Read it.

Human-rights groups and assorted do-gooders have been filling up my Twitter timeline with news of a phenomenon many think no longer exists: literal witch hunts.

In 2009 the leader of The Gambia, the self-titled Sheikh Professor Dr. Yahya Abdul-Aziz Jemus Junkung Jammeh—perhaps best known for being the inventor of an herbal HIV “cure”—launched a witch-hunting campaign. Police, army, and national intelligence agents kidnapped up to 1,000 people at gunpoint. They were taken to secret detention centers and severely beaten, almost to the point of death. They were forced to confess and to drink “potions.” At least two died from potion-induced kidney failure.

Hey, all they have to do is re-name it ‘Child Protective Services’ and everybody would be fine with it.

Self-appointed witch hunter and self-described “Lady Apostle” Helen Ukpabio recently launched a crusade she calls “Witches on the Run” in Nigeria. The Observer reports that accused children in the country are “burnt, poisoned, slashed, chained to trees, buried alive or simply beaten and chased off into the bush.” Some have had nails driven into their heads.

Sounds like Democrats in action.

In 2008 police in the Democratic Republic of Congo arrested 13 people for using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises.

Maureen Dowd had better steer clear.

Read it.

This acoustic cryptanalysis, carried out by Daniel Genkin, Adi Shamir (who co-invented RSA), and Eran Tromer, uses what’s known as a side channel attack. A side channel is an attack vector that is non-direct and unconventional, and thus hasn’t been properly secured. For example, your pass code prevents me from directly attacking your phone — but if I could work out your pass code by looking at the greasy smudges on your screen, that would be a side channel attack. In this case, the security researchers listen to the high-pitched (10 to 150 KHz) sounds produced by your computer as it decrypts data.

Read it.

The Progressive assault on the Constitution of limited government and divided powers succeeded in the creation of the apparatus of the administrative state. In the administrative state, executive branch agencies exercise judicial and legislative powers. The assumption of royal or dictatorial powers by the president has grown up along with the administrative state. President Obama has accelerated the process and aggravated the phenomenon.

Read it.

As John and others have pointed out, the Murray-Ryan budget compromise cuts spending by reducing cost of living increases in military pensions. The reduction even applies to disabled veterans.

Naturally, there has been a backlash against these cuts. So naturally, Patty Murray (but apparently not Paul Ryan) is trying to distance herself from them. Murray’s people are blaming Ryan.

Read it.

Actually, it’s still the Same Old Inequality, but a Voice of the Crust like CNN has to use handwaving like this to distract the low-information demographic from the fact that Obamacare is making things a lot, lot worse. They figure you’re so dumb you won’t notice, and will participate in the Two Minute Hate against ‘the rich’ without remembering that most rich people are, like CNN, Democrats.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Two layers of the Crust mix it up.

Read it.

“Cost is the big roadblock for algae-based fuel,” said Douglas Elliott, the laboratory fellow who led the PNNL team’s research. “We believe that the process we’ve created will help make algae biofuels much more economical.”

But not, apparently, economical enough to replace regular petroleum. Pity.

Read it.

Waddoups calls a 19th-century Supreme Court ruling banning polygamy “racist” and “orientalist,” because it asserted that Christianity’s teaching on marriage is superior to the polygamous arrangements that some Africans and “Asiatics” (presumably this means Arab Muslims) live by. This is an important point, it seems to me. If Christianity and the Christian moral and societal framework is no longer viewed as normative in laws governing sexual practice, then the slippery slope to legalizing polygamy is here. We already know from the Lawrence ruling that the state may not regulate private consensual sexual conduct; if the principle that privileging Christian marital norms is impermissible is accepted, by what standard do we prevent polygamy? I suppose you could say it harms society in some way, but this judge rejected that argument.

Read it.

