Steve Sailer doesn’t have much use for Rand Paul.

Like I’ve said a million times before, once the GOP decides it wants to talk about “amnesty,” it winds up talking about a suicidal “path to citizenship.” White people are suckers for high-mindedness, and “a path to citizenship” just sounds more idealistic than plain old amnesty.

The essential duty of American statesmanship is to preserve for Americans the advantages of being American. But does anyone in politics even know what I’m talking about anymore?

Doesn’t seem so.

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

Among the many, many components of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007was a requirement that U.S. use of biofuels increase from 4.7 billion gallons in 2007 to 36 billion gallons in 2022. The number seemed to have been pulled from the air, since nobody can really know what fuel requirements will be years in the future, although continuing growth in demand for gasoline was assumed. In fact, though, gasoline use has slid since the year the law passed, from 3,389,269,000 barrels per day to 3,185,312,000 barrels per year*. And car manufacturers advise against using gasoline blended with more than ten percent ethanol, unless the car was designed for it, which most aren’t. But companies that supply gasoline are still required to increase biofuel consumption, which means ethanol, because that’s what’s available, so …

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Over the past few months, sheriffs across the country have emerged as bulwarks for freedom by telling President Obama they will not enforce any new federal gun control laws. Now, Colorado’s Weld County Sheriff, John Cooke, has made clear that if the Democrat-sponsored gun control bills for his state are signed into law they will not be enforced.

Speaking specifically of expanded background checks and bans on high capacity magazines, Cooke said “these are feel-good, knee-jerk reactions that are unenforceable.” He said these two measures are simply part of the “uniformed,” hectic response Democrats have employed in trying to do something in the wake of the Aurora theater shooting.

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OBJECTIVE:

To describe the epidemiology of genital injuries caused by trouser zips and to educate both consumers and the caregivers of patients who sustain such injuries.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

There is a certain enlightened segment of America that relishes a good gastro-scolding, whether delivered gently by a Michael Pollan (“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”) or more vituperatively by a Mark Bittman (“In the time it takes to go into a McDonald’s, stand in line, order, wait, pay and leave, you could make oatmeal for four while taking your vitamins, brushing your teeth and half-unloading the dishwasher”). But there is a much larger segment of America whose members heedlessly eat processed foods that make them overweight and unwell. Michael Moss, a dogged investigative reporter who neither scolds nor proselytizes, is here for them.

And that’s about as close to good sense as a review in the New York Times can stand to get; not all that close. A more intelligent person, without an ax to grind, would hesitate to use the phrase ‘who neither scolds nor proselytizes’, about a book with a subtitle that suggests that unhealthy eating (by the finger-pointer’s definition, of course) is a sudden calamity visited upon the innocent consumer by the big bad corporate giants, without any individual choice or responsibility involved.

Moss’s gift to posterity is the phrase “pink slime,” which he popularized in a 2009 New York Times article as part of a series on beef safety that won him a Pulitzer Prize.

Oh, yeah, ‘pink slime’ doesn’t scold or proselytize, not a bit. (Where are these people when it’s big bad government doing the nasty on taxpayers? In the box with the ambiguity, I suppose.)

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Jillian Rayfield of Salon.com set out to create a false narrative about Breitbart News Network’s “The Uninvited” CPAC event, complete with accusations of “Islamaphobia,” before the panelists spoke a single word, according to an eyewitness.

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

“Before the panel discussion, they had already had their posts prepared,” Poole said. “I was sitting directly beside them and she had her article on ‘Islamaphobia is alive and well at CPAC’ post all ready to go.”

Poole said this is an example of Salon’s far left-wing writers fabricating a “pre-determined narrative” aimed at undermining the substance of arguments made during the event.

Hey, that’s what they’re paid for.

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Fehr also noticed a difference between children who’s grown up as siblings and those who were only children.  Contrary to the presumption that only children are more selfish than children raised in larger families, Fehr found the onlies to be the more cooperative and selfless.  They were completely untroubled by handing over toys to another child, whereas the siblings flatly refused.  Fehr came to the conclusion that the onlies didn’t know to be competitive because they’d never had to compete…They weren’t afraid of sharing toys, because they didn’t understand if you gave Barbie to another child, she might come back missing her leg or head.

