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Namaste. Do you want to sell a New Age product and/or service? Tired of coming up with meaningless copy for your starry-eyed customers? Want to join the ranks of bestselling self-help authors? We can help.

Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

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“I ran for office pledging to make our government leaner and smarter and more consumer friendly,” President Barack Obama reminded a group of small businessmen at a January 2012 White House gathering.

You can see why the audience needed a refresher course. The president’s two signature legislative accomplishments, the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank financial reform, had heaped unprecedented amounts of regulation onto the business sector at a time when full-time jobs were scarcer than they’d been in three decades. So to bolster his economic bona fides, Obama was now advocating greater executive-branch power to make the federal bureaucracy more responsive to business concerns. “Let me be clear,” he vowed. “I will only use this authority for reforms that result in more efficiency, better service, and a leaner government.”

The target of Obama’s tweaking that day was the Department of Commerce, the century-old rectangular behemoth on Constitution Avenue. Currently headed by the wealthy Chicago businesswoman Penny Pritzker, whose family fortune derives from the Hyatt hotel chain, Commerce’s mission is to “promote job creation and improved living standards for all Americans by creating an infrastructure that promotes economic growth, technological competitiveness, and sustainable development.” Yet even the president recognizes that Commerce, like many other federal agencies at the nexus of the government and the private sector, has often been better at promoting its own bewildering bureaucratic growth.

Ross Douthat takes a look behind the curtain.

The defect, crucially, is not this culture’s bias against social conservatives, or its discomfort with stinging attacks on non-Western religions. Rather, it’s the refusal to admit — to others, and to itself — that these biases fundamentally trump the commitment to “free expression” or “diversity” affirmed in mission statements and news releases.

This refusal, this self-deception, means that we have far too many powerful communities (corporate, academic, journalistic) that are simultaneously dogmatic and dishonest about it — that promise diversity but only as the left defines it, that fill their ranks with ideologues and then claim to stand athwart bias and misinformation, that speak the language of pluralism while presiding over communities that resemble the beau ideal of Sandra Y. L. Korn.

Harvard itself is a perfect example of this pattern: As Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame pointed out when the column was making waves, Korn could only come up with one contemporary example of a Harvardian voice that ought to be silenced — “a single conservative octogenarian,” the political philosophy professor Harvey Mansfield. Her call for censorship, Deneen concluded, “is at this point almost wholly unnecessary, since there are nearly no conservatives to be found at Harvard.”

Mark Steyn looks at the Bundy incident in Nevada.

These are low-level bureaucrats from a minor branch of the vast bottomless alphabet soup of federal agencies, and they’re running around pretending to be elite commandos. The county sheriff is supposed to be “the law”. But he had to broker a deal to get the BLM out of there because in America every jumped-up pen-pusher from the Bureau of Compliance has his own branch of “the law”, a personal SWAT team to act as judge, jury, executioner and, if necessary, as in Nevada, as army of occupation. In most parts of the developed world, there is “the police”, and that’s it. If a bureaucrat from the Ministry of Paperwork wants to have you seized, he has to persuade a judge to issue a warrant and then let the local coppers handle it as they see fit. There is an obvious conflict of interest when every tinpot regulatory agency has its own enforcement arm, and it imputes to even legitimate cases the whiff of something malodorous and, indeed, despotic.

…

It reminds me of 19th century Ireland, when most of the big estates belonged to absentee landlords in England. It’s an even less attractive arrangement when the absentee landlord is a distant national government. There is no need for the vast land holdings of the United States Government, especially given their ever more unpleasant and bullying attitude to public access to the land. As I’ve said, a 21st century America has fewer rights on “the people’s land” than a 13th century English peasant had in the King’s forest. If I ever do run for Senate in New Hampshire, my platform will include a pledge to return the White Mountain “National Forest” to the people of the state.

