Read it.

Read it.

Adding another voice to the political turmoil surrounding the arrest last week of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, a black police officer who was on the scene said he supported the arresting officer 100%, the Associated Press reports.

Pretty bad when even the black cops are racist. Oh, wait….

Read it.

Not something you see every day … or want to.

Read it.

It’s truly amazing what you can do with an iPhone.

But what about if you need the proteomes for several yeast and yeast strains right now. Oh, actually, there is an app for that. It’s called iProto Yeast, and this $5 app heads our list of weird science apps for Apple’s iPhone.

Read it.

I like the gold-plated assault rifles. And the white tiger, of course.

Read it.

And about time, too.

Read it.

In the thirties, governments had Four Year Plans.  Today, they have Four Year from Now Plans – big policies that basically don’t kick in until the next election.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, reviews the new book Plastic Fantastic.

“Plastic Fantastic,” Eugenie Samuel Reich’s readable account of a fairly recent ­science fraud, is valuable chiefly as a close look at the “kitchen” where scientific results are assembled and validated—and whence occasionally comes forth ­something that should not have seen the light of day.

Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal gets around to asking the question that many of us have been asking for decades.

On Sunday, he said on national television that to solve Social Security “everything’s on the table,” which of course means raising payroll taxes. On July 7 in Denver he said: “Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won’t.”

This isn’t a flip-flop. It’s a sex-change operation.

Read it.

I don’t see any torpedo tubes….

Steve Sailer is on the case.

Granted, Gates is, as we’ve seen in recent days, a race hustler. It’s completely in character for Gates to try to make money off his unfortunate temper tantrum by whipping it into a PBS documentary. Yet, for most of his long career he’s been the classiest race hustler in the racket.

But, my goodness, does he ever hustle.

Read it.

It’s so hard to get good help these days.

Read it.

Lindsey Graham has announced, as expected, that he will vote to confirm Sonia Sotomayor. When he defends terrorists’ rights, Graham is fond of saying that “it’s not about them, it’s about us.” Similarly, as I argued here and here, Graham’s decision in this instance isn’t about Sotomayor; it’s about Graham.

RINO rides again. Perhaps he can be persuaded to switch to the Democrats, as Specter did.

Read it.

The president has decided — just days before the deadline he himself set for passage of health care bills in both chambers of Congress — that he wants to create a new and very powerful executive branch agency, the Independent Medicare Advisory Council (IMAC), which would be accountable only to him and have the authority to re-write the Medicare program from top to bottom by executive memo. Now that’s audacious.

Read it.

Well, most people find money pretty motivational.

Check it out.

The shadow of the eclipse upon earth as seen from space.

Read it.

Not really news but a useful reminder.

Read it.

Yeah, that’s “art”, all right.

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

Read it.

Read it.

I used to know that, but it must have slipped my mind.

Steve Sailer is oftimes even more cynical than I am.

The kind of assimilated American Catholics and Protestants I grew up around tend to assume that the fine print on admissions to taxpayer-funded institutions such as the University of California is made up by experts with the public good always in mind, and if you need to be aware of its implications, you’ll be duly informed by professionals.

The kind of people I talk to now about these questions tend to be Korean, Armenian, Jewish, and so forth. It would never occur to them to trust public institutions to treat their family members well. Nor do they trust the media to explain the rules of the game honestly to them, since everything about public education hinges on race, and everybody is supposed to lie in public about race.

Read it.

As we noted yesterday, some of the less well-grounded members of the political media have been harshly attacking Palin for having a baby. Egads! Can we really have a heartbeat away a Christian who prays, or a woman who has borne children?

It really does seem as though the media and the Angry Left loathe Sarah Palin precisely because she is normal. Through the words of his supporters, Barack Obama has become the candidate of those who oppose religion and motherhood. With friends like these, who needs Karl Rove?

The media logothetes hate Sarah Palin because she’s every normal thing they’re not.

Yesterday the Associated Press, in reporting on the interview, relied on its own inaccurate reporting of a week earlier in claiming that Palin had “contradicted an assertion she made at her former church that ‘our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.’ ” This claim disappeared from later versions of the AP dispatch, although we haven’t found any evidence that the wire service issued a correction.

