Read it.

I am not making this up.

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But PETA has another plan for lovers of the wilderness. They want to spy on hunters as self appointed green police trying to trap them in violations. Surprisingly, these “hobbyists” are able to take home their personal drone for only $324.99.

The most expensive clay pigeon available. Think about it.

 Doug Jeanneret of the U.S. Sportsman’s Alliance asserts that PETA using drones constitutes “hunter harassment.” He added , “Imagine drones running over your duck decoys or near your tree stand. It would certainly interfere with your hunt and break the law. They will definitely be using them against all hunters.”

And, since the hunters all have guns, it’s a problem easily solved. One of the more endearing qualities of ‘progressives’ is that they have this bizarre notion that they’re invulnerable — like Greenpeace harassing Russian oil platforms, reality has a way of pointing out the errors of their worldview.

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No doubt many of them voted Democrat, perhaps more than once.

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Let’s get right down to the important stuff.

The Other McCain reminds us of a timeless truth.

If something works, it works. To intellectuals, however, theory takes precedence over practice and ideological abstractions like “equality” are more important than actual success and happiness.

Read it.

After Susan Rice disgraced herself on Meet the Press after the 9/11 attack on our consulate in Benghazi, I was so incensed that I wrote you about my research which made it very clear that the attack was not a spontaneous reaction to the YouTube video, and was undertaken by Ansar al Sharia, which is Al Qaeda affiliated.

After reading the New York Times whitewash of the Benghazi affair today, I find myself feeling like I did after watching Susan Rice on Meet the Press. The Times story is a transparent attempt to provide cover for Hillary Clinton’s upcoming run for POTUS in 2016. I find it incredible that the Times produced such a lengthy story filled with statements that are so easily refuted by facts that are readily available to anybody with half a brain and an Internet connection. There are so many misstatements that it is hard to know where to begin.

Jim Goad is delightfully dyspeptic today.

As someone who’s offended by nothing but annoyed by everyone, I found no shortage of people this past year to stoke the angry embers of my irascible soul. Try as I may to shield my eyes from the countless blinding petty indignities and massive vexations of everyday existence, each sunrise seemed to drop a new human being on my doorstep to annoy me.

Well do I know the feeling….

John C Wright has an answer.

War is fundamental. A man’s views on war tell you the basic axioms of his view on life. Because of this, a popular war story will tell you in an abbreviated form much about the storyteller’s most fundamental ideals and fears, and that of his audience.

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America is full of frustrated, broken, baffled people because so many of us think, “If I work this hard, this many hours a week, I should have (a great job, a nice house, a nice car, etc). I don’t have that thing, therefore something has corrupted the system and kept me from getting what I deserve, and that something must be (the government, illegal immigrants, my wife, my boss, my bad luck, etc).”

I really think Effort Shock has been one of the major drivers of world events. Think about the whole economic collapse and the bad credit bubble. You can imagine millions of working types saying, “All right, I have NO free time. I work every day, all day. I come home and take care of the kids. We live in a tiny house, with two shitty cars. And we are still deeper in debt every single month.” So they borrow and buy on credit because they have this unspoken assumption that, dammit, the universe will surely right itself at some point and the amount of money we should have been making all along (according to our level of effort) will come raining down.

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The pejoratively named “trickle-down economics” was the idea that by giving tax breaks to the wealthy and big business, this would spur economic growth that would benefit those further down the ladder. I guess we all know how that worked out.

But while progressives would clearly mock this policy, modern day urbanism often resembles nothing so much as trickle-down economics, though this time mostly advocated by those who would self-identify as being from the left. The idea is that through investments catering to the fickle and mobile educated elite and the high end businesses that employ and entertain them, cities can be rejuvenated in a way that somehow magically benefits everybody and is socially fair.

Two words: ‘football stadium’.

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Harvard may have met its match. In a segment that aired earlier this week on “The Colbert Report,” Stephen Colbert commented on the fact that 23,000 people applied for 600 jobs at two recently-opened Walmart stores, giving Walmart a frighteningly low acceptance rate of 2.6 percent.

