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What we know: The package contained an incredibly detailed replica of “University of Chicago Professor” Abner Ravenwood’s journal from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. It looks only sort of like this one, but almost exactly like this one, so much so that we thought it might have been the one that was for sale on Ebay had we not seen some telling inconsistencies in cover color and “Ex Libris” page (and distinct lack of sword). The book itself is a bit dusty, and the cover is teal fabric with a red velvet spine, with weathered inserts and many postcards/pictures of Marion Ravenwood (and some cool old replica money) included. It’s clear that it is mostly, but not completely handmade, as although the included paper is weathered all of the “handwriting” and calligraphy lacks the telltale pressure marks of actual handwriting.

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Despite rock-bottom congressional approval ratings, voters reelected their incumbents at near-banana-republic levels in 2012.

The difference being, of course, that elections in a ‘banana republic’ are corrupt and manipulated, and American Congressional elections are relatively fair, despite Democrat attempts to the contrary.

The author obviously thinks that this high-re-election rate is a Bad Thing. On the contrary, I suggest that this means the system is working: A Congressman is supposed to represent his district; if the district’s voters (or those that care enough to vote) think that s/he’s doing that effectively, then re-election happens. There is no value in having a ‘competitive district’ except in the newsroom or studio that is desperate for a ‘horse-race’ to report on.

Yes, there are stupid people in Congress. Witness the Congressional Black Caucus, most of whom would have trouble getting admitted to a selective Charter High School. But they reflect their districts, or they wouldn’t get re-elected, and there are obviously a lot of stupid (and foolish) voters out there. There is nothing in democratic political theory that says they don’t have a right to be represented, too.

The reason Congress is in low esteem is that Congressional votes don’t just affect their own district, but the country as a whole; one might characterize it as ‘think locally, vote globally’. People don’t mind their own Congressman, but rather than butt-head in the district next door who is getting more pork for his district than we think they’re entitled to … rr destroying historical American freedoms or bringing back slavery or whatever bugaboo the local Congressman isn’t guilty of.

Saying ‘voters hate Congress but like their own member’ is about as paradoxical as saying ‘people hate foreigners but like their own neighbor’, which illustrates how silly this whole discussion actually is.

Read it.

… climate alarmists have been remarkably adept at defining fringe views as the mainstream skeptic position, a sort of bait and switch that allows them to avoid debating the more difficult topics (for example, the proposition that the Earth’s climate system is dominated by strong positive feedbacks is far from settled and a literature review of that critical topic would show an incredibly broad range of results).   In the climate debate, the supposed “Defenders of Science” much prefer painting skeptics as beyond the bounds of polite society and therefore unworthy of response to actually debating the difficult points.

‘Climate-changers’ lie. Who knew?

I’m still waiting for someone to demonstrate how they can accurately measure the temperature of the entire planet to an accuracy of one tenth of a degree centigrade. Then we can discuss how exactly that allows them to predict what will happen in the future. Then we can discuss how exactly that justifies them blaming it on human activity. Then we can discuss the extent to which this aggregate overall warming is a Bad Thing. Then we can discuss what, if anything, can be done about it. Then we can discuss whether or not the proposed cure is worse than the situation it purports to cure.

So far they haven’t even reached first base, much less brought in the winning run. All of these fanciful ‘peer-reviewed climate articles’ are based on estimates, approximations, models, and highly questionable assumptions, and are science in the same way that astrology might be called science — yeah, there are some correlations here, but no demonstrated causal links, and that’s the key part.

Read it.

Here’s a brief tour through the quirkier side of the medium’s history. Funny money, indeed.

Although certainly no funnier than our using fancy cartoons merely on the say-so of the government, as if they were ever right about anything more than one time out of five.

Read it.

A former CEO of Continental Airlines is auctioning his watches because they’ve become too valuable to wear.

Come, join the pity party.

Read it.

Couldn’t have anything to do with Muslims murdering Christians, oh no, perish the thought.

Read  it.

A newly-released report from the conservative Americans for Limited Government (ALG), obtained by Breitbart News, found that taxpayers are footing a $4.8 million bill for the salaries of 35 union officials at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The ALG report used documents the group obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) showing that taxpayers are actually paying these 35 union officials’ salaries. Only three of them make less than $100,000 per year, and the average taxpayer-funded union boss salary is $138,175 per year.

Eight of the union bosses on the taxpayer payroll at the Department of Transportation make more than $170,000, too.

Meggings.

