According to this story in the Guardian, French women are not going topless anymore. How one measures this is unsaid, but I’m imagining young researchers sent off to the beach to count bare boobies.

Is topless sunbathing over? It certainly is in France, according to French Elle, if the coverline on its new summer issue is to be believed: “La Fin Du Topless Sur La Plage?” – which translates, verbatim, to “Is this the end of toplessness on the beach?”

According to the magazine the answer is “yes”, and the reasons are threefold. First, an increased concern over health and the dangers of skin cancer; second, the “pornified” perception of topless women (indeed Elle suggests the death of the monokini – ie swimming briefs – was linked to the idea that topless women are seen as “loose”); and third, the rise of breast-affiliated activism – chiefly Femen, who use their naked breasts as a means of attracting attention to various causes, and Free the Nipple, a recent campaign that encourages women to go topless to end the stigma surrounding female bodies. “Topless sunbathing was seen by women as a new freedom in St Tropez in the 1960s,” says Elle. And now that they’re covering up? It’s a “worrying sign of a regression in the place of women”.

The skin cancer excuse makes some sense. I suspect people are doing less sunbathing than in the past. I’ve never been a sun worshiper and my doctor tells me that is most likely why I look so young. Alternatively, she may be lying. Regardless, I bet sunbathing is down in the mostly white countries.

The “pornified” angle is interesting. The West is becoming more uptight regarding fun stuff like sex and looking at naked ladies. Drugs, boozing, sex, eating, smoking and jokes about minorities have been ruled off-limits to some degree. The sort of women going to St Tropez probably think it is horrible to look like a girl now. Of course, in a world with unlimited porn at your fingertips (Thanks Al Gore!), women showing their lady parts off in public is no longer much of a statement.

The last one is the puzzler. I had to look up “Femen” thinking it was some weird feminist nonsense like the “womyn’s rights movement.” It turns out to be nothing by naked protesting. I like this line from the Wikipedia entry:

The organisation describes itself as “fighting patriarchy in its three manifestations – sexual exploitation of women, dictatorship and religion”^[12] and has stated that its goal is “sextremism serving to protect women’s rights”

This is what passes for feminism these days. They call it Third Wave Feminism. Again, from Wikipedia:

Third-wave feminism seeks to challenge or avoid what it deems the second wave’s essentialist definitions of femininity, which often assumed a universal female identity that over-emphasized the experiences of upper-middle-class white women. The shift from second wave feminism came about with many of the legal and institutional rights that were extended to women. In addition to these institutional gains, third-wave feminists believed there needed to be further changes in stereotypes, media portrayals, and language to define women. Third-wave ideology focuses on a more post-structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality.^[3] In “Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” Joan W. Scott describes how language has been used as a way to understand the world, however, “post-structuralists insist that words and texts have no fixed or intrinsic meanings, that there is no transparent or self-evident relationship between them and either ideas or things, no basic or ultimate correspondence between language and the world”^[4] Thus, while language has been used to create binaries (such as male/female), post-structuralists see these binaries as artificial constructs created to maintain the power of dominant groups.

Got that?

The simpler definition is we have upper-middle class white women at universities with way too much time on their hands. No one takes their courses or cares about what they have to say, so they make a nuisance of themselves chasing the white eunuchs around the faculty lounge, calling them racists.

One last bit from the story:

Alice Pfeiffer, a 29-year-old Anglo-French journalist (who, incidentally does sunbathe topless in Biarritz, Guéthary, Monaco and surfing resort Hossegor), thinks the decline is inextricably linked to social media: “Young women in their 20s do it less because they are aware that … you can end up topless on your own Facebook wall.”

Pfeiffer blames “pop-porn culture – Miley Cyrus to American Apparel, ie aggressive naked imagery of young girls” – for the shift in perception of going topless.

It is one of the great ironies of the technological revolution. The old line about having 57 channels, yet nothing good is on TV. All of this technology that was supposed to free us from our chains is doing the opposite. Whip off your top on vacation and you end up getting fired because your boss saw your boobies on Facebook. With cameras everywhere, ready to publicize your moment of indiscretion, everyone has to stop having fun and I don’t get to see boobies on the beach.

There’s an old tradition in the screed business where the writer declares his interests before mounting his horse and riding around the page. I will do that here. I have never liked Fred Reed. By that, I mean his writing has never appealed to me. The main reason is I don’t like phonies. His corn-pone shtick – and it is a shtick – is a synthetic attempt to play on the vulnerability of his target audience.

His is not a unique act. I’ve met late middle-aged men doing this bit and it is always strikes me as a passive-aggressive way to avoid being challenged. In his case, it is an attempt to signal to a particular audience that he is one of them, without actually having to be one of them. It is intended to deceive and that’s something I find offensive.