That would explain a lot about Democrats, many of whom are only children due to the ‘progressive’ aversion to reproduction.

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Although I can think of any number of circumstances under which Ben Affleck ought to be hanged, I can’t say that ARGO is one of them.

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In 1987, William Blake, at the age of 23, killed a police officer and injured another while trying to escape a county courthouse he was held in on a drug charge. He was given a 77-year minimum sentence and has spent the last 26 years in solitary confinement at the maximum-security Elmira Correctional Facility in New York state. Blake wrote an essay on his experience in jail where he calls solitary confinement a fate worse than death.

I’m okay with that.

But you knew that.

Health insurance companies spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying on the health care bill. In return for that investment, they convinced the government to require everyone in the country to buy their products, on pain of a fine. As it turns out, the law has done more than grow their customer base — The Washington Post reports today that those customers will soon be paying through the nose….

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“White Privilege” is the theory advanced by people desperate to claim racism but who can’t actually find racism.  So it’s no surprise that many White Privilege conferences are held on campuses.

Not sure when ‘privilege’ came to be a synonym for ‘advantage’, but I suppose it’s all part of the Narrative.

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If you think the Dodd-Frank or ObamaCare regulations are rough, try opening a wood-fired pizza restaurant in New York City.

Where would we be without the Nanny State to save us from wood-fired pizza?

Anyway, that’s the reality in New York, that an entrepreneur setting out to grow seeks money not so much for marketing expenses or salaries or ingredients or capital equipment but for the cost of complying with the environmental regulations, or hiring professionals — “expediters” — who can make the system navigable, for a fee.

Your tax dollars at work….

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Before today’s battles over cell phones and distracted driving, there were battles over car radios and distracted driving.

There is nothing new under the sun.

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Grand Valley State University, a large public school in western Michigan, has been justly renowned as an NCAA Division II football powerhouse. Now, though, Grand Valley State will also be known as the school that settled for $40,000 after a student sued because she was banned from carrying around a pet guinea pig.

The student, 28-year-old Kendra Velzen, suffers from chronic depression and has a pacemaker, as MLive.com reports. According to her lawyer, the guinea pig supplies “emotional support and attachment (reducing symptoms of depression), and physiological and psychological benefits.”

If teachers and administrators at public schools seem to have their heads up their asses these days, dealing with crap like this might just be one of the reasons.

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Two weeks after the revelation that a baby has been “cured” of HIV, reports suggest that a similar treatment can cure some adults too. Early treatment seems crucial, but does not guarantee success.

Asier Sáez-Cirión of the Pasteur Institute’s unit for regulation of retroviral infections in Paris analysed 70 people with HIV who had been treated with antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) between 35 days and 10 weeks after infection – much sooner than people are normally treated.

Lileks looks at the popularity among the Usual Suspects of ‘nanny taxes’.

There are two issues: One is tax streamlining, which attempts to reduce pointless bewildering complexity so the tax code can be full of intentionally bewildering complexity.

But the bill’s author suggested another rationale: “Just to go after the junk food, “ he said. “Especially the Twinkies and that sort of thing.”

Cute George Harrison….

Paul Rahe turns over a rock.

Most of the New Deal liberals that I once knew have passed on. They have been replaced in positions of authority by a generation for whom everything is political. Its motto is “the personal is political and the political is personal.” What this means in practice is that the members of this generation tend to regard those at odds with them not as merely wrong and perhaps intriguingly, interestingly wrong but as simply immoral. In the face of an argument or observation that does not sit comfortably with what they believe, they resort to denunciation. The dissenter is labeled a racist or a fascist or something worse, and he is read out of the human race. In this environment, conservatives are no longer welcome. No advertisement states that they need not apply for jobs at certain institutions, but that is nearly always the case.