I agree 100% with the sentiment of the article, but the article doesn’t really point out that the number one goal of educational policy for the last three decades has been to close the gaps between whites and non-Asian minorities. To the extent that gap-closing is the number-one goal, better education for the smartest students, who are overwhelmingly white and Asian, is a negative goal because that would increase the gap.

This is why if you have smart children, the only way to ensure they get a quality education is to send them to an elite and expensive private school. (Or at least a public school in an overwhelmingly upper-middle-class district where there’s a strong PTA controlled by parents who want their gifted children to get advanced education.)

In other words, Scions of the Crust. For the rest, the goal is equality, not excellence; we don’t want these uppity middle class kids competing with our Precious Legacies for the best jobs.

Read it.

Some may think reporters and editors are simply clumsy or indifferent writers, and sometimes they are. But much of the time they choose their words (and photos) with exquisite and subtle care. They also realize that most people only look at the headlines and photos of most articles, and that those are therefore the most important elements, and that even people who do read the article often read only the first few paragraphs.

In thisWaPo article, the headline and photo have been chosen to suggest that Obama is a suffering victim—in fact, the greatest victim—of a series of unfortunate circumstances that have befallen him. He’s nearly a martyr. And the text (the excerpt quoted above is the second paragraph in the piece) reinforces that idea by this phrase, “faced a series of setbacks.” Passive voice; no actor.

The Crust rallys ’round its affirmative-action hire.

Read it.

Saw that comin’.

Seth Roberts has some advice, with reasons.

I believe Stuart’s discovery is important for two other reasons that might not impress anyone else. One is similarities with my earlier work. First, I’ve found  other “cross-over” interactions with time of day, where something helpful at one time is harmful at another time. Vitamin D in the morning improves sleep, Vitamin D at night harms sleep. Morning faces improve mood, evening faces harm mood. Second, wondering why we like sour, umami and complex flavors was the first thing to suggest to me that we need to eat plenty of fermented food to be healthy. Many facts later, I’m sure this is true. Finally, evolutionary reasoning has helped me find several new experimental effects (morning faces, Shangri-La Diet, flaxseed oil, standing and sleep).

Finally, Stuart’s discovery explains something puzzling I’d noticed repeatedly for years. Now and then I slept unusually well. I’d wonder why — how was yesterday different from usual? — and see that the only unusual thing was that I’d had dinner at a friend’s house. At the times, I guessed that seeing faces in the evening was somehow improving my sleep. This did not make sense in terms of my morning faces work, but a connection between social contact and sleep was well-established. Now I realize that dinner at a friend’s house is one of the few times I eat dessert. A friend told me that when his partner has dinner parties, she serves dessert long after the main course.

More here.

Read it.

Some cheerful news to start your day.

Read it.

“We believe that the case is closed — supplementing the diet of well-nourished adults with (most) mineral or vitamin supplements has no clear benefit and might even be harmful,” concluded the authors of the editorial summarizing the new research papers, published Dec. 16 in the Annals of Internal Medicine. “These vitamins should not be used for chronic disease prevention. Enough is enough.”

Maybe so, but I’m still taking mine.

Read it.

Like other organs, eyes sometimes need to be replaced with a transplant, and that transplant comes from a person who agreed to donate their organs upon their death. In the future, it might be a lot easier to acquire an eye transplant thanks to 3D printing. University of Cambridge researchers published a paper today detailing how they used an ink printer to print multiple types of rat eye cells; the first time anyone has been able to keep eye cells healthy and at the right consistency to flow out of a nozzle. It’s a first step toward being able to 3D print an artificial eye for a human.

Read it.

High speed rail is marketed as a sustainable alternative to air traffic. According to the International Union of Railways, the high speed train “plays a key role in a stage of sustainable development and combating climate change”. As a regular long-distance train traveller in Europe, I have to say that the opposite is true. High speed rail is destroying the most valuable alternative to the airplane; the “low speed” rail network that has been in service for decades.

