Redskin bitching is just progs trying to get free grace

Polls say that most Americans and the vast majority of native Americans have no problem with the name Redskins. Indeed a number of Native American dominated high schools call themselves the redskins. And the term was invented by Redskins who needed a simple way to describe people not of their tribe but not of any other tribe hence whiteskins, blackskins, redskins.

But progs want to be thought of as righteous but don't want to waste any time, money or reputation on natives so they bitch about a name. It takes no time, no effort, costs them nothing and all the other shallow progs will be so impressed by their cost free posturing. It's all so dammed contemptible....and "progressive".

More at the link.

http://www.spiked-online.com/freespeechnow/fsn_article/why-we-should-all-hail-to-the-redskins#.VAPQGVAo7qB

Why war torn Beirut and GI Joe beats peaceful Athens and ancient ruins every time.

When I was a boy our family moved to Abu Dhabi.  Now Abu Dhabi in 1968 was not the skyscrapered 'city of international destiny' that it bills itself today. It was a sand blown pile of nondescript concrete block buildings that smelled vaguely of sewage. Perhaps because a  common place for people to defecate was the side of the road.  There is nothing quite like coming from chock full of toilets America to a place with casual open air dumping.  For a boy of six it was….liberating.

Needless to say back then Abu Dhabi lacked some of the 'finer' things in life.  There was the "Beach Club" which really was on a beach, hell, the entire island was a beach. It was composed of a quonset hut with a bar, dartboard and snooker table.  And about a dozen air conditioners.  I submit that Willis Carrier is the true founder of the modern Trucial States, that being what they were known as back then.  Known as that because the British Empire had told the Saudis and the Persians and the French to 'sod off' and then wrote 'sod off' in genteel treaty language.  Besides it sounded so much better to call them the "Trucial" rather than the "Sod Off" States.

So in order to get its technical experts to move to Abu Dhabi my Dad's oil company had to let their wives and kids move there (this being in the dark days when sexists roamed the land) and to get the wives to go had to promise them that they could 'get out' for two weeks every fall and spring and 'really get out' every summer.  This perplexed the burkha clad native women squatting by the side of the road who - considering the recent innovations of electric lights, potable water and in particular St. Willis' air conditioners - thought things couldn't possibly get any better.

Nevertheless we got to go to Beirut.  Now I know what you're thinking:  what a cool place to go for a young boy what with all of the incredible inter-communal violence, mayhem and what have you.  And I confess that back then we boys, having been raised on a constant diet of Vietnam firefights on Walter Cronkite were definitely down with that famous song:  "All we are saying is give war a chance".  I mean the rest of the nightly news was just old dudes yammering at each other. But war….war was well, you know. But tragically for us, though not for the Lebanese, war had not yet come to Beirut.  No, back then Beirut was known as the 'Paris of the Middle East'.  And unlike most of the places that call themselves the "Harvard of this and that" it really was.  The French have many flaws but creating really nice cosmopolitan Mediterranean burgs that are then progressively destroyed by third world socialists and radical Muslims is not one of them. Everyone agreed: Beirut was way cool.  We stayed at the Hotel Phoenicia - a gleaming modern 30 story tower a few blocks from the beach not that we ever went - after all we lived in a bloody beach.  But they had a pool that had a window in the bottom that looked into an elegant bar and we never lacked for new and controversial ways for making the bar's patrons spill their Kir Royales.

The only real flaw of Beirut was that it was all in French. I had a great love for Hergé's Tintin graphic novellas but they only sold the Francophone versions in Beirut. That didn't stop me as I simply pretended I could read French and surprisingly the stories became more interesting for it. But no flaw, no lack of salutary military violence, no silly foreign argle bargle could take away from Beirut's most dazzling, brilliant attraction:  toy stores.  Beirut back then had at least one (and maybe more, in my enraptured state I didn't notice details) toy store that rivaled FAO Schwarz - if President Eisenhower had given a speech about it he would have called it a Toy-Industrial complex where one awesome toy store begat another until toy stores ruled. I think this was because at the time Beirut was the only truly civilized city in the Middle East and so everyone who was anyone came there - hence the awesome toy-age.  This store kicked Tulsa toy stores into the toilet - they not only had every possible variant of GI Joe (and this was back when GI Joe was big and had articulated arms that could wrap around Barbie so that he could be her boyfriend unlike that faker Ken) they also had GI Kraut and GI Jap back when those guys had just gotten out of Totalitarian camp and weren't the overly sensitive, politically correct whiners that they are today.  Needless to say, it was almost heaven on earth.

Which was why we were so excited when we came back for a visit in 1969.  The first thing we noticed when we landed was that quite a few of the Middle East Airlines Comets were parked off of the tarmac.  In blackened pieces - I mean they were pretty old and spectacularly dangerous planes to be a passenger in but still I didn't think all of them would crash at once.  Apparently the PLO had done this and then the Israelis had done that and then the PLO had said "oh no you don't" and then the Israelis had gone "oh yes we do" and then the PLO had said "so's your old man" and the Israelis in righteous response had blown up Lebanon's airline. Which seemed a bit tangential to us but neat nonetheless.  Blown up planes, tanks and militias with AK47s at checkpoints, desultory firefights chattering in the distance, the entire city locked down - I mean what more could bored boys ask for?

What we didn't ask for was being forced to hunker down on the living room floor of the apartment of my Dad's company's local representative while he furiously worked the phones to get us the hell out of there.  We couldn't even look out the windows because the namby pambys were terrified of snipers. Talk about boring. Well, except for the chatter of the AKs and the booms of the heavier 'ordinance' as we liked to call it.

So to make a long story short, Dad got us on a flight out to Athens.  Greece, the cradle of Western Civilization, the birthplace of Democracy, the font of something else that I can never remember.  And the absolute most crapulous place for young boys to be stuck in the entire world. First of all the hotel was one of these old 'prestige' piles with all the guys dressed up like little midget generals and tea time and absolutely no swimming pool with or without the moon window.  And on top of that, in 3,000 years of civilization the Athenians had never figured out how to make a bloody toy store.  The entire country was apparently a giant toy desert.  No GI Joe, not even the basic one was to be had in that dark, benighted corner of the world.

And that left us to the tender mercies of archaeologists. In our naïveté we had not imagined that such dark, evil men existed.  People who spent their entire lives digging up old fallen down buildings and teacups and such so that our parents could drag us from one desiccated white pile to another while ceaselessly wah, wah, wahing, about 'the glory that was Greece'.  They dragged our keisters to the top of the Acropolis and force-wandered us around that execrable pile for the better part of a day.  They then put us on a tour ship - which was great until we figured out that the guys that ran the ship had no sense of adventure and wouldn't let us do a damned thing except sit like old people or walk up and down two flights of stairs over and over again.  Which is what my brother did because he's weird that way.

And to add brutal irony to cruel insult when the boat got to where it was going what did we see?  Another bloody Greek ruin.  We were dragged from Doric this to Ionic that and don't talk to be about the gosh darn Corinthians.  It was a dark time for the Reeves boys, let me tell you.  We would much rather have been back in Abu Dhabi making fun of all the roadside crappers.

I can't speak for anyone else but at least in the late 60s for young boys like us, Beirut kicked Athen's ass.  Hard.

Think this is weird?  Well here's a whole bunch of other non- political stuff that I've written. It works just like an Ambien prescription.

