Read it.

Hey, if Danica Patrick can do it, why not Nancy Pelosi? Granted, the effect is not the same….

I like it; it has texture, and scope.

Read it.

Is there anything that this guy won’t politicize?

No; no, I suppose there isn’t.

Read it.

A cri de coeur.

Read it.

It’s not just for bridges any more.

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

 At no point in the article does anybody suggest that non-whites ought to care more about the environment. It’s all about nonwhites getting more jobs and grants to cash in bigger on the environment racket.

Presumably, environmental organizations pay a little less than the corporations they pester. So, trustfunders tend toward Greenpeace and diversity hires gravitate toward BP. The only way to alter this is for the environmental organizations to devote less of their budget to doing whatever it is they do and more toward bidding wars for diversity hires.

It’s fascinating how in the 21st Century, ancestry trumps just about everything else. It’s kind of like the era of the divine right of hereditary monarchs in that who you are descended from seems to be considered the most important trait in determining your moral worth.

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It’s clear why chefs want to make this kind of food. They get to put their highest-level skills and most carefully selected products into every dish—and they earn the satisfaction of seeing the meal they create each night consumed before their eyes. What’s much less obvious is why restaurant owners and investors want to get involved in this kind of business.

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Recently, even more evidence was presented by British scientist David Whitehouse, the Science Editor of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Despite the organization’s name, Whitehouse’s group held firm that their data indicate no warming trend; in fact, global temperatures are at a decade-long standstill.

Their original assertions were met with the usual vitriolic scorn and disbelief faced by all “deniers”. Yet, they fought back and prevailed: Britain’s Met Office, “a congenitally warmist organization”, was eventually forced to concede that have not risen or otherwise changed significantly for the past 10 years.

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Dr Teresa Belton told the BBC cultural expectations that children should be constantly active could hamper the development of their imagination.

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Using image scans, a glass mold, and stem cells, Dr. Francisco Fernandez-Aviles has nearly created a transplant-ready human nose. The Wall Street Journal reports that surgery could occur later this year, but first the nose must be removed from the patient’s arm, where Aviles is hoping that skin will graft to it. The procedure would be quite an accomplishment, but not as much as what he’s hoping to do next; working with Dr. Doris Taylor — who was able to grow rat hearts five years ago — Aviles intends to grow a working human heart. He believes that his lab may be transplanting heart parts in about 10 years, but first, he tells WSJ, “we need to make the heart come alive.”

We almost have the technology.

Read it.

The question of who might have made an aluminum gear in the dawn of time remains unanswered.

I’ll just bet it does.

Read it.

 This evening, on Ed Schultz’s soon-to-be-extinct weeknight MSNBC show, a histrionic Michael Moore accused white gun owners of racism . . . then proceeded to say it was reasonable for them not to be afraid of their white neighbors  . . . and admitted he felt more comfortable walking down the streets of Toronto than Detroit.

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Colt Manufacturing is considering a move out of Connecticut after 175 years in business due to the new gun bans being mulled by the state legislature and Democrat Governor Dannel Malloy.

Come to Texas, my friend, where you will be welcomed and treasured as the American institution that you are.

“Now Gov. Dannel P. Malloy says that with or without bipartisan consensus, he intends to ban this rifle. But a ban of the most popular semiautomatic rifle in the United States for what are essentially cosmetic reasons would make no one safer and punish a vital Connecticut industry.”

Hey, Democrats pander — it’s what they do — and it’s all about getting re-elected in a very Blue state. To hell with your business and any jobs that you might be supporting.

Read it.

Worth an estimated $27 billion, the enigmatic Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has very public holdings: he is the second-largest voting shareholder in News Corp., he owns Paris’s George V hotel and part of New York City’s Plaza hotel, he is a stockholder in Apple, and he will soon own the world’s tallest building. But the private origins—and exact size—of his massive fortune are the subject of continued debate between bin Talal and prominent media outlets. So what’s the truth? And does one of the richest men on Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index—a calorie-counting cell-phone addict who loves texting James Murdoch—really spend his free time throwing dwarves?

Funny thing how the income-inequality hand-wringers never focus on how Islam tends to throw up these kleptocratic regimes.