Men’s tights, for so long the preserve of ballet dancers and runway models, are taking Manhattan by storm and could soon be seen on the street of Britain.

I am not making this up.

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For better or worse, Americans tend to take it as an article of faith that if someone does you wrong, you can sue. But banks are quietly adding language to their account terms and services that take away your right to a day in court, and the law is on their side. In lieu of lawsuits, they require mandatory arbitration, which basically means that you can’t sue your bank in court, but instead are forced to have disputes resolved by a designated arbitrator, a kind of professional referee. Banks often combine arbitration clauses with language that also prohibits customers from banding together to file a class-action lawsuit.

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The 12th day of the 12th month of 2012 is not a day of deliverance but of delivery for devout American fans of Westvleteren 12, brewed by the reclusive Belgian monks at St. Sixtus Abbey.

The celebrated beer — often called the best in the world — is usually only available for sale at the abbey, located in the Belgian countryside. But starting Wednesday, buyers in the U.S. and other countries can purchase the beer at select retailers for $84.99 for six bottles.

Read it. And watch the video.

BLUF: Crapitalism.

Read it. And watch the video.

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

As the union members attacked the Americans For Prosperity tent, a woman cried out “there are people under there, oh my God” (at 1:20). At 1:40, as union members start walking on top of the collapsed tent, a man shouted “hey, there are people in there” but again the crowd didn’t stop, and the union members continued walking on the collapsed tent defiantly as the crowd shouted obscenities and cheered.

Look for … the Union label…. (It’ll be on the brown shirt….)

Read it.

Pity the poor oppressed brown people of South of the Border.

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Because of course the Qur’an couldn’t possibly say what they claim it says.

Except that it does….

Read it.

Popular liberal mythology to the contrary notwithstanding.

Wearer-of-bad-rugs Bob Costas may have temporarily put gun control back in the headlines, but his advocacy hasn’t made firearms restrictions any less intrusive — or any more enforceable. Like fans of all sorts of restrictions, drugs especially, gun controllers tend to jump from fantasies about a world devoid of the objects of their wrath to demands that new laws be passed to make their fantasies come true. Rarely do they put much thought into whether anybody will actually obey such laws, and the consequences of littering the landscape with impotent legislation. I’ve written before that gun laws tend to be widely flouted, and a peek at our neighbor to the south offers more evidence of such widespread defiance.

Read it.

And, of course, government regulations are the vehicle of choice.

Mike Masnick explains what’s going on:

There’s a myth out there that businesses hate regulations. That’s only partially true, and it’s only true in limited cases. In many industries — especially highly regulated ones — the incumbents often love regulations because (a) they have enough power to control the regulations, (b) they know their way around those regulations better than anyone else, (c) those regulations quite frequently limit competition and (d) those regulations quite frequently effectively block out any form of disruptive innovation by stopping it entirely.

The whole point is that none of this would be effective were not government grasping the power to regulate every nook and cranny of what people do in their daily lives. If it didn’t pay to bribe leglators, either through the old-fashioned kind of bribes or the modern equivalent, campaign contributions, then lobbyists wouldn’t do it.

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They’ve had the AN/SPN-42 Automatic Carrier Landing System that can land a plane on a carrier using radar and computers without pilot input since the ’70s. So this isn’t really all that big a deal.

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All of them Muslim, of course. But you knew that.

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Jobs First, Kids Last. Look for … the Union label….

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Can Suger Bear be far behind?

Roger Selbert is feeling grumpy.

This is the story of how elites prospered while killing the singular trend that built America, and all that you proles got in return was a dysfunctional housing market. In a reversal of more than 100 years of American history, the unique force that built the United States and the wealth of its inhabitants – geographic convergence – has been stopped. Based on labor mobility and the income convergence it engendered, geographic convergence was our great equalizer, our economy’s ace in the hole: even in the worst of times people could always move from where they were to somewhere else to improve their prospects. Well, they can’t anymore, and the reason is housing.

Who killed geographic and income convergence? Well, we wealthy, older, property-rich elites in desirable zip codes did. Call us the new landed gentry if you like. I would like to say we’re really, really, sorry but I don’t see us doing anything to correct it. It wasn’t on purpose; it was an inadvertent, unintended consequence of well-intentioned laws and regulations concerning land use, zoning, building codes, permits, property taxes and the like. We didn’t undertake those restrictions on building and development specifically to exclude you people (wait – did I really just say “you people?”). Why heck, we’re concerned as all get-out about rising inequality and income disparity, just not in our own neighborhoods, okay? And besides, residential segregation is voluntary, isn’t it? Didn’t you read Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort”? We all naturally prefer to cluster with the like-minded and socioeconomically similar, don’t we?