That said, his latest posted on The Unz Review is very disappointing. By that I mean I’m surprised it was posted there at all. The Unz Review is one of the few places willing to post heterodox opinion on complicated and controversial issues. Steve Sailer is an obvious example. Razib Khan is another. Fred Reed’s thumbless and somewhat incoherent column covering very old objections to evolutionary theory from the flat earth perspective seems wildly out of place.

In fact, it looks like troll bait. Ron Unz is a gazillionaire so it is not like he needs the traffic to sell ad space. Maybe he has a soft spot for Fred Reed or is throwing the guy a bone out of pity. I don’t know and it is not all that important, but it is a thing that bugs me.

What really bugs me about this is the dishonesty of it. Take a look at the introductory paragraphs.

Over the years I have occasionally expressed doubts over the tenets of evolutionism which, perhaps wrongly, has seemed to me a sort of political correctness of science, or maybe a metaphysics somewhat related to science. As a consequence I have been severely reprimanded. The editor of a site devoted to genetic expression furiously began deleting any mention of me from his readers. Others, to include Mr. John Derbyshire of Taki’s Magazine, have expressed disdain, though disdaining to explain just why.

In all of this, my inability to get straight answers that do not shift has frustrated me. I decided to address my questions to an expert in the field, preferably one who loathed me and thus might produce his best arguments so as to stick it to me. To this end I have settled on Mr. Derbyshire.

He has the several advantages of being highly intelligent, an excellent writer, ardent of all things evolutionary and genetic, and well versed in them. I would profit by his instruction in things in which I am only an amateur—should he be so inclined. (He may well have other things to do.) To this end, I submit a few questions which have strained my admittedly paltry understanding for some time. They are not new questions, but could use answers. I agree in advance to accept his answers (if any be given) as canonical.

I’ll address the bold portion in order. Fred Reed is a fairly well known creationist crank. I’m not a regular reader, but I have seen him referenced as a creationist crank many times. It is a hobby horse for him. I put “fred reed creationism” in a nearby Google machine and I get 6,900,000 results.

The “crank” label derives from the first bolded sentence. There are libraries full of books with all the “straight answers that do not shift. ” What he lacks the courage to say or the honesty to admit, is he does not understand or accept the science. Instead, he disingenuously shifts the burden for his ignorance from his shoulders onto others.

The second bold section is an outright lie that he surely knows is a lie. He knows John Derbyshire well enough to know his CV so he has been reading the guy for a while. John has been writing about these topics for a couple of decades, at least.If I were to guess, I’d bet John has written about evolution more than any other topic. A close second is education followed by race.

John spent years debating these guys about intelligent design, young earth creationism and Darwin. If Fred Reed has yet to “profit from John’s instruction” by this point, he never will. Again, this is just an oleaginous attempt to present himself as something other than an ideologue looking for an argument. I’ll also note that again he places the burden to educate him on others. Therefore, if he continues to clutch at his superstitions, it is the fault of others.

The last bit is an outright lie wrapped in a falsehood. His questions have all been answered thousands of times by thousands of people over the last century. He has rejected all of those attempts so there is no reason to believe this one last try by his chosen bogeyman will do the trick.

He knows all of this, but he lacks the honestly and integrity to simply say he prefers his own voodoo. I can respect people who prefer their religious explanations for the natural world. I disagree with them, but if they are sincere and honest about the why and the what, I have no quarrel with them. That’s not Fred Reed.

The rest of the very poorly written piece is a recitation of the same old complaints from the creationist crowd. Done up in the phony-baloney corn-pone style Fred has cultivated over the years makes for painful reading. The only worthwhile take away is he seems to have the boohoos over Derb saying something mean about him. In addition to being a ridiculous phony, Fred Reed is a pussy, it seems.

According to this story, the CIA has been illegally wiretapping the Senate.

he Central Intelligence Agency improperly and covertly hacked into computers used by Senate staffers to investigate the spy agency’s Bush-era interrogation practices, according to an internal investigation.

CIA Director John Brennan has determined that employees “acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding” brokered between the CIA and its Senate overseers, according to agency spokesman Dean Boyd.

The stunning admission follows a scathing, 40-minute speech Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein gave from the Senate floor back in March, in which she accused the CIA of covertly removing key documents from her panel’s computers during its review of the government’s torture, detention and rendition policies during the Bush presidency. The powerful California Democrat lacerated the CIA and charged them with possibly violating the Constitution.

