Read it.

Asghar Bukhari, a founder member of Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK, said his shoe was stolen while he slept to make him feel “vulnerable”.

Posting on Facebook, he said that one shoe was left behind “to let me know someone had been there” – but the other is still missing.

Read it. And watch the video.

The dramatic footage was filmed by terrified passengers looking on in horror from a coach waiting behind.

In it a tour guide can be heard trying to reassure the shocked passengers, telling them: “Don’t panic guys, we have locked all of the doors. Try not to panic guys.”

A leading haulage expert who viewed the footage today was in disbelief as he asked: “Where are the authorities?”

What do the French care about parasites wanting to go to Britain? I’m sure they’re helping them every way they can, since they have their own immigrant problems.

British lorry drivers have said they fear for their lives every time they travel through the notorious port, with migrants resorting to increasingly violent tactics in a desperate bid to reach the UK.

The situation is so bad that drivers now refuse to work the Calais route and many freight companies are close to pulling out of the UK market all together.

The town’s mayor has blamed Britain’s generous benefits system for the chaos, with more than 4,000 refugees now living in squalid camps near the port.

Reacting to the footage Don Armour, from the respected Freight Transport Association, said such scenes were a daily peril for lorry drivers using the port.

…

The footage emerged as a top UN official said that Britain should be forced to take in more migrants.

Read it.

Read it.

Hillary attempts to justify her position by claiming the bank is vital for American exports. According to Clinton, Ex-Im is “a tool for us to be competitive in order to support our businesses exporting.” In reality, the bank’s financing goes to major corporations that do not need loans to be competitive. Over three quarters of Ex-Im loans benefit ten well-connected corporations.  Less than one percent of one percent of US small businesses benefit from Ex-Im.

So why does Hillary Clinton support Ex-Im? Well, as the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney points out, a more appropriate name for Ex-Im bank may be the International Bank of Clinton. During a 2012 Ex-Im Conference, Bill Clinton said that “this audience is full of people who once worked for me.”

Most notably, Ex-Im President Fred Hochberg was a Clinton appointee and in 2008 he was a “Hillraiser”, meaning he helped raise six figures for Hillary’s failed Presidential campaign. Hochberg also donated a five figure sum to the Clinton Foundation, the non-profit that has come under scrutiny for – among other things — accepting donations from foreign leaders while Clinton was Secretary of State.

Read it.

“I went into the drug store. I’d run out of razor blades and just had a really frustrating purchase experience,” Katz-Mayfield recalls. “They were locked in a case, which I found to be a little bit absurd. I was buying razor blades — not diamond jewelry. And I wound up spending over $20 for four razor blades and some shaving cream, and I didn’t have a good feeling as a consumer. I knew I was getting taken advantage of, and I didn’t really have any choice in the matter.”

…

Harry’s sells shaving kits, individual razors, and bottles of shaving cream. For $15, you can get a shaving kit complete with a five-blade razor, three replacement blades, and shaving cream. When you consider that just a razor and a couple replacement blades from Gillette will run you anywhere from $10 to $15, Harry’s kits look like a pretty good deal.

I use ’em, and I like ’em.

Read it.

Guess he misses the old Soviet Union.

Read it.

Until the tragedy that came early in August 2014, the people who call themselves the Dâseni were little known to Westerners. These are the Yezidis, who mainly live in Iraq. Reviled as “devil worshippers” for centuries by their Muslim and Christian neighbors, they have endured 72 attempted genocides since 630 CE. After the predations of the “Islamic State” that number has increased to 74.

A Kurdish people in ethnicity, the Yezidis practice a distinctive religion that is neither Christian nor Muslim. Tradition states that it is one of the oldest in the world, and that they have been a presence in Mesopotamia “for more than 6,700 years.” During that long span of time Yezidism has incorporated elements of other faiths: Christian, Jewish, Muslim (Sufism), Zoroastrian, and Mandaean Gnostic. Like Hindus, the Yezidis have a caste system. Their tradition is hereditary and does not allow converts.

Most Muslims do not regard them as “People of the Book” since their traditions are oral, although some Iranians describe them as such based on their link to Zoroastrianism. Their apparent non-scriptural status is changing, however, as their core oral ‘texts’ (hymns or qawls) are written down “effectively transforming Yezidism into a scriptural religion,” according to a Yezidi source.

Read it.

But it won’t, until people die. Even then, it will fight tooth & nail to stick with the same old way of doing things.

Read it.