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The threat of disease is not uniform around the world. In general, higher, colder, and drier regions have fewer infectious diseases than warmer, wetter climates. To survive, people in this latter sort of terrain must withstand a higher degree of “pathogen stress.” Thornhill and his colleagues theorize that, over time, the pathogen stress endemic to a place tends to steer a culture in distinct ways. Research has long shown that people in tropical climates with high pathogen loads, for example, are more likely to develop a taste for spicy food, because certain compounds in these foods have antimicrobial properties. They are also prone to value physical attractiveness—a signal of health and “immunocompetence,” according to evolutionary theorists—more highly in mates than people living in cooler latitudes do. But the implications don’t stop there. According to the “pathogen stress theory of values,” the evolutionary case that Thornhill and his colleagues have put forward, our behavioral immune systems—our group responses to local disease threats—play a decisive role in shaping our various political systems, religions, and shared moral views.

If they are right, Thornhill and his colleagues may be on their way to unlocking some of the most stubborn mysteries of human behavior. Their theory may help explain why authoritarian governments tend to persist in certain latitudes while democracies rise in others; why some cultures are xenophobic and others are relatively open to strangers; why certain peoples value equality and individuality while others prize hierarchical structures and strict adherence to tradition. What’s more, their work may offer a clear insight into how societies change. According to Thornhill’s findings, striking at the root of infectious disease threats is by far the most effective form of social engineering available to any would-be reformer.

The Antiplanner discovers that his Bullshit Detector has gone off.

Those crazy planners at Smart Growth America are at it again: issuing another report all about how urban sprawl is bad and people are better off living in compact communities. Most news reports take it for granted that sprawl is evil and something ought to be done about it. But the report does devote all of three out of 51 pages to repeating claims about how sprawl makes housing unaffordable, transportation expensive, people fat, and lives shorter.

Almost all of these claims cite another report written back in 2010. Most of the claims are readily dismissed for several reasons.

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Europe, which has trailed the U.S. and Israel in the development of unmanned military aircraft, is now beginning an effort to avoid falling behind on commercial drones, too. The European Union plans to spell out rules to govern a market it suggests could reach around 15 billion euros ($20.7 billion) per year.

Note the assumption that ‘avoid falling behind’ means ‘increased regulation’. And this is the Wall Street Journal, which is presumably less pro-government than other Voices of the Crust. But that’s ‘journalism’ for you….

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

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Why is it that cities that consider themselves most progressive also tend to have the most segregated schools and the greatest income inequality?

…

The Progressive obsession with getting people out of their cars isn’t satisfied with improving bus service, which supposedly only poor people would use. Instead, they want a transit system for the middle class, and that means trains. This makes transportation expensive, keeping the poor immobilized.

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Graphene is the strongest, thinnest material known to exist. A form of carbon, it can conduct electricity and heat better than anything else. And get ready for this: It is not only the hardest material in the world, but also one of the most pliable.

Only a single atom thick, it has been called the wonder material.

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Colleges are in an unsustainable arms race of spending on non-teaching lures – football stadiums and sushi-laden cafeterias – to attract students who can neither afford the cost of education nor find jobs to repay their debt once they’re out in the real world.

With more than $1.1 trillion of outstanding student debt, up to 40 percent of recent college grads are either unemployed or underemployed. In 2010, the unemployment rate for young workers aged 16-24 hit 19.6 percent, the highest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking unemployment in 1947. The next time you go to an amusement park, think that one in four park workers has a college degree.

As is often the case, change is coming from entrepreneurs looking to reshape education. After all, this stems from a real need on the part of startups to attract and retain great engineers. In most startups, the hardest jobs to fill are positions in core technology, product design and product management.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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WELL begun; half done. That proverb—or, rather, its obverse—encapsulates the problems which have dogged civil nuclear power since its inception. Atomic energy is seen by many, and with reason, as the misbegotten stepchild of the world’s atom-bomb programmes: ill begun and badly done. But a clean slate is a wonderful thing. And that might soon be provided by two of the world’s rising industrial powers, India and China, whose demand for energy is leading them to look at the idea of building reactors that run on thorium.

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A German company, Biozoon, is working on a 3D-printed food extruder that creates food that literally melts in your mouth, allowing elderly patients with dysphagia – the inability to swallow – to eat without choking.

Perhaps they’ll call it ‘Soylent Silver’.

