Read it.

According to Politico, “Members of the Congressional Black Caucus are talking about what they want Cochran to do” if he gets re-elected for another six-year term. Their wishlist includes “maintaining funding for food stamps, beefing up programs that help poor blacks in Mississippi and even supporting the Voting Rights Act.”

“Absolutely we have expectations,’’ Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH), the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, told Politico. Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) said after Cochran was “desperate” enough to court the black vote, he hopes that Cochran is now “responsive to the voters that pushed him over the top.” And Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) said he hopes Cochran “comes to the realization that African Americans are the reason I have this final six years and therefore I’m going to try and be more responsible than I have been.”

I guess they couldn’t afford him before.

Read it.

Scotland wants to treat all families as potentially abusive and appoint a “named person” (that is, a guardian) as soon as the child is born and up through age 18 to oversee the parenting. This “shadow parent” would be empowered by the government under the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act, which will take effect in 2016.

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini

Read it.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday in Harris v. Quinn that politicians can no longer force family members caring for disabled relatives into public sector unions.

In a 5-4 ruling, the court found the state of Illinois violated the constitution when imprisoned former Gov. Rod Blagojevich agreed to funnel a portion of home healthcare worker checks to political allies SEIU and AFSCME. The unions collected more than $50 million from about 20,000 such people over a five-year period.

Read it.

We’re here to help you! The Veterans administration keeps a database administrated by secret committees that lists vets as “disruptive” and “disgruntled,” which it then uses to restrict their treatment.

Read it.

I want to underline the basis of the Z-Street case: An IRS official admitted that this organization’s tax exempt status was being delayed merely because its “activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.” Think about that. The IRS believes it can decide your tax liability and status based on your political opinion.

Doesn’t that capture in a nutshell the entire scandal, in which the IRS was used as a weapon to harass opponents of the Democratic Party and specifically of Barack Obama.

Jim Goad turns over a rock.

First they came for the male feminists, and no one spoke out—because no one likes them, not even the female feminists.

Read it.

When Jarl Mohn takes the helm as NPR’s chief executive on Tuesday, he will call on lessons learned from public radio in Los Angeles to address what he says is one of NPR’s most pressing priorities: increasing its reach into communities of color.

Perhaps it may soon quit being a Voice of the Crust? I’d bet against it.

At the time of his appointment, NPR’s board adopted a strategic plan intended to “increase the diversity of the audience by age, ethnicity and geography,” as well as the sources it quotes and the “diversity of NPR talent;” NPR’s newsroom staff is 77 percent white, and its audience even more so, according to a report from NPR’s ombudsman.

The basic problem is that black and Hispanic people don’t have the priorities that rich white ‘progressives’ think they ought to have, and that isn’t going to change any time soon.

Steve Sailer has seen it all before.

Education theorists usually have a very hard time remembering that people who thought much like them have been in charge for a long, long time and that most of their ideas have been tried (unsuccessfully) several times before. I don’t know how many times I’ve lived through cycles of fads based on the assumption that the reason for mediocre test scores is because American schools have been run like madrassas until last week, but now we’re finally going to emphasize critical thinking skills and put our chairs in a circle for the first time ever.

Freeberg captures an eternal truth.

Liberals are such a funny lot. They write their tomes about the challenges humanity faces and how it’s time to dig in and really mean business — but once they’re done running things a little while, nobody’s digging in or meaning business because it’s like running through a thicket. Suddenly, everyone is dodging little-laws. Or breaking them. And the place doesn’t look like utopia; it looks like Detroit. You look around and there isn’t anybody acting on the values the liberal was discussing; nobody helping each other, nobody being grown-up or compassionate, beginning with the end in mind, looking down the road, thinking ahead, building a better world. Just litter in the sidewalks, abandoned factories, rotting houses and people awaiting in long lines talking about “foostamps.”

Read it.

An excellent examination of how e-books are affecting people’s reading habits and patterns.

Read it.

With help from Dr. Leore Grosman from the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the design duo started out by collecting rocks of just the right size and shape from the Negev desert in southern Israel. Once the stones were sufficiently chipped and then scanned — a process described as “one of hastened evolution and bleeding” — a series of handles were designed that turn the teardrop-shaped rocks into everything from a spear to a more traditional two-handed axe. The idea is to show just how amazingly useful the seemingly basic hand-axe can be.

A Real Author explains it all to you.

