Cringely looks ahead.

This column is about homeland security, which is something our government isn’t very good at and I predict won’t get any better at this year because of a systemic inability to do correctly even the most basic things to protect our society, our privacy, and our way of life.

Preaching to the choir, here, bubba.

hese changes are minimal but I doubt they’ll even be implemented because this is a system that inevitably reverts to little fiefdoms run by idiots.

We call it ‘government’. It is not your friend.

Read it.

I guess ‘King’ doesn’t mean what it used to.

John Stossel sees an eerie parallel.

Even though Rand published Atlas in 1957, her descriptions of intrusive and bloated government read like today’s news. The “Preservation of Livelihood Law” and “Equalization of Opportunity Law” could be Nancy Pelosi’s or Harry Reid’s work.

The novel’s chief villain is Wesley Mouch, a bureaucrat who cripples the economy with endless regulations. This sounds familiar. Reason magazine reports that “as he looks around Washington these days,” Rep. Paul Ryan “can’t help but think he’s seeing a lot of Wesley Mouch.”

Read it.

Bill Gates is gone and Redmond is settling into a comfortable middle age. While this may not be good it was probably inevitable as Steve Ballmer rebuilds the company in his own image. What’s sad is it probably means an end to changing Microsoft strategy over a weekend and sending the company into a tizzy as Gates liked to do. Recent layoffs at Microsoft, for example, have much more to do with remaking the internals of the company in a new, more pinstriped model, than with cost savings.

‘Bill Gates is gone’? Time to sell your Microsoft stock.

David Pogue discovers the true nature of the Internet.

Reader feedback about my review of Google’s new cellphone yesterday was unusually voluminous and, in some sectors, vitriolic. Where I had written, “The Nexus One is an excellent app phone, fast and powerful but marred by some glitches,” some readers seemed to read, “You are a pathetic loser, your religion is bogus and your mother wears Army boots.”

Read it.

Na’vi is a constructed language spoken by the fictional indigenous race (the Na’vi) on Pandora in James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar. The language was created by Paul Frommer, a professor at USC with a doctorate in linguistics. This website exists to share this beautiful language with all who want to learn.

And to make money, of course. Don’t forget that. Monetizing a doctorate in linguistics isn’t like being a welder, you know.

Check it out.

Tell the truth: We’ve all wanted to do that.

John Fund looks at Rasmussen.

Read it.

Rule 1: Be a “Creature Unlike Any Other”

Given that Playboy has spent five decades proving the near-universal male predilection for a slender, pretty, large-breasted, blue-eyed blonde, this rule is obviously insane. In fact, most men have distinct preferences that anyone who knows them well can easily identify…Women are naturally attracted to outliers for the sheer sake of their novelty. Men aren’t.

Of the millions of old copies of The Rules that were snatched up all those years ago, I speculate further that more than half of them reek of cat urine.

Read it.

The fact that Michael Moore is still alive ought to tell you something.

Arnold Kling is always worth reading.

Think of government as a charity. From a libertarian perspective, it is a charity run by the Mafia, which will break your knuckles if you don’t make your donations. It is also a badly mismanaged charity. It funnels lots of money into questionable causes, and even when the causes are good the programs that it funds tend to be very wasteful.

Bears Fighting

Lions Hunting

Read it.

How do we know that institutions are so central to the wealth and poverty of nations? Start in Nogales, a city cut in half by the Mexican-American border fence. There is no difference in geography between the two halves of Nogales. The weather is the same. The winds are the same, as are the soils. The types of diseases prevalent in the area given its geography and climate are the same, as is the ethnic, cultural, and linguistic background of the residents. By logic, both sides of the city should be identical economically.

And yet they are far from the same.

On one side of the border fence, in Santa Cruz County, Arizona, the median household income is $30,000. A few feet away, it’s $10,000. On one side, most of the teenagers are in public high school, and the majority of the adults are high school graduates. On the other side, few of the residents have gone to high school, let alone college. Those in Arizona enjoy relatively good health and Medicare for those over sixty-five, not to mention an efficient road network, electricity, telephone service, and a dependable sewage and public-health system. None of those things are a given across the border. There, the roads are bad, the infant-mortality rate high, electricity and phone service expensive and spotty.