The key to understanding what has happened is that the new generation has made of the university a political instrument. Its purpose, as they see it, is to help them transform the larger world. Those not on board with the program are interlopers to be demonized and driven out, and the quality of the scholarly work and the teaching they do has no weight. One can write and be widely read. One can be invited to conferences and to give lectures. But, if a job comes open at a major university, one will not even be interviewed. Trust me. I know from long experience.

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Although Clotworthy was off the mark in predicting that his vision of an electronically stored human would come to pass by 2000, many of his other predictions are surprisingly close to what technology is actually like today.

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A company spun off from MIT is claiming it has cracked the holy grail of nuclear technology: a reactor design that runs on materials the industry currently discards as waste and which could meet all of the world’s power demands for the next 70 years. It’s also “walk-away safe,” the designers claim, making it immune to the kind of meltdown that destroyed the Fukushima reactors.

The Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor (WAMSR) is based on designs first dreamt up in the 1950s for reactors that used liquid rather than solid fuels. Two graduate students at MIT have now upgraded those designs so that the reactors can be fueled by nuclear waste, and also designed a safety system that will automatically shut the reactor down without power or human intervention.

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Well, for one thing, most CEOs are functional adults.

The luxury is not Mr. Allen’s lifestyle, it’s a byproduct of his job. For he is working as a close protection operator, or, in the old parlance, a bodyguard – a term he despises because of its thuggish connotations. Not for him a bomber jacket, bulking his frame. Instead, he prefers to dress like a businessman, so he can pass for a member of the entourage travelling with the chief executive or politician he is protecting. He declines to be photographed in case he becomes recognizable to a would-be assailant.

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Meet Eustace Conway, 51, the owner of Turtle Camp near Boone, North Carolina. He’s a back-to-the-land guy who bathes in a creek, grows his own food, and welcomes others to learn some survival skills at his place (which he runs as an educational nonprofit) for a small fee.

In other words, he’s out from under the Crust.

    A team of health, construction and fire officials showed up for an unannounced inspection of the preserve, acting on an anonymous tip. Escorted by two sheriffs’ deputies, they executed what Mr. Conway describes as a “SWAT-team raid”—peering into outhouses, stomping around log cabins, and climbing hand-hewn ladders.

Their findings are compiled in a 78-page report with a bullet-point list of violations. Mr. Conway’s sawdust urinal and outhouses? Unpermitted, according to the officials. The wood he used to erect two dozen buildings? Built with lumber that isn’t “grade-marked,” meaning it doesn’t specify the mill where it was produced.

The open-air kitchen, with its crates of potatoes and stacks of pots? “Not protected from insects and animals,” according to the report. “It is, in fact, outdoors.”

Which is, in fact, the point.

When I was a kid, this was a free country. Say what you will about the ’50s, we never had to put up with this kind of shit.

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A Chinese coin about 600 years old was recently unearthed on an island just off the coast of Kenya. If it proves to be authentic, the coin could show that the Chinese explorer Zheng He — like a Christopher Columbus of the East — came to this part of east Africa.

Freeberg invents a useful new word.

Maneuvering of the focus of the discussion away, consciously or otherwise, from inspection or disclosure of some matter whose opacity is strategically desirable to the speaker, by means of bullying. The forceful imposition of one person’s attention-deficit problems upon another, at an opportune time.

I see it outside of politics just as much as I see it within politics. It is now about as widespread as a text-messaging acronym among high-school age kids, and it seems to have reached a popularity crescendo at about the same time. “I don’t care about that, and neither should you” is the sentiment. It is the opposite of inquisitiveness. Over a longer period of time, it is bound to make us stupid. There is no other outcome possible.

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Real-world staffers create fingers with their own prints, somehow also create a phantom worker and someone then clocks on for both. The fingers, pictured below, don’t look particularly hard to make given silicone is nicely malleable when liquid. The mark on the cloudy cylindrical case at the finger’s base might even be an identifier of some sort, used to make the scam work among multiple scammers.

Still a few bugs in the system.