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

Read it.

Puts history in an entirely new perspective.

The Other McCain voices an eternal truth.

Keith Olbermann is an evil maniac, but at least he is not as consistently jaw-dropping stupid as Matthews.

Indeed.

Read it.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Read it.

Let’s have a punch-in where cancer patients beat on anti-nuclear hippies for a while. I’d pay to watch that.

Kindling the new censorship.

Most of the e-books, videos, video games, and mobile apps that we buy these days day aren’t really ours. They come to us with digital strings that stretch back to a single decider—Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, or whomever else. Steve Jobs has confirmed that every iPhone routinely checks back with Apple to make sure the apps you’ve purchased are still kosher; Apple reserves the right to kill any app at any time for any reason. But why stop there? If Apple or Amazon can decide to delete stuff you’ve bought, then surely a court—or, to channel Orwell, perhaps even a totalitarian regime—could force them to do the same. Like a lot of others, I’ve predicted the Kindle is the future of publishing. Now we know what the future of book banning looks like, too.

BMI under the microscope.

Belgian polymath Adolphe Quetelet devised the equation in 1832 in his quest to define the “normal man” in terms of everything from his average arm strength to the age at which he marries. This project had nothing to do with obesity-related diseases, nor even with obesity itself. Rather, Quetelet used the equation to describe the standard proportions of the human build—the ratio of weight to height in the average adult. Using data collected from several hundred countrymen, he found that weight varied not in direct proportion to height (such that, say, people 10 percent taller than average were 10 percent heavier, too) but in proportion to the square of height. (People 10 percent taller than average tended to be about 21 percent heavier.)

Read it.

Read it.

The article below is a reminder that the “cultural enrichers” imported to Western countries did not invent their barbaric practices after they got here. The customs we have come to associate with them — including “honor killings”, FGM, rape, and general misogyny — are part of their day-to-day lives at home, and form the culture with which we have decided to enrich our own.

Strangely enough, the countries and cultures within which these barbarities occur are overwhelmingly Muslim. When incidents such as this one come to light, in 95% of the cases an Islamic culture is involved.

Yes, it is true that these are archaic cultural patterns that pre-date Islam. Yet many of them they were common everywhere two millennia ago, and not just in the Arabian Peninsula. Why did they disappear in the civilized world while remaining relatively untouched in the Ummah?

Let’s face it: Islam is a self-sealing ideological system which has preserved the barbaric practices of antiquity as if in amber. Cultural anthropologists are fortunate to be able to study Islamic cultures as a window into the distant past.

Mark Helprin is on the case.

As you well know, the previous American president was held in check by his underestimation of the time and forces required by his policies in the Middle East. The current president’s most war-like virtue is the ability to apologize to people who should be apologizing to us—an extraordinary skill no doubt, but questionable. You might worry a bit more about Messrs. Sarkozy and Berlusconi, either one of whom could drive you out of business, but as for the rest, though the quivers are full, no arrows are likely to be loosed in the near future.

Read it.

Where do they think they are, Albany?

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

If you examine their proclamations and manifestos, you’ll notice that Islamic extremists have adopted large chunks of communist rhetoric and methodology. Marxist-Leninist thought can be adapted very easily to the purposes of the Great Jihad, with just a few substitutions in the core jargon to make it fit.

The modus operandi for both groups is the same: the suppression of all dissent, the rewriting of history to accord with the exigencies of ideology, an all-encompassing explanation for all events that occur, a chiliastic promise of a glorious future for everyone who abides by the doctrine, and the use of extreme violence to attain ideological ends. Exchange the Communist Manifesto for the Koran, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat for the Worldwide Caliphate, and you’re in business.

Not really news, but a good reminder.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

Apparently the future speaks Japanese.

Read it.

One by one, President Obama’s health-care promises are being exposed by the details of the actual legislation: Costs will explode, not fall; taxes will have to soar to pay for it; and now we are learning that you won’t be able to “keep your health-care plan” either.