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Health-care delivery in the United States already suffers from a lack of emphasis on customer service. You can schedule oil changes and haircuts with more precision than you can an appointment with the doctor. But keep a stiff upper lip, folks, because it can – and almost certainly will – get worse.

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 That’s essentially the message Hulu’s sending in making the entirety of the Star Trek series free for everyone, starting today through the end of March. That’s not just Shatner-era Star Trek, but literally all of it: the Original Series, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise. Normally this bountiful selection of space operatics would only be available for Hulu Plus paid subscribers, but Hulu’s going crazy in celebration of Shatner’s 82nd birthday. With all those hours of medium-octane space drama ahead of you, you could just go crazy and marathon until the offer expires come April! We wouldn’t suggest that, though.

Ronald Bailey thinks we’re at that point.

“Humanity now stands at Peak Farmland, and the 21st century will see release of vast areas of land, hundreds of millions of hectares, more than twice the area of France for nature,” declared Jesse Ausubel, the director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, in a December lecture. Ausubel was outlining the findings in a new study he and his collaborators had done in the Population and Development Review. Unlike other alleged resource “peaks,” peak farmland reflects not the exhaustion of resources but the fruits of human intelligence and growing affluence.

The amount of people and resources devoted to growing food has been trending downward for decades, as automation has been substituted for expensive labor. This is why politician-talk about ‘family farms’ is so retrograde; substitute ‘family factories’ and think about where we would be if that had been a political priority during the industrialization of the 20th century.

In 1960 India’s population was 450 million, and the average Indian subsisted on a near-starvation diet of just more than 2,000 calories per day. Indian farmers wrested those meager calories from 161 million hectares (400 million acres) of farmland, an area a bit more than twice the size of Texas. By 2010, Indian population rose by more than two and half times, national income rose 15-fold, and the average Indian ate a sixth more calories. The amount of land devoted to crops rose about 5 percent to 170 million hectares. Had wheat productivity remained the same that it was in 1960, Ausubel and his colleagues calculate that Indian farmers would have had to plow up an additional 65 million hectares of land. Instead, as people left the land for cities, Indian forests expanded by 15 million hectares—bigger than the area of Iowa.

I would quibble about 2000 calories a day being a ‘near-starvation diet’ — I’m doing that right now to lose weight, and I can tell you that it’s actually a pretty comfortable amount of food. But the rest of it is right on.

In the United States, corn production grew 17-fold between 1860 and 2010, yet more land was planted in corn in 1925 than in 2010. (The area planted in corn has started increasing again, thanks to the federal government’s biofuels mandates and subsidies.) Today U.S. forests cover about 72 percent of the area that was forested in 1630. Forest area stabilized in the early 20th century, and the extent of U.S. forests began increasing in the second half of the 20th century.

This is the dirty little secret that the eco-nazis don’t want you to know — and their fellow-travellers in the Lamestream Media take care not to report. Just as with ‘clean air’ and ‘clean water’, advancing science and improving technology are doing more to give us a healthy environment than all of the heavy-handed political mandates ever imposed on a victimized public.

One concern is that farmers may be approaching the biological limits of photosynthesis, which would constrain crop yields. But the authors note that the winners of the annual National Corn Yield Contest currently produce non-irrigated yields of around 300 bushels per acre, nearly double average U.S. yields. Ausubel suggests that the difference between the global average of 82 bushels and contest-winning 300 bushels per acre yields means that “much headroom remains for farmers to lift yields.”

Check it out.

Girl’s Guide to Guns is a website dedicated to women who dig fashion and fire power. Think of us this way: if one day Vogue and Guns&Ammo Magazine fell madly in love, got married and had babies, we would be their favorite child. Whether you’re a champion shooter or have never picked up a gun in your life, we’ve got something for you.

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I remain fascinated by people who voluntarily work as thought police for the PC regime. As I’ve said before, totalitarian regimes have always had to pay or threaten people into doing their bidding. Today’s progressive regime has lots of people who are apparently willing to ruin the lives of others to enforce unwritten speech codes.

When it comes to haters, the Left just can’t be beat.

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And why not? He is their ideal.

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In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.

