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Gotta love that Global Warming.

Watch it.

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Jack Phillips is a baker who declined to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple because his Christian belief is that marriage exists only between a man and woman. Now a Colorado judge has ordered him to bake cakes for same-sex marriages, and if Phillips refuses, he could go to jail.

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 Canada’s postal service said Wednesday that it would cease home delivery over the next five years, and substantially increase postal rates.

…

In place of home delivery, Canadians who live in cities would have to pick up their mail and parcels at so-called community mailboxes, which would be established in neighborhoods across the nation. (Apartment-dwellers would continue to pick up their mail in their buildings.)

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Name another country in which illegal immigrants can use the legal system to sue a state. Name one. I’ll wait.

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You can buy a lot of health care for $300 million. Wouldn’t it just be cheaper to pass out the money?

The purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers. — Jerry Pournelle

World socialism as a whole, and all the figures associated with it, are shrouded in legend; its contradictions are forgotten or concealed; it does not respond to arguments but continually ignores them—all this stems from the mist of irrationality that surrounds socialism and from its instinctive aversion to scientific analysis… The doctrines of socialism seethe with contradictions, its theories are at constant odds with its practice, yet due to a powerful instinct these contradictions do not in the least hinder the unending propaganda of socialism. Indeed, no precise, distinct socialism even exists; instead there is only a vague, rosy notion of something noble and good, of equality, communal ownership, and justice: the advent of these things will bring instant euphoria and a social order beyond reproach.

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Read it.

You can buy a lot of health care for $14,000. Seems to me we’d be better off just giving people the money.

The New York Times suddenly detects that the sky is falling, and wants to round up the usual suspects.

 A big reason America is falling behind other countries in science and math is that we have effectively written off a huge chunk of our population as uninterested in those fields or incapable of succeeding in them.

Well, my first question is: Who is this ‘we’? Does it include editorial writers for the New York Times? If so, why don’t they change their behavior? If not, what is with this ‘we’ business?

And I don’t see anybody standing at the door of classrooms barring anybody except white males from entering. Perhaps the Times still think this is 1954.

 Women make up nearly half the work force but have just 26 percent of science, technology, engineering or math jobs, according to the Census Bureau. Blacks make up 11 percent of the workforce but just 6 percent of such jobs and Hispanics make up nearly 15 percent of the work force but hold 7 percent of those positions. There is no question that women and minorities have made progress in science and math in the last several decades, but their gains have been slow and halting. And in the fast-growing field of computer science, women’s representation has actually declined in the last 20 years, while minorities have made relatively small gains.

Ah, that old ‘progressive’ bugaboo, ‘underrepresentation’. First, I want to see some evidence that the fact women make up half of the workforce has some inevitable relationship to how many jobs they hold in any particular field. Next thing you know, they’ll be complaining that men are underrepresented among the number of people who bear children.

John Stossel blows the whistle.

Celebrities who support big-government politicians routinely take advantage of tax breaks, which reduce the amount they contribute to that government.

It’s nice that Obama supporter Bon Jovi has a foundation that builds houses for poor people, but at tax time, the musician labels himself a “farmer.” He pays only $100 in state property tax. And his tax dodge gimmick: raising honeybees.

Bruce Springsteen sings about factories closing down but pays little tax on the hundreds of acres of land he owns. His dodge: An organic farmer works his land.

Hollywood’s campaign to “save the earth” brings out the most hypocrisy. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio recently announced, “I will fly around the world doing good for the environment.” Really? Flying around the world? I’m amazed they’re not embarrassed by what they say.

Freeberg blows the whistle.

The capable naturalists at Democracy Corps are trained to recognize even the latent, recessive racism lingering deep within the Republican genome. Like the human coccyx, the vestigial prejudice in the GOP voter is betrayed when the subject is scrutinized by those with trained eyes.

Read it.

Buried in pages of text extolling Islam, condemning idolatry and featuring a cover story calling for supporters in the West to join the Taliban’s fight is homage to Honda’s line of 125-cc workhorse motorbikes, a ubiquitous mode of transport created by the Japanese company in the 1970s for consumers in underdeveloped and developing markets, especially in traffic-congested cities like Rio and Mumbai. Since then, militant jihadists have embraced the bike it for its durability and low cost. If you see images of masked Taliban tooling around the Afghan backcountry, chances are it’s a 125-cc Honda motorbike.

And it won’t poop all over your garage. Win-win!

Read it.

And ponder the fact that the upper income levels pay a greater share of the total tax burden than their share of the national income.

And yet ‘progressives’ say that this is less than their ‘fair share’.

Read it.

A teen playing the knockout game in Las Vegas failed to knock out his would-be female victim, only to have her turn on him and beat him until her boyfriend intervened, sparing the hapless attacker further pain.

They gonna diss you back in the ‘hood, gettin’ beat up by a white girl.