Look at it this way: you have a widget you’ve invented. It’s shiny; it’s awesome. You’re pretty sure everybody’s going to love it. Problem being, you have no way to tell anybody about. You’ve spent your fortune developing the widget, and you live on an island in the middle of the ocean and phone calls are expensive. You met a guy a while back who expressed interest in your widget, but he wants you to givesell him the rights to produce the widget. And incidentally, he swears he’ll promote the hell out of your shiny widget, and also make it SHINIER! You don’t really need that; you’ve got production facilities going (your island happens to house the last robotic fabrication facility from the lost Mu Empire) but you just don’t have a way to distribute the crates and crates of beautiful widgets to the downtrodden masses whose lives are poorer for lack of your widget.

Then you get a visitor.

She – because strong, female characters are important, I’m told – offers to sell your widgets, under your name, at her enormous network of widget emporia. And not to reverse-engineer them, and cut you out of the market, as she sells widgets, and has no interest in getting into widget production, because taxes. All it’ll cost is roughly a third the retail price of each widget sold.

The other guy offered you a month’s salary or so paid over a year, and maybe about 12% retail of each widget, if anybody’s interested. Oh, and you have to give him the opportunity to buy any more widgets you invent. And you can never sell your widget through anybody else. Oh, and he doesn’t actually have any storefronts. He has relationships with other people, who will also take a cut from the sales of your widget (which is not the same thing as “your widget sales”).

Which deal do you take?

Read it.

A herd of hippopotamuses once owned by the late Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar has been taking over the countryside near his former ranch – and no-one quite knows what to do with them.

…

Valderrama, whose job until recently included watching over the hippos in the Magdalena, has seen animals up to 250km (155 miles) away from Hacienda Napoles. Fishermen are terrified of the three-tonne herbivores, he says. At night, the animals roam the countryside, wandering into ranches, eating crops and occasionally crushing small cows.

You’ve heard the phrase ‘First World problem’; well, here’s a corresponding Third World problem.

Read it.

And ponder.

Sandy Ikeda in The Freeman illuminates how the Marxian dependence on the Aggregation Fallacy (in this case treating ‘capital’ as an undifferentiated commodity — like, say, phlogiston) leads them into error.

When Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century was released in English earlier this year it sparked vigorous debate on the issue of wealth inequality. Despite the prominence of the word in the title, however, capital has not itself become a hot topic. Apparently none of his defenders have taken the opportunity to explore capital theory, and, with a few exceptions, neither have his critics.

Well, that would depend on them treating ‘capital’ as an actual thing worth investigating, rather than a bugbear to be used solely as a target.

Capital is heterogeneous. Now, mainstream economics treats capital as a homogenous glob.

And, in many instances, treats ‘labor’ the same way.

A capital good can’t be used for just any purpose:  A hammer generally can’t be used as a harbor. Second, to make a capital good productive a person needs to combine it with other capital goods in ways that are complementary within her plan: Hammers and harbors could be used together to help repair a boat. And third, heterogeneity means that capital goods have no common unit of measurement, which poses a problem if you want to add up how much capital you have:  One tractor plus two computers plus three nails doesn’t give you “six units” of capital.

Unless you’re an intellectual, of course.

But if capital goods are heterogeneous, then whether or not you earn an income from them depends crucially on what kinds of capital goods you buy and exactly how you combine them, and in turn how that combination has to complement the combinations that others have put together. You build an office-cleaning business in the hopes that someone else has built an office to clean.

The Other McCain translates.

If you’ve ever been targeted for online harassment, as I have, you know how maddening it can be to deal with people who tell you, “Oh, it’s just the Internet.” You may also be aware that mentally ill perpetrators of harassment habitually pretend that they are the victims. In the war of Internet annihilation which they initiated and refuse to cease, your acts of self-defense are portrayed as aggressions.

Now, imagine discovering that the online service you’re dealing with in your efforts to stop the harassment have entrusted your avowed enemies with authority to decide what constitutes “abuse.”

Gender Identity Watch is a radical feminist site — certainly no friend or ally of mine — that has been targeted by transgender activists who are trying to silence them. Why? Because they are feminists who refuse to go along with the sex-change pretense. The transgenders can’t stand being criticized under the banner of “feminism.” Radical women are being censored in the name of “fairness and safety.”

Apparently one type of pervert is oppressing another, all while squabbling for the banner of Victimhood. Pass the popcorn.

Theodore Dalrymple is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Science does not need women any more than it needs foot fetishists, pole-vaulters, or Somalis. What science needs (if an abstraction such as science can be said to need anything) is scientists. If they happen also to be foot fetishists, pole-vaulters, or Somalis, so be it: but no one in his right mind would go to any lengths to recruit for his laboratory foot fetishists, pole-vaulters, or Somalis for those characteristics alone.

…

It would be no consolation to know while on a collapsing bridge and about to plunge into the deep ravine below that it had been built by a truly representative sample of the population, and was therefore a monument to social justice.

