Read it.

If I ever win the Lottery, I’m going to start using shaving soap. Just because.

Read it.

The men waited until the hottest part of the day before launching the chase over a distance of four miles (6.4km).

The cheetahs got so tired they could not run any more. The villagers captured them alive and handed them over to the Kenya Wildlife Service.

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 Understand the single most defining characteristic of a liberal or a leftist is that they are lazy.  They do not want to work.  They do not want to strive.  They want an easy and paid-for life as much as possible.

However, the second most defining characteristic of a liberal or a leftist is their ego.  They have to be applauded.  They have to worshipped.  They have to be doing something that provides them and their ego validation.

Naturally, these two traits are mutually exclusive.  If you aren’t going to work hard for a living, if you’re not going to strive towards something, if you’re incapable of rigor, then you will achieve nothing noteworthy and your ego will go unvalidated.  However, leftists’ egos are so huge and so hungry they inevitably have to “do something,” and so, just like my brother did in 1986, they go for easy, but pointless, targets.

Going green.
Driving a Prius.
Shopping at Whole Foods
etc.

All of these things are nothing more than substitutes for hard work, production, self-supportation, and genuine human value.  They are nothing more than rituals, no different than rituals performed at a church.  They are pointless, they achieve nothing, but they make their religious participants falsely “feel good about themselves.”

However, where the “destruction” in The Destruction Principle comes in is where you have your environmentalists or your most vain and vile leftists.  For example, if some dolt wants to buy a Prius and smugly put their MPG on a vanity plate, they aren’t really hurting anybody.  They are destroying nothing.  But if you have protestors who are going to shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, then you are costing people their lives, jobs, not to mention economic growth for the country.  You are causing destruction.

And that’s The Destruction Principle.

Read it.

Obamacare is a vast Rube Goldberg machine that, it turns out, doesn’t work at all–an airplane that has crashed on takeoff. And the fiasco that we have seen so far is only the tip of the iceberg. The thing will unravel further and cause even more damage and disruption if a stake isn’t driven through its heart soon. What does this episode reveal about the nature of liberalism?

One obvious lesson is that liberalism fails to appreciate the complexity of the world. The hubris required by the Democrats’ attempt to reorder not just a large sector of the economy, but an important part of the lives of millions of strangers, is breathtaking. Recognizing, at least dimly, the difficulty of the task, the Democrats responded by trying to draft a law whose complexity would match that of the reality that it tried to control. That made the situation worse, not better: the more convoluted the statute became, the more unworkable it was. Friedrich Hayek, call your office!

Obamacare also illustrates the inordinate faith that many liberals have in the power of words. Various aspects of reality are not as liberals would like them to be. What is the solution? The magical power of words: reams and reams of paper covered with sections and subsections, commands and requirements. If they can only get the words right, reality will certainly fall into line, just as liberals want it to be!

Steve Sailer draws an analogy.

 The New York Times Magazine has a long adventure story by reporter Luke Mogelson about his infiltrating a group of mostly Iranian economic illegal immigrants in Indonesia who are trying to sneak into Australia by boat.

Of course, in the article the Iranians are called “refugees” and “asylum-seekers” as if they were Niels Bohr in his sailboat slipping away from the Nazi occupation of Denmark. If you read the article closely, however, the Iranians mostly seem to be seeking refuge from the general cruddiness of life in a country chock full of Iranians:

The Other McCain has a way with words.

Professional athletes can spawn with multiple baby mamas, and feminists have no word of complaint. Gay men hiring surrogates to breed children for them? Lesbians raising adopted child sex-change experiments? No problem, say the Womyn’s Studies majors. In response to the general plague of divorce and fatherlessness, the poverty-inducing epidemic of illegitimacy that replicates underclass misery, the collective reaction of the Official Women’s Movement is . . . crickets chirping.

However, let a normal couple of married Christians give birth to more than the standard 1.7 children, and they become the targets of seething rage and resentment from the feminist Left. You saw this attitude exemplified in the hysterical reaction to Sarah Palin who, by giving birth to five children, was made the object of fathomless hatred. “For many liberal women, Palin threatens their sexual identity, which is bound up with their politics,” as James Taranto observed.