The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined. Yet people relying on disability payments are often overlooked in discussions of the social safety net. People on federal disability do not work. Yet because they are not technically part of the labor force, they are not counted among the unemployed.

They are, however, among the dependent class that can be counted on to vote for the Santa Clause Party (Democrats). Funny how that works.

Read it.

This is what happens when a psychologist tries to write history.

Jim Goad points out some inconvenient truth.

As a blinkered young leftist back in the late 1980s, I subscribed to The Nation magazine for a year or two. Since I was a plumber’s son who put myself through journalism school by driving a cab on weekends, I naively identified with any media outlet that claimed to speak on behalf of the working class.

Then, as life’s cruel realities slowly peeled the scales from my bleeding eyes, I began realizing that many such propaganda machines, despite their eternal claims of uplifting “the people” in a noble fight against “the elite,” were themselves the organs of a certain class of astronomically well-heeled elites. They didn’t represent all of the elite, mind you—only a weird segment that seemed to exist in a perpetual state of denial about their own elite status.

Almost all of those who claim to speak for the ‘working class’ (or, in the American euphemism, ‘working families) are not, themselves, working class, just as those who claim to speak for the poor are not, themselves, poor.

My disappointment mutated into a lingering resentment as it became clear that such elites’ showboating “populist” efforts never really seemed to help the poor and the working class. Years of observing the mystifying spectacle of people who were quantifiably and undeniably members of the “1%” blabber nonstop about how they represented the “99%”—all while lecturing me about my imaginary “privilege”—led me to believe that such types cared far more about sculpting a compassionate public persona for themselves than they did about actually helping anyone beneath them on the economic ladder. Their relentlessly ghastly hypocrisy suggested they were interested mainly in soothing their own wealth guilt.

I very much like the term ‘wealth guilt’, which applies especially to people (Gore, Kennedy, Rockefeller, what have you) who inherited their money rather than earned it. Those who actually earned their own money tend not to feel guilty about it — and why should they?

In a previous article about limousine liberals, I mentioned Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and part owner of The Nation. Although she never shuts the frick up about sticking it to “the wealthy” via higher taxes, this didn’t prevent the sanctimonious multimillionaire from reputedly engaging in a protracted legal battle with the IRS to skirt paying her own inheritance taxes. This icy and passive-aggressive child of stratospheric privilege, who’s never had to work a day in her life yet somehow has deluded herself into thinking she’s qualified to speak on behalf of the working class, is perhaps the most egregious example of a limousine liberal alive today.

She also comes out with some of the most seriously WTF statements on politics that you can find in print today. She’s a favorite punching bag for Rush Limbaugh, the gift that never stops giving.

Every year The Nation sponsors a cruise which liberal activist Jim Hightower once referred to, with apparently not a whit of irony, as “a floating palace of populism.” Never mind that 99% of “the people” would never be able to afford a cabin on this cruise. Nor that The Nation advertised that the cruise offered “a world of comfort and easy elegance” and “all manner of sophisticated amenities” such as “fine chocolates on your pillow at night,” “extra-fluffy Egyptian cotton towels,” and such resolutely bourgeois perks as “all-weather pools, fully-equipped gym, aerobics classes, personal trainers, court sports, jogging tracks, full-service salon, hydrotherapy pool, [and] yoga classes.”

Yup, that’s the 99%, alright.

So for all their grandstanding about fighting “the wealthy” and “the powerful,” the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the owners and writers of The Nation are inextricably entangled with power and wealth. In the relentless Texas Death Cage Match between corporate power and governmental power, they take the government’s side. So they’re not fighting power at all. They’re merely picking a team. Not that this is necessarily bad; I merely wish they’d have the honesty to admit it. Their behavior suggests that they know absolutely nothing about the poor and the working class and only use such people as chess pieces in a cynical game of moral status-jockeying against other elites.

Hanging Cocoon

Cap Zappa Launcher

+10 Electronic Dice Barbarian Gauntlet

Vavuud Wind Meter For Smartphones

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There is no question that half of the students in that grade 11 class could pass the Google interview process.

No doubt growing up in a totalitarian state offers some advantages in dealing with the tedious irrelevance that most celebrity tech firms (like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook) so dearly love.

