Read it.

But that trick never works….

Otto would make a great Emperor, though.

Read it.

Remembering that would have saved a lot of trouble over the years.

It starts with the eternal battle over language. It is written in the sacred scriptures of the EU that English and French have equal status as working languages, and all French diplomats are under instructions to conduct business in French when it is their turn to chair anything. This of course triggers passive resistance; our diplomats are all supposed to speak French, though some don’t and others conceal it, and the French are doing well if they can get 10 minutes into the meeting without everyone lapsing into English. The arrival in 1995 of various Scandiwegians sealed victory for Britain, as most of them couldn’t manage so much as a parley-voo, and no doubt the struggle is now utterly hopeless.

Read it.

A useful thing to have in Britain these days. Presumably it’s knife-proof and will disguise you as a Pakistani to allow you to pass safely through the crowd.

Read it.

A poll of 1,000 people also found that half of Britons have not even tasted traditional fare including toad in the hole, Welsh rarebit and bubble and squeak.

Well, those don’t sound very inviting. At least with pasta and curry you know what goes into it.

A third of those surveyed could not identify toad in the hole and 64 per cent were ignorant when it came to Welsh rarebit.

Perhaps that’s part of the problem.

Marcus Simmons, managing director of iknow-uk which carried out the poll, said: “We think it’s a huge shame that British dishes which were previously commonplace seem to be fading into obscurity.

Perhaps because they taste like crap? That’s just a guess, of course. “British cuisine” isn’t one of those books you find in the food section at Barnes & Noble.

Read it.

According to the theory, if we know what sort of a learner a child is, we can optimize his or her learning by presenting material the way that they like.

The prediction is straightforward: Kids learn better when they are taught in a way that matches their learning style than when they are taught in a way that doesn’t.

That’s a straightforward prediction.

The data are straightforward too: It doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work–not only for the visual-auditory-kinesthetic theory, but for many other learning styles theories that have been proposed and tested since the 1940s.

But, like the other fads in American education, this will linger to destroy the intellectual development of an entire generation of children.

Read it.

The sword is the soul of the samurai.

Police described Rice as a career criminal with a history of 29 arrests who had just been released from prison Saturday after serving a yearlong sentence.

And, since they didn’t mention his race, he was undoubtedly a NAM.

Read it.

An excellent analysis of the ACORN affair.

* One report from an Acorn office was a fluke. Any large organization, public or private of any creed can be infected by amoral individuals who will try to use the organization to commit illegal or unethical acts. No organization larger than a few dozen people can police the actions of every member, all the time.

* Two reports from two separate Acorn offices was just a disturbing coincidence. The same reasoning as above applies, because in a large organizations, just as in a large installed base of computers, it’s possible for two separate bad eggs carrying out the same acts to show up in the same organization.

* Three identical reports of the same failure from three separate offices indicates the criminality arises from the organization itself. It is highly unlikely that, out of the hundreds of Acorn offices around the nation, the journalist just happened to wander into the three offices whose managers wouldn’t blink an eye at helping to set up a brothel using children.

The really disturbing part is how in all three cases the managers of the Acorn offices don’t even bat an eye when the journalist asks about setting up a brothel. Further, they seem to have the logistics and legal tangles of using a brothel to fund a political career already well thought out. I don’t know about you, but if someone ask me how to run a brothel using minors and how to funnel that money into the a political campaign, I would have to stop and think about it for while. The fact that they have the answers already queued up and ready to go tells us one thing…

… this is far from the first time they have provided this kind of “assistance”. They know the answers because they’ve been asked them before and they’ve answered them. Repeatedly.

The Other McCain is having entirely too much fun with the ACORN thing.

“Poverty rights”? I guess that means ACORN fights for people’s right to be poor. NTTAWWT, but I don’t remember “poverty rights” in the Constitution.

Read it.

The pair claim to have decoded Hitler’s DNA and matching it to cigarette butts found in an Austrian village and a used napkin from a New York restaurant, as well as letters sent from France more than three decades ago.