When I was an undergrad at Harvard, the English department produced fancy brochures about the opportunities available to its majors: teacher, editor, Rhodes scholar. Personal assistant was not listed. I hadn’t even heard of such positions until senior year, when older friends, artistically inclined friends, started snagging them. It’s the position I think I’ve heard most about now.

…

Welcome to the main artery into creative or elite work—highly pressurized, poorly recompensed, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes menial secretarial assistance. From the confluence of two grand movements in American history—the continued flight of women out of the home and into the workplace, and the growing population of arts and politically oriented college graduates struggling to survive in urban epicenters that are increasingly ceded to bankers and consultants—the personal assistant is born.

This is actually a reversion to the medieval practice, where an important man’s ‘secretary’ was a candidate for important positions later on. We are so used to thinking of secretaries as clerical drudges that we forget the roots of the job. You’ll remember the famous scene in A Man For All Seasons where Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More are speculating on who will wear the Lord Chancellor’s chain after the Cardinal. Wolsey mentions his secretary, Thomas Cromwell, and More doesn’t immediately scoff but rather considers it seriously.

Read it.

Trial by battle was a medieval European form of legal proof in which difficult lawsuits were decided by a single combat between two duellists before a judge.

Nowadays drive-bys serve as a crude substitute.

Read it.

Get a perm and a tan and pretend to be black. Wear sunglasses.

Read it.

Can you imagine having to listen to 72 speeches at your high school graduation? Kill me now….

Read it.

Perhaps the least controversial thing that President Obama ever said was that “in the coming decades, a high school diploma is not going to be enough. Folks need a college degree.” This vision is commonplace, but it implies a bleak future where everyone must work harder just to stay in place, and it’s just not true. Nothing forces us to funnel students into a tournament that bankrupts the losers and turns the winners into conformists. But that’s what will happen until we start questioning whether college is our only option.

…

But what if higher education is really just the final stage of a competitive tournament? From grades and test results through the U.S. News & World Report rankings of the colleges themselves, higher education sorts us all into a hierarchy. Kids at the top enjoy prestige because they’ve defeated everybody else in a competition to reach the schools that proudly exclude the most people. All the hard work at Harvard is done by the admissions officers who anoint an already-proven hypercompetitive elite. If that weren’t true — if superior instruction could explain the value of college — then why not franchise the Ivy League? Why not let more students benefit? It will never happen because the top U.S. colleges draw their mystique from zero-sum competition.

…

Of course, you can’t become successful just by dropping out of college. But you can’t become successful just by going to college, either, or by following any formula. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg aren’t famous because of the similar ways in which they left school. We know their names because of what each of them did differently from everybody else.

Read it.

I have been hanging on to this video by Dr. Bill Warner of the Center for the Study of Political Islam for a while now, waiting for the Crusades to come back into the news. Which hasn’t happened. So here it is. Dr. Warner’s point, which he makes persuasively, is that the Crusades were a mere blip compared to the centuries-long, and nearly successful, assault on Christendom by Islamic armies bent on conquest.

It is frankly ludicrous for contemporary Muslims to whine about the Crusades.

Read it.

Some people in the media say stuff like “why would she want do to that, it sucks be black,” but that time ended back in the 1960s. Today, it’s awesome to be black. You get the benefit of affirmative action, plus every SWPL/bobo wants you as a friend so they can demonstrate that they aren’t racist. Rachel had to make up fake hate crimes because there are no longer any real hate crimes being committed.

Read it.

A new article by University of Alabama-Birmingham researcher Edward Archer and colleagues Gregory Pavela and Carl Lavie, published this week in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, argues that the conclusions drawn by the federal government’s controversial Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) rest on fatally flawed assumptions about unusable data. Consequently, the authors conclude that the DGAC’s work—and the research used to support that work—is so off base as to be scientifically useless.

The Bat-Hook.

Protective Rain Hat. You first.

Outlet with USB power.

Cryptex Steampunk USB Drive.

Roccbox Portable Stone Bake Oven.

Clip-Together Furniture.

Read it.

ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) has been updating its online training manuals to make it easier for potential recruits who want to join either in an ISIL controlled area or as a holy warrior in another country, including where they now live. Among the useful information available is advice on how to hide the fact that they are Moslems while in a non-Moslem country. This is vital if the recruit is to avoid arrest while preparing to travel to an ISIL base. The advice covers essentials, like appearance, meaning no beard or traditional Islamic clothing, always praying in private, training inconspicuously (paintball is particularly useful) and not wearing military clothing. Women are advised to wear a colorful headscarf (as the black one marks you as hard core). Much useful advice is given on how to raise money illegally and how to get it to ISIL without getting caught.