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Thomas Jefferson was a smart dude. And in one of his letters to John Adams, dated June 27, 1813, Jefferson made an observation about the nature of politics that science is only now, two centuries later, beginning to confirm. “The same political parties which now agitate the United States, have existed through all time,” wrote Jefferson. “The terms of Whig and Tory belong to natural, as well as to civil history,” he later added. “They denote the temper and constitution of mind of different individuals.”

Taki deals out some inconvenient truth.

Some questions are asked in a spirit of inquiry, to obtain answers, but others are asked to intimidate or badger or coerce agreement with a point of view and establish the irreproachable virtue of the persons who ask them. I received such a question by email the other day from the Lancet, one of the most important medical journals in the world. Addressing me by my first name (already sufficient to irritate me), it asked me, “Do you care about the health of our planet?”

Frankly, the answer is that I don’t. Planets, unlike dogs, are not the kind of thing I can feel affection or concern for. My bank account occupies my mind more than the health of the planet. I am not even sure that planets can be healthy or unhealthy, any more than they can be witty or self-effacing. To call a planet healthy is to make what philosophers used to call a category mistake. This is not to say that I wish the earth any harm; on the contrary. Indeed, in a multiple-choice examination, I might even tick the box for wishing the world well rather than ill, at least if I had any reason for wanting to pass.

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Oh boo-hoo. I’m a victim of hate who just happens to go to one of the most exclusive universities in the world.

The assumption here is that hate is never justified; certainly the hateful will think so.

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How are new forms of violence expertise organized and exploited? Most scholars view this as primarily a question of state-building; that is, violence experts use their skills in an attempt to regulate economic transactions or to extract and redistribute resources via protection rents either for themselves or at the behest of political elites. In an alternative view, this article demonstrates that historical gunfighters active in the late 19th-century American Southwest were actually market actors—the possessors of valuable skills cultivated through participation in the Civil War and diffused through gunfighting and reputation building in key market entrepôts. Neither solely state-builders nor state-resisters, as they have traditionally been interpreted, gunfighters composed a professional class that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s and who moved frequently between wage-paying jobs, seizing economic opportunities on both sides of the law and often serving at the behest of powerful economic, rather than political, actors. I establish this claim by examining a dataset of over 250 individuals active in the “gunfighting system” of the post-bellum West, demonstrating that the social connections forged through fighting, and diffused through social networks, helped generate a form of organized violence that helped bring “law and order” to the frontier but as a byproduct of market formation rather than as state-building.

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

The Other McCain is on the case.

The ongoing conflict between radical feminists and transgender activists, which I first noticed in January and revisited last night in the context of the Dana McCallum rape case, has escaped the notice of mainstream liberal journalism. Liberals tacitly side with the transgenders in pretending that the radfems — a/k/a TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) — have no legitimate grievance.

What the TERFs perceive is that male-to-female transgenders are cynically seeking to usurp and co-opt the “feminist” label for their own advantage, thus shunting aside biological women and demoting them to second-class status within their own movement.

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Why is President Bush so much more popular than President Obama among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans? That’s an easy one. Bush was the president of let’s roll. Obama is the president of let’s retreat.

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The Carneys are Democrats, so it goes without saying that they are well-read. (“I always have a pile. I hate to be without books,” Shipman says.) So they are photographed in front of a wall of books. … Only, funny thing: those are actually the same books, photoshopped to create duplicates and make it look as though there are more books than are really present. If you look carefully you will see multiple copies of a number of books. It is really a terrible photoshop job; the funniest thing is that they duplicated the boy’s finger, too. You can see the finger floating in front of a book on the right side of the photo, in the second shelf from the top.

…

As a man, you don’t know how easy you have it until you read feminist tracts.

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White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has two framed Soviet propaganda posters in his home, as revealed by the latest edition of Washingtonian magazine.

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

Just think of the reaction if a Republican White House staffer had two framed Nazi posters from WWII on his wall.

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Last month I noted that a GAO report had found that last school year’s disastrous rollout of the updated USDA National School Lunch Program helped drive 1.6 million paying students from the lunch rolls. The new rules led some schools to abandon the program, as I reported in 2012. What’s more, the new rules, championed by First Lady Michelle Obama, have also resulted in unprecedented mountains of food waste.