How big a loser do you have to be to spend your time tracking down Hitler’s relatives? Perhaps they might have some success finding Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Quick! To the Bat Cave!

Read it.

Don’t leave home without it.

I must confess that I am somewhat disappointd not to see the usual “I’d like this in a Kindle edition” button.

Steve Sailer, voice of the actual reality-based community, is always worth reading.

So, maybe importing so many millions of foreigners from 2000 to 2007 to “do the jobs [African] Americans weren’t willing to do” wasn’t such a hot idea after all? Well, don’t ask Ms. Ehrenreich about immigration. She evidently has no opinion on the subject, since it doesn’t come up in her long spiel.

In other words, blacks weren’t as good credit-risks on average, even when incomes were the same. So, why, then, four decades of government effort to change the culture of lending in order to get more mortgage dollars into the hands of minorities? Maybe the old culture had a more accurate view of the creditworthiness of blacks than the new government-nurtured culture?

It’s like Ptolemy’s complex system of epicycles intended to “save the appearances” of the theory that all planetary orbits were perfect circles. Our era’s Ptolemaic theory is that minorities can only be victims of discrimination, not beneficiaries of discrimination, so the only logical solution is that all those blacks who defaulted on their subprime loans were victims of discrimination: see, they should have gotten prime loans!

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Martin (pictured) wrote: “God, I hate those cyclists. Every last herbal tea-drinking, Harriet Harman-voting one of them. That’s one of the reasons I live in the countryside, where birds tweet, horses roam, pigs grunt and Lycra-clad buttocks are miles away. But recently, there’s been a disturbing development.

“Each Saturday, a big black truck appears at the bottom of my road, with bikes stuck to the roof and rear. Out of it step a bunch of City-boy ponces in fluorescent Spider-Man outfits, shades, bum bags and stupid cleated shoes, who then pedal around our narrow lanes four abreast with their private parts alarmingly apparent. Do they enjoy it? They never smile. I’m sure they just come here to wind me up.”

Yeah, that about sums it up. And, of course, being good leftoid sleazes, they decided to trash him on Wikipedia.

Well, this didn’t go down at all well in the pedal-bothering community, and enraged Spider-Man cyclists moved quickly to vent their spleen on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia: Just Another Crust Media Outlet.

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The biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history lies at anchor east of Singapore. Never before photographed, it is bigger than the U.S. and British navies combined but has no crew, no cargo and no destination  –  and is why your Christmas stocking may be on the light side this year

Read it.

Bear in mind that this is the New York Times, so all they’re doing is Rounding Up The Usual Suspects, but there’s some good information along with the hand-waving.

Read it.

‘I think I can, I think I can….’

Read it.

What you don’t find in small factories is people being employed unless their work is thought to contribute to the overall effectiveness of the business. For example, they don’t employ a Five-a-Day Outreach Advisor to give readings on the virtues of broccoli in the canteen at lunchtime. Nor do they employ five people in the accounts office when the work can be done by four. Nor do they pay for design consultants to create a new corporate logo unless they see a clear need to do so. The reason none of these items of expenditure is incurred is that it would add unnecessary costs to the business; the additional costs would be unnecessary because any benefit they might deliver would be less than the cost.

My idea of a public sector non-job is necessarily affected by my view of the proper role of the State. For example, I see no good reason for the State to tell people what to eat. We all receive quite enough information on that subject throughout our lives from parents, teachers, friends, spouses, television and radio that there is no need for a single penny of tax to be spent on the matter. Exit Healthy Eating Initative Facilitators and Five-a-Day Counsellors, non-jobs of the first water.

Read it.

