Read it.

The famed Fabian socialist Sidney Webb was as blunt as anyone in his 1912 article “The Economic Theory of the Minimum Wage”:

Legal Minimum Wage positively increases the productivity of the nation’s industry, by ensuring that the surplus of unemployed workmen shall be exclusively the least efficient workmen; or, to put it in another way, by ensuring that all the situations shall be filled by the most efficient operatives who are available.

The intellectual history shows that whole purpose of the minimum wage was to create unemployment among people who the elites did not believe were worthy of holding jobs.

And it gets worse. Webb wrote:

What would be the result of a Legal Minimum Wage on the employer’s persistent desire to use boy labor, girl labor, married women’s labor, the labor of old men, of the feeble-minded, of the decrepit and broken-down invalids and all the other alternatives to the engagement of competent male adult workers at a full Standard Rate? … To put it shortly, all such labor is parasitic on other classes of the community, and is at present employed in this way only because it is parasitic.

Further, Webb avers: “The unemployable, to put it bluntly, do not and cannot under any circumstances earn their keep. What we have to do with them is to see that as few as possible of them are produced.”

Read it.

There are an absurdly large number of people who refuse to grow up. And they are increasingly taking over the modern world.

Read it.

Over the past couple of weeks, the open jihad has taken ground in Libya, Nigeria, Syria, and Iraq.  It’s ongoing success is due to innovations developed by a large and growing number of contributing groups.  Groups like:

• ISIS affiliated forces in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Yemen to
• Boko Haram in Nigeria to
• ISIS and AQ affiliated terrorist groups  inside Saudi Arabia, UK, Egypt, etc.

Open jihad evolves (gets better) through massively parallel co-development.  All of the groups in the open jihad, no matter how small (even down to individuals), can contribute.  They do this by:

1. tinkering with tactics, strategies, and technologies that can be used to advance the open jihad.
2. testing the efficacy of these innovations by using them against the enemy. In other words, throwing them against the wall to see what sticks.
3. copying the innovations that work.

The groups in the open jihad can communicate successful innovations without even using the forms of communication we pay the NSA tens of billions a year to spy on.   Instead, they communicate successful innovation through a process called stigmergy (which we do surprisingly little to analyze).  I first wrote about stigmergy back in 2004.  That earlier description is still valid today.

Read it.

Boris Nemtsov’s assassination in Moscow’s center resembles something out of the times of Stalin’s Great Terror. The authorities’ reason for sanctioning the killing must not be made too mysterious to the people. The significance of the death must be clear to all, and his death must serve as a lesson. His bullet-ridden body plastered all across Russian newspapers yesterday was a warning: “Look, even a man like that cannot feel safe.” Nemtsov was one of those opposition leaders who visited the West often, who attended various conferences, acting like an informal foreign minister of this “other Russia”. Cynics used to say that talks held in hotel lobbies in Zurich don’t bother the Kremlin. Boris’ crumpled body, beamed into every television set across Russia yesterday, is a clear message to all opposition leaders, journalists and independent activists in Russia: “Don’t think that abroad you can say what you want. The authorities keep an eye on you whether you are in Warsaw or Washington. Enough is enough: time to choose sides.”

Read it.

Pretty cold when Egypt declares you a terrorist organization.

Cool Brick.

The Leatherman Tread. What James Bond would wear if he drove a pickup.

Eight in One Portable Workshop.

D3Co Multi-Mat.

Battery Organizer.

Air Hockey Salt & Pepper Shakers. Relive the golden days of your youth.

Read it.

At any given time, around 7,000 aircraft are flying over the United States. For the past 40 years, the same computer system has controlled all that high-altitude traffic—a relic of the 1970s known as Host. The core system predates the advent of the Global Positioning System, so Host uses point-to-point, ground-based radar. Every day, thousands of travelers switch their GPS-enabled smartphones to airplane mode while their flights are guided by technology that predates the Speak & Spell. If you’re reading this at 30,000 feet, relax—Host is still safe, in terms of getting planes from point A to point B. But it’s unbelievably inefficient. It can handle a limited amount of traffic, and controllers can’t see anything outside of their own airspace—when they hand off a plane to a contiguous airspace, it vanishes from their radar.