Big Brother isn’t much of a chef. And Big Sister Michelle doesn’t have a clue.

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Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

Motorized tie rack. Yeah, I know, nobody wears ties any more, but it’s still kinda cool.

Body drier. And it’s about time.

Grush gaming toothbrush. I am not making this up.

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As government expands, extending its reach to every aspect of business, every sector of the economy, private citizens and corporations require sherpas to lead them through the mountains of regulations and tax provisions, to discover exemptions and special favors and other forms of relief or favoritism to improve the bottom line. And who better to act as sherpas than the relatives of the Democrats who impose the regulations and tax provisions in the first place, who better than the lively proprietors of a family business operating in the luxurious and morally uncomplicated world of the caste of limousine liberals who dominate politics, culture, news, and finance.

Corporations give to Democratic politicians, avoiding the scrutiny of liberal attack dogs in the media and nonprofit sectors, and enjoying the ego boost that comes with being on the “right side of history.” Then those corporations hire the Podestas to get them out of the Rube Goldberg traps the Democrats have enacted into law. John’s innovation was to establish a corporate-funded think tank where the burdensome policies would be concocted, and whose staff would go on to man the regulatory agencies that put their wool-headed ideas into practice. And to whom do the corporations turn when they find themselves on the receiving end of all this uplift, all this do-goodery, all this progress, hope, and change? Why, to the man in the red Prada loafers, and to his flamboyantly patterned wife.

Charles Krauthammer really doesn’t love Big Brother.

Two months ago, a petition bearing more than 110,000 signatures was delivered to The Post, demanding a ban on any article questioning global warming. The petition arrived the day before publication of my column, which consisted of precisely that heresy.

The column ran as usual. But I was gratified by the show of intolerance because it perfectly illustrated my argument that the left is entering a new phase of ideological agitation — no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition.

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Democrats, of course.

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MSNBC host Alex Wagner attempted to argue that the IRS was actually the victim of the recent investigation into the IRS targeting of conservative groups that were seeking 501(c)(4) status.

Is there a more thoroughgoing Voice of the Crust than MSNBC?

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According to reports, someone left a four foot crocodile at the TJ Maxx plaza in Roseville, California, in its container with a note that identified the animal as a Nile crocodile and advised whoever found him to “call rescue.” The cunning crocodile managed to escape from its cage and was found making the rounds outside the retail store.

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Well, it’s a start.

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

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The Texas EquuSearch Mounted Search and Recovery Team (TXEQ) saves lives. These volunteers conduct free search-and-rescue missions with remote-controlled airplanes. They’ve used these drones to find more than 300 missing people across the U.S. and seven other countries. Too bad, says the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA): The organization is violating federal drone policy.

John Stossel turns over a rock.

The tax code is now complex enough that most Americans now hire Bob, or his equivalent. Instead of inventing things, doing charity work or just having fun, we waste weeks (and billions of dollars) on tax preparation. And we change our lives to suit the wishes of politicians.

“What the tax code is doing is trying to choose our values for us,” complains Yaron Brook from the Ayn Rand Institute.

I think I choose my own values, but it’s true that politicians use taxes to manipulate us. Million-dollar mortgage deductions steer us to buy bigger houses, and solar tax credits persuaded me to put solar panels on my roof.

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Barack. Hossein. Obama. Um, um, um.

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Barack. Hossein. Obama. Um, um, um.

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Throughout the animal kingdom, mothers transfer microbes to their young while giving birth. Different species of tadpoles acquire specific skin bacteria from mother frogs even though they all live in the same pond with the same bacterial background. Emerging chicken eggs get inoculated with microbes from a bacteria-filled pouch near the mother hen’s rectum. And for millennia, mammalian babies have acquired founding populations of microbes by passing through their mothers’ vagina. This microbial handoff is also a critical aspect of infant health in humans. Today it is in peril.

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Land Rover is showcasing a new concept that would give drivers a better view of the road through augmented reality. The Transparent Bonnet Concept utilizes cameras mounted in the car’s grille to capture a view of the road that’s usually obscured by the hood. This data is then fed to a heads-up display that shows the video in real-time at the bottom of the windscreen, overlaying where a driver sees their car’s bonnet and effectively giving the impression that it — and the engine — are transparent.