The introduction of a high speed train connection invariably accompanies the elimination of a slightly slower, but much more affordable, alternative route, forcing passengers to use the new and more expensive product, or abandon the train altogether. As a result, business people switch from full-service planes to high speed trains, while the majority of Europeans are pushed into cars, coaches and low-cost airplanes.

A look at European railway history shows that the choice for the elite high speed train is far from necessary. Earlier efforts to organize speedy international rail services in Europe accompanied affordable prices and different ways to increase the speed and comfort of a rail trip. Quite a few of these services were even faster than today’s high speed trains.

Read it.

The Vatican Library and Oxford University’s Bodleian Library put the first of 1.5 million pages of their precious manuscripts online Tuesday, bringing their collections to a global audience for the first time.

Read it.

A mainstay of drive-up bank tellers for decades, a New Zealand cafe is finally taking the pneumatic tube to its logical conclusion: as a delivery mechanism for delicious, nutritive sliders. The Press reports the story of Christchurch’s C1 restaurant, which is in the midst of installing a network of vacuum tubing to connect its kitchen with every single table; when the system is complete late next year, cooks will be able to shoot burgers directly to their customers at over 80 miles per hour inside reinforced aluminum canisters.

Can the flying car be far behind?

Read it. And watch the video.

His range of MAG (Magnetic Assisted Geometry) furniture is made of sheet steel and solid wood, with magnets in the wooden parts allowing each piece to be assembled in minutes with no tools.

Because screwdrivers are just so last century.

Read it.

Aw, what the hell, get rid of the House of Representatives too, while we’re at it; it’s not as if they do anything useful, and we’d save a lot of money.

Read it.

Gotta love that Global Warming. (Maybe AlGore made a secret visit….)

I think this satisfies the ‘cold day in Hell’ criterion….

Read it.

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

According to Hudes, the elite use a very tight core of financial institutions and mega-corporations to dominate the planet.  The goal is control.  They want all of us enslaved to debt, they want all of our governments enslaved to debt, and they want all of our politicians addicted to the huge financial contributions that they funnel into their campaigns.  Since the elite also own all of the big media companies, the mainstream media never lets us in on the secret that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way that our system works.

In other words, the Crust.

Read it.

According to Wolin, there are three main ways in which inverted totalitarianism is the inverted form of classical totalitarianism.

• Whereas in Nazi Germany the state dominated economic actors, in inverted totalitarianism, corporations through political contributions and lobbying, dominate the United States, with the government acting as the servant of large corporations. This is considered “normal” rather than corrupt.^[6]
• While the Nazi regime aimed at the constant political mobilization of the population, with its Nuremberg rallies, Hitler Youth, and so on, inverted totalitarianism aims for the mass of the population to be in a persistent state of political apathy. The only type of political activity expected or desired from the citizenry is voting. Low electoral turnouts are favorably received as an indication that the bulk of the population has given up hope that the government will ever help them.^[7]
• While the Nazis openly mocked democracy, the United States maintains the conceit that it is the model of democracy for the whole world.^[8] Wolin writes:

Inverted totalitarianism reverses things. It is all politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash.^[9]

Read it.

Because they’re doing such a fantastic job….

Read it.

How does a mother’s weight-loss surgery affect her child’s risk of obesity? It’s a question scientists have been struggling with since a Laval University study published in April, which looked at children born to mothers who’d undergone gastric bypass surgery prior to their pregnancy. Researchers knew the children were less prone to obesity, but as they tried to figure out why, they found something unexpected. The children’s genes were different — not their genetic code itself, but the markers in between that code. It was a small study, but the results were striking: more than 5,000 genes were expressed differently when parents had undergone the surgery. The surgery had changed something in the mother’s DNA, and when the children were born just a few years later, it appeared to have changed in them too.

Jim Goad has some fun with the usual suspects.

Aisha is a blogger for slate.com. She shares a first name with the girl who was married to Muhammad at age six and consummated their marriage at the unripened age of nine—while Ol’ Mo was 53—but I didn’t see this fact mentioned in the article that set off a diarrheal blast of news coverage last week.

