Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

Social scientists notoriously suffer from “physics envy.” This feeling is quite reasonable: physicists can predict many phenomenon (and they built the atomic bomb, which probably helps even more in garnering respect).

A stranger phenomenon, however, is “IQ envy,” since the study of intelligence is routinely denounced as a pseudoscience. And, yet, if you keep your eyes open, you’ll notice that intelligence is one of the most glamorous attributes in the world of marketing.

Jim Goad sticks up for the underdog.

The most stubbornly hypocritical glitch in the egalitarian mindset is that eugenics is roundly and vigorously dismissed as a dangerous and discredited pseudoscience…unless it can be wielded to portray ideological enemies as genetically inferior throwbacks.

Thus, the same sheltered, daydreaming buttercups that strain to deny even basic visual differences between ethnic groups are the first to blame rural white poverty on things such as inbreeding and overall crappy genes. In such cases, eugenics are not only suddenly real, they are highly pertinent—decisive, even.

Yeah, funny how that works. Just like the people with the “NO H8” t-shirts are the loudest haters around. I guess some animals are more equal than others.

The same double standard permits politicians—who’d never dare publicly suggest that sub-Saharan Africa is not exactly the Hope Diamond of intellectual achievement—to smear large swaths of people who don’t kowtow to their dim notions of “progress” as “Neanderthals.”

Vice President Joseph Biden, that asshole, recently referred to Republicans as “Neanderthals.” A couple of years ago, current Secretary of State John Kerry, who resembles an archeological dig even while alive, dismissed global-warming critics as “Neanderthals.” In 2003, now-dead Senator Ted Kennedy said he would resist the appointment of any “Neanderthal” that George W. Bush might nominate as a judge. The Daily Kos, that festering armpit of self-congratulatory leftist delusion, recently suggested that NRA members possessed the “Neanderthal gene.”

The forces of tolerance on the march.

Paul Mirengoff cuts to the chase.

The world sees the spectacle of (1) a “red line” drawn by the U.S. president being brazenly crossed without retribution and (2) America wantonly farming out its response to the crossing of the red line to Vladimir Putin, a sponsor of the regime we had vowed to punish.

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

To be sure, I am not as convinced as Mirengoff that the case for intervention is so clear-cut. The job description of the Federal government isn’t ‘blow up foreigners who are doing stuff we don’t like’, it’s ‘protect the interests of America and its citizens’, and on that basis I don’t see that we have any reason to get involved in Syria at all — both the terrorist-supporting Assad regime and the terrorist-supporting jihadist rebels are our enemies, and the best outcome would be for them to slaughter each other for another ten years, as Iraq and Iran did during the 1980s; to quote Henry Kissinger, ‘It’s too bad both sides can’t lose’.

This view of Obama reminds me of the common view of Roosevelt in 1940 — he’d do the right thing if it weren’t for that pesky democracy thing, being hamstrung by Congress and public opinion and all. The point is that, in a democracy, which we still pretend to be, the President is supposed to be guided by Congress and public opinion, not regard them as inconvenient obstacles. I am far more concerned with the government’s loss of credibility at home than I am worried about what foreigners think; Tomahawk cruise missiles will correct the latter in short order if it becomes necessary.

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Welcome to Londonistan. Be careful not to step in the diversity, it’s Hell getting that stuff off of your shoes.

Comment from the source:

So let’s get one thing straight: I know exactly what Mr. Putin is, and Hillary Clinton is no less brutal, ruthless, amoral, cynical, and exploitative than he is. She lacks the means to do everything he does, but I’d bet my back teeth she wants to acquire those means, and will do all she can to put herself in that position.

Given the current state of the Republican Party, Hillary may very well be our next president. That’s a sobering thought — that the president may be someone who is no better than the former head of the KGB.

Putin is preferable to Hillary in one important respect, however: his brutality and thuggishness are used to advance the interests of his country, and not those of the New World Order. In that sense I’d take him over Hillary any day.

