Read it.

I’m waiting for Tom Cruise to come out as a lesbian too.

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Given the choice, I know which one I’d pick.

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More on the Egyptian pig situation.

Mark Steyn is inimitable.

Having proposed renaming swine/Mexican flu “undocumented flu” only the other day, I failed to notice that it’s now been re-designated as “H1N1 flu.”

It sounds oddly like a guestworker program, don’t you think? I may try it next time I come through the border post at Derby Line, Vermont: “I’m here on an H1N1 visa.” “Hey, great to have you. Welcome to America.”

By the way, many readers have said that, given Janet Napolitano’s view that the Canadian border is as great a threat as the Mexican one, we should call it “maple flu” or “beaver flu.” I’m in favor of “clubbed seal flu” myself.

Read it.

Let’s just hope it’s your mind rather than someone appointed by the government. These days, you can never tell.

Jerk those tears.

And what might GBL be?

GBL is a common solvent and reagent in chemistry and is used as an aroma compound, as a stain remover, as a superglue remover, as a paint stripper, and as a solvent in some wet aluminium electrolytic capacitors.

Doesn’t sound very inviting. So what was this paragon New Class Offspring doing taking it?

GBL is rapidly converted into GHB by lactonase enzymes found in the blood.

The hypnotic effect of GHB is enhanced by combination with alcohol. A 2003 rat study showed that GBL in combination with ethanol showed a potentiated hypnotic effect, as the sleep-timing measure was longer than both of the individual components combined.

So she wasn’t “taken by the drug GBL”, she was just another arrested adolescent trying to get high.

“I know she liked to party, she liked to drink, but she wasn’t a regular drug user or anything like that,” she said.

Of course not, Mom. And you would know, right?

Mrs Stewart, a founder of the Natural Health Advisory Service, takes comfort from the constant, loving messages of support coming from Hester’s friends. But she is still left with two questions that haunt her: Why was the drug legal? And how could her daughter have taken it?

It’s legal because the law presumes that people won’t be stupid and take it recreationally. (Of course, Mom will try to change that.) And her daughter took it because she was stupid. Even one lapse can produce a Darwin Award Nominee.

Read it.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California.

Read it.

Rail systems promoted by lovers of mass transit suffer from especially high rates of lying. What does this tell us about the most enthusiastic mass transit supporters?

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

In a significant blow to the Prime Minister’s already fragile authority, MPs voted for a motion calling for the scrapping of new immigration rules that would prevent many Gurkhas coming to live in the country they served.

With the backing of Labour rebels and the Conservative Party, a Liberal Democrat motion demanding the admission of all Gurkha veterans and their families was passed by 267 to 241.

In all, 27 Labour MPs voted with the Opposition, and dozens more abstained, defying orders to support the Government. One ministerial aide, Stephen Pound, resigned from the Government to vote with the rebels.

Honour is not dead in Britain.

Read it.

Probably just as well — it’s not as if they had, like, you know, teachers.

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What further sign of the End Times do we need?

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I thought Egypt was a Muslim country? What are they doing with pig herds?

Read it.

Well, that’s what you can do when you’re rich and famous.

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Not with McCain on the committee.

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Specter’s stunning announcement yesterday that he is rejoining the Democratic Party that he left 44 years ago roiled Washington – where the Dems and President Obama are now poised for a critical 60-vote Senate majority – and also shook the political landscape in Pennsylvania.

But the main beneficiary of the move is clear: Arlen Specter.

“This was out-and-out a political calculation,” said G. Terry Madonna, the political scientist and pollster from Franklin & Marshall College. “It’s pure politics. He can make the argument that the Republican Party was leaving him, but it was clear that victory [as a Republican] was problematic for him.”

Let’s see whether Pennsylvania wants to be represented by so corrupt a figure.

Read it.

The coordinator behind a children’s coloring book that was pulled from FEMA’s Web site last week is standing by her work — despite its controversial cover, which shows a child’s drawing of New York’s Twin Towers on fire with a plane flying toward them.

Some inconvenient truths won’t go quietly down the Memory Hole.