Colbert put it best when he warned applicants to Harvard and Princeton that they may be aiming too low. “It turns out,” he said, “there’s now an even more elite institution on the scene.”

Read it.

Our Indian correspondent takes a look at the life script of Mohammed, which authorizes — and even commands — the murder, rape, enslavement, and subjugation of anyone who is not a member of his 1400-year-old crime family.

Freeberg sums it up.

It’s funny. Whether the victim-class is defined according to race, gender, creed, obesity, language, immigration status, income level or sexual preference, the rules are always the same.

1. We should never hold the members of that class to any kind of a standard, be it a standard of performance or a standard of behavior;
2. We should treat it as a human-rights violation if any member of that class wants something, and ends up not getting it;
3. If any member of that class falls short of what they were supposed to do or screws up, we’re not allowed to notice it or talk about it;
4. They should never, under any circumstances, at all, anywhere, whatsoever — have to prove anything.

Theodore Dalrymple is fluent.

My late friend, the distinguished economist Peter Bauer, used to say that the only true unemployment in the modern world was among satirists, for the world had grown so ridiculous that what was intended as satire was either a description of what already existed or a prophecy of what would soon come to exist.

Read it.

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

After all, only Christians go to church on Christmas.

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Mind you, I understand their feelings.

Andrew told the media that he had just finished a call and placed his iPhone 4S on the table when a young man came up to the table, grabbed the phone, and ran. Andrew gave chase immediately but was quickly confronted by two teenaged girls just outside the coffee shop.

Note that they don’t mention the race of the perpetrators. That’s usually a good sign that they were black.

Police arrested Letaija Shapree Cutler-Cain, 18, and a 17-year-old accomplice whose name was not released because she is a minor.

And the name and accompanying picture confirms it.

“I was targeted because the phone was out and I’m 63 years old, and I’m sure they thought that I was easy pickins,” Andrew said.

Of course, being a Democrat, he can’t afford to mention ‘… and I was white.’

The Other McCain is on the case.

The apparent fakery by Williams probably won’t be reported in bold headlines by some outlets that reported the story originally.

And you can depend on that.

Read it.

Dead cow and spuds are the basis of all true civilization.

7-in-1 Emergency Auto Tool

Retractable Spike Snow Boots

Stainless Steel Travel Cup

Read it.

 Indiana Jones meets The Da Vinci Code in a tiny southwestern French village, where three researchers have revealed the entrance to a cave they insist contains King Solomon’s gold, and possibly the Holy Grail.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

Read it.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot….

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Probably not. The Crust has been at this game for a long, long time.

“The art of government is to make two-thirds of the nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third,” mused Voltaire. Even that cynical French Enlightenment writer couldn’t imagine what would transpire one day in California, where a portion of the mere 15.3 percent of the public that works for government has gotten the rest of the public to pay for an eye-popping level of compensation.

Read it.

No school has taken flipping as far as Clintondale. It began because Greg Green, the principal, had been recording videos on baseball techniques and posting them on YouTube for his 11-year-old son’s team. Recording the content allowed kids to watch the videos repeatedly to grasp the ideas, and left more time for hands-on work at practices.

It gave him an idea, and in the spring of 2010, he set up an experiment: He had a social studies teacher, Andy Scheel, run two classes with identical material and assignments, but one was flipped. The flipped class had many students who had already failed the class — some multiple times.

After 20 weeks, Green said, Scheel’s flipped students, despite their disadvantages, were outperforming the students in the traditional classroom. No student in the flipped class received a grade lower than a C+. The previous semester 13 percent had failed. This semester, none did. In the traditional classroom, there was no change in achievement.

We have the technology — we just need to figure out the best way to use it.

Gavin McInnes turns over a rock.