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The government is too busy mucking with your insurance coverage and your ability to buy trans-fats to do the essential work of government, like protecting the lives and property of the taxpayers.

Read it.

I put quotation marks around “social insurance” because it isn’t insurance, for the reasons discussed in this post. What is it? Just another set of programs designed to redistribute income, mainly from those who’ve earned it to those who haven’t. “Social insurance” is a trickle-down transfer-payment scheme, wherein some of the money reaches its intended targets after passing through the sticky fingers of the overpaid bureaucrats who live in and around Washington, D.C.

Read it. And watch the video.

Well, there’s the smell, for one thing….

Read it.

I can’t vouch for the chemistry here, but independent security researcher Evan Booth has a video up at LiveLeak demonstrating the construction of a grenade with materials purchased at an airport after passing through TSA security. This is just the latest very interesting revelation from Booth, who runs Terminal Cornucopia, a site dedicated to tapping into your inner MacGyver at the airport. So far, he’s built blowguns, incendiaries, and crossbows, among other items the Transportation Security Administration might wish you not acquire at the airport gift shop. The fragguccino grenade made with a coffee mug, body spray, and other goodies is a new addition.

Climbing Wall Treadmill

Tub Spout Cover

Build Your Own Car

Reinventing the Wheelchair

Healthiest and unhealthiest breakfast sandwiches

Paper Log Maker

Emergency Multifunction Hammer

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.

 Why do the Common Core educational standards (e.g., a list of what needs to be taught in each grade dreamed up by David Coleman) need to be common across the country? Why is it crucially important that 45 states upend what they’re doing to jump on board this untested bandwagon? Wouldn’t it make more sense to test Dave’s brainstorm in one state to see if it actually works before betting the country on it?

Well, no. Those who believe in the Factory Model of Schooling will always believe in the Factory Model of Schooling even when the circumstances that made the Factory Model of Schooling a good idea have long vanished, simply because they believe that what was good for Henry Ford and won World War II is how it ought to be forevermore. Such people, for example, join Unions.

 The only argument I’ve heard for why a Common Core being must be almost nationally common is that it would be nice for students who suddenly move from one state to another to find their new school is exactly where their old school left off. But how important is this?

The French minister of education is famously proud that in every school in the country the nine-year-olds are reading the same page at the same moment. Is this better or worse than a more federal system like Germany’s? Off hand, the results don’t seem all that different. The differing approaches seems more to reflect the French state’s obsession with centralization in case they want to put together an army big enough invade Russia again. In contrast, German federalism reflects their interest in decentralization so they aren’t tempted to put together an army big enough to invade Russia again.

Personally, I’d live to see both France and Germany invade Russia again. Perhaps they’d do it right this time. The way things are going, it would be French and German Muslims fighting Russian Muslims, and what’s not to like about that?

 America is just finishing up a colossal failure called No Child Left Behind, a plan dreamed up by President Bush and Senator Kennedy that mandated that every public school student in America score “proficient” in reading and math by next May. It was obvious from the get-go that it would never work, but it was wildly popular within the education industry for many years because it justified no end of conferences, meetings, pet projects, days out of the classroom to get “professional development,” and all the other things that are more fun than teaching other people’s children day after day after day.

Remember: Every government program involves lots of government workers spending taxpayer money on hiring more government workers, with a lot left over to Spread The Wealth Around to the non-government worker friends of the government workers. To paraphrase the hoary cliché about e-commerce: If you’re not the one getting government money, then you’re the one paying for it.

Read it.

I am saddened that Dallas is not on the list. But I take comfort in the fact that EVERY DAMNED ONE OF THEM IS RUN BY DEMOCRATS.

Read it.

While everyone has been focused on the Obamacare and Iranian-nuke debacles, the Kurdish region of Syria declared itself autonomous, which combined with the autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq and the large Kurdish region in Turkey, may mark a significant step towards the establishment of a Kurdish state.

Since the Kurds are not in conflict with Jews (and generally are quite friendly towards Israel), Kurdish national aspirations don’t get much attention at the U.N. or elsewhere. No one much cares that Kurds, a truly distinctive cultural identity who number several times the “Palestinians,” do not have a nation of their own.