Of course not. It’s not polite to think about, much less make fun of, the names that black parents give their daughters.

The essay was called “Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore,” and forgive me if I think it’s a wee bit uppity for Aisha to presume she has the authority to make such declarations. Aisha writes of the shame and pain and confusion and heartache she’d experience every holiday season when she walked out into the Scary Big White World and was ruthlessly confronted with “pale” Santas who had “skin as pink as bubble gum.” Aisha failed to note that if she were still living in her ancestral homeland, she likely wouldn’t be concerned with such trifles. Back in those non-wintry climes, she might even know what horseflies taste like.

Oops – there’s that word (‘uppity’). You can apply that to white people, and white people only. For shame.

Still, I find it incumbent upon myself to apologize for some of my brethren who joked that if Santa Claus was black, he’d be breaking into houses with an empty bag and leaving with it full. That so-called “joke” was not funny, nor was it appropriate in these very, very, very sensitive times of change and progress.

As with most jokes, the reason it’s funny is because it has a germ of truth.

Read it.

It’s so corrupt….

We have written many times about the corruption of the global warming movement. Billions and billions of dollars are being poured into the pockets of global warming alarmists, because they perform such a valuable service: they help to persuade voters that governments should be given greater control over the world’s economies. What’s a few billion dollars when trillions are at stake?

We have written mostly about the corruption of Greens in America, where Al Gore has become a standing joke. But the Daily Mail has performed the valuable service of exposing the corruption that is rampant among British environmentalists; specifically, global warming alarmists….

Steve Sailer lays down some inconvenient truth.

 The trendy Common Core in K-12 education is intended to teach “critical thinking skills” rather than rote memorization of stale facts. This sounds much like the old fluid v. crystallized distinction in IQ research. But can even effective schools improve fluid IQ?

…

Civilization, when properly functioning, is a device for minimizing the amount of fluid intelligence you need to function. You don’t need to turn military history into a superb epic oral poem like The Iliad anymore: you just write it down. Nowadays, you don’t have to go the library to read it. You can look it up on the Internet.

A huge problem with educational reform efforts is that they are typically designed by people who have high confidence in their own fluid intelligence relative to the average. Combine that with the contradictory dogma that students must all have equally high fluid intelligence — Jefferson wouldn’t have written it into the Declaration of Independence if it weren’t true — and you wind up with remarkably little critical thinking about education fads like critical thinking.

In contrast, the military tends to assume that everybody is an idiot who will find a way to screw up massively and probably get himself and large numbers of people around him killed, so it’s best to break things down into simple steps so soldiers can rely upon crystallized intelligence rather than fluid intelligence.

But the notion that the public schools can learn anything from the military has been out of fashion for just under 50 years. The people who took control of education 45 years ago may talk all the time about critical thinking skills, but they sure don’t like critical thinking about themselves and their ideas.

In a valiant attempt to solidify it’s position as a Voice of the Crust, The Atlantic denounces — wait for it — Republican ‘class warfare’.

Of course, pervasive and perennial Democrat class warfare is nowhere to be found.

Read it.

One of the greatest actors to appear in my lifetime.

‘Ow! That hurts!’
‘Of course it hurts.’
‘Wot’s the trick, then?’
‘The trick is, not minding that it hurts.’

Read it.

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

Read it.

Christopher Hitchens died on this date two years ago. Hitchens was the model of a public intellectual. He was certainly public in his positions and arguments, which allows for anyone interested to assess a person’s arguments. And he was intellectually honest in a way that is uncommon, with many (most?) thinkers curtailing their views if they threaten a broader ideological identity. Though definitely a man of the left, Hitchens was never orthodox and ran into trouble given his positions on issues such as abortion (he was against it), foreign interventionism (he was for it), free speech deemed offensive to certain groups (he was for it), and more. While he rarely missed opportunities to offend right-wing sensibilities (he once joked about Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s clearly having started with the president was still in office), he didn’t hold back against the left, either. He had few kind words about Martin Luther King, Jr. and he dismissed Gandhi as a “poverty pimp.”