And that is the point of the Putin meme: to undermine Hillary. It’s useful for that purpose. It’s not like any of us would ever want Putin to actually run our country.

It’s unfortunate that I have to explain something so obvious.

Posted to assist people with low comprehension skills, like Dennis.

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According to the sources contacted by Foreign Policy for a recent profile, NSA head Keith Alexander is a “cowboy,” a well-intentioned extremist, a blithely naive fan of big data. He is also, it appears, a huge fan of Star Trek. Foreign Policy describes Alexander’s data-processing “Information Dominance Center” in Fort Belvoir, Virginia as the site of a high tech homage to the Starship Enterprise. Alexander reportedly had his operations center redesigned to mimic the Enterprise bridge, “complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a ‘whoosh’ sound when they slid open and closed.”

Aye, keptin….

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That’s where Dryft’s special sauce comes into play. Instead of forcing users to acclimate to the keyboard layout of whatever touchscreen device they’re using, the Dryft keyboard appears on screen only when the user places their fingers on the display. In short, the home row (and by extension, the rest of the keyboard) follows your fingers no matter where you put them on the screen. Once your fingers have settled into a resting position, those home row keys appear under them and the rest of the keys blossom out around them.

Of course, this only works when (a) the person is already a trained touch-typist who can type accurately without looking at the keys and (b) the travel distance for this on-screen keyboard matches the ‘muscle memory’ of the typist. If you are accustomed to a full-sized keyboard and you’re typing on an iPad, for example, thinking you’re typing a ‘U’ and getting a ‘7’ instead all of the time will get old very very quickly.

Still, it’s a step in the right direction.

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The power of intuitive first impressions has been demonstrated in a variety of other contexts. One experiment found that people predicted the outcome of political elections remarkably well based on silent 10 second video clips of debates – significantly outperforming political pundits and predictions made based on economic indicators. Chia-Jung Tsay’s analysis of classical musician auditions explicitly drew on this idea by providing participants with only 6 second clips of each performance.

In a real world case, a number of art experts successfully identified a 6th century Greek statue as a fraud. Although the statue had survived a 14 month investigation by a respected museum that included the probings of a geologist, they instantly recognized something was off. They just couldn’t explain how they knew.

Cases like this represent the canon behind the idea of the “adaptive unconscious,” a concept made famous by journalist Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink. The basic idea is that we constantly, quickly, and unconsciously do the equivalent of judging a book by its cover. After all, a cover provides a lot of relevant information in a world in which we don’t have time to read every page.

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Packing school lunches seems like one of the more mundane tasks we face as the school year rolls around. But it doesn’t have to be. In taking our position at the kitchen counter bright and early each morning, we can make a political statement, save the planet, and mark our progeny as the cool green kids, all with one simple container.

And GOD FORBID that our Politically Correct tool child should go to school without making a Statement….

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The most important difference between the world today and 150 years ago isn’t airplane flight or nuclear weapons or the Internet. It’s lifespan. We used to live 35 or 40 years on average in the United States, but now we live almost 80. We used to get one life. Now we get two.

Well, not really — those averages include a lot of dead kids that now are surviving. But it’s still impressive.

You may well be living your second life already. Have you ever had some health problem that could have killed you if you’d been born in an earlier era? Leave aside for a minute the probabilistic ways you would have died in the past—the smallpox that didn’t kill you because it was eradicated by a massive global vaccine drive, the cholera you never contracted because you drink filtered and chemically treated water. Did some specific medical treatment save your life? It’s a fun conversation starter: Why are you not dead yet?

Yeah, I’ll try that the next time I’m at a party with a bunch of people I don’t know. Oh, wait….

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The protesters who uprooted a 9/11 memorial display at a liberal arts college in Vermont claimed they were defending Abenaki tribal lands and taking a stand against U.S. imperialism.

The Abenaki tribe’s response? “Disgusting.”

As indeed it was. My experience has been that in general skraelings are more sensible than their proxenoi among the Young And Stupid.

