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FOOTBALL FANS in the central African state of Congo were hurling accusations of witchcraft at each other yesterday after a freak blast of lightning struck dead an entire team on the playing field while their opponents were left completely untouched.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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“Henry Ford Health System will pay $70,000 to a family who alleges the system failed to provide sign language interpreters to a patient and family members in 2004, and must train staff on the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to a settlement announced … by the U.S. Justice Department.”

And that’s why Detroit only has half of the number of people that it was built for. The smart ones are leaving, and the stupid ones are in charge of the government.

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Oh, the humanity….

On the other hand, perhaps if she wore a sweater vest she could get a guy to hang around. Just saying.

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Look, Jane. See Michigan. See Michigan rot.

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The Obama administration has become a budget-free zone, in flagrant violation of federal law, which prescribes a process for developing a federal budget which the Democrats have simply flouted. Has our nation ever seen such fecklessness? $15 trillion in debt, the credit of the United States being downgraded, hundreds of thousands leaving the labor force, and the Democrats don’t think our government should have a budget? Or a plan to dig our way out of a $15 trillion hole? How out of touch can the Democrats be?

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The head of the South African Medical Association has called for the return of the death penalty after one of the country’s senior dermatologists was gunned down by carjackers in the capital Pretoria.

South Africans are lucky they no longer suffer under the boot of the racist white former regime.

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

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Not that you care, you swine.

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Foolish mortal.

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And when they execute him,  these defective genes will be expunged from the pool.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Unsurprisingly, protectionism would raise the cost of solar in the U.S., causing job losses. According to a new report by the Brattle Group, tariffs could eliminate upwards of 50,000 jobs. Depending on the size of the tariff (the Brattle Group examined the effects of 50 and 100 percent tariffs), costs for solar consumers would increase anywhere from $621 million to $2.6 billion over the next three years. In addition, if China retaliates by imposing its own tariffs on American solar products, another 11,000 net jobs could be lost.

So to recap: Green jobs destroy other jobs. And now the Obama administration may destroy green jobs.

Hey, we’re from the government, and we’re here to help. Really.

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It’s good to know that in this age of immediate and easy customer feedback that there are still companies that steadfastly refuse to listen to the people who have to use their products. Case in point: Microsoft.

Microsoft is a poster child for the programming approach ‘what programmers want is what ordinary customers want’.

If you haven’t been following this saga, Microsoft revealed a while back that the Ribbon found in Micosoft Office and other MS programs like WordPad and Paint is now coming to Windows Explorer as well. Did you need those extra pixels at the top of the screen? Too bad for you.

Buy a bigger monitor, you hoser. Get with the new millennium.

“Our view is that we do need to move the user interface forward and accept that a vocal set of customers are just not happy with the direction we’re going.”

I have never wanted to switch to Mac so badly in my life.

Buwah-hah-hah! Come to the appliance side, young Skywalker.

“We remind folks that there are third-party tools available… that provide a number of different interface paradigms. We do embrace the notion that third-party tools play an important part in the Windows experience.”

Yes, they do, because you keep making stupid decisions.

Sort of the way disinfectant plays a part in the medical experience.

Read it.

There are reports that CIT will again stop giving loans to suppliers of Sears and if true, it could deliver a death blow to the retailer.

God, I hope so. They went from being America’s store to crap decades ago.

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From California, of course.

Last fall, a state inspector strode into Great Beginnings preschool and declared the tree house and climbing structure too high. They would have to come down or be surrounded by extra padding.

The metal ladder to the playhouse, which had been there 30 years, could pinch the children, said Beverly Wright-Chrystal, a state child care licensing representative. Also, a log worn smooth by generations of boys and girls playing horsy and hide-and-go-seek would have to be sanded and painted because of a potential “splinter hazard,” Wright-Chrystal determined.

Marian Stocking, who opened the Long Beach preschool in a converted house on 4th Street in 1978, had the offending equipment hauled away. Watching it go, some of the children cried out, “Tell those bad men to bring our log back.”

