Americans for Tax Reform has a handy reminder list for you.

My favorite:

2. Elliot Spitzer is running for office again

Seriously. Client Number 9, New York’s former Governor will be seeking the position of NYC comptroller. It’s so real he Tweeted it. As if that wasn’t enough Kristin Davis, the woman who provided him with call girls, is running for the spot as well. This probably doesn’t help Anthony Weiner’s bid for mayor. Something’s clearly is in the drinking water.

Steve Sailer deals some inconvenient truth.

 The housing project was on K-Street, kitty-corner from the NPR headquarters. Today, the housing project is a parking lot that charges $8 per hour. Could it be that NPR executives, K Street lobbyists, and others who can pay $8 per hour to park got tired of being polar-bear hunted, and are pretty effective at eventually getting their way?

…

Have you ever noticed that every single thing in America — Washington D.C. housing, Harvard, Augusta National, Goldman Sachs, Teach for America, or whatever — runs on the basis of selectionism? The people with the power pick the new people they want to have around and don’t pick the people they don’t want around. The only exception to this pattern is immigration policy, where, as we all know, it would be unconscionable for citizens to have a say in who gets to become citizens. Didn’t you hear that George W. Bush made a speech this weekend in favor of immigration reform? Who are you to doubt the word of George W. Bush?

Read it.

Gotta love those strict gun control laws.

Read it.

Why? Because a classic diet coupled with cardiovascular exercise will result in weight loss, but it will come at a cost as 60% of the weight loss will be fat (that’s good!) while the remaining 40% will come from muscle (that’s really, really bad!).

Foseti brings the heat.

The only difference between Detroit and the Third World in terms of corruption is Detroit don’t have no goats in the street.

‘Hey, they speak English….’ No, they don’t. Listen to Eminem for a bit.

Charlie LeDuff grew up as a white kid in Detroit. He leaves Detroit to write at various major news outlets. Eventually he moves his young family back to Detroit to be closer to his extended family. He ends up depressed, violent, and just beaten down by the city. He also discovers he’s black. Along the way, he finds a lot of things that are incredibly interesting and criminally underreported. He’s an interesting guy.

He is indeed.

The catalog of problems is terrible. Alarms don’t work at the fire stations. Fire men have to fix up the station to keep it from crumbling. LeDuff discovers that city officials have been embezzling money slated to maintain the fire stations. He writes a story on it. In perhaps the most revealing episode of the book, no one even pretends to care. City officials are stealing millions, firefighters are (literally) dying, the city is plagued by arson, and no one cares.

Well, that’s Michigan for you. Blue State all the way.

Read it.

What could you do with just a compass and a strightedge?

Read it.

As the confrontation became physical and Dos Santos refused to leave the field, Da Silva allegedly produced a knife and stabbed the player, who died while being taken to hospital.

Reports said that outraged spectators responded by running on to the field and stoning Da Silva, before severing his head and sticking it on a stake in the middle of the field.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Jason Everman has the unique distinction of being the guy who was kicked out of Nirvana and Soundgarden, two rock bands that would sell roughly 100 million records combined. At 26, he wasn’t just Pete Best, the guy the Beatles left behind. He was Pete Best twice.

Then again, he wasn’t remotely. What Everman did afterward put him far outside the category of rock’n’roll footnote. He became an elite member of the U.S. Army Special Forces, one of those bearded guys riding around on horseback in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban.

…

In Everman’s cabin, I saw medal after medal, including the coveted Combat Infantryman Badge. “Sounds kind of Boy Scouty,” he said. “But it’s actually something cool.” I saw photos of Everman in fatigues on a warship (“an antipiracy operation in Asia”). A shot of Everman with Donald Rumsfeld. Another with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal. And that’s when it hit me. Jason Everman had finally become a rock star.

Surest thing you know.

Read it.

Got tired of reading stories about Muslims murdering people. So here are some stair-ish phenomena.

Steve Sailer indulges in a little revisionism.

The arrogance of the South Carolinians and their followers in the six Deep South cotton states would not have plunged the nation into a war that killed 750,000 Americans if not for Abraham Lincoln’s Hicksville unpreparedness. Indeed, Lincoln’s worldly Secretary of State William Seward came up with a brilliant plan to avert civil war at the last moment, only to have it shunned by a jealous Lincoln.

A glance at a map showing the dates of secession suggests that it might have been contained at the brushfire stage.

Read it.

In 1862, after President Abraham Lincoln appointed him secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton penned a letter to the president requesting sweeping powers, which would include total control of the telegraph lines. By rerouting those lines through his office, Stanton would keep tabs on vast amounts of communication, journalistic, governmental and personal. On the back of Stanton’s letter Lincoln scribbled his approval: “The Secretary of War has my authority to exercise his discretion in the matter within mentioned.”