Read it.

For folks who recoil at the thought of hunting animals, progressives sure do enjoy stalking human prey, especially the female of the species.

Wally: A deep appreciation of reality is the same thing as laziness.Asok: That can’t be right.
Wally: Have you ever seen a statue of Buddha running?

Read it.

No doubt it will feature prominently in the movie premier this month.

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Cybercrooks are putting up stickers featuring URLs embedded in Quick Response codes (QR codes) as a trick designed to drive traffic to dodgy sites.

One reason why I don’t do QR codes.

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Dr. Yusuf al-Qaradawi—one of the most influential Islamic clerics in the world, author of over 100 books on Muslim doctrine, head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, and spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood—maintains that Muslims must obey the commands of Islam’s prophet Muhammad, even unto murder. This would be the same Dr. Qaradawi that American academics like Georgetown professor John Esposito praise for engaging in a “reformist interpretation of Islam and its relationship to democracy, pluralism, and human rights.”

Missed in the West, Qaradawi made this declaration two years ago on his popular Arabic program, Al-Sharia wa Al-Haya (“Sharia and Life”), broadcast by al-Jazeera to an estimated audience of 60 million worldwide.

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?
That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.
Of course, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

Read it.

Last week an assistant football referee or linesman was assaulted after the match, and later died of his wounds. His name was Richard Nieuwenhuizen.

His assailants were three boys of 15 and 16 years. They didn’t like his performance on the field and attacked him. In front of his son, no less. Later a fourth boy was arrested.

The mainstream media were very careful not to mention ethnicity. With very good reason: at least two of the boys were Moroccan, one was Antillean. The ethnicity of the fourth boy is still unknown, as the media try to keep that as vague as possible. You may rest assured number four is either Moroccan or Antillean. If only because the media refuse to mention his ethnicity.

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

Read it.

We now know that people in academia overwhelmingly supported Obama.

With that in mind, it’s difficult to feel sympathy over their shrinking pool of job prospects.

Indeed. Being taught by somebody who voted for Obama is like getting driving lessons from Cheech & Chong.

An Informative Chart

Read it.

If I were a rich man … I think I’d want a private library like George Lucas’s at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County.

Read it.

Even as the nation teeters on the edge of the fiscal cliff, the feds have found $30 million in extra lunch money to shower on city schoolchildren in the name of hurricane relief.

New York City’s 1.1 million public-school students can each get a free school lunch every day in December (and could have last month, too) — even if their homes were undamaged by the superstorm or they have no financial need.

The need here is on the part of the Crust for people to look to the government for their daily bread. Financial need is not even on the radar.

Steve Sailer contemplates the Axis of Drivel.

 In December of each year, the New York Times film critics, like film critics everywhere, write Deep Think pieces about what patterns in the movies released in the current year tell us about Trends in the Big Issues. The annual answer ought to be: Virtually nothing, because what gets released in a single year is a close to a random sample of projects that had been in the works for years and happened to come to fruition now. But that never stops the critics from pontificating on 2012: The Meaning of It All.

Not surprisingly, they are still using Obama Campaign talking points.

Read it.

There are social and cultural influences and practical considerations; but the basic problem is that because of their genetic makeup, some people’s bodies are more efficient at storing calories. In a famine situation, they would be the survivors; in a world where abundant food is available, they are the obese.

Hey, you, fat guy — you’re a survivor. Take a bow. Or try, anyway.

Tom Smith understands the dialectic.

The obvious explanation I think is to consider what tax deductions actually are.  They are the very catalog of political influence in this country. The real estate industry, the non-profits, the long list of other deductions you can take: The tax code is the fine print of the social contract on which the fat belly of Leviathan comfortably rests. Those of us squished by its slimy blubber may breathe only with difficulty, but for the beast itself, it’s more like a soft mattress to which it has comfortably conformed, and vice versa. Any sort of tax reform, including deduction caps, which are incremental reform, partially wipes out part of these accumulated deals among State and special interest factions. So if you want to raise revenues for the State, and leave the tissue of these deals intact, it has to be by raising rates, not imposing caps, and the more funds you want to raise, the more important this is.

Rates declare how much of your earnings will be confiscated by the state; deductions are what the state, for political reasons (and favoring politically fashionable groups), will graciously allow you to keep.

