Read it.

Read it.

One month before Schwarzenegger took office in November 2003, just eight state employees earned more than $200,000 a year working in the core state government, which excludes universities and the Legislature. In April of this year, there were nearly a thousand, according to records.

Oh, I wish I were a government employee,

That is what I’d truly like to beeeeeeee;

‘Cause if I were a government employee,

Everyone would be afraid of meeeeee.

Freeman Dyson doesn’t approve.

Read it.

Read it.

If anybody can do it, it would be the Japanese.

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Those weird shades look like cobras.

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“Well, damn the French.” — John Cleese

Read it.

Ah! I knew that something was occupying their time other than investigating Arab terrorism.

Gives a whole new meaning to the term “peacekeeper”, doesn’t it?

Note that the nationality of the “peacekeepers” involved isn’t identified, which means that they weren’t Europeans. Had they been Europeans, of course, they’d have been identified immediately.

Read it.

Funny how the U.N. never seems to get around to investigating the myriad occasions on which “Palestinians” in Gaza kill Israelis.

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I guess they do think that California is a different country and not part of America at all.

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A very good question.

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If you are not familiar with the al Durah incident, you need to be.

Richard Landes has invented a new word, “Pallywood”, to describe the tactical practices they employ, the staging of news events, intimidation and manipulation of foreign journalists and the infiltration of the western mainstream media by local “stingers” (many of whom are nothing more than operatives of the palestinian propaganda ministries) This “weaponization” of our media can no longer be denied.

Read it.

Read it.

Kick a pacifist for Memorial Day.

It’s not as if they would do anything about it.

Except maybe whine.

Read it.

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Seems reasonable to me.

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French police have so far made no attempt to quell the protest, according to the trapped sailors.

And that’s the key to the whole situation. How would French police react if, say, the British people trapped started fighting back? Jail time galore, I suspect.

The first function of government is to keep the peace. When the peace is not kept, then there is no government, no matter how many fools parade around in uniforms.

Read it.

But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system — or even a fraction of these things — in the future. We have to make other arrangements.

In typical dhimmi fashion, Kunstler’s preferred solution is for us to suffer.

First, we’ll have to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life. We’ll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to the center of economic life. We’ll have to restore local economic networks — the very networks that the big-box stores systematically destroyed — made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers.

We’ll also have to occupy the landscape differently, in traditional towns, villages and small cities. Our giant metroplexes are not going to make it, and the successful places will be ones that encourage local farming.

Although he would no doubt resent the comparison, how does this differ from listening to Pat Buchannan?

I have an idea: Let’s do whatever it takes to get oil at an affordable price. If that means inconveniencing people who, before civilization intruded on them, measured their wealth in camels and goats, too bad for them.

Arnold Kling attempts to promote an intellectual cage match.

Read it.

Since the 1960s, humanities and social science faculties have been the last redoubt of the Left, whether in its Marxist totalitarian or post-modernist, multicultural incarnations. Academics have been allowed to have their way in imposing a stifling political correctness.

Mary Lefkowitz is a retired classicist who until recently taught at Wellesley College, a women’s liberal arts college in Massachusetts. Her troubles involved an Afro-Caribbean colleague called Anthony Martin from the Africana Studies department. By all accounts, he had done much to advance the careers of young black women under his tutelage.

One evening in October 1991, Martin was part of a group reading Twelfth Night in a college hall. He wanted to pee. On his re-ascent from the men’s room, Professor Martin was stopped by a student dorm officer, one Michelle Plantec, who had been trained to ask all non-resident visitors: ‘Excuse me, sir, who are you with?’ This seemingly straightforward challenge, evidently heavy with undertones that Martin was similarly attuned to spot, prompted the professor to respond by screaming at Plantec that she was ‘a f—ing bitch, a racist and a bigot’.

Read it.

I’ve never understood the attraction of cars with doors that swing up. Do they anticipate parking in extremely narrow spaces? Imagine the complexity — the NEEDLESS complexity — of the hinge.

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I think the lesson here is, don’t go surfing off the Mexico coast.

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Boy, that’s going to piss off the Greenpeace crowd.

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

Victor Davis Hanson has some ideas.

Cringely is always worth reading.

Most of the problems of IT start and end with bad management. I speak fairly often to technical audiences and one question I like to ask is simple: If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, could your boss do your job?

The answer is almost always “no.” By “almost always” I mean 97-99 percent of the time.