Practical and proven information on obtaining or making weapons is given as well as emphasis on how important physical and weapons training is. Potential recruits are urged to get in shape and learn martial arts if possible. There is also a lot of practical information about how to transport weapons and other contraband in such a way that is not noticed or if there is a search the hidden items are not discovered. There is also a lot of information on how to detect if you are being watched and how to escape surveillance. This includes useful information on obtaining and using false ID.

Read it. And watch the video.

In this portion of the briefing, Maj. Coughlin focuses on The Quranic Concept of War by a Pakistani brigadier general named S. K. Malik. Gen. Malik’s book lays out the scriptural basis for war against the infidel as a perpetual mandate for Islam.

Read it.

There’s a question I’d like to see the Chattering Class answer. Won’t happen, of course, just a lot of hand-waving.

Read it.

Privilege rhetoric offers an absurdly simplistic view of complex social dynamics. A widely cited essay by pro-“social justice” sci-fi writer John Scalzi seeks to explain privilege to geeks by arguing that being a straight white male is akin to playing a videogame on “the lowest difficulty setting.” Does the white son of a poor single mother have it easier than the daughter of a wealthy black couple? As a minor afterthought, Scalzi mentions that “players” in other groups may be better off if they start with more “points” in areas such as wealth. But generally, the “social justice” left strenuously avoids the issue of socioeconomic background, which, despite upward mobility, is surely the most tangible and entrenched form of actual privilege in modern American society. Rather, the focus is on racial, sexual, and cultural identities.

Writers are by their natures socialist because few of them would have the opportunity to ‘pursue their passion’ unless funded by somebody else. The preferred Santa Claus is, of course, a government, however construed, although parents and spouses also get their pockets picked in this Noble Cause.

Read it.

The publicly-funded University of Bath has hosted what it calls a conference on “Understanding Conflict,” featuring a number of controversial speakers. They include Norman Finkelstein, who has publicly stated that “every victory by Hezbollah over Israel is also a victory for liberty and a victory for freedom,” and Moazzam Begg, the leader of the infamous CAGE group, which called ISIS murderer Jihadi John a “beautiful young man.”

The three-day conference, which began on Monday, was opened by David Miller, whose now-defunct NeoConEurope website previously hosted anti-Semitic articles. Miller is also the sometime editor of the SpinWatch website, which draws together a broad conspiracy theory about ‘NeoCons’ and ‘Zionists’ – coincidentally, two core themes of the University of Bath conference this week.

Speakers at the conference, which was hosted in the Chancellors’ Building, travelled from all across the world. It is unclear whether public money was spent on flights and accommodation for the speakers, though it is common practice for the hosting organisation to cover such costs.

This means the likes of Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo detainee, and Anas Al-Tikriti, the president of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Cordoba Foundation, may be on the receiving end of taxpayer- and tuition-funded hospitality.

When only one side is fighting a war, guess who wins?

Read it.

That’s a mighty fine Religion o’ Peace you got there, fella, mighty fine.

Valdet Gashi, who is married with two children, said he wanted to “do something good and to die while doing it”.

I guess ‘responsibility’ isn’t a Muslim vertue.

The former refugee arrived in Germany at the age of six from Albania.

You’re welcome, I guess.

Enver Gashi, the jihadi fighter’s father, pleaded for his son to return.

He said:”Valdet’s place is with us – with his children, his wife and his parents.”

Evidently not.

He added: “Someone must have planted these ideas in his head.”

I think the name you’re looking for is ‘Muhammad’. I hear he wrote a book about it.

Read it.

Armed men have stormed the Tunisian consulate in Libya’s capital Tripoli and are holding 10 employees hostage, Tunisia’s foreign ministry says.

That’s a mighty fine Religion o’ Peace you got there, fellas, might fine.

It is not clear which armed group is involved in the siege.

I know the feeling.

Libya has been in turmoil since the Nato-backed removal of former leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

Be careful what you wish for….

Read it.

Prediction: Peruvian men will ignore animal rights activists.

Many called on the owner of the crocodile farm to be charged by police.

Prediction: Peruvian police will ignore many.

The RSPCA, which cannot investigate the incident due to it taking place in South America, told The Independent, “We would like to express our shock and disgust at the events in the video.

Which, to such people, is almost as good as actually doing something about it.

