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The Obama administration has riled up environmental groups by siding with big utilities in a lawsuit over whether states can sue power plant operators for contributing to climate change.

It isn’t that the Obama administration is in favor of unfettered emissions. The Department of Justice brief, filed with the Supreme Court this week, says the Environmental Protection Agency is already on the job, and doesn’t need help from private plaintiffs.

So it’s basically a turf war. What’s the point of centralizing government power if some buttinskys try to horn in on it?

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I’ve always thought that collecting adolescents together during the time of life when they are most like primitive tribesmen (genetics isn’t the only area in which ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) is responsible for much of what is wrong in the world today. Homeschooling kids is really the only sane solution.

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Maxine Waters, the gift that keeps on taking, is at it again.

Waters, who has been in Congress for more than three decades, routinely sends out mailers endorsing a list of other candidates and ballot initiatives she supports. In the 2010 cycle, she has raised more than $295,550 out of a total of $497,300 through these mailers. And getting on one of her slate mailers doesn’t come cheap—to be featured on the “Citizens for Maxine Waters” slate, candidates pay anywhere between $250 and $45,000.

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

Jonah Goldberg has a newsletter called the G-File which used to be posted on the National Review site but now requires subscription:

I’m not necessarily advocating that we take him out. First of all, even if it were a good idea, it’s too late now. But think about it. If you go by nearly every Hollywood treatment of the CIA or the NSA, Assange is precisely the sort of guy who should have been garroted in his French hotel room years ago. He’s setting up a website — a series of websites, really — that will allow whistleblowers, traitors, cranks, and misguided morons to publish the government’s most closely kept secrets. Some of these disclosures are guaranteed to damage American national security and put U.S. interests and lives at risk. What are super-cool CIA assassins for if not stopping this sort of thing in its tracks? Whether you think the CIA is an honorable  and unfairly maligned outfit that does democracy’s dirty work, or if you think it’s a hotbed of lawless evil setting back human progress at every turn, you would still expect the spooks to off this guy quietly before anyone had heard his name.

Indeed.

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Dramamine first, though.

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Presumably this can be disabled. What a great business opportunity!

I’d want one that sounds like a dog growling. That would make them wake up.

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Which tells you everything you need to know about ‘academics’ these days.

Stanley’s supporters in Denbigh have raised the £31,000 needed to pay for the bronze monument, after a vote among residents found that a clear majority wanted to commemorate the town’s most famous son.

Whatever Stanley’s personal character flaws, it is an undoubted fact that he was a classic Victorian-era globetrotting British adventurer, who was famous during his lifetime and who would have a guaranteed position in any unbiased history of the period.

The people of the area have decided to erect a monument to this legitimate historical figure. What fargin business is it of ’60 academics, authors, and campaigners’ — i.e. useless people, not one of whom lives in the area — whether they do it or not?

The letter, whose signatories include the Welsh transsexual author Jan Morris and Dr Bambi Ceuppens of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium, says: “It is impossible to disconnect Stanley, or any other imperialist of the period, from that suffering.”

Oh, those are names that inspire confidence. The distinguishing characteristic of this degenerate modern age is the prevalence of self-righteous assholes who think they have a natural right to stick their noses in other people’s business. (Of course, they’d be the first to scream if someone else tried to do it to them.)

The Other McCain has an excellent rant.

Top-down political organizations tend to destroy grassroots enthusiasm, driving away volunteers and chilling voter enthusiasm, because Ordinary Americans aren’t stupid. You can fool the people only so long before they start wising up and figure out that there is a scam afoot. They may not understand exactly how the scam works, but when the people at the grassroots see powerful insiders trying to handpick their nominees – ask yourself, how did John McCain’s presidential campaign come back from its summer 2007 near-death experience? — they understand that it’s a crooked racket, and that’s when they decide they’d rather stay home on Election Day.

Read it.

If you know what a duvet it, chances are the maid is changing the cover, not you. But it’s still useful stuff.

Megan McArdle is on the case.

Not really a surprise.

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Can’t really say he’s wrong….