Good luck with that, kid. Welcome to the Left Coast.

When I was in Law School, my torts professor would spend Friday’s class examining the latest WTF ruling that had come out of the California Supreme Court. Those sessions certainly contributed to my decision not to make my living practicing law.

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Japan’s population is expected to shrink to a third of its current size over the next century, with the average woman living to over 90 within 50 years, a UK government report said on Monday.

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Workers at the Regency Ceramics factory in India raided the home of their boss, and beat him senseless with lead pipes after a wage dispute turned ugly.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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A product of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP ), SuperTracker is an online tool located at choosemyplate.gov that helps users set and maintain dietary goals. Create a user profile at the site, and you can track the calories you consume each day, record your daily physical activities, set weight management goals, and see how close you come to eating the USDA’s recommended daily allowance of dark green vegetables. SuperTracker, an expanded version of previous tools called the MyPyramid Tracker and the MyPyramid Menu Planner, debuted in December 2011. In its first month, it reportedly attracted more than 700,000 registered users. Any day now, then, we should expect to see either the end of the obesity epidemic or SuperDuperTracker, an even more intrusive and hands-on government effort to engineer our behavior. If you’re a betting man, bet on the latter.

Homework: Determine whether it’s Democrats or Republicans who are more likely to be attempting to control what you can eat through government action. Extra credit if you find the largest number of ‘it’s for the children!’ excuses.

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Police in England arrested a man Saturday on suspicion of making a racially abusive gesture at a high-profile soccer match between Liverpool and Manchester United earlier that day, they said Sunday.

And I’m sure that’s the most important thing they had to do that day.

Sheesh.

Meanwhile, back in the real world:

We’ve featured a number of articles recently about racially-motivated larceny and violence in Britain and Denmark. Other stories about similar events in Norway, France, Germany, and Sweden have been included in the news feed — although in the case of Sweden, one has to read between the lines to detect the ethnic component of most crimes, since the media go to great lengths to avoid giving any clue about the racial or religious background of criminals.

The attackers in all these cases are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants, usually from Africa, the Arab world, or South Asia. Their modus operandi is to converge in groups of five to twenty “youths” on a white native of their host country, choosing their victim for his exposed position and relative helplessness.

And what are the ‘authorities’ doing about it?

Media reports of these incidents typically describe the attacks as “inexplicable” or “random”. Police spokesmen often tell reporters that the perpetrators’ motive is unknown. Despite the obvious racial animus behind most of the crimes — including the expression of racial epithets while the victim is being beaten or stabbed — there seems to be a widespread reluctance to discuss race when the attackers are “brown” and the victim is white. A cone of silence descends over the press and the authorities. Under those circumstances, from their point of view, race simply doesn’t exist.

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Bans on soda and “junk food” in public schools, while less objectionable than policies aimed at adults, have always struck me as symbolic. Since what kids eat (not to mention how much energy they expend) is determined by so many factors other than what’s available at school, it seems unrealistic to expect that getting rid of vending machines selling candy bars, potato chips, and sugary drinks will have a noticeable impact on their diets or waistlines.

Yeah, but it lets the people in charge Feel Good About Themselves, like they Made A Difference, and that’s all that counts with such people. Such Wellness Theater matches the Security Theater we see at the airports — it doesn’t have any effect, but so long as it looks like something is being done, that’s enough. ‘How can you say we were ineffective? Look at all the stuff we did! Look at all the money we spent!‘

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Were the (completely true) accusations against, say, Romney or Santorum, they would almost certainly be fatal, as they were against Cain and a host of other politicians.  But Newt deftly deploys a reframe and shames the questioner, and probably gains support rather than loses it.  The fact that he’s consistently talked a ‘family values’ line that he manifestly fails to live up with is irrelevant.  Only non-alphas get held to standards of hypocrisy by the neurotypical woman who is on the same side of the red/blue tribal boundaries.  Perhaps the easiest way to describe Newt is a lesser Bill Clinton, an appetite in a suit.  They’ve got nearly all the same markers, but Clinton is (IMO) slightly smarter—I view Clinton as likely @3 sigma and Newt between 2 and 3–and somewhat more charismatic.  Neither lacks the ability to seduce though, and they have nearly exactly the same vices.  I suppose some of the delta between their respective approval ratings can be explained by their median media coverage (Clinton, fawning vs Newt, hostile).