LA offers lottery prizes to get people to vote in city elections

It is a testament to how centralized our politics and government have become that no one votes in local elections. Particularly in the one party paradises. Which of course are all Dem/Lefty. I don't know of a single major municipality or urban or suburban county where a Democrat can't be competitive. Know lots of them with no Republicans. Lack of a competitive political culture subsumed in an immense, inert and smothering Federal technocracy explains why people no longer waste their time. What democracy?

More at the link.

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/voters-want-big-ideas-not-big-prizes/15682#.VANR-1Ao7qA

Oh my maiden aunt: The Goreacle was wrong? But how can he save us if he's wrong?

The Arctic ice cap is stubbornly expanding. It seems to ignore the rationalizations of politicians pretending to be scientists.

From a David Rose article in the Sunday Mail: Stunning satellite images show summer ice cap is thicker and covers 1.7million square kilometres MORE than 2 years ago…despite Al Gore’s prediction it would be ICE-FREE by now.

Progressives are people who believe they have both the ability and the right to manipulate you and your children's choices

It's all for your own good, naturally. Kids complain about lousy Obama food at school at the link.

Why don't they just leave us alone? Simple: without coercion their lives have no meaning. Sharks must keep moving to survive, progs and church ladies manipulate. No manipulation, no purpose. No purpose and they wither and die.

Now there's a yummy image.

http://eagnews.org/michelle-os-lunch-rules-sour-first-day-of-school-for-many-students/

You'd think that the IPCC would have done the math on their own predictions. And you would be wrong.

According to Ronald Bailey the IPCC estimates that the cost of doing nothing is roughly equivalent to the cost of mitigating climate change via CO2 reductions.  Wow. So according to the so called experts there is really no case for mitigation because adaptation can be done at a similar cost and the costs of adaptation come later than mitigation investments meaning we can wait and see if the forecasts pan out before doing anything.  By waiting we also can take advantage of our greater wealth and increased technological sophistication.

Its wonderful that the IPCC's data agrees with the moderate skeptics that they so eloquently denounce.  Pity they didn't realize it though.  More here.

Culture matters. A lot.

Canada more American than America? Say it ain't so...Colin?

Steven Green examines the really important inversion as the home of the free moves north. Fun at the link.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/oh-canada/

Finally liberal Jewish supporters of Israel are waking up to the obvious: The NYT isn't on their side

Bien pensant liberalism is foresquare for fashionable terror. It's all Palestinian kaffiyeh scarfs and trendy slogans. A liberal reform Rabbi explains why at the link.

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/183412/why-im-unsubscribing-to-the-new-york-times

The test is how you do out of sample

Robert Schiller won (half ) a Nobel for his anti efficient markets critique - the committee fearing a backlash had they simply honored Gene Fama as they should have. Yet Scott Sumner points out ( for the umpteenth time) that the critics can't define any theory that makes a better prediction than EMH. Which of course is the definition of EMH. He points out that any idiot can run a bunch of numbers together (climate modelers call your service) and get a bunch of correlations. The test, however is how your model predicts out of sample. And there the anti EMHers are crap. Gee, just like Gene noticed when he formulated his theory ere long ago.

So even the chap who won the prize for being the best anti EMH/anti-Fama critic produced a model that turns out to be crap. Or in other words had you used Schiller's model or any other model to invest in stocks you would have made less money than if you'd taken a random walk down Chicago lane. Which is the definition of the long time reigning champeen of the world "It is the Greatest!" Efficient Market Hypothesis.

I think the problem EMH has is branding. If you simply argued that no model or investing system can consistently earn above market returns because then everyone would adopt that system and bid up prices until the excess returns disappeared then no one would disagree. Yet that's EMH in a nutshell: ultimately nobody knows more than anyone else about which way the market is heading because the market always knows far more than any of us can. Just like Fred Hayek pointed out long ago (and also won a Nobel for Chicago for).

Next! (economist who wants to beclown themselves or possibly win a Nobel when the committee beclowns itself)

Much more at the link.

I'd like to call ' em casualties

MICHAEL WALSH ON EXPATS FIGHTING FOR ISIS: “They’re not Americans. Or ‘Britons.’ Or ‘Norwegians.’ Call them what they call themselves: Muslim members of the ummah.”

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/194113/

Rotherham Rapes - Person who ignored 1400 child abuses/rapes removed 3 kids from homes who supported a perfectly respectable political party

I have seen the face of evil and It is a left wing social bureaucrat.

FACES OF EVIL: Rotherham: the council leaders who presided over child abuse scandal.
The author of the Rotherham child abuse report said that by 2005 ‘nobody could say “I didn’t know”‘ about child sexual exploitation in the town. But who was in charge?
And note that while they ignored child rape on a scale of hundreds or thousands, there was one sin they couldn’t ignore: “The woman who presided over the last five years of failure as the boss of children’s services at Rotherham Council is the same executive who removed three children from their foster parents because they were Ukip voters

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/

The world is filled with cowards in blue. The Rotherham 1400 example.

A classic example from England that the Police aren't on your side, they're on their side. 1400 gang raped girls over a decade can't be wrong. Can they?

A classic example of why law enforcement needs to be local. The UK's nationalized police are notoriously unresponsive, politically correct and bureaucratic. They really aren't on anyone's side.

Another critical point from Glenn Reynolds:

A moral response to this behavior might involve those officials, among others, hanging from lampposts. The legal system is, ultimately, an ancient bargain: Renounce your mob violence and blood feuds and we will provide you with justice. It could be argued that such a default as this calls the whole bargain into question, and justifies self-help along ancient lines.

Indeed. For if the state won't even protect girls then why preserve the state? Social democracy destroys everything noble and leaves only - in CS Lewis' timeless words: men without chests.

Break it up break it all up. Everywhere.

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/194085/

The Obami tell colleges to poke their eye out on sexual assault and colleges comply?

The administration has instructed upon pain of loss of federal student loan proceeds that colleges 'prosecute' sexual assault in ways unheard of in Anglo Saxon countries for hundreds of years. By doing so the colleges open themselves up to huge lawsuits for gender discrimination. Lawsuits that men are winning easily. For example:

Continuing to police rape without respect for due process is also generating lawsuits, however. In a recent case, University of Cincinnati student Ethan Peloe was convicted of rape by the campus judiciary, even though the police who had investigated his case believed him to be innocent and opted not to charge him with any crime. Now Peloe is suing the university for gender discrimination. The judiciary proceedings, as outlined in his lawsuit, read like a trial from a dystopian novel: Adjudicators repeatedly refused to let Peloe present evidence that he believed would exonerate him—including "results of a rape kit examination, security camera footage, and witnesses' accounts"—and lied to him about whether they had consulted investigators. In fact, as the lawsuit claims, campus police officers avoided the trial out of fear that the university would retaliate against them for helping Peloe.

Caroline Kitchens, a senior research associate at the American Enterprise Institute who frequently writes about the travesty of campus sexual assault trials, toldReason that colleges, at the federal government's insistence, are codifying "a sexual double standard whereby all men are presumed rapists."

"In an effort to address sexual assault, college campuses are on the verge of entering into an Orwellian nightmare in which all sexual encounters are policed and students accused of misconduct are guilty until proven innocent," she said.

