Read it.

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The top enforcement official at the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission, David Meister, is leaving to join Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, the New York Times reports….

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Because THERE IS NOTHING MORE IMPORTANT FACING THE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD then whether or not one can smoke weed legally.

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American actress Scarlett Johansson has been criticized as naïve and irresponsible for endorsing SodaStream, an Israeli company that operates a factory in the West Bank settlement of Maale Adumim – to the detriment of Palestinian rights, say critics.

…

But those most familiar with the factory – Palestinians who work there – largely side with Ms. Johansson.

“Before boycotting, they should think of the workers who are going to suffer,” says a young man shivering in the pre-dawn darkness in Azzariah, a West Bank town cut off from work opportunities in Jerusalem by the concrete Israeli separation wall. Previously, he earned 20 shekels ($6) a day plucking and cleaning chickens; now he makes nearly 10 times that at SodaStream, which also provides transportation, breakfast, and lunch.

There, there, little brown brothers, the rich white people of the First World know far better what’s good for you than you do.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, jumps on the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ bandwagon. Sort of.

The Dark Enlightenment is, so far, a critical movement, with no particular intent to endarken individuals. They just want us to be aware that the Enlightenment had a dark side and that the modes of thought and society that it steered us toward might lead ultimately to a dark place, an antithesis.

And I guess I should drop the third-person pronoun in talking about the movement. A few months ago the blogger Scharlach (German for “scarlet”) drew up a very handy diagram of the movement, with participants grouped according to their major themes. At 11 o’clock on the diagram, grouped with Secular Traditionalists, is me. (Or possibly “…am I.” Please don’t email in to tell me.)

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The Icelandic Deep Drilling Project, IDDP, has been drilling shafts up to 5km deep in an attempt to harness the heat in the volcanic bedrock far below the surface of Iceland.

But in 2009 their borehole at Krafla, northeast Iceland, reached only 2,100m deep before unexpectedly striking a pocket of magma intruding into the Earth’s upper crust from below, at searing temperatures of 900-1000°C.

Now your talking….

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The former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Sheila Bair, has reportedly joined the board of directors of Banco Santander, SA.

And 3D Systems, a 3-D printing company, has reportedly named Neal Orringer, a former senior adviser to the secretary of commerce on manufacturing policy and director of manufacturing at the Pentagon, as its new vice president for alliances and partnerships.

‘And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.’ — Luke 16:9

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Mainstream liberal blogs have recently discovered the neoreactionary movement, also known as the Dark Enlightenment, which is a plucky collection of backward-looking upstarts that started to gel sometime in late 2012. The only unifying themes in coverage are an unfounded sense of hysteria and a complete inability to get the point.

…

Ah, yes. The race thing. If race is a Dark Enlightenment obsession, someone forgot to tell them. While there’s some overlap with human biodiversity (which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like and is thus a horrifying heresy to those of the universalist faith), it’s more a cousin of neoreaction; like the manosphere, it’s hardly a wholly owned subsidiary. On the matter of race, neoreaction’s biggest crime is its refusal to parrot the “White people…ewwwwwww!” meme that dominates much of progressive discourse; instead it offers a critique of the Cultural Marxist “critical race theory” that is an essential leftist article of faith.

Steve Sailer has a little fun with the pod people.

A few years ago, I came up with the idea for a sitcom called Korean Mother-in-Law, about a nice Stuff White People Like white guy (picture Joaquin Phoenix in Her) who has to live with his (wait for it) Korean mother-in-law, who regularly punctures his liberal American delusions with her bleak, Malthusian cackling.

Chua, however, more or less beat me to this shtick with Tiger Mother.

But it’s probably just as well, since Korean Mother-in-Law would have been the lowest rated show ever, judging by how only Charles Murray and I noticed that Tiger Mother was awfully funny. Most of the press, which is heavily driven by the primal resentments of Jewish women writers and editors, was outraged by Chua’s act. First, she steals our husbands, and then she steals our children’s spots at Harvard!

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Thank you, Barack Hussein Obama … um, um, um….

John Biggs takes a look.

On January 26, 1974 the world changed. A panoply of creatures popped into existence – Owlbears lumbered out of the woods while Bullettes snuffled out of caves, blinking in the sunlight. Adventurers donned metal plate armor and led their ambling pack horses into darkened dungeons. Traps sprung, capturing teams of dwarves in iron nets while gold glittered tantalizingly close to a shambling skeleton. For some, the ’70s were an era of free love. For others they were the era of untrammeled adventure.

