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CAIR, an Islamic terrorist front group that reportedly raises money for Hamas, has interfered with the U.S. government’s investigation into this operation. A few years ago it actually hampered an FBI probe into the disappearance of dozens of Twin Cities Somali men. Many in the local Somali community denounced CAIR’s actions, saying that the group was actually discouraging them from cooperating with the FBI.

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

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Time to abandon pretense that the Federal government’s power is somehow limited.

The Obama Labor Department has just finalized rules that will effectively require businesses that get federal contracts to adopt a 7 percent hiring quota for the disabled. Much of the American workforce is employed by a federal contractor, since most large companies have federal contracts. So this will affect much of the economy, and impose massive new costs on American business.

Disturbingly, the new rules require a 7 percent quota not just for the division of the company that receives a federal contract, but for the company as a whole. And they require that the 7 percent quota be met not just for the company as a whole, but also in each line of business in the company. That means they effectively must be met even in job categories where the number of disabled people is lower than average, either because the qualified labor pool is disproportionately able-bodied (like those that require hard physical labor) or because the job is not compatible with certain mental or psychological impediments that qualify as disabilities.

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When you’re well paid, your paid vacations masquerading as suspensions can be very lucrative.

And few are so well-paid as government workers.

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Hollywood Casino in Grantville, Pennsylvania has told its part-time workers that they may no longer work over 30 hours. The reason: Obamacare.

“Not the first, won’t be the last,” Gene Barr of the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry told WHTM-PA. “The casino is clearly one of many. We’re gonna see more and more of this.”

Todays reading is from Econ 101: If you raise the price of something, people will buy less of it. If you raise the price of having full-time employees, employers will cut back on the number of full-time employees to the level that they can afford.

How’s that Hope & Change working out for ya?

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“Troop deaths put strain on Mideast peace talks.” So states a Washington Post headline (print edition) this morning. The headline refers to the fact that Palestinians killed two Israeli troops this weekend, including an unarmed 20-year old whose dead body was tossed into a well by his murderer.

The armed wing of Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party has claimed responsibility for both killings. Its actual responsibility, if any, is less significant, politically speaking, than its eagerness to make the claim. Moreover, the Palestinian Authority — Israel’s “peace partner” — has not yet condemned the murders. So, yes, you can see how the murders might put a damper on “peace talks.”

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The biometrics hacking team of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has successfully bypassed the biometric security of Apple’s TouchID using easy everyday means. A fingerprint of the phone user, photographed from a glass surface, was enough to create a fake finger that could unlock an iPhone 5s secured with TouchID. This demonstrates – again – that fingerprint biometrics is unsuitable as access control method and should be avoided.

Gee, that didn’t take long.

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Thank God for those strict gun control laws, or the place would look like Texas.

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Obamacare does, of course, have something to do with the debt. But that aside, is it true that past Congresses have never used the debt ceiling in order to get their way on non-budgetary issues?

No it is not true. Indeed, Obama’s assertion is so untrue that Glenn Kessler, the “Fact Checker” at the Washington Post gives it four Pinocchios.

It turns out that Congress has been doing what Obama says it has never done since 1973. That year, led by Ted Kennedy and Walter Mondale, the Senate sought to make a campaign finance reform bill a condition of raising the debt ceiling.

Obama, either a bold-faced liar or terminally ignorant. Not a great set of choices….

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

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The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) conceals donations from overseas through a series of shell organizations, according to documents from court actions involving the Muslim advocacy group.

Since its founding in 1994, CAIR has presented itself to American Muslims and the media as a single organization centered on American concerns. But it shows a different face to the IRS, with multiple corporate entities that conceal the large financial donations that come to CAIR from Middle East sources.

A bit of vacuous hand-wringing from the Guardian, the British equivalent of The Nation.

That’s America, we say, as news of the latest massacre breaks – last week it was the slaughter of 12 people by Aaron Alexis at Washington DC’s navy yard – and move on. But what if we no longer thought of this as just a problem for America and, instead, viewed it as an international humanitarian crisis – a quasi civil war, if you like, that calls for outside intervention? As citizens of the world, perhaps we should demand an end to the unimaginable suffering of victims and their families – the maiming and killing of children – just as America does in every new civil conflict around the globe.