Why was this announcement not accompanied by reports of CIA employees being led out in chains to be processed for trial? One of the greatest dangers to a self-governing republic is a rogue spy agency using confidential material against the people’s representatives. That’s why every sane country has laws prohibiting it. We also used to hang people for this sort of stuff, a practice we should consider bringing back, it seems.

This post has already been linked to 1060 times!

I’ve known a lot of Arabs in my life. I’m well disposed to the Lebanese, for example, because they seem rather sensible. Their country has been a playground for lunatics, but the indigenous population would be happy to make money from tourists and leave the troubles of the Arab world to others. Jordanians are similar. Their location means they are a convenient staging area for lunatics from Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. As a result, they hold a dim view of the rest of the Arab world.

I’ve known some Palestinians, all crazy, except one. I knew a guy I called One-Armed George. He lost his arm when as a kid he picked up a grenade. George came to America because he decided Palestinians were nuts and not worth the trouble. He told some wild stories about growing up in the camps. His descriptions of Gaza and the West Bank brought images of a country run by West Virginia rednecks, but jammed into a tiny urban space. Apartment bloick full of guy high on meth playing with guns and fireworks.

One of things you learn where getting to know Arabs is nothing is ever as it seems. There are always layers. Even a trip to the mall has depth. It is just a natural part of their culture and maybe even baked into their DNA. You also learn that in the Arab-Israeli conflict, there are no good guys or bad guys. It is just a bunch of people with complicated agendas for no reason other than tribal, cultural and ethnic loyalty. Even within these groups, there are agendas, vendettas and conspiracies. Arabs prove that economics is based on nonsense and the blank-slate crowd in our humanities departments are nuts.

It is why I am indifferent to it all. The Jews certainly have a right to defend their people and lands. In my view, they have a right to level Gaza, drive off the people and pave it. For all of human history this would have been the result long ago. From the dawn of time until the middle of last century, you dealt with troublesome states by killing as many of its people as possible. If you could kill all of them, you won.  Since that’s temporarily off the table, perpetual low-grade war will be the status quo.

For most of my life, I’ve been on the wrong side of most Americans who see the Israelis as the white hats and the Arabs as the black hats. Our rulers, particularly Republicans, have been cozy with the Arabs for their oil, but the average American is very pro-Israel. That’s understandable as they know very little of the place, but they know plenty of Jewish Americans so a natural sense of solidarity informs their opinion. Christians in America are particularly supportive of Israel.

It is not that I’m against Israel. In fact, I wish them the best. if I have to pick a side, I’m going with civilization. But, I’m largely indifferent to it all. I just don’t care very much.

What I find baffling is the anti-Israel insanity that seems to break out anytime this things flare up. This post by the normally sensible Peter Hitchens borders on unhinged. The opening few paragraphs read like the orderlies forgot to give him his meds.

Gaza continues to be the most pressing and violent issue on the planet. It has two interesting competitors for this position, in Tripoli and the area of Eastern Ukraine around Donyetsk, but most journalists simply dare not report from these places, even if they could get in, so we hear less.

And for the moment I feel I need to rebut or reply to readers’ opinions on the Gaza issue. This is frustrating, because so many of those comments are unresponsive and useless for debating purposes. Telling me I’m wrong in some general, unspecified way is useless.

Telling me that I know nothing without saying what precisely it is that I don’t know, since none of us is omniscient, and lack of knowledge is only important when it can be clearly shown and is relevant to the issue, is useless.

Gaza in not the most pressing issue anywhere other than Gaza. Even there, most of the locals quietly hope the Israelis kill every Hamas fighter and sympathizer. The surrounding Arabs are quietly helping Israel destroy this outpost of the Muslim Brotherhood. In fairness, Hitchens elsewhere makes clear he thinks the Palestinians are their own worst enemy. But, he has this bit in another post which I find strange.

My position, as a strong supporter of Israel in general, is that Israel’s action is wrong morally and gravely mistaken politically. Attacks from the air always kill innocents. It is no good pleading that you regret such deaths, when you knew perfectly well that your actions were bound to cause them. This was equally true of our own adventures in Iraq and Serbia, and is true of American bombing in Afghanistan. Israel’s moral position is seriously weakened by the deaths of these innocents, and also by the flanneling and evasion of its spokesmen over this.’

Attacks from the ground always kill innocents. War is a bloody business. That’s the point of it. Modern Western notions of warfare border on the insane for the reason they argue that war can be something other than bloody and monstrous. It pretends the innocent can be spared. It pretends there are innocents. Make no mistake. Hamas cannot exist without the support of the people in Gaza. History is full of example where people threw over their rulers in the middle of war and made peace with their attackers.