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Google Glass can be used to check emails or search for information on the move. It can also apparently be used to save lives. The Boston Globe reports that Dr. Steven Horng, working at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, was wearing Glass last year while working on a man whose brain was bleeding. Dr. Horng knew that the patient was allergic to certain drugs that would arrest the bleeding, but didn’t know which ones. With no time to leave the stricken patient, Horng says he called up the man’s medical records on Google’s wearable device, found the relevant information, and stabilized his condition.

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A UCSB student interviewed by Austin Yack of The College Fix brings new meaning to the term low information voter.

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Aunt Zeituni’s reason for getting asylum may even top Ibragim Todashev’s, which was more or less: My dad back home in Russia is only three levels down the org chart from Vladimir Putin, so if the 82nd Airborne ever installs Masha Gessen in the Kremlin to bring Russia democracy, good and hard, well, our family could face repercussions.

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“This is a breakthrough,” says Dr. Barth Green, co-founder of The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis at the University of Miami, who was not involved in the research. “It shows you can have a living spinal cord under the layer of their injury.”

More than 1,700 paralyzed people have inquired about using this technology, which involves surgically implanting a stimulator and giving it directions with an external remote control. The stimulator creates a small, slightly visible bulge in the lower abdomen and is connected to wires that send electrical pulses to the spinal cord.

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If something is going to happen in Veneto, it won’t be an uprise of micro-nationalism: but rather, a tax revolt. You could describe Italy as a country where the North pays taxes and the South consumes taxes. This picture is painted with a wide brush, but it is not incorrect. The gap between the two parts of the country has been there for ages, and it did not narrow, in spite of the fluxes of transfers. It is only natural that economic stagnation exacerbates the problem.

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Among the problems identified in the latest report is the lack of any consolidated system at the Department of Defense to contract for health care professionals. “For example, we identified 24 separate task orders for contracted medical assistants at the same military treatment facility.” Now, multiply that across the entire military establishment.

And the creeping police state around us may be intrusive and presumptuous—but it sucks at cooperation. The Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and the Treasury are independently modernizing their wireless communications systems. “As a result, their communications systems, which represent hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, may not be interoperable and may not enable the most effective response to natural disasters, criminal activities, and domestic terrorism.”

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During the White House briefing Monday, reporters asked Carney to explain why an analysis by the American Enterprise Institute found the median salary for female White House staffers was 12 percent lower than those of male staffers.

Carney struggled to provide an explanation, barely mustering “We, as an institution here, have aggressively, addressed this challenge. And obviously though, at the 88 cents that you cite- that is not 100, but it is better than the national average.”

The biter bit, forsooth.

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KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban assailants apparently thought they were attacking an unprotected Christian-run day care center. But they mistakenly burst into the compound next door, where an American government contractor’s employees were heavily armed and ready, according to accounts that the contractor and the Afghan police gave on Friday of a wild four-hour shootout here.

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Although President Obama claimed victory on Tuesday due to the 7.1 million people who have signed up on federal or state exchanges for his health care law, the Affordable Care Act has been anything but ‘affordable.’

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Officials at Salem High School in Plymouth, Michigan, have agreed to take down bleachers and a score board paid for and built by parents for the school’s baseball team. After an anonymous complaint, the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights found the school was in violation of federal law because the baseball facilities are now superior to the girl’s softball field. The school can’t afford to upgrade the softball field, so it had to take down the amenities at the baseball field.

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That our colleges and universities have become forums to promote political ideology is a well known fact. A few days ago, the New York Times wrote uncritically about courses on global warming being taught at the University of Oregon. The course is entitled, “The Cultures of Climate Change.” Its goal is not to marshal evidence for climate change as a human-caused crisis, or to measure its effects – the reality and severity of it are taken as given – but how to think about it, prepare for it and respond to it.” Instead of using scientific texts, the class will use films, fiction, poetry and photography. Obviously, the purpose is indoctrination, not instruction.