Read it.

Seven new albino killings have been reported in Tanzania and Burundi amid signs that the lucrative trade in their body parts has not waned.

Sure, these people are ready for self-government.

Read it.

Just for perspective, consider whether a Canadian school would send kids home for wearing Canadian flags on the Fourth of July. The question answers itself.

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This is God telling you to STAY HOME.

Read it.

Identity politics raises its ugly head yet again. Lordy, I get tired of this shit. Some people just have nothing better to do than whine about stuff that Just Doesn’t Matter.

Where is Natural Selection when you really need it?

Arnold Kling holds up The Mirror.

Make a list of five to ten social issues that you feel are important. Next, make a list of five to ten social issues that you think government should stay out of. What is the intersection of those two sets? If it is zero, then you probably belong to the Church of Unlimited Government. If every social issue you care about (not just the top five or ten) is one where you want government to deal with it, then you definitely belong to the Church.

Read it.

Tax increases are driving London’s top money managers to pick up and move to Switzerland, Bloomberg News reports.

And who could blame them?

Read it.

Read it.

But they’ll all speak French, so nobody will care. Well, maybe Canadiens.

Read it.

The point of terrorism is not to “destroy.” It is to terrify. And for eight and a half years now, the dominant federal government response to terrorist threats and attacks has been to magnify their harm by increasing a mood of fear and intimidation. That is the real case against the ludicrous “orange threat level” announcements we hear every three minutes at the airport. It’s not just that they’re pointless, uninformative, and insulting to our collective intelligence; it’s that their larger effect is to make people feel frightened rather than brave.

Jerry Pournelle.

What I do not understand is why African Americans, who lose a lot of jobs to illegal immigrants, are not incensed at all this. The Republican Party freed the slaves, the Democratic Party kept the Solid South’s Jim Crow laws, so 90% of the blacks vote Democrat. I never did understand that one.

Neither do I.

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

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Schools are abandoning the practice of cutting up frogs, rats and animal organs which has been a mainstay of biology lessons for generations, out of concern for squeamish pupils and fears that they could turn their scalpels on each other.

… for multiculturalism.

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A group of villagers blockaded country lanes and formed a human barricade to stop travellers taking advantage of the Bank Holiday weekend to build a caravan site near their homes.

Gipsies in the past have used Bank Holidays to tarmac over fields because they know they have an extra day before council planning officers are back at their desks to halt development.

But residents in Meriden, near Solihull, West Midlands, swung into action after they spotted the travellers swarming onto the 10-acre field in the village just after the council offices closed at 5.30pm on Friday.

They had arrived with huge mechanical diggers, planning to rip up the ground, pour concrete bases for their mobile homes, and set up a permanent site.

UPDATE: Link fixed.

Read it.

And an entire generation….

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After being blitzed with election pamphlets Roy Newman, 74, decided to tell other voters: “GET THE LOT OUT.”

But 90 minutes after he put up the sign up in an upstairs room at his house two police officers arrived and accused him of being racist.

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

Read it.

Richie Powell, 39, was booked on a flight to Scotland to take part in a wheelchair race.

But as he tried to board the plane at Bristol airport he was told: “You can only fly if you can walk up the aircraft steps.”

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably at the hands of somebody in the TSA.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Eric Raymond is always worth reading.

I said “Increasingly it’s not just the classic hard-core unemployables (alcoholics, criminal deviants, crazies) that can’t pull enough weight to justify a paycheck; it’s the marginal ones, the mediocre, and the mildly dysfunctional.” And I pointed at a cause: “We’ve spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and downside risks associated with hiring a worker — which meant the minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn’t make sense has crept up and up and up, gradually. This effect was partly masked by credit and asset bubbles, but those have now popped.”

Read it.

It is a measure of how much the world has changed that something like this is considered news.

When I was in the Navy, he would have been tried and hanged by now.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Oh, no!

Read it.