I wonder: If the animal in question had been, say, a similarly-sized rat (and they have them that size in Peru), rather than a cute iddle puddy-tat, would the ‘many’ have been so many? Somehow I doubt it.

Read it.

Lee was attached to the precursor of the SAS, known as the Long range Desert Group (LRDG), in North Africa from 1941. He reportedly moved behind enemy lines, destroying Luftwaffe aircraft and fields, until he was seconded to the army and served with a Gurkha regiment.

“I was attached to the SAS from time to time but we are forbidden – former, present, or future – to discuss any specific operations. Let’s just say I was in Special Forces and leave it at that. People can read in to that what they like,” he said in 2011.

Read it.

Gee, that kinda happens when you demonize the police. Not very difficult to see that comin’.

Wonder how they’d cope if all of their police quit and moved somewhere else? That would be amusing.

Read it.

If the 20th century proved that democracy could beat totalitarianism, the history of 21st so far suggests that dedicated totalitarians can beat the living daylights out of half-baked ones.   All over the world, countries have put their trust in elites.  Now, in the globalized world of 2015,  when every economy aspires to be a crony capitalism — a “mixed economy” to you, the deciding factor in international contests appears to be whether my totalitarian is better than your totalitarian.

…

Fortunately the ignorant and bigoted masses are being retired from any real role in decision making.  In every part of the world the Enlightened are in taking charge.  They even meet occasionally to exchange notes at Davos and in Climate Change events. The rise of the few was inevitable since Marxist-democracy and Islamic-democracy are alike contradictions in terms where nothing after the hyphen can contradict what came before.  Ideologies are jealous; there’s no elite like an ideological elite.

Read it.

You cannot reason someone out of a stance he was not reasoned into.

A Leftist is not someone who has an alternative political philosophy to yours, or different reasons. He is someone who, in the realm of politics, has decided to eschew philosophy and abandon reason.

Leftism is what you get when you stop reasoning, kill it dead, and substitute word fetishes instead.

John C. Wright lays it out.

Hatred is the emotion that accompanies a desire to abominate and destroy the object of hatred. Hence, without being a mind reader, the hatreds of the Left can be rightfully deduced by their acts and their rhetoric. They do not hide what they believe.

…

The cult of darkness variously known as Leftists, Liberals, Progressives, Brights, Socialists, Pinkos, Late Moderns, Collectivists, Traitors, is controlled by a Seven Bad Ideas around which their various emotions and interjections orbit.

Read it.

The city and state officials who promoted construction of Honolulu’s rail transit line now admit that they don’t know how they are going to pay for the cost of operating that line. Between 2019, when the first part of the line is expected to open for business, and 2031, those costs are expected to be $1.7 billion, or about $140 million per year. In 2011, the annual operating cost was estimated to be $126 million a year.

Honolulu has about a hundred bus routes, which cost about $183 million to operate in 2013, or less than $2 million per route. The rail line will therefore cost about 70 times as much to operate as the average bus route.

What is mere money when we have a chance to make Hawaii look like 19th-century New York?

Read it.

As officials of the Obama administration announced that millions of sensitive records associated with current and past federal employees and contractors had been exposed by a long-running infiltration of the networks and systems of the Office of Personnel Management on June 4, they claimed the breach had been found during a government effort to correct problems with OPM’s security. An OPM statement on the attack said that the agency discovered the breach as it had “undertaken an aggressive effort to update its cybersecurity posture.” And a DHS spokesperson told Ars that “interagency partners” were helping the OPM improve its network monitoring “through which OPM detected new malicious activity affecting its information technology systems and data in April 2015.”

…

Meanwhile, the breach has triggered outrage from unions representing federal employees. In a letter to OPM Director Katherine Archuleta, American Federation of Government Employees president J. David Cox expressed displeasure at the way OPM had handled the breach, calling the 18 months of credit monitoring and $1 million liability insurance OPM is offering federal employees “entirely inadequate, either as compensation or protection from harm.”

So the union representing government employees is upset that government employees proved massively incompetent. I see.

Read it.

The  Nanny State takes itself seriously.

One afternoon this past April, a Florida mom and dad I’ll call Cindy and Fred could not get home in time to let their 11-year-old son into the house. The boy didn’t have a key, so he played basketball in the yard. He was alone for 90 minutes. A neighbor called the cops, and when the parents arrived—having been delayed by traffic and rain—they were arrested for negligence.

They were put in handcuffs, strip searched, fingerprinted, and held overnight in jail.