Read it.

How did the once-sovereign states become wards of Washington? They did it to themselves. State politicians came to recognize that they would benefit from a more powerful national government. As scholars like Michael Greve and Todd Zywicki have shown, state actors helped to break down the original constitutional system of “competitive federalism,” which kept government limited as states competed with each other to attract business and labor. In its place they contrived a parasitical “cooperative” or “cartel” federalism, in which states extract wealth from each other through the federal government.

Actually, it started when the South lost the Civil War. It was our misfortune that they were on the wrong end of the moral argument about slavery and so lost the more fundamental principle of states’ rights for all of us.

Read it.

Sitting up straight is not the best position for office workers, a study has suggested.

Scottish and Canadian researchers used a new form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to show it places an unnecessary strain on your back.

They told the Radiological Society of North America that the best position in which to sit at your desk is leaning back, at about 135 degrees.

Everything bad is good for you.

Read it.

Exhibit A:  A recent piece by some black woman named Aisha Harris at Slate, entitled “Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore.”  Yes, she thinks Santa henceforth should be a negro, nevermind the historical reality of Santa, which is: Santa is a composite of various European pagan and Christian figures, starting with Odin leading his ghostly yule procession through the sky, which was later overlaid with Christian elements like the Sinterklaas stories of central and northern Europe.  In short, Santa is European, which is precisely why these people want to wallpaper over him.

Steve Sailer is not impressed by certain trends in modern culture.

Stand-up comic Daniel Tosh talks about his underprivileged childhood: he grew up in a house on a public golf course … on the right side of the fairway.

About three guys in the audience will laugh. Private club golfers tend to be better players, and when better players miss, they tend to hook the ball to the left; but public course hackers tend to slice to the right, so a house on the right side of a public course fairway gets bombarded.

It’s kind of funny how tens of billions of dollars of houses and condos were built right alongside fairways from about 1960 to 2000, yet now it just seems like an all-around bad idea.

Read it.

It’s not really true that every other course here at the University of Colorado at Boulder is about race, class, and gender.  It just seems that way.  Such courses are widely advertised on all the campus bulletin boards, like the special course in the sociology department pictured here (click to embiggen).  In fact, if you did a scientific survey of the campus bulletin boards, my guess is that four-fifths of the self-made flyers advertising courses for the next semester are for holy trinity (race, class, gender) classes.  I haven’t seen one yet for a science course, and three quarters of the student body here are majoring in STEM subjects.

I like that: The holy trinity (race, class, gender).

Read it.

This year’s meeting, beginning on December 9th and concluding on Friday, included several exhibitions on space exploration, extreme weather events, and studies on the impact of various natural energy resource gathering techniques on the planet. It also included a panel on the Arctic and the dangers of a “sustained warming trend in the region,” as well as a panel dedicated to the findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Hey, who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

Read it.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Read it.

The Census Bureau has released its list of the 13 counties with the highest median incomes for the year 2012, and eight of the 13 are in the Washington, D.C. region. The Washington Post’s explanation is that “The Washington area has reigned at the top of the most affluent counties for years, in large part because it has so many residents with college degrees working at professional jobs. That gives the region a disproportionately large share of two-income households in which both adults have well-paying jobs.”

‘Willie, why do you live in Washington?’ ‘Because that’s where the money is.’

Gavin McInnes lays out some inconvenient truth.

Collectivism is a virus that has infected everything we do. I’m presently trying to get my kids into better schools and I’ve noticed the administrators fall into two categories: those who encourage the individual and those who think teamwork trumps personal development.

Steven Pressfield has some insight.

In my experience the evolution of a personal culture takes place in two stages.