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An eyewitness said: ‘He told her she already had enough shoes, more shoes that she could wear in a
lifetime and it was pointless buying any more.

‘She started shouting at him accusing him of being a skinflint and of spoiling Christmas, it was a really heated argument.’

The shouting match ended when the man chucked the bags on the floor and jumped over the balcony, smashing into Christmas decorations on his way down before hitting the floor seven stories below causing shocked shoppers to flee in panic.

Surely a Tiger Mom in training.

Jim Goad sets the record straight.

On Friday evening, ABC’s 20/20 presented a postmortem tribute that oozed with so much sanctimonious brown-nosing that it should have been called Up Mandela’s Ass. I doubt that this saccharine chunk of carefully packaged propaganda was any more idealized, unrealistic, or one-sided than the thousands of other tributes that burst forth like millions of sugarcoated tears after his passing, but I was only able to handle one Mandela tribute lest my eyes roll so violently that they pop out of my head.

The 20/20 special peddled such obviously fraudulent lies as the allegation that Mandela’s African National Congress was “committed to nonviolent resistance.” Not a peep was made about the fact that Mandela was sentenced to prison not only for “treason”—which is the only charge the show mentioned—but that he pled guilty to an indictment accusing him of complicity in “the preparation, manufacture and use of explosives—for the purpose of committing acts of violence.” Nothing was said about the radical guerrilla army he founded called “Spear of the Nation” that was linked to hundreds of acts of violence and sabotage. Nothing was said about his claim that “violence in this country was inevitable.” Nor was it mentioned that he was offered freedom from prison in February 1985 if he agreed to foreswear violence but that he refused. And they certainly didn’t dare to show a clip of an ANC “necklacing” that’s one of the most brutal snippets of mob violence I’ve ever witnessed. Nothing was said about the Church Street Bombing or any of the other bombings and violent acts committed in the ANC’s name that in other contexts would have Mandela dubbed a violent terrorist. Instead, 20/20 referred to him with the much cheerier sobriquet of “freedom fighter.”

SF author John C. Wright connects the dots.

Both Murder Incorporated and Paul Ehrlich are wrong and for a simple reason: overpopulation is not a number, it is a ratio between the productive capacity of the individual and the drain that individual represents.

If each new baby is a new pair of hands to work, a new brain, and if each new baby over his lifetime produces more than he consumes, then looking at each new baby as a new mouth to feed is folly.

The argument turns on what constitutes a resource. Is copper? You cannot eat it. Yet a man who works in a copper mine produces more than he consumes, and the world would be poorer, not richer, if he were absent. Is oil? Before Standard Oil put the price of oil within the grasp of the common man, oil found on land was a detriment, not a benefit, because it might make crops harder to raise. What about a man who writes science fiction novels, investigates news stories, writes computer manuals, or practices law. I have done all these things. Have I contributed more to the wealth of the world or taken more than I contributed?

If I am taking more than I am contributing, why does any one PAY ME ANYTHING? And yet I am productive enough that I can support five dependents, plus creditors plus the tax man. Through the tax man, I support about as many people as are in my family. In round numbers, there are ten people resting on my work, that is, consumers who are not presently productive. Eliminate me through abortion or contraception, and you eliminate one pair of hands, or, looking at it another way, you increase the unfed mouths by ten.

In the final analysis, there is no such thing as a resource. The amount that we take from nature in the raw is so small as to be below calculation. Oil is worthless without human work, and so is soil, and so are fish in the stream. The question of how to turn a useless material like oil into a substance that serves a human need is a question of human ingenuity.

Seth Godin has the answer.

Almost all college students want to figure out what job to choose. The answer will depend on what they do well, what they enjoy, and will have a big effect on the rest of their life. The better the answer, the more successful and happy they will be. For them, that is above all what college is for.

This doesn’t even occur to Brooks as a possibility. I suppose professors like this state of affairs (a smart person — Brooks — can’t even think of this). If no one mentions it, they are that much further from having to consider it. Trying to help students reach this goal means giving up power. The more a college helps students learn what they enjoy and what they are good at, the less professors can do exactly what they want.

Read it.

Go ahead, double that minimum wage — and watch the jobs evaporate.

Not withstanding the fact that the fast-food industry has been traditionally populated by workers who are largely unskilled and, therefore, easily susceptible to being replaced, the SEIU and its cohorts believe that this is the future for today’s unions.

On the other hand, however, as has happened in other industries that have become heavily unionized (see esp. manufacturing), what seems more likely is that the consequences of the SEIU’s push for unionization and higher wages will lead to a faster and more efficient automated workforce of machines and, quite possibly, a better experience for the consumer.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

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I am not making this up.

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The science behind a ‘scientific consensus’ may be a bogus as the consensus.