Instead of accepting my opinions as sincere, the female professor on the panel insisted I was scared of empowered women. I rarely talk to people this removed from reality, so it was challenging. In their world, the only reason men have a reputation for being tougher than women is because they’ve been conditioned to act that way. In their world, women earn less because of sexism. Women aren’t in math and sciences because they’ve been discouraged from pursuing it, etc. You’ve heard it all before. To them, gender roles are a kind of performance art and we should all be fine with a 130-pound firewoman carrying us from a burning building.

Meanwhile, on Earth, we just want to put food on the table so our kids stay healthy. If a qualified female shows up to work on a project you think, “Good. Maybe we’ll get out of here early.” Nobody doesn’t want her on the job. Nobody is “scared” of her. College professors don’t know this because they don’t work for a living. They’re paid to pontificate, and even then they get to go on sabbatical and pontificate even harder. (I believe the woman I was arguing with was on sabbatical during this debate—I was at work.) Despite how we all feel about women in the workforce, the panel kept implying I felt threatened by qualified women.

According to the BBC, that is.

Read it.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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Administrative bloat is not a new story, but there are two aspects of the causes of bloat that I seldom see discussed.  First, how much of the growth in administrative ranks is driven by political correctness along with federal mandates?  Most larger universities not only have large offices policing “diversity,” sexual harassment, and so forth, but often have deans and vice chancellors for these programs, usually paid at dean and vice chancellor salary levels.  Any many colleges now have administrative officers for “sustainability”—ironic since the cost model of higher education is clearly unsustainable.  (And insofar as any sensible notion of “sustainability” refers chiefly to simple resource efficiency, why isn’t this a prime candidate for outsourcing?)  The point is, liberals who moan about the high cost of college education today need to look in the mirror, for much of this cost expansion is probably the result of catering to the pressure groups who demand special programs to scratch their itch.  It would be good to see a detailed study—perhaps from our friends at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity—into this phenomena.  And it might be nice to break out the cost into line items; that is, include separate charges for “diversity” services at universities, and watch the backlash grow.

Read it.

Popular mythology about ‘the family farm’ to the contrary notwithstanding, most food today is grown in what are essentially outdoor factories. Automation and robotics are starting to dominate these places as they have long dominated indoor factories, and have traveled under the radar of the Lamestream Media because (a) they think farmers are boring and (b) farms aren’t unionized and so don’t reflect an Undercrust pressure group.

Read it. And watch the video.

Read it.

I was talking with a friend the other day about that perennial subject of conversation in the Valley, Google. And finally she gave me the clue that made the whole place make sense. “It’s about infantilizing people,” she explained. “Give them free food, do their laundry, let them sit on bouncy brightly-colored balls. Do everything so that they never have to grow up and learn how to live life on their own.”

And when you look at it that way, everything Google does makes a sick sort of sense.

I guess that explains why most of them vote Democrat.

Voice of the Crust New York Times trots out one of its Pet Brown People to lay down the Party Line.

 AT the heart of the fracas surrounding the arrest of an Indian diplomat in New York who promised to pay her housekeeper $9.75 per hour, in compliance with United States labor rules, but instead paid her $3.31 per hour, is India’s dirty secret: One segment of the Indian population routinely exploits another, and the country’s labor laws allow gross mistreatment of domestic workers.

Lesson: Unions vote Democrat more dependably than brown people. Check.

 India is furious that the diplomat, Devyani Khobragade, was strip-searched and kept in a cell in New York with criminals. Retaliation from the newly assertive but otherwise bureaucracy-ridden nation was swift. American diplomats were stripped of identity cards granting them diplomatic benefits, and security barriers surrounding the American Embassy in New Delhi were hauled away. A former finance minister suggested that India respond by arresting same-sex partners of American diplomats, since the Indian Supreme Court recently upheld a section of a Colonial-era law that criminalizes homosexuality.

I would find that amusing, certainly, when the Immovable Object of who-are-we-to-judge-their-culture gets in the way of the Irresistable Force of we-like-perverts-therefore-you-must-too and ‘progressive’ heads explode. Oh, that Orwell were alive to see this day….