As our government hands over billions to Wall Street bankers, jobless Americans live in tent cities and collect food stamps in record numbers. Now when we need it the most, growing our own food may be against the law and punishable by a fine of up to $1,000,000. Think I’m joking? Meet Bill HR 875, The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, introduced by Rosa DeLauro whose husband Stanley Greenburg works for Monsanto. The insanity doesn’t stop there—fishing boats, hotdog stands, neighborhood vegetable booths and farmers’ markets will be federally regulated under the same draconian law. As always, the spin is designed to make you (the public) believe these new provisions are for your own good. Under the deceitful guise of protection, the goal of this bill is crystal clear: to prevent us from locally growing our own food so multinational agribusiness can completely control the production and distribution of our food supply. I refer you to the usual suspects—Monsanto, ADM, Sodexo, Tyson, and Smithfield.

Needlesss to say, DeLauro is a Democrat (and, from the look of her picture, a Yooguly Feminist).

Tyler Cowen has some harsh words.

FOR years now, many businesses and individuals in the United States have been relying on the power of government, rather than competition in the marketplace, to increase their wealth. This is politicization of the economy. It made the financial crisis much worse, and the trend is accelerating.

Read it.

No one has been a more uncritical cheerleader for the Obama administration than liberal blogger Andrew Sullivan. Now, Sullivan has gotten his reward, courtesy of Obama’s Department of Justice.

Sullivan was caught smoking marijuana in a National Park and was prosecuted, consistent with the usual policy of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. But Sullivan’s pull with the Obama administration got him a sweetheart deal: the U.S. Attorney decided to drop the charges, even though there evidently is no doubt about Sullivan’s guilt. The issue here isn’t whether marijuana possession should be illegal, or should be prosecuted. It is illegal, and the U.S. Attorney in Massachusetts does routinely prosecute such cases. But not Sullivan: Barack Obama and Eric Holder paid him off for his slavish devotion.

Read it.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Fortunately it’s not likely to happen in the United States, because the places most likely to implement such a requirement, e.g. San Francisco, would consider it gay-bashing.

Read it.

Trade lawyer Scott Lincicome catches the Obama administration in another late Friday news dump, this time imposing prohibitive tariffs on imports of Chinese automobile and light truck tires under section 421 of the trade law protecting American industries against surges in imports. It’s a somewhat complicated issue that is susceptible to the mystification in which the Obama administration wraps it. Lincicome links to the Wall Street Journal report with the administration’s defense of the decision, but carefully takes apart the defense.

Inside the mystification Lincicome unwraps is — surprise! — the United Steel Workers union. Lincicome writes that the section 421 decision forced President Obama to choose between the narrow interests of the USW and everyone else in America, the United States’ image as the world’s free trade leader, and the future of both the American and global economies. Obama opted for the USW.

Read it.

This month the University of California at Berkeley opened a Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements. The center is housed in the Institute for the Study of Social Change, which the university advertises online as an institution placing “issues of race, gender, and class at the center of the agenda,” conducting “research with a conscience,” and capitalizing on “Berkeley’s history as the birthplace of transformative social movements.” Needless to say, the center is not promoting conservatism. This is, as the university reminds us, Berkeley.

Ponder the fact that nobody anywhere is establishing a Center for the Comparative Study of Left Wing Movements.

Ponder further the undoubted truth that the establishment of any such Center would trigger a firestorm of condemnation, with “McCarthyism” being the mildest of the epithets employed.

Ponder further the existence of institutions such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which allegedly tracks “hate groups” (not something you could figure out from its name), all of whom are — what a coincidence! — “right wing”.

Ponder finally that this is being done at the expense of the taxpayers of California, whom (judging from the news) one would think had better things to do with the money.

Feel free to weep for America.

Read it.

– No, we do not have a free market in health care. Medicine is socialized between the ages of 0 and 18, and 65+, and for many of the poor. Private insurance is heavily regulated. Do you know that many states force insurance to cover infertility treatment? That means that stupid poor people who breed early are subsidizing the life choices of intelligent richer people who keep putting off having children for the sake of advancing their career or furthering their education. But that’s what the stupid voters demand through their representatives.