The telegraphy system has been called ‘the Victorian Internet‘.

David Henderson, a Real Economist, points out how busybodies trying to make things better often make things worse.

Let’s say that people like Derek Thompson get their way and that offering unpaid internships becomes legally very risky. What happens next? One big advantage of a free market is that it brings together people who are strangers. So, for example, a major business can offer an unpaid internship to someone who has no connection with the firm. But if the business fears getting sued later, it will be much more hesitant to offer that internship. In what situation would the business be at less risk? When it offers an unpaid internship to someone that the firm’s owners or managers know, someone in their social circle. Why? Imagine that I offer an internship to the daughter of a good friend of mine. If the daughter accepts, then I am not as fearful that she will sue later. I know something about her ethics from knowing her father. And even if she is inclined to sue, her father will, because of our friendship, be likely to talk her out of it. So the ironic unintended consequence is that making unpaid internships legally risky gives the person who has social connections to the business an added advantage in the competition for an unpaid internship. If it’s the case that the people offering unpaid internships tend to be higher-income and that the people they’re connected with tend to be higher-income–as I think it is–then making unpaid internships legally risky will help exacerbate the very problem that Derek Thompson and others have with unpaid internships.

Read it.

One incident summarizes the confusion. A friend I was traveling with became sick. Conveniently, the man we were just about to interview had been a doctor in the war. It turned out he had been a vivisectionist. He organized “medical training” sessions in which the Japanese would take healthy Chinese people, strap them to tables, and practice field surgery on them: bowel resection, limb amputation, and (after shooting them) bullet removal. They did it without anesthesia. Why waste that on Chinese people? This man had abused the most basic premises of what it means to be a doctor. But he was a good doctor to us, helping my friend. We thanked him.

I feel the same way about abortion doctors. What does it take to kill an innocent child, then go home to the wife and kids and maybe watch a little television? There is a reason the that Hippocratic Oath begins with Primum non nocere, ‘First, to do no harm’.

I recently wrote a piece for CNN about a Syrian rebel who carved out a man’s heart and began to eat it. The editor had asked me to explain what could make a man do such a thing. I tried to explain, and many people were outraged by what I wrote. In one way or another, they were all saying: You think when you try to understand why men do evil things, you are going to learn something that might help prevent atrocities in the future. But really you are just excusing the perpetrators, justifying unjustifiable actions. The only thing you need to understand about evil is how to punish it.

And likewise, Islam is an evil religion — a religion that blesses what other religions curse (murder, robbery, deceit when it is profitable, rape, slavery) and more or less says ‘Whatever profits our group is good, whatever disadvantages our group is bad.’ By that standard, there is no moral difference between Islam and National Socialism or Communism.

Read it.

 People who keep llamas as pets will readily offer you any number of reasons: llamas are quiet, they’re gentle and affectionate, they don’t take a lot of work to maintain and, for outdoor animals, they don’t smell bad.

But it’s more than that. Look at a llama and it’ll gaze back sympathetically with those huge, beguiling eyes, ears perked up, looking for all the world like it understands you and really cares about your problems.

You can also use them to carry stuff for you on the trail, and they will flat kick the crap out of coyotes, which is why they are often used by sheep farmers to guard their flocks.

 Her husband said he gets a lot of questions about it. “People come up to me and ask, ‘Why are the llamas humming?’ ” he said. “And I’ll say, ‘Because they don’t know the words.’ ”

Congressmen are a lot like that.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, peeks into the cesspool.

Zimmerman. “It’s hard to find a sympathetic character in the entire saga,” opined our editors about the Zimmerman trial. Oh, I don’t know. I’m quite sympathetic toward Zim. He thought he’d be an active citizen, helping to keep his neighborhood safe. The poor sap thought he was living in the old, free America, where citizens looked out for each other, raised barns together, attended town meetings, and the rest.

That America is long gone, at one with Nineveh and Tyre. Town meetings nowadays are packed with activists from ACORN and GLAAD, and before you can raise a barn you need to spend two years and $100,000 on lawyers to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement. Whom did Zim think Neighborhood Watch has to watch out for? The poor guy’s living in the past, and that’s something toward which I’m definitely sympathetic.

Guy Somerset takes the red pill.

Most of us now realize that both political parties are corrupt to their core and little distinguished by their platforms. A significant portion of us knows that all publishing, broadcast, newsprint, and to a large degree electronic content is owned by a handful of companies whose interests are hostile to ours.

