Read it.

Surveying the crimes that were eagerly devoured by the public in papers such as News of the World, Orwell said the elegant middle-class criminals of the past, often involving sex triangles or desperate murderous attempts to stop sliding down the class ladder, had gone forever.

Well, if he were alive today Orwell would look around him and conclude that whatever else you can say about modern Britain, the art of murder is in vigorous good health.

And we have our diverse new immigrant population to thank for its modern-day flowering.

Whether it’s the polonium poisoning of a Russian dissident, the honor killings of errant Muslim daughters, or the voodoo dismemberment of “possessed” African children at the urging of unhinged witch doctors, murder has never been so varied.

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The events of May helped solidify national sentiment in favor of civil rights for blacks. President Kennedy reportedly said at the time that Connor had done as much for the civil rights movement as Abraham Lincoln. That’s a gross exaggeration. But by June 1963, Connor had done more than Kennedy for civil rights.

And, of course, Bull Connor — and all of his subordinates — were Democrats, something that has gone down the Memory Hole.

Read it.

A group of scientists from the University of Alberta have created a process that makes graphene-like nanomaterials out of hemp waste, suitable for use in supercapacitors.

Read it.

The parents of Gurkiren Kaur Loyal, 8, say their daughter was being treated for dehydration during a trip to India when staff reportedly gave her a mystery injection.

“I asked what was the injection for, but he gave me a blank look and injected the liquid into her,” Gurkiren’s mother Amrit Kaur Loyal told the Birmingham Mail. “Within a split second, Gurkiren’s head flipped back, her eyes rolled in her head, and the color completely drained from her. I knew they had killed her on the spot.”

The family guarded Gurkiren’s body after her death so her organs could not be harvested right away, but when her body was flown home to the UK, the family discovered all of Gurkiren’s organs had been removed and only her eyes remained, the Birmingham Mail reports.

Read it.

 The Woolworth Building’s neo-Gothic tower, one of New York City’s most recognizable landmarks, is about to be turned into luxury condominiums, a transformation that would be second only to placing penthouses atop the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building.

Read it.

It’s in the New York Times, so it must be true.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

If you want to boycott rich liberals, however, that’s not an option — they own the government, and you can’t boycott the government.

Read it.

As the former head of an explicitly racist organization, I suppose he ought to know.

Read it. And watch the video.

Read it.

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

Progressive nonprofit Great Education Colorado claims to be the most effective education advocacy group in the state, but less than 30 percent of Great Education’s funding actually finds its way to education campaigns and issues. The small amount spent on education has supported initiatives that would drastically raise taxes on Coloradans.

A prime Job of the Crust is as a well-paid employee of a ‘non-profit’ that rakes in lots of cash from the politically-correct but dimwitted public and then never does anything useful, even by their own warped standards.

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A new, and potentially dominant, ruling class is rising. Today’s tech moguls don’t employ many Americans, they don’t pay very much in taxes or tend to share much of their wealth, and they live in a separate world that few of us could ever hope to enter. But while spending millions bending the political process to pad their bottom lines, they’ve remained far more popular than past plutocrats, with 72 percent of Americans expressing positive feelings for the industry, compared to 30 percent for banking and 20 percent for oil and gas.

…

Perversely, the small number of jobs—mostly clustered in Silicon Valley—created by tech companies has helped its moguls avoid public scrutiny. Google employs 50,000, Facebook 4,600, and Twitter less than 1,000 domestic workers. In contrast, GM employs 200,000, Ford 164,000, and Exxon over 100,000. Put another way, Google, with a market cap of $215 billion, is about five times larger than GM yet has just one fourth as many workers.

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The core trait of a scientific mind is that when its commitments clash with evidence, evidence rules. On that count, what grade do liberals deserve? Fail, given their reaction to the latest evidence on universal health care, global warming, and universal preschool.

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Remind me why we have United Nations….

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Good question.

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But not, you’ll note, Hillary Clinton. ‘Look! Over there!’

I’m shocked–shocked, I tell you–to find the IRS targeting conservatives….

