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Left-wing script writers infiltrated Doctor Who to give it anti-Thatcher plot lines in the late 1980s in a failed attempt “to overthrow the Government” Sylvester McCoy has claimed.

McCoy, who played the seventh doctor from 1987 to 1989, and Andrew Cartmel, the script editor at the time, both admitted the conspiracy, saying that it “seemed the right thing to do”.

However, the secret messages remained a secret to all but Doctor Who insiders. Meanwhile the show’s popularity went into freefall and it was taken off air in 1989.

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The Other McCain is on the case.

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Thanks to the iPod, audiobook sales are soaring and actors are queuing up to make them. But what’s it like recording one? ‘Like doing “King Lear” in a cupboard’, learns Richard Johnson

Read it.

A test of simple maths skills taken by teachers from schools across the country has revealed a “shocking” lack of mental arithmetic ability and basic maths knowledge.

Only four out of 10 teachers could work out that 2.1 per cent of 400 is 8.4. Only a third knew that 1.4 divided by 0.1 is 14, and less than 50 per cent could work out that a half divided by a quarter is 2.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Sad to say, it’s already happening here.

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One of the most widely quoted and most alarmist passages in the main 2007 report was a warning that, by 2020, global warming could reduce crop yields in some countries in Africa by 50 per cent. Dr Pachauri not only allowed this claim to be included in the short Synthesis Report, of which he was co-editor, but has publicly repeated it many times since.

In the wake of all the other recent scandals, “Africa-gate” may be the most damaging of all, because of the involvement of Dr Pachauri himself. Not only is the reputation of the IPCC in tatters, but that of its chairman appears irreperably damaged. Yet the world’s politicians cannot afford to see him resign because, if he goes, the whole sham edifice they have sworn by would come tumbling down.

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Caller ID spoofing technology allows a user to change the caller ID to show any desired number on a recipients caller ID display. There are currently a handful of companies that offer this service including SpoofCard (and it’s mobile application called Spoof App) and Spoofem, among others.

Read it.

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

“The risk involved in untrained and ill-equipped officers entering the water in these circumstances are generally too high to contemplate.”

I guess it is.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, the Instapundit, was there.

There were promises of transparency and of a new kind of collaborative politics where establishment figures listened to ordinary Americans. We were going to see net spending cuts, tax cuts for nearly all Americans, an end to earmarks, legislation posted online for the public to review before it is signed into law, and a line-by-line review of the federal budget to remove wasteful programs.

These weren’t the tea-party platforms I heard discussed in Nashville last weekend. They were the campaign promises of Barack Obama in 2008.

And we see how that worked out.

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We have the technology.

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Bet on the crocodile.

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The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

Well, some people are just sick of that song.

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Burglaries have dropped as criminals turn to street muggings because domestic electrical items are now so cheap they are not worth stealing, according to a new report.

That’s capitalism for you.

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The House of Delegates is scheduled to vote Wednesday on a bill that would protect Virginians from attempts by employers or insurance companies to implant microchips in their bodies against their will.

Add ‘government’ to that list and I’m in. Although the news story focuses on Republicans, given the targets of the list (employers? insurance companies?) I suspect that Democrats (or RINOS, much the same thing) are behind it.

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When Israel’s Ambassador Michael Oren took the stage to speak at the University of California, Irvine, on Monday night, the audience was salted with apparent students who were determined not to let him speak. According to the Jerusalem Post report, eleven people were arrested as Oren was repeatedly interrupted while trying to deliver an address on campus.

Judenhasse comes to the American campus.

(What am I saying? It never left.)

NB: Islam doesn’t do ‘free speech’. Never has. Never will.

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Never forget that new technology can be made the servant of some very old ideas.

Inadvertently, of course.

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Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

There’s always the Washington Post’s XX featurette for heaping mounds of Taking Everything Personally….

The star of Precious weighs 300 pounds. No woman is going to be drawn to make an impulse purchase of a fashion and lifestyle magazine because there’s a 300 pounder on the cover.

Capital is mobile.

“In 2004 New Jersey was one of the first states to adopt a ‘millionaires’ tax, imposing an 8.97% rate on income over a half-million dollars,” Forbes reports. The consequence? “In all, the state suffered a $70 billion net outflow in wealth from 2004 through 2008, compared with a $98 billion net inflow in the prior five years.

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

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Congress: Weapon of Mass Destruction.

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Let’s start the week off with a little gloom, shall we?

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Richard Florida has hopefully labeled this trend “the rise of the creative class.” Florida reports that over the last thirty-odd years we have witnessed an ever-increasing concentration of college graduates around “superstar cities” or “means metros”-San Francisco, Washington, Denver, New York, Seattle, and the like. Thus, while 20 percent of the adult population holds an advanced degree in cities like San Fran and DC, the numbers are 5 percent in Cleveland and 4 percent in Detroit. Florida’s maps show in graphic imagery the hiving of college grads around certain metropolitan areas, a hiving that has emerged most clearly since 1970. Save for a few isolated exceptions, those hives are not located in Middle America, including our many mid-sized middle American cities.