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In the past few weeks, several reports have been released related to federal lands.  These reports attempt to explain how federal lands could be better used to access energy sources. Both the American Petroleum Institute and the Institute for Energy Research found that the amount of domestically produced oil and natural gas has greatly reduced since Obama assumed office in 2009.  The United States has some of the largest natural gas, oil and coal resources in the world.  The reports found that these are resources that are not being used to their full potential.

Perhaps because the Obama administration hates America and it’s people and is making a valiant attempt to destroy their economy. Hey, if they wanted to do that, what would they have done differently?

Read it.

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We have written many times over the years about liberal newspapers, in particular the New York Times, which have published classified information in violation of the Espionage Act. They did thus to undermine the foreign policies of the United States, and in particular to attack the Bush administration. Today the curtain was raised on one of those episodes, as a former CIA official who was more recently a Democratic staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was indicted. The Washington Post has the story (without mentioning, however, that the criminal defendant, John Kiriakou, was a Democratic staffer).

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

Katherine Mangu-Ward correctly points out the legal immigration into the U.S. is a nightmare.

We got your bureaucracy, right here.

And, of course, whenever bureaucratic nightmares arise, it generates a passel of lawyers devoted to gaming the system.

It is not a pretty sight, and will need to be fixed if we ever hope to get a handle on illegal immigration.

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A crude new method of making methamphetamine poses a risk even to Americans who never get anywhere near the drug: It is filling hospitals with thousands of uninsured burn patients requiring millions of dollars in advanced treatment … a burden so costly that it’s contributing to the closure of some burn units.

In the good old days, such people would die, and eventually all the stupid ones would have been killed off, and the trend would bottom out. In today’s new Kinder Gentler World, of course, intelligent people are on the hook for repairing the mistakes of stupid people. I predict that such a civilization won’t last very long.

Read it.

And why? Because Muslims are treated as a privileged class in the New Multi-Culti Britain.

Sources claim that converts are attracted by the chance  of better food and a more comfortable regime.

But there are also fears that some are being radicalised.

Read it.

More than 370,000 migrants who were admitted to Britain to work, study or go on holiday are now claiming out-of-work benefits, according to official figures compiled for the first time.

Bloated welfare rolls are the persistent legacy of left-wing governments — Labor in the U.K., Democrats in the U.S. — because the cornerstone of the ‘progressive’ program is to have everybody possible a dependent of the state and the political class that runs it. Britain is further advanced on this road than we are; remember their example the next time you hear some politician bloviating about a ‘path to citizenship’ for the criminals who snuck into this country to leech off of the institutions of a culture far advanced of their own.

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Assemblywoman Mary Hayashi (D-Hayward), who chairs the Committee on Business, Professions and Consumer Protection, has “pleaded no contest to charges that she tried to walk off with $2,500 in clothes.”

She merely tried to do retail what the rest of her Party is doing wholesale. Don’t break out of the herd, dear, or you’ll become a target.

“I am confident that with the close of these proceedings, she will continue to ably serve her constituents with the same talent and passion she has displayed throughout her time in office,” wrote Assembly Speaker John Pérez in a supportive statement.

Oh, I have no doubt….

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At the end of last year, the Argentinian President ordered the creation of a new, centralized, nationwide biometric ID database for law enforcement purposes, known as SIBIOS. A decree from the beginning of this year allows 14 million digitized fingerprints, gathered as part of Argentina’s national ID system, to be added to SIBIOS.

