Check it out.

If you’re interested in the famous Oak Island ‘buried treasure’, here’s a web site dedicated to it.

Read it.

Yet another news story you won’t see in the Lamestream Media.

Read it. And watch the video, if you have a strong stomach.

“If someone takes something from me, I’m going to grab it right back out of their cold, twisted, sick hands and say it is mine!” Mulgrew shouted. “You do not take what is mine!”

“And I’m going to punch you in the face and push you in the dirt because this is the teachers!” he continued. “These are our tools, and you sick people need to deal with us and the children we teach. Thank you very much!”

Uh, I wouldn’t want this moron anywhere near any children of mine, thank you very much.

Send your kid to a government school,
And he will turn out a fool;
That’s the way
Things are today —
Your tax bucks at work and play!

Read it.

Most people, if offered the alternative between their current job on one hand and, on the other hand, the same salary but no job would choose the latter. Many do make this sort of choice. Casey Mulligan, a University of Chicago economist, calculates that half the depression of the labor market during the recent recession lies in the incentives created by the expansion of the safety net.

And note that anybody who gets bored without a job or needs the sentiment of being useful can do charity work. So why do most of us want to work at paid jobs?

The answer is simple. What people are really after is not jobs, but the incomes that come with them. And people want incomes because they want to consume during their leisure time. Life is not about making useless efforts, but about enjoying things, many of which, alas, only come with some effort. Jobs are the cost; consumption is the benefit.

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The New York Times ran an op-ed piece that helpfully demonstrated the pitfalls of lifestyle arguments in favor of urbanism, namely that they are annoying to everyone but the people making the argument.

The boys, like their father, are lean, strong and healthy. Their parents chose to live in New York, where their legs and public transit enable them to go from place to place efficiently, at low cost and with little stress (usually). They own a car but use it almost exclusively for vacations.

“Green” commuting is a priority in my family. I use a bicycle for most shopping and errands in the neighborhood, and I just bought my grandsons new bicycles for their trips to and from soccer games, accompanied by their cycling father.

These arguments – whether they’re about physical health, or “diverse” or “vibrant” or “creative” communities, or whatever else – are, at bottom, about telling people that they are lacking, and that in order to improve themselves they should become more like the author. In the 1970s, when city dwellers felt superior mainly because of their supposed cultural capital and were telling middle-class suburbanites to loosen up a little, that might have been obnoxious but harmless. In our current situation – when the city dwellers making these arguments are the economic elite (the author of this particular piece, Jane Brody, lives in gentrified brownstone Brooklyn, I believe) – it’s a lot more sinister. Brody talks about commutes as if their length and form were something that most people could freely choose, rather than something imposed upon them by their wages and the price of housing and form of development of their metropolitan area. She makes this a story about personal morality, rather than the constraints we choose to put on people through public policy.

Mark Steyn looks at the Middle East.

ISIS are fast-track Nazis. No messing about with a few property restrictions and intermarriage laws as a little light warm-up: They’re only in the business of “final solutions”, and they start on Day One and don’t quit until the last Christian and Yazidi is dead or fled. As I’ve often remarked about today’s exhaustively cleansed Maghreb, Levant and Araby, Islam is king on a field of corpses. But pikers like the Muslim Brotherhood, the Baathists, the House of Saud take their time. ISIS are shooting for the Guinness Book of Records.

Read it.

Obama thinks in progressive clichés that fail to contemplate the predictable consequences of action or inaction, let alone the predictable consequences of his own words.

And as a result is always getting himselve — and us, his passengers — into trouble.

Warning: Friedman’s article may be hazardous to your health. I can feel brain cells dying as I read it.

True that.

Read it.

ISIS succeeds mostly because it is incredibly brutal. Normal people can’t deal with mass murders, crucifixions, systematic rape, and so on. ISIS documents its reign of terror on the internet. These photos explain why pretty much everyone–including, unfortunately, Iraqi soldiers–flees when ISIS comes calling.

…

Note how crucifixion, as in Roman times, is a public spectacle intended to serve a political purpose, now aided by cell phone cameras.

…

Islam has always been expansionist and imperialistic, more a political movement than a religion. Today, ISIS is the leading champion of Islam, having surpassed al Qaeda in that regard. It is impossible to know how many of the world’s Muslims are cheering on ISIS’s rampage, but it is surely a large number, since everything ISIS does is, I believe, authorized by the Koran. And everything I have read about Mohammed suggests that he would be proud of ISIS.