This from a country that has a constant problem of jihadists murdering people on the street and in the subways, with gangs of Pakistani immigrants and their get grooming girls for sex slavery. Shouldn’t the world intervene? No, because that would be raaaaaaasit.

And then there’s the massacre at a Kenyan mall that is still in the news, in which the death toll is by my estimate at least three times that at the Navy Yard, and yet not a peep out of these guys. Shouldn’t the world intervene? No, because it’s just wogs shooting niggers and nobody at the lily-white Guardian can be bothered about those sorts of people.

And don’t get me started about the civil war in Syria, which is like a fight between Hitler and Stalin – there is no good side, just two different flavors of bad that we wouldn’t even consider being involved in did we not have an arrested adolescent for a President.

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Truly, you can find anything on the Internet….

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The National Guard has taken control of the plant, and officers will monitor production and distribution.

Oh, yeah, that’ll work. The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money … and toilet paper.

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

Read it.

Hint: Some animals are more equal than others.

As part of its war on standards, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing employers around the country for using the results of background checks to screen applicants for employment. The EEOC’s theory is that such screening excludes a disproportionate amount of Black applicants and, at least in the cases where EEOC sues, is not justified by business necessity.

But the federal government screens applicants for employment. And given the size of its workforce and the disproportionate representation of Blacks among those with prior criminal convictions, the government’s screening for criminal convictions surely excludes Blacks from employment disproportionately.

Accordingly, when employers are sued by the government over background checking, they seek to discover how the government used background checks. The government, for its part, fights like hell to prevent such discovery.

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

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Last night, he detailed how the Intelligence Committee cleverly made documents briefly available right before Congress’ summer recess, but did it in such a way that nobody was likely to be made aware of it in order to make that “we held hearings but nobody came” claim. In short, they didn’t actually inform the House members’ offices at all, but did the congressional equivalent of posting a hand-written note on the bulletin board of the laundry room.

Makes you wonder what they’re trying to hide. (Perhaps any suggestion of a connection to intelligence. That’s just a guess, you understand.)

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‘Austerity’ is government-speak for ‘forced to use silver utensils rather than gold’.

To help understand what American austerity really looks like in 2013, we’ve helpfully listed the 17,000+ entries from the Federal Register (“The Daily Journal of the United States Government”) since sequestration took effect on March 1, 2013.

Not everything on the list is wasteful, of course. But is this a snapshot of a government cut to the bone?

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It’s not strange at all — Ramsey Clark has been a supporter of the enemies of America for as long as I can remember, milking his brief stint as Attorney-General until the cow squeals.

Joining him on the trip is former six-term member of Congress from Atlanta, Georgia, the virulently pro-Arab and anti-Israel Cynthia McKinney. (Her father blamed the loss of her Congressional seat on the Jews, who, he claimed, “bought everybody.”)

Yet Another Crazy Black Congresswoman. Washington is full of them.

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Except for the mass murder part. I guess black is the new ‘normal’.

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Of course, the New York Times, a Voice of the Crust, would prefer that Americans by their cloth from factories in America paying above-market rates to unionized labor, but that ain’t gonna happen.

Bayard Winthrop, the founder of the sweatshirt and clothing company American Giant, was at the mill one morning earlier this year to meet with his Parkdale sales representative. Just last year, Mr. Winthrop was buying fabric from a factory in India. Now, he says, it is cheaper to shop in the United States. Mr. Winthrop uses Parkdale yarn from one of its 25 American factories, and has that yarn spun into fabric about four miles from Parkdale’s Gaffney plant, at Carolina Cotton Works.

Mr. Winthrop says American manufacturing has several advantages over outsourcing. Transportation costs are a fraction of what they are overseas. Turnaround time is quicker. Most striking, labor costs — the reason all these companies fled in the first place — aren’t that much higher than overseas because the factories that survived the outsourcing wave have largely turned to automation and are employing far fewer workers.

Steve Sailer examines some inconvenient truth.

Well, since status in the ‘black community’ accrues to those who can pass the ‘brown bag and ruler test’, a lot of them are indistinguishable from, well, white people.

Read it. And take the test … if you dare.

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

This is one of those stories that doesn’t need to be characterized, let alone embellished. You can draw your own conclusions. Today, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing on Benghazi at which Patricia Smith and Charles Woods, the mother and father respectively of two of the men who were killed by terrorists, testified. The Democrats on the committee didn’t even have the decency to listen to what these victims of the Obama administration’s gross negligence had to say.