What I sense in Hitchens is a desire to be critical of Israel. It is as if he feels he has to show both sides an equal amount of empathy and an equal amount of enmity. I suspect he is succumbing to the pull of certain elements within the paleo-con world who have a hard-on for the Jews. Pat Buchanan, for example, has lost his marbles on the Jewish question. His personal war with Bill Kristol, I think, has led him down some blind alleys.

The Left has its own troubles in this regard. Anti-Semitism is on the rise in the hive. It has always been an element of the Rousseauist cults that have sprung up over the last 200 years. Marx was a fevered Jew hater, for example. Then we have you know who out there. In America, is has been a back burner issue, but it now springing forth again as the Holocaust fades into history. As a result, the J-Street – New Left fusion is becoming a force in American politics. Obama’s anti-Semitism being a primary example.

I’ve rambled on long enough. My general view is I simply don’t care what Israel does with Gaza and Hamas. Having dealt with Israelis and Palestinians, I can’t see how any sane person would pick the Palestinians. It’s Detroit without a proud past. If we wanted to solve the problem, we would move the population to Afghanistan where they would not be a nuisance. Perhaps drop them into Africa somewhere. That way the remaining Jews in the Middle East and Europe could have a place of their own. Everybody is happy.

Way back in the olden thymes, “post-modernism” was said to be the artistic expression of late capitalism. At least according to Frederic Jameson. I always thought a useful definition of post-modernism came from the great philosopher Moe Szyslak. He said it is “weird for the sake of being weird.” I’ve always liked that, when it comes to art. Contra Professor Jameson, with few exceptions, post-modern art is crap made by people with no real artistic talent. On the other hand, maybe that’s a telling indictment of the flickering lights of western civilization.

Anyway, I’ve come up with my own definition of post-modernism. It is when a society forgets all of the lessons about human nature handed down from the previous generations and then embarks on the process of re-learning them through painful trial and error. A good example of what I mean is right here in this story from the New York Times John Derbyshire has been flogging of late. It is the typical sob-story from a leftist rag about how men get away with being violent rapists and women are helpless victims.

She was 18 years old, a freshman, and had been on campus for just two weeks when one Saturday night last September her friends grew worried because she had been drinking and suddenly disappeared.

Around midnight, the missing girl texted a friend, saying she was frightened by a student she had met that evening. “Idk what to do,” she wrote. “I’m scared.” When she did not answer a call, the friend began searching for her.

In the early-morning hours on the campus of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in central New York, the friend said, he found her — bent over a pool table as a football player appeared to be sexually assaulting her from behind in a darkened dance hall with six or seven people watching and laughing. Some had their cellphones out, apparently taking pictures, he said.

Later, records show, a sexual-assault nurse offered this preliminary assessment: blunt force trauma within the last 24 hours indicating “intercourse with either multiple partners, multiple times or that the intercourse was very forceful.” The student said she could not recall the pool table encounter, but did remember being raped earlier in a fraternity-house bedroom.

The football player at the pool table had also been at the fraternity house — in both places with his pants down — but denied raping her, saying he was too tired after a football game to get an erection. Two other players, also accused of sexually assaulting the woman, denied the charge as well. Even so, tests later found sperm or semen in her vagina, in her rectum and on her underwear.

Later in the story, we get some additional background.

The fraternity houses, where so many parties occur, sit high above the lake. And it was at one fraternity, Kappa Sigma, where sometime between 9:30 and 10 p.m. on Sept. 7, Anna attended one of the year’s first big social events — a “highlighter party,” where students write on one another’s clothes with a marker that glows under black light.

Later there was dancing. Anna and a senior football player she had just met were grinding to the music, rubbing their bodies together.

With so many students packed together in the basement, it became hot, and the football player escorted Anna upstairs, where smaller groups congregated in students’ bedrooms. A friend tried to stop her, but she went anyway.

Anna said she had begun the evening drinking shots of rum mixed into Gatorade. She drank one beer at the dance, she said, and then the rest of an opened beer her dance partner had given her.

Around midnight, a fraternity member tried to enter his room, but found it locked. He opened the door with his key and caught a glimpse of what would become a pivotal episode in Anna’s case: The senior football player was naked, and Anna was sitting on a bed with her top off, covering her breasts. The visitor quickly left.

At this point, anyone who has trod this earth into adulthood knows what happened. A young girl got drunk and wound up pulling the train. John has this to say about the resulting rape investigation.

Is your sympathy for this young woman draining away as fast as mine is, listener?

Yep, you heard right: the young woman cried rape. The gist of the article is that she accused the original football player and two others of raping her, but the college didn’t discipline the guys.