 Notwithstanding legitimate Indian concerns about whether American marshals used correct protocol in the way they treated a diplomat, the truth is that India is party to an exploitative system that needs to be scrutinized.

Too bad that they’re not Muslim, which would deflect all such ‘scrutiny’.

I grew up in a middle-class household in India in the ’80s; my parents were schoolteachers, and our lifestyle was not lavish by any means.

Touch base I-grew-up-working-class: Check.

I received new clothes once a year; I don’t recall ever going to a restaurant; our family couldn’t afford a car, so we used a scooter.

Touch base Economically-disadvantaged: Check.

But we always had a live-in housekeeper who cooked and washed our clothes, while a man came by every other day to sweep and mop the floors.

Touch base criticize-culture-that-substitutes-human-labor-for-automation-because-latter-not-available-as-if-everybody-lived-like-Americans: Check.

Fisking the remainder of this article is left as an exercise for the reader — I have presents to wrap.

Read it.

First ask yourself one thing.  Have you ever met a runner that hasn’t complained about their ankles, knees, low back or hips?  I haven’t.  Why is that?  Let me explain.

Read it.

Vanadium dioxide is poised to join the pantheon of superstars in the materials world. Already prized for its extraordinary ability to change size, shape and physical identity, vanadium dioxide can now add muscle power to its attributes. A team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has demonstrated a micro-sized robotic torsional muscle/motor made from vanadium dioxide that for its size is a thousand times more powerful than a human muscle, able to catapult objects 50 times heavier than itself over a distance five times its length within 60 milliseconds –  faster than the blink of an eye.

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Carmat’s innovative artificial heart — which includes sections of cow tissue — initially won approval in Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Poland, and Belgium earlier this year. The company’s home country of France eventually came on board in September, and Health Minister Marisol Touraine is wasting no time in touting Carmat’s success. “This news brings great pride to France,” she told BFM TV. “It shows we are pioneers in healthcare, that we can invent, that we can carry an innovation that will also bring great hope to plenty of people.” Carmat’s CEO Marcelo Conviti took a more cautious tone. “We are delighted with this first implant, although it is premature to draw conclusions given that a single implant has been performed and that we are in the early postoperative phase,” he said in a statement.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Guess the proles are getting uppity. It will be amusing to see what the political class in SF decides to do. ‘Oh, my ducats! Oh, my ideology!’

More here.

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It seems what the producers intended and what A&E envisioned with the show is much different than the show that they ended up with, but they didn’t do anything about it because it was so wildly popular and so wildly profitable. But even with all the money, they have never really been comfortable with what happened.

This is what happened. The whole idea of the show was to parade these nouveau riche Christian hillbillies around so that we could laugh at them. “Look at them,” we were supposed to say. “Look how backward they are! Look what they believe! Can you believe they really live this way and believe this stuff? See how they don’t fit in? HAHAHA”

When the producers saw the way the show was shaping up, different than they envisioned it, they tried to change course. They tried to get the Robertson’s to tone down their Christianity, but to their eternal credit they refused. They tried to add fake cussin’ to the show by inserting bleeps where no cussword was uttered. At best, they wanted to make the Robertson’s look like crass buffoons. At worst they wanted them to look like hypocrites.

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If you ever wondered how come unions and organized crime are so often found together, look no further.

John Hinderaker lays it out.

The key datum for Ragsdale is “the unavoidable fact that the U.S. homicide rate towers over those of other developed nations.” That, he thinks, confirms the ineluctable connection between gun rights and homicide. But he is wrong: as I wrote here, there is no correlation between legal gun ownership and murder rate. The homicide rate in the U.S. is around average. Russia’s homicide rate is four times ours; rates in Africa average around five times ours; the rate in Brazil is five times ours; Mexico, which has stringent gun control laws, has double our homicide rate; murder rates in the Caribbean approximate those in Africa. It is true that Western European countries in general have lower rates than we do, but that is mostly because African-Americans commit murders at eight times the rate of whites. The murder rate in Norway is very low, but it is indistinguishable from the rate among Norwegian-Americans. It is also noteworthy that the homicide rate in the U.S. today is only one-half what it was in the early 1990s. That decline, which has occurred during a time when gun laws have generally been liberalized, is never addressed by gun control advocates.