Beekeeping Starter Kit.

Spray Cake.

Nunchopsticks. Perfect gift for Bruce Lee.

Water-draining soap dish.

Spud bar.

Peg-leg pirate chopsticks.

Read it.

Hamas used a Greek Orthodox Church sheltering hundreds of Palestinians who fled their homes to escape Israeli shelling of the terrorist group’s positions in Gaza City to launch rockets, according to an Orthodox bishop.

Archbishop Alexios, who oversees the church, says Hamas set up a rocket-launch site adjacent to the church even though at least 1,000 Muslim refugees had crowded inside. He told CBN News the terrorists set up the launch site near a roof terrace outside his office at the 12th century church.

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‘King Putt’ at his finest.

He just wants to be President, he doesn’t want to be bothered to do President.

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — High-speed rail was supposed to be President Obama’s signature transportation project, but despite the administration spending nearly $11 billion since 2009 to develop faster passenger trains, the projects have gone mostly nowhere and the United States still lags far behind Europe and China.

Don’t look at me, YOU voted for him.

Read it.

Yet another example of how heavy-handed regulations are killing small businesses.

Read it.

Y Combinator-backed biotech company Bikanta wants to find and stop cancer at its source by inserting tiny, fluorescent diamonds inside your body. The brainchild of Dr. Ambika Bumb, who holds a PhD in biomedical engineering from Oxford, these nanodiamonds can detect molecular abnormalities at a much earlier stage, essentially stopping cancer from spreading any further.

Read it.

A new iridescent plastic that reveals hidden images with a breath is described in a recent paper published in Advanced Materials. Researchers at the University of Michigan hope to use this technology for anti-counterfeiting purposes, replacing the ubiquitous hologram stickers used on things like luxury handbags and passports with a humidity-activated logo (or celebrity).

Read it.

This is currently the most-read story on the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s web site: “Stillwater cafe faces heat for adding ‘minimum wage fee’ to tab.” Minnesota’s Democratic legislature recently voted to raise the state’s minimum wage to $8 an hour, 75 cents more than the federal level. Naturally, that increase is leading to higher prices….

…

What is unique about the Oasis is that the cafe wants its patrons to know where the higher prices are coming from….

…

“We believe that the industry is overreacting,” Wade Luneburg of the MN State Council of UNITE HERE Unions told the Star Tribune this week. “Putting [minimum wage] fees on tickets and passing the cost on to consumers directly is strange at best, and creates an ‘us against them’ mentality while ordering dinner.”

Uh, guys, businesses don’t pay taxes; their customers pay taxes. This business is just refusing to pull the wool over the expense to the customer that is caused by pursuing your political agenda. Honesty is always the  chief enemy of ‘progressives’.

Read it.

THE GOVERNOR’S State House digs just underwent “a museum quality” makeover.

It cost $11.3 million, ran $2 million over budget, and brings Deval Patrick’s interior decorating muse full circle.

When Patrick first took office, he was criticized for spending $27,000 of taxpayer money on new curtains and furniture. As he exits eight years later, he leaves behind a renovated suite that features historically accurate crown moldings and paint color, along with six plasma screen TVs and the equipment necessary for not-yet-installed facial recognition security cameras.

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Begun in 1997, the push to regulate the labels on Tic Tacs, Certs, and other breath fresheners has recently been restarted with a new 145-page document after the first one was withdrawn for being outdated. But that first document spawned a host of other documents from a rogues gallery of agencies about the all-important question of portion size.

Read it.

Hey, parking tickets are for the Little People.

Read it.

A Freudian slip.

The Other McCain has some breaking news.

Dana Sitar is a 28-year-old writer who works as a barista in a bookstore coffee shop to pay her bills. Divorced and childless, she is perhaps not the role model of happiness and success to whom America’s mothers usually turn when they need parenting advice, but being a feminist entitles her to tell you what you’re doing wrong.

Uh, yeah.

Mickey Kaus blows the whistle.

Corporatism’s easy — you just get the leaders of society’s various bodily organs in a room and work the sucker out.  It’s especially easier to impose regulations on a few big players, who can foot the bill or pass it on, than on a near-infinite number of small players. That’s one reason modern liberals tend to accept corporatism when they should know better.

