Rod Dreher turns over a rock.

Here’s an incredibly well reported New Republic story from South Africa about how the post-apartheid black ruling elite have treated the poor black masses not much better than the whites who ruled them under apartheid. This excerpt comes after the reader meets Cyril Ramaphosa, who had led the black miners to oppose the apartheid government, but who went on to become a wheeler-dealer under ANC government.

Read it.

The violence that tore through Lahore’s Badami Bagh community Saturday followed the arrest of Sawan Masih, a Christian in his 20s accused of blasphemy.

But Masih’s arrest wasn’t enough to appease an angry mob of Muslims irate over the alleged crime.

“(The) mob wanted police to hand them over the alleged blasphemer,” said Hafiz Majid, a senior police official in Badami Bagh.

The mob also looted some shops run by Christians, he said.

Majid said Christians have fled the area for fear of being killed.

If convicted, Masih faces the death penalty.

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.

The basic problem with the issue is that we literally don’t know what we’re talking about. Obama and other supporters of mandated wage hikes spin a Dickensian landscape of millions of workers struggling to raise families on a minimum wage job. This is so separated from reality that it necessitates a look at who these workers actually are.

Read it.

The same week that President Obama’s administration announced that due to sequestration, White House tours would be cancelled, sources at the White House announced that it would be hosting megastars Adele and Beyonce at Michelle’s 50th birthday party next year. “America’s First Lady will be holding a huge celebrity-packed party for her birthday at the White House next year and, as she adores Adele and Beyonce, she has asked them both to sing,” the source told the UK Daily Mail. The source did say that “The Obamas will pay Adele’s expenses as it’s a private party, not a State one.”

But will they pay all the expenses of the party? Security arrangements? Food? Cleanup? White House parties are expensive affairs.

Reminds me of a story — oh, yes:

And the LORD sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and said unto him, There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor. The rich [man] had exceeding many flocks and herds: But the poor [man] had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter. And there came a traveller unto the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him; but took the poor man’s lamb, and dressed it for the man that was come to him. — 2 Samuel 12:1-5

Obama and the Democrats sittin’ in a tree — A.S.S.H.O.L.E….

Takeaways.

Whatever the problem is, Obama’s solution is to take things away from the American people.

Budget cutbacks? Take away whatever hurts the American people most.

Take away their guns, their Bill of Rights, their car, their coal, make them turn the thermostat down and tell them what and how much they are allowed to eat.

Reagan’s core philosophy was growth and freedom. Obama’s core philosophy is to take control away from the peasants, and put himself control of everything

When he said “bitter people who cling to guns and religion” it was pretty obvious where he was coming from. The only reason to cling to anything is because someone is trying to take it away from you. That person is Barack Obama.

Read it.

Let’s get back to basics, shall we? You may have thought that the flush toilet was a remarkable scientific advance, but the nice people at Yale are here to remind you that you’re full of shit, in more ways than one.

Now various innovators are promoting new kinds of toilets and technologies that use little or no water and recycle the waste.

Prediction: These very same ‘new kinds of toilets and technologies’ have long been in use in ‘developing nations’ already; what is lacking is a basic appreciation that clean is better than not.

 But although flush toilets in Nepal and the rest of South Asia may work quite well, sewer systems have not kept pace. My toilet and all the others in my Kathmandu neighborhood were connected to pipes that carried the contents of toilets away from our residences and straight into a small river a half-mile away. Stray dogs lapped the water and children played nearby.

Only the strong survive. That’s evolution. They teach it in the schools these days, whether you like it or not.

 The rivers of the Indian subcontinent flow clean and clear from the Himalaya, then become little more than sewers as they run through major cities in the plains. New Delhi’s Yamuna River receives roughly half of the largely untreated sewage of a metropolis of 17 million. The Ganges, the holiest of Hindu rivers, is fouled by raw sewage from tens of millions of people as it flows 1,500 miles from the western Himalaya to the Bay of Bengal.