Think back on all the stories you’ve read about strikes at manufacturing firms where “essential functions are being performed by managers”. How many companies could do that if their IT staff walked out?

David Friedman does a job that American bureaucrats won’t do.

It is worth noting that the only justification offered by the CPS for seizing male children was that they were being brought up to be child abusers—which is to say, being brought up in their parents’ religion. It sounds from some news stories as though the implicit deal being offered to parents was that if they would accept suitable psychological counseling, they would eventually get their children back. Combine those two and it looks as though the idea was to force people to renounce their religion, holding their children hostage until they did.

Your tax dollars at work.

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“The nation is dividing into two classes of workers: those who have government benefits and those who don’t,” USA Today noted in 2007. “The gap is accelerating in every way — pensions, medical benefits, retirement ages.” According to the Congressional Research Service, the pension collected by the average private-sector retiree is worth less than half of what a typical government retiree can expect. If you don’t have your snout in the government trough, you can expect to work ever-longer hours and pay ever-higher taxes and fees to support those who do.

Read it.

I’m curious as to why the ACLU is involved in this issue. It would appear to be somewhat far afield from their core business of making sure that American life sucks.

Read it.

The latest examples of the “pacifascists” among us would be those that raised the howl last week demanding that the US Armed Forces supply Burma’s suffering millions with aid even if they had to go in at the point of a gun with massive air cover.

It has texture, and scope.

Read it.

Read it.

A bit of Inside Grammar for those of us who care — and you know who you are.

Read it.

Slate magazine is cementing its position as home of the left-wing intellectual whore.

Why delegitimize sincere excitement that his nomination and potential election would represent a historic civil rights landmark: making an abstract right a reality at last.

Well, to start off with, this isn’t an election for Homecoming Queen, it’s supposed to be choosing the leader of the nation and the free world. There are people who think that merely being black isn’t a sufficient qualification for that. Pardon me if this comes as a shock.

Read it.

It is always soul-satisfying to have some external object that rationalizes what we would otherwise have to admit are merely character flaws. Hence the Guardian, noted socialist rag, is an appropriate venue for this article — after all, that’s what socialists do best.

The truth is that programming improves the quality of reflective thought, because it requires attention to detail — you can’t just say “whatever” and have code work. The same goes for ideas, although the feedback is less immediate: If a professor or a pundit were confronted with a Blue Screen of Death every time he said something stupid, the world would be a better place.

As Francis Crawford of Lymond famously said, “You must carry polish and precision into everything you do.”

Read it.

What the air force is really worried about is not getting chastised by the boss, but being put out of a job by new technology. The UAVs take away the original job for the air force, air reconnaissance. Now smart bombs have made it so easy to deliver accurate firepower to the ground troops that even the new army Predator can drop them.

And, indeed, this points up the absurdity of having a separate Air Force. In the Industrial Age environment of massed air fleets this might have been justified, but the modern “retail” nature of the battlefront merely underscores its obsolescence. The Navy and Marine Corps provide excellent models for integrating air assets into the overall force structure; time to turn the Air Force back into the Army Air Corps where it belongs.

Read it.

Read it.

Eugene Robinson is a Negro, so he ought to know, right?

(So far as I can tell, that’s his only qualification for writing in the Washington Post, so it has to be worth something, right?)

Some commentators have speculated that she wants to have the votes counted simply so that she can semi-plausibly claim to have had more popular support than Obama, a distinction that would serve her well if she ran again in four or eight years. I say dream on; the Clintons don’t do moral victories.

Hmm. He may have something there….

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

A lot of ethnic struggles aren’t driven so much by mass hatred as by thugs, most of them young, who get into scrapes with the other side. In the meritocratic uplands, it all seems irrelevant. But down in the lowlands, where social ties are less determined by having unusually high IQs or particular talent, but by blood and neighborliness, the young thugs are nephews and cousins and neighbors’ nephews and cousins. While they may be sons of bitches, they’re our sons of bitches.

Read it.

That will be good news, if only because it will shut up the alternative-energy fruitcakes.

Read it.

The whole concept of “intellectual property” needs to be re-thought.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

Well, stay out of that row.

Read it.

Read it.

They couldn’t do any worse than the dorks that do the uniforms for the American military.

Read it.

Bet on Phalanx.

Megan McArdle looks at inflation.

Read it.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I wasn’t, being one of the few people in the country who know the correct answer to that question.

Read it.

A brief hiatus from bitching. Enjoy it while it lasts.