Careerism also encourages exaggeration and the cherry-picking of results. In order to safeguard their exclusivity, the leading journals impose high rejection rates: in excess of 90% of submitted manuscripts. The most striking findings have the greatest chance of making it onto the page. Little wonder that one in three researchers knows of a colleague who has pepped up a paper by, say, excluding inconvenient data from results “based on a gut feeling”. And as more research teams around the world work on a problem, the odds shorten that at least one will fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a freak of the statistical noise. Such spurious correlations are often recorded in journals eager for startling papers. If they touch on drinking wine, going senile or letting children play video games, they may well command the front pages of newspapers, too.

Conversely, failures to prove a hypothesis are rarely even offered for publication, let alone accepted. “Negative results” now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990. Yet knowing what is false is as important to science as knowing what is true. The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already investigated by other scientists.

The hallowed process of peer review is not all it is cracked up to be, either. When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested.

Russ Roberts lays out some inconvenient truth.

A Martian coming down to earth would see all of the minutiae of regulation as totally irrelevant. Forget what we say our policy is. What the politicians and bureaucrats do is to keep the borrowed money flowing. That’s what the incentives are for regulators and the politicians they report to. These incentives drown out the best intentions of economists. I closed my point by saying that until the political power of large financial institutions is reduced, we’re just fooling ourselves. The political power of large institutions is the problem that needs solving, rather than trying to figure out the best way to tweak the current system to work more effectively.

And of course, my preference is to live in a world where investors and financial institutions live and die on their own. Get some skin in the game. But that’s not a politically viable solution either. Until there is enough political support against the big banks, economists are just fooling ourselves. We’re playing intellectual golf.

If economists want to make the world a better place, we need to think about how to change the incentives facing politicians and not just the incentives facing investors and managers and consumers as if they exist in a political vacuum.

Read it.

For one thing, people will leave you the fuck alone.

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

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Why should the Air Farce have all the fun?

Read it. And watch the video.

Every year in Argentina, the National Conference of Women — sponsored by various non-profit NGOs — gathers in some city and, in recent years, the event has featured a protest against the Catholic Church. So when the radical feminists marched on the cathedral in San Juan de Cuyo on November 24, they were met by 1,500 Catholics who locked arms to form a human shield around the cathedral….

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I guess you just can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Sorry, Barry.

The Other McCain blows the whistle.

When Margaret Thatcher died in April, the British Left reacted with the kind of ugly viciousness you would expect of the British Left. This is worth remembering today when liberals are demanding that everyone must now forget the reality of who Nelson Mandela was.

Read it.

The problem is that those who need it the most are the least likely to use it.

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These dogs, usually Alsatians, were also called “Hundminen” or “dog mines.” They were  trained to carry explosives on their bodies to enemy tanks, where they would then be detonated. No, it did not end very well for the dogs in question.

I bet you didn’t know that.

Pinterest has what you need.

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The 2013 hurricane season just ended as one of the five quietest years since 1960. But don’t expect anyone who pointed to last year’s hurricanes as “proof” of the need to act against global warming to apologize; the warmists don’t work that way.

Lock Pick Earrings

d20 Whiskey Stones

Inverse Umbrella

‘It’s not art if nobody likes it.’ — Wally

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Specifically, the second- and third-largest declines in car commuting were seen in the Washington, DC and Austin, TX metropolitan areas which had two of the most robust job markets during the recession.

Unlike mass-transit systems, which take you from where you aren’t to where you don’t necessarily want to be at huge expense to the taxpayers and at the mercy of government employees, riding a bicycle has most of the virtues of an automobile absent a lot of the defects (in the eyes of the politically correct).

And it’s no surprise to see it flourish in dense urban areas with semi-decent weather. (Notice that nobody is riding bicycles in Boston or Chicago).

Read it. And watch the video.

In the video below Ezra Levant talks to George Igler of the British think tank Discourse about the young Italian woman in the UK whose baby was taken from her womb without her knowledge or consent. The mother, who is said to be bipolar, had some sort of breakdown. While she was in extremis she was sedated and the baby was removed by cesarean section. The child was taken into care, and more than a year later has never been given into the mother’s custody. Recent media stories about the case have caused an international sensation.

That’s what I’m talkin’ about….

Read it.

‘It ain’t necessarily so….’

Here are some things to think about:

• Fewer than 3 percent of all workers in the United States make the minimum wage. The percentage drops further if you’re talking about full-time employees.

• 77 percent of minimum wage earners belong to households above the poverty line.

• 51 percent of minimum wage earners are 24 years or younger. Of the minimum wage earners over 24, less than a quarter are below the poverty line and 62 percent live in households that are at or above 150 percent of the poverty line.

• Even economists who question whether hiking the minimum wage causes significant unemployment for low-skilled workers tend to agree that doubling wages will reduce jobs.

• A recent New York Times story titled “Life on $7.25 an Hour” centered on a man who had a job paying $13 an hour and who owned a $500,000 house.

