Read it.

After two-and-a-half years of steadily metastasizing violence in Syria, the harsh reality is that the country isn’t going to become a stable, unified state again in the foreseeable future, let alone a remotely democratic one. It may be time to start thinking about alternatives.

Nuke ’em ’til they glow and then shoot them in the dark. (Oh, sorry, did I say that out loud?)

Keenly aware of this, Obama administration officials continue to place their hopes on brokering a negotiated settlement providing for a peaceful transition to majoritarian rule in Syria. The problem is that powerful jihadist rebel factions and their wealthy donors in the Arab Gulf will never accept a political accord that curtails their pursuit of an Islamic state in Syria, while most Alawites and other minorities will reject any transition plan that doesn’t. There’s no way to bridge the gap until someone reins in the jihadists, and that clearly isn’t going to happen before pro-regime forces are decisively defeated (if then).

As with Obamacare, the present U.S. administration clings tightly to its fantasy that wishing will make it so. Perhaps we might call this the ‘Tinkerbell’ doctrine.

Read it.

My insurance agent told me a week ago that I will be receiving notice that my insurance policy is not ACA compliant and will be discontinued. He told me my option is to start shopping for an Obamacare (ACA compliant) policy.

The policy is just on me. I am a 61 year old male with no health issues. I asked my agent, “Why is this policy not compliant with the ACA?”

Answer: “Your policy doesn’t include maternity care”.

Steve Sailer is troubled.

Is Texas about the best fate that a heavily Hispanicized America can hope for? In a future United States that won’t be able to generate all that much per-capita wealth, is Texas‘s system of cheap labor, cheap land, cheap taxes, and cheap government the only plausible future for the economy?

Well, if you’re lucky….

 Cowen’s third point—most poorly educated Americans these days don’t have high enough IQs to benefit much from more education—is of course, Steve Sailer 101.

Of course, the Crust won’t allow anybody to so diss their Underclass.

Democrats have long tried to attract massive immigration from south of the border so that they can put them on “a path to citizenship” to turn America into a one-party state, Vermont writ large. Yet a central irony for the future of American politics is that these upcoming Democratic voters will be unlikely to generate enough wealth to pay for the expensive Vermont-style policies that liberals crave. Sadly, Vermont policies without an ultra-white Vermont-style population to pay for them tend to lead to Detroit.

And, needless to say, Detroit ain’t Texas.

In the long run, both politically and economically, Texas is in deep trouble.

Hey, in the long run we’re all dead — but Texas will be the last one standing.

Read it.

Whatever you’re doing, if you enjoy it, cut it out.

The Antiplanner gives us some inconvenient truth.

Rail is less expensive than trucks–if you have high volumes moving from point A to point B. But rail simply cannot compete with trucks for low volumes moving from many origins to many destinations. That’s why most rail shipping today is coal, grain, or containers–all things that can go from one of a few origins to one of a few destinations.

This goes double for cars. The reason why urban light-rail systems (except where they made sense Back In The Day, as in New York and Boston) lose money hand-over-fist even when heavily subsidized by The Taxpayer is that most work environments in the modern world aren’t organized around the model people-live-in-bedroom-communities-but-all-gather-together-in-the-city-core-for-the-workday any more. In days when both transportation and communication were primitive and expensive, that model made a great deal of sense. Nowadays, when transportation is (relatively) cheap and communication damned near free, that model is about as useful as a buggy whip.

Read it.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, waxes choleric.

Following up last week’s rant about cant, kindly permit me a harangue about slang and the affliction of bad diction. Got that? Last week, the empty, insincere things we say; this week, the sloppy, lazy way we say them.

Nobody does it better. That’s why it’s so important to SUPPORT JOHN DERBYSHIRE. (See the top of the column to the right.)

A Voice of the Crust looks up from the food dish.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he declared the rich different from you and me. But today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind.

The Register, while normally dealing with tech, sometimes wishes it were the Onion.

Many lotharios will agree that there’s nothing attractive about a cold sore – but the virus behind this common affliction is proving very useful in tracing the migration patterns of early humans.

In fact, boffins have been able to analyse the DNA of the unsightly, lip-borne herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) to shore up the “out of Africa” theory of early human development.