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Funny how that works. Let me guess: It isn’t where white people live.

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In recent years, unions have successfully lobbied Democrat governors in states like Illinois and Connecticut to unionize home health care workers by executive action. The higher pay workers win is offset by the dues now owed to the union. The Labor Department’s action this week takes a step toward nationalizing this phenomenon.

A little known fact about union collective-bargaining agreements is that they can override federal rules and regulations. Federal regulations may require that employees who work more than 40 hours a week be paid time and a half, but a union contract can supercede that. “We know you are supposed to pay overtime,” a union boss could tell an employer. “But, recognize our union and negotiate a contract and we can waive that mandate.”

By adding more regulations to the home health-care industry, the feds are facilitating the union organizing efforts. They are providing more rules that can be waived in a collective bargaining agreement.

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Yeah, people might get the idea that California is actually a part of the United States (instead of, say, Mexico) and that would never do.

The Other McCain is on the case.

For the contemporary Left to stigmatize its opponents as Jew-haters is the exact opposite of truth. The Left — what used to be called “the far Left,” or “the extreme Left,” or simply Commies — has always been willing to exploit anti-Semitism when it suits their purposes. And in recent decades, as the Democrat Party has increasingly fallen under control of the Left, you see more and more Democrats aligned with the enemies of Israel, and using the term “neocon” as a sort of dog-whistle code word for “Jews.”

This what I mean when I refer to the “Sirhan Sirhan wing of the Democrat Party.” The increasing dominance of the Left — ideologues who share the dangerous views of extremists like Bill Ayers and Rev. Jeremiah Wright — shares less in common with Bobby Kennedy than they do with his assassin. But try asking anyone under 30 about who assassinated RFK (correct answer: a Palestinian nationalist) or who assassinated John F. Kennedy (correct answer: a pro-Castro communist named Lee Harvey Oswald) and you immediately discover that young people have been taught no facts about history.

Paul Mirengoff has it right, I think.

As John noted last night, congressional Republicans are moving toward a showdown with President Obama over defunding Obamacare. The House is poised to pass a continuing resolution that funds government operations beyond September, but does not include Obamacare. The Senate will pass a CR that funds Obamacare.

After that, it’s a question of who blinks first, and whether the blink will occur before or after a government shutdown. Call it a “blinksmanship.”

This crap happens all the time, and it’s usually the Republicans who cave.

An extended shutdown would, in all likelihood, tank the economy.

As to blame, it would, of course, be shared primarily between Obama and House Republicans. More blame would likely fall on Republicans. They, after all, will be the ones who disturbed a status quo that won’t look so bad when government services aren’t forthcoming and the economy takes a hit.

Moreover, Obama doesn’t have to face voters again. House Republicans have a rendezvous with the electorate next year.

That’s why I expect that Boehner and company will be the ones to blink, and do so pretty quickly.

Read it.

I mean … damn, people, take your shoes off if you need to….

If you’ve been following the news in the wake of the Washington Navy Yard massacre, you might be hopelessly confused about how frequently mass shootings happen in the United States. The Huffington Post reports that there have been at least 16 mass shootings this year so far, killing a total of 78 people. Mother Jones, on the other hand, has updated its much-cited “Guide to Mass Shootings” with the news that the Navy Yard murders were “the fifth mass shooting in the United States this year.” An article by Annie Linsky at Bloomberg doesn’t offer a count for 2013, but it does stress how rare such crimes are. That Huffington Post piece, by contrast, talks about how “common” mass shootings have “become.”

As you might have guessed, different reporters are using different definitions of “mass shooting.” We’ve waded through this thicket of competing numbers before, and if you want to get into the statistical weeds I can point you to a couple of posts I wrote last year, “Are Mass Shootings Becoming More Common in the United States?” and “Making Sense of Mass-Shooting Statistics.” Here’s the key points to remember as you read the numbers floating around in the press:

And, as you may have noticed, all of these counts take place in the-sky-is-falling regressive publications, who don’t really give a shit how many people get shot in ‘mass shootings’ (or they’d have something to say about the ‘mass shootings’ that take place every week in Chicago and Detroit and Los Angeles and ….) except insofar as it provides a stepping stone to enacting more ineffective ‘gun control’ laws. It’s all about the narrative.