This could get interesting.

Gavin MacInnes weathers the storm.

I recently made the mistake of doing a humorous piece about “Asian privilege,” which was nothing more than an article about white privilege with the word “white” replaced with “Asian.” Virtually no slopes got the joke and my phone almost overheated with angry emails, re-Tweets, Facebook posts, and texts. (How did those tenacious riceballs get my number?) I even won an award for “Hipster Racism.” I didn’t apologize and eventually they went away. That’s the way it works with the Perpetually Offended. They feed off apologies. They’re vindicated by them. The more apologies you give them, the more they demand. And Asians are particularly demanding.

Check it out.

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

Read it. And watch the videos.

 Andersen: “I discovered historical texts that [described] Saracens who fought with the Crusaders had a series of tests which had been preserved. For example, one test required, at a 60-bow distance, to shoot three arrows so quickly that the last shall be in the air before the first has hit,” added Lars. “That is three arrows in one-and-a-half seconds. That motivated me to accomplish it.”

Fast forward several years later with heavy training under his belt, Andersen has now achieved an impressive shooting technique. Both fast and accurate, he accomplished what many thought was simply legend or folklore.

Read it.

After more than two decades of being a dedicated Windows power user, someone who over that time has installed and supported countless systems running versions of Windows spanning from 3.0 to 8.1, I’ve now all but given up on the platform.

It might sound odd, but writing these words actually makes me sad. I devoted my 10,000 hours to mastering the platform, plus thousands more, and got the point where there wasn’t a file, registry entry, or command line trick that I wasn’t familiar with.

I knew how to make Windows work.

But now, other than for test systems and virtual machines, I carry out my day-to-day work on a variety of OS X, iOS and Android systems. I barely giving my Windows PC systems a second glance. My primary work system is a MacBook Pro, and in the ten months I’ve had it it’s flawlessly done everything I’ve asked of it, from run Microsoft Word to render 4K video. I’ve lost count of the number of notebooks I’ve owned over the years, but this MacBook Pro is, by far, the most reliable system I’ve owned, and I put part of that down to the fact that it doesn’t run Windows.

Read it.

 “The reality is that the U.S. tax system gives dual citizens a good reason to walk away from their U.S. citizenship or permanent-resident status,” said Jeffrey Neiman, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “It’s a painful process but easier than staying in compliance with the law.”

Welcome to the Hotel California….

Jerry Pournelle lays out some inconvenient truth.

I used to build models for a living. The notion of systems analysis was to find systems you could model using mathematics that let you solve the model; you then tested the model against the real world.  The various climate models do none of this. They don’t even attempt to model in known factors, and they can’t even predict the real world – that is they can’t take the initial conditions of 1950 and run to 2010 and get anything similar to what actually happened.  And as the years go on it becomes more and more clear that there is no more warming trend now than there was in the days when the great fear was a cooling trend toward an ice age.  The fact remains that we don’t know what generates long term climate trends, and we have absolutely no understanding of solar radiation phenomena.

Read it.

The Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday released 103 ways to reduce the deficit.

Not one of which has any hope of being implemented.

Read it.

No one understands the significance of last month’s Illinois State Supreme Court decision better than FatWallet founder Tim Storm. A year after the affiliate nexus law’s introduction, Storm and his 54 employees piled into thirty-odd cars and moved from their business headquarters in Rockton, Illinois to Beloit, Wisconsin—a five mile drive across state lines.

This appeared a strange, if not foolish, business decision for Storm and FatWallet. The company spent upwards of $100,000 preparing for the move and left behind a $5 million custom-built office in Rockton. Yet, FatWallet’s bottom line depended on getting out of Illinois.

Read it.

While politicians were talking about using gun control legislation to make guns harder to get in the wake of the heinous crime at Sandy Hook Elementary, citizens were taking steps to get guns for self-defense.

Thus demonstrating that citizens are generally smarter than the people they elect to public office.

Read it.