“The coloring book, which was put online in 2003, was removed last week and FEMA is currently reviewing all web content designed and posted by the previous administration,” Clark Stevens, FEMA’s press secretary, told FOXNews.com in a statement.

And of course it’s all political.

Kim Pressley-Herrick, who runs Coloring Away Pain, a Florida-based company that produces coloring books to help children deal with traumatic events, was shocked when she learned of “A Scary Thing Happened.”

“Oh gosh, that was on the front of a coloring book? As a parent, I don’t think children need to see that,” Pressley-Herrick said. “That’s an uplifting coloring book.”

Pressley-Herrick said her version of a terrorism-related coloring book for kids does not contain any burning buildings or planes targeting them, but rather features a young zebra named “Maddie” and her grandfather.

“It’s a softer approach,” she said. “There are absolutely no freaky scenes whatsoever. There are no burning buildings, absolutely not. There are ways of delivering messages to children on their level without being graphic.”

As a parent, you’re part of the conspiracy to make sure your children grow up weak and worthless, a group ready to be victims and little else.

Read it.

As has often been noted, jihad — violence against the infidel for the purpose of spreading Islam — is just one of the tactics used by Muslims to Islamize the infidel world. Various forms of “stealth jihad” supplement and support terrorism as a means of extending Islam’s reach.

Zakat, the religiously-mandated giving of alms, is one such supporting function. Islamic scripture and tradition require that charitable giving be used for the support of violent jihad, in addition to the more mundane eleemosynary functions.

It’s hard to fight this process. Who, after all, objects to charitable organizations?

Every time a Western prosecutor goes up against a Muslim “charity”, the deck is stacked against him due to our intuitive misconception of what an Islamic charitable organization must be like. Add to this the routine dissimulation of Muslims (which is also required by scripture and tradition), and you arrive at the toxic situation we face today: large amounts of money used to fund terrorism flow through the world’s banking systems in accounts maintained by Islamic “charities”.

Jim Manzi, with whom I ordinarily agree, discusses the topic du jour.

Any decent society needs to defend itself from armed aggression without becoming a society not worth defending. This is never simple to accomplish.

This is his basic premise, and it exposes the essence of the question: What is the definition of “a society not worth defending”?

The fact that it keeps being reinvented or rediscovered in various wars, and used repeatedly over time in these conflicts by troops that want to win, is excellent circumstantial evidence that it provides at least some tactical benefits.

This statement is, I think, beyond question. Given a technique the effectiveness of which is strongly supported by the available evidence, the burden of proof would appear to be on those who advocate not using it. The way he attempts to satisfy this burden is to look at the sort of regime with which this technique is popular.

Do you notice a pattern? These are either dictatorial regimes, or actions of basically democratic governments in arenas of imperial border occupation. For a democracy, waterboarding is a corruption of empire.

This is, of course, a variant on the “If Hitler liked it, it must be evil”, which is nonsense. War practices must be evaluated on their own merits, not on the basis of “guilt by association” — such would be an abdication of responsibility.

I stand with Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root and the United States military, and with a 100-year tradition of our nation, against the specific practice of waterboarding captured combatants as strategically ineffective and morally repugnant. It is beneath us; beneath our dignity, and beneath our enlightened self-interest.

This is akin to a Secretary of State refusing to look at radio traffic intercepts on the grounds that “gentlemen don’t read other people’s mail”. It is the sort of effete fastidiousness for which our current ruling class is notorious. The reductio ad absurdam of this approach is the soccer mom who refuses to be in the same building with a gun, no doubt on the theory that she might get gun cooties. Such people are a Darwin Award walking.

Read it.

The establishment media is saying almost nothing about the man who co-founded Earth Day, and who also happens to be in jail for life for murder. Arlen Specter’s involvement with the Ira Einhorn case is an important event in the party-switching Senator’s career that curious readers would want to know about — if the establishment media cared to note it.

Read it.

In each discussion, parents eagerly told us how the education being offered in the slum private schools was higher quality than in the neighboring government schools — however much the buildings’ appearances might suggest the contrary. Not one parent expressed the opposite view.