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were able to identify 31 different strains of HSV-1 in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia. The “stunning” result was that separate strains of the virus could be found on each continent.

This fact allowed the boffins to trace the pattern of human migration by analysing the relatively simple genome of HSV-1, which is significantly less complex than the human gene.

Read it.

A=432 Hz, known as Verdi’s ‘A’ is an alternative tuning that is mathematically consistent with the universe. Music based on 432 Hz transmits beneficial healing energy, because it is a pure tone of math fundamental to nature.

There is a theory that the change from 432 Hz to 440 Hz was dictated by Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. He used it to make people think and feel a certain manner, and to make them a prisoner of a certain consciousness. Then around 1940 the United States introduced 440 Hz worldwide, and finally in 1953 it became the ISO 16-standard.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning….

Pocket Watch Flip Phone

Samurai Sword Kitchen Knife Set. I am not making this up.

The World’s Best Backscratcher

Shredder scissors. I am not making this up.

Read it.

Women, beware: There’s a new emerging threat online. This week two journalists whose prior experience includes folding T-shirts at Abercrombie & Fitch and writing celebrity profiles of Demi Lovato discovered the manosphere lurking in the darkest recesses of the Internet. 20/20 has partnered with the Southern Poverty Law Center to expose this nefarious menace befouling the information superhighway as we speak.

I love the names these Regressives give their front groups: ‘Southern Poverty Law Center’ — as if it had anything to do with either poverty or law, southern or otherwise.

Like most things progressives hate, the manosphere asks difficult questions (“If feminism is so concerned with inequality, why isn’t it trying to get more women dying of workplace injuries?”) and poses uncomfortable truths. (“Men who act like belligerent assholes probably do get laid a lot more than men who show up with a dozen long stem roses on the first date.”) ABC, doing their due diligence and sticking to only the strictest of journalistic ethics, went ahead and interviewed a whopping two manosphere bloggers, which, to be fair, did provide a rough cross section of the movement.

And they have schools to train ‘journalists’ how to be this shallow. And they charge money to go to those schools. We use to have a saying that applied to that sort of thing: ‘A fool and his money are soon parted.’

If Roosh somehow manages to actually get screen time there’s going to be feminist teeth gnashing o’er the land the likes of which hasn’t been seen since…the last couple of weeks or so. It doesn’t take much to get them going, really. But Roosh is just the type of guy that sends the “gender as total social construction” crowd into a furious, white-hot rage. If Elam is your patient but wounded uncle, Roosh is the unrepentant rascal your wife prefers you not hang out with.

‘Incredulous indignation’ seems to be a constant state with some people, most of whom seem to make it into print.

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

The government finally managed to hold liable a mortgage executive this week (although in a civil, not a criminal, case). But, the executive turned out to be a woman (and a single mother to boot), so the NYT feels bad about the government’s victory.

…

While I can understand the New York Times’ argument that she must be innocent by reason of not being a man, let me point out that by the same logic, she must be guilty by reason of being white.

It’s a conundrum …

Read it.

Americans who were recipients of means-tested government benefits in 2011 outnumbered year-round full-time workers, according to data released this month by the Census Bureau.

They also out-numbered the total population of the Philippines.

Charlie Cooke has a great column today making a very similar point to what I had intended to start the G-File with: Obama’s not a dictator; he’s a king. And when I say he’s a king, I don’t mean the dictatorial kind of an absolute monarchy. I mean he’s like the king in a parliamentary democracy where the prime minister has all of the power and the monarch is supposed to mug for postcards and inspire elementary-school children. He’s less Longshanks and more King Ralph. At least whenever he’s expected to take responsibility, he becomes a figurehead who gives voice to the public’s outrage over the problems he himself created. “Nobody is angrier,” Obama routinely insists, about the crap people should be angry at him about. As Charlie puts it, “Obama is less Julius Caesar than he is a tribune of the plebs — an Oprahfied avatar that has been custom-designed both to indulge and guide the public sentiment like so many Bill Clintons feeling your pain.”

— Jonah Goldberg, G-File, 10/25/2013

If you don’t subscribe to the G-File, you really ought.

Read it.

Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Paul Howard has spent thousands of dollars of asset forfeiture funds making sure that he and his staff have a good time. According to a recent newspaper report, he’s used it to buy tickets to see Cee Lo Green, to throw holiday parties and to fund an office softball team. He also spent $16,000 of forfeiture funds on security for his home.

Hey, that money was just sitting there.

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

Read it.

CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield revealed to the Washington Examiner that 76,000 of its customers will lose their health plans with the advent of ObamaCare. The people affected come from Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. and comprise over 40% of the clients covered by CareFirst in those areas.

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

Read it.

Citing the need for more public parking, the City Council of Seattle made a unanimous decision this week to force a 103-year-old woman to sell a plot of land that is already a parking lot.

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini

Read it.

Of course he did. That’s what politicians do. Did they think he was Ted Cruz or something?

(Notice there isn’t a word about Democrats like Chuck Schumer who have done the same damned thing for decades.)

Read it.

It turns out that Dick Durbin wasn’t “lying” if by lying you mean saying something he knew to be untrue.  It was curious why Durbin would not name names.  Now we know.  He would have had to name Harry Reid as his source.

The White House gave the line to Harry Reid, who read it to the Democratic Senate caucus, one of whose members — Durbin — went public with it.  The story still was false, and the White House is claiming a “miscommunication.”

Yeah, that seems to happen a lot with this administration. Wonder why….

Read it.

One of my Chinese students told me, “I think Americans live very much in harmony with nature. There are so many trees and squirrels! When I first get here, I thought I was in a fairy tale movie.”

Yeah, that’s us. In tune with nature. The squirrels are key. (Wait until he meets a coyote….)

Read it.

A 21-year-old unmarried welfare mom from the ghetto, pregnant with a second child, goes to Barneys (a very high-end clothing retailer in Manhattan) and buys a $2,500 handbag with a temporary ATM card that doesn’t have a name on it. Hilarity ensues.

Of course, nothing suspicious about that.

Bet: If she had been white, they still would have rousted her.

Read it.

This is like praising the Confederate States of America for what they’ve done for African rights.

Yet another proof of the worthlessness of the U.N.

And you’re paying for it! Aren’t you proud?

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

In public discourse, there’s a common assumption that women in the workplace is this amazing new idea that was just invented last week. The reality is that feminism back in 1969 was pushing on an open door and quickly became the standard. Why wouldn’t it? Did corporations not want more workers competing for jobs?

…

There are a lot of reasons that computers have faded as a career for women, such as programming languages becoming more abstract. And H-1B visas have flooded the market with Asian males.

Read it.

Health activists, nutrition nannies, medical paternalists, and just plain old quacks regularly conjure up menaces that are supposedly damaging the health of Americans. Their scares range from the decades-long campaign against fluoridation to worries that saccharin causes cancer to the ongoing hysteria over crop biotechnology. The campaigners’ usual “solution” is to demand that regulators ban the offending substance or practice. Here are five especially egregious examples of activist misinformation.

Read it.

Aledo High in Texas beat Fort Worth Western Hills 91-0 in a recent football game, and that was with Aledo pulling starters early, slowing down its offense and operating under a clock that never stopped. Aledo is the top team in Class 4A in Texas and has blown out everyone it’s played by at least 41 points, including two 84-7 games. But it took no joy from this one. “I’m upset about it,” Aledo coach Tim Buchanan told the Star-Telegram of Fort Worth. “I don’t like it. I sit there the whole third and fourth quarter and try to think how I can keep us from scoring.”

Yeah, I really want to play on a team where the coach has to worry about keeping us from scoring.

Winners win, and losers lose — and losers whine, and in these degenerate modern times, that’s all it takes to win.

Read it.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, who amazingly is the number 2 Democrat in the Senate, took to his Facebook account over the weekend to make the outrageous claim that a House GOP Leader told President Obama that he “cannot stand to look at” him. On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney dismissed Durbin’s claim, saying the incident “didn’t happen.”

“It did not happen,” Carney said, as reported by The Hill, saying he discussed the incident with a “participant in the meeting.”

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

Read it.

In his book, Schweizer said there is documentation that the Obama campaign and political committees associated with Obama solicited donations from companies after the Justice Department filed civil and criminal charges against them.

Schweizer said this is a “huge problem” and there is “statistical evidence” in the book that proves the chances of going to jail are lessened if political contributions are made.