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MailMany modern Europeans have a special ability to piss themselves when the subject of firearms comes up, and the international worry-storm triggered by Defense Distributed’s development and distribution of plans for a fully 3D-printed, single-shot pistol have created just the latest opportunity for merriment and mayhem in Great Britain. In a story full of very nicely staged assassinesque photos of reporters clutching a “Liberator” pistol in public, the Daily Mail reports how it printed out the gun and “smuggled” it onto the Eurostar train, past security, “alongside hundreds of unsuspecting travellers.”

Read it.

I’ve been married and I’ve been single and married is better.

James Altucher is even more pessimistic than I am. I didn’t think that was possible.

1) The middle class is dead. A few weeks ago I visited a friend of mine who manages a trillion dollars. No joke. A trillion. If I told you the name of the family he worked for you would say, “they have a trillion? Really?” But that’s what happens when $10 million compounds at 2 percent over 200 years.

He said, “look out the windows.” We looked out at all the office buildings around us. “What do you see?” he said. “I don’t know.” “They’re empty! All the cubicles are empty. The middle class is being hollowed out.” And I took a closer look. Entire floors were dark. Or there were floors with one or two cubicles but the rest empty. “It’s all outsourced, or technology has taken over for the paper shufflers,” he said.

“Not all the news is bad,” he said. “More people entered the upper class than ever last year.” But, he said, more people are temp staffers than ever.

And that’s the new paradigm. The middle class has died. The American Dream never really existed. It was a marketing scam.

And it was. The biggest provider of mortgages for the past 50 years, Fannie Mae, had as their slogan, “We make the American Dream come true.” It was just a marketing slogan all along. How many times have I cried because of a marketing slogan. And then they ruined it.

Michael Levin explains.

Prior to the 2008 attention span meltdown, books contained the precise amount of information people needed in order to feel informed about a topic. Today, most people no longer need to feel informed about anything. If they do feel an urge to learn something, even TMZ is usually TMI. Why would you need 400 pages about Harry Truman, or Lady Di, or even Lady Gaga for that matter, when the equivalent of four pages online would suffice?

Books are also boring. You can’t check the weather — or your stocks, or look at porn — in a book. All you can do is read it. The serious point here (I know the porn reference threw you) is that we’ve moved into a world of color, light and sound with which the frumpy old black and white book cannot compete. Reading something online may or may not stick with you the way reading it from a book might, but you can look up all kinds of side references, videos, speeches, and whatnot that a plain old book can’t offer.

Mencius Moldbug explained.

Useful to Moldbug fans. You know who you are.

Progressivism

Progressivism (also called Universalism) is responsible for the vast majority of the world’s problems today. It is a non-theistic religion descended in a direct line from the various Dissenter sects of England. Although the belief in God was dropped during the religion’s evolution in order to improve its ability to spread, the core of progressive beliefs are very similar to the Quaker beliefs of a few centuries ago. In short, progressives are dangerous and creepy religious maniacs who don’t need to believe in God but that makes them no less dangerous, creepy or maniacal.

Read it.

 In an era when everything is customizable, why not customize your child’s education?

Hint: Because it threatens the rice bowl of a lot of government employees (unionized government employees, the Ruling Class’s natural prey).

“What about home schooling? You know, it’s not just for scary religious people any more.” That’s a line from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and it should strike fear into the hearts, not of vampires, but of public-school administrators everywhere.

But it doesn’t, because they provide the votes that make the whole machine run, and the governing bureaucracy is very well aware of it.

“That first year, chatting with other homeschooling parents at soccer games, picnics, and after-church coffee hours, I found that our decision was far from unusual. Homeschooling has long been a philosophical choice for religious traditionalists and off-the-grid homesteaders, but for the parents we met — among them several actors, a jazz composer, a restaurateur, a TV chef, a Columbia University physical-plant supervisor, and a handful of college professors — it was a practical alternative to New York’s notoriously inadequate education system.”

An education totally created by people for whom these hip & trendy urbanites religiously (if I may use so incongruous a term) vote. Savor the irony.

Read it.

But my experience — both on the way up and the way down — is a good window into one of the central questions facing President Obama as he prepares to take the oath of office for a second time on Jan. 21: What role, if any, should the government play in nurturing entrepreneurs and, by extension, jobs, in America? In our case, we really had no expectation that government would play any role whatsoever. Unfortunately, though, we were wrong. Dead wrong. It did play a role and, for the most part, it was not a good one. It doesn’t have to be that way; there are fixes that can be made.