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Not only do privileged children often get “sad” when their families break down, they are also markedly more likely to fail to graduate from college, to have a child outside of wedlock, and to lose the socioeconomic status of their childhood than their peers raised in an intact, married family. As I documented in a recent Atlantic article, for instance, the Add Health dataset shows that young adults from college-educated but non-intact families are about 31 percent less likely to graduate from college than their peers whose parents are married and college-educated (see below).

Read it.

Few things got—and still get—under the skin of liberals more than Ronald Reagan’s famous use of the term “welfare queen” in his 1976 campaign (he didn’t much use this theme in 1980, curiously enough).  Paul Krugman thinks it was a “minor” case of welfare fraud, while between the foam flecks of Chris Matthews you can make out that Reagan was a raaaccist for mentioning the subject.

So kudos to Josh Levin and Slate for setting the record straight.  Reagan’s “welfare queen” was a real person, and her name was Linda Taylor.

The Slate exposé is here.

When I set out in search of Linda Taylor, I hoped to find the real story of the woman who played such an outsize role in American politics—who she was, where she came from, and what her life was like before and after she became the national symbol of unearned prosperity. What I found was a woman who destroyed lives, someone far more depraved than even Ronald Reagan could have imagined. In the 1970s alone, Taylor was investigated for homicide, kidnapping, and baby trafficking. The detective who tried desperately to put her away believes she’s responsible for one of Chicago’s most legendary crimes, one that remains unsolved to this day. Welfare fraud was likely the least of the welfare queen’s offenses.

Beer Concentrate. I am not making this up.

LifeStraw.

3D Printed Guns.

“As I wrote in Tyranny of Clichés, what people always forget about Gandhi is that there was a tactical aspect to his philosophy of non-violence. He believed it would work on the British because the British conscience was open to moral suasion and guilt. George Orwell observed that Gandhi’s tactics wouldn’t work in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, because in those places a Gandhi would be carted off in the middle of the night and shot, probably alongside his whole family. In effect, Gandhi used the higher standards of the British against the British. And it worked to the extent that the Brits left India.” — Jonah Goldberg, The Goldberg File

Read it.

Draper shared his vision with TechCrunch tonight. He says he’s submitting a polished version to the state’s Attorney General in the form of a ballot proposition proposal within the next 48 hours. “Six Californias” already has a campaign website up and is eager for an army of volunteers.

Read it.

When used in trials, the compound gave mice more energy, toned their muscles , reduced inflammation, and led to big improvements in insulin resistance.

Scientists say it actually reversed the ageing process, not just slowing it down, and say that for humans the effect would be similar to a 60-year-old feeling like a 20-year-old.

Paul Mirengoff turns over a rock.

The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies has released a report (available via link here), which calls for a significant scaling back of NSA surveillance activity. The report is basically what you would expect from a panel whose five members include two left-wing law professors (Cass Sunstein and Geoffrey Stone), a grossly dishonest former bureaucrat (Richard Clarke), the man who helped scrub the Benghazi points to eliminate references to “Islamic extremists,” and a long-time liberal privacy advocate (Peter Swire).

In other words, the report is, for the most part, ideologically-driven nonsense.

I suspect, moreover, that this is about what the White House expected from the panel it hand-picked. Team Obama is far too shrewd to have picked this sort of panel if it wanted anything like an endorsement of the status quo.

Read it.

From where I sit, $250,000 a year – the amount President Barack Obama and other Democrats say is top-tier household income – is a substantial amount of money. But I don’t sit in Manhattan or Honolulu or San Francisco, where folks say they can easily blow through that much paying rent and childcare, and not living like kings.