“We didn’t know anything about this and if we had we certainly wouldn’t have sanctioned it,” he said in a statement to The Addison Independent.

Irrelevant — it is sufficient that a Sensitive White Liberal is offended for you; no need to consult the actual constructive offendee.

The field is tribal land, they claimed, and Native American beliefs prohibit disturbing the earth on hallowed ground.

But Steven said there’s no evidence that the field is an Abenaki burial site. And even if it was, the flags would be a welcome presence.

“Our burial sites honor our warriors and their bravery,” said Stevens. “Putting flags in the earth to honor bravery would not be disrespectful.”

On the Left, fantasy trumps reality every time.

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With a national debate still going on as the new national health care plan (Obamacare) is taking effect, what do federal employees think of the new system?

This week, we asked their views on being included in the new health care exchanges. There is apparently little debate among the federal workforce. Federal employees do not want to be part of the new system. Instead, they prefer to keep their current health plan based on a survey with about 2500 readers responding.

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

One of these men grew up surrounded by Communists, and internalized Marxist ideology from a very young age.

The other is the president of Russia.

Jim Goad is being considered for canonization as a Saint of Dyspepsia.

(Full disclosure: Not for a moment have I approved of the US military’s foolhardy forays into the Middle East. If I had my druthers, I’d bring all the boys—and they’d all be boys, meaning no girls and definitely no boys who suddenly decide that they’re girls—home to guard the true national-security threat, the one along the Mexican border. Before any of you perpetually sour-pussed pea-picking peckerwoods in the peanut gallery start grousing that I’m some sort of neocon, allow me to sternly instruct you that it’s possible to simultaneously disapprove of Islam and Zionism. It is also possible to deplore American military expansionism while being concerned about the fact that bullied loners and cultural outcasts lurking within the armed forces can throw tantrums and endanger American lives because people are terrified of calling them fags and/or ragheads.)

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Your tax dollars at work.

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Matthew Shepard was the winsome young homosexual in Laramie, Wyoming who in October 1998 was tortured, killed, and left hanging grotesquely from a fence. He was discovered almost a day later and later died in the hospital from his horrific wounds.

…

As gay journalist Aaron Hicklin, writing in The Advocate asks, “How do people sold on one version of history react to being told that the facts are slippery — that thinking of Shepard’s murder as a hate crime does not mean it was a hate crime? And how does it color our understanding of such a crime if the perpetrator and victim not only knew each other but also had sex together, bought drugs from one another, and partied together?”

…

He was beaten, tortured, and killed by one or both of the men now serving life sentences. But it turns out, according to Jiminez, that Shepard was a meth dealer himself and he was friends and sex partners with the man who led in his killing. Indeed, his killer may have killed him because Shepard allegedly came into possession of a large amount of methamphetamine and refused to give it up.

The book also shows that Shepard’s killer was on a five-day meth binge at the time of the killing.

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“Billions of dollars are leaving California as they raise marginal income taxes, in favor of coming to Nevada,” says Brown. “Nevada is one of nine states with zero income tax.”

So is Texas … hint, hint….

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The topic of spacing after a period (or “full stop” in some parts of the world) has received a lot of attention in recent years.  The vitriol that the single-space camp has toward the double-spacers these days is quite amazing, and typographers have made up an entire fake history to justify their position.

Whizdom personal urination device

Greyp G-12 bicycle/motorcycle

Sous-vide SDV

Couch Bunker

Ring Watch

Famgro Farms personal organic produce

Powered spaghetti fork

Jack 0′ Lantern Cake Mold

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Hey, it could happen.

 The Heineken World Bottle was designed by architect John Habraken. When then-CEO Freddy Heineken was visiting the island of Curaçao, he was bothered by the mass amounts of trash and the lack of housing. His solution? Make a beer bottle that could serve as a brick when it’s finished. It was a brilliant compromise, but Heineken’s marketing department rejected it as effeminate.