First, we have to find it. We’ve got one already, never fear. It was there from the minute we were born. Our personal culture is constituted of our point of view, our style, our sense of humor, our unique gifts and drives. Our personal culture is our voice. It’s our artist’s sensibility. It’s our Authentic Swing.

When we embark on our hero’s journey, we are seeking our individual culture, whether we realize it or not. The climax of that journey is our discovery of that voice, those gifts, that unique point of view.

Phase two is the construction and reinforcement of that individual culture. Sometimes it just happens without us even thinking about it. Stevie Nicks picked up a tambourine. She found the top hat, the swirling skirts, the whole Welsh Witch thing. It’s been working for her from “Rhiannon” in 1975 to “New Orleans” in 2009.

‘Find out who you are, and then be that person.’ — Robin Williams

George Will gives the Magic Negro a well-deserved spanking.

 The education of Barack Obama is a protracted process as he repeatedly alights upon the obvious with a sense of original discovery. In a recent MSNBC interview, he restocked his pantry of excuses for his disappointing results, announcing that “we have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly”.

…

Obama, of whose vast erudition we have been assured, seems unfamiliar with Mancur Olson ’s seminal “The Rise and Decline of Nations,” which explains how free societies become sclerotic. Their governments become encrusted with interest groups that preserve, like a fly in amber, an increasingly stultifying status quo. This impedes dynamism by protecting arrangements that have worked well for those powerful enough to put the arrangements in place. This blocks upward mobility for those less wired to power.

Obama, startled that components of government behave as interest groups, seems utterly unfamiliar with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis — how incentives influence behavior — to government. It shows how elected officials and bureaucrats pursue personal aggrandizement as much as people do in the private sector. In the public sector’s profit motive, profit is measured by power rather than money.

Read it.

Unless you know about the Crust, in which case you won’t be.

I doubt that there is any conservative organization that can boast a remotely comparable list of corporate supporters. CAP’s disclosure is a timely reminder that large corporations are not, in general, supporters of free enterprise. Many of them love to partner with government to suppress innovation and competition. Koch Industries stands alone, as far as I know, as a relatively large company that actually supports free enterprise as a matter of principle. Which is why corporatist America, through disreputable organizations like the Center for American Progress, has waged unremitting warfare against Koch.

Read it.

 Buried inside a Congressional Budget Office report this week was this nugget: when it comes to individual income taxes, the top 40 percent of wage earners in America pay 106 percent of the taxes. The bottom 40 percent…pay negative 9 percent.

You read that right. One group is paying more than 100 percent of individual income taxes, the other is paying less than zero.

It’s right there in Table 3 on page 13 of the report. The numbers are based on 2010 IRS and Census Bureau figures.

Democrats, of course, are okay with that.

The Other McCain understands the dialectic.

Once you realize that anthropogenic global warming (also known as “climate change”) is a non-falsifiable theory, the pretzel logic is amusing: Any extreme or damaging weather — including extreme cold — can be cited as evidence of “climate change,” and anything that looks like contradictory evidence can be dismissed as irrelevant because . . . well, there’s a scientific consensus, and nobody can argue with a scientific consensus. In other words, the science of global warning is not science. It’s actually the exact opposite of science, because real science requires that a theory conform to the evidence, rather than attempting to conform the evidence to a theory.

In a land that the sand overlays – the ways to her gates are untrod –
A multitude ended their days whose gates were made splendid by God,
Till they grew drunk and were smitten with madness and went to their fall,
And of these is a story written: but Allah Alone knoweth all!

When the wine stirred in their heart their bosoms dilated.
They rose to suppose themselves kings over all things created –
To decree a new earth at a birth without labour or sorrow –
To declare: “We prepare it to-day and inherit to-morrow.”
They chose themselves prophets and priests of minute understanding,
Men swift to see done, and outrun, their extremest commanding –
Of the tribe which describe with a jibe the perversions of Justice –
Panders avowed to the crowd whatsoever its lust is.