“You cut your chances of going to jail in half if you make a contribution,” Schweizer told host Sean Hannity.

Schweizer said the top five positions in the Department of Justice, beginning with Holder, were all campaign bundlers for the Obama campaign, and this unlike what Washington has seen before.

“So, you had fundraisers who were raising money and put into power who are now making decisions about who they’re going to prosecute, who they’re not not going to prosecute,” Schweizer said. “You see this melding of DOJ and the campaign apparatus of the Obama campaign.”

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

Read it.

Squaring up in one corner is Old Fold Manor golf club, which sits on the 1471 battlefield – and wants to dump thousands of tons of rubbish on it.

Of course, in America it would long since have been confiscated by the Federal government and turned into an Historic Monument site under the National Park Service.

Read it.

Nearly two decades ago, a landmark study found that by age 3, the children of wealthier professionals have heard words millions more times than those of less educated parents, giving them a distinct advantage in school and suggesting the need for increased investment in prekindergarten programs.

Of course, children of wealthier professionals probably have a 1o-point IQ advantage over ‘less educated parents’, so I’d love to see how ‘prekindergarten programs’ are going to help with that. Gene therapy or something?

Watch it.

#1 is of course Pepe’s, from New Haven.

Read it.

BLUF: Because they realize that they can do something more fun for more money.

The question I have is why they stay.

Read it.

Just in case you didn’t have anything else planned for the day. I know I didn’t.

Read it.

Healthcare.gov, a government-run e-commerce website for the Affordable Care Act, does not actually need to exist. The still-dysfunctional federal site could have offloaded all of the work to startups, which were already building more sophisticated price-comparison alternatives to the official site, just like Orbitz does for airline companies.

Healthcare.gov was supposed to be an information hub for the needs of millions of uninsured citizens who are now legally required to have a healthcare plan. The federal website ended up offering insurance directly, after 24 states (mostly Republican) refused to design their own e-commerce websites for their residents. Unfortunately, at launch, the federal and state sites crashed.

Three weeks later, Obama’s signature law, the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), is in danger of losing public confidence and the enrollment numbers it needs to meet its promise of cheap, quality insurance. But, it’s unclear why the state and federal exchanges websites were built in the first place.

Because, you idiot, the point was not to provide people with affordable health care — the point was to have people look to the government for their healthcare. Having the free market do that is entirely the opposite of what was intended.

Read it.

Virginia’s Renaissance Faire ran from 1996 to 1999, and since then the site has remained untouched, slowly crumbling as it falls into the Dark Ages. Besieged by the elements, these Tudor-style buildings and grand castles are inexorably falling apart.

Read it.

Lucky Facebook.

Jerry Pournelle looks at the ‘shutdown’.

The stories continue to pour in of government officials – particularly for some reason Parks Department employees including Rangers – taking care to make life miserable for citizens as a matter of policy. Precisely where this policy originated is not known, but considerable money was spent on the operation. The World War II, Viet Nam War, and Korean War monuments on the Mall are not attended and are open for anyone to stroll through, and they are meaningful to the veterans of those wars. The nearest barricades would be in some Park Department storage place a good way from the Mall. Had the government shut down simply removed the park people from the site, it would have cost nothing to ask the American Legion, WFW, and other such outfits to provide monitors; but it was very costly to bring out the barricades and post park police around those monuments to keep the veterans away from them. Yet that was done.

The same with the access off-ramp to the privately owned parking lot at the privately owned and operated Mount Vernon: it costs nothing to operate and no one parks on government property; but at considerable expense barricades were put up to block the off ramp, and federal employees were sent to enforce the shutdown of the turnoff. Same story for the off highway viewpoints for Mount Rushmore; at considerable expense they were closed. And tourists on a tour bus that stopped to look were forbidden to “recreate” by taking photographs of Old Faithful; it took people on duty to do that. This wasn’t saving money, this was intended to be hard on people, presumably so they would blame the Republicans for shutting down the government.