Dude — welcome to the world of the Crust. If you’re not on the outside, you’re the one being digested.

Read it.

 School administrators at Winston-Salem State University (WSSU) are systematically raising the final grades of African-American students, three ex-faculty members told Campus Reform last month.

…

Documents provided to Campus Reform by one of the former faculty members appear to validate these claims. Campus Reform has chosen not to publish the records due to concerns that doing so may violate the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act by revealing the names and grades of students.

According to Hedgepeth, and the two former professors who were granted anonymity because of they feared speaking out may jeopardize their retirement, instructors would submit final grades to the school only to have them later revised upwards by administrators as a way to “take care of their African American students.”

Affirmative Action taken to the max. My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Melomics

Flashing Roadside Emergency Disk

Food Huggers

A Massive Chart of Every Superhero’s Powers Ever

America’s top chain burgers

Microsoft Home Use Program

SolSource grill

Read it.

“Indeed, the argument that educational benefits justify racial discrimination was advanced in support of racial segregation in the 1950’s, but emphatically rejected by this Court,” U. S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion in Fisher v. the University of Texas. “And just as the alleged educational benefits of segregation were insufficient to justify racial discrimination then, see Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954), the alleged educational benefits of diversity cannot justify racial discrimination today.”

Read it.

Back in 2011 we posted extensive coverage of the “Camp of the Saints” crisis in Italy and Malta in the wake of the Arab Spring, as hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants flooded into the islands of the southern Mediterranean and the southern coasts of Italy and Sicily.

The flood of refugees abated somewhat in 2012, but is still ongoing. During the migration season — the summer months, when the Med is fairly calm — hundreds of people in rickety boats show up off the coast of Lampedusa and have to be rescued, housed, clothed, and fed, according to EU asylum regulations. No matter that they riot, vandalize, commit robberies, and terrorize the locals — they are “refugees”, and their needs come first.

Read it.

Tell the truth: Who hasn’t wanted to do that?

Aaron Renn turns over a rock.

Localities have also been in a fiscal vice as their tax receipts have collapsed thanks to the Great Recession and especially the decline in housing values, while at the same time the chickens are coming home to roost from the accumulated unfunded liabilities that had been racked up from sweetheart pension deals and the like.

And state and federal retrenchment have cut into municipal budgets. Aid to municipalities is easy to cut. Also, it’s easy for states to make municipalities bear the brunt of tax caps and other disempowerment items since living with them is Somebody Else’s Problem for state office holders. And most states radically under-empowered local governments to begin with.

Combine these and there’s little room to maneuver for many cities and mayors. They are hemmed in on all sides. So what do they do? Unsurprisingly, they’ve increasingly turned to gimmicks, especially in bigger cities that have the talent firepower to dream them up.

Just as the cash-strapped and moribund government of ancien regime France attempted to fix its financial problems by farming out the collection of revenues, a short term fix that long-term merely made thing worse, modern state and local governments are trying the same sort of financial handwaving rather than bite the political bullet of actually correcting the stupid practices that got them in trouble in the first place.

Read it.

The state of Massachusetts is experiencing millions of dollars in loss thanks to entrepreneurial can and bottle collectors from other states carpetbagging in their wares to turn them in for $0.05 a piece. According to CBS Local Boston, trucks from Rhode Island are traveling into Massachusetts loaded up with bottles and cans, which bring no return in Rhode Island, and handing them over for cash in the Bay State. According to environmental consultant Kevin Dietly of Northbridge Environmental in Westford, “We estimate that something like 6-8% of all returns that come back each year are fraudulent. That probably costs the commonwealth between four and six million dollars a year.”

How is this ‘fraudulent’? You’re the guys paying for the cans and bottles. You don’t want the cans and bottles, don’t offer to pay a nickel apiece for them. Problem solved.

Clue: You get more of the behavior you pay for. Another clue: Markets work, even when you don’t intend them to.

Read it.

Thank God for those strict gun control laws; who knows what a jungle Chi-town would be without that.

Read it.

And far too many of them work for the government, i.e. are parasites.

Read it.

 First introduced in May, the Square Stand is a cash register replacement that features both a secure iPad stand and an integrated card reader. It is also able to support additional peripherals like a receipt printer, kitchen printer, cash drawer, and barcode scanners.

Still time to buy Apple stock now that it’s cheap due to the hedge funds dumping it.

Read it.

To the rescue come the researchers and their paper, “Tin Anode for Sodium-Ion Batteries Using Natural Wood Fiber as a Mechanical Buffer and Electrolyte Reservoir”. Their brainstorm was to take cellulose fibers from a yellow pine tree, coat them first in carbon nanotubes to improve conductivity and then a tin film – tin being the anode material of choice for both lithium and sodium ion batteries.