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The achievement is a big deal for resource-poor Japan, whose energy needs are being satisfied in large part by expensive fossil fuel imports since the 2011 Tohoku earthquake stalled the country’s nuclear energy production. But methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, prompting environmental concerns about its extraction, and detractors are criticizing the government for investing so heavily in fossil fuels at the expense of renewables.

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Nuclear power basically comes down to two issues: Safety and cost. Nobody denies that mass nuclear has the raw production capacity to provide for our energy needs through the remotely foreseeable future, but some argue that doing so would either bankrupt us, sicken us, or both. While this is certainly a disputed interpretation, it’s one that has been gathering support in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and a prolonged PR campaign from coal, natural gas, and certain wings of the environmentalist movement. As a result, the conventional nuclear industry, floundering due to widespread public unease and growing legislative opposition, seems to be begging for a revolution.

Pebble-bed reactors solve all of these problems, but nobody appears to be interested.

Transatomic is not hedging its bets: the researchers claim their design is production-ready, and stand behind their numbers. “I wish someone would build this thing,” said one early investor. The project has raised about $1 million, so far.

Heh. If someone is so foolish as to try to build one, the enviro-nazis will tie it up in the courts during the rest of my lifetime, at least. The only nuclear reactor they like is 93 million miles away.

Read it.

Poor people don’t have clutter because they’re too dumb to see the virtue of living simply; they have it to reduce risk.

When rich people present the idea that they’ve learned to live lightly as a paradoxical insight, they have the idea of wealth backwards. You can only have that kind of lightness through wealth.

If you buy food in bulk, you need a big fridge. If you can’t afford to replace all the appliances in your house, you need several junk drawers. If you can’t afford car repairs, you might need a half-gutted second car of a similar model up on blocks, where certain people will make fun of it and call you trailer trash.

Please, if you are rich, stop explaining the idea of freedom from stuff as if it’s a trick that even you have somehow mastered.

The only way to own very little and be safe is to be rich.

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According to a disturbingly pleasant graphic from Information is Beautiful entitled simply 20^th Century Death, communism was the leading ideological cause of death between 1900 and 2000. The 94 million that perished in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe easily (and tragically) trump the 28 million that died under fascist regimes during the same period.

I suspect that Islam may be a contender for the 21st century.

During the century measured, more people died as a result of communism than from homicide (58 million) and genocide (30 million) put together. The combined death tolls of WWI (37 million) and WWII (66 million) exceed communism’s total by only 9 million.

And yet this is the philosophy being pushed by our schools and ruling class.

Curiously, all of the world’s worst famines during the 20th century were in communist countries: China (twice!), the Soviet Union, and North Korea.

Oh, I don’t think it’s curious at all….

Read it.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have created the first ever graphene audio speaker: an earphone. In its raw state, without any kind of optimization, the researchers show that graphene’s superior physical and electrical properties allow for an earphone with frequency response comparable to or better than a pair of commercial Sennheiser earphones.

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Grade-schoolers may want to stock up on Rice Krispies, Fruit Roll-Ups, Doritos, Welch’s Fruit Snacks and Smartfood white-cheddar popcorn. Those products are among scores of popular food items that may no longer be sold at schools under newly proposed federal regulations.

You may ask: What business is it of the Federal government what food items are sold at schools? That’s a very good question.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture last month released draft rules, spelling out what kinds of foods may or may not be purchased on school grounds under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.

Of course! The way to Hunger-Free Kids is to ban them from eating certain types of food. Hmm … not sure I follow that one….

Signed by President Barack Obama, the law aims to reduce childhood obesity. It imposes healthier food standards on schools participating in the federally subsidized breakfast and lunch programs administered by the USDA, covering most of the public education system.

Ah. They take government money for ‘subsidized breakfast and lunch programs’, so they dance to the government’s tune.

The agency laid out a complex set of criteria for determining what foods can be sold.  (It also estimated the number of extra man-hours a year that local and state administrators nationwide would have to spend on compliance:  926,935 hours or more than 100 years.)