The key difference is that those on the north side of the border enjoy law and order and dependable government services — they can go about their daily activities and jobs without fear for their life or safety or property rights. On the other side, the inhabitants have institutions that perpetuate crime, graft, and insecurity.

Read it.

Read it.

This year B&Q started to stock pig arcs to cater for those wanted to rear pigs in their back gardens.

Read it.

This refers to a Roman military policy toward cities the Romans placed under siege. The local authority would be told that, as a matter of policy, once the first battering ram touched the city wall, there would be no surrender accepted, no quarter and no mercy.

Say what you will about the Romans, they knew how to do foreign policy so that it stuck.

Now that’s comedy.

Steve Sailer explains golf.

The current theory for why golf courses are so attractive to millions (mostly men), perhaps first put forward in John Strawn’s book Driving the Green: The Making of a Golf Course, is that they look like happy hunting grounds—a Disney-version of the primordial East African grasslands. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, author of the landmark 1975 book Sociobiology, once told me, “I believe that the reason that people find well-landscaped golf courses ‘beautiful’ is that they look like savannas, down to the  scattered trees, copses, and lakes, and most especially if they have vistas of the sea.”

Any reflection on why Obama spends so much time on the links (IYKWIMAITYD, as Joe Bob would say) would be castigated as racist, so I’ll refrain; I’d hate to get the reputation as a harborer of thoughts controversial.

Generally, men (the hunters) tend to prefer sweeping vistas, while women (the gatherers) prefer enclosed verdant refuges. Perhaps it’s no accident that a longtime favorite book among little girls is called “The Secret Garden.” Similarly, women make up a sizable majority of gardeners while men often obsess over lawn care.

Overgeneralizations that promote sexual stereotypes, on the other hand, are just fun.

Read it.

Special New Year’s advice.

Read it.

If, like me, you’re long since tired of reading stories about Tiger Woods’ sordid personal life, please hang with me for one more.

An interesting aspect to an otherwise boring affair.

Read it.

When considering revolutionary new products, we can not simply compare them with existing products, but must instead compare them with the products that don’t yet exist, but should. For example, the PC was more than just an expensive, hard-to-use typewriter — it was a whole new thing that just happened to have some typewriter features. Obviously this comparison is much more difficult than the “count the checkboxes” approach that we like to use when evaluating the “better mousetrap”, but it’s critical if we’re going to understand or create anything truly new.

Read it.

A new Rasmussen Reports poll shows that if he were running for re-election today, Mr. Nelson would lose to Nebraska’s GOP Governor David Heineman by a stunning 61% to 30%. Only three years ago, Mr. Nelson won his current term with a solid 64% of the vote.

Some good news, for a change.

Read it.

A decade ago, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, two grandees of American journalism, warned of a crisis: The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal had revealed a news media publishing at “warp speed,” discarding probity for prurience and embracing a non-stop news cycle of aggression, allegation and assertion where once facts were checked and sources confirmed before ministering scandal to the public. Much like a beleaguered Scotty on a hurtling Starship Enterprise, Kovach and Rosenstiel warned that democracy “cannot take it.”

Well, they need to get rid of the political filters first.

Read it.

Too bad it didn’t happen to Tolkien before he died.

Read it.

Read it.

Why do so many terrorists have engineering degrees?

Engineers like to blow things up?

Christopher Hitchens is always worth reading.

Read it.

Some cruel, mysterious force or deity prevents me from hearing the name of anyone I’m introduced to, admits Michael Deacon.

And I know exactly what he means.

Read it.

Well, okay for Canada, but the American electoral system already does that very elegantly.

Read it.

Everything good is bad for you.