And yet the metropolis still has 17 million. Wonder how that happened? (I suspect the very do-gooders who are complaining about the sewage would, given the opportunity, complain about there being too many people in New Delhi. There’s no pleasing some people.)

A movement is gaining momentum to do something about this major environmental and public health problem in South Asia and the developing world.

Mostly on the part of people who don’t live in South Asia and the developing world, as we shall soon see.

The latest development in this field is the decision by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to invest $40 million in prize money and financial support to groups working on new toilet technology.

I’m certainly glad that we’ve solved all of the problems of North America so that we can parachute in to save the benighted masses of Asia with new toilet technology. No need for thanks — we do it just to feel good about ourselves.

The new toilets must convert human waste into useful (or at least benign) components without using septic systems.

The army calls these ‘latrines’, and they are of ancient origin. I’m having a hard time finding the new toilet technology here.

Most important, they must protect water sources — rivers, streams, and groundwater — from the water-borne diseases so endemic in the developing world.

So the ‘innovation’ is getting the idea through that clean is better than not. I can see how that’s a new idea in the ‘developing world’ but I don’t see that toilet technology has very much to do with it.

Read it.

Nearly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates need to relearn basic skills before they can enter the City University’s community college system.

In the Good Old Days, schools taught facts and skills; primary among those skills was literacy and numeracy, the ability to read and write and do basic arithmetic.

Once progressives got hold of the schools, however, they were changed into vehicles for social engineering, to produce the New Soviet Man progressive ideal of the caring and tolerant subject citizen, who feels good about himself (and herself) and strives to produce that same good feeling in others. The original function of schooling, however, got lost along the way.

I remember myself when I graduated from high school. I didn’t feel very good about myself — the nuns saw to that — but by God I could read — the nuns saw to that, as well.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Freeberg lays it out.

Now, I think everyone who understands the concept of the rule of law, would agree we’re doing a poor job coming up with the rules if certain things are happening: 1) The people coming up with the rules don’t understand what in the hell they’re doing; 2) the people who support the rules, themselves, are not following them. I’m sure we can come up with some other red flags as well, and I’m sure the applicability of these red flags would be agreeable to everybody who’s asked about it, regardless of their position on gun control…

Therefore, we see the world is divided into two groups of people. I recall what my Uncle Wally was telling me, “Morgan, the world is divided into two groups of people, those who go around dividing the whole world into groups, and everybody else.” Pro- and anti-gun-control is not the important divide here. The divide is: What if a rule is handed down, depriving you of some of the options you had before, and it’s supposed to make the world a better place but it fails some of these tests? So, before the rule is even codified, you see the people supporting it refusing to live by it. And, the people who oppose the rule are found to really, really know what they’re talking about, and their arguments make complete sense, and the people who support the rule are just dishing out a bunch of noise and demagoguery?

Read it.

No, we’re not talking about Obama (for once). The concept of ‘zero’ is a vital step in mathematical progress. This is its story.

Read it.

Perhaps no American will mourn Hugo Chavez more than Joe Kennedy.

For years, the eldest son of the late Robert F. Kennedy has relied on the Venezuelan strongman to prop up his charity with tens of millions of dollars in donated oil.

The steady flow of heating oil allowed the former congressman from Massachusetts to portray himself — and Chavez — as heroes to the poor even as Kennedy and his wife pull down more than $1 million in salary and benefits from a web of for-profit and nonprofit energy concerns.

Hey – the Crust takes care of its own.

Read it.

Because we’d like to stop and discuss something serious ever now and then.

Thor Ice Scraper

Lockitron

Pedal Pub

$10 LED Light Bulb

The Lumio Lamp

Authorea

Thermodo

Read it.

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia has publicly severed ties with Forbes magazine and its annual billionaires’ list after the magazine estimated his worth at $20 billion. The prince insists he’s worth a lot more, according to the Independent.

