, an American aged 18, marked the end of an undercover sting operation during which agents provided him with a fake bomb that he attempted to set off shortly before he was detained, the US Attorney’s Office in Chicago said in a statement.

‘Adel Daoud’? Yeah, that sure says American to me. Just living in America doesn’t make you American, any more than living in a stable makes you a horse.

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

Roger Simon takes a look at the man behind the curtain.

Hillary Clinton, I insist that you have me arrested. I am thinking of making a movie about Mohammed.

I don’t want to brag, but as a film professional with an Academy Award nomination in screenwriting, I may do a better job than Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, alleged creator of the Innocence of Muslims.

But I have to admit one thing. Hopeless and inept as Nakoula may be as a filmmaker, I agree with the intentions of his movie. I too detest Islam because I happen to abhor misogyny and homophobia, both mainstays of that faith. And, like most Americans, I prefer freedom of religion to jihad, Sharia law, and a global caliphate.

Don’t let me criticize any of that.

I also happen to agree with Nakoula that making a movie about a faith whose prophet married a six year old and deflowered her at nine is of thematic and dramatic relevance. As a father, I am seriously concerned about child abuse, as is most of our film-going public, I would imagine.

Indeed, the beginnings of Islam are the very stuff of great theatre and cinema, reprehensible as the actions of the protagonist may be. In fact, it may be great because of those actions. After all, Richard III is not a classic for nothing.

So I am very tempted by the subject of Mohammed.

Arrest me, Hillary Clinton, before I start. Call Eric Holder!

Read it.

Set aside the opening follies of this administration, such as the cringe-inducing “reset” button given to Russia’s foreign minister that yielded no cooperation but managed to produce anti-American venom from Vladimir Putin and the harassment of our ambassador to Moscow by thugs in Putin’s youth movement.

Set aside the hypocrisy of the Obama team’s scorn at former governor Mitt Romney’s lack of foreign policy experience, given that its own candidate, during his two years in the Senate prior to his presidential campaign, managed to produce one large goof: contemptuous certainty that the surge of U.S. troops to Iraq in 2007 would fail.

Set aside even the unseemliness of the president blaming America’s failures abroad on the George W. Bush administration while claiming credit for operations whose foundations were laid during the Bush presidency.

Disregard all this, and the answer remains no.

Guess Obama’s World Apology Tour was a real success, wasn’t it? Certainly the massively improved image of America overseas, especially in the Muslim world, would seem to attest to it. God knows what would have happened if that warmongering bumbler Bush were still in charge.

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The reason for the apparent disconnect is because schools don’t prepare students for the real world, so broad educational attainment will have a weak correlation with economic power. Research has consistently shown that on nearly every measure of education (instructional hours, class-size, enrollment, college preparation), what students learn in school does not translate into later life success. The United States has an abundance of the factors that likely do matter: access to the best immigrants, economic opportunity, and the best research facilities.

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Police in the Kenyan capital on Friday said they have arrested two suspects who were allegedly planning suicide attacks, and also seized six explosive vests and other arms and ammunition in an overnight raid.

“These suspects wanted to use these arms to harm innocent Kenyans during Sunday church services,” a police officer involved in the raid told AFP.

No doubt because of some obscure YouTube clip that nobody ever heard of.

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

Read it.

You, too, can be a best-selling novelist — or an awesome adventuring avatar. Here’s now.

Read it.

For years, we’ve been fascinated with the general phenomenon of technology moral panics, and how we see them all the time around new forms of technology. Video games destroying children’s brains. The internet leading kids into a life of porn. These things go back many, many years. In the 15th century there was a technopanic about the printing press (“He who ceases from zeal for writing because of printing is no true lover of the Scriptures.”) In the 19th century, people were told that traveling on trains above 20mph would asphyxiate passengers. A hundred years ago, movies and telephones were declared evil (movies: “This new form of entertainment has gone far to blast maidenhood” and telephones: “Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy? Does [it] break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?”).

Assuming, of course, that they haven’t been aborted first.