Each deduction is a privilege, in the precise meaning of that term, written into the law to favor a particular special interest, and bearing the fingerprints of a political agenda or a corrupt political deal. They are the poster children of The Tax Code As Social Engineering, rather than serving (as the Founders intended) as a just system of allocating the cost of government.

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Near the bottom of the pit of hell, Dante encounters a man walking with his torso split from chin to groin, his guts and other organs spilling out. “See how I tear myself!” the man shrieks. “See how Mahomet is deformed and torn!” For us, the scene is not only gruesome but surprising, for Dante is not in a circle of false religion but in a circle reserved for those who tear the body of Christ. Like many medieval Christians, Dante views Islam less as a rival religion than as a schismatic form of Christianity.

St John of Damascus, in his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, also classified Islam as an heretical Christian sect. Since he lived in the 8th century and his grandfather worked for the Omayyad caliph, his opinion would appear to be respectable.

The year 622-which Muslims mark as the year Mohammed and his followers made the Hijira, a fateful journey from Mecca to Medina-was not originally connected with Mohammed at all. Before there is any record of Muslims dating time from the Hijra, Arabic Christians dated the beginning of the Arabic era to 622, when they gained independence from Persias Sassanian empire.

Hmmm.

Other early Islamic texts support the notion that Islam emerged not as a new religion but as a novel development within a Syriac Christian milieu. In his contribution to Hidden Origins, Luxenberg applies his method to the inscription on the Dome of the Rock, which seems to contain a straightforward Islamic confession: “There is no god but God alone . . . Mohammed the servant of God and messenger.” Luxenberg points out that Mohammed, usually understood as a proper name, means “exalted be” or “praised be,” and also notes that Syriac Christians, who were skeptical of the Nicene doctrine of Jesus divine sonship, preferred Isaiahs title “Servant” for Jesus. He contends that the inscription should read: “There is no god but God alone . . . Praised be the servant of God and his messenger.” This makes better sense of the sequel, which explicitly identifies “Messiah Jesus, son of Mary” as “the messenger of God and his Word.” An inscription about Jesus was later reinterpreted as a confession of a different faith entirely.

That’ll get your head cut off in the Dar al-Islam. Robert Spencer looks at this in greater detail in his recent book, Did Mohammed Exist?, which I highly recommend.

And about time.

Miller, who also happens to be a front-end developer, began building Ontract — “the tool that would have kept me in the classroom,” he says. This week, Miller and co-founder Matt Duch officially beta-launched Ontract, a realt-time analytics platform for K-12 schools that aims to do for educational data what Mint.com did for financial data.

Read it.

The Senate Budget Committee reports that total spending on means-tested federal programs, if divided by the number of households living below the official poverty line, works out to $168 per day. How much is that? Well, the average American household lives on $137 per day.

That’s $21 an hour. For doing nothing. I should have such a job….

Read it.

After all, priorities are priorities.

Check it out.

I especially like the burqa for the SmartCar.

Read it.

You don’t have to be a fan of Fox News to realize that this makes a mockery of the rule of law. Instead of letting anyone who wants to buy a newspaper or a television or radio station do so, or even instead of setting up some rules that take into account modern technology like cable television and Internet video and that would apply equally to everyone, the Senate Democrats, or the Independent Vermont Socialist-caucusing-with-Democrats and his Democratic pals, want to write the country’s media ownership rules starting from the premise of how can we prevent Rupert Murdoch from buying anything else.

Senator Sanders, or someone on his staff, is apparently familiar enough with new media that his press conference is available on YouTube. The idea that ownership of a television station or two in the same market as a newspaper or a radio station amounts to a media monopoly in the age of YouTube and the Internet is laughable. It shows that what they are really out to do is not fight against media monopolization — a straw man — but to try to restrain the influence of Mr. Murdoch. If that’s really their goal, a more appropriate way of pursuing it in a free country would be for them to quit the Senate and go buy or start media companies to compete with Mr. Murdoch. The best check on a media monopoly, after all, isn’t regulation, it’s competition.

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

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Although California state law says it’s unjust, the Los Angeles City Council voted 12-1 to keep ticketing drivers who park at broken meters. This flies in the face of the state law, which says there have to be notices on meters if they are broken in order for the city to issue a ticket.

Blue state. Coming to a neighborhood near you a lot sooner than you think.

Unless you move to Texas, of course. Just sayin’.

Read it.

    Think about it for a second. The president loves basketball. He has an Indian name, he knows what it’s like to be poor and he hasn’t forgotten where he came from. And his theme song is “Hail to the Chief.” I think he definitely qualifies as the first American Indian president.