It would be a month before their sons—the 11-year-old and his 4-year-old brother—were allowed home again. Only after the eldest spoke up and begged a judge to give him back to his parents did the situation improve.

Read it.

Some good advice for people who, if they were the sort of people who listened to good advice, wouldn’t need it.

The concept of “white privilege” has become a staple of left-wing think, especially on college campuses. But is it a meaningful way to talk about race? Only, I would argue, in a limited sense that those who bandy the term about probably don’t have in mind.

Like Humpty-Dumpty, they’ve decided that a word means what they want it to mean, and to Hell with everybody else.

Whites as a class aren’t “privileged” economically. Nearly all white children had better obtain knowledge and skills, and then be prepared to work hard at least five days a week (and, of course, eschew criminal and other self-destructive behavior), if they want to make a good living. Nearly all black children who follow this path will also make a good living.

Funny how that works.

Morsy and Rothstein propose that the parenting gap be addressed through “quality preschool.” They probably assume that to propose that parents who aren’t doing so start talking, listening, and reading to their kids would make them look foolish.

Yet these practices, not preschool, are the key to spreading “white privilege” around.

As I said, above.

JOHN adds: How about “Asian privilege”? Asian-Americans earn significantly more money than whites, on the average. Is this because they are privileged in some way? Obviously not. On the contrary, the spectacular success of Asian-Americans is due mostly to the same effective parenting that Paul described with respect to whites–only more so. This has everything to do with solid values and hard work, and nothing to do with “privilege.”

Indeed. If the culture is dysfunctional, as black American culture obviously is, then the people who grow up in that culture will turn out to be dysfunctional to, more often than not.

Read it.

Watching Greenpeace heads explode all over the world….

Read it.

Instead of tilting at windmills, how about living in one? The Dutch Windwheel is a giant proposed wind turbine for the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, which will feature apartments and hotel rooms along the outside of the structure.

Read it. And watch the videos.

Maj. Stephen Coughlin is a retired U.S. Army officer and one of the foremost experts on Islamic law in the United States. For years he was well-known inside the Beltway for his “Red Pill” briefings of military commanders and defense officials on the topics of jihad and sharia. He was so effective in his work that the Muslim Brotherhood successfully arranged to have him pushed out of the Pentagon.

More recently, he is the author of Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad, which incorporates material from the “Red Pill” brief, as well as much additional material on the Muslim Brotherhood’s penetration of Western governments, transnational bodies, NGOs, and the “interfaith” industry.

Read it.

Voice of the Crust The Atlantic burnishes it’s hipster credentials with this hand-wringer about ‘segregation’.

Racially concentrated areas of affluence, by the researchers’ definition, are census tracts where 90 percent or more of the population is white and the median income is at least four times the federal poverty level, adjusted for the cost of living in each city. Racially concentrated areas of poverty, by contrast, are census tracts where more than 50 percent of the population is non-white, and more than 40 percent live in poverty.

Note that ‘white’ = ‘affluent’ and ‘black’ = ‘in poverty’ by the researchers’ definition. Not hard to find the facts you like when you stack the deck before you start.

Oh … the writer, Alana Semuels, is a Harvard graduate — and, judging by her picture, white. Of course.

Read it.

Hint: Not what the dictionary says it means.

“Don’t console yourself that you are the 99 percent,” he says. “If you live near a Whole Foods; if no one in your family serves in the military; if you are paid by the year, not the hour; if most people you know finished college; if no one you know uses meth; if you married once and remain married; if you’re not one of 65 million Americans with a criminal record — if any or all of these things describe you, then accept the possibility that actually, you may not know what’s going on, and you may be part of the problem.”

Like ‘subconscious racism’, ‘privilege’ is the catch-all leftist code-word for ‘you suck’.

Read it.

More fool you if you thought it did.

U.S. combat troops and trainers left Iraq in December 2011, but left behind a Marine embassy guard attachment for the U.S. embassy in Baghdad—the largest in the world—and up to 5,000 private military contractors for security and training purposes. Notably, Congress never revoked the authorization for the use of military force in Iraq it passed in 2002, although the Obama administration hasn’t found it necessary to invoke since sending troops back to Iraq in 2014. Instead, current military action against ISIS falls under “Operation Inherent Resolve,” which the administration claims is covered by the 2001 authorization for the use of military force against Al-Qaeda and associated forces, passed in the wake of Al Qaeda’s September 11 terrorist attacks. The Obama administration has sought a new, what it says is limited, authorization for the use of military force against ISIS. Congress appears interested neither in passing such authorization nor in stopping the actions that authorization is supposed to retroactively apply to.