Swiftly these pulled down the walls that their fathers had made them –
The impregnable ramparts of old, they razed and relaid them
As playgrounds of pleasure and leisure, with limitless entries,
And havens of rest for the wastrels where once walked the sentries;
And because there was need of more pay for the shouters and marchers,
They disbanded in face of their foemen their yeomen and archers.
They replied to their well-wishers’ fears – to their enemies laughter,
Saying: “Peace! We have fashioned a God Which shall save us hereafter.
We ascribe all dominion to man in his factions conferring,
And have given to numbers the Name of the Wisdom unerring.”

They said: “Who has hate in his soul? Who has envied his neighbour?
Let him arise and control both that man and his labour.”
They said: “Who is eaten by sloth? Whose unthrift has destroyed him?
He shall levy a tribute from all because none have employed him.”
They said: “Who hath toiled, who hath striven, and gathered possession?
Let him be spoiled. He hath given full proof of transgression.”
They said: “Who is irked by the Law? Though we may not remove it.
If he lend us his aid in this raid, we will set him above it!
So the robber did judgment again upon such as displeased him,
The slayer, too, boasted his slain, and the judges released him.

As for their kinsmen far off, on the skirts of the nation,
They harried all earth to make sure none escaped reprobation.
They awakened unrest for a jest in their newly-won borders,
And jeered at the blood of their brethren betrayed by their orders.
They instructed the ruled to rebel, their rulers to aid them;
And, since such as obeyed them not fell, their Viceroys obeyed them.
When the riotous set them at naught they said: “Praise the upheaval!
For the show and the world and the thought of Dominion is evil!”
They unwound and flung from them with rage, as a rag that defied them,
The imperial gains of the age which their forefathers piled them.
They ran panting in haste to lay waste and embitter for ever
The wellsprings of Wisdom and Strengths which are Faith and Endeavour.
They nosed out and digged up and dragged forth and exposed to derision
All doctrine of purpose and worth and restraint and prevision:

And it ceased, and God granted them all things for which they had striven,
And the heart of a beast in the place of a man’s heart was given. . . .

.          .        .          .          .           .          .          .

When they were fullest of wine and most flagrant in error,
Out of the sea rose a sign – out of Heaven a terror.
Then they saw, then they heard, then they knew – for none troubled to hide it,
A host had prepared their destruction, but still they denied it.
They denied what they dared not abide if it came to the trail;
But the Sword that was forged while they lied did not heed their denial.
It drove home, and no time was allowed to the crowd that was driven.
The preposterous-minded were cowed – they thought time would be given.
There was no need of a steed nor a lance to pursue them;
It was decreed their own deed, and not a chance, should undo them.
The tares they had laughingly sown were ripe to the reaping.
The trust they had leagued to disown was removed from their keeping.
The eaters of other men’s bread, the exempted from hardship,
The excusers of impotence fled, abdicating their wardship,
For the hate they had taught through the State brought the State no defender,
And it passed from the roll of the Nations in headlong surrender!

— The City of Brass, 1909

Or so claims Jonathan Merritt, who is a journalist with no credentials as a theologian that I can find.

Setting aside the ridiculousness of creating rigidly racial depictions of a fictitious character that does not actually exist—sorry, kids—like Santa, Kelly has made a more serious error about Jesus. The scholarly consensus is actually that Jesus was, like most first-century Jews, probably a dark-skinned man. If he were taking the red-eye flight from San Francisco to New York today, Jesus might be profiled for additional security screening by TSA.

Of course, ‘white’ doesn’t mean ‘not dark skinned’ — ask George Zimmerman. Hell, ask Al Sharpton if Jews are ‘white’; I think we can count ol’ Al (and Jesse Jackson) in our corner on this one.

Just who is making the ‘serious error about Jesus’ here?

Read it.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Friday the administration is focused on putting its health care plan in place; he declined to discuss the declaration by the fact-checking website PolitiFact of its annual “lie of the year:” President Obama’s past claim that if “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”