The colleges are trapped like rats in a box between the illiberal Obama and the Constitution. I'd like to believe the Constitution will win but it is the Obami who have the big battalions.

Liberty has been shrinking in this country for a long time but with thus latest act the left has stepped up the pace of erosion.

Tuan

My father has been sick for a long time.  More than a tenth of his life for a man of 82.  Not that we kids knew he was so sick back then - all he would say for years was that he had a 'chronic' condition that he controlled with drugs...not to worry.  And of course we, full of ourselves and our lives didn't because if Tuan said so and mom didn't make a face when he said it then that was that.  We call him Tuan which means "Master" in Bahasa the lingua franca of Indonesia.  We grew up there along with half a dozen servants and their families and their relatives who also called him Tuan - he was responsible for them too.

He wasn't an easy father - he is a very fastidious man, demanding about the details of his life.  He could be acidly critical of us if we didn't measure up.  I remember as a teenager trembling with rage because after I had mowed the lawn he - without saying a word - went out and mowed it again.  And the things that he cared about were often trivial and he would never let them drop: like a tiny pebble you can't get out of your shoe, becoming bigger and more painful with each step. But strangely, the bigger the crisis, the greater our failures the less critical he became "Dad, I need to borrow some money" "Don't worry I had to borrow money from your Grand dad, will $20,000 do?" Never mind that by the time my father was an adult his parents had gone all but bankrupt and couldn't have lent him a dime - by jumping down in the mud with us he took some of the sting of failure away.

I'm spending a lot of time with him going to and fro to MD Anderson for treatments and meetings with his doctors.  He's been at this for eight grueling years and it shows - he forgets things and struggles, searching for words. I hate to answer for him, I want so much for his doctors to see the acute, commanding man that I remember but they turn to me and I relent, I speak for Tuan, for the Master. He's thin as thin can be - "concentration camp inmate" my mother calls him. Yet he never complains about his condition -  about the fact that his food isn't hot enough or the floor isn't clean - yes, but not about his pain or his exhaustion or what has to be his desire to just down tools.  To stop fighting and go gladly into that good night.  I've never talked with him about why he's persevered where most men would have given up but that's because I know the answer.

My father believes his life means something.  That his survival, his bloody minded perseverance is a witness to how Reeves face the world and all of its slings and arrows:  uncomplaining, stoic with a smile and a wisecrack for the nurses. A witness particularly for his grandchildren - they're almost grown now and he knows they have little time for him and even less time for his advice.  But he believes deep in his being that his witness, his faithful perseverance unto death will tower in their minds so long as they shall live. And he knows it will make them stronger for having witnessed it.

My father is a hard man. As hard and precious as diamond.

Think this is weird?  Well here's a whole bunch of other non- political stuff that I've written. It works just like an Ambien prescription.

It is refreshing that our 'elite' college campuses are now being honest about their intolerance and lack of diversity

They don't want people who don't think like them.  Indeed it offends and frightens them.  Historians have long known that totalitarian movements like Marxism, Fascism and Nazism gained wide expression on college campuses long before they infected the general population.  Colleges are filled with the narrowly obsessive (faculty and staff) and the naive (students).  It is a poisonous and bigoted combination.  It is not liberal in any sense of the word.  Why this outrageously expensive diploma mills (I am speaking of our elite schools) have so much status and specifically a tax deduction mystifies me.  They're thug institutions run by thugs to create thugs.  Tax them till their pips squeak.

Tish Harrison Warren is an egalitarian, a priest in the Anglican Church, and a supporter of progressive causes. None of that, however, was enough to keep Vanderbilt University from kicking her ministry off campus. She has a compelling reflection in CT on how everything came unraveled for InterVarsity at Vandy. In essence, Vanderbilt said that no organization could require adherence to a creed in order to limit membership or leadership in campus organizations. The result? The university began discriminating against Christians for holding to Christian beliefs. In Warren’s article, this bit was particularly clarifying. She writes,

The line between good and evil was drawn by two issues: creedal belief and sexual expression. If religious groups required set truths or limited sexual autonomy, they were bad—not just wrong but evil, narrow-minded, and too dangerous to be tolerated on campus.

It didn’t matter to them if we were politically or racially diverse, if we cared about the environment or built Habitat homes. It didn’t matter if our students were top in their fields and some of the kindest, most thoughtful, most compassionate leaders on campus. There was a line in the sand, and we fell on the wrong side of it…

And while we grieve rejection, we should not be shocked or ashamed by it. That probationary year unearthed a hidden assumption that I could be nuanced or articulate or culturally engaged or compassionate enough to make the gospel more acceptable to my neighbors. But that belief is prideful. From its earliest days, the gospel has been both a comfort and an offense.

This is so true. There is no amount of niceness or progressive sympathizing that will remove the reproach of the gospel. If you have even a whiff of Jesus on you, there will be no shortage of people whose nostrils fill with the stench of death (2 Cor. 2:15-16). That won’t be the only response, but sadly it will be the response of some.

Warren’s article is really thoughtful, and I highly recommend your reading the whole thing.

Wilfull Coverup Acknowledged With Smiling Screw You

The Obama administration admits that "yes we have all these emails that have been subpoenaed by Congress and the courts for various officials in the IRS, HHS, FEC, and EPA who have been accused of using their official positions to electioneer for the President or kneecap his opponents even though we said repeatedly under oath we didn't and no you can't have them".  Nixon never tried to brazen it out like that. Obama's counting on his media shills and Dem omertà to hold him harmless.  Chicago Democrats indeed. This isn't your father's Federal Government - it's a left wing criminal conspiracy in service to the "progressive" eschaton.  And the Democrats, don't forget the Democrats.

Judicial Watch, Statement on Discovery of Backups for “Missing” Lois Lerner IRS Emails:

Department of Justice attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service told Judicial Watch on Friday that Lois Lerner’s emails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe.  The Obama administration attorneys said that this back-up system would be too onerous to search.  The DOJ attorneys also acknowledged that the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) is investigating this back-up system.

We obviously disagree that disclosing the emails as required would be onerous, and plan to raise this new development with Judge Sullivan.

This is a jaw-dropping revelation.  The Obama administration had been lying to the American people about Lois Lerner’s missing emails. There are no “missing” Lois Lerner emails – nor missing emails of any of the other top IRS or other government officials whose emails seem to be disappearing at increasingly alarming rate. All the focus on missing hard drives has been a diversion. The Obama administration has known all along where the email records could be – but dishonestly withheld this information. You can bet we are going to ask the court for immediate assistance in cutting through this massive obstruction of justice.

New York Observer:  IRS Shocker: Filing Reveals Lerner Blackberry Destroyed; The Device Was Wiped AFTER Congressional Inquiry Began:

The IRS filing in federal Judge Emmet Sullivan’s court reveals shocking new information. The IRS destroyed Lerner’s Blackberry AFTER it knew her computer had crashed and after a Congressional inquiry was well underway. As an IRS official declared under the penalty of perjury, the destroyed Blackberry would have contained the same emails (both sent and received) as Lois Lerner’s hard drive. ...

With incredible disregard for the law and the Congressional inquiry, the IRS admits that this Blackberry “was removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.” This is a year after her hard drive “crash” and months after the Congressional inquiry began.