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You’ve probably heard by now that this year’s flu season is a bad one. Below is a guide to the viruses that are going around now, plus a refresher on flu basics.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

1. If someone gets into trouble by being an idiot, we all need to lose a privilege
2. If someone works hard and produces more, he needs to share
3. Whoever is most fun to watch, is most likely to fix a problem
4. Being offended on behalf of others, who may not even exist, is a noble pursuit
5. Society’s advances were achieved by those who found new ways to be offended
6. Raw emotions do, and should, pull rank over rational thoughts
7. Inequality of wealth must precede some economic calamity
8. If you laugh, or snort derisively, at true things — you can magically make them untrue

Read it.

It was axiomatically assumed that intellectually talented black high-school students abound but that top colleges ignore them. Furthermore, these potential college graduates were allegedly often clueless regarding the admission process. Particularly odious according to the president were standardized tests such as the ACT and SAT that impede access to top schools. (In the civil-rights lingo, when blacks cannot pass a test, it is “a barrier.”) The president called for doubling of the National College Advising Corps where recent college graduates help students in “underserved” high schools complete the college admission process. He also advocated hiring new advisers and subsidizing college prep classes routinely available to rich white and Asian students.

Meanwhile, the University of Michigan also witnessed another ritualistic we-need-more-diplomas event. Here agitated black students were outraged that blacks comprised 14% of the state’s population but only 5% of the student body. So on the High Holy Day of Martin Luther King’s birthday, the activists granted the university seven days to respond to seven demands or face “physical actions” by Monday, January 27, 2014. Demands included emergency scholarships for black students unable to concentrate as a result of the school’s hostile racial climate, inexpensive on-campus housing for blacks, and doubling black enrollment to 10%. No mention was made of the state law that bars the university from using race in college admissions.

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Just in case you haven’t been keeping track, which I confess that I have not, since Hillary doesn’t loom all that large on my horizon.

On Monday, former Secretary of State and First Lady Hillary Clinton spoke at the National Automobile Dealers Association in New Orleans – where she quickly revealed that she has not driven a car for the past 18 years. At a convention of auto dealers.

And why would she? Driving themselves is for The Little People.

Steve Sailer never seems to lack for material.

 To prevent white people from robbing blacks, the only kind of popular music white people should be allowed to create is square dance calling. By the way, as Malcolm McClaren unkindly pointed out 31 years ago in “Buffalo Gals,” hip-hop was Stolen from the great white art form of square dance calling….

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Blue-ribbon panels were much in the news this past week. The Presidential Commission on Election Administration came out with a report making the case for expanding early voting options, allowing online voter registration and eliminating long lines at the polls. The little-known Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board issued an analysis concluding that the National Security Agency’s domestic phone records surveillance program is illegal and ineffectual.

Know what else is ineffectual? Recommendations from groups like these.

…

Ultimately, they’re the equivalent of those participation trophies handed out to every kid who plays in a sports league. They look nice on the shelf, but you can’t take them seriously.

The Antiplanner is delightfully dyspeptic today.

One of the more ridiculous debates going on this month is the protests over Google and other companies providing commuter bus services for their employees in the San Francisco Bay Area. No one ever comments on how much better it is for the environment that people are taking buses to work instead of driving. No one ever comments on how the fact that at least 18,000 people take private buses to work is a devastating indicator of the failure of the region’s expensive transit system.

Each Voice of the Crust has a Pet Conservative — The New York Times has David Brooks, and the Washington Post has Jennifer Rubin.

It is a coin flip, at best, for the president as to whether his signature achievement, his only achievement, will fail. It will be repealed in essence by a popular referendum: The mass refusal of people to go along with Obama’s top-down, compulsory system that was set to transform a sixth of the economy. That possibility should traumatize and probably is traumatizing the White House. Same goes for any Democratic lawmaker who spent time thinking this through. The political implications of this are almost too enormous to calculate.

And so, of course, she doesn’t even make an effort. Pet Conservatives are allowed to bark, but not to bite.

The Baron looks at the Dark Enlightenment.

Meaningful dissent against the Cathedral is not permitted, not even among ostensible “conservatives”. Just ask John Derbyshire. Or Jason Richwine.

The greatest punishments are reserved for any deviation from orthodoxy on race and ethnicity. National Review dutifully excommunicates any race-heretics from its cramped crypt in the cellar of the Cathedral. But other topics are also frowned upon, such as skepticism about global warming. Or home-schooling. Or the gold standard — dissidents on fiat money are laughed out of the nave and down the front steps.

If mockery fails as a deterrent, then more stringent persuasions are brought to bear, running from denial of funding through loss of employment to lawsuits and prosecution. The Cathedral will not be gainsaid.