You may not be interested in the fucking government, but the government is interested in fucking you.

The mere debate, however, prompted tremulous bureaucrats at the U.S. Commerce Dept. — congenitally allergic to even the slightest whiff of controversy — to tell the registries (who are regulated by Commerce) to knock it off. We thought the complaints were nonsense. After all, how bad could it be to get rid of errors and replace them with relevant search results? But it didn’t matter. The government had, effectively, dealt us a death blow.

Your tax dollars at work … or not, as the case may be.

Despite repeated efforts at reform, almost always stymied by political gridlock in Washington, federal rules make it a snap, and potentially quite lucrative, for people to file civil lawsuits, no matter how ludicrous.

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

Steve Sailer suffers form an embarrassment of riches.

Okay, which of these two white women, the brunet or the blonde, is the American Indian?

…

That raises the metaphysical question: Can a blonde lesbian who claims to be an American Indian be racist against blacks? I look forward to the Washington Post’s black magazine The Root debating this burning topic for several months.

Read it.

(Disclaimer: Please disregard all of the following, because the mainstream media and America’s social-sciences community have already established beyond all doubt that anyone who criticizes, or even dares to think bad thoughts about, America’s 44th president is motivated solely by blind feral bigotry, which is a defect of character—and, verily, the soul—that is exclusive to white males.)

Not only was Obama’s administration rocked by the Benghazi hearings and revelations that the IRS during his reign has targeted Tea Party and “patriot” groups for extra scrutiny, it has become increasingly evident even to Obama’s Borg-like defenders that he may care more about appeasing his wealthy benefactors and toasting his celebrity friends than he does about uplifting the vanishing middle class and the squirming proletarian masses.

One possible answer.

Read it.

One of the lessons of history is that peoples with nearly identical economic arrangements can have radically different political institutions, affording them equally varied access to civil liberties and influence on the decisions that shape their lives.  Thus it’s reasonable and, I think, necessary to talk about the factors that will help define the political dimension of America’s post-imperial future—and in particular, the prospects for democracy in the wake of imperial collapse.

There are at least two barriers to that important conversation.  The first is the weird but widespread notion that the word “democracy”—or, if you will, “real democracy”—stands for a political system in which people somehow don’t do the things they do in every other political system, such as using unfair advantages of various kinds to influence the political process.  Let’s start with the obvious example.  How often, dear reader, have you heard a pundit or protester contrasting vote fraud, say, or bribery of public officials with “real democracy”?

Yet real democracy, meaning the sort of democracy that is capable of existing in the real world, is always plagued with corruption. If you give people the right to dispose of their vote however they wish, after all, a fair number of them will wish to sell that vote to the highest bidder in as direct a fashion as the local laws allow.  If you give public officials the responsibility to make decisions, a fair number of them will make those decisions for their own private benefit.  If you give voters the right to choose public officials, in turn, and give candidates for public office the chance to convince the public to choose them, you’ve guaranteed that a good many plausible rascals will be elected to office, because that’s who the people will choose.  That can’t be avoided without abandoning democracy altogether.

Read it.

Ms Bentley was an Communist Party USA (CPUSA) member who was an active Soviet spy for most of a decade. Her story is perhaps a micro-version of the entire relationship between American Communism (aka progressivism) and the Soviet variety.

Many Americans joined the CPUSA and many spied for the Soviets. Many (if not all) also eventually broke with the Soviets. Obviously, these people were not all identical. They did not all come from the same background. However, when one reads their memoirs, one notices a lot of similarities. Ms Bentley is, in my opinion, the quintessential American Communist. In a way, her story is the story of them all and it’s laid out – in detail and in a matter of fact way – in this nearly forgotten book. Conservatives want you to remember Whittaker Chambers and progressives want you to remember Joseph McCarthy (if they want to remember anything at all). I would like you to remember Elizabeth Bentley.

Read it.

Truly, you can find anything on the Internet.

Read it.

I am not inclined to trust in the intellectual capacity of a white guy who wears his hair like he wishes he were a black guy, but you never know.

Jaron Lanier is a computer science pioneer who has grown gradually disenchanted with the online world since his early days popularizing the idea of virtual reality. “Lanier is often described as ‘visionary,’ ” Jennifer Kahn wrote in a 2011 New Yorker profile, “a word that manages to convey both a capacity for mercurial insight and a lack of practical job skills.”

Perhaps that’s why I’ve never heard of him.

Raised mostly in Texas and New Mexico by bohemian parents who’d escaped anti-Semitic violence in Europe, he’s been a young disciple of Richard Feynman, an employee at Atari, a scholar at Columbia, a visiting artist at New York University, and a columnist for Discover magazine. He’s also a longtime composer and musician, and a collector of antique and archaic instruments, many of them Asian.

In other words, a Child of the Crust. I dislike him already.

His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world.

And of course nothing says ‘I’m an individualist and war against a hive-mind world’ like a white guy wearing dreadlocks. No shit.

Read it.

Esther Gokhale teaches techniques for maintaining better posture. She says her advice can relieve nagging back pain.

Yet another First World problem. Eight weeks in boot camp will solve that posture problem for you, guaranteed.

Alex Tabarrok reports from the field.

In a large, randomized experiment Bowen et al. found that students enrolled in an online/hybrid statistics course learned just as much as those taking a traditional class (noted earlier by Tyler). Perhaps even more importantly, Bowen et al. found that the online model was significantly less costly than the traditional model, some 36% to 57% less costly to produce than a course using a traditional lecture format. In other words, since outcomes were the same, online education increased productivity by 56% to 133%! Online education trumps the cost disease!

Read it.

Once, being a college professor was a career. Today, it’s a gig.

Watch it.

The parking brake has its limits.

Read it.

1. Floss. Shut up about blood and it getting stuck in your teeth or a general fear of dentistry and just floss.

2. Sell your microwave. You’d be shocked how much healthier you eat when you have to clean a pan after every meal.

3. Apologize to your partner; you know what you did.

Read it.

For centuries, Egypt’s pyramids have been a point worldwide fascination. Scholars have long asked, how did the egyptians build them at all, much less so beautifully? But, when structural engineer Peter James looked at the pyramids, he asked why they were falling apart. The longstanding explanation is that looters have picked apart the pyramids over the years. But James wasn’t convinced by that idea, which led him to a new theory that he wrote about in Structure. The engineer believes that the pyramids were constructed so precisely that they weren’t built to deal with the contraction and expansion of the limestone in the desert heat, and that ironically, the most crudely built one — the Bent Pyramid — has thus held up best over the eons.

And it’s all about the funding.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is alarmed today at a letter from the Departments of Justice and Education to the University of Montana.

Read it.

We see many advantages to these kinds of contracts. In addition to eliminating the stress and “publish or perish” madhouse that comes with pursuing a tenured position, this system promises to keep bad teachers and academic hacks in the classroom for only set amount of time instead of a lifetime. Perhaps the biggest advantage for students will be the opportunity to learn from professionals who know about the world outside of academia.

Read it.

The families of Navy SEALs killed in an August 2011 shoot-down of a helicopter in Afghanistan spoke at a press conference Thursday morning, citing a number of grievances, including an allegation that the Pentagon invited a Muslim cleric who “disparaged in Arabic the memory of these servicemen.”

In addition to blasting the Obama administration for the mission and for an official investigation they deemed a cover-up, the families complained that “military brass, while prohibiting any mention of a Judeo-Christian God, invited a Muslim cleric to the funeral for the fallen Navy SEAL Team VI heroes who disparaged in Arabic the memory of these servicemen by damning them as infidels to Allah.”

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

Read it.

Jarvis soon soured on the commercial interests associated with the day. She wanted Mother’s Day “to be a day of sentiment, not profit.” Beginning around 1920, she urged people to stop buying flowers and other gifts for their mothers, and she turned against her former commercial supporters. She referred to the florists, greeting card manufacturers and the confectionery industry as “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations.”

Read it. And watch the video.

Seventy-year-old Michael Salame has eight heart stents, nerve damage and apparently quite a right hook, as an alleged home invader found out.

Read it.