…

Maybe we shouldn’t read too much into a press conference, but Obama certainly seems to be groping for a formal argument here that would set out the circumstances in which he is justified in bypassing the legislature described in the Constitution — Congress — and acting on his own. The argument would be: “Where the key interest groups of society — business, labor, religious organizations and the MSM (who else is going to anoint a bill “common sense … legislation”?) — are lined up behind a policy, then if Congress doesn’t act, the President can.

In short, it’s an argument for bypassing archaic elected legacy institutions when they stand in the way of modern government by interest group elites.

Read it.

According to a recent Nature article, “air near the bottom of the crater contained unusually high concentrations of methane — up to 9.6% — in tests conducted at the site on 16 July, says Andrei Plekhanov, an archaeologist at the Scientific Centre of Arctic Studies in Salekhard, Russia. Plekhanov, who led an expedition to the crater, says that air normally contains just 0.000179% methane.”

The scientist said the methane release may be related to Yamal’s unusually hot summers in 2012 and 2013, which were warmer by an average of 5 degrees Celsius. “As temperatures rose, the researchers suggest, permafrost thawed and collapsed, releasing methane that had been trapped in the icy ground,” the report stated.

Read it.

Truly, you can find anything on the Internet.

Read it.

Maybe black women just can’t act. Or perhaps they just aren’t much to look at — I’ve noticed that ‘black’ women who are generally considered good-looking really look like white women with one African great-grandparent. Beyoncé? Yup. Michelle Obama? Not so much.

Read it.

A Denver bar has been cited by the state’s Division of Civil Rights for discrimination because it refused to let a gay man dressed in drag enter. The bar is the Denver Wrangler, and despite what its name might suggest, it is not some Country Western joint. It is, in fact, a gay bar. So the state has determined that a gay bar has discriminated against a gay person.

Read it.

Survey of 300 US environmental groups show lower percentage of jobs held by ethnic minorities than in science and engineering

And this in the Guardian, a bona fide Voice of the Crust.

Bill Reader pulls back the curtain.

Control of the circumstances of a battle is the key to winning, and the proverb reminds us that our ability to control such things is much greater if we do it well in advance… in times of peace… than when they are immediate needs… in times of war.

Commonly in politics, we see it applied when someone (99.99% of the time a Democrat, which is not to our strategic advantage) accuses an opponent of a crime preemptively in order to excuse their own malfeasance later. The crime is often a generalized one that’s difficult to disprove, such as being an -ist. Obama bought practical immunity from questions about his otherwise extremely questionable past in two elections, simply by accusing opponents of being racist. Such general accusations of prejudice are very useful. Any sufficiently well-known public figure will be opposed for reasons both philosophical and prejudicial. The accusation gives followers sanction not to even attempt to differentiate the groups, however prominent the prior and insubstantial the latter. The accusation becomes a kind of magic word, spoken to protect the user from the conflict of ideas.

Read it.

A peek inside the workings of the Crust.

In some senses, this budding blue-collar rebellion exposes the essential contradiction between the party’s now-dominant gentry Left and its much larger and less well-off voting base. For the people who fund the party – public employee unions, Silicon Valley and Hollywood – higher energy prices are more than worth the advantages. Public unions get to administer the program and gain in power and employment while venture capitalists and firms, like Google, get to profit on mandated “green energy” schemes.

What’s in it for Hollywood? Well, entertainment companies are shifting production elsewhere in response to subsidies offered by other states, localities and companies, so high energy costs and growing impoverishment across Southern California doesn’t figure to really hurt their businesses. Furthermore, by embracing “green” policies, the famously narcissistic Hollywood crowd also gets to feel good about themselves, a motivation not to be underestimated.

This upside, however, does not cancel out hoary factors such as geography, race and class. One can expect lock-step support for any proposed shade of green from most coastal Democrats. Among lawmakers, the new Democratic dissenters don’t tend to come from Malibu or Portola Valley. They often represent heavily Latino areas of the Inland Empire and Central Valley, where people tend to have less money, longer drives to work and a harder time affording a decent home. Cap and trade’s impact on gasoline prices – which could approach an additional $2 a gallon by 2020 – is a very big deal in these regions.