The FAA knows all that. For 11 years the agency has been limping toward a collection of upgrades called NextGen. At its core is a new computer system that will replace Host and allow any controller, anywhere, to see any plane in US airspace. In theory, this would enable one air traffic control center to take over for another with the flip of a switch, as Howard seemed to believe was already possible. NextGen isn’t vaporware; that core system was live in Chicago and the four adjacent centers when Howard attacked, and this spring it’ll go online in all 20 US centers. But implementation has been a mess, with a cascade of delays, revisions, and unforeseen problems. Air traffic control can’t do anything as sophisticated as Howard thought, and unless something changes about the way the FAA is managing NextGen, it probably never will.

And yet people believe all those movies that show the CIA and other federal agencies with super-tech gear. In their dreams….

Read it.

And these people were eventually running the country. No wonder things went to Hell. (Reminder: Both Roosevelts were Harvard men.)

Read it.

Reports that “Jihadi John,” the British-accented narrator of ISIS snuff videos, is Mohammed Emwazi — an educated young man from a middle-class background — ought to put the final stake in the pretense that poverty and a lack of education and opportunity fuel Islamist hate.

This mistaken idea seems to be Obama administration policy.

If there’s a mistake available to be made, the Obama administration will make it.

Ammo Grrrll dishes it out.

I don’t care if you are a sane person who understands that there are two, and only two, “genders,” or more accurately, “sexes” (M & F), or if you are convinced that there are dozens of genders or none at all. It is – more or less – a free country except on college campuses, and you can believe what you want.

But if you are looking for advice on any particular topic, let me give you the benefit of some wisdom gleaned from my many decades upon this wacky planet.

If you want short, practical solutions to a problem at hand, ask a man.

If you want to just vent, or be listened to without even coming close to solving the problem, consult with a woman. In fact, there is substantial research claiming that that is precisely what women want when they ask a man about, say, a vexing issue at work. They just want him to listen; they do not want him to “solve” it. Further, it will even make the woman angry at the man if he tries to solve it. Talk about sandbagging someone!

This matches my experience as well.

Richard Fernandez collates recent Religion of Peace news and explains what it signifies.

These events may mystify those who believe the anger of those who president Obama described as ‘having nothing to do with Islam’ is solely directed at Crusaders.  Who think that the events of the last decade are simply payback for Andalusia or the lost mosques which Columbus found on arriving in the New World.

For contrary to the narrative, events in Paris, Denmark, Mosul, Bangladesh and elsewhere suggest that “they” — whoever “they” may be — aren’t coming for Bible-clinging, gun-toting Christians at all.  In fact they may rather avoid them.  On the contrary they are coming for newsmen, writers, artists, atheists, “free thinkers”, etc.

Well they might ask themselves why this turnabout has taken place. Why didn’t ticking the right boxes, supporting the multicultural agenda and voting for all the most progressive candidates on the ballot not give them some measure of immunity from attacks?  The standard theory, as exemplified in a Washington Post article, is that some undiscovered White Man’s sin, lying unnoticed in the bosom of the sincere progressive, has not yet been expiated.   Speaking of the recent identification of Jihadi John as a Londoner named Mohammed Emwazi, the Washington Post article quotes a source characterizing “the ‘gentle, kind’ Jihadi John [as] a ‘beautiful young man’”

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

For example, a statistician hired by the defense found that the reordering of prospective jurors, on average, pushed the number of black jurors back 43 positions in the order of selection and moved potential white jurors up by three positions. Prospective jurors who live in Boston were pushed back 25 positions, and those under 30 moved back 13 slots, the defense said.

The statistician, comparing the reordered jurors to their original order, found there were no prospective black jurors among the first 94 people in the new order. He said there would have been five potential black jurors if the court had kept the jurors in their original order. …

Well, then. Of course, the relevance of that to this case (Is Tsernaev ‘virtually black’ by some calculus?) is neither explained nor justified.

Read it.

Jamiel Shaw, Jr. was murdered by an illegal alien–a “dreamer”–the day after the dreamer was released from jail after a trivially short sentence for assault with a deadly weapon, and left to roam the streets rather than being deported. There have been many such stories; Jamiel Shaw’s story only came to light because his father, Jamiel Shaw, Sr., was called to testify before an Oversight Subcommittee hearing. His heartbreaking testimony illustrates the human cost of our government’s failure to enforce the immigration laws.

Apparently it depends on whose political agenda is being served.