On her video clip Anna says the following thing, quote: “When I came forward I felt so good because I was told that people had my back, they believed me, and the right thing would be done,” end quote. Let’s pass over in decent silence the bit about people having her back … What does she mean by “the right thing would be done”?

I don’t think there’s much doubt what she means. She means that she, Anna, should be fussed over and sympathised with as a victim, and that the guys who helped themselves to her incontinently drunk body should be expelled from campus, or better yet sent down for five to ten in the state penitentiary.

What a crock.

I’ve edited Derb’s comments for brevity, but I think I captured his intended meaning. I also largely agree with him. If you are a woman and choose to get blind drunk around a bunch of horny young males, you will probably wake up as a glazed donut. Similarly, if you don a meat suit and rush into a lion’s den, you will get mauled. This is something humans used to know. In fact, up until the 1960’s, it was so universally understood that it was common to separate boys and girls without adult supervision. Boys want sex and will do and say just about anything to get it. Girls are vulnerable and a bit gullible.

Again, we used to know these things.

That said, it is not just that we filled the heads of young women with feminist nonsense. We’ve done the same to males. Men were taught they had a moral obligation to protect the innocent. If you found a vulnerable women surrounded by predatory males, you had a duty to stop it. Today, you are told you should either join in or take pics of the gang bang and post them to your Instagram account.

The worst part of it all is this thoroughly insane idea that if it is not against the law it is permitted. Again, we have an example of this in this story. The girl and some of her friends, admit to behavior that the school should never tolerate. It is not illegal, but beneath the standards of this university. The adults running the school should know that if they turn a blind eye to their coeds getting blind drunk on weekends, this is the sort of thing that will happen. They should have expelled the women involved as a message to the rest.

Further, they boys holding the party, thinking they are young Bill Clintons, should all be expelled. The football players who appear to admit having sex with this girl should be gone. While they are not guilty of rape, they are guilty of being loathsome, despicable human filth. I’m a man who has been a lot places, seen a lot of things and done a lot of things. A guy willing to stick his dick in a passed out girl is of low character and you can never trust him. It is his nature. The men running this school should know it and throw the garbage out when they find it.

To post-modern ears, particularly those of the younger generations, this sounds like the grousing of an old man. Maybe so, but this is how we used to manage ourselves as people. Lesser people were the ones carrying on like animals. We knew that holding the line was the only way to develop young men of character and young women of virtue. Today, talking about character and virtue is a hate crime, meanwhile stupid young girls are being sodomized on pool tables at our colleges and universities.

Again, we used to know better.

This post has already been linked to 1503 times!

I’ve been a regular on MR for about a year. By “regular” I mean regular poster. It started posting mostly as a way to promote my blog, but I’ve had some entertaining times posting there. My activity was lessening as I think I squeezed most of the juice from that lemon. Anyone reading MR that would be interested in this blog has already stopped by here at least once. The number of hits here from links there has fallen to a pittance over the last couple of months.

Still, I was visiting and posting. I see today that I was banned. I have no idea why as I have not been taking part in any of the touchy subjects lately. But, I tried to post something in this thread and the post does not appear. I’m not curious enough to find out why so I’ll just leave it. I was planning to drop them from the rotation anyway since there’s so little traffic from that site now. Thinking about it, I notice a lot of others have been silent so maybe it is a new thing or a new grad student is running the site. Who knows?

I’ve been banned from better places!

This post has already been linked to 1327 times!

I was in the market on Sunday morning, doing my weekly supply run and I saw something striking. Behind the deli counter, I spied a Muslim woman in a hijab. That’s not such a big deal, but the staff is required to wear uniforms. She was in what looked like a khimar. Not being an expert on Muslim clothing styles, I’m relying on the Interwebs to provide the specifics. The grocery chain, at this point anyway, does not have uniforms that meet Muslim standards so they let her wear her own.

What was striking is she was glaring at a group of customers. I mean eyes blazing full-on furious stink-eye. It was so obvious, I stopped and followed the invisible plane of her eye-lasers to their target. It was a group of Jews. I knew they were Jews because of their outfits. They were in the plain black kit of the Orthodox. We have a sizeable cluster of Lubavitchers near where I live. As best I could tell, they were just minding their own business looking at the salmon.

I stood there watching this for a few minutes, thinking maybe there was a clash of cultures about to happen at the deli counter. I was not alone. A couple next to me was seeing the same thing and probably thinking the same thing. The Jews finally went up to the deli counter and the Muslim woman just stood there glaring at them. I could not tell if they noticed here. Plus, this sect tends to be in a fog most of the time anyway.