Not only did the yellow-pine cellulose fiber absorb much of the shock caused by the heavy sodium ions slamming into the tin, it also served as a fine receptacle for the necessary electrolytes.

Read it.

At a test site in Norway, Thor Energy has successfully created a thorium nuclear reactor — but not in the sense that most people think of when they hear the word thorium. The Norwegians haven’t solved the energy crisis and global warming in one fell swoop — they haven’t created a cold fusion thorium reactor. What they have done, though, which is still very cool, is use thorium instead of uranium in a conventional nuclear reactor. In one fell swoop, thorium fuel, which is safer, less messy to clean up, and not prone to nuclear weapons proliferation, could quench the complaints of nuclear power critics everywhere.

Yeah, well, maybe. It’s still progress.

Read it.

Dartmouth economics professor Bill Fischel has posted “Fiscal Zoning and Economists’ Views of the Property Tax,” which will be a chapter in a revised edition of Fischel’s classic The Economics of Zoning Laws. Fischel provides a great overview of zoning, development, and property taxes, highlighting the important fact that zoning is fiscal in nature — that is to say, local governments use zoning to “preserve and possibly enhance the local property tax base.” … Contrary the great myth of benevolent city planners getting together and using the best available evidence to scientifically apply land-use regulations that will maximize social welfare, land-use regulations are developed like most government “goods”: through competing self-interested special interest groups fighting over benefits in the political arena.

Read it.

From the New York Times in 1981: A cloud no bigger than a man’s, uh, hand.

Read it.

Something surprising has happened with many so-called “sustainable” buildings. When actually measured in post-occupancy assessments, they’ve proven far less sustainable than their proponents have claimed. In some cases they’ve actually performed worse than much older buildings, with no such claims. A 2009 New York Times article, “Some buildings not living up to green label,” documented the extensive problems with many sustainability icons. Among other reasons for this failing, the Times pointed to the widespread use of expansive curtain-wall glass assemblies and large, “deep-plan” designs that put most usable space far from exterior walls, forcing greater reliance on artificial light and ventilation systems.

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

Read it.

No, it’s not socialism, although one could be forgiven for guessing that.

Coccidioidomycosis, known as “cocci,” is an insidious airborne fungal disease in which microscopic spores in the soil take flight on the wind or even a mild breeze to lodge in the moist habitat of the lungs and, in the most extreme instances, spread to the bones, the skin, the eyes or, in Mr. Klorman’s case, the brain.

The infection, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has labeled “a silent epidemic,” is striking more people each year, with more than 20,000 reported cases annually throughout the Southwest, especially in California and Arizona. Although most people exposed to the fungus do not fall ill, about 160 die from it each year, with thousands more facing years of disability and surgery. About 9 percent of those infected will contract pneumonia and 1 percent will experience serious complications beyond the lungs.

Read it.

Because ? is ‘Thursday’, you twit. everybody knows that.

Read it.

Even so, most workers tick DILLIGAF* box on survey.

And rightly so.

Read it.

People are waking up to the bogus nature of the ‘intellectual property’ scam.

Read it.

“I had all kinds of negative emotions inside me,” he says. “The desire to go outside, anger towards society and my parents, sadness about having this condition, fear about what would happen in the future, and jealousy towards the people who were leading normal lives.”

He should come to America, where he could become a Democrat and an Obama supporter, hang out with like-minded people, and get a government grant. At least it would get him out of his room.

Read it.

Like Communists and Fascists, atheists like the idea of religious faith, they just don’t want God included. It’s all about them, you see.

Read it.

… which is a vast improvement over being a Marxist terrorist, which is the actual reason why he was imprisoned in 1962, although the ass-licking coverage in the Voices of the Crust don’t dare mention it … not being part of the Narrative.

Read it.

Not so’s you’d notice from the Obama administration.

The great Allen Guelzo (one of the Power Line 100) wonders something simple: why didn’t President Obama or even Vice President Foot-in-Mouth attend any of the commemorative observances of the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Gettysburg this week?  For that matter, why haven’t the mainstream media covered the story?

Hey, Gettysburg was just so 150 years ago….

Read it.

Employers across the country are complaining about the impacts of Obamacare on their businesses, with many slashing employees in order to comply with the dictates of the program. Writing teacher Clint Benjamin, who normally works for the Community College of Alleghany County, saw his hours cut thanks to Obamacare. “I’ve got a kid to raise, bills to pay,” he said. Walmart and Red Lobster are reportedly doing the same thing; part time hires have increased, with full time hires slowing.