Read it.

Whether Xi Jinping is confronting corruption, engaging in just another CCP purge, or some of both, the PLA is stuck dangerously in the middle.

Things could get interesting.

Read it.

But of course you already knew that. History tells us, if it tells us nothing else, that any action taken by government employees is probably the wrong action to take in any particular situation. There are occasional examples to the contrary, but not enough to seriously impair the rule.

Read it. And watch the video.

(Although why they would want it is anybody’s guess.)

The following propaganda video was recently released by the Islamic State. YouTube quickly pulled the original, but Vlad saved a copy so that ritamalik could translate it and he could subtitle it. We’ve uploaded the final product to LiveLeak so that it will be more likely to be available for a while. It merits close scrutiny by anyone who wants to understand the Koranic and scriptural basis of the Islamic State.

News of a video about the training camp for ISIS “cubs” made the headlines a couple of days ago, but not many people were able to watch it before it disappeared from the Web. Some countries are in the process of criminalizing the possession of videos produced by the Islamic State, even the non-violent ones (I’m not sure whether any laws have actually been passed). But what better way is there to understand the threat doctrine of the enemy than to view the propaganda he releases to his own people?

Read it.

Remember Occupy Wall Street, when thousands across the country took to the streets, sleeping in tents to protest the ultra-rich 1 percent? The occupiers’ frustration was real, but their ire was misdirected. They should have launched an Occupy the AARP movement instead.

Government policies that transfer cash from the relatively young and poor to the relatively old and wealthy are the real scandal. In 1970, Social and Medicare accounted for 20 percent of federal spending. They have since grown to 40 percent; by 2030, they will be more than half. And these numbers understate the level of federal spending for the elderly. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, some 28 percent of spending on Medicaid, a program designed to offer health care to families in poverty, goes to older Americans.

Not to mention the crushing Federal debt that they will have to pay off — if it ever does get paid off and not just shucked, which is what governments have historically done.

Read it.

Former CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson asks herself how the media would treat a given behavior if it were practiced by a Republican. If the media would go ballistic, Attkisson suggests, the same behavior ought to be deemed newsworthy when a Democrat practices it. As she explains in her memoir Stonewalled, she calls it The Substitution Game.

…

Now comes the wretched Democratic Rep. Raúl Grijalva to give us the opportunity of playing The Substitution Game. Grijalva has sent letters to seven university presidents based on his concerns about the heterodox climate-related testimony of professors at the institutions. He seeks “detailed records on the funding sources for affiliated researchers who have opposed the scientific consensus on man-made global warming,” as the Washington Post’s Joby Warrick puts it in “House Dems: Did Big Oil seek to sway scientists in climate debate?”

Read it.

Voices of the Crust, come here and get flesh.

Richard Fernandez turns over a rock.

The flip side of fame is often fear. Take the fate of Jonathan Gruber. In 2006 president Obama told an audience that he had “stolen ideas liberally” from Gruber, “one of the brightest minds from academia and policy circles”.  Gruber once had multiple contracts worth millions to supply economic modeling to the president’s signature healthcare program.  He was riding high.

Then Rich Weinstein an investment adviser from Philadelphia found a series of videos taken at small forums in which Gruber confided to audiences the less than flattering inside dope on Obamacare.  It portrayed an administration laughing at ignorant voters for believing in the promises of the program.  After the videos were publicized Gruber’s world began to fall apart.

…

If you really want to understand what holds the liberal establishment together the one-word answer is fear. Fear among the rich has a different flavor from fear among the poor. The poor are often so used to deprivation and insecurity that it holds no special terrors for them. When you’re already a bum and a good day is when you can eat the whole box of macaroni and cheese; when you’ve been unemployed for longer than you can remember, then “you’ll never work in this town again” can be answered by “so what?”

High flyers on the other hand, have an awful long way to fall. Nobody wants to finish up like the fictional Stanton Carlisle, who descends from the heights of the entertainment industry, fleeing police trouble and winds up working in a carnival freak show, eating live chickens for a living. And therefore media will be paying very close attention to the fate of Jonathan Gruber, formerly “one of the brightest minds from academia and policy circles”.  If there’s one thing you don’t want, it’s to wind up like Gruber.