Well, of course. It’s the government: Paperwork-R-Us. Sounds like yet another reason to keep your kids away from government schools.

A person claiming to be a teacher from North Carolina took a dimmer view, likening the regulations to “Soviet Russia.”

Ya think?

Read it.

Wow. A liberal professor at NYU agrees with Mayor Bloomberg’s nanny state statist policies. Who could have predicted such a thing?

Steve Sailer jerks back the curtain a little bit.

 There shouldn’t be anything too “surprising” about the Rent-a-Minority business, no more than Henry Cisneros being the Hispanic face of Countrywide Financial. Similarly, the tobacco companies poured a lot of money into minority groups before their legal defeat in the 1990s. It’s just that The Narrative gets in the way of people noticing it, just as The Narrative encourages it.

The poster child here is Jesse Jackson the Elder, who has made a tidy fortune from extortion payments contributions from companies who don’t want to get targeted as ‘racist’.

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Richard III could be laid to rest under a simple slab, under plans revealed by Leicester Cathedral officials.

Stick him in the ground, put a big rock over him so he can’t get out again. Works for me. Probably not a lot of money, too. Win-win!

Well, at least there’s a plan….

Lileks takes a look at the fever swamps.

The Onion tweeted this bio of Pope Francis, and I shrugged and unfollowed. Now: does the person who wrote that think he is a better person than the Pope? I guarantee it. The writer, I’d bet, holds certain ideological positions which are the mark of a Proper Person, and whose possession insulates the holder from all sorts of criticism. The Pope, for example, does not believe in changing marriage, which means one can safely put him in the “hater” or “-phobe” category that frees one from additional intellectual expenditures. There’s the story going around about his visit to an AIDS clinic, where he washed and kissed the feet of sufferers, which the author of the Onion piece would dismiss as a PR stunt without any regard for the meaning of the act, and then also make a face and say “really, seriously? Ick.”

So it’s faith, not works.

The last is somewhat subtle – Lileks is nominally a Lutheran.

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You will have noticed — I certainly have — of the spate of vaporing by Voices of the Crust concerning whether the college degree that we’ve all been carefully conditioned (even in government schools) to consider a necessity if one is to avoid spending the rest of one’s life in a homeless shelter grasping a bottle of Two Buck Chuck is really all that vital after all. [wring hands] There aren’t any jobs for all these poor college graaduates! [wring hands] The Youth of America is crushed under debt! [wring hands] Most of these people don’t belong in college anyway! [wring hands] Where will we get our plumbers/electricians/policemen/firemen/truck drivers if everybody goes to college? (After all, not even the most delusional high school guidance counselor believes that college is necessary for such jobs.)

Bleeding-heart liberals awash with love for the oppressed masses? Perhaps.

Perhaps not. Let me spin you a different scenario. The Upper Crust, appalled at the notion of the offspring of the Lower Orders competing with their sterling scions for the few jobs that actually require a college education, want to put a stop to it — same as they want to put a stop to petit bourgeois crypto-proles competing with them for seats in restaurants, spaces in business class, and slips at the marina. After all, If Everybody’s Somebody, Then No One’s Anybody.

Just a thought.

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Why do ‘liberals’ ‘like’ anticompetitive regulation? Why is that a given nowadays?

According to the plain textbook definition of the word, there is nothing obviously liberal about wanting the government to institute a price-control regulation that has the effect of help big companies squeeze their littler-guy competition. Yet here a ‘liberal’ blogger mentions in passing that ‘liberals’ like just that very thing, seemingly without raising any eyebrows.

Read it.

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

Sound the alarm.

The Ukrainian navy’s dolphin program has a long pedigree. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists noted that trainers there inherited the Soviet military’s 70 trained dolphins after the Soviet Union collapsed. Some of them were retrained to help with child therapy and other civilian tasks. The others? Well…

A truth so obvious that even CNN gets it.

Many people think that the rich are able to weasel their way out of taxes, but they actually pay an overwhelming majority of the taxes in the United States.

