Read it.

Gambetta and Hertog find that “the share of radical Islamic engineers is no less than nine times greater than the share we could expect if the proneness of engineers to radicalize was the same as that of the male adult population.”

Once again we find our noses rubbed in the fact that intelligence and wisdom do not correlate.

Read it.

Some of the greenest technologies of the age, from electric cars to efficient light bulbs to very large wind turbines, are made possible by an unusual group of elements called rare earths. The world’s dependence on these substances is rising fast.

Just one problem: These elements come almost entirely from China, from some of the most environmentally damaging mines in the country, in an industry dominated by criminal gangs.

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Here’s a story to round off the year: a murderous New York gangster tripped over his own baggy trousers last week and fell to his death. Hector Quinones, 44, was in the middle of an apparently drugs-related killing spree when his low-slung trousers fell down and tripped him up. One of his would-be victims fled on to the fire escape of her apartment block; Quinones yanked up his trousers and struggled after her, but no sooner had he reached the fire escape than they fell down again, and he toppled overboard.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

I don’t think that ever happened to a zoot suit….

Read it.

So when they tell you this is going to save money, you’ll know it for a barefaced lie.

Read it.

Three or four attention-starved twits doth not a dysfunctional society make.

But still, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion something’s bollywonkers here.

No shit.

Read it.

Read it.

It is all about winning. The other half of what’s wrong, is that these are the people who want to erase fissures between us in — everything. Class, wealth, prestige, national borders, “partisan bickering,” race, sex, sexual preference, creed, snips, snails and puppy dog’s tails. We’re all just on spaceship earth together…

…it’s complete bullshit. Their primal urge is to win. They want an elite club, and if nobody is excluded from it then nobody can be in it. They are dedicated to keeping us divided, and then making sure their side wins. And then, to make sure something emerges from the victory, something locked in, so that we’re stuck with it forever and ever, without regard to how unpopular it becomes. And then they want to win at the next thing.

Read it. And watch the video.

Nobody seems to be entirely sure whether this is constitutional. I don’t have a clear answer either. But it certainly does effectively defeat the purpose of having an elected legislature, and it’s certainly in direct conflict with the spirit of Article I.

The first thing that socialists do when they get power — the first thing — is work to eliminate democracy, because any shred of democracy threatens their hold on power, and power is what they’re all about. Lenin did it in Russia, Mussolini did it in Italy, Hitler did it in Germany, Stalin did it in Eastern Europe, Mao did it in China, Castro did it in Cuba, Chavez and Morales are doing it in South America, and Obama and Reid and Pelosi are doing it in the United States. Watch it coming down the street.

Read it.

Thieves stole a JCB digger from a building site, smashed through a fence and used the vehicle to wrench two parking meters out of the ground and shake the coins out, police said.

The culprits, thought to be two men, started up the mini-digger after breaking into the site and finding it still had the key in the ignition.

We have the technology. And, if left unsecured, it can be re-purposed.

Read it.

My, what a surpise.

Gene pool. Cull. Now.

Read it.

SURE she wants us to use alternative sources of energy. Maybe on another planet.

Hey! Wake up! When a Democrat tells you s/he believes in something, it’s NOT TRUE.

Read it.

And yet the ‘why can’t we all just get along’ crowd persist in believing that a Communist country won’t behave like a Communist country.

Read it.

A Chinese villager has been jailed for 12 years for shooting and eating the country’s last known wild Indochinese tiger, China Daily reports.

Bet he won’t do that again.

Jerry Pournelle really doesn’t like the new health care plan.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an editorial worth your attention. There is no better term for the ObamaCare Bill than Despotism. It’s all very well for Congressmen and Senators to look out for their states, but this bill is a pure transfer payment from Republicans to Democrats. There is built into the bill a 40% tax on the most comprehensive — and thus most expensive — health care plans: But it does not apply to everyone. Longshoremen, for instance, are exempt — and of course their unions have negotiated some of the most comprehensive healthcare short of what Congress gets. Other lines of work, nearly all heavily unionized, are exempt from the 40% tax (which will pretty well eliminate these plans for those who aren’t exempt from the tax). Also, 17 States will be exempt; for the rest it’s just too bad. There is no attempt at an explanation for these arbitrary transfers from those taxed to those not taxed. There is no logical reason why some are taxed and some are not. It’s simply a set of earmarks, rewards to those supporting the “plan” and punishment for those who don’t.