The chains of patronage are hard to avoid in exalted circles. According to Elias Groll writing in Foreign Policy, Rudy Giuliani is a consultant for Qatar. That’s nothing. The Clintons have collected over two billion dollars from foreign governments and lobby groups through their foundation.

‘Chain of patronage’ is an elegant term for the wind beneath the wings of the Crust.

You haven’t arrived until everyone is offering you job; and once hired you don’t make waves with money like that at stake. The great and the good are bound together by chains of gold.  Some will argue this is a good thing. The Clintons were perhaps the first prominent American politicians to understand that Globalization made it possible for an international elite to settle all disputes by means of cash payments or penalties.  Once the top men had reached an understanding, the elites could jointly rule over the international taxpayer, thus abolishing conflict forever.  In today’s world no longer are patronage relationships limited to national borders, as was formerly the case.  Today, political deal-making is global.

Read it.

Just in case you have any interest in the people who want to kill us and our families.

Read it.

More than a quarter of British Muslims sympathize with the terrorists who committed the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris last month, according to a new ComRes poll conducted for the BBC. These findings indicate that a substantial minority of Muslims in Britain approve of murder against individuals deemed to have insulted the Prophet Mohammed.

Roughly 27 percent of the respondents said that they have “some sympathy for the motives behind the attacks” while 32 percent said that they were not surprised by the terrorist attacks.

Read it.

The slaughter of 21 Egyptian Christians by Islamic State militants on Feb. 15 took place on the Libyan shore of the Mediterranean. Former Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan recently told the Times of London that unless order is restored in his country, ISIS will secure territory on Libya’s Mediterranean coast within two months. This would increase its potential for attacks in Italy, Greece and elsewhere in Europe. An October ISIS publication pictured St. Peter’s Square under a black flag, and ISIS’s sentiments about Christians are clear.

Greater ISIS access to the Mediterranean would be deeply troubling to the region and a large strategic advance for the terrorist group. ISIS’s prospects for significant naval power are remote. But small boats, fishing vessels, smugglers, and merchant craft that carry concealed weapons could hijack, sink, or rake commercial shipping including cruise liners in the central Mediterranean. This would divide the eastern part of the inland sea from its west and expose Europe’s southern littoral to attacks and kidnappings.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

Yesterday, I pointed out that Patricia Arquette’s Academy Award acceptance comments sounded like a trial run of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 argument for electing her President: it’s the white moms’ turn, and all the trendier minorities need to return some favors. From the New York Times today, an article detailing how accurate that was.

…

You know, Margaret Thatcher was became leader of the Tory Party on February 11, 1975, more than 40 years ago and was elected Prime Minister 36 years ago.

If Hillary wins a couple of terms, in 2023 we will still be reading the same articles about glass ceilings.

Read it.

Mostly, because he’s a partisan asshole.

Professional agitators in the civil-rights community push false narratives to stay relevant, but we should expect more from the Justice Department. Instead, we have Attorney General Eric Holder channeling Al Sharpton . Last week Mr. Holder said that he will soon announce the results of his Ferguson investigation. CNN, citing “sources,” reported that Darren Wilson, the police officer involved in the shooting, is unlikely to be charged but that Justice is preparing to sue the Ferguson police department “over a pattern of racially discriminatory tactics used by police officers, if the police department does not agree to make changes on its own.”

After months of looking into the incident, the Justice Department seems to have come to the same conclusion as the Ferguson grand jury and found no grounds for a criminal prosecution of Mr. Wilson. Mr. Holder might now be trying to justify his bigfooting by suing the city, but there is probably no basis for that, either. Hence, the leak to the media that a civil lawsuit may be in the works. The leak was an egregious breach of protocol and, in effect, a threat. We’ve seen this movie before, too.

Read it.

Exposure to UV light from the sun or from tanning beds can damage the DNA in melanocytes, the cells that make the melanin that gives skin its color. This damage is a major cause of skin cancer, the most common form of cancer in the United States. In the past, experts believed that melanin protected the skin by blocking harmful UV light. But there was also evidence from studies suggesting that melanin was associated with skin cell damage.

In the current study, Douglas E. Brash, clinical professor of therapeutic radiology and dermatology at Yale School of Medical, and his co-authors first exposed mouse and human melanocyte cells to radiation from a UV lamp. The radiation caused a type of DNA damage known as a cyclobutane dimer (CPD), in which two DNA “letters” attach and bend the DNA, preventing the information it contains from being read correctly. To the researchers’ surprise, the melanocytes not only generated CPDs immediately but continued to do so hours after UV exposure ended. Cells without melanin generated CPDs only during the UV exposure.