The Adam Smith of Neoreaction is, of course, Mencius Moldbug.

Read it.

Anglo-Dutch consumer products giant Unilever spent more than 20 years trying to beat butter at its own game. But the maker of Flora, Country Crock, and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, appears ready to give up the fight.

Butter is better. Next up: Potatoes.

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Gun-free zones are where murderers shop for victims. It’s a target-rich environment with no down-side.

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But in the developed world it’s an artifact of the anti-vaccination movement, which has associated the vaccine with autism. That connection, promoted by the discredited British physician Andrew Wakefield and the starlet Jenny McCarthy, has been thoroughly debunked. But its effects live on, as the map shows.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised. Remember that the next time you hear a ‘celebrity’ whining that the sky is falling.

Unmentioned in this Voice of the Crust, of course, is the number of vaccinators being murdered by Muslims in places like Pakistan. That would be raaaaaaacist.

Read it.

Ever since the Nixon era, the Democratic Party has faced its own internal tug of war over fiscal matters, as the party has replaced white working-class voters in the South with upscale voters, especially in the Northeast and Pacific Northwest, who are mainly drawn to the party’s social liberalism. This has placed political constituencies that desire more redistribution of wealth and view corporations and Wall Street with suspicion if not outright animus at odds with those who seek to protect their interests and use the levers of power to gain advantage – typically with the taxpayer paying the price for their cartel-like activity. With the dominance of Bill Clinton’s post-1994 approach to triangulation and the pro-war, pro-surveillance push of the party after 9/11, the progressives have been shoved aside again and again – their positions ignored if not denigrated in matters foreign and domestic. This has continued and even expanded under Barack Obama, whose approach to fiscal and regulatory policy has led to an America where corporations thrive, wages stagnate, the surveillance state expands, Too Big To Fail lives on, and Wall Street grows fat and happy.

In this understanding of what’s taken place over the past twenty years, the Obama campaign of 2008 takes on a new and more tragic depiction. It reads as the death rattle of a political movement that traces its lineage to Robert La Follette, Samuel Gompers, and Ida Tarbell: a charismatic, appealing candidate who gives verbal endorsement to the frustrations of ill-treated progressives, promising a rejection of traditional political quid pro quo, the end of wars and privacy invasion and Gitmo and lobbyists in government, and a new aspirational and transparent communitarian approach to policies that achieve positive change… and then, once elected, reveals these to be words, just words.

The Crust breaks out of its chrysalis and reveals itself as a pretty nasty bug.

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For sufficiently generous definitions of ‘car”.

If you find yourself in need of a ride in Hangzhou, China, you can waltz up to a multi-story garage, punch a few buttons, and have a fully charged electric vehicle deposited in front of you.

It’s a new car-sharing scheme launched by Kandi Technologies that takes the hyper-successful bike-sharing model in China and puts it onto four electrically powered wheels.

For a little over $3 an hour, these ultra-compact, Chinese-made EVs can get about 75 miles on a charge and max out at 50 mph, and when the driver is done, they can drop off their rented ride at another Kandi station near their destination.

Read it.

I’ll just bet that Bill Clinton is kicking himself right now.

Journal of Personal Science: Baby Shampoo Cured My Sinusitis

HeatTrak Snow and Ice Heated Stair Mat

Pivoting Microdermabrasion Brush  I look a this and think, ‘Hmmm. Enhanced Interrogation Techniques….’

Shredder Scissors

The Backpack Cannon

Seed spoons

Igloo-making tool

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The move comes after Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst penned a January 21, 2014 letter welcoming the conservative icon, in response to Hannity’s remarks that he was considering such a move. The letter signed by the legislators was penned by Texas House Ways and Means chairman and candidate for Texas Comptroller Harvey Hilderbran. Rep. Hilderbran spearheaded the effort to get the signatures. Breitbart News was the first to learn of the effort.

Y’all come back now, hear?

Read it.

When you’re the Crust,
You’re the Crust all the way
From your first GS job
To your lobbyist pay!

When you’re the Crust
Let ‘em do what they can,
You won’t have to resign,
You won’t land in the can!

You’re always employed—
You’ve got remuneration…
If someone’s annoyed
With your administration,
You’ve got salvation!

Read it.

Tanaka will pay a combined marginal income tax rate of 56.1 percent – over half of his contract. For New York state and local taxes alone he will lose an estimated $2,811,257 a year. The combined marginal income tax rate Tanaka will pay is comprised of the federal, state and local tax rates, plus the Medicare payroll tax. The chart below shows Tanaka’s tax burdens as compared between the differing franchises.

After all, he didn’t build that.