The IRS did not even attempt to retrieve that data. It cavalierly recites: “There is no record of any attempt by any IRS IT employee to recover data from any Blackberry device assigned to Lois Lerner in response to the Congressional investigations or this investigation,” according to Stephen Manning, Deputy Chief Information Officer for Strategy & Modernization.

Hillary, the Saudi foreign minister and now AL Sharpton?

Just when you think the world is hopeless and there's no capacity for change you get hit by a balanced AL Sharpton -wait, that can't be right can it? The ultimate race hustler is speaking both "truth to power" and truth to a black community that has badly gone off the rails. He did it at Friendly Temple- the respectable establishment fixture of the Black community in St. Louis where Michael Brown's funeral was held.

I've been to FT a number of times and know them. They're good people with a heart for their community, our community. I can imagine the frustration and sorrow because I feel it too. What has happened isn't just law enforcement's fault but they are culpable as is a black culture that tolerates far too much violence and misbehavior by its own.

We all need to change. But our government is the independent variable with all the guns and money and therefore needs to change most if all.

http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/at-michael-brown-funeral-al-sharptons-double-edged-eulogy-evokes-anger/article/2552433

Burger King buying Tim Hortons to reduce tax bill by becoming Canadian

One more company voting with their feet and brains. Why stand and take a whipping from the arrogant Federal Government when you don't need to? Bet the execs bail on Uncle Scam too. In the land if Hope 'n Change the Blue Passport ain't worth what it used to be. Story at the link.

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/08/who-d-a-thunk-it-total-tax-costs-in-canada-are-46-4-lower-than-the-us-and-burger-king-wants-to-move-there/

Holy smokes: are the Saudis going soft on Israel?

It would be a fascinating paradox if the fecklessness of the Obami forced a rappaprochment between Israel and the newly vulnerable oil rich gulf states. A case of when the Great Satan won't stand up the Little Satan stands in?

W.O.W. It's wild wild wild wild wild world!

Hope it's true. Doubt it though.

http://awdnews.com/top-news/9417-saudi-foreign-minister-we-must-denounce-our-hatred-toward-israel-and-begin-normalize-ties-with-jewish-nation.html

What? Legal marijuana lowers opioid overdose rates? How can that be?

How can this be? Well according to JAMA it turns out that ill people using Marijuana don't get as hooked on opiod pain killers so they don't OD - an estimated 1729 fewer deaths over the study period (a 20 to 33 percent reduction) even with the modest amount of Marijuana that the stone cold killers at DEA let by. Heck maybe if we let people use marijuana legally we can save more lives than the DEA causes to be slaughtered around the world each year.

But church ladies tell me that marijuana is of the Devil and the only way to save people using drugs is to destroy them. It's the church lady way: brutality in the name of God. The DEA's mommas are all church ladies.

 Reason has the story.

http://reason.com/blog/2014/08/25/states-with-medical-marijuana-laws-have

Paul Krugman on housing and productivity

I guess half a concession is better than no concession at all.

He concedes that the housing markets in places he approves of are expensive messes due to massive state manipulation at the behest of his rich friends and that this is driving young people out and towards places with lower costs of living who are as a result booming.  Finally an honest conclusion honestly arrived at. But then it all goes south - no, northeast:

He then claims that nothing else really differs.  Unless you look at electricity prices, retail gas prices food prices, or state and local taxes all of which conspire to push NYC's cost of living index up to between 190 and 202 percent of the national average depending upon borough.  This compares to an index of 90 in the major Texas cities. Of course this data doesn't include overpaid celebrity faculty who in New York get a cool quarter mil not to teach - but they really don't have those types of immensely productive chaps in Texas so we can't compare.

Not happy with obfuscating NYC's ridiculous cost of living, he then pretends that wages in these expensive manipulative burgs are higher due to greater "productivity". Let's press on that swollen, red pus filled claim for a moment shall we?:

A.  According to the Department of Education, NY spends more than twice as much per pupil than Texas and gets worse race adjusted results. Productivity or union power? 

B. Stroll into any NYC Bodega and compare the prices and the staffing to a Houston Walmart - clearly the retail wholesale sector in NYC is far, far more productive of high prices than in Texas.

C. Pop into a NYC eatery and note the astounding productivity of the workers that leads to the astonishingly high prices for indifferently prepared food in cramped, nondescript surroundings. Incidentally, Zagat says that Texas city residents eat out the most of any cities in the nation which is a good indicator of a very high standard of living.
D. Look in the Attorneys section of the NYC Yellow pages and marvel at the incredible number of lawyers and law firms - second only to DC - all of whom are producing immense amounts of real wealth for the nation.
E. I wonder of time spent commuting is included in those 'wonderful' 'productivity' statistics that Prof. Krugman cites given that NYC workers spend far more of their time schlepping to and from work than those of car mad Dallas or Houston. Ain't mass transit grand?

Then our Nobel Laureateness moves on to claims that Texas' success has 'nothing, absolutely nothing' to do with being business friendly. Once again let's apply the pokey pus finding finger of fate to this nasty looking claim:

A. A few decades ago NYC had over 150 of the fortune 500 and today it has 53 while Houston and Dallas Fort Worth had virtually none and today have 45 between them. Useless bloody business friendliness. 

B. In the last year TX has won Toyota's North American Headquarters (6,000 Jobs), Apple's World Operation Center (6,500 Jobs) and Occidental Petroleum's world headquarters.  All from California.  New York?  Not a damned thing.  From anywhere.  Gosh darn business suck ups!

5. But the Krugmanator's finest moment, his pies de folie if you will is his suggestion that all the country needs is a Bill Diblasio to set everything in NYC and other hemorrhaging blue garden spots right. That's right, the same Willie D. that just handed a massive back dated pay increase to the teachers in the most expensive and therefore least productive major school district in the country, the same friend of the best paid municipal employees in the world is going to use his statist, manipulative, crony socialist techniques to reduce housing costs. All I can say is W.O.W.

Looks like Texas is going to be kicking New York ass for a long time to come. Because judging by Pauley K they don't have a clue.

The real problem with the Ferguson riots: It panics the church ladies

The problem with the Ferguson riots  - I mean aside from the violence and vandalism and looting of course - is that it absolutely terrifies church ladies - both churched and unchurched branches.

And church ladies have a very simple social model: something happening that upsets you? Makeitstop! Someone upsetting you? Hurt them until they stop. There are the lefty " unchurched" church ladies like Hillary and Chuck Schumer and the Right Churchies found in any Baptist or Presbyterian church on Sunday.

Never mind that it is largely church lady moral panic and resultant brutality that has provoked the chaos. They aren't big thinkers. What they are is self centered, prideful authoritarians. And get in their way and they will hurt you in the name of God.

And so Ferguson, rather than highlighting the police and the law's excesses is likely to result in even more brutal state repression. Church ladies dig that.

Makeitstop indeed.

Petty law aggressively enforced exacerbates inequality - Reason

Reason talks about how NYC's aggressive policing and huge number of laws is a nightmare for the poor and how selective enforcement contributes to inequality.

Cornel West - Rube: " He posed as a progressive...ended up Wall Street"

And yet we're supposed to believe academics at places like Harvard are smart.

"Dark faced Clinton" oh my maiden aunt the ladies in the faculty club are becoming exercised aren't they? 