They stood there for a few minutes and the Muslim woman just stood there. Some other customer walked up and she waited on them, but still stealing glares at the Jews. This went on until someone else waited on the Jews and they moved on. The other employees certainly noticed the Muslim glaring at the Jews and they surely are aware of the world enough to figure out what was happening. Her supervisor certainly has noticed this behavior if casual customers noticed it.

I’m old enough to remember when even the mild-anti-Semite would check himself and say that the Jews deserves sympathy for what they have experienced. You never hear that anymore. I suspect that the Holocaust has finally moved into the mists of time. In fact, it seems to be fashionable to be anti-Semitic in certain circles and I don’t just mean the comment section of Taki. Hostility toward Jews and Israel seems to be rising.

I think the indifference of the market employees to one of their coworkers bigotry is understandable. They don’t need the hassle. If there’s no brownie points in pointing out the Jew-hater, they are not going to bother noticing. I certainly could have said something, but I did not. The other customers did not say anything. We just shrugged and went about our business. No harm, no foul, at least for now anyway.

Stories like this from the provinces suggest the Jews are on the wrong side of the culture war roiling in the western world. Europe has imported millions of Muslims who are bringing back the old fashioned Jew hating of a century ago. Our own government is trolling the Muslim countries, using what’s called the diversity lottery, to import Muslims into America. As has been the case with Europe, importing millions of Jew-hating Muslims will have consequences, at least for the Jews in America.

What I find striking and what was on my mind at the market, is the fact Jews don’t fight back against this. If a white guy with a mullet was caught glaring at some black customers like that, the blacks would have attacked him. His co-workers would have reported him and his superiors would have fired him. Anthony Cumia was attacked and then fired for complaining about it. He was not doing anything wrong other than walking while white in Times Square.

In modern America, Jews are the most successful minority group by miles. Jews make up 30% of the Forbes 400, despite being just 3% of the population. Jews dominate academia, the media, entertainment and government. You would think they would be pushing hard to limit immigration from lands full of people dedicated to killing Jews. But, Jews are the biggest supporters of unlimited open immigration.

It is the Jewish question I find most puzzling.

This post has already been linked to 1171 times!

For years, the assertion from the plutocrats that we needed more cheap STEM labor went unchallenged. Both political parties gushed about how wonderful it is to bring in scads of foreigners to work in technology. They would trot out the old canards about how foreigners founded most of the new businesses and invented everything. The truly strange part of this romantic narrative is how no one ever considered the implications. That is, the natives are too stupid and lazy tod o these jobs.

It was always nonsense. There never has been a shortage of STEM workers. Certain segments in certain areas will experience shortages and overages. That’s how markets work. labor sloshes around chasing demand and wages eventually reach equilibrium. Importing vast numbers of new labor is the economic equivalent of price fixing, which is what makes libertarians just another type of central planner. They love free markets until those markets result in things they don’t like or want.

Anyway, this being posted on a mainstream news site looks like a big change to me. The anti-immigration sentiment is growing and the pop culture chattering skulls are trying to get in on it.

Business executives and politicians endlessly complain that there is a “shortage” of qualified Americans and that the U.S. must admit more high-skilled guest workers to fill jobs in STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math. This claim is echoed by everyone from President Obama and Rupert Murdoch to Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.

Yet within the past month, two odd things occurred: Census reported that only one in four STEM degree holders is in a STEM job, and Microsoft announced plans to downsize its workforce by 18,000 jobs. Even so, the House is considering legislation that, like the Senate immigration bill before it, would increase to unprecedented levels the supply of high-skill guest workers and automatic green cards to foreign STEM students.

As longtime researchers of the STEM workforce and immigration who have separately done in-depth analyses on these issues, and having no self-interest in the outcomes of the legislative debate, we feel compelled to report that none of us has been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry’s assertions of labor shortages.

Stagnant wages

If a shortage did exist, wages would be rising as companies tried to attract scarce workers. Instead, legislation that expanded visas for IT personnel during the 1990s has kept average wages flat over the past 16 years. Indeed, guest workers have become the predominant source of new hires in these fields.

Those supporting even greater expansion seem to have forgotten about the hundreds of thousands of American high-tech workers who are being shortchanged — by wages stuck at 1998 levels, by diminished career prospects and by repeated rounds of layoffs.

The facts are that, excluding advocacy studies by those with industry funding, there is a remarkable concurrence among a wide range of researchers that there is an ample supply of American workers (native and immigrant, citizen and permanent resident) who are willing and qualified to fill the high-skill jobs in this country. The only real disagreement is whether supply is two or three times larger than the demand.