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 Contrary to popular culture, diamonds are not formed from the metamorphosis of coal under tremendous heat and pressure. It makes for nice poetry, but it’s not true. The real story is actually a bit more interesting than that.

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General Fusion is developing fusion technology to generate affordable, safe and plentiful energy without greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, or radioactive waste.

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries!  Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.  The effects are apparent in many countries.  Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.  A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.  The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property—either as a child, a wife, or a concubine—must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.  Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities.  Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die.  But the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it.  No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.  Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proseltyzing faith.  It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science—the science against which it had vainly struggled—the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.

— Winston S. Churchill, The River War

Read it.

In a rightly-ordered society, those would be cut first.

But no. The Crust takes care of its own.

Fouad Ajami gives it a think.

  Modernity requires the willingness to be offended. And as anti-American violence across the Middle East and beyond shows, that willingness is something the Arab world, the heartland of Islam, still lacks.

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UC San Diego has discovered a way to grow nerve fibers in rats with severe spinal cord injuries, a potentially big step toward treating some of the 300,000 Americans who are fully or partially paralyzed.

Researchers used stem cells to basically rewire the central nervous system, enabling the rats to regain some movement. The technique, reported in the journal Cell, causes connections from neurons to spread beyond the injury, restoring the ability of the brain and spine to communicate.

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Ambassador Chris Stevens did not have a Marine detail in Benghazi, Libya. But White House Senior Advisor and Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett has a full Secret Service detail on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, according to Democratic pollster Pat Caddell.

Priorities, dude, priorities. My homies are more important than whatever might be happening in wog-world.

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Well, that didn’t work out so well.

We cast aside Hosni Mubarak on a moment’s notice without taking steps to give non-Islamist parties a timetable to organize an effective transition; we overthrew Muammar Gaddafi, teaching tyrants the lesson that giving up nuclear ambitions is a deadly mistake, and then promptly departed leaving chaos; and we have isolated Israel among a sea of Islamist radicals as it seeks to stop the Iranian’s march towards nuclear weapon capability.

And all the while, our own government places blame on some previously unknown guy for making some previously unknown film which might be real or not, which people who hated us before the film take as an insult to Islam.

We’ve even sent out federal law enforcement to locate and report on someone who committed no crime.

Yes, our government even issued apologies over and sympathies for the hurt feelings of those burning our embassies and killing our Ambassador, while condemning the resulting violence.  We are, once again, hostage to the hurt feelings of those with perpetually hurt feelings, and we will sympathize with them so long as they don’t go that last step and actually pull the trigger.

The major message this administration is sending to people around the world is that the United States will throw you under the bus at the slightest indication that you are losing your grip on power.

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

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Think of this the next time you see Britain’s National Health Service celebrated in an Olympic opening ceremony: A British hospital placed a “do not resuscitate” order on a patient, listing the reasons as “Down’s syndrome” and “learning difficulties,” BBC reports.

Don’t you just love that government-provided health care? Don’t you just wish we had a system like that here in America?

(Well, we do — Canada has such a system, which is why anybody who has anything seriously wrong with him comes to the U.S. to get it fixed.)

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The number of food stamp recipients in New York has grown to 3.1 million from 1.8 million over the last five years.

You’d think the state would be looking to help people get off food stamps. Instead, it’s spending millions of dollars on “outreach” aimed at enrolling even more beneficiaries into the program. Among the non-profits receiving grants for food stamp “outreach” are the United Way of New York City, which got $4.5 million, Year Up, Inc., which got $1.5 million, and Project Hospitality, Inc., which got $1.5 million.

That’s because the government sees nothing wrong with people being on food stamps; in fact, they encourage it, because it makes more voters dependent on them spending taxpayers’ money, and spending taxpayers’ money (in exchange for votes, which everyone involved has the good grace not to mention) is what they’re all about.

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An inebriated man inadvertently falls from the platform at a metro station onto the tracks, hits his head on a rail, and is knocked unconscious.