Spoil-sports.

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Via Scott Shackford, at Reason, we learn of “The Scourge of Illegal, Underground Dinner Parties.” In short, people are paying to attend dinner parties featuring fancy food. And such transactions are unregulated.

Naturally, people are concerned. Presumably, some of those concerned parties are restaurants that are subject to heavy taxation and regulation that are nonetheless facing competition from the seedy purveyors of underground dinner parties. I don’t think the people concerned about unregulated dinner parties are going far enough. You know what else is unregulated? The kitchen at my house.

Think about what the means for a second. It means that my children–children, mind you–are being fed food that’s prepared in unregulated, uninsepected, and possibly less-than-sanitary conditions. The burgeoning field of Helen Lovejoy Political Economy demands that something must be done. For the children, of course.

The horror….

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 More than 200 colleges and high schools across the nation participated in Young America’s Foundation’s 9/11: Never Forget Project. Students came together to establish an American flag memorial on campus consisting of 2,977 flags representing each person murdered in the terrorist attacks. Unfortunately, five student protesters at Middlebury College ripped the flags out of the ground before 3:00 pm.

The 9/11: Never Forget Project has been an annual nonpartisan event at Middlebury College for the past ten years. By participating in the 9/11: Never Forget Project, students honor the victims of the attacks, as well as honor the American principles for which they died.

Middlebury student groups spent nearly two hours setting up the flag display yesterday morning. The protesters told Ben Kinney, president of the conservative club on campus, they were “confiscating” the flags in protest of “America’s imperialism.”

The protesters refused to compromise with the students because the flags were supposedly located on an “Indian burial ground and you can’t have anything penetrating the Earth.”

And there you have it. Where’s the ‘diversity training’ when you really need it?

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The one-year delay of the tax on businesses which fail to provide health insurance (or adequate health insurance) has led some managers to put the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) out of their mind.  However, there are three other tax and reporting obligations that have taken effect – or will soon take effect – of which businesses need to be aware.

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 “As the legs unfurl to power the jump,” Burrows says, “both have to move at exactly the same time. If they didn’t, the animal would start to spiral out of control.” Larger animals, whether kangaroos or NBA players, rely on their nervous system to keep their legs in sync when pushing off to jump—using a constant loop of adjustment and feedback. But for the issus, their legs outpace their nervous system. By the time the insect has sent a signal from its legs to its brain and back again, roughly 5 or 6 milliseconds, the launch has long since happened. Instead, the gears, which engage before the jump, let the issus lock its legs together—synchronizing their movements to a precision of 1/300,000 of a second.

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 Ms. Quinn never blamed her problems during the race on sexism or homophobia. Still, her inner circle debated how to grapple with the question of gender.

Note the dog that didn’t bark: nobody is talking about her qualifications or her ability to do the job compared to the other candidates. It’s all a matter of how many boxes she can check on the Political Fashion Bingo Card and whether she can outscore the other candidates who are doing the exact same thing.

This is identity politics come home to roost. And it won’t ever get any better because a  losing candidate can always say, “Well, we didn’t get our groups out enough” and off they go to prepare for the next attempt.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, goes to the (kinda sorta) movies.

I have to admit, he’s got some real contenders here. My favorite:

Afratar. A group of African Americans, weary of groaning under the heel of white privilege and fearful for the lives of their children at the hands of trigger-happy racist cops, have built a starship and fled to a distant solar system. There they have colonized a planet, which they have named Sha’Quaynelle, and established a peaceful and prosperous society.

Just as the Sha’Quaynellians are engrossed in the annual planet-wide chamber music competition, a fleet of ships from a large mining corporation arrives, crewed entirely by white men chewing tobacco and speaking with Southern accents. They want to plunder Sha’Quaynelle for its mineral wealth. The Sha’Quaynellians are forced to flee the clean, beautiful cities they have built and take to guerilla warfare in the forests.