I’ve always thought that Google was run by foreigners of high-school age, and this just proves it.

Read it.

Before the dinosaurs roamed the earth, a number of other species did — including other large sea reptiles and mollusks. But they abruptly died off about 200 million years ago, marking the end of the Triassic period, one of five major extinction events that scientists have identified throughout Earth’s history. Today, an international team scientists from MIT, Colombia, Rutgers, and other prestigious universities in Canada and Morocco released what they say is the best evidence that a series of powerful volcanic eruptions caused this mass extinction event, which opened the door for the dinosaurs to take over millions of years later.

It’s always something….

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The Old Line State — where kids have been suspended for making guns with their fingers and with toaster pastries — now boasts a school district that prohibits hugging and homemade food in public elementary schools for anyone except a parent’s own children.

Parents must also register to enter the playground and they can’t push anyone except their own kids on the swings.

All the better to turn your children into suspicious, anti-social freaks.

Officials with St. Mary’s County Public Schools say the new rules are necessary to provide a generally safe environment.

‘Generally safe environment’, of course, means for the school’s employees; it guards against them getting sued by their dysfunctional left-wing parents.

Steve Sailer points out another inconvenient truth.

 With the most spectacular element of the Bush Administration’s Invade the World – Invite the World grand strategy now a decade old, it’s worth taking a look at the U.S. military death tolls by ethnicity and sex. This is an infrequently covered subject of scant interest to the press because women and minorities were not hit hardest.

In the mid 2000s, non-Hispanic whites made up about 61% of the 25-year-olds in the U.S. But through this 2009 report by Hannah Fischer of the Congressional Research Service, whites made up 74.7% of Iraq war fatalities, while minorities only accounted for 25.3%. So, whites gave the last full measure of devotion at an 89% higher per capita rate than nonwhites in Iraq.

Read it.

There’s no doubt that we’re moving into a new age of media, and the days where a writer could just write his books and have them published and never interact with the public are gone. We do have all these new social media and all these ways of reaching out, and I think that trend is likely to continue. Where it’s gonna lead, I really have no idea. You know, I’m partly still the kind of guy that would like to tie messages to legs of ravens to get the word out. But I do use a computer. I have since 1982, so I’m adapting as best as I can to this new world. [In the Q&A session later that evening, Martin revealed what he writes on: a DOS machine running WordStar 4.0.]

Read it.

Om Malik’s brief post on the demise of Google Reader raises a good point: If we can’t trust Google to keep successful applications around, why should we bother trying to use their new applications, such as Google Keep?

Given the timing, the name is ironic. I’d definitely like an application similar to Evernote, but with search that actually worked well; I trust Google on search. But why should I use Keep if the chances are that Google is going to drop it a year or two from now?

Google obviously didn’t think this through — or it’s worse than anybody thought. A lot of people structure their online lives around Google products; if they’re going to jerk the rug out from under dedicated users like this, who’s going to trust them in the future?

Apparently ‘Don’t Be Evil’ operates under a different definition of ‘Evil’ than that used by the average person.

The Other McCain raises a good point.

Under any Pope’s teaching, Pelosi and Biden (and any other pretended Catholic who supports abortion, ‘gay marriage’, and similar bullshit) ought to be excommunicated — although it won’t happen, because American Catholic bishops are about as spineless a bunch as you’ll find outside of Congressional Republicans.

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The river as whole also serves as a single divider, surprisingly enough in the realm of radio – a medium that, on the face of it, is not as bound by the strictures of territorial demarcation. West of the Mississippi, all radio stations have call signs beginning with K. East of the river, all call signs start with W.

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And that’s just for starters.

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What sort of costs will ObamaCare impose on small business owners? A New York Times story on San Diego bakery Baked in the Sun offers a hint.

Under the law, employers with more than 50 employees must either offer qualifying health insurance to all full time employees or pay a fine of $2,000 per worker each year. Currently, Baked in the Sun does not offer health insurance to 90 of its 95 employees, which means that owners Rachel Shein and Steve Pilarski face a difficult choice: They can offer health insurance to their employees and figure out how to finance the additional cost; they can pay a fine for not offering health insurance; or they trim their full time workforce below 50 employees so that they can avoid both the cost of offering insurance and the cost of the penalty.