Body cameras on cops is an innovation whose time has come

Because everyone behaves better when they know they are being watched. In tests it reduced physical confrontations 60 percent and complaints about the police 88 percent. As Reason argues:

Although we generally take a dim view of the proliferation of surveillance cameras in American life, police on-body cameras are different because of their potential to serve as a check against the abuse of power by police officers. Historically, there was no documentary evidence of most encounters between police officers and the public, and due to the volatile nature of those encounters, this often resulted in radically divergent accounts of incidents. Cameras have the potential to be a win-win, helping protect the public against police misconduct, and at the same time helping protect police against false accusations of abuse.

Indeed.

http://reason.com/blog/2014/08/24/should-cops-wear-body-cameras-one-ex-cop

The "deep state" will violate ethical guidelines, laws and constitutions to save itself.

And the deep state is always left wing and always partisan. Doesn't care about the people much mind you, but it protects its interests with a criminal intensity. See more about how Wisconsin deep state prosecutors misbehaved at the link.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/08/24/retaliation-unsealed-docs-show-prosecutors-broad-search-tactics-against/

Nothing new under the sun: modern progressive try to stamp out sex they don't like by criminalizing it

It's amazing how puritanical and prudish the academic left has become. Next they'll be tying up our limbs at night lest we sin with our slutty legs.

Church or no church: church ladies rule!

Steven Chapman has become rather dishonest in his dotage

First he cites a municipal election's abysmal black turnout then shifts to voter ID laws implying that one has to do with the other. Of course Steve knows that in the last two presidential elections with or without voter ID blacks voted at higher rates than whites. Some discouragement. 

He also knows that voter fraud and identity is a much bigger problem than his "31 out of a billion" statistic implies. Indeed people voting multiple times, absentee fraud and people voting for other people have changed the course of the nation. Without them it is likely AL Franken would still be a comedian and Obamacare would have never passed.

He also knows that election observers from other countries are shocked to find thst we have almost no voter ID requirements and that Americans overwhelminly support voter ID laws.

And does anyone really believe that in an age where you can't go to high school without your ID that ten percent of the adult population has nothing that will work? Methinks Steve keeps only the left wing statistics.

But Steve would rather squeak racist. Because sometimes people's resentments overwhelm their good judgement.  Like for example, here.

Headless Jimmy Foley: In Syria to help Sunnis dump on America, ended up having Sunnis dump his blood on desert

One of the least credible bitches against Barack Obama (and there are so many very credible ones) is that he went back to playing golf after pointing out that the murder of James Foley was barbaric.  Is the Chief Magistrate of the world's hyperpower supposed to fall into deep introspective depression every time some Islamonutjob whacks some freelancing fool?  I say drink a toast of champagne to Mr. Foley's memory and order some Hellfire absolution for his killers.  After all the chap was playing a dangerous and possibly anti-American game.

NARRATIVE: “Daniel Greenfield is a reliable journalist, and he writes an article to spell out that Foley held the United States in contempt and had gone to Syria to associate with the Sunni rebels and help them overthrow Bashar Assad. The obituaries that I have seen make no mention of this.”

Stooges in Paradise: You know this Obama chap is beginning to grow on me

As God is my witness I did not set out in this electoral cycle to engage in Schadenfreude or gloat or say I told you so or otherwise point out the gosh darn obvious.  But with chickens coming home to roost at a frequency and velocity that suggests that the President is firing them out of a high volume repeater cannon, my natural reserves of modesty and discretion are rapidly wearing away.  I mean how many spectacular pratfalls, trips, stumbles, flips and splots can one politico go through before you break out in uncontrollable gales of hysterical laughter?  I know that repeatedly falling on your face/ass/head isn't funny and that it hurts like hell but still I must pay homage where it is due:  not since the first Stooges has a political stooge stooged it up as much as those stooges stooged.  And it took three, nay four of those stooges to generate the stoogage that our modern Presidential Stooge stooges up all by his stoogeful self.  What a spectacle! What an education in the hubris of modern state manipulation! What fun!



More mommy!  I want more!  Make the funny President do it again!

The real genius of Sherman is the genius of the IDF in Gaza

It bears important lessons for our response to terror and extremism. Well worth your time here: http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/?p=7793

NYT/CBS Poll: Only 10% believe Barack Obama has made race relations better

I'm surprised it's that high. 35% thinks they've gotten worse.  Which shocks me because even I thought that the First Duffer would help defuse racial tensions. But the relentless march of the uberstate grinds everything in its remorseless path. It makes even simple human interaction fraught with political and group identity undertones.

When you make everything subject to the state and its manipulation, you expose all of life to the poisonous zero sum game of politics with all the conflict and hatreds that entails.

More here.

Private game ranching has radically increased the numbers of megafauna in South Africa

From a low of 575,000 in the 60s to over 24 million today.  In the same time period Kenya who banned all hunting in 1977 has seen their megafauna numbers drop by 80%. In other news Barack Obama  recently banned all trade in Ivory, including antique ivory, guaranteeing a black market and more Ivory poaching in Africa.

Why is it that our Lord and Savior always chooses the stupid option?  Is he really that comprehensively obtuse?  Is this really the profile of Harvard Law grads? Is the movement he leads truly that insanely destructive?  Sigh.

More from Bloomberg here.

Indiana Cops conduct pointless SWAT assault with grenades on unarmed granny's house with open front door

The reason they conduct these assaults in such a violent manner is because they want to find drugs and fear that the homeowner might destroy them.  Because if they find drugs they get to steal the house.  So in a real sense the SWATters are just stationary bandits looting the citizenry.  Which is why they need to wear body armor, helmets and carry automatic weapons - they're enemies of the people. Watch the whole obscene, sordid, fascist thing here. Details about the pointlessness and dishonesty of the raid can be found here.

Goddamned skinhead thugs.  Fear your government because they're not on your side.  They're on their side.

NYT's Maureen Dowd finally discovers the obvious: Barack Obama isn't cut out to be President

A bit effing late to grok that don't you think MoDo?  A little bloody behind the curve are we dear?  Perhaps it might have been a better observation oh lets say six years ago?  But we wouldn't want to to burden you pretty cliche flinging head with any big, consequential thoughts.  So you go ahead and play the role of the doofus that finds out the obvious six years after all the smart kids did. Duh...ohhh..ahhhh....gooooshhhhh.  Hattip Fox News Howard Kurtz

Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who’s already been down on Barry, uses the story to ratchet up her complaints:

“The man whose singular qualification was as a uniter turns out to be singularly unequipped to operate in a polarized environment…

“Why should the president neutralize himself? Why doesn’t he do something bold and thrilling? Get his hands dirty? Stop going to Beverly Hills to raise money and go to St. Louis to raise consciousness? Talk to someone besides Valerie Jarrett?

“The Constitution was premised on a system full of factions and polarization. If you’re a fastidious pol who deigns to heal and deal only in a holistic, romantic, unified utopia, the Oval Office is the wrong job for you.”

St. Louis County is like a lot of places: if you're unpopular enough the cops can slaughter you with impunity

Murder is for the 'little people'. From Reason.com:

Early on he faced the responsibility of deciding whether to prosecute two undercover cops who shot and killed two men during an investigation. The Post-Dispatch reports:

The officers said the suspects, who had prior felony convictions for drug and assault offenses, tried to escape arrest and then drove toward the officers.