Read it.

As I have explained earlier geologist M. King Hubbert famously predicted in 1956 that U.S. domestic oil production in the lower 48 states would peak around 1970 and begin to decline. In 1969 Hubbert predicted that world oil production would peak around 2000. Hubbert argued that oil production grows until half the recoverable resources in a field have been extracted, after which production falls off at essentially the same rate at which it expanded. This theory suggests a bell-shaped curve rising from first discovery to peak and descending to depletion.

As, of course, it did.

I was under the impression that in order to be a ‘geologist’ you had to know something about, well, geology. Apparently I was wrong.

Read it.

The crash occurred around 9:30 a.m. in the tunnel’s center tube when a New Jersey Transit bus hit the back of a private bus, said Joseph Pentangelo, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. At least 18 people reported injuries that did not appear to be life-threatening and were taken to local hospitals, he said.

Note that: A government bus ran into a private company’s bus.

Prediction:

1. Nobody will get fired, except perhaps the driver of the private bus.
2. Nobody will go to jail, except perhaps the driver of the private bus.
3. If anybody has to pay, it will be the private company.

Read it.

Hah. I knew it.

Read it.

Well. There you go.

This triggers very discomforting thoughts about Austrian beer….

Read it.

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

When you put a bunch of third-world military ‘peacekeepers’ into a third-world country, you get third-world behavior. This Is Not News.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Businesses in Connecticut have understandably been critical of this latest tax increase in what is already one of the most heavily taxed states in the union. General Electric (GE), which employs 5,700 workers in Connecticut, immediately voiced their concern about the new taxes. In a letter sent to GE workers, CEO Jeff Immelt made clear that, as a result of this new $1.2 billion tax increase, the company is looking to relocate to a state that is less hostile to employers.

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

GE is not the only company that may flee the state. Another major employer, AETNA, is “looking to reconsider the viability of continuing major operations in the state” according to a company statement. Boehringer-Ingelheim, Travelers, and many businesses have also blasted the tax hike.

Yup. Hard to increase your take of the wool when the sheep you’re planning to fleece flee the neighborhood.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, gets back to basics.

One of the greatest services that economics offers to humankind is the demonstration that prices set on markets are not arbitrary dictates.  Instead, prices (1) reflect underlying realities and, in doing so, (2) inform producers and consumers about how best to coordinate their actions with each other and (3) give incentives to countless producers and consumers to adjust their actions to each other in coordinating ways.  In short, prices reflect, inform, and incentivize.  (I hate the word “incentivize,” but I now give up trying to buck the trend that has made its use widely acceptable.)

Read it.

The Obama administration wants to change the way American corporations that operate in foreign countries are taxed, increasing tax revenues to the federal government, and to use those revenues on infrastructure programs including the transportation bill. This is called “repatriation,” but the problem is that there is no relationship between corporate tax policy and transportation. On one hand, using repatriation for transportation weakens the user-fee links between transportation agencies and users; on the other hand, if Congress agreed to the change in tax policy, many other interest groups would line up with their hands out for a share of the take.

The program of the Democrite party is ‘Leave no source of revenue untapped’.

Though Republicans have the majority of both the Senate and the House, they are far from united about what should be done.

There is no ‘Republican party’. There is a Democrite party, and there is a not-quite-Democrite party that uses ‘Republican party’ as a Clever Plastic Disguise.

Fifty-two years ago, Congress had almost nothing to do with transportation. Though it had funded the Interstate Highway System in 1956, it acted mainly as a pass-through organization, taking revenues collected from refineries and oil importers and handing them over to the state highway agencies according to a simple formula. At the time, the United States was known for having the best transportation system in the world.

Ah, yes, the Good Old Days.

Since then, Congress has increasingly taken the reigns of transportation policy. It began funding mass transit in 1964. It started tinkering with highway funding, splitting the funds into more and more pots and specifying how each pot could be used, in the 1970s. In 1991, it gave cities incentives to build expensive rail transit projects.

The result has been little short of a disaster. The Interstate Highways are due for replacement yet there is no money to do so because Congress has diverted most of the federal gas tax to other things. Transit requires huge unsustainable subsidies that have done little to increase transit ridership. America’s rail transit systems are in deplorable condition as agencies eagerly build more lines even though they can’t maintain the ones they have.

The thing is that the business of government is buying votes, not all that other stuff. Until financial and performance incentives can be aligned somehow, things will just continue as they are.