A culture-enricher sees his opportunity and takes it, robbing the unfortunate man and leaving him on the tracks in front of the oncoming train.

Welcome to Modern Multicultural Sweden!

Coming soon to an American city near you.

Matt Welch gives tReason magazine a Blind Pig moment.

The fact is that the First Amendment, no matter how embattled, protects a range of expression unthinkable even in Western Europe. Because of that unique position, and because the U.S. seems doomed to play an outsized diplomatic and military role in the tumultuous Muslim world, it behooves the State Department to constantly explain the vast differences between state-sanctioned and legally protected speech in the so-called Land of the Free. If the U.S. government really was in the business of “firmly reject[ing]” private free-speech acts that “hurt the religious beliefs of others” there would be no time left over for doing anything else.

It’s really not that hard. The values in that film (or “film”) are not our values; our government respects religion, religious expression, and religious pluralism (including and especially that of Muslims, even in the wake of murderous Muslim-led attacks on American soil); and we are not in the business of approving or (for the most part) regulating the private speech of our citizens. To the extent that that message is not sufficient for rioters, the problem is theirs.

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The killings of the US ambassador to Libya and three of his staff were likely to have been the result of a serious and continuing security breach, The Independent can reveal.

According to senior diplomatic sources, the US State Department had credible information 48 hours before mobs charged the consulate in Benghazi, and the embassy in Cairo, that American missions may be targeted, but no warnings were given for diplomats to go on high alert and “lockdown”, under which movement is severely restricted.

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

After all, ‘nothing’ is what the Obama administration does best.

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An American Ambassador and three American security guards were butchered, anti-American riots broke out across the Middle East, a U.S. Embassy both before and after being stormed issued apologies for the exercise of our constitutional rights, our Secretary of State practically prostrated herself, the President had a good night’s sleep through it all and then went to Vegas for a fundraiser, and Mitt Romney commented intelligently on the absurdity of it all.

So on whom did the media collectively and in unison lash out?  Mitt Romney.

Media bias? What media bias?

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Actually, the future is already here, with highly advanced milking machines on some dairy farms and a fully automated robot planting tractor set to hit the market this fall.

Cue handwringing from the Left about the poor illegal immigrant underclass losing jobs ‘that Americans won’t do’.

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

 Since 1968, the government has increasingly crusaded for more mortgage lending to minorities and lower income borrowers by attacking lenders that don’t lend enough to favored groups. The last push, the White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership on 10/15/2002 where Bush lauded what turned out to be toxic mortgages as engines of racial justice, gave optimistic and/or get-rich-quick lenders an excuse to set off the Housing Bubble of 2004-2007.

You might think that by now everybody would have wised up about how an originally well-intentioned policy had gone too far. But, then, we’re not supposed to mention this fact. Moreover, the institutions that brought it about still exist, still get funded, and continue to search out and destroy all evidence of disparate impact in mortgage lending like robot juggernauts from the future in a James Cameron movie.

Read it.

Portions of a National Ground Intelligence Centerstudy on the lethal effects of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and high-powered microwave (HPM) weapons revealed that the arms are part of China’s so-called “assassin’s mace” arsenal – weapons that allow a technologically inferior China to defeat U.S. military forces.

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The end of needles is nigh: researches have developed a laser-based system “that blasts microscopic jets of drugs into the skin [that] could soon make getting a shot as painless as being hit with a puff of air,” reports phys.org. The laser system works by creating microsecond bubbles of air that penetrate the skin and injects a drug through a narrow space about as wide as a human hair.

Read it.

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

Maybe we ought to start a web site called “90 Days, 90 Reasons Why Obama Sucks”. We could start with his golf game.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Impossible. Everyone knows that only Republicans can be racist.

The Democratic National Committee is trying to cover up an incident at the party’s National Convention in which a Puerto Rican member of the New Progressive Party called a politician of African descent a “monkey” at a DNC luncheon.

Lornna Soto referred referred to Rafael Cox Alomar, a Puerto Rican of African descent, as “el monito,” which translates to “the monkey.”