I blame George W Bush.

Read it.

A blockbuster peer-reviewed paper in the Science Bulletin, authored by Christopher Monckton, Matt Briggs, David Legates and Wei-Hock (“Willie”) Soon, is roiling the global warming Left. The paper identifies flaws in the computer models that predict major global warming–which shouldn’t be a surprise, since the models’ predictions have flopped. It concludes that due to mathematical errors, the models overstate the impact of CO2 on the climate by a factor of three times.

So far, global warming Leftists haven’t been able to find any technical flaws in the Science Bulletin paper, which you can download here. So, naturally, they have resorted to smearing its authors. Greenpeace focused on Dr. Soon, an astrophysicist who works part time for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Greenpeace served a Freedom of Information Act request on the Smithsonian, a public entity, for documents relating to funding of Dr. Soon’s projects. Greenpeace claims that these documents show that Dr. Soon’s projects received funding from Southern Company Services that was not disclosed in certain papers that Dr. Soon published.

The New York Times, having been fed the documents by Greenpeace, eagerly took up the cudgels for global warming Leftists, publishing a supposed expose under the headline, “Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher.” The Times and its fellows on the Left argue that Dr. Soon should have disclosed certain corporate funding with respect to past projects–not, however, the recent paper that the Left seeks to discredit.

Read it.

For the study, Hensher and Mulley gave survey respondents the two images above, plus two others whose only difference was older-looking vehicle styles (one bus and one train), and asked them to rank the four images in terms of “which one you would like to travel in most.” They found that 55 percent chose the modern light rail image, and another 18 percent chose the older light rail. Only about 17 percent chose the modern BRT. Just 10 percent chose the classic old bus.

The responses varied slightly among individual cities—Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Perth—but only slightly. A majority of respondents ranked the modern light rail image first in every city except Sydney, where 49 percent gave it the top rating. The modern BRT got more first-place votes than the old bus across the board, but it never eclipsed 20 percent in any city.

What makes those findings more vexing is that every city involved in the survey is familiar with both modes. In other words, lack of awareness of BRT couldn’t explain the preference gap. Even in Brisbane and Adelaide, where BRT is more prevalent than light rail, the train earned top marks: 53 and 56 percent chose it first, respectively, to about 18 percent in each place for modern BRT.

Read it.

While the world was watching the Academy Awards ceremony, the people of Mosul were watching a different show. They were horrified to see ISIS members burn the Mosul public library. Among the many thousands of books it housed, more than 8,000 rare old books and manuscripts were burned. – See more at: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/02/23/ISIS-Burns-8000-Rare-Books-and-Manuscripts-Mosul#sthash.ULmFkjym.dpuf

Read it.

Read it.

I’m in.

Progressives tend to believe that government knows best. The unfolding fiasco over government nutrition misinformation should give them pause.

But, sadly, it won’t.

For years now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been recommending that “everyone age 2 and up should consume less than 2,300 milligrams (mg) of sodium each day. Some groups of people should further limit sodium intake to 1,500 mg per day, including adults age 51 or older, all African Americans, and anyone with high blood pressure, diabetes, or chronic kidney disease.” Recent studies now suggest that this advice is killing more people than it’s saving.

Your tax dollars at work.

Most of the government’s recommendations were derived from “consensus statements” based largely on the results of observational epidemiological studies. The new revisions tend to be based on prospective epidemiological studies and random controlled trials. Observational studies may be good at developing hypotheses, but they are mostly not a good basis for making behavioral recommendations and imposing regulations.

Hey, you can’t go against a consensus. That would make you a denier.

Read it.

Mark Oberholtzer wasn’t following the Syrian militant group Jabhat Ansar al-Din on Twitter. So when they tweeted a picture of a Ford pickup in December with an anti-aircraft gun blazing from the truck bed, he probably missed it.

Until someone mentioned to him that it was his truck. Or rather, it was a truck previously owned by his plumbing company. The jihadists hadn’t bothered to remove the decal from the door for Mark-1 Plumbing, complete with his phone number, before sending out the action shot on social media.