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

Teh Internets are a big place, though, surely with room for a good liberal racist. Naturally, LB’s goal is to convince liberals to be racist rather than racists to be liberal, and he is not always good about replying when served. But he can take off the gloves and hit a little. I charge him with contempt for history; he suggests that I should be burned as a witch. We could both be right.

Read it.

Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, identified what he called the “three laws of prediction,” reflecting an optimistic view of ingenuity: 1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong; 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture past them into the impossible; and 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

He has some good ones.

David Friedman points out that markets will show up even when they aren’t invited, that you can learn a lot about life from role-playing games even when you’re not trying to, and that much of what people ‘know’ about economics is nonsense based on silly word games.

Read it.

You are dealing with people who can be targeted, and it is not necessary, under the rules in effect, to make a decision about whether the person could be detained.  You can shoot first.  There is no affirmative duty to ask first if they want to surrender.  In that case, the decision is not a serial one of decide whether you have an obligation to try and detain; and if it seems too dangerous then to strike to kill.  You are legally permitted to strike to kill, without warning and without obligation to offer surrender.  If that’s the case, and if the personal legal risks to you or your career, now or down the road, are as they are now, and disfavor interrogation or detention, then the incentive runs toward a targeted killing.

Read it.

To be sure, it was a year that saw plenty of bad news. But in almost every instance, there was offsetting good news:

Bad news: The economy remained critically weak, with rising unemployment, a severely depressed real-estate market, the near-collapse of the domestic automobile industry and the steep decline of the dollar.

Good news: Windows 7 sucked less than Vista.

Bad news: The downward spiral of the newspaper industry continued, resulting in the firings of thousands of experienced reporters and an apparently permanent deterioration in the quality of American journalism.

Good news: A lot more people were tweeting.

Bad news: Ominous problems loomed abroad as — among other difficulties — the Afghanistan war went sour, and Iran threatened to plunge the Middle East and beyond into nuclear war.

Good news: They finally got Roman Polanski.

Read it.

Whether such constant exposure to corporate socialism is a symptom or a cause of why California is a social and financial basket case is an exercise left to the reader.

Read it.

Sign me up.

Read it.

A key part of the programme entails undoing some of the damage done to buildings by British Rail.

To All My Liberal Friends:
Please accept with no obligation, implied or explicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2010, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

To All My Conservative Friends:
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Check it out.

Check it out.

I want one of these for my house.

Cringely thinks so, anyway.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Check it out.

Read it.

A fascinating discussion from supposedly intelligent and certainly technically knowledgeable people. We are doomed, as John Derbyshire (Patron Saint of Dyspepsia) says in his latest book.

Read it.

It’s always amusing when a newspaper invites in a guest editorialist who then disembowels a policy that the paper had a major hand in setting up.

Read it.

Every now and then, someone does a brilliant analysis of contemporary cultural phenomena.

This is one such.

Read it.

Roy King, who died on November 8 aged 65, was an archer and master craftsman of the English longbow – mixing historical and artisanal expertise to produce weapons similar to those that proved so devastating at Agincourt almost 600 years ago.

Read it.

So you don’t know what ‘charcuterie’ means. So look it up.

When I visited last month they were rubbing down a few pork bellies with rosemary sprigs and a salt cure and experimenting with a new Italian sausage recipe. On the back porch, alongside the potted rosemary, three smokers issued thin white plumes that filled the neighborhood with a sweet, meaty perfume. Two contained slabs of bacon and the third—a ceramic tile Big Green Egg—held half a dozen of the paprika-and-mustard-rubbed chickens that Erik periodically smokes for favored mothers of his daughter’s classmates.

That ought to give you a clue.

“The regulations are written for industrial food operations,” says Mate. “And if you apply them to small-scale local producers, no one’s gonna do it. It’s legislating local food out of the market. Unfortunately, the health departments don’t appreciate that. But that food is actually safer. It’s easier for someone on that small scale to move things more quickly and be more careful. Local markets are self-regulating. If there’s anything wrong with your products and someone gets sick from it, then you’re out of business.”

Your tax dollars at work.

Read it.

That says something profound but I’m not quite sure what it is.