Check it out.

The Leading Resource for Historical Fencing and Medieval & Renaissance Combat Skills, it says.

The Other McCain follows this foolishness so that you don’t have to.

In 2010, the British parliament passed the Equality Act, which has had the effect of making accusations of discrimination the easiest way to destroy anybody you hate. The war between radical feminists and the transgender community — which I first wrote about in January — has been fought in the shadow of this ill-advised legislation.

Radical feminists (who are mostly lesbian) insist that their conferences must be “women-only” spaces. Radfems exclude transsexuals, viewing them as men trying to enact “feminine” gender roles. Radfems are all about abolishing gender roles, period, yet they are adamant that female is a biological category, and they especially hate “pretendbians” — transsexuals who claim to be lesbians. This is just male aggression, trying to co-opt lesbianism, say the radfems.

So, that’s the necessary background to what has gone on in the latest battle of the radfem-vs.-tranny war in England: Sarah Brown claims to have been harassed by radfems to the point of having a mental breakdown, a collapse into helpless depression.

Oh, no, say the radfems: Sarah Brown is not a victim any more than “she” is a lesbian. In fact, say the radfems, Brown is guilty of harassing actual women. Radfems were enraged that Brown was invited as keynote speaker (!) at this month’s Dyke March in London….

I’m tellin’ ya, it’s hard to keep track of these factions without a scorecard, and even then you can’t predict what they’ll do.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

In previous episodes, we’ve tracked:

– How Turkish Islamists imprisoned hundreds of members of the secularist Deep State on the grounds that well, sure, we just made up the evidence that the military is conspiring against us ruling Islamists, but we in the government are plotting against them, so it would be remiss of them not to plot against us.

– How the two branches of the Islamist ruling party then turned on each other, with the Gulen Cult, which has used its control of test prep to infiltrate the police, releasing incriminating wiretaps of Prime Minister Erdogan’s corruption.

Not surprisingly, Erdogan is now making nice with the old Deep State, presumably to use against Imam Gulen’s new Deep State.

Read it.

As Olympians go for the gold in Vancouver, even the steeliest are likely to experience that familiar feeling of “butterflies” in the stomach. Underlying this sensation is an often-overlooked network of neurons lining our guts that is so extensive some scientists have nicknamed it our “second brain”.

A deeper understanding of this mass of neural tissue, filled with important neurotransmitters, is revealing that it does much more than merely handle digestion or inflict the occasional nervous pang. The little brain in our innards, in connection with the big one in our skulls, partly determines our mental state and plays key roles in certain diseases throughout the body.

Read it.

The outlines of this new epoch are clear in numerous ways. There is the diminished role for small business, greater concentration of financial assets, and a troubling decline in home ownership. On a cultural level, there is a general malaise about the prospect for upward mobility for future generations.

Not everyone is suffering in this new age. For the entitled few, these have been the best of times. With ever more concentration of key industries, ever greater advantage of capital over labor, and soaring real estate values in swanky places such as Manhattan or San Francisco which , as one journalist put it, constitute “vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself.” The top hundred firms on the Fortune 500 list has revenues, in adjusted dollars, eight times those during the supposed big-business heyday of the 1960s.

Read it.

A controversial, outspoken law professor who frequently bashes Republicans and specializes in poverty issues as a self-proclaimed champion of the poor earns $205,400 per year – for teaching one class per semester.

The University of North Carolina School of Law pays Professor Gene Nichol $205,400 annually for his one class per semester workload. On top of his teaching salary, he receives a $7,500 stipend as director of the law school’s Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity.

Doing well by doing good.

Taki is delightfully dyspeptic today.

The Sultan had wisely divided the Middle East along ethnic lines into provinces. The Anglo-French duo in 1916 proved as ignorant as George W. Bush was to be 87 years later. Had they never heard of the Sunni-Shia divide? The 1990s wars over Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo, the Gulf War of 1991 and the disastrous Iraq war of 2003, as well as the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy, can all be traced directly to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1920 and those two fools carving up the Middle East while their minds were obviously elsewhere. (Most likely trying to figure out whose family was older and richer.)

Winston Churchill doesn’t come out very well either. He actually created Iraq, or Mesopotamia as it was then called, and by the time he was thrown out of office in 1922 his folly had become Iraq as it is today. He created the artificial monarchy that ended so badly in 1958, thinking he was dealing with sleepy Bedouins who would genuflect in front of Faisal, whose family realm in Saudi Arabia had been usurped by some camel drivers who had never used an indoor loo.

Read it.