A subsequent federal investigation showed that the men were unarmed and that their car had not moved forward when the officers fired 21 shots and killed the suspects, Earl Murray and Ronald Beasley. The probe, however, also concluded that because the officers feared for their safety, the shootings were justified.

McCulloch didn’t prosecute the officers. He specifically drew the ire of defense lawyers and protesters, who had been holding demonstrations and threatened to block Highway 40, when he said of Murray and Beasley, “These guys were bums.”

McCulloch defended his comments, complaining the public and media were trying to “vilify” the cops, who shot and killed two alleged drug dealers and appeared to lie about the circumstances. Because they were drug dealers, McCulloch insinuated, they deserved to die.

That shooting happened in 1991 in St. Louis but it’s a familiar pattern for some of the shootings authorities rule justified around the country to this day. As forensics and video technology improve, it becomes harder for fabricated stories to hold up to muster. Nevertheless, cops continue to be almost universally cleared of wrong-doing in fatal shootings.

A metaphor for California's F'd up economy

Actual parking regulation sign in Culver City, CA.  God help them.

All industrial bird killers are equal. But some industrial bird killers are more equal than others.

One story that demonstrates the moral bankruptcy of our so called 'green' movement.  It's a religion, not science and it is vicious and destructive of birds and other living things.  It particularly is not interested in Constitutionalism or the rule of law - bieng a totalitarian theocracy.  Hattip Carpe Diem

 There’s “green hypocrisy” regarding bird deaths? At the Coyote Blog earlier this week,Warren Meyer pointed out that ExxonMobil agreed in 2009 to pay $600,000 in fines to the Justice Department for the deaths of 85 migratory birds in five states (Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Texas) in a five-year period between 2004-2009. The fine amounts to a little more than $7,000 per dead bird.

Warren then pointed out that the world’s largest solar thermal power plant (the BrightSource Energy plant near Ivanpah, California) is incinerating thousands of local birds every year at that single location, and the number might be even as high as 28,000 according to estimates by an expert at the Center for Biological Diversity. At that rate and applying the fine per bird paid by ExxonMobil, BrightSource Energy should be paying annual fines of between $7 million and $196 million. But along with its green energy cousin – wind power – solar power plants are getting a pass on killing birds. A significant double standard is being applied by Team Obama where only oil and gas companies are being fined for birth deaths, but not solar and wind companies. Call it “green hypocrisy.”

Viva Chavismo! Viva Socialismo! Viva Estupidismo!

Venezuela is going high-tech insane with fingerprint based rationing.  My God, my God why have you forsaken them.  Hattip carpe diem

After price controls proved to be a miserable failure, Venezuela’s socialist government is now rationing food with a mandatory fingerprinting system to address chronic shortages of basics like milk, flour, cooking oil, and toilet paper.

DNA.  DNA testing is next:  you'll have to swab to get a squab.

In an increasingly virtual world virtual skills like distributed collaboration in gaming are becoming real selling points

Figuring out how to collaborate across geographies, time zones and cultures is increasingly important and it would seem that gamers have an advantage in this respect.  Hattip:  Instapundit.com

A new article in the Wall Street Journal online titled Can World of Warcraft Game Skills Help Land a Job? states that some job seekers are adding gaming skills to their resumes to indicate their ability to work productively in large, remote teams:

Gamers’ ability to accomplish complex tasks across virtual teams could be seen as a plus for some companies.
…
“This capability to engage in strategy-building, team-building, knowledge-sharing and problem-solving remotely is really important,” said, Ms. LeGoues, currently vice president of transformation at the YAI Network of nonprofits.

Bagpipes and brain death Federal Government style

Our Federal apparatchiks really don't believe that they're accountable to the people. And given the way they are cossetted and never fired or laid off or otherwise held accountable for their actions who can blame them?  There needs to be a massive paring of the Federals - let's start at a 50% reduction and see if anyone notices anything but significantly improvements in the living environment.

I wrote two weeks ago about two New Hampshire teenagers having their bagpipes seized at the northern border by US Customs & Border Protection. This would be the same "border" "protection" agency that has turned the southern border into an express welfare check-in for any of the world's seven billion people minded to show up there.

My fellow Granite Staters - 17-year-old Campbell Webster and Eryk Bean, of Concord and Londonderry, New Hampshire - understood that if you go to a highland fling a couple of hours north in Quebec you're now obligated to get your bagpipes approved by US Fish & Wildlife.

Because that's just the way it is in the Land of the Free.

So Messrs Webster and Bean got their CITES certificate and presented it to the US CBP agent at the Vermont border crossing.

Whereupon he promptly confiscated their bagpipes on the grounds that, yes, their US Fish & Wildlife CITES paperwork was valid, but it's only valid at 28 ports of entry and this wasn't one of them.

Nor is any other US/Canadian land crossing. So, if you're a piper in, say, Pittsburg, New Hampshire and you want to play in a competition in La Patrie, Quebec 20 minutes north, you have to drive four-to-five hours south to Logan Airport in Boston, fly to Montreal and drive two hours east to La Patrie.

Because that's just the way it is in the Land of the Free.

When the CBP agent seized Messrs Webster and Bean's bagpipes, he told them - with the characteristic insouciance of the thug bureaucracy - that they were "never going to see them again". But thanks to the unwelcome publicity the Homeland Security mafiosi were forced to cough 'em up.

Pointless, expensive and stupid is no way to go through life Mr. Federal Employee.

But wait!  There's more!  The Federal Fish and Wildlife service is even more viciously cretinous that implied above.  Once again Steyn:

And presumably, for the intervening 24 hours, their bagpipes will once again be seized by the feds, so here's a link to the petition they launched last time in case the government is minded to keep them.

By the way, here's an email to one bagpiper from Wildlife Inspector Rosemarie Levandowski - because at the Department of Fish & Wildlife bagpipes are designated as wildlife rather than fish. Because a wildlife inspector needs a bagpipe like a fish needs a bicycle. Here's what Inspector Levandowski writes:


Good afternoon,

After reviewing the certificate, I do not see a exception for crossing at the non-designated port of Champlain, NY. The certificate will either have to be amended to include Champlain or you can apply for a stand alone Designated Port Exception Permit (application attached). Given the time frame on this, It will not be possible to cross through Champlain. Also, there is fee of $238.00 involved with each crossing- entering the U.S. and leaving the U.S.

Feel free to call me with questions.

Rosemarie Levandowski
Wildlife Inspector
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
237 W. Service Road
Champlain, NY 12919

Gotta love that "also": Every time you take a bagpipe in and out of the United States it's a $476* round-trip fee.

Demanding a CITES certificate for bagpipes is a burden upon free-born citizens. Restricting the paperwork's validity to only 28 ports of entry is an unduly onerous burden. Requiring the bagpipers to come back on the Wednesday to those 28 ports of entry because the inspector's washing her hair on the Tuesday is an even more onerous and insulting burden. And charging an American $476 to play his bagpipe in Montreal is a shakedown racket unacceptable in a free society. Tyranny starts at the edges and nibbles its way in. This bagpipe regime is tyrannous, but it will not stop there.

As I said before, where is "the party of small government" on this? When will they pipe up?

Or do bagpipers have to loot and riot to get any attention from anyone who matters?

The annual Highland Games at Loon Mountain, New Hampshire are a significant economic boon to the state. But it's hard to see many Scots or Canadians willing to undergo the torments of US Fish & Wildlife and the risk of losing treasured old pipes, even if they can afford the 476 bucks. So see you, jimmeh!