Unfortunately, companies are exploiting the large existing flow of guest workers to deny American workers access to STEM careers and the middle-class security that should come with them. Imagine, then, how many more Americans would be frozen out of the middle class if politicians and tech moguls succeeded in doubling or tripling the flow of guest workers into STEM occupations.

Redundant reforms

Another major, yet often overlooked, provision in the pending legislation would grant automatic green cards to any foreign student who earns a graduate degree in a STEM field, based on assertions that foreign graduates of U.S. universities are routinely being forced to leave. Such claims are incompatible with the evidence that such graduates have many paths to stay and work, and indeed the “stay rates” for visiting international students are very high and have shown no sign of decline. The most recent study finds that 92% of Chinese Ph.D. students stay in the U.S. to work after graduation.

The tech industry’s promotion of expanded temporary visas (such as the H-1B) and green cards is driven by its desire for cheap, young and immobile labor. It is well documented that loopholes enable firms to legally pay H-1Bs below their market value and to continue the widespread age discrimination acknowledged by many in the tech industry.

When considering the credibility of the industry’s repetitive claims of “shortages,” it is worth recalling its history of misbehavior in hiring and employment. The most recent example was the proposed $300 million legal settlement of a class action against companies such as Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe for anti-competitive collusion to suppress the pay of highly skilled employees, including unlawful agreements to not recruit each others’ workers.

IT industry leaders have spent lavishly on lobbying to promote their STEM shortage claims among legislators. The only problem is that the evidence contradicts their self-interested claims.

What we have today is a modern form of resource extraction. These big tech firms are not inventing anything or creating anything. Mostly, they are harvesting ideas at a discount and commoditizing them. They can do this because they have the backing of the state. Microsoft would have gone tits up a decade ago without their monopoly power. In fact, they never would have become a dominant firm without monopolistic tactics. Google is deeply in bed with governments around the world. They did build most of China’s electronic security apparatus, after all.

I have my doubts about where this is heading. It very well may be too late. By that I mean civil, lawful reform is no longer possible. If it is possible, the only way reform can happen is if the national question is the top priority of the voters. The fact that USA Today, a liberal scandal sheet, is getting in on the act is encouraging.

This post has already been linked to 1548 times!

This is an interesting story I saw on Drudge this morning.

Wikipedia has imposed a 10-day ban on all edits made anonymously from the House of Representatives IP address, for making what Wikipedia has characterized as “disruptive edits,” Ars Technica reports.

On the user talk page for the IP address, Wikipedia moderators explained that the cause for the ban came from abusive edits made to the Mediaite page after that website published an article on the @congressedits Twitter account that has been publicizing edits made from congressional IPs.

The offending edits characterized Mediaite as a “sexist transphobic” blog that “automatically assumes that someone is male without any evidence.”

The ban sparked a debate over the fairness of restricting the shared IP address over a few abusive users.

“Out of over 9000 staffers in the House, should we really be banning this whole IP range based on the actions of two or three? Some of us here are just making grammatical edits, adding information about birds in Omsk, or showing how one can patch KDE2 under FreeBSD,” a user posting from the House IP wrote.

First. lets start with that last bit. The job of a government employee never includes editing Wiki pages. The sense of entitlement from this person is grotesque. They think they have a right to screw off at work “adding information about birds in Omsk, or showing how one can patch KDE2 under FreeBSD” on Wikipedia. These people should be thankful they were not fired. Instead, they are outraged that they cannot screw off on the taxpayer’s dime.

The part that caught my attention is the neologism “transphobic” in the complaint.  Let’s go ahead and assume for a second that “trans” in this weird context means someone that likes to pretend to be of the other sex. The second part, “phobic” has a primary meaning of “strong fear.” Agoraphobia is the strong fear of open spaces. The second definition, one fairly new, is “strong dislike.”  Putting it all together, the new scare word now is “a dislike of people who pretend to be of the other sex.”

The thing about the hive minded is the intellectual base stealing that must go on in order for their internal rules and proselytizing to make any sense. Fear of people who think they are invisible or fear of people who think they can fly is a reasonable fear. Anyone who deeply believes things that are clearly untrue has a lot of mental problems. Thinking they could be a danger to themselves or others is reasonable. It is why we lock them up.

The crotch warrior wing of the Cult of Modern Liberalism, skips past the debate over “trans-sexualism” and declares it “normal” and natural, even though it is abnormal and at odds with biology. Therefore, anyone not embracing this is evil. The word “transphobic” becomes another word for bad. The list of words that mean “bad” or “outsider” in the CML is very long. I will one day do a post listing them, when I have a weekend to kill.