Elect an idiot, get it packed up your pooper. You’d think these idiots would learn….

Read it.

Very dangerous — you go first.

Read it.

Obama administration officials are illegally delaying enforcement of a central provision in the president’s namesake legislation in a desperate attempt to manipulate the 2014 midterm elections and swell the ranks of those who look to government for healthcare.

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

Section 1513’s “Employer Mandate” is one of five parts of the ACA that are absolutely essential for this government-run system to work, with the most well-known of those five being the infamous “Individual Mandate” upheld by the Supreme Court as a tax by a controversial 5-4 decision in 2012.

And the Employer Mandate is mandatory. The law Congress wrote explicitly commands that this provision takes effect in January 2014. The ACA does not permit the government to grant a reprieve or an extension.

Yet in a blatantly illegal move, the Obama administration is presuming to rewrite the ACA by choosing not to enforce provisions that are causing visible problems. The IRS—which is tasked with enforcing the Employer Mandate—will simply not enforce it until 2015. Every large employer in the country is under the mandate. If they don’t comply, then they are breaking federal law.

But the IRS not enforcing Section 1513 is like a policeman who patrols a stretch of road who says for the next year, he won’t issue any speeding tickets. He has no authority to suspend the law, but if he chooses to violate his duty by failing to enforce the law, then to all the motorists on the road it’s as if the law does not exist.

However, the White House is doing nothing to stop Section 1501’s Individual Mandate. Almost every American is still being commanded to buy insurance or face a penalty (now called a “tax” by the Supreme Court). If you work at a large company, you might be on your own and need to buy insurance somewhere else.

Your tax dollars at work.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

 According to Forbes, there are a little over 400 billionaires in the U.S. Many (such as the Koch Brothers, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, and George Soros) are actively using their money, influence, and power to promote more immigration. (And this is not to mention foreign billionaires, such as Carlos Slim, financial savior of the New York Times, who profits exorbitantly from phone calls between Mexican immigrants in America and their friends and family in his country.)

Even the Koch Brothers, enemies of all that’s left and good in the world? Say it ain’t so….

 Here’s a question — in the latest round of controversy over immigration, has a single billionaire spoken up publicly against expanding immigration?

Uh, that would be No. And somehow I don’t see this figuring in the ritual denunciations of The Rich by The Usual Suspects any time soon.

Read it.

Could you imagine an article in the New York Times entitled ‘On the atheist coast, offering theists a spiritual home’? No, neither can I, and that points out one of the most bizarre affectations afflicting the Crust these days: The blithe assumption that, even though they run the country, they’re some how ‘rebels’ and ‘edgy’, even ‘oppressed’. Our Ruling Class is never happier than when they are playing at being victims — a romantic fringe revolting against a stifling conformity … when they are the stifling conformity. It’s like a bunch of high-school students, being rebelliously independent — and all dressing and talking the same way. You wonder what they will do when they actually wake up.

Atheists, by definition, don’t need a ‘spiritual home’ — spirit is exactly the thing they deny, and their home is wherever the Rulling Class pitch their tents. In a world where high-school students get denied diplomas for daring to mention God at graduation, I don’t see that atheists have a lot to complain about; they’re sitting in the driver’s seat with their hands on the wheel but bitching about having no say about where the car is going. There are some situations for which the term ‘clueless’ is entirely inadequate.

Read it.

An engaging look at one of Britain’s more obscure installations.

Read it.

Engelbart’s vision, from the beginning, was collaborative. His vision was people working together in a shared intellectual space. His entire system was designed around that intent.

From that perspective, separate cursors weren’t a feature so much as a symptom. It was the only design that could have made any sense. It just fell out. The collaborators both have to point at information on the screen, in the same way that they would both point at information on a chalkboard. Obviously they need their own pointers.

Likewise, for every aspect of Engelbart’s system. The entire system was designed around a clear intent.

Our screen sharing, on the other hand, is a bolted-on hack that doesn’t alter the single-user design of our present computers. Our computers are fundamentally designed with a single-user assumption through-and-through, and simply mirroring a display remotely doesn’t magically transform them into collaborative environments.

If you attempt to make sense of Engelbart’s design by drawing correspondences to our present-day systems, you will miss the point, because our present-day systems do not embody Engelbart’s intent. Engelbart hated our present-day systems.

An excellent piece, and a model for its kind.

Read it.

I like it. It has texture, and scope.

Read it.

Thereby turning an ugly building into a fugly building. That’s what they mean by progress in these degenerate modern times.

Fortunately, like all student projects, it has about as much chance of seeing reality as I do of receiving a large check from Bill Gates.

(Not that I would turn it down, you understand….)

Read it.

With good reason.