American is economically sclerotic because it's being hyper-regulated to death. But as I concluded last time:

The degeneration of "law" into regulation is a problem. The post-constitutional order is, too. But something bigger is in play. To remain free, a people need something more basic - the spirit of liberty. Once you've lost that, there are no easy roads back.

In this republic, in 2014, there is little evidence of "the spirit of liberty".

Maybe there's a Fish & Wildlife form we can fill in to get it back...

Hattip Mark Steyn

Baahrack Obaahmaah?

Cancer Man

My Dad staring down cancer as he has every day for the last 8 years. To look at him you wouldn't think that he's outlasted everyone that had his diagnosis. By day he's a courtly grandfather with a bad Oklahoma Sooners habit. But at night he becomes Cancer Man: scourge of the three different cancers that have failed so miserably to kill him. Here we see him planning his next assault on their secret carcinoma lair.

The dangers of foreign moss

This is a public service warning about the dangers of foreign moss: So called 'Spanish Moss' is a beautiful addition to any southern lawn. Which might tempt one to pick up one of the small moss'ettes' that lie on the ground after storms: they're so cute and artsy. Don't do it! My cousin took a small foreign moss ball home and before he knew it he had become an impersonal pronoun. Just Say NO! to foreign moss.

Spanish Moss:  Pretty Outside

Cute on the ground

But can turn you into a fuzzy impersonal pronoun.

Well nobody ever said that Barack Obama wasn't self centered....

The One is ramming his 'go it alone' regulatory agenda through in a bid to 'transform' the country so much that it won't be able to find it's way back after he's gone.  More here.

Groups that closely follow regulations are expecting the Obama administration to continue issuing controversial rules through the midterm elections, despite the political risk it could pose for Democrats.

With time running out on President Obama’s second term, federal agencies are hitting the gas on a number of regulatory initiatives that are central to the White House’s “go-it-alone” agenda.

The pace of rulemaking is a stark contrast from the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election, when the flow of rules came screeching to a near halt.

Texas accounts for substantially all the job growth in.the US since 2007

Texas has gained 1.3 million jobs while the rest of the US without TX lost 1.23 million. Without Texas the US economy would look like Europe's: stagnant and sliding into decline. Yee. Haw.

Hattip Carpe Diem

Amartya Sen on Global warming: "What about the poor?"

The Nobel prize winning development economist reminds us that not everyone is a rich liberal knowledge worker. And that energy use is the sole path out of poverty for billions. A path that the carbon cargo cultists are strewing with deadly obstacles.

What if the campus rape warlock hunt scares away the wrong men?

Sexual predators may or may not be deterred by the newly radicalized definition of Sexual assault. After all, the Obama administration now officially discourages colleges from calling in the police on assault cases all the better to goose the statistics and their electoral impact. And if I were a predator I'd rather deal with some academic whose greatest sanction is expulsion rather than the popo.

But according to this article "good guys" are increasingly frightened of interacting with women on campus lest their actions be interpreted as assault. It makes sense for normal men to avoid college women like the plague and find their dates off campus. Which leaves the coeds.....to the predators.

And since it's often the presence of " good guys" that deters predation (we used to always make sure unaccompanied girls - particularly drunk ones - got home), any migration by them off campus will lead to more women being hurt. Feminists often seem as if they want a world without strong men. Keep it up and they'll get it on America's campuses. And they'll hate it.

Twice as many British Muslims are fighting for ISIS as are soldiers in Britain's military

The therapeutic state doesn't replace God it radicalizes Him. Meaning is no longer found in the day to day struggle to earn a living so young redundant men search farther afield for purpose. And for Muslims already offended by the slatternly  slide in British culture the cleansing breath of hard, cruel Islam seems like what the doctor ordered.

Regardless, it looks like few will fight for the deracinated kumbaya state. A fact that should terrify progressives everywhere. Progressivism strips people's lives of purpose of meaning of their  humanity. It's not surprising that the most alienated will do almost anything to get it back.

Why do leftists want everything to be locally produced except their government?

Author Ben Domanench doesn't really say why but he argues that social and liberty conservatives both have an interest in promoting local government.

I think the reason the left is pro local everything but government is because its preferred institution for change is the state. And other nation spanning institutions- business, the church, media interfere with building the omnicompetent progressive state - hence the desire to weaken and localize them.

Finland has the best primary and secondary education achievement in the world which results in them staying in school until they are almost 30

So the value of that oh so high quality Finnish education is in fact negative because the average Finn doesn't get their first degree until 29?  And most of them then stay on for their Masters? File this under the "No good deed goes unpunished department"  See here for more.

Finnish students stay in college longer than in any other developed country save Austria, the Netherlands and Denmark, getting their first university degree on average at 29, according to a 2013 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That compares with 24 years for Britons, 26 for Germans and the OECD average of 27 years. Most Finns who graduate from college get a master’s degree.

Clearly high quality lower education is a menace - we should be thankful we don't have any because at our college's prices the nation would be bankrupt if we were as well or should I say elaborately educated as the Finns.  God help them.

Roots of great recession lie in decades of decline in labor market efficiency because of increasing government manipulation

Here's some interesting news from the  Jackson Hole conference as reported by the NYT:

The paper, presented Friday morning at the annual gathering of economists and central bankers at Jackson Hole, Wyo., argues that the share of Americans with jobs has declined because the labor market has stagnated in recent decades — fewer people losing or leaving jobs, fewer people landing new ones. This dearth of creative destruction, the authors argue, is the result of long-term trends including a slowdown in small business creation and the rise of occupational licensing.

“These results,” wrote the economists Stephen J. Davis, of the University of Chicago, and John Haltiwanger, of the University of Maryland, “suggest the U.S. economy faced serious impediments to high employment rates well before the Great Recession, and that sustained high employment is unlikely to return without restoring labor market fluidity.”

Their findings contribute to the growing genre of papers that purport to show that the weakness of the American economy is caused largely by problems that predate the recession — and that the Federal Reserve can’t remedy them with low interest rates.

"Purport" of course is the word the Keynesians like Paul "Pauley K" Krugman have told the NYT stenographers to use. Because if recessions and slow growth aren't caused by thieving bankers and bad monetary joo joo then it calls into question the entire regulatory project upon which so many Keynesians and Democrats rely upon for their livings. Because if microeconomics actually exist and market incentives are (gasp!) real. Then where do the the Krugmanites get off? I mean if they acknowledge the truth then all the power lawyers like Obama, Lizzy Warren and Hillary Clinton will crucify them for abandoning Team Corporatist. But I wouldnt worry too much if I  was a corporatist feeding off the rotting body politic because if Pauley K is any indication the Keynesians will sacrifice their Nobel Laureate Souls for a mess of fashionable press pottage and some pics with starlets.

Or as shorthand you could simply slap your forehead and say: "holy cow! We've done the exact same things the European Social Democrats have done (and that the Aussies and Canucks did before they pulled their heads out) and have gotten the exact same disastrous results! Who'da thunk it?"