And Argentina is such a poster child for democracy, too….

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Europe slowly commits suicide — and we get to watch.

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As the biggest kid on the e-commerce block, Amazon now advocates the federal government forcing all online merchants to collect sales taxes on every sale.

Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president for global public policy, said at a news conference in the governor’s office that the company supported federal legislation requiring all sales tax collections by all online companies.

“It’s the only way to level the playing field for all sellers,” Misener said. “It’s the only way for Indiana to obtain all the sales tax revenue that is already owed.”

Except that it doesn’t, of course, any more than making an Abrams tank and a Smart For Two drive in the same six feet of snow ‘levels the playing field’. The cost of compliance for ‘all online companies’ is pocket change for an entity like Amazon, but could kill most smaller vendors — which Amazon, in classic crapitalism fashion, is trying to stifle before they get out of the crib and become competitors. Bezos is a sellout, after all. How disappointing.

Heh.

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“My students never knew I normally vote Republican,” Ms. Davis said Thursday at a campaign stop in Orangeburg for Texas Gov. Rick Perry. As a teacher of third, fourth and fifth graders, “I couldn’t put a yard sign out — the kids knew where I lived,” she said. “Now I have the opportunity to go out and speak my mind.”

The lesson being that NO DEMOCRAT TEACHER EVER HAS OR EVER WILL SHOW SUCH RESTRAINT.

Read it. And ponder the poster.

The Oatmeal is watching.

Addendum: DO NOT CONFUSE ‘IF’ WITH ‘WHETHER’ (unless you have tattoos or piercings, in which case you are doomed to life in the Underclass anyway and it doesn’t matter whether you can use the language properly). (Note the correct use of ‘whether’ rather than ‘if’.)

‘IF’ is conditional. ‘I want to know if you are going.’ =>’You’re going: I want to know; you’re not going: I don’t care.’

When you want to know regardless, use ‘whether’: ‘I want to know whether you are going.’ => ‘Go or stay, I still want to know.’

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The accident was caught on video and Ms Langworthy is seen hitting the water with her feet still tied before being swept towards rapids on the river, which separates Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Will she take the hint? Only time will tell. (Gotta love Australians, but, I mean, damn….)

Darwin Award! Getcher Darwin Award here….

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, reflects on kindness in action.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith of Bristol, England have ten kids but only a four-bedroom house. Things are cramped. They are also hard-up: Mrs. Smith tells us that the children have only one Nintendo Wii console between them. If that’s got you reaching for your hanky, please note that neither of the Smiths has held a job since 2001, when the child count was three. They live entirely on government benefits, north of $150,000 worth per annum. The town gave them the house and also delivers breakfast to them.

I’d certainly like that non-job.

I just got back from a lecture by Don Barnett, an expert on the topic. Don ran through points he’s made in his Center for Immigration Studies research papers.

Bottom line: Refugee resettlement is a huge money racket, with executives of the VOLAGs (Voluntary Agencies) drawing extravagant salaries that are mostly paid by the US taxpayer. Government money has well-nigh chased out private charity. The United Nations drives the process, the State Department waving refugees through to the VOLAGS, who after a few weeks dump them on the welfare systems. (Refugees are immediately eligible for all welfare benefits.) Claims of refugee status are checked perfunctorily or not at all, so that a high proportion—Barnett thinks 90 percent—are bogus.

Your tax dollars at work. Or not, as it may be.

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Virtually all our energy exports go to the US.   As a country, we must seek new markets for our products and services and the booming Asia-Pacific economies have shown great interest in our oil, gas, metals and minerals. For our government, the choice is clear:  we need to diversify our markets in order to create jobs and economic growth for Canadians across this country.  We must expand our trade with the fast growing Asian economies. We know that increasing trade will help ensure the financial security of Canadians and their families.

Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade.  Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry.  No mining.  No oil.  No gas. No more hydro-electric dams.