Yes, you have to download a PDF, but it’s still worth reading. Conscription would appear to be on its face contrary to the 13th Amendment, and yet the half-dozen times it’s been challenged in the courts such challenges have been dismissed with judicial handwaving that involved no serious consideration of the issues. You can have all the laws in place that you want, but if those who are charged with enforcing the law don’t feel like it, you’re screwed.

Read it.

And rightly so, I should think.

The Other McCain overturns a rock.

Read it.

I guess I won’t be buying an iPad after all. Wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of the secret police.

Read it.

According to police reports, Conrad Zdzierak, 30, is alleged to have used the £450 silicon mask in an audacious string of six bank robberies in Ohio.

Guess it didn’t work.

But after a tip-off, officers found Zdzierak staying at a nearby hotel.

Ah, it would have worked, but he was betrayed.

Read it.

You can make a mainframe from the things you have at home.

Read it.

In a letter to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa fumes that the source of the funds for the $4.7 billion repayment is not GM earnings, but rather a Treasury escrow account. He chides the company and the administration for suggesting in recent statements that the money is coming from GM earnings.

Grassley writes that GM’s early repayment of the federal loan is aimed at diverting attention from another uncomfortable issue – the big break the car company would get on a proposed tax to recoup TARP losses. GM is expected to generate some of the biggest losses in the TARP program, but it won’t have to pay any money under the so-called TARP tax the Obama administration wants to impose on large financial institutions.

Oh, no! GM wouldn’t lie to us, would they?

Read it.

A California-based consumer watchdog called, er… Consumer Watchdog is calling for a Department of Justice investigation into Google.

The group, supported by mobile entrepreneur Simon Buckingham and lawyers for two price comparison websites, praised the DOJ for its action against Google Books and the FTC probe into the acquisition of AdMob.

But Consumer Watchdog said Google was unfairly using its dominance in search to the detriment of both advertisers and users.

If you get a nameplate, you can be a ‘consumer watchdog’ too. (In the Good Old Days, such people were called ‘busybodies’ and told to butt out. In these degenerate modern times, however, they are ‘consumer advocates’ and given great deference.)

Read it.

‘Judge, he needed killin’.’

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

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Hey, don’t mess with the goat.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

A more correct headline would be ’10 Sets of Bureaucrats Demand Online Privacy’.

Just another case of ‘journalists’ carrying the water for those who see no distinction between a nation and that nation’s government.

Paul Graham explains.

I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can’t afford a front yard full of old cars.

My name is Tim, and I have too much Stuff.

And unless you’re extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one’s spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there’s less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there’s more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what’s around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.

I’ve got some of those.

The worst stuff in this respect may be stuff you don’t use much because it’s too good. Nothing owns you like fragile stuff. For example, the “good china” so many households have, and whose defining quality is not so much that it’s fun to use, but that one must be especially careful not to break it.

Read it.

As if they weren’t ‘pouring into the U.S.’ anyway.

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The reality is that President Obama, like President Bush before him, has rather dramatically raised government spending and therefore has raised your taxes. To say otherwise is like saying you got your new swimming pool for free because you put it on your credit card.

Read it.

The “convenience of the employer” rule – the state tax doctrine that subjects interstate telecommuters to the risk of double taxation. Specifically, a state with a “convenience of the employer” rule can tax nonresidents who telecommute part-time to an employer within that state on the wages they earn at home, even though their home states can tax the same income.

For many people, the threat of owing taxes to two states can put a long-distance job out of reach. By making telework unaffordable for workers, the tax penalty also thwarts businesses and government agencies trying to tap the cost-saving and other economic benefits telework offers.

Read it.

LaHood says the government is going to give bicycling _ and walking, too _ the same importance as automobiles in transportation planning and the selection of projects for federal money. The former Republican congressman quietly announced the “sea change” in transportation policy last month.