Now you might argue that these acts originated in low level management, but after the first couple of days the President and every senior officer in government had to be aware of them, but nothing was done. Apparently it was decided that this was a reasonable policy. It would seem to be a good subject for investigation with possible firing of government employees under the Hatch Act, but I suppose all the teeth were taken out of that a long time ago. Civil Servants are supposed to be officially politically neutral in exchange for job security when administrations change; clearly that is not working today, and something ought to be done about it. The theory of civil service is that it beats the spoils system by keeping experienced and efficient officials on the job when administrations change. It has a cost: under the “spoils system” it is much easier to hold elected officials responsible for the actions of government. We seem to be working out a system that has all the disadvantages of both.

Read it.

Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out….

Read it.

So Holder is telling us that since he took over as AG, mass shooting incidents have tripled. Normally that might be considered an admission against interest, inasmuch as he is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. But of course Holder didn’t take any responsibility for the trend he described. As far as I can tell, Democrats are interested in crime only when it serves as an excuse for gun control; never as a reason to consider more effective law enforcement measures, or to step up prosecution and punishment of criminals.

Read it.

Oh, ya think?

Read it.

Based on mathematical models derived from these data, the scientists found that every animal took an average of 21 seconds to relieve itself, despite bladders that varied in volume from 100 milliliters to 100 liters.

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

Read it.

Over 20 years ago, I learned how to be a ship watch stander a few miles from the Raytheon facility at the Navy’s Surface Warfare Officer School. But the operations center of the Zumwalt will have more in common with the fictional starship USS Enterprise’s bridge than it does with the combat information centers of the ships I went to sea on. Every console on the Zumwalt will be equipped with touch screens and software capable of taking on the needs of any operator on duty, and big screens on the forward bulkhead will display tactical plots of sea, air, and land.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that the first commanding officer of the Zumwalt will be Captain James Kirk (yes, that’s actually his name). But considering how heavily the ship leans on its computer networks, maybe they should look for a chief engineer named Vint Cerf.

Watch it.

Read it.

And why not? Whom do you think Mafia wiseguys vote for? Betcha a paycheck it ain’t Republicans.

Bryan Kaplan is delightfully dyspeptic this morning.

First Iron Law: Students learn only a small fraction of what they’re taught.

Second Iron Law: Students remember only a small fraction of what they learn.

Third Iron Law: Most of the lessons students remember lack practical applications.

Read it.

Cities are full of the Hip & Trendy, and they have no time for ‘old people’.

Perhaps no urban legend has played as long and loudly as the notion that “empty nesters” are abandoning their dull lives in the suburbs for the excitement of inner city living. This meme has been most recently celebrated in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

Both stories, citing research by the real estate brokerage Redfin, maintained that over the last decade a net 1 million boomers (born born between 1945 and 1964) have moved into the city core from the surrounding area. “Aging boomers,” the Post gushed, now “opt for the city life.” It’s enough to warm the cockles of a downtown real-estate speculator’s heart, and perhaps nudge some subsidies from city officials anxious to secure their downtown dreams.

But there’s a problem here: a look at Census data shows the story is based on flawed analysis, something that the Journal subsequently acknowledged. Indeed, our number-crunching shows that rather than flocking into cities, there were roughly a million fewer boomers in 2010 within a five-mile radius of the centers of the nation’s 51 largest metro areas compared to a decade earlier.

Read it.

A council has removed posters advertising a circus following a complaint from a woman who is scared of clowns.

Leighton Buzzard Town Hall Council said it took down the adverts after one complaint – in a town of 28,000 people.

An unnamed female resident told the authority the posters were scaring her whenever she drove past them, explaining that she suffers from coulrophobia.

Oh, well, that’s all right then.

Phobia expert and hypnotherapist Christine Black suggested the complainant and council may have gone about addressing the issue in the wrong way.

‘The council have merely accommodated her fear,’ she said.

‘The lady is trying to manage her fear by controlling her environment but she needs to control the irrational fear.’

Good luck with that advice….

Read it.

It’s long been known that sleep, much like eating or breathing, is a vital process for humans and animals. Insufficient shut-eye in people impairs cognition, curbs energy levels, and has been linked to a bevy of illnesses. But while scientists have explored myriad mechanisms that might explain why sleep is so critical, they’ve yet to come up with a firm answer. Now, new research offers yet another compelling theory: sleep allows our brains to clean themselves up.

Read it.

If you’re interested in doing that, of course. Pretty soon we’ll just be able to 3D-print a faster horse.