• The protests are organized by groups affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and inlcude calls for unionizing fast-food workers along with the demand to double the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Read it.

Today, the bobo class views international travel as an essential activity in order to achieve self-actualization. Thus I pick international travel as an example of the hedonic treadmill, in which something unavailable in the past suddenly becomes essential when it becomes more widely available. But not too widely available because it has to be expensive enough to keep the riff-raff away. There’s no self-actualization to doing something that every blue collar worker can do.

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The blue pustules of Democrat-ruled cities in Texas are doing their bit to create the ideal police state.

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“The Dallas Independent School District recently announced that every student in the school district will now get a free breakfast and a free lunch. The reason? So few students qualified for ‘full price’ or ‘reduced price’ meals that trying to identify them cost more than it was worth,” John Goodman reports. More and more schools are serving dinner, too.

The blue pustules of Democrat rule in Texas cities are doing their best to bring the Welfare State to their own little corner.

The Other McCain is on the case.

The investigation into who spray painted a home with racist graffiti last month has turned toward the woman who lives there.
Police said on Wednesday that Andrea Brazier is now considered a “strong suspect” in the case.
Officers say they executed a search warrant on Tuesday and seized two cans of spray paint and ammunition from the home.
Brazier, who is white, and her husband Anthony Phillips, who is African American live at the home with their 13-year-old son, Isaac. Brazier initially cast suspicion on her son’s Lunenburg High School football teammates, saying he had been bullied in the past.

John Hinderaker points out that the Magic Negro still doesn’t have any clothes.

No one, not even a Democrat, would want to live in a country characterized by income equality. Obama, recognizing this, was quick to say that his concern is equal opportunity, not equality of outcomes. Yet his prescriptions were the same warmed-over liberal wish-list that we have heard in every State of the Union speech. Presumably for the last five years Obama has not been trying to stunt the economic development of the middle class or frustrate economic opportunity, yet that has been, empirically, the effect of his policies. Nowhere in Obama’s speech was there any acknowledgement that his policies have failed, or any willingness to re-think what policies will lead to economic growth and greater opportunity.

This is a large subject, and one to which we will return in the months and years to come. Here are a couple of very basic thoughts. First, If the goal is to enhance the wages of lower-skilled American workers, about whom Obama purports to care so much, there is an easy way to make progress toward that goal: stop importing tens of millions of low-skilled immigrants to compete with them and drive wages down. This is blindingly obvious, and yet Obama refuses to admit that the law of supply and demand applies to labor.

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Listen to any group of business leaders for more than a minute and you’ll get an earful about the crisis in “workforce development.” America’s economic performance, says the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, depends on “a workforce that possesses the skills and knowledge that employers need.” Millions of people are looking for work, and millions of jobs are open for hire, but the former can’t fill the latter “because of gaps in skills and training.” There simply are not enough students “emerging from our public education system” with the necessary know-how.

That is why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants the federal government to streamline its “national employment and training system.” Why it wants a public-education system that will “supply American businesses with the talent necessary to compete globally.” It is why, according to a recent news story, the Virginia Chamber “wants the state (to) put more emphasis in public schools on preparing students for skills needed in science, technology and health care careers.”

They’d much rather import them from India and Pakistan, where salary expectations aren’t so high and a green card is worth a cut in pay.

Read it.

In September, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Reid told reporters, “Let’s stop these really juvenile political games — the one dealing with health care for Senators and House members and our staff. We are going to be part of exchanges, that’s what the law says and we’ll be part of that.”

According to Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson, under the Affordable Care Act a Senator can allow that their committee and leadership staffers keep their attractive federal employee insurance plans. Reid has exercised that option. Jentleson said, “We are just following the law.”

The Crust takes care of its own.

… six black teenagers beat up a white teenager in 2007 at Jena, Louisiana, and were promptly declared to be the Official Victims, with the usual supportive marches, petitions, legal defense funds, etc.

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No, it isn’t; it’s just evidence that you’re a slob.

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The White House, Democrats, and their supporters are mobilizing behind a focus for 2014 and beyond on the wage gap between the wealthy and the rest of America.

A paper by a centrist-Democratic think tank, which will be released Wednesday, finds that more than half of U.S. working-age families with children under age 18 earn $60,000 or less a year, and more than 75% earn $100,000 or less a year, putting a new frame on what the White House has described as a growing wage gap in the country.

Next up: The growing ‘price gap’ between Rolex and Timex. They both just tell time, right? So why the disparity? No doubt Republicans are behind it….

Jacob Sullum lays it out.

For many Americans, religion is something you do on weekends and holidays. For others, it is the central organizing principle of life. That split helps explain the dispute over Obamacare’s requirement that businesses pay for their employees’ contraceptives, which is the focus of two cases the Supreme Court agreed to hear last week.