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According to Lebanese paper Al-Akhabr, the clash started when Al-Ahbash members tried to bar Hizbullah men from passing through a neighborhood where the Sunni group holds control.

Shortly afterward, Shi’ite supporters of Hizbullah and sister organization Amal set fire to a Sunni mosque in the nearby neighborhood of Basta, according to an AP photographer.

(Hum “When You’re A Jet” from West Side Story if you wish.)

The only people who appear to be burning mosques are other Muslims.

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A Harry Potter-style wand that can change television channels with the flick of a wrist has attracted a record investment from Dragons’ Den, the BBC2 show for entrepreneurs.

Steve Sailer points out an inconvenient truth.

Third World population growth is becoming an unmentionable in the press. There’s nothing much more fundamental in human affairs than population, but we talk about it less and less.

This reflects the general anti-reductionist trend in Western thought. As the education level of the elites rise, the popularity of Occam’s Razor seems to decline. Who wants to figure out the simplest way to comprehend how things basically work when it’s better for your career to assert that everything’s very, very complicated, and only an expert like yourself could possibly begin to grasp the complexities of it all?

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On a week that included the anchor Katie Couric’s trip to Afghanistan, the “CBS Evening News” recorded its lowest total viewer rating in nearly 20 years, tying a record that it set in June.

I guess Katie Couric is worth every penny of the millions they’re paying her. Of course, the New York Times spins it as merely people being uninterested in the war in Afghanistan.

It can be tricky to draw a direct correlation between subject matter and ratings. But last week’s ratings offer another talking point for the people — including some inside television newsrooms — who argue that the American public has tuned out the war.

No, they’ve just tuned out of what Rush Limbaugh calls ‘the chickification of the news’. Thanks, Katie; you’re the best.

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The secret of Big Macs is that they’re not very good, but every one is not very good in exactly the same way. If you’re willing to live with not-very-goodness, you can have a Big Mac with absolutely no chance of being surprised in the slightest.

I think this is just Urban Snobbery – it’s fashionable to sneer at McDonalds, so he sneers. I rather suspect that a Big Mac is superior to any burger that Joel Spolsky could cook. I am notoriously picky when it comes to food — ask anybody who knows me — and I find the Big Mac perfectly adequate. It isn’t the best, but it’s FAR from the worst.

Anyway, he’s really talking about software, and I suspect he knows more about software than about cooking. Enjoy.

Watch it.

The most valuable thing in this video is the lady herself. Where these days can you find a young woman who can build something this? Or even a young man?

Girl, you are worth more than rubies. God grant you many years.

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The cities of the future will be huge and super-dense — but will they also be alive? Could the increasingly complex systems needed to manage the next generation of megacities become our first true artificial intelligence?

Cisco is already building the first of these smart cities: Songdo, a Korean “instant city,” which will be completely controlled by computer networks — including ubiquitious Telepresence applications, video screens which could be used for surveillance.

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The device, popularly known as a ‘pain gun,’ is a non-lethal weapon designed to deliver an overwhelming heat to say, members of a mob scene or rioters at a prison, causing an immediate flight response. The Air Force, which helped test the device, has assured the world of its safety, and recently the devices went on sale.

A useful appendage to any public space. (Coming to an anti-WTO riot near you?)

Christopher Hitchens is back in the saddle.

Coyly untranslated here (perhaps for “outreach” purposes), Vilayet-i-faquih is the special term promulgated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to describe the idea that all of Iranian society is under the permanent stewardship (sometimes rendered as guardianship) of the mullahs. Under this dispensation, “the will of the people” is a meaningless expression, because “the people” are the wards and children of the clergy. It is the justification for a clerical supreme leader, whose rule is impervious to elections and who can pick and choose the candidates and, if it comes to that, the results. It is extremely controversial within Shiite Islam. (Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq, for example, does not endorse it.) As for those numerous Iranians who are not Shiites, it reminds them yet again that they are not considered to be real citizens of the Islamic Republic.