Pretty blunt, for an elected official. Would that the U.S. had a few such. He rips the Clever Plastic Disguise off of the regressives who would cancel anything that happened after 1900.

These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.  They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects.  They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest. They attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources.  Finally, if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach:  sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further. They do this because they know it can work.  It works because it helps them to achieve their ultimate objective: delay a project to the point it becomes economically unviable.

And that’s the sad part.

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So-called “cottage foods” laws are popping up around the country in response to the growing demand for local foods on the part of buyers and sellers. Generally, these laws help the entrepreneurs behind small startup ventures operated out of the home opt out of the crushing regulations faced by restaurants and other food sellers. But in spite of the good intentions behind the laws, they sometimes merely create a parallel system of numbingly stupid regulations.

Once again, it wouldn’t be a problem absent the government.

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I guess the ‘alternative’ in ‘Alternative Energy’ means ‘an alternative to cheap and reliable’.

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Over at Big Goverment, Schweizer talks about how green energy tycoon Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has gotten his knickers in a twist over claims that his “politically-connected solar company called Brightsource (of which Mr. Kennedy’s firm is the largest investor) landed a sweetheart billion-dollar plus taxpayer-guaranteed loan.” RFKjr calls Schweizer a “sock puppet” for “Big Oil.”

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, ponders ethnicity.

The Third World-ification of Britain began in the same way that, according to a famous historian, the British Empire itself began: in a fit of absent-mindedness. As the dissolution of that empire commenced in the years after WW2, it seemed only fair to let some of Her Majesty’s overseas subject go settle in the imperial homeland.

Then, in the 1960s, at about the same time as their American cousins, British socialists and love-the-world globalists realized that mass Third World immigration was a marvelous weapon to wield against both their native working class, who were getting ideas above their station, and domestic conservatives and traditionalists of all kinds, whom the globalists needed to delegitimize so that Davos Man could take over.

Forty years on, one in eight of Britain’s population was born abroad, most in the Third World — in, that is to say, places whose net contribution to human civilization over the last millennium has been zero, if not actually negative.

The consequences fill the pages of Britain’s newspapers. They filled them rather spectacularly in August this year, when the ineducable, unemployable, and unassimilable descendants of those Third World settlers burned and looted British town centers.

And America is well on the way to being the same.

They have filled them this past few days with the story of Emma West, a British woman who, admittedly in salty language, had the audacity to lament the demographic transformation of her homeland in public. Ms West is in jail as I write, charged with “a racially aggravated public order offence,” though no disorder seems to have ensued. Ms West’s children have been “placed in care,” which is to say, sent to re-education camps where they will be taught to hate their mother in between sessions of sex play with the pedophile camp staff. “Being the child of an enemy of the people” was the charge in Stalin’s time.

You will, I am sure, comb the records of British courts in vain to find anyone but a native Briton charged with “a racially aggravated public order offense.”

That, America’s already got.

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Employers require high school diplomas as prerequisites for many jobs. Yet if the matter gets to court, it can be quite expensive and cumbersome for them to establish that such a screen is “job related and consistent with business necessity” — necessity being of course a legal term of art.

The Americans with Disabilities Act is one of the reasons that George H W Bush will burn in Hell for all eternity.

Read it.

Here is a very nice illustration of the point I made earlier.

(1) Why is the government involved in teachers’ pensions? Because the government pays the teachers, and their pensions. Why is the government paying the teachers? Because in the centralized state that is modern Britain, government controls (and pays for) education. That makes teacher pay — and teacher pensions — a political issue.

(2) Why is the government trying to ‘reform’ teacher pensions? Because they are running out of money, and can’t keep the (ridiculously generous) promises they may earlier. Does the fact that the government eventually won’t have any money with which to pay for teacher pensions at the current level matter to the teachers? Not a shred — hence the language that they ‘cannot accept’ said reform. Since the government is running out of money, how do the teachers get off saying what they will or won’t ‘accept’? Because the teachers vote, and Britain is a Modern Democracy, in which pressure groups rule.