We asked parents to elaborate on what particular features made the private schools preferable. One mother told us: “People thought education is free; it may be free but children do not learn. This makes the quality of education poor and that is why many parents have brought their children back here. People got their children out of the private schools to the public schools because of free education. . . . However, the children do not learn; all they do is play.” Other parents agreed. A father told us: “While most of the teachers in government school are just resting and doing their own things, in private school our teachers are very much busy doing their best, because they know we pay them by ourselves. If they don’t do well they can get the message from the headmistress, of which we cannot allow because we produce ourselves the money, we get it through our own sweat, we cannot allow to throw it away, because you can’t even take the money from the trees, you have to work harder to find it so the teacher must also work harder on our children so that he earns his own living.” A mother agreed: “You will never see [in a private school] a teacher working on something else like sewing a sweater while she is supposed to be in class.”

Too often members of the establishment elite focus on buildings, computers, and teacher credentialing, rather than looking at the actual product: How educated are the students?

But how did parents know the quality in the private schools was better than in government schools? We asked them for details. Parents, it turned out, actively compared children in the government schools with children in the private schools in their neighborhoods. One mother commented: “If you make a comparison between a child attending private school and one who is in government school by asking them some questions from their subjects you will find the one in private school is doing very good, while the one from government school is poor. Even when you compare their examinations scores you will be able to see private school pupil is performing well while that from government is poor.”

Of course, this is in Africa — nothing like that could ever happend in America or Europe, could it? Could it?

Read it.

A Labour Party member who expected to be able to stand for election in a local race was denied the opportunity because she was too white — and too Jewish.

All indications are that this well-meaning woman is a whole-hearted supporter of Multiculturalism. Which means that she should have known the rules: political offices, like other spoils, are dealt out on a racial and religious basis. Whites and Jews are not part of the equation in her little corner of Multi-Land, so she had no business expecting things to be any different.

Read it.

Let’s face it: the rules are different for white people. What would be called racism if I did it becomes perfectly acceptable when it is done by someone who has slightly more melanin in his skin or who bangs his head on the floor when he prays.

Is this racism? You betcha!

But it’s not my racism. It’s the racism of the ruling Multicultural elite, who believe that black and brown people are not capable of civilized behavior, and thus refuse to hold them to the same standards that white people are expected to meet.

So if most of my friends are white, or if I hire mostly white employees to work for my business, then I’m a racist. Period. No court of appeal.

But nobody thinks anything of it if all of an African-American’s friends are black. And if an Iranian businessman has nothing but fellow Iranians as employees, what’s the big deal? It’s diversity at work — something to be celebrated.

Read it.

The appeal of any radical critique is precisely that it appears to rip up by the roots the suddenly-perceived vines that have choked the true and venerable tree of the Republic. But in actual reality, roots cannot be pulled up in this fashion. The past cannot be re-run; we can only build on institutions that exist or, even if we choose to tear down our proud towers, that only lays down another layer of ruins; it does not restore the long-since-leveled houses and estates that filled the plot in years gone by.

America’s foreign policy since its founding has been premised on an asymmetry: we must be supreme in our sphere, and no worse than equal in every other. Since our entry into World War II, it has been premised on another asymmetry: we are the leader of the “free world” and the rest of the planet is dar al-Harb. Since the end of the Cold War, it has been premised on yet another asymmetry: that America is the exceptional nation, the single power with global reach and global responsibilities, the global metropole. None of these propositions is “crazy.” If we could get away with the first proposition, why not shoot for it? And why not satisfy ourselves that we are much different from European imperialists, being generally satisfied with much less than direct colonization? As for the second proposition: are there Europeans who are less than grateful that we made friends of former enemies, financed the reconstruction of a continent, and kept the forces of utter barbarism at bay for two generations? As for the third proposition: is it absurd to conclude from the experience of World War I that a multi-polar world of Great Power risks the ultimate calamity? Assuming it can be achieved, isn’t the world better off with a global hegemon – particularly one that seeks little in the way of outright tribute – than with a war of all against all? As I say, none of these propositions is crazy. And no doubt Britain saw things similarly before us.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

Why is this sort of a scandal, but the First Lady having the equivalent make-work diversity racket job at the U of Chicago Hospitals, and getting paid $117k when her husband was chairman of the Illinois Senate Health and Human Services Committee and then getting her salary more than doubled when her husband got elected to the U.S. Senate, not a scandal?