Florida describes this trend as “the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated, and highly paid Americans to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, and a corresponding exodus of the traditional lower and middle classes from these same places,” primarily because of the high cost of living that results from the Migration of the Talented. The reasons behind this phenomenon, he says, are economic; if you’re very smart, educated, and talented, it pays to live near others like you. “The most talented and ambitious people need to live in a means metro in order to realize their full economic value,” he writes. Florida foresees a future in which the most talented and creative live among themselves in select city cores, and in which they are “catered to by an underclass of service workers living in far-off suburbs.” “Accommodating” this new geographically based cognitive sorting, he maintains, “will be one of the great political and cultural challenges of the next generation.”

Jerry Pournelle is not optimistic.

On schools, infra-structure, the whole lobbyist scene, the problem isn’t too few laws and regulations but too many. We can’t build infrastructure projects without allowing lawyers to wet their beaks, not just instantly but for years and years. The nuclear industry in the United States is paralyzed by circling legal buzzards. We all know the schools are broken, but there is no possible way to fix the situation, and any attempt is met by frantic opposition. We can’t fire incompetent teachers or promote good ones. After a while we stop trying.

Read it.

Say what you will about Britain, they certainly know how to do whatever it is that they do.

Read it.

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A high-ranking Pakistani diplomat reportedly cannot be appointed ambassador to Saudi Arabia because in Arabic his name translates into a phrase more appropriate for a porn star, referring to the size of male genitals, Foreign Policy reported.

The Arabic translation of Akbar Zeb to “biggest d**k” has overwhelmed Saudi officials who have refused to allow his post there.

The guys at PowerLine have fun with it — with a supporting Monty Python video, of course.

Read it.

After my last post, some readers suggested that I was exaggerating the potential cost of paying unemployment insurance when you hire the wrong person. Fred from Florida wrote, “Payroll tax rates that fund unemployment insurance are affected by the company’s history, but it’s not a dollar for dollar payout.” Actually, in Illinois, it’s even worse.

Don’t look to government to help the unemployment crisis — it’s best at prolonging it, as Amity Schlaes has demonstrated with FDR and the Great Depression.

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

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time.

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A bit late – but better late than never.

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Oh, ya think?

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Britain just isn’t what it used to be.

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I’ve had girlfriends like that. Not in a while, though.

George Will takes Obama to the woodshed. And nobody does it better.

Barack Obama, in the 13th month of his presidency, is learning what Clinton learned in his third month: The grinding arithmetic of economic and budgetary facts sets the parameters of political possibility.

Today, with the economy still resembling a patient etherized upon a table, and with deficits causing voters’ hair to stand on end, Obama is discovering his inner Eisenhower Republican.

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Detectives believe the victim was bludgeoned to death after 11pm on Sunday – and his body lay on the floor of his flat above the architect’s office in a “significant amount of blood” for around 12 hours before it was discovered.

Yeah, that would do it.

Read it.

Government is possibly the worst provider of goods and services available. The only time we ought to depend on government to provide something is if it absolutely has to get done and there is absolutely no one else that can do it.

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Government is the problem, not the solution.

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Odd to see the New York Times talking about elitism.

Apple represents the “auteur model of innovation,” observes John Kao, a consultant to corporations and governments on innovation. In the auteur model, he said, there is a tight connection between the personality of the project leader and what is created. Movies created by powerful directors, he says, are clear examples, from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” to James Cameron’s “Avatar.”

Rather like Obama in politics — except that Jobs can actually do it, and Obama actually can’t.

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Notice the lengths to which people will go to live free in spite of oppressive government regulation.

Sometimes it even works.

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Not that the Nanny State laws against doing that will be repealed, oh no — God forbid any governmental entity would consult Actual Facts in formulating policy.

Many will interpret this as meaning that people are obeying the law and it doesn’t matter. I think it more likely that people are just ignoring the law and, again, it doesn’t matter. The key thing to take away from it in either case, however, is that IT DOESN’T MATTER.

Read it.

But they can’t shoot you or put you in jail, as the minions of government can, so ask yourself why NPR is wasting time on this crap when Obama is out there with his hand in your wallet.

Read it.

Read it.

Guess who needs ’em? Us.

These 15 consecutive lanthanide elements have, uniquely among all the elements in the periodic table, chemical properties so similar that they are difficult and expensive to separate from one another. However, once these metals have been separated from one another, the individual physical properties of these materials put them in today’s top tier of the rarest and in many cases the most critical of metals for technological application. These metals are used to manufacture environmentally friendly products such as electric cars and in alternative power generating technologies such as wind turbines.

Guess who owns ’em? China.

The main accessible concentrations of the rare earths are found in China, where more than 95% of rare earths are now produced. Over the last seven years, China has reduced the amount of rare earths available for export by some 40%.

Chinese officials are openly concerned that the elements mined in the Bayanobo region are so valuable and important to China’s technological future that they must be conserved for future Chinese use. Rare earth production is or may soon be too low to keep up with growing demand.

For the rest of the world, the problem is that the rare earths which the Chinese deem so important to their technological and green future are already critical for maintaining the West’s technological and green present, let alone a future of green growth and sustainable production.

Does that bother you? It bothers me.

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Until they run out, of course. Then what will they do?

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Obama lies, and health care dies.

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Doing well by doing good.

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1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in D.C. (Oh, wait, they already did that….)