The nephew of the current Saudi monarch, King Abdullah, is currently ranked No. 26 on Forbes’ 27th annual billionaires’ list.  But the Prince, whose Kingdom Holding Co. has investments in everything from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. to Citigroup, put his own wealth at $29.6 billion – nearly $10 billion higher than Forbes’ estimate, the Independent reported.

Guess he hasn’t heard about how income inequality is such a problem. Or maybe he realizes that worrying about it is a First World fetish that he need not respect.

Read it.

Hundreds of pom-poms and knitted items have been strung from trees and lampposts to help reduce the fear of crime in an area of Leicester.

Why, of course! Why didn’t we think of that?

Ms Bilby, a senior lecturer in criminology at Northumbria University, said: “I think that making an area look cosier certainly makes an area feel safer.

Not be safer, you understand, but feel safer. Feeling is far more important than being in this degenerate modern age.

They were made by schools and community groups including the Knitting Guerillas of Birstall.

Truly, you cannot make this shit up.

Read it.

That’s the conclusion of a new study, “A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the past 11,300 Years,” being published in the journal Science today. But before drawing in a sigh of relief about the future of global warming, the researchers also point out that the rapid warming over the last century has essentially cancelled out 2,000 years of gradual cooling.

How ’bout that Global Warming, eh?

Read it.  And watch the video.

Pediatric oncologist Stephan A. Grupp of CHOP and his colleagues presented the updated results of their clinical trial of the innovative therapy at the American Society of Hematology (ASH) annual meeting on December 10 in Atlanta. To conduct the treatment (officially called CTL019), doctors collect T-cells from the patient and reengineer them with a disabled form of HIV to recognize and attach to a protein that is found only on the surface of B-cells. B-cells are found in the immune system and become cancerous in certain leukemias and lymphomas. Once the reengineered T-cells are injected into the patient, they multiply and are able to attach to the cancerous B-cells—which would otherwise fly under the immune system’s radar—and destroy them.

Read it.

How shocking! It’s an outrage! Oh, wait….

Normally Mike Masnick is a reasonably intelligent guy who has a common sense view of things, but this is a bit off-base.

 Now, think about that for a second. Since this is for any kids up to 18, we’re talking about most of the teenage years for most kids. These are the years in which many teens rebel against their parents, which is, in many ways, a natural part of growing up and becoming an independent adult. To think that parents should be able to find out information directly from various sites about their kids’ use of those sites seems incredibly problematic. There may be sites where the teens have tried to keep information private from their parents. And maybe that’s because, say, the parents are anti-gay, and the child is gay. Do we really want parents to have easy access to that material? Or… what if it’s a site for abused kids, and they are signing up to get help and to report that abuse? Under this law, it would appear that parents can check up on their kids on those sites.

I can’t think of a better ‘growing up’ experience than for teenagers to learn as soon as possible that (a) their ephemeral impulses don’t govern the world, (b) their ephemeral impulses don’t even govern their own lives, and (c) among the chief virtues of adulthood are circumspection and discretion. There’s nothing like living in a police state to teach you the value — and limits — of freedom, and isolating teens from their parents merely encourages them in delusional thinking that ultimately produces fools like the people who populate most Democratic administrations. This is not a trend that we ought to encourage.

Steve Sailer kicks over a rock.

 Oberlin has a wonderful website for the racially aggrieved, of which it has no shortage, called Oberlin Microagressions. The New York Times opinion page today features the ubiquitous (but, to be frank, not scintillatingly bright) Ta-Nehisi Coates on a Manhattan microaggression against a movie star.

The election of Obama in 2008 was promised to usher in a post-racial age. The re-election seems to have ushered in an age of intensifying racial animus against whites.

How come?

Hey, if you ain’t a victim, you’re an oppressor — it’s all about getting on the winning team.

Read it.

Would you be surprised to learn that the professor in question was the US Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration?