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

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, waxes nostalgic.

All this illustrates something I spend a lot of time pondering: the strange disconnect between what democratic populations want and what they get—or fail to get—from their politicians.

…

Democratic government’s plodding regularities are certainly superior to despotism or prolonged anarchy. But one can’t help feeling it would be character-building for our political classes if a mob were to come around and break their windows now and then.

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In post-occupation Iraq being gay, or even looking gay, can be a death sentence.

It’s very difficult to determine how many homosexuals have died in so called “honour killings” by their own families or in the hands of the militias. But a BBC investigation has found that law enforcement agencies are involved in ongoing, systematic and organised violence against gay people, while the government refuses to acknowledge it.

And yet ‘Islamophobia’ is the problem. Right.

A reminder, since apparently one is desperately needed, that Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion, with which no co-existence is possible.

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

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

Read it.

Two words: Corrupt politicians. Culprit? St. Jack Kennedy.

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 “We cut their right hand and their left foot, in the city of Gao, at the Place de l’Indépendance,” Aliou Mahamar Touré, a professed Islamic commissioner with Mujao, an offshoot of Al Qaeda that controls Gao, said in a telephone interview. “We cut all that today. It is not us who ordered this. It is God.”

Steve Sailer dabbles in the Topic That Dare Not Speak Its Name.

Roth’s key insight about race was that deep down, race is less about skin color than about whom your relatives are. That’s why old-fashioned passing, while beneficial objectively, was relatively rare. Under the American one-drop rule, having any black relatives meant that you were black. Hence, successful passing meant cutting yourself off from familial relationships with your kin.

And, of course, it all winds up back with Obama.

Members of the mixed-race castes began changing their self-image from Not Really Black to the Natural Leaders of Blacks just as white America was switching from despising to subsidizing blacks. Thus, several of the “black” mayors of New Orleans, such as the Morial family, have been creoles of color who could be said to be “passing” as black.

Similarly, as the Hawaiian-born preppie Obama documents in Dreams from My Father, he had to strive for years to make himself black enough to reap the rewards.

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President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney agreed to a truce on the airwaves on Tuesday to mark the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

But the Obama campaign broke that truce, posting a commercial online Tuesday that accused Romney of being “dangerous” for women’s health.

Pure class, that Obama.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, speaks some inconvenient truth.

The fundamental problem here is that we don’t know what to do with adolescents. Well, we know what to do with the ones who are bookish and willing to be educated: Sit them in rows of desks and have trained teachers instruct them. We simply have no idea what to do with the others. All we have come up with is to subject them to the same environment as the bookish kids. This (see above) leads to massive waste and destroys some subset of studious, educable youngsters’ chances.

This sort of thinking is why we need to SUPPORT JOHN DERBYSHIRE (see right).

Read it.

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

Read it.

A Latte town consists of mostly white, educated baby boomers and young single people. The inhabitants of the town are usually newcomers who have priced out all the original inhabitants. These towns are usually expensive, pretentious, abound in natural fibers and are laid back on the surface.

Latte towns like Portland pride themselves on their most cherished concepts of diversity and inclusiveness. Most Portlanders accept this myth as Gospel but upon close examination Portland’s dirty little secret is revealed.

Portland is an overwhelmingly white, non-ethnic city. It is as vanilla as it gets so it makes one wonder what all the celebrating of diversity is all about.

In SWPL terms, it is enough to celebrate diversity without, you know, doing anything about it. That way you can feel good about yourselves and yet not risk having to consort with people whose children you would avoid at all costs sending your children to the same school as.

Read it.

The throwing gap has been researched for more than half a century, and the results have been consistent. According to Jerry Thomas, dean of the College of Education at the University of North Texas in Denton, who did the throwing research Hyde cites in her paper, “The overhand throwing gap, beginning at 4 years of age, is three times the difference of any other motor task, and it just gets bigger across age. By 18, there’s hardly any overlap in the distribution: Nearly every boy by age 15 throws better than the best girl.”

Jeff Jarvis puts his finger on it.

