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Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has admitted that his chief of staff received bundles of cash from Iran but insisted the payments were a form of aid from a friendly country.

And if you believe that one, he’ll tell you another one.

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TechCrunch reader Steve Manuel claims to have found a workaround to Firesheep, the controversial Firefox extension that allows anyone on an insecure open Wifi network to access user login info for almost every single social network in existence.

Unmentioned, of course, is the most certain way of avoiding the problem: Stay away from ‘social networks’. Just sayin’.

Check it out.

And, of course, there’s always the Death Star Pumpkin.

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Even a hippy enclave like San Francisco is still subject to the eternal rule that existing businesses will use the law to exclude competition whenever they can get away with it.

Limited government gives you progress. But that’s not a ‘progressive’ value.

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Slow news day.

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

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In these degenerate modern times, it’s impossible to tell.

I must say that this is the first time I’ve heard of any Muslim objection to tobacco.

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The irony here is fairly obvious.

So it was a serendipitous time for Columbia University to convene the first Elites Research Network conference last week. The conference drew in scholars focused on inequality across academic disciplines, like economics, political science, sociology and history.

In the academic world, this was remarkable. As several of the scholars acknowledged, there has traditionally been some unease in talking about the elite, let alone researching them.

Perhaps because it’s rather obviously an exercise in navel-gazing? By what sophistry are academics convened at Columbia University considered to be somehow outside of ‘the elite’, however defined?

“The poor don’t have the power to say no. Elites don’t grant us interviews. They don’t let us hang out at their country clubs.”

Uh, hate to be the one to break the bad news, Professor, but if your not allowed to hang out at country clubs, it’s far more a function of being named Sudhir Venkatesh than of being a professor of sociology.

But Dorian Warren, an assistant professor of political science at Columbia, said the increasing concentration of wealth, moving from the top 10 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent, has made this the right time to look more closely at the group. “We have to understand what’s going on at the top,” Mr. Warren said.

Ah, now it becomes clear. When they say ‘elite’, they actually mean ‘rich’. That avoids the elephant in the room: The fact that any definition of ‘elite’ in America that doesn’t include the upper tiers of academia, government, and mass media (such as The New York Times) would be laughed out of the room in any gathering other than one of Crustian academics.

This is how the professoriat can pretend to objectivity and outsider status–the ‘elite’ are rich and we’re not rich so obviously they’re not in the ‘elite’. Never mine that every professor at Harvard or Princeton or Stanford makes far in excess of the Obamassiah’s $250,000 p.a. definition of ‘rich’.

“If you look at the poor as a problem, you’ll be angry at elites or you’ll expect them to come up with a solution,” said Mr. Venkatesh, who took the most pragmatic line. “You have to come in accepting that there will always be poor people in society and there will always be wealthy people in society, and neither of the two reached that status by their own efforts.”

And there’s the Voice of the Crust. I guess Bill Gates was just walking down the street one day and was randomly picked to win the World’s Richest Guy contest.

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Or maybe not.

Taste receptors in the lungs? Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore have discovered that bitter taste receptors are not just located in the mouth but also in human lungs. What they learned about the role of the receptors could revolutionize the treatment of asthma and other obstructive lung diseases.

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Let me get this straight……

We’ve passed a health care plan written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn’t understand it,.

It was passed by a Congress that hadn’t read it but exempted themselves from it.

It was signed by a president that also hadn’t read it and who smokes.

The funding is administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes.

It is all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that’s broke.

What the hell could possibly go wrong?

The Other McCain does a beat-down.

The problem is that Frank Rich doesn’t understand economics any better than the president does. Neither being a film critic nor attending Harvard Law requires any knowledge of economics. For reasons of pure partisan politics, Democrats have spent nearly a decade screaming “tax cuts for the rich” as an indictment of the Bush policy, without once bothering to ask themselves whether ”tax cuts for the rich” was actually a bad idea, in macroeconomic terms.

It’s just a matter of having the right “message.” And never mind whether the policies actually work, or whether your “message” is actually true.

Charles Murray is always worth reading.

Why are the members of the New Elite feeling so put upon? They didn’t object back in 1991, when Robert Reich said we had a new class of symbolic analysts in his book “The Work of Nations.” They didn’t raise a fuss in 2000 when David Brooks took an anthropologist’s eye to their exotic tribe and labeled them bourgeois bohemians in “Bobos in Paradise.” And they were surely pleased when Richard Florida celebrated their wonderfulness in his 2002 work, “The Rise of the Creative Class.”