Texas sets the standard for bad-ass.

Read it.

The idea that Medieval people drank beer or wine to avoid drinking bad water is so established that even some very serious scholars see no reason to document or defend it; they simply repeat it as a settled truth. In fact, if no one ever documents the idea, it is for a very simple reason: it’s not true.

Well, that’s not really the Great Medieval Water Myth, because people of the Middle Ages (and indeed up to the advent of knowledge of bacteria) had no concept of ‘bad water’ above what a child would have in the modern age, focusing on the smell and taste.

The rest of the article is devoted to vivisecting this straw man as if it were a Real Thing, so it’s pretty much pointless. It is, however, a good overview of writing about drinking during that period, so is not totally useless.

Read it.

All the employees of the daily newspaper, Avadhnama, were dismissed in the days after Jan. 17, when it published a 2006 cover from Charlie Hebdo showing Muhammad weeping. That image was part of the newspaper’s coverage of the aftermath of the deadly assault on Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices on Jan. 7 by Islamist militants, who said they were avenging Muslims offended by the French newspaper’s cartoons.

Ms. Dalvi was arrested on Jan. 28. She has been out on bail, but is in hiding because of threats against her.

At the urging of Urdu Patrakar Sangh, an association of Urdu-language journalists in Mumbai, five police complaints against Ms. Dalvi were filed from precincts across the city on the day her newspaper published the cartoon.

“You are free to write anything in our country, but you are not free to hurt religious sentiments,” said Nusrat Ali, a reporter with an Urdu weekly who was among those filing the complaints.

In other words, you are not free to write anything in their country.

Read it.

In years to come we may look back on the past week as the beginning of the end of an era of euphemism in American political history. It may be ending because the gap between the language of the government of the United States and the reality of Islamist inspired terror and barbarism has become an abyss. For two decades, various academics and political figures have warned us against committing the sins of Orientalism and then Islamophobia. Yet now millions of people see with their own eyes on television and computer screens that the sins of our error are being committed in the name of a fanaticism born of Islamist ideology. This fact is now so obvious that denying it leads officials into embarrassing linguistic acrobatics that finally make them objects of ridicule. Simply put, the past strategies of avoidance and deflection have ceased to convince because they are being contradicted by facts available to millions.

Steve Sailer will never lack for material.

The basic idea behind Hillary Clinton’s run for the Presidency in 2016 is that while she’s kind of old and mediocre at politics, she is a woman, and it’s about time for a woman to be elected, and Hillary’s been waiting a long time, so who else are you gonna give it to?

At the 2015 Oscars, the Hillary stand-in role was played by Patricia Arquette. Patricia is a middle aged white mom lady, and she’s been doing this acting thing for a long time, and so it seemed like it’s about time she won something.

One of the reason I have no interest in the Oscars.

What’s wrong with Democrats?

Well, you know what’s wrong with Democrats. It’s that certain other Democrat, the one you spent so much to defeat in the 2008 primaries, who decided in 2012 to unleash the crazies to get himself re-elected. It’s getting harder and harder to stuff the nuts back in the jar.

Steve Sailer reports on the fundamental connectedness of all things.

I’m serious about the intent of the movie being to engineer a nerd-gay alliance. The screenwriter of The Imitation Game, Graham Moore, is the son of Democratic political operative Susan Sher, who was Mrs. Obama’s chief-of-staff and is now a bagwoman fundraiser for the Obama Library, so Moore has a good Chicago political head on his shoulders. The screenwriter comes more from the nerd side of the divide (Moore is apparently an effeminate heterosexual). His first book, The Sherlockian, was an updated Sherlock Holmes mystery; and his movie minimizes the gay stuff (which would have to have been about an aging toff with a taste for teenage rough trade) in favor of Benedict Cumberbatch doing his Sherlock-as-supercilious-nerd impression again.

So, everything was working according to Moore’s plan to build Clintonian bridges between the geeks and the gays until the screenwriter got up to give his Oscar acceptance speech. But he implied that being a “weird” kid in high school, like he was, is comparable in victimism Pokemon points to being a gay kid in high school, and all hell broke loose with the Designated Gay Avengers at Slate.

Read it.

A federal court has ruled that the Obama administration’s plan to issue work permits to illegal immigrants is–this is not exactly a surprise–illegal. But the Democrats are undeterred. Today, for the fourth time, they filibustered funding for the Department of Homeland Security, insisting that if Obama’s illegal program isn’t funded, the entire DHS must be shut down.