As for the gorgeous mosaic of religious pluralism, it’s easy enough to find mosque Web sites and DVDs that peddle the most disgusting attacks on Jews, Hindus, Christians, unbelievers, and other Muslims—to say nothing of insane diatribes about women and homosexuals. This is why the fake term Islamophobia is so dangerous: It insinuates that any reservations about Islam must ipso facto be “phobic.” A phobia is an irrational fear or dislike. Islamic preaching very often manifests precisely this feature, which is why suspicion of it is by no means irrational.

From my window, I can see the beautiful minaret of the Washington, D.C., mosque on Massachusetts Avenue. It is situated at the heart of the capital city’s diplomatic quarter, and it is where President Bush went immediately after 9/11 to make his gesture toward the “religion of peace.” A short while ago, the wife of a new ambassador told me that she had been taking her dog for a walk when a bearded man accosted her and brusquely warned her not to take the animal so close to the sacred precincts. Muslim cabdrivers in other American cities have already refused to take passengers with “unclean” canines.

Let us by all means make the “Ground Zero” debate a test of tolerance. But this will be a one-way street unless it is to be a test of Muslim tolerance as well.

Read it.

Back in May it was reported that the failing, yet politically-connected Shorebank in Illinois was to be bailed out. The bank actually closed last Friday, but was resurrected yesterday and turned into a new bank – one that will of course have no obvious relationship to Rep. Jan Schakowsky (IL-09), who lobbied very strenuously to save Shorebank… even though it’s not based in her district. It is, however, the bank that Schakowsky’s convicted felon husband Robert Creamer used to partially extricate himself from the consequences of his fraud scheme; the bank provided critical assistance to Creamer that allowed him to avoid default – which would have beneficial effects on his sentencing a decade later*. There is a strong whiff of this transaction being part of a quid pro quo – with the latter half being paid off, well, right about now.

It must be part of that old Culture of Corruption that Nancy Pelosi keeps going on about — Oh, wait, she means Republicans….

Freeberg is on the case.

Mind you, it wouldn’t surprise me.

Read it.

In the recoveries from the previous two recessions, small businesses led job creation. This time, however, small businesses aren’t hiring. Here’s why.

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I wasn’t aware that they had these abominations in Britain, as well. Yet another bond forged across the pond.

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Actually, they make life miserable for everybody. I’d love to have a law that bars someone who has been elected state Attorney General from every running for Governor of the same state. Life would be SO much more pleasant.

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But where the two groups do not overlap, I am not sure that the group we are rescuing from sudden interest rate changes and late fees is more needy than the group who is now paying higher interest rates to counterbalance the fees.    Indeed, the higher interest rates could conceivably tip some people into the “misses bills” group.

I don’t often disagree with Megan McArdle, but this appears to be one of those times. I disapprove of her apparently willingness to use “more needy” as the primary criterion as to how the credit card business ought to be structured; I’d prefer “more fair”, which I think this legislation promotes.

Read it.

Every year on November 2 a select group of Dutch Muslims holds a party to celebrate the anniversary of Theo Van Gogh’s murder. Last year’s celebration was attended by a Dutch anthropologist who purports to “study” Islamic radicals. The existence of these parties — and his admission of his own participation — was inadvertently revealed on Twitter, and has caused a bit of controversy in the Netherlands.

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Next to breaking his pledge on taxes, the ADA is the primary things for which the elder Bush will burn in Hell.

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It’s clear now with devices like the Kindle and the iPad that the bookcase is going the way of the LP. It will be a slow death, with paper enthusiasts holding on for decades. While the LP lived for less than 50 years before it started to be dwarfed by newer technologies, the book and bookcase had an extraordinary life.

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Gotta love Australians.

Arnold Kling has the low-down.

The locavore movement says, in effect, that it knows better than the market the true cost of locally-grown vs. shipped-in produce. In fact, locavores know much less than the market. This is a basic and important point of economics. If I were to make a list of ten things that I hope that my students still understand years after they have taken my course, this would certainly be one of them.