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Wonder why that is? Well, perhaps the more intelligent citizens of Newtown made use of the simple thought process ‘Strict Gun Laws + Lunatic With Stolen Gun = Many Dead Kids’ and decided that when the balloon goes up they’d rather that the bad guy isn’t the only one holding a weapon. Just maybe.

Read it. And watch the video.

I’m talking to my daughter’s preschool class about Passover tomorrow, and in preparation I’ve been looking for appropriate Youtube videos to show them.

I was completely unaware of the genre ‘Passover videos’ until now, but there it is.

Read it.

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in January, Independence Institute Research Director David Kopel, a leading gun policy scholar, noted:

    The murderer at Sandy Hook fired 150 shots over a 20-minute period, before the police arrived. In other words, a rate of fewer than 8 shots per minute. This is a rate of fire far slower than the capabilities of a lever-action Henry Rifle from 1862, or a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle from 2010. Indeed, his rate of fire could have been far exceeded by a competent person using very old technology, such as a break-open double-barreled shotgun.

So Lupica, like other supporters of Feinstein’s bill, is simply wrong to think that Lanza needed a special sort of gun to fire as fast as he did. In any case, as Kopel pointed out, the criteria that legislators use to identify so-called assault weapons “do not ban guns based on how fast they fire, or how powerful they are.” Rather, “the definitions are based on the name of a gun, or on whether a firearm has certain superficial accessories (such as a bayonet lug, or a grip in the ‘wrong’ place).” Feinstein’s bill, for example, would ban the Bushmaster rifle that Lanza used by name while specifically exempting other rifles (such as the Ruger Mini-14, as long as it has a fixed stock) that fire the same ammunition just as quickly.

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Two months after New York made it illegal to own ammunition magazines with more than seven rounds, state lawmakers say they may increase the limit to ten.

Being in business in a Blue State nowadays is like that scene in Galaxy Quest where the good guys have to make it through a passageway that has huge pistons smashing together in a seemingly random sequence. If you time it just right, you’re good; if not, you’re paste.

Joel Kotkin looks behind the Clever Plastic Disguise.

Among the most pervasive, and arguably pernicious, notions of the past decade has been that the “creative class” of the skilled, educated and hip would remake and revive American cities. The idea, packaged and peddled by consultant Richard Florida, had been that unlike spending public money to court Wall Street fat cats, corporate executives or other traditional elites, paying to appeal to the creative would truly trickle down, generating a widespread urban revival.

Urbanists, journalists, and academics—not to mention big-city developers— were easily persuaded that shelling out to court “the hip and cool” would benefit everyone else, too. And Florida himself has prospered through books, articles, lectures, and university positions that have helped promote his ideas and brand and grow his Creative Class Group’s impressive client list, which in addition to big corporations and developers has included cities as diverse as Detroit and El Paso, Cleveland and Seattle.

Well, oops.

Since Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the Crust has been all about the notion that Clever People Planning Things is a guarantee of success in any endeavor, unlike the sloppy and sub-optimal results of the free market.

Florida himself, in his role as an editor at The Atlantic, admitted last month what his critics, including myself, have said for a decade: that the benefits of appealing to the creative class accrue largely to its members—and do little to make anyone else any better off. The rewards of the “creative class” strategy, he notes, “flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers,” since the wage increases that blue-collar and lower-skilled workers see “disappear when their higher housing costs are taken into account.” His reasonable and fairly brave, if belated, takeaway: “On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits.”

Funny how the people who reflexively deride ‘trickle-down’ when talking about supply-side economics seem to think that it works perfectly well when it’s them, the Smart People, doing it. Any city with a self-styled ‘Arts District’ knows that sinking feeling taxpayers get as they see more and more of their money poured down the sink-hole of trying to beat the dead horse of urban downtowns back to life.

“You can put mag wheels on a Gremlin,” comments one long-time Michigan observer. “but that doesn’t make it a Mustang.”

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Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) have said that they have beheaded French national Philippe Verdon in Mali. A commander of AQIM claimed that Verdon was a French spy and also said that the killing was in response to the French-led intervention in Mali.