Oh and also note that apparently Pauley K told the NYT stenographers to set up Walmart in the first paragraph.  The argument will go something like this:  "Walmart by bringing more efficiency and lower prices to poor, working class and middle class Americans has caused the job deficit and what we really need is less microeconomic efficiency.  We need more retail and wholesale distribution regulation by more Democrats and Keynsians to 'protect' jobs from rapacious capitalists like Walmart and the Kochs."  And in doing so we will put into place the last brick in the European Social Democrat stagnation model.  I'll bet you a buck they do. You just watch.

Is nothing sacred? Now they're questioning the importance of breakfast

You know if I didn't know better I'd conclude that a lot of 'public science' used by our cretinous government was actually made up in bars by guys who were too drunk to play quarters.  It seems like everything we've been told about our health whether its fat, carbs, cholesterol, salt or now breakfast has turned to be wrong or even dangerous.  Makes you wonder about the so called 'settled' science being spewed today.  Hattip instapundit.com.

Is Breakfast Overrated? “For years, we’ve heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But scientific support for that idea has been surprisingly meager, and a spate of new research at several different universities — published in multiple articles in the August issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition — could change the way we think about early-hours eating.” Yet another place where the settled science wasn’t.

Ferguson and the modern debtors prison

"Our Saviors"

Readers of this blog know that I am not a fan of the police or our criminal justice system. But my criticisms to date have been largely leveled at the felony system. Our misdemeanor legal system is if anything more out if control as George Mason Economist Alex Tabbarok details in this post. I can attest to the fact what he reports in Ferguson is the norm in Missouri. Some examples:

1. Last year Ferguson collected in fines and court costs (not levied) $321 per household. In a poor city where many people cannot pay so the levied amount per household is say...$500? This of course excludes lawyers fees. They issued 3 warrants per household and this for a community with an 'average' violent crime rate for the United States.

2. People who cannot pay are routinely arrested and as they cannot make bail they sit in what in effect is a debtors prison until the municipal court meets which for some municipalities could be once a week or even once a month. 

3. I spent a day in the hateful hands of the St. Louis county jail (it is one if the reasons I despise the police with all my heart and soul and mind). Sharing the jail intake cohort (they have so many 'evildoers' that they process them in huge batches) with me was one violent criminal and over 100 nonviolent offenders in chokey because of drugs, prostitution or inability to pay their debts to the government. I have no doubt that each one of them left jail hating law enforcement as I do.

4. The reason Ferguson and cities like it can maintain large (almost all white) police forces in a poor 75% black city is that they farm the people for fines. In richer 'burbs they make sure they only loot non residents because middle class people vote. In poor black communities they just loot and loot and loot with the money they scam going straight back to their salaries and hot new police cruisers.  All of it nice and legal - like. No doubt Michael Brown's killer thought he was going to scam a cool $100 or $200 towards his quota for a jaywalking citation.

5. Sometimes the Badged Looters get lucky:  they find a doob or marijuana residue or a prescription pill in a car and as a result they get to steal the car without having to ever prove a crime in court. They then sell it and keep the proceeds for themselves - sometimes they even steal houses.* In states like MA that have banned this obviously criminal behavior, the local police conspire with the Feds to apply the Federal Government's truly vicious forfeiture laws who then gratefully kick back a percentage to the local crime family aka: the cops. Here's a summary of a recently resolved MA case for your shocked perusal.

6. A last outrage from Tabarrok's piece:
As a final outrage, consider this story which ties together Ferguson, the courts, and the arrest of parents, often minority parents, for leaving their kids to play in parks (just as my parents did).

According to local judge Frank Vatterott, 37% of the courts responding to his survey unconstitutionally closed the courts to non-defendants. Defendants are then faced with the choice of leaving their kids on the parking lot or going into court. As Antonio Morgan described after being denied entry to the court with his children, the decision to leave his kids with a friend resulted in a charge of child endangerment.

So when you see people in Ferguson going crazy over a "simple shooting" remember what the 'boys in blue' are doing every day to destroy faith in our laws and build hatred and fear of authority.  Frankly in my and most of the residents of Ferguson's eyes the police are worse than a mafia family.  Looters. Nothing but violent, armed looters who can steal and kill and get away with it.  Indeed, they can get most of you white middle class chaps to sing their praises.  Don Vito Corleone could never pull that off. Of course I've never been harrassed, looted and humiliated by an organized crime family either.

7. This provokes a question:  if back during Prohibition a revenuer found a beer in your house could they steal your house like they do today?  And if the police could have stolen any property that they found alcohol in back then do you think we would have ever gotten rid of prohibition?  Or would that just be another controlled substance that the affluent get via prescription and everyone else gets on the street where they are harassed, assaulted, shot and stolen from by the police?  Hmmm.

And if you think I'm just a pathetic, resentful whiner who had a bad experience I recommend you read Alex Tabarrok's piece and go to the (very right wing) Institute for Justice links I provided above.

A note on law enforcement:  I know and like individual policemen.  I've even liked one prosecutor that I knew - the lawyer cum parasites are a bit tough to take.  My uncle Slim was Sheriff of Ector County Texas for 20 years and I was and am proud of him.  Individual policemen have shown me forbearance and mercy - when they could have arrested and humiliated me for an unpaid ticket or another of the countless number of trivial oppressions produced by the therapeutic state.  However I stand by my statement that I hate and fear all law enforcement with all my heart and soul and mind for two reasons:

1. Forbearance is the 'gift' that the powerful give to the weak while both reminding them who is boss and who should be the grateful supplicant. It is not the behavior of free men in a free society.  We should not grateful that sometimes the bully does not beat us when we pass.  Because we know next time if the policemen needs a collar or revenue is down or if he's just feeling his oats he could behave completely differently.  Which makes his forbearance part of his frightening unpredictability and impunity in the land where everything is against the law.

2. Even when showing forbearance law enforcement today use policing techniques designed to emphasize the enormous gulf between us and them.  When I was young (late 70s, early 80s) I was in effect a "hippy" with long hair and a NORML sticker on my car living and driving through rural, redneck Oklahoma. The law enforcement of that time and place treated me with more respect, more genuine friendship and equality than they do to me today as a "respectable" white fifty something.  Back then I was a human being that they talked to face to face.  Today I'm a threat to be managed and risk being shot if I get out of my car to talk to them so that I won't be on the equivalent of my knees before them. And I despise them for it.

Texans for Public Justice isn't.

Texans for Public Justice is a fraudulent front for corrupt hard left pressure groups. Nothing more nothing less.  They doing the PR work for the fraudulent prosecution of Governor Rick Perry.  A prosecution I might add that has been denounced by various and sundry including the Editors of the New York Times, Huffpo and MSNBC analysts and Obama svengali David Axelrod.  Here's more about the crimson astroturf from Wapo.

Texans for Lawsuit Reform recently turned the tables on Texans for Public Justice and issued a scathing report of its own on the group’s political biases and its failure to disclose many of its funders. They found:

TPJ is nothing that it claims to be. It is not Texan. Nothing about it is public. And, it is definitely not interested in justice… TPJ first appeared in Texas in 1997, when veteran operatives of leftist, out-of-state organizations – such as Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen – came to this state to set up the organization. The TPJ version of justice is one-sided. Since its inception, TPJ – preying on the good intentions of media outlets across Texas and this nation – has used an array of slanted, self-published reports to criticize a select segment of this state’s political spectrum. The targets of TPJ’s attacks are almost exclusively Republicans, business leaders and organizations, and those interested in the reform of Texas’ civil justice system.