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I guess she wasn’t as hot as she thought she was.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

Liberalism is a bad sales job, and therefore will always have a division in its midst between those who are being duped and those who are doing the duping. Just like an ass will always have a crack. The duped are, for the most part, grown-ups who have buried and forgotten whatever grand dreams they ever had as children about doing or building something great; they’ve now vectored that exuberant energy off into their voting, figuring great-and-grand things are for the political class to do, the role for the rest of us is to sort of mill about being “middle class” and doing middle-classy things. Maybe a quick vacation once a year, maybe visit someone, maybe host a party, the rest of it is all lunch sacks to work, get yelled at by the boss, go home, get yelled at by the wife. And that’s as good as it gets. The bargain they have struck is: I’ve given up on ambition. Ambition might be for my kids. I’ll settle for less pain, that’s my ambition now.

Those are the dupees. The dupers, do I even have to explain them? We have ObamaCare, which is such a debacle that there is widespread and legitimate question now as to whether that was even an accident.

…

We wonder why we’re such a contentious society lately. The answer is because kiosk-people are winning, forcing everyone else to go to centralized kiosks for everything they want or need, regardless of whether that’s how they wish to get it. If more people want the commodity than can be serviced by a single kiosk at one time, then a line forms. Then we show how civilized we are by waiting in line…which is a sad way to show it, since first-graders and Kindergarten students can be expected to do that.

It’s also ineffective. If we both wait at the same kiosk and we have a disagreement about some matter of taste, then the way we resolve it is to vote on it. And then fight about it. That’s what has been happening. We’re brought up to think the voting will settle the matter, but it only “settles” things for one voting cycle, while the battle rages onward from one cycle to the next. That, too, is what has been happening.

 

Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon we ought to be talking about real management. Unfortunately, the education industry approaches aerospace-sized projects with more starry-eyed optimism than is prudent for a bake sale, much less a war.

Whenever ‘educators’ (most of whom aren’t, really, just administrators of educational programs and institutions, which isn’t the same thing) run up against the inconvenient fact that American education sucks compared to ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, they reflexively shout “More cowbell money!”, as if money were some sort of tidal force that will eventually carry all before it. Tain’t necessarily so.

In an age when Silicon Valley trumpets “disruptive technologies,” it’s hardly surprising that the education reform establishment is addicted to the concept of magic bullets that will finally Fix the Schools. Who doesn’t love the allure of a revolutionary technological, doctrinal, or organizational fix for all that ails us?

Well, the good news is, we have that disruptive technology available. The bad news (for ‘educators’) is that it necessarily involves fewer jobs for ‘educators’, just as robotics means higher quality vehicles but fewer UAW members. Increased automation will not only break us free from the assembly-line batch-processed factory model school that has been in place since the middle ages, saving money in the process, but it will also allow us to tailor instruction to each individual’s interests and capabilities, just as modern CAD-CAM systems allow us to do ‘custom mass production’.

The junkyard of school solutions includes the 2002 No Child Left Behind act that mandated that every student in America be above average by next May.

The ‘Lake Woebegone’ fallacy. It’s no coincidence that Garrison Keillor is a raving ‘progressive’.

Lately, 45 states have signed on to junk their current curricula and tests in favor of the “Common Core,” a series of guidelines concocted by a former McKinsey consultant named David Coleman, whose only teaching experience is some tutoring of New Haven urban youth while he was buffing his Rhodes Scholarship application.

And such one-size-fits-all programs are going squarely in the wrong direction.

The education business has a short memory that keeps it from getting discouraged but also prevents it from learning from its mistakes. One reason fads are so common in public schools is that the incentive structure pays more to administrators with Ph.D.’s. A doctorate in education means you came up with some gimmick and then spent a few years documenting it. Education schools are thus novelty generation machines. Nobody gets to call himself “Doctor” for being good at making old ideas work together.