‘Has an Indian name?’ ‘Knows what it’s like to be poor’? Did they have a Jay Silverheels impersonator standing in for the President? And I wasn’t aware that basketball was a particularly Indian sport.

I suppose the fact that the throws like a girl makes him the first female president. Well, better him than Hillary. Congrats, Barry; don’t get your tits in the wringer.

Lileks.

According to a spokesman for the Department of Whoa, Didn’t See That Coming, the state is $1.1 billion in the hole, and there’s not enough gambling money to pay for the stadium. The problem, according to one of the state reps I heard on the news:

“The tax system is broken.”

That’s bad news. I guess. Perhaps he means “broken” in the “out of order” sense, where you put your money in the slot and get absolutely no state services in return, and then you get angry and find your state rep and jiggle him back and forth and maybe pound on his forehead to get the state services to fall down into the basket– you can just see that highway construction project stuck there in the screw-thing that pushes it out! Someone else is going to come along and put in some taxes and get two freeway interchanges for the price of one.

Read it.

Posted without comment.

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Racial tensions are mounting over the state Senate’s new, virtually all-white ruling coalition.

Okay, let’s Kremlinologize this: ‘virtually all-white’ means it has some non-white elements, otherwise there would be no need for the ‘virtually’. And ‘virtually’ suggests that those non-white elements are effectively no different from the white elements, because that’s what ‘virtually’ means. So there’s something going on here that depends entirely on color, because that appears to be the only significant feature. What might that something be?

Three black senators — Eric Adams of Brooklyn, Bill Perkins of Harlem, and Ruth Hassell-Thompson of The Bronx — are expected to join the Rev. Al Sharpton Saturday in a campaign to empower 15 black and Hispanic Democrats with key committee chairmanships and more influence, said a source.

Here, obviously, ’empower’ means ‘pay off’. So the ‘something’ under discussion is dividing the swag.

Sharpton claimed the coalition of Republicans and breakaway Democrats denies black and Latino senators power that should be “rightfully theirs” given that Democrats won a majority of Senate seats last month.

Suspicion confirmed. Democrats apparently are the party of non-white people, so when Democrats win, obviously non-white people are entitled to power. Competence? Doesn’t matter. Political beliefs? Irrelevant. Skin color? The only thing that matters.

In the old days, that would be called ‘racism’. But doublespeak reigns. I hope you love Big Brother; at least we can be sure he’s a Democrat.

Bryan Caplan looks at reproduction.

To be brutally honest, we’re reluctant to have more children because we think that the pain outweighs the gain. When people compare the grief that another child would give them to the joy that the child would bring, they conclude that it’s just not worth it. As Bill Cosby put it, “The reason we have five children is because we do not want six.”

More and more people on the right side of the bell curve and the upper levels of the economy are making that decision. We are no longer a labor-intensive society, so having additional hands to put to work aren’t really an advantage any more. And with the prevalence of ‘social safety nets’, you don’t need kids to look after you in your dotage, either. (In fact, they more and more regard past-sell-by-date parents as an inconvenience.) In short, people are making the entirely rational calculation that kids are more trouble than they’re worth. Some overclass people will continue to have kids, just as some people enjoy knitting socks by hand, but it will be, effectively, a hobby. (The underclass, of course, will continue to have kids because sex is one of the few recreations available to them, and they’re too stupid to think ahead.)

Just sayin’.

Read it.

That politicians regularly talk about “job creation” is a strong signal that most have never created any. It’s lost on the political class, but jobs are most plentiful in business sectors where they’re most readily being destroyed.

True dat. Especially ones who have never had a real job in their lives, like AlGore or Jesse Jackson or most of those named Kennedy or Rockefeller.

Put simply, the mass destruction of farming jobs allowed for the redirection of precious human capital toward more productive, higher value work.

And even today people aren’t comfortable with that, as all the hand-wringing about ‘family farms’ makes plain. Similarly, the mass destruction of conventional manufacturing jobs will allow for the redirection of precious human capital toward more productive, higher value work — although, again, people aren’t comfortable with that, as all the handwringing about ‘off-shoring’ makes even plainer.

Sure, a lot of low-IQ people are going to starve or spend their lives in drug-induced coma, but — tell the truth — are the rest of us really going to miss them? If everybody who voted for Obama disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow, we’d see exponential growth rates in the economy and science that would catapult us into the next stage of human existence.