Why, yes, I would. And of course he’s right: The Tea Party would dearly love to destroy the U. S. government in its tax-and-spend-socialism-cash-machine incarnation, and return it to its original purpose of defending the country and otherwise letting us go about our business, two things that Robert Reich has fought all his life to prevent. Reich has been an academic and apparatchik Member of the Crust since his earliest days, and illustrates how much better off we’d all be if no Rhodes Scholar were allowed to work in government.

Ron Radosh provides some historical perspective.

When North Korea was still being led by its original founder, Kim Il-Sung, the visitors from the United States to the horrendous Communist regime were not the likes of Dennis Rodman. Today, the founder’s grandson, Kim Jong-Un,  has inherited the mantle of leadership, thereby carrying on the dynasty that rules in the name of Marxism-Leninism, as modified by the founder’s philosophy of juche, or self-reliance, autonomy, and independence.

How far the North Korean Communists have fallen. Back in the day of the old fellow-travelers’ tours to the various communist paradises, the regimes had their praises sung by the likes of the African-American baritone Paul Robeson, who regularly went to the USSR and told the world how great Comrade Stalin was and how the Soviet Union had the only real democracy on Earth. At least Robeson was an All-American football quarterback and the most well-known black American actor and singer in the 1930s and 40s. He also received a law degree at Columbia University. That a man so intelligent could function as a dupe for Stalin was far more worrisome than seeing Rodman do the same today. No one would call Rodman intelligent. He is both a useful idiot as well as a real one; Robeson only filled the first category.

Read it.

The inmates are in charge of the asylum.

Read it.

Which do you think is more likely?:

(a) We make preschool universal and that starts a cascade of awesomeness into the general public school system, or

(b) we graft a universal preschool entitlement onto the existing universal K-12 entitlement, and preschool starts to suck just as much as the rest of the system?

Call me a cynic, but I’m going with (b).

Me, too.

Read it.

The RINOs come out to play their appeasement games.

McCain quoted heavily from a Wall Street Journal editorial that slammed Paul’s filibuster on the Obama administration’s drone use, including a line that said “If Mr. Paul wants to be taken seriously, he needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids in college dorms.”

Yeah, those guys who didn’t vote for McCain. That’ll show ’em.

John McCain seems to be settling into his post-candidate career as the Boring Rerun of Bob Dole. Every time he opens his mouth, I find myself missing Barry Goldwater.

Read it.

By now, using your smartphone for check deposits has almost become old hat. U.S. Bank is looking to take the next step in conjoining gadgets and financial accounts with the launch of Mobile Photo BillPay. The feature, which the bank says is the first of its kind, lets customers snap a photo of a bill, after which all payment fields will automatically be populated with the proper information. The underlying technology has been developed by Mitek, with extracted data including the intended payee, address, account number and total amount due. Of course you’ll get a chance to review this data before authorizing a bill’s payment; that’s a good thing, since we can’t imagine Mobile Photo BillPay will be flawless each and every time out. Nonetheless, U.S. Bank cites one study that expects the feature to reach a 33 percent adoption rate within the US by 2018. Mobile Photo BillPay is available now for U.S. Bank’s iPhone, iPad and Android mobile banking apps.

Read it.

Anodyne, nonsensical phrases seem to be the exclusive province of the left, which is no revelation given that leftist/statist philosophies are the triumph of wishful thinking over mathematical reality and physics.

Read it.

When Mitt Romney made the case for a state-level health reform as governor of Massachusetts, he promised that insurance would become affordable and “the costs of health care will be reduced.” That didn’t work out so well. Costs continued to rise, and health insurance premiums in the state were among the nation’s most expensive. So last year, Romney’s Democratic successor, Deval Patrick, signed into law an ambitious cap on health cost increases. But now it appears that Patrick’s price controls may not work very well either.

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

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to. So long as health care remains labor-intensive and heavily burdened by government paperwork, its costs will continue to rise.

Read it.