…

In Washington, D.C., there is tension between East Coast and West Coast Democrats on one side and representatives from the Plains and the South on the other. Progressives shrug at the loss of these regions and the associated white working-class voters who, as the liberal website Daily Kos contended earlier this year, are just a bunch of racists, anyway.

Read it.

In Delaware, the poultry and petroleum industries have been hammered by the ethanol mandate.

Because corn and soybeans are more expensive thanks to the biofuels industry, the cost of livestock feed has gone up.

It creates “a very uneven playing field for chicken companies to compete for necessary feedstuffs,” said Tom Super, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council, the poultry industry trade group based in Washington, D.C.

The bottom line: over $44 billion nationally in higher actual chicken feed costs, Super said.

“Adding together the higher cumulative feed costs for chicken, turkey, table eggs and hogs, the total is almost $100 billion in additional feed costs,” he said. “Also higher feed costs for other agricultural animal producers, such as dairy and beef cattle, would add measurably to the $100 billion cost.”

Read it.

At a sprawling shipyard in South Korea, workers dressed in wearable robotics were hefting large hunks of metal, pipes and other objects as if they were nothing.

It was all part of a test last year by Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering, at their facility in Okpo-dong. The company, one of the largest shipbuilders in the world, wants to take production to the next level by outfitting staff with robot exoskeletons that give them superhuman strength.

Gilwhoan Chu, the lead engineer for the firm’s research and development arm, says the pilot showed that the exoskeleton does help workers perform their tasks. His team is working to improve the prototypes so that they can go into regular use in the shipyard, where robots already run a large portion of a hugely complex assembly system.

Read it.

Yeah, we really need more of that.

Steve Sailer brings the fun.

You can see why places like Oklahoma City let themselves get raped by major league sports team owners in order to call themselves major league. Oklahoma City snagged Seattle’s NBA franchise a few years ago and now has a wonderful basketball player in Kevin Durant. The OKC basketball team is currently cool, so OKC gets featured in this article about a broad trend.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Well, there you have it: Straight from the Democrat’s mouth.

Read it.

Is this the guy that’s the fight promoter? I can never tell one crazy black guy from another.

Read it.

GOT that ringing in your ears? Tinnitus, the debilitating condition that plagued Beethoven and Darwin, affects roughly 10 per cent of the world’s population, including 30 million people in the US alone. Now, a device based on vagus nerve stimulation promises to eliminate the sounds for good by retraining the brain.

As someone who suffers from tinnitus, I hope this gets to market soon.

Steve Sailer grasps what few see.

If social construction is as powerful as its enthusiasts claim, how could it not affect human beings genetically? If a social group constructs a new ideology about who should marry whom, for instance, how would that not alter future lineages and gene frequencies?

For example, America has witnessed over the last ten generations the socially planned breeding of a new endogamous extended family, a fast-growing proto-race that now numbers over 200,000 and is currently on pace to double every 21 years: the Amish.

And, judging from how spectacularly well the Amish have weathered the last half-century’s fertility-depressing social revolution in the surrounding “English” culture, they seem to have a clear flight path to numbering in the millions before the end of this century.

Joy Pullman connects the dots.

Chicago is a home base of the American mafia, and it seems to have sent a satellite office to run the country from Washington, DC. In major respects, our government has morphed from a guard of our natural liberties into a hierarchical system of cronies that dispenses limited freedoms only in exchange for following its tight-fisted rules.

Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, has called where we’re headed feudalism. That’s a system of patronage in which the amount of leverage you have depends on your wealth and Rolodex. Another way to look at our country’s situation is by comparing how the Obama administration and its progressive allies operate to the global and American mafia.

Jim Michaels points out some inconvenient truth.

It may no longer be necessary to worry that Iraq will break apart. In many ways, it already has.

The radical Islamic State that seized a swath of western and central Iraq last month effectively left the nation in three pieces, government officials and analysts say.

Ryan Crocker, who served as U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2007 to 2009, described the divisions as “Shiastan,” “Jihadistan” and Kurdistan. The references are to the majority Shiite Muslims, who run the national government in Baghdad; the insurgent Sunni Muslim jihadists who make up the Islamic State; and the ethnic Kurds, who have long presided over an oil-rich, semiautonomous enclave in the north

Read it.

First, catch a rabbit….