That a New Elite has emerged over the past 30 years is not really controversial. That its members differ from former elites is not controversial. What sets the tea party apart from other observers of the New Elite is its hostility, rooted in the charge that elites are isolated from mainstream America and ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans.

Far from spending their college years in a meritocratic melting pot, the New Elite spend school with people who are mostly just like them — which might not be so bad, except that so many of them have been ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth and have never been outside the bubble of privilege. Few of them grew up in the small cities, towns or rural areas where more than a third of all Americans still live.

When the New Elite get around to marrying, they don’t marry just anybody. One of the funniest and most bitingly accurate parts of “Bobos in Paradise” was Brooks’s analysis of the New York Times’s wedding announcements. Go back to 1960, and the page was filled with brides and grooms who grew up wealthy but whose educations and occupations did not offer much indication that they were going to set the world on fire. Look at the page today, and it is studded with the mergers of fabulous résumés.

The more efficiently a society identifies the most able young people of both sexes, sends them to the best colleges, unleashes them into an economy that is tailor-made for people with their abilities and lets proximity take its course, the sooner a New Elite — the “cognitive elite” that Herrnstein and I described — becomes a class unto itself. It is by no means a closed club, as Barack Obama’s example proves. But the credentials for admission are increasingly held by the children of those who are already members. An elite that passes only money to the next generation is evanescent (“Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” as the adage has it). An elite that also passes on ability is more tenacious, and the chasm between it and the rest of society widens.

There so many quintessentially American things that few members of the New Elite have experienced. They probably haven’t ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club or Rotary Club, or lived for at least a year in a small town (college doesn’t count) or in an urban neighborhood in which most of their neighbors did not have college degrees (gentrifying neighborhoods don’t count). They are unlikely to have spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line (graduate school doesn’t count) or to have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian. They are unlikely to have even visited a factory floor, let alone worked on one.

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Kenneth Anderson points out some common sense.

So, I have been strongly identified with, and have been robustly urging, that one possible ground justifying the use of drone warfare and targeted killing, as well as setting rules for its conduct, is the international law of self defense.  I maintain, and certainly continue to maintain, that there are circumstances in which the use of targeted killing can and as a proper legal description should be understood to be the use of force as a lawful act of self defense even though it takes place outside of an armed conflict, and even though that use itself does not create an armed conflict.  It seems to me, before as now, crucial to be clear of the existence of this category of the use of force as a lawful possibility for the United States, particularly looking down the road to conditions and situations that do not implicate the current struggle with Al Qaeda, has nothing to do with 9/11, is not covered by the AUMF — a new terrorist group with different terrorist aims, for example, emerging in Latin America or somewhere in Asia twenty-five years from now, and having no connection to any of today’s issues.

I still think that is a perfectly good way to see the use of force.  The new groups present a threat; they present a threat in a place where the armed conflict is not actually underway with respect to them; the US targets them as self-defense in the absence of an armed conflict.  Alternatively, however, if you think either that the people you are targeting are part of the armed conflict to start with because they are linked sufficiently to AQ and the authors of 9/11, or even more directly because they are AQ or affiliates fleeing Pakistan or Afghanistan in search of new safe havens, then the case for viewing this as simply the continuation of the existing non-international armed conflict is also highly plausible.

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Unfortunately, fax machines refuse to die.

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Freeberg takes a look at credentialism and the Crustian snottiness it generates.

Lots of people find themselves in college not because they particularly care about what they can learn there, but because it’s a hoop through which they’re expected to jump.

Our over-educated set has this bad reputation of not being able to handle criticism. There’s a reason this bad rep is there. It has been earned. Let’s face it: A lot of the appeal of following an established process, is that if it earns criticism the criticism has to be routed to someone else. It’s easy to get hooked on this. And a lot of people are graduating from higher ed curricula with massive, incurable, lifetime addictions.

I’m sure that makes a lot of sense if you have a worldview of “Everything I Ever Needed To Know About Life I Learned In College.” And some people do, I know. But here’s the shocker: That does not make you an educated person. It actually makes you pretty shallow, because real life has a lot to teach us before we reach college, and even more to teach us after we graduate.

Read it.

China, which has been blocking shipments of crucial minerals to Japan for the last month, has now quietly halted some shipments of those materials to the United States and Europe, three industry officials said this week.

“The embargo is expanding” beyond Japan, said one of the three rare earth industry officials, all of whom insisted on anonymity for fear of business retaliation by Chinese authorities.