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Works of art, every one.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, speaks for us all.

We have reached a point of diminishing returns in our public life. Hardly anything actually needs doing. We may in fact be past that point; not only does nothing much need doing, but we’d benefit if much of what has been done were to be undone. What useful work can I do with Windows 8 that I couldn’t do with XP?

Politicians make a living—a very grand living indeed at the higher levels—by saying there are things wrong that need fixing. Are there, though?

Hint: Not as much as they would have you believe.

We are so short of real discontents nowadays, we have to make problems up. There aren’t any hungry children. There aren’t any people dying because they can’t afford an operation. There aren’t any Joad families on the road desperately seeking work and homes. There aren’t any workers being exploited by unscrupulous bosses or tenants being evicted by unscrupulous landlords. Nobody’s being lynched or denied due process or forced by poverty to give up a child for adoption. I wouldn’t say nobody’s poor anymore, but there is no longer what the Victorians called a “deserving poor.” To be in dire straits nowadays, you have to be really, really feckless.

I know a few of those. It is not a pretty sight.

Read it.

South Carolina Republicans go RINO hunting.

On Monday evening, the Fairfield County GOP in South Carolina formally censured Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for his activities in the U.S. Senate. The official GOP body in the state passed its own version of a 29-point resolution shredding Graham’s record in Washington as “in contravention of” principles of the Republican Party as contained in the South Carolina GOP platform.

Maybe the ones in Arizona will take the hint.

Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

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You’re never too young to learn how to be productive.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, provides some inconvenient truth.

While standard economic theory doesn’t predict that a higher minimum wage will necessarily reduce the number of hours of paid work by low-skilled workers – employers, for example, might adjust to the higher minimum wage exclusively by working all of their low-skilled workers harder – reduced employment for low-skilled workers remains among the most plausible consequences of the adjustments that employers inevitably will make to a rise in the minimum wage.

W.S. Siebert, an economist at the University of Birmingham, has a very nice article in the Summer 2013 issue of Economic Affairs reviewing much recent research on the employment effects of minimum-wage legislation.  This research, in toto, pretty convincingly shows that higher minimum wages promote higher unemployment among low-skilled workers.  Here’s a recent blog post that Prof. Siebert wrote to summarize his article’s findings.

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Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but since the 2008 meltdown, the government’s housing specialist, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, has not been active in the debate over housing policy. That might seem odd, but given the department’s role in the mortgage meltdown, it’s no wonder the agency would prefer to stay out of the limelight.

…

But then Lehman folded, and suddenly the government went silent on HUD’s great work. Instead, in 2010, the new HUD secretary, Shawn Donovan, told the House Financial Services Committee: “Seeing their market share decline [between 2004 and 2006] as a result of a change of demand, the GSEs made the decision to widen their focus from safer prime loans and begin chasing the non-prime market, loosening longstanding underwriting and risk management standards along the way.” In other words, as Fannie and Freddie plunged headlong into the subprime abyss, HUD was just a bystander.

There is no doubt what really happened. Between 1997 and 2007, HUD’s affordable-housing policies under two administrations built an enormous mortgage bubble—nine times as large as any bubble in modern history—and when this bubble collapsed, it caused a 30%-40% decline in housing prices. This left homeowners who had limited financial resources and no equity in their houses unable to refinance or sell, causing an unprecedented number of mortgage defaults. Shocked by these numbers, investors fled mortgage-backed securities, making them useless for short-term financing by financial institutions like Lehman. The result was a panic and a financial crisis.

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Earlier, we wrote about the Obama administration’s attempt to inject a race-conscious “disparate impact” provision into colorblind anti-discrimination laws like the Fair Housing Act, and how that could lead to risky, race-conscious lending, bad loans, and future bank failures, mortgage meltdowns, and financial crises. Now, Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder highlights an additional area where disparate-impact rules may be having a negative impact: higher education. (“Disparate impact” is a term in anti-discrimination law for when a neutral policy happens to affect minorities more than whites. One example is a standardized test that whites pass at a higher rate than some minority group, even though test scores are calculated the same way for members of all races. Some civil-rights laws contain language authorizing “disparate-impact” claims, but others do not, and are phrased in colorblind terms.)