A heroic Sha’Quaynellian physicist discovers a way to nullify the invaders’ technology and cut off their communication with Earth, defeating them at last. In the closing scenes we see the evil white invaders being used by the Sha’Quaynellians as beasts of burden while they rebuild their cities.

“A searing indictment of American racism.” —Christian Science Monitor

You’ve got to admit, that would be a shoo-in.

Nicholas James Pell chronicles a liberal lynching.

The witch hunt kicked into full swing when Dickinson started mocking the “social justice” crowd, stating that feminism in tech was the biggest reason he blocked people on Twitter. Articles appeared featuring Tweets made as far back as 2010. The sundry “smoking guns” will leave those not in the thrall of the True and Holy Progressive Church scratching their heads. The enterprising folk at the Ministry of Hysteria, a major “new media” outlet that will remain nameless lest we drive more traffic their way, were able to find Dickinson mocking Mel Gibson’s “pack of niggers” meltdown, nuclear brinksmanship between the United States and Russia over gay rights, and Bradley Manning’s recent gender awakening. These were translated as racism, homophobia, and transphobia, the most recent addition to the list of mortal sins, respectively.

For the Uninformed, the web-rag Business Insider is a certified Voice of the Crust.

No one who opposes the Progressive Inquisition is safe. Societies in decline are notoriously dangerous places to live. This is doubly true of irrational theocracies, searching for Old Scratch under every rock. In the absence of real red meat, the sharks in the tank will turn on whatever is conveniently available.

Asserting that your opinions are your own will not protect you. While the progressive left defensively (and to some degree, correctly) claims that employers are under no compulsion to employ anyone whose behavior they find odious, no one has ever been fired for being too politically correct.

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We have the technology.

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First off, Miss Kansas Theresa Vail is a sergeant in the U.S. Army, only the second contestant ever to be on active duty.

“Nobody expects a soldier to be a beauty queen,” Vail told People magazine. “But I’m all about breaking stereotypes.”

Second, Sgt. Vail has big tattoos. Two of them. One, the insignia for the U.S. Army Dental Corps, is on her left shoulder, while a massive version of the Serenity Prayer runs down her right side. And when she struts her stuff in the bikini contest in the Miss America competition this week in Atlantic City, they’ll both be on display for the world to see.

Words fail me.

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Well, that’s Chicago for you….

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After extending health care coverage to many of its part-time employees for years, Trader Joe’s has told workers who log fewer than 30 hours a week that they will need to find insurance on the Obamacare exchanges next year, according to a confidential memo from the grocer’s chief executive.

In the memo to staff dated Aug. 30, Trader Joe’s CEO Dan Bane said the company will cut part-timers a check for $500 in January and help guide them toward finding a new plan under the Affordable Care Act. The company will continue to offer health coverage to workers who carry 30 hours or more on average. …

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It’s one thing for a deliberately polarizing legislator like Morse to lose a close race in a swing district. It’s quite another for Giron to lose by 12 points in a district that is 47% Democratic and 23% Republican. One reason is that in blue collar districts like Pueblo, there are plenty of Democrats who cling to their Second Amendment rights. As the Denver Post noted, 20% of the voters who signed the Giron recall petitions were Democrats.

The Colorado Senate is now 18-17 Democratic, and 19-16 pro-Second Amendment. On gun issues, and on many others, the balance of power is now held by moderate Democrats, rather than by the hard left faction formerly led by Morse.

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Walking out of the new Star Trek, a friend of mine told me he wished the movie made an effort to show off what the future of today could look like, rather than the future of the ‘70s. I stopped for a second and realized that when you take out all the space travel, lens flares, and spandex uniforms, it wasn’t even four-decade-old predictions we were seeing in IMAX 3D, it was the technology we interact with every day. Everyone in the movie walks around carrying an iPad. They have heads-up displays projected on glass. They talk to each other on cell phones. For a series that inspired a generation of engineers to go out and make these incredible things they saw on TV, it’s hugely disappointing to see this big-screen admission that they’ve run out of ideas.