Proponents of the Paleo diet follow a nutritional plan based on the eating habits of our ancestors in the Paleolithic period, between 2.5 million and 10,000 years ago. Before agriculture and industry, humans presumably lived as hunter–gatherers: picking berry after berry off of bushes; digging up tumescent tubers; chasing mammals to the point of exhaustion; scavenging meat, fat and organs from animals that larger predators had killed; and eventually learning to fish with lines and hooks and hunt with spears, nets, bows and arrows.

Most Paleo dieters of today do none of this, with the exception of occasional hunting trips or a little urban foraging. Instead, their diet is largely defined by what they do not do: most do not eat dairy or processed grains of any kind, because humans did not invent such foods until after the Paleolithic; peanuts, lentils, beans, peas and other legumes are off the menu, but nuts are okay; meat is consumed in large quantities, often cooked in animal fat of some kind; Paleo dieters sometimes eat fruit and often devour vegetables; and processed sugars are prohibited, but a little honey now and then is fine.

Read it.

California is one of a handful of states that allow apprenticeships like Mr. Tittle’s in lieu of a law degree as a prerequisite to taking the bar and practicing as a licensed lawyer. In Virginia, Vermont, Washington and California, aspiring lawyers can study for the bar without ever setting foot into or paying a law school. New York, Maine and Wyoming require a combination of law school and apprenticeship.

The programs remain underpopulated. Of the 83,986 people who took state or multistate bar exams last year, according to the National Conference of Bar Examiners, only 60 were law office readers (so-called for the practice of reading legal texts as preparation). But at a time when many in legal education — including the president, a former law professor — are questioning the value of three years of law study and the staggering debt that saddles many graduates, proponents see apprenticeships as an alternative that makes legal education available and affordable to a more diverse population and could be a boon to underserved communities.

Read it.

Roslyn Chavda, a former assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire, was hired at the school during a hiring freeze … because of the school’s “ongoing efforts to enhance racial diversity on campus.”

Chavda was fired from her job in 2012 due to poor performance reviews and failure to publish in scholarly journals, according to UNH.

Chavda claimed that a white male untenured professor hired around the same time as she also did not publish, and is still employed by the school. She also had claimed gender discrimination, having had issues due to giving birth to twins shortly after her arrival at UNH.

Read it.

What is it with insane NY-related bureaucrats and their attempts to “own” things? In the past, we’ve covered how New York State is a pretty big trademark bully over the “I ? NY” phrase, and did you know that the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) claims ownership over the phrase “If you see something, say something”? And, now, we find out that the controversy-ridden Port Authority of NY and NJ appears to be claiming ownership of the NYC skyline. No joke. It apparently sent a cease-and-desist letter to Fishs Eddy, a housewares store in Manhattan that is selling some city themed dishes.

Well: (a) New York, and (b) bureaucrats. ‘Nuff said.

Bet: These guys are mostly, if not all, Democrats. This is the way Democrats think. ‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’

Read it.

Capturing carbon emissions and selling them for oil production could be big business in the U.S. as the country prepares to require power plant owners to cut their emissions.

Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

A general prejudice in health journalism is that everybody is the same, so the reason medical research hasn’t yet come up with definitive answers to questions like what kind of diet should you follow or how much sleep should you get isn’t because different people need different things. Sure, that might make sense, but that’s not Science. Instead, Science is when there’s just one answer.

…

Personally, I’m not sure I believe that “oversleeping” really exists. I hear people all the time say that they feel lousy because they slept too much. If I sleep 10 hours and I’m still tired, it’s not because I slept too much but because I needed to sleep 12. But you may well be different.

Read it.

Presumably this is education against, rather than training for.

Eric S Raymond speaks for all right-thinking people.

When I look at these buildings, and the Tolkien sketches from which they derive, that’s what I see. The timelessness, the organic quality, the rootedness in place. When I look inside them, I see a kind of humane warmth that is all too rare in any building I actually visit. (Curiously, one of the few exceptions is a Wegmans supermarket near me which, for all that it’s a gigantic commercial hulk, makes clever use of stucco and Romanesque stonework to evoke a sense of balance, groundedness, and warmth.)

I want to live in a thing like the Hobbit House – a hummocky fieldstone pile with a red-tiled roof and a chimney, and white plaster and wainscoting and hardwood floors. I want it to look like it grew where it is, half-set in a hillside. I want the mullions and the butterfly windows and the massive roof-beams and the eyebrow gables. Want, want, want!

Read it.

And be sure to read the comments.