– Doctors make a lot of money because licensing limits the labor supply and they can bid up their services. Yes, nurses can do most of what a family doctor does. No, doctors are not geniuses, I helped some current practicing M.D.’s with their chemistry and calculus homework back in the day, and let me tell you that there is one emergency room physician who had a notorious tendency to “space out” randomly who I wouldn’t want to be treated by in a pinch (though she was a very nice person). I recently went in to get some medicine for my bronchitis and I told my M.D. exactly what to prescribe and she diligently complied after a minimal check-over of my health status. $150 that insurance pays up just for signing the prescription!

– Americans demand more and more services and refuse to stop complaining about the increased premiums which those services entail. A large number of patients at my doctor’s office refuse to be seen by the nurse practitioner for basic appointments because they want “the best” care. The reality is that in most of these cases you’re getting very little extra medicine (if any) for multiples more of price. Americans demand more government services and lower taxes, so this sort of behavior is not surprising.

Cringely reveals what we all know to be true.

Read it.

Beyond that, the Democrats’ protestations about Wilson’s lack of civility ring hollow, to say the least. After all, Obama himself called Sarah Palin a liar in the very speech that so enraged Wilson. And do the Democrats really believe that voters have forgotten how they treated President Bush for the last six years of his administration? A voter would have had to spend those years in Albania not to know that “You lie!” was nicer than most of the things the Democrats had to say, both on and off the floors of Congress.

I personally think Wilson ought to resign. We don’t need somebody with impulse control that poor in Congress. Of course, Democrats do that sort of thing all the time, but Republicans at least ought to act like adults.

Read it.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Indiana.
2. The rot has already set it.

Read it.

And yet Google, who will put up a fancy new logo cartoon for the most obscure anniversary of a comic book character, considers it just another day. Nothing to see here — move along, move along.

Read it.

A Norwegian company that invented the inspiration for cinema’s best-loved light fixture is suing The Walt Disney Company and animator Pixar for alleged trade mark infringement.

Luxo makes swivel table lamps that Pixar founder John Lasseter has said were the inspiration for his company’s logo. A pair of Luxo lookalike lamps appeared in Pixar’s first film in 1986, Luxo Jr.

Mencius Moldbug points a finger.

It is too much to expect evil to walk naked in the world. In real life, evil does not wear a skull helmet or speak through a respirator. Why would it? Why not drape itself in silks of good? But this clothing interferes, by its very nature, with the fangs and sting and claws. So the patient watcher is rewarded, every now and then, with a flash of black scales or a yellow demon grin. But most of the time, he sees a kindly, wise and charming pillar of the community. Such is State.

Now, one could continue indefinitely in this vein. But this is UR, not Mark Steyn.

Read it.

Yeah, welcome to the safety school of the Ivy League.

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Suggestion: Cancel American foreign aid for every country who had a politician in that crowd. Let them sink back into the neolithic existence they enjoyed before.

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Assholes with money. That’s modern America for you.

Read it.

If you’re scratching your head about that, so am I.

President Barack Obama sent a letter this week to President Ali Abdullah Saleh pledging to “stand beside Yemen, its unity, security and stability”.

“The security of Yemen is vital for the security of the United States,” he said.

Uh … why? It’s a noplace in the middle of nowhere. Why can’t the Saudis, who are right next door, spend some of their oil money and take care of business? Why is it always the U.S. that has to do something about these stone-age bandits? Hello? Hello?

Read it.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

In the first case of its kind, an employment tribunal decided that Nicholson, 41, had views amounting to a “philosophical belief in climate change”, allowing him the same legal protection against discrimination as religious beliefs.

Environmentalism is now considered a religion in Britain.

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

Read it.

In a telephone interview with FOXNews.com, U.N. spokesman Fahran Haq explained that the MSD has a legal right to hire unlicensed doctors and nurses to work on U.N. property, because “U.N. headquarters is not part of New York.”