What’s more, their share of the tax burden is increasing.

A fact you won’t hear on the evening news, even though it seems to have sneaked by the thoughtcrime police at CNN.

Left rag International Business Times response with shock and awe.

Of course, that means there are 34 states in which car accidents kill more people than guns, but that headline wouldn’t have fit the nerrative.

Get with the program! Ban those cars! Oh, wait….

Read it.

Many shoppers are doing just that with an emerging service from a Washington-based company called Zaycon Foods, even as the company requires customers to accept two unusual practices: buying in bulk (those chicken breasts come in 40-pound boxes) and (here’s the really weird part of this) buying out of the back of a truck rather than a typical store.

How many laws this breaks is left as an exercise for the reader.

Lileks is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

He’s the latest in a long line of scolds and fussbudgets who want to slap Bad Thing X out of your hand for your own good. Never trust anyone whose frustration with the limits of persuasion lasts less than three seconds. If you can’t be persuaded you must be required. It’s almost insulting to have to try to persuade someone of something so self-evident; you have to pretend there’s mental equality between you and the idiot who insists on drinking soda with POISON in it.

And that’s my reaction to Democrats and their fellow fascists everywhere. These are people to whom the thought ‘Eh, it’s none of my business’ has never occurred.

Read it.

The U.S. government has pumped $5.5 billion in federal grants and loans into manufacturing and promoting electric cars and batteries. But research by Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus Center finds that a typical electric car driven 50,000 miles over its lifetime emits more carbon-dioxide than a similar-size gas-powered car driven the same distance.

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‘When you go … to San Francisco; … be sure to stay … out of the ‘vator shaft….’

BART officials are calling the death of a man crushed to death in an elevator shaft at one of its San Francisco stations “upsetting and disturbing,” and said they have as many questions as answers about what happened.

Perhaps they were filming a sequel to Mission Impossible. I hear that they do shoot movies in California — although not as much as they used to, before prices went up so much. Oh, and taxes; taxes are pretty high in California.

The person who was stuck in the elevator told rescue personnel that he was riding the elevator when he heard a “crunching sound” in tandem with a scream as the elevator stalled, Trost said. The dead man had some personal belongings on the top of the elevator shaft, but BART officials stopped short of saying whether they were sure the man was living there.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Just because you have water vapor coming out of your tailpipe—if you even have a tailpipe—doesn’t mean that you have zero emissions. It takes energy to create usable hydrogen or charge batteries, and the bulk of our energy is still generated by fossil fuels which create greenhouse gases. This means that discussions about which vehicles produce more carbon dioxide on the road ignore a big source of emissions.

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The huge number of multinational businessmen being abducted abroad (hundreds a year at ransoms reaching $30 million) has made organized kidnapping a big business. It has also spawned a counter industry — getting them back — and a secret drama involving former spies and revolutionaries. AK-47’s and armored cars, helicopter drops and hideaways in the Andes.

Read it.

If you want to be serious today, here’s something to get you started.

Lefty rag Business Insider serves as an echo chamber for British lefty rag The Guardian recycling the same old ‘feminist’ tropes. (The screen title says ‘Married Men Should Change Their Names’; freedom for women isn’t enough for feminists, men have to be oppressed before they’re happy – if feminists could ever be happy, which seems doubtful.)

Excuse me while I play the cranky feminist for a minute, but I’m disheartened every time I sign into Facebook and see a list of female names I don’t recognize.

And, of course, it’s All About You. The distinguishing characteristic of ‘feminists’ and other proto-fascists appears to be deep anger that the world isn’t Doing Things Their Way. Come on, world! Get with the program!

You got married, congratulations! But why, in 2013, does getting married mean giving up the most basic marker of your identity?

Oh, maybe because their identity is now changing a bit? And they want to indicate that publicly? Next up, she’ll castigate them for getting married at all.

And if family unity is so important, why don’t men ever change their names?

They do, although ‘feminists’ will never admit it. And there are cultures where women don’t take their husbands’ last names, although feminists will never admit that, either.