Read it.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Read it.

Read it.

An excellent illustration of why I wouldn’t be happy working at Google, or Microsoft, or any company run by people whose idea of a good time is worrying about questions that have no significance.

The correct answer to most of these is “Who gives a shit?”

Read it.

Read it.

Evening out the fluctuations in most natural energy systems has always been the roadblock to making them useful. This may help.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

Paging Indiana Jones….

Read it.

How about we remember him as Just Another Tinseltown Socialist?

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Fine Religion of Peace you’ve got there, fella.

Read it.

Islam has no objection to slavery. Think about that one for a while.

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And once more a “progressive” is bitten by the Law of Unintended Consequences.

You’d think they’d learn.

Read it.

And anybody who listens to Christopher Hitchens knows that the inverse is also true.

Read it.

And yet they were all over the Wilsons telling John McCain not to use their song.

Agenda? What agenda?

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Republican Newt Gingrich: “You have an administration which, in my judgment, has lost its mind.” And I agree wholeheartedly.

President Bush is so worried about his legacy – he is so afraid of being looked at as Herbert Hoover – that he is doing the very things that Hoover did: Intervene, intervene, intervene. He should do what Ronald Reagan did in 1981 and 1982 and 1987: Let the market play it out.

And that says all that really needs to be said on the subject.

Read it.

Of course, you didn’t have anything else to do today….

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Like IKEA, a giant Swedish furniture-maker, Kunskapsskolan gets its customers to do much of the work themselves. The vital tool, though, is not an Allen key but the Kunskapsporten (“Knowledge Portal”), a website containing the entire syllabus. Youngsters spend 15 minutes each week with a tutor, reviewing the past week’s progress and agreeing on goals and a timetable for the next one. This will include classes and lectures, but also a great deal of independent or small-group study. The Kunskapsporten allows each student to work at his own level, and spend less or more time on each subject, depending on his strengths and weakness. Each subject is divided into 35 steps. Students who reach step 25 graduate with a pass; those who make it to step 30 or 35 gain, respectively, a merit or distinction.

Takes vouchers to the next level.

If even socialist Sweden can recover this far, I guess there’s hope for the rest of mankind.

On the other hand, of course, Sweden doesn’t have the Identity Politics problems that the U.S. does, so maybe not.

Know your enemy.

You don’t know enough about the Koran. This will help.

Read it.

Lileks points out that even banks need adult supervision.

WaMu is a whale name. If you read about J.P. Morgan rescuing WaMu, you imagine a whiskered old plutocrat in a frock coat pushing a gasping mammal back into the tank. (Which is what happened, more or less.) Personally, I think a bank should have First in the name, or National, and should look like a place where Romans sacrificed sheep to Zeus. Or to Ben Bernanke.

Peter Hitchens is always worth reading — not always right, but always worth reading.

Read it.

It wouldn’t have been nice.

Read it.

Read it.

Your future under Islam. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Read it.

“They may have to, in the end, tolerate some of this. Because in the end, you have the Democrats desperate for socialism now. You have an administration which, in my judgment, has lost its mind. That gives you two big elements. And you have Senate Republicans desperate to go along. I’m just being truly candid. Because I think the country ought to know what the pressures really are like.

Read it.

The Chinese haven’t invented anything in 3,000 years, but they can copy like nobody else on Earth.

Bruce Bartlett, whom I respect a great deal, makes the case for a bailout.

The basic problem is that the financial sector faces systemic risk in a way that no other industry does: By its nature, it is a house of cards that can collapse at a moment’s notice.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Oh, yeah, G.E. is going to jump right on that one. Sure thing.

Read it.

Read it.

Watch it.

Arnold Kling explains it all to you.