The House bill says that after a five-year grace period all Erisa insurance offerings will have to win government approval—both by the Department of Labor and a new “health choices commissioner” who will set federal standards for what is an acceptable health plan. This commissar—er, commissioner—can fine employers that don’t comply and even has “suspension of enrollment” powers for plans that he or she has vetoed, until “satisfied that the basis for such determination has been corrected and is not likely to recur.”

The new Erisa regime will be especially difficult to meet for businesses that operate with very slim profit margins or have large numbers of part-time or seasonal workers. They may simply “cash out” and surrender 8% of their payroll under the employer-mandate tax. A new analysis by the Lewin Group, prepared for the Heritage Foundation, finds that some 88.1 million people will be shifted out of private employer health insurance under the House bill. If those people preferred their prior plan, well, too bad again.

Read it.

It took eight years from the time John Kennedy declared we would go to the moon to the day an American landed on it, 40 years ago this week. It was also eight years ago this September that terrorists struck the World Trade Center, the site of which continues to be a hole in the ground and a national disgrace.

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

Read it.

A series of bailouts, bank rescues and other economic lifelines could end up costing the federal government as much as $23 trillion, the U.S. government’s watchdog over the effort says – a staggering amount that is nearly double the nation’s entire economic output for a year.

What do they care? It’s not their money.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

The Germans were always over-achievers.

Waiting for the you-ought-not-to-go-faster-than-a-horse people to drag this out in favor of tighter speed limits….

Read it.

Surely there’s a government program for that.

Read it.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Read it.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.

It is surprising how many people seem determined to ignore that fact, despite Muslims best efforts to convince them.

Read it.

Apparently journalists don’t know the meanings of the words they use. Who knew?

The term “icon” has two basic meanings, neither of which apply to Michael Jackson, Greg Norman, Ed McMahon, most Scottish mystery writers or anyone from Paul Revere & the Raiders. Originally it referred to sacred images painted on tiny wooden panels back in the days of the Eastern Empire. Thus, in theory, Farrah Fawcett’s famous ’70s poster could vaguely qualify as an icon. But for the longest time the word “icon” was used to refer to what Webster’s describes as “an object of uncritical devotion.” No more. Today it is used to describe anyone reasonably famous who is completely over the hill, on a respirator, or stone dead. Or, in the case of Mickey D’s, beloved but inanimate.

This is just another case of hyperventilating journalists hijacking an otherwise admirable language because they are desperate to insert an infectious banality into their work and don’t care if it belongs there. There is no such thing as “the mother of all stimulus packages.” One cannot go in search of the Holy Grail of killer apps for the iPhone. The English language doesn’t work that way. It’s flexible, but it’s not stupid.

Read it.

Read it.

Mr Muller, who only sells American vehicles, is offering a gift certificate – only to be used at a licensed dealer – for a Kalashnikov AK-47 worth $450 (£320).

The guns are made by IO Inc in North Carolina, the only company in the US which manufactures the robust, durable weapon. First developed in the Soviet Union and exported to Moscow’s allies across the world, the AK-47 has been used in countless conflicts in the developing world. In the hands of the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, it became a symbol of resistance to America.

Asked why an automatic weapon with a 30 or 60-round magazine was required for self-defence, he cited the case of the Florida couple recently shot dead in their homes by a gang of six robbers.

Read it.

To further burden the urban infill developer, right now a new form of regulation is entering the scene, that of the so-called smartcode which regulates the last untouched part of the exterior of a structure: its overall form. With rigid codes and design staffs, cities can now create for themselves a vision, supplemented with pretty pictures, of the imagined future, where building patterns need to be just-so. An urban infill developer must now adhere to someone else’s opinion of where his front door is, and whether he has a front porch.

So, in reality, these urban parcels sit abandoned and income-free, with the biggest real estate growth market being in “for sale” signs, as owners try to unload these properties on a greater fool ready to do battle for the cause of urban infill. It is a no-win scenario for cities.

Read it.

Why didn’t we think of that?

Read it.