Read it.

Five years after Uzbek troops opened fire on hundreds of protestors in the city of Andijan, experts say the Central Asian state has yet to be held accountable for one major reason – Afghanistan.

Actually, the one major reason is that nobody gives a shit what happens with, to, or among Uzbeks.

Megan McArdle nails it.

But I do think that David Brooks is onto something when he notes that her relentless careerism, her pitch-perfect blandness, are a little creepy. Not in themselves, but because they’re a symptom of a culture that increasingly values what Brooks calls Organization Kids: the driven, hyperachieving spawn of the Ivy League meritocracy who began practicing Supreme Court nomination acceptances and CEO profile photo poses long before they took notice of the opposite sex.

The Other McCain is on the case.

But that trick never works….

Read it.

You can figure out the logic for yourself just fine, right? Americans eat way too much processed junk, so their/our behavior has to be brought back into line by means of a special tax that will effectively force us to eat tofu, hummus, carrots and arugula.

Read it.

Ten candidates were interviewed after the advert was placed in July and the most eligible, a 41-year-old named as Mr Lee, was introduced in October to Mr Kim’s daughter, who works for a design company. The couple is now set to tie the knot on Saturday.

And that’s the daughter’s only appearance in the whole process. We don’t even find out here name.

Read it.

I’m waiting eagerly for the census form to arrive in the mail. Its arrival will give me an opportunity to comply with the “real” Constitution by committing an act of civil disobedience. Specifically, I will refuse to answer the questions that have nothing to do with the constitutional purpose of the census.

The Constitution authorizes them to count you. Everything beyond that is a violation of privacy. (Remember your Constitutional right to privacy? It allows you to kill your unborn child but not to tell the government all about your life.)

Of course, conscription (‘The Draft’) is unconstitutional as well (read the 13th Amendment some time), and we see how well that works when it goes against what the Crust wants.

Read it.

A friendly native guide to what politicians are saying.

X :  I will serve the people of this district to the best of my ability.

Y:  I intend to look out for my own interest every step of the way, so unless you’re the highest bidder for my services, you’d better start saying your prayers now.

Read it.

The pages of this necessary but contentious book burn with a righteous moral anger about the contradictions and tensions of delivering humanitarian aid in conflict zones. Linda Polman’s polemic is a timely reminder that noble intentions and humanitarian motives are often stretched to, and beyond, breaking point in the febrile world of modern-day war. She implores us to look beyond the clichés of humanitarian aid – red crosses, heart-rending dispatches from refugee camps, fund-raising appeals – and examine in detail the difficulties involved in giving aid effectively in such circumstances.

Read it.

Having a few of them shot for treason might have a salutory effect.

Read it.

Be the first on your block.

Read it.

Ya think?

Just trying to help out.

* Iran can have nukes, but you can’t have salt.

* Shape up voters, or we’ll get a cheap replacement for you from Mexico.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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….

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Hey, don’t mess with the goat.

Read it.

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.