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Now, seven months later, Pakistani officials are telling a very different story. They say they set out to capture Mr. Baradar, and used the C.I.A. to help them do it, because they wanted to shut down secret peace talks that Mr. Baradar had been conducting with the Afghan government that excluded Pakistan, the Taliban’s longtime backer.

What, they would lie to us? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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While Borgnine’s work ethic is admirable — he has three films due out this year — his personal politics are less than laudable.

No speck of sand is too small for the Thought Police.

Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste.

In TV interviews this morning, FDA head Margaret Hamburg urged Congress to pass pending food-safety legislation that would let the agency put in place “preventive controls” rather than waiting for an outbreak to happen and then reacting to it, the Associated Press reports.

‘Scotty, I need more (government) power!’

‘Ah’m legislatin’ as fast as Ah can, Captain! If we push the voters much harder, they’ll blow!’

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Donations to the Pakistan Floods Appeal, which was launched on August 5, increased by 18 per cent in the second week and have not yet started dropping.

DEC member agencies and their partners have so far helped more than 800,000 people.

They’re certainly shaming the other Muslims around the world, whose giving has been so paltry as to be shameful. ‘Millions of dinars for radical hate mosques, but not one dhiram for flood relief!’

(Whatever happened to all these ‘Muslim charities’ who keep getting caught funneling money to Hamas and Hizbollah? Perhaps charity is only a Christian virtue after all.)

Or perhaps the rest of the Umma think of this as merely another form of jizya, an obligation laid on the kufr and not on Believers.

Read it.

A couple of years ago Jeff blogged  about wage and hour lawsuits created by the wave of employer-issued Blackberry and other PDA devices. At the time, it seemed unlikely that we’d see many of these suits for two reasons: 1. most people who are issued a PDA by an employer tended to be professional or executive employees, exempt from the FLSA’s overtime provisions; and 2. fear of retaliation would deter employees from complaining.

Indeed, it’s taken a couple of years for a high-profile case to hit the press. Now, a Chicago police sergeant has brought a class action against the city seeking compensation for overtime connected with his Blackberry use.

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For the past two years polls have shown that people liked Barack Obama personally, but they hated his policies. There was a great disconnect. But over the past seven or eight months, the tide has been turning. More and more people are deciding they don’t like Barack Obama personally.

This is, if you will recall, the opposite of what happened with Bill Clinton. In Clinton’s case, people thought he was a scumbag, but they loved his Presidency and policies. They just didn’t want their wives or daughters around him.

There are a lot of books out and coming out that will examine Barack Obama and his Presidency, but none so far have actually examined Obama’s character and conduct as President. In essence, no one has examined how well Obama is handling the Politics 101 of his job — being liked by those who elected him.

Only David Limbaugh has done this. His new book, Crimes Against Liberty, is just out and I’ve read through it. (Full disclosure: our sister company, Regnery Publishing, which is also publishing my book, published David’s) David Limbaugh really gets into the play of personality and conduct of Obama — the bully behind the bully pulpit.

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When the President of the United States, in prepared remarks, launches a broadside against any organization, it is no accident. In the case of Barack Obama and left, we have a new target for this White House — yet another company whose owners take issue with Barack Obama destroying the country.

On August 9th, speaking in Austin, TX, Barack Obama said, “Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates all across the country. And they don’t have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation. You don’t know if it’s a big oil company, or a big bank. You don’t know if it’s a insurance company that wants to see some of the provisions in health reform repealed because it’s good for their bottom line, even if it’s not good for the American people.”

Not really news, although a useful reminder. ‘Progressives’ specialize in ginning up ‘non-profit’ organizations with specious names that usually indicate exactly the opposite of what the organization is devoted to pushing. ‘Southern Poverty Law Center’, for example, which bills itself as the foremost ‘watchdog’ against ‘hate groups’ spreads far more hate than it watches; ‘Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’ is devoted to vilifying anybody attempting to spread the facts about the leftist agenda; ‘People for the American Way’ is the foremost advocate of socialism in the U.S, the most un-American ‘way’ it is possible to conceive. So this is just another case of left-wing projection, accusing their enemies of the very tactics of which they are arguably the masters. (See Nancy Pelosi, ‘Culture of Corruption’.)