Yes, we must remember. That is why I had insisted on returning in years past: so I could remember and give thanks for surviving that day. But the memorial does more than just remember. It closes up the open wound on the city but leaves the scar there. It refuses to let life return to the place where death occurred. Worse, it creates a new fortress of fear with security and scanners around it. Worse yet, one exits that fortress and returns to life through the gift shop.

That’s what happens when such things are put in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats. They build a monument to themselves rather than to what is being remembered, and that is why it takes so long, because of all the pissing contests between massive narcissistic egos. You want a good example of a monument? The Vietnam Memorial in DC — done by a Yalie, I’ll point out — is perfect.

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Where the kids don’t have to worry about, oh, strikes by greedy teachers.

Sort of like the Congresscritters who send their kids to private schools (like Sidwell Friends, recipient of Chelsea Clinton and the two Obama girls) rather than the D.C. public schools, then vote to kill the voucher program for said D.C. schools that was providing poor black kids with at least a chance to go to good private schools.

Read it. And watch the video.

Read it.

This twist was hardly surprising given the controversial discussions of the underrepresentation of women in SF — particularly Hard SF — that have been unfolding at SFsignal and elsewhere in the online SF community. However, it did bring into clearer focus something that has surprised me over the last few months: the gusto with which people have been flinging around labels. Feminist SF. Women’s SF. SF by Minorities. White Male SF. People have been deploying these phrases as if they were listing elements in the periodic table. As if they thought that they had some objective lock on the difference between the writings of men and women, or of people with differing skin colors. As if they thought that the author photo on the back cover was the single relevant datapoint for determining which genre a book belongs to and who can reasonably be expected to read it … you know, for fun, and because it’s good science fiction, instead of just to fulfill their annual guilt-expiating requirement for reading books by people who don’t look like them.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the degeneration of modern culture is the intrusion of Identity Politics into every nook and cranny of life — especially the concept of ‘underrepresented’, as if ‘representation’ has any legitimate significance outside of the political realm. (But, of course, under Identity Politics, there is nothing that is outside of the political realm.)

If you don’t subscribe to Savage Chickens, then the angels weep for you.

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Just after the Chicago Teachers Union released a statement on its website declaring their intent to strike Monday morning, the union published a solidarity statement from feminist and honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America Gloria Steinem as the top item on their website.

Well, that’s good enough for me.

The Chicago schools had been offering the CTU a 2 percent raise every year for four years. In response, the union had demanded a 30 percent raise over two years followed by a 25 percent raise over two years. One week ago, the union revised its demands to a 19 percent raise in the first year of the contract.

Such oppression! No wonder they decided to sacrifice the children they’re supposedly in the business of educating. Prediction: The kids won’t notice the difference between the teacher being there and the teacher not being there — they are, after all, government schools, the primary purpose of which is to hire and pay government workers, and if they can squeeze in a little education on the side, well, that’s gravy.

Read it.

That about sums up my opinion, too.

Understanding modernism’s not-so-hidden agenda, the Nazis were better off than we are. They recognized modern art for the degenerate thing it is. Today’s art students are taught that 1916 was an annus mirabilis that freed art from the shackles of form, figure, lighting, drawing, perspective, composition, genius, beauty, truth, and the moral principle.

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There was an unusual event in Haifa the other day. Muhammad Sharif Odeh, the leader of the Israeli community of the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam, announced the 25th anniversary of an Ahmadiyya-sponsored translation into Yiddish of selections from the Quran. Called by Haifa’s Jewish mayor, Yona Yahav, the “Reform Jews of Islam,” the Ahmadiyyas, who claim tens of millions of followers around the world, are among the most moderate of Muslims. Their Yiddish Quran project, the only one of its kind, represents a reaching out to Jews — a touchingly naive one, it must be said, since just about the only native Yiddish speakers left are Haredim, who are about as likely to read the Quran as they are to replace their black hats with Arab keffiyehs. (And who could, in any case, read the Quran in the full Hebrew translations that already exist.)