The message from the teacher unions is, essentially, ‘We don’t care that you won’t have the money to pay for these pensions, we want them anyway, and you WILL preserve our right to them, or you elected politicians will be out of a job, because the reality is that you will have an uncertain number of people who like you and a large block of people who hate your guts come next election time. If you cut our pensions, you lose your job. Take whatever action you think appropriate.’ And history shows us that the number of elected politicians who can do the right thing in the face of that threat is negligible.

Dystopia arrives, not on little cat feet, but in great big boots, with spike heels and steel toes.

Baron Bodissey is not optimistic.

Yes, the fantasy is coming to an end. The political and cultural leaders of Europe, North America, and Australia share the same dream. Those at the highest levels of government and business generally view themselves as a trans-national ruling class with no great attachment to any single nation or people. Their collective dream is one of global governance — presided over by themselves, of course — propped up by a financial system that keeps power in the hands of the oligarchs who run it, and prevents any serious irruption from “the mutable, rank-scented many” beneath.

The fall of a system as extensive, wealthy, powerful, and well-entrenched as ours will be catastrophic in scope. Rather than the end of the Third Reich, the fall of the Roman Empire provides an event of comparable historical significance.

The fall of Rome was a slow-motion process that took place over several centuries, even though it appeared rapid in hindsight a millennium later. The collapse of the Westphalian Order may occur more suddenly, given the existence of instantaneous worldwide communication networks. Alternatively, we may be in for a gradual descent into poverty, social degradation, and disorder, followed by the emergence of a new order whose form cannot yet be imagined.

I predict that it will be ugly indeed.

Read it.

Didn’t think that the day would ever come that the Royal Navy’s ‘mightiest ship’ was a Destroyer.

Let’s see:

1. Massive influx of Muslims creating social problems for which the government always blames the victims? Check.
2. Police that won’t show up if it’s too dangerous? Check.
3. Army fit only for parades and occasional UN peacekeeping duty? Check.
4. Miniscule Navy that’s basically a glorified Coast Guard? Check

Guess it’s just another Toy Scandinavian Monarchy now.

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Starting January 1, the European Union has begun imposing a requirement that all airlines landing in Europe must show that they have bought carbon emissions permits equal to the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the aircraft. Airlines without the proper number of allowances would be fined up to $130 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions and could be barred from European airspace.

And what exactly is the nature of these ‘carbon emission permits’? How do they halt or reverse ‘climate change’? Or are they just a way for Eurocrats to wet their beaks by piggybacking on the latest Chicken Little trend?

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Mother Yasmin Chaudhry drowned her one year old baby daughter in a bucket live on Skype while her boyfriend watched from Britain.

Yeah, nothing says ‘Norwegian’ like ‘Yasmin Chaudhry’. Sailed with the Vikings, her ancestors did.

The baby’s father now lives in Pakistan after splitting with the mother, his lawyer commenting that ‘he is of course, very shocked’.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing he can do, because there is no penalty under shari’ah for a parent killing his or her child.

Bryan Caplan despairs.

The main problem with democracy, I keep arguing, is that harmful policies reliably win by popular demand.  But there are exceptions.  Take Obamacare.  It appears to be genuinely unpopular.  But not only did Obama pass it; it’s now very likely that his Republican opponent will be Mitt Romney, who brought the prototype of Obamacare to Massachusetts.

For once a majority of the public wants to repeal a genuinely unpopular harmful policy.  And what options does American democracy give them?  A choice between the Obamacare’s Jesus and Obamacare’s John the Baptist.  What gives?

Welcome to my world.

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The trial was deemed so successful that a £5 million scheme will now be rolled out nationwide, targeting up to 50,000 unemployed.

Government officials were said to have been shocked by the figures, which they believe prove that a core group of claimants have no intention of working.