In the meantime, it has come to light that the Obama administration has been handing out illegal work permits for years. The Center for Immigration Studies has received documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act request that indicate millions of such illegal work permits have been issued since 2009. Here is the CIS report in its entirety:

Steve Sailer looks at the oddity that it’s okay to dislike foreigners but only if they are rich.

Americans traditionally aspired to live in freestanding houses surrounded by lawns, houses whose size and worth were readily apparent to both the neighbors and the taxman: visual synecdoches for those Jeffersonian ideals.

In the older parts of the world, however, prudent patriarchs built opaque structures that presented only a blank wall and a door directly onto the street, leaving the poverty or luxury behind them a secret known only to those allowed in.

Part of the rise of shell companies as nominal owners of New York City luxury apartments is a not wholly unreasonable response to the fact that on December 8, 1980, practically everybody in America knew that John Lennon lived in The Dakota. But on December 9, 1980, he didn’t.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Undercooked? Then, obviously, what they need is some Global Warming!

Read it.

As President Obama readies his veto pen for a bill approving the Keystone XL pipeline, the primary alternative to the controversial infrastructure project is sending trains laden with volatile crude through cities and small towns across the country. Despite having access to the world’s most extensive pipeline network, producers have had to turn to trains to transport booming crude output to refineries. But as we saw last week in West Virginia, more oil trains means more fiery derailments.

Read it.

A basic truth of the modern world, which is why you don’t hear much from the Malthusians and Zero Population Growth chicken-littles these days.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been characterized by a massive decline in fertility, beginning in rich western countries and spreading all over the world. It is a transformation that is still underway in poor countries today.

Except that it’s not a decline in fertility — people are just as fertile now as ever, if not more so — but a decline in people exercising their fertility … which they can more easily do because of improved baby-prevention technologies and the feminist cult of abortion-on-demand.

In the modern world, children are an economic drain, not an economic benefit; rather like a very expensive pet. Only where children are an economic benefit, such as qualifying single women to claim government benefits and establish their own households, do we see levels of childbearing that compare with historical norms.

Read it.

Uh-oh. Somebody exited the reservation.

Read it.

Hey, they’re learning how to be Tools of the Crust. That’s educational.

Read it.

Recall all those bullshit taxes and fees that get tacked onto your phone bill? If ISPs are regulated as common carriers, those (or one like them) will get tacked onto your Internet bill as well. “We’re from the government, and we’re here to help … ourselves to your money”.

Read it.

Ramon Cortines, the new superintendent, recently admitted that the district’s billion-dollar idea to buy every single student an iPad, Chromebook, or laptop was never affordable or practical in any sense—and in fact clashed with more urgent priorities, like procuring suitable textbooks and rebuilding infrastructure.

Yeah, that was a winner: Giving a $600 device to kids whose reaction would be “I wonder how much I can hock this for?”

Prediction: Nobody loses his job, nobody goes to jail. Your tax dollars at work.

Read it.

Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, the scrappy investigative journal that is perhaps best known in the West for regularly publishing pieces by the late Anna Politkovskaya, says he has in his possession a strategy document drafted and accepted by the Kremlin which outlines in broad strokes just what Russia’s long game in Ukraine may be….

…

He said the overall strategy included plans on how to break Ukraine into automonmous sectors, immediately attaching now war-torn southeastern Ukraine to Moscow’s tax union, with a longer term plan for annexation.

The plan suggested “the main thrust should be Crimea and the Kharkhiv region, with the aim of initiating the annexation of the eastern regions.”

Read it.

A suicide bomber described by witnesses as a young female detonated at a market checkpoint in Nigeria on Sunday, killing herself and five other people.

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The average amount of space per office worker in North America dropped to 176 square feet in 2012, from 225 in 2010, according to CoreNet Global, a commercial real estate association. Though more recent figures are not available, real estate experts say there is no doubt that workers are being shoehorned into even less space.

This means that everyone will get to hear those loud calls about how long your mother-in-law will be staying or why the $1,500 medical bill the collection agency insists you owe should really be covered by insurance.

The problem is that the savings by putting everyone in one big room is easy to quantify, and the loss of productivity and morale is not.