Stanford political scientist Neil Malhotra and Columbia University’s Yotam Margalit recently conducted a study intended in part to “determine how anti-Semitic sentiments might relate to the ongoing financial crisis.” They asked respondents “How much to blame were the Jews for the financial crisis?” 24.6 percent of non-Jewish Americans “blamed ‘the Jews’ a moderate amount or more, and 38.4 percent attributed at least some level of blame to the group.”
Oh, those racist Tea par….

Interestingly, Democrats were especially prone to blaming Jews: while 32 percent of Democrats accorded at least moderate blame, only 18.4 percent of Republicans did so (a statistically significant difference). This difference is somewhat surprising given the presumed higher degree of racial tolerance among liberals and the fact that Jews are a central part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition.

On a related note, Democrats were found to be “less likely than Republicans to assign moderate or greater blame” on “individuals who took out loans and mortgages they could not afford.”

Like Hungry Wolves:

The unambiguous message from top executives of BP rivals Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell: It’s not drilling on the outer reaches of the continental shelf that’s a problem; it’s BP.
[…]
“We would not have drilled the well the way they did,” Exxon chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson bluntly told members of the House subcommittee.
For example, Exxon would have used a different cement to build the well casing, designed the well differently and responded more aggressively to early signs of trouble, Mr. Tillerson said.
He pointed out that 14,000 deepwater wells have been drilled around the world, with few problems until now.
“It’s not a well that we would have drilled,” echoed Shell Oil president Marvin Odum.

… and then there’s losing your bedrock.
But wait, there’s more; the Doctor gives his diagnosis.
… followed by a delicious rant; something about a trifecta of morons.

A cautionary tale of badly-misfiring fake outrage.
In a post at Media Matters titled “Why does the Los Angeles Times hate Obama?”, Eric Boehlert writes “Some conservatives suffer from such an acute case of Obama Derangement Syndrome that they can’t even debate the issues of the day with out resorting to childish name-calling.” The descriptions which offended Boehlert, published in the blog posts of one of the Times‘ writers, included “ex-state senator” and “the nation’s top talker.” After asking “Why does one of the largest newspapers in the country allow its political writer to routinely disrespect the president in a casually insulting way?” Boehlert proceeded to, as Matt Welch aptly puts it, “duct-tape this ‘please kick me’ sign onto his rumpus”:

And I don’t even have to do a Google search to know for a fact that when President Bush was in office, there was nobody on staff at the Times, and certainly nobody writing off the opinion pages, who was allowed to so casually insult the office of the presidency on a regular basis.

Whoops. Enter Matt Welch:

As the Internet kidz like to say, let me Google that for you. There you’ll see a Bush-era L.A. Times columnist – one of the most consistently popular among the paper’s stable at the time – who used these phrases to describe (Bush)…”

The listed descriptions include “distracted and incompetent,” “homegrown authoritarian,” and “Torturer-in-Chief.” The columnist in question, Rosa Brooks (who now works in the Obama Pentagon) also said that Bush enabled “the so-called Big Lie theory of political propaganda, articulated most infamously by Adolf Hitler,” and that America was “already well on the way” to having a “Latin American-style military junta.”
Things get even more embarrassing for the non-Googling Eric “I-know-for-a-fact” Boehlert: it appears that he personally cross-posted one of his own L.A. Times columns to a site called “The Smirking Chimp.” Boehlert, for his part, denies it, but Patterico went to the trouble – and it took some – to set up his own account there to see whether someone else could have posted it. The results don’t look good for Boehlert – judge for yourself.
h/t TheoSpark.net

Terry Glavin of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee
… tells us that we are uniquely trusted.
CLICK

My heart sank when I saw this … because there’s no way that I know of for home-gamers to short this sucker’s bet:

Carbon dioxide permits in the U.S. Northeast’s cap-and-trade program tumbled to a record low price at auction amid a surplus of the pollution rights and doubts that Congress will create a national emissions market this year.
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative sold 40.7 million permits for $1.88 each, 19 cents lower than the last auction held in March and 2 cents above the minimum allowable bid, the cap-and-trade program said on its website today. Each permit in the carbon trading program for power plants from Maryland to Maine represents one ton of carbon dioxide.
Those permits come from the regional carbon trading program’s first phase, or “control period,” from 2009 to 2011. This week’s auction, held June 9 with the results withheld until today, also offered 2.14 million permits from the 2012-to-2014 control period. They went for $1.86.
“Prices are a lot lower than expected,” Tim Cheung, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance in New York, said in a telephone interview. “Demand for power hasn’t increased with the economic recovery and that means there’s an oversupply of permits in the market.”

Brian Lilley:

“You’ll have to forgive me for not being over the moon at news that the Red Cross is training Taliban fighters in proper first aid and supplying them with kits.”

Hey, anything that keeps our enemies alive so they can get back on the battlefield:

“In the worldly eyes of the Red Cross there is nothing wrong with what they are doing, comparing training sessions for the Taliban to giving treatment to the wounded. That’s what comes from spending too much time in the finer salons of the world. There is a great deal of difference though between saving the life of someone who has been wounded in battle and training, as well as equipping, one side of that battle.”

“Can you imagine the Red Cross training the Irish Republican Army back in the 1970s and sending them off to the streets of Belfast with little first aid kits?…”

I couldn’t have imagined it back then, but times have changed.

Peter Singer, writing in the New York Times: “Is a world with people in it better than one without? Put aside what we do to other species — that’s a different issue. Let’s assume that the choice is between a world like ours and one with no sentient beings in it at all….No one’s rights will be violated — at least, not the rights of any existing people. Can non-existent people have a right to come into existence?”
Jim Jones, speaking in Jonestown, Guyana: “It’s been done by every tribe in history, every tribe facing annihilation. All the Indians in the Amazon are doing it right now. They refuse to bring any babies into the world. They kill every child that comes into the world, because they don’t want to live in this kind of a world.”
Peter Singer: “Few of us would think it right to inflict severe suffering on an innocent child, even if that were the only way in which we could bring many other children into the world. Yet everyone will suffer to some extent, and if our species continues to reproduce, we can be sure that some future children will suffer severely.”
Jim Jones: “I don’t think it is what we want to do with our babies. I don’t think that’s what we had in mind to do with our babies. It was said by the greatest of prophets, from time immemorial, ‘No man takes my life from me, I lay my life down.'”
Peter Singer: “Even if we take a less pessimistic view of human existence than Benatar, we could still defend it, because it makes us better off — for one thing, we can get rid of all that guilt about what we are doing to future generations — and it doesn’t make anyone worse off, because there won’t be anyone else to be worse off…”
Jim Jones: “So my opinion is that we (must) be kind to children and be kind to seniors and take the potion like they used to in ancient Greece, and step over quietly because we are not committing suicide. It’s a revolutionary act…”
Peter Singer: “Is life worth living? Are the interests of a future child a reason for bringing that child into existence? And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent future human beings?”
Jim Jones: “There’s no use, Christine, it’s just not worth living like this … not worth living like this…We had, we had some value…but now we don’t have any value…I’m tired of being tormented to hell, that’s what I’m tired of…”

… baloney:

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.
“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”

ht

… I suppose it’s better than pursuing the alchemy route.

Aside from the price per square foot calculation, the thing that we like best about the listing is that it is for sale by owner.

Hopeful:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
[…]
“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”
The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion.