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It’s pretty clear that the man-made global warming hypothesis may have more economic influence than any theory in the history of mankind, including Marxism. It provides the justification for enormous government influence in every phase of economic life, and appears to herding the US economy into stalemate with bankruptcy for a great many people, and an over-all lower standard of living for everyone. That’s change you can believe in.

California emphatically rejected tax increases, but so far the message hasn’t sunk in. The purpose of the government of California is to pay enormous retirement benefits to teachers and state workers, then to pay large salaries and benefits to teachers and state employees not yet retired, and then to do everything else like put out fires and enforce laws and provide services. I see no discussion whatever of changing those goals and priorities, and until those priorities are changed, there is no “solution” to the “problem”.

Government tried running factories in the past. The US built steel mills to make armor plate, certain that proper management and engineering would let a government plant produce the stuff for about half what private industry was charging. Of course the result was somewhat different, with the output about twice the open market price, and the plants closed not long after their long delayed opening.  We all know how well the Post Office delivered mail when it had a monopoly. Apparently we have to run those experiments again, since no one studies history.

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What’s French for “Oh, shit!”

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Imagine, if you will, the firestorm (no pun intended) that would ensue were they caught burning an equivalent number of copies of the Koran.

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Must be a re-incarnated stunt team flyer.

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

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Guess they figure that with the Obamassiah in charge they’re going to need a bigger boat.

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Makes you wonder what would have happened if the Germans had come out of the war not having gotten their pants beaten. Would be be looking at a former-Gestapo Chancellor doing a very good imitation of the previous regime? For sure we wouldn’t have had the Nuremberg trials — I don’t know of any of the KGB mass-murderers ever brought to justice.

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Somali pirates might be allowing themselves to be deliberately captured in order to take advantage of European asylum laws, Dutch legal experts have warned.

Which is why they ought to be hanged upon capture, as was done in every century before this one.

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What – waterboarding? Caterpillars? Sleep deprivation? Loud rap music? Not hardly.

For two and a half days after Andrade’s abduction, the kidnappers — including Aldo Vizcarra, whom Andrade had considered a friend — deprived their victim of food and water. Through the door of the closet where he was held, Andrade could hear the cries of other victims being tortured in the house, the report said.

Meanwhile, Valencia had defied the kidnappers and called police, who listened to Andrade “scream and howl in pain” over the phone as the kidnappers tried to cut off his ear and a finger. The torture would continue until Valencia came up with the ransom, the kidnappers told her.

“Jaime felt his legs being forced apart and heard Aldo say he was going to get his money,” the report said. The kidnappers then sodomized him with a broomstick, a pair of scissors and a wooden dowel used to hang clothes in a closet.

Kidnappers will smash their victims’ fingers with bricks, snip their backs open with wire cutters, carve them up with knives or simply shoot them.

Compare that to Gitmo, where the prisoners get three hot meals a day, private prayer time, free medical care, and lawyers at taxpayer expense.

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I’m not sure exactly what they’re talking about here, but it sounds pretty impressive.

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Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

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Internet companies are trying to come up with a solution for one of the classic headaches of parenting: kids begging for money.

On Monday, a service called “Bill My Parents” launched to allow kids to virtually send online purchases to parents for approval and payment — instead of asking mom and dad for their credit cards.

The company makes money by charging a 3% to 5% commission to a merchant for a sale, and also charging parents 50 cents to complete a transaction.

I am not making this up.

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This must be seen to be believed. If Tsar Nicholas had a computer, this is the sort of computer he would have.

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Well. There it is.

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And good riddance, I say.

But a pro-LTTE website, Tamilnet, accused the army of conducting a “determined massacre” of the last surviving guerrillas.

According to the account, the leader of the political wing of the Tamil Tigers, B. Nadesan, contacted overseas supporters at 3am on Monday. He asked them to plead with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to evacuate the last 1,000 wounded fighters.

And why not? These were people responsible for 26 years of terrorism, in an attempt to take over a land that was not their own. All they had to do was stay on the mainland, where they had a perfectly fine large territory of their own.

Evidence gathered by Human Rights Watch suggests that Sri Lanka’s government broke a promise to refrain from shelling this area with heavy artillery. Hospitals and clinics were hit on at least 32 separate occasions in the space of five months. If these strikes were intentional, they could amount to breaches of international humanitarian law.

Oh, cry me a river. The “Palestinians” do that about once a month. Nobody cares when they do it. Let’s see Human Rights Watch whine about Muslims for a change.

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Arnold Kling attempts to scare our socks off.

I am not upset with political trends because I want Republicans to win. I am upset because I foresee a one-party state. Even if neither party is particularly libertarian, gridlock and competitive checks and balances are better for libertarians. Moreover, a one-party state is corrupt and backward relative to what we are used to. Again, I just come from reading North, Wallis, and Weingast, and a major characteristic of a “natural” state is that every economic organization must necessarily be a political organization. What we are seeing now, with government threatening private business executives while rewarding lobbyists with “stimulus” (see Russ Roberts, for example), is “natural state” behavior.

As for various commenters who assure me that there is some natural tendency for a second party to be competitive, allow me introduce to you to Montgomery County, Maryland, as well as to many large American cities. In fact, it is quite easy for a one-party government to emerge when there are ethnic blocs and a large public sector relative to the private sector.

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For sufficiently small values of “geek”.

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I am not making this up.

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I am not making this up.

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Jeremy Clarkson is not impressed with the new Honda “Prius-killer”.

And the sound is worse. The Honda’s petrol engine is a much-shaved, built-for-economy, low-friction 1.3 that, at full chat, makes a noise worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner. It’s worse than the sound of your parachute failing to open. Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer.

The nickel for the battery has to come from somewhere. Canada, usually. It has to be shipped to Japan, not on a sailing boat, I presume. And then it must be converted, not in a tree house, into a battery, and then that battery must be transported, not on an ox cart, to the Insight production plant in Suzuka. And then the finished car has to be shipped, not by Thor Heyerdahl, to Britain, where it can be transported, not by wind, to the home of a man with a beard who thinks he’s doing the world a favour.

Why doesn’t he just buy a Range Rover, which is made from local components, just down the road? No, really — weird-beards buy locally produced meat and vegetables for eco-reasons. So why not apply the same logic to cars?

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Here’s the problem for states that want to pry more money out of the wallets of rich people. It never works because people, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states.

The tax differential between low-tax and high-tax states is widening, meaning that a relocation from high-tax California or Ohio, to no-income tax Texas or Tennessee, is all the more financially profitable both in terms of lower tax bills and more job opportunities.

Is it coincidence that the two highest tax-rate states in the nation, California and New York, have the biggest fiscal holes to repair? No. Dozens of academic studies — old and new — have found clear and irrefutable statistical evidence that high state and local taxes repel jobs and businesses.

New York and California are nice places to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Charles Stross, British science fiction writer (and one of my Recommended Writers; see right), finds out that travel in the U.S. is about as much fun as you would expect a government-controlled activity to be.

I caught an Amtrak train — the #513 from Seattle to Portland, business class. It was that, or fly (I don’t drive in the US), and I’m fed up with security theatre.

“Security theatre”, of course, being Bruce Schneier’s term for what goes on at airports — making it look like we have security without actually doing much.

I was gobsmacked by how slow and inefficient the process of catching the train in America feels, compared to even the ghastly suboptimization of Virgin or National Express in the UK, never mind Japan Rail. First you book the ticket and a seat. You have to present photo ID to claim a boarding card —like airline travel in the 1950s — an intrusive and annoying but not actually effective security measure. Then you check your bags — all but the two carry-ons you’re allowed— not less than an hour before departure. For boarding, there’s a long queue while all those folks who didn’t think to book a seat present their tickets at the gate and are issued with seat allocations. Only then do folks get to go on board the train — which makes boarding it a half-hour torment rather than a rapid, relatively painless rush.

Our tax dollars at work.

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That’s a rather expansive definition of “we”, of course.

Joel Kotkin limns how the interests of the current ruling class are not identical with the interests of the common weal.

A yuppie stimulus differs from the more traditional approach, which aims to get the front-line, blue-collar types back to work. Instead, it would channel public funds away from those grouchy construction workers – some 30% of whom may soon be out of work – to better heeled, and, in their minds, more deserving “creative” professionals. After all, what stake do the netroots have in making things better for Joe the Plumber?

In contrast, the yuppie bailout focuses on a sure-fire Democratic constituency, the well-educated urban professional. One advocate of such an approach, pundit Richard Florida, has urged President-elect Barack Obama to eschew crude investments in traditional production and a renewed housing market in favor of goodies directed to what he calls “the creative industry.”

Florida sees any focus on restoring manufacturing and housing as a misguided rescue of the “old industrial economy,” in which Americans actually made things and other Americans consumed them. Instead, he suggests, “the first step must be to reduce demand for the core products and lifestyle of the old order.”

So let’s stop worrying about what happens to Detroit, or the crisis in the housing market. In Florida’s view, cars, of course, are demonized as woefully bad for environmental reasons and not particularly friendly to the preferred dense urbanity so attractive to advocates of “hip cool” cities.

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Identity Politics has so corrupted our culture that we may not ever recover.

A dispute over the naming of a new southern California high school provides a glimpse of the country’s ethnic future. During a February 2008 hostage standoff, Los Angeles police officer Randal Simmons was slain by a gunman as Simmons tried to protect the gunman’s family members (three of whom the gunman had already killed). During off hours, Simmons, a 27-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department and a member of its elite SWAT unit, had mentored teens in Carson, a hardscrabble industrial suburb south of Los Angeles. As a minister in the Glory Christian Fellowship, Simmons tried to keep Carson’s youth away from the city’s thriving gang life.

This fall, the Carson City Council voted to name a new high school after Simmons in recognition of his service to the community. Since then, however, Latino residents of Carson have pushed to rescind the vote and to name the new school after César Chávez, the farmworker organizer. “I’m very upset,” resident Miriam Vasquez told the Los Angeles Daily Breeze. “This is a Latino area. It should be named after Cesar Chavez.” Simmons was black, but opponents of the Simmons resolution insist that race has nothing to do with their position. Rather, they protest that the community was not consulted and that members of Simmons’s church had railroaded the recommendation through the council.

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All of your Star Wars illusions destroyed.

The core point is that the Jedi are not to be trusted:

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And, consequently, they are raising a generation of victims.

Which is okay — when the bad times come again, as they always do, it’s the children of the rednecks who will survive, and the children of the ruling class that will fertilize their soil.

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I am not making this up.

Steve Sailer discusses how regressives are going back to the 19th century.

What’s particularly striking is that this legal privilege is more or less hereditary, being passed down to the child from grandparents who currently live in Beverly Hills and from parents who used to live there.

It is, of course, all about money.

I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would have thought.

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Much has been written about how suburbs have taken people away from the city and that now suburbanites need to return back to where they came. But in reality most suburbs of large cities have grown not from the migration of local city-dwellers but from migration from small towns and the countryside.

Most suburban growth is not the result of declining core city populations, but is rather a consequence of people moving from rural areas and small towns to the major metropolitan areas. It is the appeal of large metropolitan places that drives suburban growth.

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So when somebody calls you “fathead” it’s really a compliment.

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But the storm has fallen with a special ferocity on black and Latino homeowners, the analysis shows. Defaults occur three times as often in mostly minority census tracts as in mostly white ones. Eighty-five percent of the worst-hit neighborhoods — where the default rate is at least double the regional average — have a majority of black and Latino homeowners.

Perhaps that’s because they listened to the government and bought houses that they, you know, couldn’t afford. Always a bad idea, taking the government’s advice.

“My district feels like ground zero,” said City Councilman James Sanders Jr., an African-American who represents hundreds of blocks in Queens like this one. “In military terms, we are being pillaged.”

Novel concept: an area that pillages itself.

Years ago many banks drew red lines on maps around black neighborhoods and refused to lend; more recently, some banks began taking aim at those neighborhoods for the marketing of subprime loans, say consumer advocates.

How dare those racists target minority neighborhoods for loans! The swine! Not like the good old days where we could bitch at them for not lending in minority neighborhoods.

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Pretty soon they’ll all be going to school in pajamas.

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To set the cause above renown,
To love the game beyond the prize,
To honour, while you strike him down,
The foe that comes with fearless eyes;
To count the life of battle good,
And dear the land that gave you birth,
And dearer yet the brotherhood
That binds the brave of all the earth.—

‘Qui procul hinc,’ the legend’s writ,—
The frontier-grave is far away—
‘Qui ante diem periit:
Sed miles, sed pro patria.’

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Just don’t have an argument with a large dog.

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An excellent replacement for the quasi-communist metropolitan newspapers.

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Somalia has a government? Who knew?

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Sounds like the 1930s all over again. And this time they won’t have a King to pull the plug when it all goes south.

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Well, after all, they are lawyers….

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The driver lost the money to the wind when an envelope he had stuck in the passenger seat pocket of his vehicle came loose during a test drive.

The cash – in 500, 200, and 100 euro notes – fluttered across the motorway in the midst of speeding traffic near the city of Hanover.

Here’s your sign….

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This is not your father’s trade war, a tit-for-tat over champagne or cheese. With countries worldwide desperately trying to keep and create jobs in the midst of a global recession, the spat between the United States and its normally friendly northern neighbor underscores what is emerging as the biggest threat to open commerce during the economic crisis.

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You mean the global warming alarmist are lying to us? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Peggy Noonan:

The indecipherable language of government has actually become dangerous to the well-being of the nation. As the federal government claims ever greater powers, its language has become vague to the point of meaningless and meaningless to the point of menacing.

Ever notice how policemen and lawyers can’t say “car” or “truck”?

I think I heard “accessing affordable quality health care,” “single payer plan vis-à-vis private multiparty insurers” and “key component of quality improvement.” In any case, she didn’t answer the question, which was a disappointment but not a surprise. No one answers the question anymore.

A New York Times profile recently had her recalling with self-deprecating charm the time her child ran a high fever and she caused a bit of confusion by forgetting to say, “We have to go to the hospital!” and announcing instead, “This unsustainable increase in body temperature requires immediate access to a local quality health-care facility!” I made that up, but it was believable, wasn’t it?