    So here is the challenge: a bottle of fine French wine sent to the first person who can show that Hispanic/Latino American intelligence and scholastic ability is on the same level as European American intelligence and scholastic ability.

Data please.

Read it.

We often focus on the ideological biases of the university, where the more lunatic examples of political correctness get the most attention. But in education as in economics, there is a trickle-down effect. The grandees at the elite universities train the PhD’s who go on to second and third tier institutions, where they in turn train the students who get high school and grade school teaching credentials. They also write most of the textbooks that end up in K-12 classrooms. Thus the progressive ideology metastasizes throughout the educational system, determining the curriculum, the textbooks, and the point of view of the teachers. At that level the ideas may be garbled, half-baked, incoherent, and a collection of clichés and slogans. But they are still toxic and effective at transmitting a world-view to impressionable minds.

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Instead, the Department of Education announced Thursday that income would be listed “from a dependent student’s legal parents regardless of the parents’ marital status or gender, if those parents live together.” Instead of “father,” the societally-sensitive term “Parent 1” will be used. And for “mother,” the term will be “Parent 2.”

After all, these archaic categories are just so fifteen minutes ago.

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Beneath the radar, drowned out by Benghazi, a splashy murder trial, and an even splashier kidnapping, there was one of those inconsequential “inside baseball” career stories that is normally of interest only to a select few inside the nation’s ruling class.

In this case, however, there are teachable moments well above and beyond the people involved. It was a tiny event, and yet, it explains so much about how and why Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, as well as how and why the GOP establishment so often does.

A key Romney aide and spokesperson, who committed one of the biggest blunders of the entire 2012 Presidential Campaign, was recently hired by a big Obama supporter to handle communications for a liberal propaganda group.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised. The Crust take care of their own.

Read it.

Union bosses think that veterans deserve the best, i.e. union membership.

Read it.

As Detroit’s call-it-anything-but-bankruptcy budget crisis drags on and the city government is unable to provide the most basic of services, residents have discovered an alternative to lawless anarchy: cooperative anarchy! A number of experiments in spontaneous order are popping up in Motor City, and both the rich and the not-so-rich are pitching in.

You don’t need an expensive and corrupt government bureaucracy to get things done.

Of course, this is all a drop in the bucket for the city’s problems, but even that much self-management and tiny amount of voluntaryism has Katherine McFate of the Center for Effective Government (read their anti-austerity argument here) worried:

“The idea that we are now outfitting first responders through charitable contributions should be very concerning,” she said. “There are certain functions that you want government to perform that should not be at the whim of individuals or charities.”

Clue: All services are provided at the whim of individuals; the question is whether those individuals get a government paycheck.

Well, let’s see what functions the government of Detroit is engaging in that is so much better than the “whims” of individuals and charities, shall we?

Hint: Not even close.

Read it.

Working with a continuous record of Arctic climate reaching back 3.6 million years, researchers have documented a period when the region was significantly warmer and wetter than it is today and when the atmosphere’s inventory of carbon dioxide was comparable to today’s levels.

Read it.

From, say, California or Michigan to, say, Texas.

Moving provides one of the few limits on the megalomania of state bureaucrats.

Arnold Kling reviews an important new book.

Weiner looks at the problem of social order from the perspective of legal history and anthropology. He finds a pattern of order that he calls the rule of the clan, which does not require a strong central state. However, he shows that rule of the clan relies on a set of rules and social norms which are inconsistent with libertarian values of peace, open commerce, and individual autonomy. He argues that the atrophy of the state would lead to an undesirable resurgence of the rule of the clan.

Read it.

Yeah, we can laugh, but modern life has place educrats between a rock and a spiky hard place. If they don’t want to get sued, they can take a chance on exercising ‘discretion’. In order to avoid exercising ‘discretion’, they put in place ‘mandatory’ policies. ‘Hey, it’s not my fault, the policy left me no option. Go complain to that guy over there.’ And mandatory policies, when pursued in a it’s-not-my-fault mode, lead to absurd results. But they’d rather look stupid (or at least dull followers of stupid policies) than be sued. Nobody ever got fired for following policy, no matter how stupid the policy might be, and bureaucrats are all about not getting fired. (If they can teach some kids along the way, that’s gravy, but that’s not what they’re there for.)

It’s just that simple.