Read it.

Buy ’em books, send ’em to school….

Read it.

A few weeks back, Reason.tv discussed Canadians coming to the U.S. for operations that would take forever to get in the Great White North.

Reason contributing editor and San Francisco Chronicle journo Carolyn Lochhead has a fascinating piece on American medical tourists who go elsewhere for much cheaper and equally good care….

Read it.

Chinese police were held in a hour-long stand-off with a suspected suicide bomber only to find the man was armed with sausages.

Well, at least we know he wasn’t a Muslim. That’s something.

Always thought that ‘suicide bombers’ were a bunch of wieners, anyway….

Read it.

One fully-loaded B52 would raise the average IQ in Britain beyond all imagining.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

David Pogue reveals why everybody hates the phone company.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about two particularly nasty Verizon Wireless practices. First, Verizon doubled the early-cancellation fee for smartphones, the price you pay for canceling before your two-year contract is up (it’s now $350).

Second, I passed along a note from a Verizon whistleblower who identified a really outrageous Verizon profit center: if you accidentally hit one of the arrow keys on your Verizon cellphone (which come premapped to various Verizon Internet functions), you’re charged $2 instantaneously, even if you cancel instantly. (Verizon confirms that on many models, you can’t remap those buttons to other functions even if you’re tech-savvy enough to try.)

Apparently there is no cell phone provider in the U.S. that doesn’t suck.

Read it.

What is it about being elected to public office that makes people stupid? New England was, at one time, a bastion of individual liberty and self-reliance; it is rapidly turning into Little Europe.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom wants the city to require similar labels.

Quelle surprise.

Boland uses a cell phone, but keeps it away from her head by using the speaker. The AP story also says she leaves the phone turned off unless she’s expecting a call.

And, of course, nothing will do but that EVERYBODY IN THE STATE ought to be FORCED BY LAW to do it her way — sort of an inverse Burger King.

Read it.

Facebook is being cited in almost one in five of online divorce petitions, lawyers have claimed.

Yet another reason to stay away from Facebook and its ilk.

Read it.

Cocaine’s a hell of a drug, and even more so when laced with another drug that’s commonly used to deworm opossums. Federal agents have found that 69 percent of cocaine shipments seized entering the United States contain levamisole, a veterinary drug linked to serious weakening of the immune system in humans. Here’s the real funny part: no one knows why.

Go, Darwin. Cull that gene pool.

Read it.

Surely there’s a movie in that somewhere.

Read it.

I think this counts as a virtual Darwin Award. Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Your government at work. Aren’t you proud?

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What’s the use of being a supermodel if you don’t get special treatment? I mean, duh.

Darwin says: Drop the Communist Manifesto and step away from the gene pool. Now.

Read it.

So and so is calling for you, please hold and I’ll get him.

Read it.

A lot of people talk about reviving the domestic manufacturing sector, which has shed almost one-third of its manpower over the last eight years. But some of the people I spoke to asked a slightly different question: Even if you could reclaim a chunk of those blue-collar jobs, would you have the managers you need to supervise them? It’s not obvious that you would.

Read it.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that messing with a guy who has facial tattoos is a really bad idea.

As tattoos go mainstream, criminals have to adapt. These days, even art on your neck, collarbone, and wrists is barely enough to signal your commitment to subcultures that are totally legal.

Read it.

According to Russian newpaper Kommersant, as relayed via the RIA Novosti news wire, Illarionov says that the HadCRUT dataset doesn’t include the records from many of Russia’s meteorological stations. He adds that the missing records, if they had been included by the British climate scientists, would have significantly reduced the amount of warming shown for Russia by the HadCRUT database.

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

Read it.

This is news?

Read it.

Whenever you get to feeling that you live in a bad neighborhood….

Read it.

Dozens of Iraqi security force members were involved in attacks that killed up to 112 people in Baghdad last week, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Wednesday.