A site called ’24/7 Wall St.’ has an article with that title, but the study they cite in support merely tracks deaths due to firearms, whether murder, suicide or accident — and they admit that suicide is the most frequent. In order to track ‘gun violence’ correctly, one would have to take into account woundings, and probably even crimes involving firearms, which of course they don’t do — possibly because it would reflect badly on such blue state bastions as New York, Chicago, and Detroit.

CozyRoom.

Completely Reflective Safety Umbrella.

Dual Breakfast Sandwich Maker.

Mark Steyn does what he does best.

So “workplace violence” on US Government property now covers everything from Major Hasan opening fire while shouting “Allahu akbar!” to environmentalist bureaucrats defecating. The government seems to take the latter more seriously than the former, judging from the EPA statement.

Read it.

Good luck with that. Trying to get money out of a Clinton is like trying to get blood back from a tick.

Besides, that’s better than half the annual salary of the President. For about two hours work. if she had to make the choice, which do you think she’d choose?

But she won’t ever have to make that choice — what are these ‘student leaders’ going to do, vote for a Republican? It is to laugh.

Read it.

French economist Thomas Piketty has succeeded in raising the always important and fascinating topic of inheritances back into the public spotlight, even though his contention of a return to pre-20th Century French norms mostly doesn’t seem to have gone through the formality of coming into existence yet, unless Piketty is right about their being countless vast concentrations of hidden inherited wealth that have wholly escaped the attention of taxmen, fundraisers, salesmen, and divorce attorneys.

And good luck with that. Unless you’re a Kennedy or a Rockefeller or some other flavor of Democrat. Then you’re good.

One reason is that the pre-Baby Boomer “Greatest Generation” didn’t inherit all that much, since their ancestors tended to have been hit hard by the Depression and confiscatory income tax levels at the high end. Moreover, new homes were cheap during the era of suburbanization, so inheriting grandma’s old house wasn’t typically very exciting.

My grandmother lived in a house that had a basement that my grandfather (and friends) dug out from under it. She used one of those open washing machines with an attached mangle to wring the water out. My cousin wound up with it in return for looking after her in her final years; don’t think she got much for it.

These days, the parents of many Baby Boomers are dying off and often leaving significant sums, but the large average family sizes of the Baby Boom mean that the inheritances tend to get split up among three or four kids. Individuals in Post-Baby Boom generations with smaller family sizes may do even better. The oldest post-Baby Boomer (b. 1965) is just shy of 50, although many of them are younger siblings of large Baby Boom families. But in another decade or so, the average number of children an inheritance is split among will probably be down notably.

When my mother died, my share of the estate was about half of my then annual salary. Not something you could retire on.

After WWII, however, the entire topic of inheritance and trust funds virtually disappeared from popular culture. This helps explain the often-noticed “How can they afford that place?” mystery in movies and television shows (e.g., Friends). Characters tend to live in apartments and houses for which they have no visible means of support.

Ever notice how people like TV-show police sergeants in NYC live in places for which in real life they couldn’t even have afforded the utilities?

Read it.

An excellent reason never to vote for either Huckabee or Alexander.

Read it.

Illegal and legal immigrants have accounted for all of the job growth in the United States since 2000.

On the one-year anniversary of the passage of the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” comprehensive immigration reform bill, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released a report on Friday that revealed that even though native-born Americans accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the total working-age population since 2000, the number of native-born Americans with jobs declined by 127,000.

While there were 114.8 million working-age native-born Americans with jobs in the first quarter of 2000, there were only 114.7 million with jobs in the first quarter of 2014. On the other hand, 17.1 million working-age immigrants (legal and illegal) had jobs in 2000 while 22.8 million did in 2014, which is an increase of 5.7 million.

Read it.

Ret. Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney said the Obama administration was “too politically correct” when it came to combating radical Islamic terrorists and the U.S. must recognize the “very dangerous ideology” it faces across the globe Thursday on The Kelly File.

One example he gave to host Megyn Kelly was the case of Maj. Nidal Hasan, the perpetrator of the 2009 Fort Hood Massacare, and how that case had not been designated an act of terrorism by the Army.

Read it.

I’ll bet they do, I’ll bet they do.

Read it.

Obamacare requires all doctors to keep electronic medical records. For every year a physician fails to keep their records electronically, they are fined. Outside companies typically charge doctors around $50,000 to provide this electronic filing service.

Brescia tried to comply with this mandate, but then the company he had hired to keep his records went bankrupt. Now the government Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is charging him $18,000 for failure to comply.

People have been talking about how Obamacare hurts patients, but not enough attention has been paid to how it hurts health care providers.

“I think the Affordable Care Act is really going to eliminate small practices,” Brescia told his local news station. “You’re going to have to join an organization.”