Well, what else could one expect of a RINO that would accept a position in the Obamateur’s administration? Yet another fellow-traveller on the lefty magical mystery tour attempt to turn the clock back before the Industrial Revolution. How did these crapweasels get the name ‘progressive’, anyway? Edmund Burke wasn’t even this reactionary.

Read it.

An especially surreal episode comes from Binghamton, New York. The Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton is one of those congregations that tired of its denomination slouching toward heterodoxy and decided to leave for purer pastures. A legal dispute over the property resulted in a New York court ordering the congregation to hand the church property over to the denomination. Trouble is, the denomination no longer had need of the space, what with the congregation leaving and all.

This basic scenario has been repeated all across the fruited plains over the last several years. But in this case, the Episcopal Church did it one or two better. After the court decision, the congregation offered the denomination $150,000 for the building (its assessed value was $386,400). But a Muslim imam also offered to buy it. Now you might be anticipating that the denominational officials had a moral dilemma, since the imam made a more competitive offer.

But, alas, no such dilemma ensued. Rather than sell the church building to the departing Anglican congregation, the denominational authorities managed to act with both spite and economic irrationality. They sold the church building to the imam—for $50,000. It’s now called the Islamic Awareness Center.

With ‘Christians’ like these, who needs Muslims?

Read it.

“I was five thousand miles away, drunk and happily unaware at a friend’s birthday party in Berlin, when I learned that the first white farmer had been murdered.” So begins the book The Last Resort, by Douglas Rogers. Rogers grew up in Zimbabwe on a chicken farm and vineyard; his parents presently own a small resort called Drifters, hence the title. “Own” is used here very loosely, since the concept of ownership in President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is only tangentially related to the concept of ownership as we know it. The book chronicles the life of Rogers’s parents since that first farmer died in the Zimbabwe land invasions that began in 2000.

Read it.

People don’t flinch at using anything else made in a factory; yet the term ‘factory food’ is seen as, and is meant to be, derogatory. Why is that?

Perhaps it’s because things made in factories are far less expensive that hand-made stuff, and the New York Times doesn’t like poor people who use factory-produced stuff because they have to make their limited supply of money go a long way. Perhaps it’s because the New York Times would rather see them beg in the streets while the sort of people who read the New York Times throw them a quarter or two. Perhaps that’s why the New York Times loves Whole Foods and hates Walmart.

Read it.

I’m pretty sure Rehnquist and O’Connor went to Stanford.

President Obama, Harvard Law, class of ‘91, “wants somebody who has a sense of what real life is like in America,” said Senator Patrick Leahy last week. Real life, hmm? Name somebody outside of the Axis of Ivy, someone who didn’t learn to chant, “That’s all right, that’s O.K., you’re gonna work for us someday,” while losing to a state school in hockey.

Yeah, we really do have to get rid of all that Harvard trash.

Read it.

The takeaway: For every doctor, there are five people performing health care administrative support.

There are two basic reasons for the absurdly large administrative employment in health care. First, our health care system — with its actuarially focused multiple health insurers, paper-based record keeping and multiple billing systems — is bound to create a lot of administrative work. Second, the way the payment system is structured, there is little incentive to make the system more efficient.

And how much of that administrative burden is because of government paperwork requirements? Can you spell M E D I C A R E? Can you spell M E D I C A I D? Can you spell T A X D E D U C T I B I L I T Y? Of course you can.

Read it.

That monkey must be heavily armed.

Perhaps it’s Muslim. That would do it, too.

Read it.

In the suit, job applicants claimed the Census Bureau was unlawfully screening out minorities by requiring all applicants to provide court documents related to an arrest, whether or not it resulted in a conviction.

Jeez, don’t they know how racist that is?

Read it.

The Davey family’s £815-a-week state handouts pay for a four-bedroom home, top-of-the-range mod cons and two vehicles including a Mercedes people carrier.

Father-of-seven Peter gave up work because he could make more living on benefits.

Yet he and his wife Claire are still not happy with their lot.

With an eighth child on the way, they are demanding a bigger house, courtesy of the taxpayer.