Welcome to America, kid. Be careful not to step in the leadership.

Freeberg nails it again.

The thing about abortion as a political movement, in America, is: It’s fair to connect it with other issues. Far too many people who claim to support choice but not abortion, have been revealed to support abortions, as in, more abortions. They want every abortion that might happen, to happen.

And for every 100 of those, there are 99 atheists, probably more. Which makes sense…but you’ll also find 99 people who believe in the global warming scam. Which also makes a certain amount of sense. You’ll find 99 people who support ObamaCare, which makes much less sense. I mean, think it out: You do not have a right to life if your mom wants to kill you, but if you DO make it out of there, you have a “right” to health care. How is that reconciled?

Abortion exposes liberalism for what it really is. Liberalism makes absolutely no sense at all, as it’s explained by liberals. You do not exist at all unless your mom chooses to carry you to term, but once you do make it you have a right to — health care, an ever-increasing minimum wage, lawsuits against restaurants that don’t built ramps to accommodate your wheelchair, special bathrooms for your transgender situation, lawsuits against wedding cake decorators who won’t accommodate your gay wedding, however much vacation time your union rep thinks you should have, public school education, etc….this doesn’t make any sense at all. You get more and more “rights” but only if you make it? Until you go through the breach you don’t even exist? If there’s nothing sacred about you, why do you deserve rights.

Read it.

A US team at the University of Pennsylvania scanned the brains of nearly 1,000 men, women, boys and girls and found striking differences.

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

Male brains appeared to be wired front to back, with few connections bridging the two hemispheres.

In females, the pathways criss-crossed between left and right.

These differences might explain why men, in general, tend to be better at learning and performing a single task, like cycling or navigating, whereas women are more equipped for multitasking, say the researchers in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Whoda thunkit.

But experts have questioned whether it can be that simple, arguing it is a huge leap to extrapolate from anatomical differences to try to explain behavioural variation between the sexes. Also, brain connections are not set and can change throughout life.

Not a quote, but a bald unsupported statement by the writer of the article — after all, a Voice of the Crust cannot let this contradiction of the Narrative go unchallenged.

Read it.

I think it captures her soul, don’t you?

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Betcha they find a problem. That is, after all, their job.

The Food and Drug Administration says it is conducting new studies of the safety of caramel coloring in soft drinks and other foods, even though previous research has shown no identifiable health risk.

The function of government is to hire and pay government workers, and they can’t do that without discovering a problem that only they are uniquely qualified to ‘fix’. The first step in the process is ‘panic with scary headlines’.

The agency’s announcement comes in response to a study by Consumer Reports that shows varying levels of 4-methylimidazole — an impurity formed in some caramel coloring at low levels during the manufacturing process — in 12 brands of soda from five manufacturers.

Ah, yes, Consumer Reports! What better group to report on consumers?

Read it.

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

Read it.

A Georgia cafeteria manager has been arrested after coming under suspicion that she had allegedly stolen hundreds of dollars from a cash-only line every day for at least five years, WSB-TV Atlanta reports.

According to ABC News, Brenda Watts is accused of stealing roughly $500 a day from North Spring High School in Fulton County. In the cafeteria there were four lines with cash registers that were tracked, but the blue cart serving a-la-carte items manned by Watts was cash-only with no cash register, WSB-TV reports.

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Although the book is not what the advertising promises, it really does provide an accurate picture of life inside CIA. Its exclusive focus on how bureaucrats jostle and feel about one another is entirely consistent with my eight years of experience dealing with CIA’s top levels on the U.S. Senate’s behalf. The substance of any matter notwithstanding, it always came down to which bureaucrat would gain or lose what. The bureaucrats’ personal interests come first. The welfare and reputation of the agency come second. Everything else is incidental. This book seems to describe a collective human ice cream cone licking itself.

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Israel, of course.

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Barack Hussein Obama. Um, um, um….

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Luca Iaconi-Stewart is building a paper airplane unlike anything you’ve ever seen before — and it’s taking him years to get it just right. He’s building a 1:60 scale model of a Boeing 777, one so detailed even the tiny chairs and bathrooms look real. There are even miniature meal carts. He starts by printing out object designs and then slicing them down with an X-Acto knife, before gluing it all together. Iaconi-Stewart’s building material of choice is the manila file folder, something he first started using in a high school architecture class. “Even back then I found it a really versatile material; it’s flexible enough to shape and mold, but it can be incredibly strong if you engineer it properly,” he tells The Verge. “I never really tried anything else.”

Read it.