A few weeks ago the taxpayer-funded Thanks ObamaCare campaign released the “Brosurance” ads, which featured young men drinking beer, doing keg stands, and asking “Got Insurance?” The same organization has since released new ads, this time aimed at young woman. One features a young woman holding birth control pills while standing next to a young man.

Your tax dollars at work.

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The AP reports that the EPA bowed to lobbyist pressure and changed its assumptions, i.e., boosting its estimates of average yields to 230 bushels per acre and corn prices leveling off at $3.22 per bushel. In the 2013 bumper crop year, the U.S. Department of  Agriculture estimates yields will be just over 160 bushels per acre and corn prices are currently around $4.30 per bushel.

Read it.

 Anyone who ever wanted to have a small tree house in their backyard will be totally amazed by this massive construction, The World’s Biggest Tree House, located in Crossville, Tennessee. Designed by Minister Horace Burgess, the structure relies on six oak trees as the base to support all five stories, which collectively stand 97-feet-high.

According to Burgess, his inspiration to build the tree house originated from a vision he had in 1993. He says, “I was praying to God and he said, ‘If you build me a treehouse, I will get you all the supplies.” To develop the project, the minister spent $12,000 and used mostly recycled materials across the course of 14 years. All of the wood is held together by exactly 258,000 nails, put into place by Burgess and a handful of volunteers.

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According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 932,000 people dropped out of the labor force last month, from at total of 90,609,000 in September to 91,541,000 in October.

The BLS defines a person “[n]ot in the labor force” as age 16 and older who are not employed and not considered to be unemployed as they have not looked for work in the four weeks prior to the survey.

The labor force participation rate — or all employed and unemployed people — in accordance with the decline, also hit a record low at 62.8 percent.

When President Obama took office in January 2009, the labor force participation rate was 65.7 percent.

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Ethanol is proving terrible for the environment. Spurred by the absurd biofuel volumes mandated by the Federal Renewable Fuels Standard, farmers in recent years have plowed over 5 millions of acres of conserved land and virgin prairie. This has released massive amounts of carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil. So much for ethanol’s promise of being a carbon-neutral replacement for oil.

Roughly 40% of America’s corn crop goes to support ethanol production. From the late 2000s through 2012 corn prices — stimulated by the federal ethanol mandates – soared, surpassing $7.50 a bushel last year before falling off. High prices naturally brought overfarming of corn, destroying animal habitats and causing massive water pollution from fertilizer runoff.

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Assuming, of course, that you might want to do that.

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Because she’s a ‘woman of color’, of course. ‘Victim’ trumps ‘knowledgeable’ every day in the Obamanation.

How on earth can somebody who rejects basic academic knowledge be so close to winning a city council seat?

Whoa … there’s a hole with no bottom….

Read it.

People who are troubled by markets tend to treat prices as the problem in a market. Whether the price of labor or agricultural commodities is too low, or the price of housing or healthcare or payday loans is too high, prices are the problem in need of a solution. Prices, however, are not the problem. If there is a problem, prices are literally a symbol of it.

If low wages indicate that a person has a bad life, low wages do not indicate it because the dollar number per hour is low. What indicates that a life is bad is that low wages are not good enough to have a good life. The trouble with low wages is not that they are too low to have a good life. It is that a life of low wages is bad. “Not good enough to have a good life” is not equivalent to “too low to have a good life.” “Too low” treats the wage as a sign that directly points to something known. “Good enough” treats the wage as a symbol that makes multiple indirect connections to the unknown. Prices are more like symbolic words than simple indicating traffic lights.

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I grinned watching the military operation executed against Greenpeace. I enjoyed the astonishment on the activists’ faces when, not so much disarmed as not even carrying arms, Greenpeace’s “Arctic 30” seemed to lose moral authority as fast as they lost their ship. Pictures of a pathetic English activist, elbows slouching on jail-cell bars, reveal they don’t have much backbone in the end. I mean, if you’re an eco-warrior, stand like a warrior. Don’t hug the bars like you’re waiting for mummy, whining moral platitudes at Russian guards who don’t speak English. Why should they? You (Greenpeace) are too lazy to learn Russian. If you want to effect change, why not learn the dialect first? Come on…man up, Greenpeace! Suck on the rough justice if you want to push your cause. Where’s the attitude now?