In the next few days, the Obama Administration will cancel self-guided tours of the White House. The cancellation comes in the wake of the White House having to trim around $600,000 from its annual budget. If anyone on the West Coast was planning a trip to DC next week, perhaps they can instead snag a seat at one of two wine tastings, sponsored by the Agriculture Department. Spending cuts for thee, but not for me is the Obama Administration’s approach to the sequester.

Next week, the USDA is sponsoring a California Small Farm Conference, which will featuring tasting receptions of regional vineyards and breweries. Next month, the agency is sponsoring the Priester National Extension Health Conference in Oregon. That event will also feature a wine tasting from local vineyards.

We can still spend money on frivolous shit, so long as it only benefits government employees and not the public. Don’t want to lose track of our priorities, after all.

Read it.

Presumably to give the increasing number of Muslims in Spain someone to blow up instead of native Spaniards.

Read it.

Building something interesting requires a surplus of time and money. Salaried jobs provide neither. Unless the job itself is your dream, stay the fuck away from them.

This applies to IT especially. Information Technology is a New Thing in the world, a field where what you knew five years ago is totally irrelevant to what people expect you to do today — experience isn’t a feature, it’s a bug. You have to spend all of your spare time learning new technologies and brushing up on the more obscure nooks and crannies of current technology; otherwise you will get gob-smacked by some oddity that, OMG, we need right away and I thought you said you knew SQLServer/.Net/Data Warehousing/Web programming/(insert whatever it is you do here)?

So why am I still working in IT? Well, at this point, I really can’t afford to quit….

Read it.

We’re on day two now of my son’s stay at home with a creeping respiratory crud that’s been tearing through our piece of the world. I only shook it loose from my own lungs after a course of steroids. While he’s been home, aside from the fact that seven-year-olds bounce back a hell of a lot faster than forty-somethings, I’ve noticed that my kid sops up knowledge more quickly from a stack of books by his bed than he does from a lesson plan at his school.

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

Read it.

Some on Wall Street may be celebrating the Dow hitting a record high on Tuesday, but a new report says New York City now has a record 50,000 people a night sleeping in the city’s homeless shelters.

Let’s hear it for The Nanny. Focusing on the amount of salt in restaurant food and the size of soft drinks people can buy really zeroes in on the important things in life, doesn’t it?

Read it.

Over the past two decades, a net 3.4 million people have moved out of California for other states. But contrary to conservative lore, there has been no millionaires’ march to Texas or other states with no income tax. In fact, since 2005 California has experienced a net in-migration of households earning more than $200,000, according to the U.S. Census’s American Community Survey.

As it happens, most of California’s outward-bound migrants are low- to middle-income, with relatively little education: those typically employed in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, hospitality and to some extent natural-resource extraction. Their median household income is about $40,000—two-thirds of the statewide median—and about 95% earn less than $80,000. Only one in 10 has a college degree, compared with 30% of California’s population. Roughly 40% of the people leaving are Hispanic.

What happens when an area is left with only the Upper Crust and the Lower Crust, the middle having moved away? Looks like we’re about to find out.

Read it.

When the “Higher Education Bubble bursts, it is going to take the “College -Progressive” Complex with it.

And that is a good thing.

People are beginning to realize that getting a ‘college education’ typically means (a) not really getting much of an education, (b) not getting a job after college, and (c) having to pay off massive amounts of debt without the means of doing so. Eventually this system is going to unravel, and I suspect that we are seeing the beginnings of that right now. If you’re a trust-fund hipster or some Eurotrash scion, spending four (or five) years at Brown drinking, screwing, and protesting isn’t a big deal. But if you’re trying to do the whole social-mobility thing, being the first in your lineage to ‘go to college’, it’s a real problem.

Call it the College-Progressive Complex. The first part consists of the schools themselves, with their herds of administrators, professors and impoverished grad students chasing the brass tenure ring. Think of it as a liberal tick, sucking blood and growing fatter off the efforts of Americans who actually produce something while contributing nothing to society except the clearly secondary contributions of those few in the fields of science and mathematics.