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Welcome to another episode of “Cool Science Stuff That Probably Will Have Some Effect On Our Lives Later But We Probably Won’t Realize It.” In this week’s installment we present graphene photosensors.

Read it. And watch the video.

Developer Metaio knows a thing or two about augmented reality, and building on the magic of its Audi eKurzinfo app, it’s created some prototype software for Google Glass that straps a car’s instruction manual to your face. Instead of relying on markers, GPS or point-cloud processing, the Glass app uses reference CAD models to identify what you’re looking at and overlay directions on a 3D plane.

We have the technology.

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For edX, MOOC.org represents another step towards going beyond the boundaries of its current model, which includes partnership with institutions like Harvard, MIT, Stanford and other elite universities. In April, the organization merged with Stanford University-based startup Class2Go to build an open-source version of its platform that can be used by any institution around the globe. The goal has been to allow developers access to edX’s code to allow any institution to host and distribute digital courses for on-campus and distance learners — both online and offline — and create better ways to collect student data.

With today’s partnership, edX is expanding that mission, as its partnership with Google will enable any institution or business to post courses on MOOC.org and presumably open the doors to public access of edX’s content. It will also offer a more diverse range of content from non-profit institutions to higher education institutions and businesses, edX President Anant Agarwal said.

Unfortunately, this will suffer from the General Problem of the Internet: Sorting through all of the crap to fine the useful stuff. And, when it comes to education, what constitutes ‘useful stuff’ will differ from person to person. I have high hopes, but low expectations, for the success of this initiative.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

We live in an era obsessed with gender oppression. For example, Americans were recently alerted that the women of Harvard Business School are deprived of their rightful grade point averages by being asked out so often on expensive dates by well-heeled suitors.

Guy Somerset has some advice.

Whenever a colleague asks for voting advice, I have one stock answer—vote for whoever doesn’t have commercials with children. Whichever candidate trots out the tykes is the one lacking in ideas, so avoid him.

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A cross-disciplinary team of scientists, engineers, and clinicians announced today that they have begun a Phase I clinical trial of an implantable vaccine to treat melanoma, the most lethal form of skin cancer.

I’m betting you were starting to forget that we actually have one.

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When talking about ‘white privilege’, how about let’s include this one — the privilege of not talking to racist academics.

Some animals are more equal than others.

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 Many argue inequality is an unavoidable byproduct of growth—a function of investors and entrepreneurs benefiting from successful demand for their products and value creation in financial markets. Inequality rose quickly during economic expansions (1980s and 1990s) and declined during the most recent recession. In other words, the wealthy gain more during good times and lose more during bad times.

…

A 2012 survey from GlobeScan found that 58 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “the rich deserve their wealth.” That’s actually higher than it was in 2008, before the economic crisis, Wall Street bailouts and the Occupy movement.

Damn, there’s that pesky democracy thing getting in the way of the Regressive agenda again.

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What is the sound of one hand shooting?

I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now. (Except for white people, of course.)

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Funny how that works.

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MANY scientists believe that by transforming the earth’s natural landscapes, we are undermining the very life support systems that sustain us. Like bacteria in a petri dish, our exploding numbers are reaching the limits of a finite planet, with dire consequences. Disaster looms as humans exceed the earth’s natural carrying capacity. Clearly, this could not be sustainable.

This is nonsense. Even today, I hear some of my scientific colleagues repeat these and similar claims — often unchallenged. And once, I too believed them. Yet these claims demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of the ecology of human systems. The conditions that sustain humanity are not natural and never have been. Since prehistory, human populations have used technologies and engineered ecosystems to sustain populations well beyond the capabilities of unaltered “natural” ecosystems.

…

It was only after years of research into the ecology of agriculture in China that I reached the point where my observations forced me to see beyond my biologists’s blinders. Unable to explain how populations grew for millenniums while increasing the productivity of the same land, I discovered the agricultural economist Ester Boserup, the antidote to the demographer and economist Thomas Malthus and his theory that population growth tends to outrun the food supply. Her theories of population growth as a driver of land productivity explained the data I was gathering in ways that Malthus could never do. While remaining an ecologist, I became a fellow traveler with those who directly study long-term human-environment relationships — archaeologists, geographers, environmental historians and agricultural economists.

Even the Crust can’t keep pretending any more.