What an excellent question.

(The existence of the Diversity Racket makes all this easier because it’s obviously unimportant whether they accomplish anything. The less they accomplish in, say, getting no-bid contracts for minority firms, the better for the general public.)

It does indeed.

Holman Jenkins reveals an inconvenient truth about the auto industry.

The erosion of the Big Three’s market share since then has really been the erosion of the market for monopoly labor-produced cars. The UAW standard tactic, “pattern bargaining,” which it pursues without embarrassment, would have gotten Bill Gates thrown in jail under the antitrust laws.

In a real bankruptcy, which is the natural fate of companies unable to meet their obligations, Chrysler and GM would be run (or liquidated) for the benefit of their creditors, not their workers. But, here, “pattern bargaining” will remain the law of the Detroit jungle. The UAW will continue to use its unnaturally augmented clout to extract uncompetitive pay and benefits (it can do no other given its internal incentives). As it has for 40 years, Washington will pitch in with one improvisation after another, disguised as energy policy, trade policy, health-care policy or environmental policy, to stop the rivets from popping off. Politics, especially Democratic electoral politics, will play a more dominant role than ever.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

A U.S. official with knowledge of the interrogation program told FOX News that the much-cited figure represents the number of times water was poured onto Mohammed’s face — not the number of times the CIA applied the simulated-drowning technique on the terror suspect.  According to a 2007 Red Cross report, he was subjected a total of “five sessions of ill-treatment.”

Not that the myth will ever die.

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I am not making this up.

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I am not making this up.

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Gimme two.

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Fatty foods might contain memory enhancers. University of California, Irvine, scientists found that oleic acids from fats—and the compound oleoylethanolamide used in the lab—send signals to the memory-forming amygdala.

Scott Adams actually has an interesting idea.

I mention these examples because I think the world needs another ridiculous rule to solve some big problems. And it’s no fair saying my new rule is ridiculous because that’s exactly the point. The new rule would be this: Any land controlled by a country for 50 years straight is legitimately theirs. It’s like a statute of limitations for armed resistance.

Under this rule large portions of California and south Texas would belong to Mexico. That works for me.

Read it.

I suspect a Jesuit plot.

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Put a 50-cal mount on that puppy and I’m there.

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But you knew that.

According to public disclosure information, Gore was worth somewhere between $1 million and $2 million in 2000. Not quite eight years later, Gore is estimated to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million.

Who was it said that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people?

Read it.

I suspect that lashing your mother-in-law to a fender won’t count.

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Great – I’d like one to chase down and stomp to death that damned GEICO lizard.

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In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

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Be the first on your block….

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I am not making this up.

Steve Sailer turns over the rock of government education.

When it finally dawns on Obama that if we actually start firing worse teachers and hiring better teachers, we’ll be, on net, firing blacks and hiring whites, you can expect this whole effort to get buried so far under affirmative action that nothing good comes of it.

Read it.

I don’t blame them.

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The Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership (MCCIP) report card said the increasing acidity of the oceans caused by carbon dioxide could affect the climate further and hit wildlife.

And who are they?

The report was produced by five groups of experts for the MCCIP, a coalition of scientists, the Government and devolved administrations, agencies and charities.

In other words, people who have a vested interest in climate alarmism and increased goverment spending.

In response to the threat, the Government today announced an £11 million, five-year project to investigate the effects of acidification on biodiversity, habitats, species and wider economic and social impacts in the north east Atlantic, Antarctic and Arctic oceans.

So: mission accomplished.

Read it.

Mommas, don’t let your babies grow up to be lawyers….

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Read it.

But environmentalists are all about fantasy, not reality.

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This creeps me out.

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Congressmen are shocked, shocked that waterboarding was going on.

Read it.

Not your grandfather’s Britain.