The other component of the Complex is the progressive element. Colleges and universities serve as a reservoir of leftism in society that serves several functions for those trying to turn America into a less blonde, less macho Sweden. First, it provides a taxpayer-subsidized lifestyle for millions of liberal voters to enjoy without actually having to produce anything. No wonder university types vote 95% for Democrats – they are voting themselves a salary and a sinecure. It’s welfare for people with graduate degrees and “Coexist” bumper stickers.

David Friedman comments on a disturbing trend.

 A pattern I have observed in a variety of public controversies is the attempt to establish some sort of official scientific truth, as proclaimed by a suitable authority—a committee of the National Academy of Science, the Center for Disease Control, or the equivalent. It is, in my view, a mistake,  one based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. Truth is not established by an authoritative committee but by a decentralized process which (sometimes) results in everyone or almost everyone in the field agreeing.

Read it.

If you’re a student in Massachusetts, you now have the option of visiting the locker room of your choosing under the new state guidelines about gender identity. State law now forces nondiscrimination based on gender identity. In other words, if you’re a male identifying as a female, you can hang out in the ladies’ locker room, and vice versa. “We wanted to come up with something that would best address their needs and their safety needs and affirming their identities,” said Grace Sterling Stowell of the Boston Alliance of Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Youth, who used to be a male.

Read it.

You can’t just show up and expect to get better. You can’t even just show up, work hard and expect to get better. You have to show up, work hard and deliberately focus on the specific things that will make you get better. Sometimes they will be the same as the cool things that you instinctively want to work on, but there’s no guarantee of this. Working through problems you’ve already solved won’t help much. Working on easy problems won’t help much. Working without feedback won’t help much. Working with only a superficial understanding of the technologies and frameworks you are using won’t help much. You’ll be OK for a while, but before long you might just be spinning your wheels in the mud, and if you’re unlucky you might not even notice.

To which my native indolence replies, I knew it all along – so let’s have a nap instead.

Read it.

 We’re still years away from quantum computing becoming an everyday reality, but the physics geniuses over at the University of California Santa Barbara have made a discovery that might speed that process along. A team under professor John Martinis’ tutelage has developed a way to manipulate light on a superconducting chip at the quantum level, allowing the group to control the wave forms of released photons with a switch and a resonator. That might not seem like much, but it’s ultimately a launching pad for much more. With photons now bowing to researchers’ whims, the next step is to see if the particles can securely transfer data over long distances, such as between Earth and orbiting satellites, or just from one end of the world to another. It’s a lofty goal to be sure, but nobody said the revolution would be over in a day.

Read it.

Business Forward is a 3-year-old trade association designed to be a liberal counter weight to the Chamber of Commerce. Many of its staff have had stints in the White House or the Obama campaign. Funded by corporate donations, it facilitates meetings between business executives and Obama Administration officials. Like OFA, the group raises suspicions of selling access to government officials.

The Associated Press reported this morning that “more than 50 corporate members pay $25,000 or $50,000 a year to be involved in briefings between Obama administration officials and business leaders, small businesses and entrepreneurs.”

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

Read it.

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

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.

And then there are the stories you read that go beyond our usual category of mere ineptitude.  Such as the Tabernacle Baptist Church in St. Louis that wants to fight gun violence by holding . . . a toy gun buyback.  Just a hunch here: I’ll bet they don’t sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” in that congregation.

Read it.

As you know if you have been following this dramatic story unfolding in Brooklyn Park, Maryland, seven-year-old Josh Welch has been suspended for two days after he allegedly fashioned his breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun.

Did I say “dramatic”? I meant “stupid.”

Pretty sure that if your children are “troubled” by another kid biting a pastry into something that looks sort of like a gun and waving said pastry around, you have already failed as a parent.

George Will looks at how reactionary ‘progressives’ actually are.