Even better than the distributed knowledge of professors is the distributed knowledge of markets. It is not just efficiency at issue. There is a fundamental moral issue. If my broker gives me bad market advice, I don’t have to take it. (Actually, I have never taken advice from a broker, and I never will.) But if Henry Paulson thinks that there is a profit opportunity in risky mortgage securities, I have no choice but to invest. Moreover, even though I think that Barney Frank’s affordable housing loans are bad for borrowers, bad for lenders and bad for the country, I am coerced into funding those loans.

Read it.

Frisco, Allen and McKinney each have spots picked out for future rail stations.

But none of the cities know if rail lines will ever actually reach them, or how to pay for it if they do.

Your tax dollars at work. I wonder whether the inhabitants of Frisco, Allen, or McKinney are ever embarrassed to have voted for these clowns?

Advocates for rail line expansion stepped in Friday to offer some answers, urging the three cities’ political and business leaders to support fast-tracking rail line expansions and establishing a revenue system to pay the $9 billion price tag.

No extra charge for the tail fins and the really kick-ass stereo system.

Read it.

And why not? This is America. That’s what we do.

Read it.

Girls just wanna have fun….

Read it.

Read it.

Who would have thought that there was so much hardship in Nebraska?

When Nebraska lawmakers passed a unique “safe-haven” law that allowed parents to abandon children as old as 18, they never seriously thought such dropoffs would become common.

Well, lawmakers don’t seem to have a great record when it comes to predicting what the results of their actions will be. You would think that they would learn, therefore, not to undertake these broad, sweeping changes. But you would be wrong.

Read it.

Read it.

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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You really can’t make this stuff up.

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“[R]acism against our minority student athletes … underlies much of the opposition to our student athlete high performance center,” declared UC Berkeley Chancel-lor Robert Birgeneau in a letter sent to two major donors to the school.

Now that’s comedy.

Jonah Goldberg takes a look at the new, barefaced New York Times.

It is not a pretty sight.

Read it.

From the people who brought you Barack Obama:

Sources tell CBS 2 News Chicago that Federal agents claim to have enough evidence to indict Blagojevich on fraud and conspiracy charges.

Read it.

Russia sends a nuclear warship and other vessels to the Caribbean for exercises with an avowed enemy of the U.S., along with strategic nuclear bombers: you would think this would be news. But with few exceptions, our newspapers haven’t mentioned it, and no American news outlet, to my knowledge, has given it any prominence, unlike the London Times. This is due, presumably, to a belief on the part of American reporters and editors that knowledge of Russian “gangland diplomacy” in our back yard might give voters qualms about voting for an indecisive novice like Barack Obama for President.

Oh, ya think?

David Brooks makes an amazing discovery.

Christopher Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics: “The joyous reception from Congressional Democrats to Paulson’s latest massive bailout proposal smells an awful lot like yet another corporatist love fest between Washington’s one-party government and the Sell Side investment banks.”

If you wanted to devise a name for this approach, you might pick the phrase economist Arnold Kling has used: Progressive Corporatism. We’re not entering a phase in which government stands back and lets the chips fall. We’re not entering an era when the government pounds the powerful on behalf of the people. We’re entering an era of the educated establishment, in which government acts to create a stable — and often oligarchic — framework for capitalist endeavor.

The term “liberal fascism” comes immediately to mind.

Read it.

Executive summary: Bailout bad.

Read it.

The coronets and initials represent Viscount Nelson (his British title) and Duke of Bronté (his Sicilian title).

Read it.

My, what a surprise.

The Regional Transportation Council wants North Texas communities to present a united front on rail funding options during next year’s legislative session.

Oh, I don’t doubt it.

McKinney, Frisco and Allen do not participate in DART.

That sure sounds like a united front to me. Of course, by “united front” they mean “line up and bend over”.

About 200 elected officials and business leaders attended the meeting sponsored by the three cities’ chambers of commerce.

All of whom would have their power enhanced and their pockets lined by a sales-taxpayer subsidized rail line. Note the absence of the people who are going to pay the sales tax, whether or not they take the train, so that the yuppies can pay a fare that represents at best half the actual cost of their transportation.