The more important point is just how narrow minded and intolerant the Cult is these days. Like Islam, the zone of acceptable thought and conduct is shrinking. In the Middle East, the Muslims blow up historic sites, while in the West Liberals deface your wikipedia page. Like all religious fanatics, our Progressives eleutherophbia. They live in fear that somewhere, someone is thinking and acting according to their own will.

This post has already been linked to 890 times!

The gun grabbers lost another one over the weekend. A Federal court overturned DC’s current ban on carrying a firearm outside the home. This was the city’s attempt to get around the Heller decision, which overturned their ban on gun ownership. The ban on carry outside the home was intended to make gun ownership pointless.

A federal judge in the District of Columbia on Saturday overturned the city’s total ban on residents being allowing to carry firearms outside their home in a landmark decision for gun-rights activists.

Judge Frederick Scullin Jr. wrote in his ruling in Palmer v. District of Columbia that the right to bear arms extends outside the home, therefore gun-control laws in the nation’s capital are “unconstitutional.”

“We won,” Alan Gura, the lead attorney for the Second Amendment Foundation, told Fox News in a phone interview. “I’m very pleased with the decision that the city can’t forbid the exercise of a fundamental constitutional right.”

Gura said he expects the District to appeal this decision but added, “We’ll be happy to keep the fight going.”

The decision leaves no gray area in gun-carrying rights.

Judge Scullin extensively referenced the Supreme Court decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010) to concluding “there is no longer any basis on which this court can conclude that the District of Columbia’s total ban on the public carrying of ready-to-use handguns outside the home is constitutional under any level of scrutiny.”

The court ordered the city to now allow residents from the District and other states to carry weapon within its boundaries.

Judge Scullin wrote that the court “enjoins Defendants from enforcing the home limitations of [D.C. firearms laws] unless and until such time as the District of Columbia adopts a licensing mechanism consistent with constitutional standards enabling people to exercise their Second Amendment right to bear arms.”

The defendants are the city government and Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier.

This case has dragged in the courts for five years. Gura has twice asked the federal appeals court to force Judge Scullin to issue a decision. The five plaintiffs filed in 2009, and the case was argued twice, most recently in Oct. 2012.

The city will appeal, but they have no chance to win on a total carry ban. They also open up the door for the court to rule that the right to carry is a protected right and subject to strict scrutiny by the court. There is a school of thought that if such a case were to make it to the Supreme Court, they would effectively overturn all bans on concealed carry in the country. The result would be shall issue everywhere.

I’m not sure about that as this court is timid and frightened to do anything that may upset the ruling liberals. The more likely result would be the court simply invalidating these bans as they arise. That leaves liberal states to keep their web of gun laws designed to harass middle class suburbanites, while pretending to care about the blacks who commit all of the murders.

That’s what makes the Left’s lust for gun grabbing puzzling at first. It is a loser politically and legally. The Left is far more pragmatic about the acquisition of political power than the Right. They take the long view and they are willing to accept one click on the ratchet and then fall back in defense. It is why America has steadily moved left over the last century. One side plays the long game while the other plays with itself.

There’s nothing to be gained and everything to lose with gun control. Liberals like Bill Clinton avoided the gun issue, knowing it was a loser with no upside. I think what’s going on here is it is part signaling, part culture war and part self-deception. The first part is easy. The people rushing around vowing to keep fighting for gun control are engaging in public acts of piety. The good Progressive shows he is a good Progressive by flagellating himself in public over guns. Usually, they do it while standing over a corpse.

Then there is the culture war angle. Guns are southern, white and working class, three things the Left loathes more than anything. Guns are sold at Walmart. Guns are owned by men with beards who wear camo and watch Duck Dynasty. That would be beards that are not intended to be ironic and have nothing to do with closeted homosexuals. Guns are owned by people who attend Christian services and listen to country music.

I suspect what keeps the Left going to the well these days is the last bit. It is the self-deception. No matter how hard they try to pretend otherwise, the Left has been in charged for at least three generations now. They have held complete control of our major cities. Yet, the lives of black people are worse today than under Job Crow, at least in the urban war zones. West Baltimore makes Gaza look nice. The Badlands of Philly kills more black men in a week than the KKK killed in its history.

For the same reason the left never mentions Marx or socialism anymore, they obsess over suburbanites owning guns. The failure is too painful and discomforting. By pretending the problem is not the grotesque and reckless management of our cities by the Left and is instead the fault of the bubbas in the burbs, the Left can avoid answering for their crimes.

It is a classic case of shifting the focus. It is why they are fanatics about it. If we’re not talking about guns, then we’re talking about the urban reservations the Left created to hold the blacks.

This post has already been linked to 890 times!