Progressives are remarkably uninterested in progress. Social Security is 78 years old, and myriad social improvements have added 17?years to life expectancy since 1935, yet progressives insist the program remain frozen, like a fly in amber. Medicare is 48 years old, and the competence and role of medicine have been transformed since 1965, yet progressives cling to Medicare “as we know it.” And they say that the Voting Rights Act, another 48-year-old, must remain unchanged, despite dramatic improvements in race relations.

Steve Sailer looks at the sort of people who are reproducing these days. (Yes, the headline is a pun. His, not mine.)

 With Dennis Rodman back in the news for his exercise in basketball diplomacy in North Korea, it’s worth mentioning Dennis’s dad, Philander Rodman Jr., who is the father of between 29 and 47 children, according to various published reports and what kind of mood Philander Jr. is in when reporters visit his Rodman’s Rainbow Obamaburger in the Philippines.

No word yet on Philander Rodman Sr.

Read it.

Now, it’s my belief that if you’re someone who knows that you don’t want children, then you probably shouldn’t have them. People are encumbered by parenthood enough such that it’s something that should be undertaken only by people who have the desire. Whatever floats your boat and sinks your chromosomes.

But the key problem with advocating this is that this will dissuade procreation among those the most easily dissuaded: high-IQ, driven types; that is, the type of people we need to reproduce the most if we want to sustain our advanced civilization.

In my comment there, I decided to clue Dr. Walker in on a few things. One, while she may not be missing out on much, her DNA sure will be. I wonder, do voluntarily child-free people think that their genes will magically propagate themselves? Or course, I’d imagine that for most such people, heredity is not even being factored into the equation.

Not having kids is the surest way to guarantee that the future world will not look like you.

If that prospect bothers you, well, the solution is in your pants.

Many people who curb their fertility (typically high-IQ, capable types, often on the Left of the political spectrum) actually believe by so doing, they personally are doing the planet a favor (well, some of them are). Of course, in reality, the inescapable consequence of this thinking is that this leaves the future with more people less concerned about overburdening the world and fewer people with the ability to provide for these individuals.

On the other hand, I am perfectly comfortable with high-IQ people often on the Left of the political spectrum not passing their defective genes down to future generations. In this respect, the system works. If I could somehow persuade the Kennedys, Clintons, Gores, and Carters (and Obamas) of this world not to reproduce, I would certainly do so.

Bryan Caplan explains some inconvenient truth.

In any normal labor market, massive female entry would have led to a large increase in total workers.  But the market for new doctors is anything but normal.  The rise in new female doctors has been almost perfectly offset by a matching fall in new male doctors.

My point, of course, is not that women have “stolen” men’s places in medical school.  My point, rather, is that that draconian government entry barriers are the only credible explanation of the facts.  Why else would the number of male doctors have fallen so far relative to demand?  Infinitely inelastic demand for medical services?  A massive decline in the talent of male applicants to medical school?!

As our population ages, we have naturally seen a large increase in the demand for doctors.  If the market for M.D.s worked normally, however, we would have fortuitously experienced a large offsetting supply shock: the rise of the female doctor.  Regulation has deprived us of this godsend – and deprived vast numbers of qualified men and women of the right to work in their preferred occupation.  Thanks to government entry barriers, demand has gone up and supply is frozen in place.  Consumers and taxpayers are paying a fortune for medical care.  And the problem is only going to get worse.

Read it.

We can make all the windmills the world needs, and it won’t bring back the robust jobby-ness of the past, because things just don’t work that way. Economics is not going to change course because it would make it easier for us to structure our world. It would not take that many people to make all the windmills we would ever need, because in modern and efficient businesses it just doesn’t take many people to do things. If these green energy companies really did go on a hiring spree and started employing the numbers that politicians would like to see, they would be (a) unsustainable and (b) replaced by more efficient businesses with less costs.

Taylorism during World War II created ‘good jobs’ for a lot of semi-skilled people — that’s what Tayorism does — but modern industry depends more on skilled labor supporting extensive automation. There isn’t a lot of demand any more for a high-school graduate from the left side of the bell curve putting widgets together on an assembly line, because robots are doing his job at a lower cost and can run 24/7, don’t get benefits or a pension, and can be trusted to do it right every time.