Greenpeace has been brash and impolite, if not culturally offensive, in its campaigns over the years. We in the West permit Greenpeace their transgressions because we’re furtive voyeurs of these merry pranksters who made a full-time job out of growing beards and goofing around in dirigibles. Read on, Greenpeace, and maybe take some notes from a real warrior such as Putin.

Read it.

The town is only 6 years old, designed to appeal to the Chinese middle class who hanker after a bit of British charm. Unfortunately, most bought their houses as second homes, and the place is a virtual ghost town.

Read it.

The industrial materials used to construct this church in Seville, Spain, make it look more like an edge-of-town manufacturing plant than a place for worship.

Look also at the new RC cathedral in L.A.

The Google Doodle today honors veterans.

Since when did Google start giving a shit about veterans? There must be a mole….

Read it.

Amazon has announced a partnership with the US Postal Service that will see the retailer deliver packages on Sundays from now on. The program is rolling out first to customers in the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, but the company plans to extend it to cities including Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and Phoenix in 2014.

This sort of thing is why I own Amazon stock.

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Hunger makes the best sauce, goes the maxim. According to researchers at Yale Medical School, it may make quadratic equations and Kant’s categorical imperative go down easier too. The stimulation of hunger, the researchers announced in the March issue of Nature Neuroscience, causes mice to take in information more quickly, and to retain it better — basically, it makes them smarter. And that’s very likely to be true for humans as well.

Read it.

Hitler gassed 6 million Jews! Tragedy!

Stalin starved 4 million peasants to death! <yawn>

Estimates for the death tolls of the Holocaust and Holodomor range all over the place—usually correlated (surprise!) with how much ethnic and political sympathy the estimator has for the deceased—but a rough consensus is that the number of victims was roughly the same.

Wait—aren’t all dead bodies created equal? Why the galloping disparity in public awareness of these dueling atrocities?

Some would say it’s because Western academia is dominated by leftists who are loath to acknowledge their chosen creed’s historical capacity for totalitarian cruelty.

Others would say it’s because Western media is dominated by people who are more sympathetic to Jewish people than to Christians.

Yet others would assert it’s because the USA fought alongside the Soviet Union in WWII and thus wants to avoid appearing complicit in the deliberate starvation of millions.

I’ll pick “all of the above.”

Read it.

Out in the further reaches of the critical theory left, the necessity of denying objective reality extends to language itself.  The deep-dish post-modernists declaim that language is just another subjective tool of the (white) power structure.  Whenever I hear such drivel, I usually ask not only why are we having this argument, but how are we having this argument?  (And if there is nothing but power in the world, I like to say: “Fine.  How many guns you lefties got?  Because I’ve got lots of them.”  That’s when the whole subject is usually changed or dropped.)

It should not surprise us, then, that “progressives” (the new term for “liberals” since modern liberals have discredited liberalism) are obsessed with language, and think that merely changing words will change minds. George Lakoff has made a lucrative cottage industry out of this.

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“I was really shocked,” said Colorado Obamacare supporter Cathy Wagner upon receiving her cancellation notice. “All of my hopes were sort of dashed. Oh my gosh, President Obama, this is not what we hoped for, it’s not what we were told.”

ODF. ‘You break it, you own it.’

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On Thursday the FDA proposed changing its classification of trans fats to no longer “generally recognized as safe,” which means food companies would have to prove that the partially hydrogenated oils are harmless before using them. This new, higher bar could mean that trans fats will disappear from our diets altogether, since the most recent research shows that they contribute to plaque buildup in the arteries and heart attacks.

But surprisingly, science has only been against trans fats for the past few decades. Through the late 1980s, animal fat substitutes like Crisco and margarine were all the rage, and for a brief moment were even considered a health product. Here’s the story of how America fell in love with, and then quickly slid away from, hydrogenated oils.

Trying to keep up with the fads in ‘food science’ can be a full-time job.