The ASACUSA experiment at CERN has succeeded for the first time in producing a beam of antihydrogen atoms. In a paper published today in Nature Communications, the ASACUSA collaboration reports the unambiguous detection of 80 antihydrogen atoms 2.7 metres downstream of their production, where the perturbing influence of the magnetic fields used initially to produce the antiatoms is small. This result is a significant step towards precise hyperfine spectroscopy of antihydrogen atoms.

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A liberal but poor journalist lives off food stamps for a week so she can write an article about the experience.

She discovers that organic food, cage-free meet, cold-pressed juice, artisanal coffee beans and locally made cheese are unaffordable on food stamps.

What would we do without these articles written by liberal journalists who try to slum it for a while?

The Upper Crust doesn’t like having to live like the Lower Crust. Quelle domage….

Read it.

Let’s start with the ship. I’m assuming you want a classic wooden vessel, and from your specifications I gather you want something huge, on the order of Blackbeard’s pride, the Queen Anne’s Revenge. While this isn’t something you can price on Amazon, we can make estimates based on other reconstruction efforts. A 27-meter replica of the Black Pearl, with room for 70 tourists, eight crew, and six functional bronze cannons, was listed for sale online at $2 million a while back but later reduced to $750,000. In 2009 the cost to build a replica of Blackbeard’s sloop Adventure, a much smaller ship than the Queen Anne’s Revenge, was estimated at $3.7 million. Since that was an 80-ton ship, I’ll take a flyer and project the cost to reconstruct the 200-to-300 ton Revenge at $11.6 million.

Next, the crew. Most pirate ships were fairly small, with maybe a dozen guns and crews of around 50, but some carried crews of more than 200, and the Queen Anne’s Revenge carried 300 to 400. You want 300, let’s figure payroll for 300. Pirate crews back in the day typically worked for a share of the plunder, but this is the 2010s, when even cutthroats expect a regular paycheck. In addition to general-purpose crew, you’re going to need a captain, first mate, quartermaster, boatswain, and so on. To estimate your likely outlay, I took current U.S. Navy pay rates and multiplied them by 1.4 to cover everything from Social Security and Medicare to 401(k) contributions (look, be glad I didn’t include stock options), arriving at an annual cost of $11.3 million — spreadsheet on request.

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That’s ‘cult’ in the modern sense of ‘a creepy group you want to avoid’, not in the real meaning of ‘cult’, which of course it always has been.

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There is a certain irony in the fact that Chris Christie is being pilloried because his aides caused a traffic jam that lasted for four days. Across the country, liberals have caused traffic jams that have lasted for years, and they are still trying to make them worse.

Take the Twin Cities, where I live. Like some of those New Jersey residents, I have to cross a river to get to my office. This takes an average of 15 minutes a day longer than it should because our regional planning authorities have deliberately undersized all of the area’s highways. Liberals do this to combat “sprawl,” which means living where you want to. Most people, here as elsewhere, prefer to live in the suburbs. In addition to causing an enormous amount of economic waste, undersizing highways also makes houses in the outer suburbs less valuable, and houses in the city and inner-tier suburbs more valuable. Where do you think most of the people who make regional planning decisions about highways live? While impossible as a practical matter, it would be fascinating to compare the man-hours lost due to anti-”sprawl” policies enforced by liberals with the man-hours lost over a four-day period in New Jersey because drivers from Fort Lee were delayed in crossing the George Washington Bridge.

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Irwin says the “Hello Kitty guns” are popular with bachelorette parties.

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Hint: People steal stuff left out, especially in Blue State behavioral sinks like New York and Chicago.

The Montreal-based bike-sharing company Bixi is like something out of a right-wing nightmare.

Bzzt! Wrong. Obama is like something out of a right-wing nightmare. Bixi is like something out of a left-wing wet dream. There is a difference, not that Time magazine would know it.

The firm is a government-owned entity, in Francophone Canada, that sells solar-powered bike-share equipment for cities around the world.

A recipe for failure if ever I saw one, not that Time magazine would know it.

 And yesterday, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, citing $50 million in debts. Part of the shortfall comes from $5.6 million owed the company by bike-sharing programs in New York City and Chicago, payments that have been withheld because of widespread problems with the company’s software which reportedly have caused many users to be unable to rent or return bikes.

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

Read it.

Campaigners wanting to protect the site of a 15th Century Wars of the Roses battlefield have been given more time to buy it.

The land where the Battle of Tewkesbury was fought was due to be sold in an auction, with a deadline of 3 February.

Tewkesbury Borough Council has listed the site as an asset of community value, meaning it cannot be sold for six months.

The land has been put up for sale by Tewkesbury School’s trust fund.

Read it.

We have the technology.