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It could have been SO much worse….

On the other hand, I still don’t see any excuse for not using the layout used by adding machines.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, lays out some inconvenient truth.

Among the most economically naive calculations that people (including government officials) make is to estimate the growth in tax revenues based on the assumption that nothing changes beyond a hike in the tax.  So, for example, if 10,000 pounds of apples are sold each week in Hometown, USA, and the government of Hometown imposes a 50-cent per pound excise tax on apple sales, it’s tempting for the economically uninformed to conclude that this tax will raise the weekly revenues of Hometown’s government by $5,000.  A staple of any decent principles-of-microeconomics class is to show that such a static calculation is mistaken.  Any such static calculation is arithmetic masquerading as economics.

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Technology used to understand distant planets has helped reconstruct two ornate Tudor tombs that were destroyed during King Henry VIII’s anti-Catholic offensive.

The tombs were commissioned by Thomas Howard, the third Duke of Norfolk, in the 16th century for Thetford Priory in Norfolk and when the priory was dissolved in 1540, some parts of the tombs were salvaged while others were abandoned in the ruins until they were excavated in the 1930s.

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We have the technology.

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I guess the sky isn’t really falling after all.

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In an effort to deter the US from attacking Syria, the “International Human Shields” movement is eying to locate civilians to Damascus from across the globe, including Britain and the US, reports the Daily Telegraph.

Even as residents are evacuating Syria, hundreds of activists are volunteering to be placed in harm’s way against possible air strikes, despite the dangerous nature of the protest.

So we can spank Syria and at the same time help clean up the human gene pool? I’m in.

(Actually, no; this is a very stupid idea. But they’re making it very tempting….)

Here.

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Humana actuary Nick Mueller today confirmed the Kentucky Department of Insurance has approved ObamaCare health premiums very close to the eighty percent increase he requested in June.

Internal Department of Insurance documents received today from Lori Brown at the Department contain final, approved premium information for Humana, Anthem and Kentucky Health Cooperative, the only three companies who applied to participate in the Kentucky Health Benefit Exchange. Anthem and the Kentucky Health Cooperative got exactly what rates they applied for, while Humana received a cut of less than one percent from their initial proposed increase.

An 80% increase? I guess that’s why they call it the ‘Affordable Care’ Act.

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Thank God for those strict gun control laws, or who knows what would have happened?

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That would be … very interesting.

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Identity politics made manifest. This is the way Democrats think.

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People who aren’t looking for a job aren’t counted in the headline unemployment figure, and as the AP notes, right now the percentage of people who either have a job or want one—the labor force participation rate—is at 63.2 percent, the lowest its been since 1978.

How’s that Hope and Change working out for you?

Bryan Caplan points out some inconvenient truth.

 Kevin Drum and Chris Mooney have already posted excellent summaries of this neat study of motivated numeracy.  You should read them.  But if you prefer the digest version: Even unusually numerate people take off their thinking caps when the numbers are ideologically inconvenient.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, is admirably pessimistic today.

Gelernter was not the first to notice the casual, ruthless arrogance with which the elites impose their will on the rest of us, but the process has rarely been described so well.

With the passing of sixteen years, the arrogance has only become more gross, shameless, and cruel. I thought I had the measure of our overclass, but I was shocked at the heartlessness with which Paula Deen was treated.

Hey, she was white. What did she expect?

Liberalism is not just wrongheaded; it is malicious. And it never quits until its target has surrendered unconditionally to overclass norms. You thought they’d finished tossing and goring the Boy Scouts of America? Think again….

Hey, they’re male and straight. What did they expect?

Europe is of course the overclass ideal. In Germany, a swarm of state agents converged on a home last Thursday and abducted four children to prevent their being homeschooled. Coming soon to an American household near you.

Hitler and Mussolini and Lenin and Stalin were not aberrations but rather natural developments of European intellectual movements. Be careful what you wish for….