In the 1980s, some scientists began to associate heart disease with saturated fats, and in response, groups such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the National Heart Savers Association (NHSA) began to hound manufacturers for “poisoning America … by using saturated fats,” and as a result “nearly all targeted firms responded by replacing saturated fats with trans fats,” as David Schleifer wrote in 2012 for the journal Technology and Culture.

At the time, many restaurants used beef fat for frying, which groups like CSPI believed was far worse than hydrogenated oils, based on the research of the time.

Which wouldn’t matter, except that the government sticks it’s fingers in and starts mandating stuff. ‘The science is in! There’s a consensus!’ Until it changes, and the previous ‘fact’ goes down the Memory Hole.

 Surprisingly, it was the same organization, CSPI, that later urged the FDA to add trans fats to food labels, and nutrition panels have been required to list the substance since 2006. Though American consumption of trans fat has declined precipitously in recent years, it’s still common in food such as microwave popcorn, margarine, and some coffee creamers. But probably not for much longer.

Read it.

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

Welcome to the Obamanation. How’s that Hope & Change thing workin’ out for ya?

Read it.

“No-till farming” sounds pretty dull at first. The term basically describes ways to grow crops each year without disturbing the soil through tillage or plowing.

But it’s an important idea. Plowing and tillage are major sources of soil erosion around the world — they were key factors behind the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. What’s more, churning up all that soil can release a significant amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, helping to warm the planet. So, since the 1980s, more and more American farmers (and policymakers) have started taking no-till farming seriously.

The purpose of tilling the soil is to kill the weeds that would otherwise crowd out the new grain or whatever it is being planted.

The advent of new herbicides such as atrazine and paraquat in the 1940s and 1950s allowed farmers to kill weeds without plowing up more soil. And the invention of specialized seeding equipment in the 1960s allowed farmers to plant while barely disturbing the soil. Various federal government subsidies for soil conservation also gave farmers incentives to switch practices — particularly after the 1985 farm bill. So did higher oil prices.

Of course, the downside of that is you’ve got people bitching and moaning about using chemicals in farming. But there are ways around that, although a lot of farmers just don’t want to put in the effort that it takes.

Read it.

The National Secular Society (NSS) has instructed lawyers to investigate challenging the ancient religious rite under human rights legislation.

Keith Porteous Wood, the NSS executive director, said: “The country has changed out of all recognition since the last coronation and we should now be devising an investiture ceremony for the next head of state everyone can feel part of.

After all, it’s all about them.

Read it.

The sort of SWPL problem that somebody who writes for the New York Times would worry about.

We don’t spend a lot of thought on that in Texas. Just sayin’.

Read it.

I’m pretty sure that foreigners aren’t as interested in what Americans think about their country as Americans are interested in what foreigners think about their country. And that’s a pretty significant difference.

Read it.

According to the president’s plan, these are the people who will pay more for healthcare to finance older, sicker people.

How are they supposed to pay more for healthcare when they can’t even find jobs?

I doubt that it even crossed the Magic Negro’s mind.

Read it.

No restaurant in D.C. has been better outfitted for the iPhone generation than the forthcoming Bolt Burgers. It is a restaurant full of screens — touchscreen systems for ordering your food and making your drinks, tablets at every table, and a 16-foot-wide projected TV screen to watch while you wait for your order.

You can order food without having a single interaction with another human being, which, for millennials who prefer texting and online ordering through Seamless to picking up the phone, is a major plus.

Sounds like heaven, if the burgers are any good. (Aye, there’s the rub….)

“Everybody in the burger business has a good burger,” said Spinelli, “so this is what distinguishes us from everybody else.”

Au contraire, few in the burger business have a good burger. If they think that, then I predict that their burgers will be crap.

One of the technological centerpieces of Bolt Burgers is a no-flip burger grill. The device can cook a six-ounce burger in exactly three minutes, to the exact same level of doneness every time. It can make 1,200 burgers an hour. “I think it’s fantastic,” said Clayton. “I have the confidence that the guy at the grill will hit a button and get a perfect burger every time.”

More to the point, they will have few enough employees that they’ll sail under the radar of ObamaCare, and so might actually get a chance to make a profit. Too bad for all those Victims of Color out there who want a job, although I don’t imagine there are a lot of those any more.