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

Read it.

Were it not for my native indolence, I’d do the same.

Read it.

But does Obama care? Sorry, he’s too busy with the government takeover of the health care industry.

Priorities? Sure, he’s got priorities. They just aren’t YOUR priorities.

A good example of why the dinosaur media in general, and Newsweek in particular, suck.

A new GAO report shows how George W. Bush’s Justice Department abandoned advocacy for minority groups.

As if ‘advocacy for minority groups’ were the definition of ‘civil rights’.

Ellis Cose obviously considers himself a black columnist (rather than a columnist who happens to be black), and it shows.

George W. Bush was never particularly taken with the civil-rights crowd. Not that he was exactly hostile to the notion of protecting society’s most vulnerable groups. But he and his minions assumed that the time for coddling minorities had passed. So after sizing up the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice—the most powerful advocate for civil rights within the federal government—Bush’s operatives endeavored “to rip the heart out of [it],” in the words of Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP.

Never was a President of the NAALCP so appropriately named. God forbid that anyone should ‘assume that the time for coddling minorities had passed’.

Read it.

Note that this trick isn’t possible without a government that is willing to be stupid with YOUR money. (What am I saying? That’s ALL of them.)

Read it.

No sucres will be printed or coined, but the virtual currency will be used to manage debts between the nine nations in a move to reduce reliance on the US dollar.

Cuba already signed an agreement on Saturday to pay for a shipment of Venezuelan rice in sucres, according to Rogelio Sierra, the island’s deputy foreign minister. He declined to say what the shipment was worth.

That agreement was made as it emerged that cash-strapped Cuba has fallen behind on its debt to nations and multinational corporations amid the global recession.

Judging from this, I think it ought to be pronounced ‘sucker’, but that’s just me.

I am somewhat astonished that there are only nine ‘left-wing’ governments in South America.

Read it.

Britain’s financiers and entrepreneurs are leaving the country at the rate of 10 a week to avoid rising taxes, it has emerged.

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

And they won’t want to come to America once the Obama Nation takes hold. Maybe Belize.

Read it.

So what great lesson did the military and the President take from the experience of the massacre at Fort Hood? Why, the most obvious one, of course: we need more Muslims in the military….

Incredible. Look at these pictures. Our people, deliberately murdered by a Muslim doing his bit for jihad. A Muslim who was an officer in the United States Army, who had taken an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States. And the response is ‘Please, sir, can we have another?’

Your tax dollars at work. The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

Read it.

Marching morons in Copehagen: They’re all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.

Read it.

They should only count their blessings.

Tell Norway they can have all of Obama in exchange for $50 and a third-round draft pick.

Read it.

I still remember those 50-cent Ace Tarzan paperbacks Frank did the covers for. Those were the days.

Read it.

And about time, too. She ought to have taken a frying pan to his head. Several times.

People like Governor Sandford give weasels a bad name.

Read it.

Because the previous threats have worked so very well.

Read it.

Police detain 200 activists at their Copenhagen accommodation and seize items they claim could be used for acts of civil disobedience.

Hey, all you leftists who hate America and think it ought to be more like Europe: Be careful what you wish for.

Read it.

The looters dump the producers.

Kelly, who has also served as GC at Fannie Mae, Sears, and MCI/Worldcom, is one of the more experienced and well-respected in-house lawyers in the country — and was serving as vice chairman at AIG, a rarity for a GC. If she leaves AIG soon, writes the NYT, “her departure would come at a time when the company needs experienced counsel to complete its restructuring, shepherd it through myriad legal proceedings, and prepare prospectuses for the anticipated initial public offerings of its subsidiaries.”

Joining Kelly in her decision to leave are four other senior officials of the company, who have had their compensation reduced earlier this year by the Treasury Department’s special master for compensation, Kenneth Feinberg.

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

Read it.

But sometimes a story emerges that requires outright condemnation.  On this occasion, the condemnation goes to the British Government.  The government – our government, supposedly representing you and me in its interaction with people abroad – wants to label goods as coming from the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, so as to help consumers boycott them.

The rot spreads.