And that’s one of its objectives. Democrats don’t like small businesses. They want big businesses that are easier to regulate and easier to squeeze for donations.

“Kenneth John “Ken” Bigley (22 April 1942 – 7 October 2004) was a British civil engineer who wa skidnapped in the al-Mansour district of Baghdad, Iraq, on 16 September 2004, along with his colleagues Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong, both United States citizens.^[1] The three men were working for Gulf Supplies and Commercial Services, a Kuwaiti company working on reconstruction projects in Iraq. The men knew their home was being watched and realized they were in grave danger when their Iraqi house guard informed them he was quitting due to being threatened by militias for protecting American and British workers. Bigley and the two Americans decided it was worth the risk and continued to live in the house. All were subsequently decapitated.”

— Wikipedia

Read it.

U.S. diplomatic compounds overseas continue to be endangered by lax security measures and, in many cases, are highly vulnerable to potential attack, a fact that the State Department has failed to address for nearly 10 years, according to a newly released government oversight report.

Nearly two years after terrorists killed four Americans at a U.S. facility in Benghazi, Libya, the State Department still “has not fully developed and implemented a risk management policy for overseas facilities,” according to comprehensive new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

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You have to hand it to the liberals: they never miss an opportunity to convert tragedy into political gain. In the wake of Elliot Rodger’s six murders–three with a knife and three with a gun, plus injuries inflicted with an automobile–they are calling, once again, for gun confiscation. I guess they are, anyway. As usual, they denounce conservatives and say things like “end the madness,” but confiscation seems to be the point of it all.

Once again, though, liberals are denied the holy grail of mass murderers–a conservative perpetrator, preferably a follower of the Tea Party. Rodger, like most of the others, was a devoted liberal. He followed the Young Turks on YouTube, a far-left group led by a goof named Cenk Uygur who once was an MSNBC host. So, foiled once again, liberals can make only their broader propaganda points.

Perhaps if we ban kids from being liberal, this madness would cease. (Makes about as much sense as what they’re saying.)

Read it.

I’ve always thought the EPA was full of shit, and here’s the proof.

And apparently I’m not the only one.

Read it.

Witnesses tell the Post that the man was chatting on his cellphone and appeared composed despite the knife in his back.

I’ve had performance reviews like that.

Read it.

Just as there used to be an NBC Blue network and an NBC Red network, we have an Establishment Blue (Democrat) Party and an Establishment Red (Republican) Party.

Check it out.

A comprehensive catalog of all the various forms of racism in your life that you probably missed.

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Cars have long used GPS and mapping features to help drivers detect speed cameras, but Hyundai’s latest vehicle goes one step further to ensure you truly avoid them. The Hyundai Genesis combines GPS and braking technology to slow the car down if drivers are speeding when they approach a speed camera. “It knows there is a speed camera there, it knows where the speed camera is and it will adopt the correct speed,” explains Hyundai’s Guido Schenken in an interview with Australia’s drive.com.

Read it.

I have heard it said that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, but this is absurd.

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The usual suspects doing what they usually do. You’d think that all these rich-hating people might have trouble looking in the mirror, but no.

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The Swiss company dreams of a machine that makes tailor-made food based on individual nutrition needs.

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Russian strategic air forces fired six new, precision-strike cruise missiles in test launches Friday amid new tensions between Moscow and the West over the crisis in Ukraine.

Russia’s Defense Ministry announced Friday that the missile firings took place during exercises involving eight Tu-95 Bear bombers—the same type of strategic bomber recently intercepted 50 miles off the California coast by U.S. jets.

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“From the ruins of the Obama Administration’s Middle East strategy, the most powerful and dangerous group of religious fanatics in modern history has emerged in the heart of the Middle East.” So says Walter Russell Mead, the distinguished historian of American foreign policy (who reportedly has said he voted for Barack Obama in 2008).

The fanatical group in question is, of course, ISIS. According to Mead, who cites analysts at the Brookings Institution and the Washington Institute, ISIS is more radical, better organized, and better financed than al-Qaeda. It commands the loyalty of thousands of dedicated fanatics, including many with Western and even U.S. passports. And it now controls some of the most strategic territory at the heart of the Middle East.

Read it.

Problem solved!

The group would do away with Pell Grants and those tax credits, exchanging one pile of taxpayer-funded stuff for another pile of the same taxpayer-funded stuff.

Read it.

Welcome to the Obamanation. Be careful not to step in the bipartisanship, it’s hell getting that stuff off of your shoes.

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There is indeed an app for that….

Unfortunately, the campaign finance laws don’t have a category for ‘stupid rich kid’.