China mines 95 percent of the world’s rare earth elements, which have broad commercial and military applications, and are vital to the manufacture of products as diverse as cellphones, large wind turbines and guided missiles. Any curtailment of Chinese supplies of rare earths is likely to be greeted with alarm in Western capitals, particularly because Western companies are believed to keep much smaller stockpiles of rare earths than Japanese companies.

Perhaps our government will learn something from this.

Lileks.

Oh, maybe in 100 years kids will use abandoned suburban bungalows for the standard haunted house, and ghouls will shout “I am the ghost of Chinese drywall class-action suits!” but for now we’re stuck with the same old stereotypes.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

This suggests a more general point—is the existence of a public school system consistent with a serious commitment to the separation of church and state?

I think the answer is that it is not. While teaching a fundamentalist version of the origin of life is indeed taking a side in a religious dispute, teaching a conventional account of biology and geology is is also taking a side in that dispute, just the opposite side. I do not see how I can honestly tell a fundamentalist that it is a violation of the separation of church and state to teach children that his religious beliefs are true but not a violation to teach children that they are false.

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Outside the Wellington Way polling station in Tower Hamlets yesterday, as at many other polling stations in the borough, people had to run a gauntlet of Lutfur Rahman supporters to reach the ballot box. As one Bengali woman voter went past them, we heard one of the Rahman army scolding her for her “immodest dress.”

That incident is perhaps a tiny taste of the future for Britain’s poorest borough now it has elected Mr Rahman as its first executive mayor, with almost total power over its £1 billion budget. At the count last night, one very senior figure in the Tower Hamlets Labour Party said: “It really is Britain’s Islamic republic now.”

Welcome to Londonistan.

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Note the caption on the picture.

Freeberg speaks wisdom.

The hippies have taken over the coastlines, which sends my two primary requirements for my retirement environment — I want to wake up to the smell of real salt air, and I want to shatter the beer bottles from last night with a large-caliber sidearm in my own backyard — into a collision with each other. Hippies hate guns. Everything will be rainbows and unicorns as soon as we get rid of all the guns.

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Well, to Democrats, maybe it’s not.

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And sign me up.

When was the last time you saw a hunt-and-peck pianist?

Preach it, brother.

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Well, I’m glad that’s been cleared up.

And the feminists say: (chirp) (chirp) (chirp)….

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Back to the drawing board.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

Christine O’Donnell has been widely mocked for expressing doubt as to the presence in the Constitution of separation of church and state. As you can see from the First Amendment, quoted in full above, she is correct and her critics are mistaken. Not only do the words not appear in the Constitution, the idea does not appear either. Establishment of religion was a well understood concept; it meant an official state church, supported by government money. England had had such an arrangement since at least the sixteenth century and still does. So, currently, do Denmark, Norway, and Iceland (all Lutheran), as well as lots of Muslim countries. When the First Amendment was passed, Connecticut and Massachusetts had established churches.

Radley Balko explains how it works.

It goes something like this: When a black person expresses views that liberal elites have deemed unacceptable for black people to hold, it is permissible for good liberals to respond by implying that said black person is either too stupid or too corrupt to think for himself, and to then call that black person racist names. In fact, not only are both responses permissible and not racist, they are a recommended way of displaying your open-mindedness.

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I have a long list of former American football players I’d like to see caned, starting with that scumbag Roger Staubach.

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Hey, you want to threaten a phone company, be my guest. I never liked those guys anyway.

Mobile money transfers in Africa are part of a conspiracy to rob the continent of its money, subjugate its people and impede mujahideen, the media wing of the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab wrote this week.

Well, jeez, we can’t have that.

Among those problems, destroying the hawala system – the network of Muslim money transfer operators; allowing financial transactions by Mujahideen to be monitored and intercepted; and exploiting poor people by making “them hostages to this service in all their financial activity.”

Well, jeez, we can’t have that.

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But, nowadays, what doesn’t?

The practice of checking the credit histories of job applicants is coming under fire, with critics contending the practice discriminates against blacks and Latinos who tend to have lower credit scores.

You’d think that their credit scores were just something they were born with and couldn’t change.

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When even the New York Times notices, then I suppose we can call it a trend.

“Don’t mention global warming,” warned Nancy Jackson, chairwoman of the Climate and Energy Project, a small nonprofit group that aims to get people to rein in the fossil fuel emissions that contribute to climate change. “And don’t mention Al Gore. People out here just hate him.”

Works for me.

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Among other things, Ankara wants more clarification on government plans to restrict social security for Turks who have returned to their homeland.