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.

Beheadings, suicide bombings, and ritual mutilation are not just strategies of war but time-honored warrior traditions that are theologically sanctioned. To relegate these acts to mere terrorist tactics is not only strategically unwise but diminishes the true nature of the threat. Similarly, to designate enemies as religious fanatics, Islamic extremists, insurgents, or radical militants who have corrupted the peaceful religion of Islam is a politically correct fallacy that is undermining every aspect of the war on terrorism and resulting in the death of American soldiers. In this paper, apparently inexplicable violent acts committed during the Iraq war will be presented as the sacred blood rituals of Mujahideen warriors. It will be established that ritual beheadings have been prevalent throughout Islamic history and are theologically prescribed and communally sanctioned. As I have argued throughout my research into new religions and ritualistic crimes, it is my contention that the most reliable method of understanding ritual violence is found in the symbolism, aesthetics, and blood rituals of the participating community. Consequently, in this paper I present a detailed symbolic analysis of numerous ritual beheadings that reveal “beheading signatures” specific to the al-Qaeda network. Finally, I will argue that continuing to analyze the violence from a Western perspective, sugarcoating by the media of violent aspects of the Islamic religion, and failing to recognize that we are in the midst of a century-old Holy war will only serve to perpetuate a never-ending cycle of reciprocal violence.

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Wartime atrocities are typically attributed to psychological warfare, military strategies or individual acts of brutality. Although infinite varieties of cruelty have transpired in every war throughout history, the intense media coverage of the war on terrorism and the calculated dissemination of information on the internet has made us all witnesses to unimaginable violence. Suicide bombings, beheadings, mutilation, cutting out tongues, cutting off ears, amputations, gouging out eyes, genital mutilation, and dismembering dead bodies is common and widespread. Although our natural inclination is to relegate these horrific acts to another century, when interpreted in the context of religious ideologies, sacred customs, and cultural traditions it is obvious that they are not anachronisms.

These inexplicable acts need to be understood as sacred violence and comprehended in religious concepts such as sacrifice, blood ritual, iconoclasm and desecration. They are ritualistic acts with distinct functions, meanings, objectives, and justifications. They determine an individual’s status in life, death and the afterlife, relegate punishment of community members and enemies, serve as rites of passage and initiation, and signify fidelity, honor, and courage in a warrior culture. The fact that these chilling acts also serve to terrorize the enemy is a secondary objective, what is commonly referred to as a bonus.

The primary function of ritual in the community is that of providing the proper rules for action in the realm of the sacred and the secular. For that reason it takes a fully committed true believer to commit such heinous acts; if any aspect of the faith is questioned, than the thin line between holy warrior and barbarian dissolves. Ritualizing violence legitimizes it, allowing the perpetrator to stand on solid moral ground. Mujahideen have the full support of their community in a manner the significance of which Americans cannot fully grasp. American soldiers are court-martialed, imprisoned, and publicly humiliated for unacceptable violent acts, while the Mujahideen are glorified and praised in direct proportion to the amount of blood they have on their hands. From a strategic perspective, publicly dishonoring our own soldiers undermines the war on terrorism, invalidates our military in the eyes of our enemies, negatively affects morale, and makes us tactically vulnerable; from a ritual perspective the sacred status of the holy warrior is debased, sacrificial blood is polluted, communal rituals fail to have meaning and a sacred crisis ensues. Moral ambiguity causes more damage than weapons of mass destruction; it destroys the community from within. Authentic warrior cultures understand that to question their soldiers’ actions in war is sacrilege. The Mujahideen fighter thinks in sacred terms and every act of violence is theologically and communally sanctioned. These Jihadi soldiers are not completing a tour of duty, they are all lifers groomed from birth in a continual recruitment process comprised of a series of ritual initiations whose ultimate fulfillment is to die as a martyr in holy war. Violent mutilations are not arbitrary and capricious barbaric acts; to fully comprehend them, they must be understood in the context of Jihadi blood rituals and Muslim iconoclasm. In this paper I am going to focus on the ritualistic crimes of beheadings, torture, and mutilation. It will be demonstrated that these brutal acts are ritual manifestations of Mujahideen Desecration.