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During the recent controversy over Córdoba House — better known as the Ground Zero mosque — a frequently recurring theme, replayed over and over again in the mainstream media, is that “Córdoba” refers to the “golden age of al-Andalus”, and not to the destruction of Christian culture in Iberia. The Córdoba mosque allegedly represents the high point of Islamic civilization in Spain, when all three “Abrahamic faiths” lived in harmony under the enlightened rule of the Umayyad Caliphate.

The fact that almost very media outlet peddles the same line tells us that they are all taking their talking points from CAIR, ISNA, MPAC, ASMA, etc. The “voluntary” nature of Christian submission in Córdoba is a Muslim Brotherhood meme, and the MSM has bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Unfortunately for the credulous and gullible amongst us, the entire story is bogus. The myth of “the Golden Age of Islam” in Iberia is just that, a myth.

Read it.

“I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful if she could take a photograph of her page of music and hear it instantaneously,” he recalled. “She’d know what the right notes are, and what the right rhythms are, and she could imitate what she heard.”

Soon he was dreaming of a device — or maybe just software running on a computer — that could do everything he had learned to do in music theory class: read and play a printed musical score, and listen to a passage of music and transcribe it, down to the key signature, the tempo and the time signature. He said that a quick check showed that nothing then on the market could do all that.

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Biometrics R&D firm Global Rainmakers Inc. (GRI) announced today that it is rolling out its iris scanning technology to create what it calls “the most secure city in the world.” In a partnership with Leon — one of the largest cities in Mexico, with a population of more than a million — GRI will fill the city with eye-scanners. That will help law enforcement revolutionize the way we live — not to mention marketers.

Considering the crime problems in Mexico these days, they could probably use it.

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Internal estimates, seen by The Daily Telegraph, show huge cost increases as growing numbers of officials in an expanded EU qualify for retirement, often at a younger age than the taxpayers who fund their generous pensions.

Over the next three years alone, the cost of EU civil service pensions is expected to rise by 16 per cent to an annual bill for taxpayers of £1.3 billion.

The purpose of government, as Jerry Pournelle has so famously said, is to hire and pay government workers. This applies even to pretend governments, such as the E.U. and the U.N. Of course, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, the trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.

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Julian Ku says the answer is yes, under US domestic statutes … if the US can catch him.  The “him” in question is Julian Assange, an Australian living in Sweden.  (The Swedish prosecutor has withdrawn its unrelated rape charge against Assange in apparent embarrassment, and Assange in turn has accused the prosecutor of possibly having been led into a dirty tricks campaign by the Pentagon.)

If the Mossad can do it, I don’t know why we can’t. (Oh, I forgot — the CIA are a bunch of jerk-offs.)

But what of US charges of espionage?  Adam Entous and Evan Perez report at the WSJ of the US government considering such charges .  At Opinio Juris, Ku analyzes the US domestic statute and concludes that the obstacle is not bringing charges under the statute, which does not preclude espionage chargers against a foreign person outside the United States, but instead having physical custody over a defendant.

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

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I guess they just assumed that ‘Episcopal School’ meant ‘not so Christian as you’d notice’.

They are disappointed that their daughter was denied an education there because of who they go to bed with at the end of the day.

I’m disappointed that they know so little of Christianity.

Read it. No, it’s not The Who.

Behold, we are mutants, and we are coming to get you. Bwah-ha-ha.

Unfortunately, we are also related to all of these brown-eyed people. How boring is that?

Watch it.

Note the second comment: ‘Neuroscience has some scary connotations when coupled with big government. ? Prehaps mandatory brain scans might occur in the future and people get locked up for pre-crimes. The term “thought criminal” comes to mind. I have no doubt that the majority of neuroscience is benign, but many things are benign until they are used for nefarious purposes by unscrupulous men.’

So demonstrated correlations between certain physical characteristics and crime are somehow leading to ‘nefarious purposes by unscrupulous men’. Yeah, that’s bright.

Read it.

I guess the system works.