Yeah, God forbid that the Dutch government not pay to support Turkish retirees.

We then say that in the Netherlands there are more than 400 mosques and that there are 140 Turkish imams, who are paid by the Turkish government.”

A reminder that there are no Dutch Muslims, merely Muslims who happen to be currently living in the Netherlands.

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The Obmanassiah is all about taking credit. Doing work–not so much.

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You get more of what you pay for–and if you pay for unemployment, well….

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It seems that the Muslim Waqf (a religious endowment in Islamic law that oversees land for Muslim religious or charitable purposes) has asked a court to force the city of Jerusalem to stop removing false graves from an ancient Muslim cemetery near the center of the city.

What are the false graves doing in the cemetery? According to this report, the Waqf had them constructed because it wanted to add property to the cemetery.

The cemetery had been in a state of severe disrepair for more than a century despite being under the supervision of the Waqf. But recently trucks, tractors and other heavy machines were spotted dumping building materials at the site. Workers then shaped the materials into Muslim-style tombstones with no one buried beneath them. Approximately 300 such tombstones were created.

Remember, Islam has no problem with lying to non-Muslims; indeed, it is often considered justified, even praiseworthy, if it benefits Muslims. (Any resemblance between Islam and the Mafia is, I’m sure, purely coincidental.)

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Check it out.

Patrick Acton, 57 has created a massive replica of Minas Tirith, the city from JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, using 420,000 match sticks. Acton, from Gladbrook, Iowa, spent 3,000 hours building the 8ft by 8ft structure.

Some people need to get a life.

Steve Sailer is unique.

A big part of this New Centrist obsession (e.g., Waiting for “Superman”) with changing the culture of NAMs is motivated by job-seeking on the part of Nice White People. The private sector, with its stock options, used to be cool, but now private sector jobs are in short supply. The public sector, with its jobs with defined benefit pensions and health insurance, is where it’s at in 2010. Moreover, violence is down among NAMs, so a lot of Nice White People are thinking they’d like one of those lifetime tenure jobs with benefits and a pension reforming NAM children. Of course, people already have those jobs, so the people who don’t have them are raising a stink about how the people who do have them are discriminating against NAMs by not turning them into Nice White People and thus should be fired … and replaced by a new set of Nice White People.

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I can certainly see a day when your OS comes on a cheap USB stick.

They’ll have to get a lot cheaper before they replace the CD/DVD, though. Amazon has 4GB USB sticks for about $7, which is easily 10x the cost of an equivalent-sized DVD blank.

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More accurately, Muslims currently living in Britain.

The Taliban has claimed that Britain is its greatest source of revenue and the group is funded by donations in mosques and Muslim community centres around the country.

Which is why any non-Muslim country that allows Muslims in has a death-wish. Political posturing aside, those are the facts.

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Hispanics, like blacks, can be bought–but, unlike blacks, they want the money up front, rather than pie in the sky by and by.

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As has been discussed multiple times, one of the reasons why the internet has thrived (or even why the software industry has thrived) is that the barriers to entry are low. You don’t need to build a factory or get all kinds of approvals. You can just create something and go. But, perhaps not in Indonesia any more. Glyn Moody points us to a report on a proposed law in Indonesia that would first seek to tax all technology/software firms above and beyond existing taxes and (even more worrying) require anyone creating an application to get permission from the government before any application can be released. Apparently, this will apply to any application “which uses the internet to transmit voice, images, data, content based services, e-commerce, as well as other services provided through applications.”

Funny thing how there are no democratic Islamic countries. Not one. (Not even Turkey any more.)

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The Netherlands is a famously tolerant country, but this easygoing Dutch attitude does not prevail within the culturally enriched portions of the population. Among immigrants, Christianity is especially frowned upon, and the greatest scorn and hatred is reserved for Muslims who have converted to Christianity.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace you got there, Mohammed.

Megan McArdle is more realistic than 95% of the rest of Washington.

I have no idea how you could stop this process.  To keep our neighborhoods the way Jacobs and I liked them would involve massive coercion not just of real estate owners, but of merchants, food vendors . . . everyone in the network of service providers that supports a neighborhood.  The more people like me who move into my current neighborhood, the more services the neighborhood will attract–and those, in turn, will bring further waves of gentrifiers who will use their higher incomes to drive up rents, home prices, and the assessed values upon which property taxes are based.

I want the services, but I don’t want this to price out all the people who already live there.  Unfortunately, it’s a package deal.

A sign of the End Times.

Read it.

Cats are like children but without the potential for supporting you in your old age.