The Medical Services Division provides “basic health services,” according to its Web page, but the doctors and nurses who work there are not permitted to assume primary responsibility for U.N. employees during a medical emergency crisis, even though the department’s two-year budget for 2007-2008 accounted for more than $38 million in operating expenses. The U.N. receives most of its funding from national government bodies across the globe.

The Other McCain has a short fuse.

Remarkable, really, how the Left’s erroneous presumptions haven’t changed at all: If the social welfare state is synonymous with enlightenment, opponents of the welfare state must therefore be unenlightened. The only question remaining for the liberal theorist is to identify the variety of psychopathology that explains this (presumably irrational) opposition.

So it is that Max Blumenthal, who no doubt favors putting the federal government in control of America’s health-care system, effectively nationalizing 1/7th of the economy, presumes to diagnose opponents of such policies as suffering from “the fear of freedom.”

Read it.

Read it.

Guess Communists take their property rights pretty seriously.

Read it.

If Mark Hopkins or any of his family contracted cancer, TB, polio, heart disease, or even appendicitis, they would probably die.  All the rage today is to moan about people’s access to health care, but Hopkins had less access to health care than the poorest resident of East St. Louis.  Hopkins died at 64, an old man in an era where the average life span was in the early forties.  He saw at least one of his children die young, as most others of his age did.  In fact, Stanford University owes its founding to the early death (at 15) of the son of Leland Stanford, Hopkin’s business partner and neighbor.  The richest men of his age had more than a ten times greater chance of seeing at least one of their kids die young than the poorest person in the US does today.

Read it.

In the meantime, though, greenwashing has become a virtual industry in the political and policy worlds. Take, for example, the growing push for economically regressive and environmentally problematic HOT (high occupancy toll) lanes. HOT lanes are toll lanes on public highways. Prices are set dynamically so that HOT lanes keep moving even if all the other lanes are stuck. Governor Schwarzenegger and many leading Democrats favor the idea and use it to paint themselves green. HOT lanes are also popular with many affluent motorists who love the idea of driving their SUVs in the carpool lane for what amounts to pocket change. It’s an odd alliance.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Paul Krugman has a long article in the NYT Magazine entitled “How Did the Economists Get It So Wrong?” which demonstrates quite nicely, by all the topics it avoids mentioning, how the economists got it so wrong.

Not to mention that “how Krugman got it wrong” is a hole with no bottom….

Read it.

When reading science fiction stories, I find it very difficult to accept alien species as really alien unless they are at least as incomprehensible as the Japanese.

Read it.

Now in its thirty-ninth year of operations, the government-controlled Amtrak provides good service between Boston, New York and Washington, and Los Angeles and San Diego. Elsewhere, it’s a land cruise company.

Beyond the corridors, Amtrak plies routes that were hastily drawn in 1971 to insure that they touch as many congressional interests as possible. That means meandering sleepers from New Orleans to Los Angeles, or Chicago to Seattle, which are a delight to vacationers (myself included), but inconsequential to the business of America, which drives or flies in order to get somewhere. Amtrak handles less than 1% of America’s intercity travel.

Perhaps stagecoaches will be the Next Green Thing — after all, they would reduce our Dependence On Foreign Oil, although the Emissions Problem might cause a few furrowed brows.

Read it.

Privacy disaster? You betcha.

But ten years ago we’d be horrified by what we nonchalantly share on Facebook and Twitter every day.

Some of us still are.

Read it. A very informative chart.

Read it.

Let’s hear it for the stimulus.

One of those laid off was David Wahl, 52, who had worked there for a decade and who sat behind the vice president at the town-hall-style meeting, soaking up the optimism of the moment. “With mass transit being pushed so hard,” Mr. Wahl recalled, “I figured I’d be able to work until I was 75.”

‘Put not your trust in Princes nor the sons of men, in whom there is no salvation.’ — Psalm 146

Gotta love Australians.

Read it.

Can a lawsuit be far behind?