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The University of Virginia is expecting a roughly 7-million bill for Obamacare’s new employer penalties, said Susan Carkeek, the University’s vice president and chief human resources officer. “We’re expecting fairly significant cost implications from the Affordable Care Act that pass on new penalties and charges, fees to employers – probably in the order of $7 million a year,” she explained in an interview.

Community colleges across the country are slashing employee hours to avoid costly Obamacare mandates. For example,”Pennsylvania’s Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) is slashing the hours of 400 adjunct instructors, support staff, and part-time instructors to dodge paying for Obamacare.” Youngstown State University is also “trimming staff hours to avoid Obamacare’s fiscal burden.”  Other university are also cutting employee hours, which is “a double whammy” for instructors, who are “facing a legal requirement [under the new law] to get health care and if the college is reducing our hours, we don’t have the money to pay for it,” said an adjunct biology professor.

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 After a year an a half as a “guidance counselor” I am convinced that the education system is not about the children (though there are educators in the system who do genuinely care about the students, but it is the only system we have to work within).  In reality, American public education is a government business. It is about politics and power, educators keeping their jobs, and federal and state funding. The bottom line for schools is performance ratings tied to funding. It is about “no dollar left behind”.

The current education system has little to do with the reality of over half of my students’ lives and futures.  It is a poorly run circus and my job is to hold the one-sized flaming hoop at one predetermined height and figure out a way to coax them to jump, limp or crawl through it, if they can at all.  If they can’t we have to find a way to move them out so their performance doesn’t “ding” our school’s ratings. Education needs not reforming, it needs to be blown up and re-built from the ground up.

Steve Sailer looks at the modern victim culture in academia.

While reading up a couple of weeks ago on the Oberlin College KKK fiasco, I became fascinated by the various Web pages at colleges such as Oberlin, Smith, Scripps, and similar advanced, lesbian-heavy institutions for the documenting of “microaggressions.” Since the Ku Klux Klaxon can’t be sounded every week (at least not yet), in the meantime young people are encouraged to fondle and document for posterity the subtlest of slights they feel they’ve suffered.

Check it out.

I love these guys.

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(Yeah, you have to wade through some non-political stuff; suck it up.)

The notion of a “fair” wage is central to many socialist views of proper government. They are usually coupled with schemes to rationalize the economy: why should there be twenty brands of tooth paste? It is a wasteful practice. A rationally planned economy would prevent a great deal of effort wasted in competitive practices, thus leaving more to be paid to the workers. After all, the workers produce the goods: they have a right to a fair share, which should at least include a living wage.

The problem is that often a job cannot possibly produce enough return to warrant a “fair” wage. When the production doesn’t at least equal the cost, there isn’t a job to be had. Many ‘jobs’ are discretionary. You will pay someone to do something so that you don’t have to do it yourself, but if the cost is too high, you will just do it yourself, or go without that service entirely. Clearly there are things I would like to have done for me that I don’t think I can afford. Raising the minimum wage simply moves more jobs from the “I can afford that” to the “Can’t afford it” column. That is, it does in the real world. In Senator Warren’s world, her intentions are what matter: she means well. If her proposal ends up costing a number of people their jobs, that wasn’t her intent, so it doesn’t matter: we’ll just give them more benefits to make up for their loss.

I wish that were a parody, but it is not.

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And nary a peep of Dan Brown.

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

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The future isn’t what it used to be.

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A new type of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) could enable doctors to detect a number of diseases in a matter of minutes. Unlike the traditional MRI method, which generates an electromagnetic field and pulses of radio waves to map the body, Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF) works by generating the same field across multiple frequencies simultaneously and using software algorithms to decode the results.

Mark Griswold, a radiology professor at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, compared the difference between the techniques to the difference between two choirs. While MRIs “sing” a single tone, MRFs generate a rich harmony that can distinguish between multiple tissue properties. Researchers believe they could develop a “songbook” of diseases that will allow doctors to identify diseases based on their tone. “If colon cancer is ‘Happy Birthday’ and we don’t hear ‘Happy Birthday,’ the patient doesn’t have colon cancer,” says Griswold.