The jobs are never coming back.

Sad but true. People who want ‘good jobs’ need to focus on things that can’t easily be automated. Unfortunately for the populists, many of sad jobs are ‘service’ jobs that require a human brain in a human body … but that’s about all they require, and pretty much anybody can provide that, which means that the labor pool is large, and consequently the wages are small. Not even Barack Obama can change the elementary laws of economics, although he’s giving it the old Harvard try.

Read it.

Medical researchers announced today that, for the first time, a child born with an HIV infection appears to have been cured. Doctors are hopeful that the results may be replicated and used to treat infants infected via pregnancy or delivery in the first few days of life.

Yet another milestone on the road toward saving children from the mistakes of their parents.

Read it.

Although conclusive evidence for life on Mars (or on any other foreign planet) has yet to turn up, humans are an impatient species. And so we have invented extraterrestrials of every conceivable kind. There are fictional aliens that resemble little green men, mollusks, insects, plants, and minerals. Sometimes they have no bodies at all.

Read it.

“Livability” has been a buzz word in city development for some time, and for good reason, as who doesn’t want livability, outside the zombie cohort? Things get hairy, though, when “livability”—as an economic development strategy—gets unpacked, because questions arise: “Livability” for whom? “Livability” at what cost?

Livable for the Crust, of course, as ‘affordable’ means ‘suitable for our Underclass clients’.

You could argue, then, that the original sin of “livability”-driven economic development begins right there. Namely, the emphasis will not be on the people of a city, but on potential consumers, particularly high-valued consumers with means, subsequently referred to as the “creative class”. As for creative class wants? They are, according to Richard Florida, “[an] indigenous street-level culture – a teeming blend of cafes, sidewalk musicians, and small galleries and bistros…” In this sense, the idea of “livability” gets precariously slimmed out.

In other words, trust-fund hipsters and the parasites that fatten upon them.

Perhaps the city most famous for livability-driven economic development is Portland. It is America’s amenity apex, and a recent study showed it attracts the young by the boatload due to a certain leisure-lifestyle it affords.

And it’s about 80% white. Perhaps there’s a connection.

Gavin McInnes is, like, upset or something.

I don’t like foreigners learning English littered with the word “like” as if it were so much roadside garbage. I hate hearing old men use it, and I’m disappointed the word has made it all the way to Britain, but when my daughter uses it, that’s where I draw the line. I immediately called up a sign-maker in Oregon and had him make a sign for my house that says, “You Are Entering A ‘Like’-Free Zone.” He was taken aback by the request and said, “You live around a lot of Valley Girls or something?” I was so happy to hear someone say this. Finally, one human being who thinks it’s unusual to talk as if you’re a really stupid teenage girl on the phone with an even dumber teenage girl really late at night. “No,” I replied, “I live in New York City where EVERYONE says ‘like.’ Businessmen, moms, politicians, teachers, cops. It’s an epidemic.” It isn’t just New York—it’s the entire English-speaking world. People at airports, on trains, and in convention centers use the word at least half-a-dozen times per sentence and they don’t even know it. Do you? Am I the only one pulling my hair out because of this fucking word?

I think he’s kicking against the pricks, here.

The whole thing reeks of insecurity. I remember back in college when a student was asked a question, they’d answer in this neurotic interrogative tone that rose about four octaves at the end. “I’m not sure, but, like—” they’d begin an answer to a Wuthering Heights question, “—I guess, like, Heathcliff loved Catherine?” Those last three words would go high enough to shatter a wine glass. Then we got older and realized we were right about a lot more stuff than we thought, so we confidently said, “It’s a love story” in a monotone. Be brave. Say: “He said, ‘There’s no way we are going to get across the river.’” I realize you don’t have a transcription of what he said. It’s a given that you’re paraphrasing. You don’t need to qualify it with a big fat “like” at the beginning, you pussy.

Good luck with that.